{ "site": "https://aiolum.com", "generated": "2026-10-28", "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/", "count": 252, "grades": "Evidence grades: A = disclosed by a public company, a filing or a payment processor, or verified by one; B = two or more independent reports agree, or a journalist confirmed it; C = a founder claim that no one else verified; D = reported, not verified: one founder claim or a third-party estimate with no second source; calc = computed on this page from graded facts.", "fields": { "slug": "URL key: /story//", "added": "ISO date when the story went live (used by \"newest\" sort; the default sort is \"evidence\": grade A to C, then outcomeUsd)", "aiType": "\"AI-native\" (the model output is the product) or", "team": "\"solo\" or \"small\" (2 to 10 people at the moment of success)", "outcome": "\"exit\" or \"running\"", "group": "what the product does: one slug from GROUPS (/group//)", "channel": "how most customers arrived: one slug from CHANNELS (\"unknown\" when no source says)", "trend": "revenue in the latest months against the months before: \"growing\", \"flat\",", "collections": "patterns that cut across the groups: any of \"platform\", \"phone-app\", \"open-source\"", "evidence": "best grade of the headline number: \"A\", \"B\", \"C\", or \"D\" (reported, not verified: one founder claim or a", "outcomeUsd": "headline number in US dollars, for the \"biggest\" sort and the ticker", "months": "months from launch to the headline outcome, for the \"fastest\" sort", "meters": "1 to 4 each: evidence strength, copyable pattern (used by the \"copyable\" sort), capital needed", "factsCaption": "caption of the numbers table; factsRead is the line under it", "timelineLead": "one line under the timeline heading", "facts": "rows of the numbers table; grade \"X\" means calculated on this page", "sources": "numbered list; facts and timeline entries point to these numbers" }, "stories": [ { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/base44/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/base44.md", "slug": "base44", "name": "Base44", "country": "Israel", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI app builder", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-05", "launchLabel": "January 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$80M cash exit, 18 June 2025", "sticker": "$80M exit", "outcomeUsd": 80000000, "months": 5, "teamLabel": "1 founder, then 6 to 8 staff at the sale", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "build-software", "channel": "audience", "trend": "sold", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 4, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "Vibe coding" ], "product": "You describe an app in plain language. Base44 generates a working web app with its own database, user login and hosting, so you never touch a server.", "why": "It launched in the month that AI models became good enough to write a whole app. It sold to people who cannot program, it charged from day one, and it was sold to a company that already had millions of customers.", "summary": [ "Base44 is a vibe coding platform. Vibe coding means that you describe software in plain language and an AI model writes the code. Base44 goes one step further than most tools. The generated app comes with its own database, user login, file storage and hosting. So a person who cannot program never touches a server.", "Maor Shlomo built it alone as a side project from the end of 2024. He launched it in January 2025 and sold it to Wix for about US$80 million in cash on 18 June 2025. Base44 took no outside investment. Under Wix it reached US$150 million in annual recurring revenue by May 2026. Annual recurring revenue (ARR) is the current monthly subscription revenue multiplied by twelve.", "This page grades every number by its evidence. It also shows the failed startups that promised the same thing before AI models made it work." ], "pricing": { "caption": "Base44 plans in 2026, reported by reviewers (grade C)", "note": "A credit is one request to the AI. A complex change can use several credits. Reviewers report users who pay about US$300 a month after they spend all the credits of their plan. Yearly billing is about 20% cheaper than monthly billing.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "25 credits, at most 5 a day" ], [ "Starter", "16", "20", "" ], [ "Builder", "40", "50", "" ], [ "Pro", "80", "100", "" ], [ "Highest tier", "about 160", "about 200", "" ] ] }, "factsCaption": "Payments disclosed by Wix total US$159 million by August 2026, for a company that was about six months old at the sale", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was disclosed by Wix, a public company. A grade C value is a founder claim. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a side project to US$150 million in annual recurring revenue in about 18 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "facts": [ { "fact": "Initial payment from Wix, 18 June 2025", "value": "about US$80 million, in cash", "grade": "A", "note": "Wix press release. TechCrunch confirmed the cash form with Wix.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Retention bonuses for employees, inside that US$80 million", "value": "about US$25 million", "grade": "A", "note": "The press release says the bonuses are part of the initial payment, not an addition to it.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's share of the initial payment", "value": "about US$55 million", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 80 minus 25 equals 55. Shlomo was the sole shareholder.", "src": [ 1, 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Earn-out period", "value": "2025 through 2029", "grade": "A", "note": "An earn-out is a later payment that is paid only if the business reaches agreed targets.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Earn-out payment disclosed in May 2026", "value": "US$38 million", "grade": "A", "note": "Disclosed by Wix with its results, reported by Calcalist.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Earn-out payment disclosed in August 2026", "value": "US$41 million", "grade": "A", "note": "Disclosed in Wix's second-quarter 2026 earnings, reported by Calcalist.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Total disclosed payments by August 2026", "value": "US$159 million", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 80 plus 38 plus 41 equals 159. Calcalist writes \"above 150 million\". One report mentions a further 90 million payment, but the reports do not reconcile, so it is not counted here.", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Users at the sale", "value": "250,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder posts, reported by TechCrunch.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Users in the first three weeks", "value": "10,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder posts, reported by TechCrunch.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Profit in May 2025, the month before the sale", "value": "US$189,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder posts. Stated as profit after model costs.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue at the sale", "value": "about US$3.5 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Unofficial estimate compiled by Latka. Wix did not disclose it.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Price paid divided by revenue at the sale", "value": "about 23 times ARR", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 80 divided by 3.5 equals 22.9, using the unofficial estimate above.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, August 2025", "value": "US$15 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on LinkedIn, recorded by Latka.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, March 2026", "value": "US$100 million", "grade": "A", "note": "Disclosed with Wix's fourth-quarter 2025 results.", "src": [ 4, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, May 2026", "value": "US$150 million", "grade": "A", "note": "Reported by Calcalist from Wix's disclosures.", "src": [ 4, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue growth in the eleven months after the sale", "value": "about 43 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 150 divided by 3.5 equals 42.9. The starting value is the unofficial estimate, so this is an approximation.", "src": [ 4, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Employees at the sale", "value": "6 to 8", "grade": "B", "note": "Calcalist reports six. TechCrunch reports that Wix confirmed eight.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's age at the sale", "value": "31", "grade": "B", "note": "", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "B", "note": "", "src": [ 2, 3 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2017", "what": "Shlomo co-founds Explorium, a data company, at age 24 and becomes its chief executive (CEO). Explorium later raises about US$125 million.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "End of 2024", "what": "After army reserve duty, he does not return to Explorium. He starts Base44 as a side project.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "January 2025", "what": "Public launch.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "First three weeks", "what": "10,000 users. The founder reports about US$1 million in annual recurring revenue.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 6 ] }, { "when": "January to June 2025", "what": "He posts user numbers, revenue and profit publicly on LinkedIn and X. The product spreads through user recommendations.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "when": "May 2025", "what": "Profit of US$189,000 for the month, after model costs.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "18 June 2025", "what": "Wix buys Base44 for about US$80 million in cash plus earn-outs. The company has 6 to 8 employees.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "9 July 2025", "what": "The security company Wiz reports an authentication bypass. Wix fixes it within 24 hours.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "August 2025", "what": "US$15 million in annual recurring revenue, founder on LinkedIn.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "March 2026", "what": "US$100 million in annual recurring revenue, disclosed with Wix's results.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 4, 6 ] }, { "when": "May 2026", "what": "US$150 million in annual recurring revenue. Wix discloses a US$38 million milestone payment to the founder.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "29 June 2026", "what": "Base44 launches Base1, its own AI model, trained on its users' interactions.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "4 August 2026", "what": "Wix discloses a further US$41 million payment to the founder.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 5 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Timing", "text": "In late 2024, AI models crossed a threshold: a generated full-stack app mostly ran on the first try. Every earlier attempt at this product was built before that threshold existed. Base44 launched within weeks of it." }, { "title": "The buyer", "text": "Early 2025 competitors such as Lovable, Bolt and v0 produced code that the user still had to connect to a database and deploy. Base44 hid all of that. Its customer was an operations manager or a small-business owner, not an engineer." }, { "title": "Cash from day one", "text": "Users paid for credits before they built anything. Model costs were passed through to users in the price of the credits. So the company was profitable while it was still one person." }, { "title": "Sold to distribution", "text": "Wix had millions of website customers and needed an AI app builder. After the sale, annual recurring revenue grew from about US$3.5 million to US$150 million in eleven months. The product did not change that much. The sales channel did." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from a newsletter that summarizes the founder's talks and posts. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Plain JavaScript with JSX (a syntax for writing HTML-like markup inside JavaScript) instead of TypeScript, because the models wrote it with fewer errors.", "MongoDB as the database, because the data model changed often. MongoDB is a document database, so it does not need a fixed table structure.", "Model routing: larger models (Claude, Gemini) for app logic and design, and smaller models for small fixes. Routing means that each request goes to the cheapest model that can do the job.", "Growth tactics: a staged onboarding of the first 10 users, then a relaunch on Product Hunt. Later, free credits for users who invited others, and a large hackathon event.", "The first employee was hired about six weeks before the sale." ], "src": [ 9 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database promised the same thing: software without programming. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Builder.ai", "years": "2016 to 2025", "funding": "US$445M", "cause": "Unit economics", "promise": "Custom apps for US$20,000, assembled by AI.", "died": "The apps cost US$35,000 to build. Offshore developers did the work behind the AI label. It collapsed in May 2025, one month before Base44 was sold.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2170-builderai" }, { "name": "Koji", "years": "2016 to 2021", "funding": "US$16M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "No-code app builder for creators.", "died": "Free users did not become paying users. It was squeezed between Webflow and Bubble.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/284-koji", "note": "Press reports put Koji's end in December 2023, when Linktree bought it. The dates in the database may be wrong." }, { "name": "Light Table / Eve", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$3M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Let anyone build apps without code.", "died": "Users had to learn a new way to program. Developers stayed with the editors they already knew.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1560-light-tableeve" }, { "name": "Appcubator", "years": "2013 to 2016", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Product failure", "promise": "Drag-and-drop app creation, no coding degree required.", "died": "The market was not ready. It lost to the more flexible Bubble.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1160-appcubator" }, { "name": "Sosh", "years": "2012 to 2013", "funding": "US$2.3M", "cause": "No market need", "promise": "Drag-and-drop website builder, before Webflow existed.", "died": "Too complex for beginners, too rigid for professionals, and the generated code was messy.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/565-sosh" } ], "whatChanged": [ "All five companies failed for one shared reason. Before 2024, no-code meant that the user replaced typed code with a visual tool, and the user still had to learn that tool. The database entry for Sosh says it exactly: too complex for beginners, too rigid for professionals.", "AI models removed the tool. Plain language became the interface, and real code became the output. Builder.ai is the sharpest contrast. It sold the same promise with people hidden behind an AI label, and it collapsed in May 2025. Base44 sold the same promise with a real model, and Wix bought it one month later." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Not as it is. The pattern, yes.", "text": "The general-purpose market closed within about a year. Lovable reported US$500 million in annual recurring revenue in June 2026. Base44 is inside Wix. Replit, Bolt, v0 and the model companies compete with large budgets. A new general-purpose app builder from one person has no opening.", "steps": [ "Watch for a capability threshold: a model that newly does one thing reliably.", "Build the all-in-one version for a buyer who cannot program, while competitors serve developers.", "Charge from the first day, with usage pricing, and publish your numbers.", "Sell to whoever owns distribution before funded competitors arrive." ], "open": "The vertical version is still open. That means app generation for one profession where data rules and compliance matter. Examples: clinics, law firms, property managers." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Model dependence", "text": "Base44 rents its intelligence from model providers. Base1, its own model trained on tens of millions of user interactions, is the answer. The company says that owning the model will cut inference cost and improve margins." }, { "title": "Bundling by a giant", "text": "Shlomo has said that the competitor to fear is Google, not Replit or Lovable. A free app builder inside a large software suite would remove Base44's pricing power." }, { "title": "Credit pricing", "text": "Reviewers report users who pay about US$300 a month after they spend all their plan credits. Price complaints are the most common criticism in reviews." }, { "title": "Security liability", "text": "The July 2025 flaw let anyone register inside private apps by using a public app identifier, which also bypassed single sign-on. The platform owns security for apps whose builders cannot audit them." }, { "title": "Cost to the parent", "text": "Calcalist reported that Wix's quarterly loss widened to US$76.4 million in 2026, partly because of the Base44 payouts." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://base44.com/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Wix press release, 18 June 2025: Wix Further Expands into Vibe Coding with Acquisition of Base44", "url": "https://www.wix.com/press-room/home/post/wix-further-expands-into-vibe-coding-with-acquisition-of-base44-a-hyper-growth-startup-that-simplif", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. Primary source for the deal terms, the retention bonuses and the earn-out period." }, { "title": "TechCrunch, 18 June 2025: 6-month-old, solo-owned vibe coder Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/18/6-month-old-solo-owned-vibe-coder-base44-sells-to-wix-for-80m-cash/", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. Wix confirmed the cash form and the headcount to TechCrunch. The user and profit numbers inside it are founder posts, grade C." }, { "title": "Calcalist, 18 June 2025: Vibe coding fever: Solo entrepreneur's Base44 acquired by Wix for $80 million", "url": "https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/s1iflnlelx", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founder's background and the six-employee count." }, { "title": "Calcalist, May 2026: Base44 milestone unlocks $38 million payout for founder Maor Shlomo", "url": "https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/sy8shemymg", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. Reports numbers that Wix disclosed." }, { "title": "Calcalist, 4 August 2026: Maor Shlomo's Base44 payday climbs to $150 million after latest Wix payout", "url": "https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/apa3i9eyt", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. Reports numbers from Wix's second-quarter 2026 earnings." }, { "title": "Latka, updated 31 August 2026: Base44 Revenue: $80M Wix Deal, Then $150M ARR", "url": "https://getlatka.com/blog/base44-revenue-acquired-wix", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. A secondary compilation that dates and attributes each revenue figure." }, { "title": "The Hacker News, July 2025: Wiz Uncovers Critical Access Bypass Flaw in AI-Powered Vibe Coding Platform Base44", "url": "https://thehackernews.com/2025/07/wiz-uncovers-critical-access-bypass.html", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Based on the Wiz research report." }, { "title": "TechCrunch, 29 June 2026: Vibe-coding platform Base44 launches own model as AI startups seek defensibility", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/29/vibe-coding-platform-base44-launches-own-model-as-ai-startups-seek-defensibility/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Also the source for Lovable's US$500 million ARR claim." }, { "title": "AI & No-Code Exits newsletter, 16 January 2026: How Maor Shlomo sold Base44 for $80M", "url": "https://nocodeexits.substack.com/p/how-maor-shlomo-sold-base44-for-80m", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Summarizes founder talks. Source for the technical and growth details." }, { "title": "Base44 reviews with 2026 pricing: flowstep.ai and justinmckelvey.com", "url": "https://flowstep.ai/blog/base44-review/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read as summaries. Source for the plan prices and the credit complaints." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/chatbase/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/chatbase.md", "slug": "chatbase", "name": "Chatbase", "country": "Canada, now USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI customer-support agents", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-12", "launchLabel": "2 February 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$10M annual recurring revenue, March 2026", "sticker": "$10M ARR", "outcomeUsd": 10000000, "months": 37, "teamLabel": "1 founder alone to US$1M ARR, 26 staff at US$10M ARR", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "support-agents", "channel": "audience", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "Customer support" ], "product": "A company uploads its documents or gives its website address. Chatbase turns that material into a chat agent that answers customer questions on the site, by email or by phone, and hands the conversation to a person when it cannot answer.", "why": "It launched the obvious application of a new model within weeks, with a pricing page on the first day. The founder built the parts around the model instead of a model, so every model upgrade improved the product for free. Then it moved from a consumer toy to business customers who stay.", "summary": [ "Chatbase builds AI agents for customer support. An AI agent here is a chat program that answers customer questions from a company's own documents and website, and that can take actions such as looking up an order or passing the conversation to an employee. The first version in February 2023 was much simpler: upload a PDF, then chat with its content.", "Yasser Elsaid built that first version in about two months while he was a final-year computer science student in Toronto. He posted a demo on 2 February 2023 to 16 followers, and the first customer paid about 30 minutes later. He reached US$1 million in annual recurring revenue 117 days after the demo, still alone. Annual recurring revenue (ARR) is the current monthly subscription revenue multiplied by twelve. In March 2026, Stripe, the company's payment processor, published that Chatbase had passed US$10 million in ARR with 26 employees and no outside investment.", "This page grades every number by its evidence. The headline number comes from the payment processor. Most of the growth numbers are founder statements. The page also shows five failed startups that sold automated customer conversations before language models could hold one." ], "pricing": { "caption": "Chatbase plans in October 2026, from the company's pricing page and from review sites (grade C)", "note": "A message credit is one answer from a standard model. An answer from a larger model uses more credits, up to 5 per answer according to reviewers. Extra credits cost US$40 per 1,000. Removing the Chatbase name from the chat window costs US$99 a month. Yearly billing is 20% cheaper than monthly billing.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "50 message credits a month" ], [ "Hobby", "32", "40", "700 message credits a month, 1 agent" ], [ "Standard", "120", "150", "4,000 message credits a month" ], [ "Pro", "400", "500", "15,000 message credits a month" ], [ "Enterprise", "custom", "custom", "Higher limits" ] ] }, "factsCaption": "US$10 million in annual recurring revenue three years after a demo posted to 16 followers, with the headline figure published by the payment processor", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was published by Stripe, the payment processor that handles the revenue. A grade B value comes from a supplier's account or independent press. A grade C value is a founder claim. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a weekend demo to US$10 million in annual recurring revenue in 37 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "facts": [ { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, March 2026", "value": "US$10 million", "grade": "A", "note": "Published by Stripe, the company's payment processor, in its customer story. One case study dates the milestone to May 2026; this page uses the Stripe date.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Employees at US$10 million ARR", "value": "26", "grade": "B", "note": "Stated in the Stripe story. A headcount is not a payment figure, so it is graded B.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per employee", "value": "about US$385,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 10,000,000 divided by 26 equals 384,615.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Paying customers, 2026", "value": "more than 8,000", "grade": "B", "note": "Supabase customer story. The founder's own figure is more than 10,000 (grade C).", "src": [ 2, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "B", "note": "Stripe writes fully bootstrapped. Supabase writes not a single dollar of venture funding. One AI-written directory claims a Y Combinator batch and a US$3 million raise. No other source supports that, so it is not counted.", "src": [ 1, 2, 11 ] }, { "fact": "First public demo", "value": "2 February 2023, posted to 16 followers", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interviews.", "src": [ 3, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Time to the first paying customer", "value": "about 30 minutes", "grade": "B", "note": "Stated in the Stripe story and in founder interviews. A pricing page was live at launch.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 11 February 2023", "value": "US$400", "grade": "C", "note": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is the subscription revenue of one month.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, end of February 2023", "value": "US$3,000", "grade": "C", "note": "", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, mid-March 2023", "value": "US$10,000", "grade": "C", "note": "", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, mid-May 2023", "value": "US$64,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview with Indie Hackers.", "src": [ 3, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Time to US$1 million ARR", "value": "117 days", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interviews. US$1 million ARR equals about US$83,000 of monthly revenue.", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Date of US$1 million ARR", "value": "30 May 2023", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2 February 2023 plus 117 days.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Employees until June 2023", "value": "1", "grade": "B", "note": "Stripe story: the founder was the only employee until June 2023.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "ARR at the two-year relaunch, February 2025", "value": "US$5 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder post on Indie Hackers.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Time from US$1 million to US$3 million ARR", "value": "7 months", "grade": "C", "note": "Then 12 months from US$3 million to US$5 million. Growth slowed as the product moved from consumers to businesses.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "ARR, December 2025", "value": "US$8 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on the ProductLed podcast. Team of 18, of which 11 engineers. Retention 92%.", "src": [ 5, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue recovered from failed card payments, 2023 to 2026", "value": "US$870,000", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe story. Money that automatic payment retries recovered.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to US$10 million ARR", "value": "37 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: February 2023 to March 2026.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "November 2022", "what": "Elsaid, in his last year at York University in Toronto, experiments with the GPT-3 API, weeks before ChatGPT is released. He did not get a return offer from his Meta internship.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "when": "2 February 2023", "what": "He posts a demo of ChatGPT for your PDFs to 16 followers. The post spreads. A pricing page is live, and the first payment arrives about 30 minutes later.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "when": "February 2023", "what": "He stops attending class and fails two final courses. The first plan costs US$9.99 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 7 ] }, { "when": "Mid-May 2023", "what": "US$64,000 in monthly recurring revenue. No marketing budget: subreddits, X, LinkedIn and Product Hunt. He hires his first two employees.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "30 May 2023", "what": "US$1 million ARR, 117 days after the demo, with one person.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "when": "2023 to 2024", "what": "Chatbase moves from a consumer tool with US$10 and US$30 plans to a business product: support agents that connect to a company's systems. The team moves from Toronto to New York, where 98 of its 100 target accounts are.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 7 ] }, { "when": "February 2025", "what": "Relaunch as an AI agent platform, US$5 million ARR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "December 2025", "what": "US$8 million ARR, 92% retention, 18 people.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 7 ] }, { "when": "March 2026", "what": "Stripe publishes that Chatbase passed US$10 million ARR with 26 employees.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2026", "what": "The product sells agents for chat, email and voice, with a plan for enterprise customers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Timing", "text": "The GPT-3 API became usable in late 2022, and ChatGPT created demand in January 2023. Chat with your own documents was the obvious application. Elsaid shipped it within weeks, before the category had a name. In 2023 he said himself that the viral launch was a one-time advantage and not a strategy." }, { "title": "The harness, not the model", "text": "Chatbase owns everything around the model: document ingestion, retrieval of the right passage, rules that keep the agent on script, a fallback to a human, and analytics. The founder's bet was that the models would keep improving. Every model upgrade since then improved Chatbase at no cost." }, { "title": "Paid self-serve from day one", "text": "A pricing page and Stripe checkout were live at the first demo. Customers entered a card and deployed an agent without talking to anyone. The founder was the only employee for the first four months, so the product had to sell itself." }, { "title": "From toy to business tool", "text": "Hundreds of chat-with-PDF tools appeared in 2023. Chatbase left that market and sold support agents to businesses. Business customers pay more and leave less: the founder reports 92% retention. Growth was slower in that phase, from US$1 million to US$5 million in 19 months, but it held." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from founder interviews and from the customer stories of two suppliers, Supabase and Stripe. They are grade B and C.", "items": [ "React and Next.js for the web app. Supabase, a hosted Postgres database with built-in login and file storage, as the whole backend, so one person did not have to connect four services.", "The OpenAI API and LangChain for the model calls. Pinecone, a vector database, stored the document embeddings at first. Later the embeddings moved into Postgres itself with the pgvector extension, so the search runs next to the data.", "Stripe Checkout and Billing for subscriptions, usage credits and add-ons, and Stripe Radar with custom rules against card-testing attacks, which self-serve products attract.", "The first version took about two months to build. Growth was organic: a story posted in subreddits worked better than a tool announcement, plus X, LinkedIn and Product Hunt.", "Later: one person owns search optimization for both search engines and AI answer engines, and about 80% of outbound sales go to warm leads who already visited the site.", "Team at US$8 million ARR: 18 people, 11 of them engineers. New hires then shifted to growth and sales." ], "src": [ 1, 2, 3, 5 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold automated customer conversations before language models could hold one. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Answerly", "years": "2013 to 2016", "funding": "US$550K", "cause": "Product failure", "promise": "FAQ chatbots that deflect support tickets so humans handle only the complex cases.", "died": "Every customer needed months of hand-written FAQs and decision trees. The language processing of the time could not handle real questions, and a failed answer annoyed the customer twice.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2168-answerly" }, { "name": "Hipmob", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$100K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Customer chat inside mobile apps.", "died": "Intercom and Zendesk added the same feature to larger products. With almost no funding, it stayed invisible.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1184-hipmob" }, { "name": "RightHello", "years": "2014 to 2022", "funding": "US$600K", "cause": "Ran out of cash", "promise": "Live chat for online shops that turns visitors into buyers.", "died": "A human had to answer every chat. Intercom raised US$240 million while RightHello had US$600,000, and small shops churned faster than they could be acquired.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2260-righthello" }, { "name": "Niles", "years": "2017 to 2020", "funding": "US$2.8M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A bot inside Slack that answers questions from the company's knowledge.", "died": "Slack built its own search, and the bot needed constant retraining that a small customer base could not pay for.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1031-niles" }, { "name": "Vanti", "years": "2019 to 2024", "funding": "US$18M", "cause": "No market need", "promise": "Shopping chatbots that guide customers to a purchase.", "died": "It built its own language models. When GPT-4 arrived, any startup could build the same conversation for a fraction of the cost, and the custom models became worthless overnight.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2508-vanti" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Before 2023, a support bot needed its answers written by hand. Answerly's customers spent months on FAQs and decision trees, and the bot still failed on any question that was phrased in a new way. The companies that survived in that market, Intercom and Zendesk, sold tools for human agents, not replacements.", "Language models removed the hand-written part. A company uploads what it already has, and the model reads it. Chatbase's first version was built by one student in two months, and the same idea had cost Answerly three years. Vanti is the sharpest contrast: it spent US$18 million on its own models and closed in 2024, one year after Chatbase reached US$1 million ARR on a rented model." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The first product, no. The pattern, yes.", "text": "Chat with your documents was copied hundreds of times within months of the launch, and the founder said in 2023 that the viral start was not repeatable. The business product now competes with Intercom and Zendesk, which bundle AI agents into their support suites, and with venture-funded agent companies that target the same enterprise accounts.", "steps": [ "When a model newly does one thing reliably, ship the obvious application within weeks, with a pricing page on the first day.", "Build the parts around the model: data ingestion, retrieval, rules, human handoff, analytics. Rent the model itself.", "Grow without a marketing budget first, then spend when revenue is reliable.", "Leave the consumer version when copies appear, and sell to businesses that stay." ], "open": "The vertical version is still open: a support agent built for one industry, with the integrations and the rules that industry needs. Examples: clinics, logistics companies, banks in one country. Voice support in languages other than English is also early." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Bundling by incumbents", "text": "Intercom and Zendesk sell AI agents inside products that their customers already pay for. Chatbase must win on product quality and price, and the founder says quality is the only moat when features are easy to copy." }, { "title": "Model costs", "text": "Chatbase rents every answer from a model provider and resells it as credits. Reviewers report that an answer from a large model costs 5 credits instead of 1. If model prices fall, margins improve. If customers demand the largest models, margins fall." }, { "title": "Slower growth upmarket", "text": "ARR went from US$1 million to US$3 million in 7 months, then took 12 months to reach US$5 million. Enterprise sales need salespeople, onboarding calls and compliance work, which the founder is now adding." }, { "title": "Numbers that do not agree", "text": "Customer counts are 8,000 in the Supabase story and 10,000 in founder statements. The US$10 million ARR date is March 2026 at Stripe and May 2026 in one case study. One directory claims a Y Combinator batch and a US$3 million raise that no other source mentions." }, { "title": "Churn in the small-business segment", "text": "RightHello and Hipmob died from churning small customers. Chatbase's self-serve plans serve the same segment. The reported 92% retention is a founder figure." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.chatbase.co/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Stripe customer story, 2026: Bootstrapped startup Chatbase reaches $10 million in ARR with Stripe", "url": "https://stripe.com/customers/chatbase", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. Stripe is the company's payment processor. Primary source for the ARR, the headcount, the recovered revenue and the founding month." }, { "title": "Supabase customer story, 2026: The consolidation play that took a single founder from zero to 10 million in ARR", "url": "https://supabase.com/customers/chatbase", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. A supplier's account with founder quotes. Source for the customer count, the team size and the database details." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 2023, interview by Channing Allen: How a college student reached $64,000/mo in 6 months by being an AI first mover", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-a-college-student-reached-64-000-mo-in-6-months-by-being-an-ai-first-mover-ba7981f6e1", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview. Source for the launch story, the early stack and the growth tactics." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, February 2025, founder post: From viral side project to a $5M/yr B2B AI platform", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/TpbhTVyp1sjBk0uzo4tR", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in part. The full post is behind a membership wall. Source for the US$5 million ARR at the relaunch." }, { "title": "Superframeworks case study, 2026: Bootstrapped to $10M ARR, $1M in 117 Days From a Tweet to 16 Followers", "url": "https://superframeworks.com/case-study/chatbase", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Summarizes a video interview with the founder. Source for the month-by-month revenue of 2023 and the growth phases." }, { "title": "Solo Founders newsletter, 2026: $9M ARR, no VC, solo founder", "url": "https://solofounders.beehiiv.com/p/9m-arr-no-vc-solo-founder", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the summary only. Confirms US$9 million ARR in early 2026 and the bootstrapped status." }, { "title": "ProductLed podcast, February 2026: How Chatbase hit $8M ARR with 18 people", "url": "https://www.castfox.net/podcast/productled-podcast-22666/episode/how-chatbase-hit-8m-arr-with-18-people-71565", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the episode summary, not the audio. Source for the December 2025 ARR, the team size and the move to New York." }, { "title": "Chatbase documentation and blog", "url": "https://www.chatbase.co/", "grade": "C", "how": "Not used for numbers." }, { "title": "Chatbase pricing page, read 12 October 2026, with review sites costbench.com and chatarmin.com for the plan prices", "url": "https://www.chatbase.co/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "The company page gives the Hobby price, the credit amounts and the add-on prices. The Standard and Pro prices and the credit cost of large models come from review sites." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." }, { "title": "NeuronFeed directory entry for Chatbase", "url": "https://neuronfeed.com/startups/chatbase", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. An AI-written directory. It claims a Y Combinator batch and a US$3 million raise. Cited only for that conflict." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/cal-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/cal-ai.md", "slug": "cal-ai", "name": "Cal AI", "country": "USA", "sector": "Health Care", "productType": "Calorie tracking from food photos", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "B", "added": "2026-10-12", "launchLabel": "May 2024", "outcomeLabel": "Sold to MyFitnessPal, price not disclosed, December 2025", "sticker": "Sold at $30M+ revenue", "outcomeUsd": 30000000, "months": 19, "teamLabel": "2 teenage founders plus 2 partners, 7 employees at the sale", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "health-appearance", "channel": "creators", "trend": "sold", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 3, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "Consumer app", "Teen founders" ], "product": "You photograph your meal. Cal AI sends the picture to a rented AI model and returns an estimate of the calories, protein, carbohydrates and fat. No search, no portion menus.", "why": "It sold speed to people who gave up on manual food logging, it paid 250 influencers fixed monthly fees to reach them, and it had a 30-dollar-a-year price. The rented model made the hard part cost almost nothing to build.", "summary": [ "Cal AI is a mobile app that estimates the calories in a meal from a photo. It uses a multimodal model through an API. A multimodal model is an AI model that reads images as well as text, and an API is a paid interface that lets an app send a picture to a model that another company runs. The founders did not train a model. Older calorie apps, such as MyFitnessPal, asked the user to search a database and enter portions by hand.", "Zach Yadegari and Henry Langmack, both 17 and still in high school on Long Island, New York, wrote the first code in March 2024 and launched in May 2024 with two older partners. The app passed US$1 million in sales within five months and reached an annual run rate above US$35 million one year after launch. Annual run rate is the current monthly revenue multiplied by twelve. MyFitnessPal, the largest calorie app, bought Cal AI in December 2025 after almost a year of talks. The price was not disclosed. MyFitnessPal told TechCrunch that Cal AI had more than 15 million downloads and more than US$30 million in annual revenue in under two years.", "The headline numbers on this page are grade B: a buyer's statement to the press, and documents that CNBC and Fortune reviewed. The founder's own figures, such as the US$50 million run rate at the sale, are grade C. The page also shows what happened to earlier attempts at the same idea." ], "factsCaption": "Sold to MyFitnessPal 19 months after launch, with the buyer confirming US$30 million in annual revenue and 15 million downloads, and the price undisclosed", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade B value was stated by the buyer to the press, or comes from financial documents that a journalist reviewed. A grade C value is a founder claim. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value on this page is grade A, because neither company is public and no payment processor has published the revenue.", "timelineLead": "From a weekend project in a parents' house to a sale to the market leader in 19 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Cal AI subscription prices, as reported in September 2025 and listed in the App Store in October 2026 (grade B and C)", "note": "The app is free to download, with a three-day free trial. The 2025 press prices are US$2.49 a month or US$29.99 a year, which is US$2.50 a month. The App Store listing in October 2026 shows in-app purchases called Unlimited at US$2.99, US$9.99, US$19.99 and US$29.99, and a Streak Restore at US$0.99. The listing does not say which period each price covers, so the two columns below hold the yearly and monthly prices from the press only.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "Download and a 3-day trial" ], [ "Unlimited, 2025 press", "2.50", "2.49", "Billed US$29.99 a year, or monthly" ], [ "Unlimited, App Store 2026", "", "", "Prices listed: 2.99, 9.99, 19.99, 29.99" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Annual revenue at the sale", "value": "more than US$30 million", "grade": "B", "note": "MyFitnessPal's chief executive to TechCrunch, March 2026. MyFitnessPal is privately owned, so this is a buyer's statement, not a filing.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Downloads at the sale", "value": "more than 15 million", "grade": "B", "note": "Same statement to TechCrunch.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Sale price", "value": "not disclosed", "grade": "B", "note": "TechCrunch: terms not disclosed. One blog writes a rumored US$100 million without a source. That number is not used on this page.", "src": [ 1, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Annual run rate claimed at the sale", "value": "US$50 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X, 2 March 2026, 18 months after launch.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Annual revenue, March 2026, compiled estimate", "value": "US$40 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Latka's company page, which cites Yahoo Finance. Not confirmed by the company.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Gross profit per month, September 2025", "value": "about US$1.4 million", "grade": "B", "note": "Documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. Gross profit here is revenue after the 15% to 30% that Apple and Google keep.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Net operating income per month, September 2025", "value": "about US$274,000", "grade": "B", "note": "Same documents. Profit before tax and interest, after marketing and salaries.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Gross profit per year, from the monthly figure", "value": "about US$16.8 million", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 1.4 million times 12.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Net operating income per year, from the monthly figure", "value": "about US$3.3 million", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 274,000 times 12. Most of the gross profit went to marketing and salaries.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month, September 2025", "value": "about US$2.1 million", "grade": "B", "note": "CNBC Make It headline figure, reprinted by The Nightly. Fortune reviewed records showing several million dollars a month.", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Annual run rate, May 2025", "value": "more than US$35 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in a recorded interview with Latka, one year after launch.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "First month of revenue, May 2024", "value": "more than US$28,000", "grade": "B", "note": "Documents reviewed by CNBC. The second month was US$115,000.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Cumulative sales of US$1 million", "value": "by 4 September 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview. About five months after launch.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "New downloads per day, May 2025", "value": "20,000 to 30,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Share of new users who start a trial or pay in the first session", "value": "20% to 25%", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Influencers on fixed monthly fees, May 2025", "value": "about 250", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview. Total influencer spend reached the mid six figures in one month.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Marketing test before launch", "value": "US$2,000", "grade": "B", "note": "CNBC: the founders spent US$2,000 on a social media test. One founder and one partner then paid the costs for six months until app-store payouts arrived.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Team size", "value": "17 in May 2025, 30 in September 2025, 7 employees plus contractors at the sale", "grade": "B", "note": "17 from the founder interview (grade C). 30 from CNBC documents. 7 retained employees from MyFitnessPal to TechCrunch. The founder's March 2026 post thanks a team of more than 30, so the 7 may count only employees, not contractors.", "src": [ 1, 2, 4, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "B", "note": "Founder interview and Fortune. The founder wrote that investors kept offering money and were refused.", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Founders' age at launch", "value": "17", "grade": "B", "note": "TechCrunch and Fortune.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the sale closing", "value": "19 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: May 2024 to December 2025. The sale was announced in March 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2021 to February 2024", "what": "In his first year of high school, Yadegari builds Totally Science, a games website for school networks. It reaches 5 million users and about US$60,000 a month in advertising. He sells it for about US$100,000 in February 2024, at age 16.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "when": "March 2024", "what": "First line of code. Yadegari, who tracked calories to gain weight, found manual logging so tedious that he had stopped. He and Langmack, a friend from coding camp, build the photo app with two partners met on X: Blake Anderson, 24, and Jake Castillo, 30.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4, 6 ] }, { "when": "May 2024", "what": "Launch from his parents' house in Roslyn, New York, after a US$2,000 social media test. First month: more than US$28,000. Second month: US$115,000.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "July 2024", "what": "The founders spend the month in a San Francisco hacker house and hire about 15 people. Investors offer money. They refuse.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "when": "4 September 2024", "what": "US$1 million in cumulative sales, about five months after launch.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "Early 2025", "what": "MyFitnessPal notices Cal AI in the app-store rankings through Sensor Tower and starts talks. The two apps are neck and neck in their category.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "May 2025", "what": "Annual run rate above US$35 million, 17 people, 20,000 to 30,000 downloads a day, 250 paid influencers. Yadegari is still in high school.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "Spring 2025", "what": "Yadegari's posts about being rejected by 15 of 18 colleges, with a 4.0 grade average and a profitable company, get tens of millions of views and television coverage.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "when": "September 2025", "what": "CNBC reviews documents: about US$1.4 million gross profit and US$274,000 net operating income a month, 30 employees. Yadegari starts at the University of Miami.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "when": "December 2025", "what": "The sale to MyFitnessPal closes. Cal AI gets access to MyFitnessPal's database of 20 million foods.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2 March 2026", "what": "The sale is announced. Seven employees plus contractors join MyFitnessPal. Cal AI stays a separate app. The founder posts that it passed US$50 million in annual run rate.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "Yadegari leaves MyFitnessPal.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "8 October 2026", "what": "He announces Persona, an AI assistant with a US$179 wristband, with US$10 million from Vine Ventures and others.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 7 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Distribution", "text": "Cal AI paid about 250 influencers fixed monthly fees to post on TikTok and Instagram, instead of a commission per sale. Half of the 17-person team in May 2025 worked on marketing and influencer management. The founder's own viral posts added television coverage at no cost. The product was built in two months. The audience took the rest of the money." }, { "title": "Speed over accuracy", "text": "MyFitnessPal's chief executive said it himself: his app is for users who want to specify three pickles, not two. Cal AI is for people who want an answer in two seconds and do not want to think about it. That audience was larger than the dedicated one, and nobody served it." }, { "title": "A rented model", "text": "The founder says the app was only possible because of model APIs such as ChatGPT's, and that they did not train a model. The expensive part of a 2011 photo-calorie app, the recognition, cost Cal AI a fraction of a cent per picture." }, { "title": "A low price with a trial", "text": "US$29.99 a year, with a three-day free trial and a paywall tested hundreds of times. About 20% to 25% of new users started a trial or paid in their first session. The founders expected 25% to 50% of yearly subscribers to renew." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's recorded interview with Latka, from CNBC's reporting, and from TechCrunch. They are grade B and C.", "items": [ "A native mobile app for iPhone and Android. The calorie estimate comes from a third-party multimodal model through an API; the company did not train its own model.", "Yadegari and Langmack wrote the code. Anderson, a serial entrepreneur, and Yadegari paid the running costs for six months, because Apple and Google pay out with a delay.", "Superwall, a paywall tool, ran hundreds of tests on the subscription screen.", "Growth: a US$2,000 social media test before launch, then TikTok and Instagram influencers on monthly retainers. The largest influencer earned tens of thousands of dollars a month for four posts.", "The weekly team meeting was on Sunday night, because the founders were in school.", "After the sale, the app was connected to MyFitnessPal's nutrition database: 20 million foods, 68,500 brands, 380 restaurant chains." ], "src": [ 1, 4, 6 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "The Loot Drop database has no failed food-photo app. The closest entries are below: a hardware tracker, a coaching service, and two personalized-plan apps whose records are thin. The values are from that database and are not independently verified. Two real photo-calorie attempts from 2011, which are not in the database, are described in the next section.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Jawbone", "years": "1999 to 2017", "funding": "US$930M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A wristband that turns your daily activity and food into health insights.", "died": "Fitbit and Apple built better hardware. Recalls and lawsuits drained the money. The food feature came from The Eatery, a photo app that Jawbone bought in 2013 and let die.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/257-jawbone" }, { "name": "Arivale", "years": "2015 to 2019", "funding": "US$50M", "cause": "Unit economics", "promise": "Scientific wellness: blood tests, DNA, activity tracking and a personal coach.", "died": "It cost about US$4,700 a year to serve a customer who paid about US$1,200 after the first year. The coach could not be automated.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/8-arivale" }, { "name": "Overfit", "years": "2020 to 2023", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Personalized fitness and nutrition plans from machine learning.", "died": "Customer acquisition cost more than a subscriber paid over their lifetime. Noom and MyFitnessPal kept users longer.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1347-overfit", "note": "The database record names no founder. Treat it as an illustration." }, { "name": "Refolo", "years": "2017 to 2021", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "No market need", "promise": "Paid meal plans for people who switch to a plant-based diet.", "died": "Free recipes existed everywhere, and larger wellness apps added meal plans as a feature.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1994-refolo", "note": "The database record could not be matched to press coverage." } ], "whatChanged": [ "Photo calorie counting was tried in 2011. Meal Snap, by DailyBurn, let users photograph a meal and returned a calorie range. TechCrunch assumed that people behind the app, probably paid through Mechanical Turk, identified the food, and reported a handful of cashews rated at 150 to 614 calories. The Eatery, by Massive Health, had other users rate the photo as Fit or Fat. A study of 200,000 downloads found that 69% of users never took a picture, and 2.6% used the app for more than a week. Jawbone bought Massive Health in 2013 and stopped development.", "The idea was right and the recognition did not exist. In 2024 a rented multimodal model identified the food and the portion in seconds, for a fraction of a cent. Two teenagers could build in two months what a funded company could not deliver in 2011. The remaining problem was the one the 2011 apps also had: getting people to open the app. Cal AI spent its money there." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The exact app, no. The playbook, yes, with money for marketing.", "text": "Photo calorie apps are now a category with dozens of entries, and the market leader owns the best-known one. A new entrant needs a reason to be chosen. Cal AI's playbook costs money: influencer retainers reached the mid six figures in one month, and the founders had a previous exit to fund the first six months.", "steps": [ "Pick a daily habit that people abandon because of manual entry, and remove the entry with a model API.", "Price it low with a trial, and test the paywall constantly.", "Pay creators fixed fees for reach before competitors do, and make the founder story part of the marketing.", "Watch for the incumbent: the buyer found Cal AI in the app-store rankings." ], "open": "Other logging habits that people abandon: receipts and expenses, medication, water, chores, mileage. Each one has a manual-entry app that users quit." }, "watch": [ { "title": "No disclosed price", "text": "Neither company is public, so the sale price may never be known. The outcome on this page is the revenue that the buyer confirmed, not the money the founders received. Retention terms for the founders were not disclosed, and the chief executive left after six months." }, { "title": "Renewals", "text": "A US$29.99 yearly plan sold through influencer traffic depends on renewals. In May 2025 the founders expected 25% to 50% of subscribers to renew, which is a wide range. The 2011 photo apps lost most users within a week." }, { "title": "Accuracy", "text": "The founder claims 90% accuracy. App Store reviews describe wrong sodium and fiber values and confusing portion sizes. The buyer sells the precise version itself." }, { "title": "Platform cut", "text": "Apple and Google keep 15% to 30% of every subscription. The CNBC documents show gross profit of US$1.4 million on revenue of about US$2.1 million a month." }, { "title": "Numbers that do not agree", "text": "Revenue at the sale is US$30 million (buyer), US$40 million (Latka estimate) and US$50 million run rate (founder). Team size is 7, 17 or 30 depending on the date and on whether contractors count." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.calai.app/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6480417616" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TechCrunch, 2 March 2026: MyFitnessPal has acquired Cal AI, the viral calorie app built by teens", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/02/myfitnesspal-has-acquired-cal-ai-the-viral-calorie-app-built-by-teens/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The buyer's chief executive states the revenue, the downloads, the team size, the closing date and the undisclosed terms." }, { "title": "Zach Yadegari on X, 2 March 2026: Cal AI has been acquired by MyFitnessPal", "url": "https://x.com/zach_yadegari/status/2028473704359874652", "grade": "C", "how": "Read as reproduced on arr.club, because X does not serve the post without login. Source for the US$50 million run rate and the team of more than 30." }, { "title": "Latka company page: Cal AI revenue 2026", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/calai.app", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A compiled page that cites Yahoo Finance for US$40 million. Used only for that estimate." }, { "title": "CNBC Make It, September 2025, reprinted by The Nightly: 18yo CEO Zach Yadegari learned to code at age 7, now he has a $2.1 million-a-month AI app", "url": "https://thenightly.com.au/business/cal-ai-18yo-ceo-zach-yadegari-learned-to-code-at-age-7-now-he-has-a-21-million-a-month-ai-app-c-20025032", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. CNBC reviewed company documents. Source for the gross profit, the net operating income, the first two months of revenue, the team of 30 and the 2024 sale of Totally Science." }, { "title": "Fortune, 27 September 2025: This Ivy League reject taught himself to code at 7, built a $30m app by 18", "url": "https://fortune.com/2025/09/27/gen-z-founder-treats-college-like-vacation-30-million-app-by-18", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Fortune reviewed financial records. Source for the prices, the launch month, the four founders and the refused investors." }, { "title": "Latka interview with Zach Yadegari, May 2025: How Cal AI hit $35M ARR and 20,000 daily downloads in under a year", "url": "https://getlatka.com/interviews/cal-ai-zach-yadegari-2025", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the transcript and the figure list. Founder statements on camera. Source for the run rate, downloads, conversion, influencers, team and the rented model." }, { "title": "TechCrunch, 8 October 2026: Cal AI's 19-year-old founder just raised $10M for his new AI startup", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/08/cal-ais-19-year-old-founder-just-raised-10m-for-his-new-ai-startup/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founder's departure in June 2026 and the Persona round." }, { "title": "Apple App Store listing: Cal AI, Calorie Tracker, read 12 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cal-ai-calorie-tracker/id6480417616", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the in-app purchase prices, the seller name Viral Development LLC, the 370,000 ratings and the accuracy complaints." }, { "title": "stork.ai blog, 2026: This teen's AI app sold for $100 million", "url": "https://www.stork.ai/blog/this-teens-ai-app-sold-for-100-million", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. States a rumored price without a source. Cited only to say that the rumor is not used." }, { "title": "TechCrunch, 5 April 2011: Too lazy to count calories? Now you can just take a picture of your meal", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/05/too-lazy-to-count-calories-now-you-can-just-take-a-picture-of-your-meal/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for Meal Snap and the 150 to 614 calorie range." }, { "title": "MobiHealthNews, 2014: Study: less than 3 percent of The Eatery downloaders really used it", "url": "https://www.mobihealthnews.com/news/study-less-3-percent-eatery-downloaders-really-used-it", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Reports a study in JMIR of 200,000 downloads." }, { "title": "TechCrunch, 4 February 2013: Jawbone acquires mobile health startup Massive Health in big talent acquisition", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/04/jawbone-acquires-mobile-health-startup-massive-health-for-tens-of-millions/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the acquisition and the end of The Eatery's development." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors. Several health-app records in this export name no founders, which is why the page uses only four." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/magnific/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/magnific.md", "slug": "magnific", "name": "Magnific", "country": "Spain", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI image upscaler", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-12", "launchLabel": "27 November 2023", "outcomeLabel": "Sold to Freepik, price not disclosed, 7 May 2024", "sticker": "Sold in 5 months", "outcomeUsd": 10200000, "months": 5, "teamLabel": "2 founders, no employees, no CEO", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Audience", "group": "photos", "channel": "audience", "trend": "sold", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 2, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Two founders", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "Image tools" ], "product": "You upload a low-resolution image, often one made by Midjourney. Magnific enlarges it and invents plausible detail: skin pores, fabric, leaves. A slider sets how much the model is allowed to invent.", "why": "One founder had posted AI tutorials on X for a year before the launch, so the audience existed before the product. The tool did something that had no name yet, it charged from the first hour with no free trial, and two people ran it with no employees until the largest design platform in Europe bought it.", "summary": [ "Magnific is a creative upscaler. An upscaler is a program that enlarges an image. A normal upscaler guesses the missing pixels from the pixels around them. A creative upscaler uses an image model to invent new detail that was never in the file, guided by a text prompt and a creativity slider. In late 2023 most Midjourney images were small and soft, and designers wanted to print them.", "Javi López and Emilio Nicolás, two founders from Murcia, Spain, who had sold a student-housing site after thirteen years, built the tool in about three months for under US$5,000 and opened it on 27 November 2023 after a two-week waitlist. There was no free trial. Five months later it had 725,000 registered users, and on 7 May 2024 Freepik, a design platform from Málaga with tens of millions of users, bought it for an undisclosed price. The founders say it made US$10.2 million in 2024 and US$34.42 million in 2025 with two people and a 90% gross margin after GPU costs. Gross margin is revenue minus the direct cost of delivering the product, here the rented graphics processors, divided by revenue.", "The revenue numbers are founder claims, grade C. The sale, the user count and the Freepik figures are grade B. On 28 April 2026 Freepik renamed itself Magnific, after the product it had bought, and reported US$230 million in annual recurring revenue. That figure belongs to the whole parent company, not to the upscaler." ], "factsCaption": "Two founders, zero employees, zero advertising: sold five months after launch, with founder-reported revenue of US$10.2 million in the first full year", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade B value comes from the buyer's announcement or from independent press. A grade C value is a founder claim or a reviewer's report. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A: the buyer is privately owned and no payment processor has published the revenue.", "timelineLead": "From a sabbatical hobby to a sale in five months, then the buyer took the product's name. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Magnific platform plans in 2026, as reported by a reviewer, after the merger with Freepik (grade C)", "note": "These are the plans of the merged company, which bundle the upscaler with image and video generation. Each plan has a monthly credit budget; the reviewer estimates about 2,666 upscales a year on Premium and about 44,444 on Pro, or roughly US$0.06 per upscale. In 2024, before the merger, Spanish press reported that the standalone upscaler started at US$39 a month with usage tokens and no free tier.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "about 20 images a day" ], [ "Premium", "14.50", "20", "" ], [ "Premium+", "33.75", "45", "" ], [ "Pro Starter", "82.50", "110", "" ], [ "Pro", "210", "280", "" ], [ "Business", "", "55 per seat", "two seats minimum" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue, 2024", "value": "US$10.2 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X, 28 April 2026. The first full calendar year after the launch.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, 2025", "value": "US$34.42 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Same post. The founder writes that it includes sales from both websites after the acquisition, so part of it is Freepik's.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Gross margin after GPU costs", "value": "90%", "grade": "C", "note": "Same post. GPU costs are the rented graphics processors that run the image model.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "GPU cost in 2024, implied", "value": "about US$1.0 million", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 10% of 10.2 million. Gross profit about US$9.2 million.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per founder, 2024", "value": "US$5.1 million", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 10.2 million divided by 2. There were no employees.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue one year after launch", "value": "US$10 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X, 14 February 2025.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Registered users at the sale", "value": "more than 725,000", "grade": "B", "note": "Freepik's announcement, reported by Tech.eu and LBB.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Waitlist sign-ups in the first 24 hours", "value": "more than 30,000", "grade": "B", "note": "Same announcement.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Employees", "value": "0, besides the two founders", "grade": "B", "note": "The announcement says the tool was built without a CEO. The Decoder describes a two-man team.", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Advertising spend", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's email to users, quoted by The Decoder.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Money to start", "value": "under US$5,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's account, compiled by Startup Founder Stories. Development took about three months.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Share of the code written by an AI model", "value": "about half", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's email, May 2024: written with GPT-4.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Sale price", "value": "not disclosed", "grade": "B", "note": "Freepik called it its largest acquisition. Earlier purchases were EyeEm, Videvo, Iconfinder and Original Mockups.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the sale", "value": "5 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 27 November 2023 to 7 May 2024.", "src": [ 3, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "B", "note": "Freepik's announcement and the founder's posts. The parent company is a different case: see the limits.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Parent company's annual recurring revenue, April 2026", "value": "US$230 million", "grade": "B", "note": "Freepik, renamed Magnific, to Fortune. Video is about half of it. More than one million paying subscribers, about 400 employees.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Parent company's revenue per employee", "value": "about US$575,000", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 230 million divided by 400.", "src": [ 6 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2010 to 2022", "what": "López and Nicolás build Erasmusu, a student-housing site in Murcia, for thirteen years and sell it. Both take a two-year break.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "April 2022", "what": "DALL-E 2 is released. López starts experimenting with image models and posts tutorials and tests on X. A year later the audience exists, before any product.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "Autumn 2023", "what": "A workflow from his experiments enlarges an image and redraws it with new detail. He runs his own posted artwork through it for three months. Development takes about three months and under US$5,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "Mid-November 2023", "what": "Two-week waitlist. A handful of creators get access and post before-and-after images. More than 30,000 people sign up in 24 hours.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3, 5 ] }, { "when": "27 November 2023", "what": "Open to everyone. No free trial, because every upscale costs GPU time. Users buy tokens from the first hour.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "December 2023", "what": "Relaunch on Product Hunt after a first attempt fails on Product Hunt's side, with one day of 50 free tokens for everyone.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "7 May 2024", "what": "Freepik announces the acquisition: 725,000 registered users, its largest purchase to date. Magnific continues as a subsidiary. Both founders join Freepik Labs, the AI team.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "May 2024", "what": "López tells users that half of the code was written with GPT-4 and predicts one-person unicorns.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "14 February 2025", "what": "López posts: from zero to US$10 million ARR in one year with two people.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "28 April 2026", "what": "Freepik renames the whole company Magnific and reports US$230 million ARR to Fortune. López publishes the 2024 and 2025 revenue of the upscaler.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 1, 6 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Audience before product", "text": "López opened his X account a year before Magnific existed and used it for generative AI tutorials and experiments. When the waitlist opened, 30,000 people signed up in a day. In his own words, the whole launch strategy was to spend a year talking about AI without realizing you are building a channel, then give tokens to creators so they spread the word." }, { "title": "A thing without a name", "text": "Existing upscalers kept the image faithful. Magnific invented detail, and early users complained that it was not a real upscaler. The complaint was the point: no existing tool produced that output, so there was no free alternative to compete with. The buyer's announcement called it a new category." }, { "title": "Paid from the first hour", "text": "No free trial, because each upscale cost GPU time. Tokens were sold at launch, so revenue arrived on day one and the two founders never needed a salary from investors. The founder reports a 90% gross margin after GPU costs, and personnel and marketing costs that were negligible with two people." }, { "title": "Sold to a distributor", "text": "Freepik had tens of millions of users and no upscaler. It bought the two-person company five months after launch. Two years later it took the product's name for the whole company, which by then reported US$230 million ARR across stock images, image and video generation." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's email to users, quoted by The Decoder, and from a compilation of his accounts. They are grade C.", "items": [ "A workflow on top of open-source image models, with a creativity slider and a text prompt that guide how much detail the model invents. The exact models are not public.", "About half of the source code was written with GPT-4, which in late 2023 few people believed.", "Rented GPUs ran the model. Because each image cost money, the product had tokens and no free tier from the first day.", "Launch by throttling: a two-week waitlist, early access for a few creators, their before-and-after images as the marketing. Then a Product Hunt relaunch.", "No CEO, no employees, no advertising. The founders handled everything, from support to billing, until the sale.", "A previous exit paid the founders' living costs, so the company needed no salary from day one." ], "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database tried to improve photos with software or hardware before image models existed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Lytro", "years": "2006 to 2018", "funding": "US$215M", "cause": "Unit economics", "promise": "A camera that captures every ray of light, so you refocus the photo after you take it.", "died": "The hardware delivered 1.2-megapixel output from an 11-megapixel sensor at US$399 to US$499. Phones got better faster. The company pivoted twice and never fixed its costs.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2174-lytro" }, { "name": "Picnik", "years": "2005 to 2012", "funding": "US$3.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Photo editing in the browser, without installing software.", "died": "Google bought it in 2010, folded it into Google+ and shut it in 2012. Phone apps with built-in filters made a web editor unnecessary.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/429-picnik" }, { "name": "Everalbum", "years": "2013 to 2019", "funding": "US$19.2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Unlimited photo storage with AI organization.", "died": "Google Photos offered the same for free. Users would not pay for a feature that the platform gave away.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/125-everalbum" }, { "name": "Snipshot", "years": "2006 to 2009", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Quick photo edits in the browser.", "died": "Picnik did more, free tools did the same, and there was no clear way to charge.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1241-snipshot" }, { "name": "Splashup", "years": "2007 to 2010", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Product failure", "promise": "Photoshop-like editing in the browser, with real-time collaboration.", "died": "Built on Flash as Flash died. No business model.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1660-splashup" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Before 2022, improving an image meant arithmetic or hardware. A classic upscaler averaged neighbouring pixels and produced a larger, softer picture. Lytro spent US$215 million on optics so that a photo could be refocused. The browser editors, Picnik, Snipshot and Splashup, offered convenience, and convenience lost as soon as Google or a phone app bundled the same feature for free.", "Image models changed what software could do: invent detail that looks right. That output had no free equivalent in November 2023, so two people could charge for it from the first hour. The business risk did not disappear. It moved. Freepik now gives its subscribers third-party models, and every image tool has an upscaler. Magnific was sold five months after launch, before that happened." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Not the product. The sequence, yes.", "text": "Creative upscaling is now a feature in Magnific's own parent, in Topaz, Krea, Leonardo and in the image models themselves. A new entrant with the same product competes with free. What remains is the order of events: audience first, a new capability second, paid usage from the first hour, and a sale to the company that owns distribution.", "steps": [ "Post what you learn about a new technology for a year, in public, before you have anything to sell.", "Build the first tool that uses a new model capability for one visible result, and give it a name.", "If compute costs money, sell tokens from the first hour and skip the free tier.", "Sell to the platform whose users you already serve, before the capability becomes a feature everywhere." ], "open": "The same sequence applies to each new model capability: video upscaling and restoration, 3D from one image, audio cleanup. Tools for one profession, such as architecture renders or film VFX plates, are less exposed to bundling." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Founder-reported revenue", "text": "The US$10.2 million and US$34.42 million figures come from one post on X. No buyer, filing or payment processor has confirmed them, and the 2025 figure includes sales on Freepik's site. Latka estimates the standalone upscaler at US$330,000 ARR, which contradicts the founder by a factor of 30. This page shows the founder's figures with grade C." }, { "title": "The price is unknown", "text": "Freepik did not disclose the price, and the founders' payout is unknown. The outcome on this page is the first-year revenue, not the money the founders received." }, { "title": "Bootstrapped, with a footnote", "text": "Magnific took no outside money. Its parent says the same, but Wikipedia and Spanish press report that the private-equity firm EQT took a majority stake in Freepik in 2020. The parent's US$230 million ARR is a company with 400 employees and 14 years of history, not a two-person story." }, { "title": "Category collapse", "text": "Upscaling became a feature of every image tool within two years. The founders sold before that, and the founder himself says he could not repeat the launch." }, { "title": "GPU dependence", "text": "The margin depends on rented GPU prices and on the models the company does not own. The parent now resells third-party models such as Google's Veo, which sets a floor on its costs." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.magnific.com/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Javi López on X, 28 April 2026: Magnific AI in numbers", "url": "https://x.com/javilopen/status/2049128517686919661", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through a public mirror of X, because X does not serve posts without login. Source for the 2024 and 2025 revenue and the gross margin." }, { "title": "Javi López on X, 14 February 2025: From $0 to $10M ARR in just one year with only two people", "url": "https://x.com/javilopen/status/1890536285523062917", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through a public mirror of X." }, { "title": "Tech.eu, 7 May 2024: Freepik acquires Spanish AI image upscaler Magnific", "url": "https://tech.eu/2024/05/07/freepik-acquires-spanish-ai-image-upscaler-magnific/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full, together with the same announcement on LBB Online. Based on Freepik's announcement. Source for the user count, the waitlist, the no-CEO detail and the earlier acquisitions." }, { "title": "The Decoder, May 2024: Magnific AI co-founder predicts the rise of one-person unicorns propelled by AI after exit", "url": "https://the-decoder.com/magnific-ai-co-founder-predicts-the-rise-of-one-person-unicorns-propelled-by-ai-after-exit/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Quotes the founder's email to users. Source for the zero advertising, the two-man team and the GPT-4 share of the code." }, { "title": "Startup Founder Stories: Javi López, Magnific, 0 to $10M ARR", "url": "https://startupfounderstories.com/stories/javi-lopez-magnific-0-to-10m-arr", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A compilation of the founder's talks and posts. Source for the launch date, the waitlist mechanics, the starting cost and the founders' background." }, { "title": "Fortune, 28 April 2026: Spanish startup Freepik changes name to Magnific as new focus on video AI leads to $230 million ARR", "url": "https://fortune.com/2026/04/28/freepik-magnific-joaquin-cuenca-abela-230-million-arr-video-generation-ai-pivot/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Interview with Freepik's chief executive. Source for the parent company's figures." }, { "title": "My Architect AI, 2026: Magnific AI pricing, plans, tokens and API costs", "url": "https://www.myarchitectai.com/blog/magnific-ai-pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A reviewer's page with the 2026 plans of the merged company. The company's own plan page returned an error for this check." }, { "title": "El Ecosistema Startup, 2026: Magnific factura $230M ARR sin inversión", "url": "https://ecosistemastartup.com/magnific-factura-230m-arr-sin-inversion-lecciones-para-founders/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, in Spanish. Source for the US$39 starting price of the standalone upscaler and for the note on EQT." }, { "title": "Wikipedia: Magnific (company), read 12 October 2026", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnific", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Used for the 2020 EQT stake and the company history, which it cites to Spanish press and Fortune." }, { "title": "Latka company page: Magnific AI revenue 2025", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/magnific.ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the summary. An estimate that contradicts the founder. Cited only for that conflict." }, { "title": "The AI Corner newsletter, 2026: Zero ads, zero VC, $230M ARR, the story of Magnific", "url": "https://www.the-ai-corner.com/p/the-story-of-magnific", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Narrative account that led to the founder's posts. Not used for numbers." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/photo-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/photo-ai.md", "slug": "photo-ai", "name": "Photo AI", "country": "Netherlands, run from anywhere", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI photo studio", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-12", "launchLabel": "10 February 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$105K a month in revenue and US$80K in profit, March 2026", "sticker": "$1.3M/yr, 1 person", "outcomeUsd": 1260000, "months": 37, "teamLabel": "1 person, no employees", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Audience", "group": "photos", "channel": "audience", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 2, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "Consumer app" ], "product": "You upload about 20 photos of yourself. Photo AI trains a model of your face, and then generates photos of you in any clothes, place or style: headshots, dating photos, product shots. The site calls it firing your photographer.", "why": "The founder had posted his revenue in public for ten years and had hundreds of thousands of followers before he shipped it. He launched a cheesy avatar version first, made US$100,000 in ten days, then pivoted to the useful version. Rented GPUs, one PHP file and no employees keep the profit margin above 75%.", "summary": [ "Photo AI is an AI photo studio. You upload about twenty photos of yourself, and the service fine-tunes an image model on your face. Fine-tuning means that an existing model is trained a little more on a small set of new examples, here your photos, so that it learns one new concept: you. After that, the model generates new photos of you in any setting from a text prompt. The site sells this as a replacement for a photographer.", "Pieter Levels, a Dutch programmer who has run one-person internet businesses since 2014, built it alone. He first sold AI avatars in November 2022 and made US$100,000 in ten days, then launched Photo AI on 10 February 2023 as the useful version of the same technology. In July 2023 it had 1,872 paying customers and US$61,808 of revenue a month. In March 2026 he posted that it makes US$105,000 a month with US$80,000 of profit, from a single 40,870-line PHP file on rented GPUs, with no employees.", "Every number on this page is a founder statement, grade C. Levels publishes his revenue himself, and no payment processor or buyer has confirmed it. The page also shows what happened to earlier photo startups, which could only filter, tag or print a photo that already existed." ], "factsCaption": "One person, no employees, revenue of about US$1.3 million a year in March 2026 and a profit margin of 76%, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: every value is a founder statement, grade C, unless marked \"calc\", which means computed on this page from the rows above it. The founder posts his revenue in public and has done so for a decade, but no independent party has verified these figures.", "timelineLead": "From a cheesy avatar generator to a one-person studio that outlived its funded copies. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Photo AI plans in October 2026, from the product page (grade C)", "note": "An AI credit pays for one generated photo or one step of video. Yearly billing gives about six months free: the yearly prices are US$99, US$349, US$599 and US$1,199. The site claims that a professional photo shoot costs US$250 to US$1,500 for 75 to 100 photos, which is the comparison the product is sold against; that claim is the company's own.", "rows": [ [ "Starter", "8.25", "19", "50 credits a month" ], [ "Pro", "29", "49", "1,000 credits a month, commercial use" ], [ "Max", "49.92", "99", "3,000 credits a month, most popular" ], [ "Ultra", "99.92", "199", "10,000 credits a month" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue per month, March 2026", "value": "US$105,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 6 March 2026, with the size of the code: one file of 40,870 lines.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit per month, March 2026", "value": "US$80,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Same post.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, March 2026", "value": "76%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 80,000 divided by 105,000.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per year, from the March 2026 figure", "value": "about US$1.26 million", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 105,000 times 12. Profit about US$960,000 a year.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month, November 2025", "value": "US$132,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's public revenue figures, reported by PPC Land. The highest figure on this page.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, September 2026", "value": "US$86,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's public figure, tracked daily by IdeaWave. About 35% below the November 2025 figure.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Paying customers, July 2023", "value": "1,872", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 3 July 2023.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month, July 2023", "value": "US$61,808", "grade": "C", "note": "Same post. About US$33 per paying customer per month.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "AvatarAI sales in its first ten days, November 2022", "value": "US$100,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 7 November 2022. On the Lex Fridman podcast he recalled about US$150,000 in a week; this page uses the written figure.", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Photos generated, all time", "value": "30,920,367", "grade": "C", "note": "Counter on the product page, 12 October 2026.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Employees", "value": "0", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder statements. For model setup he once hired one AI developer temporarily, according to the Indie Hackers case study.", "src": [ 6, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder: I don't raise money, I don't use VC funding, I do everything myself.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Compute", "value": "rented GPUs from Replicate", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on the podcast. He later invested in Replicate and FAL, the two inference companies he uses.", "src": [ 6, 9 ] }, { "fact": "All of the founder's businesses, revenue per month, September 2026", "value": "US$200,000 to US$250,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 23 September 2026. Photo AI is the largest. His claimed US$10 million a year includes investment gains, mostly unrealized.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Projects that made money, out of more than 70", "value": "4", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on the podcast: more than 95% of everything he built failed.", "src": [ 2, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the March 2026 figure", "value": "37 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: February 2023 to March 2026.", "src": [ 1, 8 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2014 to 2022", "what": "Levels builds Nomad List, Remote OK and dozens of other sites alone, and posts their revenue in public. He gains hundreds of thousands of followers on X.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 8 ] }, { "when": "August 2022", "what": "Stable Diffusion, an open image model, is released. He plays with it, makes a site of houses that do not exist, then Interior AI for room redesigns.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "October 2022", "what": "He uploads photos of himself to a fine-tuning tool and finds that the model learns his face. He launches AvatarAI.me, which makes stylized avatars.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "7 November 2022", "what": "US$100,000 in avatar sales in ten days. The GPU vendor raises its training price from US$3 to US$20 after seeing his revenue posts, while he sells at US$30. Lensa, a funded competitor, ships the same product as an iPhone app within weeks.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "when": "10 February 2023", "what": "Photo AI launches: not cheesy avatars but photorealistic photos of yourself for headshots and profiles. The first output quality is, in his words, so bad, and people pay anyway.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 8 ] }, { "when": "3 July 2023", "what": "1,872 paying customers, US$61,808 a month, about 14,000 lines of PHP with jQuery and no framework.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "August 2024", "what": "Four-hour interview on the Lex Fridman podcast. Sign-ups across his sites double, and Photo AI's triple.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 8 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "US$132,000 a month, the peak figure on this page. Interior AI makes US$40,000 and Remote OK US$41,000 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "6 March 2026", "what": "He posts that the 40,870-line index.php makes US$105,000 a month in revenue and US$80,000 in profit.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "1 August 2026", "what": "He adds a video editor that generates videos with the trained models, written with AI coding tools.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "Monthly recurring revenue tracked at US$86,000. He posts that his businesses make US$200,000 to US$250,000 a month in total.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 9 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Audience", "text": "Levels had posted his revenue and his experiments in public for a decade before Photo AI. The Indie Hackers case study puts it bluntly: the product succeeded because he had spent ten years building an audience of more than 600,000 followers. A four-hour podcast with Lex Fridman in 2024 tripled sign-ups. About half of the traffic now comes from search, helped by the exact-match domain and early press links." }, { "title": "Ship, charge, pivot", "text": "He launched the avatar version within days of discovering that fine-tuning worked, asked for US$30 per order, and made US$100,000 in ten days. When funded copies with iPhone apps appeared, he left the avatar market and built the useful version: photos that look real, for people who need them for work or dating." }, { "title": "Almost no cost", "text": "One PHP file, rented GPUs billed per job, no employees. The founder reports 76% profit in March 2026 and says his companies run at about 90% margins. He also says that owning no team is why he never sells: a company that runs itself earns the sale price in three years anyway." }, { "title": "Rented models, renewed often", "text": "The product uses whichever image model is best at the time. By 2026 the plans advertise Nano Banana Pro, a Google model, and video from Seedance. Each new model improves the output without new engineering, and each is one API call away for a competitor, which is why the audience matters more than the code." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's own posts and from his interview with Lex Fridman. They are grade C.", "items": [ "One file, index.php, with inline HTML, CSS and jQuery: 14,000 lines in July 2023, 40,870 lines in March 2026. No framework, no TypeScript.", "Training and generation run on Replicate, a GPU rental service that bills per job. The founder asked its chief executive to add DreamBooth, the fine-tuning method, after his first vendor raised the training price from US$3 to US$20 per model.", "The first vendor took half an hour per training run. In 2026 the product page says training takes one to three minutes.", "The image models are swapped as better ones appear: open Stable Diffusion variants first, later commercial models such as Google's Nano Banana Pro, and video models for the editor added in 2026.", "Content rules are a real cost: many fine-tuned base models were trained on adult content, and the prompts and filters had to work around that.", "Marketing was the founder's own posts, press coverage of an AI that replaces photographers, and search traffic to an exact-match domain." ], "src": [ 1, 4, 6, 7, 8 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database tried to make money from people's photos before image models existed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Mobli", "years": "2010 to 2017", "funding": "US$86M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Photo and video sharing with filters, backed by celebrities.", "died": "Instagram had the users first and was bought by Facebook. Filters on a real photo were not enough to make anyone switch.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/341-mobli" }, { "name": "Color Labs", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$41M", "cause": "No market need", "promise": "Share photos with the strangers around you.", "died": "Users did not understand it. US$41 million before launch bought no answer to the question of why anyone needed it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/65-color-labs" }, { "name": "Seerslab", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Augmented-reality effects for selfies.", "died": "Snapchat built the same effects into an app that already had the users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1463-seerslab" }, { "name": "Viewdle", "years": "2006 to 2013", "funding": "not recorded", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Face recognition that tags your photos automatically.", "died": "Google and Facebook built their own. Viewdle sold itself to Google.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/709-viewdle" }, { "name": "Picplum", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$1M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Upload photos, and they arrive printed in the mail.", "died": "Digital sharing replaced prints, and the logistics cost more than customers would pay.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1603-picplum" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Every earlier photo startup needed a photo that already existed. Mobli and Seerslab added filters and effects to it, Viewdle tagged the face in it, Picplum printed it. The photo itself still needed a camera, a place, an outfit and, for a good one, a photographer. None of those companies could charge much, because the platform that owned the camera, Instagram or Snapchat, added the same feature for free.", "In 2022 an open image model learned to generate a face from twenty examples. The photo no longer needed to exist. Photo AI charges for the shoot, not for the filter, and its comparison is a photographer at US$250 or more, not a free app. The risk did not disappear. Lensa copied the avatar version in weeks, and the image models that Photo AI rents are available to anyone. The founder's answer is the one asset that cannot be copied in weeks: his audience." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product, easily. The customers, not without an audience.", "text": "An AI photo studio is a weekend project in 2026: the fine-tuning and the models are rented by the call, and the founder himself says the product is simple. Dozens of copies exist, several with venture funding. What made Photo AI work was ten years of public building, an early viral launch, press that treated an AI replacing photographers as news, and a domain that matches the search term.", "steps": [ "Build in public for years before the product, and post real numbers, so that a launch reaches people who already trust you.", "When a new model does something new, ship the obvious version within days and charge for it, even if the output is still bad.", "Leave the novelty market when funded copies arrive, and sell the useful version to people who need the result for work.", "Keep costs near zero: rented compute billed per job, no employees, no office, so that revenue is profit." ], "open": "The same pattern fits any output that people used to pay a professional for: product photos for small shops, real-estate interiors, voice-overs, short video. The customer who needs the result for work, not for fun, pays and stays." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Self-reported numbers", "text": "Every figure here comes from the founder. He has published revenue for a decade and his figures have not been contradicted, but nobody outside has checked them. His US$10 million a year claim mixes business revenue with unrealized investment gains, so it is not comparable with the other stories on this site." }, { "title": "Revenue is falling", "text": "US$132,000 a month in November 2025, US$105,000 in March 2026, US$86,000 in September 2026. The image models that produce the photos are now sold directly by Google and others, and chat apps generate a headshot for free." }, { "title": "Vendor pricing", "text": "The first GPU vendor raised the training price from US$3 to US$20 the moment it saw his revenue posts. The business depends on two rental companies, and the founder now owns shares in both, which he discloses." }, { "title": "Funded competition", "text": "Lensa out-shipped him on mobile in 2022, and he says he now has fierce competition from a venture-backed company for the first time. He has no iPhone app." }, { "title": "Content and likeness", "text": "A service that generates realistic photos of real people carries moderation and misuse risk, and the fine-tuned base models were often trained on adult content. Dating photos that look better than the person are also a product with an unhappy end user." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://photoai.com/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Pieter Levels, 6 March 2026: Photoai.com is a 40,870 line index.php making 105,000/mo revenue and 80,000/mo profit", "url": "https://levels.io/photoai-40870-line-index-php-105k-mo-revenue", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on the founder's blog, which mirrors his X posts. Source for the headline figures." }, { "title": "PPC Land, 2025: How one photo AI app generates $132K monthly after 70 failed startups", "url": "https://ppc.land/how-one-photo-ai-app-generates-132k-monthly-after-70-failed-startups/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Reports the founder's public revenue figures and quotes the podcast. The numbers are the founder's." }, { "title": "IdeaWave revenue tracker: PhotoAI, US$86K MRR, self-reported, checked daily from 1 August to 29 September 2026", "url": "https://ideawave.io/startup/photoai-2", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A tracker that records the founder's self-reported figure each day." }, { "title": "Pieter Levels, 3 July 2023: Photo AI is almost 14,000 lines of raw PHP making $61,808 per month", "url": "https://levels.io/photoai-14000-lines-raw-php-revenue", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on the founder's blog. Source for the 2023 customer count and revenue." }, { "title": "Pieter Levels, 7 November 2022: Sold $100,000 in AI-generated avatars with AvatarAI.me in 10 days", "url": "https://levels.io/sold-100k-ai-avatars-with-avatarai-me", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on the founder's blog." }, { "title": "Lex Fridman Podcast #440, August 2024: Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life, transcript", "url": "https://lexfridman.com/pieter-levels-transcript/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the Photo AI, AvatarAI and When to sell startup sections of the transcript. Source for the origin story, the GPU vendor story, Lensa, Replicate, the failure rate and the margin claim." }, { "title": "Photo AI product page, read 12 October 2026", "url": "https://photoai.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the plans, the credits, the photo counter, the training time and the photographer price claim." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 2025: Photo AI by Pieter Levels, complete deep dive case study, $0 to $132K MRR", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/photo-ai-by-pieter-levels-complete-deep-dive-case-study-0-to-132k-mrr-in-18-months-3a9a2b1579", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A community case study that compiles the founder's posts. Source for the launch date, the temporary hire, the search-traffic share and the podcast effect." }, { "title": "Pieter Levels, 23 September 2026: I passed $10M/y in revenue and investment gains with a 94.5% profit margin", "url": "https://levels.io/passed-10m-revenue-investment-gains", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on the founder's blog. Source for the total business revenue and the investments in Replicate and FAL." }, { "title": "Pieter Levels, 1 August 2026: I vibecoded a full video editor into Photo AI", "url": "https://levels.io/video-editor-added-to-photo-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on the founder's blog." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors. Viewdle's funding field in the export holds the value 12, which is not a dollar amount, so it is shown as not recorded." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/typingmind/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/typingmind.md", "slug": "typingmind", "name": "TypingMind", "country": "Vietnam", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Chat interface for AI models", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-12", "launchLabel": "6 March 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$130K to US$160K a month, October 2025", "sticker": "$1.7M/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 1740000, "months": 31, "teamLabel": "1 founder, then 5 people with 2 employees by mid-2024", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Speed", "group": "ai-model-tools", "channel": "audience", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 2, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B" ], "product": "A chat window for AI models that is better than the one the model makers ship: search in old conversations, folders, prompt library, plugins, and any model from OpenAI, Anthropic or Google. You bring your own API key, so TypingMind never pays for the model.", "why": "It shipped five days after the ChatGPT API appeared, when the official interface logged people out, typed slowly and had no search. It charged from the first day and raised the price with every update. Then a Team version for companies turned one-time sales into subscriptions.", "summary": [ "TypingMind is a chat frontend for AI models. A frontend is the part of a program that the user sees and clicks; the model itself runs elsewhere. You paste your own API key, a password that lets a program call a model provider on your account, and TypingMind sends your messages to OpenAI, Anthropic or Google and shows the answers with search, folders, plugins and a prompt library. The company pays nothing for the model and almost nothing for hosting.", "Tony Dinh, a Vietnamese software engineer who left a job in Singapore in 2021 to build small products alone, started it on 1 March 2023, the day OpenAI released the ChatGPT API, and released it on 6 March. It made US$22,000 in its first seven days as a one-time purchase that started at US$9. In February 2024 it passed US$500,000 in total revenue. In November 2024 he wrote that it had made US$1 million in the last twelve months. In October 2025 he wrote that it makes US$130,000 to US$160,000 a month, more than half of it recurring revenue from a Team version sold to companies.", "Every number on this page is a founder statement in his own newsletter, grade C. No payment processor or buyer has confirmed them. The page also shows what happened to earlier companies that built a better interface on top of someone else's platform." ], "factsCaption": "A one-time purchase that reached US$1 million in twelve months of revenue by November 2024, then a run rate of about US$1.7 million a year, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a founder statement from his newsletter or interviews, or an estimate by a third party that says so. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a domain name suggested by ChatGPT to a business that sells 3,000-seat contracts, in 31 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "TypingMind prices in October 2026: personal licenses as reported by reviewers, Team plans from the company's page (grade C)", "note": "Personal licenses are one-time purchases, sold as lifetime licenses, and the pricing page shows a permanent 50% off. Team plans are subscriptions per month, billed yearly with two months free, with 5 seats included and more seats at US$8 each per month. Enterprise starts at US$18,700 a year with seats as low as US$4. In every case the customer pays the model provider separately for usage.", "rows": [ [ "Standard, personal", "39 one-time", "", "reviewers" ], [ "Extended, personal", "79 one-time", "", "reviewers" ], [ "Premium, personal", "99 one-time", "", "reviewers; shown as 50% off US$198" ], [ "Starter, team", "83", "99", "5 seats" ], [ "Growth, team", "166", "199", "5 seats" ], [ "Professional, team", "249", "299", "5 seats; shown as 50% off US$499" ], [ "Enterprise", "from 18,700 a year", "", "custom contract" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue per month, October 2025", "value": "US$130,000 to US$160,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's newsletter, 9 October 2025. Recurring revenue from the Team version is more than half of it.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the October 2025 range", "value": "about US$1.56 million to US$1.92 million a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the range times 12. The headline figure on this page is the midpoint, US$1.74 million.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the twelve months to November 2024", "value": "US$1 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's newsletter, 22 November 2024, from his profit-and-loss statement. Twenty months after launch. One-time purchases were still about half of monthly revenue.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Total revenue by February 2024", "value": "US$500,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's newsletter, February 2024, one year after launch. Subscriptions were US$15,000 a month of it.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month, March 2024", "value": "more than US$40,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's newsletter on the sale of his screenshot app.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the first seven days, March 2023", "value": "US$22,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder. US$1,000 on the first day, US$2,000 on the second, US$4,000 on the third.", "src": [ 2, 5 ] }, { "fact": "First price", "value": "US$9 one-time, raised to US$19, US$29 and later up to US$79", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interviews. Each update came with a price rise.", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Paying users after three months", "value": "more than 4,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview with Indie Hackers, mid-2023.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Updates in the first twelve months", "value": "171", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's newsletter.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Largest contracts, November 2024", "value": "one 3,000-seat deal and several 1,000-seat deals", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's newsletter. Enterprises use TypingMind as the front end of an internal AI platform.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Team, July 2024", "value": "5 people, of which 2 full-time employees", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's newsletter on getting SOC 2. Latka records 3 employees in October 2024.", "src": [ 7, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Cost of the SOC 2 Type I security audit", "value": "under US$10,000 and about 10 days of work", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's newsletter. He had expected US$30,000 a year. Half went to a consultant, half to the auditor.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Paid advertising results", "value": "US$2,000 on LinkedIn: no revenue. US$600 later: 2 conversions", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's newsletters, April 2024 and October 2025. Sales come from word of mouth.", "src": [ 1, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Hosting cost of the personal version", "value": "almost nothing", "grade": "C", "note": "A static web app with no backend, no database and no login, activated by a license key. That is why a one-time price was possible.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder statements throughout.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Latka's revenue estimate for 2024", "value": "US$817,000", "grade": "C", "note": "A third-party estimate, marked as such. Lower than the founder's twelve-month figure of US$1 million in November 2024.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October 2025 figure", "value": "31 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: March 2023 to October 2025.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "August 2021", "what": "Dinh, then a senior engineer in Singapore, quits to build products alone from Vietnam. His side products make US$600 a month. He has 8,000 followers on X.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "2022", "what": "Black Magic, a tool for X users, reaches about US$13,000 to US$14,000 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10, 11 ] }, { "when": "January 2023", "what": "He turns down a US$500,000 acquisition offer.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "1 March 2023", "what": "OpenAI releases the ChatGPT API. The same day he decides to build a better chat interface for it. ChatGPT suggests the domain name typingmind.com, registered on 2 March.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "6 March 2023", "what": "Release on X, five days after the API. US$9 one-time. US$22,000 in the first seven days.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 5 ] }, { "when": "April 2023", "what": "X raises its API price. He sells Black Magic for US$128,000 instead of rebuilding it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11, 12 ] }, { "when": "Mid-2023", "what": "More than 4,000 paying users, first place of the day on Product Hunt, and a Custom version for companies at US$3,500 a month in recurring revenue.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "February 2024", "what": "US$500,000 in total revenue after one year and 171 updates. Subscriptions reach US$15,000 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "19 March 2024", "what": "He sells Xnapper, his screenshot app, for US$150,000, because TypingMind makes more than US$40,000 a month and needs all his time.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "26 July 2024", "what": "SOC 2 Type I security certification for under US$10,000, to close enterprise deals. Team of 5 with 2 full-time employees.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "22 November 2024", "what": "US$1 million in revenue in the last twelve months. A 3,000-seat deal and several 1,000-seat deals. He looks for a salesperson.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "9 October 2025", "what": "US$130,000 to US$160,000 a month, more than half recurring. He writes that the product gave him financial independence.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "Still building TypingMind, now with AI coding agents, from a hacker house in Da Nang.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Speed", "text": "The API came out on a Wednesday; the product shipped the next Monday. In the founder's words, when you are first to a niche, the first version does not have to be amazing, because people have an itch and nothing on the market scratches it. OpenAI fixed the slow typing, the logouts and the missing search a few months later. By then the customers were his." }, { "title": "Charge from day one, raise the price with every update", "text": "US$9 on launch day, then US$19, US$29 and up to US$79 as features arrived. Each update was a public post, and each post was a reason to buy before the next rise." }, { "title": "No model costs, no server costs", "text": "Customers bring their own API key and pay the model provider. The personal version is a static web page with a license key, so hosting is close to free. That is why a one-time price made money, and why a copy by a funded competitor would not have had a cost advantage." }, { "title": "The Team version", "text": "Companies that wanted an internal AI chat for staff bought TypingMind Custom as the front end, with single sign-on and a security audit. Seat-based subscriptions passed one-time sales in 2025. The founder says B2B sales calls exhaust him and that he did them badly, and the contracts closed anyway." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's newsletter and his interviews. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Next.js, Tailwind CSS and Node. The first version was built in a weekend for his own use, then released five days after the API.", "The personal version is a static web app: no backend, no database, no accounts. A license key unlocks it. Hosting costs almost nothing.", "The Team version runs servers and databases, so it is a subscription. It added single sign-on at customers' request, and a SOC 2 Type I audit in July 2024 for under US$10,000.", "Model-agnostic from the first day, after the Black Magic experience: it works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others, so no single provider can end it.", "Payments moved from Lemon Squeezy to Stripe in 2024 because the subscription analytics were wrong.", "Marketing is the founder's posts on X and word of mouth. Paid ads were tried twice and failed." ], "src": [ 1, 3, 7, 9, 5 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database built a better interface on top of a platform that they did not control. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Xobni", "years": "2006 to 2013", "funding": "US$42M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A smarter inbox inside Microsoft Outlook.", "died": "Tied to Outlook, which Microsoft improved itself. Mobile made the desktop add-on irrelevant. Yahoo bought the remains.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/763-xobni" }, { "name": "Rockmelt", "years": "2009 to 2014", "funding": "US$40M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A browser with your social feeds built in.", "died": "Users moved to phones, where the social apps themselves were the interface. Chrome had Google behind it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/510-rockmelt" }, { "name": "Xmarks", "years": "2006 to 2014", "funding": "US$9M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Sync your bookmarks and tabs across browsers.", "died": "Chrome, Firefox and Safari built sync in, for free.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/762-xmarks" }, { "name": "Flux", "years": "2015 to 2018", "funding": "US$7M", "cause": "Founder conflict", "promise": "One inbox for Slack, email, WhatsApp and the rest.", "died": "The platforms kept changing their interfaces and breaking the integrations. The money went into repairs.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1901-flux" }, { "name": "Readability", "years": "2009 to 2015", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Clutter-free reading of any web article.", "died": "Browsers added a reader mode, free. Few readers paid.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/485-readability" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the five built a better window onto a platform that it did not own, and the platform owner closed the window by adding the feature, changing the interface or moving to phones. TypingMind is the same bet. OpenAI fixed the problems that TypingMind solved within months of its launch, and the founder says so himself.", "Two things differ. First, the platform is an API that the provider sells and wants used, so improvements to ChatGPT do not break TypingMind, and the model providers are several, not one. Second, the customer pays the provider directly, so TypingMind carries no usage cost and could charge once instead of monthly. The Team version added the part the platforms do not sell: an internal chat for a company with its own login, data rules and audit. That is where the recurring revenue came from." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The launch, no. The structure, yes.", "text": "Being first with a better ChatGPT window was a one-week opening in March 2023, and the founder says a late entrant would have found no painful problem left to solve. The structure is still available: a product with no usage cost, a one-time price for individuals, and a subscription for the version that companies need for compliance.", "steps": [ "When a provider releases an API, ship the obvious interface improvement within a week and charge for it.", "Let customers bring their own API key, so the model is never your cost.", "Raise the price with each visible update, and post every update.", "Build the company version, with login, security audit and seats, because that is what recurs." ], "open": "Any new API with a weak first-party interface: voice, video and image models, agent frameworks, and the internal tools that companies want behind single sign-on." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Self-reported, and a wide range", "text": "The founder gives a range of US$130,000 to US$160,000 a month, not a figure, and no one outside has checked it. Latka's estimate for 2024 is below his own figure." }, { "title": "The platform can close the window", "text": "Every predecessor on this page died when the platform added the feature. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google ship their own desktop apps, teams plans and enterprise versions. TypingMind's answer is to support all of them at once." }, { "title": "One-time revenue does not recur", "text": "About half of monthly revenue in late 2024 was one-time licenses, which must be re-earned every month. The shift to Team subscriptions is what makes the business durable, and it needs sales calls that the founder dislikes." }, { "title": "Sales depend on one person's audience", "text": "Paid ads have not worked. Growth comes from the founder's posts and word of mouth. When he sold Xnapper, he structured the deal around the fact that his X account drove its revenue." }, { "title": "Permanent discount pricing", "text": "Both the personal and the Team pages show 50% off, which reviewers note is always on. Customers who notice may wait or distrust the list price." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.typingmind.com/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Tony Dinh's newsletter, 9 October 2025: Oct 2025 updates: code, money and travel", "url": "https://news.tonydinh.com/p/oct-2025-updates-code-money-and-travel", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder's own update. Source for the monthly revenue range, the share of recurring revenue and the ad test." }, { "title": "Tony Dinh's newsletter, 22 November 2024: Nov 2024: My first million!", "url": "https://news.tonydinh.com/p/nov-2024-my-first-million", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the US$1 million in twelve months, the seat deals and the B2B sales account." }, { "title": "Tony Dinh's newsletter, February 2024: $500K milestone, my reflections after 1 year of building Typing Mind", "url": "https://news.tonydinh.com/p/500k-milestone-my-reflections-after", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the total revenue, the launch timing, the updates count and the static-app pricing logic." }, { "title": "Tony Dinh's newsletter, 19 March 2024: Another 6-figure exit and the future", "url": "https://news.tonydinh.com/p/another-6-figure-exit-and-the-future", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Xnapper sale and the US$40,000 monthly figure." }, { "title": "Startup Founder Stories: Tony Dinh, TypingMind, $22K in 7 days", "url": "https://startupfounderstories.com/stories/tony-dinh-typingmind-22k-7-days", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Quotes the founder's launch account with the exact dates and the first three days of revenue." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 2023: How a tool that improves the UI for ChatGPT reached $10k/mo only a few months after launch", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-a-tool-that-improves-the-ui-for-chatgpt-reached-10k-mo-only-a-few-months-after-launch-5e69b67949", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview. Source for the price steps, the user count and the early Custom version." }, { "title": "Tony Dinh's newsletter, 26 July 2024: Get SOC 2 certified as an indie hacker", "url": "https://news.tonydinh.com/p/get-soc-2-certified-as-an-indie-hacker", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the audit cost and the team size." }, { "title": "Latka company page: TypingMind revenue 2024, estimate", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/typingmind", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A third-party estimate and a headcount from LinkedIn." }, { "title": "Tony Dinh's newsletter, April 2024: April 2024 updates, new product", "url": "https://news.tonydinh.com/p/april-2024-updates-new-product", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the LinkedIn ads test and the move to Stripe." }, { "title": "Nomadpreneur newsletter, 2025: Solo founder who turned $100 into $1,500,000, no team, no investors", "url": "https://nomadpreneur.beehiiv.com/p/solo-founder-who-turned-100-into-1-500-000-no-team-no-investors", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A secondary account of the founder's story. Source for the 2021 background." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 2024: He made $45k/month with ChatGPT, Tony Dinh's story", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/he-made-45k-month-with-chatgpt-tony-dinh-s-story-c40283745c", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A community summary. Source for the Black Magic figures and the X API change." }, { "title": "Tony Dinh's newsletter, 26 December 2023: 2023 recap", "url": "https://news.tonydinh.com/p/2023-recap", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the rejected US$500,000 offer and the Black Magic sale." }, { "title": "Tony Dinh's newsletter, 10 June 2026: I'm on Product Hunt, updates Jun 2026", "url": "https://news.tonydinh.com/p/im-on-product-hunt-updates-jun-2026", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Confirms the product is still being built in 2026." }, { "title": "TypingMind Custom pricing page, read 12 October 2026, and reviewer pages diyai.io and toolradar.com for the personal licenses", "url": "https://custom.typingmind.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "The company page gives the Team plans. The personal pricing page loads its prices by script and could not be read, so those come from reviewers." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/headshotpro/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/headshotpro.md", "slug": "headshotpro", "name": "HeadshotPro", "country": "Netherlands", "sector": "Photography", "productType": "AI headshot generator", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-12", "launchLabel": "16 March 2023", "outcomeLabel": "More than US$10M total revenue, October 2026", "sticker": "$10M+ total revenue", "outcomeUsd": 10000000, "months": 43, "teamLabel": "1 founder for the first year, 4 people by November 2024", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "photos", "channel": "search", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Photography" ], "product": "You upload a few selfies, choose backgrounds and clothing, and get 30 to 70 business headshots back in under 30 minutes. One payment of US$29 to US$59, no subscription. Companies buy credits so every employee's photo matches.", "why": "It took one ordinary purchase, the US$300 studio headshot, and sold it for US$29 the week the technology could do it. One-time pricing fitted a product people need once. Search pages for every city brought buyers without advertising, and company orders made the customers come back.", "summary": [ "HeadshotPro is an AI headshot generator: a web service that trains an image model on a customer's own selfies and then renders that person in business clothes, studio lighting and office backgrounds. The model is a diffusion model, a neural network that builds an image by removing noise step by step, personalised with a method called DreamBooth, which teaches the model one specific face from a handful of photos. The customer pays once, from US$29, and downloads the results in under 30 minutes.", "Danny Postma, a Dutch founder who had sold his AI copywriting tool Headlime in 2021, built the first version in about 30 hours and announced it on X on 16 March 2023. Within seven weeks the Indie Hackers podcast introduced him as having passed US$300,000 in revenue. He ran it alone for the first year, with his wife answering support email, and hired a team of four by late 2024. The company's own pages show 60,497 customers in February 2024, 102,207 in March 2025 and more than 250,000 in October 2026, with more than US$10,000,000 in revenue since launch.", "All money figures on this page are statements by the founder or his company, grade C. No payment processor or buyer has confirmed them, and the founder said in August 2023 that he no longer publishes revenue. Two third-party estimates disagree with each other by a factor of 30, so the page shows them as estimates and explains why. The page also lists earlier photo-tool companies that failed, and what is different here." ], "factsCaption": "More than US$10 million in total revenue in 43 months, from one-time purchases of US$29 to US$59, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a statement by the founder, by his company's website, or by a reviewer or third party that says so. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a free experiment with AI profile pictures to a company with 250,000 customers, in 43 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "HeadshotPro prices on 12 October 2026, read from the company's pricing page (grade C). All prices are one-time payments, there is no subscription.", "note": "An individual buys one shoot. A company buys credits, one credit per person, with volume discounts that start at 20% off for 5 credits and reach 50% off at 1,000 or more; the page shows US$25.35 per shoot at 100 credits and a starting price of US$19.50 per shoot. Credits never expire. The company sells a SOC 2 Type II report and single sign-on as extras.", "rows": [ [ "Basic, individual", "29 one-time", "", "30 headshots, 6 edit credits, about 2 hours" ], [ "Professional, individual", "39 one-time", "", "50 headshots, 26 edit credits, 30 minutes, 1 free redo" ], [ "Executive, individual", "59 one-time", "", "70 headshots, 46 edit credits, 15 minutes, 4K" ], [ "Team credits, 5 to 1,000 people", "25.35 per shoot at 100 credits", "", "40 headshots per person, admin dashboard, invoice" ], [ "Team credits, 1,000 or more", "19.50 per shoot", "", "50% off list, shown as the starting team price" ], [ "Enterprise", "custom", "", "1,000+ people" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Total revenue since launch, October 2026", "value": "more than US$10,000,000", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's About page, read 12 October 2026. The same page says 17,000,000 headshots generated and 200,000+ shoots completed, and that HubSpot's sales team is a customer.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average revenue per shoot", "value": "US$50", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$10,000,000 divided by 200,000 shoots. It sits inside the US$29 to US$59 price band, so the two company figures are consistent with each other.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average revenue per month since launch", "value": "about US$233,000", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$10,000,000 divided by 43 months, March 2023 to October 2026. A floor, because the figure says \"more than\" and the sales were not spread evenly.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Customers, October 2026", "value": "more than 250,000", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's home page, read 12 October 2026.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Customers, 2 March 2025", "value": "102,207, with 17,943,292 headshots created", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's home page as saved by the Internet Archive on that date.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Customers, 24 February 2024", "value": "60,497", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's home page as saved by the Internet Archive on that date. Price from US$29, 120 headshots per person, done in 2 hours.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "New customers between the two archived pages", "value": "41,710 in 372 days, about 3,400 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 102,207 minus 60,497. At the US$39 middle price this is about US$1.6 million a year; at US$29 about US$1.2 million. Team orders count one credit per person, so the customer count is a count of people, not of buyers.", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "New customers from March 2025 to October 2026", "value": "about 148,000 in 589 days", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 250,000 minus 102,207. At US$39 that is about US$3.6 million a year. The 250,000 is a rounded figure, so this is an approximation.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue seven weeks after launch, 5 May 2023", "value": "more than US$300,000", "grade": "C", "note": "The Indie Hackers podcast listing for episode 278 says the founder talks about \"passing $300k in revenue\". That is total revenue since launch 50 days earlier, about US$180,000 a month. Several secondary sites later repeat US$300,000 as monthly revenue; see the watch list.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the first two weeks", "value": "more than US$100,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Not verified. Reported by secondary sites Startup Founder Stories and Grey Journal, which say it comes from the founder. No post by the founder with this figure was found.", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "fact": "Launch price and conversion, 17 March 2023", "value": "US$39 average order, 4% of visitors buy", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder's post on X offering affiliates 20% of each sale.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Time to build the first version", "value": "about 30 hours", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview with Unite.ai, February 2024, for ProfilePicture.AI, the product that became HeadshotPro. The Bootstrapped Founder interview says HeadshotPro was six months old in August 2023.", "src": [ 9, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 person for the first year; 4 people by November 2024, planned 6", "grade": "C", "note": "In August 2023 the founder said his wife answered support email and he was about to make his first hire. On 30 November 2024 he wrote that he hoped to grow the team from 4 to 6 with a designer and a salesperson.", "src": [ 8, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder statements. He describes the choice after Headlime as venture money, bootstrapping with a team, or selling, and says he chose to build a team this time.", "src": [ 8, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Price of a studio headshot, for comparison", "value": "US$232.50 average in the United States (company, 2025); US$300 to US$800 a session (company, 2026)", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's own comparison figures, from the archived and the current home page.", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Third-party estimate: Starter Story", "value": "US$300,000 a month, US$3.6 million a year", "grade": "C", "note": "A profile that gives no source. It matches the podcast's cumulative US$300,000 figure, so it may be a misreading of that figure as a monthly one.", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "fact": "Third-party estimate: Latka", "value": "US$96,000 revenue for 2023", "grade": "C", "note": "An automated database estimate, far below the founder's US$300,000 by May 2023. Shown here so the reader sees the spread of outside guesses.", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October 2026 figure", "value": "43 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 16 March 2023 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2020 to March 2021", "what": "Postma puts GPT-3 into Headlime, a copywriting tool, reaches about US$20,000 a month and sells it to Jasper after eight months for a seven-figure sum.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 8 ] }, { "when": "September 2022", "what": "Stable Diffusion is released. He builds Stock AI, an AI stock-photo site, then drops it: quality too low and fear of a lawsuit from Getty Images.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 8 ] }, { "when": "Late 2022", "what": "He builds ProfilePicture.AI in about 30 hours on top of DreamBooth, which trains a model on one person's face. It sells well for a week on X, then sales fall.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "2 February 2023", "what": "He posts a free tool that makes an AI headshot with an AI background, an early test of the idea.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "16 March 2023", "what": "HeadshotPro is announced on X as professional headshots for remote teams or yourself. Deep Agency, an AI model agency, launches the same week and gets the press; HeadshotPro gets the sales.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 9 ] }, { "when": "17 March 2023", "what": "Affiliate programme: 20% per sale, with a US$39 average order and a 4% conversion rate. Servers go down at night during the first weeks.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 8 ] }, { "when": "5 May 2023", "what": "Indie Hackers podcast episode 278 presents him as passing US$300,000 in revenue, seven weeks after launch.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "25 May 2023", "what": "An Indie Hackers member finds the site in the top 10 Google results for \"professional headshots\" with 200+ city pages. Postma replies that backlinks from his other sites, his followers and the domain name did it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "9 August 2023", "what": "Six months in, still alone, wife on support. He says he is mentally unable to build more features, is making his first hire, and will no longer share revenue.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "20 February 2024", "what": "Interview: a pipeline of dozens of open-source and custom models, a year of work on custom models, and a small team of contractors and part-timers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "24 February 2024", "what": "Home page shows 60,497 customers, 120 headshots per person, from US$29.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "30 November 2024", "what": "Team of 4, plan to reach 6 with a designer and a salesperson. In December he says his goal for 2025 is to do no day-to-day work himself.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "2 March 2025", "what": "Home page shows 102,207 customers and 17,943,292 headshots created.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "22 May 2025", "what": "A CNET reviewer buys the US$29 plan: 40 headshots for US$29, 100 for US$39, 200 for US$59, results in 1 to 3 hours.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "12 October 2026", "what": "Company pages show 250,000+ customers, 200,000+ shoots, 17 million headshots and more than US$10 million in revenue since launch. Packages now return 30 to 70 headshots in under 30 minutes.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2, 12 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Timing: the same week the model could do it", "text": "DreamBooth made it possible to teach an image model one person's face from a few photos in late 2022. Postma had already shipped a profile-picture version of the idea and watched its sales fade. HeadshotPro repeated the trick for the one photo people pay money for, and shipped before the dozens of copies that followed. By May 2023 he was already describing search rankings as his protection against them." }, { "title": "A product people buy once, priced once", "text": "A headshot is needed once every year or two, so a subscription would be cancelled at once. He charged US$29 to US$59 per shoot. Against a studio session that the company puts at US$232 to US$800, the saving is obvious and the buyer does not need to be persuaded." }, { "title": "Search pages instead of advertising", "text": "More than 200 generated pages, one for each city, such as \"professional headshots San Francisco\", plus blog posts, put the site in the top 10 for \"professional headshots\" within three months. Backlinks from his older sites and from launch posts gave the new domain authority. Affiliates got 20% of each sale." }, { "title": "Company orders", "text": "A firm that wants matching photos for all staff buys credits, one per person, with an admin dashboard, bulk download, invoices and a SOC 2 report. This is where a one-time consumer product gets repeat buyers: each new hire is a new credit." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's interviews and the company's pages. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Image generation on Stable Diffusion, an open-source diffusion model, personalised per customer with DreamBooth. The founder says competitors stop there; HeadshotPro adds dozens of extra open-source and custom models, and had spent a year on its own models by February 2024.", "LLaVA, an open vision-language model, checks uploaded photos and removes unsafe outputs. CodeFormer, a face-restoration model, removes AI artefacts from faces.", "Customers upload 15 to 17 photos; the founder says that number gave the best quality in 2024. By 2026 the product asks for a few selfies and returns 30 to 70 headshots in under 30 minutes.", "Marketing: programmatic search pages per city, blog posts, Product Hunt launches used for backlinks, an affiliate programme at 20%, and the founder's X account with about 187,000 followers.", "Operations: the founder alone for the first year, his wife on support, then a remote team of 4 that works without meetings, with Asana as the single record of work.", "Refunds are automatic and no questions asked; the founder complained in April 2023 that customers still filed card disputes." ], "src": [ 9, 2, 15, 10, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold photo tools to consumers before image models could make a photo from nothing. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Picnik", "years": "2005 to 2012", "funding": "US$3.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Photo editing in the browser, no download.", "died": "Google bought it and shut it down to fold the features into Google+.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/429-picnik" }, { "name": "Splashup", "years": "2007 to 2010", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Online photo editing with real-time collaboration.", "died": "Built on Flash with no business model, while phones and HTML5 took over.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1660-splashup" }, { "name": "Seerslab", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Augmented-reality filters for selfies and stories.", "died": "Snapchat and the other platforms built filters in, and nobody needed a separate app.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1463-seerslab" }, { "name": "Picplum", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$1M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Photo prints by mail as easy as a selfie.", "died": "Sharing moved to screens; costs of printing and posting ate the margin.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1603-picplum" }, { "name": "Modsy", "years": "2015 to 2022", "funding": "US$72.7M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "AI-made 3D pictures of your room with furniture you can buy.", "died": "Each design still needed a human designer, customer acquisition was expensive and customers rarely came back.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2521-modsy" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Picnik, Splashup and Seerslab sold a better way to edit a photo that already existed, and the platforms that owned the photos added the feature themselves. Picplum sold a physical print that people stopped wanting. Modsy is the closest case: an AI image service for a one-time purchase, which failed because every order still needed a human designer and the customer never came back.", "HeadshotPro differs in three places. The photo is new, not edited, so there is no platform to copy the feature into; LinkedIn does not run a photo studio. The pipeline is fully automatic, so the cost of one order is model compute, not a designer's hour. And the repeat buyer is the employer, who buys a credit for every new hire. The risk that remains is the one Seerslab met: the model makers and the big platforms can offer the same picture for free." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The first-mover week, no. The shape, yes.", "text": "Being the first paid headshot generator was an opening of weeks in early 2023, and the founder said by May that year that search rankings, not the model, were his defence. The shape is still usable: take a purchase people already make at a known price, make an AI version at a tenth of it, charge once, and build search pages for every place the purchase is searched for.", "steps": [ "Pick a purchase with a known price and a clear result: a headshot, not an avatar.", "Charge once, in the band of a tenth of the human price, and refund without questions.", "Generate one page per city or niche for the search term, and get backlinks from launches and existing sites.", "Add the company version, with credits per person, an admin view and the compliance paperwork, because that is where repeat orders come from." ], "open": "Any image or document that people buy once at a fixed price: product photos for online shops, real-estate photos, passport photos, CV layouts, voice-overs for training videos." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Self-reported, and the founder stopped reporting", "text": "Every figure is the company's own. The founder said in August 2023 that he no longer shares revenue, so the only money figure after that is the About page's \"more than US$10,000,000 since launch\". No date is given for when that line appeared." }, { "title": "The US$300,000 a month figure is probably a misreading", "text": "The Indie Hackers podcast of May 2023 said he had passed US$300,000 in total revenue. Starter Story and others report US$300,000 a month. The customer counts on the company's own pages, about 3,400 new customers a month at US$29 to US$59 between February 2024 and March 2025, give US$1.2 million to US$2 million a year, not US$3.6 million." }, { "title": "The model makers can give it away", "text": "Every big image model can now make a business portrait from a selfie. HeadshotPro's answer is likeness quality, a tested pipeline, and the company product with compliance paperwork. Seerslab died when the platforms added the feature." }, { "title": "Dozens of copies and card disputes", "text": "The founder has complained about clones since his first AI product, and about customers who dispute the charge after an automatic refund is already available. One-time consumer sales carry both costs." }, { "title": "Customer counts are not buyer counts", "text": "A company order of 50 credits adds 50 customers. The 250,000 figure is therefore a count of people photographed, and the revenue per customer on this page is an approximation." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.headshotpro.com/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "HeadshotPro, About page, read 12 October 2026", "url": "https://headshotpro.com/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Company statement. Source for the US$10,000,000+ revenue, 17 million headshots, 200,000+ shoots and HubSpot." }, { "title": "HeadshotPro, home page, read 12 October 2026", "url": "https://headshotpro.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 250,000+ customers, the 30 to 70 headshots in under 30 minutes, and the US$300 to US$800 studio comparison." }, { "title": "HeadshotPro home page as saved by the Internet Archive, 2 March 2025", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20250302071352/https://www.headshotpro.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 102,207 customers, 17,943,292 headshots and the US$232.50 studio comparison." }, { "title": "HeadshotPro home page as saved by the Internet Archive, 24 February 2024", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20240224114606/https://www.headshotpro.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 60,497 customers, 120 headshots per person and the US$29 starting price." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers podcast, episode 278, 5 May 2023: Growing a portfolio of AI products past $300k after a 7-figure exit with Danny Postma", "url": "https://bizarro.dev.to/theindiehackerspodcast/278-growing-a-portfolio-of-ai-products-past-300k-after-a-7-figure-exit-with-danny-postma", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the episode description on the DEV Community mirror; the indiehackers.com page returns error 410. The audio was not transcribed. Source for the US$300,000 in revenue." }, { "title": "Danny Postma on X, 16 March 2023: launch of HeadshotPro", "url": "https://x.com/dannypostma/status/1636337910017556480", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Source for the launch date and the positioning for remote teams." }, { "title": "Danny Postma on X, 17 March 2023: affiliate programme", "url": "https://x.com/dannypostma/status/1636556544270823425", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API, with the follow-up post. Source for the 20% commission, the 4% conversion rate and the US$39 order value." }, { "title": "The Bootstrapped Founder, 9 August 2023: Danny Postma, an indie hacker's business evolution", "url": "https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/danny-postma-an-indie-hackers-business-evolution/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the transcript in full. Source for the solo year, the wife on support, the first hire, the one-time pricing logic, the Headlime sale and the decision to stop sharing revenue." }, { "title": "Unite.ai, 20 February 2024: Danny Postma, founder of HeadshotPro, interview series", "url": "https://www.unite.ai/danny-postma-founder-of-headshotpro-interview-series/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for Stock AI, ProfilePicture.AI, the 30-hour build, the model pipeline and the move to a team." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers product page for HeadshotPro, with the founder's X posts of November and December 2024", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/product/headshotpro", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The page quotes the founder's posts. Source for the team of 4, the plan for 6, the async work and the 2025 goal." }, { "title": "CNET via Yahoo Tech, 22 May 2025: I tried an AI headshot generator", "url": "https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/headshot-using-ai-140002501.html", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on pricing and setup. A journalist's own purchase. Source for the 2025 prices and the founding in the Netherlands in March 2023." }, { "title": "HeadshotPro pricing page, read 12 October 2026", "url": "https://headshotpro.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the pricing table and the team credit discounts." }, { "title": "Starter Story: How an indie hacker built an AI headshot business to $300K/month", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/headshotpro-breakdown", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A third-party profile with no stated source for the monthly figure. Also the source of the unverified US$100,000 in two weeks claim, together with Grey Journal and Startup Founder Stories." }, { "title": "Latka company page: Headshotpro revenue 2023", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/headshotpro", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. An automated estimate, shown for contrast." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 26 May 2023: Breaking down Danny Postma's SEO strategy for HeadshotPro, and the founder's reply on X of 25 May 2023", "url": "https://indiehackers.com/post/breaking-down-danny-postmas-seo-strategy-for-headshotpro-300k-in-1-year-fad0af94d2", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, and the two X posts it links through the fxtwitter API. Source for the city pages, the rankings, the backlinks and the February 2023 free tool." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/interior-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/interior-ai.md", "slug": "interior-ai", "name": "Interior AI", "country": "Netherlands, run from anywhere", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI interior design and virtual staging", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-12", "launchLabel": "September 2022", "outcomeLabel": "US$43K a month, September 2024", "sticker": "$43K/mo, 1 person", "outcomeUsd": 516000, "months": 24, "teamLabel": "1 person, no employees", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Speed", "group": "real-estate", "channel": "audience", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Design tool" ], "product": "You upload a photo of a room, pick a room type and a style, and about 25 seconds later you get a photorealistic render of the same room redesigned. It also furnishes empty rooms for real estate listings, turns sketches into renders, and makes walk-through videos.", "why": "It was the first product of its kind, built in five days in September 2022, a few weeks after the image model it uses was released as open source. The founder already had a large audience from ten years of public revenue reports, so the launch post was enough marketing. Rented GPUs and one person keep costs low. Revenue reached about US$40,000 to US$50,000 a month and has been falling since 2025 as large AI companies and competitors ship the same feature.", "summary": [ "Interior AI is an image-to-image design tool. Image-to-image means that an image model takes an existing picture as input, here a photo of your room, and a text instruction, and produces a new picture that keeps the shape of the input but changes its content. Interior AI uses this to redesign a room in a chosen style, to furnish an empty room, which real estate agents call virtual staging (adding furniture to a photo of an empty home so that the listing looks lived in), and to turn a line sketch into a realistic render.", "Pieter Levels, a Dutch programmer who has run one-person internet businesses since 2014, built it alone in five days in September 2022, a few weeks after Stability AI released the Stable Diffusion model as open source. He has said it made US$10,000 to US$20,000 a month within a week. The site showed its own monthly recurring revenue on the home page: US$6,446 in November 2022, US$49,000 in September 2023, US$32,000 in September 2024. In September 2024 he listed it at US$43,000 a month on a record day after his Lex Fridman interview. He then launched Photo AI, which is on this site separately, from the same code and fine-tuning method.", "Every number on this page is a founder statement, grade C: his posts, his interview answers and the revenue counter that he placed on the site. No payment processor or buyer has confirmed them. His own project page shows Interior AI's share of his income falling from 13% in 2023 to 3% in 2026, and he wrote in July 2026 that large AI products are taking over what used to be small apps. The page also shows what happened to earlier interior design startups, which used human designers behind a software front." ], "factsCaption": "One person, no employees, about US$43,000 a month in September 2024 and a declining share of the founder's income since, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: every value is a founder statement, grade C, from his posts, his interviews or the revenue counter he displayed on the site, unless marked \"calc\", which means computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From an open-source image model to a paid product in two weeks, then two years near US$40,000 a month, then decline. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Interior AI prices read from the company's pricing page on 12 October 2026 (grade C)", "note": "All plans are subscriptions. The yearly price is shown per month and is billed once a year: Pro US$349, Premium US$599, Ultra US$1,199. The limit is the number of interior designs per month. From September 2024 to at least October 2025 the monthly prices were US$39, US$99 and US$299, and the yearly prices US$199, US$499 and US$1,699, according to archived copies of the page. The site says refunds are not given because the GPU time has already been paid for.", "rows": [ [ "Pro", "29", "49", "1,000 designs a month, low quality, 4 rooms in parallel" ], [ "Premium", "49", "99", "5,000 designs a month, medium quality, editing, virtual staging, videos" ], [ "Ultra", "99", "199", "25,000 designs a month, highest quality, 16 rooms in parallel, dedicated server" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue per month, September 2024", "value": "US$43,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 22 September 2024, listing each product on a record day when total revenue reached US$420,000 a month after the Lex Fridman podcast. He wrote that it had already dropped a lot by the time of posting.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the September 2024 figure", "value": "about US$516,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$43,000 times 12. This is the headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month, August 2024, founder's estimate", "value": "US$40,000 to US$50,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Lex Fridman podcast, August 2024: \"now still makes like 40K, 50K a month, and it's been like two years\".", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue shown on the site, September 2024", "value": "US$32,000", "grade": "C", "note": "The home page displayed \"$32K MRR\" next to the logo. Archived copy of 1 September 2024.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue shown on the site, January 2024", "value": "US$38,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived copy of 14 January 2024 shows \"$38K MRR\".", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue shown on the site, September 2023", "value": "US$49,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived copy of 4 September 2023 shows \"$49K MRR\". The highest value found in archived copies.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue shown on the site, November 2022", "value": "US$6,446", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived copy of 1 November 2022 shows \"($6,446 MRR)\" under the title, about six weeks after launch.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the first week", "value": "US$10,000 to US$20,000 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on the Lex Fridman podcast: \"within a week, made 10K, 20K a month\". No exact figure.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Interiors rendered by 2 October 2022", "value": "19,129", "grade": "C", "note": "Counter on the archived home page of 2 October 2022, when the product was still free and payment was not yet built.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Share of the founder's yearly revenue and investment gains", "value": "2% in 2022, 13% in 2023, 12% in 2024, 6% in 2025, 3% in 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's project page, revenue chart, read 12 October 2026. The 2026 value is extrapolated by the page. The total includes investment gains, which grew strongly, so a falling share does not by itself prove falling revenue.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Third-party estimate, November 2025", "value": "US$38,000 to US$45,000 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Indie Hackers case study on Photo AI, which lists the founder's other products. The author does not give a source for this figure.", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "fact": "GPU cost, September 2024", "value": "about US$60,000 a month for Photo AI and Interior AI together", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post. The split between the two products is not given. Other costs, server and Cloudflare, about US$500 a month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's total business revenue, September 2026", "value": "US$200,000 to US$250,000 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 23 September 2026, all products together, described as very stable.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 person", "grade": "C", "note": "The site says \"This service was built by me, Pieter Levels\". The founder describes all his products as built by himself with no employees.", "src": [ 12, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder statements throughout; his blog describes all his products as bootstrapped without funding.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the September 2024 figure", "value": "24 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: September 2022 to September 2024.", "src": [ 1, 8 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "August 2022", "what": "Stability AI releases Stable Diffusion as open source. Levels installs it on his laptop and generates houses. His post of 18 September says this was two weeks earlier.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "5 September 2022", "what": "He launches This House Does Not Exist, a site that generates modern houses. He later says that people got bored of it, but that the model was good at interiors.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14, 2 ] }, { "when": "September 2022", "what": "He builds Interior AI in five days. The first archived copy, 15 September 2022, is a gallery of generated interiors. By 2 October the site accepts a photo of your room and shows 19,129 interiors rendered; payment is \"not working yet, building it now\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 8 ] }, { "when": "4 October 2022", "what": "The launch thread on X: \"Here's how I built interiorai.com from scratch in 5 days\". He says it made US$10,000 to US$20,000 a month within a week.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 2 ] }, { "when": "1 November 2022", "what": "The home page shows US$6,446 in monthly recurring revenue. A Pro plan removes watermarks and unlocks more rooms, styles and resolutions.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "November 2022", "what": "He fine-tunes the model on a gallery of good interiors, then on photos of himself. That experiment becomes Avatar AI and then Photo AI, which is on this site separately.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "4 September 2023", "what": "The home page shows US$49,000 in monthly recurring revenue, the highest archived value. The site now calls itself \"the first AI Interior Designer in the world\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "October 2023", "what": "In a podcast he says that interior designers use the tool to show clients ideas, and that he wants to bring Photo AI and Interior AI to US$100,000 a month each.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "4 December 2023", "what": "Interior AI v2 turns minimal architect sketches into renders.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "when": "14 January 2024", "what": "US$38,000 in monthly recurring revenue on the home page. An affiliate program pays 20% of referred payments.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "27 March 2024", "what": "Someone at Wayfair asks him to cancel their subscription. The company had run 8 accounts for months while building its own AI interior design tool, which launched in 2023.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "20 August 2024", "what": "Lex Fridman podcast. He says Interior AI still makes US$40,000 to US$50,000 a month after two years.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "1 September 2024", "what": "US$32,000 in monthly recurring revenue on the home page. Prices: US$39, US$99 and US$299 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "22 September 2024", "what": "A record day after the podcast: US$43,000 a month for Interior AI inside US$420,000 a month in total, at about 80% profit. GPUs for Photo AI and Interior AI cost about US$60,000 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "13 January 2026", "what": "Room detection, the step that recognises what kind of room is in the photo, is moved to xAI's language model.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "when": "24 February 2026", "what": "He adds a viewer for Gaussian splats, a 3D representation built from images, so that a customer can walk through the generated interior, using the World Labs API.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 18 ] }, { "when": "6 April 2026", "what": "An automatic system answers Stripe payment disputes with a PDF of the designs the customer generated.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 19 ] }, { "when": "26 July 2026", "what": "He writes that large AI products are \"cannibalizing everything that used to be apps for indiehackers\", with declining revenue and traffic on his own projects too.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 20 ] }, { "when": "23 September 2026", "what": "His total business revenue is US$200,000 to US$250,000 a month and stable. His project page gives Interior AI 3% of his 2026 revenue and investment gains.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11, 10 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Two weeks after the model, first in the category", "text": "Stable Diffusion became open source in late August 2022. Levels launched a house generator on 5 September and Interior AI in September. He has said that he launched it because \"obviously interior design AI, and nobody's doing that yet\". The first version was a free site with a counter of rendered interiors; the paid plan came weeks later." }, { "title": "Image-to-image on a photo of your own room", "text": "Generating random interiors was a toy. The product became useful when a customer could upload a photo of a real room and get the same room back in a different style. The site then added the uses that people pay for: virtual staging of empty homes for real estate listings, sketches to renders for architects, and an editor to brush away mistakes." }, { "title": "An audience built over ten years", "text": "Levels had published his revenue in public since 2014 and had hundreds of thousands of followers on X when he posted the launch thread. He has said that going on national television brings him about 3 sign-ups, while the Lex Fridman podcast raised his revenue 2.5 times. There was no paid marketing." }, { "title": "Rented GPUs and one person", "text": "The model runs on rented GPUs through inference providers; the site says refunds are not possible because the GPU time has already been paid. There are no employees. In September 2024 the founder reported about 80% profit across his products." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's posts, his interviews and archived copies of the site. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Stable Diffusion, open-sourced in August 2022, with image-to-image: the photo of the room is the input, the style is the text prompt. Later a model fine-tuned on a gallery of good interior photos, and now the Flux model according to the pricing page.", "Built in five days, alone. The founder says Photo AI is \"the same code essentially\". Photo AI is a single PHP file, as described on its own page on this site.", "Inference on rented GPUs through providers such as Replicate and FAL, in which the founder later invested. GPU cost was about US$60,000 a month for Photo AI and Interior AI together in September 2024.", "A language model detects the room type in the uploaded photo; moved to xAI's model in January 2026.", "Gaussian splats from the World Labs API let a customer walk through the generated room in 3D, with a viewer the founder wrote himself in February 2026.", "Payments through Stripe. A home page counter showed monthly recurring revenue from 2022 to 2024. In 2026 an automatic system answers payment disputes with evidence of the customer's usage.", "Marketing is the founder's posts on X and podcast interviews. An affiliate program pays 20% to 30% of referred payments." ], "src": [ 14, 2, 11, 1, 17, 18, 19, 6, 5 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold interior design or home design through software. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Modsy", "years": "2015 to 2022", "funding": "US$72.7M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Upload photos of your room and get photorealistic 3D renders with furniture you can buy.", "died": "The renders were made by human designers, 2 to 4 hours per room, sold for US$69 to US$199. Margins were thin and paid social ads cost more than customers returned.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2521-modsy" }, { "name": "Laurel & Wolf", "years": "2014 to 2019", "funding": "US$25M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Online interior design: a flat fee connects you with a professional designer.", "died": "Flat fees did not cover customer acquisition. Scaling the designer network lowered quality and the brand.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2012-laurel-wolf" }, { "name": "Tastemaker", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$1.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Affordable professional interior design for middle-income households, through a web platform.", "died": "A distributed workforce of designers gave inconsistent results. Better-funded competitors arrived and the company could not pay to acquire enough users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1572-tastemaker" }, { "name": "Kujiale", "years": "2011 to 2025", "funding": "US$550M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Design your own home in 3D in the browser and see the furniture in place.", "died": "Chinese consumers did not want to design their own homes. Users played with the tool and left, and AI tools made the technology ordinary.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2371-kujiale" }, { "name": "Iwjw (Love Home)", "years": "2014 to 2019", "funding": "US$200M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "A marketplace that standardises home renovation and interior design in China.", "died": "Acquiring a homeowner cost US$300 to US$500 and few came back for a second job. Contractors left the platform after one project.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2346-iwjw-love-home" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the five sold design as a service and had a human cost behind every job: a designer who spent hours per room, a contractor, a customer acquired through paid ads. The software was a front for labour, so the price could not go below the labour, and the margin never appeared.", "Interior AI has no labour per render. A design costs GPU time measured in cents and arrives in 25 seconds, so the product can be sold as a subscription with thousands of renders a month and a profit margin near 80%. The customer gets ideas, not a finished room, and the ones who pay are the ones who need many images fast: real estate agents staging listings and designers showing options to clients. What the predecessors show is the trap to avoid: as soon as a human must touch each output, the economics of the five return." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The launch, no. The method, yes, in another domain.", "text": "Being the first interior tool on Stable Diffusion was an opening of a few weeks in September 2022, and the founder himself now writes that large AI products take over small apps. The method is still available: take a new open model, find one input that people already have, here a photo of a room, and ship the obvious product in days, with a subscription priced above the GPU cost.", "steps": [ "When a model is released as open source, build the one-input product within a week and put a counter of outputs on the page.", "Make the paid version the one that works on the customer's own data, here their room, not random generations.", "Find the customer who needs volume, such as agents staging listings, and price the plans by renders per month.", "Keep costs to rented GPUs and one person, and expect the revenue to fall when the model providers ship the same feature." ], "open": "Any new open model with a one-image or one-file input: floor plans, garden photos, product photos, architectural sketches, and the walk-through videos and 3D views that image models now produce." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Self-reported, and a record day", "text": "The headline figure, US$43,000 a month, comes from a founder post about a record day after a podcast, and he wrote that revenue dropped a lot right after. The site's own counter showed US$32,000 three weeks earlier." }, { "title": "Decline since 2025", "text": "The founder's project page shows Interior AI's share of his income falling from 13% in 2023 to 6% in 2025 and 3% in 2026, and in July 2026 he wrote that his projects have declining revenue and traffic. The exact revenue after September 2024 is not published." }, { "title": "The feature belongs to everyone now", "text": "Wayfair built its own tool after studying this one, and every image model provider now does image-to-image editing from a chat window. The founder's answer is to add what the model providers do not sell: staging, sketches, videos and 3D walk-throughs." }, { "title": "Sales depend on one person's audience", "text": "There is no paid marketing. Revenue rose 2.5 times after one podcast and fell afterwards. The business is tied to the founder's posts." }, { "title": "No refunds and dispute volume", "text": "The site refuses refunds because the GPU time is already spent, and the founder built an automatic system to fight card disputes, which suggests that disputes are frequent enough to matter." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://interiorai.com/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Pieter Levels, 22 September 2024: I hit a new $420,000/mo revenue record thanks to the Lex Fridman podcast", "url": "https://levels.io/new-420k-mo-revenue-record-lex-fridman", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder's post listing each product's revenue, GPU cost and profit margin. Source for the headline figure." }, { "title": "Lex Fridman Podcast #440 transcript, 20 August 2024: Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life", "url": "https://lexfridman.com/pieter-levels-transcript/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on This House Does Not Exist, Interior AI, fine-tuning and Avatar AI. Source for the first-week revenue, the US$40,000 to US$50,000 a month figure and the pivot story." }, { "title": "Archived copy of interiorai.com, 1 November 2022, Wayback Machine", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20221101122025/https://interiorai.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The home page shows \"($6,446 MRR)\" and the Pro plan features." }, { "title": "Archived copy of interiorai.com, 4 September 2023, Wayback Machine", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20230904105510/https://interiorai.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the header. The home page shows \"$49K MRR\"." }, { "title": "Archived copy of interiorai.com, 1 September 2024, Wayback Machine", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20240901191252/https://interiorai.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the header and the pricing section. The home page shows \"$32K MRR\" and the prices of US$39, US$99 and US$299 a month." }, { "title": "Archived copy of interiorai.com, 14 January 2024, Wayback Machine", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20240114141317/https://interiorai.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the header. The home page shows \"$38K MRR\" and a 20% affiliate program." }, { "title": "Pieter Levels on X, 4 October 2022: Here's how I built interiorai.com from scratch in 5 days", "url": "https://x.com/levelsio/status/1577086792695975936", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the first post of the thread through api.fxtwitter.com. The rest of the thread is images and could not be read." }, { "title": "Archived copy of interiorai.com, 2 October 2022, Wayback Machine", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20221002120221/https://interiorai.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Shows 19,129 interiors rendered and that payment was not yet built. An earlier copy of 15 September 2022 shows a gallery version." }, { "title": "Pieter Levels, 27 March 2024: Wayfair used my AI interior design tool to build their own", "url": "https://levels.io/wayfair-used-interior-ai-to-build-their-own", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Wayfair accounts and the \"launched 2 years ago\" statement." }, { "title": "Pieter Levels, projects page: everything built since 1996, with a revenue chart per year", "url": "https://levels.io/projects", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the revenue chart and the 2022 entries. Source for Interior AI's share of yearly revenue and investment gains." }, { "title": "Pieter Levels, 23 September 2026: I passed $10M/y in revenue and investment gains with a 94.5% profit margin", "url": "https://levels.io/passed-10m-revenue-investment-gains", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for total business revenue, the inference providers and the no-funding, no-employees position." }, { "title": "Interior AI home page and pricing, read 12 October 2026", "url": "https://interiorai.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the prices, the render time, the refund rule, the features and the \"built by me\" statement." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, November 2025: Photo AI by Pieter Levels, complete deep dive case study", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/photo-ai-by-pieter-levels-complete-deep-dive-case-study-0-to-132k-mrr-in-18-months-3a9a2b1579", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on launch history and the founder's portfolio. A community case study without stated sources for the Interior AI figure." }, { "title": "Pieter Levels, 18 September 2022: This House Does Not Exist", "url": "https://levels.io/this-house-does-not-exist", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Stable Diffusion release timing and the house generator that preceded Interior AI." }, { "title": "The Bootstrapped Founder podcast transcript, 25 October 2023: Indie hacking is dead, now what?", "url": "https://levels.io/bootstrapped-founder-indie-hacking-is-dead", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on GPUs, Interior AI and valuation. Source for the interior designers' use and the US$100,000 a month goal." }, { "title": "Pieter Levels, 4 December 2023: Minimal architect sketches turned into renders with Interior AI v2", "url": "https://levels.io/minimal-sketches-ai-interior-renders", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full." }, { "title": "Pieter Levels, 13 January 2026: Moved all my sites LLM APIs now to xAI", "url": "https://levels.io/moved-sites-llm-apis-to-xai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the room detection step." }, { "title": "Pieter Levels, 24 February 2026: Built my own gaussian splat viewer for Interior AI", "url": "https://levels.io/built-gaussian-splat-viewer-for-interior-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full." }, { "title": "Pieter Levels, 6 April 2026: Made an auto-dispute response system for Interior AI", "url": "https://levels.io/auto-dispute-response-system-interior-ai-stripe", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Stripe dispute system." }, { "title": "Pieter Levels, 26 July 2026: BigAI is cannibalizing everything that used to be apps for indiehackers", "url": "https://levels.io/bigai-cannibalizing-indiehackers-apps", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the declining revenue statement." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/formula-bot/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/formula-bot.md", "slug": "formula-bot", "name": "Formula Bot", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI spreadsheet-formula generator, now a data-analysis chat", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-12", "launchLabel": "28 August 2022", "outcomeLabel": "US$500K a year run rate, May 2025", "sticker": "$500K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 504000, "months": 33, "teamLabel": "1 founder, plus two contract developers at about 20 hours a week each by 2025", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "documents-data", "channel": "creators", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Spreadsheets" ], "product": "You type what you want a spreadsheet to do, in plain words, and it returns the Excel or Google Sheets formula. Started in August 2022 as a one-page site built without code. Since 2024 it is a chat that reads uploaded files and connected data sources and returns charts, tables and reports. Renamed Better Analyst in 2026.", "why": "It was the first visible AI tool for a task that 750 million Excel users do, and it appeared three months before ChatGPT. A Reddit post and a TikTok video brought 100,000 visitors in a day. The founder put a paywall on the site when the OpenAI bill reached US$5,000, and 606 people paid in the first month.", "summary": [ "Formula Bot is an AI tool that turns a sentence such as \"sum column B where column A says Paid\" into a spreadsheet formula. It was built with no-code tools, programs such as Bubble that let a person assemble a web application by drawing screens and rules instead of writing code. It calls the OpenAI API, the paid interface through which a program sends text to a model and receives the answer, so the founder never trained a model. Since 2024 the product is a data-analysis chat: the user uploads an Excel or PDF file or connects Google Sheets or Google Analytics, asks questions, and receives charts, tables and reports. In 2026 the company renamed it Better Analyst.", "David Bressler, a director of analytics at a media agency in Orlando, Florida, built the first version during paternity leave in July 2022 and released it on 28 August 2022. A post on the Excel subreddit and a TikTok video brought about 100,000 visitors in a day and an OpenAI bill of about US$5,000 before any revenue. He added a login, a limit of 5 free formulas a month and a US$2.99 subscription. The first month ended with 55,000 active accounts, 606 paying subscribers and US$10,700 in revenue. By March 2023 MRR, monthly recurring revenue, the sum of all active subscriptions for one month, passed US$14,000 and total monthly revenue reached about US$23,000. He kept his job until 1 September 2024, then went full time. In May 2025 he wrote on Indie Hackers that the product made more than US$42,000 a month, which is an ARR, annual recurring revenue, of about US$500,000. Bubble reported 1 million users in April 2025 and a newsletter reported 1.2 million in October 2025.", "Every money figure on this page comes from the founder, through his own posts, interviews, or a third party quoting him, so the grade is C. No payment processor, buyer or journalist-reviewed document confirms them. One widely shared figure, US$2.8 million a year posted by Indie Hackers in April 2025, does not match the founder's own US$500,000 ARR written a month later on the same site, and this page does not use it." ], "factsCaption": "From US$10,700 in the first month to more than US$42,000 a month by May 2025, every figure self-reported (grade C)", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a founder statement in his own post or interview, or a third party's estimate that says so. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a one-page formula generator built on paternity leave to a US$500,000-a-year data-analysis product, in 33 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Better Analyst (formerly Formula Bot) prices read from the company's pricing page on 12 October 2026 (grade C). The page offers an annual option labelled \"save 50%\", but the annual prices load by script and could not be read.", "note": "The monthly prices are the regular prices. The page shows a half-price first month on each plan. Max and Business are priced per user. A free plan with limited usage exists and needs no card. In 2023 the only paid plan was US$6.99 a month or US$75 a year, and at launch it was US$2.99 a month.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "limited usage, no card" ], [ "Starter", "", "20", "250 chat messages a month, 2,500 AI actions, 2 dashboards" ], [ "Max", "", "40 per user", "unlimited messages, 5,000 AI actions per user, 10 dashboards" ], [ "Business", "", "80 per user", "unlimited messages, 15,000 AI actions per user, 20 dashboards, white-label embeds" ], [ "Custom", "", "", "custom volumes and connectors, by demo" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue per month, May 2025", "value": "more than US$42,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's own Indie Hackers post, 17 May 2025, headline \"after hitting $500k ARR\". The post's summary box gives \"Revenue >$42K a month\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the May 2025 figure", "value": "about US$504,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$42,000 times 12. This is the headline figure on this page. It matches the founder's own US$500,000 ARR.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Users, April 2025", "value": "1 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Bubble's customer story, 23 April 2025, which quotes the founder. Users means accounts created, most of them free. A newsletter reported 1.2 million in October 2025.", "src": [ 2, 8 ] }, { "fact": "First month, September 2022", "value": "55,000 active accounts, 606 paid subscribers, US$10,700 revenue", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's X post of 2 October 2022. The paid plan was US$2.99 a month at the time.", "src": [ 3, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the first three months", "value": "about US$30,000, with MRR of about US$4,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interviews with No Code MBA and the Hustlers newsletter, November and December 2022. Indie Hackers wrote US$20,000 in two months and US$3,000 MRR on 21 November 2022.", "src": [ 6, 7, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month, February 2023", "value": "US$22,000 to US$23,000, of which MRR above US$14,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's Starter Story interview, 21 March 2023. The page's summary box says US$26,000 a month. The difference between total revenue and MRR is yearly plans and tips.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue and profit, May 2023", "value": "US$24,000 revenue, US$21,000 profit", "grade": "C", "note": "A third-party case study, September 2023, quoting the founder's listing on Acquire.com, where he offered the business for US$800,000. The listing itself is no longer online.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Users and paid users, September 2023", "value": "650,000 free users, 10,900 paid users", "grade": "C", "note": "Same third-party case study. 10,900 is cumulative paid users, not active subscribers.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Paid share of users, early 2023", "value": "about 5,000 of 750,000, or 0.7%", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in a podcast quoted by Starter Story. The 5-free-formulas limit was enough for 97% of users, by his count.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "OpenAI bill before any revenue", "value": "about US$5,000 in the first two weeks, about US$10,000 in the hole after a few months", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder quoted by Bubble. The first version had no login and no usage limit.", "src": [ 2, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Fixed costs at launch", "value": "US$25 a month for Bubble and US$10 for the domain", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview with No Code MBA, 2022.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Marketing spend in the first seven months", "value": "US$5,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's Starter Story interview. Influencer posts cost US$200 to US$3,000 each; some were free.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Share of customers using a personal email", "value": "60%", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's X post, 10 September 2024. He calls the product more B2C than B2B.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Team, 2025", "value": "1 founder plus two contract Bubble developers at about 20 hours a week each", "grade": "C", "note": "Bubble's customer story. He hired the agency once MRR reached about US$5,000. Earlier he used Upwork contractors.", "src": [ 2, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Date the founder went full time", "value": "1 September 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder quoted by Bubble: he kept his job exactly a year to the day from 1 September 2023, after the product's income passed his salary.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in the Website Planet interview: not VC-backed. Consistent with every other source.", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "fact": "Indie Hackers' US$2.8 million a year figure, April 2025", "value": "not used on this page", "grade": "C", "note": "An Indie Hackers X post of 8 April 2025 gives US$2.8M a year, 900K users and 87.5% profit margin. The founder's own post on the same site a month later gives US$500,000 ARR. The 87.5% margin is the May 2023 profit margin from the Acquire listing. The larger figure is unexplained.", "src": [ 12, 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the May 2025 figure", "value": "33 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 28 August 2022 to May 2025.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "May to July 2022", "what": "Bressler, a director of analytics at a media agency, has his second child. On paternity leave he tests GPT-3 on Excel questions, learns Bubble from YouTube and builds a one-page site: an input box, a button, an output box.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 2 ] }, { "when": "28 August 2022", "what": "Launch. Free, no login, no usage limit. A post on the Excel subreddit gets more than 10,000 upvotes; a TikTok account with 4.5 million followers posts a video; about 100,000 people visit in a day. The OpenAI bill reaches about US$5,000 in two weeks. He adds a tip page and receives a couple of thousand dollars from a couple of hundred users.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 14, 2, 4 ] }, { "when": "September 2022", "what": "Login, a limit of 5 free formulas a month, and a US$2.99 subscription. First month: 55,000 active accounts, 606 paying subscribers, US$10,700 in revenue. A Product Hunt launch gives the best sales day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 14 ] }, { "when": "November 2022", "what": "About US$30,000 total revenue and US$4,000 MRR after three months, 1.1 million visitors, while he still works full time. Indie Hackers publishes the first interview.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 7, 14 ] }, { "when": "March 2023", "what": "MRR above US$14,000 and about US$23,000 revenue in the last month. The plan is US$6.99 a month. About 10 copy products exist, some with the same front-end code. He has spent US$5,000 on marketing, mostly TikTok creators.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "May 2023", "what": "US$24,000 revenue and US$21,000 profit in the month. He lists the business on Acquire.com for US$800,000; it does not sell. Around the same time, eight months after he bought the domain, Microsoft sends a cease-and-desist letter over the word Excel in it; he buys formulabot.com for US$500 and widens the product beyond formulas.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 9 ] }, { "when": "September 2023", "what": "A third-party case study counts 650,000 free users and 10,900 paid users since launch and estimates US$192,760 total revenue.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "December 2023", "what": "He publicly lists 13 competing formula generators and thanks them for pushing him to build more than a formula generator.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "1 September 2024", "what": "He leaves his job after the product's income passes his salary. The product is now a chat over uploaded files and connected data sources. He hires a Bubble agency for development.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "April 2025", "what": "Bubble reports 1 million users. Indie Hackers posts a US$2.8 million a year figure on X that the founder's own later post does not support.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 12 ] }, { "when": "17 May 2025", "what": "He writes on Indie Hackers that the product passed US$500,000 ARR, more than US$42,000 a month, with little marketing, and that marketing is the next focus.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "October 2025", "what": "A newsletter reports 1.2 million users. Google Ads run only sometimes because the payback period can reach 8 months.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "formulabot.com redirects to betteranalyst.com. The product is renamed Better Analyst, with dashboards, scheduled tasks and a Slack bot. Plans are US$20, US$40 and US$80 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "First to a task that hundreds of millions of people do", "text": "In August 2022 GPT-3 could already write Excel formulas, but almost nobody had put an input box in front of it for that one task. The site asked for nothing, returned a formula in seconds, and was easy to film for TikTok. ChatGPT, which does the same thing for free, came three months later. By then the site had hundreds of thousands of accounts and was adding features ChatGPT does not have: add-ons inside Excel and Google Sheets, then file upload and charts." }, { "title": "Raise the barrier to use, step by step", "text": "In the founder's words, the biggest reason for the site's success was to gradually raise the barrier to usage. First free with no login. Then a login. Then a monthly cap. Then a subscription for unlimited use. Each step was taken after the previous one had brought users, so the paywall arrived with 55,000 active accounts already there." }, { "title": "Almost no cost per formula", "text": "A formula is a few dozen tokens in and out, so the model cost per request is tiny, and the site ran on a US$25-a-month Bubble plan. The May 2023 profit margin from the founder's own listing was 87.5%. The only expensive moment was the launch, when unlimited free use cost about US$5,000 in two weeks." }, { "title": "Distribution by other people's videos", "text": "The founder spent US$5,000 on marketing in seven months. He found TikTok creators through TikTok's Creator Marketplace, paid US$200 to US$3,000 a post or nothing, and chose by engagement, not follower count. He says he cannot tell which creator drove which signup, and that it worked anyway." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's interviews and posts and from Bubble's customer story. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Built in Bubble, a no-code web-application builder, with no line of code written by the founder. The first version took about a week and a half of paternity leave; the public version with login and checkout came in September 2022.", "The model is OpenAI's API. The product does not train or host a model. Usage limits, a login and a subscription were added after the first bill.", "Add-ons for Excel and Google Sheets followed in 2022 and 2023, so the formula could be generated inside the spreadsheet.", "After the Microsoft letter in 2023 the product widened into data analysis: upload Excel, CSV or PDF files, connect Google Sheets, Google Analytics, Search Console and databases, then ask questions and receive charts, tables, sentiment labels and cleaned data.", "Development is done by two contract Bubble developers at about 20 hours a week each, hired through an agency once MRR reached about US$5,000.", "Retention work: automated emails whose text depends on the questions a user asked and on the days since signup." ], "src": [ 4, 2, 8, 9 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold an easier spreadsheet or an easier data analysis to people who already had Excel. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Fieldbook", "years": "2014 to 2019", "funding": "US$1.7M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Spreadsheets with database features, without learning SQL.", "died": "Excel and Google Sheets added the missing features faster than users could be persuaded to move. Switching costs were high.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/142-fieldbook" }, { "name": "Skysheet", "years": "2009 to 2012", "funding": "US$200K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A cloud spreadsheet with real-time collaboration and charts.", "died": "Google and Microsoft moved their spreadsheets to the cloud and added collaboration. No clear difference remained.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1218-skysheet" }, { "name": "DataNitro", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Run Python scripts inside Excel for data analysis.", "died": "Limited by Excel's own architecture. Power Query and Power BI, then Excel's own Python, did the job inside Excel.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1587-datanitro" }, { "name": "SumAll", "years": "2011 to 2019", "funding": "US$15M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "One data dashboard for small businesses, no data scientist needed.", "died": "Free tools and large analytics products did the same. Small businesses would not pay the price, and churn was high.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/587-sumall" }, { "name": "Snapboard", "years": "2020 to 2023", "funding": "US$1.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "All your developer tools and data in one customizable dashboard.", "died": "Feature parity with Zapier and Power Automate, bigger budgets on the other side, and only subscriptions for income.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/926-snapboard" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the five asked users to leave Excel, or to add a layer on top of it, and the owner of Excel or of Google Sheets then built the feature in. Formula Bot faces the same owners: Microsoft put Copilot into Excel and Google put Gemini into Sheets, both of which write formulas, and ChatGPT writes them for free. The founder's own December 2023 list of 13 copies shows how low the barrier was.", "Two things differ. First, the cost structure. The predecessors raised money and built teams before they knew who would pay. Formula Bot's fixed cost was US$35 a month, so a 0.7% paid share of users was a profit, not a problem, and no investor needed a bigger market. Second, the product did not stay a formula generator. The Microsoft letter in 2023 forced a new name, and the founder used it to move to the part that Excel does not do for a non-technical person: upload a file or connect a data source, ask a question, get the chart. That is where the US$20 to US$80 plans and the 2026 rename to Better Analyst come from." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The launch window, no. The method, yes.", "text": "Being the first AI formula generator was an opening of a few months in 2022, and it closed when ChatGPT arrived. The method is still available: take one task that a very large number of people do badly, put the thinnest possible interface over a model API, launch free where those people already talk, and add the login, the cap and the price only after the users are there.", "steps": [ "Pick a task with hundreds of millions of users and a short input and output, so model cost per request is near zero.", "Build the first version with no-code tools in days, and launch it free with no login in the forum where the users are.", "Set a spending alarm on the model API before launch. The founder did not, and paid US$5,000 for it.", "Add the login, the monthly cap and the subscription one step at a time, each after the previous step has brought users.", "Pay small video creators by engagement, not followers, and accept that you will not know which one worked.", "When the platform owner copies the first feature, move to the next task that it does not do for a non-technical user." ], "open": "Any single task inside a mass-market tool that a model can do from a sentence: formulas in spreadsheets, regular expressions, SQL queries, slide layouts, email filters, and the file-analysis step that follows each of them." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Self-reported, and one figure is contradicted", "text": "Every number is from the founder or from someone quoting him. Indie Hackers' own X account posted US$2.8 million a year in April 2025; the founder wrote US$500,000 ARR in May 2025. This page uses the founder's lower figure and cannot explain the higher one." }, { "title": "The platform owners now ship the feature", "text": "Microsoft Copilot in Excel and Google Gemini in Sheets write formulas inside the spreadsheet, and ChatGPT writes them for free. The founder said in 2023 that about 10% of churned customers named ChatGPT as the reason. The product's answer is to be the analysis layer, which is a more crowded market than the formula layer was." }, { "title": "Mostly consumers, with a free tier that is good enough", "text": "60% of customers use a personal email. In 2023 the free limit was enough for 97% of users and about 0.7% paid. Consumer subscriptions churn, and paid acquisition had payback periods of up to 8 months, so the founder runs ads only sometimes." }, { "title": "Growth after the viral start is unclear", "text": "US$23,000 a month in early 2023 and more than US$42,000 a month in May 2025 is less than a doubling in 26 months. The founder himself wrote that marketing had not been a focus until 2025." }, { "title": "A rename in 2026", "text": "formulabot.com now redirects to betteranalyst.com. A new name loses the search traffic and the links that carried the old one, and the pricing page shows no annual prices that can be read without running its scripts." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://betteranalyst.com/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Indie Hackers, 17 May 2025: Getting serious about marketing after hitting $500k ARR, by David Bressler", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/getting-serious-about-marketing-after-hitting-500k-arr-8XGnzrxG1neA3jy37x2D", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public part: the summary box (Revenue >$42K a month), the title and the first section, which gives the paternity-leave start and the move to full time. The rest is behind the Indie Hackers login. Source for the headline figure." }, { "title": "Bubble customer story, 23 April 2025: How Formula Bot Built a 1 Million-User AI Tool on Bubble", "url": "https://bubble.io/blog/formula-bot/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full from the Wayback Machine copy of 15 May 2026, because the live page loads by script. Founder quotes on the OpenAI bill, the full-time date, the agency and the user count." }, { "title": "David Bressler on X, 2 October 2022: First month of @excelformulabot is in the books", "url": "https://x.com/bresslertweets/status/1576392611480289282", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the first-month accounts, subscribers and revenue." }, { "title": "Starter Story, 21 March 2023: I Turned My Side Project into A $26K/Month SaaS Tool, interview with David Bressler", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/excelformulabot", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The page now shows the name Better Analyst. Source for the MRR, the monthly revenue, the price, the marketing spend, the barrier-to-use method and the Orlando location. Its monetization page quotes a podcast on 750,000 users and 5,000 paying." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 10 September 2023: Case study: Excel AI bot makes projected $164,850 profit in 12 months", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/case-study-excel-ai-bot-makes-projected-164-850-profit-in-12-months-402bf5338c", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A third-party estimate built on the founder's Acquire.com listing and posts. Source for the launch date, the May 2023 revenue and profit, the asking price and the user counts. The Acquire listing itself could not be found in the Wayback Machine." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 21 November 2022: Leveraging no code and influencers to hit $3k MRR in 2 months, David Bressler of Excelformulabot", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/leveraging-no-code-and-influencers-to-hit-3k-mrr-in-2-months-david-bressler-of-excelformulabot-9ffd4bc22b", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public summary; the interview is behind the login. Source for US$20,000 in two months and US$3,000 MRR. Niall Doherty's blog of the same day adds the US$2.99 a month and US$24.99 a year prices." }, { "title": "No Code MBA, late 2022: Growing Excelformulabot to $30,000 in just 3 months", "url": "https://nocode.mba/interviews/excel-formula-bot", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview. Source for the US$4,200 MRR, the US$30,000 in three months and the fixed costs." }, { "title": "Tiny Empires newsletter, 10 October 2025: 1.2 Million users as a solo founder", "url": "https://tinyempires.substack.com/p/12-million-users-as-a-solo-founder", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A secondary account by Joshua Tiernan. Source for the 1.2 million users, the Upwork contractors, the US$8,000 to US$10,000 loss before revenue and the ad payback period." }, { "title": "David Bressler on X, 1 August 2024: domain purchase story, the Microsoft cease and desist", "url": "https://x.com/bresslertweets/status/1818801254761406953", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the letter, the US$500 domain and the pivot." }, { "title": "David Bressler on X, 10 September 2024: Formula Bot is more B2C than B2B", "url": "https://x.com/bresslertweets/status/1833477559767421345", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the 60% personal-email share." }, { "title": "David Bressler on X, 6 December 2023: I'm calling out all of my competitors", "url": "https://x.com/bresslertweets/status/1732428331625095496", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Lists 13 competing formula generators." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers on X, 8 April 2025: David Bressler (@bresslertweets): $2.8M/yr", "url": "https://x.com/IndieHackers/status/1909662238123999441", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Cited only to record the contradicted figure; not used for any value on this page." }, { "title": "Website Planet, undated, before April 2025: 900K Users As A Bootstrapped Solopreneur: How Formula Bot Founder David Bressler Did It", "url": "https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/formula-bot-interview/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview. The page carries no publication date. Source for the 900,000 signups, the no-investor statement and the pricing A/B test advice." }, { "title": "The Hustlers newsletter, 2 December 2022: David's AI side project is making $4K+ monthly revenue", "url": "https://hustlers.beehiiv.com/p/david-ai-excel-formula-bot", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A secondary account. Source for the TikTok account size, the 1.1 million visitors and the Product Hunt launch day." }, { "title": "Better Analyst pricing page (formerly formulabot.com), read 12 October 2026, with Wayback Machine snapshots of formulabot.com", "url": "https://betteranalyst.com/#pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full for the monthly prices and plan limits; the annual prices load by script and could not be read. Wayback Machine index entries show formulabot.com serving its own page on 27 July 2026 and redirecting to betteranalyst.com on 2 September 2026." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/pdf-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/pdf-ai.md", "slug": "pdf-ai", "name": "PDF.ai", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Chat with PDF documents", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-12", "launchLabel": "May 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$60K a month, November 2023", "sticker": "$720K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 720000, "months": 6, "teamLabel": "1 founder, plus a full-time developer and a full-time video creator hired in 2023", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "documents-data", "channel": "search", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Document tools" ], "product": "You upload a PDF and ask questions about it in a chat window. The answers come from the text of the document. Paid plans add more uploads, more questions, OCR for scanned pages, a Chrome extension, chat across several PDFs, and an API for developers.", "why": "The founder did not build it. He bought a weekend project with no revenue for US$20,000, paid about US$10,000 for the domain pdf.ai, and relaunched it under that name. The domain put the product at the top of Google for the words people were already typing, and a one-time launch deal paid for a developer and a video creator within weeks.", "summary": [ "PDF.ai is a chat-with-PDF tool: you upload a PDF file and type questions, and a language model answers from the text of that file. It uses OCR, optical character recognition, which turns a scanned image of a page into text, so scanned documents can be searched too. The AI model is OpenAI's; PDF.ai is the product around it.", "Damon Chen, a former Cisco engineer in Silicon Valley who already ran Testimonial.to, bought the project in May 2023. It was called Looseleaf.ai, had been built in a weekend by Josh Schneider, and had US$0 in revenue. Chen paid US$20,000 for the code and US$9,899 for the domain pdf.ai, and relaunched it under the new name with a US$99 lifetime deal. He wrote that it broke even in 6 days, had made US$35,000 by 5 June 2023, reached a US$200,000 annual run rate (one month's revenue multiplied by twelve) by September 2023, US$30,000 a month in October 2023, and more than US$60,000 in revenue in November 2023, three times the purchase price.", "Every revenue number on this page is a founder statement on X, LinkedIn or in interviews, grade C. No payment processor has confirmed any of them. The founder stopped posting PDF.ai figures after 2023; later numbers are third-party estimates and are marked as such. The product has not been sold: in October 2026 pdf.ai still sells the same plans plus an API. The page also shows what happened to earlier companies that sold search or question-answering over documents." ], "factsCaption": "A US$30,000 purchase that reported US$60,000 of revenue in a single month six months later, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a founder statement on X, LinkedIn or in an interview, or a third-party estimate that says so. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a weekend project sold for US$20,000 to US$60,000 of revenue in one month, in about six months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "PDF.ai prices on 12 October 2026, read from the company's pricing page in a browser (grade C)", "note": "The pricing page is rendered by script, so it was read in a browser, not downloaded. Prices are per user per month. Yearly billing is shown as 25% off, which matches the Ultimate price (US$27 to US$20) but not exactly the Pro price (US$17 to US$10). The API for developers is sold separately in credit packs and is not in this table.", "rows": [ [ "Hobby", "0", "0", "1 PDF upload, 100 questions a month, 10 MB files, OCR 2 pages per file" ], [ "Pro", "10", "17", "100 PDF uploads, 1,000 questions a month, 50 MB files, Chrome extension" ], [ "Ultimate", "20", "27", "Unlimited uploads and questions, advanced model, chat with all PDFs, team members" ], [ "Enterprise", "30", "37", "Unlimited, 100 MB files, OCR 100 pages per file, white-labeled PDF embed" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue in November 2023", "value": "more than US$60,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's LinkedIn post, December 2023: crossed US$60,000 in revenue in November, three times what he paid to acquire the product.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the November 2023 figure", "value": "about US$720,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$60,000 times 12. This is the headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, November 2023", "value": "more than US$500,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview with Peter Yang, 29 November 2023: grew PDF.ai to US$500,000-plus ARR. Consistent with the US$60,000 month if part of it was one-time deals.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 17 October 2023", "value": "US$30,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X: Testimonial US$70,000 MRR plus PDF.ai US$30,000 MRR equals US$100,000 MRR.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue and profit in September 2023", "value": "US$25,070 revenue, US$17,600 profit", "grade": "C", "note": "Case study by Diego Jaggi on Indie Hackers, 9 October 2023, from the founder's numbers. More than 1,250 paying users. A 70% margin.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Annual run rate, 8 September 2023", "value": "US$200,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X: hits US$200,000 ARR in 3 months.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the first month, by 5 June 2023", "value": "US$35,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X: bought for US$20,000 early last month, generated US$35,000 so far.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Purchase price of the code", "value": "US$20,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Bought on acquire.com from Josh Schneider less than 48 hours after his launch of Looseleaf.ai, with US$0 revenue, May 2023.", "src": [ 6, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Price of the domain pdf.ai", "value": "US$9,899.01", "grade": "C", "note": "Domain-industry news, 22 May 2023. The seller had paid US$610 earlier in 2023. The founder rounds it to US$10,000.", "src": [ 11, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time to recover the purchase price", "value": "6 days", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X, 11 May 2023, quoted in a newsletter: broke even in 6 days with US$2,891 of profit on top.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Lifetime deal at launch", "value": "US$99 one-time, more than 300 buyers in 3 months", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview. First customer within 24 hours. The money paid for a full-time engineer.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly visitors, September 2023", "value": "about 1,047,000, of which 350,000 from search", "grade": "C", "note": "Indie Hackers case study. The founder says most traffic comes from Google searches for the words PDF AI.", "src": [ 5, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Team, 2023", "value": "founder, 1 full-time developer, 1 full-time video creator", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X, September 2023. Latka counts 1 employee on LinkedIn in October 2024.", "src": [ 1, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X, October 2023: bootstrapped and profitable with a very healthy margin.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Latka's revenue estimate for 2024", "value": "US$591,700 a year", "grade": "C", "note": "A third-party estimate, marked as such. Latka records US$300,000 for 2023 from X.", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "fact": "Starter Story's estimate, October 2024", "value": "US$60,000 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Estimated from public sources, the page says. Its title claims US$1.5 million ARR, which does not match its own US$60,000 a month, so this page does not use the title figure.", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "fact": "Testimonial.to, the founder's other product, November 2025", "value": "US$109,000 MRR", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X with a link to a Stripe public profile. Not PDF.ai revenue; shown for context. The founder has posted no PDF.ai figure since 2023.", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "fact": "Time from relaunch to the November 2023 figure", "value": "6 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: May 2023 to November 2023.", "src": [ 3, 6 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2020 to 2021", "what": "Chen, a Cisco engineer for 8 years, builds four products that make nothing, then Testimonial.to, which reaches US$100,000 ARR in 9 months. He quits Cisco in 2021.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "Early May 2023", "what": "Josh Schneider launches Looseleaf.ai, a weekend project built with OpenAI and LangChain. Chen buys it within 48 hours for US$20,000 on acquire.com, with US$0 revenue.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 6 ] }, { "when": "May 2023", "what": "The domain pdf.ai sells for US$9,899.01. Chen rebrands the product to PDF.ai, launches on X and Product Hunt (4th of the day), and sells a US$99 lifetime deal. He writes that it broke even in 6 days.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11, 8, 9 ] }, { "when": "5 June 2023", "what": "US$35,000 of revenue in the first month. He asks his followers what he could sell it for.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "6 June 2023", "what": "Launch date recorded by the Indie Hackers case study. Pricing moves from the lifetime deal to subscriptions at US$15 a month, with an Enterprise plan at US$50 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "8 September 2023", "what": "US$200,000 ARR in 3 months. He lists his steps: buy a product with no revenue, buy a domain, sell a lifetime deal, move to subscriptions, hire a full-time video creator and a full-time developer, post every day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "September 2023", "what": "US$25,070 of revenue and US$17,600 of profit in the month. More than 1,250 paying users and about 1 million visitors, 350,000 of them from search.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "17 October 2023", "what": "PDF.ai at US$30,000 MRR and Testimonial at US$70,000 MRR: US$100,000 MRR combined.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "29 October 2023", "what": "OpenAI adds PDF chat to ChatGPT. Chen writes that he is optimistic, that PDF.ai is profitable, and that several million dollars in ARR within 1 to 2 years is his goal.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "November 2023", "what": "More than US$60,000 of revenue in the month, three times the purchase price. An interview the same month puts ARR above US$500,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "when": "October 2024", "what": "No founder figure. Latka estimates US$591,700 a year; Starter Story estimates US$60,000 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12, 13 ] }, { "when": "26 December 2024", "what": "Chen writes that for Testimonial and PDF.ai he wants a calm business, whatever the competition or the AI hype.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "August 2025", "what": "A secondary account says his two products together make US$1.3 million a year, that the chat-with-PDF market is crowded with copies, and that monthly revenue is down.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "when": "12 October 2026", "what": "pdf.ai is live with four plans, a Chrome extension, AI agents and Parse, Extract and Chat APIs. No sale has been announced.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 17 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Buy, do not build", "text": "The code was a weekend project that someone else had already shown on social media, and the reaction to that demo was the market test. Chen paid US$20,000 for it rather than spending weeks writing it himself, and said the code was worth about 10% of the business." }, { "title": "The domain is the marketing", "text": "People searched Google for the words PDF AI. A site at pdf.ai with that exact name ranked first for them. Chen said this brought most of the traffic, about 350,000 search visits a month by September 2023, with no advertising spend." }, { "title": "A lifetime deal that funds the hires", "text": "A US$99 one-time offer brought more than 300 buyers in three months. That cash paid for a full-time developer and a full-time video creator for daily Instagram and TikTok posts, while the plan moved to monthly subscriptions." }, { "title": "Daily posts and a second product's audience", "text": "Chen already had an audience on X from building Testimonial.to in public since 2020. Every PDF.ai milestone was a post, and the posts were quoted by newsletters and case studies, which sent more visitors." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's interviews and posts. They are grade C.", "items": [ "The original Looseleaf.ai was built in a weekend with OpenAI's API and LangChain on Next.js, hosted on Vercel. It could chat with one PDF at a time and had no payments.", "After the purchase Chen added payments through Stripe, the lifetime deal, then subscriptions. He says the web stack was new to him and he learned it from Udemy courses.", "Tools named by the founder: OpenAI, Vercel, Stripe, Mercury for banking and Deel to pay remote contractors.", "Later additions: OCR for scanned pages, a Chrome extension, chat across many PDFs, an AI quiz generator, and in 2026 a developer API for parsing, extracting and chatting with documents.", "Marketing is organic search on the domain name, daily short videos by a hired creator, an affiliate program paying 30% for 12 months, and the founder's own posts." ], "src": [ 7, 9, 5, 17, 1 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold search, question-answering or management of documents before language models could read them. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Niles", "years": "2017 to 2020", "funding": "US$2.8M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A Slack bot that answers questions from your company's documents.", "died": "Slack built its own search improvements, and the AI needed constant retraining that a small customer base could not pay for.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1031-niles" }, { "name": "ROSS Intelligence", "years": "2015 to 2018", "funding": "US$13M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "AI legal research that reads case law for lawyers.", "died": "Lawyers stayed with Westlaw and LexisNexis; the AI was an addition, not a replacement, and investors stopped funding long sales cycles.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1511-ross-intelligence" }, { "name": "Docucharm", "years": "2019 to 2022", "funding": "US$3M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Cloud document management: digitize, organize and retrieve business documents.", "died": "Google and Microsoft shipped the same inside their suites, for less.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/978-docucharm" }, { "name": "Documents.Me", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "All your documents from every cloud service in one app.", "died": "Free tools from the platform owners did the same, and every cloud API change cost money to follow.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1167-documentsme" }, { "name": "Readability", "years": "2009 to 2015", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Clutter-free reading of any web article.", "died": "Browsers added a reader mode, free. Few readers paid.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/485-readability" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the five sold a way to find or read what is inside documents, and each died when a platform owner added the same feature for free or when the technology could not answer well enough to replace the old tool. On 29 October 2023 OpenAI added PDF chat to ChatGPT, which is exactly the event that killed Niles and Readability. Chen wrote the same day that he was not worried.", "Two things were different for PDF.ai. First, the model did the hard part: Niles and ROSS had to build and retrain their own AI; PDF.ai calls OpenAI and pays per use, so each model upgrade improved the product at no cost. Second, the customer arrived by search, not by a sales call. A person typing PDF AI into Google found pdf.ai first and paid US$15 the same day, so the business reached US$25,000 a month before any competitor's feature launch could matter. Whether that holds is the open question: the founder's own posts stopped giving PDF.ai figures after 2023, and a 2025 account says monthly revenue fell in a crowded market." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The purchase, yes. The domain, only if one is for sale.", "text": "Buying a demo-stage project that already had a public reaction, and relaunching it with payments, is repeatable on any marketplace for small apps. The exact-match domain was the one-off: pdf.ai sold for under US$10,000 in May 2023 because the market had not priced AI domains yet. Lifetime deals to fund the first hires and a move to subscriptions are standard and still work.", "steps": [ "Watch acquire.com and similar marketplaces for weekend projects whose launch post got attention but that have no payments yet.", "Pay for the exact words customers search for, as a domain, before paying for ads.", "Sell a one-time deal for 3 months to test demand and fund a developer, then switch new customers to subscriptions.", "Post every number and every feature; let newsletters and case studies repeat them." ], "open": "Any file type people ask questions about: spreadsheets, contracts, slide decks, audio transcripts, and the API version of each for developers." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Self-reported and old", "text": "The headline is a founder's LinkedIn post about one month, November 2023. He has published no PDF.ai figure since. Third-party estimates for 2024 are US$591,700 a year (Latka) and US$60,000 a month (Starter Story), which do not agree with each other or with Starter Story's own US$1.5 million title." }, { "title": "The platform shipped the feature", "text": "ChatGPT added chat with a PDF in October 2023, and other document vendors can do the same. Every predecessor on this page died from exactly that. PDF.ai's answer is more features around the model: OCR, extensions, team seats, an API." }, { "title": "Revenue may be falling", "text": "A 2025 account of the founder's story says the chat-with-PDF market is crowded with copies and that monthly revenue is down. The founder's December 2024 post speaks of wanting a calm business rather than growth." }, { "title": "One-time money in the early numbers", "text": "The first months mixed US$99 lifetime deals with subscriptions, so the US$200,000 run rate and the US$60,000 month overstate recurring revenue. The founder's own October 2023 MRR figure was US$30,000." }, { "title": "Variable costs", "text": "Every question costs an OpenAI call and every scanned page costs OCR. The founder reported a 70% margin in September 2023; a price war with free tools would squeeze it." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://pdf.ai/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Damon Chen on X, 8 September 2023: PDF.ai hits $200K ARR in 3 months", "url": "https://x.com/damonchen/status/1700209364471333271", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full via the fxtwitter API. Source for the US$200,000 ARR, the US$20,000 and US$10,000 costs, and the two hires." }, { "title": "Damon Chen on X, 17 October 2023: $100K MRR now with Testimonial.to and PDF.ai", "url": "https://x.com/damonchen/status/1714114381657870823", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full via the fxtwitter API. Source for the US$30,000 MRR." }, { "title": "Damon Chen on LinkedIn, December 2023: PDF.ai crossed $60k in revenue in November", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/posts/damengchen_pdfai-crossed-60k-in-revenue-in-november-activity-7136059894838820864-53OW", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the post text from the public page. Source for the headline figure." }, { "title": "Peter Yang, Behind the Craft, 29 November 2023: Damon Chen, from engineer to indie hacker making $1,300,000 ARR", "url": "https://creatoreconomy.so/p/damon-chen-engineer-to-one-million", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the free part; the rest is behind a paywall. Founder interview. Source for the US$500,000-plus ARR, the Testimonial figures and the 2020 to 2021 background." }, { "title": "Diego Jaggi on Indie Hackers, 9 October 2023: PDF AI tool made $25K in MRR last month", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/pdf-ai-tool-made-25k-in-mrr-last-month-07148fa17d", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A case study from the founder's numbers. Source for September 2023 revenue, profit, users, traffic, first prices and the affiliate program." }, { "title": "Damon Chen on X, 5 June 2023: bought pdf.ai for $20k, $35k in revenue so far", "url": "https://x.com/damonchen/status/1665823454342553600", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full via the fxtwitter API." }, { "title": "Niall Doherty, 11 May 2023: Sold his app for $20K within 48 hours of launching", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/23687674-sold-his-app-for-20k-within-48-hours-of-launching", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Quotes Josh Schneider's launch post and names the buyer, the marketplace and the stack." }, { "title": "5 Biz Fri newsletter, May 2023: PDF.AI, $23k in 6 days", "url": "https://5to9.beehiiv.com/p/5-biz-fri-0004-60k-mrr-two-months-building-around-gpt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the PDF.ai section. Quotes the founder's 11 May 2023 post on breaking even in 6 days, and gives the Product Hunt rank." }, { "title": "SaaS Starter Stack: PDF.ai founder interview", "url": "https://saasstarterstack.com/interviews/pdfai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Undated founder interview, written after the US$50,000 MRR point. Source for the lifetime deal, the first customer, the search traffic and the tools used." }, { "title": "Damon Chen on X, 29 October 2023: I'm optimistic about PDF.ai", "url": "https://x.com/damonchen/status/1718491423065137169", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full via the fxtwitter API, with the quoted post about OpenAI adding PDF chat. Source for bootstrapped and profitable, and the ARR goal." }, { "title": "ccTLD.ru, 22 May 2023: The PDF.ai brought the former owner fifteen times the profit in a few months", "url": "https://cctld.ru/en/media/news/industry/34506", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Domain-industry news citing Domain Gang. Source for the US$610 and US$9,899.01 domain prices." }, { "title": "Latka company page: PDF.ai revenue 2024, estimate", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/pdf.ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A third-party estimate and a headcount from LinkedIn." }, { "title": "Starter Story, 23 October 2024: How Damon Chen scaled PDF AI to $1.5M ARR in months", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/pdf-ai-breakdown", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The page says its figures are estimated from public sources. Used only for its estimate, with the inconsistency noted." }, { "title": "Damon Chen on X, 26 December 2024: I just want to build a calm business", "url": "https://x.com/damonchen/status/1872158126071595306", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full via the fxtwitter API." }, { "title": "Damon Chen on X, 26 November 2025: $109K MRR, with a Stripe profile link, for Testimonial", "url": "https://x.com/damonchen/status/1993489819167866938", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full via the fxtwitter API. About Testimonial.to, not PDF.ai; used for context only." }, { "title": "SupaBird, 21 August 2025: Damon Chen, from corporate to $1.3M SaaS empire", "url": "https://supabird.io/articles/from-corporate-dreams-to-1-3m-arr-as-an-entrepreneur", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A secondary account with no links to the founder's posts. Used only for the 2025 statements that revenue was down and the market crowded, marked as secondary." }, { "title": "PDF.ai pricing page, read in a browser on 12 October 2026", "url": "https://pdf.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "The page renders by script, so it was read in Chrome with both billing toggles. Source for the pricing table and the product list." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/jenni-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/jenni-ai.md", "slug": "jenni-ai", "name": "Jenni AI", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI writing assistant for academic papers", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-12", "launchLabel": "July 2022", "outcomeLabel": "US$3M a year run rate, January 2024", "sticker": "$3M/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 3000000, "months": 18, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders; about 5 people in late 2023, about 8 by July 2024, 23 by April 2025", "fundingLabel": "About US$600,000 to US$850,000 in small checks, no venture round", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "learning", "channel": "creators", "trend": "flat", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Funded", "Running", "B2C", "Education" ], "product": "A text editor for students and researchers in which a language model suggests the next sentence, writes from the PDFs you upload, and inserts citations in more than 1,700 styles. Free with a daily word limit; paid plans remove the limits.", "why": "After three years stuck at US$2,000 a month as a marketing-copy tool, it narrowed to one group, students writing papers, and sold to them through short videos on TikTok and Instagram made by many small creators. One viral post in July 2022 gave it the first thousand customers; a system of paid creators and referral programs kept the growth going.", "summary": [ "Jenni AI is an AI writing assistant, a text editor in which a language model proposes the next sentence while you type and writes paragraphs from sources you give it. Its users are students and researchers. They upload PDFs of papers, and the editor writes from them and adds citations, the formal references to those papers, in any of more than 1,700 academic styles. The model behind it is OpenAI's, so the company resells model output; in September 2023 its model bill was US$20,000 to US$30,000 a month against US$150,000 of revenue.", "David Park, who dropped out of the University of California, San Diego, started it with co-founder Henry Mao in 2019 as an internal tool for a content-writing agency called Altum. The company sold it as a marketing-copy tool from 2020 and was stuck at US$2,000 a month for about three years. A viral post by a technology writer in July 2022 sent hundreds of thousands of visitors, and the two founders rebuilt the product for academic writing. On 14 January 2024 Park wrote on X that revenue had gone from zero to US$3,000,000 in annual recurring revenue, the subscription revenue of one month times twelve, in 18 months. A third-party database recorded 5 employees in late 2023. By July 2024 the team was about 8 at US$6 million ARR, and the US$10 million mark in early 2025 was reached with 23 people, so this page uses the US$3 million figure as the small-team headline.", "Every revenue number on this page is a founder statement on X, in interviews, or in a research report that quotes him. No payment processor or buyer has confirmed them. The page also shows what happened to earlier companies that sold writing tools and study tools to students." ], "factsCaption": "A marketing-copy tool that found its real customers, students, and went from about US$560,000 to US$3 million in annual recurring revenue in thirteen months, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a founder statement on X or in an interview, or a reading from a third-party database that says so. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a dead marketing tool at US$2,000 a month to a US$3 million run rate in 18 months, and to US$10 million a year with a much bigger team after that. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Jenni AI prices as shown on the company's pricing page, read 12 October 2026 (grade C)", "note": "The page has a Monthly/Annual switch with the label Save 60%, and the static text shows one price per plan: Plus US$12 a month and Pro US$29 a month. The static text does not say which billing period those prices belong to, so the yearly column is empty. Starter Story, in December 2024, described the paid plan as US$30 a month with a 60% discount on the annual plan, which matches US$12 a month billed yearly. The free plan allows 200 words a day according to the same source.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "", "0", "daily word limit; 3 AI edits, 5 chat messages, unlimited citations" ], [ "Plus", "", "12", "5,000 autocompletes, 500 AI edits, 500 chat messages a month; period not stated" ], [ "Pro", "", "29", "unlimited autocomplete, edits, chat, reviews; period not stated" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, January 2024", "value": "US$3,000,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X, 14 January 2024: from zero to US$3,000,000 ARR in 18 months.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, September 2023", "value": "US$150,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Sacra report, April 2024, citing the founder. OpenAI bill of US$20,000 to US$30,000 a month, about 83% gross margin.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the September 2023 figure", "value": "US$1.8 million a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$150,000 times 12. Latka records the same US$1.8 million for October 2023 from X.", "src": [ 2, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, end of 2022", "value": "about US$560,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Sacra report. The post of January 2024 gives the same stage as US$600,000.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team size, late 2023", "value": "5 employees", "grade": "C", "note": "Latka headcount readings: 2 in November 2021, 3 in November 2022, 5 in October and November 2023, 23 in April 2025. Latka does not record the source of the 2021 to 2023 readings.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Team size, July 2024", "value": "about 8", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's hiring post on X: a small group of about 8, at US$6 million ARR.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, April 2024", "value": "US$5.1 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Sacra estimate. Four years from zero to US$1 million ARR, then 4 months to US$2 million and 6 more months to US$5 million. Monthly churn 16%.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, early 2025", "value": "more than US$10 million", "grade": "C", "note": "TMTPost, December 2025, citing figures shared by the company; reached with 23 employees. Latka records US$10 million for February 2025 from X.", "src": [ 7, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Jenni AI monthly revenue, April 2025", "value": "US$667,500", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X, 2 May 2025. The whole group, with two unnamed products and an acquired product, made US$793,300 that month.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue, September 2025", "value": "about US$730,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X, 25 September 2025: flat at about US$730,000 a month for a year, by choice, to stay profitable.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "US$600,000 to US$850,000", "grade": "C", "note": "CB Insights: US$600,000 over 4 rounds, the last a US$250,000 convertible note from AI Grant in September 2023. Sacra: US$850,000 raised. The founder names a US$100,000 check from Jason Calacanis and funding from a Korean startup competition.", "src": [ 11, 2, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the academic pivot to the January 2024 figure", "value": "18 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: July 2022 to January 2024. The founder himself counts 18 months.", "src": [ 1, 7 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2019", "what": "Park and Henry Mao, who met at UC San Diego, build a writing tool on GPT-2 for the human writers of their content agency, Altum.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 7 ] }, { "when": "2020", "what": "After GPT-3 appears in June 2020 they sell the tool as a service to agencies and marketing teams, against Jasper and Copy.ai. Revenue stalls at about US$2,000 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 7, 8 ] }, { "when": "2021", "what": "A US$100,000 investment from Jason Calacanis after a podcast appearance. Park moves to Malaysia to make the money last, then to Korea, where a startup competition brings more funding. Latka records 2 employees.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 13, 6 ] }, { "when": "July 2022", "what": "A post by technology writer Zain Kahn listing free tools goes viral. Revenue goes from US$30,000 to US$120,000 ARR in one month; about US$10,000 of subscriptions in one day. The founders rebuild the product for students and researchers. Park is diagnosed with thyroid cancer the same year.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "when": "December 2022", "what": "About US$560,000 ARR after adding automatic citations, chat with your own library, and Word and LaTeX export. Latka records 3 employees in November 2022.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 6 ] }, { "when": "Summer 2023", "what": "Short videos stop working during school breaks. The team adds referrals, a larger creator budget, SEO and paid ads, and goes from US$1 million to US$1.75 million ARR in three months.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "September 2023", "what": "US$150,000 a month. A US$250,000 convertible note from AI Grant.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 11 ] }, { "when": "14 January 2024", "what": "Park posts that revenue went from zero to US$3,000,000 ARR in 18 months and describes each growth stage. Latka records 5 employees in late 2023.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "when": "April 2024", "what": "Sacra estimates US$5.1 million ARR, up 481% in a year.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "9 July 2024", "what": "Hiring post: US$6 million ARR, a group of about 8 people working as digital nomads, looking for a tech lead.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "September 2024", "what": "US$8 million ARR. An Indie Hackers writer counts eleven people.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10, 13 ] }, { "when": "Early 2025", "what": "More than US$10 million ARR with 23 employees. In April 2025 Jenni AI alone makes US$667,500 in the month; the group buys a citation tool, Citesure, for US$150,000 cash plus stock and earnouts.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 4, 12 ] }, { "when": "25 September 2025", "what": "Park writes that Jenni has been flat at about US$730,000 a month for a year, because he chose profit over growth.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "One narrow customer instead of everyone", "text": "As a tool for marketers it had no advantage over Jasper or Copy.ai and sat at US$2,000 a month for three years. User interviews showed that the people who stayed were students writing papers. The team removed the marketing features and built what students need: an academic tone, writing from uploaded papers, and citations that point back to the source. The founder's view is that ChatGPT killed the general writing tools but helped the specialized ones, because it taught everyone that a model can write." }, { "title": "Short videos made by many small creators", "text": "After the viral post of July 2022, creators on TikTok and Instagram made videos about the tool on their own, and those went viral too. The company then paid small creators to run new accounts that post only about Jenni, with one repeated format: a student with a paper due tonight. The videos reached hundreds of millions of views. Creators were paid partly per subscriber, US$15 each plus a share while the user stays." }, { "title": "Spread the channels before a channel dies", "text": "Growth stopped during winter break 2022 because nobody watched school videos. The team added referral programs, a ten times larger creator budget, SEO and paid ads, and had its fastest quarter the next summer while the videos failed. By January 2024 organic video was no longer the main traffic source." }, { "title": "Conversion before more traffic", "text": "From US$1.74 million to US$3 million ARR the work was internal: free-to-paid conversion, churn and referral loops, through thousands of experiments. Before this, 241,700 new users added US$26,000 of monthly revenue; after it, 152,300 new users added US$48,000." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's posts, his interview with Sacra, and press that quotes him. They are grade C.", "items": [ "The first version, in 2019, ran on a fine-tuned GPT-2 and made the agency's writers 10% to 20% faster. GPT-3 in 2020 made it good enough to sell.", "The product resells OpenAI model output. In September 2023 the model cost US$20,000 to US$30,000 a month against US$150,000 of revenue, about 83% gross margin.", "The academic version has three parts: sentence autocomplete tuned for academic tone, a document library of uploaded PDFs that the model writes from, and a citation system covering more than 1,700 styles with links back to the source passage.", "Free plan with a daily limit, paid plans at US$12 and US$29 a month, sold directly to the student.", "The team works remotely as digital nomads. The stack named in the July 2024 hiring post is TypeScript, React and Rust.", "Funding was small checks: US$10,000 from a stranger on a plane, US$100,000 from Jason Calacanis, a Korean competition, and a US$250,000 note from AI Grant." ], "src": [ 2, 7, 3, 8, 11, 14 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold writing tools or study tools to students and writers. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Draft", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A simple online editor for writers with version control and collaboration.", "died": "Google Docs added the same features. The free plan never turned into enough paid users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1605-draft" }, { "name": "WriteWith", "years": "2007 to 2010", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Group writing in the browser.", "died": "Google Docs did the same thing inside an ecosystem people already used; almost no money to compete.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1237-writewith" }, { "name": "Flashnotes", "years": "2010 to 2016", "funding": "US$1.47M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A marketplace where students sell class notes and study guides to other students.", "died": "Course Hero and Chegg had better products and more money; note quality could not be controlled. Sold to a smaller rival.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/154-flashnotes" }, { "name": "StudyRoom", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A place for students to share notes and study together online.", "died": "Too few users for network effects, high churn, and students would not pay.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1691-studyroom" }, { "name": "Knewton", "years": "2008 to 2020", "funding": "US$182.3M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Adaptive learning that personalizes content for each student.", "died": "Expensive to integrate with institutions, while Khan Academy gave content away. Sold to Wiley.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/281-knewton" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Draft and WriteWith sold a better text editor and lost to Google Docs, which was free and already open in every student's browser. Flashnotes and StudyRoom sold to students, who would not pay, and depended on other students to supply the content. Knewton sold personalized learning to institutions, which buy slowly.", "Jenni AI differs on each point. The product is not a better editor; it is the writing itself, which a word processor does not do, and the citation step, which students fear getting wrong. The content comes from a model, not from other users, so there is no supply problem. And it sells directly to the student at US$12 to US$29 a month, with no institution in the loop. The remaining weakness is the same one the predecessors had: the platform owner, here OpenAI, can add citations and PDF writing to ChatGPT, and students churn at 16% a month." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, the method is general; the viral start is not.", "text": "A model-based writing tool for one group of users with a specific fear, sold through many small creators on short video, needs no capital and no sales team. The 2022 opening, when a single post could bring hundreds of thousands of users to an unknown tool, is gone, but the founder's own account says the later growth came from systems, not from that post.", "steps": [ "Interview the users who stay, not the ones who leave, and rebuild the product for them alone.", "Pay small creators per paying subscriber to run accounts about your product, with one repeatable video format.", "The month a channel slows, add two more: referrals, SEO, paid ads.", "Once traffic is steady, spend a quarter only on free-to-paid conversion and churn." ], "open": "Any writing task with a formal rule set that people are afraid to get wrong: grant applications, legal filings, clinical notes, code documentation, and the academic markets outside English." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Self-reported", "text": "Every revenue figure comes from the founder, from a database that cites his posts, or from a research firm that interviewed him. No payment processor or buyer has confirmed any of them." }, { "title": "The small-team headline is the early one", "text": "The US$3 million figure is the latest number that the sources put with about 5 people. The US$10 million a year that press reports was reached with 23 employees, and the founder said about 8 at US$6 million. Latka does not record where its 2021 to 2023 headcounts came from." }, { "title": "Growth stopped for a year", "text": "The founder wrote in September 2025 that revenue had been flat at about US$730,000 a month for a year, by his choice, and that he was tempted to trade profit for growth." }, { "title": "Churn and seasons", "text": "Monthly churn of 16% in 2024, and revenue drops every summer and winter break. Each month the company must replace a sixth of its customers." }, { "title": "The model provider can add the feature", "text": "The product resells OpenAI output with its own interface for citations and PDFs. ChatGPT already reads PDFs; a native citation feature would remove the main difference." }, { "title": "Academic integrity rules", "text": "Universities may ban AI-written papers or detect them. The company's answer is traceable citations, but the market can change with one policy." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://jenni.ai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "David Park on X, 14 January 2024: How to go from 0 to $3,000,000 ARR in 18 months (step by step)", "url": "https://x.com/Davidjpark96/status/1746573265425064293", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Founder's own post. Source for the headline figure, the growth stages, the viral post and the conversion numbers." }, { "title": "Sacra, 26 April 2024: Jenni AI: the $5M/year Chegg of generative AI, and the interview with David Park published the same day", "url": "https://sacra.com/research/jenni-ai-the-chegg-of-generative-ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the free part in full; the rest needs a membership. Research firm citing the founder. Source for the US$150,000 monthly figure, the model bill, the US$560,000 and US$5.1 million ARR figures, churn and the US$850,000 raised." }, { "title": "David Park on X, 9 July 2024: We are hiring a Tech Lead at Jenni AI", "url": "https://x.com/Davidjpark96/status/1810718648425927092", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Source for the US$6 million ARR, the team of about 8 and the stack." }, { "title": "David Park on X, 2 May 2025: We hit $793.3K MRR in April", "url": "https://x.com/Davidjpark96/status/1918413056960545201", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Source for the April 2025 monthly figures by product." }, { "title": "David Park on X, 25 September 2025: Jenni has plateaued at ~$730k MRR for a year now", "url": "https://x.com/Davidjpark96/status/1971258958561321222", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Source for the flat year and the profit-first choice." }, { "title": "Latka company page: Jenni AI revenue and headcount readings", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/jenni.ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Third-party database. Source for the headcount readings by year and the revenue readings it attributes to X." }, { "title": "TMTPost, 19 December 2025: Small AI, Big Returns: How a Nine-Person Team Turned an Overlooked Writing Tool Into a $10 Million Business", "url": "https://en.tmtpost.com/post/7814928", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Press article from an interview with the founder. Source for the co-founder, the three pivots, the July 2022 post, the nine-person team until late 2024, the 23 employees and the US$10 million figure." }, { "title": "David Park on X, 8 June 2024: We had 10+ years of failure before any semblance of success", "url": "https://x.com/Davidjpark96/status/1799250774930952492", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Source for the US$100,000 investment, the US$2,000 a month stage, Malaysia and Korea." }, { "title": "Starter Story, 12 December 2024: How a 27-Year-Old Grew Jenni AI To $5M ARR in 2 Years", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/jenni-ai-breakdown", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the free part in full. A summary built from public sources. Source for the 9 employees estimate, the creator pay per subscriber and the pricing description." }, { "title": "ARR Club, 6 September 2024: Jenni AI ARR at $8M, hit 4M users", "url": "https://www.arr.club/jenni/jenni-ai-arr-at-8m-hit-4m-users", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A short note citing the founder. Source for the US$8 million ARR in September 2024." }, { "title": "CB Insights: Jenni funding and financials", "url": "https://www.cbinsights.com/company/altum-1/financials", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the free part. Source for the US$600,000 over 4 rounds and the AI Grant convertible note." }, { "title": "David Park on X, 3 August 2025: Here's the exact details of citesure acquisition", "url": "https://x.com/Davidjpark96/status/1952039463485616622", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Source for the Citesure purchase terms." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 25 September 2024: He beat cancer and built an $8M AI empire: David Park's story, by David Kim", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/he-beat-cancer-and-built-an-8m-ai-empire-david-parks-story-1a03c7a33a", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A community summary of a podcast. Source for the team of eleven, the US$10,000 plane investment and the withdrawn Korean offer." }, { "title": "Jenni AI pricing page, read 12 October 2026", "url": "https://jenni.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the static text. The Monthly/Annual switch is script-driven, so the billing period of the shown prices could not be confirmed." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/tweet-hunter/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/tweet-hunter.md", "slug": "tweet-hunter", "name": "Tweet Hunter", "country": "France", "sector": "Communication Services", "productType": "AI-assisted writing and scheduling tool for X (Twitter)", "aiType": "AI-leveraged", "team": "small", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-12", "launchLabel": "May 2021", "outcomeLabel": "Sold for US$2M cash plus earn-out, August 2022", "sticker": "Sold for $2M plus earn-out", "outcomeUsd": 2000000, "months": 15, "teamLabel": "2 founders, 1 partner on profit share, 1 contract developer", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "partners", "trend": "sold", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-leveraged", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2B", "Social media" ], "product": "A tool for people who want to grow an audience on X (then Twitter). It started as a search box over a library of viral tweets, then added a scheduler, automatic direct messages, a contact list, and a language model that proposes tweets and threads in the user's own style. A sister product, Taplio, does the same for LinkedIn.", "why": "Two founders shipped eleven products in about four months and kept the one that made money. They sold it on the platform it served, gave an audience owner a share of profits instead of a sponsorship fee, and used a language model to make writing faster, not to replace it. Fifteen months after launch, with about US$1 million a year in revenue, they sold to a larger French software company run by a former schoolmate.", "summary": [ "Tweet Hunter is a tool for growing an audience on X, the social network that was called Twitter until 2023. It began in May 2021 as a searchable library of viral tweets, posts that were shared far more than normal, sorted by topic, so that a user could study what worked before writing. Within months it became a full suite: a scheduler, automatic direct messages, a CRM (customer relationship management, a list of accounts to follow up with) and an AI writer. The AI writer used a large language model, a program trained on large amounts of text that writes new text from a prompt. It started on OpenAI's GPT-3, then moved to a model from AI21 Labs that the founders could fine-tune on tweet formats.", "Thibault (Tibo) Louis-Lucas and Thomas (Tom) Jacquesson, two French founders whose earlier startup went bankrupt, built it under a studio called Pony Express. They had promised themselves to ship one new product every week until one made money. Ten products failed; the eleventh was Tweet Hunter, priced at US$9 a month. A partnership with JK Molina, a writer with a large X audience, took monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the subscription revenue of one month) from about US$4,000 to US$20,000 in two weeks in late 2021. By May 2022 the product passed US$1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR, monthly recurring revenue times twelve). In August 2022, fifteen months after launch, lempire, the French maker of the sales tool lemlist, bought Tweet Hunter and its LinkedIn sister Taplio for US$2 million in cash plus an earn-out, extra payments that depend on the revenue the products reach in the following years.", "The cash price and the revenue figures on this page are founder statements, grade C. The buyer confirmed in his own blog that it was a multi-million dollar deal with revenue-based earn-outs, grade B, but did not publish the price. The founders later said the total reached about US$8 million. The page also shows five earlier companies that built businesses on top of a social network's data and lost when the network changed the rules, the same risk the founders named as a reason to sell." ], "factsCaption": "A US$2 million cash sale fifteen months after launch, plus earn-outs the founders expected to bring the total to US$10 million to US$15 million, all self-reported except the buyer's confirmation that the deal was multi-million", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade B value comes from the buyer's own blog post. A grade C value is a founder or partner statement in an interview, a thread on X, or a founder post on Indie Hackers, or a third-party report that repeats them. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A.", "timelineLead": "From a weekly product challenge to a sale to a former schoolmate's company, in 15 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Tweet Hunter prices in October 2026, read from the company's pricing page (grade C). The page is now run by lempire.", "note": "Prices are per month in US dollars. The page shows a monthly tab and a yearly tab; the yearly values are the ones its script fills in when the second tab is clicked. All plans start with a 7-day free trial and the page shows a permanent countdown offering 50% off the Grow plan. The AI writer (daily AI-written tweets, rewriting, thread ideas) is in the Grow plan and above. Enterprise adds a custom-trained model and unlimited AI use.", "rows": [ [ "Discover", "23", "29", "1 X account, 3,000 auto-DMs a month, no AI writer" ], [ "Grow", "36", "49", "5 X accounts, 7,500 auto-DMs a month, AI writer and CRM" ], [ "Enterprise", "167", "200", "unlimited X accounts, 15,000 auto-DMs a month, custom-trained AI" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Sale price, cash", "value": "US$2,000,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Partner JK Molina's thread on X, 16 January 2023: Tweet Hunter US$1,400,000 and Taplio US$600,000. Tibo's own thread the same day gives the cash as 7 figures and shows the deal table without amounts.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Deal confirmed by the buyer", "value": "multi-million dollar deal with revenue-based earn-outs", "grade": "B", "note": "Guillaume Moubeche, founder of lempire, in his blog post of 16 January 2023. He names no price. He writes that the earn-out depends on revenue goals, with an operating-margin limit, stock options with short vesting, and a time-based part.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Earn-out structure", "value": "revenue milestones from EUR 2 million to EUR 10 million, each paying a 6- or 7-figure amount, plus 6-figure payments for year 1 and year 2", "grade": "C", "note": "Table posted by Tibo on X with the exact amounts hidden. Total earn-out shown as 8 figures.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Expected total including earn-out", "value": "US$10 million to US$15 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Tibo in interviews, 2023 and May 2024, on condition that the Twitter and LinkedIn integrations keep working.", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Total received, as stated in 2024", "value": "about US$8 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Tibo to Indie Hackers, September 2024: two companies sold as a package deal for US$8 million. Lower than the earlier expectation; he says he regrets selling.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Date of the sale", "value": "August 2022", "grade": "C", "note": "JK Molina's thread: birth May 2021, acquisition August 2022, 15 months. The public announcement came on 16 January 2023. The exact month of the buyer's offer is not verified.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Annual revenue at the sale", "value": "about US$1 million a year, with US$100,000 of monthly recurring revenue for both products", "grade": "C", "note": "They Got Acquired, March 2023, from an interview with Tibo. Tweet Hunter had about 5,000 users and Taplio about 3,000.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Price to revenue multiple at the sale", "value": "about 2 times annual revenue in cash", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2,000,000 divided by 1,000,000. Tibo wrote that the full deal, with earn-outs, rewards a multiple of more than 10 times ARR.", "src": [ 1, 2, 4 ] }, { "fact": "ARR of both products, May 2023", "value": "US$3.5 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Tibo to Starter Story, nine months after the sale, with 10% to 20% growth per month and a gross margin above 50%.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, May 2022", "value": "US$41,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Tom Jacquesson to Failory. Tweet Hunter alone, before Taplio grew.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, November 2021", "value": "US$21,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Tom Jacquesson, interviewed six months after launch.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "ARR, October 2021", "value": "US$150,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Tibo's post on Indie Hackers, four months after the first version. He first titled the post with a US$1 million valuation, then changed it to the revenue figure after readers objected.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "First price", "value": "US$9 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Both founders, in several interviews. Later raised.", "src": [ 5, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Effect of the partnership with JK Molina", "value": "from US$4,000 to US$20,000 MRR in about two weeks", "grade": "C", "note": "Tibo to Starter Story; Tom says they tripled revenue in two weeks. Molina took a profit share by contract instead of equity.", "src": [ 5, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Team at the sale", "value": "2 founders, 1 partner, 1 contract developer", "grade": "C", "note": "Tom's interview of November 2021. No later statement gives a larger team before the sale.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Tom: profitable from day one, nothing invested except the fees to create the company.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Language models used", "value": "GPT-3, then AI21 Labs models", "grade": "C", "note": "AI21 case study with quotes from Tibo, February 2023. In October 2021 Tibo said the product did not use GPT-3 for generation; Starter Story says GPT-3 was used to analyse and sort tweets.", "src": [ 10, 5, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Twitter API cost after the sale", "value": "from US$0 to US$42,000 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Tibo, May 2024. Access was also cut off for a few days at one point.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the sale", "value": "15 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: May 2021 to August 2022.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2015 to 2019", "what": "Louis-Lucas and Jacquesson build Pistache, a chores app for children. Louis-Lucas then raises money for Dreamz, a game that teaches coding; it goes bankrupt.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11, 5 ] }, { "when": "Early 2021", "what": "The two start Pony Express, a product studio, with the rule of shipping one product a week until one makes money. Ten products fail; the best reaches US$400 MRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 11 ] }, { "when": "May 2021", "what": "Tweet Hunter: a search box over a library of viral tweets. First version built in two weeks, launched on X and Reddit at US$9 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 7, 9 ] }, { "when": "October 2021", "what": "US$150,000 ARR. The product now has an AI inspiration feature and a scheduler.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "Late 2021", "what": "JK Molina, a ghostwriter with about 40,000 followers, joins as a partner on profit share. His launch takes MRR from about US$4,000 to US$20,000 in two weeks. November: US$21,000 MRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 8 ] }, { "when": "January 2022", "what": "The founders decide to sell. A broker brings offers from large companies that ask them to stay two years; they refuse.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 11 ] }, { "when": "2022", "what": "Taplio, the LinkedIn version, starts after Guillaume Moubeche, a lemlist founder and paying customer of Tweet Hunter, asks why the tool is only for Twitter. A beta reaches him one week later.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "May 2022", "what": "US$41,000 MRR. The product passes US$1 million ARR, one year after launch.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 12 ] }, { "when": "Mid-2022", "what": "Moubeche, a middle-school classmate of Louis-Lucas, makes an offer about a week after they discuss the broker's offers over lunch in Paris. A letter of intent is agreed in about two weeks on WhatsApp.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "when": "August 2022", "what": "lempire buys Tweet Hunter for US$1,400,000 and Taplio for US$600,000, with earn-outs. The founders agree to stay two years.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 11 ] }, { "when": "16 January 2023", "what": "Both founders, the partner and the buyer announce the sale publicly on X and on the lempire blog.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 1, 2, 3 ] }, { "when": "May 2023", "what": "Both products reach US$3.5 million ARR under lempire. Target of US$10 million ARR by summer 2024.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "2023", "what": "Twitter raises its API price for the product from nothing to US$42,000 a month and cuts access for a few days.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "September 2024", "what": "Louis-Lucas says the two products were sold for US$8 million in total and that he would not sell again. He now builds revid.ai, feather.so and superx.so.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Eleven products in four months", "text": "The founders treated each product as a test: ship in a week, watch for revenue, move on. Eight got users, four made money, one took off. The rule removed the usual months spent on an idea nobody pays for." }, { "title": "Sell on the platform the product serves", "text": "Every sale of the earlier products had come from Louis-Lucas's own X account, so a tool for growing on X had its customers and its sales channel in the same place. The founders also shipped free mini-tools and launched them on Product Hunt as rehearsals; Louis-Lucas became Product Hunt's Maker of the Year 2022." }, { "title": "A creator as a partner, not a sponsor", "text": "Instead of paying JK Molina for a promotion, they gave him a profit share by contract. He launched to his audience and MRR went from about US$4,000 to US$20,000 in two weeks. They repeated the model with Alex Berman for Taplio." }, { "title": "AI as an accelerator, not the product", "text": "The core idea was that reading great content helps you write better content. The language model shortened the step from inspiration to draft: daily proposed tweets, rewrites, thread hooks. Louis-Lucas says the integration made the tool ten times faster. The customer still writes and posts under their own name." }, { "title": "Sell early because the platform owns the risk", "text": "The founders said the business depended on Twitter and LinkedIn policies they did not control, and that their skills were in starting, not scaling. They took a smaller cash payment with a large earn-out from a buyer with the same culture. After the sale, Twitter's API price rose to US$42,000 a month." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founders' interviews, Tibo's threads on X and the AI21 case study. They are grade C.", "items": [ "React with the Chakra UI component library, according to Jacquesson. The first version was built by Louis-Lucas in about two weeks.", "A library of viral tweets built from the Twitter API, sorted by topic. Before that the founders had tried freelancers and spreadsheets to collect examples.", "Tweet generation first used GPT-3, then moved to AI21 Labs models because they could fine-tune them on tweet formats and keep a style per user.", "Scheduling, automatic direct messages, auto-plug and auto-retweet through the Twitter API. Early on they hit Twitter's daily posting quota and had to ask Twitter for a higher limit.", "Growth came from the founders' X accounts, free side tools launched on Product Hunt, Reddit, an email list from earlier products, a purchased competitor used as a traffic source, and the creator partnership.", "Priced at US$9 a month at launch, raised as features arrived. Profitable from the first month with no outside money." ], "src": [ 8, 10, 7, 5, 9 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database built a product on data from a social network that they did not own. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Klout", "years": "2008 to 2017", "funding": "US$40M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A score from 1 to 100 that measured your influence on social networks.", "died": "Facebook and Twitter built their own analytics, and competitors offered better ones. The product depended on the networks' APIs and their policy changes.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/280-klout" }, { "name": "Nuzzel", "years": "2012 to 2019", "funding": "US$5.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "The news your friends share, taken from your Twitter and Facebook feeds.", "died": "It relied on the networks' APIs, and the networks began to offer the same feature for free.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/378-nuzzel" }, { "name": "ThinkUp", "years": "2010 to 2017", "funding": "US$1M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Personal analytics that explain your social media activity beyond likes and retweets.", "died": "A desktop-era product with little marketing, overtaken by the networks' own mobile analytics.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/624-thinkup" }, { "name": "PostRocket", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$610K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Data-driven timing to make Facebook page posts reach more people.", "died": "Facebook changed its API and the company had no plan for a pivot.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/457-postrocket" }, { "name": "Pixelpipe", "years": "2008 to 2013", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Post your photos and videos to every social network at once.", "died": "The networks closed their APIs and added their own cross-posting.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/435-pixelpipe" } ], "whatChanged": [ "All five sat on top of a social network's data and died when the network changed its API or copied the feature. Tweet Hunter carried exactly that risk, and the founders named it as their first reason to sell. Within a year of the sale, Twitter's API went from free to US$42,000 a month for the product and was cut off for days.", "Three things differ. First, the founders were paid before the risk arrived: they sold at fifteen months, with the cash upfront, and let a larger company with other revenue carry the earn-out years. Second, the product was not analytics, which the networks give away, but writing help and scheduling that X itself does not sell; a language model made the writing part possible for two people. Third, the sales channel was the founders' own accounts on the same network, so growth cost nothing in advertising and the audience moved with them to the next products." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The deal, partly.", "text": "Shipping one product a week until one pays, selling it on the platform it serves, and paying a creator with a profit share are all repeatable with no money. The sale itself depended on a buyer who knew the founders, used the product, and had reasons of his own to buy; the earn-out that was expected to reach US$10 million to US$15 million closed at about US$8 million in the founders' later account.", "steps": [ "Set a weekly shipping rule and judge each product by paid signups, not by interest.", "Build for the audience that already buys from you, on the network where they already see you.", "Offer a creator a share of profits by contract in exchange for a launch to their audience.", "Use a language model to shorten one step the customer already does by hand, and keep the customer's name on the output.", "If the product depends on another company's API, price that risk into when you sell and how much you take in cash." ], "open": "Any network or marketplace whose first-party creator tools are weak: LinkedIn, YouTube, newsletters, app stores. The same creator-partnership and weekly-shipping method applies to them." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Platform risk", "text": "The whole product runs on X's API. After the sale, the price went from zero to US$42,000 a month and access was cut for days. A policy change can end the product; the founders sold partly for this reason." }, { "title": "The headline price is not the cash price", "text": "The 8-figure number in the founders' announcement was the maximum with earn-outs. The cash was US$2 million. The founders later put the total at about US$8 million, below the US$10 million to US$15 million they expected." }, { "title": "Founder statements only", "text": "No payment processor or public filing confirms the revenue. The buyer confirmed a multi-million dollar deal but not the amount." }, { "title": "Growth engine was the founders' audiences", "text": "Sales came from the founders' and partner's X accounts. The buyer kept the founders for two years; the products' growth after that period is not public." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://tweethunter.io" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "JK Molina on X, 16 January 2023: We sold Tweet Hunter (thread, read through the Rattibha mirror)", "url": "https://x.com/OneJKMolina/status/1614969492915863552", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The first tweet was read through api.fxtwitter.com and the full thread through en.rattibha.com. Source for the dates, the buyer and the split of the US$2 million price." }, { "title": "Tibo Louis-Lucas on X, 16 January 2023: I've just sold my startup for 8 figures (thread with the deal table)", "url": "https://x.com/tibo_maker/status/1614966983698653184", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The first tweets through api.fxtwitter.com, the full thread through en.rattibha.com, and the deal-structure image downloaded from the tweet. Source for the weekly-product challenge, the partnership effect, the broker offers, the WhatsApp negotiation and the earn-out table." }, { "title": "Guillaume Moubeche, lempire blog, 16 January 2023: Acquiring a multi-million dollar SaaS business", "url": "https://blog.lempire.com/how-i-turn-my-middle-school-mate-into-a-multi-millionaire/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full from a Wayback Machine copy; the live site did not answer. Buyer's statement. Source for the multi-million confirmation, the earn-out design, the origin of Taplio and the Paris lunch." }, { "title": "They Got Acquired, 22 March 2023: How Pony Express' Tweet Hunter and Taplio sold to lempire", "url": "https://theygotacquired.com/saas/pony-express-acquired-by-lempire/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Journalist's interview with Louis-Lucas. Source for the US$1 million annual revenue, US$100,000 MRR, the user counts, the January 2022 search for a buyer and the US$10 million to US$15 million expectation." }, { "title": "Starter Story, 18 May 2023: How we built a $3.5M ARR LinkedIn tool that will be acquired for $10M-$15M", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/pony-express-studio", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview with Louis-Lucas. Source for the US$3.5 million ARR, the growth rate, the US$9 price, the US$4,000 to US$20,000 jump, the GPT-3 use and the founders' background." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 11 September 2024: Here's how Tibo sold two products for $8M and why he'll never do it again", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/heres-how-tibo-sold-two-products-for-8m-and-why-he-ll-never-do-it-again-iwykhfENoZqJgRLU33zv", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the open part; the rest is behind a free login. Source for the US$8 million total and the founder's later products." }, { "title": "Failory, 28 May 2022: Bootstrapping a Twitter-related SaaS to $41K/mo", "url": "https://www.failory.com/interview/tweet-hunter", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Interview with Jacquesson. Source for the US$41,000 MRR, the launch channels, the US$5,000 MRR at three months and the Twitter quota problem." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 4 March 2022: Interview with co-founder of Tweet Hunter ($20k MRR)", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/interview-with-co-founder-of-tweet-hunter-20k-mrr-d447ff150f", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Interview with Jacquesson recorded in November 2021. Source for the US$21,000 MRR, the team, the profit-share contract, the purchased competitor, no funding and the React stack." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 5 October 2021: I built Tweet Hunter's MVP in 2 weeks. 4 months later it grew to $150k ARR. AMA", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/i-built-tweet-hunters-mvp-in-2-weeks-4-months-later-it-grew-to-150k-arr-ama-a6ae1ee850", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the post and the first comments. Louis-Lucas's own post. Source for the US$150,000 ARR, the two-week build and the retitled valuation claim." }, { "title": "AI21 Labs, 20 February 2023: How Tweet Hunter scaled to an 8-figure exit with AI21's LLM", "url": "https://www.ai21.com/blog/tweet-hunter-case-study", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A supplier's case study with quotes from Louis-Lucas. Source for the move from GPT-3 to AI21 models, the fine-tuning reason and the follower growth from 2,000 to 60,000." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 23 May 2024: How Tibo Louis-Lucas went from bankruptcy to an eight-figure exit", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-tibo-louis-lucas-went-from-bankruptcy-to-an-eight-figure-exit-607b389af1", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Profile with quotes from Louis-Lucas. Source for the earlier startups, the broker, the earn-out expectation, the two-year stay and the US$42,000 a month API price." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 31 May 2022: TweetHunter hits $1m ARR", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/tweethunter-hits-1m-arr-8fc16ece7e", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A newsletter item repeating the founders' announcement that the product reached US$1 million ARR one year after launch." }, { "title": "Tweet Hunter pricing page, read 12 October 2026", "url": "https://tweethunter.io/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the page script that sets the monthly and yearly prices." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/audiopen/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/audiopen.md", "slug": "audiopen", "name": "AudioPen", "country": "India", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Voice notes to clean text", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-12", "launchLabel": "26 March 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$15K to US$20K a month, February 2026", "sticker": "$15K to $20K a month", "outcomeUsd": 210000, "months": 35, "teamLabel": "1 founder, no employees, part time next to a family retail business", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "voice-audio", "channel": "audience", "trend": "flat", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Productivity software" ], "product": "You press a button, talk in any language, and AudioPen returns a short, well-structured text in the style and language you chose, not a word-for-word transcript. It runs on the web, as a phone app, on desktop and as a browser extension. The free plan has short recordings; the paid plan, Prime, is sold for 3 months, 1 year or 2 years, never by the month.", "why": "The founder had 10,000 followers on X who watched him build it, so it had 100 paying users two days after a 12-hour hackathon and sold itself by word of mouth after that. A no-code stack kept costs near zero, a lifetime deal whose price rose from US$19 to US$150 funded the first year, and yearly-only pricing cut support work for one person.", "summary": [ "AudioPen is a voice-to-text tool: it records what you say and turns it into written text. Most such tools return a transcript, the exact words you spoke. AudioPen instead sends the transcript to a large language model, a program that rewrites and summarises text, and returns a clean, short, well-ordered note in the style and language you picked. The AI parts are rented: OpenAI's Whisper model for the speech and GPT models for the rewriting.", "Louis Pereira, a 31-year-old from Goa, India, who works in his family's retail business by day and has no engineering training, built the first version in under 12 hours on 26 March 2023 during a hackathon he organises himself, using the no-code tool Bubble, a visual builder that makes web apps without written code. He had paying customers that same day. By 22 April 2023 it had 400 paying users, by 16 May 2023 more than 500, and on 4 May 2023 it was first product of the day on Product Hunt. Two months after launch it had made US$73,000 from more than 1,000 paying users. In May 2024 he said it made about US$15,000 a month; in October 2024, US$12,000 to US$15,000 a month; in February 2026, US$15,000 to US$20,000 a month, from yearly and two-year subscriptions only.", "Every number on this page is a founder statement in interviews, a podcast or his own posts, grade C. No payment processor or buyer has confirmed them. The founder says that he keeps the exact revenue to himself, so the figures are ranges. The page also shows what happened to earlier companies that sold note-taking and voice products against larger platforms." ], "factsCaption": "A 12-hour build that made US$73,000 in two months and then settled at about US$15,000 to US$20,000 a month for three years, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a founder statement from an interview, a podcast, his own post on X, or a page of his company. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From four tiny experiments with new AI APIs to a product with 200,000 registered users, in 35 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "AudioPen Prime prices on the company's pricing page, read 12 October 2026 (grade C)", "note": "There is no monthly plan. Prime is sold as a 3-month, 1-year or 2-year pass; the second column is the price divided by the months in the pass, as the page itself shows it. The free plan has shorter recordings and fewer voice typing sessions. The phone apps sell Prime through the App Store and Google Play at their own prices. Up to 100 one-year licenses can be bought in one order at a 20% discount. The lifetime deal sold in 2023 is no longer on the page.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "shorter recordings, fewer voice typing sessions" ], [ "Prime, 3 months", "11", "", "33 for 3 months" ], [ "Prime, 1 year", "8.25", "", "99 a year; shown as 25% off" ], [ "Prime, 2 years", "6.63", "", "159 for 2 years; shown as 40% off" ], [ "Prime, team or class", "6.60", "", "20% off one-year licenses, 100 per order" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue per month, February 2026", "value": "US$15,000 to US$20,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's account in an Indie Hackers article of 17 February 2026. Only yearly and two-year subscriptions are sold.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the February 2026 range", "value": "about US$180,000 to US$240,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the range times 12. The headline figure on this page is the midpoint, US$210,000.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month, October 2024", "value": "US$12,000 to US$15,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Indie Hackers profile of 29 October 2024. Nineteen months after launch.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month, May 2024", "value": "about US$15,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's interview with Starter Story, 16 May 2024.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the first two months", "value": "US$73,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's interview, late May 2023. More than 1,000 paying users at several price points, and more than 11,000 registered users.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Paying users, August 2023", "value": "about 3,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Goa newspaper interview, 11 August 2023, which also gives about 35,000 registered users.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Registered users, 2026", "value": "more than 200,000", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's home page says \"Used by 200,000+ people\". Registered includes free users.", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "fact": "Paying share of registered users, May 2023", "value": "about 9%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 1,000 of 11,000. August 2023: 3,000 of 35,000, about 8.6%.", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Lifetime deal price, 2023", "value": "US$19 at launch, US$150 by August 2023", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on the Bootstrapped Founder podcast, 16 August 2023. The price rose with each new feature. Lifetime was defined as the lifetime of the product.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Paid marketing", "value": "US$7,000 spent on TikTok influencers, no measurable traffic", "grade": "C", "note": "Indie Hackers profile, October 2024. Growth is otherwise word of mouth and the founder's posts on X.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 person, part time", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder runs his family's offline business by day and builds at night. No employees are mentioned in any source.", "src": [ 5, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions investors. Build cost was about US$30 a month for Bubble.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the February 2026 figure", "value": "35 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 26 March 2023 to February 2026.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2018", "what": "Pereira, who studied in Delhi, worked in management consulting and ran a company in Gurgaon for two years, moves back to Goa to join the family business. From 2020 he writes and builds small products online at night.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "March 2023", "what": "He builds four tiny tools in a week to learn the new AI APIs, hosted on his personal website to save the cost of domains. One of them is a small voice-note tool.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 4 ] }, { "when": "26 March 2023", "what": "He builds the full version in under 12 hours at Half Day Build, a free hackathon he organises every two months, with a payment link live from the first minute. A few beta testers from X buy before launch; the first paying customers arrive the same day. The lifetime deal is US$19.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 7 ] }, { "when": "Late March 2023", "what": "100 paying customers within two days of launch, from his 10,000 followers on X.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "21 April 2023", "what": "400 paying users, announced on X the next day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "4 May 2023", "what": "Product Hunt launch, first product of the day. The founder delayed the launch until he already had more than 500 paying customers. The post offered 20% off Prime for the first 200 buyers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 6 ] }, { "when": "16 May 2023", "what": "More than 500 paying subscribers in one month. Prices: annual pass US$60, lifetime US$120. Stack: Bubble, Whisper, GPT-4, Lemon Squeezy, Progressier, Loops, Zapier.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "Late May 2023", "what": "US$73,000 in revenue in two months, more than 1,000 paying users, 11,000 registered users, 4,000 visits a day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 10 ] }, { "when": "11 August 2023", "what": "About 35,000 registered and 3,000 paying users. A Goa newspaper reports that TechCrunch has mentioned the app.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "16 August 2023", "what": "On the Bootstrapped Founder podcast: 30,000 registered users, the lifetime deal now US$150, and he answers 20 to 25 support emails a day himself.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "16 May 2024", "what": "About US$15,000 a month. He says the AI API bills are his largest cost.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "29 October 2024", "what": "US$12,000 to US$15,000 a month on a US$99 annual subscription. A US$7,000 TikTok influencer test brought no noticeable traffic.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "17 February 2026", "what": "US$15,000 to US$20,000 a month from yearly and two-year plans only. He reports DDoS attacks on the service and says his goal for the next year is 10 times the current revenue.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "An audience before the product", "text": "He had posted every small experiment on X for three years. When the hackathon version went live, people were already watching, so there were 100 paying customers in two days and 500 in a month before any launch site saw it. After that, in his words, people who are paying customers keep talking about it, and he has never had to market the product actively." }, { "title": "A rewrite, not a transcript", "text": "Speech-to-text was old. The new part in March 2023 was that a language model could turn five minutes of rambling into a tidy paragraph in the user's chosen style and language. Users show the output to other people, which is how word of mouth works for a tool whose result is a piece of text." }, { "title": "A lifetime deal that rose with every feature", "text": "There was no time to build subscriptions in 12 hours, so he sold lifetime access for US$19. Each new feature raised the price, to US$150 by August 2023, and each rise was a reason to buy now. The deal funded the first year while he worked out what usage cost him. The annual pass came next, and in 2026 only yearly and two-year passes are sold." }, { "title": "Yearly-only pricing as a workload choice", "text": "With no monthly plan there are fewer casual users, so fewer support emails for one person, and the revenue is predictable. He says this is a deliberate choice for a business he runs alone at night." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's interviews and the Product Hunt comments. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Designed in Figma, built in Bubble, a no-code web app builder costing about US$30 a month. The founder is not a developer; the MVP took about 12 hours.", "OpenAI's Whisper API for speech recognition and GPT models for rewriting. The API bills are the largest cost and scale with use, which is why the free plan limits recording length.", "Payments through Lemon Squeezy, a progressive web app through Progressier, email through Loops, and Zapier for connections. Later a backend on Xano and phone apps built in Draftbit, as readers of the 2026 Indie Hackers article summarise its paid part.", "Support is a message box in the account tab that sends an email with the user's address; the founder answered 20 to 25 a day in 2023 and refused to add a chatbot or a help page, saying the app should be clear enough not to need one.", "By 2026 the product runs on web, iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows and a Chrome extension under one account." ], "src": [ 2, 6, 7, 1, 12 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold note-taking or voice products against platforms with far more money, or could not turn free users into paying ones. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Springpad", "years": "2008 to 2014", "funding": "US$7.5M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Collect, organise and find your notes, articles and recipes in one tidy place.", "died": "A liked free product with no premium feature that users would pay for. Evernote moved faster into teams and companies.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1893-springpad" }, { "name": "Transpose", "years": "2012 to 2018", "funding": "US$0", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "An Evernote alternative with templates and collaboration for businesses.", "died": "Charged US$14.99 against Evernote with no money and no reason for anyone to switch. Few free users converted.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1849-transpose" }, { "name": "Voicery", "years": "2018 to 2021", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Text-to-speech voices that sound human.", "died": "Google, Amazon and Microsoft sold better voices cheaper, bundled with other services. US$2M could not keep up with their models.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1004-voicery" }, { "name": "Storyline", "years": "2018 to 2021", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Build Alexa voice apps without code.", "died": "Few people wanted voice apps, and the platforms were owned by Amazon and Google.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1011-storyline" }, { "name": "Petalite", "years": "2014 to 2025", "funding": "US$12M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A privacy-first voice assistant that runs on the device.", "died": "Amazon and Google sold hardware below cost and had billions of voice queries to train on. The on-device model could not improve as fast.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2471-petalite" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Voicery, Storyline and Petalite built their own voice technology and lost to companies whose models improved faster. AudioPen builds none: it rents Whisper and GPT by the minute, so when the models improve, the product improves for free. The cost moves to the user's bill, which is why the free plan is limited and there is no monthly plan.", "Springpad and Transpose had the opposite problem: a note product people liked but would not pay for. AudioPen charged from the first minute, with a lifetime deal that validated demand before any subscription existed, and it never built a free product first. About 9% of registered users paid in 2023, a high share for a consumer tool. The remaining risk is the same as the predecessors': Apple, Google and OpenAI can add a rewrite button to their own voice memo apps." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The timing, no. The method, yes.", "text": "Being the first clean voice-to-text tool on the new APIs in March 2023 was a short opening, and the phone makers now ship transcription and summaries of their own. The method is still available: build the smallest product on rented models, put a payment link on it the first day, sell to an audience you already have, and raise the price with each feature.", "steps": [ "Post what you build for a long time before you need an audience; the hackathon version sold because people were already watching.", "Put a payment link on the first version, even a lifetime deal, to see whether anyone pays before building subscriptions.", "Raise the price with each feature and say so in public; early buyers get a bargain and later buyers get a reason to hurry.", "Limit the free plan by the dimension that costs you money, here minutes of audio, and sell yearly passes so support stays small." ], "open": "Any workflow where a rented model turns a messy input into a finished output that people share: meeting notes, field reports, medical dictation in a specific speciality, or one language community's voice messages." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Self-reported ranges, no outside check", "text": "The founder gives ranges, says he keeps the exact revenue private, and no payment processor or journalist has checked the figures. The Product Hunt page today shows 877 points, while the 2023 interview said more than 1,000 upvotes." }, { "title": "Flat for three years", "text": "About US$15,000 a month in May 2024, US$12,000 to US$15,000 in October 2024, US$15,000 to US$20,000 in February 2026. The product grew in users but not much in revenue; the founder's stated goal of 10 times in a year is a goal, not a result." }, { "title": "The platforms can add the feature", "text": "Apple, Google and Samsung ship on-device transcription and summaries in their voice memo and notes apps. Every voice predecessor on this page lost to a platform owner." }, { "title": "Usage costs rise with the models", "text": "The AI API bills are the largest cost and lifetime buyers from 2023 still use the product. The founder's answer was to raise prices and remove the lifetime deal; the margin is not published." }, { "title": "One person, part time, under attack", "text": "The founder also runs a family business, answers support himself, and reported DDoS attacks in 2026. There is no second person to keep the service up." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://audiopen.ai" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/audiopen" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Indie Hackers, 17 February 2026: Building an AI tool in a half-day hackathon and hitting $20k/mo", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/tech/building-an-ai-tool-in-a-half-day-hackathon-and-hitting-20k-mo-BCloDTDRfjuip0pDghap", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the open part and the founder's replies in the comments; the full article is behind a free login. Source for the US$15,000 to US$20,000 range, the yearly-only pricing, the DDoS attacks and the 10 times goal." }, { "title": "Starter Story, 16 May 2024: The App I Built In 12 Hours Now Makes $15K/Mo", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/audiopen", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview. Source for the US$15,000 a month, the four tiny products, Figma and Bubble, the Bubble cost and the API cost." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 29 October 2024: Louis Pereira, from idea to $15K a month with AudioPen (title shortened)", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/eda6e4c6e4", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Short profile; the id-only link redirects to the post's full title. Source for the US$12,000 to US$15,000 range, the 100 paying customers in two days, the US$99 annual price and the US$7,000 TikTok test." }, { "title": "Solveo, May 2023 (republished from Indie Hackers, 25 May 2023): How I accidentally created a generative AI tool that's made $73,000 in 2 months", "url": "https://www.solveo.co/post/accidentally-created-ai-tool-thats-made-73000", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The Indie Hackers original is behind a free login; its open part and comments were also read. Source for the US$73,000, the 1,000 paying and 11,000 registered users, and the Product Hunt result." }, { "title": "O Heraldo (Herald Goa), 11 August 2023: Goan creates a revolutionary AI tool for converting messy voice notes into clear, shareable text", "url": "https://www.heraldgoa.in/?p=124807", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Newspaper interview. Source for the 26 March 2023 build date, the 35,000 registered and 3,000 paying users, and the founder's background." }, { "title": "AI Makers newsletter, 16 May 2023: 500 paying customers in 1 month", "url": "https://aimakers.beehiiv.com/p/500-paying-customers-1-month", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview. Source for the 500 paying subscribers, the 2023 prices, the tool stack and the delayed Product Hunt launch." }, { "title": "The Bootstrapped Founder podcast with Arvid Kahl, 16 August 2023: Louis Pereira, When an Indie Hacker Strikes Gold (transcript)", "url": "https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/louis-pereira-when-an-indie-hacker-strikes-gold/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the transcript sections on numbers, pricing and support. Source for the 30,000 registered users, the lifetime deal from US$19 to US$150, the beta buyers and the support routine." }, { "title": "Louis Pereira on X, 22 April 2023: AudioPen crossed 400 paying users yesterday", "url": "https://x.com/louispereira/status/1649882187515453440", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API, which gives the post date." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: AudioPen, launched 4 May 2023", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/audiopen", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The launch date is in the page data; the founder's launch post and his answers in the comments give the six weeks since launch, the Bubble stack and the discount code." }, { "title": "NoCodeLife, 2023: The half-day build that turned into 1,000 paying customers", "url": "https://www.nocodelife.com/the-half-day-build-that-turned-into-1-000-paying-customers/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview. Source for the 10,000 registered users, 4,000 daily visits and 1,000 paying users under two months after launch." }, { "title": "Build in Public Hub, 12 May 2023: Lessons from building AudioPen to 600+ paid users to clinching #1 on Product Hunt", "url": "https://buildinpublichub.substack.com/p/how-i-built-this-in-public-louis", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder guest post on building in public. Source for the 600 paid users in May 2023 and his approach to early users." }, { "title": "AudioPen pricing page, read 12 October 2026", "url": "https://audiopen.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the pricing table, the free plan limits and the team licenses." }, { "title": "AudioPen home page, read 12 October 2026", "url": "https://audiopen.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 200,000+ users claim and the list of platforms." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/remove-bg/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/remove-bg.md", "slug": "remove-bg", "name": "remove.bg", "country": "Austria", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI background removal for photos", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-12", "launchLabel": "17 December 2018", "outcomeLabel": "Sold to Canva for an undisclosed price of at least US$12M, February 2021", "sticker": "Sold to Canva, price undisclosed", "outcomeUsd": 12000000, "months": 26, "teamLabel": "1 developer at the release, 2 founders, 7 people by August 2019, 25 at the sale", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "photos", "channel": "launches", "trend": "sold", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2B", "Image editing" ], "product": "You upload a photo. In about five seconds remove.bg returns the same photo with the background cut away, so the person or product in front stands on a transparent layer. A small preview is free; full-resolution results, the API and the Photoshop plugin cost credits.", "why": "It took one task that every designer does by hand in Photoshop, made it one click and free, and let Product Hunt, Twitter and TechCrunch spread it. Then it charged professionals for resolution and for an API, stayed profitable with no investors, and sold to Canva, which had already built the tool into its own product a year earlier.", "summary": [ "remove.bg is a web tool that removes the background from a photo. It uses image segmentation, a kind of AI model that decides for every pixel whether it belongs to the foreground (a person, later also products and animals) or to the background, and keeps fine details such as single hairs. The user does not select anything. At the release in December 2018 the tool was free, worked only on photos with a person in them, and returned images of at most 500 by 500 pixels. Later the free version became a low-resolution preview, and full resolution, an API (a paid interface that lets another program send images and get results back), a Photoshop extension and desktop apps were sold for credits, one credit per image.", "Benjamin Groessing, a developer in Vienna who ran a small web agency with David Fankhauser, released it on 17 December 2018 as a side product of another idea. TechCrunch, Product Hunt and Twitter made it known to millions within weeks. The two founders set up Kaleido AI around it, owned it half each, took no investors, and were profitable from the start. By August 2019 it had thousands of paying customers and seven people. In 2020 its monthly users grew from about 3 million to more than 20 million, and the company says its tools removed more than 100 million backgrounds a month. Canva, the Australian design platform, had used remove.bg inside its own product since about early 2020. In February 2021 Canva bought 40 percent and then 100 percent of Kaleido AI, with 25 employees in Vienna at the time.", "The price was not disclosed. The company and Canva called it one of the largest exits in Austrian startup history; Der Brutkasten quoted an industry insider saying at least a high two-digit million euro amount, and TechCrunch wrote that it may have fetched nearly nine figures. The headline number on this page is only the floor of what the press reported, tens of millions of euros, converted to dollars. No revenue figure was ever published; the best disclosed numbers are 80,000 paying customers and 270 percent revenue growth in 2019, both company statements. The page also shows what happened to earlier browser photo tools, several of which were bought by a large company and then closed." ], "factsCaption": "A free tool that reached 20 million monthly users in two years and was sold to Canva 26 months after its release, for a price that was never published", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from the acquirer's own announcement. A grade B value was read by a journalist from the Austrian company register (Firmenbuch). A grade C value is a founder or company statement to the press, or an estimate by an insider or a traffic service. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a free side project released on Twitter to a sale to Canva in 26 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "remove.bg prices in October 2026, read from the data embedded in the company's pricing page; the pay-as-you-go price is from the reviewer costbench.com (grade C)", "note": "One credit is one image at full resolution. Preview-resolution images on the website are free, and a new account gets one free credit. Subscriptions are billed monthly or yearly; the yearly price is 10 percent lower. The Professional plans run from 200 to 5,000 credits a month and the Business plans from 7,500 to 75,000; the table shows the smallest sizes. Unused subscription credits do not roll over. In 2019 the founder quoted a price starting at 18 euro cents per image, and in February 2021 Trending Topics quoted 11 cents; today the Personal plan is US$0.225 per credit and the smallest Professional plan US$0.195.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "preview resolution only" ], [ "Pay as you go", "3 one-time", "", "3 credits, from the reviewer" ], [ "Personal", "8.10", "9", "40 credits a month" ], [ "Professional, 200", "35.10", "39", "200 credits a month" ], [ "Professional, 500", "80.10", "89", "500 credits a month" ], [ "Professional, 1,200", "170.10", "189", "1,200 credits a month" ], [ "Business, 7,500", "710.10", "789", "7,500 credits a month" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Sale to Canva", "value": "100 percent of Kaleido AI, completed mid-February 2021", "grade": "A", "note": "Canva's own announcement on 23 February 2021 names Kaleido as the company behind remove.bg. Der Brutkasten read in the company register that Canva Inc became the sole owner in mid-February 2021, and that the deal was done in two steps.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Sale price", "value": "not disclosed", "grade": "C", "note": "Both sides agreed not to publish it. Der Brutkasten quotes an industry insider: at least a high two-digit million euro amount. TechCrunch, citing Die Presse and Der Brutkasten, writes two-digit millions, which suggests a price approaching US$100 million. The founder said the deal was advised by i5invest and paid in two tranches.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Headline number on this page", "value": "at least US$12 million", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the floor of the reported range, 10 million euros, times the European Central Bank reference rate of 1.2129 US dollars per euro on 15 February 2021, equals US$12.1 million. This is a floor, not an estimate of the price.", "src": [ 1, 2, 17 ] }, { "fact": "First step of the sale", "value": "40 percent of Kaleido AI", "grade": "B", "note": "Trending Topics read in the company register on 4 February 2021 that VORGE Erste Beteiligungsverwaltung GmbH, owned fully by Canva Inc, held 40 percent, and the two founders 30 percent each.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly users at the sale", "value": "more than 20 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Company statement in the press release and to several papers. Leadersnet writes that the number rose from 3 million to more than 20 million during 2020, which the company describes as growth of more than 600 percent.", "src": [ 4, 6, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Backgrounds removed per month", "value": "more than 100 million (company), more than 150 million (Canva)", "grade": "C", "note": "The company said 100 million in its release and interviews; Canva's announcement says 150 million across photos and videos. Both are company figures, so grade C.", "src": [ 4, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Paying customers", "value": "more than 80,000 for remove.bg", "grade": "C", "note": "Futurezone, February 2021, from the company. Trend.at wrote 40,000 at about the same time. Both are company statements and the page shows the larger one with this caution.", "src": [ 7, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue", "value": "never published; growth of 270 percent in 2019", "grade": "C", "note": "Trend.at: revenue grew 270 percent in 2019, absolute figures not given. No source gives a revenue amount.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Price per image, 2019 and 2021", "value": "from 18 euro cents, later 11 euro cents", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder to Trending Topics in August 2019; Trending Topics in February 2021.", "src": [ 9, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly visits, early 2021", "value": "more than 33 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Trending Topics, citing traffic analysis services; among the 2,000 largest websites. Unscreen had more than 800,000.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Daily users inside Canva", "value": "more than 500,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder to Der Brutkasten. remove.bg had been one of Canva's Pro features for about a year before the sale.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder quote in the Canva press release and to every paper: two founders and a team, profitable from the start. Trending Topics found no investor in the company register in 2019, and Der Brutkasten wrote the founders owned 50 percent each until the sale.", "src": [ 2, 9, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "7 in August 2019, 15 in March 2020, 25 at the sale, more than 70 in 2022", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder statements to Trending Topics, Futurezone and Der Brutkasten, and the company's own history page.", "src": [ 9, 13, 1, 15 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly active users, 2022", "value": "30 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Company history page, written after the sale.", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "fact": "Output at the release", "value": "free, persons only, at most 500 by 500 pixels", "grade": "C", "note": "The About page on 20 December 2018. An API was promised soon.", "src": [ 12, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the release to the sale", "value": "26 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: December 2018 to February 2021.", "src": [ 11, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2015", "what": "Groessing and Fankhauser, who run the Vienna web agency byteq, release Wurstify, a browser plugin that puts a Conchita Wurst beard on any face. The founder later calls it the foundation of Kaleido.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 13 ] }, { "when": "17 December 2018", "what": "Groessing announces remove.bg on Twitter. It is free, works only on photos with a person, and returns 500 by 500 pixels. The About page says it was a side product of another app idea.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11, 12, 10 ] }, { "when": "22 December 2018 to 8 January 2019", "what": "Pulse 2 and TechCrunch cover it. TechCrunch tests it on hair and quotes the About page: the current service will stay free permanently.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10, 11 ] }, { "when": "2019", "what": "API, Photoshop extension (April) and desktop apps (May) are released; the model now handles any photo with a clear foreground, not only people.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15, 20, 9 ] }, { "when": "30 August 2019", "what": "Thousands of paying customers worldwide, from 18 euro cents per image. Four people in Vienna and three remote. Product Hunt and Twitter are the main channels. No investor in the company register.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "2019", "what": "Revenue grows 270 percent over 2018, amount not disclosed.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "About early 2020", "what": "Canva builds remove.bg into Canva Pro as its one-click background remover. It later becomes one of the most used Pro features, with more than 500,000 daily users.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "when": "5 March 2020", "what": "Unscreen, the same for video, is released. 15 employees, profitable, no investors.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "November 2020", "what": "Unscreen Pro: one minute of full-HD video costs 5 euros.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "2020", "what": "Monthly users grow from about 3 million to more than 20 million in 180 countries.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14, 4 ] }, { "when": "4 February 2021", "what": "Trending Topics finds in the company register that a Canva holding company owns 40 percent of Kaleido AI.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "Mid-February 2021", "what": "Canva Inc becomes the sole owner, in the second of two tranches.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "23 February 2021", "what": "Canva announces the purchase together with Smartmockups. Kaleido has 25 employees and plans 30 more hires in Vienna. The founders say they declined many investment offers.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 3, 4, 6 ] }, { "when": "24 February 2021", "what": "TechCrunch: price not disclosed, speculated to be nearly nine figures. Der Brutkasten: at least a high two-digit million euro amount, per an insider.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "when": "2022", "what": "remove.bg reaches 30 million monthly active users; the Vienna team passes 70 and builds photo and video tools for Canva. Kaleido AI GmbH is later renamed Canva Austria GmbH.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15, 4 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "One task, one click, free", "text": "Cutting a person out of a photo took a designer 5 to 30 minutes in Photoshop. remove.bg did it in five seconds with no selection at all, and at the release it cost nothing. That made it easy to show in a tweet, and Product Hunt, Twitter and TechCrunch did the marketing. The founder said in 2019 that those two channels had reached millions of people." }, { "title": "Free preview, paid resolution", "text": "The free output stayed small. Anyone who needed the image for print, a shop or a catalogue paid per image, with credits sold in packs and subscriptions. The company reported thousands of paying customers after eight months and 80,000 at the sale." }, { "title": "An API for the people who do it thousands of times", "text": "Agencies and shops that cut out thousands of product photos used the API, the Photoshop extension and the desktop apps. Customers named by the company include Alibaba, Samsung and The New York Times. Canva built the API into its own editor about a year before buying the company." }, { "title": "No investors, profitable, then sold to the distributor", "text": "The founders owned the company half each and financed it from cash flow. The buyer was the company that already distributed the tool to 40 million users; Canva's head of apps said they had been in contact with the team for more than a year. The deal was done in two tranches, 40 percent and then the rest." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founders' interviews, the 2018 About page and the company's history page. They are grade C.", "items": [ "The segmentation model was trained in-house and combined with classic computer-vision algorithms for fine edges and color cleanup, according to the founder in 2019. The first version detected only persons; by 2019 it handled any photo with a separable foreground.", "The About page in December 2018 said uploaded images were deleted about an hour after processing and were not used to train the model. Today the result dialog asks the user whether to contribute an image to an improvement program.", "An API came first, then a Photoshop extension in April 2019, Windows, Mac and Linux apps in May 2019, and an Android app in June 2020.", "Pricing is credits: packs of prepaid credits, monthly subscriptions, and custom contracts for large customers. Unscreen prices video by length and quality.", "Unscreen, the video version, was built on the same technology and released in March 2020, with a Pro version in November 2020.", "Marketing was Product Hunt, Twitter and press coverage. The founders said in 2019 that they made decisions from customer feedback and did not want to be steered by investors." ], "src": [ 9, 12, 20, 1, 13, 8 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database offered browser photo tools or image AI before remove.bg. Three of them were bought by a large company and then closed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Picnik", "years": "2005 to 2012", "funding": "US$3.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Photoshop-lite photo editing in the browser, no download.", "died": "Google bought it in 2010, folded the features into Google+ and closed the product in 2012.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/429-picnik" }, { "name": "Snipshot", "years": "2006 to 2009", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Edit photos in the browser without Adobe software.", "died": "Larger rivals such as Picnik and free alternatives offered more; no clear way to charge.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1241-snipshot" }, { "name": "Pixate", "years": "2012 to 2016", "funding": "US$3.6M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Design mobile app prototypes without code.", "died": "Bought by Google, then given no resources while Figma and Sketch took the market.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/434-pixate" }, { "name": "Jetpac", "years": "2011 to 2016", "funding": "US$2.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Image recognition over Instagram photos to build travel guides.", "died": "Google bought the team in 2014 and closed the product in 2016; it also depended on Instagram's API.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/258-jetpac" }, { "name": "Everalbum", "years": "2013 to 2019", "funding": "US$19.2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Unlimited photo storage with AI organization.", "died": "Charged a subscription for what Google Photos gave away free, and paid for the storage itself.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/125-everalbum" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Picnik and Snipshot were browser photo editors with many tools and no clear thing to charge for. remove.bg had one tool, and the thing to charge for was obvious: resolution, and volume through the API. Everalbum paid for storage; remove.bg stores an image for about an hour and sells the computation. Jetpac and Pixate were bought for their people and closed.", "Two things differ. First, the model did something that free software could not do in 2018, so the free preview was a demonstration and not the product. Second, the exit was to a company that already sold the tool to its own users. Canva renamed Kaleido AI GmbH to Canva Austria GmbH, kept remove.bg running and grew the Vienna team past 70 by 2022. The product was still at 30 million monthly users a year after the sale, which is the opposite of what happened to Picnik and Pixate." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The moment, no. The structure, yes.", "text": "A segmentation model good enough to cut hair was rare in 2018; today every photo app and Canva itself has one, and the press does not write about a new background remover. The structure is still available: one AI task that professionals do by hand, free at low quality, paid per image at full quality, an API for the customers who need it thousands of times, and no investors, so a sale is a choice and not a necessity.", "steps": [ "Pick one task that professionals repeat by hand and that a model does in seconds. Make it one click with no settings.", "Give the low-quality result away so people can post it; charge per image for the quality that the work needs.", "Ship the API and the plugin for the tools the professionals already use, because volume customers pay for integration, not for a website.", "Finance it from the first paying customers. Then the companies that distribute your tool are the natural buyers." ], "open": "Any visual AI task that is still manual in professional software: video matting beyond green screen, product photo relighting, 3D from photos, and batch edits for catalogues." }, "watch": [ { "title": "No price and no revenue", "text": "The sale price was never published, and no revenue amount ever was. The headline figure on this page is a floor taken from press reports, and the two reported customer counts, 40,000 and 80,000, do not agree." }, { "title": "Company numbers only", "text": "Users, removals per month and growth rates are company statements. The traffic figure is from an analysis service quoted by a newspaper. The only register-grade facts are the ownership steps." }, { "title": "Not solo at the sale", "text": "One developer released it, but two founders owned the company from the start and 25 people worked there at the sale. It qualifies as a small team, not as a solo business." }, { "title": "The buyer already owned the channel", "text": "Canva had integrated remove.bg for about a year before the sale. A tool that lives inside a bigger product can be replaced by that product's own model, which is what the predecessors show; here the owner chose to buy instead." }, { "title": "The free tier is now the model's commodity", "text": "Background removal is built into phones, Photoshop and every design tool. The paid business depends on quality at the edges, on the API and on Canva's distribution, not on being the only tool." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.remove.bg" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/remove-bg" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Der Brutkasten, 23 February 2021: Wiener Startup Kaleido AI schafft einen der größten Exits der österreichischen Startup-Geschichte", "url": "https://brutkasten.com/artikel/wiener-startup-kaleido-ai-schafft-einen-der-grosten-exits-der-osterreichischen-startup-geschichte", "grade": "B", "how": "The live page refuses automated requests; read in full from the Internet Archive copy. Source for the company register entry, the two tranches, the insider's price range, the 500,000 daily Canva users, the 25 employees and the 50/50 ownership." }, { "title": "TechCrunch, 24 February 2021: Canva acquires background removal specialists Kaleido", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/24/canva-acquires-background-removal-specialists-kaleido/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the price speculation and the founder's bootstrapping quote from the press release." }, { "title": "Canva newsroom, 23 February 2021: Canva welcomes Smartmockups and Kaleido to the family", "url": "https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/kaleido-smartmockups/", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. The acquirer's own announcement. Source for the 150 million removals a month and the customer names." }, { "title": "Kaleido AI press release, 23 February 2021: Kaleido is joining the Canva family", "url": "https://kaleido.ai/b/kaleido-is-joining-the-canva-family", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 100 million people in 180 countries in 2020, the 25 AI experts, the declined investment offers and the renaming banner." }, { "title": "Trending Topics, 4 February 2021: Kaleido AI: Australisches Unicorn Canva steigt groß bei Wiener Startup ein", "url": "https://www.trendingtopics.eu/canva-steigt-beikaleido-ai-ein/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 40 percent stake from the company register, the 33 million monthly visits and the 11 cents per image." }, { "title": "Trending Topics, 23 February 2021: Canva: Australisches Unicorn übernimmt Wiener AI-Startup Kaleido komplett", "url": "https://www.trendingtopics.eu/canva-australisches-unicorn-uebernimmt-wiener-ai-startup-kaleido-komplett/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview. Source for the 100 percent step, the 600 percent growth, the Canva cooperation of more than a year and the hiring plan." }, { "title": "Futurezone, 23 February 2021: Millionen-Deal: Wiener Start-up Kaleido AI verkauft", "url": "https://futurezone.at/start-ups/millionen-deal-wiener-start-up-kaleido-ai-verkauft/401196236", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 80,000 paying customers and the profitability quote." }, { "title": "Trend.at, February 2021: Neuer Background für Wiener Start-up Kaleido AI: Canva übernimmt", "url": "https://www.trend.at/unternehmen/neuer-background-canva-wiener-start-kaleido-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 270 percent revenue growth in 2019, the 40,000 paying customers, the Unscreen Pro launch and prices." }, { "title": "Trending Topics, 30 August 2019: Remove.bg: Dieses Wiener Startup entfernt mit AI die Hintergründe aus deinen Bildern", "url": "https://www.trendingtopics.eu/remove-bg-dieses-wiener-startup-entfernt-mit-ai-die-hintergruende-aus-deinen-bildern/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview. Source for the agency background, Wurstify, the thousands of paying customers, the 18 cents, the team of seven and the channels." }, { "title": "TechCrunch, 8 January 2019: This cool tool deletes the background from images so you don't have to use Photoshop", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/08/remove-bg-photoshop-free-image-background-editor/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Journalist's test and quotes from the About page." }, { "title": "Pulse 2.0, 22 December 2018: Remove.bg: An easy way to remove the background from photos", "url": "https://pulse2.com/remove-bg/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names Benjamin Groessing as the developer and embeds his tweet of 17 December 2018." }, { "title": "remove.bg About page, Internet Archive copy of 20 December 2018", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20181220000000/https://www.remove.bg/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the free service, persons only, the 500 by 500 limit, the privacy note and the API beta." }, { "title": "Futurezone, 5 March 2020: Hintergründe in Videos automatisch entfernen: Neues Tool aus Wien", "url": "https://futurezone.at/start-ups/hintergruende-in-videos-automatisch-entfernen-neues-tool-aus-wien/400771242", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Unscreen release, the 15 employees and the profitability statement." }, { "title": "Leadersnet, February 2021: Australier kaufen KI-Runtastic der Wiener Start-up-Szene für Rekordsumme", "url": "https://www.leadersnet.at/news/48841,australier-kaufen-ki-runtastic-der-wiener-start-up-szene-fuer.html", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the user growth from 3 million to more than 20 million in 2020." }, { "title": "Kaleido AI company history page, read 12 October 2026", "url": "https://www.kaleido.ai/about/our-story.jar", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 2015 app, the Product Hunt claim, the 2019 API, the 30 million monthly active users and the team above 70 in 2022." }, { "title": "remove.bg pricing page, read 12 October 2026, and costbench.com for the pay-as-you-go price", "url": "https://www.remove.bg/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "The page renders prices by script; the plan names, credits and prices were read from the data embedded in the page. The 3 credits for US$3 pack is from the reviewer costbench.com." }, { "title": "European Central Bank, euro foreign exchange reference rates, historical CSV", "url": "https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-hist.zip", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the row for 15 February 2021: 1.2129 US dollars per euro." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." }, { "title": "Startup Daily, February 2021: Canva buys two design startups after doubling its monthly users to 50 million", "url": "https://www.startupdaily.net/?p=87553", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Canva's co-founder quote and the founder's 600 percent statement." }, { "title": "Product Hunt, remove.bg product page with its launch list", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/remove-bg", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the launch list. Source for the Photoshop extension (25 April 2019), the desktop app (18 May 2019) and the Android app (5 June 2020)." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/podsqueeze/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/podsqueeze.md", "slug": "podsqueeze", "name": "Podsqueeze", "country": "Portugal", "sector": "Media", "productType": "AI show notes and content repurposing for podcasts", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-12", "launchLabel": "February 2023", "outcomeLabel": "€16K a month and flat for two years, August 2026", "sticker": "$16K/mo, stuck two years", "outcomeUsd": 192000, "months": 42, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders, then 3 employees by January 2025", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "sales", "trend": "flat", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Media" ], "product": "Upload a podcast episode and get the transcript, show notes, timestamps, a newsletter, social posts, a blog article, short video clips and quote images. The podcaster pays a monthly subscription priced by minutes of audio processed. Media companies and agencies pay custom contracts.", "why": "It was built in one week, right after the ChatGPT API appeared, by a podcaster who hated writing his own show notes. Reddit, cold email and a second place on Product Hunt took it to US$10,000 a month in five months. Then the first wave of AI curiosity ended, churn stayed high, and revenue has been flat at about €16,000 a month since 2024.", "summary": [ "Podsqueeze is a content repurposing tool: it takes one long piece of content, a podcast episode, and produces the short pieces that promote it, such as show notes, a newsletter, social posts and video clips. The audio is first turned into text by a speech-to-text model, a program that converts recorded speech into written words, and a large language model, a program that writes text from instructions, then writes the show notes and the rest. Customers pay a subscription priced by minutes of audio.", "Tiago Ferreira, a Portuguese software engineer who had worked at Trivago in Germany, and João Amaro, an architect by training who had run a cookie dough shop in Lisbon, built the first version in one week and added payments in the second. They released it at the end of February 2023. It reached US$800 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the subscription income that repeats every month) in the first month, US$2,000 by 2 April, US$6,500 in May, and US$10,000 on 20 July 2023. In October 2023 it made US$14,300 in revenue with US$10,725 in profit. In September 2024 the founder said it made US$16,000 a month. In August 2026 the founders appeared on Jason Cohen's podcast with the title stuck at €16,000 a month, and said they turned down an offer of 500,000 to buy the company in 2025.", "Every number on this page is a founder statement, on X, in interviews or on podcasts, grade C. No payment processor or buyer has confirmed them. This is a story about reaching a plateau as much as about reaching it fast: the page also shows what happened to earlier companies that sold convenience tools to content creators." ], "factsCaption": "Five months to US$10,000 a month on the first wave of AI interest, then about €16,000 a month, flat, for two years, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a founder statement on X, in an interview or on a podcast, or a third-party estimate that says so. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a one-week prototype to US$10,000 a month in five months, then a plateau that has lasted longer than the growth. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Podsqueeze prices on 12 October 2026, from the company's pricing page (grade C). The page shows monthly prices and a toggle that says yearly billing is 30% off; the yearly column was computed from that note", "note": "Plans are priced by minutes of audio processed per month, with unused minutes carried over up to three times the monthly amount. Each plan includes transcription, show notes and other text, a number of video clips or audiograms, and tools such as audio enhancement and an audio editor. The Enterprise plan has custom minutes and a demo call. There is no free plan on the page; the founders said on the Smart Bear Live podcast that the Pro plan has a free trial.", "rows": [ [ "Starter", "6.29", "8.99", "120 minutes a month, 8 video clips" ], [ "Pro", "34.30", "49", "320 minutes a month, 20 video clips" ], [ "Agency Lite", "62.30", "89", "600 minutes a month, 40 video clips" ], [ "Enterprise", "custom", "custom", "custom minutes and clips, priority support" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue per month, August 2026", "value": "about €16,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Title and summary of Smart Bear Live episode 3, 23 August 2026, where both founders appear. The host says in the introduction that it reached 16K in MRR in 18 months and that growth has plateaued. The founders showed their revenue graph on the video.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month, September 2024", "value": "US$16,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Indie Bites podcast episode notes, 13 September 2024: currently doing $16k MRR and growing. The two sources give the same figure two years apart in different currencies.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate used as the headline on this page", "value": "about US$192,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$16,000 times 12, from the September 2024 dollar figure. At €16,000 the dollar amount would be somewhat higher; the page keeps the dollar figure the founder gave.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Paying customers, August 2026", "value": "about 500", "grade": "C", "note": "Host's introduction on Smart Bear Live: only five hundred of those trial users converting to paying customers. In March 2024 the founder also said around 500 subscribers.", "src": [ 2, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Churn per month", "value": "15% to 20% in 2026; about 10% in March 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "The 2026 figure is the host's introduction on Smart Bear Live. The 2024 figure is the founder in the SaaStrappers interview, who called it terrible.", "src": [ 2, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Acquisition offer turned down", "value": "500,000, in 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Cohost Craig Hewitt on Smart Bear Live: they turned down an offer for 500 grand last year. The currency is not stated. Not verified beyond the podcast.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue and profit, October 2023", "value": "US$14,300 revenue, US$10,725 profit", "grade": "C", "note": "SpyMetrics interview with the founder, 12 November 2023. A profit margin of 75%, computed on this page.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 20 July 2023", "value": "US$10,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's X post, read through the fxtwitter API: crossed a mythical indie milestone, $10K MRR, in only 5 months.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, mid-2023", "value": "US$100,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Indie Hackers interview published 5 October 2023: 320 users and US$9,000 MRR five months after a late-February launch, and reaching US$100,000 ARR named as the biggest achievement. ARR is MRR times 12.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, May 2023", "value": "US$6,500", "grade": "C", "note": "Indie Hackers case study by Sveta Bay, 12 May 2023, two months after launch. SpyMetrics gives US$6,600 at the beginning of May.", "src": [ 10, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 2 April 2023", "value": "US$2,000, 1,368 users", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's X post closing the month of March: US$2,000 MRR, 1,368 users, 31,000 minutes processed.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Registered users, January 2025", "value": "more than 55,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Essential Business, 20 January 2025, from the founders. Most are free-trial users: about 500 pay, which is under 1% of 55,000, computed on this page.", "src": [ 11, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 co-founders, 3 employees in January 2025, 1 contractor in Latin America in 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Essential Business says the company Userquest Lda, formed at the end of 2023, has two partners and three more employees. On Smart Bear Live the founders said they hired a person in Latin America for sales. Latka counts 1 person on LinkedIn.", "src": [ 11, 2, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Essential Business: entirely bootstrapped, developed without any kind of external investment. The founders split the company 50/50.", "src": [ 11, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Latka's revenue estimate for 2024", "value": "US$182,200 a year", "grade": "C", "note": "A third-party estimate, marked as such. Latka also records US$144,000 a year for October 2023 from X, which is US$12,000 a month.", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the August 2026 figure", "value": "42 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: February 2023 to August 2026. SpyMetrics lists the launch as 29 January 2023; the founder says the end of February.", "src": [ 1, 9, 8 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2021", "what": "Ferreira leaves a well-paid engineering job to build his own products, starts the Wannabe Entrepreneur podcast and a paid community that reaches about US$600 a month. He interviews more than 60 bootstrapped founders.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "Late 2022", "what": "He and Amaro agree to build products together, one month each, and kill any that get no traction. Their first, a Product Hunt competitor called Indie Lottery, is dropped.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "February 2023", "what": "With the ChatGPT API new, they build Podsqueeze in one week to write show notes for Ferreira's own podcast and add Stripe payments in the second week. Released at the end of February. The first week brings one paying customer and many excited users reporting bugs.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 7 ] }, { "when": "29 March 2023", "what": "US$800 MRR in the first month. Product Hunt launch, second product of the day with 632 votes, about 5,000 visitors, 40 new users on the day and US$500 more MRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 8, 10 ] }, { "when": "2 April 2023", "what": "US$2,000 MRR, 1,368 users, 31,000 minutes of audio processed.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "May 2023", "what": "US$6,500 MRR two months after launch. First ten customers came from Reddit, AI newsletters and cold email within two weeks of launch.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10, 8 ] }, { "when": "19 July 2023", "what": "4,000 cold emails a day from their own email server.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "20 July 2023", "what": "US$10,000 MRR, five months after launch, after ten years of trying different projects.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "September 2023", "what": "Growth slows. The founders say they had expected the AI trend alone to carry them to a million in ARR and had neglected lasting marketing channels. They pay about US$1,000 for an SEO audit and start writing two or three articles a week.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "October 2023", "what": "US$14,300 in revenue and US$10,725 in profit for the month. Reaching US$100,000 ARR named as the biggest achievement.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 7 ] }, { "when": "End of 2023", "what": "The founders form Userquest Lda in Portugal to hold Podsqueeze and other products.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "17 March 2024", "what": "About US$14,000 MRR, around 500 subscribers, churn of about 10% a month. The goal for 2024 is US$100,000 MRR, which would need about 2,000 subscribers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "13 September 2024", "what": "US$16,000 MRR and growing, per the Indie Bites episode notes.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "20 January 2025", "what": "More than 55,000 users. The company has two partners and three employees, no outside investment.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "2025", "what": "The founders turn down an offer of 500,000 to buy the company. Portuguese media groups become customers at a few hundred a month each and add about 2,000 to MRR; a 5x price rise for them goes through without objection.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "23 August 2026", "what": "On Smart Bear Live, Jason Cohen and Craig Hewitt work through why revenue has sat at about €16,000 a month for two years: 15% to 20% monthly churn, about 500 paying customers, and a self-serve podcaster market where most shows stop within months.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Timing", "text": "The ChatGPT API came out in early 2023 and podcasters had never seen show notes written for them in one click. The founders say the first wave of AI interest, plus one Product Hunt launch, did most of the work up to US$10,000 a month, and that they wrongly expected it to continue on its own." }, { "title": "Build for yourself, in one week", "text": "Ferreira ran a podcast and wrote show notes by hand. The product was the fix for his own task, so the first version was correct enough to excite users who then stayed through the bugs. The rule was one month per product, kill it if nobody is excited." }, { "title": "Cold email at scale", "text": "They collected podcasters' email addresses and sent 300 a day, then 4,000 a day from their own email server, with short personal messages that end in a question. This, Reddit and AI directories brought the first customers and kept working after Product Hunt." }, { "title": "Price by minutes, carry the model cost", "text": "Unlike a bring-your-own-key tool, Podsqueeze pays for transcription and text generation itself and charges by minutes of audio. The founders reported a 75% profit margin in October 2023. Minutes that roll over keep customers from feeling cheated on quiet months." }, { "title": "What stopped working", "text": "Podcasts fade: most shows stop within months, so a self-serve subscriber stops paying when the show stops. With 15% to 20% of customers leaving each month, new sign-ups only replace the lost ones. Revenue growth after 2024 came from a few media companies in Portugal, which stay and accepted a 5x price rise, but the founders have not repeated that outside Portugal." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founders' interviews and podcast appearances. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Python backend, JavaScript and React frontend, hosted on Google Cloud Platform. Payments through Stripe from the second week.", "The first version took one week; a weekly go or no-go decision followed for the first months.", "Marketing: Reddit posts, listings on AI directories, cold email from their own SMTP server at up to 4,000 messages a day, a Product Hunt launch, then SEO from late 2023 after a paid audit.", "The product grew from show notes into transcription in more than 20 languages, video clips, quote images, audio enhancement, an audio editor and podcast landing pages, which the podcast hosts in 2026 argued made the home page talk to everyone.", "Media companies in Portugal were sold by the founders in person; a hired contractor in Latin America tried the same by WhatsApp and demos, with meetings but few sales.", "The company, Userquest Lda in Lisbon, also holds the founders' other products." ], "src": [ 7, 9, 2, 11, 8 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold tools that saved content creators effort, and died when the platforms added the feature or the creators stopped creating. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Pixelpipe", "years": "2008 to 2013", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Post your photos and videos to every social network at once.", "died": "The social networks closed their APIs and built cross-posting in themselves.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/435-pixelpipe" }, { "name": "Pressly", "years": "2011 to 2018", "funding": "US$2.9M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Curate and distribute content for your brand with less effort.", "died": "Larger competitors offered full content suites and basic curation was not enough to keep paying.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/462-pressly" }, { "name": "HighlightCam", "years": "2009 to 2012", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Automatic video editing by algorithm, no skill needed.", "died": "Free smartphone apps did the same and the market did not know it needed the product.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1636-highlightcam" }, { "name": "ReelSurfer", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$1.25M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Clip and share segments of online video without technical skill.", "died": "YouTube and Facebook added clipping; few people paid for a separate tool.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1577-reelsurfer" }, { "name": "Trapit", "years": "2011 to 2019", "funding": "US$21.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "AI-curated content feeds for marketers.", "died": "Stayed a niche, overpriced tool while large platforms covered the same need.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/658-trapit" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the five sold a convenience to people who publish content, and the convenience stopped selling when a platform added it for free or when the publishers lost interest. Podsqueeze faces both: podcast hosting services and the model providers themselves can add show notes, and most podcasters stop publishing within months, which the founders and their hosts name as the main reason revenue has not grown since 2024.", "Two things differ. First, Podsqueeze cost almost nothing to build and reached profit in months, so it survives a plateau that a funded company could not; the five predecessors spent between US$500,000 and US$21.5 million before closing. Second, the founders found one customer type that does not fade, media companies with many shows, and those customers accepted a price five times higher. Whether that can be sold outside Portugal is the open question in the August 2026 episode." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The first five months, yes. The business after that, only with a different customer.", "text": "The method that produced US$10,000 a month in five months is plain and repeatable: build the tool for your own repeated task, ship in a week, charge from the second week, and reach customers by cold email and Reddit. What it does not give you is a customer who keeps paying. Pick a customer whose need does not fade, such as an agency or a media company with many shows, before the first wave of interest ends.", "steps": [ "Pick a task you do every week and hate; write the first version in one week and add payments in the second.", "Send cold email at volume from your own server, with a short personal message that ends in a question.", "Launch once on Product Hunt with your network warmed up a week before, and treat it as a one-time event.", "Measure monthly churn from the first month. If it is above 10%, change the customer, not the feature list.", "Charge by a unit that grows with the customer, such as minutes or shows, and test much higher prices on business customers." ], "open": "Any repeated writing or editing task for a group that publishes constantly: newsletters, video channels, local media, agencies, internal communications teams, and the regulated industries where a transcript must be kept." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Self-reported, with a currency change", "text": "The 2024 figure is in dollars and the 2026 figure in euros, both about 16,000 a month. No one outside the company has checked either. Latka's 2024 estimate is in the same range." }, { "title": "The plateau is the main fact", "text": "Revenue has been flat for two years, with 15% to 20% of customers leaving every month. The founders chose to keep the company rather than sell it for 500,000; the podcast hosts argue that a flat, self-serve business is worth less each year it stays flat." }, { "title": "The platforms can add the feature", "text": "Every predecessor on this page died when a platform built the convenience in. Podcast hosts, YouTube and the model providers can all produce show notes and clips, and in 2026 there are hundreds of tools that cut podcasts into shorts." }, { "title": "Growth outside Portugal has not worked yet", "text": "The customers who stay are Portuguese media groups won by the founders in person. A hired salesperson in Latin America got meetings but few contracts." }, { "title": "Launch date differs by source", "text": "SpyMetrics lists 29 January 2023; the founders say the end of February. This page uses February 2023 and the 42-month count depends on it." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://podsqueeze.com" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Smart Bear Live, episode 3, 23 August 2026: Restarting growth after stuck at €16k/mo, show notes", "url": "https://smartbearlive.transistor.fm/3", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Jason Cohen's podcast with Tiago Ferreira and João Amaro as guests and Craig Hewitt as cohost. Source for the €16,000 a month, the two flat years and the timestamps on the 500K offer and the 5x price test." }, { "title": "Smart Bear Live, episode 3, transcript", "url": "https://smartbearlive.transistor.fm/3/transcript", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the introduction and the sections on churn, the Portuguese media customers, the Latin America hire, the price rise and the offer. Automatic transcript, about 35,000 words." }, { "title": "Indie Bites, 13 September 2024: How Podsqueeze grew to $16k MRR in 18 months, Tiago Ferreira", "url": "https://share.transistor.fm/s/02980e76", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the episode notes in full. Source for the US$16,000 MRR in September 2024. The audio was not transcribed." }, { "title": "Tiago Ferreira on X, 20 July 2023: $10K MRR", "url": "https://x.com/wbetiago/status/1682035513660952576", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Names @JOAOTHA as co-founder." }, { "title": "Tiago Ferreira on X, 2 April 2023: closing the month of March", "url": "https://x.com/wbetiago/status/1642429155534053376", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Source for US$2,000 MRR, 1,368 users and 31,000 minutes." }, { "title": "Tiago Ferreira on X, 29 March 2023: Product Hunt launch", "url": "https://x.com/wbetiago/status/1640973197771264000", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Source for US$800 MRR in the first month." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 5 October 2023: How Tiago grew an AI SaaS to over 100K ARR in 5 months", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-tiago-grew-an-ai-saas-to-over-100k-arr-in-5-months-c6fa354bc5", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview. Source for the late-February launch, 320 users, US$9,000 MRR, US$100,000 ARR and the tech stack." }, { "title": "SpyMetrics, 12 November 2023: Podsqueeze.com made $14,300 in revenue last month", "url": "https://spymetrics.beehiiv.com/p/podsqueeze", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Interview with the founder, with his X posts embedded. Source for the October 2023 revenue and profit, the Product Hunt figures, the cold email volumes and the 29 January launch date." }, { "title": "SaaStrappers, 17 March 2024: From podcasting to a tool for podcasters, Tiago Ferreira", "url": "https://saastrappers.beehiiv.com/p/18-podcasting-tool-podcasters", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Interview transcript. Source for the one-week build, the plateau from September 2023, the SEO audit, the 500 subscribers, the 10% churn, the 50/50 split and the earlier community income." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 12 May 2023: Reaching $6.5K MRR with SaaS for podcasts in 2 months", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/reaching-6-5k-mrr-with-saas-for-podcasts-in-2-months-9458343b5f", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Case study by Sveta Bay with the founder's answers. Source for the US$6,500 MRR, the first ten customers and the Product Hunt traffic." }, { "title": "Essential Business, 20 January 2025: Young Portuguese entrepreneurs shake-up digital content creation with AI", "url": "https://www.essential-business.pt/?p=29287", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Portuguese business news site, based on the founders' statements. Source for both founders' full names and backgrounds, the 55,000 users, the no-investment statement, Userquest Lda and the three employees." }, { "title": "Latka company page: Podsqueeze revenue 2024, estimate", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/podsqueeze", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A third-party estimate marked as such, an October 2023 figure attributed to X, and a LinkedIn headcount." }, { "title": "Podsqueeze pricing page, read 12 October 2026", "url": "https://podsqueeze.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Monthly prices and plan limits. The yearly price is shown only through a script toggle labeled 30% off, so the yearly column was computed." }, { "title": "Podsqueeze home page, team section, and the co-founder's X profile", "url": "https://podsqueeze.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the team section. The co-founder entry links to the X account @JOAOTHA, whose profile name, read through the fxtwitter API, is João Amaro." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/sitegpt/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/sitegpt.md", "slug": "sitegpt", "name": "SiteGPT", "country": "India", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI customer-support chatbot trained on a website", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-12", "launchLabel": "30 March 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$190K a year recurring revenue, December 2025", "sticker": "$190K ARR, two brothers", "outcomeUsd": 190000, "months": 33, "teamLabel": "1 founder alone for about 14 months, then 2 brothers, no employees", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Speed", "group": "support-agents", "channel": "search", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Customer support" ], "product": "A company pastes its website address. SiteGPT reads every page, builds a chatbot that answers visitor questions from that content, and puts it on the site. Plans are priced by the number of chatbots, pages and messages. There is no free plan, only a 7-day trial.", "why": "It was built in two to three weeks as a side feature for an existing product and launched with a paywall on day one, one month after the ChatGPT API appeared. It reached US$10,000 a month in 25 days, then lost half of it to churn. What kept it alive for three years was cheap customer acquisition: more than 50 free web tools that rank on Google and send visitors to the paid product.", "summary": [ "SiteGPT is a customer-support chatbot for websites. A customer-support chatbot is a program that answers visitor questions in a chat window instead of a person. SiteGPT builds the answers from the company's own pages: it crawls the website, stores the text, and gives it to a language model when a visitor asks something. Chatbase, already on this site, sells the same idea from Canada and the USA at about fifty times the revenue; SiteGPT is the small, two-person version of the same category, run from India.", "Bhanu Teja Pachipulusu, a software engineer who had left his job to build small products, started it in March 2023 as a feature for his earlier product Feather, a tool that turns Notion pages into a blog. He launched it on 30 March 2023 with a post on X and a paywall. In 25 days it passed US$10,000 of monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the subscription revenue of one month). Then about half of the customers left, and revenue stayed near US$15,000 a month for the next year. In late 2024 he stopped accepting new sign-ups for three months and MRR fell to US$8,200. In April 2025 he and his brother, who had joined in 2024, nearly sold the product, then decided to work on nothing else. MRR almost doubled in eight months to US$15,800 at the end of 2025, which is US$190,000 of annual recurring revenue (ARR, MRR multiplied by twelve). In February 2026 he wrote that it had crossed US$20,000 a month.", "Every number on this page is a founder statement, mostly from his own posts on X, grade C. No payment processor or buyer has confirmed them. The page also shows four earlier companies that promised a computer that answers questions in plain language and failed before language models existed." ], "factsCaption": "A side feature that reached US$10,000 a month in 25 days, then needed three years to get to US$190,000 a year, all self-reported by the founder on X", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a founder statement from his posts on X or his interviews, or an estimate by a third party that says so. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a weekend experiment to a two-brother business at US$190,000 a year, with a crash and a near-sale in between, in 33 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "SiteGPT prices read from the company's pricing page on 12 October 2026 (grade C)", "note": "A message is one answer from the chatbot. The message limit counts answers from a small model (GPT-4.1 mini); an answer from the large model (GPT-4.1) uses ten times the quota. A page is 2,500 characters of cleaned text from the company's website or files. Extra packs of 5,000 messages cost US$59 a month. Every self-serve plan starts with a 7-day trial that requires a credit card. Yearly billing is about 34% to 40% cheaper than monthly billing.", "rows": [ [ "Starter", "39", "59", "1 chatbot, 4,000 messages a month, 1,000 pages" ], [ "Growth", "79", "129", "2 chatbots, 10,000 messages a month, 10,000 pages, API" ], [ "Scale", "259", "429", "3 chatbots, 40,000 messages a month, 50,000 pages, webhooks" ], [ "Enterprise", "custom", "custom", "up to 500,000 pages, custom integrations, HIPAA agreement" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 31 December 2025", "value": "US$15,800", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X on 1 January 2026: he ended the year at US$15,800 MRR, almost double the start of the year.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, 18 December 2025", "value": "US$190,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X. This is the headline figure of this page. US$15,800 times 12 is US$189,600, so the two posts agree.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 25 February 2026", "value": "more than US$20,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X, quoted by the Arrfounder directory. The post itself could not be opened on 12 October 2026, so this value is not verified on this page. It would be US$240,000 a year.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in calendar year 2024", "value": "US$251,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X, 30 December 2024. His total 2024 income was US$524,000: SiteGPT US$251,000, Feather US$22,000 before its sale, and the Feather sale US$251,000.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Average SiteGPT revenue per month in 2024", "value": "about US$20,900", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 251,000 divided by 12. Higher than the MRR of that year because it includes yearly plans paid up front and one-time charges.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, expenses and profit, June 2024", "value": "US$15,801 revenue, US$4,271 expenses, US$11,530 profit, 73% margin", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's monthly update on X, 1 July 2024. MRR was US$11,700 at that time, growing 4% a month.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 1 January 2025", "value": "US$8,200", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X. He had closed new sign-ups more than three months earlier and MRR had been falling since.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, expenses and churn, August 2025", "value": "US$10,183 revenue, US$2,230 expenses, MRR growth 8%, churn under 5%", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's monthly update on X, 1 September 2025. Churn is the share of customers who cancel in a month.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, August 2025", "value": "about 78%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: (10,183 minus 2,230) divided by 10,183.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "MRR growth during 2025", "value": "about 1.9 times, from US$8,200 to US$15,800", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 15,800 divided by 8,200. The founder writes almost doubled.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to US$10,000 MRR", "value": "25 days", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 30 March 2023 to 24 April 2023, the date of the post Crossed $10k now.", "src": [ 7, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Churn after the launch month", "value": "about half of customers", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview, October 2023: US$10,000 MRR in the first month and US$5,000 of churn the next month.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, October 2023", "value": "about US$15,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview with Starter Story, six months after launch.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Website visitors in the first five days", "value": "more than 40,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X with a traffic chart, 4 April 2023. About 15,000 on launch day according to his interview.", "src": [ 9, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Show HN post, 1 April 2023", "value": "118 points, 96 comments, front page", "grade": "C", "note": "Read from the Hacker News search API. The front-page claim is the founder's.", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "fact": "Product Hunt launch, 5 April 2023", "value": "667 upvotes on the product page today; number 2 of the day in the founder's post that morning", "grade": "C", "note": "Later case studies write number 1 of the day. The founder's own post that morning says number 2 with the top entries very close. This page does not settle it.", "src": [ 14, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Paying customers and revenue per customer, January 2026", "value": "about 130 businesses at about US$100 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in a video interview, summarized by Superframeworks. Lifetime value US$1,700 to US$1,800 per customer, which is 17 to 18 months at US$100.", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "fact": "Total revenue since launch, early 2026", "value": "more than US$500,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Same interview. Consistent with US$251,000 in 2024 alone.", "src": [ 12, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Free tools built for search traffic", "value": "more than 50", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder: about 90% of Google traffic lands on these tools, about 50,000 visits a month give 200 leads, 60 trials, and 25% to 40% of trials pay.", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "fact": "Sale of the previous product Feather, 2024", "value": "US$251,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X, 30 December 2024. Feather was at about US$6,000 MRR, so the price was about 3.5 times its yearly revenue.", "src": [ 3, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder statements throughout. Two brothers, no employees.", "src": [ 2, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Latka's revenue estimate, June 2024", "value": "US$300,000 a year", "grade": "C", "note": "A third-party estimate, marked as such. Higher than the founder's 2024 revenue of US$251,000.", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the December 2025 figure", "value": "33 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: March 2023 to December 2025.", "src": [ 2, 7 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2021 to 2022", "what": "Pachipulusu leaves a software job after eight months, moves back to his parents' house in Andhra Pradesh to have no expenses, and builds Feather, a Notion-to-blog tool, to about US$4,000 to US$6,000 MRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10, 12 ] }, { "when": "15 March 2023", "what": "He posts that he will try to build a new AI project that weekend, because he feels behind on everything related to AI. The idea: his 100 Feather customers all have blogs, so let visitors chat with the blog.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 10 ] }, { "when": "27 March 2023", "what": "Paddle, the payment processor, approves his account. He builds the first version in two to three weeks with one feature: paste a website address, get a chatbot. No free plan, prices set high in case the model bills were large.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 10 ] }, { "when": "30 March 2023", "what": "Launch with one post on X to about 10,000 followers, paywall already in place. First customers within the hour, about 15,000 visitors on the day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 10 ] }, { "when": "1 to 5 April 2023", "what": "Show HN reaches the front page with 118 points. A denial-of-service attack hits both products the same day. 40,000 visitors in five days. He launches on Product Hunt without a plan and reaches number 2, later reported as number 1.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 13, 14 ] }, { "when": "24 April 2023", "what": "Crossed US$10,000 MRR, 25 days after launch. The next month about half of the customers cancel.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 10 ] }, { "when": "October 2023", "what": "About US$15,000 MRR, six months after launch. He writes that the hype brought curious buyers and that real businesses only started to sign up after it ended.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "13 June 2024", "what": "His elder brother Sai Dheeraj leaves his job and joins as co-founder. June revenue US$15,801, profit US$11,530, MRR US$11,700.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 18, 6 ] }, { "when": "Late 2024", "what": "Feather is sold for US$251,000. New sign-ups to SiteGPT are closed for more than three months, and MRR drifts down.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "when": "1 January 2025", "what": "MRR US$8,200. He sets a goal of US$1 million ARR, which needs about 10 times the current MRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "April 2025", "what": "After two years without growth, the brothers try to sell. Only one buyer appears, at a much lower price. At signing time they refuse, shut down every other side project, and work only on SiteGPT.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "10 August 2025", "what": "Back to US$10,000 MRR for the third time. Churn under 5% by the end of the month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 19, 5 ] }, { "when": "28 October to 5 December 2025", "what": "US$13,000, then US$14,000, then US$15,000 MRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 20, 1 ] }, { "when": "18 December 2025", "what": "US$190,000 ARR. Two people building, coding and growing.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "1 January 2026", "what": "Year ends at US$15,800 MRR, almost double January 2025.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "25 February 2026", "what": "More than US$20,000 MRR, which he attributes to a new side product, MissionControlHQ. Quoted by a directory; the post itself could not be opened.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Speed, with a paywall on day one", "text": "OpenAI released the ChatGPT API on 1 March 2023. SiteGPT launched on 30 March with one feature and no free plan. The founder wrote that every day of delay he saw a similar product appear. The first week brought US$10,000 of monthly revenue because the launch post, Show HN and Product Hunt all hit in five days. He says himself that this cannot be repeated on demand." }, { "title": "Engineering as marketing", "text": "After the launch spike, the growth channel was free web tools: a sitemap generator, a meta-tag checker, a PDF-to-Markdown converter, an FAQ generator, more than 50 in all. Each targets a Google keyword with low competition, and each ends with a link to SiteGPT. By 2026 these tools brought about 90% of Google traffic, about 50,000 visits a month, and the paid product had no advertising budget. With a coding assistant, a new tool now takes about five minutes." }, { "title": "Reuse of an existing customer list", "text": "The first users were the roughly 100 paying customers of Feather, who all ran blogs. The product was a feature for them before it was a company." }, { "title": "Retention before growth", "text": "Three times the product fell back below US$10,000 MRR. The recovery in 2025 came from working on churn, not on sign-ups: closing new sign-ups for three months, talking to customers, and getting churn under 5% a month before trying new positioning." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's posts on X and his interviews. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Built in two to three weeks in March 2023 as a side feature of Feather, with one function: crawl a website and answer questions from its text with the OpenAI API.", "Paddle as the payment processor and merchant of record, so a founder in India could charge customers worldwide. Account approval took a few weeks and delayed the launch.", "No free plan from the first day, because the founder says he cannot convert free users to paid. Prices were set high in case the model bills were large.", "The launch broke the servers. The founder spent two days rewriting code for the traffic, and Cloudflare reported a denial-of-service attack on the second day.", "Pricing is metered on three things: chatbots, pages of content, and messages a month. Answers from the large model count ten times as much against the message limit.", "Marketing is more than 50 free tools on the company site, generated from a template with a coding assistant, plus the founder's monthly revenue posts on X. No paid advertising.", "Team of two brothers, no employees. The second brother joined in June 2024." ], "src": [ 7, 10, 12, 15, 18 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised a computer that answers a question asked in plain language. All four needed hand-written answers or custom models. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Ask Jeeves", "years": "1996 to 2007", "funding": "US$50M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Ask the web a question in plain English instead of keywords.", "died": "Human editors wrote the answers, so cost grew with every new question. Google answered with an algorithm at no marginal cost. The natural-language interface was dropped in 2006.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/10-ask-jeeves" }, { "name": "Tellme", "years": "1999 to 2011", "funding": "US$238M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Ask for stock prices, weather and services by voice over the phone, with no human operator.", "died": "Every answer path was built by hand. Smartphone apps and the voice assistants of Google and Apple replaced it. Microsoft bought it in 2007 and phased it out.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/612-tellme" }, { "name": "VocalIQ", "years": "2011 to 2017", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A dialogue system that understands context and improves with use.", "died": "It could not compete with the voice teams of Apple, Google and Amazon. Apple bought it in 2015 and folded the technology into Siri.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/719-vocaliq" }, { "name": "AllHere", "years": "2016 to 2024", "funding": "US$13M", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "An AI chatbot that talks to families in many languages to reduce school absence.", "died": "It built custom language models before GPT and had to keep paying engineers to maintain them. The chatbot misunderstood parents, and a data breach and fraud charges ended the company.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2306-allhere" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Before 2023, a program that answered questions needed its answers written or modelled by people. Ask Jeeves paid editors per question. Tellme built every voice menu by hand. AllHere trained its own models and could not keep up with them. In each case the cost of adding one more question grew with the size of the knowledge.", "A rented language model removed that cost. SiteGPT reads a website once and the model composes the answer to any question. One engineer built it in two to three weeks, as a side feature, and sold it with a paywall from the first hour. AllHere is the sharpest contrast: it raised US$13 million for custom models and closed in 2024, while SiteGPT ran at a 73% to 78% margin on a model it does not own." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The launch, no. The acquisition method, yes.", "text": "Chatbots trained on a website were copied hundreds of times in 2023, and SiteGPT itself was nearly sold in 2025 because it had not grown for two years. The part worth copying is cheap acquisition: free tools that rank on Google for low-competition keywords and point at the paid product. That method works for any business software and costs nothing but time.", "steps": [ "Build the first version as a feature for customers you already have, then make it a product if strangers want it too.", "Launch with a paywall and no free plan; price high enough that the model bills cannot surprise you.", "Find keywords with low difficulty and real search volume, build one small free tool per keyword, and end every tool with a link to the paid product.", "When growth stops, measure churn before you buy more sign-ups. Under 5% a month is the founder's target.", "Post revenue, expenses and churn every month in public. The posts are the marketing, and they are also the source for pages like this one." ], "open": "A support chatbot for one industry with the integrations that industry needs, for example clinics, property managers, or online shops in one country. SiteGPT sells the generic version; the vertical version is still open, as the Chatbase page also notes." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Numbers only from the founder", "text": "Every revenue figure here is from his posts on X or interviews. Two of the posts, the US$140,000 ARR post of September 2025 and the US$20,000 MRR post of February 2026, could not be opened on 12 October 2026 and are known only from a directory's quotation." }, { "title": "Growth is slow", "text": "The product reached US$10,000 MRR in 25 days and US$15,800 MRR after 33 months. The founder's goal of US$1 million ARR needs more than five times the current revenue. He wrote in September 2025 that something needs to change for SiteGPT to become a US$1 million business." }, { "title": "A crowded category with cheap copies", "text": "Chatbase sells the same product at about US$10 million ARR, and Intercom and Zendesk bundle AI agents into their support suites. A Show HN post in 2024 advertised a 10 times cheaper alternative to SiteGPT." }, { "title": "Free-tool traffic can be diluted", "text": "Any founder with a coding assistant can now build the same free tools in minutes. Google rankings for low-competition keywords are the whole acquisition channel." }, { "title": "Product Hunt rank is uncertain", "text": "The founder's own post on launch morning says number 2 of the day. Later case studies say number 1. This page does not know which is right." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://sitegpt.ai/" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/sitegpt" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Bhanu Teja P on X, 1 January 2026: Ended the year with $15.8k MRR", "url": "https://x.com/pbteja1998/status/2006676983024071147", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Founder's own post. Source for the year-end MRR." }, { "title": "Bhanu Teja P on X, 18 December 2025: Can't believe SiteGPT is actually at $190k ARR now", "url": "https://x.com/pbteja1998/status/2001757078264877136", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Founder's own post. Source for the headline ARR, the near-sale in April 2025 and the team of two." }, { "title": "Bhanu Teja P on X, 30 December 2024: 2024 revenue, SiteGPT $251k, Feather acquisition $251k", "url": "https://x.com/pbteja1998/status/1873663403245412430", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Source for the 2024 revenue and the Feather sale price." }, { "title": "Bhanu Teja P on X, 1 January 2025: My goal for 2025 is to get to $1M ARR", "url": "https://x.com/pbteja1998/status/1874439566708580804", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Source for the US$8,200 MRR and the closed sign-ups." }, { "title": "Bhanu Teja P on X, 1 September 2025: August 2025 update for SiteGPT.ai", "url": "https://x.com/pbteja1998/status/1962388042792251459", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Source for the August 2025 revenue, expenses, growth and churn." }, { "title": "Bhanu Teja P on X, 1 July 2024: June 2024 update for SiteGPT.ai", "url": "https://x.com/pbteja1998/status/1807676777575379334", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Source for the June 2024 revenue, expenses, profit and MRR." }, { "title": "Bhanu Teja P on X, 15 to 30 March 2023: the posts before and at launch, ending with Finally launching SiteGPT.ai", "url": "https://x.com/pbteja1998/status/1641448570569015296", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the launch post and the five posts before it (15, 27, 29 and 30 March) through the fxtwitter API. Source for the launch date, the Paddle approval and the paywall." }, { "title": "Bhanu Teja P on X, 24 April 2023: Crossed $10k now", "url": "https://x.com/pbteja1998/status/1650586632444149763", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Three words and a date; the US$10,000 MRR meaning is confirmed by the Starter Story interview." }, { "title": "Bhanu Teja P on X, 31 March to 5 April 2023: launch-week posts on traffic, the attack, Hacker News and Product Hunt", "url": "https://x.com/pbteja1998/status/1643289275096522756", "grade": "C", "how": "Read seven posts of that week through the fxtwitter API. Source for the 40,000 visitors, the denial-of-service attack and the Product Hunt rank that morning." }, { "title": "Starter Story, 8 October 2023: How my AI side project grew to $15K MRR in just a few months", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/sitegpt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview in his own words. Source for the origin in Feather, the build time, the pricing decisions, the launch-day visitors, the churn and the October 2023 MRR." }, { "title": "Arrfounder, 25 February 2026: SiteGPT crosses $20K MRR, quoting the founder's post", "url": "https://arrfounder.com/news/sitegpt-crosses-20k-mrr", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's post of 25 February 2026 could not be opened on X (fxtwitter returned 404 on 12 October 2026), so the US$20,000 figure is cited from this directory's quotation and marked not verified. The same directory quotes the US$140,000 ARR post of 16 September 2025." }, { "title": "Superframeworks case study, 10 January 2026: $13K MRR, engineering as marketing masterclass", "url": "https://superframeworks.com/case-study/sitegpt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Summarizes a video interview with the founder. Source for the customer count, revenue per customer, lifetime value, total revenue, the free-tools funnel and the founder's background." }, { "title": "Hacker News search API record of the Show HN post, 1 April 2023", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35404852", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the API record (hn.algolia.com), not the discussion. Source for the 118 points and 96 comments." }, { "title": "Product Hunt product page for SiteGPT, read 12 October 2026", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/sitegpt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page text. Source for the 667 upvotes and the 2023 launch." }, { "title": "SiteGPT pricing page, read 12 October 2026", "url": "https://sitegpt.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The page carries the prices in plain text, including the yearly totals. Source for the pricing table and the message and page limits." }, { "title": "Latka company page: SiteGPT revenue 2024, estimate", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/sitegpt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A third-party estimate of US$300,000 a year for June 2024, plus the founding year and the city, Nellore." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." }, { "title": "Bhanu Teja P on X, 13 June 2024: on his brother joining SiteGPT", "url": "https://x.com/pbteja1998/status/1801346064412536870", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Source for the date the brother joined as co-founder." }, { "title": "Bhanu Teja P on X, 10 August 2025: Finally got SiteGPT.ai back to $10k MRR (again)", "url": "https://x.com/pbteja1998/status/1954489670638989471", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Source for the third return to US$10,000 MRR and the churn target." }, { "title": "Bhanu Teja P on X, 28 October, 25 November and 5 December 2025: crossed $13k, $14k and $15k MRR", "url": "https://x.com/pbteja1998/status/1983070404261581031", "grade": "C", "how": "Read all three posts through the fxtwitter API. Source for the autumn 2025 milestones." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/rytr/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/rytr.md", "slug": "rytr", "name": "Rytr", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI writing assistant", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-12", "launchLabel": "13 April 2021", "outcomeLabel": "Sold for an undisclosed price after a US$1M a year run rate, October 2022", "sticker": "Sold after $1M ARR", "outcomeUsd": 1000000, "months": 18, "teamLabel": "2 founders and 1 employee at US$1M ARR", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Price", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "search", "trend": "sold", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 2, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2C", "Marketing content" ], "product": "A web page where a user picks a use case (blog outline, product description, email, ad text), a tone and a language, types a few words, and gets a short text written by GPT-3. The free plan gives a monthly character limit; paid plans remove it. Rytr sells the output of OpenAI's model with a simpler interface and a much lower price than the other AI writing tools of 2021.", "why": "It entered an existing market with a lower price (US$29 a month for unlimited use, later US$9) and a simpler interface, sold the first customers through AppSumo, and put all marketing effort into search engine ranking, an affiliate program and a reward for reviews. It reached about US$1 million a year in revenue in seven months with three people, and a competitor bought it 18 months after launch.", "summary": [ "Rytr is an AI writing assistant: a web tool that sends a short instruction to a language model and returns a draft text for a given purpose, such as a blog outline, a product description or an email. It was built on GPT-3, the text model that OpenAI opened to developers through an API in 2020. Rytr adds a form with more than 40 use cases, 20 tones and about 30 languages, formats the request before it goes to the model and cleans the answer that comes back, so the user never writes a prompt.", "Abhimanyu (Abhi) Godara, a former strategy consultant and seed investor, built it with co-founder Atul Yadav and one employee. They launched on 1 April 2021 to private groups and on 13 April 2021 on AppSumo, a site that sells lifetime deals on software; the first day brought about 100 users and US$500. In November 2021 Godara told Starter Story that Rytr made US$83,333 a month, which is a US$1 million annual recurring revenue (ARR: the current monthly subscription revenue multiplied by twelve), with more than 300,000 users and a three-person team. The home page counted 30,000 users in August 2021, 800,000 in February 2022 and 2,000,000 in September 2022. On 6 October 2022 Copysmith, a funded competitor from Alabama, announced that it had bought Rytr together with Frase; the price was not disclosed.", "The headline number is a founder statement, grade C. The sale is confirmed by the buyer's press release, grade B, but without a price, so the page does not give a sale value. Rytr still runs as a product inside Copysmith in 2026 and its page claims 8,000,000 users. The page also shows what happened to earlier companies that sold writing and marketing software to small businesses." ], "factsCaption": "A US$1 million a year run rate seven months after launch, then an undisclosed sale 18 months after launch; the revenue is self-reported, the sale is confirmed by the buyer", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade B value is a statement by the acquirer in its press release. A grade C value is a founder statement in an interview, a number on the company's own website, or a third-party estimate that says so. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A: no payment processor, filing or buyer has published a revenue figure or a price.", "timelineLead": "From an AppSumo deal to a sale to a competitor in 18 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Rytr prices in October 2026, from the company's pricing page (grade C). The yearly column is what the page shows; the monthly column is calculated", "note": "The pricing page shows the yearly plan as a price per month with two months free, so the monthly price is the yearly price per month times 12 divided by 10: US$9 and US$29. The monthly toggle on the page loads by script and could not be read directly. The same US$9 and US$29 monthly prices appeared on the home page in February 2022, and the first paid plan in August 2021 was US$29 a month for unlimited use. The customer does not pay OpenAI separately; model usage is included.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "10,000 characters a month, 1 language" ], [ "Unlimited", "7.50", "9", "unlimited generation, 1 tone match, 50 plagiarism checks a month" ], [ "Premium", "24.16", "29", "unlimited generation, multiple tone matches, 35+ languages, 100 plagiarism checks a month" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue per month, November 2021", "value": "US$83,333", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview on Starter Story, 28 November 2021. The profile shows US$83.3K revenue a month, 2 founders and 1 employee. In the text he says seven figures in ARR.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, November 2021", "value": "about US$1 million", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$83,333 times 12 is US$999,996. This is the headline figure of the page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Sale to Copysmith", "value": "announced 6 October 2022, price not disclosed", "grade": "B", "note": "Copysmith's press release, carried by MarTech Series and Digital Media Story. Preqin lists the deal as an add-on acquisition with no deal size. Tracxn dates it 7 October 2022.", "src": [ 2, 3, 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Users, October 2022", "value": "more than 2 million", "grade": "B", "note": "Buyer's press release, as carried by Digital Media Story: over 2 million writers, freelancers and marketers. The company's own home page showed 2,000,000+ in September 2022 (grade C).", "src": [ 3, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Users, November 2021", "value": "more than 300,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview. The home page showed 250,000+ on 4 November 2021.", "src": [ 1, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Users, March 2023", "value": "close to 5 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on the Napier podcast, 13 March 2023. The home page showed 5,000,000+ on 2 March 2023.", "src": [ 7, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Team at US$1 million ARR", "value": "3 people", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview: 2 founders, 1 employee, a small 3-member team. Tracxn names the founders as Abhi Godara and Atul Yadav.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Tracxn: has not raised any funding rounds. Latka: bootstrapped. The founder says the venture was profitable and self-sustaining in November 2021.", "src": [ 6, 13, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly growth, 2021", "value": "more than 50% a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview, November 2021. Not checked against any other source.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "First day on AppSumo, 13 April 2021", "value": "about 100 users and about US$500 of sales", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Latka's revenue estimate for 2025", "value": "US$1.2 million a year, 11 employees", "grade": "C", "note": "A third-party estimate, marked as such, for the product inside Copysmith. Headcount from LinkedIn.", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the sale", "value": "18 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: April 2021 to October 2022. The press release also says within a span of 18 months since launch.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2007 to 2020", "what": "Godara works five years as a strategy consultant at a Big Four firm in London, then as an early-stage investor at a seed fund in India, then runs a venture studio and a chatbot platform for creators.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "2020", "what": "GPT-3 opens to developers. While using it in the chatbot project, Godara tries the existing AI writing tools and finds them expensive and hard to use.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "when": "March to April 2021", "what": "The team sketches the interface in Figma and builds the first version. Launch to private communities on 1 April 2021.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "13 April 2021", "what": "Public launch through an AppSumo deal. About 100 users and US$500 of sales on day one.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "4 August 2021", "what": "The home page counts 30,000+ users. Free plan 5,000 characters a month; unlimited plan US$29 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "4 November 2021", "what": "Home page: 250,000+ users.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "28 November 2021", "what": "Founder interview: US$83,333 a month, seven figures in ARR, more than 300,000 users, growth above 50% a month, three people, profitable.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "27 February 2022", "what": "Home page: 800,000+ users. A new US$9 a month plan with 50,000 characters sits between the free plan and the US$29 unlimited plan.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "2 September 2022", "what": "Home page: 2,000,000+ users; the browser extension has 10,000+ installs.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "6 October 2022", "what": "Copysmith announces that it has bought Rytr and Frase and groups the three brands as Copyrytr. Price not disclosed. Godara is quoted in the release as CEO of Rytr.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "when": "13 March 2023", "what": "Godara on the Napier podcast: close to 5 million customers. The home page shows 5,000,000+ on 2 March 2023.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 12 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "Rytr still runs as a Copysmith product. The pricing page claims 8,000,000+ users; Latka estimates US$1.2 million a year of revenue and 11 employees.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14, 13 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Price", "text": "In 2021 the other GPT-3 writing tools charged more and limited output by word count. Rytr sold unlimited generation for US$29 a month, and in 2022 added a US$9 plan. The founder says the product was aimed at early-stage users and small teams without a budget for the more expensive tools. The low price was possible because the team was three people and the model was rented from OpenAI by the call." }, { "title": "AppSumo first", "text": "The first public sale was a deal on AppSumo, a site whose users buy software at a discount and leave detailed reviews. It brought paying customers, cash and feedback on day one, and the founder personally sent a welcome email to each buyer." }, { "title": "Search ranking, affiliates and reviews instead of ads", "text": "From the first day the team wrote pages for the search queries it wanted to rank for and asked bloggers who reviewed similar tools for links; after six months it ranked on the first page for most of them. A reward of credits for leaving a review and an affiliate program with a commission turned users into promoters. The founder says he picked only two channels on purpose." }, { "title": "The form instead of the prompt", "text": "Rytr hides the model behind a form: use case, tone, language, a few words of input. The team formats the request before it reaches GPT-3 and formats the answer afterwards, and limits how much a user can generate in one step so the user reads and edits the output. That interface, not the model, is what the company owned." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's interviews and the company's own pages. They are grade C.", "items": [ "The text comes from OpenAI's GPT-3 through its API. Rytr adds its own prompt formatting on the way in and post-processing on the way out, with use-case templates refined over time.", "Payments through Stripe; email through SendGrid; support chat through Crisp; analytics with Google Analytics and Hotjar from day one; affiliate tracking with Rewardful; design mock-ups in Figma.", "A drip email series over the first two weeks after sign-up nudges free users to pay.", "A free plan with a character limit, then one or two paid plans. The unlimited plan was US$29 a month from launch; a US$9 plan arrived by February 2022.", "Features added over time: a readability score, a built-in plagiarism checker, a browser extension, team sharing and document management.", "Three people until at least November 2021: two founders and one employee." ], "src": [ 1, 7, 8, 10, 14 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold writing or marketing software to writers and small businesses before language models could write the text. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Metigy", "years": "2014 to 2022", "funding": "US$14M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "An AI marketing brain for small businesses.", "died": "Small businesses did not want recommendations to act on; they wanted the work done for them. The money went into generic insights that nobody used.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2338-metigy" }, { "name": "Draft", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A minimal cloud editor for writers with version control.", "died": "Google Docs covered the need for free. A narrow writing tool with a freemium plan could not pay for itself.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1605-draft" }, { "name": "Pressly", "years": "2011 to 2018", "funding": "US$2.9M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Content curation to keep a brand relevant with less effort.", "died": "Larger marketing suites added curation as one feature among many, and Pressly never grew beyond it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/462-pressly" }, { "name": "Wavii", "years": "2009 to 2013", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A news feed written by natural language processing.", "died": "Bought by Google before it found a way to earn money. The technology was interesting; the business was not.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/727-wavii" }, { "name": "WriteWith", "years": "2007 to 2010", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Group writing in the browser.", "died": "Google Docs shipped the same thing, free, with no funding to answer it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1237-writewith" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The five earlier companies either built writing tools whose core function a free product from Google soon matched, or sold marketing intelligence that small businesses did not have the time to act on. In both cases the product helped a person write or decide; the person still did the work.", "GPT-3 changed what a three-person company could sell: the text itself, for a few dollars a month, with the model rented by the call and no research team. Rytr's bet was that a cheap, simple layer on top of a rented model would find millions of users before the model's owner or a funded competitor took the market. It found two million in 18 months and was sold to a funded competitor, Copysmith, a month before ChatGPT appeared in November 2022 and made plain text generation free for everyone." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The timing, no.", "text": "A new model API in 2021 left room for a cheaper, simpler product in a market that already existed, and the sale closed just before free chat interfaces removed the price advantage. The method is still available: a form that hides the prompt, an AppSumo launch, search pages and affiliates instead of ads, and a price well under the incumbents, with a company small enough to live on it.", "steps": [ "Enter an existing AI product category with a lower price and a simpler interface, not a new category.", "Sell the first version on a deal site to get paying customers and public reviews on the first day.", "Pick two marketing channels only, for example search ranking and an affiliate program, and write every page for a query you want to rank for.", "Keep the team at two or three people so the low price still leaves a profit, and sell before the model owner makes the basic use case free." ], "open": "Any new model API whose first products are priced for agencies: voice, video, image and code generation tools where a US$9 plan with a form interface does not yet exist." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Self-reported revenue and no price", "text": "The US$83,333 a month comes from one founder interview in November 2021, with no later revenue figure before the sale. The buyer did not disclose a price, so the value of the exit is unknown; the page shows the last public revenue figure instead." }, { "title": "Users are not customers", "text": "All the large numbers, from 30,000 to 8 million, are counts of people who signed up, mostly on the free plan. The founder's 300,000 figure in November 2021 is also a sign-up count. No source gives the number of paying subscribers." }, { "title": "The model owner can make the product free", "text": "ChatGPT launched in November 2022, one month after the sale, and gives the same plain text generation for nothing. A layer on top of a rented model has no cost advantage over the model's owner." }, { "title": "A crowded category", "text": "Tracxn counts 473 active competitors for Rytr. The price fell from US$29 to US$9 within a year, and Latka's 2025 estimate of US$1.2 million a year, if right, is close to the 2021 run rate." }, { "title": "The acquirer's own position", "text": "Copysmith is a funded competitor in the same category and faces the same pressure from free tools. Rytr's future depends on its owner, not on its founders." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://rytr.me/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Starter Story, 28 November 2021: I Built A Simple AI Writing Tool That Makes $60K/Year", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/i-built-a-simple-ai-writing-tool-that-makes-60k-year", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full (the public part of the article). Founder interview with a profile box showing US$83.3K revenue a month, 2 founders and 1 employee. Source for the launch dates, the AppSumo day, the user count, the growth rate, the team size and the tools used. The page title says US$60K a year, which contradicts the body; this page uses the body." }, { "title": "MarTech Series, 6 October 2022: Copysmith Announces Acquisition of Frase & Rytr, Launches Copyrytr", "url": "https://martechseries.com/content/content-marketing/copysmith-announces-acquisition-of-frase-rytr-launches-copyrytr/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The buyer's press release with quotes from both CEOs. Source for the sale, the 18 months since launch and millions of creators. No price." }, { "title": "Digital Media Story, 6 October 2022: Copysmith Acquires Popular AI Content Tools Frase & Rytr", "url": "https://digitalmediastory.com/copysmith-acquires-frase-rytr/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Carries the press release with the About Rytr paragraph: over 2 million writers, freelancers and marketers." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 8 October 2022: (News) Frase & Rytr Acquired by Copysmith AI!", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/news-frase-rytr-acquired-by-copysmith-ai-2070049f2c", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A community repost of the press release." }, { "title": "Preqin company profile: Rytr LLC", "url": "https://www.preqin.com/data/profile/asset/rytr-llc/514604", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Gives Wilmington, Delaware as headquarters and lists one completed add-on deal by Copysmith on 6 October 2022 with the deal size left blank." }, { "title": "Tracxn company profile: Rytr", "url": "https://tracxn.com/d/companies/rytr/__HOCvuIDiKJVareX0OVnJlDAPrjiz0twZ64SjvgkJIio", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public part. Source for the two founders' names, no funding rounds, the 7 October 2022 acquisition date and the competitor count." }, { "title": "Napier B2B podcast, 13 March 2023: A Napier Podcast Interview with Abhi Godara, Rytr", "url": "https://www.napierb2b.com/2023/03/a-napier-podcast-interview-with-abhi-godara-rytr/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the transcript in full. Source for the founder's background, the GPT-3 timing, the close to 5 million customers and how the product formats prompts and outputs." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine, rytr.me home page, 4 August 2021", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20210804085117/https://rytr.me/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Shows 30,000+ users, the 5,000-character free plan and the US$29 a month unlimited plan." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine, rytr.me home page, 4 November 2021", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20211104192022/https://rytr.me/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Shows 250,000+ users." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine, rytr.me home page, 27 February 2022", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20220227204611/https://rytr.me/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Shows 800,000+ users and the US$9 and US$29 plans." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine, rytr.me home page, 2 September 2022", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20220902051851/https://rytr.me/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Shows 2,000,000+ users and 10,000+ extension installs, a month before the sale." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine, rytr.me home page, 2 March 2023", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20230302032123/https://rytr.me/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Shows 5,000,000+ users." }, { "title": "Latka company page: Rytr revenue 2025, estimate", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/rytr.me", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A third-party estimate of US$1.2 million a year for July 2025 and a headcount of 11 from LinkedIn." }, { "title": "Rytr pricing page, read 12 October 2026", "url": "https://rytr.me/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the current plans, the yearly prices and the 8,000,000+ claim. The monthly prices are calculated from the two-months-free rule stated on the page." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/talknotes/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/talknotes.md", "slug": "talknotes", "name": "Talknotes", "country": "France", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI voice-note to text app", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "B", "added": "2026-10-12", "launchLabel": "14 August 2023", "outcomeLabel": "Sold for US$200K, July 2024", "sticker": "Sold for $200K", "outcomeUsd": 200000, "months": 11, "teamLabel": "1 founder, no employees", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Paid ads", "group": "voice-audio", "channel": "paid-ads", "trend": "sold", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 2, "copyable": 3, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2C", "Productivity" ], "product": "You speak into your phone or browser. Talknotes transcribes the recording with a speech-to-text model and rewrites it in a style you pick: a clean transcript, a short note, a task list, a formal email, a blog post or a video script. It works in more than 50 languages and exports to text, email or a link.", "why": "A marketer who had learned to code one year earlier built it in a week, found that paid ads could buy customers for about US$50 each with a yearly plan that paid the ad bill up front, and sold the business for cash eleven months after launch, when the bugs and the support load became more than one person wanted to carry.", "summary": [ "Talknotes is a voice-note app: a program that records what you say, turns the audio into text, and then rewrites that text into a usable document. The transcription uses Whisper, OpenAI's speech-to-text model, which the founder called through the OpenAI API, a paid interface that lets one program send audio to another company's model and get text back. A second model call turns the raw transcript into the style the user picked. Because each note costs the company money at the model provider, the product is sold as a subscription.", "Nico Jeannen, a French marketer who had managed more than US$1 million of ad spend for clients before he learned to code in 2022, built the first version in about one week and showed it on X on 14 August 2023. It made US$1,500 in the first 20 days from startup directories and his X followers, fell to almost nothing when he replaced one-time passes with subscriptions, reached US$100 a month of recurring revenue on 22 September 2023, and US$2,000 a month in November 2023 after a first place of the day on Product Hunt. Facebook ads then became the main sales channel. In April 2024 he reported about US$5,000 a month in revenue, US$4,000 of it recurring, from more than 900 paying customers.", "In May 2024 he listed the business on Acquire.com, a marketplace for small software companies, after a day of bugs cut sales by 71% and burned him out. He accepted US$200,000 in cash rather than wait for a higher offer with conditions. Acquire.com, which ran the sale, confirmed the all-cash price in September 2024, which is why the headline number is grade B. The monthly revenue figures are the founder's own, grade C. The buyer has not been named in public, and the product is still sold at talknotes.io under new owners." ], "factsCaption": "A one-week prototype that reached about US$7,500 a month in recurring revenue and sold for US$200,000 in cash after eleven months, with the price confirmed by the marketplace that ran the deal", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade B value was confirmed by Acquire.com, the marketplace that listed the business and handled the sale. A grade C value is a founder statement in his blog, his X posts or an interview, or a secondary account that quotes him. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A.", "timelineLead": "From a bad experience with the dictation feature in Google Docs to a US$200,000 wire transfer in eleven months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Talknotes prices in October 2026, read from the company's pricing page, with the pre-sale prices of July 2024 from the Wayback Machine for comparison (grade C)", "note": "Today there is one plan with all features and a 7-day free trial. The yearly price is US$197, which is US$16.42 a month. In July 2024, just before the sale, the founder sold two plans, Plus at US$11.97 a month and Pro at US$49 a month, with notes limited to 20 minutes on Plus and a credit system for longer notes on Pro, and a launch offer of US$69.10 a year. The customer never pays the model provider; the company pays OpenAI for every note.", "rows": [ [ "Talknotes, all features, 2026", "16.42", "19.97", "unlimited notes, 2-hour recordings, iOS and Android" ], [ "Plus, July 2024", "5.76 (launch offer)", "11.97", "unlimited notes up to 20 minutes" ], [ "Pro, July 2024", "", "49", "credits for 2-hour notes, guest recorder link" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Sale price", "value": "US$200,000, all cash", "grade": "B", "note": "Acquire.com, the marketplace that listed the business, wrote on 19 September 2024 that he \"secured an all-cash $200,000 deal in weeks\". Its headline says US$250,000, its text says US$200,000; the founder's own posts say US$200,000.", "src": [ 1, 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue at the sale", "value": "about US$7,500 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's announcement post on X, quoted by No-Code Exits and SoFarBot: \"I took it from $0 to $7500 MRR in just 11 months.\" The original post could not be opened.", "src": [ 3, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Sale price as a multiple of yearly recurring revenue", "value": "about 2.2 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$7,500 times 12 is US$90,000 a year; US$200,000 divided by US$90,000 is 2.22.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Total sales before the sale", "value": "US$77,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in a Starter Story video interview, March 2025: Talknotes \"generated 77,000 of sales before I sold it for 200,000 last July\".", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month, April 2024", "value": "about US$5,000, of which US$4,000 recurring", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's Starter Story interview, 4 April 2024. More than 900 paying customers, recurring revenue growing about 10% a month, churn under 10%.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Cost to win one customer with ads", "value": "about US$50", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's Starter Story interview. He says the yearly plan, sold at a large discount, paid the ad cost up front.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Earlier offer refused", "value": "US$150,000 in cash at US$3,000 a month recurring", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's Starter Story interview, April 2024.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Sales in the first 20 days", "value": "US$1,500", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on the Talknotes blog and on Indie Hackers, 1 September 2023. Sold as one-year passes, one click to Stripe, no account.", "src": [ 7, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Cost to build the first version", "value": "under US$10", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's Starter Story interview: the only cost was OpenAI API calls during three or four days of coding.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder statements throughout. He reinvested only revenue from the product into ads.", "src": [ 4, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the sale", "value": "11 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: August 2023 to July 2024. The founder uses the same figure.", "src": [ 6, 3 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2022", "what": "Jeannen, a French marketer and former e-commerce seller who has managed more than US$1 million of ad spend, loses his main client, locks himself in a hotel room for two months and learns to code from an online course.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 13 ] }, { "when": "March 2023", "what": "He sells MakeLogo.ai, an AI logo generator built in 48 hours, for US$65,000 on Acquire.com three months after launch (his diary dates the sale March 2023; his Indie Page says February).", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 5 ] }, { "when": "August 2023", "what": "The dictation feature in Google Docs fails him while he drafts a post. He builds a voice-to-text prototype on Whisper in three or four days and a landing page in the rest of the week.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 2 ] }, { "when": "14 August 2023", "what": "Soft launch on X: more than 4,000 visitors and 800 sign-ups in the first days. He then submits the app to every startup directory he can find.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 2 ] }, { "when": "1 September 2023", "what": "US$1,500 in sales in 20 days, as one-year passes.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "September 2023", "what": "He replaces one-year passes with subscriptions, because transcription costs money every month. Sales fall from US$150 a day to zero. US$100 a month of recurring revenue on 22 September.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 2 ] }, { "when": "October to November 2023", "what": "First place of the day on Product Hunt. Recurring revenue goes from US$500 to US$2,000 a month in under a month. Most traffic now comes from Facebook and Google, not from his X account.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 8 ] }, { "when": "4 April 2024", "what": "About US$5,000 a month in revenue, more than 900 customers, ads as the main channel at about US$50 per customer. He has already refused a US$150,000 cash offer.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "17 April 2024", "what": "The demo on the landing page breaks and sales fall 71%. Two bugs in the mobile app lock out users for a day and Apple rejects the fix. He writes that he is burned out.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 2 ] }, { "when": "May 2024", "what": "He lists Talknotes on Acquire.com at US$200,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 14 ] }, { "when": "July 2024", "what": "The sale closes for US$200,000 in cash after a problem with the escrow service. He turns down a higher offer with conditions in order to close within weeks.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 1, 8, 3 ] }, { "when": "19 September 2024", "what": "Acquire.com publishes a podcast episode and a page on the sale, confirming the all-cash US$200,000 deal.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "17 August 2025", "what": "He writes that he has not built anything of note since the sale, that he has enough money to live for about 20 years, and that losing the pressure took away his purpose.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "2026", "what": "He builds AdKit, an ads research tool, back in the field he knows. Talknotes is still sold by its new owners at US$19.97 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 12 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A one-week product on a rented model", "text": "Whisper did the transcription and a second model call did the rewriting, so the product was a recording interface, a style picker and a payment form. The first version cost under US$10 in API calls. That is why the founder could afford to treat it as one of 17 experiments and drop it if the first week brought no sales." }, { "title": "Test with money, not sign-ups", "text": "The launch page had one button that went straight to Stripe for a one-year pass, no account needed. When free sign-ups were allowed for a few days in September 2023, there were many sign-ups and no sales, so he removed the free plan again. US$1,500 in 20 days was the signal to continue." }, { "title": "Subscriptions, because every note costs money", "text": "Each note is a paid API call, so a one-year pass would have left the company paying for users who had stopped paying it. The switch to subscriptions cut sales to zero for weeks and the founder describes that period as the hardest of his career, but recurring revenue is what made the business sellable." }, { "title": "Paid ads with a yearly plan that pays for them", "text": "His trade was Facebook ads. At about US$50 per customer, a monthly plan took months to pay back, so he sold a yearly plan at a steep discount. The yearly payment arrived up front and funded the next round of ads. Growth stopped depending on his X account, which he notes made the business worth more to a buyer." }, { "title": "Sell for cash before the cost of continuing rises", "text": "After the April 2024 outage he saw months of bug fixing and support ahead, the two jobs he did not want. He listed within weeks and took US$200,000 in cash rather than a larger offer with conditions. A comparable sale had worked for him once before, with MakeLogo.ai." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's blog diary, his X posts and his interviews. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Transcription by OpenAI's Whisper model through the API; a second model call rewrites the transcript in the chosen style. The founder describes the first version as a single index.js file and a user interface in front of it.", "First version in plain JavaScript, HTML and CSS with a Node backend. Rebuilt on Nuxt, a Vue framework, in early 2024, with the mobile app and the web app merged into one code base in March 2024.", "Payments by Stripe. The first product was a one-year pass, then a monthly subscription, then Plus and Pro plans with a credit system for notes longer than 20 minutes.", "iOS and Android apps. A bug in the mobile app in April 2024 could not be fixed quickly because the app gave no error messages or logs.", "Feature requests collected with Canny, a public request board, and most requested features were built. A welcome email asked every new user how they planned to use the app.", "Marketing: startup directories at launch, a Product Hunt launch two months later, then Facebook ads at US$30 to US$100 a day. SEO content brought three sales in total, and he dropped it.", "Coding help from Cursor, ChatGPT and Copilot; analytics with Plausible; email with Bento." ], "src": [ 4, 2, 9, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold voice or note-taking technology and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Tellme", "years": "1999 to 2011", "funding": "US$238M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Information and transactions by voice, over the telephone.", "died": "Speech recognition was weak and the telephony infrastructure was expensive. Smartphone apps with screens replaced voice menus. Microsoft bought it and shut it down.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/612-tellme" }, { "name": "VocalIQ", "years": "2011 to 2017", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A voice interface that understands context.", "died": "Apple, Google and Amazon built their own assistants with far more money. Apple bought the team and the product disappeared.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/719-vocaliq" }, { "name": "Voicery", "years": "2018 to 2021", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Natural-sounding text-to-speech for businesses.", "died": "Google, Amazon and Microsoft offered better speech synthesis at lower prices, bundled with their clouds. A small company could not charge a premium for its own model.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1004-voicery" }, { "name": "Transpose", "years": "2012 to 2018", "funding": "none recorded", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A flexible note-taking tool as an alternative to Evernote.", "died": "Charged US$14.99 to compete with Evernote with no funding and no reason for users to switch.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1849-transpose" }, { "name": "Storyline", "years": "2018 to 2021", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Build voice apps for Alexa without code.", "died": "Few people wanted voice apps, and the platform owners controlled the only way to make money from them.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1011-storyline" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Tellme, VocalIQ and Voicery built their own speech technology, which took tens of millions of dollars and still lost to the large companies' models. Talknotes built none. It rented Whisper for cents per note, so the model race was someone else's cost, and the whole product was the part the model providers do not sell: a recording button, a set of output styles and a subscription.", "Transpose and Storyline show the other risk, a product with no distribution. Talknotes had a founder whose trade was buying ads, and a price structure built around the cost of one ad-bought customer. That is also why the business could be sold: the buyer got an ad channel and a subscriber base, not a dependency on the founder's X account. What Talknotes did not have was a defense against the same model being available to everyone. The founder said in April 2024 that the same app could not be launched again because the novelty had worn off, and he sold three months later." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, if you can buy customers at a known price.", "text": "A voice-note app on a rented model is a weekend project in 2026, and the sale shows the ceiling: about two times yearly recurring revenue for a one-person product with ad-driven growth. The method is the part worth copying. Validate with a payment, price so that a yearly plan pays for the ad that brought the customer, and decide early whether the exit is the plan.", "steps": [ "Build the smallest product on a rented model in a week, and launch with one button that takes payment, not a free sign-up.", "Submit to every directory and post on your own channels to get a first signal of sales, then stop counting on that traffic.", "Switch to subscriptions as soon as the product has a per-use cost, and accept the sales dip.", "Run paid ads only when a discounted yearly plan can cover the cost of one customer up front.", "Keep the business separable from yourself: paid traffic, clean accounts, a public feature board. Then a marketplace sale is possible within weeks." ], "open": "Any narrow use of speech-to-text where the output format matters more than the transcript: inspections, field reports, medical or legal dictation with the right compliance, and languages that the big assistants serve badly." }, "watch": [ { "title": "The revenue figures are self-reported", "text": "The US$7,500 a month figure comes from the founder's own announcement, quoted by newsletters; the original post could not be opened. Only the sale price has outside confirmation, and that confirmation is from the marketplace that earned a fee on the deal." }, { "title": "The headline was inflated", "text": "Acquire.com's page title says US$250,000 and its text says US$200,000. SoFarBot's check reached the same conclusion. This page uses US$200,000." }, { "title": "Exact dates differ", "text": "One interview page says the sale closed in June 2024, the founder said \"last July\" in March 2025, and a newsletter reported the completed sale on 4 July 2024. This page uses July 2024." }, { "title": "The buyer is unknown", "text": "No source names the buyer. The product is still sold at talknotes.io, now with a Texas postal address on the site, at a higher price than before the sale." }, { "title": "A one-person business is one outage from a crisis", "text": "A broken demo and two mobile bugs cut sales by 71% in a day and led directly to the decision to sell. The founder says the profit was never measured exactly, only the ad cost per customer." }, { "title": "The founder's own account of life after the sale", "text": "A year later he wrote that he had done little since and had lost his sense of purpose. A cash exit solved his money problem and removed his reason to work." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://talknotes.io/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Acquire.com blog, 19 September 2024: Making $250k on His Second Sale on Acquire.com, Startup Acquisition Stories Ep #112", "url": "https://blog.acquire.com/startup-acquisition-episode-112/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the page text in full; the podcast audio was not listened to. The marketplace that listed and closed the sale confirms the all-cash US$200,000 deal, the 70% drop after the bug round and the listing reason." }, { "title": "Nico Jeannen's blog diary, 30 August 2023 onwards: TalkNotes, From $0 to $200,000 in 1 year", "url": "https://jeannen.com/blog/making-talknotes-io", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Dated diary entries from the launch to the sale note. Source for the directory strategy, the US$26 MRR, the US$2,000 MRR, the Facebook and Google traffic, the April 2024 outage and the US$200,000 note." }, { "title": "No-Code Exits newsletter, 25 September 2026: Nico Jeannen's $290K in Exits", "url": "https://nocodeexits.substack.com/p/three-exits-for-290000-then-a-year", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A secondary account that quotes the founder's sale post on X, including the US$7,500 MRR and the eleven months, and his post on life after the sale." }, { "title": "Starter Story, 4 April 2024: I Taught Myself To Code And Now Make $5K/Mo", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/talknotes-the-ai-voice-notes-app", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview in his own words. Source for the US$5,000 a month, the customer count, the ad cost, the refused offer, the Whisper prototype and the tech stack." }, { "title": "Starter Story video transcript, 31 March 2025: I Locked Myself In A Room, Made 17 Apps, and Sold 2 for $265,000", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/i-locked-myself-in-a-room-made-17-apps-sold-2-for-265-000", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the transcript sections on Talknotes and on his background. Source for the US$77,000 of sales before the sale and \"last July\"." }, { "title": "Nico Jeannen on X, 14 August 2023: Result of my soft launch for TalkNotes.io", "url": "https://x.com/nico_jeannen/status/1691035753088991232", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Source for the launch date, 4,000 visitors and 800 sign-ups." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers product page for TalkNotes: the founder's posts of 1, 18 and 22 September 2023", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/product/talknotes", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the US$1,500 in 20 days, the one-click Stripe pass, the switch to subscriptions, the fall from US$150 a day to zero and the US$100 MRR date." }, { "title": "NextFounder newsletter, 4 July 2024: From Idea to $200K, The Talknotes Success Story", "url": "https://nextfounder.substack.com/p/from-idea-to-200k-the-talknotes-success", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A secondary summary of the founder's account written days after the sale. Source for the May 2024 listing, the US$1,500 MRR at Product Hunt and the escrow problem." }, { "title": "Nico Jeannen on X, 18 April 2024: Yesterday was the worst day I had since I started making apps", "url": "https://x.com/nico_jeannen/status/1780923502465540272", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Source for the 71% sales drop, the mobile bugs, the Apple rejection and the 800 users." }, { "title": "Nico Jeannen on X, 17 August 2025: on the loss of purpose after selling Talknotes", "url": "https://x.com/nico_jeannen/status/1957054052204007817", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Source for the statement that the sale left him enough money for about 20 years." }, { "title": "No CS Degree, 10 July 2024: $200k exit after learning to code", "url": "https://www.nocsdegree.com/200k-exit-after-learning-to-code/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the free part; the rest is behind a subscription. Gives June 2024 as the sale month and the learning-to-code background." }, { "title": "Talknotes pricing page, read 12 October 2026, and the Wayback Machine copy of 12 July 2024", "url": "https://talknotes.io/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both in full. The current page gives one plan at US$19.97 a month or US$197 a year. The archived page gives the Plus and Pro plans sold just before the sale." }, { "title": "Nico Jeannen's blog, 8 January 2023 post about his background, reached from the blog index", "url": "https://jeannen.com/blog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the post in full; it is listed on the blog index as the post of 8 January 2023. Source for his nationality, French, and his earlier work in e-commerce and ads." }, { "title": "SoFarBot, 8 September 2026: TalkNotes actually sold for $200K", "url": "https://www.sofarbot.com/stories/talknotes-nico-jeannen-sold-250k-france", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A secondary account that checked the US$250,000 headline against the text and the founder's post, and reached US$200,000. Also quotes the founder's rule of reinvesting only the product's revenue." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/nightcafe/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/nightcafe.md", "slug": "nightcafe", "name": "NightCafe", "country": "Australia", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI image generator with a community", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-12", "launchLabel": "12 November 2019", "outcomeLabel": "US$30K a month with 2 people, October 2021", "sticker": "$30K/mo with 2 people", "outcomeUsd": 360000, "months": 23, "teamLabel": "1 founder, 2 people by October 2021, 9 staff by August 2024", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "photos", "channel": "communities", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Creative tools" ], "product": "A website where anyone can type a text prompt and get an image from one of many AI models, then share it in a community with daily challenges, chat rooms and streaks. NightCafe trains no models of its own: it rents models from OpenAI, Google, Black Forest Labs and others, and sells credits and subscriptions.", "why": "It was already online in 2019, when the only AI art was style transfer. When open-source text-to-image models appeared in mid-2021, it added them within weeks, and a Reddit post sent a crowd to the only simple website that offered them. It then kept the crowd with community features instead of better models.", "summary": [ "NightCafe is a text-to-image website: you type a sentence, an AI model draws it. The model is not NightCafe's own. It is an aggregator, a service that connects to many model providers through their APIs and shows them in one interface, with a credit system, where each image costs a number of credits that the user earns daily or buys. The site also has daily challenges, chat rooms, and a feed where users comment on each other's images.", "Angus Russell, a software engineer in Australia, launched the first version on 12 November 2019 as a side project. For almost two years it covered its own costs at best. In mid-2021 he added VQGAN+CLIP, one of the first open-source text-to-image models, and in early October 2021 a Reddit post sent so much traffic that the site crashed: one day earned 15 times the previous daily record, about US$17,000. On 9 October 2021 he reported US$30,000 a month on his Indie Hackers page. That is a run rate, one month of revenue multiplied by 12, of US$360,000 a year, 23 months after launch. NightCafe was then two people: Russell, who still worked as a software engineer at Atlassian, and his partner Elle, who ran the business side.", "The company kept growing after that, with more people. In August 2024 TechCrunch reported, from a source close to the company that it did not name, about US$4 million a year in revenue and about US$2 million in profit with nine staff. Both money figures on this page are grade C: the first is the founder's own entry, made in the week of a traffic peak, and the second comes from an unnamed source. The user counts, 25 million users and more than one billion images, come from a Google Cloud customer story, grade B. The page also shows what happened to earlier companies that sold creative tools on top of technology they did not own." ], "factsCaption": "A side project of two people that reported US$30,000 a month in October 2021, 23 months after launch, and later reached about US$4 million a year with nine staff", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade B value comes from a company other than NightCafe that put its own name on it, here Google Cloud. A grade C value is a founder statement, a journalist's unnamed source, or a reviewer. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A. The rows marked \"with 9 staff\" describe the larger company of 2024 and are not the headline of this page.", "timelineLead": "From a website that sold wall prints nobody bought to US$30,000 a month with two people, in 23 months, and then to one billion generated images with a larger team. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "NightCafe PRO plans in October 2026: plan names and credits from the pricing page's code; the prices load by script and could not be read, so the price range is from TechCrunch (August 2024) and a reviewer (grade C)", "note": "Every user gets 5 free credits a day for logging in and 3 more for the daily challenge. Subscriptions give monthly credits that do not expire, a cheaper top-up price per credit, and, from the Hobbyist plan up, unlimited base images on a set of fast models. Annual billing is shown as 40% off and quarterly as 15% off. TechCrunch reported the range as US$4.79 to US$50 a month in August 2024; the reviewer site There's An AI For That lists paid plans from US$12.49 a month in 2026. Credit packs are also sold without a subscription.", "rows": [ [ "AI Beginner", "", "", "100 credits a month; shown only to some users" ], [ "AI Hobbyist", "", "from 12.49 (reviewer)", "200 credits a month; unlimited base images on tier 1 models" ], [ "AI Enthusiast", "", "", "500 credits a month; unlimited on tiers 1 to 2" ], [ "AI Creator", "", "", "850 credits a month; unlimited on tiers 1 to 3" ], [ "AI Artist", "", "", "1,400 credits a month; unlimited on tiers 1 to 4" ], [ "AI Professional", "", "up to 50 (TechCrunch, 2024)", "2,500 credits a month; unlimited on tiers 1 to 4" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue per month, October 2021", "value": "US$30,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Self-reported by the founder on his Indie Hackers product page, last updated 9 October 2021. The site marks it as not independently verified. It was entered in the week of the Reddit traffic peak, so it may show a peak and not a normal month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the October 2021 figure", "value": "US$360,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$30,000 times 12. This is the headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team, October 2021", "value": "2 people", "grade": "C", "note": "SmartCompany, 12 October 2021: the founder, a software engineer at Atlassian, runs NightCafe with his fiancée Elle Moule. It was his side business.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October 2021 figure", "value": "23 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: November 2019 to October 2021.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Best single day, October 2021", "value": "about US$17,000", "grade": "C", "note": "TechCrunch, 2024, on the Reddit event. SmartCompany in October 2021 reported it as about 15 times the previous daily record, without an amount.", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Server capacity added in the Reddit week", "value": "about 500 times", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder to SmartCompany. Two days produced more images than all the time before.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "B", "note": "Google Cloud writes bootstrapped and without significant outside investment. TechCrunch writes entirely bootstrapped.", "src": [ 4, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Own AI models", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Co-founder to TechCrunch: NightCafe has no internal AI or machine-learning capability. It runs some open models on its own servers and calls the rest through APIs.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per year, August 2024, with 9 staff", "value": "about US$4 million annualized", "grade": "C", "note": "TechCrunch, 31 August 2024, from a source close to the company, not named. Reached with nine staff, so it is not the headline of this page. On the record the co-founder said only that the company is profitable most months.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Profit per year, August 2024, with 9 staff", "value": "about US$2 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Same unnamed source: a gross margin of nearly 50%, after expenses including payroll for nine staff.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month from the August 2024 figure", "value": "about US$333,000", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$4 million divided by 12.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from the October 2021 run rate to August 2024", "value": "about 11 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$4,000,000 divided by US$360,000 is 11.1. The two figures come from different sources of grade C, so the multiple is rough.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Staff, August 2024", "value": "9", "grade": "C", "note": "TechCrunch. Plus 5 paid moderators through an outsourcing firm in Indonesia and 20 volunteer moderators paid in site features.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Subscribers, August 2024", "value": "20,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Co-founder Elle Russell to TechCrunch. About 1 million people visit each month.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Subscription prices, August 2024", "value": "US$4.79 to US$50 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "TechCrunch. Credit packs are sold separately.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Registered users", "value": "more than 25 million", "grade": "B", "note": "Google Cloud customer story, 2025, and TechCrunch, August 2024. The founder says tens of millions of authorized users in the Google text.", "src": [ 4, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Images generated", "value": "more than 1 billion", "grade": "B", "note": "Google Cloud customer story. The company blog said the same in November 2024, and TechCrunch wrote nearly a billion in August 2024.", "src": [ 4, 6, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Engineering team, 2025", "value": "4 people", "grade": "B", "note": "Google Cloud customer story.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the August 2024 figure", "value": "57 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: November 2019 to August 2024.", "src": [ 3, 5 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2019", "what": "Russell, who has a design degree and had co-founded design startups, cannot find wall art he likes for his house in Sydney. He builds a site to create AI art with neural style transfer and sell it as prints. Nobody buys prints.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "12 November 2019", "what": "He posts on Indie Hackers that he launched the Creator as a minimum product with a few styles. About 30 people from Facebook and Reddit try it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "December 2019 to January 2020", "what": "Unsplash image search, anonymous use without sign-up through Firebase, and style masks as the feature that sets it apart. He starts a new job the next day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "April 2020", "what": "Number 3 on Google for \"AI Art Generator\", more than 100 creations a day. He turns to revenue: product mockups for every image.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "Between April 2020 and October 2021", "what": "A user generates thousands of images and raises the hosting bill by a few hundred dollars. He adds a credit limit; users ask to buy more credits. The site reaches break-even almost at once. Elle, his partner and an accountant, joins to run the business side. TechCrunch gives no date for this.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "Mid-2021", "what": "After OpenAI shows DALL-E, he adds the open-source VQGAN+CLIP text-to-image model and rents hundreds of GPUs for it. By 16 August 2021 his posts on X show images made from text prompts.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 8 ] }, { "when": "Early October 2021", "what": "An image made on NightCafe is posted to r/oddlyterrifying, a Reddit group with 1.3 million members. The site crashes. Rendering servers are scaled up about 500 times. Two days produce more images than all the time before. One day earns 15 times the previous record, about US$17,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "when": "9 October 2021", "what": "The headline figure: the founder sets the revenue on his Indie Hackers page to US$30,000 a month. NightCafe is two people, and he still works at Atlassian.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "After October 2021", "what": "Russell quits Atlassian to work on NightCafe full time. The exact date is not given.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "2023", "what": "Fine-tuning: users train a model on their own images. Each fine-tuned model is approved by moderators.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "31 August 2024", "what": "TechCrunch, now with nine staff: about US$4 million a year in revenue and about US$2 million profit, both from an unnamed source close to the company. On the record: 25 million users, 20,000 subscribers, no plans for an enterprise product.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "17 November 2024", "what": "Five years of NightCafe; more than one billion creations.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "22 October 2025", "what": "Google Cloud announces a customer story about NightCafe: 25 million users, 1 billion images, an engineering team of four, bootstrapped.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4, 8 ] }, { "when": "24 June 2026", "what": "NightCafe Select, a storytelling feature, is announced. The company page says more than one billion artworks.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 7 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Timing", "text": "NightCafe existed before text-to-image AI. When the open-source VQGAN+CLIP model appeared in mid-2021 there was no simple website for it, and NightCafe became that website within weeks, with the sign-up-free flow it had built in 2019. The Reddit crowd of October 2021 went to the only easy option." }, { "title": "Credits, not prints", "text": "The first business model, selling wall prints, failed. The credit limit was added to stop one heavy user from raising the hosting bill, and users immediately asked to buy more credits. The accidental model became the real one: pay for images, not for objects." }, { "title": "Rent every model, own none", "text": "The company says it has no machine-learning capability. It runs open models on rented GPUs and calls OpenAI, Google and others through APIs. Each new model is added to the list, so the product does not fall behind when a better model appears, and the company carries no training cost." }, { "title": "Community as the moat", "text": "The co-founder says models will become commodities and competitors will compete on something else. NightCafe competes on daily challenges, streaks, chat rooms and contests, and names Leonardo, Civitai and Midjourney, the community-centred rivals, as its real competition." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the Google Cloud customer story (grade B), the TechCrunch interview and the founder's early Indie Hackers posts (grade C). The Google Cloud numbers describe the system in 2025, not in October 2021.", "items": [ "Firebase from the start, chosen for speed to market; Firestore is still the main database, with tens of billions of records.", "Cloud Run functions for workflows and API requests, more than 100 million invocations a day; Memorystore for Redis as a cache; more than 100 TB of images in Cloud Storage.", "Image generation through Vertex AI for Google's Imagen models, and through other providers' APIs; some open models such as Stable Diffusion run on the company's own rented servers.", "Anonymous users through Firebase so that a visitor can create an image before signing up, added in December 2019.", "AI-based prompt and image moderation, plus 5 paid moderators through an outsourcing firm and 20 volunteers.", "An engineering team of four for all of this in 2025; the founder says the managed services removed the need for dedicated infrastructure staff." ], "src": [ 4, 3, 5 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold creative tools to consumers on top of technology that someone else could ship for free. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Picnik", "years": "2005 to 2012", "funding": "US$3.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Photo editing in the browser, no download.", "died": "Google bought it and folded it into Google+, then shut it down.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/429-picnik" }, { "name": "Snipshot", "years": "2006 to 2009", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Quick browser photo edits for people who would not install software.", "died": "Bigger rivals and free alternatives.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1241-snipshot" }, { "name": "ElectricObjects", "years": "2014 to 2020", "funding": "US$3.2M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "A US$600 screen that shows subscription digital art on your wall.", "died": "Hardware costs and consumers who would not pay monthly for wall art; smart TVs did it better.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/114-electricobjects" }, { "name": "Kicksend", "years": "2011 to 2017", "funding": "US$2.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Share and print your photos.", "died": "Google Photos took sharing, Shutterfly owned printing.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/274-kicksend" }, { "name": "The Grid", "years": "2014 to 2020", "funding": "US$4.7M", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Websites designed by AI, no designer needed.", "died": "The AI was not ready; the designs were clunky while rivals shipped polished tools.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/618-the-grid" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Picnik and Snipshot were the NightCafe of their day: a creative tool in the browser with no install. They died when the big platforms offered the same for free. ElectricObjects and Kicksend sold objects, screens and prints, and the objects killed the margins. The Grid promised AI creativity before the models could deliver it.", "NightCafe started with the ElectricObjects problem, prints nobody bought, and dropped it for credits. It avoided The Grid's problem by waiting: the site existed before the models were good, and added each model the week it became usable. Against the Picnik problem, free generation from OpenAI, Google and Microsoft, it does not compete on the model at all. It sells the community around the images, which a model provider does not ship. Whether that is enough when every phone generates images for free is the open question on this page." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The 2021 opening, no. The structure, partly.", "text": "Being the only simple website for VQGAN+CLIP in mid-2021 cannot be repeated. The structure can: an interface on top of models that someone else trained, paid in credits, built on managed cloud services by one engineer who kept his job, with a partner for the business side. By the founder's own report that was enough for US$30,000 a month. But it needed a crowd, and the crowd came after two years of side-project work, from one Reddit post that nobody planned.", "steps": [ "Build the interface before the model is good, so you are online the week it becomes usable.", "Charge for usage in credits, with a free daily amount, and never for objects.", "Rent every model through APIs and own none; add each new one as it appears.", "Spend the engineering time on community features, challenges, streaks and chat, because that is what the model providers do not sell." ], "open": "Any new generative medium where the first-party interfaces are poor and the hobbyist crowd has nowhere to gather: video, music, 3D, and game assets." }, "watch": [ { "title": "The headline is self-reported, in a peak week", "text": "The founder entered US$30,000 a month on Indie Hackers on 9 October 2021, days after the Reddit post. One day of that week earned about US$17,000. The figure may describe the peak and not a normal month, and no one outside checked it." }, { "title": "The larger figure is from an unnamed source", "text": "The US$4 million a year and the US$2 million profit of August 2024 were given to TechCrunch by a source close to the company. On the record the co-founder said only that NightCafe is profitable most months. No payment processor or filing confirms either money figure on this page." }, { "title": "Two people in 2021, nine staff in 2024", "text": "The headline figure belongs to two people, one of them with a full-time job elsewhere. The US$4 million figure belongs to a company of nine staff with outsourced moderators. Do not read the larger number as a two-person result." }, { "title": "The model providers give images away", "text": "OpenAI, Google and Microsoft ship free image generation inside their chat products. NightCafe's answer is community, and its competitors with the same answer, Midjourney, Leonardo and Civitai, raised money while it did not." }, { "title": "Copyright and moderation", "text": "The co-founder told TechCrunch that one court ruling against the model providers could force the company to rethink its business. The site allows images of political figures and mild adult content, and TechCrunch found copyrighted characters in its public gallery with little effort." }, { "title": "Prices could not be read", "text": "The pricing page loads prices by script. The ranges here come from a 2024 article and a reviewer, so the exact plan prices may differ." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://creator.nightcafe.studio/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Indie Hackers product page: NightCafe Creator revenue, self-reported", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/product/nightcafe-creator/revenue", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder-entered US$30,000 a month, last updated 9 October 2021, marked by the site as not independently verified. Source for the headline figure." }, { "title": "SmartCompany, 12 October 2021: How one Reddit post led to a 15x revenue boost for an Aussie AI art generator", "url": "https://www.smartcompany.com.au/startupsmart/reddit-post-15x-revenue-boost-ai-art-generator-nightcafe/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview in the week after the Reddit event. Source for the team of two, the Atlassian job, the 15x day and the 500x server scaling." }, { "title": "TechCrunch, 31 August 2024: Before Midjourney, there was NightCafe, and it's still kicking", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/31/before-midjourney-there-was-nightcafe-and-its-still-kicking/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Interview with co-founder Elle Russell plus an unnamed source for the 2024 revenue and profit. Source for the founding story, the US$17,000 day, the 2024 staff and subscriber counts, and the prices." }, { "title": "Google Cloud customer story: NightCafe Studio, announced by Google Cloud on X on 22 October 2025", "url": "https://cloud.google.com/customers/nightcafe", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. A vendor's published case study with founder quotes; the page carries no date. Source for the user and image counts, the engineering team of four, the stack and the bootstrapped status." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers product timeline: NightCafe Creator, posts from November 2019 to April 2020", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/product/nightcafe-creator", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Six founder posts. Source for the launch date, the early features and the Google ranking." }, { "title": "NightCafe blog, 17 November 2024: 5 Years of NightCafe, Artist Spotlight", "url": "https://nightcafe.studio/blogs/blog/5-years-of-nightcafe-artist-spotlight", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the Wayback Machine; the live page returned a rate-limit error. Source for the five-year date and the one billion creations." }, { "title": "NightCafe: About NightCafe, read 12 October 2026", "url": "https://creator.nightcafe.studio/about-nightcafe", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Company's own statement: founded 2019, more than one billion artworks." }, { "title": "Angus Russell on X: 16 August 2021, 12 October 2021, 3 September 2024, 22 October 2025 and 24 June 2026", "url": "https://x.com/Angus_Russell/status/1980833123916214468", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through api.fxtwitter.com. Founder posts text-to-image results, then links to the SmartCompany article, the TechCrunch article, the Google Cloud case study and the Select launch. His other posts since 2021 contain no money figures." }, { "title": "NightCafe pricing page, read 12 October 2026, and the reviewer There's An AI For That", "url": "https://creator.nightcafe.studio/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Plan names and credits read from the page's JavaScript; the prices load by script and could not be read. The starting price of US$12.49 a month is from theresanaiforthat.com/ai/nightcafe/." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/postiz/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/postiz.md", "slug": "postiz", "name": "Postiz", "country": "Israel, company registered in Hong Kong", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Open-source social media scheduler for people and AI agents", "aiType": "AI-leveraged", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-12", "launchLabel": "July 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$263K a month recurring revenue, October 2026", "sticker": "$3.2M/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 3154788, "months": 27, "teamLabel": "1 founder, with 75 code contributors on GitHub and a hiring link on the site in 2026", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "open-source", "trend": "growing", "collections": [ "open-source" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-leveraged", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Social media marketing" ], "product": "A calendar that publishes posts to more than 30 social networks: X, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Bluesky, Discord and others. The whole code is open source, so anyone can run it on their own server for free; the company sells the hosted version from US$29 a month. Since 2025 AI agents such as Claude, ChatGPT and OpenClaw can connect to it through an MCP server, a command-line tool and a public API, so an agent drafts and schedules the posts and a person approves them in the calendar.", "why": "The founder took a twenty-year-old product category with no open-source entry and open-sourced all of it, which gave him millions of Docker downloads and 37,000 GitHub stars without a marketing budget. Revenue stayed small for a year. It multiplied when he turned the product toward people who automate their posting with n8n workflows and, from late 2025, with AI agents, which need an API-first scheduler and keep paying because they post without human effort.", "summary": [ "Postiz is a social media scheduler, a program that stores posts you write in advance and publishes them to several social networks at the chosen time through each network's interface. The founder says such tools have existed for almost twenty years; Buffer and Hootsuite are the best known. Postiz is open source: its full code is public under a license that lets anyone run and change it, so a developer can self-host it, meaning run it on their own server for free, while the company charges for the hosted version. In 2025 the founder added an MCP server, a standard interface through which an AI agent (a program that uses a language model to carry out tasks on its own) can list your channels, upload media and schedule posts. The product's 2026 positioning is a scheduler for agents, with a human who approves the calendar.", "Nevo David, an Israeli developer who had done growth work for the open-source company Novu, put postiz.com online in July 2024 and posted it on Hacker News and Reddit in late August. He wrote in November 2024 that it made US$700 a month, in January 2025 US$2,100 a month, and in November 2025 US$14,000 a month, all as a single developer with no outside money. Then the agent audience arrived. Stripe-verified figures published through TrustMRR show monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the subscription revenue of one month) of US$60,731 on 2 March 2026, US$87,530 on 2 April 2026, and US$262,899 on 12 October 2026, with 7,683 active subscriptions. That is a run rate of about US$3.15 million a year.", "The headline number is grade A: TrustMRR reads it from the company's Stripe account through an API key. The revenue before November 2025 is grade C, the founder's own posts. The page also shows five earlier companies that sold social posting or social marketing tools and died, and what is different this time." ], "factsCaption": "US$262,899 in monthly recurring revenue on 12 October 2026, verified from the company's Stripe account, after sixteen months at a few thousand dollars a month", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value is read from the company's Stripe account by TrustMRR through an API key. A grade B value is a count published by a platform (GitHub, Product Hunt, the Internet Archive). A grade C value is a founder statement in his own posts. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a tool for scheduling open-source launches to US$263,000 a month in 27 months, with the growth concentrated in the last ten. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Postiz prices in October 2026, from the company's pricing page (grade C), plus the self-hosted edition", "note": "Every paid plan starts with a 7-day trial for US$0 and includes the MCP server, the command-line tool, the public API and webhooks. Yearly billing is about 20% cheaper than monthly. The pricing page states that a month that was paid for but not used is refunded in full. The open-source edition is free to run on your own server under the AGPL-3.0 license; you pay for the server and for the developer approvals of each social network yourself.", "rows": [ [ "Self-hosted, open source", "0", "0", "your own server, AGPL-3.0" ], [ "Standard", "23", "29", "5 channels, unlimited posts, 3 AI videos a month" ], [ "Team", "31", "39", "10 channels, unlimited team members, 100 AI images a month" ], [ "Pro", "39", "49", "30 channels, 300 AI images a month" ], [ "Ultimate", "79", "99", "100 channels, 500 AI images a month" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 12 October 2026", "value": "US$262,899", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from the company's Stripe account through an API key. Last synced 12 October 2026. MRR growth over the previous 30 days: 21.2%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the October 2026 MRR", "value": "about US$3.15 million a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 262,899 times 12 equals 3,154,788.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions, 12 October 2026", "value": "7,683", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, from Stripe.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average recurring revenue per subscription", "value": "about US$34 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 262,899 divided by 7,683 equals 34.22. Close to the price of the two cheapest plans, so most customers are on Standard or Team.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the 30 days to 12 October 2026", "value": "US$292,177", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, from Stripe. Growth of 49.0% over the previous 30 days. Revenue is higher than MRR because yearly plans are paid up front.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the twelve months to 12 October 2026", "value": "US$1,292,052", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, from Stripe. All-time revenue on the account: US$1,405,253.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue, November 2025 to September 2026", "value": "US$16,049 in November 2025, US$46,019 in February 2026, US$92,964 in April, US$152,041 in June, US$247,789 in September", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline from Stripe. December 2025 was US$15,785; January 2026 US$18,300; March US$82,076; May US$117,503; July US$178,649; August US$192,599.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from November 2025 to September 2026", "value": "15.4 times in ten months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 247,789 divided by 16,049.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR during spring 2026", "value": "US$60,731 on 2 March, US$87,530 on 2 April, US$96,765 on 20 April, US$115,489 on 15 May", "grade": "A", "note": "Archived copies of the TrustMRR page, same Stripe source. Active subscriptions: 1,800, 2,668, 2,936 and 3,434 on those dates.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Date the run rate passed US$1 million a year", "value": "between 2 March and 2 April 2026", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$1 million a year equals US$83,333 of MRR, which lies between the 2 March and 2 April readings. The founder is reported to have announced this in April 2026; that post was not located, so the date rests on the Stripe data.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue on the Stripe account before November 2025", "value": "about US$120,765", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: all-time revenue of 1,405,253 minus the sum of the monthly timeline from November 2025 to 12 October 2026 (1,284,488). This is all the revenue of the first sixteen months, July 2024 to October 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's own figure, September 2026", "value": "US$2.2 million ARR, US$186,000 MRR", "grade": "C", "note": "His X article of 7 September 2026, repeated on the company blog the next day, which cites a public Stripe profile. Consistent with the Stripe revenue of US$192,599 for August 2026.", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's X profile, October 2026", "value": "US$245,000 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Profile text. Lower than the TrustMRR MRR of the same week; the profile text is updated by hand.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month, November 2025", "value": "US$14,000 from subscriptions", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on dev.to, 21 November 2025, written as a single developer. The title says US$14,200. Stripe shows US$16,049 of revenue for that month, which includes yearly plans.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month, July to August 2025", "value": "US$6,523, then US$12,648", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on Hacker News and dev.to. The dev.to text writes August 2024 for the second month; the Hacker News title says the jump took one month, so it is August 2025. The cause he gives: an official n8n node and cold email to owners of n8n communities on Skool.", "src": [ 6, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month, January 2025", "value": "US$2,100, four months after launch", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on dev.to, 9 January 2025.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month, November 2024", "value": "US$700", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on dev.to, 26 November 2024. He wrote in January 2025 that the product made only a few thousand dollars a month while its Docker image had passed 1.5 million downloads.", "src": [ 9, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Docker image downloads", "value": "26,000 in November 2024; 800,000 and then 1.5 million in January 2025; 4.79 million in November 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's posts. A Docker image is a packaged copy of the program that a self-hoster runs with one command. These downloads pay nothing.", "src": [ 9, 8, 10, 6 ] }, { "fact": "GitHub repository, 12 October 2026", "value": "37,096 stars, 7,191 forks, 75 contributors, AGPL-3.0 license", "grade": "B", "note": "GitHub's own counts through its API. The repository was created on 8 July 2023 as Gitroom. The license was changed from Apache-2.0 to AGPL-3.0 on 6 January 2025.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Product Hunt launches", "value": "1,179 votes on 20 November 2024; 738 on 1 May 2025; 658 on 31 October 2025; 551 on 1 May 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "Vote counts from the Product Hunt launches page. The founder writes that the first launch finished first of the day, the week and the month.", "src": [ 12, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Prices at launch and now", "value": "US$30 a month for 5 channels in July 2024; US$29, 39, 49 and 99 by September 2024, unchanged in October 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "Archived copies of postiz.com from 28 July 2024 and of the pricing page from 21 September 2024, compared with the pricing page read on 12 October 2026. In July 2024 there was also a free plan with 1 channel and 30 posts a month; now there is a 7-day trial instead.", "src": [ 14, 15, 26 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "The company calls itself self-funded in November 2024 and a non-funded company in November 2025.", "src": [ 16, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 person, plus open-source contributors", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's words in November 2025: a single developer. In 2026 the site has a hiring link and the founder writes of a Postiz team running video pages; no headcount is published.", "src": [ 6, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Companies and location", "value": "Gitroom Limited, Hong Kong, receives the subscriptions; Gitroom LLC, Delaware, holds the social networks' developer approvals", "grade": "C", "note": "Company about page and terms of service. The founder wrote on Hacker News in December 2023 that he is Israeli and was choosing where to incorporate.", "src": [ 17, 18 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October 2026 figure", "value": "27 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: July 2024 to October 2026.", "src": [ 14, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2021", "what": "David, a full-stack developer, runs Linvo, a LinkedIn automation tool, alone and bootstrapped. It breaks the network's rules, has memory leaks, and he sells it for a low price.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 19 ] }, { "when": "2022 to early 2024", "what": "He works on growth at Novu, an open-source notification company, which reaches 31,000 GitHub stars. He writes 74 posts on dev.to with 1.18 million views and starts the Gitroom newsletter about open-source marketing.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 20, 13 ] }, { "when": "17 December 2023", "what": "He asks Hacker News where to incorporate, writes that he is Israeli, and discusses Hong Kong and Delaware.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 18 ] }, { "when": "21 to 26 March 2024", "what": "Gitroom, an open-source tool to schedule an open-source launch across Reddit, dev.to, X and LinkedIn, is posted on Hacker News and dev.to. Stack: Next.js and NestJS. The GitHub repository, created on 8 July 2023, is the one that later becomes Postiz.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 20, 11 ] }, { "when": "By 28 July 2024", "what": "postiz.com is live with the words Your ultimate AI social media scheduling tool, a free plan and a Launch plan at US$30 a month.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "24 August 2024", "what": "Show HN: I built a social media scheduling tool and open-sourced it. The repository is still named gitroom.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 21 ] }, { "when": "30 August 2024", "what": "A second Show HN lists 9 networks, basic analytics, AI copilots, team support and the stack. On the installation docs still saying Gitroom, he answers: it will be renamed to Postiz soon. The same week he posts it on r/selfhosted; the first request is a Docker image, which he builds first.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 22, 23, 6 ] }, { "when": "1 September 2024", "what": "The date the founder gives for creating Postiz. By 2 December it has almost 14,000 stars.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "21 September 2024", "what": "The pricing page shows Standard US$29, Team US$39, Pro US$49, Ultimate US$99, the same prices as in October 2026.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "20 November 2024", "what": "Product Hunt launch, 1,179 votes, first of the day, week and month according to the founder. The news post calls Postiz a self-funded startup.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 12, 16, 13 ] }, { "when": "26 November 2024", "what": "US$700 a month. 26,000 Docker downloads. Three to five support tickets a day from self-hosters.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "6 January 2025", "what": "License changed from Apache-2.0 to AGPL-3.0, which requires anyone who offers a modified version as a service to publish their changes.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "9 January 2025", "what": "US$2,100 a month after four months; 800,000 Docker downloads. Two weeks later he writes that 1.5 million downloads bring only a few thousand dollars a month, and that he launched a crypto coin whose 35% he valued at about US$500,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 10 ] }, { "when": "15 to 17 April 2025", "what": "Version 1.39.3 adds an MCP server, so an AI assistant can schedule posts to the 18 supported networks from a chat window. Second Product Hunt launch on 1 May, 738 votes.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 24, 16, 12 ] }, { "when": "July to August 2025", "what": "US$6,523 to US$12,648 a month in one month. He had noticed YouTube videos and Skool groups about automating social media with n8n, built an official n8n node (about an hour of work with Cursor, he says), cold-emailed the group owners with an offer, and his affiliate program grew. A moderator of a large paid community built a template with his affiliate link.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 6 ] }, { "when": "Autumn 2025", "what": "His daughter is born. He writes of massive burnout after a year of overwork. Third Product Hunt launch on 31 October: AI agents and MCP for 20+ channels, 658 votes.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 12 ] }, { "when": "21 November 2025", "what": "US$14,000 a month from subscriptions, as a single developer, with a target of US$20,000 in two months. 4.79 million Docker downloads. Stripe shows US$16,049 of revenue for the month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 6, 1 ] }, { "when": "30 January 2026", "what": "A skill for OpenClaw lets that agent schedule posts with one install command; he writes that people already use it. Twitch and Kick added. Revenue jumps from US$18,300 in January to US$46,019 in February.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 16, 1 ] }, { "when": "2 March 2026", "what": "MRR US$60,731 with 1,800 active subscriptions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "2 April 2026", "what": "MRR US$87,530 with 2,668 subscriptions: a run rate above US$1 million a year. Fourth Product Hunt launch on 1 May: a scheduler for agents like OpenClaw, 551 votes.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2, 12 ] }, { "when": "15 May 2026", "what": "MRR US$115,489 with 3,434 subscriptions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "7 September 2026", "what": "He publishes an X article, I make $2.2m ARR, and this is how I sell SaaS, with a link to his public Stripe profile. 238,619 views. Stripe revenue for September: US$247,789.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "when": "12 October 2026", "what": "MRR US$262,899, 7,683 subscriptions. The site lists 17 documented AI agents and more than 30 channels.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 17 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Open source as the distribution channel", "text": "Social media schedulers had existed for twenty years without a serious open-source one. By making all of the code public, the founder could list the product in the self-hosting directories, post every minor version on r/selfhosted, dev.to and Hacker News, and reach developers who would never read a marketing page. Those developers mostly do not pay; they run the Docker image on their own server. He says so himself. What they give is links, stars, bug reports, 75 code contributors, and support for each other, which a one-person company cannot buy." }, { "title": "Sixteen months of small revenue, then a new audience", "text": "The founder reports US$700 a month in November 2024 and US$14,000 a month in November 2025. The first jump came when he noticed people automating their posting with n8n workflows and sold to them: an official n8n node, cold emails to the owners of n8n communities, an affiliate program. In his words, he did not change the product; he changed the audience. Automated users also leave less, because the workflow keeps posting without anyone opening the app." }, { "title": "The publishing layer for AI agents", "text": "An MCP server in April 2025, a command-line tool, a skill for OpenClaw in January 2026 and documentation for 17 agents made Postiz the part that an agent calls when it wants to post. The Stripe data show revenue multiplying 15 times between November 2025 and September 2026, the months in which agent frameworks spread. The AI is in the customer's agent; Postiz sells the publishing layer, with per-network rules, media upload and a calendar where a person approves." }, { "title": "Sell an outcome, not an alternative", "text": "In September 2026 the founder wrote that selling an agentic scheduler as an alternative to other schedulers has a ceiling near US$100,000 of MRR, because buyers compare features. His content instead teaches how to get views on X, on video pages and with TikTok slideshows, with Postiz as the tool in the background. One such article had 238,619 views. The same text warns that some of these tactics get accounts banned." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's technical posts, his Hacker News launch posts and the GitHub repository. They are grade B and C.", "items": [ "One repository managed with NX: a Next.js front end, a NestJS back end, Prisma as the database layer on PostgreSQL, Redis with BullMQ as the queue that fires each scheduled post, and worker processes that do the posting. Resend sends the emails.", "Each social network is a provider class with four methods: generate the OAuth2 login link, exchange the code for a token, refresh the token, post. OAuth2 is the standard by which a network lets a third-party app act for a user. Gitroom LLC in Delaware holds the developer approvals that the networks require.", "A Docker image was the first thing the community asked for and the first thing built; it is how most self-hosters install it, through Coolify, Portainer or Unraid. By November 2025 it had 4.79 million downloads.", "Interfaces for machines rather than people: a public API with webhooks, an n8n node, a Make.com integration, an MCP server at mcp.postiz.com, a command-line tool installed with npm, and installable skills for agents. The founder says the n8n node took about an hour with Cursor, an AI coding editor, starting from n8n's template.", "AI features inside the product, all bought from model providers: a writing copilot, image generation, and clipping long YouTube videos into captioned short clips, sold as monthly quotas on each plan.", "Marketing without a budget: self-hosting directories, Reddit, dev.to, Hacker News, four Product Hunt launches, cold email to community owners from a separate warmed-up domain, an affiliate program, and from 2026 long articles on X. TrustMRR records a domain rating of 72.", "Payments through Stripe, billed by Gitroom Limited in Hong Kong. The license moved from Apache-2.0 to AGPL-3.0 in January 2025." ], "src": [ 23, 22, 6, 7, 11, 17, 4, 26, 1 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold tools for posting to, or marketing on, social networks, and died. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Pixelpipe", "years": "2008 to 2013", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Post your photos, videos and audio to every social network and blog at once.", "died": "The networks added their own cross-posting and closed their interfaces to third parties. It grew users without a way to charge them.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/435-pixelpipe" }, { "name": "Argyle Social", "years": "2009 to 2013", "funding": "US$2.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A social media marketing tool for engagement and leads, connected to Pardot and Marketo.", "died": "Hootsuite and the other leaders had far larger marketing budgets. It depended on the networks' interfaces and shipped only small improvements.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1832-argyle-social" }, { "name": "PostRocket", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$610K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Post to your Facebook page at the moment the data says will reach the most people.", "died": "Built on one network. Facebook changed its ranking and its rules and sold its own advertising instead. Hootsuite and Buffer covered many networks.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/457-postrocket" }, { "name": "ThinkUp", "years": "2010 to 2017", "funding": "US$1M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Personal analytics from your own Twitter and Facebook activity.", "died": "The networks restricted their interfaces and built their own analytics. It never became a full management tool, and users moved to phones.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/624-thinkup" }, { "name": "Metigy", "years": "2014 to 2022", "funding": "US$14M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "An AI marketing brain for small businesses: analyze the accounts, recommend content, predict results.", "died": "Pre-2022 models gave generic advice such as post more video. Small businesses signed up, felt overwhelmed and left within 60 to 90 days. US$14 million was spent.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2338-metigy" } ], "whatChanged": [ "All five sold access to networks they did not control, and three died when the networks closed or changed their interfaces. Postiz has the same dependence: every channel runs on a developer approval held by Gitroom LLC, and the founder's own article says that automated posting can get accounts banned. Argyle Social and PostRocket also lost to Hootsuite and Buffer, which had money for marketing. Postiz has none.", "Three things differ. First, open source gave Postiz the distribution that Argyle Social could not afford: millions of installs, 37,000 stars and the links that come with them, at the cost of giving the product away to developers. Second, the buyer changed. In 2025 and 2026 the thing that posts is often an n8n workflow or an AI agent, which needs an API, a command-line tool and a self-hostable option, and the incumbents were built for a person clicking in a browser. Third, Metigy sold AI advice, and its models could not give good advice. Postiz sells no advice. The intelligence sits in the customer's own agent, and Postiz sells the publishing layer that the agent needs." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The open-source method, yes. The timing, only partly.", "text": "Open-sourcing an existing category and marketing it to self-hosters is a documented method, and the founder has published every step. The revenue, though, came from a specific moment: automation users in 2025, then AI agents in 2026, arriving at a product that already had an API and a reputation. A copy started now would face Postiz itself, which is open source and already connected to 17 agents.", "steps": [ "Pick a product category that is old, large and without a serious open-source entry. Open-source all of it, with a Docker image on the first day, and list it in the self-hosting directories.", "Post every minor version to r/selfhosted, dev.to and Hacker News. Accept that developers will not pay and that support from self-hosters is the price of the exposure.", "Charge for the hosted version from the first month, and expect a year of a few thousand dollars a month.", "Watch for the audience that automates your category. Build the integrations they already use (n8n, Make, an MCP server, a command-line tool), then email the owners of their communities with an offer and an affiliate link.", "Publish content about the result the customer wants, with the product in the background, and link the payment processor's own figures instead of screenshots." ], "open": "Any established software category in which the next user will be an agent or a workflow rather than a person: the agent needs an API, a self-hostable option, and the rules of each destination encoded for it. Email marketing, advertising accounts, marketplaces listings and customer messaging are candidates." }, "watch": [ { "title": "The networks control the access", "text": "All 30 channels run on developer approvals and interfaces that Meta, X, TikTok and the others can change or revoke, which is how Pixelpipe, PostRocket and ThinkUp died. The founder's growth tactics (many pages per video, mobile proxies for TikTok, comment-for-link calls to action) are ones he says can get accounts banned." }, { "title": "The jump coincides with the spread of agents", "text": "Revenue multiplied 15 times between November 2025 and September 2026, the months when agent frameworks spread. If the agent frameworks or the networks themselves offer posting directly, a scheduler becomes a commodity. The product's AI label is positioning: the intelligence is in the customer's agent." }, { "title": "Small numbers that do not agree", "text": "The founder's X profile says US$245,000 a month while TrustMRR shows US$262,899 the same week. His November 2025 post says US$14,000 in the text and US$14,200 in the title, and writes August 2024 where it means August 2025. TrustMRR's founded date is 24 July 2024; the founder's own start date is 1 September 2024; the site was live by 28 July. None of these change the picture." }, { "title": "One person, and a stated burnout", "text": "The founder wrote in November 2025 of massive burnout after the birth of his daughter and a year of overwork. He also runs a second product, agent-media.ai, and in January 2025 launched a crypto coin, which he presented as worth more to him than the product at the time. The site has a hiring link but publishes no headcount." }, { "title": "Open source has a cost", "text": "7,191 forks and millions of Docker downloads pay nothing and generate support tickets. The AGPL-3.0 license, adopted in January 2025, stops competitors from selling a closed modified version, but a hosting company can still offer the unmodified program as a one-click install. The average subscription is about US$34 a month, so a small rise in churn costs a lot of customers." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://postiz.com/" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/postiz" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/postiz" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of Postiz, Stripe-verified metrics, data as of 12 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/postiz.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile. The revenue, MRR and subscription figures are read by TrustMRR from the company's Stripe account through an API key; the profile text (founded date, description) is founder-written and graded C." }, { "title": "TrustMRR profile of Postiz, archived copies of 2 March, 2 April, 20 April and 15 May 2026", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20260402143739/https://trustmrr.com/startup/postiz", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the four archived pages at web.archive.org (timestamps 20260302012033, 20260402143739, 20260420205145, 20260515174532). Each states that revenue is verified with a Stripe API key. Source for the spring 2026 MRR and subscription counts." }, { "title": "Nevo David on X, 7 September 2026: I make $2.2m ARR, and this is how I sell SaaS with ChatGPT Astra", "url": "https://x.com/wickedguro/status/2096974398167392500", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the article text through api.fxtwitter.com. Founder's own statement with a link to his public Stripe profile. Source for the US$2.2 million ARR claim, the view count and the sales tactics." }, { "title": "Postiz blog, 8 September 2026: The $2.2M ARR SaaS marketing strategy", "url": "https://postiz.com/blog/saas-marketing-strategy-chatgpt-astra-2-2m-arr", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's own retelling of the X article, with the US$186,000 MRR figure and the MCP and command-line setup." }, { "title": "Nevo David's X profile, @wickedguro, read 12 October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/wickedguro", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile JSON through api.fxtwitter.com: 23,287 followers, account created July 2025, profile text with the US$245,000 a month figure. His earlier handle, @nevodavid, no longer resolves." }, { "title": "Nevo David on dev.to, 21 November 2025: I did it! My open-source company now makes $14.2k monthly as a single developer", "url": "https://dev.to/nevodavid/i-did-it-my-open-source-company-now-makes-142k-monthly-as-a-single-developer-1179", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the dev.to API. Source for the November 2025 revenue, the Docker downloads, the n8n turn, the affiliate program, the non-funded status and the burnout." }, { "title": "Nevo David on Hacker News, 28 November 2025: My SaaS jumped from $6,523 to $12,648 monthly, here is how", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46076878", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the Hacker News API. Source for the n8n node, the cold email method, the Skool outreach and the community feature." }, { "title": "Nevo David on dev.to, 9 January 2025: You can open a startup in open-source and quit your daily job", "url": "https://dev.to/nevodavid/you-can-open-a-startup-in-open-source-and-quit-your-daily-job-3ld5", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the dev.to API. Source for the US$2,100 a month after four months, the 800,000 Docker downloads and the marketing channel list." }, { "title": "Nevo David on dev.to, 26 November 2024: I am making $700 monthly with my open-source scheduling tool", "url": "https://dev.to/nevodavid/i-am-making-700-monthly-with-my-open-source-scheduling-tool-you-can-do-it-too-33o7", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the dev.to API. Source for the November 2024 revenue, the 26,000 Docker downloads and the support load." }, { "title": "Nevo David on dev.to, 24 January 2025: You don't know it, but your open-source might be worth millions of dollars", "url": "https://dev.to/nevodavid/you-dont-know-it-but-your-open-source-might-be-worth-millions-of-dollars-47c", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the dev.to API. Source for the 1.5 million downloads, the statement that the product made only a few thousand a month, and the crypto coin." }, { "title": "GitHub repository gitroomhq/postiz-app, metadata read 12 October 2026", "url": "https://github.com/gitroomhq/postiz-app", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the repository metadata, the README, the contributor count and the LICENSE commit history through the GitHub API. Source for the stars, forks, contributors, creation date and license change." }, { "title": "Product Hunt, Postiz launches page", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/postiz/launches", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the four launch dates and vote counts." }, { "title": "Nevo David on dev.to, 2 December 2024: I built an open-source social media scheduling, and it blew up", "url": "https://dev.to/nevodavid/i-built-an-open-source-social-media-scheduling-and-it-blew-up-415e", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the dev.to API. Source for the 1 September 2024 start date, the 14,000 stars, the Product Hunt ranking and the Novu background." }, { "title": "postiz.com as archived on 28 July 2024", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20240728025541/https://postiz.com/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the archived page. Shows the product live with a free plan and a Launch plan at US$30 a month. Source for the July 2024 launch date." }, { "title": "Postiz pricing page as archived on 21 September 2024", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20240921002655/https://postiz.com/pricing", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the archived page. Shows the four plans at US$29, 39, 49 and 99." }, { "title": "Postiz news page: posts of 20 November 2024, 17 April 2025, 30 January 2026 and 11 February 2026", "url": "https://postiz.com/news", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the four posts in full. Source for the self-funded statement, the MCP release, the OpenClaw skill and the Skool and Whop channels." }, { "title": "Postiz about page and terms of service, read 12 October 2026", "url": "https://postiz.com/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both in full. Source for the two companies, their addresses, the 17 documented agents, the 30+ channels and the founder's description of the product." }, { "title": "Nevo David on Hacker News, 17 December 2023, in Ask HN: Where should I incorporate my business", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38671495", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the thread through the Hacker News API. The founder writes that he is Israeli and discusses Hong Kong and Delaware." }, { "title": "Nevo David on dev.to, 4 April 2024: I sold my startup because of bugs", "url": "https://dev.to/github20k/i-sold-my-startup-because-of-bugs-i-wish-i-had-this-serverless-repository-4l3a", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the dev.to API. Source for the Linvo background." }, { "title": "Nevo David on dev.to, 26 March 2024: My new open-source repository to schedule all your content", "url": "https://dev.to/github20k/my-new-open-source-repository-to-schedule-all-your-content-2f2a", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the dev.to API. Source for the Gitroom launch, the Novu work, the dev.to view counts and the first stack." }, { "title": "Show HN, 24 August 2024: I built a social media scheduling tool and open-sourced it", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41335868", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the thread through the Hacker News API. The first Hacker News post under the Postiz name; the repository link still says gitroom." }, { "title": "Show HN, 30 August 2024: Postiz, open-source social media scheduling tool", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41402138", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the thread through the Hacker News API. Source for the 9 networks, the Apache-2 license at the time, the stack and the rename from Gitroom." }, { "title": "Nevo David on dev.to, 3 September 2024: How I built my open-source social media scheduling tool", "url": "https://dev.to/nevodavid/how-i-built-my-open-source-social-media-scheduling-tool-dih", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the dev.to API. Source for the OAuth2 provider design, the Redis and BullMQ queue, Prisma and PostgreSQL, and the Reddit launch." }, { "title": "Hacker News, 15 April 2025: Postiz introduces MCPs, founder's comment", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43693497", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through the Hacker News API. The founder announces the MCP server and lists the 18 networks supported at the time." }, { "title": "Nevo David's public Stripe profile", "url": "https://profile.stripe.com/@wickedguro/m/5ymv2iAE", "grade": "A", "how": "Could not read; the page loads its figures by script. Listed because the founder links it as his proof. The same Stripe account is read through TrustMRR, source 1." }, { "title": "Postiz pricing page, read 12 October 2026", "url": "https://postiz.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the plan prices, the yearly prices, the quotas, the trial and the refund rule." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/arcads/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/arcads.md", "slug": "arcads", "name": "Arcads", "country": "France", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI video ads with AI actors", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-12", "launchLabel": "January 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$6M annual recurring revenue, May 2025", "sticker": "$6M ARR, 5 people", "outcomeUsd": 6000000, "months": 16, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders in a team of 5 at US$6M ARR (the interviewer counted 6), 8 people at US$10M ARR", "fundingLabel": "None until US$10M ARR, then a US$16M seed round in December 2025", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "video", "channel": "paid-ads", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Funded", "Running", "B2B", "Advertising" ], "product": "A marketer types a script, picks an AI actor from a library of more than 1,000 or creates a new one, and receives a short video of that actor speaking the script, in the style of a customer's phone video. The same ad can be made again with another face, another script or another language, so the marketer can test which version sells.", "why": "The two founders had bought video ads every week for their own mobile app, so they knew the buyer and the price. They sold AI-made ads as a service before they wrote the software. Then they advertised the product with its own output, and software agents did the growth work that a larger company hires people for.", "summary": [ "Arcads makes UGC ads with AI. UGC means user-generated content: a UGC ad is a short video that looks like a customer filmed it on a phone, and brands normally pay a person, a UGC actor, to record each one. In Arcads the person is an AI actor, a generated face and voice that speaks any script the marketer types. A company that advertises on Meta or TikTok needs many versions of each ad to find the one that sells, and Arcads produces each version in minutes.", "Romain Torres and Dylan Fournier founded this French company after they had run a marketing agency and then a mobile app studio. They took their first customers in January 2024. In an interview recorded on 16 May 2025, Torres said that Arcads had US$6 million in annual recurring revenue with a team of five people, and no outside investors. Annual recurring revenue (ARR) is the current monthly subscription revenue multiplied by twelve. On 14 November 2025 he said US$10 million with eight people, and showed his revenue dashboard on screen when the interviewer asked for proof. On 17 December 2025 the company announced a US$16 million seed round, the first sale of shares to professional investors, led by the investment group Eurazeo.", "This page uses the May 2025 figure as its headline, because that is the number reached with about five people. It is a founder statement, grade C. The November figure is grade B, because a person outside the company saw the dashboard. The page also shows four failed companies that sold cheap video advertising made by human creators, before a model could generate the person." ], "pricing": { "caption": "Arcads plans in October 2026: credit amounts from the company's help center, prices from a reviewer, because the prices appear only inside the app after sign-up (grade C)", "note": "A credit is the unit that the app charges for each generation. On Starter and Creator, unused credits expire at each renewal and the account pauses when they are used up. On Pro, Scale and Business, unused credits carry over and extra credits are billed. The prices of US$110 and US$220 come from a June 2026 review that describes a screenshot of the in-app price screen, taken when the same plans were described as 10 and 20 videos a month. They were not verified inside the app for this page, and no yearly prices were found.", "rows": [ [ "Free trial", "", "0", "3 days, 1,000 credits, card required; then the Starter price is charged" ], [ "Starter", "not found", "110", "8,000 credits a month" ], [ "Creator", "not found", "220", "16,000 credits a month" ], [ "Pro, Scale, Business", "custom", "custom", "More credits, unused credits carry over, extra credits billed" ] ] }, "factsCaption": "US$6 million in annual recurring revenue 16 months after the first customer, with five people and no investors, then US$10 million shown on a live dashboard six months later", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade B value was seen or confirmed by someone outside the company (the interviewer saw the revenue dashboard; the investor's law firm confirmed the round). A grade C value is a statement by the founders or the company, or a figure from a reviewer or a database. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A.", "timelineLead": "From a service delivered by hand in January 2024 to US$6 million in annual recurring revenue 16 months later, then a venture-funded company. Each entry carries its grade.", "facts": [ { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, 16 May 2025", "value": "US$6 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on camera. No document was shown in this interview. Six months later he showed a revenue graph that covers this period, but no one read the May value from it.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Team at US$6 million ARR", "value": "5 people, including the 2 founders", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's words: the team is still five people, engineers. The interviewer says six full-time employees twice in the same recording. The two counts were never reconciled.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "ARR per person, May 2025", "value": "US$1.2 million with 5 people, US$1.0 million with 6", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 6,000,000 divided by 5 equals 1,200,000, and divided by 6 equals 1,000,000.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue behind the headline", "value": "about US$500,000 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 6,000,000 divided by 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "ARR, April 2025", "value": "US$5 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder: one month ago we were at 5 million.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from April to May 2025", "value": "20% in one month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 6 minus 5, divided by 5.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Date of US$1 million ARR", "value": "June 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder: the first time was in June, I think. That is 5 months after the first customer (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue after the first week, January 2024", "value": "about US$5,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder, in both interviews. At that time Arcads delivered the ads as a service and had no login page.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Paying customers, May 2025", "value": "close to 4,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "ARR, 14 November 2025", "value": "US$10 million", "grade": "B", "note": "The founder said the figure. The interviewer asked for proof, and the founder showed his live revenue dashboard on a shared screen, in euros. The interviewer is a podcast host who also runs a lending company, not a newsroom, and no payment processor has published the figure.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Team at US$10 million ARR", "value": "8 people, 2 of them in sales", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in November 2025. The company's own press release of 17 December 2025 says a team of seven.", "src": [ 2, 5 ] }, { "fact": "ARR per person, November 2025", "value": "US$1.25 million", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 10,000,000 divided by 8.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Paying customers, November and December 2025", "value": "more than 6,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's answer to the interviewer, and the company press release.", "src": [ 2, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Largest contract, November 2025", "value": "six figures a year", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder. The interviewer summarizes it as more than US$100,000 a year. Large customers grow by usage: they generate more videos each month.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Videos and other assets generated, December 2025", "value": "100,000 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Company press release.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding before December 2025", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in both interviews: bootstrapped, which means paid for by the company's own revenue. He said the two founders each own 50%.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Seed round, 17 December 2025", "value": "US$16 million, led by Eurazeo", "grade": "B", "note": "Confirmed by Jones Day, the law firm that advised Eurazeo, and by a quotation from a Eurazeo managing director in the announcement. Other investors: Alpha Intelligence Capital and the Sequoia Scout program.", "src": [ 5, 6, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Profit", "value": "profitable, amount not disclosed", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder refused to give a margin in both interviews. The press release says already profitable. Spending on ads, influencers and model providers is not public.", "src": [ 1, 2, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, April 2026", "value": "US$15 million a year", "grade": "C", "note": "Latka database, marked confirmed by CEO. No interview or document for this figure was found.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Ad impressions of Arcads videos by June 2025", "value": "more than 1 billion", "grade": "C", "note": "Published by ElevenLabs, the voice supplier. The count itself most likely comes from Arcads; not verified.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the first customer to US$6 million ARR", "value": "16 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: January 2024 to May 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Before 2024", "what": "Torres and Fournier, who met as students about ten years earlier, run a marketing agency and then a mobile app studio. Its main product is WeFast, a weight-loss app for women with seven-figure revenue, which means at least US$1 million. Torres spends his days buying UGC ads for it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2, 3, 5 ] }, { "when": "January 2024", "what": "They decide to sell the app studio and start Arcads. The first customers are friends in the mobile app industry. Arcads delivers AI-made ads as a service, with no login page, to test whether brands will pay. About US$5,000 in monthly recurring revenue after one week.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "March 2024", "what": "The software is live. A customer posts an Arcads video on X and it spreads. Hundreds of sales arrive in one night, and monthly revenue jumps from about 5,000 to almost 64,000 euros. The product breaks under the load. The founders refund everyone.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "when": "April 2024", "what": "Relaunch after one month of rebuilding.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "June 2024", "what": "US$1 million ARR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "April 2025", "what": "US$5 million ARR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "16 May 2025", "what": "US$6 million ARR with a team of five, close to 4,000 paying customers, and about 100 automation agents that do growth tasks. Torres says the company is bootstrapped and very profitable.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "June 2025", "what": "ElevenLabs publishes that every Arcads actor speaks with one of its voices.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "Mid-2025", "what": "Growth slows to about 10% a month for about two months, while Torres stops marketing to hire the first salesperson and build a sales process for large brands. The exact months are not stated.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "14 November 2025", "what": "US$10 million ARR, shown on the revenue dashboard. Eight people, more than 6,000 paying customers, growth above 20% a month, and 210 ads running in the company's Meta account, which the interviewer also sees on screen. Torres says he would refuse US$150 million for the company.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "when": "17 December 2025", "what": "US$16 million seed round led by Eurazeo, to open an office in San Francisco. More than half of the users are in the United States.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 5, 6, 7 ] }, { "when": "April 2026", "what": "US$15 million in yearly revenue, according to the Latka database.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "July to October 2026", "what": "The help center lists five plans, from Starter to Business, and a 3-day free trial. The home page shows more than 1,000 AI actors and newer video models.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 11 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "The product is its own advertisement", "text": "The largest sales channel in May 2025 was paid ads on Meta, made with Arcads. In the founder's words: we use our own tool to promote our tool. Each ad shows a buyer what the product makes, and each test tells the team which feature is missing. In November 2025 the account ran 210 ads at once, and the best ones were translated into other languages." }, { "title": "The founders had been the customer", "text": "They ran a consumer app with seven-figure revenue and bought UGC ads for it every week. They knew what a marketer pays a human actor, how long delivery takes, and how many versions a campaign needs. The first buyers were friends in the same industry." }, { "title": "Sell the result before the software", "text": "In January 2024 there was no product to log in to. The founders made AI ads by hand and delivered them, to learn two things: whether brands pay for an AI-made ad, and whether they order again after they see the results. Only then did they build the software." }, { "title": "Rented models, own workflow", "text": "Arcads does not build the large video and image models. It integrates models from Google, ByteDance, Kling and ElevenLabs as they appear, and adds the actor library, the script-to-video steps and the translation. The founder says the company also builds some models of its own for narrow cases." }, { "title": "Agents instead of hires", "text": "Torres built about 100 agents in Gumloop, a tool that chains AI steps without code. One reads competitors' ad libraries every day, transcribes new ads, rewrites them for Arcads and posts them in Slack. Others find influencers and large advertisers and draft the first message. That work is why five people were enough at US$6 million." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the two recorded interviews, the ElevenLabs customer story and the company's own site. They are grade B and C.", "items": [ "Voices: ElevenLabs, chosen after tests of every large text-to-speech provider, according to ElevenLabs. Video and image generation: models from Google, ByteDance and Kling, selected by the app for each request, plus some models that Arcads builds itself for narrow cases.", "Stripe for payments, with each sale posted to a Slack channel. Intercom for the support chat. That chat is where the founders saw in March 2024 that the product had broken.", "A hook generator on a separate page of the site. A hook is the first sentence of an ad, the part that makes a viewer keep watching.", "About 100 Gumloop agents for growth work. The founder trains them with examples, not instructions: a Notion database of hooks that worked and a document of his best posts.", "Three sales channels in May 2025: paid ads made with the product, content by the founder and by partner creators, and direct contact with companies that spend heavily on ads. By November 2025 a two-person sales team came first, then paid ads, then paid influencers.", "Roles: Torres leads marketing and sales, Fournier leads product. The team of five in May 2025 was all engineers by the founder's description." ], "src": [ 1, 2, 8, 11 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold cheaper video advertising for brands when every video still needed a human in front of a camera. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "ClearMix", "years": "2020 to 2023", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Professional marketing videos without a film crew budget, made by freelance videographers and editors on demand.", "died": "The process was manual. Canva and Adobe added video tools, and AI editing tools automated the steps that ClearMix did by hand.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1336-clearmix" }, { "name": "FameBit", "years": "2013 to 2019", "funding": "US$1.75M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A self-service marketplace where a brand posts a campaign and YouTube creators apply to make the sponsored video.", "died": "Google bought it in 2016. YouTube then moved to larger brand deals, advertisers moved to Instagram and TikTok, and the marketplace was phased out.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/132-famebit" }, { "name": "CollabFinder", "years": "2013 to 2016", "funding": "US$150K", "cause": "No market need", "promise": "Automatic matching of brands with social media creators, without an agency.", "died": "About 60% of the matched pairs made their deal outside the platform, so the commission income collapsed. Brands wanted protection against fraud more than they wanted discovery.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/64-collabfinder" }, { "name": "Big Un", "years": "2013 to 2018", "funding": "US$20M", "cause": "Legal or regulatory", "promise": "Video reviews and testimonials for small local businesses, produced for them and published on its platform.", "died": "The database records that it overstated its revenue by 300% to 400% and its customer count about tenfold, while about 80% of customers left each year. The Australian regulator investigated and the company collapsed.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2337-big-un" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Before 2023, every video ad with a person in it needed that person. FameBit and CollabFinder matched brands with creators, and ClearMix sent freelance videographers. In each case a human had to be found, briefed, paid and waited for, so a brand could afford only a few versions of an ad. The marketplaces also had a second weakness: once a brand and a creator knew each other, they could work without the marketplace.", "Video and voice models removed the person. A script becomes a talking actor in minutes, and a second version with another face or another language costs one more generation. A reviewer puts the cost at about US$11 per finished video on the smallest Arcads plan. That changes how advertisers work: Arcads itself ran 210 ads at once in November 2025, a volume that would have needed a production team. The four companies above had to recruit humans for each video. Arcads rents the models and had five employees at US$6 million in annual recurring revenue." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product, hard now. The method, yes.", "text": "AI video ads became a crowded market within two years. The Latka database lists HeyGen, Synthesia and Creatify as direct competitors, and a reviewer puts Creatify's first paid plan at US$19 a month against US$110 for Arcads. Every competitor can rent the same models. The part that can be repeated is the order of the work: the founders chose a task that they had paid for themselves for years, sold the result by hand first, and only then built software.", "steps": [ "Choose a task that you already buy from people every week, so you know the buyer, the price and what a good result looks like.", "Deliver the result as a service to a few buyers before you build the software, and check that they order again.", "Rent the models. Build the steps around them: a library, a simple path from input to output, variants and translation.", "Advertise the product with its own output, test many versions, and keep only the ads that pay for themselves.", "Automate each repeated growth task with an agent before you hire a person for it." ], "open": "Arcads serves general consumer advertising. Narrower versions are still open: video ads for one regulated industry with its rules built in, ads for one language market with local faces and accents, and the step after generation, which is deciding from campaign data which version to run next." }, "watch": [ { "title": "The headline is a founder statement", "text": "US$6 million in May 2025 was said on camera and not shown. The dashboard was shown only in November 2025, to an interviewer who also runs a lending company. No payment processor, auditor or newspaper has confirmed any revenue figure." }, { "title": "Team counts that do not agree", "text": "The founder said five people in May 2025 and the interviewer said six in the same recording. The founder said eight in November 2025 and the company's press release said seven in December 2025. The differences are small, but revenue per person depends on them." }, { "title": "It is no longer a five-person bootstrapped company", "text": "Since December 2025 Arcads has US$16 million from investors, a sales team and a plan for a San Francisco office. The numbers on this page describe the period before that. Later growth says less about what a small team can do without capital." }, { "title": "Rented models and unknown margins", "text": "Every video costs Arcads a payment to a model provider, and the founder would not say how large that cost is or how much goes to ads and influencers. Google and ByteDance, two of the providers, also sell advertising and could offer the generation step inside their own ad products." }, { "title": "Price and credits", "text": "Reviewers describe Arcads as one of the most expensive tools to start with, and quote users who used a month of credits in minutes while testing versions. Cheaper competitors use the same kind of models." }, { "title": "Ads with people who do not exist", "text": "The product makes a person who was never a customer recommend a product. The founder describes customers, some about 16 years old, who run TikTok accounts with AI characters for supplement brands. Disclosure rules for such ads differ by country and platform, and this page did not check them." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.arcads.ai/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Founderpath, interview by Nathan Latka recorded 16 May 2025, published 8 July 2025: How Arcads Hit $6M ARR With a Five-Person Team and AI Agents", "url": "https://founderpath.com/resources/romain-torres-arcads-6m-arr-five-person-team-ai-agents", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full transcript on the page's watch view. Founder statements on camera. Primary source for the headline figure, the team of five, the launch story and the agents." }, { "title": "Founderpath, interview by Nathan Latka recorded 14 November 2025, published 10 December 2025: How Arcads Grew to $10M ARR in 20 Months With AI Video Ads and a Sales Team", "url": "https://founderpath.com/resources/romain-torres-arcads-10m-arr-ai-video-ads-sales", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the full transcript on the page's watch view. The founder shares his revenue dashboard and his Meta ads account on screen. Grade B for what the interviewer saw, grade C for the other statements. The automatic transcript has errors in some numbers, so only clearly stated figures are used." }, { "title": "Latka blog, by Nathan Latka, updated 31 August 2026: Arcads Revenue: Bootstrapped to $10M ARR in 22 Months, Shown Live on a Revenue Dashboard", "url": "https://getlatka.com/blog/arcads-revenue-ceo", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The interviewer's written account of both recordings, with a dated table and the conflicts he found, including the five or six people in May 2025." }, { "title": "Latka database page for Arcads, updated 7 October 2026", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/arcads.ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the April 2026 revenue marked confirmed by CEO, the two headcount readings and the competitor list." }, { "title": "Arcads blog, 17 December 2025: Arcads.ai Raises 16 Million USD in Seed Funding to Accelerate Development in the United States", "url": "https://www.arcads.ai/blog/arcads-raises-16m-seed", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's press release, with a quotation from Eurazeo's managing director. Source for the investors, the founders' names, the team of seven, the 6,000 clients and the 100,000 assets a month." }, { "title": "Jones Day, December 2025: Eurazeo leads $16 million seed financing in Arcads.ai", "url": "https://www.jonesday.com/en/practices/experience/2025/12/eurazeo-leads-16-million-seed-financing-in-arcadsai", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. A short notice by the law firm that advised the lead investor. It confirms the round and the amount from the investor's side. No announcement on Eurazeo's own site was found." }, { "title": "Net Influencer, 19 December 2025: Arcads.ai Secures $16M Seed Funding To Expand AI Video Creation Platform", "url": "https://www.netinfluencer.com/arcads-ai-secures-16m-seed-funding-to-expand-ai-video-creation-platform/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Trade press that repeats the press release. It adds no reviewed numbers." }, { "title": "ElevenLabs customer story, 16 June 2025: Arcads gets more than a billion of ad impressions with ElevenLabs voices", "url": "https://elevenlabs.io/blog/arcads", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. A supplier's account with a founder quotation. Source for the voice provider and the impression count." }, { "title": "Arcads help center, 30 July 2026: How to buy more credits, and the article How the free trial works", "url": "https://help.arcads.ai/en/articles/13230774-how-to-buy-more-credits", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both articles in full. Source for the plan names, the monthly credits, the carry-over rule and the trial. The public site has no pricing page: the address arcads.ai/pricing returns page not found." }, { "title": "eesel AI blog, last edited 17 June 2026: Arcads AI pricing in 2026: plans, credits, and the real per-video cost", "url": "https://www.eesel.ai/en/blog/arcads-ai-pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A reviewer that describes a screenshot of the in-app price screen from another review. Source for the US$110 and US$220 prices, the cost per video and the user complaints. eesel sells other AI software and promotes it in the article." }, { "title": "Arcads home page, read 12 October 2026", "url": "https://www.arcads.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the size of the actor library and the list of models. Not used for money figures." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/faceless-video/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/faceless-video.md", "slug": "faceless-video", "name": "Faceless.video", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Automated short videos for faceless channels", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-12", "launchLabel": "October 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$1M annual recurring revenue, August 2024", "sticker": "$1M ARR in 10 months", "outcomeUsd": 1000000, "months": 10, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders, one of them the only developer; 3 people on LinkedIn in August 2024", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "video", "channel": "creators", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Video" ], "product": "The customer picks a topic, a video style and a posting schedule. The service writes a story, edits it into a short video and posts it to the customer's TikTok, YouTube or Instagram account on that schedule. The customer never appears on camera and does not have to edit anything.", "why": "It sold the whole job, from the story to the posting, and not only a video editor. One paid thread by a known account on X brought the first customers, and creators who used the product then recommended it to their own audiences. One founder built everything on a no-code platform that he already knew from six failed products, so the first version was cheap and fast to change.", "summary": [ "Faceless.video makes and posts short videos for faceless channels. A faceless channel is a TikTok, YouTube or Instagram account whose videos never show the owner: a voice tells a story over pictures or game footage. The customer picks a topic, a style and a schedule, and the service writes each story, edits it into a video and posts it to the customer's account. The application was built on Bubble, a no-code platform, which is a tool for building a web application by arranging screens and rules in a visual editor instead of writing program code.", "Jacob Seeger, a songwriter and music producer with no programming training, built the application alone, after six earlier products of his had failed. His co-founder Alex Steinberg, a writer and director, had the idea and did the marketing. They launched in October 2023. Seeger says the business went from zero to US$1 million in annual recurring revenue within 10 months, with no investors. Annual recurring revenue (ARR) is the current monthly subscription revenue multiplied by twelve, so US$1 million of ARR is about US$83,000 a month. In July 2026 he said that monthly revenue is in six figures and that more than 2.5 million people have signed up. The site was open and selling plans on 12 October 2026.", "Every revenue figure on this page is a founder statement, grade C. Bubble repeated the US$1 million figure in its own customer story, but Bubble hosts the application and does not handle its payments. No payment processor has confirmed any number, and the founder gives no exact revenue figure after 2024. The page also shows five failed startups that promised easy video for everyone or that built their growth on another company's platform." ], "factsCaption": "US$1 million in annual recurring revenue ten months after launch, built by one developer on a no-code platform, with every revenue figure self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade B value comes from a company other than Faceless.video that put its own name on it and could observe it directly, here Bubble for the platform, the team and the user count, and the Internet Archive for old copies of pages. A grade C value is a statement by the founders, a figure that a supplier or a writer repeats from them, or a third-party estimate. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A.", "timelineLead": "From six failed products to US$1 million in annual recurring revenue 10 months after launch, and then the two years that followed. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Faceless.video plans in October 2026: monthly prices read from the company's pricing page; the yearly column is calculated from the page's \"Save 30%\" label (grade C)", "note": "A credit is the unit that the service charges for a video. Each plan gives two credits for each video in its limit, and the page says that other video types cost more or fewer credits. Unused credits carry over while the subscription is active. Extra credits cost US$8 for 10, US$35 for 50 or US$120 for 200. The yearly amounts load by script and could not be read, so the yearly column is 70% of the monthly price. A free trial exists. Starter Story's page, dated March 2025, records a free plan and plans up to US$99 a month, so the plans have changed since the headline figure.", "rows": [ [ "Starter", "about 14", "20", "30 credits, up to 15 videos a month, 1 social account" ], [ "Daily", "about 24.50", "35", "60 credits, up to 30 videos a month; marked most popular" ], [ "Double", "about 41.30", "59", "120 credits, up to 60 videos a month" ], [ "Studio", "about 104.30", "149", "350 credits, up to 175 videos a month, dedicated support" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, about August 2024", "value": "US$1 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in Indie Hackers, July 2026: from zero to US$1 million ARR within 10 months. Bubble's customer story of February 2025 says the same figure was reached in less than a year. Bubble hosts the application and does not handle its payments, so its figure is graded as a repeated founder figure.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Month of that milestone", "value": "about August 2024", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: October 2023 plus 10 months. No source names the month. Grit Daily called the company a seven-figure business on 16 August 2024.", "src": [ 1, 2, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to US$1 million ARR", "value": "10 months", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's statement. Bubble writes less than a year. Grit Daily dates the launch to late September 2023, Bubble to October 2023. An archived copy shows that the site already existed in July 2023, so the count starts at the public launch and not at the first version.", "src": [ 1, 2, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue at US$1 million ARR", "value": "about US$83,333", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 1,000,000 divided by 12. Starter Story's US$83.3K a month and the Indie Hackers label of more than US$83K a month are this same number, not separate measurements.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, July 2026", "value": "six figures, so at least US$100,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in Indie Hackers: \"We're currently at 6-figures in MRR.\" He gives no exact figure. Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is the subscription revenue of one month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from August 2024 to July 2026", "value": "at least 20% in 23 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 100,000 divided by 83,333 is 1.20. This is only a lower limit, because six figures means any amount from US$100,000 to US$999,999. The first US$83,333 a month took 10 months.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Users, February 2025", "value": "more than 850,000", "grade": "B", "note": "Bubble's customer story. Bubble hosts the application's database and published the figure under its own name.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Sign-ups at other dates", "value": "275,000 in August 2024; 2.5 million in July 2026; 2.8 million in October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Grit Daily, the founder in Indie Hackers, and the company's home page, which reads \"Trusted by 2.8M+ creators\", in that order. A sign-up can be a free trial. It is not a paying customer.", "src": [ 4, 1, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Sign-up growth, August 2024 to October 2026", "value": "about 10 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2,800,000 divided by 275,000 is 10.2. In the same period the stated monthly revenue went from about US$83,333 to at least US$100,000.", "src": [ 4, 8, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Paying customers", "value": "not published", "grade": "C", "note": "Grit Daily wrote of thousands of active users in August 2024. No source gives a count of paying subscribers.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Founders", "value": "2: Jacob Seeger and Alex Steinberg", "grade": "B", "note": "Bubble's story as archived on 16 April 2026: Seeger built the entire application, and Steinberg, a writer, director and animation studio founder, did the go-to-market work. Bubble changed the story on 22 April 2026. The present text names only Seeger and gives him a quotation that the earlier text gave to Steinberg. No source explains the change.", "src": [ 3, 2, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Team at the headline number", "value": "2 co-founders, of which 1 developer; 3 employees on LinkedIn", "grade": "C", "note": "Bubble: \"with just one Bubble Developer\". Grit Daily calls Seeger the app's sole developer. Latka records 3 employees in August 2024, from LinkedIn. No source reports contractors at that date.", "src": [ 2, 4, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Team in 2026", "value": "an in-house team, size not published", "grade": "C", "note": "The Indie Hackers interview has a section named \"Invest in an in-house team\". That section is behind the sign-in wall, so the size was not verified.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder: \"completely bootstrapped\", which means paid for from its own revenue, and profitable. Bubble's title says bootstrapped. Starter Story lists the business as profitable.", "src": [ 1, 2, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Built on", "value": "Bubble, with integrations and custom code added", "grade": "B", "note": "Bubble's customer story calls Bubble the centerpiece of the product. In October 2026 the public home and pricing pages are served by Next.js, a code framework, and the home page still loads its images from Bubble's file servers. Whether the signed-in application still runs on Bubble was not verified.", "src": [ 2, 8, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Products the founder built before this one", "value": "6, none of which succeeded, over about two years", "grade": "C", "note": "Indie Hackers title and introduction. Grit Daily writes of two years of failed software products.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Cost of the first promotion", "value": "about US$200 to US$250 for one thread on X", "grade": "C", "note": "Not verified in the founder's own words. An AI-written summary of the Starter Story video says US$200 and hundreds of thousands of views. Readers of the Indie Hackers interview quote US$250 and 300,000 impressions. Grit Daily confirms a promotion by a known account on X at launch, without a price.", "src": [ 7, 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Price of one video on the Starter plan, October 2026", "value": "about US$1.33", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$20 a month divided by 15 videos. The company's home page compares this with US$150 to US$300 for each video from a hired editor, which is the company's own claim.", "src": [ 9, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Website visits per month", "value": "523,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Starter Story's database page, a third-party estimate with no date. It computes US$0.16 of revenue for each visitor from US$83.3K a month.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Latka's revenue estimate, September 2025", "value": "US$330,000 a year", "grade": "C", "note": "A third-party estimate, marked as such, and lower than the founder's figure. The same US$330,000 stands next to 17 other companies in the list on that page, so it looks like a default value and not a measurement.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Confirmation by a payment processor", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR, which reads Stripe accounts, has a profile named Faceless Video. It belongs to a different product: its website is faceless-video.com, it was founded in April 2026, and its verified total revenue is US$19.90. It is not evidence for or against this story.", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "fact": "Location", "value": "Burbank, California, by Latka; terms of use under New Jersey law", "grade": "C", "note": "The company pages that were read name no legal entity. The founder's X profile reads: Founder of Faceless.video and Domno.co.", "src": [ 11, 8, 13 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Before 2023", "what": "Seeger works as a songwriter and producer and starts Domno, a music marketing agency. Over about two years he builds six software products on Bubble. None succeeds.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "when": "2023", "what": "Alex Steinberg sees faceless videos spreading on TikTok and wants a tool that makes and posts them for him. He asks Seeger, whom he knows through a friend's college contact. They decide to sell the tool as a service.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 4, 7 ] }, { "when": "23 July 2023", "what": "An Internet Archive copy of faceless.video from this date already offers automated content for faceless channels: pick a story, choose a background. The founder describes the first version as Reddit stories read aloud over Minecraft gameplay.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 10, 1 ] }, { "when": "Late September to October 2023", "what": "Launch. A paid thread by a known account on X brings many sign-ups and the first revenue at once, and the load causes technical faults that the team repairs.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 2, 7 ] }, { "when": "16 August 2024", "what": "Grit Daily reports more than 275,000 sign-ups, thousands of active users and a seven-figure business, with Seeger as the only developer.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "About August 2024", "what": "US$1 million in annual recurring revenue, 10 months after launch, by the founder's account.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "14 February 2025", "what": "Bubble publishes its customer story: US$1 million ARR in less than a year, more than 850,000 users, one Bubble developer. A new feature lets a business have an AI presenter promote its product.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "when": "28 March 2025", "what": "Starter Story's page of this date lists the business with 2 founders, US$83.3K a month, profitable, and plans up to US$99 a month. The page was last changed on 20 April 2026.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "14 June 2025", "what": "Starter Story publishes a video interview with Seeger about building a US$1 million product without code.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 7 ] }, { "when": "22 April 2026", "what": "Bubble changes its customer story. The earlier text named both co-founders; the new text names only Seeger.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "when": "21 July 2026", "what": "Indie Hackers interview: monthly recurring revenue in six figures, more than 2.5 million sign-ups, no investors, profitable.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "12 October 2026", "what": "The site is open and sells four plans from US$20 to US$149 a month. It shows 2.8 million creators, and a new connection lets a customer create and schedule videos from a chat with Claude or ChatGPT.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 9 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Sell the finished job, not a tool", "text": "The service does more than make one video from a text. It also finds the story, applies the chosen style and posts the result to the customer's account on a schedule. The customer's main decision is the topic. The founder calls it the first platform to run a faceless channel without the owner; that is his claim." }, { "title": "One paid thread, then recommendations", "text": "The founders paid a known account on X for one thread at launch, for about US$200 to US$250 by secondary accounts of the founder's interviews. It brought so many sign-ups that the application had faults. Later, creators who had found the product began to recommend it to their own audiences. A summary of the founder's video interview names that as one of the main sources of new users." }, { "title": "A tool the builder already knew", "text": "Seeger had built six products on Bubble before this one. He did not have to learn a tool while building, so he built the whole application in a few months, alone." }, { "title": "Two founders with separate work", "text": "Seeger built the product. Steinberg, a writer and director, did the go-to-market work, which means everything that brings the product to buyers: the message, the promotion and the partners. Neither waited for the other." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from Bubble's customer story, the founder's statements and what the public pages show in October 2026. Most are grade C.", "items": [ "The application was built on Bubble by one person. Bubble describes itself as the centerpiece, connected to other services through API calls and webhooks. A webhook is a message that one service sends to another when an event happens.", "The first version read Reddit stories aloud over Minecraft gameplay footage. Later versions produce complete AI short videos.", "A story has three possible origins: the AI writes it, the service takes it from a subreddit or a web search, or the customer types it.", "Posting uses the customer's own TikTok, YouTube or Instagram account, which the customer connects once, at a frequency that the customer sets.", "Readers of the Indie Hackers interview report that heavy video work was moved from Bubble to AWS Lambda and RunPod, two services that rent computing power for short periods. This comes from the part of the interview behind the sign-in wall and was not verified.", "In October 2026 the public pages are served by Next.js, with images still stored on Bubble's servers. An MCP server, a standard connection that lets an AI chat program call an outside service, lets Claude or ChatGPT operate a customer's account." ], "src": [ 2, 1, 8, 9 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database promised easy video for everyone, or built their growth on a platform that another company controlled. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Qwiki", "years": "2010 to 2015", "funding": "US$10M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Automatic multimedia stories made from text, in place of a page of search results.", "died": "High running costs and no revenue model. Yahoo bought it in 2013 and later closed it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/481-qwiki" }, { "name": "Viddy", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$30M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Filters and effects that make an amateur phone video look professional.", "died": "Users tried it once and did not return. Instagram added video in June 2013 for the users it already had.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2190-viddy" }, { "name": "Vine", "years": "2012 to 2016", "funding": "US$30M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Six-second looping videos that anyone could make and share.", "died": "Creators could not earn money there, so the best known ones moved to Instagram and YouTube. Twitter, its owner, gave it no priority.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/711-vine" }, { "name": "Meerkat", "years": "2015 to 2016", "funding": "US$14M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Live video from a phone, announced to the user's Twitter followers.", "died": "All its growth came through Twitter. Twitter bought the competitor Periscope and cut Meerkat's access.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2194-meerkat" }, { "name": "PostRocket", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$610K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "More reach for a Facebook page by choosing the best time for each post.", "died": "Facebook changed its API and its ranking rules. The product had no other platform to move to.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/457-postrocket" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Qwiki, Viddy and Vine sold easier video and still lost their users: the automatic result was expensive to produce, people did not come back, or the creators could not earn money. Meerkat and PostRocket show a second risk. A product that reaches its users only through another company's platform ends when that platform changes a rule.", "What changed is who does the work. Language, voice and image models now write the story, read it and assemble the video, so a company with two founders can sell up to 15 finished videos for US$20 a month, which is about US$1.33 for each video. Qwiki raised US$10 million for automatic video and found no revenue model. The second risk did not change. Faceless.video posts through TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, and each of them decides how many people see an automated video and whether an outside service may post at all." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The same product, with care.", "text": "The method can be repeated: learn one building tool well, release several small products, and test each one with a small paid promotion before spending more. The same product is harder today. Other services now sell automated short videos, and the three platforms control how far such videos travel.", "steps": [ "Pick one building tool, no-code or code, and build several small products with it until one sells.", "Sell the finished result that the customer wants, here a channel that keeps posting without the owner's work, and not only the tool.", "Test demand with one small paid post by an account that already has the right audience.", "Divide the work between two founders: one builds, the other writes the message and sells." ], "open": "Other content work that a person repeats by hand every day: clips from podcasts, product videos for small shops, property listings, newsletters. Bubble's story says the company itself added AI presenters for businesses in 2025." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Self-reported, and vague after 2024", "text": "The US$1 million figure is the founder's. Bubble and Starter Story repeat it and did not measure it. For 2026 the founder says only six figures a month. The payment-verified TrustMRR profile with almost the same name is another product." }, { "title": "Growth after the first year is not shown", "text": "The first US$83,333 a month took 10 months. Twenty-three months later the only public statement is at least US$100,000 a month. Sign-ups grew about 10 times in a similar period. The real figure may be much higher, but the founder did not publish it." }, { "title": "Three platforms control the product", "text": "Every video reaches viewers through TikTok, YouTube or Instagram. A rule against automated or repeated videos, or a change to posting access, would reduce what customers get for their money. Meerkat and PostRocket on this page ended that way." }, { "title": "The co-founder is missing from newer sources", "text": "Bubble's story named two co-founders until April 2026 and names one now. The Indie Hackers interview of July 2026 speaks of one founder. No source explains what changed, so the present ownership and team size are not verified." }, { "title": "No-code has a limit", "text": "The earlier Bubble story quotes a founder saying there is no intention to move off Bubble. By October 2026 the public pages run on a code framework, and readers of the Indie Hackers interview report that heavy work moved to other services. A copy of this method should expect to rewrite parts when usage grows." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://faceless.video/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Indie Hackers, 21 July 2026: Failing 6 times before hitting a 7-figure ARR in 10 months with no code, interview with Jacob Seeger by James Fleischmann", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/3FvQoHUh2SglJvAJGkSF", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the free first section, the list of contents and the reader comments. The rest of the interview is behind a sign-in wall and was not read. Source for the 10 months, the six-figure monthly revenue and the 2.5 million sign-ups." }, { "title": "Bubble customer story, 14 February 2025, changed 22 April 2026: How Faceless.video Bootstrapped a 7-Figure Business", "url": "https://bubble.io/blog/faceless-video", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Published by the platform that hosts the application. Source for the launch month, the 850,000 users and the one developer. Bubble does not handle the company's payments, so its revenue figure is graded C." }, { "title": "Internet Archive copy of the Bubble customer story, saved 16 April 2026, before the change", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20260416113221/https://bubble.io/blog/faceless-video/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The earlier text names both co-founders, Jacob Seeger and Alex Steinberg, and their separate work." }, { "title": "Grit Daily, 16 August 2024: How Jacob Seeger Built a 7-Figure Tech Company with No Technical Experience, by Greg Grzesiak", "url": "https://gritdaily.com/jacob-seeger-tech-company-no-technical-experience/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The writer's biography says his own company helps entrepreneurs get media appearances, so the article may be promotional. Source for the 275,000 sign-ups, the launch in late September, the co-founder and the founder's background." }, { "title": "Starter Story, 28 March 2025: How This App Went From Zero To $1M ARR In One Year", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/faceless-video-breakdown", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the free part. A database page that summarises the Bubble and Grit Daily articles and adds a traffic estimate. The full article is for paying members." }, { "title": "Starter Story on YouTube, 14 June 2025: I Built a $1M SaaS 100% with No Code (Bubble)", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9TUDb4sLE0", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the title, the date, the description and the chapter list. The spoken content could not be downloaded; it is cited from the summary in the next source." }, { "title": "Gistly, 3 August 2025: Build a $1M No-Code SaaS: Faceless Video Success", "url": "https://gist.ly/youtube-summarizer/build-a-1m-no-code-saas-faceless-video-success", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. An AI-written summary of the Starter Story video, so its details can be imprecise. Source for the US$200 thread and the recommendations by creators." }, { "title": "Faceless.video home page, about page, MCP connection page and terms of use, read 12 October 2026", "url": "https://faceless.video/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, and read the page code to see what serves it. Source for the 2.8 million creators, the editor price comparison, the chat connection and the governing law." }, { "title": "Faceless.video pricing page, read 12 October 2026", "url": "https://faceless.video/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The monthly prices and credit amounts are in the page. The yearly amounts load by script and could not be read." }, { "title": "Internet Archive copies of faceless.video, 23 July 2023 and 15 August 2024", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20230723003533/https://faceless.video/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the title and description tags. The page body loads by script and is empty in the archive." }, { "title": "Latka company page: Faceless.video revenue, estimate", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/faceless.video", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A third-party estimate and a headcount from LinkedIn." }, { "title": "TrustMRR profile named Faceless Video, read 12 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/faceless-video.md", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the markdown profile. It describes a different product, faceless-video.com, founded on 22 April 2026 by another person, with US$19.90 of verified revenue. Listed here only to prevent confusion." }, { "title": "X profile of Jacob Seeger, @Jacob_Seeger, read 12 October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/Jacob_Seeger", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile through the fxtwitter API: 608 followers. His posts were not read." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/kindroid/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/kindroid.md", "slug": "kindroid", "name": "Kindroid", "country": "USA", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI companion chat app", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-12", "launchLabel": "June 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$9M annual recurring revenue, March 2026", "sticker": "$9M ARR, 5 people", "outcomeUsd": 9000000, "months": 33, "teamLabel": "1 founder, 4 people at US$5M ARR, 5 people at US$9M ARR", "fundingLabel": "Seed funding from Pear VC, amount not disclosed (directories say US$1M to US$2M)", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "companions-publishing", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 1, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Funded", "Running", "B2C", "AI companion" ], "product": "A chat app for adults in which the user creates an AI character, called a Kindroid, by writing its backstory, key memories, personality, appearance and voice. The user then talks to it by text, voice call or live video call, and the character can send generated pictures and short videos of itself. The character keeps a memory of earlier conversations. The app is for users aged 18 or older and runs on the web, iOS and Android.", "why": "It launched in June 2023, when open-source language models had become good enough for a small company to build a companion, and when users of older companion apps were looking for a new one. The user writes the character, so a character from another app can be moved in. The company sells a subscription, prices its add-ons at the cost of the extra computing, and published an update about every eight days in 2026.", "summary": [ "Kindroid is an AI companion app. An AI companion app is a chat program in which the user talks to one lasting character instead of a general assistant. The character is played by a large language model, a program trained on very large amounts of text that writes each reply one word at a time. In Kindroid the user writes the character's backstory, key memories, personality, looks and voice, then talks to it by text, by voice call or by live video call. The character can also send generated pictures of itself, which the app calls selfies. The app is for adults only, and its company describes the AI as unfiltered.", "Jerry Meng launched Kindroid in June 2023. The Verge described him in December 2024 as a 26-year-old who had left Stanford University without a degree. A recruiting advert for the company, on the job board of its investor Pear VC, says that Kindroid grew \"from 0 to $9M retentive ARR\" with \"a lean, 5-person team\" and that it is \"already profitable\". The earliest dated copy of that text is from 15 March 2026. Annual recurring revenue (ARR) is the subscription revenue of the current month multiplied by twelve, so US$9 million of ARR means about US$750,000 a month. The advert does not define the word \"retentive\", and it is not a standard accounting term. An earlier copy of the same advert, dated 14 September 2025, gives US$5 million and a team of 4.", "Every revenue number on this page is the company's own statement, grade C. No payment processor, investor or journalist has confirmed it. The customer story that ElevenLabs, a supplier, published about Kindroid contains no revenue number at all. This page also lists the known risks of the category with their sources: new laws on companion chatbots, app-store rules, and user safety. It ends with four failed companies that sold company or closeness as a product." ], "factsCaption": "US$9 million in annual recurring revenue with 5 people, 33 months after launch, stated only in the company's own job advert", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade B value comes from independent press or from a store's own listing. A grade C value is a statement by the company, a statement that a supplier repeats, or an estimate by a third party that says so. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A: no payment processor or filing confirms the revenue.", "timelineLead": "From a launch in June 2023 to a claimed US$9 million in annual recurring revenue in 33 months, then the end of the free tier in October 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Kindroid prices in October 2026: App Store prices from Apple's US listing, web prices from reviewers (grade C)", "note": "Kindroid's help page shows no prices. It says that the exact price appears at checkout and that the web is usually cheaper than the app stores, so the web prices here come from reviewers who wrote between April and June 2026. Ultra and MAX are add-ons that are billed monthly only, and each one needs the tier below it. A subscriber with all three pays US$98.97 a month on the web or US$113.97 through the App Store. Since 1 October 2026 there is no permanent free tier: a new account gets 50 messages and 5 selfies, then it becomes read-only until a 3-day trial or a subscription starts.", "rows": [ [ "Free preview", "0", "0", "50 messages and 5 selfies, then read-only" ], [ "Standard, web", "", "13.99", "reviewers; 10 Kindroids, 20 group chats, 1 million audio credits a month" ], [ "Standard, App Store", "13.33", "15.99", "US$159.99 a year, or US$42.99 for 3 months" ], [ "Ultra add-on, web", "", "24.99", "reviewers; added to Standard" ], [ "Ultra add-on, App Store", "", "28.99", "added to Standard" ], [ "MAX add-on, web", "", "59.99", "reviewers; added to Standard and Ultra" ], [ "MAX add-on, App Store", "", "68.99", "added to Standard and Ultra" ], [ "500,000 audio credits", "14.99 one-time", "", "App Store price; about 286 to 500 minutes of speech" ], [ "100 selfie credits", "11.49 one-time", "", "App Store price" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue in the job advert, March 2026", "value": "US$9 million", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's own recruiting text on the job board of its investor: \"from 0 to $9M retentive ARR\". The earliest dated copy is 15 March 2026, and a second copy is dated 7 April 2026. The advert does not define \"retentive\". No outside party has confirmed the figure.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month that this ARR means", "value": "about US$750,000", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 9,000,000 divided by 12 equals 750,000.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team at that figure", "value": "5 people", "grade": "C", "note": "The same advert: \"a lean, 5-person team\". The directory Tracxn also records 5 employees in its 2026 profile.", "src": [ 1, 15 ] }, { "fact": "ARR per person", "value": "US$1.8 million a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 9,000,000 divided by 5 equals 1,800,000.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit", "value": "profitable, no figure given", "grade": "C", "note": "Both versions of the advert say \"already profitable\". In June 2026 the company wrote that its change to free access \"isn't about money or any financial trouble, we're doing fine\".", "src": [ 1, 3, 7 ] }, { "fact": "ARR in the earlier version of the advert", "value": "US$5 million with 4 people", "grade": "C", "note": "A copy posted on Built In on 14 September 2025. The text says the figure was reached \"in just over a year\", so the figure may be older than this copy.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Change between the two versions of the advert", "value": "1.8 times, in copies dated 6 months apart", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 9 divided by 5 equals 1.8. The copies are dated September 2025 and March 2026.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Third-party estimate of App Store revenue", "value": "about US$250,000 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "An estimate by the app-research site ScreensDesign for the iOS app only, read on 12 October 2026. The site does not name its data source. It is not a company figure.", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "fact": "Share of the claimed revenue that this estimate covers", "value": "about one third", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 250,000 times 12 equals 3,000,000, and 3,000,000 divided by 9,000,000 equals 33.3%. The rest would come from web payments and Google Play. The company advises users to pay on the web.", "src": [ 1, 8, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Subscribers that US$750,000 a month would need at the Standard web price", "value": "about 53,600", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 750,000 divided by 13.99 equals 53,610, if every subscriber paid only the Standard price each month. The company does not publish its subscriber count.", "src": [ 1, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Launch", "value": "June 2023", "grade": "B", "note": "The Verge, 3 December 2024: launched in June of the year before by Jerry Meng, whom it describes as a 26-year-old who left Stanford University without a degree.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Release of the iOS app", "value": "2 August 2023", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's App Store record. The seller is Beautifully Incorporated, the legal name of the company.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Usage, March 2024", "value": "more than 500,000 people had tried the app; more than 90 minutes a day for the average user", "grade": "C", "note": "ElevenLabs customer story. ElevenLabs is a supplier and repeats what its customer told it.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Google Play listing, October 2026", "value": "more than 1 million downloads, 26,000 reviews, 4.4 stars", "grade": "B", "note": "Google's own listing, rated Mature 17+, last updated on 6 October 2026.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "App Store listing, October 2026", "value": "9,700 ratings, 4.8 stars, age rating 18+", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's own listing. Version 1.70 was released on 18 August 2026.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "App Store price compared with the web price", "value": "14% to 16% higher", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 15.99 divided by 13.99, 28.99 divided by 24.99, and 68.99 divided by 59.99. The company says web prices are lower because the processing fees are lower.", "src": [ 8, 10, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "yes, from Pear VC; the company does not state the amount", "grade": "C", "note": "The advert says the company is backed by investors and it is published on Pear VC's job board. Caplight records a seed round on 1 July 2024 and US$2 million in total. NeuronFeed records US$1 million. Tracxn records no funding at all. These directories do not agree.", "src": [ 1, 14, 15 ] }, { "fact": "Free tier", "value": "ended on 1 October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Company update log. Free accounts get a limited preview, then become read-only. The company's reason: the service is expensive to provide and a lower-quality free tier did not represent the product.", "src": [ 7, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Updates published in 2026", "value": "33 dated entries from 8 January to 12 October", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: counted in the company's update log. 277 days divided by 33 equals one entry every 8.4 days.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Open position, September 2026", "value": "1 Founding Engineer, US$200,000 to US$300,000 a year", "grade": "C", "note": "Published on Pear VC's job board on 3 September 2026. The salary range is from the Built In San Francisco copy.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the March 2026 figure", "value": "33 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: June 2023 to March 2026.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2023", "what": "Replika, an older companion app, blocks erotic content after Italian regulators act against it, then brings it back with filters. Some of its users look for another app.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "June 2023", "what": "Jerry Meng launches Kindroid. Users write their character's backstory and key memories themselves.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "2 August 2023", "what": "The iOS app is released on the App Store.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "23 September 2023", "what": "Soulmate, a competing companion app, announces that it is shutting down. The Verge follows one of its users, who moves his companion to Kindroid by describing her personality in words.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "1 March 2024", "what": "ElevenLabs publishes a customer story: Kindroid uses its voices, more than 500,000 people have tried the app, and the average user spends more than 90 minutes a day in it. The story gives no revenue number.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "1 July 2024", "what": "Seed round, as recorded by the directories Caplight and CB Insights. Pear VC is the named investor. The company has not published an amount.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "3 December 2024", "what": "The Verge publishes a long report on AI companions with Meng among the founders interviewed. Kindroid is working on better voices and on video calls.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "11 September 2025", "what": "The US Federal Trade Commission orders seven large companies, among them Character Technologies, Meta and OpenAI, to report how they test companion chatbots for harm to children and teens. Kindroid is not one of the seven.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "when": "14 September 2025", "what": "A copy of Kindroid's job advert says US$5 million in ARR, a team of 4, and profitable.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2025", "what": "California's governor signs SB 243, a law on companion chatbots that covers any operator with users in the state.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "when": "15 March 2026", "what": "A new copy of the job advert says US$9 million in ARR, a team of 5, and profitable.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "25 March 2026", "what": "Live AI video calls leave beta: the character moves its lips and hands in real time during a call.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "3 April 2026", "what": "Age verification starts for free accounts. An account that looks like a minor's must subscribe or pass a check by Yoti, an outside age-verification company.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 9 ] }, { "when": "April 2026", "what": "The Android app is unavailable on Google Play. The company calls it a technical issue that it fixed on its side on 14 April. On 21 April, 7 days later, the app is still not restored.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "2 June 2026", "what": "The log announces mobile app pricing changes and link-out purchases in the US apps, which means a button that opens the web checkout at web prices. The full announcement is on Discord and was not read.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 8 ] }, { "when": "1 October 2026", "what": "The permanent free tier ends. Free accounts get a limited preview and then become read-only. The old interface is retired.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "12 October 2026", "what": "The update log adds a new entry and the web app carries a build of the same day. The company still operates and still hires.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 7 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Timing", "text": "The Verge reports that by 2023 open-source language models had improved so fast that building a companion was far easier than a few months before, and that dozens of companies appeared. In the same year Replika blocked content that its users valued, and Soulmate closed in September. Kindroid, launched in June, was open when those users looked for a new app." }, { "title": "The user writes the character", "text": "A Kindroid is defined by text that the user writes: backstory, key memories and other attributes. The user in The Verge's report moved his companion from an app that was closing by interviewing her for a week and writing her personality down. The same design means the character does not depend on one model version, because the description stays when the model changes." }, { "title": "Subscribers pay for the computing", "text": "There are no ads and the company says it does not sell data. The Standard subscription pays for the main model. The Ultra and MAX add-ons give more memory, and the company writes that they are priced to cover the cost of dedicated servers, not to make a profit. Extra audio credits are sold at cost. In October 2026 it ended the free tier, with the reason that paying subscribers were funding it." }, { "title": "Web payments beside the app stores", "text": "The help pages tell users that the web is cheaper and more flexible. On this page's numbers the App Store price is 14% to 16% higher than the web price. The US apps offer a button that opens the web checkout, announced in June 2026." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's help pages and job adverts, from a supplier's customer story and from The Verge. They are grade B and C. The company does not publish which base models it uses.", "items": [ "Its own named language models, served on its own computing: the flagship model in October 2026 is called Polaris and the default is called Ember. The September 2026 job advert lists fine-tuning pipelines and the upkeep of GPU clusters among the engineer's tasks. Fine-tuning means training an existing model further on chosen examples.", "Voice from ElevenLabs in March 2024. The founder said this saved the time and cost of running voice models on Kindroid's own servers. Whether ElevenLabs is still the provider in 2026 is not verified.", "Memory in three types: persistent text written by the user, a cascaded memory for the medium term, and long-term memories that are retrieved when relevant. Larger memory is what the paid add-ons sell.", "Generated pictures, short videos and live video calls of the character, each with its own model versions and credit prices.", "Web app, iOS app since 2 August 2023, and Android app. Subscriptions are sold through the App Store, Google Play and a web checkout.", "Safety design: the company does not filter the model's replies. It scans user input and acts on accounts in three cases: plans for imminent self-harm, plans for imminent harm to others, and child sexual abuse material. A repeated self-harm detection shows crisis lines such as 988.", "Age checks: a paid subscription counts as proof of age. A free account that a behaviour model flags as a possible minor must subscribe or pass a selfie or ID check by Yoti.", "A public update log with 33 dated entries in 2026, and a page where paying subscribers comment on a policy before it changes." ], "src": [ 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold company or closeness as a product, two as home robots and two as private social apps. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Jibo", "years": "2012 to 2018", "funding": "US$73M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A social robot for the home that talks with the family and has a personality.", "died": "The robot was expensive to build and to buy. Voice assistants from Amazon and Google did the useful tasks for far less money, and the emotional connection alone did not justify the price.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/259-jibo" }, { "name": "Anki", "years": "2010 to 2019", "funding": "US$182M", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "Small AI robots, Cozmo and Vector, that play, learn and react like a pet.", "died": "Production costs and spending were high, the demand for home robots was too small, and the company could not raise more money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/6-anki" }, { "name": "Path", "years": "2010 to 2018", "funding": "US$77M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A private social network limited to 150 close friends and family.", "died": "It could not earn enough from its users, its paid features found few buyers, and Facebook had far more resources.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/415-path" }, { "name": "Couple", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A private app for two partners to message, share photos and plan together.", "died": "Free general messengers such as WhatsApp did the same job, and the app found no clear way to earn money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1183-couple" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Jibo and Anki tried to sell a companion as a machine. Each unit had to be manufactured, shipped and sold at a high price, and the conversation was limited, because language models that can hold a long conversation did not exist yet. Path and Couple sold closeness between people as a separate app, and free messengers offered the same thing without a charge.", "Language models changed the first problem. The conversation is now the product, it needs no hardware, and a team of five can serve it from rented or owned computing. Kindroid also charges for the part that the free messengers never had, which is a character that answers at any hour and remembers. What did not change is the cost side: Jibo and Anki died of production costs, and Kindroid writes that its service is expensive to provide and that its largest add-ons may lose money." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The app, hardly. The pricing logic, yes.", "text": "A companion app in 2026 needs its own model serving, picture, voice and video generation, age verification and a published safety protocol, and it must follow new laws in several places. Kindroid built these over three years with seed funding. The parts that a small founder can reuse are its pricing and its way of working with users.", "steps": [ "Let the user write and own the definition of the product's behaviour, so the value stays when the model changes.", "Charge a base subscription, and sell the heavy computing as add-ons priced at cost.", "Offer a web checkout beside the app stores, at a lower price, and say so in the help pages.", "Publish every change in a dated log, and ask paying users before a policy change." ], "open": "Products in which a model keeps a long memory of one user and the user pays for that continuity, in fields with fewer content and age rules than romance: language practice, coaching, and role-play tools for writers and game masters." }, "watch": [ { "title": "The headline figure is one line in a job advert", "text": "The US$9 million comes from recruiting text, which a company writes to attract candidates. The metric \"retentive ARR\" is not defined, no payment processor or journalist has confirmed it, and the company does not publish subscriber counts. The supplier page that first pointed to this story, by ElevenLabs, contains no revenue number. The advert also says the company was featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker and Business Insider; this page verified only The Verge." }, { "title": "New laws on companion chatbots", "text": "California's SB 243, signed on 13 October 2025, covers any operator with users in the state. It requires a notice that the chatbot is not human when a reasonable person could be misled, a published protocol against suicide and self-harm content, extra duties toward users known to be minors, and yearly reports from 1 July 2027. Kindroid publishes such a protocol on its moderation page. An injured person can sue for at least US$1,000 per violation. The Federal Trade Commission opened a study of companion chatbots in September 2025. Kindroid's own log says that laws requiring age checks are arriving worldwide. Each new rule is work for a team of five." }, { "title": "App-store rules", "text": "Apple's review guideline 1.1.4 forbids overtly sexual material. Kindroid is rated 18+ on the App Store and Mature 17+ on Google Play, and its moderation page describes an unfiltered AI that permits adult role-play. In April 2026 the Android app was unavailable on Google Play for at least 7 days; the company called it a technical issue. A removal from a store stops new installs and store billing there. During that outage the company told Android users to use the web app and to subscribe on the web." }, { "title": "User safety", "text": "The Verge describes users who formed strong attachments and suffered when an app changed its model or closed. Kindroid's policy is to leave the model unfiltered and to act only on accounts that plan imminent self-harm, plan harm to others, or produce child sexual abuse material; general expressions of despair do not trigger an intervention. The founder told The Verge that it is acceptable if a person finds more joy in an AI relationship than in a human one. A serious harm case at any companion app brings press attention and regulators to the whole category." }, { "title": "The cost of serving", "text": "The company writes that Kindroid is expensive to provide and that it expects to break even or lose money on the Ultra and MAX add-ons. It ended the free tier on 1 October 2026, which removes a cost and also removes the easiest way for new users to try the product for a long time. Profit depends on the price of computing and on how many preview users convert." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://kindroid.ai/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6451038161" }, { "kind": "android", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kindroid.app" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Kindroid job advert, Founding Engineer, copy on the Flare Capital job board dated 15 March 2026", "url": "https://careers.flarecapital.com/companies/bridgehealthai/jobs/70764263-founding-engineer-kindroid", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's own recruiting text, copied from Pear VC's job board; the board files it under a wrong company name. Earliest dated copy with the US$9 million figure, the team of 5 and the word profitable. The date is the posting date in the page's data." }, { "title": "Kindroid job advert, Founding Engineer, copy on Built In Montreal dated 7 April 2026", "url": "https://builtinmontreal.com/job/founding-engineer-kindroid/8247134", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The same text as source 1, under the name Pear VC. Confirms the wording and gives a second date." }, { "title": "Kindroid job advert, earlier version, copy on Built In dated 14 September 2025", "url": "https://builtin.com/job/founding-engineer/4460210", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The same advert with US$5 million and a 4-person team. The page says the advert was removed on 18 September 2025." }, { "title": "Pear VC job board on Ashby: Founding Engineer, Kindroid AI, published 3 September 2026", "url": "https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Pear-VC/68c48b6d-b2fe-4240-b190-6a4887e86e81", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the entry in the board's public data feed, because the page loads by script. The salary range comes from the copy at builtinsf.com/job/founding-engineer/11006924. Source for the legal name, the tasks and the open position." }, { "title": "The Verge, 3 December 2024, Josh Dzieza: The confusing reality of AI friends", "url": "https://www.theverge.com/c/24300623/ai-companions-replika-openai-chatgpt-assistant-romance", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Independent reporting with founder interviews. Source for the launch month, the founder's background, the Replika and Soulmate events and the user accounts." }, { "title": "ElevenLabs customer story, 1 March 2024: Kindroid gives voice to their AI companions with ElevenLabs", "url": "https://elevenlabs.io/customers/kindroid", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A supplier's page with a founder quotation. Source for the usage figures of March 2024. It contains no revenue number." }, { "title": "Kindroid help center: Update log", "url": "https://kindroid.ai/v2/docs/update-log/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through a text-rendering proxy because the page loads by script. Read the entries on free access, age verification, Google Play, pricing and video calls, and counted the dated entries. The site's HTML carries a build stamp of 12 October 2026. The log prints day and month only; the year follows from the age-verification article dated 3 April 2026 and from notes marked October 2026." }, { "title": "Kindroid help center: Subscriptions, and In-App Purchases", "url": "https://kindroid.ai/v2/docs/subscriptions/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through a text-rendering proxy. Source for the plan structure, the free preview, the add-on reasoning and the advice to pay on the web. The page gives no prices." }, { "title": "Kindroid help center: Moderation Guidelines, and Age Verification", "url": "https://kindroid.ai/v2/docs/moderation-guidelines/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the three cases, the crisis protocol and the age checks, through a text-rendering proxy." }, { "title": "Apple App Store listing: Kindroid: Your Personal AI, read 12 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kindroid-your-personal-ai/id6451038161", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the listing and Apple's lookup record. Source for the in-app prices, the age rating, the rating count, the seller name, the release date and the current version." }, { "title": "Google Play listing: Kindroid: Your Personal AI, read 12 October 2026", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kindroid.app", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the listing. Source for the download band, the review count, the content rating and the date of the last update." }, { "title": "WeavAI review, 8 April 2026, updated 17 June 2026: Kindroid AI review 2026", "url": "https://weavai.app/blog/en/2026/04/08/kindroid-ai-review-2026-full-analysis-of-five-tier-memory-system-voice-calls-and-personalized-ai-companions/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the pricing table. A reviewer. Source for the web prices, which the reviewer pages at jenova.ai and aiinsightsnews.net repeat." }, { "title": "ScreensDesign app page: Kindroid: Your Personal AI", "url": "https://screensdesign.com/apps/kindroid/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the summary figures. A third-party estimate of iOS revenue and installs with no stated data source." }, { "title": "Caplight company page: Kindroid valuation and funding history", "url": "https://www.caplight.com/company/kindroid", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A directory. Source for the seed round date, the total of US$2 million and the investor. CB Insights lists two rounds with Pear VC, and NeuronFeed gives US$1 million." }, { "title": "Tracxn company page: Kindroid", "url": "https://tracxn.com/d/companies/kindroid/__szE5vZ6lc8XQf00Fzgbn3vHHrDyBKmIEtbLmvtzPZUY", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the summary. A directory. Source for the employee count. It records no funding, which conflicts with source 14." }, { "title": "Federal Trade Commission press release, 11 September 2025: FTC Launches Inquiry into AI Chatbots Acting as Companions", "url": "https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/09/ftc-launches-inquiry-ai-chatbots-acting-companions", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full through a text-rendering proxy, because the site refused a direct download. Source for the inquiry and the list of seven companies." }, { "title": "California Legislative Information: SB 243, Companion chatbots, chaptered 13 October 2025", "url": "https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260SB243", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the digest and the sections on operators, minors, reporting and civil action in the official bill text." }, { "title": "Apple App Review Guidelines, read 12 October 2026", "url": "https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read guideline 1.1.4 and section 3.1 on payments." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/umax/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/umax.md", "slug": "umax", "name": "Umax", "country": "USA", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI face-rating app", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-13", "launchLabel": "December 2023", "outcomeLabel": "Almost US$5M in its first year, December 2024", "sticker": "$5M in first year", "outcomeUsd": 5000000, "months": 12, "teamLabel": "1 founder, with freelancers and paid creators; staff count not published", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "health-appearance", "channel": "creators", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Consumer apps" ], "product": "A phone app that scores a selfie. The user uploads a photo of his face, and the app returns a score up to 100 with ratings of the jawline, the cheekbones, the skin and masculinity, and tips such as starting a skin care routine. The results are shown after the user subscribes, at about US$4 a week, or invites three friends.", "why": "Young men were already posting photos online and asking strangers to rate their looks. Umax turned that habit into a private score from an AI model. One founder built it at almost no cost on a rented vision model, and creators in one small niche spread it, because a score makes a before-and-after video easy to show. Revenue was highest within months of the launch and has fallen since.", "summary": [ "Umax is a phone app for looksmaxxing, an online term for trying to raise one's physical attractiveness as far as possible, a trend followed mostly by boys and young men. The user uploads a selfie. A vision model, an AI model that takes an image as input and answers questions about it, returns a score up to 100, ratings of the jawline, the cheekbones, the skin and masculinity, and tips for improvement. The app calls OpenAI's GPT Vision model, so the founder did not train a model of his own. The results cost about US$4 a week.", "Blake Anderson, 23 years old in 2024, built it alone in November 2023, after he left the team of his first app, and released it at the start of December 2023. He says the best month brought about US$700,000, and he does not date that month. He told Fortune in July 2024 that the app made about US$500,000 a month, and Fortune wrote that it could not verify the amount. In December 2024 he said the app had made almost US$5 million in the past year, which is the headline figure of this page. Revenue then fell: about US$400,000 a month in November 2024 and US$270,000 in July 2025, the last figure he published. A run rate is one month of revenue multiplied by twelve. The US$6 million a year that many articles repeat is a run rate, and the founder's own total for the first twelve months is lower.", "Every revenue number on this page is a founder statement, grade C. One estimate from an app-data service is well below his figures. The page also reports the criticism: psychologists say that apps which score the faces of young users can feed anxiety about appearance. The app has had no update since June 2024. The page then shows five earlier consumer apps for young users that spread fast and closed." ], "factsCaption": "Almost US$5 million in the first twelve months from a face-rating app built by one person, then a decline, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a statement by the founder in an interview, a podcast or an X post, or an estimate by a third party that says so. Fortune printed his monthly figure and wrote that it could not verify it. A grade B value is a record in Apple's or Google's app store: dates, ratings and prices, not revenue. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No revenue value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a selfie scorer coded by one person in November 2023 to almost US$5 million in twelve months, and then a decline. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Umax prices: in-app purchases listed in the App Store on 13 October 2026 (grade B), and the weekly price that Fortune and a16z recorded in 2024 (grade C)", "note": "The app is free to download. The App Store lists four prices for Weekly Premium and three for Monthly Premium. The founder says he tests prices and periods on different users with a paywall tool, and the listing does not say which price a new user sees today. Fortune recorded US$3.99 a week in July 2024, and a16z recorded US$4.99 a week in August 2024. At US$3.99 a week, a user who stays one year pays US$207.48. One further in-app purchase at US$3.99 is listed without a description.", "rows": [ [ "Weekly Premium", "", "3.99 a week", "Also listed at 4.99, 6.99 and 9.99 a week" ], [ "Monthly Premium", "", "9.99", "Also listed at 12.99 and 24.99 a month" ], [ "You as a 10/10", "", "", "Listed at 6.99; a generated picture of the user with a top score; the listing does not say if it is one-time" ], [ "Invite three friends", "0", "0", "Replaces the first weekly fee; did not work in Fortune's test in 2024" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue in the first twelve months, to December 2024", "value": "almost US$5 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in a Starter Story video interview published on 29 December 2024: \"In the past year we've done almost 5 million in revenue.\" The recording date is not given. Sales before the store's commission. This is the headline figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate stated by the founder, 4 October 2024", "value": "US$5 million a year", "grade": "C", "note": "His X post lists \"Umax ($5m arr)\". ARR, annual recurring revenue, is the current monthly subscription revenue multiplied by twelve.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month, July 2024", "value": "about US$500,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Fortune, 1 July 2024, \"according to Blake Anderson\". Fortune adds: \"The amount could not be independently verified.\"", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "That month as a yearly rate", "value": "US$6 million", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 500,000 times 12 equals 6,000,000. The founder said \"a little bit over $6 million in ARR\" on a podcast published in September 2024, and newsletters repeat it. It is a run rate from one month, not money collected in a year. The claim that it was reached 3.5 months after launch was not found in any source read for this page.", "src": [ 2, 7, 17 ] }, { "fact": "Best month", "value": "about US$700,000, month not stated", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on the Startup Ideas Podcast, November 2024: \"at our peak, we were around 700,000 in monthly revenue\". A newsletter dates his best month, for all his apps together, to February 2024. His X post of 2 January 2025 gives US$600,000 a month for the app he built on his own.", "src": [ 6, 18, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month, November 2024", "value": "about US$400,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Same podcast: \"Now I think it's closer to 400,000\".", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Profit per month, December 2024", "value": "a little over US$100,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Starter Story interview. After creator payments, the store's commission and server costs. He adds that it used to be more.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Total sales on the Apple App Store, shown to Whop", "value": "US$4.2 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Whop article, 28 May 2025; the interview date is not given. The founder showed his dashboard to a Whop employee. Whop sells the founder's paid community, so it is not an independent reviewer. In the same interview: \"Umax is still doing 350 to 400(k) a month\" and \"Apple takes 30% of that\".", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, July 2025", "value": "US$270,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's X post of 1 August 2025, which lists the July revenue of three apps. Umax is the smallest of the three. No later figure was found.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Fall from the best month to July 2025", "value": "61%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 700,000 minus 270,000 is 430,000, and 430,000 divided by 700,000 is 61.4%.", "src": [ 6, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Third-party estimate of revenue per month", "value": "US$330,000 in February 2024, US$170,000 in August 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "An estimate in the Chinese trade site Baijing, which names the app-data service Diandian Data. It puts total revenue near US$2 million by August 2024, where the founder's own figure was more than US$3 million. The article does not say if the estimate is before or after the stores' commission.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Downloads", "value": "more than 7 million by July 2024, more than 10 million by November 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder to Fortune and on the podcast. Google Play shows more than 10 million downloads on Android in October 2026.", "src": [ 2, 6, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Users", "value": "90% male, ages 16 to 45", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder to Fortune.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Price, 2024", "value": "US$3.99 a week in July, US$4.99 a week in August", "grade": "C", "note": "Fortune and a16z. Both mention that inviting three friends replaces the payment; in Fortune's test this did not work.", "src": [ 2, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Cost of one year at US$3.99 a week", "value": "US$207.48", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 3.99 times 52.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Rank among generative-AI phone apps, August 2024", "value": "44th by monthly active users", "grade": "C", "note": "a16z, a venture capital firm, in the third edition of its Top 100 list. A competitor, LooksMax AI, is 43rd.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Development cost", "value": "close to zero apart from the founder's time", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on the podcast: the face analysis is a call to GPT Vision, where it would earlier have needed his own facial recognition models.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Team when the figures were reached", "value": "1 founder, plus freelancers and paid creators", "grade": "C", "note": "He says he had the idea, designed and built the app and led most of the marketing, and that he did it on his own. He names Upwork freelancers for occasional work, and a podcast summary mentions employees. No count of staff is public.", "src": [ 1, 5, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "His X post: \"Reinvested every dollar and did it on my own.\" One Chinese article says he joined an accelerator with Umax; it does not name it, and no other source confirms it (not verified).", "src": [ 5, 9 ] }, { "fact": "App Store record, 13 October 2026", "value": "still listed; released 29 November 2023; last update 28 June 2024", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's listing: seller Improvement Tech LLC, version 1.4.3, 51,619 ratings with an average of 4.56, age rating 18+. A store record, not a revenue figure.", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "fact": "Google Play record, 13 October 2026", "value": "still listed; last update 19 April 2024", "grade": "B", "note": "More than 10 million downloads, 400,000 reviews, 4.5 stars, content rating Everyone.", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "fact": "Time since the last iPhone update", "value": "27 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 28 June 2024 to 13 October 2026.", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the headline figure", "value": "12 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: December 2023 to December 2024.", "src": [ 1, 7 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "July 2023", "what": "Anderson, a new graduate of Tulane University with no coding training, releases his first app, RizzGPT, a dating-message assistant. He taught himself to code with ChatGPT in May and June.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 8 ] }, { "when": "Before November 2023", "what": "He leaves the RizzGPT team after repeated conflict with a co-founder about who leads the company, and keeps his equity. He does not give the date.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "November 2023", "what": "He builds Umax alone, sleeping on his brother's couch. He says he spent Thanksgiving coding. The face analysis is a prompt to OpenAI's GPT Vision model.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "when": "29 November 2023", "what": "Apple's record gives this release date for Umax, under the seller Improvement Tech LLC; the version history dates version 1.0 to 30 November. The founder dates the launch to the start of December 2023.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 12, 7 ] }, { "when": "December 2023", "what": "A trade article says the app started with a video by a looksmaxxing creator, Sam Zia, and made about US$100,000 in its first month. No founder source read for this page confirms the name or the terms (not verified).", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "27 December 2023", "what": "Apple's record gives this release date for a competitor, LooksMax AI, 28 days after the release date of Umax.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "Early 2024", "what": "With revenue near US$200,000 a month and a copy on the market, he spends more than US$200,000 on creators in three days, almost all the app's income at that time. Revenue passes US$500,000 a month within five days. This account comes from a Chinese summary of his podcast; the podcast's own summary confirms the decision but not the numbers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10, 7 ] }, { "when": "First half of 2024", "what": "The best month, about US$700,000. He does not date it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "May 2024", "what": "Cal AI, a calorie-tracking app that he co-founded with two teenage founders, is released. They run its operations. It has its own page on this site.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 9 ] }, { "when": "28 June 2024", "what": "Version 1.4.3, the last update of the iPhone app.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "1 July 2024", "what": "Fortune reports about US$500,000 a month and more than 7 million downloads, both from the founder, and writes that it could not verify the revenue. Psychologists in the article criticize the trend.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "21 August 2024", "what": "a16z ranks Umax 44th among generative-AI phone apps by monthly active users.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "4 October 2024", "what": "He posts on X that Umax is at US$5 million a year and that he no longer builds apps with this method.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "November 2024", "what": "On a podcast he says revenue is closer to US$400,000 a month and downloads are above 10 million.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "29 December 2024", "what": "Starter Story publishes his interview: almost US$5 million in the past year and a little over US$100,000 of profit a month. He now works on Apex, a paid community that teaches app building.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 8 ] }, { "when": "1 August 2025", "what": "He posts that Umax made US$270,000 in July 2025.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2026", "what": "Umax is still listed in the App Store and on Google Play, with no update since 2024. No revenue figure after July 2025 was found. The founder's posts in 2026 are about other products.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 12, 13, 19 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Distribution", "text": "Growth came from creators in one small niche. Anderson told Fortune that the videos that do well are before-and-after videos and that a Umax score puts a number on the change, and Fortune writes that users often show screenshots of the app in their own videos. He counts more than 1 billion impressions across platforms. He says creators are his most profitable channel, ahead of the app's own accounts and paid ads." }, { "title": "A niche that already spent money", "text": "People who wanted to look better were already buying skin care, hair care and face massage tools, and no software served them. His rule: when a niche spends heavily on physical products, that shows the niche pays, and software for the same problem can probably be built." }, { "title": "A rented vision model", "text": "A face scorer used to need a trained facial recognition model. With GPT Vision it became a prompt, written by one person in weeks. The same fact means that anyone else can write the prompt too." }, { "title": "A low weekly price behind a tested paywall", "text": "The user sees the results after subscribing. He says low prices bring more users, more recommendations between friends and better comments on social media. He tests prices and periods on different users with a paywall tool, which he says can raise revenue per download by 1.5 to 2 times." }, { "title": "All the money on one campaign", "text": "By a Chinese account of his podcast, when a copy appeared he spent almost all of the app's income on creators in three days, and monthly revenue more than doubled within five days. He describes himself as someone who has no second plan." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's interviews and podcasts. They are grade C. The stack is the one he described in December 2024.", "items": [ "The face analysis is a prompt to OpenAI's GPT Vision model, not a model trained by the founder. He says the upfront development cost was close to zero apart from his own time.", "He learned to code with ChatGPT in May and June 2023. A Chinese article that summarizes one of his podcasts says about 85% of Umax's code was generated by ChatGPT (not verified in a founder source).", "React Native with the Expo framework for the app, Node.js for the server, Cursor as the code editor, Figma for design, CapCut for marketing videos.", "Superwall, a paywall tool, to show different prices and subscription periods to different users. The App Store listing shows four weekly prices and three monthly prices.", "Freelancers from Upwork for occasional work. His method: hire five to ten people for one or two hours each, then keep the best one.", "Costs in his words: Apple keeps 15% of sales up to the first US$1 million and 30% above that, model costs are small unless the app generates images, and most of the money goes to marketing and staff.", "Marketing: paid creators first, also videos made in-house for the app's own accounts, and paid ads on Meta and TikTok." ], "src": [ 1, 6, 8, 10, 12 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five consumer apps in the Loot Drop database spread fast among young users and then closed. Three of them exposed teenagers and students to harsh judgement from other people. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Formspring", "years": "2009 to 2016", "funding": "US$14M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Anonymous questions and brutally honest answers for teenagers.", "died": "Anonymous questions between teenagers turned into cyberbullying and bad press. It never earned enough from its large user base, and Ask.fm took its users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/161-formspring" }, { "name": "Yik Yak", "years": "2013 to 2017", "funding": "US$73M", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "An anonymous message board for everyone within 5 miles, aimed at college campuses.", "died": "Bullying and harassment led to school bans. Anonymity made advertising hard to sell, and growth stopped.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/775-yik-yak" }, { "name": "Secret", "years": "2014 to 2015", "funding": "US$35M", "cause": "Team/Founder Conflict", "promise": "Share confessions with friends without your name.", "died": "The novelty faded, gossip and bullying damaged its name, and the founders disagreed about the direction.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/526-secret" }, { "name": "Yo", "years": "2014 to 2018", "funding": "US$1.5M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "An app that sends one word: Yo.", "died": "After the viral spike, users found nothing to come back for, and the app had no way to earn money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/776-yo" }, { "name": "Meerkat", "years": "2015 to 2016", "funding": "US$14M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Live video from your phone to your Twitter followers.", "died": "Its growth depended on Twitter's network. Twitter bought a competitor, Periscope, and cut Meerkat's access.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2194-meerkat" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Formspring, Yik Yak and Secret gave young users harsh judgement from other people, without names. All three grew fast, all three were blamed for bullying, and none found a way to earn enough money. Yo shows a second pattern: a novelty that spreads in days and gives users no reason to return. Meerkat shows a third: growth that depends on a platform that the company does not control.", "Umax differs in two ways. The judgement comes from a model and only the user sees it, so there is no content from other users to moderate. And it charged from the first day, with one founder and a rented model, so it made a profit where the earlier apps spent investors' money: US$73 million in the case of Yik Yak. The other patterns still apply. Psychologists criticize face scores for young users as critics once criticized anonymous judgement. Revenue fell 61% from the best month to July 2025, as the revenue of a novelty does. And the growth depends on creators, on TikTok and Instagram, and on the stores of Apple and Google." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. This product, with care.", "text": "The method is public. Anderson described it in interviews and wrote in October 2024 that he had used it three times in one year. A copy of the product itself is a weaker plan: a competitor was in the App Store 28 days after Umax, an Australian newspaper counted at least 26 face-rating apps in 2026, and Umax's own revenue has fallen since 2024. Anyone who copies the product also takes on the criticism described in the next section.", "steps": [ "Look for a niche where people already spend money on physical products and no software serves them.", "Build the one function with a rented model, and spend the saved time on distribution.", "Pay small creators inside the niche, measure each one, and add money only where the return is positive.", "Charge a low price from the first day, and test prices and periods with a paywall tool." ], "open": "In December 2024 Anderson said that there was still room for one app that covers the whole of personal appearance, and that Umax was only a first version. The method also works outside appearance: on a podcast in November 2024 he named career advice, journaling and language learning as app ideas." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Founder numbers only, and one lower estimate", "text": "No payment processor, buyer or journalist has confirmed any revenue figure. Fortune printed US$500,000 a month and added that it could not verify it. The dashboard was shown once, to an employee of Whop, a company that sells the founder's paid community. An estimate quoted by the trade site Baijing gives US$330,000 for February 2024 and US$170,000 for August 2024, well below the founder's figures for 2024." }, { "title": "A peak, then a decline", "text": "The US$6 million a year that many articles quote is one month multiplied by twelve. The founder's later figures are lower each time: US$5 million a year in October 2024, about US$400,000 a month in November 2024, US$270,000 in July 2025. No figure after July 2025 was found. The iPhone app was last updated on 28 June 2024 and the Android app on 19 April 2024. Both were still listed on 13 October 2026, but the product has not changed for more than two years." }, { "title": "Appearance scores and teenagers", "text": "In Fortune's 2024 article, Tom Hildebrandt, a clinical psychologist at Mount Sinai in New York, calls the effect of such feedback an erosion of the sense of self and says these products earn money from insecurity. In July 2026 the Sunday Telegraph in Australia quoted Erika Penney, president of the Australian Clinical Psychology Association: apps that rate appearance make adolescents obsess over their looks, and mild advice can lead to harder practices. A University of Colorado psychiatry professor gave similar warnings to parents in August 2026. The two 2026 articles are about the category and do not name Umax, and no study of Umax users was found. Anderson's answer to Fortune: he does not want a user to feel insecure to the point of anxiety, and he thinks that telling everyone that nothing needs work is also dangerous." }, { "title": "The community it grew from", "text": "Fortune describes looksmaxxing content as a range. At the mild end, creators tell boys to wash their faces. At the extreme end, they tell them to hit their jaws to cause small fractures, to have surgery or to take steroids. Umax's tips are of the mild kind, such as a skin care routine. Its audience came from the same videos and creators, and its name in both stores is Umax - Become Hot." }, { "title": "Store rules and age ratings", "text": "Apple's review guidelines say that apps used for objectification of real people, with hot-or-not voting as the example, do not belong on the App Store and may be removed without notice. Umax scores the user's own photo with a model, which is not voting, and it has stayed in the store since 2023. The rule shows how close the category is to the limit. Age is a second point: the App Store rates the app 18+, Google Play rates it Everyone, and the founder told Fortune that users are 16 to 45." }, { "title": "Growth bought from creators, and easy to copy", "text": "The founder calls creators his most profitable channel, and by one account he spent almost all the app's income on them in three days when a copy appeared. LooksMax AI ranked one place above Umax in a16z's list of August 2024. A product that is one prompt to a rented model has no technical protection. Its position depends on continued payments to creators and on the ranking rules of TikTok, Instagram and the App Store." }, { "title": "Weekly billing", "text": "US$3.99 a week reads as a small price and adds up to US$207.48 for a user who stays one year. Fortune's test found that the offer to replace the first fee by inviting three friends did not work." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.umaxapp.com" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6471026798" }, { "kind": "android", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.umax.tech" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Starter Story, 29 December 2024: He made $10M with 3 iPhone apps (video interview with transcript)", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/he-made-10m-with-3-iphone-apps", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the transcript in full. Founder interview. Source for the headline figure, the profit, how he built Umax alone, the split from his first team and the stack." }, { "title": "Fortune, 1 July 2024, by Alexandra Sternlicht: Inside the 'looksmaxxing' economy", "url": "https://fortune.com/2024/07/01/looksmaxxing-apps-rate-teen-boys-faces-mental-health", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Fortune reports the founder's revenue and download figures and writes that it could not verify the revenue. Source for the price, the user ages, the psychologists' criticism and the founder's reply." }, { "title": "Blake Anderson on X, 4 October 2024: RizzGPT ($2.4m arr), Umax ($5m arr)", "url": "https://x.com/blakeandersonw/status/1842349939088925146", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Founder post." }, { "title": "Blake Anderson on X, 1 August 2025: I made $3.94m in July 2025", "url": "https://x.com/blakeandersonw/status/1951306304393531687", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Founder post. Source for the July 2025 revenue of Umax." }, { "title": "Blake Anderson on X, 2 January 2025: Reinvested every dollar and did it on my own", "url": "https://x.com/blakeandersonw/status/1874935568397934745", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Founder post. It does not name the apps; the second of three is read as Umax from the order." }, { "title": "The Startup Ideas Podcast with Greg Isenberg, November 2024: How to build $1M+ Viral AI Apps, interview with Blake Anderson, transcript at Audioscrape", "url": "https://audioscrape.com/podcast/the-startup-ideas-podcast/episode/how-to-build-1m-viral-ai-apps", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the free part of the transcript, the first four minutes, and the episode notes. Source for the best month, the November 2024 revenue, the downloads and the GPT Vision statement." }, { "title": "Superhuman AI podcast, 3 September 2024: How Blake Anderson built a $6 Million app with ChatGPT, page at Podwise", "url": "https://podwise.ai/episodes/1919485", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the episode summary, the outline and the first two minutes of the transcript; the rest needs an account. Source for the launch date, the US$6 million run rate claim and the summary of the creator campaign." }, { "title": "Whop blog, 28 May 2025: How He Turned Looksmaxxing into $10 Million Dollars with ChatGPT", "url": "https://whop.com/blog/looksmaxxing-blake-anderson/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Written by a company that sells the founder's paid community. Source for the App Store total, the 350,000 to 400,000 a month statement and the marketing channels." }, { "title": "Baijing (白鲸出海), 24 September 2024: article in Chinese on a calorie app by teenage founders, with a section on Anderson's apps", "url": "https://www.baijing.cn/article/50157", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on Anderson in Chinese. A trade publication. Source for the third-party revenue estimate and the unverified account of the launch creator and the accelerator." }, { "title": "Huxiu (虎嗅), 23 February 2025: article in Chinese on Anderson, written from his podcast interviews", "url": "https://m.huxiu.com/article/4050088.html", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on Umax in Chinese. A secondary account; the podcast audio was not checked. Source for the three-day creator campaign and the share of generated code." }, { "title": "Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), 21 August 2024: The Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps, 3rd Edition", "url": "https://a16z.com/100-gen-ai-apps-3/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on aesthetics and dating apps. Source for the rank, the competitor's rank and the US$4.99 weekly price." }, { "title": "Apple App Store listing: Umax - Become Hot, read 13 October 2026, with Apple's iTunes Search API record", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/umax-become-hot/id6471026798", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Apple's store record. Source for the seller, the version dates, the ratings, the age rating, the in-app purchase prices and the release date of the competitor LooksMax AI." }, { "title": "Google Play listing: Umax - Become Hot, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.umax.tech", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Google's store record. Source for the Android downloads, the content rating and the last update date." }, { "title": "Apple, App Store Review Guidelines, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the passage on user-generated content. Source for the rule on objectification of real people." }, { "title": "Australian Psychological Society, 14 July 2026, reprint of a Sunday Telegraph article: Self-rating apps a bad look as users obsess over flaws", "url": "https://psychology.org.au/insights/aps-in-the-sunday-telegraph-self-rating-apps-a-bad", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. About the category of appearance-rating apps; it does not name Umax. Source for the count of 26 apps and the statement by Erika Penney." }, { "title": "University of Colorado Anschutz, 11 August 2026: Why Are Teens Asking AI to Rate Their Faces?", "url": "https://news.cuanschutz.edu/news-stories/why-are-teens-asking-ai-to-rate-their-faces", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Interview with Emily Hemendinger, associate professor of psychiatry. About the trend; it does not name Umax." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 7 May 2024, post by Rushab Jain: Reddit trend, $6M ARR beauty app for men", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/reddit-trend-6m-arr-beauty-app-for-men-57ec364606", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A third party that repeats the US$6 million figure without a source. Cited only to show where the figure circulates." }, { "title": "Scale Nuggets newsletter, 27 August 2024: The 23-Year-Old Who's Making $11M/year with AI Apps", "url": "https://scalenuggets.beehiiv.com/p/23yearold-whos-making-11myear-ai-apps", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the free part; the rest is behind a subscription. A secondary account. Cited for the February 2024 best month." }, { "title": "Blake Anderson on X, 29 March 2026: Introducing core.so", "url": "https://x.com/blakeandersonw/status/2038276867464061056", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Shows that the founder's public work in 2026 is on other products." }, { "title": "Umax website", "url": "https://www.umaxapp.com", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. One page with a link to the App Store and the line that the app is owned and operated by Improvement Tech LLC. Not used for numbers." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/autoshorts-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/autoshorts-ai.md", "slug": "autoshorts-ai", "name": "AutoShorts.ai", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Automated faceless short videos with scheduled posting", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-13", "launchLabel": "January 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$97K monthly recurring revenue, May 2025", "sticker": "$97K MRR, one person", "outcomeUsd": 1169000, "months": 16, "teamLabel": "1 founder, no employees in any source through June 2025", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "video", "channel": "partners", "trend": "flat", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Video" ], "product": "A web service that makes a short vertical video from a topic, with a script, a synthetic voice and generated images, and posts it to the customer's TikTok or YouTube account on a fixed schedule, from 3 times a week to twice a day. The customer sets up a series once, and the videos then arrive without more work.", "why": "It started in January 2024, when faceless channels were a rising trend and one video took one to two hours of work in four separate tools. The customers were mainly YouTubers, who then promoted the product for a commission, and Facebook ads returned many times their cost. The founder had built two earlier products that passed US$30,000 of MRR.", "summary": [ "AutoShorts.ai makes and posts faceless videos: short vertical videos in which no person appears on camera. The customer chooses a topic once, called a series. For every video the service writes a script with a language model, reads it with text to speech, which is software that turns text into a human-sounding voice, generates the pictures with an image model, renders the video, and posts it to the customer's TikTok or YouTube account. The plans differ only in how often it posts: 3 times a week for US$19 a month, once a day for US$39, twice a day for US$69.", "Eric Smith, a former Instagram software engineer in Florida who builds products alone, wrote that the idea came on 20 December 2023 and the first subscriber on 1 February 2024. He then posted his MRR on X at each step. MRR is monthly recurring revenue: the value of all active subscriptions for one month, where a yearly plan counts as one twelfth. It was US$1,000 on 28 February 2024, US$40,000 on 13 May and US$83,300 on 31 July 2024, which is US$1 million of ARR, annual recurring revenue, MRR times 12. After that the growth almost stopped: US$93,822 in September 2024 and US$97,452 in June 2025. Money collected in one month was higher, US$113,400 in November 2024 and US$138,000 in May 2025, because yearly plans are paid at once. He says he has no employees and no investors.", "Every number on this page is a statement by the founder on X, several with images of his own Stripe dashboard: grade C. No payment processor, buyer or journalist has confirmed them. The article that led to this story reports \"over $113,000 MRR\"; the founder's post gives US$113,400 as the revenue of November 2024, not as MRR. The page also shows the rules of YouTube and TikTok that such videos must pass, and what happened to earlier companies that sold video without effort." ], "factsCaption": "US$1 million of annual recurring revenue six months after the first subscriber, then recurring revenue that rose only 3.9% in nine months, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a statement by the founder in a post on X, sometimes with an image of his own dashboard, or a statement by a site that repeats him. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From an idea in December 2023 to US$83,300 a month in recurring revenue by July 2024, then a plateau. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "AutoShorts.ai prices on 13 October 2026, read from the plan data inside the company's home page (grade C)", "note": "Each plan covers one series, which is one topic with its own posting schedule. A yearly plan costs 10 times the monthly price: US$190, US$390 or US$690 a year. Starter Story recorded the same three monthly prices in May 2024, so they did not change in 29 months. The plan records carry the creation dates 2 January 2024 for the monthly plans and 26 June 2024 for the yearly plans.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "videos carry a watermark; 1 video to try, per the founder and a reviewer" ], [ "Starter", "15.83", "19", "posts 3 times a week, 1 series" ], [ "Daily", "32.50", "39", "posts once a day, 1 series" ], [ "Hardcore", "57.50", "69", "posts twice a day, 1 series" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, May 2025", "value": "US$97,452", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 11 June 2025 on the results of May gives US$97,000, rounded. The Stripe dashboard image attached to the post, updated 11 June 2025, shows US$97,452.18. He took and posted the image himself.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Annual run rate from that MRR", "value": "about US$1.17 million a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$97,452.18 times 12 = US$1,169,426. This is the headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue collected in May 2025", "value": "US$138,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Same post. The gross volume chart in the image peaks at US$138,300. It is higher than MRR because a yearly plan is paid at once, and he had made the yearly plan easier to see in May. The founder writes: \"remember MRR != Revenue\".", "src": [ 1, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue collected in November 2024", "value": "US$113,400", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 2 December 2024, which calls it a slight decline. A listicle of September 2025 reports this as over US$113,000 MRR and names no source. It is one month of revenue, not MRR.", "src": [ 2, 13 ] }, { "fact": "One month of revenue, costs and profit, posted 5 September 2024", "value": "gross revenue US$112,928, MRR US$93,822, expenses US$44,069.59, profit US$68,858", "grade": "C", "note": "A table in an image posted by the founder. The post does not say which month the table covers.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Check of that cost table", "value": "the seven cost lines add up to US$50,969.59, not US$44,069.59", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 16,439.81 + 10,893 + 9,173.44 + 7,900 + 4,242.27 + 2,158.83 + 162.24. The difference is exactly US$6,900. With the sum of the lines, profit is US$61,958, which is 54.9% of revenue and not 61.0%.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Paid to AI model providers in that table", "value": "US$24,309 in the month, 21.5% of gross revenue", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: ElevenLabs text to speech US$10,893 + image generation US$9,173.44 + OpenAI US$4,242.27.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Marketing in that table", "value": "Facebook ads US$16,439.81 and affiliates US$7,900", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder calls marketing the biggest expense. The company's partner page offers affiliates a 30% recurring commission.", "src": [ 3, 14 ] }, { "fact": "MRR on 31 July 2024", "value": "US$83,300, equal to US$1 million of ARR", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 1 August 2024, with the words \"completely solo and with no funding\".", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the first subscriber to US$1 million of ARR", "value": "181 days", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 1 February 2024 to 31 July 2024.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "MRR steps in 2024", "value": "US$1,000 on 28 February, US$2,000 on 16 March, US$5,000 on 2 April, US$12,000 on 19 April, US$20,000 on 27 April, US$30,000 on 5 May, US$40,000 on 13 May, US$70,000 on 27 June, US$75,000 on 19 July", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's posts, most with a dashboard image. Indie Hackers and the eBiz Insider newsletter repeated these figures and did not measure them.", "src": [ 4, 5, 11, 12 ] }, { "fact": "MRR growth from September 2024 to June 2025", "value": "3.9% in nine months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: from US$93,822 to US$97,452.18.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Costs at US$40,000 MRR, May 2024", "value": "about US$10,000 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's reply of 17 May 2024: servers, AI models and Facebook ads.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Ad cost for one new customer, and the value of a customer", "value": "April 2024: about US$14 and about US$184. July 2024: US$20 and about 6 times that", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's posts of 21 April and 20 July 2024 about his Facebook ads.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Churn, July 2024", "value": "about 23%", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's reply of 19 July 2024: \"Churn is pretty bad, around 23%\". He does not name the period. For monthly subscriptions the usual period is one month.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Cost of free users, September 2024", "value": "about US$13,000 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 16 September 2024. In a test three days later, removing the free plan almost doubled conversions.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Volume", "value": "600 videos a day in early April 2024; more than 2.5 million AI images in June 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's posts of 4 April and 14 July 2024.", "src": [ 5, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 person", "grade": "C", "note": "\"Solo\" in his posts through 11 June 2025, with 3 to 4 hours of work a day. On 1 April 2025 he wrote that he sometimes thinks about hiring. His X profile on 13 October 2026 still says \"Solo indiehacker\".", "src": [ 1, 8, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "\"No funding\" on 1 August 2024 and \"Bootstrapped\" on 11 June 2025.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "MRR in the founder's X profile, read 13 October 2026", "value": "US$117,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Profile text without a date. No post with this figure was found, so it is not the headline.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "The founder's other products, November 2024", "value": "NicheScraper US$24,400 and CopyGenius US$9,500 in the month", "grade": "C", "note": "Same post as the AutoShorts figure. Both were larger earlier: NicheScraper came close to US$70,000 of MRR before March 2024, and CopyGenius lost US$30,000 of MRR.", "src": [ 2, 7, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the May 2025 figure", "value": "16 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: January 2024 to May 2025.", "src": [ 1, 12 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "January and February 2023", "what": "CopyGenius, his AI copywriting tool, goes from US$11,000 to US$14,000 of MRR in 11 days. A post of 13 February reports US$20,000 and credits Facebook ads without audience targeting.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "20 December 2023", "what": "The idea is formed. He builds a first version for his own use.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "when": "2 January 2024", "what": "The three monthly price plans are created in the site's database, at US$19, US$39 and US$69.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "Late January to 1 February 2024", "what": "Launch in the last week of January, according to Indie Hackers. His Stripe chart starts on 31 January. First subscriber on 1 February.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 5, 12 ] }, { "when": "25 March 2024", "what": "US$3,000 MRR. A connection to YouTube, requested by customers, multiplies the conversion rate by 4 to 6.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 9 ] }, { "when": "April 2024", "what": "600 videos a day force a rebuild of the rendering system. Facebook blocks his ads by mistake, so he asks affiliates to promote the product: MRR goes from US$6,000 on 14 April to US$12,000 on 19 April and US$20,000 on 27 April.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 9 ] }, { "when": "13 May 2024", "what": "US$40,000 MRR, with costs of about US$10,000 a month. Customers who are YouTubers publish videos about the product without being asked.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "when": "27 June 2024", "what": "US$70,000 MRR. He reports many copies of the product. Yearly plans are added on 26 June.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 14 ] }, { "when": "31 July 2024", "what": "US$83,300 MRR, which is US$1 million of ARR, six months after the first subscriber, alone and without investors.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "5 September 2024", "what": "He posts one month of accounts: gross revenue US$112,928, MRR US$93,822, profit US$68,858. Free users cost about US$13,000 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 7 ] }, { "when": "2 December 2024", "what": "November revenue: US$113,400, a slight decline. He has reduced marketing and works on the code and on search traffic.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "April and May 2025", "what": "He considers hiring and stays alone. Making the yearly plan easier to see raises monthly revenue from US$100,000 to about US$135,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "11 June 2025", "what": "Results of May: US$138,000 of revenue, US$97,452 of MRR, 3 to 4 hours of work a day. This is the last dated figure found.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "15 July 2025", "what": "YouTube renames its rule on repetitious content to inauthentic content and states that it covers mass-produced videos, which cannot earn ad money.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "when": "1 October 2025", "what": "He writes that he has worked for some months on a new release for AutoShorts. This is the latest post about the product that could be read. The site's terms are updated on 15 October 2025.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 9, 14 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2026", "what": "The site is online with the same prices. The founder's profile reads US$117,000 MRR, without a date.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 14, 15 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Customers who are also the sales channel", "text": "The buyers are people who publish videos, so they already have an audience. The founder pays them a 30% recurring commission and wrote that reaching US$1 million a year was largely because of affiliates. When Facebook blocked his ads by mistake in April 2024, he put more work into affiliates, and MRR doubled in five days. He also found that each announced feature made earlier affiliates publish a new video." }, { "title": "Paid ads with a measured return", "text": "He bought Facebook ads in the first two months and published the result: about US$14 to win a customer worth about US$184 in April 2024, and US$20 against about six times that in July 2024. He increased spending only while the return stayed positive. In the cost table of September 2024, ads are the largest line." }, { "title": "A trend, a tedious task, automation", "text": "His stated formula: find a trend, find a tedious task that people do by hand because of the trend, and automate it. In early 2024 a faceless video took one to two hours across ChatGPT, a stock footage site, ElevenLabs and a video editor. He says this was the third product he built this way, and that being early gave time to improve a first version that was not very good." }, { "title": "The product shows itself", "text": "He ran test channels made with AutoShorts and put the link in the video descriptions. Viewers who wanted the same kind of channel became customers. He also found that customers stay when one of their videos gets many views, and that the first week of posting decides whether a customer cancels." }, { "title": "Small changes with large effects", "text": "The YouTube connection multiplied conversions by 4 to 6. A test without the free plan almost doubled conversions and cut costs and support requests. Showing the yearly plan more clearly took about one hour and raised monthly revenue by about 35%, although that change moves future payments forward and does not raise MRR by the same amount." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's posts on X and from the code of the company's site. They are grade C.", "items": [ "A Next.js web application. In May 2024 the founder named OpenAI and Replicate as the AI services. The cost table of September 2024 lists ElevenLabs for the voice, a provider for image generation, and OpenAI.", "He rents the image models from a provider and does not host them himself. He wrote that he would rather pay than carry that work.", "The first version took about six weeks: idea on 20 December 2023, first paying subscriber on 1 February 2024.", "At 600 videos a day in April 2024 the rendering system had to be rebuilt.", "In April 2025 he wrote that the application runs on one DigitalOcean server for US$96 a month with no load balancer. The September 2024 table shows US$2,158.83 for rendering and hosting servers together.", "Payments go through Stripe, as his dashboard images show.", "He answers support email and writes the code himself. Sales come from Facebook ads, affiliates, his own test channels and, since late 2024, search traffic." ], "src": [ 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 14 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database promised video or social media publishing without skill or staff. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "HighlightCam", "years": "2009 to 2012", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "An algorithm that finds the best moments in raw footage and edits the video for you.", "died": "Phones and consumer editing programs offered easier alternatives. Buyers adopted automatic editing slowly, and the company found no business model that could grow.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1636-highlightcam" }, { "name": "Fuzzwich", "years": "2007 to 2010", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Animated videos by drag and drop, with ready-made characters and scenes, for people without animation skill.", "died": "It did not grow beyond its early users and stayed on the desktop while viewers moved to phones and social media.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1655-fuzzwich" }, { "name": "ReelSurfer", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$1.25M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Cut a short clip from any online video and share it, with no editing skill.", "died": "YouTube and Facebook added clipping and sharing themselves, and mobile apps replaced the desktop tool.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1577-reelsurfer" }, { "name": "ClearMix", "years": "2020 to 2023", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Professional marketing videos for companies, fast and at low cost, through a network of freelance videographers and editors.", "died": "Canva and Adobe added video, and AI editing tools automated the manual work that ClearMix sold.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1336-clearmix" }, { "name": "Argyle Social", "years": "2009 to 2013", "funding": "US$2.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "One tool for marketers to publish on social networks and connect the results to sales leads.", "died": "Larger competitors with bigger marketing budgets took the market, and the product depended on the social platforms' APIs.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1832-argyle-social" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the five sold easier video or easier publishing, and each lost when a larger company added the same function or when the manual work behind the service could be automated. ClearMix is the clearest case: the database says AI editing tools made its freelance process obsolete. AutoShorts stands on the other side of that change. It is one of the AI tools that removed the manual work.", "What differs in 2024 is that every part can be rented per use. A language model writes the script, a speech model reads it, an image model draws the pictures, and one engineer joined them in about six weeks. The cost per video is low enough to sell about 60 videos a month for US$69. What does not differ is the dependence. The predecessors depended on platforms that could add their feature. AutoShorts depends on TikTok and YouTube to accept automated posts, and on three model providers for every video." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The same product, with care.", "text": "The method is repeatable and the founder says he used it three times: a trend, a manual task, automation, then ads and affiliates. The same product is harder now. The founder reports many copies since June 2024, and Faceless.video, already on this site, reported US$1 million of ARR for about August 2024 with a similar product built without code. His own recurring revenue was nearly flat from September 2024 to June 2025.", "steps": [ "Find a trend and a task that people repeat by hand because of it. Build the tool first for your own use.", "Charge from the first week. Test Facebook ads early, and raise the budget only while a customer is worth several times the ad cost.", "Pay customers a recurring commission, and ask first those who already publish to an audience.", "Run public accounts made with your own product and link the product in every description.", "Show the yearly plan clearly, and test whether the free plan helps or costs." ], "open": "Tasks that creators or small businesses still do by hand around a rising format, in a field where the buyers publish online themselves and can act as affiliates." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Self-reported, and misquoted by others", "text": "All figures are the founder's posts and his own dashboard images. The listicle that led here turned one month of revenue, US$113,400, into MRR. His cost table of September 2024 does not add up: the lines sum to US$6,900 more than the stated total. TrustMRR, which verifies revenue through payment processors, answered \"Not found\" for three versions of the name on 13 October 2026; its profile AutoAIShorts is another product. Starter Story marks its page as estimated from public sources." }, { "title": "Recurring revenue stopped growing in late 2024", "text": "MRR was US$93,822 in September 2024 and US$97,452 in June 2025, a rise of 3.9% in nine months. The jump in revenue in May 2025 came from yearly plans paid at once. The last dated figure is from June 2025. The US$117,000 in his profile in October 2026 has no date and no post behind it." }, { "title": "YouTube does not pay for mass-produced videos", "text": "YouTube's monetization policy page, read 13 October 2026, says that since 15 July 2025 the rule once named \"repetitious content\" is named \"inauthentic content\" and covers content that is \"repetitive or mass-produced\". Its list of what cannot earn money includes AI-generated content made with generic templates that gives the impression of mass production, and image slideshows with little narrative. A second page requires creators to disclose realistic AI-generated content. A customer who buys AutoShorts to earn ad money from an automated channel is the case this rule describes." }, { "title": "TikTok limits automated posting", "text": "TikTok's Community Guidelines, effective 24 September 2026, require a label on AI-generated content that shows realistic scenes or people, list \"Using automation to run many accounts or send repetitive content\" as spam, and keep unoriginal or low-quality content out of the For You feed. Its developer rules allow about 15 posts a day per account through the posting API, keep posts from unaudited apps private, and say an app must not add its logo or watermark. An app can post publicly only after it passes TikTok's audit." }, { "title": "Every video is bought from three model providers", "text": "In the September 2024 table, ElevenLabs, an image generation provider and OpenAI together cost US$24,309, which is 21.5% of gross revenue. A price rise goes straight to the margin, and free users alone cost about US$13,000 a month. The same providers also sell products of their own: on 3 October 2024 the founder wrote that OpenAI had released a feature that did what the editor of his CopyGenius did, and did it better. In April 2025 he wrote that CopyGenius lost US$30,000 of MRR after ChatGPT appeared." }, { "title": "High churn, many copies, one person", "text": "The founder reported churn of about 23% in July 2024 and said the first week of posting decides whether a customer stays, which depends on platform algorithms that he does not control. An A/B test in September 2025 doubled churn instead of reducing it. Copies of the product have used his published tactics since mid-2024. Support, code and marketing all depend on one person who also runs other products." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://autoshorts.ai/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/autoaishorts" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "X post by Eric Smith, 11 June 2025: the results of May 2025, revenue and MRR", "url": "https://x.com/ericsmith1302/status/1932814243432153480", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API, and viewed the attached Stripe dashboard image. Source for the headline MRR, the May revenue, the team and the funding." }, { "title": "X post by Eric Smith, 2 December 2024: how the businesses did in November 2024", "url": "https://x.com/ericsmith1302/status/1863407307368858038", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. This is the origin of the figure in the listicle: US$113,400 of revenue for AutoShorts in November 2024, written as $113.4k." }, { "title": "X posts by Eric Smith, 4 and 5 September 2024: MRR back at US$93,000, and the monthly cost breakdown", "url": "https://x.com/ericsmith1302/status/1831745370822516792", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both posts in full through the fxtwitter API and viewed the cost table image. The sum of the cost lines was recalculated on this page." }, { "title": "X post by Eric Smith, 1 August 2024: US$83,300 of MRR alone, US$1 million of ARR on 31 July", "url": "https://x.com/ericsmith1302/status/1818801651446120696", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API." }, { "title": "X posts by Eric Smith, 18 March to 1 July 2024: MRR updates from US$2,000 to US$70,000", "url": "https://x.com/ericsmith1302/status/1807851248449622239", "grade": "C", "how": "Read seven posts in full through the fxtwitter API: 18 March, 4 April, 20 April, 28 April, 8 May, 16 May and 1 July 2024. Each repeats the dates of the earlier steps." }, { "title": "X replies by Eric Smith, 16 and 17 May 2024: growth channels, costs and technology", "url": "https://x.com/ericsmith1302/status/1791267610291572797", "grade": "C", "how": "Read five replies in full through the fxtwitter API. Source for the US$10,000 of monthly costs, Next.js, OpenAI and Replicate, and the first version built for his own use." }, { "title": "X posts by Eric Smith, February to October 2024: the manual method, YouTube connection, ad returns, AI images, affiliates, churn, test channels, the free plan and OpenAI", "url": "https://x.com/ericsmith1302/status/1836893890957189540", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API: posts of 6 February, 22 and 25 March, 21 April, 14, 17, 19, 20 and 25 July, 12, 16 and 19 September, and 3 October 2024." }, { "title": "X posts by Eric Smith, 2025: his formula, hiring, CopyGenius, the single server, the yearly plan and a coming release", "url": "https://x.com/ericsmith1302/status/1925240492562030641", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API: posts of 1 January, 1, 16 and 21 April, 21 May and 1 October 2025." }, { "title": "X profile of Eric Smith, @ericsmith1302, and its embedded timeline, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/ericsmith1302", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile through the fxtwitter API: 17,274 followers, location Florida, profile text that gives US$117,000 of MRR for AutoShorts. Read the public embedded timeline, which listed 100 posts from January 2023 to October 2025; no later post was visible. Source for the 2023 CopyGenius posts, the US$3,000 step and the September 2025 churn test." }, { "title": "Starter Story, 24 May 2024, changed 18 August 2026: How Eric Smith Grew AutoShorts.ai To $92K MRR", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/autoshorts-ai-breakdown", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the free part. The page is marked as estimated from public sources and embeds the founder's posts. Source for the May 2024 prices, one founder, and his earlier work at Instagram." }, { "title": "eBiz Insider newsletter by Niall Doherty, issue 383, May 2024: Zero to $40K/Month in Less Than 6 Months", "url": "https://ebizfacts.beehiiv.com/p/ebiz-insider-newsletter-383", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. It quotes the founder's posts and links them. The same issue carries a paid advertisement for AutoShorts." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 21 May 2024: Faceless short maker tool makes $30k MRR, by Rushab Jain", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/faceless-short-maker-tool-makes-30k-mrr-33bb0ca91b", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full with the reader comments. A community summary of the founder's posts. Source for the launch in the last week of January 2024." }, { "title": "Sidetool, 26 September 2025: One-Person SaaS Success Stories: Real Revenue Numbers in 2025", "url": "https://www.sidetool.co/post/one-person-saas-success-stories-real-revenue-2025/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The first source for this story. It reports over US$113,000 MRR without a source or a date, and adds product details, such as paid priority processing, that were not found in the founder's posts read for this page. No fact on this page relies on it." }, { "title": "AutoShorts.ai home page, partner page and terms, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://autoshorts.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the home page and the plan data inside it. The other pages load by script, so their text was read from the script files. Source for the prices, the plan dates, the 30% commission, the Next.js framework and the terms dated 15 October 2025." }, { "title": "Internet Archive, list of captures of autoshorts.ai, January 2024 to August 2026", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20240503092747/https://autoshorts.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the capture index only: a first capture on 4 January 2024 that redirects, then at least one capture in every month from May 2024 to August 2026, most of them working pages." }, { "title": "Argil, 6 April 2026, changed 2 October 2026: AutoShorts AI Review 2026: Features, Pricing, and Better Alternatives", "url": "https://www.argil.ai/blog/autoshorts-ai-review-2026-features-pricing-and-better-alternatives", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Written by a competitor that sells an alternative. It confirms the US$19 plan, one series per plan and the free video in 2026." }, { "title": "YouTube Help: YouTube channel monetization policies, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1311392?hl=en", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the 15 July 2025 update, on generic or repetitive content and on what is allowed to earn money. The platform's own rule page." }, { "title": "YouTube Help: Disclosing use of GenAI content, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/14328491?hl=en", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The platform's own rule page." }, { "title": "TikTok Community Guidelines, Integrity and Authenticity, effective 24 September 2026", "url": "https://www.tiktok.com/community-guidelines/en/integrity-authenticity", "grade": "C", "how": "The page loads by script; read the encoded text inside the page code. Sections on AI-generated content, spam and For You feed eligibility." }, { "title": "TikTok for Developers: Content Sharing Guidelines, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://developers.tiktok.com/doc/content-sharing-guidelines", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the audit requirement, the private posts of unaudited apps, the posting cap and the watermark rule." }, { "title": "TrustMRR, searched 13 October 2026: no profile for AutoShorts.ai", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/autoaishorts.md", "grade": "C", "how": "The addresses for the slugs autoshorts, autoshorts-ai and autoshortsai answered \"Not found\". Read the markdown profile AutoAIShorts: it belongs to another site, autoaishorts.com. Listed only to prevent confusion." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/docsbot-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/docsbot-ai.md", "slug": "docsbot-ai", "name": "DocsBot AI", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI chatbots trained on company documentation", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-13", "launchLabel": "9 March 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$1M annual recurring revenue, February 2026", "sticker": "$1M a year recurring", "outcomeUsd": 1000000, "months": 35, "teamLabel": "1 founder and owner; at US$1M ARR also 1 growth partner, a few employees and contractors", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "support-agents", "channel": "search", "trend": "flat", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Customer support" ], "product": "A company connects its website, help center, files or old support tickets. DocsBot turns that material into a chatbot that answers customers or employees with links to the source passages, in a website widget, in Slack, by voice or through an API, and passes the conversation to a person when it cannot answer.", "why": "It opened in the week OpenAI released the ChatGPT API, after seven other AI products by the same founder had earned little. It sold to businesses, which stay longer than consumers. The last step to the first million came from higher prices and from removing the cheapest plan.", "summary": [ "DocsBot builds chatbots that answer from a company's own documentation. The method is retrieval-augmented generation (RAG): for each question the program first searches the company's documents for the passages that match, then gives those passages to a language model and asks it to answer only from them, with links to the sources. A company adds its website address, help-center articles, files or old support tickets, and gets a chat widget for its site, a bot for Slack, a voice agent, or an API.", "Aaron Edwards built it in four weeks while he was chief technology officer of WPMU DEV, a WordPress plugin and hosting company where he had worked since 2009. DocsBot was the eighth AI product that he launched in six months, and most of the others lost money or only covered their costs. The DocsBot beta opened on 9 March 2023, eight days after OpenAI released the ChatGPT API. One week later it had US$3,500 in monthly revenue, most of it from Japan, where one post about it was shown 2.3 million times. On 2 March 2026 he wrote that the company had crossed US$1 million in annual recurring revenue in February 2026. Annual recurring revenue (ARR) is the current monthly subscription revenue multiplied by twelve. That is 35 months after the beta, about four months later than he had planned, and he writes that a pricing change is what completed it.", "Every revenue number on this page is a statement by the founder, grade C: his blog, his posts on X, and an interview in an independent WordPress publication. No payment processor or buyer has confirmed the figures, and TrustMRR has no profile for the product. The figures do agree with each other across dates from 2023 to 2026. Edwards is the only owner, but he did not work alone: he hired a first employee one month after the launch, and a growth partner with a profit share joined in October 2025. The page also shows four failed startups that sold answers from a company's own knowledge before language models could read documents." ], "factsCaption": "US$1 million in annual recurring revenue 35 months after a beta launch, reported by the founder and not confirmed by a payment processor", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a statement by the founder in his blog, on X or to a journalist, or a figure from a company page or a review site. The one grade B value was announced to the press by the buyer of his earlier product. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No revenue value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a free chatbot for WordPress documentation to US$1 million in annual recurring revenue in 35 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "DocsBot plans on 13 October 2026: monthly prices from the company's pricing page, yearly prices from a competitor's review (grade C)", "note": "Yearly billing gives two months free, so the yearly column is the monthly price times 10 divided by 12; the company's own page confirms US$124 for Standard. An AI credit is one standard chat answer; larger models and actions use more credits per answer. Add-ons per month: 5,000 more credits for US$49, one more bot for US$19, 10,000 more source pages for US$29, one more team user for US$19 (Business and Enterprise only). A chat widget without the DocsBot name needs the Business plan. Customers can also connect their own model API key and pay the model provider directly.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "1 bot, 50 source pages, 100 AI credits a month" ], [ "Personal", "41", "49", "1 bot, 5,000 source pages, 5,000 AI credits a month" ], [ "Standard", "124", "149", "3 bots, 15,000 source pages, 15,000 AI credits a month, 5 team users" ], [ "Business", "416", "499", "10 bots, 100,000 source pages, 60,000 AI credits a month, 10 team users" ], [ "Enterprise", "custom", "custom", "Custom quote" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, February 2026", "value": "more than US$1 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's blog, 2 March 2026: \"We finally crossed $1M ARR in February.\" He gives no exact figure and no day. He repeats the milestone in his article of 14 September 2026. No payment processor has confirmed it.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue that US$1 million ARR means", "value": "about US$83,333", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 1,000,000 divided by 12 equals 83,333.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "What the US$1 million covers", "value": "DocsBot, as far as the article says", "grade": "C", "note": "The article is about DocsBot's prices, plans and partner program. The founder's X profile says \"$1m+ ARR from my projects\", and he also owns Imajinn AI, a small image product. He does not publish the split.", "src": [ 1, 22 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the beta to US$1 million ARR", "value": "35 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: March 2023 to February 2026. The founder writes that he expected to arrive about four months earlier.", "src": [ 1, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 16 March 2023", "value": "US$3,500", "grade": "C", "note": "One week after the beta. Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is the subscription revenue of one month. He wrote that 95% of the customers were Japanese.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 21 March 2023", "value": "US$6,000", "grade": "C", "note": "He added that churn, the share of customers who cancel, was very high because there was no free trial.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "ARR of all his products together, 27 May 2023", "value": "US$250,000", "grade": "C", "note": "DocsBot, Imajinn AI and Infinite Uploads combined. Not a DocsBot figure.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "ARR of all his products together, 2 April 2024", "value": "US$500,000", "grade": "C", "note": "He calls DocsBot the main part and does not give the split. Infinite Uploads, still included here, never passed about US$3,000 MRR according to The Repository.", "src": [ 6, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Time from US$500,000 to US$1 million", "value": "22 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: April 2024 to February 2026. The step before, US$250,000 to US$500,000, took 11 months. The two earlier figures cover all his products, so the comparison is approximate. Growth slowed.", "src": [ 1, 6, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Effect of the price rise of about June 2025, after three months", "value": "MRR up 12.5%, subscribers down 2.6%", "grade": "C", "note": "He removed the lowest plan and raised the main plan by 50%. Churn rate down 14.7%, revenue per customer up 15.5%, customer lifetime value up 35.4%. Existing customers kept their old price, and about 15% upgraded on their own.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Growth in the second half of 2025", "value": "flat", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder: growth went flat through most of the third and fourth quarter of 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Trend in 2026", "value": "fewer signups, more revenue per customer", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder, 14 September 2026: revenue per customer and lifetime value climbed enough to cover the drop in signups, \"barely\". He has published no ARR figure after February 2026.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Share of paid checkouts that came from search", "value": "48.5% in 2024, 40.6% in 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "January to August of each year, from the company's analytics. AI assistants were the tracked source of 4.7% of paid checkouts in 2026, and 18.2% of the answers from people who booked a demo named an AI assistant.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Customers, October 2026", "value": "more than 3,000 businesses", "grade": "C", "note": "Company's about page. The home page also counts more than 75,000 users, which includes free accounts. About a quarter of customers were in Japan in October 2025.", "src": [ 14, 3 ] }, { "fact": "People at US$1 million ARR", "value": "1 owner, 1 growth partner, a few employees and contractors", "grade": "C", "note": "No exact count is published. First full-time employee in April 2023. In October 2025 the founder wrote of a few employees plus contractors, and of his son in marketing. LinkedIn lists 3 employees in October 2026, and Latka recorded 1 person there in July 2024.", "src": [ 4, 7, 11, 20, 21 ] }, { "fact": "The growth partner's stake", "value": "profit share and phantom equity, not shares", "grade": "C", "note": "Josh Dailey joined full-time on 1 October 2025 as Chief Growth Officer. Phantom equity is a contract that pays cash tied to the value of the company without giving ownership.", "src": [ 4, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's about page calls it a bootstrapped business, which means paid for from its own revenue. The founder kept his job as CTO until August 2023.", "src": [ 14, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Legal owner of DocsBot", "value": "UglyRobot, LLC, Delaware", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder's own company, separate from WPMU DEV, where he was an employee from 2009 to 2023 and then a part-time advisor.", "src": [ 14, 18, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Earlier product sold, November 2024", "value": "Infinite Uploads, price not disclosed", "grade": "B", "note": "The buyer, ClikIT, announced the purchase to the press. The founder writes that the offer was close to his asking price of 3 times ARR, with about 40% paid at once and the rest over three years.", "src": [ 18, 19 ] }, { "fact": "Cost of the SOC 2 Type II audit, 2025", "value": "US$1,200 for the auditor", "grade": "C", "note": "SOC 2 is a security audit that business customers ask for. The compliance tool was quoted at US$4,000 to US$6,000 a year. He expects US$5,000 to US$6,000 a year in total from now on.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Card payments in 2023 up to 16 October", "value": "3,240, with 0 disputes", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on X, as an argument for selling to businesses.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "List price of the middle plan, monthly billing, August 2026", "value": "DocsBot US$149, Chatbase US$150, SiteGPT US$129", "grade": "C", "note": "From DocsBot's own comparison page, checked by the company on 25 August 2026. Competitors' reviews of DocsBot recommend their own cheaper plan or a price per ticket.", "src": [ 17, 25, 26 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's stated goal, October 2026", "value": "US$5 million ARR", "grade": "C", "note": "Text of his X profile. In October 2025 he and his partner told The Repository that they plan to grow the company for three to five years and then sell it.", "src": [ 22, 3 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2009 to 2023", "what": "Edwards is chief technology officer of WPMU DEV, which sells WordPress plugins and hosting. He sees how much work the same support questions cost.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 23 ] }, { "when": "2021", "what": "He launches Infinite Uploads, a cloud storage plugin for WordPress, with his friend Josh Dailey. It never passes about US$3,000 in monthly recurring revenue.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 6 ] }, { "when": "2022 to early 2023", "what": "He teaches himself Python and React and launches eight AI products in six months while employed. Most lose money or only cover their costs.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 6 ] }, { "when": "February 2023", "what": "He releases ChatWP, a free chatbot trained on the WordPress documentation, and asks testers on a waiting list whether they would use the same thing for their own business. They say yes.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "9 March 2023", "what": "Beta of DocsBot, eight days after OpenAI released the ChatGPT API. Customers bring their own OpenAI key, so the product has no model cost and can offer a free plan.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "13 March 2023", "what": "A Japanese technology account posts about DocsBot. The post is shown 2.3 million times. The servers go down, and more than 50 support tickets arrive in Japanese.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "16 to 21 March 2023", "what": "US$3,500 in monthly recurring revenue after one week, US$6,000 five days later.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 9 ] }, { "when": "10 April 2023", "what": "He hires his first full-time employee.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "27 May 2023", "what": "All his products together reach US$250,000 ARR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "1 August 2023", "what": "He leaves the CTO role for a part-time advisory role and works full-time on his own products.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "5 November 2023", "what": "OpenAI is about to release its own chatbot builder. He writes that it will work as a free trial of his product, and four days later he connects DocsBot to it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "2 April 2024", "what": "All his products together reach US$500,000 ARR. He names US$1 million as the next goal.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "25 November 2024", "what": "He sells Infinite Uploads to ClikIT to spend his time on DocsBot.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 18, 19 ] }, { "when": "About June 2025", "what": "He removes the lowest plan and raises the main plan by 50%. After three months MRR is 12.5% higher with 2.6% fewer subscribers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "1 to 3 October 2025", "what": "Josh Dailey joins as Chief Growth Officer with a profit share. DocsBot completes its SOC 2 Type II security audit.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 7 ] }, { "when": "July to December 2025", "what": "Growth is flat.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "February 2026", "what": "ARR passes US$1 million after a pricing change that was planned for close to a year. The consumer plan is removed, and an agency partner program starts.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "17 June 2026", "what": "New pricing by AI credits, with add-ons and the option to connect the customer's own model API key.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "when": "14 September 2026", "what": "He reports a real drop in signups in 2026. Higher revenue per customer covers it, in his word, barely.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "5 to 7 October 2026", "what": "Nearly 90 product announcements in the twelve months since the partner joined. A business podcast publishes an episode with him titled The $1M/Year AI Business Anyone Can Start.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13, 23 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The product runs and announces a week of releases for 2 to 6 November 2026.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 24 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Timing", "text": "OpenAI released the ChatGPT API on 1 March 2023. Edwards rewrote his nearly finished product for it the same day and called the result more powerful, faster and 10 times cheaper. The beta opened eight days later, and a single post in Japan brought the first paying customers. In October 2025 he said that it was a blessing to be at the very beginning of the public excitement about AI." }, { "title": "Seven launches before the one that paid", "text": "An image plugin spread widely on X and almost nobody paid. An avatar product made about US$9,000 and then demand ended. He writes that the consumer products attracted visitors who wanted to try a new toy and not pay. Each launch reused code from the last, so the eighth product took four weeks." }, { "title": "Business customers", "text": "A company that puts a support bot on its site keeps paying while the bot answers tickets. By mid-October 2023 he reported 3,240 card payments in that year without one dispute. The company names Sony Network Communications, Sentry and StellarWP as customers." }, { "title": "A price rise completed the million", "text": "About June 2025 he removed the cheapest plan, raised the main plan by 50% and gave new features only to the new plans. He reported 2.6% fewer subscribers and 12.5% more MRR after three months. He then writes that a pricing change planned for close to a year, rolled out before February 2026, is what moved ARR past US$1 million. He does not describe its details." }, { "title": "Search as the main channel", "text": "In 2024, 48.5% of paid checkouts started from a search engine: documentation, pages that compare DocsBot with each competitor, and free tools. In the year to October 2026 the company added about 1,000 pages and now offers its site in eight languages. The share from search still fell to 40.6% in 2026." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's blog, his posts on X and his interview with The Repository. They are grade C.", "items": [ "A free test first: ChatWP answered questions from the WordPress documentation. The waiting list asked each tester whether they wanted the same for their own business.", "He taught himself Python and React in 2022 to build these products. The first DocsBot took four weeks of work, night and day, while he was employed.", "At launch every customer connected their own OpenAI key and paid OpenAI directly. That removed the model cost and the rate limits from the product, and it allowed a free plan.", "The retrieval part is the product: more than 38 kinds of sources, scheduled refresh of sources, a vector database (a database that finds passages by meaning) that was replaced in the year to October 2026, and storage in the US or the EU.", "DocsBot answers its own support tickets, many of them in Japanese, Portuguese, French and Italian.", "The SOC 2 Type II security audit was done with a compliance tool and an auditor who charged US$1,200. His son, a business student, wrote the policies.", "The team: contract developers and administrators, a few employees, his son in marketing, and since October 2025 a growth partner. The founder leads product and engineering.", "Analytics in PostHog connect the first source of each visitor to the paid checkout." ], "src": [ 3, 8, 11, 13, 7, 4, 2, 15, 26 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised to answer questions from a company's own written knowledge, or to talk to its customers, before language models could read documents. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Answerly", "years": "2013 to 2016", "funding": "US$550K", "cause": "Product failure", "promise": "FAQ chatbots that answer support tickets so that people handle only the difficult cases.", "died": "The software matched each question to an answer that someone had written by hand. Every customer needed months of FAQs and decision trees, and real questions were phrased in too many ways.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2168-answerly" }, { "name": "Niles", "years": "2017 to 2020", "funding": "US$2.8M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A bot in Slack that answers employees' questions from the company's knowledge.", "died": "Slack improved its own search, and the bot needed constant retraining that a small customer base could not pay for.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1031-niles" }, { "name": "Omniref", "years": "2015 to 2018", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "One place where developers explain and annotate source code, so that documentation answers the reader's question.", "died": "People had to write every explanation, and there was no community to write them. GitHub and Stack Overflow already had the readers.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1119-omniref" }, { "name": "RightHello", "years": "2014 to 2022", "funding": "US$600K", "cause": "Ran out of cash", "promise": "Live chat for online shops that turns visitors into buyers.", "died": "A person had to answer every chat. Intercom raised US$240 million while RightHello had US$600,000, and Zendesk included chat in its support product.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2260-righthello" } ], "whatChanged": [ "In each of the four, a person had to write the answer in advance. Answerly's customers wrote FAQs and decision trees for months. Omniref waited for developers to annotate code. RightHello needed a human in every chat. The documentation that a company already had was of no use to the software, because the software could not read it.", "Retrieval-augmented generation removed that step. The company points the product at the documentation it already has, and the model reads the matching passages at the moment of the question. One developer built the first DocsBot in four weeks. Niles shows the risk that remains: its platform, Slack, added the feature itself. For DocsBot the platform is the model provider, and OpenAI released its own chatbot builder eight months after the DocsBot beta." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product, hardly. The method, yes.", "text": "Chat with your documents was copied hundreds of times in 2023, and the founder wrote in 2024 that he lost millions in market share to a competitor that released a simpler product a few days before him. Chatbase, already on this site, showed its demo 35 days before the DocsBot beta and reports US$1 million ARR after 117 days; DocsBot needed 35 months. SiteGPT, also on this site, launched 21 days after DocsBot and reported US$190,000 a year in December 2025. The method is repeatable: many small launches, a free test with a question about willingness to pay, business customers, and a price that follows the value.", "steps": [ "Launch small products one after another and reuse the code. Stop the ones that people try and do not pay for.", "Before building the paid product, release a free version on public data and ask the testers whether they want it for their own business.", "Release the first version smaller than feels comfortable. The founder says his had too many features, and that a simpler product could have been first on the market.", "Sell to businesses, then remove the cheapest plan when it brings customers who cost more in support than they pay." ], "open": "The founder points to agencies: firms that set up and maintain AI agents for local businesses that will not do it themselves. A documentation bot built for one industry, with that industry's integrations and rules, is the other open version." }, "watch": [ { "title": "The model providers ship the same feature", "text": "In November 2023 OpenAI released a chatbot builder inside ChatGPT. The founder wrote that it would have few data sources, no refresh, and no logs, reports or escalation, and that it would work as a free trial of his product. That argument holds only while the providers' versions stay simple. This page found no measurement of how many customers chose a provider's own tool instead." }, { "title": "Price competition", "text": "DocsBot's own comparison page lists its Standard plan at US$149 a month, Chatbase Standard at US$150 and SiteGPT Growth at US$129. Competitors publish reviews of DocsBot that send readers to their own cheaper plan or to a price per ticket. With prices this close, each company competes on limits, and DocsBot keeps the widget without its name for the US$499 plan." }, { "title": "Dependence on model API prices", "text": "At launch the customer paid OpenAI directly. Now DocsBot sells AI credits: one credit per standard answer, more for larger models, and US$49 a month for 5,000 more. The company writes that stronger models and longer tasks cost more to run. If a provider raises prices, DocsBot must raise credit prices or lose margin; in March 2023 one API release made the product 10 times cheaper, so the dependence works in both directions." }, { "title": "Fewer signups in 2026", "text": "The founder reports a real drop in signups in 2026 and a falling share of checkouts from search. He asks how long higher revenue per customer can cover weaker acquisition, and answers that he does not know yet." }, { "title": "Founder-reported and not exact", "text": "The headline is one sentence in a blog post, without a dashboard image or an exact figure, and nothing newer has been published in the eight months since. The earlier figures of US$250,000 and US$500,000 cover all his products, so the growth curve of DocsBot alone is not public. Two of his statements about 2025 do not fit well: 12.5% more MRR in the three months to September, and growth that was flat through most of the third and fourth quarter." }, { "title": "Not a one-person company at the million", "text": "He founded and owns it alone, but the million was reached with a growth partner, a few employees, contractors and his son. The headcount is not published. His profile still describes a solo business, and his own article of October 2025 is titled No Longer a Solopreneur." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://docsbot.ai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Aaron Edwards' blog, 2 March 2026: We finally hit $1M ARR in February", "url": "https://uglyrobot.dev/articles/1m-arr", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The origin of the headline number. Source for the month, the flat second half of 2025, the pricing change and the removed consumer plan." }, { "title": "Aaron Edwards' blog, 14 September 2026: We Had Fewer Signups. Better Customers Barely Made Up for It.", "url": "https://uglyrobot.dev/articles/fewer-signups-better-customers", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, and compared with his X post of the same day (status 2099524190818783717, read through api.fxtwitter.com). Source for the 2026 trend and the channel shares." }, { "title": "The Repository, 16 October 2025, by Rae Morey: From Treehouses to Tech: The Lifelong Friendship Behind DocsBot", "url": "https://www.therepository.email/from-treehouses-to-tech-the-lifelong-friendship-behind-docsbot", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. An independent WordPress publication that interviewed the founder and his partner. It did not review financial documents. Source for the background, ChatWP, the Japanese customers and the plan to sell." }, { "title": "Aaron Edwards' blog, 1 October 2025: No Longer a Solopreneur", "url": "https://uglyrobot.dev/articles/no-longer-a-solopreneur", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the team before October 2025 and the partner's profit share and phantom equity." }, { "title": "Aaron Edwards' blog, 10 September 2025: Raising Prices: A Scary Decision That Paid Off", "url": "https://uglyrobot.dev/articles/raising-prices", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the price rise and its five percentages." }, { "title": "Aaron Edwards' blog, 2 April 2024: article on reaching $500K ARR after launching 8 products in 6 months", "url": "https://uglyrobot.dev/articles/500k-mrr", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the combined US$500,000 ARR, the list of failed products and the remark about the earlier competitor." }, { "title": "Aaron Edwards' blog, 3 October 2025: Finally SOC 2 Certified as a Solo Founder", "url": "https://uglyrobot.dev/articles/soc2-certified-solo-founder", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on cost and team. Source for the audit cost and the phrase a few employees plus contractors." }, { "title": "Aaron Edwards on X, 16 March 2023: launch-week thread with US$3,500 MRR", "url": "https://x.com/uglyrobot/status/1636411123623948288", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through api.fxtwitter.com, with the next post of the thread (status 1636411126056402944) on the Japanese post and its 2.3 million impressions." }, { "title": "Aaron Edwards on X, 21 March 2023: $6k MRR for DocsBot", "url": "https://x.com/uglyrobot/status/1638250896168480780", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Aaron Edwards on X, 27 May 2023: all products combined reach $250k ARR", "url": "https://x.com/uglyrobot/status/1662534640651886592", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Aaron Edwards on X, 9 March 2023: announcement of the DocsBot beta, and six other posts of 2023", "url": "https://x.com/uglyrobot/status/1633813195168141312", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through api.fxtwitter.com: the beta (9 March), own OpenAI keys (23 February, status 1628837619114168322), the ChatGPT API rewrite (1 March, 1631053661555027969), the first employee (10 April, 1645421900271693825), leaving the CTO role (1 August, 1686411609592287239) and the payment count (16 October, 1714000953362243928)." }, { "title": "Aaron Edwards on X, 5 November 2023: on OpenAI's coming chatbot builder", "url": "https://x.com/uglyrobot/status/1721185684713513099", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through api.fxtwitter.com. The follow-up of 9 November 2023 on connecting DocsBot to it was read in the profile timeline embed." }, { "title": "Aaron Edwards' blog, 5 October 2026: One Year of Building DocsBot with Josh", "url": "https://uglyrobot.dev/articles/one-year-with-josh", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product work of 2026, the new pages and languages, and the vector database change. It gives no revenue figure." }, { "title": "DocsBot about page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://docsbot.ai/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the legal operator, the bootstrapped status, the customer count and the named customers." }, { "title": "DocsBot pricing page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://docsbot.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Gives the monthly prices, the limits and the add-ons, and US$124 for Standard on yearly billing. The other yearly prices come from the SiteGPT review below." }, { "title": "DocsBot news, 17 June 2026: AI Credits Are Here So DocsBot Can Grow With You", "url": "https://docsbot.ai/article/docsbot-ai-credits-update", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the credit rules, the own-key option and the statement on model costs." }, { "title": "DocsBot comparison page: Chatbase alternative, details checked by the company on 25 August 2026", "url": "https://docsbot.ai/comparisons/chatbase-alternative", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the price sections. The company's own comparison, so it favors DocsBot. Source for the three list prices." }, { "title": "WP Tavern, 4 December 2024: ClikIT Acquires UglyRobot's Infinite Uploads and Big File Uploads Plugins", "url": "https://wptavern.com/clikit-acquires-uglyrobots-infinite-uploads-and-big-file-uploads-plugins", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Reports the buyer's announcement and states that UglyRobot, LLC is owned by Aaron Edwards. The price is not disclosed." }, { "title": "Aaron Edwards' blog, 9 December 2024: I sold Infinite Uploads!", "url": "https://uglyrobot.dev/articles/infinite-uploads-aquired", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the offer and the closing. Source for the deal terms and the closing date." }, { "title": "LinkedIn company page of DocsBot, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/docsbot", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public page data: company size 2 to 10, 3 employees listed. LinkedIn counts only people who list the company themselves." }, { "title": "Latka company page: UglyRobot, LLC", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/docsbot.ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. No revenue figure. It records 1 person on LinkedIn in July 2024." }, { "title": "Aaron Edwards' X profile, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/uglyrobot", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the US$5 million goal and the phrase $1m+ ARR from my projects." }, { "title": "Aaron Edwards' blog, 7 October 2026: From Listening to The Koerner Office to Sitting in the Studio", "url": "https://uglyrobot.dev/articles/the-koerner-office", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the podcast episode and its title. The audio was not heard." }, { "title": "DocsBot news list, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://docsbot.ai/articles/category/news", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the list. Shows releases through 2026 and the announcement for 2 to 6 November 2026." }, { "title": "eesel AI, 28 September 2026: DocsBot AI pricing in 2026: plans, credits, and the real cost", "url": "https://www.eesel.ai/blog/docsbot-pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the plan sections. A competitor's review that recommends its own price per ticket. Cited for the price competition." }, { "title": "SiteGPT, updated 11 October 2026: DocsBot AI Review 2026", "url": "https://sitegpt.ai/blog/docsbot-ai-review", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the pricing sections. A competitor's review. Source for the yearly prices of US$41, US$124 and US$416." }, { "title": "YesPress directory profile of DocsBot AI, updated 5 September 2026", "url": "https://yespress.io/products/docsbot-ai.md", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A directory that repeats the February 2026 milestone with the words according to founder Aaron Edwards. Not an independent confirmation." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/magai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/magai.md", "slug": "magai", "name": "Magai", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "One subscription for many AI models", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-13", "launchLabel": "April 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$31.7K a month recurring revenue, March 2024", "sticker": "$31.7K MRR on Stripe", "outcomeUsd": 380947, "months": 11, "teamLabel": "1 founder with freelance developer help from 2023; 6 people by April 2025, 7 named in October 2025, 12 by his count in May 2026", "fundingLabel": "No money raised for Magai; investors in his two earlier products, their stake in Magai not verified", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "ai-model-tools", "channel": "audience", "trend": "flat", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "AI chat" ], "product": "One chat window and one bill for the models of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI and others, plus image and video models. You can change the model in the middle of a conversation. Magai pays the model providers for every message, and the customer pays Magai a flat monthly price that starts at US$20.", "why": "The founder had written a marketing blog for ten years, so his own readers bought on the first day. He built the first version in 8 weeks with the no-code tool Bubble, because he had no money for developers. He sold one thing that the model makers do not sell: all of their models in one subscription.", "summary": [ "Magai is a model aggregator: a product that gives access to the AI models of several companies through one account. The customer pays one subscription and can talk to GPT, Claude, Gemini or Grok in the same chat. Magai calls each provider through its API, the interface that lets one program send requests to another, and pays the provider for every message. Several other products have similar names. This page is about Magai at magai.co, which some summaries of a 2025 video spell \"Magi\".", "Dustin W. Stout of Bakersfield, California built it alone in 8 weeks with Bubble, a no-code tool, which means a tool for building web applications by arranging visual blocks instead of writing program code. Plans were on sale by 8 April 2023. A chart on Stripe, the payment processor, shows US$31,745.58 of MRR, monthly recurring revenue, the sum of all active subscriptions counted per month, in March 2024. In a Starter Story episode of 11 October 2025 he said the business made \"almost US$100,000 a month\". By then the company's site named 7 people. Indie Hackers repeated \"nearly US$100,000\" in February 2026, so the claims show no growth between those two dates.", "The headline number on this page is the Stripe figure, grade A, because Stripe itself hosts the chart. It is from the first year, when the founder ran the business without a staff: the company's about page named only him until 2025. The later figure of almost US$100,000 a month is a founder statement, grade C, and no document for it is public. The share of revenue that remains after paying the model providers is not published for any date. The page also shows what happened to earlier companies that sold other companies' products for one flat price." ], "factsCaption": "A Stripe-hosted figure of US$31,745.58 a month after the first year, then founder statements of almost US$100,000 a month in October 2025 and February 2026", "factsRead": "How to read this table: the grade A value comes from a chart that Stripe hosts on its own domain. A grade C value is a statement by the founder or his company, or a third-party estimate that says so. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No one outside the company has confirmed the figures after March 2024.", "timelineLead": "From a bank balance of US$230.17 to a Stripe-recorded US$31,745.58 a month in 11 months, and then to a team of 7. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Magai prices on 13 October 2026, read from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "Yearly billing costs US$200, US$400 or US$2,000 a year, which the page calls a saving of 17%. Each plan includes model usage equal to its own monthly price, and the page says that how far the usage goes depends on the models chosen. It does not say at what rate usage is counted, so the margin cannot be computed from the page. There is no free plan and no trial; every plan has a 30-day refund. In October 2025 the founder described two plans: US$20 for one user and US$40 for a team of up to five.", "rows": [ [ "Standard", "16.67", "20", "US$20 of usage a month; standard models; 100 scheduled task runs" ], [ "Pro", "33.33", "40", "US$40 of usage a month; also the most expensive models; 1,000 scheduled task runs" ], [ "Ultra", "166.67", "200", "US$200 of usage a month; unlimited scheduled task runs" ], [ "Extra user on Standard", "", "20", "per user" ], [ "Usage top-up", "5 to 20 one-time", "", "US$5, US$10 or US$20 without changing plan" ], [ "Enterprise", "custom", "", "above ten seats, through sales" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, March 2024", "value": "US$31,745.58", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe profile of the account @heymagai, MRR chart for March 2023 to March 2024. The chart gives US$70.66 for the period before. The founder posted the link on 5 May 2026 and called it year 1.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the March 2024 figure", "value": "about US$381,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$31,745.58 times 12 = US$380,946.96. This is the headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month, October 2025", "value": "\"almost US$100,000\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's words in the Starter Story episode of 11 October 2025. The video title says $100K a month and the podcast version says $99K a month. He gave no exact figure, and the transcript mentions no dashboard.", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the October 2025 statement", "value": "under US$1.2 million a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$100,000 times 12 = US$1,200,000 as the upper limit; US$99,000 times 12 = US$1,188,000.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, February 2026", "value": "\"nearly US$100,000\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Indie Hackers, 25 February 2026. The same level as four months earlier, so the two statements show no growth.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, October 2023", "value": "US$23,000 with 1,010 paying subscribers", "grade": "C", "note": "Indie Hackers, 19 October 2023, and the founder's comment of 21 October 2023. He counted about 1,500 paid users in total; some had lifetime deals from his earlier products.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Average revenue per paying subscriber, October 2023", "value": "about US$22.77 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$23,000 divided by 1,010.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 30 June 2023", "value": "US$6,600", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X: from US$0 in less than 90 days.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Lifetime-deal sale, 5 to 20 June 2023", "value": "US$114,238 in 15 days, of which Magai received US$57,119", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's blog. Sold through the deal site RocketHub with a 50/50 split: 475 sales and 45 refunds. One-time prices of US$99, US$199 and US$399.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue recorded by Latka", "value": "US$267,600 a year as of October 2023; estimate of US$588,100 for October 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "A third party. The 2023 value has no recorded source; divided by 12 it is US$22,300 a month, close to the founder's US$23,000. The 2024 value is Latka's own estimate.", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "fact": "Share of revenue left after model costs", "value": "not published", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder says API costs and Stripe fees were paid out of revenue, and that the first year was profitable because he paid no staff. No source that was read gives a percentage.", "src": [ 5, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Fixed bills at the start", "value": "a domain name and the Bubble subscription", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on the Bubble forum, 5 May 2026. API costs and Stripe fees came out of revenue.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's money before Magai", "value": "US$230.17 in the bank; US$30,000 earned in all of 2022", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's blog. Two earlier products had failed and US$65,000 was lost.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Time to build the first version", "value": "8 weeks, alone", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's blog and the Starter Story episode. He learned Bubble from an online course.", "src": [ 4, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Team size by date", "value": "1 in 2023; 6 in April 2025; 7 in October 2025; 12 in May 2026; 8 named in October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Indie Hackers 2023, company press release, the company's about page on 3 October 2025 and 13 October 2026, and the founder's forum post of 5 May 2026. The count of 12 is his own and may include part-time people.", "src": [ 6, 8, 10, 5, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per person from the October 2025 statement", "value": "at most about US$171,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$1,200,000 divided by 7 people = US$171,429.", "src": [ 3, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none found for Magai", "grade": "C", "note": "Latka lists no funding. The founder writes that his two earlier products attracted investors. A reader's comment on the 2023 Indie Hackers interview says he kept those investors for Magai; the interview text needs a login, so this is not verified.", "src": [ 14, 4, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Audience before the launch", "value": "\"over 100,000 email subscribers\" in 2025; \"over 20,000\" newsletter subscribers in 2023", "grade": "C", "note": "Two founder statements that differ. The first is from the Starter Story episode and speaks of ten years in total, the second from his Indie Hackers comment of 21 October 2023, with more than 30,000 blog visitors a month.", "src": [ 3, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the Stripe figure", "value": "11 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: April 2023 to March 2024. The site showed a waiting list on 8 March 2023 and sold plans by 8 April 2023.", "src": [ 1, 13 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2014", "what": "Stout, a marketing blogger and consultant, starts a WordPress plugin company with partners. It is his first software product.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 7 ] }, { "when": "2020 to 2022", "what": "He leaves that company with money for about 18 months. Two new products fail, US$65,000 is lost, and his bank balance falls to US$230.17. He earns US$30,000 in all of 2022.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "November 2022 to early 2023", "what": "ChatGPT appears. He finds it has no chat search and no folders, learns Bubble from an online course, and builds Magai alone in 8 weeks.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 3 ] }, { "when": "8 March 2023", "what": "magai.co shows a sign-up form for a beta list.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "April 2023", "what": "Plans are on sale by 8 April, with GPT-4, chat folders and a 7-day trial. He says he had customers on the first day and US$1,500 of MRR after 30 days.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13, 4, 3 ] }, { "when": "5 to 20 June 2023", "what": "A 15-day lifetime-deal sale on RocketHub brings US$114,238, of which he receives US$57,119. Before it, Magai had about 200 subscribers and about US$4,000 of MRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "30 June 2023", "what": "US$6,600 of MRR in less than 90 days.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "19 October 2023", "what": "Indie Hackers reports US$23,000 of MRR, reached, in its words, without marketing. He counts 1,010 paying subscribers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "March 2024", "what": "The Stripe chart for the first twelve months ends at US$31,745.58 of MRR.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2 April 2025", "what": "A company press release says that Magai was first run by one person and that the team is now six, with new people in support, development and content.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "11 October 2025", "what": "Starter Story publishes the episode in which he says almost US$100,000 a month. Eight days earlier the about page named 7 people.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 3, 10 ] }, { "when": "February 2026", "what": "Version 3, written fully in custom code without Bubble, is ready. Indie Hackers reports nearly US$100,000 of MRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "30 April to 5 May 2026", "what": "Users of the Bubble forum doubt a short clip about the story. He answers with the Stripe chart, and writes that Magai supports 12 team members and has almost fully left Bubble.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 1 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2026", "what": "The site sells three plans from US$20 to US$200 a month and names 8 people. No revenue figure newer than February 2026 was found.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12, 11 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Readers before the product", "text": "He had written a blog about marketing for ten years. When Magai opened, he told the readers of his blog and newsletter, and they bought without any advertising. He gives two different sizes for this audience, more than 20,000 newsletter subscribers in 2023 and more than 100,000 email subscribers in 2025, but both statements describe the same method." }, { "title": "One bill instead of five", "text": "The Magai pricing page lists five subscriptions, among them ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro, at US$20 a month each. Magai sells access to the models behind all of them from US$20, with features that ChatGPT lacked in early 2023, such as search in old chats and folders." }, { "title": "Commissions that repeat", "text": "The affiliate program was part of the first version. A person who refers a customer is paid again every month that the customer pays, so the referrer earns more from customers who stay." }, { "title": "It pays the model bill itself", "text": "TypingMind, also on this site, sells only the chat interface, and its customer pays the model provider with their own API key, so TypingMind has no cost per message. Magai pays the providers out of a flat subscription, so every heavy user lowers its profit, and it has not published how much is left." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's blog, his forum posts and the Starter Story episode. They are grade C.", "items": [ "The interface was built in Bubble in 8 weeks, with a small amount of code that the founder could write himself. He had no developer training and learned from one online course.", "OpenRouter is the single access point for the language models, and fal.ai for image, video and audio models. Some providers are connected directly; he says his OpenAI account has the highest usage tier.", "Stripe takes the payments, ConvertKit sends the email, Google Analytics shows how the app is used, and Ahrefs tracks the search ranking.", "The first hired developer built a proxy server that streams model answers word by word, after a Bubble plugin for this did not work as needed.", "There is no free plan. In 2023 there was a 7-day trial with 10,000 words; in 2026 there is a 30-day refund instead.", "A small team of developers rewrote the product in custom code, because, the founder writes, the limits of Bubble were stopping progress. Version 3 was ready in February 2026, and the move was almost complete in May 2026." ], "src": [ 3, 4, 5, 7, 13 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold access to other companies' products through one subscription or one interface. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Oyster", "years": "2012 to 2016", "funding": "US$17M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Unlimited e-books for one monthly fee.", "died": "Publishers asked for high fees, so a wide choice of books at a flat price lost money. Amazon competed with lower prices and its own reading device.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/408-oyster" }, { "name": "Rdio", "years": "2010 to 2015", "funding": "US$125M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "All music for one monthly fee, with your friends' playlists.", "died": "Music licenses were expensive, and Spotify had more money for partnerships, a free plan and winning users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1892-rdio" }, { "name": "SetJam", "years": "2009 to 2013", "funding": "US$2.1M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "One place to find and watch shows from every streaming service.", "died": "It lacked the license agreements to show the content itself, and Netflix and Hulu grew their own libraries until fewer people needed an aggregator.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/532-setjam" }, { "name": "Singly", "years": "2011 to 2016", "funding": "US$2.7M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "One API for the data of many social networks.", "died": "It depended on the APIs of other companies, which were not reliable. Appcelerator bought it in 2013 and moved attention away from the product.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/548-singly" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the four sold other companies' products under one price or one interface, and each depended on suppliers that could raise the cost, refuse the license or sell the same bundle themselves. Magai is the same structure. It buys every answer from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and the others, and those companies sell their own US$20 subscriptions to the same customers.", "Three things differ. First, the suppliers publish their API prices and sell to anyone, so Magai needs no license negotiation, and with several suppliers no single one can stop it. Second, the plans are not unlimited: each includes a fixed amount of usage and sells top-ups, which limits the loss on a heavy user. Oyster sold unlimited use. Third, the starting cost was a domain name and a Bubble subscription, not US$17 million. What is unknown is the margin, and the one time Magai sold lifetime access, in June 2023, the founder wrote that he would not do it again soon because each lifetime customer keeps costing money." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The build, yes. The first customers, only with an audience.", "text": "A working model aggregator can be built today with OpenRouter, fal.ai and a no-code tool or an AI coding tool, for almost no money. What cannot be copied in 8 weeks is the ten years of blog readers who bought on the first day. The market is also fuller than in April 2023: Poe and other aggregators sell a similar bundle, and the model makers sell their own apps.", "steps": [ "Use the leading product in a new market every day, and list what it lacks. His list was chat search, folders and saved prompts.", "Build the first version with tools you can learn in weeks, and sell it before you can afford developers.", "Tell the readers you already have, and pay affiliates a commission on every month their referrals pay.", "Give each plan a fixed amount of usage and sell top-ups. Do not sell unlimited or lifetime access to a product with a cost per use.", "Rewrite in custom code only when revenue pays for developers and the first tool limits the product." ], "open": "Bundles for a specific profession, where the buyer wants one bill and one set of data rules: the Magai site now has pages for schools, lawyers, health professionals and agencies." }, "watch": [ { "title": "The verified number is old", "text": "Stripe confirms US$31,745.58 a month in March 2024. The figure of almost US$100,000 a month is the founder's word in two interviews, and neither shows a document. The Stripe chart he posted in May 2026 stops in March 2024, and a forum user asked why." }, { "title": "The margin is not public", "text": "Every message costs Magai money, and the model providers set the price. A revenue figure for an aggregator says less than the same figure for a product without usage costs. The founder says the first year was profitable because he paid no staff; the company now supports 8 to 12 people." }, { "title": "It is no longer a one-person business", "text": "The founder built and sold the product alone in 2023. When he said almost US$100,000 a month, the site named 7 people. Revenue per person at that level is at most about US$171,000 a year before model costs." }, { "title": "A 2023 number in a 2025 press release", "text": "The press release of 2 April 2025 says that Magai made over US$114,000 in two weeks shortly after the team grew. The founder's own blog reports US$114,238 in 15 days for the lifetime-deal sale of June 2023, of which half went to the deal site. The press release gives no date, so the two may be the same event." }, { "title": "Numbers change when others retell them", "text": "A short clip that reached the Bubble forum said US$1,000 on day one and US$10,000 in month two. In the episode itself the founder says US$3,000 in the first month, US$4,000 in the second and US$10,000 in the third. Forum users called the story false because of the clip." }, { "title": "The suppliers are also the competitors", "text": "OpenAI, Anthropic and Google sell their own subscriptions to the same customers and can add any feature that Magai has. What Magai keeps is all models in one place, and its own site lists Poe, which sells the same, among the products it compares itself with." }, { "title": "Lifetime customers", "text": "In June 2023, 475 lifetime plans were sold for one payment each, and 45 were refunded. The usage of the others is a cost for as long as they use the product." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://magai.co" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Stripe profile of Magai (@heymagai): MRR chart, March 2023 to March 2024", "url": "https://profile.stripe.com/heymagai/Eq3J6NJP", "grade": "A", "how": "The page loads by script, so its text could not be read. Read the preview image that Stripe generates for the page and serves from files.stripe.com: MRR US$31,745.58, plus 44,827.23%, US$70.66 in the previous period. The founder posted this link on the Bubble forum on 5 May 2026." }, { "title": "Starter Story on YouTube, 11 October 2025: I built a $100K/month AI app", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV7bBCAABg4", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the title, the date, the view count and the description, which names Dustin Stout, magai.co and his X account. YouTube blocked the download of the captions, so the spoken words were read in the next source." }, { "title": "StationLM transcript of the podcast version: I built a $99K/month AI app, Starter Story", "url": "https://stationlm.com/analysis/8983e86d-8bc6-4bde-9b6b-aad98110bd44", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full transcript. It is a machine transcript and writes the product name as Magi. Source for the words almost $100,000 a month, the first-year figures, the tools and the 2025 plans." }, { "title": "Magai blog, Dustin W. Stout, 5 July 2023: Making $114,238 in 15 days: WTF Just Happened?", "url": "https://magai.co/making-100k-in-15-days/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder's own account. Source for the money lost before Magai, the 8-week build, the lifetime-deal sale and its split." }, { "title": "Bubble forum, 30 April to 5 May 2026: $99k/ month with an app that started on Bubble", "url": "https://forum.bubble.io/t/99k-month-with-an-app-that-started-on-bubble/395590", "grade": "C", "how": "Read all 29 posts through the forum's JSON. The founder writes as dustinstout on 4 and 5 May 2026. Source for the 12 team members, the first-year costs, the move away from Bubble and the doubts of other users." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 19 October 2023: Hitting $20k MRR in 6 months without marketing", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/hitting-20k-mrr-in-6-months-without-marketing-xM7jCg4vt06pAJNFWgJy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the open introduction and the comments, where the founder answers. The interview text needs a login and was not read." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 25 February 2026: From broke to $100k MRR in four years", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/from-broke-to-100k-mrr-in-four-years-hS1wen0srjGNIWZxSnV9", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the open first section and the comments, where the founder answers on 12 March 2026. The rest needs a login and was not read." }, { "title": "Newsfile press release, 2 April 2025: AI Platform Magai Expands Team, Reaches Key Milestone Amid Growing Demand", "url": "https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/243520/AI-Platform-Magai-Expands-Team-Reaches-Key-Milestone-Amid-Growing-Demand", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A paid release by the company. Source for the team of six and the place, Bakersfield, California." }, { "title": "Dustin W. Stout on X, 30 June 2023: $0-$6.6k MRR in less than 90 days", "url": "https://x.com/DustinWStout/status/1674903697124651009", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Magai about page in the Wayback Machine, 3 October 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20251003071640/https://magai.co/about/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the team list: 7 named people. Also read the copies of 7 June 2023, 2 October 2024 and 1 April 2025, which name only the founder, and of 17 May 2026." }, { "title": "Magai about page and press page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://magai.co/about/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The about page names 8 people. The press page gives the founding year 2023, the founder and California." }, { "title": "Magai pricing page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://magai.co/pricing/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The yearly prices are in the page's embedded data." }, { "title": "Magai home page in the Wayback Machine, 8 April 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230408212407/https://magai.co/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, and the copy of 8 March 2023, which shows only a beta sign-up form. The first prices load by script and could not be read." }, { "title": "Latka company page: Magai revenue", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/magai.co", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. One value without a recorded source, one estimate, and a count of 1 employee on LinkedIn in October 2024." }, { "title": "Better Launch playbook page: 7 tactics from Dustin, Magi, $100K/month", "url": "https://www.betterlaunch.co/playbooks/episodes/dustin-magi", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A summary of the Starter Story episode with quotations. It gives only the first name and spells the product Magi." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/headlime/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/headlime.md", "slug": "headlime", "name": "Headlime", "country": "Netherlands", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI copywriting tool", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-13", "launchLabel": "29 June 2020", "outcomeLabel": "Sold for seven figures, March 2021", "sticker": "Sold for seven figures", "outcomeUsd": 1000000, "months": 9, "teamLabel": "1 founder, with a copywriter and a customer support person listed on the About page", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "audience", "trend": "sold", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2B", "Marketing content" ], "product": "A web tool that writes marketing text. The user describes a product in a few sentences, picks a type of text (Facebook ad, Google ad, headline, value proposition, blog post, or landing page, the single web page that an advertisement links to) and a language, and gets several drafts written by GPT-3, OpenAI's text model. A document editor has a button that continues a blog post, and a page builder produces a landing page with text, design and code. Each generation costs credits, and the plan sets the number of credits per month.", "why": "The founder already sold a small template tool for headlines when OpenAI gave GPT-3 to a first group of developers. He asked OpenAI's chief technology officer for access by email in June 2020, received it, and spent five months rebuilding the tool around the model. When that version came out in December 2020 there were few such tools and he had an audience on X from showing his work in public. He says revenue went from US$1,000 to US$20,000 a month by February 2021. He sold in March 2021, when new competitors appeared every week.", "summary": [ "Headlime is an AI copywriting tool: a web program that writes marketing text, such as advertisements, headlines and blog paragraphs, from a short description of the product. It runs on GPT-3, the text model that OpenAI made available to a first group of developers in 2020 through an API, an interface that lets one program send requests to another. Headlime adds the forms, the prompts that the founder tested against each other, an editor and a landing page builder, and it uses the DeepL translation service for other languages. The user never writes a prompt.", "Danny Postma, a Dutch designer and marketer who by his own account could not yet program at the start of 2019, launched it from Bali on 29 June 2020 as a generator of headlines from 200 fixed templates. He sold it first as a lifetime deal, a single payment for permanent access. In the same month he asked OpenAI's chief technology officer for GPT-3 access by email and received it. He rebuilt the product around the model in five months and released that version in December 2020. He says monthly recurring revenue (MRR: the sum of all subscription payments in one month) went from US$1,000 at the start of December 2020 to US$20,000 in February 2021. On 30 March 2021 he announced the sale of Headlime to Conversion.ai, the company now called Jasper.", "The price was never published. Postma says \"seven figures\", the interview site Failory titled his account \"+$1M\", and a report by TechPP on the day after the announcement says that neither side disclosed the terms. The figure of about US$1 million that many articles give matches a guess by another founder, Pieter Levels, who multiplied US$20,000 by 12 months and by 4. Every money number on this page is therefore grade C: a statement by the seller or an estimate by an outsider. No statement by the buyer about the price was found. The page also shows what happened to earlier small companies that sold marketing and writing software." ], "factsCaption": "A sale for an undisclosed seven-figure price, nine months after launch and less than four months after the GPT-3 version came out; every money number comes from the seller or from an outside estimate", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a statement by the founder in an interview, in his posts on X or on the company's website, a journalist's report of such statements, or an outside estimate that says so. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B: no filing, payment processor or buyer has published a price or a revenue figure for Headlime.", "timelineLead": "From a US$19 ebook of headline templates to a sale to a competitor, nine months after launch. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Headlime prices on headlime.com in October 2026, from the company's pricing page (grade C). The page shows monthly prices only", "note": "The pricing page shows no yearly plan, so the yearly column is empty. Credits are used only for AI generation. The page says that 1,500 credits are about 25 blog posts or 75 landing pages, and that extra credits cost US$10 for 200. White label means that the customer can show the tool under its own brand. The Business price is for 3 members; a slider on the page goes up to 100 members, and the prices for more members load by script and could not be read. US$59 a month is the price that the founder says he reached before the sale, after US$9 and then US$29. The site has had no new features since March 2021, and this page did not test whether a new subscription can still be bought.", "rows": [ [ "Individual", "", "59", "1,500 credits a month, 1 user, no white label" ], [ "Business", "", "399", "3 members, unlimited use under a fair-use rule, white label" ], [ "Extra credits", "10 one-time", "", "200 credits" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Sale price", "value": "seven figures; the exact price was never published", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder, in the Failory interview of January 2022 and in the title of his Indie Hackers thread of July 2021. Asked for the price in that thread, he answered only with zipped-mouth emoji.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Lowest price consistent with the published statements", "value": "more than US$1,000,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Failory's headline for the founder's interview reads \"+$1M\". This page uses US$1,000,000 as its headline figure because it is the lowest value that fits that statement, not because anyone stated it as the price.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Outside estimate of the price, 31 March 2021", "value": "about US$1 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Pieter Levels, another founder, on X, marked by him as a guess: US$20,000 times 12 months times 4. It is not a statement by the buyer or the seller. Later articles give about US$1 million without naming a source.", "src": [ 7, 6, 17 ] }, { "fact": "The same estimate, recomputed", "value": "US$960,000", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 20,000 times 12 times 4 = 960,000.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Price terms according to the press", "value": "not disclosed by either side", "grade": "C", "note": "TechPP, 31 March 2021, and They Got Acquired, 21 April 2022. The second outlet asked the founder for comment and got no reply.", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Buyer", "value": "Conversion.ai, later called Jarvis and now Jasper", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller's announcement on the Headlime blog and on X. TechPP reports comments by the buyer's founder, Dave Rogenmoser, in Facebook groups. An announcement by the buyer itself was not found. Jasper's chief executive confirms the earlier company name in a 2022 interview that does not mention Headlime.", "src": [ 3, 4, 5, 2, 16 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, February 2021", "value": "US$20,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder, Failory interview. Levels wrote \"$20K+ MRR\" on the day after the announcement.", "src": [ 2, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, start of December 2020", "value": "US$1,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder, Failory interview. December 2020 is the month in which the GPT-3 version came out.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from December 2020 to February 2021", "value": "20 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 20,000 / 1,000 = 20. The seller's announcement says revenue grew 100% month over month from November 2020.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Yearly run rate at US$20,000 a month", "value": "US$240,000", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 20,000 times 12.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Price as a multiple of that run rate, if the price was exactly US$1,000,000", "value": "about 4.2 times or more", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 1,000,000 / 240,000 = 4.17. The real multiple is unknown, because the price and the revenue on the day of signing are unknown.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Sales in the first weeks after launch", "value": "more than US$60,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder, Failory interview: most of it from a limited lifetime deal. Not verified.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Lifetime deal tiers at launch", "value": "200 at US$49, 200 at US$89, 200 at US$129", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder, Indie Hackers thread.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue if all 600 lifetime plans in those tiers sold", "value": "US$53,400", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 200 times 49 + 200 times 89 + 200 times 129. This is less than the US$60,000 in the row above, so that figure must include other sales. The founder does not explain the difference.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Subscription price steps", "value": "US$9, then US$29, then US$59 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder, Indie Hackers thread. He says he kept raising the price to find the highest price that customers accept, and growth did not slow.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Access to GPT-3", "value": "requested by email from OpenAI's chief technology officer in June 2020", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder. In a 2024 interview he names Greg Brockman and says he was in the first batch of users.", "src": [ 1, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Time to build", "value": "about 3 weeks for version 1; 5 months for the GPT-3 version", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder. The Failory interview says one month for version 1.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Acquisition offers", "value": "2, in February 2021", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder, Failory interview and a 2023 podcast. He names only the buyer.", "src": [ 2, 12, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Length of the sale process", "value": "about 1 week of due diligence, about 2 weeks for the contract, 1 to 2 weeks for transfer and payment", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder, Indie Hackers thread. Due diligence is the buyer's check of the seller's information. The contract was an asset purchase agreement, by which the buyer takes over the product and its customers and not the legal company. The money was held in escrow, which means by a third party, until the assets were transferred.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 founder, 1 copywriter, 1 customer support person", "grade": "C", "note": "The About page. The founder says he worked on Headlime by himself; They Got Acquired counts \"Founder + 2 Members\".", "src": [ 14, 2, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Customers", "value": "\"1,182+ companies\" on the home page", "grade": "C", "note": "Company statement. A reader of the founder's thread quoted the same number in July 2021, so the counter has not changed since then.", "src": [ 13, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Hosting cost", "value": "US$5 a month for the app server", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder: one Digital Ocean app. He says GPT-3 was a major part of the monthly cost and does not give the amount.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder: he paid his costs from a freelance job of two days a week. Levels and They Got Acquired describe the company as bootstrapped, which means paid for from its own income, without investors.", "src": [ 1, 7, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Legal form", "value": "Dutch sole proprietorship", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder, Indie Hackers thread. This is why the country on this page is the Netherlands, although he built the product in Bali, Indonesia.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the announcement of the sale", "value": "9 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 29 June 2020 to 30 March 2021 is 274 days, which is 9 months and 1 day. The founder says 8 months, which is the time from the launch to the offers in February 2021.", "src": [ 8, 4 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2015", "what": "Postma, then 21 and a freelance conversion specialist (a consultant who raises the share of website visitors that buy), starts Landingfolio, a gallery of landing page designs. He says it made no money for four years.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "April 2020", "what": "In lockdown in Bali he lists products that he could build quickly. One is a tool made from an ebook of headline templates that he and a friend had sold for US$19.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "June 2020", "what": "He emails OpenAI's chief technology officer to ask for GPT-3 access and gets it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 11 ] }, { "when": "29 June 2020", "what": "Launch on Product Hunt and X as a headline generator with 200 templates and a limited number of lifetime plans, on the domain headlime.io. It is second product of the week on Product Hunt. He says the first weeks brought more than US$60,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 9, 2 ] }, { "when": "July to November 2020", "what": "Other people copy the template tool. He spends five months rebuilding Headlime around GPT-3.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 12 ] }, { "when": "24 October 2020", "what": "The archived home page still sells templates for headlines, emails and Facebook ads, does not mention AI, and is signed \"Creator of Headlime.io\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "December 2020", "what": "Version 2 with GPT-3 comes out. Monthly recurring revenue is US$1,000 at the start of the month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "February 2021", "what": "US$20,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Two companies offer to buy Headlime. He says he was close to burnout.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "when": "17 March 2021", "what": "A TechCrunch writer tests Headlime for an article on GPT-3 startups and writes that he is impressed.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "30 March 2021", "what": "Postma announces on X and on the Headlime blog that Conversion.ai has bought Headlime. He takes a strategic role at the buyer. Headlime will get bug fixes but no new features.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 3 ] }, { "when": "31 March 2021", "what": "TechPP reports that the price is not disclosed and that buyers of the lifetime deal keep Headlime but get no new features and not most of the buyer's product. Pieter Levels guesses a price of about US$1 million.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 7 ] }, { "when": "1 July 2021", "what": "In a public question thread on Indie Hackers he describes the sale process and declines to give the price or the revenue.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "18 January 2022", "what": "Failory publishes his interview: \"seven figures\", and the buyer is now called Jarvis.ai.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "9 August 2023", "what": "On a podcast he says he sold Headlime because he was afraid to build a team, and that he now has the same choice with HeadshotPro, his AI headshot product, which has its own page on this site.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2026", "what": "headlime.com still loads, with the 2021 acquisition notice, a 2020 copyright line, a sign-up page and prices of US$59 and US$399 a month. The help site does not respond. Whether new customers can still pay was not tested.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Timing", "text": "Postma had a working copywriting product with paying customers in the month when GPT-3 reached its first developers. He did not wait for general access: he wrote to OpenAI's chief technology officer and was admitted. The GPT-3 version came out in December 2020, when few products of this kind existed. Three months later a competitor had raised close to US$3 million and, in his words, competitors appeared every week." }, { "title": "A lifetime deal first, then rising subscription prices", "text": "The first version was a simple tool that filled blanks in 200 headline templates. A limited lifetime deal in three price tiers brought, by his account, more than US$60,000 in the first weeks. During the five months of rebuilding he also had a freelance job of two days a week, which he says paid his costs. After the rebuild he sold subscriptions and raised the price from US$9 to US$29 and then to US$59 a month." }, { "title": "Showing the work in public was the sales channel", "text": "He posted progress and previews of the GPT-3 version on X while he built it. He names X, Facebook groups and word of mouth as the main channels, and says paid ads on Google never worked. He says the public posts led to the TechCrunch test. They also led to the buyer: according to They Got Acquired, the founders of Conversion.ai knew Headlime because they followed him on X." }, { "title": "Selling instead of growing the company", "text": "In February 2021 he saw three options: raise venture money and work 80 hours a week, stay self-funded and hire, or sell. He was doing support, development and marketing by himself and says he was afraid to hire. He sold to a competitor. The process took about four to five weeks from due diligence to payment." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's Indie Hackers thread and the Failory interview. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Front end in Nuxt (Vue), server in Node.js with Express, database MongoDB on MongoDB Atlas, hosting on Heroku and Digital Ocean. The app server cost US$5 a month.", "Text generation by GPT-3 through OpenAI's API, and DeepL for other languages. The pricing page lists 11 languages.", "Prompts chosen by A/B tests, which compare two versions on real users: he compared which prompt's results users marked as favourites, then tested the winner again.", "Interface parts mostly from Tailwind CSS components, to release faster.", "Version 1 took about three weeks. Version 2 took five months, and he says the last three were small bug fixes.", "Free use without a trial period. The user pays on reaching a paid feature, and limited-time offers by email move free users to paid plans.", "Code, documentation and help desk were written so that another company could take them over. Due diligence was one Notion document with the buyer's questions and his screenshots as answers.", "The company was a Dutch sole proprietorship. The sale was an asset purchase with payment through escrow." ], "src": [ 1, 2, 13 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold software that promised small businesses less marketing or writing work. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Metigy", "years": "2014 to 2022", "funding": "US$14M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "An AI marketing brain for small businesses.", "died": "Small businesses wanted the work done for them, not recommendations. The money went into generic advice that few customers used.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2338-metigy" }, { "name": "Argyle Social", "years": "2009 to 2013", "funding": "US$2.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A social media marketing tool that saves marketers work.", "died": "Larger companies with bigger marketing budgets won the customers while Argyle released small updates.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1832-argyle-social" }, { "name": "Marketfox", "years": "2017 to 2020", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Automated marketing for online shops.", "died": "Mailchimp and other large marketing automation companies had more money and more features.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1035-marketfox" }, { "name": "Userfox", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$700K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Simple automated email marketing for online shops.", "died": "Mailchimp dominated the market, and Userfox did not have the money to compete.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1199-userfox" }, { "name": "Draft", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A minimal cloud editor for writers with version control.", "died": "Google Docs covered the need for free. A narrow writing tool with a free plan could not pay for itself.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1605-draft" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the five sold a narrow marketing or writing tool, and in four cases a larger company with more money or a free product won the customers. Headlime was in the same position by March 2021. The founder wrote that competitors appeared every week, TechPP reported that Copy.ai had raised close to US$3 million that month, and other people had copied his first version completely.", "Two things differ. First, the text was written by a model that none of the earlier companies had. Before GPT-3 a template tool could only fill blanks, which is what Headlime version 1 did. For some months in late 2020 the model was the advantage, because few developers had access. Second, Postma did not try to compete with the larger companies for years. He sold to one of them nine months after launch, at a time when he says revenue doubled every month. The cost of that choice is visible on headlime.com today: a product with no new features since 2021." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The early access, no. The sequence, yes.", "text": "Getting a new model before most developers was one email and some luck, and the founder says he is not sure it would work again. The sequence can be repeated: own a small paid tool with customers in one niche, put a new model into it as soon as an API exists, raise the price while growth continues, and decide early whether to raise money, hire or sell.", "steps": [ "Start with a small tool for which you already have the content, and sell a limited lifetime deal to get the first customers and the first money.", "When a new model appears, ask for access directly and rebuild the tool around it, even if that discards work you paid for.", "Show the work in public while you build, so that customers and possible buyers know the product on release day.", "Raise the price in steps and watch whether growth slows.", "Keep code, documentation and support in a state that another company can take over, in case a buyer appears." ], "open": "Small paid tools with an existing customer group and one task that a new kind of model can now do. The same sequence applies each time a model for a new type of output, such as voice, video or structured documents, becomes available through an API." }, "watch": [ { "title": "The price is not known", "text": "\"Seven figures\" covers everything from US$1,000,000 to US$9,999,999. The seller gives no number, the buyer said nothing in public about the price, and the US$1 million in many articles matches another founder's guess from the day after the announcement. The headline figure on this page is the lowest value of that range." }, { "title": "The revenue figures are the seller's own", "text": "US$1,000 and US$20,000 a month come from one interview, ten months after the sale. No dashboard, payment processor or journalist has confirmed them. Asked in July 2021 for the revenue at the time of sale, he declined to answer." }, { "title": "\"8 months\" is rounded", "text": "The launch on Product Hunt was on 29 June 2020 and the announcement on 30 March 2021, which is nine months. The founder's accounts also differ on details: version 1 took three weeks or one month, and one interview places GPT-3 two months after the launch while his own thread has him asking for access in the launch month." }, { "title": "The product stopped", "text": "Headlime has had no new features since March 2021. Buyers of the lifetime deal kept access to a product that no longer changes and did not get the buyer's product. A reader who had supported Headlime early complained about that in the founder's thread. The site is still online in October 2026, but this page did not test whether it still generates text or takes payments." }, { "title": "The early advantage is gone", "text": "The advantage was access to GPT-3 before most developers had it. By the month of the sale a competitor had raised close to US$3 million. Today any developer can call a text model, and chat assistants write marketing text directly, so a copy of Headlime would start with no advantage." }, { "title": "Profit is unknown", "text": "The founder says GPT-3 was a major part of the monthly cost and gives no amount. Revenue is known only as two monthly figures, so neither the total revenue of the nine months nor the profit can be computed." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://headlime.com" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Indie Hackers, 1 July 2021: Danny Postma, Zero to 7 Figure Exit in 8 Months with Headlime, AMA", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/zero-to-7-figure-exit-in-8-months-with-headlime-ama-227d89ae0e", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the founder's answers. Source for the price steps, the lifetime deal tiers, the GPT-3 email, the technology, the sale process, the legal form and his refusal to give the price." }, { "title": "Failory, 18 January 2022: Building & Selling a SaaS for +$1M in 8 Months, interview with Danny Postma", "url": "https://www.failory.com/interview/headlime", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview. Source for the US$1,000 and US$20,000 monthly figures, the US$60,000 launch, the five-month rebuild, the two offers and the words \"seven figures\"." }, { "title": "Headlime blog: Headlime and Conversion.ai Join Forces in Artificial Copywriting, first saved by the Internet Archive on 30 March 2021", "url": "https://headlime.com/blog/headlime-and-conversionai-join-forces-in-artificial-copywriting", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on the live site. The seller's announcement. Source for the buyer, the plan to merge the two tools, the end of new features and the 100% monthly growth claim. The date comes from the Internet Archive index." }, { "title": "Danny Postma on X, 30 March 2021: thread announcing the acquisition", "url": "https://x.com/dannypostma/status/1376918885807480835", "grade": "C", "how": "Read ten posts of the thread through the fxtwitter API. Source for the announcement date, the \"8 months\" and his new role." }, { "title": "TechPP, 31 March 2021: Conversion.ai Acquiring Headlime is Bad News for Headlime Users", "url": "https://techpp.com/2021/03/31/conversion-ai-headlime-acquisition/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A journalist's report. Source for the undisclosed terms, the comments of the buyer's founder, the effect on lifetime-deal buyers and the Copy.ai funding." }, { "title": "They Got Acquired, 21 April 2022: In less than a year, this founder bootstrapped and sold an AI copywriting platform", "url": "https://theygotacquired.com/saas/headlime-acquired-by-conversion-ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A journalist's report based on public sources; the founder did not answer its request for comment. Source for the undisclosed terms, the team count and how the buyer knew the product." }, { "title": "Pieter Levels on X, 31 March 2021: estimate of the sale price", "url": "https://x.com/levelsio/status/1377095814963589125", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. An outside guess, marked as such by its author." }, { "title": "Product Hunt launch page of Headlime as saved by the Internet Archive, 12 August 2020", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20200812044414/https://www.producthunt.com/posts/headlime", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the launch post and the first comments. The live page could not be opened. Source for the launch date of 29 June 2020, the product-of-the-week rank and the lifetime plans." }, { "title": "Danny Postma on X, 29 June 2020: launch thread", "url": "https://x.com/dannypostma/status/1277497120090537989", "grade": "C", "how": "Read four posts of the thread through the fxtwitter API. Source for the launch date and the headlime.io domain." }, { "title": "TechCrunch, 17 March 2021: Okay, the GPT-3 hype seems pretty reasonable", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/17/okay-the-gpt-3-hype-seems-pretty-reasonable/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on Headlime. A journalist's own test of the product. It gives no revenue or user numbers." }, { "title": "Unite.ai, 20 February 2024: interview with Danny Postma", "url": "https://www.unite.ai/danny-postma-founder-of-headshotpro-interview-series/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the answers about Headlime and GPT-3. Source for the name of OpenAI's chief technology officer and the first batch of users." }, { "title": "The Bootstrapped Founder, 9 August 2023: Danny Postma, an indie hacker's business evolution", "url": "https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/danny-postma-an-indie-hackers-business-evolution/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the parts of the transcript about Headlime. Source for the three options, the two interested buyers, the copies of version 1 and the later product." }, { "title": "Headlime pricing page and home page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://headlime.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the pricing table, the languages, the customer counter and the state of the site in 2026. The help site help.headlime.com did not respond." }, { "title": "Headlime About page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://headlime.com/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the three team members and the origin of the tool as a spreadsheet of templates." }, { "title": "Headlime home page as saved by the Internet Archive, 24 October 2020", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20201024023456/https://headlime.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Shows the product as a template tool for headlines four months after launch." }, { "title": "Sacra, 16 November 2022: Dave Rogenmoser, CEO and co-founder of Jasper, on the generative AI opportunity", "url": "https://sacra.com/research/dave-rogenmoser-jasper-generative-ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the answer on the company's first product. Source only for the fact that Jasper was called Conversion.ai at launch. It does not mention Headlime." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 3 November 2023: Danny Postma built and sold AI writing tool for ~$1m in 8 months, by Hazel Lim", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/danny-postma-built-and-sold-ai-writing-tool-for-1m-in-8-months-full-story-7da7a7edf7", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A community summary of a longer article on thetinyempires.com, which could not be opened. An example of the US$1 million figure given without a source." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers podcast, episode 278, 5 May 2023: Growing a Portfolio of AI Products Past $300k After a 7-Figure Exit with Danny Postma", "url": "https://bizarro.dev.to/theindiehackerspodcast/278-growing-a-portfolio-of-ai-products-past-300k-after-a-7-figure-exit-with-danny-postma", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the episode title on the DEV Community mirror. The audio was not transcribed. Shows that the podcast also describes the sale only as seven figures." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/softgen/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/softgen.md", "slug": "softgen", "name": "Softgen", "country": "Germany, now USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI app builder", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-13", "launchLabel": "July 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$500K to US$600K ARR when sold at an undisclosed price, March 2025", "sticker": "Sold at $500K ARR", "outcomeUsd": 500000, "months": 8, "teamLabel": "1 founder until November 2024, then 2 people at the sale", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "build-software", "channel": "search", "trend": "sold", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "Vibe coding" ], "product": "A person describes a web application in plain language. Softgen's AI agent writes a Next.js project with a database, user login and payments, shows a live preview, and changes the app when the person gives feedback. The code goes to the user's own GitHub repository.", "why": "A technical founder released an early full-stack AI app builder in July 2024, and revenue stayed flat for four months. Then a second person joined who worked only on distribution, and annual recurring revenue grew about 25 times in four months. They sold the product while the growth was visible and kept their company for the next product.", "summary": [ "Softgen is an AI app builder: a website where a person describes a web application in plain language and an AI model writes the code. This way of working is called vibe coding, which means that you build software by describing it to an AI model instead of writing the code yourself. Softgen builds full-stack apps. Full-stack means both the frontend, the part that the user sees, and the backend, the part that stores data and handles logins and payments.", "Marko Kraemer, then 19 and from Frankfurt, released Softgen in July 2024 as a product of his company Kortix AI. Revenue stayed at about US$2,000 a month until late November 2024, when Domenico Gagliardi joined to work on growth. Gagliardi wrote on 8 April 2025 that they had grown Softgen from US$20,000 to almost US$600,000 in annual recurring revenue in 90 days, and on 15 April 2025 that it was US$500,000 in four months. Annual recurring revenue (ARR) is the current monthly subscription revenue multiplied by twelve. Arising Ventures, a holding company in the United States, bought Softgen in March 2025. A holding company is a company that buys other companies and keeps them. No party has published the price. Kraemer writes that it was seven figures.", "The revenue figures at the sale are statements by the two founders, grade C, and the two figures by Gagliardi differ by US$100,000. The buyer later published US$52,000 of monthly revenue for Softgen under its ownership, grade B, which is the same level. This page shows each number with its grade. It also shows five failed startups that promised software without programmers before language models could write it." ], "factsCaption": "About US$500,000 to US$600,000 in annual recurring revenue eight months after launch, then a sale at a price that no party has published", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade B value was stated by the buyer, Arising Ventures, on the Softgen websites that it now controls. A grade C value is a statement by one of the two founders, or by a third party that says so. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A.", "timelineLead": "From a side project to a sale in 8 months, and the buyer's changes after the sale. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Softgen plans in October 2026, from the structured data in the company's homepage and the description of its pricing page (grade C)", "note": "The pricing page loads its table by script, so the yearly prices could not be read. A credit pays for AI work. Credits do not expire while the subscription runs, and unused credits move to the next month on Pro. Earlier prices: in October 2024 the launch offer was US$39 a month for Starter and US$49 a month for Pro. From 14 August 2025 the buyer charged US$33 a year plus AI usage at a 15% markup. The monthly credit plans in the table replaced that model.", "rows": [ [ "Free trial", "0", "0", "trial credits, no card needed" ], [ "Starter", "not read", "25", "500 Softgen credits a month" ], [ "Pro", "not read", "49", "1,500 Softgen credits a month" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "ARR at the sale, second founder's post of 8 April 2025", "value": "almost US$600,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Domenico Gagliardi on X: from US$20,000 to almost US$600,000 ARR in 90 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "ARR at the sale, same founder's article of 15 April 2025", "value": "US$500,000", "grade": "C", "note": "From US$20,000 to US$500,000 ARR in 4 months. His profile line also says 0.5M ARR. This page uses the lower figure as the headline number.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue within four months, first founder's profile", "value": "US$50,000", "grade": "C", "note": "A third-party summary of Marko Kraemer's LinkedIn profile, not read at LinkedIn itself. Calculated: 50,000 times 12 equals 600,000.", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue under the buyer, about October 2025", "value": "US$52,000, profitable", "grade": "B", "note": "Stated by the current owner on its overview page, which is a sales document. The page has no exact date; it describes the 15 months after the July 2024 launch. Monthly revenue at that time included yearly licenses and AI usage fees, so it is not the same measure as recurring revenue.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the buyer's figure", "value": "US$624,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 52,000 times 12 equals 624,000.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Sale price", "value": "not published", "grade": "C", "note": "Kraemer writes on his own site that Softgen was acquired for seven figures. The buyer has stated no price.", "src": [ 5, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Buyer and date of the sale", "value": "Arising Ventures, March 2025", "grade": "B", "note": "The owner's timeline gives March 2025, and the footer of softgen.ai reads An Arising Ventures Enterprise. Gagliardi announced the sale on 8 April 2025.", "src": [ 4, 8, 1 ] }, { "fact": "What was sold", "value": "the Softgen product, not the founders' company", "grade": "C", "note": "Before the sale the footer read a Kortix AI Corp Product. Kortix stayed with the founders. Softgen now belongs to Softgen Labs Inc. The legal form of the deal is not published.", "src": [ 10, 8, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, July to November 2024", "value": "about US$2,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Gagliardi's article of 9 February 2025: steady at 2k MRR since July or August. Calculated: 2,000 times 12 equals 24,000, close to the US$20,000 ARR in his later posts.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Growth in ARR, late November 2024 to March 2025", "value": "25 to 30 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 500,000 divided by 20,000 equals 25, and 600,000 divided by 20,000 equals 30.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "People at the sale", "value": "2", "grade": "C", "note": "Gagliardi writes that Kraemer was mostly alone on the project until he joined in late November 2024. Gagliardi kept a full-time job until early February 2025. Other staff or contractors: not verified.", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Website views per week", "value": "from 3,000 to 8,000 up to more than 100,000 in 3 months", "grade": "C", "note": "Gagliardi on X, 20 March 2025.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding for Softgen", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "Gagliardi: bootstrapped, no VC. The owner's page calls Softgen the most established brand among app builders without venture capital. A wiki reports that Kortix, the founders' company, raised US$4 million in 2025: not verified.", "src": [ 1, 4, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Registered users, about October 2025", "value": "186,000", "grade": "B", "note": "Owner's page, which also states 900 active paying customers and 400 new users a day. The homepage in October 2026 still shows 186,000.", "src": [ 4, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue per paying customer", "value": "about US$58", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 52,000 divided by 900 equals 57.78.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Team under the buyer", "value": "5 people", "grade": "B", "note": "Owner's page: a chief executive, a chief technology officer, two senior engineers and one person for product and growth. The chief executive, KJ Erickson, also leads Arising Ventures.", "src": [ 4, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the sale", "value": "8 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: July 2024 to March 2025.", "src": [ 4, 6 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "April 2024", "what": "Kraemer, who had built websites and run a software studio since his school years in Frankfurt, starts Kortix AI.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15, 5 ] }, { "when": "12 July 2024", "what": "He posts a demo on X: Softgen, which he calls an autonomous AI developer, builds a copy of X in less than 10 minutes. The post gets about 100,000 views. The buyer later dates the public launch to July 2024 and calls it a side project.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 4 ] }, { "when": "August to November 2024", "what": "Monthly recurring revenue stays at about US$2,000. In October the site offers Starter at US$39 a month and Pro at US$49 a month and counts more than 200 makers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 10 ] }, { "when": "Late November 2024", "what": "Gagliardi, who had run more than 15 side projects next to a full-time job, meets Kraemer and joins to work on growth.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "when": "Early February 2025", "what": "Gagliardi leaves his full-time job. The site counts more than 500 makers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 10 ] }, { "when": "20 March 2025", "what": "Gagliardi posts that weekly website views rose from 3,000 to 8,000 up to more than 100,000 in three months. The first activity he names is automated submission to hundreds of directories.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "March 2025", "what": "Arising Ventures acquires Softgen.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "8 April 2025", "what": "Gagliardi announces the sale on X: from US$20,000 to almost US$600,000 ARR in 90 days, no venture capital, no office.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "15 April 2025", "what": "In an article he gives US$500,000 ARR in four months and writes that the two founders are working on their next AI product.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "14 August 2025", "what": "The buyer changes the pricing to US$33 a year plus AI usage at a 15% markup, and calls it wholesale pricing.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "23 September 2025", "what": "The Softgen account on X calls the product the world's first AI co-op.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "when": "About October 2025", "what": "The owner's overview page states 186,000 registered users, 900 paying customers, US$52,000 of monthly revenue and a team of 5.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "Softgen is online as An Arising Ventures Enterprise with monthly plans at US$25 and US$49. Kraemer leads Kortix, which publishes open-source software for AI agents.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 8, 9, 5, 14 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Early in a new category", "text": "Softgen was public in July 2024. The current owner calls it the first full-stack AI builder on the market, and Gagliardi calls it one of the first. Being early gave it a working product and paying users. It did not give it growth: revenue stayed near US$2,000 a month for four months." }, { "title": "A second person for distribution", "text": "Kraemer built the product and worked on it mostly alone. Gagliardi met him in November 2024 and took over the growth work. In the next four months ARR went from about US$20,000 to US$500,000 or more, which is 25 to 30 times. For the first two of those months Gagliardi still had a full-time job." }, { "title": "Search traffic from automated directory listings", "text": "Gagliardi's public thread names the first of three activities. They submitted Softgen to hundreds of web directories with an automation tool to collect backlinks. A backlink is a link from another website to yours, and search engines rank a site higher when it has many. Weekly views rose from between 3,000 and 8,000 to more than 100,000 in three months. The other two activities in the thread were not read for this page." }, { "title": "A fast sale to an operator", "text": "Softgen was sold eight months after launch and four months after the growth started. The buyer is a holding company that runs small software companies with its own staff, and its chief executive became the chief executive of Softgen. The founders kept their company, Kortix, and moved to its next product." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the first founder's launch post, archived copies of the Softgen website and the current owner's overview page. They are grade B and C.", "items": [ "The first public demo, on 12 July 2024, showed Softgen's AI agent building a copy of the X website in less than 10 minutes.", "In October 2024 each project started from a Next.js boilerplate, which is a prepared project skeleton, with Tailwind CSS and Shadcn UI for the interface. Firebase supplied login, database and file storage. Stripe or Lemon Squeezy handled payments, and Resend sent email.", "The user gives instructions in a chat and can upload images. The agent works in an autonomous mode or an interactive mode. A development server shows a live preview, each change is kept in a version history that can be reverted, and the code can be exported to GitHub.", "The first plans counted AI revisions: 100 a month on Starter and 200 a month on Pro.", "Under the buyer the stack changed: Next.js and Vite as frameworks, Daytona sandboxes as the development environment, Supabase as the backend, Vercel for deployment, and a choice of models from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI.", "Growth work was cheap and automated: directory submissions for backlinks, and a founder who posted the numbers in public." ], "src": [ 6, 10, 4, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database promised websites or software without programmers, before language models could write an application. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Builder.ai", "years": "2016 to 2025", "funding": "US$445M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Custom apps for people who cannot program, built by an AI assembly line instead of expensive developers.", "died": "The database records that a US$20,000 app cost up to US$35,000 to deliver, because offshore developers did most of the work that was sold as AI.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2170-builderai" }, { "name": "Kite DevTool", "years": "2014 to 2024", "funding": "US$21M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "AI code completion inside the programmer's editor, seven years before GitHub Copilot.", "died": "Its own models, built before large language models, could not match Copilot, which also reached developers through GitHub and VS Code. The free product never earned enough.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2491-kite-devtool" }, { "name": "The Grid", "years": "2014 to 2020", "funding": "US$4.7M", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Websites that an AI designs for you, with no designer.", "died": "The AI of that time produced designs of uneven quality. Wix, Squarespace and WordPress gave more reliable results, and users left.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/618-the-grid" }, { "name": "Crejo.Fun", "years": "2020 to 2022", "funding": "US$3M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A drag-and-drop builder so that creators in India could make their own mobile apps without programming.", "died": "Creators needed a larger audience first. An app of their own meant design, updates and promotion work that they did not want.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2303-crejofun" }, { "name": "Infogami", "years": "2005 to 2008", "funding": "US$12K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Anyone can build a dynamic website without coding.", "died": "WordPress won that market with open-source software and plugins. The founder joined Reddit, and the product ended there.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1672-infogami" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the five promised that a person who cannot program would get working software. Before 2023 the software still had to be written or designed by people, or by AI that was not good enough. Builder.ai hid developers behind the word AI and lost money on each app. The Grid and Kite built their own AI and were passed by better tools. From 2024, language models could write a complete small application from a description, and a company could rent them by usage. One 19-year-old built Softgen as a side project, and two people brought it to about US$500,000 of ARR without outside money.", "The same change let many others in. Base44, another AI app builder on this site, was sold to Wix in June 2025 for about US$80 million in cash, a price with grade A evidence. Softgen was sold three months earlier at a price that no party has published, and it now competes with products that have much more money." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product, hard. The growth method and the early sale, yes.", "text": "A general AI app builder now competes with Lovable, Bolt, Replit, v0 and Base44, which Softgen's own homepage names. The parts that can be repeated are different: add a person for distribution to a working product that does not grow, build search traffic with cheap automated work, and sell to an operator while growth is visible.", "steps": [ "Release a working product early in a new category and charge for it, even when revenue is small.", "If you are a technical founder and revenue is flat for months, add a partner whose only job is distribution.", "Automate the cheap growth tasks first, such as directory submissions for backlinks, and measure weekly visits.", "Decide early whether you want to run the product for years. If not, sell while growth is visible. This sale closed eight months after launch." ], "open": "An app builder for one industry or one country, with the integrations and rules of that market already built in. The general product is crowded. The owner's own plan is to earn money from templates, services and agents that are sold around the builder." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Numbers that do not agree", "text": "The same founder gave almost US$600,000 ARR in 90 days on 8 April 2025 and US$500,000 ARR in four months on 15 April 2025. The start level is US$20,000 ARR in those posts and US$2,000 a month, which is US$24,000 a year, in his February article. The founding year is 2023 in a review and a wiki, and 2020 in one news page, while the launch was in July 2024." }, { "title": "No price, and no figure from the buyer for the date of the sale", "text": "Seven figures is the first founder's phrase, so the price is between US$1 million and US$10 million if he is exact. Arising Ventures writes that its ideal acquisition has US$3 million to US$30 million of revenue, and Softgen was far below that. The buyer has not confirmed the ARR at the sale." }, { "title": "Deleted and automatic sources", "text": "Gagliardi deleted both articles from Medium, so this page read them from the Internet Archive, and only the public part of each. One news page that dates the sale to 22 May 2025 is written by AI and contains a quotation that it labels hypothetical. It is not used for any fact here." }, { "title": "Revenue stayed at the same level after the sale", "text": "The buyer's US$52,000 a month, about seven months after the sale, equals the level that the founders reported at the sale. The same page claims 20% to 30% monthly growth, which does not fit a level that did not change. The page calls itself a deck and names a contact at an outside advisory firm, which suggests that it is written for investors or buyers. The page does not say so. The homepage in October 2026 shows the same 186,000 users as that page." }, { "title": "Thin margins against funded competitors", "text": "Under the buyer, Softgen sold AI usage at a 15% markup and a license at US$33 a year, and then returned to monthly plans at US$25 and US$49. The owner's page says it gives up margin on purpose to be the cheapest. Competitors with venture capital can sell below cost for longer." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://softgen.ai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Domenico Gagliardi on X, 8 April 2025: Softgen.ai has been acquired by Arising Ventures", "url": "https://x.com/dom_gag_96/status/1909498247355515295", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Founder statement. Source for almost US$600,000 ARR in 90 days, the buyer and the bootstrapped status. His handle was DG_9_6 at that time." }, { "title": "Domenico Gagliardi on Medium, 15 April 2025: We Sold our AI startup (500k ARR), What's next", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250513101521/https://gagliardidomenico.medium.com/we-sold-our-ai-startup-500k-arr-whats-next-f4c1f89c248d", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public part in the Internet Archive copy of 13 May 2025. The author deleted the original, and the rest was for Medium members only. Source for US$500,000 ARR in 4 months and the month in which he joined." }, { "title": "Domenico Gagliardi on Medium, 9 February 2025: I quit my full-time job: now bootstrapping a startup", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260116224123/https://gagliardidomenico.medium.com/i-quit-my-full-time-job-now-bootstrapping-a-startup-158fb5002329", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public part in the Internet Archive copy. The author deleted the original. Source for the US$2,000 monthly revenue before he joined and for Kraemer working mostly alone." }, { "title": "Softgen overview page by the current owner: The Original Full-Stack AI Builder", "url": "https://teaser.softgen.ai/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full on 13 October 2026, with the page's script file for the numbers that the page shows as animated counters. A sales document by the buyer's side, with no exact date. Source for the sale month, the monthly revenue, the user and customer counts, the team and the later stack." }, { "title": "Marko Kraemer's personal site", "url": "https://markokraemer.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder statement. Source for his age and origin, for acquired for seven figures, and for his current work at Kortix." }, { "title": "Marko Kraemer on X, 12 July 2024: Softgen, our new autonomous AI developer", "url": "https://x.com/markokraemer/status/1811886439455674775", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the first public demo and its view count." }, { "title": "Domenico Gagliardi on X, 20 March 2025: thread on website traffic", "url": "https://x.com/dom_gag_96/status/1902723039743156592", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the first two posts of the thread through api.fxtwitter.com. The remaining posts could not be opened. Source for the weekly views and the directory submissions." }, { "title": "Softgen homepage, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://softgen.ai/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full, with the structured data inside the page. Controlled by the buyer. Source for the footer An Arising Ventures Enterprise, the company name Softgen Labs Inc., the user count, the named competitors and the two plan prices." }, { "title": "Softgen pricing page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://softgen.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page description only: Starter US$25 a month with 500 credits, Pro US$49 a month with 1,500 credits. The price table loads by script and could not be read." }, { "title": "Internet Archive copies of the Softgen homepage, 8 October 2024 and 7 February 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20241008173841/https://softgen.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both in full. Source for the footer Softgen, a Kortix AI Corp Product, the launch prices, the maker counts and the first technology stack." }, { "title": "Techleap Finder news entry, April 2025: Softgen AI sold for $500k ARR", "url": "https://finder.techleap.nl/news/feed/softgen-ai-sold-for-500k-arr", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A short summary of the Medium article on a startup map that runs on Dealroom data. Its title can be misread: US$500,000 is the revenue, not the price. It lists Softgen in Frankfurt and Arising Ventures in San Francisco. No link between Softgen and the Netherlands was found." }, { "title": "Arising Ventures website", "url": "https://www.arisingventures.com/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the buyer's structure as a long-term holding company, its chief executive and its usual revenue range. The page does not name Softgen and gives no price." }, { "title": "Happenstance profile of Marko Kraemer", "url": "https://happenstance.ai/u/efb190ff-0def-4de5-a376-936912e0b532", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the summary section. An automatic summary of his LinkedIn profile. Source for US$50,000 monthly recurring revenue within four months." }, { "title": "AI wiki on Miraheze: Kortix", "url": "https://ai.miraheze.org/wiki/Kortix", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the history section. A wiki with no named author. Cited for Gagliardi's role and for the Kortix funding claim, which is not verified." }, { "title": "Peerlist resume of Marko Kraemer", "url": "https://peerlist.io/markokraemer/resume", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the experience section. Source for the start of Kortix AI in April 2024 and of Softgen in June 2024." }, { "title": "Fahim AI review, 2026: I Tested Softgen AI for 60 Days", "url": "https://www.fahimai.com/softgen", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the pricing and company sections. A reviewer's account of the US$33 a year model. It gives a founding year of 2023 and yearly revenue of about US$550,000 without a source." }, { "title": "Softgen on X, 23 September 2025", "url": "https://x.com/SoftgenAI/status/1970553075656991136", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the co-op description." }, { "title": "Signalbase news page, 22 May 2025: Arising Ventures Acquires Softgen AI", "url": "https://www.trysignalbase.com/news/acquisitions/softgen-ai-acquired-by-arising-ventures-acquisition", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. An AI-written page with a quotation that it labels hypothetical. Cited only for the conflicting date and founding year." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/coco-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/coco-ai.md", "slug": "coco-ai", "name": "CoCo AI", "country": "France", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "WhatsApp marketing app for Shopify stores", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-13", "launchLabel": "4 July 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$500K to US$600K ARR when sold for an undisclosed seven-figure price, February 2025", "sticker": "Sold at $500K ARR", "outcomeUsd": 500000, "months": 7, "teamLabel": "2 named founders in a team of 4, later 3", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "sales", "trend": "sold", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2B", "E-commerce" ], "product": "An app for Shopify stores that sends marketing messages on WhatsApp and answers shoppers with an AI assistant trained on the store's catalog: reminders for abandoned carts, campaigns to subscribers, product advice in 96 languages. The store pays a monthly plan plus a charge for the WhatsApp conversations.", "why": "After a first product of their own that nobody bought, the founders copied a kind of Shopify app that already earned money, and sold it in France, where few competitors sold it. They found customers only by cold outreach, with tools that cost about US$380 a month. By their account they sold the company seven months after the App Store launch, when sales outside France became hard.", "summary": [ "CoCo AI is an app for online stores built on Shopify. It connects the store to the WhatsApp Business API, the paid interface that lets a company send WhatsApp messages by program instead of by hand. The app sends a reminder when a shopper leaves an abandoned cart, which is a basket of products that was filled but not paid, it sends campaigns to subscribers, and an AI assistant that knows the store's catalog answers questions and recommends products.", "Romàn Czerny and Pierre-Eliott Lallemant, two French founders, built it with a team of three to four people and no investors. The app launched on the Shopify App Store on 4 July 2024. They found customers only by cold outreach, which means writing to people who have never heard of you: about 1,700 emails a day plus LinkedIn messages. Czerny writes that MRR, monthly recurring revenue, the income that repeats every month, was more than US$50,000 before the sale. Lallemant gives €500,000 of ARR, annual recurring revenue, which is the same measure for a year. In early 2025 they sold the company to a buyer that they describe as an American fund, for a price that Czerny calls seven figures.", "Every money number on this page is a statement by one of the two founders, made after the sale, grade C. The buyer has never been named and the price has never been published. One fact was checked independently: the Shopify App Store listing named the founders' French company on 23 January 2025 and a developer in the state of New York on 18 April 2025. The page also shows four earlier companies that sold chat and marketing tools to online stores and closed." ], "factsCaption": "A WhatsApp marketing app that reached about US$50,000 a month and was sold seven months after its App Store launch, on the founders' own statements", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a statement by a founder, a reading of the App Store listing, or an estimate by a third party that says so. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. Grade A appears on one row only, the employee band from the French state company register, which is not a money number. No money number of CoCo AI is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a first product that nobody bought to a sale, in about two years, of which seven months on the Shopify App Store. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "CoCo AI prices in October 2026, under the new owner, from the company's pricing page and the Shopify App Store listing (grade C)", "note": "All plans are billed monthly, so there is no yearly price. WhatsApp message fees are charged on top, per conversation, at Meta's rate for each country. The company's page gives the limits as sessions; the App Store listing gives the same two prices with limits of 10,000 and 1 million messages a month and a 14-day free trial. Under the founders, in November 2024, the listing showed a free Light plan, Starter at US$59 a month and Pro at US$159 a month, each plus WhatsApp conversation charges.", "rows": [ [ "Pro", "not offered", "159", "up to 100,000 sessions a month" ], [ "Scale", "not offered", "399", "up to 1,000,000 sessions a month, account manager" ], [ "Enterprise", "not offered", "custom", "unlimited sessions, managed service" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "MRR before the sale, first founder's blog post of 25 April 2025", "value": "more than US$50,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Romàn Czerny: \"MRR before acquisition: over $50,000 — and still growing when we sold\". The same post says the growth from zero took \"just a few months\" and, in its subtitle, 6 months.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "ARR before the sale, second founder's podcast of 19 May 2025", "value": "€500,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Description of Pierre-Eliott Lallemant's episode, in French: the company reached €500,000 of ARR very quickly before it was resold to an American fund. The recording was not listened to.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "ARR before the sale, interview of 18 January 2026", "value": "US$500,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Description of Czerny's video interview: he grew the app to US$500,000 ARR and sold it for seven figures. The title of his April 2025 blog post and an article of July 2025 give the same figure. This page uses it as the headline number because it is the lower one.", "src": [ 3, 1, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the US$50,000 monthly figure", "value": "US$600,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 50,000 times 12 equals 600,000. That is 20% above the US$500,000 ARR that the same founder also gives. The two figures are not reconciled anywhere, so the page shows the range.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Sale price", "value": "seven figures, exact amount not disclosed", "grade": "C", "note": "One founder's statement in the January 2026 interview, repeated in the video description and in the chapter title \"The 7-Figure Exit\". Seven figures means at least US$1 million and less than US$10 million. No buyer, broker or marketplace has confirmed it.", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Buyer", "value": "not identified, described as an American fund", "grade": "C", "note": "The podcast description and a later case study say an American fund. Since April 2025 the App Store listing has shown the developer as \"Coco\" at a street address in White Plains, New York. Tracxn and a partner directory give Anguilla as the company's location. No name was found.", "src": [ 2, 9, 5, 13, 16 ] }, { "fact": "Month of the sale", "value": "February 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "The month comes from a machine-made summary of the January 2026 interview and was not verified against the recording. It agrees with the App Store listing, which named the French company on 23 January 2025 and the developer in New York on 18 April 2025, and with the blog post of 25 April 2025, which speaks of the sale as done.", "src": [ 4, 6, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Launch on the Shopify App Store", "value": "4 July 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "The date on the listing. The website my-coco.ai was already online on 1 March 2024 and sold the product through demonstrations.", "src": [ 5, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the App Store launch to the sale", "value": "7 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: July 2024 to February 2025. The interview description says the sale came 2 years after the start; the summary says the founders started in 2023 with a first product that failed.", "src": [ 5, 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Cost of the sales tools", "value": "about US$380 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's blog post: about US$150 for LinkedIn tools, US$150 for the cold email tools and US$80 for direct messages on X.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Sales tools as a share of monthly revenue", "value": "about 0.8%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 380 divided by 50,000 equals 0.76%. Salaries and the WhatsApp fees are not in this number.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Cold emails per day", "value": "about 1,700", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's blog post. On LinkedIn the reply rate was about 23%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Share of demonstrations that became customers", "value": "50% to 70%", "grade": "C", "note": "Description of the January 2026 interview. The summary of the interview says the rate fell to 15% to 20% in Germany and Spain.", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "4 people at first, later 3", "grade": "C", "note": "From the machine-made summary of the interview: marketing, product and programming. Not verified against the recording. Only Czerny and Lallemant are named in public sources.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Employees of the French company, 2024", "value": "3 to 5", "grade": "A", "note": "French state company register: the employee band of Neural Odyssey for 2024. The company was created in Paris on 12 September 2024 with Lallemant as its manager, and it was still active in October 2026.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's blog post: \"We didn't raise.\" Tracxn lists the company as unfunded.", "src": [ 1, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Reviews on the App Store", "value": "4 in August 2024, 30 in November 2024, 51 in January 2025, 58 in April 2025, 51 in October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Read on the listing and on its archived copies. The rating was 5.0 until January 2025, 4.8 in April 2025, and is 4.9 now.", "src": [ 6, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Stores with the app installed, October 2026", "value": "221", "grade": "C", "note": "A third-party estimate by Store Leads. It puts 46.2% of these stores in France.", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per store, if 221 stores paid US$50,000", "value": "about US$226 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 50,000 divided by 221. The result is between the Pro price of US$159 and the Scale price of US$399, so the founders' figure is plausible. The store count is from October 2026 and the revenue from early 2025, so this is not a proof.", "src": [ 1, 12, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Employees under the new owner, 30 June 2026", "value": "2", "grade": "C", "note": "Tracxn's count, a third-party figure.", "src": [ 13 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2023", "what": "The founders start with a WhatsApp version of an American product that lets shoppers buy by text message. After about 6 months it has one or two pilot customers and no traction. This entry comes from a summary of the 2026 interview.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "1 March 2024", "what": "The website my-coco.ai is online: an AI chatbot on WhatsApp for Shopify stores, sold through demonstrations.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "4 July 2024", "what": "The app launches on the Shopify App Store. In the interview Czerny says it copied Shopify apps that already earned money and was built in about 2 weeks.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 3, 4 ] }, { "when": "4 August 2024", "what": "One month after the launch the listing shows 4 reviews. The developer named on it is a company in Sarrebourg, France.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "28 August 2024", "what": "WideBundle, the maker of another Shopify app, presents CoCo AI to its own users with a 20% discount.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "12 September 2024", "what": "The company Neural Odyssey is registered in Paris, with Lallemant as manager.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "7 November 2024", "what": "The listing shows 30 reviews, all of 5 stars, and plans at US$0, US$59 and US$159 a month plus WhatsApp charges. The developer named on it is now Neural Odyssey, Paris.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "23 January 2025", "what": "51 reviews. The developer on the listing is still Neural Odyssey, Paris.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "February 2025", "what": "The founders sell CoCo AI to a buyer that they call an American fund, at more than US$50,000 of MRR, for a price that Czerny calls seven figures. According to the interview summary, marketplaces offered a low price because the revenue history was shorter than a year, and he found the buyer himself in about 2 months.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2, 3, 4 ] }, { "when": "18 April 2025", "what": "The listing shows a new developer, \"Coco\", with an address in White Plains, New York, 58 reviews and a rating of 4.8.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "25 April 2025", "what": "Czerny publishes the outreach method, the tools, their cost and the sales presentation on the blog of his next company.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "19 May 2025", "what": "Lallemant tells the story on the French podcast EcomPreneurs: €500,000 of ARR, then a sale to an American fund.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "October 2025 to August 2026", "what": "What the founders did next: GojiberryAI, a tool that finds sales leads. It is a different and larger company and not part of this story. TrustMRR shows US$1,801,629 of revenue in total from its Stripe account, synced on 14 August 2026.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 17, 18 ] }, { "when": "18 January 2026", "what": "Czerny gives a 48-minute video interview about both companies. Its description says US$500,000 ARR and a seven-figure sale.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "CoCo AI is still sold: 4.9 stars from 51 reviews, plans from US$159 a month, a review dated 4 August 2026, and an estimated 221 stores. The terms on its website still name Neural Odyssey as the developer.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 10, 12 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A copied product in a market that did not have it", "text": "The first product moved an American idea, buying by text message, to WhatsApp, and stores did not pay for it. For the second, the founders looked for Shopify apps that already earned US$2 million to US$3 million a year, copied one, and sold it in France, where few competitors sold such an app. In Czerny's account it took about two weeks to build, and the first 5 to 10 customers came within two days from people he already knew. These details come from the interview summary." }, { "title": "Cold outreach as the only sales channel", "text": "About 1,700 emails a day, LinkedIn messages and direct messages on X, each with one goal: a demonstration. The founders tried search traffic, influencers and paid ads, and write that none of them worked as well. The tools cost about US$380 a month." }, { "title": "Revenue that grows with the customer's messages", "text": "The price was a monthly plan plus a charge for WhatsApp conversations. A store that sends more campaigns pays more, so revenue can grow without new customers. This is called usage-based pricing." }, { "title": "A sale at the first sign of a limit", "text": "According to the interview summary, the founders had contacted almost every suitable store in France, and in Germany and Spain far fewer demonstrations became customers. Two team members wanted to sell. They sold seven months after the App Store launch, to a buyer found by direct contact." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's blog post, the app's listing and terms, and the description and a summary of his interview. They are grade C.", "items": [ "A Shopify app: the store installs it from the App Store. The terms say that Shopify handles the payment; the pricing page of October 2026 says that plans are billed through Stripe.", "WhatsApp access through 360dialog, a provider that gives access to the WhatsApp API. WhatsApp fees are charged per conversation at Meta's rates.", "An AI assistant trained on the store's product catalog. It answers customers and recommends products, and the listing says it works in 96 languages.", "Connections to Klaviyo and to the Shopify checkout, and pop-up windows that collect WhatsApp subscribers.", "Sales by outreach: LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Waalaxy for LinkedIn, Apollo, Clay and Instantly for email, DriPy for messages on X. The blog post says the first region was Brazil; the interview says the main market was France.", "A short sales presentation sent after the first reply or before the demonstration. The founder published it." ], "src": [ 1, 5, 10, 3, 4 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold chat, chatbots or marketing automation to online stores and closed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Vanti", "years": "2019 to 2024", "funding": "US$18M", "cause": "No market need", "promise": "AI chatbots that guide shoppers to a product and sell it in a conversation.", "died": "Brands did not see better sales than with a normal store page. Each customer was costly to win and to connect.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2508-vanti" }, { "name": "RightHello", "years": "2014 to 2022", "funding": "US$600K", "cause": "Ran out of cash", "promise": "Live chat that turns store visitors into buyers.", "died": "Intercom raised US$240 million and added the same functions. A small chat tool could not keep pace.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2260-righthello" }, { "name": "Answerly", "years": "2013 to 2016", "funding": "US$550K", "cause": "Product/tech failure", "promise": "Chatbots that answer customers' frequent questions, so that people handle only the hard ones.", "died": "Language software of that time could not understand real questions. Each customer needed months of manual setup.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2168-answerly" }, { "name": "Marketfox", "years": "2017 to 2020", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Automatic marketing messages for online stores.", "died": "Mailchimp, HubSpot and Klaviyo offered more functions and more connections, with far more money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1035-marketfox" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The four companies promised what CoCo AI promises: a program that talks to shoppers and brings them back to buy. Vanti and Answerly failed mainly because the chatbot did not work well enough or needed months of setup for each customer. RightHello and Marketfox failed because larger companies sold the same functions.", "Three things differ for CoCo AI. First, a language model can read a product catalog and answer in 96 languages without months of manual setup; the company says that setup takes 30 minutes. Second, the channel is WhatsApp, where the company claims that shoppers open 90% of the cart messages, and the Shopify App Store gives a small team a place where stores look for apps and a billing system. Third, the founders did not try to outlast the larger competitors: they sold after seven months. The risk that ended the four predecessors is still there, and it now belongs to the buyer." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The result, only with care.", "text": "Copying a kind of app that already earns money, then selling it by outreach in a country where few competitors sell it, needs no capital and no audience. The result on this page is less certain than the method: the revenue and the price are the founders' statements, and the founders say that the method stopped working outside their home market.", "steps": [ "Look in an app store for a category where several apps earn money, and for a country or language where nobody sells them actively.", "Build the smallest working copy and sell it first to people you can reach directly.", "Send outreach every day with one goal, a demonstration, and measure how many demonstrations become customers.", "Charge by usage, so that revenue grows when the customer grows.", "If you want to sell early, write to owners of several apps in the same store. Marketplaces pay little for a revenue history shorter than a year." ], "open": "App categories where the leaders earn millions of dollars a year and nobody sells actively in your country or language, on Shopify or on another app store." }, "watch": [ { "title": "No buyer, no price, no outside check", "text": "The buyer is called an American fund and has never been named. The price is the two words seven figures in one interview. No payment processor, broker, journalist or buyer has confirmed the revenue. The only independent fact is that the App Store listing changed from a French to a United States developer between 23 January and 18 April 2025." }, { "title": "The founders' numbers do not match exactly", "text": "US$50,000 a month is US$600,000 a year, but the same founder also says US$500,000 ARR, and the other founder says €500,000. The time to reach it is given as 6 months, as 9 months and as part of 2 years. All statements were made after the sale." }, { "title": "Revenue by usage is not strictly recurring", "text": "The founder calls the figure MRR, but part of it was charges for messages, which rise and fall with each store's campaigns. The sources do not say whether the figure is before or after the WhatsApp fees that go to Meta." }, { "title": "Several details come from a summary of a video", "text": "The captions of the January 2026 interview could not be downloaded. The team size, the month of the sale, the reasons for selling and the way the buyer was found come from a machine-made summary of it and are marked as such." }, { "title": "Little sign of growth after the sale", "text": "The review count went from 58 in April 2025 to 51 in October 2026. A third party estimates 221 stores, 1.0% more than a quarter earlier, and another counts 2 employees. By the interview summary, the founders sold because growth outside France was hard." }, { "title": "The share of the AI in the revenue is unknown", "text": "The product is sold as an AI assistant, but the founder's own description of April 2025 lists cart reminders, campaigns and alerts and does not mention AI. Part of the revenue would exist without the AI." }, { "title": "Two platforms control the product", "text": "Meta sets the price and the rules of WhatsApp messages, and Shopify controls the listing and the access to stores. A change by either one can remove the margin or the product." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://my-coco.ai" }, { "kind": "shopify", "url": "https://apps.shopify.com/coco-ai-cart-recovery" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Gojiberry blog, Romàn Czerny, 25 April 2025: I used this pitch deck to bootstrap my SaaS to $500K in annual recurring revenue in 9 months", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20251005184601/https://blog.gojiberry.ai/blog/i-used-this-pitch-deck-to-bootstrap-my-saas-to-500k-in-annual-recurring-revenue-in-9-months", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in the Wayback Machine copy of 5 October 2025; the live address now redirects to the company's home page. Founder's own account. Source for the MRR before the sale, the outreach tools and their cost." }, { "title": "EcomPreneurs podcast, episode 37, 19 May 2025: Pierre-Eliott Lallemant, SaaS B2B: CoCo.ai & Gojiberry.ai (in French)", "url": "https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/ecompreneurs/episodes/p--37--PIERRE-ELIOTT-LALLEMANT--SAAS-B2B--COCO-AI--GOJIBERRY-AI-e331mm7", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the episode description, the chapter list and the publication date in the page data. Did not listen to the recording. Source for the €500,000 ARR and the American fund." }, { "title": "Florian Darroman on YouTube, 18 January 2026: I Built 2 SaaS Apps to $50K MRR: Here's My 90-Day Playbook (interview with Romàn Czerny)", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDVDLvnfn4k", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the video description, the chapter list and the date in the downloaded page. The captions could not be downloaded, so the recording itself was not read. Source for US$500,000 ARR, the seven-figure sale and the 50% to 70% close rate." }, { "title": "YouTubeSummary: machine-made summary of the same interview", "url": "https://youtubesummary.com/summary/IDVDLvnfn4k", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. An automatic summary of source 3, not checked against the recording. Source for the team size, the month and reasons of the sale, and the first failed product." }, { "title": "Shopify App Store listing: Coco: AI Cart Recovery & Chat, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.shopify.com/coco-ai-cart-recovery", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full: developer name and address, launch date, rating, reviews, plans and connections." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copies of the Shopify App Store listing: 4 August 2024, 7 November 2024, 23 January 2025 and 18 April 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20241107211711/https://apps.shopify.com/coco-whatsapp-ai-cart-recovery-1", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the developer block, the rating, the review count and the plans in four copies. The copies of January and April 2025 are the Czech-language versions of the page. Source for the change of developer." }, { "title": "French state company register (Recherche d'entreprises): Neural Odyssey, SIREN 933118853", "url": "https://recherche-entreprises.api.gouv.fr/search?q=933118853", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the register record: creation date, address, manager, status and employee band for 2024. An official register, used here for the team only, not for money." }, { "title": "We Are Founders, 24 July 2025: From Zero Sales to 100 Customers in 60 Days: How GojiberryAI Got the Pivot Right", "url": "https://www.wearefounders.uk/from-zero-sales-to-100-customers-in-60-days-how-gojiberryai-got-the-pivot-right/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A secondary article based on Lallemant's account. Repeats US$500,000 ARR before the sale." }, { "title": "Superframeworks case study, 31 December 2025: $33K Revenue in 4 Months, the Gojiberry AI case study, and its newsletter of 28 February 2026", "url": "https://superframeworks.com/case-study/gojiberry", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both in full. A secondary account. Says €500,000 ARR, US$50,000 MRR and a sale to an American fund, without a source for the buyer." }, { "title": "CoCo AI website: pricing page, home page and terms and conditions, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://my-coco.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the three pages in full. Source for the current plans, the billing, the 30-minute setup claim, the use of 360dialog and the developer named in the terms (https://my-coco.ai/terms-conditions/)." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of my-coco.ai, 1 March 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240301110741/https://my-coco.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The earliest archived copy of the website. Shows the product before the App Store launch." }, { "title": "Store Leads report on the app, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://storeleads.app/reports/shopify/app/coco-whatsapp-ai-cart-recovery-1", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public part of the report. A third-party estimate of installs and countries." }, { "title": "Tracxn company profile: CoCo AI", "url": "https://tracxn.com/d/companies/coco-ai/__I_pdBSJl6VZm7d2I7elJmnJYnARDiKGHCfZyA77gkE4", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public part of the profile: founding year, location, funding and employee count. Third-party data." }, { "title": "Zero G Talent profile of Romàn Czerny", "url": "https://zerogtalent.com/people/rom-n-czerny", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A short biography in the founder's own words: a Shopify app that grew to US$500,000 ARR before he sold it in 2025." }, { "title": "WideBundle blog, 28 August 2024: Discover CoCo AI", "url": "https://blog.widebundle.com/discover-coco-ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A partner's presentation of the app with a discount for its users." }, { "title": "Avenue Z partner directory: Coco, partner for WhatsApp commerce", "url": "https://avenuez.com/coco-select-partner-for-whatsapp-commerce-avenuez/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the entry. Gives the location as Anguilla. No owner is named." }, { "title": "TrustMRR profile of GojiberryAI, the founders' next company", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/superfruits", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in the local copy. Revenue comes from the company's Stripe account, last synced on 14 August 2026. Used for one timeline entry only; it is a different business." }, { "title": "Romàn Czerny on X, 15 December 2025: I grew gojiberry.ai from $0 to $33,000 in 4 months", "url": "https://x.com/romanbuildsaas/status/2000504783384219872", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter interface. Confirms the founder's account name and his next company." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/my-askai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/my-askai.md", "slug": "my-askai", "name": "My AskAI", "country": "United Kingdom", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI customer-support agent inside existing help desks", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-13", "launchLabel": "February 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$40K a month recurring revenue, July 2025", "sticker": "$40K MRR, two founders", "outcomeUsd": 480000, "months": 29, "teamLabel": "2 founders, no employees", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Price", "group": "support-agents", "channel": "platform", "trend": "growing", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Customer support" ], "product": "A company connects My AskAI to the help desk it already uses, such as Intercom or Zendesk, and gives it the help center, the website and past tickets to read. The agent then answers customer questions inside that help desk, or writes a draft as an internal note for a human agent. When it cannot answer, it hands the conversation to a person in the same tool, with a summary.", "why": "The founders sold the idea before they built it, and built it with a no-code tool so that one person could change it every day. Then they cut the product down to the one use that brought 70% of the revenue. They placed it inside the help desks that customers already pay for, and priced it below the AI agents that the help-desk vendors sell themselves.", "summary": [ "My AskAI sells an AI agent for customer support that works inside the help desk a company already uses. A help desk is the software in which support staff receive and answer customer messages; Intercom, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Gorgias and HubSpot are examples. The agent reads the company's help center, website and past tickets, answers the customer in the same chat window, and passes the conversation to a human in the same tool when it cannot answer. The company charges a monthly plan with a price per ticket.", "Alex Rainey, a former Accenture consultant and founder of a travel-insurance startup, and Mike Heap, a former Ernst & Young accountant and product manager, launched it in London in late February 2023. The first version was a general tool: upload any document, then ask questions about it. Rainey built it alone on Bubble, a no-code tool, which is a visual editor that produces a working web application without written program code. Revenue reached about US$14,000 a month by May 2023 and US$20,000 by November 2023, then stayed between US$20,000 and US$25,000 until the middle of 2024. About a year after launch the founders narrowed the product to customer support, which already brought 70% of the revenue, and rebuilt it in about six weeks. In July 2025 Rainey reported about US$40,000 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR), which is the subscription revenue of one month, still with two people and no investors.", "Every revenue number on this page is a founder statement, grade C. The numbers were published in eight places between April 2023 and July 2025, and they agree with each other except for a few points that the page lists. No figure after July 2025 is public. Chatbase, SiteGPT and DocsBot AI, which are already on this site, started from the same 2023 idea and sell their own chat agent; My AskAI differs in the no-code build and in the choice to work inside other vendors' help desks. At the dates each one reported, it was smaller than Chatbase (US$10 million a year) and DocsBot AI (US$1 million a year) and larger than SiteGPT (US$190,000 a year)." ], "factsCaption": "About US$40,000 in monthly recurring revenue in July 2025 with two founders, no employees and no investors, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a founder statement in an interview or on a company page, or a third-party estimate that says so. A grade B value was recorded by an independent party. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A: no payment processor has published these numbers.", "timelineLead": "From a US$99 presale to about US$40,000 in monthly recurring revenue in 29 months, with about seven months without growth in between. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "My AskAI plans in October 2026, from the structured data in the source of the company's pricing page and from the company's blog (grade C)", "note": "The visible pricing page loads by script, so the prices were read from the structured data in the page source. It lists two plans, each after a 30-day free trial. It does not show a yearly price or the limit of the Scale plan. The company advertises a price from US$0.10 a ticket and says that a typical chat ticket uses about one credit. If a customer uses all 1,000 credits of the Pro plan, one credit costs US$0.199 (199 divided by 1,000). A company blog post of June 2026 mentions an offer of 50% off the first three months. Enterprise prices are on request.", "rows": [ [ "Pro", "not shown", "199", "1,000 credits a month, about 1 credit per chat ticket" ], [ "Scale", "not shown", "499", "not shown in the page data" ], [ "Enterprise", "custom", "custom", "on request" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, July 2025", "value": "about US$40,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder Alex Rainey in an Indie Hackers interview published on 10 July 2025. He also gives it as about US$500,000 a year. This is the latest dated revenue figure found.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the July 2025 figure", "value": "US$480,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 40,000 times 12 equals 480,000. A run rate is the current month multiplied by twelve. The founder rounds it to about US$500,000.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "People in the company, July 2025", "value": "2, both founders", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder statement in the same interview. In June 2024 Starter Story listed 2 founders and 0 employees, and an agency wrote blog content for them. The company's LinkedIn page still showed 2 employees on 13 October 2026.", "src": [ 1, 3, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate per person", "value": "US$240,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 480,000 divided by 2.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder statements in 2024 and 2025: the first version was paid with cash from earlier projects, and the founders say they want to stay without investors. Rainey's earlier company, Pluto, raised US$1.5 million. That money is not part of My AskAI.", "src": [ 1, 4, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Support conversations handled, July 2025", "value": "more than 75,000 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder statement.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Gross margin, July 2025", "value": "about 82%", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder statement, with the cost of the AI models included. In June 2024 Heap gave 85% to 90% gross margin and 50% to 55% net margin.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Customers who cancel per month (churn)", "value": "12% to 13% in January 2024, 3% in July 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Churn is the share of paying customers who cancel in one month. In the 2025 interview Rainey says it fell from 9% to 3% after better onboarding and analytics.", "src": [ 7, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue, 31 May 2024", "value": "US$25,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Published by Bubble, the maker of the tool the product is built with, in its customer story. Bubble does not handle the payments, so the figure is the founders' own and is graded C. The same story gives more than 40,000 registered users.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the May 2024 figure", "value": "US$300,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 25,000 times 12 equals 300,000.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Yearly revenue as stated in June 2024", "value": "US$300,000", "grade": "C", "note": "In the title of a podcast episode of 11 June 2024 with Heap, and in the title of his Starter Story interview of 18 June 2024. The summary box on the Starter Story page shows US$20,000 a month, which is US$240,000 a year.", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "One project outside the subscriptions, before June 2024", "value": "about US$100,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Heap: one piece of work that came from a LinkedIn message, for about one week of work. It is not recurring revenue.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "MRR, January 2024", "value": "more than US$20,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Newsletter interview with Rainey, 29 January 2024.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "MRR, November 2023", "value": "US$20,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Title of a No Code MBA video interview with Heap, published on 3 November 2023. Only the title, the date and the description were read.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "MRR, 18 May 2023", "value": "about US$14,000, just over 300 paying users", "grade": "C", "note": "Both founders in an Indie Hackers interview, about three months after launch.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Average revenue per paying user, May 2023", "value": "about US$47 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 14,000 divided by 300 equals 46.67. The lowest plan in October 2026 costs US$199 a month.", "src": [ 5, 10 ] }, { "fact": "MRR, 11 April 2023", "value": "US$6,000, more than 13,000 sign-ups", "grade": "C", "note": "Rainey, about six weeks after launch.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Presale before the product existed, early 2023", "value": "about US$5,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Just over 50 people paid US$99 each within two weeks, on the description alone. Check: 50 times 99 equals 4,950.", "src": [ 3, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Cost and time of the first version", "value": "under US$1,000, two to three weeks", "grade": "C", "note": "Rainey says three weeks and under US$1,000 for Bubble and OpenAI. Heap says about two weeks.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Share of revenue from customer support before the product was narrowed", "value": "70%", "grade": "C", "note": "Heap, in an interview on a supplier's blog, June 2024.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "First archived home page that describes a support agent inside Intercom or Zendesk", "value": "16 June 2024", "grade": "B", "note": "Wayback Machine. The snapshot of 10 October 2023 still describes a general AI assistant for any content. The wording changed between those two dates. An archive proves what the page said, not that its claims were true.", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from May 2024 to July 2025", "value": "60% in 14 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: from 25,000 to 40,000 is plus 60%. May 2024 to July 2025 is 14 months.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to US$40,000 MRR", "value": "29 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: February 2023 to July 2025.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Customers, October 2026", "value": "more than 200 companies", "grade": "C", "note": "Company's LinkedIn page, read on 13 October 2026. The same page says more than one million tickets resolved in total. No revenue figure after July 2025 was found.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Third-party estimate for October 2024", "value": "US$212,500 a year", "grade": "C", "note": "GetLatka marks this value as its own estimate. It is lower than the founders' figures for the middle of 2024. No founder statement confirms a fall in revenue.", "src": [ 16 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Autumn 2022", "what": "Heap and Rainey meet through a friend. They build a tool that writes university application statements with fine-tuned AI models. It gets a few paying users, and OpenAI tells them to shut it down.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 4, 5 ] }, { "when": "End of 2022", "what": "They build No Code AI Model Builder in a few days for a hackathon. It makes about US$3,500 in sales in a few months. They sell it later to work only on My AskAI.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 5 ] }, { "when": "Early 2023", "what": "A page inside the model builder offers a new product that does not exist yet. Just over 50 people pay US$99 each in two weeks, about US$5,000. At the end of January both founders decide to stop looking for other work and to build it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 5 ] }, { "when": "Late February 2023", "what": "My AskAI launches, with a Product Hunt launch. Rainey built it on Bubble in two to three weeks for under US$1,000. The product: upload content, ask a question, get an answer.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 3, 6 ] }, { "when": "11 April 2023", "what": "US$6,000 MRR and more than 13,000 sign-ups. Marketing so far: Twitter, Product Hunt and AI tool directories, with no paid ads.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "18 May 2023", "what": "About US$14,000 MRR with just over 300 paying users.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "3 November 2023", "what": "US$20,000 MRR, in the title of a video interview. The archived home page of October 2023 still sells a general AI assistant for any content.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 15 ] }, { "when": "January 2024", "what": "More than US$20,000 MRR, with 12% to 13% of customers cancelling each month. The newsletter describes the product as a customer-support AI tool.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "Early 2024", "what": "The founders narrow the product to customer support, about 12 months after launch. Support was 70% of revenue. Rainey rebuilds the product for this use in about six weeks.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2, 9 ] }, { "when": "31 May 2024", "what": "Bubble publishes a customer story: US$25,000 in monthly revenue, more than 40,000 registered users, no staff except the two founders.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "June 2024", "what": "A podcast episode and a Starter Story interview with Heap give US$300,000 a year. Heap says the company is profitable.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "when": "16 June 2024", "what": "The archived home page reads: your AI agent for customer support, add to your existing live chat providers, like Intercom or Zendesk.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "10 July 2025", "what": "About US$40,000 MRR, more than 75,000 support conversations a month, churn at 3%, still two people. Rainey says the goal for 2025 is US$1 million a year and that it will be hard to reach.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The company is running. Its blog published customer case studies in September 2026, and its LinkedIn page shows 2 employees, more than 200 customer companies and five supported help desks. No revenue figure after July 2025 is public, so the trend since then is not known.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10, 11, 12 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A narrower customer", "text": "The first product was a tool to chat with any content, used by students, law firms and support teams. The founders say this made it hard to choose features and to describe the product. Support was 70% of revenue, so they rebuilt the product for support teams of software companies only. Reported churn fell from 12% to 13% a month in January 2024 to 3% in July 2025. In May 2023 the average paying user paid about US$47 a month; in 2026 the lowest plan costs US$199." }, { "title": "Inside the tool the customer already has", "text": "A support team does not replace its help desk. It installs My AskAI from the help desk's app marketplace, and the agent answers in the same inbox and hands over to human agents there. The company says a standard setup takes 10 to 15 minutes. This removes the largest cost of a new support tool, which is the move away from the old one." }, { "title": "A lower price than the host's own AI", "text": "My AskAI advertises a price from US$0.10 a ticket. Intercom's own agent, Fin, costs US$0.99 per outcome, which Intercom counts at most once per conversation when the issue is resolved or Fin completes a workflow. Zendesk charges US$1.50 to US$2.00 for each automated resolution above the included number. The units are not the same: My AskAI counts tickets, and the two hosts count resolved cases. The founders used the price difference as the main message on their site, and say that most new customers find them through Google or ChatGPT when they look for an alternative." }, { "title": "A no-code build keeps the team at two", "text": "Rainey is the only developer. He built the first version in weeks and ships changes almost daily, without pull-request reviews. Heap, who does not program, handles finance, customers, design and testing. Both say they try to automate a task before they hire for it. The cost is dependence on Bubble, which is covered below." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from founder interviews and from the blogs of two suppliers, Bubble and Pinecone. They are grade B and C.", "items": [ "Bubble, a no-code editor, for about 80% of the core application: the screens and the workflows. The back end outside Bubble is written in Python. The company moved to Bubble's Enterprise tier when daily traffic reached 50,000 requests, and in 2025 it was moving more of its hosting to its own AWS account.", "Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG): the program first searches the customer's content for the few passages that match a question, then gives only those passages to the language model. This keeps answers tied to the customer's own documents.", "In June 2024: Pinecone as the vector database, LangChain to split text into pieces of 400 tokens with 20 tokens of overlap, OpenAI models for embeddings and answers, Carbon to read websites and third-party sources, and Portkey as a gateway that switches to a second model when the first one fails and caches answers.", "Demand was tested with a US$99 presale before any code existed. The first version took two to three weeks and under US$1,000. The rebuild for customer support took about six weeks.", "Early growth came from AI tool directories, replies to large accounts on Twitter, AI newsletters and a Product Hunt launch about once a month. The founders say each of these stopped working within months. By 2025 most growth came from search, with site text that compares the price with Intercom Fin and Zendesk AI. The founders hold an onboarding call with every serious customer.", "Two people run the company through Slack and a simple roadmap in Notion, with one meeting in person each week. They use Cursor and ChatGPT for their own work." ], "src": [ 1, 2, 3, 4, 9 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database either automated customer support before language models could do it, or built their product inside a platform that another company owned. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Answerly", "years": "2013 to 2016", "funding": "US$550K", "cause": "Product failure", "promise": "FAQ chatbots that deflect support tickets so humans handle only the complex cases.", "died": "The language processing of the time could not handle real customer questions. Every customer had to write FAQs and decision trees by hand, so setup took months.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2168-answerly" }, { "name": "Hipmob", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Customer chat inside mobile apps.", "died": "Intercom and Zendesk added chat features that matched it. With little funding it could not give customers a reason to switch.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1184-hipmob" }, { "name": "Niles", "years": "2017 to 2020", "funding": "US$2.8M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A bot inside Slack that answers staff questions from the company's knowledge.", "died": "Slack was its only platform. Slack improved its own search, and the bot lost its value to customers.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1031-niles" }, { "name": "Flux", "years": "2015 to 2018", "funding": "US$7M", "cause": "Founder conflict", "promise": "One inbox for Slack, email, WhatsApp and other messaging apps.", "died": "The external platforms kept changing and breaking the integrations. The team spent its money on repairs instead of its own priorities.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1901-flux" }, { "name": "PostRocket", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$610K", "cause": "Product failure", "promise": "Better timing of posts, so that a company's Facebook page reaches more people.", "died": "The product relied on Facebook's API. Facebook changed the API and its rules in favor of its own advertising products, and PostRocket had no second platform.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/457-postrocket" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Before 2023, a support bot needed its answers written by hand. Answerly's customers spent months on FAQs and decision trees, and the bot still failed when a question was phrased in a new way. Language models removed that work: My AskAI reads the help center and past tickets that a company already has. The build also became cheaper. One founder without an engineering team built the first version in two to three weeks for under US$1,000, with a no-code editor and a rented model.", "The second cause of death in this list did not change. Niles, Flux and PostRocket depended on a platform that another company owned, and each platform owner improved its own feature or changed its rules. My AskAI is in the same position with Intercom and Zendesk, and both now sell their own AI agents. Two things differ so far. The hosts charge per resolved case at prices that leave room for a cheaper add-on, and My AskAI works with five help desks, so one host cannot end it alone." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The 2023 launch, no. The method, yes.", "text": "The first product, chat with your documents, was copied hundreds of times in 2023, and the founders say that the early marketing channels stopped working within months. What can be repeated is the sequence: sell before building, build with a tool that one person can change daily, find the use that pays, and attach the product to software the customer already pays for. The limit is that the host can lower its price or change its marketplace rules.", "steps": [ "Sell a presale before you build. Here, 50 buyers at US$99 in two weeks decided which product to make.", "Build the first version with a no-code tool or an AI coding tool, so that one person can ship changes every day.", "Look at which use brings most of the revenue, and rebuild the product for that use only. Here it was 70%.", "Work inside the software the customer already uses, so that nobody has to switch, and price the product below the host's own feature.", "Talk to every serious customer during onboarding. The founders say this and better analytics cut churn from 9% to 3%." ], "open": "The same position, a cheaper AI layer inside a tool the customer keeps, is open for help desks that the large vendors serve less well, such as regional help-desk products or a single industry with its own rules. In June 2024 Heap named online shops as the larger market; by 2026 the company's case studies include online shops." }, "watch": [ { "title": "The hosts sell their own AI agents", "text": "Intercom's pricing page lists Fin at US$0.99 per outcome and says that Fin also works with other help desks, including Zendesk and Freshdesk. Zendesk includes AI agents in every Suite and Support plan and charges US$1.50 to US$2.00 for each extra automated resolution. My AskAI describes itself as a replacement for the host's native AI at a lower price. If the hosts lower their prices, the main reason to install it becomes weaker." }, { "title": "Dependence on marketplaces and APIs", "text": "The company's own description says that the product works through approved app and marketplace integrations of each help desk. A host can change its API, its approval rules or its fees. No source shows that a host has restricted My AskAI so far. Niles and PostRocket in the list above closed after their platform owner changed its product or its rules." }, { "title": "Dependence on Bubble and on one developer", "text": "About 80% of the core application runs on Bubble, and Rainey is the only developer. He reports a few large outages during growth, which ended with a move to Bubble's Enterprise tier, and says he should have upgraded earlier. The company is moving parts of the system to Python and its own AWS account." }, { "title": "No figure after July 2025", "text": "The founders published revenue openly from 2023 to the middle of 2025. In July 2025 Rainey said the goal of US$1 million a year for 2025 would be hard to reach. No later figure was found. The signs in October 2026 are indirect: 2 employees, more than 200 customer companies and an active blog. No payment processor has confirmed any number, and no TrustMRR profile was found for the company." }, { "title": "Numbers that do not agree", "text": "The Starter Story page of June 2024 says US$300,000 a year in its title and US$20,000 a month in its summary box. In 2025 Rainey summarized the history as US$10,000 MRR in month four, a stall, a change of direction and US$40,000 MRR six months later; the dated figures show US$14,000 in month three, US$20,000 in November 2023, US$25,000 in May 2024 and US$40,000 in July 2025. Bubble's story says the founders sold the first version of the tool at the change of direction; the founders' own interviews say they sold the earlier model builder. GetLatka estimates US$212,500 a year for October 2024, below the founders' figures." }, { "title": "A stall, and no proof of a fall", "text": "The sources show about seven months without growth, from US$20,000 in November 2023 to between US$20,000 and US$25,000 in June 2024. No founder statement found for this page reports a fall in revenue. The one lower value, for October 2024, is a third-party estimate." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://myaskai.com" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Indie Hackers, 10 July 2025, interview by James Fleischmann: Bootstrapping to $40k MRR after his VC-backed startup failed", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/LF1CwRs1vL3oVLcuoIoE", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in the Wayback Machine copy of 2 May 2026. The live page shows only the first section without a login; that section contains the headline figure. Founder interview. Primary source for the July 2025 revenue, the team size, the margin, the churn and the stack." }, { "title": "Bubble customer story, 31 May 2024: How My AskAI Is Leveling Up the Customer Support Game", "url": "https://bubble.io/blog/myaskai/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. A supplier's account with founder quotes. Bubble can observe that the application runs on its platform. It does not handle the payments, so the revenue figure in it is graded C." }, { "title": "Starter Story, 18 June 2024, interview with Mike Heap: I Built A $300K/Year AI Business For Less $50 Bucks", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/my-askai-your-ai-chatbot-for-customer-support", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the start, the presale, the launch, the growth channels, churn and the current numbers. Founder interview." }, { "title": "Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast, 11 June 2024: S4E7, How MyAskAI bootstrapped with a team of 2 to $300k ARR, with Michael Heap", "url": "https://getreditus.com/podcast/s4e7-how-myaskai-bootstrapped-with-a-team-of-2-to-300k-arr-with-michael-heap", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the show notes and the transcript sections on the start, the presale, Bubble and the two-person team. The US$300,000 figure is in the title and the show notes." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 18 May 2023, interview by Darko Gjorgjievski: Making $14,000 in MRR with a custom ChatGPT tool", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/making-14-000-in-mrr-with-a-custom-chatgpt-tool-9f25e8fe11", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Interview with both founders. Source for the May 2023 revenue, the paying users, the presale and the earlier products." }, { "title": "NoCodeLife, 11 April 2023, interview by Kieran Ball: $0 to $6k MRR in 1.5 months with a no-code app", "url": "https://www.nocodelife.com/from--0-to--6k-mrr-in-1.5-months-with-a-no-code-app", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Interview with Alex Rainey. Source for the launch date and the April 2023 revenue." }, { "title": "SaaStrappers newsletter, 29 January 2024: Interview with Alex Rainey, AI bootstrapped startup generating $20K+ MRR", "url": "https://saastrappers.beehiiv.com/p/11-interviews-alex-rainey", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on revenue, funding and churn." }, { "title": "No Code MBA on YouTube, 3 November 2023: Growing an AI app on Bubble to $20k MRR within months", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QxrW3k6NAY", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the title, the date and the description only, not the video. The title spells the guest's name as Mike Kean; Mike Heap's own page lists this video as his interview." }, { "title": "Pinecone blog, 14 June 2024: RAG Brag with My AskAI founders, Mike Heap and Alex Rainey", "url": "https://www.pinecone.io/blog/rag-brag-myaskai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the change of direction and on the architecture. A supplier's blog, but every statement in it is a founder's answer." }, { "title": "My AskAI pricing page, read 13 October 2026, with the company blog post of 22 June 2026 on AI customer service for solo founders", "url": "https://myaskai.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "The visible page loads by script. Read the structured data in the page source for the two plan prices and the free trial, and the blog post for the credits in the Pro plan." }, { "title": "My AskAI company page on LinkedIn, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/myaskai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public page without a login. Company-written text. Source for 2 employees, more than 200 customers, more than one million tickets and the supported help desks." }, { "title": "My AskAI blog: pages about the two founders, updated February and September 2026", "url": "https://myaskai.com/blog/about-mike-heap-cofounder-my-askai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both pages in full. Source for the founders' earlier jobs and products, and for the list of their interviews. The blog index showed new case studies dated 10 September 2026." }, { "title": "Intercom Fin pricing page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://fin.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the plan section. Source for US$0.99 per outcome and for the statement that Fin works with other help desks." }, { "title": "Zendesk pricing page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://www.zendesk.com/pricing/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on AI agents and automated resolutions. Source for the included AI agents and the prices of US$1.50 and US$2.00 per extra automated resolution." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine snapshots of the My AskAI home page: 13 March 2023, 10 October 2023, 16 June 2024 and 28 February 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240616085929/https://myaskai.com/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the page title and the description of each snapshot. An independent archive of the company's own page. Source for the dates between which the product changed from a general assistant to a support agent." }, { "title": "GetLatka company page for My AskAI, updated 10 August 2026", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/myaskai.com", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A third-party database. Its value for October 2024 is marked as an estimate. Cited only for that conflict." }, { "title": "LinkedIn post by Tomasz Wesolowski, 10 July 2025, on a conference talk by Alex Rainey", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tomaszwesolowski_how-do-you-build-a-6-figure-saas-without-activity-7349050522416340992-v_3_", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A listener's summary of the talk. The date was computed from the post's ID. It confirms the two founders, the Bubble Enterprise plan and the integrations. Not used for numbers." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/boltai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/boltai.md", "slug": "boltai", "name": "BoltAI", "country": "Vietnam", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Native Mac app for many AI models", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-13", "launchLabel": "May 2023", "outcomeLabel": "More than US$500K total revenue, January 2026", "sticker": "$500K+ total revenue", "outcomeUsd": 500000, "months": 32, "teamLabel": "1 founder, with help from his wife since August 2023", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "ai-model-tools", "channel": "audience", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Productivity software" ], "product": "A Mac app that puts many AI models in one chat window and behind one keyboard shortcut that works inside any other Mac app. You connect your own account at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or another provider, or run a model on your own Mac, so BoltAI never pays for the model. You pay once for the app and get one year of updates.", "why": "It appeared in spring 2023, when people used ChatGPT in a browser tab and Mac users had to copy text between the browser and their other apps. The founder showed every step on X, one well-known founder reposted it, and AI directories and the Setapp app subscription brought buyers after that. He raised the price from US$19 to US$79 and kept the app running alone.", "summary": [ "BoltAI is a native app for the Mac. A native app is written for one operating system with that system's own tools, here Apple's Swift language, so it starts fast and can work inside other apps through a keyboard shortcut. It is a client for AI models: you paste your own API key, a password that lets a program call a model provider on your account, and BoltAI sends your text to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or a model that runs on your own Mac. It is sold as a perpetual license: you pay once, you may use the version you bought for as long as you want, and you get one year of updates.", "Daniel Nguyen, a product engineer in Ho Chi Minh City, built the first version in a weekend in March 2023 and started selling it in May 2023. It had made about US$14,000 in total by September 2023. In September 2024 he said it made about US$15,000 a month on average, from license sales and from the Setapp app subscription. In March 2025 Indie Hackers reported US$15,000 to US$30,000 a month and wrote that this revenue is not recurring. He then spent more than three months in 2025 writing the app again from the start. Version 2 began to charge at the start of November 2025 and had taken US$1,162 by 16 November. In January 2026 his GitHub profile said BoltAI had made more than US$500,000 in total. The research for this page found no monthly figure for the whole product after March 2025.", "Every number on this page is a founder statement or an interview with him, grade C. No payment processor or buyer has confirmed them. TypingMind, also on this site and also built by one Vietnamese founder, is a web app, and BoltAI is a native Mac app. Both let customers bring their own API key, so neither pays for model usage. The page also shows what happened to earlier companies that built a better client for someone else's platform." ], "factsCaption": "A one-time purchase that made more than US$500,000 in 32 months, with a best reported level of US$15,000 to US$30,000 a month in March 2025, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a statement by the founder on his own pages, on X or in an interview, or a secondary account that says so. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B. Most of the revenue is one-time license sales, so a monthly figure here is the revenue in that month and not recurring revenue, unless the row says recurring.", "timelineLead": "From a weekend prototype to more than US$500,000 in total revenue in 32 months, with a complete rewrite in the middle. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "BoltAI prices in October 2026, read from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "All plans are one-time payments in US dollars for a perpetual license with one year of updates. After that year the customer may keep the last version received, or renew: individual licenses renew at 40% off the price first paid, team seats at US$79 per seat per year. Cloud Sync, the mobile app and new updates stop when the renewal lapses, so the renewal is the recurring part of the price. The page says a Windows version is coming soon. BoltAI is also included in the Setapp app subscription. In every case the customer pays the model provider separately for usage.", "rows": [ [ "Essential", "79 one-time", "", "1 desktop device; 512 MB cloud storage" ], [ "Pro", "99 one-time", "", "2 desktop devices and 1 mobile device; 1 GB cloud storage" ], [ "Pro+", "199 one-time", "", "3 desktop devices and 2 mobile devices; 5 GB cloud storage" ], [ "Team Perpetual", "99 one-time per seat", "", "5 seats minimum; 10 GB shared storage" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Total revenue of BoltAI, by January 2026", "value": "more than US$500,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's GitHub profile, last edited 27 January 2026: BoltAI is \"my top revenue generating product ($500K+)\". It gives no breakdown by year or by source.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average revenue per month over the 32 months", "value": "about US$15,600", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$500,000 divided by the 32 months from May 2023 to January 2026. A lower bound, because the profile says more than US$500,000.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month, March 2025 (the highest level reported)", "value": "US$15,000 to US$30,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Indie Hackers interview, 6 March 2025. Revenue in that month, mostly one-time license sales. The article says: \"his revenue is not recurring\".", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Average month in the same interview", "value": "about US$25,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Not verified. This part of the interview needs a login. Two secondary summaries of the interview report it, together with a founder estimate of a margin close to 90%.", "src": [ 19 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month of all three products, March 2025", "value": "US$18,000 to US$34,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Indie Hackers header. BoltAI, plus PDF Pals at US$1,000 to US$2,000 a month, plus KTool at US$1,500 monthly recurring revenue. The three ranges add up to US$17,500 to US$33,500.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month, September 2024", "value": "about US$15,000 on average", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's unedited interview: license sales on the website plus subscription revenue through Setapp. The Indie Hackers article prints it as US$10,000 a month in one-time sales and US$5,000 recurring, and does not say which product the recurring part belongs to.", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Twelve months at those monthly levels", "value": "US$180,000 at the 2024 average; US$180,000 to US$360,000 at the 2025 range", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$15,000 times 12, and the range of US$15,000 to US$30,000 times 12. These are not recurring run rates: a one-time sale must be made again every month.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "First 16 days of paid sales of version 2, November 2025", "value": "US$1,162", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post with a screenshot of the Stripe app: gross volume from 1 to 16 November 2025, against US$0 in the same days of October. It shows only the account of version 2. Sales of version 1 in those days are not public.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Pace of version 2 sales in those 16 days, per 30 days", "value": "about US$2,200", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$1,162 divided by 16 days, times 30. The first days after a release are not a normal month, and renewals and Setapp revenue may be counted elsewhere.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Total revenue of BoltAI by 28 September 2023", "value": "about US$14,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on Indie Hackers, four months after the launch.", "src": [ 8, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Total revenue of all his products by 19 April 2024", "value": "US$100,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X and his newsletter of 1 May 2024, two years after he left his job. BoltAI was the largest part.", "src": [ 10, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Customers", "value": "more than 7,000 in September 2024; more than 8,000 in March 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's interview and his post on X.", "src": [ 3, 7 ] }, { "fact": "New customers per month to September 2024", "value": "about 440", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 7,000 customers divided by the 16 months from May 2023 to September 2024.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Price of a license", "value": "raised in steps from US$19 to US$79 by September 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's interview. At US$79 the monthly revenue was slightly lower than at US$39, with about half the number of customers, fewer refunds and fewer support requests. He kept US$79. Secondary summaries of the 2025 interview give a first price of US$9; not verified.", "src": [ 3, 19 ] }, { "fact": "Cost of model usage for BoltAI", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Customers use their own API keys and pay the provider. Chats are stored on the customer's Mac.", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Updates shipped", "value": "more than 100 by September 2024; 55 releases in the twelve months to October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's interview, and a count of the monthly totals on the company's changelog page, November 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 3, 16 ] }, { "fact": "Time spent on the rewrite, 2025", "value": "more than 3 months", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 2 November 2025. Version 2 had about 80% of the features of version 1 at its public beta on 6 October 2025 and about 95% on 2 November.", "src": [ 5, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "one person in March 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "His words: \"One-person company\". His wife left her job in August 2023 to help with the products. A freelancer hired in 2024 left the same year.", "src": [ 7, 13, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X and the company's about page.", "src": [ 7, 16 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's followers on X", "value": "38,000 in May 2024; 77,145 in October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "His newsletter, and his public profile read on 13 October 2026.", "src": [ 10, 21 ] }, { "fact": "His other products", "value": "PDF Pals: about US$25,000 in total and 700 paid customers by September 2024. KTool: US$1,500 monthly recurring revenue in March 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's interviews. Indie Hackers lists PDF Pals as revenue per month and only KTool as recurring revenue.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Starter Story's figure, November 2024", "value": "US$15,000 \"MRR\"", "grade": "C", "note": "A secondary account built on the September 2024 interview. It calls the figure monthly recurring revenue. The founder's own text says average monthly revenue, mostly one-time sales.", "src": [ 18 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the January 2026 figure", "value": "32 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: May 2023 to January 2026.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "About 2009", "what": "Nguyen earns his first money online by selling a plugin for the forum software Invision Power Board. He leaves college and runs a WordPress consulting business that reaches US$100,000 in revenue, then closes it and works as a product engineer at startups.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "Before 2022", "what": "Two products of his own fail: WordPress themes and plugins, and StatusBoard, an uptime monitoring service that he closes after about six months.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "2022", "what": "He joins the founders' community on X, leaves his job and releases KTool, which sends web articles to Kindle e-readers. It takes more than a year to reach US$1,000 in monthly recurring revenue.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 9, 10 ] }, { "when": "28 March 2023", "what": "With one year of savings left, he learns the OpenAI API to find freelance work, builds a Mac prototype in a weekend and posts a demo on X with the question \"Is this good enough to ship?\"", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12, 8, 3 ] }, { "when": "May 2023", "what": "BoltAI goes on sale as a one-time purchase. Growth is slow at first. Later a repost by Pieter Levels makes it spread widely on X; the founder gives no date for it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "21 August 2023", "what": "His wife leaves her job to help with the products.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "28 September 2023", "what": "BoltAI has made about US$14,000. PDF Pals, a second Mac app that a BoltAI customer asked for, has made about US$6,000 in four months.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 9 ] }, { "when": "19 April 2024", "what": "US$100,000 in total revenue from all products, two years after he left his job.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10, 11 ] }, { "when": "September 2024", "what": "About US$15,000 a month on average, more than 7,000 customers, more than 100 updates, price raised to US$79. BoltAI is also in Setapp, which adds subscription revenue. A freelancer he hired has left.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "when": "20 January 2025", "what": "He writes on Hacker News that BoltAI pays for his full-time work, and that he will add a subscription because cloud features have running costs that a one-time price cannot cover.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "when": "6 March 2025", "what": "Indie Hackers reports US$15,000 to US$30,000 a month for BoltAI. This is the highest level on record.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "23 March 2025", "what": "He posts: one-person company, two years, more than 8,000 customers, no outside money, profitable.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "Mid-2025", "what": "New users leave because the app is slow, and the old code is hard to change. He writes the app again from the start. It takes more than three months, and he publishes almost nothing in that time.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 14 ] }, { "when": "6 October 2025", "what": "Version 2 opens as a public beta, free to use, with optional Cloud Sync.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "2 November 2025", "what": "He turns on payment for version 2 and posts that it has made US$0 so far. He calls November the test of the decision to rewrite.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "16 November 2025", "what": "Version 2 has taken US$1,162 in 16 days.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "27 January 2026", "what": "His GitHub profile says BoltAI has made more than US$500,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "12 October 2026", "what": "Version 2.18.0 is released. The site sells licenses at US$79 to US$199, offers a mobile app in beta for iPhone, iPad and Android, and says a Windows version is coming soon. Current monthly revenue is not public.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15, 16, 20 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Distribution through the founder's own posts", "text": "He showed the prototype on X before it was finished and posted each new feature every week. A repost by a well-known founder, Pieter Levels, made the app spread widely after a slow start. He also listed the app in AI directories and paid for clicks in the one that converted best, wrote help articles that search engines found, and built small free Mac apps that link to BoltAI. One of them, ShotSolve, sent 1,700 visitors." }, { "title": "A native app for a product that people used in the browser", "text": "In 2023 people used ChatGPT in a browser tab. BoltAI put it behind a keyboard shortcut inside Xcode, Apple Notes and any other Mac app, which was the founder's own daily problem. He later added a full chat window, because only expert users understood the shortcut." }, { "title": "No model cost, so a one-time price works", "text": "Customers bring their own API key and pay the provider. Chats stay on the customer's Mac. The app has almost no cost per customer, so a single payment of US$19 to US$79 could pay for it, and one person could serve about 440 new customers a month." }, { "title": "A higher price for fewer customers", "text": "He raised the price from US$19 to US$79. Revenue at US$79 was slightly lower than at US$39, and he kept US$79 because he had about half the number of customers, with fewer refunds and fewer support requests. He says a founder who works alone must also optimize for his own happiness, not only for revenue." }, { "title": "A second channel that recurs", "text": "Setapp is a subscription service for Mac apps, and BoltAI receives subscription revenue from Setapp customers. The Setapp team also promoted the app, and many customers who found it there bought a license directly." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's interview of September 2024, his announcement of version 2 and the company's pages. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Swift, SwiftUI and AppKit for the app, SQLite for local storage, and Sparkle for updates. The first version was built in a weekend.", "The website uses Next.js and Tailwind CSS on Cloudflare Pages and Workers. The app files are served from Cloudflare R2.", "Payments in 2024 went through Lemon Squeezy and Stripe. The pricing page in 2026 names Stripe.", "Version 2, released in October 2025, is a new app written from the start: macOS 13 or later, sandboxed by default, a new chat renderer that he tested with a chat of 43,000 messages.", "Cloud Sync in version 2 is optional and runs on Supabase with row-level security. API keys can be encrypted with a passphrase that only the customer knows.", "Models: hosted providers through the customer's own API keys, local models through Ollama and LM Studio, and tools through MCP servers." ], "src": [ 3, 14, 15, 16 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database built a better client for a platform that they did not control, or sold software once and could not pay for the updates. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Sunrise", "years": "2012 to 2016", "funding": "US$8M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "One calendar app for all your calendar accounts, on every device.", "died": "Microsoft bought it in 2015 and closed it a year later, after moving its features into Outlook.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1957-sunrise" }, { "name": "Mailbox", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A faster mail app, with swipe gestures and a snooze button.", "died": "Dropbox bought it and closed it. Google and Apple added the same features to their free mail apps, and it had no clear revenue model.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/314-mailbox" }, { "name": "Nuzzel", "years": "2012 to 2019", "funding": "US$5.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "The news that your friends share, collected from Twitter and Facebook.", "died": "It depended on the APIs of the two platforms. They changed the rules and offered a similar feature for free.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/378-nuzzel" }, { "name": "Tap to Learn", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Learning games for children on tablets, each sold as a one-time purchase.", "died": "One-time purchases limited its revenue. Competitors with subscriptions could pay for a constant flow of new content.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1181-tap-to-learn" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The first three built a better client for mail, calendars or social feeds that belonged to someone else, and the owner of the platform added the feature, changed the rules or bought the app and closed it. The fourth sold its software once and could not pay for new work. BoltAI carries both risks. The model makers now offer their own Mac apps, and the founder wrote in January 2025 that a perpetual license is not sustainable once the product has cloud features with running costs.", "Three things differ. First, the platform is a paid API, and there are several providers plus models that run on the customer's own Mac, so the providers earn money each time BoltAI is used and no single one can end it. Second, the app has no usage cost and almost no server cost, so one person stayed profitable at a few hundred buyers a month. Third, the license was never unlimited: it includes one year of updates, and version 2 ties Cloud Sync and the mobile app to a yearly renewal. That renewal is the answer to the one-time problem, and no figure shows yet how many customers pay it." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The structure, yes. The 2023 opening, no.", "text": "In May 2023 there were few native Mac clients for ChatGPT. Now there are many, including those of the model makers. What remains available is the structure: a desktop app with no usage cost, sold once with a year of updates, by a person who can build native software and who shows the work in public. The same case also shows the limit: each sale happens once, the founder stopped publishing revenue during the rewrite, and he is now adding recurring parts.", "steps": [ "Build the native tool for a problem you have every day, in a weekend, and show it before it is finished.", "Charge from the first version, and let customers bring their own API key, so the model is never your cost.", "Raise the price until refunds and support requests fall to a level one person can handle.", "Sell a year of updates with the license and a renewal after it, and put anything with a running cost behind the renewal." ], "open": "Native desktop and mobile clients for new kinds of models, and for systems that the model makers serve late. BoltAI's own pricing page still lists its Windows version as coming soon." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Self-reported, and no monthly figure found after March 2025", "text": "The total of more than US$500,000 is one line in the founder's GitHub profile. The last monthly figure for the whole product that this research found is from March 2025. What the app makes per month in 2026, and whether revenue went up or down after the rewrite, is not verified." }, { "title": "One-time revenue does not recur", "text": "Most of the money is license sales, and each sale happens once. Indie Hackers states that the revenue is not recurring. Starter Story still printed the September 2024 average as MRR, so check the label on every BoltAI figure you read elsewhere." }, { "title": "The rewrite cost months of sales effort", "text": "New users were leaving because of slow performance, and the fix was a new app that took more than three months. Version 2 took US$1,162 in its first 16 days of paid sales, far below the levels of early 2025, though sales of version 1 in those days are not public." }, { "title": "The platform owner can ship the same feature", "text": "Three predecessors on this page ended when the platform shipped the same feature or bought the app. The model makers now have their own Mac apps. BoltAI's answer is to support every provider and local models in one app." }, { "title": "One person", "text": "In September 2024 he wrote that the largest risk for a business like his is the founder's health, after his fourth COVID infection and after a freelancer he had just hired left. He planned a small team then and called it a one-person company six months later." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://boltai.com" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Daniel Nguyen's GitHub profile text, last edited 27 January 2026", "url": "https://github.com/longseespace", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, as the raw README file, and checked its edit dates through the GitHub API. Source for the total of more than US$500,000 and the PDF Pals customer count." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 6 March 2025: Making $30k/mo from an AI product with a perpetual license", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/cRvgt7fySrr3M76MSVas", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public part: the header, the introduction and the product list with revenue ranges. The rest needs a login and the Wayback Machine has no copy. Source for the US$15,000 to US$30,000 range and the statement that the revenue is not recurring." }, { "title": "Daniel Nguyen's newsletter, 29 September 2024: Sep 2024: Interview on Indie Hackers", "url": "https://newsletter.danielnguyen.me/p/sep-2024-interview-on-indie-hackers", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's unedited answers to the Indie Hackers interview. Source for the launch month, the US$15,000 average, the customer count, the price steps, the earlier products and the technical stack." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 11 September 2024: How going viral on X helped this solopreneur reach $15k/mo with his native AI apps", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/ZBbFBKrpwqZQkQsy7Bcs", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public part and the comments. The full answers are in the founder's newsletter. Source for the split into one-time sales and recurring revenue, and for his comment that customers bring their own API key." }, { "title": "Daniel Nguyen on X, 2 November 2025: I made $0 from BoltAI v2 so far", "url": "https://x.com/daniel_nguyenx/status/1984806813439836490", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Source for the reasons for the rewrite, its length and the start of paid sales." }, { "title": "Daniel Nguyen on X, 16 November 2025: I made $1,162 so far with BoltAI v2", "url": "https://x.com/daniel_nguyenx/status/1990052287298105421", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API and looked at the attached Stripe screenshot. A screenshot posted by the founder is still a founder statement." }, { "title": "Daniel Nguyen on X, 23 March 2025: I'm proud of BoltAI. One-person company, 2 years, 8,000+ customers", "url": "https://x.com/daniel_nguyenx/status/1903858042317488447", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 28 September 2023, post by the founder: I reached $20k in revenue with my 2 smol AI apps", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/i-reached-20k-in-revenue-with-my-2-smol-ai-apps-22d6c018eb", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the origin of the product and the first revenue total." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 4 October 2023: 1 year as a bootstrapped founder: Daniel Nguyen discusses growing 3 tools to $32k in revenue", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/1-year-as-a-bootstrapped-founder-growing-3-tools-to-32k-revenue-daniel-nguyen-2eea694a9c", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A case study in the founder's words. Source for the first channels and the KTool figure." }, { "title": "Daniel Nguyen's newsletter, 1 May 2024: $100K revenue after 2 years indie hacking", "url": "https://newsletter.danielnguyen.me/p/100k-revenue-after-2-years-indie", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the US$100,000 total and the follower count in 2024." }, { "title": "Daniel Nguyen on X, 19 April 2024: After 2 years indie hacking, I've just reached the $100k revenue milestone", "url": "https://x.com/daniel_nguyenx/status/1781306247054241844", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Gives the date of the milestone." }, { "title": "Daniel Nguyen on X, 28 March 2023: Is this good enough to ship?", "url": "https://x.com/daniel_nguyenx/status/1640765174914387968", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. The first public demo of the prototype." }, { "title": "Daniel Nguyen on X, 21 August 2023: My wife just quit her job to help me growing our indie products", "url": "https://x.com/daniel_nguyenx/status/1693465089805005238", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API." }, { "title": "BoltAI changelog, 6 October 2025: BoltAI v2 is here", "url": "https://feedback.boltai.com/changelog/boltai-v2-is-here", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the release of version 2, its license terms and its technical changes." }, { "title": "BoltAI pricing page and renewal page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://boltai.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, together with https://boltai.com/renew for the renewal discount. Source for the pricing table." }, { "title": "BoltAI changelog, about page and home page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://boltai.com/changelog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the release list and its monthly counts, the about page and the home page. Source for the current version, the release counts and the statement of no outside funding." }, { "title": "Hacker News comment by the founder (user longnguyen), 20 January 2025", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42765344", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the Hacker News API. The account's profile names BoltAI and his X account. Source for his view on perpetual licenses and subscriptions." }, { "title": "Starter Story, 10 November 2024: How Daniel Nguyen Grew Bolt AI to $15K MRR Rapidly", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/bolt-ai-breakdown", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A secondary account of the September 2024 interview. Used only to show that it labels the figure as MRR." }, { "title": "SoFarBot, 14 September 2026: How BoltAI sold up to $30K/month, and an API Token article of 11 August 2026 on the same interview", "url": "https://www.sofarbot.com/stories/boltai-daniel-nguyen-25000-monthly-sales", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both in full. Secondary summaries of the March 2025 interview, which could not be opened in full. Used only for the row marked not verified." }, { "title": "BoltAI documentation: BoltAI Mobile, getting started", "url": "https://boltai.com/docs/boltai-mobile/getting-started", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on the beta. Source for the state of the mobile app." }, { "title": "Daniel Nguyen's profile on X, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/daniel_nguyenx", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through the fxtwitter API. Confirms the account name, the follower count and that he still presents himself as the builder of BoltAI." }, { "title": "Setapp listing for BoltAI, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://setapp.com/apps/boltai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the listing. Confirms that BoltAI is still offered in the Setapp subscription." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/revid-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/revid-ai.md", "slug": "revid-ai", "name": "Revid.ai", "country": "France", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI short-video generator and publisher for social media", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-13", "launchLabel": "April 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$500K a month, September 2026", "sticker": "$500K/month, down from $680K", "outcomeUsd": 6000000, "months": 29, "teamLabel": "Founder and a CTO co-founder; 4 people on Revid in February 2026, no later count; the studio runs 7 products", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "video", "channel": "search", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Video" ], "product": "A web application that turns an idea, a link or an existing viral video into a finished short video for TikTok, Instagram and YouTube: script, generated images or video, voice, captions, music and posting. Customers pay a subscription that includes credits, and each second of generated video costs credits.", "why": "It began as a tool for product launch videos, which a customer needs once. The founder saw customers use it for social videos, which they need every week, and built a second product for that use from the same code. Free tools that rank on Google and his audience on X brought the customers. Credits priced per second kept the price of each video above the cost of the model that made it.", "summary": [ "Revid.ai makes short-form videos, vertical videos of some seconds to a few minutes for TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. The user gives an idea, a link or an existing viral video. The product writes a script, calls video-generation models (programs such as Seedance, Veo or Sora that produce moving images from a text description), adds a voice, captions and music, and posts the result. Customers pay a subscription that includes credits, units that are spent on each second of generated video, so a customer who generates more pays more.", "Thibault (Tibo) Louis-Lucas, a French engineer who had already sold an earlier software business, took over a small product-video tool named Typeframes from its maker in September 2023; he later gave the price as US$50,000. In April 2024 he forked it, which means he copied the code to start a second product, and named the copy Revid. Revid reached US$10,000 of MRR (monthly recurring revenue, the sum of all subscription payments for one month) at its Product Hunt launch on 24 June 2024. On 18 February 2026 he wrote that it made US$680,000 a month with a team of 4, the highest figure he has published. On 28 September 2026 he wrote that it generates US$500,000 a month; that latest figure is the headline of this page. Revid is the largest of the seven products of his studio TMAKER, and he wrote in March 2026 that all products together had passed US$1 million a month. This page keeps the two figures apart.", "Every Revid number on this page is a founder statement, or a value read from a chart that he published, grade C. No payment processor and no buyer has confirmed them, and Revid has no profile on TrustMRR. One smaller product of the same studio, SuperX, does have a TrustMRR profile verified through Stripe, and its verified revenue agrees with its line on the founder's chart. The page also lists the fall of about 26% between the February and the September figure, two founder statements about costs that do not agree with each other, the platform rules on mass-produced AI video, and four earlier companies that failed with a similar promise." ], "factsCaption": "A product-video tool taken over in September 2023 for US$50,000, forked into Revid in April 2024, reported at US$680,000 a month in February 2026 and at US$500,000 a month in September 2026, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a founder statement, a value read by eye from a chart that he published, or an estimate by a third party that says so. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. The one grade A value is payment-processor data for SuperX, another product of the same studio; it is not a Revid figure.", "timelineLead": "From a product-video tool taken over for US$50,000 to US$500,000 a month, in 36 months, after a higher figure in February 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Revid prices read from the company's pricing page on 13 October 2026 (grade C)", "note": "The page shows Growth as reduced from US$99 to US$39, with the words \"Discount locked in forever\". A Hobby plan is shown at the same US$39 with a shorter feature list and no stated credit amount. The company's About page also names an Elite plan at US$89 a month, which the pricing page did not show on that day. Plan credits refill each month and do not accumulate; Credit Boost packs are one-time purchases that do not expire. Credits are spent per second of generated video: 15 credits for 5 seconds with the cheapest model, 100 credits for 5 seconds with Seedance 2.5 or Veo 3, 130 with Sora 2.", "rows": [ [ "Hobby", "", "39", "videos from text or links; no credit amount stated" ], [ "Growth", "32", "39", "2,000 credits a month, 3 Auto-Mode workers; shown as reduced from US$99" ], [ "Ultra", "166", "199", "12,000 credits a month, 10 Auto-Mode workers" ], [ "Ultra, 30,000 credits", "", "459", "30,000 credits a month" ], [ "Ultra, 50,000 credits", "", "749", "50,000 credits a month" ], [ "Ultra, 100,000 credits", "", "1,459", "100,000 credits a month" ], [ "Ultra, 200,000 credits", "", "2,799", "200,000 credits a month" ], [ "Credit Boost, smallest", "49 one-time", "", "1,000 credits" ], [ "Credit Boost, largest", "1,900 one-time", "", "100,000 credits" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revid revenue per month, 28 September 2026", "value": "US$500,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post: he acquired Typeframes three years ago \"and turned it into an asset generating $500,000 per month\". A round figure in a post that promotes the product, with no chart. It is the latest dated Revid figure and the headline of this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the September 2026 figure", "value": "about US$6 million a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$500,000 times 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Highest published figure: revenue per month, 18 February 2026", "value": "US$680,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post: \"$680k MRR with a team of 4\". The chart attached to the post is titled \"Revid.ai - 30-day revenue\", so the figure is the revenue of the last 30 days and can include one-time credit packs. The last point of the chart reads about US$660,000.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Change from February to September 2026", "value": "a fall of about 26%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$500,000 minus US$680,000, divided by US$680,000. Both figures are rounded by the founder, so the size of the fall is approximate.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revid on the founder's portfolio chart, 9 March 2026", "value": "about US$660,000 of a total of about US$1.04 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Read by eye from the chart \"All Projects\" in his post. The Revid line is labelled \"Revid Total\"; the line of Outrank, the second product, is labelled \"Outrank (MRR)\" and reads about US$325,000. The post does not explain the difference between the two labels.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Revid's share of the portfolio, March 2026", "value": "about 63%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 660,000 divided by 1,040,000, from the chart readings above.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Revid revenue per month, April 2026", "value": "more than US$600,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Peter Yang's newsletter of 26 April 2026, which shows the founder's chart. In his posts from 20 May to 13 October 2026, the only later Revid figure is the one of 28 September.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Revid in 2025", "value": "passed US$500,000 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 27 April 2026. On his chart the line passes US$500,000 between October and November 2025.", "src": [ 5, 2 ] }, { "fact": "The curve, read from the 30-day revenue chart", "value": "about US$35,000 (October 2024), US$95,000 (January 2025), US$215,000 (April 2025), US$340,000 (July 2025), US$450,000 (October 2025), US$595,000 (January 2026)", "grade": "C", "note": "Values at the first day of each month, read by eye from a chart without data labels, so each can be wrong by about US$10,000. The line falls from about US$345,000 to about US$318,000 between July and August 2025, and is flat from December 2025 to January 2026.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "MRR at the Product Hunt launch, 24 June 2024", "value": "US$10,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's launch post. One subscription gave access to both Typeframes and Revid.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "MRR of Typeframes and Revid together, 30 April 2024", "value": "more than US$8,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post, in which he looks for a technical co-founder.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "MRR of Typeframes, December 2023", "value": "US$4,000, from zero in September 2023", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in a podcast interview published 24 January 2024. Typeframes was not a subscription product before he changed it.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Revid, Feather and SuperX together, September 2024", "value": "about US$28,000 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Indie Hackers article of 11 September 2024, from the part that is public. It agrees with the total line of the founder's chart for that month.", "src": [ 12, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from the launch figure", "value": "68 times at the highest figure (20 months), 50 times in September 2026 (27 months)", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$680,000 and US$500,000 divided by US$10,000; June 2024 to February 2026 and to September 2026.", "src": [ 1, 2, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Payments collected, 10 November 2025 to 12 October 2026", "value": "101,491", "grade": "C", "note": "Image in the founder's post of 13 October 2026, with at least one payment on each of 337 days.", "src": [ 20 ] }, { "fact": "Average payment implied by that count", "value": "about US$55 to US$75", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 101,491 payments in 337 days is about 9,035 per 30 days; US$500,000 to US$680,000 divided by 9,035. This fits a price list that starts at US$39, but it is a consistency check and not a proof.", "src": [ 20, 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Team on Revid, February 2026", "value": "4 people", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post. The About page names two founders, Thibault Louis-Lucas (CEO) and Nicolas Coutureau (CTO). Latka counts 4 employees on LinkedIn in July 2025. The About page says that both founded the company in 2023, but on 30 April 2024 the founder was still looking in public for a technical co-founder, so the date when Coutureau joined is not verified. The names of the other two people were not found, and no count after February 2026 was found.", "src": [ 2, 6, 8, 26 ] }, { "fact": "People across the studio, 2026", "value": "7 \"co-makers\"; US$38,000 for team and freelancers in August 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's posts of 19 September and 5 September 2026. The figures cover all seven products, not Revid alone.", "src": [ 23, 16 ] }, { "fact": "Sign-ups, August 2024 to July 2026", "value": "more than 3,000,000", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's About page, from its own analytics. It also states more than 100,000 videos rendered and more than 30,000 published to social networks each month.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder: \"no VC. no investors. just revenue.\" He said in January 2024 that money from the sale of his earlier company paid for the first developer.", "src": [ 5, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Price of Typeframes, September 2023", "value": "US$50,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 28 September 2026. In the interview of January 2024 he said that he did not pay the full value in cash and that the deal included a share of the tool's future revenue. How the US$50,000 was split is not stated.", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "fact": "The price, measured in revenue of September 2026", "value": "3 days", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$50,000 divided by US$500,000, times 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Model cost stated by the founder, August 2026", "value": "about US$0.10 per second of Seedance 2.5 video", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 8 August 2026: \"that's the price WE pay\", before upscaling, storage and failed attempts.", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "fact": "Price a customer pays for the same second", "value": "US$0.39 on Growth, US$0.33 on Ultra", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 100 credits for 5 seconds; US$39 for 2,000 credits and US$199 for 12,000 credits. That is 3.9 and 3.3 times the model cost stated above, if the customer spends all credits on this model.", "src": [ 13, 14, 15 ] }, { "fact": "Spending of the whole studio, August 2026", "value": "US$269,250, of which AI and APIs US$68,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 5 September 2026. The other lines: French taxes US$100,000, team and freelancers US$38,000, affiliates and creators US$37,000, servers and tools US$9,000, food US$250. The lines add up to US$252,250, which is US$17,000 less than the stated total.", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "fact": "Spending on AI models stated four weeks earlier", "value": "more than US$300,000 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 8 August 2026. It does not agree with the US$68,000 for AI and APIs in the row above; the ratio is 4.4. He has not explained the difference.", "src": [ 15, 16 ] }, { "fact": "SuperX, another product of the studio: verified revenue", "value": "US$30,356 in February 2026; US$21,670 in the last 30 days", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR profile, verified through Stripe, data as of October 2026. The SuperX line on the founder's chart of 9 March 2026 reads about US$30,000, so one small line of that chart agrees with payment-processor data. This is not a verification of the Revid line.", "src": [ 25, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Latka's revenue estimate for Revid, July 2025", "value": "US$440,000 a year", "grade": "C", "note": "A third-party estimate, marked as such by Latka. The founder's chart reads about US$340,000 a month for the same date, which is about US$4.08 million a year, or 9 times the estimate.", "src": [ 26, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the fork to the September 2026 figure", "value": "29 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: April 2024 to September 2026. From the takeover of Typeframes in September 2023 it is 36 months. The highest figure came 22 months after the fork.", "src": [ 6, 1, 2, 7 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2022", "what": "Louis-Lucas and his co-founder sell Tweet Hunter and Taplio to lempire; that sale is another story on this site. He writes later that he left lempire in 2024 and started again with no investors. Another of his posts gives 2024 as the year of the sale.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 3 ] }, { "when": "September 2023", "what": "He takes over Typeframes, a tool that makes product videos from text, from its maker, who had stopped working on it. He later gives the price as US$50,000; in 2024 he says the deal included a share of future revenue, so that he did not pay the full value in cash. He changes the product to subscriptions.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 1 ] }, { "when": "December 2023", "what": "Typeframes reaches US$4,000 of MRR. He calls it a side project and hires one developer for it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "April 2024", "what": "He forks Typeframes into Revid, for short social videos. On 30 April the two products together make more than US$8,000 of MRR, and he looks in public for a technical co-founder who will work for low pay and equity.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 8 ] }, { "when": "24 June 2024", "what": "Product Hunt launch of Revid at US$10,000 of MRR. He writes that he started work on Typeframes nine months before.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 10 ] }, { "when": "22 August 2024", "what": "Most new subscriptions now come through Revid. Both products share one code base, one database and one set of subscriptions, and he asks his followers if he should close Typeframes.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "11 September 2024", "what": "Indie Hackers reports that Revid, Feather and SuperX together make about US$28,000 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "January 2025", "what": "The 30-day revenue of Revid is about US$95,000 on the founder's chart.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "July to August 2025", "what": "The first fall on the chart: from about US$345,000 to about US$318,000 in one month, then growth again.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "Late 2025", "what": "Revid passes US$500,000 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 2 ] }, { "when": "18 February 2026", "what": "\"$680k MRR with a team of 4\", with a chart of 30-day revenue.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "9 March 2026", "what": "He writes that his five products together passed US$1 million a month. On the chart, Revid is about US$660,000 of it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "26 April 2026", "what": "A podcast interview with Peter Yang: Revid alone makes more than US$600,000 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "27 May 2026", "what": "He asks who would buy shares of his holding company and writes that the products together make US$1 million a month \"with very decent margin\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 21 ] }, { "when": "August 2026", "what": "Revid cuts the credit price of AI video by half because, he writes, the models got cheaper. He says the product was rebuilt around a library of viral videos, and that most of the AI video tools he has advised, at least 7, \"dipped\" in the last six months.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 17, 18, 19 ] }, { "when": "15 September 2026", "what": "He buys an advertisement on TrustMRR that tells customers of a competitor, Higgsfield, to change to Revid. The site owner removes it after 13 minutes and refunds him.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 24 ] }, { "when": "28 September 2026", "what": "He writes that the tool he acquired for US$50,000 now generates US$500,000 a month. That is below the figures of February and April.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2026", "what": "Revid is running: 101,491 payments since 10 November 2025, and the pricing page is live. His site still describes the studio as a US$1 million a month portfolio, the same round figure as in March.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 20, 13, 30 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Distribution", "text": "Three channels fed the product. The founder has more than 210,000 followers on X and posts each launch and each figure there. The site carries many free tools, each made for one search query, for example an MP3 to MP4 converter or a TikTok script generator, so that people who search Google for a small task land on Revid. And the other products of the studio send customers to each other." }, { "title": "Start from a product that already has users", "text": "He did not start from an empty repository. Typeframes had users, a brand and a working video editor, and its maker had stopped working on it. The price was US$50,000, and the deal included a share of future revenue, so he did not pay the full value in cash." }, { "title": "Follow what customers do, not the plan", "text": "Typeframes was sold for product launch videos. A founder needs one of those per launch, so subscriptions ended after one month. Customers were using the editor for short social videos, which a business needs every week. Revid was built for that use from the same code, and by August 2024 most new subscriptions came through it." }, { "title": "Credits priced per second", "text": "Each second of generated video costs credits, and each credit has a price. At the stated model cost of US$0.10 per second, a Growth customer pays US$0.39 for that second. Competitors sell plans named unlimited; Revid states a price per second, refunds failed generations, and cut the price by half in August 2026 when the models got cheaper." }, { "title": "A studio of small teams", "text": "TMAKER runs seven products. The founder calls the people who build them with him co-makers and counted 7 of them in September 2026. Revid has its own CTO co-founder. The products use each other: Outrank writes the Revid blog, and Revid makes the videos for the other products." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's posts, a podcast interview and the company's own pages. They are grade C.", "items": [ "The video editor is built on Remotion, a library that renders video from React code, with Next.js for the web application. The April 2024 post asks for a co-founder who is an expert in both.", "Revid and Typeframes ran on one code base, one database and one set of subscriptions, with conditions in the code that changed the feature set for each brand.", "The video itself comes from rented models: Seedance 2.5, MiniMax Hailuo H3, Wan 3.0, Google Veo 3 and OpenAI Sora 2, chosen per scene. The founder writes that every competitor has access to the same models.", "A library of about 2.77 million viral short videos with public engagement data (snapshot of 15 September 2026) is used to choose the hook and the format before a video is generated.", "Publishing uses the official TikTok, YouTube and Instagram integrations. Payments go through Stripe.", "Every function is also available through a public API, an MCP server and a command-line tool, so that AI agents can order videos without the web interface." ], "src": [ 8, 11, 6, 14, 18 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised automatic or easy video for everyone, or built a tool that posts media to social networks owned by other companies. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Qwiki", "years": "2010 to 2015", "funding": "US$10M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Automatic narrated videos made from text, images and voice, in place of a page of search results.", "died": "High running costs and no revenue model. Yahoo bought it in 2013 and later closed it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/481-qwiki" }, { "name": "Tout", "years": "2010 to 2016", "funding": "US$40M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A fast and simple way to record and share short video updates.", "died": "Vine and Instagram had larger networks and more money. Tout did not change its product or find revenue in time.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/652-tout" }, { "name": "Pixelpipe", "years": "2008 to 2013", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Post photos, videos and audio to many social networks at once.", "died": "The networks added their own cross-posting and closed their APIs. It had no clear way to earn money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/435-pixelpipe" }, { "name": "Mixed Media Labs", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Tools to combine text, images and video into one story and share it on any platform.", "died": "It was built for the web when users moved to phone apps such as Instagram, and it could not raise more money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1200-mixed-media-labs" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Qwiki produced narrated videos from text in 2010 and closed because each video cost too much to make and nobody paid for it. Tout and Mixed Media Labs gave consumers free tools and lost them to the social networks. Pixelpipe posted to networks that later closed their APIs and added the same function themselves. All four depended on platforms that they did not own, and none had a paying customer with a repeating need.", "Three things differ for Revid. First, the customer is a business that needs new videos every week as marketing and pays from US$39 a month. Second, the video is made by models that are rented per second, so the cost of a video is known before it is made and is charged to the customer through credits. Third, TikTok, YouTube and Instagram now offer official publishing integrations. The dependence has not gone: the models belong to a few providers and the audience belongs to the platforms, and both set rules that Revid must follow. Two similar products on this site, Faceless.video (US$1 million a year, August 2024) and AutoShorts.ai (US$97,000 a month, May 2025), sell automated faceless channels to creators. Revid reports about five times the AutoShorts figure, sells mainly to founders and small businesses, and charges by the second." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The size, not without his audience.", "text": "Each step of the method is open to one person: take over a small product that its maker has left, watch what customers do with it, and build for that use. The size is another matter. The founder had money from an earlier sale, more than 210,000 followers on X, and a studio whose products send customers to each other. He also writes that every AI video tool now has the same models, and Revid's own figure fell by about a quarter between February and September 2026.", "steps": [ "Look for a small product with users whose maker has stopped working on it, and offer a share of its future revenue so that you need little cash.", "Charge from the first day, and change one-time licenses to subscriptions if the use repeats.", "Find the use that customers return for every week, and build a separate product for it from the same code.", "Build one free tool for each search query that your customers type into Google.", "Price by usage when each use has a real cost, and lower the price when your cost falls." ], "open": "Small tools with users and no active maker, in fields that new models have just changed: audio, music video, product photography, presentations." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Self-reported, and the word MRR is used loosely", "text": "All Revid figures are the founder's posts and his own charts. The chart behind the US$680,000 figure is titled 30-day revenue, which can include one-time credit packs, and its last point reads about US$660,000. TrustMRR, which verifies revenue through payment processors, answered \"Not found\" for the names revid, revid-ai, revidai and tmaker on 13 October 2026. The September 2026 figure of US$500,000 is a round number in a post that promotes the product. Latka's estimate for July 2025 is about one ninth of the founder's figure. The one outside check is indirect: the Stripe-verified revenue of SuperX agrees with its line on the same chart." }, { "title": "Revenue has fallen since February 2026", "text": "The founder's own figures go down: US$680,000 on 18 February 2026, about US$660,000 on his chart of 9 March, \"more than US$600,000\" on 26 April, and US$500,000 on 28 September, a fall of about 26% in seven months. From March to September 2026 he describes the whole studio with the same figure, US$1 million a month, while the list of products grew from five to seven. In August 2026 he wrote that most of the AI video tools he advised \"dipped\" in the last six months, and he cut Revid's credit prices by half. On 20 July 2026 he wrote that churn has cost the studio more growth than anything else. His chart also shows a fall of about 8% in the summer of 2025, after which growth returned; no source shows yet if it returns this time." }, { "title": "Two cost statements that do not agree", "text": "On 8 August 2026 he wrote that he spends more than US$300,000 a month on AI models. On 5 September 2026 he listed the spending of the whole studio for August: US$269,250 in total, of which US$68,000 for AI and APIs. Both cannot be exact. The lines of the second list also add up to US$17,000 less than its total. Profit has not been published; the only statement is \"very decent margin\"." }, { "title": "Every video is bought from a few model providers", "text": "By the founder's figures, a 30-second video costs about US$3 in model fees, and a customer makes 3 to 10 attempts for one good result. Google's public price list on 13 October 2026 gives US$0.40 per second for Veo 3.1 Standard and US$0.10 for Veo 3.1 Fast; a Growth customer pays Revid US$0.39 per second for Veo 3, and Revid does not say which version it buys or at what price. If customers spend all their credits on the most expensive models, the margin on a plan can be small. The founder also states that all competitors rent the same models, so the video quality is no protection." }, { "title": "YouTube does not pay for mass-produced video", "text": "YouTube's monetization policy page, read 13 October 2026, says that since 15 July 2025 the rule once named \"repetitious content\" is named \"inauthentic content\" and covers content that is \"repetitive or mass-produced\". Its examples of content that cannot earn money include AI-generated content made with generic templates and image slideshows with little narrative. Revid sells Auto-Mode workers that create a new video on a schedule and can post it, and names operators of faceless channels among its customers. A customer who expects advertising income from such a channel is the case this rule describes." }, { "title": "TikTok labels AI video and limits automation", "text": "TikTok's Community Guidelines, effective 24 September 2026, require a clear label when AI is used to show realistic people or scenes, list \"Using automation to run many accounts or send repetitive content\" as spam, and keep low-quality or unoriginal content out of the For You feed. Revid posts through the official integrations, so a change in these rules or in the integrations changes the product on the same day." }, { "title": "One founder, seven products, mixed reviews", "text": "The founder wrote in August 2026 that he still does customer support on all 6 products, and a seventh was launched in September. Revid's own page reports 4.0 of 5 on Trustpilot from 301 reviews. The Product Hunt page shows 4.1 from 7 reviews, with complaints about credits, reliability and support. A competitor, Higgsfield, bought five sponsor places on TrustMRR for US$7,495 a month in September 2026, which shows what rivals spend on marketing." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.revid.ai" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/revid-ai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Tibo Louis-Lucas on X, 28 September 2026: I acquired Typeframes for $50,000 and turned it into an asset generating $500,000 per month", "url": "https://x.com/tibo_maker/status/2104526662910025988", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the headline figure and the purchase price. The post carries a demo video and no chart." }, { "title": "Tibo Louis-Lucas on X, 18 February 2026: $680k MRR with a team of 4", "url": "https://x.com/tibo_maker/status/2024068923256168688", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com, and looked at the attached chart \"Revid.ai - 30-day revenue\". Source for the highest published figure, the team size and the dated curve." }, { "title": "Tibo Louis-Lucas on X, 9 March 2026: yes, I crossed $1,000,000 / month", "url": "https://x.com/tibo_maker/status/2030954308326273489", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com, and looked at the attached chart \"All Projects\". Source for the portfolio total and the line of each product." }, { "title": "Peter Yang, Creator Economy newsletter, 26 April 2026: How This Solo Founder Bootstrapped 5 AI Products to 1M+ / Month", "url": "https://creatoreconomy.so/p/how-this-solo-founder-bootstrapped-to-1m-a-month-tibo-louis-lucas", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public part: the introduction, the chapter list, the chart caption and the five rules. The rest is for paying subscribers. Source for the April 2026 figure." }, { "title": "Tibo Louis-Lucas on X, 27 April 2026: let me introduce myself again", "url": "https://x.com/tibo_maker/status/2048696207652896877", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the 2022 sale, the year he left the buyer, the statement on investors and the 2025 milestone." }, { "title": "Revid: About page and key facts, last updated 12 October 2026", "url": "https://www.revid.ai/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's own page. Source for the founders, the legal entity TMAKER SARL, the April 2024 rename, the sign-ups, the models and the review score." }, { "title": "The Bootstrapped Founder (Arvid Kahl), 24 January 2024: Thibault Louis-Lucas, Selling a $10M SaaS and Building Another One", "url": "https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/thibault-louis-lucas-selling-a-10m-saas-and-building-another-one/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the transcript section on Typeframes. Source for the September 2023 takeover, the revenue-share deal, the US$4,000 of MRR and the first developer." }, { "title": "Tibo Louis-Lucas on X, 30 April 2024: Looking for a CO-FOUNDER", "url": "https://x.com/tibo_maker/status/1785262592333689328", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the US$8,000 of MRR, the shared video editor and the Remotion and Next.js stack." }, { "title": "Tibo Louis-Lucas on X, 24 June 2024: LAUNCH DAY", "url": "https://x.com/tibo_maker/status/1805134609182810469", "grade": "C", "how": "Read as the quoted post inside his reply of the same day (status 1805214927583322300), through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the US$10,000 of MRR and the shared subscription." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: revid.ai, launched 2024", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/revid-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the maker's launch comment and the review summary. Source for the nine months of work on Typeframes and the review score." }, { "title": "Tibo Louis-Lucas on X, 22 August 2024: Should I kill Typeframes?", "url": "https://x.com/tibo_maker/status/1826564175453171939", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the one-time use of product videos and the shared code base." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers (James Fleischmann), 11 September 2024: Here's how Tibo sold two products for $8M, and why he'll never do it again", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/heres-how-tibo-sold-two-products-for-8m-and-why-he-ll-never-do-it-again-iwykhfENoZqJgRLU33zv", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public part; the rest needs an account. Source for the US$28,000 a month of three products." }, { "title": "Revid pricing page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://www.revid.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, plans and questions. Source for the pricing table." }, { "title": "Revid AI Credit Costs: Complete Reference, last updated October 2026", "url": "https://www.revid.ai/llm/revid-ai-credit-costs.md", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's own table of credits per 5 seconds for each model." }, { "title": "Tibo Louis-Lucas on X, 8 August 2026: as someone who spends more than $300,000 / month in AI models", "url": "https://x.com/tibo_maker/status/2085999680186450326", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the model cost per second and the monthly spending claim." }, { "title": "Tibo Louis-Lucas on X, 5 September 2026: I spent $269,250 in August", "url": "https://x.com/tibo_maker/status/2096169005446766743", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the spending list of the whole studio." }, { "title": "Tibo Louis-Lucas on X, 13 August 2026: we just cut AI video prices in HALF on Revid", "url": "https://x.com/tibo_maker/status/2087827339157623294", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Tibo Louis-Lucas on X, 18 August 2026: Revid isn't a video generator anymore", "url": "https://x.com/tibo_maker/status/2089699020696371359", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the rebuilt product and the statement that all tools have the same models." }, { "title": "Tibo Louis-Lucas on X, 27 August 2026: I've advised at least 7 AI video gen tool and most of them dipped", "url": "https://x.com/tibo_maker/status/2092949060147634346", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Tibo Louis-Lucas on X, 13 October 2026: we collected 100k+ payments on Revid in less than a year", "url": "https://x.com/tibo_maker/status/2109981296369807417", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com, and looked at the attached image with the count of 101,491 payments." }, { "title": "Tibo Louis-Lucas on X, 27 May 2026: who would be interested in buying share of my holding company?", "url": "https://x.com/tibo_maker/status/2059546985376383392", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Tibo Louis-Lucas on X, 17 September 2026: tools I pay for to run my $1m MRR portfolio", "url": "https://x.com/tibo_maker/status/2100559180981514461", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Shows the portfolio figure that he used in September 2026." }, { "title": "Tibo Louis-Lucas on X, 19 September 2026: my 7 co-makers who build with me", "url": "https://x.com/tibo_maker/status/2101242456154993130", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Tibo Louis-Lucas on X, 15 September 2026: I paid $1,499 for an ad on TrustMRR", "url": "https://x.com/tibo_maker/status/2099878708982980825", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com, with the quoted post by the owner of TrustMRR on the US$7,495 a month paid by Higgsfield." }, { "title": "TrustMRR profile: SuperX (another product of the same studio)", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/superx.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile. Revenue verified through a Stripe API key, last synced 12 October 2026. Used only to test the founder's chart; it holds no Revid data. Requests for revid, revid-ai, revidai and tmaker returned \"Not found\"." }, { "title": "Latka company page: revid.ai revenue 2025, estimate", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/revid.ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A third-party estimate of revenue and a headcount from LinkedIn, both for July 2025." }, { "title": "YouTube Help: YouTube channel monetization policies, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1311392?hl=en", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the 15 July 2025 update and on generic or repetitive content. The platform's own rule page." }, { "title": "TikTok Community Guidelines, Integrity and Authenticity, effective 24 September 2026", "url": "https://www.tiktok.com/community-guidelines/en/integrity-authenticity", "grade": "C", "how": "The page loads by script; read the encoded text inside the page code. Sections on AI-generated content, spam and For You feed eligibility." }, { "title": "Google: Gemini API pricing, Veo 3.1, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the Veo 3.1 table of prices per second. The provider's public list price; Revid's own contract price is not public." }, { "title": "Tibo Maker (tmaker.io), home page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://www.tmaker.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's own site. Source for the list of seven products and the portfolio claim." }, { "title": "Collab365 Spaces, 29 April 2026: Solo founder scales AI tools to over $1m a month without staff", "url": "https://spaces.collab365.com/posts/solo-founder-scales-ai-tools-to-over-1m-a-month-wi-GIx6v9", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A short summary of Peter Yang's interview, not an independent source. Its title says \"without staff\", which the founder's own posts contradict." }, { "title": "Typist: summary of Peter Yang's video interview of 26 April 2026", "url": "https://iamtypist.dev/tools/youtube-summary/how-this-solo-ai-founder-bootstrapped-5-products-to-1m-month-tibo-louis-lucas-0UnZnonMN9o", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. An AI-written summary of the video, so its details can be imprecise; the video itself could not be downloaded. Used only as a second account of the Typeframes change and of the use of contractors." }, { "title": "Tibo Louis-Lucas on X, 20 July 2026: churn has cost us more growth than anything else", "url": "https://x.com/tibo_maker/status/2079136760580235437", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through the account timeline endpoint of api.fxtwitter.com, which returned his posts from 20 May to 13 October 2026. The same download was searched for Revid figures; the only one after April 2026 is the post of 28 September." }, { "title": "Tibo Louis-Lucas on X, 22 August 2026: higher price = lower churn", "url": "https://x.com/tibo_maker/status/2091095568005116164", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through the account timeline endpoint of api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the statement that he still does support on all 6 products." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/neural-frames/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/neural-frames.md", "slug": "neural-frames", "name": "Neural Frames", "country": "Germany", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI music-video generator for musicians", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-13", "launchLabel": "9 January 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$120K a month, June 2025", "sticker": "$1.4M/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 1440000, "months": 29, "teamLabel": "1 founder, alone in November 2023, 5 people in February 2025, 17 names on the About page in October 2026", "fundingLabel": "None; AWS cloud credits for the first version", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "video", "channel": "search", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Video" ], "product": "A web application that turns a song into a music video. The musician uploads an audio file; a feature named Autopilot writes a storyboard, renders each scene with a rented video model and cuts the scenes to the beat. Customers pay a subscription from US$39 a month that includes credits, and buy more credits when they run out.", "why": "It began in January 2023 as an easy web interface for animation with Stable Diffusion, when the alternative was an open-source library that only programmers could run. Three months later the founder rebuilt it for one group of customers: musicians, who need a video for every song they release and cannot pay a film crew. He calls this the best decision he made.", "summary": [ "Neural Frames is an AI music-video generator, a web application that produces a video for a song. A musician uploads an audio file. A feature named Autopilot analyses the rhythm and the structure of the song, writes a storyboard, and sends each scene to a text-to-video model, a neural network that produces a short video clip from a written description. The result is audio-reactive, which means that cuts and effects follow the beat of the music. Customers pay a subscription from US$39 a month that includes credits, units that are spent for each rendered clip, and they can buy more credits at any time.", "Nicolai Klemke, a German physicist who did his PhD at the DESY research centre in Hamburg, released the first version on 9 January 2023 as an easy interface for animation with the open-source image model Stable Diffusion. In April 2023 he rebuilt it for musicians. He worked alone for most of 2023 and reported US$17,000 of monthly recurring revenue at the end of October 2023. He then reported US$500,000 of revenue for the year 2024, nearly US$70,000 for the month of February 2025 with five people, and a Stripe total of US$1 million since launch on 28 April 2025. On 4 June 2025 he entered US$120,000 a month on his Indie Hackers page, which is a run rate of US$1.44 million a year. He says the company has never taken outside capital.", "Every revenue number on this page is a founder statement, grade C: an interview, posts on X, a screenshot that he published, and a self-reported field. No payment processor or buyer has confirmed them, and the last public figure is from June 2025. Two other numbers circulate. Starter Story's US$204,000 a year is the October 2023 figure times 12. Latka's US$871,200 a year for October 2024 is an estimate, and it is higher than the founder's own total for 2024. In October 2026 the company's About page lists 17 people. The page also shows what happened to earlier companies with a similar promise." ], "factsCaption": "From US$17,000 a month in October 2023 to US$120,000 a month in June 2025, with a team of about five and no outside capital, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a founder statement, a value read from a screenshot that he published, a reviewer, or an estimate by a third party that says so. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a physics PhD and a first web project to US$120,000 a month, in 29 months, and then to a company with 17 names on its About page. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Neural Frames prices read from the company's pricing page on 13 October 2026 (grade C)", "note": "Yearly billing is shown as 33% off: US$312, US$792 and US$2,388 a year. Credits arrive every month, also on yearly billing. Unused credits carry over while the subscription is active, up to 300% of one month's amount. More credits can be bought at any time as top-ups; the top-up prices and the cost calculator load by script and could not be read. The page says that the cost of an Autopilot video depends on its length and on the chosen model, and that the smallest plan is not recommended for Autopilot. Calculated at the monthly price: a credit costs about 1.6 US cents on the smallest plan and about 1.2 US cents on the largest.", "rows": [ [ "Neural Knight", "26", "39", "2,400 credits a month; 7 AI models; 1080p, no 4K" ], [ "Neural Ninja", "66", "99", "7,200 credits a month; 10 AI models; 4K upscaling" ], [ "Neural Nirvana", "199", "299", "24,000 credits a month; 10 AI models; priority upscaling" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue per month, 4 June 2025", "value": "US$120,000", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder's own entry on the Indie Hackers product page. The page says that the figure was last updated on June 4, 2025 and has not been independently verified. The page calls it monthly revenue and does not say how much of it is recurring.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the June 2025 figure", "value": "US$1.44 million a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$120,000 times 12. This is the headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the month of February 2025", "value": "nearly US$70,000, profitable", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X, 27 February 2025. In the same post: five people, no outside capital.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Total revenue from January 2023 to 28 April 2025", "value": "€876,800, which was US$1,000,249 on that day", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X with a screenshot of the Stripe \"Gross volume\" chart and a currency conversion. He wrote that this is revenue and that profit is much lower. The screenshot was published by the founder; nobody outside checked it.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Highest week on that Stripe chart", "value": "about €18,500", "grade": "C", "note": "Read from the screenshot: the top label of the weekly chart is €18,482.09, and the highest point is in April 2025.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly rate at that highest week", "value": "about US$91,000 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: €18,482.09 at the rate of 1.1408 from the same post is US$21,084 a week; times 52, divided by 12. It lies between the February figure and the June figure.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the year 2024", "value": "US$500,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X, 9 January 2025: \"Last year, we hit $500k in revenue.\" Calculated: an average of about US$41,700 a month.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, end of October 2023", "value": "US$17,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview with Starter Story, published 16 November 2023. More than 400 paying users, 1 founder, 0 employees. Starter Story's list of AI businesses shows the same figure as US$204,000 a year, which is US$17,000 times 12.", "src": [ 5, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from October 2023 to June 2025", "value": "7.1 times in 20 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$120,000 divided by US$17,000.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue of the first version, early 2023", "value": "about US$400 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Latka's estimate for October 2024", "value": "US$871,200 a year, 4 employees", "grade": "C", "note": "A third-party estimate, marked EST. on Latka's page, which also says that the company has not published its revenue. It is 1.74 times the founder's own total for the whole of 2024. The headcount is from LinkedIn.", "src": [ 6, 4 ] }, { "fact": "An event organiser's figure, 1 May 2025", "value": "more than US$1 million of yearly recurring revenue, without funding", "grade": "C", "note": "Imagine AI Live, announcing his talk. A third party, not a founder figure. It agrees with the Stripe chart of three days earlier: US$21,084 a week times 52 is about US$1.10 million.", "src": [ 12, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Cloud cost, October 2023", "value": "about US$7,000 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview: the main cost of the business. Calculated: 41% of the US$17,000 of monthly recurring revenue at that time.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Share of single credit purchases, August 2025", "value": "almost 50% of revenue", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X, 3 August 2025, with a weekly revenue chart whose amounts are hidden. About half of revenue is therefore not a subscription.", "src": [ 19 ] }, { "fact": "Weekly revenue, November 2025", "value": "an all-time record, two weeks in a row; no amount published", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X, 7 November 2025. This is the last public revenue statement that was found.", "src": [ 18 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 person in November 2023, 5 in February 2025, 17 names in October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Starter Story interview, founder's post, and the company's About page read on 13 October 2026. The About page says that he worked alone for a little under a year.", "src": [ 5, 2, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post, February 2025: \"we've never raised outside capital\". The site says \"No VC money\" in October 2026. The first version ran on AWS cloud credits.", "src": [ 2, 8, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's background", "value": "PhD in physics at DESY in Hamburg, one year in a job, then the Entrepreneur First accelerator", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview. A CrossRef record lists a 2020 conference paper under his name on high-harmonic generation from solids, which is the laser subject that he describes. He left the accelerator without a company.", "src": [ 5, 41 ] }, { "fact": "Videos made on the platform", "value": "1 million by February 2025, more than 2 million by October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 12 February 2025 and the company's pricing page.", "src": [ 24, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Autopilot videos exported in one week, October 2026", "value": "more than 3,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X, 12 October 2026. Calculated: one finished video about every 3.4 minutes.", "src": [ 29 ] }, { "fact": "Email list", "value": "313,000 addresses in June 2025, 500,000 in June 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's posts on X about two newsletters.", "src": [ 25, 26 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue through affiliates, total by January 2025", "value": "US$40,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X, 5 January 2025.", "src": [ 32 ] }, { "fact": "Taxes and social contributions, August 2026", "value": "more than €800,000 a year", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post in German, 13 August 2026, written in the second person. It does not name the company. Not verified as a company figure, and it is not a revenue figure.", "src": [ 30 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue goal", "value": "10 times the February 2025 revenue by December 2027", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 27 February 2025. Calculated: about US$700,000 a month.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the June 2025 figure", "value": "29 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: January 2023 to June 2025.", "src": [ 4, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2019 to 2022", "what": "During a physics PhD at DESY in Hamburg, Klemke writes simulation code and decides that he wants to keep programming. After one year in a job he joins the Entrepreneur First accelerator and leaves it without a company.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "Late 2022", "what": "He starts an interface for Stable Diffusion animation, alone, in about seven weeks of programming with help from ChatGPT. It is his first web application. AWS cloud credits pay for the servers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 8 ] }, { "when": "9 January 2023", "what": "The first version is released.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "15 January 2023", "what": "His Show HN post gets 247 points and 72 comments. This and a Reddit post overload the servers. The first version makes about US$400 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11, 5 ] }, { "when": "April 2023", "what": "He takes the site offline, rewrites it for musicians with a timeline editor and custom models, and releases it again.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 35 ] }, { "when": "End of October 2023", "what": "US$17,000 of monthly recurring revenue, more than 400 paying users, 130,000 visitors since April. Cloud costs are about US$7,000 a month. He is still the only person.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "2024", "what": "US$500,000 of revenue in the year. Latka counts 4 employees on LinkedIn in October.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 6 ] }, { "when": "December 2024", "what": "He writes that text-to-video rendering is still extremely expensive and that an unlimited plan at US$99 was hard to make profitable. He cuts AWS costs with reserved instances and spot GPUs.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13, 22 ] }, { "when": "February 2025", "what": "One million videos created. Nearly US$70,000 of revenue in the month, profitable, five people, no outside capital.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 24, 2 ] }, { "when": "28 April 2025", "what": "The Stripe total since January 2023 passes US$1 million.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "7 to 15 May 2025", "what": "Autopilot: a full-length music video from a song in two clicks. A quiet release on 7 May, the public release on 15 May. One day later he writes that usage has moved to the new product, that revenue is up and that margins are down.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 16, 15 ] }, { "when": "4 June 2025", "what": "He enters US$120,000 a month on Indie Hackers. On the same day he writes that the company made more in one day than his monthly PhD salary, and that all of it goes to people and servers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 17 ] }, { "when": "June 2025", "what": "Google traffic falls. The company starts paid advertising and reports a conversion rate five times higher after tests. Some customers cost more to serve than they pay.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 20, 14 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "A weekly revenue record two weeks in a row. The company looks for a third engineer.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 18, 31 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "Short-Form Studio, templates for vertical clips, is announced to an email list of 500,000 addresses.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 26 ] }, { "when": "August 2026", "what": "Interview on the TBPN programme on 10 August. On 21 August the two original editors, frame-by-frame and text-to-video, are retired in favour of Autopilot and Short-Form Studio.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 28, 27 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "17 names on the About page, which still says \"No VC money\". More than 3,000 Autopilot videos are exported in one week. No revenue figure has been published since November 2025.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 29 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Timing", "text": "In January 2023 the open-source library Deforum could make these animations, but the user had to copy a code repository and run it. He put the same technique behind a web page. Later, AI music tools such as Suno made it easy to produce a song, and the founder sees each of these songs as one that needs a video; in February 2026 he wrote: \"Audio supply is going through the roof, and we're here to visualize all of it!\"" }, { "title": "One customer group", "text": "The first tagline was \"Text-to-video for everybody\". Many early users were musicians and he had made music himself, so he rebuilt the product for music videos. He writes that this made the product easier to build and easier to sell." }, { "title": "Search traffic first, advertising later", "text": "Paid ads failed in 2023. Pages and blog posts written for search terms with little competition, free small tools and YouTube tutorials brought the customers, and Google was the source of a large part of revenue until 2025. When the ranking fell in 2025, the company started paid advertising and tested its sign-up pages." }, { "title": "Credits pass the rendering cost to the customer", "text": "A flat unlimited plan at US$99 was hard to make profitable. Plans now include a fixed number of credits, and each clip costs credits according to its length and model. By August 2025 single credit purchases were almost half of revenue." }, { "title": "Autopilot", "text": "The timeline editor gave control but took long to learn. Autopilot produces a full video from a song in two clicks and in less than 15 minutes. Within a week most usage had moved to it, and in August 2026 the old editors were retired." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's interview and posts and from the company's site. They are grade C.", "items": [ "The first version used Stable Diffusion with the frame-by-frame animation technique of the open-source library Deforum. The April 2023 version added a timeline and custom models trained for each user.", "A React frontend and Python on the servers. The founder had not built a web application before; he wrote the first version in about seven weeks with help from ChatGPT.", "AWS, with GPU servers that scale up and down with demand. In March 2025 the main backend was still one EC2 instance that served 100,000 people a month, with about 20 requests a second at peak.", "In October 2026 the site names Kling, Seedance and Runway as the video models that it offers. These models belong to other companies; Neural Frames adds the song analysis, the storyboard, character consistency and the editing.", "Stripe for subscriptions and credits, PostHog for analytics, Rewardful for affiliates, who had brought US$40,000 of revenue by January 2025.", "Marketing through search pages, free tools, YouTube tutorials and an email list that grew from 313,000 to 500,000 addresses in one year." ], "src": [ 5, 23, 10, 32, 25, 26 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database promised easy animation or video for people without film skills, rented GPUs to consumers for a flat monthly price, or built a creative tool on music that they did not own. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Fuzzwich", "years": "2007 to 2010", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Animation for everyone: drag, drop and animate, with no training.", "died": "Its desktop tool lost to Adobe and to mobile apps. It found no business model and no further funding.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1655-fuzzwich" }, { "name": "Real Artists", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$3M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A cloud animation studio for independent artists and small studios.", "died": "Larger tool makers added the same collaboration features to products that the customers already used. Small customers could not pay enough to fund growth.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1073-real-artists" }, { "name": "Viddy", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$30M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Filters and effects that make amateur phone video look professional.", "died": "Instagram added video in June 2013 for its existing users. People tried Viddy once and did not return.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2190-viddy" }, { "name": "Blade (Shadow)", "years": "2015 to 2021", "funding": "US$110M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "A high-end gaming PC streamed from the cloud for about US$35 a month.", "died": "Each subscriber needed about US$1,000 of GPU hardware, which became outdated before the subscription had paid for it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2162-blade-shadow" }, { "name": "Jamglue", "years": "2006 to 2009", "funding": "US$200K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Music remixing in the browser for anyone, without studio equipment.", "died": "Audio processing in a browser was too weak at the time, and permissions for remixed songs were costly and complicated. SoundCloud took the users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1671-jamglue" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Fuzzwich, Real Artists and Viddy gave people without training a way to make animation or polished video, and each lost when a larger company added the same function to a product that people already used. Blade rented GPUs to consumers for a flat monthly price, and the hardware cost more than the subscriptions returned. Jamglue let people remix music that belonged to others and could not afford the permissions.", "Three things differ for Neural Frames. First, the customer has a repeating need: every released song needs a video for YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. Second, the company owns no GPUs. It rents servers, uses video models from other companies, and charges the customer credits for each clip; it had a flat unlimited plan and no longer offers one. Third, the customer uploads the song and stays responsible for the rights to it. The risks have not gone. The founder reports low or negative margins on some customers, and the makers of the video models sell video generation to the same musicians." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The January 2023 opening, no.", "text": "A web page in front of Stable Diffusion animation was new in January 2023 and is not new now. What can be repeated is the sequence: put a hard open-source technique behind a simple interface, watch who pays, rebuild the product for that one group, and charge per unit of rendering so that the model cost is the customer's cost. The founder had no web development experience and no funding.", "steps": [ "Take an open-source AI technique that works but needs programming skill, and put it behind a web page.", "Release early, also to Hacker News and Reddit, and look at who the paying users are.", "Rebuild the product and every page of the site for that one group.", "Sell credits per rendered unit, not unlimited use, when each output costs GPU time.", "Write search pages and free small tools for the exact words that this group types." ], "open": "Other groups that need media for every item they publish and cannot pay a studio: podcasters, audiobook authors, game modders, teachers. The video-model makers serve everybody, so the opening is in the workflow of one group." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Self-reported, and the last figure is from June 2025", "text": "All revenue numbers are founder statements. The US$120,000 a month is a field that the founder filled in himself, and the Stripe total is a screenshot that he posted. Since June 2025 he has published records without amounts. Latka's estimate for October 2024 is 1.74 times his own total for 2024, so third-party estimates of this company are not reliable." }, { "title": "Rented GPUs and low margins", "text": "Cloud servers cost about US$7,000 a month when recurring revenue was US$17,000 a month, which is 41%. In December 2024 he wrote that text-to-video is still extremely expensive. After Autopilot he wrote \"revenue is up, margins are down\", and in June 2025 that margins are \"so bad if not to say negative\" on some customers. The company was profitable in February 2025; no profit statement was found after Autopilot." }, { "title": "The model makers sell to the same customers", "text": "Neural Frames offers the Kling, Seedance and Runway video models, which belong to other companies. Those companies, and Google and OpenAI, also sell video generation directly to anyone. Runway alone raised more than US$300 million in April 2025. A PCMag reviewer wrote in May 2026 that the available models are not the most advanced and that a video can also be made by prompting Google's Veo directly. The founder's answer is that the storyboard and image steps around the model matter as much as the model. He also writes of \"the great commoditization of the late 2020's\", and that competitors give away video generation with investors' money." }, { "title": "Music rights", "text": "The pricing page says that the customer is responsible for the rights to any music that is uploaded. Some customers bring songs made with AI music tools, and the site has a page for Suno songs. Such tools have been in dispute with record companies: Universal Music and Udio settled copyright litigation in October 2025. Warner Music and Suno announced in November 2025 that Suno will move to licensed models in 2026 and will limit downloads. A song that cannot be downloaded cannot be uploaded to another tool." }, { "title": "Search ranking", "text": "Google was the source of a large part of revenue. In 2025 the ranking began to move up and down, sometimes to the second page for important search terms, and the founder writes that AI search terms have become more competitive. The company now also pays for advertising." }, { "title": "A larger team with fixed costs", "text": "The headline figure was reached with about five people. The About page now lists 17, and in September 2026 the founder wrote that he wants to hire more. Salaries are fixed costs, and no revenue figure for 2026 is public, so revenue per person cannot be calculated today." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.neuralframes.com" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Indie Hackers product page: neural frames revenue, self-reported, last updated 4 June 2025", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/product/neural-frames/revenue", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The page states the monthly revenue, the date of the last update and that the figure has not been independently verified." }, { "title": "Nicolai Klemke on X, 27 February 2025: reintroduction, nearly $70k this month, five people, never raised outside capital", "url": "https://x.com/nicolaiklemke/status/1895100208825917463", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full text through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the February 2025 revenue, the team size, the funding statement and the revenue goal." }, { "title": "Nicolai Klemke on X, 28 April 2025: crossed a nice milestone today, with a Stripe gross volume screenshot", "url": "https://x.com/nicolaiklemke/status/1916913883912024535", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the text and both attached images: the Stripe chart with €876.8K since January 2023 and a conversion to US$1,000,249.06." }, { "title": "Nicolai Klemke on X, 9 January 2025: two years since the first version, $500k in revenue last year", "url": "https://x.com/nicolaiklemke/status/1877366478099361882", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full text through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the launch date and the 2024 revenue." }, { "title": "Starter Story, 16 November 2023: How A Doctorate In Physics Built An AI Video Generation Tool [$17K MRR]", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/neural-frames", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview. Source for the background, the first version, the relaunch, the October 2023 figures, the cloud cost and the early marketing." }, { "title": "Latka company page: Neural Frames revenue, estimate for October 2024", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/neuralframes", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A third-party estimate marked EST., and a headcount from LinkedIn." }, { "title": "Starter Story list: AI-based businesses and how much they make", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/ideas/ai-based-business/how-much-do-they-make", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the entry for neural frames: US$204,000 a year, from the US$17,000 of the interview." }, { "title": "Neural Frames About page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://www.neuralframes.com/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 17 team names, the solo first year and the statement about VC money." }, { "title": "Neural Frames pricing page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://www.neuralframes.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the plans, the credit rules, the two million videos and the statement on music rights. The cost calculator loads by script and could not be read." }, { "title": "Neural Frames home page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://www.neuralframes.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the video models that are offered." }, { "title": "Hacker News, 15 January 2023: Show HN: Create your own video clips with Stable Diffusion", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34389041", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the record through the Hacker News search API: title, date, points, number of comments and author. The comments were not read." }, { "title": "Imagine AI Live on X, 1 May 2025: Neural Frames powers $1M+ in ARR without funding", "url": "https://x.com/ImagineAILive/status/1917987383527784778", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full text in the founder's timeline, where he reposted it. A statement by an event organiser." }, { "title": "Nicolai Klemke on X, 10 December 2024: text2video is still extremely expensive", "url": "https://x.com/nicolaiklemke/status/1866419136999391255", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full text through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Nicolai Klemke on X, 12 June 2025: day 924, margins on some customers", "url": "https://x.com/nicolaiklemke/status/1933185236306731436", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full text through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Nicolai Klemke on X, 16 May 2025: revenue is up, margins are down", "url": "https://x.com/nicolaiklemke/status/1923498284406251973", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full text and the quoted post through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Nicolai Klemke on X, 15 May 2025: Today, we're releasing Autopilot", "url": "https://x.com/nicolaiklemke/status/1922980444665946147", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full text in the founder's timeline, with the post of 8 May 2025 about the quiet release." }, { "title": "Nicolai Klemke on X, 4 June 2025: more money in one day than a month of PhD salary", "url": "https://x.com/nicolaiklemke/status/1930382903701090810", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full text through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Nicolai Klemke on X, 7 November 2025: all-time weekly revenue record for the second week in a row", "url": "https://x.com/nicolaiklemke/status/1986884987333857433", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the text and the attached image, which shows customer ratings and no amounts." }, { "title": "Nicolai Klemke on X, 3 August 2025: single credit purchases are almost 50% of revenue", "url": "https://x.com/nicolaiklemke/status/1951981383540199689", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the text and the attached chart. The amounts on the chart are hidden." }, { "title": "Nicolai Klemke on X, 25 June 2025: day 938, Google traffic, paid ads and conversion rate", "url": "https://x.com/nicolaiklemke/status/1937933805438087467", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full text in the founder's timeline." }, { "title": "Nicolai Klemke on X, 25 September 2025: Google rankings as a risk", "url": "https://x.com/nicolaiklemke/status/1971203026275733579", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full text in the founder's timeline." }, { "title": "Nicolai Klemke on X, 19 December 2024: cost cutting on AWS", "url": "https://x.com/nicolaiklemke/status/1869674086130999638", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full text in the founder's timeline." }, { "title": "Nicolai Klemke on X, 22 March 2025: the main backend is one EC2 instance", "url": "https://x.com/nicolaiklemke/status/1903533481306550500", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full text in the founder's timeline." }, { "title": "Nicolai Klemke on X, 12 February 2025: one million videos created", "url": "https://x.com/nicolaiklemke/status/1889747724548911259", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the text in the founder's timeline." }, { "title": "Nicolai Klemke on X, 11 June 2025: day 923, newsletter to 313k people", "url": "https://x.com/nicolaiklemke/status/1932847206303990256", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the text in the founder's timeline." }, { "title": "Nicolai Klemke on X, 10 June 2026: newsletter to 500k people, Short-Form Studio", "url": "https://x.com/nicolaiklemke/status/2064732625701371965", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full text and the quoted company post through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Nicolai Klemke on X, 21 August 2026: goodbye to the frame-by-frame and text-to-video editors", "url": "https://x.com/nicolaiklemke/status/2090812309576785985", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full text through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Nicolai Klemke on X, 11 August 2026: on new video models and the TBPN interview", "url": "https://x.com/nicolaiklemke/status/2087194300085936206", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full text through api.fxtwitter.com, with his post of 10 August 2026 that quotes the programme's guest list. The interview itself was not heard." }, { "title": "Nicolai Klemke on X, 12 October 2026: more than 3000 Autopilot videos exported last week", "url": "https://x.com/nicolaiklemke/status/2109570017318867020", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full text through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Nicolai Klemke on X, 13 August 2026, in German: more than 800,000€ a year in taxes and social contributions", "url": "https://x.com/nicolaiklemke/status/2087854336831258688", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full text through api.fxtwitter.com. One sentence in the second person; it does not name the company." }, { "title": "Nicolai Klemke on X, 3 November 2025: We're hiring a third engineer", "url": "https://x.com/nicolaiklemke/status/1985267399361278297", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full text through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Nicolai Klemke on X, 5 January 2025: affiliates have brought in $40k in revenue", "url": "https://x.com/nicolaiklemke/status/1875917283945820329", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full text in the founder's timeline." }, { "title": "Nicolai Klemke on X, 7 October 2025: on companies that offer free access to AI video models", "url": "https://x.com/nicolaiklemke/status/1975422560566145285", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full text through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Nicolai Klemke on X, 25 September 2026: the great commoditization of the late 2020's", "url": "https://x.com/nicolaiklemke/status/2103474349961285755", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full text through api.fxtwitter.com, with his post of 24 September 2026 about hiring." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 5 June 2025: Niching down, by nicollegah", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/niching-down-pHcx4osADy88QSkWhWfu", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's short account of the first tagline and the move to music videos." }, { "title": "PCMag, 5 May 2026: I Made a Song and Music Video With AI. Can You Tell What's Wrong With Them?", "url": "https://uk.pcmag.com/ai/164766/i-made-a-song-and-music-video-with-ai-can-you-tell-whats-wrong-with-them", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on making the video. A reviewer who used Suno and Neural Frames." }, { "title": "Runway, 3 April 2025: Series D funding announcement", "url": "https://runwayml.com/news/runway-series-d-funding", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's own announcement of more than US$300 million." }, { "title": "Universal Music Group, 29 October 2025: UMG and Udio announce strategic agreements and settle copyright infringement litigation", "url": "https://www.universalmusic.com/universal-music-group-and-udio-announce-udios-first-strategic-agreements-for-new-licensed-ai-music-creation-platform/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the headline and the first paragraphs of the press release." }, { "title": "Warner Music Group, 25 November 2025: Warner Music Group and Suno forge partnership", "url": "https://www.wmg.com/news/warner-music-group-and-suno-forge-groundbreaking-partnership", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the licensed models planned for 2026 and the download limits." }, { "title": "Neural Frames page: Turn Your Suno Song into an AI Music Video, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://www.neuralframes.com/suno-to-video", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the first sections. Shows that the company addresses users of AI music tools." }, { "title": "CrossRef record: Role of intraband dynamics on circularly polarized high-harmonic generation from solids, Nicolai Klemke, 2020", "url": "https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1364/up.2020.th3b.6", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the metadata record only: title, author, conference and year. The paper itself was not read." }, { "title": "Nicolai Klemke on X, 26 February 2026: on Robert Scoble's Unaligned podcast", "url": "https://x.com/nicolaiklemke/status/2027099427505053770", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full text through api.fxtwitter.com. The podcast itself was not heard." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/castmagic/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/castmagic.md", "slug": "castmagic", "name": "Castmagic", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI content from audio and video recordings", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-13", "launchLabel": "9 February 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$1M a year run rate, November 2023", "sticker": "$1M ARR in 9 months", "outcomeUsd": 1000000, "months": 9, "teamLabel": "3 co-founders, then about 10 people in May 2024, then 2 full-time employees in August 2025", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "launches", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Marketing content" ], "product": "Upload or link a recording, such as a podcast episode, a webinar or a Zoom call, and get a transcript with speakers and timestamps. From that transcript the product writes show notes, newsletters, social posts, blog articles and quotes, and cuts captioned clips, with prompts that the customer can edit. Subscriptions are priced by the hours of recordings transcribed and start at US$19 a month.", "why": "Two podcast hosts had the show notes problem themselves and already knew many creators. A lifetime deal on AppSumo brought about 10,000 users and about US$350,000 in the first months, and paid creators and affiliates brought subscribers after that. Three founders with different skills worked for equity, so the company needed no investors.", "summary": [ "Castmagic is a content repurposing tool: it takes one long recording, such as a podcast episode, a webinar or a sales call, and writes the short pieces that are published around it: show notes, a newsletter, social posts, a blog article and captioned clips. A speech-to-text model, a program that converts recorded speech into written words, first makes a transcript. A large language model, a program that writes text from instructions, then writes each piece from that transcript and from prompts that the customer can edit. Customers pay a subscription priced by the hours of recordings transcribed.", "Blaine Bolus and Ramon Berrios, the two hosts of the business podcast DTC Pod, and Justin Tormey, a software engineer, started it with less than US$1,000 and no investors, which founders call bootstrapped: paid for by the founders and by customers only. Bolus announced it on 9 February 2023. A lifetime deal, a one-time payment for permanent access, on the deal site AppSumo in March 2023 brought about US$350,000 in sales and about 10,000 users. In November 2023, nine months after the announcement, a podcast that interviewed the founders reported US$1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR, the subscription income of one month multiplied by twelve), and Berrios later wrote that the product passed US$100,000 a month in those nine months. In May 2024 two articles based on interviews with Bolus gave almost US$2 million in ARR and a team of around ten people. In August 2025 Berrios wrote that Castmagic had two full-time employees and made \"6 figures a month\" at a profit, and in November 2025 he announced a second company.", "Every number on this page is a founder statement, on X, in interviews or on the company's AppSumo page, grade C. No payment processor or buyer has confirmed them. The two records for mid-2025 do not agree: Latka lists US$770,000 a year from a founder webinar, which is less than \"6 figures a month\". The headline is the first million, reached by three people. The page also shows that the founders have reported no growth since mid-2024, and what happened to earlier companies that sold tools for writing and packaging content." ], "factsCaption": "Three co-founders at US$1 million a year nine months after launch, a claimed peak near US$2 million in 2024, and no growth reported since, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a founder statement on X, in an interview or on a sales page, a statement that a journalist or host repeats from the founders, or a third-party record that says so. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a show notes problem on the founders' own podcast to US$1 million a year in nine months, then a peak, a smaller team and a co-founder's new company. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Castmagic prices in October 2026, read from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "Yearly billing is about 30% cheaper than monthly billing. Every plan includes a library of transcribed hours and unlimited AI outputs, and more hours can be bought. The Team plan adds seats at US$19 each per month. In May 2023 the entry plan cost US$39 a month for 200 minutes of audio a month. The AppSumo page shows a second deal with a founder message dated February 2025: yearly tiers at US$59 and US$169, and lifetime tiers at US$399, US$699 and US$999. It is marked sold out.", "rows": [ [ "Hobby", "19", "29", "30 transcribed hours, 3 seats" ], [ "Starter", "48", "69", "100 transcribed hours, 5 seats, API access" ], [ "Team", "139", "199", "400 transcribed hours, 5 seats included" ], [ "Business and Scale", "from 699", "from 999", "custom volume, sold by demo" ], [ "AppSumo lifetime tiers, 2025 deal", "399 to 999 one-time", "", "sold out in October 2026" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, November 2023", "value": "US$1 million", "grade": "C", "note": "A host of the podcast Probably Something, announcing his interview with Berrios and Bolus on 28 November 2023: \"went from $0 - $1m ARR in just 9 months\". Berrios wrote the same on Indie Hackers on 13 July 2024: \"$1M ARR in under 9 months with 0 capital\".", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month after nine months", "value": "more than US$100,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Berrios on X, 19 July 2024. His YouTube channel said \"6 figures per month\" on 8 July 2024.", "src": [ 1, 23 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from US$100,000 a month", "value": "US$1.2 million a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 100,000 times 12. It agrees with the US$1 million ARR claim for the same nine months.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the announcement to US$1 million ARR", "value": "9 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: February 2023 to November 2023. The founders also give March 2023 as the launch, the month of the AppSumo deal.", "src": [ 6, 3, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Team at that figure", "value": "3 co-founders", "grade": "C", "note": "Tormey on engineering, Bolus on product, support and community, Berrios on growth. Berrios wrote that they needed nobody else at the start and took no salary at first. He announced Castmagic as his next company on 4 September 2023; before that he ran Trend.io. No employee count for November 2023 is published.", "src": [ 1, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Starting capital and outside funding", "value": "less than US$1,000, no investors", "grade": "C", "note": "Berrios on X and Indie Hackers; Bolus wrote \"fully bootstrapped\" in August 2023; Refresh Miami wrote the same in May 2024.", "src": [ 1, 2, 15, 5, 7 ] }, { "fact": "AppSumo lifetime deal, 2023", "value": "about US$350,000 in sales, about 10,000 users", "grade": "C", "note": "Berrios in the Starter Story interview. This is one-time revenue, not recurring. The launch was prepared in two weeks.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue \"in 5 months\", 17 August 2023", "value": "US$500,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Bolus on X. He does not say whether this is a yearly rate or total sales. If it is total sales, the AppSumo deal would be 70% of it.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month in the Starter Story interview", "value": "more than US$120,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Published 22 June 2024. Berrios says in it that the company started about 10 months before, so the figure is probably from the end of 2023 or the start of 2024. The recording date is not given. He adds growth of more than 20% a month.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from US$120,000 a month", "value": "US$1.44 million a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 120,000 times 12. Starter Story rounds it to US$1.4 million in its title.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Peak claim, May 2024", "value": "almost US$2 million ARR", "grade": "C", "note": "Business Athletes newsletter, 18 May 2024, and Refresh Miami, 21 May 2024, both after talking to Bolus. In February 2025 Bolus wrote on AppSumo: \"nearly $2M in annual revenue\".", "src": [ 8, 7, 9 ] }, { "fact": "US$2 million a year as a monthly figure", "value": "US$166,667 a month, 38.9% above US$120,000", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2,000,000 divided by 12, compared with the Starter Story figure.", "src": [ 7, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Team, May 2024", "value": "around ten people", "grade": "C", "note": "Refresh Miami. Bolus told Business Athletes that the developers work from several countries.", "src": [ 7, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, August 2025", "value": "\"6 figures a month\", at a profit", "grade": "C", "note": "Berrios on X, 5 August 2025. He gives no exact figure. It is the same wording as for November 2023, and below the May 2024 claim.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Team, August 2025", "value": "2 full-time employees, offshore", "grade": "C", "note": "Berrios on X. Latka lists 7 employees in June 2025, taken from LinkedIn.", "src": [ 10, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Latka's records for June 2025", "value": "US$770,000 a year (founder webinar) and US$1 million (LinkedIn)", "grade": "C", "note": "Latka attributes the first figure to the founder at a June 2025 webinar and the second to LinkedIn. The webinar itself could not be opened: not verified.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "US$770,000 a year as a monthly figure", "value": "about US$64,167 a month, 61.5% below the US$2 million peak claim", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 770,000 divided by 12, and 1 minus 770,000 divided by 2,000,000. This is less than six figures a month, so it does not agree with the August 2025 post.", "src": [ 11, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Marketing spend", "value": "under 20% of revenue", "grade": "C", "note": "Berrios, Starter Story interview. One person ran marketing, with contractors.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Net churn", "value": "single digits", "grade": "C", "note": "Berrios, Starter Story interview. He does not give the period.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Creator program, 2023", "value": "more than 10 million views and six figures in revenue", "grade": "C", "note": "Berrios on X, 21 August 2024.", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "fact": "Users", "value": "over 60,000 in July 2024; \"over 100,000 customers\" in February 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Berrios on X and Bolus on AppSumo. The company's own pricing page said 75,000+ creators served in October 2026, so the counts do not agree.", "src": [ 14, 9, 18 ] }, { "fact": "Entry price, May 2023 and October 2026", "value": "US$39 a month, then US$29 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the monthly price of the Hobby plan is 25.6% lower. The limit changed from 200 minutes a month to a library of 30 hours.", "src": [ 19, 18 ] }, { "fact": "The same function in other products", "value": "Buzzsprout (announced May 2023), Riverside, Descript, Podbean", "grade": "C", "note": "Each company's own page or press release. All four write show notes or episode descriptions from a recording that the customer already records, edits or hosts with them.", "src": [ 24, 25, 26, 27 ] }, { "fact": "A customer's comparison with a general chat model, April 2025", "value": "30 minutes of rewriting after GPT, 2 minutes after Castmagic", "grade": "C", "note": "One customer's post, quoted by Berrios. In September 2024 Berrios wrote that Google's NotebookLM described his business better than he could.", "src": [ 28, 29 ] }, { "fact": "Sale of the company", "value": "none announced", "grade": "C", "note": "No source read for this page mentions a sale. The site was live and selling on 13 October 2026.", "src": [ 18, 20, 21 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Before 2023", "what": "Bolus and Berrios host DTC Pod, a podcast about consumer brands. All three founders had started companies before: Bolus co-founded Seated and Omnipanel, both backed by venture investors; Berrios ran Trend.io, later bought by Soona; Tormey co-founded Upside, later sold to Ampla.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 8, 20 ] }, { "when": "9 February 2023", "what": "Bolus announces castmagic.io on X: it turns podcast audio into summaries, quotes, timestamps and ready-to-post text.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "March 2023", "what": "On 9 March the product connects to the GPT-3.5 Turbo API. On 15 March the founders hold a launch panel at SXSW. A lifetime deal on AppSumo, prepared in two weeks, brings about US$350,000 and about 10,000 users.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 17, 4, 9 ] }, { "when": "26 May 2023", "what": "Buzzsprout, a podcast hosting company, announces Cohost AI, which writes episode titles, descriptions, chapter markers and transcripts as part of its hosting service.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 24 ] }, { "when": "17 August 2023", "what": "Bolus on X: \"$500K in 5 months\", with no outside money.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "4 September 2023", "what": "Berrios, whose company Trend.io was bought by Soona, announces Castmagic as his next company, with Bolus and Tormey.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13, 20 ] }, { "when": "14 November 2023", "what": "Three releases: Pages, which drafts text from several recordings, an iOS app for recording, and a Zapier app.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "when": "28 November 2023", "what": "A podcast interview with Berrios and Bolus is announced with the claim of US$0 to US$1 million ARR in nine months.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "May 2024", "what": "Almost US$2 million ARR and a team of around ten people, in two articles written after interviews with Bolus.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 8 ] }, { "when": "22 June 2024", "what": "Starter Story publishes its interview with the three founders: more than US$120,000 a month, growth above 20% a month, marketing under 20% of revenue.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "July 2024", "what": "Berrios writes that Castmagic serves over 60,000 users and processes 1 million minutes a month, and repeats US$1 million ARR in under nine months on Indie Hackers and on X.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14, 2, 1 ] }, { "when": "February 2025", "what": "A second AppSumo deal. Bolus writes there that Castmagic serves over 100,000 customers and has reached nearly US$2 million in annual revenue.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "April 2025", "what": "YouTube changes its terms and blocks downloads by other tools. Importing YouTube links into Castmagic starts to fail, and the founders tell customers to download the file themselves and upload it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "June 2025", "what": "Latka records US$770,000 a year from a founder webinar, and US$1 million and 7 employees from LinkedIn.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "5 August 2025", "what": "Berrios on X: 2 full-time employees, offshore, and \"6 figures a month\" at a profit.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "4 November 2025", "what": "Berrios announces Ripe, a new company that runs customer surveys by AI phone calls. His X profile, read on 13 October 2026, says he is building Ripe and still names Castmagic. He has not written that he left.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12, 21 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2026", "what": "The site sells plans from US$19 a month and a connector that lets the Claude chat model read a customer's library. Bolus's profile says \"Bootstrapped Castmagic to 130K+ MRR\", with no date. No sale is announced.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 18, 20, 21 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Distribution before the product", "text": "The founders hosted a podcast, met the show notes problem in their own work, and knew other hosts and creators who had it too. Berrios calls this an unfair distribution advantage, and names the podcast and the founders' relationships with creators as its two parts." }, { "title": "A lifetime deal as the launch", "text": "AppSumo asked whether they could launch in two weeks, and they did. The deal brought about 10,000 users and about US$350,000, paid once. Berrios says they accepted one-time revenue because they needed a brand, a base of users and feedback. The cost is that those users can use transcription and model capacity for as long as the company exists." }, { "title": "Three founders, three separate jobs, no salaries", "text": "Engineering, product with support, and growth each had one owner. All three worked for equity and took no salary at first, so the first US$1,000 was enough. They live in three cities, hold two 30-minute calls a week and meet in person for at least one week every quarter." }, { "title": "Creators paid per view", "text": "Berrios searched Instagram and hashtags for creators in nearby fields, paid some of them per thousand views and signed others as affiliates, and kept marketing under 20% of revenue. He says the program produced more than 10 million views and six figures in revenue." }, { "title": "A workflow around the model output", "text": "Show notes alone are a single model output. Castmagic added a library of the customer's recordings, prompts that the customer can edit, clips, integrations with Zoom and Zapier, an API and, by 2026, a connector to Claude. Berrios's answer to the question about ChatGPT was that the product solves a workflow, not one output." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founders' interview with Starter Story, their posts on X and the company's site. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Justin Tormey built it in Elixir with Phoenix and LiveView, so the front end and the back end are written in one language.", "The first landing page was a Webflow template, so that development time went to the product. In October 2026 the site's HTML names the Astro framework as its generator.", "The first version was built in two weeks to meet the AppSumo launch date. The founders say that in those weeks you have to accept an imperfect product.", "On 9 March 2023 the product connected to the GPT-3.5 Turbo API and added a newsletter writer and a thread writer.", "Pricing is a subscription with a cap on usage. The founders compare what they spend on language models and transcription with the price of each plan.", "November 2023 added Pages, an iOS app and a Zapier app. By October 2026 the site also lists a Zoom integration, a REST API and an MCP (Model Context Protocol) connector, a standard way to give a chat model access to outside data." ], "src": [ 4, 17, 20, 18, 22 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold a tool for writing, summarising or packaging content, and lost to a larger platform that offered the same function inside a product people already used. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Wavii", "years": "2009 to 2013", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Short summaries of the news, written automatically by language software.", "died": "No clear way to charge for summaries. Google bought it and closed it as a separate product.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/727-wavii" }, { "name": "Draft", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A simple online editor for writers, with version control.", "died": "Google Docs added the same functions inside a larger free product. A free plan with no path to revenue could not pay the costs.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1605-draft" }, { "name": "Hyperink", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$1.4M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Turn what an expert knows into an e-book quickly, with marketing included.", "died": "Amazon's self-publishing tools did more for less, and free online content lowered what readers would pay.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1192-hyperink" }, { "name": "Vook", "years": "2009 to 2017", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "E-books with video and audio mixed into the text.", "died": "Few readers wanted them, production was expensive, and Kindle and iBooks owned distribution.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/721-vook" }, { "name": "Pressly", "years": "2011 to 2018", "funding": "US$2.9M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Collect and distribute content for a brand with less work.", "died": "Larger marketing platforms added content curation to full product suites, and social networks added their own distribution tools.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/462-pressly" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the five sold one step of content production as a separate product, and a platform that already held the writer or the audience added that step. Castmagic is in the same position. The companies that hold the recording, such as Buzzsprout, Riverside, Descript and Podbean, now write show notes inside their own products, and Buzzsprout announced this three months after Castmagic's announcement.", "Two things differ. First, the cost: a language model made the writing step cheap to build, so three people built the product in two weeks with less than US$1,000 and reached profit, while the five predecessors raised between US$120,000 and US$5 million. A company with no investors can become smaller and stay alive, which is what the smaller team of 2025 suggests. Second, the founders owned their distribution through a podcast and creator contacts. Podsqueeze, also on this site, sells the same idea with two founders and reports about €16,000 a month, flat since 2024. Castmagic's reported figures are about six to ten times that, and neither company reports growth since 2024." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The launch method, yes. The speed of 2023, no.", "text": "The method is clear: build for a problem that you meet in work you already do in public, launch through a deal marketplace to get the first users and their feedback, and pay creators per view to reach the rest. The speed came from the date: Castmagic was on sale three months before Buzzsprout, a podcast host, announced the same function as part of its hosting service. Each of the three founders had also started a company before, and two of them hosted a podcast.", "steps": [ "Do the work in public first. The founders met the problem on their own podcast and already had relationships with the creators who became the market.", "Divide the work among co-founders with different skills, and pay with equity until customers pay.", "Use a deal marketplace for the launch, and count in advance what the one-time buyers will cost you in later years.", "Pay creators and affiliates per thousand views, and keep marketing under 20% of revenue.", "Sell the workflow around the model output, such as a library, prompts in the customer's voice and integrations, because the output itself becomes a free feature in other products." ], "open": "Recordings that no platform turns into text for its users yet: sales calls, coaching sessions, research interviews, internal meetings and events. Castmagic itself moved toward these uses and toward connecting its library to chat models." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Self-reported, and the 2025 records disagree", "text": "No payment processor, buyer or journalist has seen the accounts. For mid-2025 Berrios writes \"6 figures a month\", while Latka lists US$770,000 a year from a founder webinar, which is about US$64,167 a month. The profile figure of 130K+ MRR has no date." }, { "title": "The peak was not held", "text": "The founders gave almost US$2 million a year in May 2024 and again in February 2025. In August 2025 the wording, six figures a month, was the same as for November 2023, and three months later one co-founder announced a new company. The team was 2 full-time employees after around ten people, although the two counts may not be measured in the same way. At best this is no growth in 21 months." }, { "title": "Hosts and recording tools ship the same feature", "text": "Buzzsprout announced Cohost AI in May 2023. Riverside sells AI Show Notes that write summaries, takeaways and chapters in one click. Descript writes show notes with its Underlord assistant. Podbean AI writes titles and show notes. Each of these already holds the recording, so the customer does not have to upload it to a second product." }, { "title": "General chat models do the same job", "text": "A customer whom Berrios quoted in April 2025 compared the two: 30 minutes of rewriting after GPT, 2 minutes after Castmagic. That difference is what the subscription pays for, and it can shrink with each new model. In September 2024 Berrios wrote that Google's NotebookLM described his business better than he could. In 2026 Castmagic sells a connector that lets Claude read the customer's library, so part of the writing now happens in the chat model." }, { "title": "\"ARR\" next to one-time sales", "text": "About US$350,000 of the first year came from lifetime licenses, which do not recur, and the August 2023 figure of US$500,000 does not say what it measures. Lifetime buyers keep using transcription and model capacity that the company pays for. A second AppSumo deal followed in 2025." }, { "title": "It depends on other platforms' rules", "text": "In April 2025 YouTube changed its terms and Castmagic's YouTube import began to fail. The founders wrote that Descript had removed the same feature. The pricing page lists YouTube import again in October 2026." }, { "title": "Lower prices, and counts that differ", "text": "The entry plan costs US$29 a month in 2026 against US$39 in 2023. The pricing page gives 75,000+ creators, the about page 35,000+, and the founders' AppSumo message over 100,000 customers." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.castmagic.io" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Ramon Berrios on X, 19 July 2024: how we built Castmagic into a $100k+ MRR in 9 months", "url": "https://x.com/ramongberrios/status/1814299456587608433", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Founder's own post. Source for the monthly figure, the starting capital, the three roles and the unpaid start." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 13 July 2024: Boostrapping AI startup Castmagic to $1M in under 9 months, by Ramon Berrios", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/boostrapping-ai-startup-castmagic-to-1m-in-under-9-months-27bf7c9402", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A short post by the founder with no detail beyond the claim. No comments." }, { "title": "X post by a host of the podcast Probably Something, 28 November 2023: episode with Ramon Berrios and Blaine Bolus", "url": "https://x.com/tim__msk/status/1729512027171811339", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. The host repeats the founders' claim; Bolus reposted it. The episode itself was not listened to." }, { "title": "Starter Story, 22 June 2024: They Make $1.4M/Year With AI, video interview with the three founders", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/they-make-1-4m-year-with-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full transcript on the page. Source for the monthly revenue, growth, churn, marketing share, the AppSumo figures, the stack and the founders' earlier companies." }, { "title": "Blaine Bolus on X, 17 August 2023: $500K in 5 months, fully bootstrapped", "url": "https://x.com/bbols4/status/1692181574186320221", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Founder's own post." }, { "title": "Blaine Bolus on X, 9 February 2023: Introducing castmagic.io", "url": "https://x.com/bbols4/status/1623705770490576897", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. The first public announcement found; used as the launch date." }, { "title": "Refresh Miami, 21 May 2024: It's not just magic, it's AI! Meet the Miami startup turning conversations into content", "url": "https://refreshmiami.com/news/its-not-just-magic-its-ai-meet-the-miami-startup-turning-conversations-into-content/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A journalist's article after an interview with Bolus. Source for US$2 million ARR, the team of around ten and Justin Tormey's full name. The article does not say that the journalist saw documents." }, { "title": "Business Athletes newsletter, 18 May 2024: Blaine Bolus", "url": "https://businessathletes.beehiiv.com/p/business-athletes-blaine-bolus", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. An interview with Bolus. Source for almost US$2 million ARR in a year and the distributed team." }, { "title": "AppSumo: Castmagic deal page, with the founders' messages of February and April 2025", "url": "https://appsumo.com/products/castmagic/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 13 October 2026. Source for the deal tiers, the customer count, the annual revenue claim, the March 2023 launch and the YouTube import problem." }, { "title": "Ramon Berrios on X, 5 August 2025: 2 full time employees and 6 figures a month", "url": "https://x.com/ramongberrios/status/1952877485827248501", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Founder's own post. The newest dated revenue statement found." }, { "title": "Latka company page: Castmagic revenue 2025", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/castmagic.io", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 13 October 2026. It attributes US$770,000 to a founder webinar in June 2025, and US$1 million and 7 employees to LinkedIn. The webinar is not linked and could not be checked." }, { "title": "Ramon Berrios on X, 4 November 2025: launching Ripe", "url": "https://x.com/ramongberrios/status/1985735079390281778", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. His timeline from July 2024 to October 2026 was also read page by page." }, { "title": "Ramon Berrios on X, 4 September 2023: starting my next company", "url": "https://x.com/ramongberrios/status/1698751514846658919", "grade": "C", "how": "Read as the quoted post inside Blaine Bolus's repost of the same day. Names both co-founders by their X handles." }, { "title": "Ramon Berrios on X, 5 July 2024: just over 12 months ago we started Castmagic", "url": "https://x.com/ramongberrios/status/1809226184598732994", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the user count and the minutes processed." }, { "title": "Ramon Berrios on X, 29 July 2024: I've bootstrapped 2 companies to 7 figures in ARR in under 12 months", "url": "https://x.com/ramongberrios/status/1817890873159356904", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the distribution advantage of the podcast." }, { "title": "Ramon Berrios on X, 21 August 2024: the influencer program", "url": "https://x.com/ramongberrios/status/1826291719211515972", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the views and revenue of the creator program." }, { "title": "Blaine Bolus on X, 9 March 2023: upgrades pushed to Castmagic this week; also his posts of 15 March and 14 November 2023", "url": "https://x.com/bbols4/status/1633917415317987328", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in his timeline through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the GPT-3.5 Turbo date, the SXSW launch panel and the November 2023 releases." }, { "title": "Castmagic pricing page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://www.castmagic.io/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the monthly prices that the page's HTML carries next to the yearly ones. Source for the pricing table and the 75,000+ creators count." }, { "title": "Castmagic pricing page, Wayback Machine copy of 31 May 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230531100016/https://www.castmagic.io/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 2023 prices and limits." }, { "title": "Castmagic about page and home page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://www.castmagic.io/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founders' earlier companies, the 35,000+ count, the Claude connector and the API and MCP features. The page links the third founder to another person's LinkedIn profile; his name here follows Refresh Miami and his own X profile." }, { "title": "X profiles of Blaine Bolus (@bbols4), Ramon Berrios (@ramongberrios) and Justin Tormey (@j_tormey), read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/bbols4", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the three profile texts through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the 130K+ MRR line, for Berrios's work on Ripe and for Tormey's role." }, { "title": "Starter Story, 28 December 2024: How 3 Founders Took Castmagic from $0 to $1.4M/Year Quickly", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/castmagic-breakdown", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A written summary that the page marks as estimated from public sources. It repeats the interview figures." }, { "title": "Ramon Berrios's YouTube channel, 8 July 2024: How I Built (And Lost) A Million-Dollar Business", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kx_8moLRo6s", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the video description only. Source for the 6 figures per month line and the publication date." }, { "title": "Podnews press release, 26 May 2023: Buzzsprout Introduces AI Tool For Your Podcasting Workflow", "url": "https://podnews.net/press-release/buzzsprout-podcast-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A competitor's own announcement of Cohost AI." }, { "title": "Riverside: AI Show Notes product page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://riverside.com/show-notes", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the description of the feature. A competitor's own page." }, { "title": "Descript: Generate Podcast Show Notes, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://www.descript.com/tools/podcast-show-notes-generator", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the description of the feature. A competitor's own page." }, { "title": "Podbean AI product page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://www.podbean.com/ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on automated titles and show notes. A competitor's own page." }, { "title": "Ramon Berrios on X, 27 April 2025, quoting a customer's comparison of GPT and Castmagic", "url": "https://x.com/ramongberrios/status/1916502712105025785", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in his timeline through api.fxtwitter.com, with the quoted post of 25 April 2025. A customer's opinion, repeated by the founder." }, { "title": "Ramon Berrios on X, 15 September 2024: Google launched NotebookLM", "url": "https://x.com/ramongberrios/status/1835387177137738106", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/creativeclaw/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/creativeclaw.md", "slug": "creativeclaw", "name": "CreativeClaw", "country": "Israel", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Image, video and audio generation tools inside AI assistants", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-13", "launchLabel": "April 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$108K in the last 30 days, October 2026", "sticker": "$108K in 30 days", "outcomeUsd": 142846, "months": 6, "teamLabel": "1 founder", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "ai-model-tools", "channel": "platform", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Creative tools" ], "product": "A remote MCP server that gives an AI assistant such as Claude or ChatGPT tools to generate images, video, speech, music and 3D models with models from Google, OpenAI, ElevenLabs and others. The user installs one plugin or adds one address, logs in once and buys credits from CreativeClaw: US$10 for 1,000 credits, with a published credit cost for each model.", "why": "People already pay for an assistant and already ask it for pictures and video. CreativeClaw sells inside that conversation, so it needs no interface of its own, no sales calls and no provider accounts on the customer's side. Revenue stayed under US$5,300 a month for five months, then rose about 18 times in September 2026, after the founder had packaged the server for ChatGPT and prepared its entry in the plugin directories. He has not published the cause of the rise.", "summary": [ "CreativeClaw is a remote MCP server for making images, video and audio. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard, created by Anthropic, for connecting an AI assistant to outside programs. An MCP server is a program that offers the assistant a list of tools: functions with a name, a description and typed inputs, such as generate_image or generate_video. The assistant reads the list and decides during a conversation when to call one. Remote means that the server runs on the vendor's machines, and the user only adds one address or installs one plugin in Claude or ChatGPT. A product can be sold this way because the server knows who is calling. The user logs in once with OAuth, a standard login in which one service acts for a user without seeing the password, and the server then charges each tool call to that user's balance of prepaid credits. CreativeClaw's server card lists 48 tools. They send the request to image, video, speech and 3D models of other companies and return a file.", "Itay Dressler, an engineer in Tel Aviv, made the first commit on 30 March 2026 and announced the product on X on 13 April 2026. He wrote that he works on it full time as a \"Solo bootstrapped builder\". Before that he was a co-founder and the technology chief of theGist, a workplace AI company that raised US$7 million in 2022 and closed in September 2025. The payment records of CreativeClaw, which TrustMRR reads from the payment provider Polar, show US$30 in April, US$5,254 in August and US$92,894 in September 2026. On 13 October 2026 the last 30 days stood at US$108,177, and the total since the start at US$142,846. About 76% of all the money that the business has ever received arrived in those 30 days.", "The revenue figures are grade A: they come from the payment provider through an API key, not from the founder. They are gross receipts for credits. They do not show what CreativeClaw pays the companies whose models it resells, so the margin is not verified. One strong month in a business that is six months old is also not a trend, and this page does not multiply the month into a yearly figure. The page also shows what happened to earlier companies that grew inside a platform owned by someone else." ], "factsCaption": "US$142,846 received in about six months, of which US$108,177 in the last 30 days, read from the payment provider; costs and margin are not public", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from CreativeClaw's account at the payment provider Polar through an API key, last synced on 13 October 2026 at 11:56 UTC. A grade C value is a statement by the founder or the company, or a press report. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. Grade A covers money received. It does not cover costs, margin, profit or the number of users.", "timelineLead": "From a first commit to US$108,177 in 30 days, in about six months, of which the first five brought less than US$5,300 a month each. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "CreativeClaw prices on 13 October 2026, from the company's pricing file and home page (grade C)", "note": "There is one price: US$10 buys 1,000 credits, so one credit is US$0.01. The site says that there is no subscription and that purchased credits do not expire. Each generation costs a published number of credits: 16 credits (US$0.16) for one image with the default model at 1K resolution, 75 credits (US$0.75) for a five-second video with the default model at 720p, 400 credits (US$4.00) for five seconds with Veo 3.1, and 20 credits (US$0.20) for 1,000 characters of speech with ElevenLabs v4. Credits are deducted before a generation starts and returned if it fails because of a server error. The customer pays the assistant maker separately for the assistant.", "rows": [ [ "Free credits at signup", "0", "", "100 credits; no card" ], [ "Credits", "10 one-time", "", "1,000 credits; do not expire" ], [ "Done-for-you brand theme", "249 one-time", "", "named in the signup form; not described on the pages read" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days, at 13 October 2026", "value": "US$108,177", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from the Polar account by API key, synced 13 October 2026 at 11:56 UTC. One 30-day period, not a yearly figure. The copy cached one day earlier showed US$109,037 for its own 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue since the start, at 13 October 2026", "value": "US$142,846", "grade": "A", "note": "Same source and sync. The first payment was in April 2026. This is the money figure that this site stores for the story.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Share of all revenue that arrived in the last 30 days", "value": "about 76%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 108,177 / 142,846 = 75.7%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month, 2026", "value": "April US$30; May US$365; June US$1,715; July US$2,735; August US$5,254; September US$92,894; October to the 13th US$39,854", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table. March 2026 is US$0.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "September 2026 compared with August 2026", "value": "17.7 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 92,894 / 5,254.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "First 12 days of September 2026", "value": "US$21,930, about US$1,828 a day", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the September total minus days 13 to 30 of the daily table. The value for 13 September, US$4,388, is in the copy cached on 12 October and has left the live table. About 11 times the daily average of August, so the rise began in the first days of the month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Daily revenue, 14 September to 12 October 2026", "value": "US$2,056 to US$6,927 a day; highest on 16 September", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR daily table, 29 full days. The largest day is 6.5% of the table's total, so the month is many small purchases and not a few large payments.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average per day, peak week and after", "value": "US$5,211 for 14 to 20 September; US$3,117 for 21 September to 12 October", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the daily table. The later level is about 40% below the peak week and stayed between US$2,056 and US$4,422 for 22 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR and active subscriptions", "value": "US$10,540 a month; 203 subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot. MRR is monthly recurring revenue. The site says there is no subscription, and no page read for this story explains what the payment provider counts as one. Not verified: what these subscriptions are.", "src": [ 1, 2, 7 ] }, { "fact": "30-day revenue compared with MRR", "value": "10.3 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 108,177 / 10,540. Recurring revenue can be at most about one tenth of the month; the rest is one-time credit purchases.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Price", "value": "US$10 for 1,000 credits; 100 free credits at signup", "grade": "C", "note": "Company pricing file. One credit is US$0.01. No subscription, and purchased credits do not expire.", "src": [ 2, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Examples of what a generation costs", "value": "image 16 credits (US$0.16); five-second video 75 credits (US$0.75); 1,000 characters of speech 20 credits (US$0.20)", "grade": "C", "note": "Company pricing file, default models: Nano Banana 2.1 at 1K, Gemini Omni Flash at 720p, ElevenLabs v4.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "One cost point given by the founder", "value": "speech sold at US$0.20 per 1,000 characters; provider API price US$0.08", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: (0.20 - 0.08) / 0.20 = 60% before other costs, for this one model. The API price is from the founder's post of 30 September 2026, which also mentions a 72% provider discount until 12 October; it is not clear if US$0.08 is before or after it. Not a margin for the business.", "src": [ 16, 2 ] }, { "fact": "What the verification does not cover", "value": "costs, margin, profit and user numbers", "grade": "C", "note": "The profile says that profit margin is not shown in the public file, and that no analytics account is connected. The models belong to other companies, so part of each dollar goes to them.", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Users", "value": "more than 10,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 9 September 2026. The home page says 10,000+ creators and 148,000+ finished generations. Not verified.", "src": [ 11, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Usage on 13 September 2026", "value": "more than 24 hours of generated video in one day", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 14 September 2026. Not verified.", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "fact": "Customers", "value": "small business owners and individual creators who buy without a sales call", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's posts of 16 and 27 September 2026, which name small business owners, restaurant owners and a musician. He calls the business B2C; the TrustMRR profile text says B2B.", "src": [ 18, 15, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 person", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR profile text, the founder's X profile (solo founder) and his launch post. In the public repository, 129 of 135 commits are his, 3 are from one other account and 3 are signed by coding agents.", "src": [ 1, 18, 9, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR profile text says Bootstrapped; the launch post says Solo bootstrapped builder.", "src": [ 1, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's previous company", "value": "theGist: US$7 million raised in 2022, closed in 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "CTech and TechCrunch. Dressler was co-founder and technology chief. The company had 10 employees at the round and about 15 people in 2023, and said it would return the money raised to investors.", "src": [ 20, 21, 22 ] }, { "fact": "Reach of the founder's own X account", "value": "414 followers; 315 views of the launch post", "grade": "C", "note": "Follower count from the TrustMRR profile, views read on 13 October 2026. Too small to explain the revenue.", "src": [ 1, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Pages on the company site", "value": "287, of which 106 examples, 57 blog posts and 22 about ChatGPT", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: a count of the addresses in the sitemap file on 13 October 2026.", "src": [ 29 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October 2026 figure", "value": "6 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: April 2026 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1, 9 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "15 November 2022", "what": "Dressler is co-founder and technology chief of theGist, which announces US$7 million of pre-seed funding from StageOne Ventures and Aleph and has 10 employees. Earlier he was VP of Engineering at OpenWeb, co-founder and CTO at Salaryo, and VP R&D at Gong.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 20, 22 ] }, { "when": "3 September 2025", "what": "CTech reports that theGist is closing and will return the money raised to investors.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 21 ] }, { "when": "30 March 2026", "what": "First commit in the public repository: a Creative Claw plugin for Claude with image and video generation skills.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "31 March 2026", "what": "Dressler replies to a post on X: \"I did point #1 - built the MCP server\". The site is online and says \"Inside Claude\"; its FAQ says detailed pricing will be available at launch.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10, 27 ] }, { "when": "13 April 2026", "what": "Public announcement on X, in Hebrew. He writes that he has decided to work on it full time as a \"Solo bootstrapped builder\". The post has 315 views.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "April 2026", "what": "The first payments arrive: US$30 in the month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "May to August 2026", "what": "Revenue of US$365, US$1,715, US$2,735 and US$5,254 a month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "16 June and 20 July 2026", "what": "A Codex version of the plugin is added, then a ChatGPT version is packaged.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "27 August to 1 September 2026", "what": "Packages for Grok Bot, Cursor, Hermes and OpenClaw, listing files for the Glama and Smithery directories, and a commit named \"Prepare Claude plugin directory submission\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "1 to 12 September 2026", "what": "US$21,930 arrives in 12 days, about four times the whole of August.", "grade": "X", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "9 September 2026", "what": "Dressler: \"wild ride. @CreativeClawCo just crossed 10k users.\"", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "11 September 2026", "what": "The company posts that it is the fastest-growing startup on Unicorne, a ranking built on TrustMRR data, with +1,055% growth. Dressler writes that he did not believe this would happen to him and that he is mostly keeping the servers running.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "14 September 2026", "what": "He writes that people generated more than 24 hours of video in one day, and that he is in contact with Chinese model companies to lower costs by buying from them directly.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "15 September 2026", "what": "He announces that a company, Creative Claw Ltd, is now registered.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "16 September 2026", "what": "The highest day in the daily table: US$6,927.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "30 September 2026", "what": "September closes at US$92,894, which is 17.7 times August.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2026", "what": "US$108,177 in the last 30 days and US$142,846 since the start. MRR is US$10,540 with 203 subscriptions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2026", "what": "The product is running: the status file marks every component operational, and the repository received a commit on the same day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 28, 8 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Sold inside the assistant", "text": "The customer never opens a CreativeClaw application. The product is a plugin in Claude and in ChatGPT, and the same server is packaged for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Grok Bot, Hermes and OpenClaw. The founder's X account had 414 followers and his launch post had 315 views, so the customers did not come from his audience. The signup form asks where the person heard of the product and lists Claude and ChatGPT first." }, { "title": "One account in place of many", "text": "A marketer who wants an image from a Google model, a video from another model and a voice from ElevenLabs would need three accounts, three bills and API keys. CreativeClaw holds the provider accounts and sells one balance of credits. Packaged instructions named skills tell the assistant which model fits a job and how to write the prompt for it." }, { "title": "Credits, a low first price, no subscription", "text": "New accounts get 100 free credits without a card, and a purchase is US$10. Every model has a published credit cost. Customers pay before they generate, so the business holds the money before it owes the model provider. The founder wrote on 27 September 2026 that people come in, try and pay without a single sales call." }, { "title": "New models on the day of release", "text": "When a provider releases a model, CreativeClaw adds it within about a day and posts a demonstration: GPT Image 2.5 on 8 September, ElevenLabs v4 on 29 September, Nano Banana 2.1 on 6 October 2026. The founder writes that his own Claude setup now detects a new model, tests it, adds it and publishes the demonstration video." }, { "title": "Pages written for search and for AI crawlers", "text": "The sitemap lists 287 pages: 106 examples with their costs, 57 blog posts and 22 pages about ChatGPT, several of them comparisons with named competitors. The site also publishes an llms.txt file, a pricing file in markdown and a server card, which are written for AI assistants to read. What caused the rise of September is not stated in any source read for this story." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's developer pages, its terms, its public GitHub repository and the founder's posts. They are grade C.", "items": [ "A remote MCP server at app.creativeclaw.co/mcp over the Streamable HTTP transport, with a second endpoint for the ChatGPT app. The server card lists 48 tools.", "Login by OAuth 2.1 with PKCE through Clerk, asking only for the profile and email scopes. The customer never handles a provider API key.", "Payments through Polar. Tools named get_credits_balance, get_credits_link and purchase_credits let the assistant show the balance and give the user a purchase link.", "Generated files are stored on Cloudflare R2 and get permanent addresses.", "Models come from Google, fal.ai, Pika, OpenAI, ElevenLabs and Cartesia. fal.ai is a host that sells access to models of other companies, for example GPT Image 2.5 and MiniMax H3 Max.", "The plugin and its skills are in a public GitHub repository: 135 commits by 13 October 2026, of which 52 in September. 129 are by the founder, 2 are signed Cursor Agent and 1 Claude Agent.", "The founder builds with Claude. He wrote on 6 October 2026 that adding a new model and the English posts run automatically, and that he still writes the Hebrew posts himself." ], "src": [ 6, 3, 7, 8, 1, 19, 17 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database grew inside a platform owned by another company, or sold supply that larger companies also sold directly. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Meerkat", "years": "2015 to 2016", "funding": "US$14M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Live video from your phone to your Twitter followers.", "died": "Its growth depended on Twitter's follower graph. Twitter bought a competitor, Periscope, and Meerkat lost the channel.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2194-meerkat" }, { "name": "BranchOut", "years": "2010 to 2017", "funding": "US$49M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A professional network built inside Facebook.", "died": "Facebook changed its API rules, and the way BranchOut gained users stopped working. LinkedIn kept the market.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/30-branchout" }, { "name": "Viddy", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$30M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Filters and effects that make phone video look polished.", "died": "Instagram added video in June 2013 for the users it already had. People tried Viddy once and did not return.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2190-viddy" }, { "name": "FiftyThree", "years": "2011 to 2019", "funding": "US$45M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Paper, a drawing app for the iPad, and a stylus named Pencil.", "died": "Apple released its own Pencil and Procreate offered more features. The hardware part raised costs.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/144-fiftythree" }, { "name": "Hipmunk", "years": "2010 to 2020", "funding": "US$55M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A clearer search across other companies' flights and hotels.", "died": "Google Travel and Expedia offered the same search with more supply. The pandemic of 2020 ended it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/214-hipmunk" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the five reached its customers through a platform that it did not own, or sold supply that belonged to larger companies, and each lost when the owner changed the rules or offered the same thing itself. CreativeClaw does both at once. It reaches customers through the plugin directories of Anthropic and OpenAI, and it sells generations from models that belong to Google, OpenAI, ElevenLabs and others. Those companies publish their own connectors: ElevenLabs has had an official MCP server since March 2025, fal has one with a plugin for ChatGPT and Codex, and CreativeClaw's own comparison page lists Runway, HeyGen, Higgsfield and Kling as ChatGPT plugins.", "Three things differ. First, MCP is an open standard that several assistants support, so one server is installed in Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, Cursor and others, and no single assistant maker controls all of the distribution. Second, the assistant makers run directories and ask for connectors, so for now the platform owner helps this kind of product. Third, customers pay before they generate and every model has a published price, so the business needs no capital and can change a price when a provider does. None of this protects the margin, which no outside source has measured." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The structure, yes. The month, not on demand.", "text": "The structure is open to any engineer: a remote MCP server, OAuth login, prepaid credits and an entry in the plugin directories. It needs no capital, because customers pay first. What cannot be planned is the rise of September 2026: with the same product, revenue had been under US$5,300 a month for five months, and the founder has not said what changed. A copy also competes with the model providers, who now publish their own connectors.", "steps": [ "Choose a paid job that people already ask an assistant for and that the assistant cannot do alone. Build a remote MCP server whose tools do it.", "Use OAuth login and a prepaid credit balance, so each tool call is charged to a known user and you never pay the provider before the customer pays you.", "Publish the cost of every tool call, and give free credits without asking for a card.", "Package the server for every assistant, and submit it to each plugin directory and each MCP directory.", "Add each new model on the day its provider releases it, and post a demonstration made with it." ], "open": "Paid work that an assistant cannot do alone and that needs accounts at several providers, for example printed mail, phone calls and text messages, or purchased data. The same three parts apply: tools, login and credits." }, "watch": [ { "title": "One strong month is not a trend", "text": "About 76% of all revenue arrived in the last 30 days. Daily revenue was highest on 16 September 2026 at US$6,927 and has stayed between US$2,056 and US$4,422 since 21 September, about 40% below the peak week. Six weeks of data cannot say if this level will hold. This page shows the month as a month and does not turn it into a yearly figure." }, { "title": "Gross receipts; the margin is not verified", "text": "TrustMRR verifies money received. It does not see what CreativeClaw pays Google, fal.ai, ElevenLabs and the other providers, and the public profile shows no profit margin. The one cost point that the founder has given, for one speech model, implies about 60% before other costs. In mid-September he was still looking for lower model costs." }, { "title": "Prepaid credits are work still owed", "text": "Revenue is counted when a customer buys credits. The provider's charge comes later, when the credits are used, and purchased credits do not expire. A month with large purchases therefore contains costs that have not arrived yet." }, { "title": "Distribution depends on the assistant makers", "text": "The plugin sits in directories that Anthropic and OpenAI control. The Claude plugin needs a paid Claude plan, and on Team and Enterprise plans an administrator may have to allow it. The repository history shows changes made to pass each maker's listing review. CreativeClaw's terms say that the service relies on AI assistant platforms. A rule change or a removal would close the main sales channel." }, { "title": "The providers and the assistants can ship the same thing", "text": "ElevenLabs publishes an official MCP server. fal, which CreativeClaw's terms name as a model provider, has its own MCP server and a ChatGPT plugin that makes images, video and audio with browser login and no API key. CreativeClaw's comparison page names six other video plugins in ChatGPT. The ChatGPT menu itself has an Images entry beside Plugins." }, { "title": "A subscription count that the site does not explain", "text": "TrustMRR shows US$10,540 of MRR and 203 active subscriptions. The pricing file, the terms and the FAQ all say that there is no subscription. No page read for this story explains the difference. In either case recurring revenue is at most about one tenth of the month, so nine tenths must be earned again each month." }, { "title": "One person runs it", "text": "On 11 September 2026 the founder wrote that he was mostly keeping the servers running and sleeping little. Support, model updates, directory reviews and billing problems all go to him. He announced the registration of the company on 15 September 2026, after the money had started to arrive." }, { "title": "User and usage counts are self-reported", "text": "The 10,000 users, the 148,000 generations and the 24 hours of video in a day are statements by the founder and the company. No analytics account is connected to the TrustMRR profile." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://creativeclaw.co/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/creativeclaw" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of CreativeClaw, revenue from the payment provider Polar", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/creativeclaw", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile (https://trustmrr.com/startup/creativeclaw.md) on 13 October 2026, and the copy cached on 12 October 2026. Revenue comes from the company's Polar account through an API key, last synced on 13 October 2026 at 11:56 UTC. Source for every revenue figure, the monthly and daily tables, MRR and the subscription count. The profile text (team size, funding, audience) is written by the founder and is grade C." }, { "title": "CreativeClaw pricing file, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://creativeclaw.co/pricing.md", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The machine-readable twin of the pricing page. Source for the credit price, the free credits and the credit cost of each model." }, { "title": "CreativeClaw home page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://creativeclaw.co/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product description, the FAQ on MCP, the list of model providers, the user and generation counts, and the signup form." }, { "title": "CreativeClaw about page: a letter from the founder", "url": "https://creativeclaw.co/about/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founder's own account of why he built it and of his earlier roles." }, { "title": "CreativeClaw: how to connect", "url": "https://creativeclaw.co/how-to-connect/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on Claude, Claude Code, ChatGPT and Codex. Source for the plugin directory links, the Smithery link and the Claude plan requirement." }, { "title": "CreativeClaw developer page in markdown, and the MCP server card", "url": "https://creativeclaw.co/developers.md", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on connection, OAuth and tools, and the tool names in the server card at /.well-known/mcp.json. The card lists 48 tools; the developer page says 49." }, { "title": "CreativeClaw terms of service", "url": "https://creativeclaw.co/terms/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on credits, refunds and third-party services." }, { "title": "GitHub repository CreativeClawCo/creative-claw-marketplace: record and commit history", "url": "https://github.com/CreativeClawCo/creative-claw-marketplace", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the repository record and the titles, dates and authors of all 135 commits through the GitHub API on 13 October 2026. Source for the first commit, the dated packaging and directory steps, and the commit counts." }, { "title": "Itay Dressler on X, 13 April 2026: launch thread of three posts", "url": "https://x.com/itaydressler/status/2043684250742882770", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. In Hebrew, translated on this page; the words Solo bootstrapped builder are in English in the original. 315 views when read." }, { "title": "Itay Dressler on X, 31 March 2026: I did point #1 - built the MCP server", "url": "https://x.com/itaydressler/status/2039033130233782468", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. A reply to another user's post." }, { "title": "Itay Dressler on X, 9 September 2026: just crossed 10k users", "url": "https://x.com/itaydressler/status/2097621344296796478", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. It quotes the company post of 8 September, whose image shows CreativeClaw in second place on a ranking of fastest-growing startups." }, { "title": "Itay Dressler on X, 11 September 2026, and the company posts of the same day about first place on Unicorne", "url": "https://x.com/itaydressler/status/2098382958184857833", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com, with the image of the ranking. The founder's post is in Hebrew, translated on this page. The company post with the +1,055% figure is https://x.com/CreativeClawCo/status/2098406859371581627." }, { "title": "Itay Dressler on X, 14 September 2026: more than 24 hours of video in one day", "url": "https://x.com/itaydressler/status/2099445975282589897", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. In Hebrew, translated on this page. Source for the usage statement and the talks with model companies about cost." }, { "title": "Itay Dressler on X, 15 September 2026: the company is registered", "url": "https://x.com/itaydressler/status/2099965701150683470", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. In Hebrew, translated on this page." }, { "title": "Itay Dressler on X, 27 September 2026: on selling", "url": "https://x.com/itaydressler/status/2104231440506294635", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. In Hebrew, translated on this page." }, { "title": "Itay Dressler on X, 30 September 2026: thread on ElevenLabs v4, post 9 on price", "url": "https://x.com/itaydressler/status/2105268619038875833", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in the timeline pages from api.fxtwitter.com. In Hebrew, translated on this page. Source for the provider's API price as the founder states it." }, { "title": "Itay Dressler on X, 6 October 2026: new models are added automatically", "url": "https://x.com/itaydressler/status/2107524119235526734", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. In Hebrew, translated on this page." }, { "title": "Itay Dressler on X: timeline, 2023 to 13 October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/itaydressler", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the 49 posts that the api.fxtwitter.com timeline returned, in four pages. Source for the profile text, the posts of 16 and 24 September 2026 and the absence of posts between 17 April and 9 September 2026 in that reply." }, { "title": "CreativeClaw on X: timeline, 31 March to 6 October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/CreativeClawCo", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the 48 posts that the api.fxtwitter.com timeline returned, in four pages. Source for the dates on which new models were added." }, { "title": "CTech, 15 November 2022: Israeli startup theGist raises $7 million to increase workplace productivity using generative AI", "url": "https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hksaghzuj", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Press report. Source for the founders, the round, the 10 employees and Dressler's earlier roles." }, { "title": "CTech, 3 September 2025: AI startup theGist shuts down, plans to return investor funds", "url": "https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/jeyngl375", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Press report. Source for the closure and the team of about 15 people in 2023." }, { "title": "TechCrunch, 15 November 2022: TheGist uses AI to summarize Slack channels and threads", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/15/thegist-uses-ai-to-summarize-slack-channels-and-threads/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A second report of the same funding round." }, { "title": "Model Context Protocol documentation: What is the Model Context Protocol (MCP)?", "url": "https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/getting-started/intro", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the introduction. Source for the definition of MCP and the list of assistants and tools that support it." }, { "title": "CreativeClaw, updated 29 September 2026: What is the best ChatGPT plugin to generate videos in 2026?", "url": "https://creativeclaw.co/chatgpt/best-video-plugins/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the opening sections. The company's own comparison; it names six other ChatGPT video plugins." }, { "title": "GitHub repository elevenlabs/elevenlabs-mcp: The official ElevenLabs MCP server", "url": "https://github.com/elevenlabs/elevenlabs-mcp", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the repository record through the GitHub API on 13 October 2026: created 14 March 2025, 1,536 stars." }, { "title": "fal documentation: fal MCP server", "url": "https://docs.fal.ai/model-apis/mcp", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Describes fal's own MCP server and its plugin for ChatGPT and Codex." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of creativeclaw.co, 1 April 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260401130909/https://creativeclaw.co/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The earliest copies are from 31 March and 1 April 2026. Source for the first positioning and the pricing text before launch." }, { "title": "CreativeClaw status file, 13 October 2026", "url": "https://creativeclaw.co/status.json", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. All four components are marked operational, updated on 13 October 2026 at 08:27 UTC." }, { "title": "CreativeClaw sitemap and llms.txt, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://creativeclaw.co/sitemap-0.xml", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full and counted. 287 addresses. The llms.txt file at the site root lists the pages for AI assistants." }, { "title": "ChatGPT plugin page for CreativeClaw", "url": "https://chatgpt.com/plugins/creativeclaw", "grade": "C", "how": "Downloaded on 13 October 2026. The listing loads by script and could not be read; only the page menu was read. The address comes from the company's connect page." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/seobot/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/seobot.md", "slug": "seobot", "name": "SEObot", "country": "USA, listed as Turkey on TrustMRR", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI agent that writes and publishes search-optimized articles", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-13", "launchLabel": "26 September 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$888K in the last 12 months, October 2026", "sticker": "$888K in 12 months", "outcomeUsd": 888125, "months": 37, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders: John Rush (chief executive) and Vitalik May (technology chief)", "fundingLabel": "None, by the founder's statement", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "seo-ai-search", "channel": "audience", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Search marketing" ], "product": "A customer enters a website address. SEObot reads the site, chooses search phrases, makes a plan of articles, writes the articles with language models and publishes them to the customer's blog every week. The customer pays a monthly plan of article credits and can approve, edit or decline each article.", "why": "The founder had about 117,000 followers on X and more than 20 other products for the same customers, so the tool had buyers before it had a public launch. It sold a finished result, a published article, for about US$3.50 to US$5.44. Payment records show about US$100,000 a month at the end of 2025 and a fall in every month since January 2026.", "summary": [ "SEObot is an AI agent for SEO. An AI agent here is a program that plans and carries out a chain of tasks with language models, with no person directing each step. SEO, search engine optimization, is the work of making web pages appear high in Google's results so that people visit them without paid advertising. A customer enters a website address. SEObot studies the site, chooses search phrases, writes articles and publishes them to the customer's blog every week. Plans in the company's help center start at US$49 a month for 9 articles.", "John Rush announced it on X on 26 September 2023. He runs it with one partner, Vitalik May, who writes the code, and they split ownership 50/50. Rush also runs a studio of more than 20 small products under the name MarsX; this page counts SEObot only. TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue from a company's Stripe account through an API key, shows US$888,125 for the 12 months to 13 October 2026 and US$1,899,549 since the first payment. An API key is a password that lets one program read data from another program.", "Two points need care. First, the founder said \"almost 120K MRR\" in an interview in May 2025. MRR, monthly recurring revenue, is the subscription revenue of one month. The public payment records start in November 2025, and no month in them is above US$103,105. This page shows both numbers and does not decide why they differ. Second, revenue has fallen in every month since January 2026: the last 30 days brought US$37,817, about half of the 12-month average of US$74,010. The page also explains Google's spam policy of March 2024 against pages produced in bulk to gain rankings, which is the main risk for a customer who buys articles from a machine." ], "factsCaption": "US$888,125 in 12 months from the Stripe account of a two-person product, with the last 30 days at about half of the 12-month average", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the company's Stripe account through an API key, last synced on 13 October 2026 at 14:14 UTC. A grade C value is a statement by a founder or by the company's own pages. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. Grade A covers money received in that Stripe account. It does not cover invoices paid outside Stripe, costs, margin or profit.", "timelineLead": "From a waiting list to about US$100,000 a month in 26 months, then eight monthly falls in a row. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "SEObot plans from the company's help-center article dated 15 September 2025; the home page on 13 October 2026 still says that subscriptions start at US$49 a month (grade C)", "note": "One credit is one article. Credits do not expire, and unused credits are refunded only within 7 days of purchase. The company publishes no yearly price, so the yearly column is empty. The help center says that the complete list of plans is shown only after a customer has set up a website, so the plans today may differ from this list. Only the US$99 and US$499 plans are named in the help center (Pro and Enterprise). The FAQ on the home page also offers a full refund on the US$49 plan after the first article. Agencies that order 300 or more articles pay US$3.50 per article. On 18 May 2025 the home page said that subscriptions started at US$19 a month.", "rows": [ [ "US$49 plan", "", "49", "9 articles a month" ], [ "Pro", "", "99", "20 articles a month" ], [ "US$199 plan", "", "199", "50 articles a month" ], [ "Enterprise", "", "499", "100 articles and 20 directory listings a month" ], [ "US$570 plan", "", "570", "150 articles a month" ], [ "US$1,050 plan", "", "1050", "300 articles a month" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue in the 12 months to 13 October 2026", "value": "US$888,125", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from the Stripe account by API key, synced 13 October 2026 at 14:14 UTC. The copy cached one day earlier showed US$889,399 for its own 12 months.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days, at 13 October 2026", "value": "US$37,817", "grade": "A", "note": "Same profile. A second line on the profile, called a snapshot, shows US$38,082. Change against the 30 days before: minus 10.3%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 3 months and the last 6 months", "value": "US$127,902 and US$307,606", "grade": "A", "note": "Same profile.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue since the first payment", "value": "US$1,899,549", "grade": "A", "note": "The all-time line of the profile. The profile gives 23 September 2023 as the founding date.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month, November 2025 to September 2026", "value": "Nov US$99,433; Dec US$98,888; Jan US$103,105; Feb US$93,999; Mar US$85,954; Apr US$75,669; May US$63,803; Jun US$57,391; Jul US$50,806; Aug US$48,380; Sep US$40,732", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table. October 2026 to the 13th: US$13,967. Months before November 2025 are not public.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR and active subscriptions", "value": "US$37,197 a month; 515 subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot. MRR change over 30 days: minus 10.5%. The payment provider is Stripe; the profile says that SEObot is not sold through a merchant of record.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average month of the last twelve", "value": "US$74,010", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 888,125 divided by 12 equals 74,010.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Latest 30 days against that average", "value": "51.1% of it, so 48.9% lower", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 37,817 divided by 74,010 equals 0.511. The first half of the 12 months brought US$580,519 (888,125 minus 307,606) and the second half US$307,606, a fall of 47.0%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Highest month to latest full month", "value": "US$103,105 in January 2026 to US$40,732 in September 2026, minus 60.5%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 40,732 divided by 103,105 equals 0.395. Each month from February to September 2026 is lower than the month before.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average revenue per subscription", "value": "about US$72 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 37,197 divided by 515 equals 72.23, between the US$49 plan and the US$99 plan.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue received before the 12-month window", "value": "US$1,011,424 in about 24.7 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 1,899,549 minus 888,125. From 23 September 2023 to 13 October 2025 is about 24.7 months, so the average is about US$41,000 a month. This total can contain some months near US$100,000 in 2025. It cannot confirm or exclude US$120,000 in May 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's statement, mid-May 2025", "value": "\"almost 120K MRR\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Interview with Nathan Latka, published on 12 June 2025. While he shows his Stripe screen he says that revenue has two channels, Stripe and enterprise invoices, and that the Stripe channel is \"over 100K a month\". He also says that he sells credits. The public payment records do not cover May 2025.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "That statement next to the payment records", "value": "US$120,000 stated; US$103,105 in the highest verified month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 120,000 is 16.4% above January 2026, the highest month in the public records, and 20.7% above November 2025, the earliest. The two numbers belong to different months, so this is not a direct check. See the first item under what to watch.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's statement, November 2025", "value": "\"100K MRR\" and \"we make 100K a month\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Starter Story podcast, published 11 November 2025; the recording date is not given. The payment records show US$99,433 for November 2025, a difference of 0.6%. This statement agrees with the records.", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Cost of the language models", "value": "about US$30,000 a month on US$100,000, a 70% margin", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on Starter Story, November 2025. Not verified: TrustMRR sees money received, not costs.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "People who build and run SEObot", "value": "2", "grade": "C", "note": "John Rush, chief executive, has the idea, builds the first version and promotes the product. Vitalik May, technology chief, writes the code and the help-center articles. They split ownership 50/50. Product Hunt lists the same two people as makers.", "src": [ 2, 6, 12, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per person", "value": "about US$444,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 888,125 divided by 2 equals 444,062.50.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Share of the founders' time spent on customer support, May 2025", "value": "almost 80%", "grade": "C", "note": "Rush in the Latka interview: customers cannot connect their content systems, and the two of them were building nothing new.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "Rush says that he builds with no venture money, after ten years in venture-funded companies. No source read for this story names an investor in SEObot.", "src": [ 2, 19 ] }, { "fact": "Yearly revenue of the whole studio, not counted in the headline", "value": "US$2M (March 2024), US$3.5M (May 2025), US$3M (November 2025)", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder statements for 20 to 26 products together. None of the three totals is verified. If both of his May 2025 numbers are right, SEObot was 41.1% of the total (calculated: 120,000 times 12 equals 1,440,000, divided by 3,500,000).", "src": [ 13, 2, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Another product of the same founder, for comparison", "value": "TinyAdz: US$58,356 in 12 months", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, Stripe by API key. John Rush is listed as co-founder. He offered it for sale at US$75,000 on 30 August 2026 and at US$49,000 on 4 September 2026. It is 6.6% of SEObot's 12-month revenue (calculated: 58,356 divided by 888,125).", "src": [ 15, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Entry price", "value": "US$19 a month in May 2025; US$49 a month from September 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived home page of 18 May 2025; help-center article of 15 September 2025; home page of 13 October 2026. Calculated: 49 divided by 19 equals 2.58 times.", "src": [ 8, 6, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Price per article", "value": "US$5.44 on the smallest plan; US$3.50 on the largest", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 49 divided by 9 equals 5.44; 1,050 divided by 300 equals 3.50.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Work behind one article", "value": "727 prompts, 126 jobs, 2 hours, US$6", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 5 December 2024. The post does not say whether US$6 is the cost to produce the article or its price.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Articles written", "value": "more than 100,000 by May 2025; more than 200,000 by October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page claims, together with 0.6 billion and then 1.2 billion search impressions for customers' sites. Not verified.", "src": [ 8, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Followers of the founder on X", "value": "117,867", "grade": "C", "note": "Read on 13 October 2026. The TrustMRR profile shows 116,621.", "src": [ 14, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Country", "value": "USA by its terms of service; Turkey on TrustMRR", "grade": "C", "note": "The terms are under the law of Delaware and name only \"SEObot AI\". The TrustMRR profile lists the country code TR. Rush grew up in the Caucasus and studied in Norway, by a 2025 newsletter. No source read for this story says where Vitalik May lives; Ukraine is not verified.", "src": [ 7, 1, 18 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the announcement to the headline date", "value": "37 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: September 2023 to October 2026.", "src": [ 9, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Late 2022", "what": "Rush starts work on SEObot for his own products. On 27 December 2024 he writes: \"Two years ago, I started SEObot!\"", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "7 September 2023", "what": "The address seobotai.com shows a waiting list for \"SeoBOT\", \"starting with MarsVerse projects\", which are Rush's own products.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "26 September 2023", "what": "Rush announces \"an AI SeoBot\" on X and asks readers to request access. TrustMRR gives 23 September 2023 as the founding date.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 1 ] }, { "when": "November 2023 to June 2024", "what": "The home page still offers a waiting list and says \"We're onboarding new users every day\". Rush later says that about six months of closed use by people he knew came first, and that the public opening was 12 to 14 months before mid-May 2025, which is March to May 2024.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 2 ] }, { "when": "5 March 2024", "what": "Google announces a spam policy against \"scaled content abuse\": many pages generated mainly to manipulate search rankings, by automation, by people or by both.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "when": "9 March 2024", "what": "Rush describes his studio as a profitable holding company with US$2 million of yearly revenue and 20 products. This is the whole studio, not SEObot.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "5 December 2024", "what": "Rush describes how the agent works: one article takes about 2 hours and runs 727 prompts and 126 jobs.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "27 December 2024", "what": "SEObot launches on Product Hunt, with Vitalik May and John Rush as makers. Rush writes that users' sites had 0.6 billion search impressions and 15 million clicks.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12, 11 ] }, { "when": "Mid-May 2025", "what": "In an interview with Nathan Latka, Rush says \"almost 120K MRR\", two people, and almost 80% of their time on customer support. The home page offers plans from US$19 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 3, 8 ] }, { "when": "15 September 2025", "what": "The help center lists six plans, from US$49 a month for 9 articles to US$1,050 a month for 300 articles.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "The first month in the public payment records: US$99,433. On the Starter Story podcast, published on 11 November, Rush says \"100K MRR\".", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "when": "January 2026", "what": "The highest month in the public payment records: US$103,105.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "February to September 2026", "what": "Revenue falls in each of eight months, to US$40,732 in September. On 27 February Rush writes that he is building a second version of the agent interface for SEObot and five other bots.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 14 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR shows US$37,817 for the last 30 days, 515 active subscriptions and US$1,899,549 since the first payment. The product is on sale from US$49 a month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 5 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Buyers before the launch", "text": "Rush had a large following on X (117,867 followers in October 2026) and more than 20 products and directories for the same customer, a founder without a marketing team. He says that growth came about 30% from search, 30% from cross-promotion between his own products and 30% from social media. SEObot itself has a button that sends the customer to ListingBott, another product of his." }, { "title": "A finished result, not a writing tool", "text": "The customer enters a website address and receives published articles. There is no editor to learn and no prompt to write. The price is per article, through credits, so a customer who wants more articles pays more, and the model cost of each article is covered by its price." }, { "title": "Built for his own sites first", "text": "Rush says that he built SEObot because he needed it for his own 11 software products and 20 directories. His own sites are the public examples on the home page, and he posts their traffic results. That gave the product test data and marketing material at the same time." }, { "title": "Two people on an equal split", "text": "Rush tests the idea and sells; a technical partner builds. On SEObot the partner is Vitalik May, with 50% of the ownership. The same contract is used across the studio, which is how one person can be a founder of more than 20 products." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founders' posts and interviews and from the product's own pages. They are grade C.", "items": [ "The agent splits one article into a tree of small tasks: research in Google results, an outline, the text, fact checks, internal links and images. The founder counted 727 prompts and 126 jobs for one article, over about 2 hours.", "The language models are rented through the APIs of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Rush says that he uses all three and changes between them as each one improves, and that the model cost is about 30% of revenue.", "Finished articles go straight to the customer's content system: WordPress, Webflow, Shopify, Ghost, Framer, Wix, Notion, HubSpot or Unicorn Platform, or any other site through a REST API and webhooks.", "Billing is by credits through Stripe: one credit is one article and credits do not expire. By the founder's account, large customers pay by invoice outside Stripe.", "The marketing site is built on Unicorn Platform, a website builder that Rush bought for about US$800,000, and the help center runs on Intercom.", "Demand was tested with a waiting list in September 2023 and with a closed group for about six months, before the public opening in 2024 and the Product Hunt launch on 27 December 2024." ], "src": [ 10, 4, 5, 6, 2, 8, 18 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold marketing results or cheap content before language models could write an article. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Metigy", "years": "2014 to 2022", "funding": "US$14M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Machine learning that does the work of a marketing team for a small business.", "died": "Its software gave general advice, such as post more video, and the owner still had to do the work. Small businesses wanted the work done for them, and many left within two or three months.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2338-metigy" }, { "name": "Pressly", "years": "2011 to 2018", "funding": "US$2.9M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A platform that helps a brand collect and publish content with less effort.", "died": "It only collected content that other people had written. Larger marketing suites added the same feature next to analytics and search tools, and Pressly did not expand quickly enough.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/462-pressly" }, { "name": "Hyperink", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$1.4M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "E-books on narrow subjects, produced quickly by experts.", "died": "Every book needed paid people to write it and to market it. Amazon's self-publishing tools and free articles on the web reduced what readers would pay.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1192-hyperink" }, { "name": "Waterproof Digital Camera", "years": "2013 to 2017", "funding": "None", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "A review website for one product type, built to earn sales commissions from search visitors.", "died": "It used aggressive search tactics that Google's rules forbid. Google's updates removed its rankings, and its single product category left it nothing else to sell.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2023-waterproof-digital-camera" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Before 2023, software could advise on marketing but could not do the work. Metigy's models produced general advice, and the business owner still had to write every post. Pressly could only collect what other people had written. Hyperink needed paid writers for every book. The promise \"we do your content for you\" needed people, and people cost more than small customers would pay.", "Language models removed the writer. SEObot's founder counts 727 model calls for one article, and the article sells for US$3.50 to US$5.44. Two people serve 515 subscriptions. The problem of the fourth predecessor did not change: Waterproof Digital Camera lived on Google's rankings and ended when Google changed its rules. An article agent sells pages that are worth their price only while Google ranks them, and in March 2024 Google wrote a policy about pages made in bulk for that purpose." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. This exact product, with care.", "text": "An agent that delivers a finished result for a small monthly price is still open to two people, and the build is ordinary: rented models, a queue of tasks and connections to content systems. But the verified revenue of this product has fallen in every month since January 2026, and its starting advantage was the founder's audience of about 117,000 followers and more than 20 other products that send customers. A copy without that distribution starts from zero.", "steps": [ "Build the tool for your own sites first, and publish the results with real traffic numbers.", "Sell the finished result, a published article, and price it per unit so that heavy users pay their own model cost.", "Test demand with a waiting list and a closed group for some months before a public launch.", "Work with one technical partner on an equal split: one person sells and supports, the other builds.", "Connect the product to the systems that customers already use, so that delivery needs no manual step." ], "open": "Agents that deliver one finished marketing result for one kind of business are still open: content in the local language of one country, product pages for online shops, or pages written to be quoted by AI answer engines. Each needs proof that the pages help readers, because Google's policy judges the value of a page to users and not the method that produced it." }, "watch": [ { "title": "A founder figure above the payment records", "text": "In mid-May 2025 the founder said that SEObot was doing \"almost 120K MRR\". The public payment records start in November 2025, and their highest month is US$103,105, in January 2026. The sources allow four explanations and do not allow a choice between them. One: May 2025 was a higher month than any month since November 2025; that month is not public. Two: part of the revenue is paid by invoice outside Stripe, as the founder said in the same interview, and TrustMRR reads the Stripe account only. Three: he sells credits, so \"MRR\" in his sentence may mean all money received in a month and not only subscriptions. Four: the number was rounded up. His later statement, \"100K MRR\" in November 2025, agrees with the records to within 1%." }, { "title": "Revenue is falling", "text": "The last 30 days brought US$37,817 against a 12-month average of US$74,010. From January to September 2026 each month was lower than the one before, minus 60.5% in total. The sources give no reason. Three dated facts from the same period may or may not be connected: the entry price rose from US$19 to US$49 between May and September 2025, the founder said in May 2025 that many more people now compete for search traffic with AI, and in February 2026 he announced a rebuilt version. The headline is a figure for the past 12 months and not a forecast: at the rate of the last 30 days, a year brings about US$454,000 (calculated: 37,817 times 12 equals 453,804)." }, { "title": "Google's policy on pages made in bulk", "text": "On 5 March 2024 Google added a spam policy against \"scaled content abuse\". The policy page, as read in October 2026, defines it as the case where \"many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users\", with \"little to no value to users, no matter how it's created\". The first example in Google's list is \"Using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users\". Sites that break the policy \"may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all\". The policy does not forbid AI writing; Google's announcement says that automation is spam \"if the primary purpose is manipulating ranking in Search results\". For a customer this means two things. The risk is on the customer's own website, because the penalty applies to the site that publishes the pages and not to the tool. And a customer who lets the agent publish without review, on subjects where the site adds nothing new, is close to the example in the policy. SEObot's own FAQ says that its article quality sometimes matches an average human writer, sometimes falls short and occasionally exceeds it, and the product lets the customer approve, edit or decline every article." }, { "title": "No public figure on customers who stay", "text": "A customer whose pages stop ranking has no reason to buy more articles. SEObot publishes impressions and clicks for all customers together, 1.2 billion and 30 million, and no figure for how many customers stay. TrustMRR keeps the churn history behind a login. The fall in revenue is consistent with customers leaving, but the public records do not show the cause." }, { "title": "One founder, more than 20 products", "text": "Rush says that he brings a product to about US$50,000 a month, pauses, brings it to US$100,000, pauses again and moves to other tools. In May 2025 almost 80% of the two founders' time on SEObot went to customer support. In the same interview he said that he never sells a product; in August 2026 he offered another one, TinyAdz, for sale. The totals he gives for the studio, US$3.5 million and later US$3 million a year, are not verified and are not SEObot's figures." }, { "title": "Margin not verified", "text": "TrustMRR verifies money received. The 70% margin and the US$30,000 a month of model costs are founder statements from November 2025, when revenue was about US$100,000 a month. No source shows the margin at the revenue of October 2026." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://seobotai.com/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/seobot" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of SEOBOT, revenue read from Stripe by API key", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/seobot.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile on 13 October 2026 (revenue last synced 13 October 2026 at 14:14 UTC) and compared it with a copy cached one day earlier. The revenue, MRR and subscription figures come from the Stripe account. The profile text is written by the founder and is grade C." }, { "title": "Founderpath, 12 June 2025: How John Rush Built $3.5M ARR With AI Agents and Two-Person Teams (interview by Nathan Latka)", "url": "https://founderpath.com/resources/john-rush-marsx-3-5m-arr-ai-agents-two-person-teams", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full transcript, 170 passages, on the /watch page of this resource. Founder interview. Source for \"almost 120K MRR\", the two revenue channels, the team of two, the 50/50 split, the support load and the statement about venture money. The founder shows his Stripe screen to the interviewer; this page did not see it, so the figures stay grade C." }, { "title": "GetLatka interview page, interview date 15 May 2025: How MarsX.dev Reached $3.5M ARR Across 20 AI-Powered Tools in 2025", "url": "https://getlatka.com/interviews/marsxdev-john-rush-2025", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the summary and the metrics table. The same interview as the Founderpath resource; used for the interview date." }, { "title": "Starter Story podcast, 11 November 2025: I Make $250K/Month From 20 Apps, transcript on StationLM", "url": "https://stationlm.com/analysis/8497b902-dcf6-4000-b194-848da288e3b2", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full transcript on this third-party page; did not watch the video. Source for \"100K MRR\", the 70% margin, the model costs, the studio total of US$3 million and the partner arrangement. The recording date is not given." }, { "title": "SEObot home page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://seobotai.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the starting price, the features, the content systems, the FAQ on article quality, the count of 200,000 articles and the two founders' contact accounts. The address /pricing returns an error page; the price is on the home page." }, { "title": "SEObot Help Center, 15 September 2025, by Vitalik May: What's SEObot pricing?", "url": "https://docs.seobotai.com/en/articles/10644453-what-s-seobot-pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, together with the article on plan upgrades dated 27 February 2025. Source for the pricing table, the plan names Pro and Enterprise, and the rule that credits do not expire." }, { "title": "SEObot terms of service, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://seobotai.com/terms-of-service", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on credits, refunds and governing law. Source for the Delaware clause and the 7-day refund rule." }, { "title": "Internet Archive copies of seobotai.com, 7 September 2023 to 18 May 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230907095905/https://seobotai.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read four copies: 7 September 2023 (waiting list), 18 November 2023 and 23 June 2024 (waiting list, onboarding new users every day), 18 May 2025 (subscriptions from US$19 a month, 100,000 articles)." }, { "title": "John Rush on X, 26 September 2023: first announcement of SeoBot", "url": "https://x.com/johnrush/status/1706770428163678332", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through api.fxtwitter.com, as the post quoted inside his post of 27 February 2026." }, { "title": "John Rush on X, 5 December 2024: We've built a real AI AGENT", "url": "https://x.com/johnrush/status/1864535178133250318", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through api.fxtwitter.com, as a repost in Vitalik May's timeline. Source for 727 prompts, 126 jobs, 2 hours and US$6." }, { "title": "John Rush on X, 27 December 2024: Two years ago, I started SEObot!", "url": "https://x.com/johnrush/status/1872553029570060585", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the start of the work and the Product Hunt launch." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: SEObot, launched 27 December 2024", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/posts/seobot", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the data inside the page. Source for the launch date and the two makers." }, { "title": "John Rush on X, 9 March 2024: How I Startup!", "url": "https://x.com/johnrush/status/1766266602712891859", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the studio total of US$2 million and 20 products." }, { "title": "John Rush and Vitalik May on X: profiles and timelines, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/johnrush", "grade": "C", "how": "Read page by page through api.fxtwitter.com/2/profile/johnrush/statuses. The interface returned 98 posts back to 14 February 2026 only, so older revenue posts could not be searched. The handle changed from johnrushx to johnrush, by his post of 11 August 2026. Source for the follower count, the posts of 27 February, 30 August and 4 September 2026, and Vitalik May's profile text." }, { "title": "TrustMRR profile of TinyAdz, revenue read from Stripe by API key", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/tinyadz.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile on 13 October 2026. Another product with John Rush as co-founder. Used only to keep SEObot's figures apart from the rest of the studio." }, { "title": "Google Search Central blog, 5 March 2024: What web creators should know about our March 2024 core update and new spam policies", "url": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on the new spam policies and on scaled content abuse. Google's own statement of its rules." }, { "title": "Google Search Central: Spam policies for Google web search, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on scaled content abuse and the sentence on the consequences. Google's own statement of its rules." }, { "title": "No-Code Exits newsletter, 29 August 2025: How John Rush is Building an AI Empire Without VC or Employees", "url": "https://nocodeexits.substack.com/p/250k-users-and-30-million-views-on", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founder's background. It gives no revenue figure for SEObot." }, { "title": "John Rush's personal site", "url": "https://johnrush.me/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product list and for his own description: seven venture-funded startups, then bootstrapping." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/verbi/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/verbi.md", "slug": "verbi", "name": "Verbi", "country": "Canada", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI language tutor app", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-13", "launchLabel": "2 April 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$251K verified revenue in 6 months, October 2026", "sticker": "$251K in 6 months", "outcomeUsd": 250824, "months": 6, "teamLabel": "The founder and his girlfriend at first; the profile says 2 to 5 people, plus paid video creators", "fundingLabel": "None reported; the profile says bootstrapped", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "learning", "channel": "creators", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Education" ], "product": "A phone app for practicing a foreign language by speaking. The learner talks out loud with an AI tutor in short voice lessons and free role plays, and gets feedback after each attempt. Around that sit a daily word feed, quizzes, verb drills, listening clips and a progress score. Nine languages. The download is free and the lessons need a subscription, listed in the US App Store at US$7.99 or US$8.99 a week or US$29.99 to US$79.99 a year.", "why": "The tutor is an AI model, so the company pays for computing and has no teacher to pay by the hour. That allows a yearly price of US$47.99 to US$79.99. Customers came from a very large number of short videos on TikTok and Instagram: first slideshows that the founder's own tool generated and that two people posted from about 12 accounts, then videos by paid creators. Yearly plans are paid in full on the first day, so the cash arrived early. Half of all revenue came in September 2026, and daily sales have fallen since.", "summary": [ "Verbi is an iPhone and Android app for learning to speak a foreign language. The learner holds a button, speaks, and an AI tutor answers in that language, gives corrections and scores the session. This needs speech recognition, software that turns recorded speech into text, and a language model, a program trained on large amounts of text that writes the tutor's replies. Verbi rents both from outside AI providers, which its privacy policy does not name. The app is free to download and sells a subscription as an in-app purchase, a payment made inside the app that Apple or Google collects, keeping a commission.", "Pedro Machado, a software engineer in Vancouver who also teaches web development on YouTube, released it on 2 April 2026. The publisher is Acadia Labs Inc., a Canadian company. It was his second app: the first, a dream journal released in February 2026, reached about US$100 a month. For Verbi he and his girlfriend posted short videos on about 12 TikTok and Instagram accounts, most of them slideshows generated by a tool he built, and later he paid creators for UGC, user-generated content: videos that look like an ordinary user's post but are paid for by the company. Revenue was US$685 in April, US$53,969 in July and US$128,225 in September. By 13 October 2026 the total was US$250,824, with 4,569 active subscriptions and MRR, monthly recurring revenue, of US$21,136. MRR is the sum of all active subscriptions with each one converted to its price per month, so a yearly plan of US$47.99 counts as US$4.00.", "The revenue, MRR and subscription figures are grade A: TrustMRR read them from the company's account at RevenueCat, a service that manages in-app subscriptions for app developers and records the payments made through Apple and Google. The profile does not say whether its revenue is before or after the store's commission; RevenueCat's own documentation defines its standard revenue figure as before store fees and taxes. Everything about the method comes from the founder's posts, grade C. The app is six months old, half of its revenue came in one month, and no yearly subscriber has reached a renewal date yet. The page also shows what happened to earlier companies that sold conversation practice with human teachers." ], "factsCaption": "US$250,824 in verified revenue in the six months after launch, half of it in September 2026, read from the company's RevenueCat account", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the company's RevenueCat account through an API key; it is not a founder statement. A grade B value is published by Apple or Google. A grade C value is a founder statement, a profile field that the founder filled in, or a vendor's document. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows named in its note.", "timelineLead": "From a first app with US$45 of monthly recurring revenue in March 2026 to US$250,824 of verified revenue for the second app by October 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Verbi in-app purchases listed in the US App Store on 13 October 2026 (grade B); the listing does not say which price a new user is shown", "note": "The app is free to download and a subscription is required for full access. Apple's listing shows ten in-app purchases: seven yearly and three weekly, and no monthly plan. Several plans appear more than once at different prices, which usually means that the developer tests prices. The first column shows the yearly price divided by 12, computed on this page. The Canadian storefront lists the same plans in Canadian dollars: yearly from 39.99 to 108.99 and weekly at 9.99 or 11.99. A Google Play reviewer describes a free trial of 3 days. Prices on Google Play and on the web purchase page were not read.", "rows": [ [ "Pro, yearly at US$47.99", "4.00", "", "listed under three names at this price" ], [ "Pro, yearly at US$59.99", "5.00", "", "named Verbi Annual Pro Plan" ], [ "Pro, yearly at US$69.99", "5.83", "", "named Verbi Yearly - Pro" ], [ "Premium, yearly at US$79.99", "6.67", "", "named Verbi Premium Yearly Plan" ], [ "Pro, yearly with discount at US$29.99", "2.50", "", "named Verbi Yearly Pro Plan - Discount" ], [ "Pro, weekly", "", "7.99 a week", "also listed at US$8.99 a week; counted as US$31.96 or US$35.96 a month in MRR" ], [ "Download", "0", "0", "lessons need a subscription" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time to 13 October 2026", "value": "US$250,824", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from the RevenueCat API, last synced on 13 October 2026 at 17:59 UTC. The first revenue is in April 2026. The cached profile of 12 October showed US$249,315. This is the headline figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, 30 days to 13 October 2026", "value": "US$64,495 in one month", "grade": "A", "note": "One month of sales. It is not a yearly rate and should not be multiplied by 12: the profile marks it 38.3% below the 30 days before.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue by calendar month, 2026", "value": "April US$685, May US$3,247, June US$9,561, July US$53,969, August US$36,812, September US$128,225, October to the 13th US$18,325", "grade": "A", "note": "The monthly table of the profile. The seven values add up to the all-time total.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Share of September 2026 in all revenue", "value": "51.1%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 128,225 / 250,824. July, August and September together are 87.3%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per day, early September against early October 2026", "value": "about US$6,312 a day, then about US$1,451 a day", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the September total minus the profile's daily values for 14 to 30 September leaves US$82,053 for 1 to 13 September, divided by 13. The daily values for 1 to 12 October add up to US$17,417, divided by 12. The second value is 77% lower.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Best single day", "value": "US$16,889 on 2 September 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "RevenueCat chart in the founder's X post of 3 September, read from the image. He wrote that he had never imagined a \"16k day\". His posts do not state the cause of that day.", "src": [ 18 ] }, { "fact": "MRR, 13 October 2026", "value": "US$21,136", "grade": "A", "note": "Up 33.3% in 30 days according to the profile. RevenueCat converts each active subscription to one month: a yearly price is divided by 12 and a weekly price is multiplied by 4.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions, 13 October 2026", "value": "4,569", "grade": "A", "note": "RevenueCat counts paid subscriptions that have not expired. A subscriber who has cancelled stays in the count until the paid period ends.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Average MRR per active subscription", "value": "US$4.63 a month, or US$55.51 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 21,136 / 4,569, and that result times 12. In MRR a yearly plan at US$47.99 counts as US$4.00 a month and one at US$59.99 as US$5.00, while a weekly plan at US$7.99 counts as US$31.96. An average of US$4.63 fits a base that is almost all yearly plans. The real mix of plans and countries is not published.", "src": [ 1, 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "The same average on earlier dates", "value": "US$7.21 on 12 July, US$5.01 on 21 July, US$4.49 on 2 September 2026", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the founder's RevenueCat screenshots: MRR of US$6,781 with 941 subscriptions, US$5,899 with 1,178, and US$10,070 with 2,241. Between 12 and 21 July the subscriptions rose and the MRR fell, which fits weekly plans ending while yearly plans were added. On 16 July he wrote that his MRR does not grow because he optimizes for the yearly plan.", "src": [ 11, 16, 18 ] }, { "fact": "30-day revenue compared with MRR", "value": "3.05 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 64,495 / 21,136. A yearly plan is paid in full on the day of purchase but adds only one twelfth of its price to MRR. Most of the revenue is therefore new sales, which stop when new buyers stop.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Is the revenue before or after the store's commission?", "value": "the profile does not say", "grade": "C", "note": "RevenueCat's documentation defines its Revenue figure as gross: before store fees and taxes, minus refunds. It reports the amount after taxes and commission separately, under the name Proceeds. TrustMRR's FAQ says only that it imports \"the available revenue\" from RevenueCat, and that its rebuilt figures can differ from a provider's own by up to 30%.", "src": [ 1, 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Apple's commission on a subscription", "value": "30% in a subscriber's first year, or 15% in the Small Business Program", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's developer pages: the developer receives 70% of the price in the subscriber's first year and 85% after it, or 85% from the start when enrolled in the Small Business Program, which is open to developers with up to US$1 million in proceeds in the prior calendar year. Whether Acadia Labs is enrolled is not public.", "src": [ 20 ] }, { "fact": "What would remain after Apple's commission, as an illustration", "value": "US$213,200 at 15%, or US$175,577 at 30%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 250,824 times 0.85 and times 0.70, as if the whole amount were gross App Store sales. The split between the App Store, Google Play and web sales is not published, so this row only shows the size of the commission.", "src": [ 1, 20 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "55%", "grade": "C", "note": "A field of the TrustMRR profile that is not in its list of verified metrics. 55% of US$64,495 is US$35,472 (calculated). On 12 July 2026 the founder wrote \"80% margins\". The costs are not published.", "src": [ 1, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Figures on the day Verbi joined TrustMRR, 28 August 2026", "value": "MRR of about US$8,500, 30-day revenue of about US$29,000, about 1,900 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR's own X post. It also gave the total revenue as about US$29,000, the same as the 30-day figure, while the profile today shows US$53,969 for July alone. The first import probably held only 30 days of history; TrustMRR does not explain the difference.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's dashboard, 28 days to 21 July 2026", "value": "US$46,092 of revenue, 1,178 active subscriptions, 1,134 active trials, 33,240 new customers", "grade": "C", "note": "RevenueCat Overview screenshot in his X post, read from the image. He wrote \"45k in the last 28 days\", up from 10k, and that one working video format is enough. A new customer in RevenueCat is a newly created user ID, which is not the same as a store download.", "src": [ 16, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's dashboard, 2 September 2026", "value": "6,167 active trials, 2,241 active subscriptions, 56,323 new customers in 28 days", "grade": "C", "note": "RevenueCat Overview screenshot in his X post of 2 September, read from the image. On 21 July the same screen showed 1,134 active trials.", "src": [ 18, 16 ] }, { "fact": "First six weeks", "value": "2,570 downloads and US$387 of MRR", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's X post of 23 May 2026, with \"around 3k USD\" in the same line. TrustMRR shows US$3,932 for April and May together (calculated: 685 + 3,247). He also gives about 10% to 14% \"initial conversion\" and 15% to 40% \"trial conversion\".", "src": [ 12, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Who posted the videos, June 2026", "value": "the founder and his girlfriend, on 12 TikTok and Instagram accounts", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's X post of 3 June 2026. No paid creator had been hired yet.", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "fact": "Volume and cost of the videos, May 2026", "value": "more than 60 posts a day, of which he made 2 himself; under US$5 for thousands of generated videos", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's X post of 13 May 2026, when Verbi had 100 active subscriptions. He built an internal tool that generates TikTok and Instagram slideshows. On 2 June he added that each extra phone costs US$100 and holds 3 TikTok and 3 Instagram accounts.", "src": [ 13, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Advertising spend up to 9 June 2026", "value": "US$0", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's X post: US$4,300 of revenue in 28 days with about US$500 of MRR and no ad spend. In the same post he starts to hire creators and to boost videos on TikTok, which normally means paying the platform to show a post to more people.", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "fact": "Paid creators", "value": "a first group of 10 by 21 July 2026; a campaign manager sought on 10 September", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's X posts. What the creators are paid is not published.", "src": [ 16, 11 ] }, { "fact": "App Store rating, United States, 13 October 2026", "value": "4.6 out of 5 from 386 ratings", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's listing. The Canadian storefront has 57 ratings with an average of 4.4. Google Play shows 4.0 stars from 501 reviews and more than 50,000 downloads.", "src": [ 6, 7, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Versions released", "value": "18 between 2 April and 2 September 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "Counted in the version history of the App Store listing. The notes first mention a voice practice mode in version 4.0 on 3 June 2026. No version is listed after 5.6.3 of 2 September.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 to 5 people", "grade": "C", "note": "A field of the TrustMRR profile filled in by the founder, not verified. His posts name himself and his girlfriend, then paid creators. His X profile also lists a job as a software engineer at Twitch.", "src": [ 1, 11, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's audience", "value": "about 293,000 YouTube subscribers and 1,425 X followers", "grade": "C", "note": "The PedroTech channel page and his X profile on 13 October 2026. The channel teaches web development. His posts credit TikTok and Instagram videos for the sales, not this audience.", "src": [ 19, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "The TrustMRR profile says bootstrapped, a field filled in by the founder.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "AI model providers", "value": "not named", "grade": "C", "note": "The privacy policy says that microphone audio is streamed to third-party AI providers for transcription, replies and lesson delivery, and that scoring, translations and grammar feedback are processed by AI providers. It names none of them.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Benchmark for renewals, not about Verbi", "value": "nearly 30% of annual subscriptions are cancelled in the first month", "grade": "C", "note": "RevenueCat's State of Subscription Apps 2025 report, drawn from apps that use its platform. It also says that most apps with cheap annual plans keep up to 36.0% of users after a year. Verbi's own renewal rate cannot exist before April 2027.", "src": [ 21 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the headline figure", "value": "6 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2 April 2026 to 13 October 2026 is 194 days. Apple's record gives the release as 1 April 2026 at 07:00 UTC; the version history and the founder say 2 April.", "src": [ 6, 12 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2025 and earlier", "what": "Machado publishes web development tutorials on his YouTube channel, PedroTech, and announces them on X.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11, 19 ] }, { "when": "5 February 2026", "what": "His first app, Lucidia, a dream journal, is released in the App Store by Acadia Labs Inc. He built it with his girlfriend.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11, 6 ] }, { "when": "10 March 2026", "what": "Lucidia has 6 subscribers, 57 trials and US$45 of MRR from about 12 TikTok posts a day. On 27 March it reaches US$100 of MRR, and he moves his attention to a new app, Verbi.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "2 April 2026", "what": "Verbi version 1.0 appears in the App Store. Four updates follow in April, with a home screen widget, verb drills, crosswords and three more languages.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "13 May 2026", "what": "100 active subscriptions. He makes 2 videos a day himself and posts more than 60, generated by his own tool.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "23 May 2026", "what": "2,570 downloads and US$387 of MRR after about six weeks.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "3 June 2026", "what": "Version 4.0 adds a voice practice mode. The same day he writes that sales are rising fast with no paid creator yet: he and his girlfriend post on 12 accounts.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 14 ] }, { "when": "9 June 2026", "what": "US$4,300 of revenue in 28 days and no ad spend. He starts to hire creators.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "21 June 2026", "what": "Paid subscriptions have doubled in 20 days. He has cut the number of TikTok accounts by half and kept the ones that work.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "5 to 12 July 2026", "what": "He writes that one video spread widely. On 12 July his dashboard shows US$33,484 in 28 days and 941 active subscriptions.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "21 July 2026", "what": "US$46,092 in 28 days. A first group of 10 paid creators is complete.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "when": "22 July 2026", "what": "A web version and a web purchase page go live. The first 9 customers pay outside the App Store.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "when": "July 2026", "what": "Verified revenue for the month: US$53,969, after US$9,561 in June.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "28 August 2026", "what": "Verbi joins TrustMRR with about US$8,500 of MRR and about 1,900 active subscriptions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "2 September 2026", "what": "US$16,889 of revenue in one day, 6,167 active trials, and MRR passes US$10,000. Version 5.6.3 is released the same day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 18, 6 ] }, { "when": "10 September 2026", "what": "He looks for a manager for what he calls a mid-sized group of creators.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "US$128,225 of verified revenue, the best month and 51.1% of all revenue to date.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "14 September to 12 October 2026", "what": "Daily revenue falls from US$4,096 on 14 September to between US$863 and US$1,951 a day in October.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2026", "what": "US$250,824 in total, 4,569 active subscriptions and MRR of US$21,136. The app is live in the App Store and on Google Play.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 6, 8 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Many cheap videos on many accounts", "text": "In May 2026 he made 2 videos a day himself and posted more than 60, most of them slideshows that his own tool generated at under US$5 for thousands of videos. Each extra phone cost US$100 and held 3 TikTok and 3 Instagram accounts. His stated rule is to copy the kind of video that other apps in the category already post, then to vary it. In June he cut the number of TikTok accounts by half and kept the ones that performed best. Up to 9 June 2026 he had spent nothing on advertising." }, { "title": "One format that worked, then paid creators", "text": "In early July 2026 one video spread widely, and revenue for 28 days went from about US$10,000 to US$46,092. He wrote that one working format is enough. He then paid a first group of 10 creators to make more videos, and in September he looked for a manager for the group." }, { "title": "Yearly plans, paid on the first day", "text": "The App Store lists weekly and yearly plans and no monthly plan. The average MRR per subscription, US$4.63, fits a base that is almost all yearly plans. A yearly buyer pays the full price at once, so revenue for 30 days was 3.05 times MRR, and that cash can pay for the next videos immediately. The cost is that MRR looks small, and that nobody knows yet how many of these buyers will renew." }, { "title": "A tutor that is rented, not employed", "text": "The voice lessons run on outside AI providers that transcribe the learner's speech, write the tutor's replies and score the session. There is no teacher to recruit, schedule or pay by the hour, which is what allows a yearly price of US$47.99 to US$79.99. The voice practice mode arrived in version 4.0 on 3 June 2026, and 87.3% of all revenue came in the three full months after it." }, { "title": "A first app that failed at low cost", "text": "Lucidia, the dream journal, did not pass about US$100 of MRR. He wrote that it did not really solve a problem, so videos with many views brought few buyers. He kept the method and changed the product to language learning." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "The technology list is the founder's entry on the TrustMRR profile. The other details come from his posts, the privacy policy and the store listing. They are grade C, except the version history, which Apple publishes.", "items": [ "React Native for the app, Node.js for the server and RevenueCat for subscriptions. His first app was built with Expo, a toolkit for React Native.", "Outside AI providers transcribe the learner's speech in real time, generate the tutor's replies, and do the scoring, translations and grammar feedback. The privacy policy names none of them.", "He writes code with Cursor, an AI code editor, together with Claude, and runs a long audit prompt for bugs, leftover text, security and performance before each release.", "18 versions in five months: vocabulary and a home screen widget first, then verb drills and word games, three more languages on 29 April, the voice practice mode on 3 June, a new voice curriculum on 14 July and an interface in more languages on 24 August.", "Videos: an internal tool that generates TikTok and Instagram slideshows, phones at US$100 each for 3 TikTok and 3 Instagram accounts, and later paid creators.", "Sales through Apple and Google in-app purchases, and since 22 July 2026 also through a web app and a web purchase page with other billing partners." ], "src": [ 1, 6, 9, 10, 11, 13, 17 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold the same promise, speaking a language with a tutor, and used human teachers. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "VIPKid", "years": "2013 to 2021", "funding": "US$1.1B", "cause": "Legal/Regulatory", "promise": "One-to-one video English lessons for Chinese children with North American teachers.", "died": "China's 2021 tutoring rules banned foreign teachers and foreign curriculum, which was the whole product.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2522-vipkid" }, { "name": "Meten EdtechX", "years": "2006 to 2024", "funding": "US$600M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Face-to-face English classes for adults in China, at a price far above apps.", "died": "Winning and teaching a student cost more than the student paid. The pandemic and regulation ended it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2353-meten-edtechx" }, { "name": "TutorGroup (iTutor)", "years": "2004 to 2021", "funding": "US$300M", "cause": "Legal/Regulatory", "promise": "Live online English lessons for learners in Asia with native-speaking tutors.", "died": "A high cost to win each student and tutors who left, and then the 2021 ban on foreign tutors in China.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2216-tutorgroup-itutor" }, { "name": "Hujiang", "years": "2001 to 2021", "funding": "US$187M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Online language courses for a very large free audience.", "died": "Most users never paid, and those who paid did not cover the cost of acquiring them. A failed stock listing exposed it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2556-hujiang" }, { "name": "Teacher Finder", "years": "2015 to 2019", "funding": "US$50K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Match language learners directly with private tutors, without a language school.", "died": "Larger tutor marketplaces offered more, and winning each customer became too expensive.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1962-teacher-finder" } ], "whatChanged": [ "All five sold what Verbi sells: practice in speaking a language with someone who answers. In all five that someone was a human teacher, paid by the hour, and the students had to be found by a sales team or by expensive advertising. The database records two ways they ended: the cost of winning and teaching a student was higher than what the student paid, or a regulator removed the teachers.", "Verbi replaces the teacher with AI models that it rents, which makes a yearly price of US$47.99 possible and let a very small team build and run it. It replaces the sales team with short videos that cost almost nothing to produce. What has not changed is the question that ended Hujiang and Meten: whether a learner stays long enough to repay the cost of winning that learner. Verbi's cost per new subscriber is not published, its margin is a founder entry, and its first yearly subscribers reach their renewal date in April 2027." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The September result, no.", "text": "The parts can be repeated by one or two people with little money: a narrow product on rented AI models, a yearly plan, and a very high volume of short videos tested on many accounts. The result cannot be ordered. The best month depended on videos that spread, and daily revenue was 77% lower one month later.", "steps": [ "Release a small first app to learn the store, the paywall and the video platforms, and stop it when the numbers stay low.", "Choose a product in which an AI model does work that a paid person used to do.", "Generate many cheap video variants, post them on several accounts, and keep only the accounts and formats that bring trials.", "Offer a yearly plan, so that the cash arrives before the cost of the next videos.", "When one format works, pay creators to repeat it, and add a web purchase page to pay less commission.", "Read revenue month by month next to MRR, and do not multiply the best month by 12." ], "open": "Speaking practice for one narrow need: a job interview in a second language, an oral exam, the vocabulary of one profession. Verbi's own reviews ask for more reliable speech recognition and for real grammar correction." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Half of the revenue came in one month", "text": "September 2026 brought US$128,225, which is 51.1% of everything the app has earned. Early September ran at about US$6,312 a day and early October at about US$1,451 a day, 77% lower. TrustMRR marks the last 30 days as 38.3% below the 30 days before. The 30-day figure is one month of sales and says little about the next twelve." }, { "title": "Apple and Google collect the money and keep a share", "text": "Apple's developer pages say that a developer receives 70% of a subscription price in the subscriber's first year, or 85% in the Small Business Program. Apple also decides on refunds: Verbi's terms say that the company cannot refund an App Store purchase itself. The TrustMRR profile does not say whether its revenue is before or after this commission, and RevenueCat's documentation defines its standard figure as before it. The web purchase page of July 2026, which the founder describes as selling \"without the apple tax\", reduces this dependence only for the customers who use it." }, { "title": "Customers come from short-video platforms", "text": "The founder's posts credit TikTok and Instagram videos for the sales, and a Google Play review begins with \"TikTok brought me here\". The method uses generated slideshows and many accounts on many phones; in March 2026 he asked on X whether a device may hold only 3 TikTok accounts. A platform can close accounts or show such videos to fewer people. His posts mention no other source of customers of similar size; on 22 July he wrote that he would soon try paid ads for the web version. Paid creators and promoted posts are a cost that the first months did not have: he wrote \"80% margins\" in July, and the profile shows 55%." }, { "title": "No yearly subscriber has renewed yet", "text": "The first yearly plans were sold in April 2026, so the first renewals fall due in April 2027. RevenueCat's State of Subscription Apps 2025 report says that nearly 30% of annual subscriptions are cancelled in the first month, that most apps with cheap annual plans keep up to 36.0% of users after a year, and that on weekly plans fewer than 5% of payers reach month six. RevenueCat's count of active subscriptions includes people who have already cancelled and are waiting for the paid period to end." }, { "title": "The AI providers are not named", "text": "The privacy policy says that the learner's audio is streamed to third-party AI providers and names none. If they charge by use, as model providers usually do, a subscriber who practices a lot costs more than one who stops, and a change of price or policy by a provider changes the margin. Reviews in the US App Store in July and October 2026 report speech recognition that rejects correct answers, a limit of 3 minutes on a voice session, and mistakes in generated exercises." }, { "title": "Team, costs and the founder's time are not verified", "text": "The founder's X profile lists a job as a software engineer at Twitch and a YouTube channel next to Verbi. The team size of 2 to 5, the bootstrapped status and the 55% margin are fields that he filled in. TrustMRR verifies revenue, MRR and subscriptions only, and its FAQ says that its rebuilt figures can differ from a provider's own by up to 30%. Two reviews in the Canadian App Store, answered by the developer on 9 September 2026, say that a rebuilt version is harder to use." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.appverbi.com" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6760734657" }, { "kind": "android", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vocably.app" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/verbi" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of Verbi, revenue read from RevenueCat by API key", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/verbi", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile (https://trustmrr.com/startup/verbi.md) live on 13 October 2026, and the cached copy of 12 October. Revenue, MRR and active subscriptions come from the RevenueCat API, last synced on 13 October 2026 at 17:59 UTC. The description, team size, funding, technology list and profit margin are entered by the founder, grade C." }, { "title": "TrustMRR on X, 28 August 2026: Verbi just joined TrustMRR", "url": "https://x.com/trust_mrr/status/2093428805314764903", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API, as a repost in the founder's timeline. Source for the figures on the day of listing." }, { "title": "TrustMRR FAQ, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/faq", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on payment providers, on the RevenueCat and App Store connections, and on why figures can differ from a provider's own." }, { "title": "RevenueCat documentation: Overview Metrics, and the Revenue chart page", "url": "https://www.revenuecat.com/docs/dashboard-and-metrics/overview", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both pages in full. Source for the definitions of Revenue (gross, before store fees and taxes), Proceeds, Active Subscriptions, Active Trials and New Customers. The Revenue chart page is at /docs/dashboard-and-metrics/charts/revenue-chart." }, { "title": "RevenueCat documentation: Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) chart", "url": "https://www.revenuecat.com/docs/dashboard-and-metrics/charts/monthly-recurring-revenue-mrr-chart", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the conversion of weekly and yearly prices to a monthly value." }, { "title": "Apple App Store listing, United States: Verbi: Speak a New Language, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6760734657", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full, with Apple's public lookup API for the app and for the developer account. Source for the description, the seller name, the rating, the in-app purchase prices, the release dates of Verbi and Lucidia, the version history and three user reviews." }, { "title": "Apple App Store listing, Canada: Verbi: Speak a New Language, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/id6760734657", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the rating, the in-app purchase prices in Canadian dollars and the reviews, with Apple's lookup API for the Canadian storefront." }, { "title": "Google Play listing: Verbi: Learn a New Language, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vocably.app", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the header, the description and the first reviews. Source for the stars, the review count, the downloads, the date of the last update and the review that mentions TikTok and a 3-day trial." }, { "title": "Verbi website, with its comparison page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://www.appverbi.com", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the home page and the comparison page in full. Company's own text. Source for the product description and the link to the web app." }, { "title": "Verbi privacy policy and terms, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://appverbi.com/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the operating company, AI and voice processing, data sharing, and in the terms (https://appverbi.com/terms) the sections on subscriptions and refunds." }, { "title": "Pedro Machado on X: profile and timeline, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/pedrotech_", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile and four pages of the timeline through the fxtwitter API, 74 posts back to April 2025, and four attached screenshots by eye. Source for his profile text and for the posts of 9, 10, 11 and 27 March (first app), 16, 19 and 21 May, 2, 4 and 21 June, 5, 12 and 16 July and 10 September 2026." }, { "title": "Pedro Machado on X, 23 May 2026: launched on April 2nd, downloads, conversion and MRR", "url": "https://x.com/pedrotech_/status/2058258876013891850", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Founder's own figures." }, { "title": "Pedro Machado on X, 13 May 2026: 100 active subscriptions and the slideshow tool", "url": "https://x.com/pedrotech_/status/2054587807331647600", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Founder's own figures." }, { "title": "Pedro Machado on X, 3 June 2026: two people posting on 12 accounts", "url": "https://x.com/pedrotech_/status/2062246547178590457", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API." }, { "title": "Pedro Machado on X, 9 June 2026: 4.3k in 28 days with no ad spend", "url": "https://x.com/pedrotech_/status/2064150772770877766", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Founder's own figures." }, { "title": "Pedro Machado on X, 21 July 2026: 45k in the last 28 days and 10 creators", "url": "https://x.com/pedrotech_/status/2079628371802390972", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API, and the attached RevenueCat screenshot by eye." }, { "title": "Pedro Machado on X, 22 July 2026: web app and web purchase page", "url": "https://x.com/pedrotech_/status/2080044086699118838", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API." }, { "title": "Pedro Machado on X, 3 September 2026: a 16k day, quoting his post of 2 September on 10k MRR", "url": "https://x.com/pedrotech_/status/2095556239703068852", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both posts in full through the fxtwitter API, and the two attached RevenueCat screenshots by eye. The post of 2 September is https://x.com/pedrotech_/status/2095173251957948756." }, { "title": "YouTube channel PedroTech, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/@PedroTechnologies", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the channel name, description, subscriber count and the link to his X account in the page data." }, { "title": "Apple Developer: Auto-renewable subscriptions, and the App Store Small Business Program, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://developer.apple.com/app-store/subscriptions/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the section on net revenue on the first page and the rules of the program at https://developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program/. Source for the 70% and 85% shares and the US$1 million limit." }, { "title": "RevenueCat: State of Subscription Apps 2025", "url": "https://www.revenuecat.com/state-of-subscription-apps-2025/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the summary figures and the retention section. A vendor's benchmark from its own customers' data, not about Verbi." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/vid-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/vid-ai.md", "slug": "vid-ai", "name": "Vid.AI", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI generator of faceless short and long videos", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-13", "launchLabel": "September 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$827K Stripe-verified revenue in 12 months, October 2026", "sticker": "$827K verified in 12 months", "outcomeUsd": 826663, "months": 25, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders, Priyam Raj (product, Bangalore) and Matt Par (chief executive, USA), and a development team of unstated size; the TrustMRR profile says 2 to 5 people, LinkedIn lists 2", "fundingLabel": "None, by the founder's statement", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "video", "channel": "audience", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Video" ], "product": "A web application that turns an idea or a script into a finished video in which no person appears on camera: a script written by a language model, a synthetic voice, stock footage or AI images, captions and music. It makes vertical shorts and horizontal videos of up to 20 minutes, and it can upload to a YouTube channel that the customer connects. Customers pay a monthly or yearly subscription that includes credits. There is no free plan and no free trial.", "why": "A developer in Bangalore formed a company with an American YouTuber who already had an audience of people who want faceless channels, so customers paid from the first day. Affiliates receive 33% of every payment and brought about a tenth of all revenue, and Meta ads brought more. Nobody could use the product without paying, so no free user consumed paid AI models. Verified revenue reached about US$85,000 a month for six months, and then fell by half.", "summary": [ "Vid.AI makes faceless videos: videos in which no person appears on camera. The customer types an idea or pastes a script. A language model writes the script, a text to speech model, which is software that turns text into a human-sounding voice, reads it, stock footage or AI images fill the screen, and the service adds captions and music and renders a vertical short or a horizontal video of up to 20 minutes. Plans cost US$39, US$99 or US$199 a month and include credits, units that are used up as videos are made. There is no free plan.", "Priyam Raj, an engineer in Bangalore who sold two earlier products while he was a student, runs the product. His co-founder Matt Par, an American YouTuber, is the chief executive. Paid plans began on 27 September 2024, and the founder writes that the first day brought US$14,000 and the first month US$90,000. TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue from a company's payment processor, shows US$826,663 received through Stripe in the 12 months to 13 October 2026 and US$1,632,538 since the first payment. The same data shows a fall: US$89,846 in January 2026, US$41,609 in September 2026 and US$39,028 in the last 30 days. MRR, monthly recurring revenue, the value of all active subscriptions for one month, is US$47,175 from 715 subscriptions. The founders have offered the company for sale since August 2025, and it is listed on TrustMRR for US$1,500,000.", "The revenue figures on this page are grade A: TrustMRR read them from the Stripe account through an API key. The team, the costs, the marketing and the price of the domain are founder statements, grade C. Three similar products are already on this site, Faceless.video, AutoShorts.ai and Revid.ai, and all three rest on figures reported by their founders. This page adds monthly revenue verified by the payment processor for the same category, including the months in which it fell." ], "factsCaption": "US$826,663 in 12 months from the Stripe account of a two-founder product, with the last 30 days 43% below the 12-month average and 57% below the best month", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the company's Stripe account through an API key, or from its Google Analytics account, last synced on 13 October 2026 at 14:07 UTC. A grade C value is a statement by a founder, an image of his own dashboard, or a page of the company. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. Grade A covers money received in that Stripe account. It does not cover sales through Digistore24 or Lemon Squeezy, which the privacy policy also names, and it does not cover costs, margin or profit.", "timelineLead": "From the first paid plans to about US$85,000 a month, then four monthly falls in a row and a listing for sale, in 25 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Vid.AI prices on 13 October 2026, read from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "A yearly plan costs US$369, US$947 or US$1,919, which is 20% to 21% less than twelve monthly payments, and the whole year of credits is given at the start. The page says plans carry 200 to 1,500 credits a month, and it states each allowance two ways: as one-minute shorts or as ten-minute videos, drawn from the same credits. All plans allow videos of up to 20 minutes. New subscribers on monthly plans can get 50% off the first month. Extra credits can be bought. Unused credits are refunded within 30 days of a payment. There is no free plan and no free trial; the page gives the reason: \"Every video costs us real compute to generate\". Checkout runs through Stripe, and the privacy policy also names Lemon Squeezy and Digistore24.", "rows": [ [ "Starter", "30.75", "39", "40 one-minute shorts or 4 ten-minute videos; video models Seedance 1 Pro Fast and Wan 2.2" ], [ "Plus", "78.92", "99", "80 shorts or 8 ten-minute videos; adds Veo 3.1 Fast, Seedance 2.5, Kling 2.5 Turbo Pro and HD images" ], [ "Pro", "159.92", "199", "300 shorts or 30 ten-minute videos; priority support; shown next to a crossed-out US$299" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue in the 12 months to 13 October 2026", "value": "US$826,663", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from the Stripe account by API key, synced 13 October 2026 at 14:07 UTC. The copy cached one day earlier showed US$826,218 for its own 12 months. This is the headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue since the first payment", "value": "US$1,632,538", "grade": "A", "note": "The all-time line of the profile. The profile gives 24 September 2024 as the founding date.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days, at 13 October 2026", "value": "US$39,028", "grade": "A", "note": "Same profile. Change against the 30 days before: minus 15.2%. Last 7 days: US$9,573. The best day of the 30 was US$2,312 and the worst US$406.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 3 months and the last 6 months", "value": "US$137,504 and US$347,623", "grade": "A", "note": "Same profile.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month, November 2025 to September 2026", "value": "Nov US$53,970; Dec US$84,294; Jan US$89,846; Feb US$89,123; Mar US$84,934; Apr US$82,626; May US$83,979; Jun US$61,905; Jul US$54,471; Aug US$52,082; Sep US$41,609", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table. October 2026 to the 13th: US$14,922. Months before November 2025 are not public.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR and active subscriptions", "value": "US$47,175 a month; 715 subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot at the same sync. The profile reports the MRR change over 30 days as minus 27.3% and does not publish how it calculates MRR or that change.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average month, by period", "value": "US$68,889 over 12 months; US$57,937 over 6 months; US$45,835 over 3 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 826,663 divided by 12; 347,623 divided by 6; 137,504 divided by 3.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Last 30 days against the average month of the last twelve", "value": "43.3% lower", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$39,028 against US$68,889.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Best month against the last full month", "value": "minus 53.7%, from US$89,846 in January 2026 to US$41,609 in September 2026", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated. The largest fall in one month was June 2026: minus 26.3% from May. The six months from December 2025 to May 2026 average US$85,800; the four months from June to September 2026 average US$52,517.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "The two halves of the last 12 months", "value": "US$479,040, then US$347,623: minus 27.4%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 826,663 minus 347,623 gives the first six months.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before the last 12 months", "value": "US$805,875, about US$64,000 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 1,632,538 minus 826,663, over the 384 days from 24 September 2024 to 13 October 2025. The business was therefore about as large in its first year as in its second.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR against the cash of the last 30 days", "value": "MRR is US$8,147 higher, 20.9%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 47,175 minus 39,028. Both figures carry the same sync time, and the copy of the day before shows the same gap, so a sync difference does not explain it. The sources support three causes and give no size for any of them. Yearly plans exist, and MRR in its usual definition counts one twelfth of a yearly plan each month while the cash arrives once a year. New monthly subscribers can pay half price in the first month. The privacy policy names a service that pauses subscriptions and sends reminders for failed payments, and a paused or unpaid subscription brings no cash.", "src": [ 1, 12, 14 ] }, { "fact": "MRR per active subscription", "value": "US$65.98", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 47,175 divided by 715. It lies between the Starter price of US$39 and the Plus price of US$99.", "src": [ 1, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Stripe gross volume by year, founder's image", "value": "US$823,000 from 21 July 2025 to 21 July 2026; US$729,000 in the 12 months before", "grade": "C", "note": "Image of his Stripe dashboard in the post of 21 July 2026. The earlier period starts before the launch, so its US$729,000 was collected in about ten months. Together with TrustMRR's later months, these gross figures are about 3% above TrustMRR's all-time total; gross volume is counted before refunds.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "First day and first month, by the founder", "value": "US$14,000 on the first day; US$90,000 in the first month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 21 July 2026, written 22 months after the launch. No post from the launch weeks could be read. The chart in the same image shows a first peak of about US$12,000 in one day.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Gross volume from 1 January to 9 July 2025", "value": "US$438,222.29", "grade": "C", "note": "Image of his Stripe dashboard in the post of 9 July 2025, which gives the amount as 3.4 crore rupees (34 million rupees) and adds \"zero investors\".", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "MRR in the founder's Stripe images", "value": "US$44,003.77 on 17 August 2025; US$42,361.49 on 4 September 2025; US$52,254.92 on 4 September 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Images in the posts of 19 August 2025 and 4 September 2026. The second chart shows two highs close to US$80,000: one about three months after the launch and one early in 2026. The values of the highs were read from the chart and are approximate. From 4 September 2026 to the TrustMRR figure of 13 October 2026, MRR fell 9.7%.", "src": [ 3, 4, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Subscriber churn rate, 27 July to 17 August 2025", "value": "22.31%; 27.53% in the period before", "grade": "C", "note": "Stripe image in the post of 19 August 2025. Churn is the share of subscribers who cancel in a period. The image does not state the length of that period.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue that came through affiliates", "value": "US$175,029.94 by 22 September 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Image of the affiliate dashboard (Tolt) in the founder's post. On 12 November 2025 he wrote that affiliates had brought more than US$100,000 in 12 months. The program pays 33% of every payment for as long as the customer stays, with a 60-day tracking period.", "src": [ 6, 15 ] }, { "fact": "Affiliate share of all revenue", "value": "about 10.7%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 175,029.94 divided by 1,632,538, if both figures cover the whole life of the product. Checkouts outside Stripe would change this share.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Paid advertising", "value": "Meta ads; spending not published", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's reply of 4 September 2026: \"Currently we've just been doing Meta Ads\". The TrustMRR profile lists Meta Ads and Influencers as marketing channels. No source gives the ad budget or the cost of winning one customer.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Price of the domain vid.ai", "value": "US$47,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's posts of 24 October 2025 and 21 July 2026. No source names the seller. A capture of 13 July 2022 in the Internet Archive reads \"vid.ai is for sale\". The October 2025 post says he bought the domain \"this year\", but the archive lists captures that answered normally at vid.ai from October 2024, and the company's changelog dates the product from July 2024. The purchase date is not verified.", "src": [ 2, 9, 19 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price and offers", "value": "US$1,500,000; 38 offers received; not sold", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR listing, first listed 15 September 2026. The seller sets the price. On 16 September the founder posted an image of an offer notice for US$1,500,000, and on 7 October an image of a payment page that reads US$2,500,000.", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price against revenue", "value": "1.8 times the last 12 months; 3.2 times the last 30 days taken for a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 1,500,000 divided by 826,663, and by 39,028 times 12 (468,336). The profile shows the second figure as its revenue multiple.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "69.0%", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot. Profit margin is not among the metrics that the profile says it reads from the payment provider, and the seller's note on the listing says \"Excludes owner distributions\". At that margin the last 30 days would leave about US$26,900.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Hosting bills", "value": "US$998.00, US$968.00 and US$1,002.64 for June, July and August 2026; about US$120 expected for September", "grade": "C", "note": "Images in the founder's posts of 4 and 26 September 2026, after a move from Render to Railway. These are server bills only. The cost of the AI models is not published.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Visitors in the last 30 days", "value": "46,286; US$0.84 of revenue per visitor", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot; the profile marks the Google Analytics API as connected.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Sign-ups against paying subscriptions", "value": "more than 226,000 sign-ups; 715 active subscriptions, about 0.3%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the founder's post of 26 September 2026 (grade C) and the TrustMRR subscription count (grade A). The company's site says 100K+ creators.", "src": [ 1, 7, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Price per video inside a plan", "value": "US$0.98 per one-minute short on Starter; US$1.24 on Plus; US$0.66 on Pro", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the monthly price divided by 40, 80 and 300 shorts. A ten-minute video costs US$9.75, US$12.38 or US$6.63 in the same way.", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "fact": "List prices of the rented models", "value": "Veo 3.1 Fast: US$0.10 per second of 720p video; ElevenLabs speech: US$0.08 per 1,000 characters", "grade": "C", "note": "The providers' own price pages, read 13 October 2026. Vid.AI does not publish what it pays, and it may buy the models through another provider at another price.", "src": [ 22, 23 ] }, { "fact": "Model cost of one minute at list prices", "value": "US$6.00 for 60 seconds of generated video; about US$0.07 for one minute of narration", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 60 times 0.10; and 900 characters times 0.08 divided by 1,000, if one minute is 150 words of 6 characters. A one-minute short sells for US$0.98 on Starter, so a plan cannot pay for videos generated entirely by a video model.", "src": [ 12, 22, 23 ] }, { "fact": "The founder's public figures against the verified ones", "value": "\"around $90k a month\" on 9 July 2026, when June was US$61,905; \"$70k/mo\" in his profile on 13 October 2026, when the last 30 days were US$39,028", "grade": "C", "note": "The post and the profile text are his own. The comparison uses the TrustMRR figures. Sales through Digistore24 or Lemon Squeezy are not in the Stripe figure, and their size is not published.", "src": [ 11, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 co-founders and a development team of unstated size", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder's site names \"my co-founder Matt\". Matt Par's profile on X reads CEO of TubeMagic and VidAI. LinkedIn lists 2 employees, Priyam Raj and Matt Par. The TrustMRR profile says 2 to 5 people. On 1 October 2026 the founder wrote \"My entire dev team\", and from January to March 2026 he looked for one more developer at 80,000 to 90,000 rupees a month.", "src": [ 1, 10, 16, 17, 18 ] }, { "fact": "Legal entity", "value": "VidAI LLC", "grade": "C", "note": "Named in the terms and the privacy policy, last updated 27 September 2026. Neither page gives a state of registration or an address. TrustMRR shows the country as US. The founder's site says that his own holding company, Priyam Ventures, is in India.", "src": [ 1, 14, 16 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "\"zero investors\" in the post of 9 July 2025; \"Bootstrapped\" on the TrustMRR profile, which the founder writes.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the first paid plans to the October 2026 figure", "value": "25 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: September 2024 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1, 13 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2019 to January 2024", "what": "Priyam Raj builds Timenite, a website, in 2019, and then Morise.ai, AI software for YouTube creators, while he studies computer science. His site says both were acquired, Timenite in 2023 and Morise.ai in January 2024, when he was 21.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "when": "13 July 2022", "what": "A capture of vid.ai in the Internet Archive reads \"vid.ai is for sale\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 19 ] }, { "when": "31 July to 18 September 2024", "what": "The changelog begins on 31 July with captions timed to the narration. The editor for faceless shorts arrives on 9 September, a home page with prices on 13 September, and gameplay backgrounds on 18 September.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "24 to 27 September 2024", "what": "TrustMRR gives 24 September as the founding date. On 27 September the changelog records subscription plans with monthly credits. The founder later writes that the first day brought US$14,000 and the first month US$90,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2, 13 ] }, { "when": "January and February 2025", "what": "TubeMagic, the pair's other product for YouTubers, is at more than US$1 million of annual recurring revenue on 10 January and US$1.5 million on 15 February, by the founder's posts. The first post excludes US$200,000 to US$300,000 a year sold through Digistore24.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "June 2025", "what": "The Vid.AI editor appears on screen in the segment \"AI Slop\" of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on HBO. The founder posts a screenshot of the segment and his Stripe chart of that day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "9 July 2025", "what": "The founder posts US$438,222.29 of gross volume since 1 January, with \"zero investors\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "15 July 2025", "what": "YouTube renames its rule on repetitious content to inauthentic content and states that it covers content that is repetitive or mass-produced, which cannot earn ad money.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 20 ] }, { "when": "19 August 2025", "what": "First public offer to sell: \"We're looking to sell Vid.AI\". The attached Stripe images show MRR of US$44,003.77 and a subscriber churn rate of 22.31%.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "2 November 2025", "what": "The founder announces the listing on TrustMRR, with the Stripe account connected. Revenue of November, read from Stripe: US$53,970.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 11 ] }, { "when": "December 2025 to May 2026", "what": "Six months between US$82,626 and US$89,846. January 2026 is the best month in the public data.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "28 January to 11 March 2026", "what": "The founder looks for a developer for the video rendering code, at 80,000 to 90,000 rupees a month, remote.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "Revenue falls 26.3% in one month, to US$61,905. No source states the cause.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "21 July 2026", "what": "The founder writes that the company is \"formally open to acquisition conversations\" and gives MRR of about US$65,000. His Stripe image shows US$823,000 of gross volume in 12 months. July revenue on TrustMRR is US$54,471.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "4 September 2026", "what": "He looks for an agency or operator to \"turn around a ~$50k MRR AI SaaS\" and writes that the only marketing at that time is Meta ads. Hosting moves from Render to Railway.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 10 ] }, { "when": "15 to 30 September 2026", "what": "Listed for sale on TrustMRR at US$1,500,000 on 15 September. The changelog records 20 releases in the month, against 2 in August: animated avatars, a connection that lets Claude or ChatGPT make videos, more languages. The terms and the privacy policy are updated on 27 September. September revenue is US$41,609.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 7, 13, 14 ] }, { "when": "7 October 2026", "what": "\"vid.ai is for sale\", with an image of a payment page that reads US$2,500,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR sync: US$39,028 in the last 30 days, MRR US$47,175, 715 subscriptions, 38 offers received, still listed. The site is online and its changelog has an entry for this day.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 13 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A developer and a creator with an audience", "text": "The founder writes that he \"partnered with a creator\" and ran the product from Bangalore. The creator is Matt Par, whose profile says he runs more than 12 YouTube channels and helps people with YouTube, and whose channel the home page shows with \"1 Billion+ Views\". By the founder's account, customers paid on the first day. The privacy policy shows the sales tools of a creator: a webinar service, the Digistore24 checkout, course access and partner communities." }, { "title": "A third of every payment to affiliates, for life", "text": "The affiliate program pays 33% of each payment for as long as the customer stays, tracks a referral for 60 days and pays monthly through Tolt. By 22 September 2026 it had brought US$175,029.94 of revenue, about a tenth of the total. The buyers are people who publish videos, so many of them have an audience to which they can recommend the tool." }, { "title": "Paid Meta ads", "text": "In September 2026 the founder wrote that Meta ads were the only marketing in use at that time, and the privacy policy lists the Meta Pixel and Google Ads tags. He has not published the budget or the cost of winning a customer, so this page cannot say whether the ads pay for themselves." }, { "title": "No free use", "text": "Every video uses paid AI models and paid stock footage, and the site gives this as the reason for having no free trial. A new subscriber on a monthly plan can get 50% off the first month, and unused credits are refunded within 30 days. The founder of AutoShorts.ai, a similar product on this site, reported that free users cost him about US$13,000 a month; Vid.AI never had that cost." }, { "title": "A short name, and verified revenue used as publicity", "text": "The founder paid US$47,000 for vid.ai and names the domain first when he describes what a buyer would get. He connected Stripe to TrustMRR in November 2025 and posted the company's rank there in November and December 2025. His post of 16 September 2026 about an offer received through TrustMRR had more than 770,000 views." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's privacy policy, pricing page and changelog and from the founder's posts on X. They are grade C.", "items": [ "A Next.js web application. The founder's hiring post names Remotion, a library that builds video from program code, for the rendering, and the privacy policy says Amazon Web Services stores the media and renders the videos.", "Scripts and images come through OpenRouter, a service that passes requests to models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI. Replicate supplies image generation and the animated avatar videos.", "Voices come from ElevenLabs: the home page offers 33 narrators on the v4 or v2 voice models, and any voice from the ElevenLabs library.", "Moving images use rented video models: Seedance 1 Pro Fast and Wan 2.2 on Starter, and Veo 3.1 Fast, Seedance 2.5 and Kling 2.5 Turbo Pro on Plus and Pro. They make a 5-second intro and, as an option that uses more credits, turn the still images of the scenes into moving ones.", "Stock footage and music come from Storyblocks, photos from Pexels.", "Payments go through Stripe, with Lemon Squeezy and Digistore24 as other checkouts. Churnkey handles cancelling, pausing and failed-payment reminders. Tolt tracks affiliates.", "Hosting cost about US$1,000 a month on Render until August 2026 and about US$120 a month on Railway after that.", "Since September 2026 an MCP server, a standard connection for AI assistants, lets Claude or ChatGPT create a video from a chat with the customer's credits.", "The founder wrote that the team works without daily meetings, through voice notes and recorded videos, and that the developers use AI coding tools on a team plan." ], "src": [ 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database promised video without skill or staff, or built their product on a platform that another company controlled. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Qwiki", "years": "2010 to 2015", "funding": "US$10M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Stories with pictures, sound and narration, generated automatically from information that people usually read as text.", "died": "The platform was expensive to run, users did not change their habits, and it had no lasting revenue model. Yahoo bought it in 2013 and later closed it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/481-qwiki" }, { "name": "HighlightCam", "years": "2009 to 2012", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "An algorithm that finds the best moments in raw footage and edits the video for you.", "died": "Operating costs were high, and phones and consumer editing programs offered easier alternatives and then added similar functions.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1636-highlightcam" }, { "name": "Fuzzwich", "years": "2007 to 2010", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Animated videos by drag and drop, for people without animation skill.", "died": "It found no lasting business model, did not grow beyond its early users, and stayed on the desktop while viewers moved to phones and social media.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1655-fuzzwich" }, { "name": "ClearMix", "years": "2020 to 2023", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Professional marketing videos at low cost, made by freelance videographers on demand.", "died": "Canva and Adobe added video, and AI editing tools automated the manual work that ClearMix sold.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1336-clearmix" }, { "name": "PostRocket", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$610K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "More reach for Facebook pages, by choosing the time and form of each post from data.", "died": "Facebook changed its API and its ranking rules, which removed the value of the product, and larger tools covered several platforms.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/457-postrocket" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Four of the five sold easier video, and they failed because the technology was too costly to run, or because a larger company added the same function, or because the manual work behind the service could be automated. Vid.AI stands on the other side of that change: every step that needed people or expensive computing in 2010 can now be rented per use, and two founders with a small development team joined the steps into one product. The site sells a one-minute short for about US$1.", "What did not change is the dependence. PostRocket lost its value when Facebook changed its rules. A customer of Vid.AI needs YouTube, TikTok and Instagram to show the videos and, for many customers, to pay for them, and since July 2025 YouTube states that mass-produced content cannot earn ad money. The verified data on this page shows a second thing that did not change: a tool that many competitors can build keeps its customers only for a short time. Revenue was halved in eight months while the product stayed online and kept improving." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The partnership, yes. The same product, not now.", "text": "The repeatable part is the structure: one person builds, one person already has the audience that needs the tool, and affiliates are paid a share for life. The product itself is a weak choice today. The category is crowded, Vid.AI's own verified revenue fell by more than half between January and September 2026, the founders have tried to sell it for 14 months, and YouTube's rules now exclude the automated channels that this kind of tool was first sold for.", "steps": [ "If you can build but have no audience, find a creator whose followers already ask for the tool, and make that person a co-founder.", "Charge from the first day and offer no free plan when every use costs you money at a model provider.", "Pay affiliates a recurring share, and recruit first the customers who publish to an audience.", "Connect your payment account to a public verification service early. It gives you publicity while you grow and a record that buyers trust when you sell.", "Read your churn rate every month. If about a fifth of subscribers leave in a period, as this founder's own chart showed in August 2025, growth must come from new customers every month, and it stops when marketing stops." ], "open": "Tools for an audience that an existing creator already teaches, in a field where the result does not depend on one platform's rule about automated content." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Verified revenue fell by more than half in eight months", "text": "The Stripe data shows US$89,846 in January 2026 and US$41,609 in September 2026, a fall of 53.7%, with the largest step in June 2026. The last 30 days, US$39,028, are 43.3% below the average month of the last twelve. The headline figure of this page describes the past year and not the present rate. No source states why June fell; the founder's request of 4 September 2026 names retention, affiliates and paid growth as the things to repair." }, { "title": "The founder's own figures are higher than the verified ones", "text": "On 9 July 2026 he wrote that the product \"does around $90k a month\"; the verified figure for June was US$61,905. His profile still read \"$70k/mo\" on 13 October 2026, when the last 30 days were US$39,028. MRR, US$47,175, is also 20.9% above the cash of the last 30 days, which the sources explain only in part: yearly plans, half-price first months, and paused or unpaid subscriptions. Sales through Digistore24 and Lemon Squeezy are outside the Stripe figure and are not published." }, { "title": "For sale since August 2025, and not sold", "text": "The first public offer to sell is dated 19 August 2025, when MRR was US$44,004. The listing on TrustMRR asks US$1,500,000 and shows 38 offers, and the company was still listed on 13 October 2026. The asking price is 1.8 times the revenue of the last 12 months but 3.2 times the present yearly rate. The profit margin of 69% on the listing is not read from the payment processor, and the seller's note says it excludes owner distributions." }, { "title": "YouTube does not pay for mass-produced videos", "text": "YouTube's monetization policy page, read 13 October 2026, says that since 15 July 2025 the rule once named \"repetitious content\" is named \"inauthentic content\" and covers content that is \"repetitive or mass-produced\". Its list of what cannot earn money includes \"AI-generated content made with generic or unoriginal templates giving the impression of mass production\" and image slideshows with little narrative. The TrustMRR profile of Vid.AI promises \"monetizable AI videos on Autopilot\", which is the case this rule describes, and in June 2025 the product appeared in a television segment named \"AI Slop\". The revenue data does not show an immediate effect: the best months came five to ten months after the rule." }, { "title": "TikTok requires labels and treats repetitive automation as spam", "text": "TikTok's Community Guidelines, effective 24 September 2026, require creators \"to label AI-generated or significantly edited content that shows realistic-looking scenes or people\", list \"Using automation to run many accounts or send repetitive content\" as spam, and keep \"Low-quality or minimally edited content\" out of the For You feed. On 22 April and 8 October 2026 the founder asked his followers how to create and upload TikTok accounts for the United States from another country; the posts do not say for which product." }, { "title": "The video models cost more than a video sells for", "text": "Google's price list, read 13 October 2026, gives Veo 3.1 Fast at US$0.10 per second at 720p. Sixty seconds generated entirely by that model would cost US$6.00, while a one-minute short sells for US$0.98 on Starter and US$1.24 on Plus. A subscription at these prices could not pay for videos generated entirely by such a model. The product builds its videos from still images and stock footage, and uses video models for a 5-second intro and, for more credits, for motion in the scene images. ElevenLabs lists speech at US$0.08 per 1,000 characters, about US$0.07 for one minute of narration if a minute is 150 words of 6 characters. The company publishes none of its model costs, and a price change at a provider goes directly to its margin." }, { "title": "A crowded category with high churn", "text": "The site carries comparison pages against Crayo, SendShort, AutoShorts and Short.ai, and three similar products are already on this site. The founder's Stripe image of August 2025 showed a subscriber churn rate of 22.31%, after 27.53% in the period before. Of more than 226,000 people who signed up, 715 held an active subscription on 13 October 2026. The founder also runs a studio with several other products, so his attention is divided." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://vid.ai/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/vidai-llc" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of Vid.AI, revenue read from Stripe by API key", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/vidai-llc.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile on 13 October 2026 (revenue last synced 13 October 2026 at 14:07 UTC) and compared it with a copy cached one day earlier. The revenue, MRR and subscription figures come from the Stripe account, and the visitor count from Google Analytics. The profile text, the team size, the funding line, the profit margin and the sale listing are written or set by the founder and are grade C." }, { "title": "X post by Priyam Raj, 21 July 2026: launch figures, the domain price, and open to acquisition", "url": "https://x.com/priymrj/status/2079631496676245834", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API, with his reply that links the TrustMRR profile, and viewed the attached Stripe image: gross volume of US$823K from 21 July 2025 to 21 July 2026, US$729K in the previous period." }, { "title": "X posts by Priyam Raj, 4 September 2026: looking for someone to turn around a US$50,000 MRR product", "url": "https://x.com/priymrj/status/2095749062477877296", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the post and three replies in full through the fxtwitter API and viewed the Stripe MRR chart: US$52,254.92, against US$42,361.49 one year earlier. Source for the Meta ads statement." }, { "title": "X post by Priyam Raj, 19 August 2025: We're looking to sell Vid.AI", "url": "https://x.com/priymrj/status/1957702721194054033", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API and viewed both Stripe images: MRR of US$44,003.77 and a subscriber churn rate of 22.31% for 27 July to 17 August." }, { "title": "X post by Priyam Raj, 9 July 2025: 3.4 crore rupees halfway through the year, zero investors", "url": "https://x.com/priymrj/status/1942898972760166828", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API and viewed the Stripe image: gross volume of US$438,222.29 since 1 January 2025, written with Indian digit grouping." }, { "title": "X posts by Priyam Raj on affiliates: 12 and 18 November 2025 and 22 September 2026", "url": "https://x.com/priymrj/status/2102253418769518716", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the three posts in full through the fxtwitter API and viewed the affiliate dashboard image of 22 September 2026: revenue of US$175,029.94." }, { "title": "X posts by Priyam Raj on the sale: 16, 26 and 30 September and 7 October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/priymrj/status/2107862980633239584", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the four posts in full through the fxtwitter API and viewed two images: a TrustMRR notice of an offer of US$1,500,000 and a payment page that reads US$2,500,000. Source for the 226,000 sign-ups." }, { "title": "X posts by Priyam Raj, 30 June 2025: Vid.AI on Last Week Tonight", "url": "https://x.com/priymrj/status/1939815277023437097", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the post and his reply in full through the fxtwitter API and viewed the screenshot: a YouTube page titled \"AI Slop: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)\" with the Vid.AI editor on screen. The reply names Matt Par's account." }, { "title": "X post by Priyam Raj, 24 October 2025: bought vid.ai for US$47,000", "url": "https://x.com/priymrj/status/1981580647891407068", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. The post says \"this year\"; see the Internet Archive source for the conflict with the 2024 captures." }, { "title": "X posts by Priyam Raj on the team, hiring and hosting: 28 January, 11 March, 8 July, 4 and 26 September and 1 October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/priymrj/status/2016498842271977930", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API and viewed the image of three Render invoices. Source for Remotion, the developer budget, the development team and the hosting bills." }, { "title": "X profile and timeline of Priyam Raj, @priymrj, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/priymrj", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile and 43 pages of the timeline through the fxtwitter API, from 13 October 2026 back to November 2024, where the API stops. Source for the profile text, the posts of 9 July 2026, 2 November 2025, 10 January and 15 February 2025, and the two questions about TikTok accounts. No post from the launch weeks of 2024 could be read." }, { "title": "Vid.AI pricing page and home page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://vid.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both pages in full. Source for the three plans, the yearly prices, the video allowances, the model names, the first-month discount, the refund rule and the absence of a free trial." }, { "title": "Vid.AI changelog, July 2024 to 13 October 2026", "url": "https://vid.ai/changelog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the entries of 2024 in full and the later entries by search, and counted the releases per month from the page's own headings. Source for the dates of the first features and of the subscription plans." }, { "title": "Vid.AI privacy policy and terms, last updated 27 September 2026", "url": "https://vid.ai/privacy-policy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both in full. The contracting company is VidAI LLC; the pages give no state of registration and no address. Source for the list of service providers, the three checkouts and the YouTube upload permission." }, { "title": "Vid.AI affiliate program page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://vid.ai/affiliate", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 33% recurring commission, the 60-day tracking period and the payout rules." }, { "title": "Priyam Raj's personal site, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://priyamraj.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the home page in full. His own account of his earlier products, the two acquisitions, his studies and \"my co-founder Matt\"." }, { "title": "LinkedIn company page: Vid AI", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/vidai-llc/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public page without signing in: company size 2 to 10, 2 employees listed, Priyam Raj and Matt Par." }, { "title": "X profile of Matt Par, @MattParOfficial, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/MattParOfficial", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile through the fxtwitter API. It reads: 12+ YouTube channels, helping you with YouTube, CEO of TubeMagic and VidAI." }, { "title": "Internet Archive, captures of vid.ai from 2022 to 2025", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20220713185914/https://vid.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the capture list and the capture of 13 July 2022, which reads \"vid.ai is for sale\". The list shows working captures from October 2024. The capture of 9 October 2024 loads its text by script and could not be read." }, { "title": "YouTube Help: YouTube channel monetization policies, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1311392?hl=en", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the 15 July 2025 update, on generic or repetitive content and on what is allowed to earn money. The platform's own rule page." }, { "title": "TikTok Community Guidelines, Integrity and Authenticity, effective 24 September 2026", "url": "https://www.tiktok.com/community-guidelines/en/integrity-authenticity", "grade": "C", "how": "The page loads by script; decoded and read the text inside the page code. Sections on AI-generated content, spam and For You feed eligibility." }, { "title": "Google Gemini API pricing, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the Veo 3.1 section: US$0.40 per second for Standard, US$0.10 for Fast and US$0.05 for Lite at 720p. This is Google's own list price. Vid.AI may buy the model through another provider at another price." }, { "title": "ElevenLabs API pricing, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://elevenlabs.io/pricing/api", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the text to speech prices: US$0.08 per 1,000 characters for the v4, v3 and multilingual models, US$0.04 for the fast models. List prices; a large customer may pay less." }, { "title": "Aiolum stories of Faceless.video, AutoShorts.ai and Revid.ai", "url": "https://aiolum.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the three story files in full. All three use founder-reported revenue, grade C. Source for the comparison and for the cost of free users at AutoShorts.ai." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/magicslides/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/magicslides.md", "slug": "magicslides", "name": "MagicSlides", "country": "India", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI presentation generator and Google Slides add-on", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-13", "launchLabel": "January 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$723K total since launch, October 2026", "sticker": "$723K total, now $9K/mo", "outcomeUsd": 722575, "months": 45, "teamLabel": "1 founder; 10 to 12 people at the peak, by his own account; he wrote in September 2026 that he dismissed the whole team", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "documents-data", "channel": "platform", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Presentations" ], "product": "A user gives a topic, a text, a PDF, a web address or a YouTube link, and a language model writes a slide presentation from it. MagicSlides runs as an add-on inside Google Slides and as a web application that exports editable PowerPoint, PDF and Google Slides files. Since July 2026 the same account also includes AI tools for spreadsheets, documents, meeting notes and a design canvas, under the name Magic Suite.", "why": "It appeared in January 2023 inside Google Slides, a program where people already work, when writing slides from one sentence was new, and users showed it to each other without paid advertising. A blog about presentation topics then brought about 80% of new users from Google search, by the founder's account. Both channels weakened: search traffic fell, and Google added the same function to Slides. The verified total is real, and so is the fall: monthly revenue fell by half between February and July 2026.", "summary": [ "MagicSlides is an AI presentation generator. It started as a Google Slides add-on. An add-on is a small program that a user installs from the Google Workspace Marketplace, Google's catalog of extensions for its office programs, and that then runs inside Google Slides. The user types a topic, or gives a PDF, a web address or a YouTube link, and a language model writes the slides. Today it is also a web application that exports editable PowerPoint files.", "Sanskar Tiwari, a developer in India who taught himself to code, built the first version in about one week in January 2023 and announced it on Reddit. He took no investment. Payment data that TrustMRR reads from his Stripe account shows US$722,575 paid by customers between the launch and 13 October 2026. That is a total since launch, not a yearly rate. The present level is much lower: US$8,804 in the last 30 days, and US$10,621 of monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the subscription revenue of one month, from 785 subscriptions. Verified revenue was between US$19,000 and US$20,500 a month from November 2025 to February 2026, and it fell to about US$10,000 a month by July 2026. The founder writes that the peak was about US$29,000 of MRR.", "This was not a one-person business for its whole life. The founder writes that the team reached 10 to 12 people, of which 4 or more wrote blog articles full time, because search engine optimization (SEO), the practice of writing pages so that a search engine shows them to people who search, brought about 80% of new users. He writes that changes in Google's ranking reduced that traffic in the third year. In September 2026 he wrote that he had dismissed the whole team, and he listed the product for sale at US$700,000. This page grades every number: the totals and monthly figures come from the payment processor (grade A), and the reasons for the fall are the founder's account (grade C). The page also shows four failed startups that generated presentations automatically or depended on a platform that another company controlled." ], "factsCaption": "US$722,575 of Stripe-verified revenue in 45 months, with the monthly level in 2026 at about half of its level in late 2025", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read from the Stripe account by TrustMRR through an API key. A grade B value was published by Google or by independent press. A grade C value is a founder statement, a sale-listing detail or a third-party estimate. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From an add-on built in one week to US$722,575 in total revenue in 45 months, with a fall by half during 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "MagicSlides plans for individuals on 13 October 2026, read from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "The page shows yearly billing first: US$80, US$149 and US$279 a year, with the label Save 17%. Next to each yearly price it shows a second, higher figure (US$8, US$16 and US$29), which this page reads as the price with monthly billing. Calculated check: 80 divided by 8 times 12 equals 0.83, which agrees with the label. A license belongs to one Google account. Team, enterprise and API prices are on separate tabs that were not read. The company's update note of 23 May 2026 describes a new set of plans named Free, Premium, Plus and Enterprise, but the pricing page still showed Essential, Pro and Premium on the day it was read. Prices of earlier years could not be read from archived copies.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "limit not shown on the pricing page; the home page offers a free start without a credit card" ], [ "Essential", "6.67", "8", "10 presentations a month, up to 10 slides each" ], [ "Pro", "12.42", "16", "50 presentations a month, up to 15 slides each" ], [ "Premium", "23.25", "29", "50 presentations a month, support for 50 or more slides, a choice of models, and the spreadsheet, document, meeting and canvas tools" ], [ "Done By Us", "99 one-time", "", "a designer builds one presentation in 48 to 72 hours; shown as reduced from US$500" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue since launch, January 2023 to 13 October 2026", "value": "US$722,575", "grade": "A", "note": "Read from the Stripe account by TrustMRR through an API key. This is the sum of all payments in about 45 months. It is not a yearly rate and it is not profit.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 30 days", "value": "US$8,804", "grade": "A", "note": "Revenue last synced on 13 October 2026. The profile reports a change of minus 16.9% against the 30 days before.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 3, 6 and 12 months", "value": "US$29,150, US$64,662 and US$181,570", "grade": "A", "note": "", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Share of the total that came in the last 12 months", "value": "25.1%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 181,570 divided by 722,575 equals 0.251. Three quarters of the money was earned before October 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before the last 12 months", "value": "US$541,005, about US$16,400 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 722,575 minus 181,570 equals 541,005. From mid-January 2023 to mid-October 2025 is about 33 months, and 541,005 divided by 33 equals 16,394. The public profile does not show these months one by one.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue per month, November 2025 to February 2026", "value": "US$20,465, US$19,132, US$19,189, US$19,135", "grade": "A", "note": "A level period. The average is US$19,480.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue per month, March to September 2026", "value": "US$17,275, US$15,074, US$12,209, US$12,123, US$9,623, US$9,931, US$10,427", "grade": "A", "note": "The average of July, August and September is US$9,994.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Change from February 2026 to July 2026", "value": "minus 49.7%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 9,623 divided by 19,135 equals 0.503. Spread evenly over the five months, that is a fall of about 12.8% each month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 13 October 2026", "value": "US$10,621 from 785 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "The profile reports a change of minus 7.5% in 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per subscription", "value": "about US$13.53 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 10,621 divided by 785.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Yearly run rate at the present level", "value": "US$105,648 to US$127,452", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 8,804 times 12, and 10,621 times 12. A run rate is the present monthly figure multiplied by twelve. It assumes that the fall stops.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "75%", "grade": "C", "note": "A profile snapshot. The profile does not say that costs are read from a verified source, so this is treated as the founder's figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Peak monthly recurring revenue", "value": "about US$29,000, date not given", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's article of 27 July 2026. No month in the public verified data reaches this level, because the public monthly table starts in November 2025. It is compatible with the verified average of US$16,400 a month before that date, but it is not confirmed.", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's statement of the level on 27 July 2026", "value": "around US$19,000 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Does not agree with the verified data: July 2026 was US$9,623 and June 2026 was US$12,123. The figure matches the months from November 2025 to February 2026. An event page of 23 July 2026 gives about US$13,000 of MRR.", "src": [ 4, 1, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's figure for all his products together", "value": "about US$330,000 a year, with MagicSlides as 88% of it", "grade": "C", "note": "Book description and personal site, read 13 October 2026. Calculated: 88% of 330,000 equals 290,400. The verified MagicSlides revenue of the last 12 months is US$181,570, which is 63% of that. The claim describes an earlier and higher period.", "src": [ 6, 7, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified total across the founder's 9 listed products", "value": "US$858,144, of which MagicSlides is 84.2%", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR founder page. The other products are kept apart from the headline: SheetAI US$52,000, Blurweb US$33,000, BlurScreen US$17,000, SlackNotify US$15,000, MagicForm US$11,000, AskVideo US$4,200, MagicChat US$2,600 and a second MagicSlides listing with US$775, as rounded on that page. The share is calculated: 722,575 divided by 858,144.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Team at the peak", "value": "10 to 12 people, of which 4 or more full-time blog writers", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's about page. The founder's personal site still showed 10 team members in October 2026. Latka counted 2 people who named the company as employer on LinkedIn in July 2025.", "src": [ 3, 6, 16 ] }, { "fact": "Team in September 2026", "value": "the founder alone, by his statement", "grade": "C", "note": "X post of 1 September 2026: he fired his whole team to work with Claude Code. A video description of 13 September 2026 says he now manages his products with zero developers. Not confirmed by a third party.", "src": [ 5, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "The profile says bootstrapped. The founder writes that he never raised money for any product.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Share of new users that came from search, at the peak", "value": "about 80%", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's about page. No analytics account is connected to the TrustMRR profile, so no traffic figure confirms it.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Google Workspace Marketplace listing, 13 October 2026", "value": "more than 1 million installs, rating 4.65 of 5 from 1,483 ratings", "grade": "B", "note": "Counts published by Google on the listing, which was last updated on 12 October 2026. Google shows installs as a rounded band.", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price on TrustMRR", "value": "US$700,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Listed for sale on 3 September 2026. The listing records 8 offers and still has the status listed for sale on 13 October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price compared with revenue", "value": "6.63 times the present yearly run rate, 0.97 times all revenue since launch", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 700,000 divided by 105,648 equals 6.63, and 700,000 divided by 722,575 equals 0.97. TrustMRR shows the same multiple of 6.6.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to this total", "value": "45 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: January 2023 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2021 to 2022", "what": "Tiwari sells small tools: a browser extension that blurs private data on screen, and SheetAI, an add-on that puts a language model inside Google Sheets. He writes that SheetAI made about US$2,000 of MRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 4, 18 ] }, { "when": "January 2023", "what": "A stranger asks him on Twitter for a pitch deck for SheetAI. He builds a Google Slides add-on that generates the slides, in about one week, and announces it on Reddit. The TrustMRR profile gives 16 January 2023 as the founding date.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 4, 1 ] }, { "when": "February to July 2023", "what": "He describes the add-on as free in a post of 20 February 2023. An archived copy of the site from mid-2023 shows a free plan with 3 presentations a month and paid Pro and Premium plans.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 17 ] }, { "when": "June and July 2024", "what": "He writes that the add-on has 1 million installs and that he spends US$1,000 on OpenAI, without naming the period. He hires interns and writes several times that he is hiring.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "2023 to 2025", "what": "Over these three years the product becomes a web application with PDF, web address, Word and Excel inputs and an API. The team reaches 10 to 12 people. Four or more writers publish blog articles full time, and search brings about 80% of new users. The dates of the peak are not given.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "Third year, 2025", "what": "By the founder's account, Google's content updates reduce the blog's traffic, new registrations slow down, and for the first time the product loses more MRR than it gains.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "28 October 2025", "what": "Google announces that the Gemini app can generate a slide presentation from a prompt or an uploaded file and export it to Google Slides.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "November 2025 to February 2026", "what": "Verified revenue stays between US$19,132 and US$20,465 a month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "March to July 2026", "what": "Verified revenue falls every month, from US$17,275 in March to US$9,623 in July.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "29 June 2026", "what": "Google starts the rollout of full, editable, multi-slide presentations generated by Gemini inside Google Slides.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "July 2026", "what": "The company renames the product family Magic Suite and adds AI tools for spreadsheets, documents, meeting notes and a design canvas. The founder writes that he started paid advertising about this time, after years without it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11, 5 ] }, { "when": "1 September 2026", "what": "The founder writes on X that he fired his whole team to work with Claude Code.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "3 September 2026", "what": "MagicSlides is listed for sale on TrustMRR at US$700,000. The seller's message says that nothing is broken and that he is open to offers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2026", "what": "Verified revenue since launch is US$722,575. MRR is US$10,621 from 785 subscriptions. The listing shows 8 offers and no sale.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A tool inside the program where people already work", "text": "The first version was an add-on in the Google Workspace Marketplace. A person who is preparing slides opens the add-on menu, finds the tool and uses it in the same window. Google's listing shows more than 1 million installs. The founder's rule is that people pay inside work tools and do not pay inside games." }, { "title": "Timing", "text": "In January 2023 a language model could not reliably return structured output, so the founder chained three or four calls to get a title and bullet points that fit a slide. A presentation that filled itself in was new. He writes that users made videos about it without being paid, and that some of these videos have millions of views." }, { "title": "A blog as the growth engine", "text": "The company published lists of presentation topics and guides, written by 4 or more full-time writers. By the founder's account this brought about 80% of new users. It also brought the largest cost and the largest dependency: the team grew to 10 to 12 people, and the traffic belonged to Google's ranking." }, { "title": "Many inputs and a file that the user can edit", "text": "The product accepts a topic, a PDF, a web address, a YouTube link, Word and Excel files, and returns an editable PowerPoint or Google Slides file. The founder names the editable file, the add-on and the number of input formats as the reasons to choose it over more polished competitors." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's articles and posts and from the profile fields that he filled in on TrustMRR. They are grade C.", "items": [ "The first version took about one week: a Google Slides add-on that turned a topic into an outline of slides. Three or four chained model calls produced a title and bullet points, because models in early 2023 did not return clean structured output.", "The web application is built with Next.js and hosted on Vercel, and Stripe handles the subscriptions, according to the profile.", "The models are rented. In June 2024 the founder wrote that he spent US$1,000 on OpenAI, without naming the period. In October 2026 the pricing page lists models from several providers under the Premium plan, in two groups named premium models and standard models.", "Marketing was search and YouTube, with no paid advertising until mid-2026. The founder then started Meta ads and writes that an AI assistant reads the advertising dashboard for him.", "The product is owned by IndianAppGuy Tech Private Limited in Bengaluru, which also sells SheetAI, MagicForm, BlurWeb, BlurScreen and other small tools.", "From September 2026, by the founder's statement, the code is written with Claude Code and without employed developers." ], "src": [ 1, 4, 5, 10, 18 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database either generated presentations automatically or grew through a platform that another company controlled. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "LiveLoop", "years": "2010 to 2015", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Turn PowerPoint files into live documents that several people edit at the same time.", "died": "The product was an extension of PowerPoint, so only Microsoft users could want it. Microsoft bought the company in 2015 and built the same functions into Office.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/302-liveloop" }, { "name": "Qwiki", "years": "2010 to 2015", "funding": "US$10M", "cause": "No market need", "promise": "Automatically generated, narrated presentations of images and video as the answer to a search query.", "died": "Each presentation was expensive to generate, and users did not change from text results. Yahoo bought the company in 2013 and later closed the product.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/481-qwiki" }, { "name": "Meerkat", "years": "2015 to 2016", "funding": "US$14M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Live video from a phone to the user's Twitter followers.", "died": "All of its growth came through Twitter's network of followers. Twitter bought a competitor, Periscope, and removed Meerkat's access to that network in March 2015.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2194-meerkat" }, { "name": "Upworthy Insider", "years": "2015 to 2020", "funding": "US$12M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Selected stories with a social purpose that spread widely on Facebook.", "died": "Readers arrived through Facebook's News Feed. Facebook changed its ranking to show less content from publishers, the traffic fell, and the company had no second channel.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/692-upworthy-insider" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Before language models, an automatic presentation needed a custom pipeline. Qwiki raised US$10 million to assemble narrated presentations from images and text, and each one was expensive to produce. In January 2023 one developer chained three or four calls to a rented model and had a working add-on within a week. The cost of building the product fell from millions of dollars to almost nothing.", "The platform risk did not change. LiveLoop extended PowerPoint, and Microsoft built the same functions into Office. Meerkat and Upworthy grew through one platform's distribution and lost it when the platform changed its rules. MagicSlides has both dependencies: users found it through Google search and the Google Workspace Marketplace, and Google now generates presentations inside Slides itself. The difference from the predecessors is cost. They had investors and salaries to pay. A business without investors can continue at US$10,000 a month, and that is what the verified data shows in October 2026." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The 2023 start, no. The method, partly.", "text": "The opening of January 2023 is closed: Google generates presentations inside Slides, and funded companies such as Gamma sell the same function with far larger teams. What a reader can still copy is the method of placing a small paid tool inside a marketplace where people already do paid work. The founder's own record also shows the limit of that method: one channel that the platform owner controls is enough to start a business and not enough to keep it growing.", "steps": [ "Build the tool as an add-on in a marketplace where people already work, such as Google Workspace, Chrome, Slack or Shopify, and put a price on it in the first week.", "When a model newly does one thing, ship the simplest product that uses it. The first MagicSlides only produced an outline of slides.", "Build a second channel before the first one weakens. MagicSlides took about 80% of new users from search and started paid advertising only in 2026.", "Keep costs low enough that the business survives when revenue falls by half. Hire writers only while their articles return more than they cost." ], "open": "The founder names the remaining gap himself: tools that people search for by task, such as PDF to PPT, web address to PPT, or a converter from another presentation product, instead of general blog articles. Whether these tools can replace the lost search traffic is not shown by the data yet." }, "watch": [ { "title": "The platform owner shipped the same function", "text": "Google announced presentation generation in the Gemini app on 28 October 2025. On 29 June 2026 it started the rollout of full, editable, multi-slide presentations generated by Gemini inside Google Slides, for the Business Standard and Plus plans, the Enterprise Standard and Plus plans, and Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. An add-on that writes slides inside Google Slides now competes with a function that Google places in the same window. The verified fall began in March 2026, before that rollout, so the data does not show this function as the first cause. Its effect on MagicSlides is not established." }, { "title": "One marketplace listing", "text": "More than 1 million installs came through a single listing in the Google Workspace Marketplace. Google decides the ranking, the review rules and the existence of the listing. The founder now names this marketplace as a main channel. No source shows whether the listing's rank changed, so a loss of rank is not established." }, { "title": "Search traffic that Google controls", "text": "By the founder's account about 80% of new users came from blog articles, and Google's content updates reduced that traffic in the third year. This is the only cause that he gives for the fall. No analytics account is connected to the verified profile, so no traffic number confirms it. Price changes as a cause are not established either: the plans were reworked in May 2026, after the fall had started." }, { "title": "Funded competitors", "text": "Gamma, which also generates presentations, announced a US$68 million funding round at a valuation of US$2.1 billion in November 2025. Its founder stated US$100 million of annual recurring revenue, 70 million users and about 50 employees. The MagicSlides about page says that it is not the most polished AI presentation tool in 2026. No source measures how many customers moved to Gamma." }, { "title": "A falling business offered for sale", "text": "The asking price of US$700,000 is 6.63 times the present yearly run rate and almost equal to all revenue collected since launch. MRR fell by 7.5% in the last 30 days. The listing records 8 offers in about six weeks and no sale. A buyer would pay for a stream of payments that was about twice as large in February 2026." }, { "title": "A total earned mostly with a team", "text": "The headline is the sum of 45 months. At its peak the team had 10 to 12 people, by the founder's account, and the dates of that peak are not given. One person built and launched the product, and one person runs it now by his own statement, but the money in between was not earned alone. The public data cannot separate the periods, because the monthly table starts in November 2025." }, { "title": "Numbers that do not agree", "text": "The founder's article of 27 July 2026 says that the product sits around US$19,000 a month, while verified revenue for July 2026 was US$9,623. His personal site showed US$330,000 of annual recurring revenue and 10 team members in October 2026, while the verified MRR of all his listed products together is US$12,079, about US$145,000 a year. User counts are 1 million on the about page and 2.3 million on the home page. Presentations created are 1.3 million on the about page and 10 million on the home page." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.magicslides.app/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/magicslides-app" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of MagicSlides.app, revenue read from Stripe by API key", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/magicslides-app.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile on 13 October 2026 (revenue last synced 13 October 2026 at 18:06 UTC) and compared it with a copy cached one day earlier, which showed US$722,503. The revenue, MRR and subscription figures come from the Stripe account. The profile text, the funding line, the user count, the profit margin and the sale listing are written by the founder and are grade C." }, { "title": "TrustMRR founder page of Sanskar Tiwari: 9 startups with verified revenue", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/founder/IndianAppGuy", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full on 13 October 2026. Source for the total of US$858,144 across his listed products and for the rounded total of each other product." }, { "title": "MagicSlides about page: The MagicSlides Story", "url": "https://www.magicslides.app/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 13 October 2026. Written by the founder. Source for the origin, the peak team of 10 to 12 people, the 80% share of search, and his explanation of the fall. An archived copy of 14 April 2026 shows a shorter, general text in this section, so the present story was written after that date." }, { "title": "Founder's article, 27 July 2026: Put More Buy Buttons on the Internet", "url": "https://www.sanskartiwari.io/articles/put-more-buy-buttons-on-the-internet", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the SheetAI revenue, the one-week build, the chained model calls, the peak of about US$29,000 of MRR, the statement of around US$19,000 a month, and the statement that he never raised money." }, { "title": "Sanskar Tiwari on X, posts from 2023 to 2026", "url": "https://x.com/IndianAppGuy/status/2094886415314407836", "grade": "C", "how": "Read as JSON through api.fxtwitter.com: 151 posts from 27 August to 2 October 2026 from the timeline, and 578 older posts whose addresses are stored in the Wayback Machine. Posts used: 1 September 2026 (the linked post, fired the whole team), 28 August 2026 (2093224563308183815, small team), 28 September 2026 (2104537886268002790, no ads until three months earlier), 29 June 2024 (1806913730447323212, 1 million installs and OpenAI cost), 2 July 2024 (1808033363623563765, interns), 20 February 2023 (1627580641855537153, free add-on), 17 September 2026 (2100472371643834574, advertising read by an AI assistant), 29 September 2026 (2104821007102149099, videos made by users). The timeline between February 2025 and August 2026 could not be read." }, { "title": "Founder's personal site, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://www.sanskartiwari.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the home page and the about page. Source for the claims of US$330,000 of annual recurring revenue, 25 products and 10 team members." }, { "title": "Amazon listing of the founder's book: Stop Learning to Code, How a Call-Center Kid Built 25 Products and $330K a Year", "url": "https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H8F4S4CS", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the book description only, not the book. Source for the statement that MagicSlides is 88% of his revenue and that he works with a small team." }, { "title": "Luma event page, 23 July 2026: The honest playbook behind launching 25 products and making $330k", "url": "https://luma.com/13nluzu2", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Written by the event host. Source for the figure of about US$13,000 of MRR in July 2026." }, { "title": "YouTube, Ishan Sharma channel, 13 September 2026: How I'd Start a Business With Claude Code in 2026, with Sanskar Tiwari", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4z_RDr5py10", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the video description, not the video. Source for the statement that he moved from a team of developers to zero developers." }, { "title": "MagicSlides pricing page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://www.magicslides.app/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the Individual tab in full. The Team and Enterprise tab and the API tab were not read." }, { "title": "MagicSlides updates page", "url": "https://www.magicslides.app/updates", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the entries from April to September 2026. Source for the Magic Suite release of July 2026 and the plan change of 23 May 2026." }, { "title": "Google Workspace Marketplace listing: MagicSlides, AI PPT Maker for Google Slides", "url": "https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/magicslides_app_gpt_for_slides/371894645570", "grade": "B", "how": "Read on 13 October 2026. The install band and the rating are published by Google, not by the founder." }, { "title": "Google Workspace Updates, 30 June 2026: Create fully native and editable presentations with Gemini in Google Slides", "url": "https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2026/06/create-fully-native-and-editable-presentations-with-Gemini-in-Google-Slides.html", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Google's own announcement. Source for the rollout date and the plans that receive the function." }, { "title": "Google Workspace Updates, 28 October 2025: Generate presentations in the Gemini app", "url": "https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2025/10/generate-presentations-in-gemini-app.html", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Google's own announcement." }, { "title": "TechCrunch, 10 November 2025: AI PowerPoint-killer Gamma hits $2.1B valuation, $100M ARR, founder says", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/10/ai-powerpoint-killer-gamma-hits-2-1b-valuation-100m-arr-founder-says/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the opening paragraphs. The funding round is a company announcement reported by the press. The revenue, user and employee figures are statements of Gamma's founder." }, { "title": "Latka company page for MagicSlides App", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/magicslides.app", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A third-party estimate of about US$220,000 a year for July 2025 and a LinkedIn count of 2 people. Used only for the team comparison." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of the MagicSlides pricing page, 5 June 2023, and of the home page, 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230605034330/https://www.magicslides.app/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the archived text. The plan names and limits are readable. The prices are filled in by script and are missing from the archived copies." }, { "title": "IndianAppGuy Tech Private Limited, company site", "url": "https://www.indianappguy.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the home page and the about page. Source for the company name, the Bengaluru address and the list of other products." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/low-content-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/low-content-ai.md", "slug": "low-content-ai", "name": "Low Content AI", "country": "Italy, listed as United Kingdom on TrustMRR", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI generator of coloring, puzzle and journal books for Amazon KDP", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-13", "launchLabel": "August 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$642K total since launch, October 2026", "sticker": "$642K total, now $16K/mo", "outcomeUsd": 642409, "months": 26, "teamLabel": "1 named founder; team size not published; the UK company named on the site in 2025 reported 1 employee", "fundingLabel": "No outside funding found; not stated by the founder", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "companions-publishing", "channel": "creators", "trend": "flat", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Self-publishing" ], "product": "A web application for people who sell simple books through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing. The user describes a book, and AI models produce its pages: line drawings for coloring books, puzzles and mazes for activity books, text and layouts for journals and planners, and a description for the Amazon listing. A subscription buys credits. By the terms of service one generated image costs 200,000 credits, so the smallest plan, with 40 million credits a month, pays for about 200 images.", "why": "It sold one narrow job to a group that already existed: people who learn from YouTube channels and paid courses how to publish many simple books on Amazon. The product carries that group's own word in its name, tutorial channels in English and Italian showed it from January 2025, and the site runs an affiliate script. Two thirds of the US$642,409 came in the first 14 months, at about US$30,300 a month. The last 12 months average about US$17,600 a month.", "summary": [ "Low Content AI is a web application that produces the pages of simple books with AI. Its customers publish through Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), Amazon's self-publishing service: a person uploads a book file, Amazon lists the book in its store, and Amazon prints one copy each time a buyer orders one, a method called print on demand. The publisher holds no stock and receives a royalty, which is a share of each sale. A low-content book is a book with little or no text to read, such as a notebook, a planner or a journal. Amazon's help page defines it as a book with \"minimal or no content on the interior pages\". Publishers use the term more widely and include coloring books and puzzle books, which Amazon's own page does not count as low-content. The tool generates drawings, puzzles, text and listing descriptions for all of these.", "The founder named on TrustMRR is Brian Donatiello, whose X profile gives Milan as his location. TrustMRR gives 6 August 2024 as the founding date. Payment data that TrustMRR reads from the product's Stripe account shows US$642,409 paid by customers between the launch and 13 October 2026. That is a total since launch, not a yearly rate. The timing matters: US$430,839, which is 67% of it, came in the first 14 months, an average of about US$30,300 a month. The last 12 months brought US$211,570, an average of about US$17,600 a month. The present level is US$16,125 in the last 30 days and US$14,672 of monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the subscription revenue of one month, from 334 subscriptions. The public month-by-month table starts in November 2025 and stays between US$13,402 and US$25,642 without a clear direction. So the larger fall happened earlier, in months that the public profile does not show one by one.", "Two things on this page are not verified, and the page says so where they matter. The first is the team: TrustMRR names one founder, but an archived copy of the site from January 2025 names a British company, Wealthy Magnet LTD, as the copyright holder, and the public register lists other people as its directors. The second is the sales channel: tutorial videos about KDP, an affiliate script (an affiliate is a partner who is paid a commission for each buyer that he sends) and an advertising pixel are visible, but no source says which of them brought the money. The founder has published no revenue figure of his own, so there is no claim to compare with the verified data. He has listed the product for sale at US$800,000 since December 2025. The customers' income depends on Amazon's rules about AI-generated books, which the last section quotes. The page also shows five failed startups that sold tools or services to people who publish books." ], "factsCaption": "US$642,409 of Stripe-verified revenue in 26 months, of which 67% came in the first 14 months; the last 12 months average about US$17,600 a month", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read from the Stripe account by TrustMRR through an API key. A grade B value was published by Amazon about its own rules or by independent press. A grade C value is a profile detail written by the seller, a page of the company, an unaudited company filing, a founder post, a YouTube video or an advice site. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a login page in August 2024 to US$642,409 in total revenue in 26 months, with two thirds of it in the first 14 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Low Content AI plans on 13 October 2026, read from the company's home page and its page script. Prices are in euros (grade C)", "note": "The home page shows yearly billing first: €390, €490 and €990 a year, with the label Save 16.6%. The monthly prices of €39, €49 and €99 are in the page script, behind the Pay Monthly switch. The yearly column below is the yearly price divided by 12. Calculated check: 390 divided by 12 times 39 equals 0.833, which agrees with the label. Credits pay for generation. The site calls the unit credits and the terms of service call it tokens: one image costs 200,000 and one generated word about 1.33, so 40 million credits pay for 200 images if nothing else is generated. An archived copy of 3 January 2025 shows €292.50, €367.50 and €742.50 a year with the label Save 20%; each is exactly 75% of today's yearly price. Whether that was a lower list price or a temporary discount could not be read. The home page has a button that says Get Started for Free; the limit of the free use is not shown. There is no separate pricing page: the address /pricing returns an error page.", "rows": [ [ "Basic", "€32.50", "€39", "40 million credits a month, about 200 images; basic templates" ], [ "Pro", "€40.83", "€49", "60 million credits a month, about 300 images; priority generation, advanced templates" ], [ "Star", "€82.50", "€99", "110 million credits a month, about 550 images; unlimited templates, API access" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue since launch, August 2024 to 13 October 2026", "value": "US$642,409", "grade": "A", "note": "Read from the Stripe account by TrustMRR through an API key. This is the sum of all payments in about 26 months. It is not a yearly rate and it is not profit. A copy cached one day earlier showed US$642,278.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 30 days", "value": "US$16,125", "grade": "A", "note": "Revenue last synced on 13 October 2026 at 14:38 UTC. The profile reports a change of minus 3.1% against the 30 days before.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 3, 6 and 12 months", "value": "US$46,172, US$103,979 and US$211,570", "grade": "A", "note": "", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Share of the total that came in the last 12 months", "value": "32.9%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 211,570 divided by 642,409 equals 0.329. Two thirds of the money was earned before mid-October 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before the last 12 months", "value": "US$430,839, about US$30,300 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 642,409 minus 211,570 equals 430,839. From 6 August 2024 to 13 October 2025 is 433 days, or 14.22 months, and 430,839 divided by 14.22 equals 30,298. The public profile does not show these months one by one, so the highest month is not known.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average of the last 12 months", "value": "about US$17,600 a month, 58% of the earlier average", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 211,570 divided by 12 equals 17,631, and 17,631 divided by 30,298 equals 0.58.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue per month, November 2025 to January 2026", "value": "US$15,796, US$13,402, US$14,824", "grade": "A", "note": "The average is US$14,674.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue per month, February to June 2026", "value": "US$22,366, US$17,869, US$17,504, US$25,642, US$18,338", "grade": "A", "note": "The average is US$20,344. May 2026 is the highest month in the public table.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue per month, July to September 2026", "value": "US$14,791, US$16,253, US$16,499", "grade": "A", "note": "The average is US$15,848, which is 22.1% below the average of February to June. September 2026 is 4.5% above November 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Last 6 months compared with the 6 months before", "value": "minus 3.4%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the last 12 months minus the last 6 months equals 107,591, and 103,979 divided by 107,591 equals 0.966. Inside the last year the level moved up and down but did not fall much.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 13 October 2026", "value": "US$14,672 from 334 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "The profile reports a change of minus 16.7% in 30 days. The copy cached one day earlier showed US$14,706 and 336 subscriptions.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per subscription", "value": "about US$43.93 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 14,672 divided by 334. The plans cost €39, €49 and €99 a month. No exchange rate was applied on this page.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Yearly run rate at the present level", "value": "US$176,064 to US$193,500", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 14,672 times 12, and 16,125 times 12. A run rate is the present monthly figure multiplied by twelve. It assumes that the level stays the same.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "75%", "grade": "C", "note": "A profile snapshot. The profile does not say that costs are read from a verified source, so this is treated as the seller's figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Sale listing", "value": "asking US$800,000; first listed on 16 December 2025; 12 offers received", "grade": "C", "note": "Listing details on the TrustMRR profile, set by the seller. Calculated: 800,000 divided by 211,570 equals 3.8 times the revenue of the last 12 months. The profile shows a multiple of 4.1, which equals 800,000 divided by twelve times the revenue of the last 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founder", "value": "Brian Donatiello; 1 startup on TrustMRR", "grade": "C", "note": "Named on the TrustMRR profile and founder page. His X profile gives Milan as his location and calls him the founder of OSIAX, a company that builds AI agents for business processes. He writes that he built AI systems for clients for years and that he built a career on Upwork, a marketplace for freelance work.", "src": [ 2, 7, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's own revenue statements", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "His X account was created on 10 December 2025. The 26 posts that could be read, from 4 July to 24 September 2026, are about OSIAX and AI coding and do not name Low Content AI. So there is no founder claim to compare with the verified data.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Company named on the site on 3 January 2025", "value": "Wealthy Magnet LTD, London", "grade": "C", "note": "The archived home page ends with: Copyright @ Wealthy Magnet LTD, 27 Old Gloucester Street, London. The British company register shows a company of that name at that address, incorporated on 17 September 2024, with the activity code for educational support services. Its four directors since then are other people, all resident in Italy. The founder's name does not appear, and his relation to the company is not verified. On 15 May 2026 and today the site footer names no company.", "src": [ 5, 6, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Employees of that company, 17 September 2024 to 30 September 2025", "value": "1 on average", "grade": "C", "note": "Micro-entity accounts filed on 5 November 2025, not audited. They show net assets of 354,000, printed with a euro sign and tagged as pounds in the data, and no profit and loss statement. The register states that it does not check the accuracy of filed information.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Team size", "value": "not published", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR names one founder. No page that was read names an employee or a co-founder. Not verified.", "src": [ 1, 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "No investor, funding round or funding line was found on the profile, the site, the company register or the founder's posts. The founder has not stated it.", "src": [ 1, 6, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Law of the terms of service", "value": "Italian law, Court of Milan", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms last updated on 9 January 2025. TrustMRR shows the United Kingdom as the country. This page gives Italy as the country because the founder's location, the terms and the residence of the directors of the named company all indicate Italy.", "src": [ 4, 1, 6, 7 ] }, { "fact": "YouTube tutorials that link to the tool, January and February 2025", "value": "5 videos by 4 channels, 5,740 views together", "grade": "C", "note": "Dates and view counts as YouTube showed them on 13 October 2026: Dare Digital on 1 January (691 views) and 7 February (286), Digitaledu in Italian on 7 January (2,395), Mariana Montoya on 3 February (2,111) and Blaze Goldburst on 25 February (257). These views are too few to explain the revenue. Other videos may exist that the search did not return.", "src": [ 10, 11, 12, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Other sales channels visible in the page code", "value": "an Endorsely affiliate script and a Meta advertising pixel", "grade": "C", "note": "Read on 13 October 2026. Endorsely describes itself as affiliate program software for subscription software: it records which partner sent a paying customer. The commission rate, the number of partners and the advertising budget are not public.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Cost of one generated image to the customer", "value": "about €0.16 to €0.20", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the terms and the monthly prices: 39 divided by 200 images equals 0.195, 49 divided by 300 equals 0.163, and 99 divided by 550 equals 0.18.", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Users, seller's estimate", "value": "about 1,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Profile text. The home page says thousands of creators. The verified number is 334 active subscriptions.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Amazon's rule on AI content", "value": "AI-generated text, images and translations must be declared when a book is published", "grade": "B", "note": "Amazon's content guidelines, read on 13 October 2026. The Guardian reported on 20 September 2023 that Amazon had introduced the requirement one week earlier.", "src": [ 14, 16 ] }, { "fact": "Amazon's limit on new titles", "value": "three a day for each publisher, since September 2023", "grade": "B", "note": "The Guardian, 20 September 2023, from Amazon's statement to the newspaper. Amazon said that the number may be adjusted. Amazon's own forum page loads by script and could not be read, so the present number is not verified.", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "fact": "Amazon's definition of a low-content book", "value": "minimal or no content on the interior pages; puzzle books and coloring books are not generally included", "grade": "B", "note": "Amazon's help page, read on 13 October 2026. Low-content books are not eligible for the free ISBN that KDP gives to other books.", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "fact": "Reports of closed KDP accounts", "value": "described as increasingly common; no count is published", "grade": "C", "note": "Two advice sites for self-publishers, in articles of October and December 2025, and one author's own account of January 2024. Amazon publishes no number of terminations.", "src": [ 17, 18, 19 ] }, { "fact": "Competing AI tools for low-content books that were read for this page", "value": "3", "grade": "C", "note": "KDP Builder, with a free start of 75 credits. Low Content Studio, founded on 29 June 2026, with US$4.86 of verified revenue. A third tool that the channel JeffSetLife promoted through an affiliate link on 30 June and 21 July 2026. This is not a full count of the market.", "src": [ 20, 22, 21 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the latest figure", "value": "26 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: August 2024 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "6 August 2024", "what": "Founding date on the TrustMRR profile. The Wayback Machine first captured lowcontent.ai on 10 August 2024, and the privacy policy is dated 16 August 2024.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 5, 4 ] }, { "when": "17 September 2024", "what": "Wealthy Magnet LTD is incorporated in London, by the British company register. The site names it as copyright holder in January 2025.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 5 ] }, { "when": "1 January 2025", "what": "The earliest YouTube tutorial found that links to the tool: the channel Dare Digital lists it as the software used in the video.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "3 January 2025", "what": "The archived site shows three yearly plans at €292.50, €367.50 and €742.50, and a login page with one option, a Google account.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "6 to 9 January 2025", "what": "A Product Hunt account for the tool is created on 6 January. An Italian review video appears on 7 January. The terms of service, under Italian law, are dated 9 January.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 10, 4 ] }, { "when": "February 2025", "what": "Three more tutorials: Mariana Montoya on 3 February, Dare Digital on 7 February and Blaze Goldburst on 25 February.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12, 11, 13 ] }, { "when": "August 2024 to October 2025", "what": "US$430,839 of verified revenue in the first 14 months, about US$30,300 a month on average. Calculated from the verified totals; these months are not public one by one.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "November 2025 to January 2026", "what": "Verified revenue of US$15,796, US$13,402 and US$14,824: about half of the earlier average.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "10 to 16 December 2025", "what": "The founder opens his X account on 10 December and the product is listed for sale on TrustMRR on 16 December. A post of 17 July 2026 says that he had spent the last 7 months building an AI sales team product, which places the start of that work in the same weeks.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 1 ] }, { "when": "February to June 2026", "what": "A higher period: US$22,366 in February and US$25,642 in May, the highest month in the public table.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "30 June 2026", "what": "JeffSetLife, a KDP channel, presents a different new AI tool for low-content books through an affiliate link. The video has 5,410 views; a second video of 21 July has 9,347.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 21 ] }, { "when": "July to September 2026", "what": "Verified revenue of US$14,791, US$16,253 and US$16,499.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2026", "what": "US$642,409 in total. US$16,125 in the last 30 days. MRR of US$14,672 from 334 subscriptions, down 16.7% in 30 days. Asking price US$800,000, with 12 offers received.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A product named with the customer's own word", "text": "People who publish notebooks, planners and coloring books on Amazon call their business low-content publishing. The product and its domain use exactly that word, with AI added. A person who searches YouTube for a low-content AI tool finds videos that show it, next to videos that show its competitors." }, { "title": "A market that is taught by channels and courses", "text": "The customers learn the business from YouTube channels and paid courses, and those teachers need tools to show. Five tutorials in English and Italian linked to the tool in January and February 2025, and the site runs an affiliate script that can pay a partner for each buyer. The same channels link to several other tools in the same videos. No source says which share of the sales came this way." }, { "title": "Output that is ready for one platform", "text": "The promise is not a general image generator. It is a book file that Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing accepts, with the listing description as well. The customer pays to skip the steps between a drawing and a book that can be sold." }, { "title": "Yearly plans shown first, and credits with a known cost", "text": "The home page shows yearly prices first, from €390 to €990, and a yearly price is collected on the first day. This may be one reason why the first 14 months were stronger than the next 12, but the public data cannot confirm it. Each plan gives a fixed number of credits, and one image costs 200,000 of them, so the cost of serving a customer has an upper limit. The profile shows a profit margin of 75%, which is the seller's figure." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details were read from the site's code, its terms of service and archived copies. The founder has not published a description of how he built it. They are grade C.", "items": [ "The site is a Next.js application. Next.js is a framework for web applications written with React, and the pages load their script files from the framework's standard /_next/ path.", "Payments run on Stripe. TrustMRR reads the revenue from the Stripe account through an API key.", "In the archived copy of January 2025 the login page has one option: continue with a Google account.", "Generation is metered. The terms count the user's prompt, internal steps such as title generation and tool selection, and the generated output. One image costs 200,000 units and one generated word about 1.33.", "The pages do not say which AI models produce the images and the text.", "By the terms, a paying user owns the generated text and images and may keep using them after cancelling.", "The page code loads an Endorsely affiliate script and a Meta advertising pixel. The largest plan lists API access." ], "src": [ 3, 4, 5, 1 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold tools or services to people who write and publish books, in a market where Amazon owns the store. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Hyperink", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$1.4M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Help experts produce e-books for small niches quickly.", "died": "Self-publishing platforms gave authors more reach and better tools at lower cost, and niche titles earned too little.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1192-hyperink" }, { "name": "Booktrope", "years": "2015 to 2018", "funding": "US$1M", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "Publish a book with a team of editor, designer and marketer who share the royalties instead of charging fees.", "died": "The model was complex to run and did not reach scale. Kindle Direct Publishing gave authors a simpler path.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1125-booktrope" }, { "name": "Vook", "years": "2009 to 2017", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "E-books with video and audio inside the text.", "died": "Readers and publishers did not adopt the format, and Kindle and Apple's iBooks had the distribution.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/721-vook" }, { "name": "Curious Fictions", "years": "2018 to 2021", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A place where authors sell short stories directly to readers.", "died": "Kindle Direct Publishing and Wattpad already had the readers. Subscriptions and tips brought too little money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1018-curious-fictions" }, { "name": "Hiptype", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Analytics that show publishers how readers read their e-books.", "died": "Publishers adopted it slowly, and Amazon and Apple kept their own reading data.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1582-hiptype" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the five tried to sell something to authors or publishers while Amazon owned the store and the readers. Three of them offered another path to publication and lost to Amazon's own path. Low Content AI does not compete with Kindle Direct Publishing. It supplies it: the customer still publishes on Amazon, and the tool only makes the files. That is why a small product could collect US$642,409 without a store, readers or publisher contracts of its own.", "What changed is the cost of producing a page. In the 2010s a niche book needed an expert and an editor, and Hyperink and Booktrope existed to organise such people. Now an image model draws a coloring page for about €0.16 to €0.20 at this tool's prices. The dependence did not change. The tool's customers earn only while Amazon accepts their books, and Amazon answered the large number of AI-made books in 2023 with a duty to declare them and a daily limit on new titles. The predecessors lost to Amazon as a competitor. This business can lose to Amazon as the maker of the rules." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. This market, with care.", "text": "The method is to choose a group that already pays for courses and tools around one narrow way of earning money, to name the product with the group's own word, and to give its teachers a reason to show the product. That can be repeated elsewhere. This market is harder now: the verified level is a little more than half of the early average, new tools appear every few months, and the customers' income depends on what Amazon accepts.", "steps": [ "Find a group that has a specific name for its work and already buys tools for it. Use that name in the product name and the domain.", "Make the output ready for the platform where the group sells: the right page size, the right file format, and the listing text.", "Sell credits that map directly to your own cost for each image or word, so that every plan has a known margin.", "Give tutorial channels and course sellers an affiliate link, and expect them to show your competitors as well.", "Read the platform's rules before your customers do, and tell them plainly what they must declare." ], "open": "Other marketplaces where individuals sell simple products in volume and learn the method from channels and courses: print-on-demand clothing, digital planners and printable pages, stock images, and listing text for small sellers." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Amazon requires a declaration of AI-generated content", "text": "Amazon's content guidelines say: \"We require you to inform us of AI-generated content (text, images, or translations) when you publish a new book or make edits to and republish an existing book through KDP.\" Content created by an AI tool counts as AI-generated \"even if you applied substantial edits afterwards\". Every book made with this tool falls under that definition. The guidelines add: \"You are responsible for verifying that all AI-generated and/or AI-assisted content adheres to all content guidelines, including by complying with all applicable intellectual property rights.\" The Guardian reported on 20 September 2023 that Amazon had introduced the requirement one week earlier. The risk stays with the publisher, not with the tool." }, { "title": "Amazon's definition of low-content is narrower than the market's", "text": "Amazon's help page says: \"A low-content book has minimal or no content on the interior pages. Low-content books are generally repetitive, and designed to be filled in by the user. This does not typically include activity books, such as puzzle books or coloring books, which generally do not feature repetitive content on each page.\" Its table lists notebooks, planners, journals and log books as low-content, and puzzle books and coloring books as not generally low-content. The page also says that low-content books \"are not eligible for the free KDP ISBN\"; an ISBN is the international number that identifies one edition of a book. The same guidelines forbid \"content that's typically disappointing to customers\". A customer of the tool has to know which of Amazon's categories each book belongs to." }, { "title": "A limit of three new titles a day", "text": "In September 2023 Amazon wrote on its KDP forum, as quoted by the Guardian: \"in order to help protect against abuse, we are lowering the volume limits we have in place on new title creations\". Amazon told the newspaper that the limit is three titles a day and may be adjusted. The method that this market teaches is volume: the page of one competing tool says that successful low-content publishers build catalogs of 50 to more than 200 products. A tool can make a book in minutes, but the platform accepts three new titles a day from one publisher." }, { "title": "Publishers report closed accounts", "text": "Kindlepreneur, an advice site for self-publishers, wrote in an article updated on 27 October 2025 that suspended or terminated accounts are \"becoming increasingly common\" and that \"in most cases, account actions are triggered by an automated system rather than human review\". The site selfpublishing.com wrote on 15 December 2025 that closures often follow when authors \"release numerous low-content books that repeat the same templates or layouts\", and that \"uploading too many AI-generated titles in a short period can make your account seem suspiciously high-volume\". One author wrote on 23 January 2024 that Amazon terminated her account and that she believes the cause was that she did not declare the use of AI on a book cover. These are reports and advice, not counts: Amazon publishes no number of terminations. A publisher who loses the account has no reason to renew a yearly plan." }, { "title": "The level is a little more than half of the early average", "text": "The first 14 months averaged about US$30,300 a month and the last 12 about US$17,600. Inside the last year the months move between US$13,402 and US$25,642 without a clear direction, but MRR fell by 16.7% in the 30 days to 13 October 2026. The product has been for sale since 16 December 2025 at US$800,000, which is 3.8 times the revenue of the last 12 months, and the founder's posts since July 2026 are about a different company. He wrote on 31 July 2026, about his years on a freelance marketplace: \"Platforms can change the rules overnight.\" The same sentence describes the position of his customers on Amazon." }, { "title": "Many competing tools, sold the same way", "text": "KDP Builder offers an AI generator for low-content books with a free start of 75 credits. Low Content Studio, founded on 29 June 2026, sells plans at US$19 and US$49 a month and has US$4.86 of verified revenue. JeffSetLife, a KDP channel, promoted another new AI tool for low-content books through an affiliate link in two videos in June and July 2026, with 5,410 and 9,347 views. The image and text models behind such tools are open to every developer, so the product itself is easy to copy. What is hard to copy is a place in the tutorials of the channels, and the channels show several tools at once." }, { "title": "Who owns it, and who sent the first buyers, is not clear", "text": "TrustMRR names one founder and the United Kingdom. The site named Wealthy Magnet LTD as copyright holder in January 2025; that company's directors are other people resident in Italy, its activity code is educational support services, and the terms of service are under Italian law. A buyer of the business should ask where the customers of the first year came from." }, { "title": "Testimonials that cannot be checked", "text": "The home page shows three short testimonials signed Sarah M., John D. and Emma R., with the same wording as in the archived copy of January 2025, and it says that thousands of creators use the tool. The verified number is 334 active subscriptions, and the seller's own estimate on TrustMRR is about 1,000 users." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.lowcontent.ai/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/low-content-ai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of Low Content AI, revenue read from Stripe by API key", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/low-content-ai.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile on 13 October 2026 (revenue last synced 13 October 2026 at 14:38 UTC) and compared it with a copy cached one day earlier, which showed US$642,278. The revenue, MRR and subscription figures come from the Stripe account. The profile text, the founding date, the country, the user estimate, the profit margin and the sale listing are written by the seller and are grade C." }, { "title": "TrustMRR founder page of Brian Donatiello: 1 startup with verified revenue", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/founder/briandonatiello", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full on 13 October 2026. It showed a total of US$642,683 after a later sync, one startup, and the link to his X account." }, { "title": "Low Content AI home page and its page script", "url": "https://www.lowcontent.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 13 October 2026, with the script file that holds the plan data. Source for the product description, the yearly and monthly prices, the credits of each plan, the testimonials, the affiliate script and the advertising pixel. The address /pricing returned an error page. The home page of Endorsely was read for the description of its service." }, { "title": "Low Content AI terms and conditions, last updated 9 January 2025, and privacy policy, last updated 16 August 2024", "url": "https://www.lowcontent.ai/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both in full. Source for the cost of an image and of a word, the ownership of generated content, the renewal and refund rules, and the choice of Italian law and the Court of Milan." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of lowcontent.ai, 3 January 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250103163222/https://www.lowcontent.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the archived home page and the archived login page of the same day in full, and the list of captures, which starts on 10 August 2024. Source for the earlier prices and for the footer that names Wealthy Magnet LTD. A copy of 15 May 2026 shows today's prices and no company name." }, { "title": "Companies House, the British company register: Wealthy Magnet LTD, company number 15962341", "url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/15962341", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the overview, the officers, the persons with significant control, the filing history and the micro-entity accounts for the period to 30 September 2025. The register states that it does not check the accuracy of filed information. The founder's name is not in these records." }, { "title": "Brian Donatiello on X: profile and posts of 4 July to 24 September 2026", "url": "https://x.com/briandonatiello", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile and the 26 most recent posts through api.fxtwitter.com; older posts could not be opened. Source for his location, the date the account was created, his freelance background, the post of 17 July 2026 about 7 months of work on a new product, and the post of 31 July 2026 about platforms. No post names Low Content AI or gives a revenue figure." }, { "title": "OSIAX home page", "url": "https://www.osiax.com", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 13 October 2026. Source for the founder's present company and his description of his earlier work for clients. It does not name Low Content AI." }, { "title": "Product Hunt profile: Low Content Ai", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/@lcai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the account date of 6 January 2025, the launch month and the product description that names coloring books, games and activity books." }, { "title": "YouTube, Digitaledu, 7 January 2025: SCOPRI Come Creare Libri per Amazon KDP in Modo Semplice e Veloce!", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsQ-PCF6Emk", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the video description, the date and the view count; the video was not watched. An Italian review that lists coloring books, activity books, puzzle books, maze books and listing descriptions, and links to the tool." }, { "title": "YouTube, Dare Digital, 1 January 2025: I'M Using This SECRET Amazon KDP App to Make Passive Income! (and a second video of 7 February 2025)", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq9g_DEIWWs", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the descriptions, dates and view counts of both videos; the videos were not watched. Both list lowcontent.ai as the software used." }, { "title": "YouTube, Mariana Montoya, 3 February 2025: How to make low content book for KDP using AI", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F78B54OV4WU", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the description, the date and the view count; the video was not watched. The first line links to the tool." }, { "title": "YouTube, Blaze Goldburst, 25 February 2025: Low Content AI: Software for Creating Profitable Amazon KDP Low Content Books!", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WJHv_7Bdq4", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the title, the description, the date and the view count; the video was not watched. A promotional video for the tool." }, { "title": "Amazon KDP help: Content Guidelines, section on artificial intelligence content", "url": "https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200672390", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the section on AI content and the section on disappointing content on 13 October 2026. Source for the quoted rule texts." }, { "title": "Amazon KDP help: Low-Content Books", "url": "https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/GGE5T76TWKA85DJM", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full on 13 October 2026. Source for Amazon's definition, the table of examples and the ISBN rule." }, { "title": "The Guardian, 20 September 2023: Amazon restricts authors from self-publishing more than three books a day after AI concerns", "url": "https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/20/amazon-restricts-authors-from-self-publishing-more-than-three-books-a-day-after-ai-concerns", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the limit of three titles a day, Amazon's forum statement as quoted, and the timing of the AI declaration rule. Amazon's own forum page loads by script and could not be read." }, { "title": "Kindlepreneur, updated 27 October 2025: Amazon KDP Account Suspension: Causes, Prevention, and Solutions", "url": "https://kindlepreneur.com/amazon-kdp-account-suspension/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on warnings, suspensions and terminations. An advice site for self-publishers, not Amazon." }, { "title": "selfpublishing.com, 15 December 2025: Your Amazon KDP Account Was Closed - Now What?", "url": "https://selfpublishing.com/amazon-kdp-account-was-closed/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the reasons for closure. An advice site, not Amazon." }, { "title": "Jessica Shepherd's blog on Goodreads, 23 January 2024: KDP/Amazon Terminated My Account", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/24443366-kdp-amazon-terminated-my-account-i-am-more-powerful-than-amazon", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. One author's own account of a termination and of what she believes caused it. Not confirmed by Amazon." }, { "title": "KDP Builder: AI Low-Content Book Generator for Amazon KDP", "url": "https://kdpbuilder.com/ai-low-content-book-creator", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 13 October 2026. A competing tool. Source for its free start and for the statement about catalogs of 50 to more than 200 products." }, { "title": "YouTube, JeffSetLife, 30 June 2026: NEW AI Tool Makes Creating Low Content KDP Books Easier Than Ever (and a second video of 21 July 2026)", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y7tAk7VgR8", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the descriptions, dates and view counts of both videos, and followed the short link of the tool, which leads to an affiliate marketplace and not to lowcontent.ai. The videos were not watched." }, { "title": "TrustMRR profile of Low Content Studio", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/low-content-studio.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile on 13 October 2026. A competing tool founded on 29 June 2026. Its verified revenue is grade A; its prices are profile text." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/localrank/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/localrank.md", "slug": "localrank", "name": "LocalRank", "country": "Canada", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Local SEO software for agencies: rank tracker, directory listings and AI-written articles", "aiType": "AI-leveraged", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-13", "launchLabel": "14 March 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$730K total since launch, October 2026", "sticker": "$730K total, now $21K/mo", "outcomeUsd": 729565, "months": 19, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders: Jacky Chou (marketing) and a developer whom the site names only as Peter; total headcount not published, LinkedIn gives the range 2 to 10", "fundingLabel": "No outside funding found in any source", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "seo-ai-search", "channel": "audience", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 1, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-leveraged", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Search marketing" ], "product": "Software for marketing agencies and local businesses that want to appear higher in Google Maps and in local search results. One subscription covers a rank tracker that checks positions from a grid of points on the map, one-click listing of a business on more than 550 directories, scheduled posts and review replies for Google Business Profile, a database of local business contacts, and AI-written articles that aim to make ChatGPT and other assistants recommend the business.", "why": "The founder had an audience before the product existed: a daily YouTube show about SEO since 2023 and an X account that has 62,000 followers today, so the first customers cost nothing. A developer co-founder built the software with AI coding tools. The product started as one plain rank tracker at US$19 a month, grew into a bundle at US$57 to US$2,997 a month, and by July 2025 the first payment of a new customer from a paid ad covered the cost of that ad.", "summary": [ "LocalRank sells tools for local SEO. SEO means search engine optimization; local SEO is the work of making a business appear higher when a person nearby searches Google or Google Maps for a service, for example a dentist or a plumber. The product has four main parts. A rank tracker measures the position of a business for a keyword from a grid of points on the map, because the result changes from street to street. A citation builder submits the name, address and phone number of the business to more than 550 directory sites in one click; such a listing is called a citation. A third part schedules posts and review replies on Google Business Profile, the free listing that Google shows for a business in Maps. The fourth part, added later, uses the GPT-4o model to write articles of the type \"best plumber in Denver\" and publishes them on a network of sites, so that AI assistants find and repeat the name of the business.", "Jacky Chou, who has run the SEO agency Indexsy since 2014 and reports the income of more than ten businesses in public every month, started LocalRank with a developer whom the site names only as Peter. The site was an empty WordPress installation on 22 February 2025, and Chou announced a soft launch on X on 14 March 2025. Stripe payment records, read through TrustMRR on 13 October 2026, show US$729,565 of revenue since the start and US$431,459 in the last twelve months. The business is now much smaller than at its peak: verified revenue was US$55,941 in November 2025 and US$20,797 in September 2026, and the current MRR, monthly recurring revenue, the sum of all active subscriptions counted per month, is US$20,557 from 207 subscriptions. Chou's own monthly reports put the peak earlier, at US$68,038 in August 2025.", "The headline total is grade A, because it comes from the payment processor and not from the founder. The founder's own monthly figures are grade C and are about 11% higher than the verified ones in the months where both exist. LocalRank is on this site as AI-leveraged, not AI-native: its core is ordinary SEO tooling, the AI features came after the launch, and the founder describes the product as \"vibe coded\", which means that an AI model wrote most of the code for the two people who built it. It has been listed for sale since 5 December 2025 at US$1,789,000. The page also shows what happened to earlier companies that sold marketing tools to small businesses or depended on Google's rules." ], "factsCaption": "US$729,565 of Stripe-verified revenue in 19 months, with a peak in the second half of 2025 and a fall of 63% in verified monthly revenue from November 2025 to September 2026", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from Stripe payment records, read through the TrustMRR profile on 13 October 2026. A grade C value is a statement by the founder or by the company's own pages. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows that it cites.", "timelineLead": "From an empty WordPress site to US$68,000 in one month, by the founder's figures, in six months, and then a fall to about US$21,000 a month of verified revenue. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "LocalRank prices on 13 October 2026, read from the company's home page, its citations page and its white label page (grade C)", "note": "The four plans are subscriptions; the first column is the price per month when the customer pays for a year. Sign-up is free and the home page promises a refund if rankings do not rise in 90 days. The cheapest plan cost US$19 a month at the launch in March 2025, when the product was only a rank tracker, US$29 in June 2025, and US$57 from September 2025. The white label plans are a service: the agency sells local SEO under its own name and LocalRank does the work. The Academy is a paid community on Skool with 156 members on the day of reading; the sources do not say whether its payments are inside the Stripe figures on this page.", "rows": [ [ "Starter", "47.50", "57", "1 location; 10,000 rank tracker credits a month" ], [ "Pro", "247.50", "297", "10 locations; 50,000 credits; AI autopilot for Google Business Profile; Review Booster" ], [ "Scale", "372.50", "497", "unlimited locations; 200,000 credits; 5 AI-written articles a month" ], [ "Enterprise", "1,664.17", "2,997", "unlimited locations, articles and boosts; 300,000 credits" ], [ "Indexing run, add-on", "20 one-time", "", "per run; asks search engines to read the new listings sooner" ], [ "White label, Simple Local SEO", "", "290", "per location; audit, weekly rank tracking, 300 citations" ], [ "White label, Authority Local SEO", "", "990", "per location" ], [ "Local Rank Academy", "", "79", "community on Skool; the page says the price rises to US$89 at 175 members" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time, to 13 October 2026", "value": "US$729,565", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe payment records through an API key, as shown on the TrustMRR profile. Revenue last synced on 13 October 2026. The profile gives 22 February 2025 as the founding date.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 12 months", "value": "US$431,459", "grade": "A", "note": "Same profile. Last 6 months: US$165,783. Last 3 months: US$64,791. Last 30 days: US$20,117.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR and active subscriptions, 13 October 2026", "value": "US$20,557 from 207 subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "Same profile. It reports MRR growth of minus 22.9% over the last 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue by month, November 2025 to September 2026", "value": "US$55,941; 44,099; 41,813; 37,684; 38,047; 41,185; 30,949; 33,433; 24,621; 25,298; 20,797", "grade": "A", "note": "The public profile shows only the last twelve calendar months. October 2026 stood at US$7,828 after 13 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Change in verified monthly revenue, November 2025 to September 2026", "value": "minus 62.8%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 20,797 divided by 55,941, minus 1. The average of July to September 2026 (US$23,572) is 50.1% below the average of November 2025 to January 2026 (US$47,284).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue before the last 12 months", "value": "US$298,106 in about 7.7 months, or about US$38,900 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 729,565 minus 431,459, over the 233 days from 22 February to 13 October 2025. The averages for the last 12 months and the last 3 months are US$35,955 and US$21,597 a month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's own monthly figures, March 2025 to September 2026", "value": "first month US$11,433; peak US$68,038 in August 2025; US$26,231 in September 2026; sum US$804,042", "grade": "C", "note": "From the data behind the founder's Public Revenue Project page. July 2025 was US$66,703, which is 1.83 times June 2025 (US$36,462).", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's figures against the verified figures", "value": "11.4% higher over November 2025 to September 2026", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$438,856 against US$393,867. The gap is 6.7% to 12.4% in each month to June 2026 and 23.1% to 26.1% in July to September 2026. The sources do not explain the gap; revenue outside the Stripe account that TrustMRR reads is one possible cause, not verified.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "The company's own open metrics page, 13 October 2026", "value": "270 active subscriptions; MRR US$36,209; revenue in the last 28 days US$26,430", "grade": "C", "note": "These are higher than the TrustMRR values of the same day (207 subscriptions, MRR US$20,557). The page does not say how it counts. Earlier snapshots: 349 subscriptions on 15 May 2025, 452 on 11 July 2025, 447 on 6 December 2025, 385 on 19 April 2026.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in 28 days divided by MRR, on the company's open page", "value": "1.83 in May 2025; 1.65 in July 2025; 1.26 in December 2025; 0.86 in April 2026; 0.73 in October 2026", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the five readings of the page. In 2025 the business collected far more cash in a month than its monthly subscriptions explain. That fits payments that do not repeat monthly: yearly plans paid at once and one-time add-ons, which the price pages of that time list. No source shows a one-time lifetime deal.", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Launch offer", "value": "30% off for life with the code X30, and 20% off with the code LAUNCH20", "grade": "C", "note": "A discount on a subscription, not a one-time lifetime purchase. The launch post had 27,686 views when it was read.", "src": [ 6, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Where the launch revenue came from", "value": "80% from one YouTube video with 1,800 views, 20% from one X post with 30,000 views", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 22 March 2026. In July 2025 he wrote that US$37,000 of LocalRank revenue in four weeks came mostly from YouTube.", "src": [ 16, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Paid advertising", "value": "first-order profitable by 8 July 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's words: \"We're first order profitable with Localrank .so\" and \"Feels good to crack paid\". The image in the post is an ads report with 5 purchases at US$27.34 each. He does not publish the total ad spend.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Price of the cheapest plan", "value": "US$19 a month in March 2025, US$29 in June 2025, US$57 from September 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived copies of the home page. The top plan went from US$149 to US$1,997 and then to US$2,997 a month as citations, leads and AI articles were added.", "src": [ 6, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 co-founders; total headcount not published", "grade": "C", "note": "The About page names Jacky Chou and Peter as co-founders. Chou calls the pair \"marketer + developer\". The LinkedIn page gives a company size of 2 to 10 and lists one employee. In August 2025 Chou advertised for a developer, a salesperson and an intern.", "src": [ 4, 8, 24, 13 ] }, { "fact": "How the software is built", "value": "with AI coding tools", "grade": "C", "note": "Chou wrote of \"a 5 month old vibe coded b2b saas\" in August 2025; the image in the post is a Google result for \"local rank tracker\" with LocalRank in first place. He required that a new developer \"must use claude or cursor\", and wrote that the pair used more than US$2,000 of Claude Code credits a day while building two further products.", "src": [ 15, 13, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Site claim: \"500+ paying agencies\"", "value": "not supported by the subscription counts", "grade": "C", "note": "The claim is on the home page from June 2025 to today. The highest subscription count in any reading of the company's own open page is 452, and the verified count today is 207.", "src": [ 6, 3, 5, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Sale listing", "value": "asking US$1,789,000; listed 5 December 2025; 15 offers received", "grade": "C", "note": "Listing data on the TrustMRR profile, set by the seller. The profile also shows a profit margin of 85% for the last 30 days; that value is not in the list of metrics that TrustMRR verifies.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price against revenue", "value": "7.4 times the last 30 days annualized; 4.1 times the last 12 months; 2.5 times all revenue since launch", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 1,789,000 divided by 241,404, by 431,459 and by 729,565.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "The founder's other businesses", "value": "4 startups with US$4,463,237 of verified revenue in total on TrustMRR; LocalRank is US$729,565 of it", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR founder page, read 13 October 2026. In his own report for September 2026, LocalRank is US$26,231 of US$297,428, which is 8.8%. No figure on this page includes the other businesses.", "src": [ 21, 2, 19 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "No source names an investor. The LinkedIn page says privately held.", "src": [ 24, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the launch to the October 2026 reading", "value": "19 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: March 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 7, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2014", "what": "Jacky Chou starts Indexsy, an SEO agency, during an internship in Berlin.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 20 ] }, { "when": "2023", "what": "He starts daily YouTube uploads about SEO. His reported income from all businesses reaches its highest month, US$506,693, in November 2023.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 20, 2 ] }, { "when": "2024", "what": "His reported total falls from US$481,550 in January 2024 to US$239,839 in April 2024. Chou writes that a Google update removed his content sites; Starter Story describes the cause as AI and Google's algorithm updates.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 16, 17 ] }, { "when": "22 February 2025", "what": "localrank.so is an empty WordPress installation with one default post dated 21 February. TrustMRR gives this day as the founding date.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 1 ] }, { "when": "14 March 2025", "what": "Soft launch on X with a video and the code X30 for 30% off for life. The site sells \"The No Frills Local Rank Tracker\" from US$19 a month. Chou's first monthly figure, for March, is US$11,433.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 6, 2 ] }, { "when": "15 May 2025", "what": "The company's open page shows 349 active subscriptions, MRR of US$18,088 and US$33,129 of revenue in 28 days.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "June 2025", "what": "The home page changes to \"The AI-Powered Local SEO Software\" and adds the citations builder at US$29 to US$1,997 a month. Local Leads, a database of local business contacts, opens on 23 June.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 32 ] }, { "when": "8 July 2025", "what": "Chou writes that paid ads are first-order profitable. A few days earlier he announced Review Booster and wrote that the road to US$1 million of yearly recurring revenue was nearly 50% complete. July revenue is US$66,703 by his figures.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10, 9, 2 ] }, { "when": "August 2025", "what": "The highest month in the founder's figures: US$68,038. He advertises for a full-stack developer who \"must use claude or cursor\", a salesperson and an intern in Vancouver, and calls the product \"vibe coded\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 13, 15 ] }, { "when": "September 2025", "what": "The separate plans become one bundle at US$57, US$297, US$447 and US$1,997 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "US$55,941 of verified revenue, the first and highest month in the public Stripe history.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "5 December 2025", "what": "LocalRank is listed for sale on TrustMRR. The two top plans now cost US$497 and US$2,997 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "when": "22 March 2026", "what": "Starter Story publishes a video on Chou's 13 businesses. He writes that 80% of LocalRank's launch revenue came from YouTube. Verified revenue for March is US$38,047; he reports updates that improved retention.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 17, 16, 18, 1 ] }, { "when": "By October 2026", "what": "The home page sells LLM Citations, articles written by GPT-4o and published on more than 550 sites, and an AI Recommendation Monitor for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. Neither is on the archived page of 8 December 2025.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 22, 6 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "US$20,797 of verified revenue, the lowest full month in the public history. Chou's report for the month groups LocalRank with six other software products.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 19 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2026", "what": "US$729,565 verified since the start, MRR of US$20,557 from 207 subscriptions, still listed for sale at US$1,789,000.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "An audience first, a product second", "text": "Chou had published a video about SEO every day since 2023 and posted his income every month. He wrote that LocalRank grew to more than US$65,000 a month in three months because he had talked about SEO for 600 days. The buyers of a local rank tracker are SEO agencies, and they were already watching him." }, { "title": "One plain tool, then a bundle at a higher price", "text": "The first version was a rank tracker at US$19 a month. Citations, a leads database, review requests and AI articles followed within months, and the plans became one bundle from US$57 to US$2,997 a month. Each new part was a public post, and each post was a reason for agencies to look again." }, { "title": "Paid ads only after the organic channel worked", "text": "For the first four months the sources name only YouTube and X as channels. In July 2025 the first payment of a customer from an ad began to cover the cost of that ad, which is what first-order profitable means, and revenue by his figures rose from US$36,462 in June to US$66,703 in July." }, { "title": "Two people and AI coding tools", "text": "A marketer and a developer built and sold the product. Chou describes it as vibe coded, which means that the developer describes what he wants and an AI model writes most of the code. The same pair launched other software products in the same months." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's pages and from the founder's posts on X. They are grade C. The sources do not name the programming language, the hosting or the data providers.", "items": [ "The marketing site is WordPress: the first archived copy, of 22 February 2025, is a default WordPress installation. The application runs separately at app.localrank.so.", "The developer co-founder, Peter, wrote in 2024 that he had worked as an engineer at Amazon and that he codes with AI editors such as Cursor.", "Chou wrote of \"a 5 month old vibe coded b2b saas\" in August 2025, above an image of LocalRank in first place on Google, and asked that a new developer \"must use claude or cursor\". He wrote that the pair used more than US$2,000 of Claude Code credits a day while building two further products.", "The AI inside the product: the LLM Citations page says that GPT-4o writes articles of more than 1,000 words, which are published on a network of more than 550 sites and indexed in 2 to 4 hours. The plans also list an \"AI Autopilot\" for Google Business Profile; the page describes scheduled posts and review replies and does not name the model.", "The rank tracker and the leads database are sold by credits: 10,000 to 300,000 tracker credits a month, and lead credits that are charged only for email addresses.", "Payments go through Stripe. TrustMRR reads the Stripe account with an API key, and the company also publishes its own open metrics page." ], "src": [ 6, 3, 30, 15, 13, 14, 22, 1, 5 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five records in the Loot Drop database sold marketing tools to small businesses, or lived on the rules of a platform that they did not control. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Metigy", "years": "2014 to 2022", "funding": "US$14M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "An AI marketing adviser for small businesses that cannot pay for a marketing team.", "died": "Its advice was generic. Small businesses wanted the work done for them, not a dashboard of suggestions, and they left soon after signing up.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2338-metigy" }, { "name": "SumAll", "years": "2011 to 2019", "funding": "US$15M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "One dashboard for all the marketing and sales data of a small business.", "died": "Free tools from larger companies, such as Google Data Studio, did the same job. Small businesses did not see enough value for the price and cancelled.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/587-sumall" }, { "name": "LocalOn", "years": "2013 to 2016", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Websites, social media links and local SEO for small local shops, with no coding.", "died": "Shopify and Wix offered more. LocalOn had too little money to add features fast enough.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1548-localon" }, { "name": "Argyle Social", "years": "2009 to 2013", "funding": "US$2.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A social media marketing tool that connects to marketing automation software.", "died": "Larger competitors spent more on marketing, and the product depended on the APIs of the social platforms.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1832-argyle-social" }, { "name": "Waterproof Digital Camera", "years": "2013 to 2017", "funding": "none recorded", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "An affiliate blog that reached the top of Google with aggressive SEO methods.", "died": "Google's algorithm updates removed its rankings, and the traffic and the commissions went with them.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2023-waterproof-digital-camera" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The five predecessors show two ways to fail. Metigy, SumAll, LocalOn and Argyle Social sold software to small businesses that did not see enough value and cancelled, while larger companies offered the same functions free or in a bigger package. The affiliate blog shows the second way: income that exists only as long as Google's ranking rules allow it. Chou knows the second way from his own history: he writes that a Google update removed his content sites.", "LocalRank differs in three points. It sells to agencies, which resell the result to many local businesses and understand the tools, and not to the shop owner. It was built by two people with AI coding tools, so it needed no investor. And its first customers came from an audience that the founder already had. What did not change is the first risk: verified monthly revenue fell by 63% in ten months, and the count of subscriptions on the company's own page fell from 452 to 270." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The audience, no. The sequence, yes.", "text": "The start of LocalRank depended on years of daily videos and public income reports by one person, and that cannot be copied quickly. The order of the steps can be: a plain tool for a buyer who already listens to you, a low first price, more tools and higher prices as customers ask, and paid ads only when the first payment covers the ad. The fall after the peak is the part to study before copying. A launch to your own audience brings a wave of customers once, and the business afterwards is as large as the number of customers who stay.", "steps": [ "Teach one subject in public on a fixed schedule before you have a product, on the platform where buyers watch long content. For this product, YouTube brought four times the launch revenue of X.", "Launch one plain tool at a low monthly price to that audience, and announce every addition in public.", "Add the tools that customers request and move them into one bundle with higher prices.", "Start paid ads after the organic channel works, and continue only while the first payment of a new customer covers the ad.", "Connect a payment-verified page to your revenue, so that buyers and readers can check your figures.", "Measure from the first month how many customers cancel, because new sign-ups from an audience slow down after the launch." ], "open": "Tools for agencies that sell visibility in AI answers. A member of LocalRank's own community wrote that this offer is \"a lot more interesting to people compared to local SEO\". The demand is new, and the rules of Google and of the AI companies for such content are not settled." }, "watch": [ { "title": "The trend is down", "text": "Verified revenue fell from US$55,941 in November 2025 to US$20,797 in September 2026, minus 62.8%, and TrustMRR reports MRR growth of minus 22.9% for the last 30 days. The headline total of US$729,565 is a sum since the launch; the present level is about US$21,000 a month. No source gives the reason for the fall. In March 2026 the founder wrote that updates had improved retention, which shows that cancellations were a known problem." }, { "title": "Google's rules on reviews and fake engagement", "text": "The plans include Review Booster, described on the home page as \"Farm 5 star reviews on autopilot\". Google's policy for Maps says that merchants may not \"selectively solicit positive reviews from customers\" or offer incentives for reviews, and that fake engagement is removed. Google reported that it blocked or removed more than 292 million policy-violating reviews and more than 13 million fake Business Profiles in 2025, and that it can pause new reviews on a profile. The sources do not say whether Review Booster asks only satisfied customers. The white label page also sells \"CTR setup/management\", which it describes as click-through rate optimization, and \"PBN Citations\"; PBN is the usual short form of private blog network. If Google restricts the profile of a customer, the customer loses the result that the tool sold." }, { "title": "Google's spam policies and the AI articles", "text": "LLM Citations publishes GPT-4o articles that place the customer first, on what the page calls its own network of more than 550 sites. Google's spam policies name as scaled content abuse the use of generative AI tools \"to generate many pages without adding value for users\", name automated link creation as link spam, and count \"attempting to manipulate generative AI responses in Google Search\" as spam. The home page calls the method \"Fully Google-safe\". That is the seller's statement, and Google decides." }, { "title": "Google answers local questions with its own AI", "text": "On 12 March 2026 Google introduced Ask Maps, a conversation with Gemini inside Google Maps, first in the USA and India. Google says the answers use information from more than 300 million places and reviews from more than 500 million contributors, and that they are personalized for each user. A position on a map grid, which is what a rank tracker measures, describes such an answer less well. LocalRank's reply is its AI Recommendation Monitor, a new product in a new market." }, { "title": "Three sets of figures that do not agree", "text": "The founder's monthly figures are 7% to 26% above the Stripe-verified ones, and the company's own open page shows 270 subscriptions and MRR of US$36,209 on the day when TrustMRR shows 207 and US$20,557. The home page has said \"500+ paying agencies\" since June 2025, and no subscription count in any source reaches 500. Use the grade A rows." }, { "title": "For sale, and one product among many", "text": "LocalRank has been listed since 5 December 2025 at US$1,789,000, which is 7.4 times the present yearly rate of revenue while revenue falls. The founder runs an agency, a community and several other software products, wrote in June 2025 that he and his co-founder would launch a new B2B product every month, and now reports LocalRank inside a group of seven. The first customers came from his personal audience, so a buyer should ask which channel will sell the product after the sale." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://localrank.so/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/localrank-so" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile: LocalRank.so, revenue last synced 13 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/localrank-so", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full (https://trustmrr.com/startup/localrank-so.md) on 13 October 2026. Revenue, MRR and subscriptions come from Stripe through an API key. The description, the user estimate, the profit margin and the sale listing are entered by the seller, grade C." }, { "title": "Jacky Chou: The Public Revenue Project, monthly income by source from January 2022 to September 2026", "url": "https://jackychou.com/open", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full the JSON data that the page loads (jackychou.com/api/revenue). Founder's own figures. Source for the LocalRank column from March 2025 and for the totals of all his businesses." }, { "title": "LocalRank home page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://localrank.so/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product parts, the four plans with monthly and yearly prices, the guarantee and the claim of 500+ paying agencies." }, { "title": "LocalRank About page: The Team Behind LocalRank", "url": "https://localrank.so/about/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names two co-founders, Peter (first name only) and Jacky Chou, and shows a post from the company's community." }, { "title": "LocalRank open metrics page, read live on 13 October 2026 and in Wayback copies of 15 May 2025, 11 July 2025, 6 December 2025 and 19 April 2026", "url": "https://localrank.so/open/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read all five copies in full. The company's own counter of subscriptions, MRR and revenue in the last 28 days. It does not say how it counts." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copies of the LocalRank home page: 22 February, 14 March, 20 June, 11 September and 8 December 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250314194003/https://localrank.so/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read all five copies in full. Source for the empty first site, the launch prices, the launch code LAUNCH20 and the price changes." }, { "title": "Jacky Chou on X, 14 March 2025: soft launch, 30% lifetime off with X30", "url": "https://x.com/indexsy/status/1900589788480368679", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. 27,686 views when read. It quotes his post of 13 March 2025 about his co-founder." }, { "title": "Jacky Chou on X, 27 June 2025: The ultimate co-founder combo now: marketer + developer", "url": "https://x.com/indexsy/status/1938628256061853772", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names the X account of his developer co-founder and the plan to launch a new B2B product every month." }, { "title": "Jacky Chou on X, 5 July 2025: Review Booster is coming soon, with his quoted post of 2 July 2025 on 350 citation sites", "url": "https://x.com/indexsy/status/1941324581954023454", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both posts in full. The post of 2 July says: Road to $1M ARR, nearly 50% complete." }, { "title": "Jacky Chou on X, 8 July 2025: We're first order profitable with Localrank .so", "url": "https://x.com/indexsy/status/1942453179691712663", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with its image: an ads report that shows 5 website purchases at US$27.34 per purchase. Source for the start of profitable paid advertising." }, { "title": "Jacky Chou on X, 16 July 2025: $37k Localrank revenue in the last 4 weeks, mostly from YouTube", "url": "https://x.com/indexsy/status/1945346609400963298", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder claim about the channel." }, { "title": "Jacky Chou on X, 2 August 2025: How did I grow LocalRank to $65k+/mo in 3 months, quoting his income report for July 2025", "url": "https://x.com/indexsy/status/1951663799788081267", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both posts in full. The quoted report gives LocalRank US$66.7k for July 2025." }, { "title": "Jacky Chou on X, 4 August 2025: We're looking to hire for the following roles for Localrank or new ventures", "url": "https://x.com/indexsy/status/1952388380140208326", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the three open roles and the requirement to use Claude or Cursor." }, { "title": "Jacky Chou on X, 13 August 2025: launching 2 b2b saas, over $2k in Claude Code credits used per day", "url": "https://x.com/indexsy/status/1955656654982422605", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. About two further products built by the same pair, not about LocalRank alone." }, { "title": "Jacky Chou on X, 28 August 2025: a 5 month old vibe coded b2b saas", "url": "https://x.com/indexsy/status/1961125247769538723", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with its image: a Google result page for the search local rank tracker with LocalRank in first place. The age of five months matches the launch in March 2025." }, { "title": "Jacky Chou on X, 22 March 2026: YouTube converts 15x better than X, our LocalRank .so launch", "url": "https://x.com/indexsy/status/2035829427704336753", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the split of launch revenue between the X post and the YouTube video." }, { "title": "Starter Story on YouTube, 22 March 2026: I Make $250K/Month From 13 Businesses (After Losing Everything to AI)", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spiC5m6AJNs", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the title, the description and the chapter list on the video page. The captions could not be downloaded, so nothing spoken in the video is cited." }, { "title": "Jacky Chou on X, 31 March 2026: I made $246,799.12 in March 2026", "url": "https://x.com/indexsy/status/2039019229010407499", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Says that updates to the LocalRank group of products improved retention." }, { "title": "Jacky Chou on X, 30 September 2026: I made $297,428.43 in September 2026", "url": "https://x.com/indexsy/status/2105336741326717100", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. LocalRank is reported inside a group of seven software products at US$62,847.62." }, { "title": "Jacky Chou on X, 27 August 2026: Here's what happened every year, 2014 to 2026", "url": "https://x.com/indexsy/status/2092992208781922566", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the start of Indexsy in 2014, the daily YouTube uploads from 2023 and the move to software in 2025." }, { "title": "TrustMRR founder page: Jacky Chou, 4 startups with verified revenue", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/founder/indexsy", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full on 13 October 2026. Totals for all his listed startups: US$4,463,237 of revenue and US$87,525 of MRR. Used only to keep the other businesses apart from LocalRank." }, { "title": "LocalRank product page: LLM Citations", "url": "https://localrank.so/llm-citations/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for GPT-4o, the article length, the network of 550+ sites and the indexing time." }, { "title": "LocalRank pages: White-Label Local SEO, and Local Citation Building Services", "url": "https://localrank.so/white-label-seo/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both pages in full. Source for the white label prices and contents, the indexing add-on at US$20 a run and the list of directories." }, { "title": "LinkedIn company page: LocalRank.so", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/localrankso/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public page without login. Company size 2 to 10 employees, privately held, one employee listed. The numbers are entered by the company." }, { "title": "Local Rank Academy page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://localrank.so/academy/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A Skool community at US$79 a month with 156 members." }, { "title": "Google: Maps User Generated Content Policy, Fake and Misleading Content and Behavior", "url": "https://support.google.com/contributionpolicy/answer/7400114?hl=en", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the sections on fake engagement and rating manipulation. Google's own policy text." }, { "title": "Google Search Central: Spam policies for Google web search", "url": "https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the introduction and the sections on link spam and scaled content abuse. Google's own policy text." }, { "title": "Google blog, 12 March 2026: How we're reimagining Maps with Gemini", "url": "https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/maps/ask-maps-immersive-navigation/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Google's announcement of Ask Maps." }, { "title": "Google blog, 16 April 2026: New ways we're protecting businesses on Maps", "url": "https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/maps/new-ways-were-protecting-businesses-on-maps/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the counts of removed reviews and profiles in 2025 and for the pause of reviews on a profile." }, { "title": "Peter (@pwang_szn) on X, 19 and 28 February 2024: on AI code editors and on his time as an engineer at Amazon", "url": "https://x.com/pwang_szn/status/1762876412992663883", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both posts and his profile through the fxtwitter API. His own statements about his background." }, { "title": "Jacky Chou's personal site, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://jackychou.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Lists LocalRank as his second product by revenue and states US$2.92M of revenue in 2025 across his products, a founder claim that covers all of them." }, { "title": "Jacky Chou on X, 23 June 2025: Local Leads is officially live on Localrank", "url": "https://x.com/indexsy/status/1937203977260793874", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the opening date of the leads database and its billing by email address." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/boothie/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/boothie.md", "slug": "boothie", "name": "Boothie", "country": "Turkey", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI photo restyling app", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-13", "launchLabel": "23 June 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$141K verified revenue in 16 weeks, October 2026", "sticker": "$141K in 16 weeks", "outcomeUsd": 141030, "months": 4, "teamLabel": "1 founder, a sole proprietorship; no source presents a second person, and the team size is not published", "fundingLabel": "None reported; the founder says he launched with no money", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "photos", "channel": "creators", "trend": "flat", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Consumer apps" ], "product": "A phone app for iPhone and Android. The user picks a look, such as digicam flash, golden hour or vintage photobooth, and takes or uploads a selfie. The app sends the photo to Google's Gemini image model and returns the same person in that look within seconds. A free editor with film filters runs on the phone without AI. AI pictures cost credits, which come with a weekly subscription or in packs.", "why": "The demand existed before the app: photos that look as if a compact digital camera from the 2000s took them have been a trend on TikTok since at least 2022. Boothie sells that look without the camera, for a small weekly price, to the people who already post such photos. The founder says every user came from TikTok picture posts made by about a dozen accounts in three countries, with no paid advertising. One person could build it because the image model is rented from Google and paid for by the picture.", "summary": [ "Boothie is a phone app that changes the look of a selfie. The user picks a look and takes or uploads a photo, and the app returns the same person as if a different camera had taken the picture. The best-known look is the digicam look. Digicam is short for digital camera; online, the word means the style of a cheap compact camera from the 2000s: a hard direct flash, strong colours and some grain. Boothie does not compute the new picture itself. Its privacy policy says that the app sends the photo to Gemini, an image model from Google, which is an AI model that takes a picture and a written instruction and produces a new picture. A free editor with film filters runs on the phone without AI. An AI picture costs credits, units that the user buys and the app subtracts for each generation; credits come with a weekly subscription or in packs.", "Keremcan Şeker, who trades as a sole proprietor in Turkey, released the app in Apple's App Store on 23 June 2026 and on Google Play on 15 September 2026. The revenue on this page is not his statement. He connected the app's RevenueCat account to TrustMRR, a public database of startup revenue. RevenueCat is a service that app developers place between their app and the app stores: it handles in-app purchases and subscriptions, and it records every purchase, renewal and refund. TrustMRR read that record through an API key: US$141,030 from 23 June to 13 October 2026, which is 16 weeks. RevenueCat's Revenue measure is gross revenue: what customers paid, minus refunds, before the app store keeps its commission and before sales tax. By calendar month the revenue was US$4,727 in the last 8 days of June, US$27,329 in July, US$43,734 in August and US$43,577 in September. It rose fast for two months and has been level since August, with a higher daily average in the first 12 days of October. The app is under four months old, so this page gives totals for stated periods and no yearly rate.", "The profile also shows MRR, monthly recurring revenue, of US$51,764. That is more than the US$44,405 that customers paid in the last 30 days, and the reason is the method. Three of Boothie's four subscription plans are sold by the week, and RevenueCat counts each active weekly subscription as four payments. MRR is therefore the amount that the 2,216 active subscriptions would pay in one month if none of them cancelled, and weekly subscribers cancel often. The founder writes that every user came from TikTok carousels, posts made of several pictures that the viewer swipes through, published by \"almost a dozen persona accounts\", a term that usually means accounts that post as invented characters, and that he spent nothing on advertising. That text is from his sale listing: the business has been offered for sale since September 2026, now for US$1.5 million. This page could not find those accounts or any dated post by him about marketing. It then shows five earlier photo and video apps that grew fast and closed." ], "factsCaption": "US$141,030 in verified gross revenue in the 16 weeks after launch, level at US$43,734 and US$43,577 in August and September 2026, read from the developer's RevenueCat account", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the developer's RevenueCat account through an API key; it is not a founder statement. A grade B value is published by Apple or Google in a store record. A grade C value is a founder statement, a profile field that the founder filled in, the company's own policy pages, or a vendor's document. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows named in its note.", "timelineLead": "From the first version on 23 June 2026 to US$141,030 of verified revenue and a sale listing by October 2026, in 16 weeks. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Boothie in-app purchases listed in the US App Store on 13 October 2026 (grade B), with periods and credits from the company's terms of 23 July 2026 (grade C)", "note": "The app is free to download, and the editor with film filters is free. Apple's listing gives seven in-app purchases with a name and a price but no period. The terms of service, dated 23 July 2026, say that Plus and Gold are weekly, with 5 and 10 credits a day that do not carry over to the next day. The terms give higher prices than the listing: US$7.99 a week for Plus and US$12.99 a week for Gold, with a possible discount on the first week, no free trial and no yearly plan. The terms do not mention the two Pro plans. Credit packs are sold only to subscribers. Prices differ by country: the German store lists Plus at 8.99 euros and the Turkish store at 249 Turkish lira. Google Play lists in-app purchases from US$2.99 to US$11.99 per item. The third column holds the listed price with its period.", "rows": [ [ "Boothie Plus", "", "6.99 a week", "5 credits a day per the terms; counted as US$27.96 a month in MRR" ], [ "Boothie Gold", "", "9.99 a week", "10 credits a day per the terms; counted as US$39.96 a month in MRR" ], [ "Boothie Pro Weekly", "", "7.99 a week", "credits not published; counted as US$31.96 a month in MRR" ], [ "Boothie Pro Monthly", "", "19.99", "credits not published" ], [ "10 Credits Pack", "2.99 one-time", "", "subscribers only; not counted in MRR" ], [ "25 Credits Pack", "5.99 one-time", "", "subscribers only; not counted in MRR" ], [ "60 Credits Pack", "11.99 one-time", "", "subscribers only; not counted in MRR" ], [ "Editor with film filters", "0", "0", "runs on the phone, no AI" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time to 13 October 2026", "value": "US$141,030", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from the RevenueCat API, last synced on 13 October 2026 at 18:28 UTC. The first revenue is in June 2026. The cached profile of 12 October showed US$139,181. Gross sales, as the next row explains. This is the headline figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "What the revenue figure measures", "value": "customer payments minus refunds, before store commission and taxes", "grade": "C", "note": "RevenueCat's documentation defines Revenue this way, and defines a separate measure, Proceeds, as revenue minus its estimate of taxes and store commission. TrustMRR's FAQ does not say which RevenueCat measure it imports; for its direct App Store connection it says that revenue is customer sales before Apple's commission. The FAQ also says that its figures can differ from a provider's own by up to 30%.", "src": [ 5, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue by calendar month, 2026", "value": "June from the 23rd US$4,727, July US$27,329, August US$43,734, September US$43,577, October to the 13th US$21,663", "grade": "A", "note": "The monthly table of the profile. The five values add up to the all-time total. August and September together are 61.9% of it.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per day, by month", "value": "June US$591, July US$882, August US$1,411, September US$1,453, 1 to 12 October US$1,741", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: each monthly total divided by its days (8, 31, 31 and 30), and the profile's daily values for 1 to 12 October, US$20,896, divided by 12. August is 60.0% above July. September is 0.4% below August.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Trend", "value": "fast rise to August, level in August and September, higher in early October; no spike", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the profile's daily table, 29 full days from 14 September to 12 October: the first 14 days average US$1,376 and the last 14 days US$1,665, which is 21.0% more. Inside September, days 1 to 13 average US$1,603 and days 14 to 30 average US$1,338. The lowest day is US$1,053 (28 September) and the highest is US$2,734 (Saturday 10 October). The six days above US$1,700 are one Friday, two Saturdays and three Sundays.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, 30 days to 13 October 2026", "value": "US$44,405 in one month", "grade": "A", "note": "One month of sales, not a yearly rate. The profile marks it 3.5% below the 30 days before, which puts those earlier 30 days at about US$46,000 (44,405 / 0.965).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR, 13 October 2026", "value": "US$51,764", "grade": "A", "note": "Up 22.2% in 30 days according to the profile. RevenueCat converts each active paid subscription to one month: a weekly price is multiplied by 4 and a monthly price by 1. Credit packs and other one-time purchases are not counted.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions, 13 October 2026", "value": "2,216", "grade": "A", "note": "RevenueCat counts paid subscriptions that still give access. A subscriber who has cancelled stays in the count until the paid week or month ends.", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Average MRR per active subscription", "value": "US$23.36 a month, which is US$5.84 a week", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 51,764 / 2,216, and that result divided by 4. In MRR, a weekly plan at the US price counts as US$27.96 (Plus), US$31.96 (Pro Weekly) or US$39.96 (Gold), and the monthly plan counts as US$19.99. The average is 83.5% of the lowest weekly value, so many subscriptions pay less than the US weekly price. Possible reasons are lower prices in other countries, a discounted first week, and the monthly plan. The profile does not give the split.", "src": [ 1, 6, 8, 12 ] }, { "fact": "MRR against the last 30 days of revenue", "value": "MRR is US$7,359 higher, or 16.6%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 51,764 minus 44,405. MRR is a count at one moment that assumes every active weekly subscription pays four times. Revenue is what was paid, and it includes credit packs, which MRR leaves out. For an app sold by the week, MRR is an estimate that assumes no cancellations, not a record of money paid.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Figures on the day of listing, 23 September 2026", "value": "US$109,000 total revenue, MRR US$38,000, 1,400 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR's posts on X, rounded there as $109k, $38k and 1.4k. In the 20 days to 13 October, MRR rose 36.2% and active subscriptions 58.3%, while revenue for 30 days moved only from $43k to US$44,405. The cause of that difference is not published.", "src": [ 2, 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Paying users, founder's count", "value": "9,800 in about three months", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller's message on the profile page: \"Three months in: $50K MRR, 9,800 paying users.\" The message is not dated and the count is not among the verified metrics.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Share of those paying users who still subscribe", "value": "about 22.6%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2,216 active subscriptions / 9,800 paying users. About 77% of the people who ever paid no longer subscribe. Approximate: the two numbers have different dates, and one user can hold more than one subscription.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per paying user", "value": "about US$14.39", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 141,030 / 9,800. That is close to two weekly payments of US$6.99.", "src": [ 1, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price", "value": "US$1.5 million, down from US$2 million on 23 September 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Set by the seller. The profile gives 9 October 2026 as the first listing date, while TrustMRR's post of 23 September already announces the listing at US$2 million. The profile shows a multiple of 2.8 and 17 offers received. Calculated: 1,500,000 / (44,405 times 12) = 2.81, so the marketplace's multiple compares the price with twelve times the last 30 days of revenue.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "55.0%", "grade": "C", "note": "Shown on the profile. It is not in the profile's list of metrics that come from payment records, and the costs behind it are not published.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Store commission", "value": "15% at Apple for developers in its Small Business Program; on Google Play subscriptions 10% plus a 5% billing fee, or 15%, depending on the market", "grade": "C", "note": "Apple's and Google's own pages. Developers new to the App Store can qualify for Apple's program; whether this developer is enrolled is not verified. Calculated: if 15% applied to all sales, the developer's share of US$141,030 would be US$119,876 before taxes and costs.", "src": [ 16, 17 ] }, { "fact": "AI model", "value": "Google's Gemini, called from a Firebase backend", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's privacy policy and terms of 23 July 2026. They do not name the Gemini version. The policy says that photos are sent to the backend only to call the model and are not stored there.", "src": [ 11, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Google's list price for one generated image, October 2026", "value": "US$0.0336 to US$0.134", "grade": "C", "note": "Google's pricing page, for an image of 1,024 by 1,024 pixels: US$0.0336 with Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Image, US$0.067 with Gemini 3.1 Flash Image and US$0.134 with Gemini 3 Pro Image. The same page marks Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, at US$0.039 an image, as deprecated with a shutdown date of 2 October 2026.", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "fact": "Model cost of one Plus week with every credit used", "value": "US$1.18 to US$2.35, against a price of US$6.99", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 5 credits a day times 7 days = 35 credits; 35 times US$0.0336 = US$1.18 and 35 times US$0.067 = US$2.35. After a 15% commission the developer keeps US$5.94 of the US$6.99. This assumes that one credit is one image of that size. The company publishes neither the model version nor the number of credits per image.", "src": [ 12, 14, 8 ] }, { "fact": "App Store ratings, 13 October 2026", "value": "Turkey 4.4 from 194 ratings, United States 4.5 from 30, Germany 4.3 from 15, United Kingdom 5.0 from 6", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's lookup API, version 1.6. Apple counts ratings for each country's store separately. Of the 245 ratings in these four stores, 79.2% are Turkish.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Written reviews, Turkish App Store", "value": "11, of which 6 give one star", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's review feed, 26 June to 12 September 2026. The repeated complaints are that the AI changed the user's face, that the daily credits ran out, and the price. One of the five-star reviews has a negative text. The US and German feeds returned no written reviews.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Google Play, 13 October 2026", "value": "more than 10,000 downloads, no rating shown", "grade": "B", "note": "The page data gives 15,605 downloads, a release date of 15 September 2026 and an update on 4 October 2026. The developer's page lists this one app.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "How users were found", "value": "TikTok carousels from \"almost a dozen persona accounts\" in the US, Germany and Turkey; no paid ads", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller's message on the profile, written for buyers; the accounts are offered as part of the sale. Not verified: this page did not find the accounts, and the founder's X account has no post about marketing. Two details agree with it: the website has a notice for visitors who arrive in TikTok's in-app browser, and the App Store listing is translated into German.", "src": [ 1, 10, 8, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's audience on X", "value": "33 followers, 6 posts", "grade": "C", "note": "Read through the fxtwitter API on 13 October 2026. The posts returned are three reposts of TrustMRR and one post in Turkish that is not about the business. The users did not come from a personal audience.", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 founder named; team size not published", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR lists one founder. The seller in the App Store and the developer on Google Play carry his own name, and the terms call the business a sole proprietorship established in Türkiye. The app's bundle identifier contains a second given name next to his. No source presents a second person as part of the business, so this page names none.", "src": [ 1, 8, 9, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller's message: \"Launched in June no money, no paid ads.\" No investor is named in any source read for this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Earlier apps by the founder", "value": "none found", "grade": "B", "note": "His App Store developer account and his Google Play developer page each list only Boothie, and his TrustMRR founder page lists one startup.", "src": [ 8, 9, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the headline figure", "value": "112 days, which is 16 weeks or about 3.7 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 23 June to 13 October 2026. The card on this site shows 4 months, rounded.", "src": [ 1, 8 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "23 June 2026", "what": "Versions 1.0 and 1.1 appear in Apple's App Store under the founder's own name. The last 8 days of June bring US$4,727.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 8, 1 ] }, { "when": "26 to 28 June 2026", "what": "The first written reviews arrive in the Turkish App Store: praise for the effects, and complaints about the price and about a changed face.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "July 2026", "what": "Versions 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 on 2, 15 and 23 July. Verified revenue for the month: US$27,329.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 8, 1 ] }, { "when": "23 July 2026", "what": "Privacy policy and terms are dated this day: Plus at US$7.99 a week with 5 credits a day, Gold at US$12.99 a week with 10 credits a day, no free trial, no yearly plan, pictures made by Google's Gemini.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11, 12 ] }, { "when": "August 2026", "what": "Verified revenue of US$43,734, the highest calendar month so far.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "1 September 2026", "what": "Version 1.5.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "15 September 2026", "what": "The Android version appears on Google Play.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "Verified revenue of US$43,577, 0.4% below August.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "23 September 2026", "what": "The founder connects RevenueCat to TrustMRR and lists the business for sale at US$2 million. TrustMRR posts US$109,000 total revenue, MRR of US$38,000 and 1,400 active subscriptions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "when": "9 October 2026", "what": "The listing date now shown on the profile. The asking price is US$1.5 million.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "10 October 2026", "what": "The best day in the profile's 30-day table: US$2,734, a Saturday.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "12 October 2026", "what": "Version 1.6, the seventh version in 16 weeks.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2026", "what": "US$141,030 all time, US$44,405 in the last 30 days, MRR of US$51,764, 2,216 active subscriptions and 17 offers received on the listing.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A look that people already wanted", "text": "Boothie did not have to create demand. The BBC reported in February 2023 that TikTok videos with the hashtag #digitalcamera had more than 220 million views in twelve months and that young people were buying cameras from the early 2000s. Boothie sells the result of such a camera without the camera, and names its looks after it: Y2K digicam, Powershot flash, night flash." }, { "title": "Many small TikTok accounts, no advertising", "text": "According to the founder, all users came from carousels posted by almost a dozen persona accounts in the United States, Germany and Turkey, and he paid for no ads. A carousel of before and after pictures shows the whole product in one post. This is his statement to buyers and this page could not check it. The store ratings fit a start in Turkey: 194 of 245 ratings in four stores are from Turkey." }, { "title": "A weekly price with a daily credit limit", "text": "A weekly price of US$6.99 is a small decision for someone who wants the look for one evening's photos. The daily limit of 5 or 10 credits, which do not carry over, puts an upper limit on what one subscriber can cost in model fees. Subscribers who want more buy credit packs." }, { "title": "A rented model and a free editor", "text": "The founder trained no model. The app sends the photo to Google's Gemini and pays by the picture, so the cost follows the usage and there was nothing to build before the first sale. The free editor with film filters runs on the phone and costs nothing to serve, so the app can be useful to people who never pay." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's privacy policy and terms, from the TrustMRR profile fields that the founder filled in, and from the store listings. They are grade C, except the store records, which are grade B.", "items": [ "Technology listed on the profile: Swift and React Native for the app, RevenueCat for purchases.", "The AI pictures come from Google's Gemini. The app sends the selected photo to a Firebase backend, which calls the model and returns the result. The policy says that photos and results are not stored on the server and that the history stays on the phone.", "The free mode, called Classic Photobooth in the policy, applies film filters on the phone and sends nothing.", "No account is needed. RevenueCat ties purchases to an anonymous identifier of the installation, and Firebase App Check confirms that requests come from an unmodified copy of the app.", "Analytics with PostHog record events such as paywall viewed, purchase started and daily credits used up. Crash reports go to Firebase Crashlytics. The policy says that screen recording and click capture are turned off.", "Seven versions in 16 weeks: 1.0 and 1.1 on 23 June, 1.2 on 2 July, 1.3 on 15 July, 1.4 on 23 July, 1.5 on 1 September and 1.6 on 12 October 2026. The Android version followed on 15 September.", "The legal pages are two Notion pages, and the website is a single page with store buttons." ], "src": [ 1, 11, 12, 8, 9, 10 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold photo or video effects, or grew on another company's platform, and closed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Viddy", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$30M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Filters that make a phone video look professional, shared with friends.", "died": "People tried it once and did not come back. Instagram added video in 2013, and Vine spread at the same time.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2190-viddy" }, { "name": "Mobli", "years": "2010 to 2017", "funding": "US$86M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A photo and video sharing app with filters, promoted by celebrities.", "died": "Instagram had started earlier and Facebook bought it. Mobli had no feature that made users switch.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/341-mobli" }, { "name": "Picnik", "years": "2005 to 2012", "funding": "US$3.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Photo editing and effects in the browser, with nothing to install.", "died": "Google bought it in 2010, moved the technology into Google+ and closed the service in 2012. Phone apps with built-in filters took the users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/429-picnik" }, { "name": "Everalbum", "years": "2013 to 2019", "funding": "US$19.2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Unlimited photo storage with automatic sorting, sold by subscription.", "died": "It charged for features that Google Photos gave away free, and users chose the free one.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/125-everalbum" }, { "name": "Meerkat", "years": "2015 to 2016", "funding": "US$14M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Live video from a phone to your Twitter followers.", "died": "All its growth came through Twitter. Twitter bought a competitor, Periscope, and cut Meerkat's access.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2194-meerkat" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The five earlier companies raised between US$3.5 million and US$86 million to build an effect together with the place where people share the result, or to grow on a platform that they did not control. Each lost when a larger company added the same effect or closed the access. Boothie is exposed to the same two risks: any app can add a digicam look, and all of its users come through TikTok.", "What differs is the cost of trying. Boothie builds no network and trains no model. It rents the image model from Google by the picture, sells through the app stores, and charged from the first week, so one person reached US$141,030 of verified sales in 16 weeks without investors. Viddy and Mobli needed tens of millions of dollars before they knew whether users would stay. Boothie will learn the same answer from its own weekly renewals, with little money at risk." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. This look, for a limited time.", "text": "A rented image model, a weekly price with a daily credit limit and picture posts on TikTok are open to anyone, and the founder says he started with no money. The digicam look is one trend among many and others sell it too, so a copy needs its own look and its own audience. What nobody can know yet is how long a weekly subscriber stays: the data covers 16 weeks.", "steps": [ "Choose a visual look that people already post and save, and check that it is spreading on TikTok in your language.", "Build the effect on a rented image model, and add free filters that run on the phone so the app is useful before payment.", "Sell by the week with a fixed number of credits a day, so that the model cost of one subscriber has an upper limit.", "Post before and after carousels from several accounts in each country, and measure which country pays.", "Connect the payment records to a public verification service early, so that the figures can be checked if you decide to sell." ], "open": "Other looks, and other countries and languages. The founder names two things he has not done: more content for the United States, and work on retention." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Weekly subscriptions end fast", "text": "RevenueCat's State of Subscription Apps 2025 report says that weekly plans lose 30% to 50% of subscribers at the first renewal and that weekly plan retention rarely exceeds 10% at six months. Boothie's own numbers agree with this: by the founder's count of 9,800 paying users, about 77% no longer subscribe, and the average paying user has paid about US$14. The churn rate itself is visible on TrustMRR only after login and was not read." }, { "title": "Sixteen weeks of data, and a seller's text", "text": "The verified record starts on 23 June 2026. It shows two months of growth and two level months, which is too short to tell a business from a trend. The description of the marketing comes from a sale listing. Its asking price was US$2 million on 23 September and US$1.5 million by 12 October 2026. TrustMRR also says that its figures can differ from the provider's own by up to 30%." }, { "title": "The model is rented, and the result is the complaint", "text": "Every AI picture is a paid call to Google's Gemini, at a list price of US$0.0336 to US$0.134 an image depending on the model. Google sets that price and retires models: its pricing page gives 2 October 2026 as the shutdown date of Gemini 2.5 Flash Image. Any competitor can rent the same model at the same price. The most frequent complaint in the written reviews is that the picture no longer looks like the user, which the website promises will not happen." }, { "title": "The look is a trend", "text": "The digicam look has been spreading on TikTok since at least 2022, and a visual trend can pass. Later versions of the app added film looks and a beauty editor. No source shows which looks the revenue depends on." }, { "title": "One platform brings all the users", "text": "The founder says that every user came from TikTok carousels posted by persona accounts. A change in how TikTok shows such posts, or the loss of those accounts, would stop new users. The accounts are not named in any source, so their reach could not be checked." }, { "title": "The stores take a share and set the rules", "text": "If the developer is in Apple's Small Business Program, Apple and Google each keep about 15% of a subscription payment, and the developer's share of the headline figure is near US$119,876 before costs. Apple's review guidelines say not to submit apps that are indistinguishable from what is already widely available (4.3), require a clear description of what a subscriber gets for the price (3.1.2), and require explicit permission before personal data is shared with a third-party AI (5.1.2). A photo of a face that is sent to Gemini falls under the last rule." }, { "title": "Many apps sell the same thing", "text": "The founder's own listing names four larger apps in the same category, Tezza, Prequel, Dazz Cam and WayShot, with yearly revenue figures that this page did not verify. Google Play shows a row of similar AI photo apps next to Boothie. Photo AI and HeadshotPro, the two other photo products on this site, train a model on the customer's own photos and sell on the web, and their figures are founder statements dated 37 and 43 months after launch. Boothie's figure is verified but covers 16 weeks, and it comes from small weekly payments inside app stores, which arrive faster and stop sooner." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://boothieapp.com/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6775603987" }, { "kind": "android", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.esmakerem.boothie" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/boothie" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of Boothie, revenue read from RevenueCat by API key", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/boothie", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile (https://trustmrr.com/startup/boothie.md) live on 13 October 2026, and the cached copy of 12 October. Revenue, the monthly and daily tables, MRR and active subscriptions come from the RevenueCat API, last synced on 13 October 2026 at 18:28 UTC. The description, pricing model, technology list, marketing channel, profit margin, asking price and seller's message are entered by the founder, grade C. Also read the HTML page and the founder page for the full seller's message." }, { "title": "TrustMRR on X, 23 September 2026: Boothie just joined TrustMRR", "url": "https://x.com/trust_mrr/status/2102854405020369295", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API, as a repost in the founder's timeline. Source for the figures on the day of listing." }, { "title": "TrustMRR on X, 23 September 2026: Boothie is now listed for sale", "url": "https://x.com/trust_mrr/status/2102858179889840154", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Same figures, with the first asking price of US$2 million, which is the seller's own number, grade C." }, { "title": "TrustMRR FAQ, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/faq", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on payment providers, on the RevenueCat and App Store connections, and on why figures can differ from a provider's own. Also read https://trustmrr.com/llms.txt on what the RevenueCat connection imports." }, { "title": "RevenueCat documentation: Revenue chart", "url": "https://www.revenuecat.com/docs/dashboard-and-metrics/charts/revenue-chart", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the definitions of Revenue, Revenue net of taxes, and Proceeds." }, { "title": "RevenueCat documentation: Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) chart", "url": "https://www.revenuecat.com/docs/dashboard-and-metrics/charts/monthly-recurring-revenue-mrr-chart", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the conversion table (one week counts as price times 4), for what is left out of MRR, and for why MRR differs from revenue." }, { "title": "RevenueCat documentation: Active Subscriptions chart", "url": "https://www.revenuecat.com/docs/dashboard-and-metrics/charts/active-subscriptions-chart", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for what counts as an active subscription." }, { "title": "Apple App Store listing of Boothie: AI Photo Editor, with Apple's lookup API and review feed", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6775603987", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the US listing on 13 October 2026 for the seller, the version history and the in-app purchases; the German and Turkish listings for local prices; the lookup API for the release date and for ratings in the US, Turkish, German and UK stores; the developer lookup, which returns one app; and the customer review feeds of the Turkish, US and German stores." }, { "title": "Google Play listing of Boothie", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.esmakerem.boothie", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the listing and the developer page on 13 October 2026. Source for the developer name, the downloads, the release and update dates and the range of in-app prices." }, { "title": "Boothie website, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://boothieapp.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the list of looks, the promise that the face stays the same, the credits, and the notice for TikTok's in-app browser. The Wayback Machine has no earlier copy." }, { "title": "Boothie Privacy Policy, last updated 23 July 2026", "url": "https://puzzling-maize-c86.notion.site/Boothie-Privacy-Policy-3806b209577880b79317c0b9f5004733", "grade": "C", "how": "The page loads by script, so the text was read through Notion's public page interface. Read in full. Source for the AI provider, the backend, the analytics tools and the handling of photos." }, { "title": "Boothie Terms of Service, last updated 23 July 2026", "url": "https://puzzling-maize-c86.notion.site/Boothie-Terms-of-Service-3806b209577880a49d27d995e72219a0", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through Notion's public page interface, sections 1 to 8. Source for the legal form, the weekly plans, the daily credits and the credit packs." }, { "title": "X account of Keremcan Şeker, @keremcanseker_", "url": "https://x.com/keremcanseker_", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the whole timeline through the fxtwitter API on 13 October 2026: 33 followers and four posts returned, of which three are reposts of TrustMRR. No post about marketing, team or funding." }, { "title": "Google: Gemini Developer API pricing, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the image models. Source for the price per generated image and the shutdown notice for Gemini 2.5 Flash Image." }, { "title": "RevenueCat: State of Subscription Apps 2025", "url": "https://www.revenuecat.com/state-of-subscription-apps-2025/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on plan durations and retention. Source for the weekly plan retention and first-renewal churn. A vendor's report on the apps that use its service." }, { "title": "Apple: App Store Small Business Program", "url": "https://developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 15% commission rate and who qualifies." }, { "title": "Google Play Console Help: Service fees", "url": "https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/112622?hl=en", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the fee tables. Source for the fees on auto-renewing subscriptions." }, { "title": "Apple: App Review Guidelines, last updated 8 June 2026", "url": "https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read sections 3.1.2, 4.3 and 5.1.2." }, { "title": "BBC News, 6 February 2023, Mike Farrell: Digital cameras back in fashion after online revival", "url": "https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64512059", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the age and size of the digital camera trend on TikTok." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/soundboost-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/soundboost-ai.md", "slug": "soundboost-ai", "name": "SoundBoost.ai", "country": "Turkey", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI audio mastering from text prompts", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-13", "launchLabel": "8 February 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$218K verified revenue in 12 months, October 2026", "sticker": "$218K in 12 months", "outcomeUsd": 217705, "months": 32, "teamLabel": "4 co-founders at the release in February 2024; 5 people and 1 adviser on the About page in June 2025; 7 people and 1 adviser in October 2026", "fundingLabel": "One investor, a friend of the founder, amount not published; no venture round found; the founder called the company fully bootstrapped in January 2025", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "voice-audio", "channel": "creators", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Funded", "Running", "B2C", "Music" ], "product": "A website and phone app that masters a song from a written request such as \"warm, powerful and wide stereo\". Each request comes back as a new revision that the user can compare with the earlier ones, and a Spotify link can serve as the reference for loudness and tone. The same subscription includes a splitter that separates a song into vocals, drums, bass and instruments. Since September 2026 the company also offers a generator that makes a music video from the song. Unlimited use costs US$16 a month or US$48 a year on the web.", "why": "For its first 20 months the product brought in about US$3,500 a month. Then three things came together: phone apps with weekly plans from August 2025, web plans with unlimited use at US$4 a month billed yearly, and a new group of customers, people who make songs with AI generators such as Suno and need the last step done for them. Monthly revenue rose 7.2 times between January and July 2026. No source states which of the changes caused the rise.", "summary": [ "SoundBoost.ai is a web and phone service for audio mastering, the last processing step before a song is released: it sets the loudness, the balance between low and high frequencies, and the dynamics (the difference between the quiet and the loud parts) of the finished mix. The user uploads a song and writes what the result should sound like, or pastes a Spotify link as a reference. The founder described the method in March 2024: an LLM, a large language model, the kind of AI program that reads and writes text, interprets the request and sets a signal chain, a row of audio processors (saturation, compression, stereo width, limiting and others) that then changes the sound. The company says that it wrote this mastering engine itself and that the engine first measures genre, tempo and LUFS, loudness units relative to full scale, the standard measure of perceived loudness that streaming services use to play all songs at a similar volume. A second tool does stem splitting: it separates a finished song into its parts, called stems (vocals, drums, bass and other instruments). The founder's posts show that this tool runs HTDemucs, an open-source model published by a researcher at Meta, on graphics processors.", "Berkan Cesur, a musician and former product manager in Istanbul, left his job in late 2022 and built the product with three friends. An archived copy of the company's About page from June 2023 says that the company was \"founded by four friends\". They released it on 8 February 2024 under the name Diktatorial Suite, earned US$450 in the first month by his count, and renamed it SoundBoost in June 2025 because, he wrote, 90% of the customers were American and could not pronounce the old name. An iPhone app followed on 15 August 2025, and an Android app is on Google Play today. TrustMRR, a public database of startup revenue, read the company's accounts at Stripe, the processor for card payments, which the website uses, and at RevenueCat, a service that records the subscriptions sold inside phone apps through Apple and Google. On 13 October 2026 it showed US$217,705 of revenue in the last 12 months, US$43,309 in the last 30 days and US$288,689 since the start. Monthly revenue stayed between US$5,200 and US$6,719 from November 2025 to February 2026 and then rose to US$42,678 in July 2026; 49% of the 12-month revenue came in the last three months. MRR, monthly recurring revenue, the sum of all active subscriptions with each one converted to its price per month, was US$25,874 from 2,675 active subscriptions.", "The revenue, MRR and subscription figures are grade A: records of two payment providers, read through API keys, not a founder statement. They are revenue, not profit, and the part from RevenueCat is gross revenue: by RevenueCat's definition, what customers paid minus refunds, before Apple or Google keeps its commission. Two facts on this page differ from the short version of the story. This is not a one-person business: the About page named four co-owners in 2024 and names seven people and one adviser in October 2026, and a friend of the founder says in public that he invested. And the fast growth is recent: before October 2025 the company had collected about US$71,000 in 20 months. No source states what caused the rise in 2026; the page lists the changes that came before it, and what happened to earlier companies that sold tools to independent musicians." ], "factsCaption": "US$217,705 of verified revenue in the 12 months to 13 October 2026, 49% of it in the last three months, read from the company's Stripe and RevenueCat accounts", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the company's Stripe and RevenueCat accounts through API keys; it is not a founder statement. A grade B value is published by Apple or Google in a store listing. A grade C value is a founder or investor statement, a page of the company, a profile field that the founder filled in, or a vendor's document. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows named in its note.", "timelineLead": "From four friends who worked a year without income to US$43,309 of verified revenue in 30 days, 32 months after the release. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "SoundBoost prices on 13 October 2026: web plans from the plan data inside the company's pricing page (grade C), phone plans from the in-app purchases in the US App Store (grade B)", "note": "Every plan includes unlimited mastering and stem splitting; a free preview needs no account. On the web the yearly plans are billed at US$48 and US$72, which the page data shows as 75% below twelve monthly payments (US$192 and US$288). In the iPhone app the yearly plans cost US$49.99 and US$71.00, and there are weekly plans at US$9.99 and US$14.99, which do not exist on the web. A weekly plan kept for a full year costs US$519.48, about 10.8 times the web yearly plan (calculated). The first column is the yearly price divided by 12, computed on this page. The page data also holds two older plans with mastering credits, Pro at US$4.99 a month or US$34.99 a year, which the page does not show. Google Play prices were not read.", "rows": [ [ "Unlimited, web", "4.00", "16.00", "billed US$48 a year; 15 revisions per track" ], [ "Unlimited Plus, web", "6.00", "24.00", "billed US$72 a year; bulk mastering, unlimited revisions, drum, piano and guitar stems, priority queue" ], [ "Unlimited, iPhone app", "4.17", "17.99", "US$49.99 a year, or US$9.99 a week" ], [ "Unlimited Plus, iPhone app", "5.92", "24.99", "US$71.00 a year, or US$14.99 a week" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 12 months", "value": "US$217,705", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR profile, revenue last synced on 13 October 2026 at 23:06 UTC, from Stripe and RevenueCat together. The headline figure of this page. The profile does not publish the split between the two providers.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 30 days", "value": "US$43,309", "grade": "A", "note": "Same profile. Last 7 days: US$12,010. The profile gives the growth of the 30-day figure as +51.2%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 3 and last 6 months", "value": "US$106,752 and US$176,441", "grade": "A", "note": "Same profile.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time", "value": "US$288,689", "grade": "A", "note": "Same profile. The profile field for the founding date says 8 November 2023; the public release was on 8 February 2024.", "src": [ 1, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue by calendar month", "value": "Nov 2025 US$5,948; Dec US$5,200; Jan 2026 US$5,959; Feb US$6,719; Mar US$9,146; Apr US$10,911; May US$14,425; Jun US$25,557; Jul US$42,678; Aug US$30,862; Sep US$35,978; 1 to 13 Oct US$20,728", "grade": "A", "note": "Same profile; it publishes no earlier months. These months add up to US$214,111; the remaining US$3,594 of the 12-month figure falls in the second half of October 2025 (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Share of the 12-month revenue that came in the last 3 months", "value": "49%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 106,752 divided by 217,705. The last 6 months hold 81%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Rise of monthly revenue from January to July 2026", "value": "7.2 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 42,678 divided by 5,959. August was 27.7% below July, and September was 16.6% above August.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before the last 12 months", "value": "about US$70,984", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: all time minus last 12 months, 288,689 minus 217,705. This covers about 20 months, from the release on 8 February 2024 to the middle of October 2025, an average of about US$3,500 a month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR, monthly recurring revenue", "value": "US$25,874", "grade": "A", "note": "Same profile. Growth in 30 days: +52.6%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions", "value": "2,675", "grade": "A", "note": "Same profile.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR per active subscription", "value": "US$9.67", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 25,874 divided by 2,675. This is above the web yearly plan (US$4.00 a month) and below the web monthly plan (US$16.00), so the customers hold a mix of plans.", "src": [ 1, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Yearly rates computed from the two figures", "value": "US$519,708 from the last 30 days; US$310,488 from MRR", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 43,309 times 12, and 25,874 times 12. Revenue is higher than MRR because a yearly plan counts in full in the month of sale, while MRR counts one twelfth of it. A month with many new yearly plans therefore shows more revenue than will repeat.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's own revenue figures in 2024", "value": "US$450 in the first month; US$1,516 in total by 19 April; US$2,000 by 5 May; US$3,000 by 28 May; MRR above US$3,500 at the end of July", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's posts. On 29 July 2024 he wrote that he would stop publishing revenue. These figures agree with the calculated average of about US$3,500 a month before October 2025.", "src": [ 5, 8, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Paying subscribers on 12 November 2025", "value": "1,000, with 33,000 users in total", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post. TrustMRR's verified revenue for November 2025 is US$5,948, which is US$5.95 per paying subscriber (calculated).", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "People named on the company's About page", "value": "4 co-owners in May 2024; 5 people and 1 adviser in June 2025; 8 people and 1 adviser in January 2026; 7 people and 1 adviser in October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Live page and archived copies. The roles in October 2026: chief executive and product, design, front-end, design engineer, software developer, social media, customer support, and one adviser. The January 2026 list included an intern. The page does not say who works full time. On 3 May 2026 the founder wrote that his companies pay their interns.", "src": [ 10, 11, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue per person on the About page", "value": "about US$31,100 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 217,705 divided by the 7 people listed in October 2026, without the adviser. This is revenue before every cost, not pay.", "src": [ 1, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "one investor, amount not published", "grade": "C", "note": "Batuhan İçöz wrote \"I know I invested in the right startup\" on 16 August 2024 and \"i'm an investor\" on 1 July 2025; the company's account answered a third such post on 20 September 2026 with \"This guy believed us on day zero\". The founder wrote on 6 February 2025 that this friend has invested in almost everything he has done. Yet on 16 January 2025 the founder called the company \"a fully bootstrapped startup with no VC or investor backing\". The statements do not agree. No venture round was found.", "src": [ 9, 27, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Users, by the company's own counts", "value": "33,000 on 12 November 2025; 100,000 on 10 June 2026; 110,000 on 1 July 2026; 217,622 on the website on 13 October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder posts and the home page. The TrustMRR profile field \"Estimated user count\" says 628,739, which is close to the website's count of masterings (657,140), not to its count of musicians.", "src": [ 3, 8, 7, 12, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Share of users who make their songs with Suno", "value": "60%", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's reply to a Suno employee on 1 July 2026, in which he asked for access to Suno's API.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Share of customers in the USA", "value": "90% to 95%", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's posts of 5 June 2025 (90%), 4 December 2025 (95%) and 7 June 2026 (90%). He describes the company, DIKTATORIAL Inc., as American; he lives in Turkey.", "src": [ 8, 12 ] }, { "fact": "US App Store rating", "value": "4.6 of 5 from 140 ratings", "grade": "B", "note": "Read on 13 October 2026. Apple's data gives 4.64. Released on 15 August 2025; version 3.00 is dated 5 October 2026. The seller is DIKTATORIAL INC.", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "fact": "Google Play listing", "value": "4.5 stars from 217 reviews, more than 10,000 downloads", "grade": "B", "note": "Read on 13 October 2026; last updated on 30 September 2026. The release date of the Android app was not found.", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "fact": "Product Hunt launch, 26 March 2024", "value": "270 points", "grade": "C", "note": "Product Hunt page read in October 2026. The company's About page says it finished fourth among the products of that day; the rank could not be read on the Product Hunt page.", "src": [ 16, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Marketing spend in the first two months", "value": "US$0", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's posts of 15 March and 17 April 2024. The TrustMRR profile names word of mouth as the only marketing channel.", "src": [ 5, 8, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Landing page test, June and July 2024", "value": "sign-ups rose from about 9% of visitors to about 30%", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 29 July 2024, after two months of measuring two versions of the home page.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "How the app revenue is counted", "value": "before the stores' commission", "grade": "C", "note": "RevenueCat's documentation defines Revenue as the total paid minus refunds, and defines a separate figure, Proceeds, after the stores' taxes and commission. TrustMRR's FAQ says that it imports revenue from RevenueCat and does not mention a deduction. The share of app revenue inside the total is not published.", "src": [ 17, 18 ] }, { "fact": "Store commission for small developers", "value": "15% at Apple; 15% or less at Google for 99% of paying developers", "grade": "C", "note": "Apple's Small Business Program page, for developers with up to US$1 million of proceeds a year, and Google Play's service fee page. On a weekly plan of US$9.99 a 15% commission is US$1.50 (calculated).", "src": [ 19, 20, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Price of unlimited mastering at a music distributor", "value": "US$99 a year", "grade": "C", "note": "DistroKid's Mixea page: the first track is free, then US$99 a year for unlimited tracks. SoundBoost's web yearly plan costs US$48.", "src": [ 23, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Listed for sale", "value": "no", "grade": "C", "note": "The TrustMRR profile says that the startup is not listed for sale. Read on 13 October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the release to the October 2026 figure", "value": "32 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: February 2024 to October 2026.", "src": [ 8, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Late 2022", "what": "Cesur leaves a salaried job to work on music. He writes later that he had worked as a product manager for 12 years and has built websites for 20 years. He released his first own track in June 2020.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 3 ] }, { "when": "16 January 2023", "what": "He announces Diktatorial Suite, an AI mastering service, for the first quarter of 2023. The release comes a year later.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "30 June 2023", "what": "Sign-up for a closed test opens at diktatorial.com. The About page says the company was founded by four friends.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 11 ] }, { "when": "8 February 2024", "what": "Public release of Diktatorial Suite. In the first four days: 68 new members and 18 full masterings.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "15 March 2024", "what": "First month: 263 musicians, 1,048 masterings, 20 paid subscriptions, US$450 of revenue, US$0 spent on marketing. Cesur moves to a village near Bursa to work on the product for at least a year.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "26 March 2024", "what": "Launch on Product Hunt. He explains that an LLM interprets the request and controls the audio processors, and writes that four people built the product for a year without expecting income.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 16 ] }, { "when": "28 May 2024", "what": "5,000 masterings, 1,700 users and US$3,000 of revenue in total since the release.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "July 2024", "what": "Music reviewers on YouTube publish videos about the product; he writes that there is no commercial tie to them. A new home page triples the sign-up rate. MRR passes US$3,500, and he stops publishing revenue.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 2 ] }, { "when": "16 August 2024", "what": "He writes that the older competitor eMastered runs ads with Diktatorial's name in the title, and offers 50% off to its customers who switch. His investor answers in public the same day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 9 ] }, { "when": "20 August 2024", "what": "Mixmag Türkiye writes about the product and describes a founding team of four with an adviser from Bilkent University.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "October and November 2024", "what": "Version 2.0 on 7 October. 30,000 masterings by 22 October, one every 15 seconds. A mastering API for selected partners on 8 November. A free Loudness Penalty tool that runs in the browser on 15 November.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "16 January 2025", "what": "First-year report: more than 15,000 users and 50,000 masterings, 20,000 of them from text requests.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "5 June 2025", "what": "The product is renamed SoundBoost, with 26,000 users. On 17 June the third version of the mastering engine adds six AI mastering engineers with different styles.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "15 August 2025", "what": "The iPhone app is released. Cesur wrote it himself in about four months with AI coding tools. Subscriptions in the app go through RevenueCat.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 13 ] }, { "when": "12 November 2025", "what": "1,000 paying subscribers and 33,000 users, by the founder's count. He writes that something changed for the product in the last few months.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "The first month in TrustMRR's public history: US$5,948 of verified revenue.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "February to July 2026", "what": "Verified monthly revenue rises from US$6,719 to US$42,678.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "April 2026", "what": "The product's X account is suspended for about two weeks and then restored. The founder writes that the team had uploaded a few videos through a tool called Post-Bridge and does not know the reason.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "The servers move from Railway to a dedicated machine at Hetzner in Germany on 7 June. On 10 June: 100,000 musicians, 360,000 masters and 117,000 text requests.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "1 July 2026", "what": "Cesur asks Suno for access to its API and writes that 60% of his 110,000 users make their songs with Suno.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "August 2026", "what": "The investor buys the domain soundboost.com and writes that the founder now owes him US$15,000. The company announces the new domain on 22 August.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 27 ] }, { "when": "August and September 2026", "what": "Verified revenue is US$30,862 in August, 27.7% below July, and US$35,978 in September.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "16 September 2026", "what": "A Music Video Generator is released. Three days later lip sync is added, at no extra cost for subscribers during the launch period.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 27 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR shows US$217,705 in the last 12 months, US$43,309 in the last 30 days, MRR of US$25,874 and 2,675 active subscriptions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Timing: AI song generators made new customers", "text": "The product was built for producers who mix their own songs. By July 2026 the founder counted 60% of users as people who make their songs with Suno. Such a user holds a finished song, has no mixing skills, and still needs the last step before a release. Customers' public posts list the tools in order: the song from Suno, the mastering from SoundBoost, the pictures and the video from other AI tools." }, { "title": "A written request, not a row of controls", "text": "The user writes \"more punch, softer cymbals\", and an LLM sets the processors. Each request returns a new revision that can be compared with the earlier ones. A person who does not know what a compressor does can still say what is wrong with the sound." }, { "title": "Unlimited use at a low price, weekly plans on the phone", "text": "On the web the yearly plan costs US$48 for unlimited masterings and stem splits. In the iPhone app, released in August 2025, the same service is also sold by the week at US$9.99. Verified revenue began to rise six months after the app appeared. The profile does not show how much of the revenue comes from the apps." }, { "title": "Musicians as the sales channel", "text": "The team spent nothing on marketing in the first two months. Reviewers on YouTube found the product in July 2024. Since 2025 customers post their songs on X and name the product, and the company shows customers' songs on its home page. The TrustMRR profile names word of mouth as the only channel. The founder also writes that posts on Reddit are a method he repeats." }, { "title": "Free tools that run in the browser", "text": "A loudness meter, a Loudness Penalty checker, a metadata editor, a vocal remover and a free mastering preview are open without payment. The first of them appeared in November 2024. No source measures how many subscribers they bring." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's posts, the company's pages and the TrustMRR profile fields. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Mastering: an LLM turns the written request into settings for audio processors: saturation, stereo width, compression, limiting, true-peak control and tape effects. The company says it wrote the engine itself, that a render takes about one minute, and that the current engine was trained on audio the company generated, not on customers' uploads.", "Stem splitting: HTDemucs, an open-source separation model, on graphics processors. In November 2025 the founder compared three graphics cards on a 3-minute track and wrote that the most expensive one was about 14% faster and that customers are happy with the speed.", "Web: Next.js for the pages, Python with Django for the server, Celery for the queue of audio jobs, Stripe for payments.", "Phone app: Expo and React Native, written by the founder in about four months with Cursor and Claude Code, his first app in ten years. RevenueCat handles the subscriptions and PostHog the usage statistics.", "Hosting: containers at Railway and Mac servers for audio processing in August 2025. After repeated instability he moved to a dedicated Hetzner server in Germany in June 2026 and wrote that response times fell to about a quarter, although 90% of customers are in the USA.", "Company: DIKTATORIAL Inc., which the founder describes as American. The people on the About page work in design, front-end and software development, social media and customer support." ], "src": [ 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 26, 1 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised musicians or listeners a professional result without a studio, a label or expensive equipment. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Jamglue", "years": "2006 to 2009", "funding": "US$200K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Remix and mix songs in the web browser, without studio equipment.", "died": "Processing audio in a browser was too hard at that time, the rights to the remixed songs were costly, and SoundCloud grew.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1671-jamglue" }, { "name": "PonoMusic", "years": "2012 to 2017", "funding": "US$6.2M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Studio-quality sound for listeners, with its own player and download store.", "died": "Few listeners paid for better sound quality while streaming on a phone was more convenient.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/452-ponomusic" }, { "name": "Earbits", "years": "2010 to 2018", "funding": "US$965K", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "Online radio where independent artists pay to reach listeners without a label.", "died": "Promotion paid by artists did not bring enough money, and the streaming services improved their own discovery of independent music.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/106-earbits" }, { "name": "Mint Songs", "years": "2020 to 2023", "funding": "US$3M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Let musicians sell their songs as NFTs and earn without the traditional industry.", "died": "The NFT market fell in 2022, and artists and fans lost interest.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/338-mint-songs" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Jamglue failed partly because a browser in 2006 could not process audio well. In 2026 SoundBoost renders a master in about one minute and runs its loudness meter inside the browser. PonoMusic and Mint Songs offered something that few musicians or listeners had asked for. Earbits took its money from independent artists, who have little of it, and the income was not enough.", "Two things differ for SoundBoost. First, mastering is a step that a song needs before release, so the customer already has the task; the product only has to do it at a price the customer accepts, here US$4 to US$16 a month on the web. Second, AI song generators have multiplied the number of people who hold a finished song and cannot master it. The weak point is the one that Earbits had: the payers are independent musicians, the price is low, and larger companies can add the same step to what they already sell." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The pricing and the positioning, yes. The audio engine, only with the skills.", "text": "The team had a founder who could judge sound, a developer for signal processing, a year without income before the release, and then 20 months at about US$3,500 a month. That part is expensive to repeat. What can be copied is the shape: one finishing step that every maker of some kind of content must do before publishing, done from a written request, sold as an unlimited subscription on the web and by the week on the phone, next to a fast-growing generator that leaves the step undone.", "steps": [ "Find the finishing step that a popular AI generator leaves undone, and ask its users where they stop.", "Let the user ask in plain words, and return every request as a new version that can be compared with the last one.", "Put free single-purpose tools on the site that run in the visitor's browser, so a first visit costs you no computing.", "Sell the same subscription on the web and in the phone app, and test weekly plans in the app.", "Show customers' work on your own pages and accounts, so that they have a reason to name the product in public." ], "open": "Finishing steps for other AI-made media: cleaning and levelling AI voice recordings for podcasts, sound and colour finishing for AI video, and print preparation for AI images." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Seven people, and revenue is not profit", "text": "The verified figures are revenue. Seven people and an adviser are listed on the About page, which gives about US$31,100 of revenue per person per year before any cost. No source publishes salaries, profit or the amount the investor put in, and the founder and the investor describe the funding differently." }, { "title": "Most of the revenue is three months old", "text": "49% of the 12-month revenue came in the last three months. July 2026 was the highest month, and August was 27.7% lower. The 30-day revenue (US$43,309) is well above MRR (US$25,874), so a large part is new sales and yearly plans paid in full, sold at 75% below the monthly price. Yearly plans sold since the rise began have not reached a renewal date yet." }, { "title": "The cost of audio processing with unlimited plans", "text": "Every master and every stem split uses computing time, and the founder runs stem splitting on graphics processors. He compares cards for speed, and in 2026 he moved to another host after instability that, he wrote, was losing him customers. The plans are unlimited from US$4 a month, so a heavy user costs more than a light one and pays the same. The company publishes no cost figures." }, { "title": "Older and larger competitors", "text": "LANDR says that more than 5 million musicians trust its AI mastering and also sells a plugin and an API. iZotope's Ozone has had an AI Master Assistant since 2017. eMastered, which describes itself as an online mastering engine made by Grammy-winning engineers and powered by AI, ran ads with the product's old name in 2024, the founder wrote. DistroKid, a music distributor, sells unlimited mastering under the name Mixea for US$99 a year, inside the service that musicians already use to release songs. BandLab's mastering page could not be opened for this research, so nothing about it is verified here." }, { "title": "Dependence on Suno's users", "text": "By the founder's count, 60% of users come with songs made in Suno, and he has asked Suno for API access. Suno's own pricing page already lists stem separation in its paid plans, from US$8 a month billed yearly, and in its highest plan a studio with effects and automation. If Suno adds a mastering step, the largest group of customers may no longer need a separate product." }, { "title": "App stores and platforms", "text": "Subscriptions sold in the apps pass through Apple and Google. Apple's Small Business Program sets the commission at 15% for developers below US$1 million of yearly proceeds, and Google's fee page says that 99% of paying developers qualify for 15% or less. The RevenueCat part of the verified revenue is counted before this commission. The stores decide whether an app stays listed, and the product's X account was suspended for two weeks in April 2026 without a stated reason." }, { "title": "Limits of the evidence", "text": "TrustMRR publishes monthly figures only from November 2025, does not split Stripe from RevenueCat, and says that its own figures can differ from a provider's dashboard by up to 30%. The founder stopped publishing revenue in July 2024. User counts are the company's own and rise very fast: from 33,000 to 217,622 in eleven months." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://soundboost.ai/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6745907940" }, { "kind": "android", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.soundboost2.ai" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/soundboost-ai-formerly-diktatorial" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of SoundBoost.ai (formerly Diktatorial), revenue last synced 13 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/soundboost-ai-formerly-diktatorial.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full on 13 October 2026. The revenue, MRR and subscription figures come from the company's Stripe and RevenueCat accounts through API keys and are grade A. The description, founding date, user count, tech stack and marketing channel are founder-written fields, grade C." }, { "title": "Berkan Cesur on X, 29 July 2024: MRR above US$3,500, and the result of the landing page test", "url": "https://x.com/berkan_cesur/status/1817923260807307757", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com, in Turkish, with the post it quotes. Source for the last revenue figure he published and for the sign-up rates." }, { "title": "Berkan Cesur on X, 12 November 2025: 1,000 paying subscribers and 33,000 users", "url": "https://x.com/berkan_cesur/status/1988658259134165266", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the subscriber count and for the date he left his job." }, { "title": "Berkan Cesur on X, 26 March 2024: how the LLM controls the signal processing, and four people working a year without income", "url": "https://x.com/berkan_cesur/status/1772689191651955116", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com, in Turkish. Source for the method and for the number of people who built the product." }, { "title": "Berkan Cesur on X, 15 March 2024: report on the first month", "url": "https://x.com/berkan_cesur/status/1768639964311334964", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com, in Turkish. Source for the first-month counts, the US$450 and the zero marketing spend." }, { "title": "Berkan Cesur on X, 15 August 2025: the iPhone app and its tech stack", "url": "https://x.com/berkan_cesur/status/1956427936124309650", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the thread of five posts through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the app release, the four months of work, RevenueCat, Django, Celery, Railway and the Mac servers." }, { "title": "Berkan Cesur on X, 1 July 2026: 60% of 110,000 users create with Suno", "url": "https://x.com/berkan_cesur/status/2072355154473476529", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. A reply to a Suno employee." }, { "title": "Berkan Cesur's X timeline, September 2021 to October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/berkan_cesur", "grade": "C", "how": "Read 732 posts page by page through api.fxtwitter.com, many of them in Turkish. Source for the dated events not covered by the single posts above: the 2023 announcements, the release on 8 February 2024, the 2024 statistics, the rename, the customer shares by country, the server move, the user counts and his statements about funding and staff." }, { "title": "Batuhan İçöz on X, 1 July 2025: \"@soundboostai (i'm an investor)\"", "url": "https://x.com/batuhan/status/1939949157998862505", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com, together with his posts of 16 August 2024, 14 August 2026 and 20 September 2026. Source for the investment and for the purchase of the .com domain. No amount is stated." }, { "title": "SoundBoost About page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://soundboost.ai/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the script file that holds the team list, because the list loads by script. Source for the company's own history, the engine statements and the eight names with their roles." }, { "title": "Archived copies of the About page, 2023 to 2026 (Wayback Machine)", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240529012503/https://diktatorial.com/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the copies of 30 June 2023, 29 May 2024, 17 January 2025 and 13 June 2025, and the team script of the copy of 29 January 2026. Source for the size of the team at each date." }, { "title": "SoundBoost pricing page and home page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://soundboost.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both pages in full. The page shows the yearly price; the monthly prices and the older plans were read from the plan data inside the page source. Source for the web prices, the feature lists, the free tools, the company name and the website's own counts." }, { "title": "US App Store listing: Audio Mastering - SoundBoost, by DIKTATORIAL INC", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/audio-mastering-soundboost/id6745907940", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the listing and Apple's lookup data on 13 October 2026. Source for the release date, the version, the rating and the six in-app purchases." }, { "title": "Google Play listing: Audio Mastering - SoundBoost", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.soundboost2.ai", "grade": "B", "how": "Read on 13 October 2026. Source for the stars, the number of reviews, the download range and the date of the last update." }, { "title": "Mixmag Türkiye, 20 August 2024: Diktatorial Suite, a new online mastering tool supported by AI", "url": "https://mixmag.com.tr/read/diktatorial-suite-yapay-zeka-destekli-yeni-nesil-online-mastering-araci-tech", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, in Turkish. A short article that repeats the company's statement. Source for the founding team of four and the adviser." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: DIKTATORIAL Suite, launched 26 March 2024", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/posts/diktatorial-suite", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page text. The launch date and the points were readable; the rank of the day was not." }, { "title": "RevenueCat documentation: Revenue chart", "url": "https://www.revenuecat.com/docs/dashboard-and-metrics/charts/revenue-chart", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the definitions. Revenue is the total minus refunds; a separate figure, Proceeds, subtracts the stores' taxes and commission. Also read the page on the MRR chart." }, { "title": "TrustMRR FAQ", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/faq", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on verification and on RevenueCat. It says that TrustMRR imports revenue, MRR and subscription history from RevenueCat and that its figures can differ from a provider's dashboard by up to 30%. It does not say that store commission is subtracted." }, { "title": "Apple: App Store Small Business Program", "url": "https://developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on the 15% commission and the limit of US$1 million of proceeds." }, { "title": "Google Play Console Help: Service fees", "url": "https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/112622?hl=en", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the overview. Source for the statement that 99% of paying developers qualify for a fee of 15% or less." }, { "title": "LANDR: AI Mastering, Online Audio Mastering", "url": "https://www.landr.com/online-audio-mastering/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for LANDR's own claim of more than 5 million musicians and for its plugin and API. Its prices load by script and were not read." }, { "title": "eMastered pricing page", "url": "https://emastered.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the visible text; the prices load by script and were not read. Source only for how the company describes itself." }, { "title": "DistroKid: Mixea, instant online music mastering", "url": "https://distrokid.com/mixea/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the price of US$99 a year for unlimited mastered tracks." }, { "title": "iZotope: Ozone 12", "url": "https://www.izotope.com/en/products/ozone.html", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the product description. Source for the AI Master Assistant and the year 2017." }, { "title": "Suno pricing page", "url": "https://suno.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 13 October 2026. Source for the stem separation in the Pro and Premier plans and the studio in the Premier plan." }, { "title": "Demucs README on GitHub (facebookresearch/demucs)", "url": "https://github.com/facebookresearch/demucs", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the README. Source for what HTDemucs is: a Hybrid Transformer model under the MIT license that separates drums, bass, vocals and other stems. The author writes that the repository is no longer maintained." }, { "title": "SoundBoost's X account, February 2024 to October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/soundboostcom", "grade": "C", "how": "Read 227 posts page by page through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the product announcements, the new domain, the Music Video Generator and the reply to the investor." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/glossa-live/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/glossa-live.md", "slug": "glossa-live", "name": "Glossa.live", "country": "Cyprus", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Live AI voice translation for churches", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-13", "launchLabel": "1 June 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$182K Stripe-verified revenue in 12 months, October 2026", "sticker": "$182K in 12 months", "outcomeUsd": 182185, "months": 16, "teamLabel": "1 named founder; LinkedIn lists 3 people at the company; the headcount is not published", "fundingLabel": "None reported; ElevenLabs gave a grant of usage credits in February 2026", "primaryFactor": "Price", "group": "voice-audio", "channel": "search", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Translation" ], "product": "A church connects the audio of its service, from a microphone or the sound desk, to Glossa in a browser and starts a stream. Glossa turns the speech into text, translates the text, and reads the translation aloud with a synthetic voice. Each visitor scans a QR code, picks one of more than 100 languages on a phone, and listens with earphones or reads the captions. The church needs no receivers and no interpreter booth. It pays for the minutes of speech in each language, not for the number of listeners.", "why": "Churches with members from many countries meet every week, and the older solutions cost too much for most of them: an interpreter for each language, or radio receivers to hand out and collect. Glossa charges US$5 for one hour of speech in one language, counts by the minute, and charges nothing for silence, songs or extra listeners, so a small church can start with four free hours and then a few dollars a week. The product is shaped for this one buyer: captions go into ProPresenter and OBS, which churches already run, and a church can fix how names, Bible quotations and its own terms are translated. A very small team can offer this because the speech recognition and the voices are rented from model companies and paid by use.", "summary": [ "Glossa.live translates a church service while it is being spoken. A church connects its microphone or sound desk to Glossa in a browser, and each visitor scans a QR code and hears or reads the service in another language on a phone. Three AI steps run in sequence. Speech recognition turns the speaker's audio into text. Machine translation turns that text into text in the listener's language. Text to speech reads the translated text aloud with a synthetic voice; with voice cloning, the synthetic voice is modelled on a 30-second recording of the pastor. The company's help center says to expect a delay of about 2 to 5 seconds, because the system waits for the end of a sentence before it translates. The text of the web app itself names Deepgram for speech recognition and ElevenLabs for voice cloning. No source names the translation model.", "The founder appears on TrustMRR, a public database of startup revenue, as Anton K. LinkedIn's page for the company and a post that he wrote about the product give the full name, Anton Karbanovich. The company is INDX Ltd. in Limassol, Cyprus. The revenue on this page is not his statement. He connected the company's Stripe account to TrustMRR, and TrustMRR read the payment records through an API key: US$182,185 in the 12 months to 13 October 2026, US$31,434 of it in the last 30 days, and US$190,082 since the first payment. The monthly figures rise, but not evenly: US$7,040 in November 2025, US$4,052 in December, US$20,676 in April 2026, down to US$16,479 in June, and US$31,765 in September 2026, the highest month. The last three months brought 44.2% of the twelve-month total.", "Two figures on the profile seem to disagree, and the pricing explains them. MRR, monthly recurring revenue, is US$14,505 from 99 subscriptions, but customers paid US$31,434 in the last 30 days, 2.17 times as much. Glossa sells three monthly plans, at US$99, US$299 and US$499, and only these count as MRR. It also sells pay as you go: no monthly fee, and US$5 for each language-hour, which is one hour of speech translated into one language, paid from a balance that the church fills in advance. Payments into that balance, hours above the allowance of a plan, and yearly plans paid in one payment are revenue but not MRR. The profile does not publish the split. The team size is not published either: LinkedIn lists three people, and no outside investment appears in any source. This page grades every number by its evidence, and it shows five failed startups that sold speech, listening or translation technology before such models could be rented." ], "factsCaption": "US$182,185 of verified revenue in the 12 months to 13 October 2026, US$31,434 of it in the last 30 days, read from the company's Stripe account", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the company's Stripe account through an API key; it is not a founder statement. A grade B value is a record kept by an outside platform: Apple, Google, X, LinkedIn's follower counter or the Internet Archive. A grade C value is a statement by the founder or the company, a profile field that the founder filled in, or another company's own page. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows named in its note.", "timelineLead": "From an archived church translation page in February 2025 to US$31,765 of verified revenue in September 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Glossa.live prices on 13 October 2026, from the pricing section of the company's home page and from its help center (grade C)", "note": "A language-hour is one hour of speech translated into one language: a one-hour service in three languages uses three. Use is counted by the minute and only while someone speaks. Silence, songs and music are not counted, and the number of listeners does not change the price. Pay-as-you-go use is paid from a prepaid balance, which the customer fills manually or by automatic top-up. The yearly column is calculated from the saving printed under each plan (US$598 a year for Advanced, US$998 for Premium), which equals two free months, or 16.7%. The switch above the plans says 18% for yearly billing, so two statements in the same section differ. In the copy that was read, the saving for Standard is damaged and shows only the digits 98; US$198 follows the same rule. If a church uses all included hours, one hour costs US$3.96 on Standard, US$2.99 on Advanced and US$2.00 on Premium. A new customer and the customer who referred it each get US$20 of credit. The same four prices appear in the archived copy of 14 December 2025.", "rows": [ [ "Free trial", "0", "0", "4 language-hours, no card needed" ], [ "Pay As You Go", "", "5 per language-hour", "No monthly fee; counted by the minute of speech; paid from a prepaid balance" ], [ "Standard", "82.50", "99", "25 language-hours a month, then US$4 per extra hour" ], [ "Advanced", "249.17", "299", "100 language-hours a month, then US$3 per extra hour; voice cloning; phone support" ], [ "Premium", "415.83", "499", "250 language-hours a month, then US$2 per extra hour; voice cloning; phone support" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue in the last 12 months, to 13 October 2026", "value": "US$182,185", "grade": "A", "note": "Read by TrustMRR from the company's Stripe account through an API key, last synced on 13 October 2026 at 14:53 UTC. It is the money that customers paid, before Stripe's fees and before the cost of the AI services. The copy cached on 12 October showed US$181,280.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days", "value": "US$31,434", "grade": "A", "note": "Same profile and sync. The copy of 12 October showed US$33,641, mainly because one day with US$3,319 (13 September) then left the 30-day window. A second line of the same profile, called last 30 days revenue snapshot, says US$33,143; the profile does not explain the difference.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, all time", "value": "US$190,082", "grade": "A", "note": "The founder's page on TrustMRR, read a few minutes later, showed US$190,483.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 3 months and in the last 6 months", "value": "US$80,545 and US$136,629", "grade": "A", "note": "", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Share of the 12-month revenue that came in the last 3 months", "value": "44.2%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 80,545 divided by 182,185.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Last 6 months compared with the 6 months before", "value": "3.0 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 182,185 minus 136,629 equals 45,556 for the earlier half; 136,629 divided by 45,556 equals 3.00.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue, November 2025 to February 2026", "value": "US$7,040, US$4,052, US$6,048, US$6,511", "grade": "A", "note": "The public monthly table starts in November 2025. December was 42.4% below November.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue, March to June 2026", "value": "US$11,214, US$20,676, US$18,382, US$16,479", "grade": "A", "note": "April was 84.4% above March; Easter Sunday was 5 April 2026. May was 11.1% below April and June 10.4% below May.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue, July to September 2026", "value": "US$21,970, US$22,783, US$31,765", "grade": "A", "note": "September was 39.4% above August and is the highest month. It is 4.51 times November 2025 (calculated: 31,765 divided by 7,040).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "October 2026, first 13 days", "value": "US$13,753", "grade": "A", "note": "Calculated from it: US$1,058 a day, against US$1,059 a day in September (31,765 divided by 30). October is level with September so far, not above it.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before the monthly table starts", "value": "US$9,409", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 190,082 all time minus 180,673, the sum of the twelve monthly rows. Of this, US$7,897 came before 14 October 2025 (190,082 minus 182,185). The profile gives no monthly detail for that period.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR (monthly recurring revenue), 13 October 2026", "value": "US$14,505", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe subscriptions only, which are the Standard, Advanced and Premium plans. The profile says it grew 26.4% in 30 days. The copy of 12 October showed US$13,907 and 97 subscriptions.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions", "value": "99", "grade": "A", "note": "", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average MRR per subscription", "value": "US$146.52", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 14,505 divided by 99. Standard costs US$99 and Advanced US$299, so most subscriptions must be Standard. If all 99 were Standard, MRR would be US$9,801.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue of the last 30 days that MRR does not explain", "value": "US$16,929, which is 53.9%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 31,434 minus 14,505. This part consists of payments into the prepaid balance for pay-as-you-go use, charges for hours above a plan's allowance, and yearly plans paid in one payment. The profile does not publish the split.", "src": [ 1, 7, 8 ] }, { "fact": "The last 30 days repeated for a year", "value": "about US$377,000", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 31,434 times 12 equals 377,208. This is a run rate, which is a multiplication and not a forecast. MRR times 12 is US$174,060.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "65%", "grade": "C", "note": "Shown on the TrustMRR profile. The profile's list of verified metrics does not include it and does not say which costs are counted, so it is treated as a founder figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founder", "value": "Anton Karbanovich", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR shows him as Anton K. with the X handle @karbanovich. His X profile gives Cyprus as location and links to glossa.live. LinkedIn's company page lists Anton Karbanovich among its people, and a post of 6 February 2026 on PromptZone under that name presents Glossa.", "src": [ 2, 3, 11, 12 ] }, { "fact": "People who work on it", "value": "3 listed on LinkedIn; not published by the company", "grade": "C", "note": "LinkedIn's public company page says 3 employees and gives the size band 2 to 10. LinkedIn counts people who name the company as employer in their own profiles. Company posts say we; the founder writes my startup. The blog is signed Glossa Team. No source lists roles or says who works full time.", "src": [ 3, 5, 9, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No investor and no funding round appear in any source that was read. On 18 February 2026 the company thanked ElevenLabs for a grant. ElevenLabs' grant page describes 33,000,000 characters of use over 12 months, which is credit for its service and not money.", "src": [ 5, 27 ] }, { "fact": "Legal entity", "value": "INDX Ltd., Limassol, Cyprus, registration number HE443934", "grade": "C", "note": "From the footer of the site. Apple's App Store names the same company as seller. The Cyprus company register was not read.", "src": [ 6, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Founding date", "value": "1 June 2025 on TrustMRR; 2024 on LinkedIn", "grade": "C", "note": "The company entered both dates. An archived copy of the site from 7 February 2025 already has the title Glossa and the description Real-time Translation Service for Churches. This page counts from June 2025.", "src": [ 1, 11, 15 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the founding date to the headline figure", "value": "16 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: June 2025 to October 2026. Counted from the archived copy of February 2025 it is 20 months.", "src": [ 1, 15 ] }, { "fact": "Delay between the speaker and the translation", "value": "about 2 to 5 seconds", "grade": "C", "note": "Help center: the system waits for the end of a sentence, translates it in a second or two, and then plays the audio. There is no button to skip to the live moment, by design. The app store descriptions say no delay.", "src": [ 7, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Languages", "value": "more than 100 advertised", "grade": "C", "note": "The sitemap holds 92 language pages. The archived copy of 14 December 2025 said more than 80.", "src": [ 6, 10, 15 ] }, { "fact": "Services translated on one Sunday", "value": "more than 500, with 42,500 minutes", "grade": "C", "note": "Company post of 7 September 2026 about the day before. 42,500 minutes are 708 hours. A post of 19 August 2026 reported more than 400 services on the Sunday before. The posts do not say whether a minute is counted once per language.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Minutes translated in one week", "value": "more than 65,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Company post of 5 August 2026.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Check of the reported use against the verified revenue", "value": "inside the possible range", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 65,000 minutes are 1,083 hours; at US$2 to US$5 an hour that is US$2,167 to US$5,417 a week. Verified revenue was US$4,961 a week in July 2026 and US$5,145 a week in August (monthly figure divided by 31, times 7).", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Largest event that the company names", "value": "ARISE ASIA conference: more than 3,000 attendees, 10 languages", "grade": "C", "note": "Company post of 5 August 2026. Not confirmed by the organizer in any source read.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Number of customers", "value": "not published", "grade": "C", "note": "The site says hundreds of churches. The TrustMRR field estimated user count says 2,000. Neither is verified. The verified count is 99 active subscriptions; pay-as-you-go customers are not counted anywhere.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Phone apps", "value": "iPhone app released 22 March 2026; Android app with more than 500 downloads", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's lookup record and the Google Play listing. The US App Store shows 2 ratings; an independent review notes that one of them appears to carry the founder's first name. Listeners do not need an app: a browser is enough.", "src": [ 13, 14, 16 ] }, { "fact": "Social media audience", "value": "105 followers of the founder on X; 2 of the company on X; 12 on LinkedIn", "grade": "B", "note": "Read on 13 October 2026. The company's X account was created on 6 September 2025.", "src": [ 3, 5, 11 ] }, { "fact": "List price of streaming speech recognition at Deepgram, Nova-3 model", "value": "US$0.0077 a minute", "grade": "C", "note": "Deepgram's pricing page, pay-as-you-go column, read on 13 October 2026, with a promotional price of US$0.0048. Calculated: about US$0.46 an hour at the regular price. What Glossa pays is not published.", "src": [ 8, 25 ] }, { "fact": "List price of synthetic speech at ElevenLabs", "value": "US$0.04 to US$0.08 for 1,000 characters", "grade": "C", "note": "ElevenLabs' API pricing page, read on 13 October 2026; the price depends on the model. Its startup grant gives 33,000,000 characters in 12 months. Which model Glossa uses, and for which voices, is not published.", "src": [ 8, 26, 27 ] }, { "fact": "Live translation in general products", "value": "Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Apple AirPods", "grade": "C", "note": "From the makers' own pages. Google Meet: six languages paired with English, 90 minutes for each meeting, not in live streams. Microsoft Teams: Interpreter agent announced on 19 November 2024. Apple: Live Translation in AirPods announced on 9 September 2025 for five languages.", "src": [ 22, 23, 24 ] }, { "fact": "Published prices of two competitors", "value": "Wordly: about US$1,500 for 10 hours. OneAccord: US$150 a month for 5 hours", "grade": "C", "note": "From their own pages. Calculated: US$150 an hour at Wordly for all languages together, and US$30 an hour at OneAccord. Glossa charges US$5 an hour for each language. KUDO and Interprefy, which sell AI speech translation next to human interpreters, publish no prices on their home pages.", "src": [ 18, 19, 20, 21 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "7 February 2025", "what": "The earliest archived copy of glossa.live with content has the title Glossa and the description Real-time Translation Service for Churches.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "1 June 2025", "what": "The founding date on the TrustMRR profile; LinkedIn gives the year 2024. An archived copy of 10 June 2025 describes real-time AI translation for churches and events in more than 100 languages.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 11, 15 ] }, { "when": "6 September 2025", "what": "The company's X account is created.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "The first month in the public verified table: US$7,040. Customers had paid US$9,409 before it. December brings US$4,052, the lowest month in the table.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "14 December 2025", "what": "An archived copy shows the four prices of today, four free hours, more than 80 languages and the sentence that hundreds of churches use it.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "6 February 2026", "what": "Anton Karbanovich presents Glossa in a post on PromptZone: translation for churches at US$5 for each language and hour.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "18 February 2026", "what": "The company thanks ElevenLabs on X for a \"33mln grant\". ElevenLabs' grant page describes 33,000,000 characters of use in 12 months. Two days later the company announces captions inside ProPresenter through an API.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 27 ] }, { "when": "22 March 2026", "what": "The iPhone app is released by INDX Ltd.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "April 2026", "what": "US$20,676, the first month above US$20,000 and 84.4% above March. Easter Sunday was 5 April.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "6 May 2026", "what": "The founder posts on X: \"My vibe-coded startup for churches just hit 20k+ Revenue\", with a link to a Stripe profile. The verified April figure agrees with the post.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 3, 4 ] }, { "when": "May and June 2026", "what": "Revenue falls to US$18,382 and then to US$16,479.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "5 August 2026", "what": "The company reports more than 65,000 translated minutes in one week, and a conference, ARISE ASIA, with more than 3,000 attendees and 10 languages.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "6 September 2026", "what": "A Sunday with more than 500 services and 42,500 translated minutes, by the company's post of the next day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "US$31,765, the highest month, 39.4% above August.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR reads US$182,185 for the last 12 months, US$31,434 for the last 30 days, MRR of US$14,505 and 99 subscriptions. The business is not listed for sale.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A price that a small church can pay without a contract", "text": "Pay as you go costs US$5 for one hour of speech in one language, counted by the minute. Silence, songs and extra listeners cost nothing, and there is no hardware to buy. By the help center's own example, a 90-minute service with about 50 minutes of speech in two languages costs about US$8.30. Wordly, which sells to events and to churches, starts at about US$1,500 for a package of 10 hours. OneAccord, which sells only to churches, starts at US$150 a month for 5 hours." }, { "title": "One kind of customer with a weekly need", "text": "A church meets every Sunday, so use repeats every week without a new sale. The company reported more than 400 services on one Sunday in August 2026 and more than 500 on one Sunday in September. The product follows the way a service runs: a QR code that never changes, captions inside the presentation software, and written instructions for Bible quotations, names and church terms. The founder's X profile says: \"I love my God and my family. I build AI startups.\"" }, { "title": "Rented models, sold again by the minute", "text": "The costly parts are speech recognition and synthetic voices. The text of the web app names Deepgram and ElevenLabs for them, and both charge by use. The company does not train or host these models. Its own work is the connection between the steps, the meter that counts speech per language, the page for listeners and the links to church software. The help center says that when the models improve, the gain reaches customers with nothing to update." }, { "title": "Found by search, then shown to everyone in the room", "text": "The site publishes a page for each of 92 languages, each in 17 interface languages, and 34 blog posts that each explain how to reach one language community. One testimonial on the site describes finding Glossa during a weekend when a conference was short of interpreters. Every listener scans the product's QR code, so each service shows the product to everyone who listens. A referral gives US$20 of credit to both sides. The company's own social media accounts have almost no followers." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages, from the text of its web app, and from founder and company posts. They are grade C unless an item says otherwise. No interview with the founder was found.", "items": [ "Three AI steps in sequence, as the company's blog describes them: speech recognition, machine translation, text to speech. The system waits for a complete sentence before it translates, which is the main cause of the delay of 2 to 5 seconds.", "Speech recognition: the interface text of the web app offers a custom dictionary \"supported on Nova-2 and Nova-3 general streaming models\". Nova is the name of Deepgram's models, and the app handles messages that carry Deepgram's name. A church can add names and terms so that they are recognized.", "Voices: the interface text says that custom voices are made with ElevenLabs voice cloning. The help center asks for a 30-second sample of the speaker. The pricing section lists voice cloning under the Advanced and Premium plans.", "Translation: no source names the model. A church steers it with instructions in plain language, for example which Bible version to follow and how to translate an abbreviation. Large language models are steered in this way, so a language model is the likely translator. This is an inference from the help center, not a statement by the company.", "Web app: the page source shows a React app that loads Supabase (a hosted database with login), Stripe for payments and PostHog for usage analytics, and that keeps WebSocket connections open for the live text. The TrustMRR profile lists Next.js, React, Cloudflare and Stripe. The founder calls the product vibe-coded, a word for software whose code an AI coding tool wrote from descriptions in plain language.", "Billing: a prepaid balance with a top-up button and an optional automatic top-up for pay-as-you-go use, and three monthly plans in Stripe. The meter counts minutes of speech per language. The interface text says that streaming is disabled when the balance is critically low.", "Fit with church equipment: captions for ProPresenter, OBS, vMix and Proclaim, an RTMP input, a page to embed in the church website, webhooks and an API. Apps for iPhone and Android exist, and a browser is enough for listeners.", "How customers find it: 1,745 addresses in the sitemap, among them 52 blog posts; a help center with 35 articles; four free hours without a card; US$20 of credit for a referral; a presentation that a member can send to the church leadership; a listing in faith.tools, a directory of software for churches. Whether the company pays for advertising is not published." ], "src": [ 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 17 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold speech, listening or translation technology before AI models could be rented by the minute. None of them sold to churches; they are here for the technology and for the reason they closed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "TurboTranslations", "years": "2014 to 2023", "funding": "US$150K", "cause": "Ran out of cash", "promise": "Faster and cheaper translation through a marketplace of freelance human translators.", "died": "Every text needed paid human work. Neural machine translation improved quickly from 2016, and with US$150,000 the company could not change its model.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2263-turbotranslations" }, { "name": "Tellme", "years": "1999 to 2011", "funding": "US$238M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Information and transactions over the telephone by voice, with automatic speech recognition.", "died": "Smartphone apps replaced telephone voice services, and the voice assistants of Google and Amazon took the remaining users. Microsoft bought the company in 2007 and later ended the product.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/612-tellme" }, { "name": "VocalIQ", "years": "2011 to 2017", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A voice interface that learns from context, so that speaking to a computer works like a conversation.", "died": "As an independent company it could not compete with Apple, Google and Amazon. Apple bought it in 2015 and put the technology into Siri.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/719-vocaliq" }, { "name": "Doppler Labs", "years": "2013 to 2018", "funding": "US$51M", "cause": "No market need", "promise": "Smart earphones that filter and change the sounds around the wearer in real time.", "died": "The Here One earphones worked, but too few people bought them. Manufacturing delays raised the costs, and Apple's AirPods showed that buyers wanted simple wireless earphones.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/93-doppler-labs" }, { "name": "SoundFocus", "years": "2012 to 2017", "funding": "US$1.8M", "cause": "No market need", "promise": "A phone app that adjusts audio to a person's hearing, for people with mild hearing loss who do not want a hearing aid.", "died": "The market was smaller than expected. Users chose hearing aids or general products such as Apple's AirPods, and new customers cost too much to win in a small market.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/567-soundfocus" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Before AI models could be rented, a church had two ways to translate a service. It could seat a bilingual volunteer or a paid interpreter for each language. Or it could buy radio receivers: the company's own guide gives US$500 to US$3,000 for a starter kit with 10 to 20 receivers, and each language still needs an interpreter. Speech technology existed, but a company had to build it. Tellme raised US$238 million from 1999 for speech recognition over the telephone. Doppler Labs spent US$51 million on earphones that process sound in real time. TurboTranslations organized human translators in a marketplace and closed in 2023, after machine translation had become good enough for most text.", "Now each step can be rented. Deepgram lists streaming speech recognition at less than one US cent a minute, and ElevenLabs lists synthetic speech at US$0.04 to US$0.08 for 1,000 characters. A very small company can connect the steps, add a meter and a QR code, and sell one hour of translation into one language for US$5. Glossa collected US$182,185 of verified revenue in twelve months with three people listed on LinkedIn and no reported investment. The same change removes the protection. Any competitor can rent the same models, and the owners of the largest platforms are building translation into meeting software and earphones." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The church market already has several sellers.", "text": "The parts are public and rented: speech recognition, translation and voices are sold by the minute or by the character. At least five companies already sell live translation to churches or events. What Glossa added is a price that a small church can pay without a committee decision, and a product shaped for one kind of customer. The same method fits other groups that meet regularly with listeners in several languages. Every copy carries the same risk: large platforms are adding translation to products that people already own.", "steps": [ "Choose a customer group that has the same need every week, so that use repeats without new selling.", "Rent each model step and pay by use. Put your own work into setup, billing and the tools that the customer already runs.", "Charge by use with no minimum, count only what the customer values (speech, not silence), and give enough free hours for one real test.", "Let the customer correct the model in plain words: a list of names and terms for recognition, and written instructions for translation.", "Publish one page for each language and each community, and a help center that answers the questions of the volunteer who operates the system." ], "open": "Groups outside churches that meet regularly with listeners in several languages: school meetings for parents, city council sessions, trade union meetings, residents' meetings of housing associations, and safety training in factories and on building sites. In each case the buyer has little money and no interpreter, which is the situation of a small church." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Large platforms add live translation to products that people already have", "text": "Google Meet has Speech Translation, which speaks a participant's words in another language in a voice like the speaker's. Google's help page, read on 13 October 2026, lists six languages paired with English and a limit of 90 minutes for each meeting, and says that the feature does not work in live streams. Microsoft announced an Interpreter agent for Teams meetings on 19 November 2024: speech-to-speech interpretation that can imitate the speaker's voice. Apple announced Live Translation in AirPods on 9 September 2025 for face-to-face conversations in five languages, with four more promised by the end of 2025. None of these is built for a hall with one speaker and listeners in many languages, and their language lists are short. But a visitor who gets a usable translation from earphones that he or she already owns does not need the church to buy anything." }, { "title": "Dedicated competitors, some cheaper to start and some much larger", "text": "Wordly sells AI translation for events and has a page for churches. Its pricing page says that prices start at about US$1,500 for a package of 10 hours, which is US$150 an hour for all languages together. KUDO and Interprefy sell AI speech translation next to human interpreters for conferences. OneAccord sells live translation only to churches, says that more than 200 churches trust it, and starts at US$150 a month for 5 hours. In 2026 the Vatican began to offer the liturgy in St. Peter's Basilica in 60 languages through a QR code, built with the company Translated. For a church that needs one to three languages, Glossa's price of US$5 to US$15 an hour is far below the two published prices. A price is the easiest thing for a competitor to change, and all of them can rent the same models." }, { "title": "Accuracy for religious language is claimed, not measured", "text": "The site says that its AI is trained on biblical texts and handles theological terms correctly. The mechanisms that the help center documents are simpler: a dictionary of names and terms for the speech recognition, and written instructions for the translator, for example which Bible version to follow. No source gives an error rate. The company's blog says that modern systems are more than 95% accurate from English to Spanish, with no measurement behind the figure. An independent review by Jaeden Schafer of Learn of Christ, updated on 9 August 2026 and written from documents without a test, says that \"biblically trained\" does not guarantee theological fidelity, that names, negation and quotations need a check by a native speaker, and that a cloned voice makes a wrong translation sound like the pastor's own words. The help center itself says that accuracy depends on the audio, that some languages are stronger than others, and that sung words cannot be transcribed. The same review notes that one of the two App Store ratings appears to carry the founder's first name." }, { "title": "The models are rented, and their prices set the margin", "text": "Deepgram's list price for streaming speech recognition with the Nova-3 model is US$0.0077 a minute, about US$0.46 an hour; a promotional price of US$0.0048 a minute was shown on 13 October 2026. ElevenLabs' API list price for text to speech is US$0.04 to US$0.08 for 1,000 characters, depending on the model. An example with assumed values, 150 words a minute and 6 characters a word: one hour of continuous speech is 54,000 characters, which costs US$2.16 to US$4.32 for each language at list price. Glossa sells an extra hour for US$2 on its Premium plan. Volume contracts cost less than list prices, captions need no voice, and no source says which service produces the standard voice or the translation, so the real cost is not known. The TrustMRR profile shows a profit margin of 65% for the last 30 days without saying which costs it counts. The grant that ElevenLabs describes on its grant page covers 33,000,000 characters in 12 months. By the same assumed values that is about 611 hours of speech, less than the 708 hours that the company reported for one Sunday in September 2026. If a provider raises a price, changes its terms or retires a model, Glossa must follow." }, { "title": "Revenue follows the church calendar and single events", "text": "December 2025 was 42.4% below November. April 2026, the month of Easter, was 84.4% above March, and May and June were 11.1% and 10.4% below the month before. In the last 30 days the four Sundays brought US$1,838 on average, and all full days US$1,058. Use is concentrated in a few hours on Sunday: the company reported more than 500 services on one Sunday. A technical failure in those hours reaches most customers at the same time. One conference had more than 3,000 attendees in 10 languages according to the company; an event of that size adds revenue that does not repeat every month. The first 13 days of October 2026 average US$1,058 a day, the same as September, so the latest data show a level month and not further growth." }, { "title": "Twelve months of data and a team that is not described", "text": "The public monthly table starts in November 2025. Churn, the share of subscribers who cancel in a period, is visible on TrustMRR only after login and was not read. TrustMRR shows the founder as Anton K.; his full name comes from LinkedIn and from one post. LinkedIn lists 3 people, and the contact section of the site links a Telegram account under another person's name. No source says who writes the code, who answers customers, or whether anyone works full time. The founder calls the product vibe-coded. Hundreds of services run in the same hours on a Sunday, and keeping them running depends on a very small team." }, { "title": "Statements that differ or could not be checked", "text": "The founding date is 1 June 2025 on TrustMRR and 2024 on LinkedIn, and an archived copy shows the site in February 2025. The profile gives two figures for the last 30 days: US$31,434 in its table and US$33,143 in a snapshot line. The yearly discount is 18% on the switch of the pricing section and 16.7% by the printed amounts. The site says that hundreds of churches use it and shows the names SBC, Hillsong, PCA, CCA and UMC; no source confirms what relation these organizations have to Glossa, and the four testimonials give a first name and an organization only. The profile field for the estimated user count says 2,000. The app descriptions say no delay, and the help center says 2 to 5 seconds. The Stripe profile that the founder linked as proof loads by script, and its figures could not be read; the TrustMRR figures do not depend on it." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://glossa.live/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6759844333" }, { "kind": "android", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=live.glossa.translate" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/glossa-live" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of Glossa.live, revenue read from Stripe by API key", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/glossa-live", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile (https://trustmrr.com/startup/glossa-live.md) live on 13 October 2026, and the cached copy of 12 October. Revenue, the monthly and daily tables, MRR and active subscriptions come from the Stripe API, last synced on 13 October 2026 at 14:53 UTC. The description, founding date, pricing model, user count, technology list and profit margin are entered by the founder, grade C." }, { "title": "TrustMRR founder page: Anton K. (@karbanovich)", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/founder/karbanovich", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 13 October 2026. It lists one startup, Glossa.live, a total revenue of US$190,483, and one product update by the founder." }, { "title": "Anton K. on X, 6 May 2026: My vibe-coded startup for churches just hit 20k+ Revenue", "url": "https://x.com/karbanovich/status/2051942453633032632", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API, with his profile and the 18 posts of his timeline that the API returned. Source for his words about the product, his location, his follower count and the link to the Stripe profile." }, { "title": "Stripe profile of Glossa.live, gross volume", "url": "https://profile.stripe.com/@glossa_live/m/PbYwExG2", "grade": "C", "how": "Could not read the figures: the page loads by script. Only the page title was read, which names Glossa.live and gross volume. It shows that the profile exists. It is not used for any number." }, { "title": "Glossa on X (@glossa_ai), posts of February to October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/glossa_ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read 40 posts and the profile through the fxtwitter API. Used: 18 February 2026 (ElevenLabs grant, post 2024028403834212816), 20 February (ProPresenter), 5 August (65,000 minutes; ARISE ASIA), 19 August (400 services), 7 September (42,500 minutes and 500 services, post 2096932510340919750), 6 October (complete sentences)." }, { "title": "Glossa.live home page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://glossa.live/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, as text and as page source. Source for the features, the pricing section, the testimonials, the FAQ, the company name and registration number in the footer, the contact links and the scripts that the page loads." }, { "title": "Glossa Help Center", "url": "https://glossa.tawk.help/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the five category pages and 11 of the 35 articles in full: pricing, plans, what counts as use, the free trial, the delay, low accuracy, voice cloning, custom translation instructions, language limitation and the referral program." }, { "title": "Glossa web app, main script with the interface text, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://glossa.live/assets/index-lRaHPqE7.js", "grade": "C", "how": "Downloaded and searched as text; not run. Source for the names Deepgram and ElevenLabs, the Nova model names, and the words for the balance, the top-up and the automatic top-up. No translation provider is named in it." }, { "title": "Glossa blog, 18 March 2026: How AI Translation Works for Church Services", "url": "https://glossa.live/blog/ai-translation-church-services", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the three steps, the 95% accuracy claim and the statement on delay. Signed Glossa Team." }, { "title": "Glossa.live sitemap, with the blog post of 23 May 2026 on translation systems for churches", "url": "https://glossa.live/sitemap.xml", "grade": "C", "how": "Counted the addresses with a script: 1,745 in total, 1,656 language pages (92 languages in 18 versions), 52 blog posts. Read the post https://glossa.live/blog/best-translation-systems-for-churches in full, for the cost of radio receivers." }, { "title": "LinkedIn company page: Glossa", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/glossa-live", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public page without login on 13 October 2026. Source for the 3 employees, the size band, the founding year 2024, the 12 followers, and the founder's full name in the list of people. The founder's own LinkedIn profile could not be opened." }, { "title": "PromptZone, 6 February 2026, post by Anton Karbanovich: Glossa", "url": "https://www.promptzone.com/anton_karbanovich_1b1cec4/glossa-2l5e", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A short presentation of the product by the founder under his full name." }, { "title": "Apple App Store listing: Glossa - AI Church Translation, with Apple's lookup record", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/glossa-ai-church-translation/id6759844333", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the US listing and the lookup record on 13 October 2026. Source for the seller INDX Ltd., the release date, the number of ratings and the description text." }, { "title": "Google Play listing: Glossa - AI Church Translation", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=live.glossa.translate", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the listing on 13 October 2026. Source for the download count." }, { "title": "Internet Archive copies of glossa.live, 7 February 2025 to 16 April 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250207200243/https://glossa.live/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the list of captures and five copies: 7 February, 10 June and 18 September 2025, 14 December 2025 and 16 April 2026. The archive proves the date of each text; the text itself is the company's. Source for the early descriptions and for the prices in December 2025." }, { "title": "Learn of Christ, updated 9 August 2026, review by Jaeden Schafer: Glossa Review 2026", "url": "https://learnofchrist.com/resources/glossa", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The reviewer states that the review is based on published documents and store data, not on use of the product. Source for the risks of accuracy and voice cloning." }, { "title": "faith.tools directory entry for Glossa", "url": "https://faith.tools/app/glossa", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A directory of software for churches. It repeats the claims of the company's site and cites that site." }, { "title": "Wordly pricing page and church translation page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://www.wordly.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the pricing text and the page https://www.wordly.ai/church-translation. Source for the starting price." }, { "title": "OneAccord home page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://www.oneaccord.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for its starting price, its number of churches and its number of languages." }, { "title": "KUDO home page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://kudo.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the product descriptions. Not used for numbers." }, { "title": "Interprefy home page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://www.interprefy.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the product descriptions. Not used for numbers." }, { "title": "Google Meet Help: Learn about Speech Translation", "url": "https://support.google.com/meet/answer/16221730", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 13 October 2026. Source for the languages, the limit of 90 minutes and the exclusion of live streams." }, { "title": "Microsoft, 19 November 2024: Introducing Copilot actions, new agents, and tools to empower IT", "url": "https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2024/11/19/introducing-copilot-actions-new-agents-and-tools-to-empower-it-teams/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on the Interpreter agent in Teams." }, { "title": "Apple Newsroom, 9 September 2025: Introducing AirPods Pro 3", "url": "https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/09/introducing-airpods-pro-3-the-ultimate-audio-experience/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on Live Translation." }, { "title": "Deepgram pricing page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://deepgram.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the table of streaming prices. Source for the Nova-3 list price and the promotional price." }, { "title": "ElevenLabs API pricing page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://elevenlabs.io/pricing/api", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the text-to-speech prices for each model." }, { "title": "ElevenLabs startup grants page, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://elevenlabs.io/startup-grants", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the description of the grant and its questions and answers. Source for the 33,000,000 characters and the 12 months." }, { "title": "Mezha, 2026: Vatican to translate masses in real time using AI", "url": "https://mezha.ua/en/news/vatican-ai-translation-308634/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A news report that cites Engadget. Source for the 60 languages and the company Translated." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/polsia/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/polsia.md", "slug": "polsia", "name": "Polsia", "country": "France, now USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI agents that build and run small online companies", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-13", "launchLabel": "December 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$775K a month in subscriptions, August 2026", "sticker": "Company-reported $775K/mo", "outcomeUsd": 9300000, "months": 8, "teamLabel": "1 founder, no employees; a law firm and partner companies do some of the work", "fundingLabel": "US$1M pre-seed in 2025, then US$30M at a US$250M valuation in May 2026, both as stated by the founder", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "build-software", "channel": "audience", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 1, "capital": 3 }, "tags": [ "Cautionary", "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Funded", "Running", "B2C", "AI agents" ], "product": "You describe a business idea, or you let the product choose one. Polsia then creates a company name, a website, an email inbox and a payment account. Its AI agents write code, send sales emails, post on X and run Meta adverts. One agent chooses one task every night, does it, and emails you a report.", "why": "The founder made his own fundraising the advertisement. In February 2026 he let the product answer investor emails in public, next to a live revenue counter. A new customer needs only an idea, so thousands of people tried the product each day. The counter annualized all money that entered the platform, so it grew faster than the subscription revenue.", "summary": [ "Polsia sells AI agents that build and run a small online company for a customer. An AI agent is a program in which a language model decides the next action and performs it with tools. Examples of tools are a code editor, an email account and an advertising account. The customer gives an idea. Polsia creates a website, an inbox and a payment account. One agent does one task every night and reports by email. The customer pays a monthly subscription and buys credits for extra tasks.", "Ben Broca, who also uses the name Ben Cera, launched it alone in December 2025. He is a former manager at CloudKitchens. In February 2026 he let the product answer investor emails in public, and he showed a live counter of the company's run rate. A run rate is the revenue of a recent period, multiplied to a full year. Here it is the last 30 days times twelve. The counter passed US$1 million on 28 February 2026 and US$10 million in May 2026. In May he announced an investment of US$30 million at a US$250 million valuation. He has no employees.", "The famous number is not annual recurring revenue (ARR), which is the monthly subscription revenue times twelve. The counter also annualized one-time credit purchases, advertising money that customers send through Polsia to Meta, and the sales of the customers' own companies. On 23 May 2026, subscriptions were 47.5% of the counter. This page therefore uses the subscription figure from the company's own public data: US$774,984 a month on 27 August 2026. Every number here is reported by the company, grade C. No payment processor, auditor or journalist has checked the payment records. The founder says that churn is about 50% in the first month. Churn is the share of paying customers who cancel in a period." ], "factsCaption": "A public counter that passed US$10 million five months after launch, about half of it subscriptions, with every figure reported by the company itself", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value has one of three origins. It is a founder statement, a figure from the company's own dashboard, or a press or reviewer report that did not check payment records. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B. The dashboard figures come from copies that the Internet Archive saved on the dates shown.", "timelineLead": "From a first payment of US$19 to US$775,000 a month in subscriptions in 8 months, next to a public counter that always showed more. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Polsia prices in October 2026: plans from a reviewer on 15 September, credit steps and fees from the company's terms and app code (grade C)", "note": "Polsia has no public price page. Prices appear after sign-up, and the reviewer found two different price lists inside the product on the same day. The yearly column is empty because the product shows the yearly option only as two months free. One credit pays for one agent task. On top of the plan, Polsia keeps 3% of every payment that the customer's company receives and holds the money for 31 days. It also keeps 20% of every advertising budget. The terms of June 2026 still took 20% of customer payments. The first plan, in February 2026, was US$49 a month.", "rows": [ [ "Standard", "", "20", "1 company, 20 credits a month, no Meta adverts" ], [ "Pro", "", "50", "3 companies, 50 credits a month, Meta adverts" ], [ "Max", "", "200", "10 companies, 200 credits a month" ], [ "Max 2", "", "500", "25 companies, 500 credits a month" ], [ "Max 3", "", "1,000", "50 companies, 1,000 credits a month" ], [ "Extra task credits", "", "19 to 999", "15 to 1,000 credits a month, in 7 steps" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Subscription revenue per month, 27 August 2026", "value": "US$774,984", "grade": "C", "note": "The field mrr on the company's public dashboard, in the copy that the Internet Archive saved on 29 August 2026. The dashboard lists 20,382 paying users on that date.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Subscription run rate, 27 August 2026", "value": "about US$9.3 million a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 774,984 times 12 equals 9,299,808. The dashboard's own field arr shows 9,299,809. This is the headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Counter shown to the public, 29 August 2026", "value": "US$15,532,004", "grade": "C", "note": "The field arr_usd, which the live page showed as the run rate. It is 12 times the money received in the last 30 days, from every source.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "What the counter contained, 29 August 2026", "value": "subscriptions 60.9%, one-time purchases 27.0%, customers' money 12.0%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the 30-day fields: subscriptions US$788,489, credit packs US$332,370, domains US$17,619, advertising budgets US$120,279, sales of customers' companies US$35,576. Their sum times 12 equals the counter to the dollar. The rounded shares add to 99.9%. Under the terms, 80% of an advertising budget goes to Meta, and 97% of a customer's sales belongs to the customer.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "What the counter contained, 23 May 2026, one day after the funding news", "value": "subscriptions 47.5%, one-time purchases 28.9%, customers' money 23.6%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the same fields. Counter US$9,762,253; subscriptions US$386,643 a month; credit packs US$162,805; boosts, a paid extra, US$72,157; advertising budgets US$162,387; sales of customers' companies US$29,529.", "src": [ 1, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Subscription run rate, 22 May 2026", "value": "US$4,630,500", "grade": "C", "note": "The dashboard's own field arr: US$385,875 a month times 12, from 5,830 paying users. On that day the founder announced an annual run rate close to US$10 million.", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Date when the counter passed US$1 million", "value": "28 February 2026 as first shown; 6 March 2026 in the later version", "grade": "C", "note": "Copies saved in March 2026 show US$1,098,344 for 28 February. Copies saved from 15 April 2026 show US$590,378 for the same day and US$1,086,102 for 6 March. The company changed its history between 29 March and 15 April. This page found no explanation.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Subscription run rate when the counter passed US$1 million", "value": "US$443,208 on 1 March 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "An independent developer copied the dashboard data that day: US$36,934 a month from 592 paying users. On 6 March he copied US$923,232 from 1,193 paying users. No archived copy exists for those two days.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to US$1 million on the counter", "value": "74 days, not 30", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 16 December 2025, the first payment in the history, to 28 February 2026. The claim of 30 days counts from 26 January 2026, when the counter showed US$20,585. That is 33 days.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "The investor's version", "value": "US$1 million ARR within one month of launch, US$3 million one month later", "grade": "C", "note": "True Ventures, 23 March 2026. The archived counter shows US$1 million 74 days after the first payment and US$3 million 8 days after that. The post does not say how the investor checked the figures.", "src": [ 5, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Paying users", "value": "592 on 1 March, 5,830 on 22 May, 20,382 on 27 August 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Dashboard field paying_users. The Wall Street Journal reported 10,000 paying customers on 29 July 2026. The dashboard showed 11,761 on 24 July.", "src": [ 1, 6, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Subscription revenue per paying user", "value": "US$66 a month in May, US$38 a month in August 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Dashboard field arpu. The first plan cost US$49 a month. A reviewer reported an entry plan of US$20 a month by August 2026.", "src": [ 1, 3, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Customers who leave (churn)", "value": "about 50% in the first month, about 50% again in the second", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder, 27 May 2026. The dashboard field for 30-day paid churn showed 48% on 22 May (2,689 of 5,598) and 81.5% on 27 August 2026 (13,712 of 16,820). Polsia's own email agent told one interviewer that 85% of customers stay in month two. The two statements do not agree.", "src": [ 4, 1, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Cost of AI models per day, 18 March 2026", "value": "US$27,272", "grade": "C", "note": "Dashboard field daily_ai_cost. In May 2026 the founder said that his bill from Anthropic was about US$1 million a month, and US$1.5 million in the last month.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "AI cost compared with subscription revenue, 18 March 2026", "value": "about 4 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 27,272.11 times 30 equals 818,163 a month, against subscription revenue of US$205,100 a month. The field showed US$13,624 a day on 22 May and US$3,192 a day on 11 July 2026. In that period the founder moved to cheaper models.", "src": [ 1, 6, 15 ] }, { "fact": "Funding", "value": "US$1 million in mid-2025; US$30 million at a US$250 million valuation, announced 22 May 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder statements. Press reports name Sound Ventures, True Ventures, Offline Ventures, Adjacent, Tekton Ventures, Drysdale Ventures and Vaynerfund. True Ventures confirmed that it invested. This page found no investor statement of the amount.", "src": [ 7, 4, 16, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Valuation compared with the subscription run rate of 22 May 2026", "value": "54 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 250,000,000 divided by 4,630,500 equals 54.0. Against the counter of US$9,762,253 it is 25.6 times.", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Employees", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder, and the Wall Street Journal on 29 July 2026. He told Fortune that a law firm and an infrastructure company work for him as outside partners.", "src": [ 6, 13, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Customer companies that are still active, 29 August 2026", "value": "24,187 of 386,353 created (6.3%)", "grade": "C", "note": "Dashboard fields companies and total_companies; the share is calculated. On 23 May 2026 it was 7,704 of 123,493 (6.2%).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Sales of all customer companies together, 30 days to 29 August 2026", "value": "US$35,576", "grade": "C", "note": "Dashboard field user_company_30d. This money belongs to the customers; Polsia keeps a fee of 3%.", "src": [ 1, 18 ] }, { "fact": "Average sales per active customer company in those 30 days", "value": "US$1.47", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 35,576.24 divided by 24,187.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Customer companies that earned at least one dollar", "value": "about 10%", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder, 27 May 2026. The best company he had seen made US$3,000 to US$4,000. In February 2026 the best one made about US$50 a month. In April 2026 he told Rest of World that about one-sixth had revenue.", "src": [ 4, 3, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Independent proof of the revenue", "value": "none public", "grade": "C", "note": "Not verified by anyone outside the company. On 27 May 2026 an interviewer asked the founder to show his Stripe account. He declined and said that he would post it on X; this page did not find such a post. TrustMRR has no Polsia profile. The one Polsia-hosted company listed there shows US$0.00 of verified revenue.", "src": [ 4, 19, 17 ] }, { "fact": "Public dashboard", "value": "online from February to September 2026, gone by 12 October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "The Internet Archive holds 24 copies from 22 February to 29 August. A reviewer read it on 15 September and reported subscriptions of US$915,309 a month inside a counter of US$18.71 million. On 12 October the address returned an error.", "src": [ 1, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Trustpilot score", "value": "1.8 of 5 in August, 2.9 on 15 September, 3.3 on 2 October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Reported by two reviewers who sell competing products. On 2 October there were 347 reviews, 30% of them with one star. Trustpilot blocked the download for this page.", "src": [ 10, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the August 2026 figure", "value": "8 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: December 2025 to August 2026.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Mid-2025", "what": "Broca raises a pre-seed round of US$1 million. During 2025 he builds four products alone. Three make nothing.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "October 2025", "what": "He starts the product that became Polsia: a company that makes companies. The name is AI slop, spelled backwards. He chose it on purpose.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 12 ] }, { "when": "16 December 2025", "what": "The dashboard history starts on this day with a run rate of US$228, which is one subscription of US$19 a month. The founder dates the launch to the middle of December.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 4 ] }, { "when": "26 January 2026", "what": "The counter shows a run rate of US$20,585.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "when": "17 February 2026", "what": "He posts on X that the product will raise its own money. It answers investor emails from his inbox for 14 days, next to a public live dashboard. The counter shows US$208,516 that day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 1 ] }, { "when": "26 February 2026", "what": "In a recorded interview the host reads US$693,608 on the live dashboard. The founder says that the number counts all cash that enters the platform. The best customer company makes about US$50 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "28 February 2026", "what": "The counter passes US$1 million. The next day the dashboard data show a subscription run rate of US$443,208 from 592 paying users.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 8 ] }, { "when": "7 March 2026", "what": "He posts a run rate of US$2.5 million, up from US$1 million in one week. The subscription run rate on 6 March is US$923,232.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 8 ] }, { "when": "9 March 2026", "what": "An independent developer publishes two findings: the live page exposes customers' chats and personal data, and the counter is about twice the subscription figure.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "17 to 18 March 2026", "what": "The founder writes that the past week almost broke him: every supplier reached its rate limits. The dashboard shows AI costs of US$27,272 a day and subscription revenue of US$205,100 a month from 3,218 paying users.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 1 ] }, { "when": "23 March 2026", "what": "True Ventures announces its investment and repeats the US$1 million and US$3 million figures.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "April 2026", "what": "Between 29 March and 15 April the company replaces the history of the counter with lower values for February and March.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "29 April 2026", "what": "Rest of World reports on a factory trainer in China who pays US$199 a month, a quarter of his salary. His Polsia company has 7 sign-ups and no payment.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "22 May 2026", "what": "He announces US$30 million at a US$250 million valuation and a run rate that approaches US$10 million. The subscription run rate that day is US$4,630,500.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 1 ] }, { "when": "27 May 2026", "what": "In a second interview he confirms the run-rate method and a churn of about 50% in the first month. He gives a model bill of about US$1 million a month. He declines to show his Stripe account.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "29 July 2026", "what": "The Wall Street Journal reports 10,000 paying customers and a path to US$10 million of revenue in 2026, with no employees. Broca says that he lost money on many accounts and moved to open-source models.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "27 August 2026", "what": "The dashboard shows subscription revenue of US$774,984 a month from 20,382 paying users. The public counter shows US$15.5 million two days later.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "15 September 2026", "what": "A reviewer reads US$915,309 a month in subscriptions and 29,132 active companies of 484,592 created. The terms now take 3% of customer payments, not 20%.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10, 18 ] }, { "when": "12 October 2026", "what": "The address of the public dashboard returns an error, and the app no longer has a live page.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 18 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Distribution", "text": "The fundraising was the advertisement. On 17 February 2026 the founder posted that the product would raise its own money. He opened a live page with the revenue counter and the agents' work. The counter went from US$208,516 that day to US$1,098,344 eleven days later. He says that each post raised the numbers, and that the higher numbers brought more investors and more posts." }, { "title": "No step between idea and company", "text": "A new user types an idea or presses a button that chooses one. Before any payment, Polsia makes a company name, a market report, a live website and an inbox, and posts about the company on X. The founder says that each extra question would lower the share of users who pay. On 22 May 2026 the dashboard showed 3,767 new sign-ups in one day and 21.7% of trials that became paid, 4,467 of 20,548." }, { "title": "A counter that includes customers' money", "text": "The live number was 12 times the last 30 days of all money received. That money included subscriptions, one-time credit packs, advertising budgets that go to Meta, and the sales of customers' companies. When the interviewer asked, the founder described this method himself. From March to May 2026 the number that people shared was about twice the subscription revenue. The counter was correct as a sum, but investors and press called it ARR, and it was not." }, { "title": "Credits on top of the subscription", "text": "The subscription pays for one automatic task each night. A customer who wants more work at once buys credits, at about US$1 to US$2 per task. On 29 August 2026 one-time credit packs were 25.7% of all money received. The cost is on the same side. The founder says that a task cost him about US$2 with Claude. A task cost US$20 to US$30 when an agent repaired a large code base." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from founder interviews, press reports and the company's terms. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Built on Anthropic's Claude with the Claude Agent SDK. An SDK (software development kit) is a set of ready code; this one is for programs in which the model calls tools. In February 2026 the agent that plans strategy ran on Claude Opus 4.6.", "Each customer company receives a web server, a database, a GitHub account, an email address, a Stripe payment account and a Meta advertising account. Polsia manages all of them, so the customer connects nothing.", "A chief-executive agent runs every night. It reads the state of the company, chooses one task, gives it to an engineering, marketing or support agent, and emails the customer a report.", "The advertising agent writes the advert and generates a video of an invented person with OpenAI's Sora 2. It uploads the video to Meta and stops adverts that perform badly. The customer sets a budget from US$10 a day.", "Suppliers that the founder named in May 2026: Sapiom, Blaxel, Anchor Browser, AgentMail, Stripe, Render, Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, X, GitHub, Postmark and Amazon Web Services.", "The founder writes Polsia itself with Claude Opus and uses OpenAI Codex as a second reviewer for bug fixes. His own tools cost about US$800 a month. He says that he no longer reads the code.", "By June 2026 the founder had moved tasks from Anthropic's models to open-source models on rented graphics processors. He says that the price was about 100 times lower." ], "src": [ 3, 12, 15, 16, 6 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database promised to do the work of a small company for a customer who could not do it alone. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Builder.ai", "years": "2016 to 2025", "funding": "US$445M", "cause": "Unit economics", "promise": "Custom apps for founders who cannot code, built by AI from reusable parts.", "died": "Each US$20,000 project cost US$25,000 to US$35,000 to deliver, and offshore developers did most of the work that was sold as AI.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2170-builderai" }, { "name": "Metigy", "years": "2014 to 2022", "funding": "US$14M", "cause": "No market need", "promise": "AI marketing advice for small businesses that cannot pay a marketing team.", "died": "It gave advice on a dashboard. Small businesses wanted the work done for them, and they left within 60 to 90 days.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2338-metigy" }, { "name": "Dukaan", "years": "2020 to 2024", "funding": "US$17M", "cause": "Unit economics", "promise": "An online store in 30 seconds for small merchants.", "died": "It signed more than 5 million merchants. Most sold very little, could not pay even US$10 a month, and left.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2425-dukaan" }, { "name": "Zirtual", "years": "2011 to 2015", "funding": "US$5.5M", "cause": "Ran out of cash", "promise": "Virtual assistants on a monthly subscription for busy founders.", "died": "It hired assistants faster than revenue grew, could not pay salaries in August 2015 and closed without notice.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1850-zirtual" }, { "name": "Trada", "years": "2008 to 2015", "funding": "US$19M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Google advertising for small businesses, managed by outside experts.", "died": "Human experts did not scale at a profit, and Google automated the same work inside its own tools.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/655-trada" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the five sold the work of a company function to people who could not do that work themselves. Each found that the work cost more than those customers could pay. Builder.ai used human developers behind an AI label. Zirtual and Trada used human staff. Dukaan and Metigy gave tools to customers who earned too little to stay.", "The founder says that the models of late 2025 were the first that could use any tool and stay on a task without a person. Polsia does with a model what Builder.ai did with offshore staff, so one person can serve 20,000 paying users. The old problems did not go away. In March 2026 the model bill was about four times the subscription revenue. The founder says that half of new customers leave in the first month. Like Dukaan's merchants, most Polsia companies earn almost nothing: US$1.47 each in 30 days, on average. The founder says that the US$30 million lets him accept low margins and offer a free version." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The public fundraising, no. The measurement lesson, yes.", "text": "The growth came from one founder's public fundraising on X and a pre-seed round of US$1 million. The model bill was about US$1 million a month before revenue covered the costs. Few people can repeat that. What a reader can copy is smaller. Remove every step between an idea and a first result, and charge for usage on top of a subscription. A reader can also do the opposite of the counter: report subscriptions, one-time sales and customers' money as three separate numbers.", "steps": [ "Let a new customer see a finished result before the first payment, with no setup.", "Sell a low subscription for the automatic work and credits for work on demand.", "Measure the cost of each task from the first day. Polsia's cost per task rose when customers' code bases grew.", "Publish recurring revenue, one-time revenue and pass-through money separately, with churn next to them." ], "open": "Agents that do one function well for a small business that already has customers, for example bookkeeping, appointments or adverts for one trade. Such a customer has revenue to protect and a reason to stay." }, "watch": [ { "title": "The famous number is not ARR", "text": "The counter was 12 times the last 30 days of all money received. Subscriptions were 47.5% of it in May 2026 and 60.9% in August. Advertising budgets and the sales of customers' companies pass through Polsia; most of that money is not Polsia's revenue." }, { "title": "Company-reported only", "text": "No payment processor, auditor or journalist has confirmed the revenue. The founder declined to show his Stripe account in an interview. The company changed the history of its counter once, to lower values, and removed the public dashboard by October 2026." }, { "title": "Half of new customers leave in the first month", "text": "The founder gives about 50% churn in month one and about 50% again in month two. The dashboard field showed 81.5% for the 30 days to 27 August 2026. A run rate assumes that the current month repeats twelve times, so new sign-ups must replace the customers who leave." }, { "title": "Costs were above revenue", "text": "In March 2026 the model cost was about four times the subscription revenue. The founder told the Wall Street Journal that he lost money on many accounts. The business now runs on cheaper open-source models and has US$30 million of investment. This page found no public figure for profit or loss." }, { "title": "Most customer companies earn nothing", "text": "The founder says that about 10% of companies earned at least one dollar. All customer companies together sold US$35,576 in the 30 days to 29 August 2026. A customer who pays every month and earns nothing has a reason to cancel." }, { "title": "Complaints and privacy", "text": "Reviewers report a Trustpilot score of 3.3 of 5, with 30% one-star reviews. The complaints are tasks marked as done but not delivered, credits used on failed tasks, and refunds refused. In March 2026 the live page exposed customers' chats and personal data. Agents have sent emails that customers did not approve." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://polsia.com/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/ad-flow-polsia-app" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Internet Archive: 24 saved copies of Polsia's public dashboard data, 22 February to 29 August 2026", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20260829045311/https://polsia.com/api/public/live/dashboard", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the saved data of 22 of the 24 copies in full, with a script. The company published these figures itself. The archive proves what the company showed on each date, not that the payments exist. The live address returned an error on 12 October 2026." }, { "title": "Internet Archive: saved copy of the dashboard's daily history, 12 August 2026", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20260812183901/https://polsia.com/api/public/live/metric-history?metric=arr&days=365", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Daily values from 16 December 2025 to 11 August 2026, in the later and lower version of the series." }, { "title": "Mixergy, 2 March 2026, interview by Andrew Warner: This AI generates $689K", "url": "https://mixergy.com/interviews/this-ai-generates-689k/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the transcript in full. Recorded on 26 February 2026; the host read the live dashboard during the call. Source for what the counter includes, the first price, the 20% share and the nightly agent." }, { "title": "Mixergy, 27 May 2026, interview by Andrew Warner: Polsia: AI Agent + Zero Employees = $10M Run Rate", "url": "https://mixergy.com/interviews/is-polsia-a-250m-scam-i-asked-the-founder-to-his-face/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the transcript in full. Source for the run-rate method in the founder's words, the churn, the share of companies with revenue and the Anthropic bill. Also the source for the pre-seed round, the launch month and the Stripe request." }, { "title": "True Ventures, 23 March 2026, Tony Conrad: Polsia: The One-Person Company Is No Longer a Metaphor", "url": "https://www.trueventures.com/blog/polsia-one-person-company-no-longer-a-metaphor", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. An investor's announcement. It repeats the US$1 million and US$3 million figures and does not say how they were checked." }, { "title": "The Wall Street Journal, 29 July 2026: The Rise of Million-Dollar Companies With Just One Employee", "url": "https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-rise-of-million-dollar-companies-with-just-one-employee-f36a77c1", "grade": "C", "how": "The page needs a subscription. Read the passages on Polsia in the copy that archive.ph saved on 28 September 2026. The article does not say that the reporter saw payment records." }, { "title": "Ben Cera on X, 22 May 2026: Polsia just raised $30M at a $250M valuation", "url": "https://x.com/Bencera/status/2057847644966547920", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through api.fxtwitter.com, together with his posts of 17 February, 7 March and 17 March 2026. Source for the funding announcement and the run-rate claims on those dates." }, { "title": "SiteBloom, 9 March 2026: Polsia claims a $3M ARR and streams all user chats via public URL", "url": "https://sitebloom.ch/writing/polsia-claims-3m-arr-and-exposes-user-chats/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. An independent developer copied the dashboard data on 1 and 6 March 2026. Source for the subscription figures on those dates and for the exposed customer chats." }, { "title": "Polsia, the receipts: an anonymous analysis by the X account NotOnKetamine, May 2026", "url": "https://zero-arr.vercel.app", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A hostile analysis of the dashboard data of 22 May 2026. Its arithmetic matches the archived copy. Its claims about human staff were not verified and are not used." }, { "title": "Preuve AI, updated 15 September 2026: Polsia Review (2026): Is It Legit? An Honest Founder Read", "url": "https://preuve.ai/blog/polsia-review", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The author sells a competing product and says so. Source for the plan prices, the dashboard values of 15 September and the Trustpilot scores." }, { "title": "Crevio, 2 October 2026: Is Polsia Legit? An Honest Review With the Founder's Own Numbers", "url": "https://crevio.co/blog/is-polsia-legit", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Crevio is a competitor. Source for the Trustpilot score on 2 October 2026 and the fee summary." }, { "title": "Lean AI Leaderboard, 8 May 2026, Henry Shi: How a Solo Founder Cloned Himself With AI That Now Runs 6000 Companies and Hit $6M+ ARR", "url": "https://henrythe9th.substack.com/p/how-a-solo-founder-cloned-himself", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Most answers came from Polsia's own email agent. Source for the founder's background, the Claude Agent SDK, the founder's own tools and the retention claim." }, { "title": "Fortune, 26 March 2026, Allie Garfinkle: The one-person unicorn: Myth, miracle, or the future of startups?", "url": "https://fortune.com/2026/03/26/the-one-person-unicorn-myth-miracle-future-of-startups-polsia/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the passages on Polsia. The writer says that she doubts revenue claims of AI startups. Source for the outside law firm and infrastructure partner." }, { "title": "Rest of World, 29 April 2026, Viola Zhou: I got stood up by an AI agent, and tracked down its human owner in China", "url": "https://restofworld.org/2026/ai-agent-china-one-person-company/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A reporter found a Polsia customer after his agent sent her an email. Source for the customer case and the founder's one-sixth figure." }, { "title": "GTMnow podcast, 1 June 2026: Inside the Company that Raised $30M at a $250M Valuation With 0 Employees", "url": "https://gtmnow.com/gtm-192-inside-the-company-that-raised-30m-at-a-250m-valuation-with-0-employees-ben-cera-polsia/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the transcript sections on pricing, costs, models and the fundraising. Source for the cost per task, the cheaper models and the period in Paris." }, { "title": "Pulse 2.0, 25 May 2026: Polsia: $30 Million At $250 Million Valuation Raised For AI Operations Platform", "url": "https://pulse2.com/polsia-30-million-at-250-million-valuation-raised-for-ai-operations-platform/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. It reports the founder's LinkedIn post. Source for the investor list and the supplier list." }, { "title": "RuntimeWire, 29 July 2026: Polsia's Ben Broca runs 10,000-customer AI business with zero employees", "url": "https://runtimewire.com/article/polsia-ben-broca-10-million-revenue-zero-employees", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the free part. It notes that the customer and revenue figures come from the founder, not from audited statements." }, { "title": "Polsia Terms of Service and app code, read 12 October 2026", "url": "https://polsia.com/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "The page loads by script, so the text was read in the app's JavaScript file. Source for the 3% and 20% fees, the 31-day hold, the credit steps and the missing live page." }, { "title": "TrustMRR profile of ad-flow.polsia.app, a customer company hosted on Polsia, not Polsia itself", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/ad-flow-polsia-app", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile. Stripe-verified revenue of US$0.00, data as of 12 October 2026. TrustMRR has no profile for Polsia itself, so this source verifies none of Polsia's own figures." }, { "title": "andrew.ooo, 4 March 2026, updated 8 October 2026: Polsia: How One Solo Founder Hit $1.5M ARR in 30 Days With Zero Employees", "url": "https://andrew.ooo/posts/polsia-1m-arr-30-days-zero-employees/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A publication that AI agents write under human supervision. Used to find other sources, not for numbers." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/trackai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/trackai.md", "slug": "trackai", "name": "TrackAI", "country": "Poland", "sector": "Health Care", "productType": "Calorie tracking from food photos", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-13", "launchLabel": "June 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$242K verified revenue in 12 months, October 2026", "sticker": "$242K in 12 months", "outcomeUsd": 242116, "months": 16, "teamLabel": "1 named founder; his sale notice speaks of a founding team; headcount not published", "fundingLabel": "None, according to the founder", "primaryFactor": "Paid ads", "group": "health-appearance", "channel": "paid-ads", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Consumer app" ], "product": "You photograph a meal. TrackAI returns the dishes it recognises, an estimated weight, the calories, and the protein, fat and carbohydrates. You can correct an ingredient or a weight, and the totals update. The app also shows daily and weekly statistics, sends meal reminders and gives rewards for days in a row.", "why": "It built a product that already sold well in English for Ukraine and Central and Eastern Europe: Ukrainian language, local dishes and lower local prices. The model that reads the photo is rented and the billing is a ready-made service. The only growth channel the founder names is paid advertising on Meta.", "summary": [ "TrackAI is a phone app that estimates the calories in a meal from a photo. The user photographs a plate, and a vision model returns the dishes it sees, their weight, the calories and the macros. A vision model is an AI model that takes an image as input and answers in text. Macros is the short name for the three macronutrients: protein, fat and carbohydrates. The app is in 15 languages, and its website names borscht and varenyky among the dishes it recognises. In the three App Store countries this page checked, Ukraine has 3,918 ratings, Poland 630 and the United States 54.", "Oleksandr Yashchuk, who is based in Kraków in Poland, released the app at the end of May 2025. He is the only person the sources name: the company blog calls him founder and product owner, and until spring 2026 both app stores listed him personally as the developer. The money figure on this page is not his claim. TrustMRR, a public directory of startup revenue, reads the sales from RevenueCat with an access key. RevenueCat is a service that phone apps use to sell subscriptions through Apple's and Google's stores and to count the revenue from both. On 13 October 2026 it showed US$242,116 of revenue in the last 12 months, US$21,699 in the last 30 days and 5,158 active paid subscriptions. RevenueCat's documentation describes its revenue figure as gross: before the stores take their commission and before sales tax. The business keeps less than the headline figure.", "One question is not answered. On 7 July 2026 Yashchuk offered TrackAI for sale on TrustMRR for US$600,000, and he lowered the price seven times, to US$180,000 on 18 August. By 13 October the offer was closed, and both app stores named a Swiss company, Stellar Marketing AG, as the developer. No source says that a sale happened or at what price. This page therefore counts the business as running and grades every number by its evidence. It also shows four failed companies that promised easier tracking of health habits before a phone could read a photo of a plate." ], "factsCaption": "US$242,116 of payment-verified revenue in 12 months and US$21,699 in the last 30 days, from a photo calorie counter built for Ukraine and Central and Eastern Europe, with an ownership question that the sources leave open", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from RevenueCat, the service that records the app's subscription payments. A grade B value comes from Apple, Google, a public register, a marketplace record or an archived page. A grade C value is a founder statement. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From the App Store release to US$242,116 of verified revenue in 12 months, then a sale listing and a new company name on the store pages. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "TrackAI Premium prices in October 2026, read from Apple's App Store pages for the United States and Ukraine (grade B), with the founder's own figures for comparison (grade C)", "note": "Apple lists the in-app purchases by name: week, month, year, and a year with a discount. The yearly column is the yearly price divided by 12: 49.99 divided by 12 equals 4.17, 33.90 divided by 12 equals 2.83, 42.99 divided by 12 equals 3.58. The Poland store charges 34.99 zł a month and 149.90 zł a year. The website says there is no free version, only a 3-day trial. The founder's TrustMRR text says freemium. The two statements do not agree.", "rows": [ [ "Premium, US App Store", "4.17", "11.99", "Year US$49.99, or US$39.99 with a discount. A week costs US$2.99" ], [ "Premium, Ukraine App Store", "2.83", "6.90", "Year US$33.90, or US$23.90 with a discount. A week costs US$2.99" ], [ "Premium, as the founder states it on TrustMRR", "3.58", "9.99", "Year US$42.99. A week costs US$5.99. Store and country not stated" ], [ "Free trial", "0", "0", "3 days, then a subscription, according to the website" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue in the 12 months to 13 October 2026", "value": "US$242,116", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR reads it from RevenueCat through an API key. Last synced 13 October 2026, 17:17 UTC. Gross revenue: before store commission and sales tax, after refunds, as RevenueCat defines revenue.", "src": [ 1, 8, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days", "value": "US$21,699", "grade": "A", "note": "7.7% lower than in the 30 days before, as the profile states.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "All-time revenue, June 2025 to 13 October 2026", "value": "US$278,257", "grade": "A", "note": "", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before 13 October 2025", "value": "US$36,141", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 278,257 minus 242,116 equals 36,141. This is the first four and a half months.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 13 October 2026", "value": "US$19,716", "grade": "A", "note": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is the value of all active subscriptions expressed per month. 3.7% lower than 30 days earlier. It was US$21,306 on 4 August 2026.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Active paid subscriptions", "value": "5,158", "grade": "A", "note": "5,122 on 4 August 2026 and 5,158 on 20 August 2026 in the archived pages.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "MRR per active subscription", "value": "about US$3.82 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 19,716 divided by 5,158 equals 3.82. The Ukraine store price is US$6.90 a month or US$33.90 a year.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Highest month", "value": "US$27,412 in July 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "Monthly history: November 2025 US$12,210, December US$10,663, January 2026 US$17,337, February US$16,880, March US$25,956, April US$21,732, May US$24,031, June US$23,942, July US$27,412, August US$25,383, September US$21,949.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "September 2026 against the July 2026 peak", "value": "19.9% lower", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 21,949 divided by 27,412 equals 0.801.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Last 6 months against the 6 months before", "value": "43.0% higher", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 142,475 against 99,641, which is 242,116 minus 142,475.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Last 3 months against the 3 months before", "value": "0.3% higher", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 71,360 against 71,115, which is 142,475 minus 71,360. Growth stopped in the summer of 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Twelve-month revenue after a 15% store commission", "value": "about US$205,800", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 242,116 multiplied by 0.85 equals 205,799. An illustration only. It assumes the 15% rate of Apple's Small Business Program and of Google Play subscriptions, and it does not remove sales tax or advertising cost.", "src": [ 1, 14, 15 ] }, { "fact": "Payment data provider", "value": "RevenueCat, connected with an API key", "grade": "A", "note": "The payments themselves go through Apple's App Store and Google Play.", "src": [ 1, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's figures after 12 months, June 2026", "value": "US$20,000 MRR, more than 4,700 paying subscribers, more than 327,000 installs", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder-written description on TrustMRR. It also says the app was profitable from the second month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Paying subscribers per install", "value": "about 1.4%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 4,700 divided by 327,000 equals 0.014. Both inputs are founder figures.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin", "value": "10%, then 90%, then 94%", "grade": "C", "note": "Not verified. TrustMRR's post of 7 July 2026 shows 10%. The archived page shows 90% on 4 August and 94% on 20 August, with the Meta Ads account not connected. The live profile shows 94%.", "src": [ 1, 2, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price on TrustMRR", "value": "US$600,000 on 7 July 2026, US$180,000 on 18 August 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "Recorded in the page data of the archived listing. Seven cuts in 42 days, 70% in total.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Last asking price against 12-month revenue", "value": "0.74 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 180,000 divided by 242,116 equals 0.74. TrustMRR's own multiple on 20 August was 0.61, which is 180,000 divided by twelve times the 30-day revenue of US$24,712.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Offers counted by TrustMRR", "value": "10 on 4 August 2026, 21 on 20 August 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "A counter in the archived page data. The content of the offers is not public.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Sale listing on 13 October 2026", "value": "closed", "grade": "B", "note": "The profile says the startup is not currently listed for sale. No source reports a sale or a price.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Developer named by the app stores", "value": "Oleksandr Yashchuk until spring 2026, Stellar Marketing AG in October 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "App Store: his name on 6 March 2026 in a price tracker. Google Play: his name on 15 April 2026 in an archived page. Both stores on 13 October 2026: Stellar Marketing AG, Zug, Switzerland. The App Store copyright line still names Yashchuk.", "src": [ 3, 4, 7, 16 ] }, { "fact": "Team size", "value": "not published", "grade": "C", "note": "One named founder. TrustMRR's record lists no co-founders. His sale notice says the founding team.", "src": [ 1, 2, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none, according to the founder", "grade": "C", "note": "The profile says fully self-funded. No investor is named anywhere.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "App Store ratings, 13 October 2026", "value": "Ukraine 3,918, Poland 630, United States 54", "grade": "B", "note": "Average 4.7 of 5 in Ukraine and Poland, 4.8 in the United States. From Apple's public lookup service.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Google Play, 13 October 2026", "value": "4.9 stars, about 4,680 reviews, more than 100,000 downloads", "grade": "B", "note": "On 15 April 2026 the archived page showed more than 1,000 downloads.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Website visitors in the last 30 days", "value": "78,056", "grade": "B", "note": "TrustMRR reads it from Google Analytics. The profile computes US$0.28 of revenue per visitor.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the headline date", "value": "16 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: June 2025 to October 2026. Apple gives 31 May 2025 as the release date in Ukraine and Poland.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "16 March 2025", "what": "The Internet Archive records the address trackai.app for the first time.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "31 May 2025", "what": "Release on the App Store in Ukraine and Poland, and on 2 June in the United States. The app's identifier, com.yashchuk.trackai, contains the founder's surname.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "Mid-2025", "what": "The founder writes later that the app was profitable from its second month and used no outside money.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "First month in the public revenue history: US$12,210. The website already loads Google Analytics, a Meta Pixel and a TikTok pixel.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "when": "December 2025", "what": "Blog articles dated 7 and 8 December 2025 are signed by Yashchuk as founder and product owner. Topics: counting calories in home-cooked meals, calculating a daily intake. The archived site of 19 November 2025 had no blog.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "March 2026", "what": "Revenue rises from US$16,880 in February to US$25,956, an increase of 53.8%.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "15 April 2026", "what": "The Android version is on Google Play under the founder's own name, with more than 1,000 downloads.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "After 12 months the founder reports US$20,000 MRR, more than 4,700 paying subscribers and more than 327,000 installs.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "7 July 2026", "what": "TrackAI joins TrustMRR and is listed for sale on the same day at US$600,000. The sale notice says the founding team is committing to a new venture and that the new Android app brings more than half of new installs.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2, 6 ] }, { "when": "July 2026", "what": "Best month in the history: US$27,412.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "20 July to 18 August 2026", "what": "Seven price cuts: US$450,000, US$400,000, US$350,000, US$300,000, US$250,000, US$200,000 and US$180,000. TrustMRR counts 21 offers by 20 August.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "28 August 2026", "what": "Apple's records show a second calorie app from Stellar Marketing AG with this release date: ModernBody - Food Scanner.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "28 September 2026", "what": "Yashchuk announces another app on X: AlertyPL, which warns of air alerts in Poland.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2026", "what": "RevenueCat data on TrustMRR: US$242,116 in 12 months, US$21,699 in 30 days, MRR US$19,716. The sale listing is closed. Both stores name Stellar Marketing AG as developer, and Google Play shows the name Modernbody above the app.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 3, 4 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A known product for a language market", "text": "Cal AI, which is on this site, had more than 15 million downloads and more than US$30 million in annual revenue when MyFitnessPal announced that it had bought it, so TrackAI's verified 12-month revenue is about 124 times smaller. What the small entrant does differently, by its own description, is the market: an app in Ukrainian and 14 other languages, local dishes such as borscht, varenyky and deruny, and buyers aged 25 to 45 in Ukraine and Central and Eastern Europe." }, { "title": "Rented parts", "text": "Nothing in the sources suggests that the company trained a model. The founder's profile lists React Native for the app and RevenueCat for the billing, and the website is made with a visual site builder. The team's own work is the food logic, the 15 languages and the screens around the photo." }, { "title": "Paid advertising as the stated channel", "text": "The profile names one marketing channel: Meta Ads, which means paid advertisements on Facebook and Instagram. The website has carried tracking scripts for Meta and TikTok advertising since at least November 2025. The founder did not build an audience first: he has 89 followers on X, and the posts this page read say nothing about how he found users." }, { "title": "Local prices and short plans", "text": "The Ukraine store charges US$6.90 a month and US$33.90 a year, against US$11.99 and US$49.99 in the US store. A weekly plan costs US$2.99 in both. The result is many subscribers who each pay little: US$3.82 of MRR per active subscription." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder-written part of the TrustMRR profile, from the source code of the website and from the store listings. They are grade B and C. The company does not publish which AI model reads the photos.", "items": [ "React Native for the phone app, according to the founder's profile. React Native is a framework that produces an iPhone app and an Android app from one code base written in JavaScript.", "RevenueCat for the subscriptions. It sits between the app and the two stores, records every purchase and renewal, and gives one revenue figure for both stores. TrustMRR reads that figure.", "The website is built with Framer, a visual website builder. Its source code names Framer in the archived copy of November 2025 and in October 2026.", "The same source code loads a Google Analytics tag, a Meta Pixel and a TikTok pixel. A pixel is a small script that reports visits to an advertising system, so that the system can count which advertisement brought a visitor.", "Distribution through Apple's App Store from 31 May 2025, and through Google Play by 15 April 2026 at the latest.", "The vision model is not named on the website, in the privacy policy or in the store text. The website says only that the app uses advanced AI and that its accuracy is good according to the company's own experiments.", "Marketing: Meta Ads is the only channel in the profile. The company also has a TikTok account with 46 videos and 1,948 followers, an Instagram account, a Facebook page and, since December 2025, a blog signed by the founder." ], "src": [ 1, 3, 4, 5, 17 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised easier tracking of health habits before a phone could read a photo of a meal. None of them is an exact earlier version of TrackAI: the database holds no failed calorie counter with founders that can be checked. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Airo Health", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$4M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A wearable device that tracks stress, exercise and nutrition intake and gives advice in real time.", "died": "Apple and Fitbit improved faster. The device did not justify its price, producing and shipping hardware overwhelmed the company, and no further funding came.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1465-airo-health" }, { "name": "Jawbone", "years": "1999 to 2017", "funding": "US$930M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Bluetooth headsets and fitness wristbands that turn a person's daily data into health advice.", "died": "Fitbit and Apple took the market. Product recalls, weak customer service and long court cases used up the money and the attention.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/257-jawbone" }, { "name": "Habit Labs", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$200K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Health Month, a web application in which people set health goals and keep them through game rewards and pressure from friends.", "died": "Users did not want to pay a subscription for it. MyFitnessPal and Fitbit added social and game features to products that were free or better known.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1623-habit-labs" }, { "name": "Habitual", "years": "2019 to 2021", "funding": "US$50K", "cause": "Ran out of cash", "promise": "A habit-tracking app with personal feedback that keeps daily routines going.", "died": "The product worked, but it had no marketing plan: no partners, no presence on social media, no campaigns. Competitors with data-driven marketing got the users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1973-habitual" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Before vision models, an app could not look at a plate. A calorie counter needed the user to search a food database and enter each portion by hand. The founder's profile calls this manual logging the reason why people quit calorie tracking within days. The hardware route failed too: Airo Health promised a wearable that tracks nutrition intake and closed in 2019, and Jawbone spent US$930 million on wearables and their apps.", "A rented vision model changed the input. A photo replaces the search and the typing, and the model is paid per request, so a small team can offer the same function as a large company. The cost is accuracy: in a 2025 study, two leading general models were wrong by about 36% on average for the energy of a meal. Habitual's cause of death also still applies. When everyone can rent the same model, the difference is who reaches the users, and TrackAI's stated answer is paid advertising in one language region." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The profit is the open question.", "text": "Every part can be rented: a vision model, React Native, RevenueCat and the two app stores. What TrackAI added is a market choice, with Ukrainian language, local dishes and local prices, and paid advertising to reach that market. The sources do not show what the advertising costs. The founder's profit margin figures range from 10% to 94%, and he offered the business for sale 13 months after launch at a price that he cut by 70% in six weeks.", "steps": [ "Take a consumer AI app that already sells well in English, and check whether your language region has a version with local content and local prices.", "Rent the model and the billing. Put your own work into the local food data, the first screens and a price test for each country.", "Release on both stores. The founder's sale notice says the Android version brought more than half of new installs soon after its release.", "Connect your payment data to a public verifier early, so that readers and buyers can check the revenue.", "Measure what one paying subscriber costs in advertising before you increase the spending, and keep that record: a buyer will ask for it." ], "open": "Other language regions where no local photo calorie counter leads the store charts. A 2024 study of nutrition apps in Australia's stores concluded that AI food recognition needs more training on mixed dishes and on culturally diverse foods, which is the gap a local app can fill." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Who owns it now", "text": "The founder listed TrackAI for sale on 7 July 2026 and wrote that the founding team was committing to a new venture. On 13 October 2026 the listing was closed, and both stores named Stellar Marketing AG as developer, a company entered in the Zug commercial register in November 2024 with marketing consulting as its purpose. The register notice names one board member, who is not Yashchuk. The App Store copyright line, the blog and the TrustMRR profile still carry his name. No source states a sale, a price or the present team size." }, { "title": "Accuracy of a photo estimate", "text": "TrackAI's website gives no error figure. It says the accuracy is good according to the company's own experiments. Independent tests show large errors. A 2025 study gave 52 standard food photos to three general models: ChatGPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet had a mean absolute percentage error of 35.8% for energy, Gemini 1.5 Pro had errors between 64.2% and 109.9% across nutrients, and all three underestimated more as portions grew. A 2024 study of nutrition apps concluded that automatic energy estimates from food image recognition were inaccurate. Neither study tested TrackAI." }, { "title": "Cal AI and MyFitnessPal", "text": "MyFitnessPal has owned Cal AI since December 2025 and has a meal scan of its own. Cal AI now uses MyFitnessPal's database of 20 million foods. TrackAI's protection is language and local food, and a larger company can add both." }, { "title": "Subscription churn", "text": "TrackAI sells weekly, monthly and yearly plans after a 3-day trial. RevenueCat's 2025 report on subscription apps, across all categories, found that nearly 30% of yearly subscriptions are cancelled in the first month, and that after one year 44.1% of yearly subscribers, 17.0% of monthly subscribers and 3.4% of weekly subscribers remain. TrackAI's own churn is not public: TrustMRR shows it only to logged-in users. The public figures point down: MRR fell 3.7% in the last 30 days, and September 2026 revenue was 19.9% below the July peak." }, { "title": "Store commission and store rules", "text": "The headline figure is gross. Apple's Small Business Program lowers the commission to 15% for developers with up to US$1 million of proceeds a year, and Google Play charges 15% on automatically renewing subscriptions. At 15%, US$242,116 becomes about US$205,800 before sales tax and advertising cost. Apple's program page also says that when an app is transferred, its proceeds for the calendar year count for all accounts in the transfer. Every payment goes through the two stores, so their rules decide the price of each sale." }, { "title": "The rented vision model", "text": "The company does not say which model reads the photos. The provider of that model sets the price per image and can change the model. The 2025 study shows how much the choice matters: the error for energy was 35.8% with two of the models and much higher with the third. A buyer of the business also takes over this dependency." }, { "title": "Numbers that do not agree", "text": "Profit margin: 10% in TrustMRR's post of 7 July 2026, 90% on 4 August, 94% on 20 August and in October, about 95% in the sale notice. No advertising cost is verified. Prices: the founder's profile says US$5.99 a week, US$9.99 a month and US$42.99 a year, and Apple's US page says US$2.99, US$11.99 and US$49.99. The profile says freemium, and the website says there is no free version. Users: about 400,000 in the profile, and more than 327,000 installs in the description." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://trackai.app/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6740784584" }, { "kind": "android", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yashchuk.trackai" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/trackai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of TrackAI, revenue synced 13 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/trackai", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile (https://trustmrr.com/startup/trackai.md) and the HTML page on 13 October 2026. Revenue, MRR and subscriptions come from RevenueCat through an API key. The description, the prices, the user count, the profit margin and the marketing channel are founder-written, grade C." }, { "title": "TrustMRR page of TrackAI as archived on 4 August and 20 August 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260820070404/https://trustmrr.com/startup/trackai", "grade": "B", "how": "Read both archived copies in full, including the page data. Source for the sale listing, the eight asking prices with their dates, the offer counts and the founder's sale notice. The notice itself is a founder statement, grade C." }, { "title": "Apple App Store listing of Calorie Counter: TrackAI, and Apple's lookup service for the United States, Poland and Ukraine, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6740784584", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the listing pages of the three countries and the lookup records. Source for the seller name, the copyright line, the release dates, the ratings, the languages, the in-app prices and the seller's second app." }, { "title": "Google Play listing of Calorie Counter: TrackAI, read 13 October 2026, with the archived copy of 15 April 2026", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yashchuk.trackai", "grade": "B", "how": "Read both copies. Source for the developer name on each date, the downloads, the rating and the developer's company address." }, { "title": "TrackAI website: home page, questions and answers, blog, terms and privacy policy, read 13 October 2026, with the archived copy of 19 November 2025", "url": "https://trackai.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product description, the trial, the founder's title, the blog dates and, from the page source code, the site builder and the tracking scripts." }, { "title": "X: TrustMRR's post of 7 July 2026 about TrackAI, and the founder's timeline", "url": "https://x.com/trust_mrr/status/2074619553808556516", "grade": "C", "how": "Read two pages of the timeline of @AlexYashchuk, December 2024 to October 2026, through api.fxtwitter.com. He reposted TrustMRR's post. The two pages contain no post of his own about TrackAI's marketing or revenue." }, { "title": "Swiss commercial register, entry of Stellar Marketing AG in Zug, and the company's website", "url": "https://www.zefix.ch/ZefixREST/api/v1/firm/1666200.json", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the register record and the founding notice of 21 November 2024, and the company's home and legal pages. Source for the seat, the date and the purpose. The website describes a digital marketing agency and does not mention TrackAI." }, { "title": "RevenueCat documentation: Overview metrics and Revenue chart", "url": "https://www.revenuecat.com/docs/dashboard-and-metrics/charts/revenue-chart", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the definitions of revenue, revenue net of taxes and proceeds on both pages (the second is https://www.revenuecat.com/docs/dashboard-and-metrics/overview). Source for the statement that revenue is before store fees and taxes." }, { "title": "TrustMRR notes for AI agents: how payment providers are connected", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/llms.txt", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the section on RevenueCat connections. It says that TrustMRR imports daily revenue, MRR and active subscriptions from RevenueCat's charts. It does not say that commission is deducted." }, { "title": "TechCrunch, 2 March 2026, Julie Bort: MyFitnessPal has acquired Cal AI, the viral calorie app built by teens", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/02/myfitnesspal-has-acquired-cal-ai-the-viral-calorie-app-built-by-teens/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for Cal AI's downloads and revenue, the date the deal closed and the food database." }, { "title": "Fridolfsson and others, 2025, Current Developments in Nutrition: Performance Evaluation of 3 Large Language Models for Nutritional Content Estimation from Food Images", "url": "https://europepmc.org/article/MED/41081011", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the abstract through the Europe PMC service, not the full paper. Source for the error figures of the three models." }, { "title": "Li and others, 2024, Nutrients: Evaluating the Quality and Comparative Validity of Manual Food Logging and Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Food Image Recognition in Apps for Nutrition Care", "url": "https://europepmc.org/article/MED/39125452", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the abstract through the Europe PMC service, not the full paper. Source for the conclusion on automatic energy estimates and on culturally diverse foods." }, { "title": "RevenueCat, State of Subscription Apps 2025", "url": "https://www.revenuecat.com/state-of-subscription-apps-2025/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the sections on cancellations and on retention after one year. A benchmark across the apps that use RevenueCat, not a figure about TrackAI." }, { "title": "Apple Developer: App Store Small Business Program", "url": "https://developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the program rules. Source for the 15% rate, the US$1 million limit and the rule on transferred apps." }, { "title": "Google Play Console Help: Service fees", "url": "https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/112622?hl=en", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the fee table. Source for the 15% rate on automatically renewing subscriptions." }, { "title": "App Pricing Lab, listing of Calorie Counter: TrackAI, last updated 6 March 2026", "url": "https://apppricinglab.com/app/apple/6740784584", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A third-party tracker of public App Store data. Cited only for the developer name on that date." }, { "title": "TikTok account of TrackAI, read 13 October 2026", "url": "https://www.tiktok.com/@trackai.app", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public counters in the page data: followers, videos and likes. The videos themselves were not watched." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/voicy/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/voicy.md", "slug": "voicy", "name": "Voicy", "country": "United Kingdom", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI dictation app for every text field", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-14", "launchLabel": "September 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$187K Stripe-verified revenue in 12 months, October 2026", "sticker": "$187K in 12 months", "outcomeUsd": 187354, "months": 25, "teamLabel": "1 founder with a day job, and a small team of unpublished size", "fundingLabel": "None; the About page says 100% bootstrapped", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "voice-audio", "channel": "search", "trend": "flat", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Productivity software" ], "product": "A dictation app for Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome, iPhone and Android. You press a keyboard shortcut and speak, and the text appears with punctuation in whatever app or website you are typing in. The speech is transcribed in the cloud by the open-source Whisper model through Groq's API, or, since 12 October 2026, offline on the computer.", "why": "It started as a free Chrome extension that the founder built for his father, then sold unlimited dictation everywhere for a low monthly price. The AI model is cheap to rent: Groq lists Whisper at US$0.04 to US$0.111 per hour of audio. Users came from Google: the site has more than 1,000 pages, one for each app and each need, and the founder says that an AI agent he made writes the blog posts.", "summary": [ "Voicy is a speech-to-text app: a program that turns spoken words into written text. It works by dictation, which means that you press a keyboard shortcut, speak, and the text appears in the field where your cursor is, in any app or website: Gmail, Word, Slack, ChatGPT or a code editor. The recognition is done by Whisper, a speech recognition model that OpenAI released as open source. Voicy's privacy policy says that the audio goes to the API of Groq, a cloud company that runs AI models for other companies; an API is a way for one program to call another program over the internet. Since 12 October 2026 the Mac, Windows and Linux apps can also transcribe offline, on the computer itself.", "Kourosh Ghaffari, a developer who describes himself as a solo founder from Iran, built the first version in London in 2024 for his father, who typed his emails with one finger. It started as a free Chrome extension, then became a Windows app and a Mac app with paid plans. On 13 October 2026 TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a company's payment account, showed US$187,354 of revenue in the last 12 months from Voicy's Stripe account (Stripe is a payment processor that takes card payments for online businesses), US$17,246 of it in the last 30 days, and MRR, monthly recurring revenue, the subscription income that repeats every month, of US$12,201 from 1,501 active subscriptions. The verified history starts in December 2025, so the 12-month figure is also the all-time figure on that account. The founder still has a day job, and he gives SEO, search engine optimization, the work of making pages appear high in Google results, as the reason for the growth: more than 1,000 pages bring 20,000 to 25,000 clicks a month.", "The revenue figures are grade A, because TrustMRR read them from Stripe through an API key. Everything about the team, the users and the marketing is the founder's own statement, grade C. Monthly revenue grew 2.16 times from December 2025 to April 2026 and has stayed between US$18,757 and US$20,564 a month since. AudioPen and Talknotes, also on this site, turn a voice note into clean text inside their own app. Voicy types into whatever text field is open, so its competitors are the dictation features that Apple and Microsoft build into their operating systems and other dictation apps such as Wispr Flow." ], "factsCaption": "US$187,354 of Stripe-verified revenue in the 12 months to 13 October 2026, US$17,246 of it in the last 30 days, and US$12,201 of MRR, read by TrustMRR from the company's Stripe account", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from Voicy's Stripe account through an API key; it is not a founder statement. A grade B value is a record kept by an outside platform: the Chrome Web Store or the Internet Archive. A grade C value is a statement by the founder or the company, or a profile field that the founder filled in. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a free Chrome extension for the founder's father to US$12,201 of monthly recurring revenue in about 25 months, while the founder kept a day job. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Voicy prices on 14 October 2026, read from the company's pricing page and the price answer on its home page (grade C)", "note": "Pro is US$8.49 billed monthly or US$82 billed yearly, which is US$6.83 a month and 19.5% less (the page rounds it to 20%). Lifetime is one payment of US$260, the price of about 31 months of monthly Pro, and it is never paid again. The Team plan needs at least 3 users; the page does not say how it is billed. Students and people with disabilities get 20% off, and the disability discount needs no proof. There is a 7-day money-back guarantee. In April and September 2025 the Internet Archive shows other plans: a 30-minute free trial, US$6.99 a month for 600 minutes and US$12.99 a month for unlimited recording, with no lifetime plan.", "rows": [ [ "Free trial", "0", "0", "30 minutes of recording, all features" ], [ "Pro", "6.83", "8.49", "unlimited recording and personal devices; US$82 a year" ], [ "Lifetime", "260 one-time", "", "unlimited recording and personal devices" ], [ "Team", "", "6.79", "per user, minimum 3 users; billing period not stated" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue in the last 12 months, to 13 October 2026", "value": "US$187,354", "grade": "A", "note": "Read by TrustMRR from Voicy's Stripe account through an API key, last synced on 13 October 2026 at 23:43 UTC. It equals the all-time total on that account, because the verified history starts in December 2025. The copy cached on 12 October showed US$186,894.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days, to 13 October 2026", "value": "US$17,246", "grade": "A", "note": "Same source. The stored 30-day snapshot shows US$17,268 and a fall of 14.0% from the 30 days before. It includes one-time Lifetime licences and yearly payments in full.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR, 13 October 2026", "value": "US$12,201 from 1,501 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "Monthly recurring revenue counts monthly plans at their price and yearly plans at one twelfth of the yearly price. Lifetime licences are not in it. TrustMRR shows MRR up 4.4% in the last 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Difference between 30-day revenue and MRR", "value": "US$5,045; revenue is 1.41 times MRR", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$17,246 minus US$12,201. Revenue can be above MRR because a US$260 Lifetime licence counts once in revenue and never in MRR, and a US$82 yearly payment counts in full in revenue but as US$6.83 in MRR. TrustMRR does not publish how much of each kind was sold.", "src": [ 1, 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue per month, December 2025 to September 2026", "value": "US$10,263 in December 2025, highest US$22,133 in April 2026, US$19,495 in September 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. Revenue grew 2.16 times from December to April, then stayed between US$18,757 and US$20,564 a month from May to September; September was 11.9% below April (calculated). October to the 13th: US$7,649.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR times 12", "value": "US$146,412 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$12,201 times 12. This counts only the subscriptions, not the Lifetime licences.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average MRR per active subscription", "value": "US$8.13", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$12,201 divided by 1,501. Close to the US$8.49 price of monthly Pro.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's MRR statements, September and October 2026", "value": "US$11,000 in September; US$12,000 in his profile in October", "grade": "C", "note": "Posts on X on 16, 17 and 30 September 2026, and his X profile read on 14 October. The TrustMRR figures give about US$11,687 of MRR 30 days before 13 October (calculated: US$12,201 divided by 1.044), so his statements agree with the verified figures.", "src": [ 15, 16, 19, 14, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Paying users, September 2026", "value": "over 2,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post, 30 September 2026. TrustMRR counts 1,501 active subscriptions. The sources do not explain the difference.", "src": [ 19, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Chrome extension users and rating", "value": "10,000 users; 4.6 stars from 102 ratings", "grade": "B", "note": "Chrome Web Store listing, read on 14 October 2026, marked Featured and updated on 7 September 2026. The company's home page says 10,000+ users and over 500 million words dictated.", "src": [ 10, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Visits from Google search", "value": "20,000 to 25,000 clicks a month to more than 1,000 pages", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's posts, 26 and 30 September 2026. He credits 'SEO + GEO'; GEO, generative engine optimization, means getting a product named in the answers of AI chat assistants. On 1 October he wrote that the site gets more than 1,000 clicks a day.", "src": [ 20, 19, 21 ] }, { "fact": "Speech recognition", "value": "the Whisper model through Groq's API, with servers in the EU and the US", "grade": "C", "note": "Voicy's privacy policy: the audio goes to Voicy's servers, then to Groq for transcription and for the text clean-up step, with Groq's zero data retention setting turned on. Voicy's Whisper page says that it uses OpenAI's Whisper API; the privacy policy names Groq.", "src": [ 6, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Groq's list price for Whisper", "value": "US$0.04 to US$0.111 per hour of audio", "grade": "C", "note": "Groq's documentation: US$0.04 for whisper-large-v3-turbo and US$0.111 for whisper-large-v3. At these prices, 10 hours of dictation a month cost US$0.40 to US$1.11 (calculated), against US$8.49 for monthly Pro. Voicy's own rates and the cost of the clean-up step are not published.", "src": [ 34 ] }, { "fact": "Offline mode", "value": "Mac, Windows and Linux, 25 languages, since 12 October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Changelog, version 3.0.0. The audio is then transcribed on the computer and is not sent to Voicy or to Groq. The sources do not name the model used offline.", "src": [ 8, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "90.0%", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot, outside its list of Stripe-verified metrics. The pricing page promises that the price will never be more than 20% above total costs, which allows a margin of at most 16.7% (calculated). The two figures do not agree unless the page counts costs that TrustMRR does not.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Price of unlimited recording", "value": "US$12.99 a month in 2025, US$8.49 a month in October 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "Internet Archive copies of the pricing page from 21 April and 16 September 2025, which also show a plan of US$6.99 a month for 600 minutes. Today's Pro is 34.6% cheaper than the 2025 unlimited plan (calculated).", "src": [ 12, 13, 5 ] }, { "fact": "iPhone app revenue, 3 September 2026", "value": "US$100 MRR, 0.9% of the total", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post.", "src": [ 24 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 founder with a day job, and a small team of unpublished size", "grade": "C", "note": "The About page says 'a small, bootstrapped team' and that support emails are read by 'me and the team'. The founder calls himself a solo founder (16 September 2026), works on Voicy 'after my 9-5' (17 September 2026) and has hired a growth person. His X profile gives his day job as product manager at Tiiny Host.", "src": [ 3, 15, 17, 18, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "About page: '100% bootstrapped, with no outside investment'. The TrustMRR profile says Bootstrapped. His X profile says 'Prev: Meetwaves (YC20)', an earlier company that is separate from Voicy.", "src": [ 3, 1, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Country", "value": "London, United Kingdom", "grade": "C", "note": "About page. The TrustMRR profile gives the country as AE, the United Arab Emirates. The sources do not explain the difference.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's other income, not in these figures", "value": "RomeoSEO at US$269 MRR, and sponsored YouTube videos", "grade": "C", "note": "RomeoSEO is an SEO tool that he announced on 30 September 2026, with a goal of US$1,000 MRR by the end of 2026; his X profile gives its MRR. On 4 September 2026 he wrote that 4 to 5 sponsored videos a month can make him more money than his MRR. TrustMRR lists Voicy as his only startup with verified revenue.", "src": [ 14, 19, 28, 25, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the first public copy of the site to the October 2026 figures", "value": "25 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: September 2024 to October 2026.", "src": [ 11, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2024", "what": "Kourosh Ghaffari builds a dictation tool in London for his father, who types emails with one finger. He is already using AI to dictate his own writing.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "9 September 2024", "what": "First Internet Archive copy of usevoicy.com: a speech-to-text Chrome extension with grammar and punctuation 'powered by AI', and 'it's free'.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "21 April 2025", "what": "The pricing page shows paid plans: a 30-minute free trial, US$6.99 a month for 600 minutes and US$12.99 a month for unlimited recording.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "By December 2025", "what": "Voicy has become a Windows app and then a Mac app. The changelog starts at version 1.8.9 and calls the earlier versions 'Built over a loooong time'.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "December 2025", "what": "First month of the Stripe history that TrustMRR verifies: US$10,263. The profile gives 24 November 2025 as the founded date.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "April 2026", "what": "Highest verified month so far: US$22,133, 2.16 times December.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "22 May 2026", "what": "Version 2.2.0 adds the transcription of audio files.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "9 July 2026", "what": "Version 2.3.3: users who invite friends get free months of Pro, and users can sign in with Microsoft.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "2 September 2026", "what": "The founder writes that the 20% disability discount, given without proof, has saved users over US$10,000 in two years, 80% of it in the last four months. He first sold Voicy to 'tech bros like myself' and changed after dozens of user interviews.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 23 ] }, { "when": "3 September 2026", "what": "The iPhone app reaches US$100 of MRR, 0.9% of the total.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 24 ] }, { "when": "16 and 17 September 2026", "what": "He describes himself as a 27-year-old solo founder from Iran at US$11,000 MRR, works on Voicy after his 9-to-5 job, and calls AI dictation 'the most basic thing that EVERYONE built since wispr flow'.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15, 16, 17 ] }, { "when": "26 September 2026", "what": "The site has more than 1,000 pages and 20,000 clicks a month from Google. He pays Framer US$250 a month for it and starts to move it into his own code.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 20 ] }, { "when": "30 September 2026", "what": "He announces RomeoSEO, built on Romeo, the AI agent that he says writes Voicy's blog posts, and gives Voicy's numbers: US$11,000 MRR, over 2,000 paying users and 25,000 monthly clicks from Google.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 19 ] }, { "when": "12 October 2026", "what": "Version 3.0.0 adds offline dictation on Mac, Windows and Linux in 25 languages. The same day he writes that growth has slowed down and that he will check his Stripe dashboard only once a week.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 22 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR sync: US$187,354 in the last 12 months, US$17,246 in the last 30 days, MRR of US$12,201 and 1,501 active subscriptions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A free extension first", "text": "The first product was a free Chrome extension that typed into any text field on any website. It collected users and ratings in the Chrome Web Store, which now marks it as Featured, with 10,000 users and 102 ratings. Paid plans and the desktop apps came later, and the free product became a 30-minute trial." }, { "title": "A page for every place where people type", "text": "The site has more than 1,000 pages, one for each app or need: dictation in Gmail, Word, Claude Code or Cursor, an alternative to Dragon or Apple Dictation, help for carpal tunnel syndrome, and versions in German, Spanish, French and Japanese. The founder says they bring 20,000 to 25,000 clicks a month from Google and that he wrote none of the blog posts himself: an AI agent that he built, Romeo, writes them." }, { "title": "The model is bought per hour, the product is sold per month", "text": "Voicy sends the audio to Whisper, an open model from OpenAI, running on Groq, which lists it at US$0.04 to US$0.111 per hour of audio. A customer pays US$8.49 a month for unlimited dictation. The product work is everything around the model: one shortcut that works in every app, punctuation, text replacements, custom modes and rewriting, on six platforms." }, { "title": "Low prices and discounts", "text": "Pro costs US$8.49 a month, 43% less than the US$15 of Wispr Flow's Pro plan (calculated). The price of unlimited recording fell from US$12.99 in 2025. Students and people with disabilities get 20% off, with no proof needed for the disability discount. The founder says that user interviews showed him that for some people dictation is an essential tool, not a way to write emails faster." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's pages, the founder's posts and the founder-written fields of the TrustMRR profile. They are grade C, except the Chrome Web Store record, which is grade B.", "items": [ "Desktop apps for Mac, Windows and Linux, a Chrome extension, and phone apps for iPhone and Android. The tech stack field on TrustMRR lists Electron, React, React Native, Kotlin and SwiftUI.", "Cloud transcription: the audio goes to Voicy's servers in the EU or the US (US servers only for US users), then to Groq's API, which runs the Whisper model and also does the text clean-up. Groq's zero data retention setting is on, and Voicy says that it stores no recordings or transcripts.", "Offline transcription on the computer since version 3.0.0 of 12 October 2026, in 25 of the more than 50 languages.", "Payments through Stripe, which TrustMRR reads through an API key.", "The website ran on Framer for US$250 a month until September 2026, when the founder moved it into his own code. His next steps, posted on 1 October 2026, were A/B tests with PostHog and Microsoft Clarity to see where visitors leave.", "Marketing: search pages and blog posts, the blog posts written by his own AI agent, a YouTube channel with 15,000 subscribers after 100 videos, free months for referrals, an affiliate program, and the founder's posts on X. No source mentions paid ads." ], "src": [ 1, 6, 8, 10, 20, 21, 26, 4 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to sell a better way to type or to talk to a computer, against free tools from the companies that own the platform. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Whirlscape", "years": "2014 to 2017", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Minuum, a one-line phone keyboard that saved screen space.", "died": "The default keyboards on the phones got better AI predictions and users stayed with them. The new layout did not get past novelty.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1129-whirlscape" }, { "name": "Petalite", "years": "2014 to 2025", "funding": "US$12M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A privacy-first voice assistant that ran locally on the device.", "died": "It could not compete with the subsidized hardware, the training data and the ecosystems of the large technology companies, although its privacy was better.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2471-petalite" }, { "name": "Kite DevTool", "years": "2014 to 2024", "funding": "US$21M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "AI code completion inside the programmer's editor, years before GitHub Copilot.", "died": "The free version did not turn into enough paying users, and GitHub Copilot won with its distribution and a stronger OpenAI model.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2491-kite-devtool" }, { "name": "Tellme", "years": "1999 to 2011", "funding": "US$238M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Information and transactions by voice, over the phone.", "died": "Smartphones moved people to apps with screens, and the voice service did not adapt.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/612-tellme" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the four sold a better input tool, a keyboard, a voice assistant, a code completer or a voice service, and lost to a free tool from the company that owned the phone, the speaker or the code editor. Voicy is in the same position: Apple Dictation and Windows voice typing come with the operating system at no extra price, and Apple's guide says that its dictation adds punctuation by itself and has no time limit.", "Two things are different. First, the model is no longer the hard part. Whisper is open, and Groq rents it out at a few cents per hour of audio, so a solo developer can offer recognition in more than 50 languages without training a model, and can spend his time on the shortcut, the formatting and the six apps. Second, Voicy gets its users from search, not from an app store or a device: it has a page for every app, every competitor and every need, and the founder says that an AI agent that he built writes the blog posts." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product, no. The method, yes.", "text": "A dictation app is easy to build in 2026, and the founder himself calls it the most basic idea that everyone built after Wispr Flow. The method is still open to copy: rent an open model by the hour, sell a flat monthly price, and get users from search pages written for each app and each need, including groups of users that the larger products do not target, such as people with disabilities.", "steps": [ "Start with a free browser extension that works in every text field, and collect ratings in the store.", "Use an open model through a pay-per-hour API, and check that a heavy user costs less than a dollar a month.", "Write one search page for each app, each competitor and each need, in several languages.", "Offer offline processing for people who will not send their voice to a server." ], "open": "Dictation for groups with specific needs, which Voicy already targets with its own pages: people with disabilities, carpal tunnel syndrome or dyslexia, users of older dictation software such as Dragon, and programmers who dictate prompts to coding agents." }, "watch": [ { "title": "The operating systems include dictation", "text": "Apple Dictation on the Mac and voice typing on Windows 10 and 11 come with the operating system at no extra price. Apple's guide says that its dictation inserts commas, periods and question marks in supported languages, has no time limit, and on some setups is processed on the device. Microsoft's voice typing uses Azure Speech services and needs an internet connection. Voicy's home page claims 99% accuracy against about 90% for both; that is the company's own comparison, with no published test." }, { "title": "Many dictation apps do the same thing", "text": "Wispr Flow has a free plan with 2,000 words a week on desktop and Pro at US$15 per user a month, or US$12 billed yearly. Superwhisper has a free tier with unlimited use of Whisper models, Pro at US$8.49 a month and a lifetime option. MacWhisper transcribes audio files with the Whisper, Qwen and Nvidia Parakeet models. The founder calls AI dictation 'the most basic thing that EVERYONE built since wispr flow', and on 29 September 2026 he answered a post that called Wispr Flow a feature, not a product, with 'We do the same thing'." }, { "title": "One model, one provider", "text": "Cloud transcription and the text clean-up both run on Groq's API. If Groq changes its prices, limits or terms, Voicy's costs change with them. Whisper is open source, so other providers can run the same model, and since 12 October 2026 the desktop apps can transcribe offline. The offline mode is only for Mac, Windows and Linux." }, { "title": "Lifetime licences do not recur", "text": "The US$260 Lifetime licence is paid once. It counts in the 30-day revenue, which is US$5,045 above MRR, but it is not paid again, while a lifetime user who dictates in the cloud still costs Groq fees every month. Yearly plans also count in full in the month when they are paid. The 12-month headline includes both kinds of payment; MRR, US$12,201, is the part that repeats." }, { "title": "Revenue flat since April 2026", "text": "Verified revenue grew 2.16 times from December 2025 to April 2026, then stayed between US$18,757 and US$20,564 a month. The last 30 days were 14.0% below the 30 days before, although MRR rose 4.4%. On 12 October 2026 the founder wrote that growth has slowed down. The verified history covers only the Stripe account that starts in December 2025; any earlier revenue is not shown." }, { "title": "A part-time founder with a second product", "text": "The founder has a day job as a product manager, makes sponsored YouTube videos, and launched a second product, RomeoSEO, in September 2026. The team size is not published. The About page says that Voicy is profitable, and TrustMRR shows a 90.0% profit margin for the last 30 days, which does not agree with the pricing page's promise that the price will never be more than 20% above total costs." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://usevoicy.com/" }, { "kind": "chrome", "url": "https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hgegmplalfpnkfahiikedaghinbocfdd" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/voicy" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: Voicy, payment-verified revenue profile, synced 13 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/voicy", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile (https://trustmrr.com/startup/voicy.md) in full, live copy synced on 13 October 2026 at 23:43 UTC, and compared it with the copy cached on 12 October. The revenue, MRR, subscription and monthly figures were read from Stripe through an API key. The description, founded date, pricing, funding, country, tech stack and profit margin fields are not in the verified list and are grade C." }, { "title": "TrustMRR founder page: Kourosh Ghaffari (@buildingwaves)", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/founder/buildingwaves", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. Ties the founder's name and X account to Voicy, his only startup with verified revenue on TrustMRR." }, { "title": "Voicy: About Voicy, our story", "url": "https://usevoicy.com/about/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founder, the reason for the product, the founding in London in 2024, the team and the funding." }, { "title": "Voicy home page", "url": "https://usevoicy.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 14 October 2026. Source for the privacy answers, the price answer with the yearly price, the user and word counts, and the comparison with Apple and Windows dictation." }, { "title": "Voicy pricing page", "url": "https://usevoicy.com/pricing/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 14 October 2026. Source for the plans, the discounts and the fair pricing promise." }, { "title": "Voicy privacy policy", "url": "https://usevoicy.com/legal-pages/privacy-policy/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for Whisper, Groq, the server locations, the zero data retention setting and the offline mode." }, { "title": "Voicy: Best OpenAI Whisper alternative 2026", "url": "https://usevoicy.com/whisper-ai-alternative/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company says that it uses OpenAI's Whisper API and explains the low price by the small team." }, { "title": "Voicy changelog", "url": "https://usevoicy.com/changelog/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the release dates from December 2025 to 12 October 2026 and the order of the platforms." }, { "title": "Voicy refund policy", "url": "https://usevoicy.com/legal-pages/refund-policy/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 7-day money-back guarantee." }, { "title": "Chrome Web Store: Voicy, Voice to Text Powered by AI", "url": "https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/voicy-voice-to-text-power/hgegmplalfpnkfahiikedaghinbocfdd", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the listing on 14 October 2026. A record kept by Google: users, ratings, the Featured mark and the update date." }, { "title": "Internet Archive copy of usevoicy.com, 9 September 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240909101234/https://usevoicy.com/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The earliest copy in the archive's index; it offers a free Chrome extension." }, { "title": "Internet Archive copy of the Voicy pricing page, 21 April 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250421105504/https://usevoicy.com/pricing", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 2025 plans and prices." }, { "title": "Internet Archive copy of the Voicy pricing page, 16 September 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250916040110/https://usevoicy.com/pricing", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The same plans and prices as in April 2025." }, { "title": "Kourosh Ghaffari's X profile, @BuildingWaves", "url": "https://x.com/BuildingWaves", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through the fxtwitter API on 14 October 2026. The profile text gives Voicy at US$12,000 MRR, RomeoSEO at US$269 MRR, his job at Tiiny Host and Meetwaves as a previous company." }, { "title": "Kourosh Ghaffari on X, 16 September 2026: solo founder from Iran, US$11,000 MRR", "url": "https://x.com/BuildingWaves/status/2100166642043150608", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in his timeline through the fxtwitter API." }, { "title": "Kourosh Ghaffari on X, 17 September 2026: the most basic thing that everyone built since Wispr Flow", "url": "https://x.com/BuildingWaves/status/2100597881334091796", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in his timeline through the fxtwitter API." }, { "title": "Kourosh Ghaffari on X, 17 September 2026: work after his 9-to-5 job", "url": "https://x.com/BuildingWaves/status/2100589217076465971", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in his timeline through the fxtwitter API." }, { "title": "Kourosh Ghaffari on X, 17 September 2026: hiring a growth person for Voicy", "url": "https://x.com/BuildingWaves/status/2100525773161435512", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in his timeline through the fxtwitter API." }, { "title": "Kourosh Ghaffari on X, 30 September 2026: US$11,000 MRR, 2,000 paying users, Romeo", "url": "https://x.com/BuildingWaves/status/2105270107513700367", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in his timeline through the fxtwitter API. Source for the user count, the Google clicks and the AI agent." }, { "title": "Kourosh Ghaffari on X, 26 September 2026: 1,000 pages and 20,000 clicks a month", "url": "https://x.com/BuildingWaves/status/2103852055651811424", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in his timeline through the fxtwitter API. Source for the site size and the Framer cost." }, { "title": "Kourosh Ghaffari on X, 1 October 2026: raising the conversion rate", "url": "https://x.com/BuildingWaves/status/2105652380717175260", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in his timeline through the fxtwitter API. Source for the daily clicks, the move from Framer and the testing tools." }, { "title": "Kourosh Ghaffari on X, 12 October 2026: checking Stripe once a week", "url": "https://x.com/BuildingWaves/status/2109694679671505125", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in his timeline through the fxtwitter API. Source for the slower growth." }, { "title": "Kourosh Ghaffari on X, 2 September 2026: US$10,000 saved with the disability discount", "url": "https://x.com/BuildingWaves/status/2095060313997729832", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in his timeline through the fxtwitter API." }, { "title": "Kourosh Ghaffari on X, 3 September 2026: US$100 MRR for the iPhone app", "url": "https://x.com/BuildingWaves/status/2095441636046381564", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in his timeline through the fxtwitter API." }, { "title": "Kourosh Ghaffari on X, 4 September 2026: sponsored videos and MRR", "url": "https://x.com/BuildingWaves/status/2095892594664603709", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in his timeline through the fxtwitter API." }, { "title": "Kourosh Ghaffari on X, 23 September 2026: 15,000 YouTube subscribers", "url": "https://x.com/BuildingWaves/status/2102779647071322612", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in his timeline through the fxtwitter API." }, { "title": "Kourosh Ghaffari on X, 29 September 2026: reply to a post about Wispr Flow", "url": "https://x.com/BuildingWaves/status/2104936612375527601", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full with the quoted post in his timeline through the fxtwitter API." }, { "title": "Kourosh Ghaffari on X, 20 September 2026: goal for RomeoSEO", "url": "https://x.com/BuildingWaves/status/2101677756132262199", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in his timeline through the fxtwitter API." }, { "title": "Apple Support: Use Dictation on Mac", "url": "https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/use-dictation-mh40584/mac", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on starting Dictation, punctuation, time limits and on-device processing." }, { "title": "Microsoft Support: Use voice typing to talk instead of type on your PC", "url": "https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/use-voice-typing-to-talk-instead-of-type-on-your-pc-fec94565-c4bd-329d-e59a-af033fa5689f", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the Windows 11 section on how voice typing works and what it needs." }, { "title": "Wispr Flow pricing page", "url": "https://wisprflow.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 14 October 2026. Source for the free plan limit and the Pro prices." }, { "title": "Superwhisper home page", "url": "https://superwhisper.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 14 October 2026. Source for the free tier, the Pro price and the lifetime option." }, { "title": "MacWhisper on Gumroad", "url": "https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper", "grade": "C", "how": "The page loads by script; read its title and description in the page source." }, { "title": "Groq documentation: Speech to text", "url": "https://console.groq.com/docs/speech-to-text", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the model and price tables. Source for the Whisper prices per hour of audio." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/superpower-chatgpt/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/superpower-chatgpt.md", "slug": "superpower-chatgpt", "name": "Superpower ChatGPT", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Browser extension for ChatGPT", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-14", "launchLabel": "December 2022", "outcomeLabel": "More than US$20K a month, August 2024", "sticker": "Over $20K a month", "outcomeUsd": 240000, "months": 20, "teamLabel": "1 founder, alone from 2022 to 2026", "fundingLabel": "None found", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "ai-model-tools", "channel": "platform", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Productivity software" ], "product": "A free browser extension for the ChatGPT website that adds folders and subfolders, search in the full chat history, bulk export to TXT, Markdown, JSON and PDF, pinned messages, a prompt library and a tree map of conversation branches. A Pro plan removes the limits. It works inside the user's own ChatGPT account.", "why": "It shipped within a week of ChatGPT's release, when ChatGPT had no folders and weak search, and it was free, so it spread through the Chrome Web Store. A daily AI newsletter shown inside the extension turned the users into an audience that sponsors paid to reach, and a Pro plan added subscriptions ten months after launch.", "summary": [ "Superpower ChatGPT is a browser extension, a small program that the browser loads into a web page to add features to it. It runs on OpenAI's ChatGPT website and adds what the page lacked: folders and subfolders for conversations, search in the whole chat history, bulk export, pinned messages, a prompt library, highlights and a tree map of conversation branches. It does not sell access to an AI model; the user signs in to ChatGPT as usual, and OpenAI bills its own plans separately. The core features are free. A Pro plan costs US$10 a month billed yearly or US$15 billed monthly.", "Saeed Ezzati, a full-stack engineer in San Francisco with about ten years of experience, built the first version in three days and released it on the Chrome Web Store within a week of ChatGPT's release in late 2022. At the time he was posting the growth of the AI writing startup Copy.ai as \"our startup\". He kept the extension free and earned money from Superpower Daily, a daily AI newsletter that he showed inside it: about US$250 in March 2023, then US$100,000 to US$150,000 a year from the newsletter by November 2023. He switched on the Pro subscription in September 2023. In August 2024 Starter Story reported more than US$20,000 a month, and in July 2026 he wrote that the business has a five-figure MRR, monthly recurring revenue, the income that repeats every month, with 150,000 weekly active users and 350,000 newsletter subscribers. He still runs it alone.", "Every money figure on this page is the founder's own statement, grade C, and the 2026 figure is only a range: five figures means US$10,000 to US$99,999 a month. No payment processor has confirmed it. A TrustMRR profile with a similar name, Superpower for AI, belongs to a different seller and is not used here. The Chrome and Firefox user counts and ratings are the stores' own figures. The page also shows what happened to earlier companies that built on a platform they did not control." ], "factsCaption": "A free extension that earned first from its newsletter, then also from a Pro plan, to more than US$20,000 a month in August 2024 and five figures a month in July 2026, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a statement by the founder in his posts and interviews, by the company on its own pages, or a third-party estimate that says so. A grade B value is a count published by the Chrome Web Store, by Mozilla or by GitHub, not by the founder. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No money value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a three-day project in the first week of ChatGPT to a five-figure monthly business run by one person, in about three and a half years. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Superpower ChatGPT prices in October 2026, read from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "Pro is a subscription: US$120 billed once a year, which saves US$60 compared with paying US$15 each month. The Free plan keeps the core organization tools with limits. ChatGPT Plus and the other OpenAI plans are separate and are billed by OpenAI. The page also describes Showcase, where users publish AI image galleries; until 31 October 2026 Showcase sellers receive the sale price minus Stripe's processing fees, with no Superpower fee.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "core workspace tools, with caps" ], [ "Pro", "10", "15", "no caps; full tree map, highlights and annotations, audio player" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue per month, August 2024", "value": "more than US$20,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Starter Story video interview of 18 August 2024. Its description says he built the extension to over US$20,000 a month. The sources do not split this between Pro subscriptions and newsletter sponsors.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the August 2024 figure", "value": "more than US$240,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$20,000 times 12. This is the headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month, July 2026", "value": "five figures, which means US$10,000 to US$99,999", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in the Indie Hackers article of 8 July 2026 and on X on 16 July 2026: \"5-figure MRR\". The article's header gives more than US$10,000 a month and says this is the total of the business, extension and newsletter together.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Newsletter revenue, November 2023", "value": "US$100,000 to US$150,000 a year", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder quoted in a customer story by beehiiv, the newsletter platform that he uses. Divided by 12 on this page: about US$8,333 to US$12,500 a month.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, March and April 2023", "value": "about US$250 in March; about US$650 in April by the time of the interview", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview published 23 May 2023. The money came from newsletter sponsors and donations, because the extension was free. He expected about US$1,000 by the end of April.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Newsletter subscribers", "value": "96,000 in July 2023; more than 180,000 in September 2023; more than 350,000 in July 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's posts on X of 6 July 2023 and 1 September 2023, and the Indie Hackers article. In July 2023 he removed inactive subscribers on purpose to keep the count under 100,000; the open rate was 32%.", "src": [ 8, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Newsletter sponsor price, September 2023", "value": "minimum spend US$4,000, average US$6,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X of 1 September 2023. Some placements were already sold until November.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Chrome Web Store, 14 October 2026", "value": "100,000 users; 4.6 stars from about 3,700 ratings; Featured", "grade": "B", "note": "Google's own figures on the listing, which is titled Superpower for ChatGPT. Version 8.4.9, updated 13 October 2026. The developer has declared itself a trader under EU rules.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Firefox Add-ons, 14 October 2026", "value": "1,610 average daily users; 3.36 stars from 136 ratings", "grade": "B", "note": "Mozilla's own record. Listed since 22 January 2023, version 8.4.9. Calculated on this page: about 1.6% of the Chrome user count.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Downloads and weekly active users, July 2026", "value": "more than 420,000 downloads; more than 150,000 weekly active users", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in the Indie Hackers article and on X. He also reports thousands of reviews across browser stores.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Installs, spring 2023", "value": "almost 80,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview published 23 May 2023. The Discord group then had almost 2,000 users.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Pro price, October 2026", "value": "US$10 a month billed yearly (US$120), or US$15 billed monthly", "grade": "C", "note": "Company pricing page. The Free plan costs nothing.", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "fact": "First paid plan", "value": "September 2023, almost ten months after launch", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X of 27 September 2023: \"Turned on Superpower ChatGPT Pro subscription last night. Almost 10 months after I first launched it.\"", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Product releases since December 2022", "value": "more than 500", "grade": "C", "note": "Company pricing page, which also calls it the first ChatGPT browser extension.", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 person", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder, July 2026: \"I still run it as a solo founder.\"", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions a funding round. A third-party teardown of July 2026 lists the stage as bootstrapped and revenue and funding as not disclosed.", "src": [ 1, 19 ] }, { "fact": "Public code of the early versions", "value": "1,703 stars and 277 forks on GitHub", "grade": "B", "note": "A fork is a copy of the code made by another GitHub user. GitHub's record of the repository saeedezzati/superpower-chatgpt: created 14 April 2023, last updated 18 June 2024.", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the August 2024 figure", "value": "20 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: December 2022 to August 2024.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Late 2022", "what": "ChatGPT launches. Ezzati, a full-stack engineer in San Francisco, builds the first version of the extension two or three days later, for his own use.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 1 ] }, { "when": "December 2022", "what": "Release on the Chrome Web Store, within a week of ChatGPT's release. In the same weeks he posts the user and revenue milestones of Copy.ai as \"our startup\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 7, 8 ] }, { "when": "22 January 2023", "what": "The Firefox version is listed.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "March to April 2023", "what": "About US$250 of revenue in March and about US$650 in April, from newsletter sponsors and donations. Almost 80,000 installs.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "14 April 2023", "what": "He publishes the code on GitHub, because some users do not install an extension whose code they cannot read.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14, 5 ] }, { "when": "6 July 2023", "what": "The newsletter has 96,000 subscribers and a 32% open rate.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "9 August 2023", "what": "The Chrome Web Store marks the extension as Featured.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "1 September 2023", "what": "More than 180,000 newsletter subscribers. Sponsor placements sold until November, from US$4,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "27 September 2023", "what": "He writes that he switched on the Pro subscription the night before, almost ten months after launch.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "17 November 2023", "what": "beehiiv reports that the newsletter earns US$100,000 to US$150,000 a year and that the extension and the newsletter together reach 380,000 people.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "26 November 2023", "what": "He asks Google in public about four look-alike ChatGPT extensions with the same screenshot. The next day he writes that more keep appearing.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "18 August 2024", "what": "Starter Story publishes a video interview: more than US$20,000 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "when": "13 December 2024", "what": "OpenAI adds Projects to ChatGPT, with custom folders for chats, files and instructions.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "10 April 2025", "what": "OpenAI announces that ChatGPT memory can now refer to all past chats.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "when": "8 July 2026", "what": "Indie Hackers interview: more than 420,000 downloads, 150,000 weekly active users, 350,000 newsletter subscribers, five-figure MRR, still one person.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "16 July 2026", "what": "Version 8, with an ad blocker for the sponsored cards inside ChatGPT and better export and print tools.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2026", "what": "Version 8.4.9 on the Chrome Web Store, with 100,000 users and 4.6 stars from about 3,700 ratings.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 10 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Speed", "text": "He built the first version in three days and released it within a week of ChatGPT's launch. In spring 2023 he said that no other extension offered folders and search, and that finding users had never been this easy. The company now calls it the first ChatGPT browser extension, with more than 500 releases since December 2022." }, { "title": "A newsletter inside the extension", "text": "He did not want to put ads in the middle of the ChatGPT interface, so he put a daily AI newsletter inside the extension, then moved it to beehiiv with a link back to the extension in every issue. It grew from 96,000 subscribers in July 2023 to more than 350,000 in 2026, with sponsor placements from US$4,000. By November 2023 it earned US$100,000 to US$150,000 a year." }, { "title": "Free first, Pro after ten months", "text": "The extension was free for almost ten months before he switched on a Pro subscription in September 2023. His rule is that the free plan must feel like the real product, not a demo, and that Pro is for heavier use, higher limits and advanced tools. Pro now costs US$10 a month billed yearly or US$15 monthly." }, { "title": "The stores as the sales channel", "text": "Users find it in the Chrome Web Store, which marked it as Featured in August 2023 and in October 2026 shows 100,000 users and 4.6 stars from about 3,700 ratings. A Firefox version has existed since January 2023. In his words, Reddit, reviews, Discord, emails and support all became his product research." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's interviews, his replies under the Indie Hackers article, the company's pages and the public code record. They are grade C, except the GitHub and store records, which are grade B.", "items": [ "Built in three days as a Chrome extension for his own use, on top of the ChatGPT web page, and released within a week of ChatGPT's launch.", "It is a workspace layer on OpenAI's page: the user signs in to ChatGPT as usual, and OpenAI bills its own plans separately.", "Written in JavaScript. The code of the early versions has been public on GitHub since April 2023; the public repository was last updated in June 2024.", "In spring 2023 the founder named GitHub, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, AWS and Discord as tools he uses. The Discord group had almost 2,000 users.", "The newsletter first appeared inside the extension. He then moved the issues and the contacts to beehiiv.", "Payments go through Stripe, according to the company's pricing page and the payment link on its home page.", "OpenAI shows different versions of ChatGPT to different users at the same time, so the extension supports several variants of the page, and each fix must pass Chrome Web Store review before users get it." ], "src": [ 5, 1, 6, 12, 13, 14, 11 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database built on top of a platform that they did not control, and the platform owner copied the feature, cut off access or kept changing the interface. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Xmarks", "years": "2006 to 2014", "funding": "US$9M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A browser extension that synced your bookmarks and tabs across browsers.", "died": "Chrome, Firefox and Safari built sync in, for free.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/762-xmarks" }, { "name": "Readability", "years": "2009 to 2015", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A browser extension for clutter-free reading of any web article.", "died": "Browsers added a free reader mode, and few readers paid.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/485-readability" }, { "name": "Xobni", "years": "2006 to 2013", "funding": "US$42M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A smarter inbox inside Microsoft Outlook.", "died": "It depended on Outlook, which Microsoft improved itself. Yahoo bought the remains.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/763-xobni" }, { "name": "Meerkat", "years": "2015 to 2016", "funding": "US$14M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Live video from your phone to your Twitter followers.", "died": "Its growth ran on Twitter's network. Twitter bought a rival, Periscope, and cut off Meerkat's access.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2194-meerkat" }, { "name": "Flux", "years": "2015 to 2018", "funding": "US$7M", "cause": "Team/Founder Conflict", "promise": "One inbox for Slack, email, WhatsApp and the other messaging apps.", "died": "The platforms kept changing and breaking the integrations, and the money went into repairs.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1901-flux" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the five built on a platform that it did not own. The platform owner then added the same feature for free, cut off access, or kept changing until the repairs cost more than the product earned. Superpower ChatGPT is in the same position on the ChatGPT website: OpenAI added Projects, with custom folders for chats, in December 2024 and memory across all past chats in April 2025, and every change to the page can break the extension.", "Two things differ. It was built by one person in a few days and is still run by one person, where the predecessors raised US$5 million to US$42 million. And it built a second asset that does not depend on the ChatGPT page: a newsletter with 350,000 subscribers that sponsors pay to reach. TypingMind, also on this site, replaces the ChatGPT window with its own app that calls the models through the customer's API key (a password that lets a program use a model on the customer's account), while Superpower ChatGPT adds features to OpenAI's own page, so its core features are free but it breaks when OpenAI changes the page." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The timing, no. The structure, yes.", "text": "Being first with folders and search for ChatGPT was possible only in the months after its launch in late 2022, and OpenAI has since built folders and memory itself. The structure can be copied: a free extension on a new product that is growing fast, an audience channel built into the extension, and a paid plan for heavy users once the free version is part of their daily work.", "steps": [ "When a new web product becomes popular and its interface lacks basic organization, ship an extension that adds it within days.", "Keep the core free, so that store ratings and word of mouth do the marketing.", "Put a channel inside the product, such as a daily newsletter, and sell sponsorships to that audience.", "Add a paid plan for heavy users once they depend on the free version.", "Test against every variant of the host page, because the host shows different versions to different users." ], "open": "The newer AI products whose web pages still lack organization tools. The TrustMRR profile of a different seller shows a suite of such extensions for Gemini, Claude, NotebookLM and ChatGPT, with most of its small verified revenue, US$14,533 in total, from the Gemini extension." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Self-reported, and only a range", "text": "All money figures are the founder's own. Five figures a month can mean anything from US$10,000 to US$99,999, and no source splits it between Pro subscriptions and newsletter sponsors. The more exact figure, more than US$20,000 a month, is from August 2024. A third-party teardown in July 2026 lists revenue as not disclosed." }, { "title": "OpenAI ships the same features", "text": "OpenAI added Projects, with custom folders for chats, on 13 December 2024, and memory that refers to all past chats on 10 April 2025. Each built-in feature removes a reason to install the extension. The extension now lets users move chats into OpenAI's projects as well as into its own folders." }, { "title": "Every change to the ChatGPT page can break it", "text": "The extension works by changing OpenAI's web page. The founder writes that ChatGPT's interface, its DOM structure (the tree of page elements that a script reads), its buttons and its routes kept changing, and that OpenAI runs experiments, so different users see different versions at the same time. In July 2026 he wrote that, starting over, he would invest earlier in automated testing and resilience against these changes." }, { "title": "Store review and store rules", "text": "Every update must pass Chrome Web Store review, which the founder says takes from a few hours to a few days, so users can leave while a finished fix waits. The store's spam policy forbids one developer or related accounts from publishing several extensions with duplicate functionality, and the founder has asked Google in public to explain four look-alike extensions." }, { "title": "Copycats and look-alike names", "text": "In November 2023 the founder showed four ChatGPT extensions with the same screenshot, all with 1,000,000+ users and all but one with exactly 22 five-star reviews, and the next day wrote \"They keep popping up\". The code of the early versions is public on GitHub with 277 forks. This extension's own store listing is titled Superpower for ChatGPT, and a different seller, in the Czech Republic and founded in December 2025, now sells a suite called Superpower for AI that includes an extension with the same name. Its TrustMRR profile shows US$14,533 of verified revenue in total." }, { "title": "Sponsor income must be sold again", "text": "In November 2023 the newsletter alone earned US$100,000 to US$150,000 a year from sponsors. Sponsors buy single placements, with a minimum spend of US$4,000 in September 2023, so this part of the revenue must be sold again and again." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://spchatgpt.com" }, { "kind": "chrome", "url": "https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/amhmeenmapldpjdedekalnfifgnpfnkc" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Indie Hackers, 8 July 2026, by James Fleischmann: Building a free Chrome extension in 3 days and turning it into a 5-figure-MRR ecosystem", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/tech/building-a-free-chrome-extension-in-3-days-and-turning-it-into-a-5-figure-mrr-ecosystem-3rIbjigZxiFsrgqJjJYp", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the free part in full and the founder's replies under it, July 2026. The rest of the article is for subscribers and could not be read. Source for the 2026 figures, the solo team and the account of ChatGPT changes and store review." }, { "title": "Starter Story on YouTube, 18 August 2024: How I Built It: $20K/Month Chrome Extension", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ty9ZcimL6VE", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the video page: title, description, publication date and view count. The captions could not be downloaded." }, { "title": "Podwise page for the Starter Story episode with Saeed Ezzati", "url": "https://podwise.ai/episodes/1866271", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the free summary and chapter list, which include the monetization from free to premium features and the OpenAI risk. The transcript needs a login." }, { "title": "Superpower ChatGPT on X (@spchatgpt), posts of 16 to 31 July 2026: version 8 and the founder's thread on his Indie Hackers story", "url": "https://x.com/spchatgpt/status/2077833926115266581", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the account's 12 latest posts through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the 5-figure MRR post, the user counts, the version 8 release and the move-to-projects feature." }, { "title": "Founder Club, 23 May 2023: AI Chrome extension with 80,000 downloads and $1000 MRR", "url": "https://www.founderclub.com/saeed-ezzati/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview. Source for the early revenue, the installs, the tools and the reason for public code." }, { "title": "beehiiv blog, 17 November 2023: Superpower Daily: $150,000 Annual Revenue In Only 5 Months on beehiiv", "url": "https://blog.beehiiv.com/p/creator-spotlight-superpower-daily", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A customer story by the newsletter platform, with the founder's own figures. Source for the newsletter revenue, the move to beehiiv and the combined audience." }, { "title": "Saeed Ezzati on X (@eeeziii), 27 September 2023: the Pro subscription is switched on", "url": "https://x.com/eeeziii/status/1707052120036511857", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Saeed Ezzati on X (@eeeziii), timeline from 2020 to August 2026", "url": "https://x.com/eeeziii", "grade": "C", "how": "Read 245 posts page by page through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the newsletter posts of 6 July and 1 September 2023, the Featured post of 9 August 2023 and the Copy.ai posts of December 2022." }, { "title": "Saeed Ezzati on X (@eeeziii), 26 and 27 November 2023: look-alike ChatGPT extensions", "url": "https://x.com/eeeziii/status/1728702355812852194", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through api.fxtwitter.com, with the two follow-up posts of 27 November 2023." }, { "title": "Chrome Web Store listing of Superpower ChatGPT, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/superpower-chatgpt/amhmeenmapldpjdedekalnfifgnpfnkc", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Google's own user count, rating, version and developer details." }, { "title": "Firefox Add-ons record of Superpower ChatGPT, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://addons.mozilla.org/api/v5/addons/addon/superpower-chatgpt/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the public API record of the add-on page: daily users, ratings, creation date, version and author." }, { "title": "Superpower ChatGPT pricing page, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://spchatgpt.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the plans, the release count, the Showcase fee terms and the statement that OpenAI bills its plans separately." }, { "title": "Superpower ChatGPT home page, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://spchatgpt.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the links: Chrome Web Store, Firefox Add-ons, a Stripe payment link, Discord, Reddit and X." }, { "title": "GitHub repository saeedezzati/superpower-chatgpt", "url": "https://github.com/saeedezzati/superpower-chatgpt", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the repository record through the GitHub API: creation and last-update dates, stars, forks and language." }, { "title": "TechCrunch, 13 December 2024, by Cody Corrall: ChatGPT now has Projects to organize your chats", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/snippet/2931159/chatgpt-now-has-projects-to-organize-your-chats/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for OpenAI's own folders feature." }, { "title": "OpenAI developer community forum, 10 April 2025: ChatGPT can now reference all past conversations", "url": "https://community.openai.com/t/chatgpt-can-now-reference-all-past-conversations-april-10-2025/1229453", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the first posts through the forum's JSON. Post 6 quotes OpenAI's announcement on X that memory can now reference all past chats." }, { "title": "Chrome Web Store program policies: Spam and abuse", "url": "https://developer.chrome.com/docs/webstore/program-policies/spam-and-abuse", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on duplicate extensions." }, { "title": "TrustMRR profile: Superpower for AI, a different seller", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/superpower-for-ai", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile, data as of October 2026. A suite of four extensions from a seller in the Czech Republic, founded December 2025, verified through Lemon Squeezy. Used only to show a look-alike name, not for this story's revenue." }, { "title": "Systemaic teardown, 26 July 2026: Superpower ChatGPT revenue, ad spend and growth channels", "url": "https://www.systemaic.com/teardowns/superpower-chatgpt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the summary section. A third-party estimate that lists revenue and funding as not disclosed and the stage as bootstrapped." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/nichesss/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/nichesss.md", "slug": "nichesss", "name": "Nichesss", "country": "Brazil", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI copywriting and business idea tool", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-14", "launchLabel": "December 2020", "outcomeLabel": "US$30K a month, January 2022", "sticker": "$30K/mo in early 2022", "outcomeUsd": 360000, "months": 13, "teamLabel": "1 founder, no employees or contractors", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "launches", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Marketing content" ], "product": "A web app with more than 150 small writing tools built on OpenAI's GPT-3: business ideas from a 10-second quiz, blog posts, Facebook and Google ads, emails, social media posts, even poems. The user fills a short form and gets the text back in seconds. It sold mostly as a US$59 lifetime deal on AppSumo, next to monthly plans from US$19.", "why": "It arrived in December 2020, when GPT-3 access still came through a waitlist and only a few competitors existed, and it was priced at about 80% of their prices on purpose. A lifetime deal on AppSumo put it in front of buyers who try unknown software, and a Facebook Group and an email list kept those buyers coming back.", "summary": [ "Nichesss is a web app that writes marketing text and suggests business ideas. It runs on GPT-3, a large language model: a program trained on a very large amount of text that continues whatever text it is given. OpenAI sells access to the model through an API, an interface that lets one program send requests to another program over the internet and pay for each use. Nichesss puts more than 150 forms on top. For each form its code holds hand-picked examples of good copy, and it sends them to the model together with the user's answers. This method is a few-shot prompt: a request that contains a few finished examples, so that the model writes new text in the same form. Nichesss does not train a model of its own.", "Malcolm Tyson, a self-taught programmer and designer from the United States who had moved to Rio de Janeiro, got GPT-3 access in November 2020 and had a working app in December. In January 2021 he sold it on AppSumo, a marketplace for software deals, as a lifetime deal: one payment for permanent access. He made US$100,000 in the first month after AppSumo's share. In an interview published by Starter Story on 14 January 2022 he said the business brought in about US$30,000 a month, with no employees and costs of about US$2,200 a month.", "Every number on this page is the founder's own, grade C, and no new figure has been published since January 2022. The site still sells in October 2026, with the same plans since February 2024 and the same AppSumo deal, but ChatGPT, released free in November 2022, gives anyone the same kind of model without a form. This page shows the business at its best documented point, how it was built, and what happened to earlier products that depended on another company's platform." ], "factsCaption": "A one-person GPT-3 app that made US$100,000 in its launch month on AppSumo and about US$30,000 a month a year later, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a statement by the founder, a page of the company or of its sales marketplace, or a press report of another party's estimate. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From GPT-3 access in November 2020 to an interview at US$30,000 a month in January 2022, then nearly five years with no new figures. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Nichesss prices in October 2026, read from the company's pricing page and home page and from the AppSumo deal page (grade C)", "note": "There is no yearly billing. The three monthly prices, US$19, US$39 and US$99, were the same in January 2021 and from January 2023 on; in January 2022 the page offered one US$19 plan with unlimited use. The limits changed often: 100 and 250 credits a month in January 2021, 200 and 500 short-form generations in January 2023, and the limits below since February 2024. A short-form generation is one short text, such as an ad or a title; long-form autowrite writes whole articles. The lifetime deal is sold on AppSumo against a list price of US$999, and AppSumo's page says that it includes unlimited tokens.", "rows": [ [ "Rookie", "", "19", "2,500 short-form generations a month, no long-form" ], [ "Intermediate", "", "39", "10,000 short-form generations a month, no long-form" ], [ "Pro", "", "99", "unlimited short-form; long-form: 1,000 generations and 100,000 words a month" ], [ "Lifetime deal on AppSumo", "59 one-time", "", "one plan; shown against US$999" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue per month, interview published 14 January 2022", "value": "about US$30,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview with Starter Story. The answers speak of ads 'come next year', so they were probably written in late 2021. Users were copywriters, small businesses and marketing agencies.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from that figure", "value": "about US$360,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$30,000 times 12. Starter Story's headline uses the same figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the first month on AppSumo, January 2021", "value": "US$100,000 after AppSumo's share", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview. His post on X of 1 March 2021 also says that he made US$100,000 in a month with GPT-3 and would stop sharing numbers.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Change from the launch month to the 2022 figure", "value": "about 70% lower", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: from US$100,000 to about US$30,000 a month. The two figures may not be measured the same way: the first is after AppSumo's share, and the interview does not say whether the second is.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "AppSumo's share of each sale", "value": "30%, or 50% for a better position on the site", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview. Nichesss was a marketplace deal, which AppSumo promotes less.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Lifetime deal price", "value": "US$59 one-time, shown against US$999", "grade": "C", "note": "AppSumo deal page in May 2021, December 2021, December 2022 and October 2026. The October 2026 page says that the deal includes unlimited tokens.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's part of one US$59 sale", "value": "US$41.30 at a 30% share, US$29.50 at 50%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$59 times 0.7 and times 0.5.", "src": [ 1, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly costs, interview of January 2022", "value": "US$200 for hosting and US$2,000 for AI generation", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview. No employees, no contractors and, at that time, no paid ads.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Costs as a share of revenue", "value": "about 7.3%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$2,200 divided by US$30,000.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Cost to run the app, February 2021", "value": "US$3,000, about US$1 per user per month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X, 1 March 2021.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Spending on GPT-3, January to March 2021", "value": "US$10,000 in about 70 days", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X, 25 March 2021. He had spent about US$30 while testing.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Users, interview of January 2022", "value": "about 12,000 in the app each month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview. About 100 signups a day, of which about 16 became paying accounts. The US was the biggest market, then India.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Email list and community", "value": "over 30,000 users on the email list, almost 10,000 in the Facebook Group", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview. Another answer in the same interview gives 9,000 for the group.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Reviews on the AppSumo deal page", "value": "201 in May 2021, 236 in December 2021, 268 in December 2022, 318 in October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "AppSumo page, live and in Wayback Machine copies. A review count is a sign of buyers, not a sales figure.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "New AppSumo reviews per month", "value": "about 5.0, then 2.7, then 1.1", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 35 reviews in the 7 months to December 2021, 32 in the 12 months to December 2022, 50 in the 46 months to October 2026.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Tool cards on the home page", "value": "166 in January 2023, 207 in December 2023, 209 in December 2024, 213 in December 2025 and October 2026", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: a count of the tool cards in Wayback Machine copies and in the live page. The heading has said 'Over 150 Tools' since January 2023.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 founder, no employees or contractors", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview: a self-taught programmer and designer who built and ran it alone.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview: no startup costs beyond a domain name and hosting. No source names an investor.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue field on Indie Hackers", "value": "US$530 a month, undated", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's product page, next to a first-sale entry of December 2020. Probably an early entry that was never updated (not verified).", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the January 2022 figure", "value": "13 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: December 2020 to January 2022.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "November 2020", "what": "Tyson gets access to OpenAI's GPT-3 API after asking an OpenAI co-founder on X, and starts writing the app. OpenAI still admits developers from a waitlist.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 12 ] }, { "when": "December 2020", "what": "A working first version. One blog-post tool is tested with paid traffic, and Facebook ads return about US$3 for each US$1 spent. The first sale comes through X.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "when": "January 2021", "what": "Listed on AppSumo as a lifetime deal: US$100,000 in the first month after AppSumo's share. The pricing page shows plans at US$19, US$39 and US$99 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 9 ] }, { "when": "February 2021", "what": "Launch on Product Hunt, 263 points. The founder says that it reached second place with the help of his users' group.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 11 ] }, { "when": "1 March 2021", "what": "He posts that he made US$100,000 in a month with GPT-3 and will stop sharing numbers. Running the app cost US$3,000 the month before, about US$1 per user.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "when": "23 to 31 March 2021", "what": "He writes that buyers of GPT-3 copy tools pay US$40 a month for US$1 of content and promises to stay the cheapest. He reports US$10,000 spent on GPT-3 in about 70 days, and notes that few solo founders remain after ConversionAI, another GPT-3 copy tool, bought Headlime.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 5, 6 ] }, { "when": "3 September 2021", "what": "He asks AI21 Labs, another model maker, for API access 'without limits'. No source says that he added a second model.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "18 November 2021", "what": "OpenAI removes the GPT-3 waitlist. It still reviews applications before they go live.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "January 2022", "what": "The pricing page offers a single plan, US$19 a month with unlimited use. On 14 January Starter Story publishes the interview: about US$30,000 a month, 12,000 monthly users, no employees.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 9 ] }, { "when": "October 2022", "what": "OpenAI's price for Davinci, its strongest GPT-3 model, is US$0.02 per 1,000 tokens, down from US$0.06 in December 2021.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "30 November 2022", "what": "OpenAI releases ChatGPT, free during its research preview. Reuters reports a UBS estimate of 100 million monthly users in January 2023.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13, 14 ] }, { "when": "December 2022", "what": "The AppSumo deal adds images from DALL-E 2, 15 a month at no extra cost. The deal has 268 reviews.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "January 2023", "what": "Three plans again at US$19, US$39 and US$99, now with limits, and long-form articles on the top plan. The home page shows 'Over 150 Tools' and a US$59 lifetime deal.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 10 ] }, { "when": "February 2024", "what": "Monthly limits rise to 2,500 and 10,000 short texts. Prices and limits have not changed since.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The site and the AppSumo deal are still on sale, with 213 tools and 318 AppSumo reviews. The founder's name is still in the footer, no source reports a sale, and no revenue figure has been published since January 2022.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 9, 10 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Early access and a lower price", "text": "He built the app in about a month, while GPT-3 access still came through a waitlist and only a few competitors existed. Buyers in Facebook groups complained that those competitors were expensive, so he set his price at about 80% of theirs. He lived in Brazil, where costs are lower than in the US, so the low price still paid." }, { "title": "A lifetime deal on AppSumo", "text": "AppSumo buyers pay once for software they have not heard of, if it does what it promises. The first month brought US$100,000 after AppSumo's share, and a year later the founder called AppSumo the bulk of his distribution. The price of this channel is a share of 30% to 50% of each sale, and buyers who never pay again." }, { "title": "One pattern for every tool", "text": "As the founder describes it, every tool works the same way: a short form, hand-picked examples of good copy, and a call to GPT-3. With one pattern for all tools, one person could reach more than 150 tools while costs stayed at about 7% of revenue." }, { "title": "A community as the sales channel", "text": "Buyers were invited to a Facebook Group of almost 10,000 people and an email list of over 30,000. The group told him what to build next. When he launched new features inside the app, the community bought them, and he relied on it to reach second place on Product Hunt." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's interview and posts (grade C) and from the source code of the public web pages, which any browser loads.", "items": [ "Built alone by a self-taught programmer and designer: started in November 2020, working first version in December 2020.", "OpenAI's GPT-3 API writes all the text. The code holds hundreds of examples of good copy, which go to the model together with the user's form answers.", "The first test was one blog-post tool with paid traffic from Facebook ads. When visitors understood it and bought, he added trial limits and a payment form.", "Costs in January 2022: US$200 a month for hosting and US$2,000 a month for AI generation. No startup costs other than a domain name and hosting.", "Analytics, according to the founder: Google Analytics, Segment and June.so, which shows the most active users and where users get stuck. The page source also loads Hotjar and the Facebook Pixel, and the pricing page loads Stripe's payment script.", "Later additions: images from OpenAI's DALL-E 2 (December 2022), long-form articles on the top plan (January 2023), and access to a Nichesss API for AppSumo buyers (October 2026 page)." ], "src": [ 1, 8, 9, 10 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database depended on another company's platform, or charged for something that people could then get free. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "PostRocket", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$610K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "More reach for brands' Facebook pages by choosing the best time to post.", "died": "Facebook changed its API, and the product had no other base and no plan to change direction.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/457-postrocket" }, { "name": "BranchOut", "years": "2010 to 2017", "funding": "US$49M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Professional networking built inside Facebook.", "died": "Facebook changed its API rules and removed the growth channel that the company depended on.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/30-branchout" }, { "name": "Snipshot", "years": "2006 to 2009", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Simple photo editing in the browser, with nothing to install.", "died": "Larger competitors and free alternatives did the same job.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1241-snipshot" }, { "name": "Neeva", "years": "2019 to 2023", "funding": "US$77M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Search without ads for US$5 a month.", "died": "Few people would pay for search, and then ChatGPT changed what people expected from it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2288-neeva" } ], "whatChanged": [ "PostRocket and BranchOut were small products on Facebook's platform and ended when Facebook changed its API rules. Snipshot was a simple web tool that free alternatives replaced, and Neeva charged for a service that people then got free elsewhere. Nichesss carries both risks: it is a product on OpenAI's API, and since November 2022 OpenAI itself gives away a general version of what Nichesss sells.", "Three things differ. First, OpenAI sells its API and wants products built on it, and the price of its strongest GPT-3 model fell by two thirds between December 2021 and October 2022, which lowered Nichesss's costs instead of ending the business. Second, Nichesss had no investors and costs of about US$2,200 a month, so it did not need growth to survive, and its lifetime buyers had already paid. Third, the four earlier companies closed, while Nichesss is still on sale almost five years after its last published figure. No source shows what it earns today." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The GPT-3 window, no. The launch method, yes.", "text": "In late 2020 GPT-3 access was by waitlist, and a form that writes ads was new; since ChatGPT, anyone can ask the same kind of model for free. The method still works for any new model that most people cannot use directly: build a narrow tool in weeks, sell a lifetime deal to buyers who try unknown software, and keep them in a group and an email list.", "steps": [ "Get access to a new model early and ship one narrow tool within weeks.", "Test that tool with a small paid-ads budget before you build more.", "Launch with a lifetime deal on a deal marketplace, and count its 30% to 50% share in the price.", "Limit monthly use in every lifetime plan, because each active user keeps costing model fees.", "Gather buyers in a group and an email list, and build what they ask for." ], "open": "New image, video, voice and music models with waitlists or weak official interfaces, where a simple form for one job still saves the buyer time." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Founder figures only, and none since 2022", "text": "The US$100,000 launch month and the US$30,000 a month come from the founder's interview and posts. No payment processor, buyer or journalist has confirmed them, and in March 2021 the founder wrote that he would stop sharing numbers. The Indie Hackers page still shows US$530 a month, with no date." }, { "title": "ChatGPT made the basic service free", "text": "OpenAI released ChatGPT on 30 November 2022 and made it free during the research preview, and Reuters reported a UBS estimate of 100 million monthly users two months later. Anyone can now ask the model for an ad or a business idea without a form. The Nichesss home page still shows the same 'Over 150 Tools' and '300+ 5-Star Reviews on AppSumo' as in January 2023, and its count of tool cards has stayed at 213 since December 2025." }, { "title": "A thin layer over one model", "text": "The product is examples and forms on top of GPT-3, a model that any competitor can also buy. The founder wrote in March 2021 that buyers of GPT-3 copy tools paid US$40 a month for US$1 worth of content. That gap is the margin, and it is also what competitors and the model maker can take away. He asked AI21 Labs for access in September 2021, but no source shows a second model in use." }, { "title": "OpenAI sets the access, the rules and the price", "text": "Until 18 November 2021 developers waited for GPT-3 access, and OpenAI reviewed applications before they went live; the founder got in by asking an OpenAI co-founder on X. The Davinci price fell from US$0.06 to US$0.02 per 1,000 tokens between December 2021 and October 2022. That helped Nichesss, but a price rise or a rule change would reach it the same way." }, { "title": "Lifetime buyers keep costing money", "text": "A US$59 lifetime sale leaves US$29.50 to US$41.30 after AppSumo's share, and the AppSumo page says that the deal includes unlimited tokens. At the founder's February 2021 cost of about US$1 per user per month, an active buyer uses up that payment in about 30 to 41 months. Lower model prices since then reduce this cost, but no newer cost figure exists." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://nichesss.com/" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/nichesss" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Starter Story, 14 January 2022: This Self-Taught Programmer Built A $360K/Year GPT-3 App", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/this-self-taught-programmer-built-a-360k-year-gpt-3-app", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full: the interview text loads without a login, although the page also shows a notice for premium members. Founder interview. Source for the monthly revenue, the AppSumo month, the costs, the users and the tools." }, { "title": "Malcolm Tyson on X, 1 March 2021: i Made $100k in a month using gpt-3", "url": "https://x.com/malcolmtyson/status/1366354125248745476", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Malcolm Tyson on X, 1 March 2021: How much does it cost to run nichesss?", "url": "https://x.com/malcolmtyson/status/1366355406654746624", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the US$3,000 monthly cost and the US$1 per user." }, { "title": "Malcolm Tyson on X, 25 March 2021: $10k spent on gpt-3 in the last ~70 days", "url": "https://x.com/malcolmtyson/status/1375182093148434437", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Malcolm Tyson on X, 23 March 2021: the gpt-3 marketing copy game", "url": "https://x.com/malcolmtyson/status/1374376135304224780", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the remark about US$40 a month for US$1 of content." }, { "title": "Malcolm Tyson's X timeline, February 2021 to August 2026", "url": "https://x.com/malcolmtyson", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the 298 posts that the fxtwitter timeline API returned. Source for the posts of 23 March 2021 (the cheapest in the marketplace), 31 March 2021 (Headlime), 20 August 2021 (an American living near Rio) and 3 September 2021 (AI21 Labs), and for the fact that no returned post after March 2021 mentions nichesss." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers product page: Nichesss", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/product/nichesss", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founder-entered revenue field and the first-sale entry of December 2020." }, { "title": "AppSumo deal page for nichesss, live on 14 October 2026, and Wayback Machine copies of 28 May 2021, 22 December 2021 and 2 December 2022", "url": "https://appsumo.com/products/marketplace-nichesss/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the price, the review count and the plan text in all four. Source for the US$59 deal, the unlimited tokens, the DALL-E 2 images and the API access." }, { "title": "nichesss.com pricing page, live on 14 October 2026, and Wayback Machine copies of 9 January 2021, 29 January 2022, 27 January 2023 and 24 February 2024", "url": "https://nichesss.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, all five. Source for the plans and limits over time." }, { "title": "nichesss.com home page, live on 14 October 2026, and eight Wayback Machine copies from 9 January 2021 to 8 September 2026", "url": "https://nichesss.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, and counted the tool cards in each copy. Also read the page source for analytics and payment scripts, and the server header." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: Nichesss, biz ideas + content in under 60 seconds with AI", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/nichesss", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the product page: launched in 2021, 263 points, and the founder's launch comment. The earliest comments in the page data are from 14 and 15 February 2021." }, { "title": "OpenAI, 18 November 2021: OpenAI's API Now Available with No Waitlist", "url": "https://openai.com/blog/api-no-waitlist/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in the Wayback Machine copy of 20 November 2021. Source for the end of the waitlist and the review before an application goes live." }, { "title": "OpenAI, 30 November 2022: Introducing ChatGPT", "url": "https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in the Wayback Machine copy of 2 December 2022. Source for the release date and the free research preview." }, { "title": "Reuters, 2 February 2023: ChatGPT sets record for fastest-growing user base - analyst note", "url": "https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-sets-record-fastest-growing-user-base-analyst-note-2023-02-01/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in the Wayback Machine copy of 4 February 2023. It reports a UBS estimate, so grade C." }, { "title": "OpenAI API pricing page, Wayback Machine copies of 4 December 2021 and 17 October 2022", "url": "https://openai.com/api/pricing/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the price table in both copies. Source for the Davinci price of US$0.06 and then US$0.02 per 1,000 tokens." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/coachvox-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/coachvox-ai.md", "slug": "coachvox-ai", "name": "Coachvox AI", "country": "UK", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI clones of coaches and creators", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-14", "launchLabel": "January 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$180K a year in revenue, November 2023", "sticker": "$180K/yr revenue in 2023", "outcomeUsd": 180000, "months": 10, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders and a remote team in 6 time zones; 0 employees listed in 2023", "fundingLabel": "15 new shares sold for cash in November 2022, filed as GBP 150,000; no investment fund among the shareholders in November 2022", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "voice-audio", "channel": "audience", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Funded", "Running", "B2B", "Creator tools" ], "product": "A coach, author or creator uploads books, articles, podcast transcripts and course material. Coachvox turns them into a chat version of that person, which answers the audience in the creator's voice on a website, inside a course or in a members' group, and gives the creator the email address and the transcript of everyone who chats.", "why": "The founder sold places from design mockups to people in her own network before the product existed, and her Forbes column brought a quarter of the sign-ups at no cost. It sold creators what a general chatbot did not give them: the contact details of the people who chat, the transcripts, and the clone on their own site with their own brand.", "summary": [ "Coachvox AI sells AI clones to coaches, authors and other creators. An AI clone here is a chat program that answers questions the way one real person would, because it works from that person's books, articles, podcast transcripts and course material. Underneath is a large language model, a program trained on very large amounts of text that writes answers in normal language; the company's FAQ says its core engine comes from OpenAI. The creator puts the clone on a website, in a course or in a members' group. Everyone who chats gives an email address first, so the clone also works as a lead magnet, a free offer that a business uses to collect the contact details of possible customers.", "Jodie Cook, a British founder and Forbes contributor, sold her social media agency, JC Social Media, in 2021, in what she calls a seven-figure exit. Her next company, Coachvox Limited, registered in October 2021, first ran a platform for business coaching by voice note. It did not take off, and at the end of 2022 it turned to AI coaches. It sold places from design mockups to people in her network. On 5 September 2023 she told Starter Story that Coachvox AI had six figures of annual recurring revenue before its public launch. Annual recurring revenue is the current monthly subscription income multiplied by twelve. Starter Story lists the figure as US$180,000 a year, about US$15,000 a month, at a price of US$99 a month per creator. In November 2023 the revenue database Latka recorded the same US$180,000 with 150 customers, citing a post on X. In December 2023 the BBC reported that around 150 people had made clones with the company.", "Every revenue number on this page is grade C: a founder statement, or a third party that repeats one. No newer figure was found. It is not a one-person business: two co-founders, a technical lead who joined them and a remote team built it, and nine other shareholders held about 7% of the shares after new shares were sold for cash in November 2022. The page also shows five failed startups that sold an expert's time, or a bot that answered from a body of knowledge, before language models made this cheap." ], "factsCaption": "A founder-reported US$180,000 a year in late 2023, repeated by Latka two months later, with a BBC customer count that fits the price", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a founder statement, a third party that repeats one, a journalist's report of a company figure, or a filing on the UK company register, which does not check what companies file. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows it names. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From the sale of an agency, through a voice-note coaching platform that did not sell, to AI clones of about 150 creators in December 2023. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Coachvox AI price in October 2026, from the company's home page (grade C)", "note": "There is one plan with everything included. The page shows US$83 a month billed yearly, and its price switch shows US$99 billed monthly; yearly billing saves about two months. The free trial needs card details, has no contract, and comes with a quick-start bootcamp that the page says normally costs US$499. A done-for-you setup by the company's trainers is offered without a published price. In 2023 the price was also US$99 a month. Chats are unlimited under fair-use rules that the FAQ says affect fewer than 1% of accounts.", "rows": [ [ "Coachvox, one plan", "83", "99", "unlimited chats, fair use" ], [ "Quick-start bootcamp", "499 one-time", "", "included with the free trial, says the page" ], [ "Done-for-you setup", "", "", "price not published" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue rate, September 2023", "value": "US$180,000 a year; in the founder's words, six figures of annual recurring revenue before launch", "grade": "C", "note": "Starter Story lists 'How much money it makes: $180K/year' for the interview of 5 September 2023. The founder's own text says only 'six figures'.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Annual revenue, November 2023", "value": "US$180,000, with 150 customers", "grade": "C", "note": "Latka, a third-party revenue database, gives X (Twitter) as its source. The post itself could not be found or opened.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month from that figure", "value": "US$15,000", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$180,000 divided by 12. The product was less than a year old, so this is a yearly rate, not money received over twelve months.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "People with a clone on Coachvox, December 2023", "value": "around 150", "grade": "C", "note": "BBC News, 7 December 2023. Clients named by type: chief executives, an astrologer, a nutritionist, a fitness coach and a marriage counsellor. The article does not say how the count was obtained.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Cross-check: 150 creators at the 2023 price", "value": "US$178,200 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 150 times US$99 times 12. Close to US$180,000, if every creator paid the full monthly price, which no source states.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Price for creators, 2023", "value": "US$99 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder, Starter Story interview. Some creators charge their own audience about US$10 a month for access to their clone.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Money spent on marketing to September 2023", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder: 'We haven't spent any money on marketing yet.' Customers came from Forbes, X, Google, AI tool directories and creator groups.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Share of sign-ups from the founder's Forbes profile", "value": "25%", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder, Starter Story interview, September 2023.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Cost to start", "value": "US$30,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Starter Story list page.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Team, 2023", "value": "2 founders, 0 employees", "grade": "C", "note": "Starter Story's company box, September 2023. The founder describes a remote team in six time zones, with a technical lead and a UX designer. Latka: 1 person listed Coachvox AI as employer on LinkedIn in November 2023.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "New shares sold before launch, 5 November 2022", "value": "15 ordinary shares for cash; amount paid filed as GBP 150,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Companies House share allotment form. It shows 'Amount paid: 150000' next to the 15 shares and does not say more clearly whether this is a total; this page reads it as the total, which is GBP 10,000 a share. Afterwards there were 11 shareholders: two with 100 shares each and nine with 1 to 5 shares. No company or fund is among them.", "src": [ 11, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Part of the company sold in November 2022", "value": "about 7%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 15 of 215 shares.", "src": [ 11, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Later share issues", "value": "68 Ordinary A shares by 21 November 2025, 2 more in April 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Companies House filings from August 2024 to April 2026. The November 2025 filing shows them paid at their nominal value of GBP 0.001194 each, with 0.1194 votes each. The filings do not say who received them.", "src": [ 10, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Company registered", "value": "8 October 2021, as Coachvox Limited", "grade": "C", "note": "Companies House. The registered office moved from Birmingham to London in March 2023.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "AI model behind the clones", "value": "OpenAI, with the company's own layer of logic and workflows", "grade": "C", "note": "Company FAQ: 'The core AI engine we use is OpenAI'. The 2023 interview also lists OpenAI in the stack. No source names the model version. The 2026 home page offers a connection to Anthropic's Claude for training the clone; no source says Claude writes the answers.", "src": [ 6, 1, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Price, October 2026", "value": "US$83 a month billed yearly, US$99 billed monthly", "grade": "C", "note": "Company home page. One plan.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Time from start to the November 2023 figure", "value": "10 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: January 2023, the start date that Starter Story records, to November 2023.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "The founder's previous company", "value": "JC Social Media, a social media agency founded in 2011, acquired in 2021", "grade": "C", "note": "Wikipedia, citing Business Live of 3 June 2021: the buyer was the marketing agency group Low&Behold. The founder calls it a seven-figure exit. Its revenue and staff are not part of this page.", "src": [ 14, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2011", "what": "Jodie Cook starts JC Social Media, a social media agency, in Birmingham.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "2021", "what": "She sells the agency to the marketing group Low&Behold, in what she calls a seven-figure exit, after meeting 12 possible buyers through a broker. She writes a book, Ten Year Career, during the sale.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14, 1 ] }, { "when": "8 October 2021", "what": "Coachvox Limited is registered. Its first product is a platform for business coaching by voice note, built by a Bubble agency.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10, 1 ] }, { "when": "5 November 2022", "what": "15 new shares are sold for cash, filed as GBP 150,000. Nine shareholders now hold 1 to 5 shares each beside two holders of 100.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11, 12 ] }, { "when": "End of 2022", "what": "The voice-note platform does not take off: coaches join, but have no clients on it, so the company has to sell twice. It turns to AI coaching.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 1 ] }, { "when": "Early 2023", "what": "Demos: Jodie AI, a business coach trained on her own content, and an unofficial AI version of a famous investor. Starter Story records January 2023 as the start. Places are sold from mockups with Typeform and a Stripe checkout page.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "13 April 2023", "what": "Startups Magazine reports AI versions of coaches in marketing, property, sales and mindfulness. One coach's clone answers the questions in her membership group that took her three to five hours a week.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "5 September 2023", "what": "Starter Story interview: six figures of annual recurring revenue before the public launch, US$99 a month, no marketing spend, a quarter of sign-ups from Forbes. Starter Story lists US$180,000 a year.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "November 2023", "what": "Latka records US$180,000 in annual revenue and 150 customers, citing X.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "7 December 2023", "what": "The BBC reports around 150 people with clones made through Coachvox AI, and names Delphi and Synthesia as other providers of AI clones.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "August 2024 to April 2026", "what": "The company issues Ordinary A shares in small numbers, 70 in total.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10, 13 ] }, { "when": "September to November 2024", "what": "The founder posts on X that 'Coachvox is how we sell Coachvox' and invites coaches to free live webinars on the company's site.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15, 16 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "Running: one plan at US$83 a month billed yearly, a free trial, a connection to Claude for training, and a partnership with the International Coaching Federation. Accounts to 31 October 2025 were filed on 17 July 2026.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 6, 10 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Sell from mockups", "text": "Coachvox AI sold creator places from design mockups, with a Typeform sign-up form and a Stripe checkout page, before the product existed. The first creators were friends and people from the founder's networks, and the team looked after them like agency clients. Their feedback became the list of features." }, { "title": "The founder's column as the sales channel", "text": "Jodie Cook writes about entrepreneurship and AI as a Forbes contributor. By September 2023 her contributor profile brought a quarter of all sign-ups, and the company had spent nothing on marketing. Later the founder sold through free webinars and posts, and the company's own clone talks to visitors on its site." }, { "title": "Give creators what the model maker does not", "text": "OpenAI lets anyone build a custom GPT, a chatbot made from their own documents. Coachvox sells the parts a creator's business needs: the email address of everyone who chats, transcripts and summaries, an embed on the creator's own site or course, and the creator's own brand on the chat window." }, { "title": "OpenAI underneath, workflows on top", "text": "The FAQ says the core engine is OpenAI, with the company's own logic and workflows on top and a database with a profile of each person who chats. The creator uploads files and answers questions about how they work; there is no prompt writing and no code." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's interview and the company's own pages. They are grade C.", "items": [ "The first product, coaching by voice note, was built by a Bubble agency. Bubble is a no-code builder: software made by arranging blocks on a screen instead of writing code.", "For Coachvox AI the founder wrote notes and drew diagrams in PowerPoint, a UX designer turned them into mockups, and a technical lead, a friend from a business mastermind group she had been part of, built the platform with a new team. The founder does not write the code.", "The core AI engine is OpenAI. On top, the company built its own logic and workflows, which it calls its cognitive engine, and a database with a profile of every person who chats with a clone.", "Stack named in 2023: Basecamp, Google Cloud Storage, Vercel, OpenAI, Hey email and Jira. Starter Story's tool list for the company adds Firebase, Mailchimp, Upwork for hiring, WP Engine, Xero, Google Workspace, Stripe, Google Analytics, WordPress and Adobe.", "In 2026 a clone can be trained from inside Anthropic's Claude through a connection, sends leads to a CRM through Zapier, and embeds on any page that accepts HTML.", "The team works remotely in six time zones. Each member writes a 'user manual' that says how they like to communicate and work." ], "src": [ 1, 6, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold an expert's time on demand, or a bot that answered from a body of knowledge. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Arivale", "years": "2015 to 2019", "funding": "US$50M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Genetic and blood tests with a personal health coach for each customer.", "died": "Every customer needed a human coach. The database says it spent US$4,700 per customer to earn US$1,200 a year.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/8-arivale" }, { "name": "AirPair", "years": "2014 to 2017", "funding": "US$250K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Paid, on-demand help from expert software developers.", "died": "Developers took free answers on Stack Overflow instead of paying for an expert's time, and the marketplace never had enough experts and buyers at once.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1130-airpair" }, { "name": "Operator", "years": "2015 to 2020", "funding": "US$30M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "A personal shopper in your phone, part human and part AI.", "died": "The human part cost too much to run at scale.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/396-operator" }, { "name": "Niles", "years": "2017 to 2020", "funding": "US$2.8M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A Slack bot that answered staff questions from the company's own knowledge.", "died": "AI features became cheap and common, and Slack added its own.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1031-niles" }, { "name": "Charge Running", "years": "2021 to 2024", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Live running classes with a real coach in your ear.", "died": "Live coaching needed fixed times. AI fitness apps gave a personal feel without the schedule.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/895-charge-running" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Four of the five sold a person's time: a health coach, an expert developer, a personal shopper, a running coach. Each new sale needed more hours from people, so costs grew with revenue. Coachvox removes those hours. The creator's existing content answers the questions, and an extra conversation costs a fee to the model provider, not an hour of work.", "The fifth, Niles, is the warning. It answered questions from a company's knowledge inside Slack, and the platform it depended on built the same feature. Coachvox depends on OpenAI, which sells its own custom GPTs, and the BBC already listed other clone makers in 2023. Its defence is the business layer around the model: leads, transcripts, embeds and the creator's brand." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product, yes. The sales method, only with an audience.", "text": "The software is reproducible: document upload, a model provider's API, an embed and an email form before the chat. The sales depended on a founder with a Forbes column, an earlier exit and a network of coaches who paid before the product existed. Without that audience, the same product would need paid customer acquisition, on which this story has no data.", "steps": [ "Sell places from mockups with a form and a payment link before you build.", "Sell to people who already have content and an audience: authors, coaches, course creators.", "Build what the model maker does not give them: the contact details of every user, transcripts, and an embed with their own brand.", "Use your own clone as your sales tool, as Coachvox does on its own site." ], "open": "Experts with a large archive and more questions than hours: consultants, trainers, newsletter writers, and companies that want one chat for their own internal know-how." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Old, self-reported numbers", "text": "The only revenue figures are from September and November 2023, and both are grade C: a Starter Story figure next to the founder's interview, and a Latka entry that cites an X post this page could not open. No figure since then was found." }, { "title": "Model makers and other clone makers", "text": "OpenAI lets anyone build a custom GPT from their own documents, and Coachvox keeps a page that explains why it is different. In December 2023 the BBC named Delphi, a US start-up, and Synthesia, a UK company that makes video avatars, as other providers of AI clones. The founder herself said in 2023 that a bigger company can release an update that wipes out an AI product with little depth." }, { "title": "An AI that speaks in a real person's name", "text": "A clone can give wrong or too simple advice under a real person's name. A property-investment creator told the BBC he worried his clone would sound 'too black-and-white' about money, and he tells users it is technology, not him. The director of education at a professional body for data scientists told the BBC that machines 'cannot be trusted' with the many parameters of human situations. The company promises a clear notice that users are chatting with AI. The pages read for this story do not say who is responsible when a clone gives harmful advice." }, { "title": "Dependence on OpenAI", "text": "The FAQ names OpenAI as the core engine. A price rise, a model change or a policy change at OpenAI changes the product and its costs. The 2026 Claude connection is for training the clone, and no source says the answers can come from another provider." }, { "title": "Not a one-person company", "text": "Two co-founders, a technical lead, a designer and a remote team in six time zones built it, and nine other shareholders held about 7% of the shares after the November 2022 share sale. Starter Story's count of 0 employees does not include this team." }, { "title": "Sales depend on the founder", "text": "In 2023 a quarter of sign-ups came from her Forbes profile, and the webinars and posts that sell the product are hers. No source shows how the company sells without her." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://coachvox.ai/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Starter Story, 5 September 2023: We Built An AI Coach For Creators And Hit 6-Figures Revenue Pre-Launch", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/jodie-cook", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, the interview text as the page serves it without a login. Founder interview. Source for the backstory, the first version, the price, the marketing channels, the team and the stack." }, { "title": "Starter Story: AI tool success stories, list page", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/ideas/ai-tool/success-stories", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the Coachvox AI entry. Source for US$180K/year and US$30K to start; its link for the revenue figure points to the interview above. The entry says 2021 for the start, which the interview contradicts." }, { "title": "Latka company page: Coachvox AI revenue 2023, updated 10 August 2026", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/coachvoxai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A third-party database. Source for US$180K in November 2023 with X (Twitter) as its stated source, 150 customers and 1 LinkedIn employee." }, { "title": "BBC News, 7 December 2023, by MaryLou Costa: The people creating digital clones of themselves", "url": "https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67623614", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Journalist report. Source for the count of around 150 clones, the types of client, the competitors named and the outside experts' warnings." }, { "title": "Startups Magazine, 13 April 2023: Would you trust advice from an AI business coach?", "url": "https://startupsmagazine.co.uk/article-would-you-trust-advice-ai-business-coach", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Based on company statements. Source for the turn to AI coaching at the end of 2022 and the early examples." }, { "title": "Coachvox AI: FAQs page, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://coachvox.ai/faqs/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the AI engine, the data, chat limits and the coaching federation. Source for OpenAI as the core engine." }, { "title": "Coachvox AI: home page with pricing, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://coachvox.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the script of the price switch. Source for the prices, the free trial, the Claude connection, Zapier and the embed." }, { "title": "Coachvox AI: Alternative to OpenAI's custom GPT creator", "url": "https://coachvox.ai/alternative-to-openai-gpt-creator/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's own comparison with OpenAI's GPTs." }, { "title": "Coachvox AI, 8 September 2025: Why professional coaches choose Coachvox", "url": "https://coachvox.ai/ai-software-professional-coaches/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the text through the site's WordPress search interface. Source for the promised notice that users are chatting with AI." }, { "title": "Companies House, the UK company register: Coachvox Limited, company number 13668167, filing history", "url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/13668167/filing-history", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full list of filings. The register does not check what companies file. Source for the registration date, the office move, the share issues and the accounts dates. The accounts are image files and could not be read." }, { "title": "Companies House: statement of capital after the allotment of shares on 5 November 2022", "url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/13668167/filing-history/MzM1OTMzNjU4MGFkaXF6a2N4/document?format=pdf&download=0", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, 3 pages. Source for the 15 shares and the amount paid." }, { "title": "Companies House: confirmation statement made on 5 November 2022", "url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/13668167/filing-history/MzM1OTMzNzcwMmFkaXF6a2N4/document?format=pdf&download=0", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the shareholder section for the number and size of holdings. The shareholders' names are not used on this page." }, { "title": "Companies House: statement of capital after allotments from 31 March to 21 November 2025", "url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/13668167/filing-history/MzUwMTY1NTUzNmFkaXF6a2N4/document?format=pdf&download=0", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, 3 pages. Source for the Ordinary A shares, their price and their votes." }, { "title": "Wikipedia: Jodie Cook", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodie_Cook", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for JC Social Media's founding and its 2021 sale to Low&Behold, which the article cites from Business Live." }, { "title": "Jodie Cook on X, 5 September 2024: We use our own product", "url": "https://x.com/jodie_cook/status/1831634418378645944", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through the fxtwitter API, as part of her timeline from September 2024 to October 2026, which contains no revenue figures." }, { "title": "Jodie Cook on X, 15 November 2024: Join me live", "url": "https://x.com/jodie_cook/status/1857402039099388376", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through the fxtwitter API. Source for the free webinars on the company's site." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/aicarousels/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/aicarousels.md", "slug": "aicarousels", "name": "aiCarousels", "country": "Sweden", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI carousel maker for LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-14", "launchLabel": "15 May 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$5K a month, November 2023", "sticker": "$5K MRR in 6 months", "outcomeUsd": 60000, "months": 6, "teamLabel": "1 founder, no employees, from 2023 to 2026", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Speed", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "search", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Social media content" ], "product": "A web editor that turns a topic, a text, a web page or a YouTube video into a carousel post with several slides for LinkedIn, Instagram or TikTok. The AI writes the slides; the editor sizes the text and keeps the layout fixed, so a person who is not a designer gets a usable post in minutes. It also exports video and PowerPoint.", "why": "By the founder's account it was the first carousel maker with an AI writer, at a time when carousel posts were popular on LinkedIn, and it was built in ten days in public, so the launch had an audience. The launch coverage gave the domain backlinks, and search traffic became the largest source of users. Few design choices made it fast for people who are not designers.", "summary": [ "aiCarousels is a web tool that makes carousel posts, social media posts made of several slides that the reader swipes through, for LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok. The user gives a topic, a text, a web page or a YouTube video. The OpenAI API, a paid interface through which a program sends requests to OpenAI's models, writes the slide text, and the editor places it in fixed layouts with text that resizes itself. On LinkedIn a carousel is a PDF document that LinkedIn shows page by page.", "Fernando Pessagno, a product designer from Argentina who lives in Malmö, Sweden, built it in ten days in May 2023, in public on X and YouTube, after he heard that he might lose his job. It went live on 15 May 2023. On 28 November 2023 he told Starter Story that it made US$5,000 in MRR, monthly recurring revenue from subscriptions, with 95% of it profit, and two days later he posted a billing dashboard card that showed US$4,918.40. He works alone, and no source mentions outside money. In December 2024 he said that his two products, aiCarousels and ResumeMaker.Online, made US$180,000 a year together, and at the end of 2025 he wrote that his MRR had doubled, without a number.", "Every money figure on this page is the founder's own statement, grade C, and the last figure for aiCarousels alone is from November 2023. The page also shows what happened to earlier companies that made content and design tools that depended on a bigger platform." ], "factsCaption": "A carousel tool built in ten days that reached US$5,000 a month six months after launch, by the founder's own account", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a founder statement in an interview or on X, a company page, or a third-party estimate that says so. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a ten-day challenge during a vacation to a product rebuilt from zero in October 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "aiCarousels prices in October 2026, from the plan settings in the editor page and the public plan list of its billing service, Outseta (grade C)", "note": "Pro and Team are subscriptions. The editor page shows Pro as US$15 a month; the billing service lists it at US$14.95. The yearly prices are US$120 for Pro and US$468 for Team, shown here per month. The free plan and the yearly Team plan were created on 6 October 2026, two days before the rebuilt product went live. The first paid plan, in 2023, was Time Saver PRO at US$9.95 a month.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "3 AI carousels and 10 AI pictures in total, 5 projects, watermark" ], [ "Pro", "10", "14.95", "1 seat, 60 AI carousels and 100 AI pictures a month, no watermark" ], [ "Team", "39", "59", "5 seats, 300 AI carousels and 400 AI pictures a month" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Recurring revenue per month (MRR), November 2023", "value": "US$5,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview with Starter Story, 28 November 2023, six months after launch. 95% of it was profit.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR on his billing dashboard, 30 November 2023", "value": "US$4,918.40", "grade": "C", "note": "An Outseta MRR card attached to his post on X. It is a screenshot, so it is still a founder statement.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the November 2023 figure", "value": "US$60,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$5,000 times 12. This is the headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit per month at that point", "value": "about US$4,750", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 95% of US$5,000.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Goal he had set for the first twelve months", "value": "US$2,500 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "He reached twice the goal in half the time.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue of his two products together, December 2024", "value": "US$180,000 a year, or US$15,000 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Post on X, 3 December 2024, and the Starter Story video of 2 December 2024. aiCarousels and ResumeMaker.Online together; no split between them is given. US$180,000 divided by 12 is US$15,000.", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Change in MRR during 2025", "value": "doubled", "grade": "C", "note": "Post on X, 30 December 2025. No figure, and no product named.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Paying users on launch day, 15 May 2023", "value": "5, or US$50 MRR", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Product Hunt launch, May 2023", "value": "9th of the day, 154 upvotes, 64 comments", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's Medium post and interview. He offered 50% off to Product Hunt users and had 23 sign-ups on his coming-soon page.", "src": [ 6, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Product Hunt launch of version 2.0, 6 November 2023", "value": "11th of the day, 240 upvotes, 50 comments", "grade": "C", "note": "A third-party record of the launch.", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "fact": "Time to build the first version", "value": "10 days", "grade": "C", "note": "A public challenge during his vacation, posted day by day on X, YouTube and Medium.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "fact": "First price, 2023", "value": "US$9.95 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Time Saver PRO in the public plan list of the billing service, created 18 April 2023. Pro at US$14.95 and Team at US$59 were created on 21 June 2023.", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "fact": "Largest source of traffic, November 2023", "value": "search engines", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview. He credits the domain name and the backlinks from the launch coverage.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "LinkedIn followers, November 2023", "value": "about 3,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Affiliate commission, October 2026", "value": "40% of every payment, for life", "grade": "C", "note": "Affiliate page: US$48 upfront for each yearly referral, which is 40% of the US$120 yearly Pro price. In September 2025 he wrote that \"the affiliate program\" had brought more headaches than revenue, without naming the product.", "src": [ 14, 22 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 person", "grade": "C", "note": "About page: a one-person team. Latka counts 1 person on LinkedIn in October 2024. In August 2026 he writes about running a solo business in Sweden.", "src": [ 11, 16, 24 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions investors. In November 2024 he asks other bootstrapped founders in Sweden to contact him.", "src": [ 25 ] }, { "fact": "Latka's revenue estimate, October 2024", "value": "US$15,200 a year", "grade": "C", "note": "A third-party estimate, marked as such. It is about a quarter of the founder's run rate of November 2023.", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "fact": "AI model", "value": "OpenAI API; GPT-4o from May 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview and post on X. No later model is named in the sources.", "src": [ 1, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the November 2023 figure", "value": "6 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 15 May 2023 to 28 November 2023 is 197 days.", "src": [ 1, 8 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "July 2022", "what": "LinkedIn tests a native carousel post. Since 2019, PDF documents attached to posts show as slides that readers swipe, and users have made carousels that way.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "when": "April 2023", "what": "Starter Story gives April 2023 as the start. The first paid plan in the billing service, Time Saver PRO at US$9.95 a month, has the creation date 18 April 2023.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 13 ] }, { "when": "May 2023", "what": "A day before his vacation, Pessagno hears that he may lose his job. He starts a ten-day challenge on X and YouTube to build and launch a product, and picks carousels because they are popular on LinkedIn and slow to design.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "when": "15 May 2023", "what": "Launch on Product Hunt: 9th product of the day, 154 upvotes and 64 comments. Five people pay on the first day, US$50 in MRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 6, 7, 8 ] }, { "when": "29 May 2023", "what": "His Medium post about the ten days appears in Startup Stash. By November it has almost 20,000 views, and his build updates have reached the front pages of Indie Hackers and HackerNoon.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 1 ] }, { "when": "21 June 2023", "what": "Two new plans appear in the billing service: aiCarousels PRO at US$14.95 a month and TEAM at US$59 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "September 2023", "what": "He has lost his job and works full-time on his own products. He marks the third anniversary on 1 September 2026.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 26, 1 ] }, { "when": "4 October 2023", "what": "Canva launches Magic Studio, its set of AI design tools.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 19 ] }, { "when": "6 November 2023", "what": "aiCarousels 2.0 on Product Hunt: 11th of the day, 240 upvotes. A carousel can now start from a topic, a text, a web address or a YouTube video.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "28 November 2023", "what": "Starter Story interview: US$5,000 MRR six months after launch, 95% of it profit, against a goal of US$2,500 in twelve months. Search traffic is the largest source of users. Both of his products are listed for sale.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "30 November 2023", "what": "His final MRR post on X, with an Outseta card that shows US$4,918.40. He writes that he will not share more MRR updates.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "December 2023", "what": "LinkedIn removes image carousels from normal posts, according to Guiding Tech, and leaves them to advertisers. PDF documents still show as carousels.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 18 ] }, { "when": "13 May 2024", "what": "aiCarousels moves to OpenAI's GPT-4o model.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "15 May 2024", "what": "Version 3.0, one year after the first launch: from a carousel generator to a set of AI tools for creators, such as a quote card maker and a LinkedIn post writer.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 11 ] }, { "when": "11 June 2024", "what": "A yearly Pro plan at US$120 is added.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "July 2024", "what": "He pays the affiliates, who get a 40% commission on every customer they refer.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 27 ] }, { "when": "2 and 3 December 2024", "what": "A Starter Story video titled I Make $15K/Month With 2 AI Apps says that his two products make more than US$15,000 a month. On X he writes US$180,000 a year in recurring revenue for aiCarousels and ResumeMaker.Online together.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 3 ] }, { "when": "5 December 2024", "what": "He writes that the first version had the full Google Fonts library and many color combinations, which users found hard, and that users want fewer options.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 31 ] }, { "when": "28 January 2025", "what": "He writes that he is building free tools instead of videos, and tools without AI, to keep the cost close to zero.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 28 ] }, { "when": "30 December 2025", "what": "He writes that his MRR doubled in 2025, with no figure and no product named.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "5 February 2026", "what": "He writes that a competitor with venture funding copied some of his free tools and left in the text that praised aiCarousels.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 21 ] }, { "when": "6 to 8 October 2026", "what": "A free plan and a yearly Team plan are created in the billing service. On 8 October he posts that the new aiCarousels is live, rebuilt from zero after almost a year of work.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13, 23 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Speed", "text": "He gave himself ten days, the length of his vacation, and built in public on X and YouTube so that he could not stop. The first version was basic and had many bugs, but by his account it was the first carousel tool with an AI writer, and five people paid on the first day." }, { "title": "Launch attention turned into search traffic", "text": "Coverage after the Product Hunt launch gave the domain backlinks, and by November 2023 search engines sent the most users. He then built free tools for LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok users, a method called engineering as marketing: each free tool is a page that people search for, and some of its users move to the paid product." }, { "title": "Fewer choices than Canva", "text": "Instead of competing with template libraries such as Canva or Envato, he aimed for few design choices: fixed positions and text that resizes itself. In December 2024 he wrote that the first version still had too many options, such as the full Google Fonts library, and that users who are not designers want fewer options and a usable post quickly." }, { "title": "Bought parts, low costs", "text": "Outseta handles accounts, billing through Stripe and support tickets, and the OpenAI API writes the text, so he built only the editor. With no staff, 95% of revenue was profit in November 2023." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's interview, his Medium post, his posts on X and the company's own pages. They are grade C.", "items": [ "The first version was built in ten days without a framework: HTML elements styled with CSS, and a small JavaScript script on the landing page. The founder says he has no formal programming education.", "Outseta, a no-code service, handles accounts, billing and support tickets, and connects to Stripe for the payments. The login on the site still goes through aicarousels.outseta.com in October 2026.", "The OpenAI API writes the slide text. The product moved to GPT-4o in May 2024.", "The tools listed on his Starter Story page include GoDaddy for hosting, Figma for design, Pexels for stock images, Ahrefs for search research, Rewardful for the affiliate program and TrustSpot for reviews.", "Users come from search traffic, free tools, Product Hunt launches, his posts on LinkedIn and X, pitches to the press, and Reddit. A Chrome extension is linked from the home page.", "The product was rebuilt from zero over almost a year and relaunched on 8 October 2026, with a free plan." ], "src": [ 1, 6, 9, 10, 29, 23 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database made content or design tools that depended on a bigger platform or competed with one. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "LiveLoop", "years": "2010 to 2015", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "PowerPoint with real-time collaboration.", "died": "Microsoft bought it in 2015 and then built the same features into Office.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/302-liveloop" }, { "name": "Invision", "years": "2011 to 2023", "funding": "US$350M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Design and prototype tools for product teams.", "died": "Figma offered real-time collaboration in the browser and took the users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/251-invision" }, { "name": "Mixed Media Labs", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Create and share digital stories made of several kinds of media.", "died": "It stayed on the web while Instagram took the mobile users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1200-mixed-media-labs" }, { "name": "Qwiki", "years": "2010 to 2015", "funding": "US$10M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Automatically generated multimedia stories instead of text search results.", "died": "High costs and little demand from users. Yahoo bought it, and Google and mobile video kept the audience.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/481-qwiki" }, { "name": "Koji", "years": "2016 to 2021", "funding": "US$16M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A no-code builder that lets creators make interactive content.", "died": "It was caught between Webflow and Bubble and could not turn free users into paying customers.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/284-koji" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the five made a content or design tool that depended on a bigger company or competed with one. Microsoft bought LiveLoop, which improved PowerPoint, and then built the same features into Office. Invision lost designers to Figma. Mixed Media Labs and Qwiki made tools for telling stories while Instagram and Google owned the audience, and Koji could not turn free creators into paying customers. aiCarousels has the same exposure: LinkedIn decides how carousels appear in the feed, and Canva sells AI design tools to the same users.", "Two things differ. First, the costs: one person, bought accounts and billing, and an AI model paid per request, so US$5,000 a month was already a profit of about US$4,750, and the product did not need a large market to pay its owner. Second, the AI writes the content, which is the slow part for these users; the earlier tools only made layout or sharing easier. A feature change at LinkedIn or Canva can still hurt a product this small, but it does not need to win the market to survive." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The first place in the market, no.", "text": "Building in ten days in public, with bought accounts and billing and an AI API, is repeatable by one person. Being the first AI carousel maker is not: in 2026 there are many, including funded ones that copy his free tools.", "steps": [ "Pick a post format that people on one platform already make by hand, and automate the slow part.", "Build the first version in about ten days, in public, and buy the accounts, billing and AI model as services.", "Launch on Product Hunt, then turn the attention into search traffic with free tools for the same users.", "Keep the design choices few, and answer every support ticket yourself." ], "open": "Other formats that people make by hand for one platform: quote cards, infographics, slide decks and video versions of posts, as the founder's own later tools show." }, "watch": [ { "title": "One old figure, self-reported", "text": "The only figure for aiCarousels alone is from November 2023, and he stopped posting MRR after that. Later figures are for two products together (US$180,000 a year in December 2024) or have no number (doubled MRR in 2025). Latka's estimate for 2024 is about a quarter of the November 2023 run rate." }, { "title": "LinkedIn controls the format", "text": "LinkedIn carousels are PDF documents that LinkedIn shows page by page, a feature from 2019. LinkedIn tested a native carousel post in July 2022 and, according to Guiding Tech, removed image carousels from normal posts in December 2023. Each change in how LinkedIn shows documents changes how many people need a carousel tool." }, { "title": "Canva and the platforms", "text": "Canva launched Magic Studio, a set of AI design tools, on 4 October 2023, five months after aiCarousels went live. Canva already sells templates to the same users and has far more of them. The founder's answer is fewer options, and that answer is easy to copy." }, { "title": "Many competing carousel tools", "text": "Competitors such as PostNitro publish their own articles about AI carousel generators that promote their tools. The founder wrote in February 2026 that a competitor with venture funding copied some of his free tools. The Product Hunt topics where aiCarousels 2.0 launched hold more than 176,000 products." }, { "title": "One person, several products", "text": "He also runs ResumeMaker.Online, GeneratePPT and PreviewMyProfile, and in November 2023 both of his main products were listed for sale. He said then that working on aiCarousels alone had shown him the value of a single focus. The rebuilt product of October 2026 adds a free plan, and its effect on revenue is not known." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.aicarousels.com/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Starter Story, 28 November 2023: I Accidentally Built A SaaS in 10 Days & Quit My 9-5, interview with Fernando Pessagno", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/aicarousels", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview. Source for the ten-day build, the launch results, the US$5,000 MRR with 95% profit, the traffic sources and the tools list." }, { "title": "Fernando Pessagno on X, 30 November 2023: final MRR update, with an Outseta MRR card", "url": "https://x.com/Fer_MOMENTO/status/1730301822508597719", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the post through api.fxtwitter.com and viewed the attached image, an Outseta MRR card for aiCarousels that shows US$4,918.40." }, { "title": "Fernando Pessagno on X, 3 December 2024: US$180K ARR with two SaaS businesses", "url": "https://x.com/Fer_MOMENTO/status/1863902078428426525", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the post through api.fxtwitter.com. The figure covers two products together." }, { "title": "Starter Story on YouTube, 2 December 2024: I Make $15K/Month With 2 AI Apps", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4nsGvL4Fo0", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the title, the description and the publication date on the video page. The video itself was not watched." }, { "title": "Fernando Pessagno on X, 30 December 2025: 2025 has been kind, doubled MRR", "url": "https://x.com/Fer_MOMENTO/status/2006150053543501857", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the post through api.fxtwitter.com. It gives no figure and names no product." }, { "title": "Fernando Pessagno on Medium (Startup Stash), 29 May 2023: From Zero to SaaS, Building And Launching a SaaS in 10 Days", "url": "https://medium.com/startup-stash/from-zero-to-saas-building-and-launching-a-saas-in-10-days-66e262615d66", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's day-by-day account of the build and of the Product Hunt launch." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers product page: aiCarousels, with the post Launch! of 15 May 2023", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/product/aicarousels", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the product page and its first post." }, { "title": "Fernando Pessagno on X, 15 May 2024: aiCarousels v3.0, 365 days after the first launch", "url": "https://x.com/Fer_MOMENTO/status/1790696019300077988", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the post through api.fxtwitter.com. It dates the first launch to 15 May 2023." }, { "title": "Fernando Pessagno on X, 13 May 2024: aiCarousels now runs on GPT-4o", "url": "https://x.com/Fer_MOMENTO/status/1790147611816567269", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the post through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Fernando Pessagno on X, 27 May 2024: where the users of aiCarousels come from", "url": "https://x.com/Fer_MOMENTO/status/1795011564375875830", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the post through api.fxtwitter.com. A reply to a question about how he finds users." }, { "title": "aiCarousels About page, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://www.aicarousels.com/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founder's background and the one-person team." }, { "title": "aiCarousels editor page, plan settings in the page source, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://www.aicarousels.com/editor", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the plan settings in the page source (app version 2026.10.0): prices, seats and limits of the Free, Pro and Team plans." }, { "title": "Outseta public plan list for aiCarousels, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://aicarousels.outseta.com/api/v1/billing/plans", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the JSON list of seven plans with their prices and creation dates." }, { "title": "aiCarousels affiliate program page, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://www.aicarousels.com/affiliates", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full." }, { "title": "Hunted.space: aiCarousels 2.0 Product Hunt launch overview, 6 November 2023", "url": "https://www.hunted.space/product/aicarousels-com/launches/aicarousels-2-0", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A third-party record of the launch rank, upvotes, comments and topics, with the founder's launch comment." }, { "title": "Latka company page: aiCarousels revenue estimate and headcount", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/aicarousels.com", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A third-party estimate and a headcount from LinkedIn." }, { "title": "Social Media Today, 21 July 2022, by Andrew Hutchinson: LinkedIn Launches Native Carousel Posting Option", "url": "https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/linkedin-launches-native-carousel-posting-option/627881/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. A trade journalist's report of the LinkedIn test, with the history of PDF document posts since 2019." }, { "title": "Guiding Tech, updated 29 November 2024, by Lloyd Ingram: Use This Clever Workaround to Post Carousels on LinkedIn", "url": "https://www.guidingtech.com/use-this-clever-workaround-to-post-carousels-on-linkedin/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the removal of image carousels from normal LinkedIn posts in December 2023." }, { "title": "Canva Newsroom, 4 October 2023: Introducing Magic Studio, the power of AI, all in one place", "url": "https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/magic-studio/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the announcement. The date is from the page data." }, { "title": "PostNitro blog, 30 May 2025: AI Carousel Generator, Create Engaging Posts in Minutes", "url": "https://postnitro.ai/blog/post/ai-carousel-generator", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the opening sections. A competitor's own article about its AI carousel generator." }, { "title": "Fernando Pessagno on X, 5 February 2026: a competitor with venture funding copied his free tools", "url": "https://x.com/Fer_MOMENTO/status/2019522035312128056", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the post through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Fernando Pessagno on X, 26 September 2025: the affiliate program and revenue", "url": "https://x.com/Fer_MOMENTO/status/1971567735768305776", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the post through api.fxtwitter.com. It does not name the product." }, { "title": "Fernando Pessagno on X, 8 October 2026: The new aiCarousels is live", "url": "https://x.com/Fer_MOMENTO/status/2108105839039156266", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the post through the api.fxtwitter.com timeline." }, { "title": "Fernando Pessagno on X, 27 August 2026: running a solo business in Sweden", "url": "https://x.com/Fer_MOMENTO/status/2092893379075919953", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the thread through the api.fxtwitter.com timeline." }, { "title": "Fernando Pessagno on X, 21 November 2024: bootstrapped founders in Sweden", "url": "https://x.com/Fer_MOMENTO/status/1859499898418114562", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the post through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Fernando Pessagno on X, 1 September 2026: three years on his own products", "url": "https://x.com/Fer_MOMENTO/status/2094696565101256770", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the post through the api.fxtwitter.com timeline." }, { "title": "Fernando Pessagno on X, 27 July 2024: affiliate payday, 40% commission", "url": "https://x.com/Fer_MOMENTO/status/1817167093487255571", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the post through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Fernando Pessagno on X, 28 January 2025: free tools instead of videos", "url": "https://x.com/Fer_MOMENTO/status/1884288327677009988", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the post through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "aiCarousels home page, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://www.aicarousels.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page and its source. Source for the Outseta login link, the Chrome extension and the free tools." }, { "title": "Fernando Pessagno on X, 5 December 2024: the first version had too many design options", "url": "https://x.com/Fer_MOMENTO/status/1864586691614306519", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the thread through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/llm-gateway/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/llm-gateway.md", "slug": "llm-gateway", "name": "LLM Gateway", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "API gateway for AI models", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-14", "launchLabel": "22 May 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$1M in Stripe-verified gross receipts in 12 months, September 2026", "sticker": "$1M gross in 12 months", "outcomeUsd": 999309, "months": 16, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders, who made 85% of the code commits; size of any wider team not known", "fundingLabel": "None found", "primaryFactor": "Open source", "group": "ai-model-tools", "channel": "open-source", "trend": "growing", "collections": [ "open-source" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Developer tools" ], "product": "One API address, in the same format as OpenAI's API, that forwards each request to one of more than 200 models from more than 40 providers, such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, and records the cost of each request. Customers prepay credits at the providers' prices plus a 5% fee, bring their own provider keys for free, or run the open-source code on their own servers. DevPass is a monthly subscription for AI coding agents.", "why": "Every team that builds with AI models ends up with several provider accounts, keys, invoices and SDKs. One gateway with open code replaces them, and a developer can read the code before sending traffic through the hosted version. In 2026 the founders added DevPass, a flat monthly price for coding agents with an allowance of up to three times the price in model usage. The verified monthly receipts grew from US$57,994 in January 2026 to US$249,922 in August 2026; TrustMRR does not split them by product.", "summary": [ "LLM Gateway is an API gateway for large language models (LLMs). An API gateway is one server address that receives a program's requests and forwards each one to the right service; LLMs are the AI models that read and write text, such as the models behind ChatGPT. An application sends a request in the format of OpenAI's API, and the gateway passes it to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or one of more than 40 other providers, records the cost, and sends the request to another provider when the first one fails, which is called failover. The code is open source under the AGPLv3 licence: anyone may read, run and change it, but whoever offers a changed version as a network service must publish the changes. The hosted version sells prepaid credits at the providers' prices plus a 5% fee. OpenRouter, another gateway, works the same way: its own FAQ says it passes the providers' prices through without markup and charges a fee when customers buy credits.", "Two co-founders build it: Luca Steeb, and a developer who signs as Smakosh. The GitHub repository was created on 12 April 2025, and the founders give 22 May 2025 as the founding date. TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a company's payment processor, shows US$1,000,116 of Stripe receipts from the start to 7 September 2026. Of this, US$999,309 came in the twelve months from October 2025, and US$249,922 in August 2026 alone. In 2026 the company added DevPass, a subscription at US$29 to US$179 a month for AI coding agents. The operating company is Polar Lights LLC in Delaware. No funding round was found.", "The headline is gross receipts: all the money that customers paid, before the model providers are paid. On pay-as-you-go credits the business keeps the 5% fee, about 4.8% of each payment. On DevPass it keeps the price minus what the subscriber's usage costs, and that usage may reach three times the price at list rates; no source shows the result. The verified data stops on 7 September 2026, when the Stripe API key that TrustMRR used expired. An API key is a password that lets one program read another program's account. By a co-founder's own statement, the figures also leave out enterprise deals paid by bank wire." ], "factsCaption": "US$1 million of Stripe-verified gross receipts in about 16 months, with verification stopped on 7 September 2026. Most of the money passes on to the model providers.", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from Stripe through TrustMRR, as read up to 7 September 2026, the day the Stripe API key expired. A grade C value is the company's own page, a founder post, or a public record such as GitHub. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. The money figures are gross receipts, not the part that the business keeps.", "timelineLead": "From a GitHub repository in April 2025 to US$1 million of verified receipts in September 2026, in 16 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "LLM Gateway prices in October 2026, from the company's pricing page and DevPass page (grade C)", "note": "Pay-as-you-go customers buy credits and pay each provider's per-token price plus a flat 5% platform fee; cards from outside the US pay 1.5% more. With their own provider keys (bring your own key, BYOK) routing costs nothing. DevPass plans are monthly. From 15 October 2026 the DevPass allowance falls from 3 times to 2 times the price at each subscriber's first renewal on or after that date, and new subscriptions start at 2 times. Self-hosting the AGPLv3 code is free; code in the ee/ directory needs an enterprise licence in production.", "rows": [ [ "Free, pay as you go", "0", "0", "provider prices plus 5% fee on credits; BYOK free" ], [ "DevPass Lite", "", "29", "US$87 of usage at provider list rates (3x); US$58 from 15 October 2026" ], [ "DevPass Pro", "", "79", "US$237 of usage (3x); US$158 from 15 October 2026" ], [ "DevPass Max", "", "179", "US$537 of usage (3x); US$358 from 15 October 2026" ], [ "Enterprise", "custom", "", "volume discounts on credits, SLA, invoicing, 30-day trial" ], [ "Self-hosted", "0", "0", "AGPLv3; ee/ code needs a commercial licence" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified receipts in the 12 months to 7 September 2026", "value": "US$999,309", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data on TrustMRR. The twelve monthly figures from October 2025 to September 2026 add up to this total. Gross receipts: they include prepaid model credits that pass on to the providers.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified receipts, all time to 7 September 2026", "value": "US$1,000,116", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data on TrustMRR. By subtraction, only US$807 of it came before October 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified receipts in August 2026, the last full month", "value": "US$249,922", "grade": "A", "note": "Up from US$161,592 in July, US$101,431 in June and US$57,994 in January 2026. September 2026 has US$51,265 for its first days only.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Growth to August 2026", "value": "54.7% over July; 4.3 times January", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the monthly figures above.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from August 2026", "value": "about US$3.0 million a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$249,922 times 12 is US$2,999,064. One month only, gross, and the last full month before verification stopped.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue and active subscriptions", "value": "US$78,764 from 1,386 subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe snapshot stored on the profile at the last sync. Calculated: about US$56.83 per subscription a month. TrustMRR does not say which products the subscriptions are for.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Receipts in the last 30 days before verification stopped", "value": "US$259,539, up 54.6%", "grade": "A", "note": "Snapshot from the last sync on 7 September 2026. The daily table on the same profile shows US$0.00 for every later day, because no data arrives after the key expired.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "End of verified data", "value": "7 September 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "Last revenue sync at 02:22 UTC; the Stripe API key expired at 08:22 UTC the same day. Nothing after that date is verified.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Missing from the verified figures", "value": "enterprise deals paid by bank wire", "grade": "C", "note": "Co-founder's post on 7 September 2026: TrustMRR does not include them. Their size is not known.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "What the business keeps on pay-as-you-go credits", "value": "a 5% fee, about 4.8% of the payment", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the pricing table writes \"Pay per token + 5% fee\", so US$100 of credits costs US$105, and 5 divided by 105 is 4.76%. With the customer's own provider keys there is no fee.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Fee left after card processing on a US$105 payment", "value": "about US$1.66, or 1.6%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated at Stripe's list price for US cards, 2.9% plus 30 cents: US$3.35 of the US$5 fee goes to Stripe. LLM Gateway's real Stripe rate is not known.", "src": [ 3, 20 ] }, { "fact": "Upper limit of fee income in the all-time receipts", "value": "about US$47,625", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$1,000,116 times 5/105, as if every receipt were a credit purchase. Part of the money is DevPass subscriptions, whose margin no source shows.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "DevPass usage allowance", "value": "3 times the price, 2 times from 15 October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Company's DevPass page. Lite at US$29 a month gives US$87 of model usage at provider list rates, metered per request. Daily caps and tighter weekly caps on premium models also start on 15 October.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 co-founders", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR lists Luca Steeb and Smakosh as co-founders, and both X profiles say co-founder. Their two GitHub accounts made 4,104 of the 4,815 commits that GitHub counts, 85.2%. The About page speaks of a distributed team; its size is not known.", "src": [ 1, 2, 5, 9, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "No funding announcement in any downloaded source, and no page in the Y Combinator company directory. Not verified that none exists.", "src": [ 21 ] }, { "fact": "Company", "value": "Polar Lights LLC, Delaware", "grade": "C", "note": "The About page names it as the operator, at an address in Lewes, Delaware. The LICENSE file names LLMGateway, Inc. as the copyright holder; no source explains the difference.", "src": [ 2, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Open-source licence", "value": "AGPLv3, with a commercial licence for the ee/ directory", "grade": "C", "note": "Production use of the ee/ code needs an LLMGateway Enterprise licence for the correct number of user seats. Development and testing use is free.", "src": [ 2, 6 ] }, { "fact": "GitHub repository, 14 October 2026", "value": "1,686 stars, 193 forks, 39 contributors", "grade": "C", "note": "GitHub's own record. Created on 12 April 2025. The contributors include bots, among them dependabot and devin-ai-integration.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Traffic claimed by the company", "value": "more than 1 trillion tokens in more than 80 million requests", "grade": "C", "note": "Company's About page. Not verified.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Time from founding to US$1 million in receipts", "value": "16 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 22 May 2025 to 7 September 2026 is 473 days, or 15.5 months.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Status, October 2026", "value": "running", "grade": "C", "note": "New code was pushed on 14 October 2026, the company account announced new endpoints on 12 October 2026, and the changelog covers four products: LLM Gateway, DevPass, Lounge and Airside.", "src": [ 5, 11, 14 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "12 April 2025", "what": "The GitHub repository theopenco/llmgateway is created.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "22 May 2025", "what": "Founding date, as the founders entered it on TrustMRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "9 June 2025", "what": "A Hacker News post presents the site as an \"open-source Openrouter\". It gets 3 points.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "13 June 2025", "what": "The company account @llmgateway opens on X.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "October to December 2025", "what": "First months in the verified timeline: US$89 in October, US$10,920 in November, US$47,191 in December.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "31 March 2026", "what": "A commit by Smakosh renames the coding subscription to DevPass.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "26 April 2026", "what": "An admin page for DevPass subscribers is added to the code.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "7 May 2026", "what": "DevPass launches on Product Hunt.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "US$101,431 in one month, the first month above US$100,000.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "22 July 2026", "what": "Luca Steeb posts a response-time benchmark of LLM Gateway against OpenRouter on Hacker News.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "August 2026", "what": "US$249,922, the highest verified month. After problems with Stripe card disputes, Luca Steeb writes that \"card payments as a merchant really are a nightmare\".", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 9 ] }, { "when": "7 September 2026", "what": "All-time Stripe receipts pass US$1 million. Smakosh posts that the US$1 million is now verifiable but leaves out bank-wire deals. The Stripe key expires six hours after the last sync, and verification stops.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 8 ] }, { "when": "25 September 2026", "what": "Both co-founders present LLM Gateway on the DevNTell live stream on X.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "12 October 2026", "what": "The company announces new endpoints for OpenAI's Decisions API and Perplexity's Search API.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "15 October 2026", "what": "Scheduled: the DevPass allowance falls from 3 times to 2 times the price.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Open code that developers can check", "text": "The gateway, dashboard, API and worker are all AGPLv3 on GitHub, and self-hosting takes one Docker command. A developer can read the code before sending traffic through the hosted version, and can leave without losing the tool. An early public mention, on Hacker News in June 2025, described it as an open-source OpenRouter." }, { "title": "Prepaid credits at provider prices plus 5%", "text": "The hosted service sells model usage at each provider's own per-token price and adds a flat 5% fee when credits are bought. Customers pay before they use, so the business does not wait for its money. With their own provider keys, customers pay nothing to the gateway and still get the analytics, caching and failover." }, { "title": "A flat subscription for coding agents", "text": "DevPass costs US$29, US$79 or US$179 a month and meters up to three times that amount in model usage at list rates, for Claude Code, OpenCode and other agents. It got its name in March 2026. The verified monthly receipts rose fastest after that, from US$85,742 in April to US$249,922 in August 2026, but TrustMRR does not split receipts by product, so the share of DevPass is not known." }, { "title": "Paid features for companies", "text": "By the pricing page, Enterprise plans add volume discounts, custom routing, unlimited data retention, a 99.9% uptime SLA and invoicing, and the feature table names enterprise audit logs and enterprise guardrails. Separately, the licence puts the code in the ee/ directory under a paid licence for production use. Enterprise payments by bank wire are not in the Stripe figures." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's pages, its public GitHub repository and the co-founders' posts. They are grade C.", "items": [ "One public repository holds the gateway, the dashboard, the API and the worker, licensed AGPLv3. Self-hosting is one Docker command.", "The website moved from TanStack Start to Next.js in July 2025, by the changelog.", "The two co-founders made 85% of the commits that GitHub counts. Bots commit too: dependabot updates dependencies, and devin-ai-integration, the account of an AI coding agent, has 92 commits.", "Google Cloud hosts the application, the database and the file storage, Stripe takes the payments, Resend sends the email and PostHog records product analytics, by the company's sub-processor list of 19 August 2026. In August 2026 Luca Steeb complained in public about Stripe's handling of card disputes.", "A provider page lists, for each of 45 providers, the legal terms, the data handling and the contracting entity. The company says that it adds new models within 48 hours of their release.", "OpenCode has LLM Gateway built in, and Claude Code and other agents connect with two environment variables.", "Marketing: the company X account posts each new model, and the site has comparison pages against OpenRouter, LiteLLM, Portkey and Vercel AI Gateway." ], "src": [ 2, 5, 9, 4, 13, 11, 22, 14 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold one API in front of many services that other companies owned, or a developer platform that a larger company could give away. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Singly", "years": "2011 to 2016", "funding": "US$2.7M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "One API for a person's data from many social networks and online services.", "died": "It depended on other companies' APIs, which were not reliable. Zapier and IFTTT offered broader automation, and after Appcelerator bought it in 2013 the product lost its focus.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/548-singly" }, { "name": "Parse", "years": "2011 to 2016", "funding": "US$7M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A ready-made backend, so that app developers did not need their own servers.", "died": "Facebook bought it in 2013 and did not give it the resources it needed, while Google backed Firebase, a competing product.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/414-parse" }, { "name": "Solid", "years": "2017 to 2025", "funding": "US$81M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "One API that connects a company's business software, so that no one writes custom integrations.", "died": "Connecting everything to everything was harder than planned. Long sales cycles, a high cost to win each customer and high support costs were more than customers paid.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2479-solid" }, { "name": "Finantier", "years": "2021 to 2024", "funding": "US$3M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "One API to connect apps to the many banks of Southeast Asia.", "died": "The rules were different in each country and slowed its growth, and Plaid, a much larger rival, entered the region.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/885-finantier" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the four stood between developers and services that other companies owned. Singly broke when the social networks changed their APIs, Parse lost to a rival with Google behind it, Solid's cost of serving each customer was higher than what the customer paid, and Finantier lost to a larger rival. LLM Gateway has the same exposure: the model providers own the models, set the prices and write the terms, and Vercel and Cloudflare offer gateways with no fee at all.", "Two things differ. First, customers pay in advance and the gateway passes the providers' prices through, so the business needs little money of its own, and no funding round was found. Second, the code is open source, so a customer who stops paying can keep running it, which the company names as the reason that teams stay. Neither difference makes the margin larger: on pay-as-you-go credits the business keeps about 5% before card fees." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The margin, with care.", "text": "An open-source gateway that resells model usage needs little money to start, because customers prepay. But the fee is a few percent of the money that passes through, and large platforms offer the same function for free. The parts to copy are the open code that brings developers to the product, and products that earn more than a pass-through fee: a subscription and an enterprise licence.", "steps": [ "Publish the core under a licence such as AGPLv3, which allows self-hosting but makes anyone who sells a changed version as a service publish the changes.", "Sell prepaid credits at the providers' prices plus a small, stated fee, and let customers bring their own keys for free.", "Put the features that companies need, such as audit logs and guardrails, under a commercial licence.", "Test flat-price plans with care: an allowance of three times the price works only when most subscribers use much less." ], "open": "Gateways for other paid APIs that change fast: speech, image and video models, web search APIs, and the AI coding agents that need many models behind one key." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Gross receipts, not the business's revenue", "text": "The US$999,309 is what customers paid through Stripe. On pay-as-you-go credits about 95% passes on to the model providers, and the business keeps the 5% fee, about 4.8% of the payment, or about 1.6% after Stripe's list card fee. The margin on DevPass is not public, and no source gives a profit figure." }, { "title": "Verification stopped on 7 September 2026", "text": "The Stripe API key that TrustMRR reads expired that day, so every verified figure ends then, and the daily table shows US$0.00 for every later day. A co-founder says that enterprise deals paid by bank wire are missing, so the real total may be higher. Nothing after 7 September is verified in either direction." }, { "title": "Many competitors, some with no fee", "text": "OpenRouter uses the same model of pass-through prices and a fee on credits. LiteLLM is an open-source gateway with 61,218 GitHub stars, against 1,686 for LLM Gateway. Portkey sells a production plan at US$49 a month. Vercel AI Gateway charges no markup and no platform fee, and Cloudflare AI Gateway's core features are free. In August 2026 another gateway was posted on Hacker News as one that charges 0%." }, { "title": "Thin margins on resold model usage", "text": "DevPass gave three times its price in model usage at list rates. From 15 October 2026 it gives two times for the same price, with daily caps and tighter weekly caps on premium models. The company did not say why. A plan that gives more usage than its price makes money only when most subscribers use less than their allowance." }, { "title": "Dependence on the model providers' terms", "text": "Every request goes to a provider under that provider's terms; the company's provider page names, for each of 45 providers, the contracting party in the terms that apply to LLM Gateway's account. A provider that raises prices, limits resale or closes the account changes the product at once." }, { "title": "Two people, two company names", "text": "The work rests on two co-founders, who made 85% of the commits. The About page names Polar Lights LLC as the operator, while the licence file names LLMGateway, Inc.; no source explains which company owns the code." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://llmgateway.io" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/llm-gateway" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: LLM Gateway profile, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/llm-gateway", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile (https://trustmrr.com/startup/llm-gateway.md) in full. The revenue table, the monthly timeline, the MRR and the subscription count come from Stripe (grade A); the description, the co-founders and the founding date are founder-written (grade C). Last sync 7 September 2026; the Stripe key expired the same day." }, { "title": "LLM Gateway: About page", "url": "https://llmgateway.io/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 5% fee, the AGPLv3 licence, the ee/ directory, Polar Lights LLC and the traffic totals." }, { "title": "LLM Gateway: Pricing page", "url": "https://llmgateway.io/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the plans, the 5% fee, the fee for cards from outside the US and the BYOK rule." }, { "title": "LLM Gateway: DevPass page", "url": "https://llmgateway.io/devpass", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the plans, the notice of the change on 15 October 2026 and the agent list." }, { "title": "GitHub API: repository theopenco/llmgateway, its contributors and its organization", "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/theopenco/llmgateway", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the JSON records on 14 October 2026: creation date, last push, stars, forks, licence field and commits per contributor." }, { "title": "GitHub: LICENSE and ee/LICENSE of theopenco/llmgateway", "url": "https://github.com/theopenco/llmgateway/blob/main/LICENSE", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both files in full, as raw text." }, { "title": "GitHub: commit \"rebrand to DevPass\", 31 March 2026, and the next DevPass commits", "url": "https://github.com/theopenco/llmgateway/commit/ba3de02344f239c574a8a70a35bf83a5b4e02246", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the three oldest results of the GitHub commit search API for \"devpass\"." }, { "title": "Smakosh on X, 7 September 2026: TrustMRR and the US$1 million", "url": "https://x.com/smakosh/status/2096874683463278902", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Co-founder's post on the US$1 million and the bank-wire deals." }, { "title": "Luca Steeb on X: profile and recent posts", "url": "https://x.com/steebchen", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile and the latest 20 posts through api.fxtwitter.com: co-founder bio, his own Stripe dispute posts of August 2026, and his repost of Developer DAO's announcement of the DevNTell live stream of 25 September 2026." }, { "title": "Smakosh on X: profile", "url": "https://x.com/smakosh", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile and the latest 20 posts through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the co-founder bio." }, { "title": "LLM Gateway on X: profile and recent posts", "url": "https://x.com/llmgateway", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile and the latest 20 posts through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the account's start date and the announcements of 12 October 2026." }, { "title": "Hacker News, 9 June 2025: LLM Gateway: open-source Openrouter", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44220561", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the story record through the Algolia Hacker News search API: title, date and points. The same search gave the benchmark post of 22 July 2026 and the post of 24 August 2026 about a gateway that charges 0%." }, { "title": "LLM Gateway: Provider information page", "url": "https://llmgateway.io/legal/providers", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the introduction and the first entries of the table of 45 providers." }, { "title": "LLM Gateway: Changelog", "url": "https://llmgateway.io/changelog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the latest entries, to 22 September 2026, and the list of products." }, { "title": "OpenRouter: FAQ", "url": "https://openrouter.ai/docs/faq", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on pricing and fees. The fee rate itself loads by script and is not in the downloaded text." }, { "title": "Vercel documentation: AI Gateway pricing", "url": "https://vercel.com/docs/ai-gateway/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the introduction on markup and fees." }, { "title": "Cloudflare documentation: AI Gateway pricing", "url": "https://developers.cloudflare.com/ai-gateway/reference/pricing/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the pricing notes." }, { "title": "Portkey: Pricing page", "url": "https://portkey.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the plan table." }, { "title": "GitHub API: repository BerriAI/litellm", "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/BerriAI/litellm", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the JSON record on 14 October 2026: stars and description." }, { "title": "Stripe: Pricing page", "url": "https://stripe.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the line on card pricing in the US." }, { "title": "Y Combinator company directory: llm-gateway", "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/llm-gateway", "grade": "C", "how": "Requested on 14 October 2026; the server answered 404, no such page. A missing page is weak evidence, not proof, that there was no Y Combinator funding." }, { "title": "LLM Gateway: Sub-processor list, version of 19 August 2026", "url": "https://llmgateway.io/legal/sub-processors", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the list of operational sub-processors in full." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/calyra/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/calyra.md", "slug": "calyra", "name": "Calyra", "country": "France", "sector": "Health Care", "productType": "AI calorie tracker app that estimates the nutrition of a meal from a photo", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-14", "launchLabel": "12 August 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$507K of revenue in 12 months, October 2026", "sticker": "$507K in 12 months", "outcomeUsd": 506567, "months": 14, "teamLabel": "1 founder, Maximilien Kender; NUTRIA SAS has a single shareholder and no salaried staff in the French register", "fundingLabel": "None found: €1,000 of share capital, and the profile says bootstrapped", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "health-appearance", "channel": "creators", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Health and fitness" ], "product": "An iPhone and Android app that estimates calories, macronutrients and micronutrients from a photo of a meal, with a barcode scanner for packaged food and a log of weight and BMI. It is free to download; the service needs a subscription after a 3-day free trial, at US$9.99 a month or US$49.99 a year in the US store.", "why": "One founder released it in August 2025, after Cal AI, released in April 2024, had shown that photo calorie counting sells. It has a hard paywall, a short trial and cheap yearly plans. It appears to have started in France: the French App Store shows 598 ratings against 138 in the US store. The owner lists TikTok as the only marketing channel.", "summary": [ "Calyra is an iPhone and Android app that estimates the calories in a meal from one photo. The user points the camera at a plate; the app names the foods, estimates the amounts, and logs calories, macronutrients, the protein, carbohydrate and fat that give the body energy, and micronutrients such as vitamins. A barcode scanner covers packaged food. The company's privacy policy says only that the photos are \"traitées par notre intelligence artificielle\", processed by our artificial intelligence; no source names the model or the provider behind it. The app is free to download, but the service needs a paid subscription after a 3-day free trial: in the US App Store, US$9.99 a month or US$49.99 a year, with a yearly offer at US$29.99.", "One person built it in Aix-en-Provence, France. The French state business register shows that Maximilien Kender registered a sole proprietorship, a business that a person owns directly without a separate company, trading as NUTRIA on 1 July 2025, the founding date on the TrustMRR profile, and that he is the president of NUTRIA SAS, registered on 28 November 2025. The app's terms of use name him as its publisher, and the company's legal notice describes NUTRIA SAS as a SASU, a French simplified joint-stock company with a single shareholder, with €1,000 of share capital. The app has been on the App Store since 12 August 2025, first under the name Nutria. Its sales are recorded by RevenueCat, a service that mobile apps use to manage in-app subscriptions on the App Store and Google Play. RevenueCat's standard revenue measure is what customers paid, minus refunds, before Apple and Google take their commission, the share of each sale that the store keeps, and before taxes; it reports the money after those deductions separately, as proceeds.", "TrustMRR, a site that publishes revenue read directly from a company's payment provider, reads this RevenueCat account with a key that the owner gave it. On 13 October 2026 it showed US$506,567 of revenue in the last twelve months, US$558,567 since launch, and a monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the value of all active subscriptions converted to one month, of US$46,051 from 14,523 active subscriptions. These figures are grade A, because they come from the payment provider and not from the founder. They show a young business that is not steady: monthly revenue fell from US$24,790 in December 2025 to US$7,383 in February 2026, rose every month to US$119,599 in August 2026, and fell to US$96,766 in September. On 6 October 2026 the owner listed the app for sale at US$1,500,000. Cal AI, a larger app of the same kind that MyFitnessPal bought in a deal that closed in December 2025, had more than US$30 million of annual revenue at the sale, about 59 times Calyra's last twelve months." ], "factsCaption": "US$506,567 of RevenueCat-verified revenue in the twelve months to 13 October 2026, from an app released 14 months earlier by one founder, with a peak of US$119,599 in August 2026", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from RevenueCat payment records, read through the TrustMRR profile on 14 October 2026 (last synced 13 October 2026), from the French state business register, or from the documentation of RevenueCat or Apple. A grade B value is store data computed by Apple or Google, a published study, or a press report. A grade C value is a statement by the company or its owner. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows that it cites.", "timelineLead": "From a sole proprietorship in Aix-en-Provence to US$506,567 in twelve months and a sale listing, in 15 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Calyra prices in the US App Store, read 14 October 2026, with the trial from the company's terms and site (grade C)", "note": "Apple lists three in-app purchases; the store page does not show the trial, which comes from the company's terms of use and its site. The site says no bank card is needed for the trial. There is no weekly plan in the US list. The yearly price is 58.3% below twelve monthly payments (US$119.88), and the offer is 40.0% below the yearly price.", "rows": [ [ "Free trial", "0", "0", "3 days, then a paid plan is needed" ], [ "Monthly", "", "9.99", "full access" ], [ "Yearly", "4.17", "", "US$49.99 a year" ], [ "Yearly, offer", "2.50", "", "US$29.99 a year, listed by Apple as an offer" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue in the 12 months to 13 October 2026", "value": "US$506,567", "grade": "A", "note": "RevenueCat payment records read by TrustMRR. RevenueCat's standard revenue measure is what customers paid minus refunds, before store commission and taxes; TrustMRR does not say that it uses another measure.", "src": [ 1, 10, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue since launch", "value": "US$558,567", "grade": "A", "note": "Calculated from the two totals: US$52,000 of it came before 13 October 2025, in the first two months on sale.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days", "value": "US$83,463", "grade": "A", "note": "The profile gives a change of -24.0% against the 30 days before.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR)", "value": "US$46,051 from 14,523 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "MRR converts each subscription to a monthly value: a yearly plan counts as one twelfth of its price. The profile gives a change of -0.8% in 30 days.", "src": [ 1, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Best month", "value": "US$119,599, August 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "111.0% above July (US$56,694). September 2026: US$96,766, 19.1% below August.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Lowest month in the published history", "value": "US$7,383, February 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "The monthly history starts in November 2025 (US$21,616). August 2026 was 16.2 times February.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per day, 1 to 12 October 2026", "value": "US$2,734 on average", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the profile's daily table: US$32,805 in 12 days, 29.1% below the August average of US$3,858 a day.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR per active subscription", "value": "US$3.17 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$46,051 / 14,523. The yearly plans cost US$2.50 to US$4.17 a month and the monthly plan US$9.99, so most active subscribers probably pay yearly.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue of the last 30 days against MRR", "value": "1.81 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$83,463 / US$46,051. A yearly plan is paid in full on the first day, so cash in a month with many new yearly sales is far above MRR.", "src": [ 1, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue after a 15% store commission", "value": "about US$430,582 in 12 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$506,567 x 0.85. Apple charges 15% to developers in its Small Business Program, open to those with up to US$1 million of proceeds a year. Enrollment is not verified, and taxes come off as well.", "src": [ 1, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "80.0%", "grade": "C", "note": "Shown on the profile. Costs do not come from RevenueCat, and the profile does not say how they were entered. Not verified.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price", "value": "US$1,500,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Listed for sale on TrustMRR on 6 October 2026, with 2 offers received. The price is the seller's statement.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price as a multiple of revenue", "value": "2.96 times the last 12 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$1,500,000 / US$506,567. It is 2.71 times MRR x 12 (US$552,612). TrustMRR's own 1.5x divides by 12 times the last 30 days (US$1,001,556).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "US App Store prices", "value": "US$9.99 a month, US$49.99 a year, US$29.99 a year as an offer", "grade": "C", "note": "In-app purchases listed on the store page. No weekly plan. The terms add a 3-day free trial, and the site says no bank card is needed for it.", "src": [ 2, 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Ratings", "value": "4.7 of 5 from 138 ratings in the US App Store", "grade": "B", "note": "4.6 from 598 ratings in the French App Store, and 4.8 from 4.51 thousand reviews on Google Play, which shows more than 50,000 downloads.", "src": [ 2, 3, 9 ] }, { "fact": "App Store release", "value": "12 August 2025", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's lookup data. The company's site and terms still call the app Nutria, its first name.", "src": [ 3, 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Status on 14 October 2026", "value": "on sale in both stores, listed for sale as a business", "grade": "B", "note": "Version 1.4.4 of 4 October 2026 is the latest on the App Store. The Google Play listing is live under the same seller.", "src": [ 2, 3, 9, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 founder", "grade": "A", "note": "The register lists one president for NUTRIA SAS and marks both it and the earlier sole proprietorship as non-employers. The legal notice calls NUTRIA SAS a single-shareholder company (SASU). Contractors would not appear in the register.", "src": [ 4, 7, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "Share capital of €1,000 in the legal notice; the profile says bootstrapped.", "src": [ 7, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Other apps by the developer", "value": "none", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's lookup of developer account 1873299773 returns this one app.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Time from App Store release to the October 2026 figure", "value": "14 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 12 August 2025 to 13 October 2026, 427 days.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Cal AI at its sale, for comparison", "value": "more than US$30 million of annual revenue", "grade": "B", "note": "MyFitnessPal to TechCrunch, 2 March 2026; the deal closed in December 2025. That is about 59 times Calyra's last 12 months (calculated).", "src": [ 15 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "1 July 2025", "what": "A sole proprietorship trading as NUTRIA, classified as software publishing, is registered in Aix-en-Provence. TrustMRR gives the same date as the founding date.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "when": "12 August 2025", "what": "The app appears on the App Store, first under the name Nutria.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3, 6 ] }, { "when": "August to mid-October 2025", "what": "US$52,000 of revenue in the first two months, calculated from the profile's totals.", "grade": "X", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "28 November 2025", "what": "NUTRIA SAS, a single-shareholder company with €1,000 of share capital, is registered in Aix-en-Provence with the founder as president. It is the seller on both stores today.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 4, 7 ] }, { "when": "December 2025", "what": "US$24,790 of revenue, the best month of 2025 in the published history.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "February 2026", "what": "US$7,383, the lowest month in the published history.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "March to August 2026", "what": "Revenue rises every month: US$15,002, US$27,442, US$33,205, US$42,853, US$56,694, then US$119,599 in August.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "US$96,766, 19.1% below August.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "4 October 2026", "what": "Version 1.4.4, the fourth update after version 1.4.0 of 6 August 2026.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "when": "6 October 2026", "what": "Listed for sale on TrustMRR at US$1,500,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2026", "what": "Last RevenueCat sync: US$506,567 in 12 months, MRR of US$46,051, 14,523 active subscriptions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "One photo instead of typing", "text": "Older calorie apps make the user search a food database and type each portion. Calyra asks for one photo: the AI names the foods and estimates the amounts, and a barcode scan covers packaged food. The company's site says the results come in less than 3 seconds." }, { "title": "A hard paywall with a short trial", "text": "The terms say the service needs a paid subscription after a 3-day free trial. RevenueCat's 2025 report finds a median download-to-paying conversion of 12.11% for apps with a hard paywall against 2.18% for freemium apps. Most Health and Fitness apps give longer trials, of 5 to 9 days or more." }, { "title": "Yearly plans at a large discount", "text": "The yearly price is 58.3% below twelve monthly payments, and the offer is 40.0% below that. MRR of US$3.17 per active subscription suggests that most people chose a yearly plan. In RevenueCat's data, 44.1% of yearly subscribers still pay after a year, against 17.0% for monthly plans." }, { "title": "TikTok and the French market", "text": "The profile lists TikTok as the only marketing channel. The French App Store shows 598 ratings against 138 in the US store, and the company's site and terms are in French, so France appears to be the main market. This page could not see the videos or what they cost." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "The company publishes little about how the app is built. These items come from the store listings, the company's site and its legal pages, and are grade C.", "items": [ "An iPhone and iPad app (iOS 15.1 or later, 81.1 MB) and an Android app, both sold by NUTRIA SAS. The bundle name, com.nutria25.nutriaapp, keeps the first name of the app.", "Meal photos are \"traitées par notre intelligence artificielle pour identifier les aliments\" (processed by our artificial intelligence to identify the foods), in the words of the privacy policy, which names no model and no provider. The terms call it an image-recognition system.", "Barcode scanning for packaged food, a food database, and a recipe page that was added in an update.", "Subscriptions on both stores run through RevenueCat, and TrustMRR reads RevenueCat with a read-only key to publish the verified revenue.", "The website nutriatech.com is hosted on Vercel, according to the legal notice. The terms of use are a public Notion page." ], "src": [ 2, 8, 5, 1, 12, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised that tracking food, activity or biology would become health advice that people pay for. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Airo Health", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$4M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A wristband that tracked stress, nutrition intake and exercise and gave advice in real time.", "died": "Apple and Fitbit improved their own devices faster. The device did not justify its price, hardware production was hard, and new funding did not come.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1465-airo-health" }, { "name": "Jawbone", "years": "1999 to 2017", "funding": "US$930M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "UP fitness trackers that turned daily activity data into health insights.", "died": "Fitbit and Apple competed better. Product recalls, poor customer service and long lawsuits used up money and trust.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/257-jawbone" }, { "name": "Arivale", "years": "2015 to 2019", "funding": "US$50M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Scientific wellness: genome, blood and activity data with a personal coach, for US$3,500 up front and US$99 a month.", "died": "Each customer cost more than US$4,700 a year to serve, against US$1,188 a year of price after the first year.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/8-arivale" }, { "name": "Nutrigene", "years": "2018 to 2021", "funding": "US$3M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Liquid supplements mixed for each customer's DNA, lifestyle and health goals.", "died": "Customers were expensive to win, a personalized product was hard to scale, and simpler rivals such as Care/of sold more easily.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1010-nutrigene" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The four predecessors needed something physical to measure the body: a wristband, a fitness tracker, blood and genome tests, or a supplement mixed for each customer. Hardware and laboratories made every customer expensive, and two of them died of unit economics. Calyra measures nothing itself. The customer's own phone camera takes the picture and software estimates the calories, so one person could build it, and a new user costs little more than the processing of the photos and the store's commission.", "The cause that ended Airo Health and Jawbone has not gone away: larger companies with the same feature. Apple's search returns 183 calorie apps from 183 different sellers for one phrase, and MyFitnessPal, the largest of them by ratings, bought Cal AI and connected it to its own nutrition database. A photo calorie counter is now a common feature. What Calyra adds is a low yearly price, a start in French and a sales channel on TikTok, and a rival can copy each of these." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. An easy market, no.", "text": "Calyra shows that one person can build an AI photo calorie app and sell US$506,567 of subscriptions in twelve months, with numbers verified by the payment provider. Every part of the method is public: a camera screen, an image model, a barcode scanner, a hard paywall with a short trial, discounted yearly plans and short videos. That is also the problem. More than 180 look-alike apps compete for the same search words, so the business depends on the cost of each new subscriber, which no public source shows.", "steps": [ "Choose a daily task that people now do by typing and that one photo can replace.", "Put a paid subscription with a short free trial in front of the main feature, and sell the yearly plan at a large discount to twelve monthly payments.", "Use a subscription service such as RevenueCat for both app stores, and publish verified numbers if you may want to sell the business later.", "Start in your own language and country: Calyra has 598 ratings in the French App Store against 138 in the US store." ], "open": "Daily logging tasks that a photo can replace and that the large apps cover badly in a given language or country: drinks, medication, skin care, plant care." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Photo estimates are not exact", "text": "A 2023 systematic review of 52 studies found average calorie errors of 0.10% to 38.3% when AI estimated food from images, with smaller errors for single, simple foods. A 2025 study gave 114 meal photos to ChatGPT-4: it identified the foods with 93.0% precision but estimated medium and large portions poorly and underestimated 11 of 16 nutrients. A 2024 study of seven apps with photo recognition found their automatic energy estimates inaccurate. Calyra publishes no accuracy test on its site or store pages, and its site calls its AI \"la plus précise du marché\", the most accurate on the market, without data." }, { "title": "A crowded category of look-alike apps", "text": "On 14 October 2026, Apple's US search for \"ai calorie tracker\" returned 195 apps. 183 have a form of the word calorie in the name, each from a different seller, and 156 of those were first released after Cal AI on 8 April 2024. Calyra was number 148 in the list. MyFitnessPal has 2,377,347 ratings and Cal AI 370,360; Calyra has 138." }, { "title": "Churn after the first year", "text": "Yearly plans keep customers longest, but not most of them: RevenueCat's 2025 report finds 44.1% of yearly subscribers still paying after one year, 17.0% for monthly plans and 3.4% for weekly plans, which Calyra does not sell in the US store. Calyra's first yearly subscribers, from August to December 2025, reach their first renewal between August and December 2026, so the coming months test the business. In the last 30 days revenue fell 24.0% while MRR fell 0.8%." }, { "title": "For sale 15 months after founding", "text": "On 6 October 2026 the owner listed the app at US$1,500,000, 2.96 times its last twelve months of revenue. TrustMRR's own figure of 1.5x divides the price by twelve times the last 30 days, which upfront yearly payments make larger. A buyer gets revenue that more than doubled from July to August 2026 and then fell, costs that are not verified, and an app that one person runs." }, { "title": "Before commission, and one person", "text": "The verified revenue is most likely before Apple's and Google's commission and before taxes, so the owner receives less than the headline: about US$430,582 at a 15% commission. The register shows no salaried staff, so the business depends on one founder." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://nutriatech.com" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6748324995" }, { "kind": "android", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nutria25.nutriaapp.beta" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/nutria-9e3eaa" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile: Nutria (9e3eaa), the Calyra app, revenue last synced 13 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/nutria-9e3eaa", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full (https://trustmrr.com/startup/nutria-9e3eaa.md) on 14 October 2026. Revenue, MRR and subscriptions come from RevenueCat through an API key (grade A). The description, the funding line, the TikTok channel, the profit margin and the sale listing are written by the owner (grade C)." }, { "title": "Apple App Store listing: Calyra - AI Calorie Tracker, US store, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/calyra-ai-calorie-tracker/id6748324995", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the prices, the rating, the version history, the seller and the size." }, { "title": "Apple lookup API: developer account 1873299773 (Nutria SAS) and its apps, US and French stores", "url": "https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?id=1873299773&entity=software", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full on 14 October 2026 for the US and French stores. Source for the release date, the seller name, the ratings in each country and the single app." }, { "title": "French state business register (Recherche d'entreprises): NUTRIA SAS, SIREN 995082831, and the sole proprietorship trading as NUTRIA", "url": "https://recherche-entreprises.api.gouv.fr/search?q=nutria", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full on 14 October 2026. Source for the creation dates, legal forms, activity codes, the president and the non-employer flag. Other companies named Nutria in the results are unrelated." }, { "title": "Nutria terms of use (Conditions Générales d'Utilisation), Notion page linked from the App Store listing", "url": "https://laser-carol-7ae.notion.site/Conditions-G-n-rales-D-Utilisation-223d5fa4ad3180c2856fd359537213ac", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through Notion's page API on 14 October 2026, in French. Source for the publisher's name, the 3-day free trial, the monthly or yearly subscription and the image-recognition system." }, { "title": "NutriaTech website, home page", "url": "https://nutriatech.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 14 October 2026, in French. Source for the trial without a bank card, the under-3-seconds claim and the most-accurate claim." }, { "title": "NutriaTech legal notice (Mentions légales)", "url": "https://nutriatech.com/mentions-legales", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the SASU form, the €1,000 share capital, the RCS number and the host, Vercel." }, { "title": "NutriaTech privacy policy (Politique de confidentialité), updated 15 September 2026", "url": "https://nutriatech.com/confidentialite", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, in French. Photos are processed by the company's own description of its AI; no model or provider is named." }, { "title": "Google Play listing: Calyra - AI Calorie Tracker", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nutria25.nutriaapp.beta", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the summary section on 14 October 2026: seller, rating, review count and download range." }, { "title": "RevenueCat documentation: Revenue chart", "url": "https://www.revenuecat.com/docs/dashboard-and-metrics/charts/revenue-chart", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the definitions section. Revenue is before taxes and store commission; Revenue (net of taxes) and Proceeds are separate measures." }, { "title": "RevenueCat documentation: Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) chart", "url": "https://www.revenuecat.com/docs/dashboard-and-metrics/charts/monthly-recurring-revenue-mrr-chart", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the definitions section. Source for how yearly plans are normalized to a month." }, { "title": "TrustMRR llms.txt: how TrustMRR connects to payment providers", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/llms.txt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the read-only RevenueCat key and the imported daily revenue, MRR and subscription history." }, { "title": "Apple Developer: App Store Small Business Program", "url": "https://developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program/", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the program description: 15% commission for developers with up to US$1 million of proceeds in the prior calendar year." }, { "title": "Apple search API: \"ai calorie tracker\", US store, 200-result limit", "url": "https://itunes.apple.com/search?term=ai+calorie+tracker&entity=software&country=us&limit=200", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full on 14 October 2026 and counted with python3: names, sellers, release dates and rating counts." }, { "title": "TechCrunch, 2 March 2026: MyFitnessPal has acquired Cal AI, the viral calorie app built by teens", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/02/myfitnesspal-has-acquired-cal-ai-the-viral-calorie-app-built-by-teens/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for Cal AI's revenue and downloads at the sale and for the December 2025 closing." }, { "title": "RevenueCat, State of Subscription Apps 2025", "url": "https://www.revenuecat.com/state-of-subscription-apps-2025/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the public sections on plan durations, trials, paywalls and retention. Aggregate data from apps that use RevenueCat, not about Calyra." }, { "title": "Annals of Medicine, December 2023: AI-based digital image dietary assessment methods compared to humans and ground truth, a systematic review", "url": "https://doi.org/10.1080/07853890.2023.2273497", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the abstract through Europe PMC (PMC10836267). Source for the range of calorie errors in 52 studies." }, { "title": "Nutrients, February 2025: An Evaluation of ChatGPT for Nutrient Content Estimation from Meal Photographs", "url": "https://doi.org/10.3390/nu17040607", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the abstract through Europe PMC (PMC11858203). Source for the 114 photos, the 93.0% precision and the underestimated nutrients." }, { "title": "Nutrients, August 2024: Evaluating the Quality and Comparative Validity of Manual Food Logging and Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Food Image Recognition in Apps for Nutrition Care", "url": "https://doi.org/10.3390/nu16152573", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the abstract through Europe PMC (PMC11314244). Source for the finding on seven AI-enabled apps." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/rank-prompt/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/rank-prompt.md", "slug": "rank-prompt", "name": "Rank Prompt", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI search visibility tracking (AEO)", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-14", "launchLabel": "16 June 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$524K a year run rate, October 2026", "sticker": "$524K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 524064, "months": 16, "teamLabel": "4 partners and 1 founding engineer named; 6 people on LinkedIn, October 2026", "fundingLabel": "None found", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "seo-ai-search", "channel": "partners", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Marketing" ], "product": "Software that asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Claude, Gemini and Grok the questions that a brand's customers ask, records whether each answer names the brand and which web pages it cites, and then suggests fixes, writes articles and contacts the cited sites. Agencies can resell it under their own name.", "why": "Four owners of marketing agencies built it for their own clients, who asked whether AI recommended them. They launched it with plans made for agencies and a 30% lifetime commission for agencies that resell it. The average subscription now pays about US$206 a month, close to the price of the agency plans.", "summary": [ "Rank Prompt sells software for answer engine optimization (AEO), the work of making a brand appear in the answers of AI assistants, the way search engine optimization (SEO) makes a page appear in Google's list of links. The same work is also called generative engine optimization (GEO) or AI SEO. The product sends a customer's chosen questions, called prompts (the text that a person types into an AI assistant), to six AI engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode with AI Overviews, Claude, Gemini and Grok. It reads each answer, records whether it names the customer's brand and which pages it cites, and computes a visibility score: the share of answers that named the brand. For example, 9 questions on 3 engines give 27 answers; if 9 of them name the brand, the score is 33%. Then it suggests fixes and writes articles meant to be cited.", "Four people who ran digital marketing agencies, Nazareno Castro Bay, Ethan Kramer, Cole Feigl and Trevor Anderson, first built it as an internal tool for clients who asked \"Does AI recommend our brand?\". They launched it by press release from Miami on 16 June 2025, at US$29 a month, with a 30% lifetime revenue share for agencies. The company is Rank Prompt LLC in Florida. TrustMRR, a site that publishes revenue read directly from a company's payment processor, lists it under the X account of Tomas Marengo, whom the About page calls Founding Engineer. On 14 October 2026, Stripe data on TrustMRR showed MRR, monthly recurring revenue (the subscription revenue that comes in each month, with yearly plans counted as one twelfth of their price), of US$43,672 from 212 active subscriptions. That is about US$524,000 a year. Monthly revenue grew 5.5 times from November 2025 to September 2026.", "The revenue numbers on this page are grade A: they come from the payment processor. The team, the product description and the customer claims are company statements, grade C. The average subscription pays about US$206 a month, between the prices of the two agency plans, so most of the revenue comes from agencies and businesses, not individuals. The page also shows the large funded competitors, a study that found AI answers change from one run to the next, and three earlier companies that sold brands a measure of their visibility on platforms that they did not own." ], "factsCaption": "Stripe-verified revenue through TrustMRR: US$43,672 of monthly recurring revenue from 212 subscriptions in October 2026, 16 months after launch", "factsRead": "How to read this table: grade A values come from Stripe through TrustMRR. Grade C values are the company's own statements on its website, on LinkedIn or in its press release. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From an agency's internal tool to US$43,672 a month in verified recurring revenue, in 16 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Rank Prompt prices in October 2026, from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "The pricing page shows the price per month billed yearly and the yearly saving. The monthly prices (US$49, US$89, US$149 and US$299) are shown on the partner page. One credit runs one prompt on up to three engines; four to six engines cost two credits. The first report, 10 credits, is free without a card, and every paid plan has a 7-day free trial. At launch in June 2025 plans started at US$29 a month.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "10 credits, one full report, 3 brands" ], [ "Starter", "39", "49", "150 credits a month, 10 brands, owner only" ], [ "Pro", "71", "89", "500 credits a month, 100 brands, 2 team seats" ], [ "Agency", "119", "149", "1,000 credits a month, 500 brands, 10 seats, reports with your logo" ], [ "Agency Plus", "239", "299", "2,000 credits a month, 1,000 brands, 25 seats, app on your own domain" ], [ "Enterprise", "custom", "", "credits priced by volume" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 14 October 2026", "value": "US$43,672", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe, connected to TrustMRR by API key. Revenue last synced 14 October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from that MRR", "value": "about US$524,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$43,672 times 12 is US$524,064, the headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions, 14 October 2026", "value": "212", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe through TrustMRR.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average MRR per active subscription", "value": "about US$206 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$43,672 divided by 212. Between the Agency plan (US$119 to US$149) and the Agency Plus plan (US$239 to US$299), far above Starter (US$39 to US$49). The customers are mostly agencies and businesses.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 12 months", "value": "US$280,608", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe through TrustMRR, to 14 October 2026. All-time revenue is US$289,312.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days", "value": "US$50,384", "grade": "A", "note": "Higher than MRR because yearly plans count in full on the day that they are paid. TrustMRR shows +38.6% against the 30 days before.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month, November 2025 and September 2026", "value": "US$8,279 and US$45,493", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe through TrustMRR. The public monthly table starts in November 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from November 2025 to September 2026", "value": "5.49 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$45,493 divided by US$8,279.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Largest one-month rise", "value": "March 2026: from US$10,577 to US$21,245", "grade": "A", "note": "2.01 times February, calculated. No source read explains the rise.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Largest one-month fall", "value": "July 2026: from US$35,487 to US$29,612", "grade": "A", "note": "Minus 16.6%, calculated. August was flat at US$29,834, then September rose to US$45,493.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue from launch to mid-October 2025", "value": "US$8,704", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: all-time revenue US$289,312 minus the last 12 months, US$280,608.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Website visitors in the last 30 days", "value": "16,645, or US$3.03 of revenue per visitor", "grade": "A", "note": "Google Analytics connected to TrustMRR. Google Search Console is connected too.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team, October 2026", "value": "5 named people; LinkedIn lists 6 employees", "grade": "C", "note": "The About page names four people as Partner / Co-Founder and one as Founding Engineer. LinkedIn gives the company size as 2 to 10 employees, shows 6, and a job post for an AI Search Operations Analyst.", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "The launch press release names no investors, and LinkedIn lists the company type as Partnership. Not verified beyond these pages.", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Legal entity", "value": "Rank Prompt LLC, Miami, Florida", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms of service, last updated 4 October 2026, governed by Florida law. LinkedIn gives the same address in Coral Gables.", "src": [ 9, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Customer claims on the site", "value": "10,000+ customers; 5.0/5 on G2", "grade": "C", "note": "Not verified. The site does not say how it counts customers. The verified number of active paying subscriptions is 212. The TrustMRR profile text says 4.9/5 on G2.", "src": [ 12, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Partner commission", "value": "30% of every payment, for as long as the client stays", "grade": "C", "note": "Paid monthly through PartnerStack, 60-day cookie window. On Agency Plus at US$299 a month that is US$89.70 a month. TrustMRR revenue is counted before these payouts.", "src": [ 7, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October 2026 figure", "value": "16 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: June 2025 to October 2026. TrustMRR gives a founded date of 15 May 2025.", "src": [ 5, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Before June 2025", "what": "The four partners run digital marketing agencies. Their agencies get visitors from AI tools without knowing why, and clients ask whether AI recommends them. They build an internal tool to answer.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 3 ] }, { "when": "15 May 2025", "what": "Founded date given on the TrustMRR profile.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "16 June 2025", "what": "Launch by PR Newswire press release from Miami. It works with ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Grok. Plans from US$29 a month, and a partner program with a 30% lifetime revenue share for agencies.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "June to mid-October 2025", "what": "US$8,704 of revenue in total, calculated from the Stripe figures.", "grade": "X", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "US$8,279 of revenue in the month, the first month of the public monthly table.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "January 2026", "what": "Backlink outreach and an email hub: the product finds contacts at the sites that AI cites and sends email campaigns to them.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "March 2026", "what": "Monthly revenue doubles, from US$10,577 in February to US$21,245.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "April 2026", "what": "Google Business Profile management with AI, a task board and new exports.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "Agency Suite and the Agency Plus plan: dashboard, client reporting, client portal and approvals, called the biggest release yet. Revenue that month: US$35,487.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 1 ] }, { "when": "July 2026", "what": "Monthly revenue falls 16.6% to US$29,612, and stays flat in August.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "A public REST API and an MCP server for AI agents; a lead widget and white-label domains for agencies. Revenue that month: US$45,493. A LinkedIn post advertises a job for an AI Search Operations Analyst.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 1, 4 ] }, { "when": "14 October 2026", "what": "MRR of US$43,672 from 212 active subscriptions, US$280,608 of revenue in the last 12 months, verified from Stripe.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Built inside agencies, sold through agencies", "text": "The four partners ran marketing agencies and built the tool for their own clients. The launch came with a 30% lifetime commission for agencies that bring clients, paid through PartnerStack. The Agency and Agency Plus plans add reports with the agency's logo, a client portal and the whole app on the agency's own domain. The average subscription, about US$206 a month, sits between the two agency prices." }, { "title": "Credits instead of features", "text": "In the words of the pricing page: \"The platform is the same on all four. What you are choosing is how much you can run and whose name is on the report.\" One credit runs one prompt on up to three engines, two credits on four to six. A customer who tracks more brands or more engines needs a bigger plan." }, { "title": "A free first report", "text": "Every account gets one full report on ChatGPT, Claude and Google AI Mode free, without a card, and the site offers free checkers and a free 20-lesson course. Paid plans start with a 7-day free trial." }, { "title": "A score that says it is noisy", "text": "The methodology page says that AI answers are not deterministic and that one report is \"an honest snapshot, not a verdict\". The company says this is why the product is built around tracking the same questions on a schedule, which is a reason to keep paying every month." }, { "title": "Frequent visible releases", "text": "The changelog shows releases in January, April, June, September (two) and October 2026. Each one added a reason for agencies to move up a plan: outreach, task boards, client portals, an API and white-label domains." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages, from the source code of its public web page, and from the verification line on TrustMRR. The company pages are grade C.", "items": [ "Each prompt in a customer's set runs on each chosen engine at the time of the report, in the market's language and location. The company says nothing is cached or simulated.", "Each answer is read for the brands that it names and the sources that it cites. A brand counts as present when the answer names it or one of its configured aliases. The score is the share of answers that named the brand.", "Six engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode with AI Overviews, Claude, Gemini and Grok, on every plan. ChatGPT, Claude and Google AI Mode run when the customer picks none.", "The pages read do not say whether the engines are reached through their paid APIs or through their consumer apps, or which models write the articles. The built-in AI agent gets a budget of US$5 to US$25 a month, depending on the plan.", "September 2026: a public REST API (version 1) and an MCP server, a standard connection through which AI tools such as Claude Code or Cursor can read and use a customer's account. The site also lists webhooks.", "Integrations with Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console, WordPress, Gmail for outreach emails and Google Business Profile.", "Payments run through Stripe, connected to TrustMRR by API key, without a merchant of record. The partner program runs on PartnerStack. The public website is built with Astro, a web framework, runs on Netlify, and loads PostHog product analytics, as its page source shows." ], "src": [ 6, 2, 12, 8, 1, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Three companies in the Loot Drop database sold brands a measure of their visibility, or tools to raise it, on platforms that they did not own. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Klout", "years": "2008 to 2017", "funding": "US$40M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A score from 1 to 100 that measured how influential a person or a brand was on social networks.", "died": "Facebook, Twitter and Instagram built their own analytics, rival scores gave more detail, and changes to the platforms' API access limited the data that Klout could collect.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/280-klout" }, { "name": "Salorix", "years": "2009 to 2014", "funding": "US$3.3M", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "Machine learning that ranked social media conversations, so brands could see the themes and influencers in their market.", "died": "Its investors withdrew their support, at the same time as leaner competitors with newer AI methods arrived.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1845-salorix" }, { "name": "LocalOn", "years": "2013 to 2016", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Web tools and local search optimization, so small shops could be found online by nearby customers.", "died": "Shopify and Wix offered the same tools. It ran out of money before it found a difference that small businesses would pay for.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1548-localon" } ], "whatChanged": [ "All three sold a measure of visibility, or a way to raise it, on platforms owned by someone else. Klout's score lost its meaning when the social networks built their own analytics and limited access to their data. Salorix depended on investors who withdrew. LocalOn had nothing that larger platforms did not also offer. Rank Prompt faces the first and the third risk directly: six AI providers control the answers that it measures, and many other tools, some with far more money, measure the same thing.", "Two things differ. First, Rank Prompt has no investors to withdraw: its revenue is paid by customers, verified from Stripe, and it was paying from the first months. Second, its score is not a secret formula like Klout's: it is a count of real answers, and the customer can open and read every answer behind it. What has not changed is the dependence on the platforms. If OpenAI or Google close automated access or sell brands their own reports, the measurement loses its value." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product, with difficulty. The sales channel, yes.", "text": "AI visibility tracking is now a crowded market with companies that have raised more than US$100 million. What can still be copied is the route: build a tool for the clients of your own agency, then sell it to other agencies with their name on the reports and a commission for life.", "steps": [ "Start from a question that your own clients already ask and that no tool answers.", "Sell credits tied to usage, so that heavy users pay more and light users can start cheap.", "Give agencies white-label reports, a client portal and a recurring commission, so that they resell it.", "Give the first report away without a card, and ship a visible release every month or two." ], "open": "Other new places where buyers ask a machine instead of searching: AI shopping assistants, voice assistants and AI agents that book or buy for their users. In each one, businesses cannot yet see how they appear." }, "watch": [ { "title": "A crowded market with large venture rounds", "text": "Profound raised a US$35 million Series B led by Sequoia on 12 August 2025, a US$96 million Series C at a US$1 billion valuation on 24 February 2026 (with fewer than 120 employees), and, as AI Weekly reported from Bloomberg, a US$180 million Series D at US$1.8 billion on 15 September 2026. Peec AI in Berlin, launched in February 2025, raised a US$21 million Series A on 18 November 2025, US$29 million in total, with more than 1,300 brands and agencies. Rank Prompt's own compare page lists Profound, Peec, Otterly.AI, Gauge and RankPill, and the SEO suites Semrush and Ahrefs." }, { "title": "AI answers change from one run to the next", "text": "A study by SparkToro and by Gumshoe, an AI tracking startup, reported by Search Engine Journal on 30 January 2026, ran 2,961 prompts on ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI Overviews. ChatGPT and Google returned the same list of brands less than 1% of the time across repeated runs of the same prompt, and the same list in the same order less than 0.1% of the time. The share of answers that name a brand was more stable than its position. Rank Prompt's score is that share, but a report with a few prompts is a small sample, so a change of a few points from one week to the next can be chance." }, { "title": "Dependence on the AI providers", "text": "The product works only as long as six providers let it ask questions automatically and get answers like the ones their users see. OpenAI's Terms of Use for ChatGPT, effective 1 January 2026, forbid users to \"Automatically or programmatically extract data or Output\". The pages read do not say whether Rank Prompt uses the providers' paid APIs or their consumer apps. Klout lost data when the social networks changed their API access." }, { "title": "Young, and a team of five or six", "text": "The product is 16 months old, the public monthly table covers 11 full months, and revenue fell 16.6% in July 2026 before rising again. Churn is not public. At the headline figure the About page names five people, four partners and one founding engineer, and LinkedIn lists six employees and an open job. TrustMRR lists only the engineer as founder." }, { "title": "Revenue is not profit", "text": "TrustMRR counts revenue before the 30% commission that partners receive for each client they bring, and before the cost of running prompts on six AI engines and the agent budget. Neither cost is public, so the profit is unknown." }, { "title": "Customer claims are not verified", "text": "The home page says 10,000+ customers and shows logos of Mastercard, P&G and 7-Eleven; the TrustMRR profile text names Mastercard, LVMH, Lenovo, Costco, AstraZeneca and Hyatt. None of this is verified, and the site does not say how it counts customers. The verified number of active paying subscriptions is 212." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://rankprompt.com/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/rank-prompt" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: Rank Prompt, Stripe-verified revenue, synced 14 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/rank-prompt", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile (rank-prompt.md) in full. The revenue tables, monthly timeline, MRR and subscriptions come from Stripe through an API key; the description and customer names are founder-written, grade C." }, { "title": "Rank Prompt pricing page, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://rankprompt.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the plans, credits, engines, brands, seats and the agent budget." }, { "title": "Rank Prompt About page", "url": "https://rankprompt.com/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the agency origin, the six engines and the names and roles of the team." }, { "title": "Rank Prompt company page on LinkedIn", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/rankprompt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public page. Source for the company size, the 6 employees, the company type, the address and the job post." }, { "title": "PR Newswire, 16 June 2025: Rank Prompt Launches as Pioneering Platform to Optimize Brand Visibility in AI Search Engines (as published by MarTech Series)", "url": "https://martechseries.com/predictive-ai/ai-platforms-machine-learning/rank-prompt-launches-as-pioneering-platform-to-optimize-brand-visibility-in-ai-search-engines/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's own press release. The same text on aijourn.com carries the dateline MIAMI, June 16, 2025. Source for the founders, the launch price and the partner program." }, { "title": "Rank Prompt methodology page: AI Visibility Methodology", "url": "https://rankprompt.com/methodology/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for how prompts are run, how answers are scored and the note that answers are not deterministic." }, { "title": "Rank Prompt partner program page", "url": "https://rankprompt.com/partners/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 30% commission, PartnerStack, the cookie window and the monthly prices." }, { "title": "Rank Prompt changelog", "url": "https://rankprompt.com/changelog/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Entries are dated by month. Three entries are dated December 2024, before the launch; they are not used here because the date may be an error." }, { "title": "Rank Prompt terms of service, last updated 4 October 2026", "url": "https://rankprompt.com/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the operator, payments, governing law and contact. Source for Rank Prompt LLC and Florida law." }, { "title": "TrustMRR founder page: Marengo (@tomymarengo)", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/founder/tomymarengo", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Links the profile to the X account TomyMarengo." }, { "title": "X profile of TomyMarengo", "url": "https://x.com/TomyMarengo", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through api.fxtwitter.com: the profile, whose bio says Building @RankPrompt, and the latest 20 posts. The text of none of them mentions revenue, and two have no text." }, { "title": "Rank Prompt home page", "url": "https://rankprompt.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, and the page source. Source for the customer claims, the engine list and the Astro framework." }, { "title": "Rank Prompt compare page", "url": "https://rankprompt.com/compare/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the list of tools that the company compares itself with." }, { "title": "Search Engine Journal, 30 January 2026, Matt G. Southern: AI Recommendations Change With Nearly Every Query: Sparktoro", "url": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/ai-recommendations-change-with-nearly-every-query-sparktoro/566242/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A report of the SparkToro and Gumshoe study. The study itself was not downloaded." }, { "title": "Profound newsroom, 12 August 2025: Profound Raises $35M Series B as AI Search Becomes the Next Platform Shift", "url": "https://www.tryprofound.com/newsroom/profound-raises-35m-series-b-as-ai-search-becomes-the-next-platform-shift", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The competitor's own announcement." }, { "title": "Fortune, 24 February 2026, Lily Mae Lazarus: Exclusive: As AI threatens search, Profound raises $96 million to help brands stay visible", "url": "https://fortune.com/2026/02/24/exclusive-as-ai-threatens-search-profound-raises-96-million-to-help-brands-stay-visible/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Series C, the US$1 billion valuation and the headcount." }, { "title": "AI Weekly, 15 September 2026, Alexis Dufresne: Profound Hits $1.8B on $180M Series D From Sequoia, Kleiner", "url": "https://aiweekly.co/alerts/ai-search-marketing-startup-profound-raises-180m-series-d-at-18b-led-by-sequoia", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A short summary of a Bloomberg report; the Bloomberg article was not read." }, { "title": "Tech.eu, 18 November 2025, Tamara Djurickovic: Peec AI raises $21M Series A to help brands win in AI search", "url": "https://tech.eu/2025/11/18/peec-ai-raises-21m-series-a-to-help-brands-win-in-ai-search/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the round, the total funding, the launch month and the 1,300 brands and agencies." }, { "title": "OpenAI Terms of Use, effective 1 January 2026", "url": "https://openai.com/policies/row-terms-of-use/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on what users may not do. These terms cover ChatGPT and other services for individuals; the page says that separate Business Terms govern the APIs." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/chatseo/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/chatseo.md", "slug": "chatseo", "name": "ChatSEO", "country": "France", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI agent for SEO, connected to Google Search Console", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-14", "launchLabel": "29 November 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$385K a year run rate, October 2026", "sticker": "$385K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 385032, "months": 11, "teamLabel": "3 co-founders and one more person on development, October 2026", "fundingLabel": "None, by the founders' statement", "primaryFactor": "Audience", "group": "seo-ai-search", "channel": "audience", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Search marketing" ], "product": "An AI agent for search engine optimisation. The customer enters a website and connects Google Search Console. ChatSEO reads the real clicks, impressions and positions, gives a short list of changes in order of impact, writes articles and page titles, and can publish them to WordPress, Shopify or Webflow. Plans cost €29 to €79 a month.", "why": "One co-founder, Paul Vengeons, had worked as an SEO consultant in France since 2020 and had more than 10,000 followers on X, and the agents follow his method. The answers come from the customer's own Search Console data, the price is a fraction of Semrush or an agency, and the co-founders post free SEO guides every day that send readers to a 7-day free trial.", "summary": [ "ChatSEO is an AI agent, a program that uses a language model to plan and carry out several steps of a task, for SEO (search engine optimisation: changing a website so that it appears higher in search results). The customer connects Google Search Console, Google's free service that reports which searches showed a site, at which position, and how many people clicked. ChatSEO reads that data, lists the changes to make in order, writes the articles and page titles, and can publish them to WordPress, Shopify or Webflow. According to the company's list of service providers, all its agents run on Anthropic's Claude models. Plans cost €29 to €79 a month.", "Three co-founders built it: Paul Vengeons, a French SEO consultant since 2020; Nicholas Dulait, who works on the product from Brussels; and Léo Leducq, a developer in Bordeaux who had shipped earlier SaaS products (software sold as a subscription and used in a web browser). The first verified revenue came in December 2025. On 14 October 2026 TrustMRR, a site that reads a startup's payment account directly, showed US$258,617 in total revenue from Stripe and MRR (monthly recurring revenue: what the active subscriptions bring in each month) of US$32,086. That is a run rate, the current monthly figure times 12, of US$385,032 a year. The company says it took no outside money. It is operated by GROW IT, a small French company with one or two employees in the official register.", "The revenue figures are grade A, because they come from the payment processor. The customer counts, the team and the growth story come from the founders' posts and the company's pages (grade C). The page also covers two limits of the promise to get customers '#1 on Google and ChatGPT': Google's rule against scaled content abuse, its name for publishing many pages mainly to manipulate rankings rather than to help readers, and a study published in January 2026 that found AI assistants give a different list of brands almost every time they answer the same question." ], "factsCaption": "A three-founder AI SEO agent at US$32,086 a month in Stripe-verified recurring revenue, 11 months after its founding date", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from TrustMRR, which reads the company's Stripe account and Google Analytics through their APIs. Grade B is the official French business register. Grade C values are the founders' posts on X and the company's own pages. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the sources it names.", "timelineLead": "From a founding date in November 2025 to a first US$50,000 month in October 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "ChatSEO prices on 14 October 2026, from the company's pricing page (grade C). The page shows euros only, so the US$ columns are converted at the European Central Bank rate of 13 October 2026, US$1.1188 per euro; the euro price is in brackets", "note": "Starter costs €29 a month, or €23 a month billed yearly; Pro €49 or €39; Ranker €79 or €63; Agency from €200 a month. One credit is one message to the agent, and the plans include 100, 200 and 400 credits a month. Every paid plan starts with a 7-day free trial with 30 credits. On day 7 the card is charged for the chosen cycle: one month, or the whole year at once. The first charge is refunded in full on request within 7 days. The pricing page says that 76% of customers choose Pro.", "rows": [ [ "Starter", "25.73 (€23)", "32.45 (€29)", "100 credits a month, 1 site" ], [ "Pro", "43.63 (€39)", "54.82 (€49)", "200 credits a month, 3 sites, Google Analytics, MCP server and API" ], [ "Ranker", "70.48 (€63)", "88.39 (€79)", "400 credits a month, 10 sites, up to 5 members" ], [ "Agency", "", "from 223.76 (from €200)", "custom credits, sites and team size" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Recurring revenue per month (MRR), 14 October 2026", "value": "US$32,086", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data that TrustMRR reads through an API key. TrustMRR shows MRR 1.6% lower than 30 days earlier.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Annual run rate from that MRR", "value": "US$385,032", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$32,086 times 12. This is the headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Total revenue since the start, to 14 October 2026", "value": "US$258,617", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe-verified. The figure for the last 12 months is the same, so all of it was earned within one year.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days, to 14 October 2026", "value": "US$52,124", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe-verified, 58.8% more than in the 30 days before. The founders called it their 'first 50k month' on 13 October.", "src": [ 1, 13 ] }, { "fact": "30-day revenue compared with MRR", "value": "1.62 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$52,124 divided by US$32,086. The terms of sale say an annual plan is charged for the whole year at once, while MRR counts one twelfth of it per month. That is the most likely reason for the gap, but TrustMRR does not split the revenue by plan.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per calendar month", "value": "US$9,803 in December 2025, US$28,582 in June 2026, US$41,359 in September 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe-verified monthly timeline. October 2026 had US$24,445 by 14 October.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from the first full month to the best month", "value": "4.22 times in 9 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$41,359 in September 2026 divided by US$9,803 in December 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions, 14 October 2026", "value": "732", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe-verified. Paul Vengeons wrote on 28 September 2026 that ChatSEO had 721 customers.", "src": [ 1, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per active subscription", "value": "about US$43.83 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$32,086 divided by 732. This is close to Pro billed yearly, €39 or about US$43.63, the plan that the pricing page says most customers choose.", "src": [ 1, 5, 24 ] }, { "fact": "MRR steps in Léo Leducq's words, 9 October 2026", "value": "'10k : 4 ans, 20k : 4 mois, 30k : 7 semaines' (10k in 4 years, 20k in 4 months, 30k in 7 weeks)", "grade": "C", "note": "His post begins 'On vient de passer les 30k de MRR avec ChatSEO' (we have just passed 30k of MRR with ChatSEO). He gives no currency and does not say whether the 4 years include his earlier products. Nicholas Dulait quoted it as '30K MRR €'.", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "fact": "Stripe MRR in euros", "value": "about €28,679", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$32,086 divided by the ECB rate of US$1.1188 per euro on 13 October 2026. So the founders' '30k' matches TrustMRR only if it is counted in US dollars. No source says how the founders count it.", "src": [ 1, 24, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Website visitors in the last 30 days", "value": "43,776", "grade": "A", "note": "From the connected Google Analytics account, through TrustMRR, with US$1.20 of revenue per visitor.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Users, company claim", "value": "more than 20,000 website owners and more than 200,000 SEO analyses", "grade": "C", "note": "About page, October 2026. Most users do not pay: 732 subscriptions are active.", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "3 co-founders and one more person on development", "grade": "C", "note": "The about page names the co-founders: Paul Vengeons (SEO), Nicholas Dulait (product) and Léo Leducq (software). A post by Nicholas Dulait on 9 October 2026 thanks three teammates on X: the two other co-founders and one more person, who posts about development work. TrustMRR: team size 2 to 5 people.", "src": [ 4, 12, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Employees in the official register", "value": "band '1 or 2 employees', 2024 data; the registered seat is marked as not an employer", "grade": "B", "note": "French business register record for GROW IT. The president is a natural person whose name is not public in this record.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Operating company", "value": "GROW IT, a single-shareholder simplified joint-stock company (SASU), share capital €1,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Legal notice of chatseo.app, which names Paul Vengeons as publication director. The register gives 5 February 2024 as the creation date and computer programming (code 62.01Z) as the activity.", "src": [ 8, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder-written TrustMRR profile says 'Bootstrapped'. Paul Vengeons wrote that his target was '30k/mois, soit 10k par associé' (30k a month, so 10k per partner), enough for all three to live from the company.", "src": [ 1, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Prices", "value": "€29, €49 and €79 a month, 20% less billed yearly; Agency from €200 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Pricing page, 14 October 2026. One credit is one message to the agent.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "AI models", "value": "Anthropic's Claude models for all agents, Perplexity's Sonar model for web search, Voyage AI for embeddings", "grade": "C", "note": "Sub-processor list, change log to 1 September 2026. Model calls go through the Vercel AI Gateway, and ChatSEO has no direct contract with Anthropic or Perplexity.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Guarantee of results", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "The terms of service say ChatSEO does not guarantee that the results 'will be accurate or reliable'. The terms of sale say the service 'relies on AI technologies whose results cannot be guaranteed'. The only guarantee is a refund of the first charge.", "src": [ 7, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Affiliate commission", "value": "30% of each subscription, every month, for life", "grade": "C", "note": "Affiliate page. The sub-processor list names Tolt for referral tracking.", "src": [ 10, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Léo Leducq's earlier product", "value": "TikMatiz: US$98,692 in Stripe-verified revenue since January 2023, nothing in the last 3 months", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR profile of TikMatiz, a tool for short video content founded on 9 January 2023. His founder page lists it for sale.", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the founding date to the October 2026 figure", "value": "11 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: November 2025, the founded date on TrustMRR, to October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "9 January 2023", "what": "Léo Leducq founds TikMatiz, a tool for short video content. Over its life it takes in US$98,692, verified through Stripe.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "2023 and 2024", "what": "Internet Archive copies of www.chatseo.app show an earlier site with the same name: 'ChatGPT like you haven't seen it before', trained on Google's SEO documentation. No source says who ran it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 23 ] }, { "when": "5 February 2024", "what": "GROW IT, the company that now operates chatseo.app, is registered, with computer programming as its activity.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 11, 8 ] }, { "when": "About September 2025", "what": "Nicholas Dulait had paid for a coaching session with Paul Vengeons for the SEO of his previous startup, then sent him the idea. They look for a developer and find Léo Leducq. Paul later dates the start of the project to 'a year' before 28 September 2026.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 14 ] }, { "when": "24 September 2025", "what": "The company's X account, @ChatSEO_app, is created.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "when": "29 November 2025", "what": "Founded date given on TrustMRR. The first customer reviews on the pricing page are dated 1 December 2025.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "when": "December 2025", "what": "First full month of verified revenue: US$9,803.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "28 May 2026", "what": "Paul Vengeons announces that ChatSEO can now find free backlinks, once 'le boss @iziatask' puts it into production.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "The team applies to list ChatSEO in the Shopify App Store.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "26 June 2026", "what": "Léo Leducq shares 'tout le playbook pour faire un SaaS à 20k MRR' (the whole method for a SaaS at 20k MRR), adding that the last time it was for 10k.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "when": "1 September 2026", "what": "The sub-processor list adds the Vercel AI Gateway, which routes calls to Anthropic's Claude models, and Perplexity for web search.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "8 September 2026", "what": "The company replaces the ChatGPT-style logo that it had used for nine months.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "Best calendar month so far: US$41,359, verified.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "28 September 2026", "what": "Paul Vengeons: 721 customers, and '28k' passed that morning. The company account writes that many new users heard of it by word of mouth.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14, 17 ] }, { "when": "6 October 2026", "what": "Léo Leducq writes that Shopify suspended the app review until 4 November for one broken link.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "7 October 2026", "what": "A launch video presents ChatSEO as 'your SEO employee'. Two days later the company reports 50,000 views.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "when": "9 October 2026", "what": "Léo Leducq: '30k de MRR'. The same day ChatSEO adds a white-label option, so that agencies can send its reports under their own logo.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12, 17 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2026", "what": "Nicholas Dulait and Paul Vengeons post 'first 50k month'.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13, 18 ] }, { "when": "14 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR: US$258,617 in total, US$52,124 in the last 30 days, MRR of US$32,086 and 732 active subscriptions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "An SEO consultant's audience as the first channel", "text": "Paul Vengeons has worked as an SEO consultant since 2020 and has 10,405 followers on X. The about page says that ChatSEO's agents follow his method, which aims at revenue rather than traffic numbers. On 28 September 2026 the company account wrote that many new users came by word of mouth." }, { "title": "The customer's own data", "text": "ChatSEO connects to Google Search Console with read-only access and answers from the site's real queries and pages. The about page contrasts this with ChatGPT, which 'has never seen your site'. The company says that the first recommendations arrive in about 4 minutes (median)." }, { "title": "Free guides every day, then a trial", "text": "The co-founders post long SEO guides on X. Paul Vengeons wrote on 10 October 2026 that one article by Nicholas Dulait had 580,000 views in two days. A launch video on 7 October had 50,000 views two days later. The posts link to the 7-day free trial, and affiliates earn 30% of every subscription for life." }, { "title": "A low price and an automatic first charge", "text": "Plans start at €29 a month, against €134 for Semrush and €119 for Ahrefs Lite in the company's own comparison. The free trial ends with an automatic charge on day 7, and an annual plan is paid for the whole year at once, which can make a month's revenue larger than MRR." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's sub-processor list, about page and pricing page. They are grade C.", "items": [ "All agents run on Anthropic's Claude models through the Vercel AI Gateway. Perplexity's Sonar model handles web search, and Voyage AI makes the embeddings (number vectors that represent text) used as memory across conversations.", "12 specialised agents cover on-page changes, internal links, indexing, structured data, backlinks, local SEO and visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews.", "Data comes from the Google Search Console API with a read-only scope, from Google Analytics, from DataForSEO for keyword, search-result and backlink data, and from Firecrawl, self-hosted on the company's Hetzner servers, for reading web pages.", "Servers are rented from Hetzner in Germany. Stripe takes the payments, Resend sends transactional email, Customer.io sends marketing email, Crisp runs the support chat, Mixpanel measures product use and Sentry reports errors.", "Articles are published straight to WordPress, Shopify or Webflow. Pro and Ranker plans add an MCP server and a REST API, so other AI tools such as Claude, Cursor or ChatGPT can read and act on the customer's SEO data.", "Usage is sold in credits: one credit is one message to the agent." ], "src": [ 9, 4, 5 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold automated marketing or design work, or depended on one platform's ranking rules. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Metigy", "years": "2014 to 2022", "funding": "US$14M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "AI marketing advice that would replace a marketing team for small businesses.", "died": "Small businesses wanted the work done for them, not general recommendations such as posting more video. The money ran out.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2338-metigy" }, { "name": "The Grid", "years": "2014 to 2020", "funding": "US$4.7M", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Websites designed by AI, without paying a designer.", "died": "The AI was not ready. Its designs were inconsistent and worse than manual work or established tools.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/618-the-grid" }, { "name": "Waterproof Digital Camera", "years": "2013 to 2017", "funding": "US$0", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "An affiliate review blog built to rank on Google and earn Amazon commissions.", "died": "It relied on black-hat SEO tactics. Google's algorithm updates and penalties took its traffic away.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2023-waterproof-digital-camera" }, { "name": "Upworthy Insider", "years": "2015 to 2020", "funding": "US$12M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Positive viral stories, spread through Facebook.", "died": "Facebook changed its News Feed to show less content from publishers, and the traffic fell. There was no other channel.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/692-upworthy-insider" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The four predecessors failed in three ways that also apply to ChatSEO. Metigy sold advice that small businesses did not act on. The Grid trusted AI to do professional work before the AI could do it well. The camera blog and Upworthy depended on one platform's ranking rules, and the platform changed them.", "Two things are different now. Language models in 2025 and 2026 can read a site's real Search Console data and also write and publish the change, so the product does the work instead of only advising, which is what Metigy's customers wanted. And the price is €29 to €79 a month instead of an agency fee. The dependence on Google's ranking rules has not changed: every customer result still depends on how Google treats the pages that the agent helps to write." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The software, yes. The audience, not easily.", "text": "The technical parts are available to anyone: Claude models through a gateway, Google's free Search Console API, a paid keyword-data provider and a credit-based subscription. The hard part to copy is distribution: a co-founder who was already a known SEO consultant with an audience, and partners who publish free, detailed guides every day where the buyers read.", "steps": [ "Pair a specialist who already has an audience with a developer who has shipped SaaS products before.", "Build the agent on the customer's own data, so every recommendation points to a real page and a real query.", "Publish free, detailed guides every day, each with a link to a short free trial.", "Charge automatically at the end of the trial, offer a yearly plan, and pay affiliates a recurring share." ], "open": "Other expert services that small businesses buy as monthly retainers, where the customer's data sits behind a free API: paid advertising accounts, online-shop analytics, bookkeeping." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Google's rule on scaled content", "text": "On 5 March 2024 Google announced a spam policy on scaled content abuse: many pages made mainly to manipulate rankings rather than to help users, 'no matter whether content is produced through automation, human efforts, or some combination'. Its spam policy page, updated 28 August 2026, gives 'Using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users' as an example. ChatSEO writes and publishes articles straight to customers' sites. A customer who uses it to publish many thin pages puts the site at risk under this policy, and ChatSEO's terms disclaim any result." }, { "title": "'#1 on ChatGPT' is not a fixed position", "text": "The tagline promises '#1 on Google and ChatGPT'. A study by SparkToro with Gumshoe, reported by Search Engine Journal on 30 January 2026, asked ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI answers for brand recommendations 2,961 times in total, running each prompt 60 to 100 times on each platform. ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews returned the same list of brands less than 1% of the time, and the same list in the same order less than 0.1% of the time. The researchers say that the share of answers in which a brand appears is the useful measure, not a rank. Gumshoe sells AI tracking tools, and the article says so." }, { "title": "Many competitors, including the founders' own free guides", "text": "The about page compares ChatSEO with Semrush, Ahrefs, Mangools, Seobility and SEOptimer, and on 1 September 2026 Nicholas Dulait shared a list of '10 new SEO tools' that included ChatSEO. On this site, SEObot, an AI agent that writes and publishes articles, made about US$888,000 in its last 12 months to October 2026, and Rank Prompt, which tracks brand visibility in AI answers, reached a run rate of about US$524,000 a year in 16 months, against 11 months for ChatSEO's US$385,032. The co-founders' own guides teach readers to do SEO with Claude Code, which uses the same family of models as ChatSEO's agents." }, { "title": "A young business, and figures that do not line up", "text": "Revenue started in December 2025, so there is less than one year of history. In the 30 days to 14 October 2026, revenue rose 58.8% while MRR fell 1.6%, according to TrustMRR. Yearly prepayments after the 7 October launch video could explain this, but the profile does not say. The founders posted '28k' on 28 September and '30k de MRR' on 9 October, while the Stripe MRR on 14 October is US$32,086, about €28,679." }, { "title": "Other companies' platforms, and ownership", "text": "The agents depend on Anthropic's models through Vercel's gateway, the data on Google's Search Console API, and the Shopify app on Shopify's review, which suspended it until 4 November 2026 for one broken link. The name is close to ChatGPT, the logo was too for nine months, and an earlier site called ChatSEO used the same domain in 2023 and 2024. The legal notice describes the operator as a single-shareholder company, while three co-founders call themselves partners. The sources do not say how ownership is shared." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://chatseo.app/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/chatseo" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: ChatSEO, verified revenue profile, synced 14 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/chatseo", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile (https://trustmrr.com/startup/chatseo.md) in full on 14 October 2026. Revenue, MRR, subscriptions and visitors come from the connected Stripe and Google Analytics accounts (grade A). The description, team size and funding lines are written by the founders (grade C)." }, { "title": "TrustMRR founder page: Léo (@iziatask)", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/founder/iziatask", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Links the founder's X account and lists his two startups, ChatSEO and TikMatiz, the second marked for sale." }, { "title": "TrustMRR: TikMatiz, verified revenue profile", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/tikmatiz", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile (https://trustmrr.com/startup/tikmatiz.md) in full on 14 October 2026. Stripe-verified totals of Léo Leducq's earlier product." }, { "title": "ChatSEO: About us", "url": "https://chatseo.app/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the three co-founders, the founding story, the user counts and the comparison with Semrush and Ahrefs." }, { "title": "ChatSEO: Pricing", "url": "https://chatseo.app/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 14 October 2026. Prices, credits, plan limits and the dated customer reviews." }, { "title": "ChatSEO: General Terms of Sale, GROW IT", "url": "https://chatseo.app/cgv", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the first-charge guarantee, credits, renewal and the free trial." }, { "title": "ChatSEO: Terms of Service", "url": "https://chatseo.app/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on credits, renewal, refunds and what the service does not guarantee." }, { "title": "ChatSEO: Legal notice", "url": "https://chatseo.app/legal-notice", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names the operating company, its legal form, share capital, register number, publication director and web host." }, { "title": "ChatSEO: Sub-processors, with a change log to 1 September 2026", "url": "https://chatseo.app/sub-processors", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the AI models, the hosting and the other services that the company uses." }, { "title": "ChatSEO: Affiliate program", "url": "https://chatseo.app/affiliate", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the commission terms." }, { "title": "French business register (Annuaire des Entreprises API): GROW IT, SIREN 984 879 932", "url": "https://recherche-entreprises.api.gouv.fr/search?q=984879932", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the JSON record in full on 14 October 2026: creation date, legal form, activity code, employee band, and the president's role (the name is not public)." }, { "title": "Nicholas Dulait on X, 9 October 2026: '30K MRR €', quoting Léo Leducq's post 'On vient de passer les 30k de MRR avec ChatSEO'", "url": "https://x.com/NicholasDulait/status/2108521375233163433", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API in his timeline, with the quoted post by @iziatask (status 2108464756231147563)." }, { "title": "Nicholas Dulait on X, 13 October 2026: 'first 50k month for chatseo'", "url": "https://x.com/NicholasDulait/status/2110096898082435384", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API." }, { "title": "Paul Vengeons on X, 28 September 2026: '721 clients'", "url": "https://x.com/VengeonsP/status/2104483004273807627", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API, as the post that the ChatSEO account quoted the same day." }, { "title": "Léo Leducq (@iziatask) on X, 6 October 2026: the Shopify App Store suspension", "url": "https://x.com/iziatask/status/2107391177645228460", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API, as reposted in the ChatSEO account's timeline. His own profile could not be opened through the API." }, { "title": "Léo Leducq (@iziatask) on X, 26 June 2026: the method for a SaaS at 20k MRR", "url": "https://x.com/iziatask/status/2070546750411051020", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through the fxtwitter API in the ChatSEO account's timeline. The text of the thread by Paul Vengeons that it quotes was not returned, so its content is not verified." }, { "title": "ChatSEO (@ChatSEO_app) on X: profile and posts from 28 May to 13 October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/ChatSEO_app", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile and the whole timeline that the fxtwitter API returns, 39 posts back to 28 May 2026, including reposts by the co-founders." }, { "title": "Paul Vengeons (@VengeonsP) on X: profile and posts from 9 to 14 October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/VengeonsP", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile and three pages of posts through the fxtwitter API. Older pages were not returned." }, { "title": "Nicholas Dulait (@NicholasDulait) on X: profile and posts from 3 to 14 October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/NicholasDulait", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile and three pages of posts through the fxtwitter API." }, { "title": "Google Search Central blog, 5 March 2024, Chris Nelson: What web creators should know about our March 2024 core update and new spam policies", "url": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the section on scaled content abuse." }, { "title": "Google Search Central: Spam policies for Google web search, last updated 28 August 2026", "url": "https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the section on scaled content abuse." }, { "title": "Search Engine Journal, 30 January 2026, Matt G. Southern: AI Recommendations Change With Nearly Every Query: SparkToro", "url": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/ai-recommendations-change-with-nearly-every-query-sparktoro/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Reports the SparkToro and Gumshoe study and says that Gumshoe sells AI tracking tools." }, { "title": "Internet Archive copy of www.chatseo.app, 8 June 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230608174148/https://www.chatseo.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the captured home page. The capture list shows pages of about the same size until at least July 2024." }, { "title": "European Central Bank: euro foreign exchange reference rates, 13 October 2026", "url": "https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-daily.xml", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the US dollar rate, 1.1188 per euro, used to convert the euro prices and the MRR." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/fastwrite-io/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/fastwrite-io.md", "slug": "fastwrite-io", "name": "fastwrite.io", "country": "Germany", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI writing add-in for Microsoft Word", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-14", "launchLabel": "8 May 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$184K revenue in the last 12 months, October 2026", "sticker": "$184K in 12 months", "outcomeUsd": 183602, "months": 17, "teamLabel": "3 managing directors; 2 to 5 people according to TrustMRR", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "learning", "channel": "platform", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Education" ], "product": "An add-in for Microsoft Word, plus a web app, for German-speaking students who write seminar papers and theses. The student uploads the PDFs of the literature. While the student writes, fastwrite suggests the next sentence or a whole paragraph with a citation from those PDFs, and the Tab key accepts it. It also answers questions across all uploaded PDFs with the exact page, searches more than 20 million papers, and checks a draft against nine criteria that universities use for grading.", "why": "It puts the AI where German students already write, inside Word and in German, and each suggestion carries a citation from the student's own PDFs, so the student does not have to fear invented sources. A free plan without a time limit brings students in, and a monthly plan sold for the months in which they write turns some of them into paying customers.", "summary": [ "fastwrite is an add-in for Microsoft Word, a small program that runs inside Word and adds functions to it. A student uploads the PDFs of the literature for a seminar paper (Hausarbeit), a bachelor's thesis or a master's thesis. While the student types, fastwrite proposes the next sentence or a whole paragraph together with the matching citation, and the Tab key accepts it. The text comes from large language models, programs trained on very large amounts of text to continue a text; the privacy policy names OpenAI, Google (Gemini) and Anthropic (Claude) as the providers. To find the right passages, the documents are stored in a vector database, a database that stores text as lists of numbers so that passages with a similar meaning can be found, and each answer links the exact page. Plans cost €0, €22 and €35 a month, or about half with yearly billing.", "The Impressum, the legal notice that German law requires on a commercial website, names the operator: DocuTrust GmbH in Hamburg, a limited-liability company entered in the commercial register on 27 March 2025 with €25,000 of share capital and three managing directors. Two of them are public faces of the product. The blog's author, Moritz, is presented as a co-founder and PhD student, and Moritz Ledeganck is one of the managing directors. Timothy Williams, also a managing director, shows fastwrite.io as his project on Peerlist. On TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a company's payment processor, the founders give 8 May 2025 as the founding date, a team of 2 to 5 people and no outside funding. Its Stripe data show US$183,602 of revenue in the 12 months to 13 October 2026, US$202,018 in total, monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the subscription revenue of one month) of US$13,442 and 616 active subscriptions. Monthly revenue rose from US$9,185 in November 2025 to US$24,838 in March 2026, then fell to US$13,439 in September. On 12 October 2026 the business was listed for sale at US$320,000.", "The site does not promise text that AI detectors cannot find, and it does not sell finished papers. Its FAQ says: \"Der Einsatz von KI muss entsprechend der Richtlinien deiner Hochschule gekennzeichnet werden\" (the use of AI must be declared according to the rules of your university). That matters, because German universities ask students to sign an Eigenständigkeitserklärung, a declaration that they did the work alone and listed every aid, and a Universität Hamburg form for it asks students to tick each use of AI. The headline revenue is grade A, read by TrustMRR from Stripe. The team, product and usage details are the company's own statements, grade C. The page also shows four failed companies that built writing or email tools next to products of Microsoft or Google, or sold study help to students." ], "factsCaption": "US$183,602 of Stripe-verified revenue in twelve months from a Word add-in for German students, 17 months after its founding date, with the best month in March 2026", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from Stripe, the payment processor, through an API key. A grade B value comes from an official record: the commercial register, a university form or the European Central Bank. A grade C value is a statement by the company or its founders, or a platform page. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a company registration in Hamburg to a sale listing in 19 months, with the best month in March 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "fastwrite plans in October 2026, from the company's pricing page (grade C), converted from euros at the European Central Bank rate of 14 October 2026", "note": "The page sells in euros, with VAT included: Premium €22 and Ultimate €35 a month billed monthly. The yearly plan costs about half; the page shows Premium from €11 a month billed yearly, and its static text does not show the yearly Ultimate price, so that cell is empty. Dollar values use the reference rate of US$1.1195 per euro. The AI advisor is a chat that answers questions and gives feedback on the work. In July 2025 there was one paid plan, Premium, at €19.99 a month or €9.99 a month billed yearly, for Word on Windows only.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "1 project, 5 PDFs, 50 autocompletes a day, 5 AI-advisor messages a month" ], [ "Premium", "12.31", "24.63", "unlimited projects, PDFs and autocompletes, 20 AI-advisor messages a month, Deep Review" ], [ "Ultimate", "", "39.18", "as Premium, with 120 AI-advisor messages a month" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue in the last 12 months, to 13 October 2026", "value": "US$183,602", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from Stripe through an API key. The cached profile of 12 October showed US$183,616.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue since the start", "value": "US$202,018", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR all-time figure. US$18,416 of it came before the last 12 months (calculated: 202,018 minus 183,602).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, October 2026", "value": "US$13,442", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot. It fell 10.5% in the last 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions", "value": "616", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot from Stripe.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days", "value": "US$13,156", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, 2.9% less than in the 30 days before.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Best month", "value": "US$24,838 in March 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. November 2025 was US$9,185, February 2026 US$19,908 and April 2026 US$18,102.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month, May to September 2026", "value": "US$14,018 to US$14,803, then US$13,439 in September", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "September 2026 compared with March 2026", "value": "45.9% lower", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 13,439 divided by 24,838 is 0.541.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Last 30 days compared with the 12-month average", "value": "14.0% lower", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 183,602 divided by 12 is US$15,300 a month, and 13,156 is 14.0% below that.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the current MRR", "value": "US$161,304 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 13,442 times 12. It is lower than the 12-month revenue because revenue has fallen since March.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per active subscription", "value": "about US$21.82 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 13,442 divided by 616. Premium costs €22 (US$24.63) billed monthly, and about half when billed yearly.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "65%", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot. The public profile does not say how costs are measured. 65% of US$13,156 is about US$8,551 (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Registered students", "value": "more than 30,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Company homepage. The founders' estimate on TrustMRR is 30,000 users.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Writing projects, 4 June 2025 to 29 July 2026", "value": "14,311 projects by 12,409 users", "grade": "C", "note": "Company report of 5 August 2026, from its own database. 92.7% of users created exactly one project.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Language of the literature that students add", "value": "72% to 76% of recognizable titles are German", "grade": "C", "note": "Same report. 48.8% of projects use only German sources.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Operator", "value": "DocuTrust GmbH, Hamburg, register number HRB 191525", "grade": "B", "note": "Entered in the commercial register on 27 March 2025 for software development and sales, with €25,000 of share capital and three managing directors. The register shows three shareholders; their names are not on the free page.", "src": [ 8, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 to 5 people", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder-entered on TrustMRR. The Impressum names three managing directors.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR lists the company as bootstrapped. No investor appears in the downloaded sources.", "src": [ 1, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price, listed 12 October 2026", "value": "US$320,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller's price on TrustMRR, shown as a 2.0x revenue multiple. Calculated: 1.98 times the MRR run rate and 1.74 times the 12-month revenue. 0 offers at the time of reading.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "First paid plan, July 2025", "value": "€19.99 a month, or €9.99 a month billed yearly", "grade": "C", "note": "Earliest archived version of the site. Word on Windows only.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Subscription terms", "value": "monthly or yearly, renewing automatically, VAT included", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms of DocuTrust GmbH, version of August 2025.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "What the site says about AI rules", "value": "AI use must be declared under the university's rules", "grade": "C", "note": "Homepage FAQ in German and English. The pricing page adds: check your exam regulations.", "src": [ 2, 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Declaration of independent work, Universität Hamburg form", "value": "each use of AI must be ticked", "grade": "B", "note": "A form for bachelor's coursework. One listed use is \"zum Formulieren einzelner Passagen\" (for wording individual passages). Missing or wrong statements can count as an attempt to cheat.", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "fact": "Copilot in Word for consumers", "value": "included in Microsoft 365 Personal and Family since 16 January 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Microsoft's announcement. The US price rose by US$3 a month, and subscribers get a monthly allotment of AI credits.", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "fact": "TikTok account, October 2026", "value": "948 followers, 33,232 likes, 31 videos", "grade": "C", "note": "Profile data read on 14 October 2026.", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "fact": "Exchange rate used on this page", "value": "US$1.1195 per euro, 14 October 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "European Central Bank reference rate.", "src": [ 18 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the founding date to the October 2026 figures", "value": "17 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: May 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "20 February 2025", "what": "Date of the shareholder list and the articles of association of DocuTrust GmbH, two documents in the register file.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "27 March 2025", "what": "DocuTrust GmbH is entered in the Hamburg commercial register: software development and sales, €25,000 of share capital, three managing directors.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "8 May 2025", "what": "The founding date that the founders give on TrustMRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "4 June 2025", "what": "First writing projects in the company's own usage data.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "June 2025", "what": "fastwrite.io appears on Peerlist as a project of week 24 of 2025, under Timothy Williams's profile.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "14 July 2025", "what": "Earliest archived version of the site: \"Hausarbeit 3x schneller schreiben – direkt in Microsoft Word\" (write your seminar paper 3 times faster, directly in Microsoft Word). Windows only, Premium at €19.99 a month, a Mac version announced.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "17 July 2025", "what": "IndiePage posts on X that Timothy Williams made a €20 sale for fastwrite, about the price of one month of Premium at the time.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "First month in TrustMRR's public monthly timeline: US$9,185.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "March 2026", "what": "Best month so far: US$24,838.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "May to August 2026", "what": "Revenue settles at US$14,018 to US$14,803 a month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "5 August 2026", "what": "The company publishes a usage report: 14,311 writing projects by 12,409 users since June 2025.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "18 August 2026", "what": "A blog guide explains new connectors that let Claude and ChatGPT search a student's fastwrite library.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 2 ] }, { "when": "12 October 2026", "what": "Listed for sale on TrustMRR at US$320,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2026", "what": "Last Stripe sync: US$183,602 in 12 months, MRR of US$13,442, 616 active subscriptions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Inside the program where the paper is written", "text": "fastwrite adds its suggestions in Word, so the student does not copy text between a chat window and the document. The first version, in July 2025, ran only in Word on Windows. By October 2026 it also ran in Word on Mac and in the browser, with a web app for other devices." }, { "title": "Every suggestion names its source", "text": "The suggestions come from the PDFs that the student uploaded, and the answers link the exact page. An own-sources-only mode limits the text to the student's literature; when nothing fits, it gives a generic suggestion without a source instead of an invented reference. This answers the two fears of a thesis writer: invented references and plagiarism." }, { "title": "One language, one set of rules", "text": "The product, the site and the guides are in German, for German citation styles and German university rules. In the company's data, 72% to 76% of the recognizable titles that students add are German. The blog compares fastwrite with ChatGPT on exactly these points: real sources, page numbers and Word." }, { "title": "Free to start, paid for the writing months", "text": "The free plan does not expire and allows 50 autocompletes a day. Premium is sold for the months in which the student really writes, and can be cancelled at any time. According to the founders' TrustMRR profile, students come through TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and email; a review on the homepage says a group of students found fastwrite on TikTok." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's privacy policy, its pages and founder-entered profiles. They are grade C.", "items": [ "A Word add-in for Windows, Mac and Word in the browser, and a web app for other devices such as iPad and Chromebook. The first version, in July 2025, ran only in Word on Windows.", "Microsoft's Office Add-ins platform runs one add-in, written with HTML, CSS and JavaScript, in Office on the web, Windows, Mac and iPad. The sources do not say whether fastwrite uses it; TrustMRR's founder-entered stack also names C# and Swift.", "Language models from OpenAI, Google (Gemini) and Anthropic (Claude), used by function and availability, according to the privacy policy of September 2026. The company says users' work never trains a model.", "Pinecone as the vector database that finds passages in the users' documents, and Voyage AI to rerank the search results.", "Appwrite Cloud with a data center in Frankfurt for login and database, Vercel for the web app, Stripe for payments, Umami for analytics without cookies, and Twilio SendGrid for the newsletter.", "Peerlist lists JavaScript, Python, Go, Appwrite and Cursor, an AI code editor, as building tools. TrustMRR also names Google Cloud.", "Connectors for Claude and ChatGPT, built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard for connecting AI assistants to outside data, let those assistants search a student's fastwrite library.", "Marketing: TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and email according to TrustMRR; ads inside ChatGPT, measured with OpenAI's ChatGPT Ads pixel, according to the privacy policy; an affiliate program in July 2025; and German guides on citation styles and university AI rules on the blog." ], "src": [ 6, 2, 4, 11, 17, 1, 12, 9 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database built on a platform that they did not own, sold writing software that a large company later gave away, or sold study help to students. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Xobni", "years": "2006 to 2013", "funding": "US$42M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A smarter inbox inside Microsoft Outlook.", "died": "Tied to Outlook, which Microsoft improved itself. Mobile phones made the desktop add-on less useful, and Yahoo bought the remains.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/763-xobni" }, { "name": "Draft", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$120,000", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A simple online editor for writers.", "died": "Google Docs gave most of the same functions away, and a freemium model on a narrow product could not compete.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1605-draft" }, { "name": "Flashnotes", "years": "2010 to 2016", "funding": "US$1.47M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A marketplace where students sold class notes and study guides to other students.", "died": "Course Hero and Chegg had better products and more money, and the quality of the notes could not be controlled.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/154-flashnotes" }, { "name": "Xuebajun", "years": "2013 to 2021", "funding": "US$150M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Photograph a homework problem and get an automatic solution.", "died": "It moved from homework help into an expensive tutoring marketplace, then Chinese rules banned the business.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2325-xuebajun" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The four failed in two ways that also apply to fastwrite. Xobni and Draft built a better tool for email or writing next to products owned by Microsoft and Google, and the owners added the same functions themselves. Flashnotes and Xuebajun sold study help to students, a market where larger competitors or new rules decided the outcome. In January 2025 Microsoft put Copilot into Word for Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers, and universities now ask students to declare each use of AI.", "Two things differ. First, fastwrite does not build its own model. It buys model access from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, so a team of 2 to 5 people can run it, and TrustMRR shows a 65% profit margin in the last 30 days. Second, it is narrow where Copilot is general: German-language sources, citations with page numbers from the student's own PDFs, and checks against university grading criteria. Whether that is enough is not yet known. Revenue in September 2026 was 45.9% below March, and the owners have put the business up for sale." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, in another language or for another kind of rule-bound document.", "text": "The parts are available to anyone: language models bought by the call, a vector database for the user's own PDFs, and an add-in in the program where the work is written. What fastwrite added is a narrow group with fixed rules, German students with citation styles and grading criteria, reached in their own language on the channels they use. The same structure fits other language markets, and the same risks come with it: Microsoft can add the feature to Word, and customers may leave when the paper is handed in.", "steps": [ "Pick people who write long documents in Word under fixed rules, in a language that the large tools do not focus on.", "Ground every suggestion in the user's own documents, show the page, and give no source rather than an invented one.", "Offer a free plan without a time limit, and a monthly plan that can be cancelled after the writing months.", "Write guides for the rule questions that the group searches for, and post short videos where the group spends time." ], "open": "Academic writing in other languages, such as French, Spanish, Italian, Polish or Dutch, and other rule-bound documents written in Word, such as grant applications or legal briefs." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue peaked in March 2026", "text": "Monthly revenue rose from US$9,185 in November 2025 to US$24,838 in March 2026, then fell to US$13,439 in September, 45.9% lower. MRR fell 10.5% in the last 30 days. One year of data cannot show whether March was a seasonal peak that will come back, or the end of a launch effect." }, { "title": "Customers stay for one paper", "text": "In the company's own data, 92.7% of users created exactly one project, and Premium is sold \"für die Monate, in denen du wirklich schreibst\" (for the months in which you really write), with cancellation at any time. Every semester therefore needs new customers. The company has not published sign-ups by month, and TrustMRR shows churn only after login, so the seasonal pattern cannot be checked from public data." }, { "title": "University rules on AI", "text": "Students sign an Eigenständigkeitserklärung with their written work. A Universität Hamburg form asks them to tick each use of AI, including \"zum Formulieren einzelner Passagen\" (for wording individual passages), and warns that missing or wrong statements can be treated as an attempt to cheat (\"Täuschungsversuch\"). fastwrite tells students to declare AI use and to check their exam regulations. Stricter rules on AI-written passages would reduce the value of the main feature." }, { "title": "Microsoft sells a writing assistant inside Word", "text": "Since 16 January 2025, Microsoft 365 Personal and Family include Copilot in Word with a monthly allotment of AI credits, after a US price rise of US$3 a month. fastwrite's own comparison table lists ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and NotebookLM, and its blog compares it with Jenni AI. Its answer is to be narrower: German sources, citations with page numbers and university grading criteria." }, { "title": "Built on platforms it does not control", "text": "The product lives inside Microsoft Word, and Microsoft sets the rules for how add-ins run and how they are distributed through Microsoft Marketplace. The text comes from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, whose prices and terms the company does not set. The sources do not show whether fastwrite is listed in Microsoft Marketplace." }, { "title": "For sale while revenue falls", "text": "The owners listed the business on 12 October 2026 at US$320,000, which TrustMRR shows as 2.0 times revenue; it is 1.98 times the MRR run rate and 1.74 times the last 12 months (calculated). There were 0 offers at the time of reading. Churn, refunds and advertising spend are visible only to logged-in TrustMRR users, so a buyer must check them separately." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://fastwrite.io/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/fastwrite-io" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: fastwrite.io, Stripe-verified profile, synced 13 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/fastwrite-io", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile (https://trustmrr.com/startup/fastwrite-io.md). Revenue, MRR and subscriptions come from its Verification Sources section (Stripe API key); the description, team size, funding, channels, tech stack and asking price are founder-written, grade C." }, { "title": "fastwrite.io homepage, German, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://fastwrite.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the features, the FAQ, the student count and the reviews." }, { "title": "fastwrite.io homepage, English, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://fastwrite.io/en", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the feature sections and the FAQ, for the English wording of the AI-rules answer." }, { "title": "fastwrite.io pricing page (Preise), read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://fastwrite.io/preise", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The yearly price of Ultimate is not in the page text." }, { "title": "fastwrite.io Impressum (legal notice)", "url": "https://fastwrite.io/impressum", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names the operator, the register number and the three managing directors." }, { "title": "fastwrite.io Datenschutzerklärung (privacy policy), version of September 2026", "url": "https://fastwrite.io/datenschutz", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on processors, language models, hosting, analytics, advertising and newsletter." }, { "title": "fastwrite.io AGB (terms and conditions), version of August 2025", "url": "https://fastwrite.io/agb", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the service, subscriptions, prices and cancellation." }, { "title": "North Data: DocuTrust GmbH, Hamburg, Amtsgericht Hamburg HRB 191525", "url": "https://www.northdata.de/DocuTrust+GmbH,+Hamburg/HRB+191525", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the free page: register publications, purpose, capital and the number of managing directors and shareholders. The shareholders' names are behind a paywall." }, { "title": "fastwrite blog index, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://fastwrite.io/blog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the dated guides, the comparison posts and the author box for Moritz." }, { "title": "fastwrite Schreibreport 2026, 5 August 2026", "url": "https://fastwrite.io/blog/schreibreport-2026", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the method section and the first findings. Company data from its own database, not independently checked." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine: www.fastwrite.io on 14 July 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250714085752/https://www.fastwrite.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The earliest archived version of the site, with the first promise and prices." }, { "title": "Peerlist: fastwrite.io, project of Timothy Williams", "url": "https://peerlist.io/timothyj/project/fastwriteio", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the profile page peerlist.io/timothyj. Source for the description, the week of listing and the building tools." }, { "title": "IndiePage on X, 17 July 2025: Timothy Williams just made a €20 sale for fastwrite", "url": "https://x.com/IndiePageApp/status/1945861217085530315", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through api.fxtwitter.com. Ties Timothy Williams to fastwrite and dates an early sale." }, { "title": "TikTok: @fastwrite.io profile, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://www.tiktok.com/@fastwrite.io", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile data in the page source: followers, likes and video count." }, { "title": "Universität Hamburg, Kulturwissenschaften: Eigenständigkeitserklärung für studienbegleitende Prüfungen (form)", "url": "https://www.kulturwissenschaften.uni-hamburg.de/sm/studium/dokumente/bachelor/eigenstaendigkeitserklaerung.pdf", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full (PDF). One university's form; rules differ between universities and subjects." }, { "title": "Microsoft 365 blog, 16 January 2025: Copilot is now included in Microsoft 365 Personal and Family", "url": "https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2025/01/16/copilot-is-now-included-in-microsoft-365-personal-and-family/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Microsoft's own announcement of Copilot in Word for consumers and the price change." }, { "title": "Microsoft Learn: Office Add-ins platform overview", "url": "https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/overview/office-add-ins", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the overview section on platforms and distribution." }, { "title": "European Central Bank: euro foreign exchange reference rates, 14 October 2026", "url": "https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-daily.xml", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the US dollar rate used in the pricing table." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/chatedu/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/chatedu.md", "slug": "chatedu", "name": "ChatEDU", "country": "USA", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI study app for students", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-14", "launchLabel": "12 December 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$120K revenue in the last 12 months, October 2026", "sticker": "$120K in 12 months", "outcomeUsd": 120117, "months": 22, "teamLabel": "1 named founder; the sale offer includes 2 engineers for up to 3 months", "fundingLabel": "None found", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "learning", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Education" ], "product": "An AI study app. A student uploads class materials, such as PDFs, lecture slides, notes, images or YouTube videos, and gets answers with citations to those files, practice questions, flashcards, study guides, audio summaries and a topic-by-topic progress view. It runs on the web and, since May 2026, as an iOS app.", "why": "It starts from the student's own course files instead of general knowledge, so answers and practice questions point back to the material that the class uses. A free plan with monthly limits lets students try it, and Pro is sold by the week or by the month. Stripe shows about US$13,200 a month at the end of 2025; the seller says growth came with little to no marketing, and no source explains how students found it.", "summary": [ "ChatEDU is an AI study app from ChatEDU, Inc., a US company. A student creates a course and uploads class materials: PDFs, lecture slides, documents, images, pasted text or YouTube videos. The app then answers questions with citations, references to the place in the student's own files that supports each answer, and turns the same files into practice questions, flashcards, study guides and audio summaries that it calls podcasts. A progress view marks each topic as mastered, in progress or not started. The free plan allows 30 AI chats, 30 practice questions and 2 podcasts per calendar month, and 3 uploads; Pro costs US$20 a month or US$10 a week. No downloaded source says which AI models it uses.", "The money figures come from TrustMRR, a site that reads a startup's revenue directly from its payment processor, here Stripe, through an API key, a password that lets one program read data from another. On 14 October 2026 it showed US$174,644 in total revenue, US$120,117 in the last 12 months, and MRR (monthly recurring revenue, the subscription income expected each month) of US$7,040 from 362 active subscriptions. The public monthly history starts in November 2025. Its best month is December 2025 with US$13,243; September 2026 brought US$6,698, which is 49.4% less. In January 2026 the same page showed MRR of US$11,765 from 641 subscriptions. The founder named on the profile is Vasco Singh; no source names anyone else.", "The founder listed the business for sale on TrustMRR on 8 December 2025, in the best month of its public history. The asking price was US$390,000 in January 2026 and is US$220,000 in October 2026. Since July 2025, free general chatbots offer study features of their own, such as ChatGPT's study mode. The revenue numbers on this page are grade A because they come from Stripe through TrustMRR; the product details, the team and the sale terms are statements by the company or the seller, grade C. The page also shows earlier companies that tried to sell students a better way to study." ], "factsCaption": "A study app that Stripe shows at US$120,117 in twelve months, after a peak of about US$13,200 a month in late 2025 and a fall by half since then", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value is read by TrustMRR from Stripe through an API key. A grade C value is a statement by the company, the founder or the seller, or listing data on TrustMRR. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a chatbot for course files in 2024 to a business for sale in 2026, 22 months after its founding date. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "ChatEDU prices on 14 October 2026, from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "Pro is billed weekly or monthly, and the page shows no yearly plan. The free limits apply per calendar month; the upload allowance resets 30 days after the student reaches the limit. Uploads count files, pasted text and YouTube videos together.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "30 AI chats, 30 practice questions and 2 podcasts a month; 3 uploads" ], [ "Pro, monthly", "", "20", "unlimited chats, practice questions and uploads" ], [ "Pro, weekly", "", "10 a week", "unlimited chats, practice questions and uploads" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue in the last 12 months, to 14 October 2026", "value": "US$120,117", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe payments read by TrustMRR through an API key. The headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Total revenue since the start", "value": "US$174,644", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, synced 14 October 2026. On 12 January 2026 the same figure was US$93,391.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "MRR and active subscriptions, October 2026", "value": "US$7,040 from 362 subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot. Revenue in the last 30 days was US$6,888, 7.7% more than in the 30 days before.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the October 2026 MRR", "value": "about US$84,480 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$7,040 times 12. Lower than the 12-month figure, because revenue has fallen.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Best month in the public history", "value": "US$13,243, December 2025", "grade": "A", "note": "The public monthly history starts in November 2025 (US$13,179). Earlier months are not shown.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Fall from December 2025 to September 2026", "value": "49.4%, from US$13,243 to US$6,698 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the monthly history. October 2026 brought US$3,128 in its first 14 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR and subscriptions, January 2026", "value": "US$11,765 from 641 subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "Copy of the TrustMRR page in the Wayback Machine, 12 January 2026; the page labels the MRR as estimated. Revenue in the 30 days before was US$11,512.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Change from January to October 2026", "value": "MRR down 40.2%, subscriptions down 43.5%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$11,765 to US$7,040, and 641 to 362 subscriptions.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before mid-October 2025", "value": "US$54,527", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: total revenue of US$174,644 minus the last 12 months, US$120,117. It covers about ten months after the founding date.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per subscription per month", "value": "about US$19.45", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$7,040 divided by 362. Close to the US$20 monthly Pro price.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin", "value": "45% in January 2026, 73.0% in the 30 days to October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Shown on the TrustMRR page. The January page calls it reported. It is not in the profile's list of Stripe-verified metrics.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Prices, October 2026", "value": "Free, or Pro at US$20 a month or US$10 a week", "grade": "C", "note": "Company pricing page. Free: 30 AI chats, 30 practice questions and 2 podcasts per calendar month, and 3 uploads.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price on TrustMRR", "value": "US$390,000 in January 2026, US$220,000 in October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Set by the seller. First listed on 8 December 2025. TrustMRR shows 11 offers received by October 2026. The price cut is 43.6% (calculated).", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Students claimed on the home page", "value": "200,000+", "grade": "C", "note": "Company claim with no source behind it. Stripe shows 362 active paid subscriptions in October 2026.", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "fact": "iOS app", "value": "released 1 May 2026; version 1.0.5 on 10 October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Apple App Store record. Seller ChatEDU Inc., free to download, 4 ratings with an average of 5.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 named founder; 2 engineers offered for the handover", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller message on TrustMRR: \"2 engineers to support growth and marketing up to 3 months after sale.\" No source gives a headcount.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "No source names an investor, a funding round or an accelerator. The privacy notice reads like a template, with text still in square brackets, and has a standard section on data from shareholders and investors.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the founding date to the October 2026 figures", "value": "22 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: December 2024 to October 2026. The founding date is entered by the founder on TrustMRR; the domain had a web page in April 2024.", "src": [ 1, 13 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "18 April 2024", "what": "First copy of www.chatedu.io in the Internet Archive. Its text loads by script and could not be read.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "30 November 2024", "what": "The site offers \"Personalized AI Tools for Students\": practice questions generated from the student's materials, a chatbot that answers with citations to the student's files, and progress tracking by topic.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "12 December 2024", "what": "Founding date of ChatEDU Inc., as entered on TrustMRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "13 January 2025", "what": "Vasco Singh posts on X that ChatEDU \"dynamically identifies courses, extracts notes, and teaches content like your professors\", with an agent update going live that week.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "10 February 2025", "what": "Two blog articles on study methods: active recall, and the Feynman and Pomodoro methods. They are the only articles about studying on the site's blog.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "when": "November and December 2025", "what": "Stripe revenue of US$13,179 and US$13,243 a month, the highest in the public history.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "8 December 2025", "what": "First listed for sale on TrustMRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "12 January 2026", "what": "MRR of US$11,765 from 641 subscriptions and US$93,391 in total revenue. Asking price US$390,000.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "1 May 2026", "what": "ChatEDU Inc. releases an iOS app on the App Store.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "June to September 2026", "what": "Revenue falls to US$8,795, US$7,549, US$6,707 and US$6,698 a month. September, the start of the new school year, is flat against August.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2 September 2026", "what": "A redesign for web and iOS adds guided learning paths, chapter progress and topic-by-topic practice.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "14 October 2026", "what": "MRR of US$7,040 from 362 subscriptions and US$120,117 in the last 12 months. Asking price US$220,000. The founder's X profile names a job at another company, Arzana.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 12 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Start from the student's files", "text": "Every tool works on what the student uploads: lecture slides, PDFs, notes, images, pasted text or YouTube videos. Answers carry citations to those files, and the About page tells students to check answers and citations against the original materials and the instructor's guidance. Nothing on the site offers finished homework or text to hand in; the tools produce explanations and practice." }, { "title": "One upload, several study formats", "text": "The same file becomes a chat, practice questions, flashcards, a study guide and an audio summary. The student uploads once and studies the material in several forms. Since September 2026 a progress view marks each topic as mastered, in progress or not started." }, { "title": "Short billing periods", "text": "Pro is sold for US$10 a week or US$20 a month, with no yearly plan on the pricing page, so a student can pay for a few weeks and stop. Revenue per active subscription is about US$19.45 a month, close to the monthly price." }, { "title": "A free plan with monthly limits", "text": "The free plan allows 30 AI chats, 30 practice questions and 2 podcasts per calendar month, and 3 uploads. The pricing page presents Pro as the step after these limits: unlimited practice questions, chats and uploads." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages, the page source of its site and the App Store record. They are grade C, except what the page source shows directly.", "items": [ "The web app is built with Next.js, a framework for React web sites; its images load through Next.js image addresses.", "The page source opens connections to Vercel's analytics scripts and to PostHog, a product analytics service that records how visitors use a site, and its file addresses carry Vercel deployment IDs.", "Payments run through Stripe. TrustMRR reads the revenue from Stripe through an API key, and the privacy notice names Stripe as the payment provider.", "No downloaded source names the AI models or the model provider.", "The site is offered in 15 languages, among them Spanish, Hindi, Japanese and Chinese.", "An iOS app, ChatEDU: Study Tool & AI Notes, has been on the App Store since 1 May 2026, released by ChatEDU Inc.", "Students can bring PDFs, slides, documents, images, pasted text and YouTube videos; the free plan counts all of them against 3 uploads." ], "src": [ 4, 1, 8, 10, 6 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database tried to sell students a better way to study, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Flashnotes", "years": "2010 to 2016", "funding": "US$1.47M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A marketplace where college students sold their class notes and study guides to other students.", "died": "Course Hero and Chegg had better products and more money, and Flashnotes could not control the quality of the notes.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/154-flashnotes" }, { "name": "Grockit", "years": "2007 to 2015", "funding": "US$44.4M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Social, game-like test preparation for the SAT and the GMAT.", "died": "According to the database, Kaplan bought it in 2013 and the product faded inside the larger test-preparation company.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/196-grockit" }, { "name": "Knewton", "years": "2008 to 2020", "funding": "US$182.3M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Adaptive learning: software that changes each lesson to fit the student.", "died": "It spent its funding on complex AI that schools could not afford, while Khan Academy gave content away for free.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/281-knewton" }, { "name": "Kno", "years": "2009 to 2014", "funding": "US$73M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Interactive digital textbooks for students.", "died": "The large publishers made their own digital textbooks faster and cheaper than Kno expected.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/282-kno" }, { "name": "InstaGrok", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A search tool for students that showed results as a map of connected ideas.", "died": "Schools did not change their methods, and free tools such as Quizlet and Khan Academy kept the students.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1700-instagrok" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The five predecessors had to make or buy the study material: notes written by other students, digital textbooks, test-preparation courses, or adaptive lessons, for which Knewton raised US$182.3 million according to the database. ChatEDU has no content library. The student brings the material, and an AI model turns it into answers, questions, guides and audio. That is why a company with one named founder and no reported funding could reach about US$13,000 a month in Stripe revenue within a year of its founding date.", "The same fact is the risk. What ChatEDU does with a student's files, the general AI assistants now do as well: ChatGPT added a study mode for all logged-in users, including the free plan, on 29 July 2025, and Google's NotebookLM has turned uploaded documents into audio discussions since September 2024. In the database, several predecessors lost to free products such as Khan Academy and Quizlet. ChatEDU's revenue fell by half in the nine months after December 2025, while these free tools were available to every student; the sources do not say whether they caused the fall." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The timing is harder now.", "text": "A small team built a study app with no content of its own and reached about US$13,000 a month in Stripe revenue within a year. The method can be copied: the student supplies the material, an AI model does the work, and short billing periods fit the school calendar. The difficulty in 2026 is that free assistants from OpenAI and Google offer much of the same.", "steps": [ "Build on the user's own material, so you need no content library and every answer can cite its source.", "Turn one upload into several study formats: chat, practice questions, flashcards, guides and audio.", "Offer a free plan with monthly limits and a short paid period, such as one week, for exam time.", "Verify the revenue publicly, for example on TrustMRR, before you try to sell the business." ], "open": "Study tools for one exam or one profession, where the general assistants do not know the format: medical licensing exams, bar exams, professional certifications, and courses taught in languages other than English." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue has halved since December 2025", "text": "Stripe shows US$13,243 in December 2025 and US$6,698 in September 2026, a fall of 49.4%. From January to October 2026, MRR fell 40.2% and active subscriptions 43.5%. The seller message on the listing says \"Growth is consistent with little to no marketing\"; no source explains the fall. The last 30 days were 7.7% above the 30 days before." }, { "title": "Free chatbots with study modes", "text": "OpenAI launched study mode in ChatGPT on 29 July 2025 for logged-in users on the Free, Plus, Pro and Team plans. Google's NotebookLM has made audio discussions of uploaded sources since 11 September 2024, the same idea as ChatEDU's podcasts. Both come from companies far larger than ChatEDU. The sources do not say how many ChatEDU users moved to them." }, { "title": "A school-year pattern without the September rise", "text": "Revenue was highest at the end of the autumn term, in November and December 2025. It fell 16.0% in January, rose 10.4% in March, and averaged US$7,684 a month from June to August. A business that follows the school year should rise again in September, but September 2026 was flat against August (0.1% lower). Only one school year of monthly figures is public, so the pattern cannot be compared with an earlier year." }, { "title": "For sale, at a lower price", "text": "Listed on TrustMRR since 8 December 2025. The asking price fell from US$390,000 in January 2026 to US$220,000 in October 2026, 43.6% less, with 11 offers received. The seller offers seller financing and 2 engineers for up to 3 months after the sale. In October 2026 the founder's X profile names a job at another company." }, { "title": "Claims on the home page", "text": "The home page says \"Join 200,000+ students\" and shows the logos of ten universities, among them Harvard, MIT and Stanford, under \"Trusted by top students\". No source supports these claims, and three of the six student quotes on the page carry the label \"Sample\". Stripe shows 362 active subscriptions." }, { "title": "What the figures do not cover", "text": "TrustMRR counts Stripe payments only. The iOS app has been on the App Store since May 2026, and the sources do not say whether it sells subscriptions through Apple, which would not appear here. The team size is not published; the only numbers are 1 named founder and 2 engineers offered for the handover." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://chatedu.io/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6761738958" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/chatedu-inc" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR markdown profile: ChatEDU Inc., synced 14 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/chatedu-inc.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile (data as of October 2026). The Stripe-verified revenue, MRR, subscriptions and monthly history are grade A; the description, profit margin, asking price and seller message are founder-written or listing data, grade C." }, { "title": "TrustMRR page for ChatEDU Inc., Wayback Machine copy of 12 January 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260112175447/https://trustmrr.com/startup/chatedu-inc", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. Source for the January 2026 MRR, subscriptions, total revenue, profit margin and asking price." }, { "title": "TrustMRR founder page: Vasco Singh", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/founder/vascosingh", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Ties the founder and his X account to ChatEDU Inc." }, { "title": "ChatEDU home page, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://chatedu.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the page source. Source for the features, the 200,000 claim, the university logos, the sample quotes, the 15 languages and the services that the page loads." }, { "title": "ChatEDU About page", "url": "https://chatedu.io/en/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names ChatEDU, Inc. as the provider and tells students to check answers against their materials." }, { "title": "ChatEDU pricing page, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://chatedu.io/en/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the free limits and the Pro prices." }, { "title": "ChatEDU Terms of Service", "url": "https://chatedu.io/en/terms-of-service", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the provider, the output and the governing law. Names ChatEDU, Inc., chooses Delaware law and gives a mailing address in New Jersey. It does not say where the company is incorporated." }, { "title": "ChatEDU Privacy Notice", "url": "https://chatedu.io/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names ChatEDU, Inc. and Stripe as the payment provider; contains template text in square brackets." }, { "title": "ChatEDU blog, 2 September 2026: Introducing the new ChatEDU", "url": "https://chatedu.io/en/blog/introducing-the-new-chatedu", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the redesign and the link to the iOS app." }, { "title": "Apple App Store: ChatEDU: Study Tool & AI Notes", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/chatedu-study-tool-ai-notes/id6761738958", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the App Store lookup record (itunes.apple.com/lookup?id=6761738958). Source for the seller, the release date, the version and the ratings." }, { "title": "Vasco Singh on X, 13 January 2025: AI agents are the most powerful tool a student can have today", "url": "https://x.com/VascoSingh/status/1878941084207980696", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. The only post about ChatEDU in the part of his timeline that the API returned." }, { "title": "Vasco Singh's X profile, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/VascoSingh", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the job named in the bio." }, { "title": "ChatEDU home page, Wayback Machine copy of 30 November 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20241130220109/https://www.chatedu.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The archive's earliest copy, of 18 April 2024, loads its text by script and could not be read." }, { "title": "OpenAI, 29 July 2025: Introducing study mode", "url": "https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-study-mode/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the launch date and the plans that get study mode." }, { "title": "Google, 11 September 2024: NotebookLM now lets you listen to a conversation about your sources", "url": "https://blog.google/technology/ai/notebooklm-audio-overviews/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the opening section. Source for the Audio Overview feature and its date." }, { "title": "ChatEDU blog index", "url": "https://chatedu.io/en/blog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Lists three posts: two on study methods dated 10 February 2025 and the redesign post of 2 September 2026." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/ai-toolbox/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/ai-toolbox.md", "slug": "ai-toolbox", "name": "AI Toolbox", "country": "Israel", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Browser extension for AI chat apps", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-14", "launchLabel": "September 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$108.5K revenue in the last 12 months, October 2026", "sticker": "$109K in 12 months", "outcomeUsd": 108506, "months": 25, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders, still a two-person company in October 2026", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "ai-model-tools", "channel": "search", "trend": "growing", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Productivity" ], "product": "A Chrome extension that adds folders, full-text search, a prompt library, bookmarks and export in four formats to the web pages of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Grok. It sells no AI: users keep their own accounts, and the search index of their chats stays in their browser.", "why": "Heavy users of AI chat apps lose old answers, because the apps had no folders, no filtered search and no bulk export. AI Toolbox adds these inside the apps, for four apps at once, sells them mostly as one-time licenses, and, by the seller's account, finds its buyers through search pages instead of ads.", "summary": [ "AI Toolbox is a browser extension, a small program that runs inside the Chrome browser and can add buttons and panels to the web pages you open. It adds folders, bookmarks, a prompt library, export to text, Markdown, JSON and PDF, and full-text search, which means search in the words of every message and not only in chat titles, to the web pages of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Grok. It does not sell an AI model: users keep their own ChatGPT, Google, Anthropic or X accounts. The free plan has small limits. A paid plan for one AI app costs US$9.99 a month, US$59 a year or US$99 once, and all four apps cost US$199 once.", "Two developers, Adi Leviim and Mohammad El-Esawi, released it as ChatGPT Toolbox on the Chrome Web Store in September 2024 through their two-person company, Infi Developments. It had more than 8,000 users in February 2025. In April 2026 it added Gemini, Claude and Grok and took the name AI Toolbox, and in October 2026 the store shows 40,000 users. TrustMRR, a site that reads a seller's sales directly from the payment provider (the service that charges the buyer's card) through an API key (a password that lets one program read another program's data), shows US$108,506 of revenue in the 12 months to 14 October 2026, from Lemon Squeezy and Polar, and US$22,302 in September 2026 alone. The pricing page calls the lifetime license, one payment for permanent use, its most popular plan, and about 94% of the last 30 days of revenue does not repeat monthly. So the MRR, monthly recurring revenue, the subscription money that repeats every month, is only US$1,334.", "The revenue figures are grade A. The costs, the margin, the working hours and the claim of no advertising are the seller's own words, grade C, and this page marks them as claims. Adi Leviim has listed the business for sale on TrustMRR since January 2026, asking US$800,000. The page also shows what happened to earlier companies that added order and search to a platform that they did not own." ], "factsCaption": "Revenue read from the payment providers by TrustMRR, grade A, next to store data, the company's own pages and the seller's claims", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value is a TrustMRR figure read from the Lemon Squeezy and Polar accounts, or from Google Analytics, through an API key. A grade C value is the company's or the seller's own statement, a store listing, or a third-party test. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a ChatGPT add-on with 8,000 users to a four-app extension that took in US$22,302 in one month, in 25 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "AI Toolbox prices on 14 October 2026, read from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "Each paid plan covers one AI app: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Grok. All Access Lifetime covers all four and any app added later. The page shows the US$99 lifetime price next to a crossed-out US$123, and All Access next to US$396, the price of four single lifetime licenses. Teams costs US$12 per seat per month billed yearly or US$15 billed monthly, with at least 2 seats. All paid plans have a 14-day money-back guarantee.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "2 folders, 2 bookmarks, 2 saved prompts, first 5 search results" ], [ "Premium, one AI app", "4.92", "9.99", "one AI app; US$59 a year" ], [ "Lifetime, one AI app", "99 one-time", "", "one AI app, all future updates" ], [ "All Access Lifetime", "199 one-time", "", "all four AI apps and any added later" ], [ "Teams", "12", "15", "per seat, all four AI apps, at least 2 seats" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue, 12 months to 14 October 2026", "value": "US$108,506", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from the Lemon Squeezy and Polar accounts through API keys, synced 14 October 2026. All-time revenue: US$110,833.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 30 days", "value": "US$21,509", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, same sync. Last 3 months: US$55,888. Last 6 months: US$84,122.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the last 30 days", "value": "about US$258,108 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$21,509 times 12. Most of this money is one-time payments, so the next 12 months can differ.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month", "value": "US$2,869 in November 2025, US$6,942 in May 2026, US$22,302 in September 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table. Calculated: September 2026 is 7.8 times November 2025 and 3.2 times May 2026. July to September 2026 brought US$53,010, 2.05 times April to June.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue before mid-October 2025", "value": "US$2,327", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: all-time US$110,833 minus the 12-month US$108,506. This covers the first 13 months. The sources do not say whether some early sales went through an account that is not connected to TrustMRR.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR)", "value": "US$1,334 from 151 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot. Calculated: US$8.83 per subscription per month, between the US$4.92 of the yearly plan and the US$9.99 of the monthly plan.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Share of last-30-day revenue that does not repeat monthly", "value": "about 93.8%, or US$20,175", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$21,509 minus US$1,334, divided by US$21,509. This money comes from lifetime licenses and from yearly plans paid in advance.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Prices, October 2026", "value": "US$99 once per AI app, US$199 once for all four, or US$9.99 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Pricing page. Yearly plan: US$59 per AI app. Teams: US$12 per seat per month billed yearly. 14-day money-back guarantee.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Chrome Web Store users, 14 October 2026", "value": "40,000, rated 4.8 from 996 ratings", "grade": "C", "note": "Google's store listing. Version 5.0.54, updated the same day.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Chrome Web Store users, 9 August 2026", "value": "30,000, rated 4.6 from 559 ratings", "grade": "C", "note": "A third-party comparison of 25 ChatGPT extensions that read the store listings that day.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Users, February 2025", "value": "more than 8,000", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's home page as saved by the Wayback Machine on 27 February 2025, when the product was still called ChatGPT Toolbox.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Website visitors, last 30 days", "value": "21,193, with US$1.03 of revenue per visitor", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from Google Analytics through its API. Google Search Console is also connected.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 co-founders", "grade": "C", "note": "The About page calls Infi Developments a two-person company and names Adi Leviim (product and front end) and Mohammad El-Esawi (back end and AI systems). TrustMRR's team-size field shows the range 2 to 5 people.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR profile: Bootstrapped. No source mentions an investor.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Costs, margin and working time", "value": "under US$100 a month, about 93% margin, about 5 hours a week", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller's claims in the TrustMRR description. TrustMRR shows a 92.0% profit margin for the last 30 days, but costs are not in its list of verified sources. Not verified.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Advertising", "value": "none, by the seller's account", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller's claims: growth is 100% organic from a site built for Google and AI answer engines, and 37% of users come from organic Google search. Not verified.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price", "value": "US$800,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Set by the seller on TrustMRR, listed since 14 January 2026, 6 offers received. TrustMRR shows a revenue multiple of 3.1. Calculated: the price is 3.10 times the run rate above and 7.37 times the last 12 months.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October 2026 figure", "value": "25 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: September 2024 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Mid 2024", "what": "Two heavy ChatGPT users, each with hundreds of chats, find no folders, no search filters by date or role and no bulk export in ChatGPT, by the company's account.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "September 2024", "what": "ChatGPT Toolbox launches on the Chrome Web Store, and Infi Developments is founded the same month to publish it. The Wayback Machine first saves the website on 12 September; the product's X account opens on 24 September.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 11, 14 ] }, { "when": "27 February 2025", "what": "The home page says more than 8,000 users and offers a free year of the subscription, worth US$48, as a prize. Firefox and Edge versions are offered too.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "13 April 2025", "what": "Adi Leviim opens his X account, where he later calls himself co-founder of AI Toolbox.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "19 June 2025", "what": "First Wayback copy of OpenAI's help article on Projects in ChatGPT, a built-in way to group chats, files and instructions.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 18 ] }, { "when": "30 June 2025", "what": "ChatGPT Toolbox launches on Product Hunt, after a first launch there in 2024.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "Before mid-October 2025", "what": "Verified revenue in the first 13 months adds up to US$2,327.", "grade": "X", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "December 2025", "what": "Security researchers report that four browser extensions with more than 8 million users had collected people's AI chats since July 2025. AI Toolbox reads the same AI pages.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 16, 17 ] }, { "when": "14 January 2026", "what": "The business is listed for sale on TrustMRR. The asking price in October 2026 is US$800,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "April 2026", "what": "Version 5.0.0: Gemini, Claude and Grok modules join ChatGPT in one install, and the product is renamed AI Toolbox.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 2 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "Verified revenue: US$12,368 in the month, after US$6,942 in May.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "9 August 2026", "what": "A third-party test of 25 ChatGPT extensions reads 30,000 users and 4.6 stars from 559 ratings, and calls AI Toolbox the best folder-and-tags suite.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "6 September 2026", "what": "AI Toolbox 3.0 launches on Product Hunt. The company says it finished first for the day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 2 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "Verified revenue: US$22,302 in the month, 7.8 times November 2025.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "14 October 2026", "what": "The store shows 40,000 users, 4.8 stars from 996 ratings and version 5.0.54 released that day. TrustMRR shows US$108,506 in 12 months and MRR of US$1,334.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 4, 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Features the AI apps did not have", "text": "By the company's account, in mid-2024 ChatGPT had no folders, no search filters by date or role and no bulk export, and heavy users kept hundreds of chats. The extension added these inside ChatGPT's own sidebar, so users kept their habits and their AI subscription." }, { "title": "One set of tools for four AI apps", "text": "In April 2026 the Gemini, Claude and Grok modules joined ChatGPT in one install. Each paid plan covers one app, and All Access covers all four for US$199 once. One search box, one folder tree and one prompt library work across all four, which no single AI company offers." }, { "title": "One-time prices", "text": "A lifetime license costs US$99 per AI app, about ten months of the US$9.99 monthly price. TrustMRR counts a one-time payment as revenue in the month it arrives, but MRR counts only subscriptions. That is why the last 30 days brought US$21,509 while MRR is US$1,334." }, { "title": "Search pages instead of ads, by the seller's account", "text": "The seller says growth comes only from a website written for Google and for AI answer engines. The Wayback Machine first saved 168 pages of the site in all of 2025, and 607 new pages from July to September 2026, the quarter in which revenue was 2.05 times the quarter before (calculated). The site also publishes an llms.txt file, a plain-text summary written for AI models. Three Product Hunt launches, X accounts and a subreddit add to it." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages and from the tech list on its TrustMRR profile, which the founders filled in. They are grade C.", "items": [ "The TrustMRR tech list names Next.js, TypeScript and Sass for the front end, and Node.js, Express, MongoDB, Redis, Nginx, DigitalOcean, Cloudflare, GitHub Actions and Resend for the back end.", "The extension keeps a copy of the user's chats in IndexedDB, a database built into the browser, and runs search and automatic topic tags on the user's device.", "Folders, saved prompts, bookmarks and settings are stored on the company's servers, encrypted at rest, so that they follow the user to other devices.", "Three features, PDF export, pulling a long chat into a new one, and carrying a chat to another AI app, send the text of one chosen chat to the servers. The two summary features pass that text to the OpenAI API.", "Payments went through Lemon Squeezy and now go through Polar; some old subscriptions are still billed by Lemon Squeezy. A purchase is matched to the user's AI account by email address.", "Version 5.0.0 came out in April 2026 and version 5.0.54 on 14 October 2026. Since late August 2026 the extension can show notices to users without a store update." ], "src": [ 1, 7, 2, 5, 4 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database added order, search or sync on top of a platform that they did not control. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Xobni", "years": "2006 to 2013", "funding": "US$42M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Search and contact tools inside Microsoft Outlook.", "died": "Tied to one email program. Microsoft improved Outlook itself and users moved to phones. Yahoo bought what was left.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/763-xobni" }, { "name": "Xmarks", "years": "2006 to 2014", "funding": "US$9M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Sync bookmarks and tabs across browsers and devices.", "died": "Chrome, Firefox and Safari built sync in, for free.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/762-xmarks" }, { "name": "Readability", "years": "2009 to 2015", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Clean reading of any web article, without ads and clutter.", "died": "Browsers added a free reader mode, and few readers paid.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/485-readability" }, { "name": "Sunrise", "years": "2012 to 2016", "funding": "US$8M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "One calendar app for calendars from Google, Microsoft and others.", "died": "Microsoft bought it in 2015 and closed it a year later, moving its features into Outlook.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1957-sunrise" }, { "name": "Kippt", "years": "2012 to 2017", "funding": "US$400K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A bookmarking tool to save, organize and share web content.", "died": "Pocket and Evernote did the same job, and its sharing features did not bring new users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/278-kippt" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the five added order, search or sync to something that it did not own: Outlook, the browser, web articles, calendars and bookmarks. Each raised venture money and had to become large. Then the platform built the feature itself, or a bigger company bought it or did the same job, and the add-on lost its reason to exist. AI Toolbox makes the same bet on ChatGPT and three other AI apps, and OpenAI has already added Projects to ChatGPT.", "Three things differ. Two people run it without outside money, so, by the seller's account, it makes a profit at a size at which the predecessors could not have survived. It covers four AI apps, so one platform change does not end it, and its search and folders across all four apps are something no single AI company sells. And it took its money early, through one-time licenses: that made it profitable quickly, but it leaves a long support promise to whoever owns it next." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. This niche, only with care.", "text": "Two developers built more than US$100,000 a year of revenue by adding the missing parts of AI chat apps, with no outside money and no servers that store the chats. The method is repeatable: find what heavy users of a fast-growing web app keep asking for, build it inside that app, and sell it once at about ten months of a subscription. The niche itself is now crowded: one comparison tested 25 ChatGPT extensions in August 2026, and the AI apps keep adding folders and projects.", "steps": [ "Read the reviews and forum posts of a fast-growing web app, and list the features that its heavy users ask for and do not have.", "Build those features inside the app's own page, and keep the user's data in the browser so that server costs stay small.", "Offer a free plan with small limits, a monthly price, and a one-time price of about ten months of the monthly price.", "Write one help or comparison page for each question that users type into search engines, and publish an llms.txt summary for AI answer engines.", "When a second and a third app grow, add a module with the same features and sell one bundle for all of them." ], "open": "New AI apps with heavy users and weak history tools: AI search engines, AI image and video generators, voice assistants, and the web versions of AI coding tools." }, "watch": [ { "title": "It lives inside other companies' web pages", "text": "The extension adds buttons and panels to the pages of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Grok. The company's changelog says these apps change their interfaces without notice and that a change can hide a button the extension attaches to; its terms say such changes may affect features temporarily or permanently. It also depends on the Chrome Web Store, whose policies say Google may change them at any time." }, { "title": "The AI apps add the same features", "text": "OpenAI's help center describes Projects in ChatGPT, which group chats, files and instructions and can take old chats with a Move to project option; the Wayback Machine has a copy of that article from June 2025. Three of the five predecessors on this page lost to a platform that built the feature itself. AI Toolbox's answer is search, folders and export across four AI apps at once." }, { "title": "Lifetime plans are paid once and supported for years", "text": "About 94% of the last 30 days of revenue does not repeat monthly. The terms promise lifetime buyers all future updates, and All Access buyers every new AI app the extension adds, for as long as the extension works. Each lifetime buyer adds support work for years while the money arrives once. The seller names turning one-time plans into subscriptions as a task for a buyer." }, { "title": "Extensions that collected AI chats", "text": "In December 2025 The Register and The Hacker News reported Koi Security's finding that Urban VPN Proxy and three other extensions, with more than 8 million users, had collected people's prompts and answers on ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and other AI apps since July 2025, and that the data was sold for marketing. One of them had a Featured badge from the Chrome Web Store. AI Toolbox reads the same pages. Its privacy policy says chats stay in the browser, except for short previews of bookmarked messages and three features that send one chosen chat to its servers, two of them on to the OpenAI API for a summary. So the listing's line that no chat content leaves the browser says more than the policy does." }, { "title": "For sale, with access to users' browsers", "text": "The business has been listed on TrustMRR since 14 January 2026 at US$800,000, with 6 offers, and was still listed after 273 days (calculated to 14 October 2026). A buyer would take over an extension that about 40,000 people let read their AI chat pages. The Register notes that the store's Limited Use policy allows user data to move when a business changes owner." }, { "title": "Seller numbers that this page could not check", "text": "The margin, the costs under US$100 a month, the 5 hours a week, the zero ad spend, the 1,700 paying customers, the 47,000 monthly users and the 23,000-member subreddit are the seller's words. The listing also says revenue grew from US$2,900 a month in May, but the verified table shows US$6,942 for May 2026; US$2,869 is the figure for November 2025." }, { "title": "The growth is recent", "text": "Calculated from TrustMRR: 77.5% of the 12-month revenue came in the last 6 months and 51.5% in the last 3 months. The verified history is short, and it depends on new one-time sales every month." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://ai-toolbox.co/" }, { "kind": "chrome", "url": "https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/jlalnhjkfiogoeonamcnngdndjbneina" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/chatgpt-toolbox" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/ai-toolbox" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR markdown profile: AI Toolbox, synced 14 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/ai-toolbox.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full. Revenue, MRR, subscriptions and visitors are read through the Lemon Squeezy, Polar and Google Analytics APIs (grade A). The description, seller message, team size, funding, tech list and costs are founder-written (grade C)." }, { "title": "AI Toolbox: About Infi Developments, the team behind AI Toolbox", "url": "https://ai-toolbox.co/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the two co-founders, the two-person company and the dated history." }, { "title": "AI Toolbox pricing page, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://ai-toolbox.co/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for every price in the pricing table." }, { "title": "Chrome Web Store listing: AI Toolbox: Folders, Prompts, Advanced Search & Export for AI Chats, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ai-toolbox-folders-prompt/jlalnhjkfiogoeonamcnngdndjbneina", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Google's store data: users, rating, version, update date and the trader details, which place the publisher in Ramla, Israel." }, { "title": "AI Toolbox changelog: every release since 2024", "url": "https://ai-toolbox.co/changelog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the April 2026 rename, the version numbers and the statement on interface changes by the AI apps." }, { "title": "AI Toolbox Terms of Service, last updated 1 October 2026", "url": "https://ai-toolbox.co/terms-of-services", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on lifetime licenses and on third-party dependencies. The terms name Infi Developments as publisher but give no registration number or address." }, { "title": "AI Toolbox Privacy Policy, last updated 1 October 2026", "url": "https://ai-toolbox.co/privacy-policy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on data kept in the browser, data on the servers, OpenAI processing, payment processors and analytics." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: AI Toolbox product page and its three launches", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/chatgpt-toolbox", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the launch list and the summary. Source for the launches in 2024, on 30 June 2025 and on 6 September 2026." }, { "title": "gptprotools.com: 25 Best ChatGPT Chrome Extensions Compared (2026), updated 5 October 2026", "url": "https://gptprotools.com/blog/best-chatgpt-chrome-extensions", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the comparison table and the AI Toolbox entry. A third-party test that read the store listings on 9 August 2026." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine: ai-toolbox.co home page, 27 February 2025, then ChatGPT Toolbox", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20250227162736/https://www.ai-toolbox.co/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 8,000 users and the US$48 yearly subscription offered as a prize." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine capture index for ai-toolbox.co", "url": "http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=ai-toolbox.co*&fl=timestamp,original,statuscode&collapse=urlkey&limit=20000", "grade": "C", "how": "Downloaded the index and counted with python3 the first capture of each HTML page per quarter. A capture date shows when the archive first saw a page, not when the page was written." }, { "title": "AI Toolbox llms.txt, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://ai-toolbox.co/llms.txt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the opening section. A summary of the site written for AI models." }, { "title": "Adi Leviim on X (@adileviim): profile and posts from 4 to 14 October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/adileviim", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile and the timeline through api.fxtwitter.com: 53 of his own posts, all product tips. The timeline API returned nothing older than 4 October 2026." }, { "title": "AI Toolbox on X (@get_ai_toolbox): profile", "url": "https://x.com/get_ai_toolbox", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the date the account opened, 24 September 2024." }, { "title": "TrustMRR founder page: Adi Leviim", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/founder/adileviim", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Lists one startup with verified revenue, AI Toolbox, and no other product." }, { "title": "The Register, 16 December 2025: Chrome, Edge privacy extensions quietly snarf AI chats", "url": "https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/16/chrome_edge_privacy_extensions_quietly/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Reports Koi Security's research, the Featured badge and the gap in the Limited Use policy." }, { "title": "The Hacker News, 15 December 2025: Featured Chrome Browser Extension Caught Intercepting Millions of Users' AI Chats, by Ravie Lakshmanan", "url": "https://thehackernews.com/2025/12/featured-chrome-browser-extension.html", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. A second report of the same research." }, { "title": "OpenAI Help Center: Projects in ChatGPT", "url": "https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10169521-projects-in-chatgpt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The article gives no launch date; the first Wayback copy of it is from 19 June 2025." }, { "title": "Chrome for Developers: Chrome Web Store Program Policies", "url": "https://developer.chrome.com/docs/webstore/program-policies/policies", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on user data, Limited Use and policy changes." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/visualizee-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/visualizee-ai.md", "slug": "visualizee-ai", "name": "Visualizee.ai", "country": "Poland", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI rendering for architects", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-14", "launchLabel": "21 September 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$8.1K a month recurring revenue, October 2026", "sticker": "$98K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 97668, "months": 37, "teamLabel": "1 founder, part-time next to a full-time job; the operating company has a second shareholder and board member", "fundingLabel": "None found", "primaryFactor": "Simplicity", "group": "real-estate", "channel": "search", "trend": "flat", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Architecture" ], "product": "A web app where an architect or interior designer uploads a SketchUp screenshot, a sketch or a photo and types what to change. A chat assistant called Vizzy returns a photoreal render, or a short video, that keeps the rest of the design. Plans cost US$15 to US$80 a month.", "why": "For two years it was a powerful node editor that architects did not want, and it made about US$150 a month. The founder replaced it with a chat box where you say what you want, and changed one-time payments to subscriptions. Stripe revenue then grew 5.3 times from November 2025 to March 2026. His salary paid for the slow years.", "summary": [ "Visualizee is a rendering tool for architects and interior designers. Rendering means making a realistic picture of a building or a room from a 3D model or a drawing; done the classic way, it needs a 3D artist and hours of computer time. Here the user uploads a SketchUp screenshot, a sketch or a photo, types what to change, and a chat assistant called Vizzy returns a photoreal image in 30 seconds to 2 minutes, or a short video. Plans cost US$15, US$35 or US$80 a month. Behind the assistant are image models, AI programs that generate a picture from a text request and a reference image. The site does not say which ones it uses.", "Piotr Obidowski builds it next to a full-time job; the company that operates it is registered in Poland. He launched it on Product Hunt on 21 September 2023. For about two years it made about US$150 a month. In his account the cause was the interface: a node editor, a screen where the user connects boxes into a chain of processing steps, when architects only wanted a render by lunch. He replaced it with the chat assistant and moved from one-time payments to subscriptions. Stripe data shows US$1,737 of revenue in November 2025 and US$9,251 in March 2026. On 14 October 2026 the MRR, monthly recurring revenue, the subscription revenue of one month, was US$8,139 from 288 active subscriptions.", "The revenue figures are Stripe data that TrustMRR reads through an API key, grade A. The account of why sales changed is the founder's own, grade C. From April to September 2026 revenue stayed between US$8,852 and US$9,929 a month, and the large design-software makers now sell the same feature inside the programs that architects already use." ], "factsCaption": "Stripe-verified revenue of US$87,384 in twelve months and US$8,139 of monthly recurring revenue in October 2026, after two years at about US$150 a month", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read from Stripe by TrustMRR through an API key, or comes from an official Polish register. A grade C value is a founder statement, a founder-written profile field or the company's own page. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a node editor that made about US$150 a month to a chat assistant near US$10,000 a month, in 37 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Visualizee prices on 14 October 2026, read from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "Each plan is one monthly allowance that can be spent at any quality: a Pro render counts as about 2 Fast renders, an Ultra render as about 4. Fast takes about 30 seconds, Pro under a minute, Ultra about 2 minutes and goes up to 4K. Yearly billing saves 25%: Hobby costs US$135, Pro US$315 and Max US$720 a year. Extra render packs can be bought at any time, 15% cheaper on Pro and 30% cheaper on Max. Paid renders have no watermark and include a commercial license.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "5 Fast renders, watermarked, up to 1K, personal use only" ], [ "Hobby", "11.25", "15", "about 90 Fast, or 15 Pro plus about 60 Fast a month; images up to 2K" ], [ "Pro", "26.25", "35", "about 240 Fast, 120 Pro or 65 Ultra a month; 4K images, 1080p video" ], [ "Max", "60", "80", "about 600 Fast, 300 Pro or 160 Ultra a month; 4K video" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 14 October 2026", "value": "US$8,139", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data read by TrustMRR through an API key. Two days earlier the profile showed US$8,104.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the October 2026 MRR", "value": "about US$97,700 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 8,139 times 12 equals 97,668. This is the headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the twelve months to 14 October 2026", "value": "US$87,384", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data on TrustMRR.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in all time, to 14 October 2026", "value": "US$89,547", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data on TrustMRR. No source mentions an earlier payment provider.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before mid-October 2025", "value": "US$2,163", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 89,547 minus 87,384. Over the 26 months from August 2023 that is about US$83 a month. The founder remembers about US$100 to US$150 a month. Either way, almost all revenue came after the change of interface.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue, November 2025 to March 2026", "value": "US$1,737, US$2,726, US$5,264, US$6,976, US$9,251", "grade": "A", "note": "Monthly revenue timeline on TrustMRR. The founder writes that the line turns where the chat interface shipped.", "src": [ 1, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from November 2025 to March 2026", "value": "5.3 times in four months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 9,251 divided by 1,737 equals 5.33.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue, April to September 2026", "value": "between US$8,852 and US$9,929, average US$9,489", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the six monthly values on TrustMRR. September 2026 is 10.8% below April 2026. Revenue in the last 30 days, US$8,684, is 2.8% below the 30 days before.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Visualizee revenue in September 2026, founder's post", "value": "US$8,832", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 2 October 2026, next to US$9,669 from his full-time job and US$634.10 from his second product. The Stripe figure for September is US$8,852.", "src": [ 5, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions, 14 October 2026", "value": "288", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data on TrustMRR.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR per active subscription", "value": "about US$28 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 8,139 divided by 288 equals 28.26, between the monthly prices of Hobby (US$15) and Pro (US$35).", "src": [ 1, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Product Hunt launch, 21 September 2023", "value": "25 upvotes; 4,000 visitors and 200 signups in 4 days", "grade": "C", "note": "The upvotes are from an archived copy of the launch page made early on launch day, so the final count may be higher; the page names Piotr Obidowski as the maker. The visitors and signups are the founder's count. Revenue barely moved, he writes.", "src": [ 12, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue for about two years after launch", "value": "about US$100 to US$150 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's posts. The first sales were one-time payments.", "src": [ 3, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the chat assistant to about US$10,000 a month", "value": "about six months", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 6 October 2026. The best Stripe month so far is April 2026, with US$9,929.", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Credit packs bought by people who already subscribe", "value": "97%", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's count from 10 months of Stripe data, post of 8 October 2026.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Most common cancellation reason", "value": "only needed for occasional projects: 5 of the last 11 cancellations", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 14 October 2026.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Estimated users", "value": "25,000", "grade": "C", "note": "A founder-written field on TrustMRR, not a Stripe figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "66%", "grade": "C", "note": "Shown on TrustMRR as a snapshot. The profile does not say how costs are entered, so this page does not treat it as verified.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 founder, working on it before and after a full-time job", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's posts: no meetings, no calls, no standups for his products, and Claude Code does most of the typing.", "src": [ 11, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Operating company", "value": "Obidowski Company Sp. z o.o., in the court register since 22 December 2015, share capital PLN 5,000", "grade": "A", "note": "Polish court register (KRS 0000593281) and the tax register. The terms of service name this company as the operator. Two private persons hold the shares, 60% and 40%; no company or fund holds any. The board has two members and there is no supervisory board. The public register masks personal names.", "src": [ 20, 19, 18 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "No investor appears in the share register, and no source read for this page mentions a funding round, an accelerator or a grant. Grants and loans would not show in a share register.", "src": [ 20, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Second product of the founder", "value": "Viztunr.com, US$792 MRR", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data on the founder's TrustMRR page. A try-on tool for car tuning shops. Its customers came from cold email, he writes.", "src": [ 2, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October 2026 figure", "value": "37 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: September 2023 to October 2026.", "src": [ 12, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "22 December 2015", "what": "Obidowski Company Sp. z o.o., the company that now operates Visualizee, enters the Polish court register. Its main registered activity is software.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 20 ] }, { "when": "10 August 2023", "what": "Founding date of Visualizee, as entered on its TrustMRR profile.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "21 September 2023", "what": "Launch on Product Hunt, made by Piotr Obidowski, with an offer of 20% off for life. 25 upvotes in the archived copy from early on launch day. The product is a node editor. 4,000 visitors and 200 signups in four days, and almost no revenue.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12, 3 ] }, { "when": "2023 to 2025", "what": "About US$100 to US$150 a month from one-time payments, for about 700 days. The founder keeps his full-time job. Stripe shows US$2,163 in total before mid-October 2025.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 6, 1 ] }, { "when": "Late 2025 (exact date not stated)", "what": "He deletes the node editor and replaces it with a chat assistant, Vizzy, and replaces one-time payments with subscriptions.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 6 ] }, { "when": "November 2025 to March 2026", "what": "Stripe revenue grows from US$1,737 to US$9,251 a month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "April 2026", "what": "The best month so far: US$9,929.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "After the chat assistant (dates not stated)", "what": "Video, more models, car renders, a public API and an MCP server, so that AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT can create renders directly.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 15 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "US$8,852 on Stripe. The founder reports US$8,832, a little less than the US$9,669 from his full-time job, and writes that he has not yet reached US$10,000 in a month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 5, 3 ] }, { "when": "9 October 2026", "what": "He writes that Starter Story covered his story: 2 years of failing, then US$10,000 a month. The Starter Story page read for this story is an AI-compiled profile that names SEO and Product Hunt as the growth channels.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11, 25 ] }, { "when": "14 October 2026", "what": "MRR US$8,139 from 288 active subscriptions. Not listed for sale on TrustMRR.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Delete the expert interface", "text": "The first product was a node editor: to get a render, an architect had to connect boxes into a processing chain. In the founder's words, it was powerful, and architects did not want powerful; they wanted a render by lunch. The chat assistant asks for one sentence, such as: make it a real living room in warm evening light, keep the layout and the camera. Revenue followed within months." }, { "title": "Subscriptions with an allowance, and packs on top", "text": "One-time payments became monthly plans of US$15, US$35 and US$80, each a pool of renders that can be spent at three qualities. Extra packs were meant for people who dislike subscriptions, but 97% of pack buyers already subscribe, so packs work as a top-up for heavy users." }, { "title": "A salary paid for the slow years", "text": "The founder never quit his job. He writes that the 9-to-5 paid for 700 days of almost no revenue, and that a salary removes the pressure to look successful in public posts. No investor appears in the company's share register." }, { "title": "Search pages instead of ads", "text": "Product Hunt brought visitors but no revenue. The founder says he focused on SEO, search engine optimization, the work of making pages appear in Google results. The site has a page for each competitor (ReRender AI, Vizcom, ArchiVinci, Rendair AI, Midjourney) and pages for single tasks such as sketch to render or furnishing an empty room. An affiliate program exists but, he writes, he barely promoted it." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's posts, the founder-written parts of the TrustMRR profile and the company's own pages. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Next.js, React and TypeScript in the browser; Supabase for the database and accounts, Vercel for hosting and Stripe for payments. The founder uses the same stack for all of his products.", "Claude Code, an AI coding tool, does most of the typing; the founder decides what to build. He holds no meetings, calls or standups for his products.", "The user talks to Vizzy, a chat assistant, and gets images at three qualities: Fast in about 30 seconds, Pro in under a minute, Ultra in about 2 minutes and up to 4K, plus short videos.", "No page or post read for this story names the image models behind it. The founder writes that he added more models, and that a better AI model did not bring more customers. The FAQ says uploads are not used to train AI models.", "A public API and an MCP server. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is a standard way for AI assistants to call outside tools, so Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor can request a render directly.", "Lifecycle emails and invoicing run on their own, including KSeF, the Polish national system for electronic invoices. He builds nothing that he cannot leave alone for a week.", "The free plan attracted account farms. Sign-ups from about 121,000 throwaway email domains are now blocked." ], "src": [ 1, 10, 11, 14, 16, 15, 3 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised people a finished picture of a room or a design without the usual cost. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Modsy", "years": "2015 to 2022", "funding": "US$72.7M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "3D pictures of your own room with new furniture in it, before you buy.", "died": "Behind each 3D room were hours of work by human designers, so costs grew with every customer. It never came close to a profit.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2521-modsy" }, { "name": "Laurel & Wolf", "years": "2014 to 2019", "funding": "US$25M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Online interior design by professional designers for a flat fee.", "died": "The flat fees did not cover the cost of finding customers, and quality fell as the designer network grew.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2012-laurel--wolf" }, { "name": "Tastemaker", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$1.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Affordable interior design for people who cannot pay a designer.", "died": "Service from a scattered group of designers was uneven, and competitors with more money and more technology, such as Houzz and Modsy, offered the same.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1572-tastemaker" }, { "name": "Invision", "years": "2011 to 2023", "funding": "US$350M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Software for designers to show their designs and hand them over to developers.", "died": "Figma offered real-time collaboration in the browser, and Invision could not keep up with it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/251-invision" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Modsy, Laurel & Wolf and Tastemaker sold pictures of a finished room, and each picture needed hours of a human designer. Their costs grew with every customer, and the money ran out first. Invision had software costs, not designer costs, but lost when a competitor offered what designers wanted inside a better platform.", "Visualizee takes the human out of the picture: an image model produces it in under a minute, and on the Pro and Max plans a client-ready render costs the customer about US$0.25 to US$0.27. With no staff and no investors, about US$9,000 a month is a working business. The risk that remains is the Invision risk: large design-software makers now ship the same feature inside the programs that architects already pay for." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product, late. The method, yes.", "text": "AI rendering for architects is now a crowded market with large vendors in it, so a copy of the product starts late. The method is general: keep a salary while the product finds its form, watch where new users stop, and replace an expert interface with plain requests.", "steps": [ "Keep your job until the product pays. Here a salary paid for 700 days of almost no revenue.", "Watch the first session of new users and remove the step where they stop. Here that meant deleting the node editor.", "Sell a monthly allowance by subscription, and sell extra packs to subscribers who run out.", "Write one search page for each competitor and for each task that people type into Google." ], "open": "Other trades that pay for a picture before they build: kitchens, gardens, car wraps and paint colors, shop fronts. The founder's second product sells car try-ons to tuning shops through cold email." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Growth has stopped for now", "text": "Revenue rose from US$1,737 in November 2025 to US$9,929 in April 2026, then stayed below that: US$8,852 in September 2026, and the last 30 days were 2.8% below the 30 days before. The founder's goal of US$10,000 in a month was not reached by September 2026." }, { "title": "The large design-software makers ship the same feature", "text": "Chaos, the maker of V-Ray and Enscape, bought EvolveLAB and its AI visualization tool Veras on 19 February 2025. Trimble launched SketchUp AI on 10 December 2025, with AI Render, formerly SketchUp Diffusion, which turns a SketchUp model and a text prompt into images in seconds, sold as a monthly subscription. A SketchUp screenshot is the first kind of input that Visualizee's home page names. Specialist competitors are also many: Visualizee's own site has comparison pages for ReRender AI, Vizcom, ArchiVinci, Rendair AI and Midjourney." }, { "title": "Renders that change the design", "text": "Ibrahim Fawakherji, writing on ArchUp on 15 July 2026, described a project of his own in which an AI tool, asked only to make a finished 3D model realistic, changed the street width and the sidewalk, added elements, removed part of the facade and redrew the entrance, with no warning, and charged for each failed attempt. Visualizee's own pricing page shows smaller cases: at Fast quality a stone wall becomes flat plaster, and at Pro quality a frame sits a little higher than in the model. Its promise is a render that keeps everything else, and that is the claim a buyer should test." }, { "title": "Dependence on image-model providers", "text": "The site does not say which image models it uses. If they come from outside providers, as the founder's mention of adding more models suggests but does not prove, then the quality, the speed and the cost per render depend on companies that also sell to every competitor. A price change by a provider changes the margin; a better public model narrows the gap. The founder himself lists 'better AI model = more customers' among the beliefs that turned out wrong." }, { "title": "Price pressure from general image generators", "text": "Midjourney, a general image generator, starts at US$10 a month, or US$8 a month billed yearly, against US$15 for Visualizee's smallest paid plan. Visualizee's answer is that it keeps the architect's layout and camera, while a general generator invents a new image; a buyer who only needs mood pictures may not pay the difference." }, { "title": "Architects render in bursts", "text": "The most common cancellation reason is that the customer needs renders only for occasional projects: 5 of the last 11 cancellations, the founder wrote on 14 October 2026. A monthly subscription works against that rhythm, and he is adding a reminder email before renewal, which costs some revenue." }, { "title": "One person, part-time, several products", "text": "In September 2026 the founder's full-time job paid more than Visualizee. He also runs Viztunr and started a third product, morga.ai, on 10 October 2026. The operating company has two shareholders, both private persons, with 60% and 40%, and a two-person board; whether the second person works on the product is not known. The headline figure was reached with one person building." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://visualizee.ai/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/visualizee-ai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR markdown profile: Visualizee.ai, revenue synced 14 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/visualizee-ai.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full on 14 October 2026, and compared it with a cached copy of 12 October. The revenue, MRR and subscription figures are in its Verification Sources section, read from Stripe through an API key. The description, founding date, pricing summary, user estimate, profit margin and tech stack are founder-written or unexplained and are treated as grade C." }, { "title": "TrustMRR founder page: Piotr Obidowski (@pobidowski)", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/founder/pobidowski", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. Lists his two startups with verified revenue, Visualizee.ai and Viztunr.com, and their MRR." }, { "title": "Piotr Obidowski on X, 11 October 2026: Two years at $150/month. Here's everything that changed, in order", "url": "https://x.com/pobidowski/status/2109265760770052449", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the Product Hunt numbers, the node editor, the later features and the September 2026 figures." }, { "title": "Piotr Obidowski on X, 6 October 2026: Visualizee sat at ~$150/month for two years", "url": "https://x.com/pobidowski/status/2107380534666010725", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the change from the node editor to the chat assistant and the six months to about US$10,000 a month." }, { "title": "Piotr Obidowski on X, 2 October 2026: I've made $19,133.10 in September 2026", "url": "https://x.com/pobidowski/status/2105909042275389539", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. His three income lines add up to US$19,135.10, two dollars more than his total." }, { "title": "Piotr Obidowski on X, 26 September 2026: My first Visualizee sales were one-time payments", "url": "https://x.com/pobidowski/status/2103786243117269016", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the early revenue and the change to subscriptions." }, { "title": "Piotr Obidowski on X, 26 September 2026: the affiliate program and SEO", "url": "https://x.com/pobidowski/status/2103844790345576766", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Piotr Obidowski on X, 14 October 2026: Visualizee's #1 cancellation reason", "url": "https://x.com/pobidowski/status/2110362235474411644", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Piotr Obidowski on X, 8 October 2026: credit packs next to subscriptions", "url": "https://x.com/pobidowski/status/2108082887593722183", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Piotr Obidowski on X, 7 October 2026: How I ship 3 products next to a full-time job", "url": "https://x.com/pobidowski/status/2107722342113689722", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for Claude Code, the stack and the automated invoicing." }, { "title": "Piotr Obidowski's X profile and timeline, 24 September to 14 October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/pobidowski", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile and three pages of posts, about 60, through api.fxtwitter.com; the API returned nothing older. Source for the profile text, the posts on meetings, free-plan abuse, the revenue chart, Starter Story, Viztunr and morga.ai." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: Visualizee.ai, Render Rapidly. Reveal Reality., archived 21 September 2023", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20230921074920/https://www.producthunt.com/posts/visualizee-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in the Wayback Machine copy of the launch day. Names the maker, the featured date, the upvotes and the launch discount." }, { "title": "Visualizee pricing page, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://visualizee.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the plans, the allowances, the yearly prices and the quality examples." }, { "title": "Visualizee home page, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://visualizee.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the chat assistant Vizzy, the video feature and the comparison and task pages." }, { "title": "Visualizee MCP server page", "url": "https://visualizee.ai/mcp", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the opening section on connecting AI assistants." }, { "title": "Visualizee FAQ", "url": "https://visualizee.ai/faq", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full and searched for model names; none is given. Source for the statement that uploads are not used to train AI models." }, { "title": "Visualizee: Visualizee and Midjourney compared", "url": "https://visualizee.ai/comparison/midjourney", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's own comparison; its footer links the comparison pages for the other competitors." }, { "title": "Visualizee Terms of Service", "url": "https://visualizee.ai/terms-of-service", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the company and on contact. Names Obidowski Company Sp. z o.o. and VAT number PL9471986146 as the operator." }, { "title": "Polish Ministry of Finance, VAT taxpayer register: NIP 9471986146, 14 October 2026", "url": "https://wl-api.mf.gov.pl/api/search/nip/9471986146?date=2026-10-14", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full (JSON). Links the VAT number in the terms to court register number KRS 0000593281 and shows an active VAT status." }, { "title": "Polish court register (KRS), current extract for KRS 0000593281, as of 10 April 2026", "url": "https://api-krs.ms.gov.pl/api/krs/OdpisAktualny/0000593281?rejestr=P&format=json", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full (JSON) from the Ministry of Justice public API. Source for the registration date, share capital, shareholdings, board and main activity. The API masks personal names." }, { "title": "Chaos press release, 19 February 2025: Chaos Acquires EvolveLAB and its AEC AI Tools", "url": "https://www.chaos.com/press/chaos-acquires-evolvelab-and-its-aec-ai-tools", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. The buyer's own announcement." }, { "title": "Trimble press release, 10 December 2025: Trimble Launches SketchUp AI", "url": "https://news.trimble.com/Trimble-Launches-SketchUp-AI-a-New-Suite-of-AI-Powered-Modeling-Visualization-and-Help-Tools", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The vendor's announcement of its own product." }, { "title": "ArchUp, Ibrahim Fawakherji, 15 July 2026: The Trial of AI: Who Pays for the Hallucination?", "url": "https://archup.net/who-pays-for-ai-hallucination/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. An architect's account of an AI render that changed a finished model." }, { "title": "Midjourney documentation: Comparing Midjourney Plans", "url": "https://docs.midjourney.com/hc/en-us/articles/27870484040333-Comparing-Midjourney-Plans", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the price table." }, { "title": "Starter Story: Visualizee.ai, revenue, growth and monetization", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/businesses/visualizee-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The page says it was compiled by Starter Story's AI research system from public sources and not written by the founder. Used only for the growth channels it lists." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/koe/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/koe.md", "slug": "koe", "name": "Koe", "country": "United States", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI film generator and editor that works from one sentence", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-14", "launchLabel": "10 April 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$88K a year run rate, October 2026", "sticker": "$88K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 88224, "months": 6, "teamLabel": "1 named founder, who writes solo founder; no headcount in any source", "fundingLabel": "None found", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "video", "channel": "launches", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Video" ], "product": "A web app that writes a storyboard from one sentence, keeps the characters the same from scene to scene, generates each scene with video models rented from other companies (LTX, Kling, Seedance), and lets the user edit and export the film. Users pay with prepaid credits, on plans from US$12 to US$600 a month.", "why": "It put the newest video models, among them ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 from 14 April 2026, inside a storyboard editor that keeps characters consistent. Revenue grew from US$645 in May 2026 to US$32,697 in July. Then it fell by three quarters by September, and no source says why.", "summary": [ "Koe is a web app that turns one sentence into a short film. It writes a storyboard, a list of scenes with one still picture for each scene, keeps the same characters from scene to scene, and then sends each scene to a text-to-video model, an AI model that turns a description or a picture into a moving clip. Koe does not train these models. They are made by Lightricks (LTX), Kuaishou (Kling) and ByteDance (Seedance), and Koe pays for each use through an API, an interface that lets one program buy work from another company's servers. Users pay with credits, prepaid units that each generated scene uses up. Plans cost US$12 to US$600 a month.", "Koe launched on Product Hunt on 10 April 2026 and got 6 upvotes. The launch was submitted by Hong Xuan Kow, and the maker's comment says \"I'm Xuan, solo founder of Koe\". On 14 April Koe added ByteDance's Seedance 2.0. Stripe records, read by TrustMRR, show US$645 of revenue in May, US$7,177 in June and US$32,697 in July. On 16 July the founder posted a Stripe screenshot with about US$10,100 in MRR, monthly recurring revenue, the subscription revenue of one month. Then revenue fell: US$20,414 in August and US$8,616 in September. On 14 October 2026 the MRR was US$7,352 from 360 subscriptions, a run rate of US$88,224 a year, and total revenue was US$73,304.", "The revenue numbers are grade A, because TrustMRR reads them from Stripe, the payment processor, through an API key. The founder's posts and Koe's own pages are grade C. No source explains the fall after July, and no source gives a headcount. Under terms dated 15 September 2026, Koe also offers to turn authors' books into paid video series. The page also shows five earlier companies that promised easy video for everyone or sold stories as short paid video." ], "factsCaption": "A video app that made US$32,697 in its best month and had US$7,352 in MRR six months after launch, with revenue verified from Stripe", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value is read by TrustMRR from Stripe, the payment processor, through an API key. A grade C value is a founder statement, a company page, a price list or an encyclopedia article. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a Product Hunt launch with 6 upvotes to US$10,000 in MRR in three months, then a fall by three quarters. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Koe plans in October 2026, from the company's pricing page and home page (grade C)", "note": "The pricing page shows monthly prices and says that yearly billing saves 20%. The home page shows Hobby at US$10 and Starter at US$24 a month billed yearly, which saves US$24 and US$72 a year. The yearly prices of the larger plans load by script and were not read. A 6-second scene on the entry model, LTX 2.3 Pro, uses about 80 credits including its start frame; Kling and Seedance scenes cost more. Credits are spent when a generation starts and are not refunded. One-time credit packs never expire.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "720p with watermark; still frames only, motion needs a plan" ], [ "Hobby", "10", "12", "800 credits a month, 1080p with watermark" ], [ "Starter", "24", "30", "2,500 credits a month, no watermark" ], [ "Pro", "", "90", "8,000 credits a month" ], [ "Team", "", "240", "22,000 credits a month, 4K, priority queue" ], [ "Ultra", "", "600", "60,000 credits a month, 4K, API access" ], [ "Enterprise", "", "custom", "custom LoRA character training, single sign-on" ], [ "Credit packs", "5.99 to 109.99 one-time", "", "100 to 3,000 credits, never expire" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 14 October 2026", "value": "US$7,352", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, from the Stripe API. 360 active subscriptions. Two days earlier the profile showed US$7,568 and 367 subscriptions.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from that MRR", "value": "US$88,224 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 7,352 times 12. Revenue in the last 30 days, US$7,380, is almost equal to the MRR, so one-time payments do not raise this figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time to 14 October 2026", "value": "US$73,304", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, from Stripe. Equal to the last-12-months figure, so there was no revenue before April 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month, 2026", "value": "April US$70, May US$645, June US$7,177, July US$32,697, August US$20,414, September US$8,616, 1 to 14 October US$3,684", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline, in UTC calendar months.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Best month", "value": "July 2026, US$32,697", "grade": "A", "note": "4.56 times June, and 44.6% of all revenue to date (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Fall from July to September 2026", "value": "73.6%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 1 minus 8,616 divided by 32,697. August was 37.6% below July, and September 57.8% below August.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Last 30 days against the two months before", "value": "US$7,380 against US$16,677 a month, or 44%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 40,734 for the last 3 months minus 7,380 for the last 30 days, divided by 2, is 16,677; 7,380 divided by 16,677 is 0.443. TrustMRR shows the last 30 days 22.5% below the 30 days before them.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR, 16 July 2026", "value": "about US$10,100", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post: Koe has reached 10k in MRR, and monthly revenue grew 10 times in less than a month. The attached Stripe screenshot shows US$10.1K MRR, US$32,200 gross volume and US$30,400 net volume from sales for April 2025 to July 2026.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Change in MRR, 16 July to 14 October 2026", "value": "minus 27.2%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 7,352 divided by 10,100, minus 1. Revenue fell much faster than MRR.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "July revenue against the mid-July MRR", "value": "3.24 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 32,697 divided by 10,100. The difference comes from payments outside the mid-July MRR: one-time credit packs, yearly plans paid in advance, and subscriptions that started after 16 July or ended soon after they started. The sources do not split it.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "MRR per active subscription", "value": "about US$20.42 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 7,352 divided by 360. Between the monthly prices of Hobby (US$12) and Starter (US$30).", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "93.0%", "grade": "C", "note": "A TrustMRR snapshot that is not in its list of metrics read from the payment provider. The profile does not say which costs it subtracts, so this page does not use it.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Launch", "value": "10 April 2026, on Product Hunt", "grade": "C", "note": "6 upvotes, 1 comment, 68th product of the day. The first Stripe revenue, US$70, came in the same month.", "src": [ 3, 4, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founded date on the TrustMRR profile", "value": "8 April 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Entered by the founder. The Stripe screenshot also starts its range in April 2025, but revenue starts in April 2026.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 named founder; no headcount in any source", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR and Product Hunt name one founder, who writes 'solo founder of Koe'. The careers page says 'We keep the team small' and lists open roles in research and engineering.", "src": [ 1, 4, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "Koe is not in the Y Combinator company directory, and no source reports a funding round. The About page gives an email address for press and investors.", "src": [ 15, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Video models on the plans", "value": "LTX 2.3 Pro, Kling 3.0 and Kling O3, Seedance 2.0", "grade": "C", "note": "Pricing page feature table. The privacy policy names ByteDance/BytePlus (Seedance), OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, fal.ai, Lightricks/LTX and ElevenLabs as AI model providers.", "src": [ 7, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Credits for one 6-second scene on the entry model", "value": "about 60 for motion plus 20 for the start frame", "grade": "C", "note": "Pricing page answer for LTX 2.3 Pro. It adds that Kling and Seedance cost more, without numbers.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "What a user pays for that scene", "value": "US$0.80 to US$4.79, or US$0.13 to US$0.80 a second", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 80 credits at US$0.01 a credit (Ultra, US$600 for 60,000 credits) up to US$0.0599 a credit (a pack of 100 credits for US$5.99). On Hobby, at US$0.015 a credit, the scene costs US$1.20.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "List price of a 6-second clip at model providers", "value": "US$0.48 to US$2.40", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 6 seconds of Veo 3.1 on the Gemini API at US$0.08 a second (Lite, 1080p) to US$0.40 (Standard). Kling v3 Pro on fal.ai is US$0.14 a second, or US$0.84 for 6 seconds. Koe's own costs are not published.", "src": [ 16, 17 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October 2026 figure", "value": "6 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 10 April 2026 to 14 October 2026, 187 days.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "28 February 2025", "what": "The founder opens the X account @xuan_xuan_hh. Its bio says: founder, math olympiad medalist, ex-Meta.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "8 April 2025", "what": "The founded date that the founder entered on TrustMRR. Stripe records no revenue for the next twelve months.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "18 March 2026", "what": "Koe's X account @koedotsh is created, with New York City as its location.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "10 April 2026", "what": "Launch on Product Hunt as Koe, AI Film Studio: type one sentence, get a complete cinematic film. 6 upvotes, 68th of the day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "when": "14 April 2026", "what": "Koe adds Seedance 2.0 and Kling Omni v3. ByteDance had started its own consumer version of Seedance 2.0 outside China on 26 March, in CapCut, and the United States was not among the first markets.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 21 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "Revenue reaches US$7,177 in the month, up from US$645 in May.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "16 July 2026", "what": "The founder posts that Koe has reached US$10,000 in MRR and that monthly revenue grew 10 times in less than a month. The post had 289 views.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "July 2026", "what": "Best month: US$32,697 of verified revenue. ByteDance releases Seedance 2.5 on 31 July.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 21 ] }, { "when": "17 August 2026", "what": "Koe 2.0 is announced, available exclusively with Seedance 2.0 models. August revenue is US$20,414.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 1 ] }, { "when": "15 September 2026", "what": "Platform Terms and Author Terms, version 2026-09-15. Koe offers to turn a book into a season of 18 to 24 episodes for US$499 and to sell it on a storefront at koe.show, keeping 20% of each sale.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10, 11, 14 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "Revenue falls to US$8,616 in the month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "24 September 2026", "what": "OpenAI shuts down the Sora API, after it closed the Sora app on 26 April.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 20 ] }, { "when": "14 October 2026", "what": "MRR is US$7,352 from 360 active subscriptions, and total verified revenue is US$73,304. Koe is not listed for sale.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "An editor on top of rented models", "text": "Koe does not train a video model. It writes the storyboard, keeps characters consistent, and sends each scene to LTX, Kling or Seedance. When a provider releases a better model, Koe adds it within days: Seedance 2.0 and Kling Omni v3 on 14 April 2026, and Koe 2.0, announced as available only with Seedance 2.0 models, on 17 August." }, { "title": "Timing with a new model", "text": "Koe offered Seedance 2.0 from 14 April 2026. ByteDance's own consumer version, started outside China on 26 March, did not include the United States in its first markets. Revenue rose from US$645 in May to US$32,697 in July. No source links the two; the dates are the only evidence." }, { "title": "Free still frames, paid motion", "text": "The free plan makes storyboards and still frames, and motion clips need a paid plan. The user sees the look of the film before paying for the expensive step, the generation of video." }, { "title": "Credits spent at the start of each generation", "text": "Plans give a monthly number of credits, and packs of 100 to 3,000 credits can be added. Credits are used when a generation starts, whether or not the user keeps the result, and they are not refunded." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from Koe's own pages: the privacy policy, the pricing page and the terms. They are grade C.", "items": [ "The site is a Next.js web app; its page source shows the Next.js markers. It runs on Vercel and Railway.", "Supabase stores account data and signs users in. Cloudflare R2 and the Cloudflare network store and serve the videos.", "Stripe takes the payments. PostHog and Sentry measure usage and errors. Meta Pixel and the Conversions API measure the ads for the author program.", "AI model providers for frames, videos, audio and assistant answers: ByteDance/BytePlus (Seedance), OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, fal.ai, Lightricks/LTX and ElevenLabs.", "Video models on the plans: LTX 2.3 Pro as the entry model, Kling 3.0 and Kling O3, and Seedance 2.0. Enterprise adds LoRA training, a small add-on model trained on a customer's own character images.", "Public channels: a Product Hunt launch, X posts by the founder and by the company with 18 to 388 views each, a Discord server, a subreddit and a referral program. No source says which channel brought the July customers." ], "src": [ 9, 7, 10, 3, 5, 6, 8 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database promised that anyone could make good video without skills, or tried to sell stories as short paid video. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "HighlightCam", "years": "2009 to 2012", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Professional-looking video edits, made automatically by an algorithm.", "died": "Smartphone apps and free editing software did the same job, and the market did not see the need.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1636-highlightcam" }, { "name": "Fuzzwich", "years": "2007 to 2010", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Simple animation for people with no animation skills.", "died": "It stayed on the desktop while users moved to phones, and Adobe had more money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1655-fuzzwich" }, { "name": "Viddy", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$30M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Filters that make phone videos look professional.", "died": "Instagram added video in 2013 and Vine spread fast; Viddy lost its users to both.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2190-viddy" }, { "name": "Vook", "years": "2009 to 2017", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Books combined with video.", "died": "Readers kept reading plain e-books, and publishers did not adopt the format.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/721-vook" }, { "name": "Quibi", "years": "2018 to 2020", "funding": "US$1.75B", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Short premium episodes for phones, behind a paywall.", "died": "Lockdowns removed the commute it was designed for, and free short video on TikTok kept the audience.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1891-quibi" } ], "whatChanged": [ "HighlightCam, Fuzzwich and Viddy promised that anyone could make good-looking video without skills. They had to build the effects themselves, and larger platforms (phone apps, Adobe, Instagram) added the same features for free. Vook and Quibi tried to sell stories as video, and readers and viewers did not pay for the format. Koe's offer to turn books into paid video seasons, in terms dated 15 September 2026, is the same bet as Vook and Quibi, with AI cutting the production price to US$499 a season.", "What is different: the hard part, the video model, is now rented by the second from companies that compete to sell it, so one person can build the editor around it. The same fact is the risk. Google, Runway and Kuaishou sell the same or similar models directly, and Runway includes Kling 3.0 and Seedance 2.5 in its own plans. An editor on top of rented models keeps its customers only while its workflow is better than the model makers' own apps." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The July spike, no.", "text": "One person built a storyboard editor on top of rented video models and reached about US$10,000 in MRR three months after launch. The spike came with new models and faded within two months. What remains, US$7,352 a month from 360 subscriptions, is what the workflow itself holds.", "steps": [ "Build the workflow that the model makers do not build: storyboard, consistent characters, a timeline and export.", "Sell prepaid credits priced per model and per second, and spend them when the generation starts.", "Give cheap still frames for free and charge for the expensive motion step.", "Add each new model within days of its release and post about it, but do not depend on one model.", "Connect Stripe to a public revenue page, so that readers and buyers can check the numbers." ], "open": "Narrow uses where a general video app is weak: music videos from lyrics, ads for small brands, series from books, and countries where a new model is not yet sold directly." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue fell by three quarters after July", "text": "Verified revenue was US$32,697 in July 2026, US$20,414 in August and US$8,616 in September, 73.6% below July. MRR fell less, from about US$10,100 on 16 July (founder's screenshot) to US$7,352 on 14 October, minus 27.2%. No source explains the fall. Possible causes that this page could not verify: a launch spike of one-time credit purchases, users moving to other apps after Seedance 2.5 (31 July) and wider Seedance access, or cancelled subscriptions. In the last 30 days revenue averaged US$246 a day and in the last 7 days US$269 a day, so the fall has slowed to the level of the subscriptions." }, { "title": "The model makers sell to the same users", "text": "Google sells Veo 3.1 and its Flow video studio inside Google AI plans: AI Plus at US$4.99 a month with 200 Flow credits, AI Pro at US$19.99 with 1,000 Flow credits and a limited Veo 3.1 Lite trial, and AI Ultra from US$99.99 with Veo 3.1. Runway's Standard plan costs US$12 a month billed yearly and includes Kling 3.0, and its Pro plan lists Seedance 2.5. Kuaishou runs Kling as its own service. Runway raised US$315 million in February 2026. OpenAI closed the Sora app on 26 April 2026 and the Sora API on 24 September 2026, so even a large maker can leave this market." }, { "title": "Video generation is paid by the second", "text": "Veo 3.1 costs US$0.05 to US$0.60 a second on the Gemini API, and Kling v3 Pro US$0.14 a second on fal.ai; fal.ai bills Seedance 2.0 by tokens. A 6-second scene on Koe's cheapest model brings Koe US$0.80 to US$4.79, depending on the plan or pack. Koe does not publish the credit price of Kling and Seedance scenes, so its margin cannot be computed. TrustMRR shows a 93.0% profit margin for the last 30 days but does not say which costs it counts. Credits are not refunded when a user discards a result, so the user pays for failed generations." }, { "title": "Dependence on model providers", "text": "Koe 2.0 was announced as available exclusively with Seedance 2.0 models. In February 2026 Disney and Netflix sent ByteDance cease-and-desist letters over Seedance 2.0, and in March two US senators asked ByteDance to shut it down. If a provider raises prices, restricts access or closes a model, as OpenAI did with the Sora API, Koe must move its users to another model, and its product changes with it." }, { "title": "Platform rules on AI video and likeness", "text": "YouTube requires creators to disclose realistic AI-generated content, and its inauthentic content policy, renamed and clarified on 15 July 2025, excludes mass-produced or repetitive videos from monetization; Koe's pricing page tells users they can earn YouTube ad revenue. TikTok labels AI-generated content automatically when it is uploaded from some other platforms with C2PA Content Credentials, metadata that records how a file was made. Meta adds AI info labels. Koe's own Platform Terms forbid real people's likenesses or voices without their written permission." }, { "title": "Little evidence about the team and the new product", "text": "Only one person is named: the founder, who writes 'solo founder of Koe' on Product Hunt. The careers page lists open research and engineering roles and says the team is small, but no source gives a headcount. The book-season product is sold under terms dated 15 September 2026, and TrustMRR does not split revenue by product. The home page says Koe was featured in Rolling Stone, Billboard, Wired and Variety; this page could not verify that." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://koe.sh/" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/koe-ai-film-studio" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/hong-xuan-kow" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of Koe (listed as Hong Xuan Kow), revenue verified from Stripe, synced 14 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/hong-xuan-kow", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full and compared it with a copy cached on 12 October 2026. Revenue, MRR and subscriptions come from the Stripe API; the description, founded date and pricing text are written by the founder (grade C)." }, { "title": "The founder's X post, 16 July 2026: Koe has reached 10k in MRR", "url": "https://x.com/xuan_xuan_hh/status/2077723437729284451", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com, with the attached screenshot of the Stripe dashboard." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: Koe, AI Film Studio, launched 10 April 2026", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/koe-ai-film-studio", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page and its page data. Source for the launch date (scheduled 10 April 2026, 00:01 Pacific time) and the description." }, { "title": "Hunted.space launch record: Koe, AI Film Studio", "url": "https://hunted.space/product/koe-ai-film-studio", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 6 upvotes, the 68th place of the day, the name of the person who submitted it and the maker's comment." }, { "title": "Koe's X account @koedotsh, posts from April to August 2026", "url": "https://x.com/koedotsh", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile and its 11 visible posts through api.fxtwitter.com, two pages." }, { "title": "The founder's X profile @xuan_xuan_hh", "url": "https://x.com/xuan_xuan_hh", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile through api.fxtwitter.com. The full timeline returned an error, so only the 10 posts with images or video were read." }, { "title": "Koe pricing page, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://koe.sh/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the answers to its questions in the page data." }, { "title": "Koe home page, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://koe.sh/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the answers to its questions in the page data." }, { "title": "Koe Privacy Policy", "url": "https://koe.sh/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the AI model providers and the other service providers." }, { "title": "Koe Platform Terms, version 2026-09-15", "url": "https://koe.sh/terms/platform", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the credit rules, the storefront split and the likeness rule." }, { "title": "Koe Author Terms, version 2026-09-15", "url": "https://koe.sh/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the book seasons at US$499, the legal entity Koe Platforms and Delaware law." }, { "title": "Koe About page", "url": "https://koe.sh/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full." }, { "title": "Koe Careers page", "url": "https://koe.sh/careers", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. It lists open roles but gives no headcount." }, { "title": "koe.show, the storefront for author-owned series", "url": "https://koe.show/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full." }, { "title": "Y Combinator company directory, yc-oss mirror", "url": "https://yc-oss.github.io/api/companies/all.json", "grade": "C", "how": "Searched all 6,297 company records for Koe and koe.sh. No match." }, { "title": "Google Gemini API pricing", "url": "https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the Veo 3.1 section, prices per second." }, { "title": "fal.ai pricing", "url": "https://fal.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the list of video model prices." }, { "title": "Google AI plans", "url": "https://gemini.google/subscriptions/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the plan cards for AI Plus, AI Pro and AI Ultra." }, { "title": "Runway pricing", "url": "https://runwayml.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the plan cards and their model lists." }, { "title": "Wikipedia: Sora (text-to-video model)", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sora_(text-to-video_model)", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the article text through the Wikipedia API. Source for the shutdown dates." }, { "title": "Wikipedia: Seedance", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seedance", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the Wikipedia API. Source for the release dates, the copyright disputes and the CapCut rollout." }, { "title": "Wikipedia: Veo (text-to-video model)", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veo_(text-to-video_model)", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the Wikipedia API. Source for Veo in the Gemini app and in Google Flow." }, { "title": "Wikipedia: Kling AI", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kling_AI", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the Wikipedia API." }, { "title": "Wikipedia: Runway (company)", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runway_(company)", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the Wikipedia API. Source for the funding rounds." }, { "title": "YouTube Help: Disclosing use of GenAI content", "url": "https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/14328491", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full." }, { "title": "YouTube Partner Program policies", "url": "https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1311392", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on inauthentic content and its 15 July 2025 update." }, { "title": "TikTok newsroom, 9 May 2024: Partnering with our industry to advance AI transparency and literacy", "url": "https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/partnering-with-our-industry-to-advance-ai-transparency-and-literacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The TikTok help page on AI-generated content loads by script and could not be read." }, { "title": "Meta newsroom: Our Approach to Labeling AI-Generated Content and Manipulated Media", "url": "https://about.fb.com/news/2024/04/metas-approach-to-labeling-ai-generated-content-and-manipulated-media/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with its 1 July 2024 update." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/the-influencer-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/the-influencer-ai.md", "slug": "the-influencer-ai", "name": "The Influencer AI", "country": "Singapore", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI influencer and product-image generator", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-14", "launchLabel": "8 May 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$50.8K revenue in the last 12 months, October 2026", "sticker": "$51K in 12 months", "outcomeUsd": 50824, "months": 17, "teamLabel": "1 founder; LinkedIn lists him as the only employee", "fundingLabel": "None found", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "video", "channel": "launches", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Marketing content" ], "product": "A web app that creates one AI person, from chosen traits or from 1 to 4 photos of the user, and then generates photos, talking videos, outfit try-ons and product shots of that same person for Instagram, TikTok, ads and online shops. Plans cost US$19 to US$199 a month and include credits that each image or video second uses up.", "why": "General image generators make a new face with every prompt, so a brand or creator cannot build a recognizable character with them. This app saves the face once and generates everything else from it. One developer found users through AI directories, free single-feature tools and, later, guides written for search. Credits make the model costs grow with use.", "summary": [ "The Influencer AI makes an AI influencer, a person who does not exist, or an AI copy of a real person, who appears in social media posts as if real. The user designs the face by choosing traits such as age, hair and body, or uploads 1 to 4 photos to make an AI clone, a saved copy of the user's own face. The app then generates new photos, talking videos with lip sync, where the mouth moves to match the spoken words, virtual try-ons, where an uploaded garment is shown on the person, and product shots, all with the same face. The buyers are creators, brands and online shops that want UGC-style content, short videos that look as if an ordinary user filmed them, without hiring anyone to film. Plans cost US$19 to US$199 a month and include credits, units that each generation uses up: 1 credit for a photo, 1 or 2 credits for each second of video.", "Zeeshaan Lakdawala, a software developer who lives in Barcelona, launched it on 8 May 2025, two months before he sold his earlier AI headshot app, The Multiverse AI, for US$115,000. The company behind it, Thunderbus Pte. Ltd., is registered in Singapore. He found users through launch directories in the first weeks, free single-feature tools, and later guides and comparisons written for search engines. In the twelve months to 14 October 2026 it took in US$50,824, and its MRR, monthly recurring revenue, the total of all active subscriptions for one month, was US$4,962 from 138 subscriptions. Revenue has been uneven: US$5,692 in January 2026, US$2,685 in May, US$4,909 in September. In February 2026 he wrote that the revenue was about equal to his family's living costs and that he was not yet taking any of it out.", "The revenue figures are grade A. They are published by TrustMRR, a site that reads a startup's payment records directly from its payment processor, here Stripe, through an API key, a password that lets one program read another program's data. Everything else, from the team size to the user counts and the way the business found customers, comes from the founder's posts on X and the company's own pages, grade C. The page also shows the 2026 rules on labeling AI-generated people, and four earlier companies that sold images or creator content to brands and shoppers." ], "factsCaption": "A one-person subscription app with US$50,824 in Stripe-verified revenue in twelve months and US$4,962 in monthly recurring revenue, October 2026", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from the payment processor's records as published by TrustMRR on 14 October 2026. A grade C value is a statement by the founder or the company. A grade X value was computed on this page from the rows that it names.", "timelineLead": "From a sold headshot app to a one-person AI influencer studio, in 17 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "The Influencer AI prices in October 2026, read from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "All plans are billed month to month. The pricing page shows no yearly option, and the company's own comparison guide lists its price as \"No yearly plan\". 1 credit buys 1 photo; video costs 1 or 2 credits per second and lip sync 1 credit per second. New users get a 3-day free trial with 10 credits, and a card is required. The \"save\" labels on the page compare the price per credit with the Starter plan: 19 cents on Starter, 15.6 cents on Creator, 14.1 cents on Professional and 13.3 cents on Enterprise. Pre-made influencers are unlimited on every plan.", "rows": [ [ "Starter", "", "19", "100 credits; 1 custom influencer a month; videos up to 5 seconds; no AI Clone" ], [ "Creator", "", "39", "250 credits; 3 custom influencers a month; videos up to 10 seconds; AI Clone" ], [ "Professional", "", "99", "700 credits; 8 custom influencers a month; videos up to 15 seconds; AI Clone" ], [ "Enterprise", "", "199", "1,500 credits; 16 custom influencers a month; videos up to 15 seconds; AI Clone" ], [ "Extra credits", "0.24 per credit one-time", "", "bought at any time on top of a plan" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue in the last 12 months, to 14 October 2026", "value": "US$50,824", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe records read by TrustMRR through an API key, last synced 14 October 2026. The headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue since the start", "value": "US$65,383", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, same sync.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue in the last 30 days", "value": "US$5,548", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. The 30 daily values in the profile add up to the same amount (checked on this page).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), October 2026", "value": "US$4,962, from 138 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR metric snapshot. The profile shows MRR growth of 13.0% in the last 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the MRR", "value": "US$59,544 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$4,962 times 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average MRR per active subscription", "value": "about US$36 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$4,962 divided by 138. This lies between the US$19 and US$39 plans.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before mid-October 2025", "value": "US$14,559", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: all-time revenue minus the last 12 months. This covers about the first five months after the May 2025 launch.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Highest and lowest full month in the public table", "value": "January 2026: US$5,692. May 2026: US$2,685", "grade": "A", "note": "Monthly table from November 2025. May was 52.8% below January (calculated). September 2026 was US$4,909, 82.8% above May (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Third quarter of 2026 against the second", "value": "US$13,844 against US$9,466, up 46.2%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the monthly table: July to September against April to June.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's pay, February 2026", "value": "none taken; revenue about equal to his family's living costs", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post, 2 February 2026: \"We don't take any of it out yet though, still living off savings.\"", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "No funding round appears in the founder's posts, on the LinkedIn page or on the TrustMRR profile. The founder says he lives off savings.", "src": [ 17, 23, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team, October 2026", "value": "1 founder; LinkedIn lists him as the only employee", "grade": "C", "note": "LinkedIn's company-size field says 2 to 10 employees, a range that the company chooses. TrustMRR lists one founder.", "src": [ 23, 22, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Users claimed by the company", "value": "more than 10,000 creators, 1,600 AI influencers built and 65,000 photos and videos", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page, October 2026. Not verified.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Most common subjects among paying users", "value": "fitness, fashion, travel, food, finance and business", "grade": "C", "note": "Company guide, September 2026. It says the account type that pays most often is a personal influencer brand rather than an experiment.", "src": [ 25 ] }, { "fact": "The founder's previous company", "value": "The Multiverse AI, an AI headshot app, sold in July 2025 for US$115,000, about 0.5 times its annual recurring revenue", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's posts. His X biography says he built it to more than US$350,000 in revenue. A May 2025 post, which does not name the app but matches its dates, says it reached US$34,000 a month at a 70% profit margin and then fell by 80%. The posts do not fit exactly (calculated: an 80% fall from US$34,000 leaves about US$6,800 a month, while 0.5 times annual recurring revenue implies about US$19,000 a month).", "src": [ 12, 5, 22 ] }, { "fact": "Paid advertising test, September 2026", "value": "US$310 for the top place on the outbid daily board", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post. He needed about 4 customers from it to break even.", "src": [ 20 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October 2026 figure", "value": "17 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: May 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 4, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2023 to 2024", "what": "Lakdawala builds The Multiverse AI, an app that turns selfies into AI headshots, with two partners. He later writes that it reached US$34,000 a month at a 70% profit margin, then fell by 80% from the summer of 2024.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 22 ] }, { "when": "4 March 2025", "what": "Founding date of The Influencer AI, as entered on its TrustMRR profile.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "8 May 2025", "what": "Launch post on X: brands use AI images and video, but it is hard to keep one consistent person across the outputs, and this product solves that.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "14 to 16 May 2025", "what": "Launch on the Uneed directory, then a listing on There's An AI For That, which he says brought one conversion and, within a day, more visitors than all his other sources together in the previous 14 days.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 8 ] }, { "when": "27 May 2025", "what": "Virtual try-on added, built on FASHN AI's try-on model.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "15 June 2025", "what": "He launches a free Virtual Try On tool with no sign-up, 3 uses a day, and calls such free tools his side project. The site now has five of them, each linking back to the app.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10, 29 ] }, { "when": "1 July 2025", "what": "Launch on Product Hunt.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "July 2025", "what": "He sells The Multiverse AI for US$115,000 and writes that he now works on The Influencer AI, which is \"picking up steam\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "6 September 2025", "what": "A user publishes a step-by-step guide to the app on X. It says the photo editor uses Google's Nano Banana model.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "17 October 2025", "what": "Most users dropped off at the pricing step of a hard paywall, so he adds a 7-day free trial and tracks it with PostHog.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "12 January 2026", "what": "He lists the business on TrustMRR and posts a chart of a \"revenue rollercoaster\" in the previous three months.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "when": "2 February 2026", "what": "Revenue is about equal to his family's living costs in Barcelona. He is still living off savings.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "when": "January to May 2026", "what": "Verified monthly revenue falls from US$5,692 to US$2,685.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "3 June 2026", "what": "The Influencer AI 2.0: one consistent person, or a clone of the user, for UGC, social media, shop listings and ads.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 18 ] }, { "when": "15 July 2026", "what": "He removes the hard paywall completely, so that people see more of the app at each step from visitor to trial user, and writes that the funnel is improving.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 19 ] }, { "when": "31 August 2026", "what": "Instagram announces that it will limit the reach of accounts that show AI-generated people without its \"AI-generated profile\" label.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 30 ] }, { "when": "2 September 2026", "what": "He pays US$310 for the top place on the outbid board for one day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 20 ] }, { "when": "20 September 2026", "what": "He compares two models for NSFW detection, the automatic screening of sexual content, on the app, and writes that the one called jev is faster, more accurate and cheaper than GPT-5.6 Luna.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 21 ] }, { "when": "14 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR sync: US$50,824 in the last 12 months, US$65,383 in total, MRR US$4,962 from 138 subscriptions. Not listed for sale.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "One face that stays the same", "text": "General image generators make a new person with each prompt. Here the face is saved once, from chosen traits or from 1 to 4 photos, and every later photo, clip, edit and try-on is generated from it. The company says it tests new image and video models as they are released and switches when one is better, so the user does not have to follow model releases." }, { "title": "Credits tie model use to payment", "text": "Each plan includes a fixed number of credits: 1 for a photo, 1 or 2 for each second of video. The price per credit falls from 19 cents on Starter to 13.3 cents on Enterprise, and extra credits cost 24 cents. A heavy user buys more credits instead of using more model time for the same price." }, { "title": "Many small sources of visitors", "text": "AI directories and Product Hunt in May to July 2025, five free single-feature tools that link back to the app (the try-on tool of June 2025 needed no sign-up), nine guides and comparisons written for search, an affiliate program that pays 25% of each payment for a year, and one US$310 ad. The founder wrote that the affiliate program also brings backlinks, links from other sites that help search ranking. No traffic data is public: the TrustMRR profile has no analytics or Search Console connection, so the share of each source is not known." }, { "title": "Trial experiments, one at a time", "text": "Until October 2025 users had to pay before they could see the app, and most dropped off at the pricing step. He added a 7-day trial, measured it, and in July 2026 removed the paywall completely. In October 2026 the site offers a 3-day trial with 10 credits and asks for a card to prevent abuse." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's posts, a user's public guide, archived copies of the site and the company's own pages. They are grade C.", "items": [ "The site is a Next.js web app: the image paths in archived copies of its pages are Next.js paths.", "The models are rented from model companies, not trained by the business. The site does not name them; it says it runs the latest frontier image and video models. A user's guide from September 2025 says the photo editor used Google's Nano Banana model, and the try-on launched in May 2025 on FASHN AI.", "In September 2026 the founder compared two models for NSFW detection, the automatic screening of sexual content, on the app.", "The clone setup changed. The founder's TrustMRR description mentions 10 input photos, and the September 2025 user guide says 5 or more photos and about 5 minutes of training. In October 2026 the site asks for 1 to 4 photos and says there is no training and no waiting.", "Payments run through Stripe, which TrustMRR reads through an API key. The trial funnel is measured with PostHog.", "The company is Thunderbus Pte. Ltd., registered in Singapore, under Singapore law. The founder works from Barcelona. No source names anyone else working on the business." ], "src": [ 29, 14, 9, 21, 1, 15, 24, 22 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to give brands or shoppers images and content without a real photo shoot or with someone else's creators. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "FameBit", "years": "2013 to 2019", "funding": "US$1.75M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A self-service marketplace where brands paid YouTube creators to make sponsored videos.", "died": "Google bought it in 2016. The database says YouTube then turned to large brands, and TikTok took much of the creator market.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/132-famebit" }, { "name": "Modsy", "years": "2015 to 2022", "funding": "US$72.7M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Computer-made 3D images of furniture inside a customer's own room, so that people could buy without seeing it in person.", "died": "Each design needed paid human designers, customers were expensive to find and rarely came back, and it never reached a profit.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2521-modsy" }, { "name": "Seerslab", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Augmented-reality effects for selfies and short videos.", "died": "The large social apps did not adopt it, and Snapchat's own filters won.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1463-seerslab" }, { "name": "Polyvore", "years": "2007 to 2019", "funding": "US$22M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Outfit collages made from the product images of many shops, so that fashion fans could style clothes without a photo shoot.", "died": "Yahoo bought it, and it could not compete with Pinterest and Instagram for users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/451-polyvore" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The four companies sold content or effects that someone else could make more cheaply or give away. FameBit sold access to human creators; after Google bought it, YouTube turned to large brands and TikTok took much of the creator market. Modsy made computer images of rooms, but each one needed paid designers, so every sale cost too much. Seerslab made selfie effects and lost to Snapchat's own filters. Polyvore let users style outfits from shop photos and lost its users to Pinterest and Instagram. All four raised outside money, from US$1.75 million to US$72.7 million.", "The Influencer AI pays no designers and no creators. A rented model renders each image or clip, and the customer pays for it in credits, so the main cost grows with use instead of ahead of it. One person runs it, and about US$5,000 a month already roughly matches the founder's family costs, where the predecessors raised millions. The open risk is the Seerslab one: Instagram, TikTok and the model makers can add the same feature to their own apps." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The market is crowded.", "text": "Nothing here needed money or an audience: a product built on models that other companies train, sold as a subscription with credits, and found through directories, free tools and search pages. The same method fits any task where people want the same AI output again and again. But the company's own comparison names seven competitors in this category, and verified revenue has stayed between about US$2,700 and US$5,700 a month for a year.", "steps": [ "Pick one thing that general image tools do badly, here the same face in every picture, and build only that.", "Sell credits instead of unlimited use, so that each generation is paid for by the user who makes it.", "Put free, no-sign-up versions of single features on their own pages, each linking back to the paid app.", "List the product on AI directories in launch week and count the visitors from each one.", "Change the trial one step at a time and measure each change." ], "open": "Consistent people for niches that the general tools ignore: catalog models for small clothing shops, presenters for training videos in many languages, and labeled AI personas for brands that must follow the 2026 disclosure rules." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Disclosure rules now decide reach", "text": "On 31 August 2026 Instagram announced that it will limit the reach of accounts that show AI-generated people without its \"AI-generated profile\" label (TechCrunch). Meta shows an \"AI info\" label on content that it detects as made by an AI tool, and the company's own guide says TikTok requires its AI-generated content label on realistic synthetic people. In the EU, Article 50 of the AI Act applies from 2 August 2026: a deployer, the person or company that uses an AI system under its own authority, must disclose that a deep fake is artificially generated. A deep fake is AI-made image, audio or video content that resembles existing persons, objects, places or events and would falsely appear authentic (AI Act text; date from the European Commission). The company tells users to label every account and post as AI." }, { "title": "Paid posts by AI people are still ads", "text": "In the US, the Federal Trade Commission's Endorsement Guides call for a clear disclosure of any material connection with a brand, such as payment. In its 2023 revision the FTC wrote that the new definition of an endorser covers virtual influencers and also writers of fake reviews. The FTC says that the responsibility for disclosing rests with the influencer and the brand, not the platform, so a brand that pays for posts by an AI persona carries that duty." }, { "title": "Audience trust", "text": "Instagram said that people do not like finding out that a profile that seemed human shows an AI-generated person, and TechCrunch reported growing frustration with AI-generated content as AI influencers become common. If audiences avoid labeled AI accounts, the creators who pay for this tool lose their reason to pay." }, { "title": "Misuse of a real person's likeness", "text": "The clone is made from 1 to 4 photos. The site says to use your own photos or get explicit permission, and the terms forbid infringing the rights of others, but none of the pages read for this story describes a check that the photos show the account holder. A clone of someone else without consent is the kind of deep fake that the new rules target." }, { "title": "Dependence on model providers", "text": "The business trains no models of its own. Its quality, its cost per credit and its features depend on image and video models from other companies, which can change prices, add watermarks or ship the same feature themselves. A user wrote in September 2025 that Google's Veo clips carry SynthID watermarks that TikTok detects and flags; that claim is not verified." }, { "title": "Competition and small, uneven revenue", "text": "The company's own comparison lists seven competitors, from APOB AI at US$15 a month to Influencer Studio at US$49, and general tools such as ChatGPT also make images, though with a new face each time. Verified revenue swung between US$2,685 and US$5,692 a month over the last year, with 138 subscriptions in October 2026, and the founder was not yet paying himself in February 2026." }, { "title": "Fan-platform demand", "text": "The home page cites a virtual model said to earn up to €10,000 in a strong month from brand deals and subscriptions, and lists fan platforms among ways to earn; one guide names Fanvue next to Patreon. The same company's comparison sends fan-platform content to two other tools, and in September 2026 the founder was testing NSFW detection. Whether the product stays a marketing tool depends on keeping that line." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.theinfluencer.ai/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/the-influencer-ai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile: The Influencer AI (Stripe-verified revenue, synced 14 October 2026)", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/the-influencer-ai", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile (https://trustmrr.com/startup/the-influencer-ai.md) in full on 14 October 2026. Grade A for the Verification Sources metrics: revenue by period, the daily and monthly tables, MRR and subscriptions. The description, founding date and insights are founder-written, grade C." }, { "title": "The Influencer AI home page, October 2026", "url": "https://www.theinfluencer.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the features, the clone and builder, the user claims, the affiliate terms, the consent advice in the FAQ and the earning section." }, { "title": "The Influencer AI pricing page, October 2026", "url": "https://www.theinfluencer.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the plans, credits, cost per credit, trial and extra credits." }, { "title": "Zeeshaan Lakdawala on X, 8 May 2025: Just launched The Influencer AI", "url": "https://x.com/zeeshaanl/status/1920416356811305357", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the launch date and the problem statement." }, { "title": "Zeeshaan Lakdawala on X, 13 May 2025: the earlier SaaS that hit US$34,000 a month", "url": "https://x.com/zeeshaanl/status/1922252380646551648", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the earlier company's revenue and its 80% fall." }, { "title": "Zeeshaan Lakdawala on X, 13 May 2025: 3 learnings", "url": "https://x.com/zeeshaanl/status/1922253498458030120", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. His lessons from the earlier company, including a skipped blog feature that later ranked first on Google." }, { "title": "Zeeshaan Lakdawala on X, 14 May 2025: launched on Uneed", "url": "https://x.com/zeeshaanl/status/1922554749951365160", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Zeeshaan Lakdawala on X, 16 May 2025: listed on There's An AI For That", "url": "https://x.com/zeeshaanl/status/1923358612715438318", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the directory's traffic compared with his other sources." }, { "title": "The Influencer AI on X, 27 May 2025: Try On with FASHN AI", "url": "https://x.com/theinfluencerai/status/1927490631779209248", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. The company account names the try-on model provider." }, { "title": "Zeeshaan Lakdawala on X, 15 June 2025: a free Virtual Try On tool", "url": "https://x.com/zeeshaanl/status/1934206062795628951", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the free no-sign-up tools." }, { "title": "Zeeshaan Lakdawala on X, 1 July 2025: launch on Product Hunt", "url": "https://x.com/zeeshaanl/status/1939956282535936199", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Zeeshaan Lakdawala on X, 15 July 2025: We sold The Multiverse AI for US$115K", "url": "https://x.com/zeeshaanl/status/1945076177086869742", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the sale price and the multiple." }, { "title": "Zeeshaan Lakdawala on X, 29 July 2025: affiliate program and backlinks", "url": "https://x.com/zeeshaanl/status/1950269834106982616", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "A user's guide on X, 6 September 2025: how to make AI UGC with The Influencer AI", "url": "https://x.com/consumerxai/status/1964306755686375669", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. The author calls the founder a close friend, so this is not an independent review. Source for the Nano Banana editor, the clone setup in 2025 and the SynthID claim." }, { "title": "Zeeshaan Lakdawala on X, 17 October 2025: a 7-day trial replaces the hard paywall", "url": "https://x.com/zeeshaanl/status/1979157816561578209", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the paywall drop-off and PostHog." }, { "title": "Zeeshaan Lakdawala on X, 12 January 2026: listed on TrustMRR", "url": "https://x.com/zeeshaanl/status/2010650914991026660", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com, with his post from the same hour (status 2010648674477445629) about the revenue rollercoaster of the previous three months. The chart image was not read." }, { "title": "Zeeshaan Lakdawala on X, 2 February 2026: revenue equal to family costs, living off savings", "url": "https://x.com/zeeshaanl/status/2018299636776095824", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "The Influencer AI on X, 3 June 2026: The Influencer AI 2.0", "url": "https://x.com/theinfluencerai/status/2062173081955692975", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Zeeshaan Lakdawala on X, 15 July 2026: hard paywall removed", "url": "https://x.com/zeeshaanl/status/2077340889580515479", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Zeeshaan Lakdawala on X, 2 September 2026: top of the outbid board for US$310", "url": "https://x.com/zeeshaanl/status/2095084074675085390", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Zeeshaan Lakdawala on X, 20 September 2026: models compared for NSFW detection", "url": "https://x.com/zeeshaanl/status/2101739236118483264", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. The linked image was not read." }, { "title": "Zeeshaan Lakdawala's X profile and timeline, read October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/zeeshaanl", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile and all 173 posts that api.fxtwitter.com returned, July 2021 to October 2026. Source for his biography, location and the absence of any funding or team posts." }, { "title": "The Influencer AI company page on LinkedIn", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-influencer-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public page. Source for the company-size field and the single listed employee." }, { "title": "The Influencer AI terms of service", "url": "https://www.theinfluencer.ai/terms-of-service", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the legal entity, the usage rules and the governing law." }, { "title": "The Influencer AI guide, updated 17 September 2026: How to Create an AI Influencer in 2026", "url": "https://www.theinfluencer.ai/blog/how-to-create-an-ai-influencer", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on paying users, cloning and disclosure. Source for the paying users' subjects, the consent advice and the platform rules as the company summarizes them." }, { "title": "The Influencer AI guide, updated 2 October 2026: Best AI Influencer Generators in 2026", "url": "https://www.theinfluencer.ai/blog/best-ai-influencer-generators", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the comparison table and the picks. Source for the competitors, their prices and the line that sends fan-platform content to other tools." }, { "title": "The Influencer AI guide: How to Create an AI Influencer Like Aitana Lopez", "url": "https://www.theinfluencer.ai/blog/how-to-create-an-ai-influencer-like-aitana-lopez", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on monetization, which names Fanvue and Patreon." }, { "title": "The Influencer AI blog index and sitemap, October 2026", "url": "https://www.theinfluencer.ai/blog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the sitemap at https://www.theinfluencer.ai/sitemap-0.xml (23 pages, among them the blog index, eight blog posts, a UGC guide and five free tools)." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine capture list for theinfluencer.ai", "url": "http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=theinfluencer.ai*", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the capture list. It holds captures of home-page links tagged as coming from the free try-on and photo-editor pages on 15 July 2025, the first blog capture on 29 December 2025, and Next.js image paths." }, { "title": "TechCrunch, Lauren Forristal, 31 August 2026: Instagram puts new limits on undisclosed AI profiles", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/31/instagram-puts-new-limits-on-undisclosed-ai-profiles/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for Instagram's new label, the reach limits and Instagram's statement on what users want." }, { "title": "Federal Trade Commission: FTC's Endorsement Guides, What People Are Asking", "url": "https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/ftcs-endorsement-guides-what-people-are-asking", "grade": "B", "how": "The FTC site refused the download; read the Wayback Machine copy of 13 October 2026, the sections on platform disclosure tools and responsibility." }, { "title": "Federal Register, 26 July 2023: Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising", "url": "https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/07/26/2023-14795/guides-concerning-the-use-of-endorsements-and-testimonials-in-advertising", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the section on the revised definition of an endorser, which discusses virtual influencers." }, { "title": "EU AI Act, Article 50: transparency obligations for providers and deployers of certain AI systems", "url": "https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/50/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the deep fake disclosure duty and the definition of a deep fake." }, { "title": "European Commission: Guidelines on the transparency obligations under the AI Act", "url": "https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/guidelines-ai-transparency-obligations", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the date of application, 2 August 2026, and the Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-generated Content." }, { "title": "Meta newsroom: Our approach to labeling AI-generated content and manipulated media", "url": "https://about.fb.com/news/2024/04/metas-approach-to-labeling-ai-generated-content-and-manipulated-media/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full, with its later updates. Source for the AI info label." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/pet-plus-us/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/pet-plus-us.md", "slug": "pet-plus-us", "name": "Pet Plus Us", "country": "USA", "sector": "Photography", "productType": "AI portraits of people together with their pets", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-14", "launchLabel": "6 September 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$27.8K verified revenue in 30 days, October 2026", "sticker": "$27.8K in 30 days", "outcomeUsd": 27833, "months": 1, "teamLabel": "1 founder, Or Hirschhorn, by his own TrustMRR profile; the seller is TYGP Technologies, LLC", "fundingLabel": "None reported; the profile says bootstrapped", "primaryFactor": "Paid ads", "group": "photos", "channel": "paid-ads", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Photography" ], "product": "A web studio that turns one photo of each person and one photo of each pet into a single AI-generated portrait of them together, in a chosen scene. The first three previews are free and watermarked. The first portrait costs US$19 and each additional one US$10, as a one-time purchase, and a portrait can be sent as a gift or printed on a framed print, mug, ornament or blanket.", "why": "It sells a picture that most pet owners do not have and cannot easily take: a good photo of themselves together with their pet. The customer sees a free preview before paying, so an ad only has to bring a person to the upload page. The founder says the sales come from ads, and the site says it advertises on Facebook and Instagram. Verified daily revenue rose from US$76 on 15 September 2026 to US$1,099 on 22 September.", "summary": [ "Pet Plus Us is a web studio that makes one portrait of a person together with their pet from separate photos. The customer uploads one clear photo of each person and each animal and chooses a \"look\", such as a scene by the sea. An image model, an AI program that creates a new picture from written instructions and reference photos, then draws everyone in the same scene. The company's privacy page says that the model comes from OpenAI. The first three looks come as free previews with a watermark, a visible mark printed over the image so that it cannot be used without paying. The first portrait costs US$19 and each additional one US$10, as a one-time purchase, a single payment with no subscription. Framed prints, mugs, ornaments and blankets cost US$29 to US$179.", "Or Hirschhorn, a founder in Miami with 26 followers on X, runs it through TYGP Technologies, LLC. The domain was registered on 19 August 2026, and his profile on TrustMRR, a website that reads a company's revenue directly from its payment processor, gives 6 September 2026 as the founding date. The payment processor here is Stripe, the service that takes the card payments. TrustMRR shows US$27,833 of revenue in the 30 days to 14 October 2026, about US$1,100 a day since late September, and no subscriptions. The founder writes that the sales are one-time purchases from ads and that the business has been profitable every day. On 28 September 2026, 22 days after the founding date, he listed it for sale at US$75,000.", "The revenue figures are grade A, read from the Stripe account. The all-time total of US$33,579 is not all from this product: US$4,903 arrived in March and April 2026, four months before the domain existed, and no source says what that money was for. This page therefore uses only the last 30 days. Costs, ad spend and profit are not verified. The page also shows earlier companies that sold printed keepsakes made from customers' photos, sold gifts, or bought pet-owner customers with advertising, and why they failed." ], "factsCaption": "Stripe-verified revenue of US$27,833 in the 30 days to 14 October 2026, all from one-time purchases, 38 days after the founding date", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the Stripe account through its API, or comes from an official record such as the domain registry or a public company's results. A grade C value is the founder's or the company's own statement, or a third party's. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a domain registered on 19 August 2026 to a business listed for sale 40 days later. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Pet Plus Us prices on 14 October 2026, read from the company's own pages (grade C)", "note": "Every price is a one-time purchase; there is no subscription. A customer can choose up to 12 looks, and the first 3 get free, watermarked previews with no account or card. Every paid order includes two free re-rolls, which make the same portraits again from the same photos. Keepsake prices include standard delivery in the US and the matching digital portrait; tax is added at checkout. Prints are delivered to US addresses only.", "rows": [ [ "First portrait", "19 one-time", "", "full-resolution download, 2 free re-rolls" ], [ "Each additional portrait", "10 one-time", "", "in the same order, up to 12 looks" ], [ "Gift, one portrait", "19 one-time", "", "personal note and digital reveal" ], [ "Gift, three portraits", "33 one-time", "", "personal note and digital reveal" ], [ "Mug, 11 oz", "29 one-time", "", "US delivery included" ], [ "Christmas ornament, ceramic heart", "29 one-time", "", "US delivery included" ], [ "Framed print, 8 x 10 in", "89 one-time", "", "US delivery included" ], [ "Blanket, 50 x 60 in", "99 one-time", "", "US delivery included" ], [ "Sets of print, blanket and mug", "109 to 179 one-time", "", "2 or 3 pieces, US delivery included" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue, 30 days to 14 October 2026", "value": "US$27,833", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from the Stripe account through an API key, synced on 14 October 2026. The daily rows for 15 September to 14 October add up to the same amount. All of it came after the founding date.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, September and 1 to 14 October 2026", "value": "US$28,675", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline: US$12,755 in September and US$15,920 in October so far. The same amount as the profile's figure for the last 3 months.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time", "value": "US$33,579", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, 14 October 2026. It includes US$4,903 from March and April 2026, which this page does not count as Pet Plus Us revenue.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the same Stripe account before the domain existed", "value": "US$4,903: US$153 in March and US$4,750 in April 2026, 14.6% of the all-time total", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: from the monthly timeline. The domain was registered on 19 August 2026, and there is no revenue from May to August. The founder's TrustMRR page lists no other startup, and no source says what this money was for.", "src": [ 1, 3, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue from 1 to 12 September 2026", "value": "US$643", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the September total minus the daily rows for 13 to 30 September (13 and 14 September from a copy of the profile saved on 12 October). How much of it came before the 6 September founding date is not shown.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Daily revenue, 15 and 22 September 2026", "value": "US$76 on 15 September 2026, US$1,099 on 22 September", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR daily table, UTC dates; the public table shows only the last 30 days. A rise of about 14.5 times in one week (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average revenue per day, 22 September to 13 October 2026", "value": "about US$1,129", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the mean of 22 full days in the daily table. The lowest was US$763 on 4 October, the highest US$1,732 on 8 October.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Recurring revenue", "value": "US$0 a month, 0 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. All sales are one-time purchases.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "45.0%", "grade": "C", "note": "Shown in TrustMRR's metric snapshots. The profile verifies only the Stripe revenue and does not say where the cost figures come from, so the margin is not verified. The founder writes \"Profitable every day since launch.\"", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Profit implied by that margin", "value": "about US$12,525 in 30 days", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 45.0% of US$27,833. Not verified, because the margin is not.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Paid orders in the 30 days, upper limit", "value": "at most 1,464", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$27,833 divided by US$19, the smallest possible order. The real number is lower, because many orders add portraits, gifts or prints.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Prices", "value": "US$19 for the first portrait, US$10 for each additional one; gifts US$19, or US$33 for three; keepsakes US$29 to US$179", "grade": "C", "note": "Company pages, 14 October 2026. The first three previews are free, and each paid order includes two free re-rolls.", "src": [ 4, 7, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Image model", "value": "an OpenAI model; the model's name is not given", "grade": "C", "note": "Privacy page, updated 27 September 2026: OpenAI \"Checks photos for harmful content and generates your portraits.\"", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Where customers come from", "value": "paid ads on Facebook and Instagram", "grade": "C", "note": "Privacy page: \"We advertise on Facebook and Instagram\". The founder calls the sales \"one-time purchases from ads\". No source gives the ad spend.", "src": [ 6, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Partner program", "value": "30% of the net revenue from each sale that a partner's link brings, paid weekly", "grade": "C", "note": "Partner page. Net revenue is the price less tax, refunds and production cost. No source says how many sales come from partners.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Search visibility", "value": "Domain Rating 0 out of 100", "grade": "C", "note": "Ahrefs Domain Rating shown on TrustMRR, synced on 13 October 2026. It measures links from other sites, which help search ranking, so search engines are unlikely to bring many customers yet.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price", "value": "US$75,000", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR listing, first listed on 28 September 2026, with 13 offers and 2,252 interested buyers by 14 October. The price is about 0.2 times the last 30 days of revenue times 12, and about 2.2 times all revenue so far (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team and funding", "value": "1 person, bootstrapped", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder-written TrustMRR profile. The terms name TYGP Technologies, LLC as the seller. No source mentions outside investors.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Domain registered", "value": "19 August 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "Registry record (RDAP) of the .com registry. The registrar is Cloudflare.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Meta's average price per ad, April to June 2026", "value": "up 12% on a year earlier", "grade": "A", "note": "Meta's second-quarter 2026 results, 29 July 2026. Ad impressions rose 14%. This is an average over all of Meta's advertisers, not the cost of Pet Plus Us.", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the founding date to the headline figure", "value": "38 days", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 6 September to 14 October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "March and April 2026", "what": "US$4,903 of revenue arrives in the Stripe account that Pet Plus Us later uses: US$153 in March and US$4,750 in April, almost all of it after 14 April. Nothing arrives from May to August.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "11 and 14 April 2026", "what": "The founder's three public posts on X: two about AI coding tools that run generated code in a sandbox, one asking people to share their project links. None mentions Pet Plus Us.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "19 August 2026", "what": "The domain pet-plus-us.com is registered through Cloudflare.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "6 September 2026", "what": "Founding date on the TrustMRR profile. US$643 of revenue arrives between 1 and 12 September (calculated).", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "15 September 2026", "what": "US$76 of revenue, the first day in the 30-day daily table read on 14 October.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "22 September 2026", "what": "US$1,099 in one day. Every day after that, up to 13 October, brings at least US$763.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "27 September 2026", "what": "The privacy page is updated. It names OpenAI as the portrait generator and says that the company advertises on Facebook and Instagram.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "28 September 2026", "what": "Listed for sale on TrustMRR, 22 days after the founding date. The founder writes that it has been profitable every day since launch.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "8 October 2026", "what": "The terms are updated with the refund rules and a note that Christmas order-by dates include extra time for the busy season.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "8 October 2026", "what": "Best day in the daily table: US$1,732.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "14 October 2026", "what": "US$27,833 in the last 30 days and US$33,579 all time, with no subscriptions. Asking price US$75,000, 13 offers.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A picture people do not have", "text": "Most pet owners have many photos of their pet and few good photos of themselves with it. The studio needs only one photo of each, taken separately, and draws them together in a chosen scene. The home page answers the first question a buyer has, \"Do we need a photo together?\", with \"Nope.\"" }, { "title": "Free preview, then payment", "text": "The first three looks come as free, watermarked previews, with no account or card. The customer pays only after seeing the result, which lowers the risk of buying from an ad. So that one person cannot create unlimited free previews, the site counts uploads and preview requests per person and stores the IP address and email only as hashes, scrambled codes from which the original cannot be read back." }, { "title": "Paid ads measured per order", "text": "The company advertises on Facebook and Instagram. Meta's pixel, a small script on the home page, and messages sent from the company's server tell Meta when a preview is viewed, when checkout opens and when a payment clears. The privacy page says this measures which advertisements lead to orders. The founder says the sales come from ads." }, { "title": "Small first price, larger orders", "text": "The first portrait is US$19 and each additional look US$10. Gift versions add a personal note and a digital reveal. Printed keepsakes, made by print partners and delivered in the US, add US$29 to US$179 to an order. A partner program pays creators 30% of the net revenue from the sales that their links bring." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages and from the site's public response headers. They are grade C unless marked.", "items": [ "Portraits: an OpenAI image model draws them from the customer's photos and the chosen look, and OpenAI also screens the uploads for harmful content. The site does not say which OpenAI model. It says that it does not train models on customers' photos.", "Hosting: Vercel serves the site and stores the photos and portraits privately. The site's response headers name Vercel as the server (grade B).", "Payments: Stripe takes the card payment, so the card number never reaches the company's servers. TrustMRR reads the revenue from the same Stripe account.", "Email: Resend sends the portraits and the order links.", "Analytics: PostHog records usage events and session recordings, to show where people give up.", "Ads: Meta's pixel runs on the home page, the order finder and the legal pages, and the server reports previews, checkouts and payments to Meta. The pixel does not run on the order pages, so Meta never sees the link to a portrait.", "Cost control: uploads and preview requests are counted per person, with the IP address and email stored as hashes.", "Printed keepsakes come from unnamed specialist print partners and ship to US addresses only. The site is in English and Spanish." ], "src": [ 6, 4, 5, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold keepsakes made from customers' photos, sold gifts, or bought pet-owner customers with heavy advertising. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Picplum", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$1M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Prints of your phone photos, mailed to family members.", "died": "Larger rivals had more money and better-known brands, printing and shipping costs were high, and sharing on Instagram and Facebook reduced the demand for paper prints. It had nothing that rivals could not copy.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1603-picplum" }, { "name": "Picwing", "years": "2008 to 2011", "funding": "US$1.2M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Printed photos mailed to grandparents who did not use social networks.", "died": "Shutterfly and Snapfish were bigger and offered more, digital sharing lowered the value of prints, and winning a customer cost more than the customer paid over time.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1647-picwing" }, { "name": "Kicksend", "years": "2011 to 2017", "funding": "US$2.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Send batches of photos privately to family and order prints for them.", "died": "Shutterfly and Snapfish already had the printing customers and retail partners, Google and Apple added cloud photo sharing, and printing as the main source of revenue became a weakness.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/274-kicksend" }, { "name": "Pets.com", "years": "1998 to 2000", "funding": "US$110M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Pet supplies ordered online and delivered to the door.", "died": "Expensive advertising, including Super Bowl ads, did not create loyal customers, shipping heavy pet food cost more than it earned, and the company went public too early.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/424-petscom" }, { "name": "Wantful", "years": "2011 to 2013", "funding": "US$5.4M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Personal gift suggestions for birthdays and holidays.", "died": "It moved from gifts into general online shopping and met Amazon there. As recommendation algorithms became common, its one advantage disappeared.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1924-wantful" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Picplum, Picwing and Kicksend sold the printing and mailing of photos that people already had. Free sharing on phones made those prints less needed, and Shutterfly and Snapfish were larger. Pets.com showed what happens when a pet business pays more for advertising and shipping than its customers bring in, and Wantful lost its gift niche when it tried to sell everything.", "Pet Plus Us sells an image that did not exist before the order: a portrait of a person and a pet who were never photographed together. An image model makes it from the uploaded photos, so the digital product needs no stock and no shipping, and the prints are made by partners only after payment. Ad platforms now receive each preview, checkout and purchase as an event, so the seller can see which ads lead to orders. What has not changed is the cost of buying every customer with ads, and no source shows that cost for Pet Plus Us." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product, yes. The ad results, unknown.", "text": "Building the studio needs an image-model API, a payment page and hosting, and many apps already sell AI pet portraits. What the sources show is the part that is harder to copy: one specific promise, a free preview before payment, and ads that the founder says have been profitable every day. No source shows the ad spend, so a reader cannot check that last part.", "steps": [ "Choose a picture that people want and cannot easily take, such as a person and a pet together, and say it in one line.", "Give a free, watermarked preview before payment, and count previews per person so that free use stays limited.", "Send preview, checkout and purchase events to the ad platform, so that you can see which ads lead to orders.", "Add gift versions and printed keepsakes, made by print partners after payment, so that one order can be worth more than the first US$19." ], "open": "Other pictures that people want and cannot take: children with grandparents who live far away, a team with its office dog, a couple in the place where they met. Each needs the consent of the people shown, under the image model's rules." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Five weeks old, and already for sale", "text": "The founding date is 6 September 2026, the profile shows daily figures only for the last 30 days, and the business was listed for sale on 28 September, 22 days after the founding date. The asking price of US$75,000 is about 0.2 times the last 30 days of revenue times 12. No source says why the founder sells so early or for so little, and five weeks of data cannot show whether the sales last." }, { "title": "Not all of the verified total is this product", "text": "US$4,903 of the US$33,579 all-time total arrived in March and April 2026, four months before the domain was registered. The founder's TrustMRR page lists only Pet Plus Us, and of his three public posts on X, all from April 2026, two are about AI coding tools and one asks people to share their project links. No source says what the earlier money was for, so this page uses only the last 30 days." }, { "title": "Paid ads, and ad prices that rise", "text": "The founder says the sales are one-time purchases from ads, and the site advertises on Facebook and Instagram. With no subscriptions and a Domain Rating of 0, almost every sale has to be bought again with ads. Meta's average price per ad rose 12% in the year to June 2026. TrustMRR shows a 45.0% profit margin, but the ad spend behind it is not verified." }, { "title": "Gifts are seasonal", "text": "Much of the product is sold as a gift. The keepsakes page gives Christmas order-by dates of 3 December for framed prints and 7 December for blankets, mugs and ornaments, and the terms say these include extra time for the busy season. The verified figures cover only September and October, so no source shows sales after the holidays." }, { "title": "Easy to copy", "text": "A February 2026 buyer's guide compares five AI pet-portrait apps, from Neolemon to PetPortrait.AI, and lists more. The photo-editing app BeautyPlus offers an AI pet portrait generator on its website. TrustMRR lists Pet Characters, an AI pet-portrait product founded in November 2025, with US$2.28 of revenue in total. Building such a product is easy; selling it is the hard part." }, { "title": "One model provider and its rules", "text": "Every portrait depends on OpenAI. OpenAI's usage policies, in force since 29 October 2025, forbid the \"use of someone’s likeness, including their photorealistic image or voice, without their consent in ways that could confuse authenticity\", and they protect people under 18. A customer can upload a photo of anyone, so the business depends on OpenAI's screening, and a change in OpenAI's rules, prices or models changes the product. The privacy page says that OpenAI may keep abuse-monitoring logs of the photos for up to 30 days." }, { "title": "Refunds and reviews", "text": "Each paid order includes two free re-rolls. A portrait that is still clearly wrong is refunded in full if the customer writes within 14 days of delivery; a change of mind is not refunded. A printed piece is reprinted once, free, within 30 days. We found no public customer reviews, and Trustpilot did not let us download its page. The verified revenue for 8 October fell by US$19 between the 12 and 14 October readings, the price of one portrait, which may be a refund." }, { "title": "A founder with almost no public record", "text": "The founder has 26 followers on X, none of his three public posts mentions Pet Plus Us, and we found no interview or LinkedIn text about him. The site's contact address uses a different first name from the founder's, and no source says whether a second person helps." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://pet-plus-us.com/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/pet-plus-us" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR markdown profile of Pet Plus Us, synced 14 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/pet-plus-us.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full on 14 October 2026 and compared it with a copy saved on 12 October. Stripe-verified revenue by day and month, MRR, the listing, and the founder-written insights (grade C)." }, { "title": "TrustMRR startup page of Pet Plus Us", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/pet-plus-us", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founder's whole message to buyers, including \"Profitable every day since launch\" and \"one-time purchases from ads\"." }, { "title": "TrustMRR founder page of Or Hirschhorn", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/founder/orhirschhorn", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. Lists one startup, Pet Plus Us, with the same verified total of US$33,579." }, { "title": "Pet Plus Us home page", "url": "https://pet-plus-us.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 14 October 2026, with its response headers. Source for how it works, the prices, the re-rolls, the legal entity in the footer and the Vercel server." }, { "title": "Pet Plus Us terms, last updated 8 October 2026", "url": "https://pet-plus-us.com/legal/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for TYGP Technologies, LLC, the refund rules, US-only delivery and the busy Christmas season." }, { "title": "Pet Plus Us privacy page, last updated 27 September 2026", "url": "https://pet-plus-us.com/legal/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for OpenAI, Vercel, Stripe, Resend, PostHog and Meta, the ads on Facebook and Instagram, and the per-person preview limits." }, { "title": "Pet Plus Us keepsakes page", "url": "https://pet-plus-us.com/keepsakes", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the print, mug, ornament and blanket prices and the Christmas order-by dates." }, { "title": "Pet Plus Us gift page", "url": "https://pet-plus-us.com/gift", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the gift prices." }, { "title": "Pet Plus Us partner program page", "url": "https://pet-plus-us.com/affiliates", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 30% revenue share." }, { "title": "RDAP record of pet-plus-us.com at the .com registry", "url": "https://rdap.verisign.com/com/v1/domain/pet-plus-us.com", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full on 14 October 2026. Source for the registration date and the registrar." }, { "title": "Or Hirschhorn on X: profile and posts", "url": "https://x.com/OrHirschhorn", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile and the whole public timeline through the FxTwitter API: 3 posts, from April 2026; the profile counts 11 posts. No post mentions Pet Plus Us." }, { "title": "Meta, 29 July 2026: Meta Reports Second Quarter 2026 Results", "url": "https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2026/Meta-Reports-Second-Quarter-2026-Results/default.aspx", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the section on Family of Apps ad metrics. Source for the 12% rise in the average price per ad." }, { "title": "OpenAI usage policies, effective 29 October 2025", "url": "https://openai.com/policies/usage-policies/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on privacy, likeness and minors." }, { "title": "Neolemon, 23 February 2026: Best AI Pet Portrait Apps in 2026", "url": "https://www.neolemon.com/blog/best-ai-pet-portrait-apps/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the comparison sections. The publisher sells one of the five apps it compares." }, { "title": "BeautyPlus: AI Pet Portrait Generator", "url": "https://www.beautyplus.com/ai-pet-portrait-generator", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the opening sections. Shows a photo-editing app that offers AI pet portraits." }, { "title": "TrustMRR markdown profile of Pet Characters", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/pet-characters.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile. An AI pet-portrait product founded on 3 November 2025, with US$2.28 of verified revenue in total." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/appalchemy/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/appalchemy.md", "slug": "appalchemy", "name": "AppAlchemy", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI app designer and app builder", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-14", "launchLabel": "11 February 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$118.6K revenue in the last 12 months, October 2026", "sticker": "$119K in 12 months", "outcomeUsd": 118592, "months": 20, "teamLabel": "1 founder and no employees throughout; his searches for a co-founder (May 2025) and a part-time developer (October 2025) have no known result", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "build-software", "channel": "communities", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "No-code" ], "product": "An AI tool that draws the screens of a mobile app from a text description or a reference image, refined in a chat and exported as HTML (design.appalchemy.ai, since February 2025). Since July 2026 also an AI app builder that turns a description into React Native code for iOS and Android, with a live preview on the user's phone (appalchemy.ai).", "why": "He solved a problem he had paid for himself and shipped the simplest version in about two weeks. Then he wrote useful Reddit posts with the product link in the middle and posted each one in many related subreddits. With 70 to 115 followers on X, he says this brought over 1 million views and about 20,000 signups by July 2025.", "summary": [ "AppAlchemy is two AI products run by one founder. The first, at design.appalchemy.ai, draws the screens of a mobile app from a text description or a reference image; the user asks for changes in a chat and exports the result as HTML or a share link. The second, launched in July 2026 at appalchemy.ai, is a no-code app builder, a service that makes software for people who do not write code: the user describes an app, and the service writes React Native code, a framework in which one code base runs as both an iOS and an Android app, and shows it live on the user's phone. Both products sell monthly credits, units of AI work that each request uses up, and both bill through one Stripe account.", "Diego Roshardt, who signs as \"Dro\" and gives Miami as his location on X, says he had the idea after he paid a designer on Upwork hundreds of dollars for an app design and more for every change. He built the first version in about two weeks, started marketing it on Reddit right away, and found his paying customers there while his X account had 70 to 115 followers. He posted MRR, monthly recurring revenue, the money that subscriptions bring in each month, of US$3,219 on 23 April 2025, US$10,000 on 20 May and US$17,000 on 14 June. TrustMRR, a site that reads a startup's revenue directly from its payment processor, the company that charges the customers' cards, shows Stripe revenue of US$18,298 in October 2025, the best month in its public data, and US$243,652 in total by 14 October 2026.", "After October 2025, revenue was lower than in the month before in 9 of 11 months. September 2026 brought US$5,860, 68% below the best month, and on 14 October 2026 MRR was US$5,408 from 193 active subscriptions. The founder writes that he stopped marketing in early 2026 and that he is burned out. He has listed the business for sale on TrustMRR at US$27,500, down from US$75,000 in March 2026. The revenue figures on this page come from Stripe and are grade A; what the founder says about customers, costs and reasons is grade C." ], "factsCaption": "A solo AI design tool that made US$18,298 in its best Stripe-verified month, October 2025, then fell by two thirds to US$5,860 in September 2026 and was put up for sale at US$27,500", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from Stripe through TrustMRR's API connection. A grade C value is the founder's own statement in posts, an interview or his TrustMRR text, or a third party's report. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a two-week first version to a for-sale listing at US$27,500, in 20 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "AppAlchemy prices on 14 October 2026, from the pricing pages of both products; the design tool's yearly prices from the founder's TrustMRR text (grade C)", "note": "The design tool's yearly plans give 5 months free; the founder's TrustMRR text gives them as US$210, US$350 and US$700 a year, shown here per month. The app builder's page shows monthly prices only, and the founder's TrustMRR text gives US$100 for Max where the page shows US$200. Neither page lists a free plan, and used credits are not refunded.", "rows": [ [ "Design tool Starter", "17.50", "29.99", "4 apps, 3,000 AI credits a month" ], [ "Design tool Pro", "29.17", "49.99", "10 apps, 5,000 AI credits a month" ], [ "Design tool Ultimate", "58.33", "99.99", "unlimited apps, 10,000 AI credits a month" ], [ "Design tool Enterprise", "", "199.98", "unlimited apps, 20,000 AI credits a month, priority support" ], [ "App builder Pro", "", "20", "100 credits a month, code export" ], [ "App builder Max", "", "200", "1,000 credits a month, priority throughput" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue in the best month on record, October 2025", "value": "US$18,298", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data through TrustMRR, in the archived profile of 14 September 2026. The public monthly data start in October 2025, so an earlier month could have been higher.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate in that month", "value": "about US$219,576 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$18,298 times 12. Revenue has since fallen, so this was a peak rate, not today's.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Months from founding to the best month", "value": "8", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: February 2025 to October 2025. The founding date, 11 February 2025, is the founder's entry on TrustMRR.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue, November 2025 to September 2026", "value": "from US$17,427 down to US$5,860", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data through TrustMRR: US$17,427, 13,455, 11,577, 9,602, 10,347, 8,862, 7,303, 9,943, 6,498, 6,220 and 5,860. The archived September copy gives the same values.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Fall from the best month to September 2026", "value": "68%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 1 minus 5,860 / 18,298, over 11 months. Revenue was lower than in the month before in 9 of those 11 months.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "MRR and active subscriptions, 14 October 2026", "value": "US$5,408 and 193", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data through TrustMRR. On 14 September 2026 they were US$6,411 and 221, so MRR fell 15.6% in 30 days.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Total revenue, February 2025 to 14 October 2026", "value": "US$243,652", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data through TrustMRR. US$118,592 of it came in the last 12 months and US$5,411 in the last 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue from February to September 2025", "value": "about US$115,991, or US$14,499 a month on average", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the all-time total minus the 13 published months from October 2025 to 14 October 2026. These are the months before the public monthly data.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "TrustMRR figures on 15 March 2026", "value": "US$10,507 in 30 days, 439 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "Archived TrustMRR page. All-time revenue was US$194,808 and TrustMRR's estimated MRR US$13,750.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "MRR posted by the founder, April to June 2025", "value": "US$3,219, then US$10,000, then US$17,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Posts on X on 23 April, 20 May and 14 June 2025. On 24 June and 2 July he wrote that it makes around US$20,000 a month.", "src": [ 5, 7, 8, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in August 2026, the month of a newsletter's US$17K MRR headline", "value": "US$6,220", "grade": "A", "note": "The Startups.fyi newsletter of 11 August 2026 repeated the founder's figure from the Starter Story interview of 9 July 2025. Revenue in August 2026 was 37% of that figure.", "src": [ 12, 4, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Customers, signups and traffic, July 2025", "value": "more than 1,000 paying customers, about 20,000 signups, about 20,000 visits a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in the Starter Story interview. He says the signups came 'purely from Reddit'.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Reach from Reddit", "value": "over 1 million views, at no cost", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in the interview and on X, 3 July 2025, when he had 115 followers on X.", "src": [ 4, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Costs, July 2025", "value": "AI APIs about US$2,500 a month, Cursor US$20, Vercel about US$40; margin about 70%", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in the Starter Story interview. The AI APIs were the largest cost.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price", "value": "US$27,500, listing dated 11 September 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller's listing on TrustMRR. The price was US$120,000, then US$75,000 in March 2026, and US$45,000 in June 2026 according to a third-party capture.", "src": [ 1, 3, 18 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price as a multiple", "value": "0.42 times MRR times 12; 0.23 times the last 12 months of revenue", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 27,500 / (5,408 x 12) and 27,500 / 118,592. TrustMRR shows 0.4x. At the profile's 90% margin on US$5,411 a month, the price equals about 5.6 months of profit.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 person, no employees", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's TrustMRR entries. He looked for a marketing co-founder on 8 May 2025 and for a part-time Next.js developer on 14 October 2025; no source shows that anyone joined.", "src": [ 1, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR entry 'Bootstrapped'. The design tool's FAQ says it is not a venture-funded startup.", "src": [ 1, 17 ] }, { "fact": "Users and customers to date, founder's count", "value": "230,000 registered users, 4,700 paying customers", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's TrustMRR text, October 2026. The same text gives a 'Peak month $19K net, Aug 2025', which the public Stripe months, starting in October 2025, cannot confirm.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Early 2025", "what": "He pays a designer on Upwork hundreds of dollars for an app design, and extra for each small change, and decides to build an AI tool for the job.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "11 February 2025", "what": "Founding date on TrustMRR. He builds the first version in about two weeks and starts posting on Reddit at once.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "when": "23 March 2025", "what": "His first post on X that names AppAlchemy.ai, as a tool to 'create apps in hours'.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "23 April 2025", "what": "Posts MRR of US$3,219.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "25 April 2025", "what": "Publishes his Reddit method with screenshots of his posts' metrics: 'you can get your first 100 paid users through Reddit with 0 marketing cost'.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "8 May 2025", "what": "Looks for a marketing and distribution co-founder. No source shows that one joined.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "20 May 2025", "what": "Posts that he reached US$10,000 MRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "14 June 2025", "what": "Posts US$17,000 MRR 'in couple months with no audience': Reddit first, then influencers on X and Instagram.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "June 2025", "what": "Adds yearly plans. On 24 June and 2 July he writes that the product makes around US$20,000 a month, and he starts building a separate consumer app.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 11 ] }, { "when": "9 July 2025", "what": "Starter Story interview: about US$17,000 MRR, more than 1,000 paying customers, about 20,000 signups from Reddit, about 70% margin.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "October 2025", "what": "US$18,298 in revenue, the best month in the public Stripe data.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "22 October 2025", "what": "Posts 'Day 1 of growing Kodo to 10K MRR', about a different product.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "15 March 2026", "what": "US$10,507 in revenue in the last 30 days and 439 active subscriptions; US$194,808 in total.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "15 March 2026", "what": "For sale at US$75,000, down from US$120,000. The profile says revenue fell after he 'stepped back from marketing to focus on improving the product'.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "Asking price US$45,000 and MRR of US$7,906, according to a third-party capture of the TrustMRR page dated 27 June 2026.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 18 ] }, { "when": "July 2026", "what": "Launches the AI app builder at appalchemy.ai, which writes React Native code. By October the founder counts 6,500 signups for it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 14 ] }, { "when": "11 September 2026", "what": "Date of the current listing at US$27,500. The seller says he is burned out, has not marketed since early 2026, and priced it to close by 30 September.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "14 October 2026", "what": "Still listed, with 97 offers received. MRR US$5,408 from 193 active subscriptions; US$243,652 in total revenue.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A problem he had paid for", "text": "Before AppAlchemy he paid a designer on Upwork hundreds of dollars for an app design, and extra for each small change. He built a tool that does the same job in a chat, which he described as 'like Cursor but for designing mobile apps', and released the simplest version after about two weeks." }, { "title": "Reddit posts that teach first", "text": "His method, from the interview and his posts: use Reddit daily first, because posts from a new account are filtered out; list 5 to 10 related subreddits; write one useful post about the problem, with the product link in the middle; post it in all of them. Where a subreddit forbids self-promotion, also link a complementary product, in his case Cursor. He says this gave over 1 million views at no cost." }, { "title": "Credits tie the price to the model cost", "text": "Neither pricing page lists a free plan. Each plan includes a monthly number of AI credits, and used credits are not refunded because, in the FAQ's words, the costs of generative AI are extremely high. In July 2025 the AI APIs cost about US$2,500 a month against about US$17,000 in MRR. Yearly plans came in June 2025; today they give 5 months free." }, { "title": "Influencers after Reddit", "text": "After Reddit he worked with influencers on X and Instagram, on short-form video, although people told him that this would not work for a business product. His own following was small: the Starter Story host found 70 followers on his X account in mid-2025." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's interview of July 2025, his posts, his TrustMRR text and the company's own pages. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Next.js and React, written with the AI code editor Cursor, which cost US$20 a month in July 2025. On 25 June 2025 he moved to the Cursor Ultra plan.", "UI component libraries such as Chakra UI or Ant Design, and only widely used frameworks, because, he says, AI writes better code for the libraries that are most used on the web.", "Firebase for login and database in July 2025. The October 2026 profile lists Supabase and Firebase backends.", "Hosting on Vercel, about US$40 a month in July 2025.", "AI models through APIs, about US$2,500 a month in July 2025, the largest cost. The profile's tech stack lists OpenAI and Anthropic; no source names the exact models.", "The app builder writes React Native code that runs live on the user's own phone after a scan of a code; the user owns the code and can export it. Sign-in works with a Google account.", "Payments through Stripe, one account for both products. The profile shows a 90.0% profit margin for the last 30 days; no source shows how the costs behind it were measured." ], "src": [ 4, 1, 11, 13, 14 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database promised that people without design or coding skills could make apps, or sold tools to design them. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Builder.ai", "years": "2016 to 2025", "funding": "US$445M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Custom apps for non-technical customers, built by an AI-powered assembly line.", "died": "In the database's words, it sold US$20,000 apps that cost US$35,000 to build, while offshore developers did work presented as AI.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2170-builderai" }, { "name": "Appcubator", "years": "2013 to 2016", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "A drag-and-drop tool to create apps with no coding.", "died": "The market was not ready for no-code, and more flexible tools such as Bubble won.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1160-appcubator" }, { "name": "Crejo.Fun", "years": "2020 to 2022", "funding": "US$3M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A drag-and-drop mobile app builder so that creators in India could own their audience.", "died": "Creators needed more followers, not another app to manage and promote.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2303-crejofun" }, { "name": "Pixate", "years": "2012 to 2016", "funding": "US$3.6M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Native mobile app prototypes without writing code.", "died": "Google bought it, and design work moved to web-based tools such as Figma.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/434-pixate" }, { "name": "Invision", "years": "2011 to 2023", "funding": "US$350M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "One platform to take a design from designers to developers.", "died": "Figma's real-time collaboration in the browser took its customers.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/251-invision" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The five predecessors either had people do the work behind an AI label, as the database says of Builder.ai, or sold a drag-and-drop editor that was too limited, or lost to Figma. AppAlchemy's language models do write the screens and the code, so one founder could serve over 1,000 paying customers for about US$2,500 a month in AI costs (July 2025), without staff or investors.", "What did not change is the competition. Pixate and InVision lost to a larger platform, and AppAlchemy now competes with Figma's own prompt tool, Figma Make (May 2025), and with app builders that raised hundreds of millions of dollars. The founder says revenue fell because he stopped marketing; by his account, new customers came from his own posting, not from the product alone." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The Reddit method, yes. The product category, much harder in 2026.", "text": "Shipping a simple paid tool in weeks and posting useful Reddit threads in many subreddits is a method anyone can repeat for almost no money. The product is harder to repeat: AI app design and app building are now crowded with funded companies and Figma itself, and AppAlchemy's own revenue fell by two thirds within a year.", "steps": [ "Build for a cost you paid yourself, and measure it: the designer's fee and the price of each change.", "Ship the smallest useful version in weeks and, as he advises, start selling it, in credits that cover the model cost.", "Use Reddit daily before you post, list 5 to 10 related subreddits, and post one useful thread in all of them with the link in the middle.", "Keep marketing after the first success; this founder says revenue fell once he stopped." ], "open": "Narrow tools where an AI chat replaces a complex editor. The founder's own suggestion in June 2025: 'take product you have used that has a cumbersome drag n drop/no-code UI and replace that with a chat interface and generative ai.'" }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue fell by two thirds", "text": "Stripe shows US$18,298 in October 2025 and US$5,860 in September 2026, a fall of 68% in 11 months, with lower revenue than in the month before in 9 of them. MRR fell 15.6% in the 30 days to 14 October 2026, and active subscriptions went from 439 in March 2026 to 193. The founder's reason is that he has not marketed since early 2026; no source shows churn or cohort data." }, { "title": "A crowded field of funded builders", "text": "Lovable raised US$200 million at a US$1.8 billion valuation in July 2025, US$330 million at US$6.6 billion in December 2025 and US$400 million at US$13.3 billion in August 2026. Replit raised US$250 million at US$3 billion in September 2025. Bolt.new raised a US$105.5 million Series B and was valued at about US$700 million in January 2025, according to Sacra. For mobile apps, Vibecode raised a US$9.4 million seed round (reported in August 2025), Rork a US$15 million seed round (April 2026), and Figma launched Figma Make on 7 May 2025. In July 2026 the founder wrote that software had been the ideal business for solo founders because of its scalability, 'high barriers to entry' and location freedom, and that the change was felt 'a lot stronger since ~Opus 4.5'." }, { "title": "Apple's rules for generated apps", "text": "App Review Guideline 4.2.6 says: 'Apps created from a commercialized template or app generation service will be rejected unless they are submitted directly by the provider of the app's content.' Guideline 4.3(b) says: 'Don't submit apps that are indistinguishable from what's already widely available.' So customers must submit the apps under their own developer accounts, and each app must differ from what is already available. The app builder's pricing page offers a live preview and code export; it does not describe App Store submission." }, { "title": "For sale at 0.4 times revenue", "text": "The asking price is US$27,500: 0.42 times the current MRR times 12, 0.23 times the last 12 months of revenue, and about 5.6 months of profit at the profile's 90% margin. It was US$120,000, then US$75,000 in March 2026 and US$45,000 in June 2026. The seller says he is 'burned out', is 'exploring new projects', and priced it 'under what i'd keep collecting' to close by 30 September 2026. On 14 October 2026 it was still listed, with 97 offers received." }, { "title": "Numbers that do not match", "text": "The seller's message says 300 active subscriptions (240 monthly, 60 annual); Stripe shows 221 on 14 September 2026 and 193 on 14 October 2026. In July 2025 the founder said more than 1,000 paying customers at about US$17,000 MRR, which is under US$17 each, below the cheapest monthly plan of US$29.99; yearly plans or counting past customers could explain it, but no source says. His 'Peak month $19K net, Aug 2025' cannot be checked, because the public Stripe months start in October 2025." }, { "title": "Two products, one Stripe account", "text": "No source splits the revenue between the design tool and the app builder. The founder writes that the design tool 'drives most revenue' and that the builder, launched in July 2026, had 6,500 signups. Many daily totals equal sums of design-tool prices, for example US$79.98 = US$29.99 + US$49.99. The terms and privacy pages name no company, address or governing law, so the public pages do not show which legal entity owns the products." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://appalchemy.ai/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/appalchemy" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR, AppAlchemy markdown profile, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/appalchemy.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full (data as of October 2026, revenue last synced 14 October 2026). Revenue, MRR and subscriptions come from Stripe through an API key, grade A. The description, additional info, team size, funding, tech stack and the seller's message are founder-written, grade C." }, { "title": "TrustMRR, AppAlchemy markdown profile, Wayback Machine copy of 14 September 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260914232959/https://trustmrr.com/startup/appalchemy.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full (archived copy). Source for the October 2025 month, which the live profile no longer shows; the other months match the live profile." }, { "title": "TrustMRR, AppAlchemy page, Wayback Machine copy of 15 March 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260315190347/https://trustmrr.com/startup/appalchemy", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the archived page text in full. Stripe-verified totals of 15 March 2026 (grade A), the asking price then, and the founder's sentence on the decline (grade C). The monthly chart loads by script and is not in the copy." }, { "title": "Starter Story, 9 July 2025: How I Used Reddit to Hit $17K MRR (With ZERO Audience)", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/how-i-used-reddit-to-hit-17k-mrr-with-zero-audience", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page and its interview transcript in full. The transcript is machine-made and writes the product name as 'App Akamai'. Founder statements to the host, Pat Walls. Also published as a YouTube video the same day." }, { "title": "Diego Roshardt on X, 23 April 2025: MRR $3,219", "url": "https://x.com/DiegoRoshardt/status/1914855969621745752", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Diego Roshardt on X, 25 April 2025: first 100 paid users through Reddit", "url": "https://x.com/DiegoRoshardt/status/1915574552442388894", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. The screenshots of post metrics were not read." }, { "title": "Diego Roshardt on X, 20 May 2025: $10k MRR", "url": "https://x.com/DiegoRoshardt/status/1924631628137066847", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Diego Roshardt on X, 14 June 2025: $17k MRR with no audience", "url": "https://x.com/DiegoRoshardt/status/1933691452586144084", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the first post and replies 2 and 3 of the thread through api.fxtwitter.com. Reply 1 was not in the timeline pages." }, { "title": "Diego Roshardt on X, 2 July 2025: makes around $20k/month", "url": "https://x.com/DiegoRoshardt/status/1940209797879799853", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Diego Roshardt on X, 3 July 2025: over 1M impressions from Reddit, then influencers", "url": "https://x.com/DiegoRoshardt/status/1940601585362473187", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Diego Roshardt's X profile and timeline, posts from February 2025 to September 2026", "url": "https://x.com/DiegoRoshardt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile and every timeline page through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the location, the co-founder search, the yearly plans, the Cursor Ultra plan, the consumer app, the developer search, the Kodo post and the July 2026 post on software." }, { "title": "Startups.fyi newsletter, 11 August 2026: $17K MRR From Reddit Alone", "url": "https://startupsfyi.beehiiv.com/p/17k-mrr-from-reddit-alone-an-18-year-old-s-1k-ai-canvas-and-dog-parents-ditching-1-500-boarding-fees", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on App Alchemy. It repeats the July 2025 Starter Story figure and links to the video." }, { "title": "AppAlchemy app builder pricing page, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://appalchemy.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full." }, { "title": "AppAlchemy terms of service, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://appalchemy.ai/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Says the service generates React Native code; names no company entity, address or governing law." }, { "title": "AppAlchemy privacy policy, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://appalchemy.ai/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Sign-in via Google; no company entity named." }, { "title": "AppAlchemy design tool pricing page, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://design.appalchemy.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The monthly prices are in the page text; the yearly prices are not, so they come from the founder's TrustMRR text." }, { "title": "AppAlchemy design tool FAQ, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://design.appalchemy.ai/faq", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for HTML export, the refund rule and the statement that it is not venture-funded." }, { "title": "SoFarBot, 20 September 2026: AppAlchemy, the two-week mobile-design MVP, Reddit distribution and the truth behind $17K MRR", "url": "https://www.sofarbot.com/stories/appalchemy-diego-roshardt-17000-mrr", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A third-party summary of the Starter Story transcript and of a VibeCrowd capture of the TrustMRR page. Used only for the June 2026 asking price and MRR; the capture itself was not read." }, { "title": "Apple, App Review Guidelines, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read sections 4.2 and 4.3. Apple's own published rules." }, { "title": "TechCrunch, 17 July 2025: Lovable becomes a unicorn with $200M Series A just 8 months after launch", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/17/lovable-becomes-a-unicorn-with-200m-series-a-just-8-months-after-launch/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full." }, { "title": "TechCrunch, 18 December 2025: Vibe-coding startup Lovable raises $330M at a $6.6B valuation", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/18/vibe-coding-startup-lovable-raises-330m-at-a-6-6b-valuation/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full." }, { "title": "TechCrunch, 12 August 2026: Lovable confirms new $13.3B valuation, raises another $400M", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/12/lovable-confirms-new-13-3b-valuation-raises-another-400m/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full." }, { "title": "Bloomberg News on Bloomberg Law, 10 September 2025: AI Coding Startup Replit Valued at $3 Billion With New Funding", "url": "https://news.bloomberglaw.com/antitrust/ai-coding-startup-replit-valued-at-3-billion-with-new-funding", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the opening paragraphs." }, { "title": "Sacra, Bolt.new company page", "url": "https://sacra.com/c/bolt-new/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the funding and revenue sections. A research firm's estimates." }, { "title": "InfotechLead, 9 April 2026: Rork raises $15 mn to scale AI-powered mobile app development platform", "url": "https://infotechlead.com/tech/rork-raises-15-mn-to-scale-ai-powered-mobile-app-development-platform-94966", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full." }, { "title": "Grit Daily, 19 August 2025: Vibecode Boosts App Democratization with New $9M Seed Round", "url": "https://gritdaily.com/vibecode-boosts-app-democratization-with-seed-round/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The text gives US$9.4 million." }, { "title": "Figma blog, 7 May 2025: Introducing Figma Make", "url": "https://www.figma.com/blog/introducing-figma-make/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the header and the date. Figma's own announcement." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/founderpal/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/founderpal.md", "slug": "founderpal", "name": "FounderPal", "country": "United States", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI marketing strategy generator", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-14", "launchLabel": "8 April 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$203K total revenue, October 2026", "sticker": "$203K total revenue", "outcomeUsd": 202983, "months": 42, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders, a married couple, no employees", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "search", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Marketing content" ], "product": "A web app that turns a short description of a business into a marketing strategy, customer profiles, ideas and a task list, using GPT-4 with long prompts written by two marketers. Free AI tools bring the visitors; the full strategy is sold for a one-time payment.", "why": "It put the founders' marketing method behind a simple form at the time when people were trying to do marketing with ChatGPT and getting weak answers. A one-time price matched a need that comes rarely, and free tools brought search traffic without paid ads.", "summary": [ "FounderPal is an AI wrapper for marketing: a product that sends what the user types to another company's AI model, together with its own long instructions, called prompts, and shows the answer in its own screens. The user describes a product, waits about five minutes and gets a marketing strategy, customer profiles and a list of tasks. It calls OpenAI's GPT-4 model through the API, the paid connection that lets a program use the model, and it was built without code in Bubble, a service that makes web apps from visual building blocks. The paid strategy is sold by one-time payment, a single charge instead of a monthly subscription.", "Dan Kulkov and his wife Sveta Bay sold marketing guides and prompt collections under the name MakerBox before they started FounderPal. The founders say their first version, a tweet ideas generator released in April 2023, failed. The second product, Marketing Strategy Generator, launched on 11 September 2023 and made US$1,249 on the first day and US$18,709 in the next 58 days. In March 2024 the couple reported 800 paying customers and around US$10,000 a month, with 2 founders, no employees and no outside money. Stripe data read by TrustMRR, a site that takes revenue figures directly from a company's payment account, show US$202,983 in total revenue by 14 October 2026, about 90% of it earned before November 2025.", "Since then, revenue has fallen to almost nothing: US$4,074 in November 2025, US$298 in September 2026, and the MRR, the monthly recurring revenue from subscriptions, is zero. The total is grade A, from the payment processor. The monthly figures before November 2025 are the founders' own statements, grade C. No sale of the business was found, and the founders' recent posts are about other products. The page also shows earlier companies that sold marketing help to small businesses and failed." ], "factsCaption": "About US$203,000 of Stripe-verified revenue in three years, 90% of it before November 2025, then a fall to about US$250 a month", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from Stripe through TrustMRR's API connection, on the live profile or on an archived copy. A grade C value is a founder's statement in posts or interviews, or a third party's page. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a tweet ideas generator that failed to US$203,000 of verified revenue, then a steep fall, in 42 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "FounderPal prices in 2026 as given by a competitor's comparison page, because the FounderPal pricing page loads its prices by script and could not be read (grade C)", "note": "The title of the pricing page on 14 October 2026 reads 'Lifetime Deal with a 50% Discount'. In March 2024 the founders sold access for one strategy or for unlimited strategies, each by one-time payment. In September 2024 Dan Kulkov said the lifetime deal had become an annual pass with credits, and the code of the pricing page still counts credits for strategies and personas. TrustMRR showed US$182 of MRR in March 2026 and none in October 2026. The free tools and a free demo need no payment.", "rows": [ [ "Free tools and demo", "0", "0", "free AI tools and a free demo strategy" ], [ "One strategy", "69 one-time", "", "1 marketing strategy; competitor's comparison page" ], [ "Unlimited strategies", "199 one-time", "", "unlimited strategies; competitor's comparison page" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Total revenue, to 14 October 2026", "value": "US$202,983", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data through TrustMRR's API connection. TrustMRR gives 23 October 2023 as the founding date and the United States as the country.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the 12 months to 14 October 2026", "value": "US$22,179", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data through TrustMRR. US$4,820 in the last 6 months, US$1,489 in the last 3 months and US$248 in the last 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue earned before November 2025", "value": "US$182,742, about 90% of the total", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$202,983 minus the monthly figures from November 2025 to 14 October 2026, which add up to US$20,241.50. The public data do not show how the earlier amount was spread over the months.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average revenue per month before November 2025", "value": "about US$7,300", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$182,742 over the 25 calendar months from October 2023, the founding month on TrustMRR, to October 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Best month in the public Stripe data, November 2025", "value": "US$4,074", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data through TrustMRR. The public monthly data start in November 2025, so earlier months were probably higher: the founders reported around US$10,000 a month in March 2024 (grade C).", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue, November 2025 to September 2026", "value": "from US$4,074 down to US$298", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data through TrustMRR: US$4,074, 1,965, 3,603, 2,868, 1,945, 1,413, 991, 695, 1,844, 446 and 298. October 2026 to the 14th: US$99.50.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Fall in monthly revenue, November 2025 to September 2026", "value": "92.7%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$298 is 7.3% of US$4,074.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in 30 days on archived TrustMRR pages", "value": "US$3,175 (23 February 2026), US$2,668 (15 March 2026), US$1,261 (13 May 2026)", "grade": "A", "note": "Archived copies of the TrustMRR page. All-time revenue on 13 May 2026 was US$199,156, so US$3,827 was added in the five months after.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "MRR and active subscriptions, 14 October 2026", "value": "US$0 and 0", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data through TrustMRR. On 15 March 2026 the archived page showed US$182 of MRR, so a small recurring plan existed then.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the last 30 days", "value": "about US$2,976 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$248 times 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Launch of Marketing Strategy Generator, September 2023", "value": "US$1,249 on the first day, US$18,709 in the next 58 days", "grade": "C", "note": "Dan Kulkov's post on X, 9 November 2023. Together US$19,958 (calculated).", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the first 6 months and per month, March 2024", "value": "US$60,000; around US$10,000 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Sveta Bay in the Starter Story interview of 19 March 2024: 800 paying customers, all one-time payments. The goal for 2024 was 3,000 paying customers and US$30,000 a month.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue of Marketing Strategy Generator, September 2024", "value": "around US$100,000 in 10 months", "grade": "C", "note": "Dan Kulkov in No Code Exits, 27 September 2024. He called it stable and growing.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in two years, October 2025", "value": "about US$215,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Dan Kulkov in Indie Hackers, 9 October 2025. This is about US$32,000 more than the Stripe total before November 2025 (calculated). No source explains the difference.", "src": [ 6, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Paying customers", "value": "800 (March 2024); more than 1,800 (February 2025)", "grade": "C", "note": "The founders in Starter Story and in Dan Kulkov's Product Hunt comment. The TrustMRR profile text estimates 2,363 users.", "src": [ 4, 13, 1 ] }, { "fact": "AI cost per marketing strategy, 2024", "value": "about US$1", "grade": "C", "note": "Starter Story, March 2024: GPT-4 through the OpenAI API with long prompts. The first month cost US$150 for Bubble and OpenAI together.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Team and funding", "value": "2 founders, 0 employees, no outside funding", "grade": "C", "note": "Starter Story, March 2024. Dan Kulkov calls Sveta Bay his wife and co-founder. In 2024 they worked from Ubud, Bali, Indonesia.", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Product Hunt launch of the full platform, 3 February 2025", "value": "13th of the day, 81 points, 21 comments", "grade": "C", "note": "Product Hunt page data.", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "fact": "Dan Kulkov's other products on TrustMRR, kept apart from FounderPal", "value": "ClipsPal US$5.2K and ActivationPal US$0 in total", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data through TrustMRR's founder page: US$208,179 across his three listed products, of which US$203K is FounderPal.", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "fact": "The founders' other revenue, kept apart from FounderPal", "value": "MakerBox about US$130,000 in 3 years", "grade": "C", "note": "Dan Kulkov, October 2025, who also gave about US$10,000 a month for his three products together. In March 2024 Indie Hackers reported US$20,000 a month for all of the couple's products together.", "src": [ 6, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the first version to the October 2026 figure", "value": "42 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: April 2023 to October 2026.", "src": [ 10, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "14 March 2023", "what": "Dan Kulkov posts a first experiment built with Bubble and the ChatGPT API: describe your business, get 15 headline options for a landing page.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "8 April 2023", "what": "First product, Marketing Co-Pilot AI: 60 tweet ideas in 5 minutes. Dan Kulkov later calls it the first version of FounderPal; the founders say this first version failed.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10, 13, 4 ] }, { "when": "11 September 2023", "what": "Launch of Marketing Strategy Generator: describe your product, wait 5 minutes, get a marketing strategy. US$1,249 on the first day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 8 ] }, { "when": "23 October 2023", "what": "The founding date given on the TrustMRR profile.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "9 November 2023", "what": "US$18,709 in the 58 days after launch.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "6 February 2024", "what": "Version 2.0 of Marketing Strategy Generator, with a new design and deeper AI answers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "6 March 2024", "what": "Indie Hackers reports that Sveta Bay and her partner make US$20,000 a month from all their marketing products together.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "19 March 2024", "what": "Starter Story interview: US$60,000 in 6 months, 800 paying customers, around US$10,000 a month in one-time payments, 2 founders and no employees.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "27 September 2024", "what": "Dan Kulkov: around US$100,000 in 10 months. The lifetime deal has become an annual pass with credits, Google search is the main channel, and the back end has moved to Xano.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "3 February 2025", "what": "Product Hunt launch of the full platform: strategy, ideas, funnel improvement, an AI assistant, keyword research and SEO articles. More than 1,800 paying customers. 13th of the day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "9 October 2025", "what": "Dan Kulkov: FounderPal made about US$215,000 in two years.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "US$4,074, the best month in the public Stripe data.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "15 March 2026", "what": "US$2,668 in 30 days and US$182 of MRR.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "13 May 2026", "what": "US$199,156 in total; US$1,261 in 30 days.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "14 October 2026", "what": "US$202,983 in total, US$248 in the last 30 days, no active subscriptions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "Dan Kulkov's website still lists FounderPal as one of eight projects. Both founders' recent posts are about iOS apps, an analytics product called ActivationPal and browser games.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15, 16 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Buttons instead of prompts", "text": "The founders saw people do marketing with ChatGPT using short prompts and getting weak answers. They put their own marketing method into long prompts for GPT-4 behind a form: describe the product, wait 5 minutes, get a strategy. In their words, people prefer clicking buttons to typing to ChatGPT." }, { "title": "Pay once for a rare need", "text": "Most users do not need a new marketing strategy every week, so the founders sold one strategy or unlimited strategies for a single payment instead of a subscription. They said a US$199 one-time AI tool is easier to sell than one at US$39 a month." }, { "title": "Free tools as the sales channel", "text": "They built small free AI tools, launched each one on X, Product Hunt, Reddit and Hacker News, made a YouTube video and a blog post about it, and listed it in directories. They say they never asked for backlinks. Google search became the main source of customers. The Wayback index also lists hundreds of template pages, for example at least 324 pages of marketing agencies by city." }, { "title": "An audience and a cheap build", "text": "Both founders wrote about marketing on X and had sold digital marketing products before. The paid product was built in Bubble in 3 weeks, and its first version cost US$150 in its first month, so each test was cheap." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founders' interviews and posts (grade C) and from the page source of the website on 14 October 2026.", "items": [ "Bubble, a no-code builder, at US$32 a month: the paid product was built in 3 weeks, with Bubble as front end and back end in the first version, which cost US$150 in its first month together with OpenAI.", "OpenAI's GPT-4 through the API with long prompts, about US$1 of AI cost per strategy in 2024. The founders chose GPT-4 over the cheaper GPT-3.5 on purpose.", "Later the back end moved to Xano, because Bubble introduced workload-based pricing and the many free tools caused high usage.", "Stripe for payments, verified by TrustMRR. ConvertKit and Resend for email, Plausible for analytics, Senja for customer testimonials and Tella for videos.", "The page source today still loads Bubble, the Xano JavaScript library and Tolt's affiliate script, and the site has an affiliate page. The code of the pricing page has credit counters for strategies and personas.", "Marketing: free tools launched on X, Product Hunt, Reddit and Hacker News, YouTube videos, blog posts and directories. Newsletter sponsorships, pay-per-click ads on the Uneed directory and TikTok were also tried." ], "src": [ 4, 5, 17, 1 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold marketing software or advice to small businesses and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Metigy", "years": "2014 to 2022", "funding": "US$14M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "An AI marketing advisor that would replace a marketing team for small businesses.", "died": "Small businesses wanted someone to do the marketing for them, not recommendations. The generic advice was not used.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2338-metigy" }, { "name": "ContestMachine", "years": "2007 to 2010", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Online contests that brands could set up themselves at a low price.", "died": "Marketing suites added contests as one feature among many, and a tool that did only one thing could not compete.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1659-contestmachine" }, { "name": "Marketfox", "years": "2017 to 2020", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Marketing automation for online shops.", "died": "Mailchimp and other large tools offered the same and had far more money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1035-marketfox" }, { "name": "Argyle Social", "years": "2009 to 2013", "funding": "US$2.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A social media marketing tool to save time and raise engagement.", "died": "Larger competitors with bigger marketing budgets won, and the product changed only in small steps.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1832-argyle-social" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The four sold marketing help to small businesses and failed for two reasons: the buyers wanted the work done for them, and larger suites added the same feature. FounderPal sold to the same kind of buyer, founders with little money for marketing, and met both problems in a new form: general AI chatbots that anyone can ask for a marketing plan, and competitors that sell similar reports.", "What differed was the cost. The predecessors raised between US$20,000 and US$14 million. FounderPal raised nothing, was built without code, paid about US$1 in AI cost per strategy and found its customers through free tools instead of a sales team. That is how two people made about US$200,000 in three years without investors. It did not avoid the fall in demand: verified monthly revenue fell by 92.7% between November 2025 and September 2026." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The launch method, yes. A lasting business, not shown.", "text": "Two people without code and without investors reached around US$10,000 a month within six months, with long prompts behind a simple form, a one-time price and free tools that brought search traffic. The same method did not keep the revenue: with no subscriptions, revenue fell as soon as new sales fell, and verified revenue is now about US$250 a month.", "steps": [ "Write down a method that you already sell as a service, and turn it into long prompts behind a form.", "Charge once for a result that people need rarely, such as a strategy, instead of a monthly fee.", "Build small free tools around the paid product and launch each one on X, Product Hunt, Reddit and Hacker News.", "Add a recurring product early, because one-time sales must be won again every month." ], "open": "Rare, high-value documents that small businesses need and that a general chatbot does not produce well without guidance: plans for one specific industry, grant applications, pricing studies." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue has almost stopped", "text": "Stripe-verified revenue fell from US$4,074 in November 2025 to US$298 in September 2026, and was US$248 in the 30 days to 14 October 2026. No source gives the reason. The founders' recent posts are about iOS apps and other products, and Dan Kulkov's website lists FounderPal as one of eight projects." }, { "title": "One-time payments do not recur", "text": "Every sale must be won again each month. The founder said in 2024 that the revenue 'can fluctuate' and stays stable only while traffic and conversion stay stable. MRR was US$182 in March 2026 and is zero now, with no active subscriptions, so nothing carries revenue forward when new sales slow down." }, { "title": "Free general chatbots", "text": "The product is GPT-4 behind long prompts, and the founders built it because people were already doing marketing with ChatGPT. OpenAI offers ChatGPT with a free plan, so what a buyer pays for is the prompt design and the form around a model that is also available in ChatGPT." }, { "title": "Competitors at similar or lower prices", "text": "Comparison pages from competitors in 2026 list FounderPal next to Foundra at US$39 a month, Preuve AI at US$59 per report and ValidatorAI, which is free. These pages are written by the competitors themselves." }, { "title": "Founder totals are higher than Stripe", "text": "Dan Kulkov's figure of about US$215,000 in two years (October 2025) is about US$32,000 more than the Stripe total for the same period. The founders' early figures, such as US$10,000 a month in March 2024, have no payment-processor check." }, { "title": "Who owns it now", "text": "The 2024 sources name Sveta Bay and Dan Kulkov as co-founders. The TrustMRR profile names only Dan Kulkov. No sale or transfer was found, and the legal entity could not be read from the website, whose pages load their text by script." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://founderpal.ai/" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/founderpal" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/founderpal" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of FounderPal, data as of 14 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/founderpal", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile (https://trustmrr.com/startup/founderpal.md) in full. The revenue, MRR and subscription figures are from its Verification Sources (Stripe API key), grade A. The description, founding date, country and user estimate are founder-written, grade C." }, { "title": "TrustMRR page of FounderPal, Wayback copy of 13 May 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260513190058/https://trustmrr.com/startup/founderpal", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. Source for the all-time revenue and the 30-day revenue on 13 May 2026." }, { "title": "TrustMRR page data of FounderPal, Wayback copies of 23 February 2026 and 15 March 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260315190312/https://trustmrr.com/startup/founderpal?_rsc=2hng6", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full after decompressing both archived data files; the other copy is https://web.archive.org/web/20260223114855/https://trustmrr.com/startup/founderpal?_rsc=2hng6. Source for the 30-day revenue on both dates and the MRR on 15 March." }, { "title": "Starter Story, 19 March 2024: We Made $60,000 From A Product We Built In 3 Weeks", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/founderpal", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Sveta Bay's own account. Source for the revenue, customers, team, costs, AI model, pricing logic and Product Hunt method." }, { "title": "No Code Exits, 27 September 2024: How Dan Kulkov grew FounderPal to $100,000 revenue with free tools", "url": "https://nocodeexits.substack.com/p/how-dan-kulkov-grew-founderpal-to", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Interview with Dan Kulkov. Source for the co-founders, the tools, the move from lifetime deal to annual pass and the marketing channels." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 9 October 2025, by James Fleischmann: After losing his job, this founder grew a portfolio of indie hacking tools to $10k/mo", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/after-losing-his-job-this-founder-grew-a-portfolio-of-indie-hacking-tools-to-10k-mo-CiXnqXRQSDchBZOhUoS7", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the free part; the rest is for subscribers. Source for Dan Kulkov's revenue per product." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 6 March 2024, by James Fleischmann: Winning SEO by building free AI tools", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/winning-seo-by-building-free-ai-tools-kAG8LZJZ3fu7Pr1RBTeB", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the free introduction only. Source for the combined US$20,000 a month of all the couple's products." }, { "title": "Dan Kulkov on X, 9 November 2023: Marketing Strategy Generator earned $1249 on the launch day", "url": "https://x.com/DanKulkov/status/1722414634484084850", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Dan Kulkov on X, 11 September 2023: launch of Marketing Strategy Generator", "url": "https://x.com/DanKulkov/status/1701128753408319990", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Dan Kulkov on X, 8 April 2023: Meet our first no-code product, Marketing Co-Pilot AI", "url": "https://x.com/DanKulkov/status/1644673704427651072", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Dan Kulkov on X, 14 March 2023: Built something fun with Bubble and ChatGPT API", "url": "https://x.com/DanKulkov/status/1635502797549637634", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Dan Kulkov on X, 6 February 2024: Marketing Strategy Generator 2.0", "url": "https://x.com/DanKulkov/status/1754846672897912884", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: FounderPal, AI marketing platform for Founders, launched 3 February 2025", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/founderpal", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page data: launch date, daily rank, points, comments and the maker's comment by Dan Kulkov." }, { "title": "TrustMRR founder page of Dan Kulkov, October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/founder/dankulkov", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. Stripe-verified totals of his three listed products." }, { "title": "Dan Kulkov's website, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://dankul.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Lists FounderPal among his eight projects." }, { "title": "Recent X posts of Dan Kulkov and Sveta Bay, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/sveta_bay", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the latest 20 posts of each account (@DanKulkov and @sveta_bay) through api.fxtwitter.com. Used only for what they work on now." }, { "title": "FounderPal website: home page, pricing page and their page source, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://founderpal.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "The pages are built with Bubble and draw their text by script, so only page titles, descriptions, loaded scripts and the page code could be read. The prices are not in the code." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine index of founderpal.ai", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/*/founderpal.ai*", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the first 5,000 rows of the capture index. Source for the first capture on 5 June 2023 and the counts of template pages." }, { "title": "Starter Story: How FounderPal Makes Money", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/businesses/founderpal/monetization", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder quotes on one-time payments." }, { "title": "Starter Story list: AI-based businesses and how much they make", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/ideas/ai-based-business/how-much-do-they-make", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the FounderPal entry. It says Sveta Bay co-launched the business and gives US$10,000 a month." }, { "title": "Foundra: Foundra vs FounderPal, 2026", "url": "https://www.foundra.ai/compare/foundra-vs-founderpal", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Written by a competitor. Source for FounderPal's prices and Foundra's price." }, { "title": "Preuve AI: FounderPal alternatives and competitors, updated 24 September 2026", "url": "https://preuve.ai/compare/alternatives-to/founderpal", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Written by a competitor. Source for rival tools and their prices." }, { "title": "OpenAI: ChatGPT pricing", "url": "https://openai.com/chatgpt/pricing/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the plan names. Shows that ChatGPT has a free plan." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/screenshot-to-code/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/screenshot-to-code.md", "slug": "screenshot-to-code", "name": "Screenshot to Code", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI tool that turns screenshots and screen recordings into front-end code", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-14", "launchLabel": "15 November 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$62.8K revenue in the last 12 months, October 2026", "sticker": "$63K in 12 months", "outcomeUsd": 62779, "months": 35, "teamLabel": "1 founder; no co-founder or staff found", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Open source", "group": "build-software", "channel": "open-source", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "open-source" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Developer tools" ], "product": "A web app that turns a screenshot, a mockup, a Figma design or a screen recording of a website into front-end code: HTML with Tailwind or CSS, React, Vue, Bootstrap or Ionic. The code is open source under the MIT licence and free to run with your own model keys. The hosted version at screenshottocode.com sells monthly credits, so the user needs no API key and no setup.", "why": "The founder released it as a free open-source tool nine days after he wrote that the new GPT-4 Vision and Turbo API previews allowed only 100 requests a day. Hacker News and GitHub trending brought the repository more than 35,000 stars in under three months, and the README sends readers on to the paid hosted version for people who do not want to set up keys and servers. It had made US$1,000 within 19 days, with a Stripe payment link and no user accounts.", "summary": [ "Screenshot to Code turns a picture of a web page or an app into working code. It sends the image to a vision model, an AI model that reads images as well as text, and asks it to write the page in HTML, React or Vue. The project is open source: the code is public on GitHub under the MIT licence, and anyone may run, change or sell it. To run it yourself you need an API key, a password that lets a program call a model provider such as OpenAI on your account and at your cost, and you must start a backend server and a frontend. The hosted version at screenshottocode.com does this for you and sells credits, prepaid units of use: 1 credit buys one generation or one edit.", "Abi Raja, a founder in New York whose company WhimsyWorks, Inc. also makes Pico, an AI app builder, posted the tool on 15 November 2023. The next day it reached the front page of Hacker News, and three days later it was first on GitHub trending. On 4 December 2023 he wrote that it had made US$1,000. By 14 October 2026 the Stripe account showed US$259,933 in total revenue, of which US$197,154, 75.8%, came before October 2025. The last 30 days brought US$4,567 and the monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the subscription income expected every month, was US$4,303 from 281 subscriptions. That day he listed the business for sale at US$38,000, because he is starting a full-time job.", "The revenue numbers are read from the Stripe account by TrustMRR through an API key, grade A. The repository counts and the old prices come from public records, grade B: GitHub, Hacker News, and copies of the site's code kept by the Wayback Machine. The reasons for the sale, the profit margin and the user count are the founder's words, grade C. The page also shows earlier companies that promised to turn designs into code, and what killed them." ], "factsCaption": "Stripe-verified revenue of US$62,779 in the last 12 months and US$259,933 since the account began, three quarters of it before October 2025, and a sale listing at US$38,000", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value is read from the Stripe account by TrustMRR through an API key. A grade B value is a public record: GitHub's counters, Hacker News, or the site's own code as archived by the Wayback Machine. A grade C value is a statement by the founder. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a free open-source tool to US$259,933 of verified revenue and a sale listing, in 35 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Screenshot to Code prices in October 2026, read from the hosted app's code because the pricing page loads by script (grade B)", "note": "Yearly plans cost US$90 and US$240 a year, shown as 50% off the monthly price. Pro gives 5 times the credits of Hobby, and 1 credit pays for one generation or one edit. Earlier prices from archived copies of the site's code: 100 generations for US$15 one-time in December 2023, then subscriptions at US$15 or US$40 a month, or US$150 or US$400 a year, in February 2024. The terms say credits are non-refundable and unused credits may expire.", "rows": [ [ "Hobby", "7.50", "15", "100 credits a month" ], [ "Pro", "20", "40", "500 credits a month" ], [ "Open-source code, run yourself", "0", "0", "you pay the model providers through your own API keys" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time to 14 October 2026", "value": "US$259,933", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from Stripe through an API key, synced 14 October 2026. The account belongs to WhimsyWorks, Inc., which also sold Pico; no source says whether any Pico revenue is in this total, so the headline uses the last 12 months.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 12 months", "value": "US$62,779", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, same sync. Last 6 months: US$30,755. Last 3 months: US$14,029. Last 30 days: US$4,567, 3.7% less than the 30 days before.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue earned before the last 12 months", "value": "US$197,154, which is 75.8% of the total", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: all-time revenue minus the last 12 months. It was earned in the 23 months from November 2023 to October 2025, an average of US$8,585 a month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month, November 2025 to September 2026", "value": "US$5,080 in November 2025, highest US$6,478 in May 2026, US$4,727 in September 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table; only the last 12 months are public, and the Wayback Machine holds no copy of the profile. Calculated: September 2026 is 27.0% below May 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Fall from the early average to the last 30 days", "value": "46.8% lower", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$4,567 in the last 30 days against the US$8,585 average month before October 2025. Average month in the last 12 months: US$5,232. No source explains the fall.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR)", "value": "US$4,303 from 281 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot, down 9.7% in 30 days. Calculated: US$15.31 per subscription per month, close to the US$15 monthly Hobby price; a run rate of US$51,636 a year.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin", "value": "60% over 12 months; 40.0% in the last 30 days", "grade": "C", "note": "The 12-month figure is the founder's sale message; the 30-day figure is a TrustMRR snapshot whose costs are not among its verified sources. The founder writes that a recent switch to cheaper AI models should lift the 30-day margin.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price, listed 14 October 2026", "value": "US$38,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Set by the founder: about 1 times trailing twelve-month profit for a quick sale. Calculated: 0.61 times 12-month revenue, 0.74 times the MRR run rate, 1.01 times 12-month profit at the stated 60% margin (US$37,667).", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Users, subscribers and work time, October 2026", "value": "258,000 registered users, about 300 subscribers, under 2 hours a week", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's sale message. Calculated: 281 subscriptions are 0.11% of registered users.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, March 2024", "value": "US$100,000 (does not name the product)", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on 3 April 2024: he hit 100k ARR a couple of weeks before. The post does not say whether this is Screenshot to Code alone or the whole company, which also sold Pico. Calculated: US$8,333 a month, close to the US$8,585 average above.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "First revenue", "value": "US$1,000 by 4 December 2023", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post, 19 days after the release: no login and no user accounts, only a Stripe payment link for credits and a simple ledger on the backend.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "GitHub repository, 14 October 2026", "value": "80,363 stars and 9,816 forks, MIT licence", "grade": "B", "note": "GitHub API. Created on 14 November 2023; last push 9 October 2026. The founder reported 35,000+ stars in February 2024 and 40,000+ in March 2024.", "src": [ 3, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's share of the code", "value": "1,276 of 1,457 counted commits, 87.6%", "grade": "B", "note": "GitHub contributors API. 28 other accounts made the rest, the largest with 41 commits.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Hacker News launch, 16 November 2023", "value": "358 points and 90 comments", "grade": "B", "note": "Show HN post by the founder, read through the Algolia HN API.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Team and funding", "value": "1 person, bootstrapped", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder-written fields on TrustMRR. In 130 of his posts from June 2023 to May 2026 there is no hire, co-founder or funding round.", "src": [ 1, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Time from release to the October 2026 figure", "value": "35 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 15 November 2023 to 14 October 2026.", "src": [ 7, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "August 2023", "what": "The founder's company, WhimsyWorks, Inc., sells Pico, an AI app builder. He reports US$5,591 MRR for Pico in July 2023.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "6 November 2023", "what": "He writes that the GPT-4 Vision and Turbo API previews allow only 100 requests a day, too few to ship a product.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "15 November 2023", "what": "Release post on X: an open-source tool built with GPT-4 Vision and DALL-E, free to try with your own OpenAI API key. The repository was created the day before.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 3 ] }, { "when": "16 November 2023", "what": "Show HN post: 358 points and 90 comments. He reports 500+ GitHub stars in 24 hours and the Hacker News front page.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 8, 10 ] }, { "when": "19 November 2023", "what": "First on GitHub trending, he writes.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "29 November 2023", "what": "First Wayback Machine copy of screenshottocode.com, the hosted version.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "3 December 2023", "what": "The archived site code offers 100 code generations for US$15 through a Stripe payment link, or the free path with your own OpenAI key.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "4 December 2023", "what": "US$1,000 in revenue, with no accounts and no login. Still MIT licensed and free with your own key.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "8 February 2024", "what": "In replies under a post that is now deleted, he offers the business to serious buyers: a 70K+ mailing list, about 1,000 page views a day with no outbound marketing, 35,000+ stars, and the first two search results for screenshot to code. He still ran it in October 2026.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "9 February 2024", "what": "The archived site code now sells subscriptions: US$15 or US$40 a month, or US$150 or US$400 a year.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "21 March 2024", "what": "Second Show HN: turn a video of an app into a working prototype with Claude Opus.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 24 ] }, { "when": "24 June 2024", "what": "Adds Claude 3.5 Sonnet. In his tests it beats GPT-4o in 56% of cases, ties in 19%, loses in 25%.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "22 January 2026", "what": "README update: the best models are now Gemini 3 and Claude Opus 4.5.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "May 2026", "what": "Verified revenue reaches its highest month in the public table: US$6,478.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "Verified revenue: US$4,727 in the month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "14 October 2026", "what": "Listed for sale at US$38,000 because the founder starts a full-time job. All-time revenue US$259,933, MRR US$4,303, 281 subscriptions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Open source as the sales channel", "text": "The free repository is the marketing. It reached the Hacker News front page and GitHub trending in its first week, and the founder counted about 1,000 page views a day with no outbound marketing by February 2024. The README's first line sends readers to the hosted product, with tracking tags added in June 2026. In the sale message he writes that the 80,000-star repository drives steady organic traffic." }, { "title": "Charge for convenience, not for the code", "text": "The code is free, but running it needs model keys, a Python backend and a JavaScript frontend. The hosted version needs only a card. It began as a Stripe payment link for 100 generations at US$15 with no accounts at all, and became a subscription with monthly credits within three months. The backend of the hosted version is closed source." }, { "title": "Switch to the best model, measured by tests", "text": "When model providers released better models, the founder added them, and he compared some of them on his own test set first: GPT-4 Turbo in April 2024, GPT-4o in May 2024, Claude 3.5 Sonnet in June 2024, Gemini 3 and Claude Opus 4.5 in January 2026. He wrote in March 2024: models come and go but evals are forever." }, { "title": "Very little running work", "text": "The founder states that the business needs under 2 hours a week. 28 other accounts made 12.4% of the commits. The largest of them, with 41 commits, is named claude: its commits carry the address noreply@anthropic.com and a Claude Code session link, so Anthropic's coding agent wrote part of the 2026 work." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the public repository and the site's code (grade B) and from the founder's posts and sale message (grade C).", "items": [ "A React and Vite frontend and a Python FastAPI backend, managed with Poetry and pnpm, with a Docker setup. A headless Chromium browser through Playwright lets the agent render the page it wrote and visually check its work.", "Output stacks: HTML with Tailwind, HTML with CSS, React with Tailwind, Vue with Tailwind, Bootstrap, and Ionic with Tailwind.", "Models at launch: GPT-4 Vision for code and DALL-E for images. In October 2026 the README lists Gemini 3 Flash Preview and Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview as the best models, then GPT-5.5, GPT-5.4 Mini, Claude Opus 4.6 and Claude Opus 4.8, with z-image-turbo on Replicate for images. Gemini also extracts the real logos and images from the screenshot.", "The first paid version had no accounts: a Stripe payment link sold credits, and a simple ledger on the backend counted them. Today the hosted app's code includes Clerk for login, PostHog for product analytics, Intercom for support chat and Sentry for error reports.", "To capture a screenshot from a web address, the app calls ScreenshotOne, an outside screenshot service. Its founder wrote in November 2023 that his sign-ups jumped because of this tool.", "The backend server runs on Render, at backend-screenshot-to-code.onrender.com, since at least December 2023, and Plausible counts site visits and clicks.", "The hosted backend is closed source and is part of the sale. The terms name WhimsyWorks, Inc., with a New York address, and choose Delaware law." ], "src": [ 5, 15, 13, 9, 10, 2, 16, 6 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database promised to turn designs or descriptions into working software before vision models existed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Pagedraw", "years": "2018 to 2021", "funding": "US$1.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Turn Sketch design files into React code.", "died": "It bet on Sketch when designers moved to Figma, and developers preferred to write the final code by hand.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1006-pagedraw" }, { "name": "Haiku", "years": "2018 to 2021", "funding": "US$1.2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Turn designers' high-fidelity designs and animations into code.", "died": "It could not keep up with Figma and Adobe XD, and the 2020 downturn ended the company.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1013-haiku" }, { "name": "The Grid", "years": "2014 to 2020", "funding": "US$4.7M", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Websites designed automatically by AI, with no designer.", "died": "The AI of the time produced clumsy designs, while competitors offered polished site builders.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/618-the-grid" }, { "name": "Pixate", "years": "2012 to 2016", "funding": "US$3.6M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Build mobile app prototypes without writing code.", "died": "Google bought it and then set it aside as Figma grew.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/434-pixate" }, { "name": "Builder.ai", "years": "2016 to 2025", "funding": "US$445M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Custom apps built by an AI-assisted assembly line instead of expensive developers.", "died": "Apps that sold for about US$20,000 cost about US$35,000 to build, and much of the work called AI was done by offshore developers.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2170-builderai" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The five predecessors needed a design file in a known format, hand-written conversion rules or the weak AI of their time, and they raised between US$1.2 million and US$445 million to build it. In January 2018 a different open-source project with the same name already translated screenshots into HTML with neural networks; it reached 71 points on Hacker News. In November 2023 a general vision model, GPT-4 Vision, could read any screenshot and write the code, so one person could build the product on top of an API, with no training data and no design-file parser. The founder released it nine days after he wrote that the GPT-4 Vision and Turbo API previews allowed only 100 requests a day.", "The same change works for everyone. A model provider sells the ability that the product depends on, and the founder's own early posts note rate limits and outages of that API. Vercel announced in October 2023 that v0 would add image-to-code, and its documentation now says that v0 turns uploaded screenshots and Figma designs into working applications. Lovable and Bolt start projects from Figma designs, and ChatGPT and the Claude API accept images directly. The advantages of Screenshot to Code that the sources show are its open-source repository, which brings the traffic, and its price. No source describes a technology that others cannot copy." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The timing, no. The method, yes.", "text": "Being the first open-source screenshot-to-code tool on GPT-4 Vision depended on November 2023, and today v0, Lovable, Bolt and the chat apps accept screenshots and designs too. The method is still available: release a useful open-source tool on the day a new model ability appears, and sell a hosted version to the users who do not want to manage keys and servers.", "steps": [ "Build a small open-source tool around a model ability that has just been released, and post a demo video on X and Show HN on the same day.", "Keep the free version fully working with the user's own API key, so developers star and share it.", "Sell the hosted version from the first weeks, even with only a payment link and a ledger, then move to monthly credits.", "Test each new model on your own examples and switch quickly, so the hosted version stays better than a self-run copy with an old setup." ], "open": "New model abilities that need keys and setup to try, such as video understanding, realtime voice and computer-use agents, where a free repository can find users and a hosted version can charge for convenience." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue is falling", "text": "The average month before October 2025 brought US$8,585; the last 30 days brought US$4,567, 46.8% less. The public monthly table peaked at US$6,478 in May 2026 and fell to US$4,727 in September 2026, and MRR fell 9.7% in 30 days. No source explains why." }, { "title": "AI builders and model makers do the same job", "text": "v0 by Vercel says it converts uploaded screenshots, mockups and Figma designs into working applications. Lovable and Bolt start projects from Figma designs. ChatGPT accepts image inputs, and the Claude API takes images as input. A user who already pays for one of these tools may not need a separate product." }, { "title": "The free code is almost the same product", "text": "The repository is MIT licensed with 80,363 stars and 9,816 forks, and its README explains how to run it with your own keys. Only 281 of 258,000 registered users pay. The hosted backend is closed source, but anyone can sell a hosted copy of the open code." }, { "title": "Dependence on model providers", "text": "Every generation is a paid call to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or Replicate. The founder states a 60% margin over 12 months, while the 30-day snapshot shows 40.0%, and he writes that cheaper models should lift it. Early posts recorded a 100-requests-a-day limit and API outages." }, { "title": "For sale, and the owner is leaving", "text": "Listed on 14 October 2026 at US$38,000, about one year of profit by the founder's numbers, because he starts a full-time job. The sale includes domains, the closed-source backend, Stripe and users. The message does not say whether the GitHub repository, which brings the traffic, changes hands. Month-by-month revenue before November 2025 is not public, and the profile does not say whether the Stripe account ever carried revenue of Pico, the company's other product." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://screenshottocode.com/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/screenshot-to-code-whimsyworks-inc" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR markdown profile: Screenshot to Code (WhimsyWorks, Inc.), synced 14 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/screenshot-to-code-whimsyworks-inc.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full. Revenue, MRR and subscriptions are read from Stripe through an API key (grade A). Team size, funding, user estimate, profit margin and description are founder-written or not verified (grade C)." }, { "title": "TrustMRR startup page: Screenshot to Code, with the message from the founder", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/screenshot-to-code-whimsyworks-inc", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page text in full. Source for the founder's sale message: the reason, the pricing at about 1 times profit, the user count, the margin and what the sale includes." }, { "title": "GitHub API: repository abi/screenshot-to-code, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/abi/screenshot-to-code", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. GitHub's own counters: stars, forks, licence, creation and last push dates." }, { "title": "GitHub API: contributors of abi/screenshot-to-code", "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/abi/screenshot-to-code/contributors", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full, with anonymous contributors included. Commit counts per account, summed on this page." }, { "title": "Screenshot to Code README on GitHub, October 2026", "url": "https://github.com/abi/screenshot-to-code/blob/main/README.md", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full from the raw file. Source for the stacks, the default models, the API keys and the setup steps." }, { "title": "GitHub API: the last 100 commits that changed the README", "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/abi/screenshot-to-code/commits?path=README.md", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the commit dates and messages. Source for the dated model changes in 2026." }, { "title": "Abi Raja on X, 15 November 2023: the release post", "url": "https://x.com/_abi_/status/1724923096774185100", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through api.fxtwitter.com. Names GPT-4 Vision and DALL-E." }, { "title": "Hacker News, 16 November 2023: Show HN: Convert any screenshot into clean HTML code using GPT Vision (OSS tool)", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38285228", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the thread through the Algolia HN API: points, comment count and the founder's replies." }, { "title": "Abi Raja on X, 4 December 2023: Hit $1k revenue with screenshot to code", "url": "https://x.com/_abi_/status/1731766806887452726", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through api.fxtwitter.com in full." }, { "title": "Abi Raja's posts on X, June 2023 to May 2026", "url": "https://x.com/_abi_", "grade": "C", "how": "Read 130 of his own posts page by page through api.fxtwitter.com/2/profile/_abi_/statuses. Source for the stars, GitHub trending, the February 2024 sale offer, the model changes, the API limits, Pico's MRR and the ScreenshotOne post that he quoted." }, { "title": "Abi Raja on X, 3 April 2024: hit 100k ARR a couple of weeks ago", "url": "https://x.com/_abi_/status/1775612588350452072", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through api.fxtwitter.com in full. The post does not name the product." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine capture list for screenshottocode.com", "url": "http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=screenshottocode.com*", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the list in full. Source for the first capture date of the site and the dated copies of its code." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of the hosted app's code, 3 December 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20231203id_/https://screenshottocode.com/assets/index-595f36b1.js", "grade": "B", "how": "Searched the downloaded code for prices and services: 100 generations for US$15 by Stripe payment link, the own-key option, ScreenshotOne, Plausible and Render." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of the hosted app's code, 9 February 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240209id_/https://screenshottocode.com/assets/index-60bb3dbc.js", "grade": "B", "how": "Searched the downloaded code for prices: subscriptions at US$15 and US$40 a month, US$150 and US$400 a year." }, { "title": "The hosted app's live code, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://screenshottocode.com/assets/index-CK-VrwOE.js", "grade": "B", "how": "Searched the downloaded code for the pricing block and service names. The pricing page itself loads by script and shows no text without it." }, { "title": "Screenshot to Code Terms of Service, last updated 15 June 2026", "url": "https://screenshottocode.com/legal/terms-of-service.html", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names WhimsyWorks, Inc., Delaware law, the New York address and the credit rules." }, { "title": "Abi Raja's X profile", "url": "https://x.com/_abi_", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through api.fxtwitter.com/_abi_: 2,492 followers, location New York, and his own description of Pico and his earlier company." }, { "title": "Vercel blog, 11 October 2023: Announcing v0: Generative UI", "url": "https://vercel.com/blog/announcing-v0-generative-ui", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Lists transforming images to code as a planned feature." }, { "title": "v0 documentation: FAQs", "url": "https://v0.app/docs/faqs", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on using your own designs." }, { "title": "Lovable documentation: FAQ", "url": "https://docs.lovable.dev/introduction/faq", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on design and on attached images." }, { "title": "Bolt home page", "url": "https://bolt.new/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Offers to start a project from Figma." }, { "title": "Claude Platform documentation: Vision", "url": "https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/vision", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on providing images through the API." }, { "title": "OpenAI Help Center: ChatGPT Image Inputs FAQ", "url": "https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8400551-chatgpt-image-inputs-faq", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full." }, { "title": "Hacker News search results for screenshot-to-code (Algolia HN API)", "url": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=screenshot-to-code&tags=story", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the second Show HN of 21 March 2024 and the different 2018 project of the same name." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/iacrea/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/iacrea.md", "slug": "iacrea", "name": "IACrea", "country": "France", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI virtual staging and marketing images for real-estate agents", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-14", "launchLabel": "March 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$10.4K a month (€10K MRR), December 2024", "sticker": "$125K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 124740, "months": 21, "teamLabel": "Founder and a technical co-founder, no employees reported; since March 2025 a company with three officer companies", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "real-estate", "channel": "partners", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Real estate" ], "product": "A web and mobile app for real-estate agents that furnishes, redecorates and enhances property photos with AI, turns them into short videos and 2D floor plans, and publishes them to social networks and Meta ads. Agents pay a monthly subscription that includes credits, and each AI action uses some of them.", "why": "The founder knew image AI from data science and chose real-estate agents as customers, because they need attractive photos of every new property, every month. She sold in French first, listed the tool on directory sites, paid affiliates who already reached agents, met agents at real-estate events, and cut cancellations with credits that carry over and yearly plans.", "summary": [ "IACrea is a French web and mobile app that makes marketing images for real-estate agents. Its first feature, and still its core, is virtual staging: an AI model furnishes or redecorates a photo of an empty or dated room, so that a buyer can picture the home lived in (in French, \"home staging virtuel\"). Today it also enhances phone photos, turns photos into short videos, draws 2D floor plans from an iPhone scan, schedules social-media posts and runs Meta ad campaigns for a property. Agents pay a monthly subscription that includes credits, units that each AI action uses up. The name puts IA, the French abbreviation of intelligence artificielle, first; a podcast about the business wrote it AICrea.", "Pauline Clavelloux, a data scientist who worked nine years at IBM, started it in March 2023 after side products that failed: a crypto trading-alert service with zero sales, an AI portrait tool that made a few hundred euros and was sold, and a Twitter data tool that ended when Twitter announced a price of US$42,000 a month for its API. She first offered redecoration to anyone, then sold to agents, who need new photos every month. A co-founder does all the technical work. In December 2024 she wrote that IACrea had crossed €10,000 of MRR, monthly recurring revenue, the subscription revenue of one month, during the year. That is a run rate, the monthly figure times 12, of about €120,000 or US$124,740 a year, 21 months after launch. The same year she cut cancellations from about 40% to 4.65%, turned down a buyout offer and left IBM. In December 2025 she wrote that IACrea grew 40% in 2025.", "Every revenue number on this page is a statement by the founder or comes from interviews with her, grade C. No payment processor or buyer has confirmed them, and the figures from October to December 2024 differ slightly. The company facts come from the French state business register, grade A. The page also shows earlier companies that sold room design or online photo editing and failed, and the French rules and competitors that now surround AI images in property advertising." ], "factsCaption": "A credit-based AI photo tool for real-estate agents that its founder says crossed €10,000 a month in recurring revenue in 2024, 21 months after launch, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a statement by the founder, an interview with her, or the company's own pages. Grade A values come from the French state business register. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No revenue value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From an instant home-staging page with 940 photos in May 2023 to a marketing tool for agents with two plans and mobile apps, in three and a half years. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "IACrea prices on 14 October 2026, from the company's pricing page (grade C). Prices are in euros before VAT; the US$ columns are converted at the European Central Bank rate of 14 October 2026, US$1.1195 per euro", "note": "The page offers monthly billing without commitment, or yearly billing with one month free; the yearly columns are calculated as 11 months' price spread over 12. One credit pays for 10 photo edits, 1 video animation or 10 visuals, and a Meta ad campaign needs at least 60 credits. Extra credits cost €1 each, but a footnote on the same page gives €1.50 per credit once the included credits are used up. The page's embedded script data also contains the amounts €20 and €60 with yearly amounts of €220 and €660; they do not match the displayed prices, and this table uses the displayed ones.", "rows": [ [ "Solo", "25.66 (€22.92)", "27.99 (€25)", "15 AI credits a month; 1 phone licence with 30 enhanced photos a month" ], [ "Agence", "66.70 (€59.58)", "72.77 (€65)", "45 AI credits a month; 3 phone licences with 40 enhanced photos each" ], [ "Extra user, Agence plan", "12.31 (€11)", "13.43 (€12)", "5 more credits and 40 enhanced photos a month" ], [ "Unlimited 2D plans", "10.26 (€9.17)", "11.20 (€10)", "option, per authorised iPhone" ], [ "Extra credit", "", "1.12 (€1)", "one-off, per credit" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue reached in 2024", "value": "more than €10,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's newsletter, 19 December 2024: 'IACrea crossed €10k MRR during the year!' She does not give the month or say whether it stayed above that level.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "That MRR in US dollars", "value": "about US$10,395 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: €10,000 × 1.0395, the European Central Bank rate of 19 December 2024.", "src": [ 1, 26 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from that MRR", "value": "about €120,000, or US$124,740, a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the monthly figure times 12. This is the headline number of this page. A run rate is a projection, not revenue earned in a calendar year.", "src": [ 1, 26 ] }, { "fact": "MRR in a podcast published on 8 November 2024", "value": "'$8K MRR'", "grade": "C", "note": "The host's description of the Solos episode: 'We dive into her experience growing AICrea to $8K MRR'. The audio was not transcribed, so the currency is not verified. If the founder meant euros, it is about US$8,316 (calculated at 1.0395).", "src": [ 2, 26 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in a video interview, 15 October 2024", "value": "'$10K/Month', or 'an AI home staging app to $100,000/year'", "grade": "C", "note": "Title and description of the Starter Story video. They are the channel's summary of the founder's account.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "The founder's recurring revenue from all her products, November 2024", "value": "€100,000 a year", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's newsletter, 6 November 2024: 'I reached my first €100k ARR milestone'. ARR is annual recurring revenue. The post does not split it by product. Her site and X profile in 2026 still give €100k+ ARR.", "src": [ 4, 17 ] }, { "fact": "Growth in 2025", "value": "+40%", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's newsletter, 27 December 2025: 'IACrea grew by +40% this year.' She does not say whether this is revenue or MRR. Her goal for 2025 had been €50,000 MRR.", "src": [ 8, 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR at the end of 2025 if the 40% applies to MRR", "value": "about €14,000", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: €10,000 × 1.4. An illustration only: the founder gives no amount for 2025, and €10,000 was a level crossed during 2024, not a December figure.", "src": [ 1, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue headline, May 2024", "value": "'IACrea from 0 to 40k€'", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's newsletter, 23 May 2024, above a chart titled 'Revenue by month for IACrea'. The chart is an image and was not read. The text does not say whether €40,000 is total revenue so far or another measure.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Churn rate", "value": "about 40% early in 2024, 4.65% in December 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's newsletter. Churn is the share of subscribers who cancel; she does not give the period it is measured over. She cut it with credits that carry over, better image quality and yearly plans.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Launch", "value": "March 2023", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder: 'Fast forward to March 2023, I dived into iacrea, an instant home staging service.' On 9 May 2023 the home page counted 940 photos 'créées depuis mars 2023' (created since March 2023).", "src": [ 5, 15 ] }, { "fact": "Seller in the 2023 terms of sale", "value": "Upopy SASU", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived terms of 1 June 2023. Customers bought credits one at a time or by monthly subscription, and subscription credits did not carry over to the next month.", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "fact": "Upopy in the register", "value": "created 21 March 2023, software publishing (code 58.29C), the founder as manager", "grade": "A", "note": "French state register, UPOPY, SIREN 950997221. It is the president of IACrea SAS.", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "fact": "Operating company since 2025", "value": "IACrea SAS, created 1 March 2025 in Paris, computer programming (code 62.01Z)", "grade": "A", "note": "Register: its president is UPOPY, the founder's company, and two other companies are directors general. The employee band is empty ('NN'), and the register search does not show shareholders. Today's terms of sale name IACrea SAS as the seller.", "src": [ 16, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Team, November 2024", "value": "2 people: the founder and a technical co-founder", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's newsletter: 'my co-founder manages everything technical—maintenance, improvements, and developing new features.' The sources do not name the co-founder. In May 2024 she wrote 'My partner and I are visible and reachable'.", "src": [ 4, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions investors, grants or an accelerator. In 2024 she turned down a buyout offer because 'the offer wasn't good enough'.", "src": [ 1, 16 ] }, { "fact": "Share of website traffic from directory sites, May 2024", "value": "40%", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's newsletter. Cold email: 'Only 1% clicked on the link to try IACrea'. Ads and event sponsorship: 'Thousands of euros invested' with a 'return on investment close to zero'.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Competitors counted by the founder, November 2024", "value": "more than 30", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's newsletter: 'I counted more then 30 IACrea's competitors'.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Price of the Solo plan, October 2026", "value": "€25 a month before VAT, about US$27.99", "grade": "C", "note": "Pricing page, 14 October 2026: 15 AI credits a month and one phone licence. Converted at the ECB rate of 14 October 2026, US$1.1195 per euro.", "src": [ 11, 26 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the headline figure", "value": "21 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: March 2023 to December 2024.", "src": [ 5, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Name", "value": "IACrea, written AICrea in the podcast", "grade": "C", "note": "IA is the French abbreviation of intelligence artificielle. In April 2026 the founder wrote that the name is 'super natural in French' but that in English '“IA” means nothing'.", "src": [ 2, 9 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Before 2023", "what": "During the Covid lockdown she and a developer friend build a crypto trading robot; the trading-alert service they sell from it gets zero sales. An AI portrait tool makes a few hundred euros and is sold. A Twitter data tool ends when Twitter announces US$42,000 a month for its API.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "March 2023", "what": "IACrea opens as 'an instant home staging service': upload a photo of a room, choose a style such as Scandinavian or industrial, and get the AI's version in 10 seconds to 15 minutes.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 15 ] }, { "when": "9 May 2023", "what": "First archived copy of the site: 940 photos created since March 2023. Upopy, the founder's company, sells the credits one at a time or by monthly subscription.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15, 14 ] }, { "when": "February 2024", "what": "She writes that she knew InteriorAI existed but aimed at better photo quality and the French market first, and that IACrea now brings 'comfortable recurring revenue'.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "May 2024", "what": "'IACrea from 0 to 40k€'. She explains the method: sell to real-estate agents, list the tool on directory sites (40% of traffic), pay affiliates such as photographers and real-estate trainers, and meet agents at events.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "15 October 2024", "what": "Starter Story publishes a video interview titled 'How I Built It: $10K/Month AI Image Generator'.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "6 November 2024", "what": "Her products together reach €100,000 in annual recurring revenue. A co-founder does all the technical work. She counts more than 30 competitors.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "8 November 2024", "what": "The Solos podcast, hosted by Martin Donadieu, publishes 'From IBM to $8K MRR: How This Solo Founder Cracked AI for Real Estate'.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "19 December 2024", "what": "'IACrea crossed €10k MRR during the year.' Churn falls from about 40% to 4.65%. She turns down a buyout offer, ends nine years at IBM and works full time on her products. Goal for 2025: €50,000 MRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "1 March 2025", "what": "IACrea SAS is created in Paris, with the founder's company as president and two other companies as directors general.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "when": "27 December 2025", "what": "'IACrea grew by +40% this year.' It moves from a virtual-staging tool to 'a full marketing tool for real estate agents', and some partnerships are 'still being finalized'.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "August to September 2026", "what": "Credits now stay valid for three months while the subscription is active, to keep agents through the summer holidays. Printed flyers arrive for real-estate events.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 18 ] }, { "when": "14 October 2026", "what": "Two plans, Solo at €25 and Agence at €65 a month before VAT, for photos, video, 2D plans, social posts and Meta ad campaigns, with apps on iOS and Android. The home page announces a stand at Paris Expo Porte de Versailles in November 2026.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11, 10 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "One profession with a monthly need", "text": "She first offered redecoration to anyone, then dropped private individuals because 'they don’t renovate their homes regularly and want ultra-customization'. Real-estate agents need attractive photos of every new property they list, so the need repeats every month and fits a subscription." }, { "title": "Credits, not unlimited use", "text": "Each AI action uses credits from a monthly allowance: one credit pays for 10 photo edits or one video. The cost of running the models therefore grows only with paid use. When churn was about 40%, she let unused credits carry over and added yearly plans; churn fell to 4.65%." }, { "title": "Low-cost channels that grow over time", "text": "Directory sites brought 40% of the traffic and backlinks, links from other sites that raise a page's rank in search engines. Affiliates who already reach agents, such as photographers and real-estate trainers, earn a recurring commission. The founders meet agents at real-estate events. Paid ads and cold email did not work." }, { "title": "One sells, one builds", "text": "The founder, a data scientist with image-AI skills, does sales, marketing and partnerships. A co-founder does maintenance, improvements and new features. She chose the French market first, against an English-language competitor that already existed." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "The sources say little about the technical stack. These details come from the company's own pages, from what its website shows publicly, and from the founder's newsletter. They are grade C unless marked.", "items": [ "The founder had 'skills in AI with images' from her data-science work. Since at least November 2024 a co-founder has handled all technical work.", "No source names the image or video models. The privacy policy says customer images are used « pour améliorer notre algorithme d'intelligence artificielle » (to improve our artificial-intelligence algorithm).", "The website is served by Vercel, a hosting service, according to its response headers, and its page loads files from Supabase, a hosted database and file-storage service (visible in the page source, grade B).", "Card payments go through Stripe, according to the terms of sale.", "Mobile apps on the App Store and Google Play take and enhance photos; 2D floor plans come from a scan on iPhone Pro models.", "Meta ad campaigns are published from IACrea's own Meta page, and IACrea forwards the contacts of interested people to the agent." ], "src": [ 5, 4, 13, 12, 10 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised to show people a better-looking home, to edit photos online, or to give real-estate agents new software, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Tastemaker", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$1.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Affordable online interior design for middle-income households, by professional designers.", "died": "It depended on freelance designers, so quality varied and growth was slow. Better-funded rivals offered the same service.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1572-tastemaker" }, { "name": "Laurel & Wolf", "years": "2014 to 2019", "funding": "US$25M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Flat-fee interior design consultations online.", "died": "The flat fees did not cover the cost of finding customers, and adding designers lowered quality.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2012-laurel--wolf" }, { "name": "Snipshot", "years": "2006 to 2009", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Edit photos in the browser without desktop software.", "died": "Larger tools such as Picnik and free alternatives offered more, and its small feature set did not grow.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1241-snipshot" }, { "name": "REPitchbook", "years": "2021 to 2022", "funding": "None", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Software that collects and analyses listings and market data for real-estate agents and investors.", "died": "It was built before asking real-estate professionals what they needed.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1867-repitchbook" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Tastemaker and Laurel & Wolf sold the promise that virtual staging sells today: see what a room could look like. Each design needed a paid human designer, so every sale carried a large cost, and quality varied as they added designers. Snipshot sold browser photo editing to casual users, who had free alternatives. REPitchbook built software for real-estate agents before asking them what they needed.", "IACrea differs on each point. An image model does the designer's work, so one more photo edit uses a tenth of a credit, about €0.10 at the extra-credit price, instead of hours of work. It sells to professionals who need new images for every listing and pay monthly, not to households that redecorate once. And the founder talked to many agents before building for them. What has not changed is competition: she counted more than 30 rivals in 2024, and the software makers and listing portals that agents already pay are adding the same features." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. This product, only with a new angle.", "text": "AI virtual staging for agents is now a crowded category: a French agency-software maker bought a staging startup in December 2025, and a general image model edits a photo from one sentence for US$0.039. The method still works in other fields: pick a profession with a repeating visual need, sell credits on a subscription, and reach the customers through directories, affiliates who already serve them, and their trade shows.", "steps": [ "Choose a profession that needs the same AI output every month, not a consumer who needs it once.", "Talk to many of those professionals before building, as she did with agents.", "Price by credits so that model costs follow revenue, and let unused credits carry over to reduce churn.", "List the product on niche directories, pay recurring commissions to affiliates who reach the customers, and go to their trade shows." ], "open": "Other professions that publish photo listings every week, such as holiday rentals, used cars and hotels, and real-estate agents in countries with other languages." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Self-reported, and the figures do not line up exactly", "text": "Every revenue figure comes from the founder or from interviews with her, grade C, and IACrea has no TrustMRR profile. The figures are close but differ: '$10K/Month' in a video of 15 October 2024, '$8K MRR' in a podcast published on 8 November 2024, and 'crossed €10k MRR during the year' on 19 December 2024. The podcast host writes dollars; the founder counts in euros. For 2025 there is only '+40%', with no amount." }, { "title": "French listing rules apply to every image", "text": "The consumer institute INC writes: « Le classement du bien au regard de sa performance énergétique doit être mentionné dans les annonces relatives à la vente ou la location » (the energy-performance class of the property must be stated in sale and rental advertisements). On AI embellishment, the government answered a deputy's written question on 14 July 2026 that the consumer code « permet déjà de sanctionner les professionnels qui diffuseraient des annonces présentant les biens de manière abusive » (already allows sanctions against professionals who publish advertisements that present properties abusively), and that AI staging « ne se distingue pas fondamentalement » (does not differ fundamentally) from home staging before visits or retouched photos. The duty falls on the agent who publishes, so IACrea's customers need images that stay truthful." }, { "title": "EU AI Act labels since 2 August 2026", "text": "MySweetImmo, a French real-estate news site, writes that the AI Act's transparency rules apply to agencies since 2 August 2026: « Un visuel de home staging réalisé par IA doit être signalé lorsqu’il peut être pris pour une représentation authentique du logement » (an AI home-staging image must be labelled when it could be taken for a true picture of the home). It gives fines of up to €15 million or 3% of worldwide annual turnover. A listing text written with AI needs no automatic label, the same article says." }, { "title": "Agency software and portals add the same features", "text": "La Boîte Immo, which makes the Hektor agency software, launched Smartpix, an app that improves property photos with virtual staging, in May 2024, and bought HOQI, a French AI home-staging startup, in December 2025. In June 2025 leboncoin's head of product for real estate said that from the end of June all users would get « un assistant rédactionnel basé sur l’IA » (an AI-based writing assistant) that « génèrera une description d’annonce à partir de quelques critères » (will generate a listing description from a few criteria). Agents already pay for these platforms, so a separate subscription has to offer more." }, { "title": "General image models are cheap", "text": "Google released Gemini 2.5 Flash Image on 26 August 2025. It makes targeted edits from a plain-language instruction, such as removing a person from a photo, for US$0.039 per image through Google's API. The founder wrote in November 2024 that with AI tools 'the real challenge today isn’t building—it’s breaking through'." }, { "title": "The models behind the product are not disclosed", "text": "No source names the image or video models that IACrea uses. If they come from an outside provider, that provider's prices and rules set IACrea's costs and limits; if they are its own, it must keep up with models such as Google's. Credit pricing lets the company pass a cost change on to customers." }, { "title": "Two founders, three officer companies", "text": "The podcast calls her a solo founder, but her own newsletter of 6 November 2024 says a co-founder does all the technical work, so this page counts a team of 2. Since March 2025 the business has run in IACrea SAS, whose officers are the founder's company and two other companies. The register search does not show who owns the shares or how many people work there." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://iacrea.com/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Pauline_cx newsletter, 19 December 2024: 2024 recap, growth, wins and new challenges", "url": "https://paulinecx.beehiiv.com/p/2024-recap-growth-wins-and-new-challenges", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder's own account. Source for the €10,000 MRR, the churn figures, the refused buyout offer and the end of her IBM job." }, { "title": "Solos podcast, hosted by Martin Donadieu, 8 November 2024: From IBM to $8K MRR: How This Solo Founder Cracked AI for Real Estate", "url": "https://castbox.fm/channel/Solos-id5226090", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the episode title, date, description and chapter list on the Castbox channel page. The audio was not transcribed." }, { "title": "Starter Story on YouTube, 15 October 2024: How I Built It: $10K/Month AI Image Generator", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjCa8IFjM2E", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the title, date and description on the video page. The video was not watched." }, { "title": "Pauline_cx newsletter, 6 November 2024: I reached my 100k ARR goal, new one 500k ARR", "url": "https://paulinecx.beehiiv.com/p/i-reached-my-100k-arr-goal-new-one-500k-arr", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the €100,000 ARR across her products, the technical co-founder and the 30 competitors." }, { "title": "Pauline_cx newsletter, 23 January 2024: overview of her SaaS products", "url": "https://paulinecx.beehiiv.com/p/pauline-cx-saas-overview", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the earlier failed products and the March 2023 start." }, { "title": "Pauline_cx newsletter, 23 May 2024: user acquisition, IACrea from 0 to 40k€", "url": "https://paulinecx.beehiiv.com/p/user-acquisition", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The revenue chart is an image and was not read. Source for the target customer, directories, affiliates, events and the failed channels." }, { "title": "Pauline_cx newsletter, 28 February 2024: startup idea taken", "url": "https://paulinecx.beehiiv.com/p/startup-idea-taken", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the competitor that already existed and the French-market focus." }, { "title": "Pauline_cx newsletter, 27 December 2025: 2025, not everything went as planned", "url": "https://paulinecx.beehiiv.com/p/2025-not-everything-went-as-planned", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 40% growth and the repositioning." }, { "title": "Pauline_cx newsletter, 11 April 2026: the name mistakes I made", "url": "https://paulinecx.beehiiv.com/p/the-name-mistakes-i-made-so-you-won-t-have-to", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founder's comment on the name IACrea." }, { "title": "IACrea home page, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://iacrea.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the current features, the mobile apps and the November 2026 trade-show stand." }, { "title": "IACrea pricing page, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://iacrea.com/fr/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the footnotes. Source for the plans, credits and options." }, { "title": "IACrea terms of sale and terms of use (CGV and CGU), read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://iacrea.com/fr/cgv", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the CGU at https://iacrea.com/fr/cgu. Source for the seller IACrea SAS, Stripe payments and the Meta ad campaigns." }, { "title": "IACrea privacy policy, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://iacrea.com/fr/politique-confidentialite", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on purposes and service providers. Names no AI model provider." }, { "title": "IACrea terms of sale, Wayback Machine copy of 1 June 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230601044035/https://iacrea.com/cgu-cgv", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for Upopy SASU as seller and the 2023 credit rules." }, { "title": "IACrea home page, Wayback Machine copy of 9 May 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230509144012/https://iacrea.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The first archived copy. Source for the original features and the counter of 940 photos since March 2023." }, { "title": "French state business register (Recherche d'entreprises): IACREA, SIREN 941695157, and UPOPY, SIREN 950997221", "url": "https://recherche-entreprises.api.gouv.fr/search?q=iacrea", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the JSON records of IACREA, UPOPY and the two other officer companies. Source for legal forms, creation dates, activity codes, officers and the empty employee band." }, { "title": "Pauline Clavelloux's personal site, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://paulinecx.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for her name, her list of products and the €100k+ ARR claim." }, { "title": "Pauline_Cx on X, posts of 25 August and 11 September 2026", "url": "https://x.com/Pauline_Cx/status/2092175352164454813", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through api.fxtwitter.com, with the last 99 posts of her timeline. Source for the credit rollover and the event flyers." }, { "title": "Institut national de la consommation (INC), 8 October 2018: Ventes immobilières : le contenu minimal des annonces publiées par un professionnel", "url": "https://www.inc-conso.fr/content/ventes-immobilieres-le-contenu-minimal-des-annonces-publiees-par-un-professionnel", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the sections on price, fees and energy display." }, { "title": "Assemblée nationale, written question no. 13930 of 31 March 2026, with the government's answer of 14 July 2026", "url": "https://questions.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/questions/QANR5L17QE13930", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the question summary and the answer on misleading embellishments." }, { "title": "MySweetImmo, 4 August 2026, updated 4 September 2026: Immobilier : ce que l'AI Act change vraiment pour les agences depuis le 2 août 2026", "url": "https://www.mysweetimmo.com/2026/08/04/immobilier-ce-que-lai-act-change-vraiment-pour-les-agences-depuis-le-2-aout-2026/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on AI-written listings, AI home staging and fines." }, { "title": "MySweetImmo, 9 June 2025, by Ariane Artinian: L'IA va transformer les annonces immobilières (interview with leboncoin's head of product for real estate)", "url": "https://www.mysweetimmo.com/2025/06/09/immobilier-lia-va-transformer-les-annonces-immobilieres-iris-porto-leboncoin/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for leboncoin's AI writing assistant." }, { "title": "MySweetImmo, 28 May 2024: Pros de l'immo : La Boîte Immo intègre l'IA à ses outils pour accroître votre efficacité", "url": "https://www.mysweetimmo.com/2024/05/28/pros-de-limmo-la-boite-immo-integre-lia-a-ses-outils-pour-accroitre-votre-efficacite/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the opening sections. Source for Smartpix and Hektor Voice." }, { "title": "MySweetImmo, 4 December 2025: Immobilier : La Boîte Immo rachète HOQI, startup spécialiste du home staging assisté par IA", "url": "https://www.mysweetimmo.com/2025/12/04/immobilier-la-boite-immo-rachete-hoqi-startup-specialiste-du-home-staging-assiste-par-ia/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The buyer's statement to the press." }, { "title": "Google Developers Blog, 26 August 2025: Introducing Gemini 2.5 Flash Image", "url": "https://developers.googleblog.com/en/introducing-gemini-2-5-flash-image/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the sections on editing and price." }, { "title": "European Central Bank: euro foreign exchange reference rates, 19 December 2024 and 14 October 2026", "url": "https://data-api.ecb.europa.eu/service/data/EXR/D.USD.EUR.SP00.A", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the CSV series: US$1.0395 per euro on 19 December 2024 and US$1.1195 on 14 October 2026." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/questgen-supermeme/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/questgen-supermeme.md", "slug": "questgen-supermeme", "name": "Questgen and Supermeme.ai", "country": "India", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI quiz generator and AI meme generator", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-14", "launchLabel": "December 2020", "outcomeLabel": "US$6.5K a month, July 2026", "sticker": "$78K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 78000, "months": 67, "teamLabel": "1 founder on Questgen, 3 co-founders on Supermeme, no employees, all with other jobs", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "learning", "channel": "open-source", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "open-source" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Education" ], "product": "Three small AI web apps from one founder, run beside his full-time job. Questgen turns text, PDFs, web pages, images or videos into quizzes (multiple choice, true/false, fill in the blank) and exports them in the file formats that school learning systems import. Supermeme.ai, built with two co-founders, turns a sentence into memes: it finds fitting meme templates and writes the captions. AiArtist.io, the newest, makes short motion-graphics videos from text.", "why": "Questgen started as free open-source code on GitHub whose README sends readers to questgen.ai, where the paid plans are. Both apps then won search traffic for exact phrases such as \"AI meme generator\", and Supermeme says it has spent nothing to acquire its users. Costs are low: in June 2022 the founder said his two products were profitable at US$500 and US$100 a month. So a part-time team with no investors can keep them running.", "summary": [ "Questgen and Supermeme.ai are micro-SaaS products: small software services that are sold by subscription and run by one or a few people. Questgen is a quiz generator for teachers and trainers. You paste text or upload a PDF, and it writes multiple-choice, true/false and fill-in-the-blank questions that you can edit and export into a learning management system (LMS), the software that schools and companies use to run courses and tests. Supermeme turns a sentence into memes: it searches thousands of meme templates for one that fits and writes the captions, and its site says it is \"powered by OpenAI\". With a third app, AiArtist.io, they had more than 2.5 million registered users in July 2026.", "Ramsri Goutham Golla is an engineer from India who worked about six years in Silicon Valley and moved back in 2018. In August 2020 he published Questgen as open-source code, code that anyone may read, use and change, built on T5 models, language models that turn one text into another. By January 2022 the website sold plans and an API, a way for other programs to call the service. That month he and two partners he knew only online, Nico Botha and Sanjeev NC, started Supermeme. In June 2022 he said his two products made US$500 and US$100 a month. Supermeme's own pitch page showed US$25,000 a year in ARR (annual recurring revenue) by April 2023 and US$65,000 by March 2025, and the apps together peaked at US$100,000 ARR in 2025. On 30 July 2026 Indie Hackers reported US$6,000 to US$7,000 a month in MRR (monthly recurring revenue) for the three apps. Two days later he wrote that Supermeme makes US$4,400 a month. Questgen has earned more than US$150,000 since its launch.", "Every money figure on this page is a statement by the founder, his co-founders or their own web pages, grade C. No payment processor or buyer has confirmed any of them. They fit together across four years: in 2025 and again in 2026, Supermeme's figure is about two thirds of the total. They also show a decline, because the July 2026 run rate is about 22% below the 2025 peak. The page also shows what happened to earlier companies that made quizzes for classrooms or funny images for chats." ], "factsCaption": "A part-time portfolio of three AI apps that peaked at US$100,000 a year in 2025 and made US$6,000 to US$7,000 a month in July 2026, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a statement by the founder, his co-founders or the companies' own web pages, including older versions of those pages saved by the Wayback Machine. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From an open-source research library in 2020 to three paid apps run beside a full-time job, in 67 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Prices in October 2026 from the three products' own pricing pages (grade C). Supermeme's monthly prices are read from the plan data inside its page, which shows yearly prices first", "note": "Questgen's yearly plan is US$100 a year, shown here as US$8.33 a month. Supermeme gives 10 free credits a month with a watermark; one credit is one generation with up to 8 meme options. Its page data and FAQ also list a Pro plan at US$13.99 a month billed yearly or US$19.99 monthly, with 1,000 API requests, but the page did not show it as a plan card. AiArtist sells a one-time pass that lasts one year, and its page says the price rises with every 50 new customers.", "rows": [ [ "Questgen Basic", "0", "0", "20 free runs" ], [ "Questgen Pro", "8.33", "15", "unlimited runs, fair use" ], [ "Supermeme Free", "0", "0", "10 credits a month, watermark" ], [ "Supermeme Solo", "6.49", "9.99", "100 credits a month (about 800 memes), 1 brand kit, 100 API requests" ], [ "Supermeme Startup", "19.99", "34.99", "unlimited credits, 10 brand kits, 2,000 API requests" ], [ "Supermeme Enterprise", "83.99", "99.99", "unlimited brand kits, 5,000 API requests" ], [ "AiArtist yearly pass", "99 one-time", "", "100 credits a month for one year, launch offer" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue per month of the three apps, July 2026", "value": "US$6,000 to US$7,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Indie Hackers interview, 30 July 2026. The article's header gives US$6.5K a month and its text \"nearly $7k MRR\". Covers Questgen, Supermeme and AiArtist together.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the July 2026 figure", "value": "about US$78,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$6,500 times 12. The range gives US$72,000 to US$84,000.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Peak of the three apps, 2025", "value": "US$100,000 ARR", "grade": "C", "note": "Indie Hackers interview. His X profile in October 2026 still says \"3 AI SaaS Apps to $100k ARR with no employees\".", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Fall from the 2025 peak to July 2026", "value": "about 22%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$78,000 a year against US$100,000.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Supermeme revenue per month, 1 August 2026", "value": "US$4,400", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X. That is about 63% to 68% of the July 2026 total, so Questgen and AiArtist make about US$1,600 to US$2,600 a month together (calculated).", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Supermeme ARR on its pitch page, by March 2025", "value": "US$65,000, with 750,000 signups", "grade": "C", "note": "First seen in the Wayback capture of 20 March 2025 and still on the live page in October 2026, so it is not current. The page says its customer acquisition cost is US$0, from organic channels and word of mouth.", "src": [ 7, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Supermeme ARR on its pitch page, by April 2023", "value": "US$25,000, with 140,000 signups", "grade": "C", "note": "Wayback capture of 2 April 2023, unchanged until at least November 2024. The same answer says 100,000 signups came through organic channels.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Questgen total revenue since launch, July 2026", "value": "more than US$150,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Indie Hackers interview. The founder dates the launch \"4 years ago\"; the website was already online in December 2020.", "src": [ 1, 16 ] }, { "fact": "Total revenue of the three apps, August 2026", "value": "more than US$300,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X, 6 August 2026: \"3 Apps, 3 Years, $ 300K+ Revenue\".", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "His two micro-SaaS products, June 2022", "value": "US$500 and US$100 a month, both profitable", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview in the languagetech newsletter, 26 June 2022. He did not say which product earned which amount. His Udemy courses had made US$6,700 in total.", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "fact": "Registered users, July 2026", "value": "more than 2.5 million in total, more than 2 million of them at Supermeme and more than 150,000 at Questgen", "grade": "C", "note": "Indie Hackers interview. Questgen's home page also says \"Trusted by 150,000+ users\".", "src": [ 1, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Paying accounts, upper limit", "value": "at most about 1,000", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$6,500 a month divided by the cheapest paid price, Supermeme Solo at US$6.49 a month, is about 1,000, or 0.04% of 2.5 million registered users. Every payer on a higher plan makes the real number lower.", "src": [ 1, 12 ] }, { "fact": "AiArtist.io paying users, July 2026", "value": "more than 20", "grade": "C", "note": "Indie Hackers interview. Recently launched, sold as a US$99 one-time yearly pass.", "src": [ 1, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Supermeme's Product Hunt launch", "value": "first place of the day", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in the Indie Hackers interview. The launch date was not verified.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "Questgen: 1 person. Supermeme: 3 co-founders. No employees", "grade": "C", "note": "Questgen's Team page calls him its \"solo developer\"; a January 2022 version of the site spoke of \"the founders\". Supermeme's Team page lists three co-founders who formed the team in January 2022 and had not met in person. The founder works full-time as a data scientist, and the two co-founders list other jobs.", "src": [ 9, 17, 8, 1, 19 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Supermeme's Team page: \"completely bootstrapped\". The founder's X profile: \"bootstrapping\".", "src": [ 8, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Company behind Questgen", "value": "QuestgenAI, Inc.", "grade": "C", "note": "Copyright line on the Questgen website. Where it is registered was not verified.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the first Questgen website to the July 2026 figure", "value": "67 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: December 2020 to July 2026.", "src": [ 16, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2013 to 2018", "what": "After a master's degree at Arizona State University in 2013, he works about six years in Silicon Valley, then moves back to India in 2018 to combine freelance work with his own products.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "4 August 2020", "what": "GitHub records the creation of the open-source Questgen.ai library, MIT license. Its README today says it uses three T5 models and sends readers to questgen.ai.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "25 December 2020", "what": "First Wayback Machine capture of questgen.ai: a simple page for \"A question generation AI to automatically generate assessments for education\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "when": "16 January 2022", "what": "The Questgen site now has pricing and an API for companies, for example US$999 a month for 50,000 calls, and says it uses \"AI algorithms like GPT-3\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "when": "January 2022", "what": "Three people who know each other only online start Supermeme. Its first page, captured on 27 January 2022, says \"Coming Soon\" and names GPT-3.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 18 ] }, { "when": "26 June 2022", "what": "He tells the languagetech newsletter that his two micro-SaaS products make US$500 and US$100 a month and are profitable.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "2 April 2023", "what": "Supermeme's pitch page shows US$25,000 ARR and 140,000 signups, with nothing spent to acquire users.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "20 March 2025", "what": "The same page now shows US$65,000 ARR and 750,000 signups.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "2025", "what": "The apps together peak at US$100,000 ARR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "30 July 2026", "what": "Indie Hackers interview: US$6,000 to US$7,000 a month for three apps, more than 2.5 million registered users, and more than US$150,000 earned by Questgen since launch. He works full-time as a data scientist.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "1 August 2026", "what": "He writes that Supermeme makes US$4,400 a month \"even post the ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork revolution\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "6 August 2026", "what": "He gives more than US$300,000 as the total revenue of the three apps.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "All three sites are live with current prices. No source reports a sale of any of them.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11, 12, 13 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Open source first", "text": "Questgen began as a free library on GitHub, with 951 stars and 302 copies (forks) in October 2026. The top of its README says \"Try advanced question generation models for free\" and links to questgen.ai. The code shows what the product does; the hosted version saves the work of installing models and word lists." }, { "title": "One search page for each exact task", "text": "Questgen has a page for each task that a teacher might type into a search engine: MCQ generator, true/false generator, PDF to quiz, video to quiz, Bloom's taxonomy quiz. The founder wrote in August 2026 that Supermeme tries to keep the first or second search result for \"AI meme generator\". Supermeme's pitch page gives its customer acquisition cost as US$0." }, { "title": "Output that fits the next system", "text": "Questgen exports quizzes as QTI 2.1, Moodle XML, GIFT, AIKEN, Respondus text and CSV for D2L Brightspace, formats that school learning systems import. That removes the step of copying each question by hand. Supermeme puts a customer's logo, colors and mascot on memes and offers an API, for the same reason: the output goes straight into the customer's work." }, { "title": "Partners with the missing skills", "text": "Supermeme has an AI developer (Golla), a full-stack developer (Botha) and a meme creator (Sanjeev NC). They work mostly asynchronously in a WhatsApp group. In 2022 Golla advised technical founders to take an SEO course and to partner with someone with a complementary skill set." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder, the companies' own pages and the public Questgen code. They are grade C.", "items": [ "The open-source Questgen library is written in Python. Its README says it uses three T5 models: one for yes/no questions, one for multiple-choice questions, FAQs and paraphrasing, and one for answers. Wrong answer options come from Sense2vec word vectors, a table of words with related meanings.", "The hosted Questgen reads text, PDFs, web pages, images and videos, and its home page says it makes up to 150 quizzes from 100,000 words in one click. In January 2022 the site said it used \"AI algorithms like GPT-3\". The sources do not say which models it uses today.", "Supermeme named GPT-3 on its first page in January 2022, and its footer today says \"powered by OpenAI\". It writes captions in more than 110 languages, searches templates by meaning, and offers a REST API and an MCP server, a standard connection that lets AI assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor make memes.", "AiArtist chains a language model with image and video models to make videos of up to 8 seconds. Its page does not name the models.", "The Supermeme team works mostly asynchronously in a WhatsApp group; the three had not met in person when the Team page was written.", "No outside money. The founder has a full-time data-science job, and the two Supermeme co-founders list other jobs in their X profiles." ], "src": [ 14, 10, 17, 18, 12, 13, 8, 1, 19 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database made quizzes for classrooms or funny images for chats. They lost to free features from larger platforms or never found a way to charge. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Guggy", "years": "2017 to 2020", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Turn the text of a chat message into a matching GIF.", "died": "Chat apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger offered GIFs themselves. Guggy had no way to make money, and users did not stay after the first try.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1429-guggy" }, { "name": "Riffsy", "years": "2013 to 2019", "funding": "US$10.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "GIFs on demand from a phone keyboard.", "died": "Pushed out by Giphy and Tenor, with no plan to make money and no large partner.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/506-riffsy" }, { "name": "Socrative", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$750K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Classroom quizzes answered on students' phones instead of clicker devices.", "died": "Free products from large technology companies and slow adoption by schools. The quiz tool did not become a sustainable business.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1697-socrative" }, { "name": "Blendspace", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$150K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Drag-and-drop digital lesson plans for teachers.", "died": "Google Classroom took the market, and the free plan did not turn into revenue.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1693-blendspace" }, { "name": "QuizUp", "years": "2013 to 2020", "funding": "US$27M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Real-time trivia quiz battles on any topic.", "died": "It did not find a way to make money from its players, lost to live-hosted rivals, and was neglected by the company that bought it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/479-quizup" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The five promised the same two things as this portfolio: quizzes for teachers, and funny images made from a few words. Each died for one of two reasons. A larger platform offered the feature for free (Google Classroom, WhatsApp, Messenger), or many users never turned into payers. Both risks are visible here. Google Forms added quiz generation with Gemini in July 2026, and 2.5 million registered users produce about US$6,500 a month.", "Three things differ. First, AI now writes the questions and the captions, so a part-time team can serve millions of users without writing content by hand. Second, the apps charged early and stayed small: no venture money, no employees, and costs low enough that both were profitable at a few hundred dollars a month in 2022. A business that does not need growth to survive can live on revenue that would end a funded company. Third, they compete on the work around the AI output: export formats for school systems, brand kits for marketing teams, an API and an MCP server." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The 2020 head start, no.", "text": "Questgen had public code and a website by 2020, and Supermeme started in what its team page calls \"the pre-ChatGPT era\". A new quiz or meme generator today starts against free features from Google and OpenAI. The method still works for a new narrow task: free open code, one search page for each exact need, and output in the formats that the customer's other systems read.", "steps": [ "Publish a small open-source library that does one task well, and link the hosted version at the top of its README.", "Build one web page for each exact task that people search for, such as \"PDF to quiz\" or \"AI meme generator\".", "Export into the file formats that the customer's systems already import.", "Find partners with the skills you lack, and keep costs near zero so that a part-time product is profitable at a few hundred dollars a month." ], "open": "Narrow, repeated work tasks where the output must go into another system: test banks for training platforms, branded content for marketing teams, and tools that AI assistants call through an API or an MCP server." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Self-reported and falling", "text": "Every money figure comes from the founder, his co-founders or their own pages. The July 2026 run rate is about 22% below the 2025 peak. Supermeme's pitch page still shows US$65,000 ARR from early 2025, while the founder's US$4,400 a month in August 2026 equals about US$52,800 a year." }, { "title": "Free chatbots do the same job", "text": "OpenAI made ChatGPT for Teachers free for verified US K-12 teachers on 19 November 2025. Its page now says the free period runs through June 2028; eWeek reported June 2027 at launch. Any general chatbot can write quiz questions or meme captions. The founder himself presents Supermeme's US$4,400 a month as surviving \"the ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork revolution\", and one section of his interview is titled \"Competing with big dogs\"." }, { "title": "Education platforms build it in", "text": "Google Forms started rolling out quiz generation with Gemini on 24 July 2026, from a prompt or from Docs, Slides and PDFs in Google Drive, on paid Workspace, Education Plus and Google AI Pro and Ultra plans. Quizlet launched Q-Chat on 1 March 2023, an AI tutor built on OpenAI's ChatGPT API that quizzes students. Questgen's answer is export into other systems, but a teacher who builds quizzes inside Google Forms needs no export step." }, { "title": "Meme templates belong to someone", "text": "On 7 June 2024 a US federal appeals court, the Eighth Circuit, upheld a jury verdict that a congressman's campaign committee infringed the copyright in the \"Success Kid\" meme photo by using it in a fundraising post. The jury had rejected the committee's fair use defense. The photographer had registered the photo in 2012 and licensed it to companies such as Coca-Cola and Microsoft. Damages were US$750, the legal minimum. Supermeme's own guide says that the images behind most memes are copyrighted and that marketing is commercial use, which weighs against fair use. Marketing teams are Supermeme's main target." }, { "title": "Built on one model provider", "text": "Supermeme says it is \"powered by OpenAI\" and named GPT-3 on its first page in 2022. OpenAI also gives away the chat product that competes with it. A price change, a rule change or a better free feature at the provider reaches Supermeme directly. Questgen's open-source roots use T5 models that anyone can run on their own servers, but the sources do not say which models the paid service uses now." }, { "title": "Many users, few payers", "text": "At the cheapest paid price, US$6,500 a month means at most about 1,000 paying accounts among 2.5 million registered users, or 0.04%. Supermeme has more than 2 million of those users and about two thirds of the revenue." }, { "title": "A part-time team", "text": "The founder has a full-time job as a data scientist and runs three apps; his two Supermeme partners list other jobs in their X profiles. Each person holds one role: if one of the three stops, a product loses its only developer, its only AI developer or its only meme creator." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.questgen.ai/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Indie Hackers, 30 July 2026, by James Fleischmann: This full-time data scientist built a $7k/mo portfolio of side projects", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/quOo7AXtrGlePopsGslc", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the free introduction and the table of contents in full. The rest of the article needs an Indie Hackers account and was not read. The lead link indiehackers.com/interview/eda6679953 now opens the case-study database, whose card for this interview shows \"$6.5K MRR\"." }, { "title": "Ramsri Goutham Golla on X, 1 August 2026: Supermeme makes 4400$ MRR", "url": "https://x.com/ramsri_goutham/status/2083487374533922928", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com, from the founder's timeline." }, { "title": "Ramsri Goutham Golla on X, 6 August 2026: 3 Apps, 3 Years, $ 300K+ Revenue", "url": "https://x.com/ramsri_goutham/status/2085297426307727380", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com, from the founder's timeline." }, { "title": "Ramsri Goutham Golla, X profile, read October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/ramsri_goutham", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile through api.fxtwitter.com: 15,580 followers and the bio quoted on this page. His timeline was read back to May 2026." }, { "title": "Supermeme.ai pitch-deck page, read October 2026", "url": "https://www.supermeme.ai/pitch-deck", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Its figures carry no date; the dates come from Wayback captures. 17 captures from May 2022 to August 2026 were downloaded, one per quarter, and 7 of them contain the figures as text." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine capture of the Supermeme.ai pitch-deck page, 2 April 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230402231859/https://www.supermeme.ai/pitch-deck", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the archived page in full. Source for US$25,000 ARR and 140,000 signups. The captures of October 2023, July 2024 and November 2024 show the same text." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine capture of the Supermeme.ai pitch-deck page, 20 March 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250320151930/https://www.supermeme.ai/pitch-deck", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the archived page in full. The first checked capture that shows US$65,000 ARR and 750,000 signups." }, { "title": "Supermeme.ai Team page: Meet the Supermeme.ai Founders and Team", "url": "https://www.supermeme.ai/team", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the three co-founders, their roles, the start in January 2022 and \"completely bootstrapped\"." }, { "title": "Questgen Team page", "url": "https://www.questgen.ai/team", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for \"solo developer of Questgen\" and the link to the 2022 interview." }, { "title": "Questgen home page, read October 2026", "url": "https://www.questgen.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the user count, the input types and the export formats." }, { "title": "Questgen pricing page, read October 2026", "url": "https://www.questgen.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the prices and the QuestgenAI, Inc. copyright line." }, { "title": "Supermeme.ai pricing page, read October 2026", "url": "https://www.supermeme.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the plan data inside the page, which holds the monthly prices." }, { "title": "AiArtist.io pricing page and home page, read October 2026", "url": "https://www.aiartist.io/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both in full; the home page is www.aiartist.io. Source for the one-time pass and the description of the video pipeline." }, { "title": "GitHub: ramsrigouthamg/Questgen.ai, question generation library", "url": "https://github.com/ramsrigouthamg/Questgen.ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the README in full and the repository record through the GitHub API: created 4 August 2020, MIT license, 951 stars and 302 forks in October 2026." }, { "title": "languagetech newsletter, 26 June 2022: Building and Monetizing AI Micro-SaaS: Interview with Ramsri Golla", "url": "https://languagetech.substack.com/p/building-and-monetizing-ai-micro", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. An interview by the newsletter's author, linked from the Questgen Team page. Source for the background, the 2022 revenue and where both ideas came from." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine capture of questgen.ai, 25 December 2020", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201225060350/https://questgen.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the archived page in full. The first capture of the domain." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine capture of questgen.ai, 16 January 2022", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20220116231211/https://questgen.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the archived page in full. Source for the plans, the company API and the GPT-3 wording." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine capture of supermeme.ai, 27 January 2022", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20220127185052/https://supermeme.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the archived page in full. Supermeme before launch: \"Coming Soon\" and GPT-3." }, { "title": "X profiles of the Supermeme co-founders Nico Botha (@nwbotha) and Sanjeev NC (@yenceesanjeev), read October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/nwbotha", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both profiles through api.fxtwitter.com; the second is x.com/yenceesanjeev. They tie both people to Supermeme and list their other jobs." }, { "title": "Supermeme.ai guide by Sanjeev NC, 20 June 2023, updated 24 August 2026: Are Memes Copyrighted?", "url": "https://www.supermeme.ai/meme-marketing/are-memes-copyrighted", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Written by a Supermeme co-founder, and it says it is not legal advice." }, { "title": "US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, opinion filed 7 June 2024, on the Success Kid meme photo", "url": "https://ecf.ca8.uscourts.gov/opndir/24/06/223623P.pdf", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full, 13 pages. An official court record about meme copyright in general, not about this business." }, { "title": "Google Workspace Updates, 30 July 2026: Use Gemini in Google Forms to quickly create a new quiz", "url": "https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2026/07/use-gemini-in-google-forms-to-quickly-create-a-new-quiz.html", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Google's own announcement, with the rollout dates and the plans that include the feature." }, { "title": "Training Industry, 1 March 2023: Quizlet Launches \"Q-Chat,\" AI Tutor Built with OpenAI API", "url": "https://trainingindustry.com/press-release/personalization-and-learning-pathways/quizlet-launches-q-chat-ai-tutor-built-with-openai-api/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Quizlet's press release as published by Training Industry." }, { "title": "OpenAI, 19 November 2025: A free version of ChatGPT built for teachers", "url": "https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-for-teachers/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in October 2026. OpenAI's own page; it now gives June 2028 as the end of the free period." }, { "title": "eWeek, 19 November 2025: OpenAI Launches ChatGPT for Teachers With Free Access Through 2027", "url": "https://www.eweek.com/news/chatgpt-for-teachers-launch-openai/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. A news report from the launch day, which gave June 2027 as the end of the free period." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/virtual-staging-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/virtual-staging-ai.md", "slug": "virtual-staging-ai", "name": "Virtual Staging AI (VSAI)", "country": "USA, team mostly in Germany", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI virtual staging of listing photos", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-14", "launchLabel": "February 2023", "outcomeLabel": "Sold to Zillow for an undisclosed price after US$1M ARR, October 2024", "sticker": "$1M ARR, sold to Zillow", "outcomeUsd": 1000000, "months": 20, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders; 9 employees at the sale in October 2024, mostly in Munich", "fundingLabel": "No external funding reported; US$250,000 from the founders, friends and family", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "real-estate", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "sold", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2B", "Real estate" ], "product": "A web app for real estate agents and photographers. The agent uploads a photo of a room, chooses the room type and a furniture style, and gets back the same room with furniture in about 10 to 15 seconds. It can also remove existing furniture. Plans are monthly subscriptions sized by the number of photos, and the top plan includes an API.", "why": "In 2023, general image generators that were asked to furnish a room also changed the room: the founder said DALL-E might turn a window into a wall painting or add a door, which misrepresents a property. VSAI's own model finds the floor, the ceiling, the mirrors and the doors first and only then adds furniture. It cost US$12 to US$69 a month in early 2024, while VSAI's comparison page lists other staging services at US$16 to US$29 per photo with 12 to 48 hours of waiting. Zillow, the listing portal where such photos end up, bought it.", "summary": [ "Virtual Staging AI, or VSAI, sells virtual staging: furniture and decoration added by software to a photo of an empty room, so that people who look at a home for sale online can see how a room could be used. An agent could also pay someone to do this by hand in Photoshop, photo by photo. VSAI does it with an image model, a neural network trained to create or change pictures. According to the founder, the model first works out the 3D structure of the room, meaning where the floor, the ceiling, the mirrors and the doors are in space, and then places furniture that fits, so that the room itself is not changed. The agent uploads a photo, chooses the room type and a style, and gets the staged photo in seconds.", "Michael Bonacina, the co-founder and CEO, was looking for an apartment in Boston to study at Harvard when he saw a listing that showed the space furnished. After a class on startup research and development, he and another Harvard student, Mikhail Andreev, started VSAI at the Harvard Innovation Labs in 2023; the website was online by 21 February 2023. They put in US$250,000 from their own money and from friends and family, and raised no outside funding. In February 2024 they told TechCrunch that VSAI had 4,500 paying monthly subscribers, made more than 500,000 images a month and had reached US$1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), the yearly value of the subscriptions active at that moment, in ten months. Zillow Group, the Seattle listing company, bought VSAI in a deal that closed on 7 October 2024, for a price that was not disclosed. Its nine employees, most of them in Munich, joined Zillow's AI and tech teams, and in September 2025 Zillow built the technology into its premium listings.", "The sale is grade A: Zillow announced it in a press release and named it in its proxy statement, a document that a listed US company files with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) before its shareholder meeting. The revenue and subscriber numbers are the founders' statements to a journalist, grade C, and no later number was published. With nine employees at the sale, VSAI is at the upper end of what this site calls a small team. The page also shows what happened to earlier companies that sold pictures of furnished rooms made by human designers, and to a photo editor that a platform bought." ], "factsCaption": "A bootstrapped image-model subscription that reported US$1 million in annual recurring revenue within ten months, then sold to Zillow for an undisclosed price", "factsRead": "How to read this table: grade A is Zillow's own press release or SEC filing, or the official text of a law. Grade B is a journalist's report. Grade C is a founder statement to the press, a product review or the company's own web page. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No source gives the sale price.", "timelineLead": "From a website online in February 2023 to a sale to Zillow 20 months later, and a feature on Zillow's own listings 11 months after that. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Virtual Staging AI prices on its own pricing page, read 14 October 2026, under Zillow's ownership (grade C)", "note": "The page shows each plan's price per month with yearly billing and says that yearly billing saves up to 50%. The monthly-billing prices are switched in by a script and could not be read. The Basic plan already includes unlimited renders and downloads, furniture removal and no watermark. Earlier prices: US$29 to US$299 a month in May 2023 (Inman review), and US$12 a month for 6 photos to US$69 a month for 250 photos in February 2024 (TechCrunch).", "rows": [ [ "Basic", "16", "", "6 photos a month; billed US$192 a year" ], [ "Standard, for agents", "19", "", "20 photos a month; billed US$228 a year" ], [ "Professional, for top producers", "39", "", "60 photos a month; billed US$468 a year" ], [ "Enterprise, for teams, brokerages and photographers", "79", "", "150 photos a month; billed US$948 a year; includes the API" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Sale", "value": "to Zillow Group; the deal closed on 7 October 2024", "grade": "A", "note": "Zillow's press release. Zillow's proxy statement, filed with the SEC on 16 April 2025, repeats it: \"In October 2024, we acquired Virtual Staging AI Inc.\"", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Sale price and terms", "value": "not disclosed", "grade": "B", "note": "Inman: \"Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.\" Neither Zillow document gives a price.", "src": [ 5, 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, February 2024", "value": "US$1 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Founders to TechCrunch, 23 February 2024: reached \"over the past 10 months\" without outside investors. No later figure was published.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue implied by that ARR", "value": "about US$83,000 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$1 million divided by 12 is US$83,333.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Paying subscribers, February 2024", "value": "4,500", "grade": "C", "note": "Founders to TechCrunch: \"4,500 monthly paid subscribers\".", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per subscriber implied", "value": "about US$18.50 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$83,333 a month divided by 4,500 subscribers is US$18.52. That fits the plans of US$12 to US$69 a month at the time.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Images made per month, February 2024", "value": "more than 500,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founders to TechCrunch: \"over half a million renders per month\".", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per image implied", "value": "about 17 US cents", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$83,333 a month divided by 500,000 images a month is US$0.167.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Money put in before the sale", "value": "US$250,000 from the founders, friends and family", "grade": "C", "note": "TechCrunch, February 2024: no external funding had been raised.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Team at the sale", "value": "9 employees, mostly in Munich", "grade": "B", "note": "GeekWire: the nine employees joined Zillow's AI and tech team. Zillow: \"Most of the VSAI team is based in Munich\". GeekWire does not say whether the nine include the two founders.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team on the company's careers page", "value": "10 people and 2 machine-learning advisers", "grade": "C", "note": "Undated page, read in October 2026. It lists the two co-founders, research and full-stack engineers, and two customer-success managers.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Prices, May 2023", "value": "US$29 to US$299 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Inman review. The top plan was to include API access. Free images carried a watermark.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Prices, February 2024", "value": "US$12 a month for 6 photos to US$69 a month for 250 photos", "grade": "C", "note": "TechCrunch.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Prices, October 2026", "value": "US$16 to US$79 a month with yearly billing", "grade": "C", "note": "Company pricing page: 6 to 150 photos a month.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Website online", "value": "by 21 February 2023", "grade": "C", "note": "First capture of virtualstagingai.app by the Internet Archive. Zillow dates the founding to 2023.", "src": [ 12, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the first website capture to the sale", "value": "20 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: February 2023 to October 2024.", "src": [ 12, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Use inside Zillow", "value": "Virtual Staging in Zillow Showcase, from 10 September 2025", "grade": "A", "note": "Zillow calls it \"the first major integration of technology from Virtual Staging AI\". A buyer who views a Showcase listing taps an icon on a room photo and chooses a design style.", "src": [ 7 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Before February 2023", "what": "Michael Bonacina, looking for an apartment in Boston to study at Harvard, sees a listing that shows its rooms furnished. After a class on startup research and development, he and Mikhail Andreev, another Harvard student, decide to build a virtual staging startup.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "21 February 2023", "what": "virtualstagingai.app is online, in its first Internet Archive capture. Zillow later dates the founding to 2023, at the Harvard Innovation Labs.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12, 1 ] }, { "when": "19 May 2023", "what": "Inman reviews it: upload a photo, choose a room type, wait for the render. Plans from US$29 to US$299 a month; free images carry a watermark.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "23 February 2024", "what": "The founders tell TechCrunch: 4,500 paying subscribers, more than 500,000 images a month, US$1 million in ARR within 10 months, no outside investors. Plans from US$12 to US$69 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "7 October 2024", "what": "Zillow Group's acquisition of VSAI closes. The price is not disclosed.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "when": "8 October 2024", "what": "GeekWire reports that the nine employees, mostly in Munich, join Zillow's AI and tech team, and that Zillow plans to offer the technology through its own products.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "16 April 2025", "what": "Zillow's proxy statement names the acquisition in its list of the company's 2024 events.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "10 September 2025", "what": "Zillow launches Virtual Staging in Showcase, its premium listing format, as the first major use of VSAI's technology.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "10 October 2025", "what": "California's AB 723 is enacted as Chapter 497: agents must disclose digitally altered listing images, furniture included, and link to the original photo.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "1 January 2026", "what": "AB 723 takes effect.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "A study by Coraly, reported by HousingWire, finds signs of digital change in 10.8% of main listing photos on the four largest US portals, and no visible disclosure on more than 90% of them.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "14 October 2026", "what": "virtualstagingai.app still sells plans from US$16 a month, under Zillow's ownership.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Niche", "text": "General image generators could add furniture to a photo, but they also changed the room. The founder told TechCrunch that DALL-E \"might turn the window into a wall painting, or it might add an additional door\", and that this misrepresents the property. VSAI built a model for this one task: it finds the floor, the ceiling, the mirrors and the doors first, and then adds furniture in the style the agent chose. For a listing photo, an unchanged room matters more than a beautiful picture." }, { "title": "A price per photo close to zero", "text": "VSAI's own comparison page lists other staging services at US$16 to US$29 per photo, with 12 to 48 hours of waiting. VSAI sold a monthly subscription that started at US$12 a month for 6 photos in February 2024, returned each image in seconds and allowed unlimited new attempts. At about US$83,000 a month of revenue and 500,000 images a month, one image brought in about 17 US cents." }, { "title": "Built for agents who are not technical", "text": "TechCrunch reports that the company wanted an easy tool partly because, according to the National Association of Realtors, the median age of its agents in the United States is 60. The product has three steps: upload a photo, choose a room type and a style, download. Free use left a watermark on the image, so an agent could see the result before paying." }, { "title": "A buyer that owns the listing page", "text": "The staged photos end up on listing portals. Zillow bought the team and, eleven months later, built the technology into Showcase, its premium listing format: a home buyer taps an icon on a room photo and chooses a design style, such as Scandinavian or farmhouse. The stand-alone website kept selling subscriptions to agents." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "The sources say little about the technology. These points come from the founder's interview, a review and the company's own pages, grade C, and from the page source of an archived copy of the website, grade B.", "items": [ "Its own image model for one task: it works out the 3D structure of the room, then chooses furniture for the room type and style that the agent picked. The sources do not name a base model or describe the training data.", "Each photo comes back in 10 to 15 seconds, with unlimited new renders of the same photo. Furniture removal is included even in the cheapest plan.", "More than 500,000 images a month in February 2024, for 4,500 paying subscribers.", "The careers page lists two team members with doctorates in computer vision from TU Munich, and one who was an assistant researcher at the lab that developed Stable Diffusion.", "API access was announced for the top plan in 2023 and is part of the Enterprise plan today. The current site also runs an affiliate program that pays 30% commission on referrals.", "In May 2024 the website was a Next.js application whose images were served from Firebase Storage, as the page source of an Internet Archive copy shows." ], "src": [ 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 18 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold software pictures of furnished or edited rooms, or were bought by a platform. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Modsy", "years": "2015 to 2022", "funding": "US$72.7M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "3D pictures of your own room with furniture you could buy.", "died": "Each design still needed paid human designers, customers were expensive to win and rarely came back, and it never made a profit.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2521-modsy" }, { "name": "Laurel & Wolf", "years": "2014 to 2019", "funding": "US$25M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Online interior design by professional designers for a flat fee.", "died": "The flat fees did not cover the cost of finding customers, and quality fell as the designer network grew.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2012-laurel--wolf" }, { "name": "Tastemaker", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$1.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Affordable online interior design for middle-income households.", "died": "Competitors, uneven quality from freelance designers, and too little cash.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1572-tastemaker" }, { "name": "Picnik", "years": "2005 to 2012", "funding": "US$3.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Photo editing in the browser, with nothing to install.", "died": "Google bought it in 2010, moved its technology into other products such as Google+, and shut it down in 2012.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/429-picnik" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Modsy, Laurel & Wolf and Tastemaker sold what VSAI sells, a picture of a furnished room, but each picture needed paid human designers. Their costs grew with each customer, and the database gives unit economics or competition as the cause. VSAI's extra cost for one more image is computing time. At about US$83,000 a month in revenue and more than 500,000 images a month in early 2024, one image brought in about 17 US cents, far below the US$16 or more per photo that VSAI's comparison page lists for other staging services.", "Picnik shows the other risk for a small product: Google bought it, used its technology in other products and closed it two years later. Zillow has so far done something different: it kept virtualstagingai.app selling to agents and built the technology into its own listings. What separates VSAI from the first three is that one model replaced the designer, so a small team could serve 4,500 subscribers without outside investors." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. Virtual staging itself is crowded now.", "text": "VSAI found a task where general image models failed in a way that mattered to the customer, built a narrow model that does not fail that way, and sold it as a cheap self-serve subscription. By 2026 many tools sell virtual staging: one competitor shows US$30,688 of Stripe-verified revenue in 30 days, and Zillow lets buyers restyle rooms on its own listings. The opening is in the next task of the same kind.", "steps": [ "Find a professional photo or document task where a general AI model changes something that must stay the same: walls, doors, text, measurements.", "Build or adapt a model that keeps those parts fixed, and show the before and after on the home page.", "Price per month by volume, low enough that an agent can pay without asking anyone, and let free users see a watermarked result.", "Put an API in the top plan, so photographers and software platforms can build you into their own work." ], "open": "Other listing-photo and document edits that must stay true: floor plans from photos, renovation previews that keep the measurements, and tools that create the disclosure and the link to the original photo that California now requires." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Nine people, and only founder numbers for revenue", "text": "VSAI had nine employees at the sale, at the top of what this site calls a small team. The US$1 million ARR and the 4,500 subscribers are the founders' statements to TechCrunch in February 2024. No later revenue number and no sale price were published, so the size of the exit is unknown." }, { "title": "Disclosure rules for altered photos", "text": "California's AB 723, in force since 1 January 2026, requires agents who advertise with a digitally altered image, including one with furniture added, to say so on or next to the image and to link to the original photo. Changes to lighting, color, cropping and exposure are excluded. The National Association of Realtors' Code of Ethics already requires its members to present a \"true picture\" in advertising, in Article 12, and MLS rules copy that standard." }, { "title": "Buyers who feel misled", "text": "In the study reported by HousingWire in June 2026, 10.8% of main listing photos on the four largest US portals showed signs of digital change, and more than 90% of those had no visible disclosure. A representative of the MLS company CRMLS, quoted by HousingWire, described buyers who used listing photos as evidence in claims: in one case a fire had been added digitally to a fireplace, and the chimney and flue needed US$25,000 to US$30,000 of repairs." }, { "title": "Many competitors, and the platform itself", "text": "VSAI's comparison page lists Styldod, Padstyler, BoxBrownie and Stuccco, which take 12 to 48 hours and charge from US$16 to US$29 per photo. AI tools now compete on price: Refined Listings, a US virtual staging and marketing toolkit, shows US$30,688 of Stripe-verified revenue in the last 30 days on TrustMRR. And Zillow now lets home buyers restyle rooms on its own Showcase listings." }, { "title": "What a sale to a platform means for a small team", "text": "The team now works inside Zillow's AI and tech teams, and the product's future depends on Zillow's plans. Zillow said it would offer the technology \"through Zillow's product suite\", and the stand-alone website still sells subscriptions in October 2026. Picnik, a browser photo editor that Google bought, was closed two years after the sale." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.virtualstagingai.app/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Zillow Group press release, 8 October 2024: Zillow Group acquires AI company offering virtual staging", "url": "https://www.zillowgroup.com/news/zillow-group-acquires-ai-company-offering-virtual-staging/", "grade": "A", "how": "The live page refused the download (HTTP 403). Read in full from an Internet Archive copy. Source for the closing date, the founders, the Munich team and the plan to offer the technology through Zillow's products." }, { "title": "Zillow Group proxy statement (Schedule 14A), filed with the SEC on 16 April 2025", "url": "https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1617640/000161764025000056/z-20250415.htm", "grade": "A", "how": "The SEC site refused the download. Read the list of 2024 events in an Internet Archive copy of January 2026, which names the acquisition of Virtual Staging AI Inc." }, { "title": "GeekWire, 8 October 2024: Zillow Group acquires VSAI, a virtual staging tool that adds furniture to real estate listings", "url": "https://www.geekwire.com/2024/zillow-group-acquires-vsai-a-virtual-staging-tool-that-adds-furniture-to-real-estate-listings/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the nine employees, the Munich base and the Harvard origin." }, { "title": "TechCrunch, 23 February 2024: Virtual Staging AI helps Realtors digitally furnish rooms within seconds", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/23/virtual-staging-ai-helps-realtors-digitally-furnish-rooms-within-seconds/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview. Source for the ARR, the subscribers, the images a month, the prices, the model description and the US$250,000." }, { "title": "Inman, 9 October 2024: Super App Stronger, Zillow Acquires Virtual Staging AI", "url": "https://inman.com/2024/10/09/super-app-stronger-zillow-acquires-virtual-staging-ai/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the free part of the article. Source for the statement that the terms were not disclosed." }, { "title": "Inman, 19 May 2023: Virtual Staging AI ensures you'll never market an empty room again: Tech Review", "url": "https://www.inman.com/2023/05/19/virtual-staging-ai-ensures-youll-never-market-an-empty-room-again-tech-review/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A product review. Source for the 2023 prices, the workflow and the watermark on free images." }, { "title": "Zillow press release, 10 September 2025: Zillow brings AI-powered Virtual Staging to Showcase listings", "url": "https://zillow.mediaroom.com/2025-09-10-Zillow-brings-AI-powered-Virtual-Staging-to-Showcase-listings", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. Source for the first major use of VSAI's technology inside Zillow and the design styles." }, { "title": "Virtual Staging AI pricing page, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://www.virtualstagingai.app/prices", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Shows prices with yearly billing. The monthly-billing prices are switched in by a script and could not be read." }, { "title": "Virtual Staging AI home, API and affiliate pages, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://www.virtualstagingai.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Pages of the product under Zillow's ownership. Source for the turnaround time, the API in the Enterprise plan and the 30% affiliate commission." }, { "title": "Virtual Staging AI careers page, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://www.virtualstagingai.app/career", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. An undated list of team members by first name and role. Source for the team size and backgrounds; this story names only the two co-founders." }, { "title": "Virtual Staging AI comparison page on BoxBrownie competitors, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://www.virtualstagingai.app/boxbrownie-competitors", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. VSAI's own comparison of staging services by price per photo and turnaround time." }, { "title": "Internet Archive capture list for virtualstagingai.app", "url": "http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=virtualstagingai.app", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the list of captures. The first capture is from 21 February 2023." }, { "title": "California Assembly Bill 723 (2025), Real estate: digitally altered images: disclosure, chaptered text (Chapter 497)", "url": "https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB723", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. The official text of the new Section 10140.8 of the Business and Professions Code." }, { "title": "HousingWire, 24 June 2026: Most AI-altered listings go undisclosed, California law bans it", "url": "https://www.housingwire.com/articles/most-ai-altered-listings-go-undisclosed-california-law-bans-it/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Reports the Coraly study of listing photos and the date AB 723 took effect." }, { "title": "HousingWire, 16 April 2026: When listings lie: AI staging pushes real estate into an ethics gray zone", "url": "https://www.housingwire.com/articles/when-listings-lie-ai-staging-pushes-real-estate-into-an-ethics-gray-zone/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the NAR Article 12 true-picture standard and the fireplace claim." }, { "title": "The Close, 25 June 2026: AI Listing Photos Are Now a Disclosure Risk for Agents", "url": "https://theclose.com/news-ai-listing-photo-disclosure/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on the NAR Code of Ethics and MLS rules." }, { "title": "TrustMRR profile of Refined Listings, a competing virtual staging toolkit", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/refined-listings", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile (local cache, revenue last synced 12 October 2026). The revenue is verified through Stripe; the description is written by the seller." }, { "title": "Internet Archive copy of virtualstagingai.app, 25 May 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240525232438/https://www.virtualstagingai.app/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the page source. Source for Next.js and Firebase Storage before the sale." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export of failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/topicalmap/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/topicalmap.md", "slug": "topicalmap", "name": "Topical Map AI", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Topical map generator for SEO", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-14", "launchLabel": "March 2024", "outcomeLabel": "Sold at an undisclosed price after US$6K to US$7K a month, October 2025", "sticker": "Sold after $6K-7K/month", "outcomeUsd": 72000, "months": 19, "teamLabel": "1 founder who built and ran it, and 3 partners named on the site by January 2025", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "seo-ai-search", "channel": "partners", "trend": "sold", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2B", "SEO" ], "product": "A web tool that turns one topic into a topical map: hundreds of search keywords, found and grouped by AI models into clusters of related articles, so that a blogger or an SEO worker can plan a whole site in minutes instead of hours. It sold a monthly number of credits to bloggers, freelancers and agencies.", "why": "The founder built it in about three days to remove the part of blogging he hated, keyword research and content planning. Then he took partners, SEO people who had the audience he did not have, and they promoted it. Revenue reached US$7,000 to US$8,000 a month about eight months after the launch, and he sold the product after he had stopped working on it.", "summary": [ "Topical Map AI (topicalmap.ai) builds a topical map, a plan of related articles that together cover one subject, for search engine optimization (SEO), the work of making web pages appear high in Google's results. The user types a topic, for example \"home automation\". The tool asks AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic for hundreds of keywords, the words and questions that people type into a search engine, and sorts them into clusters, groups of keywords that one article or one section of a site can answer. SEO workers believe that Google ranks a site higher when it covers a subject completely, and they call this topical authority. The company's page in 2025 said that an SEO worker needs more than 10 hours for this work and the tool needs 60 seconds.", "Pete McPherson ran the blog, podcast and YouTube channel Do You Even Blog. After ChatGPT appeared, he moved all his work to AI in early 2023 and started to build apps by having AI write the code, with no experience as a developer. He built Topical Map AI in about three days in March 2024 to solve his own problem and first sold it as a US$49 one-time purchase. From April to November 2024 he took partners who promoted it to their SEO audiences, and he wrote that revenue grew to US$7,000 to US$8,000 a month. In a video of 28 December 2024 he said that it earned US$6,000 to US$7,000 a month, as reported by eBiz Facts. He then left it alone for about ten months and sold it at a price he has not published; his article of 3 October 2025 reports the sale. The buyer, Megan Ragab, writes on the site that she bought it in 2025 and runs it today.", "Every money figure on this page is the founder's own statement, grade C, and one of them is known only from a third party's summary of his video. No payment processor or buyer has confirmed a number, and neither the partners' share of the revenue nor the sale price is public. The page also shows what happened to earlier businesses that depended on traffic from a platform they did not control, or that sold a content tool against larger competitors." ], "factsCaption": "A topical map tool built in about three days that reached US$6,000 to US$8,000 a month in 2024 and was sold at an undisclosed price in 2025, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a statement by the founder, his partner or the company's own pages, or a third party's summary of the founder's words. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a blogger's switch to AI in 2023 to a tool built in three days and sold about 19 months after its launch. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Topical Map AI prices in October 2026, set by the buyer, from the company's home page (grade C)", "note": "Prices are per month with monthly billing. The page has a switch for yearly billing that says \"SAVE 17%\", but the yearly prices load by script and could not be read; on yearly billing the Basic plan gives 20 maps a month instead of 25. There is a 30-day refund if fewer than 10 credits were used, and users can add their own OpenAI key to cut costs. Under the founder the prices were lower: a US$49 one-time offer for 100 maps in April 2024, then US$29, US$59 and US$99 a month for 30, 100 and 250 credits in 2025, or US$290, US$590 and US$990 a year.", "rows": [ [ "Basic", "", "56", "25 maps a month, 20 on yearly billing" ], [ "Pro", "", "104", "46 maps a month, 5 maps at once" ], [ "Enterprise", "", "179", "80 maps a month, 3 seats, API with 100 requests a day" ], [ "Agency", "", "374", "139 maps a month, 5 seats, white-label exports, API with 200 requests a day" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue per month, December 2024", "value": "US$6,000 to US$7,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's video of 28 December 2024, in the summary by eBiz Facts of 20 January 2025: \"TopicalMap.ai, which now earns $6-7K per month\". The speech in the video could not be transcribed for this page.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month, April to November 2024", "value": "grew to US$7,000 to US$8,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's own article of 3 October 2025, after he took partners who promoted the product. He calls it mostly passive for him.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the December 2024 range", "value": "about US$72,000 to US$84,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the range times 12. The outcome value on this page is the low end, US$72,000.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Sale", "value": "sold at a price that has not been published", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's article of 3 October 2025: \"Sold Topical Map AI after 10 months of ignoring it\". His projects page: \"Built, launched, and successfully sold the product.\" The buyer writes on the home page that she bought it in 2025.", "src": [ 1, 10, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue at the time of the sale", "value": "not published", "grade": "C", "note": "The latest figure is from December 2024, about ten months before the sale was reported.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Earnings from the two companies he sold", "value": "more than US$350,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's article. The figure covers Topical Map AI and FABB AI together and does not separate revenue from sale proceeds. FABB AI was listed for US$45,000 in December 2024 and sold within 10 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Portfolio revenue in 2024", "value": "about US$100,000 from several AI-coded apps", "grade": "C", "note": "Title of the founder's video of 28 December 2024, and eBiz Facts: \"$100,000+ Revenue in 1 Year\". This is not Topical Map AI alone.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Time to build the first version", "value": "about 3 days, March 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's article. He built it to solve his own problem with keyword research and content planning.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Launch offer, April 2024", "value": "US$49 one-time for 100 topical maps", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived home page of 13 April 2024, shown as US$50 off a price of US$99, for the launch only.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Plans in 2025", "value": "US$29, US$59 and US$99 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived home page of 20 January 2025: 30, 100 and 250 credits a month, or US$290, US$590 and US$990 a year.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "AI models in the product, 2025", "value": "\"the latest OpenAI & Anthropic\" models", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived home page of 20 January 2025. The founder's projects page says that he integrated OpenAI.", "src": [ 7, 10 ] }, { "fact": "People named as the builders, January 2025", "value": "4", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder, the SEO trainer Charles Floate and two people listed with Merged.ca. Charles Floate called the founder \"my business partner\" in a video of 2 September 2024.", "src": [ 7, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Legal form, April 2024", "value": "a sole proprietorship owned solely by Pete McPherson", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived terms of 13 April 2024, under the law of Michigan. The terms today name the buyer as the sole owner.", "src": [ 5, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "A sole proprietorship in April 2024. The buyer's page today shows \"$0 VC funding (proudly bootstrapped)\".", "src": [ 5, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Use by October 2026", "value": "more than 4,000 accounts and 12,000 maps", "grade": "C", "note": "Buyer's home page, counted since the launch.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the reported sale", "value": "19 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: March 2024 to October 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "January 2023", "what": "Pete McPherson, who runs the blog, podcast and YouTube channel Do You Even Blog, decides after the release of ChatGPT to move all his work to AI.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "March 2023", "what": "He sees a YouTube video in which ChatGPT writes code and starts to build his first app, with no experience as a developer.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "August 2023", "what": "He tries again: an app that takes three weeks to build grows at once to US$1,000 a month in recurring revenue.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "October 2023", "what": "FABB AI, a Fully Autonomous Blog Bot, makes about US$3,000 a month. A health emergency makes him pause all his work.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "March 2024", "what": "He builds Topical Map AI in about three days to solve his own problem, makes \"a few grand\" and then leaves it to run.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "13 April 2024", "what": "The first archived copy of the site: \"1,000 keywords in 1 click\", US$49 one-time for 100 topical maps. The terms name him as the sole owner.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "when": "April to November 2024", "what": "He takes partners who promote the product. Revenue grows to US$7,000 to US$8,000 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2 September 2024", "what": "The SEO trainer Charles Floate publishes an interview with him, \"Meet The Dev - Topical Map AI\", and calls him \"my business partner\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "December 2024", "what": "He lists FABB AI for sale at US$45,000, and it sells within 10 days.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "28 December 2024", "what": "His video \"How I made $100k last year from AI-coded apps\". eBiz Facts reports from it that Topical Map AI earns US$6,000 to US$7,000 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "when": "20 January 2025", "what": "The home page names four builders and sells plans at US$29, US$59 and US$99 a month, with OpenAI and Anthropic models.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "3 October 2025", "what": "His guest article on Making Sense of Cents reports that he sold Topical Map AI after ten months of ignoring it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The buyer, Megan Ragab, runs a rebuilt version at US$56 to US$374 a month, with more than 4,000 accounts created and a 40% recurring commission for affiliates.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 18 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Distribution through partners", "text": "The founder says he hates marketing. He took partners who already had the audience he needed, SEO people with their own followers, and revenue grew to US$7,000 to US$8,000 a month about eight months after the launch. He describes his usual offer to a partner like this: he builds the app, gives the support and runs everything, about 97% of the work; the partner promotes it; they split the monthly profits and the sale 50/50." }, { "title": "His own problem, built in days", "text": "He started from the part of blogging that he hated, keyword research and content planning, and built the first version in about three days with AI writing the code. A product this small costs little time to test. His rule is to decide in the third month whether to stop a project or keep it." }, { "title": "Charge from the first version", "text": "The first offer was a US$49 one-time deal for 100 maps. By 2025 it was a subscription with a fixed number of credits a month, from US$29 to US$99, which limits how much model use each customer can cause." }, { "title": "Built to sell", "text": "Before each project he asks, \"Can I sell this in 12 months?\" or \"Can I make this 90% passive?\" He sold FABB AI ten days after he listed it, and sold Topical Map AI after ten months without work on it. He writes that buyers look for stable revenue, an easy transition and an interesting brand, and that he would have earned more if he had not paused both companies." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's article, the page of his December 2024 video, his projects page and archived copies of the product's site. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Built by a founder with no experience as a developer, by having AI write the code, which he calls vibe-coding. He recommends the AI code editor Cursor, or Windsurf.", "Stack: SvelteKit for the web app, Firebase as the database and backend, Stripe for payments. The description of his December 2024 video, which lists topicalmap.ai among his builds, adds Resend for emails, Zapier for automation and Cursor.", "His projects page lists OpenAI, SvelteKit and Firebase for Topical Map AI. The 2025 site offered \"the latest OpenAI & Anthropic\" models.", "Each plan had a monthly number of credits: 30, 100 or 250 in 2025. Paying customers also got a private Discord community.", "Customers came through partners with SEO audiences. By his account his own Do You Even Blog audience is a large asset for all his products. He was disappointed by every Product Hunt launch that he tried.", "The buyer has rebuilt it since 2025, with four map types, exports, team seats, an API and an option to use your own OpenAI key." ], "src": [ 1, 3, 10, 7, 8 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five businesses in the Loot Drop database lived on traffic or attention that another company controlled, or sold a content tool against larger competitors. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Waterproof Digital Camera", "years": "2013 to 2017", "funding": "None", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "An affiliate blog of camera reviews, built with aggressive SEO methods to earn commissions from Amazon through Google traffic.", "died": "Google's algorithm updates removed the search traffic that the site was built on.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2023-waterproof-digital-camera" }, { "name": "Upworthy Insider", "years": "2015 to 2020", "funding": "US$12M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Positive stories written to spread through Facebook.", "died": "Facebook changed the algorithm of its feed, and the traffic fell. There was no second source of readers.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/692-upworthy-insider" }, { "name": "Room 77", "years": "2010 to 2017", "funding": "US$43.7M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Detailed data on hotel rooms and their prices.", "died": "Large travel companies competed with it, and Google reduced its role, according to the database.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/512-room-77" }, { "name": "Hyperink", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$1.4M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "E-books on niche topics, produced quickly for small audiences.", "died": "Self-published books and free content online filled the same niches, and Amazon controlled the store.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1192-hyperink" }, { "name": "Pressly", "years": "2011 to 2018", "funding": "US$2.9M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A simple platform for brands to collect and publish content with less work.", "died": "Competitors sold full suites that included the same function, and Pressly did not grow beyond it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/462-pressly" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the five earned its income from attention that another company controlled: Google's search results, Facebook's feed or Amazon's store. When that company changed its ranking or competed directly, the traffic and the income went away. Topical Map AI sells to people who are in that position with Google: bloggers, freelancers and agencies whose sites depend on search traffic. Google's helpful content system, updated on 14 September 2023 and made part of its core ranking in March 2024, is designed to lower content \"made primarily to gain search engine traffic\", and a Pew Research Center study found that people click a normal result about half as often when Google shows an AI summary.", "Two things differ. Topical Map AI is a tool, not a content site, so it did not need its own pages to rank: its customers carried that risk, and its partners brought customers to it directly. And it took about three days to build, with a small stack, so the founder could sell it as soon as he stopped working on it. The buyer now carries the risk that fewer people will pay to plan content for Google while Google answers more questions itself." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The product, only with a partner who has the audience.", "text": "A small tool that removes one tedious step for people who already pay for tools, built in days with AI writing the code, is still easy to copy, and the founder's own account says that the hard part was finding customers, which he solved with partners. The weak point is the market: SEO tools are many, a larger tool such as Surfer already has a topical map feature, and AI summaries in Google now take clicks from the customers' own sites.", "steps": [ "Pick a task that you do yourself every week and dislike, and build the smallest tool that does it, in days, with an AI code editor.", "Charge from the first version: a low one-time price for early users, then monthly plans with a fixed number of credits so that model costs stay inside the price.", "Find a partner who already has your customers' attention, and offer a share of the profit and of a later sale for promoting it.", "From the first day, keep the product easy to hand over: stable revenue, little support work and a clear brand, which the founder says is what buyers look for." ], "open": "Small tools for other groups whose work is still manual and repeated: newsletter writers, podcast producers and YouTube creators, and tools for visibility in AI assistants instead of in Google." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Self-reported, partly second-hand, and old", "text": "Both revenue figures come from the founder, and the December 2024 figure is known only from the summary of his video by eBiz Facts. The latest figure is about ten months older than the reported sale, and he says that he ignored the product in that time, so the revenue at the sale is unknown. The sale price is not public." }, { "title": "The money was shared", "text": "The home page named four people as the builders in 2025. The founder describes his usual partner deal as a 50/50 split of the monthly profits and of the sale, and says that he has made it twice, but he does not say what the split was for Topical Map AI. His figure of more than US$350,000 covers two companies together." }, { "title": "Google decides whether the customers' sites get traffic", "text": "A topical map is a method to rank in Google. Google's helpful content update of 14 September 2023 aimed at content made mainly to gain search traffic. In March 2024 that system became part of Google's core ranking, and a new policy against scaled content abuse covers many pages made to manipulate rankings, \"no matter how it's created\". Core updates followed in August, November and December 2024 and in March, June and December 2025. A customer who publishes AI articles from a map in large numbers is in the group that these rules aim at." }, { "title": "AI answers take clicks from websites", "text": "Pew Research Center tracked the browsing of 900 U.S. adults in March 2025. When Google showed an AI summary, users clicked a normal result in 8% of visits, against 15% without one, and clicked a link inside the summary in 1% of visits. If websites get fewer clicks, their owners have less reason to pay for a tool that plans content for search." }, { "title": "Larger SEO tools have the same feature", "text": "Surfer, a larger SEO content tool, documents its own Topical Map tool in its help center. A small stand-alone tool has to compete with features that customers may already have in a tool they pay for." }, { "title": "Model providers set the costs and the rules", "text": "The product depends on models from OpenAI and Anthropic, so their prices and limits set its costs; the buyer's page now lets users add their own OpenAI key to cut costs. The building method depends on providers too: in March 2026 the founder wrote that usage limits made Claude Code \"unusable\" for him, and three days later that he had cancelled his Anthropic subscription." }, { "title": "A new owner rebuilt it", "text": "The buyer writes that she did not build the first version and has been fixing and rebuilding it since she bought it. She raised the monthly prices from US$29 to US$99 to between US$56 and US$374. The figures on this page describe the founder's version, not the business today." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://topicalmap.ai/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Pete McPherson, guest article on Making Sense of Cents, 3 October 2025: How I've Made $350,000 From AI-Built Apps", "url": "https://www.makingsenseofcents.com/2025/10/how-ive-made-350000-from-ai-built-apps.html", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's own account. Source for the dated timeline, the build in three days, the US$7,000 to US$8,000 a month, the partners, the sale and the stack." }, { "title": "eBiz Facts, Niall Doherty, 20 January 2025, updated 9 March 2025: He Made $100,000 Last Year From AI-Coded Apps", "url": "https://ebizfacts.com/pete-mcpherson-100k-ai-coded-apps-1-year/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A short profile that summarizes the founder's video. Source for the US$6,000 to US$7,000 a month. Also read in the copy syndicated on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/25441508-he-made-100-000-last-year-from-ai-coded-apps" }, { "title": "Pete McPherson, YouTube channel Code Playbook, 28 December 2024: How I made $100k last year from AI-coded apps", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPS4RYrxqI4", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the video page and its description, which list his stack and his builds. The speech could not be transcribed, so the revenue figure is cited from eBiz Facts." }, { "title": "Charles Floate, YouTube, 2 September 2024: Meet The Dev - Topical Map AI - Pete McPherson", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1b23mb49z4", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the video page and its description, in which Charles Floate calls the founder his business partner." }, { "title": "Topical Map AI terms and conditions, archived 13 April 2024", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20240413185916/https://topicalmap.ai/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the sole proprietorship owned by Pete McPherson and the law of Michigan." }, { "title": "Topical Map AI home page, archived 13 April 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240413184543/https://topicalmap.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The first archived copy. Source for the launch offer and the founder's own description of the problem." }, { "title": "Topical Map AI home page, archived 20 January 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250120183512/https://topicalmap.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, and compared with the archived copies of 22 April, 15 July, 12 August and 6 September 2025, which show the same builders and plans, and of 16 December 2025 and 10 February 2026, which show the buyer's new site. Source for the builders, the plans and the AI models." }, { "title": "Topical Map AI home page, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://topicalmap.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the buyer's statement, the current prices and limits, the account and map counts and the own OpenAI key option." }, { "title": "Topical Map AI terms and conditions, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://topicalmap.ai/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The terms now name the buyer as the sole owner." }, { "title": "Pete McPherson, projects page, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://petemcpherson.com/projects", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the sale statement and the stack of Topical Map AI. It dates the product 2023 to 2025, while his article dates the build to March 2024." }, { "title": "Pete McPherson on X (@doyouevenblog), posts of 3 October 2025 and 24 and 27 March 2026", "url": "https://x.com/doyouevenblog/status/2036470062438121978", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the timeline through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the link to his article and for his posts on Claude Code limits and the cancelled Anthropic subscription." }, { "title": "Google Search Central: A guide to Google Search ranking systems", "url": "https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ranking-systems-guide", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the section on the helpful content system, which says it became part of the core ranking systems in March 2024." }, { "title": "Google Search Central blog, 5 March 2024: What web creators should know about our March 2024 core update and new spam policies", "url": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the section on scaled content abuse." }, { "title": "Google Search Status Dashboard: History for Ranking", "url": "https://developers.google.com/search/updates/ranking", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the list of ranking updates from 2023 to 2025. The address leads to the Google Search Status Dashboard." }, { "title": "Pew Research Center, 22 July 2025: Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results", "url": "https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the click rates with and without an AI summary." }, { "title": "Surfer help center: Topical Map", "url": "https://docs.surferseo.com/en/collections/12374402-topical-map", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the collection page, which documents a competitor's Topical Map tool." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." }, { "title": "Topical Map AI affiliate program page, read 14 October 2026", "url": "https://topicalmap.ai/aff", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The buyer's affiliate program with a 40% recurring commission." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/vidon-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/vidon-ai.md", "slug": "vidon-ai", "name": "Vidon.ai", "country": "United Kingdom", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI tool that turns blog posts and other text into videos", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-15", "launchLabel": "May 2022", "outcomeLabel": "US$6K a month, October 2022", "sticker": "$6K/mo in 5 months", "outcomeUsd": 72000, "months": 5, "teamLabel": "1 founder; 3 employees listed in October 2022; 1 in later accounts", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "video", "channel": "sales", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Video" ], "product": "A web app that turns a blog post, an article or any written text into a short video with a generated voice, animated titles and stock images and clips, for YouTube, TikTok, other social networks and the customer's own web pages. You paste a link or write in an editor that looks like a text document, and the app builds the video. Today it also plans and publishes the videos to social media.", "why": "Content marketing agencies already had hundreds of articles and wanted video without cameras or editors. The company found them with cold email: for each large prospect it turned a recent post from the prospect's own blog into a video and sent it free, which often started a conversation. About six agencies with large contracts paid most of the first US$6,000 a month.", "summary": [ "Vidon.ai turns written content into video. A customer pastes the address of a blog post, or writes in an editor that looks like Google Docs, and the app reads the text aloud with speech synthesis, a model that turns text into a spoken voice, and puts titles, images and stock clips around it. The result is a short video for YouTube, TikTok and other social networks, or for the blog page itself. The company sold this to content marketing agencies, and used it on its own site for programmatic SEO: search engine optimization, the work of making pages rank higher in Google, done by a program that creates many pages from a template and a database, here each page with its own generated video.", "Alex Robinson, a founder with a background in artificial intelligence, started it in London in May 2022, from a problem at his previous startup: video got more engagement than text, but it took too much time and equipment. On 23 October 2022 he told Starter Story that it made US$6,000 a month in MRR, monthly recurring revenue, the subscription revenue that repeats every month, that it had helped more than 200 companies turn written content into video, and that it had no investors and was profitable from the first day. His company, Vidon AI Ltd, files micro-entity accounts, the shortest yearly accounts that UK law allows for very small companies: a balance sheet with no sales line. They show its net assets, what the company owns minus what it owes, growing from GBP 13,845 in August 2023 to GBP 57,203 in August 2024 and GBP 188,777 in August 2025, with one employee.", "The revenue figure is the founder's own statement, grade C, and no later source gives revenue. The accounts are filed by law but not audited, so they are grade C as well. The filing history shows no new shares, so the rise in net assets is profit after tax that stayed in the company: GBP 131,574 in the year to August 2025, three times the GBP 43,358 of the year before. The page also shows earlier companies that promised video without the work, and what changed after 2022: video models from Google and OpenAI, and a YouTube rule against mass-produced videos." ], "factsCaption": "US$6,000 a month five months after the start, in the founder's words, then three years of growing net assets in the company's filed accounts, all grade C", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a founder statement, a page of the company, or a figure from accounts that the company filed without an audit. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a one-button prototype to a company with GBP 188,777 in net assets, in a little over three years. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Vidon.ai prices in October 2026, read from the code of the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "The page shows the same numbers in US dollars, pounds or euros, depending on the visitor's location. The yearly prices are labelled a 40% flash sale for a limited time, but the page's code sets the end of the sale to the next 4th, 8th, 12th, 16th, 20th, 24th or 28th of the month, so the sale never ends. Each video exports in 3 aspect ratios. Teams can ask the sales team for a custom plan.", "rows": [ [ "Individual", "29", "49", "10 videos a month; voiceovers, stock media, publishing to social media" ], [ "Business", "89", "149", "40 videos a month; brand kits, API access, analytics, video translation, bulk creation, video hosting" ], [ "Custom", "on request", "", "custom plan through the sales team" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue per month, October 2022", "value": "US$6,000 in recurring revenue", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview with Starter Story, 23 October 2022, five months after the start in May 2022. Most of it came from about six content marketing agencies with large contracts.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the October 2022 figure", "value": "US$72,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$6,000 times 12. This is the headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Companies served by October 2022", "value": "more than 200", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview: the product had helped more than 200 small and large companies turn written content into video. The interview does not say how many of them paid.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder: no investment was taken, and the business was profitable from the first day. His X profile says he is bootstrapping. The filing history shows no share issue.", "src": [ 1, 4, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Net assets, 31 August 2023", "value": "GBP 13,845", "grade": "C", "note": "Micro-entity accounts for the first period, 17 August 2022 to 31 August 2023: current assets GBP 17,093, a provision of GBP 3,248 for liabilities, no debts.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Net assets, 31 August 2024", "value": "GBP 57,203", "grade": "C", "note": "Micro-entity accounts: current assets GBP 81,358, a provision of GBP 24,155 for liabilities, no debts.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Net assets, 31 August 2025", "value": "GBP 188,777", "grade": "C", "note": "Unaudited micro-entity accounts: current assets GBP 232,365, debts due within one year GBP 43,588. Approved by the director on 14 May 2026.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Profit kept in the company, year to August 2025", "value": "GBP 131,574", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: net assets of GBP 188,777 minus GBP 57,203. With no new shares in the filing history, the rise is profit after tax that stayed in the company. Any dividends paid to the owner would come on top.", "src": [ 4, 6, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Profit kept in the company, year to August 2024", "value": "GBP 43,358", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: GBP 57,203 minus GBP 13,845. The year to August 2025 kept about three times as much.", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Employees", "value": "an average of 0 in the first period, then 1 in each of the next two years", "grade": "C", "note": "Company accounts. Starter Story's page listed 1 founder and 3 employees in October 2022, and the interview speaks of a small team.", "src": [ 1, 5, 6, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Main costs, October 2022", "value": "video rendering and the speech generation AI", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview. Marketing used only free channels, email and content.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Prices, October 2026", "value": "US$49 or US$149 a month; US$29 or US$89 a month billed yearly", "grade": "C", "note": "Read from the code of the pricing page. 10 or 40 videos a month.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Company status, October 2026", "value": "Active", "grade": "C", "note": "Companies House. Accounts filed on 14 May 2026, confirmation statement dated 30 July 2026. One director, Alexander Robinson, who signs the accounts as Alex Robinson and is listed as the person with significant control.", "src": [ 2, 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Referral links to the site", "value": "48 different referral tags, October 2022 to June 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Wayback Machine index of captured addresses. Many tags name AI tool directories, for example betalist, futuretools.io and toolspedia.io. No source says how many customers they brought.", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "fact": "Followers of the founder's X account, October 2026", "value": "43", "grade": "C", "note": "The profile says he is building vidon.ai and building in public. Its latest posts, January and February 2024, are almost daily video tips. His own audience was not the sales channel.", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the start to the October 2022 figure", "value": "5 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: May 2022 to October 2022.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "April 2021", "what": "The domain vidon.ai shows a different product: AI-personalized sales videos made with a deepfake that looks and talks like the seller. No source says who ran it or whether it was the founder's previous startup.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "May 2022", "what": "Alex Robinson starts Vidon.ai in London and gives himself six months to build and test it, without investment. The first version is one button: paste a blog's address and get a video.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2022", "what": "Content marketers like the result but cannot edit the video. After two months of feedback the team designs version 2 in Figma: an editor that looks like Google Docs or Notion.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "12 July 2022", "what": "The founder opens his X account, @alex_vidon_ai.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "17 August 2022", "what": "Vidon AI Ltd is registered in England and Wales, with Robinson as the only director.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "when": "17 September 2022", "what": "The company blog publishes a guide to programmatic SEO. The company's own API made a video for each page of its learning center.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10, 1 ] }, { "when": "23 October 2022", "what": "Starter Story interview: US$6,000 a month, most of it from about six agencies, and more than 200 companies helped. Cold email is the most profitable channel.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "31 August 2023", "what": "End of the first accounting period: net assets GBP 13,845 and an average of 0 employees.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "31 August 2024", "what": "Net assets GBP 57,203 and an average of 1 employee.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "15 July 2025", "what": "YouTube renames its repetitious content policy to inauthentic content and says that it includes mass-produced videos, which cannot earn money.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15, 16 ] }, { "when": "31 August 2025", "what": "Net assets GBP 188,777 and an average of 1 employee. The year kept GBP 131,574 of profit in the company.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "14 May 2026", "what": "The 2025 accounts are approved and filed. The company is Active.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 4, 7 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "Latest capture of the site in the Wayback Machine index. AI tool directories still link to it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The site sells two plans, US$49 and US$149 a month, for 10 and 40 videos, with a sale on yearly plans that never ends.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A free sample made from the prospect's own post", "text": "The first customers came from targeted cold emails to content marketing agencies. The emails to large prospects carried a video made from a recent post on the prospect's own blog, which the prospect could use as it liked. The founder said this often opened a conversation. Cold email was still the most profitable channel in October 2022." }, { "title": "Reuse what the customer already has", "text": "Agencies and blog owners already had hundreds of articles. Vidon.ai did not ask them for new work, cameras or editors: the text became the script, the voice was generated, and stock media filled the screen." }, { "title": "An editor that looks like a text document", "text": "Version 1 had no editing, and that was the main complaint of content marketers. Version 2 looks like Google Docs or Notion, so a blog writer could edit a video by editing text: a heading becomes an animated title, an image becomes a scene." }, { "title": "Programmatic video SEO on its own site", "text": "The company used its own API to make a video for every page of its learning center, and described the method on its blog in September 2022. The founder expected search to replace cold email as the main channel. No later source says whether it did." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's interview and the code of the company's current website. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Version 1 was one button: paste the address of a blog post and get a video. Content marketers liked it but could not edit the result.", "Version 2, prototyped in Figma after two months of feedback, is a document editor: text is read by a generated voice, a heading becomes an animated title and a dropped image becomes part of the video.", "A small version of the editor was put on the homepage as a demo, because the first website did not turn visitors into users.", "In 2022 the main costs were video rendering and the speech generation AI. No source names the speech provider.", "The homepage today lists Realistic AI Voiceovers, ChatGPT and URL to Video as features, and the plans include a stock media library of more than 12 million items. It does not say what ChatGPT does in the product.", "The website is a single-page app built with Vue. Its code loads HubSpot, Google Analytics, PostHog and the Chatwoot support chat, and it asks Drift's location service for the visitor's country to show prices in dollars, pounds or euros.", "In 2022 the company named five tools: HubSpot for analytics, customer records (CRM), email and the blog, Notion for tasks and documents, Fullstory for website monitoring, Webflow for the website and Figma for design.", "The team alternated weeks: one week building, the next week marketing." ], "src": [ 1, 8, 9 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database promised video without the skill or the work. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Qwiki", "years": "2010 to 2015", "funding": "US$10M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Search results turned automatically into narrated multimedia stories.", "died": "High running costs and users who preferred text. Yahoo bought it, and Google and the large mobile video apps won the users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/481-qwiki" }, { "name": "ClearMix", "years": "2020 to 2023", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Professional marketing videos without a studio budget, made by freelance videographers on demand.", "died": "Canva and Adobe added video, and AI made its manual process obsolete.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1336-clearmix" }, { "name": "HighlightCam", "years": "2009 to 2012", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Automatic editing that found the best moments in raw footage.", "died": "Smartphone apps and consumer editing software such as iMovie did the job well enough, and its costs were high.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1636-highlightcam" }, { "name": "Fuzzwich", "years": "2007 to 2010", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Simple animated videos for casual users and small businesses, with no animation skills needed.", "died": "It stayed on the desktop while users moved to phones, and larger tools from Adobe won.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1655-fuzzwich" }, { "name": "ReelSurfer", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$1.25M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Clip and share parts of online videos without editing skills.", "died": "YouTube and Facebook built the same functions into their own platforms.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1577-reelsurfer" } ], "whatChanged": [ "All five sold video creation as a separate tool, and all five lost to a larger product that added the feature or made it unnecessary: Google and mobile video for Qwiki, Canva and Adobe for ClearMix, phone apps for HighlightCam and Fuzzwich, YouTube and Facebook for ReelSurfer. Qwiki also carried the high cost of making narrated video by machine in 2010.", "Two things differ for Vidon.ai. Generated voices and cloud rendering made each video cheap enough that the business was profitable from the first day, with one founder and no investors. And it sold to businesses with a budget, content agencies, rather than to consumers. The risk is the one ReelSurfer met: since 2024 Google and OpenAI have released models that make a video from a text prompt, and Google also owns YouTube, one of the platforms that these videos are made for." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The sales method, yes. The product, only in a niche.", "text": "Turning blog posts into videos was a gap in 2022. Since 2024 the model makers sell video generation directly, so a general text-to-video tool is harder to start now. The sales method still works: make the prospect's own sample before the first message, sell to agencies that serve many clients, and keep the costs to rendering and speech models.", "steps": [ "Pick buyers who already have a lot of raw material: agencies, publishers, shops with many product pages.", "Before the first email, turn one of the prospect's own pages into the product's output and send it free.", "Start with a few large accounts, then spread the revenue over more customers.", "Use your own product to create the pages that bring search traffic." ], "open": "Narrow content types with many pages, such as product catalogs, property listings or software documentation, sold to the agencies that manage them." }, "watch": [ { "title": "One old, self-reported revenue figure", "text": "The only revenue figure is the founder's interview from October 2022. No later post, interview or payment processor gives revenue, and TrustMRR shows no profile for it. The accounts show money kept in the company, not sales, and nobody audits them." }, { "title": "A few large customers", "text": "In October 2022 most revenue came from about six content agencies. The founder said he wanted to depend less on them. No later source says whether he did." }, { "title": "The model makers now make video from text", "text": "Google announced its video model Veo in May 2024 and released Veo 3, which also makes sound, in May 2025. OpenAI opened Sora to paying ChatGPT users in the United States and Canada on 9 December 2024 and released Sora 2 with a phone app on 30 September 2025. A customer can now get a video from a text prompt without a separate tool." }, { "title": "YouTube's rule on mass-produced videos", "text": "On 15 July 2025 YouTube renamed its repetitious content policy to inauthentic content and said that it includes repetitive or mass-produced content, which cannot earn money in its Partner Program. The Business plan sells bulk creation and 40 videos a month. Customers who post many similar generated videos may lose that income, and with it their reason to pay." }, { "title": "Dependence on model providers", "text": "Rendering and the speech model were the main costs in 2022, and the sources do not name the providers. A provider can change prices or close a model: OpenAI announced on 24 March 2026 that it would close Sora, shut the app on 26 April 2026 and the API on 24 September 2026. No source says that Vidon.ai used Sora; the case shows what a provider can do." }, { "title": "A sale that never ends", "text": "The pricing page shows a 40% flash sale on yearly plans that ends at midnight on a date that the page's code moves forward every few days. Customers who notice may distrust the list price." }, { "title": "Team size is unclear", "text": "Starter Story listed 3 employees in October 2022, but the company's first accounts report an average of 0 employees and the next two report 1. The accounts do not count the other people as employees, and no source names them." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://vidon.ai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Starter Story, 23 October 2022: How This AI Tool Hit $6K MRR In Just 5 Months", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/vidon-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview with Alex Robinson. Source for the revenue, the customer count, the team shown on the page, the cold email method, the costs and the 2022 tools." }, { "title": "Companies House, the UK company register: Vidon AI Ltd, company number 14301168", "url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/14301168", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the overview. Source for the status, the incorporation date, the activity code and the dates of the latest accounts and confirmation statement. The register does not check what companies file." }, { "title": "Companies House: Vidon AI Ltd, officers", "url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/14301168/officers", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the officer list: one director, appointed on 17 August 2022. Only the name and role are used on this page." }, { "title": "Companies House: Vidon AI Ltd, filing history", "url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/14301168/filing-history", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full list of 13 filings, August 2022 to August 2026. Source for the absence of any share issue and for the person with significant control." }, { "title": "Companies House: micro-entity accounts for 17 August 2022 to 31 August 2023", "url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/14301168/filing-history/MzQwNjY1NjY5MmFkaXF6a2N4/document?format=xhtml&download=1", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full (the iXBRL file). Source for the current assets, the provision, the net assets and the average of 0 employees. Approved on 5 January 2024." }, { "title": "Companies House: micro-entity accounts for the year to 31 August 2024", "url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/14301168/filing-history/MzQ0MzY0NTgxMmFkaXF6a2N4/document?format=xhtml&download=1", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full (the iXBRL file). Source for the net assets and the average of 1 employee. Approved on 16 November 2024." }, { "title": "Companies House: unaudited micro-entity accounts for the year to 31 August 2025", "url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/14301168/filing-history/MzUyMTY5OTQ5MWFkaXF6a2N4/document?format=xhtml&download=1", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full (the iXBRL file). Source for the net assets, the debts, the audit exemption and the average of 1 employee. Approved on 14 May 2026." }, { "title": "Vidon.ai pricing page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://vidon.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "The page loads its prices by script. Read the page's own script file for the plans, the prices, the video limits and the sale countdown." }, { "title": "Vidon.ai homepage, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://vidon.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page and its main script file for the feature list, the founder's title and the services that the page loads." }, { "title": "Vidon blog, 17 September 2022: Programmatic SEO - Ultimate Guide", "url": "https://blogs.vidon.ai/programmatic-seo-using-video", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's write-up of the search campaign named in the interview." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers: Vidon.ai product page", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/product/vidon-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names Alex Robinson as founder. Shows no revenue." }, { "title": "Alex Robinson on X: @alex_vidon_ai", "url": "https://x.com/alex_vidon_ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile and the latest 20 posts through api.fxtwitter.com. No post gives a revenue figure." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine: www.vidon.ai on 30 April 2021", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210430044659/https://www.vidon.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Shows a different product on the same domain, with no name of the people behind it." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine: index of captured vidon.ai addresses", "url": "http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=vidon.ai*&output=txt&fl=timestamp,original,statuscode&collapse=urlkey&limit=400", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the list of 326 captured addresses, April 2021 to June 2026. Source for the referral tags and the latest capture." }, { "title": "TechCrunch, Sarah Perez, 9 July 2025: YouTube prepares crackdown on mass-produced and repetitive videos, as concern over AI slop grows", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/09/youtube-prepares-crackdown-on-mass-produced-and-repetitive-videos-as-concern-over-ai-slop-grows/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the date and purpose of the policy update." }, { "title": "YouTube Help: YouTube channel monetization policies, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1311392?hl=en", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on the 15 July 2025 update." }, { "title": "Wikipedia: Sora (text-to-video model)", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sora_(text-to-video_model)", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the first release, Sora 2 and the discontinuation." }, { "title": "Wikipedia: Veo (text-to-video model)", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veo_(text-to-video_model)", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the introduction and the development section for the release dates." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/traxy-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/traxy-ai.md", "slug": "traxy-ai", "name": "traxy", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "LinkedIn lead finder for sales teams", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-15", "launchLabel": "1 May 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$53.8K a month recurring revenue, October 2026", "sticker": "$645K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 645024, "months": 5, "teamLabel": "2 to 5 people, by the founder's TrustMRR entry, October 2026", "fundingLabel": "About 7 angel investors by September 2026, amounts not stated", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "sales", "trend": "growing", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Funded", "Running", "B2B", "Sales" ], "product": "A LinkedIn lead finder for B2B sales teams. You list LinkedIn profiles to watch; traxy collects the people who like, comment on or repost their posts, scores each one against your ideal buyer, adds an email address and phone number, and an AI agent can write and send the first message.", "why": "The founder already ran a LinkedIn ghostwriting agency and built the lead tool that the agency needed. He sold it with the tool itself: traxy found the leads, and his team contacted them. Daily posts on X added trials, and credit-based prices let heavy users pay more.", "summary": [ "traxy is a lead generation tool, software that finds people who may buy and gets their contact details, for B2B sales teams. It works on LinkedIn only. A customer adds LinkedIn profiles to a watchlist, a list of accounts to follow: their own, their competitors', well-known voices in their market. When someone likes, comments on or reposts a post from those profiles, traxy scores that person from 1% to 100% against the customer's ICP, the ideal customer profile, a description of the buyer by job title, seniority, company size and industry. People above a threshold become leads. For extra credits, prepaid units that each action costs, it adds the lead's email and phone number. An AI \"Outbound Agent\" can research each lead and write the first message. Plans start at US$149 a month.", "Ben Buaron, a founder in New York who also runs Windmill Growth, a LinkedIn ghostwriting agency, launched traxy on 1 May 2026, after the first Stripe payments in March. By his posts, MRR, monthly recurring revenue, the subscription money that comes in every month, reached US$10,000 on 17 July, US$20,000 on 28 August and US$30,000 on 11 September 2026. On 23 September he connected Stripe to TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a company's payment processor, and it showed US$40,000. On 15 October 2026 it shows US$53,752 of MRR from 243 active subscriptions and US$58,301 of revenue in the last 30 days: a run rate of about US$645,000 a year, five months after launch. By the founder's account, most customers came from outreach to leads that traxy itself found, and many trials from his posts on X.", "The revenue, MRR and subscription figures are grade A, because TrustMRR reads them from Stripe. Everything else, including the team size and how the product collects its data, comes from the founder's posts and the company's own pages, grade C. The largest risk is the data source. LinkedIn's User Agreement forbids software that scrapes, which means collects automatically by a program, profiles and other data from LinkedIn. traxy says it needs no LinkedIn login and does not say how it collects the engagement; its home page quotes customers who call it scraping. The page also shows what happened to earlier companies that sold sales data or depended on another company's platform." ], "factsCaption": "A LinkedIn lead tool that reached US$53,752 of Stripe-verified MRR about five months after launch", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value is read from Stripe by TrustMRR. A grade C value is a founder post on X or a statement on the company's own pages. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a placeholder domain to US$53,752 of monthly recurring revenue, five months after launch. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "traxy prices on 15 October 2026, from the company's pricing page and FAQ (grade C); yearly prices are calculated from the 20% discount that the page states", "note": "Prices follow the monthly credit volume. One credit qualifies one engagement against the ICP; an email costs 3 credits and a phone number 5, charged only when found. Credits reset every month with no rollover. 15,000 credits and more add automated sending; 30,000 and more add the Outbound Agent and its onboarding. The 30,000, 50,000 and 75,000-credit sizes load their prices by script and could not be read. A Design Partner pays 50% of a Pro or Scale plan in return for two posts a month about traxy on LinkedIn or X. Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial.", "rows": [ [ "Pro", "119", "149", "5,000 credits a month" ], [ "Scale, smallest size", "239", "299", "15,000 credits a month, automated sending" ], [ "Scale, largest size", "879", "1,099", "100,000 credits a month" ], [ "DFY Outbound (done for you)", "", "1,099", "3-month minimum; traxy's team runs the outbound" ], [ "Enterprise and Agencies", "custom", "custom", "custom volume; agencies get 30% off each client account" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 15 October 2026", "value": "US$53,752", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from Stripe through an API key; revenue last synced on 15 October 2026. MRR growth in the last 30 days: +42.7%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from that MRR", "value": "about US$645,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$53,752 times 12 is US$645,024. The founder rounds it down to \"$500k arr\" in his post of 5 October 2026.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days, to 15 October 2026", "value": "US$58,301", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. 77.6% more than in the 30 days before.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by calendar month, 2026", "value": "March US$545, April US$3,436, May US$5,761, June US$10,182, July US$11,955, August US$21,415, September US$45,007", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table. October up to the 14th: US$32,392.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "September revenue compared with August", "value": "2.1 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$45,007 divided by US$21,415.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "All-time revenue to 15 October 2026", "value": "US$130,693", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. The same as the last twelve months: all of it is from 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions, 15 October 2026", "value": "243", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. There were 177 on 23 September 2026.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Average MRR per active subscription", "value": "about US$221 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$53,752 divided by 243. The cheapest plan costs US$149 a month, so many customers pay for larger plans or the done-for-you service.", "src": [ 1, 22 ] }, { "fact": "MRR on 23 September 2026", "value": "US$40,000 a month", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR's post on X when the profile was connected: US$41,000 of revenue in 30 days, US$88,000 in total, 177 active subscriptions.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "MRR steps reported by the founder", "value": "US$10,000 on 17 July, US$20,000 on 28 August, US$30,000 on 11 September 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 11 September 2026: 77, 42 and 14 days for the three steps, counted from 1 May.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "MRR on 3 August and 31 August 2026", "value": "US$13,500 and US$20,600", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's posts. On 31 August he also listed 78 active trials and 68 booked demos.", "src": [ 6, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Paying users", "value": "80 on 12 August, 100 on 21 August 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's posts. The home page says \"1,000+\" teams use traxy, which counts sign-ups; Stripe shows 243 active subscriptions in October.", "src": [ 5, 19, 23, 1 ] }, { "fact": "traxy's share of the founder's income", "value": "US$22,000 of US$142,210 in August, US$47,000 of US$166,342 in September 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's monthly income posts. The rest, US$120,000 and US$119,000, came from Windmill Growth, his ghostwriting agency, which manages more than 150 LinkedIn profiles. TrustMRR shows US$21,415 and US$45,007 for traxy in those months.", "src": [ 9, 8, 1, 40, 41 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 to 5 people", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder's entry on TrustMRR. His posts mention a head of go-to-market (3 August 2026), a first customer-support hire (13 August) and \"our lean team\" (14 October). His agency, a separate company, has 4 full-time writers.", "src": [ 1, 6, 14, 15, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "about 7 angel investors by 13 September 2026, amounts not stated", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's posts. On 23 September he mentioned a \"mini pre-seed round\". He wrote that from then on only clients may invest. The TrustMRR entry says bootstrapped.", "src": [ 12, 13, 11, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Legal entity", "value": "traxy, inc., 54 Spring St, New York", "grade": "C", "note": "Privacy policy and terms of service. New York law governs the terms.", "src": [ 25, 24 ] }, { "fact": "Founded and launched", "value": "founded 30 January 2026, launched 1 May 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Founded date from the TrustMRR entry, launch date from the founder. Stripe shows US$545 of revenue in March 2026, before the public launch.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October 2026 figure", "value": "5 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: May 2026 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "28 January 2026", "what": "traxy.ai shows a placeholder page: \"AI Solutions for Tomorrow\" and a contact form.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 26 ] }, { "when": "30 January 2026", "what": "Founded date in the TrustMRR entry.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "March to April 2026", "what": "First Stripe revenue before the public launch: US$545 in March and US$3,436 in April.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "1 May 2026", "what": "Public launch, by the founder's account.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "19 May 2026", "what": "The archived home page sells \"LinkedIn Engagement into Qualified Pipeline\" with three plans, Lite, Pro and Scale, at US$63, US$119 and US$239 a month for 2, 5 and 15 monitored profiles.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 27 ] }, { "when": "17 July 2026", "what": "US$10,000 of MRR, 77 days after launch.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "3 August 2026", "what": "US$13,500 of MRR. The founder promises his head of go-to-market a Rolex watch for US$100,000 of MRR by the end of September.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "12 August 2026", "what": "80 paying users and 5 to 7 trials a day. He asks his followers how to scale a self-serve product.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "13 August 2026", "what": "First customer-support hire.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "21 August 2026", "what": "100 paying users.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 19 ] }, { "when": "26 to 29 August 2026", "what": "A done-for-you outbound service is offered at US$499 a month for up to 3 senders. One post on X brings 20 times the usual daily sign-ups, and the app crashes.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 20, 10 ] }, { "when": "31 August 2026", "what": "US$20,600 of MRR, 78 active trials and 68 booked demos. traxy made US$22,000 of the founder's US$142,210 income in August.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 9 ] }, { "when": "11 September 2026", "what": "US$30,000 of MRR, 14 days after US$20,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "13 September 2026", "what": "About 7 angel investors so far, all found through X. From now on only clients may invest.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "23 September 2026", "what": "Stripe connected to TrustMRR: US$40,000 of MRR, 177 active subscriptions, US$88,000 of total revenue.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "1 October 2026", "what": "September income: US$47,000 from traxy and US$119,000 from Windmill Growth.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "5 October 2026", "what": "\"5 months after launching traxy hit $500k arr.\" Goal: US$1 million by 31 December. He also writes about bugs and churn.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "15 October 2026", "what": "US$53,752 of MRR, 243 active subscriptions and US$58,301 of revenue in the last 30 days, all verified from Stripe. The done-for-you service now costs US$1,099 a month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 22 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Engagement is the signal", "text": "A like or comment on a relevant post shows that a person is active on LinkedIn and interested in the topic now. traxy re-checks the engagement on each watched post every 2 hours, scores each person who engaged with \"a model weighing 30+ variables\", and keeps only the ones who fit the customer's ICP. The FAQ advises watching competitors, investors, employees and well-known voices in the market, because their audience overlaps with the buyer." }, { "title": "The product finds its own customers", "text": "The founder sells traxy with traxy. On 10 September 2026 he wrote that the stack of traxy for leads, Claude for research, HeyReach for LinkedIn messages and Smartlead or Instantly for email \"took us to $25k MRR in 4 months\". His posts on X add to it: on 30 August he wrote that two months of posting had brought 3 angel investors, 95 trials and around US$8,000 of MRR." }, { "title": "Credits instead of seats", "text": "Each engagement that traxy checks costs 1 credit, an email 3 credits and a phone number 5. So a customer who watches busy profiles pays more, and larger sizes add automated sending and the Outbound Agent. The average active subscription pays about US$221 a month, well above the US$149 entry price." }, { "title": "An agency as the first user and a sales channel", "text": "The founder runs Windmill Growth, a ghostwriting agency with 4 full-time writers, and uses traxy for his own companies. On 22 August 2026 he wrote that he uses only traxy to find leads for two companies, had canceled Sales Navigator, Apollo and ZoomInfo, US$1,700 a month, for traxy at US$499 a month, and had booked 79 meetings from traxy alone. Other agencies resell it: they get 30% off each client account, and traxy's own team runs outbound for customers who pay for the done-for-you service." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's FAQ, terms and pricing pages and from the founder's posts. They are grade C.", "items": [ "LinkedIn is the only data source. The FAQ says setup takes 60 seconds: paste a LinkedIn profile URL, and \"No account authentication on LinkedIn is required\". Engagement on watched posts is re-checked every 2 hours. The site does not say how the engagement is collected.", "The terms describe the service as software that analyzes LinkedIn engagement, builds a LinkedIn feed for the customer's ICP and runs \"automated and semi-automated LinkedIn outreach\", partly with technology licensed from third parties that act as subprocessors.", "Each person who engages gets an ICP fit score from \"a model weighing 30+ variables\": job title, seniority, company size, industry, growth stage and behavior. No source names the AI model or the model provider inside the product.", "An MCP server lets customers ask their own AI assistant, such as Claude, Codex or Cursor, for their leads after a one-time OAuth login. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is a standard way for an AI assistant to call an outside service.", "Integrations: Slack, Zapier, Clay, HeyReach, Meta Ads, webhooks and CSV export. Payments run through Stripe.", "The founder writes code with OpenAI's Codex agent, for example asking it for a QA plan with 50 edge cases for the team's tester. A post of 20 August 2026 shows that the database runs on Supabase.", "traxy's own outbound, by the founder's post of 10 September 2026: traxy finds the leads, Claude does the research, HeyReach sends the LinkedIn messages, and Smartlead or Instantly sends the email." ], "src": [ 21, 24, 22, 16, 38, 39, 1 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold sales data, depended on another company's platform, or sold web scraping. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "BranchOut", "years": "2010 to 2017", "funding": "US$49M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A professional network built on top of Facebook.", "died": "Facebook changed its API rules, and the growth that came through Facebook ended. LinkedIn kept the market.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/30-branchout" }, { "name": "Elucify", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Fresh business contact data for sales teams, collected from its users.", "died": "ZoomInfo and Clearbit had larger and more reliable databases. Crowdsourced data was hard to keep accurate, and users would not pay for data that was often out of date.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1078-elucify" }, { "name": "Slik", "years": "2017 to 2020", "funding": "US$1.2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Sales intelligence that finds and ranks leads for sales teams.", "died": "LinkedIn Sales Navigator and ZoomInfo offered the same with more data. Slik could not keep its data fresh, and customers left.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1439-slik" }, { "name": "Argyle Social", "years": "2009 to 2013", "funding": "US$2.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Social media marketing with lead generation, connected to Pardot and Marketo.", "died": "Larger marketing suites with bigger budgets won the buyers. It depended on the social platforms' APIs and their data-access rules.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1832-argyle-social" }, { "name": "Dashblock", "years": "2019 to 2022", "funding": "US$3M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Turn any web page into an API without code: web scraping for non-programmers.", "died": "Websites kept changing, and keeping the scrapers working took constant engineering work.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1374-dashblock" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Elucify and Slik sold sales data and lost to ZoomInfo and LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which had more data and kept it fresher. BranchOut and Argyle Social grew on other companies' platforms and lost when the rules changed or the larger players moved in. Dashblock sold scraping and spent its engineering on websites that kept changing. traxy carries all of these risks at once: it sells data about LinkedIn members, it depends on access to LinkedIn, and it competes with LinkedIn's own Sales Navigator.", "Two things are different. First, the data is not a static database that goes out of date: it is who engaged with a relevant post in the last hours, so freshness is the product, and a model scores each person while an agent drafts a message for each one. Second, the founder had customers before the product: his own agency, and other agencies that run LinkedIn accounts for clients and resell traxy to them. It also gave traxy a sales channel that does not depend on ads, and Stripe shows revenue even before the public launch: US$545 in March 2026." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The data source is the hard part.", "text": "Turning engagement on relevant posts into ranked leads is a method that anyone with a sales audience can copy, and the founder's posts show the steps. The difficult part is getting the data in a way that the platform allows and that data-protection law accepts. A copy that depends on scraping LinkedIn carries the same legal risk as traxy.", "steps": [ "Start from a service business that you already run, and build the tool that this business needs.", "Choose a signal that shows interest now, such as engagement on a competitor's post, instead of a static contact list.", "Price by usage, with credits, so that the heaviest users pay the most.", "Use the product to find its own customers, and post the revenue and named customer results often." ], "open": "The same idea on sources with official or licensed data access: a company's own website visitors, its own social accounts through the platforms' official APIs, GitHub activity, and community forums that sell API access." }, "watch": [ { "title": "LinkedIn forbids this kind of data collection", "text": "traxy's main product is data about LinkedIn members: who engaged with which post, their job and company, and for extra credits their email and phone number. LinkedIn's User Agreement, effective 3 November 2025, says that members must not \"Develop, support or use software, devices, scripts, robots or any other means or processes (such as crawlers, browser plugins and add-ons or any other technology) to scrape or copy the Services, including profiles and other data from the Services\". traxy says that it \"doesn't authenticate with LinkedIn\" and watches \"public engagement\", but not how it collects it. Its home page quotes a customer: \"Now I’m scraping engagement on my posts and a few competitor posts with traxy.\" Its privacy policy says it works with LinkedIn \"exclusively through user-authorized connections\", which the no-login setup in the FAQ does not match. If LinkedIn blocks the collection or sues, the product stops." }, { "title": "Courts: public data is not a free pass", "text": "In hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn, the US Ninth Circuit appeals court ruled for hiQ, a company that collected public LinkedIn profiles, and affirmed that decision again in April 2022. But in November 2022 a district court in California ruled that hiQ had breached LinkedIn's User Agreement, and the case ended in a settlement. In January 2025 LinkedIn sued Proxycurl, a data company with about US$10 million of revenue. Proxycurl shut down on 4 July 2025 to comply with its settlement with LinkedIn, and its founder wrote that \"there is no winning in fighting this\"." }, { "title": "European data-protection law covers the people in the lists", "text": "Under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a company that uses a person's data for marketing without consent must rely on Article 6(1)(f), its legitimate interests, which do not apply \"where such interests are overridden by the interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject\". When the data was not collected from the person, Article 14 requires the company to say \"from which source the personal data originate\", \"at the latest at the time of the first communication to that data subject\". Under Article 21 the person can object \"at any time\" to direct marketing, including profiling. traxy's privacy policy makes each customer the data controller and traxy a processor, so these duties fall on the customer who contacts a lead in Europe." }, { "title": "US cold-email rules", "text": "Under the CAN-SPAM Act (15 U.S.C. 7704), every commercial email must clearly identify itself as an advertisement or solicitation unless the recipient agreed in advance, must offer a way to opt out, and must carry \"a valid physical postal address of the sender\". Sending to a person more than 10 business days after an opt-out request is unlawful. The sender is responsible, and traxy's Outbound Agent writes the messages and can send them automatically." }, { "title": "Platform access can be priced or closed", "text": "Reddit shows what a platform can do with its data. In 2023 it started to charge for its API: the developer of the Apollo app was quoted US$12,000 for 50 million requests, about US$20 million a year, and Apollo and other apps shut down when the change took effect on 30 June 2023. In February 2024 Reddit licensed its content to Google for about US$60 million a year, and later made a deal with OpenAI. traxy's own news page reported on 5 October 2026 that Reddit is closing its public API and RSS feeds (not verified here). traxy reads only LinkedIn, and its terms say that it \"cannot guarantee that LinkedIn will remain interoperable with the Services\"." }, { "title": "Larger competitors, and LinkedIn itself", "text": "The founder names the tools that his customers replace with traxy: LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Apollo and ZoomInfo. On 24 September 2026 he congratulated the team of Trigify, a competitor, and offered its users a free first month. LinkedIn owns the data and sells Sales Navigator; if it adds the same feature, traxy has no data that LinkedIn lacks." }, { "title": "One founder, two companies, some related revenue", "text": "The founder also runs Windmill Growth, his LinkedIn ghostwriting agency, which made US$119,000 in September 2026 against traxy's US$47,000. The founder is also a customer: on 22 August he wrote that he pays US$499 a month for traxy and uses only traxy to find leads for two companies. The team of 2 to 5 people is his own entry on TrustMRR, and no source shows which people work for which company. About 7 angel investors have joined, while the TrustMRR entry says bootstrapped." }, { "title": "Very young, with churn that the founder admits", "text": "The figures cover five months since launch. On 5 October 2026 the founder wrote about \"bugs and churn\" and a feature that took 30 days to code. The home page's \"1,000+\" teams count sign-ups, not the 243 paying subscriptions. One day, 13 October 2026, brought US$9,490 of revenue, and the profile does not say what was sold." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.traxy.ai/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/traxy-ai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: traxy.ai, data as of 15 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/traxy-ai", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile (https://trustmrr.com/startup/traxy-ai.md), revenue synced on 15 October 2026. The revenue, MRR, growth and subscription figures in its Verification Sources section are read from Stripe through an API key, grade A. The description, founded date, team size, funding and pricing fields are written by the founder, grade C." }, { "title": "TrustMRR on X, 23 September 2026: traxy.ai joins TrustMRR", "url": "https://x.com/trust_mrr/status/2102586388680208437", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. TrustMRR's automatic post with the Stripe-verified figures on the day the profile was connected." }, { "title": "Ben Buaron on X, 5 October 2026: 5 months after launching traxy hit $500k arr", "url": "https://x.com/benbuaron_/status/2107116124231901412", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com (the founder's timeline, read on 15 October 2026). Source for the ARR claim, the year-end goal, the bugs and churn, and the agency's 4 full-time writers." }, { "title": "Ben Buaron on X, 11 September 2026: how long each $10k MRR took", "url": "https://x.com/benbuaron_/status/2098439078966390940", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the dates of the first three US$10,000 steps of MRR." }, { "title": "Ben Buaron on X, 12 August 2026: i launched traxy on May 1st", "url": "https://x.com/benbuaron_/status/2087516303330296047", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the launch date, the 80 paying users and the trial rate." }, { "title": "Ben Buaron on X, 3 August 2026: the MRR goal for the head of go-to-market", "url": "https://x.com/benbuaron_/status/2084381324379332947", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the US$13,500 of MRR on 3 August and the head of go-to-market." }, { "title": "Ben Buaron on X, 31 August 2026: the biggest week at traxy", "url": "https://x.com/benbuaron_/status/2094422537866236329", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the US$20,600 of MRR, 78 active trials, 68 booked demos and the waitlist for the done-for-you service." }, { "title": "Ben Buaron on X, 1 October 2026: income in September 2026", "url": "https://x.com/benbuaron_/status/2105668684958064870", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the split of the founder's income between Windmill Growth and traxy." }, { "title": "Ben Buaron on X, 31 August 2026: income in August 2026", "url": "https://x.com/benbuaron_/status/2094484915534405941", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the August split between Windmill Growth and traxy." }, { "title": "Ben Buaron on X, 29 August 2026: 20 times the daily sign-ups from one post", "url": "https://x.com/benbuaron_/status/2093705914763108722", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the sign-up spike and the crash." }, { "title": "Ben Buaron on X, 30 August 2026: what two months of posting brought", "url": "https://x.com/benbuaron_/status/2094070669818368384", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the 3 new angel investors, 95 trials and around US$8,000 of MRR attributed to posting on X." }, { "title": "Ben Buaron on X, 13 September 2026: about 7 angel investors from X", "url": "https://x.com/benbuaron_/status/2099177676871495912", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the angel investors and the rule that only clients may invest." }, { "title": "Ben Buaron on X, 23 September 2026: the mini pre-seed round", "url": "https://x.com/benbuaron_/status/2102848862633308499", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. A one-line post; no amount or investor is named." }, { "title": "Ben Buaron on X, 13 August 2026: the first customer-support hire", "url": "https://x.com/benbuaron_/status/2087909041053823230", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the first CS hire." }, { "title": "Ben Buaron on X, 14 October 2026: managed services and a lean team", "url": "https://x.com/benbuaron_/status/2110377644940288237", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the customer-support work and the words \"our lean team\"." }, { "title": "Ben Buaron on X, 10 September 2026: the traxy outbound stack", "url": "https://x.com/benbuaron_/status/2098175594332615124", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the tools used to find traxy's own customers and the US$25,000 of MRR in 4 months." }, { "title": "Ben Buaron on X, 22 August 2026: tools canceled for traxy", "url": "https://x.com/benbuaron_/status/2090962870762705300", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the canceled Sales Navigator, Apollo and ZoomInfo, the US$499 a month paid for traxy and the 79 meetings." }, { "title": "Ben Buaron on X, 24 September 2026: message to Trigify users", "url": "https://x.com/benbuaron_/status/2103113331435618670", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for Trigify as a competitor." }, { "title": "Ben Buaron on X, 21 August 2026: 100 paying users", "url": "https://x.com/benbuaron_/status/2090865893949444123", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Ben Buaron on X, 26 August 2026: the US$499 done-for-you offer", "url": "https://x.com/benbuaron_/status/2092717183658836394", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the first price of the done-for-you service." }, { "title": "traxy FAQ, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://www.traxy.ai/faq", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the no-login setup, the 2-hour refresh, the fit-score model, the credit prices, Stripe, the integrations and the MCP server." }, { "title": "traxy pricing page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://www.traxy.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The page shows the Pro price and the plan features; the middle Scale sizes load their prices by script and could not be read." }, { "title": "traxy home page, Markdown version, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://traxy.ai/index.md", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product description, the 1,000+ claim and the customer quotes about scraping." }, { "title": "traxy Terms of Service, last updated 1 August 2026", "url": "https://www.traxy.ai/terms-of-service", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the services, third-party technology, acceptable use, LinkedIn and governing law." }, { "title": "traxy Privacy Policy, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://www.traxy.ai/privacy-policy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the legal entity, the address, the controller and processor roles and the LinkedIn access statement." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine: traxy.ai on 28 January 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260128235852/https://traxy.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A placeholder page." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine: traxy.ai on 19 May 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260519121710/https://traxy.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product and the plans soon after launch." }, { "title": "LinkedIn User Agreement, effective 3 November 2025", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/legal/user-agreement", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the list of things members agree not to do. LinkedIn's own text." }, { "title": "Wikipedia: hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the appeals-court rulings, the November 2022 breach ruling and the settlement." }, { "title": "Proxycurl blog, 4 July 2025: Proxycurl Shuts Down. Thank you.", "url": "https://nubela.co/blog/goodbye-proxycurl/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's own account of LinkedIn's lawsuit and the shutdown." }, { "title": "Wikipedia: Reddit API controversy", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Reddit_API_controversy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the pricing and the impact on third-party apps." }, { "title": "Wikipedia: Reddit", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on AI integration. Source for the Google and OpenAI licensing deals." }, { "title": "traxy news page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://www.traxy.ai/news", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the list of stories. Source for traxy's own report on Reddit's API and RSS feeds, not verified independently." }, { "title": "GDPR Article 6, Lawfulness of processing (gdpr-info.eu)", "url": "https://gdpr-info.eu/art-6-gdpr/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The text of the regulation, reproduced by an independent publisher." }, { "title": "GDPR Article 14, Information to be provided where personal data have not been obtained from the data subject (gdpr-info.eu)", "url": "https://gdpr-info.eu/art-14-gdpr/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The text of the regulation, reproduced by an independent publisher." }, { "title": "GDPR Article 21, Right to object (gdpr-info.eu)", "url": "https://gdpr-info.eu/art-21-gdpr/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The text of the regulation, reproduced by an independent publisher." }, { "title": "15 U.S. Code 7704, Other protections for users of commercial electronic mail (Cornell LII)", "url": "https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/7704", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the sections on required content and opt-out requests. The FTC's own guide could not be downloaded." }, { "title": "Ben Buaron on X, 26 September 2026: a QA plan from Codex", "url": "https://x.com/benbuaron_/status/2103978533324558751", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the use of Codex." }, { "title": "Ben Buaron on X, 20 August 2026: the database in Supabase", "url": "https://x.com/benbuaron_/status/2090582834171748779", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for Supabase." }, { "title": "Ben Buaron on X, 14 September 2026: warm outbound on LinkedIn for a ghostwriting agency", "url": "https://x.com/benbuaron_/status/2099565589320605716", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for Windmill Growth as the founder's ghostwriting agency." }, { "title": "Ben Buaron on X, 8 September 2026: managing more than 150 LinkedIn profiles", "url": "https://x.com/benbuaron_/status/2097351388309168429", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the size of the agency's LinkedIn work." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/supergrow/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/supergrow.md", "slug": "supergrow", "name": "Supergrow", "country": "India", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI writer and scheduler for LinkedIn posts", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-15", "launchLabel": "April 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$32.2K revenue in 30 days, February 2026", "sticker": "$32K in 30 days", "outcomeUsd": 386592, "months": 34, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders; LinkedIn lists 8 people in October 2026 (no count for February 2026)", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "audience", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Marketing" ], "product": "A web app that writes LinkedIn posts in the member's own style from an idea, a voice note, a video, an article or a short interview with an AI, then schedules and publishes them. Team plans add approvals, a shared calendar and analytics for each employee. It can also be used from inside Claude and ChatGPT.", "why": "It entered a market where people already paid for tools such as Taplio, and did the one core task better: writing the post. The founders' public posts brought the first customers and a lifetime-deal platform, and that deal paid for growth without investors. Subscriptions, partnerships with LinkedIn influencers, affiliates and a move to team plans came after.", "summary": [ "Supergrow is a web app that writes and schedules LinkedIn posts for founders, creators, ghostwriters and marketing teams. A member types an idea, records a voice note, adds a YouTube video, an article or a PDF, or talks for 10 to 15 minutes with an AI interviewer, and the app turns it into drafts in the member's own style, then publishes them at a chosen time. The text comes from third-party large language models, programs trained on large amounts of text that write new text from an instruction; the company does not say which ones. In October 2026 it costs US$39 a month for one account and US$199 a month for five.", "Deven Bhooshan, a software engineer based in India who had worked at Amazon and GoJek, started it in April 2023 with Utsav Patel, after Twitter's new API prices ended his previous product. An API is the interface through which one program uses another company's service. The two founders posted their progress and their numbers in public on LinkedIn and X, and sold a lifetime deal, one payment for permanent access, through RocketHub for US$65,000 in total. Then they moved the business to subscriptions. The founder reported US$14,310 of monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the monthly value of all active subscriptions, in August 2024, and US$230,000 a year from more than 800 recurring customers in April 2025. They raised no outside money and trade as Supergrow Innovations LLP, a limited liability partnership, a company form in which each partner's personal liability is limited, registered in Bangalore.", "The headline is grade A. TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a company's payment account, read US$32,216 of payments in the 30 days to 28 February 2026 from Supergrow's Stripe account, the payment processor that charges its customers' cards, through an API key, a password that lets one program read another program's data. Then the key expired, so nothing newer is verified. The same profile shows MRR of US$79,479, about 2.5 times the payments, without saying why, so this page uses the payments. The company has two founders, and LinkedIn lists 8 people there in October 2026." ], "factsCaption": "Stripe-verified payments of US$32,216 in the 30 days to 28 February 2026, when the verification stopped, after a founder-reported US$230,000 a year in April 2025", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from Supergrow's Stripe account and stops on 28 February 2026. A grade C value is a founder statement, a company page or a third-party page. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a Twitter tool ended by an API price change to Stripe-verified payments of US$32,216 in 30 days, in 34 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Supergrow prices in October 2026, from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial. The page says yearly billing saves up to 20%, and its questions section gives the yearly prices: Pro US$31 a month and Teams US$189 a month. In August 2026 a competitor's review listed a US$19 Starter plan and a US$139 Teams plan with four accounts; the October page shows neither.", "rows": [ [ "Pro", "31", "39", "1 LinkedIn account" ], [ "Teams", "189", "199", "5 accounts" ], [ "Enterprise", "custom", "custom", "more than 5 executives" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue in the 30 days to 28 February 2026", "value": "US$32,216", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from Stripe through an API key. 14.0% more than in the 30 days before. This is the headline figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the 30-day figure", "value": "about US$386,592 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$32,216 times 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue by month", "value": "November 2025: US$30,247. December: US$39,107. January 2026: US$29,842. February: US$29,760", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table. Calculated: February is 1.6% below November and 23.9% below December. January and February together are 14.1% below November and December together.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) at the last sync", "value": "US$79,479, with 2,315 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot, up 24.9% in 30 days. Calculated: it is 2.47 times the payments of the same 30 days, or US$34.33 per subscription against US$13.92 collected. The profile does not explain the gap, so this page does not use MRR as the headline.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "All-time verified revenue", "value": "US$474,580 to 28 February 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. The profile does not say from which date the Stripe history starts.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue before mid-October 2025", "value": "about US$334,161", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$474,580 minus the five months in the monthly table. Those five months add up exactly to the profile's 12-month figure of US$140,419, so the October 2025 value covers only part of that month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "State of the verification", "value": "Stripe key expired. Last sync 28 February 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "No newer data reached TrustMRR, so the profile shows US$0 for the last 3 and 6 months. Calculated: 229 days between the last sync and 15 October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, April 2025", "value": "US$230,000, from more than 800 recurring customers", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's blog, 21 April 2025. Calculated: about US$19,167 a month.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "MRR, August 2024", "value": "US$14,310", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's monthly report on X, 2 September 2024: up 20.88% in a month, 1,629 signups, 168 new paying customers, 2,986 posts published through the app.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue and MRR, November 2023", "value": "US$36,449 revenue. US$1,716 MRR", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's report on LinkedIn, 1 December 2023: revenue up 1,381% and MRR up 28% on October, 226 new paying customers. More than US$32,000 came from a lifetime deal for agencies, of which the founders expected to keep 50%.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Lifetime deal on RocketHub, total", "value": "US$65,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's blog. He writes that most deal platforms keep 30% to 50% of sales. A buyer's review on RocketHub's page says the highest tier cost US$240 one-time for 50 LinkedIn accounts.", "src": [ 2, 4, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from August 2024 to February 2026", "value": "2.25 times in 18 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$32,216 of verified payments in 30 days against the founder's US$14,310 MRR. The two figures are different measures, so the multiple is approximate.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 co-founders. LinkedIn lists 8 people in October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Deven Bhooshan is CEO and Utsav Patel is CMO; both are the partnership's designated partners. One product engineer joined in August 2024. LinkedIn gives the company size as 2 to 10 employees. No source gives the headcount at February 2026.", "src": [ 5, 7, 3, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder, April 2025: the lifetime deal gave enough money to grow \"without needing to raise external funding\". Investors approached the founders; no round is reported.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Operating company", "value": "Supergrow Innovations LLP, Bangalore", "grade": "C", "note": "A limited liability partnership, LLPIN ACH-0505, incorporated on 7 May 2024 with paid-up capital of ₹10,000. The terms of service name it as the operator, under Indian law.", "src": [ 6, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Prices, October 2026", "value": "US$39 a month for one account, US$199 for five", "grade": "C", "note": "Pricing page. US$31 and US$189 a month when billed yearly. 7-day free trial.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Affiliate commission", "value": "30% of every payment, for the life of the customer", "grade": "C", "note": "Company page. It also claims a trial-to-paid conversion rate of 12% to 14%.", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "fact": "Time from start to the February 2026 figure", "value": "34 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: April 2023, when the founder says he started Supergrow, to February 2026.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2015 to 2023", "what": "Deven Bhooshan works at Amazon in 2015, co-founds MindIQ, an AI chatbot builder, in 2016, joins GoJek in 2017, and consults for other teams from 2021 to 2023.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "Before April 2023", "what": "His previous product, Honeypot, which found sales leads on Twitter, makes US$12,000 a year when Twitter's new API prices end it. Another founder whose Twitter tool was hit the same way contacts him and becomes his co-founder.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "April 2023", "what": "He starts Supergrow after studying Taplio, AuthoredUp and ContentIn. The first version does one thing: it turns a short paragraph into a LinkedIn post, with one click to generate and two to publish.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "November 2023", "what": "A lifetime deal for agencies brings in more than US$32,000. The month's revenue is US$36,449 and MRR is US$1,716. A Black Friday discount sells 15 annual plans.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "After the lifetime deal", "what": "The lifetime deal on RocketHub totals US$65,000. Subscription pricing launches on Product Hunt, where Supergrow becomes #1 Product of the Week; visitors pay US$1 for the first month, and more than half stay at the full price.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "7 May 2024", "what": "Supergrow Innovations LLP is incorporated in Bangalore with the two founders as designated partners.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "August 2024", "what": "MRR reaches US$14,310 in the best month of growth so far. The company starts a blog for search traffic and hires a product engineer.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "21 April 2025", "what": "The founder writes that Supergrow makes US$230,000 a year from more than 800 recurring customers, and that it is moving from individual buyers to companies.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "November 2025 to February 2026", "what": "Stripe shows US$30,247, US$39,107, US$29,842 and US$29,760 in the four months.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "28 February 2026", "what": "Last sync with TrustMRR: US$32,216 in 30 days, MRR of US$79,479 and US$474,580 all-time. The Stripe key then expired, on a date the profile does not show, and nothing newer is verified.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "31 July 2026", "what": "LinkedIn adds a \"Seems like AI slop\" report option and says it already shows such posts less outside the writer's own network.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 19 ] }, { "when": "24 August 2026", "what": "Taplio, a competitor, reviews Supergrow on its own blog and lists plans at US$19, US$39 and US$139 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 21 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "Supergrow is listed in Claude's connector directory, so Claude and ChatGPT users can draft posts and read analytics from their AI assistant. In the same month LinkedIn removes its own AI option for rewriting posts.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10, 11, 20 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "Pro costs US$39 a month and Teams US$199. LinkedIn lists 8 people at the company. The founder also builds a second product, WarmDogo, an agent that finds sales leads.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 8, 14 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Pick a market that already pays", "text": "The founder studied the tools that people already used, Taplio, AuthoredUp and ContentIn, and found that none wrote good posts, the one task users needed most. Supergrow's first version did only that. He writes that a competitor's venture funding is no proof of a market; paying customers are." }, { "title": "Public posts brought the first customers", "text": "Both founders posted progress, decisions and numbers on LinkedIn and X. The founder writes that the first customers came from his LinkedIn network, and that the lifetime-deal platform and investors contacted them because of those posts." }, { "title": "A lifetime deal paid for the start", "text": "RocketHub sold one-time lifetime access for a total of US$65,000, and kept a share; in November 2023 the founder expected half. He writes that this money let them grow without investors, and that only about 10% of lifetime buyers use the product actively, so the cost of supporting them stayed small." }, { "title": "Then subscriptions, influencers and affiliates", "text": "Subscription pricing launched on Product Hunt with a US$1 first month. The co-founder ran partnerships with LinkedIn influencers as a second channel, and an affiliate program pays 30% of every renewal. Search traffic came late: the blog started only in August 2024, which the founder calls a mistake." }, { "title": "From individuals to teams", "text": "For two years most buyers were individuals, and the founder writes that business buyers cancel less and pay more predictably. By 2026 the product is sold to marketing teams: a US$199 plan for five executives, approval steps, leaderboards and an Enterprise plan." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's blog post, his posts and the company's own pages. They are grade C.", "items": [ "The first version had one-click post generation and two-click publishing, and nothing else: no analytics, no scheduling, no dashboards.", "Posts are written by third-party large language models, according to the terms of service. No source names the models. The founder names OpenAI's GPT-3 as one reason he started.", "Feedback ran through Intercom chat, then Canny for feature requests, with Microsoft Clarity and Mixpanel to see what users did, and 3 to 4 customer calls a week. The founder says he watched every user's session recording, sometimes more than 300 a day, for almost a year.", "They refused to build automated LinkedIn direct messages, although many users asked for it.", "Inputs besides typed ideas: voice notes, YouTube videos, articles, PDFs, and a 10 to 15 minute interview with an AI interviewer called PostCast.", "In 2026 Supergrow added an MCP server, a standard connection that lets AI assistants use another app's functions. Claude and ChatGPT connect by signing in, and Supergrow is listed in Claude's connector directory.", "Payments run through Stripe." ], "src": [ 2, 6, 15, 23, 11, 10, 1 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database built a tool on top of a social network that they did not control. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "BranchOut", "years": "2010 to 2017", "funding": "US$49M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A professional network like LinkedIn, built inside Facebook.", "died": "Facebook changed its API rules and cut off the growth that the product depended on.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/30-branchout" }, { "name": "PostRocket", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$610K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "More reach for Facebook pages through data-driven post timing.", "died": "Facebook changed its API, and the company had no plan for another product.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/457-postrocket" }, { "name": "Pixelpipe", "years": "2008 to 2013", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Post photos and videos to every social network at once.", "died": "The networks closed their APIs and built cross-posting in themselves.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/435-pixelpipe" }, { "name": "Klout", "years": "2008 to 2017", "funding": "US$40M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A score from 1 to 100 for a person's influence on social media.", "died": "Facebook and Twitter built better analytics themselves.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/280-klout" }, { "name": "ThinkUp", "years": "2010 to 2017", "funding": "US$1M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Personal analytics on a user's social media activity, beyond likes and retweets.", "died": "It stayed a desktop product while social media moved to phones, and it did little marketing.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/624-thinkup" } ], "whatChanged": [ "All five depended on a social network's API or its users, and the network ended them by changing its rules or by building the feature itself. Supergrow makes the same bet on LinkedIn. LinkedIn released its own AI post writer in 2023, forbids unauthorized automated posting, commenting and liking, and in 2026 started to show low-effort AI posts to fewer people.", "Three things differ. Supergrow charged from the start and took no outside money, so it needs far less revenue than the funded predecessors to stay alive. It writes the content, a task that LinkedIn itself stepped back from: in September 2026 it removed its AI option for rewriting posts, and by October it offered Premium members a proofreader that only edits the member's own words. And it moved toward companies, which buy for many employees and cancel less. LinkedIn's actions against AI posts could still reduce its customers' reach, and with it their reason to pay." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The same market, with care.", "text": "Every step of the method is documented by the founder and needs little money: study paying competitors, post in public, pay for the start with a lifetime deal, then sell subscriptions. The market for LinkedIn writing tools is now crowded, and LinkedIn acts against generic AI posts, so a new entrant needs a narrower buyer and output that reads like a real person.", "steps": [ "Choose a market where people already pay, use the competitors every day, and do their weakest core task better.", "Post your progress and numbers where your buyers are. The founder's first customers, the deal platform and the investors' interest all came from those posts.", "Sell a lifetime deal for cash and feedback, and plan for the platform to keep 30% to 50% of it.", "Switch to subscriptions with a launch offer, then add a channel that is not your own posts, such as influencers or affiliates paid from each renewal." ], "open": "Tools for companies that want many employees to post about their work (called employee advocacy), and other professional platforms where people must post regularly but the platform does not write for them." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Verified figures stop in February 2026", "text": "TrustMRR's Stripe key expired, and the last sync was on 28 February 2026, 229 days before this page was written. The 75 posts in the founder's X timeline from December 2025 to October 2026 give no newer revenue figure. The company still sells and ships updates, but nothing after February 2026 is verified." }, { "title": "MRR and payments disagree", "text": "The same profile shows MRR of US$79,479 but payments of US$32,216 in 30 days, and 2,315 active subscriptions while the founder-written part of the profile estimates 1,200 users. Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial. No source explains the gap, so this page uses the payments." }, { "title": "LinkedIn writes, then restricts, AI posts", "text": "By 26 September 2023 LinkedIn had launched its own tool that drafts a post from a member's ideas. On 31 July 2026 it added an option to report posts that \"seem like AI slop\", said it already shows such posts less outside the writer's network, and said it uses better classifiers, programs that sort posts automatically, to find them. In September 2026 it removed its own AI rewriting option. A tool whose output reads as generic may cost its customers their reach." }, { "title": "LinkedIn's rules on automation", "text": "LinkedIn's User Agreement, effective 3 November 2025, forbids bots or other unauthorized automated methods to create, comment on, like or share posts, and its help pages warn that members who use such tools risk restricted accounts. Supergrow schedules posts, writes AI comments and publishes for team members. Its home page calls it a LinkedIn Verified Partner; this page could not check that claim." }, { "title": "Many competing tools", "text": "Taplio, AuthoredUp and ContentIn were there first. Taplio now reviews Supergrow on its own blog and offers the same Claude connection. The founder writes that copycats duplicated his product. Supergrow's own prices changed within two months in 2026, from US$19, US$39 and US$139 to US$39 and US$199." }, { "title": "A team of eight, not two", "text": "There are two founders, and LinkedIn lists 8 people at the company in October 2026, within a stated size of 2 to 10 employees. No source gives the headcount at the February 2026 figure. At eight people, Supergrow is near the upper limit of a small team on this site." }, { "title": "Dependence on model providers", "text": "The writing comes from third-party large language models that the company does not name. The providers set their prices, rules and quality, and the same models are available to every competitor and to LinkedIn." }, { "title": "A second product", "text": "In 2026 the founder also builds WarmDogo, an agent that finds sales leads, so Supergrow no longer has all of his time." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.supergrow.ai/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/supergrow" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: Supergrow, revenue verified through Stripe", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/supergrow", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile (https://trustmrr.com/startup/supergrow.md) in full on 15 October 2026. Its Verification Sources section says Stripe through an API key, the key expired, last revenue sync 28 February 2026. Source for every grade A figure. The profile text, such as the user estimate and the B2C label, is founder-written, grade C." }, { "title": "Deven Bhooshan's blog, 21 April 2025: From Zero to $230K ARR: The Indie Hacker's Playbook", "url": "https://blog.devenbhooshan.in/from-zero-to-250k-arr-the-indie-hackers-playbook", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's own account. Source for the start date, Honeypot, the competitor study, the RocketHub total, Product Hunt, the funding statement, the feedback tools and the two mistakes." }, { "title": "Deven Bhooshan on X, 2 September 2024: August report for Supergrow", "url": "https://x.com/devenbhooshan/status/1830499307704725723", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the August 2024 MRR, signups, customers, the start of the blog and the first engineer." }, { "title": "Deven Bhooshan on LinkedIn, 1 December 2023: November report for Supergrow", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/posts/devenbhooshan_november-report-for-supergrow-36449-activity-7136252559794552833-PJWX", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public post. The date comes from the post's ID. Source for the November 2023 revenue, MRR, customers and the lifetime deal for agencies." }, { "title": "Supergrow: About us", "url": "https://www.supergrow.ai/about-us", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names Deven Bhooshan as CEO and co-founder and Utsav Patel as CMO and co-founder. Its user count (1,200+) appears older than the TrustMRR data." }, { "title": "Supergrow: Terms of Service", "url": "https://www.supergrow.ai/tos", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the operator, AI output, third-party services and governing law." }, { "title": "Falcon Ebiz: Supergrow Innovations LLP, LLPIN ACH-0505", "url": "https://www.falconebiz.com/LLP/SUPERGROW-INNOVATIONS-LLP-ACH-0505", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A commercial copy of the Ministry of Corporate Affairs register, not the register itself. Source for the incorporation date, the paid-up capital and the two designated partners. Finanvo.in gives the same incorporation date." }, { "title": "LinkedIn: Supergrow company page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://in.linkedin.com/company/supergrowai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public page. Company size 2 to 10 employees, 8 people listed as employees." }, { "title": "Supergrow pricing page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://www.supergrow.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the questions section that gives the yearly prices." }, { "title": "Supergrow blog, 29 September 2026: What's new in Supergrow: September 2026", "url": "https://www.supergrow.ai/blog/whats-new-in-supergrow-september-2026", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the contents and the summary. Written by Deven Bhooshan. Shows that the product is still developed." }, { "title": "Supergrow changelog", "url": "https://www.supergrow.ai/changelog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the entries on the MCP connection for Claude and ChatGPT." }, { "title": "Supergrow affiliate program", "url": "https://www.supergrow.ai/affiliate-program", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the commission and the claimed trial-to-paid rate." }, { "title": "RocketHub: Supergrow lifetime deal", "url": "https://www.rockethub.com/deal/supergrow", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the deal page and its 8 customer reviews. A buyer's review gives the US$240 price of the top tier." }, { "title": "Deven Bhooshan's website", "url": "https://devenbhooshan.in/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founder's career and the second product, WarmDogo." }, { "title": "Deven Bhooshan on X, 17 September 2026: watching session recordings", "url": "https://x.com/devenbhooshan/status/2100531285714456923", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. His timeline from 21 December 2025 to 13 October 2026, 75 posts as the API lists them, was read for revenue figures and has none." }, { "title": "LinkedIn User Agreement, effective 3 November 2025", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/legal/user-agreement", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on what members must not do and on generative AI features." }, { "title": "LinkedIn Help: Prohibited software and extensions", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a1341387", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full." }, { "title": "Digital Works, 26 September 2023: LinkedIn's AI-powered writing tool for posts", "url": "https://digitalworks.dk/en/artikler/linkedins-ai-powered-writing-tool-for-posts", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A Danish agency's description of LinkedIn's tool that drafts posts." }, { "title": "ProPakistani, 31 July 2026: LinkedIn Finally Adds a Button To Kill All That AI Slop", "url": "https://propakistani.pk/2026/07/31/linkedin-finally-adds-a-button-to-kill-all-that-ai-slop/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Reports LinkedIn's statements; LinkedIn's own announcement was not read." }, { "title": "Metricool, 2 October 2026: LinkedIn Swaps Its AI Post Writer for a Proofreading Tool", "url": "https://metricool.com/linkedin-post-proofreader/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full." }, { "title": "Taplio blog, 24 August 2026: Supergrow Review 2026", "url": "https://taplio.com/blog/supergrow-review", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the verdict and the plan sections. Written by a competitor, as the page itself says." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." }, { "title": "Supergrow home page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://www.supergrow.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the input types, the length of a PostCast interview and the \"LinkedIn Verified Partner\" claim." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/adspirer/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/adspirer.md", "slug": "adspirer", "name": "Adspirer", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI agent and MCP server for ad campaigns", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-15", "launchLabel": "November 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$54.7K MRR verified by Stripe at the last sync, June 2026", "sticker": "$54.7K MRR in June 2026", "outcomeUsd": 656208, "months": 7, "teamLabel": "1 founder; LinkedIn lists 2 employees in October 2026", "fundingLabel": "None found; the profile says bootstrapped", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "platform", "trend": "growing", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Advertising" ], "product": "An AI agent for paid advertising that works inside ChatGPT, Claude, Claude Code, Cursor and other AI assistants. It connects to the customer's ad accounts at Google, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, Amazon and ChatGPT Ads, researches keywords, builds campaigns (always created paused), reports results and finds wasted spend. Scheduled agents can also watch the accounts and make reversible changes. The customer pays the ad platforms directly.", "why": "It went where the users already were: an app in ChatGPT's app store, a plugin in Claude's directory and in Claude Code, and setups for Cursor and Codex, in the months when these directories were new. It charges per tool call instead of a share of ad spend, so a small advertiser starts at US$49 a month. And it applied to the platforms' own API programs; the company says Google approved it in June 2026 and Amazon admitted it to its partner network.", "summary": [ "Adspirer is an MCP server: a program that offers tools to AI assistants through the Model Context Protocol, an open standard by which a chat assistant such as ChatGPT or Claude calls outside software. Its tools act on a customer's ad accounts at Google, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, Amazon and ChatGPT Ads: they research keywords, build campaigns, read results, change budgets and find wasted spend, all from a conversation. Each action is a tool call, one request from the assistant to one tool, and the price is a monthly number of them: 15 free, 150 for US$49, 600 for US$99 and 3,000 for US$199. The ad money goes from the customer to the platforms and never passes through Adspirer, so all of the subscription fee is the business's revenue.", "Abhilash Mekala, who describes himself as formerly at Meta and Uber and is based in San Francisco, created the public code repository on 27 October 2025 and took the first payment, US$25, in November 2025. He submitted a ChatGPT app with 36 tools on 20 December 2025, added Meta Ads on 5 January 2026, and became an official Claude Code plugin on 30 March 2026. Revenue read from Stripe by TrustMRR went from US$1,073 in February to US$68,747 in June 2026. At the last sync, on 29 June 2026, MRR (monthly recurring revenue, the subscription money that repeats every month) was US$54,684 from 742 active subscriptions, and customers had paid US$70,229 in the previous 30 days. The operating company is BETSONAGI LLC, d/b/a Adspirer. The profile lists a team of one, LinkedIn lists two employees, and no funding was found.", "The money figures are grade A, from Stripe, but they stop on 29 June 2026. The profile now says that the Stripe API key, a password that lets one program read another program's account, has expired, and it gives no expiry time. Nothing after 29 June is verified in either direction. The team size, the platform approvals, the tool counts and the agents come from the company, the founder or a partner. The page also shows what ended earlier companies that ran ads for small businesses: mostly the platforms' own automation." ], "factsCaption": "Stripe-verified MRR of US$54,684 and US$70,229 paid in 30 days at the last sync on 29 June 2026, seven months after the first payment; nothing later is verified", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from Stripe through TrustMRR, as read up to the last sync on 29 June 2026; the Stripe API key has expired since then. A grade C value is the company's own page, a founder post, a partner's page or a public record such as GitHub or LinkedIn. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From the first payment in November 2025 to US$54,684 of verified MRR seven months later, then no verified data. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Adspirer prices in October 2026, from the company's pricing page and its llms.txt file (grade C)", "note": "Each plan is a monthly number of tool calls; the pricing page calls them tasks. Annual billing costs US$485, US$999 or US$2,000 a year, 15.9% to 17.5% less than twelve monthly payments. Every plan includes all ad platforms and the ChatGPT and Claude integrations, and the scheduled Ad Ops agents come with the paid plans. Ad spend is paid by the customer to the ad platforms and is not part of these prices.", "rows": [ [ "Free Forever", "0", "0", "15 tool calls a month" ], [ "Plus", "40.42", "49", "150 tool calls a month; US$485 a year" ], [ "Pro", "83.25", "99", "600 tool calls a month; US$999 a year" ], [ "Max", "166.67", "199", "3,000 tool calls a month; US$2,000 a year" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "MRR at the last sync, 29 June 2026", "value": "US$54,684", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe through TrustMRR, last revenue sync on 29 June 2026 at 14:31 UTC. The profile says the Stripe API key has expired and gives no expiry time. MRR grew 30.0% in the 30 days before the sync.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Money paid in the 30 days before the sync", "value": "US$70,229, up 25.2%", "grade": "A", "note": "Snapshot stored at the 29 June sync. The daily table for 16 September to 15 October 2026 shows US$0.00 for every day, because no data has arrived since.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Gap between the 30-day payments and MRR", "value": "US$15,545, or 28.4% above MRR", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$70,229 minus US$54,684. A likely reason, not stated on the profile: an annual plan (US$485, US$999 or US$2,000) counts in full as a payment on the day it is paid, but only one twelfth of it counts in MRR. Ad spend is not the reason: the terms say that the platforms charge it to the customer directly.", "src": [ 1, 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the MRR", "value": "about US$656,208 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$54,684 times 12. This is the headline value in dollars a year.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue by month", "value": "US$25 (November 2025), US$1,073 (February 2026), US$21,553 (March), US$36,411 (April), US$56,108 (May), US$68,747 (June, to the 29th)", "grade": "A", "note": "Monthly timeline on the profile; no payments in December 2025 or January 2026. The six months add up to US$183,917, the all-time total on the profile.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from month to month", "value": "+68.9% (April), +54.1% (May), +22.5% (June)", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the monthly timeline. Growth slowed, but every month was higher than the one before. June 2026 was 3.19 times March.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions at the last sync", "value": "742", "grade": "A", "note": "Snapshot from the 29 June 2026 sync.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR per active subscription", "value": "about US$73.70 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$54,684 divided by 742. Between the monthly prices of Plus (US$49) and Pro (US$99).", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Profile windows that end today", "value": "US$0.00 in the last 3 months; US$141,117 in the last 6 months", "grade": "A", "note": "These windows end on 15 October 2026, but no data exists after 29 June, so they undercount. Calculated: the 6-month figure contains US$16,262 from part of April plus all of May and June.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin in the 30 days before the sync", "value": "82.0%", "grade": "C", "note": "Shown on the profile, which does not say where the costs come from. This page treats the cost side as founder-supplied.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "What the business keeps of each payment", "value": "the whole subscription fee; no ad spend passes through", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms of Service, section 6: all advertising spend is charged directly by the advertising platforms to the customer's own accounts, and Adspirer does not receive, hold, manage or process it.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Prices, October 2026", "value": "Free, then US$49, US$99 and US$199 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "For 15, 150, 600 and 3,000 tool calls a month. The founder wrote in December 2025 that per-tool-call pricing replaced a share of ad spend.", "src": [ 3, 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 person on the profile; LinkedIn lists 2 employees", "grade": "C", "note": "The TrustMRR team size is founder-written. The LinkedIn company page, read 15 October 2026, gives the size band 2-10 employees and shows 2 people. No count exists for June 2026.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "The profile says bootstrapped. No funding round was found on the company's pages, its newsroom or the founder's posts.", "src": [ 1, 9, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Operating company", "value": "BETSONAGI LLC, d/b/a Adspirer", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms of Service and privacy policy. The terms are governed by the laws of Delaware.", "src": [ 2, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Tools offered to the AI assistants", "value": "36 in December 2025; 430 documented tools in October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's thread on the ChatGPT app submission, 20 December 2025, and the company's llms.txt file. Anthropic's plugin page describes 91 tools in the Claude Code plugin.", "src": [ 5, 3, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Claude Code plugin installs", "value": "2,950", "grade": "C", "note": "Anthropic's plugin directory page, read 15 October 2026. Installs are not customers; many are free accounts.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Estimated users", "value": "about 2,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder-written field on the profile.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Scale claimed by a partner", "value": "about 3,000 customer environments and about 50 million MCP tool calls a day", "grade": "C", "note": "BlueRock's customer story. Not verified. Calculated: 3,000 accounts on the Max plan's 3,000 calls a month would make about 300,000 calls a day, so the 50 million cannot be billed tool calls.", "src": [ 12, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the first payment to the headline", "value": "7 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: November 2025 to June 2026. The profile gives 1 January 2026 as the founding date, after the first payment.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "27 October 2025", "what": "The founder creates the public GitHub repository ads-mcp, which later holds the plugins and skills for Claude Code and Cursor.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "First verified payment: US$25.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "11 to 16 December 2025", "what": "The founder posts that agencies charging a share of ad spend gain from bloated budgets, and that Adspirer charges per tool call instead. He also writes that AI tool builders should think about MCP distribution.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "20 December 2025", "what": "He submits Adspirer v1.0, the first ChatGPT app, to OpenAI's review. Each of its 36 tools needed annotations; he says it took about two hours.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "5 January 2026", "what": "Meta Ads support goes live: Facebook and Instagram campaigns from ChatGPT or Claude. Three platforms: Google, TikTok and Meta.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "15 February 2026", "what": "He posts a video on creating Google Ads campaigns from Claude Code and hosts an event listed on Luma, Build Your AI Marketing Stack with OpenClaw.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "March 2026", "what": "Verified revenue reaches US$21,553, from US$1,073 in February.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "30 March 2026", "what": "Adspirer becomes an official Claude Code plugin, installed from the plugin directory.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 7 ] }, { "when": "April to May 2026", "what": "Verified revenue: US$36,411 in April, US$56,108 in May.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "13 June 2026", "what": "The company announces Google Ads API approval \"at the agency level\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "14 June 2026", "what": "The company announces admission to the Amazon Ads Partner Network. Amazon Ads becomes its sixth ad platform.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "29 June 2026", "what": "Last Stripe sync: MRR US$54,684, 742 active subscriptions, US$70,229 paid in 30 days, US$68,747 in June. No verified data after this day.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "14 July 2026", "what": "Launch of Ad Ops agents, which run on a schedule at a level the advertiser chooses, from watch-and-alert to autonomous reversible changes.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "8 October 2026", "what": "Latest push to the public GitHub repository. The founder still posts on X on 13 October. No new revenue figure.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 5 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Distribution", "text": "In December 2025 the founder wrote that users do not adopt because of features but because you showed up where they already were. Adspirer is an app in ChatGPT's app store, a plugin in Claude's directory and an official Claude Code plugin with 2,950 installs, with setups for Cursor, Codex, Windsurf and OpenClaw. The sign-in during the install creates the free account, so the assistant's directory is the shop window." }, { "title": "Tools instead of screens", "text": "The founder wrote that ChatGPT and Claude are the interface, so he builds tools, not a dashboard. In a test he posted on 22 March 2026, the MCP tools built a full Performance Max campaign in 20 seconds with 15 tool calls, while Perplexity's computer-use agent, which works through the ad screens, needed 15 minutes." }, { "title": "Price per tool call, not per ad spend", "text": "Agencies and many ad tools charge a percentage of ad spend. Adspirer charges for the number of tool calls, so an advertiser with US$1 million of spend pays the same as one with US$10,000 if both use the same number of tools, in the founder's words. A small advertiser can start for US$49 a month." }, { "title": "Platform approvals and guardrails", "text": "The company applied to the platforms' API programs: it announced Google Ads API approval and admission to the Amazon Ads Partner Network in June 2026. To make an AI acting on real budgets acceptable, new campaigns are created paused, new spend waits for approval, every action is logged, and autonomous agents may only make changes from a list of reversible ones." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages, the founder's posts and the technology list on the TrustMRR profile. They are grade C.", "items": [ "A remote MCP server at mcp.adspirer.com/mcp. Assistants connect over Streamable HTTP or SSE and sign in with OAuth 2.1 with PKCE. The company says it does not collect or store the passwords of the connected accounts.", "Ad accounts connect through each platform's own authorization: OAuth or another approved method for Google, Microsoft, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok and Amazon, and an API key for ChatGPT Ads. Contact data sent to a platform as a conversion is hashed with SHA-256 first.", "The technology list on the profile names Next.js, FastAPI, Google Cloud, Docker, Redis, GraphQL, Clerk, Stripe, Datadog, Twilio and GitHub Actions, and the model providers Anthropic and OpenAI. In chat use the customer's own assistant is the model; no source says which model runs the scheduled agents.", "The ChatGPT app passed OpenAI's review: every tool needed annotations (readOnlyHint, destructiveHint, openWorldHint), at least five test cases and three negative test cases, and the server had to prove ownership of its domain.", "Plugins and skills for Claude Code and Cursor are in a public GitHub repository under the MIT license. The documentation runs on Mintlify and has its own llms.txt file for AI agents.", "Runtime security and monitoring for the MCP traffic come from BlueRock, according to BlueRock's customer story." ], "src": [ 3, 14, 1, 5, 8, 12 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised to take ad management off a small advertiser's hands, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Trada", "years": "2008 to 2015", "funding": "US$19M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A marketplace of paid-search experts who ran small businesses' Google AdWords campaigns.", "died": "Human experts were costly to scale, and Google's own automated campaign tools reduced the need for them.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/655-trada" }, { "name": "Automate Ads", "years": "2015 to 2018", "funding": "US$1.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Automated management of Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns.", "died": "Facebook and Google kept improving their own ad tools, and the product depended on their APIs.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1100-automate-ads" }, { "name": "Metigy", "years": "2014 to 2022", "funding": "US$14M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "An AI marketing brain for small businesses that recommended content and ad spend.", "died": "Its recommendations were generic. Small businesses wanted the work done for them, not a dashboard of advice, and the money ran out.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2338-metigy" }, { "name": "Admazely", "years": "2012 to 2014", "funding": "US$2.3M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Simple retargeting ads for small web shops.", "died": "Small shops had small ad budgets, so each customer cost more to acquire than it brought in.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1830-admazely" } ], "whatChanged": [ "All four sold a layer between small advertisers and the large ad platforms, and in three of them the platforms' own tools or the customers' small budgets ended it. Adspirer makes the same bet on the same platforms, and the platforms are still adding automation: Performance Max for all Google advertisers since November 2021, AI Max for Search campaigns from May 2025, and a Meta Advantage+ setup that applies AI to sales, app and leads campaigns from February 2025.", "Three things differ. The work that Trada paid human experts for, and that Metigy only recommended, is now done by a language model inside an assistant that the customer already pays for, so Adspirer builds tools, not screens, and the work gets done rather than suggested. It is found in the assistants' app directories instead of through sales. And the price is per tool call, not a share of ad spend, so a small advertiser pays US$49 a month and the business never holds ad money. None of this protects it from the platforms deciding to offer the same agent themselves." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The early timing, no longer.", "text": "In late 2025 the app directories inside ChatGPT and Claude were new and had few ad tools, and Adspirer was in them early. That opening is narrower now: a GitHub organization named Google Ads, linked to Google's developer site, publishes an open-source Google Ads MCP server, and Pipeboard offers a free plan for Meta. The method still works for any professional software with a public API that a specialist uses every day: wrap the API as tools, list them where the assistants are, and charge per call.", "steps": [ "Pick one paid job with official APIs and wrap each action as a tool, with reading and writing separated.", "Publish it in the assistants' directories: ChatGPT's app store, Claude's plugin directory, Claude Code and Cursor.", "Apply early for the platforms' API access levels and partner programs, because the reviews take time.", "Charge per tool call, with a free tier large enough to test in one session.", "Create every change paused or reversible, require approval for new spend, and write the terms so that the customer owns the spend." ], "open": "Jobs that run through official APIs and cost specialists hours each week: retail media, email marketing platforms, app store ads, and cloud cost management." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Verification stopped on 29 June 2026", "text": "The profile says the Stripe API key that TrustMRR reads has expired, with no expiry time. Every verified figure ends on 29 June, and the daily table shows US$0.00 for every day since, which says nothing in either direction. The latest signs that the business runs are the agents launch on 14 July, a push to the public repository on 8 October and a post by the founder on 13 October 2026, none of them with a figure." }, { "title": "The platforms automate the same job", "text": "Google made Performance Max available to all advertisers on 2 November 2021 and announced AI Max for Search campaigns on 6 May 2025. Meta made its Advantage+ setup apply AI to sales, app and leads campaigns from February 2025, and on 3 June 2025 MediaPost, citing The Wall Street Journal, reported a plan to let brands create and target ads with Meta's AI tools by 2026. Each step moves part of what an agent like Adspirer does into the platform's own product." }, { "title": "API access is granted, and can be withdrawn", "text": "The Google Ads API has access levels that each need an application: Basic Access allows 15,000 operations a day, Standard Access has no daily limit. LinkedIn opens its Advertising API only to approved developers. Adspirer's privacy policy shows a partner duty too: for data received through Meta's Muse connector platform it must notify Meta of an incident within 48 hours. Adspirer says it holds Google approval \"at the agency level\", a term that Google's access page does not use. Automate Ads, a predecessor, depended on the same kind of access." }, { "title": "An AI agent spending real budgets", "text": "The terms say that AI output can include incorrect values, \"for example, budget or bid amounts\", that Adspirer is not liable for ad spend or budget overruns, and that its liability is capped at the customer's most recent monthly fee. The guardrails are the company's own: campaigns are created paused, new spend waits for approval, and autonomous agents may only make changes from a list of reversible ones. No outside party has tested them." }, { "title": "Competitors, including free ones", "text": "The GitHub organization googleads, named Google Ads and linked to Google's developer site, publishes an open-source Google Ads MCP server, created on 3 October 2025, with 1,042 stars; its README lists tools that read account data. Pipeboard's Meta Ads MCP server has a free plan, a Meta Business Partner badge and 1,305 stars. Adspirer's own comparison page lists Ryze AI, Optmyzr, Smartly, Skai, Madgicx, Bïrch, Opteo and Adzviser." }, { "title": "Claims that no one outside has checked", "text": "BlueRock's customer story gives about 3,000 customer environments and about 50 million MCP tool calls a day, which cannot be billed calls (about 300,000 a day even if every account were on the Max plan). The Google and Amazon approvals appear only on Adspirer's own newsroom, and the team size of one is the founder's own entry, while LinkedIn lists two employees." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.adspirer.com" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/adspirer" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: Adspirer profile, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/adspirer", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile (https://trustmrr.com/startup/adspirer.md) in full. Revenue, the monthly timeline, MRR and the subscription count come from Stripe (grade A); the description, team size, funding, user estimate, technology list and founding date are founder-written (grade C). Last revenue sync 29 June 2026 at 14:31 UTC; the Stripe API key has expired, with no expiry time given." }, { "title": "Adspirer Terms of Service", "url": "https://www.adspirer.com/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the operating company, the separation of ad spend, the AI-output clauses and the liability cap." }, { "title": "Adspirer llms.txt file", "url": "https://www.adspirer.com/llms.txt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's machine-readable summary: product, MCP server address and sign-in method, platforms, assistants, tool count, prices, GitHub repository and documentation." }, { "title": "Adspirer pricing page", "url": "https://www.adspirer.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page and its embedded price data. The plan cards load by script; the prices were read from the page's metadata, which matches the llms.txt file." }, { "title": "Abhilash Mekala on X (@abhilashreddi): profile and posts from 9 December 2025 to 13 October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/abhilashreddi", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile and two pages of the timeline through api.fxtwitter.com in full. The third page returned no posts. Source for the pricing posts, the ChatGPT app submission, the platform launches and the Claude Code plugin." }, { "title": "LinkedIn: Adspirer company page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/adspirer", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public page. Source for the size band of 2-10 employees and the 2 employees listed." }, { "title": "Claude plugin directory: Adspirer Ads Agent, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://claude.com/plugins/adspirer-ads-agent", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Anthropic's listing, made by Adspirer, with the install count and the tool count." }, { "title": "GitHub repository amekala/ads-mcp: README and repository record", "url": "https://github.com/amekala/ads-mcp", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the README in full and the repository record through the GitHub API: created 27 October 2025, last push 8 October 2026, MIT license." }, { "title": "Adspirer newsroom, 13 June 2026: Adspirer Earns Google Ads API Approval at the Agency Level", "url": "https://www.adspirer.com/newsroom/adspirer-google-ads-api-agency-approval", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's own announcement; Google's side was not found." }, { "title": "Adspirer newsroom, 14 June 2026: Adspirer Approved as an Amazon Ads Partner; Amazon Ads Now Live", "url": "https://www.adspirer.com/newsroom/adspirer-amazon-ads-partner", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's own announcement." }, { "title": "Adspirer newsroom, 14 July 2026: Adspirer Launches Autonomous Ad Ops Agents", "url": "https://www.adspirer.com/newsroom/adspirer-ad-ops-agents", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the autonomy levels and the rule that auto-apply covers only reversible changes." }, { "title": "BlueRock customer story: How Adspirer secures the full lifecycle of AI advertising operations", "url": "https://www.bluerock.io/customers/adspirer", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A partner's marketing page. Source for the customer environments and the tool calls a day, which this page could not verify." }, { "title": "Adspirer About page", "url": "https://www.adspirer.com/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the guardrails: paused campaigns, approval for consequential moves, activity log." }, { "title": "Adspirer Privacy Policy", "url": "https://www.adspirer.com/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on connected platforms, authorization, security incidents and the operating company." }, { "title": "Google Ads API: Access levels and permissible use", "url": "https://developers.google.com/google-ads/api/docs/api-policy/access-levels", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Google's rules for API access levels and daily operation limits." }, { "title": "Google Ads and Commerce blog, 2 November 2021: Performance Max campaigns launch to all advertisers", "url": "https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/performance-max/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Date and scope of the launch." }, { "title": "Google Ads and Commerce blog, 6 May 2025: Introducing AI Max for Search campaigns", "url": "https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/google-ai-max-for-search-campaigns/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Date and rollout of AI Max for Search." }, { "title": "Search Engine Land, 7 February 2025: Meta simplifies Advantage+ campaign setup, adds leads campaigns", "url": "https://searchengineland.com/meta-advantage-campaign-setup-leads-campaigns-451713", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Trade press report on Meta's streamlined Advantage+ setup." }, { "title": "MediaPost, 3 June 2025: Meta Plans To Automate All Ad Creation By 2026: Report", "url": "https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/406315/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Trade press report citing The Wall Street Journal; the Journal's article was not read." }, { "title": "Microsoft Learn: LinkedIn Marketing API, increasing access", "url": "https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/linkedin/marketing/increasing-access", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. LinkedIn's rules for access to the Advertising API." }, { "title": "GitHub repository googleads/google-ads-mcp: README and repository record", "url": "https://github.com/googleads/google-ads-mcp", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the README and the repository record through the GitHub API: created 3 October 2025, 1,042 stars. The organization record names it Google Ads and links to developers.google.com/ads; GitHub does not mark it verified." }, { "title": "GitHub repository pipeboard-co/meta-ads-mcp: repository record", "url": "https://github.com/pipeboard-co/meta-ads-mcp", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the repository record through the GitHub API: description, created 11 April 2025, 1,305 stars." }, { "title": "Adspirer blog: 10 Best AI Tools for PPC Managers in 2026", "url": "https://www.adspirer.com/blog/best-ai-tools-ppc-managers-2026", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's own comparison, with a disclosure that Adspirer is its product. Source for the competitor names." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/lancer-app/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/lancer-app.md", "slug": "lancer-app", "name": "Lancer", "country": "North Macedonia", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI agent that bids on Upwork jobs", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-15", "launchLabel": "June 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$17.7K a month recurring revenue, October 2026", "sticker": "$212K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 212196, "months": 16, "teamLabel": "2 founders and no employees (January and July 2026)", "fundingLabel": "None found; no loans in the company's 2025 accounts", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "partners", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Sales" ], "product": "An AI agent for Upwork. It reads the Upwork job feed against filters that the customer sets, checks with AI whether each job fits, writes a proposal and the answers to the screening questions from the customer's own knowledge base, and submits it from the customer's Upwork account, with optional boosting. Replies are tracked in an inbox. An MCP server and a REST API let the customer's own AI agent run it.", "why": "The founder had the problem himself. Upwork had become his agency's best sales channel, but 10,000 jobs a day are posted around the clock and he could cover only about 8% of them by hand. He built the tool for his own agency and charged agency owners a business price from the start. Two Upwork coaches, who advise freelancers and agencies, switched their clients to it as affiliates, and that produced most of the growth.", "summary": [ "Lancer is an AI agent, a program that uses a language model to decide and act on its own instead of only answering questions, for Upwork, a marketplace where clients post jobs and freelancers apply with written proposals. It reads the Upwork job feed against filters that the customer sets, such as budget and the client's past spending and hire rate, and runs an AI check on whether each job fits. For the jobs that pass, it writes a proposal from a knowledge base that the customer wrote, answers the job's screening questions, and submits the proposal from the customer's own Upwork account. Proposals use Connects, credits that freelancers buy from Upwork. Lancer charges US$149 to US$499 a month.", "Ivan Nedelkovski, from Skopje in North Macedonia, started a software development agency, MVP Masters, in 2020 and grew it to 15 full-time staff before he exited it in 2025 to start a product studio. In 2024 his agency spent US$800 on Upwork and won three contracts worth US$240,000 over the next twelve months, but he could watch only a small part of the job posts by hand. He built Lancer for his own agency first, had paying users at about US$300 a month five months after the first line of code, and launched in June 2025. TrustMRR, a site that reads a startup's revenue directly from its payment processor, shows Stripe revenue that grew from US$6,434 in December 2025 to US$26,665 in September 2026. The MRR, monthly recurring revenue, the monthly value of all active subscriptions, was US$17,683 on 15 October 2026, down 17.2% in 30 days. That is a run rate, the current monthly figure times 12, of about US$212,000 a year. Two people run it, and it has been for sale since January 2026, now at US$699,999.", "The revenue figures are grade A: TrustMRR reads them from Stripe. The team size, the history and the growth channel are the founder's words, grade C. The Estonian company that operates Lancer, MVP Masters OÜ, files annual reports that show its 2024 revenue came from programming work and that it made a loss in 2025. The largest risk is the platform: Upwork's terms forbid bots and user-interface automation outside its official tools, and Upwork offers its own AI that drafts proposals. The page also shows earlier companies that died when the platform they were built on changed its rules." ], "factsCaption": "An AI agent for Upwork, run by two people, with Stripe-verified recurring revenue of US$17,683 a month in October 2026, down 17.2% in 30 days, listed for sale at US$699,999", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from Stripe through TrustMRR, from Upwork's own published terms and announcements, or from the Estonian company register and the annual reports filed there. A grade C value is a statement by the founder, the company or a third-party site. An X value was computed on this page from the sources it names.", "timelineLead": "From an agency's own Upwork problem to a product for sale, in 16 months after launch. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Lancer prices in October 2026, from the company's pricing page and the price data in its page source (grade C)", "note": "There is no yearly plan, so the yearly column is empty. Each plan is billed monthly or by the quarter, and the quarterly price is sold as 'Pay 2, get 1 free'. The cheaper plan charges by lead, a conversation started with a client: the page says 'We charge per conversation started.' Proposals also use the customer's own Upwork Connects, which Lancer can top up automatically. The page also says '33% upgrade to Unlimited within 90 days'.", "rows": [ [ "Pay-Per-Lead", "", "149", "1 Upwork account; unlimited proposals; quarterly: US$299 a quarter (about US$99 a month) with 15 leads a quarter, then US$19 each" ], [ "Unlimited", "", "499", "several Upwork accounts; setup done for you; monthly check-ins; quarterly: US$999 a quarter (about US$333 a month)" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 15 October 2026", "value": "US$17,683", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data read by TrustMRR through an API key, last synced 15 October 2026. 111 active subscriptions.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from that MRR", "value": "about US$212,196 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$17,683 times 12. This is the headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Change in MRR over the last 30 days", "value": "down 17.2%, from about US$21,356", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot. The starting value is calculated: US$17,683 divided by 0.828.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days, to 15 October 2026", "value": "US$15,267", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR: 44.5% less than the 30 days before, and 42.7% below September 2026 (calculated). Plans can be paid by the quarter, which can make single months uneven; the profile does not show how much of each month this is.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month, from Stripe", "value": "US$6,434 (December 2025) to US$26,665 (September 2026)", "grade": "A", "note": "November 2025 US$7,947; February 2026 US$8,858; March US$17,255; June US$19,804; July US$26,645; August US$19,725; September US$26,665; October to the 15th US$7,448.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average revenue a month, July to September 2026", "value": "US$24,345, 35.6% more than April to June (US$17,955)", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the monthly table. The growth of the summer did not continue into the last 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 12 months, and all time", "value": "US$186,772 and US$210,283", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. Revenue in 2025 was about US$41,100 (calculated: all-time revenue minus the 2026 months).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price", "value": "US$699,999, listed since 13 January 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller's listing on TrustMRR, which shows 26 offers received. No sale is reported.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price as a multiple", "value": "3.75 times the last 12 months of revenue, 3.3 times the run rate", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$699,999 divided by US$186,772 and by US$212,196. TrustMRR shows 3.8.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Seller's update on the listing", "value": "\"It's now doing $27K months!\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller's message, not dated. It matches revenue in July (US$26,645) and September 2026 (US$26,665). It is not MRR, which was US$17,683 on 15 October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR and team, 29 July 2026", "value": "US$20,000 with a two-person team", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in the Indie Hackers interview; the article header says revenue above US$25,000 a month. The October MRR is 11.6% lower (calculated).", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's figures, 10 January 2026", "value": "first US$10,000 month three months after launch, then \"around $10K MRR\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Starter Story interview. Stripe revenue from November 2025 to February 2026 was US$6,434 to US$8,858 a month, below this.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 founders, 0 employees", "grade": "C", "note": "Starter Story profile, January 2026, and \"a two-person team\" in July 2026. The founder calls himself co-founder; no source read names the other founder.", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Payroll of the operating company, third quarter of 2026", "value": "no labour taxes paid, no employee count reported", "grade": "C", "note": "Inforegister, a site that shows Estonian company and tax data: 'No labour taxes paid' and 'Number of employees is missing'. The 2024 annual report shows labour costs of €4, and the 2025 report shows none.", "src": [ 13, 14, 15 ] }, { "fact": "Operating company", "value": "MVP Masters OÜ, Tallinn, Estonia, registry code 16911123", "grade": "A", "note": "Estonian e-Business Register: registered 31 January 2024, share capital €1. Lancer's about page names it as the operator. MVP Masters is also the name of the founder's agency.", "src": [ 12, 4, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Operating company, 2024", "value": "€533,455 revenue, €287,532 profit", "grade": "A", "note": "Annual report for 31 January to 31 December 2024. All revenue came from programming. Lancer had not launched yet.", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "fact": "Operating company, 2025", "value": "€141,215 revenue, €189,323 loss", "grade": "A", "note": "Annual report 2025: €293,099 spent on goods, materials and services. No loans. Equity fell from €292,789 to €103,466, by exactly the loss (calculated). The report does not say how much went to Lancer.", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "fact": "The founder's agency before Lancer", "value": "15 full-time staff and seven-figure revenue", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in the Indie Hackers interview: started in 2020, exited in 2025 to start a product studio whose first product was Lancer.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Upwork result that led to the product, 2024", "value": "US$800 spent, 3 contracts, US$240,000 in 12 months", "grade": "C", "note": "Starter Story. With 10,000 jobs posted a day, he estimated that he covered 8% of them by hand.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "First price and first revenue", "value": "about US$300 a month; about US$800 MRR before launch", "grade": "C", "note": "Starter Story: paying users five months after the first line of code.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Customers", "value": "more than 400 freelancers and agencies", "grade": "C", "note": "Lancer's about page, October 2026. TrustMRR counts 111 active subscriptions on 15 October 2026.", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Main growth channel", "value": "two Upwork coaches as affiliates", "grade": "C", "note": "Starter Story: \"Most of our growth came from those two experts as affiliates.\" Also the founder's LinkedIn posts, and bids on Upwork jobs that asked for manual bidders. No paid acquisition by January 2026.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Offers before the current listing", "value": "several, from US$100,000 to US$150,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Starter Story, January 2026, after the listing on TrustMRR. None was accepted.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Launch date", "value": "June 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in Starter Story. TrustMRR gives 24 April 2025 as the founded date. Lancer's about page says January 2024, the month the Estonian company was registered.", "src": [ 3, 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October 2026 figure", "value": "16 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: June 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2020", "what": "Nedelkovski, from Skopje, who dropped out of university twice, starts a software development agency. It grows to 15 full-time staff and seven-figure revenue.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "31 January 2024", "what": "MVP Masters OÜ is registered in Estonia with €1 of share capital. It later operates Lancer.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "2024", "what": "His agency opens a new Upwork account: US$800 spent, three contracts in one quarter, US$240,000 over the next 12 months. He builds a prototype that finds and answers jobs for his own agency, and two agency-owner friends close clients with it in the first week.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "16 October 2024", "what": "Upwork announces that Uma, its AI, will create tailored proposal drafts for freelancers.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "31 December 2024", "what": "The Estonian company closes its first year with €533,455 of revenue, all from programming, and €287,532 of profit.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "24 April 2025", "what": "The founded date on Lancer's TrustMRR profile. Paying users at about US$300 a month arrive five months after the first line of code, and MRR is about US$800 before the launch.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "when": "June 2025", "what": "Public launch. The first users come from his network, through a LinkedIn post that asked for beta testers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "2025", "what": "The founder exits the agency to start a product studio. Lancer is its first product.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "23 July 2025", "what": "Upwork writes that Uma \"begins the transition from utility companion to always-on work agent\", starting with interviews that Uma runs for clients during the proposal process.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "September 2025", "what": "The first US$10,000 month, three months after launch, in the founder's words. Two Upwork coaches who recommend tools to their clients become affiliates.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "November 2025 to February 2026", "what": "Stripe revenue of US$6,434 to US$8,858 a month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "10 January 2026", "what": "Starter Story interview: two founders, no employees, \"around $10K MRR\", no money spent on paid acquisition, and offers of US$100,000 to US$150,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "13 January 2026", "what": "Listed for sale on TrustMRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "March 2026", "what": "Revenue almost doubles, from US$8,858 in February to US$17,255.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "29 July 2026", "what": "Indie Hackers interview: US$20,000 MRR with a two-person team.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "July to September 2026", "what": "The best months so far: US$26,645 in July, US$19,725 in August, US$26,665 in September.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "5 October 2026", "what": "Upwork's API & MCP Terms, version 2.4, take effect. They forbid user-interface automation and the use of Upwork content taken outside its official tools, and they describe AI agents that submit proposals through the official API.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "15 October 2026", "what": "MRR is US$17,683, down 17.2% in 30 days, with 111 active subscriptions. The asking price is US$699,999, and the listing shows 26 offers.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Distribution", "text": "Most of the growth came from two Upwork coaches, freelancers who advise agency owners and other freelancers on how to win work on Upwork. One had sent his clients to a team of manual bidders in Pakistan, the other to an established competitor. After a demo, both recommended Lancer as affiliates. The founder added LinkedIn posts, and an Upwork profile of his own that used Lancer to bid on jobs that asked for manual bidders." }, { "title": "Built for his own agency first", "text": "The founder used Upwork as his agency's sales channel and measured it: US$800 of spend, three contracts and US$240,000 in a year. The problem was coverage, with 10,000 new jobs a day around the clock. He built the tool for himself, gave it to two agency-owner friends, and then sold it to people who run the same kind of business." }, { "title": "A business price from the first user", "text": "Paying users came before the launch, at about US$300 a month. Today the plans cost US$149 or US$499 a month, and the cheaper one charges by lead, a conversation started with a client, instead of by proposal sent. One customer on the pricing page reports a first project of US$12,000 won through Lancer." }, { "title": "Filter first, then write", "text": "Each job passes the customer's filters and an AI suitability check before a proposal is written, and each proposal draws on a knowledge base that the customer writes. The company presents this as the opposite of the bots that Upwork forbids: fewer proposals, each one addressed to the job. It says its server rejects changes that remove the budget and client-quality filters unless the customer explicitly opts in." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's pages and documentation, the founder's interviews, the founder-entered part of the TrustMRR profile and the company's annual report. They are grade C, except the annual report.", "items": [ "Next.js and TypeScript for the web app; Node.js and Elasticsearch on the server; Stripe for subscriptions (the tech-stack section of the TrustMRR profile).", "Hosting and database on Google Cloud and Firebase. AI requests go through OpenRouter, a service that sends each request to one of several model providers and falls back to another. No source read names the models.", "The pipeline: campaign filters over the Upwork job feed, an AI suitability pass on every match, a proposal and screening answers written from the customer's knowledge base, then submission through the customer's connected Upwork account, which Lancer calls a bidder account, with optional boosting.", "An MCP server, a standard interface that lets AI assistants such as Claude or ChatGPT call a product's functions, and a REST API with webhooks let the customer's own agent or software run campaigns and submit bids.", "Intercom for support chat, Resend for email, PostHog and DataFast for analytics, and Cal.com for booking calls, as listed among the subprocessors in the privacy policy.", "Paying users came five months after the first line of code. The 2025 income statement of the operating company shows €293,099 spent on goods, materials and services and no labour costs." ], "src": [ 1, 8, 7, 6, 3, 15 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database built a product on top of another company's platform and died when that platform changed its rules, cut off access or built the feature itself. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "BranchOut", "years": "2010 to 2017", "funding": "US$49M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Professional networking built on Facebook's social graph.", "died": "Facebook changed its API rules and removed the channel that its whole growth plan depended on.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/30-branchout" }, { "name": "Meerkat", "years": "2015 to 2016", "funding": "US$14M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Live video from your phone to your Twitter followers.", "died": "Its growth ran through Twitter's API. Twitter bought a competitor, Periscope, and cut Meerkat off.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2194-meerkat" }, { "name": "PostRocket", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$610K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "More reach for Facebook pages, from data on when to post.", "died": "Facebook changed its API, and the company had no plan for a different product.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/457-postrocket" }, { "name": "Automate Ads", "years": "2015 to 2018", "funding": "US$1.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Software that runs digital ad campaigns automatically.", "died": "The ad platforms' own tools and smaller rivals did the same work.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1100-automate-ads" }, { "name": "Beetailer", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$250K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Online stores inside Facebook pages, so that likes turn into sales.", "died": "Facebook decided to build commerce features itself.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1197-beetailer" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the five depended on one platform's permission, and lost when the platform changed its rules or did the same job itself. Lancer makes the same bet on Upwork. It submits proposals through its customers' Upwork accounts, Upwork writes the rules for bots and automation, and since October 2024 Upwork has offered its own AI that drafts proposals for freelancers.", "Two things differ. First, Upwork's API and MCP terms of October 2026 describe AI agents that submit proposals through its official API, so an approved way to build this kind of product exists; no source read says whether Lancer uses it. Second, the buyers are agencies that pay US$149 to US$499 a month to win contracts, so Lancer sells on the quality of its filter and of the replies, not on the number of proposals." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The platform bet, with care.", "text": "The part that repeats is the path: automate a sales task that your own business already does and measures, sell it at a business price to people who run the same business, and find the few advisers who already recommend tools to those buyers. The part that does not repeat easily is the platform: Upwork sets the rules, controls the accounts and offers its own AI proposal writer.", "steps": [ "Pick a sales task that your own business pays for and measure it first; here, US$800 of Upwork spend brought US$240,000 of contracts.", "Charge a business price from the first users, before the public launch.", "Find the advisers who already recommend tools to your buyers, show them the product, and pay them as affiliates.", "Read the platform's terms on bots and automation before you build, use its official API where one exists, and keep a human review step." ], "open": "Other marketplaces where sellers answer posted requests by hand, such as public tenders, procurement portals and recruiting boards. Each has its own terms, which you must read first." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Upwork's rules on bots and automation", "text": "Upwork's Terms of Use (version 4.12, effective 10 September 2025) say that users may not \"use a robot, spider, scraper, or similar mechanisms on our site without written permission\", and forbid \"using generative AI or other tools to substantially bolster your job proposals or work product if such use is restricted by your client\". Its API & MCP Terms (version 2.4, effective 5 October 2026) forbid developers and agents to use Upwork content obtained through \"headless browsing, web-browser plug-ins\" and similar interface techniques, or \"any user-interface automation technique designed to obtain access beyond your authorized scope\". The same terms describe an agent that submits proposals \"through the Upwork API\", with the account owner responsible for the content. Lancer submits proposals from customers' own accounts and writes that \"Upwork prohibits bots that mass-apply\". No source read says whether Lancer uses the official API. If it does not, its customers' accounts, and so the business, depend on how Upwork applies these rules." }, { "title": "Upwork offers its own AI proposal writer", "text": "On 16 October 2024 Upwork announced that Uma, its AI, would \"create tailored proposal drafts\" for freelancers with \"custom AI models trained on winning proposals\". On 23 July 2025 it wrote that Uma \"begins the transition from utility companion to always-on work agent\", starting with interviews that Uma runs for clients during the proposal process. The owner of the marketplace is building the same function that Lancer sells." }, { "title": "One marketplace, one access point", "text": "In the company's own words, \"Lancer works on Upwork only — not Fiverr, Toptal, Contra, LinkedIn or cold email\". Every proposal goes through a connected Upwork account. A change in Upwork's access rules, API permissions or account policies reaches every customer at the same time." }, { "title": "For sale while revenue falls", "text": "The business has been listed since 13 January 2026 and asks US$699,999, 3.75 times the last 12 months of revenue. The seller's message says \"$27K months\". That matches revenue in July and September 2026, not recurring revenue: MRR was US$17,683 on 15 October 2026, down 17.2% in 30 days, and revenue in the last 30 days was US$15,267. The founder's January 2026 figure of about US$10,000 MRR was also above the Stripe revenue of those months." }, { "title": "Competitors with more customers", "text": "GigRadar sells an \"AI bidder that applies to the right jobs 24/7\", says \"4,000+ companies\" use it, and also offers an Upwork MCP. Vollna sells \"Upwork Auto Bidding, AI Proposals & Job Qualification\", says it is \"Trusted by 4,500+ Upwork freelancers and agencies\" and offers a 14-day free trial. These are the companies' own claims. Lancer says it has more than 400 users; TrustMRR shows 111 active subscriptions." }, { "title": "Two founders, inside the agency's company", "text": "Two founders run Lancer. The Estonian company that operates it paid no labour taxes in the third quarter of 2026, and its 2025 accounts show no labour costs. That company, MVP Masters OÜ, has the name of the founder's former 15-person agency. Its 2024 revenue, €533,455, all came from programming, and in 2025 it spent €293,099 on goods, materials and services and lost €189,323. The reports do not say who did the work on Lancer or what it cost. No source read names the second founder." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://lancer.app" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/lancer-app" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: Lancer.app, data as of 15 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/lancer-app", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile (https://trustmrr.com/startup/lancer-app.md) in full. Revenue, MRR and subscriptions come from Stripe through an API key (grade A); the founded date, description, tech stack and sale listing are founder-written (grade C)." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 29 July 2026, by James Fleischmann: Exiting his agency and hitting $10k MRR within 60 days of launching his SaaS", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/selling-his-agency-and-hitting-10k-mrr-within-60-days-of-launching-his-saas-sTo5m9qfhxXbruvhBIyH", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public part: the introduction and the first section, with the MRR, the team size and the agency background. The rest of the article needs a free sign-in and was not read. Reader comments were not used." }, { "title": "Starter Story, 10 January 2026: I Built an AI Agent That Makes $10K/Month", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/lancer", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview. Source for the launch date, the first price, the growth channels, the team of 2 founders and 0 employees, and the offers." }, { "title": "Lancer: About page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://lancer.app/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for what the product does, the customer count, the company's view of Upwork's bot rules and the legal entity." }, { "title": "Lancer: Pricing page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://lancer.app/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the structured price data in the page source." }, { "title": "Lancer: llms.txt, the product summary for AI agents", "url": "https://lancer.app/llms.txt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for 'Upwork only' and for the MCP server and REST API." }, { "title": "Lancer documentation, full text (llms-full.txt)", "url": "https://docs.lancer.app/llms-full.txt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on how Lancer works, bidder accounts and connecting an MCP client. No model names found." }, { "title": "Lancer: Privacy policy, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://lancer.app/privacy-policy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on subprocessors." }, { "title": "Upwork Legal Center: Terms of Use version 4.12 (effective 10 September 2025) and API & MCP Terms of Use version 2.4 (effective 5 October 2026)", "url": "https://www.upwork.com/legal", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the sections on prohibited uses, misrepresentation and agent-generated content. Upwork's own published terms." }, { "title": "Upwork press release, 16 October 2024: Upwork Expands AI Innovation and Unveils New Solutions for Better Work Outcomes with Upwork Updates Fall 2024 Release", "url": "https://www.upwork.com/press/releases/upwork-updates-fall-2024-release", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the section on Uma. Upwork's own announcement as a public company (Nasdaq: UPWK)." }, { "title": "Upwork blog, 23 July 2025: Upwork Updates Summer 2025: AI Innovation that Amplifies Human Brilliance", "url": "https://www.upwork.com/blog/updates-summer-2025", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the section on Uma as a work agent. Upwork's own announcement." }, { "title": "Estonian e-Business Register: MVP Masters OÜ, registry code 16911123", "url": "https://ariregister.rik.ee/eng/company/16911123", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. Official register: registration date, share capital, address and the list of annual reports." }, { "title": "Inforegister: MVP Masters OÜ, employee and tax data", "url": "https://www.inforegister.ee/en/16911123-MVP-MASTERS-OU", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the employee and tax sections. A third-party site that shows Estonian company and tax data. Its 2026 turnover figures are forecasts and are not used." }, { "title": "MVP Masters OÜ annual report 2024 (31 January to 31 December 2024), filed 29 June 2025", "url": "https://ariregister.rik.ee/eng/company/16911123/file/9013112046", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full (in Estonian). A statutory filing. Source for revenue, labour costs, profit and the main activity." }, { "title": "MVP Masters OÜ annual report 2025, filed 16 September 2026", "url": "https://ariregister.rik.ee/eng/company/16911123/file/9014634979", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full (in Estonian). A statutory filing. Source for revenue, costs, loss, cash and equity." }, { "title": "GigRadar home page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://gigradar.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the product description and the customer claim. A competitor's own page." }, { "title": "Vollna home page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://www.vollna.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the product description and the customer claim. A competitor's own page." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/1clickwebsite-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/1clickwebsite-ai.md", "slug": "1clickwebsite-ai", "name": "1ClickWebsite.ai", "country": "United States", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI WordPress site generator for agencies", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-15", "launchLabel": "June 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$14K a month in subscriptions, October 2026", "sticker": "$168K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 167904, "months": 16, "teamLabel": "1 founder, who also runs a second product", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "build-software", "channel": "audience", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Website builders" ], "product": "A web app that turns a short form, or a business name found on Google, into a complete WordPress site for a local business: a page for every service and service area, AI-written text and images, search settings, hosting on its own servers, and an AI agent for later edits. Agencies sell the sites to their clients as their own work.", "why": "The founder had sold this product by hand in his own agency, so he knew what agencies deliver: WordPress, a real page builder, and pages for each service and each town. The tool fills designer-made templates with AI text, so the output is consistent. It sells to agencies that build sites every month, which fits a monthly subscription, and it found them through his own posts and videos, with no ads.", "summary": [ "1ClickWebsite.ai makes complete WordPress sites, WordPress being the free, open-source software that many businesses use to run their websites, for local service businesses such as roofers, plumbers and lawyers. An agency answers five questions, or gives only a business name that the tool looks up on Google, and in about five minutes it gets a site with AI-written text, AI images, pages for each service and service area, and search settings: page titles, descriptions, schema (structured data that tells search engines what a page is about) and a sitemap. The sites are white label, which means they carry no 1ClickWebsite name, so the agency sells them as its own work. Plans cost US$49 to US$297 a month, and an Unlimited plan costs US$1,297 a month.", "Bennett Black ran a web design agency that sold websites, search optimization and hosting to local businesses and reached US$10,000 a month. He wrote that he shut it down in 2024. He built this tool in early June 2025 with the AI coding tools Cursor and Claude, and Version 1.0 launched that month. On 17 August 2025 he reported US$1,700 in MRR, monthly recurring revenue, the amount that subscriptions bring in each month, with no funding and no ads. On 15 October 2026 the Stripe data on TrustMRR showed MRR of US$13,992 from 401 active subscriptions and US$15,608 of revenue in the last 30 days, about US$168,000 a year at the current MRR. He also runs a second product, LocalProspects.ai, a tool for finding local sales leads.", "The headline numbers are grade A: TrustMRR reads them from Stripe, the payment processor, through an API key, a password that lets one program read data from another, which the founder connected. So they are payment records, not screenshots. The launch date, the team of one, the absence of funding and the way the product is built come from the founder's posts and the company's own pages, grade C. The page also shows earlier website builders that failed, and the Google rules against pages made in large numbers to rank in search, which matter for a product that can generate thousands of pages a month." ], "factsCaption": "Stripe-verified subscription revenue of US$13,992 a month, 16 months after a solo launch with no funding", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from Stripe through TrustMRR's API connection. A grade C value is a statement by the founder or the company's own pages. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a web agency for local businesses to a site generator with 401 paying subscriptions, in 16 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "1ClickWebsite.ai prices on 15 October 2026, from the company's home page and Unlimited plan page (grade C)", "note": "The page offers annual billing with three months free, but the annual prices load by script and could not be read, so that column is empty. Plans count new sites a month, agent credits for the AI editing agent, and mini sites, the demo sites made for prospects. A 14-day money-back guarantee covers the first plan. The TrustMRR profile still lists an older Expert plan at US$197 a month. In July 2025 the plans were US$49, US$149 and US$349 a month for 3, 15 and 45 sites.", "rows": [ [ "Starter", "", "49", "3 new sites and 30,000 agent credits a month" ], [ "Professional", "", "97", "10 new sites, 100,000 agent credits and 1,000 mini sites a month" ], [ "Agency", "", "297", "35 new sites, 300,000 agent credits and 10,000 mini sites a month; 5 team members" ], [ "Unlimited", "", "1,297", "or US$2,991 every three months (US$997 a month); customer's own OpenAI key; one 100-site server, more at US$50 a month" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 15 October 2026", "value": "US$13,992", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data read through an API key by TrustMRR, last synced 15 October 2026. MRR grew 4.2% in the last 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days", "value": "US$15,608", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data. 15.3% more than in the 30 days before, according to the profile.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the October 2026 MRR", "value": "about US$167,904 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$13,992 times 12. This is the headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions", "value": "401", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data, October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR per active subscription", "value": "about US$34.89 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$13,992 divided by 401. This is below the US$49 Starter price. The profile does not say which plans, discounts or hosting subscriptions make up the 401.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Best month", "value": "US$15,492, September 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe monthly timeline. 8.7 times the US$1,774 of November 2025, the first month shown (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average revenue a month, July to September 2026", "value": "US$13,380, against US$6,540 for April to June 2026", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the Stripe monthly timeline: 104.6% higher.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 12 months, and all time", "value": "US$84,889 and US$91,816", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data, October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before November 2025", "value": "about US$8,701", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: all-time revenue minus the twelve monthly values from November 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "86.0%", "grade": "C", "note": "Shown on the TrustMRR profile among the metric snapshots. Costs are not part of the Stripe payment data, and the profile does not say where they come from.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR, 17 August 2025", "value": "US$1,700", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on X, 60 days after launch. Two days earlier he wrote US$1,600 a month.", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Launch", "value": "June 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Version 1.0 in the company's changelog. TrustMRR gives a founding date of 14 June 2025, and the founder wrote on 17 August 2025 that he had launched 60 days earlier.", "src": [ 3, 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October 2026 figure", "value": "16 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: June 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Sites generated", "value": "more than 1,000 by July 2025, more than 5,000 by October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's home page, archived on 15 July 2025 and read on 15 October 2026.", "src": [ 8, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's earlier agency", "value": "US$10,000 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on X: a web design agency that sold websites, search optimization and hosting to local businesses, shut down in 2024.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Team and funding", "value": "1 person, no funding", "grade": "C", "note": "The TrustMRR profile text, written by the founder, gives a team size of 1 person and Bootstrapped. The founder wrote \"No funding. No ads.\" in August 2025.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Combined MRR of his two products, 11 October 2026", "value": "US$22,800", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on X, for 1ClickWebsite.ai and LocalProspects.ai together. The second product passed US$100,000 a year in recurring revenue on 25 September 2026.", "src": [ 9, 10 ] }, { "fact": "MRR of the second product implied by these figures", "value": "about US$8,808", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$22,800 minus US$13,992. The two figures are four days apart, so this is an estimate.", "src": [ 9, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Twilio bill for SMS verifications, February 2026", "value": "US$7,300", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on X, 16 February 2026. He asked why fraud prevention was not on by default.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Legal entity", "value": "not named", "grade": "C", "note": "The terms say they are governed by US law and the law of the state where 1ClickWebsite.ai is organized or operates, without naming a company, so no state register entry could be checked.", "src": [ 26 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2023 to 2024", "what": "The founder's X account, BoldSlate, posts search optimization advice for electricians and other trades for his web agency, which sells websites, search optimization and hosting to local businesses.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13, 4 ] }, { "when": "2024", "what": "He shuts down the agency, which had reached US$10,000 a month, to build software instead.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "June 2025", "what": "He builds the first version with Cursor and Claude and launches Version 1.0: WordPress sites from basic business details, with pages, text, images, SEO basics and hosting. TrustMRR lists the founding date as 14 June 2025.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 5, 1 ] }, { "when": "7 July 2025", "what": "He posts that the tool builds complete US$2,000 WordPress sites in under 10 minutes and that early access opens the next week.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "8 July 2025", "what": "Progress post: the prototype is built and people have paid for it. He announces ten times more server capacity and one free run without a credit card.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "15 July 2025", "what": "The archived home page shows plans at US$49, US$149 and US$349 a month for 3, 15 and 45 sites, and more than 1,000 sites generated.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "15 August 2025", "what": "US$1,600 a month, ten weeks after he coded the tool. A user built a roofing site in five minutes and sold it for US$99 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "17 August 2025", "what": "US$1,700 in MRR, 60 days after launch, with no funding and no ads, only organic content and Facebook posts.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "First month in the public Stripe timeline: US$1,774.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "16 February 2026", "what": "A US$7,300 Twilio bill for SMS verifications. He asks why fraud prevention is not on by default.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "5 June 2026", "what": "Version 2.0: sites are built on OCF, the company's own structured editing layer, which makes them easier to edit by hand and by the Website Agent.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "Monthly revenue doubles to US$10,025, from US$4,757 in May.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "June to October 2026", "what": "YouTube videos on selling websites to local businesses, such as building sites in under five minutes and creating 300 demo sites at once.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "when": "3 July 2026", "what": "Lead Gen accepts a CSV list of businesses and makes a demo site for each one.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "10 August 2026", "what": "The Site Creation API is available on every plan, with an agent skill for Claude Code, Codex and Cursor.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "Best month so far: US$15,492.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "25 September 2026", "what": "His second product, LocalProspects.ai, passes US$100,000 a year in recurring revenue.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "7 October 2026", "what": "An MCP server lets ChatGPT, Claude, GoHighLevel and other AI tools create and edit sites from a business name.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "11 October 2026", "what": "Combined MRR of both products: US$22,800. Goal: US$35,000 by the end of the year, with four to five videos a week.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "14 October 2026", "what": "Agency plan at US$297 a month with branded preview links, 35 sites and 10,000 demo sites a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "when": "15 October 2026", "what": "MRR of US$13,992 from 401 active subscriptions, and US$15,608 in the last 30 days.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Built from his own agency work", "text": "He sold websites, search optimization and hosting to local businesses until 2024, so the product makes what such agencies deliver: WordPress with full admin access, a real page builder, a page per service and per area, and premium plugins already licensed. In July 2025 he wrote that agencies do not want to leave their existing tools, which is why the sites are plain WordPress." }, { "title": "Templates first, AI second", "text": "The AI does not design the site. Professionally designed templates fix the layout, and the model writes the text and makes the images for each page. The founder's argument in July 2025 was that other AI builders made sites that needed another ten hours of fixing, while his templates give consistent results." }, { "title": "A tool for the sale, not only for the build", "text": "Lead Gen takes a CSV list of businesses and makes a small demo site for each one, so the agency can send an owner a link to a possible new site. The founder's method, posted in October 2026: find businesses with a bad website and recent reviews, build a demo, send the link by text or social message, close the deal on a video call, and then also sell search optimization." }, { "title": "Customers from his own posts", "text": "In August 2025 he wrote that the product had no funding and no ads, only organic content and Facebook posts. In 2026 he added YouTube videos on how to sell websites to local businesses, an affiliate program that pays 30% of each referred subscription for as long as it lasts, and connections to ChatGPT, Claude and GoHighLevel." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's posts, the company's pages and one generated sample site. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Coded in early June 2025 with Cursor and Claude (AI coding tools), n8n (a workflow automation tool) and Supabase (a hosted database service), in the founder's words. He calls the method vibe coding: describing the program to AI tools instead of writing every line.", "The web app uses Next.js and TypeScript, with Supabase and Stripe, according to the tech stack on the TrustMRR profile.", "The generated sites are WordPress. Version 1 used the Breakdance page builder, with ACF Pro, Slim SEO Pro and FlyingPress Pro licenses included. Version 2, released on 5 June 2026, uses OCF, the company's own layer of structured fields for text, images, colors and sections. Search settings are managed with Slim SEO.", "AI models write the text and make the images. The Unlimited plan asks the customer for an OpenAI API key, so at least that plan runs on OpenAI models. No source names the exact models.", "Sites are created on the company's own servers (1ClickHosting, managed WordPress) with preview links on temporary subdomains, and can be moved to any host with a migration plugin.", "Since July 2026 customers can connect their own AI coding agent through a WordPress application password. Since October 2026 an MCP server (Model Context Protocol, a standard way for AI assistants to call outside tools) lets ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor and GoHighLevel create and edit sites.", "In July 2025 he announced one free run that needed two-factor verification instead of a credit card. In February 2026 the founder received a US$7,300 Twilio bill for SMS verifications.", "The affiliate program runs on PromoteKit: the affiliate login on the home page links to it." ], "src": [ 5, 1, 8, 2, 3, 14, 18, 7, 11 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database tried to make building websites easy for people who are not web designers, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "The Grid", "years": "2014 to 2020", "funding": "US$4.7M", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Websites designed automatically by artificial intelligence, without a designer.", "died": "Its AI produced designs of uneven quality, worse than manual work or the finished tools of its rivals.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/618-the-grid" }, { "name": "WebCake", "years": "2013 to 2016", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Simple website creation for small and medium-sized businesses.", "died": "Wix and Squarespace offered more features and easier tools. It had little money and nothing that set it apart.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1541-webcake" }, { "name": "LocalOn", "years": "2013 to 2016", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Websites and online tools for small local shops, with no coding.", "died": "It could not stand apart from Shopify and Wix, and it ran out of cash.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1548-localon" }, { "name": "Sosh", "years": "2012 to 2013", "funding": "US$2.3M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A visual drag-and-drop website builder that removes the handoff between designer and developer.", "died": "Too complex for beginners and too limited for professionals.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/565-sosh" }, { "name": "GeoCities", "years": "1994 to 2009", "funding": "US$45M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Free websites for everyone, grouped in themed neighborhoods.", "died": "Yahoo bought it for US$3.57 billion and did not develop it. Users moved to MySpace and Facebook.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/180-geocities" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The Grid promised in 2014 that artificial intelligence would design websites, and its AI was not good enough. WebCake, LocalOn and Sosh sold do-it-yourself builders to small businesses and lost to Wix, Squarespace and Shopify, which had more money and more features. GeoCities gave everyone a free homepage and lost its users to social networks.", "Two things differ. First, language models can now write usable text for a plumber's service page, and 1ClickWebsite asks them only for that, inside layouts that designers made, so the AI does only the part it does well. Second, it does not sell to the small business, which buys a website once and leaves. It sells to agencies, which build sites every month and resell them, so a monthly subscription matches how they work. The large competitors are still there, and they now have AI builders too: WordPress.com since April 2025, Hostinger, Wix and Squarespace." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, if you have done the agency work yourself.", "text": "The method is to automate the work you used to do for clients, and sell the tool to the people who still do it. It needs no new research: templates, a model API and WordPress. What made it sell was the founder's knowledge of what local-business agencies deliver and where they learn, and a sales method that he teaches in public with the tool as one step.", "steps": [ "Choose a service you have delivered many times, where every client gets nearly the same thing.", "Fix the quality with templates, and let the model fill in only the text and images.", "Sell to the businesses that resell the result every month, not to the end customer who buys once.", "Publish the full sales method, with your tool as one step in it, on the channels your buyers watch." ], "open": "Other deliverables that agencies repeat for every client: landing pages for ads, Google Business Profile content, review replies and monthly reports. The same site generator in more languages is another, and the product already supports seven." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Google's rules on pages made at scale", "text": "On 5 March 2024 Google added a spam policy against scaled content abuse: many pages generated mainly to manipulate search rankings, whether automation or humans made them. Its doorway rule covers sites or pages created to rank for specific, similar searches, and its site reputation abuse rule covers third-party pages published on a site to use that site's ranking signals. The product makes service-area pages for every site and up to 10,000 demo sites a month on the Agency plan, and the sample demo site checked here had no noindex tag, the instruction that keeps a page out of Google's index. Google judges the purpose of the pages, so agencies that sell these sites for search carry the risk." }, { "title": "WordPress and the hosting companies build AI sites too", "text": "WordPress.com launched a free AI website builder on 9 April 2025, which TechCrunch described as a way to compete with Squarespace and Wix, which already had AI builders. Hostinger sells an AI Website Builder with hosting, domain and email included, and says the sites appear on Google and in AI search automatically. In July 2025 the founder named Hostinger's AI builder as the option he wanted to replace. His argument is design quality and agency features: white label, export and a real page builder." }, { "title": "Many AI builders already make WordPress sites", "text": "10Web says it plans the site, builds every page and runs it, starting from a prompt, a link or a file. ZipWP offers a free WordPress AI website builder. The founder himself compares 1ClickWebsite with GoHighLevel, Elementor and Lovable. The product's difference is narrow: local service businesses, resale by agencies, and demo sites for sales. A larger company can copy any one of these features." }, { "title": "Dependent on OpenAI and the AI assistants", "text": "The text, the images and the editing agent run on AI models. The Unlimited plan requires the customer's OpenAI API key, which shows that at least that plan runs on OpenAI; no source names the models behind the other plans. A price rise, a rate limit or a policy change at OpenAI changes the cost of every site. The newest feature, the MCP connection, also depends on ChatGPT, Claude and GoHighLevel continuing to support outside tools." }, { "title": "One founder, two products", "text": "Bennett Black also runs LocalProspects.ai, which passed US$100,000 a year in recurring revenue on 25 September 2026. On 11 October 2026 he gave combined MRR of US$22,800 for both products and a goal of US$35,000 by the end of the year, with four to five videos a week. One person divides his time between two products, a YouTube channel and customer support. The terms of service do not name the company that sells the service." }, { "title": "Customers who are new agencies", "text": "Part of the marketing speaks to people who want to start a web agency: video titles promise sites built in five minutes and sold for US$2,000, and 300 demo sites at once. Such customers keep paying only while they find clients. The founder wrote in August 2025 that he does not sell courses and does not tell people to get rich quick." }, { "title": "A short record", "text": "The Stripe data cover 16 months. September 2026 was the best month at US$15,492. In the first 15 days of October revenue per day was 17.4% below the September average (calculated), while MRR grew 4.2% in 30 days. Monthly revenue also fell in April and May 2026 before it doubled in June." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://1clickwebsite.ai/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/1clickwebsite-ai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR, 1clickwebsite.ai profile (Stripe-verified revenue, data as of 15 October 2026)", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/1clickwebsite-ai", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile (https://trustmrr.com/startup/1clickwebsite-ai.md) on 15 October 2026. Grade A for the Stripe metrics in its Verification Sources section; the profile text, team size, funding and tech stack are founder-written, grade C." }, { "title": "1ClickWebsite.ai home page with features, pricing and FAQ, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://1clickwebsite.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the plans, the WordPress and hosting details, the site count and the affiliate login." }, { "title": "1ClickWebsite.ai Updates, the product changelog from Version 1.0 (June 2025) to Version 2.92 (14 October 2026)", "url": "https://www.1clickwebsite.ai/updates", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the launch month and the dated features." }, { "title": "Bennett Black on X, 17 August 2025: Last year, I shut down my $10k/month agency", "url": "https://x.com/BoldSlate/status/1956897136068456514", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the opening post and parts 1, 5 and 6 of the thread through the api.fxtwitter.com timeline JSON. Source for the earlier agency, the launch 60 days before, the US$1,700 MRR and the absence of funding and ads." }, { "title": "Bennett Black on X, 15 August 2025: I vibe coded this tool 10 weeks ago. It now makes $1.6k/month", "url": "https://x.com/BoldSlate/status/1956237169338597846", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the build tools and the user who sold a roofing site." }, { "title": "Bennett Black on X, 7 July 2025: I built a tool that generates complete $2,000 WordPress sites in under 10 minutes", "url": "https://x.com/BoldSlate/status/1942062959426982061", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Bennett Black on X, 8 July 2025: My progress so far building 1ClickWebsite.ai, and why he is building it", "url": "https://x.com/BoldSlate/status/1942434971366355433", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the three-post thread in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the comparison with Hostinger's AI builder and the reasons for WordPress and Breakdance." }, { "title": "1ClickWebsite.ai home page archived by the Wayback Machine, 15 July 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250715222933/https://www.1clickwebsite.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the first prices, the site count and the included plugins." }, { "title": "Bennett Black on X, 11 October 2026: Can posting 4-5 videos/week grow my saas?", "url": "https://x.com/BoldSlate/status/2109144488786698386", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the combined MRR and the goal." }, { "title": "Bennett Black on X, 25 September 2026: Local Prospects just hit 100k ARR today", "url": "https://x.com/BoldSlate/status/2103599537344692520", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Bennett Black on X, 16 February 2026: a $7.3k bill in Twilio SMS verifications", "url": "https://x.com/BoldSlate/status/2023498882454634984", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Bennett Black on X, 4 October 2026: selling websites to local businesses is so easy in 2026", "url": "https://x.com/BoldSlate/status/2106867387568193704", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the four-step sales method." }, { "title": "Bennett Black's X account @BoldSlate, posts from November 2023 to October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/BoldSlate", "grade": "C", "how": "Read 174 posts and the profile through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the agency posts of 2023 and 2024, the San Diego location and the comparison with GoHighLevel, Elementor and Lovable (6 October 2026)." }, { "title": "1ClickWebsite.ai Unlimited plan page", "url": "https://www.1clickwebsite.ai/unlimited", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on pricing, servers and the OpenAI key." }, { "title": "1ClickWebsite.ai affiliate program page", "url": "https://www.1clickwebsite.ai/affiliate", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the program description and the first answers of its FAQ. Source for the 30% recurring commission and the 10% coupon." }, { "title": "Bennett Black's YouTube channel, video list", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/@BennettBlack1/videos", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the channel's video feed with titles and dates, June to October 2026." }, { "title": "bennettblack.me, the founder's page", "url": "https://bennettblack.me/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Lists his two products, 1ClickWebsite.ai and LocalProspects.ai." }, { "title": "A sample demo site for a roofing company, linked from the 1ClickWebsite.ai home page", "url": "https://35525037-ridgeline-roofing-co.x4k8.temphost024.com", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page source, the response headers and robots.txt on 15 October 2026. Source for the OCF plugin and the missing noindex tag." }, { "title": "Google Search Central Blog, 5 March 2024: What web creators should know about our March 2024 core update and new spam policies", "url": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the sections on the new spam policies." }, { "title": "Google Search Central: Spam policies for Google web search", "url": "https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the sections on doorway abuse and scaled content abuse." }, { "title": "TechCrunch, 9 April 2025, by Sarah Perez: WordPress.com launches a free AI-powered website builder", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/09/wordpress-com-launches-a-free-ai-powered-website-builder/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the opening paragraphs." }, { "title": "Hostinger AI Website Builder product page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://www.hostinger.com/ai-website-builder", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the opening sections. The page metadata gives a publication date of 12 March 2025." }, { "title": "10Web AI Website Builder product page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://10web.io/ai-website-builder/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the opening sections." }, { "title": "ZipWP, Free WordPress AI Website Builder, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://zipwp.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the opening sections." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." }, { "title": "1ClickWebsite.ai Terms and Conditions", "url": "https://www.1clickwebsite.ai/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on customer responsibility and governing law. No company name is given." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/notis-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/notis-ai.md", "slug": "notis-ai", "name": "Notis", "country": "Switzerland", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI assistant inside messaging apps", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-15", "launchLabel": "November 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$13.5K MRR verified by Stripe, October 2026", "sticker": "$13.5K MRR in October 2026", "outcomeUsd": 161448, "months": 35, "teamLabel": "1 founder; the company has a second partner; he paid salaries in 2025 and freelancers, numbers not stated", "fundingLabel": "None; the founder says US$0 raised", "primaryFactor": "Paid ads", "group": "voice-audio", "channel": "paid-ads", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Productivity" ], "product": "An AI assistant that you reach by message. You send a voice note, a text, a screenshot or a forwarded email on WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage, Slack or email, and it writes notes, tasks, draft posts and CRM updates into Notion and more than 1,000 other connected apps. It started as a voice-to-Notion tool. In 2026 it added a desktop app, a cloud computer, automations, and connections to Claude, ChatGPT and coding agents.", "why": "It reached people inside the chat app that they already open all day, so capturing an idea on a phone took one voice note. It aimed first at Notion users, whom the company told that ideas get lost on the phone. Ads on Facebook and Google then paid for fast growth in early 2026, until the founder stopped them in August 2026 because the costs were larger than the revenue.", "summary": [ "Notis is an AI assistant, a program that takes a request written or spoken in ordinary language and carries it out with a large language model. People reach it through the chat apps they already use. A voice note or a text on WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage, Slack or email becomes a formatted note, a task, a draft post or a CRM update (customer relationship management software, where a sales team records contacts and deals) in Notion or one of more than 1,000 connected apps. On WhatsApp it works through the WhatsApp Business API, the paid interface through which a company's software sends and receives WhatsApp messages. Its language models come from OpenAI.", "Florian \"Flo\" Pariset started building it in summer 2023 and launched the paid version in November 2023. He runs it through Mind the Flo Sàrl, a Swiss limited liability company registered in August 2024, and calls himself a team of one who works with AI agents; he has also paid salaries and freelancers, and he says he raised US$0. On 15 October 2026 his Stripe account, read by TrustMRR, showed MRR (monthly recurring revenue: the subscription income of one month, with a yearly plan counted as one twelfth of its price) of US$13,454 from 446 active subscriptions, and US$200,983 of revenue in the last twelve months. Monthly revenue peaked at US$39,398 in March 2026 and was US$11,628 in September 2026.", "The founder's own account explains the fall. On 9 August 2026 he wrote that Notis had made US$215,000 of gross revenue, while OpenAI had charged US$50,000, Facebook and Google US$160,000 for ads, and Stripe US$35,000 for fees, refunds and chargebacks (card payments that the customer's bank reverses after a dispute). That left minus US$30,000, and he stopped all ads that day. The revenue figures on this page are grade A, from Stripe; the costs are his statement, grade C. The page also shows earlier companies that sold an assistant to busy people, or built on top of another company's platform that later offered the same feature." ], "factsCaption": "Stripe-verified revenue that rose to US$39,398 in March 2026 and fell to US$11,628 in September 2026, beside the founder's own account of costs larger than revenue", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from Stripe through TrustMRR's API connection. A grade C value is a statement by the founder in his newsletter, blog or X posts, or a page of the company, a platform or a register. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from other rows.", "timelineLead": "From a tool the founder built for himself in summer 2023 to a Stripe-verified US$13,454 a month in October 2026, with fast growth in early 2026 and a fall after the ads stopped. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Notis prices: the pricing page loads plan prices by script, so the yearly prices come from the founder's TrustMRR profile of October 2026 and the monthly prices from the company changelog of 2 December 2025 (grade C)", "note": "Each paid plan includes a usage budget: US$20 a month on Pro, US$59 on Pro+ and US$149 on Ultra. Model use, paid tools, voice and cloud computer work are charged at twice the provider's cost, and extra use can be billed On-Demand within a limit that the customer sets. A paid plan starts with a 7-day trial with US$20 of usage. In December 2025 the changelog gave Pro+ at US$39 a month and said the yearly plan was 20% cheaper; the October 2026 profile gives US$39 a month billed yearly, so prices have changed and today's monthly prices are not verified. The free plan is the Notis CLI, a command-line tool, inside Claude Code, Codex or Cursor.", "rows": [ [ "Free (Notis CLI)", "0", "0", "inside Claude Code, Codex or Cursor; no card" ], [ "Pro", "13", "19", "US$20 of usage a month; monthly price as of December 2025" ], [ "Pro+", "39", "39", "US$59 of usage a month; monthly price as of December 2025" ], [ "Ultra", "99", "99", "US$149 of usage a month; monthly price as of December 2025" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 15 October 2026", "value": "US$13,454", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data read by TrustMRR through an API key, last synced 15 October 2026. The profile gives a 30-day MRR change of minus 13.6%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from that MRR", "value": "about US$161,448 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$13,454 × 12. The headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 12 months, to 15 October 2026", "value": "US$200,983", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe through TrustMRR. The last 6 months were US$88,478.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days", "value": "US$9,595", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe through TrustMRR. The profile gives a 30-day revenue change of minus 14.0%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR compared with the last 30 days of revenue", "value": "40% higher", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$13,454 / US$9,595 = 1.40. One likely reason, not stated in the source: MRR counts a yearly plan as one twelfth of its price each month while the cash arrives at once, so when fewer yearly plans are sold, cash falls below MRR.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Best month and latest full month", "value": "US$39,398 in March 2026; US$11,628 in September 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe monthly timeline on the profile, November 2025 to October 2026. November 2025 was US$9,383.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, July to September 2026, against April to June 2026", "value": "US$40,118 against US$60,460: minus 34%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the Stripe monthly timeline. September 2026 was 70.5% below March 2026, and March 2026 was 4.2 times November 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions, October 2026", "value": "446", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe through TrustMRR.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR per active subscription", "value": "about US$30 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$13,454 / 446 = US$30.17.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "All-time revenue on the connected Stripe account", "value": "US$235,100", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe through TrustMRR. The profile's founded date is 25 September 2024, after the Swiss company was registered; the founder dates the paid launch to November 2023.", "src": [ 1, 4, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's figure: gross revenue from subscriptions, 9 August 2026", "value": "US$215,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's newsletter.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Stripe all-time revenue at the end of July 2026", "value": "US$206,220", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$235,100 minus the August, September and October 2026 months. The founder's figure of 9 August is 4.3% higher; the sources do not explain the difference.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's costs to 9 August 2026", "value": "OpenAI US$50,000; Facebook and Google ads US$160,000; Stripe US$35,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's newsletter. The Stripe amount covers chargebacks, fees and refunds.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's result after those costs", "value": "minus US$30,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's newsletter. He adds that, counting licenses, freelancers and other costs, he is US$100,000 poorer than when he started, and that his own payout is zero.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Ads as a share of gross revenue", "value": "74%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$160,000 / US$215,000. OpenAI was 23% and Stripe 16% of the same revenue.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's figure: MRR, 19 June 2025", "value": "around US$1,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on the company blog. He wrote that a paid user cost less than the user's first-year value, and that he was self-funding salaries.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "MRR growth, June 2025 to October 2026", "value": "about 13.5 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$13,454 / US$1,000. The June 2025 figure is the founder's (grade C), the October 2026 figure is Stripe's (grade A).", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's figures, 18 June 2026", "value": "MRR stable; new trials minus 75%; new subscribers minus 58%; trial conversion plus 47%; churn minus 20%", "grade": "C", "note": "X post. He wrote that Notis was profitable \"at our very humble scale\".", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Churn, August 2026", "value": "13%", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's newsletter: the lowest since launch. The period of the rate is not stated.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Users", "value": "17,000 founders (May 2026); 1,000 paying teams (July 2026)", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's X post of 3 May 2026, and his LinkedIn post as quoted in the July 2026 changelog. Stripe showed 446 active subscriptions in October 2026; the sources do not say how each count was made.", "src": [ 7, 11, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Operating company", "value": "Mind the Flo Sàrl, Morlon, Switzerland, founded 8 August 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "Swiss commercial register (Zefix), UID CHE-345.958.711; the founding notice was published on 16 August 2024. Capital CHF 20,000 in two equal parts of 10,000 shares: the founder, as managing director and president, and a second partner who is also a managing officer. The privacy policy names the company as the operator of Notis.", "src": [ 10, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 founder", "grade": "C", "note": "His page calls him a team of one who works with AI agents; the TrustMRR profile says 1 person. He wrote of paying salaries in June 2025 and of freelancers in August 2026, without numbers. LinkedIn lists 2 employees.", "src": [ 9, 1, 3, 2, 19 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "His page says US$0 raised. The register shows only the two partners' capital. He wrote that Y Combinator rejected Notis twice.", "src": [ 9, 10, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the paid launch to the October 2026 figure", "value": "35 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: November 2023 to October 2026.", "src": [ 4, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Summer 2023", "what": "Pariset starts building Notis for himself, because he was losing ideas between tasks.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "November 2023", "what": "The paid version launches: an assistant next to a Notion workspace that can be reached from anywhere.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "8 August 2024", "what": "Mind the Flo Sàrl is founded in Morlon, Switzerland, with CHF 20,000 of capital held by two partners. The register publishes it on 16 August.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "13 May 2025", "what": "Notion releases AI Meeting Notes and Enterprise Search in Notion 2.51.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "when": "19 June 2025", "what": "Pariset writes that Notis is at about US$1,000 MRR and that he is self-funding salaries. His growth tests: an ambassador program for Notion users, lists of startups that run on Notion taken from Product Hunt, X posts against Notion AI, and an affiliate program.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "18 September 2025", "what": "Notion 3.0 rebuilds Notion AI as Agents that do multi-step work across pages and connected tools such as Slack, Google Drive and GitHub.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "when": "18 October 2025", "what": "WhatsApp adds an \"AI Providers\" section to its Business API terms, in force from 15 January 2026, that bars general-purpose AI assistants.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "4 November 2025", "what": "The Notis blog presents the product as a work hub that acts in Notion, not another WhatsApp chatbot.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 18 ] }, { "when": "November 2025 to March 2026", "what": "Stripe revenue rises from US$9,383 to US$39,398 a month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "15 January 2026", "what": "Meta's rules take effect. OpenAI, Perplexity and Microsoft have announced that their WhatsApp chatbots will stop working. Regulators in the EU, Italy and Brazil have opened antitrust probes.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "31 January 2026", "what": "Slack becomes a full channel. In March 2026 the iMessage channel adds RCS, WhatsApp and SMS on one phone number.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "23 April 2026", "what": "Pariset writes that Y Combinator rejected Notis twice.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "3 May 2026", "what": "Version 3: a desktop app, skills, a cloud computer and memory. The founder writes that 17,000 founders use Notis.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11, 7 ] }, { "when": "18 June 2026", "what": "He writes that Notis is profitable at its small scale, that churn and trial conversion improved, and that new trials fell 75% and new subscribers 58%.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "9 August 2026", "what": "Newsletter post \"I give up.\": US$215,000 of gross revenue against US$245,000 of OpenAI, ad and Stripe costs. He stops all ads.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "18 to 23 August 2026", "what": "A free plan (the Notis CLI inside coding agents), and paid plans that send work to the customer's own ChatGPT or Claude subscription.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11, 12, 22 ] }, { "when": "27 August 2026", "what": "He writes that within 30 days he will finish moving Notis away from Notion.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "15 October 2026", "what": "Stripe shows US$13,454 MRR, 446 active subscriptions and US$9,595 in the last 30 days.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "The chat app is the interface", "text": "There is no new app to learn first. A voice note on WhatsApp, in any of more than 50 languages, becomes a page, a task or a database row in Notion, and the link comes back in the chat. The same assistant later came to Telegram, iMessage, Slack, email and a desktop app, so the product does not depend on one messaging channel." }, { "title": "A first market of Notion users", "text": "In 2025 the founder aimed at people who already kept their work in Notion: an ambassador program, lists of startups that run on Notion taken from Product Hunt, and X posts showing that Notis could query Notion databases from a chat, which he said Notion AI could not do." }, { "title": "Paid ads, then no ads", "text": "In June 2025 he wrote that a paid user cost less than the user's first-year value. By August 2026 Facebook and Google had received US$160,000, three quarters of the gross revenue. Stripe revenue peaked at US$39,398 in March 2026. In June 2026 he reported new trials down 75%; on 9 August he stopped all ads; September 2026 brought US$11,628." }, { "title": "A usage budget, and the customer's own AI subscription", "text": "Each paid plan includes a dollar budget of usage, and model use, paid tools, voice and cloud work are charged at twice the provider's cost. Since August 2026 a customer can connect a ChatGPT or Claude subscription, so that the model work is paid by that subscription and not by Notis, whose OpenAI bill had reached US$50,000. The founder wrote that about US$400 of his own subscriptions did more than US$30,000 of work at API prices in one month." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages and the founder's posts and profile entries (grade C), except the GitHub activity, which TrustMRR reads from the connected repository.", "items": [ "Next.js for the front end; Python and Supabase on the server; Stripe for payments (founder's entries on the TrustMRR profile).", "Language models from OpenAI. Since July 2026 the Medium and High settings run on GPT-5.6 Sol and Low on GPT-5.6 Luna; in August 2026 voice transcription moved to OpenAI's gpt-transcribe. The OpenAI bill reached US$50,000 by August 2026.", "Messaging through the official WhatsApp Business API, Telegram, Slack (January 2026), iMessage with RCS, WhatsApp and SMS on one number (March 2026), email, and a desktop app (May 2026). The privacy policy lists Twilio and ElevenLabs for messaging and voice.", "Connections to the customers' apps run partly through Composio, an integration service that creates and stores the login tokens. The privacy policy also lists Google Cloud and Supabase for hosting, Intercom for support, and PostHog, Langfuse and Google Analytics for measurement.", "Notis also works as an MCP server (Model Context Protocol, a standard way for AI assistants to call outside tools) and as a command-line tool inside Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, ChatGPT and Notion AI.", "The founder builds with AI coding agents. TrustMRR's connection to his GitHub shows 2,752 contributions in the last year." ], "src": [ 1, 11, 13, 14, 20, 9, 2 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database promised an assistant that takes work off busy people, or a tool that competes inside another company's product or market. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Zirtual", "years": "2011 to 2015", "funding": "US$5.5M", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "Virtual assistants for busy executives and founders: hand off email and scheduling.", "died": "It hired a large staff of assistants before checking that it could pay them, and ran out of cash in the middle of the expansion.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1850-zirtual" }, { "name": "Exec", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$3.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "An on-demand assistant for errands, cleaning and personal tasks.", "died": "It offered every kind of task and did none of them best. Customer acquisition was expensive, margins were thin, and TaskRabbit won by focusing.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/128-exec" }, { "name": "Operator", "years": "2015 to 2020", "funding": "US$30M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "A personal shopper in your phone, run by people and AI together.", "died": "Each request needed expensive human work, and the costs stayed higher than the service could earn against Amazon.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/396-operator" }, { "name": "Niles", "years": "2017 to 2020", "funding": "US$2.8M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A bot inside Slack that answers questions from the company's own knowledge.", "died": "AI answers became common and cheap, and Slack added similar features itself.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1031-niles" }, { "name": "Transpose", "years": "2012 to 2018", "funding": "None", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "First called KustomNote: flexible notes and data organization for businesses, as an alternative to Evernote.", "died": "Without outside money it could not give users of the established note tool a strong enough reason to switch.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1849-transpose" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Zirtual, Exec and Operator sold the promise that Notis sells, an assistant that takes small tasks off busy people, but every task needed paid human work, and each ran out of money or margin. Niles worked inside Slack and lost when Slack offered similar features. Transpose tried to take users from Evernote and could not give them a reason to move.", "Two things are different now. A language model does the task, so a request costs cents of model use instead of an assistant's wage: OpenAI charged Notis US$50,000 against US$215,000 of revenue, and since August 2026 customers can send the model work to their own ChatGPT or Claude subscription. What has not changed is the cost of finding customers and the risk of the platform. Notis spent more on ads than on models, Notion now ships its own agents, and WhatsApp limits AI providers on its business interface. The founder's answer is more channels and a move away from Notion." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product idea, yes. The growth method, no.", "text": "One person can build an assistant that lives in a chat app and writes into the tools people already use, with AI models and an integration service. The part not to copy is the growth: by the founder's own account he spent US$160,000 on ads against US$215,000 of revenue and ended with less money than he started with.", "steps": [ "Start with one group that already keeps its work in one tool, here Notion users, and solve the problem of capturing work from a phone.", "Use the chat apps' official business interfaces, and offer several channels, so that one platform's rule change does not end the product.", "Price by usage with the model cost passed on, or let customers bring their own AI subscription.", "Before raising an ad budget, compare the cost of each paying user with what that user pays after refunds, chargebacks, payment fees and model costs." ], "open": "Assistants for the tools of one profession, such as a CRM for salespeople, a bug tracker for developers or expense software for freelancers, reached from the chat app that the profession already uses." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue is falling", "text": "Stripe revenue fell from US$39,398 in March 2026 to US$11,628 in September 2026. July to September 2026 was 34% below April to June, and MRR fell 13.6% in the last 30 days. The founder stopped all ads on 9 August 2026." }, { "title": "Costs larger than revenue", "text": "By his own account to 9 August 2026, OpenAI, ads and Stripe took US$245,000 out of US$215,000 of revenue, and with licenses and freelancers he was US$100,000 poorer than at the start. In June 2026 he wrote that Notis was profitable at its small scale, and his page still says profitable. These are his statements, grade C; TrustMRR verifies revenue, not costs." }, { "title": "Notion now has its own agents", "text": "Notion released AI Meeting Notes on 13 May 2025 and rebuilt Notion AI as Agents on 18 September 2025, with access to Slack, Google Drive and GitHub. In June 2025 Pariset called the dependence on Notion's API the main risk for Notis. On 27 August 2026 he wrote that he was finishing a move away from Notion within 30 days." }, { "title": "WhatsApp's rule on AI providers", "text": "Since 15 January 2026 the WhatsApp Business terms bar AI providers when the AI is the primary, not incidental or ancillary, function, as Meta decides at its sole discretion. Meta told TechCrunch that businesses that use AI to serve their own customers, such as a travel company's support bot, are not affected. Notis is a task tool, not a general chatbot, but its AI is its main function, so the wording could cover it. No source shows Meta acting against Notis; in October 2026 its WhatsApp page still says it works inside the official WhatsApp Business API." }, { "title": "Dependence on other companies", "text": "The models come from OpenAI, most of the marketing money went to Facebook and Google, the payments run on Stripe, and the product writes into Notion and other apps through their APIs. In June 2025 the founder wrote that WhatsApp had already been briefly unavailable to Notis." }, { "title": "Funded competitors", "text": "The founder names Viktor, which he says raised a US$75 million Series A led by Accel and has four times as many paid users as Notis. TechCrunch names Poke, backed by General Catalyst, among the WhatsApp assistants that the rule would likely affect. ChatGPT, Claude and Notion's own agents compete for the same work." }, { "title": "User counts that do not match", "text": "The founder wrote of 17,000 founders using Notis in May 2026 and of 1,000 paying teams in July 2026. Stripe showed 446 active subscriptions in October 2026. The sources do not say how each count was made." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.notis.ai/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/notis-ai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR, notis.ai markdown profile, data as of 15 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/notis-ai.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile. Grade A for the Stripe metrics in its Verification Sources section: MRR, revenue by period, the monthly timeline and subscriptions. The team, funding, pricing, user count and tech stack fields are founder-written, grade C." }, { "title": "Florian Pariset's newsletter Sunday scaries with Flo, 9 August 2026: I give up.", "url": "https://mindtheflo.substack.com/p/i-give-up", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Linked from his X post of 10 August 2026. Source for the gross revenue, the costs, the churn, the freelancers, the end of the ads and the Viktor comparison." }, { "title": "Notis blog, 19 June 2025: The messaging-first wedge, what's actually working for Notis right now", "url": "https://www.notis.ai/blog/the-messaging-first-wedge-what-s-actually-working-for-notis-right-now/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder's post. Source for the US$1,000 MRR, the salaries, the growth tests and the Notion API risk." }, { "title": "Notis blog, 21 January 2026: Notis, the messaging-first AI assistant that actually runs your Notion", "url": "https://notis.ai/blog/notis-the-messaging-first-ai-assistant-that-actually-runs-your-notion", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the start in summer 2023 and the paid launch in November 2023." }, { "title": "Florian Pariset on X, 18 June 2026: profitability, churn and trials", "url": "https://x.com/mindtheflo/status/2067567172616847483", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Florian Pariset on X, 27 August 2026: finishing the move away from Notion", "url": "https://x.com/mindtheflo/status/2092991131017437363", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Florian Pariset on X, 3 May 2026: 17,000 founders", "url": "https://x.com/mindtheflo/status/2050862956838322398", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Florian Pariset on X, 23 April 2026: Y Combinator rejected Notis twice", "url": "https://x.com/mindtheflo/status/2047384975251472656", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Notis, About Flo page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://www.notis.ai/mindtheflo/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder's page: team of one, US$0 raised, profitable, and the Viktor comparison." }, { "title": "Swiss commercial register (Zefix): Mind the Flo Sàrl, CHE-345.958.711, with the founding notice of 16 August 2024", "url": "https://www.zefix.admin.ch/ZefixREST/api/v1/firm/1652876.json", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the register record and its founding notice in the official gazette. Only names and roles are used here." }, { "title": "Notis changelog, August 2025 to August 2026", "url": "https://help.notis.ai/changelog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the dated entries. Source for the release dates, the December 2025 prices, the models and the quotation of the founder's LinkedIn post of July 2026." }, { "title": "Notis pricing page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://www.notis.ai/pricing/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The plan prices load by script and are not in the page text; the included usage, the trial and the billing rules are." }, { "title": "Notis privacy policy, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://www.notis.ai/policies/privacy/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the operating company and the processors: OpenAI, Twilio, ElevenLabs, Google Cloud, Supabase, Stripe, Intercom, PostHog, Langfuse, Google Analytics and Composio." }, { "title": "Notis WhatsApp channel page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://www.notis.ai/channels/whatsapp/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the official WhatsApp Business API and the 50+ languages." }, { "title": "TechCrunch, Ivan Mehta, 18 October 2025, updated 15 January 2026: WhatsApp changes its terms to bar general-purpose chatbots from its platform", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/18/whatssapp-changes-its-terms-to-bar-general-purpose-chatbots-from-its-platform/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Journalist's report with Meta's confirmation and the text of the new terms." }, { "title": "Notion release notes, 13 May 2025: Notion 2.51, AI Meeting Notes, Enterprise Search and more", "url": "https://www.notion.com/releases/2025-05-13", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the release title and summary. Notion's own announcement." }, { "title": "Notion release notes, 18 September 2025: Notion 3.0, Agents", "url": "https://www.notion.com/releases/2025-09-18", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Notion's own announcement." }, { "title": "Notis blog, 4 November 2025: Notis isn't another WhatsApp chatbot, it's your work hub", "url": "https://www.notis.ai/blog/notis-isn-t-another-whatsapp-chatbot-it-s-your-work-hub/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full." }, { "title": "LinkedIn, Notis company page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/notis-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public page without login: 2 employees listed, 147 followers." }, { "title": "Notis for Notion page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://www.notis.ai/for/notion/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the MCP connector for Notion AI and the 1,000+ apps." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." }, { "title": "Florian Pariset on X, 22 August 2026: work routed to the subscriptions customers already pay for", "url": "https://x.com/mindtheflo/status/2091065543763661100", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/superbulletai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/superbulletai.md", "slug": "superbulletai", "name": "SuperbulletAI", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI game builder for Roblox Studio", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-15", "launchLabel": "2 August 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$19.2K revenue in the last 30 days, October 2026", "sticker": "$230K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 230028, "months": 14, "teamLabel": "1 founder, solo at launch; no other team member named in October 2026", "fundingLabel": "Saudi accelerator investors named by the company, amount not disclosed", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "build-software", "channel": "communities", "trend": "growing", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Funded", "Running", "B2C", "Developer tools" ], "product": "A desktop app and Roblox Studio plugin that builds parts of a Roblox game from a written request: game systems, user interfaces, animations, visual effects, sounds and 3D builds, written straight into the user's project after the AI has read it. Users pay for AI tokens with a monthly plan or one-time top-ups, and can install ready-made systems from a marketplace.", "why": "The founder had made Roblox games for nine years, with 200 million visits on his own games, and his launch post on the official Roblox developer forum was read 112,656 times. He launched free, with 1 million tokens a month, and charged US$20 a month for heavy use. Then he added top-ups and a marketplace of tested systems that the AI installs, instead of writing every system from nothing.", "summary": [ "SuperbulletAI is an AI game builder for Roblox, an online platform where people play games that other users make. Roblox games are made in Roblox Studio, Roblox's free editor, and programmed in Luau, Roblox's version of the Lua programming language. SuperbulletAI is a desktop app with a Studio plugin, an add-on that runs inside Studio, so its AI can read the whole project and write code, user interfaces, animations, visual effects and sounds into it. The AI is made of large language models, programs trained on very large amounts of text that can write text and code; its roadmap and release notes name Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's GPT-4.1 and DeepSeek. Customers pay for tokens, the units of text that a language model reads and writes: 1 million a month are free, 11 million cost US$20 a month.", "The founder posts as Froredion on X, on the Roblox Developer Forum and on TrustMRR. On 2 August 2025 he launched SuperbulletAI on the forum, free for everyone, after what he called two months of solo development. He wrote that he had started making Roblox games at 12, was now 21, and had 200 million visits on his own games. The studio's own site names one founder, Erickson Talaue, as studio head and co-founder with \"200M+ visits as solo creator\", and shows the seat of a technical co-founder as open. Superbullet Studios also makes Roblox games and says it is partnered with Do Big Studios, a Roblox game publisher. In February 2026 the founder wrote that the company was venture-funded, had 25,000 registered users and made about US$12,000 a month. The website names two Saudi investors, Merak Capital and Impact46.", "The headline number is grade A. TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a company's payment processor through an API key, shows US$19,169 of Stripe revenue in the 30 days to 15 October 2026, and MRR, monthly recurring revenue from subscriptions, of US$12,256 from 619 active subscriptions. Monthly Stripe revenue rose from US$12,083 in March to US$18,044 in September 2026. Stripe is not the only payment route: the website's code also has checkouts for Tebex and Lemon Squeezy, so money taken there, and everything before February 2026, is not in these figures. The investment, the user counts and the claims about the models are the company's own statements, grade C." ], "factsCaption": "Stripe-verified revenue of US$19,169 in 30 days and US$12,256 MRR in October 2026, 14 months after a free launch on the Roblox developer forum", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from TrustMRR, which reads the company's Stripe account through the Stripe API. A grade C value is a statement by the founder or the company, on X, on the forum, or in the website's own text and code. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a free launch post on the Roblox developer forum to US$18,044 of Stripe revenue in one month, in 13 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "SuperbulletAI prices in October 2026, read from the plan list in the website's JavaScript code because the pricing page loads by script (grade C)", "note": "A token is a unit of text that a language model reads or writes. The Pro plan includes 11 million tokens a month with no daily limit, and unused tokens roll over to the next month. The yearly Pro plan costs US$192 and gives 120 million tokens at once, 20% less than twelve monthly payments. One-time top-ups come in 11 sizes, from US$20 for 10 million tokens to US$2,000 for 1 billion tokens. Systems and templates in the marketplace are paid with these credits.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "1M tokens a month, 150K a day" ], [ "Pro", "16", "20", "11M tokens a month, no daily limit" ], [ "Token top-up, smallest", "20 one-time", "", "10M tokens" ], [ "Token top-up, largest", "2,000 one-time", "", "1B tokens" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days, to 15 October 2026", "value": "US$19,169", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from the Stripe API, last synced 15 October 2026. The profile's stored snapshot shows US$19,189 and growth of 10.6% over the 30 days before. The account belongs to Superbullet, LLC, which also runs a Roblox game studio; the profile does not split revenue by product.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, October 2026", "value": "US$12,256 from 619 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, Stripe API. Growth of 2.1% in the last 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the last 30 days", "value": "about US$230,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$19,169 × 12 = US$230,028. MRR × 12 is US$147,072, the part that renews without a new purchase.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Part of the last 30 days above the monthly subscription value", "value": "about 36%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: (US$19,169 − US$12,256) ÷ US$19,169. The plan list sells one-time top-ups and a yearly plan paid at once, which count fully as revenue but not as MRR; TrustMRR does not break the difference down.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Stripe revenue by month, 2026", "value": "US$5,088 (February), US$12,083 (March), US$15,408 (June), US$18,044 (September)", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. February is the first month of the Stripe account. September is the best full month. Calculated: 49.3% more in September than in March.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Last three full months against the three before", "value": "16.9% more", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: July to September 2026, US$47,432, against April to June, US$40,585.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "All Stripe revenue to date", "value": "US$115,237", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, February to 15 October 2026. Payments taken through Lemon Squeezy or Tebex, and everything before February 2026, are not included.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Other payment providers", "value": "Lemon Squeezy and Tebex, besides Stripe", "grade": "C", "note": "The website's code has a Lemon Squeezy checkout, a Tebex checkout, and a Stripe checkout with a step that moves a subscriber from Tebex to Stripe. An internal revenue panel in the same code splits money between Stripe and Tebex.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue stated by the founder, February 2026", "value": "about US$12,000 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X, 18 February 2026. Stripe recorded US$5,088 in that month, so most of it, if the statement is right, came through the other providers.", "src": [ 8, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue and users in the founder's X profile, October 2026", "value": "about US$14,000 a month and more than 29,000 users", "grade": "C", "note": "The profile also says US$0 was spent on marketing. Read 15 October 2026.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Registered users", "value": "more than 25,000 (18 February 2026) and more than 29,000 (27 February 2026)", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's posts on X. The website's page description says \"Join 1M+ creators\", which no other source supports.", "src": [ 8, 10, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Marketplace", "value": "added 25 February 2026, paid with credits", "grade": "C", "note": "Release notes add the \"marketplace platform\" on 25 February 2026, and the terms have a marketplace section. The website's internal metrics code calls marketplace volume \"Credit spent on systems and templates. Already-recognised revenue changing hands, not new cash\", split into what the platform keeps and what creators earn. No source states the split.", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Launch", "value": "2 August 2025, free for everyone", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on the Roblox Developer Forum, after \"2 months of intense solo development\". Every user got 1 million free tokens a month.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Reach of the launch post", "value": "112,656 views, 986 likes and 216 posts", "grade": "C", "note": "Counters of the forum thread, read 15 October 2026.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Releases of the app", "value": "184, from 27 July 2025 to 15 October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Release list on the downloads page. Calculated: about 2.9 a week over 445 days.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's background", "value": "9 years of Roblox games, 200 million visits on his own games", "grade": "C", "note": "Launch post, and the studio site's founder entry: \"200M+ visits as solo creator\" and \"Contributed to 5B+ visits as tech lead\".", "src": [ 2, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Team, October 2026", "value": "1 named founder", "grade": "C", "note": "The studio site shows the technical co-founder seat as \"[Looking for co-founder]\", lists COO, CMO, CFO and CTO roles without names, and marks its team section \"Work-In-Progress\". No headcount is published.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Investors named on the website", "value": "Merak Capital and Impact46, Saudi Arabia", "grade": "C", "note": "Under \"Invested By\": \"Sovereign-backed by Saudi Arabia — through the National Development Fund and Social Development Bank\". The Merak logo links to the launch of Exel by Merak, Merak's gaming fund and accelerator. No amount is given.", "src": [ 3, 15 ] }, { "fact": "Investment terms of Exel by Merak", "value": "US$300,000 per company, as equity", "grade": "C", "note": "Jawlah, 18 August 2025: 17 startups in the first cohort received US$5.1 million in total, with founding support from the National Development Fund and the Social Development Bank. The article does not name Superbullet.", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "fact": "Seed round", "value": "US$3 million to US$4 million, said to be close in February 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X, 8 February 2026. On 18 February he listed \"Seed round millions of dollars\" under what is coming. No investor or news report that we found confirms it.", "src": [ 9, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Minimum age of users", "value": "13", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms of service. The privacy policy asks users between 13 and 18 to review it with a parent or guardian. The roadmap calls the free plan \"perfect for students and indie developers\".", "src": [ 5, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Governing law of the terms", "value": "Saudi Arabia", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms of service, section 12. TrustMRR lists the company's country as the US.", "src": [ 5, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October 2026 figure", "value": "14 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2 August 2025 to 15 October 2026, 439 days.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "About 2016", "what": "The founder starts making Roblox games at 12, by his own account. Over nine years his own games reach 200 million visits.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "May to June 2025", "what": "First features, by the roadmap: reading a Studio project, generating user interfaces and game systems, and models based on GPT-4.1 and Claude Sonnet 4.0.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "27 July 2025", "what": "Earliest release in the public list, version 0.1.12, with file search, grep and console-reading tools.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "2 August 2025", "what": "Launch on the Roblox Developer Forum after two months of solo development, free with 1 million tokens a month. Version 0.2.0 adds the free plan the same day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 4 ] }, { "when": "21 August 2025", "what": "Release notes add models named BulletGPT-5, BulletMindV1 and BulletLearnV1. The founder presents BulletLearn on the forum as \"The Duolingo for Roblox Scripting\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 13 ] }, { "when": "3 December 2025", "what": "Claude Opus 4.5 is added to the app.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "8 December 2025", "what": "Founding date of Superbullet, LLC, as entered on TrustMRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "17 January 2026", "what": "The founder explains the plan on X: Roblox has about 70 libraries and Python more than 500,000, so SuperbulletAI will build reusable Roblox libraries for its AI.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "February 2026", "what": "First month of the Stripe account that TrustMRR reads: US$5,088.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "18 February 2026", "what": "The founder writes that the company is venture-funded, has more than 25,000 registered users and makes about US$12,000 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "25 to 27 February 2026", "what": "Marketplace added on 25 February. On 27 February the founder announces the platform as live, with more than 29,000 users after six months of beta.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 10 ] }, { "when": "March 2026", "what": "Stripe revenue reaches US$12,083 in the month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "26 April 2026", "what": "Settings for Opus 4.7, an Anthropic model, are added; a fix for DeepSeek models follows on 30 April.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "Best month so far: US$18,044 of Stripe revenue.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "15 October 2026", "what": "US$19,169 in the last 30 days and US$12,256 MRR from 619 subscriptions. Version 0.4.6 adds procedural map generation.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 4 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A builder from the platform's own community", "text": "The founder had nine years of Roblox games behind him and launched where Roblox developers read: the official developer forum. The post was read 112,656 times. His X profile says the company spent nothing on marketing; its channels were forum posts, demo videos on X and a Discord server." }, { "title": "Free tokens, then paid tokens", "text": "Every user gets 1 million tokens a month free. Heavy users pay US$20 a month for 11 million, or buy top-ups from US$20 to US$2,000. In the last 30 days revenue was 1.56 times MRR, so a large part came from purchases other than monthly renewals." }, { "title": "Reusable systems instead of new code", "text": "The founder's argument is that Roblox has few shared libraries, so an AI writes every system from nothing and makes mistakes. SuperbulletAI installs tested templates and marketplace systems and lets the AI adapt them. He wrote that a movement system with sliding and sprinting costs US$0.02 to add this way, against US$20 to US$100 of model cost in other tools; that comparison is his own." }, { "title": "Inside Studio, shipped often", "text": "The app reads the project, the output log and the console, writes into Studio directly, and keeps checkpoints so that changes can be undone. It shipped 184 versions in 445 days, about three a week, and added new models such as Claude Opus 4.5 in December 2025." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the website's code and text, its documentation and the founder's posts. They are grade C.", "items": [ "A desktop app for Windows and Mac with a Roblox Studio plugin. It reads the project's properties, hierarchy and files, the output log and the console, and keeps checkpoints so that changes can be undone.", "Models: the roadmap lists GPT-4.1 and Claude Sonnet 4.0 in June 2025; release notes add Claude Opus 4.5 in December 2025, and settings for Opus 4.7 and a DeepSeek fix in April 2026. In February 2026 the founder offered users the option to work with their own Claude or ChatGPT subscription alongside it.", "BulletMindV1, a model of its own, appears in the release notes of August 2025, but the home page still calls it \"Coming soon\" and says its development begins at 2,000 subscribers. Which models run under the Bullet names is not stated.", "3D models come through Roblox's own Cube 3D generation, by the documentation. Code follows a framework that the company calls SuperbulletFrameworkV1-Knit, and the app works with Rojo, a tool that syncs code files on disk with Studio.", "The website uses Firebase for sign-in and has its own backend. Checkouts go through Stripe, Tebex and Lemon Squeezy.", "Marketing: the founder's forum posts, demo videos on X and a Discord community. The X profile says US$0 on marketing." ], "src": [ 4, 3, 23, 8, 2, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised to make writing code or building games easier, or built a service on another company's game. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Kite DevTool", "years": "2014 to 2024", "funding": "US$21M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "AI code completion inside the programmer's editor.", "died": "GitHub Copilot, with OpenAI's Codex model and Microsoft's distribution, gave better suggestions to more developers. The free product never made enough money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2491-kite-devtool" }, { "name": "Minefold", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Minecraft servers that any player could start in a click.", "died": "A server for each user cost too much without a very large user base, and cloud companies and the game platforms added similar features themselves.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1177-minefold" }, { "name": "Crejo.Fun", "years": "2020 to 2022", "funding": "US$3M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A no-code builder for apps and games, for creators in India.", "died": "A general tool for creators who needed more followers, not another app to run and promote.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2303-crejofun" }, { "name": "CodeMao", "years": "2015 to 2021", "funding": "US$360M", "cause": "Legal/Regulatory", "promise": "Game-like coding lessons for children aged 7 to 16, with 30 million registered users.", "died": "China's Double Reduction Policy of July 2021 banned for-profit tutoring for school-age children and removed about 95% of its revenue.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2554-codemao" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Kite and Minefold show the two usual endings for a tool built on someone else's platform. A bigger company with more distribution ships the same feature, as GitHub Copilot did to Kite, or the platform owner builds it in, as game platforms did to Minefold's servers. SuperbulletAI faces both: Roblox adds mesh generation, a playtest agent and a connection point for outside AI agents to Studio every few months, and general coding agents can already edit Studio through it.", "Two things are different. First, large language models made the product possible for one person: the founder built and launched it in two months on models from Anthropic, OpenAI and DeepSeek instead of building a model from the start. Second, it sells what Roblox and the general agents do not have: tested, Roblox-specific systems and templates, sold through a marketplace and installed by the AI. Whether that library stays ahead of Roblox's own tools is the open question." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The niche needs years on the platform.", "text": "A solo developer reached US$12,256 of verified monthly recurring revenue 14 months after launch by selling AI to the community he had worked in for nine years. The pattern works on other creation platforms, but it depended on a public record that the community could check.", "steps": [ "Choose one creation platform with its own editor and language, where you have shipped work that its developers can check.", "Launch free on the platform's official developer forum, with a monthly token allowance, and answer the critical replies yourself.", "Charge a flat monthly plan for a fixed number of tokens, and sell one-time top-ups to heavy users.", "Build a library of tested, reusable systems that the AI installs and adapts, so each request needs fewer model calls." ], "open": "Other platforms where people build games or apps inside one company's editor, with a scripting language that general coding tools know less well." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Roblox builds the same tools", "text": "Roblox's own Assistant was available to everyone in Studio by March 2025. On 20 March 2025 Roblox released Cube 3D, a 1.8-billion-parameter model for 3D generation. On 19 March 2026 it extended mesh generation in Assistant and added tools to its Studio MCP server, the standard interface through which outside AI agents such as Claude edit Studio; on 9 April 2026 it added a playtest agent, and on 19 August 2026 support for several connected AI clients. SuperbulletAI's FAQ says Roblox Assistant takes 52 to 53 seconds for a user interface that SuperbulletAI makes in 18; that test is its own." }, { "title": "Roblox's terms decide what the tool may do", "text": "The Roblox Terms of Use, in the version effective 1 November 2026, say that Roblox may monitor use of its APIs and \"may suspend access to the APIs by you or your API Client without notice\" if it believes the terms are broken, and that it may restrict AI tools for specific age groups of users. SuperbulletAI's release notes track the expiry of users' Roblox API keys, and its demos upload assets to Roblox automatically, so a change in these rules reaches it directly." }, { "title": "One platform, one kind of customer", "text": "All revenue comes from people who make Roblox games, and the product does not work without Roblox Studio. Minefold, above, depended on Minecraft in the same way. The studio's partnership with Do Big Studios, a Roblox game publisher, ties the company further to the same platform." }, { "title": "Competitors at the same price", "text": "Ropilot, a Roblox AI agent that also works with Claude, ChatGPT and Blender, now sells Ropilot Plus for US$20 a month, the price of SuperbulletAI Pro; in February 2026 the founder said it cost US$50. Lemonade calls itself \"The first agent for making games on Roblox\". A reply to the launch post said that GitHub Copilot with Rojo gives the same result." }, { "title": "Only part of the money is verified", "text": "TrustMRR reads only the Stripe account, which starts in February 2026. The website's code also takes payments through Tebex and Lemon Squeezy, so the true total may be higher, and part of the rise from February to March 2026 may be subscribers moved from Tebex to Stripe. Some company claims do not agree: the site says \"Join 1M+ creators\" while the founder says 29,000 users, and BulletMindV1 is listed as added in August 2025 but called \"Coming soon\" on the home page." }, { "title": "The funding is not confirmed", "text": "The founder calls the company venture-funded and wrote in February 2026 that a US$3 million to US$4 million seed round would close soon. The site shows Merak Capital and Impact46 as investors. No investor statement or news report that we found names Superbullet, and no amount is public. The terms are governed by Saudi law, while TrustMRR lists the company in the US." }, { "title": "Users from age 13", "text": "The founder started making Roblox games at 12. SuperbulletAI accepts users from 13, asks users between 13 and 18 to read its privacy policy with a parent, and calls its free plan \"perfect for students\". Paid AI plans sold to teenagers bring duties around consent, refunds and personal data. CodeMao, above, shows how fast rules for children's products can remove a business." }, { "title": "Headcount not published", "text": "Only one founder is named. The site's team section is empty and four executive roles have no names. The founder writes \"we\", and the roadmap describes libraries made by \"real human programmers\" and animators, so other people may work on it; how many is not known." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://superbullet.ai/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: Superbullet, LLC, verified revenue profile, data as of 15 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/superbullet-llc", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile. Revenue, MRR and subscription figures in its Verification Sources section come from the Stripe API (grade A); the description and founding date are founder-written (grade C)." }, { "title": "Roblox Developer Forum, 2 August 2025: SuperbulletAI launched the most powerful AI Game Builder for Roblox, and it's free for everyone to try", "url": "https://devforum.roblox.com/t/superbulletai-launched-the-most-powerful-ai-game-builder-for-roblox-and-its-free-for-everyone-to-try/3856417", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the first post and the first replies through the forum's JSON interface. Founder's launch post; source for the launch date, the solo development, his background and the thread counters." }, { "title": "SuperbulletAI home page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://superbullet.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the pre-rendered page text in full, and the investor section in the site's JavaScript code. Source for the product description, the investor logos and the BulletMindV1 note." }, { "title": "SuperbulletAI pricing, downloads, roadmap and FAQ pages, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://superbullet.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "These pages load by script; read their text in the site's JavaScript bundle. Source for the plans and top-ups, the 184 dated releases, the roadmap, the payment providers and the FAQ comparison with Roblox Assistant." }, { "title": "SuperbulletAI terms of service and privacy policy", "url": "https://superbullet.ai/terms-of-service", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on age, governing law and the marketplace in the site's JavaScript bundle." }, { "title": "Superbullet Studios website, About section", "url": "https://superbulletstudios.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "The page loads by script; read the founders, team and partner text in its JavaScript bundle." }, { "title": "Froredion on X, profile", "url": "https://x.com/froredion", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile through api.fxtwitter.com on 15 October 2026. Source for the revenue, user and marketing figures in the bio." }, { "title": "Froredion on X, 18 February 2026: Superbullet is a Roblox AI game creation platform", "url": "https://x.com/froredion/status/2024250000642101461", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com, with a second version of the post from the same evening. Source for venture-funded, 25,000 users, about US$12,000 a month and the seed round plan." }, { "title": "Froredion on X, 8 February 2026: Ropilot is essentially just Claude Code, repackaged", "url": "https://x.com/froredion/status/2020622731109347580", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the US$3 million to US$4 million seed round claim and the competitor's price then." }, { "title": "Froredion on X, 27 February 2026: Introducing SuperbulletAI", "url": "https://x.com/froredion/status/2027339207983906892", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for 29,000 users and six months of beta." }, { "title": "Froredion on X, 17 January 2026: Roblox AI sucks, not because of AI", "url": "https://x.com/froredion/status/2012544492231086227", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the library argument." }, { "title": "Froredion on X, 22 March 2026: Advanced Movement System now added to Superbullet", "url": "https://x.com/froredion/status/2035725288051785828", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the US$0.02 cost comparison." }, { "title": "Roblox Developer Forum search results for SuperbulletAI", "url": "https://devforum.roblox.com/search?q=superbulletai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the result list through the forum's JSON interface. Source for the titles and dates of the founder's posts, including BulletLearn on 21 August 2025." }, { "title": "Jawlah, 18 August 2025: Exel by Merak accelerator invests $5.1 million in 17 gaming startups", "url": "https://jawlah.co/en/40480", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the US$300,000 per company and the backing of the accelerator. It does not name Superbullet." }, { "title": "Merak Capital, 17 November 2024: Merak Capital launches Exel by Merak to empower gaming startups", "url": "https://merak.capital/blog/merak-capital-launches-exel-by-merak-to-empower-gaming-startups-as-global-leaders-2", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The SuperbulletAI site links to an older address of this page, which returns a not-found page; no Wayback copy of that address exists." }, { "title": "Roblox Developer Forum, 20 March 2025: [Beta] Cube 3D Generation Tools and APIs for Creators", "url": "https://devforum.roblox.com/t/beta-cube-3d-generation-tools-and-apis-for-creators/3558947", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the announcement through the forum's JSON interface. Roblox's own statement." }, { "title": "Roblox Developer Forum, 19 March 2026: Assistant Updates: Mesh Generation, New MCP Server Tools, Screenshot Tool, and More", "url": "https://devforum.roblox.com/t/assistant-updates-mesh-generation-new-mcp-server-tools-screenshot-tool-and-more/4527258", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the announcement through the forum's JSON interface." }, { "title": "Roblox Developer Forum, 9 April 2026: [Studio Beta] Studio Assistant & MCP Playtest Agent", "url": "https://devforum.roblox.com/t/studio-beta-studio-assistant-mcp-playtest-agent/4566767", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the announcement through the forum's JSON interface." }, { "title": "Roblox Developer Forum, 19 August 2026: Studio MCP: Multi-Agent Improvements and Connected AI Clients", "url": "https://devforum.roblox.com/t/studio-mcp-multi-agent-improvements-and-connected-ai-clients/4820583", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the announcement through the forum's JSON interface." }, { "title": "Roblox Terms of Use, version effective 1 November 2026", "url": "https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/en-us/articles/115004647846-Roblox-Terms-of-Use", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on AI Tools and Roblox APIs in the Creator Terms." }, { "title": "Ropilot home page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://ropilot.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A competing Roblox AI agent; source for its current price." }, { "title": "Lemonade home page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://lemonade.gg/", "grade": "C", "how": "The page loads by script; read its title and description only." }, { "title": "SuperbulletAI documentation", "url": "https://docs.superbulletstudios.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the contents page. Source for the framework, Rojo and Cube 3D chapters." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/genppt/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/genppt.md", "slug": "genppt", "name": "GenPPT", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI presentation generator (web app)", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-15", "launchLabel": "May 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$110.6K in the last 12 months, October 2026", "sticker": "$110.6K in 12 months", "outcomeUsd": 110559, "months": 29, "teamLabel": "1 owner, Ilias Ism, who bought it in about August 2025; one developer hired during his first year; run by him alone with a daily AI coding routine by September 2026", "fundingLabel": "None found in any source", "primaryFactor": "Search", "group": "documents-data", "channel": "search", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Productivity software" ], "product": "A web app that turns a topic, notes, a PDF, a Word file, a spreadsheet, a YouTube link or a web page into a slide deck. The user approves an outline and a visual concept, then each slide is generated as one designed full-slide image, edited by chat, and exported to PowerPoint (.pptx), PDF or PNG.", "why": "It is run by a search marketer: its pages target what people type into Google, and its best month came from a list article on another company's blog that ranked there. A US$1 trial that needs a card turns visitors directly into subscribers at US$25 a month or US$99 a year.", "summary": [ "GenPPT is an AI presentation generator, a program that writes and designs slides from a short request. The user gives a topic, notes, a PDF, a Word file, a spreadsheet, a YouTube link or a web page. GenPPT drafts a slide-by-slide outline, the user approves it and a visual concept, and then AI models generate every slide as one designed image that the user can change by chat and export to PowerPoint (.pptx), PDF or PNG. The models are bought through OpenRouter, a service that sells access to many AI models through one programming interface, and from Google Gemini. There is no free plan. A paid trial, a short first period that the customer pays a small amount for, costs US$1 for three days with a card and then becomes US$25 a month or US$99 a year unless the user cancels.", "The site was online by 25 May 2024, the date of its first copy in the Wayback Machine, a public archive of web pages. Ilias Ism, who also runs the link-building software LinkDR, the tracker AI SEO Tracker and MagicSpace, an SEO agency (search engine optimization: the work of making pages rank high in Google), wrote on 1 August 2026 that he bought GenPPT a year earlier and rewrote the whole app. TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a company's payment accounts, shows US$110,559 of revenue in the 12 months to 15 October 2026 and US$7,997 of MRR, monthly recurring revenue, the subscription money that repeats every month, from 543 active subscriptions. The best month was January 2026, at US$20,330. By his account, a listicle, an article written as a ranked list, on another company's blog ranked on Google at that time and sent about 18,000 visitors. Since September 2026 he calls GenPPT 'entirely touchless': a daily routine with the coding agent Codex reviews user chats and slides and deploys fixes.", "The revenue figures are grade A: TrustMRR reads them from GenPPT's Stripe and Lemon Squeezy accounts with an API key, a password that lets one program read another program's data. Everything else on this page, including the purchase, the costs and the traffic sources, is the owner's own statement, grade C. Revenue was about US$9,500 a month from February to July 2026 and about US$7,100 in August and September, 26% lower. He paused Google Ads on 16 September 2026 after paying US$4 to US$7 a click, and on 30 September wrote 'Just SEO from now on'. The business has been listed for sale on TrustMRR since 19 February 2026, at US$125,000 in October 2026, and the seller's note gives no reason." ], "factsCaption": "US$110,559 of verified revenue in 12 months under an owner who bought the product, with revenue down about a quarter since August 2026 and the business listed for sale at US$125,000", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from GenPPT's Stripe and Lemon Squeezy accounts, or from its DataFast analytics, which TrustMRR reads by API key. A grade B value is supported by archived page source. A grade C value is a statement by the owner on X, on his blog or on GenPPT's pages, or a value that the seller typed into TrustMRR. A grade X value was computed on this page from the values its note names.", "timelineLead": "From a template tool archived in May 2024 to a product that one owner bought, rebuilt and listed for sale. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "GenPPT prices on 15 October 2026, from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "There is one paid plan and no free plan. A new user pays US$1 for a 3-day trial with a card; if the user does not cancel, the plan price is charged. The page shows the yearly price as US$8 a month; US$99 divided by 12 is US$8.25. The page says the yearly plan saves US$201, or 67%, against 12 monthly payments.", "rows": [ [ "Trial, 3 days", "", "1 one-time", "card required; the chosen plan starts after 3 days unless cancelled" ], [ "Paid plan", "8.25", "25", "20 full-slide image decks a month; unlimited slide edits in chat; export to PowerPoint and PDF without watermark" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue in the 12 months to 15 October 2026", "value": "US$110,559", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from the Stripe and Lemon Squeezy accounts by API key, last synced 15 October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, October 2026", "value": "US$7,997 from 543 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot. MRR fell 8.6% over the last 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR per active subscription", "value": "about US$14.73 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$7,997 divided by 543. It lies between the yearly plan (US$8.25 a month) and the monthly plan (US$25).", "src": [ 1, 10 ] }, { "fact": "MRR times 12", "value": "US$95,964 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the October 2026 MRR.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month, February to July 2026", "value": "US$9,165 to US$9,754, average US$9,540", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. The average is calculated on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in August and September 2026", "value": "US$6,976 and US$7,215", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. Their average, US$7,096, is 25.6% below the February to July average (calculated). October 2026 up to the 15th: US$2,883.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Best month", "value": "January 2026, US$20,330", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. 2.13 times the February to July average (calculated). The owner wrote that his best revenue month came mostly from one listicle on another company's blog (see below).", "src": [ 1, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue since the first recorded sale", "value": "US$175,247", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR all-time figure. US$64,688 of it came before mid-October 2025 (calculated: all time minus the last 12 months). That earlier period includes months before the current owner bought GenPPT, and no source splits it between the owners.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Visitors sent by one StoryChief listicle", "value": "about 18,000, converting at 11.9%", "grade": "C", "note": "Owner's blog, updated 10 June 2026. The listicle 'Best AI Presentation Makers' was published in December and ranked on Google through January and February. His own Google visitors converted at 4.7% and direct visitors at 1.9%. When the listicle left the first page of Google, referrals fell 95%. He had rewritten that article himself earlier.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Visitors in the last 30 days", "value": "17,089, with US$0.41 of revenue per visitor", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot from DataFast analytics, connected by API key.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Google Ads spend", "value": "US$8,900 in June 2026, US$3,100 in July and in August, paused on 16 September 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Owner's monthly spending posts. The June ads equal 94% of June revenue, US$9,498 (calculated). He wrote that he paid US$4 to US$7 a click against Gamma, Beautiful.ai and ChatGPT.", "src": [ 6, 5, 4, 7 ] }, { "fact": "GenPPT costs in July and in September 2026", "value": "US$4,900 in each month", "grade": "C", "note": "Owner's posts. July: Google Ads US$3,100, AI APIs and tokens US$1,400, software and hosting US$400. September: no ads, videos by paid creators US$2,500, AI APIs and tokens US$1,500 through OpenRouter, software and hosting US$900. The costs equal 51% of July revenue and 68% of September revenue (calculated).", "src": [ 5, 3 ] }, { "fact": "GenPPT costs in August 2026", "value": "US$28,900, of which US$20,000 for a 'new acquisition (30DR+)'", "grade": "C", "note": "Owner's post. DR is Domain Rating, the 0 to 100 score that the SEO tool Ahrefs gives a site for the strength of the links pointing to it. The post does not say what was bought. AI APIs and tokens were US$5,300 that month.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "80%", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot; the profile does not say where the cost figures come from. The owner's own September costs, US$4,900 against US$7,215 of revenue, give about 32% (calculated).", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Return on the purchase", "value": "'3x ROI from the acquisition so far'", "grade": "C", "note": "Owner, 30 September 2026. ROI is return on investment. He has not published the purchase price, so the figure cannot be checked.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Users", "value": "100,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Owner's post of 2 June 2026; the site says 'Trusted by 100,000+ professionals'. A user is not a payer: TrustMRR shows 543 active subscriptions.", "src": [ 8, 11, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue of the owner's other products, in a blog post updated 10 June 2026", "value": "LinkDR 'low five figures' a month, AI SEO Tracker about US$200 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Owner's blog, which gives GenPPT as about US$10,000 a month at the same time. Low five figures means at least US$10,000. Eleven of the twelve months in the GenPPT profile are below US$10,000, so LinkDR's sales are not inside it.", "src": [ 9, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Payment accounts behind the revenue", "value": "Stripe and Lemon Squeezy, both GenPPT's", "grade": "B", "note": "TrustMRR reads both by API key. The archived home page of 10 September 2025 loads Lemon Squeezy's scripts with the store name 'genppt'. The terms of 2 October 2026 say subscriptions are processed by Stripe. On 31 July 2026 the owner linked the TrustMRR profile as 'GenPPT revenue'.", "src": [ 1, 16, 13, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Operating company", "value": "Superleuk, LLC d/b/a GenPPT", "grade": "C", "note": "About page and terms. d/b/a means 'doing business as'. The terms choose the laws of Switzerland; TrustMRR lists the country as US.", "src": [ 12, 13, 1 ] }, { "fact": "People", "value": "the owner alone; one developer hired during his first year", "grade": "C", "note": "Owner's posts of 1 August and 30 September 2026. No investor appears in any source.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price", "value": "US$125,000, listed since 19 February 2026, 12 offers received", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR listing, written by the seller. US$125,000 is 1.13 times the last 12 months of revenue and 1.49 times 12 months of the last-30-day revenue (calculated); TrustMRR shows 1.5x.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the first archived page to the October 2026 figure", "value": "29 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: May 2024 to October 2026. About 14 months under the current owner, counting from August 2025 (calculated).", "src": [ 15, 2, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "25 May 2024", "what": "First copy of genppt.com in the Wayback Machine. TrustMRR gives 1 June 2024 as the founding date.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15, 1 ] }, { "when": "3 July 2024", "what": "The home page offers PowerPoint generation from themed templates, an upgrade called GenPPT+ with unlimited PowerPoints and a 500-character input, and says '506 creators present faster'.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "About August 2025", "what": "Ilias Ism buys GenPPT; on 1 August 2026 he dated the purchase 'a year ago'. In the following year he hires a developer and rewrites the app three times while fighting churn, the loss of paying users.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "10 September 2025", "what": "The archived home page loads Lemon Squeezy's scripts, including its affiliate script, for the store 'genppt', and offers a 3-day trial.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "when": "November 2025 to July 2026", "what": "Verified revenue of US$7,019 to US$9,754 in every month except January 2026.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "December 2025 to February 2026", "what": "A StoryChief listicle, 'Best AI Presentation Makers', ranks on Google and sends about 18,000 visitors. January 2026 is the best verified month, at US$20,330.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 1 ] }, { "when": "19 February 2026", "what": "Listed for sale on TrustMRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2 June 2026", "what": "He posts 'GenPPT → 100k users'.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "By 10 June 2026", "what": "In a blog post updated on 10 June he writes that GenPPT revenue was down 16% and traces most of the fall to the listicle leaving the first page of Google.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "US$8,900 spent on Google Ads for GenPPT, against US$9,498 of verified revenue.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 1 ] }, { "when": "1 August 2026", "what": "After watching 'a painful user session' he deletes the rewritten app again and writes that he will rebuild it until it is the best product on the market.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "4 August 2026", "what": "New website and a slide engine rebuilt from scratch: full-slide visual designs, LinkedIn and Instagram carousels, pitch-deck templates, automatic web research with screenshots.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "August 2026", "what": "GenPPT costs US$28,900, including US$20,000 for a 'new acquisition (30DR+)' that the post does not describe. Verified revenue falls to US$6,976.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "when": "16 September 2026", "what": "All Google Ads paused. He writes that any keyword with 'AI' in it has become too expensive.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "30 September 2026", "what": "He writes that GenPPT is 'entirely touchless', with a daily Codex routine that reviews chats and slides and deploys fixes; '3x ROI from the acquisition so far, but still hard to grow MRR'; marketing is SEO only from now on.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "15 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR: US$110,559 in 12 months, MRR US$7,997, 543 active subscriptions, asking price US$125,000.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Search, including pages that others own", "text": "The owner is a search marketer, and the site is built for Google: comparison pages such as 'Gamma alternative' and 'Tome alternative', free generator pages, and a blog. TrustMRR lists blog, content marketing, SEO and Google Ads as its channels and gives the domain a Domain Rating of 50. Its best month came from a listicle on another company's blog that ranked on Google; those visitors converted at 11.9%, against 4.7% for GenPPT's own Google visitors." }, { "title": "A US$1 trial with a card", "text": "There is no free plan. A visitor pays US$1 for three days, and the plan starts unless the visitor cancels. The terms explain why refunds are rare: AI generation uses compute as soon as it runs, so payments are generally not refunded once paid features have been used." }, { "title": "Buy a product, then rebuild it", "text": "He did not start GenPPT; he bought it, with users and revenue, in about August 2025. The first year went into fighting churn with a hired developer and three rewrites, and August 2026 into a new slide engine that generates each slide as one designed image." }, { "title": "AI keeps it running", "text": "By September 2026 he describes GenPPT as 'entirely touchless': a daily routine with the Codex coding agent reviews user chats and generated slides, fixes problems and deploys the fixes. AI APIs and tokens cost US$1,400 to US$5,300 a month between July and September 2026." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the owner's posts and GenPPT's own pages. They are grade C, except the payment providers, which TrustMRR confirms.", "items": [ "A Next.js web app. The seller's note on TrustMRR says 'Good high-quality nextjs code'.", "AI text, research and image generation through OpenRouter and Google Gemini, by the privacy policy of 26 September 2026. On 9 September 2026 he tested two new OpenAI image models against gpt-image-2 on 11 slide cases inside GenPPT; no source says which model runs for customers.", "The user approves an outline and a visual concept first. Then each slide is generated as a full image, edited by chat, and exported to .pptx, PDF or PNG in 16:9, 1:1 or 9:16.", "Hetzner servers and database in Finland, Cloudflare for delivery and R2 file storage, Resend for email, PostHog for product analytics and Sentry for errors, by the privacy policy. Vercel and Supabase were in his July and August cost lists; on 30 September 2026 he wrote that he cut them.", "In August 2026 he deleted 88,000 lines of custom chat-workflow code and replaced it with tools from Vercel and a second vendor that the post names only by its X account.", "Payments went through Lemon Squeezy in 2025 and through Stripe in the terms of October 2026; TrustMRR reads both accounts.", "Code is written with Cursor, which is in his GenPPT cost lists for July and August 2026, and since September 2026 a daily Codex routine checks the product and deploys fixes." ], "src": [ 1, 14, 8, 11, 12, 3, 5, 4, 13, 16 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Three companies in the Loot Drop database offered a better way to make presentations or to find things, and ended when a larger company offered the same thing itself. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "LiveLoop", "years": "2010 to 2015", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "PowerPoint with real-time collaboration on one shared deck.", "died": "Microsoft bought it in 2015 and built the same features into Office.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/302-liveloop" }, { "name": "Qwiki", "years": "2010 to 2015", "funding": "US$10M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Search results turned into automatically generated multimedia stories.", "died": "High costs, user resistance and a sale to Yahoo; it lost out to Google and the large mobile video services.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/481-qwiki" }, { "name": "Hipmunk", "years": "2010 to 2020", "funding": "US$55M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Travel search that sorted flights by inconvenience instead of price alone.", "died": "Google's own travel search took its users, and COVID-19 hit the travel industry.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/214-hipmunk" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the three offered a better way to make or find something, and a larger company then offered the same thing itself: Microsoft built LiveLoop's features into Office, and Google's own travel search took Hipmunk's users. GenPPT faces both moves at once. Copilot in PowerPoint, the Gemini app with export to Google Slides, and Canva's Magic Design all make designs or slides from a prompt, and GenPPT finds its buyers through Google search, the channel that Hipmunk lost.", "Two things differ. The AI models are sold to anyone through an API, so one person can produce a deck of the same kind as the large companies without building a model, and pays only for each use. And GenPPT does not need the whole market: 543 subscriptions at about US$15 a month on average make about US$8,000 of MRR. The risk that remains is that a funded company competes for the same searches: Gamma, with US$100 million of annual recurring revenue by its chief executive's account, bids on the same Google keywords." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Partly: the purchase can be copied, the growth is not shown.", "text": "Buying a small AI product that already has paying users, then running it alone with AI coding tools, is a method that anyone with some capital can repeat. What brought the revenue here was search traffic, and this owner also runs a link-building business and an SEO agency. The record shows the limits as well: six months near US$9,500 a month, then about US$7,100 after the best referral page left Google and the paid ads stopped.", "steps": [ "Buy a product whose revenue a payment provider confirms, and find out where its buyers come from before you change it.", "Track the pages on other sites that send you buyers, such as listicles and comparisons, not only your own rankings.", "When every use costs you model fees, charge a small paid trial with a card instead of offering a free plan.", "Compare ad spend with revenue every month; in June 2026 the ads here cost 94% of revenue.", "Give routine maintenance to a daily AI coding routine so that the product does not need staff." ], "open": "Narrow AI tools that produce a finished file, such as a deck, a carousel or a report, for buyers who search for that file by name." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue is falling", "text": "Verified revenue fell from about US$9,500 a month (February to July 2026) to about US$7,100 (August and September), 26% lower, and MRR fell 8.6% in the last 30 days. On 30 September 2026 the owner wrote that MRR is still hard to grow despite marketing experiments." }, { "title": "For sale, with no reason given", "text": "GenPPT has been listed on TrustMRR since 19 February 2026, at US$125,000 in October 2026, about 1.1 times its last 12 months of revenue, with 12 offers received. The seller's note says only 'Good high-quality nextjs code'. The listing does not say whether the daily Codex routine and the owner's search work continue after a sale." }, { "title": "Microsoft, Google and Canva offer the same feature", "text": "Microsoft announced on 16 March 2023 that Copilot in PowerPoint creates presentations from a simple prompt. Google added slide generation to the Gemini app on 28 October 2025, with export to Google Slides. Canva's Magic Design, announced on 4 October 2023, makes designs from a written prompt. These features come inside office and design tools that people already have." }, { "title": "Gamma has money for the same keywords", "text": "TechCrunch reported on 10 November 2025 that Gamma raised a US$68 million Series B at a US$2.1 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz; its chief executive said it had US$100 million of annual recurring revenue and 70 million users with about 50 employees. The owner paused Google Ads in September 2026 after paying US$4 to US$7 a click against Gamma, Beautiful.ai and ChatGPT, and on 14 October 2026 he estimated with Ahrefs that Gamma gets 3.7 million organic visits a month." }, { "title": "Search traffic on pages it does not own", "text": "The best month came mostly from one listicle on StoryChief's blog. When it fell off the first page of Google, referrals fell 95%, and the owner wrote that none of his own tracking tools had seen it. In the same post he found a Google AI Overview, the AI answer above Google results, citing his competitors. Rankings and AI answers can change without notice." }, { "title": "The models belong to others", "text": "Every deck is made with models bought through OpenRouter and Google Gemini, at US$1,400 to US$5,300 a month for AI APIs between July and September 2026. A provider's price change goes straight into GenPPT's costs, and the same models are open to every competitor." }, { "title": "The same field as MagicSlides", "text": "MagicSlides, another AI presentation maker on this site, shows US$181,975 in the 12 months to 12 October 2026 on TrustMRR, 1.65 times GenPPT's US$110,559." }, { "title": "The founding story is unclear", "text": "GenPPT's About page says 'Founded by Ilias Ism', but he wrote on 1 August 2026 that he bought it a year earlier, and the site was online from May 2024. No source names the first owner or the purchase price, so the US$64,688 earned before mid-October 2025 cannot be split between the two owners." }, { "title": "The profit figures disagree", "text": "TrustMRR shows an 80% profit margin for the last 30 days but does not say where the costs come from. The owner's own September 2026 costs give about 32%." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://genppt.com/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/genppt" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of GenPPT, revenue read from Stripe and Lemon Squeezy by API key", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/genppt.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile on 15 October 2026 (revenue last synced 15 October 2026 at 09:30 UTC). Revenue, MRR, subscriptions and the monthly timeline come from the Stripe and Lemon Squeezy accounts; visitors come from DataFast. The founding date, tech stack, channels, user estimate and sale listing are written by the seller and are grade C. The profile does not say where the profit-margin costs come from." }, { "title": "Ilias Ism on X, 1 August 2026: I bought GenPPT a year ago and rewrote the whole app", "url": "https://x.com/illyism/status/2083356999979249958", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Source for the purchase about a year earlier, the hired developer and the three rewrites." }, { "title": "Ilias Ism on X, 30 September 2026: I spent US$27,581 in September 2026", "url": "https://x.com/illyism/status/2105346708070879463", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Source for the September costs, the end of Google Ads, Vercel and Supabase, the daily Codex routine and the '3x ROI' statement." }, { "title": "Ilias Ism on X, 31 August 2026: I spent US$72,480 in August 2026", "url": "https://x.com/illyism/status/2094441099070685635", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Source for the August costs, including US$20,000 for an acquisition." }, { "title": "Ilias Ism on X, 31 July 2026: I spent US$51,123 in July 2026", "url": "https://x.com/illyism/status/2083124259505750196", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API, with his reply of the same day that links the TrustMRR profile as 'GenPPT revenue'. Source for the July costs." }, { "title": "Ilias Ism on X, 30 June 2026: I spent about US$55,081 in June 2026", "url": "https://x.com/illyism/status/2071976506759286824", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Source for the June Google Ads spend." }, { "title": "Ilias Ism on X, 16 September 2026: Just paused all Google Ads on GenPPT", "url": "https://x.com/illyism/status/2100288296492417292", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the fxtwitter API. Source for the pause and the cost per click." }, { "title": "Ilias Ism's posts on X, 22 May to 15 October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/illyism", "grade": "C", "how": "Read all 343 posts that the fxtwitter timeline API returned; earlier posts were not available. Source for the 100,000 users post (2 June), the rebuild (4 August), the chat-code replacement (17 August), the image-model test (9 September) and the Gamma traffic estimate (14 October)." }, { "title": "Ilias Ism's blog: Outputmaxxing, your AI tool should ship outputs, not reports (updated 10 June 2026)", "url": "https://il.ly/blog/outputmaxxing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the StoryChief listicle, the conversion rates, the 16% fall and the revenue of his other products." }, { "title": "GenPPT pricing page", "url": "https://genppt.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 15 October 2026." }, { "title": "GenPPT home page", "url": "https://genppt.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 15 October 2026. Source for the inputs, the exports, the comparison pages and the user claim." }, { "title": "GenPPT About page", "url": "https://genppt.com/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names the company, Superleuk, LLC d/b/a GenPPT, and says 'Founded by Ilias Ism'." }, { "title": "GenPPT Terms of Service, updated 2 October 2026", "url": "https://genppt.com/blog/terms-of-service", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on payments, refunds and governing law." }, { "title": "GenPPT Privacy Policy, updated 26 September 2026", "url": "https://genppt.com/blog/privacy-policy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on analytics and service providers. Source for the AI, hosting, email and analytics providers." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of genppt.com, 3 July 2024, and the list of captures for 2024 and 2025", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20240703095603/https://genppt.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read this copy in full and the capture list, whose first capture is 25 May 2024." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of genppt.com, 10 September 2025", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20250910211642/https://genppt.com/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full, including the page source, which loads Lemon Squeezy's scripts for the store 'genppt'." }, { "title": "TechCrunch, 10 November 2025: AI PowerPoint-killer Gamma hits $2.1B valuation, $100M ARR, founder says", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/10/ai-powerpoint-killer-gamma-hits-2-1b-valuation-100m-arr-founder-says/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A journalist's report of the funding round; the revenue, user and employee numbers are the chief executive's statements." }, { "title": "Google Workspace Updates, 28 October 2025: Generate presentations in the Gemini app", "url": "https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2025/10/generate-presentations-in-gemini-app.html", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Google's own announcement." }, { "title": "Microsoft, 16 March 2023: Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot, your copilot for work", "url": "https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/03/16/introducing-microsoft-365-copilot-your-copilot-for-work/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on the Microsoft 365 apps. Microsoft's own announcement." }, { "title": "Canva Newsroom, 4 October 2023: Magic Studio", "url": "https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/magic-studio/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on Magic Design. Canva's own announcement, dated 4 October 2023 in the page data." }, { "title": "TrustMRR profile of MagicSlides.app", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/magicslides-app.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the copy cached in this pipeline (revenue last synced 12 October 2026); not fetched again. Source for the one-line comparison." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/dalea-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/dalea-ai.md", "slug": "dalea-ai", "name": "Dalea AI", "country": "Brazil", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI content planner, script writer and video editor for Instagram and TikTok", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-15", "launchLabel": "20 March 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$6.7K MRR verified by Stripe, October 2026", "sticker": "$6.7K MRR in October 2026", "outcomeUsd": 80784, "months": 7, "teamLabel": "1 founder; no co-founder or staff named in any source", "fundingLabel": "Stipend for equity from Shiva, a Brazilian pre-seed programme; amount not public", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "creators", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Funded", "Running", "B2C", "Social media" ], "product": "A web app for creators and small businesses on Instagram and TikTok. It reads the user's connected account, plans two weeks of posts, writes video scripts in the user's voice, designs carousels and edits the talking-head videos that the user records. A library of other creators' viral videos, with transcripts and an analysis of each opening line, lets the user turn a video that worked into a new script. US$9.90 a month or US$60 a year per brand. The user still publishes the posts.", "why": "The founder went where his buyers were. He stopped posting on X, where other founders are, and sold through short-form video on Instagram and TikTok, at the lowest price he could charge, in many countries and languages at once. Stripe data shows revenue of US$289 in June 2026 and US$13,041 in September 2026.", "summary": [ "Dalea AI is a web app for creators, freelancers and small businesses that sell through short-form video: vertical videos of a few seconds to a few minutes on Instagram Reels and TikTok. The user connects an Instagram or TikTok account through OAuth, a standard login flow that lets one app read another app's data without seeing the password. Dalea then reads the user's posts and metrics, plans two weeks of content, writes video scripts in the user's voice, designs carousels (posts of several images that the viewer swipes through) and edits the talking-head videos that the user records. Its library, which the FAQ says holds more than 50,000 viral videos from other creators, shows each video's transcript and an analysis of its hook, the first one or two sentences that make a viewer stay, and turns a chosen video into a new script for the user. It costs US$9.90 a month or US$60 a year per brand. The user still publishes the posts.", "Bruno Kalil, a Brazilian founder whose earlier education app had more than 100,000 downloads and came close to US$2,000 a month, released the first version, the MVP (minimum viable product: the smallest version that customers will pay for), on 20 March 2026 under the name SagaAI. He charged the lowest price he could, did demo calls with the first ten customers and used one acquisition channel, short-form videos. On 14 April 2026 it had 16 active subscriptions and US$104 of MRR, monthly recurring revenue: the subscription money that repeats every month, with a yearly plan counted as one twelfth of its price. Renamed Dalea AI, it went from 33 to almost 286 subscribers in the month to 10 August 2026, after he found what he called the right channel for his ICP, his ideal customer profile: the exact kind of buyer the product is for. On 15 October 2026 TrustMRR, a site that reads a startup's payment account through an API key and publishes the figures, showed US$6,732 of MRR, 1,027 active subscriptions and US$14,351 of revenue in the last 30 days, all from Stripe.", "The money figures are grade A, because TrustMRR reads them from Stripe. Two points need care. First, the revenue of the last 30 days is about twice the MRR, because a yearly plan is paid at once, US$60, while MRR counts it as US$5 a month. Second, Dalea is not bootstrapped, which means funded only by its own revenue: it is one of 12 companies in the portfolio of Shiva, a Brazilian programme that pays founders monthly stipends for up to 12 months in exchange for equity, a share of the company, of 5% to 15%. The founder is the only person that any source ties to the business. The page also covers the questions that a library built from other creators' videos raises: platform rules on unoriginal content, automated data collection and copyright." ], "factsCaption": "A Stripe-verified subscription business that went from US$104 to US$6,732 of MRR in six months, most of it after June 2026", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from TrustMRR's connection to the company's Stripe account. The grade B value is TrustMRR's own post of its figures on an earlier date. A grade C value is the founder, the company's own pages, or Shiva and the press about Shiva. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows that its note names.", "timelineLead": "From a waitlist in February 2026 to 1,027 paying subscriptions in October 2026, seven months after launch. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Dalea AI prices on 15 October 2026, from the company's home page and FAQ (grade C)", "note": "One plan with every feature. A brand is one profile with Instagram and TikTok connected. The yearly plan is US$60 billed at once, and the page labels yearly billing \"-49%\". The page says the price shown is the one for the visitor's region and is the final price; our download showed US dollars, so the price in reais could not be read. There is no free plan and no free trial, payment is by card only, and the Portuguese FAQ mentions a 7-day guarantee for a refund.", "rows": [ [ "One brand", "5.00", "9.90", "all features; up to 30 carousels and 20 edited videos a month" ], [ "Each extra brand", "5.00", "9.90", "the same limits for each brand" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 15 October 2026", "value": "US$6,732", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from Stripe through an API key; revenue last synced on 15 October 2026. TrustMRR shows MRR growth of 20.7% over the last 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days, to 15 October 2026", "value": "US$14,351", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR revenue table. The snapshot stored on the same profile is US$14,556, the figure in the lead for this story. Growth over the previous 30 days: 34.7%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions, 15 October 2026", "value": "1,027", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. The home page says the product is used by more than 1,500 creators, and the founder-written profile estimates 1,500 users.", "src": [ 1, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the MRR", "value": "US$80,784 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$6,732 times 12. This is the headline number in outcomeUsd.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Why the 30-day revenue is about twice the MRR", "value": "2.13 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$14,351 divided by US$6,732. A yearly plan is paid at once, US$60, and all of it counts as revenue on the day of payment, but MRR counts it as US$5 a month. MRR per active subscription is US$6.56 (US$6,732 divided by 1,027), between the yearly US$5.00 and the monthly US$9.90. If those were the only two prices, about 68% of subscriptions would be yearly. Extra brands, regional prices and refunds are not in this simple model, so 68% is an estimate.", "src": [ 1, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month, 2026", "value": "March US$17.99, April US$168, May US$290, June US$289, July US$2,647, August US$9,176, September US$13,041, 1 to 15 October US$6,995", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly revenue timeline. Calculated on this page: 97.4% of all revenue came from July onward, and September was 42.1% above August.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Daily revenue in October against September", "value": "11.5% higher", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 1 to 14 October, US$6,785 in 14 days, or US$484.6 a day, against US$434.7 a day in September (US$13,041 divided by 30). 15 October is a partial day and is left out.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue since launch, to 15 October 2026", "value": "US$32,698", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, all time.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR on 14 April 2026, under the name SagaAI", "value": "US$104, with 16 active subscriptions", "grade": "B", "note": "TrustMRR's own post on X when SagaAI joined, with US$98 of revenue in 30 days. The founder wrote the same day that it had passed US$100 of MRR with 15 subscribers, three weeks after the launch.", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from 14 April to 15 October 2026", "value": "MRR 64.7 times, subscriptions 64.2 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$6,732 divided by US$104, and 1,027 divided by 16.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Subscribers, July to August 2026", "value": "from 33 to almost 286 in one month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 10 August 2026: \"in just a month Dalea went from 33 to almost 286 subscribers, and 10x the revenue\". He gives the reason as finding \"the right channel for your ICP\" but does not name the channel in the post.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "MRR in local currency, 11 August 2026", "value": "more than 10,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post: \"hit 10k MRR\", then \"it's in your local currency\". He works from Brazil, so the currency is the real. He gave no US dollar value.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Customers outside Brazil, 6 October 2026", "value": "more than 100, in 24 countries", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post in Portuguese: \"Dalea já teve mais de 100 clientes gringos em 24 países\" (Dalea has already had more than 100 foreign customers in 24 countries). On 11 August he wrote of subscribers in 19 countries.", "src": [ 8, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Visitors on the best day, 11 to 12 August 2026", "value": "2,300, with 25 new subscriptions", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post. He wrote that conversion had been above 2% but that the traffic from X lowered it.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "A week in June 2026", "value": "250 visitors, 29 signups, 2 subscribers", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 24 June 2026, still under the name SagaAI.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Price", "value": "US$9.90 a month, or US$60 a year (US$5.00 a month), per brand", "grade": "C", "note": "Company pages, 15 October 2026. The founder-written TrustMRR profile gives the same prices. Prices are shown for the visitor's region.", "src": [ 11, 13, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Size of the viral video library", "value": "more than 50,000 videos", "grade": "C", "note": "Company FAQ. The founder-written TrustMRR description says \"Explore and remix +10.000 viral contents and creators\". The two counts differ and neither page is dated.", "src": [ 13, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Limits and languages", "value": "30 carousels and 20 edited videos a month per brand; 23 languages", "grade": "C", "note": "Company FAQ. The video editor recognizes speech in 8 languages and accepts videos of up to 5 minutes.", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "fact": "Direct publishing to Instagram or TikTok", "value": "not yet available", "grade": "C", "note": "Company FAQ: \"Today Dalea creates, plans and edits, and you publish on Instagram or TikTok yourself. Direct publishing from Dalea is coming in the next few weeks.\" The company's comparison page with Buffer marks auto-posting as available; this page follows the FAQ.", "src": [ 13, 19 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 founder", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR lists one founder. The October 2026 post that announces his panel describes it as \"um painel sobre solopreneurs construindo produtos globais\" (a panel about solopreneurs building global products). No source names a co-founder or an employee.", "src": [ 1, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Outside money", "value": "a stipend for equity from Shiva; amount not public", "grade": "C", "note": "Shiva's July 2026 portfolio update lists Dalea AI among its 12 \"Stars\". The press reports that Shiva pays \"bolsas mensais, concedidas por até 12 meses em troca de participação acionária\" (monthly stipends, granted for up to 12 months in exchange for equity) and takes 5% to 15% of each company. Shiva raised US$10 million led by Monashees with Endeavor Catalyst. Dalea's own terms are not public.", "src": [ 7, 9, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Operating company", "value": "not named", "grade": "C", "note": "The terms of use name no legal company. They say Brazilian law applies and disputes go to the courts of São Paulo. No company register entry for Dalea was found.", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "fact": "The founder's earlier product", "value": "an education app with more than 100,000 downloads", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 23 February 2026: \"even though I almost got to $2k/month, the perspective wasn't great to keep growing\". He advises against selling to students, who have little money and leave when they graduate.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October 2026 figure", "value": "7 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 20 March 2026 to 15 October 2026 is 209 days, about 6.9 months.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "22 to 27 February 2026", "what": "Building in public on X as SagaAI: more than 30 waitlist signups in a week, ten demo calls booked in a week, and a landing-page test that raised conversion by 70%.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "20 March 2026", "what": "The MVP is released under the name SagaAI. TrustMRR later records this date as Dalea AI's founding date.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "when": "14 April 2026", "what": "US$104 of MRR and 16 active subscriptions when it joins TrustMRR. The founder names three lessons: the lowest possible price, demo calls for the first ten customers, and one channel, short-form videos.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "when": "18 June 2026", "what": "The founder's blog post on reaching his first 1,000 Instagram followers in 98 videos and three months, with simple one-take videos.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 18 ] }, { "when": "24 June 2026", "what": "A slow week: 250 visitors, 29 signups and 2 subscribers. Revenue for June is US$289.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "when": "July 2026", "what": "Revenue rises to US$2,647.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "10 August 2026", "what": "Now called Dalea AI: from 33 to almost 286 subscribers in one month. Second place in TinyLaunch's ranking of launches for 3 to 9 August.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "when": "11 to 12 August 2026", "what": "MRR passes 10,000 in local currency. Subscribers in 19 countries. A record 2,300 visitors in a day, with 25 new subscriptions.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "August 2026", "what": "Revenue of US$9,176. On 1 September the founder writes \"so close to $10k\".", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "when": "1 September 2026", "what": "Shiva's founder, Lucas Marques, posts the July 2026 portfolio update that lists Dalea AI among 12 Stars. The founder reposts it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "Revenue of US$13,041, 42.1% more than in August.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "6 October 2026", "what": "More than 100 foreign customers in 24 countries. The founder is announced for a Shiva panel on solopreneurs in São Paulo on 17 October.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "15 October 2026", "what": "Stripe-verified: US$6,732 of MRR, 1,027 active subscriptions, US$14,351 in the last 30 days and US$32,698 since launch.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "One channel, where the buyers are", "text": "In February 2026 the founder was posting on X, where other founders are. By April he had stopped, because his buyers are \"more on Instagram/TikTok\", and he named \"Focusing only on one acquisition channel (short-form videos)\" as one of the three things that helped most. He already knew the format: in 2025 he grew a page for his earlier app to more than 25,000 followers with more than 200 videos. In August he wrote that a post that went viral on X brought visitors who rarely signed up." }, { "title": "A low price, sold in every country from the start", "text": "US$9.90 a month, or US$5 a month on a yearly plan, prices set per region, an app in 23 languages, and customers in 24 countries by October 2026. In April the founder put \"Charging the lowest possible price on launch\" first among his lessons. In August he advised other founders to \"go global from the start\"." }, { "title": "Start from the user's own account and from videos that already worked", "text": "Instead of a blank chat, Dalea reads the connected Instagram or TikTok account, keeps a brand memory of what the user prefers, and matches it with the library of viral videos. In the FAQ's words: \"The scripts follow formats that have already worked, not generic text.\" That is its answer to the obvious competitor, a general chat assistant: \"ChatGPT starts from scratch in every conversation; Dalea starts from your profile.\"" }, { "title": "Yearly plans bring the cash forward", "text": "A yearly plan costs US$60 at once. Revenue in the last 30 days was 2.13 times the MRR, which suggests that many subscribers chose the yearly plan; this page estimates about 68%. That money arrived up to a year earlier than monthly payments would have brought it." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages and the founder's posts. They are grade C, except the Stripe connection, which TrustMRR confirms. No page names the AI models.", "items": [ "A web app hosted with Vercel. Data is stored in Supabase, on AWS infrastructure, and the social-platform access tokens are stored encrypted.", "Instagram and TikTok accounts connect through OAuth to the Meta and TikTok APIs. Dalea receives the username, profile picture, follower count and post metrics, and says it never sees the passwords.", "Payments through Stripe, which TrustMRR reads through an API key. Cards only, billed monthly or yearly. Sign-up with a Google account.", "Product analytics with PostHog.", "An MCP server (Model Context Protocol, a standard way for AI assistants to call outside tools) lets clients such as Claude, ChatGPT, Claude Code or Cursor read and change a user's brands, content calendar and scripts.", "A public roadmap where subscribers vote on features, with each vote weighted by the subscriber's plan and time as a subscriber. Almost 10% of subscribers voted in the first couple of weeks, according to the founder in August 2026.", "The pages do not name the models that write the scripts, design the carousels or recognize speech in the editor, and they do not say how the library videos and the pasted links are collected." ], "src": [ 16, 1, 17, 6, 13, 11 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database built tools for posting, curating or measuring on social networks that they did not control. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "PostRocket", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$610K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Better reach for brands' Facebook pages, by choosing when and what to post from engagement data.", "died": "Facebook changed its API, and PostRocket had no other product to move to.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/457-postrocket" }, { "name": "Trapit", "years": "2011 to 2019", "funding": "US$21.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "AI that finds and curates content for people and marketers to share.", "died": "Large technology companies offered the same thing, and it stayed a niche tool for marketers.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/658-trapit" }, { "name": "ThinkUp", "years": "2010 to 2017", "funding": "US$1M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Personal analytics on what your Twitter and Facebook posts achieved, beyond likes.", "died": "People moved to phones and to the platforms' own apps. Keeping many social-network API connections working cost too much, and marketing was neglected.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/624-thinkup" }, { "name": "Pixelpipe", "years": "2008 to 2013", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Post photos, videos and audio to many social networks at once.", "died": "The social networks closed their APIs and built cross-posting in themselves.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/435-pixelpipe" }, { "name": "Memolane", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$2.3M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "One timeline of your posts, pulled from many social networks.", "died": "It depended on third-party APIs that changed and limited requests, and it found no way to make money from the timelines.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/330-memolane" } ], "whatChanged": [ "All five depended on social networks that could change their rules, close an API or build the feature themselves, and that is how most of them ended. Dalea depends on Instagram and TikTok in the same way: for the account connection, for the metrics that it analyzes, and for the viral videos in its library.", "Two things differ. First, the AI writes the script and edits the video, so the product does the production work that the creator or a freelancer did before, which a scheduler or an analytics dashboard did not do. Second, the customer pays from the first day, at US$9.90 a month, and the founder sells in many countries and languages at once. The five predecessors raised between US$610,000 and US$21.5 million in the database; Dalea made US$32,698 of Stripe-verified revenue in its first seven months, with a stipend from Shiva as its only known outside money." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The library, with care.", "text": "The method is repeatable: pick one kind of buyer, sell on the platform where that buyer already spends time, charge a low price from the first day and sell in many countries at once. Copy the library idea with care: ideas and formats are free to reuse, but the videos and their exact words belong to their creators, and the platforms limit automated collection.", "steps": [ "Choose the platform where your buyers are, not where other founders are, and post short videos there yourself.", "Charge from launch at the lowest price you can, and do demo calls with the first ten customers.", "Offer a yearly plan: it brings cash early, at the cost of a lower monthly figure.", "Start every output from the user's own data, such as the connected account and past posts, so the result is not generic AI text.", "Show prices per region and support many languages from the first version." ], "open": "Other platforms and formats where small businesses must post often and run out of ideas: LinkedIn posts, YouTube Shorts, Pinterest, and markets in languages other than English." }, "watch": [ { "title": "A library built from other creators' videos", "text": "The founder-written profile says users \"remix\" viral content; the product pages say \"adapt\": \"Choose a reference and use the adaptation option to create a script with your brand context, audience and tone.\" The library shows transcripts of the spoken words when available. The user publishes the result, and the terms say \"You are solely responsible for the content you publish\" and that Dalea \"does not guarantee that generated content will be accurate, original, or suitable for any specific purpose.\"" }, { "title": "Platform rules on unoriginal content", "text": "In April 2022 the head of Instagram said: \"If you create something from scratch, you should get more credit than if you are resharing something that you found from someone else.\" Instagram became less likely to recommend reposts and accounts that reshare other users' content, and in 2024 it said it would label reposts with a link to the original creator and remove aggregator posts from recommendations. TikTok's guidelines list \"Unoriginal Content and Intellectual Property Rights\" and do not allow \"reposts of copyrighted or trademarked material without permission\". A script that the user records again is new content, but a close copy can lose reach." }, { "title": "Automated collection of platform data", "text": "TikTok's terms forbid users to \"scrape, crawl, export or otherwise extract any data or content in any form, for any purpose, from the Platform using any automated system or software\" unless TikTok approves it in writing. Dalea's connection to the user's own account goes through OAuth with the platforms' permission. The pages do not say how the library of other creators' videos, or a video from a pasted link, is collected, so whether that fits these rules could not be checked. Instagram's terms page could not be downloaded." }, { "title": "Copyright protects the words, not the idea", "text": "Brazil's copyright law says that \"as idéias, procedimentos normativos, sistemas, métodos, projetos ou conceitos matemáticos como tais\" (ideas, normative procedures, systems, methods, projects or mathematical concepts as such) are not protected (Law 9.610 of 1998, article 8). US law says the same in 17 U.S.C. section 102(b): protection does not \"extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery\". A hook format or a topic can be reused; a script that repeats another creator's exact words is closer to copying the protected expression." }, { "title": "Competitors, including free ones", "text": "Dalea compares itself with the schedulers Buffer and Later. Buffer's own page shows a free plan for up to 3 channels that includes an AI Assistant, and an Essentials plan at US$5 a month per channel billed yearly. General chat assistants also write scripts for free or for a subscription. Dalea's answer is its profile analysis and library, which others can build too." }, { "title": "Dependence on AI model providers that it does not name", "text": "No page says which models write the scripts, design the carousels or recognize speech in the video editor. At US$5 to US$9.90 a month with up to 20 edited videos and 30 carousels per brand, a rise in model or transcription prices, or a change in a provider's terms, would fall on Dalea's margin." }, { "title": "An investor holds a share", "text": "Dalea is in the portfolio of Shiva, which gives stipends in exchange for 5% to 15% of a company. The amount Dalea received and the share Shiva holds are not public. The founder is the only person named in any source, and his posts and Shiva's are grade C." }, { "title": "Young revenue, measured two ways", "text": "97.4% of all revenue came from July to mid-October 2026, so most yearly plans were sold recently and the first yearly renewals come in mid-2027; until then the renewal rate is unknown. Prices depend on the visitor's region, so the US dollar prices on this page may differ from what customers in Brazil pay." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://usedalea.ai/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/dalea-ai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: Dalea AI, Stripe-verified profile, synced 15 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/dalea-ai", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile (https://trustmrr.com/startup/dalea-ai.md) in full. The revenue, MRR, subscription and monthly figures are in its Verification Sources data from Stripe (API key), grade A. The description, prices and user estimate are founder-written, grade C." }, { "title": "Bruno Kalil on X, 14 April 2026: Week 3 of growing a global SaaS from Brazil (@trysagaai)", "url": "https://x.com/brunokalil_/status/2044178421706830037", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the 20 March launch, the first 15 subscribers and the three lessons." }, { "title": "TrustMRR on X, 14 April 2026: SagaAI by @brunokalil_ just joined TrustMRR", "url": "https://x.com/trust_mrr/status/2044201585547321745", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com, as a repost in the founder's timeline. TrustMRR's own post of its figures on that day; the earlier profile page it links was not opened." }, { "title": "Bruno Kalil on X, 24 June 2026: Last week on @trysagaai", "url": "https://x.com/brunokalil_/status/2069612216551194933", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Bruno Kalil on X, 10 August 2026: in just a month Dalea went from 33 to almost 286 subscribers", "url": "https://x.com/brunokalil_/status/2086887326894915688", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. The post had 21 replies, which could not be read, so the channel that he means is not known." }, { "title": "Bruno Kalil's posts on X, 22 February to 6 October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/brunokalil_", "grade": "C", "how": "Read two pages of the timeline in full through api.fxtwitter.com/2/profile/brunokalil_/statuses, 39 posts with reposts. Source for the dated posts on the earlier app, the local-currency MRR, the countries, the visitors, the roadmap and the TinyLaunch ranking." }, { "title": "Lucas Marques on X, 1 September 2026: Shiva portfolio update, July 2026", "url": "https://x.com/LucasMarquesSv/status/2094770932422164927", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the post and its image in full. The image lists Dalea AI among the 12 \"Stars no portfólio\". The founder reposted it." }, { "title": "Bruno Kalil on X, 6 October 2026, quoting the Shiva Hack announcement", "url": "https://x.com/brunokalil_/status/2107513623040217187", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full with the quoted post, in Portuguese. The translations on this page are ours." }, { "title": "ABC da Comunicação, 2026: Shiva levanta US$ 10 milhões com Monashees para ajudar empreendedores construírem produtos globais usando IA", "url": "https://www.abcdacomunicacao.com.br/shiva-levanta-us-10-milhoes-com-monashees-para-ajudar-empreendedores-construirem-produtos-globais-usando-ia/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, in Portuguese. Source for Shiva's monthly stipends for up to 12 months in exchange for equity, and its definition of a Star as a team of at most three people." }, { "title": "Brazil Journal, 2026: O pre-seed da Shiva, que quer bancar startups criadas só com AI", "url": "https://braziljournal.com/o-pre-seed-da-shiva-que-quer-bancar-startups-criadas-so-com-ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, in Portuguese. Source for the US$10 million round and the 5% to 15% stake that Shiva takes." }, { "title": "Dalea AI home page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://usedalea.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the pricing section and its FAQ. Source for the features, the prices, the region note and the user count." }, { "title": "Dalea AI home page in Portuguese, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://usedalea.ai/pt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the pricing section and its FAQ. Source for the 7-day guarantee." }, { "title": "Dalea AI FAQ, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://usedalea.ai/en/faq", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the library size, the limits, the languages, the missing direct publishing and the comparison with ChatGPT." }, { "title": "Dalea AI: Viral video library for Instagram and TikTok", "url": "https://usedalea.ai/en/features/viral-video-library", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for how the library and the adaptation option are described." }, { "title": "Dalea AI Terms of Use, updated 13 October 2026", "url": "https://usedalea.ai/en/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full." }, { "title": "Dalea AI Privacy Policy, updated 8 March 2026", "url": "https://usedalea.ai/en/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for OAuth, Supabase, Vercel and PostHog." }, { "title": "Dalea MCP server documentation", "url": "https://usedalea.ai/docs/mcp", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the overview and the list of tools." }, { "title": "Bruno Kalil, Dalea blog, 18 June 2026: How I Got My First 1,000 Instagram Followers in 98 Videos", "url": "https://usedalea.ai/en/blog/how-i-got-my-first-1000-instagram-followers", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full." }, { "title": "Dalea vs. Buffer, the company's comparison page", "url": "https://usedalea.ai/en/compare/dalea-vs-buffer", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Its claims about Buffer were checked against Buffer's own page." }, { "title": "Buffer pricing page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://buffer.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on the Free and Essentials plans." }, { "title": "TechCrunch, 20 April 2022: Instagram to improve its ranking system to better highlight original content", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/20/instagram-ranking-system-recommend-original-content/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Quotes the head of Instagram and an Instagram spokesperson." }, { "title": "Gigazine, 2 May 2024: Instagram announces measures to prioritize original content and reduce the number of aggregator accounts", "url": "https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20240502-instagram-updated-algorithm-prioritizes-original-content", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A summary of Instagram's 2024 announcement, with links to it." }, { "title": "TikTok: Policies and engagement, summary of the Community Guidelines", "url": "https://www.tiktok.com/safety/en/policies-and-engagement/fyf-standards", "grade": "B", "how": "The page loads its text by script; read the section on integrity and authenticity in the page data." }, { "title": "TikTok Terms of Service (United States)", "url": "https://www.tiktok.com/legal/page/us/terms-of-service/en", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the section on what users may not do." }, { "title": "Brazil, Law 9.610 of 19 February 1998 (copyright law)", "url": "https://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/leis/l9610.htm", "grade": "B", "how": "Read articles 7 and 8, in Portuguese. The translation on this page is ours." }, { "title": "17 U.S.C. section 102, Subject matter of copyright: In general (Cornell Legal Information Institute)", "url": "https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102", "grade": "B", "how": "Read section 102(b)." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/threadmaster/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/threadmaster.md", "slug": "threadmaster", "name": "ThreadMaster", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI thread writer and scheduler for social media", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-15", "launchLabel": "August 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$5.2K MRR and US$91.5K in 12 months, October 2026", "sticker": "$5.2K MRR verified by Stripe", "outcomeUsd": 62112, "months": 14, "teamLabel": "1 named founder; no source says who else works on it", "fundingLabel": "None reported for ThreadMaster; the founder's other company, Syllaby, raised US$400,000", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Social media" ], "product": "A web app that writes threads, series of connected posts, for X, Threads, Facebook and LinkedIn with an OpenAI model. The user starts from one of 15 or more templates that carry engagement scores, and the app publishes or schedules the result. One plan at US$9 a month.", "why": "The founder, who has millions of followers, turned a post format that was going viral on his own Facebook page into templates and sold the tool for about US$5. It made US$26,522 in about two months, and then revenue fell. No source says which channel brought most customers.", "summary": [ "ThreadMaster is a web app that writes threads, a series of connected posts that people read as one piece, for X, Threads, Facebook and LinkedIn. The user types a topic or a rough draft and picks one of 15 or more templates, each shown with an engagement score. A large language model, a program trained on a very large amount of text to write new text, from OpenAI expands it into an opening line, a body and a call to action. The app then publishes the thread or schedules it for later, and it includes a library of more than 100 images. It costs US$9 a month, with one plan.", "Austin Armstrong, who ran a video marketing and SEO agency for about 12 years and is now CEO of the AI video company Syllaby, launched ThreadMaster in August 2025 at US$4.95 one-time. By November 2025 it cost US$5.00 a month. A separate company, FastProducts LLC, owns it. Its revenue is checked by TrustMRR, a site that reads a startup's payments directly from its payment processor, here Stripe. On 15 October 2026 TrustMRR showed MRR, monthly recurring revenue from subscriptions, of US$5,176 from 1,038 active subscriptions, US$91,524 of revenue in the last 12 months and US$118,046 since launch.", "The revenue is real, and it is falling. The best month in the verified table was November 2025, with US$10,108; the first half of October 2026 brought US$1,654. Every revenue number on this page is grade A. The descriptions of the product, its model, its owner and its founder come from the company's own pages and from interviews, grade C. The page also shows earlier companies that built tools on top of social platforms that they did not control." ], "factsCaption": "Stripe-verified revenue through TrustMRR: US$5,176 MRR and US$91,524 in 12 months in October 2026, down from a best month of US$10,108 in November 2025", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from Stripe through TrustMRR. A grade B value is an independent record, such as a company register or a platform's own rules. A grade C value is a statement by the company or the founder, or a third party's record of an interview. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a US$4.95 copy-and-paste tool in August 2025 to US$5,176 of monthly recurring revenue in October 2026, with the best month in November 2025. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "ThreadMaster prices on 15 October 2026, from the company's pricing page and FAQ (grade C)", "note": "There is one plan, billed monthly, with no free tier and no yearly price on the page. The FAQ describes a one-time US$99 lifetime plan that appears on the pricing page only while the offer runs. Every plan includes 12 months of WhisperJot Local, a voice-to-text app from the same company, which then costs US$5 a month unless cancelled. The launch price in August 2025 was US$4.95 one-time, and in November 2025 it was US$5.00 a month.", "rows": [ [ "Pro, the only plan", "", "9", "unlimited drafts; 100 published X posts a month; boost packs inside the app for more" ], [ "Lifetime offer, when it runs", "99 one-time", "", "limited-time offer" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "MRR, 15 October 2026", "value": "US$5,176", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe, through TrustMRR. Down 8.6% in the last 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 12 months", "value": "US$91,524", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe, through TrustMRR, to 15 October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue since launch", "value": "US$118,046", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe, through TrustMRR.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions", "value": "1,038", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe, through TrustMRR.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days", "value": "US$5,871, down 42.5% on the 30 days before", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe, through TrustMRR. The profile's stored snapshot gives US$5,895 for the same period and the fall of 42.5%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Best month in the 12-month table", "value": "US$10,108, November 2025", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe, through TrustMRR. December 2025 was US$8,925 and January 2026 US$9,019.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Lowest full month", "value": "US$5,606, June 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "July 2026 was US$5,622. August and September 2026 rose to US$8,590 and US$8,237; no source explains the rise.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue from 1 to 15 October 2026", "value": "US$1,654", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe, through TrustMRR. The month was not finished.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Daily revenue, first half of October 2026", "value": "about US$110 a day, against US$279 a day in the second half of September", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: averages of the daily table on the profile. A fall of 60.5%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before mid-October 2025", "value": "US$26,522", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: revenue since launch minus the last 12 months. It covers about the first two months after the August 2025 launch.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the current MRR", "value": "US$62,112 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: MRR times 12. This is the headline number of this page. It is 32.1% below the average month of the last 12 months, US$7,627.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR per active subscription", "value": "US$4.99 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$5,176 divided by 1,038. Close to the US$5.00 price of November 2025 and below today's US$9. The sources do not say what each subscriber pays.", "src": [ 1, 3, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "95.0%", "grade": "C", "note": "A TrustMRR snapshot. Costs are not among the metrics that TrustMRR lists as verified.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Price today", "value": "US$9 a month, one plan; a US$99 one-time lifetime plan while that offer runs", "grade": "C", "note": "Pricing page and FAQ, 15 October 2026. No free tier.", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Earlier prices", "value": "US$4.95 one-time in August 2025; US$5.00 a month in November 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Wayback Machine copies of the home page.", "src": [ 11, 12 ] }, { "fact": "AI model", "value": "OpenAI GPT; GPT-3.5-turbo on the launch page", "grade": "C", "note": "The terms say that the service uses OpenAI's GPT technology; the current pages name no model. A fallback generator with fixed patterns runs when the AI is unavailable.", "src": [ 5, 11, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Owner", "value": "FastProducts LLC, a Wyoming limited liability company", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms and privacy policy. The footer gives an address at 701 Tillery St, Austin, Texas.", "src": [ 5, 6, 2 ] }, { "fact": "The owner in the Wyoming register", "value": "Inactive, Administratively Dissolved (Tax)", "grade": "B", "note": "OpenCorporates' copy of the register, read 15 October 2026. The date of this status and the names of the two officers need a login and were not read.", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "fact": "Founder", "value": "Austin Armstrong, the only named founder", "grade": "C", "note": "The site's author page and TrustMRR. No source says who writes the code or how many people work on ThreadMaster.", "src": [ 7, 1 ] }, { "fact": "The founder's main company", "value": "Syllaby Inc.: team of 11, US$400,000 of total funding, about US$130,000 MRR", "grade": "C", "note": "Latka, from an interview of 23 June 2026. LinkedIn lists Syllaby at 2 to 10 employees. No source links Syllaby to ThreadMaster.", "src": [ 17, 18 ] }, { "fact": "The founder's audience", "value": "about 5 million followers, about 2.1 million of them on Facebook; 6,377 on X", "grade": "C", "note": "Latka's profile and the X profile. The home page says over 4 million.", "src": [ 17, 14, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Affiliate commission", "value": "50% of every payment, for as long as the customer pays", "grade": "C", "note": "Paid monthly through Tolt.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Published X posts included", "value": "100 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Drafting is unlimited; boost packs inside the app give more X posts.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October 2026 figure", "value": "14 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: August 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1, 11 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "January 2023", "what": "Austin Armstrong co-founds Syllaby Inc., an AI video tool, after about 12 years running Socialty Pro, a video marketing and SEO agency.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "when": "13 August 2025", "what": "The founding date of ThreadMaster, as entered on TrustMRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "15 August 2025", "what": "The first full copy in the Wayback Machine: a generator of threads to copy and paste into Facebook, LinkedIn, X and Threads, using OpenAI GPT-3.5-turbo, with 10 or more scored templates and 100 or more images. Price US$4.95 one-time.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "Mid-August to mid-October 2025", "what": "US$26,522 of verified revenue in about the first two months, calculated from the TrustMRR totals.", "grade": "X", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "4 November 2025", "what": "The site charges US$5.00 a month. The founder writes that his own Facebook posts, white text on a black background and business quote images, inspired the tool.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "The best month in the verified table: US$10,108.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "The lowest full month: US$5,606, 44.5% below November 2025.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "23 June 2026", "what": "In a Latka interview the founder gives Syllaby's figures: about US$130,000 MRR, about 3,400 paying customers, a team of 11 and US$400,000 of funding.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "when": "13 July to 28 September 2026", "what": "A weekly blog runs on the site, with posts on writing threads and on when to post.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 27 ] }, { "when": "August and September 2026", "what": "Revenue rises to US$8,590 and US$8,237. No source says why.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "14 October 2026", "what": "The founder posts that he has acquired his first company, Anderro, an affiliate marketing marketplace.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "15 October 2026", "what": "MRR of US$5,176 from 1,038 active subscriptions, and US$1,654 in the first half of October.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The product costs US$9 a month and publishes to X, Threads, Facebook Pages and LinkedIn, with analytics, a developer API and an MCP server.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 9 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "The founder's own post format", "text": "The idea came from Armstrong's own Facebook posts: threads of white text on a black background and business quote images, which he writes were the posts that went viral for him. ThreadMaster sells that format as templates, each with an engagement score that the site says comes from real performance data, together with a library of more than 100 images." }, { "title": "A very low price, raised over time", "text": "US$4.95 one-time at launch in August 2025, US$5.00 a month by November 2025, US$9 a month in October 2026. The 1,038 active subscriptions bring US$4.99 a month each on average, which suggests, but does not prove, that many subscribers kept an older price." }, { "title": "From copy and paste to a weekly tool", "text": "The first version wrote text for the user to copy and paste. By October 2026 the product publishes and schedules to X, Threads, Facebook Pages and LinkedIn, shows analytics on past posts, and offers an API and an MCP server, so that a customer has a reason to open it every week." }, { "title": "Reach that the founder already had", "text": "The home page sells the tool with the founder's reach: over 4 million followers and hundreds of millions of people a month. Latka records about 5 million followers, 2.1 million of them on Facebook. A 50% recurring affiliate commission, free tools and a weekly blog add other channels. No source says which channel brought most customers." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages and from archived copies of them. They are grade C, except the Stripe connection, which TrustMRR confirms.", "items": [ "Text generation through OpenAI. The launch page of August 2025 named GPT-3.5-turbo; the terms of October 2026 say only OpenAI's GPT technology. A fallback generator with fixed patterns runs when the AI is unavailable.", "Payments through Stripe on the web, confirmed by TrustMRR's Stripe connection. Subscriptions in the iPhone and Android apps are paid through Apple and Google, and RevenueCat passes their status to ThreadMaster.", "Publishing through the platforms' own connections to X, Threads, Facebook Pages and LinkedIn, with 100 published X posts a month in the plan and boost packs for more.", "A REST API and an MCP server for Claude Code, Cursor and Claude Desktop, with the same quotas as the app, a duplicate guard and daily platform caps.", "Google Analytics and PostHog measure use of the site, only with the visitor's consent. Tolt runs the affiliate program.", "The web front end is a React app: the page source loads react-dom and jsx-runtime script files.", "The legal owner is FastProducts LLC, a Wyoming company with an address in Austin, Texas. The same company offers WhisperJot, a voice-to-text app that comes free for 12 months with every plan." ], "src": [ 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database built tools for posting on, or measuring, social platforms that they did not control. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Pixelpipe", "years": "2008 to 2013", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Post photos and video to many social networks at once.", "died": "The large platforms closed their APIs and built cross-posting themselves.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/435-pixelpipe" }, { "name": "Klout", "years": "2008 to 2017", "funding": "US$40M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A score from 1 to 100 for a person's influence on social media.", "died": "Facebook and Twitter built better analytics themselves, and the single score lost its value. It depended on the platforms' APIs.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/280-klout" }, { "name": "ThinkUp", "years": "2010 to 2017", "funding": "US$1M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Personal analytics on your own social media posts, beyond likes and reposts.", "died": "It stayed a desktop product while social media moved to phones, and it did little marketing.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/624-thinkup" }, { "name": "Nuzzel", "years": "2012 to 2019", "funding": "US$5.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "The news that your friends share, collected from Twitter and Facebook.", "died": "It depended on the Twitter and Facebook APIs, and the platforms began to offer the same service for free.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/378-nuzzel" }, { "name": "Upworthy Insider", "years": "2015 to 2020", "funding": "US$12M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Positive stories written and packaged to spread on Facebook.", "died": "It depended on Facebook's feed. A change in Facebook's ranking cut its reach, and it had no second channel.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/692-upworthy-insider" } ], "whatChanged": [ "All five depended on platforms that they did not own: their APIs, their feeds or their data. Each one died when the platform closed access, changed its ranking or built the same feature itself. ThreadMaster has the same dependence. It posts through the X, Threads, Facebook and LinkedIn connections, and X's rules already forbid some kinds of automated posting.", "Two things differ. First, the costs are small: the text comes from a rented model, and the business reports a 95% profit margin, so it does not need outside money to survive a fall in revenue. Second, it sells the writing, not only access to the platform: if publishing through one platform stops, the templates and drafts still work by copy and paste, as the first version did. The low cost also makes the product easy to copy, and X and Meta now build their own AI into the feed." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product, yes. The reach behind it, no.", "text": "A thread writer is a prompt to a rented model, a template library and the platforms' posting connections, and one person can build it. The harder part to copy is the founder: his own posts went viral, he has millions of followers, and the home page sells the tool with that reach. The first two months brought US$26,522 at a price of about US$5, although no source says how many of those buyers came from his audience. The verified figures also show the limit of such a start: within seven months revenue fell to about half of its best month.", "steps": [ "Take a post format that already works on your own account, and sell it as templates with a measured score for each one.", "Launch to your own audience at a very low price, then raise the price for new customers.", "Add publishing, scheduling and analytics, so that customers use the tool every week.", "Pay affiliates a recurring share, and publish free tools and search pages for the people who do not follow you." ], "open": "Any post format that you have proven with your own account, such as LinkedIn text posts or quote images, on a platform where the official app does not yet write it for the user." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue is falling", "text": "The best month in the verified table was November 2025, with US$10,108. June 2026 brought US$5,606. After a rise in August and September 2026, the first half of October brought about US$110 a day, 60.5% less than the second half of September, and the last 30 days are 42.5% below the 30 days before. The current MRR, US$5,176, is 32.1% below the average month of the last year." }, { "title": "The founder runs a larger company", "text": "Armstrong is CEO and co-founder of Syllaby Inc., an AI video tool with a team of 11, US$400,000 of funding and about US$130,000 of MRR, according to his Latka interview of June 2026; LinkedIn lists Syllaby at 2 to 10 employees. He also writes that he invests US$5,000 in about 10 startups a year, and he bought a company in October 2026. ThreadMaster belongs to a different company, FastProducts LLC. No source says who writes its code or whether Syllaby staff work on it." }, { "title": "Platform rules on automation", "text": "X's automation rules forbid duplicate or very similar posts, automated posts about trending topics, automated replies sent to reach many users, and applications that claim to get users more followers. AI reply bots need X's written approval, and X can remove posts from search or suspend accounts. An example response in Meta's Threads API documentation shows a posting quota of 250 in 86,400 seconds, that is 24 hours. ThreadMaster says that it applies a duplicate guard and daily platform caps." }, { "title": "The platforms build their own AI", "text": "X has its own assistant, Grok, and may share public posts and their engagement data with xAI to train it. A news report of 13 May 2026 says that Meta is testing a Meta AI account on Threads that answers in public under posts, in five countries. Neither source says that these assistants write threads for users, but both platforms now build AI into the products that ThreadMaster depends on." }, { "title": "Competitors with AI writing", "text": "ThreadMaster's own comparison page names Typefully, Tweet Hunter, Hypefury, Taplio, Buffer and Hootsuite. Hypefury's pricing page lists a US$6 a month plan for one platform and a US$19 a month plan, and its feature list includes AI trained on the user's own posts. Typefully's pricing page, downloaded the same day, showed no prices in its text." }, { "title": "One model provider", "text": "The terms name only OpenAI, and AI-generated content is also subject to OpenAI's usage policies. A change in OpenAI's prices or rules reaches ThreadMaster directly. The fallback generator with fixed patterns is the only alternative that the company describes." }, { "title": "The owner's legal status", "text": "OpenCorporates' copy of the Wyoming register lists FastProducts LLC as Inactive, Administratively Dissolved (Tax). The terms still name it as the owner of ThreadMaster. The date of the entry needs a login and was not read." }, { "title": "What the Stripe figures cover", "text": "Subscriptions in the iPhone and Android apps are paid through Apple and Google, outside Stripe, so the verified figures may not include them. The same company also offers WhisperJot, and the profile does not say whether the connected Stripe account carries only ThreadMaster." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://threadmaster.ai/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/threadmaster" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: ThreadMaster profile, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/threadmaster", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile (https://trustmrr.com/startup/threadmaster.md) in full. Revenue, the monthly and daily tables, MRR and the subscription count come from Stripe through an API key (grade A). The description, founding date, founder, price and the profit margin, which depends on costs, are founder-entered or not listed as verified (grade C). Last revenue sync 15 October 2026 at 10:39 UTC." }, { "title": "ThreadMaster home page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://threadmaster.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founder's introduction, the features and the footer that names FastProducts LLC." }, { "title": "ThreadMaster pricing page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://threadmaster.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the US$9 plan, the X posting allowance and the WhisperJot bundle." }, { "title": "ThreadMaster FAQ, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://threadmaster.ai/faq", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the US$99 lifetime offer, the fallback generator and the included features." }, { "title": "ThreadMaster Terms of Service, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://threadmaster.ai/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the owner, on OpenAI and on discontinuation of the service." }, { "title": "ThreadMaster Privacy Policy, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://threadmaster.ai/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for Stripe, the app-store subscriptions through RevenueCat, OpenAI, Google Analytics, PostHog and Tolt." }, { "title": "ThreadMaster author page: Austin Armstrong, Founder", "url": "https://threadmaster.ai/authors/austin-armstrong", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names the founder and the origin of the idea." }, { "title": "ThreadMaster AI Thread Writer page", "url": "https://threadmaster.ai/features/ai-thread-writer", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for how the writer and the scored templates work." }, { "title": "ThreadMaster Developer API page", "url": "https://threadmaster.ai/developers", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the REST API, the MCP server, the duplicate guard and the platform caps." }, { "title": "ThreadMaster affiliate program page", "url": "https://threadmaster.ai/affiliate", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 50% recurring commission paid through Tolt." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine: threadmaster.ai on 15 August 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250815194446/https://threadmaster.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The earliest full copy; the capture list shows a first capture on 14 August 2025. Source for the launch features, GPT-3.5-turbo and the US$4.95 one-time price." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine: threadmaster.ai on 4 November 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20251104144032/https://threadmaster.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the US$5.00 monthly price and the founder's note on his Facebook posts." }, { "title": "OpenCorporates: FastProducts LLC, Wyoming company number 2024-001405293", "url": "https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_wy/2024-001405293", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the public part of the record: status, company type and registered address. Dates and officers need a login and were not read." }, { "title": "Austin Armstrong (@SocialtyPro) on X, profile read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/SocialtyPro", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the description CEO of @trySyllaby and the follower count." }, { "title": "Austin Armstrong on X, 14 October 2026: I just acquired my first company", "url": "https://x.com/SocialtyPro/status/2110484717967446065", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in the timeline JSON from api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Austin Armstrong on X, 15 October 2026: I write $5K checks into about 10 startups a year", "url": "https://x.com/SocialtyPro/status/2110710438254067743", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in the timeline JSON from api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Latka: Austin Armstrong, CEO and Co-Founder at Syllaby Inc., interview of 23 June 2026", "url": "https://getlatka.com/people/austin-armstrong-96383-mqr7dknl", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for Syllaby's team size, funding, MRR and customers, and for the founder's follower counts. The figures come from a founder interview." }, { "title": "LinkedIn: Syllaby company page", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/syllaby", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public page. It lists 2 to 10 employees, which differs from Latka's team size of 11." }, { "title": "X Help Center: Automation rules", "url": "https://help.x.com/en/rules-and-policies/x-automation", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. X's own rules." }, { "title": "X Help Center: About Grok", "url": "https://help.x.com/en/using-x/about-grok", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the sections on the data that X shares with xAI." }, { "title": "Mezha, 13 May 2026: Threads has added an AI function similar to Grok in X", "url": "https://mezha.ua/en/news/threads-dodav-shi-funkciyu-yak-u-grok-311221/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A news report that cites Engadget and The Verge." }, { "title": "Meta for Developers: Threads API troubleshooting, Wayback copy of 6 June 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260606001147/https://developers.facebook.com/docs/threads/troubleshooting", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the section on publishing quotas. The live page returned an error to a script, so the archived copy was read." }, { "title": "ThreadMaster alternatives page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://threadmaster.ai/alternatives", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's own comparison, which names its competitors." }, { "title": "Hypefury pricing page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://hypefury.com/pricing/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full." }, { "title": "Typefully pricing page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://typefully.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Could not read the prices: the downloaded page has none in its text. Cited only as a competitor that ThreadMaster names." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." }, { "title": "ThreadMaster blog index, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://threadmaster.ai/blog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the list of posts and their dates." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/adle/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/adle.md", "slug": "adle", "name": "Adle", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI media buyer for ad campaigns", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-15", "launchLabel": "27 September 2022", "outcomeLabel": "US$9.9K MRR verified by Stripe at the last sync, September 2026", "sticker": "$9.9K MRR in September 2026", "outcomeUsd": 118224, "months": 48, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders; LinkedIn lists 8 employees in October 2026", "fundingLabel": "Parallel18 accelerator grant in 2024; no venture round found", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "sales", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Advertising" ], "product": "A web app that creates, launches and adjusts ad campaigns on Meta, Google, TikTok and LinkedIn from a written request. It writes the ads, makes images and videos, works in the customer's own connected ad accounts, and shows which ads to pause or give more budget. Agencies run it themselves from US$499 a month; for brands, Adle's staff run it for US$499 a month plus 15% of the ad spend.", "why": "The founders first ran a marketplace that paid creators in free products, and saw that their clients' results were decided inside the ad platforms. In 2024 they rebuilt the company around ad buying, sold it themselves through demos to agencies and brands, and added a plan where their own staff run the ads. Stripe shows revenue almost four times higher in March 2026 than in October 2025, then a fall.", "summary": [ "Adle is an AI media buyer. A media buyer is the person who plans, buys and adjusts paid advertising; Adle does this work as software on Meta, Google, TikTok and LinkedIn. The customer writes a request, and Adle builds the campaign, makes the ad text, images and videos, launches it through each platform's API, the official interface that lets one program operate another, and then shows which ads to pause and which to give more budget. Customers connect their own ad accounts with OAuth, a standard way to give an app limited access to an account without sharing the password. The ads therefore run in the customer's own accounts, and Adle charges only its own fees.", "The operating company, Clapp Technologies, LLC, started in September 2022 as Buzzly, a marketplace where brands gave creators free products in exchange for social media posts. The co-founders are Alejandro Reyes Bradford, the chief executive, and Daniel Ruiz Ortega, the chief operating officer. In June 2024 Buzzly joined Parallel18, an accelerator, a program that gives young companies training, contacts and money, run in Puerto Rico with grants. In September 2024 the accelerator described Buzzly as a tool that creates TikTok and Meta campaigns from a short prompt. The founders write that they closed the marketplace and kept the ad-buying part, now sold as Adle. Stripe data on TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a company's payment provider, shows US$4,347 of revenue in October 2025, US$16,855 in March 2026 and US$9,587 in September 2026, and MRR (monthly recurring revenue, the subscription revenue of one month) of US$9,852 from 14 active subscriptions.", "The headline number is grade A, but it is not current. The Stripe key that TrustMRR uses expired on 30 September 2026, so no revenue after that date is recorded, and monthly revenue had already fallen 43.1% from the March peak. The team is larger than in most stories here: LinkedIn lists 8 employees, and the brand plan includes a human media buyer. The page also shows four failed companies that sold automated or outsourced ad buying, or a creator marketplace like Buzzly's first product." ], "factsCaption": "US$9,852 of monthly recurring revenue and US$131,066 in twelve months, read from Stripe, in data that stops on 30 September 2026", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from Stripe, the payment processor, through TrustMRR's connection to the company's Stripe account. A grade C value is a statement by the company, its founders, its accelerator or LinkedIn. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a creator marketplace founded in September 2022 to an AI media buyer with US$9,852 of MRR, in 48 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Adle prices in October 2026, read from the script that draws the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "The pricing page shows only \"Plans from $499/mo\" until the visitor chooses agency or brand; the plan details are in the page's script. Agency plans are monthly subscriptions with credits: a campaign costs 5 credits, an AI image 3 and an AI optimization 2. Extra credits cost from US$49 for 65 to US$636 for 1,200 a month, and extra AI videos from US$75 for 4. The brand plan, Adle Scale, adds 15% of the ad spend to US$499 a month: with US$10,000 of ad spend a month, the brand pays US$1,999 to Adle and the US$10,000 to the ad platforms. No yearly price is shown. The terms say there are no free trials and regular plans are not refundable.", "rows": [ [ "Studio, for agencies", "", "499", "600 credits, 15 AI videos, 10 advertisers, 5 users" ], [ "Agency, for agencies", "", "999", "1,500 credits, 50 AI videos, 25 advertisers, 12 users" ], [ "Enterprise", "", "custom", "price not shown" ], [ "Adle Scale, for brands", "", "499 plus 15% of ad spend", "done for you, with a customer success manager and a media buyer" ], [ "Extra credits", "", "49 to 636", "65 to 1,200 credits" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue at the last sync, 30 September 2026", "value": "US$9,852", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data read by TrustMRR. 14 active subscriptions at the same time.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from that MRR", "value": "about US$118,224 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 9,852 times 12. This is the headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last twelve months", "value": "US$131,066", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data read by TrustMRR. The twelve monthly figures from October 2025 to September 2026 add up to US$131,064; the difference is rounding.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Total revenue recorded from Stripe", "value": "US$258,260", "grade": "A", "note": "All time. US$127,194 of it came before mid-October 2025 (calculated: 258,260 minus 131,066).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Best month", "value": "US$16,855 in March 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "October 2025 was US$4,347, so March 2026 was 3.88 times as much (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in September 2026", "value": "US$9,587", "grade": "A", "note": "43.1% below March 2026 (calculated). July to September 2026 together, US$30,140, were 28.4% below April to June, US$42,098 (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue shown for the last 30 days", "value": "US$3,793", "grade": "A", "note": "The gap to the MRR comes from stale data. TrustMRR last synced at 08:06 UTC on 30 September 2026, and its Stripe API key expired at 14:06 UTC that day. The 30-day window, 16 September to 15 October, holds only 15 days of synced data, and the daily rows from 16 to 30 September add up to exactly US$3,793. The snapshot saved at the last sync shows US$10,086 for its own 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Daily revenue, 16 to 30 September 2026", "value": "US$0 to US$999 a day", "grade": "A", "note": "The days with revenue show US$75, US$299, US$499, US$924, US$997 and US$999. These are the sizes of the plan prices and add-on packs (US$499, US$999, US$75 for 4 extra AI videos), not of advertising budgets.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Average MRR per active subscription", "value": "about US$704", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 9,852 divided by 14 equals 703.71.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Ad spend inside the revenue", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "Customers connect their own Meta, TikTok and Google business accounts with OAuth, so the ads run in their accounts. The brand plan charges 15% of ad spend as Adle's fee. No source shows ad money passing through Adle's Stripe account.", "src": [ 2, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Early figures after the relaunch", "value": "19 paying customers and US$7,000 MRR after the first month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder-written story page, undated. It also claims 1 cancellation in 4 months and a gross margin of about 88%.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Offer for the ads module", "value": "a US$10,000 setup and US$5,000 a month license", "grade": "C", "note": "Story page, undated: a company tried to buy the ads module, and the founders offered a license instead of a sale.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Users in 2024", "value": "hundreds of businesses", "grade": "C", "note": "Parallel18's spotlight post, 16 September 2024. Not a count of paying customers.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Team, October 2026", "value": "2 co-founders; 8 employees on LinkedIn", "grade": "C", "note": "The about page names the chief executive and the chief operating officer as co-founders. LinkedIn gives a company size of 2 to 10 employees and lists 8. The story page sets a limit of about 20 people.", "src": [ 4, 7, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per LinkedIn employee", "value": "about US$14,778 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the US$118,224 run rate divided by 8.", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "an accelerator grant, amount not verified; no venture round found", "grade": "C", "note": "Buzzly joined Parallel18, a program of the Puerto Rico Science, Technology and Research Trust whose startups sign a grant contract. Y Combinator's directory has no page for Adle.", "src": [ 8, 12, 21 ] }, { "fact": "Operating company", "value": "Clapp Technologies, LLC", "grade": "C", "note": "Named on the about page and in the terms, which are governed by the law of Delaware, USA.", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Time from founding to the September 2026 figure", "value": "48 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: September 2022 to September 2026. The founded date, 27 September 2022, is entered by the founder on TrustMRR; LinkedIn gives 2022.", "src": [ 1, 7 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "27 September 2022", "what": "Founded date on the TrustMRR profile. The company starts as Buzzly, owned by Clapp Technologies, LLC.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "when": "19 May 2024", "what": "The archived Buzzly site is a marketplace for user-generated content: brands give products or experiences, and creators with at least 5,000 followers post about them.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "19 June 2024", "what": "The chief executive announces that Buzzly is joining Parallel18, an accelerator in Puerto Rico. The chief operating officer posts the next day that they were accepted.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 9 ] }, { "when": "16 September 2024", "what": "Parallel18's spotlight describes Buzzly as a tool that creates, launches and manages TikTok and Meta campaigns from a few phrases, with large language models, already used by hundreds of businesses.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "Undated, from 2024", "what": "The founders close the marketplace and rebuild its ad-buying part as an AI agent. Their story page reports 19 paying customers and US$7,000 MRR one month after that launch.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "October 2025", "what": "Stripe revenue of US$4,347 for the month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "March 2026", "what": "Best month: US$16,855.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "US$9,587 for the month, and MRR of US$9,852 from 14 active subscriptions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "30 September 2026", "what": "TrustMRR's last revenue sync, at 08:06 UTC. The Stripe API key expires at 14:06 UTC, and no revenue is recorded after that.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "Renamed from Buzzly to Adle, the site sells agency plans from US$499 a month and a done-for-you plan for brands. LinkedIn lists 8 employees. The chief executive posts advertising advice on X almost every day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 7, 13 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Keep the part that made money", "text": "The marketplace connected brands with creators, but the founders write that their clients' results were decided by the media buying: campaign setup, targeting, budgets, optimization and reports. They closed the marketplace and kept that part, rebuilt as an AI agent that works from a single prompt." }, { "title": "Fees, not ad budgets", "text": "In the sources, Adle does not buy the ads itself. The customer's ad accounts stay connected through OAuth, and Adle charges a subscription, credits for each AI action and, for brands, 15% of the ad spend. Its revenue grows when a brand's budget grows, without Adle paying the platforms first." }, { "title": "Software and a service team", "text": "Agencies use the software themselves, for up to 25 advertisers on the US$999 plan. Brands get Adle Scale, where a customer success manager and a media buyer run the campaigns with the software. That service needs people, and LinkedIn lists 8 employees." }, { "title": "Sold by the founders", "text": "The story page says the founders did the early sales themselves, with close personal contact, and every page of the site asks the visitor to book a demo. The chief executive's X account has about 250 followers, so his posts there are not the main channel." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from Adle's own pages, its accelerator and Google's developer documentation. They are grade C.", "items": [ "A web app in English and Spanish at adle.ai, owned by Clapp Technologies, LLC, with terms under Delaware law.", "Customers connect their Meta, TikTok and Google business accounts with OAuth. The security page says the permissions are limited to those required, tokens are kept in an encrypted vault, and each advertiser runs in its own micro-service agent.", "The ad platforms grant API access only after an application. For example, a new Google Ads API developer token starts with test access; Basic Access allows 15,000 operations a day and Standard Access has no limit. No source says which level Adle holds.", "The AI writes campaigns from a prompt and makes images, videos and captions. Parallel18 wrote in 2024 that it uses large language models; no source names the models.", "Usage is metered in credits: 5 for a campaign, 3 for an AI image, 2 for an AI optimization.", "Payments run through Stripe. The security page lists a SOC 2 Type II audit, an outside check of security controls over a period of time, as in progress with the auditor Strike Graph, with a target of the first quarter of 2026.", "The terms also cover lifetime deals bought through AppSumo, and the site's script holds an AppSumo customer rating from 34 verified reviews, but no AppSumo page was found under the names Adle or Buzzly. AppSumo sales would not appear in the Stripe data." ], "src": [ 6, 19, 10, 2, 1, 5 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold automated or outsourced ad buying, or the creator marketplace that Buzzly started as. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Trada", "years": "2008 to 2015", "funding": "US$19M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Outsource your Google Ads to a marketplace of paid-search experts.", "died": "Google's own automation did the experts' work, and the human experts were too expensive to scale.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/655-trada" }, { "name": "Automate Ads", "years": "2015 to 2018", "funding": "US$1.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Software that keeps Facebook and Instagram campaigns running and adjusted without manual work.", "died": "The platforms' own tools and faster rivals did the same work.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1100-automate-ads" }, { "name": "Admazely", "years": "2012 to 2014", "funding": "US$2.3M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Retargeting ads made simple for small webshops.", "died": "Small customers with small budgets cost more to win than they paid, and Facebook competed directly.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1830-admazely" }, { "name": "FameBit", "years": "2013 to 2019", "funding": "US$1.75M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Self-service matching of brands and YouTube creators.", "died": "Google bought it and let it fade as YouTube moved to large brands and TikTok took the creators.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/132-famebit" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the four sold a layer on top of ad platforms or creators that it did not control. Trada and Automate Ads are the closest: one sold human experts for Google Ads, the other automation for Facebook ads, and both lost to the platforms' own tools. Adle makes the same bet with both parts at once: an AI agent for agencies, and a done-for-you service for brands.", "Two things differ. Large language models can now write the ad text and make images and videos from a prompt, so one tool can do the creative work as well as the campaign setup. And Adle works across Meta, Google, TikTok and LinkedIn at once, while each platform's own automation works only inside that platform. Neither difference has protected the revenue so far: Stripe shows a fall of 43.1% from March to September 2026." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The structure, yes. The position, with care.", "text": "A subscription plus a share of ad spend, while the customer keeps the ad accounts, is a simple structure, and the official ad APIs are open to approved apps. Two things are hard: agencies must trust software to spend their clients' money, and Google and Meta are building the same automation into their own platforms.", "steps": [ "Start from a service you already sell, here media buying, and turn its repeated steps into software.", "Connect to the customer's own ad accounts through the official APIs, so you never pay for the ads.", "Charge a fixed fee plus a share of ad spend, and meter the AI work in credits.", "Require the customer's approval before any campaign goes live." ], "open": "Work that each platform's own AI does not cover: running several ad platforms from one place, reports across them, and white-label tools that agencies show to their clients under their own name." }, "watch": [ { "title": "The data stopped on 30 September 2026", "text": "TrustMRR's key to Adle's Stripe account expired that day, so the profile shows no revenue for October and a 30-day figure of only US$3,793. September revenue, US$9,587, was close to the MRR, so the business was still earning then. Whether it still earns in October 2026 is unknown." }, { "title": "Revenue fell from its March peak", "text": "From US$16,855 in March 2026 to US$9,587 in September, a fall of 43.1%. July to September was 28.4% below April to June. The story page set a goal of 100 recurring customers in 13 weeks; TrustMRR shows 14 active subscriptions at the last sync." }, { "title": "Google and Meta build the same automation", "text": "Google opened Performance Max, which buys ads across YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail and Maps from a single campaign, to all advertisers on 2 November 2021, and introduced AI Max for Search campaigns, a one-click suite of AI targeting and creative features, on 6 May 2025. Meta launched Advantage+ shopping campaigns in August 2022, which create up to 150 creative combinations at once. On 2 June 2025 MediaPost, citing The Wall Street Journal, reported that Meta plans to let brands create and target their ads with its AI by 2026. Google's tools are open to all advertisers, so Adle's customers already have them in their own accounts." }, { "title": "An AI agent can spend a budget badly", "text": "Adle's terms say it does not guarantee any return on ad spend and is not liable for lost ad spend. The company's answer is approval: its LinkedIn posts say the customer approves every campaign. The chief executive himself writes that a bidding algorithm with fewer than 30 conversions a month is guessing with the budget, and that moving a target more than 15 to 20% at once sends a campaign back into learning." }, { "title": "Access depends on the platforms", "text": "Every campaign runs through the APIs of Meta, Google and TikTok, which those companies open only to approved apps; Google, for example, gives full Google Ads API access only after an application. Adle's own terms list repeated platform policy violations that put its accounts or integrations at risk as a reason to end a customer's account." }, { "title": "Eight people, not one", "text": "LinkedIn lists 8 employees in October 2026, with two co-founders, and the brand plan includes a human media buyer. At the run rate of US$118,224 a year, that is about US$14,778 per person, and part of the revenue pays for service work." }, { "title": "Competing tools", "text": "Adspirer, another story on this site, sells a similar agent that works inside ChatGPT, Claude and other AI assistants and creates every campaign paused, and it had US$54,700 MRR at its last Stripe sync in June 2026 with one founder. Adle's own comparison page names Madgicx, which it says charges by ad spend." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.adle.ai/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/adle" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: Adle, Stripe-verified revenue profile (data as of October 2026)", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/adle", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile (https://trustmrr.com/startup/adle.md) in full, once, on 15 October 2026. Grade A for the metrics in its Verification Sources section; the description and founded date are founder-written, grade C." }, { "title": "Adle pricing page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://adle.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page and, because the plans load by script, the plan data in the page's JavaScript file." }, { "title": "Adle: Our Story, From Marketplace to AI Media Operator", "url": "https://adle.ai/story", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder-written and undated. Source for the pivot, the early customer figures, the sales method and the pricing model." }, { "title": "Adle: About, Meet the Founders", "url": "https://adle.ai/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the operating company and the two co-founders." }, { "title": "Adle AI Terms and Conditions", "url": "https://adle.ai/terms-and-conditions", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the operator, Delaware law, billing, AppSumo lifetime deals and the disclaimers on ad spend." }, { "title": "Adle Security page", "url": "https://adle.ai/security", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the OAuth connections and the SOC 2 plan." }, { "title": "LinkedIn company page: Adle (formerly Buzzly)", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/adle-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public page on 15 October 2026. Source for the company size, the 8 employees, the founding year and the post on campaign approval." }, { "title": "LinkedIn post by Alejandro Reyes Bradford, 19 June 2024: Buzzly is joining Parallel18", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/posts/alejandrorbrad_proud-to-announce-that-buzzly-is-joining-activity-7209164226534240256-c4nJ", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Date from the page's published time." }, { "title": "LinkedIn post by Daniel Ruiz Ortega, 20 June 2024: Buzzly se une a Parallel18", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/posts/danielruizortega1_buzzly-parallel18-startups-activity-7209569944533909504--ULi", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. It tags four other people, who are not named on this page." }, { "title": "LinkedIn post, 16 September 2024: Parallel18 Gen.12 Startup Spotlight: Buzzly", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/posts/hjirau_parallel18-p18-gen12-startup-spotlight-activity-7241438199309303811-pdB0", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The accelerator's description of the product and its users in 2024." }, { "title": "Internet Archive copy of heybuzzly.com, 19 May 2024", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20240519182301/https://www.heybuzzly.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the archived home page in full. Shows the marketplace before the pivot." }, { "title": "Parallel18 home page and program questions", "url": "https://www.parallel18.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the program description and the questions section. Source for the grant; the amount is not on the page." }, { "title": "Alejandro Reyes Bradford on X (@alejandrobradf), posts of 1 to 15 October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/alejandrobradf", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile and the 40 most recent posts through api.fxtwitter.com, which returned no older pages. None of them gives a revenue figure." }, { "title": "Adle vs Madgicx comparison page", "url": "https://adle.ai/vs/madgicx", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Adle's own comparison, including its pricing model." }, { "title": "Google Ads and Commerce blog, 2 November 2021: Performance Max campaigns launch to all advertisers", "url": "https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/performance-max/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the dated header and the introduction." }, { "title": "Google Ads and Commerce blog, 6 May 2025: Introducing AI Max for Search campaigns", "url": "https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/google-ai-max-for-search-campaigns/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the dated header and the introduction." }, { "title": "Social Media Today, 9 January 2023: How to Take Advantage of Meta's Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns", "url": "https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/how-to-take-advantage-of-metas-advantage-shopping-campaigns/640002/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the August 2022 launch and the 150 creative combinations." }, { "title": "MediaPost, 2 June 2025: Meta Plans To Automate All Ad Creation By 2026: Report", "url": "https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/406315/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. It reports a Wall Street Journal story." }, { "title": "Google Ads API: Access levels and permissible use", "url": "https://developers.google.com/google-ads/api/docs/api-policy/access-levels", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on access levels." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." }, { "title": "Y Combinator company directory, address for Adle", "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/adle", "grade": "C", "how": "Opened on 15 October 2026. The page returns File Not Found." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/dimeadozen/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/dimeadozen.md", "slug": "dimeadozen", "name": "DimeADozen", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI research reports on business ideas", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-15", "launchLabel": "March 2023", "outcomeLabel": "Sold for US$150K, September 2023", "sticker": "Sold for $150K", "outcomeUsd": 150000, "months": 6, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders as a side business, plus 1 marketing and growth helper from June 2023", "fundingLabel": "None (about US$185 of own money)", "primaryFactor": "Focus", "group": "documents-data", "channel": "creators", "trend": "sold", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2C", "Market research" ], "product": "A web form that takes a description of a business idea and returns a long report on its market, customers, competitors, risks and launch steps. In 2023 the text came from hundreds of pre-written prompts sent to OpenAI's ChatGPT models. A later owner still sells it in 2026, rebuilt around live web search and cited sources.", "why": "The founders first sold AI reports for many jobs, from lesson plans to travel plans, and kept the one that people paid for: the business idea check. It cost about US$185 to start, so nearly all revenue was profit. An Instagram creator's video in June 2023 brought more than US$10,000 of sales in one week. Six months after launch they sold it through Acquire.com.", "summary": [ "DimeADozen is a website that writes a research report about a business idea. The customer fills in a form. The site puts the answers into hundreds of pre-written prompts, the instruction texts that a program sends to a language model, and sends them to OpenAI's ChatGPT models. It then joins the answers into a report of 40 to 50 pages on the market, the customers, the competitors, the risks and the launch steps. The founders said that strict prompts reduced hallucinations, answers from a model that sound right but are false. In October 2023 one report cost US$39.", "Sal Aiello, a long-time chief technology officer for startups, and Monica Powers, a product designer, met in 2022 at an online founder event run by the startup accelerator Y Combinator. In March 2023 they built the first version in four days for about US$185, as a side business. It first sold AI reports for many jobs; only the business idea report sold, so they kept that one. An Instagram creator's video in mid-June 2023 brought more than US$10,000 of sales in one week. In roughly seven months the site brought in more than US$66,000. In September 2023 the founders agreed to sell it for US$150,000 to Felipe Arosemena and Danielle de Corneille, a married couple, after listing it on Acquire.com, a marketplace where small online businesses are bought and sold.", "The revenue figure is grade B: CNBC Make It wrote that it came from documents that CNBC Make It reviewed. The sale price is grade C: the article gives it as Aiello's statement, and the buyers have not published it. The site still sells reports in October 2026 under a later owner, rebuilt around live web search, while ChatGPT and Gemini now write research reports of this kind for free a few times a month." ], "factsCaption": "More than US$66,000 of revenue in about seven months, seen in documents by CNBC Make It, and a sale for US$150,000 that rests on the seller's statement", "factsRead": "How to read this table: grade B is a figure that a journalist checked in documents. Grade C is a statement by a founder, by the team's marketing helper, or by the company's own pages. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A.", "timelineLead": "From a four-day build in March 2023 to a sale through Acquire.com six months later, and then to a product type that free chatbots now offer. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "DimeADozen prices in October 2026, read from the later owner's pricing page (grade C); the 2023 prices are in the note", "note": "Every current price is one-time; there is no subscription. In March 2023 the founders sold report sections one by one for US$0.50 to US$4.00 each. On 1 April 2023 the business validation report cost US$36. In June 2023 they tested a monthly plan with several reports at a discount. In October 2023 a report cost US$39. Agencies can buy reports under their own logo on monthly or yearly plans through a separate site, CustomReport, whose prices are not on this page.", "rows": [ [ "Idea score", "free", "", "a score on 4 dimensions in about 2 minutes" ], [ "Starter", "9 one-time", "", "7 sections, typically 20+ pages, 60+ cited links" ], [ "Entrepreneur", "129 one-time", "", "full report, typically 100+ pages, 500+ cited links" ], [ "3-Pack", "179 one-time", "", "three Entrepreneur reports" ], [ "Launch Kit", "149 one-time", "", "material for a small live market test, from a full report" ], [ "Investor-Ready add-on", "299 one-time", "", "investor objection preparation and a one-page brief" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Sale price, September 2023", "value": "US$150,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Sal Aiello to CNBC Make It. The article attributes the price to him and does not say that CNBC saw the sale contract. The buyers have not published it. The marketing helper's account says only \"6-figure exit\".", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in roughly seven months, March to October 2023", "value": "more than US$66,000", "grade": "B", "note": "\"according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It\". The article does not say which documents. Aiello says nearly all of it was profit.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Average revenue per month", "value": "about US$9,400", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$66,000 divided by 7 months. The real months were uneven: four-figure revenue by early June, then more than US$10,000 in one week in June.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Sale price compared with revenue", "value": "about 2.3 times revenue to date, or about 1.3 times a year of revenue", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$150,000 divided by US$66,000, and divided by US$66,000 / 7 x 12 = about US$113,000 a year.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Lifetime revenue when listed on Acquire.com", "value": "US$50,000", "grade": "C", "note": "The marketing helper's account. The date of the listing is not given; it was before an August 2023 sale campaign.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Sales in the week of a viral Instagram video, mid-June 2023", "value": "more than US$10,000", "grade": "C", "note": "A creator answered a viewer who asked whether a business idea was good. The account says the video had more than 1.3 million views.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Traffic and conversion, by October 2023", "value": "more than 20,000 visits a month; 1% to 5% of unique visitors paid", "grade": "C", "note": "The marketing helper's account. The rate depended on the traffic source and the period.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Money spent to start", "value": "about US$185", "grade": "C", "note": "Aiello: US$150 for the web domain and US$35 for hosting and a database.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Price of a report", "value": "US$0.50 to US$4.00 a section (March 2023), US$36 (April 2023), US$39 (October 2023)", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived copies of the site and CNBC Make It.", "src": [ 4, 5, 1 ] }, { "fact": "People who used the site, as claimed on it", "value": "over 30,000 (July 2023), over 75,000 (October 2023)", "grade": "C", "note": "The site does not say how many of them paid. The October 2023 copy is from a month after the deal.", "src": [ 6, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Buyer interest after an August 2023 sale campaign", "value": "more than 30 signed NDAs and 8 to 10 buyer meetings in one week", "grade": "C", "note": "An NDA is a non-disclosure agreement that a buyer signs before seeing the numbers. The campaign was a feature in Acquire.com's newsletter, a post by Aiello on X and a post on the company's LinkedIn page.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 co-founders with equal shares, plus 1 marketing and growth helper from June 2023", "grade": "C", "note": "CNBC says the business was split evenly between Aiello and Powers. The helper, Mike Blumenthal, wrote the Indie Hackers account.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "CNBC: they spent less than US$200 to start. The later owner's facts page in 2026 says \"bootstrapped, no outside funding\".", "src": [ 1, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Paying customers since 2023, September 2026", "value": "3,100+ across 3,200+ purchases", "grade": "C", "note": "The later owner's facts page, which also counts 134,000+ ideas submitted. The home page counts 50,000+ sign-ups.", "src": [ 10, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Share of sign-ups that paid, by 2026", "value": "about 6%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 3,100 paying customers divided by 50,000 sign-ups, both from the later owner's pages.", "src": [ 10, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the sale agreement", "value": "6 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: March 2023 to September 2023.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2022", "what": "Aiello, a long-time chief technology officer for startups, and Powers, a product designer who runs a design and branding company, meet at an online founder event run by Y Combinator.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "March 2023", "what": "They build the first version in four days for about US$185: AI reports for any profession, from lesson plans to business plans.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "13 March 2023", "what": "Earliest archived copy: \"Validate your business idea in seconds\", with report sections sold one by one for US$0.50 to US$4.00.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 8 ] }, { "when": "15 March 2023", "what": "The archive captures the site's address tagged ref=futuretools.io, from Future Tools, a directory of AI tools. The team lists the site in AI directories and newsletters, tells friends and emails anyone who will listen.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 2 ] }, { "when": "1 April 2023", "what": "Ten report types for sale, from US$5 to US$36; the business validation report is the most expensive. An affiliate script is in the page.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "April to July 2023", "what": "Only the business validation report sells, so the founders remove the other report types.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 6 ] }, { "when": "Early June 2023", "what": "Four-figure revenue from single reports. A monthly plan with several reports at a discount takes monthly recurring revenue from zero to several thousand dollars in a few weeks.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "Mid-June 2023", "what": "An Instagram creator's video that answers a viewer's question about a business idea goes viral: more than 1.3 million views and more than US$10,000 of sales in one week. A marketing and growth helper joins.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "23 July 2023", "what": "The site says over 30,000 entrepreneurs have used it, shows a \"Featured On\" row of six logos: There's An AI For That, Future Tools, TopAI.tools, AI Tool Mate, Openfuture and Ben's Bites. It links a sister product, Launchmates.ai.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "Summer 2023", "what": "Listed for sale on Acquire.com after reaching US$50,000 in lifetime revenue. Few buyers ask at first.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "August 2023", "what": "A sale campaign: a feature in Acquire.com's newsletter, a post by Aiello on X and a post on the company's LinkedIn page. More than 30 NDAs and 8 to 10 buyer meetings in a week, then a deadline for offers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "September 2023", "what": "Deal to sell for US$150,000 to Felipe Arosemena and Danielle de Corneille, a software engineer and a product designer who want to run it full-time. The founders stay as advisors for about five hours a week.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "16 October 2023", "what": "CNBC Make It reports more than US$66,000 of revenue in roughly seven months, from documents it reviewed. A report costs US$39.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "when": "26 October 2023", "what": "The site claims over 75,000 users and says it uses GPT-4.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "2 February 2025", "what": "OpenAI launches deep research in ChatGPT, which writes a report from hundreds of web sources. Free users get 5 such reports a month from 24 April 2025.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "13 March 2025", "what": "Google makes Gemini Deep Research free to try for everyone, a few times a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "May 2026", "what": "The company's X account describes three options for founders: a free chatbot, US$5 to US$29 tools that only rephrase a model's answer, and its own US$129 report.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "The later owner reports 3,100+ paying customers since 2023 and sells reports from US$9 to US$179, one-time. The page footer names Pattern50 LLC.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10, 9 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Focus", "text": "The first site sold AI reports for many jobs: lesson plans, event and travel plans, garden projects, ad copy and pitch decks, from US$5 to US$36 each. After a few weeks the only real purchases were the business validation report, so the founders removed the rest. In the marketing helper's words, they let the market tell them what to make." }, { "title": "The prompts were the product", "text": "The value was in the questions, not in the model. The form's answers go into hundreds of pre-written ChatGPT prompts, and the answers are joined into one report. Aiello said it took weeks of back and forth, with strict prompts and tuned prompt settings, to get the answers they expected." }, { "title": "Costs close to zero", "text": "About US$185 to start: a domain, hosting and a database. The founders said nearly all revenue was profit. That is why a few dollars a section, and later US$39 a report, was enough. The 2023 site refused refunds because every report cost money to generate." }, { "title": "A creator video, then a planned sale", "text": "AI directories and newsletters listed the site from March 2023, and a referral feature and an affiliate program brought more users. Sales jumped in mid-June 2023 after an Instagram creator's video. The founders then sold early: an Acquire.com listing, a newsletter feature, a data room for buyers and a deadline for offers turned more than 30 interested buyers into a deal within weeks." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from CNBC Make It, the marketing helper's account and archived copies of the 2023 site. They are grade C, except the page-source details, which anyone can check in the archived pages.", "items": [ "Built in four days in March 2023: Powers designed the tool and Aiello wrote the code.", "A form asks for the business name and a description. The answers go into hundreds of pre-written ChatGPT prompts, and the answers become a report of 40 to 50 pages, delivered as a PDF.", "On the report page, users could add instructions to single items to change the answer, which the 2023 site called fine tuning.", "Costs: US$150 for the domain and US$35 for hosting and a database. The October 2023 site, a month after the deal, says it used GPT-4.", "The archived page source shows a Google Analytics tag from March 2023, the Rewardful affiliate script from April 2023 and a Google Ads tag by July 2023.", "For the sale, a data room held conversion rates, the technology used and notes on how to reach the audience. The founders agreed to stay as advisors for about five hours a week." ], "src": [ 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold research or expert insight on demand to people about to make a decision. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Mattermark", "years": "2012 to 2019", "funding": "US$17.7M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Data on private companies, gathered into insights for venture investors.", "died": "It could not beat CB Insights, its costs grew with scale, and newer AI companies sold cheaper insights.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/322-mattermark" }, { "name": "ROSS Intelligence", "years": "2015 to 2018", "funding": "US$13M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "AI legal research that answers questions faster than the old legal databases.", "died": "Lawyers kept the databases they already used.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1511-ross-intelligence" }, { "name": "Metigy", "years": "2014 to 2022", "funding": "US$14M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "AI marketing advice for small businesses that could not pay a marketing team.", "died": "Small businesses wanted someone to do the work, not recommendations. The general advice was not used.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2338-metigy" }, { "name": "Thumb", "years": "2011 to 2015", "funding": "US$12.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Instant opinions from a crowd of strangers for anyone facing a decision.", "died": "The large social networks kept the users, and it found no way to earn money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/631-thumb" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the four sold insight that the customer could also get another way: from a database it already had, from a social network, or from general advice. DimeADozen sold the same kind of thing, a report on a market, and in 2023 it was cheap and fast where human analysts were slow and expensive. In 2025 OpenAI and Google added research reports to their own chatbots, free a few times a month. That is the position that ended the predecessors: a general tool does the job of the narrow one.", "Two things differed. First, the costs were almost zero, so the business was profitable in its first months and needed no investors; none of the four could say that. Second, the founders sold after six months, while sales were still rising, so the later owner, not the founders, carried the risk of free competition. The owner's answer in 2026 is a different product: longer reports built with live web search and checked citations, at US$129." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product, no. The method, yes.", "text": "A report built from fixed prompts to one model was a good product in March 2023 and is close to free in 2026. The method still works: offer several paid outputs cheaply, keep the one that sells, run it at almost no cost, and sell the business while its numbers are rising.", "steps": [ "Put several paid report types on one site and watch which one people buy.", "Remove the rest and improve the one that sells.", "Keep fixed costs near zero, so a few sales a day are profit.", "Give creators something they can show in a short video: an answer to a question their viewers ask.", "To sell, list on a marketplace such as Acquire.com, prepare a data room and set a deadline for offers." ], "open": "Reports that a free chatbot cannot write: ones built on data that is not on the open web, such as the customer's own files, paid databases or local records, or documents that a lender or regulator needs in a fixed format." }, "watch": [ { "title": "The price is the seller's statement", "text": "CNBC Make It saw documents for the revenue, not for the price. The article gives US$150,000 as Aiello's statement. The buyers have not published it, the marketing helper's account says only \"6-figure exit\", and no copy of the Acquire.com listing was found." }, { "title": "Free chatbots now write the same report", "text": "OpenAI added deep research to ChatGPT on 2 February 2025: it searches hundreds of web sources and writes a report \"at the level of a research analyst\". From 24 April 2025 free ChatGPT users get 5 such reports a month. Google made Gemini Deep Research free to try for everyone on 13 March 2025. In May 2026 DimeADozen's own X account named the \"free chatbot (zero cost)\" as the first option a founder has." }, { "title": "Thin products on one model API have a short life", "text": "The 2023 product was a form plus fixed prompts sent to ChatGPT. By 2026 the later owner had rebuilt it: most sections are written with live web search, the citations are checked, and the facts page says it is \"not a single AI model writing from training data\". Its own post calls US$5 to US$29 tools of the 2023 kind an \"LLM wrapper (paraphrase)\". The owner kept the name, not the 2023 design." }, { "title": "Dependence on OpenAI", "text": "Every 2023 report came from OpenAI's models, and OpenAI decides which models stay available: it announced that older completion models would stop working on 4 January 2024. OpenAI also now sells deep research to the same customers. A product built on one provider's API can lose both its supplier and its market to that provider." }, { "title": "Users are not customers", "text": "The site claimed over 75,000 users in October 2023. The later owner counts 3,100+ paying customers in total by September 2026, about 6% of its 50,000+ sign-ups. Most people who tried the site never paid." }, { "title": "A success story that also sells services", "text": "The Indie Hackers account was written by the team's marketing helper and ends with an offer to help readers take their own tool \"from concept to cash\". No downloaded source shows the founders selling a course based on the sale." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.dimeadozen.ai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "CNBC Make It, Megan Sauer, 16 October 2023: Two friends used AI and $185 to start a side hustle, they just sold it for $150,000", "url": "https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/16/how-inexpensive-ai-side-hustle-dimeadozen-sold-for-thousands.html", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the revenue seen in documents (grade B), and for the sale price, buyers, costs and report price, which the article gives as Aiello's statements (grade C)." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, Mike Blumenthal, 14 October 2023: Concept to Cash: 6-Figure Exit in 6 months for DimeADozen AI", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/concept-to-cash-6-figure-exit-in-6-months-for-dimeadozen-ai-2b557c6205", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Written by the person brought on for marketing and growth in June 2023. Source for the early report types, the Instagram video, the Acquire.com listing and the sale campaign." }, { "title": "NBC4 Washington, 16 October 2023: reprint of the CNBC Make It article", "url": "https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/business/money-report/two-friends-used-ai-and-185-to-start-a-side-hustle-they-just-sold-it-for-150000-it-prints-money/3445280/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The same text as the original; used to confirm the wording." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of dimeadozen.ai, 13 March 2023", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20230313203022/https://www.dimeadozen.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with its page source. The earliest copy. Source for the first prices, the fine-tuning feature and the analytics tag." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of dimeadozen.ai, 1 April 2023", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20230401173334/https://www.dimeadozen.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with its page source. Source for the ten report types and their prices, and the affiliate script." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of dimeadozen.ai, 23 July 2023", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20230723003221/https://www.dimeadozen.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with its page source. Source for the user claim, the directory logos, the sister product and the Google Ads tag." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of dimeadozen.ai, 26 October 2023", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20231026091743/https://www.dimeadozen.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A month after the deal. Source for the 75,000 users claim and the mention of GPT-4." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine index of captured dimeadozen.ai addresses", "url": "http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=dimeadozen.ai*&output=txt&fl=timestamp,original,statuscode&filter=statuscode:200&collapse=urlkey&limit=80", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the first 80 rows. Shows the first capture on 13 March 2023 and a link from the Future Tools directory captured on 15 March 2023." }, { "title": "DimeADozen pricing page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://www.dimeadozen.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the current prices and the owner named in the footer." }, { "title": "DimeADozen facts page, last verified 24 September 2026", "url": "https://www.dimeadozen.ai/facts", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The later owner's figures for customers, purchases and funding, and its description of how reports are made now." }, { "title": "DimeADozen home page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://www.dimeadozen.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the sign-up count." }, { "title": "DimeADozen on X (@dimeadozenai), posts of 21 and 22 May 2026", "url": "https://x.com/dimeadozenai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the latest 20 posts through the fxtwitter API. Posts by the later owner about free chatbots and wrapper tools." }, { "title": "OpenAI, 2 February 2025: Introducing deep research", "url": "https://openai.com/index/introducing-deep-research/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the updates up to February 2026. Source for the launch and the free-user limit from 24 April 2025." }, { "title": "Google, 13 March 2025: Gemini app updates: Deep Research, connected apps, personalization", "url": "https://blog.google/products/gemini/new-gemini-app-features-march-2025/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for Deep Research being free to try for everyone." }, { "title": "OpenAI, updated 24 April 2024: GPT-4 API general availability and deprecation of older models in the Completions API", "url": "https://openai.com/index/gpt-4-api-general-availability/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the retirement of older completion models on 4 January 2024." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/launch-fast/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/launch-fast.md", "slug": "launch-fast", "name": "Launch Fast", "country": "United States", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Product research software and AI agent tools for Amazon sellers", "aiType": "AI-leveraged", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-15", "launchLabel": "July 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$30K a month, June 2026", "sticker": "$360K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 360000, "months": 11, "teamLabel": "1 founder who builds the product, in partnership with the Legacy X coaching company, which holds equity", "fundingLabel": "None found; equity traded for distribution", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "documents-data", "channel": "partners", "trend": "growing", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-leveraged", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "E-commerce" ], "product": "A web app, a Chrome extension and an MCP server for Amazon sellers. It estimates the revenue, prices, reviews and keyword demand of a product market, matches Amazon products to suppliers on Alibaba, analyzes ads, tracks rankings and drafts listings. Paid plans connect the seller's own Amazon account, so Claude or Codex can answer questions about the seller's sales and ads.", "why": "An Amazon seller who could not code built the research tool he needed in 48 hours with Cursor, then offered it to Legacy X, a coaching program for Amazon sellers that he had bought two years earlier. Legacy X took a share of the business, and its students were the customers from the first day. He says it reached US$10,000 a month in 30 days and US$30,000 a month by June 2026.", "summary": [ "Launch Fast is product research software for Amazon sellers. Product research here means checking a market before buying stock: how much the top products sell, at what price, with how many reviews, which keywords buyers type, and what a factory would charge. It is made for private label sellers, who sell a factory-made product under their own brand, and it matches Amazon products to suppliers on Alibaba. It comes as a web app, as a Chrome extension that shows the data on Amazon's own pages, and, since February 2026, as an MCP server. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is a standard way for an AI app such as Claude or Codex to call outside tools, so a seller can ask about markets and about his own sales and ads in a chat.", "Hasaam Bhatti had a corporate job and ran two Amazon brands on the side. He has no computer science degree and says he had never written a line of code when he found Cursor, a code editor in which an AI model writes and changes the code from plain-English instructions. Ten to twelve earlier projects never reached production. This time he built for his own problem: 20 to 30 hours of spreadsheet work for every product idea. He had no audience, so he offered Legacy X, a coaching program for Amazon sellers that he had bought two years earlier, a working tool in 48 hours. Legacy X took equity, a share of ownership, and its students became the first customers, at US$50 a month; the public price was US$199. He says it reached US$10,000 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the subscription revenue that repeats every month, after 30 days, about US$21,800 after 90 days, and US$30,000 by June 2026.", "Every revenue number is the founder's own statement in two interviews, Starter Story in January 2026 and Indie Hackers in June 2026, grade C. The two agree with each other. No payment processor confirms them, and the size of Legacy X's share is not public, so the founder's own part of the revenue is not known. The page also shows earlier companies that sold tools to sellers on top of a platform that they did not control, and what is different this time." ], "factsCaption": "A subscription tool sold first to one coaching program's students: US$10,000 a month after 30 days and US$30,000 a month by June 2026, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a statement by the founder in an interview or on X, a page of the company's own site, or a page of an outside site such as a store listing or a web archive. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a 48-hour demo for a coaching company to US$30,000 a month in about 11 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Launch Fast prices in October 2026, from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "The pricing page shows each price per month billed yearly (\"Then $74/month, billed annually\"); the prices for monthly billing load by script and could not be read. Every plan starts with a free trial of 3 Product Research reports, and a card is required. In late 2025 the founder gave two prices: US$50 a month for Legacy X students and US$199 a month for everyone else. The terms still reserve a discount for Legacy X FBA Mentorship students.", "rows": [ [ "Free trial", "0", "0", "3 Product Research reports; card required" ], [ "Starter", "41", "", "100 research credits, 20 AI report credits, 100 supplier quotes, 1 keyword rank tracker" ], [ "Growth", "74", "", "250 research credits, 60 AI report credits, 500 supplier quotes, 3 rank trackers, MCP access, Amazon Ads and SP-API reports" ], [ "Scale", "166", "", "500 research credits, 100 AI report credits, 1,500 supplier quotes, 5 rank trackers, advanced MCP workflows" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, June 2026", "value": "US$30,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview with Indie Hackers by James Fleischmann, published 2 June 2026: \"We're at $30K MRR now.\" This is Launch Fast's figure; the founder's contract work and workshops are separate.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the June 2026 figure", "value": "US$360,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$30,000 times 12. This is the headline figure on this page. Part of it belongs to Legacy X, whose share is not public.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue about 90 days after launch", "value": "about US$21,800", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder, in the Starter Story video published 5 January 2026, and again in the Indie Hackers interview. The Starter Story title says US$25K, but in the video he says about US$21,800.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue about 30 and 60 days after launch", "value": "US$10,000, then US$17,000 to US$18,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder. The same figures in both interviews.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from day 90 to June 2026", "value": "about 38%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$30,000 divided by US$21,800 is 1.376.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Prices in late 2025", "value": "US$50 a month for Legacy X students, US$199 a month for everyone else", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in the Starter Story interview. The terms in October 2026 still reserve a discount for Legacy X FBA Mentorship students.", "src": [ 2, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Subscribers implied by about US$21,800 a month", "value": "between about 110 and 436", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$21,800 divided by US$199 is 109.5, and divided by US$50 it is 436. The founder gives no subscriber count; he says all users pay.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Chrome extension users", "value": "330 active users about 90 days after launch; 848 users in October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "The first figure is the founder's. The second is the count in Google's Chrome Web Store, read 15 October 2026, with a 5.0 rating from 7 ratings, version 2.4.7, updated 16 August 2026.", "src": [ 2, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Time to build the first version", "value": "48 hours", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's hour-by-hour account. He started from Legacy X's own systems, standard procedures and data.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Main tool cost at the start", "value": "US$200 a month for Cursor's Max plan", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder: after launch the costs are minimal, and Cursor is the only large one.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Share of the business given to Legacy X", "value": "not public", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder says he traded equity for the distribution, and that even at 50%, half of US$20,000 a month is better than half of nothing. One of the Starter Story hosts guessed about 50%. Neither is a stated figure.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "No investor is named in any source. The only partner is Legacy X.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Launch date", "value": "not given; the site was live by 22 July 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "First Internet Archive capture of the site, with sign-up and log-in pages and the label \"Built by LegacyX FBA\". The founder counts the days from the launch with Legacy X.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the June 2026 figure", "value": "about 11 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: July 2025, the month of the first archived capture, to June 2026.", "src": [ 10, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Operating company", "value": "not named", "grade": "C", "note": "The terms are governed by the laws of Texas, with courts in Harris County, Texas, and the contact address is a Gmail account. The founder's X profile gives Toronto as his location.", "src": [ 4, 12 ] }, { "fact": "The founder's other work", "value": "contract builds, enterprise workshops on Claude Code, and Notara, a tool for teams", "grade": "C", "note": "Indie Hackers interview and his X post of 3 September 2026. The US$30,000 a month is Launch Fast's figure; this work is separate.", "src": [ 1, 16 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "About 2023", "what": "Bhatti, who has a corporate job and runs two Amazon brands, buys Legacy X, a coaching program for Amazon sellers. Ten to twelve earlier software projects of his, such as AI video tools and job-application automation, never reach production.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "Mid-2025", "what": "He offers Legacy X a better product research tool in 48 hours, with no obligation. He builds it in Cursor and sends a demo video. The next morning Legacy X tells him to quit his job. He gives equity in exchange for access to its students.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "22 July 2025", "what": "First Internet Archive capture of launchfastlegacyx.com: \"LaunchFast, Built by LegacyX FBA\", with sign-up and log-in pages.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "15 August 2025", "what": "The archived site shows Dashboard v1.3 and a Chrome extension with market summaries on Amazon's own pages.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "About 30, 60 and 90 days after launch", "what": "US$10,000, then US$17,000 to US$18,000, then about US$21,800 in monthly recurring revenue. All users pay. The Chrome extension has 330 active users. Legacy X students pay US$50 a month, everyone else US$199.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "when": "5 January 2026", "what": "Starter Story publishes the founder interview \"I built a $25K MRR app with Cursor\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "24 February 2026", "what": "The MCP server: Launch Fast data inside Claude and other MCP clients. From 20 March it can be added through Claude's connector settings, without configuration files or API keys.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "4 April 2026", "what": "Sellers can connect their Seller Central and Amazon Ads accounts and ask Claude about their own sales, inventory and ads.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "1 May 2026", "what": "New Starter, Growth and Scale plans, and a free FBA profit calculator and a link generator that work without an account.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "2 June 2026", "what": "Indie Hackers interview: US$30,000 in monthly recurring revenue. He also builds products for other founders on contract and runs enterprise workshops on Claude Code.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "12 August 2026", "what": "He writes that Amazon's SP-API compliance rules now include WAF protection (a web application firewall), encrypted credentials, login lockouts, vulnerability scans, penetration testing and strict data deletion.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "11 September 2026", "what": "Launch Fast becomes an official Amazon Solutions Provider with a Seller App Store listing, and opens an iPhone beta on TestFlight with Launchie, an agent that analyzes the seller's data and runs scheduled ads audits.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13, 8 ] }, { "when": "9 October 2026", "what": "Launchie moves to \"code mode\" on Cloudflare Dynamic Workers: it writes code that analyzes every row of a seller's account in a sandbox. The founder reports that its evaluation score rose from 93% to 98.5%.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Borrowed distribution, paid in equity", "text": "He had no audience, and he says zero audience means zero customers. Legacy X had thousands of active Amazon sellers who were looking for tools. He offered a working tool in 48 hours with no obligation and paid for the access with a share of the business. He argued that half of US$20,000 a month is better than half of nothing. Its students were customers from the first day, at a discount." }, { "title": "A tool for a problem he had himself", "text": "He was an Amazon seller who spent 20 to 30 hours on each product idea, copying data into Google Sheets. He says his 10 to 12 earlier projects failed because he built for users whom he did not know. Here he knew the data that new sellers need, and he started the build from Legacy X's own procedures and workflows." }, { "title": "AI coding tools instead of a developer", "text": "A founder who cannot code built the whole product in Cursor; he says he still cannot read a stack trace without AI help. He says the running costs after launch were minimal and that the only large one was Cursor's Max plan at US$200 a month." }, { "title": "From market estimates to the seller's own data", "text": "In 2026 the product added agent tools: an MCP server for Claude and other AI apps in February, connections to the seller's own Seller Central and Amazon Ads accounts in April, and official Amazon Solutions Provider status in September. The newer features work on data that each seller owns, not only on market estimates." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's two interviews, the company's site and changelog, and his posts on X. They are grade C.", "items": [ "The first version took 48 hours: hours 1 to 4 to map Legacy X's systems, standard procedures and data; 5 to 12 to build the core features in Cursor; 13 to 20 to test; 21 to 30 for branding and the interface; 31 to 40 for edge cases; then a demo video.", "The stack that he described on Starter Story: Cursor to write the code, Vercel for hosting, Supabase for the database, login and file storage (written \"Superbase\" in the transcript), Resend for onboarding emails, Apify for data collection, and TypeScript with Next.js.", "Data: market estimates of revenue, sales rank, reviews and price, supplier matches from Alibaba, and, on the Growth and Scale plans, the seller's own data through Amazon's Selling Partner API (SP-API), Amazon Ads reports and Brand Analytics, Amazon's own reports on search terms and categories. The terms say that outputs may include modeled or estimated values and information from third-party sources; no source names those third parties.", "AI: the plans include AI report credits, but no source names the model that writes the reports. The MCP server lets Claude, OpenAI's apps, Gemini and Cursor call Launch Fast's tools, and the customer's own AI app does the reasoning.", "Launchie, the company's own agent in the iPhone beta, runs its analysis code in a sandbox on Cloudflare Dynamic Workers, with read-only tools and no internet access.", "Payments go through Stripe, according to the terms. The site loads the DataFast analytics script." ], "src": [ 2, 3, 4, 7, 15 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold tools or data to online sellers and advertisers on top of a platform that they did not control. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "TradeGecko", "years": "2012 to 2021", "funding": "US$10.4M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Inventory and order management for small online sellers, connected to their store platforms.", "died": "After Intuit bought it, the focus moved to QuickBooks, and Shopify's own tools took its place.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/656-tradegecko" }, { "name": "Trada", "years": "2008 to 2015", "funding": "US$19M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Better Google Ads results by letting businesses hand their campaigns to outside experts.", "died": "Google automated ad management itself, and the paid human experts could not scale fast enough.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/655-trada" }, { "name": "Intent Media", "years": "2008 to 2018", "funding": "US$51M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Predict which online shoppers will buy, so that e-commerce ad spending pays.", "died": "Google and Facebook targeted better, and the GDPR privacy rules cut the data that its models needed.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/248-intent-media" }, { "name": "Kinnek", "years": "2012 to 2020", "funding": "US$25M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A marketplace that made it easy for small businesses to find and compare suppliers.", "died": "Amazon Business and Alibaba took over its supplier network.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/277-kinnek" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the four sold a tool or a data layer to online sellers or advertisers on top of a larger platform: Shopify stores, Google and Facebook ads, Amazon and Alibaba suppliers. Each lost when the platform owner or a giant built the same thing, or when privacy rules cut the data. Launch Fast sits in the same place: its data, its customers and its newest sales channel, Amazon's Seller App Store, all depend on Amazon, and Helium 10 and Jungle Scout already sell the same research.", "Two things differ. First, the cost: one founder who cannot code built it with an AI code editor for about US$200 a month, while the four predecessors raised US$10.4 million to US$51 million. A few hundred subscribers are enough for the revenue on this page. Second, it did not have to buy its first customers: a coaching program with thousands of students gave it a market on the first day in exchange for equity. In September 2026 it announced that it had become an official Amazon Solutions Provider with a Seller App Store listing, so it reads account data through a route that Amazon approves." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The distribution deal, yes. The 48-hour build is the easy part.", "text": "Many people can now build a working tool in a weekend with AI coding tools. The part worth copying is the order of work: pick a market that you know as a customer, find the company that already has those customers, show it a working product, and pay for the access with a share of the business instead of with years of audience building.", "steps": [ "Write down three to five fields where you have solved real problems yourself, as the founder suggests.", "List who already has your future customers: coaching companies, paid communities, influencer groups.", "Build a working first version in days from their workflows and data, and send them a demo video.", "Offer a partnership or equity for access, with a member price and a public price.", "Ship an improvement every day for the first 30 days, from the users' requests and bug reports." ], "open": "Coaching programs and paid communities in other trades, such as Etsy or Shopify sellers, real estate agents or freelancers, that teach a workflow but have no software of their own." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Self-reported, and the founder's share is unknown", "text": "Every revenue figure is the founder's own statement in two interviews. No payment processor confirms them, and no TrustMRR profile was found under the names launchfast or launch-fast. The Starter Story title says US$25K a month while the founder says about US$21,800 in the video. Legacy X holds equity of an undisclosed size, so his own part of the US$30,000 is not known." }, { "title": "One coaching partner brings the customers", "text": "The first customers were students of Legacy X, an \"FBA Mentorship\" that teaches people to sell on Amazon (FBA, Fulfillment by Amazon, is the Amazon service that stores and ships a seller's goods), and they paid a discounted US$50 a month. The early site said \"Built by LegacyX FBA\", and the terms still give its students a discount. If that program loses students, Launch Fast loses its main channel. The founder's own posts also use income promises, for example \"Making money on Amazon is too easy when you use Claude + Launch Fast\" (30 June 2026)." }, { "title": "Large, established competitors", "text": "Helium 10 shows its Platinum plan, for sellers with up to US$100,000 in yearly sales, at US$129 and US$99 a month, depending on monthly or yearly billing, and it now offers free skills for analysis in Claude. Jungle Scout says that more than 1 million sellers and brands use it. Both sell the same market research and can add the same AI features." }, { "title": "Amazon owns the data and the rules", "text": "The product exists only for Amazon sellers, and its paid features read each seller's account through Amazon's Selling Partner API, the Amazon Ads data and Amazon's own Brand Analytics. The founder wrote in August 2026 that SP-API compliance now requires WAF protection, encrypted credentials, login lockouts, penetration testing and strict data deletion. Amazon can change these terms or show the same research in Seller Central. Amazon's policy pages blocked automated download, so this page relies on the founder's account of them." }, { "title": "AI apps between the product and the customer", "text": "The newest features run inside Claude or Codex, which Launch Fast does not control: its own guide says the customer needs the Claude or Codex desktop app and that \"Your AI app may have its own access requirements.\" The plans sell AI report credits without naming the model that writes the reports. The founder says he still cannot read a stack trace without AI help, so the building also depends on AI coding tools." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://launchfastlegacyx.com" }, { "kind": "chrome", "url": "https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/aaanahdkbajinekpffbddfimfcnagbkm" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Indie Hackers, 2 June 2026: Building a product in 48 hours and hitting $30k MRR as a non-technical founder", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/tech/building-a-product-in-48-hours-and-hitting-30k-mrr-as-a-non-technical-founder-wWtWIH5tmwASUbxKaLT9", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the free part in full; the rest is for subscribers and could not be read. Founder interview by James Fleischmann. Source for the revenue at 30, 60 and 90 days, the US$30,000 MRR, the Legacy X pitch and the founder's other work." }, { "title": "Starter Story, 5 January 2026: I built a $25K MRR app with Cursor", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/hassam", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page and the full transcript. Founder interview. Source for the prices, the equity trade, the 48-hour build plan and the stack. The title says US$25K; in the video the founder says about US$21,800 at 90 days." }, { "title": "Launch Fast pricing page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://launchfastlegacyx.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the plans, credits and features. The prices are per month billed yearly; the monthly-billing prices load by script and could not be read." }, { "title": "Launch Fast terms", "url": "https://launchfastlegacyx.com/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Legacy X student discount, Stripe, the Texas governing law and the note on estimated and third-party data." }, { "title": "Launch Fast home page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://launchfastlegacyx.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product description, the MCP connections and the analytics script." }, { "title": "Launch Fast changelog", "url": "https://docs.launchfastlegacyx.com/changelog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the dated releases from December 2025 to September 2026." }, { "title": "Launch Fast: The MCP server for serious Amazon sellers", "url": "https://launchfastlegacyx.com/solutions/amazon-fba-mcp-server", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the MCP clients and the data types that the agent can call." }, { "title": "Launch Fast blog, September 2026: How to Connect Amazon to Claude or Codex with Launch Fast MCP", "url": "https://launchfastlegacyx.com/blog/review-amazon-sales-ads-claude-codex", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Solutions Provider status, the Seller App Store listing and the AI app requirement." }, { "title": "Chrome Web Store: Launch Fast, Amazon product research extension, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/launch-fast-amazon-fba-re/aaanahdkbajinekpffbddfimfcnagbkm", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 848 users, the rating, the version and the Alibaba supplier matching." }, { "title": "Internet Archive capture of launchfastlegacyx.com, 22 July 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250722011915/https://launchfastlegacyx.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The first capture of the site. Source for the earliest date and the \"Built by LegacyX FBA\" label." }, { "title": "Internet Archive capture of launchfastlegacyx.com, 15 August 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250815052949/https://launchfastlegacyx.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for Dashboard v1.3 and the Chrome extension in August 2025." }, { "title": "Hasaam Bhatti's X profile (@hasaamb)", "url": "https://x.com/hasaamb", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile through api.fxtwitter.com. Ties the founder to Launch Fast and gives his location." }, { "title": "Hasaam Bhatti on X, 11 September 2026: Launch Fast is now an official Amazon Solutions Provider", "url": "https://x.com/hasaamb/status/2098455378639966520", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in the founder's timeline through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the Solutions Provider status, the iPhone app and the TestFlight beta." }, { "title": "Hasaam Bhatti on X, 12 August 2026: Amazon SP-API compliance", "url": "https://x.com/hasaamb/status/2087655017691885739", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in the founder's timeline through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the compliance rules." }, { "title": "Hasaam Bhatti on X, 9 October 2026: Launchie on Cloudflare Dynamic Workers", "url": "https://x.com/hasaamb/status/2108573699083235646", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in the founder's timeline through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the agent sandbox and the evaluation scores." }, { "title": "Hasaam Bhatti on X, 3 September 2026: Notara", "url": "https://x.com/hasaamb/status/2095520013377536251", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in the founder's timeline through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for his other product and his work with companies." }, { "title": "Hasaam Bhatti on X, 30 June 2026: Making money on Amazon is too easy", "url": "https://x.com/hasaamb/status/2071797622205972788", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in the founder's timeline through api.fxtwitter.com. An example of the income promise in his posts." }, { "title": "Helium 10 pricing page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://www.helium10.com/pricing/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A competitor's prices and its Claude skills." }, { "title": "Jungle Scout pricing page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://www.junglescout.com/pricing/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A competitor's claim of more than 1 million sellers and brands." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/sleek/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/sleek.md", "slug": "sleek", "name": "Sleek", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI designer for mobile app screens", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-15", "launchLabel": "17 November 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$20.5K a month in recurring revenue, October 2026", "sticker": "$247K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 246516, "months": 11, "teamLabel": "3 co-founders who are friends; no employees named in any source", "fundingLabel": "None found", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "build-software", "channel": "audience", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Design tools" ], "product": "A web app that designs the screens of an iPhone or Android app from one sentence or a reference image, with AI. You chat to change the design, then paste it into Figma as editable layers, export HTML or React code, or send it to an app builder. AI coding agents can also use it through an API.", "why": "It took a narrower job than the general AI design tools, mobile apps only, for people who build apps without design skills. The three founders reused what they had learned from four earlier design tools, built it in three weeks, and showed finished designs on X before the launch. Each new Gemini model gave them a better result and a new demo to post.", "summary": [ "Sleek is an AI app designer, a web tool that draws the screens of a mobile app from a written description. The user types an idea, for example a finance app, or attaches a reference image, and Sleek returns every screen in one style for iOS or Android. The work is done by a large language model, a program trained on very large amounts of text and images that can produce a design from a request; Sleek has announced Google's Gemini 3.0 and Gemini 3.1 Pro as live in the product. The designs paste into Figma, a design program, as editable layers, or export as HTML or React code. Prices go from free to US$99 per seat a month and are counted in credits, units of AI work: about 30 credits for each new screen.", "Three friends built it: Mattia Pomelli, who had been coding for about eight years, Stefano and Niccolò Diana. In one year they built four design tools together, and Sleek is the last of them. They built it in three weeks, posted its designs on X, and launched it on Product Hunt on 17 November 2025. In January 2026 Pomelli told Indie Hackers that it reached US$10,000 in MRR, monthly recurring revenue, the amount that subscriptions bring in each month, within a month of launch and without spending money on marketing. The service is operated by 140g Labs LLC, a company registered in Wyoming in the United States. Two of the founders show an Italian flag on their X profiles, and two describe themselves as nomads.", "The later numbers are verified. Sleek's Stripe account is connected to TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from the payment processor, the company that charges the customers' cards, so those figures are grade A. Revenue was highest in April 2026, at US$32,436, and was US$20,456 in September. On 15 October 2026 MRR was US$20,543 from 589 subscriptions, a run rate, the current monthly figure times twelve, of about US$246,516 a year. The business has been listed for sale since May 2026, and the asking price in October 2026 is US$500,000. The page also shows earlier companies that promised to design software for people and lost to larger platforms." ], "factsCaption": "US$10,000 a month within a month of launch by the founder's account, then Stripe-verified revenue that peaked at US$32,436 in April 2026 and was about US$20,500 a month in October", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from Sleek's Stripe account through TrustMRR. A grade C value is a statement by the founders, by the company's own pages or by a third party. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From the first post about AI designs for mobile apps in October 2025 to US$20,543 a month in October 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Sleek prices in October 2026, from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "Yearly plans are paid at once: US$240, US$360 and US$490 per seat a year; the per-month numbers here are those amounts divided by 12. A new screen uses about 30 credits and an edit 5 to 30, so Starter's 3,000 credits make about 100 new screens a month. Every plan includes export to Figma and to code, limited on the free plan. Pro and Team include the API for AI coding agents. Payments go through Stripe, and there are no refunds.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "60 one-time credits, 1 project, 3 screens" ], [ "Starter", "20", "29", "3,000 credits a month" ], [ "Pro", "30", "69", "20,000 credits a month; API and agent skill" ], [ "Team", "40.83 per seat", "99 per seat", "30,000 credits per seat a month" ], [ "Extra credits, Pro and Team", "", "15 one-time", "5,000 credits that do not expire" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Recurring revenue per month (MRR), 15 October 2026", "value": "US$20,543", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, from Stripe through an API key. 589 active subscriptions. MRR fell 11.6% in the last 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the October 2026 MRR", "value": "about US$246,516 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$20,543 times 12. This is the headline number on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Best verified month", "value": "US$32,436, April 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly revenue from Stripe. May: US$27,865. June: US$24,425. July: US$25,159. August: US$24,908.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in September 2026", "value": "US$20,456", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly revenue from Stripe.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Fall from the best month", "value": "36.9% below April, 17.6% below the June to August average", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the monthly Stripe figures in the rows above.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the 30 days to 15 October 2026", "value": "US$17,640", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. 15.4% less than in the 30 days before.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the connected Stripe account, March to 15 October 2026", "value": "US$177,396", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR's all-time figure. The account shows no revenue before March 2026, so the first four months after the launch are not in it.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR per active subscription, October 2026", "value": "about US$34.88", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$20,543 divided by 589. It lies between the monthly prices of Starter (US$29) and Pro (US$69).", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "MRR within a month of launch", "value": "US$10,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in the Indie Hackers interview of 13 January 2026, reached without spending money on marketing. The article's title says six weeks and its introduction says two months.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "MRR after six months, May 2026", "value": "US$25,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Post by the podcast host Florian Darroman on 28 May 2026 about his interview with the founders. It agrees with the Stripe months of April and May.", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR in a co-founder's X profile, October 2026", "value": "US$21,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Stefano's profile, read on 15 October 2026, next to a target of US$100,000. It agrees with the Stripe figure.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Users", "value": "more than 60,000 app makers", "grade": "C", "note": "Company's pricing page, October 2026. The 589 active subscriptions are about 1% of that number (calculated).", "src": [ 5, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Product Hunt launch", "value": "17 November 2025, 210 points", "grade": "C", "note": "Product Hunt page. 245 followers in October 2026.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's followers on X", "value": "about 8,000 at launch, 16,446 in October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's reply on Indie Hackers, 14 January 2026, and his X profile.", "src": [ 2, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "3 co-founders, no employees named", "grade": "C", "note": "Mattia Pomelli, Stefano (X handle stefanofa) and Niccolò Diana. The founder says he built four design tools with two friends in one year.", "src": [ 1, 2, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Operating company", "value": "140g Labs LLC, Wyoming", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms of service and privacy policy. The company does business as Sleek, with an address in Sheridan, Wyoming.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "No downloaded source mentions an investor, a funding round or an accelerator.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "For sale", "value": "listed since 20 May 2026, asking US$500,000 in October 2026, 7 offers", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR listing, written by the founders. TrustMRR shows it as 2.4 times revenue; it is 2.0 times the run rate above (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "90.0%", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR profile. It is outside the Stripe-verified section of the profile, so the costs behind it are not verified.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time to build", "value": "three weeks", "grade": "C", "note": "Indie Hackers interview, 13 January 2026. The article has a section called Reusing code.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October 2026 figure", "value": "11 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: November 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 9, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "27 February 2025", "what": "sleek.design is a waitlist page, \"Made by Reweb\", for a tool that builds landing pages and exports React and Tailwind code. The Sleek account on X is created the same day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10, 3 ] }, { "when": "31 October 2025", "what": "Mattia Pomelli posts that he has been working on design generation for mobile apps and asks people to reply to try it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "3 to 10 November 2025", "what": "Five posts of app designs made with one prompt each: a sleep tracker, a language-learning app, an expense tracker, a meditation app and a book-summaries app.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "12 November 2025", "what": "Early-access post on X: people comment the word \"sleek\" to get access.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "17 November 2025", "what": "Public launch on Product Hunt, 210 points. The founder has about 8,000 followers on X.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 2 ] }, { "when": "20 November 2025", "what": "Gemini 3.0 is live on Sleek.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "24 November 2025", "what": "The founder offers to design, with Sleek, the app idea of anyone who comments on his post.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "16 December 2025 and 8 January 2026", "what": "One-click export to two app builders: Anything, then a0.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "13 January 2026", "what": "Indie Hackers interview: US$10,000 a month in recurring revenue within a month of launch, with no money spent on marketing.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "23 and 25 February 2026", "what": "Gemini 3.1 Pro goes live on Sleek. An API lets AI agents such as Cursor and Claude make designs in Sleek.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "14 March 2026", "what": "The privacy policy is updated and names 140g Labs LLC, a Wyoming company, as the operator.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "March 2026", "what": "Revenue starts in the Stripe account that TrustMRR verifies: US$14,316 in the first month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "25 March 2026", "what": "A Sleek Design Skill for Claude Code, Codex and other AI agents.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "April 2026", "what": "Best verified month: US$32,436.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "20 May 2026", "what": "Listed for sale on TrustMRR. The asking price in October 2026 is US$500,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "28 May 2026", "what": "Podcast with the co-founders, announced as zero to US$25,000 in MRR in six months.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "US$20,456 in the month, 36.9% below April.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "15 October 2026", "what": "MRR of US$20,543 from 589 active subscriptions. Still for sale, with 7 offers received.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Niche", "text": "The founder saw fewer design and coding tools for mobile apps than for the web, and built only for that: app founders and developers who cannot design and do not have the time or money to hire a designer. Every screen of an app comes out in one style, for iOS or Android." }, { "title": "Reuse", "text": "The three founders had built four design tools in the year before. In February 2025 the same domain held a waitlist for a landing-page builder that exported React and Tailwind code. Sleek took three weeks to build." }, { "title": "Show the output before the launch", "text": "In the two weeks before launch the founder posted app designs made with one prompt each on X, then asked people to comment the word \"sleek\" to get early access. After the launch he designed commenters' app ideas for free. He says no money was spent on marketing to reach US$10,000 a month." }, { "title": "A new demo with each new model", "text": "Sleek announced Gemini 3.0 three days after its launch and Gemini 3.1 Pro in February 2026, each with a demo design made with one prompt. The founders also post the same prompt run on several models, which gives them regular content to post." }, { "title": "Connect to the tools builders already use", "text": "Designs paste into Figma as editable layers, export as HTML or React with Tailwind CSS, and go to the app builders Anything and a0 in one click. Since February 2026 AI coding agents can make designs in Sleek through an API." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founders' own pages and posts: the TrustMRR profile text, the privacy policy, the pricing page and their X posts. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Models: Google's Gemini. Sleek announced Gemini 3.0 on 20 November 2025 and Gemini 3.1 Pro on 23 February 2026. The founders also post tests of GPT 5.4 and Grok 4.1, without saying that Sleek uses them.", "The TrustMRR profile lists Next.js, React, TypeScript and Tailwind CSS for the frontend, and Supabase, PostgreSQL, Vercel, Cloudflare, GitHub Actions, Resend, Stripe, Anthropic and OpenAI for the backend.", "The privacy policy names four service providers: PostHog for analytics and session recording, Supabase for login and the database, Stripe for payments and Resend for email. Users sign in with Google or GitHub.", "Use is counted in credits: about 30 for a new screen and 5 to 30 for an edit, more when images are generated. Customers who make more designs need a larger plan or extra credits.", "Exports: one click copies a design into Figma as native, editable layers, with no plugin. Code export gives HTML or React with Tailwind CSS.", "Since February 2026 a REST API, and since March 2026 an agent skill, let Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and other agents make designs in Sleek, on the Pro and Team plans.", "A blog with comparison posts, guides and use cases, started for search traffic by January 2026, and an affiliate program run on Tolt, linked from the home page." ], "src": [ 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 2 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised to design apps or websites for people, or to carry designs into code, and failed: one because its AI was not ready, three because Figma or another larger design platform added the same features. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "The Grid", "years": "2014 to 2020", "funding": "US$4.7M", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "A website that AI designs by itself from your content, with no designer.", "died": "It bet on AI before the AI was ready: the designs were clumsy and inconsistent, and Wix and Squarespace offered polished templates.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/618-the-grid" }, { "name": "Pixate", "years": "2012 to 2016", "funding": "US$3.6M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Native mobile app prototypes, with animations, without writing code.", "died": "Google bought it and did not develop it further. Figma and Sketch took the market with web-based tools for teams.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/434-pixate" }, { "name": "Invision", "years": "2011 to 2023", "funding": "US$350M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Interactive prototypes and a smooth handoff from designers to developers.", "died": "Figma offered real-time collaboration in the browser, and InVision could not change fast enough.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/251-invision" }, { "name": "Haiku", "years": "2018 to 2021", "funding": "US$1.2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "High-fidelity animations and prototypes that go straight into the code.", "died": "Figma and Adobe XD added more prototyping features, which reduced the need for a separate tool. The 2020 downturn ended it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1013-haiku" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The Grid promised in 2014 that AI would design a website from your content, and its designs were not good enough. By 2025 the models were good enough for a narrow job: Sleek's founder posted app screens made with one prompt before the launch, and customers paid within weeks. Pixate, InVision and Haiku show the other danger. Each made one step of app design easier, and each lost when Figma, a larger platform, added that step.", "Sleek faces both sides at once. It does not make its own models: it runs on Google's Gemini, and Google offers Stitch, which also pastes designs into Figma and exports code. Figma has First Draft and Figma Make inside the program that designers already use, and Anthropic, which is in Sleek's tech stack list, launched Claude Design in April 2026. Sleek's answer so far is the narrow focus on mobile apps, fast releases, and connections to app builders and AI coding agents. Its verified revenue fell 36.9% from April to September 2026. AppAlchemy, another AI app designer on this site, fell 66.4% from November 2025 to September 2026, and Sleek still makes about 3.5 times as much a month." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The launch method, yes. The niche is getting crowded.", "text": "The method costs no money: a clear buyer, finished designs posted in public before the launch, an early-access list made from comments, and a Product Hunt launch. But designing mobile screens from a prompt is now also a feature of products from Figma, Google and Anthropic, so a new tool in the same niche starts against them.", "steps": [ "Choose a narrow design job that the general tools do less well, and name the buyer: here, app founders who cannot design.", "Before the launch, post real output made with your tool, and ask people to comment to get early access.", "Export into the tools the buyer already uses: Figma layers, React code, app builders and coding agents.", "Post a demo on the day each new model arrives." ], "open": "Narrow design jobs around a mobile app that the large tools do not target yet, such as App Store screenshots and app icons, which Sleek itself has added, and design work done for AI coding agents through an API." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue has fallen since April 2026", "text": "Verified monthly revenue went from US$32,436 in April 2026 to US$20,456 in September, and MRR fell 11.6% in the last 30 days. No source gives the reason. The founders listed the business for sale in May 2026, a month after the best month." }, { "title": "Figma builds the same feature into its own program", "text": "Figma announced Make Designs, an app-design generator, at its Config 2024 conference, disabled it when its mockups looked too much like existing apps, and brought it back as First Draft in limited beta on 24 September 2024, using OpenAI's GPT-4 and Amazon Titan. On 7 May 2025 it launched Figma Make, a prompt-to-app tool. Figma is also the main place that Sleek's designs go." }, { "title": "Google offers a competitor on the model Sleek uses", "text": "Sleek runs on Gemini. On 20 May 2025 Google introduced Stitch, which designs user interfaces from a plain-English description with Gemini 2.5 Pro, pastes the result into Figma and exports front-end code: the same two exports that Sleek offers." }, { "title": "Anthropic has a design product too", "text": "On 17 April 2026 Anthropic launched Claude Design, powered by Claude Opus 4.7, for designs, prototypes and other visual work, in research preview for paying Claude subscribers. Anthropic is in the tech stack list of Sleek's own profile." }, { "title": "A crowded field", "text": "Sleek's own site keeps comparison pages against seven other tools: Claude Design, Google Stitch, Uizard, Visily, Figma Make, ScreensDesign and App Alchemy. Against more than 60,000 users claimed on the site, 589 active subscriptions are about 1%." }, { "title": "Dependence on model providers", "text": "Sleek does not make its own models, so the quality of its designs, and the cost of each credit, depend on Google and the other providers. When a provider improves its own design product, Sleek's lead becomes smaller. The founders' public tests of Gemini, GPT and Grok show that they can change models, and so can every competitor." }, { "title": "The early figures are founder statements", "text": "The connected Stripe account starts in March 2026. The US$10,000 a month after the first month and the US$25,000 after six months are founder statements, and the Indie Hackers article gives three different times for the first: one month, six weeks and two months." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://sleek.design/" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/sleek-design" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/sleek" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: Sleek, Stripe-verified revenue and sale listing", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/sleek", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile (https://trustmrr.com/startup/sleek.md) on 15 October 2026, data as of October 2026. Revenue, MRR and subscriptions come from Stripe through an API key and are grade A. The description, founded date, country, tech stack, marketing channels, profit margin and sale listing are written by the founders, grade C." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 13 January 2026: Hitting $10k MRR in six weeks with an AI design tool, by James Fleischmann", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/tech/hitting-10k-mrr-in-six-weeks-with-an-ai-design-tool-pEvmU5qkWS6ny0AR9SUv", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the free part: the title, the introduction, the table of contents and the founder's first section. The rest is for signed-in members and was not read. Read the comments, including the founder's replies of 14 and 16 January 2026." }, { "title": "Sleek on X (@sleekdotdesign): account and posts, 31 October 2025 to 7 July 2026, with the founders' posts that it reposts", "url": "https://x.com/sleekdotdesign", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the account data and all 34 posts that the fxtwitter API returns (api.fxtwitter.com/2/profile/sleekdotdesign/statuses, two pages). Source for the launch posts, the model updates, the API and the integrations." }, { "title": "Florian Darroman on X, 28 May 2026: new podcast with the Sleek founders, 0 to $25K MRR in 6 months", "url": "https://x.com/floriandarroman/status/2059892800230244838", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the post through api.fxtwitter.com. The podcast itself was not found and not heard." }, { "title": "Sleek pricing page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://sleek.design/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the plans, the credits, the exports, the API and the user count." }, { "title": "Sleek terms of service (last updated 8 September 2026) and privacy policy (last updated 14 March 2026)", "url": "https://sleek.design/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the operating company and the affiliate program, and the service providers in the privacy policy at https://sleek.design/privacy." }, { "title": "Sleek home page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://sleek.design/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the comparison pages, the affiliate link and the exports." }, { "title": "X profiles of the three co-founders, read 15 October 2026: mattiapomelli, stefanofa and NiccoloDiana", "url": "https://x.com/mattiapomelli", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the three profiles through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for their roles, follower counts and the MRR in Stefano's profile." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: sleek.design, Idea to mobile app designs in minutes", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/sleek-design/launches/sleek-design", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the launch date, the points and the follower count." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine, 27 February 2025: sleek.design", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250227171424/https://sleek.design/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the archived page in full, and the list of captures for the date of the first one in 2025." }, { "title": "Figma blog, 24 September 2024: Building a better First Draft for designers", "url": "https://www.figma.com/blog/figma-ai-first-draft/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for Make Designs, its removal and its return as First Draft." }, { "title": "Figma blog, 7 May 2025: Introducing Figma Make: A new way to test, edit, and prompt designs", "url": "https://www.figma.com/blog/introducing-figma-make/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full." }, { "title": "Google Developers Blog, 20 May 2025: From idea to app: Introducing Stitch, a new way to design UIs", "url": "https://developers.googleblog.com/en/stitch-a-new-way-to-design-uis/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full." }, { "title": "Anthropic news, 17 April 2026: Claude Design, a new Anthropic Labs product", "url": "https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-design-anthropic-labs", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full." }, { "title": "TrustMRR: AppAlchemy, Stripe-verified monthly revenue", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/appalchemy", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile, local copy synced 12 October 2026. Used only for the comparison with AppAlchemy." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/setter-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/setter-ai.md", "slug": "setter-ai", "name": "Setter AI", "country": "Germany, US company", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI appointment setter on WhatsApp and website chat", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-15", "launchLabel": "February 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$104K revenue in the last 12 months, October 2026", "sticker": "$104K in 12 months", "outcomeUsd": 104336, "months": 32, "teamLabel": "2 founders, no staff count published", "fundingLabel": "None found", "primaryFactor": "Speed", "group": "support-agents", "channel": "search", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Sales" ], "product": "A business connects its lead forms, for example Facebook lead ads, LinkedIn forms or a website form, through Zapier or Make. About 10 seconds after each form arrives, Setter AI sends the person a WhatsApp message, answers questions, asks qualifying questions, follows up when there is no reply, and books the meeting in Calendly or Google Calendar. A chat window does the same on the business's website, and WhatsApp reminders reduce missed meetings.", "why": "It sold one promise that a customer can measure: a first reply to every new lead within 10 seconds, to businesses that already pay for many leads through Meta ads. A demo on the website brought sales calls through organic search before the product was built. Revenue then fell from US$9,000 to US$12,000 a month in late 2025 to under US$2,000 in September 2026, in the same months in which the founder launched other products.", "summary": [ "Setter AI is an AI appointment setter, a program that does the job of a human appointment setter: it contacts each new sales lead, asks a few questions and books a sales call for the business. A lead here is a person who filled in a form to ask for information, for example a Facebook lead ad, an ad with a form built into it. About 10 seconds after the form arrives, Setter AI writes to the person on WhatsApp, answers questions about the business and books a time in the business's Calendly or Google Calendar. A chat window on the business's website does the same for visitors. The company's FAQ says that WhatsApp and text messages are for following up \"with leads that have submitted a form\", so the AI writes to people who asked to be contacted.", "Josef Büttgen, a German software developer who had spent two years in Southeast Asia, started it with a co-founder in February 2024, three months into a \"12 startups in 12 months\" challenge that he began when his savings were running out. Product Hunt names Timo Nikolai as the second maker. The first version phoned each lead with an AI voice. By November 2024 it worked on WhatsApp, and in mid-2025 it added the website chat, launched on Product Hunt on 30 July 2025. On 29 July 2025 Büttgen told Indie Hackers that it made US$10,000 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the subscription revenue that repeats every month. TrustMRR, a site that reads a startup's revenue directly from its payment processor, shows US$211,323 in total revenue from Stripe and US$104,336 in the 12 months to 15 October 2026. It also shows a fall: US$12,447 in November 2025, US$1,796 in September 2026, and an MRR of US$1,528 from 14 subscriptions in October 2026.", "The headline number is grade A, because TrustMRR reads it from the company's Stripe account through an API key. The July 2025 figure and most details of how the product was built are the founders' own statements, grade C. The page also explains the rules that apply when software sends automated messages to leads on WhatsApp, by text message in the US and to people in the EU, and it shows five failed startups that sold automated sales conversations before large language models existed." ], "factsCaption": "Stripe-verified revenue of US$211,323 in total and US$104,336 in the last 12 months, followed by a fall to US$1,528 in monthly recurring revenue by October 2026", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from TrustMRR, which reads it from the company's Stripe account or its Google Analytics through an API. A grade C value is a statement by the founders, the company's own pages or a third party. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From an AI that phoned new leads in 2024 to a WhatsApp and website booking agent, then a fall in revenue, in 32 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Setter AI plans on 15 October 2026, from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "The page lists three plans by number of credits, without plan names, and shows each credit amount doubled, marked \"For Limited Period\" on the monthly plans. It does not define a credit; the FAQ says that pricing is per lead and gets cheaper as the number of leads grows. All plans include unlimited messages and unlimited agents. Yearly billing is 13% to 20% cheaper than monthly billing. In May 2025 the company's blog listed much lower prices: free for 10 leads, then US$49, US$199 and US$499 a month for 50, 250 and 750 leads.", "rows": [ [ "500 credits a month", "397", "497", "1,000 credits during the offer; onboarding support, email support" ], [ "2,500 credits a month", "1,997", "2,297", "5,000 credits during the offer; onboarding done for you, email and Zoom support" ], [ "5,000 credits a month", "2,997", "3,497", "10,000 credits during the offer; custom integrations, 24/7 email and Zoom support" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue in the 12 months to 15 October 2026", "value": "US$104,336", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from Stripe through an API key, last synced 15 October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue since the start", "value": "US$211,323", "grade": "A", "note": "Same source, all Stripe payments up to 15 October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before the last 12 months", "value": "US$106,987", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$211,323 minus US$104,336. This covers February 2024 to mid-October 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue per month, November 2025 to January 2026", "value": "US$12,447, US$9,371 and US$8,914", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline from Stripe. These months are of the same size as the US$10,000 MRR reported in July 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Best month in the verified timeline", "value": "US$19,761 in May 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. The sources do not say what made this month higher.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue per month, August and September 2026", "value": "US$2,894 and US$1,796", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 15 October 2026", "value": "US$1,528 from 14 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR metric snapshot from Stripe. MRR fell 1.2% in the last 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average MRR per active subscription", "value": "about US$109 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$1,528 divided by 14. The cheapest plan on today's pricing page costs US$397 a month, so at most 3 of the 14 subscriptions can be on a listed plan; the rest pay less than any plan the page shows.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Fall from November 2025 to September 2026", "value": "86% less revenue in the month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$1,796 against US$12,447. September 2026 is also 91% below the best month, May 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, July 2025", "value": "US$10,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview on Indie Hackers, 29 July 2025: \"Revenue $10K a month\", reached \"a little over a year\" after he found the idea.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "MRR in October 2026 compared with July 2025", "value": "85% lower", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$1,528 against US$10,000.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin in the last 30 days", "value": "90%", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot. The profile does not say where the cost figures come from.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Website visitors in the last 30 days", "value": "2,594, or US$0.69 of revenue per visitor", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR reads traffic from Google Analytics through its API. Google Search Console is also connected.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Leads turned into meetings in the June 2024 case study", "value": "215 meetings from 4,197 leads, 5.12%", "grade": "C", "note": "Company blog post by Büttgen: two weeks of Facebook lead ads for a real estate project in Indonesia, with 7,989 AI phone calls including follow-ups. Calculated check: 215 divided by 4,197 is 5.12%.", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "fact": "Booking rate claimed today", "value": "15% to 52% of leads", "grade": "C", "note": "Homepage claim. No customer data is shown with it.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Price of the smallest plan today", "value": "US$497 a month, or US$397 a month billed yearly", "grade": "C", "note": "Pricing page, 15 October 2026. The page does not define a credit; the FAQ says that pricing is per lead.", "src": [ 4, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Price list in May 2025", "value": "free for 10 leads, then US$49, US$199 and US$499 a month for 50, 250 and 750 leads", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's blog post that compares it with CloseBot.", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 founders", "grade": "C", "note": "Büttgen writes of \"my Co-Founder\". Product Hunt names Josef Büttgen and Timo Nikolai as the makers, and Nikolai wrote of the company as \"us\" six weeks after the start. No staff count is published.", "src": [ 2, 7, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "Büttgen wrote in May 2024 that he was waiting for a reply from Y Combinator; YC's company directory has no page for Setter AI. In May 2026 he wrote that Stripe had mentioned him in a session on \"the rise of bootstrapped businesses and solopreneurs\".", "src": [ 11, 21, 20 ] }, { "fact": "Operating company", "value": "Setter AI LLC, United States", "grade": "C", "note": "Named in the site footer and the terms; TrustMRR lists the country as US. The sitemap and footer show no German Impressum page, and a North Data search finds no German company named Setter AI.", "src": [ 3, 5, 1, 23, 22 ] }, { "fact": "Product Hunt launches", "value": "5th product of the day on 9 January 2025, 8th on 30 July 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Product Hunt page data.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the start to the headline figure", "value": "32 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: February 2024 to October 2026. Nikolai's post of 15 March 2024, \"6 weeks in\", points to 2 February 2024, the founded date on TrustMRR.", "src": [ 1, 8 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Before 2024", "what": "Büttgen, who taught himself to code at 13, studies computer science, works as a freelancer to save money, and travels Southeast Asia for two years. A product that he built for almost a year, CourseStart, gets little traction.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "2 February 2024", "what": "Three months into a \"12 startups in 12 months\" challenge, begun when his savings ran low, Büttgen and a co-founder start Setter AI. This is the founded date on TrustMRR. Six weeks later Nikolai posts that people are \"already recommending us\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 1, 8 ] }, { "when": "29 March to 5 April 2024", "what": "The first version calls each new lead within 10 seconds with an AI voice and books the meeting into the calendar. A demo post blames its delay on \"slow Bali internet\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 10 ] }, { "when": "9 May 2024", "what": "Büttgen writes that he is waiting for a reply from Y Combinator and has moved country twice to extend his money: \"This is our last shot.\" YC's directory has no Setter AI page.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11, 21 ] }, { "when": "12 May 2024", "what": "Booked demo calls \"got a bit out of hand\" after Nikolai's posts spread widely on X, so visitors now answer qualifying questions before they can book.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "24 June 2024", "what": "Case study: a real estate project in Indonesia books 215 meetings from 4,197 Facebook form leads in two weeks with AI phone calls.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "20 November 2024", "what": "Büttgen offers access to an AI appointment setter for WhatsApp that books meetings into Calendly and needs no coding.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "9 January 2025", "what": "First Product Hunt launch, as \"Calendly for WhatsApp\": 5th product of the day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "22 January 2025", "what": "Help article: messages that the business sends first on WhatsApp go out through Zapier with a template from the customer's Meta Business Account.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "9 May 2025", "what": "Price list on the company blog: free for 10 leads, US$49 a month for 50 leads, up to US$499 a month for 750 leads.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "when": "29 July 2025", "what": "Indie Hackers interview: US$10,000 in monthly recurring revenue.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "30 July 2025", "what": "Second Product Hunt launch, \"after half a year of shipping\": a chat agent that turns website visitors into booked calls. 8th product of the day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 17 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "Stripe-verified revenue of US$12,447 in the month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "23 to 25 November 2025", "what": "Büttgen launches a separate product, ProspectEcho, which finds contact details of companies that run Facebook ads. By his count the launch brings \"$0 USD new MRR\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 18 ] }, { "when": "15 January 2026", "what": "WhatsApp's new business terms against general-purpose AI assistants take effect. Meta says that businesses using AI to serve their own customers are not affected.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 24 ] }, { "when": "January to April 2026", "what": "Büttgen posts other new products: yourformsite, OnlyCats, TalkToYourComputer and CartGhost.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 20 ] }, { "when": "12 March 2026", "what": "Büttgen writes that OpenAI has permanently restricted his account and that the appeal decision is final.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 19 ] }, { "when": "May 2026", "what": "Best month in the Stripe timeline: US$19,761.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "US$1,796 in the month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "15 October 2026", "what": "MRR of US$1,528 from 14 subscriptions; US$104,336 in the last 12 months and US$211,323 in total. Plans on the pricing page start at US$397 a month billed yearly.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 4 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A reply within 10 seconds", "text": "The product sells response time. A lead who filled in a form gets the first message about 10 seconds later, and follow-ups continue until the lead replies or books. In the June 2024 case study, a real estate project on the island of Sumba, Indonesia, booked 215 meetings from 4,197 Facebook form leads in two weeks with AI phone calls, a rate of 5.12%. The homepage now claims 15% to 52%, without data." }, { "title": "Sell the demo before the product", "text": "Büttgen wrote on Indie Hackers that his co-founder's simple \"mocked\" demo on the website already brought sales calls through organic search before they started building, and that this was their first test of demand. One section title of the interview is \"Shipping and selling within two weeks\"." }, { "title": "Connect to leads that customers already buy", "text": "Customers already pay for leads: the real estate project in the case study runs Facebook lead ads, and a customer quote on the homepage speaks of 30,000 leads a month. Setter AI connects to such forms through Zapier or Make and books into Calendly, so the customer's sales process does not change. Accounts with more than 500 leads a month get the setup done for them." }, { "title": "Change the channel, keep the promise", "text": "The first version made phone calls with an AI voice in spring 2024. By November 2024 it worked on WhatsApp, and in January 2025 it was launched on Product Hunt as \"Calendly for WhatsApp\". A website chat followed in mid-2025 and was launched on Product Hunt on 30 July 2025, and a text-message version was shown as \"Launching soon\" in October 2026." }, { "title": "Search pages as the sales channel", "text": "The sitemap lists 129 pages: 41 blog posts, most of them comparisons with rival tools, 57 pages about WhatsApp business numbers by country, and 5 free tools such as a WhatsApp link generator. TrustMRR shows a domain rating of 43 and 2,594 visitors in the last 30 days. Büttgen wrote that they choose content by \"gut feeling\" and by checking what people search for in the tool Ahrefs." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder-written part of the TrustMRR profile, the company's own pages and the source code of its website. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Web app: Svelte, Tailwind CSS and TypeScript. Backend: Supabase, Redis, hosting on Render and DigitalOcean, Cloudflare, Clerk for login, Sentry for error tracking, and Stripe for payments.", "The language model comes from OpenAI: the tech stack lists OpenAI, and Product Hunt describes it as a \"ChatGPT powered appointment setter\". No source says which model version.", "WhatsApp messages go out through the customer's own WhatsApp Business number. A message that the business sends first needs a template created in the customer's Meta Business Account.", "Lead forms connect through Zapier or Make. Calendars connect through Calendly and Google Calendar, under Google's rules for API data. GoHighLevel and HubSpot are connected on request, and the footer links a WordPress plugin.", "The marketing website runs on Webflow, with Plausible, Microsoft Clarity and Google Tag Manager for analytics, Meta and LinkedIn advertising pixels, and an affiliate program that loads a script from Tolt, an affiliate-tracking service.", "The terms still describe \"automated lead calling\" and \"AI voice agents\" from the first, phone-based version. The FAQ says the AI speaks more than 113 languages." ], "src": [ 1, 7, 15, 6, 3, 5 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold automated conversations that would turn an interested person into a buyer or a booked meeting, or sold the same scheduling work done by people. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Zirtual", "years": "2011 to 2015", "funding": "US$5.5M", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "Human virtual assistants who handled email and scheduling for busy executives.", "died": "It employed its assistants and grew the payroll faster than its cash allowed. The money ran out in the middle of an expansion.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1850-zirtual" }, { "name": "Answerly", "years": "2013 to 2016", "funding": "US$550K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Chatbots that answered customers' common questions, so that people handled only the hard cases.", "died": "Language software was too weak at the time to hold a real conversation, and Zendesk and Intercom already had the customers.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2168-answerly" }, { "name": "RightHello", "years": "2014 to 2022", "funding": "US$600K", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "Live chat for online shops that turned website visitors into buyers with well-timed conversations.", "died": "Intercom raised US$240 million for the same kind of tool. With US$600,000, RightHello could not compete.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2260-righthello" }, { "name": "Vanti", "years": "2019 to 2024", "funding": "US$18M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "AI chatbots that gave shoppers personal advice and recommendations on behalf of brands.", "died": "It found no lasting demand in a crowded market for conversational AI. Customers were expensive to win and hard to connect.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2508-vanti" }, { "name": "Ve Interactive", "years": "2009 to 2017", "funding": "US$60M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Automatic messages that brought back shoppers who had left items in their cart.", "died": "It was paid only when a sale happened, and it spent US$60 million on growth before that model could pay for itself.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2160-ve-interactive" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The five predecessors sold the same result as Setter AI: an interested person turned into a sale or a booked meeting without a salesperson's time. Zirtual did the scheduling with paid human assistants and could not afford them. Answerly's bots came before language software could hold a conversation. RightHello and Vanti sold chat tools against much better funded competitors, and Ve Interactive was paid only for each sale.", "Two things are different for Setter AI. A large language model from OpenAI holds the conversation in many languages, so no person is needed between the form and the calendar. WhatsApp's business platform, Zapier and Calendly supply the channel, the connections and the booking, so two people could build and sell it without funding. What has not changed is the competition: the company's own blog has comparison pages about rivals such as CloseBot, Lindy, Artisan, Structurely, Air AI, Bland AI, Synthflow, Respond.io, Wati and Manychat, and its Stripe revenue fell by 86% between November 2025 and September 2026." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The niche, crowded.", "text": "Two people without funding built a product that customers paid US$211,323 for, as Stripe records show, and they sold a demo before they built the product. The same niche now has many funded AI sales agents, and Setter AI's own revenue fell in 2026. The parts that still work are the demo-first test and one narrow promise that a customer can measure.", "steps": [ "Put a working demo or a mock-up on a page that can rank in search, and take sales calls before you build.", "Make one promise that a customer can measure, such as a first reply within 10 seconds, and publish a case study with real counts.", "Connect to the lead sources that customers already pay for, such as Meta lead ads and website forms, through Zapier or Make instead of building each integration.", "Message only people who filled in a form, and make each customer's form collect consent for every channel that the AI will use." ], "open": "Industries that buy many form leads and answer them slowly, such as real estate, solar and coaching, and countries where WhatsApp is the normal way to reach a business." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue is falling", "text": "Stripe shows US$12,447 in November 2025, a best month of US$19,761 in May 2026, and US$1,796 in September 2026. In October 2026 the MRR is US$1,528 from 14 subscriptions, 85% below the US$10,000 MRR of July 2025. The last three months brought US$11,348, 67% less than the three months before. No source explains the fall." }, { "title": "WhatsApp's rules decide who may use it", "text": "A message that a business sends first on WhatsApp must use a template from the business's Meta account, as Setter AI's own help page explains. Since 15 January 2026, WhatsApp's business terms forbid \"AI Providers\" whose AI is \"the primary (rather than incidental or ancillary) functionality\", \"as determined by Meta in its sole discretion\". Meta told TechCrunch that businesses that use AI to serve their own customers are not affected. Setter AI runs on each customer's own WhatsApp number to book that customer's meetings, the kind of use that Meta described as allowed, but the decision stays with Meta." }, { "title": "US rules for automated calls and texts", "text": "The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) forbids calls to a mobile number \"using any automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice\" without \"the prior express consent of the called party\" (47 U.S.C. 227(b)(1)(A)). Setter AI's first product made such calls with an AI voice. For text messages, US carriers use A2P 10DLC, a registration standard for application-to-person messages from ordinary 10-digit numbers: \"Anyone sending SMS/MMS messages over a 10DLC number from an application to the US must register for A2P 10DLC\", according to Twilio. Setter AI's text-message page showed \"Launching soon\" on 15 October 2026. Its terms do not mention the consent of the people whom the AI contacts, so that consent depends on each customer's own forms." }, { "title": "EU and German rules", "text": "For leads in the EU, the GDPR allows the processing of personal data only on a legal basis, such as consent \"for one or more specific purposes\" (Article 6). German law adds § 7 of the Act against Unfair Competition (UWG): \"Eine unzumutbare Belästigung ist stets anzunehmen ... bei Werbung unter Verwendung einer automatischen Anrufmaschine, eines Faxgerätes oder elektronischer Post, ohne dass eine vorherige ausdrückliche Einwilligung des Adressaten vorliegt\". In English: an unreasonable nuisance is always assumed for advertising by an automatic calling machine, a fax machine or electronic mail without the addressee's prior express consent. Setter AI's privacy policy lists the GDPR rights, but no source shows how customers record each lead's consent." }, { "title": "Many competitors", "text": "AI sales agents are a crowded category. The company's own blog has comparison pages about rivals such as CloseBot, Lindy, Artisan, Structurely, Air AI, Bland AI, Synthflow, Respond.io, Wati and Manychat, and about general chat platforms such as Intercom, Drift and Chatbase. The entry price also rose: the cheapest paid plan was US$49 a month for 50 leads in May 2025, and in October 2026 it is US$497 a month for 500 credits." }, { "title": "One model provider", "text": "The language model comes from OpenAI. On 12 March 2026 Büttgen wrote that OpenAI had permanently restricted his account because it \"identified activity that is not permitted under the OpenAI policies\", that he had a paid ChatGPT plan and a funded API balance, and that the appeal decision was final. He did not say whether Setter AI's own access was affected. A change in OpenAI's rules or prices would reach the product directly." }, { "title": "The founder builds other products", "text": "Since November 2025 Büttgen has launched ProspectEcho, then yourformsite, OnlyCats, TalkToYourComputer and CartGhost, according to his posts on X. ProspectEcho's launch brought \"$0 USD new MRR\" by his own count. The sources do not say how much time either founder still gives to Setter AI." }, { "title": "Little is public about the company", "text": "The operator is Setter AI LLC, a US company named in the site footer and the terms. The site has no Impressum page, and a North Data search finds no German company named Setter AI. No source gives a staff count or any funding; Büttgen applied to Y Combinator in May 2024, and YC's directory has no page for Setter AI." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.trysetter.com/" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/setter-ai" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/setter-ai-llc" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: Setter AI LLC, verified revenue profile", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/setter-ai-llc", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile (https://trustmrr.com/startup/setter-ai-llc.md) on 15 October 2026. Revenue, MRR, subscriptions and the monthly timeline come from Stripe through an API key; traffic comes from Google Analytics. The description, founded date and tech stack are written by the founder (grade C)." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers, 29 July 2025, by James Fleischmann: From desperation and dwindling runway to $10k MRR", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/tech/from-desperation-and-dwindling-runway-to-10k-mrr-VRQprGga5zF3UFDqiCqw", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the free part: header, introduction, table of contents and the comments, in which the founder answers questions. The rest is for subscribers and was not read. The introduction links Setter AI to trysetter.com." }, { "title": "Setter AI homepage", "url": "https://www.trysetter.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 15 October 2026, including the FAQ and the page source. Source for how the product works, the inbound and outbound answer, the channels, the integrations and the operator name Setter AI LLC." }, { "title": "Setter AI pricing page", "url": "https://www.trysetter.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 15 October 2026. Monthly and yearly prices by credits." }, { "title": "Setter AI terms and conditions", "url": "https://www.trysetter.com/terms-and-conditions", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Describes automated lead calling and AI voice agents; searched for consent clauses and found none about the people contacted." }, { "title": "Setter AI privacy policy", "url": "https://www.trysetter.com/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Google Calendar integration and the GDPR rights." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: Setter AI, Calendly for WhatsApp", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/setter-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page data: the two makers, the launch dates of 9 January 2025 and 30 July 2025 with their daily ranks, and the product description." }, { "title": "Timo Nikolai on X, 15 March 2024: 6 weeks in @TrySetter", "url": "https://x.com/timonikolai/status/1768503699427705188", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through api.fxtwitter.com, in the TrySetter timeline." }, { "title": "Timo Nikolai on X, 29 March 2024: Setter AI calls up new leads in < 10 seconds", "url": "https://x.com/timonikolai/status/1773619760078397498", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through api.fxtwitter.com, in the TrySetter timeline." }, { "title": "Setter AI on X, 5 April 2024: AI Appointment Setter demo", "url": "https://x.com/TrySetter/status/1776181735778394155", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the phone-call version and the remark about Bali internet." }, { "title": "Josef Büttgen on X, 9 May 2024: waiting for a reply from Y Combinator", "url": "https://x.com/josefbuettgen/status/1788585786251866527", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through api.fxtwitter.com, in the TrySetter timeline." }, { "title": "Josef Büttgen on X, 12 May 2024: booked demos after a viral post", "url": "https://x.com/josefbuettgen/status/1789597865553403950", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through api.fxtwitter.com, in the TrySetter timeline." }, { "title": "Setter AI blog, 24 June 2024, by Josef Büttgen: Case Study: Booking 100+ real estate appointments per week", "url": "https://www.trysetter.com/blog/case-study-booking-100-real-estate-appointments-per-week", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the lead, call and meeting counts of the phone-call version." }, { "title": "Josef Büttgen on X, 20 November 2024: AI appointment setter for WhatsApp", "url": "https://x.com/josefbuettgen/status/1859150655568703706", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through api.fxtwitter.com, in the TrySetter timeline." }, { "title": "Setter AI help article, 22 January 2025, by Josef Büttgen: How to send business-initiated WhatsApp messages from Zapier", "url": "https://www.trysetter.com/help/how-to-send-business-initiated-whatsapp-messages-from-zapier", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Meta message template requirement." }, { "title": "Setter AI blog, 9 May 2025: The 5 Most Popular CloseBot Alternatives (2025)", "url": "https://www.trysetter.com/blog/closebot-alternative", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on Setter AI: channels and the price list at that time." }, { "title": "Josef Büttgen on X, 30 July 2025: live on Product Hunt again", "url": "https://x.com/josefbuettgen/status/1950451292058587282", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through api.fxtwitter.com, in the TrySetter timeline." }, { "title": "Josef Büttgen on X, 25 November 2025: launch statistics of ProspectEcho", "url": "https://x.com/josefbuettgen/status/1993212624369307818", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through api.fxtwitter.com, with his launch post of 23 November 2025." }, { "title": "Josef Büttgen on X, 12 March 2026: OpenAI account permanently restricted", "url": "https://x.com/josefbuettgen/status/2032023579244601438", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Josef Büttgen on X, posts from November 2025 to August 2026", "url": "https://x.com/josefbuettgen", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the timeline page by page through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for his other products and the Stripe Sessions post of 1 May 2026." }, { "title": "Y Combinator company directory: setter-ai", "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/setter-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Opened on 15 October 2026: \"File Not Found\"." }, { "title": "North Data: search for Setter AI", "url": "https://www.northdata.com/Setter%20AI", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the result list on 15 October 2026. No German company of that name appears." }, { "title": "Setter AI sitemap", "url": "https://www.trysetter.com/sitemap.xml", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full and counted with a script: 129 pages, 41 blog posts, 57 country pages and 5 free tools." }, { "title": "TechCrunch, 18 October 2025, updated 15 January 2026, by Ivan Mehta: WhatsApp changes its terms to bar general-purpose chatbots from its platform", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/18/whatssapp-changes-its-terms-to-bar-general-purpose-chatbots-from-its-platform/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Quotes the new AI Providers clause of the WhatsApp Business Solution terms and Meta's statement that business customer-service bots are not affected." }, { "title": "Twilio documentation: What is A2P 10DLC?", "url": "https://www.twilio.com/docs/messaging/compliance/a2p-10dlc", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on what A2P 10DLC is and who must register." }, { "title": "47 U.S. Code § 227, Restrictions on use of telephone equipment (TCPA), Cornell Legal Information Institute", "url": "https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/227", "grade": "A", "how": "Text of the law. Read subsection (b)(1)(A)." }, { "title": "§ 7 UWG, Unzumutbare Belästigungen, Gesetze im Internet (German Federal Ministry of Justice)", "url": "https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/uwg_2004/__7.html", "grade": "A", "how": "Text of the law, read in full. The German original is quoted and translated on this page." }, { "title": "Art. 6 GDPR, Lawfulness of processing, gdpr-info.eu", "url": "https://gdpr-info.eu/art-6-gdpr/", "grade": "A", "how": "Text of the regulation. Read paragraph 1." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." }, { "title": "Setter AI text-message appointment setter page", "url": "https://www.trysetter.com/text-ai-appointment-setter", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 15 October 2026: \"Launching soon\" and a waiting list." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/kleo/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/kleo.md", "slug": "kleo", "name": "Kleo", "country": "United Kingdom and Cyprus", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI writing tool for LinkedIn posts", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-15", "launchLabel": "October 2025", "outcomeLabel": "More than US$1M in revenue, September 2026", "sticker": "Over $1M in revenue", "outcomeUsd": 1000000, "months": 11, "teamLabel": "4 co-founders: 3 with LinkedIn audiences and 1 engineer", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "audience", "trend": "growing", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Marketing" ], "product": "A web app for LinkedIn posts. It stores what a member knows and how the member writes, suggests topics from posts that do well, writes drafts with the member in a chat, makes 20 images a month, and schedules and publishes posts to a connected LinkedIn account, with statistics and weekly group calls. A Chrome extension saves ideas from other websites.", "why": "Three of the four co-founders had LinkedIn audiences, together more than 480,000 followers, made of the people Kleo sells to, and the free extension had already reached tens of thousands of users. When LinkedIn stopped the extension, they sold a rebuilt paid version to that audience first, in limited groups of seats, before any public launch.", "summary": [ "Kleo is a web app that helps people write and plan posts for LinkedIn. A member stores what they know and how they write; Kleo suggests topics from posts that do well, writes drafts with the member in a chat, makes images, and schedules and publishes posts through LinkedIn's API, the official interface that LinkedIn offers to outside programs, on an account that the member connects. The engineer's account of the build names Claude, Anthropic's model, as the AI that writes. Kleo costs US$99 a month or US$999 a year.", "Jake Ward, who has more than 180,000 LinkedIn followers, released the first Kleo on 8 November 2023 as a free Chrome extension, a small program that adds features to the Chrome browser. It showed popular posts inside LinkedIn's own pages and reached 60,000 to more than 70,000 users. In 2025 LinkedIn sent a cease-and-desist letter, a formal legal demand to stop an activity, because the extension read and overlaid LinkedIn's pages. Ward rebuilt Kleo as a paid web app with Lara Acosta, a LinkedIn creator with more than 300,000 followers, Rob Hoffman, and Cameron Trew, a software engineer who left his job in September 2025. The paid beta opened in October 2025. About three months later the founders told Indie Hackers that Kleo made US$62,000 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the subscription revenue that repeats every month. In September 2026 Trew wrote in his X profile that it had made more than US$1 million in revenue.", "Every number on this page is a founder statement, grade C. This page did not read the Indie Hackers interview, because that site asks AI programs not to read it; the MRR figure comes from two publications that quote it. The page also shows earlier companies that built on a social network that they did not control, and what LinkedIn has done since 2023 about AI-written posts." ], "factsCaption": "A free LinkedIn extension that LinkedIn stopped, rebuilt as a paid app that reported US$62,000 a month after three months and more than US$1 million in revenue by September 2026, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a founder statement, or a statement by a reviewer or a newsletter that quotes the founders. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a free extension that LinkedIn shut down to a paid app with more than US$1 million in revenue. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Kleo prices in October 2026, from the company's home page (grade C)", "note": "There is one plan with all features: strategy, unlimited chats and posts, 20 images a month, scheduling and publishing, analytics, weekly live calls, a template library and a private community. The yearly plan costs US$999, which is US$189 less than twelve monthly payments, and adds a private onboarding call and a price that stays the same while the plan is active. Each extra profile, for a team member or a client, costs US$49 a month more. Reviewers found no free trial; the yearly plan has a 30-day money-back guarantee. The first 1,000 beta buyers kept US$59 or US$79 a month for life.", "rows": [ [ "Standard, monthly", "", "99", "1 profile" ], [ "Standard, yearly", "83.25", "", "US$999 a year; adds a private onboarding call and a price lock" ], [ "Extra profile", "", "49", "per added profile, for a team member or a client" ], [ "Founding beta seats (closed)", "", "59 or 79", "first 1,000 seats, price kept for life" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue by September 2026", "value": "more than US$1 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Co-founder Cam Trew's X profile, read 15 October 2026: he quit his job in September 2025 to co-found the business, and by September 2026 it had made over US$1 million in revenue. It does not say whether this is gross or net, or whether sales before the relaunch are included.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue about three months after the relaunch", "value": "US$62,000", "grade": "C", "note": "The founders' interview with Indie Hackers, quoted by a Japanese newsletter on 19 July 2026 and by a review updated 16 May 2026. The interview itself was not read for this page. The founders had not yet made a public launch.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the US$62,000 a month", "value": "US$744,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$62,000 times 12.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Average monthly revenue implied for January to September 2026", "value": "at least about US$90,000", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: if October to December 2025 brought at most 3 times US$62,000, or US$186,000, then at least US$814,000 of the US$1 million came in the next nine months, about US$90,444 a month, 46% above US$62,000. Yearly plans are paid in advance, so this is cash received, not recurring revenue.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Mentions, the founders' sister product, at the time of the interview", "value": "US$20,000 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Same interview, as quoted. Mentions is a separate product and is not counted on this page. Together the two made US$82,000 a month.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Founding prices in the paid beta", "value": "500 seats at US$59 a month, then 500 at US$79, then US$99", "grade": "C", "note": "The first 500 seats sold out in 4 days, the next 500 in 9 days. The early prices were for life.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Most recurring revenue that the first 1,000 seats could bring", "value": "US$69,000 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 500 times US$59 plus 500 times US$79, if every seat paid monthly and stayed. Close to the US$62,000 reported.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Sales from pre-launch webinars", "value": "more than US$5,000 each, from three webinars", "grade": "C", "note": "Lara Acosta hosted them, as quoted from the interview.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Users of the free extension before LinkedIn stopped it", "value": "60,000 to more than 70,000", "grade": "C", "note": "The interview, as quoted, says 60,000; the company's home page and a review say more than 70,000.", "src": [ 2, 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Founders' audience on LinkedIn", "value": "more than 480,000 followers", "grade": "C", "note": "Jake Ward more than 180,000 and Lara Acosta more than 300,000, as quoted from the interview. Their followers are people who post on LinkedIn, the same people Kleo sells to.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "4 co-founders", "grade": "C", "note": "Jake Ward, Lara Acosta and Rob Hoffman, plus the engineer Cameron Trew, who calls himself a co-founder. No source gives a number of employees.", "src": [ 1, 2, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Where the founders work", "value": "London and Cyprus", "grade": "C", "note": "Acosta's X profile says London, and the company blog calls her a top UK creator; Ward wrote in October 2026 that he had recently moved to Cyprus. The other two co-founders' locations are not given.", "src": [ 13, 15, 17 ] }, { "fact": "Time to rebuild the product", "value": "4 weeks", "grade": "C", "note": "Trew rebuilt version 2.0 from Vercel's AI chatbot template, as quoted from the interview.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Advertising and Product Hunt", "value": "none before US$62,000 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "As quoted from the interview. The public launch came after that figure.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Price, October 2026", "value": "US$99 a month, or US$999 a year", "grade": "C", "note": "Company home page. Each extra profile costs US$49 a month more.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "The home page says Kleo is built by creators to serve creators, not investors. No source mentions a funding round.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Operating company", "value": "not found", "grade": "C", "note": "The terms name no company and follow the laws of Texas. None of the 20 companies named Kleo or Kleos on the first page of a UK company register search lists a co-founder as an officer.", "src": [ 7, 21 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the paid beta to the US$1 million", "value": "11 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: October 2025 to September 2026.", "src": [ 1, 11 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "8 November 2023", "what": "Jake Ward releases Kleo on the Chrome Web Store as a free extension that shows popular posts inside LinkedIn. About 2,500 people from his community had used an early version.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "23 January 2024", "what": "7,000 weekly users. Ward quotes Lara Acosta, then a user, who gained more than 60,000 followers in 5 months.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "29 November 2024", "what": "Ward sells founding memberships of Kleo Pro, a separate web platform. He writes that more than 40,000 creators use the free extension and that an extension limits what he can build.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "2025", "what": "LinkedIn sends a cease-and-desist letter because the extension overlaid LinkedIn's pages and read data from them. The extension is shut down. One review dates the letter to early 2026, which does not fit the October 2025 relaunch.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 3, 4 ] }, { "when": "September 2025", "what": "Cameron Trew leaves his software engineering job to co-found the new Kleo and rebuilds it in four weeks.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "29 September 2025", "what": "Ward announces that Kleo 2.0 opens to 500 more beta users in two days, from a waitlist. Seats are sold in groups: 500 at US$59 a month sell out in 4 days, the next 500 at US$79 in 9 days.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11, 2 ] }, { "when": "9 October 2025", "what": "Ward describes Kleo 2.0 as \"Cursor, but for LinkedIn posts\", after the AI code editor: it learns the member's writing style, finds trending topics and writes with the member in a chat.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "End of 2025", "what": "About three months after the relaunch, US$62,000 a month in recurring revenue, with no ads and no Product Hunt launch. Mentions, a sister product, makes US$20,000 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "when": "21 May 2026", "what": "A review describes Kleo as a paid web app at US$99 a month, where members write and then switch to LinkedIn to publish. The extension now only saves ideas from other websites.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "10 June 2026", "what": "Trew writes that his working days went from 8 to 14 hours after he quit his job.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "when": "24 July 2026", "what": "Acosta writes that Kleo has been growing very fast and that she is proud of the team.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "Mid-2026", "what": "Kleo 3.0 adds stored knowledge, a trained writing style, a member identity and automatic memories.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "Trew's X profile: more than US$1 million in revenue in the year since he quit his job.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "7 October 2026", "what": "Ward posts the Kleo team's analysis of more than 13 million LinkedIn posts: median views for the largest 5% of profiles fell by 50%.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Co-founders who are the audience", "text": "Ward and Acosta had more than 480,000 LinkedIn followers between them, and those followers are people who post on LinkedIn, which is exactly who Kleo sells to. The founders built a waitlist from that audience, Acosta ran three webinars that each sold more than US$5,000, and Ward and Hoffman showed how they wrote their own popular posts with the tool. There were no ads." }, { "title": "Seats that run out", "text": "The beta was sold in groups of 500 seats, each with a price for life: US$59 a month, then US$79, then the full US$99. The first group sold out in four days and the second in nine. A buyer had a reason to buy now, and later buyers paid the full price." }, { "title": "Four weeks on standard parts", "text": "Trew started from Vercel's open AI chatbot template, so the chat interface already worked, and added hosted services for the database, background jobs, login, voice input and monitoring. Beta users had a private Slack; a reported bug was fixed within hours, with a personal reply." }, { "title": "Beside LinkedIn, not inside it", "text": "The first Kleo ran inside LinkedIn's pages, and LinkedIn stopped it. The paid version is a separate web app that connects to LinkedIn through LinkedIn's own API to publish and to read post statistics, and its Chrome extension only saves ideas from other websites." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the engineer's account in the Indie Hackers interview, as quoted by a newsletter and a review, and from the company's own pages. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Started from Vercel's AI Chatbot template, an open project that already has a chat interface, so the first version took four weeks.", "TypeScript and Next.js, deployed on Vercel. Neon, a hosted PostgreSQL database. Inngest for background jobs, retries and queues. Clerk for login. shadcn/ui for interface parts.", "Claude, Anthropic's model, writes the posts. Deepgram turns voice input into text. PostHog measures how members use the app, and Langfuse records the prompts and the model costs.", "Instead of more setup forms, the product lets Claude's memory feature learn each member's writing from use.", "Members connect their LinkedIn account; Kleo then uses LinkedIn's APIs to publish or schedule posts and to show their statistics.", "Payments run through Polar. The Chrome extension saves ideas from articles on other websites into a swipe file, a saved collection of examples." ], "src": [ 2, 3, 5, 6, 4 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold a tool for people who post or write online, three of them on top of a social network that they did not control. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "BranchOut", "years": "2010 to 2017", "funding": "US$49M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Professional networking built on Facebook, as an alternative to LinkedIn.", "died": "Facebook changed its API rules, and the growth path that depended on them was gone.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/30-branchout" }, { "name": "Klout", "years": "2008 to 2017", "funding": "US$40M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A score from 1 to 100 for a person's influence, built from their posts on social networks.", "died": "Facebook and Twitter built better statistics into their own products.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/280-klout" }, { "name": "Socialbrowse", "years": "2008 to 2011", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A browser extension that added social features to ordinary web browsing.", "died": "It could not gather enough users while people spent their social time on Facebook.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1229-socialbrowse" }, { "name": "Draft", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A simple online writing tool with version control and editing help for writers.", "died": "Google Docs covered the same needs, and the narrow product could not compete.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1605-draft" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Three of the four lived on a social network that another company controlled, and lost when that company changed its rules or built the feature itself; the fourth, a writing tool, lost when Google Docs covered the same needs. Kleo has already lived through one such event: LinkedIn's letter in 2025 ended the free extension, which had tens of thousands of users.", "Two things differ. First, the paid product does not depend on reading LinkedIn's pages; it uses the API that LinkedIn offers to outside programs, and the writing happens in Kleo's own app. Second, the founders sold to their own followers, so they did not need LinkedIn to send them customers, and they charged from the first day of the beta." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The structure, yes. The audience, rarely.", "text": "Kleo's build was ordinary: a public template and hosted services, ready in four weeks. What is rare is co-founders whose 480,000 followers were the people Kleo sells to. A builder without such an audience can still copy the arrangement: an engineer who builds, and creators who sell to their own followers, all as co-founders.", "steps": [ "Find creators whose followers are the buyers, and make them co-founders, not paid promoters.", "Build the first version on a public template and hosted services, in weeks.", "Sell the beta in limited groups of seats, with a lower price for life for each early group.", "Use the platform's official API; do not read or change its pages." ], "open": "Other platforms where people publish for work, such as Substack, YouTube or X, where the followers of a few creators are the buyers of a writing or planning tool." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Founder figures only, partly second-hand", "text": "Every money figure is a founder statement. The US$62,000 a month comes from an interview that this page could not read and that two publications quote. The US$1 million comes from one line in a co-founder's X profile, which does not say whether it is gross or net or which months it covers. No payment processor, buyer or journalist has confirmed either." }, { "title": "LinkedIn has stopped Kleo once", "text": "In 2025 LinkedIn sent a cease-and-desist letter because the extension overlaid LinkedIn's pages and read data from them. A review summarizes LinkedIn's User Agreement as forbidding scraping or automated access without consent. The current product publishes through LinkedIn's API, and its home page says it avoids risky automation, but that access depends on LinkedIn's permission." }, { "title": "LinkedIn's own writing tools", "text": "By 26 September 2023 LinkedIn had its own tool that drafts a post from a member's ideas. In September 2026 it removed its AI rewriting option and gave Premium members a proofreader that only edits words that the member typed. LinkedIn can add writing help at any time, and for now it has chosen not to write posts for members." }, { "title": "LinkedIn shows AI-written posts less", "text": "On 31 July 2026 LinkedIn added an option to report posts that \"seem like AI slop\", and said it already shows such posts less outside the writer's own network and uses better classifiers, programs that sort posts automatically, to find them. Kleo's own analysis of 13 million posts, posted on 7 October 2026, found that median views for the largest 5% of profiles fell by 50%. Both affect what customers get, and the founders' own reach is the sales channel." }, { "title": "The same field on this site", "text": "Supergrow, from India, sells AI-written LinkedIn posts with payment-processor evidence of US$32,200 in 30 days in February 2026 and a falling trend, and aiCarousels, a one-person Swedish tool for carousel posts, reported US$5,000 a month in November 2023; Kleo reports larger numbers than both, with weaker evidence." }, { "title": "One model provider", "text": "The engineer's stack names one model, Anthropic's Claude, for writing and for memory. A change in Anthropic's prices, rules or model behaviour changes Kleo's costs and its output. The home page itself has to explain why a member should pay for Kleo instead of using ChatGPT or Claude directly." }, { "title": "A sister product", "text": "The founders also run Mentions, which made US$20,000 a month at the time of the interview. The combined figure of US$82,000 a month is not Kleo's; this page counts only Kleo." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://kleo.so" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Cam Trew's X profile, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/camtrew", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile text through api.fxtwitter.com. Co-founder's own statement. Source for the US$1 million in revenue by September 2026 and for his September 2025 start." }, { "title": "Lagless Portal (note.com), 19 July 2026: Issue 86: $62k MRR in 3 months with zero ads and zero Product Hunt", "url": "https://note.com/lagless/n/ne385b76682df", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, English version. A newsletter summary of the founders' Indie Hackers interview, which was not read because indiehackers.com does not allow AI agents. Source for the US$62,000 and US$20,000 figures, the team, the build stack, the seat prices, the webinars and the payment provider." }, { "title": "ConnectSafely, updated 16 May 2026: Kleo Review: LinkedIn AI Tool Pricing & Features", "url": "https://connectsafely.ai/articles/kleo-review-linkedin-content-tool-2026", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A review by a company that sells a competing LinkedIn tool. Quotes the US$62,000 figure from the Indie Hackers interview and says the product uses Claude. Its date for the cease-and-desist letter does not fit the other sources." }, { "title": "AuthoredUp, 21 May 2026, updated 11 August 2026: Kleo Review 2026: Is the $99 LinkedIn Tool Worth It?", "url": "https://authoredup.com/blog/kleo-review", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A review by a company that sells a competing LinkedIn tool. Source for the 2025 cease-and-desist letter and its reason, Kleo 3.0, the separate web app and the 30-day money-back guarantee." }, { "title": "Kleo home page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://kleo.so/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the prices, the features, the statement on LinkedIn's official API, the 70,000-user extension and the statement about investors." }, { "title": "Kleo privacy policy, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://app.kleo.so/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on LinkedIn features and connected account data." }, { "title": "Kleo terms of service, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://app.kleo.so/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names no company; governed by the laws of Texas." }, { "title": "Jake Ward on X, 8 November 2023: Kleo is officially live", "url": "https://x.com/jakezward/status/1722245502430072900", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Jake Ward on X, 23 January 2024: My free LinkedIn tool crossed 7,000 weekly users", "url": "https://x.com/jakezward/status/1749772879917371518", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Jake Ward on X, 29 November 2024: Kleo Pro for founding members", "url": "https://x.com/jakezward/status/1862496143881511310", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Jake Ward on X, 29 September 2025: Kleo 2.0 opens to 500 more beta users", "url": "https://x.com/jakezward/status/1972646886705074362", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Jake Ward on X, 9 October 2025: Imagine Cursor, but for LinkedIn posts", "url": "https://x.com/jakezward/status/1976270813306204324", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Lara Acosta on X, profile and post of 24 July 2026", "url": "https://x.com/Laraacostar/status/2080606714370363801", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile and the post through api.fxtwitter.com. The profile says co-founder of Kleo, London." }, { "title": "Jake Ward on X, 7 October 2026: the Kleo team's analysis of 13M+ LinkedIn posts", "url": "https://x.com/jakezward/status/2107845110708814273", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the first post of the thread through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Jake Ward on X, 8 October 2026: recently moved to Cyprus", "url": "https://x.com/jakezward/status/2108166761967235207", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "Cam Trew on X, 10 June 2026", "url": "https://x.com/camtrew/status/2064674227467514286", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for his working hours after he quit his job." }, { "title": "Kleo blog: Lara Acosta: The UK's #1 Female LinkedIn Creator", "url": "https://kleo.so/blog/lara-acosta", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's own profile of the co-founder." }, { "title": "Digital Works, 26 September 2023: LinkedIn's AI-powered writing tool for posts", "url": "https://digitalworks.dk/en/artikler/linkedins-ai-powered-writing-tool-for-posts", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A Danish agency's description of LinkedIn's tool that drafts posts." }, { "title": "ProPakistani, 31 July 2026: LinkedIn Finally Adds a Button To Kill All That AI Slop", "url": "https://propakistani.pk/2026/07/31/linkedin-finally-adds-a-button-to-kill-all-that-ai-slop/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Reports LinkedIn's statements; LinkedIn's own pages were not read because linkedin.com does not allow AI agents." }, { "title": "Metricool, 2 October 2026: LinkedIn Swaps Its AI Post Writer for a Proofreading Tool", "url": "https://metricool.com/linkedin-post-proofreader/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full." }, { "title": "UK Companies House search for \"kleo\", read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/search/companies?q=kleo", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the first page of results and the officer lists of the 20 companies on it. None lists a Kleo co-founder." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/skillry/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/skillry.md", "slug": "skillry", "name": "Skillry", "country": "China", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Paid library of Agent Skills for AI coding agents", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-15", "launchLabel": "8 August 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$7.7K revenue in the last 30 days, October 2026", "sticker": "$7.7K in 30 days", "outcomeUsd": 92964, "months": 2, "teamLabel": "1 person, as the founder lists it on TrustMRR", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Previews", "group": "ai-model-tools", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "flat", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Developer tools" ], "product": "A paid library of more than 400 Agent Skills: packages of instructions, templates and scripts that an AI coding agent such as Claude Code, Codex or Cursor installs and follows to make a web page section, a slide deck, a set of images or a short video in one designed style. Every Skill page shows real output first. Some Skills are free; the others cost US$4.99 each or come with Premium at US$9.99 a month, US$79 a year or US$169 once.", "why": "AI coding agents can build a working page or deck, but in the founder's words their visual output often looks generic. Skillry sells finished visual styles, one task per Skill, shows real output before the sale, and adds new Skills almost every day under one subscription. When sales began on 28 September 2026, they held at about US$430 a day for 17 days.", "summary": [ "Skillry sells Agent Skills: folders of instructions, templates and scripts that an AI agent loads when a task needs them. Anthropic introduced the format for Claude on 16 October 2025 and published it as an open standard on 18 December 2025. Skillry's Skills are for coding agents, AI programs such as Claude Code, Codex and Cursor that read and write files on the user's own computer. Each Skill makes one kind of visual work in one designed style: a landing page, a testimonial section, a slide deck, a set of article illustrations or a short launch video. Each Skill page shows that output before the buyer installs it. On 15 October 2026 the site's sitemap listed 404 Skills.", "The founder is shown on TrustMRR as Yihui, from China, with a team of one and a linked X account of 62,545 followers. The founding date there is 8 August 2026, and the site's first blog post is dated 30 August. Almost nothing sold until 28 September 2026. TrustMRR, a site that reads a startup's revenue directly from its payment provider, shows US$7,715 from 28 September to 15 October. On 15 October it showed US$7,747 in the last 30 days, US$7,855 in total, 264 active subscriptions and MRR (monthly recurring revenue: what the active subscriptions bring in each month) of US$2,600.", "The revenue numbers are grade A, read by TrustMRR from Skillry's own Stripe account. They cover only 18 days of real sales. Daily revenue stayed near US$430 a day, with no single large spike, but it did not grow. Only about one third of the 30-day revenue is MRR; the rest came from payments that do not repeat each month or from subscriptions that ended. The page also shows what the AI companies give away for free, and what happened to earlier companies that sold a curated layer on top of someone else's platform." ], "factsCaption": "A library of Agent Skills, 68 days old, with US$7,747 of Stripe-verified revenue in the last 30 days, almost all of it from 18 days of sales", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value is read by TrustMRR directly from Skillry's Stripe account. A grade C value is the founder's own text on TrustMRR or the company's own pages. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it or from the downloaded pages.", "timelineLead": "From Anthropic's new Skill format in October 2025 to a paid Skill library with US$7,747 in 30 days, 68 days after its founding date. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Skillry prices on 15 October 2026, from the company's pricing page and Skill pages (grade C)", "note": "Premium gives every paid Skill, updates and new Skills while access lasts. The Founding Lifetime price \"increases as the library grows\". A paid Skill can also be bought alone for US$4.99, and free Skills need only an account. All payments are non-refundable. Image and video Skills may need the buyer's own API key for an outside model provider such as FAL, which bills per use. The yearly price per month was calculated: US$79 / 12.", "rows": [ [ "Free Skills", "0", "0", "account sign-in" ], [ "Single paid Skill", "4.99 one-time", "", "one Skill" ], [ "Premium, monthly", "", "9.99", "all Premium Skills" ], [ "Premium, yearly", "6.58", "", "US$79 a year; all Premium Skills" ], [ "Founding Lifetime", "169 one-time", "", "all Premium Skills, no renewal" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days, to 15 October 2026", "value": "US$7,747", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from Skillry's Stripe account through an API key, last synced 15 October 2026. Up 7,073.3% on the 30 days before, when sales had barely started.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Total revenue since founding", "value": "US$7,855", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. The 3-month, 6-month and 12-month figures are the same, because the business is younger than three months.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month", "value": "August 2026 US$27, September US$1,608, 1 to 15 October US$6,220", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. October is half a month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 15 October 2026", "value": "US$2,600, from 264 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR metric snapshot.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR as a share of the 30-day revenue", "value": "33.6%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$2,600 / US$7,747. The other US$5,147 does not come back each month by itself: it is yearly plans paid in advance, US$169 lifetime licenses, US$4.99 single Skills, or subscriptions that ended. TrustMRR does not show the split.", "src": [ 1, 2, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Daily revenue from 28 September to 14 October 2026", "value": "US$7,352 in 17 days, a mean of US$432 a day", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from TrustMRR's daily table. Lowest day US$125 (6 October), highest US$806 (30 September). The highest day is 10.4% of the 30-day total, so the figure is not one day's spike.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "First and second week of sales", "value": "US$3,280, then US$2,878", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from TrustMRR's daily table: 28 September to 4 October, then 5 to 11 October, a fall of 12.3%. The three full days 12 to 14 October averaged US$398 a day, 3.2% below the second week. The level held but did not grow.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before 28 September 2026", "value": "about US$140 in total", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: all-time US$7,855 minus the US$7,715 that the daily table shows from 28 September to 15 October. 15 October was a partial day at the sync.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "30-day revenue at a yearly rate", "value": "US$92,964", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$7,747 x 12. The recurring part alone, MRR x 12, is US$31,200. The 30 days include only 18 days of sales.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Prices, 15 October 2026", "value": "Premium US$9.99 a month or US$79 a year, Founding Lifetime US$169 one-time, single Skills US$4.99, some Skills free", "grade": "C", "note": "Company pricing page and Skill pages. All payments are non-refundable.", "src": [ 2, 8, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Prices on 30 September 2026", "value": "the same three plans at the same prices", "grade": "C", "note": "The earliest Wayback Machine capture of the pricing page, two days after sales began. It already said \"1,000+ people supporting us\".", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "fact": "Skills in the catalog, 15 October 2026", "value": "404 Skill pages", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: counted with python3 in the sitemap downloaded on 15 October 2026. The home page says \"400+ Skills so far\". 404 Skills in the 68 days since the founding date is about 5.9 a day.", "src": [ 7, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Skills by kind of output", "value": "about 214 image and other, 102 web, 62 slide and 26 video Skills", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: sorted by words in each Skill's address (deck, landing, hero, hyperframes and others), so the split is approximate. 48 Skills make link-preview images in the style of a known brand such as Stripe, Notion or Airbnb.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Agents with install guides", "value": "32", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: counted in the sitemap. They include Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, Windsurf and Kiro.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 person", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder-written TrustMRR profile. The site speaks of \"our own team\" and \"the Skillry team\" but names nobody.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions an investor. TrustMRR shows a 100% profit margin for the last 30 days, which only means that no costs were connected to it.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Operating company", "value": "not named", "grade": "C", "note": "The terms of service and the privacy policy name no company. The terms speak of \"Skillry and its operators\" and give the address support@skillry.dev.", "src": [ 4, 17 ] }, { "fact": "Payment processor", "value": "Stripe, Skillry's own account", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR: verified source Stripe (API key), merchant of record: No. The terms also name Stripe as the processor.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Affiliate commission", "value": "40% of referred payments for the first 12 months", "grade": "C", "note": "Company affiliate page.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's X audience", "value": "62,545 followers", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR profile, for the X account linked to the founder shown as Yihui. No permitted source shows how many buyers came from it.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the founding date to the headline figure", "value": "68 days", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 8 August to 15 October 2026, about 2.2 months.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "9 October 2025", "what": "Anthropic releases plugins for Claude Code and lets anyone host a plugin marketplace, a curated collection that other developers install from.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "16 October 2025", "what": "Anthropic introduces Agent Skills: folders of instructions, scripts and resources that Claude loads when a task needs them, with its own Skills for Excel, PowerPoint, Word and PDF files.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "18 December 2025", "what": "Anthropic adds a directory of partner-built Skills and publishes Agent Skills as an open standard for use across platforms.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "8 August 2026", "what": "Founding date on the TrustMRR profile. The founder, shown as Yihui, gives China as the country and a team of one.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "12 August 2026", "what": "Date of the terms of service: Skills are sold as downloadable packages with a SKILL.md file, scripts and previews, paid through Stripe, with no refunds.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "30 August 2026", "what": "First blog post, \"Introducing Skillry\": a \"curated marketplace of Agent Skills\" for Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and Cursor, with free Skills and one Premium plan.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "31 August 2026", "what": "Third-Party Notices published: portions of the catalog include or are derived from MIT-licensed open-source work by 21 named copyright holders.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "August 2026", "what": "US$27 of revenue in the first month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "20 to 27 September 2026", "what": "Sales stay small: US$4.99 to US$9.99 on four days.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "28 September 2026", "what": "Sales start in earnest: US$139 that day, US$548 the next and US$806 on 30 September, the best day so far.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "30 September 2026", "what": "The first Wayback Machine capture of the pricing page shows US$9.99 a month, US$79 a year and a US$169 Founding Lifetime license, and \"1,000+ people supporting us\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "5 to 11 October 2026", "what": "Second week of sales: US$2,878, against US$3,280 in the first week.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "15 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR, synced from Stripe: US$7,747 in the last 30 days, US$7,855 in total, MRR of US$2,600 and 264 active subscriptions. The sitemap lists 404 Skills, with pages in nine languages.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 7 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Previews of real output", "text": "Each Skill page opens with a gallery of what the Skill makes, so a buyer chooses a style the way one chooses a template. The founder's TrustMRR text names this as the value: preview the real output before installing. The company describes the method: each Skill \"starts as a finished piece of work we design ourselves\", and then it writes \"the instructions, templates and scripts that let your agent make it again\"." }, { "title": "One plan for a catalog that grows every day", "text": "Premium covers every paid Skill and every new one, and on average about six Skills a day were added since the founding date (calculated). The US$169 Founding Lifetime price \"increases as the library grows\", which gives a reason to buy early." }, { "title": "A page for each Skill, task, role and agent", "text": "The sitemap has 1,312 English pages, among them the 404 Skill pages and install guides for 32 agents, and the same pages in eight more languages, 11,808 addresses in total. Free Skills need only an account. The founder lists X, Threads, YouTube, search and content marketing as channels; no source shows which of them brought the buyers." }, { "title": "No model costs for the seller", "text": "Most Skills run on the buyer's own agent and its model (\"Generates with Host Agent LLM\"). Image and video Skills call outside models such as FAL \"with your own API key, and that provider bills you per use\". Skillry sells files, so a sale adds no model cost for it." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's TrustMRR profile and the company's own pages. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Frontend in React, TypeScript and Tailwind CSS; backend on Cloudflare with SQLite and Node.js; payments through Stripe. This is the founder's tech-stack list on TrustMRR.", "A Skill is a folder: a SKILL.md file with the instructions, plus scripts, references, installation instructions, previews and other supporting files. The terms say the downloaded package is the product.", "Installation by a copied install prompt, a ZIP download, or the Skillry command-line tool, which authorizes through the browser and \"keeps a revocable credential in your system keychain\".", "The Article Illustration Set, a paid image Skill, needs a FAL account and Node.js 20 or newer, and generates with GPT Image from OpenAI.", "Web Skills ship as source code: a component file and a runnable usage example, with colors, type and corner radius as tokens to edit in one place, and images stored locally.", "Parts of the catalog include or derive from MIT-licensed open-source work: libraries such as React, Tailwind CSS, Ant Design, Shadcnblocks and ReUI, and work by individual developers and small studios, all named on the Third-Party Notices page.", "Pages in nine languages: English, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German and French." ], "src": [ 1, 4, 3, 8, 9, 5, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold a curated or better-designed layer on top of a platform, and lost when the platform or free tools did the same job. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Iddiction", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$3M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A curated app store to help people find good apps among millions.", "died": "Apple and Google improved discovery inside their own stores, and a separate curated store lost its reason to exist.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/234-iddiction" }, { "name": "Readability", "years": "2009 to 2015", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Clutter-free reading of any web article.", "died": "Browsers added free reader modes and free extensions did the same. Few readers paid.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/485-readability" }, { "name": "Xmarks", "years": "2006 to 2014", "funding": "US$9M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Sync your bookmarks and tabs across browsers.", "died": "Chrome, Firefox and Safari built the same sync into the browser, for free.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/762-xmarks" }, { "name": "Jobspice", "years": "2009 to 2012", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Good-looking resumes for job seekers who cannot design.", "died": "One narrow product. LinkedIn and free tools gave job seekers the same result without paying.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1635-jobspice" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the four sold something that a larger platform, or a free tool, later gave away: a better way to find apps, to read articles, to sync bookmarks or to make a document look designed. Skillry has the same exposure. Anthropic, which created the Skill format, ships its own Skills for documents and slides, runs a directory of partner-built Skills, and lets anyone host a plugin marketplace. Free Skills such as Anthropic's frontend-design are easy to install, and Skillry's own guide lists them.", "Two things differ. First, Skillry does not sell access to a platform but finished visual styles, hundreds of them, each shown with real output, and the platform makers do not make styles in that number. Second, the format is an open standard, and Skillry has install guides for 32 agents, so a change at one AI company does not close the store. What 18 days of sales cannot show is whether buyers keep paying after the first month." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The speed and the audience, not easily.", "text": "A Skill costs little to make: a SKILL.md file, templates and scripts. What is hard to copy is a catalog of 404 styled Skills built in 68 days, real previews for each, and a founder with 62,545 followers on X, although no source shows that the followers brought the buyers.", "steps": [ "Pick one kind of output that agents make badly, for example slides or landing pages, and design finished examples first.", "Turn each example into a Skill: instructions, templates and scripts that let the agent make it again.", "Show the real output on each Skill page, and give some Skills away to anyone with an account.", "Sell one plan for the whole catalog, and add Skills often so that the plan keeps growing." ], "open": "Skills for work where design taste matters and the model makers do not compete: brand-specific styles, industry document formats, video templates, and Skills for the newer agents that appear after Claude Code and Codex." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Only 18 days of sales", "text": "Almost all revenue came between 28 September and 15 October 2026. Daily revenue held at about US$430 but did not rise: the second week was 12.3% below the first. The first monthly subscriptions renew from late October, and only then will churn, the share of buyers who stop paying, be visible." }, { "title": "Most of the money is not monthly recurring", "text": "MRR is US$2,600, about a third of the 30-day revenue. The rest came from yearly plans paid in advance, US$169 lifetime licenses, US$4.99 single Skills, or subscriptions that ended; none of it comes back next month, and TrustMRR does not show the split. A lifetime buyer pays once and keeps access to every future Skill." }, { "title": "The AI makers run their own directories", "text": "Anthropic introduced Agent Skills on 16 October 2025, with its own Skills for Excel, PowerPoint, Word and PDF files. On 18 December 2025 it added \"a directory featuring partner-built skills\" and published the format as an open standard. Since 9 October 2025 anyone can host a Claude Code plugin marketplace, \"curated collections where other developers can discover and install plugins\". A paid catalog competes with free directories, one of them run by the platform owner." }, { "title": "Free Skills exist for the same jobs", "text": "Skillry's own guide describes Anthropic's frontend-design Skill as \"Official\" and \"Free\", \"a single SKILL.md published in Anthropic's public skills repository\", and reviews UI UX Pro Max, Impeccable and Taste skill next to it. Skillry's answer is finished templates instead of design rules, but a buyer can compare them at no cost." }, { "title": "Parts of the catalog derive from open-source work", "text": "The Third-Party Notices say that \"portions of the catalog include or are derived from\" MIT-licensed software by 21 named copyright holders, from large libraries to individual developers. The MIT license allows this with credit. The home page says \"Every Skill is designed, written and tested in-house\", and the three Skill pages read for this story credit no outside author, so a buyer cannot see how much of a Skill is derived." }, { "title": "Dependence on the agents' formats", "text": "The terms say it directly: \"AI agents, models, and third-party tools can change independently of us.\" Skills depend on how Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and the others load SKILL.md files, and image and video Skills depend on outside models billed to the buyer. Install guides for 32 agents spread this risk, and they also multiply the testing work for a team of one." }, { "title": "A very young business with no named company", "text": "The founder appears on TrustMRR only as Yihui, and the terms and privacy policy name no company, only \"Skillry and its operators\" and a support address. Payments are non-refundable, and the terms say a lifetime license \"is not a promise that the Services will operate forever\". The business was 68 days old at the headline figure." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://skillry.dev/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/skillry" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR markdown profile: Skillry, synced 15 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/skillry.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile. Revenue, the daily and monthly tables, MRR and subscriptions are in its Verification Sources section (Stripe, API key) and are grade A. Founder name, country, team size, founding date, pricing summary, tech stack and channels are founder-written profile text, grade C." }, { "title": "Skillry pricing page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://skillry.dev/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the three plan prices, the founding-price rule and the refund rule." }, { "title": "Skillry home page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://skillry.dev/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the in-house claim, the 400+ Skills count, the CLI credential and the note on FAL costs." }, { "title": "Skillry Terms of Service, dated 12 August 2026", "url": "https://skillry.dev/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for what a Skill package contains, Stripe as processor, the refund, lifetime and compatibility clauses. No company is named." }, { "title": "Skillry Third-Party Notices, dated 31 August 2026", "url": "https://skillry.dev/third-party-notices", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Lists the open-source work that parts of the catalog include or derive from, with its licenses." }, { "title": "Skillry blog, 30 August 2026: Introducing Skillry", "url": "https://skillry.dev/blog/introducing-skillry", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's first public description of the product." }, { "title": "Skillry sitemap, downloaded 15 October 2026", "url": "https://skillry.dev/sitemap.xml", "grade": "C", "how": "Downloaded in full and counted with python3: 11,808 addresses, 1,312 in English, 404 Skill pages and 32 agent install guides." }, { "title": "Skillry Skill page: Article Illustration Set", "url": "https://skillry.dev/skills/bs-article-illustration-set", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A paid image Skill at US$4.99 that needs a FAL key and generates with GPT Image." }, { "title": "Skillry Skill page: Masonry Testimonial Wall", "url": "https://skillry.dev/skills/bs-testimonial-masonry-wall", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A free web Skill delivered as component source with a usage example." }, { "title": "Skillry Skill page: Research Paper Deck", "url": "https://skillry.dev/skills/bs-research-paper-deck", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A paid slide Skill at US$4.99 with export to editable PowerPoint." }, { "title": "Skillry affiliate program page", "url": "https://skillry.dev/affiliate", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 40% commission for 12 months." }, { "title": "Skillry guide: Frontend design Skills", "url": "https://skillry.dev/learn/frontend-design-skills", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the comparison and review sections. The company's own description of Anthropic's free frontend-design Skill and of other design Skills." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine capture of the Skillry pricing page, 30 September 2026", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20260930111031/https://skillry.dev/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The earliest capture of the page. Same three prices as on 15 October 2026." }, { "title": "Anthropic, 16 October 2025, updated 18 December 2025: Introducing Agent Skills", "url": "https://claude.com/resources/articles/skills", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The old address www.anthropic.com/news/skills redirects here. Source for the format, Anthropic's own Skills, the partner directory and the open standard." }, { "title": "Anthropic, 9 October 2025: Claude Code plugins", "url": "https://claude.com/resources/articles/claude-code-plugins", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The old address www.anthropic.com/news/claude-code-plugins redirects here. Source for plugin marketplaces." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." }, { "title": "Skillry Privacy Policy, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://skillry.dev/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names no company and no data controller." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/chat-thing/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/chat-thing.md", "slug": "chat-thing", "name": "Chat Thing", "country": "United Kingdom", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "No-code builder for AI support chatbots", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-15", "launchLabel": "March 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$12K a month, 2024", "sticker": "$12K a month, a couple", "outcomeUsd": 144000, "months": 20, "teamLabel": "2 founders, a married couple who also run the Pixelhop studio; the company reports no employees", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Speed", "group": "support-agents", "channel": "audience", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Customer support" ], "product": "A no-code builder for AI support agents that answer from a company's own content: websites, files, Notion pages, YouTube videos and RSS feeds. The agents work in a website widget, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, email, phone calls and an API, on a model that the customer picks from more than 20.", "why": "It shipped in March 2023, when connecting ChatGPT to a company's own documents was new, 23 days after the first prototype. The founders posted their progress on Twitter, opened with a waitlist, and well-known early users such as Seth Godin brought attention. Low prices and frequent releases kept it selling after growth slowed in the third month.", "summary": [ "Chat Thing is a no-code chatbot builder, a tool that people use without writing program code. A customer connects its own content, such as a website, files, Notion pages, YouTube videos or an RSS feed, and gets an AI agent that answers questions from that content on a website, in Slack, Discord, WhatsApp or Telegram, by email or on the phone. The answers are written by a large language model, a program trained on very large amounts of text to produce replies. In October 2026 the customer can pick from more than 20 models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others, and the plans cost US$14 to US$299 a month, with a free plan.", "Jozef Maxted and Gemma Vincent, a married couple who run Pixelhop, their small digital studio, started a prototype on 27 February 2023 and had their first paying subscriber 23 days later, on 22 March. They posted demo videos on Twitter, collected a waitlist of 1,319 people, and a week after the first sale Seth Godin linked to a bot built on his blog. In June 2023 the founders reported £5,000 of monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the total of the subscription fees that customers pay each month: about US$6,314 at that month's exchange rate. By November 2024 eBiz Facts quoted their Indie Hackers interview: US$12,000 a month, a run rate (the monthly figure times 12) of US$144,000 a year.", "Every revenue figure on this page is a founder statement, grade C. The UK company register confirms the company, its two directors, its £2 share capital and that it reports no employees, but the filed accounts leave out the profit and loss account, as small companies may, so they cannot confirm the revenue. No figure later than 2024 was found. The page also shows earlier support-bot companies that failed when larger products added the same feature." ], "factsCaption": "A two-founder side business that reported £5,000 a month three months after launch and US$12,000 a month by November 2024, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a founder statement in their posts or interview, a page of the company, or an entry that the company itself filed with the UK register. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a weekend prototype on Notion to US$12,000 a month in 20 months, with growth that slowed in the third month. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Chat Thing prices in October 2026, from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "Prices are in US dollars per month; yearly billing gives two months free. Each plan has monthly allowances of message tokens (the pieces of text that model providers charge for) and storage tokens, and add-ons raise single limits, for example US$250 a year for 5 million more message tokens. Voice minutes cost US$10 a month per pack of 60 minutes, and phone numbers US$5 a month each, billed monthly on every plan. In November 2024 eBiz Facts gave US$14 a month for 3 chatbots, the same as the Basic plan today.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "1 agent, 1 data source, 80,000 message tokens" ], [ "Basic", "11.67", "14", "3 agents, 3.5M message tokens a month, 2 team members" ], [ "Standard", "40.83", "49", "6 agents, 19M message tokens, 4 team members; model choice, all channels" ], [ "Pro", "82.50", "99", "20 agents, 38M message tokens, 6 team members; chat analytics" ], [ "Enterprise", "249.17", "299", "50 agents, 120M message tokens, 8 team members; bot testing" ], [ "Voice pack, add-on", "", "10", "60 minutes; phone numbers US$5 a month each" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue per month, by November 2024", "value": "US$12,000", "grade": "C", "note": "The founders' figure in the title of their Indie Hackers interview, \"We built a $12k/mo AI chatbot generator\", as quoted by eBiz Facts on 14 November 2024. The interview itself was not opened (Indie Hackers blocks AI agents), so its date and its text are not verified here.", "src": [ 2, 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the November 2024 figure", "value": "US$144,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$12,000 times 12. This is the headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, June 2023", "value": "£5,000, about US$6,314", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 12 June 2023, under three months after the first paying customer; the case study repeats the same figure. Converted at US$1.2627 per pound, the June 2023 average of the Federal Reserve's daily rates.", "src": [ 1, 5, 21 ] }, { "fact": "Growth between the two figures", "value": "about 1.9 times in 17 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$12,000 divided by US$6,314, from June 2023 to November 2024.", "src": [ 1, 2, 21 ] }, { "fact": "Users, 5 June 2023", "value": "5,316 users with 3,902 bots, 35,698 chats and 227,095 messages", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post. The bots had used nearly 1 billion OpenAI tokens.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Waitlist before launch", "value": "1,319 subscribers by 27 March 2023", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post. Filled by demo videos and progress posts on Twitter, collected in ConvertKit.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "From first prototype to first paying customer", "value": "23 days", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 27 February to 22 March 2023, dates from the founder's post.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Growth in the third month", "value": "slowed down a lot", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's words in June 2023: the AI hype was cooling and more competitors were arriving.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Goal set in June 2023", "value": "£10,000 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post: at that level the project would pay for itself and the profits could be reinvested. At the June 2023 rate that is about US$12,627, slightly above the US$12,000 figure of November 2024.", "src": [ 1, 21 ] }, { "fact": "Operating company", "value": "Chat Thing Ltd, company number 14789358, incorporated 10 April 2023", "grade": "C", "note": "UK company register and the footer of the company's site. Its directors are the two founders, appointed on that day. Business: software development.", "src": [ 6, 22 ] }, { "fact": "Share capital", "value": "£2", "grade": "C", "note": "Filed accounts for the years to 30 April 2024 and 2025. No outside shareholder money appears; the case study says the product was built without external funding.", "src": [ 7, 8, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Employees of Chat Thing Ltd", "value": "none in either year to April 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Filed accounts give the average number of employees as nil.", "src": [ 7, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Cash at bank", "value": "£6,242 on 30 April 2024 and £6,166 on 30 April 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Filed accounts. The company used the small-company right to leave out the profit and loss account, so the register shows no revenue.", "src": [ 7, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Net assets", "value": "£293 on 30 April 2024, minus £4,068 on 30 April 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Filed accounts. Creditors grew from £14,149 to £22,338. The accounts do not say why.", "src": [ 7, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Prices, October 2026", "value": "a free plan, then US$14 to US$299 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Company pricing page. Yearly billing gives two months free. Voice minutes and phone numbers cost extra.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Models offered, October 2026", "value": "more than 20, including GPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok models", "grade": "C", "note": "Company pages. Requests go through OpenRouter, a service that sends each request to the provider that the customer selected; OpenAI handles speech for voice.", "src": [ 10, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Default model, March 2024", "value": "OpenAI's gpt-3.5-turbo-0125", "grade": "C", "note": "Company changelog. When OpenAI cut its price, the message tokens almost doubled on most plans.", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "fact": "Users claimed, October 2026", "value": "10,000+", "grade": "C", "note": "Company models page. It gives no date and no definition of a user.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the November 2024 figure", "value": "20 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: March 2023 to November 2024.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Case study: developed and launched without external funding. Share capital of £2.", "src": [ 5, 7 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "27 February 2023", "what": "The founders start a prototype at their studio, Pixelhop: ChatGPT answering from Notion pages, after reading Supabase's article on its \"Clippy\" bot for its documentation.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "when": "Early March 2023", "what": "A working prototype by 5 March. The first demo video on Twitter gets four likes; a second post the same day does much better.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "17 March 2023", "what": "The first 50 users are invited from the waitlist, then more in small batches.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "22 March 2023", "what": "First paying subscriber.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "when": "27 March 2023", "what": "1,319 people on the waitlist, in under a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "29 March 2023", "what": "Sign-ups open to everyone. Seth Godin, one of the first paying customers, links to a bot trained on the 5,000,000 words of his blog, and traffic spikes. He introduces Dave Winer, who wants a bot for 27 years of Scripting News.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 15 ] }, { "when": "10 April 2023", "what": "Chat Thing Ltd is registered, with the two founders as directors.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "5 June 2023", "what": "5,316 users and 3,902 bots. The product has six data sources and five channels, up from one of each at launch.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "when": "12 June 2023", "what": "£5,000 a month in recurring revenue, but growth slowed in the last month. Next goal: £10,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "6 November 2023", "what": "OpenAI launches GPTs, custom versions of ChatGPT with extra knowledge that anyone can build without coding.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "30 November 2023", "what": "Customers ask whether OpenAI has \"just killed Chat Thing\". The founders answer that GPTs take only 10 files, show no conversations and stay inside ChatGPT.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "11 January 2024", "what": "Gemma Vincent writes that the couple now runs two businesses, Pixelhop and Chat Thing, with separate goals for each.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "when": "20 March 2024", "what": "OpenAI cuts the price of the default model; the message tokens almost double on most plans.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "November 2024", "what": "eBiz Facts quotes the founders' Indie Hackers interview: US$12,000 a month. The cheapest paid plan is US$14 a month for 3 chatbots.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "when": "December 2025", "what": "Accounts to 30 April 2025 are filed: cash of £6,166, net liabilities of £4,068, no employees and no profit and loss account.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 8 ] }, { "when": "2026", "what": "Pixelhop calls itself an AI product studio that runs Chat Thing alongside client work. Chat Thing adds phone calls and a published test of 20+ models, and free website tools bring leads.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 17, 9, 10, 19 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Speed", "text": "Twenty-three days from the first prototype to the first paying customer. The founders, who normally polish client work, spent 15 minutes on the logo and built the landing page from a Tailwind UI template. A bug charged some customers for two subscriptions; the founders fixed it after the charges, and the customers forgave it." }, { "title": "A waitlist built from public progress", "text": "Demo videos and updates on Twitter filled a waitlist of 1,319 people in under a month. Invitations went out in small batches from 17 March, so the founders could tune the product before the list opened to everyone on 29 March." }, { "title": "Well-known early users", "text": "Seth Godin asked for a bot trained on his blog of more than 5,000,000 words, paid for it, and linked to it from his blog on 29 March 2023. He introduced Dave Winer, who wanted a bot for 27 years of Scripting News. The large bots tested the system, and the links brought traffic." }, { "title": "Many sources, many channels, many models", "text": "In three months the product went from one data source (Notion) and one web channel to six data sources and five channels, including Discord, Slack, WhatsApp and an API. By 2026 it offers more than 20 models and publishes its own test of them on 31 scripted support conversations, so a customer picks a model on scores and cost." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founders' posts and the company's own pages. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Built by Pixelhop, the founders' studio, as a side project between client projects. The first version connected ChatGPT to Notion, which the studio already used for its handbook and project management.", "The website is a Nuxt application (Nuxt is a framework for Vue.js); its robots file is generated by a Nuxt module.", "Services that the company lists in July 2026: Supabase for the database, file storage and login; Railway for hosting; Cloudflare for the network; Stripe for payments; Plausible and PostHog for analytics; ConvertKit for email; Nylas for the email channel.", "Models: OpenAI at first, with nearly 1 billion OpenAI tokens used by June 2023 and gpt-3.5-turbo-0125 as the default in March 2024. In 2026, more than 20 models reached through OpenRouter, and OpenAI for speech in the voice features.", "Launch marketing: demo videos on Twitter, a ConvertKit waitlist, and Plausible to watch the traffic. The founders wrote in June 2023 that they had been bad at marketing so far.", "By 2026, free website tools (an agent-readiness checker, FAQ and llms.txt generators) bring search traffic, and the studio's AI agent researches the businesses that use them." ], "src": [ 1, 11, 10, 14, 19, 20 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised a bot or chat tool that answers customers or staff, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Niles", "years": "2017 to 2020", "funding": "US$2.8M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A Slack chatbot that answered staff questions from the company's own knowledge.", "died": "Slack and knowledge tools such as Guru and Confluence added similar features, and AI answers became a common feature faster than Niles expected.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1031-niles" }, { "name": "Answerly", "years": "2013 to 2016", "funding": "US$550K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "FAQ chatbots on company websites that deflect support tickets and pass only hard questions to people.", "died": "The language technology of the time could not handle real customer questions, and each customer needed long manual setup of FAQs and decision trees.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2168-answerly" }, { "name": "Hipmob", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Live support chat inside mobile apps and websites.", "died": "Intercom and Zendesk added the same chat features to products that customers already used. With little money, Hipmob could not stand out.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1184-hipmob" }, { "name": "Vanti", "years": "2019 to 2024", "funding": "US$18M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Conversational AI shopping assistants for brands.", "died": "In a crowded conversational-AI market it could not show that chatbots sold more than ordinary shop pages. Customers were expensive to win and integrations were complex.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2508-vanti" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Answerly and Niles had the same idea before large language models existed. From 2013 to 2020 a support bot needed long manual setup, with hand-written FAQs and decision trees, and still failed on real questions, so each customer cost too much to serve. Large language models removed most of that setup. In 2023 a bot could read a Notion workspace or a 5,000,000-word blog and answer from it on the first day, which is why two people at a small studio could build one and sell it within about three weeks.", "The other cause of death is still present. Hipmob and Niles failed when larger products added the same feature, and Chat Thing faces the same risk: OpenAI's GPTs since November 2023, help desks such as Intercom and Zendesk, and many small builders. The company's own site has comparison pages against eleven named products. Its answer so far is breadth and price: many data sources, channels and models, a published test of the models, a free plan and a US$14 plan." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The timing, no. The method, yes.", "text": "A no-code chatbot trained on your own content was new in March 2023 and is a crowded product now, also sold by the model makers themselves. What can still be copied is the method: a prototype on a tool you already use within a week, a waitlist filled by public progress posts, early users whose own posts bring traffic, and frequent releases at low prices.", "steps": [ "Build the first version on top of a tool that your team already uses, here Notion, and ship it within a month.", "Post short demo videos while you build, and collect a waitlist before you open sign-ups.", "Invite users in small batches and charge from the first weeks.", "Serve well-known early users well: one link from Seth Godin's blog brought a traffic spike." ], "open": "Narrow versions for one trade or one language, voice and phone answering for small firms, and test results that show a business which model answers its own customers best." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Founder figures only", "text": "Both revenue figures come from the founders: £5,000 a month in their own post of June 2023, and US$12,000 a month in their Indie Hackers interview, which this page could read only as eBiz Facts quoted it. The company files its accounts without the profit and loss account, so the register cannot confirm the revenue. No figure after 2024 was found." }, { "title": "The model makers sell the same idea", "text": "On 6 November 2023 OpenAI launched GPTs: anyone can build a custom ChatGPT with extra knowledge and no coding. Customers asked the founders whether OpenAI had \"just killed Chat Thing\". Their answer was more data sources, conversation history and channels outside ChatGPT. Each new feature from a model maker can raise the same question again." }, { "title": "Many builders compete", "text": "Competitors appeared within weeks of the March 2023 launch, the founders wrote. In 2026 the company's own site has comparison pages against eleven named products, from small builders such as Chatbase and DocsBot to help desks such as Intercom and Zendesk." }, { "title": "Growth slowed early", "text": "Three months after launch the founders wrote that growth had slowed a lot in the last month, as the AI hype cooled and more competitors arrived. By November 2024 the figure was US$12,000 a month, close to but below the goal of £10,000 that they set in June 2023 (about US$12,627 at that month's rate)." }, { "title": "Dependence on model providers", "text": "Every answer uses tokens bought from a model provider. In 2023 the bots ran on OpenAI's models, with nearly 1 billion OpenAI tokens used by June, and in March 2024 a price cut by OpenAI let the company almost double its token allowances. The reverse can also happen: prices, model changes and terms set by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or the router OpenRouter change Chat Thing's costs." }, { "title": "Two founders, two businesses", "text": "The founders also run Pixelhop, a studio that builds for clients, and run Chat Thing alongside it. Chat Thing Ltd reports no employees, and its balance sheet showed net liabilities of £4,068 in April 2025." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://chatthing.ai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Pixelhop blog, 12 June 2023, by Jozef Maxted: The story of Chat Thing, bootstrapping our first side project to £5000 MRR in under 3 months", "url": "https://pixelhop.io/writing/the-story-of-chat-thing-bootstrapping-our-first-side-project-to-pound5000-mrr-in-under-3-months/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's own account. Source for the £5,000 monthly recurring revenue, the launch dates, the waitlist, the user counts of 5 June 2023, the slowing growth and the £10,000 goal." }, { "title": "eBiz Facts, by Niall Doherty: Start a Service Business With This $12K/Month AI Chatbot", "url": "https://ebizfacts.com/gemma-vincent-chat-think-12k-mrr-service-business-idea/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Gives US$12,000 monthly revenue for Chat Thing and quotes the title of the founders' Indie Hackers interview. The page says it was updated on 6 March 2025." }, { "title": "Niall Doherty's blog on Goodreads, 14 November 2024: the same eBiz Facts post", "url": "https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/25260097-start-a-service-business-with-this-12k-month-ai-chatbot", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A copy of source 2 with its first publication date, 14 November 2024, and the US$14 price for 3 chatbots." }, { "title": "Indie Hackers: We built a $12k/mo AI chatbot generator while exploring England with our baby", "url": "https://www.indiehackers.com/post/tech/we-built-a-12k-mo-ai-chatbot-generator-while-exploring-england-with-our-baby-n1LB1nqDNUOTObkwG0ir", "grade": "C", "how": "Could not open: the robots.txt of indiehackers.com blocks AI agents. Cited from eBiz Facts' quotation of its title (sources 2 and 3)." }, { "title": "Pixelhop case study: Chat Thing", "url": "https://pixelhop.io/our-work/chat-thing/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Repeats the £5,000 figure of June 2023 (the same figure, not a second one), and states that the product was built without external funding." }, { "title": "Companies House, the UK company register: CHAT THING LTD, company number 14789358", "url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/14789358", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the overview, officers and filing history pages. Source for the incorporation date, the directors, the nature of business and the filing dates. Names and roles only." }, { "title": "Companies House: accounts of Chat Thing Ltd made up to 30 April 2024", "url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/14789358/filing-history/MzQzMzQ0NjU1NWFkaXF6a2N4/document?format=xhtml&download=1", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in the machine-readable version. Unaudited small-company accounts without the profit and loss account. Source for cash, creditors, net assets, share capital and the number of employees." }, { "title": "Companies House: accounts of Chat Thing Ltd made up to 30 April 2025", "url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/14789358/filing-history/MzQ5MjE4MjgxNGFkaXF6a2N4/document?format=xhtml&download=1", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in the machine-readable version. Same form as source 7, with the 2024 figures for comparison." }, { "title": "Chat Thing pricing page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://chatthing.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The prices are in the page text, not loaded by script." }, { "title": "Chat Thing models page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://chatthing.ai/models", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the model list and the SupportBench table of scores. Source for the 20+ models and the 10,000+ users claim." }, { "title": "Chat Thing list of sub-processors, updated 29 July 2026", "url": "https://chatthing.ai/legal/sub-processors", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the database, hosting, network, payment, analytics, email and model-routing services." }, { "title": "Chat Thing blog, 30 November 2023: OpenAI GPTs vs Chat Thing", "url": "https://chatthing.ai/blog/open-ai-gpts-vs-chat-thing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founders' answer to customers who asked whether GPTs had ended Chat Thing." }, { "title": "OpenAI, 6 November 2023: Introducing GPTs", "url": "https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpts/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the announcement. Source for the launch date and for what GPTs do." }, { "title": "Chat Thing changelog, 20 March 2024: More tokens for everyone", "url": "https://chatthing.ai/blog/more-tokens-for-everyone", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the default model and the effect of OpenAI's price cut." }, { "title": "Seth's Blog, 29 March 2023: Opening the pod bay door", "url": "https://seths.blog/2023/03/opening-the-pod-bay-door/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Seth Godin announces an AI chat bot trained on all 5,000,000 words of his blog and links to it on chatthing.ai." }, { "title": "Pixelhop blog, 11 January 2024, by Gemma Vincent: Navigating the year, setting and achieving SMART goals in a small company", "url": "https://pixelhop.io/writing/navigating-the-year-setting-and-achieving-smart-goals-in-a-small-company/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Says that the two founders run two businesses, Pixelhop and Chat Thing, and set goals for both. No figures." }, { "title": "Pixelhop about page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://pixelhop.io/about/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Describes Pixelhop as a small AI product studio that runs Chat Thing alongside its client work." }, { "title": "Pixelhop blog, 3 February 2026: AI in 2026, how we learned to build smarter", "url": "https://pixelhop.io/writing/ai-in-2026-how-we-learned-to-build-smarter/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Says that Chat Thing keeps growing, with no figures." }, { "title": "Pixelhop blog, 9 September 2026: We built free AI tools for SEO, then realised they could generate leads too", "url": "https://pixelhop.io/writing/free-ai-tools-for-seo-then-realised-they-could-generate-leads-too/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the free tools made for Chat Thing and the lead research done by the studio's AI agent." }, { "title": "Chat Thing sitemap, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://chatthing.ai/sitemap.xml", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Lists 62 blog pages, the free tools, and comparison pages against eleven named competitors." }, { "title": "Federal Reserve, H.10 release: historical rates for the British pound, in US dollars per pound", "url": "https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h10/hist/dat00_uk.htm", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the daily rates. The June 2023 average of the 21 daily values, US$1.2627 per pound, was computed with python3." }, { "title": "Chat Thing terms of service, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://chatthing.ai/legal/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The footer gives company number 14789358, which is Chat Thing Ltd in the register, and says the site is built by Pixelhop." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/rankai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/rankai.md", "slug": "rankai", "name": "RankAI", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI service that runs search optimization and AI-answer visibility", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-15", "launchLabel": "1 June 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$56.5K a month in recurring revenue, July 2026", "sticker": "$678K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 678396, "months": 37, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders and 1 more person; Y Combinator lists a team of 3", "fundingLabel": "Y Combinator (Summer 2023) and other investors; amounts not public", "primaryFactor": "Price", "group": "seo-ai-search", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Funded", "Running", "B2B", "Search marketing" ], "product": "A business or a marketing agency enters a website. RankAI learns the business and its market, decides which pages the site should have, writes them, publishes them to the site's content management system, fixes technical search problems, measures the results and rewrites pages that do not perform, for Google and for AI assistants. Agencies can resell it under their own brand.", "why": "It sells what a search agency sells, the research, the pages, the publishing and the rewrites, as a monthly service run mostly by software, for a fraction of an agency fee. Agencies resell it under their own brand. In 2026 it added visibility in AI answers, and verified revenue more than doubled between March and July 2026.", "summary": [ "RankAI sells search engine optimization (SEO), the work of making a website appear high in Google results for the searches that its buyers type, as a service that runs mostly by itself. It reads the customer's site and market, chooses which pages should exist, writes them with language models, programs trained on large amounts of text that write text, publishes them to the customer's own website and rewrites the ones that do not perform. It now also sells answer engine optimization, the same work aimed at being named in the answers of AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity. Businesses buy it for their own sites. Marketing agencies buy a white-label version, which means that the agency resells the service under its own brand.", "Y Combinator's directory lists two co-founders: Dyllan Liu, the chief executive, and Hugo (Kanghong) Zhan, the technology chief. Both worked in engineering at Amazon and studied at UC Berkeley. The company was founded in 2023 and went through Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch in San Francisco. In September 2024 its plans cost US$69 and US$129 a month. In July 2026 its monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the total of all active subscriptions for one month, was US$56,533 from 155 subscriptions. That is a run rate, one month multiplied by twelve, of about US$678,000 a year. Revenue had been about US$21,000 a month from November 2025 to March 2026 and reached US$54,841 in July 2026.", "The revenue figures are grade A: TrustMRR reads them from the company's account at Stripe, its payment processor, through an API key, a password that lets one program read data from another. That key expired on 30 July 2026, so no figure on this page is later than that day. RankAI took venture money from Y Combinator and, by its own account, from others. Y Combinator lists a team of three, and the same directory now lists Dyllan Liu under former founders. The page also shows four failed companies that sold traffic from platforms that they did not control." ], "factsCaption": "Monthly recurring revenue of US$56,533 in July 2026, read from Stripe by TrustMRR, three years after a Y Combinator batch", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from the company's Stripe account through TrustMRR, as of the last sync on 30 July 2026. A grade B value is published by Y Combinator about its own investment. A grade C value is a company statement or a third-party directory. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a Y Combinator batch in 2023 to US$56,533 in monthly recurring revenue in July 2026, in 37 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "RankAI prices in October 2026 from its agency page, and the 2024 prices from an archived copy of its homepage (grade C)", "note": "The current site publishes one price: the Autonomous Agent plan for agencies starts at US$49 a month for each client site, with bulk pricing, and the page does not say whether yearly billing is cheaper. The Expert-Led Full Service plan for agencies and the plan for businesses have no published price: the buyer books a call or a demo. The two 2024 rows come from the Wayback Machine, where each price was shown next to a higher crossed-out price. In July 2026 the average monthly recurring revenue per active subscription was about US$365 (calculated: 56,533 divided by 155).", "rows": [ [ "Autonomous Agent, for agencies", "", "from 49", "per client site; bulk pricing available" ], [ "Expert-Led Full Service, for agencies", "custom", "custom", "dedicated strategist" ], [ "For businesses", "not published", "not published", "book a demo; the TrustMRR profile says a self-serve plan exists" ], [ "Starter, September 2024", "", "69", "2 blog posts a week; shown next to US$109" ], [ "Advanced, September 2024", "", "129", "10 blog posts a week; shown next to US$199" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 30 July 2026", "value": "US$56,533", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot from the Stripe API at the last sync. The profile gives MRR growth of 26.9% in the last 30 days of synced data.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the 30 days to 30 July 2026", "value": "US$54,910", "grade": "A", "note": "Stored snapshot from the last sync. The profile gives growth of 38.0% against the 30 days before.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from that MRR", "value": "about US$678,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 56,533 times 12 equals 678,396. This is the headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions, 30 July 2026", "value": "155", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot from Stripe.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average MRR per active subscription", "value": "about US$365 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 56,533 divided by 155 equals 364.7. The profile does not show how the amounts are spread.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the profile's last 12 months", "value": "US$290,278", "grade": "A", "note": "The ten monthly rows, October 2025 to July 2026, add up to US$290,277 (calculated), the same figure within rounding. So the window holds no payments after 30 July 2026: at most ten months of data, October 2025 to July 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly average over those 12 months", "value": "about US$24,190", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 290,278 divided by 12. It is below the mid-2026 level, because the window ends with more than two months without data.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue since the start", "value": "US$376,985", "grade": "A", "note": "All-time figure from Stripe, as of 30 July 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Share of all revenue earned in the last 12 months", "value": "77%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 290,278 divided by 376,985 equals 0.770. The remaining US$86,707 came before October 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue, November 2025 to March 2026", "value": "US$18,016 to US$22,640", "grade": "A", "note": "Average US$20,833 a month (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue, April to July 2026", "value": "US$37,029, US$41,775, US$39,865 and US$54,841", "grade": "A", "note": "July 2026 is 31% above May 2026, the best earlier month, and 2.4 times March 2026 (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue synced after 30 July 2026", "value": "none", "grade": "A", "note": "The profile states that the Stripe API key expired at 21:04 UTC on 30 July 2026; the last sync was at 15:04 UTC that day. Its daily rows from 16 September to 15 October 2026 show US$0.00, and its 3-month total, US$15,967, is lower than July alone, so it covers days after the last sync. Without synced data these are not verified falls in revenue.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "3 people", "grade": "C", "note": "Team size in the Y Combinator directory, read 15 October 2026. The November 2024 launch post lists the same number: the two co-founders and a third team member who had grown FlowGPT to 4 million users through search traffic.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Accelerator", "value": "Y Combinator, Summer 2023 batch", "grade": "B", "note": "Y Combinator's own directory. Its standard deal is US$500,000 for 7% of the company plus an uncapped SAFE; no source says what RankAI received.", "src": [ 2, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Other investors", "value": "Treeo VC, and a seed stage dated December 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "Listed by the funding directory VCBacked, without an amount. No press report of a funding round was found.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Microsoft, OpenAI and a16z", "value": "logos under 'Backed by world-class investors'", "grade": "C", "note": "Homepage. The TrustMRR description reads 'Investors from YCombinator, OpenAI, A16z, etc.', which can mean people who work there. No source says that Microsoft, OpenAI or a16z invested as companies.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "First published prices, September 2024", "value": "US$69 and US$129 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived homepage: Starter with 2 blog posts a week, Advanced with 10 a week.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Entry price for agencies, October 2026", "value": "from US$49 a month per client site", "grade": "C", "note": "Agency page. Plans for businesses are sold through a demo call.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Pages on rankai.ai, October 2026", "value": "497", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: counted in the sitemap on 15 October 2026. 368 articles, 53 blog posts, 22 comparison pages (17 with named SEO and AI-search competitors, 5 with website builders, Claude Code and content management systems), 16 free SEO tools and 15 education pages.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "How customers arrive", "value": "not stated by any source", "grade": "C", "note": "The November 2024 launch post asked readers for introductions to small businesses. In 2026 the company sells through agencies and publishes its own articles and free SEO tools. No source says which brought most customers.", "src": [ 3, 5, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Operating company", "value": "LineUpp, Corp.", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms of service, governed by California law.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Time from founding to the July 2026 figure", "value": "37 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: June 2023 to July 2026. The founding date is the one in the TrustMRR profile; no source gives a release date.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "1 June 2023", "what": "Founding date in the TrustMRR profile. Y Combinator's directory gives the founding year as 2023.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "Summer 2023", "what": "Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch, San Francisco. Y Combinator's standard deal is US$500,000; no source says what RankAI received.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2, 10 ] }, { "when": "12 September 2024", "what": "The earliest archived homepage calls RankAI an AI SEO agency that is 20 times cheaper, with plans at US$69 and US$129 a month for 2 or 10 blog posts a week. Parts of the page still carry placeholder text from a website template.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "13 November 2024", "what": "Launch post on Y Combinator's site: AI agents that replace marketing agencies. Five automated steps, from crawling the customer's site to publishing weekly blog posts. A team of three.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "December 2024", "what": "The funding directory VCBacked dates a seed stage to December 2024, with Y Combinator and Treeo VC as investors and no amount.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "October 2025", "what": "First month in the profile's verified monthly table: US$12,604.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "November 2025 to March 2026", "what": "Verified revenue stays between US$18,016 and US$22,640 a month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "April 2026", "what": "Revenue rises to US$37,029, 64% above March (calculated).", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "July 2026", "what": "Best month in the table: US$54,841. Monthly recurring revenue of US$56,533 from 155 active subscriptions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "30 July 2026", "what": "Last revenue sync at 15:04 UTC. The Stripe API key that TrustMRR uses expires at 21:04 UTC the same day. No figures after this date.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The site sells search optimization, answer engine optimization and conversion work, with a white-label agency plan from US$49 a month per client. Y Combinator's directory shows the company as active with a team of 3, Hugo (Kanghong) Zhan as active founder and Dyllan Liu under former founders.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 4, 5 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Price", "text": "The 2024 launch post says that small business owners still pay thousands for marketing agencies, and that RankAI's first agent makes the SEO process 20 times more affordable. The archived 2024 homepage offered plans at US$69 and US$129 a month, against the US$1,000 to more than US$10,000 that the same page says businesses spend on agencies." }, { "title": "The full cycle, done for the customer", "text": "The launch post lists five steps: crawl the site, suggest technical fixes based on Google's guide, research keywords, write the content, and publish the fixes and weekly blog posts to the live site. The 2026 homepage adds measuring and rewriting: RankAI researches, publishes, measures, and rewrites. The terms of service describe the content as AI-generated and human-reviewed." }, { "title": "Agencies resell it", "text": "The agency page offers a white-label plan from US$49 a month per client site. It says that agencies resell this work at US$2,000 to US$6,000 a month in the U.S., and that RankAI aims to leave them at least 40% margin. Agencies are the first target persona in the TrustMRR profile." }, { "title": "From Google to AI answers", "text": "By October 2026 the product menu lists search engine optimization, answer engine optimization, conversion rate optimization and analytics, and the homepage names Google, ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity as the places where pages should appear. Verified revenue went from US$22,640 in March 2026 to US$37,029 in April and US$54,841 in July. No source says which change caused the rise." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages and from the founder-written part of the TrustMRR profile. They are grade C, except the payment provider, which TrustMRR verifies.", "items": [ "Next.js for the website, and OpenAI and Stripe in the backend, as the tech stack in the TrustMRR profile lists them. No source names a model.", "Stripe takes the subscription payments. TrustMRR reads them through a Stripe API key, which expired on 30 July 2026.", "It publishes to the customer's content management system: the homepage names Webflow, Framer and WordPress, and a question in the FAQ also names Next.js and Sanity.", "The terms of service list website audits, technical fixes, keyword research, AI-generated and human-reviewed content, reporting, and integrations such as Google Search Console.", "Agency customers get white-label reports, one dashboard for all client accounts and a shared Slack channel for support.", "The company's own site follows the same method: its sitemap lists 497 pages in October 2026, including 368 articles, 53 blog posts, 22 comparison pages and 16 free SEO tools.", "The operating company is LineUpp, Corp. Its terms are governed by California law." ], "src": [ 1, 4, 5, 6, 8 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold small businesses and brands more traffic from a platform that they did not control, or content made mainly to rank. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "PostRocket", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$610K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Data-driven timing and tuning of Facebook posts, so that brands reach more people.", "died": "The product depended on Facebook's API and News Feed algorithm. Facebook changed both and moved brands toward paid ads.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/457-postrocket" }, { "name": "Waterproof Digital Camera", "years": "2013 to 2017", "funding": "US$0", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Camera reviews written to rank in Google and earn affiliate commissions from Amazon.", "died": "It ranked through aggressive search tactics. Google's algorithm updates took away the traffic, and the commissions with it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2023-waterproof-digital-camera" }, { "name": "LocalOn", "years": "2013 to 2016", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Websites, social media and local search visibility for small shops, without coding.", "died": "Small businesses chose Shopify and Wix, which offered more. It ran out of money before it stood out.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1548-localon" }, { "name": "Pressly", "years": "2011 to 2018", "funding": "US$2.9M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Content curation that keeps a brand's audience supplied with relevant posts with less effort.", "died": "Larger marketing suites added curation as one feature among many, and a single-purpose tool could not stand out.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/462-pressly" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the four sold traffic or content for a business, and each depended on a platform that decided how much attention the work received: Facebook's feed for PostRocket, Google's ranking for the affiliate blog, or a small-business market that larger platforms served better. The affiliate blog is the closest case: it made pages mainly to rank, and Google's updates removed the traffic.", "Two things differ. First, language models make the writing and publishing cheap enough to sell the result of an agency for tens or hundreds of dollars a month, and agencies resell it at their own price. Second, the pages go on the customer's own site, about the customer's own products, and the terms say a person reviews them. The old risk remains: Google and the AI assistants decide how many visitors those pages receive." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. Being early, no.", "text": "The method is public and several small teams sell it: an automated search service at a monthly price, sold to businesses directly and to agencies under their own brand. RankAI started in 2023 with Y Combinator's money and network, and its own site now carries 17 pages that compare it with named competitors.", "steps": [ "Sell the result that an agency sells, research, pages, publishing and rewrites, for a monthly fee that a small business can pay.", "Publish to the customer's own site and content management system, so that there is nothing to migrate.", "Give agencies a white-label version and a margin, so that they resell it to their clients.", "Add visibility in AI answers as assistants take a share of searches.", "Keep a human review step and add pages only where they help a reader, because of Google's scaled content abuse policy." ], "open": "Search and AI-answer visibility for one platform or one industry, for example online stores or local services, where a narrow service can show results quickly." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Google's scaled content abuse policy", "text": "On 5 March 2024 Google announced its March 2024 core update and three new spam policies. One is scaled content abuse: many pages generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users, whether made by automation, by people or by both. One example in the policy is using generative AI tools to generate many pages without adding value for users. RankAI writes and publishes pages automatically, so its customers pass this test only where the pages add value for readers. Its terms say the content is human-reviewed, and in 2024 its larger plan offered 10 blog posts a week." }, { "title": "AI answers take clicks", "text": "Pew Research Center studied the browsing of 900 U.S. adults in March 2025 and published on 22 July 2025: users who saw a Google AI summary clicked a normal search result in 8% of visits, against 15% for users who did not see one, and clicked a link inside the summary in 1% of visits. RankAI now also sells visibility inside such answers, but a mention in an answer can bring fewer visits than a high ranking used to." }, { "title": "Same field, compared", "text": "This site's stories on SEObot (two co-founders, no outside money by the founder's statement, US$888,000 in the 12 months to October 2026) and ChatSEO (three co-founders, no outside money by the founders' statement, a run rate of US$385,000 a year in October 2026) describe the same automated search service; RankAI's run rate of about US$678,000 a year in July 2026 falls between them, and it is the only one of the three with venture money." }, { "title": "The verified figures stop on 30 July 2026", "text": "TrustMRR states that the Stripe API key expired on 30 July 2026, and nothing has been synced since. The profile does not say why. This does not show that revenue stopped or fell: the zeros after that date are missing data. It also means that nobody outside the company can see whether the growth of April to July 2026 continued." }, { "title": "Dependence on model providers", "text": "The only model provider that any source names is OpenAI, in the founder-written tech stack. A price rise, a policy change or an outage at that provider changes the cost and the output of every page RankAI writes. The homepage FAQ asks: why can't I just use Claude or ChatGPT? So the company itself treats the general AI assistants as a substitute for its service." }, { "title": "A change of founders", "text": "The Y Combinator directory describes Dyllan Liu as co-founder and chief executive, the 2024 launch post lists him in the team, and the TrustMRR profile still names its founder as Dyllan. The Y Combinator directory now lists him under former founders, with Hugo (Kanghong) Zhan as the active founder. No source says when or why this changed." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://rankai.ai/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/rankai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR markdown profile of RankAI, revenue verified from Stripe, last synced 30 July 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/rankai.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile on 15 October 2026. The revenue, MRR and subscription figures in its Verification Sources section are grade A; the description, funding, investors and tech stack are founder-written, grade C." }, { "title": "Y Combinator company directory: Rankai", "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/rankai", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the batch, founding year, team size, location, status and the active and former founders." }, { "title": "Launch YC, 13 November 2024: Rankai, AI Agents that Replace Marketing Agencies", "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/MFe-rankai-ai-agents-that-replace-marketing-agencies", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full (the page's data file). Founder-written launch post. Source for the thesis, the five steps and the team." }, { "title": "RankAI homepage, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://rankai.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product, the plans, the investor logos and the customer stories." }, { "title": "RankAI for agencies, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://rankai.ai/agency", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the only published price and the reseller terms." }, { "title": "RankAI terms of service", "url": "https://rankai.ai/tos", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the operator, the services and governing law." }, { "title": "RankAI homepage archived by the Wayback Machine, 12 September 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240912184049/https://www.rankai.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The earliest snapshot; no snapshot of a pricing page exists. Source for the 2024 plans and prices." }, { "title": "RankAI sitemap, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://rankai.ai/sitemap.xml", "grade": "C", "how": "Downloaded and counted the 497 page addresses by section." }, { "title": "VCBacked: Rankai funding and investors", "url": "https://www.vcbacked.co/company/rankai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A third-party funding directory. Source for the seed stage and Treeo VC; it gives no amount." }, { "title": "Y Combinator: the YC deal", "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/deal", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the deal terms. It describes the standard deal, not what RankAI received." }, { "title": "Google Search Central: spam policies for Google web search", "url": "https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the section on scaled content abuse." }, { "title": "Google Search Central Blog, 5 March 2024: What web creators should know about our March 2024 core update and new spam policies", "url": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the sections on the core update and the new spam policies." }, { "title": "Pew Research Center, 22 July 2025: Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results", "url": "https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the click rates with and without an AI summary." }, { "title": "Aiolum stories on SEObot and ChatSEO", "url": "https://aiolum.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the two story files on this site for the one-sentence comparison." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/audionotes/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/audionotes.md", "slug": "audionotes", "name": "AudioNotes", "country": "India", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI voice notes and transcription app", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-16", "launchLabel": "May 2023", "outcomeLabel": "About US$7.2K a month, August 2024", "sticker": "$7.2K a month", "outcomeUsd": 85831, "months": 15, "teamLabel": "1 founder (Latka counts 1 person in November 2023), a studio of 5 people by 2026", "fundingLabel": "None found", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "voice-audio", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Productivity" ], "product": "An AI note-taking app for speech: record a voice note or upload audio, video or text, and get a transcript, a summary, meeting minutes, an email or a social post. It runs on iPhone, Android, the web and a Mac beta, with links to Notion, Zapier, webhooks and WhatsApp.", "why": "It started two months after OpenAI's Whisper API made accurate transcription cheap, and it sold the step after the transcript: a summary, minutes, an email or a post, sent on to Notion, Zapier or WhatsApp. In 2023 it charged by the year, US$99 or US$199.", "summary": [ "AudioNotes turns speech into finished text. You record a voice note, upload an audio or video file, or type a note, and the app returns a transcript and a structured version of it: a summary, meeting minutes, an email or a social post. A speech-to-text model, a program that converts recorded speech into written words, makes the transcript; the company names OpenAI's Whisper, and its privacy policy also lists Deepgram and AssemblyAI. A large language model, a program trained on large amounts of text to write and rewrite text, makes the structured version; the privacy policy lists OpenAI and Google Gemini for voice-to-text processing and summarization. Results can go to Notion, Zapier, WhatsApp or a webhook, a web address of the customer's own system that receives each note automatically. The apps run on iPhone, Android, the web and a Mac beta, and the company behind them is 1811 Labs, a product studio in Bengaluru, India.", "Vatsal Sanghvi, a BITS Pilani graduate who had worked at Flipkart, founded 1811 Labs in February 2023 and started building AudioNotes in May 2023, two months after OpenAI opened the Whisper API at US$0.006 a minute. In December 2023 it had more than 5,700 registered users and 200 paying customers, at US$99 or US$199 a year. A gaps.com report first published in May 2024 says it made over US$7,000 a month in monthly recurring revenue, the subscription revenue that repeats every month. On 21 August 2024 an Inshorts brief for BuildSchool, a course seller where he was a mentor, said the app makes ₹6 lakh a month. At the August 2024 average of 83.8855 rupees per US dollar, that is about US$7,153 a month, a run rate (the monthly figure times 12) of about US$85,831 a year.", "Every money figure on this page is grade C. Both come from the founder's side, one through a course promotion and one through a report that names no source, and no payment processor confirms them. No figure after August 2024 was found. Between December 2023 and July 2025, Google, Apple and OpenAI put recording, transcription and summaries into their own products. The page also shows earlier companies that sold note-taking against a free, larger product, or built voice technology that the large platforms then built themselves." ], "factsCaption": "A voice-notes app that reached about US$7,000 a month in 2024, by figures from the founder's side", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a statement from the founder's side, the company's own pages, or a third party that does not name its source. Grade B values are shown by the app stores. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No revenue value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a new domain in May 2023 to about US$7,000 a month in August 2024, in 15 months, and what the large platforms shipped around it. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "AudioNotes prices in October 2026, from the company's pricing page and the App Store listing (grade C)", "note": "The yearly Pro plan is US$129.99, which the page shows as a 64% saving against US$29.99 a month (63.9%, calculated). The monthly price was read from the page's embedded data, because the monthly view loads by script. The App Store lists more in-app prices, including weekly plans from US$3.99 to US$12.99 and other yearly prices of US$89.99 and US$99.99. In December 2023 gaps.com reported US$99 a year for the personal plan and US$199 a year for the pro plan, with lifetime plans at double. The company gives no refunds for paid plans.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "voice notes of up to 1 minute each; unlimited text notes" ], [ "Pro", "10.83", "29.99", "US$129.99 billed yearly; recordings up to 6 hours, files up to 500 MB" ], [ "Enterprise", "custom", "custom", "teams of 5 or more" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue per month, August 2024", "value": "₹6 lakh (₹600,000)", "grade": "C", "note": "Inshorts brief, 21 August 2024: BuildSchool, a course seller where the founder was a mentor, is reported as \"stating that his Audionotes app makes ₹6 lakh/month\". The words do not say recurring revenue. A lakh is 100,000 rupees.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "The same figure in US dollars", "value": "about US$7,153 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: ₹600,000 divided by 83.8855 rupees per US dollar, the average of the Federal Reserve's 22 daily rates for August 2024.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the August 2024 figure", "value": "about US$85,831 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$7,152.61 times 12. This is the headline number on this page.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue reported by gaps.com", "value": "over US$7,000", "grade": "C", "note": "gaps.com report, first published 6 May 2024 and updated 2 May 2025. It says \"now\" without a date and names no source. No 2024 copy is in the Wayback Machine, so the month of this figure is not verified.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Users, December 2023", "value": "more than 5,700 registered users, 200 paying customers", "grade": "C", "note": "gaps.com, as of December 2023.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Recurring revenue that 200 yearly customers would give", "value": "about US$1,650 to US$3,317 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 200 times US$99 or US$199, divided by 12. It assumes every paying customer was on a yearly plan. So the recurring revenue of over US$7,000 a month was reached after December 2023.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Annual revenue recorded by Latka, November 2023", "value": "US$17,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Latka marks the source as \"not recorded\". That is about US$1,417 a month (calculated: divided by 12), in line with the December 2023 customer count.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Total from all the founder's AI products, August 2024", "value": "more than ₹80 lakh (₹8,000,000) in 18 months, about US$95,368", "grade": "C", "note": "Inshorts headline. This total is not AudioNotes alone: the same brief says that Podnotes, another of his products, made ₹40 lakh in 10 months. Conversion at the August 2024 rate (calculated).", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Users, October 2026", "value": "200,000+ users and over 1 million notes", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's about page. The number of paying users is not stated.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Team, November 2023", "value": "1 person", "grade": "C", "note": "Latka: \"1 person lists AudioNotes as their employer on LinkedIn (November 2023).\" The App Store seller is the founder as an individual.", "src": [ 7, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Team of the parent studio, October 2026", "value": "5 people, the founder among them", "grade": "C", "note": "1811 Labs calls itself \"A small team of problem solvers and tinkerers in Bengaluru, India\" and names Claude Code and Codex as its \"AI crew\". The five also build the studio's other products.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "Latka records no funding, and no source read for this page mentions a round.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "App stores, October 2026", "value": "App Store (US): 4.8 from 96 ratings. Google Play: 4.1 from 404 reviews, 10K+ downloads", "grade": "B", "note": "Shown by Apple and Google. The Android app was updated on 6 October 2026.", "src": [ 9, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Price of the top yearly plan", "value": "US$199 in the December 2023 report, US$129.99 in October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "34.7% lower (calculated). The 2026 page also has a free plan with unlimited voice notes of up to 1 minute each.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Operating company", "value": "1811 Labs, Bengaluru, India", "grade": "C", "note": "The about page says \"Built by 1811 Labs\". The terms are governed by the laws of India, with the courts in Bengaluru, Karnataka. The founder's profile lists him as founder of 1811 Labs since February 2023.", "src": [ 4, 6, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the start of building to the August 2024 figure", "value": "15 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: May 2023 to August 2024.", "src": [ 2, 4 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "February 2023", "what": "Vatsal Sanghvi founds 1811 Labs, after roles at Entrepreneur First, Flipkart and Omidyar Network India, according to his profile.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "1 March 2023", "what": "OpenAI opens its Whisper speech-to-text model through the API at US$0.006 a minute.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "3 May 2023", "what": "First capture of audionotes.app in the Wayback Machine. The company says it started building AudioNotes that month.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 12, 4 ] }, { "when": "After August 2023", "what": "A redesign after customer feedback, with new features. gaps.com links it to a rise in income.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "November 2023", "what": "Latka records US$17,000 in annual revenue and 1 person on LinkedIn.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "6 December 2023", "what": "Google's Recorder app on the Pixel 8 Pro gets summaries from Gemini Nano, a model that runs on the phone.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 19 ] }, { "when": "December 2023", "what": "More than 5,700 registered users and 200 paying customers, at US$99 or US$199 a year.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "6 May 2024", "what": "gaps.com publishes a report that lists AudioNotes at over US$7,000 a month in recurring revenue.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "10 June 2024", "what": "Apple announces that its Notes and Phone apps can record, transcribe and summarize audio.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 18 ] }, { "when": "21 August 2024", "what": "An Inshorts brief for BuildSchool says that the app makes ₹6 lakh a month, about US$7,153.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "when": "20 March 2025", "what": "OpenAI releases gpt-4o-transcribe and gpt-4o-mini-transcribe, with lower word error rates than Whisper.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "16 July 2025", "what": "ChatGPT's record mode reaches Plus users in the macOS app, for team meetings or voice notes.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "200,000+ users and Pro at US$29.99 a month or US$129.99 a year. The parent studio lists five people.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 5, 11 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Built on a model that had just become cheap", "text": "The company's own account starts with Whisper: \"When OpenAI released Whisper, transcription suddenly became dramatically better, and almost overnight, commoditized.\" The Whisper API cost US$0.006 a minute from 1 March 2023, which is US$0.36 for an hour of audio (calculated). AudioNotes started two months later, so the hardest part, speech recognition, was rented by the minute instead of built." }, { "title": "Sell the step after the transcript", "text": "The app does not stop at the words. It turns a recording or a note into a summary, meeting minutes, an email or a social post, in a style and length that the user chooses. The Pro plan adds custom prompts and chat with your notes." }, { "title": "Send the result where people work", "text": "Links to Zapier, Notion and WhatsApp were part of the product by the 2024 report. In 2026 the Pro plan includes Notion, Zapier and webhooks, and the site offers a WhatsApp bot." }, { "title": "Yearly plans", "text": "In 2023 the plans were US$99 and US$199 a year, with lifetime plans at double. In 2026 the yearly Pro plan is US$129.99 against US$29.99 a month, and the page shows the yearly plan as a 64% saving." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages and files (grade C) and from the app stores (grade B).", "items": [ "Speech-to-text: the pricing page names \"OpenAI's Whisper and other audio models\". The privacy policy lists Deepgram and AssemblyAI \"for speech-to-text transcription\", and OpenAI and Google Gemini \"for AI-based voice-to-text processing and summarization\".", "Text generation: \"we use OpenAI's models to power our AI features\", with OpenAI's data training turned off for its content, according to the same page.", "Payments: Stripe on the web and the app stores of Apple and Google, according to the privacy and refund policies.", "The affiliate program runs on Lemon Squeezy, which gives each affiliate a tracked link; commissions are paid by PayPal.", "The website is built with Next.js: its robots.txt file refers to the /_next/static/ folder and to next.config.mjs.", "Apps for iPhone, Android, the web and a Mac beta. The iPhone app is sold under the founder's own name, with in-app plans from US$3.99 a week to US$129.99 a year.", "The home page loads Google's analytics tag, gtag.js.", "The company scores summary quality on its comparison pages with GPT-4o as the judge: a language model that rates each summary against a fixed rubric.", "In 2026 the parent studio says that Claude Code \"Writes all the code\" and that Codex \"Plans everything. Tests everything.\"" ], "src": [ 5, 25, 26, 22, 21, 9, 23, 11 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold note-taking against a free, larger product, or built voice technology that the large platforms then built themselves. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Transpose", "years": "2012 to 2018", "funding": "None", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "First launched as KustomNote: a more flexible Evernote, later for business teams.", "died": "It could not give Evernote users a reason to switch, and it charged for plans without outside money to compete with a larger, established product.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1849-transpose" }, { "name": "Springpad", "years": "2008 to 2014", "funding": "US$7.5M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Save and organize articles, recipes and notes in one place, as an Evernote competitor.", "died": "Users valued the free product, but premium features and business plans did not sell, and development fell behind Evernote.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1893-springpad" }, { "name": "VocalIQ", "years": "2011 to 2017", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Voice interfaces that learn from context, for assistants and cars.", "died": "Apple, Google and Amazon, with more money, moved faster with their own voice technology. Apple bought it in 2015, which ended it as an independent company.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/719-vocaliq" }, { "name": "Tellme", "years": "1999 to 2011", "funding": "US$238M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Information and transactions by voice over the phone, with speech recognition.", "died": "Smartphones moved people to apps with screens, and Google and Amazon built their own AI voice products.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/612-tellme" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Transpose and Springpad sold note-taking against Evernote, a larger product that people already used for free, and could not give users a reason to pay or to switch. VocalIQ and Tellme built voice technology and lost to Apple, Google and Amazon, which built their own. AudioNotes carries both risks at once: it is a paid notes app, and Apple, Google and OpenAI now record, transcribe and summarize inside their own products.", "Two things differ. The costly part, speech recognition, is now rented from a model provider by the minute, so one person could start in 2023 without outside money, while VocalIQ raised US$2 million and Tellme US$238 million to build their own voice systems. And the product sells the steps after the transcript: a finished summary, minutes, an email or a post, sent on to Notion, Zapier, webhooks or WhatsApp. The open question for AudioNotes is whether those steps stay worth paying for while the built-in tools improve." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The same product, no.", "text": "In May 2023 a clean transcript with a summary was new for most people, and Whisper had just made it cheap. In 2026 Apple, Google and OpenAI include recording, transcription and summaries in their own products, and Otter gives 300 minutes a month for free. The method still works for a narrower user, where a fixed output format matters more than the transcript.", "steps": [ "When a model becomes cheap through an API, build a product around it within weeks and charge from the start.", "Turn the model's raw output into a finished document that a person needs: minutes, an email, a post.", "Send the result to the tools where the user already works, such as Notion, Zapier or WhatsApp.", "Sell yearly plans and show the saving against the monthly price." ], "open": "Voice-to-document tools for one kind of user with a fixed output, such as medical, sales or lecture notes, where a general summary is not enough." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Second-hand figures from the founder's side", "text": "No payment processor confirms either revenue figure. The ₹6 lakh figure is a course seller's claim, relayed in a short news brief. The gaps.com figure has no named source and no exact month. The two agree, about US$7,000 a month, but neither is independent." }, { "title": "A course promotion as a source", "text": "The Inshorts brief promotes BuildSchool, where the founder was a mentor, and its link leads to a GrowthSchool course application form, not to an article. A course seller has a reason to show high incomes for its mentors. The brief's ₹80 lakh headline is the total of several products over 18 months, not AudioNotes alone." }, { "title": "No figure after August 2024", "text": "No revenue figure from 2025 or 2026 was found, so the trend is unknown. Users grew to 200,000+ by 2026, but the number of paying users is not given, and the top yearly price fell from US$199 to US$129.99." }, { "title": "The platforms ship the same feature", "text": "Google added summaries to the Recorder app on the Pixel 8 Pro on 6 December 2023. Apple announced on 10 June 2024 that Notes and Phone can \"record, transcribe, and summarize audio\". OpenAI gave ChatGPT Plus users a record mode on macOS on 16 July 2025 for \"team meetings or voice notes\". These come with a phone or a subscription that many users already have, and Otter's free Basic plan includes 300 transcription minutes a month." }, { "title": "Cheaper and better speech-to-text for everyone", "text": "The transcript is no longer scarce. Whisper cost US$0.006 a minute in 2023, and in March 2025 OpenAI released two newer transcription models with a lower word error rate, the share of words that a model gets wrong. Every competitor gets the same models on the same day, so users compare the price of the app. AudioNotes added a free plan and cut its top yearly price by 34.7% between the 2023 report and 2026." }, { "title": "Dependence on model providers", "text": "The pricing page says that OpenAI's models power the AI features, and the privacy policy lists four providers: OpenAI and Google Gemini for processing and summaries, Deepgram and AssemblyAI for transcription. Several providers make a switch possible when one raises its price or fails, but the company owns none of the models, and a change at any of them reaches every user." }, { "title": "One founder's time, several products", "text": "Latka counted one person in November 2023. By 2026 the founder runs a studio of five people that also builds HomeDesignAI, UGC Pulse and marketing agents, and that sells advice including \"TikTok UGC at scale\". How much of the team's time goes to AudioNotes is not known." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.audionotes.app" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6736822144" }, { "kind": "android", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.labs.audionotes" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "gaps.com: AI Content Report, 17 Startups Generating $1.5M in MRR, first published 6 May 2024, updated 2 May 2025", "url": "https://gaps.com/ai-content/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on AudioNotes (number 4). The page names no source for its figures, and no 2024 copy is in the Wayback Machine, so the month of the US$7,000 figure is not verified." }, { "title": "Inshorts, 21 August 2024: Vatsal has built AI products to make ₹80L+ in 18 months: BuildSchool", "url": "https://inshorts.com/en/news/vatsal-has-built-ai-products-to-make--80l--in-18-months--buildschool-1724211003096", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full (a 60-word brief). It reports a claim by BuildSchool, a course seller; it is a promotion, not reporting. Source for the ₹6 lakh a month and the ₹80 lakh total." }, { "title": "Federal Reserve Board, H.10 historical rates: India, rupees per US dollar", "url": "https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h10/hist/dat00_in.htm", "grade": "A", "how": "Downloaded the daily table and averaged the 22 business days of August 2024 with python3: 83.8855. Used only for the conversion; it says nothing about AudioNotes." }, { "title": "AudioNotes: About, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://www.audionotes.app/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the May 2023 start, the Whisper account, the 200,000+ users and the 1811 Labs name." }, { "title": "AudioNotes: Plans and Pricing, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://www.audionotes.app/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The monthly price (US$29.99) was read from the page's embedded data because the monthly view loads by script. Source for the FAQ on Whisper and OpenAI." }, { "title": "AudioNotes: Terms of Service", "url": "https://www.audionotes.app/tos", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on governing law and jurisdiction." }, { "title": "Latka company page: AudioNotes revenue", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/audionotes.app", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A third-party record: it marks the revenue source as not recorded and counts profiles on LinkedIn." }, { "title": "Peerlist: Resume of Vatsal Sanghvi", "url": "https://peerlist.io/vatsalsanghvi/resume", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's own profile: founder of 1811 Labs since February 2023, and his earlier roles." }, { "title": "Apple App Store listing (US): Audionotes: Audio Notes AI, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/audionotes-audio-notes-ai/id6736822144", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The seller, the ratings and the in-app price list are shown by Apple; the description is the developer's." }, { "title": "Google Play listing: Audionotes: AI Notes & Minutes, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.labs.audionotes&hl=en-US", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The developer name, download range, reviews and update date are shown by Google." }, { "title": "1811 Labs, the parent studio, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://1811labs.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The studio's own description of its team, products and services." }, { "title": "Internet Archive Wayback Machine: first captures of audionotes.app", "url": "http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=audionotes.app&limit=4", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the capture list: the first capture is from 3 May 2023. The captured page shows only the name, so it does not prove a working product on that day." }, { "title": "Internet Archive copy of link.buildschool.net/inshorts, captured 24 October 2025", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20251024093350/https://link.buildschool.net/inshorts", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The link in the Inshorts brief redirects to a GrowthSchool course application form; no BuildSchool article with the figure was found, and buildschool.net no longer resolves." }, { "title": "OpenAI, 1 March 2023: Introducing ChatGPT and Whisper APIs", "url": "https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-and-whisper-apis/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on the Whisper API and its price." }, { "title": "OpenAI, 20 March 2025: Introducing next-generation audio models in the API", "url": "https://openai.com/index/introducing-our-next-generation-audio-models/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on the new speech-to-text models." }, { "title": "OpenAI Help Center: ChatGPT release notes", "url": "https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6825453-chatgpt-release-notes", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the entry of 16 July 2025 on record mode." }, { "title": "OpenAI Help Center: ChatGPT Record, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://help.openai.com/en/articles/11487532-chatgpt-record", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the overview, which lists the plans that have record mode." }, { "title": "Apple Newsroom, 10 June 2024: Introducing Apple Intelligence for iPhone, iPad, and Mac", "url": "https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/06/introducing-apple-intelligence-for-iphone-ipad-and-mac/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on recording, transcription and summaries in Notes and Phone." }, { "title": "Google, 6 December 2023: Pixel December feature drop", "url": "https://blog.google/products/pixel/pixel-feature-drop-december-2023/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on Summarize in Recorder." }, { "title": "Otter.ai pricing, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://otter.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the free Basic plan." }, { "title": "AudioNotes robots.txt, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://www.audionotes.app/robots.txt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Its comments, dated 5 May 2026 and 12 September 2026, describe search-engine work, and its paths show a Next.js site." }, { "title": "AudioNotes: Affiliate program", "url": "https://www.audionotes.app/affiliates", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the offer: 30% commission when a referred user upgrades." }, { "title": "AudioNotes: Testing Methodology", "url": "https://www.audionotes.app/testing-methodology", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on how summary quality is scored." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." }, { "title": "AudioNotes: Privacy Policy, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://www.audionotes.app/privacypolicy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the list of model providers (OpenAI, Google Gemini, Deepgram, AssemblyAI) and the payment processors." }, { "title": "AudioNotes: Refund Policy, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://www.audionotes.app/refundpolicy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the sales channels: Apple App Store, Google Play and Stripe." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/easygen/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/easygen.md", "slug": "easygen", "name": "EasyGen", "country": "France", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI writer for LinkedIn posts", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-16", "launchLabel": "March 2024", "outcomeLabel": "Sold at an undisclosed price after US$41.5K a month in 2024, October 2026", "sticker": "Sold after $41.5K MRR", "outcomeUsd": 498000, "months": 31, "teamLabel": "1 founder who does not code and 2 employees in late 2024; 8 employees on LinkedIn by July 2025", "fundingLabel": "None (US$0 outside investment, November 2024)", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "audience", "trend": "sold", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2C", "Marketing" ], "product": "A web app and a Chrome extension that write LinkedIn posts. The member picks an industry, a niche and a type of topic, or gives an idea or a voice note, and the AI writes a draft in the member's style; the member edits it and posts it. By 2026 it also showed the best posts of top creators, found trending topics on Reddit, X, Google, Bing and Perplexity, and planned posts in a calendar. It never posted on its own.", "why": "The founder had already built one of the largest audiences on LinkedIn by posting about AI every day, so the product had buyers on the day it launched. It sold one plan at about US$60 a month, as a US$2-a-day ghostwriter against US$2,000 to US$3,000 for a human one, and his employees grew their own accounts with it and sold it for a commission.", "summary": [ "EasyGen is a web app and a Chrome extension, a small program that adds features to the Google Chrome browser, that writes LinkedIn posts with a large language model, an AI system trained on large amounts of text that writes new text from an instruction. The member chooses an industry, a niche and a type of topic, or pastes an idea, and the AI writes a draft that the member edits and then posts. It does not post by itself: the home page says the team decided against automatic posting because it reduces how many people see a post.", "Ruben Hassid, a French creator who says he reached 100 million views on LinkedIn, released it in March 2024. He says he knows no code and took no outside investment. His posts on X, quoted by the newsletter Tiny Startups, give MRR, monthly recurring revenue, the subscription revenue that repeats every month, of US$9,128.66 on 30 June 2024, 92 days after launch, and US$41,532.86 on 29 November 2024, with more than 27,000 users. That is a run rate, the monthly figure times 12, of about US$498,000 a year. Gaps.com later reported US$540,000 in ARR, annual recurring revenue, by May 2025 at the latest. In October 2026 the home page says that EasyGen has been acquired and takes no new signups. The buyer and the price are not public.", "Every money figure is the founder's own statement, grade C. Starter Story and Latka publish estimates that they mark as estimates, and Latka counts 8 employees on LinkedIn in July 2025. The page also shows earlier companies that built tools for people who publish on social networks, on top of platforms that they did not control." ], "factsCaption": "From US$9,128 a month at 92 days to US$41,532 a month about eight months after launch, then US$540,000 a year reported by May 2025, and a sale at an undisclosed price in October 2026, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a founder statement in his posts, quoted by newsletters and reports, or an estimate by a third party that says so. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a creator's own writing system to a sale, in 31 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "EasyGen prices before the sale, from a November 2024 copy of the home page and the founder's newsletter in 2025 (grade C). In October 2026 the site takes no new signups, so there is no current price", "note": "The home page of November 2024 gave three free posts without a credit card, then one paid plan. An annual plan existed, 50% off for Black Friday 2024, but no source gives its price. The privacy policy says that all sales are final, with no refunds.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "", "0", "3 posts, no credit card (November 2024)" ], [ "Paid plan", "", "59.99", "home page, November 2024" ], [ "Pro", "", "59", "founder's newsletter, August and December 2025" ], [ "Pro, first-month offer", "", "0.99", "first month only, December 2025" ], [ "Any plan, October 2026", "", "", "closed to new signups after the sale" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue per month (MRR), 29 November 2024", "value": "US$41,532.86", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X, quoted by Tiny Startups on 3 December 2024, with more than 27,000 users and 195 days after the launch date that he counted from. Gaps.com gives the same figure as US$41,500 by November 2024.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the November 2024 figure", "value": "about US$498,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$41,532.86 times 12 is US$498,394. This is the headline figure on this page, from the period when the founder wrote of 2 employees.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue reported later", "value": "US$540,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Gaps.com writes that EasyGen is now generating US$540,000 ARR, among figures that it says Ruben shared. Its AI content report, last updated on 2 May 2025, already shows it, so the figure is from May 2025 or earlier. This page did not find the founder's own post with it.", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Change from November 2024 to the US$540,000 figure", "value": "about 8% more", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$540,000 divided by 12 is US$45,000 a month, 8.3% above US$41,532.86.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month (MRR), 30 June 2024", "value": "US$9,128.66", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X, 92 days after launch, quoted by Tiny Startups on 1 July 2024. He wrote it as $9,128,66. Gaps.com: over US$9,100 at 92 days.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from June to November 2024", "value": "4.55 times in 152 days", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$41,532.86 divided by US$9,128.66.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month when he wrote about his 2 employees", "value": "US$33,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Title of the founder's Reddit post, quoted by Starter Story on 22 November 2024: How my 2 employees helped me reach $33,000 MRR as my biggest affiliates. This page could not open the post itself.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Price", "value": "US$59.99 a month after 3 free posts", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page, November 2024. The founder's newsletter gives US$59 a month in August 2025 and offered the first month for US$0.99 in December 2025.", "src": [ 6, 12, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Code written by the founder", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "His posts of June and November 2024 both say: Line of code I know: 0. NetInfluencer reports that he developed the post-writing system together with a US serial entrepreneur.", "src": [ 1, 2, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Outside investment", "value": "US$0", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's posts of June and November 2024. No source reports a funding round.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "the founder and 2 employees in late 2024; 8 employees on LinkedIn in July 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "The 2 employees are from the founder's Reddit title. Starter Story estimates 2 founders and 6 employees in November 2024 and marks the number as an estimate. Latka counts 8 employees from LinkedIn in July 2025.", "src": [ 10, 17 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's LinkedIn audience", "value": "650,000 followers in August 2025; 710,000+ in October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's newsletter and the EasyGen sign-up page, which also gives 155,000+ newsletter readers. The home page says he reached 100 million views on LinkedIn before he built EasyGen.", "src": [ 11, 15, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Chrome extension users", "value": "9,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Chrome Web Store, read 16 October 2026: 4.7 stars from 91 ratings, version 2.0.10 of 14 August 2025.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Sale", "value": "buyer, price and date not public", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page, 16 October 2026: EasyGen has been acquired and isn't taking new signups. Copies of the home page from 10 June and 29 September 2026 do not show this notice.", "src": [ 5, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Latka's revenue estimate", "value": "US$880,000 a year, July 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "A third-party estimate, marked as such. It is higher than any founder figure.", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "fact": "Launch date", "value": "about 30 March 2024", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 92 days before his post of 30 June 2024. His November post (195 days on 29 November) points to 18 May 2024 instead, and the Reddit text quoted by Starter Story says that he launched the SaaS on 19 May 2024. The Wayback Machine first captured easygen.io on 21 March 2024.", "src": [ 2, 1, 10, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the November 2024 figure, and to the sale", "value": "8 months; 31 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: March 2024 to November 2024, and March 2024 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Country and company", "value": "France; no legal entity named", "grade": "C", "note": "Latka lists Paris, France, and NetInfluencer calls him a French entrepreneur. The privacy policy says only that the site is operated by EasyGen. The site shows no terms page or company register number.", "src": [ 17, 9, 16 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Late 2022", "what": "The release of ChatGPT is his first real contact with generative AI, according to an interview. He then posts on LinkedIn every day for three years.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 18, 13 ] }, { "when": "March 2024", "what": "EasyGen goes live. The Wayback Machine first captures easygen.io on 21 March, and his own count of days puts the launch at about 30 March.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 2 ] }, { "when": "19 May 2024", "what": "The date that he later gives for the launch of the SaaS, in a Reddit post quoted by Starter Story.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "30 June 2024", "what": "MRR of US$9,128.66 after 92 days, with no code written by him and no outside money.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "11 July 2024", "what": "NetInfluencer interview: he calls EasyGen a '$2-a-day ghostwriter'. Two employees who used it on new accounts reached 1.4 million people in 35 days, he says.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "November 2024", "what": "The home page offers 3 free posts, then US$59.99 a month, and an extension for Chrome. A Reddit post says that his 2 employees, as his biggest affiliates, helped him reach US$33,000 MRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 10 ] }, { "when": "29 November 2024", "what": "MRR of US$41,532.86 and more than 27,000 users. Black Friday offer: 50% off the annual plan.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "By 2 May 2025", "what": "Gaps.com reports US$540,000 in annual recurring revenue.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "July 2025", "what": "Latka counts 8 employees on LinkedIn and estimates revenue at US$880,000 a year.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "when": "August 2025", "what": "650,000 LinkedIn followers. His newsletter lists EasyGen at US$59 a month among the AI tools that he pays for. The Chrome extension reaches version 2.0.10.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11, 12, 8 ] }, { "when": "3 December 2025", "what": "700,000+ followers after three years of daily posts. EasyGen Pro is offered at US$0.99 for the first month instead of US$59.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "23 September 2026", "what": "He launches GPC, an AI consulting company that he formed by buying a consulting firm.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The home page says that EasyGen has been acquired and takes no new signups. Existing customers can still log in, and the page sends companies to GPC and readers to his newsletter.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 7 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "An audience before a product", "text": "He posted about AI on LinkedIn every day for years before EasyGen and, by his count, reached 100 million views. When the tool launched, the buyers already followed him. His newsletter, with 155,000+ readers by October 2026, kept selling it." }, { "title": "Employees as proof and as affiliates", "text": "Two employees used EasyGen on new LinkedIn accounts of their own; he says they reached 1.4 million people in 35 days. They then sold it as affiliates, people who earn a share of each sale made through their personal link, and by his account they were his biggest affiliates on the way to US$33,000 a month." }, { "title": "One plan, priced against a ghostwriter", "text": "One paid plan at US$59.99 a month after three free posts. He compares it with a human ghostwriter at US$2,000 to US$3,000: in his words, you pay $2 a day for a ghostwriter who works 24 hours a day." }, { "title": "Drafts, not automation", "text": "EasyGen writes drafts and the member posts them. The home page says the team chose not to post automatically, and the store page of the extension says it never connects to LinkedIn's API, the official interface through which programs use LinkedIn. That kept it away from the kind of tool that LinkedIn has acted against." }, { "title": "Revenue posted in public", "text": "He posted his MRR, his user count, the lines of code that he knows (zero) and his outside money (zero) on X, and newsletters such as Tiny Startups repeated the posts to their readers." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's posts and interviews, the company's own pages and the page source of its web site. The founder's statements are grade C; the page source shows which tools the site loads.", "items": [ "The founder says he knows no code. NetInfluencer reports that he developed the post-writing system with a US serial entrepreneur, as what he calls an agent workflow, in which language models pass work to each other.", "No source names the AI model provider.", "A web app at app.easygen.io and a free Chrome extension that shows how a post will look on a phone and connects to the member's EasyGen account. Its store page says it never connects to LinkedIn's API.", "The 2024 site was built with Webflow and the 2026 site with Next.js. Both load Rewardful, an affiliate tracking service, and Google's analytics tag; the 2024 site also loaded Intercom for support chat.", "The privacy policy names Microsoft Clarity and Microsoft Advertising for tracking how visitors use the site, and gives an opt-out at Retention.com for a service that matches visitors to email or home addresses for marketing. All sales are final.", "By 2026 the product had creator search, a trending-topics tool that, according to the home page, scrapes Reddit, X, Google, Bing and Perplexity, style settings, voice-note input and a content calendar." ], "src": [ 9, 1, 8, 6, 5, 16 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database built tools for people who publish, or writing tools, on top of platforms or free products that they did not control. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "BranchOut", "years": "2010 to 2017", "funding": "US$49M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A professional network, like LinkedIn, built inside Facebook.", "died": "Facebook changed its API rules and cut off the growth that the product depended on.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/30-branchout" }, { "name": "Klout", "years": "2008 to 2017", "funding": "US$40M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A score from 1 to 100 that measured a person's influence from their social media posts.", "died": "Facebook and Twitter built better analytics themselves, and the score lost its value.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/280-klout" }, { "name": "Pixelpipe", "years": "2008 to 2013", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Post photos, videos and text to many social networks at once.", "died": "The networks closed their APIs and built cross-posting in.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/435-pixelpipe" }, { "name": "Trapit", "years": "2011 to 2019", "funding": "US$21.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "AI that finds and curates content for people and companies to share.", "died": "Large technology companies offered the same, and it stayed a niche tool for marketers.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/658-trapit" }, { "name": "Draft", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A simple web editor that helps writers write and revise.", "died": "Google Docs gave the same for free, and a narrow paid writing tool could not compete.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1605-draft" } ], "whatChanged": [ "All five sold help to people who publish, and each depended on a platform or a free product that it did not own. The platform closed its API, built the feature itself, or gave it away. EasyGen had the same exposure: LinkedIn has had its own AI drafting tool since 2023, Premium members now get its proofreader, and ChatGPT writes posts for anyone.", "Two things differ. First, a large language model did the writing, so a few people could sell what once needed a staff of ghostwriters, and EasyGen never needed LinkedIn's API, because the member posts the draft. Second, the customers came from the founder's own audience, not from a platform's growth features, so no API change could cut them off, although a change in how LinkedIn shows his posts could. The business ended in a sale, not a shutdown, but the price is not public." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product, yes. The sales, only with an audience.", "text": "A LinkedIn post writer on top of a commercial model is easy to build, and several competitors on this site built one. What made EasyGen sell was an audience of hundreds of thousands of followers, built over years of daily posts, which the founder turned into buyers on launch day and kept selling to through a newsletter.", "steps": [ "Build the audience first, on the platform where your customers spend their working day.", "Turn the system that you use for your own posts into a product, and show its results on new accounts.", "Pay employees and customers as affiliates, so that each success story is also a sales channel.", "Write drafts that a person posts, instead of automating actions that the platform can ban.", "Post your revenue in public; newsletters repeat it to their readers." ], "open": "A writing tool for the creators of one platform, sold by a creator on that platform: newsletters on Substack, threads on X, videos on YouTube, with the product built around what the creator already does every day." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Founder figures only", "text": "Every money figure is the founder's own, from posts on X that newsletters quote and from a report by Gaps.com. No payment processor or buyer has confirmed them. His two counts of days since launch point to different launch dates, 30 March and 18 May 2024." }, { "title": "Team size at the figures", "text": "At the headline figure of November 2024, the founder wrote of 2 employees, and he writes no code himself, so at least one more person built the software. Starter Story estimated 2 founders and 6 employees in November 2024, and Latka counted 8 employees on LinkedIn in July 2025, when the US$540,000 figure had already been reported." }, { "title": "Sold, with no details", "text": "The home page says that EasyGen has been acquired and takes no new signups. It names no buyer, price or date, and no source found by this page does. Copies from 10 June and 29 September 2026 do not show the notice, so it appeared between 29 September and 16 October 2026. What happens to existing customers is not stated." }, { "title": "LinkedIn writes and judges posts itself", "text": "By 26 September 2023 LinkedIn had a tool that writes a first draft of a post from a member's ideas. In September 2026 it removed its AI rewriting option, and by 2 October it had given Premium members a proofreader that only edits the member's own draft. On 31 July 2026 it added a report option for posts that seem like AI slop, and according to ProPakistani it already shows low-effort AI posts less outside a member's own network. A tool that writes posts with AI depends on how LinkedIn treats them." }, { "title": "LinkedIn's rules on extensions and data", "text": "A review site that sells its own LinkedIn tool reports that LinkedIn sent Kleo a cease-and-desist letter in early 2026 for scraping LinkedIn's pages through a Chrome extension, and restricted Taplio's company page in April 2025. EasyGen's store page says that its extension never connects to LinkedIn's API and does not go against LinkedIn's terms; that is the company's own claim. The home page says EasyGen learns from the posts of top creators but does not say how it collects them." }, { "title": "The same field on this site", "text": "Kleo, with four co-founders, reports more than US$1 million in revenue by September 2026, Supergrow has payment-processor evidence of US$32,200 in 30 days in February 2026, and aiCarousels, with one founder, reported US$5,000 a month in November 2023; EasyGen's monthly figures fall between Kleo's and Supergrow's, and it is the only one of the four that was sold." }, { "title": "One creator's audience", "text": "The buyers came from Ruben Hassid's posts and newsletter, and no source shows another channel that worked. By September 2026 his attention had moved to GPC, his new consulting company, and the sale notice appeared within weeks." }, { "title": "Dependence on model providers", "text": "The writing comes from large language models that no source names. The model provider sets the price, the rules and the quality, and the same models are open to every competitor, to LinkedIn and to the members themselves; the home page has to explain why a member should pay for EasyGen instead of using ChatGPT." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.easygen.io/" }, { "kind": "chrome", "url": "https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/gbefjkkjhjcloofcbandphbododcebko" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Tiny Startups newsletter, 3 December 2024: issue 39, quoting Ruben Hassid's post on X of 29 November 2024", "url": "https://tinystartupsnewsletter.beehiiv.com/p/tiny-startups-39-ad25", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Could not open the post on X (it needs a login); cited from the newsletter's quotation. Source for the MRR of US$41,532.86, the 27,000+ users, the 195 days and the Black Friday offer." }, { "title": "Tiny Startups newsletter, 1 July 2024: issue 18, quoting Ruben Hassid's post on X of 30 June 2024", "url": "https://tinystartupsnewsletter.beehiiv.com/p/tiny-startups-18", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Cited from the newsletter's quotation of the post. Source for the MRR of US$9,128.66 after 92 days, the zero lines of code and the zero outside investment." }, { "title": "Gaps.com: Social media startups report, published 22 January 2024, modified 23 March 2026", "url": "https://gaps.com/social-media/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on EasyGen (entry 7). Figures that it says the founder shared." }, { "title": "Gaps.com: AI content startups report, published 6 May 2024, last updated 2 May 2025", "url": "https://gaps.com/ai-content/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on EasyGen (entry 10) and the changelog, which lists a revenue update for EasyGen. Dates the US$540,000 figure to May 2025 or earlier." }, { "title": "EasyGen home page, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://www.easygen.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the acquisition notice, the features, the decision not to post automatically, the 100 million views and the links to GPC and the newsletter." }, { "title": "EasyGen home page, Wayback Machine copy of 2 November 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20241102085141/https://www.easygen.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with its page source. Source for the 3 free posts, the price of US$59.99 a month and the tools that the 2024 site loaded." }, { "title": "EasyGen home page, Wayback Machine copies of 10 June and 29 September 2026, and the capture index of easygen.io", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260929154420/https://easygen.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both copies in full and the capture index. Neither copy shows the acquisition notice. The first capture of the domain is from 21 March 2024." }, { "title": "Chrome Web Store: EasyGen, Intelligent LinkedIn content, made easy, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/easygen/gbefjkkjhjcloofcbandphbododcebko", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The description is written by the company; the user count, the rating and the version date are shown by the store." }, { "title": "NetInfluencer, 11 July 2024, by Cecilia Carloni: AI Meets LinkedIn: Why EasyGen Founder Ruben Hassid Is Betting On Business Networking", "url": "https://www.netinfluencer.com/ruben-hassid-easygen-ai-meets-linkedin/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. An interview: the founder's statements as reported by a journalist. Source for the ghostwriter price comparison, the two employees and how the system was developed." }, { "title": "Starter Story, 22 November 2024: How AI SaaS EasyGen Hit $33K MRR in 5 Months", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/easy-gen-breakdown", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The page is marked Estimated from public sources, so its revenue and headcount are used only as estimates. It quotes the title and first line of the founder's Reddit post on his 2 employees and US$33,000 MRR, which this page could not open." }, { "title": "Ruben Hassid's newsletter How to AI, 10 August 2025: 10,000 followers", "url": "https://ruben.substack.com/p/linkedin", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the free part. Source for the 650,000 followers and his advice to use EasyGen's Trending tab." }, { "title": "Ruben Hassid's newsletter How to AI, 3 August 2025: How much should you spend on AI?", "url": "https://ruben.substack.com/p/spend", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the free part. Lists EasyGen at US$59 a month." }, { "title": "Ruben Hassid's newsletter How to AI, 3 December 2025: Flow", "url": "https://ruben.substack.com/p/flow", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 700,000+ followers after three years of daily posts and the US$0.99 first-month offer." }, { "title": "Ruben Hassid's newsletter How to AI, 23 September 2026: General Purpose Consulting", "url": "https://ruben.substack.com/p/gpc", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the launch of GPC by the purchase of a consulting company. It does not mention EasyGen." }, { "title": "EasyGen newsletter sign-up page, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://easygen.io/subscribe", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 710,000+ followers and the 155,000+ readers." }, { "title": "EasyGen privacy policy, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://www.easygen.io/privacy-policy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names no legal entity. Source for the tracking services, the marketing opt-out and the no-refund rule." }, { "title": "Latka: EasyGen revenue and team, updated 2 September 2026", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/easygen.io/team", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A third-party revenue estimate, marked as such, and a headcount from LinkedIn." }, { "title": "Productivity Stacks newsletter, 15 October 2024: Cracking the Code to Growing on LinkedIn: EasyGen Founder Ruben Hassid on Mastering AI", "url": "https://productivityexpress.beehiiv.com/p/issue-no-123-cracking-the-code-to-growing-on-linkedin-easygen-founder-ruben-hassid-on-mastering-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the introduction; the full interview is on another site and was not read. Source for his first contact with generative AI in late 2022." }, { "title": "Digital Works, 26 September 2023: LinkedIn's AI-powered writing tool for posts", "url": "https://digitalworks.dk/en/artikler/linkedins-ai-powered-writing-tool-for-posts", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for LinkedIn's own tool that writes a first draft." }, { "title": "ProPakistani, 31 July 2026: LinkedIn Finally Adds a Button To Kill All That AI Slop", "url": "https://propakistani.pk/2026/07/31/linkedin-finally-adds-a-button-to-kill-all-that-ai-slop/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the report option and LinkedIn's reduced reach for low-effort AI posts." }, { "title": "Metricool, 2 October 2026: LinkedIn Swaps Its AI Post Writer for a Proofreading Tool", "url": "https://metricool.com/linkedin-post-proofreader/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the removal of LinkedIn's AI rewriting option and the new proofreader for Premium members." }, { "title": "ConnectSafely: Kleo Review: LinkedIn AI Tool Pricing and Features, 2026", "url": "https://connectsafely.ai/articles/kleo-review-linkedin-content-tool-2026", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on Kleo 1.0 and on compliance. The reviewer sells a competing LinkedIn tool. Source for LinkedIn's cease-and-desist letter to Kleo and the restriction of Taplio's page." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/copygenius/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/copygenius.md", "slug": "copygenius", "name": "CopyGenius", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI copywriting tool with templates and a writing editor", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-16", "launchLabel": "March 2022", "outcomeLabel": "US$9.5K a month in recurring revenue, May 2025", "sticker": "$9.5K MRR, now $4K", "outcomeUsd": 114000, "months": 38, "teamLabel": "1 founder, who calls himself a solo indie hacker; no employee in any source", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 1, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Marketing content" ], "product": "A web app that writes marketing text with OpenAI's GPT-3. The customer picks one of more than 40 templates, such as an ad, an article, a blog outline, an email or a product description, types a few details, and gets a draft in seconds, in more than 100 languages. A second tool, the Genius Editor, continues a text in the author's writing style. Plans sell a monthly number of words, from 40,000 words for US$19 a month.", "why": "It launched in March 2022, eight months before OpenAI released ChatGPT, and sold GPT-3 text through fixed templates for a monthly fee. A third-party report gives US$14,000 of monthly recurring revenue at its best and US$9,500 by May 2025. In 2026 the founder's own profile listed it at US$4,000, beside his much larger AutoShorts.ai.", "summary": [ "CopyGenius is an AI copywriting tool: a web app that writes marketing text, such as ads, product descriptions, blog outlines and emails, from a few details that the customer types in. Its terms page says that the text comes from GPT-3, a large language model from OpenAI, which is a program trained on a very large amount of text to predict the words that come next. The customer chooses one of more than 40 templates, fixed forms that turn the customer's details into an instruction for the model, and gets a draft in seconds. A second tool, the Genius Editor, analyzes the author's writing style and tone of voice and writes the next sentence or paragraph. Plans sell a number of words per month: 40,000 words for US$19, 120,000 words for US$39, and an Unlimited plan for US$79.", "Eric Smith, a former Instagram software engineer in Florida who calls himself a solo indie hacker, started CopyGenius in March 2022; the oldest plan record in the site's data was created on 27 March 2022. A report by Gaps, last changed on 2 May 2025, gives US$9,500 of MRR, monthly recurring revenue: the value of all active subscriptions for one month. The same report says that MRR had earlier reached US$14,000, and gives no date for it. In September 2026 his profile on X, as the directory Arrfounder shows it, listed CopyGenius at US$4,000 of MRR, 71.4% below that best figure. The same founder later built AutoShorts.ai, which has its own story on this site.", "Every number on this page is the founder's own profile text or a figure from a third-party site that does not name its source: grade C. No payment processor, buyer or journalist has confirmed them. The Gaps page is excluded from the Wayback Machine, so its older versions cannot be read to date the figures more exactly. The page also shows what happened to earlier writing tools when a larger company offered the same help inside a product that people already used." ], "factsCaption": "A GPT-3 copywriting tool that reported US$14,000 of monthly recurring revenue at its best, US$9,500 by May 2025 and US$4,000 in September 2026, all self-reported or repeated by third parties", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is the founder's own profile text, a figure from a third-party site that does not name its source, or a reading of the company's own pages. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a template tool on GPT-3, eight months before ChatGPT, to a product that its founder listed at US$4,000 a month in 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "CopyGenius prices on 16 October 2026, read from the plan data inside the company's home page (grade C)", "note": "The address copygenius.io/pricing returns an error page; the plans are in the data of the home page. A yearly plan costs 10 times the monthly price: US$190, US$390 or US$790 a year, which is 16.7% less than 12 monthly payments. Words that are not used do not carry over to the next month, and a customer can buy one-time refill credits. A Wayback Machine copy of the home page from 25 February 2023 holds the same nine plan records with the same prices, so the prices did not change between February 2023 and October 2026. The data also holds an older Starter plan at US$5 a month or US$50 a year for 5,000 words, created in April and August 2022; its monthly record allows use through Shopify and not on the web.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "500 words once, to try" ], [ "Starter", "15.83", "19", "40,000 words a month" ], [ "Premium", "32.50", "39", "120,000 words a month" ], [ "Unlimited", "65.83", "79", "sold as unlimited; the plan record sets 8,000,000 words a month" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, by May 2025", "value": "US$9,500", "grade": "C", "note": "Gaps, in a page first published on 6 May 2024 and last changed on 2 May 2025, writes that the business \"is now achieving $9,500 in monthly recurring revenue\". Other entries in the same version describe events up to about October 2024, so the figure dates from between about October 2024 and May 2025. Gaps does not name its source. This is the headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Annual run rate from that MRR", "value": "US$114,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$9,500 times 12 = US$114,000.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Highest monthly recurring revenue reported", "value": "US$14,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Same Gaps page: the figure \"has previously reached $14,000 MRR\". No date is given.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Fall from the highest figure to May 2025", "value": "32.1%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: (US$14,000 minus US$9,500) divided by US$14,000.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, September 2026", "value": "US$4,000", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder's profile text on X, as Arrfounder shows it in a record updated on 20 September 2026: \"CopyGenius.io: $4K MRR\". Arrfounder's product page gives the same US$4,000 a month and US$48,000 a year, collected with AI on 20 September 2026; Arrfounder does not mark the founder as verified.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Fall from the highest figure to September 2026", "value": "71.4%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: (US$14,000 minus US$4,000) divided by US$14,000. Against the May 2025 figure of US$9,500 the fall is 57.9%.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Launch", "value": "March 2022", "grade": "C", "note": "Gaps: \"founded in March 2022 by Eric Smith\". The oldest plan record in the site's data, the Free plan, was created on 27 March 2022. The terms page gives 18 January 2022 as its last update.", "src": [ 1, 4, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the headline figure", "value": "38 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: March 2022 to May 2025, the last change of the page that reports the figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Prices", "value": "US$19, US$39 and US$79 a month, or 10 times that a year", "grade": "C", "note": "Plan data in the home page, read 16 October 2026, and the same records in a Wayback Machine copy of 25 February 2023. Gaps describes the same three paid tiers, from 40,000 words to unlimited.", "src": [ 4, 5, 1 ] }, { "fact": "AI model", "value": "GPT-3, from OpenAI", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms page: \"the A.I. model powering CopyGenius (GPT-3) is designed to write creatively, not necessarily factually\". No source says whether it later moved to a newer model.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Usage limits", "value": "a hard monthly word cap and 3 requests every 10 seconds", "grade": "C", "note": "FAQ: the word limit resets each month and unused words do not roll over; refill credits can be bought; \"All plans have a rate limit of 3 queries every 10 seconds\".", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Payment providers in the site code", "value": "Stripe, PayPal and Shopify", "grade": "C", "note": "The site's script lists these three as subscription providers. The plan records carry PayPal plan identifiers.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Affiliate commission", "value": "30% of every payment, recurring, with no cap", "grade": "C", "note": "Partners page, read 16 October 2026. It invites affiliates with the words \"Ready to start making passive income?\"", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Shopify app, October 2026", "value": "not available in the Shopify App Store", "grade": "C", "note": "The App Store page for CopyGenius says: \"This app is not currently available on the Shopify App Store.\" The site still has a Shopify login page.", "src": [ 7, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 founder", "grade": "C", "note": "Gaps names one founder. His profile text on X, as Arrfounder shows it, begins \"Solo indiehacker (Ex-Instagram Eng)\". No source mentions an employee.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions an investor. The terms page names no company, only the product.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "fact": "The founder's products, September 2026", "value": "AutoShorts.ai US$117,000, NicheScraper US$11,000 and CopyGenius US$4,000 of MRR", "grade": "C", "note": "His profile text as Arrfounder shows it. It also lists a project named ProjectX at US$20,000 a month, which this page could not identify.", "src": [ 3 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "18 January 2022", "what": "The CopyGenius terms page gives this date as its last update, two months before the first plan record.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "27 March 2022", "what": "The Free plan record, 500 words to try, is created. Gaps gives March 2022 as the founding month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "when": "21 April to 24 August 2022", "what": "Paid plans are added: a Starter plan at US$5 a month in April, Unlimited at US$79 in May, and the present Starter at US$19 and Premium at US$39 on 24 August.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "30 November 2022", "what": "OpenAI releases ChatGPT. It gains one million users in five days and 100 million in two months.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "1 February 2023", "what": "OpenAI announces ChatGPT Plus at US$20 a month and says it will keep free access to ChatGPT.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "25 February 2023", "what": "A Wayback Machine copy of the CopyGenius home page shows the same nine plan records and prices as in 2026.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "Not dated, before May 2025", "what": "Monthly recurring revenue reaches its highest reported level, US$14,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "6 May 2024 to 2 May 2025", "what": "Gaps publishes a report on AI content startups. The version last changed on 2 May 2025 lists CopyGenius sixth, at US$9,500 of MRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "20 September 2026", "what": "Arrfounder's latest update shows the founder's profile listing CopyGenius at US$4,000 of MRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "when": "16 October 2026", "what": "The site still sells the same plans. Its Shopify app is no longer available in the Shopify App Store.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 7 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Templates instead of instructions", "text": "The customer does not write an instruction for the model. For an ad or a product description, a template asks for a few details and builds the request itself, and the draft arrives in seconds in more than 100 languages. Until 30 November 2022 there was no ChatGPT, so this was the easy way to get text from GPT-3." }, { "title": "Words sold as a monthly allowance", "text": "Each plan is a hard cap of words per month that resets at renewal, with refill credits for more. The FAQ promises that the customer is never billed above the plan price, and the cap also puts an upper limit on the model cost of each customer." }, { "title": "An editor that continues the author's text", "text": "The Genius Editor is a text editor with the model built in. The site says it analyzes the author's writing style and tone of voice to write the next sentence or paragraph. It is the part of the product that is closest to what a general chatbot does." }, { "title": "Several small sales channels", "text": "The checkout code reports each purchase to a Google Ads account as a conversion, so the business measured paid search ads. Affiliates earn 30% of every payment for as long as the customer stays. A Shopify app sold the tool to shop owners until it left the App Store. No source says which channel brought most customers." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages and the code that they send to the browser. They are grade C.", "items": [ "A Next.js web app: the pages load from /_next/ paths and carry their plan data as JSON inside the page.", "Text from OpenAI's GPT-3, per the terms page. The FAQ says that the model was trained on roughly 10% of the published internet and that names, citations and emails in its output are generally filler made up by the model.", "Payments through Stripe and PayPal, and through Shopify for the Shopify app; the code lists all three as subscription providers.", "The route list of the site includes an affiliate dashboard and admin pages for affiliates, events and user costs.", "The route list also includes a Chrome sign-in page and a Shopify login page; this page found no Chrome Web Store listing.", "A Google Ads conversion tag in the checkout code." ], "src": [ 4, 6 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Three companies in the Loot Drop database sold a better tool for writers and lost to a larger company that offered the same help inside a bigger product. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Draft", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A simple cloud editor for writers, with version control and collaborative editing.", "died": "Google Docs made it redundant. Its narrow focus and free tier could not compete with Google's full set of office tools.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1605-draft" }, { "name": "WriteWith", "years": "2007 to 2010", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Group writing in the browser, with several authors on one document.", "died": "Google Docs offered the same core function with better integration, and WriteWith had too little money to keep going.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1237-writewith" }, { "name": "Taleship", "years": "2018 to 2020", "funding": "US$0", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A shared writing space for novelists, with real-time co-authoring.", "died": "It spread its work over too many features and could not stand out among the free tools that writers already had.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1918-taleship" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The three predecessors sold a better place to write, and each lost to a large company that offered the same help inside a product that people already used, at no extra price. CopyGenius sold the next step, a tool that writes the text itself, and the same thing happened to it faster: ChatGPT appeared eight months after CopyGenius launched and gained 100 million users in two months.", "What differs is the cost. The predecessors needed years and, in two cases, outside money. CopyGenius needed one engineer, a web app and an account with a model provider, and its founder still listed it at US$4,000 a month in 2026. A template product on top of a model costs little to build and run, so it can stay profitable at a small size, but nothing in it stops the model maker from offering the same function to everyone." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product, no. Being early on a new model, yes, for a short time.", "text": "A general template tool for marketing text is now a free feature of the large chatbots, and the figures on this page show the fall. What can still be copied is the timing and the pricing: a paid tool for one job on a new model, sold in the months before the model maker offers the same thing to everyone, with usage sold as a capped monthly allowance.", "steps": [ "When a new model becomes available through an API, ship a narrow tool for one job in its first months, and charge from the first day.", "Sell usage as a capped allowance, so the model cost of each customer has an upper limit.", "Add a channel inside a platform where the buyers already are, such as an app store for shop owners.", "Expect the model maker to release the same function, and build the next product before revenue falls." ], "open": "Jobs that a general chatbot does badly because they need the customer's own data or a direct connection to a platform, for example text that is published straight into a shop, an ad account or a store listing." }, "watch": [ { "title": "General chatbots write the same texts", "text": "OpenAI released ChatGPT on 30 November 2022 and runs it on a freemium model, which means basic use is free and a paid plan adds more. It gained 100 million users in two months and had 900 million weekly active users in February 2026, per Wikipedia. OpenAI announced ChatGPT Plus on 1 February 2023 at a flat US$20 a month, about the price of the CopyGenius Starter plan, which is capped at 40,000 words." }, { "title": "Many tools at the same price", "text": "In the same Gaps report, Magai sells access to ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI services in one subscription from US$19 a month for up to 50,000 words, against 40,000 words for US$19 at CopyGenius. OpenAI priced gpt-3.5-turbo, the model of ChatGPT, at US$0.002 per 1,000 tokens, the pieces of words that models count, 10 times cheaper than its earlier GPT-3.5 models; that lowered the cost of text for every rival at once. CopyGenius kept the prices it had in February 2023." }, { "title": "Two earlier copywriting stories on this site", "text": "Headlime was sold for seven figures in March 2021 and Rytr was sold in October 2022 after a run rate of US$1 million a year, both before ChatGPT was released, while CopyGenius launched in March 2022 and stayed with its founder as its revenue fell." }, { "title": "One model provider that is also a competitor", "text": "The terms page names GPT-3 as the model behind the product, and no source says whether it moved to a newer model or to another provider. OpenAI sets the price and the rules of the model, and it also sells ChatGPT to the same customers." }, { "title": "Self-reported and partly undated", "text": "Gaps gives no date for the US$14,000 figure and no source for either of its figures, and its page is excluded from the Wayback Machine. The 2026 figure is the founder's profile text as Arrfounder collects it with AI, and Arrfounder does not mark him as verified." }, { "title": "A Shopify channel that ended", "text": "The Shopify App Store no longer lists the CopyGenius app, and an old plan in the site's data was for Shopify use only. No source says when or why the app left the store." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://copygenius.io" }, { "kind": "shopify", "url": "https://apps.shopify.com/copygenius" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Gaps, 6 May 2024, changed 2 May 2025: 17 AI Content Startups (With 2025 Revenue Numbers)", "url": "https://gaps.com/ai-content/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Entry #6 is CopyGenius. Source for the founder, the founding month, the templates, the three paid tiers and the US$9,500 and US$14,000 figures, and for Magai's price. The page is excluded from the Wayback Machine, so earlier versions could not be read." }, { "title": "Arrfounder product page: CopyGenius, record updated 20 September 2026", "url": "https://arrfounder.com/product/copygenius", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the record data inside the page: MRR 4,000, ARR 48,000, source \"ai\", collected 20 September 2026, founder not verified." }, { "title": "Arrfounder founder page: Eric Smith (@ericsmith1302), record updated 20 September 2026", "url": "https://arrfounder.com/@ericsmith1302", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. It shows the founder's X profile text, his location in Florida and four products. Source for the 2026 figure, the solo founder, and the link between CopyGenius and AutoShorts.ai." }, { "title": "CopyGenius home page with its FAQ, partners and editor sections, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://copygenius.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "The pages build their text with scripts. Read the plan data inside the home page and the text in the site's script files for the home, FAQ and partners pages and its route list. The /pricing address returned an error page." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of the CopyGenius home page, 25 February 2023", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20230225161028/https://copygenius.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the plan data inside the page: the same nine plan records and prices as in October 2026." }, { "title": "CopyGenius Terms & Conditions, last updated 18 January 2022", "url": "https://copygenius.io/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "The page builds its text with a script; read the text in that script file. Source for GPT-3 as the model. It names no company." }, { "title": "Shopify App Store page for CopyGenius, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.shopify.com/copygenius", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. It says that the app is not currently available on the Shopify App Store." }, { "title": "Wikipedia: ChatGPT, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on release and users: released 30 November 2022, run on a freemium model, one million users in five days, 100 million in two months, 900 million weekly active users in February 2026." }, { "title": "OpenAI, 1 February 2023: Introducing ChatGPT Plus", "url": "https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-plus/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the US$20 monthly price and the promise to keep free access." }, { "title": "OpenAI: Introducing ChatGPT and Whisper APIs", "url": "https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-and-whisper-apis/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The downloaded copy shows no date. Source for the price of gpt-3.5-turbo." }, { "title": "Starter Story: How Eric Smith Grew AutoShorts.ai To $92K MRR", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/autoshorts-ai-breakdown", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the free part. It does not mention CopyGenius. Source that Eric Smith founded AutoShorts.ai and worked as a software engineer at Instagram, which matches the profile text in source 3." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/wave-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/wave-ai.md", "slug": "wave-ai", "name": "Wave AI", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI meeting and call note-taker app", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-16", "launchLabel": "26 July 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$4M annual recurring revenue, November 2024", "sticker": "$4M ARR in 16 months", "outcomeUsd": 4000000, "months": 16, "teamLabel": "1 founder; outside help for design, ads and some engineering", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Paid ads", "group": "voice-audio", "channel": "paid-ads", "trend": "flat", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Productivity" ], "product": "An app for iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows and the web that records meetings, phone calls and lectures, writes a transcript with the speakers identified, and then a summary with action items. A user can also ask questions about a recording. It is free for 30 minutes a month; Pro costs US$100 a year in the app stores.", "why": "It reached the App Store early, in July 2023, with the simplest form of the idea: press one button, get a transcript and a summary. The founder paid for Meta ads while they still worked for a new kind of app, tested paywalls constantly and moved buyers to annual plans. He works alone with AI coding tools, so in his own 2026 account about US$3 million of about US$7 million a year stays as profit.", "summary": [ "Wave is an AI note taker: an app that records a conversation and turns it into written notes with AI models. It works in two steps, as the founder describes them. First speech-to-text, a model that converts recorded audio into written words, makes a transcript. Then a large language model, a model trained on very large amounts of text that can read a transcript and write a shorter text from it, writes the summary and the action items. Wave records in-person meetings on the phone, phone calls on its own phone numbers, and Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams calls through a bot that joins the call. Its data processing terms name AssemblyAI for transcription, with Gladia as a backup, OpenAI for summaries and Anthropic for the chat assistant. It is sold as an in-app subscription, a recurring payment that Apple or Google collects through its app store: free for 30 minutes a month, then US$100 a year or US$15 a month in the app stores, or US$80 a year on the web.", "Josh Mohrer, formerly the general manager of Uber in New York, was out of work at the end of 2022 when ChatGPT appeared. He used it to write Swift, Apple's programming language for iPhone apps, and released Wave on the App Store on 26 July 2023. On 29 July 2024 Adapty, the company whose software runs the app's subscriptions, published a case study with US$2 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR, the yearly value of all active subscriptions), more than 50,000 downloads and one team member. By 10 November 2024 Adapty had changed the page to US$4 million ARR, and the founder had replied on X to a post about his US$2 million: \"It's $4M actually.\" In an interview published on 3 February 2026 he said that Wave was at about US$7 million ARR, flat for a few months, that he keeps about US$3 million a year, and that he is still the whole team, with outside help over the years for design, ads and some engineering work.", "This page grades the US$2 million and US$4 million figures A. Adapty is not the payment processor, the company that moves the money, because for app store purchases that is Apple or Google. But every purchase of the app passes through Adapty's software, which the founder calls his \"central system for all things subscription\", and Adapty states the figures under its own name. This site counts a payment company's customer story, such as Stripe's, as grade A for that reason. The case study does not say that the figures were read from Adapty's dashboard, so a stricter reader can treat them as grade B. The US$7 million, the profit and the costs are the founder's own words, grade C. The page also shows earlier companies that lost when a large platform gave the same feature away." ], "factsCaption": "A one-person iPhone app at US$2 million ARR in July 2024 and US$4 million by November 2024 in its subscription vendor's case study, then about US$7 million in February 2026 in the founder's own words", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value is stated by Adapty, the company whose software records the app's subscriptions, in its case study under its own name. A grade B value is a count published by Adapty or Apple that is not a payment figure. A grade C value is the founder's own words. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a prototype written with ChatGPT to about US$7 million a year in recurring revenue, run by one person, in 31 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Wave prices in October 2026, from the company's pricing page and its answers to pricing questions (grade C)", "note": "Pro bought on the web costs US$80 a year or US$15 a month, which the page calls 20% less than in the app stores. Pro bought through the App Store or Google Play costs US$100 a year or US$15 a month. Weekly billing also exists, and the page says that prices vary by platform and region. The App Store listing shows in-app purchases named Standard at US$6.00, US$15.00 and US$100.00 and older ones named Professional from US$6.99 to US$139.99, without saying which period each one covers. In February 2026 the annual plan came with a three-day free trial, which the founder said should be seven days.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "30 minutes of recording a month" ], [ "Pro, bought on the web", "6.67", "15", "unlimited recording; US$80 a year" ], [ "Pro, App Store or Google Play", "8.33", "15", "unlimited recording; US$100 a year" ], [ "Teams", "", "7.50 per user", "minimum 5 users; billing period not stated" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, November 2024", "value": "US$4 million", "grade": "A", "note": "Adapty's case study, in the version archived on 10 November 2024 and still on the page in October 2026: \"Current ARR: $4M\". Adapty runs the app's subscriptions. The founder gave the same figure on X: \"It's $4M actually.\"", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, July 2024", "value": "US$2 million", "grade": "A", "note": "The first version of the same case study, published on 29 July 2024 and archived on 8 August 2024: \"Current ARR: $2M\".", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, February 2026", "value": "about US$7 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in a podcast interview published on 3 February 2026. He said that he had been \"flat there for a few months\".", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Profit, early 2026", "value": "about US$3 million a year", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder, asked about profit: \"Can I keep three? Or something like that.\" He also said that the business \"did seven last year\", in 2025, and that he would like ten in 2026.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Profit as a share of revenue", "value": "about 43%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$3 million divided by US$7 million. Both are the founder's round numbers.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "AI cost, late 2024", "value": "10% to 20% of revenue", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's replies on X, quoted by the Gaps income report for October 2024: about US$0.10 per hour of audio to OpenAI for transcription, and a similar amount for summaries.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "AI cost in dollars at US$4 million ARR", "value": "about US$400,000 to US$800,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 10% and 20% of US$4 million.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Team at US$2 million and US$4 million ARR", "value": "1 person", "grade": "B", "note": "Adapty: \"Team members: 1\". Other people did the design and the ad promotion; the founder wrote and maintained the app and answered every support email. A headcount is not a payment figure, so it is graded B.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Team, February 2026", "value": "the founder, with occasional helpers", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder: \"You're talking to the whole team.\" People came in and out over three years for some engineering and marketing work, and he brings on a new ad agency a few times a year. The website in October 2026 says \"a small team in New York\".", "src": [ 4, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Downloads", "value": "more than 50,000 by July 2024, more than 55,000 by November 2024", "grade": "B", "note": "Adapty's case study, the two archived versions. Not a payment figure.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Recurring revenue per download", "value": "at most about US$73 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$4 million divided by 55,000 downloads. The case study says more than 55,000, so the true value is lower.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "App Store rating, October 2026", "value": "4.9 from 12,169 ratings", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's own App Store record. In February 2026 the founder named the 4.9 rating as a reason why App Store search sends him users.", "src": [ 9, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Plan mix, February 2026", "value": "about a third weekly, a third monthly and a third annual, by number of subscribers", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder. By dollars, most revenue comes from annual plans, and most money that comes in each day is renewals.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder: \"I'm not gonna raise money.\" The app is published by Mohrer Associates LLC of New York, the seller name in the App Store and the operator named in the terms of service.", "src": [ 4, 9, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Time from App Store release to US$4 million ARR", "value": "16 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: July 2023 to November 2024. Adapty writes \"in 8 months\" without saying where it starts counting. It cannot be the release date, because 8 months after July 2023 is March 2024, before Adapty's own US$2 million figure of July 2024.", "src": [ 1, 9 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "End of 2022", "what": "Mohrer, formerly general manager of Uber in New York, is out of work when ChatGPT appears. He uses it to become an engineer and builds small demos: a summary tool for New York State bills, an AI on top of a group chat, and an app that records audio, transcribes it and summarizes it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "2023", "what": "The first concept of the app, in Swift for the iPhone, is ready in one day: he splits the code into small parts and asks ChatGPT to write each part.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "26 July 2023", "what": "Wave: AI Note Taker is released on the App Store by Mohrer Associates LLC.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "29 July 2024", "what": "Adapty publishes its case study: US$2 million ARR, more than 50,000 downloads, and one team member who also answers every support email.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "By 10 November 2024", "what": "Adapty changes the case study to US$4 million ARR and more than 55,000 downloads. The Gaps income report for October 2024 quotes the founder's reply on X to a post that put Wave at US$2 million: \"It's $4M actually.\"", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "when": "3 February 2026", "what": "In a Mixergy interview: about US$7 million ARR, flat for a few months, about US$3 million kept as profit, and no investors. New users come through Apple Search Ads, Google Ads and App Store search; Meta ads have not worked for more than a year.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "10 October 2026", "what": "Version 4.1.0 of the iPhone app is released. Apple's record shows 12,169 ratings with an average of 4.9.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The website lists apps for iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows, the web and watches, and a phone line with real US and Canada numbers. It says Wave is built by \"a small team in New York\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Paid ads at the right time", "text": "The founder says that in Wave's early growth \"meta ads worked super well\" because the app was \"a first of its kind thing\"; once many similar apps existed, those ads stopped working. Adapty also names \"strategic ad promotion\" as a cause of the growth. Now Apple Search Ads on iPhone and Google Ads on Android bring users, together with App Store search, where more than 12,000 ratings at 4.9 make the app look trustworthy." }, { "title": "Paywall tests and annual plans", "text": "Every purchase runs through Adapty, which the founder uses to run A/B tests of the paywall, the screen that asks the user to pay. An A/B test shows two versions to different users and keeps the one that sells better. Adapty calls this testing the key to the app's growth. Subscribers split about evenly between weekly, monthly and annual plans, but most of the money comes from annual plans and from renewals." }, { "title": "Buy the best transcription", "text": "The founder says that he tried Whisper, AssemblyAI and Deepgram for transcription and was not afraid to pay for the best output. In late 2024 AI costs were 10% to 20% of revenue. In 2026 the company's data terms list AssemblyAI for transcription with Gladia as a backup, and OpenAI for summaries." }, { "title": "One person, with AI as the engineering team", "text": "ChatGPT wrote the first Swift code in parts in 2023. In 2026 he works with Claude Code and Anthropic's Opus model, which he says costs him US$200 a month as a subscription instead of US$50 to US$100 a day through the API. He answers the support messages himself, because that is where he learns about bugs and about what users want." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's interview, the Adapty case study and Wave's data processing terms, which list the outside services that handle customer data. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Swift for the iPhone app. The first concept was written in one day in 2023, with ChatGPT writing each piece of code. The founder says that he wrote the first version himself and used AI for examples such as background audio recording.", "Speech-to-text: he tried Whisper 2 and 3, AssemblyAI and Deepgram. The 2026 data terms list AssemblyAI, with Gladia as a backup. Summaries and language features: OpenAI. The chat assistant: Anthropic.", "Google Cloud with Firebase and Firestore for storage, databases and login; Vercel for the web app and the API; Trigger.dev for the background transcription and summary jobs; Turbopuffer for search; Recall.ai for the bots that join Zoom, Meet and Teams calls.", "Phone calls: Twilio for call recording, and Telnyx for phone numbers, calls and text messages.", "Payments: Apple and Google in-app purchases, managed through Adapty, which also runs the paywall tests; Stripe for web subscriptions.", "Support through Intercom's in-app chat, answered by the founder on a page that he built himself on Intercom's API. PostHog for usage analytics, Sentry for errors, Customer.io for email.", "Coding in 2026 with Claude Code and the Opus model, after the Windsurf editor. The website says the service is SOC 2 Type 1 compliant, a security audit standard." ], "src": [ 4, 2, 7, 6 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised to capture what people write or say and make it useful, or built a feature that a large platform then gave away. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Kiko", "years": "2005 to 2008", "funding": "US$70K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A web calendar that made booking meetings easy.", "died": "Google Calendar launched for free and made it irrelevant. The founders sold the company on eBay.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/276-kiko" }, { "name": "Tellme", "years": "1999 to 2011", "funding": "US$238M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Information by voice: speak to the phone instead of reading a screen.", "died": "Apps and later AI assistants replaced its voice commands.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/612-tellme" }, { "name": "Springpad", "years": "2008 to 2014", "funding": "US$7.5M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Collect and organize everything, from web articles to recipes, in one notes app.", "died": "Users liked the free product, but the company never found what they would pay for before the money ran out.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1893-springpad" }, { "name": "Transpose", "years": "2012 to 2018", "funding": "US$0", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A notes app like Evernote for businesses, with templates and collaboration.", "died": "It charged US$14.99 against Evernote, with no venture money and no strong reason for users to switch.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1849-transpose" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Kiko died when Google gave away a calendar, and Springpad and Transpose died because free or established notes apps left users little reason to pay. Wave faces the same pressure. Zoom gave away meeting summaries to paid accounts in September 2023, Google Meet added note-taking in August 2024 and notes for in-person meetings in August 2026, and Apple added call recording and summaries to the iPhone in October 2024.", "Three things differ. Speech-to-text and language models became good enough and cheap enough in 2023 to sell notes for US$100 a year with AI costs of 10% to 20% of revenue. One person with AI coding tools and occasional helpers could build and run apps for phones, computers, the web and watches, so the company needed no venture money. And Wave covers in one app what each platform covers only in part: in-person conversations, phone calls on a separate number, and calls in any meeting tool, with the same notes on every device." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The timing, no. The method, partly.", "text": "The months when a new kind of app could grow on Meta ads are over; the founder says such ads stopped working once many similar apps appeared. What can still be copied is the structure: a phone app that does one job well, paid model APIs instead of own models, constant paywall tests, annual plans, and one person who reads every support message.", "steps": [ "Pick a job that a new model makes possible and ship the simplest version on the App Store.", "Buy the best speech or language API you can, and check that AI costs stay a small share of the price.", "Use a subscription platform to test paywalls and prices often, and offer annual plans.", "Answer support yourself; it is where you find the bugs and the next features." ], "open": "Recording and summary apps for one profession at a time (the founder was advised to build a version for doctors or for construction and chose a general app instead), and languages or regions that the large meeting tools serve poorly." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Phones and meeting tools now include it", "text": "Zoom made meeting summaries part of paid accounts at no extra cost on 5 September 2023. Google Meet began rolling out \"Take notes for me\" to selected Workspace customers on 27 August 2024 and started extending it to in-person meetings in August 2026. Apple added recording, transcription and summaries to the Phone and Notes apps with iOS 18.1 on 28 October 2024. Otter, an older rival app, has a free plan with 300 minutes a month and Pro listed at US$8.49 to US$16.99 a month. Wave's answer is one app for every kind of conversation." }, { "title": "Recording laws and consent", "text": "Federal law and 38 states with the District of Columbia allow a recording when one party to the conversation consents, but the Digital Media Law Project lists eleven states that require the consent of every party, among them California, Florida, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Washington. Apple's Phone app tells all participants automatically when a recording starts. Wave's terms make the user \"solely responsible\" for getting consent, and its call-recording page says to \"inform the other party when required\". The Wave pages read for this story do not say that the app announces a recording itself." }, { "title": "Growth has stopped, and ads are harder", "text": "In February 2026 the founder said that revenue had been flat for a few months at about US$7 million a year, and that Meta ads had not worked for more than a year because there are now many similar apps. The business depends on Apple Search Ads, Google Ads, App Store search and renewals." }, { "title": "Dependent on model providers", "text": "Transcription comes from AssemblyAI with Gladia as a backup, summaries from OpenAI and the chat assistant from Anthropic. A price rise, a policy change or a provider's own note-taking feature would hit the margin directly; in late 2024 these costs were already 10% to 20% of revenue." }, { "title": "Same idea, smaller results", "text": "The site's AudioNotes story (about US$7,200 a month in August 2024, founder figures) and Talknotes story (sold for US$200,000 in July 2024) sell the same record, transcribe and summarize idea for voice notes; Wave aimed at meetings and calls, bought ads, and reached US$4 million ARR in its second year." }, { "title": "One person, and a vendor's marketing page", "text": "The founder does the engineering and the support alone and says that things get missed. The grade A figures come from Adapty's marketing page, which changed from US$2 million to US$4 million without dating the change; the later figures are his own words." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://wave.co/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6451491556" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Adapty case study: Wave AI, growing an indie app from $0 to $4M ARR with Adapty (published 29 July 2024, later changed; archived 10 November 2024)", "url": "https://adapty.io/case-studies/wave/", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full, live on 16 October 2026 and in the Wayback Machine copy of 10 November 2024, which already shows US$4M. Adapty runs the app's subscriptions. Source for the US$4M ARR, the team of one and the downloads." }, { "title": "Adapty case study, first version: from $0 to $2M ARR in 6 months, Wayback Machine copy of 8 August 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240808165212/https://adapty.io/case-studies/wave/", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. Source for the US$2M ARR, more than 50,000 downloads, the one-day prototype written with ChatGPT and the support done by the founder." }, { "title": "Gaps Income Report, October 2024 (published 10 November 2024): Josh Mohrer shared his AI note-taking has reached $4M in ARR", "url": "https://gaps.com/oct-2024/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on Wave. It quotes the founder's replies on X: the US$4M figure and the AI costs." }, { "title": "Mixergy, 3 February 2026: The $7 Million Vibe Coded App, Andrew Warner's interview with Josh Mohrer", "url": "https://mixergy.com/interviews/the-7-million-vibe-coded-app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full transcript. Source for the US$7M ARR, the profit, the team, the ads, the tools and the plan mix. The transcript is automatic and gets some words wrong." }, { "title": "Wave pricing page", "url": "https://wave.co/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 16 October 2026, including the answers to pricing questions in the page code." }, { "title": "Wave website: home, about, phone and terms of service pages", "url": "https://wave.co/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 16 October 2026. Source for the platforms, the phone line, the operating company Mohrer Associates LLC and the consent clause in the terms." }, { "title": "Wave Data Processing Addendum, Annex 3: subprocessors and vendors", "url": "https://wave.co/dpa", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the subprocessor tables. Source for the AI providers and the infrastructure." }, { "title": "Wave: record phone calls, use-case page", "url": "https://wave.co/use-cases/call-recording-app", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the answer to \"Is it legal to record phone calls?\" in the page code." }, { "title": "App Store listing of Wave AI Note Taker & Recorder, and Apple's lookup record for app 6451491556", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wave-ai-note-taker-recorder/id6451491556", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full on 16 October 2026. Apple's record gives the release date of 26 July 2023, the seller, the in-app purchases and the rating count." }, { "title": "Apple Newsroom, 28 October 2024: Apple Intelligence is available today on iPhone, iPad, and Mac", "url": "https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/10/apple-intelligence-is-available-today-on-iphone-ipad-and-mac/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on the Notes and Phone apps. Source for call recording with an automatic notice to participants." }, { "title": "Zoom press release, 5 September 2023: Zoom introduces Zoom AI Companion, available at no additional cost with paid Zoom user accounts (GlobeNewswire copy on aap.com.au)", "url": "https://www.aap.com.au/aapreleases/globenewswire8916139/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Zoom's investor site refused the download (HTTP 403), so the wire copy was used." }, { "title": "Google Workspace Updates, 27 August 2024: \"Take notes for me\" in Google Meet is now available", "url": "https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2024/08/take-notes-for-me-google-meet-gemini.html", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full." }, { "title": "Google Workspace Updates, August 2026: Take Notes for me for in-person meetings is now available", "url": "https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2026/08/take-notes-with-me-for-in-person-meetings-is-now-available.html", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The month comes from the address of the post; the exact day was not confirmed." }, { "title": "Otter.ai pricing page", "url": "https://otter.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the plan table on 16 October 2026." }, { "title": "Digital Media Law Project: Recording Phone Calls and Conversations", "url": "https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/recording-phone-calls-and-conversations", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A legal guide for journalists, not legal advice; it notes later changes, for example in Illinois." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/storyshort/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/storyshort.md", "slug": "storyshort", "name": "StoryShort", "country": "France", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Faceless short videos made and posted on a schedule", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-16", "launchLabel": "July 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$18K monthly recurring revenue, October 2026", "sticker": "$18K MRR, one person", "outcomeUsd": 216036, "months": 27, "teamLabel": "1 founder who writes the code and answers support, with no growth team and no outsourced support (October 2026)", "fundingLabel": "None found; the site calls it an independent product", "primaryFactor": "Automation", "group": "video", "channel": "paid-ads", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Video" ], "product": "An AI tool that writes, makes and posts short \"faceless\" videos for TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels: script, AI images or clips, voiceover, music and captions. It also makes long videos of 8 to 10 minutes, AI UGC ads and talking avatars, and it can rebuild a video that did well for another creator.", "why": "It sells a channel instead of a single video: a series picks the topic, makes the video and posts it every day. Growth came from ads and from affiliates who keep 30% of each payment for life, and the founder swaps in new video models when better ones appear.", "summary": [ "StoryShort is a faceless video generator. A faceless video is a short clip in which no real person appears on camera: a computer voice tells a story over pictures or generated clips. You type an idea, and StoryShort writes the script, plans the scenes, makes the images and clips, adds the voice, music and captions, and can post the result to TikTok, YouTube and Instagram. A series, a schedule that you set once, lets it pick the next topic in your niche and post a new video every day without you opening the app. It also makes long videos, talking avatars and UGC ads, product advertisements made to look as if a customer filmed them on a phone (UGC means user-generated content).", "Samuel Rondot, the founder, writes on the site that StoryShort is built and run by one person, who writes the code, picks the AI models and answers the support email. The Internet Archive saved the working site on 27 July 2024, with the line \"Powered by GPT-4o\". In November 2024 he said it had passed US$10,000 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the amount that active subscriptions bring in each month, and that he promoted it with ads and affiliates, people who earn a commission on each customer they send. On 15 October 2026 TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a company's payment processor, showed US$18,003 of MRR from 327 active subscriptions in StoryShort's Stripe account, US$321,908 in the last 12 months and US$588,328 since the start.", "These Stripe figures are grade A. They also show a fall: the best month was January 2026 with US$44,459, and September 2026 brought US$21,767, 51% less. The business has been listed for sale on TrustMRR since 18 December 2025 at US$1.2 million. The page also covers the rules that decide whether the customers' videos can earn money and stay online: YouTube's July 2025 update on mass-produced content, TikTok's labels for AI content, the US rule against fake testimonials, and copyright when a tool rebuilds another creator's video." ], "factsCaption": "Stripe-verified revenue of US$18,003 a month in October 2026, about half of the January 2026 peak, from a product built and run by one person", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from TrustMRR's reading of the company's Stripe account. A grade C value is a statement by the founder, the company's own pages, or a field the founder entered on TrustMRR. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a site that already claimed 27,000 creators in July 2024 to a business listed for sale, in 27 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "StoryShort prices in October 2026, read from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "Yearly billing costs US$279, US$499, US$899 or US$1,399 a year, about 40% less than monthly. Each plan gives a number of credits per month, and the page lists typical costs: about 15 credits for a 30-second video with AI images, about 115 for a UGC video ad and more than 270 for a talking avatar video. The credit table marks long-form video as not in the Starter and Growth plans. Signing up is free; making a video needs credits from a paid plan.", "rows": [ [ "Starter", "23", "39", "400 credits, 1 series: about 26 videos of 30 seconds" ], [ "Growth", "42", "69", "1,200 credits, 2 series: about 80 videos of 30 seconds" ], [ "Influencer", "75", "129", "2,400 credits, 3 series: about 160 videos of 30 seconds" ], [ "Ultra", "117", "199", "5,000 credits, 4 series: about 330 videos of 30 seconds" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 15 October 2026", "value": "US$18,003", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR reads it from the company's Stripe account through an API key, last synced 15 October 2026. 327 active subscriptions.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from that MRR", "value": "about US$216,036 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$18,003 times 12. This is the headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days and the last 12 months", "value": "US$20,877 and US$321,908", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data on TrustMRR, to 15 October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue since the start", "value": "US$588,328", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data on TrustMRR. US$266,420 of it came before mid-October 2025 (calculated: all-time revenue minus the last 12 months).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Best month", "value": "US$44,459, January 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "64.3% more than December 2025, US$27,062 (calculated). The public monthly table starts in November 2025 with US$24,626.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in September 2026", "value": "US$21,767", "grade": "A", "note": "51.0% below January 2026. July to September 2026 averaged US$22,279 a month, 49.9% below January (both calculated). October 2026 up to the 15th: US$11,640.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Change in the last 30 days", "value": "MRR -16.3%, revenue -9.9%", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshots on 15 October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average revenue per active subscription", "value": "about US$55 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$18,003 divided by 327 subscriptions is US$55.06. The monthly plans cost US$39 to US$199.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "75.0%", "grade": "C", "note": "A TrustMRR snapshot. Costs are not part of the payment data that TrustMRR verifies, so this value is treated as unverified.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR, November and December 2024", "value": "passed US$10,000, then US$14,000 by 10 December 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder statement reported by the gaps.com newsletter, which spells his name \"Rondont\". MRR grew 28.6% from US$14,000 to the October 2026 figure (calculated).", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Earliest dated copy of the product", "value": "27 July 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "Internet Archive copy of the home page: \"Faceless Videos on Auto-Pilot\", \"Powered by GPT-4o\" and \"Trusted by 27,000+ creators\". TrustMRR gives a founded date of 6 August 2024, entered by the founder; the copy shows the product was live before that date.", "src": [ 6, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 person", "grade": "C", "note": "The About page: \"built and run by one person\", with \"no growth team and no outsourced support\". The terms name no operating company and are governed by the laws of France.", "src": [ 3, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "The About page calls StoryShort \"an independent product\". No source mentions an investor.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Sale listing", "value": "asking US$1,200,000 since 18 December 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller's asking price on TrustMRR; 21 offers received, still listed on 16 October 2026, no team size given. TrustMRR's 4.8x multiple equals the price divided by 12 times the last 30 days of revenue (4.79, calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Creators claimed", "value": "90,000+", "grade": "C", "note": "Home and pricing pages, October 2026. The founder's TrustMRR entry estimates 27,000 users.", "src": [ 5, 4, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Affiliate commission", "value": "30% of each payment, for the life of the customer", "grade": "C", "note": "Affiliate page: 60-day attribution period, monthly payouts, US$100 minimum payout.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the first archived copy to the October 2026 figure", "value": "27 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: July 2024 to October 2026. From the TrustMRR founded date it is 26 months.", "src": [ 6, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "27 July 2024", "what": "First Internet Archive copy of storyshort.ai: \"Faceless Videos on Auto-Pilot\", \"Powered by GPT-4o\", series that publish daily on TikTok and YouTube, and \"Trusted by 27,000+ creators\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "6 August 2024", "what": "Founded date that the founder entered on TrustMRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "November 2024", "what": "The founder says StoryShort passed US$10,000 of monthly recurring revenue, promoted with ads and affiliates.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "10 December 2024", "what": "gaps.com reports US$14,000 of monthly recurring revenue.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "US$24,626 of Stripe revenue, the first month in TrustMRR's public monthly table.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "18 December 2025", "what": "Listed for sale on TrustMRR, asking US$1,200,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "January 2026", "what": "Best month in the table: US$44,459.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "February to September 2026", "what": "Revenue falls from US$33,251 in February to about US$22,000 to US$23,000 a month from June, and US$21,767 in September.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "15 October 2026", "what": "US$18,003 of MRR from 327 active subscriptions and US$588,328 since the start. Still for sale after 21 offers.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The site offers long videos, UGC ads, talking avatars, a video cloning tool, an API and an MCP server, and names its models: Claude, ElevenLabs, OpenAI, Qwen, Seedance, Grok, Wan, Veo and p-video.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 8, 9 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A channel, not a video", "text": "Since at least July 2024 the core feature has been the series: the customer chooses a niche and a schedule once, and StoryShort picks the next topic, writes it, makes it and posts it to TikTok, YouTube and Instagram. The customer pays every month for a stream of videos, which fits a subscription better than a tool used once." }, { "title": "Ads and affiliates", "text": "In November 2024 the founder said that he promoted the app with ads and affiliates. The affiliate program pays 30% of every payment from a referred customer for as long as that customer pays, with a 60-day attribution period (the time after a click in which a sale still counts for the affiliate) and monthly payouts from US$100. The TrustMRR profile connects no traffic or ads data, so the split between the two channels is not known." }, { "title": "Copy what already works", "text": "The 2026 product follows creators that the customer picks, shows the videos that did much better than their usual (the page's example: 12 times the average), and rebuilds one with the customer's style and characters in one click. A separate Clone Video with AI tool extracts the full transcript of a TikTok, YouTube or Instagram video and makes a new video from it." }, { "title": "Credits per video type", "text": "Every plan is a monthly number of credits, and the pricing page lists what each video type costs: about 15 credits for a 30-second video with AI images, about 115 for a UGC ad and more than 270 for a talking avatar. Longer scripts and premium models use more credits, so the cost of an expensive model falls on the credits that the customer spends." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages, an archived copy of its home page and the TrustMRR profile. They are grade C, except the payment provider, which TrustMRR reads through an API key.", "items": [ "One person writes the code, picks the AI models and answers support, with no growth team and no outsourced support (About page, October 2026).", "Scripts: written by Claude in October 2026. The archived home page of 27 July 2024 said \"Powered by GPT-4o\".", "Voices: ElevenLabs, OpenAI and Qwen. Qwen can also copy a customer's own voice from a short recording.", "Video: Seedance, Grok, Wan, Veo or p-video, depending on the quality level chosen. The FAQ says: \"We swap these when a better one comes out.\"", "Payments: Stripe, read by TrustMRR through an API key. StoryShort is not a merchant of record, a reseller that sells in its own name and handles sales tax.", "A REST API with webhooks and an MCP server (a standard way for AI assistants to call outside tools) let other programs generate and publish videos; the example script makes a 30-second UGC ad.", "Every page links about 55 tool pages under /tools/, from meme video generators (\"Italian Brainrot\" and others) to thumbnail makers. The page code loads the DataFast and PostHog analytics scripts." ], "src": [ 3, 5, 6, 1, 9, 4 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database promised easier video making, or a better deal for video creators, on platforms that they did not control. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Viddy", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$30M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Instagram for video: filters that make phone clips look professional.", "died": "Lost to better-funded rivals with more distribution. People tried it once and did not come back.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2190-viddy" }, { "name": "Vine", "years": "2012 to 2016", "funding": "US$30M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Six-second video loops for quick, shareable creativity.", "died": "Twitter, its owner, never made it a priority, and creators could not make money. When Instagram added video and YouTube paid creators, the top creators left.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/711-vine" }, { "name": "ReelSurfer", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$1.25M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Cut and share segments of online videos with a simple tool.", "died": "YouTube and Facebook built similar editing and sharing features into their own products.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1577-reelsurfer" }, { "name": "Vidme", "years": "2014 to 2018", "funding": "US$9M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A simpler place for creators to upload videos and earn from them.", "died": "Could not match YouTube's scale. Content moderation and video hosting cost too much.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/708-vidme" }, { "name": "FameBit", "years": "2013 to 2019", "funding": "US$1.75M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Self-service matching of brands with YouTube creators for sponsored videos.", "died": "Google bought it in 2016 and phased it out as YouTube moved to large brand deals and TikTok grew.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/132-famebit" } ], "whatChanged": [ "All five depended on a platform that they did not control, and all five lost when that platform built the same feature, paid creators better or changed its priorities. StoryShort depends on platforms twice: TikTok, YouTube and Instagram decide whether its customers' videos are shown and paid, and outside model companies make every script, voice and clip.", "Two things differ. StoryShort hosts no videos and runs no social network, so it carries none of the hosting and moderation cost that the database names for Vidme; its TrustMRR snapshot shows a 75% margin. And it charges the creator, not the platform: the subscription is paid before any video earns anything, so StoryShort earns money even when its customers' channels do not, until those customers decide that the videos are not worth the price. No source says why revenue fell after January 2026." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The niche is crowded. The structure can be copied.", "text": "Faceless short-video tools were already many in 2024: this site has two other stories in the field, and TrustMRR lists more video businesses for sale next to StoryShort. What can be copied is the structure: a subscription for a stream of output instead of one file, prices in credits that follow model costs, and growth paid through ads and recurring affiliate commissions from the first months.", "steps": [ "Sell a schedule of finished output, such as a video every day, so the subscription matches what the customer gets.", "Price in credits per output type and publish the cost of each type, so that a new, more expensive model does not reduce your margin.", "Start ads and a recurring affiliate commission early, as StoryShort had by November 2024.", "Keep the model layer swappable: StoryShort moved from GPT-4o on its 2024 home page to Claude for scripts by 2026." ], "open": "Video formats that new models made possible only recently: the same character across scenes, characters that talk on screen, long videos, and API access for companies that make ads in volume. Each needs the platforms' rules on AI labels and original content built into the product." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue has halved since January 2026", "text": "Stripe revenue peaked at US$44,459 in January 2026 and was US$21,767 in September 2026, 51.0% lower. MRR fell 16.3% in the last 30 days, to US$18,003. No source explains the fall. The business has been listed for sale since 18 December 2025 at US$1,200,000, 4.8 times its last 30 days of revenue counted for a year, and it was still listed on 16 October 2026 after 21 offers. The listing gives no team size." }, { "title": "YouTube does not pay for mass-produced videos", "text": "On 15 July 2025 YouTube renamed its \"repetitious content\" policy to \"inauthentic content\" and made clear that it includes content that is \"repetitive or mass-produced\"; YouTube says such content has always been ineligible for money from the YouTube Partner Program. Its reused content policy also covers channels that repost others' content without significant original commentary or changes. A series that posts a new AI video every day is the kind of channel these reviews look at. StoryShort's own guide repeats the rule and says that \"nobody can promise you a number\"." }, { "title": "TikTok labels for AI content", "text": "TikTok's synthetic media policy, introduced in 2023, \"requires people to label AI-generated content that contains realistic images, audio or video\". In September 2023 TikTok also began testing an \"AI-generated\" label that it plans to apply automatically to content that it detects was made or edited with AI. Videos that StoryShort posts for its customers fall under this rule when they look real." }, { "title": "AI testimonials and the US rule on fake reviews", "text": "The US Federal Trade Commission's rule on consumer reviews and testimonials, published on 22 August 2024 and in force from 21 October 2024, covers testimonials that misrepresent \"that the reviewer or testimonialist exists\", and the Commission wrote that \"AI-generated reviews are covered by the final rule\". StoryShort's API page uses the example prompt \"Make a UGC testimonial ad for our new skincare line\". An AI person shown as a real customer in such an ad is the case that the rule describes; the sources read here do not say how the rule applies to the tool that made the video." }, { "title": "Rebuilding another creator's video", "text": "The Clone Video with AI tool finds videos that did well on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, extracts \"the full word-for-word transcript\" and makes a new video that \"mirrors the original's winning formula\". A word-for-word transcript is the original creator's text, and the US Copyright Office explains that \"only the owner of copyright in a work has the right to prepare, or to authorize someone else to create, an adaptation of that work\". YouTube's monetization page adds that copyright still applies to reused content. StoryShort's terms forbid content that infringes copyrights and make the user \"solely responsible\" for what the tool generates." }, { "title": "A crowded field", "text": "This site's AutoShorts.ai story (one founder, US$97,000 a month in May 2025) and Arcads story (AI UGC ads, US$6 million a year with 5 people in May 2025, then a US$16 million seed round) both rest on founder statements, grade C, while StoryShort's smaller US$18,003 a month is the only one of the three read from the payment processor." }, { "title": "Built on other companies' models", "text": "Claude writes the scripts; ElevenLabs, OpenAI and Qwen make the voices; Seedance, Grok, Wan, Veo and p-video make the clips. A price rise, a usage limit or a content rule at any of these companies changes what a credit costs StoryShort or what it can make. The models have already changed once: the 2024 home page said \"Powered by GPT-4o\". The 75% profit margin is a TrustMRR snapshot that does not come from the verified payment data." }, { "title": "Numbers that do not match", "text": "The site says \"Trusted by 90,000+ creators\"; the founder's TrustMRR entry estimates 27,000 users; Stripe shows 327 active subscriptions. The July 2024 home page already claimed 27,000 creators, although TrustMRR gives 6 August 2024 as the founded date. The affiliate page invites promoters to start \"earning passive income\"; it offers a commission to affiliates, not an income promise to customers." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://storyshort.ai/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/storyshort" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR markdown profile: StoryShort, revenue last synced 15 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/storyshort.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile once, on 16 October 2026 (revenue last synced 2026-10-15T20:14Z). Grade A for the Stripe metrics in its Verification Sources section; the founded date, user estimate, description, margin and listing price are founder-entered or unverified, grade C. Source for every revenue figure and the sale listing." }, { "title": "gaps.com, 10 December 2024: Gaps Income Report, November 2024, insight #26", "url": "https://gaps.com/nov-2024/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on StoryShort (insight #26). A founder statement reported by the newsletter. Source for the 2024 MRR and the ads and affiliates." }, { "title": "StoryShort: About, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://storyshort.ai/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the one-person team and the founder's roles." }, { "title": "StoryShort: Pricing, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://storyshort.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the plans, yearly prices, credits and the cost of each video type." }, { "title": "StoryShort home page, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://storyshort.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the questions and answers in the page code. Source for the product features and the AI models." }, { "title": "Internet Archive copy of storyshort.ai, 27 July 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240727214453/https://storyshort.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The first copy that the archive saved. Source for the early product and the GPT-4o line." }, { "title": "StoryShort: Affiliate Program, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://storyshort.ai/affiliate", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the commission terms." }, { "title": "StoryShort: Clone Video with AI, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://storyshort.ai/tools/clone-video-with-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on how cloning works. Source for the transcript extraction and the recreation." }, { "title": "StoryShort: Automate AI UGC videos, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://storyshort.ai/automate-ai-ugc", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section with the example API script. Source for the testimonial example and the API." }, { "title": "StoryShort: YouTube Automation Tool, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://storyshort.ai/tools/youtube-automation", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on YouTube's rules and on income. Source for the company's own warning." }, { "title": "StoryShort: Terms of Service, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://storyshort.ai/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the governing law, the prohibited content and the user's responsibility." }, { "title": "YouTube Help: YouTube channel monetization policies, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1311392?hl=en", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the update list (15 July 2025) and the sections on inauthentic and reused content." }, { "title": "TikTok Newsroom, 19 September 2023: New labels for disclosing AI-generated content", "url": "https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/new-labels-for-disclosing-ai-generated-content", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the label rule and the automatic label test." }, { "title": "Federal Register, 22 August 2024: Trade Regulation Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials (FTC)", "url": "https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/08/22/2024-18519/trade-regulation-rule-on-the-use-of-consumer-reviews-and-testimonials", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the sections on fake testimonials and AI-generated reviews in the Federal Register's full-text file, and the dates from its API record. ftc.gov refused the download, so the Federal Register copy is cited." }, { "title": "U.S. Copyright Office, Circular 14: Copyright in Derivative Works and Compilations", "url": "https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. Source for the right to prepare adaptations." }, { "title": "Aiolum stories: AutoShorts.ai and Arcads", "url": "https://aiolum.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the published story data for both. Their figures are founder statements, grade C." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/jungle/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/jungle.md", "slug": "jungle", "name": "Jungle", "country": "United States", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI study app that makes questions from your own material", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-16", "launchLabel": "29 January 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$850K a year in recurring revenue, December 2024", "sticker": "$850K/yr recurring revenue", "outcomeUsd": 850000, "months": 23, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders and 2 engineers at the end-2024 figure, plus contractors; 7 people listed from March 2025", "fundingLabel": "Pre-seed of about US$600,000, then about US$300,000 in 2025 (founder figures)", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "learning", "channel": "creators", "trend": "flat", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Funded", "Running", "B2C", "Education" ], "product": "A study app that turns a student's own lecture slides, PDFs, notes, videos and lecture recordings into multiple-choice questions, flashcards and exam-style clinical-case questions, gives feedback on each answer, and schedules reviews so that weak topics come back. It runs on the web, iPhone and Android, with a free plan and paid plans.", "why": "It shipped within days in reply to a public request for exactly this tool, in January 2023, when AI tools were new and AI directories and their video reviewers sent traffic at almost no cost. It then aimed all marketing at medical students, the heaviest flashcard users, paid student creators to post about it on TikTok and Instagram, and bought Google Ads only while they paid back their cost.", "summary": [ "Jungle is a study app. A student uploads lecture slides, a PDF, notes, a video or a lecture recording, and the app turns it into multiple-choice questions, flashcards and clinical-case questions in the style of exams such as USMLE Step 1, the first United States medical licensing exam. The questions are written by a large language model (LLM), an AI program trained on large amounts of text that writes text from instructions. The app then schedules reviews by spaced repetition, a method that shows a question again just before you are likely to forget it. It runs on the web, iPhone and Android. The company behind it is Mindflow Inc. in California.", "Julian Alvarez, a developer who grew up in a Texas border town and had worked at LinkedIn Learning and Meta, built the first version with his co-founder David Glass in one 21-hour coding session in January 2023, in reply to a viral post on X that asked for exactly this tool. It launched on 29 January 2023 under the name Wisdolia. By the end of 2023 it had US$300,000 in ARR, annual recurring revenue: the subscription revenue of a recent month counted for a full year. By the end of 2024 it had US$850,000 in ARR, 650,000 users and a profit, with two co-founders and two engineers plus contractors. In early 2025 the founder told investors on the podcast The Pitch that ARR was approaching US$1 million. Before that the company had raised a pre-seed round, a first small round of venture money, of about US$600,000.", "Every revenue figure on this page is a statement by the founder, grade C. The only money confirmed by a second party is the US$150,000 that The Pitch Fund and Jesse Middleton of the venture firm Flybridge disclosed themselves in May 2025, invested as SAFEs, agreements that turn money into shares at a later funding round. In June 2025 the founder said growth had started to plateau and that the 2025 round raised about US$300,000 of the US$2 million he wanted. In July and August 2025 OpenAI and Google added study modes to ChatGPT and Gemini. The page also shows what happened to earlier companies that tried to make studying and quizzing more engaging." ], "factsCaption": "A study app that reached US$850,000 a year in recurring revenue with four people at the end of 2024, then stopped growing in mid-2025, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a statement by the founder or the company, or a third party that repeats it. Grade B is an investor's own disclosure of its investment. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No revenue figure is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a reply to a stranger's post on X to a million users, in about two years. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Jungle prices in October 2026: the free plan from the company's pricing page, the paid plans as iPhone in-app purchases in the US App Store (grade C)", "note": "The web pricing page names its paid plans Pro and Elite but loads their prices by script, so they could not be read; this table uses the App Store's in-app purchase prices instead, and how the store's plan names match the web plans is not stated. Yearly prices are shown per month (calculated: the yearly price divided by 12). Super Learner is also sold weekly at US$6.99. In early 2025 the founder gave the prices as US$8 a month for the middle plan and US$20 a month for the top plan, and the free plan then allowed 15 generations a month.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "2 generations a month, documents up to 30 pages" ], [ "Mega Mind", "5.00", "7.99", "App Store; US$59.99 a year" ], [ "Super Learner", "6.00", "15.00", "App Store; US$72.00 a year, or US$6.99 a week" ], [ "Elite", "15.00", "37.00", "App Store; US$179.99 a year; exam-style templates, AI voice tutor" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, end of 2024", "value": "US$850,000, up from US$300,000 a year earlier", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder's end-of-year roundup, as reported by Gaps on 9 January 2025. Gaps adds that the company was profitable. Repeated by a second Gaps page and by a July 2026 newsletter.", "src": [ 1, 6, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly equivalent of the end-2024 figure", "value": "about US$70,800 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$850,000 divided by 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Growth during 2024", "value": "2.8 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$850,000 divided by US$300,000 is 2.83.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Users, end of 2024", "value": "650,000, up from 200,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder, via Gaps. Calculated: 3.25 times in the year.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, early 2025", "value": "approaching US$1 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on The Pitch, recorded when December 2024 was the latest month, aired 7 May 2025. He said the company had been net profitable for the last four months and had 180,000 monthly active users.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Money received per month, late 2024 to early 2025", "value": "over US$100,000 a month for three months", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on The Pitch, right after saying that 40% of subscribers buy a yearly plan, which brings revenue in up front. So this cash figure is higher than one twelfth of ARR. A July 2026 newsletter gives \"$100K a month\" without a date.", "src": [ 2, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Users and total revenue, April 2025", "value": "1 million users and US$1 million in lifetime revenue", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder to Gaps, 17 April 2025, who also said the company was \"on track to reach $1M in annual revenue\". Lifetime revenue is the total since launch, a different measure from ARR. The July 2026 newsletter calls it \"$1M ARR\".", "src": [ 5, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Growth in June 2025", "value": "\"started to plateau a little bit\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in The Pitch season finale, 26 June 2025. He said the next goal was to get back to profitability.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Eight weeks after launch, late March 2023", "value": "7,000 downloads, 2,500 weekly active users, US$800 spent on marketing", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's LinkedIn post, quoted in Yuma Ueno's newsletter. Users in more than 120 countries.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Total revenue by September 2023", "value": "US$15,000, with 60,000 downloads", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's LinkedIn post, quoted in the same newsletter.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Google Ads, three months to early 2025", "value": "US$105,000 spent, US$108,000 earned", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on The Pitch. Calculated: 1.03 dollars back for each dollar. Spend was about US$30,000 a month. Earlier, the ads contractor reported 5 times and then 3.5 times the spend in its first two months, and 20% of revenue from ads.", "src": [ 2, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Creator program, early 2025", "value": "about 30 paid student creators, 12 videos a week each, 76 million views in three months", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on The Pitch. The program had doubled from 15 creators. Students run their own TikTok and Instagram accounts.", "src": [ 2, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Sign-ups in December 2024", "value": "144,000, of which 40% came by word of mouth", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on The Pitch. Calculated: about 57,600 people came through referrals.", "src": [ 2, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Paid churn", "value": "12% a month during a semester, about 19% in summer", "grade": "C", "note": "Founders on The Pitch. Churn is the share of paying subscribers who cancel.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Plan mix, early 2025", "value": "30% to 40% buy the top plan; 40% pay yearly", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on The Pitch. The middle plan was US$8 a month and the top plan US$20 a month then.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Time to make a deck", "value": "30 seconds in Jungle, 1.5 to 3 hours in Anki", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's own comparison page. The founder says medical students spend about 10 hours making 700 flashcards for one exam.", "src": [ 17, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Pre-seed round", "value": "about US$600,000 at an US$8 million post-money valuation", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on The Pitch. An investor on the show recalled it as \"I believe, 800k\". The company met its ads contractor through a venture investor at an incubator.", "src": [ 2, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Investments disclosed by The Pitch, May 2025", "value": "US$150,000 in SAFEs at a US$12 million post-money cap", "grade": "B", "note": "The investors' own disclosure: The Pitch Fund US$100,000 and Jesse Middleton of Flybridge US$50,000. A cap is the highest valuation at which the money turns into shares.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "2025 seed round, total", "value": "about US$300,000 of the US$2 million sought", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in the season finale, 26 June 2025. The venture firm Baukunst passed after diligence.", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Outside money raised in total", "value": "about US$900,000", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: about US$600,000 pre-seed plus about US$300,000 in 2025, both founder figures.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Team at the end-2024 figure", "value": "2 co-founders and 2 engineers, plus contractors", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on The Pitch: \"We have two other engineers\", plus supporting roles such as a Google Ads person and an illustrator. The about page in December 2024 listed the two co-founders, one engineer and an advisor.", "src": [ 2, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Team from March 2025", "value": "7 people and an advisor", "grade": "C", "note": "The about page in March 2025, August 2025, May 2026 and October 2026: the two co-founders, three engineers, a creator program lead and a creative lead. In June 2025 the founder named two key hires: a founding AI engineer and an illustrator and game designer.", "src": [ 9, 3 ] }, { "fact": "App Store rating, October 2026", "value": "4.6 from about 1,000 ratings", "grade": "C", "note": "The listing says more than 1 million students use the app. Updated at least twice in October 2026.", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the end-2024 figure", "value": "23 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: January 2023 to December 2024.", "src": [ 7, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "25 January 2023", "what": "A post on X asks for a GPT tool that makes Anki-style flashcards from books and articles. It gets 390,000 views. Alvarez and his co-founder David build the tool in one 21-hour session and reply to the post.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "29 January 2023", "what": "Launch under the name Wisdolia. The founder messages every person who engaged with the post and gets his first 100 users; X suspends his account for the volume of messages.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 6 ] }, { "when": "Early 2023", "what": "Listed on every AI directory he can find. A Futurepedia video about AI tools reaches 1.58 million views. Monthly revenue rises to about US$2,000, then stops growing.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "Late March 2023", "what": "Eight weeks in: 7,000 downloads, 2,500 weekly active users in more than 120 countries, US$800 spent on marketing.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "September 2023", "what": "60,000 downloads and US$15,000 in total revenue.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "Undated, after the plateau", "what": "All marketing aimed at medical students. One medical student's TikTok video reaches 2.5 million views, and monthly revenue goes from US$2,000 to US$15,000 within one to two weeks.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "End of 2023", "what": "US$300,000 in annual recurring revenue.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "when": "By August 2024", "what": "Renamed Jungle: the about page archived on 19 August 2024 already uses the new name and lists two co-founders, one engineer and an advisor.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 6 ] }, { "when": "Before the 2025 round, undated", "what": "A Google Ads contractor sets up tracking. Returns of 5 times the spend in the first month and 3.5 times in the second; the company has its first profitable month and a revenue record.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "December 2024", "what": "US$850,000 in annual recurring revenue, 650,000 users, profitable. 144,000 sign-ups in the month, 40% by word of mouth.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "Early 2025", "what": "Pitch on the podcast The Pitch: ARR approaching US$1 million, 180,000 monthly active users, net profitable for four months, raising US$2 million.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "March 2025", "what": "The about page lists 7 people: the co-founders, three engineers, a creator program lead and a creative lead.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "17 April 2025", "what": "1 million users and US$1 million in lifetime revenue, on track for US$1 million a year.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "7 May 2025", "what": "The episode airs. Baukunst passes after diligence; The Pitch Fund and Jesse Middleton of Flybridge invest US$150,000 in SAFEs at a US$12 million cap.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "26 June 2025", "what": "In the season finale the founder says the round raised about US$300,000, growth started to plateau, and the team will stop raising and work to get back to profitability.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "29 July and 6 August 2025", "what": "OpenAI adds study mode to ChatGPT, including the free plan. Google launches Guided Learning in Gemini.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14, 15 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The iPhone app is updated at least twice in the month and claims more than 1 million students. The privacy policy allows licensing user data to third parties for AI training.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13, 12 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Distribution", "text": "The product was simple to copy, so the founders put their effort into finding students: first AI directories and the video reviewers who read them, then one niche, then paid creators and ads that paid back. The founder says that in generative AI the main defense is to move fast and experiment more than others: 50 to 100 experiments a month, reviewed every Monday." }, { "title": "A fast reply to a public request", "text": "On 25 January 2023 a post on X asked for a GPT tool that makes Anki-style flashcards from what you read. The founders built it in one 21-hour session, replied to the post, and messaged every person who engaged with it, which brought the first 100 users. They talked to each of them and changed the product from their feedback." }, { "title": "One niche with the most need", "text": "Usage data showed that medical students used the app far more than anyone else. They are also the main users of Anki. For about a year all marketing aimed at them, and the product added clinical-case questions in the style of medical exams, which law and dental students then found useful too." }, { "title": "Paid student creators", "text": "One medical student's TikTok video reached 2.5 million views and lifted monthly revenue from about US$2,000 to US$15,000 within one to two weeks. The company turned this into a program: about 30 students paid to run their own accounts and post about 12 videos a week each, 76 million views in three months." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's statements, the company's own pages and its Google Ads contractor. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Prompts on top of large language models, plus \"some fine tuned models\", in the founder's words in early 2025. He said the prompt had been revised more than a hundred times. No source read for this page names the model provider.", "Question quality is tested with an LLM as the judge: each platform generated questions from the same 3 documents, and the questions were scored without showing which platform made them. The home page compares Jungle with Quizlet, Turbo, Gizmo and StudyFetch.", "Google Firebase for the backend database and login, Amplitude and Google Analytics for analytics, and Smashsend for email marketing, per the privacy policy.", "The website was built on Webflow, and the Google Ads campaigns were measured with Google Analytics 4, per the ads contractor's case study.", "A web app plus iPhone and Android apps from the developer Mindflow Inc. The iPhone app sells the paid plans as in-app purchases.", "Features beyond questions: image occlusion (labels hidden on a diagram for the student to name), lecture recordings, an AI voice tutor, spaced repetition, export to Anki, streaks, and a tree that grows as the student answers.", "An experiment hour every Monday, with 50 to 100 experiments a month on ads, pages, prices, onboarding and features." ], "src": [ 2, 11, 12, 8, 13, 10, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised students or parents a better or more engaging way to study or quiz, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Grockit", "years": "2007 to 2015", "funding": "US$44.4M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Social, game-like test preparation for the SAT and GMAT.", "died": "Kaplan, a large test-prep company, bought it in 2013 and folded it into its own business, where the product did not survive.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/196-grockit" }, { "name": "QuizUp", "years": "2013 to 2020", "funding": "US$27M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Real-time quiz battles on thousands of topics.", "died": "It spread fast, but it never found a way to make money, lost players to live-hosted quiz games, and its buyer neglected it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/479-quizup" }, { "name": "Airy Labs", "years": "2010 to 2012", "funding": "US$1.7M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Learning games for children, based on cognitive science.", "died": "Costly content met free-to-download app store prices, and parents could not see the difference from free apps.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/3-airy-labs" }, { "name": "Xuebajun", "years": "2013 to 2021", "funding": "US$150M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Photograph a homework problem and get an AI solution.", "died": "It moved from homework help into an expensive live-tutoring marketplace, then a ban by the Chinese government ended its business.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2325-xuebajun" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the four sold a better way to study or quiz, and none found revenue that covered its costs. QuizUp spread fast but never made money from its players, Airy Labs could not charge more than free apps, Grockit disappeared inside a test-prep company, and Xuebajun spent its money on tutors before a ban. Jungle sells to the same buyer, a student near an exam, and has the same weak point: students cancel in summer and leave after graduation.", "Two things differ. First, the AI writes each new set of questions from the student's own slides, so the company does not pay people to write course content, as Grockit and Airy Labs had to. Second, it charged early, sold yearly plans to 40% of subscribers, and bought ads only while they paid back, so four people reached US$850,000 a year after a pre-seed round of about US$600,000. The new risk is one the predecessors did not face: the AI model makers now offer study features inside their own chat apps." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The early market, no.", "text": "A tool that writes study questions from a student's own files was new in January 2023, and Jungle shipped it within days of a public request. Since mid-2025 ChatGPT and Gemini have their own study modes. What can still be copied is the method: one group of users under exam pressure, paid creators from that group, ads that pay back, and many small experiments.", "steps": [ "Build the tool that people ask for in public, ship it within days, and reply to the request yourself.", "Find the user group with the most urgent need in your usage data, and aim all marketing at it.", "Pay members of that group to post short videos from their own accounts, several a week each.", "Buy search ads only while the revenue they bring covers the spend, and sell yearly plans." ], "open": "Exam-heavy groups that general chat apps serve less well: nursing, law, licensing and certification exams, and language tests, with questions in the exact style of each exam." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Self-reported, and three different measures", "text": "Every revenue figure is the founder's own statement. The sources use three measures that are easy to mix up: ARR (US$850,000 at the end of 2024), lifetime revenue (US$1 million in total by April 2025) and money received per month (over US$100,000, which includes yearly plans paid in advance). The July 2026 newsletter repeats \"$1M ARR\" and \"$100K a month\" without new dates." }, { "title": "Growth stopped in 2025", "text": "In June 2025 the founder said growth \"started to plateau a little bit\", that the seed round raised about US$300,000 of the US$2 million sought, and that the goal was to get back to profitability. A venture firm passed after diligence, saying the product's maturity fitted a pre-seed round. No source gives a revenue figure after April 2025." }, { "title": "Students leave", "text": "Paid churn was 12% a month during a semester and about 19% in summer, by the founders' figures. Medical students use the app around exams and stop after graduation, which limits how much each customer pays over time." }, { "title": "The model makers now offer study modes", "text": "OpenAI added study mode to ChatGPT on 29 July 2025 for logged-in users on the Free, Plus, Pro and Team plans. Google launched Guided Learning in Gemini on 6 August 2025. Investors on The Pitch said they already upload PDFs to ChatGPT and ask it to quiz them." }, { "title": "Large study apps compete for the same students", "text": "Jungle's home page names Quizlet, Turbo, Gizmo and StudyFetch as competitors. Its ads contractor wrote that Quizlet and Anki dominated the same search ads. The founder said many of Jungle's users came from Anki or Quizlet." }, { "title": "School and exam rules on AI", "text": "Guidance from England's Department for Education, updated 12 August 2025, says schools may review homework and unsupervised-study policies because of generative AI, and need to keep taking reasonable steps to prevent malpractice involving generative AI in formal assessments. Practice questions made from a student's own slides are revision, not assessed work; the risk is that a school's general rules on AI tools cover them too." }, { "title": "Dependence on model providers", "text": "The product is prompts and some fine-tuned models on top of large language models from providers that the sources do not name. The founder said generative AI gives no strong protection against copies, and the host of The Pitch said everybody uses the same models. A price rise or a rule change by the provider affects the margin directly." }, { "title": "A larger team after the headline figure", "text": "The headline figure is from the end of 2024, when the team was two co-founders and two engineers. From March 2025 the about page lists 7 people and an advisor, plus about 30 paid student creators, so the 2025 figures come from a team of 7." }, { "title": "User data may be licensed for AI training", "text": "The privacy policy read in October 2026 says the company may license or sell data collected through the service, including personal data, to third parties, including for training AI models. Students who upload course material may object." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://jungleai.com" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6657995165" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Gaps, Glen Allsopp, 9 January 2025: December 2024 income report", "url": "https://gaps.com/dec-2024/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on Jungle (insight 3). Reports the founder's end-of-year roundup. Source for the US$850,000 and US$300,000 ARR, the users and the profit." }, { "title": "The Pitch, season 13 episode 9, 7 May 2025: Jungle: Your AI Study Coach", "url": "https://www.thepitch.show/162-jungle-your-ai-study-coach", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the episode page in full, with its transcript and deal summary. Founder statements to investors, recorded when December 2024 was the latest month. Source for ARR, money per month, users, channels, prices, churn, team, the pre-seed and the 2025 investments." }, { "title": "The Pitch, season 13 finale, 26 June 2025: Founders Flip the Script", "url": "https://www.thepitch.show/season-13-finale-founders-flip-the-script", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the Jungle segment of the transcript. Source for the result of the 2025 round, the plateau and the new hires." }, { "title": "The Pitch blog, 7 May 2025: From Video Game Addict to $1M Revenue: How 1,000+ Experiments Grew a Jungle", "url": "https://www.thepitch.show/blog/from-video-game-addict-to-1m-revenue-how-1000-experiments-grew-a-jungle-/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The show's summary of the pitch. Source for the creator program growth, the flashcard time claim and the founder's background." }, { "title": "Gaps, Glen Allsopp, 17 April 2025: March 2025 income report", "url": "https://gaps.com/mar-2025/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on Jungle (insight 14). Source for 1 million users, US$1 million in lifetime revenue and the US$1 million annual target." }, { "title": "Gaps: online learning businesses, updated 12 May 2025", "url": "https://gaps.com/online-learning/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on Jungle. Source for the two founders, the 2023 founding, the former name Wisdolia and the US$850,000 figure." }, { "title": "Yuma Ueno's newsletter, 7 July 2026: The Guy Who Built the MVP in a 21-hour and Grew an AI Flashcard App to $100K/Month", "url": "https://yumaueno.substack.com/p/the-guy-who-built-the-mvp-in-a-21", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A secondary account built on the founder's LinkedIn posts, which could not be fetched (LinkedIn may not be fetched). Source for the launch story, the early numbers and the creator strategy." }, { "title": "Profit Mill case study: Jungle AI, 5x ROI within 1 month of running Google Ads", "url": "https://www.profitmill.io/case-studies/Jungle-AI", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The Google Ads contractor's own account, undated in its text. Source for the ad returns, the tools and the pre-seed status." }, { "title": "Jungle about page, live and five Wayback copies", "url": "https://jungleai.com/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 16 October 2026, and the Wayback copies of 19 August 2024, 13 December 2024, 24 March 2025, 31 August 2025 and 15 May 2026. Source for the founders' roles and the team size at each date." }, { "title": "Jungle pricing page, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://jungleai.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the free plan and the features of each plan. The paid prices load by script and could not be read." }, { "title": "Jungle home page, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://jungleai.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product, the named competitors and the LLM-scored question test." }, { "title": "Jungle privacy policy, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://jungleai.com/privacy-policy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the company name Mindflow Inc., its state, its service providers and the data licensing clause." }, { "title": "Apple App Store: Jungle: AI Flashcards & Quiz, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6657995165", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the in-app purchase prices, the rating, the developer name and the update dates." }, { "title": "OpenAI, 29 July 2025: Introducing study mode", "url": "https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-study-mode/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the launch date and the plans that get study mode." }, { "title": "Google blog, 6 August 2025: Guided Learning in Gemini: From answers to understanding", "url": "https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/education/guided-learning/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the announcement. Source for the launch date." }, { "title": "UK Department for Education: Generative artificial intelligence (AI) in education, updated 12 August 2025", "url": "https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/generative-artificial-intelligence-in-education/generative-artificial-intelligence-ai-in-education", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on homework and formal assessments." }, { "title": "Jungle: Anki vs Jungle comparison page", "url": "https://jungleai.com/anki-vs-jungle", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's own comparison of deck creation time." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/ai2sql/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/ai2sql.md", "slug": "ai2sql", "name": "AI2SQL", "country": "United States", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Text-to-SQL assistant (web app)", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-16", "launchLabel": "25 October 2021", "outcomeLabel": "US$10K a month, January 2025", "sticker": "$120K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 120318, "months": 39, "teamLabel": "1 founder; no employees reported", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "documents-data", "channel": "search", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Developer tools" ], "product": "A web app that writes SQL queries from requests in plain English, and explains, fixes and speeds up existing queries, for MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle, SQLite, Snowflake, BigQuery and other databases. Paid plans connect to the customer's own database and run read-only queries, also from Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor.", "why": "It launched in October 2021 with one narrow promise, write SQL without knowing SQL, on OpenAI's Codex and GPT-3 models and a no-code app builder. It kept its prices low, built a site of more than 700 pages, among them SQL lessons, templates and comparisons, and added what a general chatbot does not have: a live, read-only connection to the customer's database. Its recurring revenue, as the founder reported it, doubled in 2024 to about US$10,000 a month.", "summary": [ "AI2SQL writes SQL, Structured Query Language, the standard language for reading and changing data in relational databases, from requests in plain English. This is called text-to-SQL: a language model reads the request and the type of database and returns the query. The 2022 home page gave this example request: \"Show me dogs and cat names where breed is 'dachshund' and size is 'small'\". The tool also explains a query, fixes syntax errors and suggests a faster version. On the Pro and Team plans it connects to the customer's own database, reads its schema, the list of tables and columns with their types, and runs read-only queries. It can do this from inside Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor through an MCP server, a service that follows the Model Context Protocol, a standard way for AI assistants to call outside tools.", "Mustafa Ergisi launched AI2SQL on Product Hunt on 25 October 2021. In February 2022 the site said it was \"Powered by OpenAI Codex & GPT3\", and its sign-up pages ran on Bubble, a no-code builder, a service for making web apps by arranging parts on screen instead of writing code. A third-party write-up says it had US$1,151 of MRR, monthly recurring revenue, the amount that all active subscriptions bring in each month, in February 2023 (not verified). According to the gaps.com newsletter, the founder reported US$5,000 MRR about a year before January 2025, and a screenshot of his revenue dashboard shows US$10,026.53 MRR on 19 January 2025. That is a run rate, the current month's revenue times 12, of about US$120,000 a year, 39 months after launch.", "Every figure on this page comes from the founder, through a screenshot or a third party that repeats him, so it is grade C. No payment processor, buyer or journalist has confirmed it, and no figure newer than January 2025 was found. The same write-up also reports US$100,000 a year in December 2023, which does not fit the other figures, so this page does not use it. The page also shows earlier companies that promised an easier way to get answers from data, and what happened to them when larger platforms built the same feature." ], "factsCaption": "A text-to-SQL tool, launched in October 2021, at about US$10,000 a month in recurring revenue by January 2025, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a founder statement, shown in a screenshot or repeated by a newsletter or a write-up, or a record on Product Hunt or on the company's own pages. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a Bubble app \"Powered by OpenAI Codex & GPT3\" to an MCP server for Claude and ChatGPT, in five years. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "AI2SQL prices in October 2026, from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "Every paid plan starts with a 7-day free trial that needs a card. Billed yearly, the plans cost US$84, US$168 and US$348 a year, which the page calls a 25% saving. Connecting your own database needs Pro or Team. The Lifetime plan is one payment with a monthly query limit.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "3 queries a day on a demo database" ], [ "Start", "7", "9", "100 queries a month; MySQL and PostgreSQL" ], [ "Pro", "14", "19", "unlimited queries; advanced model; own database; MCP; desktop app" ], [ "Team", "29", "39", "5 users; shared query library; role-based access" ], [ "Lifetime", "29 one-time", "", "500 AI queries a month" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 19 January 2025", "value": "US$10,026.53", "grade": "C", "note": "A screenshot of a revenue dashboard (\"MRR $10,026.53\", \"Updated Jan 19\") in the gaps.com report for January 2025, published 6 February 2025. The newsletter wrote \"If correct\" and does not say that it checked the account.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from that figure", "value": "about US$120,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$10,026.53 times 12 is US$120,318.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, early 2024", "value": "US$5,000", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder's earlier statement as gaps.com reports it, \"almost a year\" before the January 2025 figure. The newsletter gives no exact date or link.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Growth during 2024", "value": "about 2 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$10,026.53 divided by US$5,000 is 2.0. Gaps.com: he \"effectively doubled his revenue in 2024\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, February 2023", "value": "US$1,151 from 128 paying users", "grade": "C", "note": "A third-party write-up of September 2025 that cites an Indie Hackers post by the founder, which this page could not open. Not verified. About US$9 per paying user a month (calculated).", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "\"US$100,000 ARR\", December 2023", "value": "not used", "grade": "C", "note": "Same write-up, which gives it as about US$8,500 a month. US$100,000 divided by 12 is US$8,333, two thirds more than the US$5,000 reported for early 2024, and the dashboard line shows no fall. The write-up does not say how it was counted.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Users and queries, early 2025", "value": "50,000 users, 75,000 queries", "grade": "C", "note": "The site's own numbers as gaps.com quotes them: 1.5 queries per user (calculated). The newsletter guessed that most people test one query and do not return.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Early use, February 2022", "value": "500+ sign-ups, 1,600+ queries generated", "grade": "C", "note": "Counters on the home page in the Wayback Machine snapshot of 27 February 2022, four months after launch.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Product Hunt launches", "value": "25 October 2021 and 14 March 2023", "grade": "C", "note": "Product Hunt's record. The first, \"Write SQL queries with no knowledge of SQL\", was fifth of the day and 26th of the week. AI2sql 2.0 was 20th of the day. The write-up's launch date of April 2022 does not match.", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "fact": "AI models", "value": "OpenAI Codex and GPT-3 in 2022; not named today", "grade": "C", "note": "The 2022 footer: \"Powered by OpenAI Codex & GPT3\". In October 2026 the pricing page names only a \"Basic\" and an \"Advanced\" model. The company also published a fine-tuned Mistral 7B model on Hugging Face.", "src": [ 4, 5, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Prices, October 2026", "value": "US$9, US$19 and US$39 a month; US$29 one-time", "grade": "C", "note": "Start, Pro and Team, or US$7, US$14 and US$29 a month billed yearly. The one-time Lifetime plan allows 500 queries a month. A free plan allows 3 queries a day on a demo database.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Affiliate commission", "value": "30% of the first 3 subscription payments", "grade": "C", "note": "From the affiliate program page.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Pages in the sitemap, October 2026", "value": "752", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: counted on this page from the sitemap. They include SQL lessons, SQL templates, database comparisons and blog posts.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 founder; no employees reported", "grade": "C", "note": "Gaps.com and Product Hunt name only Mustafa Ergisi. The write-up calls him a solo founder and a former data analyst from Istanbul, Turkey: not verified.", "src": [ 1, 3, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No source reports a funding round. The write-up says \"No external funding\".", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Operating company", "value": "Cross Regions Technology, Jacksonville, Florida", "grade": "C", "note": "Named on the contact page in October 2026. The terms of service say only \"operated by AI2sql\" and choose United States law.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the January 2025 figure", "value": "39 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: October 2021 to January 2025.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "25 October 2021", "what": "First launch on Product Hunt: \"Write SQL queries with no knowledge of SQL\". Fifth product of the day, 26th of the week.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "27 February 2022", "what": "The site says \"Powered by OpenAI Codex & GPT3\". Its sign-up and pricing links go to ai2sql.bubbleapps.io, an app built with Bubble. Counters show 500+ sign-ups and 1,600+ generated queries.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "February 2023", "what": "US$1,151 MRR from 128 paying users, according to a third-party write-up that cites the founder. Not verified.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "14 March 2023", "what": "Second Product Hunt launch, AI2sql 2.0: \"Converse with your data in natural language\". 20th product of the day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "31 July 2023", "what": "Databricks opens a public preview of an assistant that generates, explains and fixes SQL from English inside its SQL editor.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "Early 2024", "what": "The founder reports US$5,000 MRR, as gaps.com later recounts.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "12 June 2024", "what": "Databricks announces AI/BI with Genie, which answers business questions in conversation with queries and charts.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "19 January 2025", "what": "A dashboard screenshot shows MRR of US$10,026.53, about double the figure of a year earlier. Gaps.com publishes it on 6 February 2025.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "Plans from US$9 to US$39 a month and a US$29 lifetime plan, an MCP server for Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor, and a desktop app. The footer calls the product \"The data layer for AI agents\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 7 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "One narrow job", "text": "AI2SQL does one thing: SQL. It writes a query from a request in plain English, explains a query, fixes syntax errors and suggests faster versions, in the variant of SQL that each database uses: MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle, SQLite, Snowflake, BigQuery and others. It went on Product Hunt in October 2021 with that single promise and still sells it five years later." }, { "title": "Bought parts for the first version", "text": "In February 2022 the site said that OpenAI's Codex and GPT-3 models produced the SQL, and the sign-up and pricing pages ran on Bubble, a no-code builder. The model came from OpenAI and the app pages from Bubble." }, { "title": "A page for every SQL question", "text": "The sitemap lists 752 pages: SQL lessons for functions in each database, SQL templates, database comparisons, pages such as \"AI2sql vs. ChatGPT\", and blog posts. Pages like these answer searches that people who write SQL type, and the pages read for this story carry a free sign-up offer. No source says what share of customers came from search." }, { "title": "Low prices, a trial and a lifetime plan", "text": "Plans cost US$9 to US$39 a month, or US$7 to US$29 a month billed yearly, and each starts with a 7-day trial that needs a card. A US$29 lifetime plan with 500 queries a month brings in cash once. Affiliates get 30% of the first 3 subscription payments of each customer they refer." }, { "title": "Inside the chatbots, not against them", "text": "The newest features put AI2SQL inside the general assistants. Its MCP server lets Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and VS Code write SQL through AI2SQL on every plan, and run read-only queries on a connected database on Pro and Team. The footer now calls the product \"The data layer for AI agents\"." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's pages, read in October 2026 and in a Wayback Machine snapshot of February 2022, including the code of those pages. They are grade C.", "items": [ "2022: a landing page whose sign-up and pricing links went to ai2sql.bubbleapps.io, an app made with Bubble. The footer said \"Powered by OpenAI Codex & GPT3\". The page loaded Google Analytics and Hotjar to record visits.", "2026: the marketing site is built with Astro, a framework that produces static pages, and the app runs at builder.ai2sql.io. The pages load Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Mixpanel and Microsoft Clarity to measure visits, a Google Ads tag, and Crisp for support chat.", "Models: the pricing page names only a \"Basic\" and an \"Advanced\" AI model and says that customer queries and schemas are \"never sold or used to train models\". A blog post describes AI2SQL Mistral-7B, the open Mistral 7B model fine-tuned for text-to-SQL on WikiSQL data with LoRA, a method that trains a small set of added weights instead of the whole model, and published on Hugging Face. The site does not say whether the paid plans use it.", "Today the product has a web app, a desktop app for Windows and Mac, an API, and an MCP server for Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and VS Code.", "Company: the contact page names Cross Regions Technology in Jacksonville, Florida. The terms of service, made with the PolicyMaker.io template generator, say only \"operated by AI2sql\" and choose United States law.", "A third-party write-up lists Bubble, Google Cloud, HubSpot, Stripe, Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity as the tools, with monthly costs. Bubble, Google Analytics and Clarity are visible in the page code; the rest is not verified." ], "src": [ 4, 6, 5, 9, 7, 8, 2 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised an easier way to get answers from data or to run a database, and lost when larger platforms offered the same thing. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Ask Jeeves", "years": "1996 to 2007", "funding": "US$50M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Ask a search engine a question in plain words, without learning keyword and Boolean syntax.", "died": "Its answers depended on human editors and a fixed set of question-and-answer pairs, which could not grow with the web. Google's automatic ranking won.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/10-ask-jeeves" }, { "name": "SumAll", "years": "2011 to 2019", "funding": "US$15M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "One dashboard of marketing and sales data for small businesses, with no data specialist needed.", "died": "It could not stand apart from Tableau, Google Analytics and free tools. Small businesses did not see the value in its price, and many left.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/587-sumall" }, { "name": "Skysheet", "years": "2009 to 2012", "funding": "US$200K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A spreadsheet in the cloud with real-time collaboration and better charts.", "died": "Google and Microsoft moved their own spreadsheets to the cloud and added collaboration.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1218-skysheet" }, { "name": "FathomDB", "years": "2008 to 2011", "funding": "US$0", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Managed cloud databases with automatic scaling, backups and monitoring.", "died": "AWS introduced RDS, and the large cloud providers offered the same service with far more money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1231-fathomdb" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the four sold an easier way to reach data or to run a database, and each lost when a larger company that owned the platform built the same feature into it. AI2SQL faces the same risk. The databases that it writes SQL for now write SQL themselves: in July 2023 Databricks wrote: \"Describe your task in English and let the Assistant generate SQL queries, explain complex code, and automatically fix errors.\" That is close to AI2SQL's own list of features. Snowflake, Google and Microsoft document similar features.", "Two things differ. First, AI2SQL is one person without outside funding, so it does not need a large share of the market: about US$10,000 a month can support one person. Second, it works across many databases and also inside Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor, so a customer with data in several systems, or a person who already works in a chatbot, has a reason to use it instead of one vendor's assistant. Whether that reason lasts as each platform improves its own assistant is the open question." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The early start, no. The narrow tool with search pages, partly.", "text": "AI2SQL started in 2021 on OpenAI's Codex and GPT-3; today the database makers and the general chatbots write SQL too. What a new founder can still copy is the shape: one narrow job that people repeat every week, a reference page for every variant of that job, a low price with a trial, and a connection into the tools that people already use.", "steps": [ "Choose one task that people repeat every week and must get exactly right, such as SQL for a particular database.", "Build the first version on a model API and a no-code builder, as AI2SQL did with OpenAI's models and Bubble.", "Publish a page for every variant of the task: each function, database, error code and comparison.", "Add what a general chatbot lacks, the customer's own schema, a read-only connection and team features, and offer them inside the chatbots through MCP." ], "open": "Other formal languages that people write rarely but must get exactly right: spreadsheet formulas, regular expressions, DAX for Power BI, log search queries and infrastructure configuration files." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Self-reported, from one screenshot", "text": "The headline figure is a screenshot of a revenue dashboard that the founder shared and a newsletter republished with the words \"If correct\". No payment processor, buyer or journalist has confirmed it. The latest figure is from January 2025, 21 months before this page was written, so whether revenue kept growing is not known." }, { "title": "The 2023 figures conflict", "text": "A third-party write-up gives US$100,000 ARR in December 2023, which is about US$8,333 a month. That is two thirds more than the US$5,000 a month reported for early 2024, and the dashboard line shows no fall in that period, so this page does not use it. The same write-up dates the launch to April 2022, but Product Hunt records the first launch on 25 October 2021." }, { "title": "The database makers built it in", "text": "Databricks put SQL generation, explanation and error fixing into its SQL editor in a public preview on 31 July 2023, and announced Genie, a conversational interface for business questions, on 12 June 2024. Snowflake documents Cortex Analyst, with which \"business users can ask questions in natural language\". Google's BigQuery documentation describes a SQL generation tool that \"lets you use natural language to generate a SQL query\", and Microsoft documents Copilot in Azure SQL Database on a page dated 8 April 2025. These come with platforms that the customers already pay for." }, { "title": "General chatbots write SQL", "text": "The company's own site has pages that compare AI2SQL with ChatGPT. The gaps.com writer guessed that \"standard ChatGPT could handle the majority of use cases\". The site's numbers in early 2025, 50,000 users and 75,000 queries, are 1.5 queries per user, and the writer read them as most people trying one query and not returning." }, { "title": "Dependence on model providers", "text": "The product started on OpenAI's Codex and GPT-3, and today the pricing page names only a \"Basic\" and an \"Advanced\" model. The newest features run inside Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor through MCP, so the companies that sell the language models also own the screens where these users work." }, { "title": "Company details are incomplete", "text": "The terms of service are a generic template that names no company. The contact page names Cross Regions Technology in Jacksonville, Florida. Where the founder lives and works is not verified." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://ai2sql.io" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/ai2sql" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Gaps.com report for January 2025, published 6 February 2025, insight #2: An AI-Powered SQL Query Builder Just Surpassed $10,000 in Monthly Recurring Revenue", "url": "https://gaps.com/jan-2025/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on AI2SQL and viewed its screenshot of the MRR chart. Source for the January 2025 MRR, the earlier US$5,000 figure, the growth in 2024 and the user and query counts." }, { "title": "Linh BaDien, 11 September 2025: AI2SQL, From Idea to $100K ARR in One Year with a Solo Founder", "url": "https://linhbadien.com/ai2sql-from-idea-to-100k-arr-in-one-year-with-a-solo-founder/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A third-party write-up that names an Indie Hackers post by the founder as its source; that post was not opened, because Indie Hackers does not allow this crawler. Its launch date conflicts with Product Hunt's record, so it is used only for the 2023 figures, the team and the funding, each marked not verified." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: AI2sql product page and launch pages", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/ai2sql", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the launch list and the page data. Source for the two launch dates, the daily and weekly ranks and the maker's name." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine: ai2sql.io on 27 February 2022", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20220227224750/https://www.ai2sql.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the page code. Source for the 2022 model statement, the Bubble sign-up address, the analytics scripts and the early counters." }, { "title": "AI2SQL pricing page, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://ai2sql.io/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the plans, prices, limits, trial terms and model labels." }, { "title": "AI2SQL home page and sitemap, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://ai2sql.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the page code, and counted the 752 addresses in the sitemap at ai2sql.io/sitemap-0.xml. Source for the features and the analytics, ads and chat scripts." }, { "title": "AI2SQL: MCP server page", "url": "https://ai2sql.io/mcp", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the connection to Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and VS Code." }, { "title": "AI2SQL contact page, terms of service and affiliate program page", "url": "https://ai2sql.io/contact", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with ai2sql.io/termsandconditions and ai2sql.io/affiliate-program. Source for the operating company, the governing law and the affiliate commission." }, { "title": "AI2SQL blog: Exploring the AI2SQL Mistral-7B Model on Hugging Face", "url": "https://ai2sql.io/ai2sql-mistral-7b-model/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Undated. Source for the fine-tuned open model." }, { "title": "AI2SQL: AI2sql vs. ChatGPT, Which AI Tool Is Best for Generating SQL Queries?", "url": "https://ai2sql.io/ai2sql-vs-chatgpt-generate-sql-queries/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's own comparison with ChatGPT. Not used for numbers." }, { "title": "Databricks Blog, 31 July 2023: Introducing Databricks Assistant", "url": "https://www.databricks.com/blog/introducing-databricks-assistant", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Not used for numbers. Source for the public preview of SQL generation, explanation and error fixing." }, { "title": "Databricks Blog, 12 June 2024: Introducing AI/BI: Intelligent Analytics for Real-World Data", "url": "https://www.databricks.com/blog/introducing-aibi-intelligent-analytics-real-world-data", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Not used for numbers. Source for Genie." }, { "title": "Snowflake Documentation: Cortex Analyst", "url": "https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/snowflake-cortex/cortex-analyst", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The page has no date; read 16 October 2026. Not used for numbers." }, { "title": "Google Cloud Documentation: Write queries with Gemini assistance, BigQuery, updated 13 October 2026", "url": "https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/write-sql-gemini", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the SQL generation tool. Not used for numbers." }, { "title": "Microsoft Learn, 8 April 2025: Microsoft Copilot in Azure with Azure SQL Database Overview", "url": "https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/copilot/copilot-azure-sql-overview", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The date is the page's own. Not used for numbers." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/alvas-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/alvas-ai.md", "slug": "alvas-ai", "name": "Alvas.ai", "country": "Denmark", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI writer for automated marketing emails", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-16", "launchLabel": "December 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$16.4K a month recurring revenue, February 2025", "sticker": "$196K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 196200, "months": 14, "teamLabel": "A team of two at the November 2024 figure; no later headcount found", "fundingLabel": "US$61,500 raised in May 2024; investors not named in the sources", "primaryFactor": "Agency partner", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Funded", "Running", "B2B", "Email marketing" ], "product": "An AI writer for an online shop's automated marketing emails. Connected to Klaviyo or another email platform, it writes a different subject line, headline and text for every recipient from the products that person looked at or left in the cart, in the shop's tone, in more than 40 languages, and measures the result against the shop's old email.", "why": "Online shops send the same abandoned-cart and viewed-product email to every customer, because writing more versions takes people. A rented language model made one unique email per recipient cheap. Alvas sold this first through a Danish email marketing agency that set it up for its clients, and showed the gains with tests against the shops' old emails.", "summary": [ "Alvas.ai sells online shops an AI layer for their marketing email. A shop connects it to its email service provider, the platform that stores the subscriber list and sends the mail, such as Klaviyo. In the shop's flows, the emails that the platform sends automatically after an event such as an abandoned cart or a viewed product, Alvas writes the subject line, the headline and the text for each recipient from the products and the customer data, in the shop's tone of voice and in more than 40 languages. The model behind it is rented: the terms of service say the AI runs on Microsoft's Azure OpenAI Service, which is OpenAI's models hosted and sold by Microsoft.", "Villads Leth appears in the sources as founder, co-founder and CEO. The company behind the site is 404 Technologies Inc., and its case studies come from the Danish market: the email agency Ackermann and its clients, and the retailer Coolshop. In November 2024 he reported US$102,300 in annual recurring revenue (ARR), the subscription revenue of one year at the current monthly rate, with a team of two, after a raise of US$61,500 in May 2024. In early 2025 he reported that monthly recurring revenue (MRR) had grown 91% to US$16,350, with US$39,147 in the bank.", "Both figures are the founder's own statements as relayed by one site, gaps.com, so they are grade C. They agree with each other: US$102,300 a year is about US$8,525 a month, and a 91% rise to US$16,350 means about US$8,560 before. No figure after February 2025 was found, and the pricing page no longer shows prices. The page also shows earlier companies that promised online shops more sales from email, cart reminders and chat, and why they failed." ], "factsCaption": "Recurring revenue of US$102,300 a year in November 2024 and US$16,350 a month in February 2025, both self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a founder statement relayed by gaps.com, or a statement on the company's own pages. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From the first dated company page in December 2023 to US$16,350 a month in February 2025, in 14 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Alvas.ai prices: the current pricing page, read on 16 October 2026, shows plan limits but no prices; the last published prices come from archived copies of the page from 2024 (grade C)", "note": "The page offers a 14-day free trial, as it did in 2024. In April and November 2024 the page showed US$250 and US$800 a month, without saying whether that was billed monthly or yearly, and add-ons for Starter: an extra domain for US$50 a month and Self Learning, Assets and Campaigns for US$200 a month each. That is about US$5.00 per 1,000 emails on Starter and US$5.33 on Pro. In both years Enterprise is priced by contract. The 2026 plans count markets instead of domains, and their email limits are lower than in 2024. The shop pays its own email platform separately.", "rows": [ [ "Starter, 2026", "", "not shown", "25,000 emails a month, 1 market, Klaviyo only" ], [ "Pro, 2026", "", "not shown", "100,000 emails a month, 5 markets, all integrations" ], [ "Enterprise, 2026", "", "by contract", "custom limits, unlimited markets" ], [ "Starter, 2024 (archived)", "", "250", "50,000 emails a month, 1 domain" ], [ "Pro, 2024 (archived)", "", "800", "150,000 emails a month, 5 domains" ], [ "Starter add-ons, 2024 (archived)", "", "50 to 200 each", "extra domain US$50; Self Learning, Assets, Campaigns US$200 each" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, February 2025", "value": "US$16,350", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder statement, relayed by gaps.com on 13 March 2025, which says he revealed it the week before. Up 91%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the February 2025 figure", "value": "US$196,200 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$16,350 times 12. This is the headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, November 2024", "value": "US$102,300", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder statement, relayed by gaps.com on 10 December 2024: reached while being just a team of two.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue behind the November 2024 figure", "value": "about US$8,525", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$102,300 divided by 12. The 91% rise to US$16,350 implies about US$8,560 before (US$16,350 divided by 1.91). The two bases differ by 0.4%, so the two statements agree.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Cash in the bank, early 2025", "value": "US$39,147", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder statement, relayed by gaps.com. About 2.4 months of revenue at the February 2025 rate (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Outside money", "value": "US$61,500, raised in May 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "gaps.com, which says it could not find good sources on total funding and that this round might be all of it. No source read for this page names the investors.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team at the November 2024 figure", "value": "2 people", "grade": "C", "note": "gaps.com, from the founder. No later headcount was found.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Prices in April and November 2024", "value": "Starter US$250 a month for 50,000 emails; Pro US$800 a month for 150,000 emails", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived copies of the pricing page. About US$5.00 and US$5.33 per 1,000 emails (calculated). Add-ons cost US$50 to US$200 a month.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Prices in October 2026", "value": "not published", "grade": "C", "note": "The pricing page lists limits of 25,000 and 100,000 emails a month and a 14-day free trial, with no amounts.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "AI model", "value": "Azure OpenAI Service from Microsoft; GPT-4 named in an agency case study", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms of service, last updated 22 October 2024, and the Ackermann case study.", "src": [ 9, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Test results reported in case studies", "value": "revenue per email sent up 102%, 113% and 95%", "grade": "C", "note": "Shaping New Tomorrow and Fusion, both run by the agency Ackermann, and Coolshop. Tests against the shops' old emails, published on Alvas's own site. No outside party checked them.", "src": [ 6, 7, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Operating company", "value": "404 Technologies Inc., doing business as Alvas.ai", "grade": "C", "note": "Privacy notice and site footer. The terms refer to United States federal and state taxes. The state of incorporation is not stated.", "src": [ 10, 9, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Earliest dated company page", "value": "1 December 2023", "grade": "C", "note": "The date of the privacy notice. The launch date is not published. The first Wayback Machine copy of www.alvas.ai is from 27 February 2024.", "src": [ 10, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the earliest dated page to the February 2025 figure", "value": "14 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: December 2023 to February 2025.", "src": [ 10, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "1 December 2023", "what": "Date of the privacy notice of 404 Technologies Inc., doing business as Alvas.ai, the earliest date on the company's pages.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "27 February 2024", "what": "First copy of www.alvas.ai in the Wayback Machine.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "16 April 2024", "what": "The pricing page lists Starter at US$250 a month for 50,000 emails and Pro at US$800 a month for 150,000 emails, with a 14-day free trial.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "May 2024", "what": "Raises US$61,500. No source read for this page names the investors.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "when": "13 June 2024", "what": "A blog post by Villads Leth explains the method: few-shot learning to write each email, combined with machine learning.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "27 to 29 August 2024", "what": "Case studies go up on the site. Ackermann, a Danish email marketing agency, used Alvas for clients including Shaping New Tomorrow and Fusion, and Villads Leth calls it the first and only preferred partner. Coolshop reports revenue per email sent up 95% in its test and rolls Alvas out to all its markets.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 7, 8 ] }, { "when": "22 October 2024", "what": "The terms of service say the AI runs on Microsoft's Azure OpenAI Service.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "November 2024", "what": "The founder reports US$102,300 in annual recurring revenue with a team of two (gaps.com, 10 December 2024).", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "February 2025", "what": "The founder reports monthly recurring revenue up 91% to US$16,350 and US$39,147 in the bank (gaps.com, 13 March 2025).", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "6 May 2025", "what": "Villads Leth, introduced as CEO and founder, talks about AI-written email on the Hello $Firstname podcast. The episode page says he puts the fall in the cost of content creation with AI at a factor of 200.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "16 October 2026", "what": "The site is online with sign-up and a 14-day free trial. The pricing page shows plan limits but no prices. No revenue figure after February 2025 was found.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 4 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Writing inside the platform the shop already pays for", "text": "Alvas does not replace the email platform. It connects to the shop's Klaviyo account, or Drip, Blueshift and others, and fills in the text of the automated emails that the platform sends, for example the one sent when a customer leaves a cart. The subscriber list and the sending stay with the shop's own platform." }, { "title": "An agency as the first partner", "text": "Ackermann, a Danish email marketing agency, came to Alvas to develop the product with it, tested new features first, and then set Alvas up for several of its clients. The founder called it the first and only preferred partner. One agency that runs Klaviyo for many shops gives a team of two access to many customers at once." }, { "title": "Proof in the customer's own numbers", "text": "Each case study is a test of the Alvas email against the shop's old email; Fusion's was an A/B test, where half of the recipients get each version, run inside its own Klaviyo account. The case pages report revenue per email sent up 102% for Shaping New Tomorrow, 113% for Fusion and 95% for Coolshop. These are the company's own pages, not audited results." }, { "title": "Languages and markets as the unit of price", "text": "An email can be translated into more than 40 languages with one click, and the plans are sized by markets: 1 on Starter, 5 on Pro. A shop that sells in many countries, like Coolshop, has the most to gain, because writing every flow by hand in every language is the most work." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages and an agency case study. They are grade C.", "items": [ "The model: the terms of 22 October 2024 say the AI runs on the Azure OpenAI Service from Microsoft, and that Microsoft does not use the submitted data to train its models. An agency case study says the emails are written with GPT-4.", "The method, from a blog post by Villads Leth of 13 June 2024: few-shot learning, which means putting a few example emails into the prompt, combined with machine learning. The Self Learning feature on the Pro plan is described as an algorithm that adjusts the content toward what converts.", "Integrations: Klaviyo first, the only one on the Starter plan. The integrations page also lists Drip, Blueshift, Shopify, HubSpot, Salesforce, Customer.io, Bloomreach, Agillic, Voyado and Raptor.", "More than 180 prebuilt templates for flows such as abandoned cart, price drop and post-purchase, a tone-of-voice setting, and translation into more than 40 languages.", "Payments: the privacy notice says all payment data is stored by Stripe.", "The company: 404 Technologies Inc., doing business as Alvas.ai, with a team of two at the November 2024 revenue figure." ], "src": [ 9, 6, 12, 17, 3, 4, 10, 2 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised online shops more sales from automated email, cart reminders or chat. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Ve Interactive", "years": "2009 to 2017", "funding": "US$60M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Win back shoppers who leave their carts, with personalized pop-ups.", "died": "It spent US$60 million on growth while being paid only when a sale happened.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2160-ve-interactive" }, { "name": "Userfox", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$700K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Simple automated lifecycle emails and analytics for online shops.", "died": "Mailchimp's position and too little money to keep up with competitors.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1199-userfox" }, { "name": "Marketfox", "years": "2017 to 2020", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Marketing automation built for e-commerce businesses.", "died": "Larger and better-funded marketing-automation suites such as Mailchimp took the market.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1035-marketfox" }, { "name": "RightHello", "years": "2014 to 2022", "funding": "US$600K", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "Live chat that turns e-commerce visitors into buyers with well-timed conversations.", "died": "It had US$600,000 against Intercom's US$240 million and could not keep up.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2260-righthello" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the four sold online shops a way to turn more visitors or subscribers into buyers, and each lost money or market share to larger platforms. Userfox and Marketfox built their own email-automation products and competed with Mailchimp. RightHello competed with Intercom. Ve Interactive was paid only when a sale happened and spent US$60 million on growth.", "Alvas differs in two ways. It does not replace the email platform: it writes the text inside the shop's existing Klaviyo flows and sells through an agency that already runs Klaviyo for its clients, so it works next to the large platforms rather than against them. And the writing costs little, because a rented model writes each email. The same two facts are the risk: the platform can add the feature, and the model belongs to someone else." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, if you find the agency first.", "text": "Nothing in the method needs a large team or a large raise: an AI writer that fills in text inside an email platform that shops already pay for, sold through one agency that runs that platform for many shops, and proven with a test against the shop's old email. The model is rented, so what the business owns is the integrations, the templates and the partner.", "steps": [ "Pick one email or CRM platform with an API and many paying shops, and build for it first, as Alvas did with Klaviyo.", "Find an agency that runs that platform for many clients, and develop the first version with it.", "Run every first customer as a test against the old email, and publish revenue per email sent.", "Price by volume and by market, and add translation, because shops that sell in many countries have the most writing to do." ], "open": "Other automated messages that still use one text for everyone: SMS and push notifications, product descriptions on marketplaces, and email in smaller languages." }, "watch": [ { "title": "One relay site, and nothing after February 2025", "text": "Both revenue figures are the founder's statements as reported by gaps.com. The original posts were not found, and no payment processor, buyer or journalist has checked the numbers. They agree with each other. No figure after February 2025, twenty months before this page was written, was found, and the pricing page no longer shows prices." }, { "title": "Gmail and Yahoo bulk-sender rules", "text": "Since February 2024, Google's sender guidelines require anyone who sends more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail accounts to authenticate the mail with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, records that prove the domain sent it, to offer one-click unsubscribe, and to keep the spam rate in Google's Postmaster Tools below 0.3%. Yahoo set the same 0.3% limit and requires unsubscribes to be honored within 2 days. The shop's own platform sends the mail, so the shop's domain carries the complaints if AI-written emails annoy readers." }, { "title": "Consent rules for marketing email in the EU", "text": "Article 13 of EU Directive 2002/58/EC sets an opt-in rule: unsolicited marketing email may be sent only with the recipient's prior agreement. It is a directive, so each member state, Denmark included, applies it through its own law; the Danish law text could not be read for this page. Alvas works on the shop's own subscriber lists and automated flows, not on bought lists, so the consent must come from the shop." }, { "title": "Many funded competitors", "text": "gaps.com's own table lists other AI email companies with far more money: Singulate, US$2.3 million pre-seed in January 2025; Bounti, US$16 million seed in September 2024; and 11x, described there as scaling outbound sales with AI personalization, US$50 million Series B in November 2024. Alvas had raised US$61,500. The email platforms that Alvas plugs into could also add the same feature." }, { "title": "A rented model", "text": "The terms say the AI runs on Microsoft's Azure OpenAI Service and that the service relies on third-party providers such as Microsoft. A price change, an outage or a policy change there changes Alvas's costs and product, and competitors can rent the same models." }, { "title": "Who runs it, and where", "text": "The sources name one founder. The word co-founder and the phrase their founders in a case study suggest at least one more, who is not named in any source read for this page. The team was two people at the November 2024 figure, and no later headcount was found. The operating company is 404 Technologies Inc., whose terms refer to United States taxes, while the customers in the case studies are Danish." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.alvas.ai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "gaps.com, 13 March 2025: February 2025 income report, insight 22: Alvas.ai, Which Uses AI for Personalised Email Outreach, Grows MRR 91% to $16,350", "url": "https://gaps.com/feb-2025/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on Alvas.ai and the comparison table after it. Relays a statement by the founder; the original post was not found. Source for the monthly revenue, the cash and the competitors." }, { "title": "gaps.com, 10 December 2024: November 2024 income report, insight 40: Last Month I Shared Three Startups Raising Money to Add AI to Email OutReach. Now I'm Introducing One That Just Hit $100,000 in ARR", "url": "https://gaps.com/nov-2024/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on Alvas.ai. Relays a statement by the founder. Source for the annual recurring revenue, the team of two and the May 2024 raise." }, { "title": "Alvas.ai home page, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://www.alvas.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product description, the templates, the languages and the operating company in the footer." }, { "title": "Alvas.ai pricing page, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://www.alvas.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. It shows plan limits and a free trial but no prices." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copies of the Alvas.ai pricing page, 16 April 2024 and 7 November 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20241107201636/https://www.alvas.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both copies in full. Source for the last published prices and add-ons." }, { "title": "Alvas.ai case study, published 27 August 2024: Ackermann x Shaping New Tomorrow, the first ever AI generated Abandoned Cart email", "url": "https://www.alvas.ai/cases/ackermann-shaping-new-tomorrow", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for GPT-4, the test results and the founder's quote about the partner." }, { "title": "Alvas.ai case study, published 27 August 2024: Ackermann doubled the Revenue Per Email for Fusion, by using Alvas", "url": "https://www.alvas.ai/cases/ackermann-x-fusion-x-alvas", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the agency, the A/B test in Klaviyo and the results." }, { "title": "Alvas.ai case study, published 29 August 2024: Coolshop x Alvas x Raptor", "url": "https://www.alvas.ai/cases/coolshop-x-raptor-x-alvas", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Coolshop test results and the rollout to all markets." }, { "title": "Alvas.ai Terms of Service, last updated 22 October 2024", "url": "https://www.alvas.ai/policies/terms-of-service", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on AI services, taxes and subprocessors. Source for Azure OpenAI Service." }, { "title": "Alvas.ai privacy notice, last updated 1 December 2023", "url": "https://www.alvas.ai/policies/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the company and on payment data. Source for 404 Technologies Inc. and Stripe." }, { "title": "Hello $Firstname podcast, 6 May 2025: From Prompts to Personalization: How AI is Rewriting Email Marketing, with Villads Leth, CEO and Founder of Alvas.ai", "url": "https://hellofirstname.podbean.com/e/from-prompts-to-personalization-how-ai-is-rewriting-email-marketing-with-villads-leth-ceo-and-founder-of-alvasai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the episode page in full; the audio was not heard. Confirms the founder's role in May 2025." }, { "title": "Alvas.ai blog, 13 June 2024, by Villads Leth: Few Shot Learning", "url": "https://www.alvas.ai/blog/few-shot-learning", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's own post. Source for the method." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine capture list for alvas.ai", "url": "http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=alvas.ai&matchType=domain&limit=6&fl=timestamp,statuscode,original&filter=statuscode:200", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the first copy of the site, 27 February 2024." }, { "title": "Google Workspace Admin Help: Email sender guidelines", "url": "https://support.google.com/a/answer/81126?hl=en", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on requirements for all senders and for senders of 5,000 or more messages a day. The rule-maker's own page." }, { "title": "Yahoo Sender Hub: Sender best practices and requirements", "url": "https://senders.yahooinc.com/best-practices/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on sender requirements. The rule-maker's own page." }, { "title": "Wikipedia: Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive 2002", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_and_Electronic_Communications_Directive_2002", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on unsolicited email. The official text on EUR-Lex could not be downloaded." }, { "title": "Alvas.ai integrations page, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://www.alvas.ai/product/integrations", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the list of email and CRM platforms." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export of failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/sheets-resume/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/sheets-resume.md", "slug": "sheets-resume", "name": "Sheets Resume", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI resume builder and reviewer", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-16", "launchLabel": "August 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$26K to US$30K a month, March 2025", "sticker": "$336K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 336000, "months": 7, "teamLabel": "3 partners: the founder, co-founder Nate and one more; no employees", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "documents-data", "channel": "communities", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Careers" ], "product": "A website that writes a resume in one recruiter-tested format from an old resume, a LinkedIn profile or answers to questions, with a cover letter writer, mock interviews, a LinkedIn profile rewriter and a job search. Members pay US$99 once or US$39 a month, and only after they finish a resume.", "why": "The founder had answered resume questions on Reddit for six years, and his free template had millions of users, so the AI tool launched to people who already trusted his format. It replaced a US$400 one-to-one review with a US$99 product that costs little to run.", "summary": [ "Sheets Resume is an AI resume builder, a website where a large language model, a program trained on large amounts of text that writes new text on request, turns a job seeker's old resume, LinkedIn profile or answers into a new resume. The model follows one plain format and a set of rules from two former recruiters: Colin McIntosh, whose free resume template has more than 4 million downloads, and his old colleague Nate, now a software engineer. A member pays US$99 once, or US$39 a month, for unlimited resumes, cover letters, mock interviews and job search, and pays only after finishing a resume.", "McIntosh wrote a resume guide on Reddit in 2018 that in January 2025 was the first Google result for resume advice on Reddit, and he answered questions under it for years. In 2023 he and Nate sold one-to-one reviews for US$400. In 2024 they wrote their rules into an AI tool, gave it away for a week, then launched it in August: US$128 in sales on the first day, US$500 on the second. In a Starter Story video of 22 January 2025 he said it made more than US$20,000 a month at about 90% net margin, the share of revenue left after all costs. On 21 March 2025 a written Starter Story interview gave US$26,000 a month, and he wrote \"$30,000+ per month\". That is a run rate, monthly revenue times 12, of about US$312,000 to US$360,000 a year. Three partners own it, with no employees and no investors.", "Every revenue number on this page is a founder statement, grade C, and the last one is from March 2025. No payment processor or buyer has confirmed them. The page also shows four earlier companies that tried to serve job seekers or recruiters and failed, and the risks this one faces from general chatbots, from the large resume builders and from employers who now receive many more AI-written applications." ], "factsCaption": "A part-time product of three partners that reported more than US$20,000 a month in January 2025 and US$26,000 to more than US$30,000 a month in March 2025, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a statement by the founder or the company, in interviews or on its own pages, or by a third party that says where its data comes from. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a Reddit post in 2018 to a resume app with a run rate of about US$336,000 a year, seven months after launch. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Sheets Resume prices in October 2026, from the company's membership page (grade C)", "note": "Lifetime access is a one-time payment; the monthly plan can be cancelled at any time. Both give all tools. The user pays only after finishing a resume, and refunds are same-day. In early 2025 the prices were US$99 for lifetime access and US$29 for one week, with no monthly plan. In July 2025 the founder described a one-day membership for US$3 shown to visitors from dozens of countries; it is not on the page. Connecting the builder to Claude or ChatGPT is free; exporting files needs a paid plan.", "rows": [ [ "Lifetime access", "99 one-time", "", "all tools, unlimited use" ], [ "Monthly", "", "39", "all tools, cancel anytime" ], [ "Free tools", "0", "0", "basic builder, resume template, cover letter generator" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue per month, March 2025", "value": "US$26,000 in the profile; more than US$30,000 in the founder's text", "grade": "C", "note": "Starter Story interview of 21 March 2025. The profile box gives US$26,000 a month; the founder writes that paid memberships \"are now generating $30,000+ per month\". The page title still says US$20,000.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the March 2025 figures", "value": "about US$312,000 to US$360,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$26,000 and US$30,000 times 12. The headline figure on this page is the midpoint, US$336,000.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month, January 2025", "value": "more than US$20,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Starter Story video of 22 January 2025, its title and description. A separate interview from the written one of March 2025.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Yearly revenue, January 2025", "value": "US$250,000", "grade": "C", "note": "A newsletter of 31 January 2025, nine days after the video and with the same points. It also says the app reached US$20,000 a month within two months of launch.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from January to March 2025", "value": "30% to 50%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$26,000 and US$30,000 against US$20,000. The figures come from two different Starter Story interviews about two months apart.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "First sales, August 2024", "value": "US$128 on the first day, US$500 on the second", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder, March 2025. The tool had been free for its first week. The newsletter gives US$1,000 a day within the first week.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Margin", "value": "about 90% net", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in the January 2025 video: \"close to 100% margin product\", \"around 90% net margins\". The newsletter repeats 90%.", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Prices in early 2025", "value": "US$99 lifetime or US$29 for one week", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in the video and the interview. He said he did not want monthly subscriptions because he finds them \"predatory\" for a job search.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Prices in October 2026", "value": "US$99 one-time or US$39 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Membership page. The one-week pass is no longer listed.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Price by country, July 2025", "value": "a one-day membership for US$3", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder: shown to visitors from dozens of countries after a cost-of-living study, and tested on 20% of visitors first. Revenue per visitor from those countries \"more than doubled\". No amounts are given.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Downloads of the free resume template", "value": "more than 4 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder, March 2025. The template carries a line that offers the AI builder.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Price of a one-to-one resume review before the AI tool", "value": "US$400 on the home page, US$500 on the about page", "grade": "C", "note": "The pages do not say which price came first. The founder says one review took him three hours.", "src": [ 6, 8, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "3 partners, no employees", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in the video: \"I split this three ways with these two other guys\", and he spends at most 5 to 10 hours a week. The site names Colin and Nate; in March 2025 Nate was also a software engineer at Eventbrite. Starter Story's profile box lists 1 founder and 0 employees.", "src": [ 3, 1, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "\"The business is totally bootstrapped.\"", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Operating company", "value": "Colin McIntosh LLC, doing business as SheetsResume.com", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms and conditions; Colorado law applies. Starter Story places the business in Denver.", "src": [ 9, 1 ] }, { "fact": "AI models", "value": "OpenAI and Google Gemini", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's tech stack in March 2025; the energy page bases its estimate on data from OpenAI and Gemini. No source names the model versions.", "src": [ 1, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the March 2025 figure", "value": "7 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: August 2024 to March 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2018", "what": "Colin McIntosh, a former recruiter, writes a long resume guide on Reddit on a Saturday morning. It becomes the top Google result for resume advice on Reddit, and over the years he answers tens of thousands of questions.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 3, 8 ] }, { "when": "2023", "what": "He and Nate, his former recruiting colleague, sell one-to-one resume reviews on nights and weekends for US$400. They cannot serve everyone who asks.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "when": "2024", "what": "Nate suggests automating the reviews. They spend about four months of nights and weekends writing their rules into an AI tool.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "August 2024", "what": "After a free first week, launch. A line in the free template points to it. Sales: US$128 on the first day, US$500 on the second.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "22 January 2025", "what": "A Starter Story video says the app makes more than US$20,000 a month at about 90% net margin, with the founder working 5 to 10 hours a week.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "when": "31 January 2025", "what": "A newsletter puts revenue at US$250,000 a year and says the app reached US$20,000 a month within two months of launch. An affiliate agency has started to promote it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "21 March 2025", "what": "Starter Story interview: US$26,000 a month in the profile box, \"$30,000+ per month\" in the text. A job board for employers has just launched.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "26 July 2025", "what": "The founder writes that a one-day US$3 membership for visitors from dozens of countries raised revenue and profit, after an A/B test on 20% of visitors.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "2026", "what": "The company's press page lists Forbes Advisor's 2026 ranking of the best resume builders, with Sheets Resume fourth of ten.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "Running: US$99 once or US$39 a month, and a free connector that brings the builder into Claude and ChatGPT.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 10 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A Reddit post that ranks in Google", "text": "In 2018 the founder wrote a long resume guide on Reddit and kept answering questions under it. Google ranks Reddit high for advice searches, so the post still brings visitors, and his free template has more than 4 million downloads. When the AI tool launched, the template itself carried the offer. He describes this as using Reddit's search ranking instead of building his own." }, { "title": "Write the expert's rules into the AI", "text": "The two partners first did reviews by hand for US$400, about three hours each. The AI tool applies the same rules from their recruiting years, so in the founder's words he can now do \"1,000 resume reviews a day\". The model cost is small, and the founder puts net margin near 90%." }, { "title": "Charge once, after the result", "text": "The user builds a full resume first and pays only if satisfied: US$99 for lifetime access, and at first also US$29 for a week. A job search is a one-time event, so a one-time price matches it. Refunds are same-day, and anyone short of money can ask by email for a free temporary membership." }, { "title": "Price by country", "text": "A cost-of-living study showed that visitors outside the United States and Western Europe almost never paid. A one-day US$3 membership for visitors from dozens of countries was tested on 20% of traffic and then shown to all. The founder says revenue per visitor from those countries more than doubled." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's interviews and the company's own pages. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Models from OpenAI and Google Gemini, PHP with the Laravel framework, a REST API and Amazon Web Services. Stripe takes the payments.", "The founder is not a programmer. Nate and a third partner build it; he writes the feature notes and the product plan, in 5 to 10 hours a week.", "About four months of nights and weekends in 2024 from the first rules to a working interface.", "Free for the first week to test demand, then paid. The charge comes only after a finished resume.", "A connector built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard for connecting AI assistants to outside services, lets Claude and ChatGPT users edit their Sheets Resume resumes inside the assistant. The AI writing then runs on the user's own assistant plan, and only exporting files needs a paid membership.", "0.5% of each membership fee goes to carbon removal through Stripe Climate." ], "src": [ 1, 3, 4, 10, 11 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised job seekers a better resume or a better job search, or sold AI that reads resumes. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Jobspice", "years": "2009 to 2012", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Good-looking resumes for job seekers who cannot design.", "died": "One narrow product. LinkedIn and free tools did the same job for nothing.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1635-jobspice" }, { "name": "Jobr", "years": "2014 to 2019", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Swipe through jobs on a phone, like a dating app.", "died": "LinkedIn and Indeed had more jobs and more job seekers. The swiping did not keep users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/261-jobr" }, { "name": "Ansaro", "years": "2017 to 2022", "funding": "US$15M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "AI for recruiters, from reading resumes to scheduling interviews, without bias.", "died": "Employers saw it as optional and trusted human judgment more than an algorithm.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1853-ansaro" }, { "name": "Monster Worldwide", "years": "1994 to 2025", "funding": "US$500M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "The first large online job board.", "died": "LinkedIn's network and Indeed's search traffic took the job seekers.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2400-monster-worldwide" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the four sold to people looking for a job or for a candidate. Three lost to larger platforms that already had the job seekers: LinkedIn, Indeed and free tools. Ansaro sold AI on the employer side and found that recruiters did not want it enough to pay.", "Sheets Resume differs in cost, not in promise. It paid nothing to reach job seekers, because a 2018 Reddit post and a free template already reached millions. The AI applies two recruiters' rules at a model cost so low that the founder reports about 90% margin, so three part-time partners can run it without employees or investors. It sells to the job seeker once, at the moment of need. The old risk remains: LinkedIn, Indeed, the large builders and the general chatbots can write a resume too." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The structure, yes. The audience, not quickly.", "text": "The method can be copied: sell an expert service by hand, write its rules into an AI tool, and charge once after the customer sees the result. The audience cannot be copied quickly. It took six years of free answers on Reddit and a template with millions of downloads before the AI tool launched to a ready market.", "steps": [ "Do the expert work by hand for money first, to learn the rules and the demand. They charged US$400 a review.", "Write those rules into the prompts and checks of the AI tool, so its output follows one tested format.", "Give it away for a week, then charge once, after the user sees a finished result.", "Put the offer inside free material that already ranks in search.", "Test prices by country on part of the traffic before showing them to everyone." ], "open": "Other one-time events where a professional's checklist decides the result: rental applications, visa document packs, grant applications for small nonprofits, and insurance claim letters." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Founder figures, one publisher, nothing after March 2025", "text": "Every revenue figure is a founder statement: two Starter Story interviews, a video and a written one, and a newsletter that repeats the video's points nine days later. The podcast summary quotes the video. The March 2025 page shows US$20,000 in its title, US$26,000 in its profile box and \"$30,000+\" in its text. The newsletter dates the launch to August 2023, but the founder's own account says August 2024. No source gives a figure after March 2025." }, { "title": "General chatbots write resumes too", "text": "Greenhouse, a hiring software platform, reports that 65% of candidates use AI at some point in the application process, including for resumes and cover letters (reported by Black Enterprise on 4 September 2026). A user of ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini can get a resume without a resume site. Sheets Resume's answer is to work inside those assistants: its connector for Claude and ChatGPT is free, and only exporting files needs a paid plan." }, { "title": "The large builders have AI as well", "text": "Kickresume's page, read on 16 October 2026, says its AI Resume Writer uses a fine-tuned GPT-4.1 model, and it counts more than 12 million resumes created. Aiolum's aiCarousels story covers a solo founder whose other product, ResumeMaker.Online, sells in the same field. The company's press page reports fourth place in Forbes Advisor's 2026 list of ten resume builders; that list was not opened for this page." }, { "title": "Employers receive more AI-written applications", "text": "Greenhouse counts an average of 244 applications per job opening in 2025, against 116 in 2022, across more than 640 million applications at more than 6,000 companies. In a study of 25 recruiters in the United States, 92% said their applicant tracking system, the software that collects and ranks applications, did not reject resumes automatically for content, formatting or design. In a 2025 survey of 1,013 HR professionals by Jobseeker, itself a resume builder, 81.6% had seen AI-written cover letters and only 11.6% treat AI-assisted applications the same as others. A polished resume is now common, and unedited AI text is judged more strictly." }, { "title": "Model prices can rise", "text": "The founder said in January 2025 that OpenAI credits are \"dirt cheap\" now and \"I don't think it'll be like that forever\". The product runs on OpenAI and Gemini models, so the 90% margin depends on their prices and terms, which Sheets Resume does not control." }, { "title": "One post and two platforms bring the traffic", "text": "The main channel is a 2018 Reddit post that ranks in Google. A change in Reddit's rules or in Google's ranking would cut it. The about page says the site exists partly \"in case Reddit ever shuts down or my post goes kaput\"." }, { "title": "Pricing has changed", "text": "In January 2025 the founder said he did not want monthly subscriptions because he finds them \"predatory\" for a one-time job search. In October 2026 the pricing page offers US$39 a month, cancel anytime, beside the US$99 lifetime price, and the one-week pass is gone." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://sheetsresume.com" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Starter Story, 21 March 2025: We Built A $20K/Month AI Resume App", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/sheets-resume", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder-written interview, not a page marked \"Estimated from public sources\". Source for the March 2025 revenue, the launch account, the tech stack, the team and the funding." }, { "title": "Starter Story on YouTube, 22 January 2025: How I Built It: $20K/Month AI App as a Non-Technical Founder", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yue9in5oh64", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the video page: title, publication date, length of 15 minutes and description, which says \"over $20,000/month\". The video itself was not watched; its quotations on this page come from source 3." }, { "title": "Better Launch playbook of the same episode: How I Built It: $20K/Month AI App as a Non-Technical Founder", "url": "https://www.betterlaunch.co/playbooks/episodes/colin-sheetsresume", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Quotes the founder from the video on prices, margin, the three-way split, hours per week, Reddit and Google, and OpenAI costs." }, { "title": "Money Making Story newsletter, 31 January 2025: AI Side Hustle to $250K", "url": "https://www.moneymakingstory.com/p/ai-side-hustle-to-250k-colin-s-ai-powered-blueprint", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Published nine days after the video, with the same points. Source for US$250,000 a year, US$20,000 a month within two months, 90% margin and the affiliate agency. It dates the launch to August 2023 and writes the domain as SheetsRes.com; both look like errors." }, { "title": "TechBullion, 26 July 2025: Surprising Decisions That Fueled Revenue Growth: 21 Leaders Reveal All", "url": "https://techbullion.com/surprising-decisions-that-fueled-revenue-growth-21-leaders-reveal-all/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section by Colin McIntosh. A founder statement on the one-day US$3 membership and its A/B test." }, { "title": "Sheets Resume home page, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://sheetsresume.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names Nate and Colin, the US$400 review and the rule that payment comes after a finished resume." }, { "title": "Sheets Resume membership page, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://sheetsresume.com/membership", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the current prices." }, { "title": "Sheets Resume about page: The Sheets Resume Story", "url": "https://sheetsresume.com/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founders' history, the US$500 review price and the reason for the site." }, { "title": "Sheets Resume terms and conditions", "url": "https://sheetsresume.com/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the operator, data rights and governing law." }, { "title": "Sheets Resume: Use Sheets Resume in Claude and ChatGPT", "url": "https://sheetsresume.com/connect-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the MCP connector and what it costs." }, { "title": "Sheets Resume: Energy Consumption and Offset", "url": "https://sheetsresume.com/energy-consumption", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names OpenAI and Gemini as the basis of its estimate, and the 0.5% Stripe Climate pledge." }, { "title": "Sheets Resume tools page", "url": "https://sheetsresume.com/tools", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Lists the resume analyzer, anonymizer, LinkedIn updater and job search." }, { "title": "Sheets Resume press page", "url": "https://sheetsresume.com/press", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's own list of its coverage, including the Forbes Advisor ranking; the rankings themselves were not opened." }, { "title": "Black Enterprise, 4 September 2026: Your AI-Generated Resume Could Be Hurting Your Job Search", "url": "https://www.blackenterprise.com/ai-generated-resumes-hurt-job-search/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A summary of an Inc.com report; inc.com was not opened because its robots rules exclude ClaudeBot. Source for the Greenhouse application data and the study of 25 recruiters." }, { "title": "Jobseeker, last updated 20 October 2025: 2026 Hiring Trends: What 1000+ HR Professionals Really Want in a Candidate", "url": "https://www.jobseeker.com/en/resume/articles/2025-hr-trends-hiring-statistics", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on AI-written letters and the research background. A 2025 survey of 1,013 HR professionals in 59 countries by a company that sells a resume builder." }, { "title": "Kickresume: AI Resume Writer, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://kickresume.com/en/ai-resume-writer", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A competitor's own page, source for its GPT-4.1 claim and its resume count." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/makelanding/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/makelanding.md", "slug": "makelanding", "name": "MakeLanding", "country": "France", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI landing page generator", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-16", "launchLabel": "May 2023", "outcomeLabel": "Sold for US$35K, November 2023", "sticker": "Sold for $35K", "outcomeUsd": 35000, "months": 6, "teamLabel": "1 founder; a friend co-built the first version in April and May 2023", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "build-software", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "sold", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2B", "Website builders" ], "product": "A web app that writes and designs a one-page website from a short description. The user typed a few words about a business; the AI wrote the headline and the text, made a logo and illustrations, and filled a page template in about a minute. The page could be shared with a link or downloaded as HTML and CSS code.", "why": "It launched in May 2023, when interest in AI tools was at its highest and before Framer, Wix and Webflow had their own AI page generators. It charged from the first day and made about US$8,000 in its first month. Six months after the launch, when sales had stopped growing and the founder no longer cared about the market, he sold it on a marketplace for 2.5 times its trailing-twelve-month figure.", "summary": [ "MakeLanding, first called LandingAI, was an AI generator of landing pages. A landing page is a single web page that presents one product and asks the visitor to do one thing, such as buy, download or sign up. The user wrote a few words about a project; the AI wrote the headline and the text, made a logo and illustrations, and filled a page template in about a minute. The page could be shared with a link or downloaded as code. Before the sale it was sold per site, not by subscription: in September 2023, US$29 for one site, or US$39 with unlimited revisions and an editor.", "Marc Lou, a developer from France who builds many small products alone and publishes his numbers, started it in April 2023 with a friend, after testing GPT, OpenAI's family of large language models, programs that write text from an instruction. It launched in May as LandingAI and made about US$8,000. The two friends then went separate ways. In June he renamed it MakeLanding, because LandingAI is the name of a large company, and replaced 90% of the code. In July he tried a monthly subscription and got US$20 of MRR, monthly recurring revenue, the subscription income that repeats every month, from 15,000 visitors. He went back to one-time prices and made about US$7,000 in the next three months. In October he bought his friend's shares and listed the business on Acquire.com, a marketplace for buying and selling small online businesses, asking US$38,000 for US$14,000 TTM, trailing twelve months, the figure for the last twelve months. The first buyer paid only part of the price and stopped answering. A second buyer came within 24 hours, and the money arrived in November 2023: US$35,000, 2.5 times the TTM figure. In the same months he launched ShipFast, a Next.js boilerplate, a ready-made starter codebase for new web apps, which made US$40,000 in its first month and became his main business.", "The money figures are the founder's own statements, grade C: his newsletter, his website, and a post he wrote on Reddit, read here in a full copy on a business forum because Reddit's robots.txt does not allow the original to be fetched. No buyer is named and no payment record is public. Archived copies of the site from June to December 2023 confirm the product, its one-time prices and its counter of pages made. A third-party list, Gaps, reports US$3,000 a month of recurring revenue at the sale; that figure does not match the founder's account and is not used for the headline. The page also shows earlier companies that tried to automate the building of websites and failed." ], "factsCaption": "An AI landing page generator that made about US$8,000 in its launch month and sold for US$35,000 six months after launch, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a statement by the founder in his newsletter, on his website or in his Reddit post, a value on the company's own pages, or a third-party report that names no source. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a test of GPT in April 2023 to a marketplace sale in November 2023, in about six months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "MakeLanding prices in October 2026 under the buyer, read from makelanding.ai, with the founder's prices before the sale from Wayback Machine copies of June and September 2023 (grade C)", "note": "Today the buyer sells three monthly plans that can be cancelled at any time, and the page shows no yearly billing, so the yearly column is empty for them. The Premium plan adds access to an API, a programming interface that lets other software create pages. Before the sale the founder sold one-time payments per site. In June 2023 the page showed US$99 crossed out and US$49 per landing page, with a free preview and a full refund offer. The archived copies from July to December 2023 show two one-time prices, and by September the page said that there were no free previews and no refunds, because 'Generative AI costs money to run'. The founder says that he tried a monthly subscription in July 2023; no archived copy shows its prices.", "rows": [ [ "Starter, buyer, 2026", "", "9", "10 pages per month" ], [ "Pro, buyer, 2026", "", "19", "50 pages per month, analytics, custom domain" ], [ "Premium, buyer, 2026", "", "29", "150 pages per month, API access" ], [ "1 website, founder, September 2023", "29 one-time", "", "1 logo, 1 to 3 illustrations, 1 text" ], [ "1 website + unlimited revisions, founder, September 2023", "39 one-time", "", "editor, analytics, code download, commercial rights" ], [ "Per landing page, founder, June 2023", "49 one-time", "", "next to US$99 crossed out; free preview, refund offered" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Sale price, November 2023", "value": "US$35,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's newsletter of 25 November 2023 and his Reddit post, copied on 29 November 2023, which says the money arrived earlier that month. His website lists it as 'Sold for $35K'. The buyer is not named.", "src": [ 1, 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price on Acquire.com, October 2023", "value": "US$38,000 for US$14,000 TTM", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's Reddit post. He called the price '3x profit' and does not say whether the US$14,000 is revenue or profit.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Sale price as a multiple of the TTM figure", "value": "2.5 times (the asking price was 2.7 times)", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$35,000 / US$14,000 = 2.5, and US$38,000 / US$14,000 = 2.71.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the launch month, May 2023", "value": "about US$8,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's Reddit post, for the first version, LandingAI, built with a friend.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by early September 2023", "value": "US$12,000 'in a few months'", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's newsletter of 2 September 2023, with 'Low conversion, angry customers, high refund rate'.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Subscription test, July 2023", "value": "US$20 MRR from 15,000 visitors", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's Reddit post. With the new price, users began to compare the app with Framer and Webflow. Gaps writes instead that 6,000 users of an early free option brought US$20 a month.", "src": [ 2, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue after the return to one-time prices", "value": "about US$7,000 in three months", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's Reddit post, for August to October 2023.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Average revenue a month in those three months", "value": "about US$2,333", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$7,000 / 3.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Share of the founder's income, July 2023", "value": "60% of about US$3,000 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's newsletter of 23 December 2023, about all his products together.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "MakeLanding's part of that income", "value": "about US$1,800 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 60% of US$3,000.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Gaps' figure at the sale", "value": "US$3,000 in monthly recurring revenue", "grade": "C", "note": "A third-party list, first published on 22 January 2024 and updated on 17 October 2025, that names no source. It does not match the founder's account, in which the subscription failed and sales were one-time. Its tiers of 'US$9-29 per month' match the buyer's later page.", "src": [ 8, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Prices before the sale", "value": "US$49 per page in June 2023; US$29 or US$39 one-time from July to December 2023", "grade": "C", "note": "Wayback Machine copies of the home page of 1 June, 4 July, 12 August, 27 September and 10 December 2023. The December copy is after the sale.", "src": [ 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Pages made, by the site's own counter", "value": "1,359 (1 June 2023), 3,576 (4 July), 3,948 (27 September), 4,268 (10 December 2023), 8,363 (October 2026)", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's counter on its home page, not checked by anyone else.", "src": [ 9, 10, 12, 13, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Pages made a month, from the counter", "value": "about 2,045 in June 2023, then 104 to 168", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2,217 pages in the 33 days to 4 July 2023, 215 in 39 days to 12 August, 157 in 46 days to 27 September, 320 in 74 days to 10 December, and about 120 a month from December 2023 to October 2026.", "src": [ 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 friends for the first version, then 1 founder from June 2023", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's Reddit post. After the May launch the friends 'had different visions'. He bought his friend's shares in October 2023, before the sale.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's newsletter: 'We won't raise money and hire a team of growth hackers.' His website says that he has built 38 startups solo. No source names an investor in this product.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's audience on X, November 2023", "value": "50,000 followers", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's newsletter of 25 November 2023, when the newsletter had 5,000 readers.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Listing fee on Acquire.com", "value": "4%", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's guide to selling a small startup, 21 October 2023, given as an example of a platform fee.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to sale", "value": "6 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: May 2023 to November 2023.", "src": [ 2 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "March 2023", "what": "Lou sells GameWidget, a product that made US$80 a month, for US$4,300. It is his first sale of a product.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "April 2023", "what": "During what he calls 'AI FOMO', the fear of missing out on AI, he tests GPT and starts an AI landing page generator with a friend. He decides that every project must have a buy button.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 4 ] }, { "when": "May 2023", "what": "LandingAI launches as a first minimal version and makes about US$8,000. The two friends split over the direction. The first archived capture of makelanding.ai is from 29 May.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 15 ] }, { "when": "1 June 2023", "what": "The home page sells a landing page for US$49, next to US$99 crossed out, with a free preview and a refund offer. Counter: 1,359 sites.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "June 2023", "what": "Renamed MakeLanding, because LandingAI is the name of a large company. He removes 90% of the code and builds a full website builder with AI.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "July 2023", "what": "A monthly subscription replaces the one-time price and brings US$20 MRR from 15,000 visitors. MakeLanding is 60% of his income of about US$3,000 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 5 ] }, { "when": "August 2023", "what": "Back to one-time prices; sales return, about US$7,000 in three months. After two weeks in Korea he decides to build products that he would use himself.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 4, 5 ] }, { "when": "1 September 2023", "what": "He launches ShipFast, a Next.js boilerplate. It makes US$40,000 in its first month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "27 September 2023", "what": "The page has two one-time prices, US$29 and US$39, no free previews and no refunds. Counter: 3,948 sites.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "October 2023", "what": "On a friend's advice he decides to sell, buys his co-founder's shares and lists MakeLanding on Acquire.com at US$38,000. Dozens of buyers sign NDAs, non-disclosure agreements, within hours. The first buyer pays only part of the price and stops answering, so he cancels the deal.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "November 2023", "what": "A second buyer, found within 24 hours, pays US$35,000 within weeks. They never speak on a call, only exchange a few messages. On 25 November Lou announces it as his third sale of the year.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "10 December 2023", "what": "After the sale the site still sells the same one-time prices. Counter: 4,268 sites.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "October 2025", "what": "A list by Gaps, updated on 17 October 2025, gives MakeLanding US$3,000 in monthly recurring revenue and monthly tiers of US$9 to US$29.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "Under the buyer the site sells monthly plans at US$9, US$19 and US$29, with an API in the top plan, and counts 8,363 pages. Lou's website lists MakeLanding as sold for US$35,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14, 3 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Timing", "text": "He built it in April 2023, when interest in AI tools was at its highest, and launched in May. Framer AI launched in June and Wix announced its AI Site Generator in July. The first month brought about US$8,000, and the site's counter shows 2,217 pages made between 1 June and 4 July, then fewer than 200 a month." }, { "title": "A price on the first version", "text": "Every generated page cost money in model fees. The June page offered a free preview; by September the page said 'We don't do free previews'. A monthly subscription in July brought US$20 a month from 15,000 visitors; one-time prices of US$29 and US$39 brought about US$7,000 in three months. The founder's advice in his newsletter is to remove free plans." }, { "title": "Sell when growth stops", "text": "He did not use the product and did not care about its market, so he listed it when sales stopped growing. On Acquire.com, buyers signed non-disclosure agreements within hours. His guide to selling gives the steps: a letter of intent, an asset purchase agreement, payment through escrow, a third party that holds the buyer's money until the assets are handed over, and then the transfer of the domain, database and accounts." }, { "title": "Many small products", "text": "MakeLanding was one of 8 products that he built in 8 months in 2023. Six made money and two paid the bills. He says that the sale gave him 'time and clarity'; by then ShipFast, launched on 1 September 2023, was his main product." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's Reddit post and from archived copies of the product's own pages, including their page source. They are grade C.", "items": [ "The first version took the user's text and had an AI fill a template with copy and AI-generated images. The founder says that he started after testing GPT; no source names the exact text model or the image model.", "In June 2023 he removed 90% of the code and made a website builder with an editor, because users wanted a very different product.", "The app is built with Next.js: the archived pages load their scripts from Next.js paths.", "Generated pages are HTML, CSS with Tailwind classes and DaisyUI components, and JavaScript. They can be shared with a link or downloaded.", "AI illustrations in 6 art styles and 12 colour themes, a library of 5 million stock photos from Unsplash, and copy in more than 50 languages.", "Plausible counts visitors, and Reflio runs an affiliate program; both scripts are in the page source of September 2023.", "Archived links to the site carry referral tags from AI directories such as Futurepedia and FutureTools and from the founder's other products. No source says which channel brought most customers.", "The sale went through Acquire.com, with non-disclosure agreements, a letter of intent and escrow." ], "src": [ 2, 9, 12, 15, 6 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised to build websites or software for people who cannot code, and two of them said that AI would do the work. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "The Grid", "years": "2014 to 2020", "funding": "US$4.7M", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Websites designed automatically by AI from the content that you give it.", "died": "The AI of the time made designs below the quality of manual work and of template builders, and users did not trust it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/618-the-grid" }, { "name": "Sosh", "years": "2012 to 2013", "funding": "US$2.3M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A drag-and-drop builder for professional websites without code.", "died": "Too complex for beginners and too limited for professionals. The database calls Webflow its successor.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/565-sosh" }, { "name": "WebCake", "years": "2013 to 2016", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Simple design and publishing of websites for small businesses.", "died": "No clear difference from Wix, Squarespace and WordPress, and no further funding.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1541-webcake" }, { "name": "Builder.ai", "years": "2016 to 2025", "funding": "US$445M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Custom software from an 'AI-powered assembly line' for founders who cannot code.", "died": "Each project needed hundreds of hours of human developers behind the AI, so the costs were higher than the prices.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2170-builderai" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The Grid promised in 2014 what MakeLanding did in 2023: a website designed by AI from a short input. It raised US$4.7 million and closed because the AI of its time made pages that looked worse than manual design and than the template builders. Sosh and WebCake built easier website builders and lost to Wix, Squarespace and WordPress. Builder.ai raised US$445 million for AI-built software and closed because people, not the AI, did most of the work.", "Two things were different in 2023. First, large language models could write usable page text and image models could draw usable illustrations, so one developer could build the product in weeks with no investment. Second, the founder did not need to win the market: he charged from the first day, took about six months of sales, and sold the business on a marketplace. The competition that ended the predecessors came back quickly: Framer AI launched in June 2023, Wix announced its AI Site Generator in July 2023, and Webflow released an AI site builder in February 2025." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. This product, no.", "text": "A general AI landing page generator was a short opening in the first half of 2023; Framer, Wix and Webflow now include the same feature. The method is still open: build a narrow AI tool in weeks, put a price on it from the first day, and sell it on a marketplace when you stop using it.", "steps": [ "Charge from the first version, because each AI generation costs you money, and do not offer a free plan.", "Test one-time and monthly prices on real visitors and keep the one that sells.", "Keep clean records of the last twelve months of revenue and costs, because buyers of small businesses price on that figure.", "List on a marketplace such as Acquire.com when you stop caring about the market, and have the buyer pay through escrow." ], "open": "Narrow AI tools for one kind of user or one platform, where a general builder such as Wix or Framer is not the obvious choice." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Founder figures only", "text": "The price, the TTM figure and the revenue are the founder's statements. The buyer is not named, and no payment record or marketplace record is public. A third-party list, Gaps, reports US$3,000 a month of recurring revenue, which does not match the founder's account of a failed subscription and about US$2,300 a month of one-time sales." }, { "title": "Website builders added the same feature", "text": "Framer AI, which starts a site from a prompt, was the first product of the day on Product Hunt on 14 June 2023. Wix announced an AI Site Generator in July 2023, with ChatGPT writing the text. Webflow released an AI site builder in beta on 27 February 2025. When MakeLanding moved to a subscription in July 2023, its users began to compare it with Framer and Webflow." }, { "title": "Small AI tools sell for low multiples", "text": "MakeLanding sold for 2.5 times its US$14,000 TTM figure. A sale advisor's summary of Acquire.com's reports says that in February 2023 SaaS businesses under US$100,000 of revenue sold at 3.4 times revenue and 5.5 times EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization), and that the January 2024 report gave an average of 4.3 times TTM profit, with a range from 0.63 to 34 times. The founder's own rule is three times annual revenue, and he notes that one-time sales cannot be projected over a year as subscriptions can." }, { "title": "Every page costs model fees", "text": "The product paid an AI provider for each generated page, so the pre-sale page offered no free previews and no refunds, because 'Generative AI costs money to run'. The founder reported a high refund rate and angry customers. A product built on another company's models has no advantage that the website builders cannot also buy, and the founder's guide to selling says that a buyer often has to open new accounts and API keys, the passwords that let a program call a provider, because cloud accounts cannot always be transferred." }, { "title": "A short history behind the TTM figure", "text": "The business was five months old when it was listed, so its trailing twelve months covered only those months, and about US$8,000 of the revenue came in the launch month of May. The site's counter grew by 2,217 pages from 1 June to 4 July 2023, and by 104 to 168 a month after that." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://makelanding.ai/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Marc Lou's newsletter Just Ship It, 25 November 2023: Ditch your free plan", "url": "https://newsletter.marclou.com/p/ditch-your-free-plan", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder's own update. Source for the sale announcement, his audience and his position on funding." }, { "title": "The Fastlane Forum, 29 November 2023: I sold my AI tool for $35,000 (Reddit Post), a copy of the founder's post on Reddit r/Entrepreneur", "url": "https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/community/threads/i-sold-my-ai-tool-for-35-000-reddit-post.111450/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A forum member's full copy of the founder's post, which starts 'Marc here'. Reddit's robots.txt disallows the original post, so it was not opened. Source for the month-by-month account, the Acquire.com listing and the sale." }, { "title": "Marc Lou's website, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://marclou.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Lists MakeLanding as acquired and 'Sold for $35K', and says that he has built 38 startups solo." }, { "title": "Marc Lou's newsletter, 2 September 2023: $6,000 of profit in 48 hours", "url": "https://newsletter.marclou.com/p/usd6000-of-profit-in-48-hours", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the April 2023 start, the US$12,000 and the refund problem." }, { "title": "Marc Lou's newsletter, 23 December 2023: My solopreneur story: $0 to $65,000/month in 2 years", "url": "https://newsletter.marclou.com/p/my-solopreneur-story-0-to-65k-month-in-2-years", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 60% share of his income in July 2023, the decision to sell and the ShipFast launch." }, { "title": "Marc Lou's newsletter, 21 October 2023: How to sell your micro startup", "url": "https://newsletter.marclou.com/p/how-to-sell-your-micro-startup", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for his first sale, his rule of three times annual revenue, the steps of a sale, the 4% fee and the accounts that cannot be transferred." }, { "title": "Marc Lou's newsletter, 8 September 2026: I've made $3M with my 36 startups", "url": "https://newsletter.marclou.com/p/i-ve-made-3m-with-my-36-startups", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder's life story and source for his background in France. It repeats the 2023 lines about MakeLanding." }, { "title": "Gaps: 39 Web Development Startup Success Stories (2025 Revenues), published 22 January 2024, updated 17 October 2025", "url": "https://gaps.com/web-development/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on MakeLanding, entry 4. A third-party summary that names no source." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of makelanding.ai, 1 June 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230601100647/https://makelanding.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the page source. Source for the June price, the refund and preview offers, the counter and the Unsplash library." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of makelanding.ai, 4 July 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230704135219/https://makelanding.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the pricing section and the counter." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of makelanding.ai, 12 August 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230812091046/https://makelanding.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the pricing section and the counter." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of makelanding.ai, 27 September 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230927003447/https://makelanding.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the page source. The last copy before the sale: features, prices, answers to common questions, and the analytics and affiliate scripts." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of makelanding.ai, 10 December 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20231210021343/https://makelanding.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the pricing section and the counter. The first copy after the sale." }, { "title": "makelanding.ai home page under the buyer, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://makelanding.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for today's prices and counter only; nothing on this page is used for the founder's period." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine capture index for makelanding.ai, 2023 to 2024", "url": "http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=makelanding.ai&from=2023&to=2024&fl=timestamp,original,statuscode&collapse=timestamp:6", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the index of all paths for 2023. Source for the first capture on 29 May 2023 and the referral tags in archived links." }, { "title": "Hunted.space: Framer AI, Product Hunt launch overview", "url": "https://www.hunted.space/product/framer/launches/framer-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A third-party record of the Product Hunt launch of 14 June 2023." }, { "title": "Mezha, 18 July 2023: Wix announced an AI-powered tool that builds a website based on prompts", "url": "https://mezha.media/en/2023/07/18/wix-announced-an-ai-powered-tool-that-builds-a-website-based-on-prompts/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A news report based on TechCrunch. Wix's own filing on sec.gov refused the download." }, { "title": "Webflow Updates: Introducing Webflow's AI Site Builder, launched 27 February 2025", "url": "https://webflow.com/updates/ai-site-builder", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's own release note." }, { "title": "Livmo: Acquire.com Biannual Acquisition Multiples Report (Feb 2023), Livmo Summary, published 13 November 2023, updated 28 August 2026", "url": "https://livmo.com/blog/acquire-com-biannual-acquisition-multiples-report-feb-2023-livmo-summary/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A sale advisor's summary of Acquire.com's February 2023 and January 2024 reports; the reports themselves were not opened." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/laper/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/laper.md", "slug": "laper", "name": "Laper", "country": "China, company registered in Hong Kong", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI screenwriting and pre-production web app", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-16", "launchLabel": "18 December 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$43.4K a month in recurring revenue, October 2026", "sticker": "$521K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 520812, "months": 10, "teamLabel": "1 founder at first, 5 people within about half a year", "fundingLabel": "None reported (listed as bootstrapped)", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "companions-publishing", "channel": "audience", "trend": "flat", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Screenwriting" ], "product": "A web editor for screenplays and novels. It keeps the industry page format automatically, turns the scene headings and character names in the script into lists of scenes, characters and locations, and adds AI help that the writer calls on: short continuations, script review, character images and storyboard frames. Several people can edit one script at the same time.", "why": "The founder had worked as a screenwriter and knew which part of the job is tool work: the page format, and keeping characters and scenes consistent across a long draft. He built the editor around that work and kept the AI in the role of a helper. He says Claude Code wrote all the code. The beta grew through invite codes that users earned by posting about it, and monthly revenue rose from US$5,136 in May 2026 to about US$46,000 in August and in September.", "summary": [ "Laper is screenwriting software, a text editor that keeps a script in the page format that film and television productions expect: scene headings, action lines, character names and dialogue each have a fixed place on the page. Laper adds AI help inside that editor. In the beta that Tencent News tested in December 2025, when the cursor rested on an empty line for 3 to 5 seconds, the AI proposed a short continuation, usually 50 to 100 Chinese characters, which the writer could accept or change. The editor also reads the script and builds lists of scenes, characters and locations, and from them a relationship map, character images and storyboard frames. A storyboard is a series of pictures, one per camera shot, that a film crew plans with. Several people can edit one script at once through a CRDT (conflict-free replicated data type), a data structure that lets copies of one document on different computers take edits separately and merge them later; Laper merges at the level of whole screenplay blocks, such as one dialogue paragraph.", "The founder, Zhao Chunxiang (赵纯想), worked for several years at Tingdong Pictures, a Chinese film studio, where he broke films down shot by shot, wrote scripts and was an actor for one year. The name Laper comes from 拉片 (la pian), the Chinese film term for that shot-by-shot study. He then built AI apps, among them an AI food diary that was popular in 2023. In a WeChat chat, a co-founder of the Chinese company Meituan asked him why he did not build an AI screenwriting product from his own experience, and he stopped his earlier project. Laper was founded on 28 September 2025, shipped a first alpha on 6 October 2025 and opened an invite-only beta on 18 December 2025. The founder says that all of the code, more than 100,000 lines, was written by Claude Code, an AI coding agent from Anthropic that writes and changes the code of a project when the developer describes the change in words.", "Laper connected its account at Stripe, the payment processor that charges its customers' cards, to TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from the processor through an API key, a password that lets one program read another program's data. On 16 October 2026 TrustMRR showed US$43,401 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the subscription revenue of one month, from 1,348 active subscriptions: grade A. Revenue was small until April 2026, rose fast from May to August, and was level in August and September at about US$46,000 a month. The founder says the team grew from one person to five, and no source reports outside funding. Since 17 August 2026 the business has been listed for sale on TrustMRR at US$1,999,999; on 16 October 2026 it was still listed." ], "factsCaption": "US$43,401 a month in recurring revenue ten months after an invite-only beta, read from Stripe by TrustMRR, for a business that is now listed for sale", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read from the company's Stripe account by TrustMRR. A grade C value is a founder statement, a press report, or a value that the seller typed into the TrustMRR profile. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a first alpha release in October 2025 to about US$46,000 of revenue a month in August 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Laper plans in October 2026, from the company's pricing page and its llms.txt file (grade C)", "note": "The pricing page shows the monthly prices; the yearly prices come from the company's llms.txt file and are 20% below twelve monthly payments. AI chats and writing cards are text requests to the assistant. Credits pay for image, video and other generation, and every plan also gets daily refresh credits. The December 2025 beta had other prices: a free tier, Senior at US$9 a month (beta only) and Master at US$50 a month, with 500 credits for US$4.99.", "rows": [ [ "Junior", "0", "0", "10 AI chats and 10 writing cards a month; 2 screenplay, 2 film and 2 novel projects" ], [ "Senior", "16", "20", "500 AI chats, 500 writing cards and 600 credits a month; assistant model Laper 16mm" ], [ "Elite", "48", "60", "2,000 AI chats, 2,000 writing cards and 2,800 credits a month; assistant model Laper IMAX" ], [ "Master", "80", "100", "unlimited AI chats and projects, 6,000 credits a month" ], [ "Legend", "320", "400", "unlimited AI chats and projects, 32,000 credits a month, dedicated support" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 16 October 2026", "value": "US$43,401", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from the Stripe account by API key; revenue last synced 16 October 2026 at 14:41 UTC. The profile shows MRR growth of -3.5% over the last 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from that MRR", "value": "about US$520,800 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 43,401 times 12 equals 520,812. This is the headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions, 16 October 2026", "value": "1,348", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, from Stripe.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average MRR per subscription", "value": "about US$32 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 43,401 divided by 1,348 equals 32.20. The paid plans cost US$20 to US$400 a month, or less per month when billed yearly.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the 30 days to 16 October 2026", "value": "US$45,917", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, from Stripe. The profile shows revenue growth of -3.3% over the last 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month, June to September 2026", "value": "US$15,857, US$27,108, US$45,999 and US$46,079", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline, from Stripe. October 2026 shows US$24,961 for the first 16 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Change from August to September 2026", "value": "+0.17%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: (46,079 - 45,999) divided by 45,999. Within 15% either way, so this page calls the trend flat. From June to August revenue grew 2.9 times.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue from December 2025 to April 2026", "value": "US$3,145 in five months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the sum of the TrustMRR monthly rows US$760, US$294, US$162, US$1,334 and US$595.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, May 2026", "value": "US$5,136", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. The first month above US$2,000.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "All-time revenue to 16 October 2026", "value": "US$168,486", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, from Stripe.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Share of all-time revenue earned in June to September 2026", "value": "80.2%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 135,043 divided by 168,486.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR reported on 3 September 2026", "value": "US$40,708 from 1,165 paid subscriptions", "grade": "C", "note": "aidevcases.com, quoting TrustMRR at that date; this page did not read TrustMRR on that date. The same article mentions an earlier, undated snapshot of US$30,200 and 898 subscriptions on aggregator sites.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from 3 September to 16 October 2026", "value": "MRR +6.6%, subscriptions +15.7%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 43,401 against 40,708, and 1,348 against 1,165.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "68.0%", "grade": "C", "note": "Shown on the TrustMRR profile, outside the metrics that TrustMRR says it reads from the payment processor. The profile does not say how it is computed.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price", "value": "US$1,999,999", "grade": "C", "note": "The seller's listing on TrustMRR, first listed on 17 August 2026. The profile shows 4 acquisition offers received; their amounts are not public.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price as a multiple of revenue", "value": "about 3.6 times a year of revenue", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 1,999,999 divided by 12 times the last-30-day revenue of US$45,917 equals 3.63, which TrustMRR shows as 3.6x. On the current MRR it is 3.84.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 founder at first, 5 people within about half a year", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder's text on TrustMRR and aidevcases.com. TrustMRR lists the team size as 2 to 5 people. No source names the other members.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR lists the business as bootstrapped. No source reports an investment.", "src": [ 1, 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Beta participants by 24 December 2025", "value": "more than 1,800", "grade": "C", "note": "Tencent News, six days after the invite-only beta opened.", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Beta prices, December 2025", "value": "free, US$9 and US$50 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Senior at US$9 a month was a beta price. Credits were US$4.99 for 500, about US$0.01 each. In October 2026 the Senior plan costs US$20 a month.", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Code written by hand", "value": "none, by the founder's account", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder says Claude Code wrote all of the more than 100,000 lines. The site footer says 100% Built by Claude Code. No one outside the company has checked it.", "src": [ 2, 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's followers on X", "value": "46,306", "grade": "C", "note": "Shown on the TrustMRR profile in October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the beta to the October 2026 figure", "value": "10 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: December 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Earlier, not dated", "what": "Zhao Chunxiang works for several years at Tingdong Pictures, a Chinese film studio: shot-by-shot film breakdowns, screenwriting, and one year as an actor.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "when": "2023", "what": "His AI food-diary app becomes popular. It used invite codes: each code entered improved the app's food recognition for the inviter and for the invited user.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "2025, before the founding", "what": "In a WeChat chat, a co-founder of Meituan asks him why he does not build an AI screenwriting product from his own experience. He stops the project he had worked on and moves to Laper.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "when": "28 September 2025", "what": "Founding date on the TrustMRR profile. The company is registered in Hong Kong.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "6 October 2025", "what": "Version 0.0.1, the first alpha release.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2025", "what": "A post on the Laper site says that its assistant runs on Claude Sonnet 4, a model from Anthropic.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "Versions 0.1.0 to 0.3.0: real-time sync through the Loro CRDT, file import, and an interface in 11 languages.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "18 December 2025", "what": "The invite-only beta opens. A user earns an invite code by forwarding a set post to WeChat Moments, keeping it visible for at least 5 minutes and uploading a screenshot. Posts about Laper on Xiaohongshu, X and TikTok that get 3 likes earn points, up to 60 days of free membership.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "when": "21 December 2025", "what": "The founder posts on X that Laper started with that WeChat chat. aidevcases.com quotes the post.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "24 December 2025", "what": "More than 1,800 people are in the beta. Plans: free, US$9 and US$50 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "December 2025 to April 2026", "what": "US$3,145 of revenue in five months.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "May to August 2026", "what": "Monthly revenue goes from US$5,136 to US$15,857, US$27,108 and US$45,999.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "17 August 2026", "what": "Listed for sale on TrustMRR with an asking price of US$1,999,999.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "3 September 2026", "what": "aidevcases.com reports US$40,708 in MRR from 1,165 paid subscriptions, and a team of five.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "US$46,079 of revenue, level with August.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "16 October 2026", "what": "US$43,401 in MRR from 1,348 subscriptions. Still listed for sale, with 4 offers received.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Niche", "text": "Laper is built for one profession. The founder broke films down shot by shot and wrote scripts at a film studio, and he designed the tool around the work that takes a writer's time without being writing: the page format, and keeping characters, locations and scenes consistent across a long draft. General writing tools and general AI chat do not handle that format, and Final Draft, the long-time standard in Hollywood, is a desktop program." }, { "title": "AI as a helper, not the author", "text": "The AI proposes a short continuation when the writer pauses, and it reads only the part of the script that the writer chooses: the cursor position, a scene, a range or the outline. Edits that the writer approves go through the normal editor. The company says it serves writers who dislike generative AI. Tencent News noted the difference from tools that generate a complete story from one prompt: in Laper the writer keeps the decisions." }, { "title": "Sharing built into sign-up", "text": "In the beta, an invite code cost a public post: forward a set post to WeChat Moments, keep it there for at least five minutes and upload a screenshot. Posts on Xiaohongshu, X and TikTok that got three likes earned points toward free months. Every new user was also a post that friends saw. More than 1,800 people joined in the first six days." }, { "title": "Claude Code wrote the code", "text": "The founder says he wrote none of the more than 100,000 lines himself. The documentation files that the site publishes carry a header line that says, in Chinese, to update the header after each change and then check CLAUDE.md, the instruction file that Claude Code reads. A former screenwriter who had built smaller apps before shipped a collaborative editor with real-time sync and AI features, then grew the team to five." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages, the TrustMRR profile (the tech stack there is typed by the seller) and the founder's account in the press. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Code: written by Claude Code, by the founder's account, more than 100,000 lines with no hand-written code. The site footer says 100% Built by Claude Code.", "Editor: Plate, an open-source rich-text editor framework for React, with typed screenplay elements. Scene headings feed the list of locations, and character cues feed the list of characters.", "Collaboration: Loro, an open-source CRDT library, with a separate lorosync service. Conflicts are resolved per screenplay block. Supabase Realtime is not used for script data.", "AI: the footer says Powered by Mastra, an open-source TypeScript framework for AI agents. A post of 13 October 2025 says the assistant runs on Claude Sonnet 4. The plans name the assistant models Laper 16mm and Laper IMAX without saying which models are behind them, and no source names the image or video models.", "Backend: an API service owns authorization, credits, task status, retries and refunds; a separate generation worker calls the models and uploads the results. The TrustMRR stack lists React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Supabase, PostgreSQL, Go, Docker and Stripe.", "Hosting and search: a comment in the robots.txt file names Cloudflare Pages as the host. The site publishes llms.txt files for AI assistants, comparison pages against Final Draft, WriterDuet, Celtx, Sudowrite, Highland and Fade In, and a script archive that the robots.txt file describes as thousands of pages built on request.", "Files: imports Final Draft .fdx scripts and exports PDF and Final Draft XML. The interface has been in 11 languages since November 2025." ], "src": [ 2, 3, 4, 6, 1, 11, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold tools for writers or for visual storytelling before AI could help with the work. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Draft", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A simple cloud editor for writers, with version control and shared editing.", "died": "Google Docs gave the same basic features for free, and a narrow writing tool with a freemium model could not compete.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1605-draft" }, { "name": "Taleship", "years": "2018 to 2020", "funding": "US$0", "cause": "No market need", "promise": "Real-time co-writing of stories: Google Docs for novelists.", "died": "Few writers wanted to write together, and the company spread its work over too many features.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1918-taleship" }, { "name": "Real Artists", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$3M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A cloud animation studio for independent artists and small studios.", "died": "Adobe and other large companies had more money and better tools, and it did not win the large clients it needed.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1073-real-artists" }, { "name": "Lightwell", "years": "2019 to 2022", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A no-code tool for designers and other creative people to build interactive stories.", "died": "Adobe and Canva covered most of the need, and the remaining niche was too small.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1369-lightwell" }, { "name": "Fuzzwich", "years": "2007 to 2010", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Short animated videos by drag and drop, for people without animation skills.", "died": "It stayed on the desktop while users moved to phones, and Adobe had far more money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1655-fuzzwich" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The five companies in this list sold tools for writers or for visual storytelling, and the database records the same end for four of them: a large company offered enough of the same thing. Draft and Taleship were general writing editors, and Google Docs gave basic shared editing for free. Real Artists, Lightwell and Fuzzwich made visual tools and lost to Adobe and Canva. Each of them also had to pay engineers to build the editor, the sync and the drawing tools before it could sell anything.", "Laper differs in three ways. It is not a general editor: it serves one profession whose format and planning work general tools do not handle, the same kind of position that Final Draft has held for about 20 years. The visual part, character images and storyboard frames, is now a request to a model provider instead of a studio's work. And the founder says that an AI agent wrote the code, so a team of five could build the editor, the real-time sync and the AI features. The same change lowers the cost for every competitor: WriterDuet had added generated images by June 2024, and the founder's own listing names a rival that raised a US$12 million seed round." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The founder's position, no. The method, yes.", "text": "Laper rests on two things that a new founder cannot copy quickly: years of work inside a film studio, and an audience of 46,306 followers on X plus an earlier app that was popular in China. The method is open to anyone with real experience in one profession: build the tool for the part of the work that follows fixed rules and takes time, keep the AI in the role of a helper, and let an AI coding agent write the code.", "steps": [ "Pick a profession that you worked in, and list the tasks that follow fixed rules and take time without being the real work.", "Build the editor around those rules first, then add AI that the user calls on for a defined part of the document.", "Make each invite code cost a public post, so that every sign-up also creates a post that friends see.", "Price the plans by AI usage, because every generation request costs money." ], "open": "The same kind of tool for other writing jobs with fixed formats: stage plays, comics, game scripts, subtitles, and legal or grant documents. Each has a format, a review process and a profession that general AI chat does not serve well." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Listed for sale", "text": "Since 17 August 2026 the business has been on TrustMRR's marketplace with an asking price of US$1,999,999, about 3.6 times a year of revenue at the last-30-day rate, and the profile shows 4 offers received by 16 October 2026. A new owner may change the product, the prices or the team." }, { "title": "A short revenue history", "text": "Most of the money came in four months: 80.2% of all-time revenue fell in June to September 2026. August and September were level at about US$46,000, and over the last 30 days revenue changed by -3.3% and MRR by -3.5%. Ten months of data do not show whether subscribers stay for a year." }, { "title": "Competitors, old and new", "text": "Final Draft, the desktop program that Hollywood writers have used for about 20 years, sells version 13 in October 2026. A Leonardo.Ai case study of June 2024 describes how WriterDuet added generated character headshots, environments and video trailers through Leonardo.Ai's API. Laper's own comparison pages list Celtx, Sudowrite, Highland and Fade In as alternatives, and the founder's listing names preiview.io, which he says raised a US$12 million seed round. Large companies can add AI features fast, so Laper's advantage has to come from the format and planning work." }, { "title": "Union rules on AI", "text": "The Writers Guild of America's summary of its 2023 Minimum Basic Agreement (MBA), the contract between the guild and the studios, says that AI cannot write or rewrite literary material, and that AI output is not source material that could reduce a writer's credit. A writer may use AI if the company consents and the writer follows its policies, but the company cannot require it, and it must tell the writer when material it hands over was made with AI. So a guild writer on a covered project can use Laper's AI only with the studio's consent. The guild also reserves the right to argue that training AI on writers' material is prohibited. This page did not check whether a newer agreement changed these rules." }, { "title": "Dependence on model providers", "text": "The assistant runs on a rented model, Claude Sonnet 4 according to the company's post of October 2025, and the code itself was written by Claude Code. Image and video generation runs through a generation worker that calls the models, and no source names those models. A price rise, a model change or an outage at a provider would change both the product and the 68.0% profit margin that the profile shows." }, { "title": "Numbers and people that do not agree", "text": "The founder's TrustMRR text says Laper grew from a solo founder, while Tencent News in December 2025 says he built it with his team and quotes a business partner. No source names the other team members. The company is registered in Hong Kong, and aidevcases.com notes that the founder's activity looks centered in mainland China. The profile's traffic figure, 19 visitors in 30 days, is far too low for 1,348 subscribers and is not used here." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://laper.ai/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/laper" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of Laper, revenue read from Stripe by API key", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/laper.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile on 16 October 2026 (revenue last synced 16 October 2026 at 14:41 UTC). MRR, subscriptions, revenue and the monthly timeline come from the Stripe account. The founding date, team size, funding status, tech stack, channels, description, follower count, profit margin and sale listing are written or entered by the seller, or not covered by the verification note, and are grade C." }, { "title": "AI Dev Cases, 3 September 2026: \"I Didn't Write a Single Line of Code\": A Former Screenwriter Built a 100,000-Line AI Screenwriting Tool With Claude Code Alone, Hitting $40K+ MRR in 8 Months", "url": "https://aidevcases.com/en/cases/laper", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. An editorial case study that quotes TrustMRR and the founder's X post of 21 December 2025. Source for the background, the beta mechanics, the team growth and the September 2026 snapshot." }, { "title": "Tencent News, 24 December 2025, Yangfan Chuhai account, author 子墨: a screenwriter turned app developer goes all in on an AI screenwriting tool after one remark by a Meituan co-founder (title translated from Chinese and shortened)", "url": "https://news.qq.com/rain/a/20251224A0410K00", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, in Chinese. Launch coverage six days after the beta opened. Source for the founder's background, the origin of the idea, the Claude Code claim, the invite mechanics, the beta prices and the 1,800 beta users." }, { "title": "Laper pricing page and llms.txt file, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://laper.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Monthly prices and plan limits from the pricing page; yearly prices from https://laper.ai/llms.txt, which also gives the architecture notes. The footer says 100% Built by Claude Code and Powered by Loro CRDT / Mastra." }, { "title": "Laper home page, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://laper.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product description and the purpose check." }, { "title": "Laper llms-full.txt, the company's generated reference for AI assistants", "url": "https://laper.ai/llms-full.txt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on architecture, Final Draft import, the comparison pages and the post of 13 October 2025 that names Claude Sonnet 4 as the assistant model." }, { "title": "Laper changelog", "url": "https://laper.ai/changelog/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Release dates from 0.0.1 on 6 October 2025 to 0.4.1 on 9 January 2026; no later entries." }, { "title": "Leonardo.Ai case study, 14 June 2024: WriterDuet Brings Screenplays to Life with Leonardo.Ai", "url": "https://www.leonardo.ai/news/writerduet-brings-screenplays-to-life-with-leonardo-ai", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. A supplier's account. Source for WriterDuet's generated images and trailers." }, { "title": "Final Draft home page, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://www.finaldraft.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Shows Final Draft 13 as the version on sale. Its prices load by script and were not read." }, { "title": "Writers Guild of America: Summary of the 2023 WGA MBA", "url": "https://www.wgacontract2023.org/the-campaign/summary-of-the-2023-wga-mba", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the section on artificial intelligence. The guild's own summary of its 2023 agreement with the studios." }, { "title": "Laper robots.txt, updated 26 June 2026", "url": "https://laper.ai/robots.txt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Its comments name Cloudflare Pages as the host and describe the script archive." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export of failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/letterly/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/letterly.md", "slug": "letterly", "name": "Letterly", "country": "Spain", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Voice notes and dictation app", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-16", "launchLabel": "November 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$215K a month, April 2026", "sticker": "$2.6M/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 2580000, "months": 29, "teamLabel": "Founder and CEO with a team of 10 people at the April 2026 figure", "fundingLabel": "None reported; run by the founder as a self-employed person registered in Spain", "primaryFactor": "Simplicity", "group": "voice-audio", "channel": "paid-ads", "trend": "flat", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Productivity" ], "product": "An app for iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows and the web that records speech and returns finished text: a clean note, an email, a list, a social post or a meeting summary split by speaker. A phone keyboard and a desktop dictation tool let users speak into any other app. It handles more than 90 languages and recordings of up to 90 minutes.", "why": "The first apps that combined OpenAI's Whisper and ChatGPT for voice notes appeared in 2023, and the founder found them \"not implemented well enough\". His team built a simpler one, collected early users and feature requests through lifetime deals on AppSumo in 2024, and in 2025 grew with advertising and paywall tests measured in Adapty's subscription data.", "summary": [ "Letterly is a voice notes app for iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows and the web. The user speaks; a speech recognition model, software that turns recorded speech into written words, makes a transcript; and a large language model, an AI model trained on very large amounts of text that can rewrite text on request, turns the transcript into the text the user chose: a clean note, an email, a list, a post or a meeting summary split by speaker. A keyboard on the phone and a dictation tool on the computer let users speak into any other app. Its data processing agreement, the contract that lists the outside companies that handle user data, names Microsoft Azure and ElevenLabs for transcription and Google's Gemini for text processing (24 March 2026), and its privacy policy names OpenAI as an AI provider.", "Anton Lebedev, its founder and CEO, had launched five startups in 15 years, and none succeeded, Adapty writes. In 2023 he and his team saw apps that sent audio to OpenAI's Whisper and the transcript to ChatGPT, found them badly made, and dropped their own project to build a simpler one. AppSumo, a marketplace that sells software deals, gives 1 September 2023 as the founding date, and the iPhone app was in the App Store by 23 November 2023. Lifetime deals on AppSumo brought early users from August 2024. From April to August 2025 the app's monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the money that active subscriptions bring in each month) rose 345%, and revenue for June to August 2025 was US$600,000, ten times the US$60,000 of March to May. The version of Adapty's case study last changed on 1 April 2026 says that Letterly makes US$215,000 a month with a team of 10 people, about US$2.58 million a year.", "This page grades the US$215,000 a month A. Adapty's software runs the app's subscriptions: in the case study's words it handled \"payments, receipt validation, cross-platform subscription management\" and became the team's \"ground truth\" for decisions, and Adapty states the figure under its own name. Adapty is not the payment processor, the company that moves the money, because for app store purchases that is Apple or Google and for web sales it is Stripe. This site counts a payment company's customer story, such as Stripe's, as grade A for that reason, as it did for Wave AI. The case study does not say that the figure was read from Adapty's dashboard, does not date its word \"today\", and is a marketing page for Adapty's own product, so a stricter reader can treat it as grade B. Ten people is the upper limit of this site's small-team filter; the story is on the site only because the money evidence is grade A or B." ], "factsCaption": "US$215,000 a month with a team of 10, stated by Adapty, the company whose software runs the app's subscriptions, in the version of its case study of 1 April 2026", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value is stated by Adapty, the company whose software records the app's subscriptions, in its case study under its own name. A grade B value is a count published by Adapty, Apple or AppSumo that is not a payment figure. A grade C value comes from Letterly's own pages, the founder's posts or the AppSumo listing. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a dropped project in 2023 to US$215,000 a month about 29 months after the iPhone app appeared, with lifetime deals first and paid ads later. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Letterly prices in October 2026: the in-app purchases on Apple's US App Store page and the AppSumo deal. letterly.app has no pricing page", "note": "The app is free to download, and the website says \"Start for free\" without listing the limits of the free version. Apple's page lists four yearly prices and two lifetime prices for the same PRO subscription and does not say which users see which price; an app that tests paywalls, as Adapty says Letterly does, needs a separate store product for each price it tests. Web purchases go through Stripe, and their prices are not published on letterly.app. Paid plans have no limits on recordings or AI rewrites.", "rows": [ [ "PRO, 1 month", "", "19.99", "no limits on recordings or AI rewrites" ], [ "PRO, 3 months", "", "14.97", "billed 44.90 every 3 months" ], [ "PRO, 1 year", "5.83 to 8.33", "", "four App Store prices: 69.99, 79.99, 89.99 and 99.99 a year" ], [ "PRO, lifetime", "199.99 one-time", "", "also listed at 249.99 one-time" ], [ "AppSumo lifetime deal", "89 one-time", "", "1 code, list price shown as 200; 10 codes for 890" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue per month, April 2026 version of the case study", "value": "US$215,000", "grade": "A", "note": "Adapty: \"Today Letterly makes $215,000 a month\". In the version last modified 1 April 2026, archived on 22 April 2026, and unchanged on the live page, modified 27 April 2026. The page was first published on 13 March 2026; no copy of that first version exists. The title, \"Scaled to $215K/Month in 5 Months\", ties the figure to the five months from April to August 2025, so it may describe the level reached in 2025. The page does not say whether app store fees are deducted.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from US$215,000 a month", "value": "about US$2.58 million a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$215,000 times 12. This is the headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Growth of monthly recurring revenue, April to August 2025", "value": "+345%", "grade": "A", "note": "Adapty: \"From April to August 2025: Letterly’s MRR jumped 345%\". August MRR was therefore 4.45 times April MRR (calculated). Adapty gives no MRR amounts.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, March to May 2025 and June to August 2025", "value": "US$60,000, then US$600,000", "grade": "A", "note": "Adapty: \"total three-month revenue increased from $60K to $600K (Mar – May vs. Jun – Aug)\". Ten times as much; June to August averages US$200,000 a month (both calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average revenue per user (ARPU), April to August 2025", "value": "+253%", "grade": "A", "note": "Adapty: \"ARPU climbed 253%\"; the highlights give 253.1%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue from the two best paywalls", "value": "US$127,000 and US$95,000", "grade": "A", "note": "Adapty: \"Two of their winning paywalls brought in $127K and $95K.\" The page does not give the period. Together US$222,000 (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Installs, April to August 2025", "value": "+188.8%", "grade": "B", "note": "Adapty's highlights: \"+188.8% increase in installs\". A download count, not a payment figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team at the US$215,000 figure", "value": "10 people", "grade": "B", "note": "Adapty: \"Letterly runs a lean team of 10 people\", on the same page as the revenue figure. A headcount is not a payment figure, so it is graded B. No source gives a smaller team at an earlier dated figure.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per team member", "value": "about US$258,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$2.58 million divided by 10 people.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "April 2026 compared with June to August 2025", "value": "about 7.5% higher", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$215,000 against the June to August 2025 average of US$200,000. That is within 15%, so this page counts the trend as flat.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Operator", "value": "the founder, as a self-employed person registered in Spain", "grade": "C", "note": "Data processing agreement: \"Letterly, operated by Anton Lebedev, Autónomo registered in Spain\". Autónomo is the Spanish status of a self-employed person. The contacts page gives a business address in Valencia, and Apple's page lists him as seller and developer.", "src": [ 5, 7, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions an investor. A self-employed person has no company shares to sell, so the business in its present legal form has no equity investors (a deduction, not a statement by the company).", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Founding date", "value": "1 September 2023", "grade": "C", "note": "AppSumo's company details: \"Founded September 1, 2023\".", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "iPhone app available", "value": "by 23 November 2023", "grade": "C", "note": "The first archived copy of the real letterly.app, 23 November 2023, links to the App Store and marks Google Play as \"soon\" with a waiting list for Android.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "App Store ratings, October 2026", "value": "about 1,100 ratings, 4.7 out of 5", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's US page shows \"1.1K Ratings\". Apple counts them; they are not a payment figure.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Users claimed", "value": "more than 300,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page: \"What 300,000 + users say\". Not verified.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "AppSumo reviews, October 2026", "value": "366", "grade": "B", "note": "AppSumo's deal page. Counted by the marketplace.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "AI providers named by the company", "value": "Microsoft Azure, ElevenLabs, Google Gemini and OpenAI", "grade": "C", "note": "Data processing agreement effective 24 March 2026 and privacy policy last updated 1 January 2026. Neither says which model does which step.", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the iPhone app to the April 2026 figure", "value": "29 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: November 2023 to April 2026. From the founding date of 1 September 2023 it would be 31 months.", "src": [ 9, 2, 8 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Before 2023", "what": "Lebedev spends 15 years on startups. He launches five, and none succeeds.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2023", "what": "He and his team see apps that transcribe audio with OpenAI's Whisper and reformat it with ChatGPT. They drop the project they were working on and build Letterly.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "1 September 2023", "what": "Founding date, as given on AppSumo.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "By 23 November 2023", "what": "The iPhone app is in the App Store: \"Convert any speech to clear & structured text\". Android is \"soon\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "August 2024", "what": "First launch on AppSumo, with a founder's post dated 14 August 2024. The app is then \"a simple list of voice notes with a strict 15-minute limit\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "2 October 2024", "what": "Second AppSumo launch. A web version is in beta, a Mac version is coming, and notes sync between phone and web.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "26 December 2024", "what": "Third AppSumo launch. The founder writes that launching there \"has been one of the best decisions of 2024\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "April to August 2025", "what": "MRR rises 345%, ARPU 253% and installs 188.8%. Revenue for June to August is US$600,000, ten times March to May. Advertising plays a major role.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "13 March 2026", "what": "Adapty publishes its case study on Letterly.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "1 April 2026", "what": "Version of the case study that says \"Today Letterly makes $215,000 a month\" and gives a team of 10 people, archived on 22 April 2026. The same day Letterly releases an Android app rebuilt from the ground up.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2, 10 ] }, { "when": "April 2026", "what": "MCP support: Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor can search and manage Letterly notes.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "Letterly Keyboard on iPhone and a dictation bubble on Android: users can dictate inside any app.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "Still updated every few weeks: version 2.7.8 on the App Store, about 1,100 ratings at 4.7.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A proven idea, made simpler", "text": "Lebedev's earlier startups were new ideas that nobody used. This time, according to Adapty, he \"chose a market-validated idea and focused entirely on execution\": the Whisper and ChatGPT apps of 2023 had shown that people wanted the product, and Letterly made every screen and every interaction as simple as it could. Adapty names \"ruthless simplicity\" as the reason people pay while free tools exist." }, { "title": "Lifetime deals for early users", "text": "Letterly sold lifetime access on AppSumo in at least four launches between August 2024 and April 2025, and again in May 2026; today a code costs US$89. The founder's posts there thank the buyers for the requests that became the web and Mac versions, sync between devices and custom rewrite styles. The deal page shows 366 reviews." }, { "title": "Paid ads measured by subscription data", "text": "Adapty writes that advertising \"played a major role\" in the growth from April to August 2025, when installs rose 188.8%. The privacy policy lists Facebook Audience Network and AppsFlyer for advertising; AppsFlyer is an attribution tool, software that tells an app which ad brought each install. Adapty supplied the revenue side: MRR, ARPU and churn, the share of subscribers who cancel, by country and product." }, { "title": "Paywall tests", "text": "A paywall is the screen that asks the user to pay. With Adapty's Paywall Builder the team assembled and shipped its own paywall designs in twenty minutes instead of waiting for developers, and kept the ones that sold best. Two of the winning paywalls brought in US$127,000 and US$95,000. Apple's page today lists four yearly prices and two lifetime prices for the same PRO plan." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from Letterly's data processing agreement, privacy policy and updates page, Apple's App Store page and the Adapty case study. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Speech and text models: the data processing agreement of 24 March 2026 lists Microsoft Azure for \"Transcription; text processing\", ElevenLabs for \"Transcription and voice processing\" and Google's Gemini for \"AI text processing\". The privacy policy of 1 January 2026 names OpenAI as an AI provider. No source says which model does which step, or whether Letterly itself ever used Whisper.", "Infrastructure: Google Cloud Platform in the EU, Firebase Authentication for accounts, Vercel for the website, Sentry for error reports, OneSignal for messages to users, and Amplitude and Google Analytics for Firebase for product analytics.", "Payments: Apple and Google in-app purchases and Stripe for the web, with Adapty managing the subscriptions and the paywalls on all platforms.", "Apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Android, Windows and the web, kept in sync. A keyboard on iPhone and a dictation bubble on Android, both from June 2026, let users speak into other apps.", "Connections: Zapier and webhooks send notes to other tools, and an MCP server (Model Context Protocol, a standard way for AI assistants to call outside tools) lets Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor search the notes, from April 2026.", "More than 90 languages detected automatically, recordings of up to 90 minutes, and no limits on recordings or rewrites in paid plans. The site says that notes are never used to train AI." ], "src": [ 5, 6, 10, 3, 1 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database tried to change how people put words into a device, or how they keep notes, and lost to what the platform owners shipped or to the phone itself. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Whirlscape", "years": "2014 to 2017", "funding": "US$0.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Minuum, a one-line phone keyboard that saved screen space.", "died": "The default keyboards got better AI, and users stayed with them.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1129-whirlscape" }, { "name": "Tellme", "years": "1999 to 2011", "funding": "US$238M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Information and services by voice command over the phone.", "died": "Phone apps and AI assistants replaced its voice commands.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/612-tellme" }, { "name": "VocalIQ", "years": "2011 to 2017", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Talking to computers in natural conversation.", "died": "It could not compete with the voice assistants of the large technology companies and ended inside Apple.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/719-vocaliq" }, { "name": "Springpad", "years": "2008 to 2014", "funding": "US$7.5M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Save and organize everything, from web articles to recipes, in one free app.", "died": "Users liked the free product, but the company did not find what they would pay for before the money ran out.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1893-springpad" }, { "name": "Humane", "years": "2018 to 2025", "funding": "US$230M", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "A US$700 AI badge with a laser projector, to replace the smartphone.", "died": "Nobody asked for a phone replacement, and the phone already did the job.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2397-humane" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the five tried to change how people put words into a device or keep notes, and each lost to what the platform owners shipped for free or to the phone itself: default keyboards beat Minuum, phone apps and assistants replaced Tellme's voice service, VocalIQ ended inside Apple, and Humane's badge could not replace the phone. Letterly sells into the same place. Apple's Notes and Phone apps record, transcribe and summarize, Google's Recorder summarizes on Pixel phones, and ChatGPT records, dictates and summarizes audio files.", "Two things differ. First, the predecessors had to build their own technology and raised between US$500,000 and US$238 million to do it; Letterly rents speech recognition and language models from several providers and pays by use, and no source reports any investment. Second, Letterly sells a finished result, an email or a note in the user's style, in the apps where people already write, and it measures every price and every paywall with subscription data, so a team of 10 could see within five months which paywall and which ads brought paying users." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product is copied often. The method can be copied.", "text": "A voice-to-text app is easy to build with rented models, and the App Store already shows many similar apps, AudioPen among them, while Apple, Google and OpenAI include the same features in their own products. What made Letterly earn money was execution: a simpler app than the first ones, early users from lifetime deals, then paid ads and paywall tests measured by subscription data. That needs money for ads and a team that can test quickly, so it is harder for one person than it looks.", "steps": [ "Choose an idea that rough early products have already proven, and make the simplest version of it.", "Sell lifetime deals on a marketplace early, for cash and for feature requests from real users.", "Run every purchase through one subscription platform, so that MRR, ARPU and churn are visible by country and product.", "Test paywalls and prices all the time, keep the winners, and buy ads only where the subscription data shows paying users." ], "open": "Dictation inside other apps, through a phone keyboard or a desktop app, and notes that AI assistants can read through MCP: the two directions that Letterly itself took in 2026." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Ten people, the top of this site's range", "text": "Adapty says that Letterly runs a team of 10 people, on the same page as the US$215,000 a month. That is the upper limit of this site's small-team filter, and the story is here only because the revenue evidence is grade A. It is not a one-person business, and no source gives an earlier revenue figure from a smaller team." }, { "title": "A vendor's marketing page, and an undated \"today\"", "text": "The revenue figures come from Adapty's case study, a marketing page for its own product. It was published on 13 March 2026 and changed on 1 April and 27 April 2026; no archived copy of the first version exists. Its title ties US$215,000 a month to five months of growth in 2025, while the text says \"today\". It does not say whether the figure is before or after the app stores' fees, or whether it includes web sales. A stricter reader can grade it B." }, { "title": "Apple and Google build it into the phone", "text": "Apple announced on 10 June 2024: \"In the Notes and Phone apps, users can now record, transcribe, and summarize audio.\" Google's feature drop of 6 December 2023 put \"Summarize in Recorder\", run by its Gemini Nano model on the phone, on the Pixel 8 Pro. Both come at no extra cost on the phones that support them." }, { "title": "ChatGPT does the same job", "text": "OpenAI's release notes list record mode in the ChatGPT Mac app (Team users from 4 June 2025, Plus users from 16 July 2025), a new speech-to-text model for dictation in all plans (26 June 2026), and audio uploads that \"turn a meeting, interview, or lecture into structured notes or a follow-up email draft\" for paid plans (6 October 2026). Adapty itself notes that Letterly earns money while \"ChatGPT and dozens of other transcription tools remain free\"." }, { "title": "The same field on this site", "text": "Among this site's voice-note stories, Letterly's US$215,000 a month (grade A, team of 10) is below Wave AI's US$4 million a year in November 2024 (grade A, one founder) and far above AudioPen's US$15,000 to US$20,000 a month in February 2026 and AudioNotes's about US$7,200 a month in August 2024 (both grade C, one founder each), while Talknotes was sold for US$200,000 in July 2024 (grade B)." }, { "title": "Rented models and unlimited use", "text": "Every recording goes to outside providers: Letterly's own documents name Microsoft Azure, ElevenLabs, Google's Gemini and OpenAI. Their prices and terms set Letterly's costs, and the company promises \"no limits on recordings or AI rewrites\", also to buyers of lifetime plans (US$89 on AppSumo, US$199.99 or US$249.99 on the App Store) who never pay again." }, { "title": "Growth paid for with ads", "text": "Adapty says that advertising played a major role in the 2025 growth. Ad-driven growth stops when ad prices rise or when many similar apps bid for the same users, and Apple's page for Letterly lists seven other voice and note apps under \"You Might Also Like\", AudioPen among them." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://letterly.app/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6464049772" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Adapty case study: How a team of 10 scaled Letterly to $215K/month without building infrastructure (published 13 March 2026, modified 27 April 2026)", "url": "https://adapty.io/case-studies/letterly/", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full, live on 16 October 2026. Adapty runs the app's subscriptions. Source for the US$215,000 a month, the 2025 growth figures, the paywall results, the team of 10 and the founder's account." }, { "title": "Adapty case study on Letterly, Wayback Machine copy of 22 April 2026 (version modified 1 April 2026)", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260422055458/https://adapty.io/case-studies/letterly/", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. The earliest archived copy; its article text is the same as the live page, including US$215,000 a month and the team of 10. No copy of the first version of 13 March 2026 exists." }, { "title": "Apple App Store, US: Letterly: AI Note Taker", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/letterly-ai-voice-note-taking/id6464049772", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full on 16 October 2026. Source for the seller and developer name, the in-app purchase prices, the ratings, the version history and the similar apps." }, { "title": "Letterly home page", "url": "https://letterly.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 16 October 2026. Source for the features, the limits and the 300,000 users claim. The address letterly.app/pricing returns the same page; there is no pricing page." }, { "title": "Letterly Data Processing Agreement, effective 24 March 2026", "url": "https://letterly.app/dpa/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the operator's legal form and the list of sub-processors, the outside companies that handle user data." }, { "title": "Letterly privacy policy, last updated 1 January 2026", "url": "https://letterly.app/policy/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on third parties and AI providers. Source for OpenAI, the advertising tools and the infrastructure services." }, { "title": "Letterly contacts page", "url": "https://letterly.app/contacts/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names the founder with a business address in Valencia, Spain." }, { "title": "AppSumo deal page: Letterly, AI speech-to-text app", "url": "https://appsumo.com/products/letterly/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 16 October 2026. Source for the deal prices, the founding date, the review count and the founder's posts of 14 August 2024, 2 October 2024, 26 December 2024, 17 April 2025 and 20 May 2026." }, { "title": "Letterly home page, Wayback Machine copy of 23 November 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20231123155137/https://letterly.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The first archived copy of the real site: the iPhone app is available and Android is \"soon\"." }, { "title": "Letterly updates page", "url": "https://letterly.app/updates/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the entries from March 2025 to October 2026. Source for the Android rebuild, MCP, the keyboard and the dictation tools." }, { "title": "Letterly affiliate program", "url": "https://letterly.app/affiliate/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A 30% commission for web sales made through a referral link." }, { "title": "Apple Newsroom, 10 June 2024: Introducing Apple Intelligence for iPhone, iPad, and Mac", "url": "https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/06/introducing-apple-intelligence-for-iphone-ipad-and-mac/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on Notes and Phone. Source for the built-in recording, transcription and summaries." }, { "title": "Google blog, 6 December 2023: Pixel feature drop, December 2023", "url": "https://blog.google/products/pixel/pixel-feature-drop-december-2023/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on Recorder. Source for Summarize in Recorder with Gemini Nano on the Pixel 8 Pro." }, { "title": "OpenAI Help Center: ChatGPT release notes", "url": "https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6825453-chatgpt-release-notes", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the entries on record mode (June and July 2025), dictation (26 June 2026) and audio uploads (6 October 2026)." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/coconote/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/coconote.md", "slug": "coconote", "name": "Coconote", "country": "USA", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI note-taker and study app for students", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-16", "launchLabel": "April 2024", "outcomeLabel": "Sold for an undisclosed price after US$6.7M ARR, February 2026", "sticker": "Sold after $6.7M ARR", "outcomeUsd": 6700000, "months": 22, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders, plus 5 to 12 contracted content creators before the sale and about 25 after it", "fundingLabel": "None (US$0 raised; about US$10,000 from each founder)", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "learning", "channel": "creators", "trend": "sold", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2C", "Education" ], "product": "A phone and web app that records a lecture, or imports audio, video, a PDF, a document or a link, and makes a transcript, organized notes, flashcards, quizzes, a chat with the note and a short AI-narrated podcast of it. A student gets one free note; after that the app needs a subscription, which starts with a free trial.", "why": "Two former Loom staff built a premium-priced app for something students do several times a week, going to class, and sold it through short videos by a small group of contracted creators instead of paid ads. It charged from the first day, and revenue paid for growth with about 50% EBITDA margins until Quizlet bought it.", "summary": [ "Coconote is a phone and web app for students that turns a recorded lecture into study material. The student records the class, or imports audio, video, a PDF, a document or a link. A speech-to-text model, a program that writes down spoken words, makes a transcript, the full text of what was said, and a large language model, an AI program that writes text from instructions, turns it into organized notes, flashcards, quizzes, a chat with the note and a short podcast read by an AI voice. The app gives one free note; after that the student needs a subscription. Its home page says it uses \"AI that doesn't break your University's honor code\" and that \"it doesn't cheat for you\".", "Zack Hargett, who worked in design and product at Loom, the video-messaging company, and Brett Bauman, an engineer on Loom's mobile team, launched it in April 2024 at US$99 a year or US$19.99 a month, with about US$10,000 of their own money each and no outside investors. They say it passed US$100,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR, the yearly value of all active subscriptions) within 45 days, US$1 million in four months and US$2 million in five, while a small group of contracted creators posted short videos on TikTok and Instagram. They also say it made an EBITDA margin of about 50% in nearly every month; EBITDA is profit before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. On 5 February 2026 Quizlet, an online learning platform, announced that it had acquired Coconote; a founder says the deal closed in December 2025. On 18 March 2026 Zack Hargett posted that Coconote had US$6.7 million in ARR at the sale.", "The revenue figures are the founders' own statements, grade C. Quizlet's announcement confirms the purchase and the more than 1 billion video views, grade B, but gives no price and no revenue. RevenueCat, the subscription platform that the founders used and that publishes the Sub Club podcast, repeats the figures without saying that it checked them in its own data. The page also shows earlier companies that tried to help students study or take notes, and why they failed." ], "factsCaption": "US$6.7 million in annual recurring revenue 22 months after launch, then a sale to Quizlet at an undisclosed price; the revenue is self-reported, the sale is confirmed by the buyer", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade B value comes from Quizlet's own announcement of the purchase. A grade C value is a founder statement on the Sub Club podcast or in a post quoted by AI Dev Cases, or a store listing. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No revenue value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a Chrome extension that summarized videos to a sale to Quizlet, 22 months after launch. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Coconote prices: the company has no pricing page (coconote.app/pricing returns 404), so the launch prices come from the founders and the October 2026 list from Apple's App Store page, which does not show billing periods (grade C)", "note": "The founders say about 80% of subscribers chose the yearly plan. Apart from one free note, the app works only with a subscription, which starts with a free trial. The App Store page of October 2026 lists ten Coconote Pro purchases: US$9.99 (twice), US$19.99 (three times), US$71.99, US$99.99, US$129.99 (twice) and US$152.99, without saying which period each one covers. In June 2026 AI Dev Cases read a range of US$9.99 to US$129.99.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "one note, then a free trial" ], [ "Coconote Pro, yearly, at launch in April 2024", "8.25", "", "US$99 a year; founders" ], [ "Coconote Pro, monthly, at launch", "", "19.99", "founders" ], [ "Coconote Pro, yearly, after an early price test", "10.83", "", "US$129.99 a year on the App Store; the founders say US$129" ], [ "Other Coconote Pro prices, October 2026", "", "", "US$9.99, US$71.99, US$99.99 and US$152.99; periods not shown" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue at the sale", "value": "US$6.7 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Zack Hargett's post of 18 March 2026, quoted by AI Dev Cases, and the founders on the Sub Club podcast. Quizlet published no revenue figure.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Sale to Quizlet", "value": "announced 5 February 2026, price not disclosed", "grade": "B", "note": "EdTech Innovation Hub reports Quizlet's announcement of \"the acquisition of note-taking app Coconote\", with no price or terms. AI Dev Cases gives the date. A founder says the deal closed in December 2025.", "src": [ 2, 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "EBITDA margin", "value": "about 50% in nearly every month from the start to the sale", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on the podcast; the post says \"~50% ebitda\".", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "EBITDA at the sale run rate", "value": "about US$3.35 million a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 50% of US$6.7 million. The founders did not give this figure.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue 45 days after launch", "value": "US$100,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on the podcast.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue four months after launch", "value": "US$1 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on the podcast and the headline of RevenueCat's recap. That is about August 2024.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue five months after launch", "value": "US$2 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on the podcast. That is about September 2024.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue during the year of the sale process", "value": "roughly doubled", "grade": "C", "note": "Zack Hargett on the podcast, for the time in which an investment bank prepared and ran the sale.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "US$0; about US$10,000 from each founder", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder's post says \"$0 raised\"; the podcast gives the founders' own money.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founders' money at the start", "value": "about US$20,000", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: about US$10,000 from each of the two founders.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Views of the creators' videos", "value": "more than 1 billion in 18 months", "grade": "B", "note": "Quizlet's announcement, as reported by EdTech Innovation Hub. The founder's post says \"1 billion+ organic views on social\".", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Content creators, all contractors", "value": "5 to 10 before the sale, 12 at most; about 25 after it", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on the podcast. About 30 creators were tried in the first two months, and three of them made a large difference.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Prices at launch", "value": "US$99 a year or US$19.99 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on the podcast. About 80% of subscribers chose the yearly plan.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Yearly price after an early test", "value": "US$129", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder: the higher price brought more users and more revenue at the same time, and it stayed for most of the company's life. The App Store lists a US$129.99 Coconote Pro purchase.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Free use", "value": "one note, then a free trial", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder: \"You can make one note for free without starting a trial and that's it.\"", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Paid advertising", "value": "tried and stopped", "grade": "C", "note": "The founders could not make the first purchase pay back the cost of the ads.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "App Store rating, October 2026", "value": "4.8 from about 17,000 ratings", "grade": "C", "note": "Apple's listing, shown as 17K ratings. The seller is now Quizlet Inc.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the announced sale", "value": "22 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: April 2024 to February 2026. To the close in December 2025 it is 20 months.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2022", "what": "Zack Hargett, who had shut down a venture-backed product studio that built apps for high school and college students, makes a Chrome extension that summarizes blog posts and YouTube videos with GPT-3.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2023", "what": "He and Brett Bauman, who met through Loom, try to replace Siri with GPT-4 before they arrive at Coconote.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "April 2024", "what": "Coconote launches with a free trial and charges from the first day: US$99 a year or US$19.99 a month. The Internet Archive holds a copy of coconote.app from 1 May 2024.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 8 ] }, { "when": "45 days after launch", "what": "US$100,000 in annual recurring revenue. About 30 creators are tried in the first two months.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "About August 2024", "what": "US$1 million in annual recurring revenue, four months after launch, without relying on paid ads.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "when": "About September 2024", "what": "US$2 million in annual recurring revenue, five months after launch.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "25 September 2024", "what": "The home page says Coconote uses \"AI that doesn't break your University's honor code\" and lists iPhone, Android and web.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "2025", "what": "An investment bank prepares and runs a sale process through the year. The founders tell no one, and revenue roughly doubles in that time.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "December 2025", "what": "The sale to Quizlet closes, according to a founder.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "5 February 2026", "what": "Quizlet announces that it has acquired Coconote, together with a new AI study experience of its own. No price is given.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "when": "18 March 2026", "what": "Zack Hargett posts US$6.7 million ARR, about 50% EBITDA, more than 1 billion organic views and US$0 raised. The Sub Club podcast episode and RevenueCat's recap appear the same day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 1, 4 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The App Store lists the app under Quizlet Inc, rated 4.8 from about 17,000 ratings, with Coconote Pro prices from US$9.99 to US$152.99.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Distribution: creators, not influencers", "text": "The founders paid content creators to make short videos, not famous people to mention the app. They looked for creators with 5,000 to 10,000 followers and a personal email address in their profile, and avoided creators who had an agency, because, in a founder's words, agencies \"are almost always going to take more than they give\". Before the sale they worked with 5 to 10 creators at a time, at most 12, and met each one. One creator ran the main Coconote account and brought hundreds of millions of views. Quizlet counts more than 1 billion views in 18 months." }, { "title": "Videos that sell, not only videos that spread", "text": "A video with 41 million views did not bring sales, because it showed the app as a toy. Videos that showed a student's problem and then the app solving it converted much better. The founders told creators to imagine offering the app to a new student and her mother at college orientation." }, { "title": "A premium price and almost no free use", "text": "The app launched at US$99 a year or US$19.99 a month, and an early test at US$129 a year brought more users and more revenue. Apart from one free note, it cannot be used without a subscription. The founders say a high price made students trust the app with notes they would be examined on." }, { "title": "Small tests on the sign-up and cancel screens", "text": "A longer onboarding, the first screens of the app, of about 15 screens raised free-trial starts by 16%. Moving the login screen to after the paywall, the screen that asks for payment, removed a 10% drop-off. On the web, a cancel flow kept 25% of people who tried to cancel, and the best offer was seven more days of free trial, not a discount." }, { "title": "A task that repeats", "text": "Students go to class several times a week, so a recording app is used often, and the notes from one course build up over a term. The founders compare this with apps such as Strava and Ladder that people open for every run or workout." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founders on the Sub Club podcast, from AI Dev Cases and from the app's store listing. They are grade C.", "items": [ "An app for iPhone first, then Android and the web. By October 2026 the App Store lists versions for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple Vision.", "Two AI steps: speech-to-text turns the recording into a transcript, then a large language model writes the notes, quizzes and flashcards. The founders say transcription costs more than the language model. No source names the model providers.", "Reliable recording on a phone was hard: early versions lost recordings, and a phone call can stop a recording. A founder says Apple does not make reliable recording easy.", "Payments through the App Store and Google Play, with RevenueCat for subscription data (a founder says he checked \"the RevenueCat chart\" far too often), and Stripe for subscriptions on the web. The cancel flow with the trial extension ran on the web.", "The account is created after the payment screen, which needed extra work to connect an Apple purchase to an account made later.", "A content team of contracted creators who post on TikTok and Instagram Reels, coached by the founders. A test of paid ads, with an outside agency cutting the creators' raw videos into ads, did not pay back.", "The sale was run by an investment bank, Accretive Partners, through which the founders got back in touch with Quizlet." ], "src": [ 1, 3, 5 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database tried to help students study or take notes, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Flashnotes", "years": "2010 to 2016", "funding": "US$1.47M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A marketplace where college students sold their class notes and study guides to other students.", "died": "It could not control the quality of the notes, and Course Hero and Chegg won with a better product and more money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/154-flashnotes" }, { "name": "StudyRoom", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "An online place where students in the same course study together and swap notes.", "died": "It did not reach the number of users that a network product needs, and it found no way to earn money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1691-studyroom" }, { "name": "InstaGrok", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A search tool for students that showed a topic as a map of concepts.", "died": "Schools did not change their methods, and the free tools of Quizlet and Khan Academy took the users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1700-instagrok" }, { "name": "Xuebajun", "years": "2013 to 2021", "funding": "US$150M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Photograph a homework problem and get the solution from software, for school students in China.", "died": "It moved from the cheap homework app to costly live tutoring, then Chinese rules banned its business.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2325-xuebajun" }, { "name": "Transpose", "years": "2012 to 2018", "funding": "US$0", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A note-taking app with templates, first as an alternative to Evernote, then for business data.", "died": "It charged US$14.99 against Evernote without outside money, and users had no reason to switch.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1849-transpose" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The five earlier companies each needed something that was slow or expensive to get: good notes written by other students (Flashnotes), enough users in the same course (StudyRoom), schools that would change their habits (InstaGrok), paid human tutors (Xuebajun), or a reason to leave an established notes app (Transpose). InstaGrok lost to free tools that included Quizlet, the company that bought Coconote.", "Coconote needed none of these. A speech-to-text model and a language model turn each student's own lecture into notes, so there is no marketplace to fill and no network to build, and the founders kept a margin of about 50% while paying for the models. Short-video feeds that rank videos by interest, not by the number of followers, let a few contracted creators reach students without paid ads. What has not changed is the risk that a larger, free product does the same job: in 2025 OpenAI and Google added study features to their assistants." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The creator method, yes. The empty market of early 2024, no.", "text": "Coconote launched when the note-takers that existed were mostly web apps or tools for business meetings, and the founders thought that no one was taking the idea seriously. By 2026 the field is crowded, and the AI makers have their own study features. The method still transfers: pick a task people do several times a week, charge a premium price from the first day, and pay a few chosen creators for videos that show the product solving a real problem.", "steps": [ "Choose a task the customer repeats every week, such as going to class, so that the product gains value with each use.", "Charge from the first day with a yearly price and a free trial, and test a higher price early.", "Recruit creators with 5,000 to 10,000 followers and a personal email address, coach each one, and keep the video formats that show a problem and its solution.", "Test the sign-up and cancel screens: put the login after the payment screen, and offer more trial time instead of a discount." ], "open": "Other recordings that people make every week and must study afterwards: language classes, medical and nursing training, professional exam courses and training sessions at work." }, "watch": [ { "title": "The revenue figures are the founders' own", "text": "US$6.7 million ARR, the 50% EBITDA margin and every earlier step come from the founders: a post on X quoted by AI Dev Cases, and the Sub Club podcast. RevenueCat, which hosts the podcast and handled the app's subscription data, repeats the figures in its recap but does not say it checked them. Quizlet's announcement confirms the purchase and the views, not the revenue or the price." }, { "title": "Team size is not documented", "text": "The sources name two co-founders and count the creators, who were contractors: 5 to 10 at a time before the sale, at most 12, and about 25 after it. No source gives a number of employees; a founder mentions \"the folks on the team\" without a count." }, { "title": "The AI makers now offer study help inside their assistants", "text": "OpenAI added study mode to ChatGPT on 29 July 2025 for logged-in Free, Plus, Pro and Team users, to help students \"work through problems step by step instead of just getting an answer\". Google launched Guided Learning in Gemini on 6 August 2025 as \"a personal learning companion\". Students already use these assistants, and the study features come at no extra price, while Coconote charged about US$130 a year." }, { "title": "Recording a class can need permission", "text": "Coconote's own FAQ says the app is fine \"as long as your professor or teacher is cool with you audio recording the class\". Rules differ by place: Florida law lets a student at a public college record a lecture for personal educational use, but says a recorded lecture \"may not be published without the consent of the lecturer\". The app also serves shared notes at public web addresses with transcript pages, according to the Internet Archive's capture list." }, { "title": "Model costs it does not control", "text": "The founders say transcription costs more than the language model, and that \"the foundational LLM or AI model providers are doing amazing work and we have no right to compete with them\". The 50% margin depended on prices set by providers that no source names. Local models, which the founders say are getting much better, can cut that cost, and they also make copies cheaper to build." }, { "title": "Same field, smaller numbers on this site", "text": "Jungle, a funded study app that also grows through creator videos, reported US$850,000 a year in recurring revenue in December 2024, about one eighth of Coconote's US$6.7 million, and AudioNotes, a voice-notes app built by one founder, reported about US$7,200 a month in August 2024." }, { "title": "One channel and a few people", "text": "Paid ads did not pay back, so sales depended on short videos on TikTok and Instagram, and three of about 30 early creators made a large difference. A change in how these feeds rank videos, or the loss of those creators, would reach revenue directly. A founder says their own first TikTok attempts ended with a ban." }, { "title": "Now part of Quizlet", "text": "Quizlet Inc is the seller on the App Store, and the founders said that under the new owner the app may become cheaper (\"stay tuned on that\"). The October 2026 listing shows Coconote Pro prices from US$9.99 to US$152.99 without billing periods. Results after the sale belong to Quizlet and are not public." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://coconote.app/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6479320349" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Sub Club podcast, 18 March 2026: Bootstrapped to $6.7M ARR and an Exit to Quizlet in 2 Years, Brett Bauman and Zack Hargett, Coconote", "url": "https://subclub.com/episode/bootstrapped-to-67m-arr-and-an-exit-to-quizlet-in-2-years-brett-bauman-zack-hargett-coconote", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full transcript on the episode page. The founders' own account of the launch, the revenue steps, prices, margins, creators, ad tests and the sale process." }, { "title": "EdTech Innovation Hub, 11 February 2026: Quizlet acquires note-taking app Coconote, launches new AI-powered learning experience", "url": "https://www.edtechinnovationhub.com/news/quizlet-acquires-note-taking-app-coconote-launches-new-ai-powered-learning-experience", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. A press report of Quizlet's announcement: the acquisition, the new AI study experience and the more than 1 billion views in 18 months, with no price or terms. Quizlet's own release on PR Newswire of 5 February 2026, also read in full, gives the same facts and no price." }, { "title": "AI Dev Cases, 22 June 2026: How Coconote Hit $6.7M ARR in 18 Months With Almost No Ad Spend", "url": "https://aidevcases.com/en/cases/coconote", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Quotes Zack Hargett's X post of 18 March 2026 ($6.7m ARR, ~50% ebitda, 1 billion+ organic views, $0 raised). The post itself was not opened, because x.com needs a login; its date was checked from the post ID. Source for the creator details and the TikTok and Reels channels." }, { "title": "RevenueCat blog, by David Barnard, 18 March 2026: How Coconote hit $1M ARR in 4 months with no paid ads", "url": "https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/growth/brett-zack-coconote-sub-club-podcast-2026/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The podcast host's recap. It repeats the founders' figures and does not say they come from RevenueCat's own data, so it is not an independent check." }, { "title": "Apple App Store listing: Coconote - AI Note Taker, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/coconote-ai-note-taker/id6479320349", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Seller, rating, platforms and the list of Coconote Pro in-app purchase prices, which does not show billing periods." }, { "title": "Coconote home page, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://coconote.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Features and the FAQ on honor codes and recording permission. The footer now says Quizlet, Inc. The address coconote.app/pricing returns 404." }, { "title": "Internet Archive copy of the Coconote home page, 25 September 2024", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20240925160039/https://coconote.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The home page before the sale: features, platforms and the honor-code statement." }, { "title": "Internet Archive capture list for coconote.app, 2024 to 2026", "url": "http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=coconote.app*&from=2024&to=2026", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the list of captures from 2024 onward. It starts with a copy of the home page from 1 May 2024. Shared notes are served under coconote.app/notes/ with transcript, quiz and flashcard pages." }, { "title": "OpenAI, 29 July 2025: Introducing study mode", "url": "https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-study-mode/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The maker's own announcement, with the plans that get the feature." }, { "title": "Google, 6 August 2025: Guided Learning in Gemini: From answers to understanding", "url": "https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/education/guided-learning/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The maker's own announcement." }, { "title": "The Florida Senate: 2025 Florida Statutes, section 1004.097", "url": "https://www.flsenate.gov/Laws/Statutes/2025/1004.097", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the section on recording class lectures at public colleges and universities." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/wrestle-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/wrestle-ai.md", "slug": "wrestle-ai", "name": "Wrestle AI", "country": "USA", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI wrestling coach app that scores practice and match video", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-16", "launchLabel": "18 September 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$131.9K in total revenue, February 2026", "sticker": "$131.9K total revenue", "outcomeUsd": 131863, "months": 5, "teamLabel": "2 partners, the founder and a wrestling creator, plus one freelancer paid about US$250", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "health-appearance", "channel": "creators", "trend": "growing", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Health and fitness" ], "product": "An iPhone app for wrestlers. Upload a clip of a practice or a match and the AI returns a score, strengths and weaknesses, drills and strategy notes. It also has drill plans, a technique library, a match tracker, a calorie tracker and a weight-cut mode, and in April 2026 it added Brazilian jiu-jitsu, freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling. Every feature needs a subscription.", "why": "The founder had wrestled in school and knew that wrestlers rarely have an expert to review their film, and in 2025 the App Store had no app like it. The video breakdown can be shown in under 10 seconds, so creators could sell the app in posts that look like training videos, not ads. A no-code builder kept the total spending at about US$1,100.", "summary": [ "Wrestle AI is an iPhone app that coaches wrestling technique. A wrestler uploads a clip of a practice or a match, and the app returns a score, strengths and weaknesses, drills that fix the mistakes, and strategy notes. It was built with Rork, a no-code AI app builder: a service that writes and publishes a phone app from instructions in plain language, so the maker writes no program code. The analysis runs on OpenAI models. Running a trained model on new input, here the frames of a video, is called inference, and it is the cost that grows with every video. Every feature sits behind a paywall, a screen that asks for payment before the app can be used: US$9.99 a month or US$59.99 a year.", "George Lampropoulos, an 18-year-old college student in the United States who says he does not know how to code, found Rork in June 2025. The first App Store version is dated 18 September 2025. Rork's case study of 25 February 2026 says the app earned US$131,863 in total revenue, counted from August 2025, with MRR (monthly recurring revenue, the subscription income of one month) of US$23,000, and US$39,400 of revenue in the month when yearly payments are counted in full. He spent about US$1,100 in total, including about US$250 for a freelancer. Users came through short videos by wrestling creators, whom he contacted with about 100 messages a day and paid per view. A large wrestling creator became his partner, whom Rork calls his co-founder; the podcast of Superwall, a company that makes paywall software for apps, lists a 50/50 partnership with the wrestling creator Cayden Henschel. Rork's press release put the app at over US$30,000 a month in April 2026.", "Every money figure on this page is grade C. It comes from Rork, which sells the builder and uses this story in its marketing and in its funding announcement, from the founder, or from sites that repeat them. No payment processor or app-revenue platform is quoted, and the figures use different definitions: US$17,000 a month in December 2025, US$23,000 MRR in February 2026, over US$30,000 a month in April 2026. The latest figure, almost US$41,000 MRR in October 2026, covers three of his apps together. The page also shows earlier companies that promised feedback on how athletes move, and the risks of an app for teenage athletes in one sport." ], "factsCaption": "US$131,863 in total revenue by February 2026 and over US$30,000 a month by April 2026, all reported by the tool maker or the founder", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a statement by Rork, the company that sells the app builder, by the founder, or by a site that compiles their statements. A grade B value is a record that Apple shows on the App Store. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No money value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a failed app built by agencies, started at age 15, to an app built alone with prompts and sold through creators. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Wrestle AI prices on the US App Store, read 16 October 2026 (grade C)", "note": "Every feature needs a subscription. Rork's case study of February 2026 says the yearly plan has a 3-day free trial and the monthly plan has none, which pushes buyers to the yearly plan. The App Store also lists a Discount Yearly plan at US$29.99, an offer price. The yearly plans are paid once a year; the per-month values in the table are the yearly price divided by 12.", "rows": [ [ "Basic Monthly", "", "9.99", "all features" ], [ "Basic Yearly", "5.00", "", "US$59.99 a year; 3-day free trial" ], [ "Discount Yearly", "2.50", "", "US$29.99 a year; offer price" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Total revenue to February 2026", "value": "US$131,863", "grade": "C", "note": "Rork's case study, 25 February 2026, captioned \"Aug 2025 to Feb 2026\". Rork sells the app builder and does not say which payment system the figure comes from. Rork's post on X, quoted by AI Dev Cases, gives US$131,000 in about six months.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), February 2026", "value": "US$23,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Rork's case study. It does not say how yearly plans are counted in this figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the month, February 2026, with yearly payments counted in full", "value": "US$39,400", "grade": "C", "note": "Rork's case study: \"total monthly revenue hitting $39.4K when you include yearly subscriptions\". It is about 1.7 times the MRR because the free trial is offered only on the yearly plan.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the February 2026 MRR", "value": "about US$276,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$23,000 times 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average revenue per month to February 2026", "value": "about US$21,977 over six months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$131,863 divided by 6, Rork's window from August 2025. Counted from the first App Store version in September 2025, five months, the average is about US$26,373.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month, December 2025", "value": "US$17,000, of which about US$8,000 from monthly subscribers", "grade": "C", "note": "A December 2025 article on thestartupstorys.com, as summarised by AI Dev Cases; the article is no longer online. The other US$9,000 was yearly-plan revenue spread over the months.", "src": [ 6, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month, April 2026", "value": "over US$30,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Rork's press release on its US$15 million seed round, 9 April 2026: the founder \"scaled it to over $30,000 in monthly revenue\".", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue of his three apps together, October 2026", "value": "almost US$41,000 MRR, and US$84,000 in 28 days", "grade": "C", "note": "The Superwall Podcast episode of 15 October 2026: Wrestle AI, Brawler and a fitness app. No split per app is published, so this is not a figure for Wrestle AI alone.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Total spending to February 2026", "value": "about US$1,100", "grade": "C", "note": "Rork's case study. Rork's post on X, quoted by AI Dev Cases: he \"spent only ~$1,100 to reach $20K/mo\".", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Running cost", "value": "under US$150 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Rork's case study: Rork for the app, Supabase for the backend, OpenAI for AI inference.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Outside help", "value": "about US$250 for a freelancer", "grade": "C", "note": "Hired on Fiverr to add payments and sign-in, which Rork did not handle well at the time, according to Rork.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Downloads", "value": "more than 17,000 by February 2026, more than 100,000 by October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Rork's case study, then the podcast description: \"Wrestle AI passed 100K downloads on creators alone\".", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "App Store ratings, 16 October 2026", "value": "about 2,200 ratings, average 4.8 of 5", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's count on the App Store page. Rork's case study showed about 1,700 ratings in February 2026.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "First App Store version", "value": "18 September 2025", "grade": "B", "note": "Version 1.0 in the App Store version history. Rork says the app reached place 18 in its App Store category on launch day from pre-orders. Rork's revenue window starts in August 2025; the sources do not explain the difference.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Seller on the App Store, October 2026", "value": "WRESTLE AI LLC", "grade": "B", "note": "The App Store page. Fight AI, his app for MMA, is sold by IMPROVESCAPE LLC together with five other apps. AI Dev Cases named IMPROVESCAPE LLC as the developer of Wrestle AI in August 2026.", "src": [ 2, 8, 7, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "the founder and one creator partner, plus a freelancer", "grade": "C", "note": "Rork calls the partner \"his co-founder - one of the largest wrestling creators online\". The podcast description lists a 50/50 partnership with the wrestling creator Cayden Henschel. No source says whether 50/50 means a share of the company or of the revenue.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions investors in Wrestle AI. The US$15 million seed round of April 2026 was raised by Rork, the builder.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the first App Store version to the February 2026 figure", "value": "5 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: September 2025 to February 2026. Rork counts six months from August 2025.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Age 15", "what": "With a friend he builds an audience of 10,000 followers for a social self-improvement app, then pays three development agencies to build it. It takes a year and a half; by launch the audience has gone and the savings are spent.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "June 2025", "what": "He finds Rork and builds Wrestle AI with prompts, from morning to night, pasting error logs into ChatGPT when something breaks. A freelancer from Fiverr adds payments and sign-in for about US$250.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "18 September 2025", "what": "Version 1.0 on the App Store. Rork says the app reached place 18 in its category on launch day from pre-orders.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "when": "29 September 2025", "what": "Answering a review about the price, the developer writes that the app processes hundreds to thousands of frames per video and pays very high AI inference costs.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2025", "what": "Version 2.0 adds a practice mode, a match-day poster generator and a weight-cut mode.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "17 November 2025", "what": "Version 3.0 adds a new calorie tracker, an opponent analysis mode, a journal and a weight management dashboard.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "December 2025", "what": "A feature article reports US$17,000 a month, about US$8,000 of it from monthly subscribers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 4 ] }, { "when": "25 February 2026", "what": "Rork's case study: US$131,863 in total revenue, US$23,000 MRR, about US$1,100 spent, more than 17,000 downloads. The founder runs weekly marketing sessions on Rork's Discord server and wrote the marketing guide in Rork's documentation.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "9 April 2026", "what": "Rork announces a US$15 million seed round and names Wrestle AI as an example at over US$30,000 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "13 April 2026", "what": "Version 5.4 adds Brazilian jiu-jitsu, freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "14 April 2026", "what": "On X, the founder writes that his published method led to hundreds of copycat apps for other sports and that almost none of them made money, as quoted by AI Dev Cases.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "28 July 2026", "what": "He publishes a Growth Playbook about the apps that took him \"from $0 to $50k a month\", as quoted by AI Dev Cases. The figure covers all his apps.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "4 September 2026", "what": "Version 5.5, called Wrestle AI 2.0, adds a social area, The Locker Room, and a new interface.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "15 October 2026", "what": "The Superwall Podcast: his three apps make almost US$41,000 MRR and Wrestle AI passed 100,000 downloads from creators alone. The episode description lists the 50/50 partnership with the wrestling creator Cayden Henschel.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 9 ] }, { "when": "16 October 2026", "what": "The App Store lists WRESTLE AI LLC as the seller, version 5.9 of 1 October 2026, and about 2,200 ratings with an average of 4.8.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2, 8 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A sport he had practiced", "text": "He wrestled through middle and high school, and he knew that wrestlers rarely have an expert to review their film. The first version did one thing: upload a clip, get a scored breakdown. Rork's post on X gives the reason that so little money was needed: there were no other apps like it on the App Store." }, { "title": "The feature is the advertisement", "text": "The founder calls it the \"gotcha moment\": the raw match clip, then the AI breakdown with drills, which can be shown in under 10 seconds. Creator videos that look like a day of training, with the app in the middle, sold it better than polished ads. The podcast description says a raw screen recording reached a cost per acquisition (CPA), the advertising cost of one new user, of US$10, while polished ads failed." }, { "title": "Creators paid per view", "text": "He sent about 100 direct messages a day to creators, opened with \"Paid promo?\", and negotiated by phone, never by text. He paid US$2 to US$5 per thousand views, a price called CPM, with a guaranteed number of views and a cap on the total. One of these contacts, a large wrestling creator, became his partner. The podcast says one US$4,500 creator deal paid back 75% of its cost, about US$3,375." }, { "title": "Onboarding that ends at a paywall", "text": "New users answer questions on weight class, goals and position, upload a video and see a preview of the analysis; only then does the app ask for payment. The free trial exists only on the yearly plan, which pushes buyers to pay US$59.99 for a year at once. That is why revenue in February 2026 was US$39,400 in the month against US$23,000 of MRR." }, { "title": "Almost no fixed cost", "text": "Rork wrote the app, Supabase stores the data and accounts, and OpenAI models write the feedback. Spending to February 2026 was about US$1,100 in total and the running cost under US$150 a month. The cost that grows with use is the AI analysis of each video, which the developer called \"very high\" in a reply to a user in September 2025." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from Rork's case study, the App Store page, the podcast description and AI Dev Cases. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Built with Rork from prompts, with no code written by the founder. When something broke, he pasted the error log into ChatGPT and asked for the fix.", "Payments and sign-in were added by a freelancer hired on Fiverr for about US$250, because Rork handled them badly at the time.", "Supabase for the backend, which holds the database, the accounts and the stored files, and OpenAI models for the analysis and the written feedback. Running cost under US$150 a month.", "The analysis reads frames taken from the uploaded clip. A user review of January 2026 says that full matches must be trimmed first and that uploads repeatedly failed to analyze.", "19 App Store versions from September 2025 to October 2026 added drill plans, a calorie tracker, a weight-cut mode, opponent analysis, Brazilian jiu-jitsu and a social area.", "The same method produced Fight AI, an app for MMA, which is sold by IMPROVESCAPE LLC. Wrestle AI is sold by a separate company, WRESTLE AI LLC.", "The privacy policy, terms of service and license agreement linked from the App Store page are hosted on Termly. The privacy policy could not be read for this page." ], "src": [ 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 13 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised feedback on how a person moves, or an app for one sport. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Enflux", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$1M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Clothing with sensors that tracked movement in 3D and gave athletes real-time feedback on their form.", "died": "Larger companies had more money and trusted brands. The niche product never sold in the volume needed to make it cheap, and production was expensive.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1089-enflux" }, { "name": "FitFu", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$300K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A phone app that detected exercises with the phone's motion sensors and turned workouts into a game.", "died": "Users left after the novelty, it had no strong way to charge, and Nike Training Club and Fitbit offered more complete products.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1194-fitfu" }, { "name": "Charge Running", "years": "2021 to 2024", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Live online running classes with real-time audio coaching.", "died": "It could not win and keep users against larger fitness apps. Classes at fixed times lost appeal, and on-demand AI coaching undercut it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/895-charge-running" }, { "name": "Rally Tennis", "years": "2017 to 2020", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "An app that matched amateur tennis players with local opponents of the same level.", "died": "It needed many active players in each city, and users would not pay enough to keep it running.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1040-rally-tennis" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Enflux put sensors in clothing and FitFu used the phone's motion sensors to judge an exercise. The records say that the clothing was expensive to make and that the phones of the time were too limited for better features. Charge Running and Rally Tennis were apps for one activity that could not win or keep enough users: Charge Running against larger fitness apps, Rally Tennis because it needed many players in each city. All four spent investors' money, from US$120,000 to US$5 million.", "Wrestle AI needs only an ordinary phone video and a general AI model, so it has no hardware cost and is useful to one user alone. It was built for about US$1,100 in total, so it reached revenue without investors, and its users came from creators who already had the audience. Two things did not change: it is an app for one sport, like Rally Tennis, and it competes with large team-video companies such as Hudl for the same athletes." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The empty niche, only once per niche.", "text": "The tools are open to anyone: a no-code AI builder, a general AI model for video, a freelancer for payments, and creators paid per view. The founder writes that hundreds of copycat apps for other sports followed his published method and that almost none made money. Rork gives the reason as being first in a sport that had no such app, and the founder names his own persistence and his choice of niche.", "steps": [ "Pick a sport or skill that you have practiced yourself, where people film themselves but have no expert to review the film.", "Build one feature first: upload a clip, get a score and drills. Check that the result can be shown in a 10-second video.", "Send many short messages to creators in that niche and pay per view, with a guaranteed number of views and a cap.", "Put the paywall after the user has answered the onboarding questions and uploaded a video, and offer the free trial only on the yearly plan." ], "open": "Sports where athletes film themselves and few coaches are available, as long as no app serves them yet. The founder's own warning applies: copies of his app for other sports mostly made no money." }, "watch": [ { "title": "The figures come from the tool maker", "text": "Every revenue figure comes from Rork, which sells the builder and uses this story in its marketing and in its funding press release, or from the founder, who runs weekly sessions on Rork's Discord server and wrote the marketing guide in Rork's documentation. No payment processor or app-revenue platform figure is public. The monthly figures range from US$17,000 to over US$30,000 depending on the date and the definition." }, { "title": "Large sports-video companies", "text": "Hudl, founded in 2006 and based in Lincoln, Nebraska, sells video and data tools to teams, from youth teams to professional clubs. It bought Ubersense, a slow-motion video app for athletes, in September 2014, and its competitors Krossover in May 2019 and Wyscout in August 2019; Bain Capital invested in May 2020. Its site says that its AI algorithms tag and track what teams film. Wrestling apps such as MatBoss and WrestlingIQ appear next to Wrestle AI in the App Store, and similar AI wrestling coach apps from another developer exist." }, { "title": "Videos of school-age athletes", "text": "The App Store page names youth and high school athletes as users, and the app is rated 13+ and has a weight-cut mode. In the United States, the COPPA law applies to online services that are directed to children under 13 or know that they collect data from them; courts can fine up to US$53,088 per violation, and in August 2026 TikTok and ByteDance agreed to pay US$400 million to settle a COPPA lawsuit. The app's privacy label lists usage data used to track users across other companies' apps and websites, and advertising data; it does not list the uploaded videos. The privacy policy on Termly could not be read." }, { "title": "One sport and one creator", "text": "Wrestle AI serves one sport, its users arrived through creators, and one wrestling creator is a 50/50 partner. No public source says what the partnership covers, who owns WRESTLE AI LLC, or what happens if the partner leaves. The October 2026 figure covers three apps with no split, so the trend of Wrestle AI alone after April 2026 is not known." }, { "title": "Dependence on Rork and OpenAI", "text": "Rork wrote the app and OpenAI models run the analysis. A price change at OpenAI changes the cost of every video, and the developer already called the inference costs \"very high\" in September 2025. A review of January 2026 says uploads repeatedly failed to analyze. A founder who does not code needs Rork or freelancers for every repair." }, { "title": "Other stories built without code", "text": "Several businesses on this site were built with Bubble, a no-code builder where the maker arranges parts on a screen: AudioPen, Formula Bot, Magai and My AskAI. No other story here names Rork, a builder that works from prompts, as its builder; the AppAlchemy story describes that market, where Rork raised US$15 million in 2026. The founder writes that hundreds of copies of his app for other sports made almost no money." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6751189075" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Rork blog, 25 February 2026: 18yo Made $131K in 6 Months with Rork", "url": "https://rork.com/blog/george-wrestle-ai-case-study", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A case study by the company that sells the app builder. Source for the revenue, MRR, spending, costs, freelancer, tech stack, prices, marketing method and the earlier failed app. It does not name the system that the figures come from." }, { "title": "Wrestle AI on the US App Store, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wrestle-ai/id6751189075", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full: description, prices, version history, privacy label, age rating, seller, ratings and reviews. Seller, dates and ratings are Apple's records; the description and prices are written by the company." }, { "title": "The Superwall Podcast, 15 October 2026: George Lampropoulos - Meet the ex-wrestler making $41k/mo with AI apps", "url": "https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/george-lampropoulos-meet-the-ex-wrestler-making-%2441k/id1831299632?i=1000796558729", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the episode page and description on Apple Podcasts. The 47-minute audio was not transcribed. Source for the three-app figure, the downloads, the 50/50 partnership and the advertising results." }, { "title": "AI Dev Cases, 24 August 2026: A Non-Coder, 18 — How Wrestle AI Turned a No-Code Build Into $131,863 in Six Months", "url": "https://aidevcases.com/en/cases/wrestle-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A compilation that quotes the founder's and Rork's posts on X and summarises the December 2025 article. Source for those quotations and for the developer name in August 2026." }, { "title": "PR Newswire, 9 April 2026: Rork Raises $15M to Power the Next Generation of App Store Entrepreneurs", "url": "https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/rork-raises-15m-to-power-the-next-generation-of-app-store-entrepreneurs-302736638.html", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Rork's own press release. Source for the April 2026 monthly figure and for Rork's funding." }, { "title": "thestartupstorys.com, December 2025: feature on Wrestle AI at US$17,000 a month", "url": "https://www.thestartupstorys.com/2025/12/how-18-year-old-turned-wrestling-app-into-17k-month-startup.html", "grade": "C", "how": "Could not open: the page returns 404, the site search does not find it, and the Wayback Machine has no copy. Its figures are cited from AI Dev Cases' summary." }, { "title": "App Store developer page: IMPROVESCAPE LLC, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/improvescape-llc/id1669492574", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Lists Fight AI and five other apps." }, { "title": "App Store developer page: WRESTLE AI LLC, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/wrestle-ai-llc/id1877830303", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Lists only Wrestle AI." }, { "title": "The Superwall Podcast episode list, superwall.com", "url": "https://superwall.com/podcast", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the episode list. It lists the episode on 12 October 2026 with a link to the video." }, { "title": "Hudl: About page, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://www.hudl.com/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for Hudl's description of its video and AI analysis for teams." }, { "title": "Wikipedia: Hudl", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudl", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the history and acquisitions sections. Source for the founding year, the acquisitions and the funding dates." }, { "title": "Wikipedia: Children's Online Privacy Protection Act", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Protection_Act", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on scope, penalties and enforcement. Source for the age limit of 13, the fine per violation and the August 2026 TikTok settlement." }, { "title": "Wrestle AI privacy policy on Termly, linked from the App Store page", "url": "https://app.termly.io/policy-viewer/policy.html?policyUUID=019ea327-0891-49fc-98db-0aa0828bb96d", "grade": "C", "how": "Could not read: the page loads its text by script, and Termly's interface answered \"Policy Not Found\" on 16 October 2026." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/glowup/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/glowup.md", "slug": "glowup", "name": "GlowUp", "country": "Canada", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI makeup try-on app", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-16", "launchLabel": "15 October 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$1.2M ARR before a sale at an undisclosed price, March 2025", "sticker": "Sold after $1.2M ARR", "outcomeUsd": 1200000, "months": 5, "teamLabel": "1 founder; Adapty writes of a small team without a number", "fundingLabel": "None reported; creators reportedly paid with equity", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "health-appearance", "channel": "creators", "trend": "sold", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2C", "Beauty" ], "product": "An iPhone app for makeup. The user uploads a selfie without makeup and a photo of a makeup look, for example from TikTok or Instagram. The app's AI applies that look to the user's own face, then gives a step-by-step routine and a list of products to buy. It is free to download and paid for with subscriptions through the App Store.", "why": "Its result is a before-and-after picture of the user's own face, which a short video shows in seconds. The founder chose TikTok as the channel before he built the app, then tripled revenue from almost the same installs by moving and testing the paywall with Adapty.", "summary": [ "GlowUp, first released as Glam AI, is an iPhone app for virtual makeup try-on: software that shows how a makeup look would appear on a person's own face before the person buys or applies anything. The user uploads a selfie without makeup and a photo of a look, for example from TikTok or Instagram. The app's AI applies that look to the user's face, then gives a step-by-step routine and a list of products to buy. The app is free to download and is paid for with subscriptions sold through the App Store.", "Louis-David Paul-Hus, a Canadian founder based in Montreal, built it after about ten apps that failed, according to the case-study site aidevcases, which gives 15 October 2024 as the release date. He posted short videos on TikTok with no advertising budget, and aidevcases reports that he later paid TikTok and Instagram creators with equity instead of cash. In March 2025 Adapty, the company whose software runs the app's subscriptions, published that the app's monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the subscription revenue of one month) had grown from US$30,000 in December 2024 to nearly US$100,000, and its annual recurring revenue (ARR, MRR multiplied by twelve) from US$400,000 to US$1.2 million, with almost the same number of installs. The founder's own website now lists GlowUp as sold, and since May 2026 at the latest Apple names Zipo Apps Ltd., a company that buys apps, as the seller. No source gives the price or the date of the sale.", "This page grades the US$1.2 million A, as it graded the Wave AI and Letterly stories. Adapty is not the payment processor, the company that moves the money, because for App Store purchases that is Apple. But every purchase passes through Adapty's software, and Adapty states the figures under its own name. A stricter reader can grade them B: the case study is a marketing page for Adapty's product, its \"today\" has no exact date, it does not say whether Apple's fee is deducted, and some of its other numbers do not agree with each other. The founder's figure of US$800,000 in 365 days is grade C. The page also shows four failed startups that sold beauty products, try-before-you-buy shopping or camera effects for selfies." ], "factsCaption": "US$1.2 million in annual recurring revenue about five months after release, stated by Adapty, the company whose software runs the app's subscriptions, before a sale at an undisclosed price", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value is stated by Adapty, the company whose software records the app's subscriptions, in its case study under its own name. A grade B value is a record in Apple's App Store, or a count or statement by Adapty that is not a payment figure. A grade C value comes from the founder, his website, the app's own pages, the buyer's website or a case-study site. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From about ten failed apps to US$1.2 million in annual recurring revenue in five months, and then a sale. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "GlowUp in-app purchases listed in the App Store on 16 October 2026, under the new owner (grade B)", "note": "The app is free to download. Apple shows ten in-app purchases and does not say whether each one is weekly, monthly, yearly or one-time; most still carry the old names Glam AI Pro and Glamly AI Pro. The new owner's terms say that premium features are sold as weekly, monthly or yearly subscriptions or as a one-time payment, with a possible free trial that renews automatically. In March 2025 the founder told Adapty that a single weekly price sold better than several prices, a three-week price and a yearly plan with a free trial.", "rows": [ [ "Glam AI Pro", "", "", "listed 7 times at 3.99, 6.99, 7.99, 9.99 and 13.99; period not shown" ], [ "GlowUp Pro", "", "", "9.99; period not shown" ], [ "Glamly AI Pro", "", "", "13.99; also 6.99 in the list of July 2025" ], [ "Unlimited Access", "", "", "8.99; not in the list of July 2025" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, March 2025", "value": "US$1.2 million", "grade": "A", "note": "Adapty: \"ARR grew from $400K in December to $1.2M today\". In the first version of the case study, published on 11 March 2025 and archived on 24 March 2025, and unchanged on the live page, last modified on 24 April 2026. The page does not date \"today\"; this page uses March 2025, the month of publication.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, December 2024 and March 2025", "value": "US$30,000, then nearly US$100,000", "grade": "A", "note": "Adapty: \"MRR jumped from $30K to nearly $100K.\" and \"It all happened with almost the same number of installs.\"", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from December 2024 to March 2025", "value": "about 3.3 times in MRR, 3 times in ARR", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 100,000 divided by 30,000 equals 3.33; 1,200,000 divided by 400,000 equals 3. US$400,000 of ARR equals about US$33,333 a month, a little more than the US$30,000 of MRR that Adapty gives for the same month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Users who saw the paywall before the tests", "value": "20%", "grade": "B", "note": "Adapty: \"only 20% of users even saw the paywall\". The founder: \"We tripled our daily revenue just by repositioning the paywall.\" A share of users is not a payment figure, so it is graded B.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Paywall and price tests, December 2024 to March 2025", "value": "more than 17 A/B tests", "grade": "B", "note": "Adapty: \"Over three months, GlowUp ran 17+ A/B tests\" of price points, free trials and paywall placement. An A/B test shows two versions to different users and keeps the one that sells better. A single weekly price won.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Lifetime value per user, over the three months", "value": "+36.4%", "grade": "A", "note": "Adapty's highlights. Lifetime value (LTV) is the revenue that one user brings over the whole time they pay. Adapty ties it to a small price increase that did not lower purchases.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue kept by declining refund requests", "value": "US$25,872", "grade": "A", "note": "Adapty: \"Saved nearly $26K ($25,872 to be exact)\" with its Refund Saver tool. The live page also says \"$1,165 in refunds won back\" and that 55 of 64 requests were declined, and the two versions give 70%, 75%, 77% and 86% as the share won. These numbers do not agree with each other.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the first 365 days", "value": "US$800,000", "grade": "C", "note": "The title of the founder's Starter Story video: \"My mobile app made $800K in 365 days\". The page does not date the video or say which 365 days.", "src": [ 7, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Average revenue per month in that year", "value": "about US$66,667", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 800,000 divided by 12.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Countries", "value": "130", "grade": "B", "note": "Adapty: \"expanding to 130 countries\".", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Users", "value": "more than 500,000", "grade": "C", "note": "The developer's text on Apple's page in July 2025 and October 2026: \"Join over 500,000 users!\". The app's 2025 website claimed \"2M+ Users and 400M TikTok Views\". No one outside has checked either figure.", "src": [ 3, 4, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Ratings on the App Store", "value": "12,700 in July 2025; 13,000 at 4.4 out of 5 in October 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's page. Some reviewers wrote that the AI changed their facial features.", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Release on the App Store", "value": "15 October 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "aidevcases, from Apple's record; Apple's page today does not show the date. The oldest version in Apple's history list is 1.0.19 of 12 December 2024.", "src": [ 6, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Time from release to US$1.2 million ARR", "value": "about 5 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 15 October 2024 to March 2025; 147 days to the publication of the case study on 11 March 2025.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Team at the US$1.2 million figure", "value": "1 founder; a \"small team\" in Adapty's words", "grade": "B", "note": "Adapty's live page: \"For a small team striving to scale its subscription system\", with no number. aidevcases calls him a solo builder, from his X post of 12 September 2025 to \"the Canadian solopreneur community\". No source names an employee.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions investors. aidevcases reports that TikTok and Instagram creators were paid with equity instead of cash; no source says how many creators or how much equity.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Advertising budget at launch", "value": "US$0", "grade": "C", "note": "Starter Story: \"he did it all by posting on TikTok for $0.\" aidevcases: \"no paid ads\".", "src": [ 7, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Company that ran the app until 2025", "value": "Viral Tech Inc.", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's page in July 2025 names Viral Tech Inc. as the seller and the copyright holder. The app's 2025 terms: \"operated by Viral Tech Inc.\" The founder's website gives a contact address at viraltech.ca.", "src": [ 4, 9, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Sale", "value": "sold; price and date not published", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder's website: \"2024-2025 · sold\" and \"was successfully acquired\". It does not name the buyer. Apple's page names Zipo Apps Ltd. as the seller by 19 May 2026, and ZipoApps writes: \"we acquire the best apps and take them to the next level.\"", "src": [ 5, 4, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Change of seller on Apple's page", "value": "between 23 July 2025 and 19 May 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "Wayback Machine copies of Apple's page: Viral Tech Inc. on 23 July 2025, Zipo Apps Ltd. on 19 May 2026. The founder dates his work on GlowUp 2024 to 2025.", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "In-app purchase prices, October 2026", "value": "US$3.99 to US$13.99", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's page lists ten prices, mostly under the old name Glam AI Pro, without the billing period. The new owner's terms name weekly, monthly and yearly subscriptions.", "src": [ 3, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Age rating", "value": "4+", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's page in July 2025 and October 2026. The 2025 terms: \"Users must be at least 4 years old to use the App.\"", "src": [ 3, 4, 9 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Before 2024", "what": "Paul-Hus ships about ten apps, and all fail. He decides to choose the channel, TikTok, before he builds the next product.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "15 October 2024", "what": "Glam AI appears on the App Store, published by Viral Tech Inc. He promotes it with his own TikTok posts and no advertising budget.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 7, 4 ] }, { "when": "Late 2024", "what": "In the founder's words to Adapty, the marketing worked before the app was ready: \"It kept crashing, and the payment system wasn't integrated.\" He fixes the app and adds payments.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "December 2024", "what": "MRR is US$30,000 and ARR US$400,000.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "December 2024 to March 2025", "what": "The subscriptions run on Adapty after RevenueCat could not run paywall tests in the FlutterFlow app. More than 17 A/B tests follow. Only 20% of users had seen the paywall; moving it tripled daily revenue. A single weekly price sells best.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "Early 2025", "what": "Three app updates carry the note \"hii girls, invite 3 friends to reveal your results! ;)\".", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "11 March 2025", "what": "Adapty publishes its case study: ARR from US$400,000 in December to US$1.2 million, MRR from US$30,000 to nearly US$100,000, users in 130 countries.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "July 2025", "what": "Updates with the note \"New Design\", and the listing carries the name GlowUp. On 23 July Apple's page shows Viral Tech Inc. as the seller, more than 500,000 users and 12,700 ratings.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "when": "12 September 2025", "what": "On his 24th birthday he writes on X that he wants to give back to \"the Canadian solopreneur community\", as quoted by aidevcases.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "Between late July 2025 and May 2026", "what": "GlowUp is sold. The founder's website lists it as \"2024-2025 · sold\". By 19 May 2026 Apple's page names Zipo Apps Ltd., which describes itself as a buyer of apps, as the seller. The price is not published.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 4, 10 ] }, { "when": "April to May 2026", "what": "Adapty moves its case study to a new address under the name GlowUp. From 20 May 2026 its old address holds a case study about another app named Glam AI, which Adapty's menu lists separately, in the Photo & Video category.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "16 October 2026", "what": "The app is live under ZipoApps: last update 2.2.3 on 7 May 2026, 13,000 ratings at 4.4, age rating 4+, and a description that still says \"previously GlamAI\".", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "The channel before the product", "text": "After about ten failed apps, the founder changed the order of his work, aidevcases writes: first the channel, TikTok, and an angle that spreads there, then the app. GlowUp's result is a before-and-after picture of the user's own face, which a short video shows in seconds. Starter Story writes that he did it all by posting on TikTok for US$0." }, { "title": "More revenue from the same installs", "text": "Adapty's data showed that only 20% of users ever reached the paywall, the screen that asks the user to pay. Moving it tripled daily revenue, in the founder's words, and MRR went from US$30,000 to nearly US$100,000 with almost the same installs. Tests also showed that several prices on one screen sold worse than one, and that a single weekly price sold best." }, { "title": "Creators paid with equity", "text": "aidevcases reports that to grow beyond his own posts, he partnered with TikTok and Instagram creators and paid them with equity, a share of the business, instead of cash. That let him enlist creators without an advertising budget. No source says how many creators or how much equity, and no creator is named." }, { "title": "Existing AI, no model of its own", "text": "aidevcases writes that he did not train a model but turned existing AI into a makeup product. His own website lists OpenAI for GlowUp. The 2025 privacy policy says that face photos go to \"trusted third-party services\" that generate the makeup looks." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's words in Adapty's case study, his own website, the app's 2025 website and privacy policy, and aidevcases. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Built with FlutterFlow, a visual tool that produces apps in Flutter, Google's framework for iPhone and Android apps, mostly by placing components instead of writing code. In March 2025 the founder told Adapty: \"we're using Flutterflow\". His own website now lists Swift, Firebase and OpenAI for GlowUp; no source says whether the app was rewritten.", "Subscriptions: first RevenueCat, then Adapty, because the founder could not run paywall A/B tests with RevenueCat in a FlutterFlow app. Purchases go through Apple's in-app purchase system.", "AI: no model of its own. The app sends the face photo and the chosen look to outside AI services; the privacy policy does not name them, and the founder's website names OpenAI. No source names the model that draws the makeup.", "Data: the 2025 privacy policy treats face images as biometric data, processed with the user's consent.", "Products: the 2025 website said that the app recommends Sephora products matched to the user's skin tone and the uploaded look.", "Marketing: the founder's own TikTok posts with no advertising budget, then TikTok and Instagram creators paid with equity, according to aidevcases." ], "src": [ 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 9 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised help with beauty purchases, try-before-you-buy shopping or camera effects for selfies. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Seerslab", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Augmented-reality effects for selfies and stories.", "died": "It needed the big social networks to carry its effects, and Snapchat had its own filters.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1463-seerslab" }, { "name": "Try.com", "years": "2018 to 2022", "funding": "US$4M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Try clothes at home before you buy them online.", "died": "High costs, the pandemic's shift to essential purchases, and Amazon's return policies.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/668-trycom" }, { "name": "Hush", "years": "2016 to 2020", "funding": "US$3M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Affordable beauty products online for young buyers on a budget.", "died": "A general beauty reseller that lost to brands selling directly, and COVID cut the demand for makeup.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/230-hush" }, { "name": "Inporia", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$1.2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Fashion and cosmetics shopping with friends' style tips.", "died": "Too many competitors, and no revenue before the money ran out.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1198-inporia" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the four needed something large to deliver its promise. Seerslab needed the social networks to carry its selfie effects and lost to Snapchat's own filters. Try.com shipped physical clothes for home try-on and paid for the returns. Hush bought and resold beauty products on thin margins. Inporia needed a social network of its own for shopping. Each raised between US$1.2 million and US$5 million and lost to larger companies.", "GlowUp needed none of that. An AI model shows the look on the user's own photo, so there is nothing to ship and no stock to hold. FlutterFlow and Adapty supplied the app and the subscription system, Apple supplied the billing, and TikTok supplied the first customers at no cost. One founder could test the idea after ten failures. The risk is the one that ended Seerslab: the large companies of the field, such as L'Oréal and Perfect Corp, already offer virtual try-on themselves." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. This niche, now crowded.", "text": "A result that a short video can show in seconds, posted on TikTok before the app was finished, and then paywall tests to earn more from each install: this method works for other consumer apps with a visual result. Makeup try-on itself is now offered by large beauty companies and by many apps.", "steps": [ "Choose the channel first, and design the app's result so that it fits a short video.", "Post the before-and-after yourself, with no advertising budget, and keep the angle that spreads.", "Measure how many users reach the paywall; GlowUp found that only 20% did, and moving it tripled daily revenue.", "Test one price against several; GlowUp's best seller was a single weekly price.", "If you have no cash for creators, offer them a share of the business, as GlowUp reportedly did." ], "open": "Other visual results shown on the user's own photo: hair color, nails, glasses or clothes, where a short video shows the before and after." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Sold, on terms nobody published", "text": "The founder's website lists GlowUp as sold, and Apple names Zipo Apps Ltd. as the seller, but no source gives the price, the date or whether the founder kept any part. The revenue figures on this page describe his period, up to March 2025, not the app under its new owner." }, { "title": "A vendor's marketing page, with numbers that do not agree", "text": "The grade A figures come from Adapty's case study, a marketing page for its own product. Its \"today\" has no date, and it does not say whether Apple's commission is deducted. Its highlights call the US$1.2 million revenue earned in three months, while the text calls it ARR, and the 2025 page title said US$1M ARR. The refund numbers differ within the page: US$25,872 or US$1,165 saved, and 70%, 75%, 77% or 86% of requests won. A stricter reader can grade the figures B." }, { "title": "The beauty industry already sells try-on", "text": "L'Oréal bought ModiFace, whose 3D virtual makeup and skin diagnosis were \"used by nearly all the major beauty brands\", on 16 March 2018. Perfect Corp, a company listed in New York, reported US$69.2 million of revenue for 2025, 14.9% more than in 2024, mainly from subscriptions to its YouCam apps and web services; it had 908,000 active subscribers on 31 December 2025, 4.0% fewer than three months earlier." }, { "title": "Beauty filters and young users", "text": "A study by Dove, a beauty brand, reported on 8 February 2022, found that 75% of Australian girls had used filters on their photos before they turned 13, and that 62% of 10- to 17-year-olds wished the world cared more about who they are than what they look like. GlowUp is rated 4+ on the App Store, its 2025 terms required users to be \"at least 4 years old\", and three updates in early 2025 told \"girls\" to invite three friends to see their results. Some App Store reviewers wrote that the AI changed their facial features toward a narrow beauty standard. No source shows a face or attractiveness score; the 2025 website offered a \"Beauty Score\" for products." }, { "title": "Dependent on FlutterFlow, Adapty, Apple and the AI providers", "text": "The app was built in FlutterFlow, its subscriptions and tests ran on Adapty, its billing on Apple's in-app purchase system, and its images on outside AI services that receive the user's face photo. The founder had already left RevenueCat when it did not fit FlutterFlow. A price or policy change at any one of them changes the app's costs or its product, and the quality of the images depends on models that the business does not control." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://zipoapps.com/glowupmakeupios/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6736916284" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Adapty case study: How GlowUp scaled to $1,2M ARR in 3 months with Adapty + FlutterFlow (published 11 March 2025, modified 24 April 2026)", "url": "https://adapty.io/case-studies/glowup/", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full, live on 16 October 2026. Adapty runs the app's subscriptions. Source for the MRR and ARR figures, the paywall tests, the refund figures, the small team and the founder's quotes." }, { "title": "Adapty case study, first version: How Glam AI scaled to $1.2M ARR in 3 months with Adapty + FlutterFlow, Wayback Machine copy of 24 March 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250324213247/https://adapty.io/case-studies/glam-ai/", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. The earliest archived copy, modified on 24 March 2025; it already gives the MRR from US$30,000 to nearly US$100,000 and the ARR from US$400,000 to US$1.2 million. Since 20 May 2026 this address holds a case study about a different app named Glam AI." }, { "title": "Apple App Store: GlowUp - Makeup & Beauty, id6736916284", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/glowup-makeup-beauty/id6736916284", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full on 16 October 2026. Source for the seller Zipo Apps Ltd., the description, the in-app purchase prices, the age rating, the ratings, the reviews and the version history." }, { "title": "Apple App Store page, Wayback Machine copies of 23 July 2025 (seller Viral Tech Inc.) and 19 May 2026 (seller Zipo Apps Ltd.)", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250723084028/https://apps.apple.com/us/app/glowup-makeup-beauty/id6736916284", "grade": "B", "how": "Read both copies; the second is at https://web.archive.org/web/20260519172353/https://apps.apple.com/us/app/glowup-makeup-beauty/id6736916284. Source for the change of seller and the 2025 prices, users and ratings." }, { "title": "Louis-David Paul-Hus's website: home page and Digital Products page", "url": "https://www.louisdavidpaulhus.com/digital-products", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both pages in full. The founder's own site. Source for GlowUp listed as sold, its stack, his base in Montreal and his contact address at viraltech.ca." }, { "title": "AI Dev Cases: From ~10 Failed Apps to GlowUp (published 27 June 2026, figures checked 15 August 2026)", "url": "https://aidevcases.com/en/cases/glowup", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A case-study site that cites the founder's X posts, the App Store, Adapty and Starter Story. Source for the ten failed apps, the release date, the creators paid with equity, the X post of 12 September 2025 and the change of publisher." }, { "title": "Starter Story video page: My mobile app made $800K in 365 days", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/Louisv2", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page; the video itself was not watched. Source for the US$800,000 and the TikTok launch for US$0. The page gives no date." }, { "title": "Glam AI website, Wayback Machine copy of 23 July 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250723101325/https://www.useglowup.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The live site did not respond on 16 October 2026. Source for the Sephora recommendations, the claim of 2M+ users and 400M TikTok views, and the product score." }, { "title": "Glam AI terms of service and privacy policy, Wayback Machine copies of 23 July 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250723101544/https://www.useglowup.app/terms-of-service", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both in full; the privacy policy is at https://web.archive.org/web/20250723101034/https://www.useglowup.app/privacy-policy. Source for the operator Viral Tech Inc., the minimum age of 4 and the face images sent to unnamed services." }, { "title": "ZipoApps home page", "url": "https://zipoapps.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The buyer's own description of its business: a company that acquires apps." }, { "title": "ZipoApps: GlowUp - Makeup & Beauty page and terms of use", "url": "https://zipoapps.com/glowupmakeupios/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both in full; the terms are at https://zipoapps.com/glowupmakeupios/terms/. Source for the current description and the weekly, monthly or yearly subscriptions." }, { "title": "L'Oréal press release, 16 March 2018: L'Oréal acquires ModiFace further expanding its worldwide expertise in beauty tech", "url": "https://www.loreal-finance.com/eng/news-release/loreal-acquires-modiface-further-expanding-its-worldwide-expertise-beauty-tech", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. The acquirer's own release." }, { "title": "Perfect Corp. results for the full year 2025, Business Wire release of 24 February 2026", "url": "https://www.01net.it/perfect-corp-reports-unaudited-financial-results-for-the-three-months-and-the-full-year-ended-december-31-2025/", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the sections on revenue and subscribers in the copy published by 01net.it; the company's own investor page did not open. A listed company's results release." }, { "title": "Marketing Mag, 8 February 2022: Dove Australia releases study revealing three in four Australian girls are using filters by the age of 13", "url": "https://www.marketingmag.com.au/news/dove-australia-releases-study-revealing-three-in-four-australian-girls-are-using-filters-by-the-age-of-13/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A trade magazine's report of a study by Dove, a beauty brand of Unilever." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/aidesigner/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/aidesigner.md", "slug": "aidesigner", "name": "AIDesigner", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI design generator for website and app interfaces", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-16", "launchLabel": "14 November 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$8.6K MRR verified by Stripe at the last sync, October 2026", "sticker": "$8.6K MRR in October 2026", "outcomeUsd": 102756, "months": 11, "teamLabel": "1 founder, no employees reported", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "build-software", "channel": "audience", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Design tools" ], "product": "A web app that turns a short text prompt into a website or mobile app screen, a logo, a brand kit or a marketing graphic. You edit the result on a canvas, export it, or publish it as a website on your own domain. An MCP server lets coding agents such as Claude Code and Cursor ask it for designs from inside a developer's project.", "why": "It named a problem that many builders saw in 2025 and 2026: screens written by AI coding tools look alike. It sold the fix inside those tools, as an MCP server for Claude Code, Cursor and other coding agents, first published on 29 March 2026. Stripe revenue in April was 12.2 times March. Since April revenue has fallen, and September was 37.2% below it.", "summary": [ "AIDesigner is an AI design generator, a web app that draws a finished visual design from a sentence of text. You describe a landing page, a mobile app screen, a logo or a brand kit, and it returns a design that you can edit on a canvas, export, or publish as a website on your own domain. It is aimed at people who practise vibe coding, which means building software by describing it to an AI coding assistant instead of writing the code. The home page promises \"Designs that don't look AI-generated\": screens without the uniform look of interfaces that AI tools write. It also offers an MCP server. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is an open standard that lets an AI assistant call outside tools, so Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, VS Code with Copilot or Windsurf can ask AIDesigner for a design from inside a developer's project.", "The founder appears as Wiz on his profile at TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a company's payment account, and in the site's own page data (X account @bowlcutWiz). The author box of the company blog names him as Tyler Yin, \"the founder of AIDesigner\". The business runs through Friend Technologies, LLC, a US company named in the terms of service. He gave 14 November 2025 as the founding date. Stripe, the payment processor, shows the first sales in December 2025, US$638, and between US$1,155 and US$3,019 a month until March 2026. On 29 March 2026 the npm package that installs the MCP server was first published; npm is the public registry for JavaScript code, and its record shows the date. April revenue reached US$14,082, 12.2 times March. On 16 October 2026 the MRR (monthly recurring revenue: what the active subscriptions bring in each month) was US$8,563 from 293 active subscriptions. That is a run rate, the monthly figure times 12, of about US$102,756 a year.", "The revenue figures are grade A. TrustMRR reads them from the company's Stripe account through an API key, a password that lets one program read another program's data, and the same account code appears in the Stripe identifiers of the prices on AIDesigner's pricing page. The trend is down: September 2026 revenue, US$8,841, was 37.2% below April, and MRR fell 5.3% in the 30 days to 16 October. The founding date, the team of one, the user counts and the account of how customers came are statements by the founder or the company, or come from a compiled page that is not an interview; they are grade C. The page also shows five earlier companies that promised to automate web design or to turn designs into code." ], "factsCaption": "Stripe-verified revenue that went from US$1,155 in March 2026 to US$14,082 in April, then declined to US$8,841 in September, with MRR of US$8,563 in October 2026", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from the company's Stripe account through TrustMRR. A grade C value is a statement by the founder or the company on its own pages, a registry record, or a compiled third-party page that says so. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a founding date in November 2025 to a twelvefold jump in April 2026 and a slow decline after it, in eleven months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "AIDesigner prices on 16 October 2026, from the company's pricing page and the plan table in that page's script (grade C)", "note": "There is one paid plan, Pro, sold in eleven sizes by the number of credits, which are spent on generations. The page text shows only the 100-credit tier; the other tiers and the yearly prices were read in the page's script. A yearly plan costs ten times the monthly price, so two months are free. The page lists these Pro features: credit rollovers, unlimited published websites, custom domains, WebGL effects and backgrounds without a watermark, advanced image tools, high-quality exports, unlimited projects and priority support. The free plan gives 5 lifetime credits without a credit card. The terms say there are no refunds unless the law requires one or the company decides otherwise.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "5 lifetime credits, no credit card" ], [ "Pro, 100 credits", "20.83", "25", "100 credits a month; US$250 a year" ], [ "Pro, 200 credits", "41.67", "50", "200 credits a month; US$500 a year" ], [ "Pro, 400 credits", "83.33", "100", "400 credits a month; US$1,000 a year" ], [ "Pro, 800 credits", "166.67", "200", "800 credits a month; US$2,000 a year" ], [ "Pro, 1,200 credits", "245", "294", "1,200 credits a month; US$2,940 a year" ], [ "Pro, 2,000 credits", "400", "480", "2,000 credits a month" ], [ "Pro, 3,000 credits", "587.50", "705", "3,000 credits a month" ], [ "Pro, 4,000 credits", "766.67", "920", "4,000 credits a month" ], [ "Pro, 5,000 credits", "937.50", "1,125", "5,000 credits a month" ], [ "Pro, 7,500 credits", "1,406.67", "1,688", "7,500 credits a month" ], [ "Pro, 10,000 credits", "1,875", "2,250", "10,000 credits a month" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 16 October 2026", "value": "US$8,563", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR reads the company's Stripe account through an API key; last synced 16 October 2026 at 20:46 UTC. TrustMRR gives it as a current snapshot.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from that MRR", "value": "about US$102,756 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$8,563 times 12. This is the headline figure of the page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions, 16 October 2026", "value": "293", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data through TrustMRR.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average MRR per active subscription", "value": "about US$29.23 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$8,563 divided by 293. Close to the US$25 price of the smallest paid tier.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the 30 days to 16 October 2026", "value": "US$10,378", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR shows +17.0% against the 30 days before. One day, 7 October 2026, brought US$2,405, about 8.7 times the average of the other 29 days (US$275), and that day is larger than the whole gain.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue all time, December 2025 to 16 October 2026", "value": "US$79,038", "grade": "A", "note": "Equal to the last 12 months: the Stripe account shows no sales before December 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Best month", "value": "April 2026, US$14,082", "grade": "A", "note": "12.2 times March 2026 (US$1,155). December 2025 to March 2026: US$638, US$3,019, US$1,715 and US$1,155.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in September 2026", "value": "US$8,841", "grade": "A", "note": "May to August 2026: US$10,639, US$11,417, US$10,762 and US$9,383. October to the 16th: US$7,390.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Fall from April to September 2026", "value": "37.2%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$14,082 minus US$8,841, divided by US$14,082. From the best month after April (June, US$11,417) the fall is 22.6%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR change in the last 30 days", "value": "minus 5.3%", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot, 16 October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Stripe account compared with the product", "value": "the same account code", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the Stripe icon link on the TrustMRR profile decodes to the account acct_1STWoUIJSxbVg0Q6, and every Stripe price ID in AIDesigner's pricing script contains its last ten characters, IJSxbVg0Q6. The profile lists only aidesigner.ai as the website.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Users", "value": "18,000+", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page, 16 October 2026, which also claims 90,000+ designs created. The founder's TrustMRR profile estimates 15,000 users. Free users are counted: the 293 subscriptions are 1.6% of 18,000.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Compiled MRR claim, 1 May 2026", "value": "US$9,500, up from under US$1,000 in 30 days", "grade": "C", "note": "Not verified. From a page that says it is compiled from public sources and written as an interview; it attributes the figure to an announcement by the founder. It agrees in size with the Stripe revenue of April 2026.", "src": [ 14, 1 ] }, { "fact": "First version of the MCP package on npm", "value": "29 March 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Registry record of @aidesigner/agent-skills: created 29 March 2026, five versions up to 11 April 2026, maintainer tyleryin.", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "fact": "Entry price", "value": "US$25 a month for 100 credits, or US$250 a year", "grade": "C", "note": "Pricing page. The largest tier is US$2,250 a month for 10,000 credits. The free plan gives 5 lifetime credits.", "src": [ 2, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Affiliate commission", "value": "20% of each referred subscription, every month", "grade": "C", "note": "Affiliate page: 20% recurring, a 30-day cookie and monthly payouts.", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 founder, 0 employees", "grade": "C", "note": "Not verified: only the compiled page gives the headcount. The company's own pages name one person, the founder, and no source mentions staff.", "src": [ 14, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions investors. The compiled page calls him a solo indie hacker.", "src": [ 14, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Operating company", "value": "Friend Technologies, LLC", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms of service: the laws of the United States apply, and there are no refunds unless the law requires one or the company decides otherwise.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Time from founding to the October 2026 figure", "value": "11 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: November 2025 to October 2026. The founder entered the founding date, 14 November 2025; the Internet Archive's first copy of the site is from 7 January 2026.", "src": [ 1, 17 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "14 November 2025", "what": "The founding date that the founder entered on his TrustMRR profile.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "December 2025", "what": "First Stripe revenue: US$638.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "7 January 2026", "what": "Earliest copy of aidesigner.ai in the Internet Archive. The archive has no earlier version of the site.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "when": "January to March 2026", "what": "Revenue of US$3,019, US$1,715 and US$1,155 a month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "29 March 2026", "what": "First version of the npm package @aidesigner/agent-skills. One command installs the MCP server, so coding agents such as Claude Code and Cursor can request designs from AIDesigner.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12, 9 ] }, { "when": "April 2026", "what": "Revenue reaches US$14,082, 12.2 times March, the best month so far.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "1 May 2026", "what": "A compiled page reports that the founder announced US$9,500 MRR, up from under US$1,000 in 30 days, after posting a demo of each new feature on X, Threads and Reddit, and that he named churn as his biggest problem. Not verified.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "2 May 2026", "what": "The company blog publishes a guide to front-end design with Claude Code that pairs Anthropic's own Frontend Design plugin with AIDesigner's MCP server.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "June to October 2026", "what": "The founder writes comparison posts on the company blog against Figma, Figma Make, v0, Lovable, Canva, Bolt and other tools.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 5, 6 ] }, { "when": "May to September 2026", "what": "Monthly revenue goes from US$10,639 to US$8,841.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "16 October 2026", "what": "MRR of US$8,563 from 293 active subscriptions, US$10,378 in the last 30 days and US$79,038 in all. The latest blog posts are from 7 October 2026.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 6 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A problem stated in one line", "text": "The home page promises \"Designs that don't look AI-generated\". That speaks to people who build with AI coding assistants and get screens that all look alike. The company blog quotes Anthropic's own front-end guidance, which says that models \"tend to converge toward generic\" outputs." }, { "title": "Sold inside the coding tools", "text": "The MCP server puts AIDesigner inside Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, VS Code with Copilot and Windsurf. One command writes the configuration files, and the agent can then ask AIDesigner for a design and put the result into the project. The npm package appeared on 29 March 2026, and Stripe revenue in April was 12.2 times March." }, { "title": "Credits that grow with use", "text": "One paid plan with eleven credit tiers, from US$25 to US$2,250 a month, and a yearly price of ten months. Heavy users pay more without a sales call. The average active subscription brings in about US$29 a month, close to the entry tier." }, { "title": "Search pages and affiliates", "text": "The blog index lists 52 posts, many of them comparisons with Figma, Canva, Lovable, v0, Bolt, Framer and Webflow, written by the founder. The site also has single-purpose tool pages, such as an ASCII art generator and a website cloner, and an affiliate program that pays 20% of each referred subscription every month." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages and page code, the npm registry and a compiled third-party page. They are grade C.", "items": [ "A Next.js web app. The page code loads Clerk for sign-in, and the checkout uses Stripe prices.", "Generation uses what the site calls \"top design models\" and \"Fine-tuned models\"; no page names the model provider. The API can first generate a reference image from the prompt, and the design model then works from that image. Its error list includes \"upstream model failure\".", "A compiled page says the pipeline uses fine-tuned image models such as Stable Diffusion or Flux. Not verified.", "Designs come out as Tailwind CSS code, the MCP page says, and can be edited on a canvas, exported, or published as a website on the user's own domain.", "The MCP server installs with npx -y @aidesigner/agent-skills init. For Claude Code it writes .mcp.json plus an agent, a command and a skill file. Sign-in uses OAuth, so no API key is stored in the user's project.", "A public API streams results in the OpenAI server-sent-event format, for developers who call it from their own code.", "Marketing: the founder's posts on X, Threads and Reddit (from the compiled page), the comparison posts on the blog, single-purpose tool pages, and a 20% recurring affiliate program." ], "src": [ 2, 3, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database promised to automate web design or to turn designs into code. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "The Grid", "years": "2014 to 2020", "funding": "US$4.7M", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Websites designed by AI, without a designer's fee.", "died": "It bet on AI before the AI was ready. Its designs looked clumsy next to polished and easy alternatives.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/618-the-grid" }, { "name": "Pagedraw", "years": "2018 to 2021", "funding": "US$1.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Turn Sketch designs into React code automatically.", "died": "It built on Sketch while designers moved to Figma, and developers preferred to write the code by hand.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1006-pagedraw" }, { "name": "Haiku", "years": "2018 to 2021", "funding": "US$1.2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Turn designers' detailed animations into code.", "died": "Figma and Adobe XD covered the same ground, and the 2020 downturn ended it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1013-haiku" }, { "name": "Pixate", "years": "2012 to 2016", "funding": "US$3.6M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Mobile app prototypes for designers, without code.", "died": "Google bought it and then set it aside, while design work moved to the web and to Figma.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/434-pixate" }, { "name": "Invision", "years": "2011 to 2023", "funding": "US$350M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Close the gap between designers' files and developers' code.", "died": "Figma offered real-time collaboration in the browser, and the users moved there.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/251-invision" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The Grid promised websites designed by AI in 2014 and died because the AI was not good enough. Pagedraw, Haiku and Pixate tried to turn designs into code and lost to design tools that more people used. AIDesigner makes both promises again, and two things are different. AI models in 2025 and 2026 can produce a layout from a sentence that 293 subscribers pay for, and many buyers now build with AI coding agents whose screens, the company's blog argues, look generic by default.", "The second difference is distribution. Pagedraw and Haiku asked developers to add a new tool to their work. AIDesigner plugs into the coding agents that developers already run, through an open protocol, so a design request is one more command in the same session. The risk that ended the predecessors is still present: Figma, Vercel, Lovable and the model makers can add the same feature to products with far more users, and AIDesigner's revenue has fallen since April 2026." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The timing, not easily.", "text": "The April 2026 jump came while AI coding agents were new and their screens looked generic, and that space is now crowded with funded tools. What can be copied is the method: name a visible weakness of a popular AI tool, sell the fix inside that tool through MCP, and price by usage so that heavy users pay more.", "steps": [ "Find a weakness that users of a popular AI tool complain about in public, and state it in one line on your home page.", "Ship the fix as an MCP server, so that it runs inside the agents that people already use, with one install command.", "Record a short demo of each new feature and post it where those users read, such as X and Reddit.", "Price in credits with many tiers and a yearly option, and pay affiliates a recurring share." ], "open": "Other weak spots of AI coding agents that users complain about in public: accessibility, copywriting, charts, animation, and a consistent brand across many generated screens." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue is falling", "text": "September 2026 revenue was 37.2% below April, and MRR fell 5.3% in the 30 days to 16 October 2026. The last 30 days show +17.0% in revenue only because of one US$2,405 day. The compiled page says the founder calls churn his biggest problem (not verified)." }, { "title": "Large funded competitors", "text": "Vercel's post of 11 October 2023 announced v0, introduced a few weeks before, which makes a website from a description of the idea. Lovable, an AI app builder, raised US$200 million at a US$1.8 billion valuation in July 2025, US$330 million in December 2025 and US$400 million at a US$13.3 billion valuation in August 2026. AIDesigner's own blog compares it with Figma, Figma Make, Canva, Uizard, Framer, Webflow and Bolt." }, { "title": "Dependence on model providers and coding agents", "text": "The site does not name the models it uses, and its API lists \"upstream model failure\" among its errors, so a provider's price change or outage reaches AIDesigner directly. Its MCP channel runs through Claude Code, Cursor and other agents that it does not control. Anthropic publishes its own Frontend Design plugin for the same problem, and AIDesigner's blog tells readers to install it first." }, { "title": "One person and a small paying base", "text": "No source mentions staff; only the compiled page gives a headcount, 0 employees. The 293 subscriptions at about US$29 a month are 1.6% of the 18,000 users that the home page claims." }, { "title": "Which revenue is counted", "text": "The Stripe account behind the TrustMRR figures is the one that AIDesigner's pricing page uses. The compiled page says the founder also built two other AI tools, and the TrustMRR profile does not say whether any other product sells through the same account." }, { "title": "A website cloner", "text": "One of the site's tools promises to \"Clone any website's design instantly\". Copying another company's design can raise copyright questions for the user and for AIDesigner." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.aidesigner.ai/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/ai-designer" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR markdown profile: AI Designer, revenue verified through a Stripe API key, last synced 16 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/ai-designer.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile. The revenue, MRR, subscription and monthly rows come from Stripe (grade A). The founding date, country, founder name, description and user estimate are written by the founder (grade C)." }, { "title": "AIDesigner pricing page, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://www.aidesigner.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The page text shows the 100-credit tier; the eleven tiers with monthly and yearly prices and their Stripe price IDs were read as text in the page's script file." }, { "title": "AIDesigner home page, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://www.aidesigner.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the user and design counts, the product list, the free credits and the quoted posts from X and Reddit users." }, { "title": "AIDesigner terms of service", "url": "https://www.aidesigner.ai/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the operating company, the governing law and the refund policy." }, { "title": "AIDesigner blog, 22 August 2026: Figma Make Alternatives: 6 Better Tools, Tested (2026)", "url": "https://www.aidesigner.ai/blog/figma-make-alternatives", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Written by Tyler Yin; its author box says that he is the founder of AIDesigner. Source for the founder's name and for the rivals that the company names." }, { "title": "AIDesigner blog index, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://www.aidesigner.ai/blog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Lists 52 posts, many of them comparisons with other tools; the latest are dated 7 October 2026." }, { "title": "AIDesigner blog, 8 June 2026: AIDesigner vs Figma: Which AI Design Tool Wins? (2026)", "url": "https://www.aidesigner.ai/blog/aidesigner-vs-figma", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Written by Tyler Yin. Source for the free plan's 5 lifetime credits." }, { "title": "AIDesigner blog, 2 May 2026: a guide to front-end design with Claude Code", "url": "https://www.aidesigner.ai/blog/claude-code-frontend-design", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on why Claude Code interfaces look generic and on Anthropic's Frontend Design plugin." }, { "title": "AIDesigner MCP server documentation", "url": "https://www.aidesigner.ai/docs/mcp", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the install command, the files it writes and the supported coding agents." }, { "title": "AIDesigner MCP product page", "url": "https://www.aidesigner.ai/ai-ui-design-mcp", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the definition of MCP, the fine-tuned models and the Tailwind CSS output." }, { "title": "AIDesigner API reference", "url": "https://www.aidesigner.ai/docs/api", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on streaming, reference images and errors." }, { "title": "npm registry record for @aidesigner/agent-skills", "url": "https://registry.npmjs.org/@aidesigner%2fagent-skills", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A registry record: created 29 March 2026, five versions up to 11 April 2026, maintainer tyleryin." }, { "title": "AIDesigner affiliate program page", "url": "https://www.aidesigner.ai/affiliate-program", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 20% recurring commission and the plan prices that it lists." }, { "title": "MRR Story, May 2026: From $1K to $9.5K MRR in 30 Days: The Solo AI Tool Fixing Ugly 'Vibe-Coded' Apps", "url": "https://www.mrrstory.com/stories/from-1k-to-95k-mrr-in-30-days-the-solo-ai-tool-fixing-ugly-vibe-coded-apps", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The page says that it is compiled from public sources and presented in an interview format; it is not an interview. Used only for leads; every claim taken only from it is marked not verified." }, { "title": "Vercel blog, 11 October 2023: Announcing v0: Generative UI", "url": "https://vercel.com/blog/announcing-v0-generative-ui", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the date and purpose of v0." }, { "title": "Lovable blog index, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://lovable.dev/blog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the list of announcements: US$200 million at US$1.8 billion (17 July 2025), US$100 million ARR (23 July 2025), US$330 million (18 December 2025) and a US$400 million Series C at US$13.3 billion (12 August 2026)." }, { "title": "Internet Archive availability record for aidesigner.ai", "url": "http://archive.org/wayback/available?url=aidesigner.ai×tamp=20240101", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The closest copy to 1 January 2024 is from 7 January 2026, so the archive holds no earlier version of the site." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/pingo-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/pingo-ai.md", "slug": "pingo-ai", "name": "Pingo AI", "country": "United States", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI language tutor app", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-16", "launchLabel": "January 2025", "outcomeLabel": "Almost US$500K a month, April 2026", "sticker": "Almost $6M/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 6000000, "months": 15, "teamLabel": "2 founders in July 2025; 3 to 4 people at the April 2026 figure (YC page: 3 in December 2025, 4 in June 2026)", "fundingLabel": "Y Combinator's standard US$500,000 (Summer 2025 batch)", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "learning", "channel": "creators", "trend": "growing", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Funded", "Running", "B2C", "Education" ], "product": "A phone app for practicing a foreign language by speaking. The learner talks out loud with an AI tutor in everyday scenes and role plays, gets corrections on pronunciation and grammar during the conversation, and the app keeps a learning plan and remembers past mistakes. More than 25 languages. A free trial, then a subscription through the app stores.", "why": "Speaking is the part of language learning that most apps practice least, and the founders built the practice partner that they had been for each other. A short video format, in which the AI points out a creator's pronunciation errors, spread on TikTok through about 100 creators that the company manages, with no paid ads by the co-founder's account, and a simple subscription turned a small part of the free users into payers.", "summary": [ "Pingo AI is a phone app for practicing a foreign language by speaking. The learner talks out loud with an AI tutor in everyday scenes, such as ordering food or booking a hotel, and the app corrects pronunciation and grammar during the conversation and remembers the mistakes for later sessions. It teaches more than 25 languages. The replies come from AI models run by other companies: its privacy policy names OpenAI and Groq, a company that runs AI models for other businesses, as the providers that receive the learners' messages and voice recordings. Learners get a 7-day free trial, by the co-founder's account, and then pay by in-app purchase, a subscription sold through Apple's App Store or Google Play: US$14.99 a month or US$99.99 a year.", "Michael Xing (CEO) and Morrie Schonfeld (COO) were roommates in their first year of college and practiced Chinese together every week, and they launched Pingo in January 2025 from Schonfeld's dorm room at Northwestern University. Two dated revenue figures from two different sources describe its growth. In their Y Combinator launch post, published on 3 August 2025, the founders wrote that as of July the app had more than 300,000 users and US$200,000 of monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the subscription revenue that repeats every month. On 20 April 2026 The Superwall Podcast, a show made by a company that sells payment screens for phone apps, published an episode with Schonfeld whose description says that Pingo \"is approaching $500K/month with 3 million users and zero paid ads\". That is a run rate, the monthly figure times 12, of almost US$6 million a year, 15 months after launch. Between the two figures revenue grew at most about 11% a month, down from the 100% a month that the founders reported for the first half of 2025.", "The team stayed small: the Y Combinator page listed 2 people in July 2025, 3 in December 2025 and 4 from June 2026, and the only outside money in the sources is Y Combinator's standard investment of US$500,000. Users came through short creator videos, mostly on TikTok, in which a creator says a phrase in a foreign language and the AI points out the pronunciation errors; the podcast description says the app got 400 million views in a single month and that the company runs about 100 creators. The episode's 3 million users fit the company site's own \"3,000,000+ Users\" of 15 March 2026, and Google named Pingo the Best Hidden Gem among Google Play's best apps of 2025. Every revenue number on this page is a founder statement, grade C. A case-study site's US$500,000 a month, which cites the founders' LinkedIn profiles, agrees with the podcast but stays marked as not verified." ], "factsCaption": "Almost US$500,000 a month in April 2026 and US$200,000 a month in July 2025: two founder figures from two different sources that agree with each other", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a statement by the founders or the company, or a third party's report that says where it came from. The two grade B values come from Google, which is independent of the company: its award list and the download count on its store. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No revenue value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From two roommates practicing Chinese to an app with more than 5 million Android downloads, in 21 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Pingo Pro prices in October 2026, from the App Store listing (grade C); the company has no pricing page and shows its prices inside the app", "note": "Pingo Pro is an auto-renewing subscription bought inside the app. The company's llms.txt file says there is a free trial and that Pingo Pro gives unlimited conversations and lessons; the co-founder says on a podcast that the trial lasts 7 days and that outside the US a 7-day trial did 2% better than a 3-day trial. A case-study site gives the same two main prices in June 2026. The yearly plan costs about 44% less than twelve monthly payments. The App Store also lists Pingo Pro at US$83.99, US$89.99 and US$17.99 without saying the period; these may be offers, other durations or prices for other countries.", "rows": [ [ "Free trial", "0", "0", "7 days, by the co-founder's account; not stated on the store page" ], [ "Pingo Pro, yearly", "8.33", "", "US$99.99 a year; unlimited conversations and lessons" ], [ "Pingo Pro, monthly", "", "14.99", "unlimited conversations and lessons" ], [ "Other Pingo Pro prices listed", "", "", "US$83.99, US$89.99 and US$17.99, period not stated" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly revenue, April 2026", "value": "almost US$500,000", "grade": "C", "note": "The Superwall Podcast, episode with co-founder Morrie Schonfeld published 20 April 2026. Its description: \"Fourteen months after launching from his Northwestern dorm room, Pingo AI is approaching $500K/month with 3 million users and zero paid ads.\" No transcript is published.", "src": [ 19 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the April 2026 figure", "value": "almost US$6 million a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: just under US$500,000 times 12. This is the headline figure on this page; US$6 million is its upper bound.", "src": [ 19 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, July 2025", "value": "US$200,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founders' Y Combinator launch post, published 3 August 2025: \"As of July, we’ve grown to 300K+ users and $200K MRR since launching in January.\" A different source from the April 2026 figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the July 2025 figure", "value": "US$2.4 million a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$200,000 times 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Growth implied between the two founder figures", "value": "at most about 11% a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: from US$200,000 in July 2025 to just under US$500,000 in April 2026 is at most 2.5 times in nine months, at most 10.7% a month. Counted to March 2026, fourteen months after launch as the episode says, it is at most 12.1% a month, the same as for the aidevcases figure below. Either way growth had slowed from the 100% a month of the first half of 2025.", "src": [ 1, 19, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Growth before the launch post", "value": "100% a month on average, 200% in the past month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founders' launch post. At 100% a month for six months, revenue doubles six times, so the January 2025 figure would have been about US$3,100 a month (calculated: US$200,000 divided by 64).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Users, July 2025", "value": "more than 300,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founders' launch post. Calculated: US$200,000 divided by 300,000 users is about US$0.67 per user a month, far below the US$14.99 monthly price, so most users did not pay.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Users, March and April 2026", "value": "3,000,000+ on the company site; 3 million in the podcast", "grade": "C", "note": "Wayback Machine copy of the home page, 15 March 2026: \"Join 3,000,000+ Users Getting Fluent with Pingo AI\". The podcast figure of 20 April 2026 fits it. Calculated: almost US$500,000 divided by 3 million users is at most about US$0.17 per user a month, against US$0.67 in July 2025, so users grew faster than revenue.", "src": [ 9, 19 ] }, { "fact": "Users claimed in October 2026", "value": "6,000,000+ learners; 8,000,000+ users", "grade": "C", "note": "Live home page and App Store description. The two company figures differ from each other.", "src": [ 8, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, about March 2026, from a case-study site", "value": "US$500,000 (not verified)", "grade": "C", "note": "aidevcases.com, 24 June 2026: \"$500K MRR (~$6M ARR)\" 14 months after launch, labelled \"Monthly (est.)\". Its sources for it are the founders' LinkedIn profiles, which this page may not open, so it stays not verified, although it agrees with the podcast. The same site writes \"peak ~70% month-over-month\", against the founders' average of 100%, and \"750K+ users\", far below the company's 3,000,000.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Later mention by the podcast host", "value": "\"hit $500K/month\"", "grade": "C", "note": "The host's solo episode of 25 September 2026 lists \"how Pingo used one to hit $500K/month\". It may repeat the April episode and gives no new date for the figure.", "src": [ 20 ] }, { "fact": "Android downloads, October 2026", "value": "more than 5 million", "grade": "B", "note": "Google Play's own count on the store page, with 4.7 stars from about 205,000 reviews. Downloads are not paying users.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Google Play award", "value": "Best Hidden Gem, best apps of 2025", "grade": "B", "note": "Google's blog, 18 November 2025: \"Best Hidden Gem: Pingo AI Language Learning\".", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Team size on the Y Combinator page", "value": "2 in July 2025, 3 in December 2025, 4 from June 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Wayback Machine copies of 28 July 2025, 17 December 2025 and 21 June 2026, and the live page on 16 October 2026. The launch post is signed by the two founders. At the April 2026 figure the team was 3 or 4. A profile site, yespress.io, says other data sources list about 24 employees; not verified.", "src": [ 3, 2, 1, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "Y Combinator's standard US$500,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Summer 2025 batch. YC invests US$500,000 in every company it accepts: US$125,000 for 7% of the company and US$375,000 on an uncapped SAFE, a contract that turns into shares at a later funding round. aidevcases.com writes \"Raised a $500K seed in Sept 2025\" and yespress.io lists seed funding in August 2025; the amount equals YC's standard deal, and no downloaded source names another investor.", "src": [ 2, 13, 4, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Prices", "value": "US$14.99 a month or US$99.99 a year, after a 7-day free trial", "grade": "C", "note": "App Store in-app purchases and the company's llms.txt file; the trial length is from the April 2026 podcast description. The yearly plan is about 44% cheaper than 12 monthly payments (calculated).", "src": [ 5, 12, 19 ] }, { "fact": "AI providers", "value": "OpenAI and Groq", "grade": "C", "note": "Privacy policy, last updated 11 August 2026: \"Our third-party AI service providers currently include OpenAI and Groq.\" Chat messages and voice recordings are shared with them. The policy does not name the models.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Creator videos", "value": "400 million views in one month; about 100 creators", "grade": "C", "note": "Podcast description, 20 April 2026: \"Running 100 creators like a VC portfolio, cutting the bottom 30%, coaching the middle\", and a roast format that \"creators invented inside a custom scenario feature hit 52 million views\". aidevcases.com counted more than 200 million TikTok views across 624 videos in June 2026, as Pingo's own public figures; not verified.", "src": [ 19, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Paid ads", "value": "\"zero paid ads\" in April 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Podcast description. The privacy policy of 11 August 2026 describes AppsFlyer measuring \"our paid advertising campaigns\", so ads may have started later, or the policy text is general.", "src": [ 19, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Users who paid nothing", "value": "200,000 in Russia", "grade": "C", "note": "Podcast description: \"Why 200K Russian users generated zero dollars, and how geo-targeting became a core distribution strategy\".", "src": [ 19 ] }, { "fact": "Age rating", "value": "4+ on the App Store, Everyone on Google Play", "grade": "C", "note": "Store listings. The app is sold as a language tutor; the App Store text calls Pingo \"your AI speaking companion\".", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Languages", "value": "25+ to learn, 15+ languages of instruction", "grade": "C", "note": "Company home page and App Store description.", "src": [ 8, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the April 2026 figure", "value": "15 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: January 2025 to April 2026, by calendar month. The episode description says fourteen months.", "src": [ 1, 19 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "First year of college", "what": "Michael Xing and Morrie Schonfeld are roommates and practice Chinese together every week. Xing is fluent; by 2025 Schonfeld has been learning it for eight years.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "January 2025", "what": "Launch on the App Store and Google Play from Schonfeld's dorm room at Northwestern, with the website mypingoai.com.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 14, 19 ] }, { "when": "July 2025", "what": "More than 300,000 users and US$200,000 a month in subscriptions, after average growth of 100% a month. The Y Combinator page lists a team of 2.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "when": "3 August 2025", "what": "Launch post on Y Combinator's site, as part of the Summer 2025 batch. YC's standard investment is US$500,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 13 ] }, { "when": "18 November 2025", "what": "Google names Pingo AI Language Learning the Best Hidden Gem among Google Play's best apps of 2025.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "17 December 2025", "what": "The Y Combinator page lists a team of 3.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "March 2026", "what": "The company's site, now at pingo.ai, says 3,000,000+ users.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "20 April 2026", "what": "The Superwall Podcast publishes an episode with Schonfeld: Pingo is approaching US$500,000 a month with 3 million users and zero paid ads, after 400 million views in one month and with about 100 creators.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 19 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "A case-study site reports US$500,000 a month at 14 months, citing LinkedIn (not verified), and more than 200 million TikTok views across 624 videos. The Y Combinator page lists a team of 4.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 3 ] }, { "when": "11 August 2026", "what": "The privacy policy names OpenAI and Groq as the AI providers that process the conversations.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "25 September 2026", "what": "The podcast's host says in a solo episode that Pingo used one creative strategy to hit US$500,000 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 20 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "6,000,000+ learners on the home page, 8,000,000+ users in the App Store text, more than 5 million Android downloads, and app version 5.4.4 released on 7 October. No open jobs.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 5, 6, 11 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Distribution through creator videos", "text": "The growth came from one repeatable video: a creator says a phrase in a foreign language, the AI says how far off the pronunciation is, and the creator reacts. People who do not learn the language also find it funny, and native speakers comment to correct and translate, so one video reaches several language communities. By the co-founder's account in April 2026, the company runs about 100 creators like a portfolio of investments, drops the weakest 30% and coaches the middle, and the app got 400 million views in a single month with no paid ads." }, { "title": "Speaking only", "text": "Most language apps teach words and grammar with taps and drills. Pingo does one thing, spoken conversation with correction, which the founders call the part most apps overlook. The learner picks a scene, talks, gets corrected during the conversation, and the app remembers the mistakes for the next session." }, { "title": "Aim at countries that pay", "text": "The co-founder says 200,000 users in Russia produced no revenue, and that geo-targeting, choosing which countries the videos reach, became a core part of distribution. A view counts only if the viewer can and will pay through the app store." }, { "title": "A simple app-store subscription", "text": "A 7-day free trial, reminders before the trial ends and messages after an abandoned purchase lift conversion, by the co-founder's account; then Pingo Pro costs US$14.99 a month or US$99.99 a year, paid through Apple or Google. Revenue per user was about US$0.67 a month in July 2025 and at most about US$0.17 in April 2026, so a small share of a very large free audience pays for the whole business." }, { "title": "Bought AI, small team", "text": "The conversations run on models from outside providers, OpenAI and Groq according to the privacy policy, so a team of two to four people could offer more than 25 languages with models that other companies run." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages, its launch post, the co-founder's podcast episode and the two app-store listings. They are grade C.", "items": [ "A phone app for iPhone, iPad and Android. The seller on both stores is Pingo AI, Inc. Category: Education. It needs iOS 15.1 or later.", "AI: the privacy policy of 11 August 2026 names OpenAI and Groq as the AI service providers and also mentions speech-processing providers without naming them. Chat messages and voice recordings go to these providers to generate the replies.", "Measurement: Firebase for analytics, and AppsFlyer to attribute installs to marketing sources and to measure paid advertising campaigns.", "Payments: auto-renewing subscriptions sold as in-app purchases on the App Store and Google Play. The payment screen uses a 7-day free trial, trial reminder messages and flows for abandoned purchases, by the co-founder's account.", "Features named in the store text and on the company's pages: a learning plan built from the learner's goals, role plays and debates, instant feedback on pronunciation and grammar, transcripts, and a feedback setting of strict, balanced or light.", "Website: mypingoai.com in the August 2025 launch post, pingo.ai by March 2026. In August 2025 the domain pingo.ai showed an unrelated Vietnamese app for finding places to eat." ], "src": [ 10, 5, 6, 1, 9, 12, 19 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold the same promise, practice with a fluent speaker over the internet, using paid human teachers. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "VIPKid", "years": "2013 to 2021", "funding": "US$1.1B", "cause": "Legal/Regulatory", "promise": "One-on-one English lessons by video between Chinese children and North American teachers.", "died": "China's 2021 education rules banned foreign tutors and foreign curriculum, which ended its business model at once.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2522-vipkid" }, { "name": "TutorGroup (iTutor)", "years": "2004 to 2021", "funding": "US$300M", "cause": "Legal/Regulatory", "promise": "Online English tutoring that connected 30,000 Western teachers with Chinese students, at about US$50 an hour.", "died": "China's 2021 ban on foreign tutors removed about 70% of its revenue, while the cost of winning each customer, over US$800, and tutor turnover were already too high.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2216-tutorgroup-itutor" }, { "name": "Qkids", "years": "2015 to 2021", "funding": "US$100M", "cause": "Legal/Regulatory", "promise": "Live small-group English classes by video, with North American teachers for Chinese children.", "died": "China's 2021 ban on for-profit tutoring for school-age children ended the business model at once.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2557-qkids" }, { "name": "Hujiang", "years": "2001 to 2021", "funding": "US$187M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Online language courses with a free tier, for 190 million users in China.", "died": "A failed stock-market listing showed that winning each customer cost too much and margins were negative, against better-funded rivals.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2556-hujiang" }, { "name": "Teacher Finder", "years": "2015 to 2019", "funding": "US$50K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Match language learners directly with tutors, without an expensive language school in between.", "died": "Better-funded tutor marketplaces won the market, and its simple product, built on Zapier automations, could not change fast enough.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1962-teacher-finder" } ], "whatChanged": [ "All five sold speaking practice with a fluent person over the internet, and the demand was real: VIPKid alone served 700,000 students at its peak, by the database's account. But each lesson needed a paid human teacher, so every hour of practice stayed expensive, and three of the five ended when China changed its tutoring rules in 2021.", "Pingo replaces the teacher with AI models bought from providers, so an extra hour of practice costs the model and voice processing, not a teacher's wage, and one app serves more than 25 languages in many countries through the app stores. The risk moved instead of going away: Pingo does not depend on teachers or on one government, but on the AI providers' prices, on the rules of the app stores and TikTok, and on whether Duolingo and ChatGPT give the same practice to their much larger audiences." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The empty market, no.", "text": "Pingo was early with a speaking-only AI tutor and found a video format that spread on TikTok. By 2026 Duolingo sells AI video calls and ChatGPT talks back, so a new copy would compete with both. What can still be copied is the method: a narrow product, a short video that shows the product's main moment, and a managed group of creators who post that format to the countries where users pay.", "steps": [ "Pick the one skill that the large apps teach worst, and build only that.", "Find the moment in the product that is funny or surprising to watch, and make it the whole video.", "Give the format to many creators, about 100 at Pingo; drop the weakest and coach the middle.", "Aim the videos at countries where users pay; Pingo's 200,000 Russian users paid nothing.", "Sell one subscription through the app stores, with a free trial, a cheaper yearly plan and reminders before the trial ends." ], "open": "Speaking practice for one exam, job or situation (medical English, job interviews, a language test for a visa), and target or native languages that the large apps serve badly." }, "watch": [ { "title": "The revenue figures are the founders' own", "text": "Both dated figures come from the founders: US$200,000 a month in their launch post (July 2025) and almost US$500,000 a month in the description of a podcast episode with Schonfeld (April 2026). No payment processor or buyer has confirmed either, and the podcast publishes no transcript. The two figures come from different sources and fit a growth rate of at most about 11% a month, and the episode's 3 million users match the company site's figure of March 2026. A case-study site's US$500,000, which cites LinkedIn profiles that this page may not open, stays not verified; that site differs from the founders on growth (\"peak ~70%\" against an average of 100%) and from the company on users (750,000 against 3,000,000)." }, { "title": "Duolingo sells the same practice", "text": "Duolingo introduced Duolingo Max, built with OpenAI's GPT-4, on 14 March 2023, and announced Video Call, spoken conversations with its character Lily, on 24 September 2024. Video Call is available to Max subscribers learning English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese." }, { "title": "ChatGPT talks back", "text": "OpenAI began rolling out voice conversations in ChatGPT on 25 September 2023, for Plus and Enterprise users on iOS and Android. One Pingo reviewer on the App Store wrote that ChatGPT's spoken role play suggests things and pushes back when instructed, in a way that Pingo's conversations did not." }, { "title": "Dependence on model and voice providers", "text": "Every conversation goes to outside AI providers, OpenAI and Groq according to the privacy policy. Their prices, quality and terms set Pingo's costs and quality, and the same providers sell to every competitor, including OpenAI's own ChatGPT." }, { "title": "Team size outside the YC page", "text": "Y Combinator's page shows 2, then 3, then 4 people. A profile site, yespress.io, says other data sources list about 24 employees, which may count contractors or the roughly 100 video creators; this page could not check it. At the April 2026 figure the YC page listed 3 people (December 2025) or 4 (June 2026)." }, { "title": "Managed creators and paid ads", "text": "The co-founder says the company runs about 100 creators and cuts the weakest 30%, so the videos are a managed program, not chance posts by fans. No source says how the creators are paid or whether the videos are marked as advertising. The episode says \"zero paid ads\" in April 2026, while the privacy policy of August 2026 describes AppsFlyer measuring \"our paid advertising campaigns\"." }, { "title": "Users are not payers", "text": "User counts grew much faster than revenue: about US$0.67 of revenue per user a month in July 2025, at most about US$0.17 in April 2026 (calculated). The co-founder says 200,000 users in Russia paid nothing. The 6 to 8 million users claimed in October 2026 say little about revenue." }, { "title": "Many similar tutors", "text": "The App Store page lists similar apps such as LingoTok and Bunpo, and this site's Verbi story is another AI speaking tutor sold through the app stores and grown with creator videos. Store reviews of Pingo complain about speech recognition in Arabic and about how to cancel the subscription; the developer replied that it had added cancellation inside the app." }, { "title": "A wider direction", "text": "The careers page says \"Pingo starts with language learning\" and that the team wants to \"Define what human–AI relationships look like\". Today the app is a language tutor rated 4+ on the App Store and Everyone on Google Play; a move toward a general AI companion would change both the market and the risks." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://pingo.ai" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6738882620" }, { "kind": "android", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.picoai.languageapp.android" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Launch YC, 3 August 2025: Pingo AI: AI companion that helps you learn languages", "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/O6R-pingo-ai-ai-companion-that-helps-you-learn-languages", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, from the page's JSON. The founders' launch post, created 3 August 2025. Source for the July 2025 revenue and users, the growth rate and the founders' story." }, { "title": "Y Combinator company page: Pingo, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/pingo-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the batch, the team size of 4, the location and the founders' roles. The address now redirects to /companies/pingo." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copies of the Y Combinator company page, 28 July 2025, 17 December 2025 and 21 June 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250728224222/https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/pingo-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the team-size field in each of the three copies: 2, 3 and 4." }, { "title": "AI Dev Cases, 24 June 2026: \"Getting Roasted by an AI\" Went Viral, How Pingo AI Hit $500K MRR in 14 Months on 200M TikTok Views", "url": "https://aidevcases.com/en/cases/pingo-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A third-party case write-up, figures checked 21 August 2026. For the US$500,000 it cites the founders' LinkedIn profiles, which this site may not open, so that figure is not verified. Source for the TikTok format and video counts." }, { "title": "App Store: Language Learning: Pingo AI, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/language-learning-pingo-ai/id6738882620", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the prices, the age rating, the user claim, the seller, the version notes and the reviews." }, { "title": "Google Play: Language Learning: Pingo AI, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.picoai.languageapp.android", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Google's own download count and rating, and the content rating." }, { "title": "Google blog, 18 November 2025: Google Play's best apps, books and games of 2025", "url": "https://blog.google/products/google-play/best-apps-games-2025/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the list of app awards. Source for the Best Hidden Gem award." }, { "title": "Pingo AI home page, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://pingo.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the learner count, the languages and the note on voice data." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of the Pingo AI home page, 15 March 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260315042639/https://pingo.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 3,000,000 users. An earlier copy, of 6 August 2025, shows an unrelated Vietnamese app on the same domain." }, { "title": "Pingo AI privacy policy, last updated 11 August 2026", "url": "https://pingo.ai/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on service providers, analytics and advertising measurement." }, { "title": "Pingo AI careers page, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://pingo.ai/careers", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the company's stated direction and for the absence of open roles." }, { "title": "Pingo AI llms.txt file, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://pingo.ai/llms.txt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's description for AI assistants. Source for the free trial and what Pingo Pro includes." }, { "title": "Y Combinator: The Y Combinator Standard Deal", "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/deal", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the description of the deal. These are YC's general terms; the page does not name Pingo." }, { "title": "yespress.io profile: Pingo AI", "url": "https://yespress.io/pingo-ai.md", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A profile site that compiles other sources. Source for the launch month, the seed-funding entry and the note that other data sources list about 24 employees; the last two were not checked." }, { "title": "Duolingo blog, 14 March 2023: Introducing Duolingo Max, a learning experience powered by GPT-4", "url": "https://blog.duolingo.com/duolingo-max", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Duolingo's own announcement; the page has since been updated to list Video Call and Roleplay as the Max features." }, { "title": "Duolingo blog, 24 September 2024: Video Call lets you have real life conversations with Lily", "url": "https://blog.duolingo.com/video-call", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Duolingo's own announcement and the list of languages." }, { "title": "OpenAI, 25 September 2023: ChatGPT can now see, hear, and speak", "url": "https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-can-now-see-hear-and-speak/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. OpenAI's own announcement of voice conversations in ChatGPT." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." }, { "title": "The Superwall Podcast, 20 April 2026: Morrie Schonfeld - How I built a $500k/mo ai app (so you can just copy me)", "url": "https://www.buzzsprout.com/2522779/episodes/19048679-morrie-schonfeld-how-i-built-a-500k-mo-ai-app-so-you-can-just-copy-me", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the episode's title, date and description in the show's RSS feed (https://rss.buzzsprout.com/2522779.rss) and on the episode page. Did not listen to the 58-minute audio; no transcript is published. The co-founder's statements as the show summarizes them. Source for the April 2026 revenue, users, views, creators, paid ads, Russian users and trial." }, { "title": "The Superwall Podcast, 25 September 2026: Joseph Choi - 1,000 Hours of Studying The Most Profitable Apps in 17 Minutes", "url": "https://www.buzzsprout.com/2522779/episodes/19864962-joseph-choi-1-000-hours-of-studying-the-most-profitable-apps-in-17-minutes", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the episode's title, date and description in the same feed and on the episode page. The host's solo episode. Source for the later mention that Pingo hit US$500,000 a month." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/3ak-track-field/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/3ak-track-field.md", "slug": "3ak-track-field", "name": "3AK Track & Field", "country": "USA", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI sprint coach app that analyses running video", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-16", "launchLabel": "15 December 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$162.8K verified revenue in 10 months, October 2026", "sticker": "$162.8K in 10 months", "outcomeUsd": 162777, "months": 10, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders, both college track athletes, and a third partner for the football app; no employees reported", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "health-appearance", "channel": "audience", "trend": "growing", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Health and fitness" ], "product": "An iPhone app for sprint training. You film a sprint, and the AI splits it into phases (reaction, drive, acceleration, top-end, speed and finish) and says what to fix. It also has an AI coach, adaptive sprint plans, a daily readiness check, strength workouts, a \"Sprint Age\" fitness score and calorie logging from meal photos. Every feature needs a subscription. It started as a track-and-field app and in August 2026 added a path for everyday people who want to get fit.", "why": "Two college track athletes already had about 150,000 Instagram followers who asked them every day for a training plan. They built that plan into an app without writing code, promoted it inside their own race videos, and priced it for teenagers.", "summary": [ "3AK is an iPhone app that coaches sprinting. The user films a sprint and uploads the clip, and the app's stride analysis, a step-by-step reading of body position and timing from video, splits the run into phases (reaction, drive, acceleration, top-end, speed and finish) and says what to work on. It also has an AI coach to chat with, adaptive sprint plans, strength workouts and photo calorie logging, in which the user photographs a meal and the app estimates its calories and macros, the grams of protein, fat and carbohydrate. Every feature needs an App Store subscription. The app was made in Rork, a no-code AI app builder: a service that writes and publishes an app from instructions in plain language, so the makers write no code.", "Braylin Byrd and Christian Rac, high-school teammates in Texas who now run track for Texas Tech and Texas Southern, had about 150,000 Instagram followers from their training videos, and daily messages asking for their training plan. The app reached the App Store on 15 December 2025, and they announced it to their followers in January 2026. By 12 October 2026 it had US$162,777 of verified sales, US$30,898 of them in the last 30 days, and monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the subscription income that repeats every month, of US$14,367 from 4,283 active subscriptions. Monthly revenue peaked at US$22,145 in March 2026, fell to US$11,330 in July and returned to US$21,652 in September.", "The revenue figures are grade A. TrustMRR, a site that shows startups' revenue read directly from their payment accounts, and a second site, whatsthe.app, both read them from RevenueCat, a service that records App Store subscription payments for app makers. The founders' own figures, such as US$10,000 in the first month and the effect of a price cut, are grade C. The founders listed the app for sale in June 2026 at US$350,000. By 16 October 2026 the TrustMRR profile no longer loaded, and no source says that the app was sold, so this page treats it as running. The page also shows earlier companies that sold coaching or form feedback to athletes and lost to larger rivals." ], "factsCaption": "US$162,777 of verified sales in the ten months from the App Store release to 12 October 2026, read from RevenueCat, next to the founders' own statements", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read from the app's RevenueCat account by TrustMRR or by whatsthe.app. A grade B value is a record that Apple shows on the App Store. A grade C value is a statement by the founders, by Rork, which sells the app builder, or by a site that compiles them. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a training post in May 2025 to a for-sale listing in June 2026 and a recovery in the autumn. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "3AK prices in October 2026, from the in-app purchase list on the US App Store page (grade B)", "note": "The App Store lists ten in-app purchase entries, with three different yearly prices, and does not say which buyer sees which. AI Dev Cases reads this as A/B testing: showing different prices to different users to compare how many buy. Calculated: the weekly plans cost about US$30.29 and US$43.29 a month (the price times 52, divided by 12). The founders launched at US$59.99 a year and US$9.99 a month. A separate 3AK Shopify store sells training programs.", "rows": [ [ "Yearly, lowest listed", "2.50", "", "US$29.99 a year; all features" ], [ "Yearly", "3.33", "", "US$39.99 a year" ], [ "Yearly, highest listed", "4.17", "", "US$49.99 a year" ], [ "Monthly", "", "9.99", "all features" ], [ "Weekly", "", "", "US$6.99 a week" ], [ "Weekly Pro", "", "", "US$9.99 a week" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue to 12 October 2026, all time", "value": "US$162,777", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from the app's RevenueCat account through an API key, synced 12 October 2026. The monthly table starts in December 2025, so the 12-month figure is the same. The profile does not say whether Apple's commission is already taken off.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 30 days to 12 October 2026", "value": "US$30,898", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. Last 7 days: US$8,047. Last 3 months: US$55,992. Last 6 months: US$104,492. The profile gives growth of 109.8% over the 30 days before; calculated, those earlier 30 days brought about US$14,727.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 12 October 2026", "value": "US$14,367 from 4,283 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot, up 27.0% in 30 days. Calculated: US$3.35 per subscription per month, and US$172,404 a year at that rate.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month", "value": "US$2,555 in December 2025, US$22,145 in March 2026, US$11,330 in July 2026, US$21,652 in September 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table. Calculated: July was 49% below March; September was 1.91 times July and 1.71 times August (US$12,676). July to September brought US$45,658, 12% less than April to June (US$52,006). The first 12 days of October brought US$15,992.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Second tracker, 28 days to 30 September 2026", "value": "US$21,344 of revenue, MRR of US$13,324, 3,817 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app, which says \"All data is verified through RevenueCat\". MRR growth over 28 days: 9.8%. Calculated: US$3.49 of MRR per subscription, close to TrustMRR's US$3.35.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "First month, and the figure reported in March 2026", "value": "US$10,000 in the first month, US$17,460 in the last 28 days", "grade": "C", "note": "Rork's case study, 9 March 2026. It says the 28-day figure is \"verified by RevenueCat\" but shows no RevenueCat data, and its headline says US$19K a month. Rork sells the app builder. TrustMRR records US$11,887 for January and US$22,145 for March 2026.", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Fall reported for August 2026", "value": "about US$9,500 to US$10,200 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "AI Dev Cases, update of 25 September 2026, quoting TrustMRR (US$9,534 in the 30 days to 17 August) and whatsthe.app (MRR of US$10,218 in mid-August). It called the cause unconfirmed. Calculated: 45% and 42% below the US$17,460 that Rork reported in March.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Prices on the US App Store, 16 October 2026", "value": "US$29.99, US$39.99 or US$49.99 a year; US$9.99 a month; US$6.99 or US$9.99 a week", "grade": "B", "note": "In-app purchase list on the App Store page. The founders say they launched at US$59.99 a year and US$9.99 a month, cut the yearly price to US$29.99, and that conversions tripled.", "src": [ 3, 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "What the subscription includes", "value": "AI stride and form analysis, AI coaching, workout programs, nutrition tracking, daily challenges, performance analytics", "grade": "B", "note": "App Store description: \"3AK requires a subscription to access all features\". The meal photo returns calories and macros. AI Dev Cases writes that the AI form analysis and the AI coach carry the product value.", "src": [ 3, 6 ] }, { "fact": "App Store rating, 16 October 2026", "value": "4.8 from about 2,200 ratings in the US, number 118 in Sports", "grade": "B", "note": "Shown as \"2.2K Ratings\". whatsthe.app counts about 2,300 ratings across all countries. Age rating 9+, marked as containing health or wellness topics. The description, written by the developer, says 50,000+ people train with it.", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Release on the App Store", "value": "15 December 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "whatsthe.app gives this worldwide release date. TrustMRR's founded date is 16 December 2025, and its first month of sales is December 2025 (US$2,555). The founders, Rork and MRR Story say they launched in January 2026.", "src": [ 2, 1, 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Founders", "value": "Braylin Byrd and Christian Rac, Division I college track athletes at Texas Tech and Texas Southern", "grade": "C", "note": "Rork, MRR Story and AI Dev Cases. They were teammates in high school and say they are 19 and 20 years old. The website shows Byrd as founder of 3AK; TrustMRR lists Rac as the founder and the seller.", "src": [ 4, 5, 7, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team at the October 2026 figure", "value": "2 co-founders and a third partner for 3AK Football; no employees reported", "grade": "C", "note": "MRR Story, May 2026: a third co-founder, a football player at West Virginia, joined to lead 3AK Football. Its profile card shows 2 founders and 0 employees. No source mentions staff.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Company and App Store account", "value": "3AKings LLC, Houston, Texas", "grade": "B", "note": "The App Store names 3AKings LLC as the seller; the website footer gives Houston, TX. The developer account is in the name of an individual whose first name is Christian, and it also publishes 3AK Football and two other apps. The TrustMRR seller message is signed \"Christian J\". No source says whether the account name is Christian Rac's legal name.", "src": [ 3, 7, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions investors. MRR Story lists the costs as Rork subscriptions, Apple's developer fee of US$99 a year and Shopify at US$39 a month.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Audience before launch", "value": "112,000 Instagram followers on Byrd's account and 42,500 on Rac's", "grade": "C", "note": "Rork, 9 March 2026, repeated by AI Dev Cases in July 2026. Rork also shows Instagram growth from 20,000 to 110,000 followers in one year, without naming the account. Byrd's relay reel of 14 February 2026, with \"3AK Method in App Store to get this fast\" on screen, had about 118,300 likes.", "src": [ 4, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Paid advertising", "value": "Meta ads at US$50 to US$100 a day", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller message on TrustMRR: \"Only paid channel is Meta at $50–100/day\". Calculated: US$1,500 to US$3,000 a month. MRR Story says no money went to ads at launch. The profile's profit margin of 80.0% is not among the metrics that it says are verified.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Sale listing", "value": "US$350,000 asked, listed 19 June 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR copy of 12 October 2026: 16 offers received. whatsthe.app shows the price cut from US$500,000. Calculated: 0.94 times the last 30 days of revenue times 12, or 2.15 times all revenue so far.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Shopify store of training programs", "value": "US$100 to US$200 a day", "grade": "C", "note": "Rork and MRR Story. Separate from the app revenue above; no tracker shows it. Calculated: US$3,000 to US$6,000 a month.", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Time from store release to the October 2026 figure", "value": "10 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: December 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "14 May 2025", "what": "A training post called \"Literal Cheat Code\" on the 3AK Instagram account gets about 3,300 likes. Commenters ask to see the method.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "Before December 2025", "what": "The two founders find Rork and spend 8 to 10 hours a day learning it, with ChatGPT to help them debug. Neither can code.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "when": "15 December 2025", "what": "Worldwide release on the App Store.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "December 2025", "what": "First verified sales: US$2,555.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "January 2026", "what": "Launch to their followers, with no paid ads by their account. TrustMRR records US$11,887 for the month; Rork reports US$10,000 in the first month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 4, 5 ] }, { "when": "14 February 2026", "what": "Byrd's relay reel with the app's name on screen gets about 118,300 likes and 549 comments.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "March 2026", "what": "The best month so far: US$22,145. On 9 March Rork publishes its case study with US$17,460 in 28 days. By then the yearly price has been cut from US$59.99 to US$29.99.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "when": "14 May 2026", "what": "Version 4.1.0 adds live run tracking and an activity tab. In May, MRR Story reports a third co-founder and a second app, 3AK Football.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3, 5 ] }, { "when": "19 June 2026", "what": "Listed for sale on TrustMRR at US$350,000. The seller writes that he is out of time and working on too many projects.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "July 2026", "what": "Revenue falls to US$11,330, the lowest month since January.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "1 August 2026", "what": "Version 5.8 adds a \"General Health and Fitness path with sprint plans built for everyday athletes\". By October the app is called 3AK Sprinting.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "Revenue returns to US$21,652. On 25 September AI Dev Cases reports the August fall.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "when": "12 October 2026", "what": "Last TrustMRR sync: US$30,898 in 30 days, MRR of US$14,367, 4,283 active subscriptions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "16 October 2026", "what": "The live TrustMRR profile no longer loads. The App Store still shows the same seller and developer account, with version 6.7 released the day before.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3, 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Audience first", "text": "Byrd and Rac posted their own training and race results for years; Byrd cut his 100-metre time from 11.4 to 10.2 seconds in one year. By launch they had about 150,000 followers and daily messages asking for their training plan. The app answered those messages, so buyers were waiting on the first day, and the founders say the first paying customer came from a reply to a direct message." }, { "title": "Promotion inside normal posts", "text": "The launch reels were race footage with one line of text: \"3AK Method in App Store to get this fast\". One had about 118,300 likes. The seller writes that Meta ads at US$50 to US$100 a day are the only paid channel, and that influencers, videos by other creators, App Store search optimization and marketing outside the US were never tried." }, { "title": "Priced for teenagers", "text": "The founders say their buyers are high-school and college athletes aged about 15 to 22. They cut the yearly price from US$59.99 to US$29.99, about US$2.50 a month, and say conversions tripled. Calculated from TrustMRR, the average subscription now brings US$3.35 a month." }, { "title": "A niche the large apps leave open", "text": "The founders describe Strava and Nike Run Club as apps that track miles. 3AK reads a sprint start, the drive phase and top speed from a phone video, the questions that sprinters ask. In August 2026 it widened to everyday people who want to get fit by sprinting, and September revenue was 1.91 times July's." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founders, Rork, the TrustMRR profile and the App Store page. Only the App Store records are checked by Apple; the rest is grade C.", "items": [ "Built entirely in Rork by two founders with no coding experience. The app's bundle ID, its internal name on the App Store, starts with app.rork.", "ChatGPT helped them debug when they were stuck.", "TrustMRR's tech stack, entered by the founder, lists SwiftUI, Apple's interface framework, for the app, Supabase for the backend database and RevenueCat for subscriptions.", "The AI features: stride analysis of an uploaded video in six phases, an AI coach in a chat, and meal photos turned into calories and macros. No source names the AI models behind them.", "The App Store page lists 25 versions between 4 April and 15 October 2026, most of them bug fixes. Reviews in February and March reported failed video uploads and unreadable coach messages.", "A Shopify store sells training programs as PDF files that promote the app, and the app promotes the store.", "Costs named by the founders: Rork subscriptions, Apple's US$99 a year and Shopify's US$39 a month, plus the Meta ads that the seller describes." ], "src": [ 4, 5, 1, 3 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold coaching, form feedback or fitness tracking to active people and failed, all of them against larger competitors. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Charge Running", "years": "2021 to 2024", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Live running classes with a coach speaking in your headphones, as in a group class.", "died": "The database summary says AI fitness apps gave the same personal attention without fixed class times.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/895-charge-running" }, { "name": "Enflux", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$1M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Clothing with sensors that tracked movement in 3D and gave real-time feedback on exercise form.", "died": "Hardware with high manufacturing costs, in a wearables market led by Fitbit and Apple.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1089-enflux" }, { "name": "Jawbone", "years": "1999 to 2017", "funding": "US$930M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "UP fitness wristbands that turned daily activity data into health advice.", "died": "Lost to Fitbit and Apple after US$930 million of funding, product recalls and lawsuits.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/257-jawbone" }, { "name": "Fitmob", "years": "2013 to 2017", "funding": "US$9.8M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Low-cost group workouts in many venues, with a community around them.", "died": "ClassPass won the studio partnerships while Fitmob spent about US$10 million organizing pop-up classes.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/151-fitmob" } ], "whatChanged": [ "All four predecessors needed expensive things to deliver coaching or feedback: sensor clothing (Enflux), wristbands (Jawbone), live instructors on a schedule (Charge Running) or class venues (Fitmob). Each raised venture money, and each lost to a larger competitor. 3AK needs no hardware and no instructors: the analysis works on a video from the user's own phone, and the costs that the founders name are software subscriptions, Apple's fee and Meta ads of US$50 to US$100 a day.", "The second difference is how customers arrived. The predecessors had to find their users; 3AK started with two athletes' Instagram audiences, which the founders built over years from their own training posts. The cause that ended all four, a larger competitor, is still present: Strava, which says it has more than 150 million registered users, agreed in April 2025 to buy Runna and its AI-powered training plans." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes, if you already have the audience.", "text": "The founders built the app without code, so the software is not the hard part. The hard part took years: about 150,000 followers who trusted two athletes because of their own race results, and who asked for the product before it existed. Without such an audience, the same app would have to buy its users with ads.", "steps": [ "Choose a sport you compete in, and post your own training and race results until people ask for your plan.", "Treat the questions people send you as the feature list.", "Build the app with a no-code builder, put the analysis and the coach behind a subscription, and show the app inside your normal posts.", "Price for the buyers you have: these founders halved the yearly price for high-school athletes." ], "open": "Sports in which a phone camera can see the technique and young athletes follow athlete-creators: jumps, throws, swimming and pitching. 3AK Football and Wrestle AI already cover two other sports." }, "watch": [ { "title": "A summer fall, then a recovery", "text": "Revenue fell from US$22,145 in March to US$11,330 in July, and AI Dev Cases reported MRR near US$10,000 in August. September brought US$21,652, and the 30 days to 12 October brought US$30,898. The rise came after the 1 August update that opened the app to everyday fitness users; no source says that the update caused it." }, { "title": "For sale, and the TrustMRR profile is gone", "text": "The app has been listed since 19 June 2026 at US$350,000, cut from US$500,000 on whatsthe.app. By 16 October 2026 the live TrustMRR profile no longer loaded, and the Wayback Machine has no copy. No source says that the app was sold, and the App Store still shows the same seller and developer account. A buyer would not get the two Instagram accounts that bring most customers." }, { "title": "Strava and Runna", "text": "Strava announced on 17 April 2025 that it would buy Runna, a running-plan app that Tom's Guide calls an AI run coaching app. Strava's own AI feature, Athlete Intelligence, entered a beta test for subscribers in May 2024. Runna's plans target races such as 5K runs and marathons. Neither source mentions sprint video analysis, which either company could add." }, { "title": "Rork and unnamed AI models", "text": "The founders do not write code, so every update depends on Rork, its prices and its terms. The stride analysis and the coach use AI models that no source names, so this page cannot say what they cost or who could change them." }, { "title": "Another Rork coach on this site", "text": "Wrestle AI, a wrestling coach also built in Rork and promoted through a creator's audience, reported US$131,863 in total revenue by February 2026 in Rork's figures (grade C), while 3AK's figures come from RevenueCat through two trackers (grade A)." }, { "title": "Statements that do not agree", "text": "MRR Story says no money went to ads at launch and that the founders tested videos by other creators; the seller message says Meta ads are the only paid channel and that such videos were never run. The founders say January 2026, while sales started in December 2025. The website says sprinting gives \"More testosterone and growth hormone, naturally\"; this page did not check that claim. Apple rates the app 9+, and the founders say most buyers are 15 to 22 years old." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://3akathletics.com/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6756290066" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/3ak-track-field" }, { "kind": "whatsthe", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/braylin" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of 3AK Track & Field, as read on 12 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/3ak-track-field.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full, from the copy that this site's pipeline saved; revenue synced 12 October 2026 from RevenueCat through an API key. The live profile no longer loaded on 16 October 2026, and the Wayback Machine has no copy. Revenue, MRR and subscription counts are grade A; the seller message, the asking price, the tech stack and the profit margin are written by the founder, grade C." }, { "title": "whatsthe.app listing of 3AK", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/braylin", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full on 16 October 2026. Metrics \"verified through RevenueCat\", last updated 30 September 2026. Source for the second revenue reading, the release date and the price cut of the listing." }, { "title": "Apple App Store: 3AK Sprinting", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6756290066", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full on 16 October 2026. Source for the features, the subscription list, the age rating, the ratings, the seller, the developer account and the version history." }, { "title": "Rork blog, 9 March 2026: Two college athletes are making $19K/mo with an app they built in Rork", "url": "https://rork.com/blog/3ak-case-study", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Written by Rork, which sells the app builder. Source for the founders, the first-month revenue, the 28-day figure, the Instagram audiences, the reels and the price cut." }, { "title": "MRR Story, May 2026: This No-Code Sports App Hit $45K in 2 Months", "url": "https://www.mrrstory.com/stories/this-no-code-sports-app-hit-45k-in-2-months", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Written in the founders' voice; the page does not say whether they were interviewed. Source for the tools, the costs, the ages, the third co-founder and 3AK Football." }, { "title": "AI Dev Cases, 13 July 2026, updated 25 September 2026: How 3AK was built in Rork", "url": "https://aidevcases.com/en/cases/3ak", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A compiled case study. Source for the August 2026 fall that it read from two trackers and for the reading of the price list as A/B testing." }, { "title": "3AK website", "url": "https://3akathletics.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 16 October 2026. Source for the company name and city, the general-fitness message and Byrd's role as founder." }, { "title": "Strava press release, 17 April 2025: Strava to Acquire Runna, A Leading Running Training App", "url": "https://press.strava.com/articles/strava-to-acquire-runna-a-leading-running-training-app", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. The acquirer's own announcement; the user count is Strava's own figure. Source for the date and the 150+ million registered users." }, { "title": "Tom's Guide: Strava just bought the AI run coaching app Runna", "url": "https://www.tomsguide.com/wellness/fitness/strava-just-bought-the-ai-run-coaching-app-runna-heres-what-it-means-for-you", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the article. A reviewer's description of Runna's AI-powered training plans." }, { "title": "Strava press release, 16 May 2024, on Fitt Insider: Strava unveils new chapter of accelerated product development", "url": "https://insider.fitt.co/press-release/strava-unveils-new-chapter-of-accelerated-product-development-at-brands-flagship-event/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the press release. Source for Athlete Intelligence, Strava's AI feature in beta for subscribers." }, { "title": "Aiolum story: Wrestle AI", "url": "https://aiolum.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the story file on this site for the one-sentence comparison. Its revenue figures come from Rork, grade C." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/draft-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/draft-ai.md", "slug": "draft-ai", "name": "Draft AI", "country": "Georgia", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "iPhone app that turns voice memos into carousels and posts", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-16", "launchLabel": "15 August 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$21.6K MRR, October 2026", "sticker": "$259K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 259332, "months": 14, "teamLabel": "1 person, a private entrepreneur in Georgia; no other person is named in any source", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Simplicity", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Marketing content" ], "product": "An iPhone app that turns a voice memo of 30 seconds to 2 minutes into an Instagram or LinkedIn carousel, a reel or TikTok script, a thread for X, story scripts and hooks. It places the text on templates and exports PNG images or a PDF. It can also learn the user's writing style, suggest post ideas, and turn a pasted video link into the user's own carousel.", "why": "A carousel needs both writing and design. Draft AI asks for a minute of speech instead and returns finished slides, plus scripts, threads and hooks from the same recording. It charges before the first result, so everyone who uses it has subscribed or started the trial of a paid plan.", "summary": [ "Draft AI is an iPhone app that turns a short voice recording into social media posts. The user speaks an idea for 30 seconds to 2 minutes. The app makes a transcript, the written text of the recording, with OpenAI's Whisper service. Then a large language model, a program trained on large amounts of text that writes new text from an instruction, turns the transcript into the chosen format: a carousel, a post of several image slides that the reader swipes through on Instagram or LinkedIn, a script for a short video, a thread for X, or hooks, the first lines of a post that make a reader stop and read. The app places the carousel text on templates and exports PNG images or a PDF, and the user posts them. The models are reached through OpenRouter, a service that gives one programming interface to models from many companies.", "Valery Alexeev is the only person that any source connects to the app. Apple lists the seller as Valerii Alekseev, a person and not a company, and the app's legal pages name the operator as \"P/E Valerii Alekseev\": a private entrepreneur, which is a legal form for one person doing business, with an address in Tbilisi, Georgia. Version 1.0 appeared on the App Store on 15 August 2025. The download is free, but the app generates nothing until the user subscribes to Draft+ at US$14.99 a month or US$99.99 a year. This design is a hard paywall: a payment screen in front of the main feature, with no free version behind it. On 16 October 2026 the app had 1,672 active subscriptions and an MRR, monthly recurring revenue, the subscription revenue that repeats every month, of US$21,611, or about US$259,000 a year.", "The revenue figures are grade A. TrustMRR, a site that publishes startup revenue read directly from the payment system, takes them from RevenueCat, a service that app makers use to manage subscriptions sold through the app stores, through an API key, a password that lets one program read another program's data. A second site, whatsthe.app, connects to the app's RevenueCat account separately and showed an MRR of US$23,181 on the same day. The monthly figures form an uneven line: US$36,614 in January 2026, US$14,206 in June, US$34,650 in August and US$25,520 in September, so this page marks the trend as falling. No source says how customers find the app." ], "factsCaption": "Payment-system data shows US$21,611 in monthly recurring revenue and US$268,272 earned from December 2025 to 16 October 2026, below the best months of January and August 2026", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from the app's subscription data in RevenueCat, read by TrustMRR or whatsthe.app through the owner's API key. A grade C value comes from the app's own pages, the App Store listing or the founder's entries on TrustMRR. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From the first App Store version to US$21,611 in monthly recurring revenue in 14 months, with two high points and a deep fall between them. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Draft AI prices in October 2026, from the in-app purchase list on the US App Store page and the app's terms (grade C)", "note": "All plans are Apple in-app subscriptions, and Apple handles refunds. The monthly plan has no free trial. The yearly plan starts with a 7-day trial limited to 10 generations, then gives unlimited generations. Without a subscription the app generates nothing. The App Store list also shows \"Draft+ / Skip Trial\" at US$79.99, and no source says what period it covers. Prices vary by country.", "rows": [ [ "Free download", "0", "0", "no generations: the app can be opened, not used" ], [ "Draft+ yearly", "8.33", "", "US$99.99 a year; 7-day trial with 10 generations, then unlimited" ], [ "Draft+ monthly", "", "14.99", "unlimited generations; no trial" ], [ "Draft+ Skip Trial", "", "", "US$79.99 listed; period not stated" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 16 October 2026", "value": "US$21,611", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, from RevenueCat through the founder's API key, synced on 16 October 2026 at 20:56 UTC. A second TrustMRR profile for the same app shows the same figure and is counted once.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions, 16 October 2026", "value": "1,672", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, from RevenueCat.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days, to 16 October 2026", "value": "US$21,361", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. The profile gives the change against the 30 days before as -25.3%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Total verified revenue, December 2025 to 16 October 2026", "value": "US$268,272", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR's all-time figure; its monthly table starts in December 2025. The second profile starts in February 2026 and shows US$207,379, which is the same total without December and January. No source gives revenue for August to November 2025.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Second verification, 16 October 2026", "value": "MRR US$23,181; revenue US$23,639", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app, a leaderboard that reads app revenue through the owner's read-only RevenueCat key, for the app with the bundle ID app.Draft. The page does not state the period of its revenue column. Its MRR is 7.26% above TrustMRR's.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month", "value": "Dec 2025 US$24,279; Jan 2026 US$36,614; Feb US$31,303; Mar US$32,080; Apr US$18,997; May US$18,286; Jun US$14,206; Jul US$21,839; Aug US$34,650; Sep US$25,520", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, from RevenueCat. October 2026 stood at US$10,496 on the 16th.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Change from the best recent months", "value": "September 2026: 26.3% below August and 30.3% below January", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the monthly rows. The last 30 days are 38.4% below August. June 2026 was 61.2% below January, and August was 143.9% above June.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate", "value": "about US$259,332 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the MRR of US$21,611 times 12. This is the headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per active subscription", "value": "about US$12.93 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: MRR divided by 1,672 subscriptions. It lies between the yearly plan, US$8.33 a month, and the monthly plan, US$14.99.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "95.0%", "grade": "C", "note": "Shown on the second TrustMRR profile. The profile does not say which costs are counted, so this page does not treat it as verified.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "First App Store version", "value": "1.0, 15 August 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "App Store version history. The privacy policy and terms are effective from 2 August 2025. The founder's TrustMRR entry gives 1 September 2025 as the founding date.", "src": [ 4, 5, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 person", "grade": "C", "note": "Apple lists the seller as an individual, Valerii Alekseev. The legal pages name the operator as P/E Valerii Alekseev, a private entrepreneur. No source names a co-founder or an employee.", "src": [ 4, 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Country", "value": "Georgia", "grade": "C", "note": "The privacy policy gives the operator's address in Tbilisi, Georgia.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions investors.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "App Store ratings, 16 October 2026", "value": "35 ratings, average 4.0", "grade": "C", "note": "US App Store page.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Versions released", "value": "21, from 15 August 2025 to 16 September 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "App Store version history.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October 2026 figure", "value": "14 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: August 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2 August 2025", "what": "The privacy policy and the terms of service take effect. They name the operator as P/E Valerii Alekseev.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "when": "15 August 2025", "what": "Version 1.0 appears on the App Store. Four small updates follow by 30 August.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "12 September 2025", "what": "Version 1.1: photos in the carousel editor, more languages, and an option to ask the AI to keep the user's original words.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "21 October 2025", "what": "Version 1.1.1: an updated carousel editor with new templates, fonts, photo upload and export to PDF.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "2 November 2025", "what": "The app is listed on whatsthe.app, a leaderboard that reads app revenue from RevenueCat.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "December 2025", "what": "The first month in TrustMRR's verified history: US$24,279.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "6 January 2026", "what": "Version 1.2.0 adds an idea generator: the user describes a niche and swipes through suggested posts with hooks, right to save, left to skip.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "January 2026", "what": "The best month so far: US$36,614. February and March stay above US$31,000.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "24 April 2026", "what": "Version 1.3: the user pastes a link to a TikTok, Instagram or YouTube video, and the app turns it into the user's own carousel, post or script.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "April to June 2026", "what": "Revenue falls to US$18,997, then US$18,286, then US$14,206 a month, 61.2% below January.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "24 July 2026", "what": "The updated privacy policy names the services behind the app: OpenAI's Whisper API for speech, OpenRouter for text generation, and Apify for reading public Instagram posts.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "August 2026", "what": "Revenue comes back to US$34,650, the second-best month, 143.9% above June.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "US$25,520. Version 1.4.1 is released on 16 September.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "when": "16 October 2026", "what": "MRR of US$21,611 from 1,672 active subscriptions, and US$21,361 in the last 30 days, 25.3% less than in the 30 days before. whatsthe.app shows an MRR of US$23,181.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 3 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Speak instead of type", "text": "The user records 30 seconds to 2 minutes of speech. OpenAI's Whisper API turns the audio into text, and the privacy policy says the audio file is deleted right after processing. A language model reached through OpenRouter then writes the carousel, script or thread. The App Store page's own example is a morning walk that becomes a carousel." }, { "title": "Writing and design in one step", "text": "A carousel needs text and a layout. The app places the generated text on templates, with fonts, brand colors, photo upload and sizes for Instagram and LinkedIn, and exports PNG or PDF. The user does not need a separate design tool." }, { "title": "Payment before the first result", "text": "Free users can open the app but generate nothing. The yearly plan starts with a 7-day trial limited to 10 generations, and the monthly plan has no trial. The terms mention an older system of prepaid balances that is being phased out. So every person who gets a result is a subscriber, or a trial user whose subscription starts unless cancelled." }, { "title": "One recording, many formats", "text": "The same voice memo gives an Instagram carousel, LinkedIn slides, a reel or TikTok script, an X thread, story scripts and hooks, in English and 25 more languages. New versions added new inputs to the same app: an idea generator in January 2026 and video links in April 2026." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the app's privacy policy, the page source of getdraft.io, the App Store listing and the technology list on the second TrustMRR profile, which the founder fills in. They are grade C.", "items": [ "The iPhone app is built with SwiftUI, Apple's framework for app screens, according to the TrustMRR technology list.", "The server and the website use Laravel, a PHP framework, according to the same list. The page source of getdraft.io shows Inertia.js, a library that connects a server framework such as Laravel to JavaScript pages.", "Speech to text: the OpenAI Whisper API. Text: \"various AI models\" through the OpenRouter API, and the privacy policy says the app optimizes \"AI model selection\". No source names the models.", "When a user gives Instagram links as examples, Apify, a web-scraping service, extracts the public content so that the app can write similar posts.", "Payments: Apple In-App Purchase, with RevenueCat for subscription management and analytics. The TrustMRR list also names Stripe; no source says what Stripe is used for.", "Measurement: Firebase Analytics, Mixpanel and Sentry in the app, and the Meta Pixel and PostHog on the website. Sign-in is with Apple, or anonymous and tied to the device.", "The website has a blog with 84 articles in its sitemap, dated from November 2025 to October 2026, for example a comparison of AI and manual carousel design." ], "src": [ 5, 7, 4, 2, 8 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold tools that made posting or writing easier, and the platforms or larger software makers then built the same help into their own products or changed the rules. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Pixelpipe", "years": "2008 to 2013", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Post photos, videos and audio to many social networks at once.", "died": "Facebook and Twitter added their own sharing features and closed their APIs to it, and it never found a way to charge.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/435-pixelpipe" }, { "name": "PostRocket", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$610K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "More reach for brands' Facebook posts, by choosing the time and the content.", "died": "Facebook changed its feed and its rules and pushed brands toward its own ads, while Hootsuite and Buffer covered more networks.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/457-postrocket" }, { "name": "Draft", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A simple writing tool with version control and editing help for writers.", "died": "Google Docs added similar features, and a free plan without a clear way to paid use did not cover the costs.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1605-draft" }, { "name": "Argyle Social", "years": "2009 to 2013", "funding": "US$2.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A social media marketing tool for engagement and sales leads.", "died": "Larger competitors outspent it on marketing, and the platforms it depended on built their own tools for brands.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1832-argyle-social" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the four helped people publish on platforms that it did not own, and each closed after the platforms, or larger software makers, built the same help in or changed their rules. Draft AI depends on the same kind of owners: LinkedIn offered its members AI-written drafts of posts from 2023 until it removed its AI writer in September 2026, Instagram was testing captions written by Meta AI in March 2025, and Apple controls the store and the payments.", "Two things differ. First, Draft AI does not use any platform's API to publish: it exports images and the user posts them, so a change in LinkedIn's or Instagram's interfaces cannot switch it off. Second, it charges before the first result through Apple's subscription system, so its revenue does not wait for a business model. Its new weak point is the platforms' attitude to AI text: LinkedIn now lets members report posts as AI slop and shows such posts less outside the writer's own network." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product, yes. The sales channel is not public.", "text": "Every part is a bought service: speech to text from OpenAI, text models through OpenRouter, payments through Apple and RevenueCat. The founder added one flow from speech to finished slides, and a price before the first result. No source explains how 1,672 subscribers found the app, so a copy has to solve that part alone.", "steps": [ "Choose a format that needs two tools today, such as writing plus design for carousels, and make one app do both.", "Take the input by voice, so that the user does not have to sit down and write.", "Charge before the first result: a monthly plan, and a yearly plan with a short trial that has a usage limit.", "Connect the subscription account to a revenue-verification site, so that buyers and partners can check the numbers." ], "open": "Other formats that need text plus layout: newsletters, slide decks, captions for short videos, and posts for platforms whose own AI writing tools are limited." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue is below its best months", "text": "September 2026 was 26.3% below August and 30.3% below January, and the last 30 days were 25.3% below the 30 days before. Revenue fell 61.2% from January to June 2026 and then came back, so the history is short and uneven. The verified data starts in December 2025, four months after launch." }, { "title": "The platforms write posts too", "text": "By 26 September 2023 LinkedIn had a tool that writes a first draft of a post from a member's ideas. In March 2025 Instagram was testing \"Write with Meta AI\", which suggests captions and comments based on the photo. Either company can add more writing help to its own app at no charge to members." }, { "title": "LinkedIn is acting against AI-written posts", "text": "On 31 July 2026 LinkedIn added a \"Seems like AI slop\" report option, said that it already shows low-effort AI posts less outside the writer's own network, and removed its own AI rewriting feature. Metricool reported on 2 October 2026 that members had used the report option more than a million times in under three weeks, and that Premium members now get a proofreader that only edits their own words. Posts that read as machine-written may reach fewer people." }, { "title": "The same field on this site", "text": "Kleo and EasyGen, LinkedIn writing tools run by small teams, reported more than US$1 million in revenue by September 2026 and US$41,500 a month in 2024, and aiCarousels, a one-person Swedish carousel tool, reported US$5,000 a month in November 2023; all three are founder statements (grade C), while Draft AI is the only one of the four with payment-system data and the only phone app." }, { "title": "Apple sets the terms", "text": "Every subscription runs through Apple's in-app purchase system, and Apple decides refunds. Apple's commission is 15% for developers with up to US$1 million in yearly proceeds, and its standard rate applies above that. App review, store search and refunds are all Apple's decisions, and no source shows sales outside the App Store." }, { "title": "Bought models", "text": "Transcription comes from OpenAI's Whisper API and the writing from models reached through OpenRouter. Other companies set their prices, rules and quality, and the same models are open to every competitor and to Meta and LinkedIn." }, { "title": "Content made from other creators' posts", "text": "Since version 1.3 users can paste a link to another person's TikTok, Instagram or YouTube video and turn it into their own post, and the privacy policy says Apify extracts public Instagram content to \"Generate similar content based on examples\". The platforms or the original creators may object to posts made this way." }, { "title": "Unknown sales channel, one RevenueCat account", "text": "No source says how customers find the app. The founder's X account had 169 followers, and the website loads the Meta Pixel, code that measures visitors for Facebook and Instagram advertising; no source says whether ads were bought. He also sells two other apps. The revenue sources tie the data to the Draft app's bundle ID, app.Draft, but cannot show whether the other two apps report into the same RevenueCat account." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://getdraft.io" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6749152418" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/draft-ai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR, Draft AI markdown profile (slug draft-ai), revenue synced 16 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/draft-ai.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile. Revenue, MRR, subscriptions and the monthly table come from RevenueCat through an API key, as its Verification Sources section states; the description and founder fields are founder-written (grade C)." }, { "title": "TrustMRR, Draft AI markdown profile (slug draft-ai-1), revenue synced 16 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/draft-ai-1.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile. The same RevenueCat data with a shorter history, counted once. Source for the founding date, the technology list and the profit margin, which are founder entries or unexplained (grade C)." }, { "title": "whatsthe.app leaderboard, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/leaderboard", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the table row and the embedded listing data for Draft AI: MRR, revenue, bundle ID, credential type and listing date." }, { "title": "App Store: Draft AI: Carousel Post Maker, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6749152418", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The description is the developer's; the seller, the in-app purchase prices, the ratings, the version history and the developer's other apps are shown by Apple." }, { "title": "Draft privacy policy, last updated 24 July 2026", "url": "https://app.getdraft.io/legal/privacy-policy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the operator, the country, and the AI, analytics and payment services." }, { "title": "Draft terms of service, last updated 24 July 2026", "url": "https://app.getdraft.io/legal/terms-of-service", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the plans, the trial, the generation limits and the prepaid balances." }, { "title": "Draft AI home page, getdraft.io, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://getdraft.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "The page renders by script. Read the landing text embedded in its page data, and the page source, which names the Meta Pixel and PostHog and uses Inertia.js." }, { "title": "getdraft.io sitemap, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://getdraft.io/sitemap.xml", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Lists the home page, the blog and 84 blog articles with their dates." }, { "title": "Apple Developer: App Store Small Business Program", "url": "https://developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 15% commission and the US$1 million threshold." }, { "title": "Digital Works, 26 September 2023: LinkedIn's AI-powered writing tool for posts", "url": "https://digitalworks.dk/en/artikler/linkedins-ai-powered-writing-tool-for-posts", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A Danish agency's description of LinkedIn's tool that drafts posts." }, { "title": "Passionfruit, 19 March 2025: You Can Now Write Instagram Captions and Comments With AI", "url": "https://passionfru.it/instagram-ai-comments-161432/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Reports Instagram's suggested captions written by Meta AI." }, { "title": "Ubergizmo, 21 March 2025, by Paulo Montenegro: Meta Tests AI-Generated Comments To Enhance User Interaction On Instagram", "url": "https://www.ubergizmo.com/2025/03/meta-ai-instagram/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Reports the Write with Meta AI test and quotes Meta's statement." }, { "title": "ProPakistani, 31 July 2026: LinkedIn Finally Adds a Button To Kill All That AI Slop", "url": "https://propakistani.pk/2026/07/31/linkedin-finally-adds-a-button-to-kill-all-that-ai-slop/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Reports LinkedIn's statements; LinkedIn's own pages were not read because linkedin.com may not be fetched." }, { "title": "Metricool, 2 October 2026: LinkedIn Swaps Its AI Post Writer for a Proofreading Tool", "url": "https://metricool.com/linkedin-post-proofreader/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/brawler/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/brawler.md", "slug": "brawler", "name": "Brawler", "country": "USA", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI boxing coach app that scores training video", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-16", "launchLabel": "1 May 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$22.6K MRR, October 2026", "sticker": "$271K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 271200, "months": 5, "teamLabel": "2 people according to one sale listing; only the founder is named", "fundingLabel": "None reported; listed as bootstrapped", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "health-appearance", "channel": "creators", "trend": "growing", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Health and fitness" ], "product": "An iPhone app that coaches boxing. The user uploads a video of shadowboxing, bag work or sparring, and the AI scores the technique in seven areas (stance and balance, guard, footwork, punch selection, combinations, head movement, range control) with corrections and drills. It also has an AI chat coach, training programs, a punch callout mode with audio cues, a round timer, AI food logging from a photo, a barcode or voice, and a weight-cut mode. Every feature needs a subscription.", "why": "It moved the structure of the founder's first app, Wrestle AI, to boxing, a sport that people can train alone: an AI breakdown of a training video, a calorie tracker and a weight-cut mode, all behind a subscription at the same prices. Users came from Meta ads and influencers, according to the founder's TrustMRR profile, with a self-reported marketing spend of US$10,000 a month.", "summary": [ "Brawler, sold on the App Store as BRAWLER- Future of Boxing, is an iPhone app that coaches boxing. The user uploads a video of shadowboxing, bag work or sparring, and the app's AI scores the technique in seven areas, from stance and guard to head movement and range control, with corrections and drills. It also has an AI chat coach, training programs, a round timer and AI food logging. Every feature sits behind a paywall, a screen that asks for payment before the app can be used: US$9.99 a month or US$59.99 a year. One sale listing marks it as made with Rork, a no-code AI app builder that writes a phone app from instructions in plain language, and names OpenAI as its AI provider.", "The app went live on 1 May 2026, sold by Brawler LLC. The Superwall Podcast of 15 October 2026 counts it among the three apps of George Lampropoulos, and his first app has its own story on this site: Wrestle AI. Brawler's App Store page links to wrestleai.app as its developer website. TrustMRR reads the app's sales through an API key, a password that lets one program read another program's data, for RevenueCat, a service that records in-app subscription purchases for app makers. It shows US$146,852 in total revenue to 16 October 2026 and MRR, monthly recurring revenue, in which a yearly plan counts as one twelfth of its price, of US$22,600 from 4,180 active subscriptions. September, at US$48,741, was more than double August.", "The revenue figures are grade A, because they come from the app's own subscription records, not from screenshots. The ownership is less clear. TrustMRR names no founder. One whatsthe.app listing names the founder as @Georgelampro20 and asks US$200,000; a second whatsthe.app listing for the same app, named Strikr, names no one, gives a team of 2 and asks US$127,940. Daily revenue in mid-October was about 45% below late September. The page also shows earlier coaching and fitness companies that failed, and the risks of a five-month-old app that is offered for sale." ], "factsCaption": "US$146,852 of RevenueCat-verified revenue in five and a half months and US$22,600 of MRR by 16 October 2026, with two sale listings at different prices", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR or whatsthe.app from the app's RevenueCat account through an API key. A grade B value is a record that Apple shows on the App Store. A grade C value was written by the seller or the founder, on a listing, on the App Store or in a podcast description. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From release to two sale listings and US$22,600 of MRR in five and a half months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Brawler prices on the US App Store, read 16 October 2026 (grade C)", "note": "Every feature needs a subscription. The App Store lists ten in-app purchases. The first three rows are the prices that TrustMRR and both whatsthe.app listings show for the app; Apple also lists seven BRAWLER Pro prices, and no source says which users see them. Yearly plans are paid once a year; the per-month values in the table are the yearly price divided by 12.", "rows": [ [ "Monthly", "", "9.99", "all features" ], [ "Yearly", "5.00", "", "US$59.99 a year" ], [ "Discounted Yearly BRAWLR Premium", "2.50", "", "US$29.99 a year; named as a discount" ], [ "BRAWLER Pro Monthly", "", "5.99 to 12.99", "three prices listed: US$5.99, US$7.99, US$12.99" ], [ "BRAWLER Pro Yearly", "1.50 to 3.33", "", "four prices listed: US$17.99, US$24.99, US$35.99, US$39.99 a year" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 16 October 2026", "value": "US$22,600", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, revenue synced on 16 October 2026 at 22:57 UTC through a RevenueCat API key. 4,180 active subscriptions. TrustMRR gives MRR growth of 76.7% in the last 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the October 2026 MRR", "value": "about US$271,200 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$22,600 times 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Total revenue, May to 16 October 2026", "value": "US$146,852", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, all time. The six monthly values in the profile add up to US$146,851; the difference of US$1 is rounding.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days, to 16 October 2026", "value": "US$58,752", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, which gives growth of 149.3% over the 30 days before. Revenue is the money received, so a yearly plan counts in full on the day it is paid; that is why this is 2.6 times the MRR.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month, 2026", "value": "May US$4,152; June US$17,996; July US$26,161; August US$23,482; September US$48,741; October to the 16th US$26,319", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. May is the month of release.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Rise in September 2026", "value": "US$25,259 more than August, plus 107.6%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$48,741 minus US$23,482. September was also 86.3% above July. No source explains the rise. The App Store shows version 2.3, with a boxing course, on 17 August and version 2.5.0 on 5 September.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Daily revenue, late September and mid-October 2026", "value": "about US$2,495 a day on 18 to 30 September, about US$1,368 a day on 10 to 16 October", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from TrustMRR's daily table: 45.2% lower. The October average to the 16th, US$1,645 a day, is still close to the September average of US$1,625 a day.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "whatsthe.app listing named Brawler, 1 October 2026", "value": "US$48,709 in 28 days, MRR of US$18,768, 3,407 active subscriptions, 22,026 new customers in 28 days", "grade": "A", "note": "Read by whatsthe.app through RevenueCat, last updated on 1 October 2026. The founder is named as @Georgelampro20, and the leaderboard data marks the listing \"revenuecat-verified\".", "src": [ 3, 5 ] }, { "fact": "whatsthe.app listing named Strikr, 2 October 2026", "value": "US$49,923 in 28 days, MRR of US$19,093, 3,464 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "It links the same App Store page and gives the same bundle ID, app.rork.boxing-pro-ai-trainer. No founder is named, the leaderboard data marks it \"revenuecat\", and the page says that the RevenueCat API key expired, with data last updated on 2 October 2026.", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Asking prices", "value": "US$200,000 on TrustMRR and on the whatsthe.app Brawler listing; US$127,940 on the whatsthe.app Strikr listing", "grade": "C", "note": "Set by the sellers. TrustMRR: first listed on 18 June 2026, 17 offers received. whatsthe.app: the Brawler listing was created on 19 June 2026 and the Strikr listing on 12 July 2026.", "src": [ 1, 3, 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price compared with revenue", "value": "about 0.74 times a year of MRR, or 0.28 times the last 30 days of revenue times 12", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$200,000 divided by US$271,200, and by US$705,024. TrustMRR shows the second ratio rounded to 0.3x.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founder", "value": "George Lampropoulos", "grade": "C", "note": "The Superwall Podcast description of 15 October 2026 counts Brawler among his three apps. The whatsthe.app listing names the founder as @Georgelampro20. TrustMRR names no founder.", "src": [ 6, 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 people", "grade": "C", "note": "Self-reported on the Strikr listing, which names no one. The podcast description mentions a popup that lets users book a call with \"the founders\", without saying which app. No second person is named for Brawler in any source.", "src": [ 4, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported; listed as bootstrapped", "grade": "C", "note": "Strikr listing. No source mentions investors.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Seller on the App Store", "value": "Brawler LLC", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's record. The developer page of Brawler LLC lists only this app. The app's developer website link points to wrestleai.app, and its privacy policy link is the same Termly document that the Wrestle AI page links.", "src": [ 2, 7, 8 ] }, { "fact": "His three apps together, October 2026", "value": "almost US$41,000 MRR and US$84,000 in 28 days", "grade": "C", "note": "Podcast description: Wrestle AI, Brawler and a fitness app, with no split per app. On this page's calculation, Brawler's MRR was about 46% of the three-app MRR on 1 October (US$18,768) and about 55% on 16 October (US$22,600).", "src": [ 6, 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Self-reported costs", "value": "marketing spend of US$10,000 a month; profit margin of 55%", "grade": "C", "note": "Strikr listing, marked by whatsthe.app as unverified and self-reported. TrustMRR shows a profit margin of 50.0% for the last 30 days.", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Users", "value": "\"over 10k boxers\" in the seller's text; 1,200 in the founder's TrustMRR estimate", "grade": "C", "note": "Neither is verified, and they do not agree. The verified count is 4,180 active subscriptions on 16 October 2026; whatsthe.app counted 23,617 active customers on 1 October.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "App Store ratings, 16 October 2026", "value": "about 2,000 ratings, average 4.8 of 5", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's page shows 2K ratings, and its page data gives 2,012. whatsthe.app shows about 1,600 of them from the United States.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Release", "value": "1 May 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "The worldwide release date on both whatsthe.app listings and the founded date on TrustMRR. The oldest version in the App Store history is 1.0.2 of 6 May 2026.", "src": [ 3, 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Time from release to the October 2026 figure", "value": "5 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: May 2026 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "1 May 2026", "what": "Brawler is released worldwide on the App Store, sold by Brawler LLC. TrustMRR gives the same date as the founding date.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "when": "6 May 2026", "what": "Version 1.0.2 updates the onboarding and adds a \"new abandon paywall\". Two days later version 1.0.4 adds the keyword \"brawler\".", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "May 2026", "what": "US$4,152 of revenue in the first month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "US$17,996 of revenue, more than four times May.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "18 June 2026", "what": "Listed for sale on TrustMRR at US$200,000. A whatsthe.app listing naming @Georgelampro20 as founder, which now asks the same price, follows on 19 June.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "when": "9 July 2026", "what": "Version 1.6 adds a cut weight mode with guided diet plans.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "12 July 2026", "what": "A second whatsthe.app listing for the same app, named Strikr, is created. It names no founder and now asks US$127,940.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 4 ] }, { "when": "1 August 2026", "what": "Version 2.1: video analysis, coach chats and nutrition move to \"our most powerful AI models yet\". The release note names no model.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "17 August 2026", "what": "Version 2.3 adds Coach Marco, a course that teaches how to box.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "US$48,741 of revenue, 107.6% more than August.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "1 to 2 October 2026", "what": "The two whatsthe.app listings show about US$49,000 in 28 days and about US$19,000 of MRR. The data of the Strikr listing stops on 2 October; the page says that its RevenueCat key expired.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "when": "15 October 2026", "what": "The Superwall Podcast: the three apps of George Lampropoulos, Wrestle AI, Brawler and a fitness app, make almost US$41,000 MRR together.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "16 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR: US$22,600 MRR, 4,180 active subscriptions, US$146,852 in total, and 17 offers for the US$200,000 listing.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A second sport, the same structure", "text": "The App Store pages of Wrestle AI and Brawler show the same design: an AI breakdown of a training video as the main feature, a calorie tracker and a weight-cut mode, and every feature behind a subscription of US$9.99 a month or US$59.99 a year. Boxing can be trained alone, and the app is built for that: shadowboxing, bag work, pad work sessions, a punch callout mode with audio cues and a round timer." }, { "title": "Paid reach: ads and creators", "text": "The founder's TrustMRR profile and the Strikr listing name Meta Ads and influencers as the marketing channels, and the Strikr listing gives a self-reported marketing spend of US$10,000 a month. whatsthe.app counted 22,026 new customers in the 28 days to 1 October 2026. The podcast on his apps covers raw screen recordings run as ads, and creator videos in stitch and ranking formats that also work as paid ads; a stitch is a TikTok video that begins with a clip from another video. It does not split these results by app." }, { "title": "Paywall before use", "text": "The app is free to download, but every feature needs a subscription. Version 1.0.2, five days after release, changed the onboarding and added an \"abandon paywall\". The App Store lists ten in-app purchases, from US$5.99 a month to US$59.99 a year, while the listings show three of them." }, { "title": "Money from yearly plans", "text": "MRR counts a yearly plan at one twelfth of its price, while revenue counts the whole payment on the day it is made. Brawler's revenue in the last 30 days, US$58,752, was 2.6 times its MRR of US$22,600, so much of the money arrives as yearly plans paid in advance. whatsthe.app shows the same ratio for its 28 days, 2.6, as a \"cash flow index\"." }, { "title": "Built with a no-code builder and OpenAI", "text": "The app's bundle ID, its unique name in Apple's systems, is app.rork.boxing-pro-ai-trainer, and whatsthe.app shows a \"Made with Rork\" badge on the Strikr listing. That listing names Swift, SwiftUI, Supabase and OpenAI as the technology; the founder's TrustMRR profile names Swift, SwiftUI, Supabase and RevenueCat." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the sale listings, the founder-entered fields of the TrustMRR profile and the App Store page. They are grade C unless the App Store is the source, which makes them grade B.", "items": [ "Made with Rork, a no-code AI app builder: the bundle ID starts with app.rork, and whatsthe.app shows a \"Made with Rork\" badge. The Brawler listing also links a Google Play address that starts with app.rork.", "Swift and SwiftUI for the iPhone app, Supabase for the backend and RevenueCat for subscriptions, according to the founder's TrustMRR profile. The Strikr listing adds OpenAI for the AI.", "The release note of 1 August 2026 says that video analysis, coach chats and nutrition moved to \"our most powerful AI models yet\". No source names the models.", "Food logging works from a photo, a barcode or voice. The video analysis covers seven areas of technique and returns corrections and recommended drills.", "25 versions in the App Store history from 6 May to 4 October 2026. Most release notes say only \"bug fixes\".", "The privacy policy, terms of service and license agreement are hosted on Termly. The privacy policy link is the same document that the Wrestle AI page links." ], "src": [ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised coaching or fitness help through a service, an app or a device. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Arivale", "years": "2015 to 2019", "funding": "US$50M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Health coaching built on genetic, blood and activity data, for US$3,500 up front and US$99 a month.", "died": "The coaching was done by people, and each coach could handle only 50 to 100 clients. The record puts the cost at more than US$4,700 a customer a year against US$1,188 a year of revenue after the first year.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/8-arivale" }, { "name": "Charge Running", "years": "2021 to 2024", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Live online running classes with real-time audio coaching, like a personal trainer at home.", "died": "Users preferred flexible times to scheduled classes, and AI fitness apps such as Future offered personal coaching on demand.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/895-charge-running" }, { "name": "Jawbone", "years": "1999 to 2017", "funding": "US$930M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "UP fitness trackers that turned daily activity data into health advice.", "died": "Fitbit and Apple had more money and moved faster. Product recalls, poor customer service and long legal battles used up its resources.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/257-jawbone" }, { "name": "Fitmob", "years": "2013 to 2017", "funding": "US$9.8M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Fitness classes at many studios and pop-up venues without a gym membership.", "died": "Running physical classes with many venues added cost without matching revenue. ClassPass, with a larger network, took the market, and users moved to on-demand digital fitness.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/151-fitmob" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Arivale and Charge Running sold coaching that needed people: coaches with 50 to 100 clients each, or instructors at fixed times. Jawbone needed hardware and Fitmob needed venues. All four spent investors' money, from US$5 million to US$930 million, and lost to larger or more flexible competitors.", "Brawler's coach is software: it answers at any hour, reviews a video without a human coach and needs no venue or device beyond a phone, and the listings report a profit margin of 50% to 55%. What did not change is the competition. Charge Running's record says that AI fitness apps took its market, and the same can happen to a small AI app when Apple or a large fitness company adds AI features: Apple put Workout Buddy, which needs Apple Intelligence, on the Apple Watch in September 2025." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The head start, no.", "text": "Brawler is a second app built on a structure that had already worked once: an AI breakdown of training video for one combat sport, a paywall before use, ads and creators. The tools are open to anyone: a no-code AI builder, a general AI model, RevenueCat for subscriptions. A newcomer does not have the lessons of a first app that already sold, and both listings offer this one for less than a year of its MRR.", "steps": [ "Start from an app format that already sells in one niche and move it to a neighbouring niche where people train alone and can film themselves.", "Build it with a no-code AI builder, use a general AI model for the analysis and RevenueCat for the subscriptions.", "Put every feature behind a subscription, with a monthly plan, a yearly plan and a discounted yearly offer.", "Connect the revenue account to a verification site such as TrustMRR, so that buyers can see real figures if you sell later." ], "open": "Sports and exercises that people train alone and can film with a phone, as long as no app and no large fitness company serves them yet." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Two sale listings, two prices", "text": "TrustMRR and a whatsthe.app listing that names @Georgelampro20 ask US$200,000. A second whatsthe.app listing, created on 12 July 2026 under the name Strikr, links the same App Store page and bundle ID, names no founder, gives a team of 2 and asks US$127,940. Both listings read the revenue through RevenueCat API keys, which whatsthe.app describes as the seller's read-only keys, so both were made by someone with access to the app's revenue account. No source says whether the same people made both listings, or why the prices differ." }, { "title": "Five months of history", "text": "The app was released on 1 May 2026 and listed for sale on 18 June 2026, seven weeks later. Revenue more than doubled in September, but daily revenue on 10 to 16 October, about US$1,368 a day, was 45% below the level of late September. The founder's user estimate on TrustMRR (1,200) and the seller's text (\"over 10k boxers\") do not match the verified 4,180 active subscriptions." }, { "title": "Large fitness companies and other AI boxing apps", "text": "Apple added Workout Buddy, a feature that needs an iPhone with Apple Intelligence, to the Apple Watch with watchOS 26 on 15 September 2025, and watchOS 27 added Spanish to it on 14 September 2026. Direct competitors are other AI boxing coaches: Boxer AI from Impact Development LLC, first released on 8 March 2026, with about 2,000 ratings, and JAB AI from Limitnil, first released on 19 August 2025, with 489 ratings. The App Store shows both next to Brawler, and whatsthe.app lists Boxer AI for sale at US$7,748 of MRR." }, { "title": "A competitor's name in the description", "text": "The App Store description ends with a list of search words that starts with \"Boxer Ai\", the name of a competing app. Apple's App Review Guideline 2.3.7 tells developers not to pack metadata with \"trademarked terms, popular app names\" and says that Apple may modify inappropriate keywords at any time or take other appropriate steps to prevent abuse." }, { "title": "Dependence on Rork and OpenAI", "text": "The app was made with Rork, and the seller names OpenAI as the AI provider. A price change at OpenAI changes the cost of every video analysis and every chat. A review of July 2026 says that the AI analysis \"says a lot of the same things no matter how well you do them\". The Strikr listing says that the source code, written with Rork, is included in a sale." }, { "title": "A teen audience and body data", "text": "The app is rated 13+. Its privacy label lists photos or videos, audio, body data (hands and head) and environment scanning among the data it collects, though not linked to the user's identity, and purchase data as used to track users across other companies' apps and websites." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6760366949" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/brawler" }, { "kind": "whatsthe", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/brawler" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of Brawler, revenue synced 16 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/brawler.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile. The revenue, MRR, subscription and daily figures come from its Verification Sources section, read through a RevenueCat API key. The founded date, prices, tech stack, channels, user estimate and profit margin are entered by the founder; the sale data is TrustMRR's listing record." }, { "title": "BRAWLER- Future of Boxing on the US App Store, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/brawler-future-of-boxing/id6760366949", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full: description, in-app purchases, version history, privacy label, age rating, seller, developer website link, ratings and reviews. Seller, dates and ratings are Apple's records; the description and prices are written by the company." }, { "title": "whatsthe.app listing: Brawler, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/brawler", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. The revenue metrics were read by whatsthe.app through RevenueCat, last updated on 1 October 2026; the asking price, description and founder handle are entered by the seller." }, { "title": "whatsthe.app listing: Strikr, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/app.rork.boxing-pro-ai-trainer", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. The revenue metrics were read through RevenueCat until the key expired, last updated on 2 October 2026; team size, financing, technology, marketing spend, profit margin and asking price are entered by the seller." }, { "title": "whatsthe.app leaderboard, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/leaderboard", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the listing data embedded in the page for the Brawler and Strikr entries: founder field, verification type, creation dates and bundle ID." }, { "title": "The Superwall Podcast feed, episode of 15 October 2026: George Lampropoulos - Meet the ex-wrestler making $41k/mo with AI apps", "url": "https://rss.buzzsprout.com/2522779.rss", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the episode title and description in the podcast's RSS feed. The 47-minute audio was not transcribed. Source for the founder's name, the three-app figures and the marketing topics." }, { "title": "App Store developer page: Brawler LLC, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/brawler-llc/id1869962518", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Lists only this app." }, { "title": "Wrestle AI on the US App Store, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wrestle-ai/id6751189075", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the description, prices, seller and privacy policy link, to compare them with Brawler's page." }, { "title": "Apple: App Review Guidelines", "url": "https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read guideline 2.3.7 on app names, keywords and metadata." }, { "title": "Boxer AI on the US App Store, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/boxer-ai/id6759840821", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the seller, ratings and version history." }, { "title": "JAB AI - Boxing & MMA Training on the US App Store, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/jab-ai-boxing-mma-training/id6751054115", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the seller, ratings and version history." }, { "title": "Wikipedia: watchOS", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WatchOS", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the watchOS 26 and watchOS 27 sections. Source for the Workout Buddy feature and the release dates." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/imagined-with-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/imagined-with-ai.md", "slug": "imagined-with-ai", "name": "Imagined with AI", "country": "Belgium", "sector": "Photography", "productType": "AI portrait generation service", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-22", "launchLabel": "October 2022", "outcomeLabel": "US$4.5K a month, January 2023", "sticker": "$4.5K/mo reported", "outcomeUsd": 54000, "months": 3, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders, a couple with full-time jobs; no employees reported in 2023 or 2024", "fundingLabel": "None, by the founder's statement", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "photos", "channel": "audience", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Photography" ], "product": "A website where you upload 5 to 10 photos of yourself, a loved one or your pet, and get back 120 portraits in 15 styles: realistic profile pictures, cartoon styles, Renaissance paintings. The company's page lists one price, US$6.99 one-time, read in October 2026. A sister product, AI Puppy, does the same for dogs, and later sister sites sell professional headshots and boudoir-style photos.", "why": "It went live in mid-October 2022, a few weeks after Dreambooth made it possible to teach an image model one person's face. The founder said in January 2023 that the first version was a static page with a Stripe button and that the first portraits sold within 24 hours. A Facebook post, then Instagram and TikTok videos of dogs, brought the customers. The founder said the hype for AI avatars was already fading in January 2023, so the couple moved to pets, where the owners keep buying.", "summary": [ "Imagined with AI is a portrait service built on Dreambooth, a method published in 2022 that fine-tunes an image model, that is, continues its training on a few photos of one subject, so the model can then draw that subject in any style. The customer uploads 5 to 10 photos; the company trains a model on them and returns 120 images in 15 styles. The company's page, read in October 2026, lists the price as US$6.99 for the package, and the same price was on the page in March 2023.", "Sabatino Masala, a freelance developer in Ghent who is head of development at a Belgian consultancy, and his girlfriend Silke, who does the marketing, started it on a trip to New York in October 2022. The founder told Starter Story in January 2023 that the first version was a static HTML page with an upload form and a Stripe button, that the first week's orders were trained by hand, and that the service had sold in more than 25 countries and generated 234,000 images. He wrote in the same interview that revenue would reach about €10,000 (US$10,000) by the end of December 2022, six weeks after launch, and the Starter Story profile on that interview lists US$4,500 of revenue a month with 2 founders and 0 employees. In a follow-up interview published in March 2024 he said that a sister product for dogs, AI Puppy, now sells more than Imagined with AI itself, at €2,500 to €3,000 (US$2,700 to US$3,200) a month, and that a boudoir photo pack brings about €1,200 a month.", "Every money figure on this page is a founder statement to one publication, Starter Story, so the evidence grade is D, reported and not verified. No payment processor, buyer or journalist has checked the numbers. The page also lists earlier consumer photo tools that died when the novelty passed or when the platform owners shipped the feature for free." ], "factsCaption": "A two-person side business that the founder reported at US$4,500 a month in January 2023, three months after launch, with no second source for any figure", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is a single founder statement on a single date, or a profile figure on one site, with no second source. A grade C value is read directly from the company's own pages. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a jet-lagged idea in New York to a reported US$4,500 a month, in three months, then a move into pets and sister sites. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Prices in October 2026 from the company's own pages and its sister sites (grade C); the AI Puppy in-app prices from the App Store listing", "note": "The main service is a one-time purchase: 120 images for US$6.99, the same price the page showed in a March 2023 archive copy. The founder said in March 2024 that AI Puppy charges US$6.99 for 120 portraits; its App Store listing shows in-app purchases from US$6.99 to US$79.99, which includes a styles pack and an \"Unlimited Edits\" subscription whose price the listing does not state. Studio Deepfake, a later sister site, is a subscription with a free tier; its yearly prices are US$90 and US$890, shown here divided by 12. Boudoir.ai is a one-time payment for 40 photos.", "rows": [ [ "Imagined with AI, person or pet portraits", "6.99 one-time", "", "120 images in 15 styles" ], [ "Cat portraits page", "6.99 one-time", "", "120 images" ], [ "AI Puppy, website and App Store", "6.99 one-time", "", "120 dog portraits; in-app purchases up to US$79.99" ], [ "Boudoir.ai pack", "19.95 one-time", "", "40 photos plus 10 extra credits; women only" ], [ "Studio Deepfake, Basic", "0", "0", "free models, 1 photo at a time" ], [ "Studio Deepfake, Hobby", "7.50", "9", "2 custom models, 2 photos at a time" ], [ "Studio Deepfake, Professional", "74.17", "82", "9 custom models, no concurrency limit" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue per month, January 2023", "value": "US$4,500", "grade": "D", "note": "The profile box on the founder's Starter Story interview of 29 January 2023 lists \"$4,500 revenue/mo\". The 6 March 2024 update page shows the same figure unchanged. No second source.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the January 2023 figure", "value": "US$54,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$4,500 times 12. Starter Story's list page shows the same business as \"$54K/year\".", "src": [ 1, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the first six weeks, to end of December 2022", "value": "about €10,000 (US$10,000)", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder wrote in the January 2023 interview that the business was \"looking at reaching the €10k ($10K) revenue milestone\" by the end of December 2022, six weeks after launch. An expectation at the time of writing, not a closed figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "AI Puppy revenue per month, March 2024", "value": "€2,500 to €3,000 (US$2,700 to US$3,200)", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder's update interview, 6 March 2024, for the dog product alone, which he said sells more than Imagined with AI itself.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Boudoir.ai pack revenue per month, March 2024", "value": "about €1,200", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder's update interview, 6 March 2024, for one photo pack sold on a separate landing page.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Gross margin", "value": "about 40% in January 2023; 70% to 80% in March 2024", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder statements in the two Starter Story interviews. He said GPU prices fell between the two dates.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 co-founders, 0 employees", "grade": "D", "note": "Starter Story profile on both interviews. The founder said in March 2024 that both of them work full-time jobs and build these products in evenings and weekends.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder said in January 2023 that the business was bootstrapped entirely from the couple's own money, including the ad campaigns.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Price of the main package", "value": "US$6.99 one-time for 120 images", "grade": "C", "note": "Company page read on 22 October 2026. The Wayback Machine copy of 13 March 2023 shows the same price.", "src": [ 3, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Customers and output, January 2023", "value": "more than 25 countries; 234,000 images generated", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder statement in the January 2023 interview.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Advertising spend, March 2024", "value": "about US$250 per five days, about once a month, on Instagram", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder's update interview. In January 2023 he said paid campaigns had been worth it but gave no amount.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "App Store ratings, October 2026", "value": "Imagined with AI app: 1.0 from 3 ratings; AI Puppy: 1.1 from 14 ratings", "grade": "C", "note": "Read from the US App Store listings, both published by Wonderlus, seller Wonderlus VOF. The company's website, not the apps, is the main sales channel.", "src": [ 7, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the headline figure", "value": "3 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: mid-October 2022 to January 2023.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Summer 2022", "what": "Masala, a freelance developer and head of development at a Belgian consultancy, spends his evenings writing prompts for DALL-E and Stable Diffusion.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "when": "October 2022", "what": "On a city trip to New York, just after Dreambooth is introduced, the couple decides on AI portraits. He trains a first model in Google Colab and posts the results in his employer's Slack; the reaction convinces them to sell it.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "when": "Mid-October 2022", "what": "The first version goes live: a static HTML page with an upload form and a Stripe button. The first portraits sell within 24 hours. In the first week the founder trains each order by hand.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "October to November 2022", "what": "A Facebook post to friends brings the first paying customers. The couple starts TikTok and Instagram accounts; an Instagram Reel of a dog reaches 30,000 views in a few hours.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "About November 2022", "what": "An iPhone app with in-app purchases, built in one Saturday morning and submitted the same day; the first in-app purchases arrive by Monday. A first business partner resells the images on personalized photo products.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "when": "16 December 2022", "what": "AI Puppy, the dog version, is on Product Hunt: 94 upvotes, 17 comments, 21st of the day, submitted by Masala himself.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "End of December 2022", "what": "The founder writes that revenue is about to reach €10,000 (US$10,000), six weeks after launch.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "29 January 2023", "what": "Starter Story publishes the interview. Its profile lists US$4,500 of revenue a month, 2 founders and 0 employees. The founder says margins are about 40%, the process is fully automated, and the hype for AI avatars is dying, so they will go after pets.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "13 March 2023", "what": "Archive copy of the home page: 120 images in 15 styles for US$6.99, with AI Puppy and cat portraits in the menu, and the trained model offered for download.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "May 2023", "what": "In an IdeaMensch interview the founder says the tool is running and still generates revenue every day, and that he works on it one or two hours in the evening after his day job.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "6 March 2024", "what": "Update interview: AI Puppy sells more than Imagined with AI, at €2,500 to €3,000 (US$2,700 to US$3,200) a month; margins 70% to 80%; a boudoir pack brings about €1,200 a month. Both founders still have full-time jobs. Generation takes 20 minutes and cheaper competitors are faster.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "22 October 2026", "what": "The site is live at the same US$6.99 price, with Studio Deepfake added to the menu. The two iPhone apps are still listed, with ratings of 1.0 and 1.1 out of 5.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 7, 8, 10 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Timing", "text": "Dreambooth was published in late summer 2022, and the service was live by mid-October 2022, before the wave of avatar apps that followed in December. The founder said in May 2023 that it was one of the first profile-picture generators. Being early is what made a static page with a Stripe button enough: the founder said in January 2023 that the first portraits sold within 24 hours." }, { "title": "Sell first, automate later", "text": "The founder said in January 2023 that in the first week he trained each order by hand while all the effort went into marketing, and only then automated the flow end to end. The service never had to be finished before it earned money." }, { "title": "Pets, not people", "text": "The founder said in January 2023 that AI images are something people buy once and forget, and that the avatar hype was dying, while dog owners had always been the largest customer group. AI Puppy, launched in December 2022, got its own app and, by the founder's March 2024 account, out-sold the original product at €2,500 to €3,000 a month. Silke writes one page per dog breed with sample results, a long-tail search strategy that the home page's list of 70 breed pages shows." }, { "title": "Upsells and resellers", "text": "The founder said in January 2023 that offering a second training run at 50% off to existing customers, for example for a partner, was a large revenue driver, and that cold emails to print-on-demand companies that resell the images worked well. In March 2024 he said more B2B outreach would have brought more success." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's two Starter Story interviews, his IdeaMensch interview and the company's own pages. They are grade D where they rest on one founder statement.", "items": [ "Dreambooth fine-tuning of Stable Diffusion: the founder said in January 2023 that he trained his first model in Google Colab; the page's FAQ says uploads go to an external training service and are deleted, and that the trained model can be downloaded for use in Stable Diffusion tools.", "The first version was a static HTML page with an upload form and a Stripe button; the production backend is Laravel with Laravel Nova, which the founder called his standard stack for a new product.", "The Starter Story tool lists name Digital Ocean and Amazon Web Services on the 2023 page and Linode and AWS infrastructure on the 2024 page for hosting, with Mailchimp and Mailgun for email, Zendesk for support, Google Analytics, and Facebook and Instagram ads.", "GPU time is the main cost. The founder said in January 2023 that GPU prices had surged unexpectedly and that a flexible setup let him switch within hours; in March 2024 he said GPU costs had fallen and margins had grown to 70% to 80%.", "The iPhone app was built in one Saturday morning with in-app purchases; the App Store lists both apps under the developer name Wonderlus, seller Wonderlus VOF.", "In March 2024 a model and its photos took about 20 minutes to generate; the founder said competitors using prompting or DALL-E 3 were faster and cheaper but lost the likeness, and that he was preparing cheaper alternatives, such as a free cartoon-your-pet tool to upsell the paid service." ], "src": [ 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold consumer image tools whose novelty faded, whose customers did not come back, or whose feature the big platforms shipped for free. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Picnik", "years": "2005 to 2012", "funding": "US$3.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Photo editing with effects in the browser, no software to install.", "died": "Google bought it in 2010 and folded the technology into Google+; phones and Instagram made a standalone web editor unnecessary.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/429-picnik" }, { "name": "Snipshot", "years": "2006 to 2009", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Quick photo edits in the browser for casual users.", "died": "Bigger web editors and free alternatives copied the convenience; it never found a way to charge.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1241-snipshot" }, { "name": "Splashup", "years": "2007 to 2010", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Social photo editing in the browser, several people on one image at once.", "died": "Built on Flash as HTML5 arrived, with a loyal user base but no business model.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1660-splashup" }, { "name": "Picplum", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$1M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Upload photos, and prints are mailed to the people you choose.", "died": "Social sharing replaced prints, and the logistics cost more than customers would pay.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1603-picplum" }, { "name": "Modsy", "years": "2015 to 2022", "funding": "US$72.7M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Upload photos of your room and get photorealistic redesigns, sold as AI.", "died": "Each order needed hours of human designer time; customers bought once and rarely returned, so paid acquisition lost money on every customer.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2521-modsy" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Three of the five sold a web image tool that was useful once and free to copy, and the platform owners, Google, Adobe, Instagram, shipped the same feature inside products people already used. Picplum and Modsy had the other problem that Imagined with AI shares: the customer buys once and does not come back, so the business must find each customer again. The founder said in January 2023 that AI portraits are exactly that kind of purchase.", "Two things are different here. The founders spent nothing on staff or offices, so a reported US$4,500 a month, by the founder's January 2023 account, was a profitable side business and not a funded company looking for growth. And instead of defending one product, they kept moving to the niche that still bought: from people to dogs, cats and rabbits, then to breed-by-breed search pages, headshots and boudoir packs on separate sites. Whether that beats the pattern is not shown: no source gives a total revenue figure after January 2023." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product, no. The method, yes.", "text": "An AI portrait service in 2026 competes with hundreds of apps and with free image models that need no training. The founder said in March 2024 that cheaper and faster methods were already taking customers. What can be copied is the way they entered: a new model capability, a page with a payment button within days, manual fulfilment at first, and a quick move to the customer group that keeps buying.", "steps": [ "When a new model capability appears, put a one-page order form with a payment button in front of it the same week, and fulfil the first orders by hand.", "Post the results where friends and followers already are; the founder said in January 2023 that a Facebook post brought the first paying customers and a dog video on Instagram the first viral reach.", "Watch which subject sells, and build the next product for that group; here, dog owners.", "Add a page per segment with sample results, one dog breed per page, so search brings buyers without ads.", "Offer existing customers a second run at a discount and find businesses that resell the output on their own products." ], "open": "Any new generative capability with a clear consumer use, applied to a group that buys repeatedly: pet owners, parents, hobby communities, small shops that need product photos." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline figure, US$4,500 a month, rests on one source: the profile box on Sabatino Masala's Starter Story interview of 29 January 2023, repeated unchanged on his update interview of 6 March 2024. The €10,000 in six weeks, the AI Puppy figure of €2,500 to €3,000 a month and the boudoir pack's €1,200 a month are also single founder statements to the same publication. No payment-processor profile, company account or second interview with a total was found. A reader could look for a TrustMRR or Stripe-verified profile, the published accounts of the App Store seller Wonderlus VOF at the Belgian company register, or a later interview that gives a total." }, { "title": "A side project of two people with day jobs", "text": "The founder said in March 2024 that both founders work full-time and that answering support requests in time had become hard. Growth depends on evenings and weekends." }, { "title": "The hype passed, and the technology moved", "text": "The founder said in January 2023 that the avatar hype was dying, and in March 2024 that competitors using prompting or DALL-E 3 produce results in 20 seconds instead of 20 minutes at much lower cost. Pet portraits and search pages bought time; they do not stop a cheaper model from doing the same job." }, { "title": "Weak app ratings", "text": "The two iPhone apps show 1.0 stars from 3 ratings and 1.1 stars from 14 ratings in October 2026. Most sales go through the website, but the listings do not help the brand." }, { "title": "Sister sites with sensitive names", "text": "The same founders now sell Studio Deepfake, whose page says it makes professional headshots of yourself, and Boudoir.ai, whose page says it applies a nudity filter and serves women only. Both are self-portraits of the paying customer, but the names invite scrutiny, and any misuse would reflect on the whole business." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://imagined-with.ai/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6444571467" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Starter Story, 29 January 2023: Our AI Image Generator Made $10K In Just 6 Weeks", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/imagined-with-ai", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview with a profile box that lists US$4,500 revenue a month, 2 founders, 0 employees, Ghent, Belgium, started October 2022. Source for the launch account, the six-week figure, margins, channels and tools." }, { "title": "Starter Story, 6 March 2024: How We Expanded Our AI Image Generator Tools And Make $4.5K Per Month", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/imagined-with-ai-e35e50f4-7a1a-4613-94c2-2f26c3433c2e", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. Founder update interview. Source for the AI Puppy and boudoir figures, the 70% to 80% margins, the ad spend, the full-time jobs and the 20-minute generation time. The profile box repeats the US$4,500 figure." }, { "title": "Imagined with AI home page, read 22 October 2026", "url": "https://imagined-with.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the price, the 120 images in 15 styles, the FAQ on the external training service and the list of breed pages." }, { "title": "Imagined with AI, About us: The story behind Imagined with AI", "url": "https://imagined-with.ai/about-us", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Company's own account naming Sabatino and Silke and the New York trip in October 2022." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of imagined-with.ai, 13 March 2023", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20230313061738/https://imagined-with.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Shows the same US$6.99 price and the AI Puppy and cat portrait pages in March 2023." }, { "title": "IdeaMensch, May 2023: Sabatino Masala, Head of Technology at Craftzing", "url": "https://ideamensch.com/sabatino-masala/", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview, dated May 2023 with the text written in March 2023. Confirms the launch in October 2022, the Facebook launch, the app and that the tool still earned daily; gives no amount." }, { "title": "App Store listing: Imagined with AI, by Wonderlus", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/imagined-with-ai/id6444571467", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Developer Wonderlus, seller Wonderlus VOF, in-app purchases, 3 ratings at 1.0. The Belgian store page returned 404 on 22 October 2026; the US page loaded." }, { "title": "App Store listing: AI Puppy, by Wonderlus", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ai-puppy/id1659610716", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. In-app purchase prices from US$6.99 to US$79.99, a styles pack and an unlimited-edits subscription, 14 ratings at 1.1." }, { "title": "Hunted.space: AI Puppy Product Hunt launch dashboard", "url": "https://hunted.space/dashboard/371416", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A third-party mirror of Product Hunt data: launched 16 December 2022, 94 upvotes, 17 comments, 21st of the day, hunted by Sabatino Masala." }, { "title": "Studio Deepfake home and pricing page, read 22 October 2026", "url": "https://studiodeepfake.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Sister site linked from the company menu. Source for its prices and the FLUX fine-tune announcement." }, { "title": "Boudoir.ai home page, read 22 October 2026", "url": "https://boudoir.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Sister landing page named in the March 2024 interview. Source for the US$19.95 price and the nudity-filter FAQ." }, { "title": "Imagined with AI, cat portraits page", "url": "https://imagined-with.ai/cat-portraits", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the cat package price." }, { "title": "Starter Story list: AI-based content creation business success stories", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/ideas/ai-based-content-creation-business/success-stories", "grade": "D", "how": "Read the Imagined with AI entry. Lists the business at US$54,000 a year, US$0 to start, and links to the interview." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/tabitha-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/tabitha-ai.md", "slug": "tabitha-ai", "name": "Tabitha.ai", "country": "USA", "sector": "Education", "productType": "AI teaching assistant for lesson planning and AI-written-text detection", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-23", "launchLabel": "March 2023", "outcomeLabel": "Sold for US$4.25K, July 2023", "sticker": "Sold for $4.25K", "outcomeUsd": 4250, "months": 4, "teamLabel": "1 founder, part time, a couple of hours a day; no employees", "fundingLabel": "None reported; built part time on no-code tools", "primaryFactor": "Speed", "group": "learning", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "sold", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2C", "Education" ], "product": "A web app for teachers, built without code on Bubble, that checked whether a student's essay was written by an AI model and then grew generative tools: plan a lesson, write an assessment, research a topic, draft feedback. The founder said in July 2023 that it was sold as a subscription at US$19 a month. The same domain still sells a teacher assistant in October 2026, under a later owner, with a paper grader and report-card writer added.", "why": "The founder built the first version in about two weeks of part-time work because her partner, a teacher, worried about students cheating with ChatGPT. She told the No-Code Exits newsletter in July 2023 that she likes the early stage of a product and not the long growth stage, so she listed the app on the Tiny Acquisitions marketplace while it had 2 paying users, and said a buyer who wanted to learn Bubble paid US$4,250 within days.", "summary": [ "Tabitha.ai was an AI teaching assistant that ran in a browser tab. It started as an AI detector, a tool that estimates whether a text was written by a language model such as ChatGPT, for teachers who suspect that an essay was not written by the student. The founder then added generative AI features, that is, features where a language model writes new text on request: lesson plans, assessments, topic research and draft feedback. The whole app was built with no-code tools, visual builders such as Bubble that let a person assemble a web application from blocks and connect it to outside services through their APIs, the interfaces that programs use to call other programs, without writing program code. The founder said in July 2023 that teachers paid US$19 a month for it as a SaaS subscription, software sold as a monthly service.", "Milly Barker-DeStefano, an international lawyer from England who lives in Connecticut and runs a small venture studio beside a job as chief growth officer at a fintech startup, told the No-Code Exits newsletter in July 2023 that she built the first version, only the detector, in about two weeks of a couple of hours a day, without telling anyone, because she was not sure she could make the AI integrations work in Bubble. She said that she then listed the app on Tiny Acquisitions, a marketplace for very small online businesses, got interest the same day, and sold it for US$4,250, of which the marketplace took a 9.5% fee. At the time of the sale, she said, the app had about 100 free users, 2 paying users, revenue of US$38 a month and about 600 visitors a month. The buyer, she said, wanted to learn Bubble and had contacts among teachers.", "Every figure on this page comes from that one interview, published on 6 July 2023, so the evidence grade is D, reported and not verified: no buyer statement, marketplace record or payment-processor profile confirms the price. The page also lists earlier tools for teachers in the Loot Drop database that died when free platforms from Google and others covered the same jobs. The domain tabitha.ai still sells a teacher assistant in October 2026 under a later owner." ], "factsCaption": "A no-code app with 2 paying users that its founder said she sold for US$4,250 in mid-2023, about four months after the first archived copy of its page; one source for every number", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is a single founder statement in one interview, with no second source. A grade C value is read directly from an archived or current page. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a tool built for one teacher to a sale on a marketplace for tiny businesses, in about five months of part-time work. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "The 2023 price as the founder stated it in July 2023 (grade D), and the prices on tabitha.ai in October 2026, which belong to a later owner (grade C)", "note": "The founder said in July 2023 that the app was a subscription at US$19 a month with a free trial, and that a free-trial user cost her about US$0.25 to serve. The 2026 page, run by a later owner, sells a free plan with 15 credits and a Pro plan at US$19.99 a month with 150 credits, where one credit is one graded submission, one report-card comment or one AI-detection scan; it says yearly plans are 20% cheaper, which this page computes as US$15.99 a month. School and district licences are priced on request. Payments in 2026 go through Lemon Squeezy, not the Stripe setup the founder described.", "rows": [ [ "Tabitha.ai, 2023, founder's statement", "", "19", "free trial, then one plan" ], [ "Free Starter, 2026, later owner", "0", "0", "15 credits on signup" ], [ "Tabitha Pro, 2026, later owner", "15.99", "19.99", "150 credits a month" ], [ "School and district licence, 2026, later owner", "", "", "price on request, purchase orders" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Sale price, by July 2023", "value": "US$4,250", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder's statement in the No-Code Exits interview published 6 July 2023. She said Tiny Acquisitions took a 9.5% platform fee. No buyer or marketplace record was found.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Net to the founder after the marketplace fee", "value": "about US$3,846", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$4,250 minus 9.5%. The founder did not state the net amount.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month at the sale", "value": "US$38", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder's statement, July 2023. Two paying users at US$19 a month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Price of the sale against monthly revenue", "value": "about 112 months of revenue", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$4,250 divided by US$38. The buyer paid for the built app, not for the revenue.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Users at the sale", "value": "about 100 free, 2 paying, about 600 visitors a month", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder's statement, July 2023. Elsewhere in the same interview she says 40 to 50 sign-ups before the sale; the two figures are not reconciled.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Price per month, 2023", "value": "US$19", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder's statement, July 2023. The archived pages are built by script and show no prices.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Cost to serve one free-trial user", "value": "about US$0.25", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder's statement, July 2023, the cost of the AI calls for a trial.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time to build the first version", "value": "about two weeks, a couple of hours a day", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder's statement, July 2023. Her first app built alone in Bubble, including sign-up, log-in and payments.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 person, part time", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder's statement, July 2023: she built it alone beside a full-time job and did not want to build a team.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "D", "note": "No investment is mentioned in either interview; the founder describes self-built side projects sold to other entrepreneurs.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Earliest archived copy of tabitha.ai", "value": "26 March 2023", "grade": "C", "note": "The Wayback Machine index lists a first capture on 5 March 2023 with no stored page, then a stored page on 26 March 2023 that describes an AI teaching assistant. The link-preview image in that page carries a Bubble upload stamp that converts to 27 January 2023.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "The founder's earlier exit", "value": "Shout About, sold for US$15,000 in 2022", "grade": "C", "note": "Her November 2022 interview with the same newsletter: a media-contacts app built with a co-founder on Bubble, with US$1,003 of monthly recurring revenue, listed at US$10,000 and sold for US$15,000.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Months from the first archived page to the sale", "value": "4", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: March 2023 to July 2023, the month the interview reporting the sale was published. The exact sale date is not stated.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "April to November 2022", "what": "Barker-DeStefano builds Shout About, a media-contacts app, on Bubble with a co-founder, pre-sells 20 subscriptions on Twitter and sells the business for US$15,000 after a broken leg stops her work. She describes a venture studio that builds small apps and sells them.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "27 January 2023", "what": "The link-preview image of tabitha.ai is uploaded to Bubble, by the time stamp in its file name. The founder later says the first version, an AI detector for her partner's classroom, took about two weeks.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "when": "26 March 2023", "what": "First stored copy of tabitha.ai in the Wayback Machine: \"The powerful AI teaching assistant that helps to improve educational experiences for everyone\", a Bubble app.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "Spring 2023", "what": "Generative tools added: lesson plans, assessments, topic research, feedback drafts. Marketing is six weeks of scheduled social posts, YouTube videos and cold emails to teachers found on Apollo. About 40 to 50 sign-ups, 2 of them paying.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "By 6 July 2023", "what": "Listed on Tiny Acquisitions; interest within a day; sold for US$4,250 less a 9.5% fee to a buyer who wants to learn Bubble and has contacts in teaching. Revenue at the sale: US$38 a month.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "15 December 2023", "what": "The site is still the same Bubble app with the same description, now under the buyer.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "tabitha.ai sells a paper grader, a report-card writer and an AI detector at US$19.99 a month through Lemon Squeezy, with district licences. The page claims 12,000 teachers; nothing on it confirms the claim, and it belongs to a later owner.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 6 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Build for one known user, in two weeks", "text": "The first version solved one problem for one teacher, the founder's partner: is this essay written by an AI model? The founder said in July 2023 that she built it in about two weeks of part-time work with no announcement, because the only open question was whether she could make the AI integrations work in Bubble. Validation came after the build, through sign-ups." }, { "title": "No code, so the app itself is the asset", "text": "Bubble for the app, Stripe for payments, PriceWell to connect the two, MailerLite and Postmark for emails, FreshDesk for help articles, Reflio for affiliates, Apollo for teacher email addresses. A buyer who cannot program can run and extend such a stack, and the founder said the buyer wanted exactly that: a working Bubble app to learn from." }, { "title": "Sell at the start, not at the end", "text": "The founder said she likes finding problems and getting the first users, not the long growth stage. She calls what she sells a business in a box: a built app with early sign-ups that another entrepreneur takes over. Her stated US$4,250 for an app with US$38 a month of revenue is a price for the build and the idea, not for the income." }, { "title": "A marketplace for tiny deals", "text": "Tiny Acquisitions lists businesses too small for the larger marketplaces. The founder said the listing drew interest within a day because it was a no-code product using AI for a specific problem, and that the platform fee was 9.5%." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's July 2023 interview and from the archived page code. They are grade D unless the page code shows them.", "items": [ "Bubble, a visual no-code builder, for the whole application: sign-up, log-in, the detection tool, the generative tools, saved and printable reports. The archived page code carries Bubble's page-load markers.", "AI detection and generative AI connected through outside APIs; the founder does not name the providers.", "Stripe for payments, with PriceWell to manage the Stripe-to-Bubble link.", "MailerLite for welcome and marketing emails, Postmark for transactional emails such as password resets, FreshDesk for support articles, Reflio for an affiliate program.", "Apollo to find teachers' email addresses for a cold email series; social media accounts filled with six weeks of scheduled content; YouTube videos of use cases.", "The founder said a free-trial user cost her about US$0.25 to serve, which set the cost of the free tier." ], "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database, all from the same 2010 accelerator wave, sold teachers tools for grading, lesson planning and classroom records, and all closed by 2013. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "ClassroomIQ", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Digital grading of paper exams, so teachers keep paper tests but lose the hand marking.", "died": "Schools adopted digital tools slowly, better-connected rivals reached them first, and the company did not move to automatic grading in time.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1685-classroomiq" }, { "name": "Blendspace", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$150K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Drag-and-drop digital lesson plans built from web content.", "died": "Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams absorbed the job, and a free plan for teachers never turned into revenue.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1693-blendspace" }, { "name": "Edusight", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$250K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Classroom records and assessment tracking for K-12 teachers.", "died": "Slow school procurement, then simpler rivals such as ClassDojo and Seesaw won the teachers.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1678-edusight" }, { "name": "BrightLoop", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Track and share each student's progress in real time.", "died": "Google's free classroom tools covered the same need before the company could raise more money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1681-brightloop" }, { "name": "Socrative", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$750K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Live classroom quizzes on phones instead of clicker devices.", "died": "Free offerings from large platforms and slow school adoption; the technology was sold off while the stand-alone business was not sustainable.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1697-socrative" } ], "whatChanged": [ "All five predecessors raised money, hired, and tried to sell to schools, whose purchasing is slow and whose budgets are small; then Google shipped the same features free. Tabitha.ai never faced that test. The founder said in July 2023 that she sold it with 2 paying teachers, before any school sale and before the free tools from OpenAI and Google reached the same jobs.", "Two things were different in 2023. A single person could build the whole app in two weeks with no-code tools and a language-model API, so the cost of trying was a few weeks of evenings rather than a seed round. And a marketplace existed for selling such an app at a four-figure price: the founder said Tiny Acquisitions found a buyer within a day. The money came from selling the built product, not from the teachers, who paid US$38 a month in total by her account." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes; the money, barely.", "text": "The founder's method is fully described and needs no capital: one real user, a two-week no-code build, a few weeks of scheduled posts and cold email, then a listing on a marketplace for tiny businesses. The founder said the result was US$4,250 before a 9.5% fee, for roughly five months of part-time work, and the only evidence is her own interview. A reader who copies the method should expect a price for a working app and an idea, not for revenue.", "steps": [ "Pick one person you know with a recurring task and build the smallest tool that does it, on a no-code builder with a language-model API.", "Charge from the first day with a free trial, and know what a trial user costs you per month.", "Schedule several weeks of posts in one sitting and send a short cold email series to the exact profession.", "If you do not want to run the growth stage, list the app on a small-business marketplace while it still has sign-ups and a working stack a buyer can learn from." ], "open": "Any profession with repeated writing work that the large free assistants do not yet package for it: a specific exam board, a specific report format, a specific language of instruction." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline figure, a sale for US$4,250, rests on one source: the founder's own interview in the No-Code Exits newsletter, published on 6 July 2023. The same interview is the only source for the US$38 a month of revenue, the 2 paying users, the US$19 price and the 9.5% marketplace fee. The buyer is not named, the Tiny Acquisitions listing is archived only as a script-rendered page with no readable text, and no payment-processor profile exists. A reader could look for the buyer's own account of the purchase, a Tiny Acquisitions record of the closed listing, or a later statement by the founder that repeats the figures." }, { "title": "Two users is not a business", "text": "By the founder's account the app had US$38 a month of revenue when sold. The price paid, if accurate, was for the built app and the early sign-ups. Nothing on this page shows that the product could have grown." }, { "title": "The later site makes claims this page cannot check", "text": "In October 2026 tabitha.ai says that more than 12,000 teachers use it. That is a later owner's statement with no evidence on the page, and it has no bearing on the 2023 sale." }, { "title": "Free assistants cover the same jobs", "text": "ChatGPT, Gemini and the free teacher tools from large companies write lesson plans and feedback at no charge, and AI detectors are known to produce false accusations against students. Every predecessor on this page died when a free platform covered its job." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.tabitha.ai/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "No-Code Exits newsletter, 6 July 2023: How Milly built and sold an AI teaching assistent", "url": "https://nocodeexits.substack.com/p/37-ai-teaching-assistent-acquired", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. The founder's interview. The only source for the sale price, the fee, the revenue, the user counts, the price, the build time and the tool stack." }, { "title": "No-Code Exits newsletter, 3 November 2022: How Milly went from validation to acquisition with No-Code", "url": "https://nocodeexits.substack.com/p/from-no-code-saas-validation-to-acquisition", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's earlier interview about Shout About. Source for her background, her venture studio and her first exit." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine: tabitha.ai on 26 March 2023, the earliest stored copy", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230326223732/https://tabitha.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page code. The page is a Bubble app rendered by script, so only the title, the description and the Bubble markers are readable. The capture list came from the Wayback index for tabitha.ai." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine: tabitha.ai on 15 December 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20231215055926/https://tabitha.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page code. Same Bubble app and description after the sale." }, { "title": "Tabitha.ai pricing page, read 23 October 2026, run by a later owner", "url": "https://www.tabitha.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 2026 plans, the credits, the yearly discount and the Lemon Squeezy payments." }, { "title": "Tabitha.ai home page, read 23 October 2026, run by a later owner", "url": "https://www.tabitha.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 2026 features and the unverified user claim." }, { "title": "Birkwood Ventures, the founder's studio site, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://birkwood.co/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A one-page site for a London company offering startup consulting; it does not mention Tabitha.ai." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/stomach-book/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/stomach-book.md", "slug": "stomach-book", "name": "Stomach Book (胃之书, Bellybook)", "country": "China", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI food diary app for iPhone", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-23", "launchLabel": "April 2024", "outcomeLabel": "about US$12K a month, September 2024", "sticker": "$12K/month, reported", "outcomeUsd": 144000, "months": 5, "teamLabel": "1 founder; a second programmer wrote the Android version by September 2024", "fundingLabel": "None (two investment offers declined)", "primaryFactor": "Design", "group": "health-appearance", "channel": "communities", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Food" ], "product": "An iPhone app in which you record what you ate in one sentence or one photo. A language model fills in the dish, the cuisine and the background, cuts the food out of the photo, and files the meal in a personal collection with ink-painting illustrations. It is sold as a diary for people who like food, not as a calorie counter. The app is free with a paid membership inside it.", "why": "The founder said in September 2024 that the app does not sell AI; it sells a feeling, and the animation that plays when the model finishes its work is the moment people decide to pay. It charged from the first day, spent nothing on advertising, gave a free month to users who posted about it on Xiaohongshu, and reached the top three of Apple's Food and Drink chart in China within weeks.", "summary": [ "Stomach Book (胃之书, now also sold in English as Bellybook) is a food diary, an app in which a person records every meal, built on a large language model, a program trained on text that can read a short description and complete it. The user writes one sentence or takes one photo; the model names the dish, assigns it to one of the eight Chinese cuisines, writes a note about it, and cuts the food out of the photo for a collection. The founder, Zhao Chunxiang (赵纯想), told the Chinese tech site Huxiu in September 2024 that the app uses the model's ability to summarize, not to generate, and that he removed the letters AI from its original name.", "Zhao is a former novelist and screenwriter from China who had built more than twenty apps before this one, of which, he told Huxiu, only five made money. The app was live on the Chinese App Store by 23 April 2024 (the date of its earliest review). The interview site Silicon Star reported in November 2024 that in-app purchases brought US$12,000 in the first month, that Apple's editors recommended the app within 15 days, and that it reached the top three of the paid chart. Huxiu reported on 29 September 2024 that monthly revenue was stable at about US$12,000 from paid subscriptions, that the app had 60,000 users 100 days after launch, and that the founder had turned down two investment offers.", "Every money figure on this page is the founder's own statement, reported once by a journalist, and no payment processor or buyer has confirmed it; the evidence grade is D, reported, not verified. Three articles repeat the same figure of US$12,000 for three different periods (the first month, a stable month, and five months after launch), so the page treats it as one reported number. Prices in Chinese yuan are converted at 6.6743 CNY per US dollar, the European Central Bank reference rate for 22 October 2026, and the original yuan figure is shown next to each conversion." ], "factsCaption": "A one-person food diary app that its founder said made about US$12,000 a month in September 2024, with no advertising and no investors; one source for each figure", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is a founder statement that appears in one source only, usually a journalist's interview, and that no payment processor, buyer or second interview confirms. A grade C value is a founder statement that two sources agree on, or a fact read on the company's App Store page. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a failed 2019 startup to a paid app in Apple's top three for food in China, with every figure a founder statement and its grade shown.", "pricing": { "caption": "Stomach Book in-app purchases on the Chinese App Store, read 23 October 2026, converted at 6.6743 CNY per US dollar (grade C); the US store lists the monthly plan at US$9.99", "note": "The app is free to download. The Chinese store lists six in-app purchases: two monthly memberships (CNY 12 and CNY 18), a yearly membership at CNY 128, a Gourmet yearly membership at CNY 198, and two lifetime memberships at CNY 198 and CNY 669. The monthly-billed column shows the yuan price converted to US dollars; the yearly column shows the yearly price divided by 12. The US store page, read on the same day, shows a monthly membership at US$9.99, about four times the Chinese monthly price. The yuan prices were converted with the European Central Bank reference rate for 22 October 2026.", "rows": [ [ "Monthly membership (月会员)", "", "1.80 (CNY 12)", "China store; US store US$9.99" ], [ "Monthly membership (月度会员)", "", "2.70 (CNY 18)", "China store, second monthly listing" ], [ "Yearly membership (年会员)", "1.60 (CNY 128 a year)", "", "China store" ], [ "Gourmet yearly membership (美食家年度会员)", "2.47 (CNY 198 a year)", "", "China store" ], [ "Lifetime membership (胃之书永久会员)", "29.67 one-time (CNY 198)", "", "China store" ], [ "Gourmet lifetime membership (美食家永久会员)", "100.24 one-time (CNY 669)", "", "China store" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue per month, September 2024", "value": "about US$12,000 (about CNY 80,092 at the October 2026 rate)", "grade": "D", "note": "Huxiu, 29 September 2024, journalist Wang Qin reporting the founder's figure: monthly revenue from paid subscriptions is stable at about US$12,000. The article gives the figure in US dollars. One source.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the September 2024 figure", "value": "about US$144,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$12,000 times 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "In-app purchase revenue in the first month after launch", "value": "US$12,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Silicon Star interview, republished by Woshipm on 5 November 2024. The same number as the monthly figure above, stated for a different period. One source.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue five months after launch", "value": "US$12,000", "grade": "D", "note": "The Paper, 2 January 2025, a self-media account (鲸选AI) on the site's Paike platform, not a staff journalist. It says revenue reached US$12,000 five months after launch and the app reached third place in Apple's Food and Drink category. The period does not match the other two sources.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Users", "value": "10,000 registrations on the first day; 60,000 users at 100 days; 90,000 users by January 2025", "grade": "D", "note": "First day: Silicon Star. 100 days: Huxiu, with 21 versions released in that time. 90,000: The Paper. Each figure appears in one source.", "src": [ 2, 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Chart position, May 2024", "value": "third in the top-grossing chart of Apple's Food and Drink category in China", "grade": "C", "note": "Huxiu says third in the category's top-grossing chart in May. Silicon Star says the app reached the top three of the paid chart and was recommended by Apple's editors within 15 days of launch. The Paper says third, behind the recipe app Xiachufang.", "src": [ 1, 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Team at the September 2024 figure", "value": "the founder and one other programmer", "grade": "C", "note": "Huxiu: the app's developers are the founder and one other programmer. Silicon Star: the founder found a partner who writes the Android version while he writes the iOS version; the rest is him alone.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none; two investment offers of CNY 1.5 million and CNY 2 million (about US$224,743 and US$299,657) not taken", "grade": "C", "note": "Huxiu: the founder missed two investment intentions after a June 2024 roadshow and set investment aside. Silicon Star: he does not want investment. The Paper says an investor gave him a term sheet.", "src": [ 1, 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Advertising spend", "value": "zero", "grade": "C", "note": "Silicon Star: one person, zero advertising, tens of thousands of downloads. The Paper: zero advertising and zero marketing cost.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Developer of record on the App Store", "value": "Shanghai Diyu Network Technology Co., Ltd", "grade": "C", "note": "Apple's page for the app in the Chinese and US stores. The founder's interviews do not name the company.", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "App Store ratings, October 2026", "value": "1,878 ratings, 4.7 of 5, on the Chinese store; 111 ratings on the US store", "grade": "C", "note": "Read on Apple's pages on 23 October 2026.", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Earlier products", "value": "more than twenty apps, about a dozen on the store, five made money", "grade": "C", "note": "Huxiu. The founder's 2019 startup Space Chat raised CNY 1 million (about US$149,828) and spent it in six months.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the September 2024 figure", "value": "5 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: April 2024 to September 2024.", "src": [ 4, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2019", "what": "Zhao Chunxiang, a screenwriter and novelist, raises CNY 1 million for a startup called Space Chat. The money is spent in six months and the company fails.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2019 to 2023", "what": "He builds more than twenty apps alone, about a dozen of them released, five profitable. He learns to write server code only in 2023.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "23 April 2024", "what": "Stomach Book is live on the Chinese App Store: the earliest user review on Apple's page carries this date. The app is paid from the first day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 2 ] }, { "when": "May 2024", "what": "Apple's editors recommend the app within 15 days of launch, and it reaches third place in the top-grossing chart of the Food and Drink category in China. Silicon Star reported that the first month brought US$12,000 in in-app purchases and 10,000 registrations on the first day.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "June 2024", "what": "A roadshow talk brings investors and press. Two investment offers, CNY 1.5 million and CNY 2 million, are not taken; the founder says he needs to think about the next step first.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "August 2024", "what": "About 100 days after launch: 60,000 users and 21 versions released, as the founder told Huxiu.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "29 September 2024", "what": "Huxiu publishes its interview: monthly revenue stable at about US$12,000 from subscriptions, two developers, a plan to add a review platform for snacks and drinks, and a card game in development.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "5 November 2024", "what": "Silicon Star's interview, republished by Woshipm: a second app, Stranger Alarm Clock, is out, and the founder says nobody could afford to buy Stomach Book.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "2 January 2025", "what": "The Paper's self-media account writes that the app reached 90,000 users and that the founder's products run on StepFun's Yuewen model platform.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "15 April 2025", "what": "Version 2.0.0 on the App Store.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "Version 2.3.0, released in the week before this page was written. The app is also listed in the US store under the English name Bellybook, with a monthly membership at US$9.99.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 5 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Design as the product", "text": "The founder told Huxiu that the app does not have much AI in it and that what sells is the experience: black-and-white ink paintings, a sesame grinder that vibrates in your hand when the app opens, and three plain screens followed by a fourth on which the model's result suddenly animates. He said that this moment of emotion is what makes people pay, and that he proved it so that he can reuse it in other products." }, { "title": "A diary, not a calorie counter", "text": "The App Store description says the app rejects the lies and anxiety of calorie tracking and is made for people who love food. The user writes one sentence or takes a photo; the model does the filing. The competitor the founder named to Huxiu is Cal AI, a calorie-counting app abroad that he said made US$400,000 a month, and he said that selling his own app abroad in dollars would multiply its revenue." }, { "title": "Paid from day one, no advertising", "text": "The founder said in his Silicon Star interview that an app must charge from the first day, because switching from free to paid later makes users leave. He said that he spent nothing on advertising, and that all the subscription fees had to feed only one person, so it was hard to lose money." }, { "title": "Posts for a free month", "text": "Huxiu reported that any user who posted a recommendation of the app on Xiaohongshu, the Chinese photo-sharing community, received a month of membership, and that Xiaohongshu attention plus press coverage drove the growth. The App Store's featured review says the reviewer found the app through a recommendation there. The Paper's account adds that perhaps half of the users were other developers who came after reading the press." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's interviews with Huxiu and Silicon Star, from Apple's pages for the app and from The Paper's self-media account. They are grade C or D.", "items": [ "A native iPhone app; the founder said he writes the iOS version himself and a partner later wrote an Android version.", "A large language model reads the one-sentence meal entry or the photo, names the dish, assigns a cuisine and writes the background; the founder said it uses the model's summarizing ability, not its generating ability. The Paper's account says his products run on StepFun's Yuewen model platform under its developer program; no other source confirms the provider.", "Hand-drawn ink illustrations by the founder, including a noodle master taken from one of his own novels.", "Free download with in-app memberships through Apple's App Store, monthly, yearly and lifetime; Apple's pages list them from CNY 12 a month in China and US$9.99 a month in the US store.", "21 versions in the first 100 days; version 2.3.0 by October 2026.", "Distribution by user posts on Xiaohongshu rewarded with a free month, Apple's editorial recommendation and press interviews; the founder said advertising spend was zero." ], "src": [ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold the organization of what people eat, or the tracking of their health, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Springpad", "years": "2008 to 2014", "funding": "US$7.5M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Collect and organize recipes, articles and videos in a personal digital library.", "died": "A loved free product whose makers never found what users would pay for before the money ran out.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1893-springpad" }, { "name": "Refolo", "years": "2017 to 2021", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A meal planner with personal recipes to move people to a plant-based diet.", "died": "Charged for meal plans while free alternatives existed, and larger wellness apps absorbed the feature.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1994-refolo" }, { "name": "Qraved", "years": "2013 to 2021", "funding": "US$15M", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "Restaurant discovery and booking with editorial reviews for Jakarta's food lovers.", "died": "Google Maps took discovery, super-apps took bookings, and the pandemic ended dining out.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2233-qraved" }, { "name": "Arivale", "years": "2015 to 2019", "funding": "US$50M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Track your body's data with tests and a coach to improve your health before illness.", "died": "It cost far more to serve each customer than the customer paid, and customers lost interest once the novelty of the data passed.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/8-arivale" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Springpad and Refolo asked people to organize what they ate and could not get paid for it: one stayed free, the other charged for plans that free sites gave away. Qraved and Arivale paid staff, editors and coaches to produce the content and the data, and the cost per customer stayed above the revenue per customer. Stomach Book has one person and no staff cost, and the model does the filing that Springpad's users had to do by hand. The founder said that the app charged from its first day, so the question that killed Springpad was answered before launch.", "What has not changed is the size of the market. The founder told Huxiu that some investors considered the ceiling of a food diary low, and his own next step, a review platform for snacks and drinks, is the same move toward reviews and discovery that Qraved made with venture money. The monthly figure he reported, about US$12,000 in September 2024, feeds one or two people and would not have covered any of the four predecessors' payrolls." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The structure, yes; the design, only if you can draw.", "text": "A one-person paid app in a category that the large companies treat as a free feature, with a model doing the data entry and no advertising budget, is repeatable, and the founder said the economics work because the subscriptions only have to feed one person. The part that is hard to copy is the founder's own illustration and screenwriting, which he said is the reason people pay.", "steps": [ "Pick a daily habit that people already record by hand, and let a language model do the filing from one sentence or one photo.", "Charge from the first day through the app store, with monthly, yearly and lifetime options.", "Spend the design effort on one moment of surprise after the model returns its result, rather than on more features.", "Reward users who post about the app on the community where your customers already are, instead of buying advertising." ], "open": "Any diary-like habit with a visual result: wardrobes, coffee, books read, places visited, plants grown, each in a market the large apps serve only as a free side feature." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline figure, about US$12,000 a month, rests on one source: the founder's statement to Huxiu's journalist Wang Qin, published on 29 September 2024. Silicon Star (republished 5 November 2024) gives the same US$12,000 as the first month's in-app purchase revenue, and The Paper's self-media account (2 January 2025) gives it as the revenue five months after launch; the number is the same but the period differs in each telling. No payment processor, app-store revenue statement, buyer or second interview confirms the monthly figure. A reader could look for an App Store Connect screenshot shared by the founder, a later interview with a dated figure, or a verified revenue profile." }, { "title": "The app's charts and downloads are in China", "text": "All the chart positions, user counts and prices are from the Chinese App Store. The US listing under the name Bellybook has 111 ratings against 1,878 in China, and no source gives revenue outside China." }, { "title": "The founder's attention is elsewhere", "text": "By November 2024 he had released a second app and was preparing a third, and told Huxiu that a card game was the thing he wanted to make, with Stomach Book feeding it. Huxiu's interview quotes investors' concern that he does not focus on one product." }, { "title": "Small market, free competition", "text": "Apple, WeChat and the large Chinese platforms can add a photo meal diary as a free feature, as the predecessors on this page found with their own categories. The founder's answer is design and emotion, which a large company can also hire." }, { "title": "No figures after September 2024", "text": "The app is still updated in October 2026, but no source gives revenue or users after January 2025, so the trend is unknown." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://bellybook.cn/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Huxiu, 29 September 2024, by Wang Qin: When a screenwriter turns to AI startups (当一位编剧转行搞AI创业)", "url": "https://m.huxiu.com/article/3521097.html", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full after extracting the article text from the page. A staff journalist's profile with the founder's figures: the monthly revenue, the May chart position, the 60,000 users, the two investment offers, the team of two and the Xiaohongshu reward. The money figures are the founder's statements and are graded D where no second source gives the same period." }, { "title": "Silicon Star (硅星人), republished by Woshipm on 5 November 2024: A conversation with Zhao Chunxiang: AI finally lets me work alone (对话赵纯想：AI终让我能单枪匹马)", "url": "https://www.woshipm.com/share/6136757.html", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A question-and-answer interview by the tech publication Silicon Star, republished on the product-manager site Woshipm. Source for the first-month revenue, the first-day registrations, the editorial recommendation, the paid-from-day-one rule, the zero advertising and the Android partner." }, { "title": "The Paper (澎湃新闻), Paike self-media account 鲸选AI, 2 January 2025: This group makes AI hits, one person earns a million a year (这个群体，AI捏爆款，1人年入百万)", "url": "https://m.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_29825888", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. A self-media article on The Paper's platform, not by a staff journalist; it summarizes other reports. Source for the 90,000 users, the five-month revenue statement, the Jike promotion and the Yuewen platform claim." }, { "title": "Apple App Store, China: 胃之书 - 人生美食收纳手册, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/cn/app/id6479637639", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the developer name, the in-app purchase prices, the ratings, the version history and the earliest review date." }, { "title": "Apple App Store, United States: Bellybook, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6479637639", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the English name, the US monthly price and the US ratings count." }, { "title": "Bellybook website, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://bellybook.cn/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page source; the page loads its content by script and shows only a title and description. Used for the purpose check and the privacy and user-agreement links." }, { "title": "Frankfurter exchange-rate API, European Central Bank reference rate, 22 October 2026: 1 US dollar = 6.6743 CNY", "url": "https://api.frankfurter.dev/v1/latest?base=USD&symbols=CNY", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. The rate used for every conversion from Chinese yuan on this page." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/invrs-io/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/invrs-io.md", "slug": "invrs-io", "name": "invrs.io", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Open-source AI design tools for optics", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "B", "added": "2026-10-23", "launchLabel": "26 October 2023", "outcomeLabel": "Sold to Apple for an undisclosed price, February 2026", "sticker": "Sold to Apple, price undisclosed", "outcomeUsd": 0, "months": 28, "teamLabel": "1 founder, the only employee and the only shareholder at the sale", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Open-source work in public", "group": "build-software", "channel": "open-source", "trend": "sold", "collections": [ "open-source" ], "meters": { "evidence": 2, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2B", "Photonics" ], "product": "A set of free Python packages for designing optical parts with AI methods: a gym of standard design problems (invrs-gym), optimization algorithms (invrs-opt), a light simulator that runs on GPUs (fmmax), and a public leaderboard of the best solutions. Everything is MIT-licensed code on GitHub, installed with pip. There was no paid product.", "why": "One researcher who had led AI-guided optics design at Alphabet and Meta put the tooling of that field into the open, with a shared benchmark that anyone could run. Apple, which designs cameras, displays, sensors and lidar parts, bought the assets and hired him. The buyer's filing with the European Commission is the only hard document; it gives no price.", "summary": [ "invrs.io is a set of open-source tools for inverse design, a method in which an engineer states the performance a part must have and an algorithm computes the shape that gives it, instead of drawing the shape first. The field here is photonics, the engineering of components that guide and shape light: lenses, color filters, waveguides for AR glasses, micro-LEDs. The main package, invrs-gym, is a collection of standard design problems with one software interface, so that a new AI method can be compared with earlier ones on the same problems. A public leaderboard holds the best known solutions, and a simulator called fmmax computes how light moves through a candidate structure.", "Martin Schubert founded invrs.io LLC in 2023 after about seven years at Alphabet's X lab, where he started an AI-guided photonics design project in 2017, and a period at Meta Reality Labs. The first invrs-gym release appeared on PyPI on 26 October 2023, and 40 versions followed by October 2024. He published the paper that describes the gym on arXiv on 31 October 2024 as the only author. The company never sold anything: every package is free under the MIT license, and the Solo Founders newsletter wrote in February 2026 that it was not venture-backed.", "In October 2025 Apple told the European Commission that it would acquire certain assets of invrs.io LLC and hire its sole equityholder and employee. The Commission published the notice in February 2026, and MacRumors, 9to5Mac and heise reported it. The buyer disclosed no price, and no source reports any revenue, so the money figure on this page is zero, as the facts table says. The evidence for the sale itself is grade B: a regulator's published list of the buyer's own filing, read by three news outlets." ], "factsCaption": "A sale with no public number: Apple's filing with the European Commission names the company and the one person, and nothing else", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value is the buyer's disclosure to a regulator; grade B is that disclosure as read and quoted by journalists, or a platform record (PyPI, GitHub, arXiv); grade C is a founder or company statement, including a LinkedIn profile as quoted by press. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From the first package on PyPI to a published acquisition notice in 28 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "invrs.io prices: there were none. All packages are free under the MIT license, as read on GitHub and PyPI in October 2026 (grade B)", "note": "The company had no pricing page and no paid plan in any source. The table lists the main packages and their license. The GitHub pages show 12 repositories, each marked MIT where a license is shown. A reader who wants to use them pays only for their own computer or GPU time.", "rows": [ [ "invrs-gym, design challenges", "0", "0", "MIT license, pip install invrs-gym" ], [ "invrs-opt, optimization algorithms", "0", "0", "MIT license" ], [ "fmmax, Fourier modal method simulator on JAX", "0", "0", "MIT license, pip install fmmax" ], [ "leaderboard, dataset of solutions", "0", "0", "public dataset and website" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Outcome, February 2026", "value": "Apple acquired certain assets of invrs.io LLC and hired its only shareholder and employee", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's notification to the European Commission, as quoted by MacRumors, 9to5Mac and heise online. The Commission's list is the acquirer's own disclosure; this page reads it through the three articles.", "src": [ 1, 2, 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Sale price", "value": "not disclosed", "grade": "B", "note": "No article and no filing gives a price. The money figure on this page is 0 because no public money figure of any kind exists: no price, no revenue, no funding.", "src": [ 1, 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "Every package is free MIT-licensed code on GitHub and PyPI. No source reports a paid product, a customer or a revenue figure.", "src": [ 7, 8, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Date Apple notified the Commission", "value": "October 2025", "grade": "B", "note": "MacRumors: Apple notified the Commission in October 2025; the Commission published the information after a four-month waiting period. The GitHub repositories were last updated between 20 and 23 October 2025.", "src": [ 1, 5, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Date the notice became public", "value": "week of 24 February 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "9to5Mac on 24 February 2026, MacRumors and heise online on 25 February 2026.", "src": [ 1, 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Team at the sale", "value": "1 person", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's filing describes the founder as the sole equityholder and employee of invrs.io LLC.", "src": [ 1, 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Company founded", "value": "2023", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder's LinkedIn profile, as quoted by heise online and MacTech. The LLC's registration date was not found.", "src": [ 3, 5 ] }, { "fact": "First public release", "value": "invrs-gym 0.1.0 on 26 October 2023", "grade": "B", "note": "PyPI release history, read in the Wayback copy of 18 October 2024. A 0.0.0 placeholder precedes it.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Releases by 14 October 2024", "value": "40 versions of invrs-gym, up to 1.4.3", "grade": "B", "note": "Counted from the PyPI release history. Version 1.0.0 came on 5 July 2024.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Paper", "value": "arXiv 2410.24132, submitted 31 October 2024, one author", "grade": "B", "note": "Title: invrs-gym: a toolkit for nanophotonic inverse design research. Author: Martin F. Schubert.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Code, October 2026", "value": "12 repositories; gym 78 stars, fmmax 21 stars", "grade": "B", "note": "GitHub organization page and repository pages read on 23 October 2026. The code is still public after the sale.", "src": [ 7, 8, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Origin of the simulator fmmax", "value": "written and open-sourced at Meta, then forked", "grade": "C", "note": "The fmmax README says it was originally developed and open-sourced at Meta and forked after the primary author left Meta, with significant improvements since.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's background", "value": "Micron; 7 years at Alphabet's X, AI photonics design project from 2017; Meta Reality Labs", "grade": "C", "note": "LinkedIn profile as quoted by heise online. MacTech quotes the same profile: about 15 years in the semiconductor industry, more than 6 years leading inverse design programs at Google and Meta, nearly 100 issued patents and 40 peer-reviewed papers.", "src": [ 3, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "The Solo Founders newsletter, 27 February 2026: he did not build a venture-backed startup. No funding record was found.", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "fact": "Time from first release to the public notice", "value": "28 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: October 2023 to February 2026. From the first release to Apple's notification in October 2025 it is 24 months.", "src": [ 1, 10 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2017", "what": "Schubert starts and leads an AI-guided photonics design project at Alphabet's X research lab, where he stays about seven years in total.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "2022 to 2023", "what": "At Meta Reality Labs he works on inverse design of micro-LEDs for AR glasses. The simulator fmmax is written and open-sourced at Meta.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 9 ] }, { "when": "2023", "what": "He founds invrs.io LLC after leaving Meta. The company's stated aim: AI-guided design, first for optics, with an ecosystem open to AI scientists, optimization researchers and optics designers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 5, 7 ] }, { "when": "26 October 2023", "what": "invrs-gym 0.1.0 appears on PyPI: optics design challenges with one common interface.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "5 July 2024", "what": "invrs-gym 1.0.0. By 14 October 2024 there are 40 released versions.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "31 October 2024", "what": "The paper describing the gym is submitted to arXiv with one author.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "October 2025", "what": "Apple notifies the European Commission that it will acquire certain assets of invrs.io LLC and hire its sole equityholder and employee. The GitHub repositories receive their last updates between 20 and 23 October.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "when": "24 and 25 February 2026", "what": "The Commission's list becomes public after a four-month waiting period. MacRumors spots it; 9to5Mac, heise online, MacTech and Open Source For U report it. No price is given.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 ] }, { "when": "27 February 2026", "what": "The Solo Founders newsletter lists the sale as an exit by a founder who never raised venture money.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A narrow field with few experts", "text": "Inverse design of photonic structures is a small specialty inside optics, and the founder had led it at two of the largest companies that need it. The press accounts describe that background as the reason for the deal: Apple bought the assets and hired him, which is what buyers do when the value is a person's knowledge rather than a product's revenue." }, { "title": "The benchmark as the product", "text": "invrs-gym is not a design tool for end users; it is a shared set of problems and a scoring rule, with a leaderboard of the best solutions. Whoever defines the benchmark in a field becomes the reference point for everyone who publishes in it. The founder's own paper, with one author, describes the gym and its baselines." }, { "title": "Open code, in public, under a permissive license", "text": "Every package was MIT-licensed on GitHub and installable from PyPI, with 40 releases in the first year. That made the work visible to the small number of people who could judge it, with no sales effort. The newsletter that listed the exit summarized it as: keep putting things out there until someone on the same frequency finds you." }, { "title": "A regulator made the sale public", "text": "Under the EU's Digital Markets Act, Apple must report every acquisition to the European Commission, which publishes a list after a waiting period. That is why a one-person sale with no press release became known at all, and why the dates on this page come from a regulator rather than from the founder." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the GitHub pages, the PyPI release history and the arXiv paper. The platform records are grade B; the README statements are grade C.", "items": [ "Python packages built on JAX, Google's library for array computing with automatic differentiation and GPU execution, so that gradients of an optical simulation can drive an optimizer.", "invrs-gym: a collection of design challenges, each a Challenge object with a Component, a loss function and evaluation metrics, so one code can run many problems. Challenges come from published papers, including Google's Ceviche challenges and problems from the founder's own earlier work.", "fmmax: a Fourier modal method solver on JAX, originally written and open-sourced at Meta, forked and improved after the author left.", "invrs-opt: optimization algorithms with a common interface, including L-BFGS-B. A leaderboard repository holds a dataset of user-submitted solutions with performance and manufacturability scores.", "Distribution: 12 public repositories under the MIT license, pip-installable packages on PyPI with 40 invrs-gym releases by October 2024, and a single-author paper on arXiv.", "No website content was found: invrs.io does not resolve in October 2026 and the Wayback Machine holds no copy, so the GitHub organization page is the company's only surviving self-description." ], "src": [ 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database built developer or engineering tools that engineers liked and could not turn into a business. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Mage", "years": "2021 to 2023", "funding": "US$2.6M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "An open-source data pipeline framework, friendlier than Airflow.", "died": "Thousands of GitHub stars, but few teams paid for hosting, and larger funded competitors took the category.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/962-mage" }, { "name": "WunderGraph", "years": "2020 to 2024", "funding": "US$3M", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "An open-source framework that joins APIs and databases into one typed interface.", "died": "Enterprise sales were too slow for the runway, and cloud platforms added the same features.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2495-wundergraph" }, { "name": "Pathmind", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "AI-driven simulation to optimize engineering and business processes.", "died": "Customers needed long education before they could use it, and large AI providers overshadowed the niche.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1070-pathmind" }, { "name": "numericcal, inc.", "years": "2018 to 2021", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Advanced analytics for engineering product design.", "died": "Could not stand out against Autodesk and Ansys, and did not move to AI-driven design in time.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1415-numericcal-inc" }, { "name": "Fig DevTool", "years": "2020 to 2024", "funding": "US$2.4M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Autocomplete and visual command builders for the terminal.", "died": "Developers used it daily and would not pay; AWS bought the team and technology instead.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2502-fig-devtool" } ], "whatChanged": [ "All five raised venture money and then had to turn developer goodwill into recurring revenue on a schedule set by their runway. Open code brought users; it did not bring budgets. Fig ended as invrs.io did, with a large company hiring the team, but after US$2.4 million of investors' money and a failed attempt to sell subscriptions.", "invrs.io never tried to sell. It had one person, no reported funding and no price list, so there was no runway to run out of. The output was a benchmark, a simulator and a paper in a field where the possible buyers are a handful of companies that build optical hardware. One of them bought the assets and hired the author. That is not a repeatable business model; it is what a published body of work in a scarce specialty can be worth to a company that needs it." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The structure, for specialists; not as a plan for revenue.", "text": "The available part is the method: pick a narrow technical field you already know from the inside, put a shared benchmark and the tools around it into the open under a permissive license, release often, and write the paper. The non-available part is the field itself and the founder's record at Alphabet and Meta, which is what a buyer pays for in a deal with no revenue.", "steps": [ "Choose a specialty where the number of people who can judge your work is small and the companies that need it are large.", "Publish the benchmark, not only a tool: a set of standard problems with one interface and a leaderboard makes your work the reference point.", "Release on the public package index often, under the MIT license, so that use costs nothing and needs no sales call.", "Write the paper as the single author, so the work is tied to one name that a buyer can hire." ], "open": "Any engineering specialty where simulation is slow and expert designers are few: antenna and radio-frequency design, battery materials, acoustic and thermal components, chip packaging." }, "watch": [ { "title": "No money figure at all", "text": "The buyer disclosed no price, no source reports revenue, and no funding is recorded. This page shows a money outcome of zero. The sale is real, the amount is unknown, and it may have been small." }, { "title": "An acquisition of assets and a hire, not a product sale", "text": "Apple's filing says it acquired certain assets and hired the sole equityholder and employee. The press calls it a micro-acquisition or an acqui-hire. The value to the buyer appears to be the person and the code, not a customer base." }, { "title": "The maintainer is gone from the public code", "text": "The GitHub repositories were last updated in October 2025, the month Apple filed its notice. The packages stay public under the MIT license, but no source says who will maintain them." }, { "title": "The founder has said nothing in public", "text": "No statement by Schubert about the sale was found: not a post, not an interview. The founding year and the career history come from a LinkedIn profile as quoted by press, and the newsletter item is a secondary summary of the same articles." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://github.com/invrs-io" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "MacRumors, 25 February 2026: EU Reveals Apple Made a Tiny Acquisition Last Year", "url": "https://www.macrumors.com/2026/02/24/apples-next-acquisition-revealed/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Joe Rossignol's report on the Commission's list. Source for the October 2025 notification, the four-month waiting period, the quoted notice text and the 2023 founding year from LinkedIn." }, { "title": "9to5Mac, 24 February 2026: Apple acquires startup specializing in AI-powered light and optics design tools", "url": "https://9to5mac.com/2026/02/24/apple-acquires-startup-specializing-in-ai-powered-light-and-optics-design-tools/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Marcus Mendes's report, crediting MacRumors. Source for the filing's words: acquire certain assets from and hire the sole equityholder and employee of invrs.io LLC." }, { "title": "heise online, 25 February 2026: Apple acquires photonics startup invrs.io", "url": "https://heise.de/-11190289", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. An English translation of the German article, editorially reviewed. Source for the founder's career: Micron, seven years at Alphabet's X with an AI photonics design project from 2017, Meta Reality Labs and micro-LED inverse design." }, { "title": "European Commission, Digital Markets Act case search: acquisitions notified by gatekeepers", "url": "https://digital-markets-act-cases.ec.europa.eu/acquisitions", "grade": "A", "how": "Could not read: the page loads its list through a script and an API key. The notice text is cited from the quotations in MacRumors, 9to5Mac, heise online and MacTech, which link to this page." }, { "title": "MacTech, 24 February 2026: Apple acquiring invrs.io that develops open-source frameworks for photonics research", "url": "https://www.mactech.com/2026/02/24/apple-acquiring-ivrs-io-that-develops-open-source-frameworks-for-photonics-research/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A summary of MacRumors and 9to5Mac that quotes the founder's LinkedIn profile: founded 2023, 15 years in the industry, 6 years leading inverse design programs, nearly 100 patents, 40 papers." }, { "title": "Open Source For U, 25 February 2026: Open Source Photonics Frameworks Drive Apple Acquisition Of invrs.io", "url": "https://www.opensourceforu.com/2026/02/apple-absorbs-open-source-photonics-platform-in-strategic-acqui-hire/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A secondary report that calls the deal a micro-acquisition and names 9to5Mac as the first reporter." }, { "title": "GitHub organization page invrs-io, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://github.com/invrs-io", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The company's self-description, the list of 12 repositories, their MIT licenses and their last-update dates in October 2025." }, { "title": "GitHub repository invrs-io/gym, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://github.com/invrs-io/gym", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the README. Source for the package design, the list of challenges and the 78 stars." }, { "title": "GitHub repository invrs-io/fmmax, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://github.com/invrs-io/fmmax", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the README. Source for the statement that fmmax was developed and open-sourced at Meta and forked after the primary author left, and for the 21 stars." }, { "title": "PyPI project page for invrs-gym, Wayback Machine copy of 18 October 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20241018004059/https://pypi.org/project/invrs-gym/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The live PyPI page returns a script challenge. Source for the release history from 0.1.0 on 26 October 2023 to 1.4.3 on 14 October 2024, the author field and the MIT license." }, { "title": "arXiv 2410.24132: invrs-gym: a toolkit for nanophotonic inverse design research", "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.24132", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the abstract page. Submitted 31 October 2024, single author Martin F. Schubert." }, { "title": "Solo Founders newsletter, 27 February 2026: Solo founder raises $50M, an Apple acquisition, and a new solo launch", "url": "https://solofounders.beehiiv.com/p/solo-founder-raises-50m-an-apple-acquisition-and-a-new-solo-launch", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the invrs.io item. A secondary summary: not venture-backed, open-source tools shared on GitHub, Apple acquired the company to bring him in-house, nearly 100 patents and 40 papers. It links to 9to5Mac." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/agentaos/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/agentaos.md", "slug": "agentaos", "name": "AgentaOS", "country": "Estonia", "sector": "Financial Services", "productType": "Merchant of record with AI pricing and billing agents for solo founders", "aiType": "AI-leveraged", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-23", "launchLabel": "3 March 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$9.5K a month, October 2026", "sticker": "$9.5K/mo, one source", "outcomeUsd": 114000, "months": 7, "teamLabel": "1 founder named on every page; no employee named anywhere", "fundingLabel": "None reported; an ElevenLabs Startup Grants badge on the home page", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "build-software", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-leveraged", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Financial Services" ], "product": "A merchant of record for freelancers, agencies and small software companies: AgentaOS becomes the legal seller on each card sale, charges the buyer's VAT or sales tax, sends the invoice and pays the seller out to a bank account, including in countries where Stripe does not sign up sellers. Every account includes two AI agents, one that reviews the seller's pricing and one that runs billing from Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor. The company's own pages say that it charges 4.5% plus EUR 0.50 per card sale with no monthly fee, or EUR 49 a month for a lower rate.", "why": "The founder had spent years in payments and had just failed with a stablecoin wallet for AI agents under the same name. In August 2026 he relaunched the brand as a merchant of record aimed at sellers in countries the big processors skip, with the first country guides written for the Western Balkans. The company's about page quotes an Indie Hackers interview of 6 October 2026 whose title says the relaunched business reached US$9.5K of monthly recurring revenue in two months, and its home page counts more than 400 sellers and 1,400 payments since August 2026.", "summary": [ "AgentaOS is a merchant of record, a company that sells another company's product in its own name: it takes the card payment, charges the buyer's VAT (the value-added tax that European countries put on digital sales) or sales tax, files the tax returns, sends the invoice, carries the chargeback risk (a card payment reversed by the buyer's bank) and pays the seller out to a bank account twice a month, as its pages say. Sellers can be individuals, with no company, in more than 190 countries, including many where Stripe does not open accounts. Two AI agents come with every account: a Pricing Intelligence that signs up to the seller's product as a customer, scores the pricing out of 100 and ranks the fixes, and a Payments Intelligence, which is the same billing system exposed through an MCP server (a server that speaks the Model Context Protocol, so that assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor can call it as a tool) with 31 operations: create a plan, open a checkout, send an invoice.", "Panche Isajeski, who the company's pages describe as a founder with 19 years in payments and who, by his own company site, was earlier co-founder and chief technology officer of a crypto exchange, launched AgentaOS on 3 March 2026 as a \"financial operating system for the agent economy\", a stablecoin wallet with spending rules for AI agents, built by his Estonian company Aristokrates OÜ. By mid-March 2026 the archived blog had a pilot for bank accounts for e-Residency founders, a wallet product, and a command-line tool. None of those pages mention revenue. In August 2026 the same domain became a merchant of record for human sellers, with Stripe for cards, Bridge for settlement and Wise for payouts. The company's about page quotes, as press, an Indie Hackers interview of 6 October 2026 titled \"Starting from scratch and hitting $9.5k MRR in two months\", and its listing on Startup Fame, written by the company, says the same figure was reached with no ads.", "That one figure, US$9,500 of monthly recurring revenue in October 2026, is the headline of this page and rests on one source, the founder's interview headline as quoted by his own site and three directory listings he wrote, so the page is graded D, reported and not verified. No payment processor profile, investor or journalist has confirmed it. The sellers and payments counters are the company's own, from its home page. The page also shows what happened to earlier payment companies that promised the same thing to small sellers." ], "factsCaption": "A merchant of record relaunched in August 2026 whose founder's interview headline, as quoted on his own site, says US$9,500 a month two months later; the rest of the figures are company counters and prices", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is a single founder statement with one date and no second source. A grade C value is read directly from the company's current or archived pages. A grade B value is visible in public code. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A.", "timelineLead": "From a stablecoin wallet for AI agents to a merchant of record for people, in seven months, with one reported revenue figure at the end. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "AgentaOS prices on 23 October 2026, read from the company's pricing page and its markdown copy (grade C). EUR prices converted at the ECB reference rate of 22 October 2026, US$1.1205 per euro, where the company gives no USD price", "note": "AgentaOS earns a fee on each sale rather than a flat subscription: the company's pricing page lists 4.5% plus EUR 0.50 per card sale on the free plan, 4% plus EUR 0.40 on Pro, and 1.5% or 1% when the buyer pays by bank transfer. Its terms say Pro costs EUR 49 a month, or US$49 on USD accounts, and that the fee is waived for a group it calls the Founding 30. The two set-up packages are one-time services: a pricing call, payment links and legal templates for EUR 99, or a checkout inside the seller's app with webhooks for EUR 199 and up. The terms also list a 1% payout fee with a minimum of EUR 1, a EUR 35 fee per card dispute, and a 1.5% surcharge on international cards that the company says it waives for the Founding 30 through 2026.", "rows": [ [ "Pay as you grow", "0", "0", "4.5% + EUR 0.50 per card sale; 1.5% on bank transfer" ], [ "Pro", "", "49", "4% + EUR 0.40 per card sale; 1% on bank transfer; EUR 49 or US$49 per the terms" ], [ "First paying users, set-up package", "111 one-time", "", "EUR 99 once: pricing call, 3 payment links, templates" ], [ "Paywall in your app, set-up package", "from 223 one-time", "", "EUR 199 once and up: checkout inside the app, webhooks, up to 3 plans" ], [ "Scale", "", "", "custom volume rates, per llms.txt" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, October 2026", "value": "US$9,500", "grade": "D", "note": "The title of an Indie Hackers interview of 6 October 2026, \"Starting from scratch and hitting $9.5k MRR in two months\", as quoted on the company's own about page under \"In the press\". The interview itself was not read, because Indie Hackers does not allow this site's crawler. The same figure appears in the company's own listings on Startup Fame, Turbo0 and Findly, which add \"with no ads\".", "src": [ 1, 2, 14, 15 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the October 2026 figure", "value": "about US$114,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$9,500 times 12. It rests on the single grade D figure above.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Sellers, October 2026", "value": "more than 400", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's home page counter, labelled \"Counted from AgentaOS records, October 2026\". The growth page carried the same count on 26 September 2026. Sellers include free accounts.", "src": [ 3, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Payments processed since August 2026", "value": "more than 1,400", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page counter, October 2026. Payments, not revenue: the company earns a fee of a few percent on each one.", "src": [ 3, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Fee per card sale", "value": "4.5% plus EUR 0.50 on the free plan; 4% plus EUR 0.40 on Pro", "grade": "C", "note": "Pricing page, 23 October 2026. The llms-full file says these prices were verified by the company on 21 August 2026.", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Pro plan", "value": "EUR 49 a month, or US$49 on USD accounts", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms of service, last updated 7 September 2026; the fee is waived for the \"Founding 30\".", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "fact": "Payment partners", "value": "Stripe for cards, Bridge for e-money settlement, Wise for bank payouts", "grade": "C", "note": "Security page and terms. The company says it is not a bank and that a seller's balance is a claim on Aristokrates OÜ, not safeguarded client money.", "src": [ 18, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 founder named; no employee named on any page", "grade": "C", "note": "The about page says the company \"is founder-led\" and names only Panche Isajeski. Archived 2026 posts use \"we\" and \"the founding team\" without naming anyone else. Headcount is not stated.", "src": [ 1, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No investment is mentioned on any current or archived page. The home page shows an \"ElevenLabs Startup Grants\" badge; a grant program, not equity. The founder's company site says his earlier company Kromatika raised US$1.15 million.", "src": [ 3, 17 ] }, { "fact": "First public launch of AgentaOS", "value": "3 March 2026, as a financial operating system for AI agents", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived launch post by the founder, \"Formerly Agentokratia. Same team, same codebase.\" The Wayback Machine's first capture of agentaos.ai is dated 4 March 2026.", "src": [ 7, 20 ] }, { "fact": "Relaunch as a merchant of record", "value": "August 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "The home page counts payments \"since Aug 2026\"; the archived April 2026 about page still described a non-custodial stablecoin wallet; the terms versions of 3 and 7 September 2026 name Stripe, Bridge and Wise.", "src": [ 3, 11, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Open-source code", "value": "SDK, CLI and MCP server under Apache-2.0; 111 commits, 4 stars", "grade": "B", "note": "GitHub repository AgentaOS/agentaos, read 23 October 2026. TypeScript, packages @agentaos/pay and agentaos on npm. The platform itself is not open source.", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "fact": "Legal entity", "value": "Aristokrates OÜ, Tallinn, registry code 16961316", "grade": "C", "note": "About page and llms-full. The archived about page of April 2026 shows a different registry code, 16948108, under the same name; the page does not explain the change.", "src": [ 1, 5, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Product Hunt launch", "value": "planned for 27 October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder's post on the Product Hunt forum, read 23 October 2026. Not yet launched when this page was written.", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October 2026 figure", "value": "7 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: March 2026 to October 2026. The interview headline counts two months from the August 2026 relaunch.", "src": [ 1, 7 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2016 to 2022", "what": "Isajeski is co-founder and chief technology officer of Kromatika Finance, a crypto exchange, and product lead at a Swiss payment gateway, according to his company site. The site says the SEC later classified his token as an unregistered security.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "when": "2024", "what": "Aristokrates OÜ is registered in Estonia through the e-Residency programme, per the founder's company site; the AgentaOS about page gives 2025 as the founding year.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 17, 1 ] }, { "when": "February 2026", "what": "Two posts under the AgentaOS name describe a stablecoin wallet for AI agents with spending rules and a settlement protocol on the Base blockchain.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "3 March 2026", "what": "Launch post: \"the first financial operating system built for the agent economy\", formerly Agentokratia. Open-source SDK, free to start. First Wayback capture the next day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 20 ] }, { "when": "9 March 2026", "what": "Pilot for programmable business accounts with a EUR IBAN, aimed at e-Residency founders who cannot get a bank account.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "18 March 2026", "what": "\"Agenta Pay is live\": a stablecoin wallet with payment links, invoices and a checkout, and the @agentaos/pay SDK on npm.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "26 March 2026", "what": "The agenta command-line tool is live; it doubles as an MCP server with 21 tools, and a SKILL.md file lets Claude Code set up an account.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "16 April 2026", "what": "The about page describes \"the first business account where AI agents can pay and get paid\", non-custodial and MiCA-compliant. No revenue is mentioned.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "August 2026", "what": "Relaunch as a merchant of record for freelancers, agencies and software sellers, with cards acquired by Stripe. The home page counts payments from this month. Prices verified by the company on 21 August 2026.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 5 ] }, { "when": "7 September 2026", "what": "Terms updated, naming Stripe, Bridge and Wise as partners and a \"Founding 30\" group with the Pro fee waived.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "26 September 2026", "what": "The growth page shows more than 400 sellers and 1,400 payments since August.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "6 October 2026", "what": "Indie Hackers publishes an interview titled \"Starting from scratch and hitting $9.5k MRR in two months\", which the company's about page lists as press. This is the headline figure, grade D.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "16 to 18 October 2026", "what": "Listings on AI Agents Directory, Turbo0, TheDevToolsDir and Startup Fame, all repeating the US$9.5K figure as the company's own text, and a forum post announcing a Product Hunt launch for 27 October 2026.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 14, 16 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A niche the big processors leave open", "text": "The company's country pages say that Stripe is not available in 37 of the 85 countries it checked, among them North Macedonia, Serbia, Albania, Kosovo, Pakistan and Egypt. A merchant of record can sell on behalf of a person there because the merchant of record, not the seller, is the legal seller. The first country guides on the site are for the Western Balkans, and the first seller testimonial on the home page is marked \"US → MK\". No source read for this page states the founder's own country." }, { "title": "The seller does not need a company", "text": "Because AgentaOS issues the invoice in its own name and files the tax, an individual can sell a subscription or a template without registering a company abroad. The site compares this with Stripe Atlas and Estonian e-Residency, which cost money and time before the first sale." }, { "title": "Partners for every regulated part", "text": "The security page says cards are acquired by Stripe, proceeds settle on Bridge's e-money rails and payouts go through Wise. The company holds no licence of its own and says so: a seller's balance is a contractual claim on Aristokrates OÜ. That is what lets one person run a payments company." }, { "title": "AI agents as the product's extra", "text": "Every applicant gets a free written review of their pricing, terms and checkout before approval, produced by the company's Pricing Intelligence agent and sent, it says, within 24 hours. The same billing system is reachable from Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor through an MCP server, so a founder who builds an app with an AI coding tool can add a paid plan without leaving it." }, { "title": "Pages instead of ads", "text": "The company's listings say the revenue came with no ads. The site's sitemap lists about 150 comparison, country, fee-calculator and answer pages, each dated and sourced, plus markdown copies and an llms.txt file for AI assistants, and it is listed on 16 directories. No source says which of these brought the paying sellers." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's current and archived pages and its public code. They are grade C, except the public code, which is grade B.", "items": [ "TypeScript throughout: the @agentaos/pay SDK, the agenta command-line tool and the MCP server are one Apache-2.0 repository on GitHub, with pnpm workspaces and a Claude Code plugin.", "Cards are acquired by Stripe in hosted fields, so card numbers never touch AgentaOS servers; settlement runs on Bridge, an e-money institution licensed in Luxembourg; payouts go out through Wise in EUR or USD.", "The first version, March 2026, was a non-custodial stablecoin wallet with threshold signing and passkey login; the merchant of record of August 2026 replaced it on the same domain and codebase.", "The hosted MCP server at mcp.agentaos.ai exposes 31 operations with OAuth login; a SKILL.md file on the site teaches an AI coding agent the whole setup.", "An embedded checkout script and a React component put the checkout inside the seller's own page; webhooks unlock and lock access.", "The marketing site is static pages with markdown copies, an llms.txt and llms-full.txt for AI answer engines, and fee calculators for each competitor." ], "src": [ 13, 18, 7, 5, 10 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold payments or payouts to small sellers and creators and died. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Balanced", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$3.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Marketplace payments that let sellers avoid PayPal.", "died": "Stripe launched its own marketplace product and took the customers; compliance and fraud costs ate the margin.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1188-balanced" }, { "name": "Bluepad", "years": "2020 to 2024", "funding": "US$250K", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Gumroad for India: local payments and lower fees for creators locked out of PayPal.", "died": "Acquiring a creator cost more than the creator's fees for years; the big platforms added free monetization.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2212-bluepad" }, { "name": "Fast", "years": "2019 to 2022", "funding": "US$120M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "One-click checkout for any website.", "died": "Paid standard processing costs but had to charge merchants less than competitors: negative margin on every sale.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2062-fast" }, { "name": "Bitpass", "years": "2002 to 2008", "funding": "US$12.5M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A wallet for paying small amounts for articles and songs.", "died": "Buyers would not change how they paid; PayPal served small transactions well enough.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/22-bitpass" }, { "name": "Tipjoy", "years": "2008 to 2011", "funding": "US$1M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Tips for online content with only an email address.", "died": "Money-transmission rules, the 2008 downturn and PayPal's head start; it never reached scale.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1227-tipjoy" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Balanced and Fast built payment rails that competed with Stripe on price and lost, because Stripe could copy the feature and they paid Stripe-level costs underneath. Bluepad, Bitpass and Tipjoy sold payments to small sellers and creators whose transactions were too small to pay for acquiring them. AgentaOS is exposed to both: it runs on Stripe, Bridge and Wise underneath, and its sellers are small.", "Two things differ. First, the business is not a rail but a legal role: being the seller of record, filing tax in 135 jurisdictions and carrying chargebacks is what Stripe does not offer to an individual in Skopje or Karachi, and it is what the regulated partners let one person resell. Second, the costs that killed the predecessors were people, compliance teams and marketing; here the compliance reviews are done by an AI agent, the setup by an MCP server, and the marketing by dated comparison pages. Whether a fee of 4.5% on small sales pays for disputes at EUR 35 each, the terms say, is the question the founder's reported US$9,500 a month does not yet answer." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The structure, with care. The numbers, not yet.", "text": "A merchant of record is a regulated business wrapped in contracts with Stripe, an e-money institution and a bank partner, and the founder came to it with 19 years in payments, by his company's account. What a reader can copy is the positioning: find the customers that the largest platforms refuse for reasons of geography or company status, and sell them the legal role, not the technology. The revenue figure is reported by the founder once, in October 2026, and nothing else confirms it.", "steps": [ "List the countries or customer types that Stripe, Paddle and Lemon Squeezy refuse, from their own pages, and write one dated page per country.", "Rent every regulated piece from a licensed partner and say so in the terms, so that one person can operate the product.", "Give each applicant a free written review before approval; it filters risk and doubles as the sales conversation.", "Expose the product to AI coding tools through an MCP server and a skill file, so that founders who build with Claude or Cursor can add billing without a docs visit." ], "open": "Any regulated service that the large platforms sell only to companies in a few rich countries: invoicing, tax filing, app-store publishing, business banking, insurance for freelancers." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline figure, US$9,500 of monthly recurring revenue, rests on one source: the title of an Indie Hackers interview of 6 October 2026, stated by the founder, Panche Isajeski, and quoted on his company's about page and in the company's own directory listings on Startup Fame, Turbo0 and Findly, which add that it came with no ads. The interview itself could not be read, because Indie Hackers does not allow this site's crawler. No payment-processor profile, journalist or investor confirms the figure, and no second dated figure exists to compare it with. The counts of 400 sellers and 1,400 payments are the company's own. A reader could look for a TrustMRR profile, a Stripe or Paddle-style verified revenue page, a second interview with a dated figure, or the Estonian annual report of Aristokrates OÜ for 2026 when it is filed." }, { "title": "A seller's money is a claim on a small company", "text": "The security page and the terms say that proceeds sit with Bridge as Aristokrates OÜ's funds, that a seller's balance is an unsecured claim on that company, and that it is not safeguarded client money. New accounts wait about 14 days for the first payout, and the company may hold a reserve. A seller is trusting a one-person Estonian company with its revenue between sale and payout." }, { "title": "The business changed completely in its first year", "text": "The archived pages of February to April 2026 describe a non-custodial stablecoin wallet for AI agents, a bank account pilot for e-Residency founders and an x402 payment protocol. By August 2026 the same domain sold a merchant of record for people, with cards through Stripe. The archived about page of April 2026 also shows a different registry code for the company than the current page does. The pivot may be the reason for the growth, or a sign of more pivots to come." }, { "title": "Fees must cover disputes and compliance", "text": "The predecessors on this page died because small transactions did not pay for acquiring, compliance and fraud. AgentaOS charges 4.5% plus EUR 0.50 and passes on EUR 35 per dispute, by its terms. Whether the margin after Stripe, Bridge and Wise covers the free pricing reviews, tax filings in 135 jurisdictions and chargebacks is not shown by any source." }, { "title": "The large platforms can open the door", "text": "The niche exists because Stripe, Paddle and others refuse sellers in some countries. The company's own country pages say that Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, Polar, Creem, Dodo Payments and Gumroad already accept sellers in North Macedonia. If Stripe adds those countries, or the merchants of record add AI agents, the differentiation narrows to the pricing review." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://agentaos.ai" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/agentaos" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "AgentaOS about page, read 23 October 2026: About us, with \"In the press: Indie Hackers, Starting from scratch and hitting $9.5k MRR in two months, 6 October 2026\"", "url": "https://agentaos.ai/about", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. Names the founder, the company and its registry code, and quotes the Indie Hackers interview title that carries the headline figure." }, { "title": "Startup Fame listing: AgentaOS, review, pricing and alternatives", "url": "https://startupfa.me/s/agentaos", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. Company-written description that repeats the US$9.5K MRR figure \"with no ads (Indie Hackers case study, October 2026)\" and the sellers and payments counts." }, { "title": "AgentaOS home page, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://agentaos.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the counters of 400+ sellers and 1,400+ payments since August 2026, the badges, the two seller testimonials and the fee summary." }, { "title": "AgentaOS pricing page and its markdown copy, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://agentaos.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with https://agentaos.ai/pricing.md. Source for the pricing table." }, { "title": "AgentaOS llms-full.txt, full reference for AI answer engines, last updated 17 October 2026", "url": "https://agentaos.ai/llms-full.txt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the fee schedule verified on 21 August 2026, the partner list, the agents, the entity and the founder's profile link." }, { "title": "AgentaOS: Growth Merchant of Record, last updated 26 September 2026", "url": "https://agentaos.ai/growth-merchant-of-record", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Dates the 400+ sellers and 1,400+ payments counters to September 2026 and explains the pricing review." }, { "title": "Wayback copy of the AgentaOS blog, 3 March 2026: Introducing AgentaOS, The Financial OS for the Agent Economy, by Panche Isajeski", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260304123347/https://agentaos.ai/blog/launch", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The first launch post; \"Formerly Agentokratia. Same team, same codebase.\" Also lists the February 2026 posts on the wallet and the settlement protocol." }, { "title": "Wayback copy of the AgentaOS blog, 9 March 2026: AgentaOS Pilot Program, programmable business accounts for remote founders", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260309140008/https://agentaos.ai/blog/pilot", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The bank-account pilot for e-Residency founders and the feature status table." }, { "title": "Wayback copy of the AgentaOS blog, 18 March 2026: Agenta Pay is live, the first AI-native stablecoin wallet", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260416165131/https://agentaos.ai/blog/agenta-pay-live", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The wallet launch and the @agentaos/pay SDK." }, { "title": "Wayback copy of the AgentaOS blog, 26 March 2026: AgentaOS CLI, let AI set up your payment account", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260327074922/https://agentaos.ai/blog/agenta-cli-live", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The command-line tool, the 21-tool MCP server and the SKILL.md setup." }, { "title": "Wayback copy of the AgentaOS about page, 16 April 2026: The Team Behind Agent Banking", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260416174522/https://agentaos.ai/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The pre-relaunch description of the company, with a different registry code." }, { "title": "AgentaOS Master Services Terms, last updated 7 September 2026", "url": "https://agentaos.ai/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on partners, fees, payouts and reserves. Source for Stripe, Bridge and Wise, the Founding 30, the Pro price in USD and the dispute fee." }, { "title": "GitHub: AgentaOS/agentaos, SDK, CLI and MCP server, Apache-2.0", "url": "https://github.com/AgentaOS/agentaos", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the repository page and README. Public code: TypeScript packages, 111 commits, 4 stars on 23 October 2026." }, { "title": "Turbo0 listing: AgentaOS, published 18 October 2026", "url": "https://turbo0.com/item/agentaos", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. Company-written listing that repeats the US$9.5K MRR figure and the counters." }, { "title": "Findly.tools listing: AgentaOS", "url": "https://findly.tools/agentaos", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. Company-written listing that repeats the US$9.5K MRR figure." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: AgentaOS product page and forum post by Panche Isajeski, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/agentaos", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's post announcing a launch on 27 October 2026." }, { "title": "Aristokrates llms-full.txt, the founder's company site", "url": "https://aristokrates.eu/llms-full.txt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's career, his earlier company Kromatika, and the company's founding year and registry code. The founder's profile page on this site is closed to crawlers and was not read." }, { "title": "AgentaOS: Security and compliance", "url": "https://agentaos.ai/security", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The money flow through Stripe, Bridge and Wise and the status of a seller's balance." }, { "title": "European Central Bank euro foreign exchange reference rates, 22 October 2026", "url": "https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-daily.xml", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the XML file. USD 1.1205 per euro, used for the EUR prices on this page." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine capture index for agentaos.ai", "url": "http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=agentaos.ai/*&output=txt&fl=timestamp,original,statuscode", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the index. First capture of the home page on 4 March 2026; lists the archived blog posts." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/eightify/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/eightify.md", "slug": "eightify", "name": "Eightify", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI YouTube video summarizer (browser extension and phone apps)", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-23", "launchLabel": "17 January 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$45K a month estimated by Starter Story, May 2024", "sticker": "~$45K/mo, estimated", "outcomeUsd": 540000, "months": 16, "teamLabel": "1 founder at launch; 3 people (Starter Story estimate) at the headline figure; 5 employees on LinkedIn in July 2025", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Speed", "group": "ai-model-tools", "channel": "search", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [ "platform", "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Productivity" ], "product": "A Chrome extension that adds a Summarize button to every YouTube page. It downloads the video's subtitles, cuts them into parts, sends each part to a language model and shows eight key ideas with timestamps, a transcript and a summary of the comments. The same account works in iPhone and Android apps.", "why": "It shipped a working summarizer two months after ChatGPT appeared, launched on Product Hunt and Hacker News in the same month, and then turned every summary into a public web page that ranks in Google. Starter Story, which estimates revenue from public data, put it at about US$45,000 a month in May 2024 with three people.", "summary": [ "Eightify is a browser extension, a small program that runs inside Chrome and changes the pages you visit. On YouTube it adds a button that produces a summary of the video in a few seconds: eight key ideas with timestamps, the full transcript, and the main points of the comments. The founder wrote on Hacker News in January 2023 that it downloads the subtitles, splits the transcript into parts, summarizes each part with OpenAI's GPT model and then summarizes the summaries. The Chrome Web Store listing in October 2026 says the summaries are now powered by Claude and ChatGPT.", "Alex Kataev, a software engineer who had been chief technology officer of an education company for seven years, built the prototype in two days and launched the extension on Product Hunt on 17 January 2023, where it finished fourth of the day. Dmytro Tymoshenko is the company's chief executive. The company behind it, Rational Expressions, Inc., is registered in San Francisco. Starter Story, a site that estimates business figures from public data, estimated in May 2024 that Eightify made about US$45,000 a month with an estimated three employees. GetLatka, a revenue database, estimated in July 2025 that it made about US$550,000 a year with five employees.", "No founder, payment processor or buyer has published a revenue figure, so this page carries the badge \"Reported, not verified\" and every money figure is graded D. The user counts come from the Chrome Web Store, which showed 100,000 users from November 2023 to December 2024 and 200,000 users in 2026. The page also shows five earlier companies that sold automatic summaries or digests of other people's content and failed." ], "factsCaption": "About US$45,000 a month sixteen months after launch, according to a Starter Story estimate from May 2024; a second estimate by GetLatka in July 2025 gives a similar yearly figure", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is a third-party estimate (Starter Story, GetLatka) or a single founder statement, not checked by anyone else. A grade C value is a founder statement in a public thread, or a count read on the company's own pages or store listings. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a waiting-list page in December 2022 to an estimated US$45,000 a month in May 2024, then two store listings with 200,000 Chrome users in 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Eightify prices in October 2026, read from the App Store listing's in-app purchases and the Chrome Web Store FAQ (grade C); the website has no pricing page. The May 2024 row is a historical price from Starter Story (grade D)", "note": "The Chrome Web Store FAQ says the extension offers a 7-day free trial with unlimited summaries, then a paid subscription. The App Store lists two in-app purchases: Eightify Pro at US$9.99 a month or US$59.99 a year, which is US$5.00 a month. Starter Story wrote in May 2024 that the free plan then gave three summaries a week for videos up to 30 minutes, and that the paid plan cost US$4.95 a month or US$3.95 a month billed yearly, so the price has roughly doubled.", "rows": [ [ "Free trial", "0", "0", "7 days, unlimited summaries, then a paid plan" ], [ "Pro (App Store in-app purchase)", "5.00", "9.99", "unlimited summaries; US$59.99 a year" ], [ "Pro, May 2024 (historical)", "3.95", "4.95", "Starter Story; free plan then had 3 summaries a week" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue per month, May 2024", "value": "about US$45,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Starter Story estimate, page dated 8 May 2024 and marked \"Estimated from public sources\". The page cites eightify.app as its only source. Not confirmed by the founders or a payment processor.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the May 2024 estimate", "value": "about US$540,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 45,000 times 12. This is the headline figure of the page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per year, July 2025", "value": "about US$550,000", "grade": "D", "note": "GetLatka estimate, dated July 2025. GetLatka writes that the company has not published its revenue. 1.9% above the Starter Story run rate, so the two estimates agree, but neither is a measurement.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Employees at the headline figure, May 2024", "value": "3 (estimate)", "grade": "D", "note": "Starter Story's table, marked \"(est.)\", with 1 founder.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Employees, July 2025", "value": "5", "grade": "D", "note": "GetLatka, from LinkedIn. The company's own author page names Dmytro Tymoshenko as chief executive.", "src": [ 2, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Founder at launch", "value": "1, Alex Kataev", "grade": "C", "note": "His Product Hunt maker comment on 17 January 2023: \"I'm Alex, the founder\". He wrote that he built the prototype in two days and launched after one and a half months.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Starting costs", "value": "about US$23,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Starter Story: US$17,491 as the average cost of a Chrome extension, US$5,000 for OpenAI GPT access and US$600 for the YouTube API. The page does not say where these numbers come from.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Launch prices, January 2023", "value": "US$8.60 for 20 summaries, US$19.80 for 60, US$48.60 for 180", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's Hacker News comment on 27 January 2023. He wrote that he was changing prices every two days and would add subscriptions within a week.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Model cost per video, January 2023", "value": "US$0.10 to US$0.90", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on Hacker News: OpenAI's standard price for davinci-003, depending on video length. Transcripts of podcasts averaged 150,000 characters.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Product Hunt launch, 17 January 2023", "value": "484 points, 4th of the day", "grade": "C", "note": "Product Hunt page, read in October 2026. Starter Story quotes 884 upvotes; Product Hunt recounts votes over time.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Hacker News launch, 27 January 2023", "value": "147 points, 120 comments", "grade": "C", "note": "Show HN thread. The founder answered most questions himself.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Chrome Web Store users", "value": "100,000 from November 2023 to December 2024; 200,000 in February and October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Store listing, read live and in Wayback copies. The store rounds user counts down to a band. Ratings grew from 257 in November 2023 to 861 in October 2026, average 4.0 of 5.", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Users claimed by the company", "value": "more than 500,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page in May 2025 and October 2026: \"Trusted by 500,000+ users worldwide\". The company's own count across Chrome, iOS and Android, not checked.", "src": [ 7, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly website traffic, May 2024", "value": "6.6 million visits", "grade": "D", "note": "Starter Story estimate. The site publishes every summary as a web page, which is what brings this traffic.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Price of the paid plan", "value": "US$4.95 a month in May 2024; US$9.99 a month or US$59.99 a year in October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "May 2024 from Starter Story (grade D); October 2026 from the App Store listing's in-app purchases.", "src": [ 1, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "D", "note": "No source read for this page reports an investment round. GetLatka lists none. This is an absence of a report, not a statement by the company.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the headline estimate", "value": "16 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: January 2023 to May 2024.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "30 December 2022", "what": "The site eightify.app is a waiting list: \"Boost 8x YouTube productivity, AI-powered video summaries, Get early access\", signed Rational Expressions, Inc.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "17 January 2023", "what": "Launch on Product Hunt. Kataev writes that he built the prototype in two days, worked one and a half months more, and that OpenAI GPT-3 is under the hood. Fourth of the day with 484 points.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "27 January 2023", "what": "Show HN: 147 points, 120 comments. Prices are packages of summaries; subscriptions are a week away. He pays OpenAI US$0.10 to US$0.90 per video and limits use with a Google login so that he does not, in his words, wake up bankrupt.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "16 March 2023", "what": "He posts a page of Y Combinator videos summarized by GPT on Hacker News: the first public summary pages, which later became the search traffic source.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "5 July 2023", "what": "He posts explore.eightify.app on Hacker News, an encyclopedia of summaries with AI-generated illustrations.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "November 2023", "what": "The Chrome Web Store shows 100,000 users and 257 ratings.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "8 May 2024", "what": "Starter Story publishes its breakdown: an estimated US$45,000 a month, 3 employees (estimate), 6.6 million monthly visits, US$4.95 a month for the paid plan.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "June 2024", "what": "The home page offers the extension for Chrome, with an iOS app and Safari as other options.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "December 2024", "what": "The Chrome Web Store still shows 100,000 users, now with 630 ratings.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "May 2025", "what": "The home page says \"Trusted by 500,000+ users worldwide\" and links to iOS and Android apps.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "July 2025", "what": "GetLatka estimates US$550,000 a year and counts 5 employees on LinkedIn, with Dmytro Tymoshenko as chief executive.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "13 November 2025", "what": "Extension version 1.643 is published. The listing says summaries are powered by Claude and ChatGPT and offers a 7-day free trial.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The Chrome Web Store shows 200,000 users and 861 ratings; the App Store sells Pro at US$9.99 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 10 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Speed", "text": "ChatGPT appeared on 30 November 2022. The waiting list was up by 30 December, the extension was on Product Hunt on 17 January and on Hacker News ten days later. The founder wrote on Hacker News that a free competitor's public release made him nervous and hurried him to finish. In his first comments he was already changing prices every two days." }, { "title": "The hard part is before the model", "text": "The founder wrote on Hacker News that 80% of his time went into preprocessing the transcript before sending it to GPT, because a raw transcript pasted into a model gives a bad summary. The pipeline splits the transcript, summarizes each part, summarizes the summaries for chapter names and summarizes again for a title. That work is what a copy of the idea cannot skip." }, { "title": "Every summary becomes a web page", "text": "From March 2023 the site published summaries as public pages, first for Y Combinator videos, then as an encyclopedia. Starter Story wrote in May 2024 that the site drew 6 million visitors a month by turning summaries into search-optimized articles, and that the business had grown from launch posts to organic Chrome Web Store traffic and press. Starter Story is an estimate, but the summary pages are visible in the site's own footer today." }, { "title": "Pay per use, then subscriptions, then a doubled price", "text": "At launch the founder sold packages of 20, 60 or 180 summaries, as he wrote on Hacker News in January 2023. Starter Story reported a US$4.95 monthly subscription in May 2024. The App Store listing in October 2026 shows US$9.99 a month or US$59.99 a year, with a 7-day trial instead of a permanent free plan. The company sells the same account on Chrome, iPhone and Android." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's Hacker News comments in January 2023 (grade C), the Starter Story breakdown of May 2024 (grade D) and the current store listings (grade C).", "items": [ "The extension downloads YouTube subtitles with the youtube-transcript-api Python library, splits the transcript into parts, summarizes each part with OpenAI's davinci-003 model and then summarizes the summaries, the method OpenAI described for summarizing books. About 15% of videos had no subtitles; OpenAI Whisper took minutes per video, so it was put off.", "Starter Story lists the stack as a Chrome extension in TypeScript, a React front end, a Python and Flask back end, Postgres, Docker, GitLab, Metabase for analytics, AWS for hosting and Stripe for payments.", "A Google login was added in a hurry at launch so that free use could be limited; the founder wrote that without a limit he could wake up bankrupt from model costs.", "The Chrome Web Store listing in October 2026 says the summaries are powered by Claude and ChatGPT, and the extension ships in 52 languages. Apps for iPhone and Android share the account; the App Store lists Rational Expressions, Inc. as the seller.", "Every summary is also published as a web page on eightify.app, which is the search channel. Starter Story estimated 6.6 million monthly visits in May 2024.", "The founder wrote on Hacker News that Twitter banned his ads account when he tried to run an ad with a video of Elon Musk; the launch channels were Product Hunt, Hacker News and Reddit." ], "src": [ 4, 1, 5, 10 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold automatic summaries or digests of other people's content before language models could write one. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Wavii", "years": "2009 to 2013", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A personal news feed with summaries written by natural language processing.", "died": "No path to revenue; Google bought the team in 2013 and shut the product.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/727-wavii" }, { "name": "Prismatic", "years": "2012 to 2017", "funding": "US$15M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A personalized news feed built by algorithms from your interests and social accounts.", "died": "User growth stopped, advertising did not pay, and Google and Facebook built the same feed into their own products.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/465-prismatic" }, { "name": "Circa", "years": "2011 to 2015", "funding": "US$5.5M", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "News broken into short facts you can follow on a phone.", "died": "Larger outlets copied the format; the company could not build an advertising business and the backers stopped funding it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1920-circa" }, { "name": "Snowball", "years": "2014 to 2018", "funding": "US$2.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A real-time personalized news feed from many sources.", "died": "Nothing beyond aggregation, no way to charge, and readers moved to social media for news.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/561-snowball" }, { "name": "Nuzzel", "years": "2012 to 2019", "funding": "US$5.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "The news your friends share, pulled from Twitter and Facebook.", "died": "It depended on two platforms' APIs and died when those platforms offered the same thing for free.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/378-nuzzel" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the five promised to save the reader time on other people's content. Each needed a large funded team to build the summarizing or ranking technology, and none could charge the reader, so they lived on advertising or on hope of a sale. Wavii's natural language processing could not write a summary a person would pay for; Circa paid journalists to write its short facts by hand.", "Two things changed. First, a general language model made a readable summary a function call that costs cents, as the founder wrote on Hacker News in January 2023 when he quoted US$0.10 to US$0.90 per video. The hard part moved to splitting the transcript and asking the right questions, which one engineer can do. Second, the extension sits on the page where the need appears, the YouTube video itself, and asks for money at that moment, so readers who never paid Prismatic or Nuzzel pay Eightify, if Starter Story's estimate of US$45,000 a month in May 2024 is right. The same dependence remains: YouTube owns the page, and Google could add a summary button of its own." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The timing, no. The pattern, yes.", "text": "A YouTube summarizer in January 2023 was a short opening; there are dozens now, and the Chrome Web Store shows them next to Eightify. The pattern is still open: put a model's output exactly where the user already is, charge from the first day, and publish every output as a public page that search engines index. Starter Story estimated the result at US$45,000 a month in May 2024; no founder figure confirms it.", "steps": [ "Pick one place where people lose time on long content and build the button there, not a separate site.", "Spend the engineering time on preprocessing and prompt structure, not on the model; the founder said 80% of his time went there.", "Charge per use at launch, then move to a subscription once you know the cost per use.", "Publish each generated result as a page with a stable address, so the product markets itself through search." ], "open": "Any long content people skim: lectures, earnings calls, meeting recordings, podcasts on platforms other than YouTube, and long documents inside the tools where people read them." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline figure of about US$45,000 a month rests on one source: Starter Story's breakdown page dated 8 May 2024, which is marked \"Estimated from public sources\" and lists eightify.app as its only source. GetLatka's estimate of about US$550,000 a year in July 2025 agrees with it, but GetLatka also says the company has not published its revenue, and an estimate that agrees with an estimate is not a measurement. Neither founder has published a revenue figure in any source read for this page; the Product Hunt and Hacker News comments from January 2023 give prices and costs, not revenue. A reader could look for a TrustMRR or Stripe-verified profile (none existed in October 2026), a founder interview with dated figures, or a press report. One more note: a listing on the Microns marketplace dated 28 July 2025 offered an unnamed \"first-to-market AI-powered YouTube summarizer delivered via Chrome extension and mobile apps\", founded in 2023, for sale, with US$39,000 in monthly recurring revenue and 8,100 subscribers. The listing names no company, so this page does not attribute it to Eightify." }, { "title": "The headcount is an estimate too", "text": "Starter Story's 3 employees in May 2024 is marked as an estimate, and GetLatka's 5 employees in July 2025 is a LinkedIn count. The company's own pages name two people, Kataev as co-founder and Tymoshenko as chief executive." }, { "title": "The platform can add the button", "text": "Every predecessor on this page died when a platform offered the same thing for free. YouTube already shows AI summaries on some videos, and Google could show them on all. Eightify's answers are the transcript, the comment summary, the phone apps and the languages." }, { "title": "Store user counts are bands", "text": "The Chrome Web Store shows 100,000 users for thirteen months and then 200,000; it rounds down to a band and says nothing about paying users. The company's 500,000+ figure is its own and covers three platforms." }, { "title": "Subscription complaints", "text": "App Store reviews include a one-star complaint about a yearly subscription that kept renewing after cancellation attempts. One review is not a pattern, but a yearly plan sold through a 7-day trial is where such complaints start." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://eightify.app/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6467562658" }, { "kind": "chrome", "url": "https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/cdcpabkolgalpgeingbdcebojebfelgb" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Starter Story: Eightify breakdown, dated 8 May 2024, marked \"Estimated from public sources\"", "url": "https://starterstory.com/stories/eightify-breakdown", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. A third-party estimate of revenue, employees, traffic and starting costs; also quotes the May 2024 prices and the launch channels. Its only listed source is eightify.app." }, { "title": "GetLatka company page: Eightify revenue 2025, estimate", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/eightify.app", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. A third-party estimate of yearly revenue (July 2025), with a LinkedIn headcount and the chief executive's name." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: Eightify, AI YouTube Summary, launch of 17 January 2023 with the founder's maker comments", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/posts/eightify", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the maker's introduction and his replies. Source for the launch date, the rank, the points and the two-day prototype." }, { "title": "Hacker News: Show HN: YouTube Summaries Using GPT, 27 January 2023, and the founder's later submissions (user ax8080)", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34548154", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the Hacker News Algolia API, which serves the same thread as JSON. Source for the launch prices, model costs, pipeline, login limit and the March and July 2023 summary pages." }, { "title": "Chrome Web Store: Eightify, AI YouTube Summarizer, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/eightify-ai-youtube-summa/cdcpabkolgalpgeingbdcebojebfelgb", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the user count, ratings, version, update date, developer address, free trial and the models named." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copies of the Chrome Web Store listing: 14 November 2023, 31 May 2024, 17 December 2024 and 8 February 2026", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20240531144641/https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/eightify-ai-youtube-summa/cdcpabkolgalpgeingbdcebojebfelgb", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the user count, ratings and update date in each copy." }, { "title": "Eightify home page, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://eightify.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 500,000+ users claim, the feature list, the phone apps and the company name in the footer. Purpose gate: nothing about detector evasion, spam or income promises." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copies of eightify.app: 30 December 2022, 3 June 2023, 1 June 2024 and 20 May 2025", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20221230184244/https://www.eightify.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the waiting-list page before launch, the 2024 platform list and the May 2025 users claim." }, { "title": "Eightify author pages: Alex Kataev and Dmytro Tymoshenko", "url": "https://eightify.app/media/author/alex-kataev", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both pages in full (the second is at /media/author/dmytro-tymoshenko). Company-written biographies: Kataev as co-founder and former chief technology officer of an education company, Tymoshenko as chief executive." }, { "title": "App Store: Eightify, AI YouTube Summarizer, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/eightify-ai-youtube-summarizer/id6467562658", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the in-app purchase prices, the seller name, the version date and the subscription complaint." }, { "title": "Microns marketplace listing, 28 July 2025, archived 31 August 2025: an unnamed AI YouTube summarizer for sale", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20250831152427/https://www.microns.io/startup-listings/ai-powered-youtube-summarizer-app", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. The listing names no company, so its figures are mentioned only in the \"What is not verified\" box and are not attributed to Eightify." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/rosebud/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/rosebud.md", "slug": "rosebud", "name": "Rosebud", "country": "United States", "sector": "Health Care", "productType": "Interactive AI journaling app", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-23", "launchLabel": "26 July 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$67K to US$97K a month implied by 7.5K paying customers, June 2025", "sticker": "7.5K paying customers", "outcomeUsd": 809100, "months": 23, "teamLabel": "2 founders; a team of 4 in August 2024 and at the June 2025 figure; 12 people by October 2026 (company help page)", "fundingLabel": "US$6M seed in June 2025 led by Bessemer, after two earlier rounds of undisclosed size", "primaryFactor": "Memory", "group": "health-appearance", "channel": "partners", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Funded", "Running", "B2C", "Mental wellness" ], "product": "A journal that answers. You write or speak an entry, and an AI model replies with a reflection, follow-up questions and a weekly report, and it remembers earlier entries so that it can connect today's problem to what you wrote weeks ago. The company said in June 2025 that it had more than 7,500 paying customers; it sells a subscription that TechCrunch reported at US$12.99 a month.", "why": "Two founders with consumer-app experience built a prototype in under a week, launched a free web app in July 2023, kept it a web app for twelve months, and added native phone apps in August 2024 once the product had its users. It positions itself as a companion between therapy sessions, not as therapy, and gets recommended by therapists and coaches. The company said in June 2025 that 7,500 paying customers came from that positioning and a long-term memory system that chat models did not offer.", "summary": [ "Rosebud is an interactive journal: a journaling app in which a large language model, a text-generating AI model of the kind behind ChatGPT, answers each entry with a reflection, questions and guidance. Its distinguishing feature is long-term memory, a store of earlier entries that the model reads before it answers, so that a difficult day can be linked to something written weeks before. Users type or speak; the app transcribes voice, tags entries, tracks goals and writes a weekly report. The founders say it is not therapy and not a replacement for professional care; its help pages tell users in a crisis to contact a professional.", "Chrys Bader, a co-founder of the social app Secret, and Sean Dadashi started Rosebud in 2023 in Santa Monica, California, and released it as a free web app on 26 July 2023 with a US$4.99 a month premium plan, according to the company's own launch post. Native iPhone and Android apps followed on 6 August 2024. A reporter for the Santa Monica Daily Press wrote in August 2024 that the team was four people and that the premium plan cost US$12.99 a month or US$107.99 a year. On 4 June 2025 the company announced a US$6 million seed round led by Bessemer Venture Partners and said it had more than 7,500 paying customers and 500 million words journaled; TechCrunch reported the same day that the team was still four people. At the company's own prices, 7,500 subscriptions imply US$67,000 to US$97,000 a month, a figure computed on this page, not stated by anyone.", "The headline figure rests on one company statement, so the page is marked \"Reported, not verified\". A third-party estimate read in October 2026, by the app-analytics site Screens Design, puts the iPhone app's revenue at about US$100,000 a month; it agrees in size with the implied figure but is itself an estimate. A US$2.7 million revenue estimate for 2024 that circulates under the name Rosebud belongs to a different company, Rosebud AI, a game-development startup, and is not used here. The company's help page said in October 2026 that the team had grown to 12, so Rosebud is now larger than the small team that reached the June 2025 figure." ], "factsCaption": "A company statement of 7,500 paying customers in June 2025, a price of US$12.99 a month, and a third-party estimate of US$100,000 a month in October 2026, none of them verified by a payment processor", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value comes from one source with one date, either the company's own announcement or a directory estimate that says it is an estimate. A grade C value is a company or founder statement that agrees across dates or a reviewer's observation. A grade B value was reported by a journalist. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A.", "timelineLead": "From a prototype built in under a week to a venture-funded app with 7,500 paying customers in 23 months, then a team of 12. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Rosebud prices in October 2026: the Bloom plan from the company's home page, the Thrive plans from the App Store in-app purchase list (grade C)", "note": "The free plan was retired on 30 September 2026, according to the company's help center, which says the new memory system costs too much to run for free. Bloom is shown on the home page as US$8.99 a month billed yearly (US$107.99 a year, with a struck-out list price of US$155.99) or US$12.99 a month. The App Store list adds Rosebud Thrive 2x at US$24.99 a month or US$199.99 a year and Rosebud Thrive 5x at US$59.99 a month or US$499.99 a year; the list does not explain the multiplier, and the help center says that plans differ in their weekly AI usage budget. Yearly prices were divided by 12 on this page. Subscriptions bought in the iPhone app are billed by Apple; the web app has its own billing and accepts referral and discount codes.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "retired 30 September 2026" ], [ "Bloom", "8.99", "12.99", "weekly AI usage budget; long-term memory, voice" ], [ "Thrive 2x", "16.67", "24.99", "App Store list; larger usage budget" ], [ "Thrive 5x", "41.67", "59.99", "App Store list; largest usage budget" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Paying customers, June 2025", "value": "more than 7,500", "grade": "D", "note": "Company blog post of 4 June 2025 announcing the seed round. One statement, one date; no second source gives a customer count.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Subscription revenue implied by that count", "value": "about US$67,000 to US$97,000 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 7,500 customers times the yearly plan's US$8.99 a month (low) or the monthly plan's US$12.99 (high). The headline figure on this page is this range, and outcomeUsd is the low end times 12, US$809,100 a year. Real revenue depends on the mix of plans, discounts and app-store fees, which no source gives.", "src": [ 1, 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Third-party revenue estimate, iPhone app", "value": "about US$100,000 a month", "grade": "D", "note": "Screens Design app page, read 23 October 2026, which shows \"Revenue $100k\" and \"Installs <5k\" per month and gives no method. An estimate for the App Store only; web and Android sales are not included. By this date the team was 12 people.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Price of the premium plan", "value": "US$12.99 a month or US$107.99 a year", "grade": "B", "note": "TechCrunch, June 2025, reported US$12.99 a month. The Santa Monica Daily Press reported both prices in August 2024, and the home page and App Store list show the same prices in October 2026.", "src": [ 2, 3, 5, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Price at launch, July 2023", "value": "free web app; premium US$4.99 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Company launch post of 26 July 2023.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Words journaled", "value": "7 million (September 2023), 32 million (March 2024), 100 million (August 2024), 500 million (June 2025)", "grade": "C", "note": "Company home page in Wayback Machine copies, a founder quote to the Santa Monica Daily Press, and the company's seed announcement. Consistent growth across four dates.", "src": [ 15, 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Users claimed", "value": "50,000+ (March 2025), 150,000+ (October 2026)", "grade": "C", "note": "Company home page, Wayback Machine copy of March 2025 and the live page in October 2026. A user count, not a paying-customer count.", "src": [ 15, 14 ] }, { "fact": "App store ratings, October 2026", "value": "App Store 4.9 from 3,400 ratings; Google Play 4.2 from 2,850 reviews and 100,000+ downloads", "grade": "C", "note": "The two store listings. The App Store rates the app 18+ and lists the seller as Just Imagine, Inc.", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Team size", "value": "4 people in August 2024 and June 2025; 12 by October 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "The Santa Monica Daily Press reporter in August 2024; TechCrunch in June 2025 (\"its team of four\"); the company's help center roadmap page in October 2026 (\"a small team of 12 based in LA\"), undated.", "src": [ 3, 2, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "US$6 million seed, June 2025, plus two earlier rounds of undisclosed size", "grade": "B", "note": "TechCrunch and the company's post name Bessemer Venture Partners as lead, with 776, Initialized Capital, Fuel Capital, Avenir and Tim Ferriss. Bader told the Santa Monica Daily Press in August 2024 of \"two rounds of relatively modest investment\"; the help center lists Seven Seven Six, Initialized, Fuel and Weekend as backers.", "src": [ 2, 1, 3, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Mental-health survey claim", "value": "75% of users surveyed report meaningful improvement within 30 days", "grade": "D", "note": "Company statement in its seed announcement. The home page says 1,300 users were surveyed after 7 days. Self-reported by users to the company; no independent study.", "src": [ 1, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Free plan", "value": "retired on 30 September 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Company help center. The reason given is the running cost of the new memory system.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "The US$2.7 million estimate for 2024", "value": "belongs to Rosebud AI, a different company", "grade": "C", "note": "GetLatka's page for rosebud.ai, a game-development company founded in 2019 with a different chief executive, estimates US$2.7 million for December 2024. It is not the journaling app and is not used on this page.", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the June 2025 figure", "value": "23 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 26 July 2023 to June 2025.", "src": [ 8, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2020 to 2022", "what": "Bader starts journaling after a retreat during the pandemic and wonders what an AI could notice in his entries over time.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "Early 2023", "what": "He and his colleagues build a prototype in under a week and test it with people.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "26 July 2023", "what": "Launch as a free web app that can be added to a phone's home screen, with a US$4.99 a month premium plan, on Product Hunt the same day. The launch post says the app is powered by OpenAI.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 7 ] }, { "when": "September 2023", "what": "The home page claims over 7 million words journaled and 807 reviews.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "March 2024", "what": "Over 32 million words journaled and 2,625 reviews. The tagline is now \"the #1 AI-powered journal for mental health and personal growth\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "6 August 2024", "what": "Native iPhone and Android apps, a year after the web launch, with a second Product Hunt launch. A local reporter counts a team of four in a small office on Main Street, Santa Monica. Bader says 100 million words and 5,000 ratings, and that two modest funding rounds have been raised.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3, 7, 10 ] }, { "when": "27 November 2024", "what": "Bader appears on The Undefeated Underdogs podcast on building a consumer app in mental health. No transcript is published.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 18 ] }, { "when": "March 2025", "what": "The home page claims 50,000+ users and shows the Bloom plan at US$12.99 a month or US$8.99 a month billed yearly.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "4 June 2025", "what": "US$6 million seed round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. The company says more than 7,500 paying customers and 500 million words journaled; TechCrunch reports a team of four. At the company's prices the customer count implies US$67,000 to US$97,000 a month, computed on this page.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "30 September 2026", "what": "The free plan is retired; the company says its new memory system costs too much to run for free.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The help center says the team is 12 people in Los Angeles, and the home page has shown a hiring link since at least March 2026. The home page claims 150,000+ users. Screens Design estimates the iPhone app's revenue at about US$100,000 a month.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 10, 15, 14, 4 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Memory is the product", "text": "A chat model forgets each conversation. Rosebud stores entries and reads them back before answering, so the reply can say \"last week you mentioned this\". TechCrunch reported in June 2025 that part of the new money would go into what the company calls its proprietary memory technology. The help center's comparison page sells it directly: ChatGPT, short-term memory; Rosebud, long-term memory, at US$12.99 a month against US$20." }, { "title": "Between sessions, not instead of them", "text": "The app is sold as a companion between therapy and coaching sessions, co-designed with practitioners, and its own help page says it cannot diagnose, treat or handle a crisis. Bader told the Santa Monica Daily Press in August 2024 that a significant number of therapists recommend it to clients to use between sessions. A practitioner program and an affiliate program turn those recommendations into a channel." }, { "title": "Web first, phones later", "text": "The first year was a web app that users added to the home screen, and the help center's 2024 goal was a native app with the most requested features. Native apps came on 6 August 2024, with billing through Apple on iPhone and the company's own billing on the web." }, { "title": "Price by AI budget", "text": "Every plan has a weekly budget of AI usage, and the meter runs faster on the more capable model. Higher plans in the App Store list (Thrive 2x, Thrive 5x) sell a larger budget. When the memory system became more expensive to run, the company retired the free plan on 30 September 2026 rather than cut the feature." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages, its Product Hunt entries and press reports. They are grade C unless marked.", "items": [ "A prototype in under a week, then a web app that could be installed on a phone's home screen, launched 26 July 2023; native iPhone and Android apps on 6 August 2024.", "The launch post of July 2023 says the app is powered by OpenAI. By the time of its Product Hunt \"built with\" entry the company wrote that Claude 3.5 Sonnet had raised the quality of its responses and that users preferred it to GPT.", "A long-term memory store, auto-tagging, weekly reports, voice transcription and text-to-speech, all counted against a weekly usage meter that the user can see in settings.", "Entries are encrypted in transit and at rest and, the company says, never used to train AI models; the therapy page calls the practices HIPAA-aligned.", "Billing by Apple inside the iPhone app and by the company on the web, where referral and discount codes work. A help center on Notaku, a Discord community for early testers, an affiliate program and a practitioner program.", "Two founders and two others until mid-2025, funded by two small rounds and then a US$6 million seed round that the company said in June 2025 would pay for engineers, product people and marketing." ], "src": [ 8, 7, 10, 16, 9, 1 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold self-reflection, mental-health support or journaling to consumers before AI models could answer back. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "OhLife", "years": "2008 to 2011", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A journal you keep by replying to a daily email.", "died": "Too simple to hold users once richer journaling apps and social networks arrived; email prompts lost to push notifications.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1652-ohlife" }, { "name": "In Your Corner", "years": "2014 to 2017", "funding": "US$1M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Affordable online therapy with licensed therapists by video.", "died": "Each session needed a human therapist, so costs did not fall with scale, and better-funded rivals with insurer deals took the market.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1527-in-your-corner" }, { "name": "Mindstrong", "years": "2014 to 2024", "funding": "US$160M", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Predict mental-health relapses from how you type and scroll on your phone.", "died": "Could not prove its clinical claims to regulators and payers, pivoted several times, and ran out of a business model.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2477-mindstrong" }, { "name": "Likebetter", "years": "2006 to 2009", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Self-improvement through game-like choices and community insight.", "died": "No way to charge and no reason to return; early social networks absorbed the audience.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1665-likebetter" } ], "whatChanged": [ "OhLife and Likebetter could only record or ask; they had nothing to say back, and users left. In Your Corner had something to say back, a therapist, at a human's cost per hour. Mindstrong tried to make the phone itself the clinician and ran into the evidence that a medical claim needs. Rosebud sits between these: a model that answers every entry, sold as self-reflection with a memory, without a clinical claim to defend.", "What changed is the cost and the quality of an answer. A large language model reads a year of entries and replies in seconds, which makes a journal worth returning to, and each reply costs the company model usage, which is why the plans are priced by AI budget and why the company retired the free plan in September 2026. What has not changed is the predecessors' problem of staying different: the model makers can add memory to their own chat apps, and Rosebud's answer is a memory built for reflection, practitioner recommendations and a price that the company's comparison page sets below ChatGPT's." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The structure, yes. The scale, not alone.", "text": "A journaling app with a model that remembers is a weekend prototype, and the first year of Rosebud was a web app with a US$4.99 plan, as the company's launch post says. Getting to the 7,500 paying customers that the company reported in June 2025 took native apps, therapist relationships, two small rounds and then a venture seed round, and the team was four people at that point and twelve a year later.", "steps": [ "Launch as a web app that installs to the home screen, so the product can change daily without store review, and move to native apps once users ask for them.", "Make memory the feature: store entries, retrieve the relevant ones before each reply, and show the user what was remembered.", "Position beside professionals, not against them: write the limitations page first, make the app a companion between sessions, and give practitioners a program to recommend it.", "Price by AI budget per week, with higher plans selling a larger budget, so that heavy users pay for the model calls they cause." ], "open": "Any reflective practice that a model can answer and remember: coaching check-ins, language learning diaries, recovery and habit programs, and journals for one condition or life stage, each with its own practitioners to partner with." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline rests on one source: the company's own blog post of 4 June 2025, which says \"7,500+ paying customers\". No payment processor, investor or journalist has confirmed the count, and the revenue range on this page was computed from it at the company's list prices, so the real figure depends on the plan mix, discounts and app-store fees. The only money figure stated by a third party, Screens Design's estimate of about US$100,000 a month for the iPhone app, was read on 23 October 2026, carries no date or method, and covers the App Store only. The US$2.7 million revenue estimate for 2024 that appears under the name Rosebud on GetLatka belongs to Rosebud AI, a game-development company, and was not used. A reader could look for a TrustMRR or Stripe-verified profile (none existed in October 2026), a founder interview with dated revenue, or a later funding announcement that states revenue." }, { "title": "The team grew past the site's limit", "text": "Four people reached the June 2025 figure. By October 2026 the company's help center said 12, and the home page showed a hiring link from March 2026. The seed round of US$6 million, reported by TechCrunch in June 2025, makes Rosebud a venture-funded company; the story is on this site for the period when it was four people." }, { "title": "The model makers can add memory", "text": "Rosebud's own comparison page is built around one difference from ChatGPT: long-term memory against short-term memory. Nothing stops the model makers from closing that gap in their own apps. Every predecessor on this page that depended on a feature lost it to a larger platform. Rosebud's answers are a memory tuned for reflection, practitioner relationships and privacy terms." }, { "title": "Mental-health claims", "text": "The company says 75% of surveyed users reported meaningful improvement in their mental health within 30 days. That is a self-reported survey of its own users, not a study. The app's pages say it is therapist-recommended and HIPAA-aligned, while its limitations page says it cannot diagnose, treat or handle a crisis. Reviewers on the home page compare it with their therapists; the company does not." }, { "title": "Usage costs rise with the product", "text": "The free plan ended on 30 September 2026 because the memory system costs more to run. Plans are sold by AI budget, so the company's margin depends on model prices that it does not control." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.rosebud.app/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6451135127" }, { "kind": "android", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.justimagine.rosebud" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/rosebud" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Rosebud blog, 4 June 2025: Rosebud Raises $6M to Expand the World's Leading AI Journal", "url": "https://www.rosebud.app/blog/rosebud-raises-6m-to-expand-the-worlds-leading-ai-journal", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. The company's own announcement. Source for the 7,500 paying customers, the 500 million words, the survey claim and the investor list." }, { "title": "TechCrunch, 4 June 2025, by Aisha Malik: Rosebud lands $6M to scale its interactive AI journaling app", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/04/rosebud-lands-6m-to-scale-its-interactive-ai-journaling-app", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full from a Wayback Machine copy, because techcrunch.com's robots.txt disallows this agent's crawler. Source for the team of four, the US$12.99 price, the round and the founders' quotes." }, { "title": "Santa Monica Daily Press, 15 August 2024, by Scott Snowden: Santa Monica startup Rosebud offers mental health via an AI-based learning app", "url": "https://smdp.com/2024/08/15/santa-monica-startup-is-offering-therapy-through-an-ai-based-learning-app/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. A local reporter's visit. Source for the team of four, the prices, the 100 million words, the two earlier rounds and the therapist channel." }, { "title": "Screens Design app page: Rosebud: AI Journal & Diary, onboarding, paywall and UX flow", "url": "https://screensdesign.com/apps/rosebud-ai-journal-diary/", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full on 23 October 2026. A third-party estimate of App Store revenue and installs, with no date or method given." }, { "title": "App Store listing: Rosebud: AI Journal & Diary, by Just Imagine", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rosebud-ai-journal-diary/id6451135127", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 23 October 2026. Source for the in-app purchase prices, the ratings, the 18+ rating and the seller name." }, { "title": "Google Play listing: Rosebud: AI Journal & Diary, by Just Imagine, Inc.", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.justimagine.rosebud&hl=en_US", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the header. Source for the download band, the rating and the review count." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: Rosebud product page, its two launches and its \"built with\" page", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/rosebud", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the product page, the launch list and the built-with page. Source for the launch dates of 26 July 2023 and 6 August 2024 and the company's note on Claude 3.5 Sonnet." }, { "title": "Rosebud blog, 26 July 2023, by Chrys Bader: Meet Rosebud: Your AI Personal Growth Coach", "url": "https://www.rosebud.app/blog/meet-rosebud", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The launch post. Source for the free web app, the US$4.99 plan and \"Powered by OpenAI\"." }, { "title": "Rosebud help center: About us", "url": "https://help.rosebud.app/about-us", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names the founders, Santa Monica, and the early backers Seven Seven Six, Initialized, Fuel and Weekend." }, { "title": "Rosebud help center: Roadmap (live page, October 2026, and the Wayback Machine copy of 19 May 2025)", "url": "https://help.rosebud.app/getting-started/roadmap", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both versions. The live page says \"a small team of 12 based in LA\"; the May 2025 copy says the native app launched on 6 August 2024." }, { "title": "Rosebud help center: Changes to the Free Plan", "url": "https://help.rosebud.app/account/changes-to-the-free-plan", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The free plan ends 30 September 2026 because the memory system costs more to run." }, { "title": "Rosebud help center: Rosebud's Limitations", "url": "https://help.rosebud.app/getting-started/rosebud's-limitations", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's own statement of what the app cannot do: diagnose, treat, or handle a crisis." }, { "title": "Rosebud help center: ChatGPT vs. Rosebud", "url": "https://help.rosebud.app/comparison/chatgpt-vs.-rosebud", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's price and memory comparison with ChatGPT." }, { "title": "Rosebud home page, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://www.rosebud.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the pricing section in the page's script. Source for the Bloom prices, the 150,000+ users claim and the 1,300-user survey note." }, { "title": "Rosebud home page in the Wayback Machine: copies of September 2023, March 2024, March 2025 and March 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/2025/https://www.rosebud.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read all four copies. Source for the words-journaled counts, the review counts, the 50,000+ users claim and the prices over time." }, { "title": "Rosebud for Therapy & Coaching page", "url": "https://www.rosebud.app/therapy-and-coaching", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the between-sessions positioning, the HIPAA-aligned claim and the store review counts." }, { "title": "GetLatka: Rosebud AI revenue 2024, estimate (rosebud.ai, a game-development company)", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/rosebud.ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Shows that the US$2.7 million estimate belongs to a different company, founded in 2019 with a different chief executive." }, { "title": "The Undefeated Underdogs podcast, 27 November 2024: Chrys Bader, a masterclass on the art of building viral consumer apps", "url": "https://share.transistor.fm/s/f195b262", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the episode page and chapter list. No transcript is published, so no figures were taken from it." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/innsikt-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/innsikt-ai.md", "slug": "innsikt-ai", "name": "Innsikt.AI", "country": "Norway", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI child avatars for interview training", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-23", "launchLabel": "April 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$209K revenue in the 2025 accounts, December 2025", "sticker": "$209K revenue in 2025", "outcomeUsd": 209412, "months": 20, "teamLabel": "4 academic co-founders; 8 employees in the company register, September 2026", "fundingLabel": "No venture round found. About NOK 3.5M (US$330K) of new share capital in 2024 and 2025, calculated from the filed accounts, plus research and EU grants", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "learning", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 1, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Funded", "Running", "B2B", "Training" ], "product": "A web platform where police officers, child welfare workers and school health staff practise interviews with an AI child avatar that answers as a child of that age would. After each session the platform scores the questions against best-practice interview methods, marks closed and leading questions, and tracks the user's progress. Sold to municipalities and agencies by demo request; no public prices.", "why": "Seven years of research at a Norwegian university produced the method, the training data and the avatar before the company existed. The founder is the professor who led that research, the university licensed the technology to her company, and public bodies that must train staff in child interviews are the customers. The filed accounts show revenue of NOK 816,000 in 2024 and NOK 2,176,042 in 2025, at a loss.", "summary": [ "Innsikt.AI sells training for professionals who interview children in abuse and neglect cases. The user talks with an AI avatar, a computer-generated child, shown on screen, whose answers are produced by a language model, and the platform grades each question in real time: open questions are good, closed and leading questions are marked in red, following the interview methods that Norwegian police and child welfare services are supposed to use. The company's website says the platform runs in a web browser, in Norwegian and English, and is sold to teams and organizations with central administration and volume pricing; it publishes no prices.", "The company is a spin-off, a business created to sell technology that a research institution developed, from OsloMet, the Oslo Metropolitan University, and SimulaMet, a research center for digital engineering. Gunn Astrid Baugerud, a psychologist and professor of social work at OsloMet, led the research project that started in 2018 and founded INNSIKT.AI. AS on 9 May 2023 with three academic co-founders. OsloMet wrote in November 2024 that it had licensed the technology to the company. The Norwegian company register lists Baugerud as general manager and board chair and 8 employees as of September 2026.", "The headline figures come from the company's annual accounts, the yearly financial statements that every Norwegian limited company must file with the public Register of Company Accounts, which publishes them through an open interface. They show sales of NOK 816,000 in 2024 and NOK 2,176,042 in 2025, which this page converts to about US$76,000 and US$209,000 with the central bank's average exchange rates for each year. The 2025 accounts also show a net loss of NOK 1,659,862 and salary costs above revenue, so this is a growing but loss-making company financed by new share capital and grants. Latka, a directory, estimated revenue of US$770,000 a year in October 2025; the filed figure is 3.7 times lower, and this page uses the filed figure." ], "factsCaption": "Revenue of NOK 2,176,042 (about US$209,000) in 2025, 2.67 times the 2024 figure, read from the audited accounts filed with the Norwegian register, with a net loss of NOK 1,659,862 in the same year", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from the company's filed annual accounts, from the Norwegian company register, or from the central bank's exchange-rate data. A grade B value comes from OsloMet, the university that licensed the technology, or from an archived copy of the company's site. A grade C value is a statement on the company's own site. A grade D value is a directory estimate with no second source. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a university research project in 2018 to a company with NOK 2.2 million of revenue in 2025, through a formation in May 2023 and a product launch in spring 2024. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Innsikt.AI publishes no prices. The site has no pricing page (checked 23 October 2026; /en/pricing returns 404) and sells by demo request. The rows below describe the plans named on the site (grade C)", "note": "The FAQ on the home page says that team plans include centralized administration, progress monitoring across the organization and volume pricing, that enterprise clients can order custom scenarios, and that prices are given on contact. The Asker municipality project of 2025 was supported by Akershus county, so at least part of that customer's cost was paid by a public grant.", "rows": [ [ "Team and organization plan", "custom", "custom", "central administration, progress monitoring, volume pricing; price on request" ], [ "Enterprise with custom scenarios", "custom", "custom", "scenarios written for one organization's protocols; price on request" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Sales revenue, financial year 2025", "value": "NOK 2,176,042", "grade": "A", "note": "Filed annual accounts for 1 January to 31 December 2025, journal number 2026581439, read from the Register of Company Accounts (Regnskapsregisteret) open interface. The accounts are audited (the audit opt-out field is false).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Sales revenue 2025 in US dollars", "value": "about US$209,000", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2,176,042 divided by 10.3912, Norges Bank's average USD/NOK rate for 2025, equals 209,412. This is the headline figure of this page.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Average revenue per month, 2025", "value": "about US$17,500", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 209,412 divided by 12 equals 17,451. An average over the year, not a run rate at year end.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Sales revenue, financial year 2024", "value": "NOK 816,000, about US$76,000", "grade": "A", "note": "Filed annual accounts for 2024, journal number 2025640406. The dollar figure is calculated at Norges Bank's 2024 average rate of 10.7433 (816,000 divided by 10.7433 equals 75,954).", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Sales revenue, financial year 2023", "value": "none", "grade": "A", "note": "The 2023 accounts show no operating income and a loss of NOK 4,350. The company was founded in May 2023.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from 2024 to 2025", "value": "2.67 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2,176,042 divided by 816,000 equals 2.67, an increase of 167%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Net loss, 2025", "value": "NOK 1,659,862, about US$160,000", "grade": "A", "note": "Filed accounts. Operating costs were NOK 3,886,139, of which salary costs NOK 2,750,135, against NOK 2,176,042 of sales. The 2024 net loss was NOK 370,572.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Cash at the end of 2025", "value": "NOK 1,982,230, about US$191,000", "grade": "A", "note": "Filed accounts. Total equity was NOK 1,495,017 and short-term debt NOK 714,137.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "New share capital, 2024 and 2025", "value": "about NOK 2.0 million in 2024 and NOK 1.5 million in 2025, about US$330,000 in total", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: equity rose from NOK 25,651 to NOK 1,654,878 in 2024 while the company lost NOK 370,572, and fell only to NOK 1,495,017 in 2025 while it lost NOK 1,659,862. The accounts do not say who paid in the capital.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Latka's revenue estimate", "value": "US$770,000 a year, October 2025", "grade": "D", "note": "Latka writes that the company has not published its revenue and that this is Latka's own estimate. It is 3.7 times the figure in the filed 2025 accounts (770,000 divided by 209,412 equals 3.68), so this page does not use it.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Employees", "value": "8 in the company register, September 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "Reported through the employer register (NAV Aa-registeret) on 10 September 2026 and recorded in the Register of Legal Entities on 14 September 2026. Latka records 7 employees in October 2025 from LinkedIn (grade D). The company's team page lists 7 people and one advisory board member.", "src": [ 2, 5, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per employee, 2025", "value": "about US$26,000", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 209,412 divided by 8 equals 26,177. Far below a software company's usual level; the salary costs in the accounts exceed revenue.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Founder and management", "value": "Gunn Astrid Baugerud, general manager and board chair", "grade": "A", "note": "Roles in the Register of Legal Entities. The register also lists a second board member, who is the CFO on the company's team page, and an auditor. The archived team page of July 2024 names Baugerud as CEO and co-founder with three other co-founders from OsloMet and SimulaMet.", "src": [ 3, 5, 17 ] }, { "fact": "Company founded", "value": "9 May 2023, registered 2 June 2023", "grade": "A", "note": "INNSIKT.AI. AS, organization number 931507354, Oslo. Latka's page says founded in 2024, which the register contradicts.", "src": [ 2, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Technology licensed from the university", "value": "yes, OsloMet and SimulaMet", "grade": "B", "note": "OsloMet wrote on 20 November 2024, when it gave Baugerud its 2024 innovation prize, that the technology is licensed to Innsikt.AI and is being tested in Norway, Europe and the USA.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Research behind the product", "value": "project started in 2018; 22 publications from 2021 to 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's research page lists the papers. The 2021 OsloMet article describes the first chatbot, trained on transcripts of about 2,000 recorded mock interviews from Australian partners, with real anonymized interview transcripts planned as the next step.", "src": [ 8, 17, 18 ] }, { "fact": "Research funding", "value": "Research Council of Norway and the Wøyen foundation", "grade": "C", "note": "The company writes that the ILMA research project was funded by Norges forskningsråd and Stiftelsen Wøyen. Amounts are not given. This money went to the research project, not to the company.", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "fact": "EU program", "value": "Women TechEU, selected July 2025, 40 of 1,038 applicants", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's own announcement. The program's grant amount is not stated in any downloaded source.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Named customers and users", "value": "Asker municipality (2025 project); in use in Norway and Canada", "grade": "B", "note": "The Asker project is from the company's site (grade C), with funding from Akershus county. The use in Norway and Canada, and interest from the USA and Ukraine, is from OsloMet's article of June 2025.", "src": [ 7, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the 2025 accounts", "value": "20 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: April 2024, the first archived copy of the site that shows the platform, to December 2025, the end of the financial year.", "src": [ 1, 16 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2018", "what": "The ILMA research project (Interactive Learning with Multi-modal Avatars) starts at OsloMet with SimulaMet, led by Baugerud, to train interviewers of children with an artificial child.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12, 17 ] }, { "when": "29 September 2021", "what": "OsloMet describes the first version: a text chatbot trained on transcripts of about 2,000 mock interviews recorded in Australia, with a visual avatar to be tested before Christmas 2021.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "9 May 2023", "what": "INNSIKT.AI. AS is founded in Oslo and registered on 2 June 2023. The 2023 accounts show no revenue.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "27 January 2024", "what": "The website shows one line, Interview Training using Virtual Avatars, and asks visitors to be the first to know when we launch.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "13 April 2024", "what": "The website now presents the training platform with a sign-in link.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "when": "15 July 2024", "what": "The team page lists nine people: four co-founders from OsloMet and SimulaMet, a CTO, a CFO, a child psychologist and two developer-researchers.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "when": "20 November 2024", "what": "OsloMet gives Baugerud its 2024 innovation prize and writes that the technology is licensed to Innsikt.AI and under test in Norway, Europe and the USA.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "31 December 2024", "what": "First year with revenue: NOK 816,000 of sales, a net loss of NOK 370,572, and about NOK 2.0 million of new share capital, calculated from the equity change.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "21 March 2025", "what": "Kickoff of a training program with Asker municipality for child welfare and school health staff, supported by Akershus county.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "30 April 2025", "what": "A PhD on the avatar's effect on interview technique is defended at OsloMet; the candidate is the company's child psychologist.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "24 June 2025", "what": "OsloMet writes that the technology is in use in Norway and Canada and hosts a delegation of Ukrainian prosecutors who test the avatar.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "4 July 2025", "what": "Selected for the EU's Women TechEU program, 40 companies out of 1,038 applicants.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "October 2025", "what": "Latka estimates revenue of US$770,000 a year and records 7 employees from LinkedIn.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "31 December 2025", "what": "Sales of NOK 2,176,042 (about US$209,000), salary costs of NOK 2,750,135, a net loss of NOK 1,659,862, and about NOK 1.5 million of new share capital.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "The company register records 8 employees.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "The research came first, for seven years", "text": "The method (the dialogical interview model used by Norwegian police), the training data (about 2,000 mock-interview transcripts, with real transcripts planned) and the avatar were built inside a funded university project from 2018. OsloMet's 2021 article shows the chatbot before any company existed. The company was formed in May 2023 to sell what the project had built, and the university licensed the technology to it." }, { "title": "The founder is the domain expert, not a software person", "text": "Baugerud is a psychologist with a child welfare background and a professor of social work. The customers are police units, child welfare offices and school health services that she has studied and trained for years. The AI researchers from SimulaMet are co-founders, and the CTO comes from the same group." }, { "title": "A buyer that must train and cannot do it well today", "text": "Police and child welfare staff in Norway are trained in classrooms and lose the skill soon after, according to the founder's research. Practice with actors is expensive and hard to arrange. An avatar that is available at any time and grades every question replaces that practice. Public bodies pay for it, sometimes with county or EU money." }, { "title": "Evidence as the sales argument", "text": "Twenty-two papers, a PhD on the training effect, an innovation prize from the university and features by the Research Council give a public buyer the justification it needs. The company's news pages are conference talks and research results, not marketing." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from OsloMet's articles, the company's research and home pages, and the filed accounts. The grades are given in the facts table.", "items": [ "The first chatbot (2021) was trained on transcripts of about 2,000 recorded mock interviews from Australian partners; real anonymized transcripts of about 1,000 Norwegian interviews were the planned next step. OsloMet wrote in 2025 that the model behind the platform is trained on specific, real interview data.", "A 2025 pilot study listed on the company's research page used GPT-3 with one-shot prompting to simulate an eight-year-old girl, so at least the research versions ran on OpenAI's model.", "The platform runs in a web browser in Norwegian and English. Its code is served from a Next.js build. Questions are graded in real time and shown with color codes; managers get dashboards for their organization.", "The company employs its researchers: salary costs were NOK 2,750,135 in 2025, more than its sales. The money came from about NOK 3.5 million of new share capital over two years, research grants to the university project, and an EU program.", "Sales are by demo request to public organizations, often with a public grant attached, such as Akershus county for the Asker municipality project." ], "src": [ 8, 18, 5, 1, 11 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold training, chatbots or avatars to organizations and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Hickory", "years": "2015 to 2018", "funding": "US$2.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Corporate training personalized by AI for each employee.", "died": "Enterprise buying took longer than the money lasted, and cheaper rivals had more content.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1509-hickory" }, { "name": "Answerly", "years": "2013 to 2016", "funding": "US$550K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Chatbots that answer customer questions so people only handle the hard ones.", "died": "Natural language processing in 2013 could not hold the conversation. Too early for the models, too late to beat Zendesk and Intercom.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2168-answerly" }, { "name": "Invact Metaversity", "years": "2021 to 2022", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Professional courses taught in 3D classrooms with avatars.", "died": "Students wanted jobs, not avatars. The 3D infrastructure cost US$5 million and nobody asked for it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2302-invact-metaversity" }, { "name": "AllHere", "years": "2016 to 2024", "funding": "US$13M", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "AI chatbots sold to public school districts to reduce student absence.", "died": "The model could predict absence but not change it, and the founder was charged with fraud over the company's figures.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2306-allhere" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Answerly built a conversation product before language models could hold a conversation; Innsikt.AI's research versions ran on GPT-3, a model that can. Invact Metaversity built avatars that its students did not need; Innsikt.AI's avatar replaces a real expense, actors and classroom days, in a job where the law requires the skill. Hickory and AllHere sold to organizations with slow purchasing and could not wait; Innsikt.AI's founder came from inside those organizations, with the university's name and a prize behind her, and the first contracts arrived with county and EU grants attached.", "What has not changed is the economics of selling to public bodies. The 2025 accounts show salary costs above revenue and a loss of NOK 1.66 million, covered by new share capital. The company is growing, 2.67 times from 2024 to 2025, but it is not yet a business that pays for itself, and the predecessors show that research credibility does not shorten a municipality's budget cycle." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product, no. The pattern, in parts.", "text": "Nobody can copy seven years of funded research, a licensed dataset of real child interviews and a professor's standing with the police. What can be copied is the shape: find a profession that is legally required to practise a conversation skill, build an AI counterpart that plays the other side and grades the practice, and sell it to the employer with the evidence that it works.", "steps": [ "Pick a conversation that professionals must train for and currently practise with actors or colleagues: interviews, consultations, negotiations, de-escalation.", "Build the counterpart on a language model with a prompt and data that make it behave like the real person on the other side, then grade the user's turns against a published method.", "Publish the evidence: a pilot study, a validation paper or a named organization's results, because institutional buyers justify purchases with documents.", "Expect losses for years: Innsikt.AI's filed accounts show a net loss of NOK 1.66 million on NOK 2.18 million of sales in 2025, financed by share capital and grants." ] }, "watch": [ { "title": "Growing revenue, larger losses", "text": "The filed accounts show NOK 2,176,042 of sales in 2025 against NOK 3,886,139 of operating costs. Equity fell despite about NOK 1.5 million of new capital. Cash at the end of 2025 was NOK 1,982,230, which covers about one more year of the 2025 loss." }, { "title": "A team of eight, not a solo business", "text": "The register lists 8 employees in September 2026 and the site lists seven people plus an advisor. Revenue per employee in 2025 was about US$26,000. This is a research spin-off with a payroll, included here because the money evidence is grade A and the team is within the site's small-team limit." }, { "title": "The directory estimate is wrong by 3.7 times", "text": "Latka's US$770,000 a year for October 2025 is marked as its own estimate, and the audited accounts give NOK 2,176,042, about US$209,000, for the whole of 2025. Readers who meet the Latka figure elsewhere should prefer the filing." }, { "title": "Dependence on the university and on public money", "text": "The technology is licensed from OsloMet and SimulaMet; the license terms are not public. Customers are public bodies, and the Asker project and the EU program came with grants. A change in either relationship would matter more than for a consumer product." }, { "title": "Who paid in the capital is not public", "text": "The accounts show about NOK 3.5 million of new share capital in 2024 and 2025 but not who provided it. No venture round was found in any source, and the share capital of NOK 35,364 in the register is consistent with a small private company." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.innsikt.ai/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Brønnøysund Register Centre, Register of Company Accounts (Regnskapsregisteret) open interface: annual accounts of INNSIKT.AI. AS for 2023, 2024 and 2025", "url": "https://data.brreg.no/regnskapsregisteret/regnskap/931507354", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full as JSON on 23 October 2026. Source for sales, costs, losses, equity and cash. The 2024 and 2025 accounts are audited." }, { "title": "Brønnøysund Register Centre, Register of Legal Entities (Enhetsregisteret): INNSIKT.AI. AS, organization number 931507354", "url": "https://data.brreg.no/enhetsregisteret/api/enheter/931507354", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full as JSON. Source for the formation date, address, share capital and the employee count with its reporting dates." }, { "title": "Brønnøysund Register Centre, Register of Legal Entities: roles of INNSIKT.AI. AS", "url": "https://data.brreg.no/enhetsregisteret/api/enheter/931507354/roller", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full as JSON. Source for the general manager, board chair, board member and auditor." }, { "title": "Norges Bank exchange rate data: annual average USD/NOK, 2023 to 2025", "url": "https://data.norges-bank.no/api/data/EXR/A.USD.NOK.SP?format=csv&startPeriod=2023&endPeriod=2026", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full as CSV. Rates used: 10.7433 for 2024 and 10.3912 for 2025, averages of daily observations." }, { "title": "Innsikt.AI home page: AI-Powered Child Interview Training Platform", "url": "https://www.innsikt.ai/en/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 23 October 2026. Source for the product description, the FAQ on plans, the team list and the founder's role. No pricing page exists." }, { "title": "OsloMet news, 20 November 2024: prize winners (Prisvinnere), including the 2024 innovation prize to Gunn Astrid Baugerud", "url": "https://www.oslomet.no/om/nyheter/prisvinnere", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the section on the innovation prize. Source for the license to Innsikt.AI and the testing in Norway, Europe and the USA." }, { "title": "OsloMet news, 24 June 2025: AI solution can increase children's legal protection in Ukraine (KI-løysing kan auke barns rettstryggleik i Ukraina)", "url": "https://www.oslomet.no/om/nyheter/barneavhor-ukraina", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founder's background, the real-time grading with color codes, the training data, and use in Norway and Canada." }, { "title": "OsloMet research news, 29 September 2021: artificial intelligence for child interviews (Kunstig intelligens i avhør)", "url": "https://www.oslomet.no/forskning/forskningsnyheter/kunstig-intelligens-avhor", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the research project, the 2,000 mock-interview transcripts, the chatbot and the planned avatar." }, { "title": "Latka company page: Innsikt.AI revenue 2025, estimate", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/innsikt.ai", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. A third-party estimate marked as such, with a headcount from LinkedIn and a founding year that the register contradicts." }, { "title": "Innsikt.AI news, 4 July 2025: Innsikt.AI Selected for Women TechEU Program", "url": "https://www.innsikt.ai/en/news/women-techeu-winner", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Company announcement. Source for the EU program and the spin-off description." }, { "title": "Innsikt.AI news, 21 March 2025: Asker Kommune Project Kickoff", "url": "https://www.innsikt.ai/en/news/asker-kommune-kickoff", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the municipal customer, the cohort structure and the county funding." }, { "title": "Innsikt.AI news, 9 April 2025: Featured by Norwegian Research Council", "url": "https://www.innsikt.ai/en/news/forskningsradet-feature", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the ILMA project, its leader, its institutions and its funders." }, { "title": "Innsikt.AI news, 30 April 2025: PhD Defense: AI Avatars for Interview Training", "url": "https://www.innsikt.ai/en/news/phd-defense-ragnhild-roed", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the PhD on the training effect." }, { "title": "Innsikt.AI news, 25 March 2025: Founder Receives OsloMet Innovation Award", "url": "https://www.innsikt.ai/en/news/oslomet-innovation-award", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's account of the prize and the research team." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine, 27 January 2024: innsikt.ai", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20240127014815/https://innsikt.ai/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. A one-line page asking visitors to be the first to know when we launch." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine, 13 April 2024: innsikt.ai", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20240413160444/https://innsikt.ai/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The first archived copy that presents the training platform with a sign-in link; used as the launch month." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine, 15 July 2024: innsikt.ai, with the team page", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20240715124726/https://www.innsikt.ai/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 2018 origin and the nine-person team with four co-founders." }, { "title": "Innsikt.AI research page: 22 publications, 2021 to 2025", "url": "https://www.innsikt.ai/en/research", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the publication count and the GPT-3 pilot study." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/mockey/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/mockey.md", "slug": "mockey", "name": "Mockey", "country": "India", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI mockup generator for product images", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-23", "launchLabel": "December 2022", "outcomeLabel": "US$12K a month, March 2025", "sticker": "$12K/month reported", "outcomeUsd": 144000, "months": 27, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders at the March 2025 figure; customer reviews on the home page thank a support employee", "fundingLabel": "None, by the founder's account", "primaryFactor": "A free tool with a paywall at the moment of use", "group": "photos", "channel": "search", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Design tools" ], "product": "A website where a seller or designer uploads a flat design, picks one of 30,000 or more templates (t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, phones, books, packaging) and downloads a photo of the product with the design on it. AI tools on top of the templates make product photoshoots, several shots from one product photo, short videos, background removal and designs from a text prompt.", "why": "It was a free tool for two years, so search engines and design communities sent it a large audience before it charged anything. Then the founders put a limit of three downloads a day on free users, and the founder said in March 2025 that revenue roughly tripled after that cap. The same founder said the business made about US$12,000 a month in March 2025, most of it from subscriptions.", "summary": [ "Mockey is a mockup generator. A mockup is a photo of a real product, such as a t-shirt or a mug, with a customer's own design placed on it so that the product can be shown in a shop before it exists. Print-on-demand sellers, who sell goods that a supplier prints only after an order, need such photos for every listing. Mockey lets them upload a flat design file and place it on one of more than 30,000 template photos in the browser, without Photoshop and without a photo shoot. Since 2024 the paid plans also sell AI credits, a prepaid unit of use for the AI tools: a generated photoshoot, several angles from one product photo, a short video of the product, or a design made from a text prompt.", "Pranay Agarwal and Mofid Ansari, two designers from India, started it in 2022 as a side project for the users of Blinkstore, a print-on-demand startup where Agarwal worked as a designer. The archived home page of January 2023 shows a free generator with about 1,000 templates and no download limit. The founder said in an Indie Hackers interview of 20 March 2025, as summarized by Startup Founder Stories, that display ads on about 100,000 visitors a month brought in only about US$700 a month. In April 2024 they added subscriptions and capped free users at three mockups a day. The founder said in the same interview that revenue roughly tripled after the cap and reached about US$12,000 a month in March 2025, eleven months after the subscriptions started, with ads still about US$700 of it.", "The headline figure on this page rests on that one founder statement from March 2025, read in a secondary source. No payment processor, buyer or journalist has checked it, and no later figure exists, so the page carries the badge \"Reported, not verified\". The rest of the page is read from the company's own pages, archived copies of them, Product Hunt and reviewers, and it also shows five earlier companies that tried to sell design without a designer." ], "factsCaption": "About US$12,000 a month in March 2025, stated once by the founder and quoted by a secondary source, with the earlier ad revenue and the price history from archived pages", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is a single founder statement with one date, here from an Indie Hackers interview of March 2025 as summarized by Startup Founder Stories, with no second source. A grade C value is from the company's own pages or a reviewer. A grade B value is a platform record such as a Product Hunt launch date or a Wayback capture date. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a free side project for a print-on-demand startup to a reported US$12,000 a month in 27 months, with the paywall arriving in month 16. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Mockey plans in October 2026, from the company's own comparison posts of March 2026 (updated July 2026) and a reviewer of May 2026 (grade C); the pricing page itself loads by script and shows only \"paid plans start from US$7 a month\" in its page description", "note": "Yearly billing lowers the Starter plan to US$5.70 and the Creator plan to US$15.20 a month, in the company's own words. The Creator plan includes 150 AI credits a month (1,800 a year on the yearly plan); a video generation costs 10 credits and the Kling video models cost 40 to 160 credits a run. Forever is a one-time purchase with 1,000 credits. The free plan gives three JPG downloads a day at 400 by 500 pixels without commercial rights, according to a reviewer that is itself a competitor. Prices can differ by region: that reviewer gives the Starter plan as US$9.90 a month. In April 2024 the archived pricing page showed one Pro plan at US$9 a month or US$89 a year and an Enterprise plan from US$500 a month.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "3 downloads a day, JPG only, 400 by 500 pixels" ], [ "Starter", "5.70", "7", "all templates, unlimited downloads, PNG, no ads, no AI credits" ], [ "Creator", "15.20", "19", "150 AI credits a month" ], [ "Forever", "199 one-time", "", "1,000 AI credits, no subscription" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue per month, March 2025", "value": "about US$12,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder Pranay Agarwal in an Indie Hackers interview published 20 March 2025, as summarized by Startup Founder Stories. About US$700 of it from display ads, the rest from subscriptions. One statement, one date, no second source.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the March 2025 figure", "value": "about US$144,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 12,000 times 12. This is the headline figure of the page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Ad revenue before subscriptions", "value": "about US$700 a month on about 100,000 visitors a month", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder, same interview. The site was free and ad-supported from 2022 to April 2024.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Effect of the free-plan cap", "value": "revenue roughly tripled", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder, same interview, about the limit of three mockups a day for free users introduced with the subscriptions in April 2024.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Start of subscriptions", "value": "April 2024", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder, same interview. The pricing page archived on 22 April 2024 shows one Pro plan at US$9 a month or US$89 a year, an Enterprise plan from US$500 a month, and Stripe as the payment gateway.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Months from the subscriptions to the March 2025 figure", "value": "11", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: April 2024 to March 2025. The interview title gives the same count.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founders and start year", "value": "Pranay Agarwal and Mofid Ansari, 2022", "grade": "C", "note": "Company about page. A newsletter of February 2026 describes them as builders from Lucknow; Startup Founder Stories places Agarwal in New Delhi.", "src": [ 2, 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Origin", "value": "a side project for the users of Blinkstore, a print-on-demand startup", "grade": "C", "note": "Agarwal worked there as a designer according to Startup Founder Stories; the newsletter calls Blinkstore their previous startup. The Android app's package name on Google Play begins with in.blinkstore, which the company's own pages link to.", "src": [ 1, 3, 10 ] }, { "fact": "First archived home page", "value": "2 December 2022", "grade": "B", "note": "Wayback Machine capture index. The capture of 1 January 2023 shows a free mockup generator with about 1,000 templates and the words \"no limit on free downloads\".", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Product Hunt launches", "value": "4 April 2023 and 2 May 2024 (Mockey AI Pro)", "grade": "B", "note": "Product Hunt product page. Both founders are tagged as makers in a launch comment.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Founder leaves his job", "value": "December 2023", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder, same interview: he quit his full-time role to work on Mockey only.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Library and usage, October 2026", "value": "30,000 or more templates, more than 1 million mockups created, 50,000 or more professionals", "grade": "C", "note": "Company home page. The home page also shows a 4.4 rating from more than 40 Trustpilot reviews.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Team at the March 2025 figure", "value": "2 co-founders", "grade": "D", "note": "Startup Founder Stories lists the founder type as co-founders and says the team stayed lean. A customer review on the home page thanks a support employee by first name, so at least one more person handles support by 2026.", "src": [ 1, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none stated", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder, same interview: bootstrapped, reinvesting what came in. A company-data directory that this page could not open lists Mockey with funding; see the first watch box.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Next target stated by the founder, March 2025", "value": "US$50,000 a month", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder, same interview. No later figure has been published.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Prices, March to July 2026", "value": "Starter US$7, Creator US$19 a month; Forever US$199 one-time", "grade": "C", "note": "Company blog posts comparing Mockey with two competitors. The first post was published 3 March 2026 and updated 8 July 2026.", "src": [ 7, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the first archived page to the March 2025 figure", "value": "27 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: December 2022 to March 2025.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2022", "what": "Agarwal and Ansari, both designers, build Mockey as a side project so that sellers on Blinkstore, a print-on-demand startup, can preview their designs on products without Photoshop.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 3, 1 ] }, { "when": "2 December 2022", "what": "First capture of mockey.ai in the Wayback Machine.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "1 January 2023", "what": "The archived home page offers about 1,000 free mockup templates in ten categories with unlimited free downloads. Revenue comes from display ads.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 1 ] }, { "when": "4 April 2023", "what": "Launch on Product Hunt as a free mockup generator for e-commerce brands with 14 categories.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "December 2023", "what": "Agarwal quits his full-time job to work on Mockey alone. The founder said in March 2025 that the site then had about 100,000 visitors a month and ads brought about US$700 a month.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "April 2024", "what": "Subscriptions start next to the ads: one Pro plan at US$9 a month or US$89 a year, with PNG downloads, higher resolution, no ads and AI product photos; Enterprise from US$500 a month. Free users are capped at three mockups a day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 1 ] }, { "when": "2 May 2024", "what": "Mockey AI Pro launches on Product Hunt with AI mockups in more than 25 categories.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "20 March 2025", "what": "Indie Hackers publishes an interview with Agarwal. He says revenue roughly tripled after the cap and is about US$12,000 a month, mostly subscriptions, with ads still about US$700. The stated next target is US$50,000 a month.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "9 February 2026", "what": "An Indian AI newsletter profiles Mockey as built in Lucknow for small sellers in smaller Indian cities and names both founders.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "March 2026", "what": "The company's own comparison posts show four plans, including a US$199 one-time Forever plan, video mockups made with Kling models, and an Android app.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 8 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The home page shows 30,000 or more templates, more than 1 million mockups created, a Shopify app, a Figma plugin, an Etsy app and ad templates. No revenue figure after March 2025 has been published.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A free tool first, traffic from search", "text": "For about two years Mockey gave away every download. Startup Founder Stories reports that the site ranked for mockup searches and spread through design communities, and that the founder said it had about 100,000 visitors a month by the time he quit his job. The audience existed before the price did." }, { "title": "The paywall at the moment of use", "text": "The change that the founder credits most is a cap of three mockups a day for free users, added in April 2024 with the subscriptions. A seller who needs ten product photos for ten listings hits the limit on the same afternoon. The founder said in March 2025 that revenue roughly tripled after the cap." }, { "title": "Built on an existing user base", "text": "The first users were sellers on Blinkstore, the print-on-demand startup where Agarwal worked. The jump in usage after the tool was connected to that product told the founders the idea worked, according to Startup Founder Stories, before they spent anything on marketing." }, { "title": "Credits for AI on top of a template subscription", "text": "The template library is the cheap part: a subscription removes ads and limits. The AI features, photoshoots, videos and prompts, cost credits, and the company's own posts say a Kling video run costs 40 to 160 credits. That separates a flat price for unlimited template downloads from a usage price for model calls." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages and their source code, the archived pricing page and the Startup Founder Stories summary. They are grade B where read in the page source and grade C otherwise.", "items": [ "Two designers built it; Startup Founder Stories lists Figma, Stripe and Google Search Console as the tools behind it. The archived pricing page of April 2024 says Stripe is the payment gateway for subscriptions.", "The site today is generated with Astro (the page source names Astro 7.3.1) and tracked with Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics 4. A comment in the source says Razorpay and Lemon Squeezy checkout scripts load only for the regions that use them, so payments run through three processors by region.", "Video mockups use Kling v2.6 Pro and Kling V3 Pro models, according to the company's own comparison post, and the video files on the home page carry Replicate prediction names, which points to Replicate as the model host.", "Images and blog assets are served from a WordPress installation on a separate assets host. Sign-in uses Google's identity service.", "Distribution beyond the website: a Shopify app, a Figma plugin, an Etsy app, an Android app published as a trusted web activity under the Blinkstore developer name, a Discord server, an affiliate program and two Product Hunt launches.", "Marketing is organic by the founder's account: search rankings, design communities, word of mouth and free resources such as a Figma illustration set that the founder published." ], "src": [ 1, 6, 10, 7, 4 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database promised design or image work without a designer or desktop software. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Snipshot", "years": "2006 to 2009", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Edit photos in the browser without installing software.", "died": "Larger browser editors such as Picnik and free alternatives offered more, and the site had no clear way to earn money from casual users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1241-snipshot" }, { "name": "Splashup", "years": "2007 to 2010", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Advanced photo editing in the browser, with several people on one image at once.", "died": "It was built on Flash as Flash died, it had no business model, and users moved to phones and to cheaper Adobe plans.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1660-splashup" }, { "name": "The Grid", "years": "2014 to 2020", "funding": "US$4.7M", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "A website that designs itself with AI from your content, no designer needed.", "died": "The AI of 2015 produced inconsistent layouts; Wix and Squarespace gave acceptable results without the surprises, and the users left.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/618-the-grid" }, { "name": "Lightwell", "years": "2019 to 2022", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A no-code tool for designers to build interactive content without developers.", "died": "Adobe and Canva already covered the need, the tool lacked integrations, and it never grew past a small group of early users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1369-lightwell" }, { "name": "Scoutzie", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Custom design work from a curated group of freelance designers.", "died": "Businesses wanted cheap design, Fiverr and Upwork gave it to them, and early AI design tools cut the value of bespoke work further.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1562-scoutzie" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Snipshot and Splashup put image editing in the browser, which was the hard technical part in 2007, and then had nothing to charge for: casual users edit a photo now and then and will not pay for it. The Grid promised AI design in 2014, when the models could not deliver a consistent result, and lost its users to tools that gave a predictable one.", "Mockey's customer is not casual. A print-on-demand seller needs a new product photo for every listing, every week, and the photo earns money. That is why a cap of three downloads a day could convert free users, which the founder said in March 2025 roughly tripled revenue, while Snipshot's users would just have left. And the AI part came last, in 2024, when image and video models could produce a usable product photo from one upload; until then the product was a template library with ads, which is a modest business but a possible one. The Grid did the reverse: it sold the AI first and the result second." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The head start, no.", "text": "A free tool that solves one recurring task for sellers, ranks in search for two years, and then adds a daily cap and a cheap subscription is a repeatable pattern, and it needs no capital. What cannot be copied is the audience Mockey had before it charged: 100,000 visitors a month, by the founder's account in March 2025, built when free mockup generators were rare. Canva, Placeit, Dynamic Mockups and several free rivals now compete for the same searches, and the figure on this page is a single founder statement.", "steps": [ "Pick a task that one type of seller repeats every week and that currently needs Photoshop or a paid service.", "Give it away in full for a year or more, so that search engines and communities bring the audience; take ad revenue in the meantime.", "Put the paywall at the moment of use: a small daily limit on free downloads, a low monthly price to remove it.", "Sell AI features separately as credits, so that model costs are paid by the users who cause them.", "Add a plugin or app inside the tools the sellers already use: Shopify, Etsy, Figma." ], "open": "The same pattern for other recurring seller tasks: listing photos for second-hand marketplaces, menu photos for restaurants, book covers for self-published authors, or packaging previews for small food brands, in languages and markets where the large design tools are weak." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline figure, about US$12,000 a month in March 2025, rests on one statement by founder Pranay Agarwal in an Indie Hackers interview published 20 March 2025, read here in the summary by Startup Founder Stories, since Indie Hackers does not allow this site's crawler. The same single source gives the US$700 a month from ads, the 100,000 visitors a month, the tripling after the cap, the December 2023 job exit and the bootstrapped status. No payment processor profile exists: TrustMRR has no entry for Mockey. A company-data directory that this page could not open lists Mockey with outside funding, which the founder's account contradicts; this page does not count it either way. A reader could look for a TrustMRR or Stripe profile, a second interview with a later figure, or the company's filings in India." }, { "title": "Most of the product is a template library", "text": "The AI tools are a layer added in 2024 and sold as credits. The main value, 30,000 or more templates, is a content library that competitors can build too. Dynamic Mockups, Placeit, Canva and smaller free tools such as Modor sell the same thing, and one of those competitors publishes a review that calls Mockey's free plan not truly free." }, { "title": "Free traffic depends on search rankings", "text": "Growth came from ranking for mockup searches and from communities, by the founder's account. A change in how Google or AI assistants answer a search for a free mockup generator changes the top of the funnel at once, and Mockey has no paid acquisition it has described." }, { "title": "No figure after March 2025", "text": "Nineteen months have passed since the only revenue statement. The founder's target of US$50,000 a month, stated in March 2025, has not been reported as reached or missed. The trend on this page is marked unknown for that reason." }, { "title": "Prices differ by region and by promotion", "text": "The company's own posts give the Starter plan as US$7 a month; a reviewer in May 2026 gives US$9.90; the page source mentions Razorpay and Lemon Squeezy checkouts for some regions. A reader comparing the pricing table on this page with the live page may see different numbers." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://mockey.ai/" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/mockey-ai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Startup Founder Stories, 26 June 2026: how Pranay Agarwal grew Mockey.ai to $12k a month by adding download limits", "url": "https://startupfounderstories.com/stories/pranay-agarwal-mockey-12k-mrr", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. A summary of the founder's Indie Hackers interview of 20 March 2025 (\"Hitting $12K MRR just 11 months after turning a free side project into an AI business\"), which this site may not fetch. Source for every money figure, the visitor count, the download cap, the Blinkstore origin, the job exit and the tools listed." }, { "title": "Mockey AI about page: Our Story", "url": "https://mockey.ai/about-us", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names the two founders and the start year 2022." }, { "title": "AI Radar Daily #11 by Avinash Raghava, 9 February 2026: Mockey AI", "url": "https://aiboomiradar.substack.com/p/11-airadardaily-mockey-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A newsletter profile. Source for Lucknow, the Blinkstore origin as the founders' previous startup, and the target market of small Indian sellers. No numbers." }, { "title": "Product Hunt product page: Mockey AI", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/mockey-ai", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the two launch dates, the 2023 product description and the makers' handles in a launch comment." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine: mockey.ai captured 1 January 2023, and the capture index showing the first capture on 2 December 2022", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230101013316/https://mockey.ai/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The archived home page describes a free generator with about 1,000 templates and no limit on free downloads." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine: mockey.ai/pricing captured 22 April 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240422235900/https://mockey.ai/pricing/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's own pricing page at the start of subscriptions: Pro at US$9 a month or US$89 a year, Enterprise from US$500 a month, Stripe as payment gateway, AI product photoshoot as a Pro feature." }, { "title": "Mockey AI blog, 3 March 2026, updated 8 July 2026: Dynamic Mockups vs Mockey AI", "url": "https://mockey.ai/blog/dynamic-mockups-vs-mockey-ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's own comparison. Source for the four plans, the yearly prices, the credit amounts and the Kling video models." }, { "title": "Mockey AI blog, 9 March 2026, updated 8 July 2026: Mock It vs Mockey AI", "url": "https://mockey.ai/blog/mock-it-vs-mockey-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Confirms the yearly prices and mentions the Android app." }, { "title": "Modor blog, 1 May 2026, updated 20 August 2026: Mockey AI Review", "url": "https://modor.io/blog/mockey-ai-review/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the pricing and free-plan sections. A review written by a competitor; used for the free-plan limits and the regional Starter price of US$9.90." }, { "title": "Mockey AI home page and pricing page, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://mockey.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the page source. Source for the template count, usage claims, integrations, the Trustpilot rating, the support review, and the tools named in the source code (Astro, Google Tag Manager, Razorpay, Lemon Squeezy, Replicate file names, the Google Play package name). The pricing page loads its plans by script and shows only the starting price in its description." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/inbox-zero/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/inbox-zero.md", "slug": "inbox-zero", "name": "Inbox Zero", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Open-source AI email assistant for Gmail and Outlook", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-23", "launchLabel": "July 2023", "outcomeLabel": "Over US$10K a month, October 2025", "sticker": "$10K+/mo reported", "outcomeUsd": 120000, "months": 27, "teamLabel": "1 founder; Latka counted 2 people on LinkedIn in December 2024 and 3 in June 2025", "fundingLabel": "No funding round found in the sources read", "primaryFactor": "Open-source distribution", "group": "documents-data", "channel": "search", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [ "platform", "open-source" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Email" ], "product": "An assistant that connects to a Gmail or Outlook account, sorts and labels every incoming email with rules written in plain English, drafts replies in the user's own tone, unsubscribes from newsletters in bulk and blocks cold sales email. The code is public under the AGPL license, so anyone can run it on their own server; the company sells a hosted version per user per month, at prices listed on its pricing page.", "why": "The founder built it for his own inbox, published the code from the first day and launched it on Product Hunt the day after Christmas 2023, where he says it finished first. The open-source community, two newsletters and the GitHub trending page brought the first thousands of users. According to the Startup Founder Stories summary of his Indie Hackers interview, he then narrowed the product to a niche when larger competitors arrived and reached US$10,000 in monthly recurring revenue about a year after the first customer.", "summary": [ "Inbox Zero is an AI email assistant: a program that reads the mail arriving in a Gmail or Outlook account through the provider's API, the interface that lets one program read and change data in another, and then acts on it. It labels each email, archives what the user never reads, drafts a reply in the user's tone for the emails that need one, and blocks cold sales email. It is commercial open source, a model where the full code is public and free to run yourself, and the company earns money by hosting it for people who do not want to run a server. The hosted version costs US$18 to US$42 per user per month according to the pricing page read on 23 October 2026.", "Elie Steinbock, a software engineer in the United States, started it in 2023 for his own inbox. A waitlist page existed in July 2023. He launched on Product Hunt on 26 December 2023 and on Hacker News three days later, and wrote in January 2024 that the launch finished first on Product Hunt with over 1,000 upvotes and took the GitHub repository from 200 to 1,200 stars. The Startup Founder Stories page that summarizes his Indie Hackers interview of 16 October 2025 reports a first customer in July 2023, US$1,000 in monthly recurring revenue in December 2023, US$10,000 in June 2024 and over US$10,000 in October 2025. GetLatka estimated revenue of US$330,000 a year in June 2025, with 3 people on LinkedIn.", "Every money figure on this page is grade D, reported but not verified: the founder's statements reach this page only through a third party's summary of his interview, and the only other figure is a directory estimate that does not agree with it. No payment processor, buyer or journalist has checked the numbers. The page also shows what happened to earlier companies that sold a better inbox on top of an email provider they did not control." ], "factsCaption": "A one-person open-source email assistant reported at over US$10,000 a month in October 2025 by a summary of the founder's interview; the only other figure is a Latka estimate", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is a founder statement that this page could read only in a third party's summary of his Indie Hackers interview, or a directory estimate; a grade C value is the founder's own blog or product page; a grade B value is visible in the public code repository; a \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A.", "timelineLead": "From a waitlist page in July 2023 to a reported US$10,000 a month in about a year, and a third Product Hunt first place in October 2026, in 27 months to the headline figure. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Inbox Zero prices on 23 October 2026, read from the company's pricing page (grade C), per user per month", "note": "The pricing page shows the yearly price first and the monthly price in its comparison table. Every AI plan has a 7-day free trial. The email client is free on web, desktop and iPhone; the AI features are the paid part. Payments go through Stripe. A cheaper version existed in January 2024: the founder wrote then that the pro version cost US$10 to US$19 a month.", "rows": [ [ "Email app", "0", "0", "free email client for Gmail and Outlook" ], [ "Starter", "18", "20", "per user; sorting, labels, drafted replies, cold email blocker, bulk unsubscribe" ], [ "Plus", "28", "35", "per user; 2 email accounts, meeting notetaker, Slack and app integrations" ], [ "Professional", "42", "50", "per user; team-wide analytics, priority support, onboarding manager" ], [ "Enterprise", "custom", "", "SSO, SCIM, on-premise deployment" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, October 2025", "value": "over US$10,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Startup Founder Stories, which summarizes the founder's Indie Hackers interview of 16 October 2025 titled \"Carving out a small niche in a big market and bringing in $10K MRR\". The interview itself could not be read (Indie Hackers blocks this site's agents). One founder claim, one date.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the October 2025 figure", "value": "at least US$120,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 10,000 times 12. A floor, because the source says \"over\" US$10,000.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "GetLatka's revenue estimate, June 2025", "value": "US$330,000 a year", "grade": "D", "note": "A third-party estimate marked \"EST.\" on the Latka page. It equals about US$27,500 a month, well above the founder's \"over US$10,000\" four months later, so one of the two is wrong. Startup Founder Stories repeats the US$330,000 figure as \"full-year 2025 revenue\".", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, June 2024", "value": "US$10,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Startup Founder Stories milestone table: reached about 12 months after the first customer.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, December 2023", "value": "US$1,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Startup Founder Stories milestone table: about six months after the first customer, in the month of the Product Hunt launch.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "First customer", "value": "July 2023, US$10", "grade": "D", "note": "Startup Founder Stories milestone table. A Wayback Machine snapshot of 23 July 2023 shows the site with a waitlist.", "src": [ 1, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Product Hunt launch, 26 December 2023", "value": "first place of the day; over 1,000 upvotes per the founder, 801 points on the page today", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's blog, January 2024. Product Hunt lists three launches: 26 December 2023 (801 points), 1 October 2024 (582 points) and 18 October 2026 (379 points, rank 1 of the day).", "src": [ 5, 4 ] }, { "fact": "GitHub stars", "value": "200 before the launch, 1,200 two weeks after, 12.8k on 23 October 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "The founder's blog gives the first two counts (grade C); the repository page shows the current count and 11,696 commits.", "src": [ 5, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Hacker News Show HN, 29 December 2023", "value": "167 points, 143 comments", "grade": "C", "note": "From the Hacker News Algolia API record of the thread.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 founder; 2 people in December 2024 and 3 in June 2025 per LinkedIn", "grade": "D", "note": "Startup Founder Stories: \"Solo founder\". Latka's headcount readings come from LinkedIn.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "no round found", "grade": "D", "note": "No source read mentions a funding round for Inbox Zero. Not verified: the founder's January 2024 post lists funding of other open-source companies and none for his own.", "src": [ 6, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Price of the pro version, January 2024", "value": "US$10 to US$19 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's blog, 25 January 2024, in his argument that self-hosting to save that fee is not worth the effort.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "License", "value": "AGPL", "grade": "B", "note": "Repository license file. Anyone may run the code, but a modified hosted version must publish its code too.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Growth channel", "value": "SEO and content; Product Hunt and the open-source community at launch", "grade": "D", "note": "Startup Founder Stories lists \"SEO / Content\" as the main channel. The founder wrote on Hacker News in December 2025 that a Google search for \"inbox zero\" shows his product first.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Country", "value": "United States", "grade": "D", "note": "Startup Founder Stories (\"USA\") and Latka (\"United States\"). Not stated on the company's own pages.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the first customer to the headline figure", "value": "27 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: July 2023 to October 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2023", "what": "Steinbock starts Inbox Zero for his own email; Latka records the founding year as 2023. He also runs a YouTube channel about open-source code.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 2, 7 ] }, { "when": "23 July 2023", "what": "The Wayback Machine's first snapshot of getinboxzero.com: \"Inbox Zero uses AI to help you empty your inbox daily\", with a waitlist. Startup Founder Stories dates the first customer, at US$10, to this month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12, 1 ] }, { "when": "December 2023", "what": "US$1,000 in monthly recurring revenue, according to the Startup Founder Stories milestone table.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "26 December 2023", "what": "Product Hunt launch, the day after Christmas, with a hunter. The founder writes that it finished first with over 1,000 upvotes and brought thousands of users; the repository goes from 200 to 1,200 stars and two AI newsletters feature it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 4 ] }, { "when": "29 December 2023", "what": "Show HN on Hacker News: 167 points and 143 comments. In the thread the founder says the app uses Vercel's AI package, stores analytics in Tinybird, has passed Google's Gmail API review, and can be self-hosted by anyone who does not trust it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "22 to 25 January 2024", "what": "Two blog posts on the launch and on why he builds commercial open source. The pro version costs US$10 to US$19 a month, he writes.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "when": "June 2024", "what": "US$10,000 in monthly recurring revenue, according to the Startup Founder Stories milestone table, about a year after the first customer.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "21 August 2024", "what": "The changelog adds Claude 3.5 Sonnet and makes Anthropic the default model; OpenAI stays as an option.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "1 October 2024", "what": "Second Product Hunt launch, \"An open source, AI personal assistant for email\": 582 points.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "December 2024", "what": "Latka counts 2 people on LinkedIn.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "June 2025", "what": "Latka estimates revenue of US$330,000 a year and counts 3 people on LinkedIn.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "16 October 2025", "what": "Indie Hackers interview, as summarized by Startup Founder Stories: over US$10,000 in monthly recurring revenue, a solo founder, and the lesson to narrow the niche when competition arrives.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "18 October 2026", "what": "Third Product Hunt launch, \"Open-source Superhuman alternative\": a free email client for Gmail and Outlook on web, desktop and iPhone, with the AI assistant as a US$20 a month add-on. Rank 1 of the day, 379 points.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "23 October 2026", "what": "The repository shows 12.8k stars and 11,696 commits. The pricing page lists Starter, Plus and Professional at US$18, US$28 and US$42 per user per month billed yearly, and the home page claims SOC 2 compliance.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 7, 8, 9 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Open source as the launch engine", "text": "The founder's own account of the launch: open-source products were finishing first on Product Hunt in late 2023 (Cal.com, PostHog, Papermark, Documenso), and he says being open source is almost a guaranteed first place because the open-source community votes for its own. He posted in open-source communities, used a hunter, and the repository went from 200 to 1,200 stars in two weeks. The launch got the product into Ben's Bites and The Rundown AI, newsletters he says reach hundreds of thousands of readers." }, { "title": "Search on the product name", "text": "The product is named after the method it serves. Startup Founder Stories lists SEO and content as the main growth channel, and the founder wrote on Hacker News in December 2025 that a Google search for \"inbox zero\" shows his product first. The company blog publishes dozens of guides such as how to stop emails from Amazon, LinkedIn or Reddit, each a search page that ends with the product." }, { "title": "Niche down when the big players arrive", "text": "Startup Founder Stories summarizes the interview's main lesson: he was early in a market that filled up quickly, and instead of matching every feature of larger competitors he narrowed the product to the people who get more email than they can handle and want labels, drafts, unsubscribes and a cold email blocker without changing their email client." }, { "title": "Self-hosting as trust, hosting as revenue", "text": "An email assistant reads everything in the inbox, so trust is the main objection. The public code answers it: anyone can inspect what the code does or run it on their own server. The founder wrote in January 2024 that nobody self-hosts to save a fee of US$10 to US$19 a month, because running the servers costs more than that in time, so the open code brings users without losing many customers." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the public repository (grade B), the founder's comments on Hacker News and his blog, and the product's changelog (grade C).", "items": [ "A TypeScript monorepo managed with Turborepo and pnpm: Next.js for the web app, Prisma on PostgreSQL, Redis through Upstash, and Docker files for self-hosting. A command-line installer, npx @inbox-zero/cli, starts the containers.", "Two parts: an AI assistant that runs in the background on a Gmail or Outlook account, and an email client. Each works on its own. The iPhone client is a native Swift app and is not open source yet.", "The model layer uses Vercel's AI package so that several providers fit behind one interface. OpenAI was the first provider; on 21 August 2024 the changelog added Claude 3.5 Sonnet and made Anthropic the default.", "Email analytics were stored in Tinybird, a hosted ClickHouse service, with an encryption key so the host cannot read the data; the founder said in December 2023 that a browser-only version was planned.", "Payments through Stripe, per the pricing FAQ. The repository tags also name Resend and Loops for email sending and PostHog for product analytics.", "Marketing: three Product Hunt launches, a Show HN, the founder's YouTube channel (2,000 subscribers at the launch), a 20,000-address newsletter list he emailed on launch day, and a blog of search-oriented guides." ], "src": [ 7, 3, 5, 11, 8 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold a better inbox on top of an email provider or client that they did not control. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Mailbox", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Swipe gestures and snooze to clear a Gmail inbox on the phone.", "died": "Dropbox bought it, then shut it down when Gmail and Apple Mail added the same gestures for free.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/314-mailbox" }, { "name": "Xobni", "years": "2006 to 2013", "funding": "US$42M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A smarter inbox with search and contact analytics inside Microsoft Outlook.", "died": "Tied to Outlook, which Microsoft improved itself. Mobile made the desktop add-on irrelevant. Yahoo bought the remains.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/763-xobni" }, { "name": "Threadable", "years": "2014 to 2017", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Turn long email threads into an organized chat room.", "died": "Slack made the idea obsolete; the product could not stand out or integrate smoothly and ran out of money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1144-threadable" }, { "name": "Skiff", "years": "2020 to 2024", "funding": "US$14.2M", "cause": "No market need", "promise": "An encrypted, privacy-first email and documents suite to replace Google Workspace.", "died": "Privacy alone did not move mainstream users off the free incumbents; the company sold to Notion and the product was closed.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2489-skiff" } ], "whatChanged": [ "All four built on or against an email platform they did not own, and the platform owner or a better-funded rival made the feature free or made the product unnecessary. Inbox Zero has the same exposure: it reads mail through the Gmail and Microsoft APIs, needs Google's periodic security review to keep that access, and Google, Microsoft and Superhuman now ship their own AI sorting and drafted replies.", "What differs is cost and ownership. The predecessors raised venture money, from US$500,000 to US$42 million, and had to grow fast enough to repay it; the sources for Inbox Zero show one founder, no round, and a team of two or three people, so the business is reported to be sustainable at the US$10,000 a month that the founder said he reached. And the code is public under the AGPL: if the hosted company stopped, the product would still run on anyone's server, which the founder gives as a reason customers trust it." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The launch method, yes. The reported revenue, treat as unproven.", "text": "Launching an open-source version of a well-known paid category on Product Hunt and Hacker News is a method the founder describes step by step and that other commercial open-source projects used in the same months. It needs a product people can inspect and self-host, and a name or a blog that can rank in search. What a reader cannot copy is certainty about the money: the only revenue figures are a single interview summarized by a third party, reported at over US$10,000 a month in October 2025, and a directory estimate that disagrees with it.", "steps": [ "Build the tool for a pain you have yourself, on an API the platform wants used (Gmail, Outlook), and publish the code under a license that lets others self-host.", "Launch on Product Hunt with a hunter and post in open-source communities the same day; the founder says the open-source community votes a public repository to first place.", "Name the product after the search term for the method it serves, and write search guides that end with the product.", "When larger competitors add the same feature, narrow to one group of users and keep the parts they cannot get without changing their email client." ], "open": "Any personal data tool where trust is the main objection: calendar assistants, note tools, personal finance, password or document managers, where open code and self-hosting answer the trust question." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline figure, over US$10,000 a month in October 2025, rests on one source: the founder's Indie Hackers interview of 16 October 2025, which this page could read only as summarized by Startup Founder Stories, because Indie Hackers does not allow this site's agents to read its pages. The earlier milestones (US$1,000 a month in December 2023, US$10,000 in June 2024) come from the same summary. The only independent figure, GetLatka's estimate of US$330,000 a year in June 2025, is an estimate and is about 2.7 times higher than the founder's own number. No payment processor, buyer or journalist has confirmed any of it. A reader could look for a TrustMRR or Stripe-verified profile, the original interview, or a second dated statement by the founder." }, { "title": "The platforms are adding the same features", "text": "Gmail, Outlook and Superhuman ship AI sorting, summaries and drafted replies. Every predecessor on this page died when the platform added the feature. Inbox Zero's answer is to be the open, inspectable version and to add an email client of its own, launched in October 2026." }, { "title": "Access depends on Google's review", "text": "Reading a Gmail account through the API requires Google's security review, which the founder said in December 2023 every such app must pass and which Google tightened in 2024. A failed review would cut the product off from most of its users." }, { "title": "Open code can be copied", "text": "Under the AGPL anyone may run a competing hosted version if they publish their changes. The founder's view in January 2024 was that code alone does not bring users and that no clone of Cal.com or PostHog had taken their customers. That holds while the brand and the search ranking stay with him." }, { "title": "One person, several products", "text": "The founder also writes a blog of dozens of search guides, runs a YouTube channel and ships an email client, a Chrome extension, a Slack assistant and a mobile app. The sources show two or three people. Support and security work for a tool that reads private email grows with every new surface." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.getinboxzero.com/" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/inbox-zero-2" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Startup Founder Stories: Elie Steinbock, Inbox Zero, open source email assistant, $10K+ MRR (summary of the Indie Hackers interview \"Carving out a small niche in a big market and bringing in $10K MRR\", 16 October 2025)", "url": "https://startupfounderstories.com/stories/elie-steinbock-inbox-zero-open-source-10k-mrr", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. A third party's summary that cites Indie Hackers as its source. Source for the headline figure, the milestone dates, the solo-founder and USA statements and the growth channel. The Indie Hackers page itself was not fetched (its robots.txt disallows this site's agents)." }, { "title": "GetLatka company page: Inbox Zero revenue 2025, $330K estimate", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/getinboxzero", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. A third-party estimate marked EST. and two LinkedIn headcount readings. Source for the founding year, the country and the team size." }, { "title": "Hacker News, 29 December 2023: Show HN: Inbox Zero, open-source email assistant (thread and the founder's comments, via the Algolia API)", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38809770", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the thread record and all comments by the founder's accounts (elieskilled, elie222), including his December 2025 comment on the Google ranking. Source for the points, the Tinybird and Vercel AI details and the Gmail API review." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: Inbox Zero product page and its three launches", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/inbox-zero-2/launches", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the product page and the launches list. Source for the three launch dates, their points and the October 2026 day rank." }, { "title": "Inbox Zero blog, 22 January 2024: How my open source SaaS hit first on Product Hunt", "url": "https://www.getinboxzero.com/blog/post/how-my-open-source-saas-hit-first-on-product-hunt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder's own account of the launch. Source for the upvotes, the star counts, the newsletters, the hunter and the launch-day list." }, { "title": "Inbox Zero blog, 25 January 2024: Why build an open source SaaS", "url": "https://www.getinboxzero.com/blog/post/why-build-an-open-source-saas", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the US$10 to US$19 a month price in January 2024 and the founder's reasoning on self-hosting and clones." }, { "title": "GitHub repository elie222/inbox-zero, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://github.com/elie222/inbox-zero", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the README and the license file. Source for the star and commit counts, the AGPL license, the stack and the two-part structure." }, { "title": "Inbox Zero pricing page, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://www.getinboxzero.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the pricing table and the Stripe payment note." }, { "title": "Inbox Zero home page, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://www.getinboxzero.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the footer, for the purpose check. Source for the feature list, the 12k+ stars claim and the SOC 2 claim. The footer's \"Email Blaster\" link is a browser game at /game, not a sending tool." }, { "title": "Inbox Zero about page", "url": "https://www.getinboxzero.com/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product description and the Gmail, Google Workspace and Outlook support." }, { "title": "Inbox Zero changelog (Featurebase), entries of May to August 2024", "url": "https://www.getinboxzero.com/changelog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the visible entries. Source for the Claude 3.5 Sonnet entry of 21 August 2024." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine snapshot of getinboxzero.com, 23 July 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230723191243/https://www.getinboxzero.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full (a short waitlist page). Source for the state of the site in July 2023." }, { "title": "Inbox Zero case studies page", "url": "https://www.getinboxzero.com/case-studies", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Four named customers; used only to confirm that the product sells to small companies and teams." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/monai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/monai.md", "slug": "monai", "name": "MonAi", "country": "Germany", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "Expense-tracking phone app with natural-language entry", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-23", "launchLabel": "20 June 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$35K a month, April 2026", "sticker": "$35K/mo MRR, reported", "outcomeUsd": 420000, "months": 34, "teamLabel": "1 founder, plus a content-creator partner from late 2024 and an Android developer; 3 people named in 2026", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "documents-data", "channel": "creators", "trend": "growing", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Personal finance" ], "product": "An iPhone and Android app for tracking personal spending. The user types or speaks a sentence such as \"lunch twelve, groceries forty-five yesterday\", and a language model turns it into separate entries with amount, date and category. On iPhone an Apple Shortcut can prompt for the entry right after an Apple Pay payment. There are shared lists for couples, budgets per category, recurring entries and a chat that answers questions about the data.", "why": "The founder says the app sat at about US$300 a month for a year and a half, until a content creator in Colombia found the founder's X link inside the app and proposed a partnership. According to the founder, three story-driven videos a month in Spanish, paid with a share of the profits and a fixed retainer, took the app to more than US$35,000 a month in about a year.", "summary": [ "MonAi is an expense tracker, an app in which a person records what they spend so that they can see their spending by category and month. Most such apps need a form for every purchase. MonAi replaces the form with natural-language entry: the user types or dictates a plain sentence, and a language model, a program that reads and writes text, such as the ones behind ChatGPT or Claude, extracts the amount, the date and the category. The app sells a subscription of about US$3 to US$4 a month after a seven-day trial, according to its App Store listing and its own FAQ page.", "Florian Vates, an iOS developer at a mobile agency and a father of two in Freilassing, Germany, built the first version in a month or two in 2023 and launched it on Product Hunt on 20 June 2023, where it finished 25th of the day. He told Starter Story in April 2026 that it took him a year and a half to reach US$300 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the subscription income of one month. At the end of 2024, Charlie Alvarez, a Colombian content creator, found the founder's X link inside the app and offered to work together. The founder said that the first video multiplied MRR by ten within a week, that MRR was almost US$8,000 within a month, and that by April 2026 it was a bit over US$35,000. In an Indie Hackers interview of 13 May 2026, as retold by the directory SoFarBot, he said his four apps together made US$40,000 to US$60,000 a month, about 90% of it from MonAi. He left his job in January 2026.", "Every money figure on this page is a statement by the founder, in one video interview and one written interview, with no payment-processor or app-store data to confirm it. The site marks it \"Reported, not verified\". The page also shows what happened to earlier personal-finance apps that promised simple expense tracking." ], "factsCaption": "A founder-reported US$35,000 a month in April 2026, up from about US$300 a month before a creator partnership at the end of 2024; every money figure is a founder statement, grade D", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is a single founder statement, made in one interview on one date, with no second source and no payment-processor data. A grade C value is a founder or company statement that two sources agree on, or a fact read on the company's own pages or store listing. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a side project built in a month or two to a founder-reported US$35,000 a month, in 34 months, with the growth concentrated in the 16 months after a content creator joined. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "MonAi in-app purchases in October 2026, from the United States App Store listing (grade C); the company's FAQ gives no prices and says they vary by region", "note": "All plans start with a seven-day free trial, then an auto-renewing subscription bought through Apple or Google. The App Store lists an introductory price (Basic monthly intro US$2.99, Basic yearly intro US$24.99) and a regular price (Basic monthly US$3.99). The Family plan covers the family group through Apple Family Sharing or Google Family Library; the FAQ says up to 5 people, the home page says up to 6. Student prices are given on request by email. The App Store also lists items called Monthly (US$7.99), Yearly (US$71.99) and Advanced (US$2.99) without a description; they may be older or regional plans. The yearly column is the yearly price divided by 12. SoFarBot read the United Kingdom store in September 2026: Basic £2.99 a month or £24.99 a year, Family £3.99 a month or £34.99 a year.", "rows": [ [ "Basic", "2.08 (US$24.99 a year, intro price)", "3.99, intro 2.99", "all features, one person" ], [ "Family", "", "3.99", "shared with the family group, 5 or 6 people" ], [ "Student", "2.08 (US$24.99 a year)", "2.99", "on request by email" ], [ "Monthly and Yearly, unnamed items", "6.00 (US$71.99 a year)", "7.99", "listed in the store without a description" ], [ "Advanced, unnamed item", "", "2.99", "listed in the store without a description" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, April 2026", "value": "a bit over US$35,000", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder, in a Starter Story video interview published 6 April 2026: \"we are currently at a bit over 35,000 of MRR\". The page title says US$35K a month. No second source gives a MonAi-only figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the April 2026 figure", "value": "about US$420,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 35,000 times 12. This is the headline figure of the page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue of all four apps per month, May 2026", "value": "US$40,000 to US$60,000, about 90% from MonAi", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder in an Indie Hackers interview of 13 May 2026, as quoted by SoFarBot. 90% of that range is US$36,000 to US$54,000, which is consistent with the April figure. The other apps are Mindr, Re-Frame and Max.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue before the partnership, late 2024", "value": "about US$300", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder in both interviews: about one and a half years of work alone reached US$300 in MRR.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "MRR one month after the first creator video, end of 2024", "value": "almost US$8,000", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder to Starter Story: \"within a week we 10x'd the MRR and within a month it was at almost 8K\". The Indie Hackers retelling says about US$300 to US$12,000 in two months.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "MRR after the second video, early 2025", "value": "US$13,000", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder to Starter Story: a second short video added more than US$5,000 of MRR.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Effect of the June 2025 video", "value": "about 1 million views and almost US$5,000 more MRR", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder to Starter Story. The video told the story of Apple inviting him to WWDC; the transcript dates it \"June 21\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Trial starts and conversion", "value": "14% of visitors start a trial; 40% to 50% of trials convert", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder figures from the Indie Hackers interview, as quoted by SoFarBot, with no sample size.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Creator deal", "value": "a percentage of profits plus a fixed monthly retainer", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder to Starter Story. The first contract paid a percentage of revenue; it was changed because that did not scale. The amounts were not disclosed.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Videos per month", "value": "3", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder in both interviews: three story-driven videos a month on the creator's own channel, quality over quantity.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Team, 2026", "value": "3 people: the founder (design and iOS), Charlie Alvarez (content), Zeki (Android)", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's FAQ and About section. The Android developer is named only by first name on the site.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's employment", "value": "full-time iOS developer at an agency until half-time in 2025, left in January 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "December 2023 interview for the job; the Indie Hackers retelling for the half-time step and the January 2026 date; Starter Story: \"earlier this year I was finally able to quit my job\".", "src": [ 1, 2, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none mentioned", "grade": "D", "note": "No source mentions investors. The app was a side project next to a job for its first two and a half years.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly tool costs, April 2026", "value": "about US$725 plus one-time purchases", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder to Starter Story: Claude Code US$100, RevenueCat about US$400, Appwrite US$25, OpenAI and Anthropic API calls about US$200; Helm US$175 one-time; Xcode and Figma free.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "App Store rating, United States, October 2026", "value": "4.8 stars from 885 ratings", "grade": "C", "note": "Read on the listing. The company's home page says 4.8 stars from more than 8,500 ratings, which would be all countries.", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Product Hunt launch", "value": "20 June 2023, 25th of the day", "grade": "C", "note": "Product Hunt page; the rank is from the founder's December 2023 interview.", "src": [ 6, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Ponicorn directory figure", "value": "US$12,000 MRR, dated August 2026, marked unverified", "grade": "D", "note": "A directory entry that cites Indie Hackers. It matches the founder's figure for the first two months of the partnership, not the 2026 figures, so this page treats it as a misdated number and does not use it.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the April 2026 figure", "value": "34 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: June 2023 to April 2026.", "src": [ 1, 7 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2021 to 2023", "what": "Vates, a senior iOS developer at a mobile agency, spends about two years with friends on CORDI, an app for planning events, and shuts it down for lack of users. He says the lesson was to launch in weeks, not years.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "when": "Spring 2023", "what": "He builds MonAi for himself in a month or two, because every expense tracker he tried needed too many taps and he wanted to try the new language models.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "when": "20 June 2023", "what": "Launch on Product Hunt, 25th of the day with a handful of followers on X. Free to download; subscription for the full features, data kept in the user's iCloud.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 7 ] }, { "when": "July 2023", "what": "He starts posting the work in public on X. Marketing consists of that alone.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "4 December 2023", "what": "Interview with the Indie Goodies newsletter: 31 years old, two children, one hour a day for side projects. MonAi is \"not my most successful app as of now\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "Late 2024", "what": "After about a year and a half, MRR is about US$300, the founder says. Charlie Alvarez, a content creator in Colombia, finds the founder's X link in the app settings and proposes a partnership.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "End of 2024", "what": "The first video, a plain walkthrough of the app in Spanish. The founder says MRR multiplied by ten within a week and reached almost US$8,000 within a month.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "Early 2025", "what": "A second short video adds more than US$5,000 of MRR, to US$13,000, the founder says. Then a quiet period of testing. The deal moves from a share of revenue to a share of profits plus a retainer.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2025", "what": "He reduces his agency job to half-time.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "June 2025", "what": "A video about Apple inviting him to WWDC gets about a million views and adds almost US$5,000 of MRR, he says. The team replaces a restricted free plan with a seven-day full trial and a hard paywall, which he says raised revenue and reviews.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "January 2026", "what": "He leaves his job to work on the apps full-time.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "6 April 2026", "what": "Starter Story publishes the video interview: a bit over US$35,000 in MRR, 7-day trial, three videos a month, a team of two plus an Android developer.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "13 May 2026", "what": "Indie Hackers interview, retold by SoFarBot: the four apps make US$40,000 to US$60,000 a month, about 90% from MonAi.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "22 October 2026", "what": "Version 1.10.2 on the App Store. Version 1.10 added AI reports, a WhatsApp bot that turns a text or voice note into an entry, and automatic currency conversion. The site lists three people and a blog with several posts a week.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 5 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "One creator, three videos a month, paid from profits", "text": "The founder says he works with one creator instead of twenty, and that the creator posts three story-driven videos a month on his own channel, each built around a problem such as a forgotten expense before showing the app. The first contract paid a share of revenue; the founder says it was changed to a share of profits plus a fixed monthly retainer, so that the creator earns more when the app earns more and has a reason to make better videos. The amounts were not disclosed." }, { "title": "A market the founder did not live in", "text": "The creator's audience is in Colombia and Latin America, and the videos are in Spanish. Starter Story's producer noted that the founder did not build for Germany or the United States, where he and the interviewers live, but partnered with someone who had an audience elsewhere. The founder says the same approach has not yet worked as well in the United States." }, { "title": "Remove the form", "text": "The product's only real difference from the hundreds of expense trackers is that entry takes one sentence or one voice note. On iPhone, a Shortcut can prompt for the entry right after an Apple Pay payment; on Android, the app reads the bank's payment notification. The founder says the app stays deliberately small: no tabs, no dashboards, because people stop tracking when it takes effort." }, { "title": "Full trial, then a hard paywall", "text": "The founder says the app was free with limits at first, and that testing showed a seven-day trial of everything followed by a paywall produced more revenue and better reviews. The founder reported to Indie Hackers that 14% of visitors start a trial and 40% to 50% of trials convert, figures without sample sizes." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's Starter Story interview of April 2026 and his December 2023 interview, plus the company's FAQ. They are founder statements, grade C and D.", "items": [ "Native iOS app written in Xcode; the Android app is by a separate developer. The founder told Starter Story in April 2026 that he uses Claude Code heavily and pays US$100 a month for the Max plan.", "OpenAI models for the simple tasks (reading a sentence into entries) and Anthropic models for the deeper analysis (the AI reports); the founder said in April 2026 that the API calls cost about US$200 a month.", "RevenueCat for subscriptions and paywall experiments, which the founder said cost about US$400 a month in April 2026; the FAQ asks users for their RevenueCat ID to move a subscription between iOS and Android.", "Appwrite as backend, login and database for the account-based sync between devices, at US$25 a month according to the founder; the original version kept data in the user's iCloud with no login.", "Helm, a desktop tool for App Store Connect, bought as a lifetime plan for about US$175, the founder said; Figma on the free plan for design.", "Marketing: the founder's own posts on X from July 2023, a Product Hunt launch in June 2023, and from late 2024 the creator's videos on his own channels; the company's Instagram account is linked from the site. The founder says paid advertising is hard to make profitable at a US$3 subscription." ], "src": [ 1, 5, 6, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold personal expense tracking or shared budgets before language models existed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Birdy", "years": "2014 to 2018", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Ran out of cash", "promise": "A minimalist budgeting app without the bloat of other finance apps.", "died": "Users asked for bank connections and investing, the banks did not cooperate, and the money ran out before the app found enough paying users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1929-birdy" }, { "name": "Wesabe", "years": "2006 to 2011", "funding": "US$4.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Track your spending and get advice from a community of users.", "died": "Mint pulled transactions from the bank automatically and needed no typing; Wesabe asked the user to do more work, missed phones, and lost.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/736-wesabe" }, { "name": "Glassjar", "years": "2015 to 2018", "funding": "US$1.2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Track expenses and save money as a group.", "died": "Splitwise and Venmo already did the same for larger groups of users; Glassjar had no partner banks and could not explain what was different.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1112-glassjar" }, { "name": "Ivella", "years": "2021 to 2024", "funding": "US$2.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A finance app for couples that splits expenses.", "died": "Splitting bills was already a feature of bank apps and PayPal; a separate app with US$2.5 million could not win the couples' trust.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1302-ivella" }, { "name": "Clarity Money", "years": "2016 to 2018", "funding": "US$15M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Expense tracking, budgeting and subscription cleanup in one app.", "died": "Goldman Sachs bought it in 2018, folded the technology into its Marcus bank and closed the brand.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/52-clarity-money" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Birdy promised in 2014 what MonAi promises now, a small expense tracker without bloat, and died because typing every purchase was work that users stopped doing, while the apps that connected to banks, Mint and its successors, did the typing for them. Wesabe lost to Mint for the same reason. The products that survived were bank connections, which need licences and contracts that a one-person company cannot get.", "Two things changed. A language model now turns one spoken sentence into a categorized entry, so the typing cost fell close to zero without a bank connection; MonAi's FAQ says bank connections would make the subscription much more expensive, and the Apple Pay prompt and the Android notification reader capture most payments anyway. And distribution changed: Birdy, Glassjar and Ivella spent their funding on getting noticed, while MonAi's founder says one creator with his own audience, paid from profits, did it. Whether that holds outside one Spanish-speaking audience is still open, and the founder says it has not yet worked as well in the United States." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product, easily. The distribution, only with the right partner.", "text": "An expense tracker with natural-language entry is a few weeks of work with current models, and the founder says building is the easy part. What made the money, according to him, was a creator who proposed the partnership himself, in a market the founder did not know, paid by a share of profits. The founder's own playbook, as told to Starter Story in April 2026, is to find a creator whose audience and tone match the product, offer a long-term profit share rather than a one-off post, and look outside the United States.", "steps": [ "Build the smallest version of a repeated daily task where a language model removes a form, and charge for it after a short full-feature trial.", "Put your own contact link inside the app; the partnership here started because a creator found it there.", "Offer one creator a long-term share of profits plus a retainer, not a fee per post, and let them make few, story-driven videos on their own channel.", "Test a market you do not live in; a local creator can carry the product where ads at a US$3 price do not pay." ], "open": "Any daily record-keeping habit that dies from data entry: hours for freelancers, meals, medicines, mileage, time with clients. And any phone app with a small subscription that a creator in one language region could carry." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline figure, a bit over US$35,000 in monthly recurring revenue, rests on one statement by the founder, Florian Vates, in a Starter Story video interview published on 6 April 2026. The only other figure, US$40,000 to US$60,000 a month across four apps with about 90% from MonAi, is from an Indie Hackers interview of 13 May 2026 that this page could read only as retold by the directory SoFarBot. There is no RevenueCat, App Store or payment-processor data, and the Ponicorn directory lists a conflicting US$12,000 MRR dated August 2026. A reader could look for a RevenueCat or TrustMRR profile of MonAi, a second interview with the dashboard shown, or the founder's own posts on X." }, { "title": "One creator, one audience", "text": "The founder says growth came from one person's videos to one Spanish-speaking audience, and that the same approach has not yet worked as well in the United States. If the creator stops, or the audience moves on, there is no second channel; paid ads, he says, are hard to make profitable at this price." }, { "title": "Apple and Google take their share", "text": "Every subscription passes through the app stores, which keep up to 30% in the first year, and the stores decide the ranking, the review rules and the fees. A phone app has no other way to charge." }, { "title": "Cheap plan, crowded category", "text": "The plan costs about US$3 to US$4 a month, and the App Store lists dozens of expense trackers at similar prices. Bank apps add spending views for free. The founder's answer is to stay smaller and faster than the rest, which any competitor can copy." }, { "title": "Numbers that do not agree", "text": "The founder gives US$8,000 after one month to Starter Story and about US$12,000 after two months to Indie Hackers, which can both be true; the Family plan covers 5 people on the FAQ and 6 on the home page; the store lists plans named Monthly, Yearly and Advanced that the site does not explain; and one directory calls the founder Austrian, while his legal notice and his own words put him in Germany." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.get-monai.app/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6447112647" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/monai-2" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Starter Story, 6 April 2026, video interview by Pat Walls: This App Makes $35K/Month With One Influencer", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/Florian", "grade": "D", "how": "Read the page and the full transcript. The founder's own words: the US$300 plateau, the US$35,000 MRR, the video-by-video growth, the creator deal, the tool stack and costs. A single dated founder statement, so grade D for the money figures." }, { "title": "SoFarBot, 13 September 2026: What MonAi does; $40K–$60K was portfolio revenue, not MonAi alone", "url": "https://www.sofarbot.com/stories/monai-florian-vates-40000-portfolio-monthly-lower-bound", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. A directory's retelling of the founder's Indie Hackers interview of 13 May 2026, which this page may not read directly. Source for the four-app revenue range, the 90% share, the trial figures, the half-time and January 2026 job dates, and the UK store prices. It names the founder's country as Austria, which his legal notice contradicts." }, { "title": "Ponicorn directory entry: MonAi, $12k MRR, unverified, August 2026", "url": "https://ponicorn.com/startups/monai", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. A directory that cites Indie Hackers. Cited only for its conflicting figure and the technology list." }, { "title": "App Store listing, United States, read 23 October 2026: Expense Tracker - MonAi", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/expense-tracker-monai/id6447112647", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Seller Florian Vates, 885 ratings at 4.8 stars, in-app purchase prices, version 1.10.2 of 22 October 2026 and the release notes." }, { "title": "MonAi website, home page, FAQ and legal notice (Impressum), read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://www.get-monai.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the home page, the FAQ and the Impressum. The team of three, the trial and plan rules, the RevenueCat and account sync details, the founder's address in Freilassing, Germany." }, { "title": "Indie Goodies newsletter by Khoa Pham, 4 December 2023: Indie Interview: Florian Vates", "url": "https://indiegoodies.substack.com/p/indie-interview-florian-vates", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's written answers: his job, family, the CORDI failure, building in public from July 2023, the Product Hunt rank." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: MonAi, AI powered expense tracker, launched 20 June 2023", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/monai-2", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The launch date from the page data, 100 points, 80 followers." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/klipy-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/klipy-ai.md", "slug": "klipy-ai", "name": "Klipy", "country": "Hong Kong", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI sales assistant that keeps the CRM up to date", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-23", "launchLabel": "10 July 2024", "outcomeLabel": "At least US$10K a month, July 2026", "sticker": "$10K+/mo reported", "outcomeUsd": 120000, "months": 24, "teamLabel": "3 co-founders, no employees; a newsletter summary of the founder's interview counts 3 full-time co-founders beside him", "fundingLabel": "Accelerators (AppWorks, SparkLabs Taiwan, 500 Global); a first outside round from SparkLabs Taiwan in June 2026, amount not disclosed", "primaryFactor": "Paid testers", "group": "support-agents", "channel": "launches", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Funded", "Running", "B2B", "Sales" ], "product": "A sales assistant for small B2B firms whose owner sells and delivers at the same time. It connects to the email, calendar, LinkedIn, WhatsApp and Telegram accounts, records meetings, writes every contact, deal and interaction into its own CRM, and drafts the next follow-up. Nothing is sent until the user approves it, and the user pays only for the actions approved.", "why": "The founder had sold two machine-vision companies, lost a third to COVID and spent six years as a consultant, where sellers always refused to type data into the CRM. He coded a tool that fills the CRM itself, charged from the first day, sold lifetime deals on AppSumo at a loss to recruit testers who never cancel, and turned the launch sites' freelancers into affiliates. In July 2026 he told Indie Hackers that monthly recurring revenue had five digits.", "summary": [ "Klipy is an AI sales assistant for small business-to-business firms. It reads the owner's mailboxes, calendars and messaging accounts, joins video calls as a notetaker (a bot that records and transcribes a meeting), and writes every contact, company, deal and conversation into its own CRM, a customer relationship management database where a sales team keeps the record of each prospect. From those records it drafts the next follow-up email, a pre-meeting brief and a daily list of next moves. The user approves or rejects each draft. The company says that nothing is sent without that approval, and that a rejected draft costs nothing.", "Jung-Hong Kim, a Korean engineer who had built and sold machine-vision retail-analytics companies in Hong Kong, released the first version on Product Hunt on 10 July 2024 and on Hacker News a week later, saying he had built it for his own fractional-executive business after getting tired of updating HubSpot. He founded the company in August 2024 with two co-founders, Tina Law and Joey Lee, in Hong Kong. A Japanese newsletter that summarized his Indie Hackers interview of 15 July 2026 reported that he said recurring revenue was in the five-figure range per month, that is at least US$10,000 a month, that about 4,000 companies used the product, and that the stated goal was US$1.5 million of annual recurring revenue by the end of 2026. The company's own pages count 4,300 customers in 64 countries in October 2026.", "The money figure is grade D: one founder statement, on one date, read in a newsletter's summary rather than in the interview itself, with no payment-processor profile and no second figure to compare it with. Everything else on this page comes from the company's own pages, the AppSumo listing, Product Hunt, Hacker News and a 2024 archive of the first website, all grade C. The team is three co-founders. The company joined accelerator programs and took a first outside investment from SparkLabs Taiwan in June 2026, of an amount it has not disclosed." ], "factsCaption": "A five-figure monthly recurring revenue reported by the founder in July 2026, about two years after the first launch, with every other number self-reported by the company", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is a single founder statement quoted by one newsletter, with no second source. A grade C value is a company statement on its own pages or a marketplace listing. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a tool the founder wrote for his own consulting business to a three-founder company that reported five-figure monthly revenue, in 24 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Klipy prices in October 2026, from the company's pricing page (grade C). Billing is monthly only; the page says annual plans are not available yet", "note": "Every plan, the free one included, has all AI features. Paid plans add seats, exports, roles and support. Usage is metered in tokens: a draft costs 2 tokens, a meeting recording 10 tokens an hour, and a token is spent only when the user approves an action. Extra tokens cost US$0.10 each, up to a monthly cap the user sets. Prices are per seat per month.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "", "0", "200 tokens a month, 2 inboxes, 1 seat, 1 pipeline" ], [ "Starter", "not offered", "39 per seat", "400 tokens per seat, up to 5 seats, unlimited inboxes" ], [ "Growth", "not offered", "89 per seat", "1,500 tokens per seat, unlimited seats, HubSpot and Attio sync" ], [ "Professional", "not offered", "149 per seat", "4,000 tokens per seat, Salesforce sync, audit logs, success manager" ], [ "Extra tokens", "", "0.10 per token", "pay as you go, with a monthly cap set by the user" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, July 2026", "value": "five figures, that is at least US$10,000 a month", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder's statement in his Indie Hackers interview of 15 July 2026, as quoted by the newsletter Masa, Lagless Portal, issue 85, on 18 July 2026. The newsletter says the values are self-reported. The interview itself was not read.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Minimum annual run rate from that figure", "value": "US$120,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$10,000 times 12. The true figure can be anything from this up to just under US$1.2 million a year.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Stated goal for the end of 2026", "value": "US$1.5 million in annual recurring revenue", "grade": "D", "note": "A target the founder gave in the July 2026 interview, as quoted by the newsletter. Not a result.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Companies using the product, July 2026", "value": "about 4,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder statement quoted by the newsletter. The company's own pages count 4,300 customers in October 2026.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Customers and countries, October 2026", "value": "4,300 customers in 64 countries", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's about and press pages. The customers page gives 2,300 sellers in 53 countries, apparently an older count that was not updated.", "src": [ 2, 3, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Emails processed per month", "value": "2.3 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Press page, October 2026. The company timeline says 2 million in January 2026.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "3 co-founders", "grade": "C", "note": "Company pages name Jung-Hong Kim (CEO and engineer), Tina Law (COO) and Joey Lee (CPO) and say there are no other staff. The newsletter's summary of the interview says Kim runs it with 3 full-time co-founders, one more than the company's count.", "src": [ 1, 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "accelerator programs; a first investment from SparkLabs Taiwan in June 2026, amount not disclosed", "grade": "C", "note": "Company timeline. Programs listed: AppWorks #31 (September 2025), UBS Project Female Founder (March 2026), SparkLabs Taiwan #11, and an Industrial Bank of Korea program with 500 Global.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "AppSumo lifetime deal", "value": "US$59 one-time for the first tier, listed against US$320, 2 December 2024 to 9 February 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "The AppSumo listing. Three tiers, the third at US$339. The listing shows 19 reviews. The founder said in the interview that the deal was meant to lose money and recruit about 100 lifetime testers.", "src": [ 6, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time to the first version", "value": "3 months, coded by the founder", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder statement quoted by the newsletter.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Public launches", "value": "Product Hunt on 10 July 2024, 21 August 2024 and 15 March 2026; Hacker News on 17 July 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "Product Hunt product page and the Hacker News archive. The company's own timeline dates the first shipped product to November 2024.", "src": [ 7, 8, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the first launch to the revenue figure", "value": "24 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: July 2024 to July 2026. From the company's own November 2024 date it is 20 months.", "src": [ 1, 7 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Before 2024", "what": "Kim builds and sells machine-vision retail-analytics companies in Hong Kong as their technical lead. A later retail business collapses during COVID and leaves him in debt, which he repays over six years of consulting.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "when": "10 July 2024", "what": "First Product Hunt launch: \"Klipy AI powered CRM, from hello to renewal\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "17 July 2024", "what": "Show HN. The founder writes that he built it for his own fractional CIO business because he kept forgetting to update HubSpot, and that other fractional executives and founders were already using it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "August 2024", "what": "The company is founded by three co-founders. A second Product Hunt launch, Mailroom by Klipy, on 21 August.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 7 ] }, { "when": "1 October 2024", "what": "The website useklipy.com presents \"an actual simple CRM\" that fills itself from email, free to start, aimed at founders, fractional executives and agencies.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "29 October 2024", "what": "The founder's first post on AppSumo. The lifetime deal runs from 2 December 2024 to 9 February 2025 at US$59 for the first tier.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "November 2024 to January 2025", "what": "The company's own timeline: first product ships in November, first paying customer in December, 100 paying customers in January.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "30 May 2025", "what": "LinkedIn inbox integration: direct messages are read and answered inside the product.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "June 2025", "what": "The product moves from logging to the work after the call: follow-ups and next moves. Multi-pipeline support ships on 9 June.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 10 ] }, { "when": "25 July 2025", "what": "Meeting recording moves to Recall.ai.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "August to September 2025", "what": "2,000 users. The company joins AppWorks batch #31 in Taiwan.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "December 2025 to February 2026", "what": "Hey Klipy v2, an agent with 27 skills, in beta on 27 December; generally available on 26 February 2026 running on Gemini and Claude.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "January 2026", "what": "More than 2 million emails processed a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "March to June 2026", "what": "UBS Project Female Founder in March; third Product Hunt launch on 15 March; incorporation in Delaware in May; first outside investment from SparkLabs Taiwan in June, amount not disclosed.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 7 ] }, { "when": "15 July 2026", "what": "Indie Hackers interview. The founder reports five-figure monthly recurring revenue, about 4,000 companies, and a goal of US$1.5 million in annual recurring revenue by the end of the year, as quoted by a newsletter three days later.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "16 July 2026", "what": "MCP server for Claude and ChatGPT, with 38 tools; on 18 September it is listed in the Claude connector directory.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "4,300 customers in 64 countries, 2.3 million emails a month, headquarters moving to Seoul.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 3 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Charge from the first day", "text": "The founder said in the July 2026 interview, as quoted by the newsletter, that he did not want feedback from people unwilling to pay, because such feedback is mostly nice-to-have features. Pricing existed from the first launch." }, { "title": "Lifetime deals as a hiring budget for testers", "text": "He said that a lifetime deal cannot be profitable with the gross margin of a product built on large language models, and that he sold one anyway. The goal was about 100 core users who never cancel, keep giving feedback and bring referrals. The AppSumo deal of December 2024 sold the first tier at US$59 against a list price of US$320, as the listing shows." }, { "title": "Launch-site members become affiliates", "text": "The members of the launch sites, freelancers and small agencies, were turned into affiliates, so the people who bought the deal became the next sellers. Each launch site got its own offer, prepared by studying the previous month's top launches on Product Hunt, Microlaunch, Reddit and AppSumo." }, { "title": "Usage pricing on approved actions", "text": "Every plan has every AI feature. The company says a user pays a token only when a draft, a recording or a research lookup is approved, and that a rejected draft is free. Paid plans sell seats, exports and support rather than AI features, so the cost of the model is tied to approved work." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the newsletter's summary of the founder's interview, the company's changelog and press page, and the Hacker News thread. They are grade C or D.", "items": [ "The founder wrote the first version himself in three months, for his own consulting business, before any co-founder joined. The first public product read a mailbox and created contacts and deals from it.", "Meeting recording was moved to Recall.ai in July 2025. Transcription covers 99 languages since September 2025.", "The agent, Hey Klipy v2, runs on Gemini and Claude since February 2026, with web search through Exa. Company data comes from a waterfall of People Data Labs, Clearbit and Apollo since March 2026.", "An MCP server since July 2026 lets Claude and ChatGPT read and write the CRM; it is listed in the Claude connector directory since September 2026. The founder called this a headless CRM: a data layer for agent ecosystems rather than an app with a screen.", "Google Cloud for Startups is listed as the technology partner. The product is CASA Tier 2 certified; SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and HIPAA were in progress in October 2026.", "Growth followed a nine-step order the founder gave in the interview: ad pixels and event tracking first, a LinkedIn Ads audience, building in public, testimonials collected by every means, explanation videos on YouTube so that AI assistants find the product, support articles written for search and AI answers, direct messages to competitors' followers, and paid ads last." ], "src": [ 1, 8, 9, 10, 3 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database promised to fill a sales team's records or to find its contacts automatically. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Brisk", "years": "2012 to 2016", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Could not scale", "promise": "Pull a salesperson's CRM, email, calendar and web data into one place and turn it into next actions.", "died": "Every customer needed custom work. The tailoring consumed the team, the platform never became standard, and no further funding came.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1834-brisk" }, { "name": "Xobni", "years": "2006 to 2013", "funding": "US$42M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Contacts and conversation history built automatically from the inbox, inside Microsoft Outlook.", "died": "Tied to Outlook, which Microsoft improved itself. Mobile made the desktop add-on irrelevant. Yahoo bought the remains.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/763-xobni" }, { "name": "Elucify", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Accurate, real-time contact data for sales teams from a crowdsourced database.", "died": "ZoomInfo and Clearbit already had the market. Crowdsourced data was hard to keep fresh, and users would not pay for data they did not trust.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1078-elucify" }, { "name": "Slik", "years": "2017 to 2020", "funding": "US$1.2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Sales intelligence on demand: aggregated data turned into actions for sales teams.", "died": "LinkedIn Sales Navigator and ZoomInfo had more data and a bigger brand. Data went stale, customers churned, and the next round never came.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1439-slik" }, { "name": "Mattermark", "years": "2012 to 2019", "funding": "US$17.7M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Growth signals and funding data on private companies for investors and sales teams.", "died": "CB Insights and PitchBook had deeper data. Data operations cost more than revenue grew, and the market of investors and large sales teams was small.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/322-mattermark" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Four of the five sold data or analytics about prospects, and lost to incumbents with bigger databases: once a buyer compares contact data, the largest database wins, and the challenger's data goes stale first. Brisk and Xobni are closer to Klipy: both read a salesperson's own email and calendar and built the record from it. Brisk died of custom work per customer; Xobni died with the desktop add-on it depended on.", "Klipy differs in three ways that the sources show. The record is built from the user's own conversations, so the valuable data is the customer's, not a database the company must keep fresh; the enrichment it adds comes from other vendors' data over a waterfall, which the company does not need to own. A large language model drafts the follow-up from the record, work that in 2012 needed a human, and the company charges per approved action, so the model cost is paid by the user who gets the result. And the product has run as a three-person company on accelerator money, where Brisk and Mattermark carried teams funded by venture rounds.", "What has not changed is the competition. Attio, folk, HubSpot and Pipedrive all sell AI features for the same owner-seller, and the pricing page lists them as alternatives. The revenue figure is a single founder statement; the predecessors' lesson is that a crowded sales-tool market punishes the product that cannot show a difference." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The structure, yes. The revenue, not yet shown.", "text": "A CRM that fills itself from the owner's mailbox is a product one engineer can build in months, as this founder said he did, and charging from day one plus a loss-making lifetime deal to recruit permanent testers is a method any founder can repeat. What a reader cannot confirm is the result: the founder reported a five-figure monthly revenue in July 2026, and no second source shows it.", "steps": [ "Build the tool for your own sales work first, and charge from the first launch so that feedback comes from payers.", "Sell a lifetime deal on a launch site as a tester-recruiting cost, not as revenue, and set the tier limits so that the loss is bounded.", "Turn the launch site's buyers into affiliates, and prepare a separate offer for each launch site after studying its recent winners.", "Price usage by approved action, so that model cost is paid only for work the customer accepted.", "Expose the data through an API and an MCP server, so that AI assistants can act as a second interface to the product." ], "open": "Any back-office job that an owner-operator postpones because it is typing: bookkeeping from receipts, proposal drafting from calls, project status from chat. The same approval-gated agent with per-action pricing fits each of them." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline figure, at least US$10,000 a month in July 2026, rests on one source: the founder's statement in his Indie Hackers interview of 15 July 2026, read here only in the Japanese newsletter Masa, Lagless Portal, issue 85, of 18 July 2026, which says the values are self-reported. The exact amount was not given; five figures means anything from US$10,000 to US$99,999 a month. No payment-processor profile, press report or second interview confirms it, and the US$1.5 million annual target is a goal, not a result. A reader could look for a TrustMRR or Stripe-verified profile, a second dated founder statement, or a filing after the June 2026 investment." }, { "title": "Funded, with the amount unknown", "text": "The company says SparkLabs Taiwan made its first outside investment in June 2026 and lists AppWorks, 500 Global, Industrial Bank of Korea and UBS as backers or programs. No amount is disclosed. If the round was large, the company may hire past the small-team size that this site covers; in October 2026 it still said it had three founders and no staff." }, { "title": "Two launch dates", "text": "Product Hunt and Hacker News show a public product in July 2024, and AppSumo sold lifetime deals from December 2024, but the company's own timeline dates the first shipped product to November 2024 and the first paying customer to December 2024. This page uses the July 2024 launch; from the company's date the time to the revenue figure is 20 months, not 24." }, { "title": "A crowded market with usage pricing", "text": "The pricing page itself lists HubSpot, Pipedrive, Attio, folk and Close as alternatives, and all of them sell AI features. Klipy's plans include every AI feature free and meter usage in tokens, so revenue depends on approved actions per seat, a figure that no source gives." }, { "title": "Features at the edge of outreach", "text": "The product finds a contact's work email and phone through third-party data vendors, reads and answers LinkedIn direct messages, and the founder's growth steps include messaging competitors' followers directly. The company says every message waits for the user's approval unless the user switches on automatic sending per channel. None of the plans sells bulk sending, inbox rotation or automated LinkedIn actions." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://klipy.ai" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/klipy" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Masa, Lagless Portal, issue 85, 18 July 2026: Lifetime deals may run at a loss, the contrarian launch method of an AI CRM that reached five-digit MRR by hiring lifetime testers (in Japanese)", "url": "https://note.com/lagless/n/ncb46ccc6e722", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. A newsletter summary of the founder's Indie Hackers interview of 15 July 2026, which this site may not fetch. Source for the five-figure monthly revenue, the 4,000 companies, the US$1.5 million target, the debt story, the three-month build, the lifetime-deal reasoning, the affiliate method and the nine growth steps. The newsletter marks these as self-reported public values." }, { "title": "Klipy: About Klipy, our story, team, and backers", "url": "https://klipy.ai/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Company timeline from August 2024 to October 2026, the three founders, backers and programs, customer and country counts." }, { "title": "Klipy: Press page, key facts", "url": "https://klipy.ai/press", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Legal entity, founders' backgrounds, investors, programs, technology partner, 4,300 customers, 2.3 million emails a month." }, { "title": "Klipy pricing page, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://klipy.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Plans, token prices, the statement that annual billing is not available, and the list of alternatives." }, { "title": "Klipy home page, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://klipy.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Product description, connected channels, integrations with Pipedrive, Attio, HubSpot and Notion, MCP server for Claude and ChatGPT, footer entity." }, { "title": "AppSumo: Klipy, fully automated CRM for small businesses", "url": "https://appsumo.com/products/klipy/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Lifetime-deal tiers and limits, deal dates in the page data, the US$59 and US$339 prices, 19 reviews, and the founder's post of 29 October 2024." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: Klipy AI product page with its three launches", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/klipy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Launch dates of 10 July 2024, 21 August 2024 and 15 March 2026, 6 reviews, 347 followers." }, { "title": "Hacker News, 17 July 2024: Show HN: Klipy, all in one AI CRM for small and growing businesses (Algolia API record)", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40984214", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the Algolia API. The founder's comment on building it for his fractional CIO business and on the first users." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine snapshot of useklipy.com, 1 October 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20241001031930/https://useklipy.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The early product: a CRM that fills itself from email, free to start, for founders, fractional executives and agencies." }, { "title": "Klipy changelog: every release since 2024", "url": "https://klipy.ai/changelog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the dated entries from May 2025 to September 2026. Source for Recall.ai, Gemini and Claude, Exa, the enrichment vendors, the LinkedIn inbox, WhatsApp and the MCP server." }, { "title": "Klipy customers page", "url": "https://klipy.ai/customers", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Testimonials from named customers and the older counts of 2,300 sellers and 53 countries." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/runbear/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/runbear.md", "slug": "runbear", "name": "Runbear", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI agents inside Slack and Microsoft Teams", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-23", "launchLabel": "23 November 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$400K annual recurring revenue reported, October 2025", "sticker": "$400K ARR reported", "outcomeUsd": 400000, "months": 23, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders; 5 people listed by a directory in 2026; headcount at the figure not stated in any source read", "fundingLabel": "US$660K pre-seed, reported by one source", "primaryFactor": "Focus", "group": "ai-model-tools", "channel": "search", "trend": "growing", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Funded", "Running", "B2B" ], "product": "A company writes instructions for an AI agent, connects its documents and tools (Notion, Google Drive, HubSpot, Zendesk, Jira), and places the agent in Slack or Microsoft Teams with a name such as @Support or @SalesOps. Team members mention the agent in a channel; it answers from the connected knowledge, drafts replies and briefs, and updates records after a person approves. No code is needed.", "why": "The first version was an AI copilot for DevOps engineers, who could build their own agents. The founders moved the product to non-technical teams that answer the same questions all day, started every customer with one small use (repeated questions in Slack), and added a higher-priced plan when power users asked for more agents. The founder said in an interview of 17 October 2025, as quoted by SoFarBot, that this took the company from US$100,000 to US$400,000 in annual recurring revenue.", "summary": [ "Runbear is a no-code platform for AI agents that live inside team chat. No-code means the user configures the software through forms and plain-language instructions instead of writing a program. An AI agent here is a program built on a large language model that reads a message, decides whether to answer, searches connected documents, calls other software tools and posts a reply. A team installs Runbear in Slack or Microsoft Teams, connects sources such as Notion, Google Drive, HubSpot and Zendesk, and then mentions the agent in a channel as it would mention a colleague.", "Snow Lee and Liam Hwang, two software founders from South Korea who had worked together for 16 years, started the company in 2023 and launched the first Slack product, then called PlugBear, on Product Hunt on 23 November 2023. Three permitted secondary sources quote the founder's own figures: Startup Founder Stories and SoFarBot report that the founder stated US$100,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR, the current monthly subscription revenue multiplied by twelve) in September 2024, followed by a plateau, and that in an Indie Hackers interview of 17 October 2025 he stated US$400,000 in ARR. Startup Founder Stories also reports that the founder said he raised US$660,000 in pre-seed funding.", "Every money figure on this page is a founder statement quoted by a third party, or a directory estimate, so the page carries the grade D badge \"Reported, not verified\". The founder's own posts are on Medium, which this site's research rules do not read, and no payment processor has confirmed any figure. The page also shows four earlier companies that sold a chat bot or a chat platform to businesses and closed." ], "factsCaption": "A founder-reported US$400,000 in annual recurring revenue in October 2025, up from a founder-reported US$100,000 in September 2024, all quoted by secondary sources", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value comes from one founder statement quoted by a newsletter or from a directory, with no second source. A grade C value is a founder figure that two permitted sources give for the same period, or a statement on the company's own pages. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From open-source developer tools in mid-2023 to a reported US$400,000 in annual recurring revenue in October 2025, 23 months after the first Product Hunt launch. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Runbear prices read on the company's pricing page on 23 October 2026 (grade C); the yearly column is computed from the page's \"Yearly -20%\" toggle", "note": "Plans are priced by usage, not by seat. Each plan includes a monthly number of credits and a number of builders, the people who create and manage agents. A credit reflects the model work of a task: a quick knowledge-base answer is about 5 credits, a workflow with a few tool calls 20 to 50, a multi-page research task 300 to 1,500. Unused monthly credits do not roll over; pay-as-you-go buys more at the same rate. Business and Enterprise can bring their own model API key, and credits then become a small processing fee. The page shows only the monthly list prices and a 20% yearly discount; the yearly figures here are those prices times 0.8.", "rows": [ [ "Team", "79.20", "99", "20,000 credits a month, 5 builders, Slack, Discord and Teams" ], [ "Business", "319.20", "399", "100,000 credits a month, 10 builders, HubSpot and Zendesk, bring your own key, SAML single sign-on, SOC 2 report" ], [ "Enterprise", "custom", "custom", "custom credits and builders, SCIM, HIPAA agreement on request" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, October 2025", "value": "US$400,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder statement in an Indie Hackers interview of 17 October 2025, as quoted by SoFarBot (13 September 2026), Startup Founder Stories and a note.com article (16 February 2026). One founder claim with one date; no payment-processor confirmation. Startup Founder Stories adds that a December 2025 year-in-review post confirmed it, which this page could not read.", "src": [ 1, 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly equivalent of the October 2025 figure", "value": "about US$33,333 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$400,000 divided by 12. SoFarBot rounds this to US$33,000 a month and notes that it is an annualized figure, not cash received in one month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, September 2024", "value": "US$100,000, then a plateau", "grade": "C", "note": "Startup Founder Stories gives US$100,000 ARR in September 2024; SoFarBot summarizes a founder-written Reddit post that reported US$100,000 ARR after about nine months and then a plateau; Starter Story's page of 12 December 2024 carries the same figure in its title. Three permitted sources agree on the period.", "src": [ 1, 2, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue, December 2024", "value": "US$8,300, profitable", "grade": "D", "note": "Starter Story page dated 12 December 2024. The page does not say how the figure was obtained; it is consistent with US$100,000 a year. The page wrongly lists one founder.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Higher-priced Business plan", "value": "more than 20 customers, none churned by the interview date", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder statement in the October 2025 interview, quoted by SoFarBot and the note.com article. SoFarBot dates the plan to July 2025; the note.com article says the single-plan period ended in July 2024. The two summaries disagree on the year.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Price per user, December 2024", "value": "US$29 a month with a free trial", "grade": "D", "note": "Starter Story. Billing moved from messages to credits on 23 November 2025, according to the company's changelog, and the plans read in October 2026 are US$99 and US$399 a month.", "src": [ 4, 8, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Pre-seed funding", "value": "US$660,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Startup Founder Stories: \"He received $660K in pre-seed funding.\" No investor, date or second source was found.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 co-founders; 5 people listed in 2026", "grade": "D", "note": "The Org lists five people under the two founders in 2026 and the band \"Employees 1-10\", marked unverified. The co-founders' roles are on the company's author pages. No source read states the headcount at the October 2025 figure.", "src": [ 13, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Customers, October 2026", "value": "422 teams with 20 or more agent conversations in the past 12 months", "grade": "C", "note": "Company home page, \"Runbear production data, as of Oct 9, 2026\". The page also states 1,200+ agents that did work and 35,000+ conversations handled in the last 28 days, on paid workspaces.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Named customers", "value": "Matillion, Fireflies.ai, BCG, Minted, Mercor, Tabs, TaxDome, Peak Ace, Storykit, SYPartners", "grade": "C", "note": "Logos on the company's home and pricing pages. Case studies name Aloware, Peek.us, LaserAway, Power Real Estate Group and others.", "src": [ 6, 16 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the Product Hunt launch to the October 2025 figure", "value": "23 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 23 November 2023 to 17 October 2025.", "src": [ 11, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Product Hunt rating", "value": "5.0 from 8 reviews, three launches", "grade": "C", "note": "Product page: PlugBear launched 23 November 2023 and 7 May 2024, Runbear launched 24 June 2025.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Security audit", "value": "SOC 2 Type II, announced 25 July 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "Company blog. The changelog of 17 January 2024 said the audit was under way.", "src": [ 10, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Advertising cost per click", "value": "cut from US$1.06 to US$0.15", "grade": "D", "note": "Starter Story's account; it says early paid marketing did not work until the cost per click was lowered.", "src": [ 4 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2023", "what": "Snow Lee, a Seoul National University graduate who had founded and sold two companies and had been chief product officer at Buzzvil, starts Runbear with Liam Hwang, his co-founder of 16 years. Starter Story gives 2023 as the year started.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "when": "July to August 2023", "what": "The company publishes LangBear, an open-source prompt admin for LangChain, and awesome-runbook, a list of runbook resources, on Hacker News.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "23 November 2023", "what": "PlugBear, \"Connect GPTs/Assistant to Slack and Discord\", launches on Product Hunt. The first paying customer arrives in November 2023, according to Startup Founder Stories.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11, 2 ] }, { "when": "17 January 2024", "what": "Changelog: a /plugbear slash command for Slack, a SOC 2 Type II audit under way, and a Microsoft Teams app under review.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "7 May 2024", "what": "Second Product Hunt launch: \"Custom GPT for your Slack, Teams, HubSpot, Zendesk and more\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "25 July 2024", "what": "SOC 2 Type II certification announced on the company blog.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "28 August 2024", "what": "Changelog: new interface, \"LLM Apps\" renamed \"Assistants\", Google Gemini models added next to OpenAI.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "September 2024", "what": "The founder reports US$100,000 in annual recurring revenue, then a plateau, in a Reddit post summarized by SoFarBot; Startup Founder Stories dates the milestone to September 2024, one year after the first customer.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "12 December 2024", "what": "Starter Story publishes a page stating US$8,300 in monthly revenue, profitable, at US$29 per user per month.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "24 June 2025", "what": "Third Product Hunt launch under the name Runbear: \"Your best new hire, but AI, in Slack\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "July 2025", "what": "A higher-priced Business plan replaces the single plan with an agent limit, after customers kept asking for more agents; more than 20 customers take it and none churns by October. SoFarBot dates this to July 2025; the note.com summary says July 2024.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "when": "17 October 2025", "what": "In an Indie Hackers interview the founder states US$400,000 in annual recurring revenue and describes the move from DevOps engineers to non-technical teams.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 2, 3 ] }, { "when": "23 November 2025", "what": "Billing moves from a count of messages to credits, with pay-as-you-go top-ups.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "9 October 2026", "what": "The home page states 422 customer workspaces with 20 or more agent conversations in the past year, and 35,000+ conversations handled in the last four weeks.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2026", "what": "Changelog: agents move to Claude 5.5 models, GPT-6.1 Sol and Gemini 3.8 Flash; an activity feed shows each agent's tool calls.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 17 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Stop selling to people who can build it themselves", "text": "The first product was a copilot for DevOps engineers. Engineers can connect a model to Slack on their own, so the customers were also the competitors. The founder told Indie Hackers, as quoted by the note.com article, that the people who used Runbear most were team leaders, customer-success staff, account managers and operations people, who knew the outcome they wanted and did not care how the model worked." }, { "title": "One narrow first use", "text": "Almost every customer began with the same job: answering the questions that colleagues ask again and again in Slack. It is low-risk, read-only and easy to judge. Once a team trusted the agent with answers, it let the agent draft replies and update records in HubSpot or Zendesk. The founder said that if he started again he would find this killer use case before adding features." }, { "title": "Let the limit requests set the price", "text": "Until the Business plan existed there was one subscription whose only limit was the number of agents. When customers kept asking for the limit to be lifted, the founders did not lift it; they added a plan with more support at a higher price. SoFarBot quotes the founder that more than 20 customers took it and none had churned by the interview date, which raised revenue per account without needing the same number of new customers." }, { "title": "Live inside the tool the customer already opens", "text": "The agent is a Slack or Teams member with a name. There is no new login and no new dashboard for the people who ask questions; only the builders use Runbear's web app. The Slack Marketplace listing says the app runs in Slack's app container on paid Slack plans. Per-user authorization, approval steps, an audit log and a SOC 2 Type II report answer the objections of larger companies." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "The stack below comes from the founder's interview as summarized by the note.com article, from the company's changelog and from the Starter Story page. All of it is grade D or C.", "items": [ "TypeScript, hosted on Vercel, with Supabase as the database and backend service, according to the note.com summary of the founder's interview.", "Claude models for the core answer generation; OpenAI models for evaluation, knowledge extraction and compressing responses; Gemini and Perplexity available to customers who prefer them. The changelog of October 2026 lists Claude Opus, Sonnet and Haiku 5.5, GPT-6.1 Sol and Gemini 3.8 Flash, and a Claude Agent SDK runtime.", "Early versions wrapped the OpenAI Assistants API: the changelog of April 2024 moved customers to Assistants v2, and the January 2024 changelog imported OpenAI GPTs. Google Gemini was added in August 2024.", "Starter Story says the first version was built in seven days from existing APIs and launched on Product Hunt to collect feedback.", "Knowledge sources sync from Notion, Confluence, Google Drive, SharePoint, Slack and uploaded files; tools connect through MCP and 2,000+ integrations.", "SOC 2 Type II audit from January 2024, certified in July 2024; SAML single sign-on, SCIM and a HIPAA agreement on the upper plans.", "Marketing: use-case guides and customer stories on the company blog, creator collaborations on YouTube, X and LinkedIn, and search engine optimization for keywords about AI agents in chat channels. Starter Story adds Medium, Reddit and X posts and a paid-ads test whose cost per click was cut from US$1.06 to US$0.15." ], "src": [ 3, 17, 9, 7, 4, 5, 10 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold a bot or a chat platform to businesses before large language models existed, and closed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Niles", "years": "2017 to 2020", "funding": "US$2.8M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "An AI chatbot inside Slack that answers questions from the company's knowledge.", "died": "Its answers depended on 2017 language technology. Slack added its own search, and knowledge tools such as Guru and Confluence grew their features. Being only a Slack add-on left no room to move.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1031-niles" }, { "name": "Answerly", "years": "2013 to 2016", "funding": "US$550K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "FAQ bots that deflect support tickets so humans handle only the hard cases.", "died": "Natural language processing of the time could not handle real customer questions. Each customer needed months of manual FAQ writing and decision trees before the bot worked.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2168-answerly" }, { "name": "Moped", "years": "2012 to 2017", "funding": "US$1M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A real-time team messaging platform with integrations, similar to Slack.", "died": "Slack grew faster with a better product and an ecosystem of integrations. Moped never differentiated and lost investor confidence.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/353-moped" }, { "name": "Vanti", "years": "2019 to 2024", "funding": "US$18M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Conversational AI chatbots that guide shoppers through product discovery and purchase.", "died": "Brands ran pilots and churned because chat-driven shopping did not beat the normal web shop on conversion. High acquisition cost and integration work killed the unit economics.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2508-vanti" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Niles is the closest predecessor: a bot in Slack that answers questions from company knowledge. It died because the language technology of 2017 gave poor answers and because Slack and the knowledge tools added the feature themselves. Answerly died for the same first reason: each customer had to write FAQs and decision trees for months before the bot was useful.", "Runbear builds on models that it does not have to train, so the answer quality that Niles and Answerly lacked arrives from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google with every model release, and the set-up that took Answerly months is a connection to Notion or Google Drive. The platform risk that killed Niles has not gone away: Slack sells its own AI, and the model makers sell team plans. Runbear's answer is to support every model and every chat tool, and to sell the parts the platforms do not: per-user permissions, approvals, audit logs and connections into the company's other software." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes; the market position, with care.", "text": "The steps the founder described, as quoted by the note.com article and SoFarBot, are ordinary and repeatable: watch which customers get value, interview them, rank their problems by urgency, frequency, how many people have it and what it costs unsolved, then sell one narrow job first. The position is harder. A Slack agent platform competes with Slack, with the model makers and with every developer who can connect an API to a channel, and the founders had sixteen years of company building and, according to Startup Founder Stories, US$660,000 of pre-seed money before the figures on this page.", "steps": [ "Pick a buyer who cannot build the agent alone and whose day is spent answering repeated questions in chat.", "Start each customer with read-only question answering from one knowledge source, with citations, before giving the agent any write actions.", "Put the agent where the questions already are, with no new login for the people who ask.", "When customers ask you to lift a limit, add a higher plan instead of lifting it.", "Get the security audit early; it is what larger customers ask for before the demo matters." ], "open": "Any internal workflow that runs through chat and a few business systems: IT help desk, HR questions, sales call follow-up, on-call engineering. Microsoft Teams in companies that do not use Slack." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline figure, US$400,000 in annual recurring revenue, rests on one founder statement in an Indie Hackers interview of 17 October 2025, read here only through three summaries (SoFarBot, Startup Founder Stories and a note.com article). The earlier US$100,000 in September 2024 is also a founder figure, though three sources give it for the same period. The US$660,000 pre-seed round comes from one secondary source. No payment processor, investor or journalist has confirmed any of it. A reader could look for a TrustMRR or Stripe-verified profile, the founder's December 2025 year-in-review post on Medium, or a second interview with figures." }, { "title": "Headcount at the figure is not stated", "text": "The only headcount source is The Org, an unverified directory that lists five people in 2026. With US$660,000 of pre-seed money the team at the October 2025 figure may have been larger than five, and no source read says." }, { "title": "The platform can close the window", "text": "Slack sells its own AI, Microsoft sells Copilot inside Teams, and Anthropic, OpenAI and Google sell team plans with connectors. Niles, the closest predecessor, died when Slack added search. The Slack Marketplace listing notes that Runbear's agent experience in Slack's app container requires a paid Slack plan." }, { "title": "The two summaries disagree on a date", "text": "SoFarBot says the single-plan period ended in July 2025; the note.com article says July 2024. The interview itself was not read." }, { "title": "Usage billing moves the model cost risk to the customer", "text": "Since November 2025 a task costs credits in proportion to the model work it uses, and agents pause when credits run out. Heavy research or tool-calling agents can cost far more than the plan price suggests, and the company's own margin by workflow is not public." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://runbear.io/" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/runbear" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "SoFarBot, 13 September 2026: How Runbear reached a reported $400K ARR: pivoting from DevOps copilots to AI teammates in Slack", "url": "https://www.sofarbot.com/stories/runbear-snow-lee-33000-monthly", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. A source-linked summary of the Indie Hackers interview of 17 October 2025 and of a founder Reddit post; the source for the US$400,000 figure, the US$33,000 monthly equivalent, the Business plan and the pricing history." }, { "title": "Startup Founder Stories: Runbear Revenue: $400K ARR, $100K ARR in 1 year", "url": "https://startupfounderstories.com/stories/snow-lee-runbear-pivot-devops-to-400k-arr", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. Summarizes the same interview; source for the October 2025 and September 2024 figures, the first customer in November 2023, the co-founders and the US$660,000 pre-seed round." }, { "title": "note.com, こうへい, 16 February 2026: The target for AI agents was wrong: a Korean founder's third company reaches ARR of 60 million yen (in Japanese)", "url": "https://note.com/aiedgerunner/n/nd5965c500c50", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. A Japanese summary of the Indie Hackers interview with direct quotations; source for the founders' background, the pivot, the ICP method, the stack and the growth channels." }, { "title": "Starter Story, 12 December 2024: How Snow W Lee Grew a No-Code AI Platform to $100K ARR", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/runbear-breakdown", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. Gives US$8,300 in monthly revenue, profitable, the seven-day first build, the US$29 price and the ad test. The page lists one founder, which other sources contradict." }, { "title": "Runbear pricing page, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://runbear.io/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the plans, credits, builders and bring-your-own-key terms." }, { "title": "Runbear home page, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://runbear.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the customer logos and the production figures dated 9 October 2026." }, { "title": "Runbear changelog, page 6 (November 2023 to January 2024)", "url": "https://runbear.io/changelog/page/6", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the PlugBear slash command, the SOC 2 audit under way and the Teams app in review." }, { "title": "Runbear changelog, 23 November 2025: Pricing Update, from messages to credits", "url": "https://runbear.io/changelog/2025-11-23-changelog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the move to credit billing and pay-as-you-go." }, { "title": "Runbear changelog, 28 August 2024: New Look, Google Gemini, and More", "url": "https://runbear.io/changelog/2024-08-28-revamp-ux", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the 24 April 2024 entry on OpenAI Assistants v2 at https://runbear.io/changelog/2024-04-24-assistants-v2." }, { "title": "Runbear blog, 25 July 2024: Runbear is SOC 2 Type II Compliant!", "url": "https://runbear.io/posts/Runbear-is-SOC-2-Type-II-Compliant", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Company announcement of the certification." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: Runbear product page with three launches", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/runbear", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the launch list and the rating. Source for the launch dates of 23 November 2023, 7 May 2024 and 24 June 2025." }, { "title": "Hacker News search API (Algolia) for \"runbear\"", "url": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=runbear&tags=story", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the JSON result. Source for the LangBear and awesome-runbook posts of July and August 2023 and the Show HN posts of 2025." }, { "title": "The Org: Runbear, Inc.", "url": "https://theorg.com/org/runbear-inc", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. An unverified crowd-sourced org chart listing the two founders, three other people and the band \"Employees 1-10\"." }, { "title": "Runbear author pages: Snow Lee, CEO, and Liam Hwang, CTO", "url": "https://runbear.io/author/snow-lee", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with https://runbear.io/author/liam-hwang. Source for the founders' roles." }, { "title": "Slack Marketplace: Runbear", "url": "https://slack.com/marketplace/A065JPVAD3P-runbear", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the listing. Source for the developer name, the connected tools and the paid-Slack-plan note." }, { "title": "Runbear case study: Meet Booker, Peek.us's AI Teammate in Slack", "url": "https://runbear.io/case-studies/Meet-Booker-Peekuss-AI-Teammate-in-Slack", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the case-studies index at https://runbear.io/case-studies. Company-published customer results." }, { "title": "Runbear changelog, first page, 13 October 2026 entry", "url": "https://runbear.io/changelog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the current models and the Claude Agent SDK runtime." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/langua/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/langua.md", "slug": "langua", "name": "Langua", "country": "United States", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI conversation tutor for language learners", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-23", "launchLabel": "January 2024", "outcomeLabel": "More than US$260K a month, June 2025", "sticker": "$3.1M/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 3120000, "months": 17, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders, one of them employed full time at Google until October 2025, plus a small staff of unpublished size (an engineering team with at least one hire by June 2025); the marketplace tutors are contractors, not staff", "fundingLabel": "None; the tutoring marketplace's profits paid for the AI product", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "learning", "channel": "creators", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Education" ], "product": "A web and phone app in which a language learner talks out loud with an AI character whose voice is cloned from a native speaker of a chosen dialect, such as Mexican Spanish. The AI corrects mistakes with explanations, writes a feedback report after each conversation, and feeds the learner's saved words into flashcards, stories and later conversations. More than 20 languages are included in one subscription.", "why": "The two founders already ran LanguaTalk, a marketplace of human language tutors, so they had paying learners, YouTube language teachers who recommended them, and profits to spend on the AI product. The conversation feature, written by the technical co-founder at night while he managed engineers at Google, became the product that learners paid for; by late 2024 it earned more than the marketplace, by the founders' own account.", "summary": [ "Langua is an AI language tutor. A learner picks a language and a dialect, then speaks with an AI character in that language, by text, voice or a hands-free call mode, a phone-call style conversation in which the learner can interrupt the AI. The character's voice is made by voice cloning, a method that copies the sound of a real speaker's voice from recordings, so a Mexican Spanish tutor and a Spanish tutor from Spain sound and choose words differently. The AI corrects errors, explains them, and turns saved words into flashcards and stories. Langua is sold by LanguaTalk Inc., a company that also runs a marketplace of human tutors, a website where independent teachers sell lessons and the company takes a share.", "The company began as a tutoring marketplace in 2021, built by Alex Redfern, who had run a smaller marketplace called Lingoci since 2017, and Don Pottinger, a software engineer who kept his full-time job as an engineering manager at Google until 12 October 2025. When ChatGPT appeared, they used the marketplace's profits to build an AI product, and they launched Langua in January 2024. The newsletter gaps.com reported on 13 March 2025 that Pottinger had shared a figure of US$144,000 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the subscription income that repeats every month) 13 months after launch. Pottinger wrote on 18 June 2025 that the company was \"north of US$260,000 MRR just on the SaaS side\", which is Langua, and on 26 June 2025 that it had crossed US$3 million in annual recurring revenue. That is a run rate, the latest month multiplied by twelve, of about US$3.1 million a year, 17 months after launch.", "Every revenue figure on this page is a founder statement, grade C: the figures come from two different sources (a newsletter in March 2025 and the co-founder's own blog in June 2025) and agree in direction, but no payment processor or buyer has confirmed them. The founders have not published the number of staff; the page explains below why the LinkedIn head count of 30 that a directory shows counts tutors who are contractors. The page also shows what happened to earlier companies that sold online tutoring." ], "factsCaption": "From a tutoring marketplace's side project to more than US$260,000 a month in subscription revenue in 17 months, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a founder statement in his own blog or quoted by a newsletter, or a company statement on its own site. A grade D value is an estimate by a directory, marked as such. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a US$300 tutoring website in 2017 to an AI tutor with a run rate above US$3 million a year, built by two people with day jobs and a tutoring marketplace. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Langua prices in October 2026 from the company's App Store listing (grade C); the web pricing page loads its prices by script and shows them in the visitor's currency, so it could not be read", "note": "Both paid plans include all languages and all features. Standard (called Communicate on the App Store) is limited to 75 chat messages or 30 minutes of calls a day; Unlimited has a fair-use allowance of 350 messages a day in the terms. The App Store also lists 3-month plans: US$49.99 for Communicate and US$69.99 for Unlimited. A free account allows 3 minutes of calls a day and about 20 messages a week. A promotion code on the company's blog gives 25% off the annual Unlimited plan bought on the web. Plans for schools and companies start at US$500 a month in October 2026; the same page said US$200 a month in a March 2025 copy.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "3 minutes of calls a day, about 20 messages a week" ], [ "Standard (Communicate)", "12.50", "19.99", "75 messages or 30 minutes of calls a day; US$149.99 a year" ], [ "Unlimited", "16.67", "29.99", "fair use of 350 messages a day; US$199.99 a year" ], [ "Organizations", "from 500", "", "custom plan per seat, from US$500 a month" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, June 2025", "value": "more than US$260,000 (Langua only)", "grade": "C", "note": "Co-founder Don Pottinger's blog, first posted on LinkedIn on 18 June 2025: \"north of $260K MRR just on the SaaS side\". The SaaS side is Langua; the marketplace is counted separately. His 8 June 2025 post says \"$250K+ MRR\".", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the June 2025 figure", "value": "about US$3.12 million a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$260,000 times 12. The headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, 26 June 2025", "value": "crossed US$3 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Pottinger's blog, 26 June 2025, written as co-founder of LanguaTalk. US$3 million a year is US$250,000 a month, which agrees with the 18 June figure.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, March 2025", "value": "US$144,000, 13 months after launch", "grade": "C", "note": "Gaps.com income report for February 2025, published 13 March 2025: \"Dom shared that Langua has grown to $144,000 in monthly recurring revenue\" (the report misspells the co-founder's first name). Repeated in the March 2025 report.", "src": [ 2, 17 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from March to June 2025", "value": "about 81%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: from US$144,000 to US$260,000 in about three months.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue around March 2025, company level", "value": "US$141,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Pottinger's blog, 16 June 2025: \"as LanguaTalk hit 141K MRR and investor interest heated up\", three months earlier. Close to the US$144,000 Langua figure of the same period.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Langua compared with the marketplace", "value": "Langua earned more than the marketplace by late 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "Pottinger's blog on leaving Google, October 2025.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Gross volume of the tutoring marketplace", "value": "US$8.19 million in three years", "grade": "C", "note": "Pottinger's blog, 18 June 2025. Gross volume is the total paid for lessons, most of which goes to the tutors; it is not the company's revenue.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Learners", "value": "more than 30,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Company's home page and organizations page, read in October 2026. App ratings: about 2,700 on the App Store and about 2,090 reviews on Google Play.", "src": [ 11, 12, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 co-founders and a small staff of unpublished size", "grade": "C", "note": "Pottinger worked full time at Google until 12 October 2025 and built Langua at night and on weekends. He wrote in June 2025 that they had \"built out our engineering team\" and had hired a junior engineer out of college. The company's updates page in May 2026 says \"a small team like ours\". The terms make tutors independent contractors, so the LinkedIn count of 30 in a directory includes tutors.", "src": [ 3, 5, 6, 8, 14, 18 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Pottinger's blog: the marketplace's profits were the research fund for Langua; in 2025 the company reviewed funding options with an advisor because of investor interest, and he calls it profitable and growing.", "src": [ 3, 7, 19 ] }, { "fact": "Co-founder's earlier marketplace, Lingoci", "value": "about US$60,000 a month in February 2020, started with US$300 in January 2017", "grade": "C", "note": "Alex Redfern's interview with Starter Story, February 2020. He ran it alone with a virtual assistant and outsourced accounting.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Directory estimate of company revenue, 2024", "value": "US$3.5 million a year, estimate", "grade": "D", "note": "Latka's company page, marked as an estimate; it also records 30 employees from LinkedIn in October 2024, a count that includes tutors.", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the June 2025 figure", "value": "17 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: January 2024 to June 2025. The launch month is inferred: gaps.com counts 13 months before its February 2025 report, and a Wayback copy of 15 January 2024 shows the \"Communicate with AI\" feature that the 10 October 2023 copy lacks.", "src": [ 2, 15 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "January 2017", "what": "Alex Redfern, then at a marketing agency in London, launches Lingoci, a language-tutoring website, with US$300.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "February 2020", "what": "Lingoci makes about US$60,000 a month, profitable, with one virtual assistant. Redfern says he is working with a software developer in the United States on a more scalable platform.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "2021", "what": "LanguaTalk launches as a tutoring marketplace, built by Redfern and Don Pottinger, who keeps his job as an engineering manager at Google. LanguaTalk Inc. is a remote company registered in the United States.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 10, 3 ] }, { "when": "2023", "what": "After ChatGPT, the founders decide to build an AI product with the marketplace's profits. The first features are AI transcripts of podcasts and videos with flashcards; the conversation feature comes later from Pottinger's late-night work.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 16 ] }, { "when": "10 October 2023", "what": "A Wayback copy of the Langua section shows podcasts and videos, but no AI conversation yet.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "January 2024", "what": "Launch. A Wayback copy of 15 January 2024 shows \"Communicate with AI\" among the features; gaps.com later counts 13 months from launch to February 2025.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15, 2 ] }, { "when": "July 2024", "what": "Feedback reports after each conversation, and a move to what the updates page calls the smartest AI model available.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 18 ] }, { "when": "October 2024", "what": "Ten more languages, including Russian, Greek, Turkish and Polish.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 18 ] }, { "when": "Late 2024", "what": "Langua earns more than the tutoring marketplace.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "27 December 2024", "what": "The iPhone and Android apps go live.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 18 ] }, { "when": "13 March 2025", "what": "Gaps.com reports US$144,000 in monthly recurring revenue, 13 months after launch.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "March 2025", "what": "At about US$141,000 in monthly recurring revenue, investors show interest. The founders review funding options with an advisor and stay self-funded.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "May to June 2025", "what": "Guided mode, custom conversations and a call mode with interruptions. The company hires a junior engineer out of college; Pottinger writes that the engineering team is now built out.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 20, 6, 5 ] }, { "when": "18 June 2025", "what": "Pottinger writes that the company is north of US$260,000 in monthly recurring revenue on the SaaS side, and that the marketplace has processed US$8.19 million in three years.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "26 June 2025", "what": "Pottinger writes that the company has crossed US$3 million in annual recurring revenue.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "July 2025", "what": "An outage: servers down, users locked out, support tickets flooding in, in Pottinger's words.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 21 ] }, { "when": "12 October 2025", "what": "Pottinger's last day at Google after a voluntary separation. He works full time on Langua.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "May to September 2026", "what": "The company rebuilds parts of its cross-platform mobile app software, describing itself as a small team, then ships a call mode that hears the learner directly and accounts for organizations.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 18, 12 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "An audience before the product", "text": "The marketplace's learners became the beta testers of Langua from the first day, and the founders' first customers came from relationships built over years in language learning, by Pottinger's account. They did not need to find a market; they already sold to it." }, { "title": "The marketplace paid for the AI", "text": "Pottinger writes that the marketplace's profits were the research budget for Langua, so there was no investor and no deadline. When investors appeared in 2025, the company was already profitable and could say no." }, { "title": "Built around what the models allow", "text": "Instead of adding a chatbot to lessons, Langua is a conversation: cloned native voices in regional dialects, corrections with explanations, a learner who can switch to their own language when stuck. The founder says the conversation feature came late and by accident, and became the stickiest feature." }, { "title": "Teachers on YouTube as the sales force", "text": "The company says it grew through word of mouth from users and language teachers on YouTube. In June 2025 a Spanish-teaching YouTuber with 217,000 subscribers tested the AI language apps for three weeks and ranked Langua first, unpaid, because its Mexican and Spanish tutors used the right regional words." }, { "title": "A part-time co-founder with AI coding tools", "text": "Pottinger built and ran Langua at 5 a.m. and on weekends while managing a Google team. He writes that AI coding tools, Claude Code above all, let him build the deployment pipeline, debug the production database and ship features alone, and that a junior engineer with those tools became a top product contributor." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the co-founder's blog posts and the company's own pages. They are grade C.", "items": [ "A web app with a Postgres database; the co-founder debugs production by connecting an AI coding agent to the database. Mobile apps for iPhone and Android, live since December 2024, built with cross-platform software so that one small team maintains both.", "Voices cloned from native speakers for each dialect; a call mode that, since September 2026, hears the learner directly instead of waiting for a transcript. The AI model providers are not named; the updates page mentions AI provider errors and a move in July 2024 to a stronger model.", "Claude Code for the deployment pipeline, bug fixes, features and production debugging, after Copilot, ChatGPT and Cursor, by the co-founder's account. He also uses it for marketing content and data analysis.", "Subscriptions on the web and through the App Store and Google Play, with a 30-day money-back guarantee on web and Android purchases. The web price is shown in the visitor's currency.", "Growth through word of mouth, YouTube language teachers and an affiliate program; the privacy terms also mention Meta ads. Support by email through a Help Scout knowledge base, which the home page stresses is answered by people, not chatbots.", "The company is remote. Two well-known language teachers, Olly Richards and Lucy Simkins, support it, by the company's own about page." ], "src": [ 22, 18, 1, 11, 8, 19 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold online tutoring with human teachers. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Tutorspree", "years": "2011 to 2015", "funding": "US$1.9M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A marketplace to find the right tutor online.", "died": "Customer acquisition cost more than a student was worth, and the marketplace never reached the density of tutors and students it needed.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/672-tutorspree" }, { "name": "TutorCloud", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$1.2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "On-demand tutoring over video for any subject.", "died": "Could not keep tutors or students on the platform, and bigger companies took the market.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1703-tutorcloud" }, { "name": "SmarterCookie", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "An on-demand marketplace that connects students with educators.", "died": "Larger rivals and technical problems; users did not stay engaged.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1695-smartercookie" }, { "name": "VIPKid", "years": "2013 to 2021", "funding": "US$1.1B", "cause": "Legal/Regulatory", "promise": "One-to-one online English lessons for Chinese children with North American teachers.", "died": "China's 2021 rules banned foreign tutors and for-profit school-age tutoring, ending the business model at once.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2522-vipkid" }, { "name": "Juni Learning", "years": "2017 to 2024", "funding": "US$30M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Premium one-to-one coding and math tutors for children.", "died": "Human tutors cost too much per lesson; churn after the pandemic and rising instructor wages ate the margin.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2311-juni-learning" } ], "whatChanged": [ "All five sold the time of human tutors. That has two costs that do not shrink: each lesson pays a teacher, and each student must be found again when the last one stops. Tutorspree, TutorCloud and SmarterCookie died on acquisition cost and thin margins; Juni on the price of instructors; VIPKid when a government closed its market. LanguaTalk's own marketplace has the same shape, and the founders say it was hard to run.", "Langua changed the cost side. A conversation with an AI character costs model and voice fees, not a teacher's hour, so a US$20 to US$30 subscription can pay for unlimited practice, and the company's marketing says plainly that the model costs are the reason for the daily limits and the card on trial. The acquisition side changed too: the marketplace gave Langua its first users for free, and YouTube teachers sent the rest. What stays the same is that the founders still sell human lessons; they say the ideal method is both, so the marketplace keeps the learners who want a person." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The structure, yes; the head start, only with an audience.", "text": "Starting an AI conversation tutor in 2026 means competing with Langua itself, with Duolingo's video calls and with apps that raised venture money. What can be copied is the order of events: a small profitable business that already serves the customers, an AI product built with its profits and tested on its users, and a part-time technical founder who ships with AI coding tools until the revenue justifies leaving the job.", "steps": [ "Start or buy a small service business in the niche, so the AI product has customers and testers on day one.", "Pay for the AI product from that business's profit, not from investors, and charge from the first month.", "Build the feature that the models make newly possible, here spoken conversation in real dialects, not a chatbot bolted onto the old product.", "Find the teachers and creators who already review tools in the niche and make the product good enough that they recommend it unpaid.", "Keep the day job until the recurring revenue is proven; use AI coding tools to do the work of a larger team." ], "open": "Any skill that people practice with a human coach by the hour: public speaking, job interviews, sales calls, music, medical and legal exams; and any niche where a small human-service business already has the customers." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Founder statements only", "text": "The US$144,000 figure was shared by the co-founder with a newsletter, and the US$260,000 and US$3 million figures are his own blog posts; no payment processor, filing or buyer has confirmed them, and \"north of\" is not an exact number. No figure later than June 2025 has been published; the October 2025 post says only that Langua earned more than the marketplace." }, { "title": "Which business the numbers cover", "text": "The June 2025 figure is explicitly the SaaS side, Langua. The March 2025 figures are described once as Langua (US$144,000) and once as LanguaTalk (US$141,000), so the marketplace's own revenue is not published and the company total is larger than the headline by an unknown amount." }, { "title": "The staff count is not published", "text": "The founders say \"a small team\" and describe an engineering team with at least one hire; one co-founder was a full-time Google employee until October 2025. A directory records 30 employees from LinkedIn, but the terms make every tutor an independent contractor, and LinkedIn counts tutors who list the company. Readers should treat the staff size as unverified." }, { "title": "Model and voice costs", "text": "The company says the AI it uses is not cheap to run, which is why trials need a card and the Standard plan has daily limits. A price increase from the model providers goes straight into the margin; the organization plan's starting price rose from US$200 to US$500 a month between March 2025 and October 2026." }, { "title": "Big competitors and outages", "text": "Duolingo, Babbel and venture-funded AI tutors sell to the same learners, and the models that make Langua possible are available to all of them. In July 2025 the service went down with users locked out, by the founder's account." }, { "title": "Investor interest", "text": "In 2025 the company reviewed funding options with an advisor. If it takes venture money and grows its staff, it will leave the small-team category that this site covers." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://languatalk.com/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6737520234" }, { "kind": "android", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.strukturedkaos.languatalkapp" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Don Pottinger's blog: The Unconventional Path to $100K MRR (originally posted on LinkedIn, 18 June 2025)", "url": "https://www.donpottinger.net/blog/modified-stairstep-approach", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Co-founder's own post. Source for the US$260,000 MRR on the SaaS side, the US$8.19 million gross volume and the founder's history." }, { "title": "Gaps.com: Gaps Income Report, February 2025 (published 13 March 2025)", "url": "https://gaps.com/feb-2025/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the Langua section. Quotes the co-founder's figure of US$144,000 MRR 13 months after launch, and names both founders and the 2021 start." }, { "title": "Don Pottinger's blog: I Just Left Google, announcement post (October 2025)", "url": "https://www.donpottinger.net/blog/leaving-google-announcement", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the marketplace profits as the research fund, Langua passing the marketplace in late 2024, and the 12 October 2025 last day at Google." }, { "title": "Don Pottinger's blog: The AI Revolution in Language Learning (26 June 2025)", "url": "https://www.donpottinger.net/blog/ai-language-learning-disruption", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the US$3 million ARR statement and the product approach." }, { "title": "Don Pottinger's blog: Work-Life Balance is a Myth (8 June 2025)", "url": "https://www.donpottinger.net/blog/work-life-balance-myth", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the US$250,000+ MRR, the weekend and 5 a.m. work, and the built-out engineering team." }, { "title": "Don Pottinger's blog: Family, Founders, and AI (4 June 2025)", "url": "https://www.donpottinger.net/blog/family-ai-resilient-teams", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the hire of a junior engineer." }, { "title": "Don Pottinger's blog: The Million Dollar Lesson in Deal Structure (16 June 2025)", "url": "https://www.donpottinger.net/blog/million-dollar-lesson-deal-structure", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the US$141,000 MRR, the investor interest, the review of funding options and the profitable status." }, { "title": "LanguaTalk support site: (About Us Page) What is LanguaTalk and who created it? (updated 21 May 2026; Wayback copies of June and December 2024)", "url": "https://support.languatalk.com/article/89-what-is-languatalk-and-who-created-it", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, live and in two Wayback copies. Source for the co-founders, the 2021 start, the 2024 launch, the remote company, LanguaTalk Inc. and the two teacher supporters." }, { "title": "Starter Story: How I Built A $60K/Month Language Tutoring Platform With No Coding Skills (16 February 2020)", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/language-tutoring-online", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Alex Redfern's interview about Lingoci: the US$300 start, the US$60,000 a month, the virtual assistant and the US developer. The page's own revenue box is a Starter Story figure and was not used." }, { "title": "Starter Story: Lingoci Update: How We Doubled Revenue And Grew Referrals By 20% (2021)", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/how-we-doubled-revenue", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Redfern says he built and launched LanguaTalk with Don Pottinger." }, { "title": "LanguaTalk home page, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://languatalk.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 30,000+ learners, the plans, the YouTube word of mouth, the trial and refund rules." }, { "title": "Langua: AI language learning on the App Store, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/langua-ai-language-learning/id6737520234", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the listing, the in-app purchase prices and the version history. Seller LanguaTalk Inc." }, { "title": "Langua on Google Play, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.strukturedkaos.languatalkapp", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the listing. Developer Languatalk Inc., Atlanta, Georgia; about 2,090 reviews." }, { "title": "Latka company page: Languatalk revenue 2024, estimate", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/languatalk", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. A third-party estimate of US$3.5 million and LinkedIn head counts of 15 to 33; the head counts include tutors." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copies of languatalk.com/langua, 10 October 2023 and 15 January 2024", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20240115195645/https://languatalk.com/langua", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both copies. The October 2023 copy lists podcasts and videos; the January 2024 copy adds Communicate with AI. Used for the launch month." }, { "title": "Don Pottinger's blog: Stop Overthinking Your Startup Ideas (13 June 2025)", "url": "https://www.donpottinger.net/blog/stop-overthinking-startup-ideas", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the origin of LanguaTalk and the late arrival of the conversation feature." }, { "title": "Gaps.com: Gaps Income Report, March 2025 (published 17 April 2025)", "url": "https://gaps.com/mar-2025/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the Langua mention. Repeats the US$144,000 figure." }, { "title": "LanguaTalk support site: See the latest updates on Langua (July 2024 to October 2026)", "url": "https://support.languatalk.com/article/152-see-the-latest-updates-on-langua", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the feature dates, the mobile app launch on 27 December 2024, the small team statement of May 2026 and the September 2026 call mode." }, { "title": "Don Pottinger's blog: 50K Downloads, $300 Revenue: The Vanity Metrics Trap (15 June 2025)", "url": "https://www.donpottinger.net/blog/vanity-metrics-vs-reality", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the profitable and growing statement and the YouTube creators." }, { "title": "Don Pottinger's blog: One Insight That Changed How We Build Langua (23 May 2025)", "url": "https://www.donpottinger.net/blog/languatalk-update", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for guided mode, custom conversations and the coming call mode." }, { "title": "Don Pottinger's blog: Travel Chaos to Startup Wisdom (29 July 2025)", "url": "https://www.donpottinger.net/blog/travel-nightmare-entrepreneurship-lesson", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the July 2025 outage." }, { "title": "Don Pottinger's blog: From 15 Tools to One: My Week with Claude Code", "url": "https://www.donpottinger.net/blog/claude-code-versatility-transformation", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the deployment pipeline, the Postgres database and the AI coding tools." }, { "title": "LanguaTalk Terms and Privacy, read October 2026", "url": "https://languatalk.com/blog/terms-and-privacy/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on tutors, fair use and advertising. Tutors are independent contractors; the Unlimited plan has a 350-message fair-use allowance; Meta receives subscription events for ads." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." }, { "title": "Don Pottinger's blog: When a YouTuber Validates Your Product Vision (22 June 2025)", "url": "https://www.donpottinger.net/blog/qroo-paul-langua-validation", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the unpaid YouTube review by a teacher with 217,000 subscribers and the dialect detail; the post also dates the start of building to about 18 months earlier." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/vizologi/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/vizologi.md", "slug": "vizologi", "name": "Vizologi", "country": "Spain", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI business-plan and business-idea generator", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-23", "launchLabel": "February 2019", "outcomeLabel": "US$8K a month, October 2021", "sticker": "$8K/mo, founder-reported", "outcomeUsd": 96000, "months": 32, "teamLabel": "1 founder and 3 employees in October 2021, plus 3 to 4 contractors reported in April 2021; 2 people listed on LinkedIn in July 2025 according to Latka", "fundingLabel": "One business angel by April 2021, amount not disclosed; no venture round found", "primaryFactor": "Search content", "group": "documents-data", "channel": "search", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Funded", "Running", "B2B", "Business planning" ], "product": "A web tool that writes a business plan, a business model canvas, a competitor report or a list of startup ideas from a few words of input, on top of a database of more than 4,000 business models that the company collected from public sources. Plans are sold as monthly credits that the pricing page defines as AI-generated words.", "why": "The founder first published about 1,000 free business model canvases, which brought search traffic that he said reached 50,000 visits a month, and only then sold a paid tool to those visitors. In October 2020 he said he obtained early access to OpenAI's GPT-3, and from late 2021 the product changed from a data search tool into a text generator, with lifetime deals on AppSumo and resellers in the United States and India adding sales.", "summary": [ "Vizologi is a business model generator, a program that writes the parts of a business plan (customers, revenue, costs, partners) from a short description of an idea. It runs on a large language model, a neural network trained on large amounts of text that writes new text from a prompt, supplied by OpenAI, and on a database of more than 4,000 business model canvases, one-page summaries of how a known company makes money, that the company compiled by crawling public sources. The paid plans are measured in credits, which the pricing page defines as AI-generated words.", "Pedro Trillo, a telecommunications engineer from Alicante who had worked as a project manager at Orange and Telefónica, started it in February 2019 and published the canvases first, as free pages. Alicante Plaza reported in May 2019 that the site had 30,000 unique visitors a month after three months and had reached break-even. In October 2020 he said the company got access to OpenAI's GPT-3, and in April 2021 he told Alicante Plaza that sales had grown 200% in six to seven months, that a business angel had invested, and that the company would become a fully AI-based firm by October 2021. In the Starter Story interview of 29 October 2021 he stated a gross income of about US$8,000 a month in recurring revenue, 50,000 visits a month, one founder and three employees.", "No figure on this page comes from a payment processor or a buyer. The headline is one founder statement with one date, so the page carries the grade \"Reported, not verified\". The only later figure is an estimate by the directory GetLatka, US$220,000 a year in July 2025, with two people listed on LinkedIn. The page also shows earlier companies that sold company data, answers from a curated database or AI advice to small businesses, and failed." ], "factsCaption": "A founder-reported US$8,000 a month in October 2021, reached 32 months after launch with four people; later figures are a directory estimate only", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is a single founder statement with one date, or a third-party estimate, with nothing else confirming it. A grade C value was stated by the founder on more than one date or was reported by a journalist who spoke to him. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From 1,000 free business model canvases to a text generator sold by the word, in 32 months to the only dated revenue figure. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Vizologi prices read on the company's pricing page on 23 October 2026 (grade C), plus the AppSumo lifetime deal archived in October 2021", "note": "The pricing page shows three unnamed tiers, with a yearly price 30% below the monthly one and shown per user per month. A credit is 5 characters of input plus output text; the page translates the lowest tier to about 4,500 AI-generated words a month. The middle tier gives 20,000 credits a month when billed monthly and 50,000 when billed yearly. A 7-day free trial needs a credit card. The AppSumo deal of October 2021 was a one-time purchase, listed as US$69 against a list price of US$900, for the middle tier.", "rows": [ [ "Lowest tier", "9", "19", "15,000 credits a month, 1 list, 1 project" ], [ "Middle tier, most popular", "19", "29", "50,000 credits a month yearly, 20,000 monthly; 5 lists, 5 projects" ], [ "Highest tier", "39", "49", "unlimited credits, lists and projects" ], [ "AppSumo lifetime deal, October 2021", "69 one-time", "", "20,000 AI credits a month, 5 lists, 5 projects" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue per month, October 2021", "value": "about US$8,000 in recurring revenue", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder's words in the Starter Story interview of 29 October 2021: a gross income of around US$8,000 MRR. One statement, one date. The page is not marked as an estimate.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the October 2021 figure", "value": "about US$96,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$8,000 times 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "GetLatka revenue estimate, July 2025", "value": "US$220,000 a year", "grade": "D", "note": "A directory estimate, marked as such by Latka, which says the company has not published its revenue. Latka shows the same US$220,000 for many other small companies in its generative AI category, so the figure may be a formula, not a measurement.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Visits per month", "value": "30,000 unique visitors in May 2019; 50,000 in December 2020 and October 2021", "grade": "C", "note": "Alicante Plaza quoting the founder in May 2019; the founder's blog in late 2020; Starter Story in October 2021. The founder's own site said more than 5 million visitors in total by 2026.", "src": [ 3, 16, 1, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Users, October 2021", "value": "more than 1,500 users served since launch; about 550 users a month", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder's statement in Starter Story. The same interview gives a customer acquisition cost of US$50 and a lifetime value of US$100 per customer.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team, October 2021", "value": "1 founder and 3 employees", "grade": "C", "note": "Starter Story profile box, October 2021. Alicante Plaza wrote in April 2021 that three people were employed directly and three or four more worked as suppliers. The Blasting News interview of June 2021 says the developers were in Goa, India, and operations in Valencia.", "src": [ 1, 2, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Team, July 2025", "value": "2 people listed on LinkedIn", "grade": "D", "note": "Latka's count of people who list Vizologi as their employer. The founder's own site also names a second company of his, Xendai, an AI engineering studio.", "src": [ 6, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "one business angel, by April 2021; amount not disclosed", "grade": "C", "note": "Alicante Plaza, April 2021: Tomás Guillén of Big Ban Angels became a partner. The founder said a Series A was planned for late 2021 or early 2022; no source shows that it happened.", "src": [ 2, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Early traction, May 2019", "value": "about 80 recurring users and break-even after 3 months in the market", "grade": "C", "note": "Alicante Plaza, 31 May 2019, quoting the founder. Free access to the business models of 1,500 companies; the paid plan gave access to the data.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "AppSumo lifetime deal, October 2021", "value": "US$69 one-time, listed against US$900", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived AppSumo page of 6 October 2021: lifetime access with 20,000 AI credits a month, an 'Infinite ideAI generator' and product naming. The founder said in Starter Story that lifetime plans raised revenue considerably.", "src": [ 5, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Price history", "value": "US$9 a month yearly or US$19 monthly in 2019; three credit-based tiers from US$19 to US$49 monthly by September 2022", "grade": "C", "note": "Wayback copies of the home and pricing pages: June 2019, August 2020 (US$15 yearly), September 2021 (unchanged), September 2022 (credits), June 2023, April 2024, April 2025. The credit allowance of the lowest tier went from 4,000 in 2022 to 6,000 in 2023, 8,000 in 2025 and 15,000 in 2026.", "src": [ 10, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Content and data", "value": "about 1,000 canvases at launch, more than 1,500 pieces of content by 2021, more than 4,000 business models in 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Starter Story for the 2021 counts; the home page in October 2026 for the 4,000 figure. The company's AI page describes crawling, entity extraction by its own models and manual checking by data analysts.", "src": [ 1, 9, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October 2021 figure", "value": "32 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: February 2019 to October 2021.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Summer 2016", "what": "Trillo, then a project manager in large companies, writes down the idea: a combinatorial system that generates a business model for every person on earth. The project is first called Compass.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 16, 17, 1 ] }, { "when": "February 2019", "what": "Start of Vizologi in Alicante. About 1,000 business model canvases are published as free pages first, to build search traffic before any paid product.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "when": "31 May 2019", "what": "Alicante Plaza reports 30,000 unique visitors a month, about 80 recurring users and break-even after three months. The paid plan gives access to the data behind the canvases.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "12 June 2019", "what": "Vizologi wins the Wonderful innovation contest of the Alicante local development agency.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "June 2019", "what": "The archived home page sells one plan: US$9 a month billed yearly or US$19 monthly, with premium data, search, canvas design and SWOT analysis.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "October 2020", "what": "The founder says the company got access to OpenAI's GPT-3. His site later calls Vizologi the first Spanish start-up licensed to use OpenAI's technology.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 4, 14 ] }, { "when": "14 April 2021", "what": "Alicante Plaza: sales up 200% in six to seven months, partners reselling in the United States and India, a business angel as partner, and a plan to become a fully AI-based company by October 2021.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "10 June 2021", "what": "In a Blasting News interview the founder describes the current AI as text classification of crawled pages into canvas categories, and announces a generative business model builder for the winter.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "6 October 2021", "what": "The archived AppSumo page sells lifetime access for US$69 one-time with 20,000 AI credits a month and an 'Infinite ideAI generator'.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "29 October 2021", "what": "Starter Story interview: about US$8,000 a month in recurring revenue, 50,000 visits a month, 1 founder and 3 employees. The main channel is search, then LinkedIn and AppSumo.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "September 2022", "what": "The archived home page shows three plans priced by credits, from US$19 to US$49 a month, and the slogan 'Get AI-generated answers to all your business questions'.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "21 March 2023", "what": "Innoleaps, an innovation agency, announces a partnership to use Vizologi for consumer-goods clients.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "4 July 2023", "what": "In a Distrito Digital interview the founder says the company is growing a lot since ChatGPT appeared in November 2022, after two years of early adopters, and that team collaboration would arrive by the end of the year.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "24 October 2023", "what": "A SafetyDetectives interview, republished by the company, describes a business plan presentation generated in about one minute from a short questionnaire.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "July 2025", "what": "GetLatka estimates US$220,000 a year and counts 2 people on LinkedIn.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The pricing page sells the same three tiers, now with 15,000 to unlimited credits; the AI page says the product runs on OpenAI's GPT-5.5.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 11 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Free content first, paid tool second", "text": "The founder published about 1,000 business model canvases as free pages before selling anything, and told Starter Story that search brought more than 50,000 visits a month by 2021. His advice in that interview: if you have no way to create helpful content for your business, you have nothing. The paid product was then sold to visitors who were already on the site." }, { "title": "Early access to a text model", "text": "The founder said he obtained access to OpenAI's GPT-3 in October 2020, two years before ChatGPT. The product changed from a database with search and canvas tools into a generator sold by the word; the archived pricing page of September 2022 lists credits defined as AI-generated words. He told Distrito Digital in 2023 to build on third-party APIs rather than train models in Spain." }, { "title": "Lifetime deals and resellers", "text": "The founder said in Starter Story that the sale of lifetime plans on AppSumo raised revenue considerably, used as a slow channel that adds recurring revenue each month rather than a single spike. Alicante Plaza reported in April 2021 that partners reselling in the United States and India were a main cause of the 200% growth." }, { "title": "Low cost of operation", "text": "Developers in Goa, operations in Valencia and a remote team from the start, according to the Blasting News interview. The founder said in that interview that a well-configured AI would do four or five activities that three people would otherwise do, at a low cost in API payments." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's interviews, the Starter Story tools list and the company's own pages. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Node.js on Heroku, with Stripe for payments and Cloudflare in front, according to the Starter Story tools list and the founder's answer on platforms.", "Text generation by OpenAI models: GPT-3 from the October 2020 access the founder described; the company's AI page in 2026 says GPT-5.5, with its own data about business models added.", "A data pipeline described on the AI page since 2020: crawl business news and company sites, extract sectors, patterns and companies with the company's own models, link each organization to a unique ID, and have data analysts check the data by hand.", "A content site on WordPress with Yoast for search optimization; more than 1,500 pages on how named companies work, in 14 languages today.", "Customer tools named by the founder: HubSpot for CRM, Freshdesk for support, Mailchimp and Sendfox for email, Google Analytics, Hotjar and Profitwell for measurement, Jira for tasks, Fiverr for freelance work.", "Sales channels: search, LinkedIn content with inbound requests after cold messages failed, and the AppSumo marketplace." ], "src": [ 1, 4, 11, 9 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold company data, answers from a curated database, AI advice to small businesses or a brainstorming tool, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Mattermark", "years": "2012 to 2019", "funding": "US$17.7M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Private company data aggregated into insights for investors and sales teams.", "died": "CB Insights and PitchBook had larger datasets; the data operation cost more than the revenue it produced.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/322-mattermark" }, { "name": "Ask Jeeves", "years": "1996 to 2007", "funding": "US$50M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Ask a question in plain words and get one answer from a curated database.", "died": "Human editors curated the answers, so costs grew with every new question while Google answered from the whole web by algorithm.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/10-ask-jeeves" }, { "name": "Metigy", "years": "2014 to 2022", "funding": "US$14M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "An AI marketing brain for small businesses that could not afford a marketing team.", "died": "The machine-learning recommendations of 2016 to 2020 were too generic; small businesses wanted done-for-you services or very simple tools, and churned.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2338-metigy" }, { "name": "Thinkature", "years": "2006 to 2009", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A shared online whiteboard for brainstorming and idea generation in remote teams.", "died": "Too early for the infrastructure and users of its time; free users did not convert, and Google Docs added collaboration.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1670-thinkature" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Mattermark and Ask Jeeves both sold access to a database that people had to curate by hand, and the cost of curation grew faster than revenue. Metigy sold AI advice to small businesses, and the advice of pre-2020 models was too generic to keep them. Vizologi started in 2019 with the same shape as the first two: a hand-checked database of business models sold by subscription.", "Two things differ. First, the database was published as free pages before it was sold, so it paid for itself in search traffic, which the founder said reached 50,000 visits a month, instead of being a cost. Second, from late 2021 a large language model wrote the output, so the product no longer depended on the database alone, and the answers were specific to the user's input, which is what Metigy's models could not do. The risk that remains is the one Ask Jeeves faced: a general tool, ChatGPT today, can answer the same questions for free." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The content method, yes. The revenue, unverified.", "text": "Publishing a large set of useful reference pages first, then selling a tool to the visitors, is a method that any solo founder can repeat in a niche, and it does not depend on being early to a model. The founder said that the 2021 revenue was about US$8,000 a month, but nothing outside his own statement confirms it, and no later founder figure exists, so copy the method, not the number.", "steps": [ "Pick a niche where people search for structured reference pages, and publish hundreds of them for free.", "Sell a paid tool only to visitors who already use the free pages; the founder said search was his main channel.", "Price generation by usage, as credits or words, so the model's API cost stays below the price.", "Use lifetime-deal marketplaces as a slow channel for revenue and feedback, and resellers in countries you cannot reach yourself." ], "open": "Any field with a known one-page format that people search for: pitch decks, grant applications, job descriptions, lesson plans, compliance checklists." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline figure, about US$8,000 a month, rests on one source: the founder, Pedro Trillo, in his Starter Story interview of 29 October 2021. No payment processor, buyer or second interview confirms it, and no founder figure for any later year was found. The only later number is GetLatka's estimate of US$220,000 a year for July 2025, which Latka marks as an estimate and which it also shows for many other small companies in the same category. There is no TrustMRR profile for the company as of 23 October 2026. A reader could look for a payment-processor-verified profile, a second interview with figures, or a Spanish company register filing." }, { "title": "Growth is unknown since 2021", "text": "The founder said in July 2023 that the company was growing a lot after ChatGPT appeared, but gave no number. Latka counted two people on LinkedIn in July 2025, down from four in 2021, and the founder's own site lists a second company, Xendai, an AI engineering studio." }, { "title": "The general tool answers the same questions", "text": "ChatGPT and similar assistants write business plans and canvases for free. The company's answer is its database of business models and its fixed output formats, which is the Ask Jeeves position: a curated database against a general engine." }, { "title": "One model supplier", "text": "Every version of the product has run on OpenAI's models, from GPT-3 in 2020 to the GPT-5.5 that the AI page names in 2026. A price or policy change at OpenAI changes the cost of every credit sold." }, { "title": "Marketing claims on the company's pages", "text": "The AI page gives parameter counts and training details for GPT-5.5 that OpenAI has not published, and the home page says every US$1 spent returns US$75 in new ideas. Neither claim could be checked, and the page's product descriptions use them as marketing." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://vizologi.com/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Starter Story, 29 October 2021: Our $8K/Month AI-Powered SaaS Helps Businesses Find New Opportunities", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/our-8k-month-ai-powered-saas-helps-businesses-find-new-opportunities", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview, not marked as estimated. Source for the US$8,000 monthly revenue, the visits, the user counts, the team of four, the start date and the tools list." }, { "title": "Alicante Plaza, 14 April 2021 (Sandra Murcia): La startup Vizologi crece un 200% en el último semestre y aumenta presencia en EE.UU. e India", "url": "https://alicanteplaza.es/alicanteplaza/la-startup-vizologi-crece-un-200-en-el-ultimo-semestre-y-aumenta-presencia-en-eeuu-e-india", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Journalist article quoting the founder. Source for the 200% growth, the business angel, the resellers, the three direct employees and the October 2021 AI pivot plan." }, { "title": "Alicante Plaza, 31 May 2019: Vizologi, la inteligencia artificial que compara tu modelo de negocio con otras 1.500 empresas", "url": "https://alicanteplaza.es/alicanteplaza/vizologi-la-inteligencia-artificial-que-compara-tu-modelo-de-negocio-con-otras-1500-empresas", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Journalist article quoting the founder. Source for the 2019 visitors, the 80 recurring users, break-even, the 1,500 companies and the founder's background." }, { "title": "Blasting News interview, 10 June 2021, republished on vizologi.com: Pedro Trillo, CEO of Vizologi: Artificial Intelligence reduces costs in new hires", "url": "https://vizologi.com/pedro-trillo-ceo-of-vizologi-artificial-intelligence-reduces-costs-in-new-hires-the-interview-from-blasting-news/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on the company's blog. Source for how the AI worked in 2021, the OpenAI access of October 2020, the remote team in Goa and Valencia, and the generative version announced for the winter." }, { "title": "AppSumo deal page for Vizologi, archived by the Wayback Machine on 6 October 2021", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20211006120823/https://appsumo.com/products/vizologi/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the deal terms and plan features. Source for the US$69 lifetime price, the 20,000 AI credits and the ideAI generator in October 2021." }, { "title": "GetLatka company page: Vizologi Revenue 2025: $220K Est.", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/vizologi.com", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. A directory estimate dated July 2025 and a LinkedIn headcount of 2, both marked as such by Latka." }, { "title": "Distrito Digital Comunitat Valenciana, 4 July 2023: Entrevista a Pedro Trillo, fundador y CEO de Vizologi", "url": "https://distritodigitalcv.es/2023/07/entrevista-a-pedro-trillo-fundador-y-ceo-de-vizologi/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview. Source for the growth after ChatGPT, the customer profile and the advice to build on third-party APIs." }, { "title": "SafetyDetectives interview, 24 October 2023, republished on vizologi.com: From IT Consultancy to AI Pioneer", "url": "https://vizologi.com/from-it-consultancy-to-ai-pioneer-a-conversation-with-pedro-trillo-vizologis-ceo/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on the company's blog. Source for the one-minute business plan and the founder's description of the idea generator." }, { "title": "Vizologi pricing page, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://vizologi.com/pricing/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the current prices, credits, the trial terms and the feature list. The home page, read the same day, gives the 4,000 business models figure." }, { "title": "Vizologi pricing and home pages in the Wayback Machine, June 2019 to April 2025", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20210921024923/https://vizologi.com/pricing/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the home page of 20 June 2019, 30 May 2020, 17 May 2021 and 29 September 2022, and the pricing page of 15 August 2020, 21 September 2021, 6 June 2023, 16 April 2024 and 14 April 2025. Source for the price history and the change to credit pricing." }, { "title": "Vizologi: How Vizologi uses Artificial Intelligence, read 23 October 2026, and its Wayback copy of 15 August 2020", "url": "https://vizologi.com/how-vizologi-uses-artificial-intelligence/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, both versions. Source for the data pipeline, the OpenAI model named in 2026 and the 2020 roadmap." }, { "title": "Alicante Plaza, 11 July 2023: Desde la alicantina Mamby a E.ON, casos de uso de Vizologi", "url": "https://alicanteplaza.es/alicanteplaza/desde-la-alicantina-mamby-a-e-on-casos-de-uso-de-vizologi", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the corporate clients the company named in 2023." }, { "title": "Impulsa Alicante, 12 June 2019: Vizologi, una startup alicantina, gana el concurso de innovación Wonderful", "url": "https://www.impulsalicante.es/vizologi-una-startup-alicantina-gana-el-concurso-de-innovacion-wonderful/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The local development agency's own announcement of the prize." }, { "title": "Pedro Trillo's personal site, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://pedrotrillo.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the home page. Source for the OpenAI license claim, the total visitor count and the founder's second company." }, { "title": "Innoleaps, 21 March 2023: How Innoleaps and Vizologi are partnering to bring generative AI to the FMCG sector", "url": "https://www.innoleaps.com/posts/how-innoleaps-vizologi-are-partnering-to-bring-generative-ai-to-the-fmcg-sector", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The partner agency's announcement." }, { "title": "Pedro Trillo's blog, late 2020: Mind-blowing!!! GPT-3 lo cambia todo", "url": "https://pedrotrillo.com/gpt-3-lo-cambia-todo", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Undated post whose images were uploaded in December 2020. Source for the 50,000 monthly visitors at that time and the plan to generate full business models with OpenAI." }, { "title": "Pedro Trillo's blog, 2020: La 3ª generación disruptiva ya es generativa", "url": "https://pedrotrillo.com/la-3a-generacion-disruptiva-ya-es-generativa", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the summer 2016 origin of the idea and the January 2020 decision to start generative AI development." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/dropmagic/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/dropmagic.md", "slug": "dropmagic", "name": "Dropmagic", "country": "France", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI store builder for Shopify", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-23", "launchLabel": "August 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$124K a month, April 2026", "sticker": "$1.5M/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 1488494, "months": 8, "teamLabel": "3 co-founders: the founder, a designer and a YouTube creator; no employees named", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "build-software", "channel": "creators", "trend": "growing", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "E-commerce" ], "product": "You paste the link of a product on AliExpress, Amazon or another Shopify store. Dropmagic reads the product, writes the sales copy for a chosen customer persona, generates product images, designs the pages and publishes the store to your Shopify account. Building is free; publishing costs US$79 a month.", "why": "The founder had already grown one tool for dropshippers, Minea, to US$750,000 a month of recurring revenue by his own account, by putting a YouTube creator in the founding team. He repeated the same method: a creator co-founder whose videos bring the customers, a product that shows its result in a few minutes, and a free version that charges only at the moment of publishing.", "summary": [ "Dropmagic is an AI store builder for Shopify. A store builder is a program that produces the pages of an online shop, and this one does it from a single product link: it imports the product, writes the text, generates images and publishes to the customer's Shopify account. The customers are mostly dropshippers, sellers who list a supplier's product in their own shop and let the supplier ship it, so they never hold stock. They test many products, and each test needs a new store.", "Loïc Berthelot, a French software developer, co-founded Minea, a tool that finds products by scanning advertisements. He said on a podcast on 2 March 2026 that Minea reached US$750,000 a month in recurring revenue, that he left his post as its chief executive about seven months earlier, and that he started Dropmagic with his best friend, a designer, and a 24-year-old YouTube creator who makes the videos. He said the product made US$1,000 a month of recurring revenue within five days and passed US$1 million a year of recurring revenue on the day of the recording. Two newsletters then quoted his posts on X: High Signal wrote on 29 April 2026 that recurring revenue was US$117,000 a month, and Tiny Startups wrote on 22 May 2026 that he had made over €106,000, about US$124,000, in April.", "Every revenue figure on this page is a founder statement, repeated by a newsletter, a podcast or a reviewer, so the grade is C. No payment processor has published the numbers. The page also shows what happened to five earlier companies that sold store builders and no-code tools to small sellers, and why the French consumer regulator watches the dropshipping sector." ], "factsCaption": "About US$124,000 of revenue in April 2026, eight months after the founder's stated start, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a founder statement, quoted by a newsletter, a podcast or a reviewer. A grade B value is a register record or an archived page. A grade D value is a third-party estimate. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A.", "timelineLead": "From a product-research tool with a creator co-founder to a store builder that repeats the same method, with about eight months from the stated start to US$124,000 in one month. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Dropmagic prices on 16 October 2026, from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "There are two plans. Free builds and previews one store but cannot publish it to Shopify; the reviewer at Ecommerce-Platforms.com confirms that publishing needs Pro. Pro is billed monthly; the page shows no yearly price. The reviewer writes that a yearly option exists but that its price is not published. Every store also needs a Shopify plan, which starts at US$39 a month, paid to Shopify. Refunds are possible within 7 days if the customer has not launched more than one live store.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "1 store, build and preview only" ], [ "Pro", "", "79", "unlimited stores, 30 AI image credits a month, publishing to Shopify" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue in April 2026", "value": "over €106,000, about US$124,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Tiny Startups newsletter, 22 May 2026, quoting the founder's post on X. The newsletter gives US$125,000; this page converts at the ECB reference rate of 30 April 2026, 1.1702 US dollars per euro.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 29 April 2026", "value": "US$117,000", "grade": "C", "note": "High Signal newsletter, 29 April 2026, quoting the founder's post on X. Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is the subscription revenue of one month. The two April figures differ by 6%.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the April 2026 revenue", "value": "about US$1.49 million a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 106,000 euros times 1.1702 equals 124,041 US dollars; times 12 equals 1,488,494.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 2 March 2026", "value": "about US$83,400", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on the Profitable Founder podcast: on the day of the recording the company passed US$1 million of annual recurring revenue, \"83.4\" thousand a month.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Time from start to US$1 million annual recurring revenue", "value": "\"six, seven months\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on the podcast. The podcast title says 7 months.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, November 2025", "value": "over US$45,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in a Starter Story episode of November 2025, as quoted on Starter Story's researched profile: \"over 45K MRR within the first four months\".", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue in under six months", "value": "US$60,000", "grade": "C", "note": "The reviewer at Ecommerce-Platforms.com, 31 July 2026, reporting the founder's statement. The podcast host used the same figure on 2 March 2026.", "src": [ 4, 3 ] }, { "fact": "First recurring revenue", "value": "US$1,000 a month within 5 days, US$5,000 within 30 days", "grade": "C", "note": "Podcast host's summary, confirmed by the founder, and the reviewer.", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Starter Story's revenue estimate", "value": "about US$85,000 a month, as of 2026", "grade": "D", "note": "A directory estimate marked \"Triangulated from 3 public sources\". It is below the founder's April 2026 figures.", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "fact": "Team at the April 2026 figure", "value": "3 co-founders", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on the podcast: himself on the code, his best friend as designer and product lead, and a YouTube creator who makes the videos. Tiny Startups wrote \"Solo-founder\"; the founder's own account contradicts that.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Tiny Startups: \"100% bootstrapped\". The reviewer: \"bootstrapped, with no outside funding\".", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Stores generated", "value": "more than 120,000", "grade": "C", "note": "A company figure, reported by the reviewer, who calls it self-reported. The company's home page shows an animated counter that reads 0 in the page text.", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Rating", "value": "4.9 out of 5 from more than 1,500 sellers", "grade": "C", "note": "Company home page. The reviewer reports the same 4.9 on the Shopify App Store.", "src": [ 5, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Domain registration", "value": "20 March 2024", "grade": "B", "note": "Registry record on whois.com. The registrant is hidden behind a privacy service.", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "fact": "First archived page", "value": "16 November 2024", "grade": "B", "note": "Wayback Machine. The page already sold the same product, with \"$10 off\" for the first customers. The founder counts the growth from about August 2025, so the product existed before the start he describes.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Previous company, Minea", "value": "US$750,000 a month in recurring revenue, 5 co-founders", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on the podcast. The reviewer writes \"around $750K MRR\". Minea is a product-research tool for dropshippers, built with a large French YouTube creator.", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Price", "value": "US$79 a month for Pro; Free builds but cannot publish", "grade": "C", "note": "Company pricing page.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Affiliate commission", "value": "30% of every payment, recurring", "grade": "C", "note": "Company affiliate page, which also claims that the top affiliates earn US$8,400 a month.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Share of new customers from YouTube", "value": "more than 60%", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in the Starter Story episode, as quoted on Starter Story's profile: \"more than 60% of our new customers come from YouTube\".", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the stated start to the April 2026 figure", "value": "8 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: August 2025 to April 2026. The start month is itself derived from the podcast of 2 March 2026, \"seven months ago\".", "src": [ 3, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Earlier years", "what": "The founder says he spent about five years after school in an incubator building software that nobody used.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "Before 2025", "what": "Minea: his product-research tool merges with other French tools and with a large YouTube creator, Yomi Denzel, as co-founder. He says it grew to US$750,000 a month in recurring revenue with five co-founders, YouTube creators as the main channel, and no venture money.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "when": "20 March 2024", "what": "The domain dropmagic.ai is registered.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "16 November 2024", "what": "First archived page: \"Turn any product from Aliexpress into a complete high-converting Shopify store in minutes with AI\", with a launch discount for the first customers.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "About August 2025", "what": "He leaves his post as chief executive of Minea and starts Dropmagic with his best friend, a designer, and a 24-year-old YouTube creator as third co-founder. A launch video by the creator brings the first customers: US$1,000 of monthly recurring revenue in five days and US$5,000 in 30 days.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "In a Starter Story episode he says the product is at over US$45,000 of monthly recurring revenue within its first four months.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "9 February 2026", "what": "The site publishes comparison pages against Shopify Magic and other builders, and a set of dropshipping guides, for search traffic.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 16, 8 ] }, { "when": "2 March 2026", "what": "On the Profitable Founder podcast: US$1 million of annual recurring revenue reached that day, about US$83,400 a month, after plateaus at US$10,000 and US$50,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "29 April 2026", "what": "High Signal reports the founder's post: US$117,000 of monthly recurring revenue.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "22 May 2026", "what": "Tiny Startups reports the founder's post: over €106,000 made in April, about US$124,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "31 July 2026", "what": "A reviewer at Ecommerce-Platforms.com reports the company's claims of 120,000 stores generated and US$1 million of annual recurring revenue, and a 4.9 rating on the Shopify App Store.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "30 August 2026", "what": "Dropmagic V2: a rebuilt editor, an AI agent that designs a whole store from one link, a brand kit, an image studio and one-click publishing to Shopify.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A creator in the founding team", "text": "The founder says that at Minea the first plateau, at US$30,000 a month, broke when a large French YouTube creator became a co-founder, and that more than 80% of its customers then came from YouTube creators. For Dropmagic he put a creator in the founding team from the first day, paid with equity. The creator uses the product daily, gives product feedback, makes the launch videos and knows the conversion rate of a video, so the company can pay other creators at a known price per view." }, { "title": "A result in minutes", "text": "The user pastes a link and watches the store being built on screen, with animation. The founder calls this the wow moment: the funnel was built to be shared, like a TikTok video, and the creator's launch video of it spread. He says that when distribution is secured, the team can take its time and build the product well before launch." }, { "title": "Free to build, paid to publish", "text": "Building and previewing cost nothing. The customer pays US$79 a month only when the store goes to Shopify. A dropshipper who tests several products a month needs several stores, and the Pro plan allows unlimited stores, so the price is small next to the Shopify plan and the advertising budget that each test needs." }, { "title": "The same method three times", "text": "The founder describes one repeated method: find the one channel that works, close the others, and work with creators for months until they become ambassadors rather than advertisers. He says he used it for his earlier tools, for Minea and for Dropmagic, and that he built an internal tool, Blime, to find and track creators." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's podcast interview and from a Starter Story episode as quoted on Starter Story's researched profile. They are grade C.", "items": [ "The founder writes the code himself again, with Claude Code, after years as a chief executive who did not program. He says the technical part is hard even with an AI coding agent.", "Starter Story quotes him on the stack: Next.js and Vercel for the front end and hosting, Supabase for the database, Gemini and OpenAI models for the copywriting, an image model for the AI product images, Cursor as the editor, Sentry for debugging and Loops for email.", "The product sits on Shopify: the generated store is pushed into the customer's Shopify account, and the customer pays Shopify separately. Dropmagic does not host the live shop.", "Distribution is YouTube creators: a creator co-founder who makes the videos, paid creators tracked with an internal tool, and an affiliate program that pays 30% of every payment. Starter Story quotes the founder saying that more than 60% of new customers come from YouTube.", "Content pages for search were added in February 2026: comparisons against Shopify Magic, PagePilot, Atlas and others, and dropshipping guides.", "Version 2, released on 30 August 2026, rebuilt the editor and added an AI agent that designs the whole store, a brand kit and an image studio." ], "src": [ 3, 13, 14, 16, 9 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold store builders or no-code tools to small sellers and creators. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Dukaan", "years": "2020 to 2024", "funding": "US$17M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Launch an online store in 30 seconds, for India's small merchants.", "died": "It signed up more than five million merchants, but most sold a few hundred dollars a month and would not pay even US$10 a month when free alternatives existed. The paying ones left fast.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2425-dukaan" }, { "name": "Lysto", "years": "2021 to 2024", "funding": "US$12M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Storefronts for micro-entrepreneurs who sell through WhatsApp and Instagram.", "died": "Acquiring a seller cost more than the seller ever earned for the platform, and 70% of sellers left after fewer than three transactions.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2527-lysto" }, { "name": "Beetailer", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$250K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Turn a Facebook page into a shop for online retailers.", "died": "Facebook changed its platform often and then built shopping itself, and Shopify integrated with Facebook directly. The intermediary was no longer needed.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1197-beetailer" }, { "name": "Koji", "years": "2016 to 2021", "funding": "US$16M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A no-code builder for creators to make interactive apps without programming.", "died": "Squeezed between larger no-code platforms, and it could not turn free users into paying ones at a sustainable rate.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/284-koji" }, { "name": "Sosh", "years": "2012 to 2013", "funding": "US$2.3M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A drag-and-drop website builder that removes the designer-developer handoff.", "died": "Too complex for beginners, too rigid for professionals, and small businesses would not pay premium prices. Template builders took the mass market.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/565-sosh" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Dukaan and Lysto gave small sellers a free store and could not get them to pay, because the sellers earned too little. Koji and Sosh built general builders that were too open: beginners got lost, and free users never converted. Beetailer lived on top of Facebook until Facebook and Shopify built the feature themselves.", "Dropmagic sells to a customer who already pays: a dropshipper who pays Shopify US$39 a month and spends on advertising, and who needs a new store for each product test. The builder does not replace Shopify; it feeds it, so Shopify has no reason to shut it out, while Beetailer's platform did. The generative part is what the earlier builders lacked: the text, the images and the design are produced for the product, so the beginner does not face an empty template. The customers arrive through YouTube creators at a cost the founder says he knows per view, which is the problem Lysto never solved. The Beetailer risk remains: Shopify Magic, Shopify's own AI, already writes descriptions and generates starter layouts, and Dropmagic's comparison page admits that it is useful." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product, maybe. The method, only with a creator.", "text": "An AI store builder is not hard to build with current models, and several competitors exist: Atlas, PagePilot, Copyfy, BuildYourStore and Shopify's own Magic. The founder himself says that the growth, in the reviewer's quotation, had nothing to do with the product and everything to do with distribution. The repeatable part is the structure of the founding team and the funnel, not the code.", "steps": [ "Pick a market where the customers already pay for tools and need the result again and again, such as sellers who test products.", "Bring a creator with an audience in that market into the founding team, paid with equity, and let that person use the product daily and make the launch video.", "Build a first use that shows its result on screen in minutes, free, and charge at the moment the result is used.", "Find the one channel that works in the first month, close the others, and pay creators at a measured cost per view until they become ambassadors." ], "open": "The same structure in other markets with paying hobbyists or small sellers: print-on-demand shops, Etsy sellers, Amazon listings, real-estate listings, and short-video advertising for the stores that these builders produce." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Self-reported, and two measures that differ", "text": "The April 2026 revenue of over €106,000 and the US$117,000 of monthly recurring revenue are founder posts, repeated by two newsletters. Revenue in a month and recurring revenue are different measures, and nobody outside has checked either. Starter Story's own estimate, about US$85,000 a month, is lower." }, { "title": "Not a solo founder", "text": "Tiny Startups wrote \"Solo-founder\". On the podcast the founder says there are three co-founders: himself, a designer and a YouTube creator. Customer reviews quoted by the reviewer also thank a named support person. The revenue is shared by a team, and the creator holds equity." }, { "title": "When did it start", "text": "The domain dates from March 2024 and a selling page was archived in November 2024, but the founder counts the growth from about August 2025, when he left Minea. The \"seven months to US$1 million\" story leaves out the earlier version." }, { "title": "Shopify can build it in", "text": "Beetailer died when the platform added the feature. Shopify Magic already writes product text, edits images and generates a starter layout for free with every plan. Dropmagic's defense is design quality, persona-based copy and image generation, all of which Shopify can add." }, { "title": "A sector with a regulator's attention", "text": "The French consumer authority DGCCRF checked 215 dropshipping sites in 2022 and found 116 in breach: misleading claims, fake reviews, undelivered or dangerous products. Dropmagic's guide recommends urgency elements such as countdown timers and limited-stock notices, its 2024 page imported supplier reviews into the store, and its home page shows testimonials signed with initials and marked \"Verified\". The product builds the shop; the seller carries the legal duties." }, { "title": "One channel, one creator", "text": "More than 60% of new customers come from YouTube, by the founder's account. The co-founding creator makes the videos. If that relationship or the YouTube channel weakens, the funnel weakens with it." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://dropmagic.ai/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Tiny Startups newsletter #102, 22 May 2026: This week in Tiny Startups, Tweet of the Week", "url": "https://tinystartupsnewsletter.beehiiv.com/p/this-week-in-tiny-startups-102", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Quotes and links the founder's post on X: over €106,000 made in April from Dropmagic, with the notes \"Solo-founder\" and \"100% bootstrapped\". The newsletter writes the founder's name as \"Louc\"." }, { "title": "High Signal newsletter by Pete, 29 April 2026: $117k MRR for Dropmagic", "url": "https://www.highsignal.io/117k-mrr-for-dropmagic/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Quotes and links the founder's post on X: US$117,000 of monthly recurring revenue." }, { "title": "Profitable Founder podcast by Florian Darroman, 2 March 2026: I Built a SaaS From 0 to $83K MRR in 7 Months, show notes and transcript", "url": "https://www.buzzsprout.com/2026218/episodes/18973973-i-built-a-saas-from-0-to-83k-mrr-in-7-months", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the show notes and the machine transcript in full. Founder interview. Source for the three co-founders, the Minea history, the US$1 million annual run rate, the first weeks and the creator method. The transcript misspells several names." }, { "title": "Ecommerce-Platforms.com, Bogdan Rancea, 31 July 2026: DropMagic Review: An Honest Look at the AI Shopify Store Builder", "url": "https://ecommerce-platforms.com/articles/dropmagic-review", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A reviewer who reports the company's claims and quotes Shopify App Store reviews. Source for the US$60,000 figure, the 120,000 stores claim, the Minea co-founding and the plan details." }, { "title": "Dropmagic home page, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://dropmagic.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product description, the rating claim and the testimonials. Checked for income promises: none found." }, { "title": "Dropmagic pricing page, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://dropmagic.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the two plans." }, { "title": "Dropmagic affiliate program page, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://dropmagic.ai/affiliate", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 30% recurring commission and the affiliate earnings claim." }, { "title": "Dropmagic guide: How to Start Dropshipping in 2026, read 16 October 2026", "url": "https://dropmagic.ai/dropshipping", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Checked for income promises: it gives margin ranges and says most first products fail. Source for the urgency-element advice." }, { "title": "Dropmagic updates page: Dropmagic V2, 30 August 2026", "url": "https://dropmagic.ai/updates", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the version 2 release." }, { "title": "Dropmagic terms and conditions, updated 21 April 2026", "url": "https://dropmagic.ai/legal/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. French law governs the terms. Source for the refund rule." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine snapshot of dropmagic.ai, 16 November 2024", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20241116112509/https://dropmagic.ai/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The earliest archived copy. Source for the 2024 version of the product." }, { "title": "whois.com record for dropmagic.ai", "url": "https://www.whois.com/whois/dropmagic.ai", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Registry record: registered on 20 March 2024, registrant hidden by a privacy service." }, { "title": "Starter Story researched profile for Dropmagic: revenue page", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/businesses/dropmagic/revenue", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. An AI-compiled profile that the founder did not write. Its estimate is grade D. It quotes the founder's words from a Starter Story episode of November 2025 and from the podcast, which are cited as founder statements." }, { "title": "Starter Story researched profile for Dropmagic: growth channels page", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/businesses/dropmagic/growth-channels", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Quotes the founder on YouTube as the source of more than 60% of new customers." }, { "title": "DGCCRF, 23 November 2023: Dropshipping, des manquements dans la moitié des sites contrôlés", "url": "https://www.economie.gouv.fr/dgccrf/dropshipping-des-manquements-dans-la-moitie-des-sites-controles", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The French consumer authority's report on its 2022 checks of 215 dropshipping sites. Context for the sector, not about Dropmagic." }, { "title": "Dropmagic comparison page, 9 February 2026: Shopify Magic vs DropMagic", "url": "https://dropmagic.ai/ai-store-builder/shopify-magic-vs-dropmagic", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's own comparison. Source for the business model description and the competitor list." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/calbuddy/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/calbuddy.md", "slug": "calbuddy", "name": "CalBuddy", "country": "Israel", "sector": "Health Care", "productType": "AI calorie-tracking iPhone and Android app in Hebrew", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-23", "launchLabel": "June 2025", "outcomeLabel": "Over US$81K a month, April 2026", "sticker": "$81K/mo, founder-reported", "outcomeUsd": 972000, "months": 10, "teamLabel": "1 founder, no employees reported; two Israeli fitness influencers hold a 50/50 share of the revenue from Israel (founder's statement, August 2026)", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Localization", "group": "health-appearance", "channel": "creators", "trend": "growing", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Health" ], "product": "A phone app for Israel, in Hebrew: photograph a meal and the app returns an estimate of its calories and macronutrients in seconds, then logs it against a daily target. It also reads barcodes, has a database of foods common in Israel, and reads steps and burned calories from Apple Health. The founder says it is a copy of the idea behind Cal AI, the American app, rebuilt for one country and language.", "why": "The founder, a marketer who is not a programmer, said in an August 2026 interview that he built the first working version in two weeks with the AI code editor Cursor, launched in June 2025, and reached about US$20,000 a month in four months with paid ads, which cost less in Israel than in the United States. He then gave two well-known Israeli fitness influencers half of the revenue from Israel instead of paying them per post, and said that this took the app to over US$81,000 in April 2026.", "summary": [ "CalBuddy is a calorie tracker, an app in which a person records every meal so that the total calories eaten each day can be compared with a target. The AI part replaces the typing: the user photographs the plate, the app sends the image to a vision model from Google or OpenAI, and the model returns the foods it sees, their estimated calories and their macronutrients, meaning the grams of protein, carbohydrate and fat. The app is in Hebrew, is sold mainly in Israel, and is paid for through subscriptions in the Apple App Store and Google Play.", "Tomer Cnaan, who is listed as the developer of the app on the App Store, told Starter Story in a video interview published on 9 August 2026 that he had worked in marketing for other businesses, heard a podcast with the founder of Cal AI in March 2025, and decided to build the same kind of app for his own country, where none existed in Hebrew. He said that revenue was about US$1,000 in June 2025, the first month, about US$20,000 a month after four months of paid advertising, and over US$81,000 in April 2026. The company behind the app is CALBUDDY TECHNOLOGIES LTD., registered in Israel.", "Every revenue figure on this page comes from that one interview, so the page carries the badge \"Reported, not verified\" and evidence grade D. What outside sources confirm is smaller: the Israeli App Store page showed 2,533 ratings with an average of 4.2 in October 2026, Google Play showed more than 10,000 downloads, and the company's own pages name the tools, the prices and the legal entity. The founder's own words that he \"copied a huge app\" are the framing of the interview, and this page keeps them: the product is a localization, a version of an existing product adapted to one language and market, not a new idea." ], "factsCaption": "Revenue of over US$81,000 in April 2026, ten months after launch, as the founder stated in one video interview in August 2026; store listings and the company's own pages for everything else", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is a founder statement from one interview, or a third-party estimate that says so, with no second source. A grade C value comes from the company's own pages or from an app store listing read on the date given. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a podcast about Cal AI to an app that the founder says makes over US$81,000 a month in Israel, in about thirteen months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "CalBuddy prices in October 2026, from the company's pricing page and the Israeli App Store listing, in shekels converted to US dollars at 1 ILS = US$0.32036 on 23 October 2026 (grade C)", "note": "The company's pricing page, dated 2 July 2026, lists a yearly plan at ₪119.90 with a 3-day free trial and a monthly plan at ₪40.50, in Israeli new shekels including VAT. The Israeli App Store listing shows the same two prices as in-app purchases, plus older or promotional yearly subscriptions at ₪59.90, ₪84.00 and ₪99.90. The company's pages say the premium subscription is needed for food-scan results. Web purchases are processed by Paddle according to the pricing page, and by RevenueCat Web Billing according to the terms of use dated 20 August 2026.", "rows": [ [ "Premium, yearly", "3.20", "", "₪119.90 a year (US$38.41); 3-day free trial" ], [ "Premium, monthly", "", "12.97", "₪40.50 a month" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue, April 2026", "value": "over US$81,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder's statement in the Starter Story video interview published 9 August 2026, read from a revenue chart he showed on screen. No second source.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the April 2026 figure", "value": "about US$972,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$81,000 times 12. This is the headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the first month, June 2025", "value": "about US$1,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder's statement in the same interview.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue after about four months of paid ads", "value": "about US$20,000 a month", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder's statement: paid ads with creatives modeled on viral fitness content took the app to around US$20,000 a month in four months, before the influencer deals.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Ratings on the Israeli App Store, October 2026", "value": "2,533 ratings, average 4.2 of 5", "grade": "C", "note": "Apple's listing data on the Israeli store page, read 23 October 2026. The United States store page shows 39 ratings, average 4.4.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Google Play downloads, October 2026", "value": "more than 10,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Google's listing shows the bracket \"10K+\" and a last update on 5 October 2026.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Company", "value": "CALBUDDY TECHNOLOGIES LTD., registered in Israel", "grade": "C", "note": "Named in the terms of use, the privacy policy and the pricing page, and as the developer on Google Play.", "src": [ 4, 5, 6, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Developer named on the App Store", "value": "Tomer Cnaan", "grade": "C", "note": "Both the Israeli and the United States App Store pages list Tomer Cnaan as developer. Starter Story names the founder as Tomer and links the X account tomercn.", "src": [ 1, 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Time to build", "value": "2 weeks to a working version, about 2 months to the App Store", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder's statement. He says the wait for the Apple developer program and the App Store review took longer than the coding.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Influencer deal", "value": "50/50 share of revenue from Israel", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder's statement: two well-known fitness influencers get half of the Israeli revenue under an agreement that fixes how many pieces of content and filming days they deliver each month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly cost of the named tools", "value": "US$355 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the founder's figures: Claude US$200, PostHog US$20, Supabase US$35, Expo US$100. RevenueCat was named without a price.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "AI models behind the food scan", "value": "Google Gemini API, with the OpenAI API as fallback, through the Vercel AI Gateway", "grade": "C", "note": "Privacy policy dated 20 August 2026. Barcodes are checked against the Open Food Facts database.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Subscription prices", "value": "₪119.90 a year or ₪40.50 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Pricing page dated 2 July 2026 and the in-app purchase list on the Israeli App Store page.", "src": [ 6, 2 ] }, { "fact": "AppGoblin estimate for the Android app, October 2026", "value": "about 47,000 installs and under US$10,000 a month", "grade": "D", "note": "A third-party estimate for Google Play only, marked as an estimate on the page. It says nothing about the iPhone app, which the founder presents as the main one.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder mentions no investors in the interview, and no source read for this page reports a round.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the April 2026 figure", "value": "10 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: June 2025 to April 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "March 2025", "what": "Cnaan, then doing marketing for other businesses, is looking for a product of his own. He hears a podcast with the founder of Cal AI about scaling to over US$1 million a month, and decides to build the same thing for Israel in Hebrew.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "Spring 2025", "what": "With the AI code editor Cursor, and with little coding experience, he has a working version with the main features in two weeks. Getting into the Apple developer program and through App Store review takes most of the two months to launch.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "June 2025", "what": "Launch. About US$1,000 of revenue in the first month, the founder says. AppGoblin first recorded the Google Play listing on 21 June 2025.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 8 ] }, { "when": "About October 2025", "what": "About US$20,000 a month after four months of paid ads, the founder says, with creatives modeled on the most viral fitness content in the United States and Israel.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "Late 2025 to early 2026", "what": "Two well-known Israeli fitness influencers sign revenue-share deals: half of the revenue from Israel in return for a fixed number of posts and filming days a month. The founder says this took the app from US$20,000 to US$80,000 a month.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "April 2026", "what": "Over US$81,000 of revenue in the month, per the chart the founder showed in the interview.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2 July 2026", "what": "The company's pricing page lists ₪119.90 a year and ₪40.50 a month, with web checkout through Paddle.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "9 August 2026", "what": "Starter Story publishes the video interview \"I Copied A Huge App. Now I Make $80K/Month\".", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "20 August 2026", "what": "New terms of use and privacy policy name CALBUDDY TECHNOLOGIES LTD., the Google Gemini and OpenAI APIs, Supabase, RevenueCat, Expo, PostHog, Sentry, Microsoft Clarity and Singular.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The Israeli App Store page shows 2,533 ratings at 4.2; Google Play shows 10,000+ downloads and an update on 5 October 2026. The store listings name Tomer Cnaan as developer.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 7 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Copy a proven product into one language", "text": "The founder says the product is not a one-to-one clone but is not very different from other AI calorie trackers: the same photo-to-calories flow, in Hebrew, with small changes for how Israelis eat and name food. He chose a large category, fitness and nutrition, because a small country cannot support a narrow one, and chose it because he knew the Israeli fitness scene personally." }, { "title": "Build with AI, launch in two months", "text": "A marketer with high-school coding experience got a working app in two weeks by prompting Cursor, he says. The founder's advice is that the slow part is Apple: the developer program application and the App Store reviews, not the code." }, { "title": "Paid ads where attention is cheap", "text": "He says every channel works and the question is which one is most efficient in a given market. In Israel the CPM, the price of showing an ad a thousand times, is much lower than in the United States, so ads could be profitable without a long testing period. He studied the most viral content of similar American apps and of Israeli fitness accounts, made ad creatives in that style, and reached about US$20,000 a month in four months, by his account." }, { "title": "Influencers as partners, not as ad space", "text": "Instead of paying well-known influencers per story or reel, he offered them a share of revenue from Israel, 50/50 by his account, under an agreement that sets how many pieces of content and filming days they owe each month. He waited until the app made about US$20,000 a month so that he could negotiate from strength, and says the two faces took the app to over US$80,000 a month. The cost is that half of the home-market revenue now belongs to the partners." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's interview (grade D) and from the company's own terms of use and privacy policy (grade C).", "items": [ "Cursor, the AI code editor, for the first version; Claude for coding and for AI agents across the business, at US$200 a month, the founder said in August 2026.", "Expo, the React Native toolchain, for the app and for in-app updates, at US$100 a month per the founder; the privacy policy also names Expo for push notifications.", "Supabase for the database, file storage and backend functions, at US$35 a month per the founder; the privacy policy says the data sits in Frankfurt.", "Google Gemini API for the meal analysis, with the OpenAI API as fallback, routed through the Vercel AI Gateway; Open Food Facts for barcodes.", "RevenueCat for subscription management and web billing; Apple and Google for store billing; Paddle on the web pricing page.", "PostHog for product analytics at US$20 a month per the founder; Sentry for crash reports; Microsoft Clarity for session recordings; Singular for ad attribution to Meta, TikTok and Google.", "No user accounts: the app creates an anonymous identifier on the device and ties the profile, logs and subscription to it." ], "src": [ 1, 4, 5, 6 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold consumers a data-driven way to eat or live more healthily. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Arivale", "years": "2015 to 2019", "funding": "US$50M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Scientific wellness: genomic tests, blood markers and coaching to improve your health before you get sick.", "died": "Spent about US$4,700 per customer to earn US$1,200 a year, and the customers lost interest after the first data.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/8-arivale" }, { "name": "Refolo", "years": "2017 to 2021", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A personal meal planner that moves omnivores to plant-based eating with customized recipes.", "died": "Charged for meal plans that free sites gave away, and larger wellness apps absorbed the features.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1994-refolo" }, { "name": "Nutrigene", "years": "2018 to 2021", "funding": "US$3M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Custom liquid vitamins mixed from your DNA, lifestyle and health goals.", "died": "High costs, regulation, and competitors with simpler pills.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1010-nutrigene" }, { "name": "SpringWit", "years": "2014 to 2017", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A subscription that turns wearable data into tailored health insights and recommendations.", "died": "Apple and Fitbit owned the data, and the generic tips bored the users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1538-springwit" }, { "name": "Airo Health", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$4M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A wearable that tracks stress, nutrition intake and exercise in real time.", "died": "Could not justify its price against Apple and Fitbit, and could not raise more money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1465-airo-health" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the five asked consumers to pay for health insight that was expensive to produce: lab tests, coaches, custom supplements, hardware, or hand-written plans. Their marginal cost per customer stayed high, and when a large platform or a free site offered a simpler version, the customers left. CalBuddy's insight is produced by a rented vision model for a fraction of a cent per photo, so the founder says the app could be built in two weeks and could run on a few hundred dollars a month of tools.", "Two more things differ. First, the product was not new: Cal AI and others had already shown in the United States that people pay a subscription for photo-based calorie counting, so the founder says he took no product risk, only distribution risk. Second, he chose a market small enough that no funded competitor had bothered to localize for it, where ads were cheap and where he knew the influencers personally. Whether this holds against a Hebrew version from a large competitor is the open question of this page." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The numbers, unverified.", "text": "The method is explicit and the founder presents it as repeatable: take an app that is proven in the United States, rebuild it with AI tools for one language and country that the large apps ignore, buy ads where they are cheap, and then convert the local celebrities into partners with a share of revenue. The revenue figures rest on one interview, so a reader should treat the size of the result as unconfirmed.", "steps": [ "Pick a category large enough to work in a small country, and a proven product in it that has no version in your language.", "Build the first version with an AI code editor and submit to Apple early; the review and the developer program take longer than the code.", "Run paid ads with creatives modeled on the most viral content of the same category, in the local language, and measure cost per subscriber.", "Once the app has traction and public reviews, offer the best-known local creators a revenue share with fixed content obligations instead of a fee per post." ], "open": "Any subscription app proven in English with no serious version in a mid-sized language: calorie and fitness tracking, sleep, language learning, budgeting, and the other categories where the American leaders have not localized." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "Every revenue figure on this page rests on one source: the Starter Story video interview published on 9 August 2026, in which the founder, Tomer, says that revenue was about US$1,000 in June 2025, about US$20,000 a month after four months, and over US$81,000 in April 2026, reading from a chart he shows on screen. No payment processor, store report or journalist has confirmed any of it, and no second interview with dated figures was found. The only outside numbers are weaker: the Israeli App Store listing's 2,533 ratings, Google Play's \"10K+\" downloads, and AppGoblin's estimate of under US$10,000 a month for the Android app alone. The founder's full name, Tomer Cnaan, comes from the App Store developer field, not from the interview, which gives only the first name and the X account tomercn. A reader could look for a RevenueCat or TrustMRR verified profile (none existed on 23 October 2026), a second interview with dated figures, or a filing by CALBUDDY TECHNOLOGIES LTD. in the Israeli companies register." }, { "title": "Half of the home market belongs to the partners", "text": "The founder says the two influencers receive 50 percent of revenue from Israel, which is where the app is sold. The US$81,000 figure he gives is revenue, not what remains after their share, Apple's and Google's commissions and the advertising spend. The page has no profit figure." }, { "title": "A copy can be copied", "text": "The founder says that anyone can build the same app with Cursor in two weeks and that his advantage is brand and distribution. Cal AI or another large app could ship a Hebrew version, and a second Israeli builder could sign other influencers. The predecessors on this page died when a bigger platform offered the same thing." }, { "title": "AI estimates of food are estimates", "text": "The company's own terms say that portion sizes, hidden ingredients and cooking methods can cause significant errors, and that users must not rely on the app for allergens or medical conditions. App Store reviews quoted on the listing complain about recognition accuracy and about refunds, which Apple controls." }, { "title": "A single small market", "text": "The app is in Hebrew with an Arabic and English interface, and the terms say it is primarily intended for users in Israel. Growth beyond the current figure would need either more of a market of about ten million people or a second localization, which means a second brand and a second set of partners." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://calbuddy.co.il/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6745977666" }, { "kind": "android", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tc.calbuddy" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Starter Story, 9 August 2026: I Copied A Huge App. Now I Make $80K/Month (video interview with transcript)", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/i-copied-a-huge-app-now-i-make-80k-month", "grade": "D", "how": "Read the page and the full transcript. Founder's statements on screen. Source for every revenue figure, the build time, the ad and influencer strategy, the tools and their costs. The page names the founder only as Tomer and links the X account tomercn." }, { "title": "Apple App Store, Israel: CalBuddy, calorie calculator (id6745977666), read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/il/app/calbuddy/id6745977666", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the developer name Tomer Cnaan, the 2,533 ratings at 4.2, the in-app purchase prices in shekels, the languages and the 9+ age rating." }, { "title": "Apple App Store, United States: CalBuddy, calorie calculator (id6745977666), read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/calbuddy/id6745977666", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Confirms the developer name Tomer Cnaan; 39 ratings at 4.4; version history from February 2026 showing Apple Health, step tracking and a larger food database." }, { "title": "CalBuddy terms of use, last updated 20 August 2026", "url": "https://calbuddy.co.il/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the legal entity CALBUDDY TECHNOLOGIES LTD., the no-account design, the AI providers, RevenueCat and the disclaimers about estimates." }, { "title": "CalBuddy privacy policy, last updated 20 August 2026", "url": "https://calbuddy.co.il/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the full list of service providers: Supabase in Frankfurt, Google Gemini API and OpenAI via the Vercel AI Gateway, Open Food Facts, Singular, Meta, TikTok and Google ads, RevenueCat, Expo, PostHog, Sentry, Microsoft Clarity." }, { "title": "CalBuddy pricing page, last updated 2 July 2026", "url": "https://calbuddy.co.il/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the yearly and monthly prices in shekels, the 3-day trial and the Paddle checkout." }, { "title": "Google Play: CalBuddy, calorie calculator (com.tc.calbuddy), read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tc.calbuddy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the developer CalBuddy Technologies LTD, the 10K+ downloads bracket and the 5 October 2026 update." }, { "title": "AppGoblin: CalBuddy Android analytics, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://www.appgoblin.info/apps/com.tc.calbuddy", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. A third-party estimate for the Android app only: about 47,000 installs, under US$10,000 a month, first crawled 21 June 2025." }, { "title": "nextplatform, 11 August 2026: iOS app case study, CalBuddy's winning strategy for a small local market (Korean)", "url": "https://nextplatform.net/ios-app-case-study-calbuddys-winning-strategy-for-a-small-local-market/", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. A secondary account of the same Starter Story interview, by a named author, with the same figures and the same tool list; it adds no independent verification." }, { "title": "Frankfurter exchange-rate API, ILS to USD, 23 October 2026", "url": "https://api.frankfurter.app/latest?from=ILS&to=USD", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the JSON reply: 1 ILS = US$0.32036. Used only to convert the shekel prices in the pricing table." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/welmi-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/welmi-ai.md", "slug": "welmi-ai", "name": "Welmi", "country": "Cyprus", "sector": "Health & Fitness", "productType": "AI calorie counter and food-photo scanner app", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-23", "launchLabel": "March 2025", "outcomeLabel": "Over US$200K monthly recurring revenue, November 2025", "sticker": "$200K+ MRR in 8 months", "outcomeUsd": 2400000, "months": 8, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders; a contact directory lists 6 people in 2026 (not verified)", "fundingLabel": "None; store-payout advances from Adapty Finance in 2026", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "health-appearance", "channel": "paid-ads", "trend": "growing", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Health" ], "product": "An iPhone and Android app that counts calories from a photo of the plate, from a voice note or from a barcode, sets a daily calorie and protein target, and keeps a diary of GLP-1 weight-loss injections next to the meals. The app recognizes the food with AI; the calorie numbers, meal plans, fasting timer and progress charts are built around that.", "why": "It entered a crowded category in March 2025 with paid advertising instead of a personal audience, and it treated the economics of each ad channel as the product to optimize. Cheaper attribution let it test low-cost traffic, and weekly advances on App Store payouts let it put each week's earnings back into ads within days instead of 45. Adapty, the company whose software runs the app's subscriptions, published the figures under its own name.", "summary": [ "Welmi is a calorie counter, an app in which a person records what they eat and the app adds up the calories and the protein, carbohydrate and fat against a daily target. The difference from the older apps in this category is the input: the user takes a photo of the plate and an AI model names the foods and estimates the amounts, or the user says the meal aloud. The app also has a GLP-1 diary. GLP-1 medicines such as semaglutide and tirzepatide are weekly injections prescribed for weight loss; the app records the dose, sends injection reminders and logs side effects, and its store page says that it does not recommend or calculate doses. The seller is T-SHAPED APPS LTD, a company with its registered office in Paphos, Cyprus, which also sells a period tracker and a gym workout planner.", "The app launched in March 2025. Adapty, the subscription software company that records the app's purchases and that also runs its ad attribution, published two case studies. The first, dated 22 December 2025, gives a dated series of monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the subscription revenue of one month): US$60,000 in August 2025, US$150,000 in October 2025 and over US$200,000 in November 2025, eight months after launch. The second, dated 7 April 2026, quotes the co-founder, named in it only as Sergey, saying that revenue went \"from around $30–50K to $300K in about four months\" after the company began taking weekly advances on its App Store payouts instead of waiting 45 days, with no outside capital. A contact-data directory lists Sergei Tokarev as co-founder and CEO of Welmi.ai and counts 6 employees; no other downloaded source gives the full name or the headcount.", "This page grades every number by its evidence. The headline figure is grade A because the company that processes the subscriptions stated it, as with the Wave AI story on this site. The headcount and the founder's full name rest on a directory and are marked as such. The page also shows five earlier health and nutrition startups from the Loot Drop database that failed with a similar promise." ], "factsCaption": "Over US$200,000 in monthly recurring revenue eight months after launch, stated by the company whose software records the app's subscriptions, with the later US$300,000 figure from the same company but without a month", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value is stated by Adapty, the company whose software records the app's subscriptions and runs its ad attribution, in a case study under its own name. A grade B value is a count or a price published by Adapty, Apple or Google that is not a payment figure. A grade C value is the founder's own words or the company's own pages. A grade D value comes from one directory and is not verified. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a launch in March 2025 to more than US$200,000 a month in November 2025, then a reported US$300,000 in 2026, with paid ads as the only named channel. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Welmi in-app purchase prices listed by Apple on the US App Store page, read 23 October 2026 (grade B). Apple lists the price points but not the plan names, so the table groups them by period", "note": "The app is free to download and logs food for free; the store page says that AI analysis results require a subscription. Apple lists four yearly price points, three monthly ones, one weekly one, a product named premium at US$79.99 and a Welmi AI Bundle at US$24.99, whose periods the listing does not show. The monthly equivalents of the yearly prices were computed on this page. The company's own terms say that purchases made on the website go through Stripe and that App Store and Google Play purchases follow the stores' rules.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "food log; AI analysis results need a subscription" ], [ "Yearly, 4 price points", "2.00 to 5.00", "", "US$23.99, 35.99, 47.99 or 59.99 a year" ], [ "Monthly, 3 price points", "", "11.99 to 19.99", "US$11.99, 14.99 or 19.99 a month" ], [ "Weekly", "", "4.99 a week", "" ], [ "premium", "", "", "US$79.99; period not shown by Apple" ], [ "Welmi AI Bundle", "", "", "US$24.99; period not shown by Apple" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, November 2025", "value": "over US$200,000", "grade": "A", "note": "Adapty's case study published on 22 December 2025, in its timeline: \"November 2025: $200K+ MRR\". Adapty's software records the app's subscriptions. The same page says the team went from its first organic sale to over US$200,000 in MRR within eight months of the March 2025 launch.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the November 2025 figure", "value": "about US$2.4 million a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 200,000 times 12. The headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, August 2025", "value": "US$60,000", "grade": "A", "note": "Same Adapty timeline: \"August 2025: $60K MRR\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, October 2025", "value": "US$150,000", "grade": "A", "note": "Same Adapty timeline: \"October 2025: $150K MRR\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from August to November 2025", "value": "about 3.3 times in 3 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 200,000 divided by 60,000 equals 3.33. Adapty's headline for the same period is \"from $60K to $200K MRR in 3 months\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue growth reported in April 2026", "value": "from around US$30,000 to 50,000 to US$300,000 in about four months", "grade": "A", "note": "Adapty's second case study, published 7 April 2026, quoting the co-founder: \"We went from around $30–50K to $300K in about four months.\" The page calls it revenue and does not name the months or say per month in that sentence; its highlights say \"Grew revenue from $30-50K to $300K in 3-4 months\". The starting range is below the US$60,000 MRR that the first case study gives for August 2025, so the two pages do not describe the same months in a way this page can reconcile.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "A", "note": "Adapty, April 2026: \"They didn't raise outside capital or take on debt.\" The company used Adapty Finance, which advances up to 85% of unpaid store earnings for a fixed fee, with no equity.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Store payout cycle before and after the advances", "value": "45 days, then weekly", "grade": "B", "note": "Adapty, April 2026. The co-founder: \"the money was sitting in Apple's payout queue, and we couldn't touch it for another 45 days.\" Funds arrived within 48 hours of the application and the company switched to weekly payouts.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Return on the best ad campaigns", "value": "over 100% in the first week", "grade": "B", "note": "Adapty, April 2026: \"ROI on their best campaigns exceeded 100% in the first week\". A vendor's statement about advertising returns, not a payment figure, so graded B.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Attribution cost per install", "value": "US$0.04 with Adjust, US$0.02 with Adapty", "grade": "C", "note": "The co-founder's words in the December 2025 case study. Attribution is the matching of an app install to the ad that caused it.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 co-founders; 6 people according to a directory", "grade": "D", "note": "Adapty names only \"Sergey, co-founder Welmi.ai\". RocketReach, a contact-data directory, lists Sergei Tokarev as Co-Founder and CEO, a second co-founder, a head of engineering, a product manager and a creative producer, and writes \"Welmi.ai employs 6 employees\". The help center articles are signed by the person the directory lists as head of engineering. Not verified by any other source.", "src": [ 5, 7, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Ratings and downloads, October 2026", "value": "20,000 US App Store ratings at 4.8; over 1 million Google Play downloads and 178,000 reviews", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's and Google's store pages, read 23 October 2026. The App Store description claims more than 250,000 ratings across countries and the home page claims 226,000 or more; those are the company's own counts.", "src": [ 3, 4, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Android launch", "value": "August 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "AppBrain, a directory of Google Play developers, records T-SHAPED APPS LTD as active since August 2025 with 3 apps and 2 million downloads in total.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Company", "value": "T-SHAPED APPS LTD, Griva Digeni 51, Athineon Court, Office 202, 8047 Paphos, Cyprus", "grade": "B", "note": "Seller on both store pages and in the company's own terms. Its App Store developer page lists two more apps, Vea, a period tracker, and Gymtone, a gym workout planner. The UK Companies House register has no company of this name; the Cyprus register's public search needs a login, so the directors could not be read.", "src": [ 3, 4, 6, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Age rating and medical position", "value": "9+ on the App Store; \"not a medical device\"", "grade": "B", "note": "The store page: \"Welmi does not recommend or calculate doses. Follow your doctor's instructions.\" The help center says the profile's age options start at 18 and the terms require users to be at least 18.", "src": [ 3, 7, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the headline figure", "value": "8 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: March 2025 to November 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "March 2025", "what": "Welmi launches on the App Store. Adapty's timeline: \"March 2025: Launch\". The company starts with Adapty for subscriptions and with Adjust for attribution.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "3 April 2025", "what": "The earliest archived copy of welmi.ai is a one-page site made on Tilda, a website builder, titled \"Calorie Counter & Diet - FitMe\" with the line \"Personal nutritionist for everyone\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "August 2025", "what": "US$60,000 in monthly recurring revenue. The Android version appears on Google Play the same month, according to AppBrain.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 11 ] }, { "when": "Second half of 2025", "what": "The company moves attribution from Adjust to Adapty's new attribution product, among the first apps to do so. The co-founder says the per-install price halved, from US$0.04 to US$0.02, which made cheap traffic channels worth testing.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "October 2025", "what": "US$150,000 in monthly recurring revenue.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "Over US$200,000 in monthly recurring revenue, eight months after the first organic sale.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "22 December 2025", "what": "Adapty publishes the first case study, \"How Welmi.ai scaled from $60K to $200K MRR in 3 months\".", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "Early 2026", "what": "The company applies for Adapty Finance, which advances up to 85% of unpaid store earnings. Funds arrive within 48 hours and payouts become weekly. The co-founder: \"The first week we got a weekly payout through Adapty Finance, we put it straight back into ads.\"", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "7 April 2026", "what": "Adapty publishes the second case study: revenue \"from around $30–50K to $300K in about four months\", no outside capital, paid acquisition in several regions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "5 October 2026", "what": "Version 7.6 on the App Store, after at least 25 versions since April 2026. 20,000 US ratings at 4.8; Google Play shows more than 1 million downloads.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3, 4 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Paid ads as the business, not a tactic", "text": "No founder audience, no launch site and no creator channel appears in any source. Adapty writes that the team ran \"paid acquisition across multiple regions and scaling what worked\" and that its best campaigns returned more than 100% in the first week. The product is the paywall and the ad creative as much as the food scanner." }, { "title": "Cheaper attribution opened cheap traffic", "text": "Attribution software matches each install to the ad that caused it. With Adjust the company paid about US$0.04 per install, which the co-founder says made low-cost traffic segments unprofitable to test. Adapty's attribution at about US$0.02 per install, connected to the same dashboard as the subscription revenue, let the team see return on ad spend per campaign in real time and test segments it had skipped." }, { "title": "Weekly payouts instead of 45 days", "text": "Apple pays developers on a monthly schedule, so money earned in a week was unusable for about 45 days. In 2026 the company took advances on unpaid store earnings from Adapty Finance, for a fixed fee and no equity, and reinvested each week's earnings into the next week's ads. Adapty's second case study attributes the rise to about US$300,000 in about four months to this faster loop." }, { "title": "Photo logging plus a GLP-1 diary", "text": "The feature list on the store page is the category standard in 2025: photo, voice and barcode logging, daily calorie and protein targets, meal plans, fasting timer, Apple Health sync. The GLP-1 diary is the addition that follows the market: people on weekly weight-loss injections need to log doses, reminders and side effects, and the app keeps that next to the meals while saying it does not calculate doses." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the store pages, the company's own legal text and website code, and the Adapty case studies. Grades B and C.", "items": [ "An iPhone app that needs iOS 17.1 or later, 169.8 MB, in English and 16 more languages; an Android version on Google Play since August 2025 under the package name welmi.ai.android.", "Adapty's SDK handles the in-app subscriptions, paywalls and A/B tests; Adapty Attribution replaced Adjust for matching installs to ads; Adapty Finance advances the store payouts. The attribution flow described in the case study takes spend data from Meta Ads and TikTok for Business.", "Purchases on the website go through Stripe, according to the company's privacy policy; the policy also names Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Firebase and an AppsFlyer ID, and the app syncs with Apple Health.", "The website is a single-page React app with i18next translations in 17 languages, served from Netlify according to a comment in its HTML; the first site in April 2025 was built on Tilda. The AI model that recognizes food is not named anywhere.", "Support runs on an Intercom help center with 27 articles in 12 languages; the store pages give a support address and a Cyprus phone number." ], "src": [ 3, 4, 1, 2, 6, 8, 9, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold personal nutrition or health insight to consumers and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Refolo", "years": "2017 to 2021", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A meal-planning app with personalized recipes for people moving to a plant-based diet.", "died": "Charged for meal plans that Pinterest gave away, then larger wellness apps added the same features. Too few users were motivated enough to pay.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1994-refolo" }, { "name": "Wink Health", "years": "2015 to 2018", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Personal health recommendations on demand, by subscription, from the user's data.", "died": "Could not hold subscribers against larger health companies and rivals with better data analysis, and regulation added cost.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1103-wink-health" }, { "name": "SpringWit", "years": "2014 to 2017", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Personalized wellness plans and alerts from wearable data, by subscription.", "died": "Apple and Fitbit owned the devices and the data. Generic health tips bored the users, who left.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1538-springwit" }, { "name": "Airo Health", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$4M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A wristband that tracked stress, nutrition intake and exercise and gave real-time advice.", "died": "Could not justify its price against Fitbit and Apple Watch, had logistics problems with the hardware and ran out of money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1465-airo-health" }, { "name": "Arivale", "years": "2015 to 2019", "funding": "US$50M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Scientific wellness: genome, blood and microbiome tests plus a personal coach, for US$3,500 up front.", "died": "Spent about US$4,700 per customer to earn about US$1,200 a year from each. The customers lost interest once the novelty of the data passed.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/8-arivale" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the five sold the same promise, that personal data about food and the body would lead to better habits, and each needed either hardware, laboratory tests or human coaches, so the cost per customer was high and the device makers owned the data. Refolo, the one pure app, found that people would not pay for meal plans. Welmi's costs are an AI model call per photo and an ad per install; there is no hardware, no test kit and no coach.", "Two things in the market changed. First, in 2023 food-photo recognition became good enough that logging a meal takes one photo instead of a search through a database, which removed the chore that made earlier calorie counters lose users. Second, GLP-1 injections turned weight loss into a weekly routine with a dose to record, and an app that logs the dose next to the meals has a reason to be opened every day. Adapty's numbers show that the business grew while the company bought every user with ads, so the question for the next years is whether the subscriptions last longer than the payback period of the ads." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product, with difficulty. The money loop, yes.", "text": "Food-photo calorie counters are a crowded category: Google Play lists SnapCalorie next to Welmi and Cal AI has its own page on this site. The method that the sources support is the operating loop: measure return on ad spend per campaign with attribution tied to subscription revenue, pay as little as possible per attributed install, and shorten the time between earning and reinvesting. The capital this needs is small but not zero: the company started on 45-day store payouts and later paid a fee for weekly advances.", "steps": [ "Pick a subscription app category where a new AI input, such as a photo, removes the main chore of the old apps, and ship the standard feature list around it.", "Run paid acquisition from the first month, with attribution connected to subscription revenue so that each campaign's return is visible within days.", "Shop for attribution and subscription tooling by price per install; a halved price makes cheap traffic segments testable.", "When the payback period is shorter than the store's payout cycle, use payout advances or a credit line to reinvest weekly, and stop when a campaign's first-week return falls below 100%." ], "open": "Any phone subscription where a weekly routine produces something to log: sleep, medication, training, skin, cycles. The seller already applies the same model to a period tracker and a workout planner." }, "watch": [ { "title": "The numbers come from a vendor's marketing pages", "text": "Adapty publishes case studies to sell its software, and the two Welmi pages do not line up: the December 2025 page gives US$60,000 in August 2025 and over US$200,000 in November 2025, while the April 2026 page quotes a rise from around US$30,000 to 50,000 to US$300,000 in about four months without naming the months. No payment-processor profile, press report or company filing confirms either series. The founder's full name and the headcount of 6 come from one contact-data directory." }, { "title": "Growth bought with ads and payout advances", "text": "Every named channel is paid. Growth stops when a campaign's return drops below the advance fee plus the ad cost, and the subscriptions have to outlive the payback period. The store pages show one-week trials and weekly plans, which are the plan types with the shortest lives." }, { "title": "A health app with a GLP-1 diary", "text": "The app logs injections of prescription medicines. The store page says that it does not recommend or calculate doses and is not a medical device, and the terms require users to be at least 18 while the App Store rates it 9+. Any change in how Apple, Google or regulators treat apps that touch weight-loss drugs would reach this feature first." }, { "title": "A crowded category with a large competitor", "text": "Cal AI and SnapCalorie sell the same photo logging. The AI model behind the recognition is not named and is probably rented from a model provider, so every competitor can buy the same accuracy." }, { "title": "Support complaints in the reviews", "text": "The most recent US reviews on the App Store include a paying user locked out of the account with no password recovery and a user whose free trial did not start. The help center is run by one named author." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://welmi.ai/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6741707862" }, { "kind": "android", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=welmi.ai.android" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Adapty case study, published 22 December 2025, updated 21 July 2026: How Welmi.ai scaled from $60K to $200K MRR in 3 months with Adapty Attribution", "url": "https://adapty.io/case-studies/welmi/", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. Adapty's software records the app's subscriptions and runs its attribution. Source for the launch month, the MRR timeline, the Adjust and Adapty per-install prices and the co-founder's first name." }, { "title": "Adapty case study, published 7 April 2026: How Welmi grew revenue 6x in 4 months without raising a single dollar", "url": "https://adapty.io/case-studies/welmi-app/", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. Source for the US$30,000 to 50,000 to US$300,000 statement, the no-outside-capital statement, the 45-day payout cycle, the first-week returns and Adapty Finance." }, { "title": "Apple App Store, US: Welmi - Calorie Counter & Diet, by T-SHAPED APPS LTD, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/welmi-calorie-counter-diet/id6741707862", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the feature list, the GLP-1 wording, the age rating, the in-app purchase prices, the ratings count, the version history and the seller." }, { "title": "Google Play: Welmi - Calorie Counter & Diet (welmi.ai.android), read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=welmi.ai.android", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the description, the ratings and the developer section. Source for the downloads, the review count, the developer address and phone number, and the SnapCalorie listing among similar apps." }, { "title": "RocketReach directory: Welmi.ai management team", "url": "https://rocketreach.co/welmiai-management_b695b281c9517d74", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. A contact-data directory. Source for the full name of the co-founder and CEO, the roles of four other people and the count of 6 employees. Not verified elsewhere." }, { "title": "Welmi Terms of Use, Privacy Policy and Cancellation & Refund Policy, the English text that welmi.ai/tos, /policy and /cancellation load, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://welmi.ai/tos", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the provider, age, medical disclaimers, payments, analytics and Apple Health, from the site's English legal text file. Source for the company name and address, the 18-year rule, the Stripe, Google, Firebase and AppsFlyer mentions and the AI Health Reports disclaimer." }, { "title": "Welmi Help Center on Intercom, including the article How to set up and adjust your goals", "url": "https://intercom.help/welmi/en/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the index and one article. Source for the 27 articles in 12 languages, the single named author and the statement that the age options start at 18." }, { "title": "Welmi home page, read 23 October 2026", "url": "https://welmi.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the HTML and the site's JavaScript bundle, since the page renders by script. Source for the 226,000-plus ratings claim, the company footer and the Netlify, React and i18next details." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of welmi.ai from 3 April 2025", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20250403035742/https://www.welmi.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The earliest archived copy: a Tilda page titled Calorie Counter & Diet - FitMe." }, { "title": "Apple App Store developer page: T-SHAPED APPS LTD", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/t-shaped-apps-ltd/id1795194542", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Lists three apps: Vea, Gymtone and Welmi." }, { "title": "AppBrain developer page: T-SHAPED APPS LTD", "url": "https://www.appbrain.com/dev/T-SHAPED+APPS+LTD/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the summary. A directory of Google Play developers. Source for the Android start month, the three apps and the download totals." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/snaptest/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/snaptest.md", "slug": "snaptest", "name": "SnapTest", "country": "Cyprus (company site), Norway (app terms)", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI quiz app for students, from photos of notes", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-23", "launchLabel": "30 October 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$174.5K in verified revenue since launch, October 2026", "sticker": "$174.5K in 12 months", "outcomeUsd": 174534, "months": 12, "teamLabel": "1 named founder; the company calls itself a small studio with 6 apps; headcount not published", "fundingLabel": "None disclosed", "primaryFactor": "Price", "group": "learning", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "growing", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Education" ], "product": "An iPhone and iPad app. A student takes a photo of handwritten notes or uploads a PDF, and the app writes multiple-choice questions from that material and serves them as short games with points, streaks and hints. The free version is limited; full access needs a subscription of US$4.99 a week or US$39.99 a year.", "why": "It sells a weekly subscription for a task students repeat before every test, and it charges from the first screen: the App Store reviews complain that the app cannot be used without paying. One small studio ships the same shell, the same legal pages and the same billing stack across six apps, so each new app costs little. The revenue, read from the app's RevenueCat account, reached US$23,480 in its best month and US$174,534 in total within twelve months of launch.", "summary": [ "SnapTest is an iPhone and iPad app for students. The student takes a photo of handwritten notes or uploads a PDF, and the app turns that material into multiple-choice questions, served as short games with points, streaks and hints. The app's own terms describe it as \"an app that helps you study with AI. You can take pictures of your notes, and the app will generate multiple-choice questions for you.\" The company does not name the model it uses. Reading handwriting from a photo and writing questions about it is the job of a multimodal model, a large language model that accepts images as well as text. The app is free to install with in-app purchases, payments made inside an iPhone app and collected by Apple: an Unlimited plan at US$4.99 a week or US$39.99 a year.", "The App Store lists the seller as Cool App Company Ltd and the copyright holder as Emil Qvarfort, who is also the copyright holder of the seller's first app, Viral Score AI, from April 2025. On TrustMRR the founder appears only as \"Emil\". The seller has six apps in the store: a skincare scanner, a tanning timer, a room redesign app, a study timer, a social-media score app and SnapTest. Its website describes \"a small studio in Limassol, Cyprus\" with no open roles; the app's terms of October 2025 give a company address in Oslo, Norway. No source states how many people work there. Version 1.0 reached the App Store on 30 October 2025. TrustMRR, a service that reads revenue through the seller's own billing account, shows US$2,037 in December 2025, US$22,802 in January 2026, a best month of US$23,480 in March 2026, a fall to US$8,108 in August 2026, then US$22,835 in September 2026. By 23 October 2026 the total was US$174,534, with monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the monthly value of all active subscriptions) of US$16,988 from 1,470 subscriptions.", "The revenue figures are grade A: TrustMRR reads them through an API key from RevenueCat, the subscription-management service that records the app's App Store purchases. The founder's name, the company's location and the team size come from App Store pages and the company's own websites, grade C, and they do not fully agree with each other. The page also shows earlier companies that sold gamified studying or photographed homework, and why they failed." ], "factsCaption": "US$174,534 in verified revenue in the twelve months after launch, with one month above US$23,000, a fall of 64% into August 2026 and a recovery in September; the money is read from the billing account, the people and the company are not verified", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the app's RevenueCat account through an API key. A grade B value is a record that a public register or a page's source code shows. A grade C value is what the company or the App Store page states. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a first app in April 2025 to US$174,534 of verified revenue from the second one, in about twelve months after its launch. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "SnapTest in-app purchases in October 2026, from the App Store page and the TrustMRR profile (grade C); monthly equivalents calculated on this page", "note": "The App Store page says that full access needs an auto-renewing subscription. There is no monthly plan. The weekly plan costs US$4.99 a week, which is US$21.62 a month and US$259.48 a year if kept for a year; the yearly plan costs US$39.99, 6.5 times less than a year of weekly payments. Version 1.1.1 of February 2026 added an onboarding with the words \"try SnapTest for free\". Apple collects the payments and keeps its commission; the TrustMRR profile does not say whether its figures are before or after that commission.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "install and onboarding; full access needs a subscription" ], [ "Unlimited Weekly", "", "21.62", "US$4.99 a week, auto-renewing; monthly figure calculated" ], [ "Unlimited Yearly", "3.33", "", "US$39.99 a year, auto-renewing; monthly figure calculated" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time, to 23 October 2026", "value": "US$174,534", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from the app's RevenueCat account through an API key, synced 23 October 2026 at 21:04 UTC. The last-12-months figure is the same, because the monthly table starts in December 2025. The profile does not say whether Apple's commission is already taken off. On 17 October 2026 the same profile showed US$170,501.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Best month", "value": "US$23,480 in March 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table. January 2026, the first full month after the December start, brought US$22,802; September 2026 brought US$22,835.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month", "value": "Dec 2025 US$2,037; Jan 2026 US$22,802; Feb US$19,499; Mar US$23,480; Apr US$21,266; May US$16,417; Jun US$12,195; Jul US$9,270; Aug US$8,108; Sep US$22,835; Oct US$16,625 to 23 October", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table, synced 23 October 2026. The eleven months add up to exactly the all-time figure of US$174,534.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Fall and recovery", "value": "64% down from January to August 2026, then 2.8 times up from August to September", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: (22,802 - 8,108) / 22,802 = 64.4%; 22,835 / 8,108 = 2.82. March to August was a fall of 65.5%. October's first 23 days, scaled to 31 days, would be about US$22,400.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 30 days to 23 October 2026", "value": "US$23,207", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. Last 7 days: US$3,731. Last 3 months: US$49,063. Last 6 months: US$87,857. The profile gives a 30-day growth of 40.7% against the 30 days before.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 23 October 2026", "value": "US$16,988 from 1,470 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot; 30-day MRR growth shown as 0.0%. On 17 October 2026 it was US$17,197 from 1,473 subscriptions.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per active subscription per month", "value": "about US$11.56", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 16,988 / 1,470. The yearly plan alone would give US$3.33 a month and the weekly plan US$21.62, so the subscribers are a mix of both. MRR times twelve is US$203,856 a year.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Where the revenue figures come from", "value": "RevenueCat, through an API key; merchant of record: no", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR's verification section. RevenueCat is a subscription-management service that records each App Store purchase; Apple is the merchant that charges the customer. No Google Analytics, DataFast or Search Console connection, so there are no verified traffic figures.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Prices", "value": "Unlimited Weekly US$4.99; Unlimited Yearly US$39.99", "grade": "C", "note": "The App Store page's in-app purchase list, read 17 October 2026, and the TrustMRR profile's pricing line. The App Store description says: \"To get full access to the app, you need to purchase an auto-renewal subscription.\"", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Launch", "value": "version 1.0 on 30 October 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "The App Store version history, read 17 October 2026. The app's terms and privacy policy are dated 22 and 23 October 2025. TrustMRR gives a founding date of 5 November 2025.", "src": [ 2, 7, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Last app update shown", "value": "version 1.2.2 on 16 March 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "App Store version history, read 17 October 2026: nine versions from 30 October 2025 to 16 March 2026, and none after. The company's website says \"SnapTest. The biggest update yet. August 2026.\"", "src": [ 2, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Ratings on the US App Store", "value": "4 ratings, 3.3 out of 5", "grade": "C", "note": "Read 17 October 2026. One review of 10 September 2026: \"literally had to pay to even use the app\". One of 4 September 2026: \"Good app to study\".", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Age rating and category", "value": "4+, Education", "grade": "C", "note": "App Store page. The company's own privacy policy of July 2026 says: \"Our apps are not directed at children under 16\". The app's terms say that minors need a parent's permission.", "src": [ 2, 6, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Seller and copyright holder", "value": "Cool App Company Ltd; copyright Emil Qvarfort", "grade": "C", "note": "App Store page: \"Seller Cool App Company Ltd\" and \"Copyright © 2026 Emil Qvarfort\". The seller's first app, Viral Score AI, shows \"Copyright © 2025 Emil Qvarfort\"; its GlowApp shows the company as copyright holder. TrustMRR names the founder only as \"Emil\".", "src": [ 2, 9, 10, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Apps by the same seller", "value": "6", "grade": "C", "note": "The App Store developer page, read 23 October 2026: Iglo: Study Timer, GlowApp: Skincare With AI, Tanned: AI Tanning & UV index, Decora - AI Home Design, SnapTest: AI Quiz & Study, Viral Score AI - Go Viral.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Company location", "value": "Limassol, Cyprus (company website, 2026); Oslo, Norway (app terms, October 2025)", "grade": "C", "note": "The company website's terms, effective 14 July 2026: \"Cool App Company Ltd, a company registered in Limassol, Cyprus\". The app's terms, last updated 22 October 2025: \"Coolappcompany ... a company registered in Norway… Oslo\", with a Norwegian phone number. No company register entry was found; see the watch section.", "src": [ 6, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Not on the UK company register", "value": "no company named Cool App Company Ltd", "grade": "B", "note": "A search of the Companies House register on 17 October 2026 for \"cool app company\" returned other companies only. The \"Ltd\" in the seller name is therefore not a UK registration.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "\"a small studio\"; 0 open roles", "grade": "C", "note": "The company website: \"We're a small studio that ships fast.\" The careers page: \"A small studio in Limassol, Cyprus\" and \"0 open roles right now\". No source gives a number of people.", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none disclosed", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions investors. This is an absence of information, not a statement by the company.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Technology", "value": "React Native, Convex, RevenueCat", "grade": "C", "note": "The tech-stack section of the TrustMRR profile, which is written by the founder. Both websites are built with Next.js, visible in their page source (grade B).", "src": [ 1, 4, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October 2026 figure", "value": "12 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 30 October 2025 to 23 October 2026 is 358 days.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "8 April 2025", "what": "Viral Score AI, the seller's first app, reaches the App Store at version 1.0, with Emil Qvarfort as copyright holder.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "22 and 23 October 2025", "what": "SnapTest's terms of use and privacy policy are published, naming Coolappcompany at an address in Oslo, Norway.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "30 October 2025", "what": "SnapTest version 1.0 in the App Store. Version 1.0.1 follows on 1 November.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "5 November 2025", "what": "Founding date given on the TrustMRR profile.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "December 2025", "what": "First verified revenue: US$2,037. Updates on 12 and 16 December reduce the camera zoom and add analytics.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "January 2026", "what": "US$22,802 in the first full month of the verified series, eleven times December.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "12 February 2026", "what": "Version 1.1.1: \"New onboarding experience - try SnapTest for free!\"", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "March 2026", "what": "Best month, US$23,480. Version 1.2.2 on 16 March is the last update that the App Store shows by October 2026.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "April to August 2026", "what": "Revenue falls every month: US$21,266, US$16,417, US$12,195, US$9,270, US$8,108.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "14 July 2026", "what": "The company website's terms and privacy policy take effect, now naming Cool App Company Ltd in Limassol, Cyprus, and announcing \"SnapTest. The biggest update yet. August 2026.\"", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 6 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "US$22,835, 2.8 times August. A review of 10 September complains of having to pay to use the app.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "23 October 2026", "what": "US$174,534 all time, US$16,625 in October so far, MRR of US$16,988 from 1,470 subscriptions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "The photo is the whole input", "text": "The student does not type, upload a course or pick a topic. A photo of handwritten notes, or a PDF, is enough, and the model writes the questions. That is the step that was impossible before models could read handwriting, and it is why a one-screen app can replace the flashcard decks that students used to write by hand." }, { "title": "Study as a game", "text": "The company's page shows the app's screens: a question with four answers, a hint that costs a key, streak counters, points for each correct answer and a \"Level up every day\" promise. The app sells the habit, not the content, and the content is generated for each student." }, { "title": "A weekly price behind a paywall", "text": "US$4.99 a week is US$21.62 a month, a high price for a student app, but a small amount at the moment of paying before a test. The yearly plan is 6.5 times cheaper per week. The App Store description says that full access needs a subscription, and a reviewer wrote that the app could not be used without paying. The verified revenue per active subscription, about US$11.56 a month, shows that many subscribers pay the weekly price." }, { "title": "One studio, six apps", "text": "The seller published six apps between April 2025 and 2026, each with the same billing stack and the same template legal pages. The company's website also describes \"Heimdall\", which it calls a \"creator intelligence engine\" that writes the next marketing brief from the results of earlier posts. No source says which channel brought SnapTest's customers, so this page leaves the channel unknown." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "The stack comes from the founder-written part of the TrustMRR profile and from the page source of the two websites. Nothing here was confirmed by the makers of the tools.", "items": [ "React Native, a framework for building iPhone and Android apps in JavaScript, for the app. Only an iOS version is published.", "Convex, a hosted backend that stores data and runs server functions, listed as the backend.", "RevenueCat for subscriptions: it records every App Store purchase, and TrustMRR reads the revenue from it through an API key.", "Apple's in-app purchases collect the money; Apple is the merchant of record, so the company never holds card details.", "Both websites, snaptestapp.com and coolappcompany.com, are Next.js sites; the company site loads its typeface from Fontshare.", "The App Store privacy labels say the app may use identifiers and usage data to track the user across other companies' apps, and that photos and names are collected but not linked to the user." ], "src": [ 1, 8, 4, 2 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold gamified studying or photographed homework before a model could read a student's own notes. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Grockit", "years": "2007 to 2015", "funding": "US$44.4M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Gamified, social test preparation for the SAT, ACT and GMAT, with points and peer competition.", "died": "The database summary says the social and game features stopped being special as free and cheap study resources spread; Kaplan bought it and the product faded.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/196-grockit" }, { "name": "QuizUp", "years": "2013 to 2020", "funding": "US$27M", "cause": "No market need", "promise": "Real-time quiz battles on any topic, with a global audience.", "died": "The database summary says the first viral wave did not turn into retention or revenue, because content and features did not keep evolving.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/479-quizup" }, { "name": "Airy Labs", "years": "2010 to 2012", "funding": "US$1.7M", "cause": "Unit economics", "promise": "Learning games for children built on spaced repetition, adaptive difficulty and instant feedback.", "died": "The database summary says that the cost of building hand-made educational games met the economics of free apps, and parents could not see the difference from free alternatives.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/3-airy-labs" }, { "name": "Xuebajun", "years": "2013 to 2021", "funding": "US$150M", "cause": "Unit economics", "promise": "Photograph a homework problem and get an instant answer with steps, built on optical character recognition and a database of solved problems.", "died": "The database summary says the free homework app earned little, so the company pivoted to expensive live tutoring, and China then banned for-profit tutoring in 2021.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2325-xuebajun" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Xuebajun built photographed-homework help in 2013 with optical character recognition, which reads printed characters, and a database of already-solved problems. It needed a large team to collect answers, and it could only match questions that someone had solved before. Grockit and QuizUp needed people to write every question and every game level, and that cost is why a study game with US$44 million of funding could not stay ahead of free alternatives.", "A multimodal model reads a student's own handwriting and writes new questions about it, so there is no database to build and no question writers to pay. The model cost is paid per use, and Apple collects the money. That is how a studio that calls itself small could publish six apps in eighteen months and take US$174,534 from this one in a year. The same ease means that the App Store's own suggestions on SnapTest's page list six other AI quiz and study apps." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product, yes. The revenue, not guaranteed.", "text": "A photo-to-quiz app is a weekend of work with React Native, a hosted backend and a multimodal model, and the App Store page shows that many people have built one. SnapTest's verified revenue shows that one such app can take more than US$20,000 in a month, and also that it can lose two thirds of that in five months. The reason for both the rise and the recovery is not public.", "steps": [ "Build the smallest possible input: a photo or a PDF, then questions. Do not ask the student to type or organize anything.", "Charge from the first screen, with a weekly plan for the week before a test and a yearly plan priced at about eight weeks of the weekly plan.", "Use a subscription service such as RevenueCat from the first day; it also makes verified revenue possible later.", "Reuse the shell, the billing and the legal pages for the next app, so that each new app is cheap to try." ], "open": "A version for one exam system or one country, with questions in that language and in the form that the real exam uses, is still open. So is a version that lets a teacher or a parent see what was studied; SnapTest is a single-student app." }, "watch": [ { "title": "A revenue curve that moves by two thirds", "text": "Verified revenue fell from US$23,480 in March 2026 to US$8,108 in August, then rose to US$22,835 in September. Students study less in summer, and the recovery matches the start of the school year, but no source confirms the cause. MRR growth over the last 30 days to 23 October 2026 is shown as 0.0%." }, { "title": "Who owns it and where", "text": "The App Store names Cool App Company Ltd as seller and Emil Qvarfort as copyright holder. The app's terms of October 2025 place the company in Oslo, Norway; the company website of July 2026 places it in Limassol, Cyprus. The UK register has no company of that name, and no Norwegian or Cypriot register entry could be read for this page. The headcount is not published anywhere." }, { "title": "Weekly pricing and the paywall", "text": "US$4.99 a week is US$259 a year if a student forgets to cancel. The App Store page has four ratings, 3.3 out of 5, and one of two written reviews says the app could not be used without paying. Apple's refund and cancellation rules protect the customer, and a refund wave would show in the RevenueCat figures." }, { "title": "Age rating against the company's own policy", "text": "The app is rated 4+ on the App Store, while the company's privacy policy says its apps are not directed at children under 16 and the app's terms say minors need a parent's permission. The App Store privacy labels also declare tracking across other companies' apps." }, { "title": "No update since March 2026", "text": "The App Store version history shows nine versions between 30 October 2025 and 16 March 2026 and none after, as read on 17 October 2026, while the company's website announced \"the biggest update yet\" for August 2026. Either the update was late or the store page had not caught up." }, { "title": "A crowded shelf", "text": "Apple's own suggestions on SnapTest's page list six other AI quiz and study apps, plus a flashcard timer. The input, a photo of notes, is the same for all of them, and the model is rented by all of them. Price, the game loop and marketing are the only differences." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.snaptestapp.com/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6754300629" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/snaptest" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of SnapTest, as read on 23 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/snaptest.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full, live on 23 October 2026 and again against a copy from 17 October 2026. Revenue, MRR and subscription counts are read from RevenueCat through an API key and are grade A. The description, founder name \"Emil\", founding date, pricing line and tech stack are written by the founder, grade C." }, { "title": "App Store page: SnapTest: AI Quiz & Study, US storefront", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/snaptest-ai-quiz-study/id6754300629", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 17 October 2026. Source for the description, the in-app purchase prices, the version history, the ratings and reviews, the age rating, the seller name, the copyright holder and the privacy labels." }, { "title": "App Store developer page: Cool App Company", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/cool-app-company/id1804151720", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 23 October 2026. Lists the seller's six apps." }, { "title": "Cool App Company website, home page", "url": "https://coolappcompany.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 17 October 2026. Source for the \"small studio\" statement, the SnapTest screens and wording, the Heimdall description and the August 2026 update announcement. The page source shows a Next.js build." }, { "title": "Cool App Company website, careers page", "url": "https://coolappcompany.com/careers", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 17 October 2026. States \"A small studio in Limassol, Cyprus\" and \"0 open roles right now\"." }, { "title": "Cool App Company website, terms of use and privacy policy, effective 14 July 2026", "url": "https://coolappcompany.com/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both pages in full on 17 October 2026. Source for the Limassol, Cyprus registration statement, the Cyprus governing law and the under-16 statement." }, { "title": "SnapTest terms of use, last updated 22 October 2025, and privacy policy, 23 October 2025", "url": "https://www.snaptestapp.com/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both pages in full on 17 October 2026. Source for the product description in the company's words, the Oslo, Norway address and phone number, and the minors clause." }, { "title": "SnapTest website, home page", "url": "https://www.snaptestapp.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 17 October 2026. Three feature lines and a \"Get better grades by playing games\" headline; no pricing page. The page source shows a Next.js build." }, { "title": "App Store page: Viral Score AI - Go Viral, by the same seller", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/viral-score-ai-go-viral/id6743716034", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the information section on 23 October 2026. Version 1.0 on 8 April 2025, seller Cool App Company Ltd, copyright Emil Qvarfort." }, { "title": "App Store page: GlowApp: Skincare With AI, by the same seller", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/glowapp-skincare-with-ai/id6776585089", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the information section on 23 October 2026. Copyright Cool App Company Ltd, age rating 13+." }, { "title": "Companies House, UK register: company search for \"cool app company\"", "url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/search/companies?q=cool+app+company", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the first results page on 17 October 2026. No company named Cool App Company Ltd; the matches are unrelated companies." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/genaipi/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/genaipi.md", "slug": "genaipi", "name": "GenAIPI", "country": "United States", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI implementation consultancy with a fractional Chief AI Officer service, courses and an agent product", "aiType": "AI-leveraged", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-24", "launchLabel": "1 March 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$1M a year run rate, September 2025", "sticker": "$1M/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 1000000, "months": 6, "teamLabel": "1 founder alone at the September 2025 figure; by 2026 a team of unstated size ('a handful of employees' in March 2026) delivers the work", "fundingLabel": "None; started with US$400", "primaryFactor": "Speed", "group": "build-software", "channel": "audience", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-leveraged", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Consulting" ], "product": "A consultancy that puts AI to work inside other companies: an outside executive called a fractional Chief AI Officer who sets the plan, hands-on building of workflows and small tools with the client's staff, training, and, since 2026, a company agent product called G.E.N.A. built on NVIDIA's NemoClaw. It also sells one-day courses and a US$59 certification test to individuals; the founder said in April 2026 that engagements are priced from US$10,000 a month.", "why": "The founder said in April 2026 that he built the whole platform in a weekend with Replit for US$400, sold a US$15,000 training contract through LinkedIn messages on the first Monday, and that AI tools let him reach a US$1 million a year run rate alone before he hired anyone. Then he turned one-off training days into a recurring retainer, and the retainer into software.", "summary": [ "GenAIPI, the General AI Proficiency Institute, is a US consultancy that installs AI inside other companies. Its main service is a fractional Chief AI Officer: a senior person who acts as a company's head of AI for a few days a month instead of being hired full time. The engagement includes a 90-day plan, hands-on building of workflows with the client's staff, role-specific training, and since 2026 a software product, G.E.N.A., which the founder describes as an agent harness, a layer that lets AI agents read a company's systems and carry out tasks with permission checks. The founder said in April 2026 that engagements are priced from US$10,000 a month, and the company's own page says the same.", "Jon Cheney, who said he raised US$13 million for an earlier venture-backed startup founded in 2016 and later sold it, built the first version by vibe coding, which means describing an application in plain language to an AI coding tool, here Replit, and letting it write the code. He told the Mixergy podcast in April 2026 that he started on Thursday 27 February 2025, launched on 1 March with US$400, found that his first Facebook ads produced 140 visitors and zero sales because Stripe was misconfigured, and sold a US$15,000 training contract to a local CEO through LinkedIn messages on the Monday. He said in the same interview that he reached a US$1 million a year run rate, the current month's revenue times twelve, in September 2025 while still working alone, with six Chief AI Officer clients at once; that figure is the headline of this page, because it is the last one from the time he was the whole company. He then hired. A podcast description reposted in March 2026 said the company had made US$2.5 million in its first year with \"a handful of employees\", and he said in April 2026 that it was at about US$4.5 million in annual recurring revenue, the yearly value of the retainers in force, with a team of unstated size.", "Every number on this page is a statement by the founder, mostly from one interview published twice, so the page carries grade D, reported but not verified; the headline run rate was stated seven months after the fact. No payment processor, buyer or journalist has checked the figures, and the company's own blog gives a lower figure for month six than the founder gave on the podcast. The page also shows what happened to earlier companies that sold AI or training to other businesses." ], "factsCaption": "A consultancy that the founder says one person took from US$400 to a US$1 million a year run rate in six months, and a team to US$4.5 million a year by April 2026; every figure is a founder statement", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is a founder statement made on one occasion, with no second source that agrees on the same period. A grade C value is a founder statement that two sources, or the company's own pages, give alike. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a US$105,000 app quote to a one-person US$1 million run rate in six months, then a team and a consultancy the founder values at US$20 million, all in his own words. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "GenAIPI prices on 24 October 2026, read from the company's fractional Chief AI Officer, live courses and certification pages (grade C)", "note": "The Chief AI Officer engagements have four levels (AI Leadership System, AI Enablement, AI Transformation, Enterprise Transformation); the page gives only the starting price and says the level is set on a call. The page says the service is for companies with 10 or more employees. The courses are one-day live sessions. G.E.N.A. has no public price; the founder said in April 2026 that it is sold together with the officer service, not alone.", "rows": [ [ "Fractional Chief AI Officer, from the AI Leadership System level", "", "from 10,000", "companies with 10+ employees" ], [ "Live course: How to Build a Business in a Weekend with AI", "1,349 one-time", "", "one day, taught by the founder" ], [ "Live course: How to Build a Business with AI, Setting Up OpenClaw", "345 one-time", "", "one day" ], [ "AI Proficiency Certification Test", "59 one-time", "", "40 questions, 60 minutes, 70% to pass" ], [ "AI Readiness Assessment and AI Mastery Predictor", "0", "", "free, email address required" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue run rate, September 2025, founder working alone", "value": "US$1 million a year", "grade": "D", "note": "The headline figure. Founder on Mixergy, 23 April 2026: \"I hit a million in September\", \"about 80,000, 90,000 a month\", later \"110,000 a month\", \"by myself\". The company's blog gives \"$50K+/month\" for month six, which is lower.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, April 2026, with a team", "value": "about US$4.5 million a year", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder on the Mixergy podcast, 23 April 2026: \"We're sitting at about four and a half million in annual recurring.\" The interviewer's newsletter repeated the figure on 1 May 2026. One interview, two publications, so one source. Headcount at this figure not stated, so it is not the headline.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the first year, March 2026", "value": "US$2.5 million, over 50% profit", "grade": "D", "note": "Description of The Koerner Office podcast episode, as reposted by Ventureboom in March 2026: \"A year later he's at $2.5 million in revenue, over 50% profit, and on pace for $7 million this year with just a handful of employees.\"", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Total revenue in the first six weeks, April 2025", "value": "over US$100,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Company blog post, shown as dated 10 May 2025: \"it generated over six figures in revenue within the first 6 weeks\".", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue in month six, September 2025", "value": "US$50,000 or more a month", "grade": "D", "note": "The same blog post: \"Month 6: Processing $50K+/month consistently\". The post's shown date, 10 May 2025, is earlier than the sixth month it describes, so the post was changed later or the date is wrong.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "First contract, 3 March 2025", "value": "US$15,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on Mixergy, the Replit customer story and the company's press page agree: a one-day AI training for a local company's staff, sold by LinkedIn message on the Monday after launch.", "src": [ 1, 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "First fractional Chief AI Officer contract, 2025", "value": "US$15,000 a month, US$180,000 a year", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder on Mixergy: invented on a call with a pool company owner who asked for ongoing help; signed by DocuSign and paid the same day.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Starting cost", "value": "US$400", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on Mixergy and on the Replit customer story. The blog puts running costs at under US$100 a month: Replit US$25, database under US$20, SendGrid US$10.", "src": [ 1, 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin", "value": "about 99% at the start, about 50% in April 2026", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder on Mixergy. Clients paid tool costs on their own cards; the margin fell when he hired people and added software.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Valuation, 18 months after launch", "value": "US$20 million", "grade": "D", "note": "Replit's customer story: \"$20M valuation after eighteen months, according to Jon\". No transaction or investor is named; it is the founder's own number.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Website visits in one week, April 2026", "value": "876 from organic search, 412 direct, 166 organic video, 105 organic social, 44 referral", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder reading his Google Analytics on Mixergy. He said the GEO work made ChatGPT recommend the firm to a large training company.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team at the US$1 million run rate, September 2025", "value": "1 person with six officer clients at once", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder on Mixergy: \"I took this to a million dollars by myself\"; \"I had, you know, six, you know, CAIO jobs at the same time\"; then he started hiring.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team, March to April 2026", "value": "\"a handful of employees\"; headcount not stated", "grade": "D", "note": "Podcast description reposted by Ventureboom, March 2026. Founder on Mixergy: \"I've got a team now that's working and delivering.\" The site also runs a Talent Network of operators who can be \"deployed into companies\".", "src": [ 3, 1, 16 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's earlier company", "value": "raised US$13 million, founded 2016, later sold", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder on Mixergy. The company's about page says \"$20M+ raised\" and \"Multiple exits\" over 20 years.", "src": [ 1, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding for GenAIPI", "value": "none stated", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder describes starting with US$400 and says he did not want to raise money again. No round is reported anywhere.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Projection stated in April 2026", "value": "US$10 million a year; US$1 million a month by December 2026", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder on Mixergy. A forecast, not a result.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the September 2025 figure", "value": "6 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: March 2025 to September 2025. The April 2026 figure came 13 months after launch.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2016", "what": "Cheney founds a venture-backed startup and, he says, raises US$13 million over the years; the company is later sold.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "Late 2024", "what": "A development agency quotes US$105,000 for a travel app he has wanted for years. The same day he reads a LinkedIn post about Replit, drops the agency's proposal PDF into it, and has a working first screen in ten minutes. Over the next months he builds about 20 apps.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2, 5 ] }, { "when": "27 February 2025", "what": "He starts building the General AI Proficiency Institute: a free AI test that collects an email address, then a paid certification and courses. Three days of about 12 hours each, with the LLC, bank account and social pages set up while Replit works.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "1 March 2025", "what": "Launch. Facebook ads go live at 3 a.m. on Saturday night. By Monday, 140 people have started the test and nobody has paid: Stripe was misconfigured.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "when": "3 March 2025", "what": "He messages people on LinkedIn, gets a call with a local CEO and ends it with a US$15,000 contract to test and train the company's staff.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 5, 6 ] }, { "when": "27 March 2025", "what": "The Wayback Machine holds a first snapshot of genaipi.org.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "April 2025", "what": "The company's blog says revenue passed US$100,000 in the first six weeks.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "7 May 2025", "what": "The local station KUTV runs a story: AI helped a Utah entrepreneur build a six-figure business in a few days. The founder says he called the station himself.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 1 ] }, { "when": "10 June 2025", "what": "Press release on PR Newswire: the institute has delivered a US$75,000 enterprise training.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "Mid-2025", "what": "A pool company owner asks what he offers after the training day. He invents the fractional Chief AI Officer on the call at US$15,000 a month and sends a DocuSign contract the same day.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "September 2025", "what": "The founder says he hit a US$1 million a year run rate, alone, with six officer clients, and started hiring.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "March 2026", "what": "A podcast description says US$2.5 million of revenue in the first year, over 50% profit, and \"a handful of employees\".", "grade": "D", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "23 April 2026", "what": "On Mixergy he says the company is at about US$4.5 million in annual recurring revenue and announces G.E.N.A., a company agent built on NVIDIA's NemoClaw, to launch in about ten days.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "1 May 2026", "what": "The interviewer's newsletter repeats the US$4.5 million a year figure and the playbook.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "Replit's customer story says GenAIPI was worth US$20 million eighteen months after launch, according to the founder, with employees and health insurance.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "24 October 2026", "what": "The site sells officer engagements from US$10,000 a month, a US$1,349 one-day course, a US$345 OpenClaw course and a US$59 certification; the next course session is 17 November 2026.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 8, 9 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A credible shell in a weekend", "text": "The founder said in April 2026 that the name, the .org domain, the social pages, the bank account and the working payment flow were all set up before the first ad, so that a buyer would find no broken link. He says the institutional look is what let him sell to governments and larger companies at a price of US$15,000 a day." }, { "title": "Sell the service, not the course", "text": "The automated plan, free test then paid certificate, made nothing in its first weekend. The money came from a direct LinkedIn message and a call. The founder told Mixergy that his advice is to skip the ads and message customers on LinkedIn, then look for recurring revenue." }, { "title": "Turn the training day into a retainer", "text": "A customer asked for ongoing help; the answer was a part-time head of AI priced like an employee, which the founder said in April 2026 was US$10,000 to US$15,000 a month, cancellable at any time. He says the first such contract was worth US$180,000 a year and that he will not take clients under US$20,000 now." }, { "title": "Let the client pay for the tools, then add software", "text": "The founder said in April 2026 that clients paid Replit and other tool charges on their own company cards, so his margin was close to 99% while he worked alone. In 2026 the firm packaged what it built for clients into G.E.N.A., an agent product it installs together with the officer service, because, in his words, software alone is almost worthless now and distribution is the moat." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's podcast interview, the company's blog and Replit's customer story. They are grade C or D.", "items": [ "The site, the admin tools, the tests and the course platform were built in Replit by a founder who says he does not know how to code; the blog says Replit also hosts it, with a database that scales with use and SendGrid for email.", "Stripe takes payments for courses and certification; the first launch failed because it was misconfigured.", "ChatGPT was used to choose the business, by interviewing the founder about his skills, and Grok to test the plan against what people on X say.", "Search visibility: he had ChatGPT and Grok study a leading generative-engine-optimization firm, merged their findings and told Replit to install the result, meta tags, robots file, FAQs; he said in April 2026 that half of visits came from organic search and that a large training company found the firm through ChatGPT.", "Sales come from daily LinkedIn posts, direct LinkedIn messages, local television and podcasts; DocuSign for contracts.", "The agent product G.E.N.A. is a customized NemoClaw, NVIDIA's enterprise harness for the open-source OpenClaw agent, connected to each client's systems such as NetSuite, QuickBooks, HubSpot or Salesforce over a few weeks." ], "src": [ 1, 4, 5, 2 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold AI, automation or skills to other businesses and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Olive AI", "years": "2012 to 2023", "funding": "US$852M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "An AI workforce that would automate hospital administration.", "died": "Each client needed custom integrations built by engineers, the bots broke when systems changed, and the cost of delivery never matched the price of the promise.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2046-olive-ai" }, { "name": "Pathmind", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Let companies use AI to optimize operations without in-house experts.", "died": "Customers were not ready, the product was complex, and the big cloud providers offered the same capabilities with more reach.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1070-pathmind" }, { "name": "Pluralsight", "years": "2004 to 2024", "funding": "US$4B", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Keep company workforces skilled through on-demand technology courses.", "died": "Expensive enterprise sales for seats that few employees used, while free video and AI made the content less valuable.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2296-pluralsight" }, { "name": "Zirtual", "years": "2011 to 2015", "funding": "US$5.5M", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "A subscription assistant for busy business owners.", "died": "A people-heavy service grew faster than its finances; it closed overnight when it could not meet payroll.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1850-zirtual" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Olive AI and Pathmind sold automation to companies whose systems were all different, and the cost of making it work at each client ate the business. Pluralsight sold training seats that employees did not use. Zirtual sold a people-based service by subscription and could not pay its people. GenAIPI combines all four promises: automation, implementation, training and a retainer for a person's time.", "What differs, in the founder's account, is the cost side. He says the first US$1 million a year of revenue was earned by one person whose tools cost under US$100 a month, with clients paying for their own software, so the margin was near total and no money was raised. The custom integration work that sank Olive AI is now done with AI coding tools at the client's expense, and the retainer is priced like an employee rather than like a software seat. Whether that holds as the team grows is the open question; he said in April 2026 that margins had already fallen to about 50%." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The model, yes. The numbers, not verified.", "text": "The founder says anyone can copy him and that the window is about five more years. The parts that do not depend on his background are concrete: a credible site built in days, direct outreach instead of ads, a training day that becomes a monthly retainer, and the client's own card for tool costs. The part that is hard to copy is a decade as a funded CEO, which is what let him charge US$15,000 a day from the first call, as he said in April 2026.", "steps": [ "Build the complete storefront, domain, payments, social pages, in a weekend with an AI coding tool, and test the payment flow before any ad runs.", "Message the people you already know on LinkedIn and sell a fixed-price training day; do not wait for the automated funnel.", "When a client asks what comes next, offer a part-time role priced like an employee, cancellable monthly, and sign it the same day.", "Put tool and model costs on the client's card, keep your own costs under US$100 a month, and package what you build for one client into a product for the next." ], "open": "Every trade with many similar small companies, law, dental, logistics, construction, that has no in-house AI lead and can pay US$10,000 a month; and the agent-harness layer, OpenClaw and NemoClaw, that lets a consultancy sell software it did not write." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline, a US$1 million a year run rate in September 2025 while the founder worked alone, rests on one statement by the founder, Jon Cheney, on the Mixergy podcast on 23 April 2026, seven months later; the company's own blog gives a lower figure for that month. The later figures, US$2.5 million in the first year and US$4.5 million a year in April 2026, come from the founder too, the first through a podcast description and the second from the same interview, repeated in the interviewer's newsletter on 1 May 2026. No payment processor, accountant, buyer or journalist has seen the books, and the US$20 million valuation is the founder's own. A reader could look for a payment-processor profile, a second interview with the same figures, or client confirmations of the contract sizes." }, { "title": "The company's own blog gives a lower figure", "text": "The blog post about building on Replit says month six was \"$50K+/month\", about US$600,000 a year, while the founder told Mixergy that month six, September 2025, was US$80,000 to US$110,000 a month. The blog may count only payments through the platform, or it may have been edited later: its shown date, 10 May 2025, is before the month it describes." }, { "title": "Team size after the headline figure is unknown", "text": "The founder says he reached the first US$1 million a year alone, which is why that figure is the headline. By March 2026 there were \"a handful of employees\", by April a team \"working and delivering\", and the site recruits a Talent Network of operators to be deployed into client companies. If the firm is larger than ten people now, it is a small consultancy, not a one-person AI business." }, { "title": "A consultancy, with a product attached", "text": "Most of the revenue is retainers for people's time; the founder himself calls that a linear business. G.E.N.A., the agent product, is weeks old at the time of the interview and is sold only together with the officer service." }, { "title": "The courses sell the founder's own story", "text": "The US$1,349 course is called How to Build a Business in a Weekend with AI and promises \"a fully functional, revenue-generating business in just one weekend\" and \"from idea to paying customers in days\". No income figure is promised to buyers, but the marketing is the founder's result. The founder told Mixergy that the original plan, to sell certificates and courses automatically, \"was a bust\"." }, { "title": "Figures that are forecasts", "text": "\"On pace for US$7 million this year\" (March 2026) and \"US$1 million a month by December\" (April 2026) are projections stated by the founder, not results." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://genaipi.org" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Mixergy, 23 April 2026: \"I make $4.5 million implementing AI\", interview with Jon Cheney by Andrew Warner, with full transcript", "url": "https://mixergy.com/interviews/i-make-4-5-million-implementing-ai/", "grade": "D", "how": "Read the full transcript. Source for the US$4.5 million ARR, the US$1 million run rate in September 2025, the launch dates, the first contracts, the margins, the team statements and the tools." }, { "title": "The Next New Thing newsletter, 1 May 2026: He makes $4.5 mil/year implementing AI, this is his playbook, by Andrew Warner", "url": "https://thenextnewthing.beehiiv.com/p/he-makes-4-5-mil-year-implementing-ai", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. The same interviewer's summary of the Mixergy interview; the US$4.5 million a year figure, the US$400 start, the Stripe failure, the daily LinkedIn posts and the NemoClaw move." }, { "title": "Ventureboom, March 2026: He Turned $400 Into $2.5M Using AI (No Coding), a repost of The Koerner Office podcast episode description", "url": "https://www.ventureboom.com/2026/03/he-turned-400-into-2-5m-using-ai-no-coding/", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. A repost of a podcast description, used only for the first-year revenue, profit and headcount sentence." }, { "title": "GenAIPI blog, shown as dated 10 May 2025: How I Built a Multi-Million Dollar Business with Replit for a Few Hundred Bucks, by Jon Cheney", "url": "https://genaipi.org/blog/build-multi-million-dollar-business-replit-few-hundred-bucks", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 1 March 2025 launch date, the six-week and month-six figures, the running costs and the tool list. Its shown date is earlier than the sixth month it describes." }, { "title": "Replit customer story: GenAIPI, Built in a Weekend for Under $400", "url": "https://replit.com/customers/genaipi", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. A vendor page quoting the founder: US$400, US$15,000 first customer within five days, US$20 million valuation 'according to Jon'. Its page metadata carries a date before the company existed, so it is cited undated." }, { "title": "GenAIPI press page: KUTV story of 7 May 2025 and press release of 10 June 2025", "url": "https://genaipi.org/press", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's own list of its press, with the dates and summaries of the television story and the press release." }, { "title": "GenAIPI: Fractional Chief AI Officer page, read 24 October 2026", "url": "https://genaipi.org/fractional-chief-ai-officer", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Starting price of US$10,000 a month, the four engagement levels, the client list and the 10-employee minimum." }, { "title": "GenAIPI: Live AI Training Courses page, read 24 October 2026", "url": "https://genaipi.org/live-courses", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, prices from the page's structured data. The two one-day courses, their prices and the next session date." }, { "title": "GenAIPI: Certification page, read 24 October 2026", "url": "https://genaipi.org/certification", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The US$59 test, 40 questions, 60 minutes, 70% to pass; the free assessments." }, { "title": "GenAIPI: About page", "url": "https://genaipi.org/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founded in early 2025 by Jon Cheney; the founder's 20 years, US$20 million raised and multiple exits before it." }, { "title": "GenAIPI home page, read 24 October 2026", "url": "https://genaipi.org", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The five-part offer, the statement that the founder leads a multidisciplinary team, and the list of media appearances." }, { "title": "GenAIPI: G.E.N.A. product page", "url": "https://genaipi.org/gena", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The agent product's description as an organizational agent harness with permissions; no public price." }, { "title": "GenAIPI: Success Stories page", "url": "https://genaipi.org/success-stories", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Client case studies and testimonials; used for the kind of work delivered, not for revenue." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine snapshot of genaipi.org, 27 March 2025", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20250327172131/https://www.genaipi.org/", "grade": "C", "how": "Opened; the archived page renders by script and shows only the company name, which confirms the site existed on that date." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." }, { "title": "GenAIPI: Talent Network page", "url": "https://genaipi.org/talent-network", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company recruits and certifies operators who may be deployed into client companies." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/nonerds/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/nonerds.md", "slug": "nonerds", "name": "NoNerds", "country": "Jordan", "sector": "Consumer Discretionary", "productType": "AI study tools built from recorded university lectures", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-24", "launchLabel": "27 December 2023", "outcomeLabel": "Sold to JoAcademy for US$140K, June 2026", "sticker": "Sold for $140K", "outcomeUsd": 140000, "months": 30, "teamLabel": "1 founder named; no source gives a headcount; the iPhone app was published through an outside developer account", "fundingLabel": "None disclosed", "primaryFactor": "Strategic buyer", "group": "learning", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "sold", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2C", "Education" ], "product": "A course marketplace for university students in Jordan where instructors and students upload recorded lectures and past exam papers, and the platform's AI turns each lecture into flashcards, exam questions, study notes and a study plan. A student asks a question about a lesson, by text or voice, and gets an answer taken from that lecture, not from the general internet.", "why": "The founder's press release of 9 June 2026 said that the largest online-learning company in Jordan, JoAcademy, paid US$140,000 for the AI part of the platform and hired the 19-year-old founder to lead its AI work. The release reported 12,000 students and 6,000 lectures at the time of the sale. No buyer statement, revenue figure or team size has been published.", "summary": [ "NoNerds was an AI-native education marketplace, a product whose main feature is the AI itself rather than a human service with AI added. Instructors and students in Jordan uploaded recorded lectures and past papers, which are exam papers from earlier years. The system analysed each video lecture and produced flashcards, exam questions, study notes and a personal study plan. The answers to a student's text or voice questions were grounded in the lecture, meaning the model was told to answer from that course material instead of from its general training. The iPhone app appeared in the App Store on 27 December 2023 as a free download, published through a developer account named avancer.", "On 9 June 2026 a press release from the founder's side, distributed by a public-relations agency and published on Zawya, said that Mohammad Alsufi, a 19-year-old founder from Amman described as founder and CTO of NoNerds, had sold the platform to JoAcademy for US$140,000. The same release stated more than 120 courses, 6,000 lectures, 12,000 students and 128,000 watch hours, and said that Alsufi joined JoAcademy to lead its AI work. Five regional outlets repeated the release within three days; two of them, WAYA and Startup Scene, added that NoNerds was founded in 2022. The Zawya page has since been removed and survives in the Wayback Machine.", "Every number on this page comes from that one release or from outlets that copied it, so the evidence grade is D. JoAcademy, the buyer, has published no statement: its home page and its 250 news URLs, read on 24 October 2026, do not mention NoNerds. No revenue, profit or headcount was ever disclosed. The page also shows what happened to earlier student marketplaces and tutoring platforms in the Loot Drop database." ], "factsCaption": "A sale price of US$140,000 stated in a founder-side press release of 9 June 2026, user counts from the same release, and App Store dates that are the only platform-verified facts", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value appears in one founder-side press release and in outlets that copied it, with no buyer or payment-processor confirmation. A grade B value is a record on a platform the company does not control, here the Apple App Store. A grade C value is a company's statement on its own page. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a free iPhone app in December 2023 to a sale announced in June 2026, in 30 months. Each entry carries its grade; most are D because they rest on one press release.", "pricing": { "caption": "NoNerds prices: no pricing page exists or was archived. The iPhone app was free on the App Store; course prices inside the marketplace were never published (grade B for the app, no source for the courses)", "note": "The App Store listing, read on 24 October 2026, shows the app as free with no in-app purchases listed, and its version 1.3 note of 22 November 2024 says \"removed paid content\", which means courses were sold outside Apple's payment system. The press release says instructors and students \"create and sell courses\" on the platform but gives no price and no commission. After the sale the product became part of JoAcademy, whose own subscriptions are not NoNerds prices.", "rows": [ [ "NoNerds iPhone app", "0", "0", "free download; recorded lectures, past papers and the AI study tools" ], [ "Courses in the marketplace", "not published", "not published", "sold by instructors on the platform; no price or commission in any source" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Sale price, June 2026", "value": "US$140,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Stated in the founder-side press release published on Zawya on 9 June 2026 and repeated by WAYA, Startup Scene and three other outlets. No statement from the buyer.", "src": [ 1, 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Buyer", "value": "JoAcademy, Amman", "grade": "D", "note": "The release says JoAcademy serves more than 2.1 million students in Jordan, Iraq, Palestine and Saudi Arabia; JoAcademy's own home page, read on 24 October 2026, says 2.5 million students and 600 teachers.", "src": [ 1, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Users at the sale, June 2026", "value": "12,000 students, more than 120 courses, 6,000 lectures, 128,000 watch hours", "grade": "D", "note": "Figures from the release. Registered students, not paying students; no revenue figure accompanies them.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Sale price per registered student", "value": "about US$11.67", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$140,000 divided by 12,000 students from the release.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founder", "value": "Mohammad Alsufi, 19 at the sale, described as founder and CTO", "grade": "D", "note": "Named in the release and in every outlet. The release says he started building websites at 14 and incorporated a web development company in Dubai at 16. Spelled Al Soufi and Al-Sufi in two outlets.", "src": [ 1, 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Founding year", "value": "2022", "grade": "D", "note": "WAYA and Startup Scene both write \"founded in 2022\"; the Zawya release itself gives no year.", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "iPhone app release", "value": "version 1.0 on 27 December 2023; version 1.3 on 22 November 2024", "grade": "B", "note": "App Store version history. Free, category Education, English only, 28.3 MB, one rating. The 1.3 note says \"removed paid content\".", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "App publisher", "value": "a developer account named avancer, with a seller name of an information-technology company", "grade": "B", "note": "App Store listing. The copyright line names a person other than the founder. The account also publishes an unrelated courses app, which is consistent with an outside development company publishing on the founder's behalf.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Team size", "value": "not stated in any source", "grade": "D", "note": "The release names one founder and no employees or co-founders of NoNerds; it calls Alsufi a co-founder only of Planless, his later company. The app was published through an outside account.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none disclosed", "grade": "D", "note": "No source mentions an investor in NoNerds. WAYA's phrase \"venture-backed\" is not supported by any named round.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Buyer's own funding", "value": "US$28 million Series B in early 2025, led by Rua Ventures with 16 Jordanian banks", "grade": "D", "note": "As stated in the release. Ground News lists Rua Ventures as a related company.", "src": [ 1, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's role after the sale", "value": "joined JoAcademy to lead AI initiatives", "grade": "D", "note": "Release and all outlets.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's other companies in 2026", "value": "Brainsless, an AI research lab, and Planless, an AI co-founder product incorporated in Delaware", "grade": "C", "note": "The Brainsless page, archived on 7 June 2026, names Alsufi as co-author of two technical reports; the Planless page says it runs on a Brainsless model.", "src": [ 10, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Buyer confirmation", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "JoAcademy's home page and its five news sitemap pages, 250 article URLs, read on 24 October 2026, contain no article about NoNerds or an acquisition. The original Zawya page returned Page Not Found on 14 October 2026.", "src": [ 9, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Independent coverage", "value": "one original source", "grade": "D", "note": "Ground News records Zawya as the only source that broke the story on 9 June 2026. MENA Startup Digest credits Entarabi; the others paraphrase the release.", "src": [ 8, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Time from app release to sale", "value": "30 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 27 December 2023 to June 2026.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2022", "what": "NoNerds is founded in Amman by Mohammad Alsufi, according to WAYA and Startup Scene; by this page's arithmetic from the age in the release, he was about 15 or 16.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "when": "27 December 2023", "what": "Version 1.0 of the NoNerds iPhone app appears in the App Store as a free Education app offering recorded lectures and past papers, published through the developer account avancer.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "28 August 2024", "what": "Version 1.1 adds a books marketplace, a question-and-answer section and a better video player.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "22 November 2024", "what": "Version 1.3 removes paid content from the iPhone app, which means the courses were no longer sold through Apple.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "Early 2025", "what": "JoAcademy closes a US$28 million Series B led by Rua Ventures, according to the later release.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "May to June 2026", "what": "Alsufi's research lab Brainsless publishes two technical reports and a model that runs his second product, Planless.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10, 11 ] }, { "when": "9 June 2026", "what": "A press release on Zawya, sent by a public-relations agency, says JoAcademy bought NoNerds for US$140,000 and that the platform had 12,000 students and 6,000 lectures. Alsufi joins JoAcademy to lead AI.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 8 ] }, { "when": "9 to 12 June 2026", "what": "Arab Founders, MENA Startup Digest, Lucidity Insights, WAYA and Startup Scene carry the news, all from the release.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The Zawya page is gone, nonerds.com resolves to an unrelated site behind a Cloudflare error, and JoAcademy's site has no mention of the deal.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 9 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Answers from the lecture, not from the internet", "text": "Students asked about a specific lesson and got answers taken from that recording. General chat models answer from training data and can contradict the instructor; a system that reads the course content first gives the answer the exam expects. The release calls this the platform's AI learning directly from the content itself." }, { "title": "The marketplace fed the AI", "text": "Instructors and students uploaded lectures to sell them. Every upload was also new material for the flashcards, exam questions and notes, so the content library and the AI features grew together without the founder producing content." }, { "title": "A buyer with 2 million students and no AI layer", "text": "JoAcademy had raised US$28 million in early 2025, by the release's account, and its home page promises AI techniques. Buying a working system with 6,000 processed lectures, and hiring the person who built it, was cheaper than building one. The release says the AI infrastructure will be integrated into JoAcademy's platform." }, { "title": "A small price, stated by the seller", "text": "The release put the sale at US$140,000, about US$11.67 per registered student by this page's calculation, and the founder took a job at the buyer. This looks like a purchase of technology and a hire rather than a purchase of revenue, and no revenue was ever disclosed." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder-side press release and from the App Store listing. No source names the model provider, the hosting or the programming language.", "items": [ "The system analysed video lectures and generated flashcards, exam questions, study notes and personal study plans from them, by the release's description.", "Students asked questions about a lesson by text or voice and received answers grounded in the course material, which implies speech recognition plus retrieval from the lecture transcript, though no source names the components.", "The iPhone app, 28.3 MB, English only, requires iOS 13.4 or later. It was published through the developer account avancer, whose seller is an information-technology company, so the mobile app was likely built or published by an outside developer.", "The App Store version notes show the product's path: lectures and past papers in December 2023, a books marketplace and a question-and-answer section in August 2024, search and notifications in October 2024, and paid content removed from the app in November 2024.", "The founder's later work, two technical reports on attention in transformers and a model called Neptyn at his lab Brainsless, shows the technical direction, but no source says that NoNerds used a Brainsless model." ], "src": [ 1, 2, 10, 11 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold study material, peer learning or tutoring to students and closed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Flashnotes", "years": "2010 to 2016", "funding": "US$1.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A marketplace where college students sell their class notes and study guides to peers.", "died": "No quality control on student-made content, while Course Hero and Chegg had better products and more money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/154-flashnotes" }, { "name": "StudyRoom", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Students in the same course swap notes and study together online.", "died": "Never reached enough users in one course for the network to be useful; Piazza took the question-and-answer use.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1691-studyroom" }, { "name": "Tutorspree", "years": "2011 to 2015", "funding": "US$1.9M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Find a vetted tutor online for any subject.", "died": "Too few tutors and students on each side of the marketplace, and Wyzant was already there.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/672-tutorspree" }, { "name": "EduKart", "years": "2011 to 2018", "funding": "US$1M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Online courses from school to professional level for learners across India.", "died": "Partnerships with institutions slowed it down, the platform was not built for phones, and BYJU'S took the market.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/110-edukart" }, { "name": "Xuebajun", "years": "2013 to 2021", "funding": "US$150M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Photograph a homework problem and get an AI-generated step-by-step solution.", "died": "Moved from a cheap homework-help tool into a costly tutoring marketplace, then China banned for-profit tutoring.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2325-xuebajun" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Flashnotes, StudyRoom and Tutorspree all needed two sides of a marketplace to show up at the same time in the same course or subject, and all three ran out of money before that happened. NoNerds also depended on uploads, but each uploaded lecture became useful on its own once the AI had turned it into flashcards and questions, so a course with one instructor and a few students already worked. The release says 6,000 lectures were processed, which in 2012 would have needed people writing the notes.", "The second difference is the ending. The predecessors looked for enough revenue to justify their funding and closed when it did not come. NoNerds, by its founder's account, raised nothing, stayed in one country, and was bought for US$140,000 by the company that already had the students. Xuebajun shows the other risk: an AI study tool that works is still exposed to the rules of its market, and in Jordan the buyer, not the founder, now carries that risk." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product idea, yes. The exit, only with a buyer already in the market.", "text": "Turning a university's own lectures into study tools is a small, repeatable product: one country, one language, courses that students already pay for. The sale depended on a local company with 2 million students and fresh funding that wanted an AI layer and a person to run it, and the US$140,000 the release stated is a technology-and-hire price, not a business valuation.", "steps": [ "Pick one country and one group of students, and let instructors upload the lectures they already record.", "Build the study tools on top of each lecture, with answers restricted to the course material, so a single course is useful on day one.", "Keep payments outside the app stores where you can, as the November 2024 version note shows this product did.", "Know the two or three companies in your market that would buy the AI layer rather than build it, and keep the metrics they will ask for: courses, lectures, students, hours." ], "open": "Any country where a national online-learning company has students but no AI features: the same lecture-to-study-tools product for schools, professional exams or language courses." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The sale price, US$140,000, rests on one source: a press release from the founder's side, sent by the agency Makers PR and published on Zawya on 9 June 2026, which named Mohammad Alsufi as founder and CTO. Zawya has since removed the page, and this page read it in the Wayback Machine. WAYA, Startup Scene, Arab Founders, MENA Startup Digest and Lucidity Insights repeated the figure within three days without adding a second source; Ground News records Zawya as the only origin. JoAcademy, the buyer, has published nothing: its home page and its 250 news URLs, read on 24 October 2026, do not mention NoNerds. The counts of 12,000 students, 120 courses, 6,000 lectures and 128,000 watch hours come from the same release. No revenue, profit or headcount was ever disclosed, and the App Store listing was published through an outside developer account whose copyright line names a different person. A reader could look for a statement from JoAcademy or its investors, a Jordanian companies-register entry for the business, an interview with the founder that repeats the price, or the terms of his employment at JoAcademy." }, { "title": "Technology and a hire, not a business", "text": "The release describes the deal as an integration of NoNerds' AI infrastructure and says the founder joined the buyer. No source mentions paying students, revenue or a transfer of instructor contracts. Readers who want a copyable business should not read the price as a valuation of a revenue stream." }, { "title": "The product no longer exists on its own", "text": "nonerds.com is archived as an unrelated site and was not the product's domain as far as any source shows, the iPhone app has not been updated since November 2024, and the technology is now inside JoAcademy. Nothing on this page can be checked against a live product." }, { "title": "The name record is thin", "text": "The founder's name appears in three spellings across the outlets, the App Store listing credits a developer account and a copyright holder who are not the founder, and no company register entry was found. The founder's own later pages, Brainsless and Planless, name him but do not mention NoNerds." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6470132800" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Zawya press release, 9 June 2026: 19-year-old Jordanian founder sells AI EdTech startup NoNerds to JoAcademy in $140,000 acquisition (Wayback Machine snapshot of 10 June 2026)", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20260610021609/https://www.zawya.com/en/press-release/companies-news/19-year-old-jordanian-founder-sells-ai-edtech-startup-nonerds-to-joacademy-in-140-000-acquisition-vap1ci0o", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full from the Wayback Machine snapshot; the original Zawya page returned Page Not Found on 14 October 2026. A founder-side release with a Makers PR media contact. Source for the price, the founder's name and age, the user counts, the buyer's funding and the founder's new role." }, { "title": "Apple App Store listing: NoNerds, id6470132800, read 24 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nonerds/id6470132800", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the release dates, the version notes, the free price, the developer account and the app description." }, { "title": "WAYA, 10 June 2026: Jordan's JoAcademy Acquires AI EdTech Startup NoNerds in USD 140K Deal", "url": "https://waya.media/jordans-joacademy-acquires-ai-edtech-startup-nonerds-in-usd-140k-deal/", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. Repeats the release and adds the founding year 2022." }, { "title": "Startup Scene, 12 June 2026: Jordan's JoAcademy Acquires AI Startup NoNerds in $140,000 Deal", "url": "https://thestartupscene.me/INVESTMENTS/Jordan-s-JoAcademy-Acquires-AI-Startup-NoNerds-in-140-000-Deal", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. Repeats the release and gives the founding year 2022." }, { "title": "MENA Startup Digest, 9 June 2026: Jordanian EdTech Leader JoAcademy Acquires AI Startup NoNerds for $140,000", "url": "https://menastartupdigest.com/jordanian-edtech-leader-joacademy-acquires-ai-startup-nonerds-for-140000/", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. Credits Entarabi as its source; spells the founder Al Soufi." }, { "title": "Arab Founders, 9 June 2026: Jordanian EdTech Giant JoAcademy Acquires AI Learning Startup NoNerds, Founded by a 19-Year-Old Entrepreneur, in $140K Deal", "url": "https://arabfounders.net/en/nonerds-raises-140k-ai-learning/", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. A translation of the release; spells the founder Al-Sufi." }, { "title": "Lucidity Insights, 10 June 2026: JoAcademy Acquires NoNerds to Accelerate AI-Driven Learning Solutions", "url": "https://lucidityinsights.com/news/joacademy-acquires-nonerds", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. Restates the release with the same metrics in a table." }, { "title": "Ground News story page: 19-year-old Jordanian founder sells AI EdTech startup NoNerds to JoAcademy in $140,000 acquisition", "url": "https://ground.news/article/19-year-old-jordanian-founder-sells-ai-edtech-startup-nonerds-to-joacademy-in-140-000-acquisition", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. An aggregator entry showing one source, Zawya, on 9 June 2026, and Rua Ventures and Planless as related companies." }, { "title": "JoAcademy home page and news sitemap, read 24 October 2026", "url": "https://www.joacademy.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the home page in Arabic (2.5 million students, 600 teachers, a promise of AI techniques) and the five pages of the news sitemap, 250 URLs: no article mentions NoNerds or an acquisition." }, { "title": "Brainsless Research Lab home page (Wayback Machine snapshot of 7 June 2026)", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20260607164157/https://brainsless.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's own lab page; names Mohammad Alsufi as co-author of two technical reports and describes the Neptyn model. Does not mention NoNerds." }, { "title": "Planless home page (Wayback Machine snapshot of 7 June 2026)", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20260607155213/https://planless.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's second product; says it runs on a Brainsless model and names Alsufi as a paper author. Does not mention NoNerds." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/recall/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/recall.md", "slug": "recall", "name": "Recall", "country": "Netherlands", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI knowledge base and summarizer", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-24", "launchLabel": "7 June 2022", "outcomeLabel": "US$9K a month (founder interview), October 2023", "sticker": "$9K/mo, reported", "outcomeUsd": 108000, "months": 16, "teamLabel": "3 founders at the October 2023 figure; the founder wrote \"We have 3 full-time employees\", read here as the same 3 people (the profile box lists 3 founders and 3 employees); later a small remote team, size not published", "fundingLabel": "US$120,000 SAFE (November 2022), then US$1.5M pre-seed led by Jason Calacanis (December 2024)", "primaryFactor": "Persistence", "group": "learning", "channel": "launches", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Funded", "Running", "B2C", "Knowledge management" ], "product": "A personal knowledge base. You save an article, a YouTube video, a podcast, a PDF or your own note, and Recall writes a summary, adds tags, links the item to related items you saved before, and lets you chat with everything you saved. It also makes quiz questions for spaced repetition. It runs as a web app, phone apps and browser extensions.", "why": "The founder kept a product that had failed once, asked Hacker News in public whether to continue, and got an investor from that post. He then watched new users try the product in front of him, cut the setup steps until everyone could create a first summary, and started to charge. AI summaries of long videos and podcasts gave people a reason to come back, and Product Hunt and AI tool directories brought the first paying users.", "summary": [ "Recall is a personal knowledge base, a private library of what one person has read, watched and written, organized so that it can be searched and reused. You save a web article, a YouTube video, a podcast, a PDF or a note. Recall writes a summary with an AI model, adds tags, and stores the item in a knowledge graph, a database of items and the links between them, so that an old item comes back when you save or read something related. It also makes quiz questions for spaced repetition, a study method that shows a question less often each time you answer it correctly.", "Paul Richards, a South African software developer who had been one of the first employees at the link-analysis company Maltego, started Recall as a side project in early 2022 and showed it on Hacker News on 7 June 2022. In November 2022 a second Hacker News post, in which he asked whether he should give up, reached 493 points; he said in his Starter Story interview that an investor contacted him within 24 hours and wired US$120,000 against a SAFE. He brought in Igor Gligorevic as co-founder and CTO; the company's About page names Sankari Nair as the third co-founder and COO. In that interview, published on 19 October 2023, Richards said that Recall had just reached US$9,000 a month in recurring revenue, was growing 10% a month and had 3 full-time employees.", "That figure is a single founder statement on a single date, so this page grades it D, reported and not verified. No payment processor or later interview confirms it, and Recall has published no revenue figure since. After it, the company says it went through Jason Calacanis's LAUNCH Accelerator in 2024 and stated in December 2024 that it had raised US$1.5 million in pre-seed money. In 2025 it posted openings for engineers in what it called a small remote team, and in October 2026 its own site claims more than 700,000 users." ], "factsCaption": "A three-person company that a founder interview put at about US$9,000 a month in October 2023, after a US$120,000 first check; one source, grade D", "factsRead": "How to read this table: grade D means one statement on one date that nobody else has checked. Grade C is a company statement repeated by a second source, or a public record such as a Hacker News post. A \"calc\" value (grade X) was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a side project that almost stopped to a funded company, in about two and a half years. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Recall prices in October 2026, read from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "Prices are in US dollars per month. Yearly billing saves about 17% on Plus and about 21% on Max. The free plan gives 10 AI summaries a month but unlimited saved items and notes. Paid plans are \"unlimited\" under a fair-use policy, and students can ask for a 20% discount. The company offers a refund within 30 days.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "10 AI summaries a month; unlimited saves and notes; API and MCP access" ], [ "Plus", "10", "12", "unlimited AI summaries, chat, automatic tags and knowledge graph, quizzes" ], [ "Max", "38", "48", "choice of AI model, bulk actions on up to 100 items, 1:1 onboarding" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Recurring revenue per month, October 2023", "value": "about US$9,000 (\"just hit 9k USD\", later in the same interview \"just under 10k USD\")", "grade": "D", "note": "Paul Richards in his Starter Story interview, published 19 October 2023. One founder statement on one date. Not profitable yet; salaries were the largest cost.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the October 2023 figure", "value": "about US$108,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$9,000 times 12. It rests on the grade D figure above.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Growth rate, October 2023", "value": "10% a month", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder in the same interview. No monthly series was published.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team at the October 2023 figure", "value": "3 full-time employees; Starter Story lists 3 founders", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder interview. The three founders named on the company's About page are Paul Richards (CEO), Igor Gligorevic (CTO) and Sankari Nair (COO).", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "First outside money, November 2022", "value": "US$120,000 on a SAFE", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder interview. A SAFE (simple agreement for future equity) is money given now for shares at a later funding round. The company's December 2024 announcement names the first investor as Splash Capital, but not the amount.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Hacker News post that led to the money, 1 November 2022", "value": "493 points", "grade": "C", "note": "Hacker News record read through the Algolia API. The founder wrote that he faced the question of whether to continue the project.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Pre-seed round, December 2024", "value": "US$1.5 million, led by Jason Calacanis", "grade": "C", "note": "Company announcement of 3 December 2024, repeated by Silicon Canals the same day. Blockchain Founders Capital, Rocket Capital and two angels also invested. No revenue or headcount was given.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Accelerator", "value": "LAUNCH Accelerator, cohort 31, public demo day on 17 June 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "This Week in Startups episode page lists Recall first, presented by Sankari Nair. The company says it was voted top startup in its cohort.", "src": [ 6, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Users claimed, October 2026", "value": "more than 700,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Company's About and pricing pages. Users, not paying customers.", "src": [ 4, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Team in 2025", "value": "\"small, remote, international\", from the Netherlands, Serbia, South Africa and Pakistan", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's hiring posts on Hacker News, January, May and June 2025. No headcount given.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Signups from the first Product Hunt launch", "value": "a couple thousand, with poor retention", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder interview. A Product Hunt launch that came 2nd product of the day brought about the first 20 paying users.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from first public post to the October 2023 figure", "value": "16 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: June 2022 to October 2023.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Early 2022", "what": "Richards starts experimenting with Recall as a side project while he works full-time as a freelance software developer.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "7 June 2022", "what": "Show HN: \"Recall – Your Personal Encyclopedia\", 34 points. He replies that it will be freemium: 50 items free, then about US$5 a month as the plan for now.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "2022", "what": "A Product Hunt launch brings a couple thousand signups, but few stay. He parks the project for some months and returns to freelance work.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "1 November 2022", "what": "A new Show HN asks the community whether to continue. 493 points. Within 24 hours an investor writes to him; after one phone call they sign a SAFE for US$120,000.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "when": "Late 2022 to 2023", "what": "He works on Recall full-time, hires Igor Gligorevic from Serbia through an introduction after failed trial projects with freelancers, and makes him co-founder. Watching friends try the product leads to a much simpler onboarding.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "9 March 2023", "what": "Show HN: summarize podcasts and other web content with ChatGPT, through a browser extension.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "8 June 2023", "what": "Show HN: build a personal knowledge graph from content you consume online. He writes that Recall has pivoted to a browser extension. 79 points.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "19 October 2023", "what": "Starter Story interview: about US$9,000 a month in recurring revenue, 10% monthly growth, 3 full-time employees, not yet profitable.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "June 2024", "what": "Recall presents first at the LAUNCH Accelerator 31 demo day on 17 June. The company says it was #1 Product of the Month on Product Hunt in June.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 2 ] }, { "when": "3 December 2024", "what": "The company announces US$1.5 million in pre-seed money led by Jason Calacanis. Silicon Canals reports it the same day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "when": "January to June 2025", "what": "Richards posts engineer openings on Hacker News for a small remote team from four countries. Stack: React and TypeScript, Python with FastAPI, Google Cloud.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The product runs at recall.it, with web, iOS, Android and four browser extensions, three plans, and a claim of more than 700,000 users. No new revenue figure.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 4, 7 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Persistence, then a public question", "text": "The first version failed to keep users. Instead of a quiet shutdown, the founder asked Hacker News, with an honest title, whether he should continue. The post reached the top of the site for about 13 hours by his account, and an investor contacted him the same day. The money paid for a full-time co-founder." }, { "title": "Watch users, do not ask them", "text": "Feedback forms to users who had left got no answers. He then sat friends in front of the product and was not allowed to explain anything. Most could not finish onboarding. He fixed each place where someone got stuck and repeated with a new person until everyone could create a first summary." }, { "title": "A summary as the first value", "text": "The product began as a database of cards with automatic links. Summaries of long videos, podcasts and articles, made possible by the large language models of 2023, gave a new user something useful in the first minute; the knowledge graph and the quizzes keep the content coming back later." }, { "title": "Launch sites and directories", "text": "Product Hunt launches brought the first paying users, and listings on AI tool directories, some of them paid, brought many more, by the founder's account. Hacker News brought the money. In 2026 the site also has dozens of comparison pages aimed at search traffic." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's interview, his Hacker News posts and the company's own pages. They are company statements, not checked by anyone else.", "items": [ "The idea comes from Maltego, where the founder worked on software that maps relationships between pieces of information. Recall applies the same graph idea to one person's saved content.", "The first version in 2022 stored data in the browser's IndexedDB database with a backup on the server.", "In 2025 the stack was React and TypeScript in front, Python with FastAPI on the server, and Google Cloud for hosting.", "The Plus plan picks a model for each task among frontier models, open-source models and Gemini Flash. The Max plan lets the user choose ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or another model.", "Payments run through Stripe, and the company was registered in the United States with Stripe Atlas. The founder uses Semrush for keyword research.", "An early growth test was a bot that posted summaries of trending articles as replies on Twitter; it stopped paying off when the Twitter API price rose.", "The product now offers an API and an MCP server, so other AI tools can read the user's saved knowledge." ], "src": [ 1, 5, 8, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database promised to help people save, organize or digest what they find online. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Delicious", "years": "2003 to 2017", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Save, tag and share web links from anywhere.", "died": "Yahoo bought it and let it stand still while people moved to phones. Several later owners could not make it pay.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2009-delicious" }, { "name": "Kippt", "years": "2012 to 2017", "funding": "US$400K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A good-looking bookmarking tool that would cure information overload, with social sharing.", "died": "Caught between Pocket and Evernote. The social features did not bring new users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/278-kippt" }, { "name": "Xmarks", "years": "2006 to 2014", "funding": "US$9M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Sync your bookmarks and tabs across browsers.", "died": "Chrome, Firefox and Safari built the same sync in, for free.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/762-xmarks" }, { "name": "Transpose", "years": "2012 to 2018", "funding": "US$0", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A more flexible Evernote, with templates for personal notes and then for businesses.", "died": "It charged for a note tool when people already had one and saw no reason to move.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1849-transpose" }, { "name": "Wavii", "years": "2009 to 2013", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Short machine-made summaries of the news that matters to you.", "died": "Google bought it for the technology before it found a way to make money; the product ended.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/727-wavii" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The five predecessors saved links or condensed news, and each lost to a bigger company that offered the same thing free or to the cost of getting people to switch. Saving was never the hard part; going back to what was saved was, and none of them solved that. Recall's founder describes the same problem: people save content and seldom return to it.", "Two things are different. First, a language model can now turn a two-hour video or podcast into a summary in seconds, so the saved item is useful on the day it is saved, not only later. Second, the same models make the links between items and the quiz questions automatically, work that tools like Evernote or Obsidian leave to the user. The risk that killed Xmarks and Kippt is still there: ChatGPT, NotebookLM and the browsers can add similar features, and Recall now sells itself partly as a way to use those models with your own content." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The funding luck, no.", "text": "A viral Hacker News post that produces an investor within a day cannot be planned. The rest can be copied: a tool for your own information problem, real users watched in silence, a summary as the first thing a new user gets, and an early price. The founder named two lessons in his interview: launch earlier and charge earlier.", "steps": [ "Build for a problem you have yourself, and show a simple version early on Hacker News and Product Hunt.", "When users leave, watch new people use the product without help and fix each place they stop.", "Give a useful result in the first minute: for content tools, an AI summary of something the user already wants to read or watch.", "Charge early. He kept about 3,000 users free for a long time, and said that charging is the only way to learn whether people will pay.", "List the product on AI tool directories and write guides for each use case to bring search traffic." ], "open": "Knowledge tools for one profession (lawyers, doctors, researchers) whose saved material is too private or too specialized for a general chatbot." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline figure, about US$9,000 a month in recurring revenue, rests on one source: Paul Richards's own interview with Starter Story, published on 19 October 2023. The 3-person team and the US$120,000 first check come from the same interview. There is no TrustMRR profile (a fetch of the profile address returned \"Not found\" on 24 October 2026), no Latka page, and no later revenue figure from the company, its investors or the press. A reader could look for a Stripe-verified revenue profile, an investor update, or a later interview with a dated figure." }, { "title": "The company grew past the team in the figure", "text": "The figure is from a team of 3. Since then Recall raised US$1.5 million (December 2024) and in 2025 posted openings for engineers in what it called a small remote team in four countries. The current headcount is not published, and any later revenue would come from a larger, funded company." }, { "title": "Funded, not bootstrapped", "text": "The business ran on outside money from November 2022, and the founder said in October 2023 that it was not yet profitable and that salaries were the largest cost." }, { "title": "Big companies sell similar features", "text": "NotebookLM, ChatGPT and Perplexity all summarize and chat with sources. The predecessors on this page lost when bigger companies added their feature for free." }, { "title": "Users are not customers", "text": "The 700,000 users that the site claims include the free plan. The company has not said how many pay." }, { "title": "Name confusion", "text": "Microsoft Recall, a Windows feature, and Recall.ai, a meeting-recording company, share the name. Recall's own About page spends a section saying it is neither." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.recall.it" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Starter Story, 19 October 2023: How My Passion Side Project Became A VC-Backed Startup In Just 24 Hours (interview with Paul Richards)", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/recall", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. A founder interview, not a page marked as an estimate. Source for the monthly revenue, growth, team, the US$120,000 SAFE, the Product Hunt results and the tools." }, { "title": "Recall blog, 3 December 2024: From a Hacker News Post to securing $1.5M Funding", "url": "https://www.recall.it/post/recall-fundraising-announcement-2024", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Company announcement. Source for the pre-seed round, the investors, the first investor's name, the founder's background and the June 2024 Product Hunt result." }, { "title": "Silicon Canals, 3 December 2024: Amsterdam's Recall bags EUR 1.4M funding, by Vigneshwar Ravichandran", "url": "https://siliconcanals.com/recall-bags-1-4m-funding/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Repeats the funding announcement and quotes the COO. No revenue or headcount." }, { "title": "Recall About page, last updated October 2026", "url": "https://www.recall.it/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the three founders and their roles, the Amsterdam headquarters, the user claim and the product description." }, { "title": "Hacker News posts by Paul Richards (paulrchds), 2022 to 2025", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=paulrchds", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through the Algolia API (search by author and the item records 31655676, 33425947, 36245557, 40639734, 42308801 and 44881901). Source for the post dates, points, the 2022 price plan and the 2023 pivot." }, { "title": "This Week in Startups, 17 June 2024: LAUNCH Accelerator 31 Public Demo Day", "url": "https://thisweekinstartups.com/episodes/deef88-launch-accelerator-31-public-demo-day", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the episode page and show notes. The transcript was not available, so nothing from the pitch itself is used." }, { "title": "Recall pricing page, read 24 October 2026", "url": "https://www.recall.it/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the monthly prices in the page's structured data. Source for the pricing table and the models used." }, { "title": "Hacker News, Who is hiring threads, January, May and June 2025: Recall job posts by Paul Richards", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42577097", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through the Algolia API, with the posts 43967085 and 44180352. Source for the team description and the technology stack." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/toneadapt/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/toneadapt.md", "slug": "toneadapt", "name": "ToneAdapt", "country": "United States", "sector": "Consumer Software", "productType": "Guitar tone-matching app", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-24", "launchLabel": "December 2025", "outcomeLabel": "About US$25K a month, June 2026", "sticker": "$25K a month, reported", "outcomeUsd": 300000, "months": 6, "teamLabel": "1 founder; the App Store seller is the founder himself, and no source names an employee", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "voice-audio", "channel": "creators", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Music" ], "product": "A guitarist picks a song and enters the guitar, amplifier and pedals that he or she owns. ToneAdapt looks up the gear and settings used on the original recording and translates them into settings for the user's own gear: which pickup to use, where to set each knob, and in which order to connect the pedals. It works on the web and as an iPhone app, for electric guitar and bass.", "why": "The founder built it for a problem he had himself as a new guitarist, so he knew the problem without market research. He shipped a simple web version first and charged from the start. Then he posted short videos of the product several times a day, with his own face, and one of the first videos spread widely. The iPhone app came only after the web version had paying users.", "summary": [ "ToneAdapt is a tone-matching app for guitarists. A guitar's tone is the character of its sound, and it depends on the guitar, its pickups (the magnetic sensors under the strings), the amplifier and its knobs, and the effect pedals in the signal chain, the order in which the guitar signal passes through each device. Copying a famous player's knob positions rarely works, because every brand of amplifier responds differently. ToneAdapt uses an AI model with web search to find the gear and settings behind a recording, then gives settings for the user's own gear.", "Kyan Santiago-Calling, a computer-science student at San Diego State University who had taken up the guitar in 2024, built the first version in about a week over the Thanksgiving break of 2025, without writing code by hand. AI Dev Cases reports that the web app went live on 8 December 2025 and that the iPhone app followed in April 2026. In a Starter Story interview published on 14 June 2026, the founder said that the web and the app together had made over US$25,000 in the previous four weeks: about US$11,500 through Stripe on the web and about US$14,000 in the iPhone app.", "That figure rests on one founder statement on one date, so this page grades it D, reported but not verified. The interviewer said the founder showed his revenue dashboards on screen, but no payment processor, buyer or journalist has published the numbers, and the TrustMRR profile that a later article cited could not be opened. The page also shows four failed companies that tried to make guitar playing easier or cheaper with hardware, rentals or celebrity teachers." ], "factsCaption": "A one-person guitar app that its founder said made over US$25,000 in four weeks, six months after the web launch, with no figure confirmed by a payment processor", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is reported but not verified, usually one founder statement on one date, or a third party's reading that this page could not open. A grade C value comes from the company's own pages or the App Store listing. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a student's resume project to an iPhone app with a reported US$25,000 a month, in about six months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "ToneAdapt prices on 24 October 2026, from the web plans page and the US App Store listing (grade C)", "note": "The web plans page shows yearly prices and a 7-day free trial; its monthly prices load only when a switch is pressed, so the monthly column for the web is derived from the page's own \"save\" figures (US$43.89 and US$81.89 a year). The App Store lists ten in-app purchases with several prices for the same period, which suggests that the app tests different paywalls. In the June 2026 interview the founder described the prices as about US$10 a week and about US$60 a year. The plans page says \"All sales final. No refunds.\"", "rows": [ [ "Web, Beginner", "3.33", "6.99", "20 tone adaptations a month, 15 saved tones a month; billed 39.99 a year; monthly price derived" ], [ "Web, Expert", "4.17", "10.99", "unlimited adaptations and saved tones; billed 49.99 a year; monthly price derived" ], [ "iPhone, ToneAdapt Unlimited", "2.50 to 6.25", "14.99", "unlimited; yearly 29.99, 59.99 or 74.99; weekly 5.99 or 9.99" ], [ "iPhone, ToneAdapt", "2.92 to 4.17", "", "yearly 34.99 or 49.99; weekly 8.99" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue in the four weeks before the interview, web and iPhone app together", "value": "over US$25,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder, Starter Story interview published 14 June 2026: about US$11,500 on the Stripe dashboard for the web app and about US$14,000 in the iPhone app. The interviewer, Pat Walls, said the founder pulled up his revenue dashboard and showed it. This page could not check the dashboards.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the June 2026 figure", "value": "about US$300,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$25,000 times 12. Using the founder's two parts, US$25,500 per four weeks, times 13 four-week periods gives US$331,500.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Web revenue in the three months before the interview", "value": "US$45,000, with 1,400 new subscribers", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder, Starter Story interview, 14 June 2026. That is US$15,000 a month on average (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscribers in the iPhone app", "value": "over 397", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder, Starter Story interview, 14 June 2026, about one month after the app launch.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Users", "value": "over 100,000 by June 2026", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder in the interview. His own site says 100,000 people in the first 100 days on the App Store and 300,000+ players in October 2026; the company home page says 150,000+ guitarists. The counts are not explained.", "src": [ 1, 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in January 2026", "value": "US$750", "grade": "D", "note": "Reported by AI Dev Cases on 23 July 2026 as a founder figure, with no primary source given for it.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by February 2026", "value": "about US$9,600", "grade": "D", "note": "Reported by AI Dev Cases on 23 July 2026, with no primary source given for it.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Last-30-day revenue on TrustMRR, as quoted", "value": "US$17,261", "grade": "D", "note": "AI Dev Cases wrote on 23 July 2026 that the TrustMRR tracker showed this figure. On 24 October 2026 the TrustMRR markdown profile returned \"Not found\", so this page could not read it.", "src": [ 3, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Highest month, as quoted", "value": "\"$35K last month\"", "grade": "D", "note": "A founder figure quoted by AI Dev Cases on 23 July 2026 without a date or link. AI Dev Cases notes that published figures range from US$17,000 to US$35,000.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Time to build the first version", "value": "about a week", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder: built over the Thanksgiving break of 2025 with AI coding tools, \"Not a single line of code has been written myself\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Web launch", "value": "8 December 2025", "grade": "D", "note": "Reported by AI Dev Cases. The founder said only that he built it over the Thanksgiving break.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "iPhone app launch", "value": "April 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's site. The earliest App Store reviews shown are dated 10 April. On 30 April 2026 the founder posted \"18 days into my first iOS app\" (quoted by AI Dev Cases).", "src": [ 4, 7, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the web launch to the June 2026 figure", "value": "6 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: December 2025 to June 2026.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "App Store seller and copyright holder", "value": "Kyan Santiago-Calling; copyright ToneAdapt, LLC", "grade": "C", "note": "US App Store listing, read 24 October 2026. His own site says his company Six String Studio, LLC (Delaware, 2026) owns ToneAdapt.", "src": [ 7, 4 ] }, { "fact": "App Store rating", "value": "4.8 from 3,200 ratings", "grade": "C", "note": "US App Store, 24 October 2026. AI Dev Cases recorded 4.75 from 610 ratings in July 2026. The founder's site says 4.8 from 6,000+ ratings, probably across countries.", "src": [ 7, 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Gear database", "value": "9,000+ items", "grade": "C", "note": "App Store description, October 2026. The founder showed over 1,500 guitars and 2,000 amps in June 2026; AI Dev Cases reports a jump from 200 to over 4,000 items in March 2026.", "src": [ 7, 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Paid advertising", "value": "none by April 2026, according to the founder", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder's X post of 30 April 2026, quoted by AI Dev Cases: \"Still don't understand or run TikTok or Meta ads\". In June 2026 he advised putting money behind winning videos on Meta and TikTok ads, and his site lists paid social among his skills, so this may have changed.", "src": [ 3, 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "D", "note": "AI Dev Cases writes \"Fully bootstrapped\". No source mentions an investor.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 person", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder speaks of building and marketing the app himself (\"I used Cursor to build the entire project\"); the App Store names him as seller and developer. No source names an employee. He also co-founded a separate app studio in Seattle in early 2026, which makes other apps.", "src": [ 1, 7, 4 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2023", "what": "Starts computer science at San Diego State University. His site says he later left to build.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "2024", "what": "Works as a machine-learning data associate at Amazon, and takes up the guitar, which he soon plays almost every day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 3, 1 ] }, { "when": "Autumn 2025", "what": "Makes short user-generated videos for brands for extra money, and learns which videos get attention. While looking for a resume project, he notices that ChatGPT gives inaccurate guitar settings.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "Thanksgiving 2025", "what": "Builds the first web version in about a week, all with AI coding tools.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "8 December 2025", "what": "The web app goes live, according to AI Dev Cases. The first video about it spreads overnight, the founder said.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "when": "January to February 2026", "what": "AI Dev Cases reports US$750 of revenue in January and about US$9,600 by February.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "March 2026", "what": "The gear database grows from 200 to more than 4,000 items, according to AI Dev Cases.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "April 2026", "what": "The iPhone app goes live, built natively in Swift. On 30 April the founder posts that he does not run TikTok or Meta ads.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 3, 1 ] }, { "when": "14 June 2026", "what": "Starter Story publishes the interview: over US$25,000 in four weeks and over 100,000 users, the founder said. The video had 180,396 views by 24 October 2026.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "23 July 2026", "what": "AI Dev Cases publishes a case study and quotes a TrustMRR reading of US$17,261 in 30 days.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "Two more guitar apps, ToneID and GuitarMaxx, go out, and the founder sets up Six String Studio to own all three. Version 1.2.0 of ToneAdapt adds over 5,000 guitars and 3,000 amps.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 7 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "Version 1.2.4, with a new results screen that draws the user's own amp and pedals. The App Store shows 4.8 stars from 3,200 ratings in the US.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "The founder was the customer", "text": "He played guitar almost every day and could not get the sound of the records on his own gear. He asked ChatGPT for settings and found the answers inaccurate, and other guitarists in Reddit and Instagram comments had the same complaint. So he knew the problem and the words his customers used for it before he wrote any code." }, { "title": "The demo is the advertisement", "text": "A 15-second clip that shows a famous song's tone dialed in on ordinary gear is both a product demo and entertainment. The founder posted three times a day on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook, with his own face, and when one video format brought subscribers he remade it many times. The first video about the app spread overnight, he said." }, { "title": "Web first, phone app second", "text": "The first version was a web app with Stripe payments, built in about a week. Only after it had paying users did he build a native iPhone app with an in-app paywall. The founder said in June 2026 that the iPhone app made about US$14,000 in its first month, more than the web in the same four weeks." }, { "title": "Data around the model", "text": "Any developer can call an AI model. ToneAdapt adds a database of gear models with the real controls of each amplifier and pedal, which grew to more than 9,000 items by October 2026 according to the App Store page. The model's research is then translated onto those controls, so the answer names knobs that the user's amp actually has." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's Starter Story interview and the App Store listing. The interview text is an automatic transcript, so two product names in it are misspelled; the likely names are given.", "items": [ "The founder said every line of code was written by AI tools: Cursor for the first version, and a coding tool that the transcript spells \"Cloud Code\", probably Anthropic's Claude Code.", "Web app: Supabase for the database, Vercel for hosting, analytics and the backend API routes, Mailgun for email and Stripe for payments.", "AI: the OpenAI API, plus a web search API that the transcript spells \"Tavli\", probably Tavily, to research the gear behind each recording.", "iPhone app: written natively in Swift, with RevenueCat to track subscriptions and Superwall to show and test paywalls.", "Marketing: short videos three times a day on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook, and posts on X about building the app." ], "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to make guitar playing easier or cheaper for ordinary musicians, mostly with hardware or people instead of software. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Magic Instruments", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$4M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A digital guitar with buttons and lights on the neck, so a beginner could play songs without learning chords.", "died": "The hardware was expensive to make, players found the move to a real guitar hard, and cheaper music-learning apps did the same job without a special instrument.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1062-magic-instruments" }, { "name": "Guitar Hero Live", "years": "2015 to 2019", "funding": "US$50M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A guitar game with a new controller and live-action crowds, so playing felt like a real concert.", "died": "Plastic guitar controllers cost too much next to free phone games, the rhythm-game genre declined, and Activision stopped supporting it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/201-guitar-hero-live" }, { "name": "Sharingear", "years": "2014 to 2020", "funding": "None", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A marketplace where independent musicians rent instruments, amps and pedals from each other on tour.", "died": "Musicians did not trust strangers with their gear, insurance could not cover the risk, and rental prices left too little margin.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1986-sharingear" }, { "name": "FrontRow", "years": "2020 to 2023", "funding": "US$18M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Online classes in singing, music, acting and comedy taught by Indian celebrities, at a low price.", "died": "Each celebrity course cost a lot to make, while students would pay little, so the company spent its money before the numbers worked.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2205-frontrow" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The four predecessors needed something expensive between the musician and the result: a special guitar, a game controller, a rental network with insurance, or a celebrity's time. Each of those costs grew with every new customer. ToneAdapt sells only an answer on a screen. Each answer comes from calls to an AI model and a web search service, and the founder said that he built the first version alone in about a week.", "Two things made that possible in 2025. AI models with web search can read rig rundowns, interviews and forum posts and produce a likely list of the gear on a recording, which a person would need hours to collect. And AI coding tools let a student with no shipped software build a web app and then a native iPhone app. What did not change is the need for customers to find the product; the founder's answer was his own short videos, not paid advertising, at least until April 2026." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, if you are already inside the hobby.", "text": "The method does not depend on a moment in time: pick a small, frequent pain in a hobby you practice yourself, ship a paid web version in days, and show the product working in short videos every day. The hard part is the content. The founder had made videos for brands before, and he showed his face from the first day.", "steps": [ "List the small problems you meet in a hobby you practice every week, and check in comment sections that strangers have the same problem.", "Ship a paid web version in days with an AI coding tool, a hosted database and Stripe.", "Post the product solving a real case on short-video platforms three times a day for at least four weeks.", "When one video format brings subscribers, remake it many times, then build the phone app with a tested paywall." ], "open": "Other hobbies where equipment differs from person to person and the result can be shown in seconds: bass and synthesizer patches, camera and lens settings, fishing tackle, home espresso machines, bicycle setup." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline figure, over US$25,000 in the four weeks before the interview (about US$11,500 on the web and about US$14,000 in the iPhone app), rests on one source: the founder's statement in a Starter Story interview published on 14 June 2026. The interviewer said that the founder showed his revenue dashboards on screen, but this page could not check them. AI Dev Cases wrote on 23 July 2026 that TrustMRR showed US$17,261 in the last 30 days and quoted a founder peak of \"$35K last month\"; the TrustMRR profile returned \"Not found\" on 24 October 2026. A reader could look for a live TrustMRR or RevenueCat verified profile, a second dated interview, or the founder's own revenue posts on X." }, { "title": "The figures disagree", "text": "Published monthly figures range from US$17,000 to US$35,000, and user counts from 100,000 to 300,000, depending on the source and the date. Weekly subscriptions and yearly plans paid at once make a four-week revenue window move a lot from month to month." }, { "title": "Accuracy complaints", "text": "Several App Store reviews praise the app, but one from May 2026 says it gave the same settings for very different songs and calls it AI output that invents wrong answers. A tool that tells a beginner where to set the knobs depends on users trusting its answers, and an AI model can state wrong settings with confidence." }, { "title": "Growth depends on a stream of videos", "text": "The founder's method is to post three times a day and remake the formats that work. When the videos stop or a platform changes what it shows, new users can stop too. The founder now also runs two newer guitar apps and a consulting offer, which share his time." }, { "title": "Strict billing terms", "text": "The plans page says \"All sales final. No refunds.\", the iPhone app sells weekly plans up to US$9.99, and one reviewer who signed up through Apple wrote that he could not reach support. Pricing like this raises revenue in the short term and can raise complaints and refund requests later." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://toneadapt.com/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6761394160" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/toneadapt" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Starter Story episode page, 14 June 2026: The First App I Ever Built Makes $25K/Month, with transcript", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/i-turned-my-hobby-into-a-25k-month-app", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full, including the automatic transcript. Founder interview by Pat Walls. Source for the four-week and three-month revenue, subscribers, users, the build time, the stack and the marketing method." }, { "title": "YouTube watch page of the Starter Story video, 14 June 2026", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4k8JNYKJT0", "grade": "D", "how": "Read the public watch page text: title, description, publication date and view count. The video itself was not downloaded." }, { "title": "AI Dev Cases, 23 July 2026: A 21-Year-Old Student Turned His Own Guitar-Tone Frustration Into an App", "url": "https://aidevcases.com/en/cases/toneadapt", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. A secondary case study that compiles the founder's X posts and other sources. Source for the launch dates, the January and February figures, the TrustMRR reading and the quoted X post of 30 April 2026." }, { "title": "Kyan Santiago-Calling's personal site", "url": "https://www.kyansc.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder's own site. Source for his background, Six String Studio, the April 2026 App Store launch, the later apps and the user count." }, { "title": "ToneAdapt home page", "url": "https://toneadapt.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product description and the company's own user count." }, { "title": "ToneAdapt plans page", "url": "https://toneadapt.com/plans", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 24 October 2026. Source for the web prices, plan limits, the free trial and the no-refund line." }, { "title": "ToneAdapt on the US App Store", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/toneadapt-guitar-tone-match/id6761394160", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 24 October 2026. Source for the seller, the in-app purchase prices, the ratings, the reviews and the version history." }, { "title": "TrustMRR markdown profile for ToneAdapt", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/toneadapt.md", "grade": "D", "how": "Could not open: the markdown profile returned \"Not found\" on 24 October 2026. Its last-30-day figure is cited from AI Dev Cases' quotation." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/macwhisper/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/macwhisper.md", "slug": "macwhisper", "name": "MacWhisper", "country": "Netherlands", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Mac app that transcribes audio on the device with open speech models", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-24", "launchLabel": "January 2023", "outcomeLabel": "About US$100K in total revenue, August 2023", "sticker": "About $100K total, reported", "outcomeUsd": 100000, "months": 7, "teamLabel": "1 founder, who is the seller of record on the App Store; in 2026 the website says \"Jordi Bruin and friends\" and gives no headcount", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Privacy", "group": "voice-audio", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Audio" ], "product": "A native Mac app that turns audio and video files, recordings from the microphone and online meetings into text. The speech models run on the Mac itself, so files do not leave the computer. The free version uses the smaller models; a one-time Pro license, listed on Gumroad at €65 in October 2026, adds the larger models, speaker recognition, batch work, dictation features and connections to AI services. An iPhone, iPad and Mac App Store version is sold as Whisper Transcription.", "why": "OpenAI published its Whisper speech model as open weights, which anyone may run for free. Jordi Bruin, a Dutch developer of many small Apple apps, put it in a simple Mac app with drag and drop, gave the basic version away on Gumroad and charged once for the larger models. A newsletter, startups.email, reported in August 2023 that the app had made about US$100,000 in total, but it gave no source for that figure.", "summary": [ "MacWhisper is a transcription app for the Mac. Transcription means turning recorded speech into written text. The app runs Whisper, a speech-recognition model that OpenAI released with open weights, which means anyone may download the trained model and run it on their own computer without paying OpenAI. MacWhisper runs it on-device, on the user's own Mac, so the audio is never uploaded and the developer pays nothing per minute of audio. Later versions added other open models, Nvidia's Parakeet and Qwen3-ASR, and optional cloud services for users who bring their own API keys.", "Jordi Bruin, an indie developer in the Netherlands who works under the name Good Snooze, released it in January 2023, according to the startups.email newsletter, and sells it mainly through Gumroad. On 5 February 2023 the Gumroad page data showed 7,160 orders, with Pro listed at €10. On 25 August 2023 it showed 57,430 orders, with Pro listed at €25. The next day, 26 August 2023, the startups.email newsletter reported that MacWhisper had made about US$100,000 in revenue and had been downloaded 57,574 times. By October 2026 the counter stood at 619,325 and Pro was listed at €65.", "The revenue figure is the weak point of this page, so the page carries the badge \"Reported, not verified\" and evidence grade D. The newsletter does not say where the figure comes from: it names no founder statement, no screenshot and no payment data, only \"our database\", and that database is no longer online. In every source read for this page, the founder gives prices, version notes and download figures but no revenue. The download counter is Gumroad's own data, but it also counts free downloads of the free version, so it cannot be turned into a revenue figure." ], "factsCaption": "About US$100,000 of total revenue in August 2023, seven months after launch, as one third-party newsletter reported without naming a source; Gumroad's own page data for orders and prices before and after", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value comes from one source with no second source, here a third-party newsletter. A grade C value comes from the company's own pages, from the data of the Gumroad or App Store page read directly or in a Wayback Machine copy on the date given, or from a press article. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a free Mac app on Gumroad to more than 600,000 orders on the same page, in under four years. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "MacWhisper prices on 24 October 2026: Gumroad prices in euros converted at the rate shown in Gumroad's own page data (1 EUR = US$1.1204), and App Store prices in US dollars from the United States store page (grade C)", "note": "Gumroad is the main shop. The free version is a €0 order on the same page. Pro is a one-time license with lifetime updates; the Gumroad page lists €65 for one license and lower prices per license in packs of 5 to 50, while the official website showed €64 on the same day. The Gumroad page offers 25% off to journalists, students and non-profits who write to support, and a refund within 7 days. The App Store version, Whisper Transcription, sells lifetime Pro unlocks and an Assistant subscription for cloud transcription; the store page lists the prices below without naming which unlock belongs to which platform.", "rows": [ [ "MacWhisper Free (Gumroad)", "0", "0", "smaller Whisper models, no license needed" ], [ "MacWhisper Pro, 1 license (Gumroad)", "72.83 one-time", "", "€65; personal use, lifetime updates" ], [ "Pro, 5 licenses (Gumroad)", "301.39 one-time", "", "€269, listed as €54 per license" ], [ "Pro, 10 licenses (Gumroad)", "549.00 one-time", "", "€490, listed as €49 per license" ], [ "Pro, 20 licenses (Gumroad)", "1,007.24 one-time", "", "€899, listed as €45 per license" ], [ "Pro, 50 licenses (Gumroad)", "2,463.76 one-time", "", "€2,199, listed as €44 per license" ], [ "Whisper Transcription Pro Lifetime (App Store)", "89.99 or 99.99 one-time", "", "two lifetime prices listed" ], [ "Whisper Transcription Assistant (App Store)", "7.50", "9.99", "US$89.99 a year; also US$5.99 a week; Pro & Assistant US$12.99" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Total revenue, August 2023", "value": "about US$100,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Reported by the startups.email newsletter (author Dimi) on 26 August 2023, which says the app launched in January 2023 and calls it a one-time purchase product. The newsletter cites no source: no founder statement, no screenshot, only \"our database\". No second source.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Downloads reported with the revenue figure", "value": "57,574", "grade": "D", "note": "Same newsletter, 26 August 2023. It agrees with Gumroad's own counter a day earlier (next row), which suggests the newsletter read the Gumroad page for this number.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Orders on the Gumroad page, 25 August 2023", "value": "57,430", "grade": "C", "note": "The sales counter in the page data of a Wayback Machine copy. It counts every order, and the free version is a €0 order on the same page, so it is not a count of paying customers. The page had 854 ratings.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Orders on the Gumroad page, 5 February 2023", "value": "7,160", "grade": "C", "note": "Wayback Machine copy, about three weeks after launch. 135 ratings.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Orders on the Gumroad page, 14 June 2024 and 14 June 2025", "value": "117,604 and 226,001", "grade": "C", "note": "Wayback Machine copies of the same page.", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Orders on the Gumroad page, 24 October 2026", "value": "619,325", "grade": "C", "note": "Live page data. 2,803 ratings with an average of 4.5 of 5; the seller is shown as Jordi Bruin, verified, with 29 products.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Price of one Pro license on Gumroad", "value": "€10 (February 2023), €25 (August 2023), €30 (June 2024), €59 (June 2025), €65 (October 2026)", "grade": "C", "note": "Read from the license options in the Gumroad page data on each date. 9to5Mac also gave €10 in February 2023.", "src": [ 4, 2, 5, 6, 3, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue figure computed from orders and prices", "value": "not possible", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the counter mixes free and paid orders and the page does not split them, so multiplying it by the Pro price gives no revenue figure. This page does not attempt one.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "App Store version", "value": "Whisper Transcription, for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Vision", "grade": "C", "note": "United States store page read 24 October 2026: seller Jordi Bruin, developer Good Snooze, 171 ratings with an average of 3.9. The oldest review shown is dated 4 May 2023.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Hacker News front-page post, 22 August 2023", "value": "240 points and 93 comments", "grade": "C", "note": "Posted by a user, not by the founder, four days before the newsletter. Read through the Algolia Hacker News API.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Apple's own marketing, 29 October 2024", "value": "MacWhisper used as a benchmark in Apple's Mac mini announcement", "grade": "C", "note": "Apple wrote that the M4 Mac mini transcribes with on-device AI speech-to-text up to 2x faster in MacWhisper than the M1 model.", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "fact": "The founder's other work", "value": "more than 20 apps over two years, seven of them featured on the App Store", "grade": "C", "note": "Speaker biography on the Appdevcon conference page, undated, with talks from June 2022.", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 founder", "grade": "C", "note": "The App Store lists Jordi Bruin as seller; the Gumroad page writes in the first person (\"I'll try to email you back\"). In 2026 the website footer says \"Built by Jordi Bruin and friends at Good Snooze in the Netherlands\", without a headcount.", "src": [ 8, 3, 7 ] }, { "fact": "TrustMRR profile", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "The profile address returned \"Not found\" on 24 October 2026, and the local cache of profiles has no entry.", "src": [ 18 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "D", "note": "No source read for this page mentions an investor or a funding round.", "src": [ 1, 15 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the August 2023 figure", "value": "7 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: January 2023 to August 2023.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "June 2022", "what": "Bruin speaks at Appdevcon in the Netherlands on shipping side projects in \"2-2-2 easy steps\". His undated conference biography says he shipped more than 20 apps in two years.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "January 2023", "what": "MacWhisper appears on Gumroad: a free Mac app that runs Whisper locally, with the larger models as a paid upgrade. The month comes from the startups.email newsletter.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "3 February 2023", "what": "9to5Mac reviews it: drag and drop, local processing, four model sizes, export to SRT and VTT subtitles, and Pro at €10 for the Medium and Large models.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "5 February 2023", "what": "The Gumroad page data shows 7,160 orders and 135 ratings.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "May 2023", "what": "The App Store version, Whisper Transcription, is on sale; its oldest review shown is dated 4 May 2023.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "19 June 2023", "what": "The writer Om Malik publishes \"Why I love MacWhisper\" and writes that he cancelled his Otter subscription, which he said cost him about US$100 a year.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "22 August 2023", "what": "A user posts the Gumroad page to Hacker News; it gets 240 points.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "25 August 2023", "what": "The Gumroad page data shows 57,430 orders, 854 ratings, and Pro at €25.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "26 August 2023", "what": "The startups.email newsletter reports about US$100,000 in revenue and 57,574 downloads, with no source named.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "8 March 2024", "what": "Bruin is the guest on Slices, the Deep Dish Swift podcast, described as an indie dev at Good Snooze building MacWhisper, Navi, Posture Pal and Vivid.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "when": "14 June 2024", "what": "117,604 orders on the Gumroad page; Pro at €30.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "29 October 2024", "what": "Apple's Mac mini announcement uses MacWhisper as one of its speed benchmarks.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "6 December 2024", "what": "MacWhisper 11 adds a redesign and system-wide dictation from the menu bar, 9to5Mac reports.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "14 June 2025", "what": "226,001 orders on the Gumroad page; Pro at €59.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "14 July 2026", "what": "MacWhisper 14 ships with a new transcript editor; 9to5Mac calls Bruin a prolific indie developer and notes support for Nvidia's Parakeet models.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "24 October 2026", "what": "Version 15.2 on Gumroad, 619,325 orders, 2,803 ratings, Pro at €65. No revenue figure from the founder or a payment processor has been found.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A free app as the shop window", "text": "The basic app costs nothing and runs the smaller models. The larger, more accurate models and the work features (batch transcription, speaker recognition, meeting recording, dictation clean-up) need the one-time Pro license. Gumroad's counter went from 7,160 orders in February 2023 to 57,430 in August 2023, but it counts free and paid orders together, so the share of buyers is unknown." }, { "title": "The customer's computer does the work", "text": "Whisper's weights are free, and the transcription runs on the user's Mac, so each extra minute of audio costs the developer nothing. That is what makes a one-time price workable, and it is also what reviewers praised: 9to5Mac stressed that files never leave the Mac, and Om Malik wrote in June 2023 that he cancelled a transcription subscription that he said cost about US$100 a year." }, { "title": "Prices that rise with the product", "text": "The Gumroad page data shows Pro at €10 in February 2023, €25 in August 2023, €30 in June 2024, €59 in June 2025 and €65 in October 2026. Over the same period the page added new models and features, and it promises Pro owners all current and future updates." }, { "title": "Every new open model is a new version", "text": "When new open speech models appeared, the app added them: WhisperKit, distilled Whisper models, Nvidia Parakeet, Qwen3-ASR and Nemotron diarization. Each version got its own coverage in 9to5Mac, and Apple itself used the app as a benchmark in October 2024." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the Gumroad page, the official website, the App Store page and press articles. They are grade C, except the whisper.cpp detail, which only the newsletter gives.", "items": [ "A native macOS app. Transcription runs locally with OpenAI's open Whisper models, from Tiny to Large V3, with Metal and GPU support for up to about 30 times real time, the Gumroad page says.", "Pro adds Nvidia Parakeet v2 and v3 (up to 300 times real time on M-series Macs, per the Gumroad page), Qwen3-ASR, WhisperKit and distilled models, and speaker diarization with NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Diarization.", "The startups.email newsletter wrote that the app is based on Whisper and whisper.cpp, the open C++ version of Whisper.", "Optional cloud features use the customer's own API keys: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Groq, xAI, Deepseek, Azure and OpenRouter for summaries and prompts; OpenAI, ElevenLabs, Deepgram, Groq and Gladia for cloud transcription; Ollama and LM Studio for local AI models.", "Sold through Gumroad, which issues the license keys, and through the App Store as Whisper Transcription with in-app purchases. The App Store version's Assistant cloud transcription runs on Mistral's Voxtral model, with ElevenLabs Scribe for larger files, the September 2026 release notes say.", "Business features: deployment across organisations through MDM tools such as Jamf, a command-line interface, watched folders, and automatic upload to Notion, Zapier, Obsidian, n8n, Make.com or a webhook.", "The website is built with Framer and the documentation is hosted on Help Scout Docs, as the page source shows. Customers can join a Gumroad affiliate program." ], "src": [ 3, 7, 8, 1, 9 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database offered a voice service or a better utility, and lost when large platforms offered the same thing for free or at a loss. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Tellme", "years": "1999 to 2011", "funding": "US$238M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Information and services by voice over the phone, before smartphones.", "died": "Users moved to apps with screens, and Google and Amazon built voice assistants with far more data. Microsoft bought it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/612-tellme" }, { "name": "Petalite", "years": "2014 to 2025", "funding": "US$12M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A privacy-first voice assistant that runs locally on the device.", "died": "Amazon and Google sold their devices at or below cost and had more training data; privacy alone did not win buyers.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2471-petalite" }, { "name": "Xmarks", "years": "2006 to 2014", "funding": "US$9M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Sync bookmarks and tabs across browsers.", "died": "Chrome, Firefox and Safari built sync in, for free.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/762-xmarks" }, { "name": "Readability", "years": "2009 to 2015", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Clutter-free reading of any web article.", "died": "Browsers added a reader mode for free, and too few readers paid.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/485-readability" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Tellme and Petalite had to build or license their own speech technology and run it on servers or hardware they paid for, and both met platform owners who could give the same service away. Xmarks and Readability built small, useful utilities that the browser makers then copied for free. MacWhisper is exposed to both risks: speech recognition is a feature that Apple, Google, Microsoft or OpenAI can add to their own products.", "What differs is cost. OpenAI gave away the model, and the customer's Mac supplies the computing power, so the product has no cost per user and one developer could ship it, sell it once and still profit, if the reported figure is right. The startups.email newsletter reported about US$100,000 of revenue in the first seven months. The defense is speed and breadth: the app keeps adding new open models and work features, such as batch jobs, meeting recording, MDM deployment and a command line, that a free built-in feature is unlikely to match." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The number, unverified.", "text": "The method is clear and public: take a strong open model, wrap it in a native app that is simple to use, run it on the customer's own hardware so there is no usage cost, give the basic version away and sell a one-time upgrade. The size of the result is not known: the only revenue figure, which a newsletter reported in August 2023, has no stated source.", "steps": [ "Watch for open-weight model releases that solve a task people now pay a subscription for.", "Build a native, offline app around the model, so the customer's hardware pays for the computing.", "Give away the version with the small model and charge once for the larger models and the work features.", "Raise the price as features arrive, and keep existing buyers on free updates." ], "open": "Other open models that still lack a simple, private desktop app: image upscaling, OCR of scanned documents, translation, music separation and local search over a person's own files." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline figure of about US$100,000 in total revenue rests on one source: the startups.email newsletter by Dimi, published on 26 August 2023. The newsletter cites no founder statement, no screenshot and no payment data, only \"our database\", and the startups.email site now shows a domain-for-sale page, so the database cannot be checked. In every source read for this page the founder, Jordi Bruin, gives prices, features and download numbers but no revenue, and TrustMRR has no profile for the app. What outside data confirms is smaller: Gumroad's own counter showed 57,430 orders on 25 August 2023, close to the newsletter's 57,574 downloads, but that counter includes free downloads. A reader could look for a payment-processor-verified profile (TrustMRR or Gumroad), a talk or interview in which the founder gives revenue, or the annual accounts of his business in the Dutch company register." }, { "title": "Downloads are not sales", "text": "Gumroad's counter passed 619,325 in October 2026, but the free version is a €0 order on the same page, and the page does not show how many orders were paid Pro licenses. The App Store version has 171 ratings in the United States store, a small number next to the Gumroad page." }, { "title": "Platforms can build it in", "text": "The model is free for anyone, including Apple, Microsoft, Google and OpenAI, and each can add transcription to its own products. Every predecessor on this page lost to a platform that offered the same thing for free." }, { "title": "Meeting recording without a bot", "text": "The website says the app records Zoom, Teams, Webex, Skype and Discord calls in the background, with \"No bots joining\". This is the one borderline feature: other people in the call get no notice from a bot, and in many places recording a call needs the consent of everyone in it. The legal duty sits with the user, and one App Store reviewer describes recording meetings \"with permission\"." }, { "title": "One person, many apps", "text": "Bruin has shipped more than 20 apps, and the website now says \"Jordi Bruin and friends\". No source gives the size of the team or how much of his time MacWhisper takes, so how well it would survive his absence is unknown." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.macwhisper.com/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1668083311" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/macwhisper" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/macwhisper" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "startups.email newsletter (Dimi), 26 August 2023: ~$100,000 Revenue with a simple Mac app", "url": "https://startupsemail.substack.com/p/100000-revenue-with-a-simple-mac", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. Source for the revenue figure, the 57,574 downloads, the January 2023 launch month and the whisper.cpp detail. It names no source for any figure beyond \"our database\"." }, { "title": "Gumroad product page for MacWhisper, Wayback Machine copy of 25 August 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230825233846/https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page data: the sales counter (57,430), the rating counts and the license options with their prices in euros." }, { "title": "Gumroad product page for MacWhisper (Good Snooze), read 24 October 2026", "url": "https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full description and the page data. Source for the current prices, the 619,325 counter, the 2,803 ratings, the models, the feature list and the first-person support text." }, { "title": "Gumroad product page for MacWhisper, Wayback Machine copy of 5 February 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230205000535/https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page data: 7,160 orders, 135 ratings, Pro at €10." }, { "title": "Gumroad product page for MacWhisper, Wayback Machine copy of 14 June 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240614222416/https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page data: 117,604 orders, Pro at €30." }, { "title": "Gumroad product page for MacWhisper, Wayback Machine copy of 14 June 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250614090026/https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page data: 226,001 orders, Pro at €59." }, { "title": "MacWhisper official website, read 24 October 2026", "url": "https://www.macwhisper.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page and its source. Source for the feature list, the €64 Pro price, the meeting recording text, the footer naming Jordi Bruin and friends at Good Snooze in the Netherlands, Framer and Help Scout Docs. The FAQ answers load by script and could not be read." }, { "title": "Apple App Store, United States: Whisper Transcription (id1668083311), read 24 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/whisper-transcription/id1668083311", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the seller Jordi Bruin, the developer Good Snooze, the 171 ratings, the in-app purchase prices, the reviews and the release notes naming Mistral's Voxtral and ElevenLabs Scribe." }, { "title": "9to5Mac (Filipe Espósito), 3 February 2023: MacWhisper is a macOS app that uses OpenAI to transcribe audio files into text", "url": "https://9to5mac.com/2023/02/03/macwhisper-app-transcribe-audio-text/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the first version's features and the €10 Pro price." }, { "title": "Om Malik, On my Om, 19 June 2023: Why I love MacWhisper", "url": "https://om.co/2023/06/19/why-i-love-macwhisper/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with comments. A user's review naming the independent developer Jordi Bruin." }, { "title": "Hacker News, 22 August 2023: MacWhisper: Transcribe audio files on your Mac", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37228821", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the full thread through the Algolia Hacker News API (hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/37228821). The founder did not comment and no comment gives revenue." }, { "title": "Apple Newsroom, 29 October 2024: Apple's new Mac mini is more mighty, more mini, and built for Apple Intelligence", "url": "https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/10/apples-new-mac-mini-is-more-mighty-more-mini-and-built-for-apple-intelligence/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections that name MacWhisper as a benchmark." }, { "title": "9to5Mac (Zac Hall), 6 December 2024: MacWhisper 11 brings a friendly redesign to the best AI-powered transcription app", "url": "https://9to5mac.com/2024/12/06/macwhisper-11-brings-a-friendly-redesign-to-the-best-ai-powered-transcription-app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the dictation feature and the local AI services." }, { "title": "9to5Mac (Marcus Mendes), 14 July 2026: MacWhisper 14 launches with a new transcript editor, faster performance, more", "url": "https://9to5mac.com/2026/07/14/macwhisper-14-launches-with-a-new-transcript-editor-faster-performance-more/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for version 14, the Parakeet models and the description of Bruin as a prolific indie developer." }, { "title": "Appdevcon speaker page: Jordi Bruin, indie developer at Good Snooze", "url": "https://appdevcon.nl/speaker/jordi-bruin/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the count of apps and the June 2022 talks. Undated biography." }, { "title": "Slices: The Deep Dish Swift Podcast, 8 March 2024: Jordi Bruin (Apple Podcasts episode page)", "url": "https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/jordi-bruin/id1670026071?i=1000648540627", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the episode page. No transcript was available, so only the description and date are used." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: MacWhisper product page, read 24 October 2026", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/macwhisper", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page: launched in 2023, two launches, 318 followers, 7 reviews. No revenue." }, { "title": "TrustMRR markdown profile address for macwhisper, checked 24 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/macwhisper.md", "grade": "C", "how": "Fetched once; the reply was \"Not found\", so no verified profile exists. The local cache of 570 profiles has no MacWhisper entry either." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/codeguide/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/codeguide.md", "slug": "codeguide", "name": "CodeGuide", "country": "Canada", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Planning documents for AI coding tools", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-24", "launchLabel": "24 December 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$42K MRR, March 2025", "sticker": "$42K MRR in 90 days", "outcomeUsd": 504000, "months": 3, "teamLabel": "2 people: the founder and a friend who built the back end", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Audience", "group": "build-software", "channel": "audience", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Developer tools" ], "product": "A web app that turns an app idea in plain English, or an existing GitHub codebase, into planning documents for AI coding tools: features, tech stack, architecture, database, screens, wireframes and a step-by-step task list. The user attaches the documents to Cursor, Claude Code, Lovable or a similar tool, so that the tool writes code that fits the plan.", "why": "Its users were mostly beginners and part-time developers who build with AI coding tools, which in the founder's words \"hallucinate\" and \"assume things\". He had written such planning documents for his agency's clients, automated his own prompts, and showed a demo to an X audience that had read his posts on AI prompting since 2022. More than 1,800 people joined the waitlist before the product existed, and in its first months there was no free trial.", "summary": [ "CodeGuide is a planning tool for people who build software with AI coding tools, programs such as Cursor, Claude Code or Lovable in which a large language model writes the code from instructions in plain English. Its founder's starting point was that these tools \"hallucinate\" and \"assume things\". A hallucination is output from a model that looks right but is invented; here, code that ignores what the project needs. CodeGuide takes the user's description of the app idea and writes a blueprint for the coding tool: the features, the tech stack, the architecture, the database, the screens and a step-by-step task list, in documents such as a PRD, a product requirements document that lists what the app must do and for whom. The user attaches the documents to the coding tool as context, the text that a model reads before it answers. CodeGuide can also import an existing codebase from GitHub and plan new features for it.", "CJ Zafir, who says he moved to Canada in 2018, ran an agency that built first versions of apps and spent nine to ten hours with ChatGPT on the planning documents for each one. He turned his prompts into an automated sequence and cut that to about two hours. In 2024 he set himself 12 startups in 12 months; of the 11 he built, he wrote on X in March 2025 that 3 were sold for US$30,000 in total and 7 failed. He had posted on X about AI prompting since 2022, so he posted a demo of the new idea before it existed and collected more than 1,800 waitlist emails in two weeks. With a friend who wrote the back end, he built CodeGuide in 14 days and launched it on 24 December 2024. In a Starter Story video interview published on 21 May 2025 and recorded in about March 2025, the founder told the interviewer that it reached US$42,000 in MRR, monthly recurring revenue, the amount that subscribers pay each month, within 90 days, on costs of about US$3,500 a month, most of it for the OpenAI API, the paid interface through which a program uses a provider's models.", "The revenue figures on this page rest on one source, so the page is grade D, reported but not verified: the founder told Starter Story, in the interview published in May 2025, that CodeGuide reached US$42,000 a month in recurring revenue. No payment processor, buyer or journalist has confirmed it, and when this page checked on 24 October 2026, TrustMRR listed no profile for CodeGuide. His posts from the same weeks agree on the direction: he wrote on 7 March 2025 that the company was profitable on a monthly bill of US$3,495, and his user counts rose from 3,013 on 27 February to 5,019 on 23 March 2025. He has published no later revenue figure that names the product. On 24 October 2026 the site was still live, with the same plans and the same claim of more than 40,000 users as nine days before, and a relaunch on Product Hunt on 10 March 2026 shows that the product was still being developed; the founder's own posts are now mostly about fine-tuning small language models and about SkillTune, his new product. The page also shows what happened to earlier companies that sold a helpful layer on top of programmers' main tools." ], "factsCaption": "A planning tool whose founder told Starter Story in May 2025 that it reached US$42,000 a month in recurring revenue within 90 days of launch, on costs of about US$3,500 a month; reported, not verified", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is a revenue figure that rests on one source, the founder's Starter Story interview of May 2025, and that no other source confirms. A grade C value is a statement by the founder in that interview or in a post on X, or a figure on the company's own website or its Product Hunt page. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From an agency owner's prompts to a planning tool that claims 40,000 users, in 22 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "CodeGuide prices on 24 October 2026, from the company's home page (grade C)", "note": "The page shows the prices billed yearly; its monthly switch loads by script. The Pro plan's monthly price comes from the page's own button text, \"pay $29\", which lists the Pro plan's features; the Founder plan's monthly price was not shown. In early 2025 there was no free plan and no trial: the founder said that a month cost US$29, with 40% off the yearly plan (US$199 a year in March and April 2025), and in August 2025 he announced a new price of US$49 a month. Use is counted in credits, and Pro users can buy more credits. The plans and prices on the home page were the same on 15 and 24 October 2026; the address /pricing returns \"This page could not be found\".", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "120 credits once, 1 project" ], [ "Pro", "24", "29", "5,000 credits a month, 15 projects; US$288 a year" ], [ "Founder", "29", "", "6,000 credits a month, 18 projects, own API keys, team members; US$348 a year" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue within 90 days of launch", "value": "US$42,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder in a Starter Story video interview published 21 May 2025: \"in just last three months we've grown CodeGuide to 42k MRR\". He also called it \"42k per month\" and did not say how yearly plans were counted. Day 90 after the launch was 24 March 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from that figure", "value": "US$504,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$42,000 times 12. The interviewer, Pat Walls, says \"over 500 000 in ARR\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month 49 days after launch", "value": "US$17,000", "grade": "D", "note": "The interviewer's account of a message from the founder. Day 49 was 11 February 2025 (calculated from the launch date). No money was spent on marketing.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Projection given in the interview", "value": "about US$90,000 for that month", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder: \"we're projecting to cross around 90k this month\". No later figure confirms it.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Members at the time of the interview", "value": "more than 4,800", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in the interview. His posts give 4,678 on 19 March and 5,019 on 23 March 2025, which places the recording at about 20 to 23 March 2025. That date is an inference on this page, not a stated date.", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Launch", "value": "24 December 2024, 100 users on the first day", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in the interview. The product took 14 days to build.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Waitlist before the product existed", "value": "more than 1,800 emails in two weeks", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder. The landing page was made with Bolt in about 30 minutes. His demo post got about 400 reposts and 300 sign-ups.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly costs, February 2025", "value": "US$3,495", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 7 March 2025: OpenAI API US$2,890 (\"98% AI work\"), Claude API US$340, Gemini Flash API free, and 11 other tools and services. He added: \"And yes we are profitable.\"", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Share of model APIs in the February 2025 costs", "value": "92.4%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: (US$2,890 + US$340) / US$3,495. The OpenAI API alone was 82.7%.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly costs, June 2025", "value": "US$3,477", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 17 June 2025: OpenAI API US$2,134 and Claude API US$780. He wrote that 84% of all costs were model API costs; (2,134 + 780) / 3,477 = 83.8%.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Costs as a share of the March 2025 revenue", "value": "about 8%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: about US$3,500 a month in costs (founder, interview) divided by US$42,000 = 8.3%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Users in 2025", "value": "3,013 (27 February), 5,019 (23 March), 7,600 (29 April), 11,356 (17 June)", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's posts. No post says how many of them pay.", "src": [ 7, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Users claimed on the website, October 2026", "value": "more than 40,000", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's home page, read on 15 and again on 24 October 2026 with the same text. No source says how many of them pay. The CodeGuide Chrome extension shows 135 users.", "src": [ 14, 22, 19 ] }, { "fact": "Product Hunt relaunch", "value": "10 March 2026, rank 15 of the day, 118 points", "grade": "C", "note": "The Product Hunt page of CodeGuide, read 24 October 2026: featured on 10 March 2026, 108 followers. It gives no revenue and no team size.", "src": [ 23 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue (TrustMRR)", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "The TrustMRR profile address returned \"Not found\" on 24 October 2026, and the local copy of 570 TrustMRR profiles has no entry for CodeGuide or its founder.", "src": [ 24 ] }, { "fact": "Price in March 2025", "value": "US$29 a month, no trial; yearly plan US$199 with 40% off", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in the interview (\"we're not doing any trials because we're using top of the line AI models\") and his posts of 23 March and 29 April 2025.", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Team in March 2025", "value": "2 people", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder did the front end and the marketing; a friend did the back end and the customer service. No later source gives the team size.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "On 14 July 2025 he wrote that top venture firms wanted to invest and that he was \"strongly against raising funds\".", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "His other products in 2024", "value": "11 built: 3 sold for US$30,000 in total, 7 failed, 1 profitable (CodeGuide)", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 24 March 2025. In the interview he said that 10 of the 11 collapsed.", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Followers on X, October 2026", "value": "64,357", "grade": "C", "note": "Profile data returned by the X API mirror on 15 October 2026.", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the US$42,000 figure", "value": "3 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: December 2024 to March 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2018", "what": "Zafir moves to Canada and takes his first office job, which he says was a bad experience. He then builds agencies and software products.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2022", "what": "He writes many posts on X about prompting AI models.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2024", "what": "He sets out to build 12 startups in 12 months. He builds 11: 3 are sold on Acquire.com for US$30,000 in total, 7 fail, and one becomes CodeGuide.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "Before the launch", "what": "He turns the prompts that he used for his agency's planning documents into a sequence on Make.com, posts a demo, and collects more than 1,800 waitlist emails in two weeks. He and a friend build the product in 14 days.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "24 December 2024", "what": "Launch, with 100 users on the first day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "About 11 February 2025", "what": "US$17,000 a month after 49 days, by the interviewer's account.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "7 March 2025", "what": "3,689 members after 74 days. He posts his February bill, US$3,495, and writes that the company is profitable.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "16 March 2025", "what": "He writes that CodeGuide uses a mixture of models, OpenAI's o1 and o3-mini and Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 3.7, to write the documents.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "About 24 March 2025", "what": "US$42,000 in monthly recurring revenue within 90 days of launch, by the founder's account in the interview.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "21 May 2025", "what": "Starter Story publishes the interview. On 16 June he writes that 100,000 people have watched it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 12 ] }, { "when": "17 June 2025", "what": "11,356 users and a monthly bill of US$3,477, 84% of it for model APIs.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "14 July 2025", "what": "He writes that venture firms are offering money and that he will not raise it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "12 August 2025", "what": "Codespace, a coding agent inside CodeGuide that runs Claude Code on a server with the Kimi K2 and Claude Sonnet 4 models. He says that it does 99% of the team's own development for US$35 to US$55 a day, and announces a new price of US$49 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "24 January 2026", "what": "CodeGuide 2.0: a planning and prototyping tool that writes requirements documents, wireframes, skills, prompts and tasks.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "10 March 2026", "what": "CodeGuide is featured on Product Hunt, as a tool that writes PRDs, specs and wireframes and maps an existing GitHub codebase. It ends the day at rank 15 with 118 points.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 23 ] }, { "when": "1 August 2026", "what": "His posts are now about fine-tuning small language models. Among the results of a 15-day break he lists \"sold 1 project\", without naming the project.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11, 13 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The site sells a free plan and two paid plans and claims more than 40,000 users; on 24 October 2026 it is live with the same plans and prices. His X profile describes him as fine-tuning small language models and links to his new product, SkillTune.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14, 22, 13, 15 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Audience", "text": "He had posted about AI prompting on X since 2022. He showed a demo of a product that did not exist yet, collected more than 1,800 emails, and launched to them. In the interview he calls the method content-audience fit: post content every day for 14 days, read the replies to find the main problem, and send the readers to a waitlist page. All growth was organic; there was no paid marketing." }, { "title": "It writes the plan, not the app", "text": "CodeGuide does not write the code. It writes the documents that the coding tool needs, and the user's own Cursor, Claude Code or Lovable writes the code. That made the product small enough for two people to build in 14 days, and every new coding tool became a place where CodeGuide was useful, not a competitor." }, { "title": "No free trial", "text": "In March 2025 there was no free trial, because the founder said that the best models were expensive. He told Starter Story in that interview, published in May 2025, that a month cost US$29, with 40% off the yearly plan. A free plan with 120 credits came later." }, { "title": "Costs that stay small", "text": "The founder posted on 7 March 2025 that the February 2025 bill was US$3,495, and that US$2,890 of it was the OpenAI API. Measured against the US$42,000 a month that he told Starter Story he had reached in March 2025, the costs were about 8%. He paid affiliates through Rewardful and spent nothing on advertising." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's interview, his posts on X and the company's home page. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Two people built the first version in 14 days: the founder did the front end and the marketing, a friend did the back end and the customer service.", "The first version was a sequence of the founder's own prompts on Make.com that cut a nine-hour planning task to about two hours. The first landing page was made with Bolt in about 30 minutes.", "Next.js for the front end; Supabase (PostgreSQL) for the database and storage; Vercel for deployment; a Hetzner server; Clerk for login; ConvertKit for email; Stripe for payments; Rewardful for affiliates.", "The code is written with AI tools: Cursor as the main editor, Windsurf, and Claude for designing interface components; by June 2025 also v0 and Bolt.", "The documents are written by a mixture of models. In February 2025 the OpenAI API did 98% of the AI work, by the founder's bill, with Anthropic's Claude doing the rest; Google's Gemini Flash API, free at the time, ran a feature called Codie. The site now offers more than 40 models, and the Founder plan lets users bring their own API keys.", "From August 2025 the team wrote almost all of its own code with Codespace, its agent built on Claude Code with Kimi K2 and Claude Sonnet 4; the founder wrote on 12 August 2025 that it cost US$35 to US$55 a day." ], "src": [ 1, 2, 3, 6, 8, 14 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold tools that made building software easier, and failed when a bigger platform built or bought the same thing, or when users would not pay. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Kite DevTool", "years": "2014 to 2024", "funding": "US$21M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "AI code completion inside the programmer's editor.", "died": "Few users paid for its free product, and GitHub Copilot, built on OpenAI's Codex model, gave better suggestions with GitHub's reach.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2491-kite-devtool" }, { "name": "Builder.ai", "years": "2016 to 2025", "funding": "US$445M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Custom apps for non-technical founders, built by an AI-powered assembly line.", "died": "It spent US$445 million selling apps for about US$20,000 that cost about US$35,000 to build, with offshore developers doing work that was sold as AI.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2170-builderai" }, { "name": "CodeSee", "years": "2020 to 2024", "funding": "US$10M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Maps of a codebase, so that developers understand it faster.", "died": "Developers liked the maps, but engineering managers saw no clear return for an occasional need, and free tools did much of the same.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2500-codesee" }, { "name": "Fig DevTool", "years": "2020 to 2024", "funding": "US$2.4M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Editor-style autocomplete and visual command builders for the terminal.", "died": "Few users paid in a market full of free tools. AWS acquired it in 2024.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2502-fig-devtool" }, { "name": "Pixate", "years": "2012 to 2016", "funding": "US$3.6M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Mobile app prototypes without code, between design and development.", "died": "Google bought it and gave it little attention, while Figma and other web-based design tools took the market.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/434-pixate" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Kite and Fig added a helpful layer to a programmer's main tool, and the owner of a bigger platform built or bought that layer: GitHub Copilot replaced Kite, and AWS bought Fig. CodeSee sold an understanding of large codebases that managers would not pay for. Builder.ai sold finished apps to non-technical founders and, by the Loot Drop record, spent more on each app than it charged. Pixate sold prototypes between design and code and lost to Figma.", "CodeGuide differs in cost and in sales. It sells only the plan, not the app, so its costs were about 8% of its revenue in March 2025 by the founder's own figures as he stated them to Starter Story, and it sells to individuals through the founder's posts, with two people and no venture money. It shares the main risk of Kite and Fig: the coding tools that it feeds have started to write their own plans." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The same product, probably not.", "text": "The way CJ Zafir found and sold CodeGuide can be repeated by anyone with an audience of builders: show a demo before the product exists, collect emails, build only after people sign up, and charge from the first day. The gap that CodeGuide filled in early 2025 is closing, because the coding tools now write their own plans.", "steps": [ "Do the slow task by hand for clients first, then turn your prompts into an automated sequence and measure the time saved: his went from nine hours to about two.", "Post a screen-recording demo before you build, and send readers to a waitlist page: he collected 1,800 emails in two weeks.", "Build the first version in two weeks with one partner, and charge for a subscription from launch day.", "Know your model cost per customer: the founder told Starter Story in May 2025 that his whole bill was about US$3,500 a month when revenue was US$42,000." ], "open": "Tools that prepare input for AI agents in a field where the agent lacks context and the agent's maker is not building the same thing: test plans, data pipeline specifications, a company's own rules. The founder's next product, SkillTune, writes and tests skill files, instructions that an AI agent loads for one kind of task." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "One interview, and no figure since. Every revenue figure on this page rests on one source: a Starter Story video interview with the founder, CJ Zafir, by Pat Walls, published on 21 May 2025 and recorded in about the third week of March 2025. In it the founder said that CodeGuide reached US$42,000 in MRR within 90 days of launch and projected about US$90,000 for that month; the US$17,000 a month at day 49 is the interviewer's account of a message from the founder. He called the figure both MRR and \"42k per month\" and did not say how yearly plans were counted. No payment processor, buyer or journalist has confirmed any of these figures. On 24 October 2026 this page checked again: TrustMRR had no CodeGuide profile (the address returned \"Not found\"), a search of Hacker News through the Algolia API found no story or comment about codeguide.dev, the Product Hunt page of the March 2026 relaunch gives no revenue, and a web search found only podcast directories that republish the same Starter Story episode, which is the same source and not a second one. On 18 September 2025 he posted only the words \"$1M ARR.\", with no product named and no screenshot; this page does not count it. A reader could look for a payment-processor profile (TrustMRR or a Stripe screenshot that names CodeGuide) or a second dated interview with a revenue figure." }, { "title": "The coding tools now plan for themselves", "text": "Claude Code's changelog lists \"Improvements to plan mode\" in version 1.0.33, published on 23 June 2025. Kiro, an AI coding editor announced on 14 July 2025, is built around specs, documents in which a feature is thought through before the code is written. Cursor introduced Plan Mode on 7 October 2025 and wrote that most new features at Cursor now begin with its agent writing a plan. CodeGuide's answer was its own coding agent in August 2025 and wireframes, skills and prompts in version 2.0 in January 2026." }, { "title": "A product built on one trend", "text": "CodeGuide grew with vibe coding, which means building software by describing it to an AI tool and accepting the code that it writes, and which spread in early 2025. The founder's own record shows how short such products can live: of 11 products he built in 2024, 7 failed and 3 were sold for US$30,000 in total. Of the 255 posts of his own that the X API returned for February to mid-October 2026, one mentions CodeGuide; the rest are mostly about fine-tuning small models and about SkillTune. On 1 August 2026 he wrote that he had sold a project, without saying which. Whether CodeGuide still has the same owner and his full time is not known, and no source after March 2025 says whether the team is still two people. The product itself was still being developed in 2026: version 2.0 in January and a Product Hunt relaunch on 10 March." }, { "title": "Dependence on model providers", "text": "In February 2025 the OpenAI API was 82.7% of all costs, and in June 2025 model APIs were 84%. The quality and the cost of every document depend on models whose prices OpenAI, Anthropic and Google set, and Anthropic also sells Claude Code, a coding agent with its own plan mode. The founder has moved between providers several times, from mostly OpenAI to a mix with Claude, Gemini and Kimi K2." }, { "title": "No named company, changing prices", "text": "The website names no operating company: its terms and privacy paths return \"not found\", the extension's privacy policy names no company, and the Chrome Web Store lists the developer as a non-trader. Prices have changed several times: US$29 a month in early 2025, a new price of US$49 a month announced in August 2025, and US$24 to US$29 a month billed yearly in October 2026, now with a free plan, unchanged when the page was read again on 24 October 2026." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.codeguide.dev" }, { "kind": "chrome", "url": "https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/mjbnmjepcopembijhlcokfmmlapmipec" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/codeguide-2" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/codeguide" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Starter Story, 21 May 2025: From Zero to $42K/Month in 90 Days with AI (video interview with CJ Zafir by Pat Walls)", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/from-zero-to-42k-month-in-90-days-with-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full: the page's automatic transcript of the video. It misspells some product names (\"Cloud\" for Claude, \"Winserve\" for Windsurf, \"Superbase\" for Supabase). Source for the MRR figure, the launch date, the team, the costs, the prices and the method." }, { "title": "CJ Zafir on X, 7 March 2025: monthly bill for February, 3,689 members in 74 days", "url": "https://x.com/cjzafir/status/1898029248473915629", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the February costs, the tools and \"And yes we are profitable.\"" }, { "title": "CJ Zafir on X, 17 June 2025: monthly bill, 11,356 users", "url": "https://x.com/cjzafir/status/1934992006901866828", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the June costs and the 84% share of model APIs." }, { "title": "CJ Zafir on X, 24 March 2025: 12 startups in 12 months", "url": "https://x.com/cjzafir/status/1904198565276303869", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the post in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the 11 products, the 3 sales for US$30,000 and the 7 failures." }, { "title": "CJ Zafir on X, 14 July 2025: on venture firms that want to invest in CodeGuide", "url": "https://x.com/cjzafir/status/1944856589791584455", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for the absence of outside funding." }, { "title": "CJ Zafir on X, 16 March 2025: the models that write the documents", "url": "https://x.com/cjzafir/status/1901306892275880005", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for o1, o3-mini and Sonnet 3.7." }, { "title": "CJ Zafir on X, 23 March 2025: Home of 5019 AI Coders, yearly membership US$199", "url": "https://x.com/cjzafir/status/1903889600449552513", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com, with the same post on 27 February 2025 (3,013, status 1895180690440012103), 19 March 2025 (4,678, status 1902395744344273163) and 29 April 2025 (7,600, status 1917237979854336027)." }, { "title": "CJ Zafir on X, 12 August 2025: Codespace and the new price", "url": "https://x.com/cjzafir/status/1955274148747649181", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com, with the launch post of 16 August 2025 (status 1956720628461134272) that names Kimi K2 and Claude Sonnet 4." }, { "title": "CJ Zafir on X, 24 January 2026: Introducing CodeGuide 2.0", "url": "https://x.com/cjzafir/status/2015080467033395673", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "CJ Zafir on X, 18 September 2025: $1M ARR.", "url": "https://x.com/cjzafir/status/1968684589607530686", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. The post has no other text, no image, no quoted post and no reply target." }, { "title": "CJ Zafir on X, 1 August 2026: me 2.0", "url": "https://x.com/cjzafir/status/2083544116433162264", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com. Source for \"sold 1 project\"." }, { "title": "CJ Zafir on X, 16 June 2025: 100,000 people have watched the Starter Story interview", "url": "https://x.com/cjzafir/status/1934623635861573727", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through api.fxtwitter.com." }, { "title": "CJ Zafir's X profile and timeline, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://x.com/cjzafir", "grade": "C", "how": "Read all 607 posts that api.fxtwitter.com returned, 26 February 2025 to 13 October 2026; the API returned no older posts. Source for the follower count, the profile text and the count of posts that mention CodeGuide." }, { "title": "CodeGuide home page and pricing, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://www.codeguide.dev/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the plans, the prices billed yearly, the \"pay $29\" button, the features and the 40,000 users claim." }, { "title": "SkillTune home page, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://skilltune.dev/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The open letter on the page is signed by CJ Zafir as CEO and founder." }, { "title": "Cursor blog, 7 October 2025: Introducing Plan Mode", "url": "https://cursor.com/blog/plan-mode", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's own announcement." }, { "title": "Claude Code changelog, with the npm registry record for its versions", "url": "https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the plan mode entries. The publish date of version 1.0.33 (23 June 2025) is from https://registry.npmjs.org/@anthropic-ai/claude-code." }, { "title": "Kiro blog, 14 July 2025: Introducing Kiro", "url": "https://kiro.dev/blog/introducing-kiro/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The maker's own announcement of its spec-based coding editor." }, { "title": "Chrome Web Store: CodeGuide extension, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/codeguide/mjbnmjepcopembijhlcokfmmlapmipec", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 135 users and the non-trader status." }, { "title": "CodeGuide extension privacy policy, read 15 October 2026", "url": "https://www.codeguide.dev/privacy/codeguide-extension", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. It names no company. The site's /terms and /privacy paths returned 404." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." }, { "title": "CodeGuide home page and pricing, read again 24 October 2026", "url": "https://www.codeguide.dev/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The plans, prices and the 40,000 users claim are the same as on 15 October 2026. The site has no robots.txt (the address returns the site's \"not found\" page), and /pricing returns \"This page could not be found\"." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: CodeGuide, read 24 October 2026", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/codeguide-2", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the relaunch featured on 10 March 2026, the day rank, the points and the followers. An older Product Hunt page, /products/codeguide, has 1 review and 1 follower." }, { "title": "TrustMRR: CodeGuide profile address, checked 24 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/codeguide.md", "grade": "C", "how": "Could not open: the address returned \"Not found\". The local copy of 570 TrustMRR profiles has no entry for CodeGuide or CJ Zafir. Source for the absence of a verified revenue profile." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/rankability/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/rankability.md", "slug": "rankability", "name": "Rankability", "country": "United States", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "SEO content and AI search visibility software for agencies", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-24", "launchLabel": "June 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$17.6K a month, January 2025", "sticker": "$17.6K/mo, one source", "outcomeUsd": 211200, "months": 7, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders, with development contracted to an outside agency; 3 people listed on the about page in October 2026", "fundingLabel": "None reported; gaps.com reported US$426,111 of the founder's own money", "primaryFactor": "Audience", "group": "seo-ai-search", "channel": "audience", "trend": "flat", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 3 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Search marketing" ], "product": "Software for SEO agencies. In January 2025 it made AI-written content briefs with OpenAI's GPT models, scored a draft against the pages that already rank with natural language processing from Google and IBM Watson, and monitored pages over time. In October 2026 it also writes AI-assisted drafts, tracks whether a client's brand appears in the answers of 11 AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, runs site audits, and offers an AI agent called Serena.", "why": "Nathan Gotch had taught SEO for more than ten years through a YouTube channel, a book and a paid program for agency owners, Gotch SEO Academy. Gaps.com wrote that he launched Rankability to the audience he had built, and the Academy's SEO method used the tool. He paid for two years of outside development with his own money, a sum that gaps.com reported as US$426,111, before most software founders would have reached revenue.", "summary": [ "Rankability is SEO software. SEO, search engine optimization, is the work of making a web page appear high in Google's results for the words that people search. Its first product was a content optimizer: a program that reads the pages that already rank for a keyword, extracts the topics and phrases they share with natural language processing (NLP, software that finds meaning in text), and scores a new draft against them. Rankability added AI-written content briefs, the plan a writer receives before writing, made with OpenAI's GPT models. Since 2025 it has moved to AI search visibility, also called AEO (answer engine optimization): it asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and other assistants the questions that a client's buyers ask, every day, and reports whether the client is named or cited in the answers.", "Nathan Gotch, an SEO consultant in St. Louis who started the agency Gotch SEO in 2013 and later the training program Gotch SEO Academy, founded Rankability, Inc. in 2024 with Simon L. Smith, the Academy's lead instructor and co-author of Gotch's book. The site showed a waitlist from October 2023 and a working product by June 2024. Glen Allsopp's gaps.com reported in its January 2025 income report, published on 6 February 2025, that Rankability made US$17,600 in monthly recurring revenue the month before, 7% more than in December, and that it had made US$87,296 in total revenue while Gotch had spent US$426,111 of his own money to build it. Rankability's own about page said in January 2025 that more than US$500,000 and 15,000 hours of development had gone into it.", "The monthly revenue figure is graded D on this page: it was reported once, by one publication, from figures the founder shared, and no payment processor, buyer or second source confirms it. The page also shows the team behind it, why the build cost so much, and what happened to earlier companies that sold tools to content marketers." ], "factsCaption": "An SEO content tool that gaps.com reported at US$17,600 a month in January 2025, seven months after its site went live, after its founder had spent more than four times its total revenue to build it", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is reported, not verified: one publication's figure with one date and no second source. A grade C value is read directly from the company's current or archived pages, or from a podcast page. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a blog about baseball pitching to an AI search visibility platform for agencies, with one reported revenue figure in January 2025. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Rankability prices on 24 October 2026, read from the company's pricing page (grade C). Yearly prices are the page's yearly totals divided by 12", "note": "Each plan includes unlimited client workspaces and team members; the plans differ in how much work they allow each month. One content project is one new page or one refresh of an existing page, with research, a brief, an outline, an AI-assisted draft and two AI revisions. The yearly plans cost ten months' price for twelve months (US$970, US$2,970 and US$4,970 a year). A 7-day trial needs a card. The Agency Pro yearly plan includes Nathan Gotch's weekly group coaching. In January 2025 the archived pricing page listed three different plans, SEO Specialist, SEO Expert and SEO Master, at US$149, US$249 and US$449 a month, with 2, 5 and 10 user seats.", "rows": [ [ "Starter", "80.83", "97", "20 content projects a month, 100 tracked AI queries, 50 Google keywords" ], [ "Agency", "247.50", "297", "80 content projects, 300 tracked AI queries, 150 Google keywords" ], [ "Agency Pro", "414.17", "497", "160 content projects, 500 tracked AI queries, 250 Google keywords, coaching with yearly plan" ], [ "Enterprise", "", "", "sales call, custom capacity" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, January 2025", "value": "US$17,600", "grade": "D", "note": "Gaps.com January 2025 income report by Glen Allsopp, published 6 February 2025. The headline says \"$17,600 in MRR Last Month\", and the report's image shows a card reading \"Current MRR $17.6k\", up 7% \"vs. December\". The report does not name the analytics service behind the card.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the January 2025 figure", "value": "US$211,200 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$17,600 times 12. This is the headline value on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue implied for December 2024", "value": "about US$16,400", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$17,600 divided by 1.07. The card's figure is rounded, so this is approximate.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Total revenue to the date of the report", "value": "US$87,296", "grade": "D", "note": "Gaps.com, as the \"most recent numbers\". The report does not give the date of this figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "The founder's own money spent on the build", "value": "US$426,111", "grade": "D", "note": "Gaps.com: \"spending $426,111 of his own money to build the platform\". Undated in the report.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Money invested, as stated by the company in January 2025", "value": "more than US$500,000, and more than 15,000 hours of development", "grade": "C", "note": "Rankability's about page, archived 8 January 2025. It agrees in size with the gaps.com figure, which may be older.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Spend not yet covered by revenue", "value": "US$338,815", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$426,111 minus US$87,296. Gaps.com rounded it to about US$338,000.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue as a share of spend", "value": "20.5%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$87,296 divided by US$426,111.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Share of spend that went to outside APIs", "value": "7%, about US$29,800", "grade": "D", "note": "Gaps.com: \"only 7% of spend was for external APIs\". The amount is calculated on this page: 7% of US$426,111.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team at the January 2025 figure", "value": "2 co-founders, with development contracted to an outside agency", "grade": "C", "note": "The archived about page of January 2025 names Nathan Gotch and Simon L. Smith as co-founders, Smith as head of the development team. A podcast page of July 2026 says the platform had two years of outsourced development by an outside agency. No source gives the agency's headcount.", "src": [ 2, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Team in October 2026", "value": "3 people listed: 2 co-founders and 1 customer success person", "grade": "C", "note": "Rankability's about page. The careers page calls it a small, remote-first team and lists no open roles.", "src": [ 5, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Profitability in October 2026", "value": "the company says it is profitable", "grade": "C", "note": "Careers page: \"We're profitable, founder-led, and growing\". No figure and no date.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "D", "note": "Gaps.com describes the spend as the founder's own money. No funding round appears in any source read.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founded", "value": "2024, as Rankability, Inc., St. Louis, Missouri", "grade": "C", "note": "Rankability's about page, key facts section.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "First public product page", "value": "12 June 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "First Wayback capture of the working site with sign-up; captures from October 2023 to February 2024 show a waitlist page, and 20 May 2024 returned an error. The product may have been sold earlier.", "src": [ 13, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the first product page to the January 2025 figure", "value": "7 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: June 2024 to January 2025.", "src": [ 1, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Entry price, January 2025 and October 2026", "value": "US$149 a month, then US$97 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived pricing page of 21 January 2025 and the current pricing page. The plans and their limits changed between the two dates.", "src": [ 4, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Product changes after the in-house rebuild", "value": "10,000 in five months", "grade": "C", "note": "Chapter title of a podcast episode published 20 July 2026, in the founder's interview.", "src": [ 9 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2011", "what": "Nathan Gotch, a college student, starts a baseball pitching blog and learns SEO to get traffic to it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "2013", "what": "He starts his own SEO business, Gotch SEO, in St. Louis.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "2015", "what": "Google gives manual penalties to his own site and many client sites because of a blog network he built for links. He has the penalties removed and moves to content-based SEO.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "2016", "what": "He sells his first SEO training. It later becomes Gotch SEO Academy, rebuilt with his business partner as a coaching program for agency owners.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10, 11 ] }, { "when": "3 October 2023", "what": "rankability.com shows a \"coming soon\" page with a waitlist.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13, 14 ] }, { "when": "12 June 2024", "what": "The working site is live: keyword research, AI content briefs made with OpenAI, and a content optimizer with NLP from Google and IBM Watson.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "8 January 2025", "what": "The about page names Gotch and Simon L. Smith as co-founders and says more than US$500,000 and 15,000 hours of development went into the tool. Plans cost US$149 to US$449 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 4 ] }, { "when": "January 2025", "what": "Monthly recurring revenue is US$17,600, up 7% from December, as reported by gaps.com.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "6 February 2025", "what": "Gaps.com publishes the figure with total revenue of US$87,296 against US$426,111 of the founder's own money.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2025 to 2026", "what": "After two years of outsourced development, Gotch replaces the platform with one rebuilt in-house with AI tools, after what he calls 1,400 hours spent in meetings.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "20 July 2026", "what": "Podcast episode on Serena, Rankability's AI agent built on a base language model plus five million tokens of transcribed coaching calls and about 300 standard operating procedures.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "Rankability sells itself as an AI search visibility platform for agencies at US$97 to US$497 a month. gotchseo.com now redirects to rankability.com, and the careers page says the company is profitable.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 6, 7 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "An audience before the product", "text": "Gotch had a YouTube channel, a book for agency founders and a paid coaching program before Rankability existed. Gaps.com wrote that he launched the software to that audience. In January 2025 every plan included weekly calls with the two co-founders and SEO training by Gotch, so the tool was sold as part of the method he already taught." }, { "title": "The tool is part of the training", "text": "The founder said in a 2024 podcast that Rankability is the tool he uses most, to write content and even YouTube scripts. In October 2026 the most expensive yearly plan includes his weekly group coaching. A customer who learns the method in the Academy meets the tool inside it, which lowers the cost of finding customers." }, { "title": "Paying for a long build from another business", "text": "Gaps.com reported that the founder spent US$426,111 of his own money, and that total revenue was a fifth of that at the time. The founder also ran an SEO agency and a coaching business, and he paid for about two years of contracted development before the product earned back its cost, with no investor in the company." }, { "title": "Following the search change", "text": "The company says Rankability started as a content optimization tool. When buyers began to ask ChatGPT and other assistants instead of Google, it added daily tracking of brand mentions in 11 AI assistants, audits for AI search and an AI agent, and changed its whole site to this message." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's current and archived pages and from the founder's podcast interviews. They are grade C, except the page-source details, which anyone can see in the archived HTML.", "items": [ "Keyword research used Google search data; the content optimizer used NLP from Google and IBM Watson; the content briefs used OpenAI's GPT models, the archived pricing page stated in January 2025.", "The waitlist page of 2023 was built with ConvertKit. The marketing site of January 2025 was built on Webflow; the site of October 2026 is built with Astro and measured with PostHog and Google Tag Manager.", "For about two years an outside development agency built the platform, with Simon L. Smith as head of the development team. The founder then replaced it with a platform rebuilt in-house with AI tools.", "Serena, the AI agent, is a base language model given five million tokens of transcribed coaching calls and about 300 standard operating procedures from the founders' consulting work.", "The content pipeline identifies search intent, picks a template, researches 50 to 75 competing pages per topic and runs several editorial passes before a draft is ready.", "Customers can use the tools from their own AI assistants through an MCP server and an API, which share the plan's monthly limits." ], "src": [ 4, 3, 13, 2, 9, 5, 6 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold tools or content to people who depend on search engines and feeds, and died when a larger platform or an algorithm change took the value away. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Trapit", "years": "2011 to 2019", "funding": "US$21.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "AI-powered content curation for marketers and content creators.", "died": "Google and Facebook improved their own content algorithms, free curation tools were easy to copy, and the paying customers were a narrow group of marketers.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/658-trapit" }, { "name": "Draft", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A simple cloud writing and editing tool for bloggers, journalists and content writers.", "died": "Google Docs added the same features inside a suite that people already used, and the freemium model never paid the costs.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1605-draft" }, { "name": "Waterproof Digital Camera", "years": "2013 to 2017", "funding": "None", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "An affiliate review site that earned commissions from search traffic.", "died": "It was built on black-hat SEO, and Google's algorithm updates and penalties removed its traffic.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2023-waterproof-digital-camera" }, { "name": "Mode Media", "years": "2004 to 2016", "funding": "US$230M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "A network of 5,000 lifestyle blogs sold to advertisers as one premium audience.", "died": "Programmatic ad exchanges automated its middleman role, while it carried more than 230 employees and an expensive sales team.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2173-mode-media" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the four stood between content and a larger platform: Google, Facebook, the ad exchanges. When the platform changed its algorithm or built the feature itself, the middle position lost its value. Rankability stands in the same place. Its customers sell SEO to their own clients, and Google's updates and the move of buyers to AI assistants decide whether that work keeps its value. Gotch said that Google penalized his own site and many client sites in 2015 for a blog network built for links, the same kind of manipulation that the Waterproof Digital Camera record describes.", "Two things differ. First, the costs are low compared with the founder's other income: gaps.com reported that only 7% of spend went to outside APIs, and the build was paid with the founder's own money, as gaps.com reported, not by investors who need fast growth. Second, Rankability followed the change instead of waiting for it: when assistants began to answer buyers' questions, it changed from a content optimizer into a tracker of AI answers, which is the new platform's problem for agencies." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product, yes. The cost, not without an audience.", "text": "Content optimizers and AI visibility trackers are a crowded category, and gaps.com reported that this one cost its founder more than four times its total revenue to build. What made it work was an existing audience of agency owners who already paid the founder for training. The founder said in July 2026 that he replaced two years of contracted work with a platform rebuilt in-house with AI tools, and that the barrier to entry is dropping.", "steps": [ "Build the tool for the method you already teach, so your students are the first customers.", "Include your coaching or calls in the higher plans, so the tool and the training sell each other.", "Keep model and API costs a small share of spend; gaps.com reported 7% for this business.", "When the platform your customers depend on changes, change the product's job with it." ], "open": "Any field where a consultant already trains other practitioners: a tool that turns the consultant's method into software, sold inside the training." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline figure, US$17,600 of monthly recurring revenue in January 2025, rests on one source: the gaps.com January 2025 income report by Glen Allsopp, published on 6 February 2025, whose headline states it and whose image shows a card reading \"Current MRR $17.6k\", 7% up on December. Allsopp writes that he asked for permission before sharing such figures, so they appear to come from the founder, but the report does not name the analytics service, link a public dashboard or date the total revenue and spend figures. No payment processor, buyer or second publication confirms them. A reader could look for a public subscription-analytics page for Rankability, a TrustMRR profile, or a dated statement by Nathan Gotch in an interview or his own newsletter." }, { "title": "The team size at the figure is not known", "text": "The company had two co-founders in January 2025, and the development was done by an outside agency for about two years. No source says how many people that agency put on the work, or how many people from Gotch's other company helped. The about page lists 3 people in October 2026." }, { "title": "A large loss at the time of the figure", "text": "Gaps.com reported total revenue of US$87,296 against US$426,111 of spend. The careers page says the company is profitable in October 2026 but gives no figure, so it is not known whether the spend was recovered." }, { "title": "The figure is 21 months old", "text": "No later revenue figure has been published that this page could find. The prices, the plans and the product's main job have all changed since January 2025." }, { "title": "Customers depend on Google and the AI assistants", "text": "Rankability sells to agencies whose work loses value when Google or an assistant changes how it chooses sources. The product also depends on outside services for search data, language models and NLP." }, { "title": "Sales depend on one person's audience", "text": "The tool is sold through the founder's training program, YouTube channel and coaching. If his audience shrinks or the Academy loses members, the main channel shrinks with it." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.rankability.com/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Gaps.com, Glen Allsopp: Gaps Income Report, January 2025, published 6 February 2025, insight #10: With $426,000 Invested, This SEO Content SaaS Generated $17,600 in MRR Last Month", "url": "https://gaps.com/jan-2025/", "grade": "D", "how": "Read the section on Rankability and viewed its image, which shows the MRR card. Source for the headline figure, the total revenue, the spend and the 7% API share." }, { "title": "Wayback copy of the Rankability about page, 8 January 2025: Our story", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250108130714/https://www.rankability.com/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the two co-founders, Smith's role as head of development, the US$500,000 invested and the 15,000 hours." }, { "title": "Wayback copy of the Rankability home page, 15 January 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250115195852/https://www.rankability.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the page source. Source for the features in January 2025, the weekly calls with the co-founders and the Webflow site." }, { "title": "Wayback copy of the Rankability pricing page, 21 January 2025: Become a Founding Member", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250121113215/https://www.rankability.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 2025 plans and the technology answer that names Google, IBM Watson and OpenAI." }, { "title": "Rankability about page, read 24 October 2026", "url": "https://www.rankability.com/about/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the team list, the founding year, the company name and city, and the move from content optimization to AI search. gotchseo.com redirected here on 24 October 2026." }, { "title": "Rankability pricing page, read 24 October 2026", "url": "https://www.rankability.com/pricing/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the pricing table. The purpose check found no humanizer, AI-detection bypass or parasite SEO offer." }, { "title": "Rankability careers page, read 24 October 2026", "url": "https://www.rankability.com/careers/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the profitability statement and the small, remote-first team." }, { "title": "Rankability product page: Promote, read 24 October 2026", "url": "https://www.rankability.com/products/promoter/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The link feature is research on existing backlinks and prospects for manual outreach; it does not buy or place links." }, { "title": "Hubhopper podcast page, 20 July 2026: Nathan Gotch on Building an AI Agent That Actually Knows SEO", "url": "https://listen.hubhopper.com/episode/nathan-gotch-on-building-an-ai-agent-that-actually-knows-seo/33023389", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the episode description and chapter list; the audio was not heard. Source for the outsourced development, the in-house rebuild, Serena and the content pipeline." }, { "title": "PageTraffic Agency Insider podcast, 2024: How AI is Transforming SEO With Nathan Gotch", "url": "https://www.pagetraffic.com/podcast/ai-transforming-seo-nathan-gotch.php", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the transcript on the page. Source for the 2015 penalty, the 2016 training launch and the founder's own use of Rankability." }, { "title": "Wayback copy of the Gotch SEO about page, 26 January 2025: The Gotch SEO Story", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250126022752/https://www.gotchseo.com/about/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founder's background, the 2013 start of Gotch SEO and how the Academy promoted Rankability." }, { "title": "Wayback copy of the Gotch SEO training page, 19 March 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250319155525/https://www.gotchseo.com/seo-training/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full for the purpose check. The Academy teaches agency SEO and link building \"that'll keep you safe\"; no parasite SEO or link selling was found. The home page of 26 January 2025 and the services page of 5 August 2023 were also read." }, { "title": "Wayback copies of rankability.com, 3 October 2023 and 12 June 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240612183459/https://rankability.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both. The 2023 copy is a waitlist page built with ConvertKit; the June 2024 copy is the first working product site." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine capture index for rankability.com, 2022 to 2024", "url": "http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=rankability.com&from=2022&to=2024&output=json&fl=timestamp,statuscode,length&collapse=timestamp:6", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the index. Waitlist-sized captures until February 2024, an error on 20 May 2024, the working site from 12 June 2024." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/sprout/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/sprout.md", "slug": "sprout", "name": "Sprout - AI Job Search", "country": "United States", "sector": "Human Resources", "productType": "AI job-search app: swipe on jobs, AI-tailored resumes and cover letters, an AI agent that submits the application", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "February 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$250K a month, October 2025", "sticker": "$250K MRR in 8 months", "outcomeUsd": 3000000, "months": 8, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders (Nicole Cheung, who does everything except code, and a technical co-founder) at Magnifex AI Inc., with creator managers and 200+ paid creators; total staff not published", "fundingLabel": "None reported (AI Dev Cases: no venture capital, no ad spend)", "primaryFactor": "A trained network of 200+ short-video creators", "group": "documents-data", "channel": "creators", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Job search" ], "product": "A phone and web app for job seekers. You fill in a profile once and swipe through job listings. For each job you swipe right on, the app asks a few questions about missing details, writes a resume and a cover letter for that one job, and an AI agent fills in and submits the application form on the employer's own website. All applications and employer replies are tracked in one list. Applying needs a paid plan: the company's pricing page says US$19.99 a week for 50 applications or US$39.99 a month for 200.", "why": "Filling in the same facts on every employer's application form, and rewriting a resume for every job, is the slowest part of a job search for students and new graduates. The founder had already built a growth system for her first app: hundreds of paid short-video creators trained with her own course. She moved the same system to a job app, aimed at college students and recent graduates, who she says have more buying power than her beauty app's users.", "summary": [ "Sprout, first released as Prep AI, is a job-search app sold by Magnifex AI Inc. in the United States. You swipe through job listings as in a dating app. For each job you like, it writes a resume and a cover letter for that job and then an AI agent, a program that uses a language model to operate a web page step by step as a person would, fills in the form on the employer's website and submits it. Most large employers receive applications through an applicant tracking system (ATS), the hiring software behind a company's careers page, such as Workday, Greenhouse or Lever; Sprout's comparison page with the rival app Massive lists \"Auto-applies across Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, and easy-apply\" for Sprout. When a site blocks it with a CAPTCHA or another anti-bot tool, the company's help page says Sprout stops and returns the application credit.", "Nicole Cheung built it while she was a psychology and economics student at Claremont McKenna College, after her first app, the AI beauty app Glam Up, reached one million users and US$150,000 in MRR (monthly recurring revenue, the subscription money that comes in every month) in 2024. In a Starter Story video interview published on 20 May 2026 she said Sprout reached US$250,000 MRR in October 2025, as shown in RevenueCat, a service that counts in-app subscription revenue, about eight months after it started, and that it has since held at around US$200,000 MRR. The Superwall Podcast's notes of 13 May 2026 give the same US$250,000 in eight months. She says she does everything that is not code; her co-founder writes it.", "The growth came from UGC (user-generated content: short videos made by paid creators who look like ordinary users) on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, not from ads. She said that at the peak she managed about 200 active creators and that one seven-day period brought 400 million views. All revenue figures here are the founder's own statements, grade C; no payment processor has published them. The page also shows what readers may question: the app is built to send many applications fast, and employers are not told that a program filled in the form." ], "factsCaption": "About US$3 million a year in subscription run rate eight months after launch, then about 20% lower, all from the founder's interviews", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a statement by the founder, the company's own pages, or a reviewer or retelling that says where it comes from. A grade X value was calculated on this page from the rows it names. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From an interview-practice app to a swipe-to-apply job app with an AI agent, in about eight months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Sprout prices on the company's pricing page, read 25 October 2026 (grade C). The App Store and reviewers show other price lists", "note": "Every plan includes the same features; plans differ only in the number of applications (credits). A credit is returned when a submission fails. The App Store page lists ten in-app purchases still named Prep AI, from US$9.99 to US$39.99, mostly without the period. JobCopilot, a competitor, read Basic US$19.99 for 80 applications, Pro US$39.99 for 200 and Ultra US$79.99 for 600 in March 2026. AI Dev Cases read the same three prices as weekly prices in August 2026. The quarterly plan is shown as \"70% off\" US$239.99; the real reduction is 66.7%. An App Store reviewer complained that there is no free trial; the company replied that inviting 3 friends gives 5 free credits.", "rows": [ [ "Free download", "0", "0", "browse jobs; applying needs a plan" ], [ "Weekly", "", "19.99 a week", "50 applications a week; about US$86.62 a month if kept" ], [ "Monthly", "", "39.99", "200 applications a month" ], [ "Quarterly", "", "26.66", "US$79.99 every 3 months, 600 applications per 3 months" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, October 2025", "value": "US$250,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in the Starter Story video of 20 May 2026: \"I recorded this in October of last year We were at 250K MRR on our revenue cat\". The Superwall Podcast notes of 13 May 2026: \"Sprout reaching $250K MRR in eight months\". The video's machine transcript once says \"250K ARR\"; the X post quoted at the start, \"three million ARR in eight months\", matches US$250,000 a month.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the October 2025 figure", "value": "US$3 million a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$250,000 times 12. This is the outcomeUsd on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, May 2026", "value": "around US$200,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in the same video: \"we have steadily been growing at around 200K MRR\". AI Dev Cases (June 2026) and BigGo (May 2026) both read it as settling at about US$200,000.", "src": [ 1, 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Change from October 2025 to May 2026", "value": "about 20% lower", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$200,000 divided by US$250,000 is 0.8. The trend on this page is therefore \"falling\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from start to US$250,000 MRR", "value": "about 8 months", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder and the Superwall notes say eight months. The start month on this page, February 2025, is calculated back from October 2025; the earliest App Store reviews seen are dated 4 March 2025.", "src": [ 1, 2, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Combined revenue of her two apps, May 2026", "value": "over US$400,000 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Superwall Podcast notes: \"The last two pulled over $400K a month combined\" (Glam Up and Sprout).", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Views, late 2025", "value": "about 100 million a month; 400 million in one seven-day period", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in the Starter Story video. She says the apps now get 400 to 500 million views a month across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Creators at the peak", "value": "about 200 active creators", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder: \"we were managing around 200 maybe a bit more active creators at the same time\". More than 50% of creators who finish her course go viral within two weeks, she says.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Paid advertising", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "AI Dev Cases: \"With no ads and no VC it hit $250K MRR in 8 months\". The founder's thesis says the same of Glam Up.", "src": [ 3, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Users", "value": "\"Used by 750,000+ job seekers\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Company home page, October 2026. Its About page says 150K+ active job seekers and 1M+ jobs applied.", "src": [ 7, 17 ] }, { "fact": "App Store ratings", "value": "72K ratings, average 4.6", "grade": "C", "note": "US App Store page read 25 October 2026. On 28 April 2025 the page showed 1.2K ratings.", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Where it applies", "value": "on the employer's website", "grade": "C", "note": "App Store text: \"our AI agent completes the application directly on the employer's website for you\". The founder: \"we will just automatically apply for you on the company website\". No Sprout page says it applies through LinkedIn; its comparison pages present \"Beyond LinkedIn Easy Apply\" as a difference from competitors.", "src": [ 5, 1, 15 ] }, { "fact": "Email used on applications", "value": "a Gmail alias of the user, or an @whisperpost.io address made by Sprout", "grade": "C", "note": "Help center. Sprout reads that address to handle verification codes and portal setup links, and forwards employer replies to the user. When an employer's site needs an account, Sprout creates it and stores the password.", "src": [ 9, 16 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 co-founders, creator managers and 200+ creators", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder names Aaron, met at a San Francisco startup, as her co-founder for Glam Up and says she does everything that is not coding; BigGo's summary of the interview lists the same co-founder for Sprout. In July 2025 she told her college she was \"building a team\". No source gives a staff count.", "src": [ 1, 4, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "AI Dev Cases: \"Fully bootstrapped — no ad spend, no VC\". Not confirmed by a company filing.", "src": [ 3 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "April 2024", "what": "Nicole Cheung and her co-founder launch Glam Up, an AI beauty app, while she is a senior at Claremont McKenna College.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "May to November 2024", "what": "Glam Up passes one million users and US$150,000 MRR without paid ads or funding, as her senior thesis records.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "February 2025", "what": "Calculated start of the job app, eight months before the October 2025 figure. It starts as Prep AI, an AI interview-practice app, while the team looks for buyers with more money than beauty-app users.", "grade": "X", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "4 March 2025", "what": "The earliest App Store reviews seen describe swiping right on jobs and letting the app apply.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "17 April 2025", "what": "Version 1.7.4. The App Store page shows \"NEW! Swipe to Apply\" next to mock interviews with AI feedback, and 1.2K ratings.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "21 July 2025", "what": "Her college reports that she is scaling her second app, Prep AI, and \"building a team\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "26 August 2025", "what": "Version 1.9.4: \"Prep AI is now Sprout! Same great app, new name.\"", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "October 2025", "what": "US$250,000 MRR in RevenueCat, according to the founder. About 100 million views a month from about 200 active creators.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "13 January 2026", "what": "Version 2.0.0, rebuilt: \"Millions of new jobs\", job-specific questions before each application, and tracking across mobile and web.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "13 and 20 May 2026", "what": "Interviews on The Superwall Podcast and Starter Story. She says Sprout holds at around US$200,000 MRR and that two newer apps are near US$200,000 in annual recurring revenue.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "The App Store page shows 72K ratings at 4.6; the website says 750,000+ job seekers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 7 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "One swipe replaces one application", "text": "The slow part of applying is typing the same facts into a new form for each employer and rewriting the resume. Sprout turns that into a swipe: the language model writes the resume and cover letter for that one job, and the agent fills in the employer's form. The April 2025 App Store text said \"just like Tinder!\" and the website now says \"Basically, Tinder for jobs.\"" }, { "title": "Credits sold by the week", "text": "A plan is a number of applications. The weekly plan costs US$19.99 for 50, which makes each application cost about US$0.40; the quarterly plan brings it to about US$0.13. The paywall comes right after the onboarding questions. The Superwall notes list two of her tests: a hard paywall right after onboarding beat letting people explore first by 50% in conversion, and a 20% price rise raised conversion." }, { "title": "A creator system, not ads", "text": "She recruits creators through application forms and outreach, interviews them, and trains them with her own course of videos and quizzes for each app. For the later stages she describes regular feedback calls, referral rewards for creators and growth dashboards. She says more than half of those who finish the course have a viral video within two weeks. At the peak about 200 creators posted at the same time." }, { "title": "The same system, a second time", "text": "Glam Up was the first app run this way. Sprout reused the creator system in a different market with buyers who pay more. She says two further apps in stealth are on the same path. The asset is the creator system, not the code." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's interviews and the company's own pages. They are grade C.", "items": [ "The app is built with React Native, one code base for iPhone and Android; the company's terms name Expo and Google Play Services as third-party services in it.", "RevenueCat counts subscription revenue and Superwall runs the paywall screens. PostHog is named for analytics.", "SideShift is named as the place to recruit creators, and Attio as the CRM (customer relationship management) system.", "The AI writes a resume and cover letter per job from the profile plus answers to job-specific questions; the user can review and edit, or skip review. No source names the language model.", "The agent fills in forms on employer career sites. It stops when a CAPTCHA or anti-bot tool blocks it and returns the credit.", "Applications use a Gmail alias of the user or an address on whisperpost.io, so the app can read verification codes and track employer replies.", "The founder does design, onboarding, paywalls and creator management; her co-founder writes the code." ], "src": [ 1, 5, 9, 10, 18 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to make job hunting or resumes simpler and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Jobr", "years": "2014 to 2019", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Tinder for jobs: swipe right on a job in a mobile app.", "died": "LinkedIn and Indeed kept the job seekers, and the swipe alone did not keep users coming back.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/261-jobr" }, { "name": "Jobspice", "years": "2009 to 2012", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Good-looking resumes in minutes for people who are not designers.", "died": "It did one task, and LinkedIn and free resume tools did the same task for nothing.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1635-jobspice" }, { "name": "WantRemoteJob", "years": "2018 to 2021", "funding": "None", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A job board only for remote IT jobs.", "died": "Indeed and LinkedIn added remote filters, and a one-founder board could not match their listings.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1907-wantremotejob" }, { "name": "Monster Worldwide", "years": "1994 to 2025", "funding": "US$500M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Every job and every resume in one online database.", "died": "LinkedIn's network and Indeed's search traffic took the job seekers; the database had no reason to be visited.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2400-monster-worldwide" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Jobr had the same swipe idea in 2014, but a swipe only expressed interest; the job seeker still had to fill in each employer's form and write each cover letter, so the swipe saved little. Jobspice made one document faster and was beaten by free tools. The job boards died when bigger networks held the job seekers.", "Two things are different for Sprout. First, language models can now write a document for each job and an agent can complete the employer's form, so the swipe does the whole application, which is the work people will pay to skip. Second, it does not try to win job seekers away from LinkedIn with search traffic; it buys attention with hundreds of trained creators on short-video apps. What has not changed is the dependence on others: on employers' sites letting the agent through, and on video platforms continuing to show the creators' videos." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The creator system, yes. The bulk-apply product, with care.", "text": "The part others can copy is the distribution method: find a format that goes viral, then hire and train many creators to repeat it, and design the app so its screens make good videos. The founder had done it once already. The product itself is crowded (the company's own site compares it with about twenty rivals), and an app that sends many applications for people raises questions from employers and job sites that a new builder has to answer.", "steps": [ "Pick a problem that is painful, common and easy to show in a 20-second screen recording.", "Test formats yourself or with two to ten creators until one goes viral, then write a course that teaches it.", "Scale the creator group with interviews, feedback calls, referral rewards and a dashboard.", "Put a hard paywall after onboarding and test prices up as well as down." ], "open": "Other dull, repeated forms that people pay to skip, in markets where short videos reach the buyers: benefits applications, apartment rentals, scholarship applications, insurance claims." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Only the founder's word", "text": "The US$250,000 MRR for October 2025 and the US$200,000 for May 2026 come from the founder in two interviews in May 2026; she showed a RevenueCat screen in the video, but no payment processor or app-data profile publishes Sprout's revenue. AI Dev Cases labels its figure \"Monthly (est.)\" and cites her own LinkedIn profile." }, { "title": "Revenue is below its peak", "text": "By the founder's own numbers, revenue was about 20% lower in May 2026 than in October 2025, while the creator system still brought 400 to 500 million views a month. Growth this dependent on views stops when the views stop." }, { "title": "Volume applying, and employers are not told", "text": "Sprout's blog teaches how to \"mass apply\" and says the swipe screen \"lets you bulk apply to jobs by moving through 100+ roles in a single session\". One App Store review says \"60 apps in one night\"; another says the app \"serves to inflate the number of applicants per posting\". The FAQ answers \"Will employers know if I used Sprout?\" with \"No\", and applications go out from an alias or a Sprout-made address. The company says it does not bypass ATS systems and stops at CAPTCHAs. Whether each employer's career site allows automated applications was not checked." }, { "title": "Team size not public", "text": "The seller is Magnifex AI Inc. The founder names one co-founder; she also hires creator managers and pays 200+ creators, and the company blog has its own writer. No source gives the number of employees when the US$250,000 figure was reached." }, { "title": "Prices that move", "text": "Three different price lists exist: the company's page (weekly, monthly, quarterly), the App Store list still named Prep AI, and reviewers' Basic, Pro and Ultra tiers. A weekly plan kept for a month costs about US$86.62, which reviewers of an app for unemployed people call too high." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.usesprout.com/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6740011494" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Starter Story, 20 May 2026: My Two Apps Make $150K/Month Each (video with transcript, host Pat Walls)", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/nicole", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page and the full transcript. Founder interview. Source for the US$250,000 MRR in October 2025, the US$200,000 since, the views, the creator system, the co-founder and the tools." }, { "title": "The Superwall Podcast, 13 May 2026: Nicole Cheung - she makes $400k/mo from ai apps (while in college), show notes in the podcast feed", "url": "https://rss.buzzsprout.com/2522779.rss", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the episode's show notes in the feed. Did not listen to the audio. Source for the US$250,000 MRR in eight months, the combined US$400,000 and the paywall tests." }, { "title": "AI Dev Cases, 28 June 2026 (figures checked 21 August 2026): Sprout, the Tinder for jobs built by a non-engineer in college", "url": "https://aidevcases.com/en/cases/sprout", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A compiled case page that cites the founder's interviews and LinkedIn profile and labels its figure an estimate. Source for no ads and no venture capital." }, { "title": "BigGo Finance, 17 May 2026: Nicole Built Two $150K/Month Apps Without Writing Code", "url": "https://finance.biggo.com/news/c3da3cfd909a60f2", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A retelling of the Starter Story interview. Used only for its reading that the same co-founder writes Sprout's code and that revenue settled near US$200,000." }, { "title": "Apple App Store, US: Sprout - AI Job Search, seller Magnifex AI Inc., read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sprout-ai-job-search/id6740011494", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full: description, ratings, reviews with developer replies, version history and in-app purchase list." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of the App Store page, 28 April 2025: Prep AI - Get Your Dream Job", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250428231920/https://apps.apple.com/us/app/prep-ai-get-your-dream-job/id6740011494", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the earlier name, the swipe-to-apply feature as new, the 1.2K ratings and the earliest reviews." }, { "title": "Sprout home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.usesprout.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the FAQ. Source for the product flow, the user count and the FAQ on employers." }, { "title": "Sprout pricing page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.usesprout.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the pricing table." }, { "title": "Sprout Help Center: Why is the email on my job applications not my personal email?", "url": "https://help.usesprout.com/en/articles/11511462-why-is-the-email-on-my-job-applications-not-my-personal-email", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Gmail alias and whisperpost.io addresses." }, { "title": "Sprout Help Center: Why did Sprout fail to submit my job application?", "url": "https://help.usesprout.com/en/articles/11511529-why-did-sprout-fail-to-submit-my-job-application", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the CAPTCHA and anti-bot stops and the credit refunds." }, { "title": "Claremont McKenna College news, 21 July 2025: Nicole Cheung '25 co-founds AI beauty app, achieves milestone", "url": "https://www.cmc.edu/news/nicole-cheung-25-co-founds-ai-beauty-app-achieves-milestone", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Glam Up launch date and the work on Prep AI in July 2025." }, { "title": "Nicole Cheung, senior thesis, Claremont McKenna College, 2025: From 0 to 1 Million Users in 6 Months: How I Built My Viral App", "url": "https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/3882/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the abstract page; the thesis itself is campus only. Source for the Glam Up figures." }, { "title": "JobCopilot, 10 March 2026: Sprout AI Job Search Review (2026)", "url": "https://jobcopilot.com/sprout-ai-job-search-review/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Written by a competitor. Source for the earlier Basic, Pro and Ultra prices and for how applications reach employers." }, { "title": "Sprout blog, 22 April 2026: Can You Apply to Multiple Jobs at Once?", "url": "https://www.usesprout.com/blog/can-you-apply-to-multiple-jobs-at-once", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full; also read the blog post How to Mass Apply for Jobs in February 2026. Source for the bulk-apply wording." }, { "title": "Sprout comparison pages: Sprout vs Massive, vs LazyApply and vs BulkApply", "url": "https://www.usesprout.com/vs/massive", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the three pages in full. Source for the ATS list (Workday, Greenhouse, Lever) and \"Beyond LinkedIn Easy Apply\"." }, { "title": "Sprout Help Center: How Do I View Login Credentials?", "url": "https://help.usesprout.com/en/articles/12053211-how-do-i-view-login-credentials", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for accounts created on employer sites." }, { "title": "Sprout About page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.usesprout.com/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 150K+ active job seekers and 1M+ jobs applied." }, { "title": "Sprout Terms of Service, last updated 15 June 2025", "url": "https://www.usesprout.com/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for Magnifex AI, Inc. as the provider and for Expo and Google Play Services as third-party services." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/meetoscar/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/meetoscar.md", "slug": "meetoscar", "name": "Meet Oscar", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI email assistant that drafts replies from a company's own documents", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "January 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$48K a month in recurring revenue, November 2025", "sticker": "$48K MRR reported", "outcomeUsd": 576000, "months": 22, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders, Giovanni Brees and Lucas, the lead developer; AppSumo lists 1-10 people in the USA, Portugal and Spain", "fundingLabel": "None; AppSumo lists the company as bootstrapped", "primaryFactor": "Own problem", "group": "support-agents", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Productivity" ], "product": "An AI assistant that connects to a Gmail inbox, sorts the mail by priority and writes draft replies in the user's own tone. The user uploads price lists, policies, contracts and FAQs, and the assistant takes its facts from those documents. The AppSumo listing states that auto-drafts are never sent without the user's approval and that the deal tiers were limited to 50, 150 or 500 AI-written replies a month.", "why": "Giovanni Brees wrote on AppSumo that he built the first version to answer the email of his own earlier business, because general AI writing tools did not know his prices, contracts or rules. He then partnered with Lucas, the lead developer, to rebuild it for other users. The founders said on AppSumo in November 2025 that it had more than 1,200 customers and US$48K of monthly recurring revenue.", "summary": [ "Meet Oscar is an AI email assistant for consultants, freelancers and small companies. It reads whole email threads in Gmail, marks what needs an answer, and drafts replies. Its main feature is what the founders call a Knowledge Foundation, a kind of knowledge base: a set of the customer's own documents (price sheets, refund policies, contracts, FAQs) that the AI model reads before it writes, so that a reply quotes the real price and not an invented one. It also copies the tone of the user's earlier emails to the same contact.", "The co-founders are Giovanni Brees and Lucas, the lead developer; their AppSumo page lists the company in Wyoming, United States, founded on 1 January 2024, bootstrapped, with 1 to 10 people based in the USA, Portugal and Spain. On 24 November 2025 the founders answered AppSumo's question \"What is your current monthly recurring revenue (MRR)?\" with \"48k\", and said they had more than 1,200 customers. MRR, monthly recurring revenue, is the amount that subscriptions bring in every month; it should not include one-time sales. That answer was posted 21 days before the company's lifetime deal on AppSumo went live on 15 December 2025; a lifetime deal is a one-time payment, here US$59 to US$299, for permanent access. A YouTube interview published on 2 January 2026 by SaaS Mastery, a channel that sells SaaS launch services, is titled \"From Idea to $45,000/Month AI SaaS in 60 days\", and the channel's description states that he built the assistant with no-code tools (visual builders that need no programming) and reached \"$45K MRR in just 2 months\".", "Every money figure on this page is a founder statement, or an interviewer's summary of one, with no second source of a different kind, so the evidence grade is D: reported, not verified. The words Brees spoke in the video could not be read for this page, because YouTube's robots.txt closes its caption and transcript endpoints to automated agents; the US$45K figure is quoted from the video's title and description only. The page also lists earlier email tools that died when the large email platforms shipped the same features." ], "factsCaption": "A two-founder AI email assistant that the founders listed at US$48K of monthly recurring revenue and more than 1,200 customers in November 2025, three weeks before an AppSumo lifetime deal; no figure has a second, independent source", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is a founder statement on one date, or an interviewer's summary of one, with no independent second source. A grade C value is read from the company's own listing on AppSumo. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a tool built for the founder's own inbox to a reported US$48K a month and a lifetime deal on AppSumo. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Meet Oscar prices: the AppSumo lifetime deal that ran from 15 December 2025 to 13 February 2026, read on the listing on 25 October 2026 (grade C). The company's own pricing page was not read, because its robots.txt disallows Claude agents, and no reviewer page found lists the monthly plans", "note": "All three rows are one-time payments for lifetime access to the Starter (Tier 1) or Pro (Tiers 2 and 3) plan, and the deal is now sold out. The listing shows struck-through values of US$348, US$1,668 and US$2,093 next to the three tiers, without saying how they were set. The subscription prices that make up the reported recurring revenue are not shown here because no permitted source lists them; a directory entry repeats the company's own text about a 14-day free trial.", "rows": [ [ "License Tier 1, AppSumo lifetime deal", "59 one-time", "", "1 mailbox, 5,000 emails and 50 AI-written replies a month" ], [ "License Tier 2, AppSumo lifetime deal", "139 one-time", "", "3 mailboxes, 15,000 emails and 150 AI-written replies a month" ], [ "License Tier 3, AppSumo lifetime deal", "299 one-time", "", "6 mailboxes, 30,000 emails and 500 AI-written replies a month" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 24 November 2025", "value": "US$48,000", "grade": "D", "note": "The founders' \"Company and Product FAQ's\" post on AppSumo, created 24 November 2025, answers \"What is your current monthly recurring revenue (MRR)?\" with \"48k\". The post is 21 days older than the lifetime deal, so the figure cannot contain lifetime-deal sales. The post does not say whether it is in US dollars or how it was counted. Still on the listing on 25 October 2026. No second source.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the November 2025 figure", "value": "US$576,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$48,000 times 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Customers, 24 November 2025", "value": "more than 1,200", "grade": "D", "note": "Same AppSumo post: \"How many customers do you have today?\" answered with \"1200+\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average revenue per customer", "value": "at most about US$40 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$48,000 divided by 1,200. Because the post says \"1200+\" customers, the true average is this figure or lower.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly figure in the YouTube interview, published 2 January 2026", "value": "US$45,000", "grade": "D", "note": "The video title on the SaaS Mastery channel says \"$45,000/Month AI SaaS in 60 days\" and the channel's description says \"$45K MRR in just 2 months\". The spoken words were not read, so this page cannot say how Brees himself defined the figure or when the interview was recorded. The video was published during the lifetime deal. About 6% below the November 2025 answer.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "AppSumo lifetime deal", "value": "15 December 2025 to 13 February 2026; US$59, US$139 or US$299 one-time", "grade": "C", "note": "Start and end dates from the listing's deal data; the deal is shown as sold out. The founders wrote that the money would pay for a larger development team.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 co-founders, Giovanni Brees and Lucas (lead developer)", "grade": "C", "note": "AppSumo posts signed \"Giovanni & Lucas - Co-Founders\". The company details list 1-10 people, and the founders wrote that the team is based in the USA, Portugal and Spain. The YouTube description says \"without VC funding or a large dev team\".", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "AppSumo company details: \"Bootstrapped\". The YouTube description says the same.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Founded", "value": "1 January 2024, Wyoming, United States", "grade": "C", "note": "AppSumo company details. A 1 January date may be a placeholder; no other source gives a launch date. This conflicts with the video's \"in just 2 months\", unless the two months count from a later relaunch.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's earlier work", "value": "part of 4,500+ product launches and US$500M+ in sales over more than a decade", "grade": "D", "note": "The YouTube channel's description of Brees, repeated by Startups.fyi. The businesses are not named in any downloaded source.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Critical third-party dependency", "value": "Google, for hosting", "grade": "C", "note": "The founders' answer on AppSumo. The deal terms say a Google account is required.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "AppSumo reviews, October 2026", "value": "4 reviews, average 4.75 out of 5", "grade": "C", "note": "Listing data read on 25 October 2026: three 5-taco and one 4-taco review, dated 16 December 2025 to 9 February 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the listed founding date to the November 2025 figure", "value": "22 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: January 2024 to November 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Before 2024", "what": "By the founders' account on AppSumo, Brees is \"drowning in inbox chaos\" in his earlier business, tries existing AI tools that do not know his prices, contracts or rules, and builds a first version to answer his own email.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "1 January 2024", "what": "The founding date that AppSumo lists for the company, in Wyoming, United States.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "Before November 2025", "what": "Brees partners with Lucas, the lead developer, to rebuild the tool for other users. The YouTube description says it was first built with no-code tools.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "7 November 2025", "what": "The deal terms of the AppSumo listing are created, by the listing's own data.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "24 November 2025", "what": "The founders' FAQ post on AppSumo gives the monthly recurring revenue as \"48k\" and the customers as \"1200+\".", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "15 December 2025", "what": "The lifetime deal goes live on AppSumo at US$59, US$139 and US$299. Brees writes: \"I built Meet Oscar for a simple reason: email was eating way too much of my day.\"", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "23 December 2025", "what": "Update for AppSumo buyers: HTML signatures, tone matching from older emails in the same thread, and a beta that drafts replies to emails tagged \"Action required\" without sending them.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2 January 2026", "what": "SaaS Mastery publishes a 36-minute interview titled \"From Idea to $45,000/Month AI SaaS in 60 days\"; its chapters cover validation, low-budget ads, a prepayment funnel, the MVP, vibe coding, SEO, the technical team and profitability.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "9 January 2026", "what": "Release of multiple inboxes per account, with the number set by the AppSumo tier.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "13 February 2026", "what": "The AppSumo deal ends. The listing later shows it as sold out.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "25 August 2026", "what": "The Startups.fyi newsletter repeats the interview's figure in its roundup: \"Two months later: $45K MRR, no VC money, no dev team.\"", "grade": "D", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "The AppSumo listing still shows the \"48k\" answer, 4 reviews and 39 comments. The video has 9,803 views.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Own problem", "text": "The founders wrote on AppSumo that Brees built the first version for his own business, because general AI tools wrote replies without knowing his prices, contracts or rules. The product's main feature, answering from uploaded documents, comes directly from that problem. A tool that its maker uses every day gets tested every day." }, { "title": "Facts from the customer's documents", "text": "Most AI writing tools generate text from the model alone. Meet Oscar, by the listing's description, first reads the customer's own price sheets, policies and FAQs and takes its facts from them. For a small business, a wrong price in an email costs more than a slow reply, so this is the part customers pay for." }, { "title": "Validate before building", "text": "The YouTube description states that the interview covers testing demand with landing pages and small prepayments before building, testing several customer groups cheaply, and starting with no-code tools before hiring developers. These are the channel's own summary of the talk; this page could not read what Brees said about each step." }, { "title": "A lifetime deal for cash and feedback", "text": "The founders wrote that they wanted feedback from AppSumo buyers and would put the money into a larger development team. In the four weeks after the deal began, the founders posted two updates with four new features, which they wrote came from buyers' feedback. The cost is that lifetime buyers keep using AI credits every month without paying again." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founders' AppSumo posts and the description of the YouTube interview. The founders wrote them; nobody outside has checked them.", "items": [ "The YouTube description states that the first version was built with no-code tools by a non-technical founder; the founders wrote on AppSumo that Lucas, the lead developer, then rebuilt it for other users.", "The founders wrote that the product depends on Google for hosting and stores customer data in the USA; the deal terms say a Google account is required.", "The AppSumo listing states that it works with Gmail; the October 2026 version of the FAQ says it works with \"major email providers\".", "A Knowledge Foundation: by the founders' description, users upload PDFs, documents, policies and price lists, and the assistant takes its facts from them when it drafts a reply.", "Tone matching, per the December 2025 update post, reads older emails in the same thread to copy how the user writes to that contact.", "Auto-drafts, per the same post, are written for emails tagged \"Action required\" and left as drafts; credits are only counted when the user sends one.", "The AppSumo tiers list usage limits, from 50 to 500 AI-written replies a month, which caps what each lifetime buyer costs in model calls." ], "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database tried to fix email or take it off a busy person's hands, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Mailbox", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Swipe gestures that would clear an inbox on the phone.", "died": "Dropbox bought it and later closed it, while Gmail and Outlook shipped free features that did the same job.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/314-mailbox" }, { "name": "Xobni", "years": "2006 to 2013", "funding": "US$42M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A smarter, searchable inbox and contact view inside Microsoft Outlook.", "died": "Tied to Outlook, which Microsoft improved itself, and overtaken by mobile email. Yahoo bought the remains.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/763-xobni" }, { "name": "Threadable", "years": "2014 to 2017", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Turn chaotic email threads into organized group conversations.", "died": "Slack made the idea obsolete, and the company ran out of money and interest.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1144-threadable" }, { "name": "Zirtual", "years": "2011 to 2015", "funding": "US$5.5M", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "Human virtual assistants who handle a busy owner's email and scheduling.", "died": "It hired many salaried assistants before it could pay for them and ran out of cash in the middle of its expansion.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1850-zirtual" }, { "name": "Skiff", "years": "2020 to 2024", "funding": "US$14.2M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Private, encrypted email and documents as an alternative to Google Workspace.", "died": "Free incumbents with network effects kept the users; privacy alone was not enough to make them switch.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2489-skiff" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Mailbox, Xobni and Threadable built a better layer on top of an email platform they did not own, and the platform owners, Google, Microsoft and later Slack, shipped similar features for free. Zirtual sold the same promise as Meet Oscar, someone else answers your email, but did it with salaried people, so every new customer added payroll. Skiff tried to replace the email platform itself and could not move users away from free incumbents.", "Two things differ for Meet Oscar. The assistant is an AI model, so the cost of answering one more email is a model call, not a salary, and the founders capped that cost with monthly reply limits. And it does not try to replace Gmail; it drafts inside it from documents that Google does not have. Whether that is enough is not shown: the platform owners can add AI drafting to their own mail apps at any time, and the founders said on AppSumo in November 2025 that revenue was US$48K a month, with no later figure from a second source." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product, with care. The method, yes.", "text": "AI email drafting has many sellers, and the email platforms can add it themselves. What can be copied is how the founders described their route: solve the problem in your own business first, take facts from the customer's own documents, test demand with a landing page and small prepayments as the interview's description states, and only then pay developers.", "steps": [ "Build the first version for your own work, with no-code tools, and use it every day before you sell it.", "Make the product answer from the customer's own documents, so its replies are correct and not only fluent.", "Test demand with a landing page and a small prepayment before you build, as the interview description states the founder did.", "If you run a lifetime deal, cap the monthly usage per tier, as the founders' AppSumo listing states, so one-time buyers cannot cost more than they paid." ], "open": "AI assistants that answer from a business's own documents in other channels where small firms lose time: supplier email, booking requests, insurance and property questions." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline figure, US$48K a month, rests on one statement: the founders' answer \"48k\" to AppSumo's question \"What is your current monthly recurring revenue (MRR)?\" in a post created on 24 November 2025, with \"1200+\" customers. The only other figure, US$45K a month, is in the title and the channel-written description of a SaaS Mastery interview published on 2 January 2026, and in a Startups.fyi roundup of 25 August 2026 that retells that video. This page could not read what Giovanni Brees said in the video, so it cannot say how he defined the US$45K or whether it included lifetime-deal sales. A reader could look for a TrustMRR or Stripe-verified revenue profile, the interview's own transcript, or a later interview with a dated figure." }, { "title": "Recurring revenue and a lifetime deal at the same time", "text": "The AppSumo lifetime deal ran from 15 December 2025 to 13 February 2026, and the video with the US$45K figure was published on 2 January 2026, in the middle of it. One-time deal sales are not recurring revenue. The November 2025 answer was posted three weeks before the deal began, so it cannot contain deal sales, but whether the video figure does is not known." }, { "title": "Two months or two years", "text": "The video's description states that the assistant reached US$45K MRR \"in just 2 months\" and Startups.fyi wrote \"no dev team\", while the AppSumo page lists the company as founded on 1 January 2024 and names Lucas as lead developer. Both cannot be read literally; the two months may count from a relaunch." }, { "title": "The interview channel sells launch services", "text": "SaaS Mastery's video description opens with a form to buy its host's help to launch a SaaS product. A large, round figure in the title helps that channel's sales. This does not make the figure false, but it is not a neutral source." }, { "title": "The platforms sell the same feature", "text": "Meet Oscar works on top of Gmail and, by the founders' answer, depends on Google for hosting. Google can add the same drafting feature to Gmail itself. Every email predecessor on this page died when the platform owner shipped a similar feature." }, { "title": "Lifetime buyers keep costing money", "text": "Each AppSumo buyer can use up to 50, 150 or 500 AI-written replies a month for life, and every reply is a paid model call. If many buyers stay active, the deal's one-time cash is spent on their usage." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.meetoscar.com/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "AppSumo listing: Meet Oscar, Write on-brand email replies with AI, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://appsumo.com/products/meet-oscar/", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full, and compared with a copy downloaded on 15 October 2026. The founders' posts, including the FAQ created on 24 November 2025 with the \"48k\" MRR and \"1200+\" customers answers (grade D), the launch post, the update posts, the company details, the deal tiers and limits, and the deal's start and end dates from the page's data (grade C)." }, { "title": "SaaS Mastery on YouTube, 2 January 2026: From Idea to $45,000/Month AI SaaS in 60 days, MeetOscar, Giovanni Brees", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dg1awui-g4", "grade": "D", "how": "Read the watch page: title, channel-written description, chapter titles, date, length and view count. The spoken words were not read: YouTube's robots.txt disallows /api/ (captions) and /youtubei/ (transcripts) for all agents." }, { "title": "Startups.fyi newsletter, 25 August 2026: AI Agents That Finish the Job Themselves, AI That Draws Manga, and the $250M One-Man Company", "url": "https://startupsfyi.beehiiv.com/p/ai-agents-that-finish-the-job-themselves-ai-that-draws-manga-and-the-250m-one-man-company", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. The item is in the editorial roundup, not a sponsored listing, and links to the YouTube video; it retells the video's figure and adds nothing independent." }, { "title": "SoftwareOne Marketplace: Meet Oscar, vendor AppSumo", "url": "https://platform.softwareone.com/product/meet-oscar/PCP-8946-5486", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A reseller listing that describes the product and its lifetime tiers; no prices or revenue." }, { "title": "The Daily Workflow: MeetOscar vs Editby", "url": "https://thedailyworkflow.com/compare/meetoscar-vs-editby", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the MeetOscar entry. A directory that repeats the company's description with a 14-day free trial and lists no price." }, { "title": "Meet Oscar robots.txt, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.meetoscar.com/robots.txt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. It disallows ClaudeBot, anthropic-ai and Claude-Web for the whole site, so the company's home and pricing pages were not used as sources." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/little-cat-ring-light/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/little-cat-ring-light.md", "slug": "little-cat-ring-light", "name": "Little Cat Ring Light (小猫补光灯)", "country": "China", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "Selfie fill-light app for iPhone", "aiType": "AI-leveraged", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "4 November 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$44K to US$59K total Pro revenue, May 2026", "sticker": "$44K-$59K total, reported", "outcomeUsd": 51506, "months": 18, "teamLabel": "1 founder, who built, markets and updates both apps alone", "fundingLabel": "None (the founder said he declined more than ten investors)", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "photos", "channel": "audience", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-leveraged", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Photography" ], "product": "Two iPhone apps that turn the phone screen into a coloured light for selfies. The free app, Little Cat Ring Light, fills the screen with one of a set of preset colours, or a custom colour, at full brightness. The paid app, Little Cat Ring Light Pro, costs CNY 1.00 once and adds a camera view on the same screen, so the user can light her face and take the photo, a Live Photo or a video at the same time. The apps themselves contain almost no AI; the founder, who could not program, wrote them with an AI coding tool.", "why": "Many women on Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social app, already lit their selfies by opening a solid-colour picture on a second phone, which took several steps: search, open the post, zoom, raise the brightness. The founder said in December 2024 that his partner's remark showed him this need and that he decided to build the app in under five minutes. He said he built it in about an hour with Cursor, posted it on Xiaohongshu, and answered the comments as a person; when copies appeared, he released the paid version at CNY 1 and, as he told Qbitai, turned the act of charging into a marketing event.", "summary": [ "Little Cat Ring Light (小猫补光灯) is a fill-light app: a fill light is a lamp that adds soft light to a face from the front, and this app makes the phone screen act as one by showing a bright, single colour such as warm pink or cool white. Its maker is Chen Yunfei (陈云飞), a former user researcher and product manager at large Chinese internet companies, who left his job in March 2023, taught himself to build software with AI, and is known online as 花叔 (Huashu). He wrote the app with Cursor, a code editor in which an AI model writes the code from plain-language instructions, and he told Qbitai in December 2024 that he does not write code himself. The free app went on the China App Store on 4 November 2024; the paid Pro version, at CNY 1.00, was on the store by 12 November 2024 and, the founder said, reached first place among all paid apps within four hours.", "The only figure for the app's own money is one sentence that the founder told the financial news service China News Economics (中新经纬), published on 22 May 2026: \"目前两款应用各自下载量约在30万至50万之间，其中'小猫补光灯Pro'收入(从推出至今)约为三四十万元。\" (\"At present each of the two apps has about 300,000 to 500,000 downloads, and the revenue of Little Cat Ring Light Pro, from its launch to now, is about 300,000 to 400,000 yuan.\") Converted at the European Central Bank reference rate of 22 May 2026, 6.7953 yuan per US dollar, the figure he stated is about US$44,000 to US$59,000 in 18 months. An earlier and larger number, close to one million yuan, was reported in January 2025 by a column on The Paper's platform, but that article said it was his total income from AI work, mostly consulting and online traffic, so it is not used here.", "This page gives the story the grade D, reported, not verified: one founder statement in one dated article, with no app-store report or second interview behind it. The figure is at least consistent with his download figure, because 300,000 to 500,000 paid downloads at CNY 1 each give CNY 300,000 to 500,000 before Apple's commission. The page also shows four earlier companies whose one-feature phone apps went viral and then faded or were copied by larger players." ], "factsCaption": "A CNY 1 selfie-light app that one founder built with an AI coding tool, and whose revenue since launch he put at 300,000 to 400,000 yuan in May 2026; one source for the money", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is a founder statement that appears in one source only, here an interview with China News Economics, and that no app-store report, payment processor or second interview confirms. A grade C value is a founder statement in an interview, a third party's account, or a fact read on the App Store page. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From leaving a large company in March 2023 to two App Store apps and one reported revenue figure in May 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Little Cat Ring Light prices on the China App Store, read 25 October 2026, converted at 6.7953 yuan per US dollar (ECB reference rate of 22 May 2026) (grade C)", "note": "Both apps are sold by the developer account 云飞 陈 (Yunfei Chen). The Pro app is a one-time paid download of CNY 1.00, about US$0.15, with Family Sharing for up to six people; its page lists no in-app purchases. The free app lists no in-app purchases either; since September 2026 it shows a Pro prompt when the user presses the shutter. The free app's privacy label lists device identifiers used for third-party advertising, but no source gives any advertising income. A WeChat mini-program version also exists; its price was not checked.", "rows": [ [ "Little Cat Ring Light (free app)", "0", "0", "fill light, presets, custom colours, a selfie mode since January 2026" ], [ "Little Cat Ring Light Pro", "0.15 one-time", "", "CNY 1.00; camera view, Live Photos, video, timer, rear camera" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue of the Pro app from launch to May 2026", "value": "about CNY 300,000 to 400,000 (三四十万元)", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder's statement to China News Economics, published 22 May 2026: 「‘小猫补光灯Pro’收入(从推出至今)约为三四十万元」, \"the revenue of Little Cat Ring Light Pro from its launch to now is about 300,000 to 400,000 yuan\". The article does not say whether this is before or after Apple's commission.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "The same figure in US dollars", "value": "about US$44,148 to US$58,864; midpoint US$51,506", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: CNY 300,000 and 400,000 divided by 6.7953 yuan per US dollar, the European Central Bank reference rate for 22 May 2026, the date of the statement. The headline uses the rounded range and the midpoint.", "src": [ 1, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Downloads, May 2026", "value": "about 300,000 to 500,000 for each of the two apps", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder's statement in the same sentence: 「目前两款应用各自下载量约在30万至50万之间」, \"at present each of the two apps has about 300,000 to 500,000 downloads\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Check of the revenue against the downloads", "value": "consistent", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: at CNY 1.00 per paid download, 300,000 to 500,000 Pro downloads give CNY 300,000 to 500,000 before Apple's commission. The reported CNY 300,000 to 400,000 lies inside that range. This checks only that the two founder figures agree with each other, not that either is true.", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Downloads, December 2024", "value": "close to 200,000 for both apps together", "grade": "C", "note": "Qbitai, 20 December 2024: 「两款App的总下载量已经接近20万」, \"the total downloads of the two apps were already close to 200,000\".", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Downloads of the free app, January 2025", "value": "more than 100,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Column on The Paper's platform, 2 January 2025: 「上线App Store 至今超10万的下载量」, \"more than 100,000 downloads since it went on the App Store\".", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Price of the Pro app", "value": "CNY 1.00 one-time, about US$0.15", "grade": "C", "note": "China App Store page, read 25 October 2026. The founder told Qbitai he released it after copies of the free app appeared: 「上线新增拍照功能但收费1元的pro版」, \"a Pro version that adds a camera function but costs 1 yuan\".", "src": [ 7, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Chart position after release", "value": "first place among all paid apps, within 4 hours", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's statement to Qbitai (December 2024) and to China News Economics (May 2026). His own site says the app stayed on the paid chart for more than a month.", "src": [ 2, 1, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Chart position, 25 October 2026", "value": "No. 22 in Photo and Video", "grade": "C", "note": "Read on the Pro app's China App Store page.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Ratings, 25 October 2026", "value": "free app 310 ratings, Pro 959 ratings, both 4.7 out of 5", "grade": "C", "note": "Read on the two China App Store pages.", "src": [ 6, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Time to build the first version", "value": "about 1 hour; two apps in 1.5 hours", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder to China News Economics (about one hour, approved by Apple the next day) and Qbitai (1.5 hours for two iOS apps including Little Cat Ring Light).", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Money from the app in April 2025", "value": "not considerable, in 36Kr's words", "grade": "C", "note": "36Kr, 22 April 2025: 「这个仅需要付费1元的APP，并没有给陈云飞带来可观的收入」, \"this app, which costs only 1 yuan, did not bring Chen Yunfei a considerable income\". Not a number, and earlier than the May 2026 figure.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's total AI income in his first year after leaving his job", "value": "close to CNY 1 million, mostly consulting and traffic, not the app", "grade": "C", "note": "The Paper column, 2 January 2025: 「陈云飞的百万收入，其实更多是流量收入」, \"Chen Yunfei's million in income is in fact mostly traffic income\"; it cites the media analytics firm Xinbang (新榜) that AI consulting for companies was the largest part. Kept out of the headline.", "src": [ 4, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 person", "grade": "C", "note": "Every source calls him an independent developer (独立开发者) who builds and updates the apps himself.", "src": [ 1, 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder to China News Economics: more than ten investors contacted him and he declined all of them. He told 36Kr in April 2025 that he did not want to start a company.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Reach of the launch post", "value": "1.18 million reads for one Xiaohongshu note", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's own site, snapshot of 26 September 2026.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the revenue figure", "value": "18 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: November 2024 to May 2026.", "src": [ 6, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2011 to 2023", "what": "Chen works in user research at a design consultancy and several Chinese internet companies, and last in product operations at Meituan.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "March 2023", "what": "He leaves his job without another one and travels while learning AI. He posts videos about ChatGPT on Bilibili and YouTube.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 3 ] }, { "when": "2023", "what": "He writes several Chrome extensions by asking GPT-4 for the code, then stops at what he calls the limit of its programming ability. After the GPT Store opens in November 2023 he makes thirty to forty GPTs; one reaches its front page.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "August 2024", "what": "He starts using Cursor and spends up to 16 hours a day building with it in cafés. Before Little Cat Ring Light he makes more than 20 small products.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "4 November 2024", "what": "Version 1.0 of the free app appears on the China App Store. He builds it in about an hour after his partner's remark about fill-light pictures.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 1 ] }, { "when": "By 12 November 2024", "what": "Little Cat Ring Light Pro, at CNY 1, is on the store (version 1.4 is the earliest listed). The founder says it reached first place among paid apps within four hours.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 2 ] }, { "when": "November 2024", "what": "20 updates in one month across the two apps, many of them crediting Xiaohongshu users by name for the bug reports. A WeChat mini-program version follows on 25 November.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 7 ] }, { "when": "20 December 2024", "what": "Qbitai interview: close to 200,000 downloads for the two apps together.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "2 January 2025", "what": "A column on The Paper's platform reports more than 100,000 downloads and says his income of close to one million yuan came mostly from consulting and traffic.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "February and March 2025", "what": "The Pro app adds DeepSeek (version 2.0.8, 10 February) and four more languages (version 2.1.2, 10 March). His book on DeepSeek is out by the end of March.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 3 ] }, { "when": "22 April 2025", "what": "36Kr writes that the CNY 1 app has not brought him considerable income.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "May 2026", "what": "China Central Television's programme Focus Report (焦点访谈) features the app as an example of the \"hand-rubbed economy\" (手搓经济) of apps made with AI, according to his site.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "22 May 2026", "what": "China News Economics publishes his statement: 300,000 to 500,000 downloads for each app, and CNY 300,000 to 400,000 in Pro revenue since launch.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "September and October 2026", "what": "Pro versions 2.4 to 2.5.3 rewrite the camera and add automatic colour choice from the face; the free app adds scene presets and warns that copies use its name and icon.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 6 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A need found by watching what people already did", "text": "Women on Xiaohongshu were lighting selfies with solid-colour pictures shown on a second phone. The founder told Qbitai that he looks for people who satisfy a need in a slow, unproductized way, not for what they say they want. The app shortens that process to one tap." }, { "title": "AI wrote the code", "text": "He could not program. After GPT-4 Chrome extensions in 2023, he says Cursor in 2024 made building real apps possible, and that the first version took about an hour. The app is simple, so the AI tool replaced a hired developer, not a team." }, { "title": "The founder as a person in the comments", "text": "The App Store shows a developer's full name. When users started calling out \"陈云飞\" in the comments of his Xiaohongshu note, he kept answering as himself, fixed bugs overnight, and named the users in the update notes. He told Qbitai that this turned the note into a shared joke that people forwarded to friends." }, { "title": "A one-yuan price as an event", "text": "When copies of the free app appeared, he released a paid version at CNY 1 instead of lowering anything. He told Qbitai that he turned charging itself into a marketing event: a wider top of the funnel with lower conversion gave more downloads. The founder said in May 2026 that this version had earned 300,000 to 400,000 yuan." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's interviews and from the two App Store pages. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Written with Cursor, an AI code editor, by a founder who says he does not write code. He told The Paper's columnist that AI programming became practical for him after Claude 3.5 appeared.", "Before Cursor he used GPT-4 in a chat window to produce the files of small Chrome extensions, copying and testing them by hand.", "Two native iOS apps: the free one needs iOS 15, Pro needs iOS 16. The Pro app is in five languages since March 2025. A WeChat mini-program version of the free app exists since November 2024.", "The Pro app added DeepSeek in February 2025 (version 2.0.8); the notes do not say for which feature. In September 2026 it added an automatic choice of light colour from the face.", "Feedback loop: bug reports come from Xiaohongshu comments and App Store reviews, and the update notes name the users who sent them.", "Marketing is the founder's own posts on Xiaohongshu, Bilibili and his WeChat account. No source mentions paid advertising." ], "src": [ 2, 3, 4, 6, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database made a one-feature phone or web app that spread fast and then faded, or was copied by a larger company. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Yo", "years": "2014 to 2018", "funding": "US$1.5M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "An app that sends one word, \"Yo\", to a friend.", "died": "After the first viral spike, users found it did not add enough to their messaging and stopped using it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/776-yo" }, { "name": "Viddy", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$30M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Short phone videos with filters, an Instagram for video.", "died": "Instagram added video in June 2013 and Vine spread faster; users tried Viddy once and did not return.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2190-viddy" }, { "name": "Meerkat", "years": "2015 to 2016", "funding": "US$14M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Live video from a phone, broadcast to Twitter followers.", "died": "Its growth came from Twitter; Twitter bought the competitor Periscope and cut Meerkat off from its social graph.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2194-meerkat" }, { "name": "Snipshot", "years": "2006 to 2009", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Simple photo editing in the browser, with no software to install.", "died": "Larger tools such as Picnik and free alternatives offered the same simple edits, and it did not add more.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1241-snipshot" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the four was a single feature that spread quickly. Yo and Viddy lost their users once the novelty was gone, Meerkat lost the platform it grew on, and Snipshot was matched by larger, free tools. Little Cat Ring Light has the same weakness: the founder told Qbitai that copies, some with the same name and logo, appeared on iOS, Android and mini-program stores, and a large beauty-camera app shipped a similar feature, which he mocked in a Pro update note.", "The difference is the cost. The predecessors raised from US$20,000 to US$30 million, according to the database, and needed a large audience to survive. This app had no funding and no staff, and no source mentions any server or advertising cost; the founder built it in an hour with an AI coding tool. So even the 300,000 to 400,000 yuan in 18 months that he stated in May 2026 is a real result for one person. His own site also puts the app first among his works, next to his book, his free guides and his paid talks, so it brings him attention that he sells in other ways." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, if you can find the need and reach the people who have it.", "text": "Writing the app was the easy part: an hour with Cursor. The hard parts were noticing a slow habit that many people already had, and posting about it where those people read. The founder had ten years of user research behind him and had made more than twenty earlier products before this one spread. The money stated is small for a business, about US$44,000 to US$59,000 in 18 months by the founder's account, but it came at almost no cost.", "steps": [ "Look for people who already solve a problem in a clumsy, manual way on a social app, such as saving pictures to use as a tool.", "Build the smallest app that removes those steps, with an AI coding tool, and release it the same week.", "Post about it where those users are, and answer the comments yourself; credit users by name in the update notes.", "When copies appear, release a better paid version at a very low price and treat the price itself as news." ], "open": "Other small phone habits that people repeat by hand: using the screen as a mirror, a lamp or a sign, and simple tools for one hobby group on Xiaohongshu, Instagram or TikTok." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline figure, CNY 300,000 to 400,000 in revenue from the Pro app since its launch, rests on one source: Chen Yunfei's statement to Lin Wansi of China News Economics (中新经纬), published on 22 May 2026. No App Store report, payment record or second interview with a dated figure confirms it. The article does not say whether the figure is before or after Apple's commission, nor whether it includes any advertising income of the free app. A reader could look for an App Store Connect screenshot posted by the founder, an estimate by an app-analytics firm such as Qimai or Sensor Tower, or a later interview that gives a second dated figure." }, { "title": "The founder's larger income is not the app", "text": "The figure of close to one million yuan that circulated in early 2025 was his total income from AI work in about a year, and the article that reported it said most of it came from consulting and traffic. His site lists talks at 50,000 to 80,000 yuan each and paid promotion deals. This page counts only the app's own revenue." }, { "title": "Copies and larger competitors", "text": "Copies with the same name and icon appeared in Chinese Android stores, and the free app's notes of September 2026 still warn about imitations on the App Store. A large beauty-camera app added the same idea. A screen-colour light is easy to build, and the founder himself says the hard part is the need, not the code." }, { "title": "One payment of one yuan", "text": "The Pro app is a one-time purchase of CNY 1.00 with no subscription and no in-app purchases. Revenue comes only from new downloads, so it depends on the app staying visible; in October 2026 it ranked No. 22 in Photo and Video, below the first place of its launch week." }, { "title": "How much did AI do?", "text": "The story is told as an app built in an hour by someone who cannot code. One App Store reviewer wrote that an app this simple could also be built by hand in about an hour, and called the founder's statement to state television, that a team might need months, an exaggeration." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.huasheng.ai/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "China News Economics (中新经纬), Lin Wansi, 22 May 2026: 「手搓App，我赚了40万元」 (\"I hand-built an app and earned 400,000 yuan\")", "url": "https://www.chinanews.com.cn/cj/2026/05-22/10626593.shtml", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full, downloaded again on 25 October 2026. The only source for the Pro revenue, the May 2026 download figures and the declined investors." }, { "title": "Qbitai (量子位), 20 December 2024: 不会代码的独立开发者，除了学Cursor，还该会些什么？｜十问爆款「小猫补光灯」", "url": "https://www.qbitai.com/2024/12/235182.html", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview in ten questions. Source for the build time, the downloads in December 2024, the CNY 1 decision, the copies and his use of GPT-4 and Cursor." }, { "title": "36Kr Workplace Bonus (职场Bonus), 22 April 2025: 对话「小猫补光灯」陈云飞：35+岁大厂i人，用离职、旅居、AI开发来打破中年魔咒", "url": "http://eu.36kr.com/zh/p/3260888901418760", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A profile with the founder's career, the August 2024 start with Cursor and the remark that the CNY 1 app brought no considerable income." }, { "title": "The Paper, Pengpai account 鲸选AI, 2 January 2025: 这个群体，AI捏爆款，1人年入百万，能造出下个Super App?", "url": "https://m.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_29825888", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A column on the newspaper's open platform, not a newsroom article. Source for the March 2023 departure, the Claude 3.5 remark, the 100,000 downloads and the statement that his million-yuan income was mostly consulting and traffic." }, { "title": "Huxiu, from the WeChat account 非复制人类, author 祝颖丽, 14 July 2025: 新自由故事：当AI成为技术合伙人", "url": "https://www.huxiu.com/article/4576067.html", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on Chen Yunfei. Confirms the one-hour first version, the partner's suggestion and his paid AI-programming community." }, { "title": "China App Store page: 小猫补光灯 - 花叔官方出品, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/cn/app/id6737742513", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Price, ratings, privacy label and the full version history from version 1.0 on 4 November 2024." }, { "title": "China App Store page: 小猫补光灯Pro, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/cn/app/id6737987084", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The CNY 1.00 price, the chart position, the ratings and the version history from version 1.4 on 12 November 2024." }, { "title": "Founder's site huasheng.ai (花叔 Alchain), snapshot of 26 September 2026", "url": "https://www.huasheng.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, downloaded 15 October 2026. Source for the chart claim, the 1.18 million reads, the Focus Report appearance and his paid talks and promotion." }, { "title": "Frankfurter exchange-rate API, European Central Bank reference rate, 22 May 2026: 1 US dollar = 6.7953 CNY", "url": "https://api.frankfurter.dev/v1/2026-05-22?base=USD&symbols=CNY", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the JSON reply. The rate used for every conversion from yuan on this page, chosen as the date of the founder's statement." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/mausbot/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/mausbot.md", "slug": "mausbot", "name": "MausBot", "country": "India", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Open-source chat app for a team of AI agents, with paid cloud machines", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "11 August 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$5.5K in the last 30 days, October 2026", "sticker": "$5.5K in 30 days", "outcomeUsd": 66036, "months": 2, "teamLabel": "2 founders, plus outside open-source contributors", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Speed", "group": "ai-model-tools", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "growing", "collections": [ "open-source" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "AI agents" ], "product": "A free, open-source desktop and phone app in which every chat contact is an AI agent with its own job, model, computer and connected apps. The agents run on the Claude, Codex and Grok command-line tools that the user already pays for, so MausBot does not pay for the model. The business sells Cloud plans: an always-on cloud machine for the agents, from US$15 a month.", "why": "xAI released Grok Bot, a messaging app of AI agents, in beta on 11 August 2026. The two founders published their own open version about two hours later, under the name OpenGrokBot, and pitched it to people who wanted the same idea on Claude or Codex instead of Grok. Payment records show the first payment on 27 September 2026 and US$5,503 in the 30 days to 25 October 2026.", "summary": [ "MausBot is a chat app in which each contact is an AI agent: a program that uses a language model to plan steps and then act, for example open a browser, fill in a form, edit a file or draft an email, instead of only answering in text. The app does not contain its own model. It starts the CLI (command-line interface, a program that is used by typing commands in a terminal) of Claude, Codex or Grok on the user's computer, with the user's existing login, and a small local harness, a server that owns every agent process and passes its messages to the chat window, shows the work. Risky actions such as shell commands appear as approval cards that the user allows or denies. The app is open source under the Apache 2.0 licence: anyone may read, change and reuse the code. The money comes from Cloud plans that keep the agents running on a rented Linux machine when the user's laptop is closed.", "Omkar Satpute and Milind Soni make it, through Supamaus Software Private Limited, a company incorporated in India. The public repository was created on 11 August 2026, the day xAI released Grok Bot in beta, and the founders wrote on Product Hunt that they open-sourced their work about two hours after that launch. By 25 October 2026 the repository had 5,595 stars and 941 forks. The payment provider records read by TrustMRR show the first payment on 27 September 2026, US$753 in September, US$4,751 in October to the 25th, and US$5,503 in the last 30 days. Monthly recurring revenue was US$7,020 from 121 active subscriptions.", "The revenue figures are grade A: TrustMRR reads them from the company's Dodo Payments account through an API key. But they cover one month. All revenue except about US$1 arrived in the 30 days before 25 October, and one day, 16 October, brought US$1,549, about 28% of it. This page does not treat one month as a trend. The profile text says the agents write \"posts and replies\"; the company's pages show that they do this only in apps that the user connects, after the user approves, and its terms forbid spam. The page also shows earlier companies that sold a personal assistant and failed." ], "factsCaption": "US$5,504 received since the first payment on 27 September 2026, of which US$5,503 in the 30 days to 25 October, read from the payment provider", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from MausBot's Dodo Payments account through an API key, last synced on 25 October 2026 at 06:29 UTC, or from a connected Google Analytics account. A grade B value is visible in public code or public repository data on GitHub. A grade C value is a statement by the founders or the company. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. Grade A covers money received and traffic. It does not cover costs, margin or profit.", "timelineLead": "From a public repository on the day a large competitor launched to the first payment in seven weeks, and US$5,503 in the next 30 days. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "MausBot prices on 25 October 2026, from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "The desktop app is free. Starter, Pro and Max are monthly Cloud plans for one person, each with a 3-day free trial that needs a card; the first payment is on day 4. Pro includes US$10 and Max US$20 of Claude credit every month. Team and Business plans start with a call; the yearly prices are per month, billed yearly. In every plan the customer pays the model provider separately, through an own Claude, ChatGPT or Grok plan or an API key. The TrustMRR profile text lists older launch prices: Personal US$29, Pro US$49 and Max US$89 a month.", "rows": [ [ "Free, desktop app", "0", "0", "your own computer and AI account; unlimited bots" ], [ "Starter, Cloud", "", "15", "2 shared CPUs, 2 GB memory, 100 computer-hours a month" ], [ "Pro, Cloud", "", "49", "4 shared CPUs, 4 GB memory, 300 computer-hours a month" ], [ "Max, Cloud", "", "99", "8 shared CPUs, 8 GB memory, 800 computer-hours a month" ], [ "Team", "135", "169", "up to 5 people; 1,000 computer-hours a month, shared" ], [ "Business", "479", "599", "up to 20 people; US$25 a month for each extra person" ], [ "Business self-hosted", "299", "", "billed yearly; up to 20 people on your own servers" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days, at 25 October 2026", "value": "US$5,503", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from the Dodo Payments account by API key, synced 25 October 2026 at 06:29 UTC. One 30-day period. The discovery endpoint of TrustMRR, read the same day from a different snapshot, gave US$5,520.81.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue since the start, at 25 October 2026", "value": "US$5,504", "grade": "A", "note": "Same source and sync. The same value appears for the last 3, 6 and 12 months, so the business had almost no revenue before 26 September 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month, 2026", "value": "September US$753; October to the 25th US$4,751", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table. The first payment, US$200, is on 27 September 2026, so September covers four days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Share of all revenue that arrived in October", "value": "about 86%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 4,751 / 5,504 = 86.3%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Largest single day", "value": "US$1,549 on 16 October 2026, about 28% of the 30 days", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR daily table; the share is calculated: 1,549 / 5,503 = 28.1%. Ten of the 30 days in the table show US$0. The profile does not say what was bought on 16 October.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 7 days, at 25 October 2026", "value": "US$1,711", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR period table.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue and active subscriptions", "value": "US$7,020 a month; 121 subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot. MRR is the monthly value of the subscriptions that are active now. It is higher than the 30-day revenue because many subscriptions began recently, some of them after a 3-day free trial. The discovery endpoint showed US$7,219 in its snapshot.", "src": [ 1, 2, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Average MRR per active subscription", "value": "about US$58 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 7,020 / 121 = 58.0. Between the Pro price, US$49, and the Max price, US$99.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "30-day revenue at a yearly rate", "value": "US$66,036", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$5,503 x 12. This is the money figure that this site stores for the story, not a forecast. MRR x 12 is US$84,240.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Visitors in the last 30 days", "value": "35,787; US$0.15 of revenue per visitor", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, from the connected Google Analytics account. The company's partners page says 90,000 unique visitors a month, which this figure does not confirm.", "src": [ 1, 12 ] }, { "fact": "People using the free app", "value": "10,000 or more", "grade": "C", "note": "Company partners page (10k+) and TrustMRR profile text (estimated user count 10,000). Not verified.", "src": [ 12, 1 ] }, { "fact": "GitHub repository, 25 October 2026", "value": "5,595 stars, 941 forks", "grade": "B", "note": "GitHub's public data for milind-soni/OpenMausBot. A star is a bookmark by a GitHub user; a fork is a copy of the code in another account. The repository was created on 11 August 2026 at 18:58 UTC.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Release pace", "value": "the newest 100 releases run from version 0.1.21 on 16 August to 0.1.127 on 24 October 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "GitHub release data of the public releases repository.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 people", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's post-about-us page says that only \"the two of us who run MausBot\" can read the submissions. TrustMRR profile text: team size 2 to 5. Outside contributors also send code: the repository owner's account has 3,704 commits, and the next three accounts 544, 345 and 334.", "src": [ 5, 1, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR profile text says Bootstrapped. The home page lists the Google for Startups Cloud Program and Claude for Startups, which are programs of those vendors; no source read here mentions an equity investment.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Company", "value": "Supamaus Software Private Limited, incorporated in India", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms of service. The terms name Indian law and the courts at Pune.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Payment provider", "value": "Dodo Payments", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR verification line. The company's terms say that Dodo Payments acts as merchant of record and handles taxes; the TrustMRR profile says Merchant of record: No. The two sources disagree on this point.", "src": [ 1, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Product Hunt launch", "value": "13 October 2026, number 7 of the day, 158 points", "grade": "C", "note": "Product Hunt product page, read 25 October 2026.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the public repository to the October 2026 figure", "value": "2 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 11 August to 25 October 2026 is 75 days, about 2.5 months; the first payment came 47 days after the repository.", "src": [ 8, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "11 August 2026", "what": "xAI releases Grok Bot in beta, a messaging app of agents in its cloud, on Grok only. The same day the founders create the public repository, first named OpenGrokBot. They wrote that they open-sourced it about two hours after the launch, from work they had already started.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 6, 8, 10 ] }, { "when": "16 August 2026", "what": "Version 0.1.21, the oldest of the newest 100 releases. The pace is more than one release a day until late October.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "17 August 2026", "what": "First blog post: the open-source alternative to Grok Bot, on the Claude, Codex and Grok tools the user already has.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "22 September 2026", "what": "Eleven blog posts in one day. By 8 October the blog has 39 posts, most of them comparisons with other agent products.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "27 September 2026", "what": "First payment: US$200. September ends at US$753.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "6 October 2026", "what": "Blog post Meet MausBot, signed by Omkar Satpute and Milind Soni, under the new name.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2026", "what": "Product Hunt launch, number 7 of the day with 158 points.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "16 October 2026", "what": "US$1,549 in one day, the largest day in the table.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "US$5,503 in the last 30 days, MRR US$7,020, 121 active subscriptions, 35,787 visitors in 30 days. Version 0.1.127 was released the day before.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 9 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Speed", "text": "The founders published an open version of a new product category on the day a large company launched it. People who searched for an open-source Grok Bot, or who did not want to move to Grok, found a working repository the same day. The company's blog says that people search for \"open source grok bot\", and its pages use those words." }, { "title": "The customer pays for the model", "text": "The agents run on the customer's own Claude, Codex or Grok subscription, through the official command-line tools. MausBot pays for no model use except the small Claude credit in its higher plans, so a Cloud plan at US$15 a month is mostly the price of a small rented server." }, { "title": "Free app, paid always-on machine", "text": "The desktop app is free and complete, but agents on a laptop stop when the laptop sleeps. The Cloud plans sell the part that a free app cannot give: a machine that keeps scheduled jobs running, cloud desktops for the agents and phone alerts. Checkout for the 3-day trial asks for a card, and the first payment is on day 4 unless the user cancels." }, { "title": "Content that answers comparison searches", "text": "Most of the 39 blog posts compare MausBot with a named product of xAI, Meta, OpenAI, Manus or another open project. A rewards page offers up to US$50 in Claude credits for honest public posts on the poster's own account, with the reward disclosed where the platform asks for it." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the public repository and from the founders' profile text on TrustMRR. The repository details are grade B, the profile text grade C.", "items": [ "Desktop shells for macOS, Windows and Ubuntu in Electron; the chat interface in React, Vite and Tailwind CSS. The profile also lists React Native, Swift, SwiftUI and Kotlin for the phone apps.", "A harness server on 127.0.0.1 starts the claude, codex and grok command-line tools and turns each provider's protocol into one stream of events for the chat window.", "A permission broker turns each risky action, such as a shell command or a file edit, into an approval card in the chat.", "Cloud computers for the agents come from Boat (boat.dev), which the README calls a sponsor. Connected apps such as Gmail, Slack and GitHub come through Composio. Hosted voices come from ElevenLabs or Fish Audio.", "Payments through Dodo Payments. The profile lists Node.js, Docker, Cloudflare, Vercel and Fly.io for the back end.", "More than one release a day, with outside contributors sending code to the public repository." ], "src": [ 8, 1, 9 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold a personal or work assistant that would do tasks for its users, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Zirtual", "years": "2011 to 2015", "funding": "US$5.5M", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "Virtual assistants for busy business owners: email, scheduling and routine tasks.", "died": "The assistants were employees, so costs grew with every customer. It expanded faster than its cash allowed and stopped paying.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1850-zirtual" }, { "name": "Exec", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$3.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "An on-demand concierge for any task, from cleaning to personal errands.", "died": "It tried to cover every task, while a competitor chose one kind of task and made it work.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/128-exec" }, { "name": "Operator", "years": "2015 to 2020", "funding": "US$30M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "A personal shopper in an app, with people and software finding hard-to-find products.", "died": "Human work in every request made each order expensive, and large online stores were cheaper and faster.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/396-operator" }, { "name": "Niles", "years": "2017 to 2020", "funding": "US$2.8M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A bot inside Slack that answered staff questions from the company's knowledge.", "died": "Slack added its own features, and cheaper competitors arrived.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1031-niles" }, { "name": "Petalite", "years": "2014 to 2025", "funding": "US$12M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A privacy-first voice assistant that ran on the device instead of in the cloud.", "died": "It could not compete with the hardware, data and ecosystems of Amazon and Google, even with better privacy.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2471-petalite" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Zirtual, Exec and Operator sold an assistant that was partly or fully a person, so each new task added labour cost, and the price that customers would pay did not cover it. Niles and Petalite built software assistants, but a platform owner, Slack or Amazon and Google, offered the same thing inside a product that people already used.", "MausBot removes most of the cost side. The agent is a language model, and the customer pays the model provider through a subscription that the customer already has, so the business sells only a rented machine and the app around it. The platform risk is still there and is larger: xAI, Meta, OpenAI and Manus each sell their own agent product, and MausBot depends on their command-line tools and on their subscription rules. Its answer so far is to support several providers at once and to keep the code open, so that a user is never tied to one of them." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The timing, rarely. The structure, yes.", "text": "An open copy published on the launch day of a large company's product is an opening that lasts hours. The structure can be repeated: a free open-source app that runs on the customer's own AI subscription, and a paid hosted machine for the part that must run all day.", "steps": [ "Let customers bring their own AI subscription or API key, so the model is never your cost.", "Give the full app away as open source, and charge for the always-on hosted version.", "Write a comparison page for each product that people search alternatives for.", "Connect revenue to a verifier such as TrustMRR from the first payment, so outsiders can check the numbers." ], "open": "Open, multi-provider versions of each new agent product that the large AI companies release on one model only." }, "watch": [ { "title": "One month of revenue", "text": "All revenue except about US$1 arrived in the 30 days before 25 October 2026. A business that is two months old, with one month of sales, has not yet shown whether customers renew. The next months of the same TrustMRR profile will show it." }, { "title": "One large day", "text": "US$1,549 of the US$5,503 came on 16 October, three days after the Product Hunt launch, and ten of the 30 days show no revenue. The profile does not say what was bought that day, for example a yearly or team plan." }, { "title": "It runs on other companies' tools", "text": "The agents use the Claude, Codex and Grok command-line tools with the customer's own subscription. A change in those tools or in the providers' subscription rules could stop the product or raise its price." }, { "title": "Large competitors", "text": "xAI, Meta, OpenAI and Manus sell their own agent products, which the blog compares with MausBot. Each predecessor on this page lost to a company with more money or a platform of its own." }, { "title": "Open code can be copied", "text": "The code is under the Apache 2.0 licence and has 941 forks. Anyone may host it and sell a competing Cloud plan." }, { "title": "Company claims and verified data differ", "text": "The partners page says 90,000 unique visitors a month; the connected Google Analytics account shows 35,787 in 30 days. The terms call Dodo Payments the merchant of record; the TrustMRR profile says it is not." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.mausbot.com/" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/mausbot" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/mausbot" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: MausBot, markdown profile (data as of 25 October 2026)", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/mausbot.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full on 25 October 2026. Revenue, MRR, subscriptions and traffic come from its Verification Sources (Dodo Payments API key, Google Analytics); the description, team size, funding, prices and tech stack are founder-written profile text, grade C." }, { "title": "TrustMRR public discovery endpoint, fastest-growing startups (read 25 October 2026)", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/api/ai/discovery", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. A second snapshot of the same verified data: 30-day revenue US$5,520.81 and MRR US$7,219." }, { "title": "MausBot home page", "url": "https://www.mausbot.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Source for the ready-made bots, the approval rule and the startup programs." }, { "title": "MausBot pricing page", "url": "https://www.mausbot.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Source for every price, the trial terms and the included Claude credit." }, { "title": "MausBot: Post about MausBot, get Claude credits", "url": "https://www.mausbot.com/post-about-us", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the post-rewards rules and the team of two." }, { "title": "MausBot blog, 17 August 2026, updated 3 October 2026: Open source Grok Bot: MausBot, the free alternative", "url": "https://www.mausbot.com/blog/open-source-alternative-to-grok-bot", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Grok Bot launch date and the first name, OpenGrokBot." }, { "title": "MausBot blog, 6 October 2026: Meet MausBot, your own team of AI bots, in a chat app", "url": "https://www.mausbot.com/blog/meet-mausbot", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names both founders." }, { "title": "GitHub: milind-soni/OpenMausBot, README and repository data", "url": "https://github.com/milind-soni/OpenMausBot", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the README in full. Creation date, stars, forks and commit counts read from GitHub's public API for the repository and its contributors list on 25 October 2026." }, { "title": "GitHub: milind-soni/openmausbot-releases, releases", "url": "https://github.com/milind-soni/openmausbot-releases/releases", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the releases page and the release list from GitHub's public API (newest 100 releases)." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: MausBot, Open source Grok Bot: Free, Local", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/mausbot", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the maker's launch comment. Source for the launch date, rank and points." }, { "title": "MausBot terms of service", "url": "https://www.mausbot.com/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the company, payments, acceptable use and governing law." }, { "title": "MausBot: Become a Featured Partner", "url": "https://www.mausbot.com/partners", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the company's user, visitor and Discord figures." }, { "title": "MausBot blog index", "url": "https://www.mausbot.com/blog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the dates and topics of the 39 posts." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/promptmonitor/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/promptmonitor.md", "slug": "promptmonitor", "name": "Promptmonitor", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI search visibility tracking (GEO)", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "3 June 2025", "outcomeLabel": "Sold for US$85K, January 2026", "sticker": "Sold for $85K", "outcomeUsd": 85000, "months": 7, "teamLabel": "1 founder (Yogesh, @yogesharc), who also ran the Remote3 job board", "fundingLabel": "None found", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "seo-ai-search", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "sold", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2B", "Marketing" ], "product": "Software that sends a brand's chosen questions to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, DeepSeek and Grok every day, records whether each answer names the brand, in which position and with what sentiment, and lists the web pages that the answers cite. For each cited page it extracts the author's contact details, so that the customer can ask the publisher to mention the brand. A snippet on the customer's site also logs visits by AI crawlers such as GPTBot and ClaudeBot.", "why": "According to the newsletter that told his story, the founder saw visitors arrive at his job board from ChatGPT in May 2025 and built the tool that he wanted for himself in about three weeks. He launched it on Product Hunt on 3 June 2025, kept shipping weekly through months of slow sales, and cut his prices from a range of US$99 to US$499 a month (July 2025) to US$29 to US$129 a month (January 2026), according to the archived pricing pages. Stripe data on TrustMRR lists revenue of US$2,054 in November 2025 and US$2,648 in December 2025. A newsletter reported that he then listed the product for US$100,000 and sold it nine days later for US$85,000.", "summary": [ "Promptmonitor is a tool for generative engine optimization (GEO), the work of making a brand appear in the answers of AI assistants, in the way that search engine optimization (SEO) makes a page appear in Google's list of links. The same work is also called answer engine optimization (AEO). The customer enters questions that buyers might ask, called prompts (the text that a person types into an AI assistant), for example \"best accounting software for small business\". Promptmonitor sends each prompt to several AI models on a schedule, stores every answer, and computes a visibility score. The founder-era page defined it as 80% presence rate (the share of answers that name the brand) plus 20% position (how early the brand is named). For example, a brand named in 6 of 10 answers has a presence rate of 60%, and being named earlier in those answers adds to the score. The AI models are not only the subject of the product: every number in it is computed from answers that the models generate when the product calls them.", "The founder, Yogesh (@yogesharc on X), also ran Remote3, a job board for web3 jobs. According to the newsletter AI & No-Code Exits (10 July 2026), he saw visitors arrive at the job board from ChatGPT in May 2025, built a first version in about three weeks, and then sat at about US$500 a month of revenue for months, as the newsletter reported. Product Hunt shows a launch on 3 June 2025, eighth product of the day. TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a company's payment processor, lists Stripe revenue of US$2,054 in November 2025 and US$2,648 in December 2025, and MRR (monthly recurring revenue: the subscription revenue that comes in each month) of US$2,473 from 38 active subscriptions at its last sync on 25 January 2026. The newsletter reported that he listed the product on TrustMRR on 5 January 2026 with an asking price of US$100,000 and sold it on 14 January 2026 for US$85,000 to a buyer building a small portfolio of software products.", "The revenue figures on this page are grade A: they come from Stripe through TrustMRR. The sale price, the asking price and the dates of the sale rest on one newsletter article, grade D: no buyer statement and no second article confirms them. Other records agree with a change of owner in early 2026: the Stripe connection stopped syncing on 25 January 2026, the TrustMRR profile no longer lists the product for sale, and the company named in the terms of service changed from Bootstrapped LLC (December 2025) to Stackdirectory LLC (May 2026). The page also shows four earlier companies that sold brands a measure of their visibility on platforms that they did not own." ], "factsCaption": "A one-person AI visibility tracker with Stripe-verified revenue of about US$2,000 to US$2,700 a month at the end of 2025, reported sold for US$85,000 in January 2026, seven months after launch", "factsRead": "How to read this table: grade A values come from Stripe through TrustMRR. Grade C values are the company's own pages (live or archived) or Product Hunt's records. Grade D values rest on one newsletter article and are not verified. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a strange line in a job board's traffic report to a sale in nine days, in seven months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Promptmonitor prices in October 2026, from the company's pricing page, run by the owner after the sale (grade C)", "note": "The page offers a monthly and a yearly price and says yearly billing saves 15%. The yearly price per month in the page data is US$33 for Starter and US$67 for Growth, which match 15%, but US$83 for Pro, which does not (15% off US$149 is about US$127); the table shows the page data. An \"AI answer\" is one run of one prompt on one model. Starter covers ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity; the page data gives 5 models for Growth and 8 for Pro. Every paid plan has a 7-day free trial. Under the founder the prices were different: Free, Lite US$99, Startup US$199 and Business US$499 a month in July 2025, and Starter US$29, Growth US$39 and Pro US$129 a month in January 2026, the month of the sale.", "rows": [ [ "Starter", "33", "39", "2,250 AI answers a month, 1 website, 25 prompts tracked twice a week, 1 seat" ], [ "Growth", "67", "79", "4,500 AI answers a month, 2 websites, 50 prompts tracked daily, unlimited seats" ], [ "Pro", "83", "149", "14,000 AI answers a month, 5 websites, 150 prompts tracked daily, unlimited seats" ], [ "Enterprise", "custom", "", "more than 20 websites, custom prompt volume, SSO and API access" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Sale price, 14 January 2026", "value": "US$85,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Reported by the newsletter AI & No-Code Exits on 10 July 2026, which calls it the marketplace's biggest acquisition at the time. No buyer statement or second source found. The buyer is described only as a SaaS portfolio operator.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price, 5 January 2026", "value": "US$100,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Same newsletter: listed on TrustMRR on 5 January 2026. The TrustMRR profile now says the startup is not listed for sale.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Sale price as a share of the asking price", "value": "85%, after 9 days on the market", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$85,000 divided by US$100,000; 5 to 14 January 2026.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, November 2025", "value": "US$2,054", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe, connected to TrustMRR by API key.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, December 2025", "value": "US$2,648", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe through TrustMRR. 28.9% more than November, calculated. January 2026 shows US$1,441, a month that the data covers only until the last sync on 25 January.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR at the last sync, 25 January 2026", "value": "US$2,473 from 38 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe through TrustMRR. The profile says the Stripe API key has expired, so no later data exists on TrustMRR.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from that MRR", "value": "about US$29,676 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$2,473 times 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Sale price divided by the run rate", "value": "about 2.9 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$85,000 divided by US$29,676. Divided by the revenue of the twelve months shown on TrustMRR (US$6,599), it is about 12.9 times.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Average MRR per active subscription", "value": "about US$65 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$2,473 divided by 38. Between the January 2026 Growth plan (US$39) and Pro plan (US$129).", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "All-time revenue at the last sync", "value": "US$11,297", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe through TrustMRR. The last-twelve-months figure is US$6,599, so US$4,698 came before late October 2025 (calculated). The profile gives a founded date of 6 April 2023, two years before the product, so part of that earlier revenue may come from another product on the same Stripe account: not verified.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before the rise", "value": "about US$500 of MRR for months", "grade": "D", "note": "Newsletter account, no exact dates. It says revenue then jumped and doubled again shortly after.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Product Hunt launches", "value": "3 June 2025: 8th of the day, 193 points on launch day; 25 August 2025: 15th of the day", "grade": "C", "note": "Product Hunt's product page. The first launch was featured; the second was not.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Price of the cheapest paid plan", "value": "US$99 a month in July 2025; US$29 a month from September 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived pricing pages. The top plan fell from US$499 (July 2025) to US$249 (September and October 2025) and US$129 (January 2026).", "src": [ 3, 8, 9, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Companies signed up, as the site claimed", "value": "650+ in July 2025; 1,450 in January 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Company claims on the home page, not verified. TrustMRR's estimated user count is also 1,450. The verified number of paying subscriptions in January 2026 is 38.", "src": [ 3, 4, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 founder", "grade": "C", "note": "The newsletter describes one indie builder. The founder-era site says \"Text the founder on LinkedIn\", and Product Hunt lists Yogesh as the maker.", "src": [ 2, 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "No source names an investor. Not verified beyond these pages.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Company in the terms of service", "value": "Bootstrapped LLC in December 2025; Stackdirectory LLC by May 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived terms of service. Both versions say \"Last Updated: September 30, 2025\" and have the same Delaware mailing address; only the company name changed. The home page still named Bootstrapped LLC on 8 February 2026.", "src": [ 10, 11, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the sale", "value": "7 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: June 2025 to January 2026.", "src": [ 5, 2 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "May 2025", "what": "Yogesh sees visitors arrive at his job board, Remote3, from ChatGPT. He decides to build a tool that shows when and why AI models mention a site, and ships a first version in about three weeks.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "3 June 2025", "what": "Launch on Product Hunt: \"Get your brand mentioned by ChatGPT, Gemini + other AI/LLMs\". It is featured and ends 8th of the day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "8 July 2025", "what": "The archived site offers a free plan and paid plans of US$99, US$199 and US$499 a month, tracks six AI models, extracts publishers' contacts, and claims more than 650 companies. The footer names Bootstrapped LLC and links to Remote3.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "June to October 2025", "what": "The newsletter reported that revenue sat at about US$500 a month for months while the founder shipped new features every week.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "25 August 2025", "what": "Second Product Hunt launch, 15th of the day, not featured.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "8 September 2025", "what": "New prices: Starter US$29, a middle plan US$89 and Pro US$249 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2025", "what": "Growth costs US$49 a month with a Halloween discount code; the 7-day free trial replaces a 10-day one.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "Stripe revenue of US$2,054 in the month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "December 2025", "what": "Stripe revenue of US$2,648 in the month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "1 January 2026", "what": "The archived site shows Starter US$29, Growth US$39 and Pro US$129 a month, a free Agency plan with revenue sharing, and \"Over 1450 Companies Signed Up\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "5 January 2026", "what": "Listed for sale on TrustMRR with an asking price of US$100,000, as the newsletter reported.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "14 January 2026", "what": "Sold for US$85,000 to a buyer building a small SaaS portfolio, as the newsletter reported.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "25 January 2026", "what": "Last Stripe sync on TrustMRR: MRR of US$2,473 from 38 active subscriptions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "March 2026", "what": "The public changelog shows new releases: CSV export, a new sign-in screen and weekly reports for every user of an account.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "May 2026", "what": "The terms of service name Stackdirectory LLC instead of Bootstrapped LLC.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "10 July 2026", "what": "The newsletter AI & No-Code Exits publishes the account of the sale.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The site, now run by the new owner, tracks eight AI models, sells plans from US$39 a month and claims more than 5,000 marketing teams.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 7 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "The idea came from the founder's own traffic data", "text": "According to the newsletter, the founder saw an unexplained referrer, ChatGPT, in the analytics of his job board. He had the problem himself (AI models were mentioning his site and he could not see when or why), so he built for one known user first and did not run a market survey." }, { "title": "A product that runs on the models it measures", "text": "Each paid plan is a quota of AI answers: one answer is one prompt sent to one model. The archived FAQ says that Promptmonitor sends the customer's questions to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, Grok and Perplexity, records each mention and its position, and scores the result. The cost of the product grows with the number of answers, which is why the plans are priced by answers, prompts and models." }, { "title": "From a dashboard to an action", "text": "A score alone does not tell a customer what to do. The founder-era site listed the pages that AI answers cite, extracted the authors' email addresses and social accounts, and showed SEO metrics for each page, so the customer could decide \"whether to outreach or create better content to outrank them\". It also generated an llms.txt file, a plain-text summary of a website for AI models." }, { "title": "Lower prices, then a sale at the top of the interest", "text": "According to the archived pages, the entry price was US$99 a month in July 2025 and US$29 a month from September 2025. Stripe data on TrustMRR lists monthly revenue above US$2,000 in November and December 2025, after the newsletter reported months near US$500. The newsletter reported that he listed the product in January 2026, while interest in AI visibility tools was rising, and sold it in nine days." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the TrustMRR profile (written by the founder), and from the page source of the founder-era site in the Wayback Machine, July 2025 to January 2026. They are grade C, except the Stripe connection, which TrustMRR verifies.", "items": [ "Next.js and Node.js, as the TrustMRR profile says (\"Built with Next.js and Nodejs\"). The archived pages load Next.js files.", "Images and plan icons served from Supabase storage.", "Payments through Stripe: the archived pricing data carries Stripe price IDs, and TrustMRR reads revenue from the Stripe account.", "Crisp for live chat support, and Fathom for website analytics, both loaded by the archived pages.", "An affiliate program with a 30% commission run on PromoteKit, linked from the footer.", "A Google Ads tag and a LinkedIn Insight tag in the page source, which measure visitors from those ad platforms; no source says how much was spent on ads.", "Launched twice on Product Hunt and listed on There's An AI For That, whose badges appear on the founder-era home page." ], "src": [ 1, 3, 4, 5 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold brands a measure of their visibility, or of what people said about them, on platforms that they did not own. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Klout", "years": "2008 to 2017", "funding": "US$40M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A score from 1 to 100 that measured how influential a person or a brand was on social networks.", "died": "Facebook, Twitter and Instagram built their own analytics, rivals gave more detail, and changes to the platforms' API access limited the data that Klout could collect.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/280-klout" }, { "name": "Salorix", "years": "2009 to 2014", "funding": "US$3.3M", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "Machine learning that ranked social media conversations, so brands could see the themes and influencers in their market.", "died": "Its investors withdrew their support at the same time as leaner competitors with newer AI methods arrived.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1845-salorix" }, { "name": "SumAll", "years": "2011 to 2019", "funding": "US$15M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "One dashboard that collected a small business's data from its social media and marketing platforms.", "died": "It could not set itself apart from larger analytics products and free tools, and its price did not match what small businesses thought it was worth, so customers left.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/587-sumall" }, { "name": "Isentium", "years": "2012 to 2020", "funding": "US$50M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Sentiment analysis of social media and news, read by natural language processing, to predict markets for traders.", "died": "Social media data was noisy and carried compliance risk, competitors offered broader analytics, and it depended on a few large clients.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/255-isentium" } ], "whatChanged": [ "All four sold a measure of how a brand appeared on platforms owned by someone else. Klout lost its data when the social networks limited API access and built their own analytics. SumAll could not set itself apart from free tools. Salorix and Isentium needed investor money and large clients. Promptmonitor carries the same platform risk: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic decide what their models answer and can change their terms, their prices or the answers themselves, and large SEO suites sell AI visibility reports too, such as Ahrefs Brand Radar, which the current pricing page compares.", "Two things differ. First, Promptmonitor had no investors to satisfy and almost no fixed cost: the archived pages show one founder and off-the-shelf services for hosting, chat, analytics and payments. Second, the founder did not need the business to last for years. The newsletter reported that he sold it seven months after launch, while interest in the category was rising, so the platform risk passed to the buyer, who paid US$85,000 for it, as the newsletter reported." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The price, not certain.", "text": "Many founders saw ChatGPT appear in their analytics in 2025, and many AI visibility tools now compete (Product Hunt lists Otterly.AI, Writesonic and MentionBird among the similar products), so a late copy of this product meets a crowded market. The method is open to anyone: read your own analytics for a source you cannot explain, build the tool that you need yourself, price it low enough to collect paying users, and sell while the category is rising. The reported price of US$85,000 rests on one newsletter.", "steps": [ "Look in your own analytics for traffic that no tool explains, and build the tool that explains it for you first.", "Ship a first version in weeks and launch it where builders look, such as Product Hunt.", "Charge from the start, and test lower prices when sales stay flat.", "Connect a payment-processor revenue profile (such as TrustMRR) before you sell, so a buyer can check the numbers." ], "open": "Other places where AI models now decide what people see: AI shopping answers, AI answers inside maps and local search, and the AI crawlers that fetch a site's pages." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The sale price of US$85,000, the asking price of US$100,000 and the dates (listed 5 January 2026, sold 14 January 2026) rest on one source: the newsletter AI & No-Code Exits, 10 July 2026, which does not quote the buyer or show a document. The months at about US$500 a month are also only the newsletter's account. A reader could look for TrustMRR's own record of the acquisition, a statement by the buyer, or the founder's own post about the sale." }, { "title": "The founded date is older than the product", "text": "TrustMRR gives a founded date of 6 April 2023, about two years before Promptmonitor existed. Part of the US$11,297 of all-time revenue may come from an older product on the same Stripe account. The monthly figures from November 2025 match the period when Promptmonitor was the founder's main product." }, { "title": "Claims on the site are much larger than the paying base", "text": "The site claimed 1,450 companies signed up in January 2026 and now claims more than 5,000 marketing teams. Stripe showed 38 active subscriptions in January 2026. Sign-ups to a free report are not customers." }, { "title": "The models decide the product's numbers", "text": "Every score depends on answers that OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and others generate, and these answers change from one run to the next. If a provider limits automated queries or raises prices, the cost of each AI answer rises with it." }, { "title": "Outreach from extracted contacts", "text": "The product extracts authors' email addresses from cited pages so that customers can pitch them. Sending such email in bulk is regulated in many countries, and the customer, not the tool, is responsible for how it is used." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://promptmonitor.io/" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/promptmonitor" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/promptmonitor-ai-visibility-geo-tracker" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR markdown profile: Promptmonitor, AI Visibility / GEO Tracker (Stripe-verified revenue, last synced 25 January 2026)", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/promptmonitor-ai-visibility-geo-tracker.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile, 25 October 2026. The Verification Sources section (Stripe by API key) is grade A; the description and pricing text are founder-written, grade C." }, { "title": "AI & No-Code Exits newsletter, 10 July 2026: Stuck at $500 MRR for Months. Sold for $85,000 in 9 Days.", "url": "https://nocodeexits.substack.com/p/stuck-at-500-mrr-for-months-sold", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full (post page and the publication's feed). Retells the founder's account. Only source for the sale price, the asking price and the sale dates." }, { "title": "Promptmonitor home page, Wayback Machine copy of 8 July 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250708051917/https://www.promptmonitor.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the page source. Source for the founder-era features, FAQ, prices, company name and the tools loaded by the page." }, { "title": "Promptmonitor home page, Wayback Machine copy of 1 January 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260101064558/https://www.promptmonitor.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the page source. Source for the prices and sign-up claim in the month of the sale." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: Promptmonitor product page", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/promptmonitor", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page and its embedded launch data: dates, daily ranks, points and the maker." }, { "title": "Promptmonitor pricing page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://promptmonitor.io/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the plan data in the page source. Run by the owner after the sale. Source for the pricing table." }, { "title": "Promptmonitor home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://promptmonitor.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the current features and claims, and for the purpose check." }, { "title": "Promptmonitor pricing page, Wayback Machine copy of 8 September 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250908031137/https://www.promptmonitor.io/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the price section." }, { "title": "Promptmonitor pricing page, Wayback Machine copy of 25 October 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20251025112639/https://www.promptmonitor.io/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the price section." }, { "title": "Promptmonitor terms of service, Wayback Machine copy of 24 December 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20251224190014/https://promptmonitor.io/terms-of-service", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections that name the company and the update date." }, { "title": "Promptmonitor terms of service, Wayback Machine copy of 15 May 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260515130900/https://promptmonitor.io/terms-of-service", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections that name the company and the update date. The live page of 25 October 2026 names the same company." }, { "title": "Promptmonitor changelog", "url": "https://updates.promptmonitor.io/changelog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, 25 October 2026. Shows the releases of March 2026." }, { "title": "Promptmonitor home page, Wayback Machine copy of 8 February 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260208012547/https://promptmonitor.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the price section and footer. The footer still names Bootstrapped LLC and links to Remote3." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/pattrn/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/pattrn.md", "slug": "pattrn", "name": "Pattrn", "country": "Brazil", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "Habit and goal tracker app with a paid AI coach", "aiType": "AI-leveraged", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "13 February 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$5.1K MRR, October 2026", "sticker": "$61K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 60930, "months": 20, "teamLabel": "1 named founder; no source gives a headcount, and the App Store seller is a Brazilian company in his name", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Persistence", "group": "health-appearance", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "flat", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-leveraged", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Productivity" ], "product": "An iPhone app for habits and goals. The user sets a goal with a start point, an end point and a deadline, links daily habits to it, and the app shows each day whether the goal is on track. The paid plan, Pattrn Pro, adds an AI agent that turns a wish into a goal plan, splits goals into milestones, reviews the progress data and suggests changes, plus widgets and Apple Health logging.", "why": "It entered a crowded category, habit trackers, with a free tracker and a paid AI coach on top. The founder shipped 83 versions in 21 months, so the product changed every week or two. Many buyers pay for a year at once, and whatsthe.app read that the money in the last 28 days was almost twice the monthly recurring revenue.", "summary": [ "Pattrn is a habit tracker, an app in which a person records every day whether they did a planned action, such as reading 10 pages, and sees streaks and charts of that record. Pattrn links these habits to goals with a deadline and computes whether each goal is on track. Its paid plan adds an AI agent, here a chat assistant built on a language model that can read the user's habit and goal data and change it: it writes goal plans, splits goals into milestones (smaller goals on the way), and suggests a later deadline or a smaller habit when the user falls behind. The tracker itself works without AI, so this page calls the business AI-leveraged: the AI is the part that people pay for, and the site's mission page says that only AI makes advice for each person possible.", "Pedro Schott, who calls himself the founder of Pattrn on its help page, released version 1.0 on 23 January 2025 and the worldwide release on 13 February 2025. On 1 October 2026, whatsthe.app, a marketplace and leaderboard for app businesses, read the app's subscription data from RevenueCat, a service that records the subscriptions that an app sells through Apple. It showed monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the subscription income of one month, with a yearly plan counted as one twelfth of its price) of US$5,077, US$9,627 of revenue in the last 28 days, and 1,509 active subscriptions. The same listing offers the app for sale at US$110,000.", "The revenue figures are grade A, because whatsthe.app read them from RevenueCat and not from a screenshot. They are a single reading on a single date: no source gives an earlier figure, so the growth path is not known. No source gives the team size or says how customers find the app. The page also shows four earlier habit and self-improvement companies that failed, one of which paid human coaches for the job that Pattrn gives to a model." ], "factsCaption": "US$5,077 of monthly recurring revenue 20 months after the worldwide release, read from the app's RevenueCat account on 1 October 2026", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by whatsthe.app from the app's RevenueCat account. A grade B value is a record that Apple shows on the App Store. A grade C value was written by the founder or the seller, on the app's own site or on the sale listing. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From version 1.0 in January 2025 to US$5,077 of monthly recurring revenue in October 2026, with 83 releases in between. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Pattrn prices in October 2026, from the list of in-app purchases on the App Store (grade B)", "note": "Apple lists nine in-app purchases for the same app: four yearly prices, two monthly prices, a weekly price and a lifetime price. No source says which users see which price. Per-month values for yearly plans are the yearly price divided by 12; the weekly value is US$4.99 times 52 divided by 12. The free plan's limits are from the changelog entry of 26 February 2025.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "unlimited habits, up to two goals" ], [ "Pro, lowest yearly price", "1.67", "", "US$19.99 a year" ], [ "Pro, other yearly prices", "2.50 to 3.33", "", "US$29.99, US$34.99 or US$39.99 a year" ], [ "Pro, monthly", "", "4.99 or 7.99", "two monthly prices" ], [ "Pro, weekly", "", "21.62", "US$4.99 a week" ], [ "Lifetime", "44.99 one-time", "", "one payment" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 1 October 2026", "value": "US$5,077", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app: \"All data is verified through RevenueCat. Last updated: Oct 1, 2026\". The page data gives 5,077.49 and the credential type \"revenuecat-verified\". The leaderboard data of the same site shows the same value.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 28 days, to 1 October 2026", "value": "US$9,627", "grade": "A", "note": "Same reading. The page data gives 9,626.95.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the MRR", "value": "US$60,930 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 5,077.49 times 12 equals 60,929.88. whatsthe.app shows the same ARR.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue compared with MRR", "value": "1.9 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 9,626.95 divided by 5,077.49 equals 1.90. Revenue counts the full price of a yearly or lifetime purchase when it is paid; MRR counts a yearly plan as one twelfth a month. So sales of yearly plans make revenue larger than MRR.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions, 1 October 2026", "value": "1,509, plus 11 active trials", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app reading. Paid subscriber share 99.3%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR per active subscription", "value": "about US$3.36 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 5,077.49 divided by 1,509 equals 3.365. whatsthe.app shows an ARPPU of US$3.36.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Customers, 28 days to 1 October 2026", "value": "10,449 active customers, 6,361 new customers", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app reading. Calculated: 1,509 divided by 10,449 is 14.4% of active customers with a subscription, the same as the page's \"Subscription Penetration\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Change over 28 days", "value": "MRR minus 1.5%, subscribers minus 0.5%", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app reading. This page marks the trend as flat.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price", "value": "US$110,000", "grade": "C", "note": "The whatsthe.app listing says the app is for sale, with 136 buyer views and 0 inquiries. Calculated: 1.81 times the ARR of US$60,930. The page also shows a \"Claim this app\" banner, and its data marks the listing as imported by the site.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founder", "value": "Pedro Schott", "grade": "C", "note": "The help page starts: \"I'm Pedro, the founder of Pattrn.\" The App Store names him as developer, and whatsthe.app names him as founder with the X account @pedroschott0.", "src": [ 7, 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Seller on the App Store", "value": "a limited company (LTDA) in the founder's name", "grade": "B", "note": "The company name ends in \"TECNOLOGIA DA INFORMACAO LTDA\", the Portuguese form of a Brazilian limited company. This page infers the country from it; no source states where the founder lives.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "not stated", "grade": "C", "note": "Only the founder is named. Developer replies on the App Store are signed \"Pattrn team\", and changelog entries are signed either \"The Pattrn Team\" or \"Pedro\".", "src": [ 3, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No downloaded source mentions an investor. The whatsthe.app listing leaves its financing field empty.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "First version", "value": "23 January 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Changelog: \"Pattrn 1.0 ... The first version of Pattrn\". whatsthe.app gives a worldwide release date of 13 February 2025, the date of version 1.01, and says business operations started in February 2025.", "src": [ 5, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Free plan and paid Pro plan", "value": "since 26 February 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Changelog of version 1.3: the free plan tracks unlimited habits and up to two goals; Pro adds unlimited goals, AI features and milestones.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Releases", "value": "83 iOS versions from 23 January 2025 to 20 October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Counted in the changelog. Calculated: 635 days divided by 83 is one release every 7.7 days.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "AI models named by the company", "value": "OpenAI o3-mini, GPT-4.1 and o4-mini", "grade": "C", "note": "Changelog: o3-mini in March 2025, GPT-4.1 for Pro users in April 2025, o4-mini in June 2025, and \"Updated the AI model used by Pattrn\" in April 2026 without a name.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "App Store ratings, October 2026", "value": "4.8 from about 2,100 ratings in all countries", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's US page shows 4.8 from 1K ratings. whatsthe.app counts 2,124 ratings in 16 countries, 940 of them in the US. The app's own description says \"Rated 4.9/5 by users\".", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Users claimed on the home page", "value": "25,000+", "grade": "C", "note": "Company statement, not verified. whatsthe.app counted 10,449 active customers on 1 October 2026.", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the worldwide release to the headline figure", "value": "20 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: February 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "23 January 2025", "what": "Version 1.0 of the iPhone app: track habits, set goals.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "13 February 2025", "what": "Worldwide release on the App Store, according to whatsthe.app.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "26 February 2025", "what": "A free plan and Pattrn Pro. Pro holds the AI features and milestones.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "March 2025", "what": "The home page calls Pattrn a \"Habit Tracker & Goal Setting AI App\". Version 1.5 splits the AI analysis into several specialized prompts and uses OpenAI's o3-mini model.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 5 ] }, { "when": "April to June 2025", "what": "GPT-4.1 for Pro users, then o4-mini. iCloud sync arrives in April; in May the company stops offering it to new users after internal tests found possible data loss.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "14 May 2025", "what": "The AI assistant becomes the Pattrn Agent, which learns from the user's past goals and habits.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "July 2025", "what": "Portuguese and Spanish. Pattrn 2.0 on 24 July: a rebuilt design, a global leaderboard, friend competitions, a referral link that gives free Pro, and a Discord server.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "22 September 2025", "what": "AI agent chat that can plan and change anything in the app, community events and a lessons library, all for Pro.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "January to February 2026", "what": "Apple Health logging for Pro, and specialized agents for fitness and study.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "10 July 2026", "what": "Pattrn 3.0: a daily journal, habits to stop, XP and levels.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "11 August 2026", "what": "The app's listing is created on whatsthe.app.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "1 October 2026", "what": "whatsthe.app reads US$5,077 of MRR, US$9,627 in 28 days and 1,509 active subscriptions from RevenueCat. The app is listed for sale at US$110,000.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "20 October 2026", "what": "Version 3.0.8: Pattrn Cloud accounts, a Mac app, and a way for Pro users to connect assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT to their habits and goals.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 3 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A free tracker, a paid coach", "text": "Since February 2025 the habit tracker is free, with a limit of two goals. The paid plan sells what a human coach would do: a plan for a goal, milestones, a weekly look at the data, and a suggestion when the user slips. App Store reviewers praise both the free tracker and the AI." }, { "title": "Persistence: a release every 7.7 days", "text": "The changelog lists 83 iOS versions in 635 days, and new AI models arrived three times in the first six months. Most releases are small fixes; the large ones, 1.5, 1.6, 2.0 and 3.0, came every two to twelve months." }, { "title": "Yearly plans", "text": "whatsthe.app read US$9,627 of revenue in 28 days against US$5,077 of MRR. The difference comes from purchases paid in advance, such as yearly and lifetime plans. Cash comes in early, and each yearly buyer must renew a year later." }, { "title": "One founder, many small apps", "text": "The same App Store developer account publishes three other apps: a health dashboard, a calorie tracker and an AI to-do list. Pattrn is the one with public revenue." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's changelog, its help page and the App Store. They are grade C, except the App Store records (grade B).", "items": [ "An iPhone app first, with beta support for iPad, macOS and visionOS from March 2025 and a Mac app in October 2026. An Android version is marked as coming soon.", "OpenAI models for the AI features: o3-mini in March 2025, GPT-4.1 in April 2025, o4-mini in June 2025. The analysis is split into several specialized prompts, and the agent keeps context about the user's past goals and habits.", "Subscriptions are sold as App Store in-app purchases and recorded in RevenueCat, which whatsthe.app reads.", "Sync moved from iCloud, which the company stopped offering to new users in May 2025 because of possible data loss, to its own account system, Pattrn Cloud, in October 2026.", "Apple Health logging from January 2026, Apple Shortcuts actions, home and lock screen widgets, and a way to connect outside AI assistants.", "Community features to keep users: a global leaderboard, friend competitions, a referral link that gives free Pro, a feature suggestion board and a Discord server." ], "src": [ 5, 7, 3, 1 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to sell better habits or personal coaching before language models could give advice to each user. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Habit Labs", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$200K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Health Month, a web app in which users set personal goals and tracked them in a social game.", "died": "It charged for habit building while competitors offered free game-like apps.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1623-habit-labs" }, { "name": "Habitual", "years": "2019 to 2021", "funding": "US$50K", "cause": "Ran out of cash", "promise": "A habit tracker based on the book Atomic Habits, with personal feedback to keep routines going.", "died": "The database says the product was good but had no marketing plan in a crowded category of productivity apps.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1973-habitual" }, { "name": "Likebetter", "years": "2006 to 2009", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "No market need", "promise": "Self-improvement as a game of choices that would teach users about themselves.", "died": "It had no money and no clear group of users, and lost attention to Facebook.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1665-likebetter" }, { "name": "Arivale", "years": "2015 to 2019", "funding": "US$50M", "cause": "Unit economics", "promise": "Genetic and blood tests plus a human wellness coach, for US$3,500 upfront and US$99 a month.", "died": "Each coach could serve only 50 to 100 clients. The database says it spent about US$4,700 a year per customer and collected about US$1,200.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/8-arivale" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The two habit trackers in this list show the two usual ways to fail: Habit Labs charged for something that free apps also did, and Habitual built a good tracker that nobody heard of. Arivale shows the other end: personal coaching that worked but needed one paid coach for every 50 to 100 clients, and lost money on each customer.", "Pattrn keeps the tracker free and charges for the coaching part, which a language model does for every user at once. The founder does not hire coaches, and Apple and RevenueCat handle billing. That is how one named founder can sell a coach-like service for a few dollars a month: whatsthe.app read an MRR of about US$3.36 per active subscription. Whether Pattrn has solved Habitual's problem, finding users, the sources do not say." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The structure, yes. The category is crowded.", "text": "The App Store shows many similar apps next to Pattrn, such as other discipline and habit trackers, and any of them can add an AI coach with the same models. What can be copied is the structure: a free tool that people use every day, and a paid AI layer that does a job people used to pay a person for.", "steps": [ "Pick a daily activity that already has a tracker category, and make the free tracker good on its own.", "Put the AI in the paid plan, and make it act on the user's own data: plans, milestones, changes when the user slips.", "Ship small releases often and keep a public changelog.", "Sell yearly plans next to monthly ones, and use a subscription service such as RevenueCat so the revenue can be verified when you want to sell." ], "open": "The same free-tracker and paid-coach structure for narrower groups: students before exams, people in physical therapy, shift workers, or one sport. The narrower the group, the more specific the AI advice can be." }, "watch": [ { "title": "One reading, one date", "text": "All revenue figures come from one whatsthe.app reading of 1 October 2026. No source gives an earlier figure, so this page cannot show how fast the app grew. MRR fell 1.5% in the 28 days before the reading." }, { "title": "For sale", "text": "The listing asks US$110,000, about 1.8 times the yearly run rate, and showed 136 buyer views and 0 inquiries. A new owner could change the product or the prices. The page also asks the owner to claim the app, and its data marks the listing as imported by the site, so the founder has not confirmed the listing on that page." }, { "title": "Team and country not stated", "text": "Only Pedro Schott is named. Replies on the App Store are signed \"Pattrn team\". The country on this page comes from the company form of the App Store seller, not from a statement." }, { "title": "Unknown customer channel", "text": "whatsthe.app counted 6,361 new customers in 28 days, but no source says where they came from. The App Store privacy section says the app may use identifiers for third-party advertising, but no source says that the company buys ads." }, { "title": "Model costs and copies", "text": "Every Pro user's AI answers cost the company money, and no source gives that cost. The average MRR per subscription is about US$3.36. Other habit trackers can add the same models, so the AI part alone is not a lasting difference." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://pattrn.io" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6740924171" }, { "kind": "whatsthe", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/pattrn" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "whatsthe.app listing of Pattrn, data of 1 October 2026", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/pattrn", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026, including the page data. Metrics \"verified through RevenueCat\", last updated 1 October 2026. Source for the MRR, revenue, subscriptions, customers, asking price, release date and ratings by country." }, { "title": "whatsthe.app leaderboard", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/leaderboard", "grade": "A", "how": "Read on 25 October 2026 in the lead search, including the embedded listing data. Confirms the same MRR and revenue, the founder's name, the \"revenuecat-verified\" credential and the listing date of 11 August 2026." }, { "title": "App Store: Pattrn - Discipline Tracker", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pattrn-discipline-tracker/id6740924171", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Source for the developer and seller, the in-app purchase prices, the ratings, the description, the reviews and the version history." }, { "title": "Pattrn home page", "url": "https://pattrn.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Source for the product description, the AI coach and the 25,000+ users claim." }, { "title": "Pattrn Updates: iOS changelog and release notes", "url": "https://pattrn.io/updates", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Source for the release dates, the free and Pro plans, the AI models and the features by date." }, { "title": "Pattrn mission page", "url": "https://pattrn.io/mission", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the company's reason to use AI: advice fitted to each person." }, { "title": "Pattrn help page: Getting Started with Pattrn", "url": "https://pattrn.io/get-started", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Written by the founder. Source for the founder's name and for what Pro and the AI agent do." }, { "title": "Pattrn home page, Wayback Machine copy of 13 March 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250313025809/https://pattrn.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Shows that the app was sold as an AI app one month after its release." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/glamour/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/glamour.md", "slug": "glamour", "name": "Glamour: Color Analysis & Glow Up", "country": "Turkey", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI colour-season analysis and virtual make-up app for iPhone", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "25 January 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$173K in verified revenue in 12 months, October 2026", "sticker": "$173K in 12 months", "outcomeUsd": 172972, "months": 21, "teamLabel": "Not published; the App Store seller, Appfluence Media LLC, has 4 apps, and the founder appears only under the name \"Lynex\"", "fundingLabel": "None disclosed", "primaryFactor": "Paid ads", "group": "health-appearance", "channel": "paid-ads", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Beauty" ], "product": "An iPhone app. The user takes a selfie, and the app names the user's colour season (Spring, Summer, Autumn or Winter), shows a palette of clothing and make-up colours, colours to avoid, celebrities with the same season, and features such as undertone, skin tone and face shape. A \"Glow Up\" feature shows an edited picture of the user's own face with a make-up look and lists the steps to apply it. The basic season result is free; the rest needs the Glamour Plus subscription.", "why": "Personal colour analysis is a paid service that people book with a human consultant; the app does a version of it from one selfie in about 30 seconds, for the price of an app subscription. The seller's TrustMRR profile says that the growth came from Meta advertising in Turkey alone, and more than nine in ten of the app's App Store ratings are from the Turkish store. The RevenueCat account that TrustMRR reads shows US$172,972 in the twelve months to 25 October 2026, but also a fall of more than half in recurring revenue in the last month.", "summary": [ "Glamour is an iPhone app for personal colour analysis, a styling method that sorts a person's skin, hair and eye colouring into one of four \"seasons\" and recommends the clothing and make-up colours of that season. The user uploads a selfie, and the app's website says: \"Just 30 seconds! Take a selfie and our AI will analyze your features instantly.\" The result names the season, shows a palette, colours to avoid, celebrities with the same season, and labels such as undertone, skin tone, contrast and face shape. A \"Glow Up\" screen shows an edited image of the user's own face with a make-up look and the steps to copy it, and the app recommends Sephora products that match the palette. The app is free to install with in-app purchases, payments made inside an iPhone app and collected by Apple. The App Store lists seven prices for a subscription called Glamour Plus: All In Beauty+, from US$4.99 to US$74.99, without saying which period each covers.", "The App Store names the seller as Appfluence Media LLC, which also publishes a hairstyle app and two party games. No source names a person behind it: on TrustMRR the profile gives the country as Turkey, and on whatsthe.app, an app revenue directory, the founder appears only under the name \"Lynex\". The app was released worldwide on 25 January 2025. TrustMRR, a service that reads revenue through the seller's own billing account, shows US$217,346 in total revenue by 25 October 2026, of which US$172,972 came in the last twelve months. The best month was May 2026 with US$19,737. Then revenue fell: US$10,940 in September 2026, and monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the monthly value of all active subscriptions) of US$4,380 from 298 subscriptions on 25 October 2026, against US$9,441 from 602 subscriptions that whatsthe.app showed on 5 October 2026.", "The revenue figures are grade A: TrustMRR reads them through an API key from RevenueCat, a subscription-management service that records an app's App Store purchases. whatsthe.app shows figures from the same RevenueCat connection, so it confirms the dates but is not an independent second source. Everything else on this page, including the team, the advertising and how the analysis works, comes from the seller's own pages and is grade C. The page also shows earlier companies that sold personal styling or virtual try-on, and why they failed." ], "factsCaption": "US$172,972 in verified revenue in the twelve months to 25 October 2026, with a best month of US$19,737 in May 2026 and a fall of more than half in recurring revenue during October; the money is read from the billing account, the people behind the app are not named", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR, or by whatsthe.app through the same connection, from the app's RevenueCat account. A grade C value is what the seller, its website or the App Store page states. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a worldwide release in January 2025 to US$217,346 of verified revenue 21 months later, with the peak in spring 2026 and a fall since. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Glamour in-app purchases on the US App Store, read 25 October 2026 (grade C)", "note": "The App Store lists eight in-app purchases: seven prices for Glamour Plus: All In Beauty+ (US$4.99 appears twice) and one called Glow Up: AI Makeup & Color at US$0.99. It does not say which price is weekly, monthly or yearly, so the period columns are empty; several prices for one product usually mean that the app shows different offers to different users. The website's FAQ says that the basic season analysis is free and that detailed palettes and make-up guides need a subscription. whatsthe.app shows an average revenue per paying user of US$15.68 on 5 October 2026. Apple collects the payments and keeps its commission; the TrustMRR profile does not say whether its figures are before or after that commission.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "basic colour-season analysis, per the website FAQ" ], [ "Glamour Plus: All In Beauty+", "", "", "prices listed: US$4.99, US$7.99, US$9.99, US$24.99, US$49.99, US$74.99; periods not shown" ], [ "Glow Up: AI Makeup & Color", "", "", "US$0.99; type of purchase not shown" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 12 months to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$172,972", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, from RevenueCat through an API key, last synced 25 October 2026. The twelve monthly values on the same profile add up to US$171,509, because the rolling window and the calendar months do not cover exactly the same days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue since launch, 25 October 2026", "value": "US$217,346", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, all time.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before November 2025", "value": "US$44,374", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: all-time revenue minus the last twelve months.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Best month", "value": "US$19,737, May 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. March 2026 was US$19,627 and April 2026 US$18,825.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, September 2026", "value": "US$10,940", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. 44.6% below May 2026 (calculated). October 2026 to the 25th: US$4,714.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, last 30 days to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$6,439, down 42.9%", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. Daily revenue fell from US$325 to US$359 a day in the last days of September 2026 to about US$100 to US$200 a day in late October.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 25 October 2026", "value": "US$4,380 from 298 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR metric snapshot; MRR growth over the last 30 days shown as -55.3%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 5 October 2026", "value": "US$9,441 from 602 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app, \"verified with RevenueCat\", last updated 5 October 2026. Its record names the credential as \"revenuecat-trustmrr\", so it is the same connection as TrustMRR, not an independent source. Revenue in the last 28 days: US$9,809.", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days to 25 October 2026", "value": "45.0%", "grade": "C", "note": "A TrustMRR metric snapshot. The profile does not say how the costs were read; it mentions Meta Ads spend among the metrics that need a login.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Growth claim in the seller's description", "value": "from US$222 to US$15.8K MRR in 10 months through Meta campaigns in Turkey", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder-written profile text on TrustMRR, undated. The same text claims about 9% churn and zero refunds. Not verified.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Worldwide release", "value": "25 January 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "whatsthe.app app page, from App Store data.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "App Store ratings", "value": "about 7,000, of which 6,400 in the Turkish store", "grade": "C", "note": "whatsthe.app, all storefronts. The US store shows 77 ratings with an average of 4.3. The website's lines \"Trusted by 1,000,000+ women\" and \"Rated 4.8★ on the App Store\" do not match these counts.", "src": [ 2, 4, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Age rating", "value": "4+", "grade": "C", "note": "US App Store. The website's privacy policy says the services \"are not directed to individuals under the age of 16\".", "src": [ 2, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Seller", "value": "Appfluence Media LLC, 4 apps", "grade": "C", "note": "App Store developer page: Glamour, AI Hair Style&Care - HairMaxx, Meme Jam and Doodle Phone. No source gives a headcount or a person's full name.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Updates", "value": "25 versions from 3 July 2025 to 25 June 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "App Store version history as shown on 25 October 2026. No version after 25 June 2026.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Time from release to the October 2026 figure", "value": "21 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: January 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Yearly value of the October 2026 MRR", "value": "US$52,560", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$4,380 times 12. The last 30 days of revenue times 12 give US$77,268. Both are far below the twelve-month total of US$172,972.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "25 January 2025", "what": "The app is released worldwide on the App Store by Appfluence Media LLC.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 2 ] }, { "when": "24 April 2025", "what": "Date of the privacy policy on the app's website. It says that selfies are processed to find the colour season and are not stored afterwards.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "July to October 2025", "what": "Nineteen versions in four months. Every release note shown, from July 2025 on, says \"We know you came from Instagram!\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "US$12,616 in verified revenue in the month, the first month in the public part of the TrustMRR timeline. US$44,374 had come in before it (calculated).", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "January 2026", "what": "US$15,775 in the month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "March to May 2026", "what": "Three months between US$18,825 and US$19,737 each; May 2026 is the best month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "25 June 2026", "what": "Version 9.1, the last update shown on the App Store page in October 2026.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "July and August 2026", "what": "About US$13,300 a month, about a third below the spring months.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "21 August 2026", "what": "The app is added to the whatsthe.app revenue directory with its RevenueCat figures.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "US$10,940 in the month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "5 October 2026", "what": "MRR US$9,441 from 602 active subscriptions, on whatsthe.app.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "MRR US$4,380 from 298 subscriptions on TrustMRR. US$172,972 in the last twelve months and US$217,346 since launch.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A human service, done from one photo", "text": "Colour analysis is normally a session with a consultant who holds coloured fabrics next to the client's face. The app gives a season, a palette and make-up advice from a selfie, and the website's FAQ says it takes 30 seconds. The App Store text still speaks of \"our stylists' expert color matching\", while the website says \"Let AI find your perfect colors\"; no source says whether any human checks a result." }, { "title": "Paid social ads in one country first", "text": "The seller's own TrustMRR description says that the growth came \"through Meta campaigns in Turkey alone\", and Meta owns Instagram and Facebook. The release notes greet users with \"We know you came from Instagram!\", and about 6,400 of the app's roughly 7,000 ratings are in the Turkish App Store. The app is translated into eight languages, so other countries were possible next markets." }, { "title": "A free result, a paid report", "text": "The season itself is free. The detailed palette, the make-up guide and the Glow Up images need the subscription. A user sees a result about their own face before the paywall, which is a strong reason to pay for the rest." }, { "title": "Creators with discount codes", "text": "The website contains a creator area where TikTok users could make a 50% discount code, post a video of at least 30 seconds that mentions the app and tags its TikTok account, and wait for approval. In October 2026 the page said that registration was not active. No source says how much revenue came from it." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the seller's TrustMRR profile, the App Store page and the website's page code. They are grade C, except the RevenueCat connection, which TrustMRR confirms.", "items": [ "The tech stack listed on the TrustMRR profile, which the seller writes: SwiftUI, Swift and Expo for the app, Node.js and Express on DigitalOcean for the server, and RevenueCat for subscriptions.", "Subscriptions are sold through Apple's in-app purchases and recorded in RevenueCat, which TrustMRR and whatsthe.app read through an API key.", "No source names the AI model that reads the selfie or edits the make-up images. The privacy policy says that \"secure AI algorithms\" extract colour and feature information and that selfies are not stored after processing.", "The website glamourapp.net is a single-page app whose page source loads the script of GPT Engineer, the AI site builder now called Lovable. It has an English and a Turkish version.", "The App Store privacy labels declare that contact information, identifiers, usage data and diagnostics may be used to track users across other companies' apps, which is what ad measurement for Meta campaigns needs.", "The seller published 25 versions between July 2025 and June 2026, sometimes two in one day." ], "src": [ 1, 2, 6 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database promised personal styling, a better way to choose clothes, or fashion and beauty for Turkish women. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Thread", "years": "2012 to 2020", "funding": "US$40M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Personal clothing recommendations from human stylists helped by machine learning.", "died": "The cost of the human stylists did not fall as the company grew, and faster, more automated competitors squeezed its margins.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/625-thread" }, { "name": "Trunk Club", "years": "2010 to 2019", "funding": "US$128M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A personal stylist who chose clothes and sent them to the customer's door.", "died": "Bought by Nordstrom in 2014, it depended on human stylists and shipping boxes, and data-driven rivals scaled better. Nordstrom closed it in 2019.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/666-trunk-club" }, { "name": "Try.com", "years": "2018 to 2022", "funding": "US$4M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Try clothes on before paying for an online order.", "died": "High operating costs, few retailers willing to join, and the free returns of Amazon and Zappos.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/668-trycom" }, { "name": "Lidyana", "years": "2012 to 2022", "funding": "US$10M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Fashion, beauty and lifestyle content with shopping, made for Turkish women.", "died": "Paid editorial staff and held stock at the same time, then lost its readers to Instagram creators who gave the same advice for free.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2280-lidyana" }, { "name": "Polyvore", "years": "2007 to 2019", "funding": "US$22M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Build outfits and style boards from products found on the web.", "died": "After its sale to Yahoo it could not keep its users against Pinterest and Instagram.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/451-polyvore" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Thread and Trunk Club sold style advice from human stylists, and the database records that the stylists were the cost that did not shrink as the companies grew. Glamour gives a narrower answer, a season and a palette, but it gives it from a selfie without a person in the loop, so one more customer costs a model call and a little server time. Lidyana and Polyvore lost their readers to Instagram; Glamour, by its own description, found its buyers there through paid Meta ads.", "The predecessors needed shipping, stock or staff, and raised millions of dollars. No source mentions outside funding for Glamour, and TrustMRR shows a 45% profit margin over the last 30 days. What the predecessors teach still applies: a product that one ad channel feeds depends on the price of that channel, and the verified figures show revenue falling by more than half within October 2026, with no app update since June." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, with paid ads and a narrow, visual result.", "text": "Nothing in the product is hard to build: a selfie, a classification into four seasons, a palette and an edited image. What worked, by the seller's own account, was paid Meta advertising in one country where the app's language and the ads matched the audience. The verified curve also shows the risk: revenue fell from about US$19,700 a month in May 2026 to under US$5,000 in the first 25 days of October, as TrustMRR reports it.", "steps": [ "Pick a paid service that people book with a human consultant and that a model can approximate from one photo.", "Show the free result before the paywall, and sell the detailed report and the edited images as a subscription.", "Test paid social ads in one country and language first, and measure revenue per user through a subscription tool such as RevenueCat.", "Keep shipping updates and new hooks, because the same ads that bring users can stop working within weeks." ], "open": "Other analyses that consultants do from a face or a photo without judging the person's looks: hairstyle and glasses-frame suggestions, wardrobe colour checks for an existing closet, make-up shade matching for a given product range." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue is falling fast", "text": "TrustMRR shows US$19,737 in May 2026, US$10,940 in September and US$4,714 in the first 25 days of October. MRR fell from US$9,441 on 5 October to US$4,380 on 25 October 2026, and daily revenue in late October was less than half of late September. No source explains the fall; the app has had no update since 25 June 2026." }, { "title": "No named person and no headcount", "text": "The App Store seller is Appfluence Media LLC, with four apps. TrustMRR gives Turkey as the country, and whatsthe.app lists the founder only as \"Lynex\". No source gives a full name, a register entry or the number of people, so the team label \"small\" on this page is an assumption from the size of the app list, not a verified fact." }, { "title": "Marketing claims that do not match the data", "text": "The website says \"Trusted by 1,000,000+ women\" and \"Rated 4.8★ on the App Store\", and shows three reviews with first names only. The App Store shows about 7,000 ratings across all stores, 4.3 in the US store, and TrustMRR shows 298 active subscriptions on 25 October 2026." }, { "title": "AI or stylists", "text": "The website says that \"our AI will analyze your features instantly\", while the App Store text speaks of \"our stylists' expert color matching\". No source names the model or says whether people review the results." }, { "title": "Age rating and selfies", "text": "The app is rated 4+ on the App Store, while its privacy policy says it is not directed at anyone under 16. It processes selfies and declares tracking across other companies' apps. The app classifies colouring and face shape and edits make-up onto the face; no downloaded page shows a score or rating of the user's attractiveness." }, { "title": "One ad channel, one country", "text": "By the seller's own description the growth came from Meta campaigns in Turkey, and most ratings are Turkish. A rise in ad prices or a change in Meta's targeting would reach revenue directly, and Apple's suggestions on the app's page list several other colour-analysis and glow-up apps." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://glamourapp.net/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6737767298" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/glamour" }, { "kind": "whatsthe", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/glamour" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of Glamour, as read on 25 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/glamour.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full, live on 25 October 2026. Revenue, monthly timeline, daily revenue, MRR and subscription counts are read from RevenueCat through an API key and are grade A. The description, the growth claim, the country, the tech stack and the profit-margin snapshot are seller-written or not explained, grade C." }, { "title": "App Store page: Glamour:Color Analysis&Glow Up, US storefront", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6737767298", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026, with its five screenshots. Source for the description, the in-app purchase prices, the version history and release notes, the ratings and reviews, the age rating, the seller name and the privacy labels." }, { "title": "App Store developer page: Appfluence Media LLC", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/appfluence-media-llc/id6782832272", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Lists the seller's four apps." }, { "title": "whatsthe.app page for Glamour:Color Analysis&Glow Up", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/glamour", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Revenue and subscription figures \"verified with RevenueCat\", last updated 5 October 2026, through the same connection as TrustMRR. Also the worldwide release date, the ratings per storefront and the in-app prices (grade C)." }, { "title": "whatsthe.app revenue leaderboard", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/leaderboard", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the Glamour row and its page data on 25 October 2026. Source for the founder name \"Lynex\", the date the app was added (21 August 2026) and the credential type \"revenuecat-trustmrr\"." }, { "title": "Glamour website, home page and privacy policy (last updated 24 April 2025)", "url": "https://glamourapp.net/", "grade": "C", "how": "The page text loads by script, so the English and Turkish texts were read from the site's script file on 25 October 2026. Source for the AI claims, the FAQ, the Sephora recommendations, the creator program, the marketing claims and the privacy policy. The page source shows the gptengineer script." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/lyro/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/lyro.md", "slug": "lyro", "name": "Lyro Music", "country": "United Kingdom", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI song generator and browser music studio", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "21 September 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$2.7K a month recurring revenue, October 2026", "sticker": "$32K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 32232, "months": 1, "teamLabel": "1 person on the company register (sole director, secretary and majority owner); no founder named in public", "fundingLabel": "None found", "primaryFactor": "Packaging", "group": "voice-audio", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Music" ], "product": "A web app that makes a finished song from a short description, from your own lyrics, from your own recorded vocal or from your own beat. Lyro writes the lyrics if you want, an AI model sings and produces the track, and a mixer and mastering tool in the browser finish it. Subscriptions start at US$14 a month and there is no free plan.", "why": "It packages rented music models from Google, reached through the model host fal.ai, as one studio with a clear credit price, a commercial licence and an AI label on every file. TrustMRR, reading the company's Stripe account, showed US$2,686 in monthly recurring revenue and 154 active subscriptions on 25 October 2026, five weeks after the founding date on the profile.", "summary": [ "Lyro Music is an AI song generator: a program in which a machine-learning model writes and sings a complete song, with instruments and vocals, from a text description. You can also start from your own audio. Lyro sings your lyrics over a beat you upload, or writes a beat around a vocal you recorded, and its studio separates a track into stems, the separate audio tracks for vocals, drums, bass and other parts. Its terms of service say that its two song models, Lyro High and Lyro Extra, are \"models from Google\" reached through fal.ai, a company that hosts AI models behind an API (an interface that lets one program call another over the internet), and that the tools for your own audio use the open-source ACE-Step model. Mixing and mastering run in the browser.", "The business is RNIFY Limited, a private company registered in England and Wales on 29 September 2025. The Companies House register lists one person as its only director, its company secretary and the owner of 75% or more of the shares. That person lives in Turkey and is not named on the product's site, so this page does not name him. The founder-written TrustMRR profile gives 21 September 2026 as the founding date. On 25 October 2026 TrustMRR, which reads revenue directly from the company's Stripe account through an API key, showed US$2,686 in MRR (monthly recurring revenue, the monthly value of all active subscriptions), 154 active subscriptions, US$2,027 of revenue in the last 30 days and US$2,051 since the start. The profile also shows the business listed for sale since 14 October 2026 with an asking price of US$50,000.", "The money figures are grade A: a payment processor's records, read by a third party. They cover only five weeks, and almost all of the revenue is first-month subscription payments, so no source yet shows how many customers renew. The page also shows four earlier companies that promised to let anyone make music without skill or without a studio, and what killed them." ], "factsCaption": "Five weeks of Stripe-verified subscription revenue for a one-person AI music studio, read on TrustMRR on 25 October 2026", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the company's Stripe account through an API key, or is an entry in the UK company register. A grade C value is the company's own statement on its site or in the founder-written parts of the TrustMRR profile. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a company registration in September 2025 to a product with 154 paying subscriptions and a for-sale listing, in about five weeks of selling. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Lyro Music prices on 25 October 2026, read from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "Both plans are billed monthly at one regular price; the pricing page lists no yearly price, although the terms describe a yearly offer shown once in the app after a purchase. A song on the default model Lyro High costs 4 credits, on Lyro Extra 5 credits. Plan credits carry over for one month. Top-up packs are one-time purchases for subscribers and never expire. There is no free plan or free trial. In the iPhone app, Apple sells the plans at its own, higher prices.", "rows": [ [ "Starter", "", "14", "80 credits, about 20 songs on Lyro High; own vocal or beat; commercial licence" ], [ "Creator", "", "24", "300 credits, about 75 songs on Lyro High; stem splitter; 3 songs at once" ], [ "Teams and Ads", "custom", "custom", "credits sized to volume, invoice billing" ], [ "Top-up, 20 credits", "15 one-time", "", "about 5 songs; subscribers only" ], [ "Top-up, 40 credits", "25 one-time", "", "about 10 songs" ], [ "Top-up, 100 credits", "58 one-time", "", "about 25 songs" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 25 October 2026", "value": "US$2,686", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR metric snapshot, from Stripe through an API key; revenue last synced 25 October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions, 25 October 2026", "value": "154", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR metric snapshot, from Stripe.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days, to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$2,027", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR verified revenue, from Stripe. The profile shows this as +8,346.4% compared with the 30 days before.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue since the start, to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$2,051", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR verified revenue: US$164 in September 2026 and US$1,887 in October 2026 to the 25th.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Largest day of revenue in the last 30 days", "value": "US$142, on 10 October 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR daily table, from Stripe. Every day from 26 September to 24 October has revenue between US$3 and US$142, so the total is many small subscription payments, not one or two large sales.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the MRR", "value": "US$32,232 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$2,686 times 12. This is the headline number on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average MRR per active subscription", "value": "about US$17.44", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$2,686 divided by 154. It lies between the Starter price of US$14 and the Creator price of US$24.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "MRR about 30 days earlier", "value": "about US$54", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the profile's 30-day MRR growth of +4,874.1%: US$2,686 divided by 49.741.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price for the business", "value": "US$50,000, listed for sale since 14 October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller's listing on TrustMRR. The profile shows a revenue multiple of 2.1x and 4 offers received. The seller wrote: \"I want to make my first exit, nothing else.\"", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "95.0%", "grade": "C", "note": "Shown in the profile's metric snapshots, outside its Verification Sources section, so not verified. Every generation costs the company money at the model provider, which makes this margin hard to judge from outside.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Visitors and Google search impressions, last 30 days", "value": "647 visitors; 7,209 search impressions", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR snapshots. Google Search Console is connected; Google Analytics and DataFast are not, so the source of the visitor count is not stated.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Users", "value": "1,075 (founder's estimate on TrustMRR); \"2,000+ creators\" (home page)", "grade": "C", "note": "Two company statements that do not agree. Neither is verified.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Company behind the product", "value": "RNIFY Limited, registered in England and Wales on 29 September 2025", "grade": "A", "note": "Companies House register; the site's about page and terms of service name the same company and number. Nature of business: business and domestic software development.", "src": [ 9, 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "People on the company register", "value": "1 person: sole director, company secretary and owner of 75% or more of the shares", "grade": "A", "note": "Companies House officers and persons-with-significant-control pages, read 25 October 2026. The person lives in Turkey. No employees are named anywhere.", "src": [ 10, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none found", "grade": "A", "note": "The register shows one person with 75% or more of the shares and voting rights; no source mentions investors.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "AI models used", "value": "two Google music models through fal.ai, and the open-source ACE-Step model for work on your own audio", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms of service, last updated 19 October 2026. The site sells the Google models under its own names, Lyro High and Lyro Extra.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the founding date to the MRR figure", "value": "1 month (34 days)", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 21 September 2026, the founding date on the profile, to 25 October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "29 September 2025", "what": "RNIFY Limited is registered in England and Wales, with one person as director, secretary and majority owner.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 9, 10, 11 ] }, { "when": "21 September 2026", "what": "Founding date on the TrustMRR profile. The same day, the company runs a small blind listening test (one rater, seven Turkish-language briefs, three models) to choose its default model.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 4, 8 ] }, { "when": "24 September 2026", "what": "Lyro Extra, a second Google model with richer arrangements by its provider's account, is added next to the default Lyro High.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "US$164 of verified revenue in the first month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "14 October 2026", "what": "The business is listed for sale on TrustMRR with an asking price of US$50,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "19 October 2026", "what": "The terms of service are updated; they name fal.ai, Google and ACE-Step as the model sources and Stripe as the payment provider.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR shows US$2,686 in MRR, 154 active subscriptions and US$2,027 of revenue in the last 30 days, from Stripe.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Rented models, sold as one studio", "text": "Lyro does not train a music model. Its terms say that its two song models are Google models reached through fal.ai, and that the tools for your own audio use the open-source ACE-Step model. What it builds is the layer around them: a prompt writer, a credit price, a mixer and mastering tool in the browser, and one place to start from a description, lyrics, a vocal or a beat. When a better model appears, the about page says, it tests the model and changes the line-up." }, { "title": "No free plan, priced from the cost of each song", "text": "Every generation costs the company money at the model provider, so the pricing page says there is no free plan and no free trial. The Starter plan is US$14 a month for 80 credits and a song costs 4 or 5 credits. Failed generations refund their credits automatically. The TrustMRR profile shows that 154 people paid for a subscription in the first five weeks." }, { "title": "Your own vocal or beat on every plan", "text": "Many AI song tools start only from a text prompt. Lyro sells starting from a producer's own audio, on the cheapest plan: vocals over your beat, a beat around your vocal, and stem separation on the Creator plan. The home page says your vocal or beat is never altered." }, { "title": "Rules written into the product", "text": "The acceptable use policy bans cloning a real person's voice without documented consent and naming a real artist as a style target, and every download carries a tag that declares it AI-generated. The site's guides explain the platforms' rules on AI music. This lowers the risk that distributors or the model providers close the account." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own site, its terms of service and the founder-written parts of the TrustMRR profile. They are grade C, except the Stripe connection, which TrustMRR confirms.", "items": [ "Song generation: two Google music models through fal.ai, sold as Lyro High (4 credits a song) and Lyro Extra (5 credits a song).", "Work on the customer's own audio, such as a beat around a vocal or stem separation: the open-source ACE-Step model.", "Mixing, mastering and tempo and key detection run in the browser.", "Hosting on Cloudflare Workers, and billing with Stripe, by the founder's description on TrustMRR. Stripe is the payment provider that TrustMRR reads.", "A web app in 11 languages, and a Lyro app for iPhone in which Apple sells the plans.", "A creator programme gives TikTok, Instagram and YouTube creators credits and an invite link; no source says how many customers came from it." ], "src": [ 5, 1, 4, 3, 12 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised to let people make, remix or share music without skill, gear or a label, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Jamglue", "years": "2006 to 2009", "funding": "US$200K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Remix music in the browser and become a bedroom producer without expensive gear.", "died": "Audio processing in a browser was too hard for the time, licensing user remixes was costly, and SoundCloud took the users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1671-jamglue" }, { "name": "Magic Instruments", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$4M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A digital guitar with buttons and lights, so you can play songs without knowing a chord.", "died": "High hardware costs, and cheaper music apps taught people to play without a special instrument.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1062-magic-instruments" }, { "name": "Mixwit", "years": "2008 to 2011", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Legal/Regulatory", "promise": "Make and share digital mixtapes.", "died": "Rights holders sent cease-and-desist letters, licences could not be agreed, and Spotify arrived.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1228-mixwit" }, { "name": "Mint Songs", "years": "2020 to 2023", "funding": "US$3M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Musicians sell their songs as NFTs and earn outside the music industry.", "died": "The NFT market fell in 2022, and few artists or fans wanted songs as speculative assets.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/338-mint-songs" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Jamglue and Magic Instruments both tried to remove the skill needed to make music, and both hit a technical wall: browser audio was too weak in 2008, and a special guitar cost too much to build. Mixwit and Jamglue also hit the rights wall, because their products were built on other people's recordings. Mint Songs bet on a payment model that buyers left.", "Lyro avoids the technical wall because the hard part, a model that sings and produces a full song, is now rented from Google through fal.ai, and the browser can mix and master. It is built to avoid the rights wall: the output is new audio, the acceptable use policy bans other people's voices and artist names as styles, and every file is labelled as AI-made. It charges a subscription from the first song. What it has not shown yet, after five weeks, is whether customers keep paying." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, and the barrier to copying is low.", "text": "Lyro is a product layer over models that anyone can rent through fal.ai. A single person built a paid studio with clear prices, rules and a mixer, and TrustMRR shows that 154 subscriptions followed within five weeks. The same low barrier means that competitors can do the same, and the model provider sets both the quality and the cost of each song.", "steps": [ "Pick a model category that a hosting service such as fal.ai offers by API, and test the models blind for your main use case.", "Price in credits that match the model cost of each output, and refund failed generations automatically.", "Sell starting points that a text prompt alone does not cover, such as the customer's own vocal or beat.", "Write the rules on consent, artist names and AI labels into the product before a distributor or provider asks." ], "open": "Other model types sold by API through hosts like fal.ai: sound effects, podcast intros, voice-overs with licensed voices, and jingles for small businesses." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Five weeks of data", "text": "TrustMRR shows US$164 of revenue in September 2026 and US$1,887 in October to the 25th. Most of the 154 subscriptions are in their first month, so no source yet shows how many renew, and the MRR of US$2,686 is a snapshot, not a trend. The terms of service also mention a lower first-month price for some new accounts." }, { "title": "Listed for sale one month after launch", "text": "The business has been for sale on TrustMRR since 14 October 2026 at US$50,000. The seller wrote that the goal is a first exit. A buyer would take over a product whose models, quality and cost depend on Google and fal.ai." }, { "title": "Owner not named in public", "text": "The site, terms and register name the company, RNIFY Limited, and the register lists one person as director and majority owner, who lives in Turkey. No source names a founder in public, so the team size rests on the register: one officer and no named staff." }, { "title": "Numbers that do not agree", "text": "The home page says \"2,000+ creators\"; the founder's estimate on TrustMRR is 1,075 users. TrustMRR shows 647 visitors in 30 days next to 154 active subscriptions, which would be an unusually high share of paying visitors; the visitor count does not come from a connected analytics source. The 95.0% profit margin is not verified, although each song costs the company money at the model provider." }, { "title": "Rented models and unsettled law", "text": "Google's and fal.ai's usage policies are part of Lyro's terms, and the terms say a change in a provider's policy may change what Lyro allows. The about page says the law on AI music is not yet settled, and the home page says that some distributors do not accept AI music." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://lyromusic.com/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/lyro" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR markdown profile: Lyro, revenue synced 25 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/lyro.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full on 25 October 2026, twice (the second read returned the same cached snapshot). The revenue, MRR, subscription and daily figures are in its Verification Sources and revenue sections, read from Stripe through an API key. The description, founding date, user estimate, profit margin, visitor count, tech stack and seller message are founder-written or unexplained and are treated as grade C." }, { "title": "Lyro Music home page", "url": "https://lyromusic.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Source for the product description, the company name, the user claim and the statement that Lyro has no voice cloning." }, { "title": "Lyro pricing: plans, credits and what a song costs", "url": "https://lyromusic.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the plans, the credit costs, the top-up packs and the iPhone app pricing." }, { "title": "About Lyro Music and RNIFY Limited, the company behind it", "url": "https://lyromusic.com/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the company, the two models, the listening test and the date Lyro Extra was added." }, { "title": "Lyro Music terms of service, last updated 19 October 2026", "url": "https://lyromusic.com/legal/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on who the company is, payment, the iPhone app, acceptable use and model providers. Source for fal.ai, the Google models, ACE-Step and Stripe." }, { "title": "Lyro Music acceptable use policy", "url": "https://lyromusic.com/legal/acceptable-use", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the ban on cloning real voices without documented consent and on naming real artists as style targets." }, { "title": "Lyro Music guide: how to make music like an artist without naming them", "url": "https://lyromusic.com/learn/make-music-like-an-artist", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for how the product handles artist names in prompts." }, { "title": "Lyro Music llms.txt, the site's summary for AI assistants", "url": "https://lyromusic.com/llms.txt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the summary at the top. Source for the company number and the model credit costs." }, { "title": "Companies House: RNIFY LIMITED (16749515), company overview", "url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/16749515", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Source for the incorporation date, status, company type and nature of business. The site has no robots.txt." }, { "title": "Companies House: RNIFY LIMITED, officers", "url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/16749515/officers", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. One person holds both officer roles. The name is not used on this page because the person is not a public face of the business." }, { "title": "Companies House: RNIFY LIMITED, persons with significant control", "url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/16749515/persons-with-significant-control", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. One person with 75% or more of the shares and voting rights." }, { "title": "Lyro Music creator programme page", "url": "https://lyromusic.com/creators", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the creator programme with credits and invite links." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/makelogo/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/makelogo.md", "slug": "makelogo", "name": "MakeLogo.ai", "country": "France", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI logo generator", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "7 December 2022", "outcomeLabel": "Sold for US$65K, March 2023", "sticker": "Sold for $65K", "outcomeUsd": 65000, "months": 3, "teamLabel": "1 founder, no employees; in January 2023 he planned to hire a support assistant, and no source says he did", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Speed", "group": "photos", "channel": "launches", "trend": "sold", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2C", "Design" ], "product": "A web page where you typed the name of your project and a few sentences about it. An image-generation model drew several logo concepts, you picked the ones you liked, and the service converted them into high-resolution files with a transparent background. A logo editor added text, fonts and colors. You paid once for a pack of logos; there was no subscription.", "why": "The founder took orders before the software existed: for the first days a form collected the project details and the payment, and he made the logos himself with AI tools and sent them by email. He was among the first to sell AI-made logos, so curiosity brought buyers to Product Hunt and to AI tool directories without any ad budget. When customer support took most of his time and he could not improve the app further by himself, he sold it for cash three months after launch.", "summary": [ "MakeLogo.ai was an AI logo generator: a web app in which an image-generation model, a program trained on many images that draws a new picture from a text description, turns a project's name and description into logo concepts. The user chose the concepts he liked, the app converted them into high-resolution files with a transparent background and vector versions, and a logo editor added text in any Google Font. It was sold as one-time packs. The founder's pages in December 2022 and February 2023 list three packs at US$9.97, US$14.97 and US$19.97.", "Nico Jeannen, a French marketer who had learned to code in 2022, had the idea at 20:48 on 5 December 2022 and gave himself 48 hours. He published a minimum viable product (MVP), the smallest version that a customer can pay for, at 20:48 on 7 December: a landing page and a Typeform form that took the order and the payment, with no automated back end, so he generated and sent the first logos by hand. The first sale came about two hours later. Within a week he had built a Stripe checkout and reached first place of the day on Product Hunt. He then sold the business on Acquire.com, a marketplace for small software companies. His diary entry of 11 March 2023 says \"I just sold the app for $65,000\", and in a March 2025 interview he said that it had made US$26,000 in sales before the sale. His next business, Talknotes, an AI voice-note app that he built in August 2023 and sold for US$200,000 in July 2024, has its own page on this site.", "Every number on this page comes from the founder: his blog diary, his post on X as quoted by a newsletter, his app list and two interviews. They agree on the US$65,000 price across 2023, 2025 and 2026, which is why the headline is grade C. No buyer, marketplace or payment processor has confirmed it, and the buyer has never been named. The sources disagree on the month of the sale, February or March 2023. After the sale the new owner redesigned the site and sold a single pack; by April 2025 the site returned an error, and it still did on 25 October 2026." ], "factsCaption": "A logo service built in 48 hours that, by the founder's account, made US$26,000 in sales and sold for US$65,000 in cash about three months after launch", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a statement by the founder, in his blog diary, his X post, his app list or an interview, or a claim on the product's own web pages in the Wayback Machine. A grade D value has only one founder statement behind it. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From an idea at 20:48 on a Monday evening to a cash sale in about three months, and from there to an error page two years later. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "MakeLogo.ai prices from the product's own pages in the Wayback Machine, December 2022 to December 2023; the site no longer loads in October 2026, so there are no current prices (grade C)", "note": "All prices were one-time payments for a pack of logos; there was never a subscription. In the 48-hour diary the founder first planned US$5 for 5 logos, then US$10 for 5 concepts and US$15 for 10. The page of 19 December 2022 lists three packs at US$9.97, US$14.97 and US$19.97 and three sizes, 6, 12 and 24 concepts, in the same order, and offers a 30% discount during the beta. In February 2023 the same three prices bought 10, 30 or 60 concepts, of which 2, 4 or 6 were converted to high resolution. Under the new owner, the page of December 2023 offers one pack, Startup, at US$9.99, shown against a crossed-out US$29.99, with no billing period on the page. The company paid the image model for every order, and each pack paid for its own generation.", "rows": [ [ "6 concepts, December 2022", "9.97 one-time", "", "HD versions with transparent background" ], [ "12 concepts, December 2022", "14.97 one-time", "", "HD versions with transparent background" ], [ "24 concepts, December 2022", "19.97 one-time", "", "HD versions with transparent background" ], [ "10, 30 or 60 concepts, February 2023", "9.97 to 19.97 one-time", "", "2, 4 or 6 converted to HD; logo editor" ], [ "Startup, December 2023, new owner", "9.99, period not shown", "", "30 ideas, 120 previews, 2 final HD logos, vector files" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Sale price", "value": "US$65,000 in cash", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's diary, entry of 11 March 2023: \"I just sold the app for $65,000\". His post on X, quoted by No-Code Exits: \"I just sold makelogo.ai for $65,000. Launched it 3 months ago, with 0 budget and less than 600 followers.\" The same figure in his Starter Story interview of March 2025 and on his app list. No buyer or marketplace has confirmed it.", "src": [ 1, 3, 2, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Offers before the sale", "value": "about US$50,000, then about US$55,000, then US$65,000 paid over a year, then US$65,000 in cash", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in the Starter Story interview, March 2025. The last buyer offered cash on the condition that everything closed within two weeks.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Interested buyers", "value": "about 30 signed non-disclosure agreements", "grade": "C", "note": "No-Code Exits, 25 September 2026, retelling the founder's account: the winning offer was above his asking price. The asking price is not given.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Sales before the sale", "value": "US$26,000", "grade": "D", "note": "One statement, by the founder in the Starter Story interview of March 2025: \"makelogo ai which generated 26 000 USD of sales\". He added \"that's around 85,000 in total revenue\", which does not match the sum in the next row.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Sales plus sale price", "value": "US$91,000", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$26,000 plus US$65,000. The founder said \"around 85,000\" in the same interview.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Sale price as a multiple of all sales", "value": "2.5 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$65,000 divided by US$26,000. The sources give no monthly or yearly revenue, so the usual multiple of yearly revenue cannot be computed.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Average sales per month while he owned it", "value": "about US$8,400", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$26,000 over the 94 days from 7 December 2022 to 11 March 2023, or 3.09 months. It assumes that all the founder's US$26,000 fell in that period; the sources do not say how sales were spread.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time to build the first version", "value": "48 hours", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's diary: idea at 20:48 on 5 December 2022, \"48 hours later, to the minute, the MVP is published\" at 20:48 on 7 December. First sales at 22:40 the same evening.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "How the first orders were filled", "value": "by hand", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in the Starter Story interview: \"I use Typeform to get the information ... and collect the payment So I didn't have any backend at all It was not automated\". A Stripe back end followed on 9 December 2022.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Product Hunt result", "value": "#1 Product of the Day, December 2022", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's diary, entry of 12 December 2022. He had expected no more than about US$100 in sales from the launch.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Customer survey, December 2022", "value": "0% very disappointed, 40% somewhat disappointed, 60% would not care", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's diary, 18 December 2022: the share of customers who would be disappointed if they could no longer use the app. He called the results \"quite terrible\" and rebuilt the back end.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Logos created, February 2023", "value": "\"Already 10,000+ logos created\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Claim on the home page of 2 February 2023. Not verified. In January 2023 the founder's diary mentions \"the hundred of orders I had\".", "src": [ 7, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Audience and budget at launch", "value": "fewer than 600 followers on X, no ad budget", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X quoted by No-Code Exits. In the Starter Story interview he said that he had little savings and spent nothing on ads.", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder statements: \"0 budget\" and no money spent on ads.", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Why he sold", "value": "he needed cash and could not improve the app alone", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview with No CS Degree, July 2024: \"I sold it because I needed some cashflow, and I couldn't improve the app further by myself.\" In January 2023 his diary names customer service as the \"#1 issue\".", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the sale", "value": "3 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 94 days, from 7 December 2022 to 11 March 2023. The founder's post says \"3 months\".", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Status in October 2026", "value": "the site returns \"Not Found\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Read on 25 October 2026. The Wayback Machine has working pages until January 2025 and error pages from April 2025.", "src": [ 10 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2022", "what": "Jeannen, a marketer who had managed more than US$1 million of ad spend, learns to code from a Udemy web development course. By his own blog list he then builds small apps, among them an AI painting site that he calls a failure in October 2022.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 3, 11 ] }, { "when": "5 December 2022, 20:48", "what": "He writes in his diary: \"what if I made a micro-app to generate logos in 48 hours max\". The first attempt, training a custom image model on a set of logos, gives inconsistent results, and he finds another way the same night.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "6 December 2022", "what": "He calls an image service from Node.js and generates a full logo as an SVG file. He settles on US$10 for 5 concepts and US$15 for 10.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "7 December 2022", "what": "At 20:48 the landing page goes live with a Typeform order form, on Heroku, with Crisp chat and Simple Analytics. He fills the orders by hand. First sales at 22:40.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "9 December 2022", "what": "A real back end with Stripe payments and file storage on AWS S3.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "12 December 2022", "what": "#1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt, after a post on Indie Hackers and a call for support on X.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "17 to 18 December 2022", "what": "A logo editor for text and fonts goes live, and he buys the domain makelogo.ai. A customer survey finds that no customer would be very disappointed to lose the app.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "19 December 2022", "what": "The home page sells packs of 6, 12 or 24 concepts for US$9.97 to US$19.97, delivered in one to two hours, with commercial rights included.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "24 to 31 December 2022", "what": "He rebuilds the back end from scratch and calls the app done on 31 December.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "January 2023", "what": "Event tracking, email with Bento, Google Analytics and landing page tests with Google Optimize. An affiliate program on 22 January. He writes that customer service is the main problem.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2 February 2023", "what": "The home page says \"Already 10,000+ logos created\" and sells 10, 30 or 60 concepts at the same prices.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "February or March 2023", "what": "He lists the business on Acquire.com. About 30 buyers sign non-disclosure agreements; he takes US$65,000 in cash over an offer of US$65,000 paid over a year. His app list says February; his diary and his 2025 interview say March.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 2, 5, 1 ] }, { "when": "11 March 2023", "what": "Diary entry: \"I just sold the app for $65,000\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "4 April 2023", "what": "The site is unchanged and still says \"Made by @nico_jeannen\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "August 2023", "what": "He builds Talknotes, his next business, an AI voice-note app, which he sells for US$200,000 in July 2024.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 5 ] }, { "when": "8 December 2023", "what": "Under the new owner the site has a new design, no founder credit, \"Trusted by Over 10,000 Satisfied Customers\", and one pack at US$9.99 against a crossed-out US$29.99.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "23 January 2025", "what": "The last working home page in the Wayback Machine, dated 2024.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "April 2025 to October 2026", "what": "The Wayback Machine records an error page from April 2025. On 25 October 2026 the site returns \"Not Found\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Take orders before writing the software", "text": "On launch day the product was a landing page and a Typeform form that collected the project details and the payment. The founder made the logos himself with AI tools and sent them by email. Sales in the first hours told him that people would pay, and only then did he spend two more days on a Stripe back end." }, { "title": "Be first while the technology is new", "text": "The founder said in 2025 that he was among the first to offer AI-generated logos and that people were \"just naturally curious\". With fewer than 600 followers and no ad budget, that curiosity carried the launch: first place of the day on Product Hunt, then links from AI tool directories that the Wayback Machine records through 2023 and 2024." }, { "title": "One-time packs for a per-use cost", "text": "Each order made the company pay the image model once. A one-time pack covers that cost in the same payment, so no subscription was needed. His next product, Talknotes, worked differently: users kept using it, and he said in 2025 that he started it with one-year passes and then switched to a subscription." }, { "title": "Sell when one person reaches the limit", "text": "By January 2023 customer service took most of his time, and he said later that he could not improve the app further by himself. He listed the business within weeks of finishing it and, by his account in 2025, took US$65,000 in cash to close within two weeks rather than the same amount paid over a year." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's diary, written during the build, and from his interviews. They are grade C.", "items": [ "First attempt: train a custom image model on a set of logos found online. The results were inconsistent, so he switched to an outside image-generation service called through its API. The sources do not name the model or the service.", "Back end in Node.js with Axios for the API calls; output as SVG vector files. ChatGPT helped convert code examples and set up file storage on AWS S3.", "Launch version: a landing page on Heroku and a Typeform form for the order and the payment, with orders filled by hand. Two days later, Stripe payments and an account without registration, using the magic-link login from his earlier app OpenForAds.", "A logo editor that adds text in any Google Font, then a complete rebuild of the back end in the last week of December 2022.", "Support chat with Crisp, analytics with Simple Analytics and Google Analytics, landing page tests with Google Optimize, email with Bento, and purchase events sent to Facebook.", "Marketing: posts on X, a story on Indie Hackers, a Product Hunt launch and an affiliate program that gave free logos for referrals." ], "src": [ 1, 2, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised design work without the price of a designer. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Jobspice", "years": "2009 to 2012", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Good-looking resume designs for job seekers who cannot design.", "died": "One narrow product. Free resume templates and tools spread online and LinkedIn grew, so few people paid.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1635-jobspice" }, { "name": "Tastemaker", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$1.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Affordable interior design without the designer's price.", "died": "It depended on a distributed group of human designers, so quality varied. Better-funded competitors took the market.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1572-tastemaker" }, { "name": "Laurel & Wolf", "years": "2014 to 2019", "funding": "US$25M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Interior design for a flat fee from professional designers.", "died": "The flat fee did not cover the cost of finding customers, and quality fell as the designer network grew.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2012-laurel--wolf" }, { "name": "Modsy", "years": "2015 to 2022", "funding": "US$72.7M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "AI-powered 3D room designs that show furniture in your own room.", "died": "It was marketed as AI, but each room took hours of human designer time. High customer cost and few repeat buyers.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2521-modsy" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Tastemaker, Laurel & Wolf and Modsy all sold cheap design, and all paid human designers to make it. Each order carried hours of labor, so a low price could not cover the cost of the work and of finding the customer. Modsy is the clearest case: it called itself AI, but the database says that each room took two to four hours of a designer's time. MakeLogo.ai began the same way, with the founder making each logo by hand, but only for its first days. By 10 December 2022 the orders went through an automated pipeline, and the work per logo was done by the model.", "Jobspice shows the risk that MakeLogo.ai did not escape: a narrow design product loses its value when free tools do the same job. The founder's own survey in December 2022 found no customer who would be very disappointed to lose the app, and he sold three months after launch, while buyers still paid for the novelty. The new owner kept the site for about two years. By April 2025 it no longer loaded." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The novelty, no. The order of the steps, yes.", "text": "An AI logo generator was new in December 2022 and common soon after, so the first-mover sales cannot be repeated. The method can: take paid orders with a form before you write the software, fill them by hand, automate only after people pay, and sell while buyers still value the novelty, if the product has no reason for users to come back.", "steps": [ "Describe the output on a landing page and take payment through a form on the first day.", "Fill the first orders by hand with existing AI tools, and build the automated pipeline only after the first sales.", "Launch on Product Hunt and submit to AI tool directories in the same week.", "Ask customers early how disappointed they would be without the product; a weak answer is a reason to sell soon.", "When you list the business, compare cash now with payments over a year, not only the headline price." ], "open": "Any task where a new image, video or voice model produces a usable result for a few dollars a time: product photos, icons, short videos, voice-overs. The window for each is short, so speed matters more than polish." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The US$65,000 price is the founder's own statement, repeated in his diary of 11 March 2023, his post on X, his app list and his March 2025 interview. No buyer, marketplace or payment processor has confirmed it. The US$26,000 in sales rests on one statement, in the March 2025 Starter Story interview, and in the same sentence he gave a total of \"around 85,000\", while US$26,000 plus US$65,000 is US$91,000. A reader could look for an Acquire.com page on the sale or a second interview with the sales figure." }, { "title": "Sale month: February or March 2023", "text": "His app list says \"Sold for $65,000 in February\", and the Talknotes page on this site uses February 2023. His diary entry with the sale is dated 11 March 2023, he said in 2025 that \"the transaction was closed in March\", and No-Code Exits counts three months from the December launch. This page uses March 2023. The offer may have been accepted in February and the money paid in March, but no source says so." }, { "title": "Start date", "text": "No-Code Exits says the idea came \"one evening in December 2022\", which matches the diary, 5 December 2022. In the 2025 interview the founder said \"I started working on it I think in November\". This page uses the diary." }, { "title": "The buyer is unknown, and the product is gone", "text": "No source names the buyer. The new owner redesigned the site by December 2023 and sold one pack at US$9.99. The Wayback Machine records error pages from April 2025, and on 25 October 2026 the site returns \"Not Found\". What the buyer earned from it is not known." }, { "title": "Customer counts are claims on the site", "text": "The February 2023 page says \"Already 10,000+ logos created\" and the new owner's page says \"Trusted by Over 10,000 Satisfied Customers\". Neither is verified. In January 2023 the founder's diary mentions \"the hundred of orders I had\"." }, { "title": "Customers did not need it", "text": "In his December 2022 survey no customer said they would be very disappointed to lose the app, and most bought one pack once. Revenue depended on new buyers who were curious about AI, which is the kind of demand that falls when the technology becomes common." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "archive", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230202165539/https://makelogo.ai/" }, { "kind": "indiepage", "url": "https://indiepa.ge/jeannen" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Nico Jeannen's blog diary, 5 December 2022 to 11 March 2023: MakeLogo.ai, From idea to $65,000 exit in 3 months", "url": "https://jeannen.com/blog/making-ai-logo", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Dated, timed entries written during the build. Source for the 48 hours, the first sales, the tools, the prices he planned, the Product Hunt result, the survey, the January 2023 work and the sale entry of 11 March 2023." }, { "title": "Starter Story video transcript, 31 March 2025: I Locked Myself In A Room, Made 17 Apps, and Sold 2 for $265,000", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/i-locked-myself-in-a-room-made-17-apps-sold-2-for-265-000", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the transcript sections on MakeLogo.ai, its launch, its marketing and its sale. Source for the US$26,000 in sales, the one-time packs, the Typeform launch, the customer types, the offers and \"closed in March\"." }, { "title": "No-Code Exits newsletter, 25 September 2026: Three Exits for $290,000. Then a Year of Nothing.", "url": "https://nocodeexits.substack.com/p/three-exits-for-290000-then-a-year", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A secondary account that quotes the founder's sale post on X, with the price, the three months, the 600 followers and the zero budget, and reports about 30 buyers under non-disclosure agreements. robots.txt allows /p/ pages." }, { "title": "No CS Degree, 10 July 2024: $200k exit after learning to code", "url": "https://www.nocsdegree.com/200k-exit-after-learning-to-code/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the free part; the rest is behind a subscription. Founder interview. Source for the Udemy course and his reasons for building and selling MakeLogo.ai." }, { "title": "Nico Jeannen's Indie Page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://indiepa.ge/jeannen", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's own list of his apps. Source for \"Sold for $65,000 in February\" and the Talknotes sale." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of makelogo.ai, 19 December 2022", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20221219195615/https://makelogo.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the page source. Source for the first public prices, the pack sizes, the delivery time, the founder credit and the Typeform and Crisp scripts." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of makelogo.ai, 2 February 2023", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20230202165539/https://makelogo.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the page source. Source for the 10,000 logos claim, the four-step process, the new pack sizes and the Bento script." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of makelogo.ai, 4 April 2023", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20230404163351/https://makelogo.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Shows the site unchanged three weeks after the sale." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of makelogo.ai, 8 December 2023", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20231208055819/https://makelogo.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the page source. The new owner's design and the single Startup pack at US$9.99." }, { "title": "makelogo.ai, read 25 October 2026, with the Wayback Machine copy of 23 January 2025 and its list of captures", "url": "https://makelogo.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "The live site returned \"Not Found\". Read the January 2025 copy in full and the Wayback capture list, which shows error pages from April 2025. robots.txt has no rules for any agent." }, { "title": "Nico Jeannen's blog index, read 25 October 2026, and his post of 8 January 2023 about his background", "url": "https://jeannen.com/blog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the index in full, and the post of 8 January 2023 that it lists. Source for the dated list of his projects before and after MakeLogo.ai and for his nationality, French." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/superdev/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/superdev.md", "slug": "superdev", "name": "Superdev", "country": "Netherlands", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI app builder that turns a text description into a full-stack web app", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "February 2025", "outcomeLabel": "Sold for US$350K, August 2025", "sticker": "Sold for $350K", "outcomeUsd": 350000, "months": 6, "teamLabel": "1 founder named (Itay Elgazar); no source names a co-founder or employees or gives a headcount", "fundingLabel": "None disclosed; Acquire.com calls it bootstrapped", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "build-software", "channel": "creators", "trend": "sold", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2B", "Developer tools" ], "product": "A web app where a developer or founder describes an app in plain words and the AI writes both the front end and the back end, with a database, user login, file storage and email already connected. The user edits the app by chatting, syncs the code with GitHub and publishes it with one click. After the sale the product was renamed Buildy.", "why": "It launched in February 2025. In the newsletter's account, the founder bet that \"vibe coding\" (describing software in words and letting AI write it) was about to become popular. Acquire.com, the marketplace that handled the sale, wrote that the first users came from Reddit and that short demo videos by TikTok and YouTube creators then spread it without paid ads. The founder listed the company while it was still growing; five buyers made offers within two weeks.", "summary": [ "Superdev was an AI app builder: a web service in which a person types what an app should do and a large language model writes the code. Its pitch was full-stack generation, meaning both the front end (the screens the user sees) and the back end (the server code, database, login and storage behind them) from one chat window, so the user does not connect five separate services. Its archived home page of July 2025 says: \"Build full-stack apps in seconds\" and \"Databases, auth, storage, and emails are already wired into your app.\"", "Itay Elgazar, a developer based in Amsterdam according to the newsletter cited below, who had earlier sold a small project called Reclips through Acquire.com, launched Superdev in February 2025. According to Acquire.com's own story about the deal, published on 16 September 2025, the product gained hundreds of paying customers within months, he listed it on Acquire.com in August, five letters of intent (written, non-binding purchase offers) arrived within two weeks, and a buyer closed the deal in about a week and a half. Acquire.com gave no price. On 26 June 2026 the newsletter AI & No-Code Exits reported that the founder said on X that he sold Superdev for US$350,000, and that it had reached just below US$7,000 a month in recurring revenue.", "The price rests on that one newsletter, which describes the founder's X post but does not link or date it, so the evidence grade is D. The archived home pages also do not fit the newsletter's revenue timeline: in mid-May 2025, about three months after the launch, the site was a closed-beta waitlist with 312 people on it. By December 2025 the new owner had renamed the product Buildy, and superdev.build now redirects to buildy.ai. The page also shows earlier app builders in the Loot Drop database that failed." ], "factsCaption": "A sale price of US$350,000 reported ten months later by one newsletter from the founder's X post, a sale process described by the marketplace that hosted it, and archived home pages that show how the product changed", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value appears in one source only, here a newsletter that retells the founder's X post, with no buyer, marketplace or payment-processor confirmation. A grade C value is a statement by the company, the founder or the marketplace that hosted the sale, including archived copies of the company's own pages. A grade B value is visible in public page source. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From launch in February 2025 to a sale in August 2025, six months, and a new name by December 2025. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Superdev and Buildy prices: no Superdev pricing page was archived, and the Buildy pricing page returns an error page with no prices (read 25 October 2026). The rows come from the company's other pages (grade C)", "note": "The Superdev home page of 16 July 2025 offered \"Start for free\" but showed no paid plans. After the sale the product became Buildy; its pricing page at buildy.ai/pricing loads an error page. Buildy's affiliate page uses a \"$99 Pro plan\" in its earnings calculator, which pays 15% of that each month after the first, so the Pro price is US$99 a month. A Buildy help article describes a Max plan with monthly credits but no price. These are the later owner's prices, not the prices Superdev charged before the sale.", "rows": [ [ "Free (Superdev, July 2025)", "0", "0", "\"Start for free\" on the home page; limits not shown" ], [ "Pro (Buildy, October 2026)", "", "99", "price from the affiliate earnings calculator; credit limits not shown" ], [ "Max (Buildy, October 2026)", "", "", "1,000 Building credits and 40,000 Operating credits a month; price not shown" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Sale price, August 2025", "value": "US$350,000", "grade": "D", "note": "AI & No-Code Exits newsletter, 26 June 2026: \"sold for $350,000 through Acquire.com in August 2025\". It says the founder stated it on X (@elgazar_itay) but gives no link or date. Not confirmed by the buyer or by Acquire.com.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Sale process", "value": "listed on Acquire.com in August 2025; five letters of intent within two weeks; a buyer closed in less than a week and a half", "grade": "C", "note": "Acquire.com blog and podcast, 16 September 2025, written from an interview with the founder. They call the sale a \"life-changing, clean exit\" and give no price and no buyer name.", "src": [ 2, 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue before the sale", "value": "just below US$7,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Same newsletter only: \"scaled to just below $7K MRR in about two months\". Not verified, and the mid-May 2025 waitlist page (next rows) does not fit a two-month timeline from a February launch. Acquire.com says only that recurring revenue \"doubled in just a few months\".", "src": [ 1, 2, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Price as a multiple of yearly revenue", "value": "about 4.2 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$350,000 divided by US$84,000 (US$7,000 times 12). Both inputs are grade D. The newsletter itself writes \"near a 4x annual-revenue valuation\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Customers before the sale", "value": "hundreds of paying customers", "grade": "C", "note": "Acquire.com blog and the YouTube description of its podcast episode. No exact count.", "src": [ 2, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Launch", "value": "February 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Acquire.com: \"In February 2025, he launched a tool that promised ... a simple way to build full-stack apps with AI.\"", "src": [ 2, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Home page, 3 April 2025", "value": "a site with Features, Templates, Pricing and Docs links and a \"New v2.0\" label", "grade": "C", "note": "Wayback Machine copy. Two feature texts still name \"GenFast\" and the footer links to a GitHub account named genfast that no longer exists. No source explains the name.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Home page, 15 May 2025", "value": "closed beta with \"312 users\" on the waitlist and \"100 invites every week\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Wayback Machine copy, about three months after the launch. The page pitched \"custom business software\" and said \"We're currently in closed beta.\"", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Product updates, June 2025", "value": "two-way GitHub sync on 12 June; a documentation site on 17 June", "grade": "C", "note": "Superdev documentation changelog.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Home page, 16 July 2025", "value": "public product: \"Build full-stack apps in seconds\", \"Start for free\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Wayback Machine copy, about one month before the listing. Aimed at solo developers, founders, product teams and designers.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "How customers arrived", "value": "Reddit first, then demo videos by TikTok and YouTube creators; no paid ads", "grade": "C", "note": "Acquire.com blog, from the founder's account. No source says whether the creators were paid.", "src": [ 2, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none disclosed", "grade": "C", "note": "Acquire.com titles the podcast episode \"The Secrets Behind This Bootstrapped AI App Life-changing Exit\".", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's earlier exit", "value": "Reclips, a smaller project, sold through Acquire.com", "grade": "C", "note": "Acquire.com blog. No price given.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Name after the sale", "value": "Buildy (buildy.ai), by December 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "The Wayback copy of docs.superdev.build of 10 December 2025 says \"Meet Buildy.ai\". On 25 October 2026 superdev.build redirects to buildy.ai, and the Buildy home page still loads images from api.superdev.build.", "src": [ 9, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the sale", "value": "6 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: February 2025 to August 2025.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Before 2025", "what": "Elgazar sells a smaller project, Reclips, through Acquire.com and learns what buyers ask for.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "February 2025", "what": "He launches Superdev, an AI tool that writes the front end and the back end of an app from one prompt.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 4 ] }, { "when": "3 April 2025", "what": "The home page shows a \"New v2.0\" label and links to templates, pricing and docs; some text still names \"GenFast\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "15 May 2025", "what": "The home page is a closed-beta waitlist: 312 people waiting, 100 invites sent each week.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "12 to 17 June 2025", "what": "Two-way GitHub sync ships, then a documentation site.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "16 July 2025", "what": "The public home page reads \"Build full-stack apps in seconds\" with a free start.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "August 2025", "what": "He lists Superdev on Acquire.com. Five letters of intent arrive within two weeks, and a buyer closes in about a week and a half.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "August 2025", "what": "Sale price, as the newsletter later reports from his X post: US$350,000.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "16 September 2025", "what": "Acquire.com publishes the story, a video and podcast episode 143 of Startup Acquisition Stories, with no price.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 3, 4 ] }, { "when": "10 December 2025", "what": "The documentation site now says \"Meet Buildy.ai\": the new owner has renamed the product.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "26 June 2026", "what": "The newsletter AI & No-Code Exits publishes the US$350,000 price and the figure of just below US$7,000 a month.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "superdev.build redirects to buildy.ai, which now sells an all-in-one AI business platform to non-developers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10, 11 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Timing", "text": "The founder started in February 2025 on the bet, as the newsletter tells it, that vibe coding was about to become popular. Acquire.com writes that AI tools were everywhere but most were fragmented or too complex, and that developers wanted speed and simplicity. A working product in that moment was found by people looking for exactly that." }, { "title": "Free channels: Reddit and creator videos", "text": "According to Acquire.com's account, the first signups came from Reddit, and then TikTok and YouTube creators posted short clips of an app being built in minutes. An app builder makes a good demo video because the whole result appears on screen in under a minute." }, { "title": "One clear sentence for a buyer", "text": "Full-stack apps from one AI interface, with database, login, storage and email included. Acquire.com says the founder used this difference, and growth from organic marketing, as his main arguments to buyers." }, { "title": "A prepared, competitive sale", "text": "He had sold through Acquire.com before, so his figures and documents were ready before buyers asked. Five offers in two weeks let the buyers compete on the price. In Acquire.com's words, due diligence (the buyer's check of the figures, code and contracts) \"moved fast\", and the right buyer stepped forward in less than a week and a half. The newsletter reported a price of US$350,000; Acquire.com stated none." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from archived copies of Superdev's own pages and from Acquire.com's account. They are grade C, except the framework, which is visible in the page source (grade B).", "items": [ "The archived home pages load their scripts from /_next/static/, the file layout of the Next.js web framework.", "In April 2025 the site said users could \"Connect your own or use our Supabase connector\" for the back end; by May it promised a built-in database with \"No Supabase needed\".", "By July 2025 each generated app came with a database, user roles, login, file storage and email, all managed inside Superdev.", "Generated apps could call OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini models, according to the May 2025 page. No source says which model wrote Superdev's own code.", "Two-way GitHub sync (12 June 2025) let users edit the code in their own editor and push it back.", "No paid advertising: Reddit posts and creator videos brought the users, as Acquire.com reported from the founder." ], "src": [ 5, 6, 7, 8, 2 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database promised that people could build software without writing code, or that AI would write it. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Builder.ai", "years": "2016 to 2025", "funding": "US$445M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Custom apps assembled by AI instead of expensive developers.", "died": "Each project cost more to build than the customer paid, and much of the work said to be AI was done by people. The money ran out.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2170-builderai" }, { "name": "The Grid", "years": "2014 to 2020", "funding": "US$4.7M", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Websites designed by AI, without paying a designer.", "died": "The AI of the time could not produce good designs, and Wix, Squarespace and WordPress kept improving.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/618-the-grid" }, { "name": "Koji", "years": "2016 to 2021", "funding": "US$16M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A no-code builder for creators' interactive apps.", "died": "Caught between Webflow and Bubble, it could not turn free users into paying ones at scale.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/284-koji" }, { "name": "Appcubator", "years": "2013 to 2016", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Drag-and-drop app creation without a programming degree.", "died": "Users hit the limits of the builder, kept leaving, and moved to more flexible tools such as Bubble.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1160-appcubator" }, { "name": "Kite DevTool", "years": "2014 to 2024", "funding": "US$21M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "AI code completion inside the developer's editor.", "died": "Its free product never made money, and GitHub Copilot, built on a far stronger language model, took the market.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2491-kite-devtool" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The older companies in this list either promised AI before the models could deliver (The Grid, Kite) or offered drag-and-drop builders whose limits users reached quickly (Koji, Appcubator). Builder.ai said AI built its apps while people did much of the work. In 2025 a language model could write a working app from a description, so a small product could deliver what these companies had promised.", "Superdev also did not try to outlast the large, funded app builders of 2025. Its founder sold it six months after launch, while users were still growing, to a buyer who wanted the product. The newsletter reported a price of US$350,000. For a one-person product in a crowded market, a sale was the result, not a long-running business." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The timing, no. The sale process, yes.", "text": "The vibe-coding moment of early 2025 cannot be repeated. What a reader can copy is how the founder sold: he had sold one product before, prepared the figures and documents in advance, listed while the product was still growing, and let several buyers compete.", "steps": [ "Sell one small project first, so that you learn what buyers check.", "Keep revenue, user and cost figures and the code documentation ready before you list.", "List while the growth is still visible, not after it stops.", "Let several buyers make offers at the same time, and answer their questions quickly." ], "open": "Any product built on a new AI ability in the month the ability appears, and sold to a strategic buyer before larger competitors arrive." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The sale price, US$350,000, rests on one source: the newsletter AI & No-Code Exits of 26 June 2026, published ten months after the sale, which says the founder (@elgazar_itay) stated the price on X. The newsletter does not link or date that post, and this page did not read it, because X requires a login. Acquire.com, which hosted the sale, published the story, a video and a podcast on 16 September 2025 and gave no price, only \"life-changing\". Their standard closing text mentions \"350,000+ buyers\" on Acquire.com, a different number that a reader should not confuse with the price. The figure of just below US$7,000 a month in recurring revenue comes from the same newsletter only. A reader could look for the founder's X post itself, the Acquire.com listing, the podcast audio, or a statement from the buyer." }, { "title": "The revenue timeline does not fit the archived pages", "text": "The newsletter says the product reached just below US$7,000 a month within about two months of a February 2025 launch. The archived home page of 15 May 2025, three months after the launch, shows a closed beta with 312 people on a waitlist and 100 invites a week, and the April 2025 page still names another product, \"GenFast\". A public product page appears only in July 2025. The revenue may have come later than the newsletter says, or the figure may be wrong." }, { "title": "The buyer and the later product", "text": "No source names the buyer. The product is now Buildy, sold to non-developers as a way to \"launch a profitable business that runs itself\", with an affiliate program that promises \"passive income\". Those are the new owner's words, not the founder's, and they describe a different product from the developer tool that was sold." }, { "title": "Growth from creators, without retention data", "text": "The users came from Reddit and creator videos. No source gives churn (the share of paying users who cancel each month), the cost of the AI models per user, or whether the creators were paid." }, { "title": "Competition from other app builders", "text": "Acquire.com itself describes early 2025 as a time when AI tools were everywhere. Superdev's only stated difference was full-stack generation from one interface, which other builders can also add. The predecessors on this page show what happens to app builders that cannot keep paying users or keep their costs below their prices." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.buildy.ai/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "AI & No-Code Exits newsletter, 26 June 2026: How Itay Elgazar took an AI app from zero to nearly $7K MRR in two months, then sold at the top for $350,000", "url": "https://nocodeexits.substack.com/p/how-itay-elgazar-took-an-ai-app-from", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full (the post page and the same text in the publication's feed). The only source for the US$350,000 price and the US$7,000 monthly figure; it retells the founder's X post without a link or date, and its lessons follow the Acquire.com article closely." }, { "title": "Acquire.com blog, 16 September 2025, by Veronica Buratini: The Secrets Behind This Bootstrapped App Life-changing Exit", "url": "https://blog.acquire.com/the-secrets-behind-this-bootstrapped-ai-app-life-changing-exit/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The marketplace's own story of the sale, from an interview with the founder. Source for the launch month, the channels, the five letters of intent and the earlier Reclips sale. No price." }, { "title": "Startup Acquisition Stories podcast, episode 143, 16 September 2025: The Secrets Behind This Bootstrapped AI App Life-changing Exit", "url": "https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-secrets-behind-this-bootstrapped-ai-app-life/id1595743531?i=1000727112959", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the Apple Podcasts episode page and description; the 16-minute audio was not transcribed. Confirms the sale two weeks after listing and \"hundreds of paying users\"." }, { "title": "Acquire.com on YouTube, 16 September 2025: The Secrets Behind This Bootstrapped AI App Life-changing Exit", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV8goOnXl8Q", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the video page's description only. Confirms the February 2025 launch, Reddit, TikTok and YouTube demos, and the listing in August." }, { "title": "Superdev home page, Wayback Machine copy of 3 April 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250403043702/https://www.superdev.build/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Shows the \"New v2.0\" site, the Supabase connector and the leftover \"GenFast\" text." }, { "title": "Superdev home page, Wayback Machine copy of 15 May 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250515200949/https://www.superdev.build/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Shows the closed beta, the waitlist of 312 and the model and database claims." }, { "title": "Superdev home page, Wayback Machine copy of 16 July 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250716060513/https://www.superdev.build/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The public product page one month before the listing." }, { "title": "Superdev documentation: Changelog", "url": "https://docs.superdev.build/changelog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Source for the June 2025 GitHub sync and documentation dates." }, { "title": "Superdev documentation home, Wayback Machine copy of 10 December 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20251210041958/https://docs.superdev.build/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Shows the product renamed Buildy.ai after the sale." }, { "title": "Buildy home page", "url": "https://www.buildy.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. superdev.build redirects here. The new owner's page; used only for the rename and for what the product became." }, { "title": "Buildy affiliate program page", "url": "https://www.buildy.ai/affiliates", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Source for the US$99 Pro plan price and the affiliate wording. The pricing page, buildy.ai/pricing, returned an error page with no prices." }, { "title": "Buildy news: Meet your new Buildy credits", "url": "https://www.buildy.ai/news/meet-your-new-buildy-credits", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Source for the Max plan's monthly credits." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/intentpost/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/intentpost.md", "slug": "intentpost", "name": "IntentPost", "country": "United States", "sector": "Communication Services", "productType": "Direct-mail outreach for B2B sales teams, with AI-written messages", "aiType": "AI-leveraged", "team": "small", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "September 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$120K ARR before a sale at an undisclosed price, July 2026", "sticker": "Sold after $120K ARR", "outcomeUsd": 120000, "months": 10, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders and 3 staff on the company's About page, January 2026; no headcount is given for the time of the revenue figure", "fundingLabel": "None disclosed", "primaryFactor": "Pre-selling", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "audience", "trend": "sold", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-leveraged", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2B", "Marketing" ], "product": "A service that sends handwritten cards, postcards and gifts by post to sales prospects of business-to-business companies. The customer gives a list or a trigger, such as a LinkedIn profile URL, an email address or a website visit; IntentPost finds a home or office address, an AI model suggests the text, the customer approves it, and partners print and ship the item. Delivery is tracked so that an email or LinkedIn message can follow on the day the item is delivered. The pricing page lists plans from US$199 a month billed yearly.", "why": "According to Acquire.com's article, the founder saw that cold email and LinkedIn messages had become so common that buyers recognized and ignored them, so he moved the first contact to paper and kept the digital tools around it. He put up a landing page with a payment link before the product was built; according to Acquire.com's article of 2 July 2026, one customer paid US$2,500 a month within two weeks and the business reached US$120,000 in annual recurring revenue six weeks later. It was then sold through the Acquire.com marketplace, and no price was published.", "summary": [ "IntentPost is an outbound sales tool. Outbound means that the seller contacts a possible buyer first, instead of waiting for the buyer to come. Most outbound today is email and LinkedIn messages. IntentPost uses direct mail, which is paper sent by post to a named person: a handwritten card, a postcard or a gift. It starts from intent signals, which are records that a company may be ready to buy, such as a visit to the seller's website or a change of deal stage in the seller's customer database. The service then does address enrichment, which means finding a postal address for a person from a name, an email address or a LinkedIn profile. An AI model suggests what to write and what to send, the customer approves the preview, and printing and shipping partners deliver it. The company's terms name Sidequest Inc., a Delaware corporation, as the owner of the product.", "Faiz Imran, who describes himself on his own site as a 24-year-old founder with six exits, started IntentPost as co-founder and chief executive with Riley Baker as co-founder and chief technology officer. The website project was created in early September 2025 and the domain intentpost.ai was registered on 28 September 2025. According to an article by the marketplace Acquire.com on 2 July 2026, based on an interview with him, he first set up only a landing page and a payment link; within two weeks one customer paid US$2,500 a month, and IntentPost reached US$120,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR, the yearly value of all subscriptions that are running at one moment) six weeks after that, with customers that included HubSpot. The same article says he sold the company through Acquire.com after only a few months of operation. His own site lists IntentPost as acquired, with the words \"$0 → $120K ARR in 6 weeks\".", "The revenue figure rests on one founder account, repeated by Acquire.com, by its podcast page, by his site and by a newsletter that retold the article, so the evidence grade is D. The buyer and the price are not disclosed, and no source gives a calendar date for the US$120,000 figure or for the sale. Acquire.com ran the marketplace where the sale took place, which makes its statement that a sale happened stronger than the revenue figure. The page also shows earlier companies in the Loot Drop database that tried to sell sales data, outbound calls or physical gifts and closed." ], "factsCaption": "A founder-reported US$120,000 in annual recurring revenue six weeks after the first paying customer, then a sale through Acquire.com at an undisclosed price, first reported on 2 July 2026", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is a founder statement that appears in one interview and in pages that repeat it, with no buyer or payment-processor confirmation. A grade C value is a statement on the company's own pages or by the marketplace that handled the sale. A grade B value comes from a record the company does not control: the domain registry or the Wayback Machine. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a website project in September 2025 to a sale reported in July 2026, in about 10 months. Each entry carries its grade; the money entries are D because they rest on one founder account.", "pricing": { "caption": "IntentPost prices on its pricing page, read 25 October 2026; the page is the same as the Wayback Machine copy of 9 March 2026 and was last published on 23 January 2026, before the sale was reported (grade C)", "note": "Every plan charges a monthly fee plus credits for each item sent; the page does not say how many credits a card, a postcard or a gift costs. Yearly billing is shown as 20% off, which matches the Basic and Pro prices by this page's calculation (199 is 79.9% of 249, and 698 is 79.9% of 874). The FAQ says there are no platform fees, minimums or contracts, while the terms page says some plans may include setup fees or minimum commitments. The DFY (done for you) plan adds a creative team and campaign management by the company. The prices on the page did not change after the sale, as far as the Wayback copy shows.", "rows": [ [ "Basic", "199", "249", "1 seat; US$0.40 per credit; handwritten cards, postcards, address enrichment, AI-written messages, automated campaigns" ], [ "Pro", "698", "874", "3 seats; US$0.25 per credit; adds customized gifts and custom integrations" ], [ "DFY (done for you)", "from 3,450", "from 4,449", "unlimited seats; 42,000 credits a year billed yearly or 3,500 credits billed monthly; campaign management by the company's team" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue six weeks after the first customer", "value": "US$120,000", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder's account in Acquire.com's article and podcast of 2 July 2026, repeated on his own site and in the No-Code Exits newsletter of 21 August 2026. No source gives the calendar date of the figure. The newsletter adds: the figures are founder-reported.", "src": [ 1, 2, 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month at that ARR", "value": "US$10,000", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$120,000 divided by 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "First paying customer", "value": "US$2,500 a month, within two weeks of the landing page", "grade": "D", "note": "Acquire.com's article, from the founder's interview. The payment came through a payment link before the full product was built.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Share of the ARR from the first customer", "value": "25%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$2,500 times 12 is US$30,000, divided by US$120,000. This assumes the first customer was still paying at the time of the ARR figure, which no source says.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Named customer", "value": "HubSpot", "grade": "D", "note": "Acquire.com's article: signed customers such as HubSpot. HubSpot has not confirmed it in any source read for this page. The home page shows testimonials from staff of Rounds.so and Shoofly.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Sale", "value": "sold through Acquire.com; price and buyer not disclosed", "grade": "C", "note": "Acquire.com's article of 2 July 2026, on the marketplace's own blog: the founder sold the company through Acquire.com after only a few months of operating. The No-Code Exits newsletter writes that the sale price and the buyer are both undisclosed.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Date of the sale", "value": "not stated; before 2 July 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "The first dated report is Acquire.com's article and podcast episode of 2 July 2026. The founder's site places IntentPost under 2025, which is the year the project started. The company website still named him chief executive when it was last published on 23 January 2026.", "src": [ 1, 2, 3, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Founders", "value": "Faiz Imran, co-founder and CEO; Riley Baker, co-founder and CTO", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's About page. Faiz Imran's own site calls him co-founder and CEO of IntentPost.", "src": [ 7, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Team, January 2026", "value": "5 people: 2 co-founders, a product operations manager, a client success manager and a founding engineer", "grade": "C", "note": "The About page, last published on 23 January 2026 and identical in the Wayback copy of 9 March 2026. No source gives the headcount at the time of the ARR figure.", "src": [ 7, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding of IntentPost", "value": "none disclosed", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions an investment in IntentPost. The founder says he had three venture-backed and three bootstrapped exits overall, without saying which kind IntentPost was. He also invests through Sidequest VC; the company that owns the product is called Sidequest Inc.", "src": [ 3, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Company behind the product", "value": "Sidequest Inc., a Delaware corporation", "grade": "C", "note": "The terms page, last updated 28 October 2025. It says the service operates only within the United States and uses Stripe for payments.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Website project created", "value": "3 September 2025", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the Webflow site ID in the page source, 68b8681b9524e7690bb0488e, begins with a timestamp that decodes to 3 September 2025. The share image of the About and pricing pages is a file named ChatGPT Image Sep 6, 2025.", "src": [ 5, 6, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Domain registered", "value": "28 September 2025", "grade": "B", "note": "The registry's RDAP record for intentpost.ai, read 25 October 2026.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Prices", "value": "US$199 to US$874 a month for Basic and Pro, DFY from US$3,450 a month billed yearly", "grade": "C", "note": "The pricing page, read 25 October 2026. Credits for each item sent are charged on top.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Results claimed by the company", "value": "90% open rates and 50%+ reply rates for physical plus digital sequences", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder's blog post on the company site, 12 January 2026. No method or sample size is given.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "A customer's result", "value": "US$100,000 in pipeline", "grade": "C", "note": "A testimonial on the home page attributed to the chief executive of Rounds.so. Pipeline means the value of possible deals, not revenue.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Time from website project to the first report of the sale", "value": "about 10 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: September 2025 to July 2026.", "src": [ 5, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "3 September 2025", "what": "The Webflow project of the IntentPost website is created, by this page's decoding of the site ID in the page source. Three days later a share image made with ChatGPT is added, by its file name in the About and pricing pages.", "grade": "X", "src": [ 5, 7 ] }, { "when": "September 2025", "what": "The founder puts up a landing page with a payment link before the team builds the full product, according to Acquire.com's article.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "when": "28 September 2025", "what": "The domain intentpost.ai is registered.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "Within two weeks of the landing page", "what": "The first customer pays US$2,500 a month, by the founder's account.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "14 October 2025", "what": "The Wayback Machine makes its first capture of intentpost.ai.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "28 October 2025", "what": "The terms page is dated: IntentPost is a product of Sidequest Inc., a Delaware corporation, and payments run through Stripe.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "Six weeks after the first customer", "what": "IntentPost reaches US$120,000 in annual recurring revenue with customers that include HubSpot, by the founder's account. By this page's arithmetic this would be late October or November 2025; no source gives the date.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "when": "12 January 2026", "what": "The founder publishes a blog post arguing that Gmail's new AI filtering makes sales email weaker and that physical mail followed by LinkedIn messages works better for large accounts.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "23 January 2026", "what": "The website is published for the last time. The About page lists two co-founders and three staff, says the company was founded in 2025, and says it has not yet made its launch announcement.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "First half of 2026", "what": "The founder sells IntentPost through Acquire.com after a few months of operation. Price and buyer are not disclosed.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "when": "2 July 2026", "what": "Acquire.com publishes episode 171 of its Startup Acquisition Stories podcast and an article on the sale.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "21 August 2026", "what": "The No-Code Exits newsletter retells the story and notes that the figures are founder-reported.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "intentpost.ai is still online and unchanged since January. The founder's site lists IntentPost as acquired and names a new project for 2026.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 3 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A payment link before the product", "text": "The founder put a price and a checkout on a landing page instead of a waiting list. According to Acquire.com's article, a customer paid US$2,500 a month within two weeks, before the full product existed. A payment tells the founder the price, the buyer and what was promised, so the first version is built to a known order instead of a guess." }, { "title": "Paper as the first contact, digital tools around it", "text": "The company's own pages say that email gets opened about one time in five and that a handwritten card is almost always opened. IntentPost kept the parts of modern outbound that already worked, the target lists, the triggers and the follow-up sequences, and changed only the first contact from an email to a letter or a gift. The tracked delivery date then sets the moment for the follow-up email or LinkedIn message." }, { "title": "AI writes the note, people approve it", "text": "Handwritten notes do not scale when a person must write each one. An AI model suggests the text for each prospect from the enriched details, and the FAQ says the customer receives a preview to approve or edit before anything is sent, unless the customer chooses otherwise. That is what let a five-person team offer personal letters as a software subscription." }, { "title": "Fitting into the customer's existing tools", "text": "The home page lists connections to Zapier, Clay, HubSpot, Slack, Make and the outreach tools Instantly, Smartlead and HeyReach, plus webhooks. A customer does not change its sales process; a deal-stage change or a website visit in a tool it already runs sends a card. This also made the business easy to hand to a buyer, because the workflow runs the same without the founder, as the No-Code Exits newsletter put it." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages, the page source of its website and the founder's interview. No source names the AI model, the programming language or the printing partner.", "items": [ "The marketing site is built with Webflow; the site project was created on 3 September 2025 and the share image was made with ChatGPT on 6 September 2025, by the file names in the page source.", "The workflow, in the founder's words to Acquire.com: start with a LinkedIn profile, find address data, draft the message with AI, send the mail, track delivery, and trigger a digital follow-up.", "Address enrichment finds home and office addresses, and prospect enrichment adds interests, email and phone, according to the pricing page.", "Printing, shipping and delivery use both in-house and third-party fulfillment partners, the terms page says.", "Payments run through Stripe, and the site measures visits with Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity, by the terms page.", "The app runs at app.intentpost.ai with sign-up links for each plan, and every plan includes a Slack support channel, by the pricing page." ], "src": [ 5, 1, 6, 8 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database tried to sell contact data, outbound calling, curated gifts or physical cards and closed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Elucify", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Accurate business contact data for sales teams, from a crowdsourced database.", "died": "ZoomInfo and Clearbit had better data and more money, and the crowdsourced data was hard to keep fresh enough that users would pay.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1078-elucify" }, { "name": "Slik", "years": "2017 to 2020", "funding": "US$1.2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Sales intelligence that finds and ranks the leads a sales team should call first.", "died": "LinkedIn Sales Navigator and ZoomInfo offered the same with larger datasets; customers left over stale data and it could not raise more.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1439-slik" }, { "name": "VOIQ", "years": "2015 to 2018", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Outbound sales calls by a network of trained agents on demand.", "died": "Call quality was hard to keep across a dispersed workforce, and automated sales tools and broad freelance marketplaces undercut it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1485-voiq" }, { "name": "Spoil", "years": "2015 to 2018", "funding": "US$1.2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Curated gifts chosen, packed and delivered for you on short notice.", "died": "Amazon was faster and cheaper, manual curation and logistics did not scale, and gift buyers rarely came back.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1106-spoil" }, { "name": "Chirply", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$200K", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Greeting cards and stationery with designs crowdsourced from artists.", "died": "Producing and shipping custom physical cards was harder than expected, and demand for paper cards fell as digital cards grew.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1624-chirply" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Elucify and Slik sold sales data and lost to larger databases. VOIQ sold human outbound calls and lost to cheaper tools. IntentPost did not compete on data; it bought or connected to the data and the triggers that customers already had, through Clay, HubSpot and website-visitor tools, and sold the step those tools do not do: a physical item on a desk. Spoil and Chirply show that gifts and paper cards are costly to curate, produce and ship. IntentPost passed the production to fulfillment partners and used an AI model to write each note, which a small team could not have done by hand for every prospect.", "The second difference is timing. The predecessors spent years and venture money looking for demand. IntentPost asked for payment before it built the product and, by the founder's account to Acquire.com, had a customer paying US$2,500 a month within two weeks. The founder then sold within months, so the long-run questions that ended Spoil and Chirply, repeat purchases and the cost of physical delivery, now belong to the buyer." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The pre-sale method, yes. The exact numbers, not verified.", "text": "A landing page with a price and a payment link, shown to people who already have the problem, costs a few days and answers the demand question before any building. That part is copyable by anyone selling to businesses. The reported speed, US$120,000 in annual recurring revenue six weeks after the first customer by the founder's account, came from a founder who says he had already built and sold several companies, and who told Acquire.com that he tests business-to-business ideas on LinkedIn and builds in public.", "steps": [ "Write the offer as a landing page with a monthly price and a working checkout, not a waiting list.", "Show it to the buyers you can reach directly: your own posts, your network, a short list of accounts.", "Build only what the first paying customer was promised, then add connections to the tools that customer already uses.", "Keep the business transferable from the start: shared passwords in a manager, tasks in a tracker, accounts owned by the company, as the Acquire.com article lists." ], "open": "Other channels that digital outreach crowded out and that AI now makes cheap to personalize: printed catalogues for a single buyer, phone voicemail with an approved script, physical samples for B2B products." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline figure, US$120,000 in annual recurring revenue six weeks after the first customer, rests on one source: the founder, Faiz Imran, in an interview that Acquire.com published as an article and podcast episode on 2 July 2026. His own site repeats it as \"$0 → $120K ARR in 6 weeks\", and the No-Code Exits newsletter of 21 August 2026 retold the article and wrote that the figures are founder-reported. The first customer at US$2,500 a month and HubSpot as a customer come from the same interview. No source gives the calendar date of the figure, the price or the buyer of the sale, or the headcount at the time. Acquire.com, which ran the marketplace, confirms that a sale happened, not the revenue. A reader could look for a payment-processor profile such as TrustMRR, a listing summary from the Acquire.com marketplace with verified revenue, a statement by the buyer, or a HubSpot reference to IntentPost." }, { "title": "Home addresses of cold prospects", "text": "The product finds home addresses of people who have not asked to be contacted, and the FAQ says it generates lists of cold prospects from intent data. The company's own terms forbid customers to upload purchased or non-opt-in contact lists, which is hard to square with that FAQ. Rules on using personal addresses for marketing differ by country and state; the terms say the service operates only in the United States." }, { "title": "Connected to outreach automation tools", "text": "IntentPost itself sends paper, not email, and the pages read for this story sell no inbox rotation, no sending inboxes and no LinkedIn automation. But its home page lists connections to Instantly and Smartlead, which are cold-email tools, and to HeyReach, which automates LinkedIn outreach, so a customer can trigger cards from such campaigns." }, { "title": "Very young at the sale", "text": "The company was sold, by the founder's account, after a few months of operation. Six weeks of revenue says little about how many customers stay. Acquire.com's article lists, as a lesson of this sale, that a business can lose its position in a sale when its numbers slow during due diligence, the buyer's checks before closing." }, { "title": "The website stopped changing", "text": "The site was last published on 23 January 2026 and still names the founder as chief executive. The No-Code Exits newsletter says the product still runs at intentpost.ai, but no source shows what the new owner has done with it." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://intentpost.ai/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Acquire.com blog, 2 July 2026: A Startup Sale Built on Demand, Not Guesswork, by Veronica Buratini", "url": "https://blog.acquire.com/a-startup-sale-built-on-demand-not-guesswork/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The marketplace's own article from its podcast interview with the founder. Source for the sale through Acquire.com, the US$2,500 first customer, the US$120,000 ARR, HubSpot, the workflow and the founder's background. The revenue figures in it are the founder's account (grade D); the sale is the marketplace's own statement (grade C)." }, { "title": "Apple Podcasts: Startup Acquisition Stories, episode 171, 2 July 2026: 6 Exits by 24: The Demand-First Startup Sale", "url": "https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/6-exits-by-24-the-demand-first-startup-sale/id1595743531?i=1000775192723", "grade": "D", "how": "Read the episode page and description; did not listen to the audio. Confirms the date and the US$120K ARR within weeks." }, { "title": "Faiz Imran's personal site, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://faizimran.com/", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. The founder's own list of companies: IntentPost under 2025, acquired, co-founder and CEO, $0 → $120K ARR in 6 weeks; six exits, three venture-backed and three bootstrapped." }, { "title": "AI & No-Code Exits newsletter, 21 August 2026: His First Customer Paid $2,500 a Month for a Product That Did Not Exist Yet", "url": "https://nocodeexits.substack.com/p/his-first-customer-paid-2500-a-month", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. A retelling of the Acquire.com article that adds that the price and buyer are undisclosed and that the figures are founder-reported." }, { "title": "IntentPost home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://intentpost.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the page source. Source for the product steps, the integrations, the testimonials, the FAQ, and the Webflow site ID in the page source." }, { "title": "IntentPost pricing page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://intentpost.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the page source. Source for the plans, credits, features, sign-up links and the share image file name." }, { "title": "IntentPost About page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://intentpost.ai/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founders, the team of five and the founding year; the page source shows it was last published on 23 January 2026." }, { "title": "IntentPost legal page (terms and privacy), last updated 28 October 2025", "url": "https://intentpost.ai/legal", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for Sidequest Inc., the Delaware governing law, Stripe, the analytics tools, the fulfillment partners and the acceptable-use rules." }, { "title": "IntentPost blog, 12 January 2026: Gmail's New AI Just Changed Outbound Forever (Here's What We're Doing About It), by Faiz Imran", "url": "https://intentpost.ai/post/gmails-new-ai-just-changed-outbound-forever-heres-what-were-doing-about-it", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founder's argument for physical mail and the claimed open and reply rates." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine: captures of intentpost.ai, first on 14 October 2025, and the home, About and pricing pages of 9 March 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260309081153/https://intentpost.ai/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the capture list and the three March 2026 copies; they match the live pages word for word." }, { "title": "RDAP registry record for intentpost.ai, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://rdap.identitydigital.services/rdap/domain/intentpost.ai", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the registration date, 28 September 2025." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/boxer-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/boxer-ai.md", "slug": "boxer-ai", "name": "Boxer AI", "country": "USA", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI boxing coach app that tracks punches with the phone camera", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "8 March 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$5.4K MRR, October 2026", "sticker": "$65K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 64716, "months": 7, "teamLabel": "1 person according to the seller's TrustMRR profile; the seller is a student, named only by an X handle", "fundingLabel": "None reported; listed as bootstrapped", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "health-appearance", "channel": "creators", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Health and fitness" ], "product": "An iPhone app that coaches boxing at home. The phone's camera tracks the user's jabs, crosses, hooks and uppercuts, and the app gives live coaching, video analysis, AR padwork and headwork, guided drills and workouts. After each session it shows a technique score, punch statistics, calories burned and personalized feedback. Users earn XP, climb levels and fight 1v1 matches against other users. The coaching, analysis, drills, workouts and leaderboard need a subscription.", "why": "It needs nothing but a phone: the camera replaces the sensors, the bag and the coach that earlier fitness products had to supply. The game layer of XP, levels and 1v1 matches gives users a reason to come back. The seller lists TikTok, TikTok Ads and Instagram as its marketing channels.", "summary": [ "Boxer AI is an iPhone app that works as a boxing coach. The user puts the phone in front of them and trains; the phone's camera tracks each punch, and the app scores the technique and gives feedback during and after the session. This is computer vision, software that recognizes objects and movements in camera images. Most of the app sits behind a paywall, a screen that asks for a subscription before the feature can be used. The App Store seller is Impact Development LLC, a Wyoming company that also sells AI coaches for wrestling, golf and basketball and a makeup app.", "The app was released on 8 March 2026. TrustMRR reads its sales through an API key, a password that lets one program read another program's data, for RevenueCat, a service that records in-app subscription purchases for app makers. On 25 October 2026 it showed US$44,509 of revenue since launch and MRR, monthly recurring revenue, in which a yearly plan counts as one twelfth of its price, of US$5,393 from 755 active subscriptions. A second tracker, whatsthe.app, read the same account until 15 September 2026, when the MRR was US$7,748 from 764 subscriptions.", "The revenue figures are grade A, because both sites read them from the app's subscription records, not from screenshots. Everything else is less certain. The seller is named only as the X handle @itsbenmarlowe, describes himself as a student, enters a team of one person and no funding, and offers the app for sale at US$35,000 on TrustMRR and US$150,000 on whatsthe.app. Revenue peaked in August 2026 at US$10,155 and was falling in October. The page also shows earlier motion-tracking and coaching companies that failed." ], "factsCaption": "US$44,509 of RevenueCat-verified revenue in seven and a half months and US$5,393 of MRR on 25 October 2026, down from a peak in August", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR or whatsthe.app from the app's RevenueCat account through an API key. A grade B value is a record that Apple shows on the App Store. A grade C value was written by the seller, on a listing, on the App Store or in the company's terms. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From release to a sale listing and a falling MRR in seven and a half months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Boxer AI in-app purchases on the US App Store, read 25 October 2026 (grade C)", "note": "The app is free to download, and live AI coaching, full analysis, the arena, drills, workouts and the leaderboard need a subscription. Apple lists six in-app purchases with names and prices but not the length of each plan, and whatsthe.app shows the same six prices. The per-month values are calculated from the plan names. One App Store review of 16 July 2026 complains that the price appears only after the whole registration.", "rows": [ [ "Boxer AI Pro (four prices)", "", "", "US$8.99, US$9.99, US$29.99 and US$34.99; no source gives the length of each plan" ], [ "Yearly Discounted", "1.25", "", "US$14.99, named as a yearly discount" ], [ "3 Months Discounted", "", "", "US$19.99 for 3 months, about US$6.66 a month" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 25 October 2026", "value": "US$5,393", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot, revenue synced on 25 October 2026 at 11:39 UTC through a RevenueCat API key. 755 active subscriptions. TrustMRR gives MRR growth of -25.2% over the last 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the October 2026 MRR", "value": "about US$64,716 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$5,393 times 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Total revenue, March to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$44,509", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, all time. The eight monthly values add up to US$44,510; the difference of US$1 is rounding.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month, 2026", "value": "March US$4,619; April US$3,874; May US$1,763; June US$4,358; July US$6,752; August US$10,155; September US$8,585; October to the 25th US$4,404", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. March is the month of release. Calculated: August was 50.4% above July, and September 15.5% below August.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days, to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$5,940", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, which gives growth of -33.5% against the 30 days before; calculated, those earlier 30 days brought about US$8,932. Last 3 months: US$24,262. Last 6 months: US$36,207.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Daily revenue, late September and October 2026", "value": "about US$307 a day on 26 to 30 September, about US$160 a day on 14 to 24 October", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from TrustMRR's daily table: 47.8% lower.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "whatsthe.app figures, 15 September 2026", "value": "MRR of US$7,748, US$9,064 of revenue in 28 days, 764 active subscriptions, 4,187 active customers", "grade": "A", "note": "Read by whatsthe.app through RevenueCat (\"revenuecat-verified\" in the page data), last updated on 15 September 2026 at 20:40 UTC. MRR growth over 28 days: 0.0%. Calculated: the MRR on TrustMRR on 25 October was 30.4% lower.", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "MRR per active subscription", "value": "about US$10.14 in September, about US$7.14 in October 2026", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$7,748 divided by 764, and US$5,393 divided by 755. The number of subscriptions hardly changed, so the fall in MRR came mainly from a lower value per subscription.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Asking prices", "value": "US$35,000 on TrustMRR; US$150,000 on whatsthe.app", "grade": "C", "note": "Set by the seller. Both listings were first made on 23 August 2026 and carry the same seller message. TrustMRR counts 17 offers received; whatsthe.app counts 1 inquiry.", "src": [ 1, 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price compared with revenue", "value": "0.5 times on TrustMRR; 1.4 times on whatsthe.app", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$35,000 divided by 12 times the last 30 days of revenue (US$71,280) is 0.49, as TrustMRR shows; US$150,000 divided by whatsthe.app's annualized revenue of US$108,800 is 1.38.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Seller", "value": "the X handle @itsbenmarlowe; no full name in any source", "grade": "C", "note": "whatsthe.app names this handle as the founder of Boxer AI and of the company's makeup app, and the listing's contact address is on the impactdevelopment.llc domain. TrustMRR names no founder.", "src": [ 3, 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Seller on the App Store", "value": "Impact Development LLC", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's record. The company's terms describe it as a Wyoming limited liability company. Its developer page lists five apps.", "src": [ 2, 7, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 person", "grade": "C", "note": "Entered by the seller on TrustMRR. The seller's message says that he has started a major project with a co-founder while continuing his studies; that project is not Boxer AI.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported; listed as bootstrapped", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR profile. No source mentions investors.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Self-reported profit margin", "value": "50%", "grade": "C", "note": "On both listings; whatsthe.app marks it as self-reported.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Users", "value": "670 in the seller's estimate; 755 active subscriptions verified", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR shows the estimate next to the verified count, and they do not agree. whatsthe.app counted 4,187 active customers on 15 September 2026, with 18.2% of them subscribed.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "App Store ratings, 25 October 2026", "value": "2.1K ratings, average 4.7 of 5", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's page. TrustMRR's App Store sync of 12 October 2026 gives 2,029 ratings in the US store.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Age rating", "value": "13+", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's page, with frequent contests, user-generated content and social media. The company's terms say that users aged 13 to 17 need a parent's or guardian's consent and supervision.", "src": [ 2, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Release", "value": "8 March 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "Version 1.0 in the App Store history. whatsthe.app gives the same worldwide release date and TrustMRR the same founded date.", "src": [ 2, 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from release to the October 2026 figure", "value": "7 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: March 2026 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "12 June 2025", "what": "Impact Development LLC releases the makeup app Glamify AI; the listing text calls it Blush AI, the name on the App Store today. Its sale listing later calls the app pre-marketing.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 9 ] }, { "when": "8 March 2026", "what": "Boxer AI version 1.0 is released on the App Store, sold by Impact Development LLC. Three more versions follow the next day.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "March 2026", "what": "US$4,619 of revenue in the first month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "May 2026", "what": "US$1,763 of revenue, the lowest month, 61.8% below March.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2 to 15 June 2026", "what": "Seven new versions in two weeks, from 1.0.9 to 1.1.5. Every release note says only \"Improvements\".", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "July 2026", "what": "US$6,752 of revenue, 54.9% more than June.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "August 2026", "what": "US$10,155 of revenue, the best month so far.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "23 August 2026", "what": "Listed for sale on TrustMRR and on whatsthe.app on the same day, with the same message: the seller no longer has time for the app.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "when": "25 August 2026", "what": "Version 1.2.0, the latest version on 25 October 2026.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "15 September 2026", "what": "Last whatsthe.app update: MRR of US$7,748, 764 active subscriptions, US$9,064 in 28 days.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "US$8,585 of revenue, 15.5% below August.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR: MRR of US$5,393, 755 active subscriptions, US$44,509 in total, 17 offers for the US$35,000 listing.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "The phone camera as the only equipment", "text": "The App Store page says that the camera tracks jabs, crosses, hooks and uppercuts and that every session can be done at home with only the phone. Earlier products in this area needed sensor clothing, a game console camera or a human coach. Here the user needs no device, no gym and no partner, which also makes the first try cheap." }, { "title": "A game around the training", "text": "Users earn XP, level up, compete in 1v1 matches with boxers worldwide and join a community; Apple's age rating notes frequent contests. One review dated 30 June describes competitions with a cousin. These parts give a reason to open the app again, and the leaderboard and arena are behind the subscription." }, { "title": "Subscription after onboarding", "text": "The app is free to download, and the paywall appears after registration. A review of 16 July 2026 complains about exactly that. Apple lists six in-app purchases, two of them named as discounts, from US$8.99 to US$34.99." }, { "title": "One format, several sports", "text": "The same seller sells Wrestler AI, Golfer AI and Hooper AI, and their App Store pages repeat the structure: camera or video coaching, XP and levels, global rankings, a community, simple nutrition tools and a subscription for the main features. A different founder built the same kind of app for boxing, Brawler, which the App Store shows next to Boxer AI." }, { "title": "Short videos as the channel", "text": "Both listings name TikTok, TikTok Ads and Instagram as the marketing channels. No source gives the ad spend or the number of videos, and the seller writes that \"the previous strategy left significant room for growth\" in marketing and distribution." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the seller-entered fields of the TrustMRR profile and the whatsthe.app listing (grade C) and from the App Store page (grade B).", "items": [ "Swift and SwiftUI for the iPhone app; Python with FastAPI for the backend, running on Google Cloud and Firebase.", "OpenAI is named in the technology list. No source says which model is used or whether the punch tracking runs on the phone or on a server.", "RevenueCat records the subscriptions; TrustMRR and whatsthe.app read the revenue from it through API keys.", "21 versions in the App Store history from 8 March to 25 August 2026; the release notes say only \"Improvements\". The app is 175.7 MB, needs iOS 17 or later and is offered in English and six other languages.", "Apple's privacy label says \"Data Not Collected\"; Apple notes that it has not verified this. The terms page, written for the company's makeup app, says that third-party services such as OpenAI may process users' data.", "The company's website is a three-page Google Sites site with a contact address, a privacy policy and the terms." ], "src": [ 1, 3, 2, 8 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to coach exercise through motion tracking or remote coaching. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Enflux", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$1M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Smart clothing with sensors that track movement in 3D and give real-time feedback on form.", "died": "The clothing was costly to make and needed a complex supply chain, and Fitbit and Apple kept adding features to their wearables.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1089-enflux" }, { "name": "FitFu", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$300K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A phone app that detected exercises with the phone's motion sensors and turned them into a game with rewards.", "died": "Users left after the novelty wore off, it had no strong way to make money, and phones were not yet capable of better tracking. Nike Training Club and Fitbit offered more.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1194-fitfu" }, { "name": "Zigfu", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$200K", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Tools that let developers add motion sensing with Microsoft's Kinect camera to their applications.", "died": "It depended on one device, and Microsoft moved away from Kinect. Motion detection that needs no special hardware made its offer less useful.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1602-zigfu" }, { "name": "Charge Running", "years": "2021 to 2024", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Live online running classes with real-time audio coaching, like a personal trainer at home.", "died": "Users preferred flexible times to scheduled classes, and AI fitness apps offered personal coaching on demand.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/895-charge-running" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Enflux put sensors in clothing, Zigfu depended on the Kinect depth camera, and FitFu had only the motion sensors of a 2011 phone. Each needed special hardware or ran into the limits of the hardware of its time. Charge Running used people as coaches, at fixed times. All four raised money, from US$200,000 to US$5 million, and closed.", "Boxer AI uses only the ordinary camera of an iPhone and software that recognizes punches, so it has no hardware to make and no coaches to pay, and one person could build and run it. What did not change is FitFu's problem: keeping users after the first weeks. Boxer AI's revenue in the 30 days to 25 October 2026 was 41.5% below its best month, August, and the seller says that he no longer has time to market it. Larger apps for the same sport, such as Brawler, compete for the same users." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The format, yes. This app as an investment, with care.", "text": "An AI coach for one sport that people train alone, with the phone camera as the only equipment, a game layer and a subscription, is a format that several small sellers now repeat. The tools are open to anyone. What a copier cannot take from this case is a growing business: Boxer AI's verified revenue peaked in August 2026 and the seller has moved to another project.", "steps": [ "Pick a sport that people practise alone in front of a phone, where a camera can see the whole movement.", "Make the camera tracking the core feature, and add XP, levels and matches against other users so that people return.", "Charge a subscription, and show the price early: one user's main complaint was that it appeared only after registration.", "Connect the RevenueCat account to a verification site such as TrustMRR, so that a buyer can see real figures if you sell later." ], "open": "Sports and exercises with clear, countable movements that people train at home, as long as no app with large ad budgets serves them yet." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Falling revenue", "text": "Revenue rose from US$1,763 in May to US$10,155 in August 2026, then fell: US$8,585 in September and US$5,940 in the 30 days to 25 October, 33.5% below the 30 days before. Daily revenue on 14 to 24 October, about US$160 a day, was 47.8% below the level of late September. The MRR fell from US$7,748 on 15 September to US$5,393 on 25 October while the number of subscriptions stayed near 760." }, { "title": "Two listings, two prices", "text": "The same seller message appears on TrustMRR at US$35,000 and on whatsthe.app at US$150,000, both listed on 23 August 2026. The whatsthe.app figures have not changed since 15 September 2026, although the site says that data is updated hourly and the page data does not mark the API key as expired, so its US$150,000 price rests on older and higher numbers." }, { "title": "A seller known only by a handle", "text": "No source gives the seller's full name. whatsthe.app ties the handle @itsbenmarlowe to Boxer AI and to the company's makeup app, and the listing's contact address is on the company's domain. The App Store names only the company, Impact Development LLC. The seller says that he is a student and now works on another project with a co-founder." }, { "title": "Teenage users and camera data", "text": "The app is rated 13+ and includes contests, user-generated content and social features. The privacy label says that no data is collected, which Apple has not verified, for an app that films users through the camera. The terms ask for a parent's consent for users aged 13 to 17." }, { "title": "Dependence on OpenAI and on ads", "text": "The seller names OpenAI in the technology list and TikTok Ads among the channels. A price change at the model provider or on the ad platform changes the cost of each user. No source gives the cost of either." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6759840821" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/boxer-ai" }, { "kind": "whatsthe", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/boxerai2026" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of Boxer AI, revenue synced 25 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/boxer-ai.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile. The revenue, MRR, subscription, monthly and daily figures come from its Verification Sources section, read through a RevenueCat API key. The founded date, team size, funding, tech stack, channels, user estimate and profit margin are entered by the seller; the sale data is TrustMRR's listing record." }, { "title": "Boxer AI on the US App Store, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6759840821", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full: description, in-app purchases, version history, privacy label, age rating, seller, ratings and reviews. Seller, dates, ratings and age rating are Apple's records; the description and prices are written by the company." }, { "title": "whatsthe.app listing: Boxer AI, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/boxerai2026", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full, including the data embedded in the page. The revenue metrics were read by whatsthe.app through RevenueCat, last updated on 15 September 2026; the asking price, seller message, channels, technology, profit margin and founder handle are entered by the seller." }, { "title": "whatsthe.app leaderboard, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/leaderboard", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the listing data embedded in the page for the Boxer AI entry: founder field, verification type and creation date." }, { "title": "whatsthe.app founder page: @itsbenmarlowe, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/founder/itsbenmarlowe", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Lists two apps under this handle: Boxer AI and Glamify AI - Makeup & Beauty." }, { "title": "whatsthe.app listing: Glamify AI - Makeup & Beauty, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/llc.impactdevelopment.glamifyai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The seller's text for the company's makeup app: release date, team size 1, bootstrapped, no marketing, asking price US$600. Read for the purpose check of the seller's other apps." }, { "title": "App Store developer page: Impact Development LLC, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/impact-development-llc/id1816085564", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Lists five apps: Golfer AI, Hooper AI, Wrestler AI, Boxer AI and Blush AI." }, { "title": "Impact Development LLC: Terms & Conditions", "url": "https://www.impactdevelopment.llc/terms-conditions", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Linked from the Boxer AI App Store page. Source for the company form, the age rules and the use of third-party AI services. The site's robots.txt returns a 404 page, so no rule blocks it." }, { "title": "Blush AI: Makeup & Beauty on the US App Store, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/blush-ai-makeup-beauty/id6746294667", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the description, age rating and seller, for the purpose check: the user previews a makeup look on a selfie of their own face." }, { "title": "Wrestler AI on the US App Store, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wrestler-ai/id6801542604", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the description, age rating and seller, to compare the structure with Boxer AI." }, { "title": "Golfer AI: Swing Coach on the US App Store, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/golfer-ai-swing-coach/id6812569480", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the description, age rating and seller, to compare the structure with Boxer AI." }, { "title": "Hooper AI on the US App Store, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hooper-ai/id6807834578", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the description, age rating and seller, to compare the structure with Boxer AI." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/roastgpt/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/roastgpt.md", "slug": "roastgpt", "name": "RoastGPT", "country": "United Kingdom", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI roast and comeback generator app for iPhone", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "3 January 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$66K verified revenue in 11 months, October 2026", "sticker": "$66K in 11 months", "outcomeUsd": 66002, "months": 33, "teamLabel": "1 named owner, Matt Cowlin, through his company MSDC Technologies Ltd; no staff reported; who wrote the first version is not known", "fundingLabel": "None reported; listed as bootstrapped", "primaryFactor": "Low running cost", "group": "ai-model-tools", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Entertainment" ], "product": "An iPhone app with two buttons. The user uploads a screenshot of a text conversation and gets a joking reply to send back, or types a short description of a person and gets a joke about that person. A slider sets how sharp the joke is. Almost every use is behind one in-app purchase called All Access.", "why": "The app costs almost nothing to run: the owner reports a profit margin of 99%, and the App Store page shows no new version since July 2025. A small, steady flow of downloads, about 2,500 in 28 days in October 2026, keeps about 150 paid subscriptions alive. The owner is an experienced app marketer who already sells more than a dozen other apps from the same developer account.", "summary": [ "RoastGPT is an iPhone app that writes a roast or a comeback with an AI language model. A roast is a joke that makes fun of a person, as at a comedy show where friends tease a guest. A comeback is a quick, clever reply to something another person said. The user uploads a screenshot of a chat or describes a person, and the app returns a short joke to copy. The App Store page says it is \"Designed for fun, not harm\" and rates it 9+, with \"Infrequent/Mild Profanity or Crude Humor\".", "The App Store seller is MSDC Technologies Ltd, the company whose privacy policy is published on the personal website of Matt Cowlin, a British app marketer who writes that he has built \"90+ Apps\". Version 1.0 appeared on 3 January 2024. The earliest archived copy of the App Store page, from 14 September 2024, already names MSDC as seller. TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a payment provider, shows US$66,002 of revenue from December 2025 to 25 October 2026, read from RevenueCat, a service that records the subscriptions an app sells through the App Store. All of that revenue came while MSDC was the seller. No figure exists for the months before December 2025.", "This page is about running an app, not about building one. The app's internal identifier uses a prefix that none of MSDC's 15 other apps uses, so another developer may have created the first version, but no source names that developer or says that the app was bought. Revenue fell from US$8,365 in January 2026 to US$5,000 in September 2026, and the app has been for sale since 10 January 2026 at US$100,000. The page also shows four failed startups whose social products became tools for teasing and bullying." ], "factsCaption": "US$66,002 of payment-verified revenue in 11 months from one in-app purchase, earned by an app that received no update in that time", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR or whatsthe.app from RevenueCat, the service that records the app's App Store subscriptions. A grade B value is on Apple's App Store page or an archived copy of it. A grade C value was written by the owner or a sale listing. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a first version in January 2024 to a for-sale app that makes about US$4,500 a month. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "RoastGPT prices in October 2026, from the in-app purchase list on the US App Store page (grade B)", "note": "The App Store page lists one in-app purchase, All Access at US$6.99, and does not say whether it renews weekly, monthly or yearly. Calculated: monthly recurring revenue divided by active subscriptions is about US$29.30 a month (US$4,219 divided by 144 on TrustMRR), which is close to a weekly price of US$6.99 (US$30.29 a month). This is a reading of the numbers, not a stated period. The download is free. User reviews describe a payment screen at the first launch, and one says that a few free roasts come before it.", "rows": [ [ "All Access", "", "", "US$6.99 in-app purchase; period not stated on the App Store page" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue, December 2025 to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$66,002", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from RevenueCat through an API key, synced 25 October 2026. The 12-month total and the all-time total are the same number, and the monthly table starts in December 2025, so no revenue before December 2025 is connected.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 30 days to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$4,458", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. 11.0% below the 30 days before.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 25 October 2026", "value": "US$4,219, from 144 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot. Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is the subscription revenue that repeats each month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 2 October 2026", "value": "US$4,455, from 153 active subscriptions and 14 trials", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app, read from RevenueCat; last updated 2 October 2026, after which the API key expired. Revenue in the 28 days to that date: US$4,529.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Best month", "value": "US$8,365, January 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table. December 2025: US$5,911.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, September 2026", "value": "US$5,000", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table. June to August 2026: US$5,504, US$5,776 and US$5,499.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Fall from the best month to September 2026", "value": "about 40%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: (8,365 minus 5,000) divided by 8,365 equals 0.402.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average month, December 2025 to September 2026", "value": "about US$6,234", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 62,342 (the ten full months) divided by 10.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "99%", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot. Costs are entered by the owner, not read from a payment provider. A Flippa listing states 100% margins.", "src": [ 1, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Downloads, 28 days to early October 2026", "value": "about 2,500", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app, iOS and Android combined, with 2,468 new customers in RevenueCat in the same 28 days. An undated Flippa listing states 14,500 downloads a month.", "src": [ 2, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Ratings on the US App Store", "value": "7 in September 2024, about 1,000 in January 2026, about 1,300 in October 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "Archived App Store pages of 14 September 2024 and 21 January 2026, and the live page. Average 4.6 in October 2026. whatsthe.app counts 1,700 ratings across all countries.", "src": [ 3, 4, 5, 2 ] }, { "fact": "App Store seller", "value": "MSDC TECHNOLOGIES LTD, at least since 14 September 2024", "grade": "B", "note": "Named on every App Store copy read for this page, from September 2024 to October 2026. The same account sells teleprompter, soundboard, film-set and podcast apps.", "src": [ 3, 4, 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Link between MSDC and Matt Cowlin", "value": "MSDC's privacy policy is on mattcowlin.com", "grade": "C", "note": "The App Store page links to that policy. TrustMRR names the founder as Matt, with the profile name mattcowlin, and whatsthe.app shows @MattCowlin as the seller.", "src": [ 8, 3, 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Who wrote the first version", "value": "not known", "grade": "C", "note": "The app's bundle identifier uses a prefix that none of the 15 other MSDC apps on the App Store page uses (they use matt.app, msdc.app, com.msdc, com.msdcangel or com.infinity). No source names another developer or a purchase.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Start of the business, as entered by the seller", "value": "January 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "whatsthe.app sale details: \"Business Operations Started Jan 2025\". The app itself was released on 3 January 2024. The Flippa listing gives the app's age as 1 year.", "src": [ 2, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Last app update", "value": "version 2.2.2, 25 July 2025", "grade": "B", "note": "App Store version history. The note reads \"Fixes Critical error as our data provider went bust!!\". All verified revenue came after this update.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price", "value": "US$100,000", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR (listed since 10 January 2026, 8 offers received), whatsthe.app and Flippa. An undated Acquire.com listing asks US$75,000.", "src": [ 1, 2, 10, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price compared with revenue", "value": "about 1.5 times the US$66,002", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 100,000 divided by 66,002 equals 1.52. TrustMRR states 1.9x, which matches the last 30 days times 12 (US$53,496).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Annual revenue on the Acquire.com listing", "value": "US$106,000, with US$85,700 annual profit", "grade": "C", "note": "Undated seller listing. It is 1.6 times the verified all-time total, so it is probably a yearly rate from a strong month. It is not used as a headline.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Time from version 1.0 to the October 2026 figure", "value": "33 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: January 2024 to October 2026.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2012 to 2023", "what": "Matt Cowlin founds Teleprompter Pro in 2012 and sells it in 2023, according to his website. He describes himself as a marketer of 12 years and more who has built more than 90 apps, mostly for video production.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "3 January 2024", "what": "Version 1.0 of RoastGPT appears on the App Store. Version 1.1 follows on 7 January.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "when": "10 and 11 February 2024", "what": "Versions 2.0 and 2.2.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "June 2024", "what": "roastgptapp.com, the site that the app's privacy and terms links point to, shows a domain registrar's page that asks the owner to verify contact details. By November 2024 it shows a parked page.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "14 September 2024", "what": "The earliest archived App Store page names MSDC TECHNOLOGIES LTD as seller. The app has 7 US ratings and an All Access purchase at US$6.99.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "4 March 2025", "what": "Version 2.2.1, with stability fixes.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "25 July 2025", "what": "Version 2.2.2: \"Fixes Critical error as our data provider went bust!!\". It is the last update up to October 2026.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "December 2025", "what": "First month of verified revenue on TrustMRR: US$5,911.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "10 January 2026", "what": "Listed for sale on TrustMRR at US$100,000. The seller's message: \"Fund personal projects.\"", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "January 2026", "what": "Best month, US$8,365. The App Store page of 21 January 2026 shows about 1,000 ratings and links to the MSDC privacy policy on mattcowlin.com.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "US$5,000, about 40% below January.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2 October 2026", "what": "whatsthe.app shows MRR of US$4,455 and 153 active subscriptions, then stops updating because the RevenueCat key expired.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR shows US$4,458 in the last 30 days, MRR of US$4,219 and 144 active subscriptions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Low running cost", "text": "The owner reports a 99% profit margin on TrustMRR. The app had no new version between July 2025 and October 2026, so there was no development cost while all of the verified revenue came in." }, { "title": "One purchase behind a paywall", "text": "The app sells a single in-app purchase, All Access at US$6.99. User reviews describe a payment screen at the first launch and only a few free roasts. Several one-star reviews complain about it, and the average rating is still 4.6 from about 1,300 US ratings." }, { "title": "A clear name in a search-driven store", "text": "The App Store name is \"RoastGPT - AI Roast Generator\" and the subtitle \"Roast AI Comeback Generator\": the words a person types when looking for such an app. No source says where the downloads come from. The seller writes on whatsthe.app that the app \"could explode on TikTok if someone with that knowhow takes it on\", which suggests TikTok is not a channel today." }, { "title": "Running, not building", "text": "The owner is a marketer with more than a dozen apps on the same developer account. The evidence shows him operating and selling RoastGPT. It does not show who wrote its code, and the seller-entered start date, January 2025, is a year after the first release." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "Few build details are public. These come from the sale listings, written by the seller (grade C), and from the App Store page (grade B).", "items": [ "Native iPhone app written with SwiftUI, Apple's interface framework, according to the tech stack on whatsthe.app.", "Subscriptions are sold through Apple's in-app purchase system and recorded in RevenueCat, which TrustMRR and whatsthe.app read through API keys.", "The AI model provider is not named anywhere. The July 2025 update says it fixed a critical error because the app's \"data provider went bust\", which suggests the app changed the service behind the roasts at that time.", "Two inputs: a cropped screenshot of a chat, read by the app, or a typed description of a person. A slider on the result screen sets how sharp the joke is, as the App Store screenshots show.", "The app's privacy and terms links first pointed to roastgptapp.com. By January 2026 they pointed to an MSDC Technologies Ltd policy page on mattcowlin.com.", "The sale includes the source code and brand assets, with support from the seller after the sale, according to whatsthe.app." ], "src": [ 2, 3, 1, 4, 5, 9 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database built social products for young users in which teasing turned into bullying, or a fun add-on for chats that the large platforms copied. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Formspring", "years": "2009 to 2016", "funding": "US$14M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A question-and-answer site where teenagers asked each other questions, often anonymously.", "died": "It did not earn money from its large audience, and the anonymous questions turned into cyberbullying and bad press. Ask.fm and newer networks took its users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/161-formspring" }, { "name": "Yik Yak", "years": "2013 to 2017", "funding": "US$73M", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Anonymous posts that anyone within about 8 kilometres could read, aimed at college campuses.", "died": "Bullying and harassment led to school bans and damaged its name. Anonymous posts were hard to sell advertising against, and growth slowed.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/775-yik-yak" }, { "name": "Secret", "years": "2014 to 2015", "funding": "US$35M", "cause": "Team/Founder Conflict", "promise": "An app for sharing confessions and gossip without your name.", "died": "The novelty faded, cyberbullying grew, and the founders disagreed about the direction while users left.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/526-secret" }, { "name": "Guggy", "years": "2017 to 2020", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Turn the text of a chat message into a funny animated GIF.", "died": "WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger built GIF search into their own apps. Guggy had no clear way to charge, and it depended on the platforms it plugged into.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1429-guggy" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Formspring, Yik Yak and Secret show what happens when a product for young users makes it easy to say hurtful things about other people: schools ban it, the press turns against it, and users leave. Each of them raised millions of dollars and needed a large audience to sell advertising. Guggy shows the other risk of a fun add-on for chats: the messaging platforms copy it for free.", "RoastGPT differs in two ways. It is not a social network: the joke goes to the user, who decides whether to send it, and nobody posts anything inside the app. And it charges a few dollars to a small number of people instead of selling advertising to millions, so about 150 subscribers are enough to keep it profitable. The risk that remains is the one the predecessors had: the app invites jokes about a real person, and its 9+ rating means children can install it." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The app, maybe. The model, yes.", "text": "Many roast and reply apps compete in the same App Store searches: eight of the ten apps that the RoastGPT page recommends are roast, flirting or reply apps. A copy would need its own name, search position and paywall. The more general model is open: a single-purpose AI app with one purchase, low running cost and a small team, run by someone who knows App Store marketing, and sold when growth stops.", "steps": [ "Pick a request that people type into the App Store search box, and put those words in the app name and subtitle.", "Keep the app to one or two actions, each a single request to a language model, so the running cost stays near zero.", "Connect a subscription service such as RevenueCat from the start, so the revenue can be verified when you want to sell.", "Write clear rules against harm in the app, set the age rating honestly, and check what users really do with it." ], "open": "Single-purpose AI apps for a concrete everyday task, for example a reply helper for work messages, apology or thank-you notes, or language practice, where the joke or text is about the user and not about another person." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Who built it and when it changed hands", "text": "Apple's page has named MSDC Technologies Ltd as seller since at least 14 September 2024, eight months after version 1.0. The app's internal identifier differs from all other MSDC apps, the seller gives January 2025 as the start of the business, and the first website, roastgptapp.com, lapsed in 2024. No source says who wrote the code or whether MSDC bought the app. All verified revenue on this page came under MSDC." }, { "title": "Jokes about real people, with a 9+ rating", "text": "The app asks the user to \"Describe a person you'd like to make harmless fun with\", and a screenshot shows a roast of a person named Nico. It asks users to be respectful, but nothing stops a joke aimed at a classmate, and an early review says it \"roasted the person I want to stand up to\". The App Store rates it 9+. Formspring, Yik Yak and Secret failed in part because of bullying." }, { "title": "Falling revenue and no updates", "text": "Monthly revenue fell about 40% from January to September 2026, and the last 30 days were 11% below the 30 days before. The app has had no new version since 25 July 2025." }, { "title": "Numbers that do not agree", "text": "An undated Acquire.com listing states US$106,000 of annual revenue and US$85,700 of profit at an asking price of US$75,000, more than the US$66,002 that RevenueCat shows for all time. The other listings ask US$100,000. The listing figures are written by the seller; this page uses the RevenueCat figures." }, { "title": "Complaints about the paywall", "text": "Several reviews say the app asks for payment before the user sees a roast, and that a \"Continue for Free\" button still led to a payment screen. Another review says a \"Dismiss\" button skips the payment." }, { "title": "For sale", "text": "The app has been listed for sale since 10 January 2026. A new owner would get a running app with no recent updates, an unnamed AI provider and a downward trend." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6469049780" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/roastgpt" }, { "kind": "whatsthe", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/yinka.RoastGPTKask" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of RoastGPT, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/roastgpt.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full, live on 25 October 2026; revenue synced the same day from RevenueCat through an API key. Revenue, MRR and subscription counts are grade A; the profit margin, the seller message, the asking price and the description are written by the owner, grade C." }, { "title": "whatsthe.app listing of RoastGPT", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/yinka.RoastGPTKask", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Metrics \"verified through RevenueCat API keys\", last updated 2 October 2026. Source for the second revenue reading, the release date, the downloads, the tech stack and the seller's sale details." }, { "title": "Apple App Store: RoastGPT - AI Roast Generator", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/roastgpt-ai-roast-generator/id6469049780", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026, with the three screenshots. Source for the description, the age rating, the in-app purchase, the ratings, the reviews, the version history, the seller and the other MSDC apps with their bundle identifiers." }, { "title": "Apple App Store page, Wayback Machine copy of 14 September 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240914010756/https://apps.apple.com/us/app/roastgpt-ai-roast-generator/id6469049780", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The earliest archived copy. Source for the seller in 2024, the 7 ratings, the US$6.99 price and the roastgptapp.com links." }, { "title": "Apple App Store page, Wayback Machine copy of 21 January 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260121233439/https://apps.apple.com/us/app/roastgpt-ai-roast-generator/id6469049780", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the ratings in January 2026 and the privacy link to mattcowlin.com." }, { "title": "Apple App Store page, UK storefront, Wayback Machine copy of 12 November 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20241112121334/https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/roastgpt-ai-roast-generator/id6469049780", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Confirms MSDC TECHNOLOGIES LTD as seller in November 2024." }, { "title": "Matt Cowlin's personal website", "url": "https://mattcowlin.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026 (the page says it was last updated on 2 July 2024). Source for his background, Teleprompter Pro and the 90+ apps. It does not mention RoastGPT." }, { "title": "MSDC Technologies Ltd privacy policy and terms, on mattcowlin.com", "url": "https://mattcowlin.com/policies/privacy.html", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The page that the App Store listing links to. Source for the link between MSDC and Matt Cowlin." }, { "title": "roastgptapp.com, Wayback Machine copies of 2 June and 6 November 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240602190505/http://roastgptapp.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both copies. June 2024 shows a registrar page that asks the owner to verify contact details; November 2024 shows a parked domain. No earlier copy with content exists." }, { "title": "Flippa listing: RoastGPT - AI Roast Generator", "url": "https://flippa.com/12287932-roastgpt-ai-roast-generator", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public part on 25 October 2026. Undated. Source for the monthly profit and downloads stated by the seller, the app age and the asking price. Financial details need an account and were not read." }, { "title": "Acquire.com listing: AI roast generator app for playful users", "url": "https://app.acquire.com/startup/j372yq54hw-ai-roast-generator-app-for-playful-users-to-create-light-hearted-comebacks-solid-app-store-position", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public part on 25 October 2026. Undated. Cited only for its revenue, profit and asking price, which do not agree with the verified figures." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/visualize-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/visualize-ai.md", "slug": "visualize-ai", "name": "Visualize AI", "country": "United Kingdom", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI room and garden redesign app for iPhone", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "2 September 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$63.5K in verified revenue in 12 months, October 2026", "sticker": "$63.5K in 12 months", "outcomeUsd": 63524, "months": 13, "teamLabel": "2 to 5 people, as the seller states on TrustMRR; the UK register lists one director, Jack Brown, and no employees in the year to September 2025", "fundingLabel": "None: TrustMRR lists it as bootstrapped, and the owning company has one share, held by its director", "primaryFactor": "Simplicity", "group": "real-estate", "channel": "creators", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Interior design" ], "product": "An iPhone app. The user takes or uploads a photo of a room, a garden or a single object, types what the new design should be (for example \"minimalist living room with industrial touches\") or picks a preset style and colour, and the app returns an edited photo of the same space. The user can edit the result again, save and share it, and open a Shop feature that sends the image to Google Lens to find similar products. Generating designs needs a weekly, monthly or yearly subscription.", "why": "A redesign picture of one's own room used to need an interior designer or hours of 3D software. Image-editing models offered as hosted services now make one in seconds, so a single developer could wrap such a model in a simple app and sell it as a subscription. The RevenueCat account that TrustMRR reads shows US$63,524 in the twelve months to 25 October 2026, with a best month in April 2026 and a steady fall since.", "summary": [ "Visualize AI is an iPhone app that redesigns a room from a photo. The user photographs a living room, a kitchen or a backyard, writes the change in plain words or picks a style, and the app sends the photo and the text to an image-editing model, an AI model that changes an existing picture according to an instruction instead of drawing a new one from nothing. The app's privacy policy says that the photo goes to FAL, a service that runs such models, and that OpenAI's models write short titles for the designs. The app is free to install with in-app purchases, payments made inside an iPhone app and collected by Apple, here a weekly, monthly or yearly subscription from US$5.99 a week to US$39.99 a year.", "The App Store names the developer and seller as Jack Brown, whose other apps are a travel tracker, a career log, a breathing-exercise app and a habit tracker. The app's terms of service, updated on 8 June 2026, say the app is provided by Pothos Digital, and the UK company register lists Pothos Digital Limited, formed in September 2024, with Jack Brown as its only director and the holder of its only share. No source shows a sale or a change of owner, so all the revenue on this page came under the same owner. The app was released on 2 September 2025. TrustMRR, a service that reads revenue through the seller's own billing account, shows US$71,522 in total by 25 October 2026, of which US$63,524 came in the last twelve months. The best month was April 2026 with US$8,188; September 2026 brought US$3,097, and monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the monthly value of all active subscriptions) was US$2,847 from 240 subscriptions on 25 October 2026. The app has been listed for sale since 1 August 2026.", "The revenue figures are grade A: TrustMRR reads them through an API key from RevenueCat, a subscription-management service that records an app's App Store purchases. whatsthe.app, an app revenue directory, shows figures from RevenueCat as well, but its listing was imported by the site itself and probably reads the same account, so it is not counted as an independent second source. The company facts come from the official UK register. Everything else, including the team size, the marketing channel and how the app is built, comes from the seller's own pages and is grade C. The page also shows earlier companies that sold interior design online, and why they failed." ], "factsCaption": "US$63,524 in verified revenue in the twelve months to 25 October 2026 and US$71,522 since a September 2025 launch, from an app whose monthly revenue fell by 62% between April and September 2026", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the app's RevenueCat account, or comes from the official UK company register. A grade C value is what the seller, the App Store page or the app's own website states. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a one-person company formed in September 2024 to US$71,522 of verified app revenue 13 months after the app's release, with a peak in April 2026 and a fall since. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Visualize AI in-app purchases on the US App Store, read 25 October 2026 (grade C)", "note": "The App Store lists five subscription prices, and whatsthe.app shows the same five. The store page does not say how many designs each plan includes; the terms of service say that \"included generation credits\" are shown before purchase. Two weekly prices for one plan name usually mean that the app shows different offers to different users. The yearly plan is US$39.99 a year, about US$3.33 a month (calculated). One App Store review from July says the app gave \"exactly one sparse image before requiring payment\". Apple collects the payments and keeps its commission; the TrustMRR profile does not say whether its figures are before or after that commission.", "rows": [ [ "Pro Yearly", "3.33", "", "US$39.99 a year; design limits not shown" ], [ "Monthly", "", "17.99", "design limits not shown" ], [ "Pro Weekly", "", "", "US$8.99 a week" ], [ "Weekly", "", "", "US$7.99 a week; a second weekly price of US$5.99 is also listed" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 12 months to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$63,524", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, from RevenueCat through an API key, last synced 25 October 2026. The twelve calendar months on the same profile, November 2025 to 25 October 2026, add up to US$62,443 (calculated), because the rolling window and the calendar months do not cover exactly the same days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue since launch, 25 October 2026", "value": "US$71,522", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, all time.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before late October 2025", "value": "US$7,998", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: all-time revenue minus the last twelve months. This covers about the first eight weeks after the release on 2 September 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Best month", "value": "US$8,188, April 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. May 2026 was US$7,613. November 2025 to March 2026 averaged US$5,532 a month (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, September 2026", "value": "US$3,097", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. 62.2% below April 2026 (calculated). June, July and August 2026: US$4,901, US$4,658 and US$4,172. October 2026 to the 25th: US$2,155.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, last 30 days to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$2,566, down 20.8%", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. The last three months brought US$10,089, against US$16,958 in the three months before them, a fall of 40.5% (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 25 October 2026", "value": "US$2,847 from 240 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR metric snapshot; MRR growth over the last 30 days shown as -7.9%. About US$11.86 of MRR per subscription (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 1 October 2026", "value": "US$3,055", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app, \"All data is verified through RevenueCat\", last updated 1 October 2026. Revenue in the last 28 days: US$2,700. The listing is marked as imported by the site's system, and the seller's picture is stored on the image host that TrustMRR uses, so it probably reads the same account and is not an independent second source.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Yearly value of the October 2026 MRR", "value": "US$34,164", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$2,847 times 12. The last 30 days of revenue times 12 give US$30,792. Both are about half the twelve-month total of US$63,524.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days to 25 October 2026", "value": "90.0%", "grade": "C", "note": "A TrustMRR metric snapshot. The profile does not say how the costs were read.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Seller's own summary", "value": "\"$50k+ in 11 months (lifetime). Almost completely passive with 0-1 hour per week.\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller-written text on the TrustMRR profile, undated. The verified totals agree with the first part.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Release", "value": "2 September 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "App Store version history (version 1.0, 09/02/2025) and whatsthe.app (\"Worldwide Release Date: September 2, 2025\"). TrustMRR gives 1 September 2025 as the founding date.", "src": [ 2, 8, 1 ] }, { "fact": "App Store developer and seller", "value": "Jack Brown, 5 apps", "grade": "C", "note": "The App Store page shows \"Seller Jack Brown\" and \"Copyright © 2025 Jack Brown\"; the app's bundle identifier is com.jackbrown.visualize. His newest app, a travel tracker, shows \"Copyright © 2026 Pothos Digital\" under the same seller.", "src": [ 2, 3, 4, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Company that provides the app", "value": "Pothos Digital", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms of service and privacy policy, both \"Last updated: June 8, 2026\".", "src": [ 6, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Pothos Digital Limited", "value": "UK private company formed 19 September 2024; one director, Jack Brown; one share", "grade": "A", "note": "UK company register. The register of persons with significant control lists him with 75% or more of the shares and votes, notified 19 September 2024 and still active on 25 October 2026. The confirmation statement of 18 September 2026 still shows one share.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Company accounts to 30 September 2025", "value": "cash of £221, net liabilities of £971, no employees", "grade": "A", "note": "Unaudited small-company accounts, signed by the director on 11 June 2026. They end four weeks after the app's release and do not include a profit-and-loss account.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 to 5 people", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller-written field on TrustMRR (\"Team size: 2–5 people\"). The company accounts record an average of no employees in the year to September 2025. The TrustMRR and whatsthe.app account that lists the app for sale uses the first name \"Felix\", which is not the developer's name; no source says who that is.", "src": [ 1, 8, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR: \"Funding: Bootstrapped\". The register shows one share held by the director.", "src": [ 1, 9 ] }, { "fact": "For sale", "value": "asking US$39,500, listed since 1 August 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR shows a revenue multiple of 1.3x and 7 offers; whatsthe.app shows the price cut from US$49,500. The asking price is 0.62 times the last twelve months of revenue (calculated).", "src": [ 1, 8 ] }, { "fact": "App Store ratings", "value": "3.7 from 66 ratings in the US store", "grade": "C", "note": "US App Store page, 25 October 2026. whatsthe.app counts 93 ratings across seven storefronts.", "src": [ 2, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Time from release to the October 2026 figure", "value": "13 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: September 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "19 September 2024", "what": "Pothos Digital Limited is formed in England with one share. Jack Brown is its only director and its person with significant control.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "2025", "what": "Jack Brown's App Store account carries a breathing-exercise app, a career log and a habit tracker, each with a small subscription, all with a 2025 copyright line in his name.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "2 September 2025", "what": "Visualize AI version 1.0 is released on the App Store.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 8 ] }, { "when": "8 September 2025", "what": "Version 1.1.0 adds preset styles and colours and taking a photo inside the app.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "30 September 2025", "what": "End of the company's first accounting year: £221 in the bank and no employees.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "US$4,792 in verified revenue, the first month in the public part of the TrustMRR timeline. About US$7,998 had come in before late October (calculated).", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "8 January 2026", "what": "Version 1.3.3 adds \"Shop for products\", which opens Google Lens with the generated image.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 7 ] }, { "when": "7 April 2026", "what": "Version 2.0.0: a new interface, editing of generated images and subscription management. April 2026 becomes the best month, with US$8,188.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "when": "8 June 2026", "what": "New terms of service and privacy policy name Pothos Digital as the provider and list FAL and OpenAI as the AI providers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 7 ] }, { "when": "9 June 2026", "what": "Version 2.0.2, the last update on the App Store page in October 2026.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "1 August 2026", "what": "The app is first listed for sale on TrustMRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "US$3,097 in the month, 62% below April.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "1 October 2026", "what": "MRR US$3,055 on whatsthe.app, where the asking price is now US$39,500, down from US$49,500.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "MRR US$2,847 from 240 subscriptions on TrustMRR. US$63,524 in the last twelve months and US$71,522 since launch. Jack Brown is still the company's director and owner on the register.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 9 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "One photo, one sentence, one result", "text": "The app asks for two things: a photo and a description. The App Store text gives examples such as a \"tropical backyard oasis\", and the home page lists four steps: snap a photo, describe the style, generate ideas, save and compare. The work that an interior designer or a 3D modeller once did is one call to an image-editing model." }, { "title": "Rented models, small costs", "text": "The privacy policy says that FAL processes the photo and hosts the generated image, and that OpenAI writes short titles. The developer runs no model of his own. TrustMRR shows a 90% profit margin for the last 30 days, which the seller does not explain; it would fit a product whose main cost is model time paid per image." }, { "title": "A subscription before the result", "text": "Generating designs needs a weekly, monthly or yearly plan, and one July review complains that the app gave one image before asking for payment. Weekly plans at US$5.99 to US$8.99 let a user who wants a few redesigns for one renovation pay for a week instead of a year." }, { "title": "Short videos as the marketing channel", "text": "The seller's TrustMRR profile lists TikTok as the marketing channel. The privacy policy says that the Meta SDK is used for purchase attribution and app event measurement, which advertisers use to measure paid ads, but no source says that the app paid for ads. No source gives the number of downloads." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the app's terms of service and privacy policy, the App Store page and the seller's TrustMRR profile. They are grade C, except the RevenueCat connection, which TrustMRR confirms.", "items": [ "Image generation: the photo and the prompt go to the app's backend and then to FAL, which runs the image-editing model and hosts the output images. The privacy policy says that the original photos are not kept after processing.", "OpenAI generates \"short design metadata such as titles\" for each design.", "The terms list Expo, a framework for building iPhone and Android apps in JavaScript and React Native, and Convex, a hosted backend database, among the services the app uses.", "Subscriptions are sold through Apple's in-app purchases and recorded in RevenueCat, which TrustMRR reads through an API key.", "PostHog measures how the app is used; the Meta SDK and RevenueCat measure purchase attribution. The App Store privacy labels declare device identifiers used for third-party advertising and say that the app contains advertising.", "The Shop feature opens Google Lens with the generated image so that Google shows shopping results; the privacy policy does not say whether the app earns a commission from it.", "The website visualizeai.app is a one-page site with a download link, a privacy policy and terms. An Android download link is in the page code but commented out, and the App Store lists the app for iPhone only.", "The seller published 11 versions between 2 September 2025 and 9 June 2026." ], "src": [ 6, 7, 2, 1, 5 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised to make interior design affordable through software or an online service. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Modsy", "years": "2015 to 2022", "funding": "US$72.7M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Upload photos of a room and receive photorealistic 3D renderings with furniture to buy from partner retailers.", "died": "Each room needed hours of human designer work behind the software, so gross margins stayed thin while paid social ads made customers expensive.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2521-modsy" }, { "name": "Laurel & Wolf", "years": "2014 to 2019", "funding": "US$25M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Flat-fee online interior design by professional designers.", "died": "The flat fees did not cover the cost of finding customers, and quality fell as the designer network grew.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2012-laurel--wolf" }, { "name": "Tastemaker", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$1.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Affordable online interior design for middle-income households.", "died": "A distributed workforce of designers gave uneven service, customers were costly to win, and better-funded rivals took the market.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1572-tastemaker" }, { "name": "Kujiale", "years": "2011 to 2025", "funding": "US$550M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Design your home in 3D in the browser and buy the furniture you placed.", "died": "Consumers played with the tool and then left, because they wanted experts to design for them, and AI image tools made its technology obsolete.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2371-kujiale" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Modsy, Laurel & Wolf and Tastemaker sold a design made by people, and the database records that the designers' time was the cost that did not shrink as they grew. Kujiale replaced the designer with a 3D editor, and the database records that most consumers did not want to do the design work themselves. Visualize AI asks for one sentence and returns a picture, with no designer and no 3D model, so one more customer costs a model call rather than hours of work.", "The predecessors raised between US$1.5 million and US$550 million. Visualize AI is run by a company with one share and no employees on its last accounts, and it rents its model from FAL. What it does not solve is what the predecessors' customers also wanted: the actual furniture and the actual renovation. The app makes a picture; the Shop feature hands the picture to Google Lens. TrustMRR's verified figures show the revenue falling from April 2026, while Apple's own page for the app suggests ten similar apps." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, easily, which is also the main risk.", "text": "The whole product is a photo upload, a prompt box, a call to a hosted image-editing model and a subscription paywall. One developer built it next to four other small apps. The same simplicity lets anyone build the same app: the App Store page of Visualize AI suggests ten other AI home-design apps, and an older iPad app by another developer has almost the same name.", "steps": [ "Pick a job where people pay a professional for a picture of a possible result: a room, a garden, a facade, a haircut.", "Use a hosted image-editing model (FAL, OpenAI or similar) instead of training one, and keep the photos only as long as processing needs.", "Sell weekly, monthly and yearly plans through Apple's in-app purchases and record them in RevenueCat.", "Keep shipping features that bring users back, such as editing a result again and shopping for the items in it, because revenue falls when the updates stop." ], "open": "Redesign apps for one narrow buyer, such as landlords who want listing photos, gardeners, shop owners planning a shop window, or tradespeople who show a client a finished bathroom before quoting." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue is falling", "text": "TrustMRR shows US$8,188 in April 2026, US$3,097 in September and US$2,155 in the first 25 days of October. The last 30 days are down 20.8%, and the last three months are 40.5% below the three before them (calculated). The last app update was on 9 June 2026, and the seller describes the app as almost passive, at 0 to 1 hour of work a week." }, { "title": "Who is \"Felix\"?", "text": "The App Store developer, the copyright line, the bundle identifier and the company register all point to Jack Brown and his company Pothos Digital. The TrustMRR and whatsthe.app account that lists the app for sale uses the first name \"Felix\". No source says whether that is a partner, an agent or another name, and the team size of 2 to 5 people is the seller's own statement, while the company's accounts record no employees in the year to September 2025." }, { "title": "Listed for sale", "text": "The app has been for sale since 1 August 2026, now at US$39,500, about 0.6 times its last twelve months of revenue. A sale would change the owner, and nothing on this page says what a new owner would do. No sale had happened by 25 October 2026: the App Store seller and the register still name Jack Brown." }, { "title": "User complaints", "text": "The US rating is 3.7 from 66 ratings. Reviews from February and July complain that saving images failed, that a paid subscription was not recognised, and that the app changed the size of a room. One review says the user installed it after an Apartment Therapy review, but an older iPad app by YMDevs, LLC is called \"Visualize AI: Interior Design\" too, and no downloaded source shows which app the magazine covered." }, { "title": "Many near-copies", "text": "Apple's suggestions on the app's page list ten other AI home-design apps. All of them can rent the same image models, so the product has no technical advantage over them; its revenue depends on being found and on its price." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://visualizeai.app/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6751707385" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/visualize-ai" }, { "kind": "whatsthe", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/visualize-ai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of Visualize AI, as read on 25 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/visualize-ai.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full, live on 25 October 2026 (synced 17:21 UTC), and compared it with a copy read six hours earlier: the revenue figures were the same. Revenue, monthly timeline, daily revenue, MRR and subscription counts are read from RevenueCat through an API key and are grade A. The description, team size, funding, marketing channel, sale details and profit-margin snapshot are seller-written or not explained, grade C." }, { "title": "App Store page: Visualize AI - Interior Design, US storefront", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6751707385", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Source for the description, the in-app purchase prices, the version history and release notes, the ratings and reviews, the age rating, the seller and copyright lines, the privacy labels and Apple's list of similar apps." }, { "title": "App Store developer page: Jack Brown", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/jack-brown/id1768322049", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026, with the App Store pages of the seller's other apps: Climb, Nasalflow and Habit Tracker - Grow. Source for the list of five apps, their purpose and their prices." }, { "title": "App Store page: Stamped: Travel Tracker & Map", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stamped-travel-tracker-map/id6770658127", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Source for \"Copyright © 2026 Pothos Digital\" under the seller Jack Brown, which ties the App Store account to the company." }, { "title": "Visualize AI website, home page", "url": "https://visualizeai.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Source for the four steps of the product and the iOS download link; the Android link is commented out in the page code. The site's robots.txt contains only content-signal comments and no rules." }, { "title": "Visualize AI terms and conditions, last updated 8 June 2026", "url": "https://visualizeai.app/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Source for Pothos Digital as the provider, the generation credits and the list of third-party services." }, { "title": "Visualize AI privacy policy, last updated 8 June 2026", "url": "https://visualizeai.app/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Source for the use of FAL and OpenAI, the photo retention rule, the Google Lens shop feature and the analytics and attribution tools." }, { "title": "whatsthe.app page for Visualize AI", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/visualize-ai", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026, including its page data. Revenue figures \"verified through RevenueCat\", last updated 1 October 2026; the page data marks the listing as imported by the site, so it probably reads the same account as TrustMRR. Also the release date, the ratings per storefront, the in-app prices, the seller name \"Felix\" and the price cut (grade C)." }, { "title": "UK company register: Pothos Digital Limited, company 15966268", "url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/15966268", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the overview, the officers, the persons with significant control, the filing history and the confirmation statement of 18 September 2026 on 25 October 2026. Official register entries." }, { "title": "Pothos Digital Limited, unaudited financial statements for 19 September 2024 to 30 September 2025", "url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/15966268/filing-history", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the filed accounts in full (iXBRL version), filed 19 June 2026. Source for the cash, the net liabilities and the number of employees." }, { "title": "App Store page: Visualize AI: Interior Design by YMDevs, LLC", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6472616702", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the header and seller lines on 25 October 2026. A different, older app with almost the same name, from another developer." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/inkfusion/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/inkfusion.md", "slug": "inkfusion", "name": "InkFusion", "country": "United Kingdom", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI tattoo design generator and virtual try-on app for iPhone and Android", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "12 February 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$4.3K MRR, October 2026", "sticker": "$51K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 51228, "months": 20, "teamLabel": "2 designated members of the UK partnership that sells the app; the seller on the sale listing writes in the first person", "fundingLabel": "None reported; the seller states expenses of US$100 a month and no paid ads", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "photos", "channel": "creators", "trend": "flat", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Art and design" ], "product": "A phone app for people who plan a tattoo. The user describes an idea in words, picks a style such as linework, realism, blackwork or Japanese, and the app generates tattoo designs. A second mode turns a photo, for example of a pet or a person, into a tattoo design. A third mode places the design on a photo of the user's own body, where the user can change size, position and angle. Designs can be saved, shared and turned into stencils. Most use needs a weekly or yearly subscription.", "why": "A tattoo is permanent, so people want to see it before they sit in the chair, and the app sells exactly that preview. The design is made by image models from fal.ai and OpenAI, so the company did not have to train a model. The seller says all traffic is unpaid and comes from two TikTok accounts that come with the sale.", "summary": [ "InkFusion is an iPhone and Android app that generates tattoo designs from a text description or from a photo, and shows the design on a photo of the user's skin. This last feature is a virtual try-on, a picture of how something would look on you before you buy it. The images come from generative image models, AI models that draw a new picture from a text prompt or a reference picture; the company's terms say that prompts and photos go to fal.ai and OpenAI. The app is free to download, and most use sits behind a paywall, a screen that asks for a subscription before the result is shown: from US$4.99 a week or US$19.99 a year on the US App Store.", "The app was released on 12 February 2025. It is sold by ASTRONIX LLP, a limited liability partnership (LLP), a UK company form whose owners are called members, registered in England and Wales on 14 October 2025 with two designated members. One of them, Nikita Barabash, matches the X handle @nikita_barabas that offers the app for sale on whatsthe.app, a marketplace for phone apps, at US$59,000. whatsthe.app reads the sales through an API key, a password that lets one program read another program's data, for RevenueCat, a service that records in-app subscription purchases. On 2 October 2026 it showed MRR, monthly recurring revenue, in which a yearly plan counts as one twelfth of its price, of US$4,269 from 600 active subscriptions, and US$3,909 of revenue in the last 28 days.", "The revenue figures are grade A, because they come from the app's own subscription records, not from screenshots. On 25 February 2026 the same listing showed MRR of US$3,141, so the MRR rose by about 36% in seven months, while the revenue of the latest 28 days was 5.4% below the 28 days before. The API key expired after 2 October 2026, and the seller's own text still says \"Around $2,500 MRR\". The page also shows earlier companies that sold a preview before a purchase, or creative and photo tools, and failed." ], "factsCaption": "A tattoo design app with US$4,269 of verified monthly recurring revenue 20 months after release, offered for sale at US$59,000", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by whatsthe.app from the app's RevenueCat account through an API key. A grade B value is a record that Apple, Google or the UK company register (Companies House) shows. A grade C value was written by the seller or the company, on the sale listing, on its own site or in its terms. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From release in February 2025 to a sale listing and a flat month in October 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "InkFusion in-app purchases on the US App Store, read 25 October 2026 (grade C)", "note": "The app is free to download, and generating, viewing and trying on most designs needs a subscription. Apple lists ten in-app purchases with names and prices; the names say weekly or annual, and no source says which users see which price. The per-month values are calculated: a weekly price times 52 divided by 12, a yearly price divided by 12. whatsthe.app shows the same prices. One Google Play review of 25 July 2026 complains that after the first design the app kept asking for an upgrade to see the image.", "rows": [ [ "Pro Weekly Access, lowest price", "", "21.62", "US$4.99 a week, all features" ], [ "Pro Weekly Access, other prices", "", "25.96 to 38.96", "US$5.99, US$6.99 and US$8.99 a week" ], [ "Pro Annual Access, lowest price", "1.67", "", "US$19.99 a year, all features" ], [ "Pro Annual Access, other prices", "2.33 to 3.33", "", "US$27.99, US$29.99 and US$39.99 a year" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 2 October 2026", "value": "US$4,269 from 600 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app, read from the app's RevenueCat account through an API key, last updated 2 October 2026 at 03:01 UTC. The page says the API key expired after that date. MRR growth over 28 days: 0.2%. Calculated: US$7.12 of MRR per subscription.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the October 2026 MRR", "value": "about US$51,228 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$4,269 times 12. whatsthe.app shows the same figure as ARR.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the 28 days to 2 October 2026", "value": "US$3,909", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app, RevenueCat. Revenue growth over 28 days: -5.4%. Revenue is the money received, so a yearly plan counts in full on the day it is paid. The page data also gives 5,263 active users and 3,968 new customers in the period; no source defines these two terms.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "The same listing, 25 February 2026", "value": "MRR US$3,141 from 496 active subscriptions; US$3,400 of revenue in 28 days", "grade": "A", "note": "Wayback Machine copy of the whatsthe.app listing, last updated 25 February 2026. MRR growth over 28 days: -1.5%; revenue growth: -6.8%.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Change from February to October 2026", "value": "MRR up 35.9%, 28-day revenue up 15.0%, subscriptions up 21.0%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the two whatsthe.app readings. MRR per subscription rose from US$6.33 to US$7.12. Over the latest 28 days the MRR was flat and revenue fell 5.4%, so this page calls the trend flat.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "The seller's own revenue figure", "value": "\"Around $2,500 MRR\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller's text on the listing, the same in February and October 2026. It is 58.6% of the verified MRR of October and 79.6% of February's. No source explains the difference; it may be an older figure or a figure after Apple's and Google's commission.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Costs and marketing", "value": "\"Only $100/month in expenses\"; \"No paid ads - all traffic is 100% free\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller's text. The seller says the traffic is \"fully organic traffic from TikTok\" and that the sale includes two TikTok accounts. whatsthe.app marks the marketing spend of US$100 a month as unverified.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price", "value": "US$59,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Entered by the seller, the same on 25 February and 25 October 2026. whatsthe.app calls it 1.3 times revenue. Calculated: 1.15 times the October run rate of US$51,228. 265 buyers had viewed the listing and 2 inquiries were sent by 25 October 2026.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Downloads", "value": "10K+ on Google Play; 4.0K in the 28 days to 2 October 2026 on iOS and Android", "grade": "B", "note": "Google Play shows the 10K+ band. The 28-day figure is from whatsthe.app. The company's studio site says 50k+ downloads for its apps (grade C).", "src": [ 6, 1, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Ratings, 25 October 2026", "value": "4.5 from 20 ratings on the US App Store; 2.9 from 89 reviews on Google Play", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's and Google's records. One Google Play review of July 2025 says the app is not AI; the developer replied that it uses AI to generate designs from the prompt, style and ratio.", "src": [ 4, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Age rating", "value": "18+ on the App Store; Everyone on Google Play", "grade": "B", "note": "The two stores rate the same app differently. The company's terms require users to be at least 16.", "src": [ 4, 6, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Company", "value": "ASTRONIX LLP, registered in England and Wales, incorporated 14 October 2025", "grade": "B", "note": "Companies House: active, two designated members, both appointed 14 October 2025, both with verified identity. First accounts to 31 March 2026 are due by 31 December 2026. The terms and privacy policy name the same company and number.", "src": [ 7, 8, 10, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Seller of record on the App Store", "value": "an individual in December 2025, ASTRONIX LLP in October 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "A Wayback copy of the App Store page from 4 December 2025 names as seller a person who is the second designated member of the LLP. The live page of 25 October 2026 names ASTRONIX LLP. Google Play names the developer as ASTRONIX APPS, run by ASTRONIX LLP.", "src": [ 5, 4, 6, 8 ] }, { "fact": "AI providers", "value": "fal.ai and OpenAI", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms of use and privacy policy: prompts and uploaded photos are processed by \"our AI partners, fal.ai and OpenAI\". No source names the models.", "src": [ 11, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Time from release to the October 2026 figure", "value": "20 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: February 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 4, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "12 February 2025", "what": "Version 1.0 on the App Store. whatsthe.app gives the same worldwide release date.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "when": "March 2025", "what": "The website is one page with the words \"AI TATTOO GENERATOR\" and links to the privacy policy and terms.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "when": "28 May 2025", "what": "Version 1.0.25: \"Improved the quality of tattoo generations.\" Eleven more versions follow in 2025.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "July 2025", "what": "A Google Play reviewer writes that the app is only an image library; the developer replies that it generates designs with AI.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "14 October 2025", "what": "ASTRONIX LLP is registered in England and Wales with two designated members.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 7, 8 ] }, { "when": "4 December 2025", "what": "The App Store still names an individual, the second designated member, as the seller.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "25 February 2026", "what": "Listed for sale on whatsthe.app at US$59,000. Verified MRR US$3,141 from 496 subscriptions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "19 May 2026", "what": "Version 2.0.0: better generation quality, new styles for men and women, design customization, better photo and on-body features, voice input for prompts.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "19 August 2026", "what": "Version 2.1.0 adds German, French and Spanish.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "27 September 2026", "what": "Version 2.2.0 adds an Edit mode and a smoother try-on, on both stores.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4, 6 ] }, { "when": "2 October 2026", "what": "Last RevenueCat reading: MRR US$4,269 from 600 subscriptions, US$3,909 of revenue in 28 days. The API key then expires.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "Still offered for sale at US$59,000. The studio also sells a tattoo-meaning app, a couples question game and a recipe manager.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 13 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A narrow need with a clear moment", "text": "People search for a tattoo app at one moment: before a permanent decision. The app answers three questions of that moment, what the design could be, how a personal photo could become one, and how it looks on the body, and it charges at the point where the user wants to see the result." }, { "title": "Rented models", "text": "The terms say that prompts and photos go to fal.ai and OpenAI. The company did not build or train an image model; its work is the app, the styles, the prompts and the try-on screen. That keeps the work small enough for a team of one or two people." }, { "title": "Unpaid short videos", "text": "The seller writes that all traffic comes from TikTok, from two accounts that are part of the sale, with no paid ads and about US$100 a month of expenses. Tattoo designs are visual and short videos show the before and after in seconds. No source shows the accounts or their figures." }, { "title": "Weekly and yearly subscriptions", "text": "The prices are US$4.99 to US$8.99 a week or US$19.99 to US$39.99 a year. The seller states that most annual subscriptions renew. The verified MRR per subscription rose from US$6.33 in February to US$7.12 in October 2026." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's terms, privacy policy and site (grade C) and from the App Store and Google Play pages (grade B).", "items": [ "Image generation by fal.ai and OpenAI, according to the terms and the privacy policy; no source names the models.", "Three modes: a text prompt with a style, a photo turned into a design, and a try-on on an uploaded body photo with size, position and rotation.", "RevenueCat records the subscriptions; whatsthe.app reads the revenue from it through an API key. The privacy policy names Mixpanel for usage analytics.", "One app on both stores under the package name com.app.inkfusion. The iPhone app is 127.6 MB and needs iOS 15 or later.", "23 versions in the App Store history from 12 February 2025 to 27 September 2026, with German, French and Spanish added in August 2026." ], "src": [ 11, 10, 1, 4, 6 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold a preview before a purchase, or a creative or photo tool for consumers, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Modsy", "years": "2015 to 2022", "funding": "US$72.7M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Upload photos of a room and see it in 3D with new furniture before buying.", "died": "Each room needed hours of human designer time and paid social ads were expensive, so it never became profitable.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2521-modsy" }, { "name": "Try.com", "years": "2018 to 2022", "funding": "US$4M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Try clothes at home before you pay for them.", "died": "High operating costs, few retailers willing to adopt it, and large stores with free returns already offered the same comfort.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/668-trycom" }, { "name": "Seerslab", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Augmented reality effects for selfies and social posts.", "died": "Snapchat already had AR filters built in, and no large social platform partnered with it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1463-seerslab" }, { "name": "FiftyThree", "years": "2011 to 2019", "funding": "US$45M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A digital sketchbook for the iPad with its own stylus.", "died": "Apple's own Pencil and stronger drawing apps took away what made it different.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/144-fiftythree" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Modsy and Try.com sold the same thing as InkFusion, a way to see a result before committing, but each preview cost them real work: designer hours per room, or clothes shipped and returned. Seerslab and FiftyThree built creative tools and had to pay for their own technology, then lost when a large platform offered the same feature for free.", "InkFusion's preview is drawn by models from fal.ai and OpenAI, with no human work for each design, and the companies that could copy it are the model providers, which sell to the app instead of competing with it. The risk that remains is the one Seerslab met: many other tattoo generator apps are listed next to it on the App Store, and the technology is open to all of them." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The format, yes. The niche, only with care.", "text": "A single-purpose app that wraps rented image models around one decision that people fear, with a try-on screen, a paywall and unpaid short videos, is a format that many small studios now repeat. The App Store shows at least five other AI tattoo generators next to InkFusion, so a copier needs a niche with fewer rivals or a better result than theirs.", "steps": [ "Pick a permanent or expensive choice where people want to see the result first: tattoos, hair, rooms, gardens.", "Use a hosted image model through an API, and spend the work on styles, prompts and the screen that places the result on the user's own photo.", "Show a first result for free, then ask for a weekly or yearly subscription, and make the price visible early.", "Post the before and after as short videos from your own accounts, and connect RevenueCat to a verification site so that a buyer can check the figures." ], "open": "Other choices that people cannot undo easily, where a photo of themselves or their space is enough input and no large app serves the niche yet." }, "watch": [ { "title": "One tracker, and the key has expired", "text": "All money figures come from whatsthe.app reading RevenueCat. The last reading is from 2 October 2026; the page says the API key expired after it. No second tracker, such as TrustMRR, has a profile of the app." }, { "title": "The seller's figure is lower than the verified one", "text": "The listing text says \"Around $2,500 MRR\" in both February and October 2026, while RevenueCat showed US$3,141 and then US$4,269. No source explains the gap." }, { "title": "Who built it is not stated", "text": "The company has two designated members. The seller is named only by the handle @nikita_barabas, which has 5 followers on whatsthe.app and matches one member's name. In December 2025 the App Store named the other member as seller. No source says who designed, coded or marketed the app." }, { "title": "Mixed reviews and a hard paywall", "text": "The Google Play rating is 2.9 from 89 reviews, against 4.5 from 20 ratings on the US App Store. One reviewer complains that the app keeps asking for an upgrade to see a design; another says it is not real AI, which the developer denies." }, { "title": "Different age ratings", "text": "The App Store rates the app 18+ and Google Play rates it Everyone, and the terms ask for users of at least 16. The app processes photos of users' bodies, which are sent to fal.ai and OpenAI." }, { "title": "Dependence on TikTok and on model providers", "text": "The seller names TikTok as the only source of users, and the designs come from two outside AI providers. A change in TikTok's reach or in the providers' prices changes the business, and the buyer receives the two TikTok accounts with the sale." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.inkfusion.app/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6738701897" }, { "kind": "android", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.app.inkfusion" }, { "kind": "whatsthe", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/com.app.inkfusion" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "whatsthe.app listing: InkFusion, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/com.app.inkfusion", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full, including the data embedded in the page. The revenue, MRR, subscription and growth figures were read by whatsthe.app through RevenueCat, last updated 2 October 2026; the asking price, the seller's text, the marketing spend and the founder handle are entered by the seller (grade C). The site's robots.txt allows this path." }, { "title": "whatsthe.app listing: InkFusion, Wayback Machine copy of 26 February 2026", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20260226043054/https://www.whatsthe.app/com.app.inkfusion", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full, including the embedded data. RevenueCat figures last updated 25 February 2026, and the same seller text and asking price." }, { "title": "whatsthe.app founder page: @nikita_barabas, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/founder/nikita_barabas", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Lists one app, InkFusion, with 600 subscriptions, and 5 followers." }, { "title": "InkFusion: AI Tattoo Generator on the US App Store, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/inkfusion-ai-tattoo-generator/id6738701897", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full: description, in-app purchases, version history, privacy label, age rating, seller and ratings. Seller, dates, ratings and age rating are Apple's records; the description and prices are written by the company." }, { "title": "InkFusion on the US App Store, Wayback Machine copy of 4 December 2025", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20251204053646/https://apps.apple.com/us/app/inkfusion-ai-tattoo-generator/id6738701897", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the seller, copyright, age rating and in-app purchase sections, to see who sold the app before the LLP." }, { "title": "InkFusion: AI Tattoo Design on Google Play, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.app.inkfusion", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full: developer, downloads band, rating, content rating, update date, reviews and the developer's reply. The robots.txt allows /store/apps/details." }, { "title": "Companies House: ASTRONIX LLP (OC458462), company overview", "url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/OC458462", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the company form, status, incorporation date and filing dates. The site's robots.txt returns a 404 page, so no rule blocks it." }, { "title": "Companies House: ASTRONIX LLP, officers", "url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/OC458462/officers", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Two LLP designated members, both appointed 14 October 2025. Only the member who is also the public seller is named on this page." }, { "title": "InkFusion home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.inkfusion.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the three modes, the styles and the company named in the footer. The robots.txt has no rules for any agent." }, { "title": "InkFusion privacy policy", "url": "https://www.inkfusion.app/privacy-policy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the operating company, its registration, the AI providers and the analytics tool." }, { "title": "InkFusion terms of use", "url": "https://www.inkfusion.app/terms-of-use", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the AI providers, the minimum age, the weekly and annual subscriptions and the governing law." }, { "title": "ASTRONIX LLP studio site, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://astronixapps.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's own description as a UK app studio and its download claim. The site's robots.txt returns a 404 page." }, { "title": "App Store developer page: ASTRONIX LLP, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/astronix-llp/id1781932207", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Lists four apps: InkFusion, InkSense, WeDeep and TomPal. Read for the purpose check of the studio's other apps." }, { "title": "InkSense: Find Tattoo Meaning on the US App Store", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/inksense-find-tattoo-meaning/id6755247308", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the description, age rating (18+) and seller, for the purpose check: it explains the symbolism of a scanned tattoo." }, { "title": "WeDeep: Couple Deep Questions on the US App Store", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wedeep-couple-deep-questions/id6759728664", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the description, age rating (18+) and seller, for the purpose check: a question card game for couples." }, { "title": "TomPal: Recipe Manager on the US App Store", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tompal-recipe-manager/id6758551840", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the description, age rating (16+) and seller, for the purpose check: a recipe saver and grocery list." }, { "title": "InkFusion home page, Wayback Machine copy of 20 March 2025", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20250320081518/https://www.inkfusion.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The first archived version of the site, one month after release." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/coupleai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/coupleai.md", "slug": "coupleai", "name": "CoupleAI", "country": "Spain", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI reply suggestions for screenshots of chats, on iPhone, Android and the web", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "22 June 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$84.4K in verified revenue in 12 months, October 2026", "sticker": "$84.4K in 12 months", "outcomeUsd": 84401, "months": 16, "teamLabel": "1 founder, Miguel Miranda, through his company Miranda Network SL; no source gives a headcount", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "ai-model-tools", "channel": "creators", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 3, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Dating and relationships" ], "product": "An app that suggests what to write back in a chat. The user takes a screenshot of a conversation in WhatsApp, Instagram, Tinder, Bumble, Hinge or Telegram, picks one of five tones (funny, flirty, romantic, playful or damage control), and copies the reply that the AI writes. The reply is one or two lines long, in the language and slang of the chat. Unlimited replies and all five tones need a subscription.", "why": "It needs no connection to any chat app: a screenshot works for all of them, and a model that reads images does the rest. The seller says that most users are in Latin America, and the App Store ratings come mainly from Spain and Mexico, a Spanish-speaking market with fewer rival apps. The seller lists influencers as the marketing channel, and the web app has a creator programme with referral codes.", "summary": [ "CoupleAI is a phone and web app that writes replies for a chat. The user uploads a screenshot of a conversation, chooses a tone, and gets one suggested message. The app sends the image to a multimodal model, an AI model that reads images as well as text; the company's privacy policy names Google's Gemini API as its AI processor. Most features sit behind a paywall, a screen that asks for a subscription before the feature can be used. The App Store seller is Miranda Network S.L, a software company in Tenerife, Spain, which Google Play describes as a studio created by Miguel Miranda. It has no other app.", "The app was released on 22 June 2025. TrustMRR, a site that shows startups' revenue, reads its sales through an API key, a password that lets one program read another program's data, for RevenueCat, a service that records in-app subscription purchases, and for Stripe, which takes the web payments. On 25 October 2026 TrustMRR showed US$84,401 of revenue in the last 12 months, US$94,253 since launch, US$3,951 in the last 30 days, and MRR, monthly recurring revenue, in which a yearly plan counts as one twelfth of its price, of US$3,075 from 159 active subscriptions. A second tracker, whatsthe.app, read the RevenueCat account until 14 October 2026 and showed an MRR of US$3,481.", "The revenue figures are grade A, because both sites read them from the payment records, not from screenshots. Revenue peaked at US$12,237 in March 2026 and has fallen every month since, and the app has been for sale since May 2026. The seller's own listing text claims more than the records show. The page also shows earlier dating and couples apps that failed." ], "factsCaption": "US$84,401 of verified revenue in the 12 months to 25 October 2026, with a peak in March 2026 and an MRR of US$3,075 at the end", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR or whatsthe.app from the app's RevenueCat and Stripe accounts through API keys. A grade B value is a record that Apple or Google shows on its store. A grade C value was written by the seller, on a listing, a store page or the company's website. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From release to a sale listing and falling revenue in 16 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "CoupleAI in-app purchases on the US App Store, read 25 October 2026 (grade C)", "note": "The app is free to download. Apple lists four in-app purchases, and whatsthe.app and TrustMRR show the same prices; the per-month values are calculated from the plan names. The weekly plan costs more per week than the monthly plan costs per month. A 3-day free trial was added to the weekly plan in July 2025. The web app also sells weekly, monthly, yearly and lifetime plans through Stripe, but it loads those prices by script and they could not be read; an older text in the site's code offers the lifetime plan as \"Before €250, now €199.99\".", "rows": [ [ "CoupleAI Weekly", "", "about 38.96", "US$8.99 a week; unlimited replies, all five tones" ], [ "CoupleAI Monthly", "", "7.99", "unlimited replies, all five tones" ], [ "CoupleAI Yearly", "3.33", "", "US$39.99 a year" ], [ "CoupleAI Yearly Offer", "2.08", "", "US$24.99 a year, a discounted yearly price" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue in the last 12 months, to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$84,401", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, revenue synced on 25 October 2026 at 15:39 UTC through RevenueCat and Stripe API keys. All time: US$94,253. Last 6 months: US$35,817. Last 3 months: US$13,231.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month, November 2025 to October 2026", "value": "Nov US$4,558; Dec US$5,213; Jan US$4,313; Feb US$11,898; Mar US$12,237; Apr US$10,320; May US$9,520; Jun US$7,111; Jul US$6,017; Aug US$5,047; Sep US$4,297; Oct to the 25th US$3,171", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. Calculated: February was 175.9% above January; every month from April to September was 7.8% to 25.3% below the month before. The twelve values add up to US$83,702, and US$10,551 of the all-time total came before November 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days, to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$3,951", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, which gives growth of -8.2% against the 30 days before; calculated, those earlier 30 days brought about US$4,304. Calculated: 67.7% below the best month, March 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 25 October 2026", "value": "US$3,075 from 159 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot. Calculated: about US$19.34 of MRR per subscription, and a run rate of about US$36,900 a year.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "whatsthe.app figures, 14 October 2026", "value": "MRR of US$3,481, US$3,235 of revenue in 28 days, 185 active subscriptions, 31 active trials, 6,245 active customers", "grade": "A", "note": "Read by whatsthe.app through RevenueCat, last updated on 14 October 2026 at 03:40 UTC. MRR growth over 28 days: -7.2%. Calculated: the MRR on TrustMRR on 25 October was 11.7% lower; TrustMRR also counts the Stripe web sales.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Share of active customers who pay", "value": "3.0%", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app's subscription penetration, 14 October 2026: 185 subscriptions among 6,245 active customers.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Seller's own revenue claim", "value": "around €14,000 to €15,000 a month, \"over €55,000\" in six months", "grade": "C", "note": "The listing text on whatsthe.app, undated. The verified records do not reach this monthly level: the best verified month is US$12,237. Calculated: verified revenue from January to June 2026 was US$55,399, close to the six-month claim but in US dollars.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Asking prices", "value": "US$60,000 on TrustMRR; US$100,000 on whatsthe.app", "grade": "C", "note": "Set by the seller. TrustMRR records the first sale listing on 21 May 2026 and 14 offers received. The whatsthe.app listing text asks for about €350,000, a third price.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price compared with revenue", "value": "1.3 times on TrustMRR; 2.6 times on whatsthe.app", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$60,000 divided by 12 times the last 30 days of revenue (US$47,412) is 1.27, as TrustMRR shows; US$100,000 divided by whatsthe.app's annualized revenue of US$38,814 is 2.58.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Founder", "value": "Miguel Miranda", "grade": "B", "note": "Google Play's developer page says that Miranda Network is a software development studio created by Miguel Miranda; the developer contact email is in his name. TrustMRR names him as founder and seller, and the Android package name is dev.miguelmiranda.coupleai.", "src": [ 5, 4, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Seller on the stores", "value": "Miranda Network S.L, Spain", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's and Google's records. Both developer pages list only CoupleAI. The company's own site calls it an independent software company in Tenerife, Spain.", "src": [ 3, 6, 5, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 named founder; no headcount in any source", "grade": "C", "note": "whatsthe.app leaves the team size empty. The seller writes on TrustMRR that \"we\" lack \"the resources or team capacity\" to expand into new markets.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions investors. whatsthe.app leaves the financing field empty.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Users", "value": "\"more than 300,000 registered users\" in the seller's text; 50K+ Play Store downloads; 4.9K downloads in 28 days", "grade": "C", "note": "The user claim is the seller's text on TrustMRR. The download counts are Google's record and whatsthe.app's 28-day figure for iOS and Android.", "src": [ 1, 4, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "90.0%", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot. whatsthe.app shows a self-reported marketing spend of US$1,500 a month, marked as not verified.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "App Store ratings", "value": "19 ratings in the US store, average 3.9 of 5; 81 ratings in total, 35 of them in Spain and 27 in Mexico", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's page for the US; whatsthe.app for the other storefronts, average 4.0.", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Age rating", "value": "18+ on the App Store; Everyone on Google Play", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple notes infrequent mature or suggestive themes. The company's terms say that users must be 18 or over.", "src": [ 3, 4, 7 ] }, { "fact": "AI model", "value": "Google Gemini API", "grade": "C", "note": "Named as the AI processor in the privacy policy text in the web app's code. No source names the model version.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Release", "value": "22 June 2025", "grade": "B", "note": "Version 1.0.6, the oldest version in the App Store history. whatsthe.app gives the same date; TrustMRR gives a founded date of 18 July 2025.", "src": [ 3, 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from release to the October 2026 figure", "value": "16 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: June 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "22 June 2025", "what": "CoupleAI version 1.0.6 is released on the App Store, sold by Miranda Network S.L.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "when": "3 July 2025", "what": "Version 1.0.8 adds a 3-day free trial to the weekly plan.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "June to October 2025", "what": "US$10,551 of revenue before November, by the difference between TrustMRR's all-time total and its monthly timeline.", "grade": "X", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "US$4,558 of revenue, the first month in TrustMRR's timeline.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "5 to 7 January 2026", "what": "Versions 1.1.0 and 1.2.1: improved AI in the \"Cupid\" section, unused features removed.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "February 2026", "what": "US$11,898 of revenue, 175.9% more than January. Version 1.2.5 on 6 February adds a chatbot assistant.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "when": "March 2026", "what": "US$12,237 of revenue, the best month so far.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "21 May 2026", "what": "First listed for sale on TrustMRR. The seller says the company is moving to other business opportunities.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "June to September 2026", "what": "Revenue falls each month, from US$7,111 in June to US$4,297 in September.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2026", "what": "Version 5.0.0: the app is rebuilt from scratch as one screen with five tones and fifteen languages.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "14 October 2026", "what": "Last whatsthe.app update: MRR of US$3,481, 185 active subscriptions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR: US$84,401 in the last 12 months, MRR of US$3,075, 159 active subscriptions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A screenshot as the only input", "text": "The app does not connect to WhatsApp, Instagram or any dating app. The user takes a screenshot, and a model that reads images works out the text, the tone and the language. That avoids every integration and every platform rule, and it lets one person support all chat apps at once." }, { "title": "Five fixed tones and short replies", "text": "The web app's code holds one instruction per tone: funny, a \"subtle flirty response\" that is \"playful but not intense\", romantic, friendly teasing, and a reply that resolves an awkward moment. Every reply is one or two lines, in the same language, length and punctuation as the chat. The user chooses; the model only writes." }, { "title": "A Spanish-speaking market first", "text": "The site's default language is Spanish, and 62 of the 81 App Store ratings that whatsthe.app counts come from Spain and Mexico. The seller writes that the app has a strong presence in Latin America and that larger markets are the next step." }, { "title": "Creators and referral codes", "text": "The seller lists influencers as the marketing channel on TrustMRR. The web app has a creator programme: each creator gets a code and a link that opens the store, and a dashboard shows clicks, sign-ups, purchases and commission. No source gives the commission rate or the number of creators." }, { "title": "Weekly subscriptions with a trial", "text": "The weekly plan at US$8.99 has a 3-day free trial, and it costs more per week than the monthly plan costs per month. Short plans with a trial are common in consumer AI apps: the first payment comes soon after the user tries the app." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the seller-entered technology list on TrustMRR (grade C), the App Store page (grade B), and the text and code of the company's web app, which anyone can read in the browser.", "items": [ "Expo and React Native for the phone app, Tailwind CSS for the design, according to the seller's technology list.", "Supabase holds the accounts and the database, and a Supabase function receives each screenshot and returns the suggested reply.", "The privacy policy names Google's Gemini API as the AI processor, Stripe for payments, RevenueCat for subscriptions, Apple for the store and Vercel for hosting.", "The company says that screenshots are sent encrypted, analysed and discarded, never stored and never used to train a model. Google Play's data label says that no data is collected; Apple's label lists the name and email address.", "Version 5.0.0 of 13 October 2026 rebuilt the app as one screen with no menus, in fifteen languages. The app is 51.6 MB and needs iOS 15.1 or later.", "The web app also includes the creator programme, an account page that exports or deletes a user's data, and terms under Spanish law." ], "src": [ 1, 3, 7, 4 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to help people date or stay close to a partner. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "HowAboutWe", "years": "2010 to 2018", "funding": "US$22M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A dating app where users proposed real date ideas instead of small talk.", "died": "Tinder and OkCupid had simpler, game-like apps. After IAC bought it in 2014, it was merged into Match Group and shut down.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/226-howaboutwe" }, { "name": "Couple", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A private messaging app for two people in a relationship.", "died": "WhatsApp and similar free apps already served couples and everyone else, and Couple never found a way to make money from its users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1183-couple" }, { "name": "Dating Ring", "years": "2014 to 2017", "funding": "US$350K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Matchmaking by human matchmakers, combined with online dating.", "died": "Its costs grew with every client, because people did the work, while Tinder and Bumble served millions with software.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1143-dating-ring" }, { "name": "Cuddli", "years": "2015 to 2019", "funding": "US$0", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "A dating app for one group of users, people who call themselves geeks.", "died": "The niche was too small, and a freemium dating app needs many more users than it attracted before it can pay its costs.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2014-cuddli" } ], "whatChanged": [ "HowAboutWe, Dating Ring and Cuddli each had to build a network: a dating service is useful only when enough other people are on it, and that took money, from nothing at Cuddli to US$22 million at HowAboutWe. Couple tried to replace the chat app itself and lost to WhatsApp. Dating Ring paid people to do the matching, so its costs grew with each client.", "CoupleAI needs no network and replaces no chat app. It works on top of the apps that people already use, through screenshots, and a model provider does the writing, so one founder could build it and the costs stay low; TrustMRR shows a profit margin of 90% for the last 30 days. What has not changed is the problem of keeping users. Its verified revenue fell from US$12,237 in March 2026 to US$3,951 in the 30 days to 25 October, and any competitor can build the same product on the same models." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The format, yes. Plan for it to fade.", "text": "A single-purpose app that reads a screenshot, applies a fixed instruction and returns a short answer is quick to build, and CoupleAI shows that it can earn about US$12,000 in a good month in a market that larger apps ignore. The same case shows the weak point: revenue fell for six months in a row, and the seller put the app up for sale.", "steps": [ "Pick one small, frequent writing task that people do inside other apps, and accept a screenshot as the input.", "Write one instruction per mode and keep the answer short, in the user's own language.", "Start in a language market that the large apps serve badly, and reach it through creators with referral codes.", "Connect RevenueCat and Stripe to a verification site from the start, so that a buyer can see real figures if you sell." ], "open": "Other short writing tasks in personal chats in a language with few local apps: replies to family groups, polite refusals, messages to a landlord or a school." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Falling revenue", "text": "Verified revenue rose to US$12,237 in March 2026 and fell in every month after it: US$10,320 in April, US$7,111 in June and US$4,297 in September. The 30 days to 25 October brought US$3,951, 67.7% below March. The MRR fell from US$3,481 on 14 October (whatsthe.app) to US$3,075 on 25 October (TrustMRR)." }, { "title": "Seller claims that the records do not support", "text": "The whatsthe.app listing text says that the app currently makes around €14,000 to €15,000 a month and asks for about €350,000, while the verified records never passed US$12,237 in a month and the asking price fields say US$100,000 and, on TrustMRR, US$60,000. The seller's figure of more than 300,000 registered users compares with 6,245 active customers counted by whatsthe.app." }, { "title": "Replies the other person does not know about", "text": "The web app's questions page asks \"Can people tell I didn't write it?\" and answers \"No, because it doesn't write like an AI\". The person on the other side of the chat is not told that a model wrote the message. The terms forbid using the app to harass or impersonate anyone." }, { "title": "Two age ratings and two privacy labels", "text": "Apple rates the app 18+ and the terms require users to be 18 or over, but Google Play rates the Android version Everyone. Google Play's data label says that no data is collected, while Apple's label lists the name and email address, and the app receives screenshots of other people's messages." }, { "title": "A product anyone can copy, on rented models", "text": "The app depends on Google's Gemini API for every reply and on Apple, Google and Stripe for payments. The same product can be built by anyone with the same models, and the seller writes that the company lacks the team to expand. No source gives the cost of the model calls." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://coupleai.app/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6747322608" }, { "kind": "android", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dev.miguelmiranda.coupleai" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/coupleai" }, { "kind": "whatsthe", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/coupleai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of CoupleAI, revenue synced 25 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/coupleai.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile. The revenue, monthly, daily, MRR and subscription figures come from its Verification Sources section, read through RevenueCat and Stripe API keys. The description, founded date, technology list, channel and seller message are entered by the seller; the sale data is TrustMRR's listing record." }, { "title": "whatsthe.app listing: CoupleAI, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/coupleai", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full, including the data embedded in the page. The revenue metrics were read by whatsthe.app through RevenueCat, last updated on 14 October 2026; the listing text, asking price, marketing spend and founder handle are entered by the seller." }, { "title": "CoupleAI: What To Text Back on the US App Store, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6747322608", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full: description, in-app purchases, version history, privacy label, age rating, seller, ratings and reviews. Seller, dates, ratings and age rating are Apple's records; the description and prices are written by the company." }, { "title": "CoupleAI: Flirting Assistant on Google Play, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dev.miguelmiranda.coupleai", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full: description, downloads, content rating, data safety label and developer details. Used for the purpose check and the founder link; no address or phone number is used." }, { "title": "Google Play developer page: Miranda Network, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=7766828810612698413", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Describes Miranda Network as a software development studio created by Miguel Miranda and lists one app." }, { "title": "App Store developer page: Miranda Network S.L, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/miranda-network-s-l/id1820804727", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Lists only CoupleAI, so there are no other apps of the seller to check." }, { "title": "CoupleAI website and web app, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://coupleai.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "The pages load their text by script, so the text was read in the site's JavaScript file: the landing page, questions, terms (users 18 or over), privacy policy with its list of processors, the reply instructions for each tone and the creator programme. The site has no robots.txt file." }, { "title": "Miranda Network website, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://mirandanetwork.es/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A one-page site of the company: an independent software company in Tenerife, Spain. Its robots.txt allows ClaudeBot and anthropic-ai." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/fishing-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/fishing-ai.md", "slug": "fishing-ai", "name": "Fishing AI App", "country": "USA", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "iPhone app that recommends fishing lures from a photo of the fishing spot", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "10 June 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$2.3K MRR verified through RevenueCat, October 2026", "sticker": "$2.3K MRR in October 2026", "outcomeUsd": 27252, "months": 16, "teamLabel": "1 founder, Christopher Alonso, who publishes it under his own name; no staff reported", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "learning", "channel": "creators", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Sports and outdoors" ], "product": "An iPhone app for people who fish. The user takes a photo of the fishing spot, and the app suggests lures and lure colors for the conditions it sees and reads: weather, water clarity, time of day and moon phase. The user can limit the suggestions to the lures in their own tackle box. It also shows live weather, keeps a catch log with streaks and statistics, and since August 2026 identifies fish. Most features need a subscription of US$7.99 a month or US$29.99 a year.", "why": "Choosing a lure is the question that every new angler has at the water, and a phone camera plus weather data can answer it in seconds. One developer built a narrow app around that single question, put the answer behind a subscription, and promoted it with short videos on TikTok. Sales are highest in the summer fishing months.", "summary": [ "Fishing AI App is an iPhone app that picks fishing lures. A lure is an artificial bait, made of metal, plastic or wood, that an angler pulls through the water to make a fish bite; the right shape and color depend on the light, the water and the fish. The user photographs the fishing spot, and the app combines the photo with live weather, water clarity and the time of day to suggest which lures and colors to use. The App Store page names this \"AI-Powered Lure Recommendations\" as the first core feature, and its subtitle is \"AI Lure Picker & Catch Log\". A catch log, weather screens and, since August 2026, fish identification come with it. The app is free to download, but a hard paywall, a payment screen that the user must pass before using the main features, asks for a subscription: reviewers write that the app analyzes the spot and then asks them to buy premium.", "The App Store lists Christopher Alonso as the developer and seller, and the same account publishes three other small subscription apps. The TrustMRR profile names the founder by the X handle @chrisnl_, which is also part of the app's bundle ID, com.chrisnl.FishingAI. The app was released on 10 June 2025. On 25 October 2026 it had monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the subscription income that repeats every month, of US$2,271 from 663 active subscriptions, and US$29,424 of revenue since launch. Revenue by month was low from November 2025 to April 2026 (US$893 in six months), rose to US$5,893 in August 2026, then fell to US$3,808 in September.", "The revenue figures are grade A. TrustMRR, a site that shows startups' revenue read directly from their payment accounts, and a second site, whatsthe.app, both read them from RevenueCat, a service that records App Store subscription payments for app makers, and their figures agree. The founder's own statements on TrustMRR, such as 14,000 TikTok followers and a 60% profit margin, are grade C. The app has been for sale since May 2026, at US$20,000 on TrustMRR and US$120,000 on whatsthe.app. The page also shows earlier companies that sold expert advice for an outdoor hobby, or object recognition on a phone camera, and failed." ], "factsCaption": "US$29,424 of verified revenue in the 16 months from the App Store release to 25 October 2026, read from RevenueCat, next to the founder's own statements", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read from the app's RevenueCat account by TrustMRR or by whatsthe.app. A grade B value is a record that Apple shows on the App Store, now or in a Wayback Machine copy. A grade C value is a statement by the founder on his TrustMRR profile, or a directory's summary. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a release in June 2025, through a quiet winter, to a summer peak in 2026 and a for-sale listing. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Fishing AI App prices in October 2026, from the in-app purchase list on the US App Store page (grade B)", "note": "The App Store lists three subscriptions and does not say which buyer sees the discounted yearly price. Calculated: US$29.99 a year is US$2.50 a month, and US$19.99 a year is US$1.67 a month. The same monthly and yearly prices were on the App Store page in August 2025. The App Store description says \"Some features require a premium subscription\" and does not list which ones.", "rows": [ [ "Fishing AI Yearly", "2.50", "", "US$29.99 a year; premium features" ], [ "Fishing AI Yearly Discount", "1.67", "", "US$19.99 a year; premium features" ], [ "Fishing AI Monthly", "", "7.99", "premium features" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 25 October 2026", "value": "US$2,271 from 663 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot, revenue synced 25 October 2026 from RevenueCat through an API key; MRR up 4.0% in 30 days. Calculated: US$3.43 per subscription per month, and US$27,252 a year at that rate.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Second tracker, 28 days to 2 October 2026", "value": "US$3,514 of revenue, MRR of US$2,210, 627 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app, which says \"All metrics are verified with RevenueCat\". Calculated: US$3.52 of MRR per subscription, close to TrustMRR's US$3.43; TrustMRR's MRR three weeks later is 2.8% higher.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month", "value": "US$136 in November 2025, US$169 in April 2026, US$732 in May, US$2,597 in June, US$5,545 in July, US$5,893 in August, US$3,808 in September, US$2,359 in 1 to 25 October 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table. Calculated: November 2025 to April 2026 together brought US$892.79; September was 35.4% below August; June to 25 October 2026 brought US$20,202.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days, to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$2,961, down 25.1%", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. The last 3 months brought US$12,746 and the last 12 months US$22,029. Revenue counts a yearly subscription in the month it is paid, so it falls faster than MRR when fewer people subscribe.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue since launch, to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$29,424", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR all-time figure. Calculated: the monthly table from November 2025 sums to US$21,826.79, so about US$7,597 came in June to October 2025, the first five months after release.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "What the subscription pays for", "value": "AI lure recommendations from a photo of the spot, plus weather, catch log and fish identification", "grade": "B", "note": "App Store description: \"Snap a photo of your fishing spot, and get custom lure suggestions\". A review of 6 August 2025 says the app \"analyzes my area and says it knows what I need to use. Then it asks me if I want to buy premium\". No source lists exactly which features are free.", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Prices on the US App Store, October 2026", "value": "US$29.99 or US$19.99 a year; US$7.99 a month", "grade": "B", "note": "In-app purchase list. The August 2025 copy shows the same US$29.99 yearly and US$7.99 monthly plans; the discounted yearly plan appears by July 2026.", "src": [ 3, 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "App Store ratings in the US", "value": "399 on 16 August 2025, 956 on 22 July 2026, about 1,500 on 25 October 2026; average 4.8", "grade": "B", "note": "Wayback Machine copies and the live page (shown as \"1.5K Ratings\"). TrustMRR's App Store data gives 1,478 on 12 October 2026. whatsthe.app counts about 2,000 ratings in all countries, with Canada, the UK and the Netherlands next after the US.", "src": [ 4, 5, 3, 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Release on the App Store", "value": "10 June 2025", "grade": "B", "note": "whatsthe.app gives the worldwide release date of 10 June 2025; the App Store version history dates version 1.0 to 11 June 2025. whatsthe.app says business operations started in June 2025.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Updates", "value": "8 versions from June to August 2025, none from September 2025 to April 2026, version 2.0 on 7 May 2026, then 6 more to 12 September 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "App Store version history. Version 2.0 improved the camera screen; 2.5 (13 August 2026) added fish identification; 2.6 (12 September 2026) improved fishing spots. Revenue rose from May 2026, after the 2.0 update; no source says that the update caused the rise.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Founder and seller", "value": "Christopher Alonso, developer account in his own name", "grade": "B", "note": "The App Store lists him as developer, seller and copyright holder. TrustMRR names the founder \"Lens Chris\" with the X handle @chrisnl_ (466 followers), and its App Store data gives the bundle ID com.chrisnl.FishingAI. whatsthe.app shows the same handle.", "src": [ 3, 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Team at the October 2026 figure", "value": "1 founder; no employees reported", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR lists one founder, and the App Store account is an individual's, not a company's. No source mentions staff or contractors.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions investors. TrustMRR records a profit margin of 60.0% for the last 30 days, a figure that is not among the metrics it says are verified.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Other apps on the same developer account", "value": "SoulFast (Christian fasting), learn lock (study before unlocking distracting apps), PetScan (pet food ingredient scanner)", "grade": "B", "note": "App Store developer page and each app's page. All three are subscription apps; none of them sells a feature that the site's purpose rules exclude.", "src": [ 6, 7, 8, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Marketing", "value": "TikTok, with 14,000 followers", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder-written TrustMRR fields: marketing channel TikTok, \"14K Followers on TikTok\", and \"Top app under Fishing AI Search on AppStore\". This page could not check them: TikTok blocks AI agents.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Tech stack", "value": "React Native, RevenueCat", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder-written TrustMRR fields. No source names the AI model that reads the photo.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Sale listing", "value": "US$20,000 on TrustMRR, first listed 27 May 2026; US$120,000 on whatsthe.app", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR: 44 offers received, 0.6 times revenue. whatsthe.app: 2.8 times revenue, 0 inquiries, the listing not claimed by the seller. Calculated: US$20,000 is 0.56 times the last 30 days of revenue times 12 and 0.68 times all revenue so far.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Time from store release to the October 2026 figure", "value": "16 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: June 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "10 June 2025", "what": "Fishing AI App is released worldwide on the App Store, under Christopher Alonso's own developer account.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "when": "27 June 2025", "what": "Version 1.0.5 adds lure color recommendations based on real-time weather and water clarity.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "20 July 2025", "what": "Version 1.0.15 lets users get recommendations only from the lures in their own tackle box, with tips on why each one works.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "when": "16 August 2025", "what": "The App Store page shows 399 ratings with an average of 4.8, and subscriptions at US$29.99 a year and US$7.99 a month.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "June to October 2025", "what": "About US$7,597 of revenue in the first five months.", "grade": "X", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "November 2025 to April 2026", "what": "US$893 of revenue in six months, and no app updates from September 2025 to April 2026.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "when": "7 May 2026", "what": "Version 2.0 improves the camera screen; four more updates follow in May and June. Revenue rises to US$732 in May.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "when": "27 May 2026", "what": "The app is first listed for sale on TrustMRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "July and August 2026", "what": "Revenue reaches US$5,545 in July and US$5,893 in August. Ratings pass 956 by 22 July. Version 2.5 adds fish identification on 13 August.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 5, 3 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "Revenue falls to US$3,808. Version 2.6 improves fishing spots on 12 September.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "when": "2 October 2026", "what": "whatsthe.app reads MRR of US$2,210 and 627 active subscriptions from RevenueCat, with the app offered there at US$120,000.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR reads MRR of US$2,271 from 663 active subscriptions and US$29,424 of revenue since launch; the asking price there is US$20,000.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "One question, answered at the water", "text": "The app is built around one decision that every angler makes: which lure to tie on. A photo of the spot plus live weather, water clarity, time of day and moon phase gives an answer in seconds, so a new angler does not need a guide or a long video. The catch log, weather screens and fish identification are added around that question." }, { "title": "The AI result is what the paywall sells", "text": "The app analyzes the spot first and then shows the subscription screen. A reviewer wrote in August 2025 that it \"analyzes my area and says it knows what I need to use\" before asking for premium. Another reviewer, in August 2026, complains that the trial offer cannot be skipped. That makes the AI answer the thing a user pays to see." }, { "title": "Short videos for a hobby audience", "text": "The founder lists TikTok as the marketing channel and says the account has 14,000 followers (grade C). A fishing spot and a lure suggestion are easy to show in a short video." }, { "title": "Season and updates", "text": "Revenue was high in the first summer, fell to about US$150 a month in the winter of 2025 to 2026, when there were no updates, and rose again from May 2026 with version 2.0 and the summer season. The sources do not say which of the two caused the rise." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the App Store records and the founder-written fields of the TrustMRR profile. The App Store records are grade B; the tech stack is grade C.", "items": [ "A React Native app, according to the founder's TrustMRR fields, published for iPhone and iPad under the developer's own name.", "Subscriptions are sold through Apple's in-app purchase and recorded in RevenueCat, which also gives TrustMRR and whatsthe.app read-only access to the revenue.", "The camera screen sends a photo of the fishing spot for analysis; the App Store privacy section lists photos, precise location and purchase history as collected data. No source names the AI model.", "Weather, cloud cover, wind, moon phase and time of day are added to the photo to choose lures and colors; users can restrict the choice to their own lures.", "Fifteen versions in 15 months, most of them in two bursts: June to August 2025 and May to September 2026.", "The App Store page links its privacy policy to a placeholder address, yourdomain.com/privacy, while the developer's other apps link to pages on Notion." ], "src": [ 1, 3, 4, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold expert advice for an outdoor hobby, coaching for an amateur sport, or object recognition through a phone camera, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Edyn", "years": "2014 to 2017", "funding": "US$2.7M", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "A solar-powered garden sensor and water valve that read soil, sunlight and weather and told gardeners what to do.", "died": "The database summary says hardware costs were high, sales stayed low, and gardening demand is seasonal.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1135-edyn" }, { "name": "Garden.com", "years": "1995 to 2000", "funding": "US$65M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Expert gardening advice online, with plants chosen for the buyer's climate.", "died": "It shipped perishable plants at a loss, paid about US$200 to win each customer, and sold mostly in spring.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2089-gardencom" }, { "name": "Moodstocks", "years": "2008 to 2016", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Object and image recognition on a smartphone camera.", "died": "It could not stay different from Google's own image recognition, and Google bought it in 2016.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/351-moodstocks" }, { "name": "Charge Running", "years": "2021 to 2024", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Live running classes with a coach speaking in your headphones.", "died": "The database summary says AI fitness apps gave personal coaching on demand, without fixed class times.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/895-charge-running" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Edyn and Garden.com sold advice for a seasonal hobby, and both needed physical goods to deliver it: sensors and valves, or live plants shipped across the country. Each raised venture money and ran out of it. Moodstocks built phone-camera recognition as a technology and had to sell it against Google. Fishing AI App needs no hardware and no inventory, and it does not build its own recognition technology: it uses a phone camera, public weather data and an AI model that no source names, and sells the answer as a subscription through the App Store.", "The seasonal problem has not gone away. TrustMRR's monthly table shows US$893 of revenue in the six months from November 2025 to April 2026, against US$5,893 in August 2026 alone. A one-person app can survive a quiet winter that would have ended a funded company, because its costs are small; the founder states a profit margin of 60% (grade C). The App Store page also lists ten other fishing apps under \"You Might Also Like\", four of them with AI in the name or subtitle, so the niche is no longer empty." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, for a niche hobby with one clear question.", "text": "Nothing here needed an audience, funding or new technology. One developer chose a hobby question that a photo and weather data can answer, put the answer behind a subscription, and kept the app small. The limits are visible in the numbers: revenue follows the season, and competitors with the same idea appeared quickly.", "steps": [ "Pick a hobby where people ask the same practical question at the moment of doing it: which lure, which bait, which setting.", "Answer it from the phone camera plus public data (weather, time, place), and show the answer before the payment screen so users see what they would pay for.", "Charge a low yearly price, here US$29.99, next to a monthly one, and record payments in a service such as RevenueCat.", "Plan for the off-season: update before the season starts and expect most yearly subscriptions to be sold in the busy months." ], "open": "Other seasonal outdoor hobbies with a choice at the moment of doing it: fly selection for fly fishing, wax for skis, planting times for gardeners, and bait for ice fishing in the winter months when this app sells little." }, "watch": [ { "title": "A seasonal fall", "text": "Revenue fell from US$5,893 in August to US$3,808 in September and US$2,359 in the first 25 days of October 2026; TrustMRR shows the last 30 days down 25.1%. Last winter the app made US$893 in six months. MRR held at about US$2,200 to US$2,300 because yearly subscriptions bought in the summer still count, but it could drop below US$2,000 a month when those come up for renewal." }, { "title": "Two asking prices that do not agree", "text": "TrustMRR shows an asking price of US$20,000 with 44 offers received; whatsthe.app shows US$120,000 for a listing that the seller has not claimed. No source explains the difference, and no source says the app was sold. The App Store still shows the same developer." }, { "title": "Many copies of the idea", "text": "The App Store page recommends ten other fishing apps, four of them with AI in the name or subtitle: Fish AI, FishAngler, Fishing Spots and tackle - AI Fishing Assistant. The founder says the app is the top result for the search \"Fishing AI\" (grade C); that position is the main thing a rival could take away." }, { "title": "An unnamed AI model and a placeholder privacy link", "text": "No source names the AI model or its cost per photo, so this page cannot say how the margin would change if the provider raised prices. The App Store page links the privacy policy to yourdomain.com/privacy, a placeholder address, although the app collects photos and precise location." }, { "title": "Founder statements not checked", "text": "The TikTok audience of 14,000 followers, the 3,000 estimated users and the 60% profit margin are founder-written fields on TrustMRR, not verified metrics. TikTok blocks AI agents, so this page could not read the account." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6745577141" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/fishingai" }, { "kind": "whatsthe", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/fishingai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of FishingAI, as read on 25 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/fishingai.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full; revenue synced 25 October 2026 from RevenueCat through an API key. Revenue, MRR and subscription counts are grade A; the founder name, the description, the tech stack, the marketing channel, the user estimate, the profit margin and the asking price are written by the founder or not verified, grade C." }, { "title": "whatsthe.app listing of Fishing AI App", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/fishingai", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Metrics \"verified with RevenueCat\", last updated 2 October 2026. Source for the second revenue reading, the release date, the ratings by country and the US$120,000 asking price." }, { "title": "Apple App Store: Fishing AI App", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6745577141", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Source for the features, the in-app purchase list, the ratings, the reviews, the seller, the version history, the privacy section and the similar apps." }, { "title": "Apple App Store: Fishing AI App, Wayback Machine copy of 16 August 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250816213153/https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fishing-ai-app/id6745577141", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 399 ratings, the 2025 prices and the review about the payment screen." }, { "title": "Apple App Store: Fishing AI App, Wayback Machine copy of 22 July 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260722123603/https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fishing-ai-app/id6745577141", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the header, the version history and the information section. Source for the 956 ratings and the three subscription prices in July 2026." }, { "title": "Apple App Store: developer page of Christopher Alonso", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/christopher-alonso/id1813038011", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Lists the four apps on the account." }, { "title": "Apple App Store: learn lock: study to scroll", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/learn-lock-study-to-scroll/id6758608834", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the description. Checked for the site's purpose rules: it blocks chosen apps until the user answers study questions." }, { "title": "Apple App Store: PetScan - Pet Food Scanner", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/petscan-pet-food-scanner/id6761250612", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the description. Checked for the site's purpose rules: it scans pet food labels for ingredients." }, { "title": "Apple App Store: SoulFast - Christian Fasting", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/soulfast-christian-fasting/id6754760032", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the description. Checked for the site's purpose rules: a fasting tracker for Christians." }, { "title": "App Pricing Lab: Fishing AI App", "url": "https://apppricinglab.com/app/apple/6745577141", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A directory built from App Store data, last updated 31 August 2025; it repeats the developer name, the release date and the 530 reviews of that date, but says the app has no in-app purchases, which the App Store copies of 2025 contradict." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/resumeup-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/resumeup-ai.md", "slug": "resumeup-ai", "name": "ResumeUp.AI", "country": "India", "sector": "Human Resources", "productType": "AI resume builder and ATS checker", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "8 December 2024", "outcomeLabel": "About US$4K MRR, November 2025", "sticker": "$4K MRR reported", "outcomeUsd": 48000, "months": 11, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders and 3 employees in November 2025, as Starter Story lists them; in May 2025 a co-founder said 5 full-time employees", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Search", "group": "documents-data", "channel": "search", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Job search" ], "product": "A website where a job seeker uploads a resume or builds one in a chat, pastes a job description, and gets a rewritten resume, a score from an ATS checker, a cover letter, mock interview practice, LinkedIn profile suggestions and an application tracker. The pricing page lists a free plan with 20 AI credits and a Pro plan at US$29 a month.", "why": "The co-founders said that they had seen good candidates rejected by applicant tracking software before a person read their resumes. They launched on Product Hunt, wrote search pages with freelance writers, and sold a lifetime deal on AppSumo. Hareesh Vemasani told Starter Story in November 2025 that the business made about US$4,000 a month in recurring revenue.", "summary": [ "ResumeUp.AI is an AI resume builder, a website where a large language model, a program trained on large amounts of text that writes new text on request, rewrites a job seeker's resume to fit one job description. Its second main tool is an ATS checker. An ATS, or applicant tracking system, is software such as Workday, Greenhouse or Lever that employers use to collect applications, read the text of each resume and filter candidates by keywords. The checker gives a resume a score from 0 to 100 against a job description, lists missing keywords, and rewrites the weak parts with one click. Around these two tools the site sells cover letters, practice interviews with an AI interviewer, LinkedIn profile suggestions, an application tracker, a free Chrome extension that fills in application forms, and, newly launched in October 2026, a job board.", "Two friends from Bangalore, India, run it: Hareesh Vemasani and Rohith Reddy, both software engineers. The site was online by June 2024, and it had its first Product Hunt launch on 8 December 2024; Vemasani told Starter Story that the first sale came about three days after that public launch. A second launch, ResumeUp 2.0, was the first product of the day on Product Hunt on 8 March 2025. In an interview published on 8 May 2025, Reddy said that the company had more than 300 paid subscribers, about 25,000 visitors a month, 5 full-time employees and \"a revenue touching $6,000\", without saying whether that is a month's revenue. In a Starter Story interview published on 21 November 2025, Vemasani said that it \"brings in around $4,000 MRR\". MRR, monthly recurring revenue, is the amount that subscribers pay each month. That is a run rate, MRR times 12, of US$48,000 a year.", "The headline figure rests on one founder interview, so this page is grade D, reported but not verified. No payment processor, buyer or journalist has confirmed any revenue figure, and TrustMRR has no profile for the company. The two founder figures also do not fit together well: at the archived prices of May 2025, 300 subscribers could pay at most about US$3,900 a month, not US$6,000. The page also shows what happened to earlier companies that sold resume tools and job boards." ], "factsCaption": "An AI resume builder whose co-founder told Starter Story in November 2025 that it made about US$4,000 a month in recurring revenue; reported, not verified", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is a revenue figure stated by one co-founder in one interview, which no other source confirms. A grade C value is a statement by a co-founder, or a figure on the company's own website, its press release, its Product Hunt page or its AppSumo page. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a free resume tool online in June 2024 to a site that claims 540,700 users, with one dated revenue figure in between. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "ResumeUp.AI prices: the current plans from the company's pages on 25 October 2026, older prices from archived copies of its pricing page, and the AppSumo deal (grade C)", "note": "Since November 2025 the pricing page loads its price table from Stripe by script, so this page could not read the quarterly and yearly prices of the current Pro plan. The company's home page and the data inside its pricing page give two plans: Free, and Pro at US$29 billed monthly, with unlimited AI credits, all 20+ templates and unlimited cover letters. The home page says to \"Pay only while you're actively applying. Cancel anytime.\" Archived copies show that the monthly price was US$7.99 in December 2024 and US$12.99 from March to October 2025, while the yearly plan stayed at US$4.49 a month (US$53.88 a year). AppSumo sells a lifetime license of the monthly plan in seven tiers.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "20 AI credits once, basic templates, LinkedIn optimizer, tracker, 2 to 3 mock interviews, Chrome extension" ], [ "Pro, October 2026", "", "29", "unlimited AI credits, all templates, unlimited cover letters; other billing periods load by script" ], [ "Pro, March to October 2025", "4.49", "12.99", "archived; quarterly plan US$7.99 a month" ], [ "Pro, December 2024", "4.49", "7.99", "archived; quarterly plan US$6.49 a month" ], [ "AppSumo lifetime deal, tier 1", "49 one-time", "", "list price US$156; higher tiers up to US$2,999 one-time" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, November 2025", "value": "about US$4,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Hareesh Vemasani in a Starter Story founder interview published 21 November 2025: \"Today, ResumeUp.AI brings in around $4,000 MRR\". The page is a founder interview, not one marked \"Estimated from public sources\". No other source confirms it.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from that figure", "value": "about US$48,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$4,000 times 12. The Starter Story page itself says \"an average of $48K/year\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue stated in May 2025", "value": "\"touching $6,000\", period not stated", "grade": "D", "note": "Rohith Reddy in an Indieniche newsletter interview published 8 May 2025. He did not say whether this is monthly revenue, recurring revenue, or includes one-time sales such as lifetime deals.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Paid subscribers, May 2025", "value": "more than 300", "grade": "C", "note": "Rohith Reddy in the same interview: \"we have surpassed 300 paid subscribers\".", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Most that 300 subscribers could pay at the May 2025 prices", "value": "about US$3,897 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 300 times US$12.99, the highest monthly price on the archived pricing page of 15 May 2025. On the yearly plan, 300 subscribers would pay US$1,347 a month. So the US$6,000 is not monthly subscription revenue from 300 subscribers; it may include one-time sales, which this page cannot check.", "src": [ 2, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Subscribers needed for US$4,000 a month at the October 2025 prices", "value": "about 308 to 891", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$4,000 divided by US$12.99 (monthly plan) and by US$4.49 (yearly plan, per month). This fits the more than 300 paid subscribers of May 2025, so the November figure is plausible, but it is not a check of it.", "src": [ 1, 2, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Visitors, May 2025", "value": "about 25,000 unique visitors a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Rohith Reddy: most of the traffic came from search-optimized content and social media.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Users claimed by the company", "value": "20K+ (February 2025), 144,600+ (November 2025), 250,900+ (April 2026), 500,000+ (August 2026), 540,700+ (October 2026)", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived copies of the home page, the company's press release of 4 August 2026, and the live home page. None of these says how many users pay.", "src": [ 7, 10, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Pro price history", "value": "US$7.99 a month (December 2024), US$12.99 (March to October 2025), US$29 (October 2026), billed monthly", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived pricing pages and the live pricing page. The monthly price rose 62.6% between December 2024 and March 2025 (calculated); the yearly plan stayed at US$4.49 a month through October 2025.", "src": [ 5, 6, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Product Hunt launches", "value": "8 December 2024; ResumeUp 2.0 on 8 March 2025, first of the day", "grade": "C", "note": "Product Hunt page data: ResumeUp 2.0 had daily rank 1, weekly rank 7 and monthly rank 20, with 786 points. Makers: Hareesh Vemasani and Rohith J (profile @rohithreddy).", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "AppSumo lifetime deal", "value": "US$49 one-time for tier 1 (list US$156), 96 reviews", "grade": "C", "note": "AppSumo page read 25 October 2026. Seven tiers from US$49 to US$2,999. Vemasani told Starter Story that the deal brought \"hundreds of new customers in a short span\". Videos titled \"ResumeUp.AI Lifetime Deal\" on the page date from 17 and 18 June 2025.", "src": [ 9, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team, May 2025", "value": "5 full-time employees, including developers and a marketing lead, plus the co-founders", "grade": "C", "note": "Rohith Reddy: his best friend, who had worked part-time, joined full-time as a co-founder in April 2025. That is about 7 people.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Team, November 2025", "value": "2 founders, 3 employees", "grade": "C", "note": "The data box of the Starter Story interview. It does not say whether the 3 employees are full-time.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's AppSumo profile: \"Bootstrapped\", \"Built without external funding\", company size 1-10, founded 1 September 2024. No source mentions a funding round.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue (TrustMRR)", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "The address trustmrr.com/startup/resumeup-ai.md returned \"Not found\" on 25 October 2026, and no ResumeUp slug is in the local list of 11,412 TrustMRR slugs.", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the first Product Hunt launch to the November 2025 figure", "value": "11 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 8 December 2024 to 21 November 2025. The site was online by 27 June 2024, 17 months before the figure.", "src": [ 8, 1, 7 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "27 June 2024", "what": "The earliest archived copy of resumeup.ai shows a live site titled \"Resume Up: Free AI Resume Builder & ATS Checker\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "1 September 2024", "what": "The founding date that the company gives on its AppSumo profile.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "7 December 2024", "what": "The archived pricing page shows one Pro plan at US$7.99 a month, US$6.49 a month billed quarterly, or US$4.49 a month billed yearly.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "8 December 2024", "what": "First launch on Product Hunt, \"Smart resumes, more interviews\". Vemasani told Starter Story that the first payment appeared in Lemon Squeezy about three days after the public launch.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 1 ] }, { "when": "February 2025", "what": "The home page says \"20K+ users built resumes\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "8 March 2025", "what": "ResumeUp 2.0, a chat that builds the resume, is the first product of the day on Product Hunt. By 15 March the monthly price is US$12.99.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 6 ] }, { "when": "April 2025", "what": "Reddy's best friend, who had worked part-time, joins full-time as a co-founder.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "8 May 2025", "what": "Reddy tells the Indieniche newsletter that the company has more than 300 paid subscribers, about 25,000 visitors a month and 5 full-time employees, and that revenue is \"touching $6,000\".", "grade": "D", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "June 2025", "what": "Videos titled \"ResumeUp.AI Lifetime Deal\" are published; the AppSumo deal page shows them.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "21 November 2025", "what": "Vemasani tells Starter Story that the business \"brings in around $4,000 MRR\", with 2 founders and 3 employees. The home page claims 144,600+ users.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "when": "4 August 2026", "what": "A press release on GlobeNewswire calls Rohith Reddy \"Founder and CEO\", describes the company as U.S.-based, and claims more than 500,000 users and a conversational resume builder.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The home page claims 540,700+ users, sells Pro at US$29 a month, and announces a job board with \"Auto-apply coming soon\" and Twinny, an AI that answers recruiters' questions from the user's own resume and stories.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 4 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Search pages and free tools", "text": "Vemasani told Starter Story that, with his background in search engine optimization, he hired freelance writers for blog posts and landing pages that \"slowly started ranking on Google\". In May 2025 Reddy said that most of the 25,000 monthly visitors came from such content. The site now has more than 15 single-purpose tool pages, such as a resume bullet point generator and a LinkedIn headline generator, and comparison pages such as \"Jobscan Alternatives\", each one a page that people search for." }, { "title": "Launch sites and a lifetime deal", "text": "The second Product Hunt launch was first of the day on 8 March 2025. Vemasani said that the AppSumo lifetime deal was a planned investment to get users and reviews quickly, and that it brought hundreds of customers and many reviews. A lifetime deal is a one-time payment for permanent access, so it brings cash once but no recurring revenue." }, { "title": "One fear, one score", "text": "The product is built around one worry of job seekers: that software rejects the resume before a person reads it. The home page quotes a Harvard Business School report that 88% of qualified job seekers are filtered out by automated screening, and the ATS checker turns that worry into a number from 0 to 100 that the user can raise with one-click rewrites." }, { "title": "A low price, then a higher one", "text": "Reddy said in May 2025 that the price was \"almost 60% cheaper\" than the top 10 platforms in the niche. The archived pricing pages put the monthly plan at US$7.99 in December 2024 and US$12.99 from March 2025, and the current page lists US$29 a month, while the company's own FAQ lists Jobscan at US$49.95 a month." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the co-founders' interviews, the company's own pages and its AppSumo profile. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Reddy said that he spent a couple of months on research and talks with HR staff, then hired a front-end developer; the first version was live in four months and was tested with friends and colleagues. Vemasani told the same story of a 3 to 4 month first version.", "The AppSumo profile names \"GPT 4.0 APIs\" as the third-party service that the product critically depends on. The home page now says that the model is fine-tuned on resumes that led to interviews; no source names that model.", "Payments: the first sale appeared in Lemon Squeezy, by Vemasani's account. The current pricing page embeds a Stripe pricing table.", "Hosting: the home page says that servers and databases run on Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, that uploaded files are deleted after 24 hours, and that resumes are not used to train the model.", "Reddy listed Reddit, Indie Hackers, PostHog and Intercom as tools that helped the company grow; AppSumo lists Intercom as an integration.", "The company says that it tests its templates every quarter against five applicant tracking systems: Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS and Oracle Taleo." ], "src": [ 2, 1, 9, 4, 3 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold tools to job seekers, from a resume builder to job boards, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Jobspice", "years": "2009 to 2012", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Professional-looking resumes made quickly from customizable templates.", "died": "It sold one thing, a resume, while free templates spread and LinkedIn became the place where people kept their career record.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1635-jobspice" }, { "name": "Jobr", "years": "2014 to 2019", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A mobile app where job seekers swiped through jobs as in a dating app.", "died": "LinkedIn and Indeed offered more and reached more people, and the swiping idea did not become a way to make money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/261-jobr" }, { "name": "WantRemoteJob", "years": "2018 to 2021", "funding": "US$0", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A job board for remote work in the IT industry.", "died": "Large job sites added remote filters, and the small niche board had no money to compete on features.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1907-wantremotejob" }, { "name": "Jobridge", "years": "2017 to 2020", "funding": "US$0", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "A job search that joined local business directories with an online job board.", "died": "Without outside money it could not grow, and digital job sites took the market faster than it could change.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1902-jobridge" }, { "name": "Monster Worldwide", "years": "1994 to 2025", "funding": "US$500M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "The first large online job board, with a database of resumes for employers.", "died": "It treated job search as a database of listings, and LinkedIn's network and Indeed's search traffic took its users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2400-monster-worldwide" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Jobspice sold a template-based resume and lost to free templates and LinkedIn. Jobr, WantRemoteJob and Jobridge tried to be a better job board and lost to Indeed and LinkedIn, which had the employers and the traffic. Monster was the job board, and it lost when search and professional networks took over job discovery.", "ResumeUp.AI sells something that a free template could not do: it rewrites each resume for one job description and scores it against the keyword filters of applicant tracking systems, which many large employers use. A language model makes that cheap enough for a low subscription price. The new risk is the same one that ended Jobspice: the general chat assistants can do much of this for free, and the company's own FAQ compares itself with ChatGPT. Its newest step, a job board with automatic applications, moves it toward the job board market where the other four predecessors failed." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The same product, only with a clear difference.", "text": "The way ResumeUp.AI found customers is open to any small team: search pages and free tools for questions job seekers type into Google, a Product Hunt launch, and a lifetime deal for early reviews. The product itself is in a crowded market with Jobscan, Rezi, Teal, Kickresume and the free chat assistants, so a copy needs one thing those do not do.", "steps": [ "Pick one fear that users can measure, such as an ATS rejecting the resume, and turn it into a score that the product can raise.", "Write a single-purpose tool page for each search query in the niche; ResumeUp.AI lists more than 15 of them.", "Prepare a Product Hunt launch for weeks, and launch again when the product changes; the second launch was first of the day.", "Use a lifetime deal for reviews and feedback, but keep it limited, because each sale brings money once and costs model usage for years." ], "open": "Tools for one profession's application documents, where the rules are specific and general assistants do poorly: academic CVs, grant applications, nursing and teaching portfolios, government job forms." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline figure rests on one source: Hareesh Vemasani's Starter Story founder interview, published on 21 November 2025, in which he said that ResumeUp.AI \"brings in around $4,000 MRR\". The only other revenue statement is from the other co-founder, Rohith Reddy, in the Indieniche newsletter of 8 May 2025: \"a revenue touching $6,000\", with more than 300 paid subscribers. He did not say what period or what kind of revenue that is; at the archived prices of May 2025, 300 subscribers could pay at most about US$3,900 a month, so the US$6,000 probably includes one-time sales or another measure, and it cannot be compared directly with the November figure. No payment processor, buyer or journalist has confirmed any of these figures; TrustMRR has no ResumeUp profile, and AppSumo and Product Hunt give no revenue. No dated revenue figure exists after November 2025, so the trend on this page is unknown. A reader could look for a payment-processor profile (TrustMRR, or a Stripe screenshot that names ResumeUp.AI) or a second dated interview that names MRR." }, { "title": "Automatic applications", "text": "The free Chrome extension fills in application forms \"on LinkedIn, Indeed, Greenhouse, Lever, ZipRecruiter, and 20 more job boards\" when the user clicks \"Autofill This Page\", and the user can review the details before submitting. The AI Job Search page says \"AI That Applies Jobs For You\", and in October 2026 the home page announced \"Auto-apply coming soon\", with applications \"submitted on your behalf\" after the user approves the skills. No page read for this story claims to get past CAPTCHA tests or to be undetectable. Job sites set their own rules for automated tools, and a change in those rules could break these features." }, { "title": "Dates and names that do not agree", "text": "The Starter Story data box says the business \"started August 2025\", but the site was online by June 2024, the AppSumo profile gives 1 September 2024, and the first Product Hunt launch was on 8 December 2024; the August 2025 date is probably an error. Each co-founder tells the founding story in the first person. The Indieniche interview gives the company 5 full-time employees in May 2025, Starter Story 3 employees in November 2025. The August 2026 press release calls Rohith Reddy \"Founder and CEO\" and the company U.S.-based, while its 2025 pricing pages named an Indian limited liability partnership in Bangalore." }, { "title": "Many users, few payers", "text": "The company claims 540,700+ users in October 2026, up from 144,600+ in November 2025, but no source says how many pay. If the November 2025 figure is right, about 308 to 891 people paid, which is 0.2% to 0.6% of the users claimed at that time (calculated). Most users stay on the free plan." }, { "title": "Crowded market and free assistants", "text": "Jobscan, Rezi, Teal, Kickresume, Zety and many others sell the same tools, and the site's own comparison pages name more than ten of them. ChatGPT and other chat assistants can rewrite a resume for a job description at no extra cost, which the company's FAQ addresses directly. The Pro price has risen from US$7.99 to US$29 a month, which may help revenue or lose price-sensitive users." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://resumeup.ai/" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/resumeup-ai" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/resumeup-ai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Starter Story, 21 November 2025: My AI Resume App Makes $4K Per Month (founder interview with Hareesh Vemasani)", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/resumeup-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full (the free part of the page; the full article is for members). A founder interview, not marked \"Estimated from public sources\". Source for the MRR figure, the team box, the Product Hunt and AppSumo account, the first sale in Lemon Squeezy and the search content." }, { "title": "Indieniche newsletter, 8 May 2025: The Resume Game Is Rigged. This Founder Built a Cheat Code. (interview with Rohith)", "url": "https://indieniche.substack.com/p/the-resume-game-is-rigged-this-founder", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The title is the newsletter's; the product is a resume tool, not a cheating tool. Source for the 300 paid subscribers, the US$6,000 statement, the 5 full-time employees, the 25,000 visitors and the tools." }, { "title": "ResumeUp.AI home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://resumeup.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the features, the job board and auto-apply notice, Twinny, the FAQ on ATS testing, hosting and data, the free plan, the US$29 price and the 540,700+ users claim." }, { "title": "ResumeUp.AI pricing page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://resumeup.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The price table loads from Stripe by script; the page's structured data lists Free at US$0 and Pro at US$29 billed monthly." }, { "title": "ResumeUp.AI pricing page, archived 7 December 2024 (Wayback Machine)", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20241207042418/https://resumeup.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the December 2024 prices." }, { "title": "ResumeUp.AI pricing page, archived 15 March, 15 May, 12 July, 12 September and 9 October 2025 (Wayback Machine)", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20251009163410/https://resumeup.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read all five copies in full; they show the same prices. The copies from 27 November 2025 to April 2026 load the prices by script." }, { "title": "ResumeUp.AI home page, archived 27 June 2024, 14 February 2025, 15 November 2025 and 2 April 2026 (Wayback Machine)", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20251115143627/https://resumeup.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read each copy for its title and user count. Source for the earliest live date and the user counts." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: ResumeUp.AI, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/resumeup-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the launch data inside the page. Source for the launch dates, the ranks, the points and the makers." }, { "title": "AppSumo: ResumeUp.AI lifetime deal, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://appsumo.com/products/resumeupai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the company profile data inside the page. Source for the deal tiers, the reviews, the founding date, the company size, \"Bootstrapped\" and the model dependency." }, { "title": "GlobeNewswire, 4 August 2026: ResumeUp.AI Crosses 500,000 Users and Launches a Conversational AI Resume Builder (company press release)", "url": "https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/08/04/3338492/0/en/ResumeUp-AI-Crosses-500-000-Users-and-Launches-a-Conversational-AI-Resume-Builder.html", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full from the Wayback Machine copy of 5 August 2026, because the live site refused automated requests. A press release written by the company." }, { "title": "ResumeUp.AI: AI Job Search page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://resumeup.ai/ai-job-search", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the automatic application claims." }, { "title": "ResumeUp.AI: Autofill Job Applications page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://resumeup.ai/autofill-job-applications", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Chrome extension, the job boards it supports and the review step before submission." }, { "title": "ResumeUp.AI: AI Mock Interview page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://resumeup.ai/ai-mock-interview", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The interviews are practice sessions before a real interview, with feedback." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." }, { "title": "TrustMRR: ResumeUp.AI profile address, checked 25 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/resumeup-ai.md", "grade": "C", "how": "Could not open: the address returned \"Not found\". Source for the absence of a verified revenue profile." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/ai-peekaboo/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/ai-peekaboo.md", "slug": "ai-peekaboo", "name": "AI Peekaboo", "country": "Portugal and USA, Wyoming company", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI search visibility tracking (GEO)", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "September 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$8K a month MRR, January 2026", "sticker": "Reported $8K MRR", "outcomeUsd": 96000, "months": 4, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders, Filipe Lins Duarte (CEO) and John Rice (CTO); no employees named in the sources", "fundingLabel": "None found", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "seo-ai-search", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Marketing" ], "product": "Software that sends the questions a brand's buyers might ask to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode on a schedule, with Claude (through Anthropic's API) and Microsoft Copilot as add-ons. It stores each answer, records whether the brand is named, in which position and with what sentiment, lists the web pages that the answer cites, and turns the gaps into a to-do list. Agencies can show the results to their clients under their own brand.", "why": "Two co-founders launched it in September 2025, when brands had started to ask how AI assistants describe them and few tools measured it. It sold to agencies from the start, with archived agency plans of US$100 and US$200 a month listed in September 2025, and an Austin agency announced a partnership in December 2025. In January 2026 the founder posted on Hacker News that it had reached US$8,000 in monthly recurring revenue about five months after launch, and that the co-founders were considering a sale because their objectives differed.", "summary": [ "AI Peekaboo is a tool for generative engine optimization (GEO), the work of making a brand appear in the answers of AI assistants, in the way that search engine optimization (SEO) makes a page appear in Google's list of links. The customer enters prompts, the questions that a person types into an AI assistant, for example \"best review platform for online stores\". The software sends each prompt to each chosen AI model with live web search turned on, stores the answer, and computes an AI visibility score: the share of answers that name the brand. It also records the brand's position in the answer, the sentiment (whether the answer describes the brand positively or negatively) and the citations, the web pages that the model names as its sources. The AI models are not only the subject of the product: according to the company's help and home pages, every number in it is computed from answers that the models generate when the product queries them, and Google AI Overviews, which has no API, is read from the real search interface.", "The company page names two co-founders, Filipe Lins Duarte (CEO, strategy and sales) and John Rice (CTO, product and technology), who it says have built together since 2024. A free beta ran in May 2025. The about page dates the launch to September 2025, and the terms of service, from Think Outside The Box Ventures, LLC, a Wyoming company, took effect on 2 September 2025. The company lists offices in Lisbon, Portugal, and in Minnesota, USA. On 22 January 2026 the founder posted on Hacker News: \"We hit $8K MRR about 5 months after launching.\" MRR means monthly recurring revenue, the subscription money that comes in each month; US$8,000 a month is about US$96,000 a year if it stays the same. In the same post he wrote that \"due to some misalignment in co-founder objectives\" they were considering a sale. In October 2026 the about page still names both founders and calls the company independent; no source reports a sale.", "The revenue figure rests on one post by the founder, grade D: no payment processor, buyer or journalist has confirmed it, and the post was written to find a buyer. The rest of the page comes from the company's own pages, live and archived, and from two articles that the company itself lists as a partnership announcement and as sponsored content. The page also shows four earlier companies that sold brands a measure of their visibility on platforms that they did not own." ], "factsCaption": "A two-founder AI visibility tracker that its founder said reached US$8,000 a month in recurring revenue in January 2026, about four to five months after a September 2025 launch", "factsRead": "How to read this table: the grade D value is one founder post that no one else has checked. Grade C values are the company's own pages, live or in the Wayback Machine, and articles that the company lists as partnership news or sponsored content. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a free beta to a sale offer on Hacker News in eight months, and still run by the same two founders in October 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "AI Peekaboo prices in October 2026: the rate and rules from the company's help page, with the examples computed on this page (the calculator on the pricing page loads its prices by script); the January 2026 plans from the archived home page (grade C)", "note": "Later in 2026 the fixed plans gave way to a calculator: according to the help page (last reviewed 14 August 2026), US$16.67 per 1,000 \"configured checks\" a month, where one check is one prompt for one brand answered by one model once, with a minimum of US$29 a month. The pricing page says every plan starts at US$30 a month, which matches its default configuration. Yearly billing takes 15% off. The yearly column and the examples were computed on this page from that rate. White-label reports and share links unlock at US$100 a month, and configurations of US$600 a month or more go to a sales conversation. The January 2026 plans in the last three rows used 3 models; the same coverage under the new rate would cost about US$30, US$60 and US$150 a month (calculated). A white-label lead-generation funnel for agencies is a separate managed service with custom pricing.", "rows": [ [ "Minimum charge", "24.65", "29", "the floor for any configuration" ], [ "Default on the pricing page", "25.50", "30", "1 brand, 40 prompts, 3 models, every 2 days: 1,800 checks a month" ], [ "Example: daily on all 5 standard models", "85", "100", "1 brand, 40 prompts: 6,000 checks a month; white-label reports included from this price" ], [ "Example: 100 prompts", "212.50", "250", "1 brand, 100 prompts, 5 models, daily: 15,000 checks a month" ], [ "Large configurations", "", "600 and up", "handed to sales instead of self-serve checkout; custom volume pricing above 150 brands" ], [ "Claude API and Microsoft Copilot", "", "add-on", "priced separately in the quote" ], [ "Starter (Brand), January 2026", "", "50", "1 brand, 40 prompts, every 2 days, 1,800 data points" ], [ "Peek (Brand), January 2026", "", "100", "1 brand, 40 prompts, daily, 3,600 data points" ], [ "Grow (Brand), January 2026", "", "200", "1 brand, 100 prompts, daily, 9,000 data points" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, January 2026", "value": "US$8,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder's post on Hacker News, 22 January 2026: \"We hit $8K MRR about 5 months after launching.\" One source, written to find a buyer.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from that figure", "value": "about US$96,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$8,000 times 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the figure", "value": "4 calendar months (about 4.7 months, 143 days, from 1 September 2025)", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: September 2025 (about page; terms effective 2 September 2025) to 22 January 2026. The founder wrote \"about 5 months\".", "src": [ 1, 2, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Subscriptions needed for US$8,000 a month at January 2026 prices", "value": "40 to 160", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$8,000 divided by the brand plan prices of US$200 and US$50 a month. Agency plans on custom prices would lower the count.", "src": [ 1, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Reason given for a possible sale", "value": "\"misalignment in co-founder objectives\"", "grade": "D", "note": "Same post. In October 2026 the about page still names both co-founders.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Founders", "value": "Filipe Lins Duarte (CEO) and John Rice (CTO)", "grade": "C", "note": "About page and the archived home pages of September 2025 and January 2026. Both are named in the February 2026 sponsored article.", "src": [ 2, 8, 9, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Launch", "value": "September 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "About page: \"Launch day, September 2025.\" Terms of service effective 2 September 2025. A free beta was live on 22 May 2025.", "src": [ 2, 7, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Company", "value": "Think Outside The Box Ventures, LLC, a Wyoming limited liability company", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms of service. Peekaboo is a trade name of this company. The site lists offices in Lisbon and in Minnesota.", "src": [ 10, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "No source names an investor. The January 2026 post asked for introductions to buyers of small software companies or to funds.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "AI models queried", "value": "ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode; Claude API and Microsoft Copilot as add-ons", "grade": "C", "note": "Help page: Gemini with search grounding, Perplexity with its own web search, ChatGPT and the Google surfaces through \"dedicated infrastructure\", Claude through Anthropic's API (claude-sonnet-5) with web search.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Price unit in 2026", "value": "US$16.67 per 1,000 checks a month, minimum US$29", "grade": "C", "note": "Help page, last reviewed 14 August 2026. Yearly billing 15% off.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Agency plans at launch", "value": "US$100 a month for 2 brands, US$200 a month for 5 brands, daily tracking", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived home page, 4 September 2025.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Claimed users", "value": "\"3,000+ users\" (September 2025 to January 2026); \"250+ companies\" (October 2026)", "grade": "C", "note": "Company pages. The January 2026 page says \"3,000+ brands analyzed\", which counts free reports, not paying customers.", "src": [ 8, 9, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Agency partnership", "value": "Intellibright, a digital marketing agency in Austin, Texas", "grade": "C", "note": "MarTech360, 19 December 2025, quoting the CEO. The current home page shows Intellibright's white-label client reports.", "src": [ 11, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Payments", "value": "Stripe", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms of service and the subscription help page.", "src": [ 10, 17 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2024", "what": "Filipe Lins Duarte and John Rice start building together, according to the about page.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "22 May 2025", "what": "An archived page shows a beta, \"Completely free during early access\", that reports a site's visibility in ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, and promises \"autonomous content agents\" that publish posts on Medium and wiki pages.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "2 September 2025", "what": "The terms of service of Think Outside The Box Ventures, LLC take effect. The about page dates the launch to September 2025.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10, 2 ] }, { "when": "4 September 2025", "what": "The archived home page lists agency plans at US$100 and US$200 a month, claims \"3,000+ users\", and shows the two co-founders as the team.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "19 December 2025", "what": "Intellibright, an agency in Austin, Texas, announces a partnership to offer AI Peekaboo's visibility data to its clients.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "14 January 2026", "what": "The archived home page lists brand plans at US$50, US$100 and US$200 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "22 January 2026", "what": "On Hacker News the founder posts \"Selling my AI visibility SaaS – $8K MRR, 5 months in – looking for intros\", citing differences in the co-founders' objectives.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "9 February 2026", "what": "Forbes Portugal publishes sponsored content (Forbes Lab) in which both founders answer questions about brands in AI answers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "August 2026", "what": "The help center describes a new price per check, a REST API and MCP access on every plan, and a free open-source content skill that drafts articles from the measured gaps.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 16, 3 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The about page still names both co-founders and calls AI Peekaboo \"An independent company\". The pricing page claims \"250+ companies\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 4 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Timing", "text": "The product launched in September 2025, in the months when marketers began to see visitors arrive from ChatGPT and Perplexity and asked what those assistants said about them. The free beta of May 2025 tested the idea before the paid launch. The founder said in January 2026 that monthly recurring revenue reached US$8,000 about five months after launch." }, { "title": "Agencies as the first market", "text": "The September 2025 page listed only agency plans with prices: several client brands in one account, white-label reports and unlimited seats. An agency that sells AI visibility to ten clients brings ten brands, and the December 2025 partnership with Intellibright made one agency a reseller of the data to its clients." }, { "title": "Price follows the cost of each answer", "text": "Each check is one call to one model, and model calls cost money. The 2026 price, according to the help page, is US$16.67 per 1,000 checks a month, so a customer who tracks more prompts, more models or a higher frequency pays more, and the margin per check stays the same." }, { "title": "Real interfaces, not a guess", "text": "The help pages say that the software asks live, web-search-enabled models instead of asking a model what it would probably say. Google AI Overviews, which has no API, is captured from the real search interface. The company presents this as the reason its numbers match what a buyer sees." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages, live and archived. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Every tracked prompt is asked live against each chosen model with web search on. Gemini is queried with search grounding, Perplexity through its own web search, and Claude through Anthropic's API with web search.", "ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode and Microsoft Copilot are captured through what the help page calls dedicated infrastructure that reads the consumer interfaces; a fallback method runs when the main path fails.", "Results feed a dashboard, a Looker Studio connector, a REST API and an MCP server, so a customer can ask Claude Code or Cursor about the data.", "A free, open-source agent skill on the founder's GitHub account reads a customer's data through the API and drafts an article for a gap, pausing for approval before it writes.", "Subscriptions are billed through Stripe; the site pages are built with Next.js, as their page source shows.", "Free tools (an AI visibility report, a citation checker, an llms.txt generator) and comparison articles about more than twenty other SEO and AI visibility tools are listed on the site and in its sitemap." ], "src": [ 6, 3, 16, 17, 10, 19 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold a measure of how a person or a brand appeared on platforms that they did not own. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Klout", "years": "2008 to 2017", "funding": "US$40M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A score from 1 to 100 that measured how influential a person or a brand was on social networks.", "died": "Facebook, Twitter and Instagram built their own analytics, rivals gave more detail, and changes to API access limited the data that Klout could collect.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/280-klout" }, { "name": "ThinkUp", "years": "2010 to 2017", "funding": "US$1M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Insights from a person's Twitter and Facebook activity that went beyond counts of likes and retweets.", "died": "The platforms improved their own analytics and restricted API access, and larger social media tools offered more than analytics.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/624-thinkup" }, { "name": "SumAll", "years": "2011 to 2019", "funding": "US$15M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "One dashboard that collected a small business's data from its social media and marketing platforms.", "died": "It could not set itself apart from larger analytics products and free tools such as Google Data Studio, and customers left over price.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/587-sumall" }, { "name": "Salorix", "years": "2009 to 2014", "funding": "US$3.3M", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "Machine learning that ranked social media conversations, so brands could see the themes and influencers in their market.", "died": "Its investors withdrew their support at the same time as leaner competitors with newer AI methods arrived.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1845-salorix" } ], "whatChanged": [ "All four measured a brand's presence on platforms owned by someone else, and all four lost when the platforms built their own analytics or closed their data. AI Peekaboo carries the same risk: OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Microsoft decide what their assistants answer, and the help page shows that ChatGPT and the Google surfaces are read from consumer interfaces, not from an official reporting service. Large SEO suites, such as the Ahrefs and Semrush products that the company's blog reviews, sell AI visibility reports too.", "Two things differ. First, the platforms do not sell this measurement themselves yet, so there is no native analytics product to replace it, as there was for Klout and ThinkUp. Second, the company has no investors to satisfy: two founders, per-check pricing that passes the model cost to the customer, and agencies that resell the data. The open question is the founders themselves: the founder wrote in January 2026 that their objectives differed." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The market, crowded.", "text": "The company's own blog has comparison and alternatives articles about more than twenty other SEO and AI visibility tools, so a new copy meets a crowded market. The method is still open: price each model call so that the customer pays for the coverage they choose, sell to agencies first because each agency brings many brands, and give them reports under their own name.", "steps": [ "Query the real AI interfaces with web search on, and store every answer and citation as evidence.", "Price per unit of model usage, with a low minimum, so that small customers can start and large ones pay for their volume.", "Sell to agencies with multi-brand accounts and white-label reports, and sign one agency partner early.", "Before you post a revenue figure to sell, connect a payment-processor profile so that a buyer can check it." ], "open": "Measurement where AI now decides what people see and no official report exists: AI shopping answers, AI answers in maps and local search, and assistants inside apps." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The figure of US$8,000 in monthly recurring revenue rests on one source: Filipe Lins Duarte's post on Hacker News of 22 January 2026, written to find a buyer, with no dashboard or document. No payment processor, buyer or journalist confirms it, and no later revenue figure exists. The team size at that date is also known only from the company's pages, which name two co-founders and no employees. A reader could look for a payment-processor profile (for example on TrustMRR), a marketplace listing for the sale, or a later interview with either founder." }, { "title": "The co-founders disagreed", "text": "The founder wrote in January 2026 that the two founders' objectives differed and that they were considering a sale. In October 2026 both are still named on the about page and no sale has been reported, but the outcome of that disagreement is not public." }, { "title": "A beta promise of content agents", "text": "The free beta page of May 2025 promised \"autonomous content agents\" that would \"publish and refresh content on Medium blog posts wiki pages and your website\", with tasks such as \"Build wiki page for your product\". The paid product from September 2025 does not list this, and a help page of 2026 says Content Briefs \"will not write your articles for you\". Publishing promotional pages on third-party sites to influence AI answers would be against the rules of many of those sites." }, { "title": "Reddit tasks in the to-do list", "text": "The recommendations screen suggests tasks such as \"Earn mentions in cited Reddit threads\" and \"Share customer proof in Facebook groups\". The product only suggests them; it does not sell or post comments. How a customer carries out such a task, openly or not, is the customer's responsibility." }, { "title": "Claims on the site are larger than the paying base", "text": "The site claimed \"3,000+ users\" from September 2025, the month of launch, which counts free reports. In October 2026 it claims \"250+ companies\". Neither number is a count of paying customers." }, { "title": "The models decide the numbers", "text": "Every score depends on answers that the AI providers generate, and these answers change from one run to the next. If a provider blocks automated access to its consumer interface or raises its prices, the cost and the reliability of each check change with it." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.aipeekaboo.com/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Hacker News, 22 January 2026: Selling my AI visibility SaaS – $8K MRR, 5 months in – looking for intros (post by filipeduarte), read through the Algolia HN API", "url": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/46725725", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full (story and text, items 46725725 and 46725726). Only source for the MRR figure, the time since launch and the reason for a sale." }, { "title": "AI Peekaboo about page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.aipeekaboo.com/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founders, their roles, the launch month, the company name and the independence statement." }, { "title": "AI Peekaboo home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.aipeekaboo.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the menus and the managed services section. Source for the current features and for the purpose check." }, { "title": "AI Peekaboo pricing page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.aipeekaboo.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The calculator loads its prices by script; the page text gives the starting price, the rules and the customer claim." }, { "title": "AI Peekaboo help center: Plans and pricing (last reviewed 14 August 2026)", "url": "https://www.aipeekaboo.com/help-center/plans-and-pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the price per check, the minimum, the yearly discount and the thresholds used in the pricing table." }, { "title": "AI Peekaboo help center: How we get the data (last reviewed 14 August 2026)", "url": "https://www.aipeekaboo.com/help-center/how-we-get-the-data", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for how each AI model is queried." }, { "title": "AI Peekaboo home page, Wayback Machine copy of 22 May 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250522065022/https://www.aipeekaboo.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the free beta and the content agents it promised." }, { "title": "AI Peekaboo home page, Wayback Machine copy of 4 September 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250904002023/https://www.aipeekaboo.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the launch-month agency prices, the user claim and the team section." }, { "title": "AI Peekaboo home page, Wayback Machine copy of 14 January 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260114080313/https://www.aipeekaboo.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the brand plan prices in the month of the revenue figure." }, { "title": "AI Peekaboo terms and conditions (effective 2 September 2025)", "url": "https://www.aipeekaboo.com/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the contracting entity, payment and governing law." }, { "title": "MarTech360, 19 December 2025: Intellibright Partners with Peekaboo to Redefine Modern Search Marketing", "url": "https://www.martech360.com/news/media-growth/intellibright-partners-with-peekaboo-to-redefine-modern-search-marketing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A partnership announcement that quotes the CEO; linked from the company's about page as partnership news." }, { "title": "Forbes Portugal (Forbes Lab, sponsored content), 9 February 2026: Será que a IA sabe que a minha marca existe?", "url": "https://www.forbespt.com/sera-que-a-ia-sabe-que-a-minha-marca-existe/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full (in Portuguese). Sponsored content, as the page and the company's about page say. Names both founders." }, { "title": "AI Peekaboo: White Label AI Lead Generation for Agencies", "url": "https://www.aipeekaboo.com/features/ai-lead-generation", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the managed service listed under \"Managed services\" in the menu, checked for the purpose gate." }, { "title": "AI Peekaboo: To-dos and recommendations feature page", "url": "https://www.aipeekaboo.com/features/recommendations", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the action plan. Source for the Reddit and Facebook task suggestions." }, { "title": "AI Peekaboo help center: What AI Peekaboo does not do (last reviewed 14 August 2026)", "url": "https://www.aipeekaboo.com/help-center/what-peekaboo-cannot-do", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the statement that Content Briefs will not write articles." }, { "title": "AI Peekaboo help center: The AI Peekaboo content skill on GitHub (last reviewed 14 August 2026)", "url": "https://www.aipeekaboo.com/help-center/content-skill", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the open-source drafting skill." }, { "title": "AI Peekaboo help center: Managing your subscription (last reviewed 14 August 2026)", "url": "https://www.aipeekaboo.com/help-center/managing-your-subscription", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on cancelling and invoices. Source for the Stripe billing portal." }, { "title": "AI Peekaboo sitemap, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.aipeekaboo.com/sitemap.xml", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the list of pages. Source for the free tools and the comparison articles about other tools." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/guidejar/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/guidejar.md", "slug": "guidejar", "name": "Guidejar", "country": "India", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Step-by-step guides and interactive walkthroughs from screen captures, with AI writing, voiceover and translation", "aiType": "AI-leveraged", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "October 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$85.1K verified revenue in 12 months, October 2026", "sticker": "$85.1K in 12 months", "outcomeUsd": 85136, "months": 36, "teamLabel": "1 founder, run as a side project in June 2025, with freelance help; Latka counted 2 people on LinkedIn in October 2024", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "documents-data", "channel": "launches", "trend": "flat", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-leveraged", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Productivity" ], "product": "A Chrome extension and desktop apps for Mac and Windows record each click while a person does a task on screen. Guidejar turns the clicks and screenshots into a step-by-step guide or an interactive walkthrough that can be shared by link, embedded in a website or collected in a help center. On the paid plans an AI writer named Nila rewrites the steps, and other AI features add a spoken voiceover, translate the guide into more than 30 languages, turn a screen video into a guide and answer readers' questions from the guides.", "why": "The first customers came from a lifetime-deal sale on AppSumo, at a time when the product had no AI at all. That gave about a thousand users, word of mouth and a Powered by Guidejar link on every free guide. From April 2024 the founder sold subscriptions instead, and added AI writing, voiceover and translation to the paid plans, metered in credits.", "summary": [ "Guidejar makes SOPs, standard operating procedures, which are written instructions for how a task is done in a company, and interactive walkthroughs, guides that show one screen at a time with a marker on the exact place to click. A browser extension, a small program added to Chrome, or a desktop app records every click and screenshot while you do the task once. The result is a guide that can be shared, embedded or placed in a help center. On paid plans, Guidejar AI writes the step text, adds a narrated voice track, translates and answers readers' questions, paid for with AI credits, a monthly allowance of usage units that each AI action consumes.", "Shri Vatz, a software developer in Chennai, built it alone. His first sold product, Cold DM, sent cold direct messages on Twitter in bulk; he sold it in 2022 for US$6,000. He started Guidejar in June 2023 and launched it in October 2023 without any AI features. A lifetime deal, one payment for permanent access, on the AppSumo marketplace brought 950 or more paying customers by March 2024. From April 2024 he sold subscriptions, and by June 2024 the main paid plan included AI paraphrase, translation and voiceover. TrustMRR, which reads revenue directly from the company's Stripe account, shows US$85,136 in the twelve months to 25 October 2026 and US$7,221 in the last 30 days.", "The revenue figures are grade A: two services read them from Stripe on 25 October 2026 and agree within 2%. The earlier monthly figures are the founder's own statements in interviews, grade C. One question was checked separately: whether customers pay for the AI or only for screen capture and hosting. The pricing page puts AI credits in every paid plan, sells extra credits, and makes AI the main difference of the top plan, so AI is a large paid part of the product today. But the first thousand customers bought a version with no AI, so this page counts Guidejar as AI-leveraged, not AI-native." ], "factsCaption": "A screen-capture guide tool with an AI writing layer: US$85,136 of Stripe-verified revenue in the twelve months to October 2026, built by one founder", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read from the company's Stripe account by TrustMRR or by IndiePage. A grade B value is a platform's own published rule. A grade C value is a statement by the founder, by the company's own pages, or by a site that interviewed him or compiled his posts. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a bulk-DM tool sold for US$6,000 to a guide maker with 210 active subscriptions, in about four years. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Guidejar prices on 25 October 2026, from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "Prices are per user (seat) per month in US dollars. The page states the yearly price only for Pro (US$16 instead of US$19); for the other plans it says that yearly billing costs about ten months of monthly billing. Readers of a guide never need a seat. Every paid plan has a 7-day free trial and a refund within the first 3 days. AI credits roll over and never expire; Business teams can also bring their own OpenAI, Anthropic or ElevenLabs API keys.", "rows": [ [ "Starter", "0", "0", "5 guides, browser capture, share and embed; no AI" ], [ "Pro", "16", "19", "1 user, unlimited guides, 5,000 AI credits a month" ], [ "Plus", "", "25", "1 user, desktop capture, MP4 export, help center on own domain, 10,000 AI credits a month" ], [ "Business", "", "75", "5 users included, US$15 for each extra user; Ask AI, voice cloning, auto-redact; 100,000 AI credits a month" ], [ "Enterprise", "custom", "custom", "from 10 users, single sign-on, custom AI credit allowance" ], [ "AI credit top-up", "", "4.99 one-time", "20,000 extra AI credits" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue in the twelve months to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$85,136", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from Stripe through an API key, last synced 25 October 2026. IndiePage, also connected to Stripe, shows US$84,872 for the last 365 days on the same date.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days, 25 October 2026", "value": "US$7,221", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. IndiePage shows US$7,290 on the same day. The two figures differ by about 1%.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the last 30 days", "value": "about US$86,652 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$7,221 times 12. Close to the twelve-month total, which is the headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue and subscriptions, October 2026", "value": "US$4,877 a month; 210 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR metric snapshot. Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) counts subscription payments spread per month. It is lower than the 30-day revenue, so part of the money comes from yearly plans, top-ups or other payments counted when they are paid.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Total revenue since the start", "value": "US$150,965", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, Stripe. IndiePage shows US$153,266. Money from the AppSumo campaign was probably paid out by AppSumo, not through Stripe; this is not verified.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month, November 2025 to October 2026", "value": "from US$5,299 (February 2026) to US$12,355 (January 2026)", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. Eight of the twelve months are between US$5,400 and US$6,800. October 2026 was still running when read.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Last six months compared with the six months before", "value": "US$37,666 against US$47,470, about 21% lower", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the TrustMRR six-month and twelve-month totals. The difference comes mostly from January and March 2026; May to October 2026 stayed between US$5,457 and US$7,762 a month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR stated by the founder", "value": "about US$2,000 (October 2024), US$3,000 (January 2025), about US$4,000 with 170+ customers (June 2025)", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder statements in a Microns interview, a Gaps report on his posts, and a Fake Mayo interview. They agree with the verified US$4,877 in October 2026.", "src": [ 4, 5, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Growth of MRR from June 2025 to October 2026", "value": "about 22%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$4,877 against the founder's US$4,000. The starting figure is grade C.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "AppSumo lifetime deal, December 2023 to March 2024", "value": "950+ paid customers in 4 months, with a 50-50 revenue split", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in the Fake Mayo interview. In October 2024 he told Microns 1,000+ lifetime-deal customers.", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "AI in the first versions", "value": "none in October 2023 or February 2024; AI paraphrase, translation and voiceover by June 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "Wayback copies of the home page. The February 2024 copy already says 500+ paid customers with no AI feature listed.", "src": [ 10, 11, 12 ] }, { "fact": "AI in the paid plans, October 2026", "value": "5,000 to 100,000 AI credits a month by plan; 20,000 extra credits for US$4.99", "grade": "C", "note": "Pricing page. Nila rewriting, voiceover, translation, FAQs and imports from PDF or Word files are on Pro and above; Ask AI, voice cloning and automatic hiding of personal data are on Business. The free plan has no AI.", "src": [ 6, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Paid advertising", "value": "about US$500 a month on Google Ads, return on ad spend about 1.38", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder, June 2025. He spent US$100 a month on Apollo for cold email when revenue was US$80 a month, without results.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Acquisition offer turned down", "value": "US$75,000, when revenue was US$300 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Gaps report of January 2025 on the founder's posts. Date of the offer not stated.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 founder; one freelance influencer-marketing manager in October 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder called Guidejar a solo, very serious side project in June 2025. Latka counted 2 people who list Guidejar on LinkedIn in October 2024. No current headcount was found.", "src": [ 3, 4, 16 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions an investment. TrustMRR does not list funding.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Earlier product Cold DM, sold in 2022", "value": "US$6,000, at about US$70 MRR", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in the Microns interview. A tool that found Twitter users and sent them direct messages in bulk; see the timeline.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October 2026 figure", "value": "36 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: October 2023 to October 2026.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "July 2022", "what": "While resting from a knee injury, Shri Vatz, a software developer, finds the build-in-public community on Twitter and decides to build his own products.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "8 August 2022", "what": "He launches Cold DM. The September 2022 version is an opt-in community whose page says it is not an auto-DM tool.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 14 ] }, { "when": "Autumn 2022", "what": "Cold DM is rebuilt as a Twitter outreach tool: it collects the followers of any account, or people who used a keyword, and sends them personalized DMs in bulk, up to 400 a day. Twitter's automation rules said: 'You may not send unsolicited Direct Messages in a bulk or automated manner.'", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13, 15, 4 ] }, { "when": "About October 2022", "what": "At about US$70 MRR, two months after launch, he sells Cold DM for US$6,000 within four days of listing it on Microns. A second product, Support Guy, a website chatbot, also goes to the same buyer (date not stated).", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 3 ] }, { "when": "June 2023", "what": "He starts building Guidejar, because making product demos for his earlier products was slow.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "when": "October 2023", "what": "Launch on X. The site sells a Chrome extension that records clicks, with a free plan and a Premium plan at US$12 a month (discounted from US$20). No AI features.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 10 ] }, { "when": "November 2023", "what": "A Black Friday lifetime deal, promoted on Reddit and deal directories, brings 7 to 8 users in a week.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "December 2023", "what": "AppSumo campaign starts with a 50-50 split. More than 100 paid users in the first days.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "7 February 2024", "what": "The home page says 500+ paid customers and lists a Mac app; still no AI features.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "March to April 2024", "what": "The AppSumo campaign ends after 4 months and 950+ paid customers. Guidejar moves to subscriptions.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "when": "1 June 2024", "what": "The Premium plan, US$10 per user a month billed yearly, now includes AI Paraphrase, AI Translate and AI Voiceover.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "October 2024", "what": "About US$2,000 MRR, says the founder. He has hired a freelancer as influencer-marketing manager.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "January 2025", "what": "US$3,000 MRR and a goal of US$10,000, reports Gaps from his posts.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "15 June 2025", "what": "About US$4,000 MRR with 170+ customers. He still runs it alone as a side project and spends about US$500 a month on Google Ads.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "January 2026", "what": "Best month in the verified record: US$12,355.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "US$85,136 in twelve months, US$7,221 in 30 days, MRR US$4,877, 210 active subscriptions, read from Stripe. The product now has an AI writer, AI credits and a connector for Claude and ChatGPT.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2, 8 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A lifetime deal for the first thousand users", "text": "Guidejar had almost no users a month after launch. A lifetime deal on AppSumo, with half of each sale going to AppSumo, gave it more than 950 paying customers in four months. The founder says much of the later word of mouth came from these AppSumo customers, and that getting customers mattered more than revenue at that stage." }, { "title": "The free plan advertises the product", "text": "Guides made on the free plan carry a Powered by Guidejar link wherever they are shared or embedded. The founder names this, word of mouth from AppSumo buyers and his own Reddit comments as his main sources of users; paid ads came later and returned about 1.38 times their cost, he said in June 2025." }, { "title": "AI as a metered layer on top of capture", "text": "The recorder that turns clicks into steps is not AI. On the paid plans, AI writes the step text, a title and FAQs, narrates the guide, translates it and answers readers' questions. Each AI action uses credits, each seat brings a monthly allowance, and extra credits are sold. So the AI cost is paid by the customers who use it, and the free plan carries no AI cost." }, { "title": "One person runs it on rented services", "text": "The security page lists the parts: Google Cloud with Firebase for the database, login and media processing, Vercel for the web app, Cloudflare for file storage, AWS for video export, OpenAI for text and ElevenLabs for voice. None of these needs an employee to operate." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's security and privacy pages and from the founder's interviews. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Capture: a Chrome extension and desktop apps for Mac and Windows record each click and take a screenshot; no screen video is needed.", "Back end: Google Cloud Platform, with Firestore as the database, Firebase Authentication for login and Cloud Run for backend functions and media processing.", "Front end on Vercel; uploaded screenshots, recordings and audio on Cloudflare R2 and the Cloudflare network; video export rendered on Amazon Web Services.", "AI: OpenAI for guide rewriting and video-to-guide, requests routed through the Vercel AI Gateway; ElevenLabs for voice. The privacy notice also names Google Cloud AI as a provider.", "Search by Algolia, analytics by Tinybird, PostHog and Google Analytics, errors by Sentry, support chat by Crisp, email by Autosend, referral tracking by Dub.", "Payments through Stripe-hosted checkout. A connector based on the Model Context Protocol lets Claude, ChatGPT or Grok create and search guides." ], "src": [ 9, 3, 7, 8, 19 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised to turn knowledge into easy guides, narrated stories or shared screens, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Qwiki", "years": "2010 to 2015", "funding": "US$10M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Automatically generated, narrated multimedia presentations instead of plain search results.", "died": "High costs and little user demand; it was bought by Yahoo and disappeared next to Google and mobile video.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/481-qwiki" }, { "name": "Niles", "years": "2017 to 2020", "funding": "US$2.8M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A chatbot in Slack that answers staff questions from the company's collected knowledge.", "died": "Slack's own features and cheaper competitors did the same job.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1031-niles" }, { "name": "Omniref", "years": "2015 to 2018", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A shared place to document and explain source code.", "died": "No community and no money; GitHub and Stack Overflow already held the users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1119-omniref" }, { "name": "Screenhero", "years": "2012 to 2017", "funding": "US$2.7M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Screen sharing where several people control the same screen.", "died": "Sold to Slack, then overtaken by Zoom and Microsoft Teams, which built screen sharing in.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/525-screenhero" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Qwiki generated narrated presentations from 2010 and, according to the database, died of high costs and little demand. Niles answered staff questions from company knowledge in Slack from 2017 and lost to Slack's own features. Omniref and Screenhero needed users to move their work onto a new product, and larger platforms already had those users.", "Guidejar's case is different in three ways. Writing, narration and translation are now rented as APIs from OpenAI and ElevenLabs, so one person can offer them and pass the cost to the customer as credits. The capture itself, clicks turned into screenshots and steps, is a narrow tool that fits into the help centers, wikis and chat assistants people already use, instead of asking them to move. And the first customers came from a marketplace, AppSumo, that brought buyers without a large audience or a sales team." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, with a crowded market.", "text": "Nothing here needed capital or an audience: a capture tool, a lifetime deal on a marketplace for the first customers, then subscriptions with AI features charged by usage. The difficulty is competition. Guidejar's own site compares it with Scribe, Guidde, Tango and Supademo, and the founder says the hardest part was explaining in one sentence what the product does.", "steps": [ "Build a narrow tool that solves a task you had yourself, as the founder did with product demos.", "Use a lifetime deal on a marketplace such as AppSumo to get the first few hundred users, then switch to subscriptions.", "Put a link to your product on everything the free plan produces.", "Sell AI features in credits, so heavy users pay for their own model costs.", "Listen to what customers really use it for; here it was internal training, not product demos." ], "open": "Capture tools for a single profession or system (medical records software, accounting packages, factory machines), where generic guide makers do not know the vocabulary." }, "watch": [ { "title": "The AI came after the customers", "text": "Guidejar launched in October 2023 without AI, and its February 2024 home page claimed 500+ paid customers with no AI feature listed. AI paraphrase, translation and voiceover appear by June 2024; AI writing, credits and top-ups came later. No source splits the revenue between people who pay for the AI and people who pay for unlimited guides, branding and the help center. A reader can judge from the pricing table which part they would pay for." }, { "title": "Uneven months and a lower last half year", "text": "The verified months range from US$5,299 to US$12,355. The last six months brought about 21% less than the six before, mostly because January and March 2026 were high. MRR rose from the founder's US$4,000 in June 2025 to US$4,877 in October 2026." }, { "title": "The founder's earlier product broke Twitter's rules", "text": "Cold DM, sold in 2022, collected Twitter users from follower lists, replies and keyword searches and sent them personalized DMs in bulk, up to 400 a day on the top plan. (A June 2023 copy, after the sale, tells users in its FAQ that Twitter allows bulk DMs.) Twitter's automation rules of September 2022 said the opposite: no unsolicited Direct Messages in a bulk or automated manner. The founder described it himself as a tool to 'DM them automatically'. Guidejar itself sells nothing of this kind; its pages show no such feature." }, { "title": "A crowded category", "text": "The company's own site compares Guidejar with Scribe, Guidde, Tango and Supademo. No source on this page shows that Guidejar's AI features are unique among them, so a reader should not assume they are a lasting difference." }, { "title": "One person, part time", "text": "In June 2025 the founder described Guidejar as a side project next to his job as a developer. The current headcount is not stated anywhere; a buyer or a larger customer would depend on one person." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.guidejar.com/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/guidejar" }, { "kind": "indiepage", "url": "https://indiepa.ge/shri" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of Guidejar, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/guidejar.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full, live; revenue synced 25 October 2026 from Stripe through an API key. Source for the 30-day, six-month, twelve-month and all-time revenue, the monthly timeline, MRR and subscriptions. The description and insights are founder-written, grade C." }, { "title": "IndiePage profile of Shri Vatz, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://indiepa.ge/shri", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full, including the page's Stripe revenue data. Second payment-processor reading of the revenue; also lists Cold DM and Support Guy as acquired." }, { "title": "Fake Mayo, 15 June 2025: How Shri Vatz grew his side hustle Guidejar into a $4K MRR success", "url": "https://www.fakemayo.com/p/how-shri-vatz-grew-his-side-hustle-guidejar-into-a-4k-mrr-success", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The story is told by the founder. Source for the launch dates, the AppSumo campaign, the marketing channels, the Google Ads figures, the MRR and the solo side-project status." }, { "title": "Microns, 23 October 2024: How Shri Sold His Micro-SaaS for $6K and Made an Extra $12K in Freelancing After", "url": "https://www.microns.io/success-stories/how-shri-sold-his-micro-saas-for-6k-and-made-an-extra-12k-in-freelancing-after", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview on the marketplace where he sold Cold DM. Source for the Cold DM launch, what it did, the sale price, and Guidejar's MRR in October 2024." }, { "title": "Gaps Income Report, January 2025", "url": "https://gaps.com/jan-2025/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on Guidejar (item 34). A compilation of the founder's posts: US$3,000 MRR and the turned-down US$75,000 offer." }, { "title": "Guidejar pricing page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.guidejar.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the feature comparison and the FAQ. Source for the prices, AI credits and top-ups." }, { "title": "Guidejar home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.guidejar.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for how the product works and the Guidejar AI features; checked for the purpose gate." }, { "title": "Guidejar AI page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.guidejar.com/ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for Nila, voiceover and voice cloning of the user's own voice, translation, credits and bring-your-own-key." }, { "title": "Guidejar security page with subprocessor list, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.guidejar.com/security", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the infrastructure, the AI providers and the support, analytics and payment services." }, { "title": "Guidejar home page, Wayback Machine copy of 12 October 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20231012170518/https://www.guidejar.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The launch-month product and prices, with no AI features." }, { "title": "Guidejar home page, Wayback Machine copy of 7 February 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240207230716/https://www.guidejar.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. 500+ paid customers claimed; no AI features listed." }, { "title": "Guidejar home page, Wayback Machine copy of 1 June 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240601205939/https://www.guidejar.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. First copy found with AI Paraphrase, AI Translate and AI Voiceover in the Premium plan." }, { "title": "Cold DM home page, Wayback Machine copy of 29 October 2022", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20221029030844/https://www.colddm.me/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The bulk Twitter DM campaigns, daily limits and contact lists from followers and keywords. Whether the founder or the buyer owned it on that day is not certain; the founder's own description in the Microns interview matches it." }, { "title": "Cold DM home page, Wayback Machine copy of 7 September 2022", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20220907044944/https://www.colddm.me/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The first, opt-in community version." }, { "title": "Twitter automation rules, Wayback Machine copy of 1 September 2022", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20220901043053/https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-automation", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the sections on automated Direct Messages and automated following. The current version on help.x.com, read 25 October 2026, has the same rule." }, { "title": "Latka page on Guidejar's team, updated 10 August 2026", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/guidejar.com/team", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Used only for the LinkedIn headcount of October 2024; its revenue figure (US$1,000, source not recorded) is not used." }, { "title": "Guidejar media kit, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.guidejar.com/media-kit", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company describes Guidejar as an AI-powered documentation tool." }, { "title": "Cold DM home page, Wayback Machine copy of 2 June 2023, after the sale", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230602054043/https://www.colddm.me/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The buyer's version: the same daily DM limits, plus spintax and automatic follow and unfollow, and an FAQ that says Twitter allows bulk DMs. Used only for that FAQ, not as a description of the founder's product." }, { "title": "Guidejar privacy notice, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.guidejar.com/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on payments, analytics and AI service providers. Source for Google Cloud AI as an AI provider." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/ai-suitup/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/ai-suitup.md", "slug": "ai-suitup", "name": "AI SuitUp", "country": "United States", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI professional headshots from selfies", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "16 February 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$649K verified revenue all time, October 2026", "sticker": "$649K all-time revenue", "outcomeUsd": 648649, "months": 44, "teamLabel": "1 founder, known by a handle, who builds it next to a day job by his own profile; the site mentions marketing and support staff but no headcount", "fundingLabel": "None found; no source names an investor", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "photos", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Photography" ], "product": "A website that turns about 16 selfies into 50 to 150 business portraits in one to six hours. The customer picks an outfit, a background and a style (business, medical, real estate and others) and uploads the selfies. The company trains a private AI model on that one face and generates the portraits. Individuals buy a one-time pack from US$27. Companies invite each employee, who uploads their own selfies, and pay per member.", "why": "A studio portrait needs a photographer, a booking and days of waiting. AI SuitUp sold the same result, a photo for LinkedIn or a résumé, for a one-time price from early 2023, with a money-back guarantee on the larger packs. It narrowed the offer to one use, professional headshots, and then built a landing page for almost every profession and a version for company teams. Stripe records US$648,649 of payments in total, but only US$35,743 of it in the last 12 months, so most of the money came in 2023, 2024 and 2025.", "summary": [ "AI SuitUp sells AI headshots: portraits of a real person, made by an image model, that look like photos from a studio. The customer uploads about 16 selfies. The company writes that it \"trains a unique, private AI model on photos you upload\". The usual name for this step is fine-tuning: an existing image model is trained a little further on a small set of photos of one person, so that it can draw that person's face in new clothes, light and backgrounds. In June 2024 the site named SDXL (Stable Diffusion XL, an open image model from Stability AI) as its model; in October 2026 it names FLUX, a newer image model family from Black Forest Labs. A pack of 50 to 150 portraits costs US$27 to US$57, paid once.", "The terms of service say that the service belongs to Deep Rest LLC, a company registered in New Mexico. The founder publishes only a handle, @profondob1ue. On his IndiePage profile he writes that he is an applied scientist at FAANG (an abbreviation for the largest US technology companies: Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google) by day and builds his startup by night; he does not say which company, and this page uses only the names that the business itself publishes. The revenue on this page is not his statement. TrustMRR, a public database of startup revenue, reads the company's Stripe account through an API key. Stripe is the payment processor that charges the customers' cards. On 25 October 2026 the account showed US$648,649 in payments since the start, US$35,743 in the last 12 months and US$1,769 in the last 30 days.", "The money is falling. The profile's monthly table starts in November 2025 at US$5,000, peaks at US$5,427 in January 2026 and drops to US$718 in September 2026. The last 30 days are below this site's floor of US$2,000 a month, so the story stands on the all-time total, which is far above the floor of US$25,000. The MRR (monthly recurring revenue, the amount that active subscriptions pay each month) is zero, because every sale is a one-time purchase and no customer pays again automatically. The business has been offered for sale on TrustMRR since 26 December 2025 at US$350,000. The page then shows four earlier photo companies that failed when large platforms gave away similar features, or when every sale needed costly work and customers did not return." ], "factsCaption": "US$648,649 in Stripe payments from February 2023 to 25 October 2026, read by TrustMRR, of which US$35,743 in the last 12 months and US$1,769 in the last 30 days", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the company's Stripe account through an API key; it is not a founder statement. A grade C value is the company's own website, an archived copy of it, a profile field that the founder filled in, or a figure that TrustMRR shows outside its list of verified metrics. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows named in its note.", "timelineLead": "From a site built with Framer in March 2023 to US$648,649 of verified payments and a sale listing, in 44 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "AI SuitUp prices read on the company's home page and teams page on 25 October 2026 (grade C)", "note": "All packs are one-time purchases: TrustMRR shows US$0 MRR and no active subscriptions. The home page shows each individual pack as a discount from a higher price (US$59, US$69 and US$99) under the heading \"50% Off Pro Headshots - Limited Time Only\". The Basic pack has no money-back guarantee line; the other two have \"100% Money back guaranteed\". The teams page lists prices per member with volume discounts of 10% to 30%, but it does not say how many members each tier needs; a calculator on the home page shows the Professional team pack at US$57 per user. In June 2024 the archived home page sold Basic, Professional and Ultimate packs at US$19, US$29 and US$49, shown as discounts from US$29, US$59 and US$99, with 75 to 300 headshots. Free tools give one headshot, or three hairstyle previews, without an account.", "rows": [ [ "Basic, individual", "27 one-time", "", "50 headshots, 768x768 pixels, 6 hours; shown as 54% off US$59" ], [ "Professional, individual", "37 one-time", "", "100 headshots, 1024x1024 pixels, 3 hours, money-back guarantee" ], [ "Executive, individual", "57 one-time", "", "150 headshots, 2048x2048 pixels, 1 hour, money-back guarantee" ], [ "Basic, teams", "37 one-time per member", "", "no volume discount" ], [ "Startup, teams", "33 one-time per member", "", "10% discount" ], [ "Pro, teams", "31 one-time per member", "", "15% discount" ], [ "Premium, teams", "29 or 27 one-time per member", "", "20% or 25% discount; two tiers with the same name" ], [ "Enterprise, teams", "25 one-time per member", "", "30% discount" ], [ "Elite, teams", "custom", "", "contact sales" ], [ "Free tools", "0", "0", "1 headshot, outfit try-on, 3 hairstyle previews, portrait enhancer" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$648,649", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from the Stripe API, last synced on 25 October 2026 at 14:40 UTC. Stripe is not the merchant of record, so these are the company's own card payments. This is the headline figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 12 months to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$35,743", "grade": "A", "note": "Also above the floor of US$25,000 in total. It is 5.5% of the all-time total.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before the last 12 months", "value": "US$612,906, which is 94.5% of the total", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 648,649 minus 35,743. The profile has no monthly figures before November 2025, so the best year and the best month are not known.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average revenue per month before the last 12 months", "value": "about US$19,000", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$612,906 divided by 32.3 months, from the founded date of 16 February 2023 to 25 October 2025. The result is US$18,997. This assumes that all payments in the account belong to AI SuitUp and that sales started near the founded date; the profile confirms neither.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue by calendar month", "value": "2025: November US$5,000, December US$3,234. 2026: January US$5,427, February US$3,363, March US$3,177, April US$2,457, May US$3,312, June US$1,908, July US$1,764, August US$1,657, September US$718, October to the 25th US$1,631", "grade": "A", "note": "The monthly table of the profile. The twelve values add up to US$33,648. The rest of the 12-month total, about US$2,095, would fall on the last days of October 2025; the profile does not define the first day of its 12-month window, so this is approximate.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Trend", "value": "down 69.7% from the first three months of the table to July to September 2026", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: November 2025 to January 2026 average US$4,554 a month; July to September 2026 average US$1,380 a month. September 2026 is 86.8% below January 2026. The last 6 months, US$11,080, are 55.1% below the 6 months before them, US$24,663.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 30 days to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$1,769", "grade": "A", "note": "Below this site's monthly floor of US$2,000. The profile marks it +128.4% against the 30 days before, which puts those days at about US$775 (1,769 / 2.284). The daily table shows sales on 14 of the 30 days. Seven of those days equal one pack of US$27 or US$37; the largest day is US$464 on 1 October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 3 and last 6 months", "value": "US$4,478 and US$11,080", "grade": "A", "note": "About US$1,493 a month over the last 3 months (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR and active subscriptions, 25 October 2026", "value": "US$0 and 0", "grade": "A", "note": "Every sale is a one-time pack. Revenue must be won again each month from new customers.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "27.0%", "grade": "C", "note": "Shown on the profile, but not in its list of metrics that come from payment records. Calculated: 27% of US$1,769 is about US$478. The costs behind it are not published.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price", "value": "US$350,000, listed since 26 December 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Set by the seller. The profile shows a multiple of 16.5 and 4 offers received. Calculated: 350,000 / (1,769 times 12) = 16.49, so the multiple compares the price with twelve times the last 30 days. Against the last 12 months it is 9.8 times.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Customer count", "value": "\"20,000+ Happy Customers\" and \"trusted by 40,000+ customers & teams\" on the same page", "grade": "C", "note": "Company's home page, October 2026. TrustMRR's profile gives an estimated user count of 20,000. In June 2024 the archived home page said \"Trusted by 20,414 professionals\". The two current numbers do not agree with each other.", "src": [ 2, 7, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per claimed customer", "value": "about US$32", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$648,649 / 20,000 = US$32.43. That lies between today's Basic and Professional packs, so the 20,000 figure and the Stripe total are consistent with mostly single purchases. With the 40,000 figure it would be US$16.22, below every individual pack of June 2024 and today, which suggests that 40,000 counts something other than paying customers.", "src": [ 1, 2, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Headshots generated, company counter", "value": "\"59,762,100+\" in June 2024; \"30,768,189\" in October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived home page of 19 June 2024 and the live home page. A running total cannot fall by 28,993,911, so at least one of these counters is not a real count. The money figures on this page do not depend on them.", "src": [ 7, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Image model", "value": "SDXL in June 2024, FLUX in October 2026, one private model per customer", "grade": "C", "note": "The 2024 packs list \"Superior Photorealism with latest AI model (SDXL)\" and the 2026 packs \"Superior Photorealism with the latest AI model (FLUX)\". The free outfit page says the paid product \"trains a unique, private AI model on photos you upload\".", "src": [ 7, 2, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Model behind the free tools", "value": "Google's Gemini image model, called \"Nano Banana\"", "grade": "C", "note": "The free outfit page names \"Google 'Nano Banana 2' (Gemini 3.1 Flash Image)\" at the top and \"Google Gemini 2.5 API AKA 'Nano Banana'\" in its questions, so the version is not certain. The page separates this from the paid product's own model.", "src": [ 9, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Photos needed and how long they are kept", "value": "16 selfies; photos and the trained model deleted after 30 days", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page: \"Only 16 clear shots of your face\" and \"we securely retain the AI model trained with your photos for 30 days. After this period, it is permanently deleted.\" The guidelines ask for photos with \"only your entire face\" and no other people.", "src": [ 2, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Consent rules", "value": "uploads of other people without their authorization, of minors and of pornographic content are prohibited", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms of service, section 7: users may not \"Upload pictures of any person without that person authorization\", \"Uploading pornographic content\" or \"Uploading pictures of minors\". Section 8 requires written consent of every identifiable person in an upload. The privacy policy says the company does not knowingly collect data from children under 18. No page offers face swaps, removal of clothes or removal of watermarks.", "src": [ 3, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Company behind the site", "value": "Deep Rest LLC, registered in New Mexico", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms of service and the copyright line of every page. The copyright line read \"Copyright © 2024 Deep Rest LLC\" in June 2024, and the affiliate sign-up link runs on a Deep Rest LLC account.", "src": [ 3, 7, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 founder listed; staff count not published", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR lists one founder, by handle. His IndiePage bio reads \"Applied Scientist in FAANG by Day. Building my startup by Night\". The affiliate page offers \"Tailored assistance from AI SuitUp marketing team\", and reviews on the home page praise a \"customer service team\"; no page says how many people that is or whether they are employees or contractors.", "src": [ 1, 8, 10, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "No investor is named on the TrustMRR profile, the IndiePage profile or the company's pages.", "src": [ 1, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Founder-entered MRR on IndiePage", "value": "US$5,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Typed in by the founder, not connected to Stripe (the profile's Stripe payout list is empty). The product entry was created on 30 August 2024, and the page does not date the figure. A goal of US$10,000 a month is shown above it. Not used for the headline.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Affiliate program", "value": "25% of each sale, up to US$14.75, paid to PayPal every 15 days", "grade": "C", "note": "Affiliate page. Affiliates may not refer themselves, create fake accounts, make exaggerated claims, run search ads in the company's name or post the link in irrelevant places. Calculated: 25% of US$57 is US$14.25; US$14.75 is 25% of US$59.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Website size", "value": "104 pages in the sitemap", "grade": "C", "note": "Landing pages for doctors, lawyers, real-estate agents, students, sales people, models and executives, free tools, and blog posts that compare AI SuitUp with ChatGPT and Google's \"Nano Banana\" image model.", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the headline figure", "value": "44 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: February 2023, the founded date on the profile, to October 2026. The first archived copy of the site is from 19 March 2023.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "16 February 2023", "what": "The founded date on the TrustMRR profile.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "19 March 2023", "what": "The first archived copy of aisuitup.com, a site built with Framer: \"Generate hundreds of high-quality professional headshots of you using AI\", \"perfect for your next LinkedIn or Tinder profile\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "19 June 2024", "what": "The archived home page, now on Webflow, says \"Trusted by 20,414 professionals\" and sells packs at US$19, US$29 and US$49 made with SDXL. The copyright line names Deep Rest LLC.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "30 August 2024", "what": "The founder adds AI SuitUp to his IndiePage profile with a typed-in MRR of US$5,000 and the line \"Professional Headshots for Remote Teams\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "The first month in the profile's table: US$5,000 in verified revenue.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "26 December 2025", "what": "Listed for sale on TrustMRR. The asking price on 25 October 2026 is US$350,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "January 2026", "what": "US$5,427, the best month in the table.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "June to August 2026", "what": "Revenue falls to US$1,908, US$1,764 and US$1,657 a month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "US$718, the lowest month in the table.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "US$648,649 in verified payments since the start, US$35,743 in the last 12 months, US$1,769 in the last 30 days, no subscriptions. The site now names FLUX as its model and sells packs at US$27, US$37 and US$57.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "One private model for each face", "text": "A general image model cannot draw a specific person. AI SuitUp asks for about 16 selfies with different light, clothes and backgrounds, trains a model on that one face, and returns 50 to 150 portraits. Its guidelines explain that the input photos decide the quality of the result, which moves part of the work to the customer." }, { "title": "One use, sold once", "text": "The product does one thing, a work portrait, and the customer pays once. There is no subscription to cancel, and the larger packs carry a money-back guarantee. Both in 2024 and in 2026 each pack was shown as a discount from a higher price. The cost of this model is visible in the data: with no repeat payments, revenue each month depends entirely on new buyers." }, { "title": "A page for every profession, and free tools", "text": "The sitemap lists 104 pages: headshots for doctors, lawyers, real-estate agents, students and executives, a free headshot generator, a free LinkedIn photo generator, outfit and hairstyle try-on tools, and blog posts that compare the service with ChatGPT and Google's image model. These pages are built to be found by search. No source says what share of customers came through them, so the channel on this page is unknown." }, { "title": "Teams, with each employee's own selfies", "text": "The team version lets a company invite each employee by email. Each employee uploads their own selfies, and the company gets matching portraits for its website and directories at US$25 to US$37 per member. This sells the same one-time product to many people at once, and every face in it comes from its owner." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages, their archived copies and the page source. They are grade C, except the payment processor, which TrustMRR confirms.", "items": [ "The marketing site was built with Framer in March 2023 and with Webflow by June 2024. Orders run in a separate web app on web.aisuitup.com.", "Payments go through Stripe, as the terms of service and the TrustMRR profile state. Stripe is not the merchant of record, so the company itself is the seller, and its terms say it adds sales tax where required.", "The paid packs use a model trained on each customer's photos: SDXL in June 2024, FLUX in October 2026. Uploaded photos and the trained model are kept for 30 days for support, then deleted.", "The free tools call Google's Gemini image model and are embedded from a separate app hosted on Vercel.", "The teams page says that data is stored on AWS.", "An affiliate program on Rewardful pays 25% of each sale to PayPal every 15 days. Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity scripts on the home page record how visitors use it." ], "src": [ 6, 7, 2, 3, 1, 9, 12, 5, 10 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold better photos or better photo software before image models could draw a person. They failed when large platforms gave the feature away, or when the cost of each sale stayed too high. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Everalbum", "years": "2013 to 2019", "funding": "US$19.2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Unlimited photo storage with AI that sorts your pictures across all devices.", "died": "It charged for features that Google Photos gave away free, and users chose the free one.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/125-everalbum" }, { "name": "Picnik", "years": "2005 to 2012", "funding": "US$3.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Photo editing in the browser, with no software to install.", "died": "Google bought it and folded the features into Google+, while phone apps with built-in filters made a separate web editor unnecessary.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/429-picnik" }, { "name": "Lytro", "years": "2006 to 2018", "funding": "US$215M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "A camera that records light from every angle, so you can refocus a photo after taking it.", "died": "The cameras cost too much to make and gave worse pictures than a phone, and each new market had the same cost problem.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2174-lytro" }, { "name": "Modsy", "years": "2015 to 2022", "funding": "US$72.7M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "AI-made 3D pictures of your room with furniture you can buy.", "died": "Each design still needed hours of a human designer, customers were expensive to win and rarely came back.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2521-modsy" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Everalbum and Picnik sold a better way to handle photos, and Google gave a similar feature away. Lytro sold better photos through new hardware that cost too much. Modsy sold AI pictures for a one-time purchase, but every order needed a human designer and customers did not come back. AI SuitUp avoided Lytro's and Modsy's cost problem: no camera, no studio and no designer, only computing time for each pack. A solo founder with a day job could run it, and Stripe recorded US$648,649.", "It has not avoided the Everalbum and Picnik problem. Its own blog compares the service with ChatGPT and with Google's \"Nano Banana\" image model, and its free tools run on that Google model. When a general model that anyone can use for free makes a good portrait from one photo, a paid pack that needs 16 selfies and an hour of waiting is harder to sell. The data fits that reading but does not prove it: revenue fell from US$5,427 in January 2026 to US$718 in September 2026, and no source gives the reason. Like Modsy's, its sales are one-time, so each month starts again at zero." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The 2023 opening, no. The method, partly.", "text": "Selling AI portraits as a one-time pack was a strong business while a custom-trained model was the only way to get a convincing picture of yourself. That gap is closing as free general models improve, and AI SuitUp's own numbers show the fall. The parts that still transfer are the narrow use, a page for each profession and the team version that sells one product to a whole company.", "steps": [ "Pick one use that people already pay a professional for, such as a work portrait, and sell only that.", "Write the photo rules and the consent rules before launch: own face only, no minors, no other people.", "Build one landing page for each profession or need, with a free tool on it.", "Add a team version where the company pays and each employee uploads their own photos.", "Watch monthly revenue from the first month: with one-time sales there is no base that stays." ], "open": "Uses where a general model is still not good enough or not trusted: portraits that must match one brand style across a large company, and professions that need a written record of each person's consent." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue is below the floor and still low", "text": "The last 30 days brought US$1,769, below this site's floor of US$2,000 a month, and September 2026 brought US$718. The story qualifies only on the all-time total of US$648,649 and the 12-month total of US$35,743." }, { "title": "The best years are not broken down", "text": "94.5% of the total came before late October 2025, and the profile gives no monthly figures for that period. The best year, the best month and the profit in those years are not known. The profile also does not show whether the Stripe account holds payments of any other product." }, { "title": "Marketing numbers disagree", "text": "The home page claims both 20,000 and 40,000 customers, and the headshot counter showed 59.8 million in June 2024 but 30.8 million in October 2026. Read these counters as advertising, not as data." }, { "title": "Free general models compete", "text": "The company's own blog compares it with ChatGPT and Google's image model, and its free tools use Google's model. The fall in revenue in 2026 is consistent with customers choosing free tools, though no source states the cause." }, { "title": "Part-time founder, business for sale", "text": "The founder writes that he works at a large technology company by day. The business has been for sale since December 2025, at 16.5 times the yearly rate of the last 30 days. A buyer would take over the site, the model pipeline and the support work, not a growing income." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.aisuitup.com/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/ai-suitup" }, { "kind": "indiepage", "url": "https://indiepa.ge/profondobl1ue" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: AI SuitUp, markdown profile (data as of 25 October 2026)", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/ai-suitup.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile, live on 25 October 2026. Revenue, monthly and daily tables, MRR and subscriptions come from the Stripe API; the founded date, description, user estimate, profit margin and sale listing are profile fields." }, { "title": "AI SuitUp home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.aisuitup.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the prices, the model name, the 16-selfie rule, the 30-day deletion, the customer and headshot counters and the reviews." }, { "title": "AI SuitUp terms of service, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.aisuitup.com/terms-of-service", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the company, payments, prohibited activities and user contributions. Source for Deep Rest LLC, Stripe and the consent rules." }, { "title": "AI SuitUp photo guidelines, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.aisuitup.com/guidelines", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the rules on which selfies to upload." }, { "title": "AI SuitUp for teams, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.aisuitup.com/teams", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the team process, the prices per member and AWS storage." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of aisuitup.com, 19 March 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230319232238/https://aisuitup.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page title and description; the body loads by script. The earliest archived copy, built with Framer." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of www.aisuitup.com, 19 June 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240619174717/https://www.aisuitup.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 2024 prices, SDXL, the customer and headshot counters and the copyright line." }, { "title": "IndiePage profile of @profondob1ue, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://indiepa.ge/profondobl1ue", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the page data. Source for the founder's bio, the typed-in MRR and the entry date." }, { "title": "AI SuitUp free AI outfit try-on, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.aisuitup.com/100-free-ai-outfit-try-on---no-signup-required", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Gemini model of the free tools and the private model of the paid product." }, { "title": "AI SuitUp affiliate program (Earn with us), read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.aisuitup.com/earn-with-us", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the commission, the payout rules, the marketing team and the affiliate rules." }, { "title": "AI SuitUp privacy policy, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.aisuitup.com/privacy-policy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on minors and deletion of data." }, { "title": "AI SuitUp free AI hairstyle try-on, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.aisuitup.com/free-ai-hairstyle-tryon", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, and the page source for the embedded app on Vercel." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." }, { "title": "AI SuitUp sitemap, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.aisuitup.com/sitemap.xml", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the number of pages, the profession landing pages and the blog titles." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/vibe3d-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/vibe3d-ai.md", "slug": "vibe3d-ai", "name": "Vibe3D AI", "country": "India", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI rendering for architects and interior designers", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "18 September 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$20K a month in revenue, June 2026", "sticker": "$240K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 240000, "months": 8, "teamLabel": "3 co-founders, described as a three-person team in June 2026", "fundingLabel": "None (bootstrapped)", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "real-estate", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Architecture" ], "product": "A web app for architects and interior designers. The user uploads a scene from a 3D model made in SketchUp, Revit, Rhino, 3ds Max or a similar program, and gets a photoreal render in about 30 seconds that keeps the geometry and materials. Typed instructions change the light, materials or landscape. Other features turn still renders into walkthrough videos and improve low-quality renders. It is paid with credits, sold as one-time packs and, since mid-2026, as monthly plans.", "why": "It serves one profession with one narrow need: a client-ready picture of a design that is already modeled, without a GPU workstation or a rendering agency. Its payment processor says that the conversion rate doubled when the company changed to a checkout that worked for buyers outside India, and that paying customers came from more than 150 countries. Prices were cut from US$49 for 100 renders in August 2025 to US$9 to US$19 for a starter pack.", "summary": [ "Vibe3D is a rendering tool for architects and interior designers. Rendering means making a realistic picture of a building or a room from a 3D model; done the classic way, a 3D artist sets up materials and lights in a program such as V-Ray or Enscape and a powerful computer calculates the image for minutes or hours. Here the user uploads a scene from a model made in SketchUp, Revit, Rhino or a similar program, and an AI model in the cloud returns a photoreal image in about 30 seconds while keeping the geometry, materials and camera angle. Typed instructions then change the time of day, the light or a material. The company says the work runs on its own cloud GPU clusters, so the user needs only a browser. The site does not say which image models it uses. It sells credits, prepaid units that each output uses up: 1 credit for a standard render, 4 for a \"HyperReal\" render, 1 per second of video.", "Brijesh Patel, Arunangshu Bhakta and Smit Patel founded it in India in 2025. They had built Flynx, a floating web browser for Android, from 2014; the founder's profile lists Flynx as acquired. The first archived page of vibe3d.ai is from 19 August 2025, and the official launch on Product Hunt was on 18 September 2025. On 24 January 2026, an archived copy of Brijesh Patel's IndiePage profile shows US$5,300 of monthly revenue, a figure he typed in himself. On 2 June 2026, Dodo Payments, the company that processes and collects Vibe3D's payments, published a case study that says Vibe3D generates US$20,000 in monthly recurring revenue, is profitable, has no outside funding, and has paying customers in more than 150 countries.", "The headline figure comes from the payment processor, grade A. One correction is needed: Dodo Payments called it recurring revenue, but two weeks later Vibe3D's own pricing page said that it sold only one-time credit packs and no subscriptions. The figure is therefore best read as US$20,000 of sales a month, which must be earned again every month. The page also shows four failed companies that sold interior design pictures with human designers or rented expensive GPUs for a low monthly price." ], "factsCaption": "Monthly revenue of US$20,000 in June 2026, stated by the payment processor, about eight months after the launch, from a three-person team with no outside funding", "factsRead": "How to read this table: the grade A values come from the case study by Dodo Payments, the merchant of record that collects Vibe3D's payments. Grade C values are the company's own pages and the founder's statements. The grade D value is a figure that the founder typed into his IndiePage profile. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a floating browser for Android in 2014 to an AI rendering service with paying customers in more than 150 countries, eight months after its launch. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Vibe3D prices on its pricing page, read on 25 October 2026 (grade C)", "note": "There is no yearly billing. The Pro and Studio prices are shown as a \"limited-time\" discount; the same kind of launch offer has been on the site since November 2025. One credit buys one standard render or edit; a HyperReal render costs 4 credits, a HyperReal edit 2, and a walkthrough video 1 credit per second. One-time credits never expire; monthly credits are refreshed each billing cycle. Every new account gets 3 free renders. Until at least 16 June 2026 the site sold only the one-time packs.", "rows": [ [ "Starter, monthly", "", "19", "75 credits a month" ], [ "Pro, monthly", "", "39", "300 credits a month; shown as 33% off US$59" ], [ "Studio, monthly", "", "79", "unlimited usage, priority support; shown as 39% off US$129" ], [ "Pro pack", "39 one-time", "", "200 credits; shown as 33% off" ], [ "Studio pack", "99 one-time", "", "600 credits; shown as 33% off" ], [ "Student", "9 one-time", "", "50 credits, needs a .edu or .ac email address" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly revenue, June 2026", "value": "US$20,000", "grade": "A", "note": "Dodo Payments case study, published 2 June 2026. Dodo Payments is the merchant of record that collects Vibe3D's payments. It calls the figure monthly recurring revenue, but the pricing page of 16 June 2026 sold only one-time packs.", "src": [ 1, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the June 2026 figure", "value": "US$240,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$20,000 times 12. A run rate assumes that the month repeats; one-time pack sales may not.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue on the founder's IndiePage profile, seen 24 January 2026", "value": "US$5,300", "grade": "D", "note": "Entered by Brijesh Patel by hand, not connected to a payment processor. The page shows no date of entry; an archived copy dates it to 24 January 2026 or earlier. The live profile still showed US$5,300 on 25 October 2026, so it was not updated after the June figure.", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Change from the January to the June figure", "value": "about 3.8 times in about 4 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$20,000 divided by US$5,300, from 24 January to 2 June 2026. The two figures come from different sources and the January one may be older than its archive date.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Sales needed for US$20,000 a month", "value": "about 513 Pro packs at US$39, or about 202 Studio packs at US$99", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated, as a check against the June 2026 price list. The home page claimed 120,000 sign-ups by October 2026, so this many purchases a month is plausible.", "src": [ 1, 12, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Countries with paying customers, June 2026", "value": "more than 150", "grade": "A", "note": "Dodo Payments case study. The founder is quoted that they had expected 10 to 20 countries.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Conversion rate after the change of payment provider", "value": "doubled", "grade": "C", "note": "Brijesh Patel, quoted in the Dodo Payments case study. The earlier provider is not named; international payments were difficult to process at checkout.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit and funding, June 2026", "value": "profitable, no outside funding", "grade": "C", "note": "Dodo Payments case study, from the company's account. No profit figure is given.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "3 co-founders: CEO, CPO and CTO", "grade": "C", "note": "The About page names Brijesh Patel, Arunangshu Bhakta and Smit Patel. The Dodo Payments case study calls it a three-person team that has worked together for more than fifteen years.", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Sign-ups claimed, November 2025", "value": "more than 12,000 designers within 3 months of launch", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's Peerlist listing of 6 November 2025 and the home page archived on 13 November 2025.", "src": [ 8, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Sign-ups claimed, October 2026", "value": "more than 120,000 architects and designers in more than 180 countries", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page, 25 October 2026. These are accounts, not paying customers. The home page of 24 December 2025 showed two different counts, 25,000+ and 16,000+.", "src": [ 6, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Renders created, October 2026", "value": "more than 2,000,000, about 30 seconds each on average", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page claims.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Price of 100 renders, August 2025", "value": "US$49 (shown as reduced from US$59)", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page archived on 19 August 2025. Packs of 500 renders cost US$179 and of 1,000 renders US$299, all pay-as-you-go.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Price per credit, October 2026", "value": "US$0.13 on the Pro monthly plan, US$0.165 to US$0.195 in one-time packs", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the pricing page: US$39 for 300 credits, US$39 for 200 credits, US$99 for 600 credits.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue goal on IndiePage", "value": "US$50,000", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder's own goal, shown on his profile in January and October 2026. His Peerlist headline also says he is scaling Vibe3D to US$50,000 a month.", "src": [ 2, 3, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the June 2026 figure", "value": "8 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 18 September 2025 to 2 June 2026 is 257 days, about 8.4 months.", "src": [ 7, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2014", "what": "The founders' first product, Flynx, a floating web browser for Android, launches on Google Play. In mid-2014 it is selected for TLabs India, and in early 2015 tech publications cover it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "2016", "what": "Flynx development is paused. The founder's IndiePage profile lists Flynx as acquired; the Dodo Payments case study says that the team then worked together at Byju's.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13, 2, 1 ] }, { "when": "19 August 2025", "what": "First archived copy of vibe3d.ai, a site built with Framer that promises 3D renders in seconds, with pay-as-you-go packs from US$49 for 100 renders to US$299 for 1,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "18 September 2025", "what": "Official launch on Product Hunt, after a month of tests with a first group of designers, with 50% off all paid plans.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "31 October 2025", "what": "Brijesh Patel adds Vibe3D and Flynx to his IndiePage profile, which says \"Sold one startup. Now building another.\"", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "The company says it has more than 12,000 designers within 3 months of launch. Packs now cost US$9 for 30 credits, US$39 for 200 and US$99 for 600, with a launch discount of up to 33%.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 10 ] }, { "when": "24 December 2025", "what": "The starter pack becomes US$19 for 50 credits. The home page claims more than 25,000 designers and architects.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "24 January 2026", "what": "An archived copy of the founder's IndiePage profile shows US$5,300 a month for Vibe3D, a figure he entered by hand.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "2 June 2026", "what": "Dodo Payments publishes its case study: US$20,000 a month, profitable, bootstrapped, a three-person team, paying customers in more than 150 countries, conversion doubled after the move to Dodo.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "16 June 2026", "what": "The pricing page says Vibe3D is \"completely pay-as-you-go\" with \"no monthly subscriptions, recurring charges, or automatic renewals\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "Monthly plans at US$19, US$39 and US$79 now sit next to the one-time packs. The home page claims more than 120,000 users and 2,000,000 renders.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 6 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "One profession, one job", "text": "General image generators make attractive rooms that do not match the drawings. Vibe3D sells to architects and interior designers only, and its promise is that the render keeps the modeled geometry, materials and camera. The company's Peerlist listing says that this is the difference from other AI tools, which do not preserve the model and so are not usable by professionals." }, { "title": "A checkout that works abroad", "text": "Most buyers came from outside India. The founder told Dodo Payments that international payments did not work well with the first provider, and that the conversion rate doubled when the company moved to a merchant of record, a seller that takes the payment, collects sales tax and VAT in each country and pays out the rest. For three people that also removed the tax work." }, { "title": "Credits instead of seats", "text": "Rendering costs GPU time per image, so Vibe3D prices per output: 1 credit for a standard render, 4 for the better HyperReal render, 1 per second of video. Credits in packs never expire. This lets an occasional user pay once, and it matches the cost of each sale to the price." }, { "title": "Lower entry prices", "text": "In August 2025 the smallest pack cost US$49 for 100 renders. By November 2025 a first pack cost US$9, and later US$19 for 50 credits, with 3 free renders on sign-up. Monthly plans came later, in 2026, after the case study's June figure." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages, its Peerlist listing, the payment processor's case study and the page source of the site. Most are grade C.", "items": [ "A web app at app.vibe3d.ai. The Peerlist listing names JavaScript, ReactJS and TypeScript.", "The work runs on the company's cloud GPU clusters, according to the home page, so a user needs only a browser. The site does not name the image models.", "The first marketing site, archived from August to December 2025, was built with Framer; its page source shows a Framer generator tag. Product analytics come from PostHog, visible in the page source from November 2025 to October 2026.", "Payments, sales tax and VAT go through Dodo Payments as merchant of record. Smit Patel, the CTO, integrated it in one to two days.", "Launches on Product Hunt in September 2025 and on Peerlist in November 2025. A creator program offers sponsored content, affiliate rewards and free access to architecture creators and students." ], "src": [ 8, 6, 9, 1, 7, 14 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold pictures of designed rooms, or rented GPU power cheaply each month. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Modsy", "years": "2015 to 2022", "funding": "US$72.7M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Photorealistic 3D renders of a customer's own room with furniture that could be bought.", "died": "Marketed as AI, but each room needed hours of human designer time. High customer acquisition cost and few repeat buyers.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2521-modsy" }, { "name": "Laurel & Wolf", "years": "2014 to 2019", "funding": "US$25M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Flat-fee online interior design from professional designers.", "died": "The flat fee did not cover the cost of finding customers, and quality fell as the designer network grew.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2012-laurel--wolf" }, { "name": "Tastemaker", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$1.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Affordable interior design for middle-income homes.", "died": "A distributed workforce of designers gave uneven service, and better-funded competitors took the market.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1572-tastemaker" }, { "name": "Blade (Shadow)", "years": "2015 to 2021", "funding": "US$110M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "A powerful Windows gaming PC streamed from the cloud for a low monthly fee.", "died": "Each subscriber needed expensive GPU hardware that became outdated before the monthly fees paid for it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2162-blade-shadow" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Modsy, Laurel & Wolf and Tastemaker sold the same thing that Vibe3D sells: a convincing picture of a room before it exists. All three paid people for each picture, so every new customer added hours of designer work, and the price could not cover it. Vibe3D's buyer is a professional who already has the 3D model, and an AI model makes the picture in about 30 seconds, according to the company. The cost of one more render is GPU time, not a person's afternoon.", "Shadow is the warning on the other side. It rented a GPU for a fixed low monthly price and lost money on each heavy user. Vibe3D charges per output with credits, which ties price to GPU cost. Its newest plan, Studio at US$79 a month with unlimited usage, is the one place where that link is cut, and its pricing page does not say what limits apply." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, if you pick a profession that already has the input file.", "text": "Architects and interior designers already have a 3D model, so the product only has to turn it into a picture that respects the model. A small team can sell that worldwide with a merchant of record and credit packs. The copyable part is the choice of niche and the payment setup. The hard part is the quality of the model output, which is the whole product and which larger image-model companies also improve.", "steps": [ "Choose a profession whose customers already hold a structured input (a model, a drawing, a file) and need a finished picture or document from it.", "Promise fidelity to the input, not creativity, and show it with before-and-after examples.", "Price per output with credits that match your GPU cost, and start with a cheap first pack.", "Use a merchant of record from the first day if most buyers will be abroad." ], "open": "The same input-to-picture step for other professions with files: landscape plans, kitchen and furniture configurators, product photos from CAD files, floor plans for real estate agents." }, "watch": [ { "title": "\"Recurring\" is the wrong word", "text": "Dodo Payments wrote US$20,000 in monthly recurring revenue on 2 June 2026. On 16 June 2026 Vibe3D's pricing page said there were \"no monthly subscriptions, recurring charges, or automatic renewals\". The money came from one-time packs that must be sold again each month. Monthly plans appeared later in 2026." }, { "title": "One dated figure from a vendor", "text": "The US$20,000 figure appears in a marketing case study by the payment provider, which benefits from the customer's success. There is no later figure. The founder's own IndiePage number, US$5,300, was not updated after June 2026 and is older." }, { "title": "Sign-ups are not customers", "text": "The home page claims 120,000 architects and designers. These are accounts with 3 free renders, not buyers. In December 2025 the same page showed two different counts." }, { "title": "A permanent launch discount", "text": "A \"launch offer\" or \"limited-time offer\" of about 33% off has been on the site since November 2025. Buyers who notice may distrust the list price." }, { "title": "Large image models improve fast", "text": "The product depends on image models that bigger companies also sell to everyone. A general model that keeps geometry well would reduce the gap. Other AI rendering services for architects already compete for the same buyers." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://vibe3d.ai" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/vibe3d-ai" }, { "kind": "indiepage", "url": "https://indiepa.ge/brijeshpatel" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Dodo Payments case study, 2 June 2026: How Dodo Payments helped Vibe3D double conversions and reach 150+ countries", "url": "https://dodopayments.com/case-studies/vibe3d", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. Dodo Payments is Vibe3D's merchant of record. Source for the monthly revenue, the countries, the conversion change, the team, the funding and the founders' history. The publication date is in the page's article:published_time tag." }, { "title": "Brijesh Patel's IndiePage profile, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://indiepa.ge/brijeshpatel", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full, including the page data. Founder-entered monthly revenue of US$5,300, not connected to a payment processor; the date the Vibe3D entry was created; Flynx marked as acquired; the US$50,000 goal." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of the IndiePage profile, 24 January 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260124114134/https://indiepa.ge/brijeshpatel", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. The only archived copy; it dates the US$5,300 figure to 24 January 2026 or earlier." }, { "title": "Vibe3D About page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://vibe3d.ai/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founders' names and roles and the founding year." }, { "title": "Vibe3D pricing page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://vibe3d.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the product data in the page. Source for the current plans, packs and credit costs." }, { "title": "Vibe3D home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://vibe3d.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product description, the user and render counts, the GPU claim and the page source." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: Vibe3D.ai, launch of 18 September 2025", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/vibe3d-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the launch section and the maker's comment by Brijesh Patel. Source for the launch date and the launch discount." }, { "title": "Peerlist project page: Vibe3D, November 2025", "url": "https://peerlist.io/brijeshpatel/project/vibe3d", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's own listing. Source for the 12,000 sign-ups, the technology list and the founder's profile headline." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of vibe3d.ai, 19 August 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250819195610/https://vibe3d.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The first archived home page. Source for the first prices and the Framer site." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of vibe3d.ai, 13 November 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20251113023954/https://vibe3d.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the pricing and user-count sections. Source for the November 2025 prices." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of vibe3d.ai, 24 December 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20251224094726/https://vibe3d.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the pricing and user-count sections. Source for the US$19 starter pack and the two user counts." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of the Vibe3D pricing page, 16 June 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260616173641/https://vibe3d.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Shows that two weeks after the case study the company sold only one-time packs." }, { "title": "Flynx website", "url": "https://flynx.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founders' earlier Android browser, with its 2014 to 2016 history and press quotes." }, { "title": "Vibe3D Creator Program page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://vibe3d.ai/creator-program", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the creator, affiliate and student program." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/brandaxis/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/brandaxis.md", "slug": "brandaxis", "name": "BrandAxis", "country": "South Africa", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI search visibility tracking (GEO)", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "4 May 2026", "outcomeLabel": "Reported US$10K a month, June 2026", "sticker": "Reported $10K a month", "outcomeUsd": 120000, "months": 1, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders, Felix Norton (CEO) and Freddie O'Donnell (CTO); Starter Story's header listed 3 employees in June 2026, while the company's careers page says two founders", "fundingLabel": "None; the founders said the launch was fully bootstrapped", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "seo-ai-search", "channel": "partners", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Marketing" ], "product": "Software that sends the questions a brand's buyers might ask to ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Google AI Mode every day, with Claude (through Anthropic's API) as an add-on. It stores each answer, records whether the brand is named, how early, and with what sentiment, and lists the web pages that the answer cites. The pricing page lists a free tier and paid plans from US$19 a month, and a pay-per-tracker option for agencies.", "why": "Felix Norton runs a digital marketing agency in Cape Town and, by his account, heard a client say in 2024 that ChatGPT had recommended the agency. His co-founder, Freddie O'Donnell, a former senior developer at Twitch, built the tracker alone in about a month, according to the founders. They launched it on 4 May 2026 and priced it about 30% below the competitors that the pricing page names. The first customers came from the agency's own clients, the founder said, and a Starter Story header listed US$10,000 in revenue a month one month after launch.", "summary": [ "BrandAxis is a tool for generative engine optimization (GEO), the work of making a brand appear in the answers of AI assistants, in the way that search engine optimization (SEO) makes a page appear in Google's list of links. Some marketers call the same work answer engine optimization (AEO). The customer enters prompts, the questions that a person types into an AI assistant, for example \"best family-friendly electric SUVs in 2026\". The software runs each prompt every day on three AI models that the customer chooses, stores the answer, and computes a visibility score, the share of answers that name the brand, together with the brand's rank in the answer, the sentiment of the words used about it, and the citations, the web pages that the model names as its sources. The AI models are not only the subject of the product: according to the company's documentation, every number comes from answers that the models generate when BrandAxis queries them, six of them by scraping (reading the page automatically) the consumer interfaces and Claude through Anthropic's paid API. The plans are sold as quotas of prompts and models, so the customer pays for a number of AI answers each day.", "The company names two co-founders in Cape Town: Felix Norton, who also runs the digital marketing agency Woww, and Freddie O'Donnell, who built the software. According to the founders, the build took about a month, cost about US$5,000 for tools, equipment and company setup, and used \"a couple of Mac minis turned into agents and Gemini\". The about page dates the first version, the MVP (minimum viable product), to 4 May 2026, and early access ended on 9 July 2026. A Starter Story interview dated 4 June 2026 shows a header with \"$10K revenue/mo\", \"2 Founders\" and \"3 Employees\"; no sentence in the founders' own answers states the current revenue. The title of the interview says \"$50K Per Month\", but in the text the founders say only that they \"expect to hit revenue targets between $50 000 - $100 000 MRR by the end of 2026\". MRR, as the founders put it, means monthly recurring revenue, the subscription money that comes in each month.", "The revenue figure rests on one header field on one page, grade D, and Starter Story writes next to such figures that they \"are from research, estimations, and/or self-reported by the business and have not been independently verified\". The founder said that the first customers were his agency's existing clients, and the company's partner page says that every client of that agency gets a BrandAxis workspace as part of the engagement, so an unknown share of the revenue may come through one related company. The rest of this page comes from the company's own pages, live and archived, and a launch press release. The page also shows four earlier companies that sold brands a measure of how they appeared on platforms that they did not own." ], "factsCaption": "A two-founder AI visibility tracker from Cape Town for which a Starter Story header listed US$10,000 in revenue a month in June 2026, one month after its launch", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value comes from one header field on a Starter Story page that no one else has checked. Grade C values are the founders' answers in that interview and the company's own pages, live or in the Wayback Machine. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a client who said \"ChatGPT recommended you\" to a public product with seven AI models in about two years, and from the first version to a reported revenue figure in one month. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "BrandAxis prices in October 2026, read from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "The pricing page shows each monthly price next to a higher price that is struck through (US$29, US$99, US$249 and US$499), and offers no yearly billing, so the yearly column is empty. Every paid plan includes any 3 of 6 \"UI models\" (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Google AI Mode) with a daily refresh. Each extra model costs US$7, US$25, US$59 or US$115 a month by plan. Claude, measured through its API, costs US$2 per prompt a month: US$40 on Lite, US$100 on Starter, US$300 on Pro and US$700 on Advanced. Cancelled plans are refunded for the unused days through Stripe, and the first charge is refunded in full within 30 days if the product does not work for the customer.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "", "0", "5 prompts, ChatGPT only, 1 workspace, 1 seat" ], [ "Lite", "", "19", "20 prompts, 3 models, 1 workspace, 2 seats; shown as reduced from US$29" ], [ "Starter", "", "69", "50 prompts, 3 models, 2 workspaces, 5 seats, API and MCP access; shown as reduced from US$99" ], [ "Pro", "", "169", "150 prompts, 3 models, 5 workspaces, 17 seats; shown as reduced from US$249" ], [ "Advanced", "", "349", "350 prompts, 3 models, 10 workspaces, 37 seats, dedicated customer success manager; shown as reduced from US$499" ], [ "Pay as you go", "", "from 1.51", "US$1 base fee plus trackers from US$0.51; one tracker is one prompt on one model for a month" ], [ "Enterprise", "", "custom", "unlimited prompts, workspaces and seats, all models, private deployments" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue per month, June 2026", "value": "US$10,000 (Starter Story header)", "grade": "D", "note": "Header field of the Starter Story interview dated 4 June 2026: \"$10K revenue/mo\" and \"$10,000 revenue/mo\". No sentence in the founders' answers states current revenue. Starter Story's note next to the figure: \"Revenue figures are from research, estimations, and/or self-reported by the business and have not been independently verified by Starter Story.\" The page is not marked \"Estimated from public sources\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from that figure", "value": "US$120,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$10,000 times 12. The same page shows \"currently makes an average of $120K/year\", which is the same header figure times 12, not a second source.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue target for the end of 2026", "value": "US$50,000 to US$100,000 MRR", "grade": "D", "note": "A target, not a result: \"expect to hit revenue targets between $50 000 - $100 000 MRR by the end of 2026\". The interview title \"$50K Per Month\" refers to this target.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the figure", "value": "1 month (31 days)", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: MVP launch on 4 May 2026 (about page) to the interview date, 4 June 2026.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Subscriptions needed for US$10,000 a month at October 2026 prices", "value": "about 29 to 526", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$10,000 divided by the Advanced price of US$349 and by the Lite price of US$19. At the Pro price of US$169 it is about 59. Add-ons and pay-as-you-go trackers would change the count.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 co-founders; the Starter Story header lists 3 employees", "grade": "C", "note": "About page: \"Two founders. Built in Cape Town.\" Careers page, October 2026: \"BrandAxis is two founders in Cape Town\", no open roles. The 3 employees appear only in the Starter Story header (June 2026). Either way the team is 5 people or fewer.", "src": [ 2, 11, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Build cost and time", "value": "about US$5,000 and about one month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founders in the interview: \"about $5000 spent in Tools/ Tech Equipment / R&D expenses / company setup fees\". Built by the CTO alone with Mac minis as agents and Gemini.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Founders: \"Our initial launch was fully bootstrapped\". No source names an investor.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "First customers", "value": "the founder's existing agency clients and contacts", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in the interview. Then business networks and LinkedIn, partner agencies and an affiliate program for content creators.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Link to the founder's agency", "value": "every client of Woww gets a BrandAxis workspace", "grade": "C", "note": "BrandAxis partner page for Woww: \"Every Woww client gets a BrandAxis workspace as part of their engagement\". The page lists Woww's services from US$2,000 a month. How much of BrandAxis's revenue comes through Woww is not public.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Size of the founder's agency", "value": "\"650+ scaling businesses\" served in 10 years", "grade": "C", "note": "About page. In the interview the founder also calls Woww a \"$1.5M MRR+ digital marketing agency\". That is a separate business, not BrandAxis revenue.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "AI models queried", "value": "6 consumer interfaces scraped daily, plus Claude through its API", "grade": "C", "note": "Documentation: \"UI models are measured by scraping the real AI search interfaces\". The home page says queries go through \"a network of real residential proxies\". Claude was added on 12 October 2026.", "src": [ 5, 3, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Brands counted on the home page", "value": "88,284 in June 2026; 288,717 in October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page counters, archived 11 June 2026 and live in October 2026. These count every brand detected in answers, including competitors, not paying customers.", "src": [ 15, 3, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Price range", "value": "free, then US$19 to US$349 a month, or pay per tracker", "grade": "C", "note": "Pricing page, October 2026. The archived home page of 11 June 2026 already said \"From $19\".", "src": [ 4, 15 ] }, { "fact": "Company", "value": "BrandAxis Inc.", "grade": "C", "note": "Site footer. The about page says \"Founded 2025\"; the Starter Story header says \"started August 2025\".", "src": [ 3, 2, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2024", "what": "On a kickoff call, a client of the founder's agency says \"Oh, ChatGPT recommended you.\" The founder then spends 18 months testing GEO methods on clients and his own websites, by his account.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "August 2025", "what": "Start of the business, according to the Starter Story header. At a dinner, the co-founder says he could build the tracker \"in like a month\"; the about page does not date that dinner.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "3 May 2026", "what": "The company blog publishes its GEO playbook, written by the CEO. It tells readers to answer on Reddit with \"genuine answers from a real account\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "4 May 2026", "what": "The MVP launches in early access, by invitation.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "when": "15 May 2026", "what": "The documentation site goes live with more than 20 articles.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "when": "4 June 2026", "what": "Starter Story publishes the founders' interview. Its header lists US$10,000 in revenue a month, 2 founders and 3 employees; the founders give a target of US$50,000 to US$100,000 MRR by the end of 2026.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "5 June 2026", "what": "A press release announces the public platform with free and paid plans.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "11 June 2026", "what": "The archived home page shows \"From $19\" and \"Tracking 88,284 brands across 3 core models\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "9 July 2026", "what": "Early access ends: anyone can sign up, with a free tier of 5 prompts and paid plans from US$19 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "24 September 2026", "what": "Pay-as-you-go trackers for agencies: one prompt on one model for a month, from US$0.51.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "12 October 2026", "what": "Claude tracking is added as a paid add-on, measured through Claude's API instead of a scraped interface.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The careers page says the company is two founders with no open roles; the home page counts 288,717 brands across all major AI models.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11, 3 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Distribution", "text": "The founder already ran a digital marketing agency that, according to the about page, had worked for more than 650 businesses. He said the first customers were those agency clients and contacts, and the partner page says that every agency client gets a BrandAxis workspace. That gave a new product paying users in its first month, before the public sign-up opened." }, { "title": "Price below the first trackers", "text": "The founders said they started after a LinkedIn post complained about the price of Ahrefs' Brand Radar, and the pricing page claims prices about 30% below competitors such as Peec and Promptwatch. The lowest paid plan is listed at US$19 a month, and an agency can pay per tracker instead of per plan." }, { "title": "Agencies as resellers", "text": "Agencies bring many brands. The product has proposal workspaces that track a prospect for three days without using the plan's quota, a directory of partner agencies, and per-tracker billing with one line per client on one invoice." }, { "title": "Each price is a quota of AI answers", "text": "A plan is a number of prompts, run every day on a number of models. Extra models and Claude cost more because each one adds answers to collect; the pricing page says the price of an add-on \"tracks the compute the extra model actually consumes\"." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founders' interview and the company's own pages. They are grade C, except the page-source details, which anyone can see.", "items": [ "The CTO built the platform alone, including the scraper, \"With a couple of Mac minis turned into agents and Gemini under his command\", according to the about page.", "Six models are read by scraping their consumer interfaces in a browser, through residential proxies in the chosen country; Claude is queried through its API.", "Each answer is parsed for every tracked brand: mention, rank, sentiment and cited sources, refreshed daily on all plans.", "Customers can read their data through a read-only REST API and an MCP server for Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor, from the Starter plan up.", "Payments and refunds run through Stripe. The marketing site is built with the Astro framework and measured with Google Tag Manager, as its page source shows; demos are booked through Calendly.", "The founders said the launch cost about US$5,000 in total and that the first version took about a month." ], "src": [ 2, 5, 6, 4, 1 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold brands a measure of how they appeared, or what people said about them, on platforms that they did not own. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Klout", "years": "2008 to 2017", "funding": "US$40M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A score from 1 to 100 that measured how influential a person or a brand was on social networks.", "died": "Facebook, Twitter and Instagram built their own analytics, rivals gave more detail, and changes to API access limited the data that Klout could collect.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/280-klout" }, { "name": "Isentium", "years": "2012 to 2020", "funding": "US$50M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Sentiment analysis of social media and news, turned into signals for traders and insurers.", "died": "Social media data was noisy and carried compliance risks, broader analytics competitors arrived, and a few large clients made up most of the business.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/255-isentium" }, { "name": "Salorix", "years": "2009 to 2014", "funding": "US$3.3M", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "Machine learning that ranked social media conversations, so brands could see the themes and influencers in their market.", "died": "Its investors withdrew their support at the same time as leaner competitors with newer AI methods arrived.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1845-salorix" }, { "name": "SumAll", "years": "2011 to 2019", "funding": "US$15M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "One dashboard that collected a small business's data from its social media and marketing platforms.", "died": "It could not set itself apart from larger analytics products and free tools such as Google Data Studio, and customers left over price.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/587-sumall" } ], "whatChanged": [ "All four measured a brand's presence on platforms owned by someone else, and three of them lost to larger analytics products or to the platforms' own tools. BrandAxis has the same risk: OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Perplexity decide what their assistants answer, and the documentation shows that six of the seven models are read by scraping consumer interfaces, not through an official reporting service. Large SEO suites such as Ahrefs and Semrush sell AI visibility reports too, and the company's own blog has comparison articles about at least seven competing tools.", "Two things differ. First, the AI providers do not sell this measurement themselves yet, so there is no native analytics product to replace it, as there was for Klout. Second, BrandAxis has no investors and, according to the founders, cost about US$5,000 to launch, so it does not need the scale that the funded predecessors needed. Its weakness is closer to Isentium's: the founder said the first customers came from his own agency, so the business may depend on a few related clients until outside customers are counted." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The market, crowded.", "text": "Many AI visibility trackers launched in 2025 and 2026, and the company's sitemap lists articles about alternatives to at least seven of them. The part that a reader can copy is the distribution: the founder already had agency clients who needed the measurement, and he said they became the first customers. Without such a group of buyers, a new tracker competes on price alone.", "steps": [ "Build the measurement that your own service clients already ask for, and give it to them first.", "Run each prompt on the real interfaces that buyers use, and store every answer and citation as evidence.", "Sell quotas of prompts and models, and charge more for models that cost more to query.", "Give agencies multi-client billing and short trial workspaces for their pitches.", "Connect a payment-processor profile before you publish a revenue figure, so that a reader can check it." ], "open": "Measurement where AI now decides what people see and no official report exists: AI shopping answers, AI answers in maps and local search, and assistants inside apps." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The figure of US$10,000 in revenue a month rests on one source: a header field on the Starter Story interview with Felix Norton and Freddie O'Donnell, dated 4 June 2026, one month after launch and while the product was still in invite-only early access. No sentence in the founders' answers states the figure, and Starter Story says that such figures are not independently verified. The US$50,000 in the title is a target for the end of 2026. The 3 employees in the same header do not match the careers page, which says the company is two founders. A reader could look for a payment-processor profile (for example on TrustMRR), a later interview in which a founder states revenue with a date, or a company filing." }, { "title": "Revenue through the founder's agency", "text": "The founder said the first customers were his existing agency clients, and the partner page says every Woww client gets a BrandAxis workspace \"as part of their engagement\". If Woww pays for those workspaces, part of the revenue moves between two companies owned by the same founder. No source says how large that share is. No source shows BrandAxis selling agency services itself: its pricing page sells only software plans." }, { "title": "Reddit in the recommendations", "text": "The home page says the data tells customers \"which thread to join\", the features page shows a planned recommendation \"Answer Reddit thread: r/marketing 'best GEO tools?'\", and the founders said their own tool showed them \"Reddir threads to post on\" to get AI models to cite them. The company blog asks for \"genuine answers from a real account\". The product does not sell or post comments; how a customer carries out such a task is the customer's responsibility." }, { "title": "Scraped interfaces and residential proxies", "text": "Six of the seven models are read by scraping their consumer interfaces through \"a network of real residential proxies\". If OpenAI, Google, Microsoft or Perplexity block automated access, the cost and the reliability of the data change. Only Claude is measured through an official API, and the pricing page says that costs \"far more per answer\"." }, { "title": "Counters are not customers", "text": "The home page counts 288,717 brands tracked. The documentation says brand data \"falls out of the same AI runs\", so the counter includes every competitor named in any answer. No source gives a number of paying customers." }, { "title": "A very young product in a crowded market", "text": "The product launched on 4 May 2026 and opened to everyone on 9 July 2026. The company's own pricing FAQ and blog compare it with Peec, Promptwatch, Profound, Otterly, Semrush, Ahrefs and others, and the struck-through list prices are shown on every plan." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://brandaxis.ai/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Starter Story, 4 June 2026: I Help Brands Rank In ChatGPT (AEO, $50K Per Month), interview with Felix Norton and Freddie O'Donnel (spelled so on the page)", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/brandaxis-ai", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full, including the header fields and the note on revenue figures. Only source for the US$10,000 a month, the 3 employees, the target, the build cost and the first customers." }, { "title": "BrandAxis about page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://brandaxis.ai/about/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founders, their roles, the origin story, the MVP launch date and the build method." }, { "title": "BrandAxis home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://brandaxis.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the menus and the FAQ. Source for the features, the residential proxies, the brand counter and the purpose check." }, { "title": "BrandAxis pricing page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://brandaxis.ai/pricing/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the page source for the struck-through prices. Source for the pricing table, the add-ons, the refund rules and Stripe." }, { "title": "BrandAxis documentation: Which AI models we track", "url": "https://brandaxis.ai/docs/models/which-models-we-track/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the UI models that are scraped and the API model." }, { "title": "BrandAxis documentation: How brand data is collected (updated 15 May 2026)", "url": "https://brandaxis.ai/docs/brands/how-brand-data-is-collected/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for what each answer records and for what the brand counter counts." }, { "title": "BrandAxis changelog, 9 July 2026: BrandAxis is out of early access", "url": "https://brandaxis.ai/docs/changelog/2026-07-09-out-of-early-access/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the end of early access and the free tier." }, { "title": "BrandAxis changelog, 12 October 2026: Track Claude", "url": "https://brandaxis.ai/docs/changelog/2026-10-12-track-claude/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Claude add-on and its price." }, { "title": "BrandAxis changelog, 24 September 2026: Pay-as-you-go AI visibility trackers", "url": "https://brandaxis.ai/docs/changelog/2026-09-24-pay-as-you-go-trackers/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the per-tracker pricing for agencies." }, { "title": "BrandAxis agency directory: Woww", "url": "https://brandaxis.ai/agency-directory/woww/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the link between the founder's agency and BrandAxis and for the agency's starting price." }, { "title": "BrandAxis careers page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://brandaxis.ai/careers/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the team of two founders and the absence of open roles." }, { "title": "BrandAxis features page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://brandaxis.ai/features/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the planned recommendations, including the Reddit example." }, { "title": "BrandAxis blog, 3 May 2026: The complete GEO playbook, by Felix Norton", "url": "https://brandaxis.ai/blog/complete-geo-playbook/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on cited sources and Reddit. Source for the company's advice on Reddit answers." }, { "title": "TechIntelPro, 5 June 2026: BrandAxis Launches AI Search Analytics Platform for Brands (press release text, no author named)", "url": "https://techintelpro.com/news/ai/generative-ai/brandaxis-launches-ai-search-analytics-platform-for-brands", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A launch announcement in the company's words; it gives no revenue figure." }, { "title": "BrandAxis home page, Wayback Machine copy of 11 June 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260611075051/https://brandaxis.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the June 2026 starting price and the brand counter one week after the revenue figure." }, { "title": "BrandAxis changelog, 15 May 2026: Documentation site launched", "url": "https://brandaxis.ai/docs/changelog/2026-05-15-docs-launch/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the date of the documentation launch." }, { "title": "BrandAxis sitemap, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://brandaxis.ai/sitemap-0.xml", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the list of pages. Source for the changelog dates and the articles about competing tools." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/indilingo/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/indilingo.md", "slug": "indilingo", "name": "Indilingo", "country": "India", "sector": "Education", "productType": "AI language-learning app", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "May 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$2.1K monthly recurring revenue, October 2026", "sticker": "$2.1K MRR", "outcomeUsd": 25668, "months": 17, "teamLabel": "Co-founders, among them Jay Gala, and a small team; headcount not published", "fundingLabel": "None (bootstrapped); free AI model access from AI Grants India", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "learning", "channel": "communities", "trend": "growing", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Language learning" ], "product": "An Android and iPhone app that teaches 39 languages, including all 22 scheduled languages of India, from the language the learner already speaks. A learner can study Kannada from Hindi or Spanish from Tamil, chat with an AI tutor, and speak with it out loud for pronunciation feedback. The free plan has daily limits; the PRO subscription removes them.", "why": "Most language apps teach through English, which excludes many people in India. Indilingo makes the learner's own language the language of the whole app, and a large language model makes that possible for hundreds of language pairs without writing a separate course for each pair. Low Indian prices and payment by UPI then turned a free app into about 1,200 small subscriptions.", "summary": [ "Indilingo is a language-learning app from Indilingo Labs LLP, a company registered in Mumbai. Its idea is \"learn any language from any language\": the lessons, the explanations and the AI tutor use the language the learner already knows, not English. The tutor is a large language model, an AI system trained on very large amounts of text that can hold a conversation, here in the role of a patient teacher. The app also has a speaking mode in which the learner talks out loud and gets feedback on pronunciation.", "The company was built by co-founders and a small team. Dodo Payments, its payment processor, names one of them as \"Jay, Co-Founder\", and the company blog gives his full name, Jay Gala. The Android app was live by May 2025 and the iPhone app followed in January 2026. TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a startup's payment provider, shows US$2,139 in monthly recurring revenue on 25 October 2026 from 1,223 active subscriptions. Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is the subscription revenue that repeats every month; a yearly plan counts as one twelfth of its price. Verified revenue was US$745 in June 2026 and US$3,207 in September 2026.", "The figures are small, but they are verified by the payment provider and they are subscriptions, not one-time sales. In India the PRO plan costs ₹99 a month, so the business needs many paying learners: the average is about US$1.75 a month per subscription. Indian users could pay only after the company added UPI, the Unified Payments Interface, India's instant bank-to-bank payment system that most people pay with from their phone. This page grades every number and shows five failed companies that sold language learning before an AI tutor could speak dozens of languages." ], "factsCaption": "US$2,139 in monthly recurring revenue from 1,223 subscriptions in October 2026, read by TrustMRR from the payment provider", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the company's payment provider, Dodo Payments, or was stated by Dodo Payments itself. A grade B value comes from an app store listing or another independent party. A grade C value is a statement by the company or the founder. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a waitlist page in February 2025 to verified recurring revenue above US$2,000 a month in October 2026, 17 months after the Android app was live. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Indilingo prices in October 2026, from the company's pricing page and the US App Store listing (grade B for the prices)", "note": "The company's pricing page lists the plan features but says that live prices load from the app, so the PRO prices come from the App Store. In the US store PRO costs US$4.99 a month or US$29.99 a year (US$2.50 a month, 50% less than twelve monthly payments, calculated). In the Indian store it costs ₹99 a month or ₹399 a year (₹33.25 a month, 66% less, calculated). Every PRO plan starts with a 7-day free trial. On the web and Android the company takes UPI and card payments through Dodo Payments; payments are not refunded, and a subscription is cancelled by email. The same company sells Mira, an AI tutor that calls the learner's phone, as a separate product at US$9.99, US$19.99 and US$39.99 a month for 60, 120 and 240 minutes of talk.", "rows": [ [ "Basic", "0", "0", "all languages; 5 AI chat messages a day; 10 minutes of live speech" ], [ "PRO, US App Store", "2.50", "4.99", "US$29.99 billed yearly; unlimited AI chats and live sessions, progress analytics" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 25 October 2026", "value": "US$2,139", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot, revenue last synced 25 October 2026 from Dodo Payments through an API key. This is the headline number. It is 7% above the site's floor of US$2,000 a month (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions, 25 October 2026", "value": "1,223", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot from the payment records.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average MRR per active subscription", "value": "about US$1.75 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2,139 divided by 1,223 equals 1.749. Low because most paying users are in India, where PRO costs ₹99 a month or ₹399 a year.", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the MRR", "value": "US$25,668 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2,139 times 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR growth in the last 30 days", "value": "+13.5%", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, June 2026", "value": "US$745", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. Revenue counts all payments received in the month, so a yearly plan counts in full in the month it is paid.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, July 2026", "value": "US$2,062", "grade": "A", "note": "2.8 times June (calculated). The company launched Mira, a separate phone-call tutor, on 23 July 2026; no source says which product the payments came from.", "src": [ 1, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, August 2026", "value": "US$2,907", "grade": "A", "note": "41% more than July (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, September 2026", "value": "US$3,207", "grade": "A", "note": "10% more than August (calculated). The best full month so far.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, 1 to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$2,923", "grade": "A", "note": "A partial month. At the same daily rate the full month would be about US$3,625 (calculated: 2,923 divided by 25, times 31).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 30 days to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$3,475", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR gives +5.3% against the 30 days before. A second snapshot on the same profile says US$3,512.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time", "value": "US$13,723", "grade": "A", "note": "The monthly timeline from November 2025 adds up to US$13,492 (calculated); the profile does not explain the difference of about US$231.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Share of all-time revenue earned in the last 3 months", "value": "68%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$9,297 in the last 3 months divided by US$13,723.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "First month with verified revenue", "value": "November 2025, US$120", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. Revenue stayed below US$500 a month until June 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Payment provider", "value": "Dodo Payments", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR reads the revenue from Dodo Payments and marks it \"Merchant of record: No\". The Dodo case study describes Dodo as the merchant of record for Indilingo. App Store purchases go through Apple and are not part of the TrustMRR figures.", "src": [ 1, 2, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Company behind the app", "value": "Indilingo Labs LLP, Mumbai", "grade": "B", "note": "Named in the terms of service and as the provider on the App Store listing. An LLP is an Indian limited liability partnership.", "src": [ 6, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Founders", "value": "two or more co-founders, among them Jay Gala", "grade": "B", "note": "Dodo Payments quotes \"Jay, Co-Founder\". The company blog names Jay Gala as the author of its first post, and his TrustMRR handle is jaygala223. No source names the other co-founder or co-founders.", "src": [ 2, 10, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team size", "value": "not published; \"a small team\"", "grade": "B", "note": "Dodo's words. Three different people sign the company blog posts, and the careers page offers one remote internship.", "src": [ 2, 12, 16 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none stated", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder-written TrustMRR profile says Bootstrapped. The home page says \"Supported by AI Grants India, ElevenLabs\"; AI Grants India gives builders free AI model access and voice credits, not money for shares.", "src": [ 1, 3, 20 ] }, { "fact": "Learners", "value": "more than 70,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Company home page. The founder-written TrustMRR profile estimates 85,029 users. Google Play shows more than 50,000 Android downloads (grade B).", "src": [ 3, 1, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Countries with users", "value": "more than 90", "grade": "B", "note": "Dodo case study. Paying customers include the US, UK, Singapore, France, Malaysia and Denmark; India became the largest paying market after UPI went live.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "App ratings, October 2026", "value": "4.6 from 167 ratings (App Store India); 3.9 from about 1,170 reviews (Google Play)", "grade": "B", "note": "Read on the store pages.", "src": [ 7, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Age rating", "value": "4+ (App Store), Everyone (Google Play)", "grade": "B", "note": "The terms of service require users to be at least 13 years old. No source shows homework or exam answers for sale; the related Mira product sells timed IELTS and TOEFL speaking mock tests with an estimated band, and says it is not affiliated with IELTS or ETS.", "src": [ 7, 9, 6, 15 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the Android app to the headline figure", "value": "17 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: May 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 18, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "23 February 2025", "what": "The site indilingo.in is a waitlist page: \"Master any Indian language with AI\", with personalized lessons and real-time feedback.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "when": "14 May 2025", "what": "The site links to the Android app on Google Play and offers 13 official Indian languages, with AI conversation practice and quizzes.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 18 ] }, { "when": "29 May 2025", "what": "Jay Gala's first blog post sets the mission: learn a language from your mother tongue, not through English. Live AI chat is available; speaking with pronunciation feedback is \"coming soon\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "First month of verified revenue through Dodo Payments: US$120. The site still shows a waitlist for the iPhone app.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 19 ] }, { "when": "January 2026", "what": "Version 1.0 of the iPhone app appears on 8 January; the version of 16 January adds subscriptions for Indilingo PRO.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "May to June 2026", "what": "The App Store version history adds the Word Maze game in May and a new onboarding and dashboard in June. Verified revenue is US$436 in May and US$745 in June.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 7, 1 ] }, { "when": "July 2026", "what": "Verified revenue rises to US$2,062. On 23 July the company launches Mira, a separate AI tutor that calls the learner's phone.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 13 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "Best full month so far: US$3,207 in verified revenue.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "1 October 2026", "what": "The company blog reports that its paper on CIPHER, a method that teaches an AI model a language with very little digital text, was accepted at a workshop of the EMNLP 2026 conference.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR shows US$2,139 in MRR from 1,223 active subscriptions and US$3,475 in revenue in the last 30 days.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A niche the large apps left open", "text": "Most language apps teach through English. Indilingo's first blog post names this as the main problem: many people in India who want to learn another language do not read English well. Making every one of 39 languages a possible starting language gives the app pairs such as Kannada from Hindi or Japanese from Tamil. A user review on the home page compares it favourably with TalkPal for Punjabi." }, { "title": "The model does the per-language work", "text": "A hand-written course for every pair of 39 languages would need more than 1,400 courses. A large language model can explain, quiz and converse in most of these languages, so a small team can offer all pairs and then improve the weak ones. The team's research on Tulu, a language with little digital text, shows where the model still fails: it drifts into a larger neighbouring language." }, { "title": "Prices and payment methods for India", "text": "The Indian App Store price is ₹99 a month or ₹399 a year. The Dodo case study says that most early paying users were outside India, and that India became the largest paying market only after UPI payments went live. The result is many very small subscriptions: about US$1.75 of MRR each on average." }, { "title": "Community launch", "text": "Dodo reports that a post in the Sanskrit community on Reddit became one of that subreddit's top posts ever, and a user review on the home page says the reviewer found the app on Reddit. Learners of Sanskrit form a small online group, so a single popular post can reach a large share of them." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's blog and pages, the founder-written part of the TrustMRR profile and the Dodo Payments case study. Most are grade C; the Dodo statements are from the payment provider.", "items": [ "Android app in Kotlin, and a web app with React and Next.js, according to the founder-written tech stack on TrustMRR. An engineering post says the Android app uses a single-activity architecture and reports a 100% crash-free rate.", "Backend in Python: the Dodo case study says the team migrated it from Flask to FastAPI, and the blog describes indic-uid, an open-source Python library that makes unique identifiers in Indian scripts and runs in the app.", "Payments through Dodo Payments: subscriptions, webhooks, UPI for Indian users and cards for other countries. The co-founder told Dodo that the first test payment went through in one night and that he had not changed the payment code since the first version.", "iPhone subscriptions are sold as App Store in-app purchases.", "AI: an AI tutor for chat and live speech with pronunciation feedback. No source names the model provider. The home page lists AI Grants India, which gives free model access, and ElevenLabs as supporters.", "Research: the team's CIPHER method lets a model compare its translations with verified references, write rules from its mistakes and store them in a prompt that a person can read. In tests on Tulu it reduced mixing with Kannada words." ], "src": [ 1, 2, 7, 11, 12, 3, 20 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold language learning, or apps for speakers of Indian languages, before an AI tutor could teach many language pairs at a very low cost. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Teacher Finder", "years": "2015 to 2019", "funding": "US$50K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Match language learners directly with tutors, without expensive language schools.", "died": "According to the database, better-funded competitors won, and its MVP built on Zapier automation could not change fast enough. Every lesson still needed a paid human tutor.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1962-teacher-finder" }, { "name": "TutorGroup (iTutor)", "years": "2004 to 2021", "funding": "US$300M", "cause": "Legal/Regulatory", "promise": "Live English lessons with Western teachers for students in Asia.", "died": "China's 2021 ban on foreign tutors removed most of its revenue, according to the database, while the cost of acquiring each student and tutor churn were already high.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2216-tutorgroup-itutor" }, { "name": "Hujiang", "years": "2001 to 2021", "funding": "US$187M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Online language learning and school courses for millions of users with a free tier.", "died": "A failed stock market listing exposed a high cost per customer and negative margins in a market where many rivals sold the same content.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2556-hujiang" }, { "name": "Wall Street English", "years": "2000 to 2021", "funding": "US$300M", "cause": "Legal/Regulatory", "promise": "Premium English courses in learning centres, with multimedia lessons and teachers.", "died": "The database says it used new students' upfront payments to fund operations until regulators banned upfront payments. Its model depended on centres and staff.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2347-wall-street-english" }, { "name": "Koo", "years": "2020 to 2024", "funding": "US$60M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A microblogging network for Indians who prefer to write in their own language, not English.", "died": "Politicians joined but ordinary users did not stay, and the company spent US$60 million chasing user numbers. It shows that the language need is real but must be paired with a reason to stay.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2199-koo" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Before language models, each language course was written by people, and the cheapest live practice was a human tutor. Teacher Finder, TutorGroup and Wall Street English all depended on paid teachers, so each learner cost money every week, and the courses that existed were mostly English or a few large languages taught through English.", "A language model can explain grammar to a Hindi speaker in Hindi, quiz a learner of Kannada and then hold a spoken conversation, with no teacher paid per lesson. That made a learning app for small language pairs possible for a small team, at prices as low as ₹99 a month. The open problem is quality in languages with little text on the web, which is why Indilingo also publishes research on it." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The pattern, yes. The scale is still small.", "text": "Indilingo's verified revenue is about US$3,000 a month, with an average of US$1.75 of MRR per subscription. The niche is real, but the large apps can add more Indian languages, and every speaking minute has a model cost that a low price must cover.", "steps": [ "Find a group that the large apps serve badly because they assume English, and make the user's own language the language of the whole product.", "Let a language model cover the long tail of language pairs, then improve the weakest pairs with your own data and research.", "Price for the home market and accept its local payment method from the first day; for India that means UPI.", "Launch in the communities of small languages, such as a Sanskrit forum, where one good post reaches a large share of the possible users." ], "open": "The same approach is open for other countries with many languages and weak English, such as Nigeria, Indonesia or the Philippines, and for heritage learners abroad who want to speak with their families. Speaking practice by ordinary phone call, as Mira does, also reaches users without a smartphone or mobile data." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Just above the floor", "text": "The MRR of US$2,139 is only 7% above the site's floor of US$2,000 a month. Monthly revenue is higher, US$2,907 to US$3,207 in August and September 2026, probably because yearly plans are paid in full in one month. Revenue first passed US$2,000 a month in July 2026, so the record is four months long." }, { "title": "What the verified figures cover", "text": "TrustMRR reads only the Dodo Payments account. iPhone subscriptions sold as App Store in-app purchases are paid through Apple and are not in these figures. The company also sells Mira, launched in July 2026, and no source says whether Mira's payments go through the same account." }, { "title": "Very low price per subscriber", "text": "The average subscription brings about US$1.75 a month, while each AI chat and speaking minute costs the company money for the model. If heavy users speak a lot on a ₹99 plan, the margin can be thin. No source gives the company's model costs or profit." }, { "title": "Founder and source details", "text": "Dodo Payments names only \"Jay, Co-Founder\"; the full name Jay Gala comes from the company blog and his TrustMRR handle. The other co-founder or co-founders and the headcount are not published. The Dodo case study carries a publication date of 20 May 2025 in its page data, but it describes paying users and UPI payments, while TrustMRR shows the first Dodo revenue in November 2025, so that date is probably wrong. Dodo calls itself the merchant of record for Indilingo; TrustMRR says it is not." }, { "title": "Age rating and children", "text": "The app is rated 4+ on the App Store and Everyone on Google Play, while the terms of service require users to be at least 13. Children can download an app with open AI chat and voice conversation. The app sells language practice only; no source shows homework or exam answers for sale." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.indilingo.ai/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6754466568" }, { "kind": "android", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.indilingo" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/indilingo" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR markdown profile: Indilingo, revenue last synced 25 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/indilingo.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile live on 25 October 2026. The revenue, MRR and subscription figures in its Verification Sources and Revenue sections come from Dodo Payments through an API key (grade A). The description, funding, user estimate and tech stack are founder-written (grade C)." }, { "title": "Dodo Payments case study: How Dodo Payments helped Indilingo scale a language app to 90+ countries", "url": "https://dodopayments.com/case-studies/indilingo", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. The payment provider's account with quotations from \"Jay, Co-Founder\". No revenue figure. The page data gives 20 May 2025 as the publication date, which does not fit its content." }, { "title": "Indilingo home page (indilingo.in, now served from indilingo.ai), read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.indilingo.in/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the learner count, the supporters and the product description; checked for the purpose gate." }, { "title": "Indilingo pricing page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.indilingo.in/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Gives the plan features and limits; the prices themselves load from the app." }, { "title": "Indilingo about page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.indilingo.in/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the mission and the research work." }, { "title": "Indilingo terms of service, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.indilingo.in/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names Indilingo Labs LLP of Mumbai, the minimum age of 13, Dodo Payments as the payment provider and the no-refund rule." }, { "title": "App Store (India): Indilingo - Learn Any Language, by Indilingo Labs", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/in/app/indilingo-learn-any-language/id6754466568", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the provider name, the age rating, the Indian in-app prices, the rating and the version history." }, { "title": "App Store (US): Indilingo - Learn Any Language", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/indilingo-learn-any-language/id6754466568", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the information section. Source for the US prices of US$4.99 a month and US$29.99 a year." }, { "title": "Google Play: Indilingo: Learn Any Language, by Indilingo Labs", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.indilingo&hl=en", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the downloads, the rating, the content rating and the language list." }, { "title": "Indilingo blog, Jay Gala, 29 May 2025: Why We're Building Indilingo", "url": "https://www.indilingo.ai/blog/why-indilingo", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's first post; ties Jay Gala to the company. The blog index dates it 25 May 2025." }, { "title": "Indilingo blog, 1 October 2026: Teaching AI to Speak Languages It Barely Knows: Inside CIPHER", "url": "https://www.indilingo.ai/blog/self-evolving-prompts-low-resource-languages", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the research on Tulu and the workshop acceptance. Signed by Jay Gala and a second author." }, { "title": "Indilingo blog, 19 November 2025: How We Keep a 100% Crash-Free Rate at Indilingo", "url": "https://www.indilingo.ai/blog/how-we-keep-100-percent-crash-free-rate", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. An engineer's post about the Android architecture." }, { "title": "Indilingo blog, 23 July 2026: Introducing Mira, Your AI Language Tutor That Calls You on the Phone", "url": "https://www.indilingo.ai/blog/introducing-mira-indilingo-voice", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the first half. Source for the launch date of Mira." }, { "title": "Mira by Indilingo home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://mira.indilingo.in/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for Mira's prices; checked for the purpose gate as the company's other product." }, { "title": "Mira by Indilingo: IELTS and TOEFL speaking practice, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://mira.indilingo.in/ielts", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Checked that it sells timed speaking mock tests with feedback, not exam answers." }, { "title": "Indilingo careers page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.indilingo.in/careers", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. One open role, a remote social media marketing internship." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine: indilingo.in on 23 February 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250223141810/https://www.indilingo.in/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The site was a waitlist page." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine: indilingo.in on 14 May 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250514144835/https://www.indilingo.in/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The site linked to the Android app on Google Play." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine: indilingo.in on 24 November 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20251124175513/https://www.indilingo.in/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The site showed a waitlist for the iPhone app and named its supporters." }, { "title": "AI Grants India home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://aigrants.in/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on who it is for and what it gives. Checked that its support is free AI model access, not an investment." }, { "title": "App Store (India): Studiofy: AI Product Photos, by Indilingo Labs", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/in/app/studiofy-ai-product-photos/id6783415470", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the description. One of the company's other products, checked for the purpose gate." }, { "title": "App Store (India): SuperLazy, Your AI Second Brain, by Indilingo Labs", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/in/app/superlazy/id6779848663", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the description. One of the company's other products, checked for the purpose gate." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/draftly/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/draftly.md", "slug": "draftly", "name": "Draftly", "country": "India", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI 3D website builder", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "February 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$155.9K verified revenue in 8 months, October 2026", "sticker": "$156K in 8 months", "outcomeUsd": 155858, "months": 8, "teamLabel": "1 founder, a student; the site credits a Mumbai agency with management and marketing", "fundingLabel": "None (bootstrapped)", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "build-software", "channel": "creators", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Website builder" ], "product": "A customer describes a brand or picks a ready-made design. Draftly makes a still image with an image model, turns it into an 8-second video with Google's Veo 3.1 model, cuts the video into about 200 frames, and builds a web page that plays those frames as the visitor scrolls. It then hosts the site or gives a ZIP file with the code.", "why": "The scroll effect looks like an expensive 3D site but needs no 3D engine, only video frames, so rented models can make it in minutes. Short Instagram videos show the effect better than any text, and the founder took payments from other countries from the first week through a payment company that also handles sales tax.", "summary": [ "Draftly is a web app that builds scroll-driven websites from one text prompt. A scroll-driven website changes as the visitor scrolls: here, the page plays a short video forward frame by frame, so a car or a planet seems to move in 3D. Draftly makes the video with Google's Veo 3.1 model and cuts it into about 200 still frames. No 3D engine such as WebGL runs in the browser. The company's own pages credit one founder, Piyush Singh. A case study by Dodo Payments describes him as a third-year engineering student in Surat, India.", "Revenue is verified. TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a startup's payment provider, shows US$155,858 in payments from February 2026 to 25 October 2026, read from Dodo Payments. Part of that is recurring revenue, money from subscriptions that renew every month or year. TrustMRR measured it as US$22,472 of monthly recurring revenue (MRR) on 29 September 2026 and US$12,545 on 25 October 2026. The rest includes one-time payments: lifetime deals, a single payment that gives a monthly credit allowance with no renewals, plus credit top-ups. TrustMRR does not label each payment, but two single days, 17 September and 17 October 2026, brought US$31,208, or 20% of all revenue. Dodo Payments published on 31 May 2026, before the lifetime offer appeared on the pricing page, that Draftly had scaled to US$25,000 in monthly recurring revenue with 700 paying customers.", "This page grades every number by its evidence and separates recurring from one-time money where the sources allow it. The trend is down: recurring revenue fell 44% in the four weeks to 25 October 2026, and the business was listed for sale on TrustMRR on 19 September 2026. The page also shows five failed startups that tried to make web design automatic or website animation smooth before video models existed." ], "factsCaption": "US$155,858 of payments in 8 months, verified through Dodo Payments; the recurring part was US$12,545 a month on 25 October 2026, down from US$22,472 four weeks earlier", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the payment provider, or published by Dodo Payments, the payment provider itself. A grade B value is a supplier's description. A grade C value comes from the company's own pages or a founder-written listing. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a first payment in February 2026 to a sale listing in September 2026, in 8 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Draftly plans on 25 October 2026, from the company's pricing page (grade C). Lifetime-deal prices load from the company's server and are not in the page text", "note": "Credits pay for the AI work: a full first build costs about 593 credits (about 25 for the still image, about 340 for the motion video, about 228 for the site). Every paid plan includes 5 live sites and 25 GB of hosting a month; extra sites cost US$5 a month each. The free trial gives one complete build for two days and needs a card. Lifetime deals were offered as a launch offer at 45% to 70% off, for new customers only, and are not refundable. Archived copies of the pricing page from 15 May and 3 June 2026 show the same four subscription prices and no lifetime deal.", "rows": [ [ "Free trial", "0", "0", "1 complete build, 2 days, card required" ], [ "Basic", "20", "25", "1,500 credits a month, about 3 full sites" ], [ "Basic Plus", "32", "40", "2,500 credits a month, about 5 full sites" ], [ "Pro", "48", "60", "6,000 credits a month, about 12 full sites, ZIP export" ], [ "Premium", "160", "200", "25,000 credits a month, about 50 full sites, 4K upscale" ], [ "Lifetime Starter, Growth, Pro", "one-time", "one-time", "650, 1,200 or 2,500 credits a month, no renewals" ], [ "Credit top-up", "20 one-time", "", "1,000 credits; 3,000 for US$50; 7,000 for US$100" ], [ "Enterprise", "custom", "custom", "quote on request" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue, February to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$155,858", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from Dodo Payments through an API key. The last-12-months figure equals the all-time figure because the first payments came in February 2026. It includes recurring and one-time payments.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 25 October 2026", "value": "US$12,545", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot, with 381 active subscriptions. This is the recurring part of the revenue.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 29 September 2026", "value": "US$22,472", "grade": "A", "note": "Archived copy of the TrustMRR profile, with 667 active subscriptions.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Change in recurring revenue, 29 September to 25 October 2026", "value": "minus 44%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 12,545 divided by 22,472 is 0.558. Active subscriptions fell from 667 to 381, minus 43%.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, May 2026", "value": "US$25,000", "grade": "A", "note": "Dodo Payments case study, published 31 May 2026: \"Draftly scaled to $25,000 in monthly recurring revenue\". No lifetime deal was on the pricing page then.", "src": [ 3, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Paying customers, May 2026", "value": "700", "grade": "A", "note": "Dodo Payments case study. The contact page said \"Serving 1,000+ creators worldwide\" in October 2026 (grade C).", "src": [ 3, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue by month, March to August 2026", "value": "US$18,842; 29,042; 23,964; 17,145; 13,295; 9,364", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. April 2026 is the highest month before the lifetime offer. August is 68% below April (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, September 2026", "value": "US$29,924", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. One day, 17 September, brought US$22,715 of it.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Share of September from one day", "value": "76%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 22,715 divided by 29,924. The other 28 days of 1 to 29 September averaged about US$248 a day.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, 17 October 2026", "value": "US$8,493", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR daily table. It is 57% of the US$14,816 of the last 30 days (calculated). Without that day, the last 30 days brought US$6,323.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue on the two largest days", "value": "US$31,208, 20% of all revenue", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 22,715 plus 8,493, divided by 155,858. TrustMRR does not say which plan each payment bought. Lifetime deals, yearly plans and credit packs are all possible.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "First month with revenue", "value": "February 2026, US$149", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. The founder told Dodo Payments that before Dodo he had \"literally zero paying customers\".", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Team size", "value": "1 person", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR listing, written by the founder. Dodo Payments calls him \"a solo founder in college\". The about page credits TechInfinity, a Mumbai digital agency, with \"Managed & Marketed\".", "src": [ 1, 3, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR listing: \"Funding: Bootstrapped\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly visitors after a viral post", "value": "from 30,000 to 170,000", "grade": "B", "note": "Dodo Payments case study, figures from the founder. It also reports an Instagram post with 1.6 million views and 65,000 signups. The study calls this 4.5x growth; 170,000 divided by 30,000 is 5.7.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days to 25 October 2026", "value": "80%", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot. The cost side is not listed as verified.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price on TrustMRR", "value": "US$870,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Listed for sale since 19 September 2026, 7 offers by 25 October 2026. A seller's price, not a sale.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price compared with revenue", "value": "5.6 times the verified revenue to date", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 870,000 divided by 155,858. TrustMRR shows 4.9x, computed on 12 times the last 30 days of revenue.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Basic plan price", "value": "US$25 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Pricing page; US$20 a month billed yearly.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Time from first revenue to the figure above", "value": "8 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: February 2026 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "31 October 2025", "what": "The earliest archived copy of draftly.space shows a small web app titled draftly-react.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "February 2026", "what": "First verified payments, US$149. The founder integrates Dodo Payments in one working session with Claude and Cursor; the first test payment goes through the same night.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "when": "March 2026", "what": "US$18,842 of verified revenue in the first full month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "April 2026", "what": "US$29,042, the highest month before any lifetime deal.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "15 May 2026", "what": "The pricing page shows four subscription plans at US$25, US$40, US$60 and US$200 a month and no lifetime deal.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "31 May 2026", "what": "Dodo Payments publishes a case study: US$25,000 in monthly recurring revenue and 700 paying customers, growth almost entirely from Instagram.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "June to August 2026", "what": "Monthly revenue falls each month, to US$9,364 in August.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "17 September 2026", "what": "One day brings US$22,715, 76% of the month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "19 September 2026", "what": "Draftly is listed for sale on TrustMRR with an asking price of US$870,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "29 September 2026", "what": "Monthly recurring revenue US$22,472 with 667 active subscriptions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "17 October 2026", "what": "One day brings US$8,493, 57% of the last 30 days.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "Monthly recurring revenue US$12,545 with 381 active subscriptions. The site shows a \"Launch offer: lifetime plans 45–70% off\" with a countdown.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 5 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A video instead of a 3D engine", "text": "A real 3D website needs a 3D artist and code for the browser's graphics engine. Draftly makes an 8-second video and plays its frames as the visitor scrolls, which looks similar. The home page says it plainly: \"No WebGL, no Three.js, no code\". Rented video models made this cheap enough to sell at US$25 a month." }, { "title": "Short videos as the sales channel", "text": "The product is visual, so a short screen recording explains it. The Dodo Payments case study says the founder grew the Instagram account to more than 30,000 followers by posting often, and that one creator with 750,000 followers shared it, which sent about 170,000 visits and 65,000 signups." }, { "title": "Credits as the unit of price", "text": "Each plan is a monthly pool of credits, and each AI step has a credit cost: the video costs the most, about 340 of the 593 credits of a first build. So the customer pays for each AI step that the founder pays a model provider for, and a heavy user buys more credits instead of costing more on a flat plan." }, { "title": "Global payments without a company abroad", "text": "Most customers were in the US, Germany and the UK, while the founder was a student in India. Dodo Payments collected the payments and handled sales tax in other countries. The founder told Dodo that he had not known about tax compliance before." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's about page and documentation (grade C) and from the Dodo Payments case study (grade B).", "items": [ "Next.js 14 for the web app and Firebase as the backend, according to the about page, which also lists Gemini 2.5 as the AI engine.", "Veo 3.1 from Google makes the motion video for every site. The documentation says about 200 WebP frames are then extracted at 25 frames per second, adjustable from 10 to 40, and loaded as the visitor scrolls.", "Still images come from several rented models: Seedream 4.5 through fal, Gemini 2.5 Flash Image and Gemini 3.1 Flash Image, and on higher plans Flux and Kling. Clip extension uses LTX 2.3 Fast through fal.ai, and upscaling uses Topaz.", "Payments and subscriptions run on Dodo Payments, integrated in one session with Claude, Cursor and Dodo's documentation.", "Search content at scale: the sitemap lists 2,250 addresses, 1,840 of them blog posts: 573 in an industry section and 240 in an India section, among others.", "An affiliate program pays 10% on every paying referral, with payouts by PayPal, UPI or bank." ], "src": [ 3, 6, 9, 10, 14, 15 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database tried to make web design automatic or website animation smooth before video models existed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "The Grid", "years": "2014 to 2020", "funding": "US$4.7M", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Websites designed by AI, without paying a designer.", "died": "The AI of the time produced designs below what a person or a template from Wix or Squarespace gave, and the platform could not deliver consistent quality.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/618-the-grid" }, { "name": "Famo.us", "years": "2011 to 2017", "funding": "US$31M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A JavaScript framework for smooth, app-like animation in the browser.", "died": "Its own rendering engine had to be updated for every browser change, and React won developers with a simpler model and a larger community.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/133-famous" }, { "name": "Sosh", "years": "2012 to 2013", "funding": "US$2.3M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A drag-and-drop website builder that removes the handoff from designer to developer.", "died": "It was too complex for beginners and too limited for professionals, and the code it produced was hard to work with.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/565-sosh" }, { "name": "WebCake", "years": "2013 to 2016", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "An all-in-one website maker for people without technical skills.", "died": "Wix and Squarespace offered more templates and features, and WebCake had no money to build something different.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1541-webcake" }, { "name": "NudgePad", "years": "2009 to 2012", "funding": "US$150K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A visual editor where designers and clients build a website together in real time.", "died": "Wix and WordPress offered more complete products with larger ecosystems, and NudgePad could not show why a customer should switch.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1631-nudgepad" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Before video models, a website with film-like motion needed an animation engine and a designer. Famo.us spent US$31 million on such an engine and lost to simpler tools. The Grid tried to replace the designer with AI in 2014, and its designs were worse than templates. The Dodo Payments case study puts the price of a designed 3D website at US$5,000 to US$10,000.", "By 2026, a model such as Veo 3.1 makes an 8-second cinematic clip from one still image, and a browser can play the frames of that clip as the visitor scrolls. That removes both the engine and most of the design work. One student assembled the pipeline from rented models and sold it from US$25 a month. What did not change is the old lesson of WebCake and NudgePad: when the effect is easy to copy, the larger website builders can add it." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The technique, yes. The revenue pattern, with care.", "text": "Video frames played on scroll are a known web technique, and every step uses a model anyone can rent, so competitors can copy the product quickly. The revenue also shows a pattern to avoid: fast growth from one viral wave, then a fall, then one-time lifetime sales that make single months look large while recurring revenue drops.", "steps": [ "Find an effect that used to need an agency and that a new model can now produce in one step.", "Wrap the model in a fixed pipeline (still image, video, frames, page) so the customer gives one prompt, not ten.", "Price in credits that follow the model costs, with the most expensive step clearly priced.", "Show the result in short videos, because a visual product sells itself on Instagram and TikTok.", "Report recurring and one-time revenue separately, to buyers and to yourself." ], "open": "The same video-to-scroll method fits narrow markets that need product pages with motion: car dealers, real-estate developers, consumer hardware launches. A version that connects to an existing store or site builder, instead of hosting its own sites, is also open." }, "watch": [ { "title": "One-time payments inside the monthly totals", "text": "Lifetime deals, credit top-ups and bandwidth packs are one-time payments, and yearly plans are paid in advance. TrustMRR shows only totals, but two days, 17 September (US$22,715) and 17 October 2026 (US$8,493), made 20% of all revenue. Outside those days, payments averaged about US$240 a day in September and October. The recurring part is the MRR figure: US$12,545 on 25 October 2026." }, { "title": "Recurring revenue is falling", "text": "MRR fell from US$22,472 on 29 September to US$12,545 on 25 October 2026, and active subscriptions from 667 to 381. Monthly revenue had already fallen from US$29,042 in April to US$9,364 in August. The Dodo case study credits one viral Instagram post with most of the early traffic." }, { "title": "Listed for sale", "text": "Draftly was listed for sale on TrustMRR on 19 September 2026, two days after its largest day, at US$870,000. A buyer would also take over the lifetime customers, who receive monthly credits \"for as long as Draftly offers the plan\" with no further payment, while each build calls paid video and image models." }, { "title": "Numbers that do not agree", "text": "The daily payments outside the two large days add up to about US$7,000 a month, well below the MRR figures; TrustMRR does not publish how it computes MRR, and yearly plans paid earlier are one possible reason. The Dodo study calls a rise from 30,000 to 170,000 visitors 4.5x growth; it is 5.7x. The study says Dodo acts as merchant of record; the TrustMRR profile says \"Merchant of record: No\"." }, { "title": "Who does the work", "text": "TrustMRR lists a team of one, and Dodo calls the founder a solo founder in college. The about and contact pages also credit TechInfinity, a Mumbai digital agency, with \"Managed & Marketed\". How much of the marketing the agency does is not stated. The customer quotes on the home page could not be verified." }, { "title": "Easy to copy", "text": "The method uses public models (Veo, Gemini, Seedream, Flux) and a known browser technique. Large website builders can add a video-to-scroll section, as Wix and Squarespace outlasted WebCake and NudgePad." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.draftly.space/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/draftly-1" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR, Draftly (draftly.space) markdown profile, synced 25 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/draftly-1.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile, live, on 25 October 2026. The revenue, MRR and subscription figures are read by TrustMRR from Dodo Payments through an API key (grade A); team, funding, profit and the sale listing are founder-written (grade C)." }, { "title": "TrustMRR, Draftly markdown profile as archived on 29 September 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260929113145/https://trustmrr.com/startup/draftly-1.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full from the Wayback Machine. Source for the MRR and subscriptions on 29 September 2026 and the daily payments of September." }, { "title": "Dodo Payments case study, 31 May 2026: How Draftly went from zero paying customers to $25K MRR with Dodo Payments", "url": "https://dodopayments.com/case-studies/draftly", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. Dodo Payments is Draftly's payment provider. Source for the May 2026 MRR and customer count (grade A) and for the founder's story, traffic and tools (grade B)." }, { "title": "Draftly pricing page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.draftly.space/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the questions section on lifetime deals. The lifetime prices load from the company's server, which robots.txt closes to crawlers, so they are not given." }, { "title": "Draftly home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.draftly.space/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product description, the lifetime launch banner and the purpose check." }, { "title": "Draftly about page", "url": "https://www.draftly.space/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names the founder, the technology stack and the agency credited with management and marketing." }, { "title": "Draftly contact page", "url": "https://www.draftly.space/contact", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Links the founder to the X handle that the TrustMRR profile also shows." }, { "title": "Draftly terms of service, last updated 22 October 2026", "url": "https://www.draftly.space/legal/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on refunds, lifetime deals and governing law (India). The terms name the operator only as Draftly." }, { "title": "Draftly documentation: video generation", "url": "https://www.draftly.space/docs/video-generation", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for Veo 3.1, the frame extraction and the clip extension model." }, { "title": "Draftly documentation: image generation", "url": "https://www.draftly.space/docs/image-generation", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the model table." }, { "title": "Draftly pricing page as archived on 15 May 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260515233455/https://www.draftly.space/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full from the Wayback Machine. Four subscription plans, no lifetime deal." }, { "title": "Draftly pricing page as archived on 3 June 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260603133054/https://www.draftly.space/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full from the Wayback Machine. Same plans, no lifetime deal." }, { "title": "Draftly home page as archived on 31 October 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20251031200837/https://www.draftly.space/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page shell only; the content loads by script. Shows that the site existed in October 2025." }, { "title": "Draftly sitemap, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.draftly.space/sitemap.xml", "grade": "C", "how": "Counted the addresses: 2,250, of which 1,840 are blog posts." }, { "title": "Draftly affiliate program page", "url": "https://www.draftly.space/affiliate", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 10% commission; no income promises seen." }, { "title": "TrustMRR, a different startup also named Draftly (draftly.live)", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/draftly.md", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the markdown profile only to rule out a mix-up. It is a separate product by a different founder in France; none of its figures are used on this page." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/advanced-gsc-mcp/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/advanced-gsc-mcp.md", "slug": "advanced-gsc-mcp", "name": "Advanced GSC MCP", "country": "Canada", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Hosted MCP server that gives AI assistants live SEO data", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "29 April 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$4.9K a month MRR, October 2026", "sticker": "$4.9K MRR", "outcomeUsd": 58692, "months": 6, "teamLabel": "1 named founder; no source names any other staff", "fundingLabel": "None reported (TrustMRR listed Bootstrapped on 12 October 2026)", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "seo-ai-search", "channel": "open-source", "trend": "growing", "collections": [ "open-source", "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "SEO" ], "product": "A hosted server that an AI assistant such as Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor calls as a tool. The assistant reads the customer's Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4 data live, and on higher plans also checks search results, keywords, backlinks, Core Web Vitals and page markup. The product has no report screens of its own: the customer asks questions in the AI chat.", "why": "The founder first gave away the same idea as free open-source code, which collected about 2,000 GitHub stars, and he already had a free Chrome extension with at least 10,000 users among search specialists. The paid version removes the installation work and adds data that the free code does not have. Most of the first buyers came from that existing audience.", "summary": [ "Advanced GSC MCP is a hosted MCP server for search specialists. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is an open standard from Anthropic that lets an AI assistant call outside tools and read live data; an MCP server is the program that offers those tools. This one connects the assistant to Google Search Console (GSC), Google's free report of how a website appears in Google search: clicks, impressions, average position and indexing status. On the Pro plan it also connects GA4, Google Analytics 4, which counts visits on the site.", "Amin Foroutan, an SEO consultant who builds his own tools, published a free GSC MCP server on GitHub in March 2025. Users asked for an easier way in, because the free version needs Python and a Google Cloud setup on the user's own computer. The hosted version started taking payments in late April 2026 and is sold in groups of 100 seats. On 25 October 2026 its Stripe account, read by TrustMRR, showed US$4,891 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the subscription revenue that repeats each month) from 149 active subscriptions. Revenue was US$1,041 in May 2026 and US$4,310 in August 2026.", "The money numbers on this page are grade A: TrustMRR reads them from the payment processor through an API key. The team size and the funding status are founder statements. The page also shows four failed startups that sold dashboards, marketing analysis or easy data connections before AI assistants could do the analysis themselves." ], "factsCaption": "US$4,891 of monthly recurring revenue six months after the first payment, from 149 subscriptions, read from Stripe by TrustMRR", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from the company's Stripe account, read by TrustMRR through an API key. A grade B value is public data from a third party (GitHub, the Chrome Web Store, a connected Google Analytics account). A grade C value is a statement by the founder or on the company's own pages. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a free open-source tool in March 2025 to a paid hosted service with US$4,891 of monthly recurring revenue in October 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Advanced GSC MCP plans for the second 100-seat round, read from the company's pricing page on 25 October 2026 (grade C). There is no yearly plan: the first price column is the quarterly price divided by three.", "note": "Prices exclude tax. Quarterly billing is 15% cheaper than monthly billing. The first 100 subscribers, the founding round, keep lower prices for as long as they stay subscribed: US$12, US$35 and US$100 a month, or US$29, US$84 and US$240 a quarter, as the Markdown version of the same page still lists. The customer's AI assistant is billed separately by its own provider. Starter and Pro can start with a 5-day free trial that needs a card; Max is billed at once.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "1 property, 3 Search Console tools, last 30 days of data" ], [ "Starter", "12.75", "15", "3 properties, 200 search result lookups and 100 keyword lookups a month" ], [ "Pro", "34", "40", "10 GSC and 10 GA4 properties, 500 search result lookups a month" ], [ "Max", "89.25", "105", "Unlimited properties (about 100 under fair use), crawl tools, 250 backlink lookups a month" ], [ "Custom", "custom", "custom", "Connections to a content management system such as WordPress or Webflow" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 25 October 2026", "value": "US$4,891", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR metric snapshot, revenue last synced from Stripe on 25 October 2026. TrustMRR states that its last-30-day MRR growth was 14.6%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate", "value": "US$58,692 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 4,891 multiplied by 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions, 25 October 2026", "value": "149", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR metric snapshot from Stripe.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average MRR per subscription", "value": "about US$32.83", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 4,891 divided by 149. This is close to the Pro price, US$40 a month, minus founding and quarterly discounts.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 12 October 2026", "value": "US$4,712 from 144 subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "A copy of the same TrustMRR profile, synced on 12 October 2026. From 12 to 25 October, MRR rose 3.8% (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, May 2026", "value": "US$1,041", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline from Stripe. April 2026 shows US$0.60, which looks like a test payment.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, June 2026", "value": "US$1,364", "grade": "A", "note": "", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, July 2026", "value": "US$2,010", "grade": "A", "note": "", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, August 2026", "value": "US$4,310", "grade": "A", "note": "2.14 times the July figure (calculated). Quarterly plans are paid in advance, so a month can include three months of payment from some customers.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, September 2026", "value": "US$4,252", "grade": "A", "note": "1.3% below August (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, 1 to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$3,872", "grade": "A", "note": "Month not finished when read; the last day is partial.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, all time to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$16,850", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR total. The monthly rows above add up to US$16,849.60 (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Website visitors, last 30 days to 25 October 2026", "value": "4,101", "grade": "B", "note": "From the connected Google Analytics account, through TrustMRR. TrustMRR computes US$1.15 of revenue per visitor.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Seats sold in rounds", "value": "first round of 100 sold out; 36 of 100 left in round two", "grade": "C", "note": "Company pricing page, 25 October 2026. That implies 164 seats taken in both rounds (calculated), against 149 active subscriptions at TrustMRR; the difference can be cancellations, but no source explains it.", "src": [ 2, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 named founder", "grade": "C", "note": "The pages are written in the first person by Amin Foroutan, support tickets go to the developer directly, and the terms say the service is owned by Amin Foroutan. No source gives a headcount.", "src": [ 2, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "The TrustMRR profile copy of 12 October 2026 lists Funding: Bootstrapped, which is founder-entered profile text. The 25 October version no longer has the line.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Stars on the free open-source server, October 2026", "value": "2,028", "grade": "B", "note": "GitHub counter for AminForou/mcp-gsc. The company's About page still says over 800 stars, and a March 2026 article said more than 600.", "src": [ 7, 6, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Users of the founder's free Chrome extension", "value": "10,000 in the store; 17,000+ on the company site", "grade": "B", "note": "Chrome Web Store listing of Advanced GSC Visualizer, version 3.5.2, rating 4.5 from 70 ratings. The higher figure is the company's own claim (grade C).", "src": [ 9, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the first payment to the headline figure", "value": "6 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 29 April 2026, the founding date on TrustMRR, to 25 October 2026 is 179 days.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "March 2025", "what": "Amin Foroutan builds a free Google Search Console MCP server in Python and publishes it on GitHub under the MIT license, a few months after Anthropic introduced MCP.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 6 ] }, { "when": "2025", "what": "The open-source server gets users who ask for an easier setup; the founder says this is why he built a hosted version. He also keeps his free Chrome extension for Search Console and his SEO consulting.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 10 ] }, { "when": "26 March 2026", "what": "His article on the company blog explains GSC MCP and says the free server has more than 600 GitHub stars.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "29 April 2026", "what": "Founding date of the hosted product on TrustMRR. The Stripe account shows its first, very small payment in April.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "May 2026", "what": "First full month of sales: US$1,041 of revenue.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "July to August 2026", "what": "Revenue grows from US$2,010 to US$4,310 a month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "Revenue US$4,252. The free open-source server gets releases 0.4.0 and 0.4.1 with fixes from outside contributors.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "when": "12 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR shows US$4,712 of MRR and 144 active subscriptions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "18 October 2026", "what": "New terms of service: the product is in Early Access, sold in cohorts of up to 100 subscribers, and each subscriber keeps the price of the cohort while subscribed.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR shows US$4,891 of MRR from 149 subscriptions. The pricing page says the founding round sold out and 36 of 100 round-two seats are left, at higher prices.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A free version first", "text": "The open-source server on GitHub does the core job for free, and its README links to the hosted version. The founder's About page says the paid product exists because users of the free one asked for an easier way in. The free code works as a demonstration and as a list of interested users." }, { "title": "Selling the setup, not the data", "text": "Google gives Search Console and GA4 data away through its official APIs. What the free route costs is time: Python, a Google Cloud project and an OAuth credentials file, and it works only in desktop apps. The hosted version replaces that with a Google sign-in and one line of configuration, and it also works in the web versions of Claude and ChatGPT." }, { "title": "Data the free version does not have", "text": "The paid plans add search result snapshots, keyword volumes and backlink data bought from DataForSEO, a licensed data provider, plus Core Web Vitals from Google's Chrome UX Report and page audits. Without these plans, a customer would need a separate SEO data tool for the same data." }, { "title": "An audience that already trusts the founder", "text": "The founder's free Chrome extension for Search Console has at least 10,000 users in the Chrome Web Store, and the extension site quotes posts about it by other search specialists. The extension site, the founder's own site and his news site Daily SEO Brief all link to the paid server." }, { "title": "Small rounds with price locks", "text": "Seats are sold in rounds of 100. Each round costs more than the one before, and a subscriber keeps the round's price while the subscription stays active. This gives early buyers a reason to subscribe now and a reason not to cancel." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's terms, privacy policy, page source and the open-source repository. They are grade B and C.", "items": [ "The free version is a Python MCP server built on the official MCP Python SDK. Users run it on their own computer with a Google Cloud OAuth setup or a service account.", "The hosted version runs on rented cloud servers, and the privacy policy says it is operated from the United States. TrustMRR lists Next.js for the website, and the page source loads images from the Sanity content system.", "Search Console and GA4 data come from Google's official APIs. The privacy policy says the use of Google data follows the Google API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use rules, and that the server does not store the data permanently.", "Search results, keyword data and backlinks come from DataForSEO. Only the keyword, the location or the domain that the customer asks about is sent there.", "Payments, trials, retries of failed cards and plan changes run on Stripe. The in-app support assistant and the chat widget on the marketing pages use the OpenAI API.", "The marketing pages measure visits with Google Analytics, Microsoft Clarity and DataFast." ], "src": [ 4, 5, 7, 2, 1 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold marketing dashboards, automated marketing advice or easier connections between software tools before AI assistants could read the data and explain it. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "SumAll", "years": "2011 to 2019", "funding": "US$15M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "One dashboard for a small business's marketing and sales data, without a data scientist.", "died": "Large analytics companies and free tools offered the same charts. An undifferentiated dashboard could not justify its price.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/587-sumall" }, { "name": "Metigy", "years": "2014 to 2022", "funding": "US$14M", "cause": "No market need", "promise": "Machine learning that analyzes a small business's social media and recommends what to do, in place of a marketing team.", "died": "The recommendations were generic and small businesses wanted someone to do the work for them. It spent US$14 million on advice that customers did not use.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2338-metigy" }, { "name": "Xkit", "years": "2018 to 2021", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A platform that makes connecting and managing third-party APIs easy for software teams.", "died": "Zapier and do-it-yourself cloud tools covered the same need, and Xkit could not keep up with its own integration work and costs.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1412-xkit" }, { "name": "DataNitro", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Run Python scripts inside Excel for data analysis without leaving the spreadsheet.", "died": "Excel added its own Python support and stronger competitors appeared, so the add-on lost its reason to exist.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1587-datanitro" } ], "whatChanged": [ "SumAll and Metigy both tried to turn marketing data into decisions for people who are not analysts. SumAll stopped at charts, which free tools also drew. Metigy tried to write the advice itself with its own machine learning, and its customers found the advice generic. Both needed large teams and venture money, and both closed.", "Advanced GSC MCP does neither job itself. The customer's own AI assistant, which the customer already pays for, does the analysis, and the server only delivers the data and a few calculations to it. That is why one person can build and support it. The weak point is the one that ended Xkit and DataNitro: a connector is easy to copy, and the platforms it sits between, Google and the AI assistant makers, can add the same connection themselves." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, if you already have the audience.", "text": "Writing an MCP server for a public API is a small project, and the founder's own article calls his server one of the earliest GSC MCP implementations, so others exist. What is hard to copy is the founder's position: a free open-source server with about 2,000 stars and a free Chrome extension with at least 10,000 users in the same niche, built over several years.", "steps": [ "Pick a data source that a professional group checks every day and that has an official API, such as Search Console for search specialists.", "Publish a free, self-installed MCP server first, and watch which setup steps users complain about.", "Sell the hosted version that removes those steps, and add paid data from a licensed provider that the free version does not have.", "Sell in small rounds with a locked price, and answer support requests yourself while the rounds are small." ], "open": "The same pattern is open for other data that professionals read every day through an official API: ad accounts, app store analytics, accounting systems, e-commerce stores. Each needs a founder who already knows the users and the questions they ask." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Google or the AI companies can add the same connection", "text": "Search Console and GA4 data are free from Google. If Google or Anthropic ships an official Search Console connector, the basic plan loses its reason to exist, and the paid data from DataForSEO becomes the main thing that customers pay for." }, { "title": "Revenue flat for two months", "text": "Revenue was US$4,310 in August and US$4,252 in September 2026, while MRR kept rising. Quarterly plans are paid in advance, so monthly revenue and MRR do not move together. The figures cover only six months." }, { "title": "Early Access status", "text": "The terms say the product is in Early Access, with expected bugs and outages, and that these do not qualify for a refund. Customers in later rounds pay more than founding members, which can make later rounds sell more slowly." }, { "title": "Numbers that do not agree", "text": "The company site says 17,000+ extension users; the Chrome Web Store shows 10,000. The About page says over 800 GitHub stars; GitHub shows 2,028. The pricing page implies 164 seats sold; TrustMRR counts 149 active subscriptions. TrustMRR lists the country as Canada, while the privacy policy says the service is operated from the United States." }, { "title": "Dependence on outside providers", "text": "The product depends on Google's API terms and quotas, on DataForSEO for search and backlink data, and on the MCP support of each AI assistant. A change in any of them changes what the product can sell." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.advancedgsc.com/mcp" }, { "kind": "chrome", "url": "https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/cdiccpnglfpnclonhpchpaaoigfpieel" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/advanced-gsc-mcp" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR, Advanced GSC MCP profile (Stripe-verified metrics, synced 25 October 2026)", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/advanced-gsc-mcp.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile on 25 October 2026, and a copy of the same profile saved on 12 October 2026. Revenue, MRR and subscriptions come from Stripe through an API key; the description, country, founding date and funding line are founder-entered (grade C)." }, { "title": "Advanced GSC MCP home and pricing page", "url": "https://www.advancedgsc.com/mcp", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026, including the plan prices in the page source. Source for the plans, the seat rounds and the purpose check." }, { "title": "Advanced GSC MCP, Markdown version of the home page for AI agents", "url": "https://www.advancedgsc.com/mcp.md", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the plan contents, the founding-round prices and the FAQ answers." }, { "title": "Advanced GSC MCP Server, Terms of Service, updated 18 October 2026", "url": "https://www.advancedgsc.com/mcp/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the owner's name, the official Google APIs, Early Access, the cohorts, the price locks, trials and refunds." }, { "title": "Advanced GSC MCP Server, Privacy Policy", "url": "https://www.advancedgsc.com/mcp/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for Stripe, OpenAI, DataForSEO, the analytics tools, the Google API Services User Data Policy statement and the United States operation." }, { "title": "About Advanced GSC", "url": "https://www.advancedgsc.com/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder's account of the open-source server and why he built the hosted version." }, { "title": "GitHub, AminForou/mcp-gsc: Google Search Console MCP Server for SEOs", "url": "https://github.com/AminForou/mcp-gsc", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the repository page and README on 25 October 2026. Source for the star count, the MIT license, the release notes and the link to the hosted version." }, { "title": "Advanced GSC blog, 26 March 2026, Amin Foroutan: Google Search Console MCP: What It Is and How to Use It", "url": "https://www.advancedgsc.com/blog/google-search-console-mcp", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the March 2025 start of the open-source server and the setup that the free version needs." }, { "title": "Chrome Web Store, Advanced GSC Visualizer", "url": "https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/advanced-gsc-visualizer/cdiccpnglfpnclonhpchpaaoigfpieel", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the listing page. Source for the user count, rating, version and update date of the founder's free extension." }, { "title": "Amin Foroutan, personal website", "url": "https://aminforoutan.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the home page. Source for the founder's SEO consulting and his other tools, checked for the purpose rules." }, { "title": "Advanced GSC Visualizer home page", "url": "https://www.advancedgsc.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's free Chrome extension; source for its own user claim and its link to the paid server." }, { "title": "Daily SEO Brief", "url": "https://www.dailyseobrief.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the home page. The founder's AI-curated SEO news site; it carries a banner for the paid server." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/vectosolve/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/vectosolve.md", "slug": "vectosolve", "name": "VectoSolve", "country": "France", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI image-to-vector converter for cutting, laser and embroidery machines", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "October 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$2.7K revenue in the last 30 days, October 2026", "sticker": "$2.7K in 30 days", "outcomeUsd": 31812, "months": 12, "teamLabel": "1 founder and sole developer; the operating company, GTA GO TO AGENCY SAS, lists two co-directors", "fundingLabel": "None (bootstrapped, per the founder's TrustMRR profile)", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "photos", "channel": "search", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Design tools" ], "product": "A web app that turns a PNG, JPG or WEBP picture into a vector file. The customer drops an image, sees a free watermarked preview, and pays only to download: US$6.99 for one file, or a plan from US$7.99 a month. Besides SVG, it exports the formats that hobby and shop machines read: DXF and G-code for lasers and CNC routers, and DST, PES and JEF for embroidery machines.", "why": "The conversion itself is rented: the company's terms say it uses Recraft AI's vectorization, which Recraft lists at US$0.01 a request. The founder built the parts around it, machine export formats and cleanup, and wrote a search page for nearly every cutter, laser and craft use. Stripe data shows that this reached US$4,261 of revenue in June 2026 and US$2,651 in the 30 days to 25 October 2026.", "summary": [ "VectoSolve converts a raster image, a picture stored as a grid of coloured pixels, into a vector file, a drawing stored as lines, curves and filled shapes that stay sharp at any size. Cutting machines such as a Cricut, laser engravers and embroidery machines need such outlines, not pixels. The company's terms say the conversion is done by Recraft AI, an outside AI service, through its API, the official interface that lets one program send work to another. VectoSolve adds its own cleanup (it says it removes stray specks, merges nearly equal colours and closes outlines) and exports to the file formats each machine reads. It also sells AI logo, animation, image and video tools that run on Google Gemini, Recraft, Kling and fal.ai.", "The founder is Robin Monteiro. The site's About page says he is self-taught, worked as a landscaper and plasterer before he learned to code, and builds and runs the product alone. The legal notice names the publisher as GTA GO TO AGENCY, a French SAS (simplified joint-stock company) registered in Dijon, with Robin Monteiro as publication director. TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a company's payment provider, shows Stripe revenue of US$6.50 in January 2026, US$2,034 in April, US$4,261 in June, US$3,141 in September, and US$2,651 in the 30 days to 25 October 2026. US$21,351 has come in since the start. MRR, monthly recurring revenue, the value of the active subscriptions for one month, was US$1,634 from 250 subscriptions on that day.", "The headline number is grade A, because TrustMRR reads it from Stripe through an API key. It is close to this site's floor of US$2,000 a month, and it is falling: the last 30 days were 37.8% below June. MRR covers only about 62% of the 30-day revenue; the rest is mostly one-file payments and yearly plans paid at once, which TrustMRR does not split. The business has been listed for sale on TrustMRR since 10 September 2026. The page also shows four failed companies that sold browser image editing or automatic design before such models existed." ], "factsCaption": "US$2,651 of Stripe revenue in the 30 days to 25 October 2026, from a one-person converter that rents its vectorization from an AI provider", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from Stripe or Google Search Console, read by TrustMRR through the company's own connections. A grade B value comes from an independent party: the Internet Archive or the price list of the AI supplier. A grade C value is a statement by the founder or the company. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a first archived page in October 2025 to US$2,651 in 30 days, 12 months later. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "VectoSolve prices in October 2026, from its pricing page; the Production and API plans from the company's llms.txt file (grade C)", "note": "One conversion costs 0.20 credits, so 5 credits buy 25 conversions. The same credits pay for the other tools: background removal 0.07, upscaling 0.15, an AI logo 0.25, an AI image 0.50 and a video from 2.00 credits. SVG, AI and EPS exports are free on the web app; DXF and G-code cost 0.10 credits and an embroidery file 0.25. Unused subscription credits roll over. Yearly prices are shown as a monthly amount: Starter is US$49 a year, Pro US$129 a year, Production US$990 a year. Prepaid API lots cost US$19.99 for 100 conversions, US$79 for 500 and US$259 for 2,000.", "rows": [ [ "Free preview", "0", "0", "1 watermarked preview a day, no signup" ], [ "Just this file", "6.99 one-time", "6.99 one-time", "the file just converted, full quality" ], [ "Starter", "4.08", "7.99", "25 conversions a month (5 credits)" ], [ "Pro", "10.75", "14.99", "100 conversions a month (20 credits)" ], [ "Production, for print and embroidery shops", "82.50", "99", "1,500 conversions a month, every machine format, batch and API" ], [ "API plans", "19.92 to 279.08", "29 to 399", "500 to 8,000 API conversions a month" ], [ "Custom", "custom", "custom", "more volume or a new format, agreed with the company" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days, to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$2,651", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data read by TrustMRR, last synced at 16:43 UTC on 25 October 2026. The profile also stores a snapshot of US$2,658 and a change of -13.8% against the 30 days before. The 30 daily rows add up to US$2,624.16 (calculated); the difference is probably the time window.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from that figure", "value": "about US$31,812 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2,651 times 12. This is the outcome value used on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days, to 12 October 2026", "value": "US$2,847", "grade": "A", "note": "An earlier copy of the same TrustMRR profile, synced on 12 October 2026. The figure fell 6.9% in 13 days (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Best month", "value": "US$4,261 in June 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe monthly revenue on TrustMRR. The months before: March US$969, April US$2,034, May US$2,527.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, July to September 2026", "value": "US$3,248, US$2,949 and US$3,141", "grade": "A", "note": "September was 26.3% below June (calculated). The three months together, US$9,338, were still 5.8% above April to June, US$8,822 (calculated), so June looks like a single strong month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, 1 to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$2,156", "grade": "A", "note": "A partial month. The daily rows range from US$6.99 to US$261.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "First month with revenue", "value": "January 2026, US$6.50", "grade": "A", "note": "February was US$58.55. April 2026 was the first month above US$2,000.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Total revenue since the start", "value": "US$21,351", "grade": "A", "note": "All-time Stripe revenue on 25 October 2026. The monthly rows add up to US$21,350.05 (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 25 October 2026", "value": "US$1,634 from 250 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "Down 8.4% in 30 days, per the profile. On 12 October it was US$1,731 from 255 subscriptions. The average subscription is worth about US$6.54 a month (calculated: 1,634 divided by 250).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Share of the 30-day revenue that MRR explains", "value": "about 62%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 1,634 divided by 2,651. The rest comes from one-file payments, credit purchases and yearly plans paid at once; TrustMRR does not split them.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Paying customers and accounts", "value": "1,892 paying customers, 20,020 registered accounts, 98 countries", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder-written text on TrustMRR. The same text says 226 active subscriptions, while the Stripe count is 250, so the text is older than the data. All-time revenue per paying customer: about US$11.28 (calculated: 21,351 divided by 1,892).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Google Search impressions in the last 30 days", "value": "673,924", "grade": "A", "note": "Read by TrustMRR through a connected Google Search Console account. An impression is one appearance of a page in Google's results. On 12 October the figure was 610,446.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Visitors in the last 30 days", "value": "19,761", "grade": "C", "note": "Shown on TrustMRR, but neither Google Analytics nor DataFast is connected, so this is not read from an analytics API.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin in the last 30 days", "value": "85.0%", "grade": "C", "note": "Shown on TrustMRR with the same value on 12 and 25 October. Costs are not part of the Stripe verification.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Engine behind the paid conversion", "value": "Recraft AI's vectorization", "grade": "C", "note": "The terms say the service uses third-party AI vectorization technology (Recraft AI), and the privacy policy lists Recraft AI as the sub-processor for AI image vectorization. TrustMRR's description also mentions a local centerline engine for line art. Recraft's documentation does not say how its vectorizer works inside.", "src": [ 9, 8, 1, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Recraft's list price for one vectorization", "value": "US$0.01 per request", "grade": "B", "note": "Recraft's API pricing page, October 2026. No source says what VectoSolve actually pays.", "src": [ 10, 11 ] }, { "fact": "VectoSolve's price per file against that list price", "value": "about 32 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the Starter plan, US$7.99 for 25 conversions, is about US$0.32 a file, divided by US$0.01. A single file at US$6.99 is 699 times the list price.", "src": [ 6, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 person", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR says Team size: 1 person. The About page says the founder is the sole developer and answers every support email himself. The legal notice lists two co-directors of the operating company; only Robin Monteiro appears on the product pages.", "src": [ 1, 3, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Operating company", "value": "GTA GO TO AGENCY, SAS, Dijon, France, share capital 1,000 euros", "grade": "C", "note": "Named in the legal notice (mentions légales, last updated 3 March 2026), the terms and the privacy policy. The same company runs Datalenk, a web analytics product that VectoSolve also uses.", "src": [ 2, 9, 8, 18 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder's TrustMRR profile says Bootstrapped.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price on TrustMRR", "value": "US$74,000, listed since 10 September 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Set by the seller. The profile gives a revenue multiple of 2.3x, which matches the 30-day revenue times 12 (calculated: 74,000 divided by 31,812 equals 2.33). It also shows 4 offers received.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Search traffic stated by the company", "value": "22,000+ Google clicks in 28 days, July 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "From the company's advertising page, which says the figures are rounded down and come from Search Console.", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October 2026 figure", "value": "12 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: October 2025 to October 2026. The founded date on TrustMRR is 7 October 2025 and the first Internet Archive copy is from 14 October 2025. The About page says building started in 2024.", "src": [ 1, 12, 3 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2024", "what": "The About page and the company's llms.txt file say the founder has built VectoSolve since 2024. No source from 2024 was found.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "when": "7 October 2025", "what": "Founded date that the founder entered on TrustMRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "14 October 2025", "what": "First Internet Archive copy of the site: a PNG to SVG converter with AI-powered vectorization, where a free account gets 5.00 credits, or 25 conversions.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "January 2026", "what": "First Stripe revenue: US$6.50 for the month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "3 March 2026", "what": "The legal notice, last updated that day, names GTA GO TO AGENCY SAS in Dijon as the publisher and Robin Monteiro as publication director.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "April 2026", "what": "US$2,034 of revenue, the first month above US$2,000. The advertising page says two sponsored placements were bought in its AI logo generator comparison that month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 14 ] }, { "when": "2 May 2026", "what": "A comment in the site's robots.txt file says the marketplace, shop and creator pages were closed that day, in a change of direction, and now return 410 Gone.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "Best month: US$4,261.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "July to September 2026", "what": "US$3,248, US$2,949 and US$3,141 a month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "10 September 2026", "what": "Listed for sale on TrustMRR, with an asking price of US$74,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "10 October 2026", "what": "The robots.txt file now lets AI crawlers such as GPTBot and ClaudeBot read the site, after blocking them before; the comment calls the AI assistants a traffic channel.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "12 October 2026", "what": "US$2,847 of revenue in 30 days and US$1,731 MRR.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "US$2,651 of revenue in 30 days, US$1,634 MRR from 250 subscriptions, and US$21,351 since the start.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Rent the model, sell the file", "text": "The conversion runs on Recraft AI's vectorization, which Recraft sells to any developer at a list price of US$0.01 a request. VectoSolve charges about US$0.32 a file on the Starter plan and US$6.99 for one file without a plan. The customer does not pay for the model call. The customer pays for a file that opens without errors in Design Space, LightBurn or an embroidery machine, and that work is VectoSolve's own." }, { "title": "One page for each machine and each job", "text": "The site has a page for nearly every cutter and laser (Cricut Maker 3, Cricut Joy, Silhouette Cameo 4, Glowforge, xTool, Bambu Lab) and for jobs such as tattoo stencils, neon signs and memorial engraving. TrustMRR, reading the company's Google Search Console, shows 673,924 search impressions in 30 days, and the founder lists SEO and a blog as the marketing channels." }, { "title": "See the result, then pay", "text": "Every visitor can convert one image a day without an account and see the full result with a watermark. The paid step comes only after the preview. This fits people who need one file once, which explains why much of the revenue is single payments rather than subscriptions." }, { "title": "Many tools on one credit balance", "text": "The same credits pay for background removal, upscaling, AI logos, animations from Google Gemini, and videos from Google Veo, Kling or fal.ai. Each new tool is another page that can rank in search, and each is a reason to buy a plan instead of one file." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages (About, privacy policy, terms, llms.txt) and from the founder's TrustMRR profile. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Next.js, React, TypeScript and Tailwind CSS for the web app, hosted on Vercel. Supabase, a hosted Postgres database with login, holds the accounts. The TrustMRR profile also lists Node.js, Redis, AWS and Sentry.", "Recraft AI's API does the image vectorization. The terms tell users that they also agree to Recraft's terms of service.", "Google Gemini writes the CSS animations and the Etsy listings, alt text and blog articles; the company's file names gemini-2.5-flash and gemini-2.5-flash-lite. Recraft v3 makes the AI logos. Google Veo, Kling and fal.ai make the videos.", "Stripe takes the payments. Amazon SES sends the transactional email and Upstash limits requests per IP address.", "Datalenk, an analytics product of the same company, measures visits and ties purchases to the channel that brought the buyer.", "Other ways to use the product, per the TrustMRR profile: a Chrome extension, a Firefox add-on, an embeddable widget, a public REST API, a hosted MCP server for AI agents, npm packages, a GitHub Action and a Rhino plugin.", "The company states its limits: lettering becomes outlined shapes, not editable text, and embroidery output has no satin columns and no pull compensation, so fine lettering still needs a professional digitizer." ], "src": [ 3, 1, 9, 8, 5, 4 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold image editing in the browser, or automatic design, as a cheaper way around desktop software and designers. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Picnik", "years": "2005 to 2012", "funding": "US$3.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Simple photo editing in the browser, without installing Photoshop.", "died": "Google bought it in 2010 and folded its technology into other products such as Google+, then closed it in 2012, while mobile apps with built-in filters took its users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/429-picnik" }, { "name": "Snipshot", "years": "2006 to 2009", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Edit photos in the browser without Adobe software.", "died": "Larger rivals such as Picnik offered more features, free tools did the same job, and it never found a clear way to earn money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1241-snipshot" }, { "name": "Splashup", "years": "2007 to 2010", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Online photo editing with real-time collaboration.", "died": "It was built on Flash as browsers moved to HTML5, and it had no business model that paid for its users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1660-splashup" }, { "name": "The Grid", "years": "2014 to 2020", "funding": "US$4.7M", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Websites designed by AI, without paying a designer.", "died": "The AI of the time produced uneven designs that were worse than manual work or templates from WordPress, Wix and Squarespace.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/618-the-grid" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Picnik, Snipshot and Splashup sold the same promise as VectoSolve: do in a browser what otherwise needs Adobe software. They had to write every editing function themselves, and they sold to everyone, so free tools and larger rivals copied them. The Grid sold design by AI before the AI could do it well.", "Two things are different for VectoSolve. The hard part, turning pixels into clean shapes, is now a paid API call at a list price of one US cent, so one person can sell the result without building the model. And the buyers are a narrow group with a concrete need: owners of cutting, laser and embroidery machines who need a file in a format that their machine reads. The risk is also clear in the data: the same API is open to every competitor, and revenue has fallen since June 2026." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. A lasting lead, no.", "text": "Everything VectoSolve uses can be bought by anyone: Recraft's vectorization API, Gemini, Stripe and Vercel. What one person can add is the work around the model for one group of buyers: their machines, their file formats, their questions in search. That is repeatable in other niches, and for the same reason it is easy to copy in this one.", "steps": [ "Pick a buyer group whose machines or software need a specific file format, and learn those formats exactly.", "Rent the AI step through a public API and spend your own work on cleanup and export.", "Write one useful page for each machine, brand and job that the buyers search for.", "Show the full result before payment, sell a single file for people who need one, and a plan for those who return." ], "open": "Other conversions that machine owners pay for: photos to 3D relief files for CNC routers, sketches to sewing patterns, logos to embroidery files with real satin stitches (VectoSolve says it does not make those), or scanned drawings to clean CAD files for small workshops." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue fell after June", "text": "Monthly revenue was US$4,261 in June 2026, then US$3,248, US$2,949 and US$3,141. The 30 days to 25 October brought US$2,651, 37.8% below June and 6.9% below the 30 days to 12 October. July to September together were still 5.8% above April to June, so the fall is recent." }, { "title": "Most of the money is not a subscription", "text": "MRR is US$1,634, below this site's floor of US$2,000 a month. The 30-day revenue is above the floor only because it includes one-file payments, credit purchases and yearly plans. That revenue comes from many small buyers each day, not from one contract, but it must be earned again every month through search." }, { "title": "One supplier does the core work", "text": "The terms and the privacy policy name Recraft AI as the vectorization provider. Recraft sells the same API call to anyone at US$0.01, so a change of Recraft's price, terms or quality changes VectoSolve's product, and a competitor can buy the same engine." }, { "title": "Paid positions in comparison articles", "text": "The advertising page sells a top-3 position with a review in the article's voice for 1,500 euros, in articles such as 10 Image-to-Vector Converters Tested. In the AI logo article, the paid entries are labelled Partner and their links carry rel=\"sponsored\", the mark Google asks for on paid links. These payments go by bank transfer, so they are outside the Stripe figures. The page says once that one placement was sold to date and elsewhere that two were bought in April 2026." }, { "title": "Company figures that do not agree", "text": "The About page says building started in 2024; the founded date on TrustMRR is 7 October 2025, and the first archived page is from 14 October 2025. The About page says 21,500+ makers and 25,000+ images converted; the TrustMRR text says 20,020 accounts, and the company's llms-full.txt file speaks of 100,000+ conversions. The founder's text says 226 active subscriptions; Stripe shows 250. The 85.0% profit margin is the same in both TrustMRR copies." }, { "title": "For sale", "text": "The business has been listed on TrustMRR since 10 September 2026 at US$74,000. A buyer would get a product that depends on Recraft's API and on Google search rankings, run until now by its founder alone." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://vectosolve.com/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/vectosolve" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: VECTOSOLVE, Stripe-verified revenue profile (data as of October 2026)", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/vectosolve", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile (https://trustmrr.com/startup/vectosolve.md) in full, once, on 25 October 2026, synced at 16:43 UTC that day; compared with the pipeline's copy synced on 12 October 2026. Grade A for the Stripe and Search Console metrics in its Verification Sources section; the description, founded date, team size and customer counts are founder-written, grade C." }, { "title": "VectoSolve: Mentions Légales (legal notice), last updated 3 March 2026", "url": "https://vectosolve.com/mentions-legales", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the operating company, its registration in Dijon and the publication director." }, { "title": "VectoSolve: About, Built by Robin", "url": "https://vectosolve.com/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founder's background, the solo team, the stack and the user counts." }, { "title": "VectoSolve llms.txt, last updated 10 October 2026", "url": "https://vectosolve.com/llms.txt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's summary for AI assistants. Source for the founder's full name, the Production and API plan prices and the stated limits of the output." }, { "title": "VectoSolve llms-full.txt", "url": "https://vectosolve.com/llms-full.txt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the tools, the Gemini models, the affiliate program and the statistics." }, { "title": "VectoSolve pricing page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://vectosolve.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the plan prices and the credit cost of each tool." }, { "title": "VectoSolve home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://vectosolve.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full; the copy downloaded earlier the same day was identical in size. Source for the product description, the free preview and the cleanup steps." }, { "title": "VectoSolve Privacy Policy", "url": "https://vectosolve.com/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the list of sub-processors, including Recraft AI, Google Gemini and Veo, Kling, fal.ai, Amazon SES, Upstash and Datalenk." }, { "title": "VectoSolve Terms of Service", "url": "https://vectosolve.com/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the operator and for section 7.3, which names Recraft AI as the third-party vectorization technology." }, { "title": "Recraft API documentation: Vectorize", "url": "https://www.recraft.ai/docs/api-reference/tools/vectorize", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the page. The supplier's own description and price of the vectorization endpoint." }, { "title": "Recraft API documentation: Pricing", "url": "https://www.recraft.ai/docs/api-reference/pricing", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the price tables. Source for the US$0.01 list price of Vectorize image." }, { "title": "Internet Archive copy of vectosolve.com, 14 October 2025", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20251014220448/https://www.vectosolve.com/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the archived home page in full; the earliest capture in the archive's index is from the same day." }, { "title": "VectoSolve robots.txt, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://vectosolve.com/robots.txt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Its comments date the closing of the marketplace and shop (2 May 2026) and the decision to allow AI crawlers (10 October 2026)." }, { "title": "VectoSolve: Advertise, sponsored placements in ranking comparisons", "url": "https://vectosolve.com/advertise", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the rate card, the search traffic the company states and the placements sold." }, { "title": "VectoSolve blog: best AI logo generators 2026", "url": "https://vectosolve.com/blog/best-ai-logo-generators-2026", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the article and checked the page source of its links. The two paid entries are labelled Partner and carry rel=\"sponsored\"." }, { "title": "VectoSolve: Affiliate Program", "url": "https://vectosolve.com/affiliate", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A 20% commission on each referred customer's first purchase, paid by PayPal from US$50 or as credits." }, { "title": "VectoSolve: Creator and Influencer Partner Program", "url": "https://vectosolve.com/partners", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Checked for income promises: its earnings table multiplies a number of referrals by an average US$5 order and 20%." }, { "title": "Datalenk home page and terms", "url": "https://datalenk.com/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the home page and the terms. The terms say Datalenk is operated by GTA Go To Agency SAS, the company behind VectoSolve." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/tailride/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/tailride.md", "slug": "tailride", "name": "Tailride", "country": "Spain", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI invoice and receipt collection for small companies and accountants", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "October 2024", "outcomeLabel": "Passed to a new owner after US$18.97K of Stripe revenue in one month, March 2026", "sticker": "$19K/mo, then new owner", "outcomeUsd": 227640, "months": 17, "teamLabel": "1 named founder; no source gives the headcount before the change of owner (the new owner's About page lists 3 people)", "fundingLabel": "No outside funding found in any source", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "documents-data", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "sold", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2B", "Accounting" ], "product": "Tailride connects to a company's email inboxes, finds every invoice and receipt in them, including past ones, and reads each document with AI so that the vendor, amount, tax and date are filled in. A browser extension collects invoices from supplier websites such as Amazon or Meta Ads through the customer's own logged-in session. The invoices then go to accounting software, Google Drive or Google Sheets.", "why": "It solved one narrow and repeated task that every company has at the end of each quarter: find all invoices and give them to the accountant. It read the invoices where they already were, in the inbox and on supplier websites, instead of asking people to forward them, and it let customers write their own checking rules in plain language. Stripe data shows monthly revenue rising from US$12,631 in November 2025 to US$18,970 in January 2026.", "summary": [ "Tailride is a web application for collecting invoices. It connects to Gmail, Outlook or any other mailbox, finds the invoices and receipts in the messages, and uses AI to read each one. A browser extension, a small program that runs inside the customer's Chrome browser, fetches the invoices that suppliers show only on their own websites. The product started in October 2024 as GetInvoice, at get-invoice.com, and was renamed Tailride in mid-2025. The founder, Miquel (Miki) Palet, ran it from Spain through his company ARBICHAT, S.L., according to the terms of use of that time.", "The money figures on this page are verified revenue: TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a company's payment provider through an API key, reads this business's Stripe account. That account received US$12,631 in November 2025, US$18,970 in January 2026 and US$18,598 in March 2026, and US$119,345 in total. A run rate is one month's revenue multiplied by twelve; January 2026 equals about US$227,640 a year.", "Between February and March 2026 the business passed to a new owner. The site's own pages show the change: by 13 February 2026 the footer linked to Mike Erman instead of the founder, on 11 March 2026 an About page named Mike Erman as CEO, and terms dated 31 March 2026 name Tailride S.à r.l., a company in Luxembourg, as the operator. No source states a sale, a buyer, a date or a price, so this page says only that the business passed to a new owner and that the sale terms were not disclosed. From April 2026 almost no revenue reached the founder's Stripe account, while the site stayed live; the later revenue went elsewhere. The founder's next business is Zernio, formerly Late, a social media API that says it uses \"Official APIs only\"." ], "factsCaption": "US$18,970 of Stripe revenue in January 2026, 15 months after launch, then a change of owner in February and March 2026", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the company's Stripe account. A grade C value comes from the company's own pages or the founder's profile text. An X value was computed on this page from the rows above it. Figures after March 2026 belong to the new owner's period and are shown only to explain the drop.", "timelineLead": "From a Gmail invoice finder in October 2024 to a new owner in March 2026, 17 months later. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Tailride plans on 24 January 2026, the last copy of the pricing page from the founder's period, read in the Wayback Machine (grade C). The monthly prices of the three larger plans load by script and are not in the copy.", "note": "Yearly billing gave 4 months free, and monthly plans had double credits in the first month. Add-ons in January 2026: automatic forwarding of invoices to any email address for US$20 a month, and human-powered manual retrieval from all portals for US$500 a month. In October 2026 the new owner kept the same yearly prices with higher limits (900, 4,200, 9,000 and 18,000 invoices a year) and no longer listed the human retrieval add-on.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "10 invoices a month" ], [ "Starter", "13", "19", "600 invoices a year, 2 connected email accounts" ], [ "Growth", "34", "not shown", "3,000 invoices a year, 8 connected email accounts" ], [ "Scale", "69", "not shown", "6,000 invoices a year, 20 connected email accounts" ], [ "Premium", "138", "not shown", "12,000 invoices a year, unlimited email accounts" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue, January 2026", "value": "US$18,970", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly revenue timeline, read from the Stripe account through an API key. The best month in the record and the last full month before the footer of the site changed to the new CEO.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate at the January 2026 figure", "value": "about US$227,640 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 18,970 multiplied by 12 equals 227,640.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, November 2025", "value": "US$12,631", "grade": "A", "note": "December 2025: US$13,465.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from November 2025 to January 2026", "value": "about 50%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 18,970 divided by 12,631 equals 1.502.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, February and March 2026", "value": "US$15,254 and US$18,598", "grade": "A", "note": "These months fall in the handover period, when the site already named the new CEO but the founder's Stripe account still received the payments.", "src": [ 1, 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time", "value": "US$119,345", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, data synced on 25 October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue up to the end of March 2026", "value": "about US$114,757", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 119,345 minus 3,980 (April 2026) minus 608 (June 2026). The profile lists no other month after March 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue after March 2026 on the founder's Stripe account", "value": "US$3,980 in April, US$608 in June, US$0 in the 3 months to 25 October 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "Current monthly recurring revenue US$34 with 1 active subscription. The site was still live in October 2026, so the later revenue went to another account; no source says which.", "src": [ 1, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Founded", "value": "29 October 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "Founded date entered on the TrustMRR profile. The first Wayback copy of GetInvoice, the original name, is from 12 November 2024.", "src": [ 1, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Operator until February 2026", "value": "ARBICHAT, S.L., a Spanish company", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms of use, last updated 10 October 2024, with the contact address miki@get-invoice.com. A copy of 16 February 2026 still names ARBICHAT, S.L. but gives mike@tailride.so as the contact.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Operator from 31 March 2026", "value": "Tailride S.à r.l., Luxembourg", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms and privacy policy, last updated 31 March 2026. The About page, first copied on 11 March 2026, names Mike Erman as CEO, with a CTO and a marketing and support manager.", "src": [ 5, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Sale terms", "value": "not disclosed", "grade": "C", "note": "No downloaded source states a sale, a buyer, a date or a price. The change of owner is read from the site's footer, About page and terms.", "src": [ 4, 5, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Team before the change of owner", "value": "1 named founder; headcount not stated", "grade": "C", "note": "Until January 2026 the footer said the site was made by the same creator as getlate.dev and linked only to the founder. No source gives a staff count.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Entry price, January 2026", "value": "US$19 a month for 50 invoices a month; 10 invoices a month free", "grade": "C", "note": "Pricing page description and home page FAQ.", "src": [ 2, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the change of owner", "value": "17 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: October 2024 to March 2026.", "src": [ 1, 7 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "10 October 2024", "what": "ARBICHAT, S.L., the founder's Spanish company, dates the first terms of use. The service then only connects email accounts to find invoices.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "29 October 2024", "what": "Founded date on the TrustMRR profile.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "12 November 2024", "what": "First Wayback copy of GetInvoice: connect Gmail accounts, scan past dates, extract invoice data, download as CSV or ZIP, 10 invoices a month free.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "16 January 2025", "what": "GetInvoice now connects email accounts and web portals, with 16 supported supplier websites such as Amazon, AWS, ChatGPT and Meta Ads.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "May to July 2025", "what": "The product is renamed. A copy of 16 July 2025 shows the banner \"GetInvoice is now Tailride!\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "US$12,631 of revenue in one month on the Stripe account.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "January 2026", "what": "US$18,970 in one month, the highest month in the record. The footer still says the site comes from the same creator as getlate.dev.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "13 February 2026", "what": "The footer now links to Mike Erman, and the contact address is mike@tailride.so.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "11 March 2026", "what": "An About page names Mike Erman as CEO. The founder's quotation on the home page now calls him founder of Late.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "when": "31 March 2026", "what": "New terms and privacy policy name Tailride S.à r.l., Luxembourg, as the operator. March revenue on the founder's Stripe account is US$18,598.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 1 ] }, { "when": "April to October 2026", "what": "Revenue on the founder's Stripe account falls to US$3,980 in April, US$608 in June and zero from late July. The site stays live under the new owner.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 13 ] }, { "when": "2026", "what": "The founder's other product, Late, is renamed Zernio. Its About page lists 9 people and no outside money.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11, 12 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Read the inbox instead of asking for forwards", "text": "Many invoice tools give the customer a special email address and ask everyone to forward invoices to it. Tailride connected to the inboxes directly, including the inboxes of colleagues, and scanned them every day and backwards in time. A finance person did not have to remember anything, and past quarters could be recovered in one scan." }, { "title": "Supplier websites through the customer's own session", "text": "Some suppliers, such as Amazon or Meta Ads, show invoices only on their website. The Chrome extension fetched them with the browser session in which the customer was already logged in. The January 2026 home page says: \"You don't have to give us access to any of these portals.\"" }, { "title": "AI extraction plus rules in plain language", "text": "When an invoice was found, AI filled in all its fields. Customers then wrote their own rules as sentences, for example to exclude one sender or to set a tax rate, so the AI had the context to check the result. This replaces the manual review step that older tools left to the customer." }, { "title": "A free tier and a small entry price", "text": "Ten invoices a month were free without a card, and the first paid plan cost US$19 a month in January 2026. The plans were priced by number of invoices, so the price grew with the customer's volume. Accountants with many clients had their own page." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages of the founder's period (grade C) and from the TrustMRR profile (grade A for the payment provider).", "items": [ "Mailbox connections for Gmail, Outlook and any IMAP mailbox. The January 2026 FAQ says the use of data received from Google APIs follows Google's API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements.", "A Chrome extension that collects invoices from supplier websites with the customer's own logged-in browser session. The Telegram and WhatsApp bots accept photos of paper receipts.", "AI fills in the invoice fields, and customer rules written as sentences adjust the result. Bank statements in PDF or CSV are matched against the invoices to show what is missing, across currencies.", "Exports to QuickBooks, Xero, Business Central, Google Drive, Google Sheets and OneDrive, and a DATEV XML file for German accounting.", "Data stored in the European Union, in AWS Spain, according to the January 2026 FAQ. The app passed a Cloud Application Security Assessment (CASA) Tier 2 under the App Defense Alliance.", "Stripe for payments, connected to TrustMRR through an API key. A feature request board on Featurebase and an affiliate program paying 50% commission." ], "src": [ 1, 2, 8 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised to automate the paperwork of small companies' finances or administration before language models could read any document. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "ScaleFactor", "years": "2014 to 2019", "funding": "US$100M", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Automated bookkeeping for small and medium businesses, with machine learning replacing the accounting firm.", "died": "Its machine learning models could not do the accounting work reliably, marketing promised more than the product did, and support costs were higher than planned.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/523-scalefactor" }, { "name": "NetBooks", "years": "2006 to 2011", "funding": "US$33M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A simple online accounting system for small business owners without finance staff.", "died": "It could not stand out against QuickBooks, customer acquisition was expensive, and it lacked features that competitors added.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/367-netbooks" }, { "name": "Sleek", "years": "2019 to 2023", "funding": "US$10M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Expense management and corporate cards for small and medium businesses.", "died": "It entered a market that Brex and Ramp already held with far more money, and small customers produced too little card revenue to pay for their acquisition.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2529-sleek" }, { "name": "Olive AI", "years": "2012 to 2023", "funding": "US$852M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Software bots that do the repetitive administrative work of hospitals, such as claims and billing reconciliation.", "died": "The bots needed custom integrations for each client and broke when a hospital changed its software or forms, so serving a customer cost more than it paid.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2046-olive-ai" } ], "whatChanged": [ "ScaleFactor tried to automate the whole bookkeeping of a company with its own machine learning models and closed after US$100 million, because the models could not do the work reliably. Olive AI's bots did narrow administrative tasks but broke whenever a form changed, and each client needed its own integration work.", "Tailride took a smaller task: find the invoices and read them. Language models read invoices of any layout without a template per supplier, and the customer could correct them with a sentence instead of a support ticket. The supplier websites were reached through the customer's own browser session, not through a custom integration per client. With this scope, the Stripe record shows US$114,757 of revenue in 17 months under one named founder." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The pattern, yes. The category is crowded.", "text": "Tailride's own pages name the products it replaces: GetMyInvoices for supplier websites, Dext and Hubdoc for accounting exports, Wellybox and SparkReceipt for inbox scanning. Any team can call the same language models, so the work is in the mailbox and website connections, the security review for mailbox access, and the export to each accounting system.", "steps": [ "Pick one repeated back-office task with a clear end, such as collecting invoices before the quarterly tax filing.", "Read the data where it already is (the inbox, the supplier website) instead of asking users to move it.", "Let customers correct the AI with rules in plain language, so the manual check disappears.", "Price by volume with a free tier, and make a separate page for accountants who bring many clients." ], "open": "The same approach fits other documents that arrive by email or wait on supplier websites: delivery notes, contracts, payslips, utility bills for property managers, or customs papers for small importers." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The revenue figures are verified by TrustMRR from the founder's Stripe account. The change of owner is not: no source states a sale, a buyer, a date or a price. The site's own pages show that the footer linked to Mike Erman by 13 February 2026, that an About page named him CEO by 11 March 2026, and that terms dated 31 March 2026 name Tailride S.à r.l. in Luxembourg as the operator. This page therefore says that the business passed to a new owner and that the sale terms were not disclosed. Where the revenue went after March 2026 is not shown. A reader could look for a sale announcement by the founder or the buyer, or for the Luxembourg company's filings." }, { "title": "Team size before the change", "text": "Only the founder is named for the period up to January 2026, and no source gives a headcount. In January 2026 the pricing page sold human-powered retrieval of invoices from portals for US$500 a month, which needs people to do the work. The founder also ran Late, now Zernio, which lists 9 people." }, { "title": "Logins to supplier websites", "text": "In the founder's period the extension used the customer's own browser session and asked for no portal passwords. Under the new owner, a desktop app can store supplier passwords on the customer's computer, protected by macOS Keychain or Windows DPAPI; the company writes that they are not sent to Tailride, and that CAPTCHAs and SMS codes still need the user. This page did not check each supplier's own terms on automated sign-in." }, { "title": "A changing monthly record", "text": "A copy of the TrustMRR profile from 12 October 2026 showed US$4,361 for October 2025; the live profile of 25 October 2026 shows US$2,130 for the same month. This page uses neither figure for its headline." }, { "title": "Dependence on mailbox access", "text": "The main input is the customer's inbox. The company states that it follows Google's API Services User Data Policy and passed a CASA Tier 2 security assessment. A change in the rules of Google or Microsoft for mailbox access would reach the core of the product." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://tailride.so/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/tailride" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of Tailride (markdown), data synced 25 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/tailride.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile. The monthly revenue, all-time revenue and current subscription figures come from its Verification Sources section (Stripe, API key); the founded date and the description are founder-written text (grade C)." }, { "title": "Tailride home page, Wayback copy of 24 January 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260124080623/https://tailride.so/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The last copy with the founder's footer; source for the features, the FAQ and the portal method." }, { "title": "Tailride terms of use, Wayback copy of 18 October 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20251018232324/https://tailride.so/tos", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names ARBICHAT, S.L. as the operator. A copy of 16 February 2026 was also read." }, { "title": "Tailride home page, Wayback copy of 13 February 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260213185310/https://tailride.so/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the footer and compared it with the January copy: the founder's link and the getlate.dev line are replaced by Mike Erman's link." }, { "title": "Tailride About page, Wayback copy of 11 March 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260311012928/https://tailride.so/about-us", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The first archived copy of the page; names the new CEO, a CTO and a marketing and support manager. The live page in October 2026 lists the same three." }, { "title": "Tailride home page, Wayback copy of 11 March 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260311005026/https://tailride.so/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the testimonial and footer: the founder is now called founder of Late." }, { "title": "Tailride terms and conditions, last updated 31 March 2026", "url": "https://tailride.so/tos", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full (live page, 25 October 2026, and a Wayback copy of 3 May 2026). Names Tailride S.à r.l., Luxembourg. The privacy policy of the same date says the same." }, { "title": "Tailride pricing page, Wayback copy of 24 January 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260124084203/https://tailride.so/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the plan table and add-ons of the founder's period; the monthly prices of the larger plans are not in the copy." }, { "title": "GetInvoice home page, Wayback copies of 12 November 2024 and 16 January 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20241112192347/https://get-invoice.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both copies in full. Source for the first product and the addition of web portals." }, { "title": "Tailride home page, Wayback copy of 16 July 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250716072932/https://tailride.so/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the banner about the rename from GetInvoice. A GetInvoice copy of 17 May 2025 still used the old name." }, { "title": "Zernio About page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://zernio.com/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's next company: team of 9, bootstrapped, founded 2025. The home page was read for the words \"Official APIs only\"." }, { "title": "Zernio rebrand page: Late is now Zernio", "url": "https://zernio.com/rebrand", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Confirms that getlate.dev, named in Tailride's old footer, is now Zernio." }, { "title": "Tailride home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://tailride.so/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Shows the site live under the new owner, with the desktop app and the current portal method. Not used for founder-period facts." }, { "title": "Tailride blog, 7 October 2026: GetMyInvoices Alternative: Desktop App with Local Password Storage", "url": "https://tailride.so/blog/getmyinvoices-alternative-desktop-local-passwords", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The new owner's description of local password storage; a post of 6 October 2026 on TOTP sign-in was also read." }, { "title": "Tailride pricing page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://tailride.so/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The new owner's plans, used only for the note under the price table." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/decorai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/decorai.md", "slug": "decorai", "name": "DecorAI", "country": "United States (Wyoming company)", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI interior, exterior and garden redesign", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "20 December 2022", "outcomeLabel": "US$2.4K monthly recurring revenue, October 2026", "sticker": "$2.4K MRR, verified", "outcomeUsd": 29280, "months": 46, "teamLabel": "Owned by Creefty LLC, a company of 2 co-founders; DecorAI headcount not stated", "fundingLabel": "None (TrustMRR: Bootstrapped)", "primaryFactor": "Search", "group": "real-estate", "channel": "search", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Design tool" ], "product": "You upload a photo of a room, a house front or a garden, pick a style or describe the look in words, and get four photorealistic redesigns in about 30 seconds. The same subscription includes about 20 other tools: virtual staging of empty rooms, object removal, sketch to render, floor plans and short renovation videos.", "why": "It sells one simple offer, unlimited image designs for US$24 a month, and has kept that price since at least October 2023. In March 2026 the company rebuilt the app and raised the number of tools from 6 to 19, and it publishes a separate page for each room type, style and tool. Payment records read by TrustMRR show revenue rising from US$423 in June 2026 to US$2,069 in September 2026.", "summary": [ "DecorAI is a web app that redesigns a room from one photo. The user uploads a picture of a living room, kitchen, bathroom, house front or garden, chooses one of 175 styles or types a description, and an image generation model, a program that produces a new picture from an input picture and a text instruction, returns four photorealistic versions in about 30 seconds. Walls, windows and doors stay where they are; furniture, finishes and lighting change. The app also does virtual staging, which means placing computer-made furniture into a photo of an empty room so that a property listing looks lived in.", "TrustMRR, a site that publishes revenue read directly from a company's payment accounts, names Faridul Haque as the founder. The terms of service say that the operator is Creefty LLC, a company registered in Wyoming, United States. Creefty's own about page says that two entrepreneurs founded it in 2022 and names them: Farhan Rizvi as co-founder and CEO and Faridul Haque as co-founder and CFO. Creefty also sells Framer website templates (FramerBite) and design mockups (Mockupia). The DecorAI site was online by 12 January 2023, according to the first copy in the Internet Archive, and charged US$24 a month for unlimited designs by October 2023.", "The headline number is monthly recurring revenue (MRR): the subscription revenue that comes in every month, with half-yearly and yearly plans divided into monthly amounts. On 25 October 2026 TrustMRR showed US$2,440 of MRR from 100 active subscriptions, read through an API key, a password that lets a program read an account, from the company's Stripe and Paddle accounts. The public record begins in June 2026, so it is short: only September 2026 is a full month above US$2,000. This page grades every number, explains what the record does not show, and lists five failed startups that sold interior design help before image models could draw a room." ], "pricing": { "caption": "DecorAI plans on 25 October 2026, from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "Image designs are unlimited on every paid plan and use no credits; videos use credits, with a set number per plan. The free trial lasts 1 day and asks for a card; the pricing page says that charges after a free trial are not refunded unless no images were generated. All plans include commercial usage rights and a private generation mode. In October 2023 the plans were a 7-day trial for US$7 with 50 renders and a US$24 monthly plan with unlimited renders.", "rows": [ [ "Free trial", "0", "0", "3 designs during a 1-day trial, then the monthly plan" ], [ "Monthly", "not offered", "24", "unlimited image designs, up to 20 AI videos" ], [ "Half-yearly", "20", "not offered", "US$120 every 6 months, unlimited designs, up to 120 AI videos" ], [ "Yearly", "20", "not offered", "US$240 a year, unlimited designs, up to 240 AI videos" ] ] }, "factsCaption": "US$2,440 of monthly recurring revenue from 100 subscriptions in October 2026, read by TrustMRR from the company's Stripe and Paddle accounts", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the company's payment accounts through an API key. A grade B value comes from an independent record, here the Internet Archive. A grade C value is a statement by the company or its founders. An X value was calculated on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a two-founder company in 2022 to its first verified month above US$2,000 in September 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 25 October 2026", "value": "US$2,440", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR metric snapshot; revenue last synced on 25 October 2026 at 17:15 UTC from Stripe and Paddle API keys.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions, 25 October 2026", "value": "100", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR metric snapshot.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average MRR per subscription", "value": "about US$24.40", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2,440 divided by 100 equals 24.40, close to the US$24 monthly price.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 12 October 2026", "value": "US$2,337 from 96 subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "Copy of the same TrustMRR profile synced on 12 October 2026.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, September 2026", "value": "US$2,069", "grade": "A", "note": "The first full month above US$2,000. The money came from many small payments: the 12 October copy lists daily totals for 13 to 30 September that add up to US$1,410.99, and the largest day is US$152. It is not one or two one-off payments.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, 1 to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$2,069", "grade": "A", "note": "A partial month that already equals September, with six days left. The daily totals for 1 to 25 October add up to US$2,068.98.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, June, July and August 2026", "value": "US$423, US$438 and US$1,172", "grade": "A", "note": "Monthly revenue timeline in the TrustMRR profile.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from June to September 2026", "value": "4.9 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2,069 divided by 423 equals 4.89.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, 26 September to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$2,485", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the sum of the 30 daily totals in the profile is US$2,484.98. The profile's own last-30-days row shows US$2,533, the same value as in the 12 October copy, so that row seems to be stored from the earlier sync. The largest single day in this period is US$199.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "All-time verified revenue", "value": "US$6,171", "grade": "A", "note": "Equals the sum of the five months from June to October 2026. The site has sold subscriptions since 2023, so earlier revenue is not in the public record.", "src": [ 1, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "95.0%", "grade": "C", "note": "Shown by TrustMRR, but a profit margin needs the costs, which a payment account does not contain; graded as a founder figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none stated", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR lists 'Funding: Bootstrapped' in the founder-written part of the profile.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 co-founders of the parent company", "grade": "C", "note": "Creefty's about page names Farhan Rizvi (CEO) and Faridul Haque (CFO). No source states how many people work on DecorAI.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Designs generated to date", "value": "more than 40 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Company claim on the home page and in its llms.txt file. Not dated.", "src": [ 3, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Customers served", "value": "over 2,500", "grade": "C", "note": "Creefty's home page: 'Serving over 2500+ customers worldwide.' Not dated.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly price", "value": "US$24, unchanged since at least October 2023", "grade": "B", "note": "Internet Archive copy of the pricing page of 1 October 2023 and the live pricing page of October 2026.", "src": [ 13, 4 ] }, { "fact": "First archived copy of the site", "value": "12 January 2023", "grade": "B", "note": "Internet Archive. TrustMRR gives 20 December 2022 as the founded date (founder-written, grade C).", "src": [ 12, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the founded date to the headline figure", "value": "46 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: December 2022 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2022", "what": "Two entrepreneurs found Creefty, a company for templates and mockups for designers and developers. Its first products are FramerBite and Mockupia.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "20 December 2022", "what": "DecorAI's founded date, as written in its TrustMRR profile.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "12 January 2023", "what": "First Internet Archive copy of decorai.io: 'Get new interior design ideas in seconds', with 5 free ideas and no credit card required.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "October 2023", "what": "The pricing page offers a 7-day trial for US$7 with 50 renders and a monthly plan for US$24 with unlimited renders.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "26 March 2026", "what": "Version 3.0 beta: the company says it rebuilt the platform from scratch and raised the number of tools from 6 to 19, adding image to video, 3D room planning, object removal and sky replacement.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "10 April 2026", "what": "Version 3.1 adds renovation videos and a kitchen design tool.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "The public TrustMRR revenue record begins: US$423 in the month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "24 August 2026", "what": "Version 3.2 adds a floor plan generator. August revenue is US$1,172.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 8, 1 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "Verified revenue of US$2,069, the first full month above US$2,000.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR shows US$2,440 of MRR from 100 active subscriptions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "One offer, one price", "text": "Every paid plan includes every tool and unlimited image designs. The monthly price has been US$24 since at least October 2023; the half-yearly and yearly plans cost the same as US$20 a month. A customer does not need to compare credit packs, which makes the pricing page short." }, { "title": "Many pages that match searches", "text": "The site has a page for each tool (room, kitchen, bathroom, exterior, garden, landscape, virtual staging), an inspiration page for each room type and style, a blog about remodel costs, versions in eight languages and an llms.txt file for AI assistants. The founder lists SEO and blog first among the marketing channels on TrustMRR. No source gives traffic figures, so the share of customers from search is not verified." }, { "title": "More tools for the same price", "text": "Version 3.0 in March 2026 tripled the tool count from 6 to 19, and later versions added videos and floor plans. The verified revenue rose in the months after these releases, from US$438 in July 2026 to US$2,069 in September 2026. The sources do not say whether the releases caused the rise." }, { "title": "Rented models, small costs", "text": "The privacy policy says that outside AI infrastructure providers host the image models. The tech stack listed on TrustMRR is a WordPress and PHP site on Hetzner servers behind Cloudflare. TrustMRR shows a 95.0% profit margin for the last 30 days; that figure needs the founder's cost data and is not verified." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages and from the founder-written tech stack in the TrustMRR profile. They are grade C, except the payment providers, which TrustMRR connects to directly.", "items": [ "Marketing site: WordPress with React, Sass and JavaScript, served by PHP, MySQL and Nginx on Hetzner servers, with Cloudflare in front (TrustMRR tech stack, founder-written).", "The app itself runs at app.decorai.io. The image generation models are hosted by AI infrastructure providers that the privacy policy does not name.", "Payments: older subscriptions were billed by Paddle as the merchant of record, the company that sells to the customer in its own name and handles sales tax and refunds. New subscriptions are billed by Stripe. TrustMRR reads both accounts through API keys.", "Product: about 20 tools, 175 styles and 129 space types; most tools offer either a preset (space plus style) or a free text description, and image upscaling up to 4 times.", "Site: separate landing pages per tool and per style, eight languages, a public changelog and roadmap, and an llms.txt summary for AI assistants.", "Marketing channels listed by the founder on TrustMRR: SEO, blog, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, X and YouTube. No source gives the results of each channel." ], "src": [ 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold interior design help before image models could draw a redesigned room in seconds. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Modsy", "years": "2015 to 2022", "funding": "US$72.7M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "3D renderings of a customer's own room with furniture from large retailers, so homeowners could see a design before buying.", "died": "Behind the software, human designers spent 2 to 4 hours on each room while customers paid US$69 to US$199 per room. High customer acquisition cost and few repeat buyers meant it never became profitable.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2521-modsy" }, { "name": "Laurel & Wolf", "years": "2014 to 2019", "funding": "US$25M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Interior design for flat fees, through a marketplace of professional designers.", "died": "The flat fees did not cover the cost of finding customers, and adding more designers lowered the quality of the work.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2012-laurel--wolf" }, { "name": "Tastemaker", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$1.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Affordable online interior design for ordinary households.", "died": "It depended on a distributed team of designers whose service quality varied, and better funded competitors such as Houzz and Modsy offered similar services.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1572-tastemaker" }, { "name": "Kujiale", "years": "2011 to 2025", "funding": "US$550M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Drag-and-drop 3D design of a home, with the furniture in the design available to buy.", "died": "Most Chinese home buyers wanted experts to design their homes rather than doing it themselves, so many users made a few designs and left.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2371-kujiale" }, { "name": "Iwjw (Love Home)", "years": "2014 to 2019", "funding": "US$200M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Transparent prices and quality control for home renovation and interior design in China.", "died": "Finding each homeowner cost US$300 to US$500, fewer than 5% of customers came back, and contractors could leave the platform after one job.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2346-iwjw-love-home" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Before image models, showing a homeowner a redesigned room needed a person. Modsy's 3D renders needed 2 to 4 hours of designer time per room, and Laurel & Wolf and Tastemaker sold the work of human designers. Each design had a labor cost, so these companies needed large fees, large funding rounds or both, and the Loot Drop records say that the fees did not cover the costs.", "An image generation model now makes the render. DecorAI's home page says that a redesign takes about 30 seconds and gives four versions per click, and the company sells an unlimited number of them for US$24 a month. A two-founder company can run that service because the cost of one design is a short computation on rented hardware, not hours of a designer's time." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method yes; this market is crowded.", "text": "This site already has two stories in the same market, Interior AI and Virtual Staging AI. DecorAI's own blog compares it with RemodelAI and RoomGPT. A new app has to win on the quality of the results, on tools for one kind of professional, or on search pages for questions that the larger apps do not answer.", "steps": [ "Pick one task that a model now does in seconds and that people used to pay a professional for, such as showing a room in another style.", "Sell it at one flat monthly price with every tool included, and keep the price stable.", "Build a page for each concrete search: each room, style, material and language.", "Connect the payment accounts to a public revenue profile, so buyers and readers can check the numbers." ], "open": "Tools for one profession are still less crowded than general room redesign: kitchen and cabinet makers, tile and flooring shops, pool builders and garden centers, each with their own products shown in the customer's photo." }, "watch": [ { "title": "A short verified record", "text": "The public TrustMRR record starts in June 2026. Only September 2026 is a full month above US$2,000, and the MRR of US$2,440 is a little above that level. One or two weak months would put the business back under it." }, { "title": "Earlier years are not shown", "text": "DecorAI has sold subscriptions since 2023, and older subscriptions are still billed by Paddle. TrustMRR lists both Paddle and Stripe as connected, but its all-time total of US$6,171 equals the five months from June to October 2026. So this page cannot say how large the business was before June 2026, or how much of the rise since then comes from new customers rather than from the way the accounts are recorded." }, { "title": "Competition", "text": "Interior AI, Virtual Staging AI, RoomGPT, RemodelAI and many other apps sell the same photo-to-redesign service, and general image models from large AI companies can also restyle a room photo. DecorAI's answer so far is a wider tool set for one flat price." }, { "title": "Trial terms", "text": "The free trial lasts one day and asks for a card. The pricing page says that charges after a free trial are not refunded unless no images were generated." }, { "title": "Who does the work", "text": "No source states how many people work on DecorAI. Creefty, its owner, has two named co-founders and runs two other businesses, FramerBite and Mockupia." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://decorai.io/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/decorai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of DecorAI, read 25 October 2026 (revenue last synced 25 October 2026)", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/decorai.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile. The revenue, MRR and subscription figures are read by TrustMRR from the company's Stripe and Paddle accounts through API keys. The founder name, founded date, funding, tech stack and marketing channels are founder-written and graded C." }, { "title": "TrustMRR profile of DecorAI, copy synced 12 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/decorai.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in a local copy saved on 12 October 2026. Source for the MRR and subscription count of that date and for the daily totals of 13 to 30 September 2026." }, { "title": "DecorAI home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://decorai.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product description, the 30-second results and the 40 million designs claim." }, { "title": "DecorAI pricing page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://decorai.io/pricing/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the plans, the trial terms and the payment providers." }, { "title": "DecorAI terms of service", "url": "https://decorai.io/terms-conditions/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names Creefty LLC, registered in Wyoming, as the company behind DecorAI." }, { "title": "DecorAI refund policy", "url": "https://decorai.io/refund-policy/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the move from Paddle to Stripe for new subscriptions." }, { "title": "DecorAI privacy policy", "url": "https://decorai.io/privacy-policy/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the payment processors and for the outside AI infrastructure providers that host the image models." }, { "title": "DecorAI changelog", "url": "https://decorai.io/changelog/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the entries from March to August 2026. Source for the version 3.0, 3.1 and 3.2 releases." }, { "title": "DecorAI llms.txt", "url": "https://decorai.io/llms.txt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Company summary for AI assistants; source for the tool, style and space counts and the list of blog topics." }, { "title": "Creefty about page", "url": "https://creefty.com/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founding year 2022 and the two named co-founders." }, { "title": "Creefty home page", "url": "https://creefty.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Lists DecorAI, FramerBite and Mockupia as Creefty products and claims over 2,500 DecorAI customers." }, { "title": "Internet Archive copy of decorai.io, 12 January 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230112170000/https://decorai.io/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The earliest successful capture in the archive's index; an independent record that the site was online on that date." }, { "title": "Internet Archive copy of the DecorAI pricing page, 1 October 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20231001175021/https://decorai.io/pricing", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 2023 plans; a copy of 6 August 2024 shows the same prices." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/postnitro/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/postnitro.md", "slug": "postnitro", "name": "PostNitro", "country": "United States", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI carousel maker and social media scheduler", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "November 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$200K verified revenue all time, September 2026", "sticker": "$200K verified revenue", "outcomeUsd": 200520, "months": 34, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders until May 2025, then the founder, his wife on marketing and 1 hired engineer", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Social media content" ], "product": "A web editor that writes and designs carousel posts, single-image posts and short slide videos from a topic, a web address, a text or a post on X. It applies the customer's fonts, colours and logo, and on the US$30 plan it publishes the posts to LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, Facebook Pages and Pinterest at a set time. The same engine is sold as an embeddable editor, a REST API, an MCP server and a command-line tool.", "why": "Two co-founders with full-time jobs elsewhere built a narrow tool for one post format that marketers found slow to design, and launched it on Product Hunt. A partner deal turned the editor into an SDK that other social media tools embed, which gave a second sales channel. Revenue peaked at US$14,386 in November 2025 and then fell to under US$4,000 a month by mid-2026, with the product still being rebuilt.", "summary": [ "PostNitro makes carousel posts, social media posts made of several slides that the reader swipes through. On LinkedIn a carousel is a PDF document that LinkedIn shows page by page. The user gives a topic, an article address, a text or a post on X; a language model from OpenAI or Anthropic writes the slides, and PostNitro's editor places them in templates with the user's brand kit, a saved set of fonts, colours, logo and photos. It now also schedules and publishes the posts through the official programming interfaces of six networks.", "Muneeb Awan and Seerat Awan, who called themselves digital marketers and first-time founders, started it in 2023 next to full-time jobs, at about 5 hours a week. A first version in March 2023 was an AI tool for writing posts on Twitter; they changed to carousels because of high third-party fees and instability on that platform, and launched on Product Hunt in November 2023. Paid plans started on 1 May 2024. The payments ran first through Lemon Squeezy and by December 2024 through Paddle, both merchants of record, companies that sell the product in their own name and handle sales tax and refunds. Seerat Awan left on 31 May 2025, when Muneeb Awan wrote that monthly recurring revenue was over US$4,000; he bought his co-founder's share, gave marketing to his wife and hired one engineer.", "The headline comes from TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a company's payment provider through an API key. It shows US$200,520 of verified revenue in total and US$83,816 in the 12 months to 18 September 2026, when the sync stopped because the Lemon Squeezy key expired. The same data show the fall: from US$14,386 in November 2025 to US$3,940 in August 2026. The founder has listed the business for sale on TrustMRR since March 2026, and the product is still being developed: a new editor came out in September 2026." ], "factsCaption": "US$200,520 of revenue read from the payment providers by TrustMRR, with a peak month of US$14,386 and a fall to under US$4,000 a month before the sync stopped", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the company's payment providers (Lemon Squeezy and Paddle), or stated by Paddle. A grade B value comes from a supplier's account that quotes the founder. A grade C value is a founder or company statement. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From an AI writing tool for Twitter to a carousel design engine with a scheduler, 34 months from the Product Hunt launch to the last verified figure. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "PostNitro plans in October 2026, from the company's pricing page and fact sheet (grade C)", "note": "The pricing page shows monthly prices and says yearly billing gives two months free; the yearly column is computed from that (10 months of price paid for 12). Scheduling and publishing start on Creator+. API, MCP and command-line access is a US$10 a month add-on with 250 credits on a paid plan, or included in Creator+ and Team+; an AI-written slide costs 2 credits. The older Creator (US$25) and Team (US$50) plans are no longer sold. Paid plans start with a 3-day trial, and fees are refundable within seven days.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "5 slides per carousel, 5 downloads, 1 brand kit, watermark" ], [ "Starter", "12.50", "15", "8 AI slides per carousel, 30 downloads a month, no scheduling" ], [ "Creator+", "25", "30", "15 AI slides, unlimited downloads, 10 social accounts, 200 API credits a month" ], [ "Team+", "50", "60", "5 workspaces and 5 members, 20 AI slides, 30 social accounts, 500 API credits a month" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time, to 18 September 2026", "value": "US$200,520", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from the Lemon Squeezy and Paddle API keys. Last sync 18 September 2026 at 22:10 UTC. This is the headline figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, 12 months to 18 September 2026", "value": "US$83,816", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average revenue per month in those 12 months", "value": "about US$6,985", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 83,816 divided by 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before October 2025", "value": "about US$116,700", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 200,520 minus the 12 monthly values that TrustMRR shows from October 2025 to September 2026 (sum 83,815). Paid plans started on 1 May 2024.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Best month in the public timeline", "value": "US$14,386, November 2025", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. The sources do not say why this month was high.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, February 2026", "value": "US$12,601", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. March 2026: US$9,982. April 2026: US$7,493.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, June to August 2026", "value": "US$3,770, US$3,208 and US$3,940", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. Average about US$3,639 a month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Fall from the best month to August 2026", "value": "73%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 3,940 divided by 14,386 is 0.27.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days before the sync stopped", "value": "US$3,818", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. September 2026 shows US$1,769 for the part of the month up to 18 September.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Payment providers connected to TrustMRR", "value": "Lemon Squeezy and Paddle", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR names Lemon Squeezy as the primary credential; its key expired on 19 September 2026 at 04:10 UTC, after the last sync. No later revenue is shown.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Current MRR snapshot on TrustMRR", "value": "US$490, 14 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is the subscription revenue of one month. This snapshot is far below the US$3,818 of the last 30 days, and the profile does not say which provider it covers. This page does not use it as a revenue figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, June 2025", "value": "over US$4,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Muneeb Awan's blog post of 10 June 2025, at his co-founder's departure.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Conversion rate after the move from Lemon Squeezy to Paddle", "value": "3 times higher", "grade": "B", "note": "Paddle customer story, quoting Muneeb Awan after a couple of weeks on Paddle. Customers paid in 10 currencies instead of US dollars only.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Customers outside the United States", "value": "70%", "grade": "B", "note": "Founder quote in the Paddle story, 2024.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Trial to paid conversion, 8 to 20 May 2025", "value": "50% of 30+ trials", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder blog post. The 3-day trial was run by Paddle.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Users after the Product Hunt launch, end of November 2023", "value": "1,389, up from 670", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder blog post. A post two weeks earlier said over 2,000 users.", "src": [ 4, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Users, June 2025", "value": "40,000+", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder blog post.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Creators, October 2026", "value": "85,000+", "grade": "C", "note": "Company fact sheet, which calls it a self-reported figure. TrustMRR's founder-written profile says 82,000.", "src": [ 10, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Platforms that embed the editor", "value": "200+", "grade": "C", "note": "Company fact sheet. The first partner was Circleboom, from 27 May 2024; ContentStudio is named as another.", "src": [ 10, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price on TrustMRR", "value": "US$1,000,000, listed since 21 March 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "A seller's listing. TrustMRR shows 5 offers received and a revenue multiple of 21.8, which equals 1,000,000 divided by 12 times the last-30-day revenue of US$3,818.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 co-founders until 31 May 2025; then the founder, his wife and 1 engineer", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder blog posts. The engineer joined on 23 June 2025. No later headcount is stated.", "src": [ 3, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "The founders call it a bootstrapped project in 2023 and 2025. PostNitro was in Paddle's 2024 AI Launchpad cohort, a mentoring programme; no source mentions investment.", "src": [ 3, 6, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the Product Hunt launch to the last verified figure", "value": "34 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: November 2023 to September 2026.", "src": [ 4, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "March 2023", "what": "PostNitro's first site is an AI Powered Twitter Growth Tool with a waitlist, built in public. The plan lists a first release in April 2023.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "2023", "what": "High third-party fees and instability on Twitter make the co-founders change the product to an AI carousel generator. They work on it about 5 hours a week next to full-time jobs and ship a beta in 3.5 months.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "when": "November 2023", "what": "Product Hunt launch: 9th product of the day, 390 upvotes. Users grow from 670 before the launch to 1,389 in about 1.5 weeks.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "January 2024", "what": "Muneeb Awan replies to a post by Circleboom, a social media management tool, about LinkedIn carousels. Circleboom's co-founder proposes a partnership, and the two founders build PostNitro Embed, an editor that other products can put inside their own pages.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "1 May 2024", "what": "PostNitro launches its paid plans.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "27 May 2024", "what": "PostNitro Embed goes live inside Circleboom. It is already integrated with five applications, including ContentStudio.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "By December 2024", "what": "After a Lemon Squeezy checkout fault during a campaign and US-dollar-only prices, PostNitro moves its payments to Paddle and reports three times more conversions. Paddle's story is first archived on 3 December 2024.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "8 May 2025", "what": "A 3-day trial run by Paddle starts; 30+ trials in 12 days, half of them convert, and some users repeat trials or download in bulk.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "31 May 2025", "what": "Seerat Awan leaves for a job. Muneeb Awan buys his share and writes that the two built PostNitro to 40,000+ users and over US$4,000 in monthly recurring revenue.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "23 June 2025", "what": "The first employee, a software engineer, joins. The founder's wife already handles marketing.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "Best month in the TrustMRR timeline: US$14,386.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "February 2026", "what": "OpenAI approves PostNitro for ChatGPT's plugin directory. Revenue that month is US$12,601.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 11, 1 ] }, { "when": "21 March 2026", "what": "The business is listed for sale on TrustMRR with an asking price of US$1,000,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "June to August 2026", "what": "Revenue is between US$3,208 and US$3,940 a month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "Version 3 adds a freeform drag-and-drop editor.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "18 September 2026", "what": "Last TrustMRR sync. The Lemon Squeezy key expires the next morning, and the profile shows no revenue after this date.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "7 October 2026", "what": "The company fact sheet lists 85,000+ creators, publishing to six networks and listings in Claude's and ChatGPT's directories.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "One format, done completely", "text": "PostNitro does not try to be a general design tool. It makes slide posts for social networks: templates sized for each network, a brand kit that recolours every template, and export as PNG, PDF or MP4. The founders chose carousels because marketers found them slow to design and the networks gave them reach." }, { "title": "The editor as a product for other companies", "text": "A reply on X to Circleboom led to an embeddable editor in 2024. Social media management tools put PostNitro's editor inside their own product, and the company says 200+ platforms do so in 2026. The same engine is now sold as a REST API, an MCP server, a command-line tool and as connectors in Claude and ChatGPT, all paid with one pool of credits." }, { "title": "Payments that fit a foreign customer base", "text": "The founder told Paddle that 70% of customers were outside the United States. Lemon Squeezy then charged in US dollars only. After the move to Paddle, prices showed in 10 currencies, and the founder reported three times more conversions in the first weeks." }, { "title": "Scheduling through official interfaces", "text": "Publishing is done with the user's own connected accounts through each network's official programming interface, according to the company's LinkedIn page. The pages describe publishing the user's own posts, and a first comment under them, at a set time; they offer no liking, following or commenting on other people's posts. Scheduling is included only from the US$30 plan." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founders' blog posts, the Paddle customer story, the company's own pages and the founder-written part of the TrustMRR profile. They are grade B and C.", "items": [ "Next.js, TypeScript and Node.js with Express for the web app, Prisma and Supabase for data, Docker and Vercel for hosting, according to the founder-written tech stack on TrustMRR.", "Text from OpenAI and Anthropic models chosen per generation, and images from several image models, according to the pricing page. Cheaper plans get the smaller models.", "The co-founders replaced third-party services for PDF, PNG and MP4 output with their own renderer, the founder wrote in June 2025.", "Payments through Lemon Squeezy from May 2024, then Paddle, with Paddle's ProfitWell Metrics for MRR and churn and Paddle Retain for failed card payments. Usermaven for product analytics.", "The first users came from cold email, tutorial videos and blog posts, conversations on Twitter and early access for influencers; later from Product Hunt, partner platforms, free tools and a blog of 498 posts.", "A 20% lifetime commission for affiliates, paid monthly after a 60-day hold.", "Team: two co-founders part-time in 2023; from mid-2025 the founder, his wife on marketing and one hired engineer." ], "src": [ 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 14, 17 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold tools for publishing or designing social media content and depended on the networks they posted to. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "PostRocket", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$610K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Better reach for Facebook pages by choosing when and what to post from engagement data.", "died": "Facebook changed its API, and PostRocket had no plan for a product that did not depend on it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/457-postrocket" }, { "name": "Pixelpipe", "years": "2008 to 2013", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Post photos, video and audio to many social networks and blogs in one step.", "died": "The networks closed their APIs and built their own cross-posting, so the service was no longer needed.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/435-pixelpipe" }, { "name": "Argyle Social", "years": "2009 to 2013", "funding": "US$2.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A social media marketing tool for engagement and leads, connected to Pardot and Marketo.", "died": "Competitors with much larger marketing budgets took the market while it made small updates.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1832-argyle-social" }, { "name": "Mixed Media Labs", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Combine text, images and video into one story and share it across platforms.", "died": "It stayed on the web while Instagram took the mobile users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1200-mixed-media-labs" } ], "whatChanged": [ "PostRocket and Pixelpipe lived on the networks' interfaces and died when those interfaces changed. PostNitro met the same problem early: its first product was a writing tool for Twitter, and Paddle's story says that high third-party fees and instability on that platform made the founders change product. The carousel product publishes to six networks, so no single network decides its fate, but every one of them can still change its rules.", "What is new is the writing. Before language models, a social media tool could schedule a post or offer templates, but a person still had to write each slide. With a model writing the text and an editor placing it, two part-time co-founders could build a product that took a topic to a finished, branded post. The same change makes the product easy to copy: in June 2025 the founder wrote that a new carousel editor appeared almost every other day." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The carousel tool, hardly. The embed channel, yes.", "text": "AI carousel makers are now common, and the founder himself describes copies of his editor. Canva, Taplio and many small tools compete for the same users, and PostNitro's own verified revenue fell by about three quarters between November 2025 and August 2026. The part that is less common is selling the editor to other software companies, so that their customers use it inside their products.", "steps": [ "Pick one content format that people find slow to make by hand, and build the full path from idea to a finished file for it.", "Offer the same engine to other tools as an embeddable editor or API, and find the first partner by talking to their founders in public.", "If most customers are abroad, use a payment provider that charges in local currencies, and measure the conversion rate before and after.", "Publish only through the networks' official interfaces, and keep several networks so that one rule change does not end the business." ], "open": "The embed model is still open for other formats: an editor for one kind of content (menus, real-estate flyers, course slides) that scheduling and marketing tools can put inside their product and pay for per use." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue is falling", "text": "TrustMRR shows US$14,386 in November 2025 and US$3,940 in August 2026. The sources do not say why. The business has been for sale since 21 March 2026, and a sale would change who runs it." }, { "title": "The verified data stopped on 18 September 2026", "text": "TrustMRR's last sync was on 18 September 2026, and the Lemon Squeezy key expired the next morning. Payments have run through Paddle since at least December 2024, and Paddle is also connected, but the profile shows no revenue after the sync stopped. The current MRR snapshot of US$490 from 14 subscriptions does not match the US$3,818 of the last 30 days and is not used on this page. A new sync would show whether revenue continued." }, { "title": "Platform rules", "text": "Publishing depends on the interfaces of LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, Facebook and Pinterest. The company says it uses LinkedIn's official API. A Chrome extension adds a formatting toolbar inside LinkedIn's post editor; the user still clicks to publish." }, { "title": "Copies and larger competitors", "text": "The founder wrote in June 2025 that new carousel editors appear almost every other day. Canva and Taplio are named on PostNitro's own comparison pages." }, { "title": "Numbers that do not agree", "text": "A founder post of 15 November 2023 says over 2,000 users; a post of 29 November 2023 says 1,389 users. The company's fact sheet says 85,000+ creators in October 2026, and the founder-written TrustMRR profile says 82,000. User counts are company figures; only the revenue is verified." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://postnitro.ai/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/postnitro" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of PostNitro, revenue read from Lemon Squeezy and Paddle (data last synced 18 September 2026)", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/postnitro.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile on 25 October 2026. The Verification Sources and Revenue sections are grade A; the description, tech stack, user count and sale listing are founder-written, grade C." }, { "title": "Paddle customer story: PostNitro 3x conversions overnight after migrating from Lemon Squeezy to Paddle", "url": "https://www.paddle.com/customers/postnitro-conversion-uplift-with-paddle", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full, with a Wayback copy of 3 December 2024 for the date. Names both co-founders and confirms Paddle as the payment provider; the conversion figures are founder quotes." }, { "title": "Muneeb Awan, PostNitro blog, 15 November 2023: Building an AI Carousel Maker as First-Time Founders", "url": "https://postnitro.ai/blog/post/building-an-ai-carousel-maker-as-first-time-founders", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the start, the hours per week, the first marketing and the bootstrapped status." }, { "title": "Muneeb Awan, PostNitro blog, 29 November 2023: After effects of our Product Hunt Launch", "url": "https://postnitro.ai/blog/post/after-effects-of-our-product-hunt-launch", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Product Hunt result and the user counts." }, { "title": "Muneeb Awan, PostNitro blog, 28 May 2024: PostNitro Embed, From Tweet to Carousel SDK", "url": "https://postnitro.ai/blog/post/the-story-of-postnitro-embed-from-a-tweet-to-a-carousel-generation-sdk", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Circleboom partnership, the embed launch and the start of paid plans on 1 May 2024." }, { "title": "Muneeb Awan, PostNitro blog, 21 May 2025: SaaS Free Trial Experiment, Unexpected Lessons", "url": "https://postnitro.ai/blog/post/saas-free-trial-experiment-lessons", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Paddle trial, the conversion rate and the analytics tools." }, { "title": "Muneeb Awan, PostNitro blog, 10 June 2025: From Co-founders to Solo, PostNitro's Next Chapter", "url": "https://postnitro.ai/blog/post/from-co-founders-to-solo-postnitro-next-chapter", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the co-founder's departure, the MRR and user figures of June 2025 and the new team." }, { "title": "PostNitro home page", "url": "https://postnitro.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026 for the purpose check and the product description. Footer: 2026 PostNitro Inc." }, { "title": "PostNitro pricing page", "url": "https://postnitro.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Source for the plans, limits and AI models." }, { "title": "PostNitro fact sheet, last verified 7 October 2026", "url": "https://postnitro.ai/facts", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the legal entity, the 2023 founding, the user and partner counts, and the September 2026 editor." }, { "title": "PostNitro llms.txt, last updated 7 October 2026", "url": "https://postnitro.ai/llms.txt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the ChatGPT directory approval in February 2026 and the withdrawn plans." }, { "title": "PostNitro LinkedIn scheduling page", "url": "https://postnitro.ai/scheduling/linkedin", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full for the purpose check. States that publishing uses the official LinkedIn API." }, { "title": "PostNitro Chrome extension page", "url": "https://postnitro.ai/products/extension", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full for the purpose check. The extension formats text and opens the carousel editor inside LinkedIn's post editor." }, { "title": "PostNitro affiliate programme page", "url": "https://postnitro.ai/affiliates", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 20% lifetime commission; no income promises beyond the commission rate." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of postnitro.ai, 25 March 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230325223928/https://postnitro.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Shows the first product, an AI Powered Twitter Growth Tool with a waitlist." }, { "title": "PostNitro terms and privacy pages", "url": "https://postnitro.ai/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The privacy page names PostNitro Inc. as the company that controls personal data." }, { "title": "PostNitro blog index (llms-full.txt), 498 posts with dates and authors", "url": "https://postnitro.ai/blog/llms-full.txt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the index to find the founders' own posts and count the posts. Not used for money figures." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/presentia-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/presentia-ai.md", "slug": "presentia-ai", "name": "Presentia AI", "country": "United Kingdom", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI presentation generator", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "October 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$60.1K verified revenue all time, October 2026", "sticker": "$60K total, now $1.1K MRR", "outcomeUsd": 60120, "months": 24, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders plus an AI engineer and an SEO lead on the about page, October 2026; TrustMRR names one founder", "fundingLabel": "None reported; the company's AppSumo profile says bootstrapped", "primaryFactor": "Price", "group": "documents-data", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Presentations" ], "product": "A user types a topic, pastes text or uploads a Word, PDF or text file of up to 4 MB. Presentia AI writes a slide deck from it, gives every slide its own AI-generated image, and lets the user change the slides in a browser editor, also with typed commands such as \"make all titles larger\". The deck downloads as a PowerPoint (.pptx) file.", "why": "It sold a simple promise, a finished PowerPoint file from one sentence, at a low price: in 2024 and the first half of 2025 the archived pricing showed unlimited decks for US$9.99 a month. Stripe payments read by TrustMRR add up to US$60,120 since the start. The verified monthly figures also show a steady fall after November 2025, when the plans had moved from unlimited use to slide credits, and the founder put the business up for sale.", "summary": [ "Presentia AI is a web application that turns a topic or a document into a PowerPoint presentation. A language model writes the slide text and structure, and an image model, an AI model that draws a picture from a text description, makes one picture for each slide. The user can then edit the deck in the browser and download it as a .pptx file. The company's terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and TrustMRR lists the country as the United Kingdom.", "The money figures on this page come from TrustMRR, a site that connects to a startup's payment account and publishes the revenue it reads there. Here the connection is a Stripe API key, a read credential for the Stripe payment account. On 25 October 2026 TrustMRR showed US$60,120 of revenue all time and US$26,792 in the last 12 months. The best month in the public table is November 2025, with US$4,126. Every month after it is lower: US$856 in September 2026, a fall of 79%. Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the subscription revenue that repeats every month, was US$1,136 from 162 active subscriptions.", "The founder named on TrustMRR is Jorge Alexander. The company's about page lists him and Khadin Akbar as co-founders, with a lead AI engineer and an SEO lead. Since 14 December 2025 the business has been listed for sale on TrustMRR at US$30,000. This page grades each number by its evidence and shows four failed startups that tried to automate or improve the making of presentations and visual stories before language models existed." ], "pricing": { "caption": "Presentia AI plans on 25 October 2026, read from the pricing panel of the company's home page (grade C), and the AppSumo lifetime deal that ended on 22 September 2026", "note": "The site has no separate pricing page; the plans are shown on the home page. Starter and Pro have a 7-day free trial. Pro is shown as reduced from US$29 and Max Yearly as reduced from US$600. Only Max Yearly lists commercial use. Extra credits can be bought at any time. One credit is one slide with standard images and two credits are one slide with premium images, according to the founder's note on AppSumo. Calculated: Max Yearly at US$199 a year is US$16.58 a month. Earlier prices from archived copies of the home page: unlimited decks for US$9.99 a month, US$29.99 a year or US$99.99 one time (October 2024 and April 2025); Basic US$4.99, Pro US$9.99 and Business US$49.99 a month with slide limits (September 2025); Pro US$9.99 a month and Max Yearly US$199 (23 October 2025); Pro US$20 a month (11 November 2025).", "rows": [ [ "Starter", "", "9.99", "up to 50 slides a month" ], [ "Pro", "", "20", "up to 110 slides a month" ], [ "Max Yearly", "16.58", "", "up to 1,500 slides a year, priority support, commercial use" ], [ "AppSumo License Tier 1 (ended)", "49 one-time", "", "25 credits a month plus 300 one-time credits" ], [ "AppSumo License Tier 2 (ended)", "99 one-time", "", "50 credits a month plus 800 one-time credits" ], [ "AppSumo License Tier 3 (ended)", "149 one-time", "", "100 credits a month plus 1,500 one-time credits" ] ] }, "factsCaption": "US$60,120 of Stripe-verified revenue in about two years from a PowerPoint generator, with monthly revenue down 79% from November 2025 to September 2026", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read from the Stripe account by TrustMRR. A grade B value comes from an independent record, such as the domain registry, a marketplace's deal data or a connected analytics account. A grade C value is stated by the company or the founder. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a new domain in October 2024 to a business listed for sale, in 24 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue all time, to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$60,120", "grade": "A", "note": "Read from the Stripe account by TrustMRR through an API key, last synced 25 October 2026. It is the sum of all payments, not a yearly rate and not profit.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue in the last 12 months, to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$26,792", "grade": "A", "note": "", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before the last 12 months", "value": "US$33,328", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 60,120 minus 26,792. This money was paid before late October 2025. The public profile does not show those months, so the best month of the business may lie in that period.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Best month in the public table, November 2025", "value": "US$4,126", "grade": "A", "note": "The public profile shows only the 12 months from November 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, May 2026", "value": "US$1,684", "grade": "A", "note": "Down from US$2,589 in April 2026, the largest drop between two months in the table.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, September 2026", "value": "US$856", "grade": "A", "note": "", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Fall from November 2025 to September 2026", "value": "79%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: (856 minus 4,126) divided by 4,126 equals minus 0.79.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, 1 to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$634", "grade": "A", "note": "A partial month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days, to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$729", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR shows minus 17.9% against the 30 days before.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 25 October 2026", "value": "US$1,136", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR shows minus 15.8% in the last 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions, 25 October 2026", "value": "162", "grade": "A", "note": "", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average MRR per active subscription", "value": "about US$7.01", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 1,136 divided by 162. It is below the US$9.99 Starter price, which suggests that some subscribers pay older, lower prices or yearly plans; that reading is not verified.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Visitors in the last 30 days", "value": "3,176", "grade": "B", "note": "From the Google Analytics account connected to TrustMRR. An analytics figure, not a payment figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin in the last 30 days", "value": "80%", "grade": "C", "note": "Shown in the TrustMRR snapshot. It is not part of the Stripe data, so it is treated as a founder figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price on TrustMRR", "value": "US$30,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Set by the founder; first listed 14 December 2025; 7 offers received by 25 October 2026. TrustMRR states a revenue multiple of 3.4x. Calculated check: 30,000 divided by (729 times 12) equals 3.43.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "People listed on the about page, October 2026", "value": "4", "grade": "C", "note": "Two co-founders (Jorge Alexander, product advisor; Khadin Akbar, sales and marketing), a lead AI engineer and an SEO and growth lead. The page does not say who works full time. The AppSumo company profile gives 1 to 10 employees.", "src": [ 3, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "The company profile on AppSumo says bootstrapped. No source mentions an investor.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Domain presentia.ai registered", "value": "3 October 2024", "grade": "B", "note": "Creation date in the registry record. The first archived copy of the site is from 6 October 2024.", "src": [ 12, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Founding date given by the company", "value": "26 November 2021 on TrustMRR; 1 June 2025 on AppSumo", "grade": "C", "note": "The two profiles disagree with each other and with the domain date. This page uses the first archived copy, October 2024, as the launch.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Presentations generated, company claim", "value": "over 100 (October 2024); over 61,400 (April to November 2025)", "grade": "C", "note": "Counters on the home page. The 61.4k figure did not change between April and November 2025.", "src": [ 7, 8, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the all-time figure", "value": "24 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: October 2024 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1, 7 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "3 October 2024", "what": "The domain presentia.ai is registered.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "6 October 2024", "what": "First archived copy of the site: a PowerPoint generator with unlimited decks for US$9.99 a month, US$29.99 a year or US$99.99 one time, and a counter of over 100 presentations generated.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "16 April 2025", "what": "Same unlimited prices. The counter shows over 61,400 presentations generated.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "2 September 2025", "what": "Unlimited use is gone. The plans now cap slides: Basic US$4.99 for 50 slides, Pro US$9.99 for 110 slides and Business US$49.99 for 600 slides a month, with AI-generated images.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "23 to 25 October 2025", "what": "The home page shows Pro at US$9.99 a month and a new Max Yearly plan at US$199 for 1,500 slides. The terms, revised on 25 October 2025, allow usage caps on lifetime plans because AI images \"incur variable costs\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10, 4 ] }, { "when": "11 November 2025", "what": "Pro costs US$20 a month. Refunds are now limited to subscribers who have not yet created a presentation.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "US$4,126 of verified revenue, the best month in the public 12-month table.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "14 December 2025", "what": "The founder lists the business for sale on TrustMRR at US$30,000, with the message \"Looking to sell for a cash injection to be able to prioritise other startups.\"", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "February 2026", "what": "The company's blog describes the current workflow: choose a template, a theme and an image model, including Nano Banana Pro, then refine in an edit mode and export.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "May 2026", "what": "Verified revenue drops to US$1,684 from US$2,589 in April.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "27 July to 22 September 2026", "what": "A lifetime deal named Presentia Slides runs on AppSumo at US$49, US$99 and US$149, and is marked sold out.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "US$60,120 verified revenue all time, MRR of US$1,136 from 162 subscriptions, and US$634 in the first 25 days of October.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "One input, one finished file", "text": "The product does one job: it turns a topic, an outline or an uploaded document into a downloadable PowerPoint file with a picture on every slide. The company's site has 22 landing pages, most of them for one input type, such as PDF to PPT, Word to PPT, YouTube to PPT and lesson plan to PPT, and one page in Hindi written in Latin letters. No source says how many customers came through these pages, so the channel on this page is unknown." }, { "title": "A low price, then credits", "text": "From October 2024 to at least April 2025 the archived home page offered unlimited decks for US$9.99 a month or US$99.99 one time. Each picture costs the company money at the image model provider, and the refund rule on the current home page says that \"costs incurred for generative AI are extremely high\". By September 2025 the plans counted slides, and in November 2025 the most popular plan cost US$20 a month. The public figures start in November 2025, so they cannot show how revenue moved before and after the change." }, { "title": "A falling subscription base", "text": "The verified monthly revenue fell in 10 of the 11 steps from November 2025 to October 2026. The current MRR of US$1,136 is far below the US$4,126 collected in November 2025, so the remaining subscribers pay much less in total than the customers of a year earlier." }, { "title": "A lifetime deal on a marketplace", "text": "From July to September 2026 the company sold lifetime licenses on AppSumo, a marketplace for one-time software deals, and the deal was marked sold out. AppSumo collects that money itself, so it is probably not in the Stripe figures; this page could not verify whether it is." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages, its blog, the AppSumo listing and the public page source. They are grade C unless marked.", "items": [ "The about page says the product is built with Next.js, TypeScript and Google Cloud AI services.", "Images come from a choice of image models. The home page offers a Nano Banana model in its generator, and the blog of February 2026 describes Nano Banana Pro as the model for charts, diagrams and infographics. Nano Banana is the name of Google's Gemini image models.", "Credits are counted per slide: 1 credit for a slide with standard images and 2 credits with premium images, according to the founder's note on AppSumo.", "The home page says that exported PowerPoint slides are high-resolution graphics, so they look the same on every computer, and that an export with editable text is on the roadmap. The AppSumo listing describes the exports as fully editable .pptx files. The two pages disagree.", "Payments run through Stripe (grade A, from the TrustMRR connection). The privacy policy names Stripe, and Google Analytics or Plausible for analytics; the page source loads the Plausible script (grade B).", "An affiliate program pays 20% commission on each paid subscription; the page source loads the script of Tolt, an affiliate tracking service (grade B)." ], "src": [ 3, 2, 13, 6, 1, 5, 17 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to change how people make presentations or visual stories, before language and image models could write and draw the content. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "LiveLoop", "years": "2010 to 2015", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Real-time collaboration on PowerPoint files, so a team edits one shared deck instead of mailing versions.", "died": "Microsoft bought it in 2015 and built the same features into Office. Its dependence on PowerPoint limited it to people who already used Microsoft's tools.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/302-liveloop" }, { "name": "Qwiki", "years": "2010 to 2015", "funding": "US$10M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Automatically generated, narrated multimedia presentations for any search topic, made from images, video and voice.", "died": "The generation was expensive to run, users kept reading text results, and it had no lasting revenue model. Yahoo bought it in 2013 and later shut it down.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/481-qwiki" }, { "name": "Lightwell", "years": "2019 to 2022", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A no-code tool for designers to build interactive stories without developers.", "died": "Adobe and Canva already offered complete design environments, and Lightwell did not grow beyond a small group of early users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1369-lightwell" }, { "name": "WebCake", "years": "2013 to 2016", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "An all-in-one tool for small businesses to design and publish websites without technical skills.", "died": "Wix and Squarespace offered more templates and features, and WebCake raised no money after its seed round.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1541-webcake" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Before 2023, a tool could help with the layout of slides, but a person still had to write the words and find the pictures. Qwiki tried to generate whole presentations automatically from 2010, and the Loot Drop record says the generation was too expensive to run and found no lasting revenue. LiveLoop, Lightwell and WebCake made the editing easier, but competed with Microsoft, Adobe, Canva, Wix and Squarespace, which had more features.", "Rented language and image models removed the writing and the picture search. Presentia AI is a thin product on top of them: an input box, templates, a browser editor and a PowerPoint export, built by a team of four people or fewer. The same low cost of entry lets many others build the same product; the company's own blog compares it with Gamma, Canva, Beautiful.ai, Tome, Prezi and seven other presentation tools. The cost of the models also stayed: each generated picture is paid for, which is why the plans moved from unlimited use to slide credits." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product, not easily. The cost lesson, yes.", "text": "An AI presentation generator is one of the most crowded AI product types, and Presentia AI's verified revenue has fallen by 79% in ten months. What a reader can take from it is the unit cost problem: when each output calls a paid image model, an unlimited plan at US$9.99 a month carries a risk, and changing the plans later is visible to every customer.", "steps": [ "Price by the unit that costs you money (here: slides with images) from the first day, instead of moving from unlimited plans to credits later.", "Make one landing page for each input that people search for (PDF to slides, Word to slides, lesson plan to slides).", "Connect the payment account to a public revenue profile, so a buyer can check the numbers if you sell.", "Read the monthly figures as a trend: the verified table shows the fall month by month, long before the total stops growing." ], "open": "Generators for one kind of deck with its own data are less crowded than general slide makers, for example decks built from a company's sales figures, or lesson decks that follow one country's school curriculum. A real editable-text PowerPoint export is still a gap: Presentia's own home page lists it as a roadmap item." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue is falling", "text": "Verified monthly revenue went from US$4,126 in November 2025 to US$856 in September 2026, and MRR was US$1,136 on 25 October 2026. The all-time total of US$60,120 grows by only about US$700 a month now." }, { "title": "The business is for sale", "text": "The founder listed it on TrustMRR on 14 December 2025 at US$30,000 and wrote that he wants to prioritise other startups. A new owner may change the product, the prices and the team." }, { "title": "Founding dates that do not agree", "text": "TrustMRR gives 26 November 2021, AppSumo gives 1 June 2025, and the domain was registered on 3 October 2024. If the Stripe account is older than this product, the all-time total could include payments for something else. The public profile does not show the months before November 2025, so this page could not check it." }, { "title": "Export format", "text": "The home page says exported slides are images and that editable text is a roadmap item; the AppSumo listing says the exports are fully editable. A buyer of the product should test the export before paying." }, { "title": "Students as a target", "text": "The home page lists \"Educators & Students\" and \"thesis defense decks\", and the research paper page says \"Students : Defend your thesis with confidence.\" The product turns a user's own paper or notes into slides; none of the pages read for this story sells essay writing or homework answers." }, { "title": "Team size", "text": "TrustMRR names one founder, the about page shows four people, and AppSumo gives 1 to 10 employees. No source says how many of them work full time on Presentia AI." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.presentia.ai/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/presentia-ai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of Presentia AI, revenue read from Stripe by API key", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/presentia-ai.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile on 25 October 2026 (revenue last synced 25 October 2026 at 20:36 UTC). It matched a copy downloaded earlier the same day. The revenue, monthly table, MRR and subscription figures come from the Stripe account; the visitor figure comes from the connected Google Analytics account. The founding date, profit margin, description and sale listing are written by the founder and are grade C." }, { "title": "Presentia AI home page with the pricing panel, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://presentia.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product description, the current plans and prices, the refund rule, the export format and the use cases. Compared with a copy downloaded earlier the same day; the text was the same." }, { "title": "Presentia AI, About Us page", "url": "https://www.presentia.ai/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the team list and the technology stack." }, { "title": "Presentia AI, Terms and Conditions, last revised 25 October 2025", "url": "https://www.presentia.ai/tos", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the governing law, the usage limits and the lifetime-plan caps. No company number or street address is given." }, { "title": "Presentia AI, Privacy Policy, last revised 25 October 2025", "url": "https://www.presentia.ai/privacy-policy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the payment and analytics providers it names." }, { "title": "AppSumo deal page: Presentia Slides", "url": "https://appsumo.com/products/presentia-ai/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full, including the deal data in the page source (start 27 July 2026, end 22 September 2026). The deal tiers and dates are AppSumo's data (grade B). The company profile (founding date, employee range, bootstrapped) and the founder's message about credits are written by the company (grade C)." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of presentia.ai, 6 October 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20241006102301/https://www.presentia.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. First archived copy. Source for the first prices and the counter of over 100 presentations." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of presentia.ai, 16 April 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250416174300/https://www.presentia.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the unlimited plans and the counter of over 61,400 presentations." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of presentia.ai, 2 September 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250902185031/https://www.presentia.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the first slide-limited plans." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of presentia.ai, 23 October 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20251023173637/https://www.presentia.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Pro and Max Yearly plans before the price rise." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of presentia.ai, 11 November 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20251111021409/https://www.presentia.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the US$20 Pro plan and the new refund rule." }, { "title": "WHOIS registry record for presentia.ai", "url": "https://lookup.icann.org/en/lookup?name=presentia.ai", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the record with the whois command-line tool on 25 October 2026 (registrar Namecheap, creation date 3 October 2024). The link is the public ICANN lookup for the same domain; this page did not read it there." }, { "title": "Presentia AI blog, 23 February 2026, updated 2 March 2026: How to Create AI Presentations with Nano Banana Pro", "url": "https://www.presentia.ai/blog/how-to-create-ai-presentations-nano-banana-pro", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the current workflow and the image model choice." }, { "title": "Presentia AI, Convert Research Papers to PowerPoint with AI", "url": "https://www.presentia.ai/convert-research-papers-to-powerpoint-with-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full for the check of what the product is sold for. Source for the thesis-defense wording." }, { "title": "Presentia AI, AI presentation maker for teachers", "url": "https://www.presentia.ai/ai-presentation-maker-for-teachers", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full for the check of what the product is sold for. It is written for teachers who prepare lessons." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." }, { "title": "Presentia AI, Affiliate Program page", "url": "https://www.presentia.ai/affiliate", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 20% commission. It makes no income promises beyond the commission rate." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/chefgpt/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/chefgpt.md", "slug": "chefgpt", "name": "ChefGPT", "country": "Not stated (a directory lists Singapore)", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI recipe, meal-plan and calorie-tracking app", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "January 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$54.7K verified revenue all time, October 2026", "sticker": "$54.7K verified, all time", "outcomeUsd": 54732, "months": 45, "teamLabel": "1 founder, no staff (founder's profile text on TrustMRR, October 2026)", "fundingLabel": "Bootstrapped (founder's profile text)", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "health-appearance", "channel": "search", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Health" ], "product": "A website and a phone app that write recipes with AI. The user lists the ingredients at home, names a dish, gives a target of protein, carbohydrate and fat, or asks for a meal plan for a week. Since July 2025 the app also estimates the calories of a meal from a photo and logs them against a daily target, so the App Store now calls it an AI calorie tracker.", "why": "It launched in January 2023 with a name that people were already typing into search engines, and the company wrote that more than 35,000 people used it in its first two weeks. One person then kept adding features, languages and more than 2,000 recipe articles for search, and moved the app from recipe ideas toward calorie tracking, which people pay for every month.", "summary": [ "ChefGPT is a recipe generator: a form collects ingredients, cooking time, skill level and diet, and a language model writes a recipe from those inputs. The same idea runs in four modes, PantryChef (cook from what you have), MasterChef (any dish), MacrosChef (hit a target of macronutrients, the grams of protein, carbohydrate and fat in a meal) and MealPlanChef (a plan for up to 30 days). In July 2025 the app added a photo calorie scanner, and today its App Store name is \"ChefGPT: AI Calories Tracker\". Most features need a paid subscription.", "The founder named on the company's TrustMRR profile is Stefano Cantù, and the App Store lists the seller as MIU Digital Limited. TrustMRR reads revenue directly from RevenueCat, a service that records the in-app subscriptions sold through Apple and Google, through an API key that the owner connects. On 25 October 2026 that connection showed US$54,732 of revenue since the start, US$24,009 in the last 12 months, and monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the subscription revenue that repeats every month) of US$2,002 from 387 active subscriptions. A second marketplace that also reads RevenueCat, whatsthe.app, showed MRR of US$1,924 and 365 subscriptions on 1 October 2026.", "The headline is the all-time total, not a monthly figure, because the recent months are below this site's floor of US$2,000 a month: the best months were November 2025 to January 2026, at about US$3,000 each, and February to September 2026 averaged about US$1,500. The business has been listed for sale on TrustMRR since 15 October 2026 at US$75,000. This page also shows four failed startups that tried to sell recipes and meal plans before a language model could write them for almost nothing." ], "factsCaption": "US$54,732 of verified app revenue in 45 months, read from the payment data that the founder connected to TrustMRR, with a second RevenueCat-verified marketplace that agrees on the size of the business", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value is read from the app's subscription data through RevenueCat, by TrustMRR or whatsthe.app. A grade C value comes from the founder's profile text, the company's own pages or the app store listings. A grade D value is a directory's estimate. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a web recipe generator in January 2023 to a calorie-tracking app listed for sale in October 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "ChefGPT prices in October 2026, from the web app's pricing page, the App Store in-app purchase list, the founder's TrustMRR profile and the API page (grade C)", "note": "The web pricing page shows the monthly Pro price; its yearly price loads by script and could not be read. The founder's TrustMRR profile lists app plans at US$29.99, US$39.99 and US$69.99 a year with a 3-day trial, US$9.99 a month and US$4.99 a week. The App Store lists ten in-app purchases from US$2.99 to US$89.99, including a \"One Time Offer\" at US$59.99. In February 2023 and May 2024 the company's blog gave the Pro price as US$2.99 a month or US$29.99 a year. Free app users can watch an advertisement to get one more generation. The API plans are sold separately to other apps and websites.", "rows": [ [ "Basic (web)", "0", "0", "10 AI generations a month, manual calorie tracking, meal plans up to 3 days, 5 saved recipes" ], [ "Pro (web)", "", "12.99", "Unlimited generations, AI calorie tracking, meal plans up to 30 days, no ads; 3-day trial" ], [ "Pro yearly (app)", "2.50", "", "US$29.99 a year; also sold at US$39.99 (3.33 a month) and US$69.99 (5.83 a month)" ], [ "Pro monthly (app)", "", "9.99", "All Pro features" ], [ "Pro weekly (app)", "", "", "US$4.99 a week" ], [ "API Essential", "", "19.99", "1,000 requests a month, 1 embeddable widget" ], [ "API Grow", "", "49.99", "2,500 requests a month, 5 widgets" ], [ "API Pro", "", "99.99", "10,000 requests a month, 20 widgets" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time, to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$54,732", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from RevenueCat through an API key; revenue last synced 25 October 2026. RevenueCat is the only payment source named, so the total covers what RevenueCat records; the profile does not say whether web or API sales pass through it, or whether the figure is before Apple's and Google's commission.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 12 months", "value": "US$24,009", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, same connection.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average revenue per month over the last 12 months", "value": "about US$2,001", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 24,009 divided by 12 equals 2,000.75.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Best month in the public table", "value": "US$3,343, January 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table. November 2025 was US$3,172 and December 2025 US$2,721.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month, February to September 2026", "value": "US$1,160 to US$1,748, average US$1,506", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table. The average is calculated: the eight months sum to 12,048.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Fall from the best three months to July to September 2026", "value": "about 52%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: November 2025 to January 2026 averaged 3,079 a month; July to September 2026 averaged 1,477.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, 1 to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$1,955", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table, a partial month. The last 30 days were US$2,244, which TrustMRR shows as 49.4% more than the 30 days before.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before November 2025", "value": "about US$31,493", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the all-time total of 54,732 minus the 12 months in the table, which sum to 23,239. The rolling 12-month figure of 24,009 covers slightly different days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 25 October 2026", "value": "US$2,002 from 387 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot. That is about US$5.17 a month per subscription (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 1 October 2026", "value": "US$1,924 from 365 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app, which states that all metrics are verified with RevenueCat. Revenue in the last 28 days: US$1,411.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 person, no staff", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder-written profile text on TrustMRR: team size 1 person; the seller's message says the app runs with no staff.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none (bootstrapped)", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder-written profile text on TrustMRR. No source read for this page mentions an investor.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Running cost of AI", "value": "about US$150 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller's message on TrustMRR. The profile also shows a profit margin of 60% for the last 30 days, a figure that depends on costs the owner enters.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price, listed 15 October 2026", "value": "US$75,000", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR acquisition section. The seller writes that he is selling to focus on his personal life. One offer received at the time of reading.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price as a multiple of the last 12 months of revenue", "value": "about 3.1 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 75,000 divided by 24,009. TrustMRR shows 2.8 times, measured against the last 30 days multiplied by 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Users in the first two weeks", "value": "over 35,000, with 33,000 recipes generated", "grade": "C", "note": "Company blog post of 3 February 2023. These are free users, not customers.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Seller and developer of the app", "value": "MIU Digital Limited", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller and developer field on the App Store; Google Play lists MIU Digital. The website's terms and privacy policy name no company.", "src": [ 5, 6, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Founder", "value": "Stefano Cantù", "grade": "C", "note": "Named as founder on the TrustMRR profile, which links the App Store app and the Google Play app of MIU Digital.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "App store ratings, October 2026", "value": "234 ratings at 4.4 on the US App Store; about 2,130 reviews (2.13K) at 3.9 and 100,000+ downloads on Google Play", "grade": "C", "note": "Read from the store pages on 25 October 2026. whatsthe.app counts about 1,500 App Store ratings across all countries.", "src": [ 5, 6, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Website traffic, May 2026", "value": "about 61,000 visits a month, 70.7% from organic search", "grade": "D", "note": "Estimate by the directory indexator.ai; no second source.", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the all-time figure", "value": "45 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: January 2023 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1, 8 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "January 2023", "what": "Early launch of the ChefGPT website. A directory dates the first release to 20 January 2023 and lists a Product Hunt launch that month with 17 upvotes.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 17 ] }, { "when": "3 February 2023", "what": "Official launch post: over 35,000 users and 33,000 generated recipes in two weeks. New modes MasterChef, MacrosChef, MealPlanChef and wine pairing. Pro costs US$2.99 a month or US$29.99 a year; the free plan gives 5 recipes a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "April 2023", "what": "An affiliate program pays 20% of each Pro subscription for as long as the referred user stays. The interface and the recipes become available in 7 more languages.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "May 2023", "what": "A button sends a recipe's ingredients to an Amazon Fresh cart in the United States. Arabic, Hebrew and Chinese are added.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 18 ] }, { "when": "16 June 2023", "what": "The iPhone app is released worldwide, with Pro sold as an in-app purchase; an Android app follows.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 9 ] }, { "when": "December 2023", "what": "MixologyMaestro for cocktails, an AI-generated image for every recipe, and recipe generation from a photo of the ingredients.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "May 2024", "what": "The free plan grows to 10 generations a month; Pro stays at US$2.99 a month; meal plans of up to 30 days for Pro users.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "14 July 2025", "what": "ChefGPT 2.0 adds tailored calorie plans and an AI calorie scanner that reads a photo of a meal.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "November 2025 to January 2026", "what": "The best months in the public data: US$3,172, US$2,721 and US$3,343.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "February 2026", "what": "Version 3.1 adds fasting-window tracking, weight history charts and a new onboarding tutorial.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "February to September 2026", "what": "Revenue falls to between US$1,160 and US$1,748 a month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "15 October 2026", "what": "The founder lists ChefGPT for sale on TrustMRR at US$75,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "US$54,732 of verified revenue since the start, US$2,002 MRR and 387 active subscriptions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Timing and a name people searched for", "text": "ChefGPT went live in January 2023 with GPT in its name. The company wrote that more than 35,000 people used it in the first two weeks. In May 2026 the directory indexator.ai estimated 2,820 searches a month for \"chefgpt\" and 1,290 for \"chef gpt\", so the name itself still brings visitors." }, { "title": "One model call behind many forms", "text": "PantryChef, MasterChef, MacrosChef and MealPlanChef are the same task, asking a language model for a recipe, with different inputs on the form: ingredients, a dish name, gram targets, or body measurements and a goal. Each new mode, language and kitchen tool is a change to a form and a prompt, which is how one person could publish several product updates in 2023." }, { "title": "From recipe ideas to a daily habit", "text": "A recipe generator is used when someone does not know what to cook. A calorie tracker is opened at every meal. In July 2025 the app added photo calorie scanning and calorie plans, later water, fasting and weight tracking, and renamed itself an AI calorie tracker. The three best months in the public data, November 2025 to January 2026, came after that change; the data does not show the months before, so the effect cannot be measured." }, { "title": "Search pages in many languages", "text": "The website's sitemap lists more than 2,000 recipe articles in English and pages in 19 other languages. The founder's TrustMRR profile names app store optimization, search engine optimization and content marketing as the channels, and indexator.ai estimated that 70.7% of the website's visits in May 2026 came from organic search." }, { "title": "A hard paywall in the app", "text": "The App Store text says that access to the features requires an active paid subscription. The app sells ten different subscription prices, and one App Store review from March 2026 describes repeated discount offers on a spinning wheel during onboarding, from about US$80 a year down to US$20." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's TrustMRR profile, the company's pages and the app store listings. They are grade C. No source names the language model that writes the recipes.", "items": [ "Expo and React Native with TypeScript for the iPhone and Android apps, according to the tech stack on the founder's TrustMRR profile.", "Firebase for the backend and Vercel for hosting, from the same profile. The website's page source loads files from the folder _next, which the Next.js framework uses.", "RevenueCat for app subscriptions, connected to TrustMRR as the verified revenue source. Google Analytics and Google Search Console are also connected.", "AI-generated recipe images and photo recognition of ingredients since December 2023, and a photo calorie scanner since July 2025.", "Buttons that send ingredients to Amazon Fresh or Instacart carts, and a merchandise shop with caps, aprons and hoodies run on Fourthwall.", "A paid API with an embeddable widget that sells the same recipe and meal-plan generation to other apps and websites.", "The seller states AI costs of about US$150 a month and no staff." ], "src": [ 1, 3, 7, 10, 14 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to sell home cooks recipes, meal plans or organized cooking, before a language model could write a recipe for almost nothing. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Refolo", "years": "2017 to 2021", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A personal meal planner with customized recipes for people moving to plant-based food.", "died": "It charged for meal plans while free recipe sites existed, and larger wellness apps added the same features.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1994-refolo" }, { "name": "Springpad", "years": "2008 to 2014", "funding": "US$7.5M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Collect and organize web content, including recipes, in one place.", "died": "Users liked the free product, but the company never found a feature they would pay for before the money ran out.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1893-springpad" }, { "name": "Dinnr", "years": "2012 to 2013", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Same-day delivery of measured ingredients with a recipe.", "died": "Same-day delivery of fresh food needed logistics that the company could not pay for.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1984-dinnr" }, { "name": "Chef’d", "years": "2014 to 2019", "funding": "US$35M", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "Chef-designed meal kits bought one at a time, without a subscription.", "died": "Perishable logistics were expensive, subscription competitors had steadier cash flow, and the money ran out when investors left.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/47-chefd" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The four predecessors had a cost for every recipe or meal they delivered. Refolo and Springpad needed people to write or collect the recipes, and Dinnr and Chef’d had to buy, pack and ship food. When free recipe sites or larger companies offered something similar, the customers did not pay enough to cover those costs.", "ChefGPT writes each recipe on request with a rented language model, for any diet, ingredient list or macronutrient target, in about 20 languages, and ships nothing physical. The seller states the AI cost at about US$150 a month. That is why one person could run it, and also why it is easy to copy: the App Store shows several other AI recipe generators next to it, and the move to calorie tracking puts it against larger calorie apps." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The result is small.", "text": "Wrapping a language model in forms for one everyday task, then adding features every month, is easy to repeat, and ChefGPT shows that it can earn a verified US$54,732 over almost four years. It also shows the limits: revenue has stayed near US$2,000 a month, the best months did not last, and the owner is selling.", "steps": [ "Pick one daily task where people already search for help, and put a language model behind a short form for it.", "Offer several entry points to the same model call (by ingredients, by dish, by nutrition target, by plan) so that each one ranks for its own searches.", "Publish the product in many languages early; the model writes the output in the user's language at no extra cost.", "Move from occasional use to daily use (here, from recipes to calorie tracking) so that a monthly subscription makes sense to the customer.", "Connect the subscription data to a public verification service before trying to sell the business." ], "open": "Narrow cooking tools for a group with fixed rules are still open: meal plans for one medical diet written with a dietitian, school or hospital kitchens, or recipes from the stock of one grocery chain." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue is falling from its best months", "text": "The verified months fell from about US$3,079 on average in November 2025 to January 2026 to about US$1,477 in July to September 2026, a fall of about 52%. October 2026 was better, with US$1,955 by the 25th, and the last 30 days were 49.4% above the 30 days before. MRR stood at US$2,002, right at this site's floor." }, { "title": "Claims on the company's pages that do not match", "text": "The home page says the app is \"Loved by more than 1 Million Home Cooks\" and shows \"Over 100k 5-star ratings\"; the pricing page says over 600,000 users and the API page 800,000. The US App Store shows 234 ratings, Google Play about 2,130 reviews, and TrustMRR counts 387 active subscriptions. The user counts may include free users of the 2023 website, but no source explains them." }, { "title": "Health wording", "text": "The home page says AI recipes and calorie tracking help users \"see results—up to 4x quicker\" and cites no study. The meal-plan page calls the product \"Your AI Powered Nutritionist\", offers the goal \"Lose Weight\" and a \"quick detox weekend\", and a blog article says that diabetic readers can enjoy one dish \"without worrying about your blood sugar levels\". No page read for this story claims to treat or cure a disease, and none carries a medical disclaimer; the terms only say the service is provided \"as is\"." }, { "title": "Paywall tactics", "text": "The App Store text says the features require a paid subscription, the store lists ten different prices, and a March 2026 review titled \"Shady Pricing Tactics\" describes repeated discount offers on a spinning wheel before the reviewer could try the app." }, { "title": "A business for sale", "text": "The founder listed ChefGPT for sale on 15 October 2026 at US$75,000. A new owner may change the product, the prices and the channels, so the method on this page describes the founder's period." }, { "title": "Easy to copy", "text": "The App Store suggests several other AI recipe apps next to ChefGPT, and calorie tracking from photos is offered by many apps. The product depends on a rented language model that no source names." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.chefgpt.xyz/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6449961549" }, { "kind": "android", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.miudigital.chefgpt" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/chefgpt" }, { "kind": "whatsthe", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/chefgpt" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR, ChefGPT markdown profile, revenue synced 25 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/chefgpt.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full on 25 October 2026. The revenue table, monthly timeline, MRR and subscriptions come from RevenueCat through an API key (grade A). The founder name, team size, funding, tech stack, channels, prices and seller message are founder-written text (grade C)." }, { "title": "whatsthe.app: ChefGPT: AI Calories Tracker, metrics updated 1 October 2026", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/chefgpt", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. A marketplace for mobile apps that states all metrics are verified with RevenueCat. Source for the MRR of US$1,924, 365 subscriptions, the last 28 days of revenue, the release date of 16 June 2023 and the ratings by country." }, { "title": "ChefGPT home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.chefgpt.xyz/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product description, the \"up to 4x quicker\" wording and the user and rating claims." }, { "title": "ChefGPT web app pricing page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://app.chefgpt.xyz/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Basic and Pro features and the Pro monthly price of US$12.99; the yearly price loads by script and could not be read." }, { "title": "Apple App Store: ChefGPT: AI Calories Tracker (id6449961549), read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/chefgpt/id6449961549", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the seller MIU Digital Limited, the in-app purchase prices, the version history from 2023 to April 2026, the ratings, a review about pricing, and the developer's other apps." }, { "title": "Google Play: ChefGPT: AI Meal Plans Tracker (com.miudigital.chefgpt), read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.miudigital.chefgpt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the developer MIU Digital, 100,000+ downloads, 2.13K reviews and the update of 22 July 2026." }, { "title": "ChefGPT feature page: MealPlanChef, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.chefgpt.xyz/features/mealPlanChef", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the MacrosChef, MasterChef and PantryChef pages. Source for the inputs of each mode, the weight-loss goal, the detox wording and the Amazon Fresh and Instacart buttons." }, { "title": "ChefGPT blog, 3 February 2023: Introducing ChefGPT", "url": "https://www.chefgpt.xyz/blog/news/hello-world", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the early launch, the 35,000 users in two weeks and the first prices." }, { "title": "ChefGPT blog, 2 July 2023: Introducing the ChefGPT app", "url": "https://www.chefgpt.xyz/blog/news/introducing-the-chefgpt-app", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the iPhone app launch and the plan for Android." }, { "title": "ChefGPT blog, 17 December 2023: December Product Update", "url": "https://www.chefgpt.xyz/blog/changelog/december-product-update", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for MixologyMaestro, recipe images and ingredient photos." }, { "title": "ChefGPT blog, 27 May 2024: May 2024 Product Update", "url": "https://www.chefgpt.xyz/blog/changelog/may-2024-product-update", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the free plan, the Pro price in 2024 and the rewarded advertisements." }, { "title": "ChefGPT blog, 3 April 2023: Introducing ChefGPT's Affiliate Program", "url": "https://www.chefgpt.xyz/blog/news/chefGPT-affiliate-program", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 20% recurring commission. It makes no income promises." }, { "title": "ChefGPT terms of service, last updated 27 January 2023", "url": "https://www.chefgpt.xyz/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the privacy policy. Neither names a company or a person. Source for the \"as is\" clause and the US$5 referral payment." }, { "title": "ChefGPT API home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://api.chefgpt.xyz/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the API plans and prices and the 800,000 users claim." }, { "title": "ChefGPT blog recipe articles: German Recipes for Weight Loss (1 June 2025) and Delicious Diabetic Indian Recipes (24 October 2025)", "url": "https://www.chefgpt.xyz/blog/recipes/german-recipes-for-weight-loss", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both in full to check health claims. Diet marketing, no claims to treat a disease. The second article is at /blog/recipes/delicious-diabetic-indian-recipes." }, { "title": "Apple App Store: PuffPal: Quit Vaping Addiction, by MIU Digital Limited, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/puffpal-quit-vaping-addiction/id6751634576", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the SoberPal, SugarPal, DecafPal and SCRT Chat pages, to check the developer's other products. They are habit trackers with a virtual pet and make no treatment claims." }, { "title": "indexator.ai: ChefGPT company page, traffic data for May 2026", "url": "https://dev.indexator.ai/companies/chefgpt", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. A directory with estimates. Source for the traffic estimate, the share of organic search, the keyword volumes, the first release date and the Product Hunt launch. It lists Singapore as headquarters, not confirmed elsewhere." }, { "title": "ChefGPT blog, 10 May 2023: May Product Update", "url": "https://www.chefgpt.xyz/blog/changelog/may-product-update", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Amazon Fresh button and the new languages." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." }, { "title": "ChefGPT sitemap, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.chefgpt.xyz/sitemap-0.xml", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. 2,259 addresses, of which 2,048 are English recipe articles, plus pages in 19 other languages." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/colorize-cc/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/colorize-cc.md", "slug": "colorize-cc", "name": "Colorize.cc", "country": "Thailand (TrustMRR); the operator is registered as a Russian individual entrepreneur", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI colorization and restoration of old black-and-white photos, paid with one-time credit packs", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "2018", "outcomeLabel": "US$50K in verified revenue in 12 months, October 2026", "sticker": "$50K in 12 months", "outcomeUsd": 49951, "months": 105, "teamLabel": "1 founder, Alexander Kozhevin, who runs the service as an individual entrepreneur; no source gives a headcount", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Persistence", "group": "photos", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Photo restoration" ], "product": "A website that adds color to black-and-white photos and repairs old, damaged prints. The user uploads a JPG or PNG file and gets a free preview in simplified quality. Full quality, up to 4K, needs credits. One credit pack is a one-time payment, and the credits are spent per photo: 1 credit for an older model, 6 credits for the V7 model. The same credits pay for scratch removal, resolution upscaling, an editor called V8 Studio, short videos made from a photo, and a generated portrait.", "why": "The service has run since 2018 and keeps adding model versions, from V2 in 2022 to V8, the newest in October 2026, so the same customers come back for better results. It sells to a clear group, people with family albums, genealogy research and memorial photos, and to studios and museums. The price is a one-time pack instead of a subscription, which suits a customer who has one box of old photos.", "summary": [ "Colorize.cc is a web service for photo colorization, which means adding plausible color to a black-and-white photo, and for photo restoration, which means removing scratches, tears, stains and noise. The work is done by neural networks, computer models that learn a task from many examples; here they learned from millions of color photos which colors usually belong to skin, clothing, plants and objects. The service sells credits, prepaid units that are spent per processed photo: US$12 buys 50 credits, US$49 buys 250 and US$199 buys 1,250. The company's pages say that it has worked since 2018 and has processed more than 3 million photos for more than 500,000 users; these are the company's own figures.", "The terms of service, updated on 23 October 2026, say that the service is provided by the individual entrepreneur Alexander Sergeevich Kozhevin, a sole trader under Russian law. TrustMRR, a site that shows startups' revenue, names Alexander Kozhevin as the founder and lists the country as Thailand. TrustMRR reads the sales of Colorize.cc from Stripe, the payment processor, through an API key, a password that lets one program read another program's data. On 25 October 2026 it showed US$49,951 of revenue in the last 12 months, US$116,016 in total and US$4,196 in the last 30 days. Its MRR, monthly recurring revenue from subscriptions, is US$0, because all sales are one-time credit packs.", "The revenue figures are grade A, because TrustMRR reads them from the payment records, not from screenshots. Monthly revenue has stayed between US$2,771 and US$5,564 for a year, and the last six months brought almost exactly as much as the six months before. The page also shows browser photo editors and photo services that failed before neural networks could do the work themselves." ], "pricing": { "caption": "Colorize.cc credit packs, from the prices on the home page, read 25 October 2026 (grade C)", "note": "All packs are one-time payments through Stripe, not subscriptions. The home page, the restoration page and the terms say that credits are valid for 365 days; older pages of the same site (the price, animation and portrait pages) still say \"Credits never expire\". Credit costs per photo: V2, V4 and V5 1 credit; V6.0 and V6.1 2 credits; V6.2 3 credits; V7 6 credits; V8 Studio 2 to 4 credits per edit. The free preview on the landing page is in simplified quality. The Russian-language text on the restoration page also offers a single restored photo for 100 rubles.", "rows": [ [ "Free preview", "0", "0", "simplified quality, on the landing page only" ], [ "Basic", "12 one-time", "", "50 credits; 12 premium photos at 4 credits each" ], [ "Standard", "49 one-time", "", "250 credits; shown as a saving of US$11" ], [ "For studios", "199 one-time", "", "1,250 credits; shown as a saving of US$101" ] ] }, "factsCaption": "US$49,951 of verified revenue in the 12 months to 25 October 2026, all of it from one-time credit packs, from a photo service that its founder says has run since 2018", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the company's Stripe account through an API key. A grade C value was written by the founder or the company, on its own site, on a TrustMRR profile or in a public comment. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a service built on an open-source model in 2018 to its own V8 model and about US$4,000 a month by October 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue in the last 12 months, to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$49,951", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, revenue synced on 25 October 2026 at 20:00 UTC through a Stripe API key. Last 6 months: US$25,032. Last 3 months: US$15,016. Calculated: an average of about US$4,163 a month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue since the Stripe records begin", "value": "US$116,016", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR's all-time figure. It covers the Stripe account only (see the watch box on other payment methods).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month, November 2025 to October 2026", "value": "Nov US$3,963; Dec US$4,156; Jan US$4,681; Feb US$3,972; Mar US$3,971; Apr US$3,957; May US$2,771; Jun US$4,292; Jul US$3,713; Aug US$5,527; Sep US$5,564; Oct to the 25th US$3,033", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. Calculated: the eleven full months average US$4,233, with a low of US$2,771 in May 2026 and a high of US$5,564 in September 2026. The twelve values add up to US$49,600, US$351 less than the 12-month total, because the periods end on different days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days, to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$4,196", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, which gives growth of -22.7% against the 30 days before. Calculated: those earlier 30 days brought about US$5,428, and the last 30 days are 24.6% below September 2026, the best month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Last 6 months compared with the 6 months before", "value": "US$25,032 against US$24,919, 0.5% more", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the 6-month total from the 12-month total (US$49,951 minus US$25,032). This is the reason this page calls the trend flat, although the last 30 days fell after two record months.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before November 2025", "value": "US$66,416", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the all-time total of US$116,016 minus the twelve monthly values (US$49,600).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue and subscriptions, 25 October 2026", "value": "US$0 MRR, 0 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot. All revenue comes from one-time credit packs, sold to many buyers: TrustMRR shows sales on every day of the last 30, from US$12 to US$394 a day.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Operator", "value": "the individual entrepreneur Alexander Sergeevich Kozhevin", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms of service, updated 23 October 2026, section 1, with a Russian tax number. Section 10 says that the law of the Russian Federation applies.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Founder", "value": "Alexander Kozhevin", "grade": "C", "note": "Named as founder on TrustMRR, and quoted by name on the company's AI portrait page: \"AI portraits are our internal development based on unique technology.\"", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Country", "value": "Thailand on TrustMRR; Russian law in the terms", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR lists the country code TH. The terms name a Russian individual entrepreneur. No source explains the difference.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 named founder; no headcount in any source", "grade": "C", "note": "An individual entrepreneur is a one-person legal form. The enterprise page gives one contact, the founder's X handle @alexpolymath. The site's pages write \"we\".", "src": [ 3, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions investors.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Start of the service", "value": "2018", "grade": "C", "note": "The enterprise page says \"Colorize.cc has been created in 2018\", and the home page says \"Working since 2018\". TrustMRR gives a founded date of 18 December 2022, which is entered by the founder.", "src": [ 8, 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "First dated outside mention", "value": "3 January 2019", "grade": "C", "note": "A reader comment signed Alexander Kozhevin under a 2016 Lifehacker article links to colorize.cc and says that it is based on the open-source project DeOldify.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Photos processed (company figure)", "value": "more than 200,000, then more than 2 million, now more than 3 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Three figures on three pages of the same site, written at different times: the enterprise page, the older price and animation pages, and the home page. No page gives a date.", "src": [ 8, 5, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Users and paid customers (company figures)", "value": "more than 500,000 users; more than 10,000 paid customers", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page. TrustMRR shows the same user estimate, entered by the founder.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the start of the service to the October 2026 figure", "value": "94 to 105 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: from December 2018 or January 2018 to October 2026. The company gives the year 2018 but not the month; the page uses 105.", "src": [ 8, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2018", "what": "Colorize.cc is created, according to its enterprise page.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "3 January 2019", "what": "In a comment under a Lifehacker article about an older colorization demo, Alexander Kozhevin links to colorize.cc and writes that it is based on the open-source project DeOldify and handles some photos much better.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "10 April 2019", "what": "Another reader comments under the same article that two photos uploaded to the service a day earlier were still processing.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "2022", "what": "The V2 model, the oldest model still offered, according to the model list on the restoration page.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "18 December 2022", "what": "The founded date on the TrustMRR profile.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2024 to 2026", "what": "New model versions: V4 in 2024; V5, V6.0, V6.1 and the flagship V7 in 2025; V6.2 in 2026. V8 High and the V8 Studio editor follow.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 2 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "US$3,963 of revenue, the first month in TrustMRR's public timeline.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "May 2026", "what": "US$2,771 of revenue, the lowest month of the year.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "August and September 2026", "what": "US$5,527 and US$5,564 of revenue, the two best months of the year.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "23 October 2026", "what": "Updated terms of service name the operator, the individual entrepreneur Alexander Sergeevich Kozhevin.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR: US$49,951 in the last 12 months, US$116,016 in total, US$4,196 in the last 30 days, no subscriptions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "One task with an obvious buyer", "text": "Old family photos are black and white, faded or torn, and many families, genealogy researchers and museums want them in color. The home page names these buyers directly: family albums, genealogy research, memorial photos, studios, museums and agencies. A customer understands the result in one look at a before-and-after picture." }, { "title": "A free preview, then full quality for credits", "text": "The landing page colorizes a photo for free in simplified quality, with no sign-up. Full quality, up to 4K, needs credits, and the Russian-language text of the restoration page says that the full result comes \"without a watermark\". The free preview shows the value before the customer pays." }, { "title": "One-time packs instead of a subscription", "text": "The site writes \"Not a subscription — a fair one-time purchase\". A person with one box of photos does not want a monthly plan, so the packs are sized by the number of photos. The cost is that every month needs new buyers or returning ones; TrustMRR shows no recurring revenue at all." }, { "title": "Many model versions, priced by credit", "text": "The service keeps old and new models side by side, from V2 at 1 credit per photo to V7 at 6 credits. Newer models keep faces closer to the original and follow text instructions such as \"muted 1940s palette\". A customer can choose between a cheap result and a better one, and each new model is a reason to come back." }, { "title": "More tools for the same photo", "text": "The same credits pay for scratch and crack removal, upscaling up to 10 times, a generated portrait, short videos made from a still photo, and edits in V8 Studio. Each tool works on a photo that the customer has already uploaded." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages and their page source (grade C), the founder's 2019 comment (grade C) and the TrustMRR profile (grade A for the payment provider).", "items": [ "The first version was based on DeOldify, an open-source colorization model published on GitHub, according to the founder's comment of January 2019.", "The service now lists more than 10 models of its own numbering, from V2 (2022) to V8, the newest in October 2026. The founder says that the AI portraits are an internal development; the enterprise page says that the colorization software needs an Nvidia 1080 Ti graphics card or a faster one.", "Photos are stored in Yandex Cloud Storage, according to the restoration page: paid photos for 1 year, free photos for 90 days.", "Payments in US dollars go through Stripe payment links, and TrustMRR reads them from Stripe. The page source of several pages also loads the checkout widget of YooKassa, a Russian payment service.", "The current pages are built with the Astro and Next.js web frameworks, visible in the page source. Login is by email link or Google sign-in.", "The enterprise page offers companies a dedicated processing worker in the company's cloud, or an installation of the software with its pipelines on the customer's own machines." ], "src": [ 11, 4, 8, 6, 1, 2, 3 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold photo editing or family photo services before neural networks could edit a photo on their own. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Picnik", "years": "2005 to 2012", "funding": "US$3.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Simple photo editing in the browser, with no software to install.", "died": "Google bought it and later closed it, moving its tools into Google+.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/429-picnik" }, { "name": "Snipshot", "years": "2006 to 2009", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Quick photo edits in the browser for casual users.", "died": "Larger rivals offered more tools, and free editors took the casual users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1241-snipshot" }, { "name": "Splashup", "years": "2007 to 2010", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Advanced photo editing in the browser, with several people editing the same image at once.", "died": "It was built on Flash and had no business model when the web moved to HTML5 and mobile apps.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1660-splashup" }, { "name": "Picwing", "years": "2008 to 2011", "funding": "US$1.2M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Print uploaded photos and mail them to family members on a schedule.", "died": "Printing and postage cost too much per customer, and digital sharing and Shutterfly were faster or cheaper.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1647-picwing" }, { "name": "Everalbum", "years": "2013 to 2019", "funding": "US$19.2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Unlimited photo storage with automatic organization.", "died": "It charged a subscription for features that Google Photos gave away for free.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/125-everalbum" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Picnik, Snipshot and Splashup gave people editing tools in the browser, but the person still did the work: every color, every repaired scratch, by hand. Automatic colorization was still a research demonstration in 2016, when Lifehacker wrote that its results depended strongly on the photo. These services competed on convenience, and free editors and large companies took that advantage away. Picwing and Everalbum sold services around family photos, printing and storage, and lost on cost and to free alternatives.", "Neural networks changed what the customer pays for. The model does the colorization and the repair, so the customer pays for a result, not for a tool. In 2019 one person could start from an open-source model, DeOldify, and sell the result as a web service. The weak point is the same as before: the core task became cheap for everyone, and Colorize.cc keeps its customers by adding newer models and more tools for the same photo, not by owning the idea." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The colorizer itself is a crowded market.", "text": "Colorize.cc shows that a one-person web service around one image task can earn about US$4,000 a month for years, with no subscription, according to its Stripe records. The same task is offered by many other sites, and the founder built on an open-source model that anyone can use. What a copy needs is the work the founder kept doing: new model versions, more tools around the same photo, and pages in more than one language.", "steps": [ "Pick one image task that a clear group of people needs, such as family archives, and show the result with before-and-after examples.", "Start from an open-source model, and replace it with your own trained versions over time.", "Give a free preview in lower quality, and sell full quality as one-time credit packs sized to the job.", "Add tools that work on the photo that the customer has already uploaded: repair, upscaling, editing.", "Connect the payment account to a verification site such as TrustMRR, so that the figures can be checked." ], "open": "Services for institutions are still open: archives, libraries and local history societies that need thousands of photos processed with records of what the model changed. The enterprise page of Colorize.cc offers this only as a contact address." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Only the Stripe account is verified", "text": "TrustMRR reads the Stripe account only. The page source of several pages also loads the checkout widget of YooKassa, a Russian payment service, and the Russian-language text offers a photo for 100 rubles. Any sales through YooKassa are not in the verified figures, so the real total may be higher." }, { "title": "No recurring revenue", "text": "MRR is US$0 and there are no subscriptions. Every month depends on new buyers or returning ones. The last 30 days brought US$4,196, 22.7% less than the 30 days before, after the two best months of the year; the 12-month level of about US$4,000 a month has held so far." }, { "title": "Company figures that do not agree", "text": "The site gives three counts of processed photos on different pages: more than 200,000, more than 2 million and more than 3 million. Older pages say that credits never expire; the home page and the terms say 365 days. The user count of 500,000 is the founder's figure." }, { "title": "Photos of real people that move and speak", "text": "The examples page sells short videos in which \"the person in the photo starts speaking\", and the portrait page generates a new portrait from an old photo. The site markets these for family memories, and the terms require the consent of the people shown and forbid deceptive impersonation. The same tools could still be misused on photos of living people." }, { "title": "Easy to copy", "text": "The first version was built on DeOldify, an open-source model. Free demonstrations of automatic colorization existed by 2016, when Lifehacker wrote about one, and every new general image model can colorize and repair photos. Colorize.cc competes on its own model versions, its tools and its prices." }, { "title": "Two jurisdictions", "text": "TrustMRR lists Thailand; the terms name a Russian individual entrepreneur and choose Russian law. Payment, tax or sanction rules in either country could change how the service is paid and run." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://colorize.cc/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/colorize-cc" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of colorize.cc, revenue synced 25 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/colorize-cc.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile. Revenue figures read by TrustMRR from Stripe through an API key (grade A); the description, the founded date, the user estimate and the country are entered by the founder (grade C). Data as of October 2026." }, { "title": "Colorize.cc home page with prices, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://colorize.cc/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product, the credit packs, the credit cost per model, the target buyers and the company's user and photo counts." }, { "title": "Colorize.cc Terms of Service, last updated 23 October 2026", "url": "https://colorize.cc/terms/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the operator, the rules on consent and prohibited use, the 365-day credits and the applicable law." }, { "title": "Colorize.cc restoration page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://colorize.cc/restore/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the questions and answers in the page source. Source for the model list with years, the storage provider and the Russian-language single-photo offer." }, { "title": "Colorize.cc older pricing page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://colorize.cc/price", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. An older design of the site with the same three prices; source for the claim that credits never expire and for the 2 million photos figure." }, { "title": "Colorize.cc AI portrait page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://colorize.cc/aiavatar/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the portrait tool and the founder's quotation." }, { "title": "Colorize.cc examples page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://colorize.cc/examples", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the photo-to-video examples and the 10,000 professional clients claim." }, { "title": "Colorize.cc enterprise page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://colorize.cc/colorize_enterprise/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. An old, short page. Source for the 2018 start, the 200,000 photos figure, the GPU requirement and the enterprise offer." }, { "title": "Colorize.cc photo animation page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://colorize.cc/animate", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the nine predefined animations. Used for the purpose check." }, { "title": "Colorize.cc portrait generation page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://colorize.cc/generation/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the portrait generator from a photo of one person, with 5 to 8 hours of processing. Used for the purpose check." }, { "title": "Lifehacker (lifehacker.ru), 19 July 2016: Colorize Photos turns black-and-white photos into color photos, with reader comments", "url": "https://lifehacker.ru/colorize-photos/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, in Russian. The article is about another, older colorization demo. Source for the founder's comment of 3 January 2019 that names colorize.cc and DeOldify, and a user comment of 10 April 2019." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/archifruits/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/archifruits.md", "slug": "archifruits", "name": "Archifruits", "country": "Turkey and USA (Delaware company)", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI architectural rendering", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "27 November 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$73K verified revenue in 11 months, October 2026", "sticker": "$73K in 11 months", "outcomeUsd": 73052, "months": 11, "teamLabel": "1 founder listed, Fatih Ekşi; the product is run by Blick3d, Inc., the company of his visualization studio, whose team size is not stated", "fundingLabel": "None reported (no source mentions outside investment)", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "real-estate", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Architecture" ], "product": "An architect or designer uploads a photo, a sketch, a floor plan or a 3D view from design software such as SketchUp, Rhino or Revit, and picks one of about 25 modules named after fruits: sketch to render, style transfer, material swap, day or night, upscaling, image to CAD drawing, image to 3D model, or a short video of the building. Each module sends the image to the model that suits that task, and the customer pays with credits from a monthly or yearly plan.", "why": "The founder runs an architectural visualization studio, so he built modules for the jobs that studio clients pay for, not one general image generator. Each module keeps the geometry of the building and chooses a model for its task, and plugins bring the tool inside the design software that architects already use.", "summary": [ "Archifruits is a web app that makes architectural renders with AI. An architectural render is a picture of a building or a room that does not exist yet, made from a 3D model or a sketch so that a client can see the design. Studios usually make renders with 3D software and long computer render times. Archifruits takes an image the architect already has and returns a finished picture in seconds. It is built as model orchestration: the app does not train its own model, but sends each task to the rented model that does that task best, for example Google's Nano Banana for realistic renders, Kling or Seedance for short films, and Tripo or Hunyuan for 3D models.", "TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a startup's payment provider, lists one founder, Fatih Ekşi. The terms of service name the operator as Blick3d, Inc., a Delaware company, and the about page of the Blick3d visualization studio names Fatih Ekşi as its managing director. Revenue is verified. TrustMRR shows US$73,052 in payments from November 2025 to 25 October 2026, read from Stripe. It also shows US$4,754 of monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the subscription revenue of one month with yearly plans spread over twelve months, from 110 active subscriptions.", "This page grades every number by its evidence. The trend is down: monthly revenue peaked at US$9,149 in June 2026, then fell to between US$5,000 and US$5,900 a month from July to September, and the last 30 days brought US$4,465, about half of June. The page also shows four failed startups that tried to sell 3D design pictures or design work for buildings and rooms before image models could make a render in seconds." ], "factsCaption": "US$73,052 of verified payments in 11 months, read from Stripe; monthly revenue fell by about half from the June 2026 peak to the last 30 days", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from Stripe, the payment provider, through an API key. A grade C value comes from the company's own pages or a founder-written listing. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a company founded in February 2025 to a falling revenue line in October 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Archifruits plans on 25 October 2026. The pricing page loads by script; the prices below are from the plan list that the page loads from the company's server (grade C)", "note": "Credits pay for the AI work. The pricing questions say a balance render costs 2 credits, a standard render 5 credits and a high-detail 2K Pro render 15 credits. Extra credits can be bought, never expire, and need an active plan. The page says \"Save 21%+ annually\": the Basic yearly plan is 28% cheaper than 12 monthly payments and the Pro yearly plan 21% (calculated). The company describes the US$19 plan as \"essentially a trial subscription\". The search description of the pricing page also mentions \"a watermarked free trial\", which is not in the plan list. Images are deleted after 30 days.", "rows": [ [ "Hobby (trial)", "", "19", "1,250 credits a month, up to 4 images a batch, some modules limited" ], [ "Basic", "49.92", "69", "5,000 credits a month (60,000 a year on the yearly plan), up to 8 images a batch" ], [ "Pro", "133.25", "169", "12,500 credits a month (150,000 a year on the yearly plan), up to 15 images a batch" ], [ "Basic yearly", "599 a year", "", "billed once a year" ], [ "Pro yearly", "1599 a year", "", "billed once a year" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue, November 2025 to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$73,052", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from Stripe through an API key, last synced 25 October 2026. It includes monthly plans, yearly plans paid in advance and credit purchases.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 25 October 2026", "value": "US$4,754", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot, with 110 active subscriptions. TrustMRR shows a change of minus 1.4% over the last 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average revenue per active subscription", "value": "about US$43 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 4,754 divided by 110 equals 43.2. The plans cost US$19, US$69 and US$169 a month, so most subscribers pay for the cheaper plans or for yearly plans.", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Yearly run rate from MRR", "value": "about US$57,000", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 4,754 multiplied by 12 equals 57,048.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue by month, November 2025 to February 2026", "value": "US$1,139; 4,854; 7,491; 7,285", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. November 2025 covers only the days after the launch.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue by month, March to June 2026", "value": "US$6,433; 6,882; 9,127; 9,149", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. June 2026 is the highest month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue by month, July to September 2026", "value": "US$5,735; 5,908; 5,027", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. The average of the three months, about US$5,557, is 39% below June (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, 1 to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$3,574", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline, a partial month. At the same daily rate, all of October would bring about US$4,430 (calculated: 3,574 divided by 25, multiplied by 31).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 30 days to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$4,465", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR shows minus 30.0% against the 30 days before. It is 51% below June 2026 (calculated: 4,465 divided by 9,149 is 0.488). The largest single day, 1 October, brought US$870, 19% of the 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Last 3 months compared with the 3 months before", "value": "US$15,025 against US$24,125, minus 38%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from TrustMRR's last-3-months (US$15,025) and last-6-months (US$39,150) totals: 39,150 minus 15,025 equals 24,125.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly totals compared with the all-time total", "value": "US$448 apart", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the twelve monthly figures add up to US$72,604, which equals TrustMRR's last-12-months figure (US$72,605), while the all-time figure is US$73,052. TrustMRR does not say which payments make the difference.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "65%", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot. The cost side is not listed among the verified sources.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founded", "value": "27 November 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR, entered by the founder. The operating company, Blick3d, Inc., was incorporated on 18 February 2025 according to the privacy policy. An archived copy of the home page exists from 30 November 2025.", "src": [ 1, 3, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Company behind the product", "value": "Blick3d, Inc., a Delaware C corporation", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms of service and privacy policy. The privacy policy says the service is operated from the United States and Turkey; the contact address is in Istanbul.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Founder", "value": "Fatih Ekşi", "grade": "C", "note": "Named as founder on TrustMRR. The Blick3d studio's about page names Fatih Ekşi as managing director. The Archifruits home page lists social accounts under the handle efatiheksi, the same handle as the TrustMRR founder link.", "src": [ 1, 4, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Team size", "value": "not stated", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR names one founder. The Blick3d studio describes \"A team of architects and artists\" without a number. No source gives an Archifruits headcount.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "AI providers", "value": "Google (Gemini), Replicate, fal.ai, RunPod, Anthropic", "grade": "C", "note": "Listed as AI processing providers in the privacy policy of 22 September 2026.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Module pages on the site", "value": "25 documentation pages, 26 tutorials, 13 languages", "grade": "C", "note": "Counted in the sitemap on 25 October 2026.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the figure above", "value": "11 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: November 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Before 2023", "what": "Fatih Ekşi runs Blick3d, an architectural visualization and animation studio. Its pages claim \"About 12 years of experience\", \"More than 300 professional projects\" and \"over 15 years\" of work; the pages carry a 2023 copyright.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "when": "18 February 2025", "what": "Blick3d, Inc. is incorporated in Delaware, according to the Archifruits privacy policy.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "27 November 2025", "what": "Archifruits is founded, according to TrustMRR. The first verified payments arrive the same month: US$1,139.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "30 November 2025", "what": "The earliest archived copy of the home page describes the first version: \"Upload up to 3 images, pick a style, and get side-by-side before/after visuals in seconds.\"", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "January 2026", "what": "US$7,491 of verified revenue, the first full month above US$7,000.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "May and June 2026", "what": "The two best months: US$9,127 and US$9,149.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "July 2026", "what": "Revenue falls to US$5,735, 37% below June (calculated), and stays between US$5,000 and US$5,900 through September.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2 September 2026", "what": "Version 0.1.2 of the SketchUp plugin is packaged. It opens Archifruits inside SketchUp and sends the current 3D view to a render module.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "22 September 2026", "what": "The privacy policy is updated. It lists Google (Gemini), Replicate, fal.ai, RunPod and Anthropic as AI providers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR shows US$73,052 in verified revenue, US$4,754 MRR from 110 subscriptions, and US$4,465 in the last 30 days, minus 30%.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A tool from inside the trade", "text": "The founder runs a studio that sells renders and animations to architecture firms. Archifruits sells the same jobs as self-service modules: sketch to render, material swap, new camera angles, environments, floor plan coloring, flyers and short films. The home page says: \"Architecture is too specific for one-size-fits-all AI. We pick the strongest model per task so your output stays predictable.\"" }, { "title": "One model per task", "text": "Each module calls the model that suits its job: Nano Banana from Google for realistic renders, Flux and GPT Image for other image tasks, Kling or Seedance 2.0 Fast for films, Tripo or Hunyuan for 3D models. The company rents these models through official paid interfaces (Google's Gemini API, Replicate, fal.ai) and changes them as better ones appear. The architect sees one tool and one credit balance." }, { "title": "Inside the design software", "text": "Plugins for seven design programs (SketchUp, Rhino, Revit, AutoCAD, Archicad, Blender and Cinema 4D), downloaded from the site at no charge and all marked beta, open Archifruits next to the 3D model and send the current view to a module with one click. The SketchUp plugin is a small Ruby file that captures the view and loads the Archifruits website; it calls no other AI service itself." }, { "title": "Credits that follow model costs", "text": "A cheap balance render costs 2 credits and a high-detail render 15 credits, so heavy use of expensive models costs the customer more. Yearly plans are paid in advance, which brings cash early but makes single months uneven." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages, its privacy policy, the text files of its web app and the SketchUp plugin file (grade C; the plugin code is public).", "items": [ "A single-page web app: the site loads its content by script, in 13 languages, from text files on the same server. A backend on Railway handles accounts, credits and Stripe checkout; the privacy policy lists Railway and Vercel as hosts.", "Sign-in only with Google accounts. Payments, plan changes and the customer billing page run on Stripe.", "AI providers named in the privacy policy: Google (Gemini), Replicate, fal.ai, RunPod and Anthropic. The module texts name Nano Banana Pro and Nano Banana 2, Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, GPT Image 2, Flux 3, Kling, Seedance 2.0 Fast, Tripo and Hunyuan.", "A SketchUp plugin (version 0.1.2, packaged 2 September 2026) for SketchUp 2021 to 2025, plus beta plugins for Rhino, Revit, AutoCAD, Archicad, Blender and Cinema 4D, all downloaded from the site instead of a store.", "Content for search and learning: a documentation page for each of 25 modules and 26 video tutorials, including courses on AI visualization for villa projects.", "Google Analytics, Google Ads and Meta Pixel measure visits and ad campaigns, according to the privacy policy. Sentry records errors." ], "src": [ 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to sell pictures of a future room or building, or the design work behind them, before image models could make a render in seconds. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Modsy", "years": "2015 to 2022", "funding": "US$72.7M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Upload photos of a room and receive photorealistic 3D renders with furniture to buy.", "died": "Each room needed 2 to 4 hours of human designer time, customers paid US$69 to US$199 per room, and paid social ads cost more than customers brought back.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2521-modsy" }, { "name": "Kujiale", "years": "2011 to 2025", "funding": "US$550M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Design a home in 3D in the browser and render it as a photorealistic picture in minutes.", "died": "Consumers made a few designs and left because they wanted experts to design for them, and AI image tools made its technology ordinary.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2371-kujiale" }, { "name": "Laurel & Wolf", "years": "2014 to 2019", "funding": "US$25M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Online interior design from professional designers for a flat fee.", "died": "The flat fees did not cover the cost of finding customers, and quality fell as the designer network grew.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2012-laurel--wolf" }, { "name": "Katerra", "years": "2015 to 2022", "funding": "US$2.6B", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "One company for the whole building process, from architecture to factories to construction.", "died": "It built factories and bought companies before it had enough customers, and the losses grew faster than its investors would cover.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/270-katerra" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Before image models, a picture of a design that did not exist needed people. Modsy sold 3D renders of customers' rooms but needed 2 to 4 hours of designer time per room, and closed after spending US$72.7 million. Kujiale raised US$550 million for browser 3D design with fast rendering, and its database entry says AI image tools made that technology ordinary. A visualization studio such as Blick3d sells renders project by project, with artists and render time.", "By 2026, rented image models redraw a sketch or a SketchUp view as a realistic picture in seconds, and video models turn it into a short film. That removed the labor that sank Modsy, and it let one architect who runs a studio package the studio's jobs as self-service modules with no investors reported. What did not change is competition: the same models are open to every developer, and Archifruits' revenue fell after June 2026." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The pattern, yes. The moat, no.", "text": "Any developer can rent the same image and video models, and many AI render tools for architects already exist. What a copier cannot rent is the founder's knowledge of which jobs architecture clients pay for and what a correct render must keep: the geometry, the camera and the proportions. The falling revenue since June 2026 shows how hard it is to hold customers in this market.", "steps": [ "Start from a trade you know, and list the paid jobs in it that a new model can now do in one step.", "Make one focused module per job instead of one general prompt box, and pick the best rented model for each.", "Put the tool inside the software the trade already uses, through plugins.", "Price in credits that follow model costs, with a low-priced trial plan that can be upgraded.", "Watch monthly revenue and recurring revenue separately when yearly plans are paid in advance." ], "open": "The same module approach fits neighbouring trades that sell pictures of things not yet built: landscape design, kitchen and bathroom showrooms, real-estate developers selling homes before construction. Tools that export editable files (CAD drawings, 3D models) rather than only pictures are also less crowded." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue is falling", "text": "Monthly revenue reached US$9,149 in June 2026 and has stayed between US$5,000 and US$5,900 since July. The last 30 days brought US$4,465, minus 30% against the 30 days before. The pace of October points to about US$4,430 for the month. No source gives a reason for the fall." }, { "title": "Yearly plans and the first renewals", "text": "Yearly plans cost US$599 and US$1,599 and are paid in advance, so the early months include whole years of revenue. The first yearly plans, bought from late November 2025, come up for renewal from late November 2026. How many renew will show whether the US$4,754 of MRR holds." }, { "title": "Who does the work", "text": "TrustMRR names one founder, and no other person is tied to Archifruits in the sources. The product is operated by Blick3d, Inc., the company of the founder's visualization studio, which describes \"A team of architects and artists\". How many people work on Archifruits is not stated." }, { "title": "Dependence on rented models", "text": "Every module calls a model made by another company, such as Nano Banana, Kling, Seedance, Flux, GPT Image, Tripo or Hunyuan, through Replicate, fal.ai and Google. The plugins call no AI service themselves and the models are rented through official paid interfaces, but price changes or new limits from these providers change Archifruits' costs. TrustMRR's profit-margin snapshot, which is not among its verified sources, is 65%." }, { "title": "Numbers that do not agree", "text": "The Blick3d pages give \"About 12 years of experience\" on one page and \"over 15 years\" on another. TrustMRR gives the country as the US, while the privacy policy says the service is operated from the United States and Turkey. The twelve monthly revenue figures add up to US$448 less than the all-time total." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.archifruits.ai/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/archifruits-ai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR, Archifruits.ai markdown profile, synced 25 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/archifruits-ai.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile, live, on 25 October 2026. The revenue, MRR and subscription figures are read by TrustMRR from Stripe through an API key (grade A); the founder name, founding date, country, description and profit margin are founder-written (grade C)." }, { "title": "Archifruits terms of service, last updated 27 October 2025", "url": "https://www.archifruits.ai/en/page/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names the operator, Blick3d, Inc., a Delaware C corporation; source for the yearly plans, the credit system, Stripe and the ban on reselling access." }, { "title": "Archifruits privacy policy, last updated 22 September 2026", "url": "https://www.archifruits.ai/en/page/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the incorporation date, the AI providers, the hosting, the analytics and advertising tools, and the countries of operation." }, { "title": "Blick3d studio, about page", "url": "https://blick3d.com/about.html", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names Fatih Ekşi as managing director of the Blick3d visualization studio; source for the studio's claimed experience and projects." }, { "title": "Blick3d studio, home page", "url": "https://blick3d.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's other business: an architectural visualization and animation studio. Checked for the purpose gate." }, { "title": "Archifruits home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.archifruits.ai/en", "grade": "C", "how": "The page loads by script. Read the page source (title, description, links to the efatiheksi social accounts) and the English text file that the page loads, https://www.archifruits.ai/locales/en/landing.json, in full. Source for the product description and the purpose check." }, { "title": "Archifruits pricing page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.archifruits.ai/en/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "The page loads by script. Read the plan list that the page loads from the company's server (archifruits-production-production.up.railway.app/api/subscription/plans/?lang=en) and the English pricing text file, in full." }, { "title": "Archifruits module texts (English)", "url": "https://www.archifruits.ai/locales/en/modules.json", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections that name the models and providers used by each module." }, { "title": "Archifruits plugins page and SketchUp plugin file, version 0.1.2", "url": "https://www.archifruits.ai/downloads/archifruits-sketchup-plugin.rbz", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the plugins page text in the web app's script file and the three Ruby files in the plugin archive as text, without running them. The plugin captures the SketchUp view and opens the Archifruits website; it calls no other AI service." }, { "title": "Archifruits sitemap, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.archifruits.ai/sitemap.xml", "grade": "C", "how": "Counted the English pages: 25 documentation pages for modules and tools, 26 tutorials, and 13 languages." }, { "title": "Archifruits home page as archived on 30 November 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20251130091958/http://archifruits.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page source from the Wayback Machine; the content loads by script. Shows that the site was live three days after the founding date, with the first product description." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/myroomdesigner-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/myroomdesigner-ai.md", "slug": "myroomdesigner-ai", "name": "MyRoomDesigner.AI", "country": "Hungary", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI room redesign from a photo, with an AI mood board generator", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "April 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$39K verified revenue in the last 12 months, October 2026", "sticker": "$39K in 12 months", "outcomeUsd": 39262, "months": 42, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders (Marta Herget, CEO; Gabor Herget, developer); no employees named", "fundingLabel": "None reported (no source mentions outside investment)", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "real-estate", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Design tools" ], "product": "You upload a photo of a room, choose the room type, a style and a color scheme, and the site returns new versions of the same room in a few seconds. You can then ask for changes in a chat (\"paint the walls sage green\"), enlarge the image, remove objects, and look for real products that resemble the furniture in the picture. A companion site, Mood Board AI, generates mood boards from a style and a color choice.", "why": "The founders already had a paying mood board tool for interior design when image models became usable in 2023. They added AI mood board generation in April 2023 and AI room redesign later, and by May 2024 they ran it on an exact-match domain, myroomdesigner.ai. Revenue read from Stripe was US$39,262 in the last 12 months to 25 October 2026, but it is falling: September 2026 was 67% below November 2025.", "summary": [ "MyRoomDesigner.AI is an AI room designer: a web app in which an image-generation model redraws a photo of a real room in a new style while it keeps the walls and doors in place. The same app does virtual staging, which means adding furniture to a photo of an empty or plain room so that a buyer or a client can see how it could look. It comes from MoodBoardly, a mood board tool started in 2021. A mood board is one picture that collects furniture, colors and materials for a room, so that a client can approve a direction before buying anything.", "Marta Herget (founder and CEO) and Gabor Herget (founder and developer) are named on the home page, and the terms of service say that the service is operated by Mr Bojli Kft, a company under Hungarian law. Wayback Machine copies show the order of events: a mood board editor with paid plans in 2022, a first AI mood board page on 26 April 2023, AI interior design pages by September 2023, and the AI room designer on myroomdesigner.ai by 19 May 2024. In 2023 that domain carried a different room-design site whose footer named another company, Resume AI LLC; no source says how the domain changed hands.", "The money figures are grade A. TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a company's payment account, shows US$39,262 in the last 12 months, US$2,180 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the subscription revenue that repeats each month) and 95 active subscriptions on 25 October 2026. TrustMRR also shows US$123,105 all time since 2021, but the page uses only the last 12 months as its headline, because part of the older total came from the mood board editor before it had any AI, and no source says how much." ], "factsCaption": "Stripe-verified revenue of US$39,262 in the last 12 months, all of it earned years after the AI products started, with a fall from US$6,378 in November 2025 to US$2,105 in September 2026", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from the company's Stripe account through TrustMRR. A grade C value is a statement on the company's own pages, a value that the founder typed into the TrustMRR profile, or a dated archive copy of the company's pages. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a mood board editor in 2021 to an AI room designer on its own domain in 2024, and Stripe revenue that peaked in November 2025. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "MyRoomDesigner.AI plans on 25 October 2026, from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "The yearly price is shown per month and billed once a year: US$288, US$948 and US$1,788. That is 17%, 20% and 25% below the monthly prices (calculated); the page header says \"Save up to 35%\" and the footer says \"Save up to 25%\". Paid plans add a chat with an AI interior designer, an AI description of the uploaded photo, upscaling and a shopping list creator. The companion site Mood Board AI sells plans at the same three prices, with AI mood board generations instead of room redesigns. The home page says there are no refunds because each generation uses GPU time at once.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "1 room project and 3 style explorations a month" ], [ "Designer Starter", "24", "29", "50 AI room redesigns a month" ], [ "Designer Pro", "79", "99", "200 AI room redesigns a month" ], [ "Studio Premium", "149", "199", "400 AI room redesigns a month" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue in the last 12 months, to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$39,262", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR reads the company's Stripe account through an API key; last synced 25 October 2026. This is a rolling 12-month window. Every month in it falls more than two years after the first AI product (April 2023). The Stripe account is shared by the room designer and the AI mood board site, so the figure cannot be split between the two.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 25 October 2026", "value": "US$2,180", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR current snapshot, from Stripe.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from that MRR", "value": "about US$26,160 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$2,180 times 12. Lower than the last 12 months because revenue is falling.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions, 25 October 2026", "value": "95", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot from Stripe.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average MRR per active subscription", "value": "about US$22.95 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$2,180 divided by 95. Below the cheapest paid price today (US$24 a month billed yearly), so some subscribers probably pay older or discounted prices; no source says.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Best month in the data, November 2025", "value": "US$6,378", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline from Stripe.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "October 2025", "value": "US$5,158", "grade": "A", "note": "From the TrustMRR profile as archived on 8 September 2026, whose 12-month timeline started one month earlier than the October profile.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the 12 full months October 2025 to September 2026", "value": "US$42,030", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the sum of the monthly values in the two TrustMRR profiles.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Latest full month, September 2026", "value": "US$2,105", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. 67% below November 2025 (calculated). Monthly values from February to September 2026 stayed between US$2,042 and US$3,254.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the 30 days to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$2,028", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR shows -8.9% against the 30 days before. On 8 September 2026 the same window showed US$2,999.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue all time, May 2021 to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$123,105", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, from Stripe. It includes the years of the mood board editor before it had AI (May 2021 to March 2023), so it is not used as the headline.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before October 2025", "value": "US$79,519", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$123,105 minus the 13 monthly values from October 2025 to October 2026 (US$43,586). TrustMRR's public profile does not show the older months, so the split between the pre-AI years and the AI years from April 2023 is unknown.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "90%", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot. TrustMRR does not say that costs come from a connected account, so this page treats it as a founder-entered value.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Room redesigns generated", "value": "more than 85,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Company's home page. The TrustMRR profile gives 85,000 as an estimated user count, a different measure.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Company", "value": "Mr Bojli Kft, Hungary", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms of service (last updated 16 May 2024) and privacy policy, which says \"MoodBoardly by Mr Bojli Kft.\" A Kft is a Hungarian limited liability company.", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Founded", "value": "5 May 2021", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder-entered date on TrustMRR. It is the start of the mood board business, not of the AI product.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Mood board editor prices, December 2022 (before AI generation)", "value": "US$9 a board, US$15 a month or US$59 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Wayback copy of the MoodBoardly pricing page. The only AI feature then was automatic background removal.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the first AI product to the headline", "value": "42 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: April 2023 to October 2026.", "src": [ 10, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "5 May 2021", "what": "Founding date of the business, as entered on TrustMRR. It starts as a mood board tool for interior design.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "5 July 2022", "what": "The archived site moodboardly.com offers a mood board editor with a furniture database, \"magic background removal\" and a shareable purchase list. The page still calls the tool Moodli.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "10 December 2022", "what": "Paid plans: US$9 for one board, Personal at US$15 a month, Business at US$59 a month. No image generation yet.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "1 February 2023", "what": "The home page says MoodBoardly \"comes with the latest AI-powered features\", meaning one-click background removal.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "7 March 2023", "what": "First archive copy of myroomdesigner.ai: a different room-design site that sold 100 renders for US$9.99, with a footer naming Resume AI LLC.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14, 16 ] }, { "when": "26 April 2023", "what": "First archive copy of moodboardly.com/ai, \"Mood Board AI\": \"We created thousands of mood boards with AI\". This page treats it as the start of the AI product.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10, 16 ] }, { "when": "26 May 2023", "what": "A \"Mood Board AI Generator\" page lets users pick a room, a style and colors and generate a board.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "24 September 2023", "what": "Archived generator pages for more than 20 room types, such as \"Generate Your Own Living Room Mood Boards with AI\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12, 16 ] }, { "when": "29 February 2024", "what": "New pricing sells AI generations inside every plan: Personal at US$25 a month with 100 AI generations, Business at US$59, Premium at US$119. The menu now has \"Interior Design AI\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "16 May 2024", "what": "Date of the terms of service that name Mr Bojli Kft as the operator of MyRoomDesigner.AI.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "19 May 2024", "what": "myroomdesigner.ai now shows MoodBoardly's room designer: \"Room Designer AI: Design My Room Online in 60 Seconds\", with photo upload.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15, 16 ] }, { "when": "9 August 2024", "what": "moodboardly.com redirects to moodboardai.com, which becomes the companion mood board site.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 16, 17 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "Best month in the Stripe data: US$6,378.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "8 September 2026", "what": "TrustMRR shows US$44,116 in the last 12 months and US$119,930 all time.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "2026", "what": "The home page promotes minniie, a new AI personal stylist app from Marta Herget.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 19 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "US$39,262 in the last 12 months, MRR of US$2,180 and 95 active subscriptions. September revenue was US$2,105.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "An existing product met a new model", "text": "The founders did not start from zero in 2023. They had a mood board editor for interior design with a furniture database, paid plans and users who wanted to see a room before buying. When image generation became usable, they put it into that editor: first generated mood boards, then redesigns of a user's own room photo. The old editor survived as the \"Design Studio\", where generated images become shopping lists." }, { "title": "One job per domain", "text": "By 2024 the business used two names that say what each product does: myroomdesigner.ai for redesigning a room photo and moodboardai.com for mood boards. The old name, moodboardly.com, redirects. The room site carries hundreds of public pages for room types and styles (\"Modern Bedroom\", \"Traditional Kitchen\") and files for AI agents (llms.txt). No source says how many customers arrive through these pages, so the channel is marked unknown." }, { "title": "Generations sold as a monthly allowance", "text": "Each plan is a number of AI room redesigns a month, from 50 to 400. Every generation costs GPU time, so the home page says there are no refunds. TrustMRR shows a 90% profit margin for the last 30 days, a value that the founder entered." }, { "title": "Two founders, many small subscriptions", "text": "Marta Herget is named as CEO and Gabor Herget as developer. Revenue arrives as many small payments: in TrustMRR's daily list many days show US$29 or US$58, one or two payments of the US$29 monthly plan, and the largest day of the last 30 was US$360. No single large contract appears." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "Few build details are public. These come from the company's pages, the page source and TrustMRR.", "items": [ "The site is a Next.js web app: its pages load scripts from the /_next/static/ folder that Next.js creates.", "Payments go through Stripe, which TrustMRR reads through an API key. Stripe is not the merchant of record (the party legally responsible for the sale and its taxes), so the company itself is the seller.", "No source names the image model or the GPU provider. The site says a design is generated in under 4 seconds and that the layout of the room is kept.", "Paid plans add an AI description of the uploaded photo, which the site uses to write a better prompt for the image model, and a chat that changes the prompt.", "An affiliate program ran on Rewardful; its sign-up page now says the program is no longer active.", "The privacy policy was written for moodboardly.com and still covers \"MoodBoardly by Mr Bojli Kft.\"" ], "src": [ 3, 1, 4, 20, 6 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold help with designing a room before generative AI existed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Modsy", "years": "2015 to 2022", "funding": "US$72.7M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Upload photos of your room and get photorealistic 3D designs with furniture you can buy.", "died": "Each design needed hours of work by human designers, so the cost of every customer stayed too high to make a profit.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2521-modsy" }, { "name": "Laurel & Wolf", "years": "2014 to 2019", "funding": "US$25M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Online interior design by professional designers for a flat fee.", "died": "The flat fees did not cover the cost of finding customers, and quality fell as the designer network grew.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2012-laurel--wolf" }, { "name": "Tastemaker", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$1.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Affordable interior design for middle-income households.", "died": "A distributed team of designers gave uneven results, and better-funded competitors won the market.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1572-tastemaker" }, { "name": "Polyvore", "years": "2007 to 2019", "funding": "US$22M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Create virtual mood boards of fashion and home products and shop from them.", "died": "After the Yahoo acquisition it lost users to Pinterest and Instagram.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/451-polyvore" }, { "name": "Kujiale", "years": "2011 to 2025", "funding": "US$550M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Design your home in 3D in the browser, then buy what you designed.", "died": "Most buyers wanted experts to design for them, and, in the database's words, AI made its technology obsolete within 18 months.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2371-kujiale" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Modsy, Laurel & Wolf and Tastemaker all sold the same promise: see your room redesigned before you spend money. Each one needed human designers for every order, so every customer cost hours of paid work, and the companies raised millions to cover that cost. Polyvore and Kujiale gave users tools to build the picture themselves, which kept costs low but asked users to do the design work.", "An image model removes the designer from each order. A redesign of a user's own photo now costs seconds of GPU time, so two founders can sell it as a monthly allowance of 50 to 400 images without staff. The risk also changed: the expensive part is no longer the work but the attention of buyers, and other AI room designers and general chat assistants now offer a similar result. The founders' own comparison table on the home page sets their product against ChatGPT." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The move from an old tool to AI, yes. The market, crowded.", "text": "Adding generative AI to a small tool that already had users and a narrow subject (furniture and rooms) is repeatable for many small software businesses. The home page compares the product with \"Other Tools\" and with ChatGPT, so buyers have alternatives, and this business's own Stripe revenue has fallen since late 2025.", "steps": [ "Start from a tool that your users already pay for, and add generation where they already make the picture by hand.", "Keep the old editor as the step after generation, so the AI image becomes a shopping list or a client presentation.", "Put each product on a domain that says what it does, and keep the old name as a redirect.", "Sell a monthly number of generations so that GPU cost and price move together." ], "open": "Visual planning for other purchases where people want to see the result first: gardens, shop fronts, event decoration, clothing (the co-founder's new product, minniie, tries the last one)." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Falling revenue", "text": "Stripe revenue was US$6,378 in November 2025 and US$2,105 in September 2026, 67% lower. The last 12 months fell from US$44,116 on 8 September 2026 to US$39,262 on 25 October 2026, and MRR fell 9.6% in 30 days. October 2026 was US$1,556 with six days left." }, { "title": "Two products in one Stripe account", "text": "TrustMRR describes the profile as \"Mood board creator and ai room designer\". The revenue covers both myroomdesigner.ai and the AI mood board site, and no source splits it. Both sell AI generation, so the AI share of the last 12 months is close to all of it, but the room designer's own share is unknown." }, { "title": "Older revenue had no AI", "text": "The all-time figure of US$123,105 starts in May 2021. The mood board editor charged from at least December 2022, before any image generation, so part of the US$79,519 earned before October 2025 is not AI revenue. This page does not use the all-time figure as the headline for that reason." }, { "title": "A domain with an earlier owner", "text": "In 2023 myroomdesigner.ai showed another company's room-design site. By May 2024 it showed MoodBoardly's product. No source says whether the domain was bought, and if a customer list came with it." }, { "title": "Competition from general AI", "text": "Any user can ask a general chat assistant to restyle a room photo. The home page's own comparison table names ChatGPT as the alternative and claims faster images and better layout preservation; those claims are the company's." }, { "title": "Attention moving to a new product", "text": "The home page promotes minniie, a 2026 AI stylist app from co-founder Marta Herget. A second product can take time away from the room designer." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://myroomdesigner.ai/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/moodboardly" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR markdown profile: MoodBoardly (website myroomdesigner.ai), read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/moodboardly.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile. Stripe API key, last synced 25 October 2026. Source for all current revenue figures, the monthly timeline from November 2025, MRR, subscriptions and the founder-entered founding date and profit margin." }, { "title": "TrustMRR markdown profile: MoodBoardly, as archived by the Wayback Machine on 8 September 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260908033133/https://trustmrr.com/startup/moodboardly.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. Same profile seven weeks earlier. Source for October 2025 revenue and the earlier 12-month and all-time totals." }, { "title": "MyRoomDesigner.AI home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://myroomdesigner.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founders' names and roles, the features, the 85,000 redesigns claim, the comparison table, the refund rule and the minniie section." }, { "title": "MyRoomDesigner.AI pricing page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://myroomdesigner.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the plans and prices." }, { "title": "MyRoomDesigner.AI terms of service, last updated 16 May 2024", "url": "https://myroomdesigner.ai/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names Mr Bojli Kft as the operator and Hungarian law." }, { "title": "MyRoomDesigner.AI privacy policy", "url": "https://myroomdesigner.ai/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the operator and the country. Says \"MoodBoardly by Mr Bojli Kft.\" and that the company is based in Hungary." }, { "title": "moodboardly.com home page, Wayback copy of 5 July 2022", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20220705130911/https://www.moodboardly.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The mood board editor before AI generation." }, { "title": "moodboardly.com home page, Wayback copy of 1 February 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230201084539/https://www.moodboardly.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The \"AI-powered features\" were background removal." }, { "title": "moodboardly.com pricing page, Wayback copy of 10 December 2022", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20221210084244/https://www.moodboardly.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the pre-AI prices." }, { "title": "moodboardly.com/ai, Mood Board AI, Wayback copy of 26 April 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230426145904/https://www.moodboardly.com/ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. First archived AI page of the business." }, { "title": "moodboardly.com/ai-generator, Mood Board AI Generator, Wayback copy of 26 May 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230526172134/https://www.moodboardly.com/ai-generator", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full." }, { "title": "moodboardly.com AI living room generator, Wayback copy of 24 September 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230924201514/https://www.moodboardly.com/ai-generator/interior-design-living-room", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the opening section. One of more than 20 room-type generator pages archived that day." }, { "title": "moodboardly.com pricing page, Wayback copy of 29 February 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240229015220/https://www.moodboardly.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the first plans with AI generations and the \"Interior Design AI\" menu item." }, { "title": "myroomdesigner.ai home page, Wayback copy of 7 March 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230307191749/https://www.myroomdesigner.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The earlier site on the domain, with a footer naming Resume AI LLC." }, { "title": "myroomdesigner.ai home page, Wayback copy of 19 May 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240519135356/https://myroomdesigner.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. First archived copy that shows MoodBoardly's room designer on the domain." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine capture lists (CDX) for myroomdesigner.ai and moodboardly.com", "url": "https://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=myroomdesigner.ai&output=json", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the capture dates, status codes and page changes for both domains, and the redirect of moodboardly.com to moodboardai.com on 9 August 2024." }, { "title": "Mood Board AI home and pricing pages, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://moodboardai.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The companion AI mood board product and its prices." }, { "title": "MyRoomDesigner.AI llms.txt and agent guide", "url": "https://myroomdesigner.ai/llms.txt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Describes the product and names Mood Board AI as the companion product." }, { "title": "minniie home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://minniie.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The co-founder's 2026 AI stylist app, read for the purpose check." }, { "title": "MyRoomDesigner.AI affiliate program sign-up page on Rewardful", "url": "https://myroomdesigner-ai.getrewardful.com/signup", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Says the program is no longer active." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/chessigma/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/chessigma.md", "slug": "chessigma", "name": "Chessigma", "country": "Belgium", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI chess coach on top of free game analysis", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "27 March 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$16.7K verified revenue in one month, September 2026", "sticker": "$16.7K in September 2026", "outcomeUsd": 16651, "months": 18, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders, Mehdi Ben Haddou and Eliot (who also works as a software engineer at Amazon); no other staff named", "fundingLabel": "None reported (no source mentions outside investment)", "primaryFactor": "Price", "group": "learning", "channel": "creators", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Chess" ], "product": "A chess player types a Chess.com or Lichess username, or pastes a game file, and gets a free move-by-move review of every game from the Stockfish engine, which runs in the player's own browser. The paid plan, Supercoach, reads up to 12 months of the player's games, scores five areas (blunders, tactics, the clock, converting won positions, openings), builds a new 15-minute training plan every morning, and adds an AI coach that answers questions about the player's own games.", "why": "The free part does what the market leader charges for: unlimited game reviews, where Chess.com gives free users one a day. Because the engine runs on the player's device, each free review costs Chessigma almost nothing, so the free tool could grow to about 900,000 visitors a month. Revenue started only when the AI coach went on sale in May 2026: TrustMRR shows US$42 in April 2026 and US$3,738 in May 2026.", "summary": [ "Chessigma is a chess training website with two layers. The free layer is game analysis by Stockfish, the strongest open-source chess engine. A chess engine is a program that searches the possible moves of a position and gives each position a score, for example +1.0 when White is about one pawn ahead. Since 2020 Stockfish scores positions with NNUE (efficiently updatable neural network), a small neural network trained on billions of positions, so even the free layer uses machine learning, but it is a standard engine that every chess site uses. The paid layer, Supercoach, is the new part: a personal report, daily drills made from the player's own mistakes, and a chat coach whose answers are written by a large language model, a text model of the kind behind ChatGPT, reached through the OpenRouter service.", "Mehdi Ben Haddou launched the site on 27 March 2025 and runs it with a co-founder, Eliot, who also works as a software engineer at Amazon. The legal pages name the operator as Arche Labs Ltd, trading as Chessigma. Revenue is verified: TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a startup's payment provider, shows US$16,651 of Stripe payments in September 2026, US$17,454 in the 30 days to 25 October 2026 and US$73,209 in total. It also shows US$7,622 of monthly recurring revenue (MRR) from 593 active subscriptions. MRR counts only subscription revenue and spreads a yearly payment over twelve months, so it is lower than the cash that arrives in a month, which also includes yearly and one-time lifetime payments.", "This page grades every number by its evidence. Monthly revenue grew from US$3,738 in May 2026 to US$16,651 in September 2026, but the growth slowed: September was 5.6% above August, and the last 30 days were 3.7% below the 30 days before. The page also checks the fair-play question, because the site offers a free best-move tool, and shows four failed startups that taught or hosted board games, or sold personalized learning, before language models could explain a player's own mistakes." ], "factsCaption": "US$16,651 of Stripe payments in September 2026, read by TrustMRR, four months after the AI coach went on sale", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from Stripe, the payment provider, through an API key. A grade B value was read by TrustMRR from Google Analytics. A grade C value comes from the company's own pages or a founder-written listing. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a free game reviewer launched on Reddit to a paid AI coach with US$16,651 of revenue in one month. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Chessigma plans on 25 October 2026, from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "The monthly price of US$14 is shown next to a struck-through US$19. The yearly plan is US$97 billed once a year, which is US$8.08 a month and 42% less than 12 monthly payments (calculated). The page sells the plans as a founding class (\"Founding Class #2\"); in May 2026 the yearly plan cost US$140 and the lifetime plan US$340. All paid plans have a 7-day money-back guarantee. The phone app is free and does not unlock the paid plan; the paid features work on the website and the desktop app.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "Unlimited game review and puzzles; random daily plan, 5 opening lines, 2 bots, 1 Woodpecker puzzle set" ], [ "Supercoach monthly", "", "14", "Personal daily plan, Chess DNA report, all trainers and bots unlimited, AI coach Froggy 200 messages a month, no ads" ], [ "Supercoach yearly", "8.08", "", "Same as monthly, AI coach 400 messages a month (the page adds \"x2\"); US$97 billed yearly" ], [ "Lifetime", "490 one-time", "490 one-time", "Same as yearly, one payment, no renewals" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue, September 2026", "value": "US$16,651", "grade": "A", "note": "Monthly revenue timeline of the TrustMRR profile, read from Stripe through an API key. Stripe is not the merchant of record. Payments through the Apple and Google app stores, if any, are not in this figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 30 days to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$17,454", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR shows a change of -3.7% against the 30 days before. Two days, 7 and 8 October 2026, brought US$4,661 of it.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$73,209", "grade": "A", "note": "US$73,095 of it in the last 6 months, that is from May 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, January to April 2026", "value": "US$18 to US$42 a month", "grade": "A", "note": "In those months the only paid plan was a US$3-a-month supporter plan; the AI coaching plan was marked coming soon.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue by month, May to August 2026", "value": "US$3,738; US$7,828; US$13,654; US$15,775", "grade": "A", "note": "May 2026 is the month the Supercoach plan went on sale.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from August to September 2026", "value": "5.6%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 16,651 divided by 15,775 equals 1.056. From July to September: 21.9%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 25 October 2026", "value": "US$7,622", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR metric snapshot, with +14.1% in the last 30 days. MRR counts subscriptions only, with yearly plans spread over 12 months.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions, 25 October 2026", "value": "593", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR metric snapshot.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Annual run rate of the recurring revenue", "value": "US$91,464", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 7,622 times 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Visitors, last 30 days to 25 October 2026", "value": "913,959", "grade": "B", "note": "Read by TrustMRR from Google Analytics. Revenue per visitor: US$0.02 (TrustMRR); 17,454 divided by 913,959 equals US$0.019 (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Paying customers so far", "value": "1,713", "grade": "C", "note": "Company pages: \"1,713 happy customers so far\" and \"1,713 trained with Coach Froggy\". Not a payment figure.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Visitors in the first week after launch", "value": "more than 100,000 unique visitors", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder blog post of 6 April 2025.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Visitors a day, May 2025", "value": "about 7,000 unique visitors", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder blog post of 15 May 2025 on how the analysis works.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 co-founders", "grade": "C", "note": "The site links Mehdi and Eliot as founders, the blog lists Eliot as co-founder and Amazon software engineer, and the pricing page says Mehdi or Eliot handle refunds. No other staff are named.", "src": [ 2, 11, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions an investment. Mehdi Ben Haddou's profile mentions an earlier job as founding engineer at a Y Combinator company; that is his former employer, not an investor in Chessigma.", "src": [ 1, 19 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the headline month", "value": "18 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: March 2025 to September 2026. Time from the paid launch in May 2026: 4 months.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "27 March 2025", "what": "The founders launch Chessigma as a free tool that gives unlimited game analysis reports with no sign-up. They post it on Reddit.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "March and April 2025", "what": "A day after the Reddit post, a chess YouTuber posts a short video about the site. The founders write that it went viral and was reposted on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp groups, and that the site had more than 100,000 unique visitors in the first week.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "15 May 2025", "what": "A blog post explains that the site compiles Stockfish to WebAssembly so the player's own computer does the analysis, at about 7,000 unique visitors a day, which keeps hosting cheap and the core report free.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "8 July 2025", "what": "A blog post describes the planned AI chess coach that reads a player's whole game history. The current version of that post says the coach is live.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "February to April 2026", "what": "The pricing page sells a US$3-a-month supporter plan (no ads, a Discord badge) and lists a Pro plan with \"Advanced AI coaching\" at US$9 a month as coming soon, with a waitlist. Verified revenue is US$21 to US$42 a month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "when": "May 2026", "what": "Supercoach goes on sale. On 28 May the pricing page says \"Class #1 grabbed $9/mo and sold out\", offers 200 more seats at US$14 a month with 174 left, and includes an AI coach named Tommy with up to 200 messages a month. Verified revenue for May: US$3,738.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "when": "June to September 2026", "what": "Verified revenue rises each month: US$7,828, US$13,654, US$15,775 and US$16,651.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "15 August 2026", "what": "Eliot publishes \"Is Using Chess AI Cheating?\", which says that engine help during a rated game is cheating and that engine analysis after the game is training.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "The plans cost US$14 a month, US$97 a year or US$490 once, and the coach is now called Froggy. TrustMRR shows US$7,622 of MRR from 593 active subscriptions and US$17,454 in the last 30 days.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Free where the leader charges", "text": "Chess.com gives free users one full game review a day; Chessigma gives unlimited reviews with no account. That one difference brought the first wave of users from Reddit and a creator video, and the free tools (a best-move finder, rating calculators, opening guides, and pages translated into five more languages) keep bringing visitors." }, { "title": "The user's computer does the work", "text": "Stockfish runs in the browser as WebAssembly, a format that lets compiled code run inside a web page. The founder wrote in May 2025 that this keeps the hosting bill low, so a free product with hundreds of thousands of visitors does not need investors to pay for servers." }, { "title": "Sell the part an engine cannot do", "text": "An engine says which move was best but not why a player keeps losing. The paid plan turns many games of engine analysis into a report on the player's habits, daily drills built from those mistakes, and a language-model coach that answers questions with the player's own numbers. Revenue stayed under US$50 a month for four months of a supporter plan and passed US$3,700 in the month the coach went on sale, by TrustMRR's figures." }, { "title": "Founding classes and price steps", "text": "The coach was sold in numbered founding classes: the company's pricing page reported that the first class at US$9 a month sold out, and the second class at US$14 had a limited number of seats. A yearly plan and a lifetime plan bring cash up front, which is why monthly revenue is about twice the MRR." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages, its privacy policy and the founder-entered part of the TrustMRR profile. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Next.js for the web app, Supabase for the database, sign-in and storage, Vercel for hosting, and Stripe for website payments (TrustMRR tech stack and the privacy policy).", "Stockfish compiled to WebAssembly runs on the player's device. Cloudflare delivers the engine files, and Amazon Web Services runs server-side analysis of imported games.", "The coach and other chess processing run on Modal, a cloud service for running code on demand. OpenRouter, a service that forwards requests to many AI model providers, sends the coach questions to the models that write the answers. The pages do not name the model.", "Resend for account and product emails, PostHog for product analytics, Google AdSense ads for free users, and RevenueCat for subscription records of the phone apps.", "A desktop app for Mac, Windows and Linux that shows the live site in its own window, and lighter iPhone and Android apps with game review and the opening trainer only.", "A public MCP server, a connector that lets Claude, ChatGPT and other AI assistants call Chessigma's chess tools, with links back to the site." ], "src": [ 1, 7, 9, 15, 20 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database taught chess, hosted a board game online, or sold personalized learning before language models could explain a player's own mistakes. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Chesscademy", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Interactive chess lessons and videos that make learning chess easy for beginners and intermediate players.", "died": "Free chess content was everywhere, Chess.com offered lessons and a community in one place, and a freemium model without a paid feature people wanted did not bring enough revenue.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1680-chesscademy" }, { "name": "Kaya.gs", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "none", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "A modern online platform for the board game Go with new features for beginners and experienced players.", "died": "Technical debt and a small team could not deliver reliable real-time play, and voluntary donations did not cover server costs and development.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1977-kayags" }, { "name": "Knewton", "years": "2008 to 2020", "funding": "US$182.3M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Adaptive learning: software that analyzes each student's answers and recommends a personal learning path.", "died": "The technology was complex and costly to put into schools and publishers, free platforms such as Khan Academy grew faster, and newer machine-learning tools removed its technical lead.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/281-knewton" }, { "name": "Juni Learning", "years": "2017 to 2024", "funding": "US$30M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Personal one-to-one online coding and math lessons for children, with vetted instructors.", "died": "Every lesson needed a paid human instructor, customer acquisition was expensive, and after the pandemic families left faster than the costs could be covered.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2311-juni-learning" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Chesscademy and Kaya.gs show the old problem of board-game sites: the basic service (lessons, a place to play) was available for free elsewhere, and the extras did not make people pay. Juni Learning shows the other side: personal teaching does make people pay, but a human teacher for every student cost more than the price could cover. Knewton tried to automate personal teaching with its own software and raised US$182.3 million for it.", "Chessigma uses two things those companies did not have. Stockfish became free, very strong and able to run inside a web browser, so a two-person team gives away unlimited analysis at almost no cost. Language models, rented per answer through OpenRouter, turn that analysis into explanations in plain words about one player's games. The free part brings the visitors; the coach is the part they pay for, at US$14 a month instead of the price of a human chess teacher." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The pattern, yes. This market, with care.", "text": "Other chess sites also sell analysis and training, and Chess.com, the largest, limits free game reviews in order to sell its premium plan. Chessigma's free tier depends on public game data from Chess.com and Lichess, and the founders already changed their move labels after a trademark discussion with Chess.com. The pattern is general: give away the expensive-looking part that can run on the user's device, and charge for a personal layer that a language model adds on top.", "steps": [ "Find a feature that the market leader limits for free users and that you can run on the user's own device at almost no cost.", "Give it away without an account, and post it where the players already are (Reddit, chess creators).", "Build pages for every small search the players make: calculators, opening guides, a best-move finder, translated versions.", "Sell a personal layer on top of the free data: a report on the user's habits, daily drills from their mistakes, and a coach that answers with their own numbers.", "Open the paid plan in small, numbered classes at a low first price, then raise the price for the next class." ], "open": "The same structure fits other games and skills where a free engine or solver exists but explains nothing: Go and shogi engines, poker solvers, bridge, and typing or music practice with automatic scoring." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Growth has slowed", "text": "Monthly revenue grew about 3.7 times from May to July 2026, but only 5.6% from August to September, and the last 30 days to 25 October were 3.7% below the 30 days before. Two days in October brought more than a quarter of the last 30 days of revenue." }, { "title": "Cash revenue is about twice the recurring revenue", "text": "MRR was US$7,622 while the last 30 days brought US$17,454. Yearly plans at US$97 and lifetime plans at US$490 are paid up front, so part of each month's revenue does not repeat. The recurring part is the more stable measure." }, { "title": "The fair-play line", "text": "The free best-move tool returns Stockfish's move for any position. The company's pages say that using an engine during a rated game is cheating and list study uses only, and the paid plan sells training, not live help. Misuse by some visitors is still possible, as with any engine." }, { "title": "Claims to customers that do not agree", "text": "The pricing page says players gain 112 Elo rating points in their first month, and the Supercoach page says 91. Neither figure has a stated method." }, { "title": "Dependence on the big chess sites", "text": "The free tier imports games from Chess.com and Lichess, and the paid plan reads the same history. A change in their public data access would hit both layers." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.chessigma.com/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/chessigma" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR markdown profile: Chessigma, revenue synced 25 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/chessigma.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full on 25 October 2026. Revenue metrics are read from Stripe through an API key; the description, tech stack and founding date are founder-entered (grade C)." }, { "title": "Chessigma pricing page, 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.chessigma.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the plans, prices, plan contents, the refund guarantee and the 112 Elo claim." }, { "title": "Chessigma Supercoach page, 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.chessigma.com/supercoach", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for what the paid plan does, the founding classes, the customer count and the 91 Elo claim." }, { "title": "Chessigma pricing page, Wayback Machine copy of 16 April 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260416181845/https://www.chessigma.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Shows the US$3 supporter plan and the AI coaching plan marked coming soon." }, { "title": "Chessigma pricing page, Wayback Machine copy of 28 May 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260528225320/https://www.chessigma.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Shows Supercoach on sale, the sold-out first class at US$9, the second class at US$14 and the AI coach with 200 messages a month." }, { "title": "Chessigma blog, 6 April 2025, by Mehdi: launch post", "url": "https://www.chessigma.com/blog/launching-chessigma", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the launch date, the Reddit post, the creator video and the first-week visitors." }, { "title": "Chessigma blog, 15 May 2025, by Mehdi: Free Chess Game Review and Analysis (how the analysis works)", "url": "https://www.chessigma.com/blog/how-chessigma-analysis-works", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for Stockfish in WebAssembly, the daily visitors in May 2025 and the move labels." }, { "title": "Chessigma blog, 8 July 2025, by Mehdi: The AI chess coach that actually knows your game", "url": "https://www.chessigma.com/blog/the-ai-chess-coach", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The post has been updated since its date; used for the plan of the coach." }, { "title": "Chessigma privacy policy, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.chessigma.com/privacy-policy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names Arche Labs Ltd and lists the service providers, including OpenRouter for the coach answers." }, { "title": "Chessigma terms of service, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.chessigma.com/tos", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names the operator, Arche Labs Ltd, trading as Chessigma, and the payment and refund terms." }, { "title": "Chessigma home page, 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.chessigma.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the free analysis, the AI coach offer, the founder links and the author name in the page data." }, { "title": "Chessigma Next Move tool page", "url": "https://www.chessigma.com/tools/next-move", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full for the fair-play check: the listed uses and the answer that engine use in a rated game is cheating." }, { "title": "Chessigma blog, 15 August 2026, by Eliot: Is Using Chess AI Cheating? Where the Line Actually Is", "url": "https://www.chessigma.com/blog/is-using-chess-ai-cheating", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full for the fair-play check." }, { "title": "Chessigma blog author page: Eliot", "url": "https://www.chessigma.com/blog/author/eliot", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for Eliot's role as co-founder and Amazon software engineer." }, { "title": "Chessigma download page", "url": "https://www.chessigma.com/download", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the desktop and phone apps and which features each includes." }, { "title": "Stockfish home page", "url": "https://stockfishchess.org/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on NNUE evaluation." }, { "title": "Ship or Die profile of Mehdi Ben Haddou", "url": "https://www.ship-or-die.com/u/mehdi-ben-haddou", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Lists his other shipped products (Tweet.rip, PolyMRR, Homefast), whose home pages were read for the purpose check." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." }, { "title": "humansfix.ai developer profile of Mehdi Ben Haddou", "url": "https://humansfix.ai/u/mehdi-bh", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Self-written profile; source for his earlier jobs." }, { "title": "Chessigma MCP server page for developers", "url": "https://www.chessigma.com/developers/mcp", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the connector for Claude, ChatGPT and other AI assistants." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/headroom/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/headroom.md", "slug": "headroom", "name": "Headroom", "country": "Netherlands", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Desktop app that compresses the input of AI coding agents", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "1 April 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$2K monthly recurring revenue, October 2026", "sticker": "$2K MRR", "outcomeUsd": 24300, "months": 6, "teamLabel": "1 founder, Garm Lucassen, through his company Garm Tech B.V. (team size founder-stated)", "fundingLabel": "None (bootstrapped, founder-stated)", "primaryFactor": "Packaging", "group": "ai-model-tools", "channel": "search", "trend": "growing", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Developer tools" ], "product": "A menu bar app for macOS, Windows and Linux. It runs a proxy on the developer's own computer between Claude Code or ChatGPT Codex and the Anthropic or OpenAI servers, and it compresses tool output, logs, JSON and documents before each request leaves the machine. The originals stay on the computer, and the AI model can ask for them back. The app also installs optional add-ons and shows the savings and usage limits in a dashboard. After a 7-day free trial it costs from US$3 to US$40 a month, matched to the customer's Claude or ChatGPT plan.", "why": "The compression engine already existed as a free, open-source Python tool, but it was hard to install. Garm Lucassen packaged it into a desktop app that installs with a double click, connects the coding agents by itself and removes its changes when it quits. The engine's creator suggested that he build it and keep the Headroom name. Developers who hit the usage limits of their AI plans pay a small monthly price to make those limits last longer.", "summary": [ "Headroom is a desktop app for developers who use AI coding agents: programs such as Claude Code and ChatGPT Codex that read files, run commands and write code with a large language model. Every turn of such an agent sends text to the model, counted in tokens (pieces of words, the unit in which AI providers measure use and set limits). Most of that text is machine output: logs, search results, JSON. Headroom runs a local proxy, a small server on the developer's own computer that receives each request before it goes to Anthropic or OpenAI. The proxy shortens the noisy parts and forwards the smaller request. The company says this saves about 50% on the noisy items and typically 25% to 50% across a session.", "Two parties built the product. The compression engine is the Headroom CLI, an open-source project created by Tejas Chopra and published under the Apache 2.0 license, a permissive license that allows anyone to use, change and sell the code if they keep its copyright and license notices. The desktop app is the work of Garm Lucassen and his Amsterdam company Garm Tech B.V. (Chamber of Commerce number 99602075). Its code is public on GitHub under the MIT license with the copyright line \"Garm Tech BV\". Lucassen wrote on AppSumo that he asked the engine's creator for an installable app, and that the creator told him to build it himself and to use the Headroom name. He shipped version 1 on 1 April 2026.", "TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a startup's payment provider, shows US$2,025 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the subscription revenue that repeats every month, with a yearly plan counted as one twelfth of its price) from 222 active subscriptions on 25 October 2026. The payment provider is Polar. Verified revenue was US$2,540 in June 2026, fell to US$1,542 in August, and rose to US$2,284 in September and US$2,620 in the first 25 days of October. This page grades every number and shows four failed companies that sold developers a paid improvement to a tool owned by someone else." ], "factsCaption": "US$2,025 in monthly recurring revenue from 222 subscriptions in October 2026, six months after launch, read by TrustMRR from the payment provider Polar", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the company's payment provider, Polar, or from Google Search Console. A grade B value is visible in public code or was stated by an independent party such as AppSumo. A grade C value is a statement by the company or the founder. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a first version on 1 April 2026 to verified recurring revenue just above US$2,000 a month in October 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Headroom prices on 25 October 2026, from the pricing section of the company's home page, with the AppSumo deal prices from the AppSumo listing", "note": "Each plan matches the customer's AI plan: Pro for Claude Pro or ChatGPT Plus, Max x5 for Claude Max x5 or ChatGPT Pro x5, Max x20 for Claude Max x20 or ChatGPT Pro x20. Yearly billing is 25% cheaper than monthly billing. The trial gives 7 days of use within 14 calendar days and needs no card; there is no free plan after it. At launch on 1 April 2026 the yearly prices were US$5, US$25 and US$50 a month and a free plan allowed use with 25% of the Claude plan; the current yearly prices are 40% lower (calculated). AppSumo sells one-time lifetime licenses at US$29, US$99 and US$199 for the three plan levels; AppSumo bills those sales itself.", "rows": [ [ "Free trial", "0", "0", "7 days of use, no card" ], [ "Pro", "3", "4", "for Claude Pro or ChatGPT Plus; email support" ], [ "Max x5", "15", "20", "for Claude Max x5 or ChatGPT Pro x5" ], [ "Max x20", "30", "40", "for Claude Max x20 or ChatGPT Pro x20; priority support" ], [ "Team & Enterprise", "custom", "custom", "shared controls, private deployment" ], [ "AppSumo Lifetime Tier 1", "29 one-time", "29 one-time", "Pro level, 1 user license" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 25 October 2026", "value": "US$2,025", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot; revenue last synced 25 October 2026 from Polar through an API key. This is the headline number. It is 1.25% above the site's floor of US$2,000 a month (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions, 25 October 2026", "value": "222", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot from the payment records.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average MRR per active subscription", "value": "about US$9.12 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2,025 divided by 222 equals 9.12. The average is above the Pro price of US$3 to US$4 a month, so some subscribers are on the Max plans.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the MRR", "value": "US$24,300 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2,025 times 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR growth in the last 30 days", "value": "+43.4%", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, April and May 2026", "value": "US$336 and US$538", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. March 2026 shows US$0.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, June 2026", "value": "US$2,540", "grade": "A", "note": "4.7 times May (calculated). The home page then offered 50% off all paid plans as founder pricing, and the app had added ChatGPT Codex.", "src": [ 1, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, July 2026", "value": "US$2,251", "grade": "A", "note": "11% below June (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, August 2026", "value": "US$1,542", "grade": "A", "note": "39% below June (calculated), and below the site's floor of US$2,000 a month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, September 2026", "value": "US$2,284", "grade": "A", "note": "48% more than August (calculated). The founder-written profile says the AppSumo lifetime deal launched this month; AppSumo bills those sales itself.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, 1 to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$2,620", "grade": "A", "note": "A partial month, already 3% above June (calculated). At the same daily rate the full month would be about US$3,249 (calculated: 2,620 divided by 25, times 31). The daily table shows US$493 on 1 October; no source explains it.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 30 days to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$3,198", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR gives +80.2% against the 30 days before. A second snapshot on the same profile says US$3,240. The 30 daily values on the profile add up to US$3,199 (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time", "value": "US$12,111", "grade": "A", "note": "The monthly timeline from March to October 2026 adds up to the same US$12,111 (calculated). 55% of it came in the last 3 months (calculated: 6,601 divided by 12,111).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Payment provider", "value": "Polar", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR reads the revenue from Polar through an API key and marks it \"Merchant of record: No\". The terms of service name Polar as the payment processor for subscriptions. AppSumo purchases are billed by AppSumo under the terms, so they are probably not in these figures.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Company behind the app", "value": "Garm Tech B.V., Amsterdam, Chamber of Commerce number 99602075", "grade": "C", "note": "Named in the terms of service and the privacy policy, and on garm.com with the same number. A B.V. is a Dutch private limited company. The number was not checked in the Dutch business register.", "src": [ 5, 6, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Founder", "value": "Garm Lucassen", "grade": "C", "note": "He signs the AppSumo launch letter \"I'm Garm, founder of Extra Headroom\" and is the author of every post on the company blog. The TrustMRR founder handle is garmdotcom, the name of his company site garm.com.", "src": [ 7, 11, 1, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Team size", "value": "1 person", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder-written field on TrustMRR. The AppSumo listing gives the company size as the range 1 to 10.", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none stated", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR (founder-written) and the AppSumo listing both say Bootstrapped.", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Who built the compression engine", "value": "Tejas Chopra, Headroom CLI, Apache 2.0", "grade": "B", "note": "The company's own pages name him as the creator and say the app was built with his endorsement. The engine repository, headroomlabs-ai/headroom, was created on GitHub on 7 January 2026, carries the Apache 2.0 license with the notice \"Copyright 2025 Headroom Contributors\", and had 77,809 stars on 25 October 2026.", "src": [ 3, 4, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Who built the desktop app", "value": "Garm Tech B.V., MIT license", "grade": "B", "note": "The repository gglucass/headroom-desktop was created on 30 March 2026; its license reads \"Copyright (c) 2026 Garm Tech BV\". It had 621 stars on 25 October 2026. The README says the shell is open source but the app needs a Headroom account and a paid plan to run.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Does the license allow selling the app?", "value": "yes", "grade": "B", "note": "From the license text in the engine repository: Apache 2.0 allows commercial use and redistribution of the engine if the license and notices are kept, and it does not grant use of a trademark. The founder says the engine's creator asked him to use the Headroom name; the site credits him in every footer: \"powered by Headroom by Tejas Chopra\".", "src": [ 9, 7, 2 ] }, { "fact": "First version", "value": "1 April 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's AppSumo letter. A Wayback copy of the home page from the same day shows a macOS download, Claude Code only, and paid plans from US$5 a month billed yearly. TrustMRR gives 27 March 2026 as the founding date.", "src": [ 7, 13, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Installs", "value": "1,557 on 27 June 2026; 7,719 on 25 October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Counters on the home page. Growth of about 5 times in four months (calculated: 7,719 divided by 1,557). The founder-written TrustMRR profile estimates 7,527 users.", "src": [ 14, 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Google search impressions, last 30 days", "value": "91,453", "grade": "A", "note": "Read by TrustMRR from Google Search Console. TrustMRR also shows 3,157 visitors in the last 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Measured input reduction, 183 users, 29 September to 5 October 2026", "value": "34%", "grade": "C", "note": "Company blog post: 3.50 billion input tokens removed from a baseline of 10.30 billion. The output reduction of 33% is an estimate in the same post.", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "fact": "Listed for sale on TrustMRR", "value": "asking US$199,999 since 21 July 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "The asking price is set by the founder. The profile shows 4 offers received and a revenue multiple of 5.1.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the headline figure", "value": "6 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: April 2026 to October 2026.", "src": [ 7, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "7 January 2026", "what": "The open-source compression engine, Headroom CLI, appears on GitHub. It is published on PyPI as headroom-ai under the Apache 2.0 license.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "March 2026", "what": "Garm Lucassen tries to install the engine, fails for an afternoon, and asks its creator for an app that installs with a double click. The creator tells him to build it and to keep the Headroom name. The desktop repository is created on 30 March.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 8 ] }, { "when": "1 April 2026", "what": "Version 1 ships for macOS and Claude Code only. Plans: Free with 25% of the Claude plan, Pro at US$5, Max x5 at US$25 and Max x20 at US$50 a month billed yearly, after a 14-day trial.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 13 ] }, { "when": "April and May 2026", "what": "First verified revenue through Polar: US$336 in April and US$538 in May.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "The app supports ChatGPT Codex, offers 50% off all paid plans as founder pricing and counts 1,557 installs. Verified revenue rises to US$2,540.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 14, 1 ] }, { "when": "21 July 2026", "what": "The business is listed for sale on TrustMRR with an asking price of US$199,999.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "August 2026", "what": "Verified revenue falls to US$1,542, the lowest month since May.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "A lifetime deal launches on AppSumo at US$29 to US$199. Verified revenue through Polar rises to US$2,284.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "when": "5 October 2026", "what": "New terms of service: a 7-day trial without a card, no free plan after it, and rules for marketplace and lifetime purchases.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "6 October 2026", "what": "The company publishes production data from 183 Claude Code users: input down 34% in one week.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR shows US$2,025 in MRR from 222 active subscriptions and US$3,198 in revenue in the last 30 days. The home page counts 7,719 installs on macOS, Windows and Linux.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Packaging an existing engine", "text": "The hard part, the compression itself, was free code by another developer. Installing it needed Python, pip and changes to the agent's settings. The app installs its own Python runtime of about 3 GB, points Claude Code and Codex at the local proxy, and removes every change when the user quits. Customers pay for that installation, the updates and the dashboard, which the FAQ says plainly in its answer to \"Isn't this just a paid wrapper around an open-source project?\"" }, { "title": "Prices tied to the customer's AI plan", "text": "Each Headroom plan matches a Claude or ChatGPT plan: Pro for Claude Pro or ChatGPT Plus, Max x5 and Max x20 for the larger plans. The app reads the plan from the connected accounts. A heavy user who pays more for AI also pays more for Headroom, and the company prices each plan as \"a small fraction of the subscription it stretches\"." }, { "title": "Savings the user can see", "text": "The app shows the tokens saved in each session and an equivalent value at API prices. The company published a week of production data from 183 users and a blog post on how to state savings percentages honestly, and its terms warn that real savings can be far below the benchmarks." }, { "title": "Search pages and marketplaces", "text": "The sitemap lists about 25 articles and blog posts on Claude Code and Codex costs and usage limits, and comparison pages with other token-saving tools. TrustMRR shows 91,453 Google search impressions in 30 days. The founder also lists Reddit, Hacker News and Product Hunt, and the app was sold as a lifetime deal on AppSumo from September 2026." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the public desktop repository, the company's pages and the founder-written part of the TrustMRR profile. The code details are grade B; the rest is grade C.", "items": [ "A Tauri shell, a few megabytes in size, with a Rust intercept proxy on port 6767 and a managed Python backend on port 6768 that runs the Headroom engine and the rtk tool for shell output.", "The engine routes each block to a compressor by content type: SmartCrusher for JSON, an AST-based compressor for code, and Kompress-v2-base, a text compression model published on Hugging Face. Originals are stored locally so the model can retrieve them.", "Routing is set through an env block in the Claude Code settings file, a provider block in the Codex config file and a managed block in the shell profile, each with a backup before the edit.", "Optional add-ons from other open-source projects: RTK, MarkItDown, Serena, Codebase Memory, Context7, Ponytail, Caveman and Chisle. The README says only tools that run fully on the user's machine are included.", "Subscriptions through Polar; anonymous usage events through Aptabase, crash reports through Sentry and page statistics through Simple Analytics, according to the privacy policy. The founder lists React, Rust, Ruby on Rails and Python in the TrustMRR tech stack.", "Signed and notarized macOS builds; releases for macOS, Windows and Linux are published on GitHub from the same tag." ], "src": [ 8, 9, 6, 1 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold a paid improvement to developers or to users of a platform that someone else owned. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Kite DevTool", "years": "2014 to 2024", "funding": "US$21M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "AI code completion inside the developer's editor, years before GitHub Copilot.", "died": "According to the database, it never turned free users into enough paying ones, and GitHub Copilot, built on a large language model and on GitHub's own distribution, took the market.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2491-kite-devtool" }, { "name": "Fig DevTool", "years": "2020 to 2024", "funding": "US$2.4M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Autocomplete and visual command builders for the terminal.", "died": "Developers used it daily but would not pay much for a terminal improvement, since free alternatives and their own scripts existed. AWS acquired it in 2024.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2502-fig-devtool" }, { "name": "PostRocket", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$610K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Better reach for Facebook pages through data on when to post.", "died": "Its value depended on Facebook's API and algorithm. When Facebook changed them and pushed its own advertising tools, the product lost its purpose.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/457-postrocket" }, { "name": "Cushion", "years": "2017 to 2025", "funding": "US$15M", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Save consumers money by recovering bank fees automatically.", "died": "The database says banks saw it as taking revenue from them and blocked its access to accounts. A service that saves users money at a platform's cost depends on that platform's tolerance.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2466-cushion" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Before AI coding agents, developers did not pay for model tokens in their daily work. Tools such as Kite and Fig improved the editor or the terminal, and the database records that developers would not pay much for that, because the gain was small and free options existed. There was nothing to save money on.", "AI coding agents changed this. A Claude or ChatGPT plan has a usage limit per 5-hour window and per week; one reviewer quoted on the home page writes that on the US$20 a month Claude plan they occasionally hit both limits. The company's home page says that most of what uses up the limit is \"the noise your tools pump into every prompt\". A tool that cuts that output turns into extra hours of work on a plan the developer already pays for, so a small monthly price is easy to compare with the plan price. The remaining risk is the one PostRocket and Cushion faced: the product lives on top of services owned by Anthropic and OpenAI." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The pattern, yes, if the author of the engine agrees.", "text": "Headroom resells no AI access and no closed code: it packages a permissive open-source engine, with credit and with the creator's agreement according to the founder. Anyone can do the same with the same engine, and Anthropic or OpenAI can build compression into their own agents.", "steps": [ "Find a popular open-source tool that is hard to install for the people who would benefit from it, and read its license before you start.", "Ask the author first, credit the author on every page, and keep the original free path visible.", "Sell the parts the free tool lacks: one-click installation, automatic updates, clean removal and a dashboard that shows the benefit.", "Price as a small share of the bill that your product reduces, in tiers that match the customer's existing plan." ], "open": "Many open-source AI tools have the same gap between strong code and hard installation: local speech-to-text, local document search, model routers for small teams. A signed desktop app with clean removal and a clear savings or time dashboard is open in each of them." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Just above the floor", "text": "The MRR of US$2,025 is only 1.25% above the site's floor of US$2,000 a month, and verified revenue was below it in August 2026 at US$1,542. Revenue first passed US$2,000 in June 2026, so the record above the floor is about five months long, with one month below it." }, { "title": "Another person's engine and another company's platform", "text": "The compression engine belongs to the open-source Headroom project of Tejas Chopra, and the app only works with Claude Code, Codex and a few other agents. If Anthropic or OpenAI build the same compression into their agents, change their usage limits, or restrict local proxies, the product loses its reason to exist. The terms of service forbid use that breaks Anthropic's or other providers' terms." }, { "title": "What the verified figures cover", "text": "TrustMRR reads only the Polar account. AppSumo lifetime licenses, sold since September 2026 at US$29 to US$199, are billed by AppSumo and are probably not in these figures; they also bring no recurring revenue. The team size and the bootstrapped status are founder-written fields." }, { "title": "Savings claims", "text": "The home page promises about 50% on noisy items and up to twice the usage. The company's own production week shows 34% less input, and its terms say that results \"may be materially lower than any published benchmark\" and that usage can even rise." }, { "title": "For sale", "text": "The business has been listed for sale on TrustMRR since 21 July 2026 at an asking price of US$199,999, with 4 offers received. A new owner may change the product, the prices or the agreement with the engine's author." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://extraheadroom.com/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/headroom" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR markdown profile: Headroom, revenue last synced 25 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/headroom.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile live on 25 October 2026. The revenue, MRR, subscription and search figures come from Polar through an API key and from Google Search Console (grade A). The description, team size, funding, user estimate, channels, tech stack and asking price are founder-written (grade C)." }, { "title": "Headroom home page (extraheadroom.com), read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://extraheadroom.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the pricing section, the install counter, the benchmark claims and the footer credit; checked for the purpose gate." }, { "title": "Headroom: What is Headroom?, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://extraheadroom.com/what-is-headroom", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names the Headroom CLI as the engine, its Apache 2.0 license and its creator, Tejas Chopra." }, { "title": "Headroom FAQ, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://extraheadroom.com/faq", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the answers on open source, the paid wrapper question, cost, licenses and reviews." }, { "title": "Headroom terms of service, last updated 5 October 2026", "url": "https://extraheadroom.com/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names Garm Tech B.V. and its Chamber of Commerce number, Polar as payment processor, the trial, the marketplace and lifetime rules, and the savings disclaimers." }, { "title": "Headroom privacy policy, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://extraheadroom.com/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on data collected and third parties. Source for Polar, Aptabase, Sentry, Simple Analytics and Google Ads conversion tracking." }, { "title": "AppSumo: Headroom, with the founder's launch letter by Garm Lucassen", "url": "https://appsumo.com/products/headroom/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The deal prices, terms and review count are AppSumo's (grade B). The launch letter, the founding date and the company details are the founder's (grade C)." }, { "title": "GitHub: gglucass/headroom-desktop, the desktop app's repository", "url": "https://github.com/gglucass/headroom-desktop", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the README and the LICENSE file through raw.githubusercontent.com, and the creation date, stars and license through the GitHub API, on 25 October 2026." }, { "title": "GitHub: headroomlabs-ai/headroom, the open-source compression engine", "url": "https://github.com/headroomlabs-ai/headroom", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the README, the LICENSE and the NOTICE file through raw.githubusercontent.com, and the creation date, stars and license through the GitHub API, on 25 October 2026." }, { "title": "Garm.com, the site of Garm Tech B.V.", "url": "https://garm.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Lists the company's products, among them Extra Headroom, Evalship, Nommer and Criticaster, with the same Chamber of Commerce number." }, { "title": "Extra Headroom blog index, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://extraheadroom.com/blog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Every post from June to October 2026 is signed by Garm Lucassen." }, { "title": "Extra Headroom blog, Garm Lucassen, 6 October 2026: Extra Headroom in production: Input -34%, Output -33% across 183 Claude Code users", "url": "https://extraheadroom.com/blog/claude-code-savings-real-usage", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the results and method sections." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine: extraheadroom.com on 1 April 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260401150310/https://extraheadroom.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The launch-day page with the first plans and prices." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine: extraheadroom.com on 27 June 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260627130049/https://extraheadroom.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the June install counter, Codex support and the founder pricing." }, { "title": "Evalship home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://evalship.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the first screen. Another Garm Tech product (quality checks for LLM evaluations), checked for the purpose gate." }, { "title": "Nommer home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://nommer.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the first screen. Another Garm Tech product (a recipe split between two phones), checked for the purpose gate." }, { "title": "Criticaster home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://criticaster.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the first screen. Another Garm Tech product (one score from expert product reviews), checked for the purpose gate." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/recipe-one/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/recipe-one.md", "slug": "recipe-one", "name": "Recipe One", "country": "Israel", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI recipe keeper app with meal planner and grocery list", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "June 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$2.1K verified revenue in one month, September 2026", "sticker": "$2.1K in September 2026", "outcomeUsd": 25632, "months": 15, "teamLabel": "1 founder, Oren Haliva, the app's seller on the App Store and developer on Google Play; no other staff named in any source", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "documents-data", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Food and cooking" ], "product": "A phone app for home cooks. The user shares a link to a TikTok, Instagram or YouTube video, a food blog page, a photo of a cookbook page or a PDF, and the app writes out the title, ingredients and steps as a clean recipe in the user's own collection. An AI cook called Maya answers questions while the user cooks, and the app plans the week's meals and builds a grocery list from the saved recipes.", "why": "Many recipes now live in short videos, where the ingredients are spoken or shown and never written down. A model that can watch a video and write out a structured recipe turned an old app category, the recipe keeper, into something that works for these videos. One developer built it on rented models and sells it through the app stores as a subscription.", "summary": [ "Recipe One is a recipe keeper: an app that stores the recipes a person wants to cook again, in one searchable place. Its difference from older recipe keepers is the import step. The user shares a TikTok, Instagram or YouTube video, a web page, a photo or a PDF, and Google's Gemini models extract the recipe from it. For a video, the file itself goes to Gemini, which reads it directly, so the app can write out a recipe even when the creator never typed the ingredients. Around the import, the app adds cookbooks, search, a cooking mode that keeps the screen on, a meal planner, a grocery list and an AI chat assistant called Maya.", "The App Store lists the seller as Oren Haliva, and Google Play lists him as the developer, with a contact in Israel; the revenue profile names the founder as Oren. A copy of the website from 28 June 2025 already offered to extract recipes from social media and videos. Revenue is shown on TrustMRR, a site that reads a startup's sales directly from its payment provider through an API key, so the founder cannot type the figures in. Here the provider is Superwall, a service that runs the subscription screens of phone apps and records each purchase. TrustMRR reports verified revenue of US$2,136 in September 2026 and US$24,106 in total by 25 October 2026. Six months reached US$2,000 or more, with the best month, US$3,005, in January 2026.", "This page grades every number by its evidence. The revenue figures are grade A because they come from payment records. The founding month, the user counts and the plan prices come from the founder, the company's pages and the app stores. The page also shows four failed startups that tried to save recipes and web content or to sell home cooking, and what changed since then." ], "factsCaption": "A one-person recipe app that reached US$2,136 of verified revenue in September 2026 and US$24,106 in total, read from its subscription provider", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the app's payment records through Superwall, the subscription provider. A grade C value comes from the founder, the company's own pages or the app stores. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a website that promised to extract recipes from videos in June 2025 to six months at US$2,000 or more by September 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Recipe One prices in October 2026, from the in-app purchase list on the App Store page and the company's affiliate page (grade C); the website has no pricing page", "note": "The app is free to start, with a limited number of free recipe imports; the paid plan is called Recipe One Pro. The App Store lists several prices for the same plan names (Pro Annual at US$19.99, US$29.99, US$39.99 and US$49.99; Pro Monthly at US$7.99 and US$9.99); the store does not say which price applies to whom. The affiliate page uses US$39.99 a year as its example. An Unlimited purchase is listed at US$29.99, with an introductory offer at US$19.99, and its billing period is not stated. Payments go through Apple and Google.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "a limited number of free recipe imports" ], [ "Pro Annual", "3.33", "", "US$39.99 a year; also listed at 19.99, 29.99 and 49.99" ], [ "Pro Monthly", "", "9.99", "also listed at 7.99" ], [ "Unlimited", "29.99, period not stated", "", "intro offer listed at 19.99" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue, September 2026", "value": "US$2,136", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly revenue timeline, read from Superwall through an API key. Last sync 25 October 2026 at 16:01 UTC. The profile does not say whether Apple's and Google's commission is already deducted.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$24,106", "grade": "A", "note": "Just below US$25,000. The story qualifies because six months reached US$2,000 or more.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Months at or above US$2,000", "value": "6: January, February, March, June, July and September 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "US$3,005, US$2,619, US$2,783, US$2,356, US$2,190 and US$2,136.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Best month", "value": "US$3,005, January 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "Up from US$1,018 in November 2025 and US$1,153 in December 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average month, April to September 2026", "value": "about US$1,971", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: (1,981 + 1,571 + 2,356 + 2,190 + 1,592 + 2,136) / 6 = 1,971. About 30% below the January to March 2026 average of about US$2,802.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 30 days to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$1,680", "grade": "A", "note": "The profile shows -22.6% against the 30 days before. October 2026 to the 25th: US$1,378.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 25 October 2026", "value": "US$1,007", "grade": "A", "note": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is the subscription money that comes in each month, with yearly plans spread over 12 months. The profile shows +14.6% in the last 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions, 25 October 2026", "value": "357", "grade": "A", "note": "", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR per active subscription", "value": "about US$2.82 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 1,007 / 357 = 2.82. Close to a US$39.99 yearly plan (3.33 a month) with some cheaper prices, so most subscribers probably pay yearly; the profile does not show the plan mix.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "82.0%", "grade": "C", "note": "Shown on the TrustMRR profile. The profile does not say how costs are counted or who entered them, so it is graded as a founder figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founded", "value": "1 June 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder-entered date on TrustMRR. A Wayback Machine copy of the website from 28 June 2025 already describes the product.", "src": [ 1, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Users", "value": "1,000+ home cooks, 100,000+ recipes saved", "grade": "C", "note": "Company home page. TrustMRR shows 1,000 users, entered by the founder. Google Play shows 1K+ downloads.", "src": [ 4, 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Store ratings, October 2026", "value": "4.6 from 144 ratings (App Store); 4.4 from 194 reviews (Google Play)", "grade": "C", "note": "", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions investors. The founder's only app on both stores is Recipe One.", "src": [ 1, 10, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the September 2026 figure", "value": "15 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: June 2025 to September 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "1 June 2025", "what": "Founding date that the founder entered on TrustMRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "28 June 2025", "what": "The earliest Wayback Machine copy of recipeone.app: \"Never lose a recipe with Recipe One. Extract recipes from any social media, videos, images, or text, and instantly get a structured, organized recipe for your recipes library.\"", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "First month in the verified timeline: US$1,018. Version 1.3.2 adds a banner that shows how many free recipes are left.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "December 2025", "what": "US$1,153. Version 1.4.2 adds accounts, sync between devices and sign-in with Apple and Google.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "January 2026", "what": "Best month so far: US$3,005.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "March 2026", "what": "US$2,783. Version 1.5.0 translates recipes into 18 languages and converts units automatically; version 1.5.1 adds iPad support.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "April and May 2026", "what": "Revenue falls to US$1,981 and US$1,571. Version 1.7.2 improves imports from websites, Pinterest and social pages.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "June and July 2026", "what": "US$2,356 and US$2,190.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "18 September 2026", "what": "Version 2.0 adds a meal planner, a grocery list sorted by supermarket aisle and an AI chef. September revenue: US$2,136.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "15 October 2026", "what": "Version 2.0.2 names the AI chef Maya; she remembers the user's diet and allergies. The terms of service, updated the same day, say the service does not give medical, nutritional or dietary advice.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 6 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR: US$24,106 in total, US$1,680 in the last 30 days, MRR US$1,007 and 357 active subscriptions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Video became readable", "text": "A recipe in a short video is spoken or shown on screen, not written. The privacy policy says the app uploads the video of a social media post to Google's Gemini Files API, and that Gemini reads YouTube videos directly. A model that reads video is what lets one developer offer import from TikTok and Instagram, the places where the home page says recipes hide." }, { "title": "An old category with a new import step", "text": "Recipe keepers are an old app category, and the App Store page lists ten similar apps next to this one. The organizing features (cookbooks, search, cooking mode, PDF export) are common to these apps. The import from videos, photos and scanned pages is the part that needs a model." }, { "title": "Subscriptions through the app stores", "text": "The app is free to start and sells Pro subscriptions through Apple and Google, with Superwall running the subscription screens and recording each purchase. TrustMRR read those records: 357 active subscriptions and US$1,007 of monthly recurring revenue on 25 October 2026." }, { "title": "Rented services instead of staff", "text": "The privacy policy names the parts: Gemini for the AI, Firebase and Google Cloud for sign-in, the database and files, Apify to fetch social media posts, Superwall for subscriptions, Mixpanel for analytics, AppStack for ad attribution and Expo for notifications. Each one replaces work a team would otherwise do." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's privacy policy, the App Store version history and the founder-entered technology list on TrustMRR. They are grade C.", "items": [ "App: built with Expo, a framework for writing one React Native app for both iPhone and Android (TrustMRR technology list). The App Store page lists English and 18 more languages.", "AI: Google's Gemini models through the Gemini API extract recipes from links, videos, photos and PDFs, translate recipes and estimate nutrition; the AI chef runs through Firebase AI Logic. The privacy policy says user content is not used to train models.", "Fetching posts: Apify, a web-data service, retrieves the posts, captions and videos behind TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest links that users save.", "Back end: Firebase and Google Cloud for sign-in, database, file storage and servers. The website runs on Vercel, with PostHog and Vercel Analytics for website measurement and Airtable for a waitlist.", "Money and growth: Superwall for paywalls and subscription management, Mixpanel for product analytics, and AppStack to see which ads lead to installs. The privacy policy says the company advertises on Apple Ads, Meta, Google and TikTok.", "Other ways in: a Chrome extension that saves the recipe from the page in the browser, a connector that lets ChatGPT, Claude and Cursor read and edit the user's recipes, about ten free web tools (unit converters, a nutrition calculator, a recipe cleaner) and a private affiliate program for food creators that pays 30% to 50% of what referred users pay." ], "src": [ 1, 5, 2, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to save recipes and web content in one place, or to make home cooking easier, before models could read a video. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Springpad", "years": "2008 to 2014", "funding": "US$7.5M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Collect, organize and find everything from web articles to recipes in one place.", "died": "Users liked the free product, but the company could not find features that people would pay for, and Evernote moved faster. It ran out of money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1893-springpad" }, { "name": "Kippt", "years": "2012 to 2017", "funding": "US$400K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A bookmarking tool to save, organize and share web content.", "died": "Pocket and Evernote offered more complete products, and its social features did not bring new users on their own.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/278-kippt" }, { "name": "Delicious", "years": "2003 to 2017", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Save and tag web links from anywhere and share them.", "died": "After Yahoo bought it, development stalled. It was slow to move to phones, where people started to save things inside each app.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2009-delicious" }, { "name": "Dinnr", "years": "2012 to 2013", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Same-day delivery of pre-measured ingredients with a recipe.", "died": "Same-day delivery needed a logistics network and stock that a small company could not pay for, and growth outside its first city made it worse.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1984-dinnr" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Springpad, Kippt and Delicious saved links and web pages. They stored what the page already said, and when the content moved into apps and videos, a saved link stopped being useful. Springpad also shows the money problem: people liked a free place to save things, and few paid for it.", "Two things are different for Recipe One. First, a model can now read a video or a photo and write out the recipe, so the saved item is a usable recipe, not a link. Second, the app sells a subscription through the app stores from the first import, with a free limit, instead of hoping to charge later. Dinnr tried to solve home cooking with ingredients and delivery trucks; Recipe One is software only, so its costs are the rented model and services, and TrustMRR shows an 82.0% margin for the last 30 days." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, the method is easy to copy, and many have.", "text": "The App Store page lists ten similar recipe-saving apps next to this one; one of them, Plum, describes itself as saving Instagram and YouTube videos. The models and fetching services that Recipe One uses can be rented by anyone. What one developer can still build is a better import for hard cases, a cleaner app and steady distribution. Revenue here also shows the limit of a crowded category: it peaked in January 2026 and has stayed near US$2,000 a month since April, according to TrustMRR.", "steps": [ "Find an old app category where the hard step is reading messy input, such as a video, a photo or a scanned page.", "Use a model that reads that input to do the hard step, and build the familiar app around it.", "Charge through the app stores with a free limit, and use a subscription tool that records every purchase.", "Add many small ways in: free web tools that rank in search, a browser extension, a connector for AI assistants and an affiliate program for creators." ], "open": "The same import step can work for other content that lives in videos: workout routines, craft and sewing instructions, home repair steps, or language lessons. Each needs a structured format at the end, the way a recipe has ingredients and steps." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue fell from its January peak", "text": "TrustMRR shows US$3,005 in January 2026 and an average of about US$1,971 from April to September 2026, about 30% lower. The last 30 days to 25 October 2026 were US$1,680. Monthly recurring revenue rose 14.6% in the same 30 days, so the next months will show the direction." }, { "title": "Gross or net is not stated", "text": "The figures come from Superwall, which records app-store purchases. The profile does not say whether Apple's and Google's commission is already taken off, so the money the developer keeps may be lower than these figures." }, { "title": "Other creators' recipes", "text": "The app copies a recipe from another creator's video or page into the user's own collection. The app pages describe saving for personal use, sharing with friends and family, and PDF export; the website's sitemap lists 145 pages (tools, blog posts and legal pages) and no public recipe pages, so the app does not republish the recipes it imports. The terms tell users to check an imported recipe against its original source." }, { "title": "Depends on other platforms", "text": "Imports from TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest go through Apify, and the AI through Google's Gemini. A change in those platforms' access rules or in Gemini's prices would hit the core feature." }, { "title": "Affiliate page shows an income chart", "text": "The affiliate page for food creators has a chart titled \"Your Affiliate Income\" with an axis up to 8k and a rising line, next to a worked example of US$240 a month for 1,000 readers at a 2% purchase rate and the words \"Real payouts vary by country, plan, taxes, refunds, and localized pricing\". It is a commission program for creators with an audience, not a promise to users." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.recipeone.app/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6743317601" }, { "kind": "android", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.recipeapp.ai" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/recipe-one" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: Recipe One profile, Superwall-verified revenue (data as of 25 October 2026)", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/recipe-one", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile (https://trustmrr.com/startup/recipe-one.md) in full, once, on 25 October 2026. Grade A for the metrics in its Verification Sources section (Superwall API key, not merchant of record, revenue last synced 25 October 2026 at 16:01 UTC). The description, founder name, founded date, user estimate and technology list are founder-written, grade C." }, { "title": "App Store: Recipe One: Recipe Keeper, by oren haliva", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/recipe-one/id6743317601", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Source for the seller name, the description, the version history with dates, the ratings and the in-app purchase prices." }, { "title": "Google Play: Recipe One: Recipe Keeper, by Oren Haliva", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.recipeapp.ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Source for the developer name and country, the download count and the rating." }, { "title": "Recipe One home page", "url": "https://www.recipeone.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026, including the questions and answers. Source for the product description, Maya and the user counts." }, { "title": "Recipe One privacy policy", "url": "https://www.recipeone.app/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Source for the AI models, the service providers, the Chrome extension, the AI assistant connector and the advertising platforms." }, { "title": "Recipe One terms of service, last updated 15 October 2026", "url": "https://www.recipeone.app/tos", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the AI accuracy section and the statement that the service gives no medical, nutritional or dietary advice." }, { "title": "Recipe One affiliate program", "url": "https://www.recipeone.app/affiliates", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Source for the commission tiers, the US$39.99 yearly price example and the income chart." }, { "title": "Recipe One: Just the Recipe, a free web tool", "url": "https://www.recipeone.app/just-the-recipe", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Shows that the web tool displays a cleaned recipe and saves nothing on the page." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of recipeone.app, 28 June 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250628115253/https://www.recipeone.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The earliest archived copy of the website; source for the first product description." }, { "title": "App Store developer page: oren haliva", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/oren-haliva/id1802181552", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Lists one app, Recipe One." }, { "title": "Google Play developer page: Oren Haliva", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Oren+Haliva", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Lists one app, Recipe One." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/motionfly/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/motionfly.md", "slug": "motionfly", "name": "Motionfly", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI generator of product launch videos", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "April 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$2.04K verified revenue in one month, August 2026", "sticker": "$2.04K in August 2026", "outcomeUsd": 2037, "months": 4, "teamLabel": "1 named founder, Natnael Girma (NATE G on TrustMRR); no other staff named", "fundingLabel": "None found; listed for sale on TrustMRR since June 2026", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "video", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Video" ], "product": "A web editor and a Mac app that turn a written description of a product into a short launch video: 3D phone and laptop mockups of the product's screens, animated text and logos, background music, sound effects and a synthetic voiceover. On the Premium and Studio plans, the user can also ask Claude or ChatGPT for the video, and the AI app builds it through the Motionfly desktop app.", "why": "It serves one narrow need: a founder who is about to launch a product and has no launch video. The About page says a motion design studio costs US$3,000 to US$10,000 for such a video; Motionfly sells plans from US$29 a month. Stripe data shows three months at or just above US$2,000 of revenue from June to August 2026, then a fall.", "summary": [ "Motionfly makes product launch videos, the 30 to 90 second clips that a company posts when it releases a product, for example on Product Hunt, on X or on its own landing page. Such clips are usually made by a motion designer, a person who animates text, logos and screen images with tools such as After Effects. Motionfly replaces that work with software: the user writes a description of the product, and the program writes a script, places the product's screenshots in 3D mockups (computer-drawn phones and laptops that show the screenshots on their screens), animates the text and adds music, sound effects and an AI voiceover. Since October 2026 a Mac app also connects to Claude and ChatGPT through MCP, the Model Context Protocol, a standard way for an AI chat app to call tools in another program, so the user can ask for the video in the chat.", "The About page says Motionfly was created by Natnael Girma, a software engineer; the terms and the privacy policy give only his address natnael@motionfly.co and name no company. An archived copy shows a waitlist page on 22 March 2026. Revenue started in April 2026. TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a company's payment provider, shows Stripe revenue of US$2,338 in June 2026, US$2,147 in July and US$2,037 in August, then US$1,904 in September. On 25 October 2026 it showed US$2,004 in the last 30 days and MRR (monthly recurring revenue, the subscription revenue of one month) of US$2,005 from 47 active subscriptions.", "The headline number is grade A, but it is small and not growing: only three months reached US$2,000, and September was 18.6% below June. The founder has listed the business for sale on TrustMRR since 24 June 2026 at US$20,000. From 2024 to 2025 the same domain showed a different business, a video editing service with a team of editors; no source this page read says who owned it. The page also shows four failed companies that tried to make animation or marketing video cheap before AI could generate it." ], "factsCaption": "Three months at or just above US$2,000 of Stripe revenue in the first five months, then a slow fall, for a one-person video generator", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from Stripe, the payment processor, through TrustMRR's connection to the company's Stripe account. A grade B value is visible in the public code of the company's web editor. A grade C value is a statement by the company on its own pages or a value the founder typed into his TrustMRR profile. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a waitlist page in March 2026 to US$2,037 of verified revenue in August 2026, in four months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Motionfly plans in October 2026, read from the script that draws the pricing page of the web editor (grade C)", "note": "The pricing page at editor.motionfly.co is drawn by a script, so the plans were read from that script. Plan names in the script differ from the names shown: the plan shown as Premium is stored as \"studio\" and the plan shown as Studio is stored as \"enterprise\". The yearly prices are 290, 386 and 1,490 US dollars a year; the table divides them by 12. The free plan gives no AI tokens: an error message in the script reads \"0/month on free tier\". AI voiceover and sound effects are listed only in the Studio plan. Connecting Claude or ChatGPT needs the Premium or Studio plan, and the user's own Claude or ChatGPT subscription pays for that model.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "editor only, 0 AI tokens a month" ], [ "Pro", "24.17", "29", "60-second videos, 10 exports in 4K and 20 in 1080p a month, 5,000 AI tokens" ], [ "Premium", "32.17", "59", "90-second videos, unlimited exports, 40,000 AI tokens, video built by your own Claude Code or Codex" ], [ "Studio", "124.17", "149", "unlimited length, 4K, voiceover and sound effects, 100,000 AI tokens, video built by Motionfly's agents" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue, August 2026", "value": "US$2,037", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly revenue timeline, from the Stripe account through an API key. Stripe is not the merchant of record. The latest full month at or above US$2,000.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, June 2026 (best month)", "value": "US$2,338", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly revenue timeline.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, July 2026", "value": "US$2,147", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly revenue timeline.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, April and May 2026", "value": "US$200 and US$1,208", "grade": "A", "note": "The first two months with revenue.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, September 2026", "value": "US$1,904", "grade": "A", "note": "Below the US$2,000 floor of this site.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, 1 to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$1,697", "grade": "A", "note": "A partial month; the profile was synced on 25 October 2026 at 16:16 UTC.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Fall from June to September 2026", "value": "18.6%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: (1,904 minus 2,338) divided by 2,338. August was 12.9% below June.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 30 days to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$2,004", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR shows growth of 3.0% against the 30 days before. This figure is 14.3% below June 2026 (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR, 25 October 2026", "value": "US$2,005 from 47 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR metric snapshot from Stripe.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average MRR per active subscription", "value": "about US$42.66", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2,005 divided by 47. Between the Pro price of US$29 and the Premium price of US$59.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Payments by day, 26 September to 25 October 2026", "value": "largest day US$277; 6 of 30 days with no revenue", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR daily revenue table. Most days show amounts such as US$29, US$49, US$50, US$58 or US$79, which match single plan payments, so the last 30 days came from many small payments, not one contract. TrustMRR does not publish customer counts for June to August.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$11,531", "grade": "A", "note": "Equals the sum of the seven monthly figures (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the August 2026 figure", "value": "about US$24,444 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2,037 times 12. Revenue has been lower since then.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "75%", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot. Revenue comes from Stripe, but the costs behind the margin are not shown as verified.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founded date", "value": "20 April 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Typed by the founder into the TrustMRR profile. The first Stripe revenue is in April 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the headline figure", "value": "4 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: April 2026 to August 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founder", "value": "Natnael Girma, software engineer", "grade": "C", "note": "Named on the company's About page. The terms and privacy policy name no company and give the address natnael@motionfly.co. TrustMRR lists the founder as NATE G with the handle natnaelgirma27.", "src": [ 3, 5, 6, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price on TrustMRR", "value": "US$20,000, listed on 24 June 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "The profile shows 17 offers received and a multiple of 0.8. Calculated: 20,000 divided by (2,004 times 12) is 0.83. An asking price is not a sale.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions investors.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "March 2024 to April 2025", "what": "Archived copies of motionfly.co show a different business named MotionFly: first flat-rate motion graphics services, then on-demand video editing by a team of editors. No source names its owner, and no source links it to the current product.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12, 13 ] }, { "when": "22 March 2026", "what": "An archived copy shows a waitlist page: motion design videos for product launches and SaaS explainers from prompts, with AI voiceover and 3D mockups.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "April 2026", "what": "First Stripe revenue, US$200. The founder gives 20 April 2026 as the founding date.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "May 2026", "what": "Revenue rises to US$1,208. The terms of service, dated 7 May 2026, call the product a beta.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "Best month so far: US$2,338. On 24 June the founder lists the business for sale on TrustMRR at US$20,000.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "11 July 2026", "what": "An archived copy shows the current title, AI Product Launch Video Generator, and a new web app.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "July and August 2026", "what": "US$2,147 and US$2,037 of verified revenue.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "Revenue falls to US$1,904.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "22 October 2026", "what": "Version 0.2.1 of the Mac app, with a screen recorder, local rendering and a connection to Claude and ChatGPT.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 8 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "US$2,004 in the last 30 days and MRR of US$2,005 from 47 active subscriptions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "One narrow use case", "text": "Motionfly does not sell general AI video. Every page is about one moment: the launch of a software product or app. The use-case pages name the places where such a video is posted (Product Hunt, the App Store, a landing page), and the About page names the cost it replaces, US$3,000 to US$10,000 for a studio. A narrow product lets one person build templates, 3D devices and animations that fit that one kind of video." }, { "title": "The AI writes code for a video, not pixels", "text": "The editor's public script shows that a video is a set of animated layers drawn with Remotion, a library that renders video from React code, and with Three.js for the 3D devices. The AI fills in the scenes, the text and the timing. The result is sharp text and real screenshots, which image-generating video models still draw badly." }, { "title": "The customer's AI subscription does part of the work", "text": "On the Premium plan the video is built by the customer's own Claude Code or Codex over MCP. The company's MCP page says the user's own Claude or ChatGPT subscription pays for the model, so it does not use the Motionfly budget. This moves model cost from the seller to the buyer." }, { "title": "Small, frequent subscriptions", "text": "The Stripe data on TrustMRR shows 47 active subscriptions and daily payments of a few tens of dollars, not a few large contracts. Revenue is therefore spread over many customers, but each one pays little, and a launch video is a need that ends after the launch." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the public script of the web editor (grade B), the company's pages and the founder-written part of the TrustMRR profile (grade C).", "items": [ "React for the front end and Node.js for the back end, according to the tech stack on the TrustMRR profile.", "Remotion, a library that renders video frames from React components, draws the videos; the editor's script contains its code and error messages.", "Three.js release 170, a 3D graphics library for the browser, draws the phone, laptop, tablet and watch mockups.", "Supabase, a hosted Postgres database with login and file storage, holds the accounts and the uploaded logos and screenshots.", "The voiceover uses ElevenLabs: the editor shows a picker titled ElevenLabs voice with a list of stock voices. The script has no voice-cloning, face or avatar feature.", "The Mac app runs a local MCP server on the user's computer. A small bridge inside the app writes a motionfly entry into the configuration of Claude Code, Codex and the Claude desktop app each time it starts.", "Stripe takes the subscription payments, and TrustMRR reads them through an API key." ], "src": [ 1, 4, 7, 8 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to make animation or marketing video cheaper for small teams before AI could generate it. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "ClearMix", "years": "2020 to 2023", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Professional marketing videos for businesses, made quickly and cheaply by a network of freelance videographers and editors.", "died": "Canva and Adobe added video tools, AI editing tools automated the manual steps, and a network of freelancers was hard and costly to scale.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1336-clearmix" }, { "name": "Fuzzwich", "years": "2007 to 2010", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Animated videos for casual users and small businesses, made by drag and drop with ready-made characters and scenes.", "died": "It could not grow beyond early users, stayed on the desktop while viewing moved to phones and social media, and had no follow-on funding.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1655-fuzzwich" }, { "name": "Real Artists", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$3M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A cloud animation studio that let small studios and independent artists produce animation without expensive software.", "died": "Large software makers added collaboration features to tools that customers already used, and small customers could not pay enough to fund growth.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1073-real-artists" }, { "name": "Haiku", "years": "2018 to 2021", "funding": "US$1.2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "High-quality interface animations made by designers and exported directly as code.", "died": "Figma and Adobe XD added prototyping and animation features, and the 2020 downturn ended its search for more funding.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1013-haiku" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The four predecessors made the animator's tools easier or cheaper, but a person still had to design every scene: ClearMix paid freelancers, Fuzzwich and Real Artists gave users characters and timelines to arrange, and Haiku gave designers a better editor. Each one competed with Adobe on Adobe's own ground, a tool for people who animate, and each one lost to Adobe, Canva or Figma.", "Language models can now write the scene description and the code that animates it. Motionfly uses this to remove the designer from the simplest kind of marketing video, a product launch clip with screenshots, text and a voice. The founder did not need a studio or a team of editors, which the business on the same domain in 2025 still advertised. The limit is also visible: the same technology lets any founder ask a general AI agent for such a video, and Stripe data shows Motionfly's revenue stopped growing after three months." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. This exact product, with care.", "text": "Building a narrow AI tool for one kind of video, with a free editor and monthly plans, needs only one engineer and almost no capital. But the market is crowded, launch videos are bought once per launch, and general AI agents can already write the same kind of animation code. The founder's own sale listing asks US$20,000, which TrustMRR shows as 0.8 times yearly revenue: the last 30 days times 12 is US$24,048 (calculated).", "steps": [ "Pick one video format that businesses need and that follows rules: launch clips, App Store previews, feature announcements.", "Let the AI write the scene and animation code, and render it with a video library, so text and screenshots stay sharp.", "Offer a free editor and charge for AI generation, exports and audio.", "Connect to the AI chat apps that customers already pay for, so they carry part of the model cost." ], "open": "Formats where the rules are strict and the need repeats: App Store preview videos in many languages, release-note videos for every product update, and onboarding clips that must change whenever the interface changes." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Small and falling", "text": "Only June, July and August 2026 reached US$2,000. September was 18.6% below June, and October was at US$1,697 on 25 October. The last 30 days rose 3.0%, so the fall may be slowing, but no month since June has been higher than the one before." }, { "title": "For sale", "text": "The founder has listed the business on TrustMRR since 24 June 2026 at US$20,000, with 17 offers shown. A new owner could change the product, the prices or the team, and this page would then describe a different business." }, { "title": "Who owns the domain's past", "text": "Archived copies from 2024 and 2025 show motionfly.co selling flat-rate motion graphics and on-demand video editing by a team of editors, with the address support@motionfly.com. No source this page read says whether that service had the same owner. Its revenue is not in the Stripe data, which starts in April 2026." }, { "title": "Founder identity rests on the company's own page", "text": "The About page names Natnael Girma, and the contact address on the terms and privacy pages is natnael@motionfly.co. Both terms and privacy policy say they are summaries still being finalized, and no company name or registration appears on any page this page read." }, { "title": "Brand names in the showcase", "text": "The showcase lists videos titled Gemini launch video, Google Drive launch video and GPT 5.5 Announcement video recreated. The site does not say that Google or OpenAI are customers, and only the GPT 5.5 video is labelled as recreated. A reader should treat these as demonstrations, not as customer references." }, { "title": "One-time need, many competitors", "text": "A company needs a launch video once per launch, so subscriptions may end after the launch. General AI agents such as Claude Code can already write Remotion animation code without a separate product, which Motionfly itself relies on in its Premium plan." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://motionfly.co/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/motionfly" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR markdown profile: Motionfly (Stripe API key, synced 25 October 2026)", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/motionfly.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile on 25 October 2026. The revenue tables, the MRR and the subscription count are grade A; the founded date, tech stack, channels, profit margin and sale listing are founder-entered or listing data, grade C." }, { "title": "Motionfly home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://motionfly.co/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product description, the plans that include the desktop app and the connection to Claude and ChatGPT." }, { "title": "About Motionfly, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://motionfly.co/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names Natnael Girma as the creator. Source for the studio cost that the product replaces." }, { "title": "Motionfly web editor and its pricing script, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://editor.motionfly.co/", "grade": "C", "how": "The pricing page is drawn by a script; the plan names, prices and limits were read from that script. The same public script shows the libraries used (Remotion, Three.js, Supabase) and the ElevenLabs voice picker, graded B for the stack." }, { "title": "Motionfly terms of service, last updated 7 May 2026", "url": "https://motionfly.co/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A short beta summary with the contact address; no company name." }, { "title": "Motionfly privacy policy, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://motionfly.co/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A summary being finalized, with the same contact address; no company name." }, { "title": "Motionfly for desktop, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://motionfly.co/desktop", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for version 0.2.1 of 22 October 2026, local rendering and the screen recorder." }, { "title": "Motionfly MCP troubleshooting page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://motionfly.co/mcp", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for how the desktop app connects to Claude Code, Codex and Claude, and for who pays for the model." }, { "title": "Motionfly showcase, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://motionfly.co/showcase", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the list of video titles. Cited for the brand names in the showcase." }, { "title": "Motionfly use case: AI product launch video generator, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://motionfly.co/use-cases/product-launch-video", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the launch-video use case and the stated cost of a studio video." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of motionfly.co, 22 March 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260322075630/https://www.motionfly.co/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Shows the waitlist page before revenue started." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of motionfly.co, 28 March 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240328010526/https://www.motionfly.co/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Shows the earlier flat-rate motion graphics service on the same domain." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of motionfly.co, 9 April 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250409125339/https://www.motionfly.co/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Shows the earlier on-demand video editing service with a team of editors." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of motionfly.co, 11 July 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260711013037/https://motionfly.co/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the first part. Shows the AI product launch video generator and the new web app." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/road-to-offer/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/road-to-offer.md", "slug": "road-to-offer", "name": "Road to Offer", "country": "France", "sector": "Education", "productType": "AI case-interview practice for consulting candidates", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "16 January 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$3.8K a month recurring revenue, October 2026", "sticker": "$3.8K MRR, one founder", "outcomeUsd": 45096, "months": 9, "teamLabel": "1 founder, who wrote that he works full time elsewhere, with former consultants reviewing the content", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Search", "group": "learning", "channel": "search", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Education" ], "product": "A practice site for people who apply to strategy consulting firms such as McKinsey, BCG and Bain. An AI interviewer runs a business case with the candidate, out loud or step by step, and then scores the answer on 7 skills. The site also sells timed drills, practice versions of the firms' online tests, a resume grader and practice for behavioral questions.", "why": "Candidates for consulting jobs need dozens of practice cases, and the usual options are a free peer partner of uneven quality or a coach who charges US$100 to US$300 an hour. A language model can play the interviewer at any hour for US$49 a month. The founder wrote that the customers come from search: the sitemap lists 596 blog pages written for Google and for AI assistants.", "summary": [ "Road to Offer sells practice for the case interview, the interview format of strategy consulting firms: the interviewer describes a business problem, for example a falling profit, and the candidate must structure it, ask for data, do the calculations out loud and give a recommendation. On Road to Offer an AI interviewer, a language model that is instructed to act like a consulting interviewer, asks the questions, shows charts and tables, pushes back and then writes a debrief that scores 7 skills. The site has 71 practice cases, more than 550 short drills and practice versions of 8 online assessments, the tests and games that firms send before the first interview.", "The founder is Esteban Ronsin. The company's pages say that he worked at Deloitte and then in strategy consulting at Accenture, and that former McKinsey, BCG and Bain consultants review the cases and the grading. TrustMRR gives 16 January 2026 as the founding date. TrustMRR is a site that reads a startup's revenue directly from its payment provider; here the provider is Stripe, connected with an API key. On 25 October 2026 it showed US$3,758 of monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the subscription revenue that repeats every month) from 85 active subscriptions, US$5,575 of revenue in the last 30 days and US$18,436 in total. Monthly revenue rose from US$79 in February 2026 to US$4,524 in August and US$4,923 in October up to the 25th.", "The revenue figures on this page are grade A because they come from the payment provider through TrustMRR. The team, the founder's background and the user counts are the company's own statements. The business has been listed for sale on TrustMRR since 13 May 2026 at US$100,000. The page also shows five failed companies that sold test preparation, tutoring or job-seeker tools before a model could play the examiner." ], "factsCaption": "US$3,758 of monthly recurring revenue nine months after the founding date, read from Stripe by TrustMRR, built by one founder", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read from the company's Stripe account by TrustMRR. A grade B value is visible in a public file or a public register. A grade C value is a statement by the founder or by the company's own pages. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From the founding date to US$3,758 of monthly recurring revenue in 9 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Road to Offer prices on 25 October 2026, from the home, pricing and about pages (grade C). The pricing page loads the monthly price by script; the US$49 comes from the text of the home page and the about page.", "note": "Every paid plan includes unlimited cases, drills, voice practice and Coach chat. The 90-Day Sprint showed a recruiting-season offer: US$120 instead of US$199. The test packs are one-time purchases with lifetime access; the Casey pack carries a refund of 50% if the candidate does not pass BCG's Casey test, under conditions in the terms. Subscriptions without a free trial can be refunded within 7 days if fewer than 2 full cases and 10 drills were used.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "One full case with a scored debrief, daily drills, one resume review, one run in each test simulator" ], [ "Monthly Pro", "", "49", "Unlimited cases, drills, voice practice and Coach chat" ], [ "90-Day Sprint", "120 one-time", "", "90 days of Pro, with the Casey, CCA and SOVA test practice included" ], [ "Annual Pro", "20.75", "", "US$249 a year, all test practice included, even McKinsey Solve" ], [ "Behavioral Unlimited", "", "39", "Behavioral and fit interview practice" ], [ "Solve Pack", "79 one-time", "", "Every McKinsey Solve practice game" ], [ "Casey, BCG", "69 one-time", "", "Chatbot case simulations" ], [ "CCA, BCG", "49 one-time", "", "Six timed numerical simulations" ], [ "Bain prep", "49 one-time", "", "SOVA-style and TestGorilla-style practice, 238 original questions" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 25 October 2026", "value": "US$3,758", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from Stripe through an API key. Revenue last synced 25 October 2026. MRR growth over the last 30 days: +33.5%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions, 25 October 2026", "value": "85", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, from the same Stripe connection.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average MRR per subscription", "value": "about US$44", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 3,758 divided by 85 equals 44.2. Close to the US$49 monthly price; yearly plans count as US$20.75 a month.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue run rate", "value": "about US$45,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 3,758 times 12 equals 45,096. This counts only subscriptions. One-time packs and sprints come on top.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, last 30 days to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$5,575", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. Growth over the previous 30 days: +58.5%. It includes one-time purchases, so it is higher than the MRR.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue, February to June 2026", "value": "US$79, US$256, US$971, US$526, US$1,389", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue, July to October 2026", "value": "US$2,246, US$4,524, US$3,523, US$4,923", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. The October value covers 1 to 25 October only.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, all time to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$18,436", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. The last 12 months and all time are the same figure, so all revenue is from 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Share of all revenue earned in the last 3 months", "value": "71%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 13,088 (last 3 months on TrustMRR) divided by 18,436 equals 0.71.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "September compared with August 2026", "value": "22% lower", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 3,523 divided by 4,524 equals 0.78. October passed August within 25 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founding date", "value": "16 January 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Entered by the founder on TrustMRR. The first verified revenue is in February 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 founder", "grade": "C", "note": "The about page names Esteban Ronsin as founder and the only member of the team section; former consultants build and review the cases and the grading. TrustMRR gives no team size.", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions investors or a funding round. The seller wrote on TrustMRR that he is working full time and has no time to grow the business.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "90%", "grade": "C", "note": "A TrustMRR snapshot. TrustMRR lists revenue, MRR, customers, subscriptions and churn as payment-verified; costs are not in that list, so this page grades the margin C.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Visitors, last 30 days", "value": "8,937", "grade": "B", "note": "TrustMRR, from the DataFast analytics API. The profile shows US$0.10 of revenue per visitor, but 5,575 divided by 8,937 equals 0.62, so the two figures do not agree.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price", "value": "US$100,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Listed for sale on TrustMRR since 13 May 2026. TrustMRR shows 12 offers received.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price as a multiple of yearly revenue", "value": "1.5 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 100,000 divided by (5,575 times 12, which is 66,900) equals 1.49. TrustMRR shows the same 1.5x.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Practice content", "value": "71 cases, 550+ drills, 8 test formats", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page. The stats page counts 631 drill records, 540 of them active, and 61 cases that work in voice mode.", "src": [ 2, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Candidates reached and practice sessions", "value": "14,000+ candidates, 30,000+ sessions", "grade": "C", "note": "Company stats page, updated 9 June 2026. TrustMRR's own field for estimated users shows 0.", "src": [ 6, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Blog pages in the sitemap", "value": "596", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: count of the /blog/ addresses among 693 addresses in sitemap.xml, read 25 October 2026.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "In-app rating", "value": "4.5 out of 5 from 242 ratings", "grade": "C", "note": "Ratings in the 90 days before 20 September 2026, as stated by the company. It says this is not a Trustpilot score.", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "fact": "Months from founding date to the headline figure", "value": "9", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: January 2026 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "16 January 2026", "what": "Founding date entered on TrustMRR. The company's pages say the founder came from Deloitte and from strategy consulting at Accenture.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "when": "February 2026", "what": "First verified revenue: US$79. The sitemap's oldest last-changed dates are from 5 February 2026.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 11 ] }, { "when": "April 2026", "what": "US$971 of revenue in the month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "13 May 2026", "what": "The founder lists the business for sale on TrustMRR. The asking price on 25 October is US$100,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "9 June 2026", "what": "The company's stats page claims more than 14,000 candidates reached and more than 30,000 practice sessions.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "July 2026", "what": "US$2,246 of revenue, the first month above US$2,000.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "August 2026", "what": "US$4,524 of revenue. From 11 August the Casey test pack carries a guarantee: pass BCG's Casey test or get 50% back.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "US$3,523 of revenue. The terms and the privacy policy are updated on 27 and 25 September.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 7, 8 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "US$3,758 of MRR from 85 subscriptions, US$5,575 in the last 30 days, US$4,923 in October so far.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A narrow interview with a high price of failure", "text": "The product serves one kind of interview at one kind of employer. The about page compares it with private coaches who charge US$100 to US$300 an hour; the home page frames the price against a consulting salary. The home page says candidates need dozens of repetitions, which would cost hundreds or thousands with live coaching." }, { "title": "The model plays the interviewer", "text": "A case interview needs a second person who knows the case, asks follow-up questions and judges the answer. Peer platforms match two candidates, and the feedback depends on the partner. Here a language model takes that role and scores every case on the same 7 skills. The privacy policy names OpenRouter and Groq for AI processing and voice transcription, and OpenAI for fallback and voice audio." }, { "title": "Search pages as the sales channel", "text": "The seller's message on TrustMRR describes the business as \"SEO driven automatic marketing\" and claims a number 1 ranking in AI assistants. The sitemap lists 596 blog pages about firms, frameworks and tests, plus free drills, calculators and one free run of each test simulator. The home page even asks visitors to ask ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity whether the product is worth it." }, { "title": "Prices shaped by the recruiting season", "text": "Candidates prepare for a few months and then stop. Next to the monthly plan, the site sells a 90-day sprint, a yearly plan and one-time packs for each firm's online test, so a candidate can pay once for one season. In the last 30 days the revenue was US$5,575 while the MRR was US$3,758. The difference comes from payments that are not monthly, such as sprints, packs and yearly plans paid in advance; this is this page's reading, not a TrustMRR figure." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the TrustMRR profile, the company's privacy policy and its public pages. They are grade C, except the payment provider, which TrustMRR confirms.", "items": [ "Next.js for the web app, according to the TrustMRR technology list, which also names React Native. The privacy policy names Vercel for hosting; TrustMRR also lists Railway.", "Supabase for the database and login, Stripe for payments, Sentry for error monitoring, PostHog for product analytics and session replay, Resend for email and Crisp for support chat.", "OpenRouter and Groq for the model calls and voice transcription, and OpenAI for fallback paths and voice audio. The voice mode lets the candidate speak the case out loud; the Casey practice records a 60-second spoken recommendation and scores it from a transcript.", "The cases and test simulations are original content. The McKinsey Sea Wolf page says it is built from public information about the format and does not reproduce confidential McKinsey questions.", "About 600 blog pages in English, plus French, Spanish and German home pages, for search engines and AI assistants. Ahrefs, Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising appear in the privacy policy for analytics and advertising measurement.", "Self-serve only: support by email and a contact form, with no scheduled calls." ], "src": [ 1, 8, 9, 10, 11 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold test preparation, tutoring or tools for job seekers before a language model could act as the examiner. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Grockit", "years": "2007 to 2015", "funding": "US$44.4M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Social, game-like preparation for the SAT, GMAT and other standardized tests, where students study together and get personalized feedback.", "died": "The database says Kaplan bought it in 2013 and the product faded inside the larger company. The database lists competition as the cause.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/196-grockit" }, { "name": "Tutorspree", "years": "2011 to 2015", "funding": "US$1.9M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "An online marketplace that matched students with good tutors.", "died": "It never reached enough tutors and students for the matching to work, and it faced many competitors.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/672-tutorspree" }, { "name": "TutorCloud", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$1.2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "On-demand online tutoring, one student and one tutor at a time.", "died": "It could not keep tutors or students and did not grow. The database describes the service as an expensive video call with homework help.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1703-tutorcloud" }, { "name": "LearnUp", "years": "2011 to 2017", "funding": "US$8.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Short training modules that prepared job seekers for specific employers and connected them to those employers.", "died": "LinkedIn Learning and Coursera offered more content to the same people with much more money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/292-learnup" }, { "name": "Jobspice", "years": "2009 to 2012", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A tool that made professional-looking resumes quickly for job seekers who are not designers.", "died": "It sold one narrow feature, and LinkedIn and free resume tools offered the same thing.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1635-jobspice" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Before language models, interview and test practice needed a second human. Grockit put students together online, Tutorspree and TutorCloud matched each student with a paid tutor, and peer platforms for consulting cases still match two candidates who grade each other. Each practice session cost a person's time, so the business either charged coach prices or depended on enough users being online together.", "A language model can now read a case, play the interviewer, check the arithmetic and write a debrief at almost no cost per session. That lets one founder sell unlimited practice for US$49 a month and still report a 90% margin to TrustMRR. What the founder still has to supply is the domain knowledge: original cases, a grading scale that matches real interviewers, and hundreds of guide pages that bring candidates in from search." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The pattern, yes. This exact market is crowded.", "text": "The Casey page alone compares Road to Offer with five other paid Casey simulators, and the about page names PrepLounge, RocketBlocks and Management Consulted as alternatives. The copyable part is the shape: an AI examiner for one high-stakes interview or exam, original content written by someone from that field, one-time season packs, and a large set of search pages.", "steps": [ "Pick one interview or exam where candidates already pay coaches by the hour, and where you know the format from the inside.", "Let the model play the examiner and score every attempt on a fixed scale; write the cases and the scale yourself, with people from the field.", "Give one full attempt free, then sell monthly access plus one-time packs that match the length of the season.", "Write a guide page for every firm, test and question type that candidates search for, and put free tools on them.", "Keep practice clearly separate from the real test: the terms here forbid using the service to break exam or recruiting rules." ], "open": "Similar case-style interviews exist outside the big three firms: product manager interviews, investment banking technical interviews, medical school multiple mini interviews and civil service assessment centres. Most of them still rely on human coaches and peer practice." }, "watch": [ { "title": "No legal entity on the legal pages", "text": "The terms say the service is operated by \"Road to Offer\" and give no legal form. The privacy policy, last updated 25 September 2026, still shows \"[ENTITY-TODO: legal entity name + form]\" in place of the data controller. The site has no French legal notice (mentions légales) page, and a search of the French company register for \"Road to Offer\" returned no company. The founder is named on the about page, the founder page and the TrustMRR profile." }, { "title": "For sale", "text": "The founder has listed the business on TrustMRR since 13 May 2026, now at US$100,000, and wrote that he works full time and lacks time to grow it. A buyer may change the prices, the content or the people behind the grading." }, { "title": "Salary framing", "text": "The home page headline says \"Prep for your $150K+ consulting career\", and a calculator titled \"See how much you'll earn\" shows first-year pay at each firm (for example US$134,500 total for a McKinsey Business Analyst) against the cost of preparation, ending with \"One offer and it pays for itself on day one.\" These are salary figures for the consulting jobs, not income from the product, but no product can promise an offer." }, { "title": "Formats owned by others", "text": "The simulators copy the format of tests that McKinsey, BCG and Bain run. The site says it is not affiliated with these firms and that formats change between offices and recruiting cycles, so each change requires new work." }, { "title": "A short and seasonal history", "text": "There are nine months of revenue. September 2026 was 22% below August before October recovered, and consulting recruiting has seasons. One strong season does not show what a full year looks like." }, { "title": "Numbers that do not agree", "text": "TrustMRR shows US$0.10 of revenue per visitor, but its own revenue and visitor figures give US$0.62. The seller's message gives a domain rating of 26; the profile's synced value is 32. TrustMRR's estimated user count is 0, while the company claims 14,000 candidates. The company gives 400+, 500+ and 590 for its number of guides on different pages." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.roadtooffer.com/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/road-to-offer" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR markdown profile: Road to offer, revenue synced 25 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/road-to-offer.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile, live on 25 October 2026. Revenue, MRR and subscriptions are read from Stripe through an API key (grade A). The description, founding date, seller message, asking price and technology list are entered by the founder (grade C)." }, { "title": "Road to Offer home page", "url": "https://www.roadtooffer.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, 25 October 2026. Source for the product, the plan prices, the FAQ that names the founder, and the salary headline." }, { "title": "Road to Offer pricing page", "url": "https://www.roadtooffer.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The monthly price loads by script; the page text gives US$120 for 90 days and US$249 a year." }, { "title": "Road to Offer about page", "url": "https://www.roadtooffer.com/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the team section, the content reviewers, the alternatives, the Behavioral Unlimited price and the refund terms." }, { "title": "Founder page: Esteban Ronsin, Founder of Road to Offer", "url": "https://www.roadtooffer.com/authors/esteban", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's own account of his background and of who reviews the content." }, { "title": "Road to Offer stats page, updated 9 June 2026", "url": "https://www.roadtooffer.com/stats", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Company claims on candidates, practice sessions, drills and guides." }, { "title": "Road to Offer Terms and Conditions, last updated 27 September 2026", "url": "https://www.roadtooffer.com/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the operator name, the ban on cheating (section 6.2) and the Casey guarantee (section 10.3)." }, { "title": "Road to Offer Privacy Policy, last updated 25 September 2026", "url": "https://www.roadtooffer.com/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the processor list (Stripe, Supabase, Vercel, OpenRouter, Groq, OpenAI and others) and for the missing legal entity name." }, { "title": "Road to Offer BCG Casey simulator page", "url": "https://www.roadtooffer.com/bcg-casey-chatbot", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for how the Casey practice is scored, the competitor comparison and the guarantee conditions." }, { "title": "Road to Offer McKinsey Sea Wolf simulator page", "url": "https://www.roadtooffer.com/mckinsey-sea-wolf", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the statement that the simulations are original and do not reproduce confidential McKinsey questions." }, { "title": "Road to Offer sitemap.xml", "url": "https://www.roadtooffer.com/sitemap.xml", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026 and counted: 693 addresses, 596 of them under /blog/." }, { "title": "Road to Offer home page script with the salary calculator", "url": "https://www.roadtooffer.com/_next/static/immutable/chunks/2r9gdu-f0967a.js", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the calculator text and its salary table as plain text, not run. The calculator is hidden in a collapsed section of the home page." }, { "title": "French company register search (recherche-entreprises.api.gouv.fr) for \"road to offer\"", "url": "https://recherche-entreprises.api.gouv.fr/search?q=road%20to%20offer", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the result on 25 October 2026: 0 companies found under that name." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." }, { "title": "Road to Offer candidate reviews page", "url": "https://www.roadtooffer.com/reviews", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 4.5 rating and how the company says it was counted." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/elyxai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/elyxai.md", "slug": "elyxai", "name": "ElyxAI", "country": "France", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI agent inside Excel", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "July 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$2.8K a month recurring revenue, October 2026", "sticker": "$2.8K MRR, listed for sale", "outcomeUsd": 33744, "months": 15, "teamLabel": "1 founder; the company has no employees in the French register", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "documents-data", "channel": "search", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Spreadsheets" ], "product": "An add-in for Microsoft Excel with a chat panel. The user writes a request such as \"remove duplicates, sort by date and add a total row\", and the AI agent does it in the open workbook: it writes formulas, cleans imported data, builds pivot tables and charts, and formats the sheet. It is sold as a subscription in euros, mainly to accountants, controllers and small finance teams in France.", "why": "It does the work in the cells instead of explaining what to paste, and it works in the Excel that people already have, without a Microsoft Copilot license. The founder already taught Excel to a large French audience. The AI models are bought by the request from OpenAI and Anthropic, so one person could build and run it.", "summary": [ "ElyxAI is an Office Add-in, a small web application that Microsoft's Excel loads in a side panel and that can read and change the open workbook through Microsoft's official JavaScript programming interface, Office.js. Inside that panel runs an AI agent: a program that takes a request in plain English or French, plans the steps, and carries them out itself, here by writing formulas, cleaning data and building pivot tables and charts in the user's cells. The add-in is listed in Microsoft's store for add-ins by TCD Apps, a one-person French limited company. The company's legal notice and the French business register name its manager, Thomas Coget, who also sells Excel training under the name Exceleur.", "The first archived product page dates from July 2025. Stripe payment records, read by TrustMRR through an API key, show the best month in February 2026 at US$18,819, then US$7,306 in April and a fall to US$1,062 in September. On 25 October 2026 the profile showed monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the amount that active subscriptions bring in each month) of US$2,812 from 131 active subscriptions, about US$33,744 a year if nothing changed. October 2026 looks better than that, US$6,535 by the 25th, but 78% of it arrived in five days, 13 to 17 October. Since 27 May 2026 the business has been listed for sale on TrustMRR at US$79,000; the seller says the dip comes from his reduced involvement.", "The headline on this page is the MRR figure, because it is recurring and grade A. The all-time figure of US$74,636 is also grade A, but US$21,004 of it was paid before November 2025, when the product barely sold, and the Stripe account belongs to a company that also publishes an Excel training site and an AI consulting service. The page also shows earlier companies that built on top of Excel or Outlook and lost when Microsoft added the feature itself." ], "factsCaption": "A one-person Excel add-in with US$2,812 a month in recurring revenue from 131 subscriptions in October 2026, read from Stripe; revenue peaked in February 2026 and then fell", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from Stripe payment records, read through the TrustMRR profile on 25 October 2026 (revenue last synced the same day), from the French state business register, or from the documentation of Microsoft or the European Central Bank. A grade B value is store data computed by Microsoft. A grade C value is a statement by the company or its owner. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows that it cites.", "timelineLead": "From a \"Coming Soon\" page in February 2025 to US$2,812 a month in subscriptions and a sale listing, in 15 months from the first product page. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "ElyxAI prices on 25 October 2026, from the company's pricing and home pages and its Microsoft store listing (grade C). Prices are in euros; the US$ columns are converted at the European Central Bank rate of 23 October 2026, US$1.1193 per euro", "note": "The pricing page shows yearly billing by default: Plus at €120 a year and Pro at €290 a year, which is 10 months' price for 12. The monthly prices, €12 and €29, come from the home page and the Microsoft listing. A request is one task sent to the agent; Fast mode is unlimited on paid plans, Advanced requests are counted, and one Expert task uses roughly 20 to 50 times more of the allowance than an Advanced request. The pages do not say whether VAT is included. Prices have changed several times: in February 2026 the plans were Solo €19, Pro €69 and Business €200 a month, and the TrustMRR profile still lists Starter €29, Pro €59 and Team €119.", "rows": [ [ "Free trial", "0", "0", "7 days, about 25 Advanced requests in total, no card" ], [ "Plus", "11.19 (€10)", "13.43 (€12)", "unlimited Fast mode, about 500 Advanced requests a month" ], [ "Pro", "27.05 (€24.17)", "32.46 (€29)", "about 1,000 Advanced requests a month, Expert mode, priority support" ], [ "Team or company", "", "on request", "central billing and member management, by email" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 25 October 2026", "value": "US$2,812", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe records through TrustMRR, revenue last synced 25 October 2026. The profile also gives an MRR change of -23.0% in the last 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions, 25 October 2026", "value": "131", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe records through TrustMRR.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the October 2026 MRR", "value": "US$33,744 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$2,812 times 12. This is the outcomeUsd value of this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average revenue per subscription", "value": "about US$21.47 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$2,812 divided by 131. It sits between the Plus price (US$13.43 a month) and the Pro price (US$32.46 a month), which fits a mix of ElyxAI plans.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, 1 to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$6,535", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe records through TrustMRR. The last 30 days were US$6,724, shown by TrustMRR as +641.3% over the 30 days before.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Share of October revenue paid on 13 to 17 October", "value": "US$5,118, 78.3%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the daily table: US$2,436 on 13 October alone (37.3%), then US$220, US$1,015, US$557 and US$890. The profile does not say whether these were yearly plans, team plans or other payments.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Best month in the last twelve", "value": "US$18,819, February 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe records through TrustMRR. Then US$5,867 in March and US$7,306 in April 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, September 2026", "value": "US$1,062", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe records through TrustMRR. May to August: US$3,934, US$3,021, US$2,406 and US$1,195.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Fall from April to September 2026", "value": "85.5%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$1,062 against US$7,306.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Last three months against the three before", "value": "US$9,122 against US$9,111", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: TrustMRR gives US$9,122 for the last 3 months and US$18,233 for the last 6; the difference is the earlier three. February to April 2026 together were US$31,992.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last twelve months", "value": "US$53,633", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe records through TrustMRR. The twelve monthly rows from November 2025 to October 2026 add up to the same amount.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue all time", "value": "US$74,636", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe records through TrustMRR. The profile does not show months before November 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before November 2025", "value": "US$21,004", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: all time minus the last twelve months. November 2025 itself was only US$94.20, so the source of this earlier money is not known; the Stripe account belongs to TCD Apps, which also publishes other services.", "src": [ 1, 17, 19 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "65.0%", "grade": "C", "note": "A snapshot on the TrustMRR profile; the costs behind it are entered by the owner.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price on TrustMRR", "value": "US$79,000, listed 27 May 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Set by the seller. TrustMRR shows 8 offers received and a revenue multiple of 1.0x.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Company", "value": "TCD Apps, a single-member limited company with €1,000 of share capital", "grade": "A", "note": "Registered on 13 June 2023 in the Lille Métropole register, activity code 62.01Z (computer programming). The register lists one manager.", "src": [ 5, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Employees", "value": "none", "grade": "A", "note": "The register marks TCD Apps as a non-employer. The seller writes in the first person.", "src": [ 5, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Microsoft store listing", "value": "version 1.0.0.3, updated 24 October 2026, 1 rating of 5.0", "grade": "B", "note": "Published by TCD Apps. Microsoft's listing data gives a certification state of \"None\". Capabilities: can read and change the document, can send data over the Internet.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "AI providers", "value": "OpenAI and Anthropic (through AWS Bedrock), with Tavily for web search", "grade": "C", "note": "From the privacy policy. All are official paid programming interfaces, processed in the European Union except Tavily.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Users claimed in February 2026", "value": "more than 1,000 analysts and Excel power users", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page archived on 8 February 2026. Not checked; TrustMRR shows an estimated user count of 0.", "src": [ 15, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's audience as an Excel trainer", "value": "more than 1 million followers and more than 4,000 people trained", "grade": "C", "note": "His own statements on the Exceleur site. No source shows this audience being sent to ElyxAI.", "src": [ 18 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the first product page to the headline figure", "value": "15 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: July 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 12, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2021", "what": "Thomas Coget starts Exceleur, video courses and a newsletter that teach Excel in French. He later publishes a book on Excel with Larousse.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 16, 18 ] }, { "when": "13 June 2023", "what": "TCD Apps is registered as a single-member limited company for computer programming.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "28 February 2025", "what": "getelyxai.com shows only a \"Coming Soon\" page.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "12 July 2025", "what": "First archived product page: \"Elyx.AI - Intelligence Artificielle pour Excel\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "16 October 2025", "what": "The English page offers a 14-day free trial and subscription plans.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "The page offers a 7-day trial for €1. Stripe shows US$94.20 of revenue in the month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 14, 1 ] }, { "when": "January 2026", "what": "A credit system for usage, file uploads, web search, image and PDF reading, and the new name ElyxAI on 9 January.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "February 2026", "what": "Plans at €19, €69 and €200 a month, team management, and a newer AI model on 5 February. Best month: US$18,819.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 15, 9, 1 ] }, { "when": "13 March 2026", "what": "New credit-based plans. The public changelog stops on 18 March 2026.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "April 2026", "what": "Revenue of US$7,306.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "27 May 2026", "what": "Listed for sale on TrustMRR; the asking price on 25 October is US$79,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "Revenue falls to US$1,062.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "13 to 17 October 2026", "what": "US$5,118 is paid in five days, 78% of the month to the 25th.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "24 October 2026", "what": "Microsoft store listing updated to version 1.0.0.3, with Plus at €12 and Pro at €29 a month.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "MRR of US$2,812 from 131 active subscriptions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Do the work in the cells", "text": "General chat assistants give a formula to paste or a list of steps. ElyxAI acts in the workbook through Office.js: it reads several tabs, writes the formulas, creates the pivot table and shows each change so that the user can review or undo it. The home page puts this difference first, and the comparison table on the same page is aimed at Microsoft's own Copilot, which needs a separate license." }, { "title": "A narrow customer", "text": "The TrustMRR description names finance staff at French mid-market companies, and the target list adds accounting firms and freelance controllers. These users live in Excel, often work in French, and care that data is hosted in Europe. The product answers in English or French and says that its infrastructure is hosted in Europe." }, { "title": "Models bought by the request", "text": "The company does not train a model. The privacy policy lists OpenAI and Anthropic (through AWS Bedrock) for the AI work and Tavily for web search. The plans count Advanced and Expert requests and fall back to the cheaper Fast mode when the allowance is used up, which keeps the cost of each subscriber below the price." }, { "title": "Found through Microsoft's store and search pages", "text": "Users install the add-in from Microsoft's store in about two minutes. The founder lists SEO and content marketing as the channels on TrustMRR, and the site has guide pages on Excel formulas, Excel errors and use cases by profession. The founder's own Exceleur audience could be a channel too, but no source shows that." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's privacy policy, changelog and Microsoft listing, and from the stack that the owner entered on TrustMRR. They are grade C.", "items": [ "An Office Add-in that runs in the Office JavaScript sandbox inside Excel for Windows, Mac and the web; only requests to the company's own servers leave the user's Office environment.", "Web code in JavaScript and TypeScript with React and Next.js, hosted on Vercel in the European Union, with servers also at Hetzner.", "Supabase in its EU eu-central region for the database, sign-in with Google or Microsoft accounts, server functions and encrypted workbook checkpoints.", "OpenAI for prompts and reading images and scanned PDFs; Anthropic models through AWS Bedrock for longer reasoning; Tavily for web search inside answers.", "Stripe for subscriptions and credit top-ups, Resend for transactional email, Google Analytics and DataFast for site statistics.", "Features added in early 2026 include a worksheet function called ELYX.AI(), Python processing of uploaded files, and screenshots of cell ranges so that the agent can check its own result." ], "src": [ 8, 1, 9, 6 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database built on top of Microsoft's office software or competed with spreadsheets, and lost when the platform owners added the feature. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "DataNitro", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Run Python scripts inside Excel without leaving the spreadsheet.", "died": "Limited by Excel's architecture and squeezed by Microsoft's own tools; Excel later added Python itself.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1587-datanitro" }, { "name": "Xobni", "years": "2006 to 2013", "funding": "US$42M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A smarter inbox inside Microsoft Outlook.", "died": "Tied to Outlook, which Microsoft improved itself; mobile made the desktop add-on less useful. Yahoo bought the remains.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/763-xobni" }, { "name": "Fieldbook", "years": "2014 to 2019", "funding": "US$1.7M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Spreadsheets with the structure of a database, without knowing SQL.", "died": "Excel and Google Sheets added database-like features faster than users would switch.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/142-fieldbook" }, { "name": "ScaleFactor", "years": "2014 to 2019", "funding": "US$100M", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "AI-driven bookkeeping for small businesses, without accountant fees.", "died": "The automation was weaker than the marketing promised, and QuickBooks kept the customers' trust.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/523-scalefactor" }, { "name": "Skysheet", "years": "2009 to 2012", "funding": "US$200K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A cloud spreadsheet with real-time collaboration, to replace Excel.", "died": "Google and Microsoft moved their own spreadsheets to the cloud with the same features.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1218-skysheet" } ], "whatChanged": [ "DataNitro, Xobni, Fieldbook and Skysheet each added something that Excel, Outlook or Google Sheets lacked, and each lost when the platform owner built the same thing. ElyxAI is in the same position: Microsoft sells Copilot in Excel, and its store rules control how ElyxAI is listed and priced. ScaleFactor shows the other risk, an AI promise for finance work that the product could not keep.", "Two things are different. The AI models are bought by the request from several providers through official programming interfaces, so the product needed no training budget and no team, and the margin depends on the plan limits rather than on servers. And the customer is narrow: French-speaking finance staff who want results in their own files without a Copilot license. That niche carried the business to US$2,812 a month of recurring revenue by the October 2026 Stripe figure, but not further once the founder stepped back." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product, yes. Keeping the sales going is the hard part.", "text": "An Office Add-in with a bought AI model is within reach of one developer, and Microsoft's store gives it a place to be found. The Stripe figures show that the hard part is not the build but the steady work of getting new customers: revenue fell by 85.5% from April to September 2026 while the founder spent less time on it.", "steps": [ "Pick one host application and one job that its users do every week, here Excel and finance reporting.", "Act in the user's file through the official add-in interface, and show every change so that it can be checked and undone.", "Buy the models through official APIs from more than one provider, and set plan limits that keep each subscriber's model cost below the price.", "Write the guide pages that the same users search for, and list the add-in in the host's store.", "Plan who will sell it every week before the founder's attention moves elsewhere." ], "open": "Add-ins that do the work, not only explain it, for Word, PowerPoint, Outlook or Google Sheets, aimed at one profession and one language that the large vendors serve poorly." }, "watch": [ { "title": "One Stripe account, several services", "text": "The Stripe account that TrustMRR reads belongs to TCD Apps, which also publishes the Exceleur training site and the Klaryx AI consulting site. TrustMRR does not split payments by product. US$21,004 of the all-time total was paid before November 2025, when the product itself made US$94.20 a month, and the February 2026 peak of US$18,819 is not explained by any source. This page therefore uses the MRR from 131 subscriptions as the headline, whose average of about US$21 a month fits ElyxAI's own plans." }, { "title": "Revenue fell when the founder stepped back", "text": "Monthly revenue went from US$7,306 in April to US$1,062 in September 2026, MRR fell 23.0% in the last 30 days, and the public changelog has had no entry since 18 March 2026. The seller wrote on TrustMRR that he is refocusing on consulting and that the dip reflects his reduced involvement." }, { "title": "October is mostly five days", "text": "Of the US$6,535 paid from 1 to 25 October 2026, US$5,118 came on 13 to 17 October, and US$2,436 on a single day. These may be yearly plans or a few larger customers; the profile does not say. One strong month after a weak summer is not yet a recovery." }, { "title": "Microsoft is both the store and a competitor", "text": "Copilot in Excel does part of the same work, and every predecessor on this page lost to a platform owner. Microsoft's store policy 1100.8 also says that when an add-in changes its pricing or licensing terms, existing users must keep the original functionality at the original price; ElyxAI changed its plans at least three times in 2026, and no source says how existing subscribers were treated." }, { "title": "Claims on the site that could not be checked", "text": "The home page says \"Certified by Microsoft\", but Microsoft's listing data gives a certification state of \"None\": the add-in is listed in the store, without Microsoft 365 Certification or publisher attestation. The testimonials give first names only, and the changelog for 13 March 2026 notes \"Updated displayed user testimonials\". The February 2026 claim of more than 1,000 users is the company's own, and the store listing has one rating." }, { "title": "Listed for sale", "text": "The asking price of US$79,000 is about 1.06 times all-time revenue and about 2.3 times the yearly run rate from MRR. A buyer gets the code and the listing, not the founder's audience as an Excel trainer, and would have to do the sales work that the seller says has stopped." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://getelyxai.com/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/elyx-ai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile: Elyx AI, revenue last synced 25 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/elyx-ai", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full (https://trustmrr.com/startup/elyx-ai.md) on 25 October 2026. Revenue, MRR, subscriptions and the daily and monthly tables come from Stripe through an API key (grade A). The description, the target customers, the tech stack, the channels, the profit margin and the sale listing are written by the owner (grade C)." }, { "title": "ElyxAI home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://getelyxai.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product description, the comparison with Copilot, the monthly prices, the testimonials and the claim \"Certified by Microsoft\". Also checked for the purpose gate." }, { "title": "ElyxAI pricing page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://getelyxai.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the trial, the yearly prices, the request modes and the team offer. Also checked for the purpose gate." }, { "title": "ElyxAI legal notice and privacy summary, updated 19 May 2025", "url": "https://getelyxai.com/en/legal", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names the publisher TCD Apps, its register number, share capital and manager." }, { "title": "French state business register (Recherche d'entreprises API): TCD Apps, SIREN 953464666", "url": "https://recherche-entreprises.api.gouv.fr/search?q=953464666", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the JSON record in full on 25 October 2026. Source for the registration date, activity code, legal form, manager and non-employer status. A search by the manager's name also returned his other companies." }, { "title": "Microsoft Marketplace: ElyxAI - AI Agent for Excel, by TCD Apps", "url": "https://marketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/product/wa200008658", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the listing and its embedded data in full on 25 October 2026. Source for the publisher, version, update date, rating, capabilities, certification state and the prices in the description." }, { "title": "Microsoft Learn: Commercial marketplace certification policies", "url": "https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/marketplace/certification-policies", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the sections 1100 (Microsoft 365) and 1120 (Office Add-ins) and the AI content rules. Source for the Office.js requirement and policy 1100.8 on price changes." }, { "title": "ElyxAI privacy policy, effective 11 February 2026", "url": "https://getelyxai.com/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the AI providers, the hosting regions, the Office JS sandbox note and the data controller." }, { "title": "ElyxAI changelog, last updated 18 March 2026", "url": "https://getelyxai.com/changelog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the features and dates from January to March 2026." }, { "title": "ElyxAI end-user license agreement", "url": "https://getelyxai.com/eula", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the definitions and fee sections. Confirms that TCD Apps is the licensor and that the add-in is distributed through Microsoft's store." }, { "title": "getelyxai.com archived by the Wayback Machine, 28 February 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250228142305/https://www.getelyxai.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A \"Coming Soon\" page." }, { "title": "getelyxai.com archived by the Wayback Machine, 12 July 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250712004254/https://www.getelyxai.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page title; the page content loads by script. First archived product page." }, { "title": "getelyxai.com archived by the Wayback Machine, 16 October 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20251016010400/https://www.getelyxai.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 14-day free trial." }, { "title": "getelyxai.com archived by the Wayback Machine, 11 November 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20251111235452/https://getelyxai.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 7-day trial for €1 and the footer naming TCD Apps." }, { "title": "getelyxai.com archived by the Wayback Machine, 8 February 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260208085020/https://getelyxai.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the February 2026 plans and the claim of more than 1,000 users." }, { "title": "Exceleur home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.exceleur.fr/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's Excel training business, \"since 2021\", with the Klaryx link and the footer naming TCD Apps. Checked for the purpose gate." }, { "title": "Exceleur legal notice", "url": "https://www.exceleur.fr/mentions-legales/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names TCD Apps SARL, with the same register number, as publisher and Thomas Coget as publication director." }, { "title": "Exceleur: ExcelGPT course page", "url": "https://www.exceleur.fr/formations-excel/excelgpt/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founder's statements on his followers, the people he trained and his Larousse book. Checked for the purpose gate; course payments go through the Schoolmaker platform." }, { "title": "Klaryx home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.klaryx.fr/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. AI consulting for small and mid-sized companies, booked with Thomas Coget, footer naming TCD Apps. Matches the seller's note about consulting." }, { "title": "European Central Bank euro reference rates, 23 October 2026", "url": "https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-daily.xml", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. US$1.1193 per euro, used for the price conversions." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/polyfork/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/polyfork.md", "slug": "polyfork", "name": "Polyfork", "country": "Germany", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Library of low-poly 3D assets written as code by AI agents, with an MCP server", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "1 August 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$16.3K in verified revenue in under 3 months, October 2026", "sticker": "$16.3K in 3 months", "outcomeUsd": 16307, "months": 3, "teamLabel": "1 founder; TrustMRR lists a team of 1, and AI agents build the assets", "fundingLabel": "No investors found; US$500,000 XPRIZE prize money in September 2026", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "build-software", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "3D assets" ], "product": "A web store of 2,634 low-poly 3D models for games, websites and virtual reality. Each model is a small JavaScript program with settings (colours, sizes, number of parts) that rebuilds the model when a setting changes, and it also downloads as an ordinary GLB, FBX, USDZ or OBJ file. An MCP server lets AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Cursor or Codex search the catalogue and place models in a scene. A factory of AI agents writes and checks the models: XPRIZE wrote in September 2026 that it publishes more than 175 a week.", "why": "The founder made the 3D models themselves into code, so AI agents could write them in large numbers and other AI agents could read and change them. He opened the store with a one-time Founders Club seat for US$100, and Stripe data shows US$8,917 in the first month. Revenue then fell each month, and almost all of it came from one-time seats, not from subscriptions.", "summary": [ "Polyfork sells low-poly 3D assets: 3D models of buildings, cars, characters, trees and terrain built from few triangles, so that they load fast in a web browser or a game. Each asset is a small ES module, a JavaScript file that another program can import, and calling it returns a ready model for three.js, the most used library for 3D graphics on the web. The module declares typed settings (\"knobs\") such as colour scheme, height or number of parts, and the same model is also sold as a GLB file for Godot, Blender and other engines that read glTF, the standard 3D file format, and as FBX for Unity and Unreal. For AI coding tools there is an MCP server: MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is a standard way for an AI assistant to call outside tools, here search_assets, get_kit, buy_plan and nine more.", "Lucas Martinic, an XR developer who represented Germany in the Build with Gemini XPRIZE, started the store on 1 August 2026, by the date on his TrustMRR profile. The models are not made by hand: XPRIZE wrote that \"an AI-agent factory publishes more than 175 a week\", and the company's own posts describe a \"builder-and-judge lane\" in which one AI agent writes a model and automatic checks and a judge test it. The catalogue grew from 326 assets on 5 August to 2,634 on 25 October 2026. On 26 September 2026 Polyfork won the first prize of the Build with Gemini XPRIZE, US$500,000.", "The headline number is grade A. TrustMRR reads it from Polyfork's Stripe account: US$16,307 from August to 25 October 2026, made of US$8,917 in August, US$5,780 in September and US$1,610 in October to the 25th. The trend is down, and the revenue is almost all one-time payments: TrustMRR shows US$0 of monthly recurring revenue and no active subscription, and the seat counter on the pricing page shows 145 of the US$100 lifetime seats taken. The page also shows four failed companies that sold 3D content creation or 3D tools for the web." ], "factsCaption": "US$16,307 of Stripe-verified revenue between 1 August and 25 October 2026, falling each month, almost all from one-time US$100 seats", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from Stripe, the payment processor, through TrustMRR's connection to Polyfork's Stripe account. A grade B value comes from a third party that is not the founder. A grade C value is a statement by Polyfork or its founder, or a reading of the company's own pages and their archived copies. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a store of 326 assets on 5 August 2026 to 2,634 assets and US$16,307 of verified revenue 85 days later. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Polyfork plans on 25 October 2026, read from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "The pricing page shows Pro at US$15 a month and says yearly billing saves US$31; the yearly column is calculated from that (15 times 12 minus 31 equals US$149 a year, about US$12.42 a month). Pro was US$10 a month in August 2026. The Lifetime seat is one payment of US$100 (shown as reduced from US$125), capped at 200 seats including the 100 sold-out Founders Club seats, with 55 left on 25 October 2026. Students and people in low-income and lower-middle-income countries can apply for Pro at US$50 for 2 years. The Platform plans are for products that hand the assets to their own users; their yearly prices are ten months for twelve. Separate orders: a custom character skin costs US$9, a custom kit of 60 parts US$85 if it is published to the catalogue, or US$200 if it stays private.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "every asset under 600 triangles, 883 of 2,634" ], [ "Pro", "12.42", "15", "every asset, own CDN path, remix baking" ], [ "Lifetime", "", "100 one-time", "everything in Pro for life, 200 seats" ], [ "Platform 400", "249.17", "299", "400 assets, up to 5,000 of your users a month" ], [ "Platform 1000", "582.50", "699", "1,000 assets, up to 25,000 users a month" ], [ "Platform 2000", "1,249.17", "1,499", "2,000 assets, up to 50,000 users a month" ], [ "Full catalogue", "", "from 2,900", "priced on a call, up to 100,000 users a month" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue, 1 August to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$16,307", "grade": "A", "note": "Stripe data read by TrustMRR, last synced at 17:13 UTC on 25 October 2026. The same figure is shown for all time, the last 3, 6 and 12 months, so no revenue was recorded before August 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in August 2026", "value": "US$8,917", "grade": "A", "note": "The first month. About US$288 a day (calculated: 8,917 divided by 31).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in September 2026", "value": "US$5,780", "grade": "A", "note": "35.2% below August (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in October 2026, to the 25th", "value": "US$1,610", "grade": "A", "note": "About US$64 a day, 66.6% below September's daily average of about US$193 (calculated: 1,610 divided by 25, against 5,780 divided by 30). 8 of the 25 days had no revenue.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days", "value": "US$3,780", "grade": "A", "note": "As shown on the profile. The 30 daily rows listed, 26 September to 25 October, add up to US$3,580 (calculated); a separate stored snapshot shows US$4,780. Either way it is above US$2,000 a month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue and active subscriptions", "value": "US$0 and 0", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot on 25 October 2026. The revenue is one-time payments, although a monthly Pro plan is on sale.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Daily payments in October 2026", "value": "mostly US$100 to US$125, or US$10 to US$50", "grade": "A", "note": "11 of the 25 days show US$100 or more. These sizes match one US$100 lifetime seat, plus small orders such as a US$9 skin or a US$15 Pro month.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Lifetime and Founders Club seats taken", "value": "15 on 5 August, 31 on 12 August, 136 on 3 October, 145 on 25 October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Read from the seat counter on archived and live copies of the home and pricing pages (100 seats at first, 200 later, counted as 200 minus the seats left). The counter is the company's own display.", "src": [ 13, 14, 15, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Share of revenue from US$100 seats", "value": "about 89%, at most", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 145 seats times US$100 equals US$14,500, which is 88.9% of US$16,307. It is an upper estimate: some seats may have been paid at a lower price after a Pro credit or a reduced-price application. If the 200 Lifetime seats were in addition to the 100 Founders Club seats, the seats alone would be US$24,500, more than all revenue, so the counter must include them.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "First-month figures given to XPRIZE", "value": "US$4,428 from 54 paying customers, with 583 models", "grade": "C", "note": "XPRIZE announcement, 26 September 2026. The window of that first month is not stated; it does not match the Stripe figure for August (US$8,917). About US$82 per customer (calculated).", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Assets in the catalogue", "value": "326 on 5 August, 457 on 12 August, 1,921 on 3 October, 2,634 on 25 October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Read from archived and live copies of the home page. The live page shows 256 new assets in the last 7 days.", "src": [ 13, 14, 15, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Publishing rate of the AI-agent factory", "value": "more than 175 models a week", "grade": "C", "note": "XPRIZE announcement, from the founder's submission.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 person", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR lists a team size of 1 person; the home page says \"Hey, I am Lucas and I build Polyfork\" and the footer \"Built by Lucas Martinic\". The pages often write \"we\".", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none found; a US$500,000 prize", "grade": "B", "note": "TrustMRR lists the company as bootstrapped (founder-entered). XPRIZE announced on 26 September 2026 that Polyfork won the US$500,000 grand prize, which is prize money, not an investment for shares. It came after the August and September revenue.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Visitors and Google impressions, last 30 days", "value": "967 visitors; 2,267 search impressions", "grade": "A", "note": "Google Search Console is connected to the profile; the visitor count is TrustMRR's snapshot. TrustMRR gives US$4.84 of revenue per visitor.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October figure", "value": "85 days, under 3 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 1 August to 25 October 2026. The founded date is entered by the founder on TrustMRR.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "1 August 2026", "what": "Founded date on the TrustMRR profile.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "5 August 2026", "what": "The archived home page shows 326 assets, an MCP server with ten tools, Pro at US$10 a month and a Founders Club seat at US$100 once, with 85 of 100 seats left.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "11 to 12 August 2026", "what": "Blog posts on terrain programs and shader looks. The home page shows 457 assets, 115 new in the last 7 days, and 69 of 100 Founders Club seats left.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10, 14 ] }, { "when": "August 2026", "what": "US$8,917 of revenue, the best month so far.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "27 August 2026", "what": "Characters v2: every humanoid becomes one engine called with a config, checked by automatic gates, the same lane that later builds US$9 custom skins.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "US$5,780 of revenue, 35.2% below August.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "26 September 2026", "what": "Polyfork wins first place and US$500,000 in the Build with Gemini XPRIZE. The announcement gives US$4,428 from 54 paying customers in the first month.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "when": "28 September 2026", "what": "A blog post compares two coding agents building the same game, one with Polyfork's catalogue and one without; the founder reports the farm game cost US$1.63 against US$3.08 in model fees.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "3 October 2026", "what": "The archived home page shows 1,921 assets. The Founders Club has sold out; a Lifetime seat costs US$100 with 64 of 200 seats left, and Pro costs US$15 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "2,634 assets and 55 of 200 seats left. October revenue to date is US$1,610, and TrustMRR shows no active subscription.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2, 3 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A model that is a program", "text": "A normal 3D model is a fixed mesh. A Polyfork model is a function, createAsset(), with declared settings, so the same file gives a short pine or a tall one, green or autumn coloured. The founder's argument on the home page is that an AI agent can only move a mesh around, but it can read a program's settings and change them. The knobs are also published as JSON, so agents need no human to explain them." }, { "title": "AI agents write the catalogue", "text": "XPRIZE describes an AI-agent factory that publishes more than 175 models a week, and the company's posts describe a builder agent, a judge and automatic gates that test fit, seams and triangle budgets. The founder reads the kit requests before anything is built. The catalogue went from 326 to 2,634 assets in 81 days, which one person modelling by hand could not do." }, { "title": "Built for coding agents", "text": "The site offers an MCP server, a REST API, llms.txt and prompt.txt, so Claude Code, Cursor or Codex can search the catalogue, fetch a matching part and place a whole kit with one call. Browsing needs no key. An agent can also start a purchase with the buy_plan tool, which the documentation says never charges anything itself." }, { "title": "One-time seats paid the first months", "text": "The launch offer was a Founders Club seat: everything, forever, for US$100 once, limited to 100 seats. It sold out, and a Lifetime seat at the same price replaced it. The seat counter shows 145 seats taken, which would be at most about 89% of all revenue. This brought cash quickly, but each seat pays only once, and TrustMRR shows no recurring revenue." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from Polyfork's own pages, its documentation for agents and the XPRIZE announcement. They are grade C unless the source is TrustMRR.", "items": [ "Each asset is a self-contained ES module that returns a three.js group, with no loader and no waiting. The download is a zip with the module, a GLB, a README of every knob, the licence and an index.html.", "The same model is exported as GLB, FBX, USDZ and OBJ, with colours as named materials so that nothing arrives white in Unity or Blender. A Unity plugin to browse and import assets is on the founder's GitHub.", "Characters are one shared humanoid on a 22-bone skeleton with Mixamo bone names; no animation clips are bundled, and free Mixamo clips retarget onto it.", "The factory: a builder agent writes a config or module, automatic gates test it (fit-check, pose-check, seam-check and a 4,000-triangle budget for characters), and a judge model reviews it. The sources do not name the AI models used.", "An MCP server at polyfork.dev/mcp uses JSON-RPC 2.0 over HTTP POST, with no session setup. A Bearer key is needed only to download paid files.", "Stripe takes the payments, by TrustMRR's verification section and the privacy page. TrustMRR lists JavaScript for the frontend and PHP for the backend.", "Marketing on the sources: the founder's X account with 5,666 followers, ads on X (the privacy page describes their tracking), a Product Hunt page with 7 points, a weekly email of new assets, and the XPRIZE win." ], "src": [ 6, 7, 8, 16, 18, 19, 1, 17 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold 3D content creation or 3D tools for the web before AI agents could write the content. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Modsy", "years": "2015 to 2022", "funding": "US$72.7M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "3D room visualization that shows real furniture in a customer's own room before buying.", "died": "It was marketed as AI, but each room needed 2 to 4 hours of human designer work, so margins stayed low while it spent US$72.7 million.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2521-modsy" }, { "name": "Sketchbox", "years": "2018 to 2021", "funding": "US$1.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Build VR and AR worlds without writing code.", "died": "Unity and Unreal offered stronger tools and larger communities, and VR headsets spread slowly.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1028-sketchbox" }, { "name": "Famo.us", "years": "2011 to 2017", "funding": "US$31M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "An HTML5 framework for smooth 3D-style animation in the browser.", "died": "Its own rendering engine had to be updated for every browser change, and simpler open-source frameworks such as React won the developers.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/133-famous" }, { "name": "MyMiniLife", "years": "2006 to 2010", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Small virtual worlds that people placed on their blogs.", "died": "Simple web graphics lost to richer games, and Zynga bought it in 2009 and used the technology in its own products.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/361-myminilife" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Modsy is the closest lesson. It needed 3D models of real furniture and hours of human design work for every room, and the cost of that labour decided its fate. Polyfork has the same need for a large catalogue of 3D models, but AI agents write the models as code and automatic gates check them, so one founder added more than 2,000 assets in under three months.", "The buyers also changed. Sketchbox and Famo.us sold tools to people who build 3D scenes by hand. Polyfork also sells to AI coding agents that build games and scenes from a sentence. Its catalogue is documented for them in llms.txt, prompt.txt and an MCP server, and its own test reports that an agent with the catalogue built a farm game for about half the model fees of an agent without it." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The format, yes. The revenue model, not yet proven.", "text": "Turning a product into code that agents can both write and read is a method others can use for icons, sounds, shaders or level designs. The revenue so far does not show that it lasts: one-time seats brought most of the money, and October revenue fell to about a fifth of August's daily rate. A US$500,000 prize gives the founder time to find out.", "steps": [ "Choose content that can be expressed as a small program with settings, so an AI agent can produce many items and another agent can adjust them.", "Build automatic checks for every item before it is published, and publish the failures too.", "Document the catalogue for agents (llms.txt, an MCP server, a JSON schema of the settings) as well as for people.", "Open with a limited one-time offer for cash, but plan the recurring plan that must replace it." ], "open": "The same agent-readable catalogue for other content types: 2D sprites and tiles, sound effects, UI components, or 3D parts in a higher-detail style." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue fell every month", "text": "US$8,917 in August, US$5,780 in September and US$1,610 in October to the 25th. By daily average, October is 77.6% below August (calculated). In October about one US$100 seat sold every two days." }, { "title": "Almost no recurring revenue", "text": "TrustMRR shows US$0 of monthly recurring revenue and no active subscription on 25 October 2026. The seat counter shows 145 lifetime seats, which would be up to about 89% of all revenue. Lifetime buyers get every future asset without paying again, and 55 seats are left before the offer closes." }, { "title": "Numbers that do not agree", "text": "XPRIZE gives US$4,428 from 54 customers for the first month, while Stripe shows US$8,917 for August. The window of the XPRIZE month is not stated. On TrustMRR the last-30-days total (US$3,780), the sum of its daily rows (US$3,580) and a stored snapshot (US$4,780) also differ." }, { "title": "A side project with a prize", "text": "The home page says the founder builds XR \"for a living\", and his GitHub profile lists him as an XR creative technologist. The US$500,000 prize is not revenue and is not in the Stripe figures." }, { "title": "Copies and competition", "text": "The licence forbids reselling the files or using them to train a commercial asset generator, but the modules are readable source. Image-to-3D generators, such as Tencent's Hunyuan3D that Polyfork's own blog discusses, improve each year and could make a pre-built library less needed." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://polyfork.dev/" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/polyfork" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/polyfork" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: Polyfork, Stripe-verified revenue profile (data as of 25 October 2026)", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/polyfork", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile (https://trustmrr.com/startup/polyfork.md) in full, once, on 25 October 2026. Grade A for the metrics in its Verification Sources section (Stripe API key, last synced 25 October 2026); the description, founded date, team size and funding are founder-written, grade C." }, { "title": "Polyfork home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://polyfork.dev/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product, the MCP tools, the asset count, the founder's note and the seat counter." }, { "title": "Polyfork pricing page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://polyfork.dev/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the plans, the Lifetime seats, the end of the Founders Club and the reduced price." }, { "title": "XPRIZE, 26 September 2026: Polyfork wins the Build with Gemini XPRIZE for building a scalable AI business in 90 days", "url": "https://www.xprize.org/news/polyfork-wins-the-build-with-gemini-xprize", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The organizer's announcement. Source for the prize, the founder's country, the AI-agent factory and the first-month figures (which are the founder's submission, grade C)." }, { "title": "Pulse 2.0: Polyfork Wins $500,000 Build With Gemini XPRIZE After Building AI-Powered 3D Model Business In 90 Days", "url": "https://pulse2.com/polyfork-wins-500000-build-with-gemini-xprize-after-building-ai-powered-3d-model-business-in-90-days/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. It retells the XPRIZE announcement and adds no new figure." }, { "title": "Polyfork licensing page, last updated August 2026", "url": "https://polyfork.dev/licensing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the licence, the rule against training a commercial generator, and the factory orders." }, { "title": "Polyfork llms.txt, the catalogue written for AI agents", "url": "https://polyfork.dev/llms.txt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the skeleton, the skin and steering prices, and the formats." }, { "title": "Polyfork blog, 27 August 2026: Characters v2, our 3D characters are programs now, not meshes", "url": "https://polyfork.dev/blog/characters-v2", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the character engine, the gates and the builder-and-judge lane." }, { "title": "Polyfork blog, 28 September 2026: Build a whole low-poly 3D world in three.js with one call", "url": "https://polyfork.dev/blog/a-kit-is-a-place", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the kit loader and the founder's test of two coding agents." }, { "title": "Polyfork blog, 11 August 2026: Hunyuan3D WorldClaw and the 3D asset supply problem", "url": "https://polyfork.dev/blog/worldclaw-and-the-3d-asset-supply-problem", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's view of generated meshes against a parametric library." }, { "title": "Polyfork custom skin page", "url": "https://polyfork.dev/skin", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the US$9 skin and what the company refuses to build, including real people without their consent." }, { "title": "Polyfork: Steer the factory", "url": "https://polyfork.dev/steer", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the kit ideas board and the founder's review of each idea." }, { "title": "Internet Archive copy of polyfork.dev, 5 August 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260805111834/https://polyfork.dev/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the archived home page in full. Source for the early asset count, prices and seat counter." }, { "title": "Internet Archive copy of polyfork.dev, 12 August 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260812162920/https://polyfork.dev/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the archived home page in full." }, { "title": "Internet Archive copy of polyfork.dev, 3 October 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20261003062730/https://polyfork.dev/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the archived home page in full. Shows the Lifetime plan after the Founders Club sold out." }, { "title": "Polyfork: connect the catalogue to your AI agent", "url": "https://polyfork.dev/agents", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the MCP tools and setup." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: Polyfork", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/polyfork", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the product page and the founder's launch comment. It shows 7 points and 37 followers." }, { "title": "GitHub: lucas-martinic", "url": "https://github.com/lucas-martinic", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile and the repository list. Source for the founder's job title, the Unity plugin and his other projects." }, { "title": "Polyfork privacy page, last updated August 2026", "url": "https://polyfork.dev/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for Stripe payments and the ads on X." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/treebarkid/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/treebarkid.md", "slug": "treebarkid", "name": "TreeBarkID", "country": "Spain", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI tree identification app", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "July 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$2.9K verified revenue from 1 to 25 October, October 2026", "sticker": "$2.9K by 25 October", "outcomeUsd": 2936, "months": 15, "teamLabel": "1 named founder-developer at Fluxer Labs SL; the App Store account is in another person's name; headcount not published", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "learning", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "growing", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Nature apps" ], "product": "An iPhone and Android app. The user photographs the bark, the leaves or the whole shape of a tree. The app sends the photo to Google's Gemini model and shows the likely species, its family, typical height, native region, a visual health check and care tips. Saved trees go into folders and onto a map. The free version allows one identification a day; the Pro subscription removes the limit.", "why": "It answers one narrow question that hikers, gardeners and people who heat their homes with firewood actually ask, and it answers it with a rented AI model instead of a model the company had to train. The same small studio sells the same pattern for snakes, mushrooms, birds, rocks, stamps and trading cards, so the work on one app helps the others.", "summary": [ "TreeBarkID is a phone app that identifies a tree from a photo. It uses a multimodal model, an AI model that reads images as well as text, through an API, a paid interface that lets an app send a picture to a model that another company runs. The app's privacy policy says that Google's Gemini API \"analyses photos to produce the identification\", and that species facts come from a botanical database called Perenual. Older tree apps needed a team that trained its own image recognition.", "The app is published by Fluxer Labs SL, a small software company in the Canary Islands, Spain. Its website names Germán Hernández del Rosario as \"fundador y desarrollador\" (founder and developer) and lists TreeBarkID as one of its own apps, next to client work that starts at 3,000 euros. The App Store shows version 1.1.0 on 15 July 2025, so the app is at least 15 months old. TreeBarkID connected its RevenueCat account to TrustMRR. RevenueCat is a service that manages in-app subscriptions for the App Store and Google Play, and TrustMRR reads the revenue from it through an API key. That record starts in July 2026 and shows US$150 in July, US$1,370 in August, US$1,735 in September and US$2,936 from 1 to 25 October 2026.", "The headline number is grade A because TrustMRR reads it from the payment records and not from a founder's statement. It is also a month that has not ended: October is the only month in the record above US$2,000, and the current monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the value of all active subscriptions spread over one month) is US$1,612. The October revenue came from many small payments, the largest single day being 10.7% of the month. The page also shows five failed startups that sold image recognition or gardening advice before a rented model could do the hard part." ], "pricing": { "caption": "TreeBarkID Pro prices in the US App Store listing, read 25 October 2026 (grade B); the app has no pricing page on the web", "note": "The listing shows six in-app purchase prices and does not say which are current offers. TrustMRR's founder-written profile gives Pro Yearly at US$39.99 and Pro Weekly at US$9.99 as the pricing model. A weekly price of US$9.99 equals about US$43.29 a month (9.99 × 52 ÷ 12). The free limit of one identification a day comes from a user review of February 2026 and the developer's reply to it. Archived listings show earlier prices: US$5.99 a week, US$29.99 a year and US$64.99 for life in July 2025; US$7.99 a week, US$14.99 a year and US$49.99 for life in November 2025; US$49.99 a year and US$79.99 for life in March 2026.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "1 identification a day" ], [ "Pro Yearly", "3.33", "", "US$39.99 a year, also listed at US$49.99; unlimited identifications, nature guide, map" ], [ "Pro Weekly", "", "9.99 a week", "Also listed at 7.99 a week" ], [ "Pro Lifetime", "69.99 one-time", "", "Also listed as a Lifetime Offer at 29.99" ] ] }, "factsCaption": "US$2,936 of verified revenue in the first 25 days of October 2026 from a tree identification app, read from RevenueCat by TrustMRR", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the app's RevenueCat account, which records the App Store and Google Play payments. A grade B value comes from Apple's App Store pages or their archived copies. A grade C value is a statement by the company or a founder-written profile field. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a small listing with 3 ratings in July 2025 to US$2,936 of verified revenue in 25 days of October 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue, 1 to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$2,936", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline, RevenueCat API key, synced 25 October 2026 at 17:44 UTC. The daily rows for 1 to 25 October add up to US$2,936.12; 25 October still shows US$0.00 because the day was not over.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, September 2026", "value": "US$1,735", "grade": "A", "note": "Last full month in the record. Below the site's floor of US$2,000 a month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, August 2026", "value": "US$1,370", "grade": "A", "note": "", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, July 2026", "value": "US$150", "grade": "A", "note": "First month in the record. The app sold subscriptions since at least July 2025, so this is when the RevenueCat record starts, not when sales started.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from September to October 2026", "value": "69%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2,936 divided by 1,735 equals 1.692. October still had 6 days to go.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average revenue per day, 1 to 24 October 2026", "value": "about US$122", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2,936.12 divided by 24 complete days equals 122.34.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Largest single day in October 2026", "value": "US$315 on 6 October, 10.7% of the month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 315 divided by 2,936.12. No day dominates, so the month did not come from one or two large payments.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Minimum number of payments in October 2026", "value": "at least 42", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2,936 divided by 69.99, the highest price in the listing, equals 41.9. With the US$39.99 yearly plan it would be at least 74.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 30 days", "value": "US$3,235, up 88.1%", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR's own last-30-days figure and growth rate.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 25 October 2026", "value": "US$1,612", "grade": "A", "note": "Below US$2,000. The value of the active subscriptions spread over one month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions, 25 October 2026", "value": "376", "grade": "A", "note": "", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "All verified revenue in the record", "value": "US$6,191", "grade": "A", "note": "July to 25 October 2026 only. Below US$25,000.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "90%", "grade": "C", "note": "A TrustMRR snapshot. The profile does not say how the costs were measured, so it is not treated as verified.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "App Store ratings", "value": "75 ratings, average 4.2 (October 2026); 3 ratings, average 3.7 (July 2025)", "grade": "B", "note": "US storefront.", "src": [ 2, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Earliest dated release seen", "value": "version 1.1.0, 15 July 2025", "grade": "B", "note": "From the earliest archived copy of the listing, 20 July 2025. The first version may be older.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Releases from 4 March to about 21 October 2026", "value": "25", "grade": "B", "note": "Counted in the version history of the current listing, from version 2.3.8 to version 3.0.0.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Languages", "value": "English and 35 more", "grade": "B", "note": "", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "People named behind the business", "value": "1 founder-developer", "grade": "C", "note": "Fluxer Labs' home page: \"Soy Germán Hernández, fundador y desarrollador de Fluxer Labs\". The App Store developer account is in the name of another individual, whose role is not stated.", "src": [ 2, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions an investor. Fluxer Labs also sells app development to clients from 3,000 euros.", "src": [ 9 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "15 July 2025", "what": "Version 1.1.0 is in the App Store with 3 ratings. The seller is a private individual. Pro costs US$5.99 a week, US$29.99 a year or US$64.99 for life.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "Version 2.0.2. The yearly plan is listed at US$14.99 and the lifetime plan at US$49.99.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "December 2025", "what": "Fluxer Labs SL, of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain, last updates its legal notice.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "18 February 2026", "what": "TreeBarkID's terms take effect. They say the app is operated by Fluxer Labs and warn not to rely on it for edible or poisonous decisions.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "March 2026", "what": "Version 2.4.0 adds more than 10,000 species to the nature guide. The listing now shows US$49.99 a year and US$79.99 for life. The seller is still the individual.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2, 5 ] }, { "when": "July 2026", "what": "First month in the RevenueCat record on TrustMRR: US$150.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "August 2026", "what": "Verified revenue of US$1,370.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "Verified revenue of US$1,735.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "3 October 2026", "what": "The privacy policy names Fluxer Labs SL as data controller and lists Google's Gemini API, Supabase, Vercel and RevenueCat as providers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "About 21 October 2026", "what": "Version 3.0.0, with a new identify button and the option to pin trees on the map.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "US$2,936 of verified revenue in October so far, 376 active subscriptions, US$1,612 MRR. The App Store now names Fluxer Labs SL as the seller.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A rented vision model", "text": "The privacy policy says Google's Gemini API analyses each photo and that species facts come from the Perenual botanical database. The company's terms mention its own \"prompts, routing, or backend logic\", which means the work is in the instructions sent to the model and in the app around it. No source shows that Fluxer Labs trained a model, although its product page claims a model \"trained with millions of images\"." }, { "title": "One free scan a day, then a subscription", "text": "The free version allows one identification a day, according to a user review and the developer's reply. Pro removes the limit and adds the nature guide and the map. The listing shows weekly, yearly and lifetime prices, and the archived copies show that they changed at least three times between July 2025 and October 2026." }, { "title": "A studio of identifier apps", "text": "The same App Store account sells apps that identify snakes, mushrooms, birds, rocks and stamps, a trading card scanner and a food scanner. Each uses the same pattern: a photo, a model answer, a reference guide and a paywall. Fluxer Labs also built AdsBuddy, a web tool for Apple Ads campaigns, and the privacy policy says the app records Apple Ads attribution through RevenueCat." }, { "title": "Many small releases", "text": "The listing shows 25 releases between 4 March and about 21 October 2026, and the app is translated into 36 languages. Most releases are small fixes; a few add features such as folders, share cards, an in-app camera and the map." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the app's privacy policy and terms, the App Store listing and Fluxer Labs' website. They are grade B and C. No interview with the founder was found.", "items": [ "Google's Gemini API identifies the tree in each photo. The botanical database Perenual supplies species facts; only species names are sent to it.", "Supabase, a hosted Postgres database with file storage, keeps the photos in Ireland for up to 35 days. Vercel hosts the service.", "RevenueCat manages the App Store and Google Play subscriptions and records Apple Ads attribution. Apple and Google take the payments.", "The saved collection, notes and tree locations stay on the phone and are not sent to the servers, according to the privacy policy.", "For client work, Fluxer Labs says it uses cross-platform technology with one code base for iOS, Android and web; it does not name the framework used for TreeBarkID.", "The marketing site tree-identifier.com has field guides on identifying trees by bark, without leaves and from a photo, in English and Japanese." ], "src": [ 6, 2, 8, 9 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold image recognition on phones or gardening advice before a rented AI model could identify a plant from one photo. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Moodstocks", "years": "2008 to 2016", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Point the phone camera at an object or image and get information about it instantly.", "died": "It had to build its own image recognition and could not reach enough users. Google bought it in 2016, which ended the independent product.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/351-moodstocks" }, { "name": "Blippar", "years": "2011 to 2018", "funding": "US$130M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Point the phone at a product or poster and see videos, 3D models and links on top of it.", "died": "Brands paid only if people used the app, and people used it only if there was something to scan. Most users opened it once. It spent US$130 million and pivoted several times, including to visual search.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2159-blippar" }, { "name": "Jetpac", "years": "2011 to 2016", "funding": "US$2.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "City guides built by machine learning that analysed public Instagram photos.", "died": "It depended on Instagram's data and competed with Google and Yelp. Google bought it in 2014 and closed the service in 2016.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/258-jetpac" }, { "name": "Edyn", "years": "2014 to 2017", "funding": "US$2.7M", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "A solar-powered garden sensor and valve that told gardeners how to care for their plants.", "died": "The hardware was expensive to make, gardening demand is seasonal, and competitors had larger scale. It ran out of cash.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1135-edyn" }, { "name": "Garden.com", "years": "1995 to 2000", "funding": "US$65M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Online gardening advice for your climate zone, sold together with plants and tools.", "died": "It sold perishable, low-margin goods with expensive shipping, spent heavily to find customers, and customers bought only in spring. It spent US$65 million.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2089-gardencom" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Before general vision models, identifying an object from a phone photo meant building the recognition yourself. Moodstocks spent eight years and US$5 million on that technology and was absorbed by Google. Edyn and Garden.com tried to sell gardening knowledge through hardware and shipping, and both had costs that a seasonal hobby could not carry.", "In 2026 a small company sends the photo to a model it rents by the request, adds a species database and a paywall, and ships the same pattern for snakes, mushrooms and stamps. The hard part that Moodstocks had to invent is now a line in TreeBarkID's privacy policy. What remains hard is being chosen among ten similar tree apps in the same store." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Easy to copy, and many have.", "text": "The App Store page of TreeBarkID itself lists ten other tree identifier apps under \"You Might Also Like\". The model is rented, the species data is licensed, and the app shell is the same for every identifier. TreeBarkID's verified record shows a small, growing app, not a large one: US$1,612 of MRR in October 2026.", "steps": [ "Pick a question people ask about something in front of them (a tree, a snake, a mushroom) and answer it from one photo with a rented vision model.", "Add a reference database so the answer has facts beyond the name, and a collection or map so users come back.", "Give one free use a day and sell weekly, yearly and lifetime plans through the app stores, then test the prices.", "Reuse the same app shell for the next subject, and translate the store listing into many languages." ], "open": "Identifiers for professional users are less crowded: arborists, foresters, firewood sellers and insurance inspectors, who need reports and records, not only a name. One TreeBarkID reviewer used it to choose firewood for heating a home." }, "watch": [ { "title": "October is not finished", "text": "The headline covers 1 to 25 October 2026. Every full month in the record is below US$2,000, and the MRR on 25 October is US$1,612. The full October figure may end higher, and November could be lower." }, { "title": "The record starts in July 2026", "text": "The app sold subscriptions since at least July 2025, but TrustMRR's RevenueCat record starts in July 2026. The all-time figure of US$6,191 therefore covers only four months, and nothing is known about the first year's revenue." }, { "title": "Who runs the app", "text": "Fluxer Labs SL operates the app according to its terms and privacy policy, and is the seller in the App Store since some time between March and October 2026. Before that, the seller was a private individual, who still holds the App Store developer account. Fluxer Labs' website names one founder-developer, while the developer's replies to reviews speak of \"our team\". The headcount is not published." }, { "title": "Accuracy claims and safety", "text": "Fluxer Labs' product page claims 95% accuracy and a model trained on millions of images; no test supports these figures, and the privacy policy says Google's Gemini API makes the identification. Reviews report wrong identifications. The terms warn against using the app for edible or poisonous decisions, and the same account sells a mushroom identifier described as \"Edible & Toxic\"." }, { "title": "Crowded store and platform risk", "text": "Ten similar tree apps appear on the same App Store page. The app depends on Apple and Google for payments and discovery and on Google for every identification, so a price change for the model or a store policy change affects it directly." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.tree-identifier.com/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6747532583" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/treebarkid" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of TreeBarkID, RevenueCat-verified metrics, synced 25 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/treebarkid.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile on 25 October 2026. The revenue, MRR and subscription figures are read by TrustMRR from the app's RevenueCat account through an API key; the description, pricing model and profit margin are founder-written or unexplained and graded C. Source for the monthly and daily revenue." }, { "title": "App Store listing: Tree Identifier: TreeBarkId, US storefront, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tree-identifier-treebarkid/id6747532583", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Apple shows the seller, ratings, prices, languages and version history; the description and review replies are written by the developer. Source for the prices, the 25 releases and the other apps." }, { "title": "App Store developer page of the account that publishes TreeBarkID", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/id1797308286", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Lists the eight apps of the account: identifiers for trees, snakes, mushrooms, birds, rocks and stamps, a trading card scanner and a food scanner. Used for the purpose check." }, { "title": "Archived App Store listing of TreeBarkID, 20 July 2025", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20250720160519/https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tree-identifier-treebarkid/id6747532583", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full at web.archive.org. Earliest archived copy. Source for version 1.1.0 of 15 July 2025, the 3 ratings, the individual seller and the 2025 prices." }, { "title": "Archived App Store listings of TreeBarkID, 8 November 2025 and 16 March 2026", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20260316111304/https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tree-identifier-treebarkid/id6747532583", "grade": "B", "how": "Read both archived pages (timestamps 20251108115201 and 20260316111304). Source for the price changes and for the seller, still the individual in March 2026." }, { "title": "TreeBarkID privacy policy, last updated 3 October 2026", "url": "https://www.tree-identifier.com/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the data controller (Fluxer Labs SL), the AI model (Google Gemini API), Perenual, Supabase, Vercel, RevenueCat and Apple Ads attribution." }, { "title": "TreeBarkID terms and conditions, effective 18 February 2026", "url": "https://www.tree-identifier.com/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. States that the app is operated by Fluxer Labs, mentions AI model providers and proprietary prompts, and warns against safety-critical use." }, { "title": "TreeBarkId website home page", "url": "https://www.tree-identifier.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the features, the 10,000-species nature guide and the field guides. It has no pricing section." }, { "title": "Fluxer Labs home page (Spanish)", "url": "https://www.fluxerlabs.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names Germán Hernández del Rosario as founder and developer, lists TreeBarkID among the company's own apps, and gives the client-work prices." }, { "title": "Fluxer Labs legal notice, last updated December 2025", "url": "https://www.fluxerlabs.com/legal", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names the owner as Fluxer Labs SL, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain, under Spain's e-commerce law (LSSI-CE)." }, { "title": "Fluxer Labs product portfolio", "url": "https://www.fluxerlabs.com/apps", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Lists nine products, including an eye color identifier and AdsBuddy. Used for the purpose check." }, { "title": "Fluxer Labs product page for TreeBarkID", "url": "https://www.fluxerlabs.com/apps/treebarkid", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the company's own claims of 95% accuracy, 1,000+ species and a model trained on millions of images, which this page does not treat as verified." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/sheetai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/sheetai.md", "slug": "sheetai", "name": "SheetAI", "country": "India", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI functions for Google Sheets (add-on)", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "20 November 2022", "outcomeLabel": "US$52K total since launch, October 2026", "sticker": "$52K total, now $367 MRR", "outcomeUsd": 52136, "months": 47, "teamLabel": "Built and launched by the founder alone, by his account; the same company's MagicSlides team reached 10 to 12 people at its peak; zero developers by September 2026, by his statement", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "documents-data", "channel": "platform", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Spreadsheets" ], "product": "SheetAI is an add-on for Google Sheets. It adds formulas such as =SHEETAI(\"Write a tagline for a coffee brand\") that send a prompt to a language model and write the answer into the cell. The user drags the formula down a column to process hundreds of rows. Other functions classify, summarize, extract, and build lists and tables, and through Replicate they generate images, video and music. A sidebar writes ordinary spreadsheet formulas from a plain-English description. The customer either pastes an API key from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI or DeepSeek, which is free since 2026, or pays for a hosted plan.", "why": "It put a language model inside Google Sheets from November 2022, and Google's marketplace brought more than 201,000 installs. Few installs paid: US$52,136 of verified revenue in 47 months is about US$0.26 per install. Its most important result may be indirect: a request for a pitch deck for SheetAI led the founder to build MagicSlides, which by its own verified data earned about 14 times as much. SheetAI's own revenue is now falling, and Google has offered a similar AI function inside Sheets since June 2025.", "summary": [ "SheetAI is a Google Sheets add-on. An add-on is a small program that a user installs from the Google Workspace Marketplace, Google's catalog of extensions, and that then runs inside Google Sheets. SheetAI adds custom functions, formulas that the add-on defines, such as =SHEETAI(A2). Each call sends a prompt to a large language model, a program that generates text, through the provider's official API, the programming interface that OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others sell access to. The answer appears in the cell. The customer can paste an API key, a secret code that bills the model use to the customer's own account with the provider, or pay SheetAI for a hosted plan that uses the company's keys.", "Sanskar Tiwari, the founder of IndianAppGuy Tech Pvt Ltd in India, put the first version online in November 2022 as a tool that turned text instructions into spreadsheet formulas. In July 2026 he wrote that SheetAI was doing about US$2,000 of monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the subscription revenue of one month, when a stranger asked him for a pitch deck. Instead of making the deck, he built MagicSlides, which has its own page on this site and became his largest product. Payment data that TrustMRR reads from SheetAI's Stripe account shows US$52,136 paid by customers between the founding on 20 November 2022 and 25 October 2026. That is a total for 47 months, not a yearly rate.", "The present level is small and falling. Verified revenue averaged US$869 a month from November 2025 to March 2026 and US$474 a month from June to September 2026, a fall of 45%. On 25 October 2026 MRR was US$367 from 35 subscriptions. Between June and October 2026 the company changed its prices: the use with the customer's own key, which had cost US$20 a month, became free, and hosted plans now cost US$12 or US$29 a month. This page grades every number: the revenue comes from the payment processor (grade A), the install count from Google (grade B), and the early MRR and the team sizes from the founder (grade C). It also shows four failed startups that tried to improve the spreadsheet or depended on another company's platform." ], "factsCaption": "US$52,136 of Stripe-verified revenue in 47 months from an add-on with more than 201,000 installs, with the monthly level in 2026 at about half of its level in late 2025", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read from the Stripe account by TrustMRR through an API key. A grade B value was published by Google. A grade C value is a statement of the founder or of the company's own pages, including archived copies. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a formula generator in November 2022 to US$52,136 in total revenue in 47 months, with the monthly level falling in 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "SheetAI plans on 25 October 2026, read from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "BYOK means bring your own key: the customer pastes an API key from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, xAI or Replicate and pays the provider for the model use. The Pro plan also costs US$290 a year, which the page describes as about two months free. Credit packs are one-time purchases for hosted use: US$29 for up to 97 million tokens, US$79 for 260 million, US$139 for 460 million and US$299 for 1 billion. A token is a piece of text of about three quarters of a word. Earlier prices, from archived copies: in January 2023 a Formula Genie plan at US$2.99 a month and an Unlimited plan at US$8 a month with the customer's own OpenAI key; in June 2024 Unlimited at US$8 a month or US$72 a year; from September 2025 to at least 12 June 2026 Unlimited at US$20 a month or US$200 a year, still with the customer's own key, plus a domain license at US$299 a year for up to 20 users from May 2026.", "rows": [ [ "BYOK Free", "0", "0", "unlimited SHEETAI calls and formula generation with the customer's own API keys" ], [ "Starter", "", "12", "hosted AI without an API key, up to about 500 AI runs a month, email support" ], [ "Pro", "24.17", "29", "hosted AI with higher usage described as soft unlimited, bulk image, video and music through Replicate, priority support" ], [ "Credit pack", "29 one-time", "", "up to 97 million tokens of hosted use; larger packs at US$79, US$139 and US$299" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue since founding, 20 November 2022 to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$52,136", "grade": "A", "note": "Read from the Stripe account by TrustMRR through an API key, revenue last synced on 25 October 2026 at 20:17 UTC. This is the sum of all payments in 47 months. It is not a yearly rate and it is not profit.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 30 days, 3 months, 6 months and 12 months", "value": "US$312, US$1,096, US$3,136 and US$8,285", "grade": "A", "note": "The profile reports a change of minus 25.7% in the last 30 days against the 30 days before.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue per month, November 2025 to March 2026", "value": "US$1,006, US$912, US$756, US$792, US$880", "grade": "A", "note": "The average is US$869.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue per month, April to September 2026", "value": "US$571, US$997, US$558, US$493, US$404, US$440", "grade": "A", "note": "October 2026 shows US$244 up to 25 October, a partial month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Change from November 2025 to March 2026 against June to September 2026", "value": "minus 45%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the average of June to September 2026 is 473.75, the average of November 2025 to March 2026 is 869.2, and 473.75 divided by 869.2 equals 0.545.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 25 October 2026", "value": "US$367 from 35 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "The profile reports a change of minus 13.2% in 30 days. Calculated: 367 divided by 35 equals about US$10.49 per subscription.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before the last 12 months", "value": "US$43,851, about US$1,253 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 52,136 minus 8,285 equals 43,851. From November 2022 to October 2025 is about 35 months, and 43,851 divided by 35 equals 1,253. The public profile does not show these months one by one.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Share of the total that came in the last 12 months", "value": "15.9%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 8,285 divided by 52,136 equals 0.159. Most of the money was earned before October 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue around January 2023", "value": "about US$2,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's article of 27 July 2026: he was building SheetAI, doing about US$2,000 of MRR, when someone asked him for a pitch deck, which led to MagicSlides in January 2023. The public verified data starts its monthly table in November 2025, so it cannot confirm this month. It is higher than the calculated average of US$1,253 a month before October 2025.", "src": [ 9, 11, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Google Workspace Marketplace listing, 25 October 2026", "value": "more than 201,000 installs, rating 3.9 of 5 from 63 ratings", "grade": "B", "note": "Counts published by Google on the listing, which was last updated on 25 February 2026. The developer is named as IndianAppGuy Tech Pvt Ltd. The SheetAI home page shows 198,000 or more installs and a rating of 4.5 of 5 from 45 reviews.", "src": [ 4, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Installs stated on the company's own home page", "value": "22,000 in March 2023, about 139,000 in June 2024, 198,000 or more in October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived copies of 6 March 2023, 9 June 2024 and 5 October 2026, and the live page. The figure of about 139,000 was still shown on 1 November 2025.", "src": [ 7, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue per install", "value": "about US$0.26", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 52,136 divided by 201,000 equals 0.259. Google shows installs as a rounded band, and an install is not an active user.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder writes that he never raised a rupee for any of his products.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Team that built SheetAI", "value": "the founder alone, by his account", "grade": "C", "note": "His projects page lists SheetAI among 33 products that he built and launched solo. The about page of SheetAI names him as founder and CEO.", "src": [ 12, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Peak team of the company", "value": "10 to 12 people, of which 4 or more full-time blog writers", "grade": "C", "note": "The MagicSlides about page describes the team of the company's largest product at its peak, without dates. The founder's personal site showed 10 team members in October 2026. Latka counted 2 people who named MagicSlides as their employer on LinkedIn in July 2025. No source gives a headcount for SheetAI alone.", "src": [ 11, 13, 15 ] }, { "fact": "Team in September 2026", "value": "zero developers, by the founder's statement", "grade": "C", "note": "Description of a video published on 13 September 2026: he went from building products with a team of developers to managing multiple products with zero developers using Claude Code.", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "fact": "MagicSlides total compared with SheetAI total", "value": "about 14 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: MagicSlides, the founder's product that started from a request for a SheetAI pitch deck, had US$722,575 of Stripe-verified revenue on 13 October 2026, and 722,575 divided by 52,136 equals 13.9.", "src": [ 20, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from founding to this total", "value": "47 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: November 2022 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "20 November 2022", "what": "SheetAI's founding date on the TrustMRR profile. The Wayback Machine's first copy of sheetai.app is from the same day. A copy of 6 December 2022 describes a tool that turns text instructions into Google Sheets formulas, and its footer lists earlier products of the company: DiscordNotify, SMSNotify and SlackNotify.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "when": "December 2022 to January 2023", "what": "The founder publishes guides on connecting OpenAI to SheetAI and on asking OpenAI not to use the customer's data. The pricing page of 4 January 2023 shows a free plan, a Formula Genie plan at US$2.99 a month and an Unlimited plan at US$8 a month with the customer's own OpenAI key, and it quotes comments from Reddit users.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 8 ] }, { "when": "January 2023", "what": "SheetAI is doing about US$2,000 of MRR, by the founder's account, when a stranger asks him for a pitch deck for SheetAI. He builds a Google Slides add-on that generates the deck instead. It becomes MagicSlides, and he writes that the side project ate the main project.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 11, 10 ] }, { "when": "March 2023", "what": "The home page shows 22,000 installations and a rating of 4.5 of 5.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "June 2024", "what": "The home page shows about 139,000 installs. The Unlimited plan costs US$8 a month or US$72 a year, still with the customer's own OpenAI key. The free plan allows 50 SHEETAI calls.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 8 ] }, { "when": "25 June 2025", "what": "Google announces an AI function inside Google Sheets: a prompt in a cell, with an optional data range, returns text generated by Gemini. The rollout to the paid Workspace plans and to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers starts the same day.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "when": "September 2025", "what": "The Unlimited plan costs US$20 a month or US$200 a year with the customer's own key. Token packs for hosted use start at US$29.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "November 2025 to March 2026", "what": "Verified revenue is between US$756 and US$1,006 a month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "May 2026", "what": "The pricing page names OpenAI, Claude and Replicate keys and adds a domain license at US$299 a year for up to 20 users. The same prices are still shown on 12 June 2026.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "June to September 2026", "what": "Verified revenue falls to between US$404 and US$558 a month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "13 September 2026", "what": "A video description says that the founder now manages multiple products with zero developers, using Claude Code.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "By 5 October 2026", "what": "The home page offers the use with the customer's own key for free and hosted plans from US$12 a month, with image, video and music generation through Replicate.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 2 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "Verified revenue since founding is US$52,136. MRR is US$367 from 35 subscriptions. The product is not listed for sale on TrustMRR.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A formula as the user interface", "text": "People who work in spreadsheets already know how to write a formula and drag it down a column. SheetAI turns a model call into a formula, so the same prompt applied to 500 rows is one drag of the mouse. The home page sells exactly this: one prompt, hundreds of rows of output, with no copying between a chat window and the sheet." }, { "title": "A listing in Google's marketplace", "text": "The add-on is installed from one listing in the Google Workspace Marketplace, which shows more than 201,000 installs. The founder's rule, written in July 2026, is to sell where people already do paid work, such as Sheets and Slides add-ons, instead of crowded app stores. The installs show that this channel brings users. The revenue per install, about US$0.26, shows that most of them did not pay." }, { "title": "The customer pays for the model", "text": "From the first pricing page, customers could use their own OpenAI key. In January 2023 the pricing page put that use at about US$0.02 per 750 words, paid to OpenAI, and the present page says that the customer pays OpenAI directly. SheetAI also stores answers so that a repeated prompt does not call the model again. This keeps the company's costs close to zero for those users. Since 2026 that use is free, and SheetAI charges only for hosted plans that use its own keys." }, { "title": "One product leads to the next", "text": "SheetAI's largest effect was MagicSlides. A user's request for a pitch deck for SheetAI led to a Slides add-on that, by its own verified data, collected US$722,575 by 13 October 2026, about 14 times SheetAI's total. SheetAI's footer now links seven other products of the company, and each one is another place where a person can pay." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from SheetAI's own pages, documentation and archived copies, and from the TrustMRR profile. They are grade C, except the payment provider, which TrustMRR confirms.", "items": [ "The first version, online in November 2022, generated Google Sheets formulas from a text description. The =SHEETAI function for free prompts followed, with guides from December 2022 and January 2023 on connecting an OpenAI key.", "The model calls use the providers' official APIs. The setup guide tells customers to create keys at platform.openai.com, aistudio.google.com, console.anthropic.com, console.x.ai and platform.deepseek.com. It says that the key is stored in the customer's Google account, is never sent to SheetAI's servers, and is used for direct API calls from the Sheets session.", "Images, video and music come from models hosted on Replicate, a service that runs open models through an API. The function =SHEETAI_IMAGE generates one image per row.", "Repeated prompts are answered from a stored copy instead of a new model call, according to the pricing page, which reduces the customer's model costs.", "Stripe takes the payments, according to the TrustMRR profile, and the site links to a Stripe billing portal for subscription changes. A license belongs to one Google account email address and needs no license key.", "An affiliate program ran through Rewardful. Its page said in October 2026 that the program is no longer active.", "From September 2026, by the founder's statement, the company's products are managed with Claude Code and without employed developers." ], "src": [ 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 14, 21 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to improve the spreadsheet or depended on another company's platform. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "VisiCalc", "years": "1979 to 1984", "funding": "US$0", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "The first spreadsheet program, which turned business calculations on the Apple II into a table that recalculates itself.", "died": "It stayed tied to the Apple II while buyers moved to IBM PCs, and Lotus 1-2-3 overtook it on the new platform.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/715-visicalc" }, { "name": "Skysheet", "years": "2009 to 2012", "funding": "US$200K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A spreadsheet in the browser with real-time collaboration and charts.", "died": "Google and Microsoft built the same functions into their own spreadsheet products, and a company with US$200,000 could not compete with them.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1218-skysheet" }, { "name": "Fieldbook", "years": "2014 to 2019", "funding": "US$1.7M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A spreadsheet with database functions, so people could organize linked data without learning SQL.", "died": "Excel and Google Sheets added the missing functions faster than Fieldbook could persuade users to leave the tools they knew.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/142-fieldbook" }, { "name": "PostRocket", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$610K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Better timing for Facebook page posts, based on data from the page's own audience.", "died": "The product worked only through Facebook's API. Facebook changed the API, and PostRocket had no product left and no plan for a second one.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/457-postrocket" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Skysheet and Fieldbook tried to replace or extend the spreadsheet with a product of their own, and both lost when Google and Microsoft added the same functions. SheetAI did not ask anyone to leave Google Sheets. It added one function inside Google's product, and the hard part of that function, the language model, was rented through an API. The founder built it alone, by his account, and customers who used their own keys paid for the model themselves.", "The platform risk did not change. VisiCalc was tied to one computer, and PostRocket lost its product when Facebook changed its API. SheetAI depends on one marketplace listing, and since June 2025 Google has sold its own AI function inside Sheets to paying Workspace customers. The verified monthly data starts in November 2025, after Google's launch, so it cannot show whether that launch reduced SheetAI's revenue. What the data shows is a business without investors that still collects money from 35 subscriptions after almost four years, at a much lower level than before." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The add-on idea, yes. The 2022 timing, no.", "text": "In November 2022 a language model inside a spreadsheet was new. In 2026 Google offers the same function inside Sheets for its paid plans, and many add-ons sell similar formulas. A reader can still copy the method: a small paid tool inside a marketplace where people already work, with model costs paid by the customer. SheetAI's own numbers also show the limit: more than 201,000 installs produced US$52,136 in total, so installs alone do not make a business.", "steps": [ "Put a model behind a function that people already use every day, such as a spreadsheet formula, and let them apply it to many rows at once.", "Publish it in a marketplace where people do paid work, and put a price on it from the first week.", "Let customers bring their own API key, so that heavy users do not create model costs for you, and sell a hosted plan to customers who do not want to manage keys.", "Watch revenue per install, not installs. A free plan that is good enough can hold most users at zero." ], "open": "The general function is now built into Google Sheets. What remains open is narrower work that Google's general function does not do: functions for one industry's data, such as product catalogs, lead lists or accounting entries, with the checks and the output formats that industry needs." }, "watch": [ { "title": "The platform owner sells the same function", "text": "On 25 June 2025 Google announced an AI function inside Google Sheets that generates, summarizes and categorizes text from a prompt in a cell, for Business Standard and Plus, Enterprise Standard and Plus, education add-ons, and Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. SheetAI's main function does the same work. The public verified data starts in November 2025, so the effect of Google's launch on SheetAI's revenue is not established." }, { "title": "Falling revenue", "text": "Verified revenue averaged US$869 a month from November 2025 to March 2026 and US$474 a month from June to September 2026. The last 30 days were 25.7% below the 30 days before, and MRR fell 13.2% in 30 days. The sources give no reason for the fall. The price change that made the use with the customer's own key free came between June and October 2026, after most of the fall." }, { "title": "A total earned with a company team", "text": "The founder built and launched SheetAI alone, by his account, and he says that he now works with zero developers. Between those dates the same company employed up to 10 to 12 people at its peak, a figure given on the MagicSlides about page, and no source says how much of their work went to SheetAI or when the peak was. The verified total is a sum of 47 months, and the public data cannot separate the periods." }, { "title": "One marketplace listing", "text": "All installs come through a single listing in the Google Workspace Marketplace. Google decides its ranking, its review rules and whether it stays online. Several Google reviews, from February 2023 to August 2025, say that a payment did not activate the paid plan or that support did not answer. The developer replied to some of them with an apology or a refund offer." }, { "title": "Numbers that do not agree", "text": "The SheetAI home page shows a rating of 4.5 of 5 from 45 reviews, the same figure that it showed in June 2024, while Google's listing shows 3.9 of 5 from 63 ratings in October 2026. The pricing page quotes a review dated 4 January 2022, before the product's founding date of 20 November 2022. The founder's figure of about US$2,000 of MRR in January 2023 is higher than the calculated average of about US$1,253 a month before October 2025, which is possible if the revenue fell after 2023, but the public data cannot show it." }, { "title": "The founder's other products", "text": "SheetAI's footer links MagicForm, a quiz generator for teachers and trainers; MagicSlides; TalkingPDF and AskVideo, which answer questions about a PDF or a YouTube video; BananaSlides, a slide generator; SecondBrain, a memory app for Mac; and BuildCheap, an app builder. Their home pages, read on 25 October 2026, did not offer essay writing, ways to pass AI detectors, or income promises." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.sheetai.app/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/sheetai-app" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of SheetAI.app, revenue read from Stripe by API key", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/sheetai-app.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile on 25 October 2026 (revenue last synced 25 October 2026 at 20:17 UTC); it matched a copy read earlier the same day. The revenue, MRR and subscription figures come from the Stripe account. The description, founding date, user estimate and audience are written by the founder and are grade C." }, { "title": "SheetAI home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.sheetai.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product description, the install and rating claims, the footer list of other products and the company name IndianAppGuy Tech Pvt Ltd." }, { "title": "SheetAI pricing page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.sheetai.app/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the questions and answers. Source for the current plans, the credit packs, the stored-answer feature and the license rules." }, { "title": "Google Workspace Marketplace listing: SheetAI App", "url": "https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/sheetai_app/789651835706", "grade": "B", "how": "Read on 25 October 2026. The install band, the rating and the developer name are published by Google. The reviews are user statements that Google does not verify." }, { "title": "SheetAI documentation: How to Set Up Your API Key", "url": "https://www.sheetai.app/set-up/how-to-set-up-api-key", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the supported providers, the official key pages and the statement that the key stays in the customer's Google account." }, { "title": "SheetAI about page", "url": "https://www.sheetai.app/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names Sanskar Tiwari as founder and CEO and the company as the owner." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copies of the SheetAI home page, 6 December 2022 to 5 October 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230306000315/https://www.sheetai.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the archived copies of 6 December 2022, 6 March 2023, 9 June 2024, 1 November 2025 and 5 October 2026, and the capture index, which lists a first copy on 20 November 2022. Source for the first product, the blog dates and the install claims over time." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copies of the SheetAI pricing page, 4 January 2023 to 12 June 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230104041630/https://www.sheetai.app/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the archived copies of 4 January 2023, 14 June 2024, 9 September 2025, 1 May 2026 and 12 June 2026. Source for the price history." }, { "title": "Founder's article, 27 July 2026: Put More Buy Buttons on the Internet", "url": "https://www.sanskartiwari.io/articles/put-more-buy-buttons-on-the-internet", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Source for the MRR of about US$2,000, the rule of selling in work tools, and the statement that he never raised money." }, { "title": "Founder's article, 11 August 2026: I Never Planned to Build MagicSlides", "url": "https://www.sanskartiwari.io/articles/i-never-planned-to-build-magicslides", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the statement that SheetAI was his focus and was growing when MagicSlides started." }, { "title": "MagicSlides about page: The MagicSlides Story", "url": "https://www.magicslides.app/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Source for SheetAI as the main project in 2022, the pitch-deck request, and the company's peak team of 10 to 12 people." }, { "title": "Founder's projects page: My 33 buy buttons on the internet", "url": "https://www.sanskartiwari.io/projects", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Lists SheetAI among the products that he built and launched solo, and lists his other products." }, { "title": "Founder's personal site, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.sanskartiwari.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the home page. Source for the figure of 10 team members." }, { "title": "YouTube, Ishan Sharma channel, 13 September 2026: How I'd Start a Business With Claude Code in 2026, with Sanskar Tiwari", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4z_RDr5py10", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the video description, not the video, in a copy downloaded on 13 October 2026 for this site's MagicSlides page. Source for the move from a team of developers to zero developers." }, { "title": "Latka company page for MagicSlides App", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/magicslides.app", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in a copy downloaded on 13 October 2026. Used only for the LinkedIn count of 2 people in July 2025." }, { "title": "Google Workspace Updates, 25 June 2025: Generate data with Gemini in Google Sheets", "url": "https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2025/06/generate-data-with-gemini-in-google-sheets.html", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Google's own announcement of the AI function in Sheets, its rollout dates and the plans that receive it." }, { "title": "Home pages of the founder's other products linked in SheetAI's footer, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.magicform.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the home pages of MagicForm (and its pricing page), TalkingPDF, AskVideo, BananaSlides, SecondBrain and BuildCheap to check what they sell. Not used for numbers." }, { "title": "SheetAI documentation: SHEETAI Function Guide", "url": "https://www.sheetai.app/docs/sheetai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the list of functions." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." }, { "title": "TrustMRR profile of MagicSlides.app, the founder's larger product", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/magicslides-app.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in a copy downloaded on 13 October 2026 for this site's MagicSlides page (revenue last synced 13 October 2026). Used only for the comparison of totals: US$722,575 since launch." }, { "title": "SheetAI affiliate program page on Rewardful", "url": "https://sheetai.getrewardful.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read on 25 October 2026. The page says that the affiliate program is no longer active." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/journable/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/journable.md", "slug": "journable", "name": "Journable", "country": "USA", "sector": "Health and Fitness", "productType": "AI calorie counter app for Android and iPhone", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "1 May 2024", "outcomeLabel": "About US$80K a month MRR, March 2026", "sticker": "$80K MRR, reported", "outcomeUsd": 960000, "months": 22, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders, Steve Hoyek and one co-founder whom the sources do not name; no employee count given", "fundingLabel": "None, by the founder's statement: only the founders' own money", "primaryFactor": "Paid ads", "group": "health-appearance", "channel": "paid-ads", "trend": "growing", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Health and Fitness" ], "product": "A calorie counter for Android and iPhone where you log food and exercise by typing a sentence or by taking a photo of your plate. An AI model names the ingredients, estimates the portions, and returns calories, protein, carbohydrates and fat for each item and for the meal. The app also tracks weight, water and streaks, and makes a weekly report. After a free trial it needs a subscription; the App Store listing lists US$9.99 a month or US$39.99 a year.", "why": "Steve Hoyek said he had lost 45 kilos by counting calories in many apps and found them too complex, so the two co-founders built the simplest one they could. The founder said on Starter Story that iPhone ads cost about four times as much per view as Android ads, while iPhone users convert only about 20% better. With no outside money, they put their ads on Android, mostly Google's app campaigns, and the founder said about 80% of users and revenue came from Android.", "summary": [ "Journable is a calorie counter, an app that adds up the energy in the food a person eats so that they can eat less, more or the same as a goal. Most older calorie counters make the user search a database of foods and weigh portions. In Journable the user writes \"yogurt, granola, blueberries and almonds\" or takes a photo, and an AI model returns the calories and the macros, short for macronutrients: protein, carbohydrates and fat. The founder said that the backend uses OpenAI models for most of the AI work. The company behind it is Journable LLC, the developer and seller named on the App Store and the developer on Google Play.", "Steve Hoyek, who lists himself on Product Hunt as co-founder of Journable, launched it there on 1 May 2024; it finished ninth of the day. In a Starter Story video published on 25 March 2026 he said that the two co-founders had grown revenue over the past year from less than US$1,000 to US$100,000 a month, with only their own money. On camera he showed his RevenueCat dashboard (RevenueCat is a service that handles in-app subscriptions on iPhone and Android and reports their revenue), and he said it showed US$125,000 of revenue in the past 28 days and an MRR, monthly recurring revenue, of about US$80,000, with just over 30,000 active subscribers. He said about 80% of users and revenue came from Android.", "Every money figure on this page comes from that one video, so the evidence grade is D, reported and not verified. A dashboard shown on camera by the founder is at most grade C, and here there is only one date. The founder also said that his all-time Google Ads spend was just under US$500,000 and that the revenue attributed to those ads was about the same, so the business was close to break-even on paid ads and its profit is not known. The page also lists earlier health-tracking companies that failed, most of them with far more money." ], "factsCaption": "An AI calorie counter that its co-founder reported at about US$80,000 of monthly recurring revenue in March 2026, 22 months after its Product Hunt launch, with no second source for the money figures", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is a statement by the founder in one video on one date, including figures he read from a dashboard on camera, or a third party's summary of that video. A grade C value was read directly from the company's own pages, the app store listings or Product Hunt. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a Product Hunt launch with two paying subscribers to a reported US$100,000 a month, mostly from Android users found by Google ads. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Journable prices in October 2026, read from the US App Store listing (grade C); the company's website has no pricing page and the Google Play listing shows no prices", "note": "The app is free to download with a free trial; the store listings say a subscription is then needed to keep logging food and exercise, and that it gives unlimited entries, all features and no ads. The founder said in March 2026 that there are two packages, monthly and annual, and that all revenue comes from them. The App Store shows the same two prices several times, which usually means several product codes at one price. A referral code from the company's affiliate program gives a 7-day free trial. Prices on Google Play, where most revenue comes from, could not be read.", "rows": [ [ "Free trial", "0", "0", "trial length not stated on the store listing" ], [ "Premium, monthly", "", "9.99", "unlimited entries, all features, no ads" ], [ "Premium, annual", "3.33", "", "US$39.99 a year on the App Store" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue in the past 28 days, March 2026", "value": "US$125,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Steve Hoyek read it from his RevenueCat dashboard on camera in the Starter Story video published on 25 March 2026. A dashboard shown by the founder is at most grade C; with one date only, it is D. It is higher than the MRR because a yearly subscription counts in full in the month it is paid, while MRR spreads it over 12 months.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, March 2026", "value": "about US$80,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Same dashboard and video. The founder said it is just under US$1 million a year in annual terms.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the MRR", "value": "US$960,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$80,000 times 12. This is the headline value of the page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Subscribers, March 2026", "value": "just over 30,000 active, about 40,000 in total", "grade": "D", "note": "Same dashboard and video.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue growth to March 2026", "value": "from less than US$1,000 to US$100,000 a month in about a year", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder statement in the video. He also said he built the app \"almost 18 months ago\", which does not match the Product Hunt launch of May 2024, 23 months before the video.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Share of revenue from Android", "value": "about 80%", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder said about 80% of users and about 80% of revenue come from Android and 20% from iOS. The video description, written by Starter Story, says 92% of his revenue comes from Android. The two figures do not agree.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "All-time Google Ads spend and attributed revenue, March 2026", "value": "just under US$500,000 spent; about the same in attributed revenue", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder showed his Google Ads dashboard and said they were effectively at break-even on ads. ProvenStartups notes that attributed revenue near break-even is not net profit.", "src": [ 1, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Advertising cost, iOS against Android", "value": "about 4 times the cost per view on iOS; iOS users convert about 20% better", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder statement. He said the conversion figure came from RevenueCat's State of Subscription Apps report of 2025, which was not read for this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Google Play downloads", "value": "1,000,000+ (October 2026)", "grade": "C", "note": "Read on the Google Play listing on 25 October 2026. The founder said in March 2026 that Android downloads were almost at a million.", "src": [ 8, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Store ratings, October 2026", "value": "Google Play 4.7 from 123K reviews; App Store 4.8 from 513 ratings", "grade": "C", "note": "Read on the two listings on 25 October 2026. The much larger Play count agrees with the founder's statement that most users are on Android.", "src": [ 8, 7 ] }, { "fact": "First Product Hunt launch, 1 May 2024", "value": "193 upvotes, 18 comments, 9th of the day", "grade": "C", "note": "Product Hunt launch data. The founder said it brought a couple hundred installs and two subscribers. A second launch on 1 January 2025 had 9 upvotes.", "src": [ 6, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Prices", "value": "US$9.99 a month or US$39.99 a year", "grade": "C", "note": "In-app purchases on the US App Store listing, October 2026.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Languages", "value": "English and 71 more", "grade": "C", "note": "App Store listing. The affiliate page says the app is available in all languages.", "src": [ 7, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 co-founders", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder spoke of \"my co founder and I\" in the video; ProvenStartups summarises the team as 2 cofounders. Product Hunt lists only Steve Hoyek as maker, with the title co-founder. No source gives an employee count.", "src": [ 1, 4, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder said: \"We are bootstrapped. We have spent only our own money since day one.\"", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Company", "value": "Journable LLC", "grade": "C", "note": "Developer and seller on the App Store, developer on Google Play with a United States address. The App Store copyright line reads 2022. The founders' own location is not stated in any source read.", "src": [ 7, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the headline figure", "value": "22 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: May 2024 to March 2026.", "src": [ 6, 2 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Before 2024", "what": "Steve Hoyek loses 45 kilos, from 125 to 80, by counting calories in several apps. He and his co-founder, who also lost weight, decide that the existing apps are too complex.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2022", "what": "The App Store listing's copyright line names Journable LLC with the year 2022. No source says what was built then.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "16 April 2024", "what": "Steve Hoyek joins Product Hunt.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "1 May 2024", "what": "Product Hunt launch: \"Chat your way to health & fitness with AI powered tracking\". 193 upvotes, 18 comments, 9th of the day. The founder said it brought a couple hundred installs, and that two of them became subscribers, which told the team people would pay.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 1 ] }, { "when": "2024 to 2025", "what": "First paid ads on Meta. The founder said they could not afford iPhone campaigns, ran Android campaigns in the United States, found the conversion as good as on iPhone, and moved the budget to Google Ads, with the Play Store ad as the best performer.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "1 January 2025", "what": "A second Product Hunt launch, \"AI nutrition assistant\", gets 9 upvotes.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "About March 2025 to March 2026", "what": "The founder said revenue grew from less than US$1,000 to US$100,000 a month over this year.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "25 March 2026", "what": "Starter Story publishes \"I Built a $100K/Month Android App\". On camera the founder shows US$125,000 of revenue in 28 days, about US$80,000 MRR, just over 30,000 active subscribers, and an all-time Google Ads spend of just under US$500,000 with about the same attributed revenue.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "14 October 2026", "what": "ProvenStartups adds the video to its case list as \"Joinable\", the spelling of the automatic captions, and labels it third-party verified.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "The Google Play listing shows 1,000,000+ downloads and 4.7 stars from 123K reviews, updated on 19 October 2026; the App Store shows version 2.1.264 with frequent updates through the year.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 7 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Paid ads on Android", "text": "The founder said that iPhone ads cost about four times as much per view as Android ads, while iPhone users convert only about 20% better, so a team paying from its own pocket gets more subscribers per dollar on Android. Google's app campaigns place one set of ads across Google Search, YouTube, the Discover feed, the display network and, most important for this app, the Play Store search results for words like \"calorie counter\". The founder said that some iPhone installs follow from the Android ads as well." }, { "title": "Send every in-app event to the ad platform", "text": "The founder said the first step of the method is attribution: the app reports to Google Ads each install, each view of the paywall, each free trial and each purchase with its value, so that Google's algorithm can learn which people become subscribers. Then come install campaigns to collect data, many headlines, images and videos for the algorithm to test, better Play Store screenshots, and finally campaigns that bid for a target cost per acquisition. He said such a campaign needs a daily budget of about ten times the target cost of one event, because the algorithm needs about ten events a day." }, { "title": "Simpler than the old calorie counters", "text": "Older apps make users search a food database and weigh portions. Journable takes a sentence or a photo, and the AI model does the rest. The founder said that simplicity is the main thing they focus on and what their marketing tries to show; the interviewer added that users spend less time in the app than in others, and that this is what makes it valuable." }, { "title": "Two plans, many languages", "text": "The App Store listing lists a monthly plan at US$9.99 and an annual plan at US$39.99, and the app is offered in English and 71 other languages, which lets one set of Android campaigns reach many countries. The founder said all revenue comes from the two subscriptions." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's account in the Starter Story video and from the app store listings. The tool names and monthly costs are the founder's statements; names are given as the founder said them, corrected where the automatic transcript misspelled them.", "items": [ "Backend on Google's stack: the founder said they use Firebase and Google Analytics 4 for the backend, BigQuery for data, Google Cloud, Google Play and Google Ads, and that \"we effectively work for Google at this point\".", "AI: the founder said OpenAI models handle most of the AI work, reading the text or photo, naming ingredients, estimating portions and returning calories and macros per ingredient.", "Subscriptions: RevenueCat manages the in-app subscriptions on both stores and is the dashboard the founder showed on camera.", "Coding and operations tools, with the monthly costs the founder said: Claude Code and Claude Cowork at US$100 (the transcript spells them \"Cloud Code\" and \"Cloud Cowork\"), an OpenAI premium plan at US$20, GitHub Copilot at US$39 and CodeRabbit for code review at US$30.", "Running the company, with the monthly costs the founder said: an AI email-support tool that the transcript spells \"Fixer\" at US$30, n8n for automation at US$24, AppFollow for app store optimization at US$180, and Webflow for the website at US$18.", "The website is a Webflow site with links to both stores, a blog, a podcast called The Weigh In and an affiliate program that the company says pays 50% of a referred subscriber's payments for up to 12 months through PayPal." ], "src": [ 1, 9, 10, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised to track food, activity or health and turn the data into better habits, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Jawbone", "years": "1999 to 2017", "funding": "US$930M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "The UP wristbands: sleek fitness trackers that turned daily activity, sleep and food data into health insights.", "died": "Fitbit and Apple out-competed it; product recalls, poor customer service and long legal fights used up the money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/257-jawbone" }, { "name": "Airo Health", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$4M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A wristband that would track stress, nutrition intake and exercise better than a Fitbit or an Apple Watch.", "died": "The device could not justify its price against Apple and Fitbit, hardware production and distribution overwhelmed the team, and further funding did not come.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1465-airo-health" }, { "name": "Arivale", "years": "2015 to 2019", "funding": "US$50M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Scientific wellness: genome, blood and microbiome tests plus a personal human coach, for US$3,500 upfront and US$99 a month.", "died": "The coaches made every customer expensive: the database records about US$4,700 of cost per customer a year against about US$1,200 of yearly revenue.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/8-arivale" }, { "name": "Habitual", "years": "2019 to 2021", "funding": "US$50K", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "A clean habit-tracking app based on the book Atomic Habits, with personal feedback.", "died": "A good product with no marketing plan: it never reached enough users in a crowded app category.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1973-habitual" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Jawbone and Airo Health tried to measure food and activity automatically with a device on the wrist, and the hardware cost them the company. Arivale used human coaches to turn data into advice, and the database records that each customer cost about four times what the customer paid, by its estimate. Habitual had a simple app and no way to reach people.", "Journable changes two of these points. A language model now does what the wristbands and the coaches tried to do: it turns a sentence or a photo of a plate into calories and macros, at the cost of an API call, with no device to build or ship. And the founders put their effort into the one thing Habitual lacked, a measured paid channel: the founder said every install, trial and purchase is reported to Google Ads, which then buys more users like the ones who paid. The risk that stays is the one the founder stated himself, that ad spend and the revenue it brings were about equal in March 2026." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Another AI calorie counter, hard. The Android paid-ads method, yes.", "text": "The App Store already shows many AI calorie counters next to Journable, and a new one would compete with all of them for the same ad space. What can be copied is the method the founder described in March 2026: pick Android where ads are cheaper, report every in-app event to Google Ads, start with install campaigns and many creative assets, then bid for a target cost per subscriber and raise the budget only as the conversion rate rises.", "steps": [ "Look at the ad cost and conversion data for both platforms before choosing one; the founder said Android gave more subscribers per dollar for a team with no outside money.", "Before any campaign, send installs, paywall views, trials and purchases with their value from the app to the ad platform.", "Run install campaigns first, with many headlines, images and videos, even stock ones, and let the algorithm find what works.", "Improve the store listing, because Google's app campaigns use its screenshots, title and description as ad material.", "Move to target cost-per-acquisition campaigns with a daily budget of about ten times the target cost, and raise budgets only as the subscription conversion rate improves." ], "open": "The founder said there are two openings: apps that succeed on iPhone and have no good Android equivalent, and small, specific problems that were not worth building an app for before AI tools lowered the cost of software." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "Every money figure on this page rests on one source: Steve Hoyek, co-founder, showing his RevenueCat and Google Ads dashboards on camera in a Starter Story video published on 25 March 2026. No payment processor, buyer or journalist has checked them, and no second date exists. The sources also disagree in two places: the founder said about 80% of revenue comes from Android while the video description says 92%, and he said he built the app almost 18 months before the video while the Product Hunt launch was 23 months before it. A reader could look for a payment-processor-verified profile, for example on TrustMRR (none was listed there in October 2026), or a later interview with new figures." }, { "title": "Close to break-even on ads", "text": "The founder said the all-time Google Ads spend was just under US$500,000 and the revenue attributed to those ads was about the same. Revenue that does not come from ads, renewals and the cost of the AI model calls decide whether the business makes a profit, and no source gives those numbers." }, { "title": "One ad platform, one store", "text": "Most users come from Google's app campaigns and most revenue from Google Play. A change in Google's ad prices, in its campaign algorithm or in Play Store rules would hit the business directly, and the founder said that making content, which could build an audience of its own, is a skill the business is missing." }, { "title": "The AI estimates can be wrong", "text": "Portion size from a photo is hard to estimate. An App Store reviewer in September 2026 wrote that the photo feature recorded 2 ounces of meat that weighed 5.5 ounces on a scale, and Google Play reviewers in July 2026 reported undercounted calories and wrong quantities; the developer's replies say it is working on accuracy. For users who rely on exact numbers, these errors matter." }, { "title": "A weight-loss app rated for all ages", "text": "The Google Play listing says \"Hit your weight loss goals\" and the app is rated 9+ on the App Store and Everyone on Google Play. The listings make no medical or cure claims, and the app records the weight that the user types; it does not rate bodies or looks. Calorie counting can still be a risk for people with eating disorders, and a 9+ rating means the App Store offers it to children from age 9." }, { "title": "A crowded category", "text": "The App Store places many other AI calorie counters next to Journable, and apps such as Cal AI, which ProvenStartups lists at US$25M a year, sell the same photo-to-calories idea. Competition for the same ad keywords raises the cost of each new subscriber." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.journable.com/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6477719720" }, { "kind": "android", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.journable.app" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/journable" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Starter Story episode page, 26 March 2026: I Built a $100K/Month Android App, with Steve of Journable", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stevehoyek", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full, including the full transcript. Founder interview with dashboards shown on camera. Source for every money figure, the team, the funding, the ad method and the tool list." }, { "title": "YouTube, Starter Story channel, published 25 March 2026: I Built a $100K/Month Android App", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pp4X58q_0s", "grade": "D", "how": "Read the title, publication date and description on the watch page. The description links Journable and the founder's X account and says 92% of revenue comes from Android. Captions and transcripts were not fetched." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: Journable product page", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/journable", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names Steve Hoyek as author of the page and says the product launched in 2024." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: Journable makers", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/journable/makers", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Lists Steve Hoyek as maker, \"Co-founder, builder, seller, techie\"." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: Steve Hoyek's profile", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/@stevehoyek", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Shows Journable as his only made product, two launches and the date he joined." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: Journable launches", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/journable/launches/journable", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the launch dates of 1 May 2024 and 1 January 2025, the vote counts, comments and the daily rank of 9." }, { "title": "App Store listing: Journable: AI Calorie Counter, by Journable LLC", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/journable/id6477719720", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Source for the prices, the age rating 9+, the seller, the languages, the ratings, the version history and the reviews." }, { "title": "Google Play listing: Journable: AI Calorie Counter", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.journable.app", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Source for the 1,000,000+ downloads, the 4.7 rating from 123K reviews, the rating Everyone, the developer name and the reviews." }, { "title": "Journable home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.journable.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the chat and photo tracking description and the store links. The site has no pricing page and names no founder." }, { "title": "Journable affiliate program page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.journable.com/affiliate-program", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 50% commission for up to 12 months, the 7-day trial code and PayPal payouts. It promises a commission rate, not an income." }, { "title": "ProvenStartups case page: Joinable, captured 14 October 2026", "url": "https://provenstartups.com/projects/joinable-ai-calorie-counter-android", "grade": "D", "how": "Read the free sections. A third-party summary of the same Starter Story video, under the caption spelling \"Joinable\"; not an independent second source." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/essaygrader/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/essaygrader.md", "slug": "essaygrader", "name": "EssayGrader", "country": "Canada", "sector": "Education", "productType": "AI essay grading for teachers", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "B", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "8 February 2023", "outcomeLabel": "Sold for US$125K, February 2024", "sticker": "Sold for $125K", "outcomeUsd": 125000, "months": 12, "teamLabel": "1 technical founder at the sale; the buyer ran it alone at first and had a six-person team by July 2025", "fundingLabel": "None; the buyer paid in cash from his savings and says he turned down private equity and venture capital", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "learning", "channel": "search", "trend": "sold", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 2, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2B", "Education" ], "product": "A web app for teachers. The teacher uploads a whole class of essays, or imports them from Google Classroom, Canvas or Schoology, chooses or uploads a rubric, and gets a suggested score and written feedback for each student in a few minutes. The teacher reviews and edits the result before the students see it. Paid plans add AI-writing detection and plagiarism checks for the teacher, and schools and districts buy licenses for all their teachers.", "why": "A software engineer built it as a side project and launched it on Product Hunt in February 2023. A year later he sold it on Acquire.com to Chanakya (Chan) Yerneni, a former teacher and product marketer, who said he paid US$125,000 in cash when it made about US$5,000 a month. The buyer then talked to hundreds of teachers, built the features they asked for, and said in November 2025 that revenue had reached about US$80,000 a month.", "summary": [ "EssayGrader grades student essays with a large language model. A teacher gives it a rubric, the table of criteria and score levels that a teacher uses to grade an assignment, and a stack of essays. It returns a suggested score for each criterion and written feedback for each student. It connects to the LMS (learning management system, the school software where students hand in work, such as Google Classroom or Canvas), so the teacher does not have to download and upload files. Paid plans cost US$14.99 to US$49.99 a month for one teacher, and schools buy licenses by quote.", "Two owners ran it, and this page keeps their numbers apart. A software engineer built it: the company's About page credits a developer named Payton with the idea, after he saw how much grading his wife, an English teacher, took home, and with the first version. It launched on Product Hunt on 8 February 2023. In February 2024 he sold it through the Acquire.com marketplace. The buyer, Chan Yerneni, said on the Buying Online Businesses podcast that he paid US$125,000 in cash at a revenue multiple of about 2, which means the price was about two times one year of revenue. Acquire.com and the buyer put the revenue at the sale at about US$5,000 of MRR, monthly recurring revenue from subscriptions. The headline of this page is that sale, the outcome for the one-person business that the engineer built.", "Everything after the sale belongs to the buyer and the team he hired. He switched on live chat support, says he spoke to 300 to 400 teachers in the first year, and built what they asked for: AI-writing detection, plagiarism checks, analytics and LMS integrations. In July 2025 Acquire.com wrote that he and a six-person team were closing school and district contracts and that the business was on track to pass US$1 million of ARR (annual recurring revenue, the MRR times 12). In November 2025 the podcast's notes said that he had grown it to US$80,000 a month. The price is the buyer's own statement in an interview, grade B. All revenue figures come from the buyer alone, grade C, and some of them disagree with each other." ], "factsCaption": "A side project that sold for US$125,000 after one year, then grew under its buyer, by his account, from about US$5,000 to about US$80,000 a month", "factsRead": "How to read this table: grade B is the buyer's own statement of the price he paid, given in a podcast interview. Grade C values are statements by the buyer in interviews and on Acquire.com's sites, or claims on the company's own website. Grade D is a third-party estimate or an AI-compiled profile. A \"calc\" value (grade X) was computed on this page from the rows above it. No payment processor has confirmed any figure.", "timelineLead": "From a side project for one teacher's grading load to a school-district product, with the sale in the middle. Rows before February 2024 belong to the builder; rows after it belong to the buyer.", "pricing": { "caption": "EssayGrader prices read from its pricing page on 25 October 2026 (grade C)", "note": "The page shows US$14.99 and US$34.99 per month with a Monthly / Annually switch labelled \"UP TO 30% OFF\"; the page's script swaps in US$19.99 and US$49.99. Because US$34.99 is exactly 30% below US$49.99, this page reads the lower pair as the price per month billed yearly and the higher pair as the monthly price. That reading is an inference. The free Basic plan grades 100 essays a month. Schools and districts with 25 or more users get a quote. The directory indexator.ai also lists a Lite plan at US$6.99 a month, which the current page does not show.", "rows": [ [ "Basic", "0", "0", "100 essays a month, 1,000 words each" ], [ "Pro", "14.99", "19.99", "350 essays a month, 3,500 words each, AI-writing and plagiarism detection" ], [ "Premium", "34.99", "49.99", "800 essays a month, 8,000 words each, automatic detection" ], [ "School District / Higher-Ed", "custom", "", "25+ users, quote" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Sale price, February 2024", "value": "US$125,000, all cash", "grade": "B", "note": "The buyer's statement on the Buying Online Businesses podcast. The show notes say he bought it \"for $125K in cash at a 2x revenue multiple\" (they misspell the name as SAGrader.ai). ProvenStartups' summary of the video adds February 2024 and that he paid slightly more than the seller asked. No seller statement and no Acquire.com record of the price were found.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue at the sale", "value": "about US$5,000 a month (MRR)", "grade": "C", "note": "Acquire.com's blog and its podcast page, July 2025, both from the buyer's interview. Acquire.com's other site, Bootstrappers.com, wrote in March 2025 that it made US$8,000 a month.", "src": [ 2, 4, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Price compared with revenue", "value": "about 2.1 times one year of revenue", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$5,000 times 12 is US$60,000 a year, and US$125,000 divided by US$60,000 is 2.08. This agrees with the stated 2x multiple. With US$8,000 a month the multiple would be 1.3, so the US$5,000 figure fits the stated deal better.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Users at the sale", "value": "about 400, mostly individual teachers", "grade": "C", "note": "Bootstrappers.com, March 2025, from the buyer.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to sale", "value": "12 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: Product Hunt launch on 8 February 2023 to the sale in February 2024.", "src": [ 12, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, March 2025", "value": "\"over five times\" the US$8,000 a month at the sale, so more than US$40,000 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Bootstrappers.com, 21 March 2025, from the buyer. The US$40,000 is calculated on this page: 5 times US$8,000.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, July 2025", "value": "\"on track to cross $1M in ARR\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Acquire.com blog and the Startup Acquisition Stories podcast page, 21 July 2025. The podcast title says the buyer 10x'd the revenue; 10 times US$5,000 is US$50,000 a month (calculated). Starter Story quotes an X post from the same week: \"Quit a corporate job and acquire'd a $5K MRR SaaS. Now on track for $1M ARR.\"", "src": [ 2, 4, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, November 2025", "value": "about US$80,000 a month, \"hitting $1M in annual recurring revenue\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Buying Online Businesses podcast notes and YouTube description, 5 November 2025, from the buyer. They say he reached it \"less than a year\" after buying; the July 2025 report above still said \"on track\", so the month it was reached is unclear. ProvenStartups notes that the host first said US$800,000 and corrected himself on air.", "src": [ 1, 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the November 2025 figure", "value": "about US$960,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$80,000 times 12. Growth from US$5,000 to US$80,000 a month is 16 times, over about 21 months from February 2024 to November 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team after the sale", "value": "the buyer alone at first; \"his CTO and a small team of developers\" by March 2025; a \"six-person team\" by July 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "ProvenStartups, Bootstrappers.com and Acquire.com, all from the buyer. The About page lists Suraj Reddy as co-founder and CTO and the original builder and his wife as advisers.", "src": [ 6, 3, 2, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "The buyer told Bootstrappers.com: \"We had private equity firms and VCs reach out last year. But we turned them down.\" ProvenStartups says he paid from just under US$200,000 of savings.", "src": [ 3, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Buyer's own income in 2024", "value": "less than he earned at a student job", "grade": "C", "note": "The buyer: \"I had made more money as a student working at Subway than I made in 2024 at EssayGrader.\" Revenue went back into the product.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Teachers using it", "value": "100,000+ in March and November 2025; 200,000 claimed in October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Company and podcast claims, not counts of paying users. The pricing page says that by July 2026 more than 200,000 educators had graded more than 3.5 million assignments.", "src": [ 3, 1, 8, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Search position", "value": "\"ranks #1 for its top keywords\" and has \"over 60% of search traffic for 'AI essay grading'\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Acquire.com blog, July 2025, from the buyer. The directory indexator.ai estimated 107,000 visits in May 2026, 62.1% of them from organic search, and 17,350 searches a month for \"essay grader\".", "src": [ 2, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Grading accuracy claimed by the company", "value": "94% of criterion scores within one point of a human score, 22,000+ essays, July 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's own study on its pricing page. No outside audit is cited.", "src": [ 9 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "8 February 2023", "what": "The builder launches EssayGrader on Product Hunt: software that \"reduces the time it takes teachers to grade essays/papers using AI\", with feedback reports, error reports and summaries; \"AI detection tool coming soon!\" It finishes 32nd of the day with 71 points.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "End of 2023", "what": "Chan Yerneni, a senior product marketing manager at OpenText with a baby on the way, decides to buy a business instead of starting one. He reviews listings on Acquire.com every morning for about 90 days and looks at 25 to 30 businesses.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 1, 6 ] }, { "when": "February 2024", "what": "He buys EssayGrader for US$125,000 in cash at about US$5,000 a month, by his account. The seller is described as a technical founder who did not want to grow it. Funds go through Escrow.com; discovery to full transfer takes about a month.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 1, 2, 6 ] }, { "when": "May or June 2024", "what": "He switches on live chat support and answers teachers himself. He says he spoke to 300 to 400 teachers in the first year (in another interview, \"over a thousand\").", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 2, 3 ] }, { "when": "2024", "what": "He hires customer-facing developers, redesigns the interface, improves the grading engine, learns SEO and hires an SEO partner. Teachers ask for AI detection, plagiarism checks, analytics and Google Classroom and Canvas integrations.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "when": "21 March 2025", "what": "Bootstrappers.com reports revenue \"over five times\" the US$8,000 a month it gives for the sale, 100,000 educators, and that he turned down investors.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "21 July 2025", "what": "Acquire.com's blog and podcast: on track to pass US$1 million ARR, a six-person team closing school and district contracts, adoption in over 35 U.S. states, and a goal of US$2 million ARR within two years.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 4 ] }, { "when": "5 November 2025", "what": "On the Buying Online Businesses podcast the buyer's revenue is given as US$80,000 a month, about US$1 million ARR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "when": "July 2026", "what": "The company says 200,000 educators have graded more than 3.5 million assignments and that it has data privacy agreements with over 100 schools in more than 30 U.S. states.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 8 ] }, { "when": "29 September 2026", "what": "Version 5.2 learns a teacher's grading from up to six graded examples, compares revisions and checks citations.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A narrow, painful job", "text": "Grading essays is the part of teaching that teachers take home. The builder made the product after seeing his wife's grading load, and the buyer, a former teacher, says he chose it over listings with better revenue because \"I was a former teacher. I knew the pain point.\" A tool for one repeated task can be sold to one teacher at a time with a card, without waiting for a school budget." }, { "title": "Buy traction instead of building it", "text": "The buyer's test for a listing, as ProvenStartups quotes it: \"What would happen if this business is turned off tomorrow? Are there at least 100 people that are going to lose their minds?\" He told Acquire.com not to fixate on profitability when a business is below about US$200,000 and to look for early product-market fit, meaning proof that some customers want the product badly. He said he paid about two times a year of revenue, so the risky first year was already behind the product." }, { "title": "Talk to every customer, then build what they ask", "text": "The buyer turned on chat support and answered it himself. The features that drove growth, by his account, were teachers' requests: AI-writing detection for the teacher, plagiarism checks, writing analytics and direct LMS integrations. He said: \"The features that made the biggest difference weren't things I thought of.\"" }, { "title": "Teachers sell it to their schools", "text": "Teachers who used it told colleagues, and some asked their districts to pay. That turned individual subscriptions into school and district licenses, which need security reviews, data privacy agreements and training sessions, and that is where the team of six came in. Search did the rest: the buyer says the site ranks first for its main keywords, and a traffic directory puts organic search at 62% of visits." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's Terms of Service and pages and from the buyer's interviews. They are grade C. Nothing public describes the builder's original code.", "items": [ "The Terms of Service list the third-party services the product uses: OpenAI, PromptLayer (a tool for logging and managing prompts sent to language models), Pinecone (a vector database, which stores text as numbers so similar text can be found), Dropbox, Google Classroom and Canvas LMS.", "The same Terms name the vendors that run it: Stripe for payments, and DigitalOcean and Heroku for hosting.", "The buyer \"rebuilt the product from scratch\" after the purchase, according to Acquire.com's podcast page, with a CTO and customer-facing developers.", "Integrations with Google Classroom, Canvas and Schoology are built into the product, so teachers import submissions and send grades back without extra software.", "For schools it signs data privacy agreements and says it complies with the U.S. student-privacy laws FERPA and COPPA and with California's CCPA, and that student work is not used to train AI models.", "Before buying, the buyer checked each listing's search traffic with Ahrefs and SEMrush and signed NDAs to see financials; the payment went through Escrow.com." ], "src": [ 11, 4, 8, 9, 2 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to sell teachers software for grading, assessment or classroom records, all between 2010 and 2013. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "ClassroomIQ", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Grade paper exams and assignments faster through a digital interface.", "died": "Schools adopted technology slowly and the product did not make grading itself automatic.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1685-classroomiq" }, { "name": "Edusight", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$250K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A platform for K-12 teachers to track student performance and manage assessments.", "died": "School bureaucracy slowed sales and better-funded rivals such as ClassDojo and Seesaw won the classrooms.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1678-edusight" }, { "name": "BrightLoop", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Let teachers record and share student progress in real time.", "died": "Teachers were slow to adopt new tools, and Google's free tools did the job before the company could raise money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1681-brightloop" }, { "name": "Blendspace", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$150K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Help teachers build digital lessons from content on the web.", "died": "Google Classroom covered the need for free, and a freemium model brought users but little revenue.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1693-blendspace" } ], "whatChanged": [ "All four sold teachers a better way to organize work that the teacher still had to do. They needed school budgets, and Google gave schools free tools that did much of the same. They raised money, so they needed fast growth that schools could not give them.", "EssayGrader differs in three ways. The language model does the slow part, reading and commenting on each essay, so the time saved is hours a week rather than minutes, and the company claims 6 to 10 hours a week from a survey of its own users. It connects to Google Classroom and Canvas instead of competing with them. And it is sold first to single teachers for US$14.99 to US$49.99 a month, so revenue arrived before any district purchase; the buyer said the district contracts came later, when teachers asked their schools to pay. Under the builder this was enough for a sale at US$125,000 after one year, by the buyer's account." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The build was copyable in 2023. The purchase is copyable now.", "text": "An engineer with a teacher at home built a small AI grading tool and sold it after a year. The buyer's method is the more repeatable part: buy a small product with paying users in a market you know, then talk to the users and build what they ask for. It needs capital (he said US$125,000 in cash) and a buyer who can sell to schools.", "steps": [ "Build for one repeated, hated task of one profession that you can watch at close range.", "Charge single users by card from the start, so you do not wait for an institution's budget.", "If you buy instead of build, review dozens of listings, check traffic and financials, and choose a market you understand over the highest profit.", "Answer support chat yourself in the first months and turn the most common requests into features.", "Add the paperwork that institutions need (privacy agreements, security reviews, training) once users start asking their employers to pay." ], "open": "Grading and feedback for other written or spoken work: lab reports, language-learning speaking tests, nursing care plans and job-training assessments, and small listed products in these niches whose builders do not want to grow them." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Every money figure comes from the buyer", "text": "The price, the revenue at the sale and every later revenue figure are the buyer's statements in interviews, most of them on Acquire.com's own blog, podcast and Bootstrappers site, which promote buying through Acquire.com. No payment processor profile, seller statement or filing confirms them." }, { "title": "The accounts disagree in places", "text": "Revenue at the sale is US$5,000 a month in three sources and US$8,000 in one. The deal took \"three days\", \"within days\", \"about three weeks\" or \"about a month\". He spoke to \"300 to 400\" or \"over a thousand\" teachers. The November 2025 notes say US$80,000 a month was reached in less than a year, but in July 2025 the business was still \"on track\" for US$1 million ARR. The pricing page says the product launched in September 2023, while Product Hunt shows a launch on 8 February 2023." }, { "title": "Founder or buyer", "text": "The About page calls the buyer \"Founder & CEO\" and says the company began with a team of four, including him. His own interviews say he bought a product that someone else built. This page treats the engineer as the builder and the buyer as the owner who grew it." }, { "title": "Not a one-person business after the sale", "text": "The headline is the sale of a side project built by one engineer. The later growth to about US$80,000 a month, by the buyer's account, came with a CTO, developers and a six-person team by July 2025." }, { "title": "AI grading depends on trust and on suppliers", "text": "Teachers and districts must trust the scores; the company's accuracy study is its own. The product runs on OpenAI's models and on access to Google Classroom, Canvas and Schoology, which those companies control, and competitors such as CoGrader sell the same idea." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.essaygrader.ai/" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/essaygrader" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Buying Online Businesses Podcast (Jaryd Krause), 5 November 2025: Acquiring a SaaS Business & Scaling it From $5k - $80k P/mth In 1 Year with Chanakya Yerneni", "url": "https://omny.fm/shows/buying-online-businesses-podcast/acquiring-a-saas-business-scaling-it-from-5k-80k-p-mth-in-1-year-with-chanakya-yerneni", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the show notes in full; the audio was not transcribed. The buyer's statement of the price and multiple (grade B), and the US$80,000 a month (grade C). Publication date from the page data." }, { "title": "Acquire.com blog, 21 July 2025, by Veronica Buratini: How He Acquired an EdTech SaaS and 10x'd Its Revenue", "url": "https://blog.acquire.com/acquired-edtech-saas-10x-revenue/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Interview-based account by the marketplace where the sale happened. Source for the US$5,000 MRR at the sale, the 90-day search, Escrow.com, the six-person team, the search ranking and the US$2 million goal." }, { "title": "Bootstrappers.com (powered by Acquire.com), 21 March 2025, by Peter Upton: Why Chan Yerneni Chose to Buy, Not Build his Startup", "url": "https://bootstrappers.com/chan-yerneni-essay-grader/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the US$8,000 figure, \"over five times\" by March 2025, about 400 users at the sale, the team with a CTO, the declined investors and the buyer's 2024 income." }, { "title": "Startup Acquisition Stories (Acquire.com podcast), episode 135, 21 July 2025: How He Acquired an EdTech SaaS and 10x'd Its Revenue", "url": "https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/startup-acquisition-stories/59ff4410-2a39-013a-d610-0acc26574db2/how-he-acquired-an-edtech-saas-and-10xd-its-revenue/2696dff8-c022-4cdb-b8bd-da2d4f8acc77", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the episode description on Pocket Casts. Source for US$5,000 MRR, \"on track to hit $1M ARR\", 400+ customers and the rebuild from scratch." }, { "title": "YouTube, Jaryd Krause - Buying Online Businesses, 5 November 2025: Acquiring a SaaS Business & Scaling it From $5k - $80k P/mth In 1 Year with Chanakya Yerneni", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVzfwtURhGI", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the title, publication date and description of the watch page only; no captions or transcript were used." }, { "title": "ProvenStartups case page, captured 22 September 2026: EssayGrader.ai acquisition turnaround", "url": "https://provenstartups.com/projects/essaygrader-ai-acquisition-turnaround", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the free sections. A third party's summary of the YouTube interview, labelled founder-reported. Source for February 2024, all cash, above the asking price, the GitLab engineer as seller, the chat support timing, the savings and the host's on-air correction." }, { "title": "EssayGrader About page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.essaygrader.ai/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the builder's role, the team listing and the buyer's title." }, { "title": "EssayGrader home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.essaygrader.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product, the teacher counts, the LMS integrations, the privacy statements and the AI-detection feature sold to teachers." }, { "title": "EssayGrader pricing page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.essaygrader.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the price-switch script. Source for the plans, the July 2026 usage claims, the accuracy study and the stated launch month." }, { "title": "EssayGrader AI Content Detector page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.essaygrader.ai/features/ai-content-detector", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Shows that AI detection is sold to teachers \"to preserve academic integrity\"." }, { "title": "EssayGrader Terms of Service, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.essaygrader.ai/terms-of-service", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the parties, third-party services and vendors. Names Tech Nest Ventures Inc. as the company and lists OpenAI, PromptLayer, Pinecone, Stripe, DigitalOcean and Heroku." }, { "title": "Product Hunt launch page: EssayGrader, launched 8 February 2023", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/essaygrader/launches/essaygrader", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the launch date, the original description and the day rank." }, { "title": "Starter Story business profile: EssayGrader (AI-compiled), with its evidence pages", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/businesses/essaygrader", "grade": "D", "how": "Read the profile, revenue tab and evidence pages. An automated profile; used only for its verbatim quotation of an X post of July 2025 and to find the Acquire.com and podcast sources." }, { "title": "indexator.ai company page: EssayGrader", "url": "https://indexator.ai/companies/essaygrader", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. Third-party traffic estimates for May 2026 and a list of plans." }, { "title": "EssayGrader feature updates, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.essaygrader.ai/feature-updates", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the list of releases. Source for version 5.2 in September 2026." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/slashspace/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/slashspace.md", "slug": "slashspace", "name": "Slashspace", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Branching AI chat on a desktop canvas", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-25", "launchLabel": "September 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$131K total verified revenue, October 2026", "sticker": "$131K total revenue", "outcomeUsd": 131070, "months": 25, "teamLabel": "1 founder, operating through his company Lokus LLC", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Pricing", "group": "ai-model-tools", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Productivity software" ], "product": "A desktop app for Mac, Windows and Linux. Each AI chat is a box on an endless canvas, and any answer, or one sentence of an answer, can start a new branch of the conversation. PDFs, web pages, videos and notes can be connected to a chat as its sources. The user can send the same question to several models side by side, with their own API keys, their own Claude or ChatGPT subscription through the official Claude Code and Codex tools, local models, or prepaid hosted models.", "why": "A normal chat window is one long thread, and a side question either breaks that thread or is never asked. The founder sold a fix for that one problem to heavy AI users. The subscription version earned little; the one-time licence that followed sold to many buyers, and Stripe data on TrustMRR shows US$131,070 in total. Sales then fell, because each one-time buyer pays only once.", "summary": [ "Slashspace, called RabbitHoles AI until May 2026, is a branching chat app. Branching chat means that a reply in a conversation with an AI model can start a separate thread, so a side question gets its own space and the main conversation stays clean. The chats sit as boxes on an infinite canvas, a drawing surface without edges that the user can scroll and zoom, and lines between the boxes decide which sources and earlier answers each chat can read. The models come from other companies: the user brings an API key, a password that lets a program call a model provider on the user's own account, or uses a Claude or ChatGPT subscription through the providers' official command-line tools, or buys hosted usage from a prepaid wallet.", "Praneeth Pike, the founder, sells it through his company Lokus LLC. Archived copies of the site show a web app with a US$14 a month Pro plan in September 2024, then a Mac app with a US$39 lifetime licence from November 2024. The price rose to US$89 and then US$249 for a lifetime licence. TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a company's Stripe account, showed US$131,070 of total revenue and US$46,449 in the last 12 months on 25 October 2026. Most of it is one-time payments, and the current monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the subscription revenue that repeats every month, was only US$118.", "This page grades every number by its evidence. The revenue totals come from the payment processor through TrustMRR (grade A). The price history comes from the company's own pages and archived copies of them (grade C). The best month was November 2025 with US$14,726; the six months to October 2026 brought about half as much as the six months before. The page also shows failed startups that tried to make research and thinking more visual before language models could answer the questions." ], "factsCaption": "US$131,070 of verified revenue from one-time licences and yearly plans in 25 months, with sales now falling", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the company's Stripe account. A grade C value comes from the company's own pages or archived copies of them. A grade D value is a single claim by a third party. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. Most revenue is one-time licence sales, so a monthly figure is the revenue of that month, not recurring revenue.", "timelineLead": "From a US$14 a month web app to a desktop app sold mostly as a one-time licence, with US$131,070 of verified revenue in 25 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Slashspace prices on 25 October 2026, read from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "There is no monthly plan and no free trial; both plans can be refunded within 7 days. Both include every feature and 500 wallet credits once (1 credit is US$0.01). The wallet pays only for Slashspace's hosted models and hosted image generation; a top-up of US$10 of credit costs US$11, a 10% platform fee. Chats on the user's own API keys, Claude or ChatGPT subscription or local models cost nothing extra. An extra computer costs US$49 once. Buyers of the earlier US$89 one-off licence keep the version they have.", "rows": [ [ "Yearly", "7.42", "", "US$89 a year; every feature; updates while subscribed; 2 computers" ], [ "Lifetime", "249 one-time", "", "Every feature; every future version; 2 computers" ], [ "Extra device slot", "49 one-time", "", "One more computer" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Total verified revenue, all time, to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$131,070", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR markdown profile, revenue synced from Stripe through an API key on 25 October 2026. The profile is still listed under the old name Rabbit Holes AI.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 12 months to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$46,449", "grade": "A", "note": "The 12 monthly values in the same profile add up to US$43,216; the 12-month window and the calendar months do not start on the same day.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before the last 12 months", "value": "US$84,621", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 131,070 minus 46,449. This is the revenue up to about late October 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average revenue per month, last 12 months", "value": "about US$3,871", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 46,449 divided by 12. Above the site's floor of US$2,000 a month only as an average; 6 of the 12 calendar months were below it.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Best month", "value": "US$14,726, November 2025", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. It is 32% of the last 12 months' revenue. The next best month was June 2026 with US$7,676.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 6 months", "value": "US$15,654", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, to 25 October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the 6 months before that", "value": "US$30,795", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 46,449 minus 15,654. The last 6 months brought 49% less.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Lowest recent months", "value": "US$191 in August 2026, US$430 in September 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. October 2026 recovered to US$2,685 by the 25th.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days", "value": "US$2,685, on 14 of 30 days", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR daily list, 27 September to 26 October 2026. The largest day was US$747, which equals three US$249 lifetime licences.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Smallest number of payments behind the total", "value": "at least 527", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 131,070 divided by 249, the highest price on sale, rounded up. The site sells no team or enterprise plan, so the total cannot come from a few large payments. The real number of payments is higher, because many were US$89 or less.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, October 2026", "value": "US$118, from 11 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR metric snapshot. Yearly plans and older monthly plans are recurring; lifetime licences are not.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Users stated by the company", "value": "more than 1,600 in March 2026; more than 2,500 in October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived home page of 16 March 2026 (\"1600+ Users\") and the home page of 25 October 2026 (\"2,500+ people\"). The company does not say how many of them paid.", "src": [ 15, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue claimed in a YouTube analysis, October 2025", "value": "US$80,000 in 6 months", "grade": "D", "note": "Title of a video by the channel The Solo Entrepreneur, published 14 October 2025. ProvenStartups reports that the same video also says 1,200 paying users and later 200 users times US$90, which do not agree. The TrustMRR total before the last 12 months, US$84,621, is close to the US$80,000 claim.", "src": [ 17, 16, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Price, September 2024", "value": "Free plan, and Pro at US$14 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived pricing page of the web app. Pro included \"Latest Pro Models from ChatGPT and Claude\".", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Price, November 2024", "value": "US$39 lifetime licence, Mac app", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived home page: \"Limited Offer: Lifetime License for $39\", with downloads for Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "fact": "Price, April 2025", "value": "US$89 lifetime licence", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived home page: \"Purchase Life Time Deal • $ 89\", with the user's own API keys.", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "fact": "Price, November 2025 to March 2026", "value": "US$89 one-time with one year of updates, or US$249 lifetime", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived home pages of 2 November 2025 and 16 March 2026.", "src": [ 14, 15 ] }, { "fact": "Price, October 2026", "value": "US$89 a year, or US$249 once", "grade": "C", "note": "Pricing page. The lifetime price is 2.8 times the yearly price, as the page says.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 founder", "grade": "C", "note": "About page: \"Slashspace is built by its founder and operated by Lokus LLC\". The same page uses the heading \"A small team, run remotely\" without naming anyone else.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Company behind the product", "value": "Lokus LLC", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms of Use, updated 14 October 2026: an agreement with Lokus LLC, \"a company registered in Delaware\". The About page says registered in New York. TrustMRR lists the country as US. ProvenStartups and the YouTube video describe the founder as Indian.", "src": [ 5, 4, 1, 16 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "D", "note": "No source names an investor. The YouTube description says the founder built it with \"no team, no investors\".", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "fact": "Date of the new name", "value": "19 May 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Company blog post \"RabbitHoles AI is now Slashspace AI\".", "src": [ 7 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "23 March 2023", "what": "Founding date that the founder entered on his TrustMRR profile. No product from that time is archived.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "July 2024", "what": "The rabbitholes.ai domain shows Learnbrain AI, described as \"AI-powered research for the curious mind by @praneeth-pike\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "September 2024", "what": "Rabbitholes AI runs as a web app with a free plan and a Pro plan at US$14 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "November 2024", "what": "A Mac desktop app replaces it, sold as a lifetime licence for US$39 as a launch offer. Users bring their own API keys from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "April 2025", "what": "The lifetime licence costs US$89.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "14 October 2025", "what": "A Hindi-language YouTube channel publishes a video that claims US$80,000 in 6 months.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "Best month in the TrustMRR data: US$14,726. The site now sells US$89 with one year of updates, or US$249 for life.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 14 ] }, { "when": "March 2026", "what": "The home page says 1600+ users.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "19 May 2026", "what": "RabbitHoles AI becomes Slashspace. The founder writes that branching chat alone \"no longer capture[s] the full opportunity\" and that the old name sounded optional, \"a side quest\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "Second-best month: US$7,676.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "August to September 2026", "what": "Revenue falls to US$191 and US$430.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "US$89 a year or US$249 once, hosted models from a prepaid wallet, apps for Mac, Windows and Linux. TrustMRR shows US$131,070 in total and US$118 of monthly recurring revenue.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 3, 8 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "The price shape", "text": "The September 2024 web app cost US$14 a month and the models were included. ProvenStartups, retelling a YouTube analysis, reports that the product was \"almost a dead product\" on subscriptions. From November 2024 the founder sold a desktop app once, for US$39, then US$89, then US$249, and the Stripe data shows at least 527 payments behind the total." }, { "title": "No model bill at first", "text": "From November 2024 the buyer brought their own API keys, so each chat was paid to OpenAI, Anthropic or Google directly. A one-time price is safe only when the seller does not pay for usage. The hosted models added later are prepaid from a wallet, at cost plus a 10% fee on each top-up." }, { "title": "One problem, solved visibly", "text": "The product does one thing that a chat window cannot: keep side questions as separate branches that can all be seen at once. One testimonial on the home page, from an educator, says he switched after spending too much time copying text between ChatGPT, Claude and browser tabs." }, { "title": "Why the revenue falls", "text": "A lifetime licence is paid once. Revenue each month depends on new buyers, so it rises with a launch or a mention and drops between them: US$14,726 in November 2025, US$191 in August 2026. The yearly plan of October 2026 is a step back toward recurring revenue." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's privacy policy, terms and documentation, read on 25 October 2026. They are grade C.", "items": [ "A desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux. Canvases, chats and files are saved in a folder on the user's computer; API keys are stored in the operating system's secure storage and sent only to their provider.", "Hosted models go through Vercel AI Gateway to Anthropic, OpenAI and Amazon Bedrock. Image generation goes through OpenRouter. The Orchestrator mode, which plans work and hands parts of it to sub-agents, runs as background jobs on Trigger.dev with an Anthropic model.", "Subscriptions are used by starting the official Claude Code and Codex command-line tools that the user installed and signed in to. The documentation says usage \"counts against your Claude or ChatGPT plan\".", "Clerk for sign-in, Convex as the main database, Supabase for older accounts, Render and Cloudflare for the servers, Groq for transcription, Turbopuffer for search, Composio and MCP servers for connections to Gmail, Notion and other services.", "Stripe and Autumn take the payments; Resend and Loops send emails; PostHog and Sentry measure use and errors.", "Earlier buyers move over by email address: \"Rabbitholes lifetime deals\" and deals bought through a partner are matched to the new account." ], "src": [ 6, 5, 8, 9 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to make research, notes or brainstorming more visual before language models could answer the questions themselves. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "InstaGrok", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A search tool for students that showed results as a map of linked concepts instead of a list.", "died": "Schools did not change how they taught research, and free tools such as Quizlet and Khan Academy took the students.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1700-instagrok" }, { "name": "Thinkature", "years": "2006 to 2009", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A shared online whiteboard for brainstorming and planning.", "died": "Google Docs covered most of the need, and free users did not become paying customers.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1670-thinkature" }, { "name": "Omnity", "years": "2015 to 2021", "funding": "US$4.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Semantic search that connected documents from different fields for researchers.", "died": "Its own search algorithms were expensive to run, and large technology companies built stronger AI search.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/385-omnity" }, { "name": "Kippt", "years": "2012 to 2017", "funding": "US$400K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A clean tool to save and organize web pages against information overload.", "died": "It was caught between Pocket and Evernote, and its social features did not bring new users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/278-kippt" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Before 2023, a visual research tool could only arrange what the user already knew or found. InstaGrok drew search results as a map, Thinkature gave teams a shared whiteboard, and Kippt saved pages; the thinking itself still had to be done by the person, and each company had to pay for its own search or servers.", "Language models made each box on the canvas able to answer. Slashspace does not run a model; it connects the user's own accounts at OpenAI, Anthropic or Google, so the founder had no model bill to cover when he sold a licence once. Omnity spent US$4.5 million on its own search algorithms, while TrustMRR shows that one founder took US$131,070 by building only the canvas around rented models." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The pricing lesson, yes. The steady revenue, not yet.", "text": "Branching chat on a canvas is a crowded category: the About page itself names Heptabase, Anara, Arky and Poppy AI as competitors, and the large chat apps can add branching at any time. The one-time price brought many buyers but no recurring base: the Stripe data shows US$118 of monthly recurring revenue after US$131,070 in total.", "steps": [ "Sell a client for other companies' models with the buyer's own API keys, so a one-time price carries no usage cost.", "Test the price shape, not only the price: the same product moved from a monthly plan to a lifetime licence and sold far more.", "Raise the price in steps while buyers keep coming, here from US$39 to US$89 to US$249.", "Add a yearly plan and prepaid usage before the lifetime sales slow down, not after." ], "open": "A branching workspace built for one profession, with its sources and outputs: lawyers comparing case law, doctors reading studies, analysts comparing filings. Slashspace sells to a general audience of researchers, students and founders." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Falling revenue", "text": "The last 6 months brought US$15,654, against US$30,795 in the 6 months before. August and September 2026 brought US$191 and US$430. Monthly recurring revenue was US$118 on 25 October 2026." }, { "title": "Lifetime buyers pay once", "text": "Each lifetime licence is a cost that never ends: updates, support and the servers behind the documents, search and sign-in. Revenue must come from new buyers every month, or from the new yearly plan and wallet top-ups." }, { "title": "Rules of the model providers", "text": "The subscription feature drives the official Claude Code and Codex tools under the user's own account, and the terms tell users that they must follow the providers' terms. The terms also say that a third party \"may change or stop a model or service at any time\", which would remove that feature." }, { "title": "Competition from the chat apps", "text": "ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini control both the models and the most-used chat windows. If they add branching and a canvas, the main reason to buy a separate app becomes smaller." }, { "title": "Numbers that do not agree", "text": "The YouTube analysis claims 1,200 paying users and also computes 200 users times US$90, as ProvenStartups notes. The company's own user counts (1,600+ in March 2026, 2,500+ in October 2026) do not say how many paid. Founding is 2023 on TrustMRR and 2024 on the About page; the company is registered in Delaware in the terms and in New York on the About page." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.slashspace.ai/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/rabbit-holes-ai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of Rabbit Holes AI (now Slashspace), revenue synced from Stripe on 25 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/rabbit-holes-ai.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile on 25 October 2026. Revenue, monthly timeline, daily list and recurring revenue are verified through the Stripe API; the description, founding date and pricing text are founder-written (grade C)." }, { "title": "Slashspace home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.slashspace.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the questions and answers in the page. Source for the product, the models, the user count and the previous name." }, { "title": "Slashspace pricing page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.slashspace.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the plans, the wallet and the 10% fee." }, { "title": "About Slashspace, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.slashspace.ai/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founder, the company, the reason for the new name and the competitors." }, { "title": "Slashspace Terms of Use, last updated 14 October 2026", "url": "https://www.slashspace.ai/legal/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the parties and on AI models and third-party services. Confirms Lokus LLC as the company behind the product." }, { "title": "Slashspace Privacy Policy, last updated 21 October 2026", "url": "https://www.slashspace.ai/legal/privacy-policy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the model providers, the AI gateway and the service providers." }, { "title": "Slashspace blog, 19 May 2026: RabbitHoles AI is now Slashspace AI", "url": "https://www.slashspace.ai/blog/rabbitholes-is-now-slashspace", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder's post on the new name." }, { "title": "Slashspace documentation: Plans and billing", "url": "https://www.slashspace.ai/docs/plans-and-billing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the earlier one-off licence, older plans, wallet rules and the move of RabbitHoles lifetime deals." }, { "title": "Slashspace documentation: Subscription providers", "url": "https://www.slashspace.ai/docs/settings/subscription-providers", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on Claude Code and Codex. Source for how subscriptions are used." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of rabbitholes.ai, 25 July 2024 (Learnbrain AI)", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240725193419/https://rabbitholes.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page title and description." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of the RabbitHoles AI pricing page, 20 September 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240920181047/https://www.rabbitholes.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the US$14 a month plan." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of the RabbitHoles AI home page, 3 November 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20241103071813/https://rabbitholes.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Mac app and the US$39 lifetime licence." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of the RabbitHoles AI home page, 1 April 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250401030646/https://rabbitholes.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the pricing part. Source for the US$89 lifetime licence." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of the RabbitHoles AI home page, 2 November 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20251102080506/https://rabbitholes.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the pricing part. Source for the US$89 and US$249 prices." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of the RabbitHoles AI home page, 16 March 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260316115414/https://rabbitholes.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the pricing part and the user count." }, { "title": "ProvenStartups, captured 25 July 2026: Rabbit Holes AI, $80K in about 6 months", "url": "https://provenstartups.com/projects/rabbit-holes-ai-branching-chat-lifetime-deal", "grade": "D", "how": "Read the free sections. A retelling of one YouTube video, marked Creator-relayed, which itself notes that the video's numbers do not agree." }, { "title": "The Solo Entrepreneur on YouTube, 14 October 2025: This Indian Founder Made $80,000 in 6 Months with One SaaS Product!", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxXhtE7zQjk", "grade": "D", "how": "Read the title, date and description only; the video was not watched. A third-party analysis, not a founder interview." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/myzia/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/myzia.md", "slug": "myzia", "name": "MyZia", "country": "India", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI search optimization that writes and publishes blog posts to the client's site", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-26", "launchLabel": "June 2024", "outcomeLabel": "About US$5K a month, September 2026", "sticker": "Reported $5K a month", "outcomeUsd": 60000, "months": 27, "teamLabel": "1 founder, Dhairya Patel, and 1 employee, September 2026 (Starter Story's fact box)", "fundingLabel": "None (bootstrapped, founder statement)", "primaryFactor": "Direct sales", "group": "seo-ai-search", "channel": "sales", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Marketing" ], "product": "A web service for small and mid-sized businesses and for agencies. According to its own pages, it scans how visible a client's website is in Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, fixes technical items such as schema markup, writes long blog posts in the client's style, and publishes them directly to the client's WordPress, Shopify, Webflow or other site. It also writes Google Business Profile posts and replies to real customer reviews. The pricing page lists plans from ₹2,999 a month, about US$31.51.", "why": "The founder said that he already ran a development agency, Web5 Solution, and saw its clients fail to adapt to AI answer engines. He said he sold the product as a paid service from the first day, through direct conversations with business owners and agencies he already knew, and that this gave over 150 paid clients in the first two months.", "summary": [ "MyZia sells AI search optimization: work that makes a business appear both in ordinary Google results and in the answers that AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity give. The company's pages use three names for it. SEO (search engine optimization) means changing a website so that it ranks higher in search results. AEO (answer engine optimization) means formatting a site so that an assistant can take a direct answer from it. GEO (generative engine optimization) means making an AI model mention or cite the brand when it writes an answer. According to the home page, MyZia measures this visibility, fixes technical items such as schema markup (structured data in the page code that tells search engines what the page is about), and writes blog posts that it publishes directly into the client's CMS (content management system, the software that runs the website, such as WordPress).", "The founder is Dhairya Patel, who told Starter Story that he also runs a development agency, Web5 Solution. Starter Story's fact box lists the business as from Gurgaon, India, started in June 2024, with 1 founder and 1 employee. The website says the product belongs to Web5 NexGen Innovations Private Limited. In an interview that Starter Story published on 11 September 2026, the founder said: \"Today we bring in around $5K/month, with over 150 paid clients in our first two months.\" He said that the first prototype took about a month, that the first customers came from direct sales to owners of small businesses and agencies he already knew, and that the company has stayed bootstrapped, that is, funded only by its own revenue. The pricing page lists prices in Indian rupees, from ₹2,999 a month before taxes.", "The figure of about US$5,000 a month rests on that one founder interview, so this story has grade D: reported, not verified. No payment processor, buyer or journalist has confirmed it, and no second dated figure was found. The page also shows the main risk of the method: Google's spam policies treat many AI-generated pages \"without adding value for users\" as scaled content abuse, and MyZia sells publishing on \"full autopilot\"." ], "factsCaption": "One founder-reported revenue figure from September 2026, the company's own claims, and the prices on its pricing page; nothing is confirmed by a payment processor", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value comes from one founder interview with no second source. A grade C value is the company's own statement on its website. A grade A value here is a primary record that is not about MyZia itself, such as a central bank exchange rate. An \"X\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From an agency owner's side project to a reported US$5,000 a month in 27 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "MyZia prices on its pricing page, read 26 October 2026, in Indian rupees before taxes, converted to US dollars at the European Central Bank reference rate of 26 October 2026, about ₹95.19 to US$1 (grade C for the prices)", "note": "The page shows no yearly billing, so the yearly column is empty. The Growth plan is billed ₹7,999 every 3 months (about US$84.04); the table shows it per month. The Agency plan adds a one-time setup fee of ₹4,999 (about US$52.52) that includes 200 bonus credits. All plans list a 7-day free trial with no credit card. The frequently asked questions on the same page say plans give \"30 articles per month up to unlimited articles\", which does not match the 4 and 8 posts that the plan cards list.", "rows": [ [ "Basic", "", "31.51", "₹2,999 a month; tracking, AI Visibility Score, 4 blog posts a month" ], [ "Growth", "", "28.01", "₹7,999 every 3 months; tracking in Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, technical fixes, 8 blog posts a month" ], [ "Agency", "", "31.51", "₹2,999 a month plus ₹4,999 setup; 100 credits a month (10 clients or 50 blogs), white-label portals" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue per month, September 2026", "value": "around US$5,000", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder said in the Starter Story interview published on 11 September 2026: \"Today we bring in around $5K/month\". One source, one date.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from that figure", "value": "about US$60,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$5,000 times 12. Starter Story's own summary on the same page also says US$60,000 a year.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Paid clients in the first two months", "value": "over 150", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder, same interview. He does not say which months these were.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per paid client, rough check", "value": "about US$33 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$5,000 divided by 150. This is close to the Basic plan price of about US$31.51, so the two founder numbers agree in size. They come from different times, so this is only a rough check.", "src": [ 1, 3, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Businesses and articles claimed on the home page, October 2026", "value": "500+ businesses, 50K+ articles published, 120M+ words generated", "grade": "C", "note": "Company's own marketing claims with no date range. 500 businesses does not match 150 paid clients, but the home page does not say that all 500 pay.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Team, September 2026", "value": "1 founder and 1 employee", "grade": "D", "note": "Starter Story's fact box for the interview. The home page speaks of \"our team\" and \"expert editors\" without numbers.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder said \"we have stayed bootstrapped the whole way\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Start", "value": "June 2024, Gurgaon, India", "grade": "D", "note": "Starter Story's fact box.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "First capture of myzia.io in the Internet Archive", "value": "16 July 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "The archive's index lists a redirect from http://myzia.io/ on that date. The archive was offline when its snapshots were requested, so the page content of that date could not be read.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Time to build the first prototype", "value": "about a month", "grade": "D", "note": "Starter Story's interview text.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Lowest price, October 2026", "value": "₹2,999 a month, about US$31.51, before taxes", "grade": "C", "note": "Pricing page, converted at the European Central Bank rate of 26 October 2026.", "src": [ 3, 9 ] }, { "fact": "AI engines that the product tracks", "value": "Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity", "grade": "C", "note": "Pricing page, Growth plan. The interview says the scan covers \"16 AI models and 40+ signals\"; the home page says \"5 AI engines tracked in real time\". No source names the model that writes the articles.", "src": [ 1, 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Time from start to the September 2026 figure", "value": "27 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: June 2024 to September 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Before June 2024", "what": "Dhairya Patel runs Web5 Solution, a development agency, and sees its clients struggle with search moving to AI answer engines. The home page describes him as an alumnus of BITS Pilani with 8+ years of venture building.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "June 2024", "what": "The business starts in Gurgaon, according to Starter Story's fact box.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "After June 2024, date not given", "what": "The first prototype, a simple automated optimizer, takes about a month to build. The hardest technical work is publishing reliably into many different CMS platforms.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "First two months after launch, dates not given", "what": "Over 150 paid clients, according to the founder, found through direct sales conversations with owners of small businesses and agencies he already knew.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "16 July 2025", "what": "First capture of the domain myzia.io in the Internet Archive.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "11 September 2026", "what": "Starter Story publishes the founder interview: around US$5,000 a month, 1 founder and 1 employee, bootstrapped. He says he is moving into outbound email to marketing agencies, software directories, review platforms and founder communities.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "26 October 2026", "what": "The site is live with plans from ₹2,999 a month, claims of 500+ businesses and 50K+ published articles, and \"Featured On\" badges for the directories Dang.ai and Toolpilot.ai.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 3 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Direct sales to an existing network", "text": "The founder said the first customers did not come from a launch event. He sold the product in direct conversations to owners of small businesses and agencies that he already knew from his development agency. A service business gave him both the problem and the first buyers." }, { "title": "Done for the client, not advice for the client", "text": "The founder said the idea was that the fix \"could not be another dashboard full of recommendations\". MyZia writes the posts, adds images and publishes them into the client's site, so a small business owner does not have to act on a report. This is the opposite of Metigy, a predecessor below, whose customers wanted the work done and got recommendations." }, { "title": "Paid from the first day, priced for India", "text": "The founder said the product was paid from launch and that revenue paid for further development. The plans cost about US$28 to US$32 a month at the October 2026 exchange rate, so the founder's reported US$5,000 a month implies about 159 paying accounts at the Basic list price." }, { "title": "Agencies as a multiplier", "text": "The Agency plan, as the pricing page lists it, gives white-label client portals and 100 credits a month, which the page says equal 10 clients or 50 blogs. One agency customer can bring several end clients without MyZia selling to each of them." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the Starter Story interview (grade D) and the company's own pages (grade C). No source names the AI model that writes the articles or the hosting provider.", "items": [ "A scanning engine that, in the founder's words, checks a website \"across 16 AI models and 40+ signals\"; the pricing page lists tracking in Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity.", "An article generator that writes posts of 2,000 or more words, matched to the client's past writing, with WebP featured images and keyword alt text, according to the blog service page.", "Publishing connectors for WordPress, Webflow, Shopify, Ghost, Wix and HubSpot, and REST webhooks for custom sites. The client can choose to save posts as drafts for approval or to publish automatically.", "Integrations listed on the home page: Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Looker Studio, Keyword Planner, WordPress, APIs and MCP.", "Google Business Profile tools that write posts and reply to real customer reviews; the service page sells replies that include service and location keywords.", "The founder said the first prototype took about a month, and that the hardest part was making the auto-posting work reliably across dozens of CMS platforms when demand arrived." ], "src": [ 1, 2, 4, 5 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised small businesses online visibility or content with less work, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Metigy", "years": "2014 to 2022", "funding": "US$14M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "An AI marketing brain for small businesses that analyzed social media and recommended content strategies.", "died": "According to the database, small businesses wanted done-for-you marketing, not AI insights, and the recommendations were too generic. It ran out of cash.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2338-metigy" }, { "name": "Waterproof Digital Camera", "years": "2013 to 2017", "funding": "None", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "An affiliate blog that reviewed waterproof cameras and earned commissions from search traffic.", "died": "It relied on black-hat SEO tactics. Google's algorithm updates and penalties removed the traffic, and the affiliate income with it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2023-waterproof-digital-camera" }, { "name": "Pressly", "years": "2011 to 2018", "funding": "US$2.9M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A platform that helped brands collect, curate and publish content to keep their audience engaged.", "died": "Larger marketing suites added curation as one feature, and competitors offered broader integrations.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/462-pressly" }, { "name": "LocalOn", "years": "2013 to 2016", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Websites, social media links and local SEO for small shops, with no technical skill needed.", "died": "It could not stand out against Shopify and Wix, and limited funding slowed its updates.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1548-localon" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Metigy and LocalOn sold small businesses tools and advice and found that owners did not have time to act on them. Pressly sold content work as a separate product and lost to suites that included it. MyZia's answer, as the founder describes it, is to do the work itself: a large language model writes the posts and a connector publishes them, so the cost of one post is small enough for plans of about US$28 to US$32 a month, as the pricing page lists them.", "Waterproof Digital Camera shows the other side. Content that exists mainly to rank can lose its traffic in one search engine update. Google's current guidance says that AI content is allowed, but that many AI pages \"without adding value for users\" may be scaled content abuse, and it asks publishers to \"manually factcheck and review\" AI content before publishing. MyZia's value to a client therefore depends on posts that a reader finds useful, not only on volume." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, if you already have a service business with clients.", "text": "The parts are common: a language model API, a CMS connector and a visibility report. What the founder had and most copiers lack was an agency with existing small-business clients who would pay on the first conversation. The method can be repeated in other countries and languages, at local prices.", "steps": [ "Start from a group of clients that you already serve, and sell to them in direct conversations before any public launch.", "Do the work for the client (write and publish) instead of giving a report of what to do.", "Offer draft mode with approval, so a person checks each post before it goes live.", "Add an agency plan with white-label portals, so agencies resell the service to their own clients." ], "open": "Small businesses in countries where English-language SEO tools are priced too high, and local languages that the large tools cover poorly." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline figure, around US$5,000 a month, rests on one source: Dhairya Patel's interview with Starter Story, published on 11 September 2026. The 150 paid clients in the first two months, the team of 1 founder and 1 employee and the bootstrapped funding come from the same interview. No payment processor, buyer or journalist has confirmed them, and no second dated figure was found. The company's own numbers also differ: the home page claims 500+ businesses, and the start date of June 2024 is a year before the first archive capture of the domain in July 2025. A reader could look for a payment-processor-verified profile (for example on TrustMRR, which had no MyZia profile in this site's list of its pages) or a later interview with a second dated figure." }, { "title": "Search engines may treat auto-posted AI content as spam", "text": "Google's spam policies define scaled content abuse as \"many pages generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users\", and give as an example \"Using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users\". Google's guidance on AI content says it is \"critical to manually factcheck and review all AI-generated content\" before publishing. MyZia's blog page sells publishing \"without human intervention\" on \"full autopilot\", although it also offers draft mode. The small plans, 4 or 8 posts a month, are ordinary volumes; the risk is larger where the Agency plan's 50 blogs per 100 credits or the FAQ's \"unlimited articles\" are used on one site. A client site that Google demotes is a lost customer." }, { "title": "Dependence on model providers and AI answer engines", "text": "The product writes with generative AI and measures how ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity mention a brand. The sources do not say which model writes the posts. A price change by the model provider changes MyZia's cost per post, and a change in how the assistants choose sources changes what MyZia can deliver. Neither is under the company's control." }, { "title": "Low prices need many customers", "text": "At about US$31.51 a month for the Basic plan, the reported US$5,000 a month needs about 159 paying accounts at list price. Each lost customer must be replaced, and the founder said that the next channels are outbound email, directories and review platforms, not yet proven by any figure." }, { "title": "Small compared with the other search stories on this site", "text": "SEObot, which also writes and publishes search articles automatically, reports US$888,000 in the last 12 months with grade A evidence; MyZia's single reported figure, about US$60,000 a year, is about one fifteenth of that and is grade D." }, { "title": "The founder runs another company", "text": "The founder said he also runs Web5 Solution, a development agency, and that the first customers came from its network. How much of his time goes to MyZia, and whether sales continue beyond that network, is not stated." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://myzia.io" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Starter Story, 11 September 2026: My AI-Search Optimization Platform Makes $5,000/Month With 150 Clients (founder interview with Dhairya Patel)", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/myzia-io", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. A written founder interview, not a page marked \"Estimated from public sources\". Source for the revenue figure, the client count, the fact box (Gurgaon, June 2024, 1 founder, 1 employee), the sales method and the bootstrapped funding." }, { "title": "MyZia home page, read 26 October 2026", "url": "https://myzia.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product description, the founder section, the claims of 500+ businesses and 50K+ articles, the integrations, the directory badges and the company name." }, { "title": "MyZia pricing page, read 26 October 2026", "url": "https://myzia.io/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the three plans, the prices in rupees and the FAQ about article volume." }, { "title": "MyZia service page: Blog Generation and Posting, read 26 October 2026", "url": "https://myzia.io/services/blog-generation-and-posting", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the article length, the CMS connectors, the draft-or-autopilot option and the claim of publishing without human intervention." }, { "title": "MyZia service page: GMB / GBP Review Replies, read 26 October 2026", "url": "https://myzia.io/services/gmb-review-replies", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the description and the capabilities section. Checked that it replies to real reviews and does not sell reviews." }, { "title": "Internet Archive CDX index for myzia.io", "url": "http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=myzia.io&limit=5&output=json", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the index. The first capture is a redirect on 16 July 2025. The archive was offline when snapshots were requested, so no archived page content was read." }, { "title": "Google Search Central: Spam policies for Google web search, last updated 28 August 2026", "url": "https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the section on scaled content abuse. Google's own policy; it says nothing about MyZia." }, { "title": "Google Search Central: Google Search's guidance on using generative AI content on your website, last updated 1 October 2026", "url": "https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/using-gen-ai-content", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. Google's own guidance; source for the review-before-publishing advice." }, { "title": "European Central Bank euro foreign exchange reference rates, 26 October 2026", "url": "https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-daily.xml", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. US$1.1188 and ₹106.4935 per euro, so about ₹95.19 per US dollar; used to convert the rupee prices." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/buildpad/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/buildpad.md", "slug": "buildpad", "name": "Buildpad", "country": "Romania", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI co-founder app that researches demand and plans a product", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-26", "launchLabel": "19 August 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$6K MRR, July 2025", "sticker": "$6K MRR", "outcomeUsd": 72000, "months": 10, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders, the brothers Felix and David Heikka; a team planned for 2026", "fundingLabel": "None found in the sources", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "build-software", "channel": "communities", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Startup tools" ], "product": "A web app for people who want to start a business. AI agents search Reddit, X, app stores, review sites and the web for complaints and demand, write cited reports, and then a guided plan takes the founder from idea to a product, with a canvas for notes, AI-run customer interviews and a website builder. It is sold as Pro at US$39 a month and Max at US$85 a month, paid in credits for AI work.", "why": "The two founders had built two products that nobody wanted. They turned that problem into the product, tested the idea first with a survey in founder subreddits, and then posted their progress and revenue figures again and again on X, Reddit, Hacker News and Product Hunt, where their buyers, other early founders, read.", "summary": [ "Buildpad is a web app that calls itself an AI co-founder: an AI assistant that leads a person through the steps of starting a business, asks questions, and pushes back on weak ideas, instead of only answering what it is asked. Its main feature uses AI agents, programs that run a large language model in a loop with tools such as web search, to read Reddit and X discussions, app-store reviews and market reports and to report whether people really have the problem the founder wants to solve. Users pay with credits, units that the app subtracts for each AI action; research uses more of them than a short chat message.", "Two Swedish brothers built it. David Heikka had co-founded an earlier software business and learned to code in 2023; Felix Heikka left the Swedish army in March 2024 and joined him in Budapest. After an AI lead-form product and a dating-profile joke app failed, they posted a survey in founder subreddits in July 2024, released a first version on 19 August 2024 and launched on Product Hunt in October 2024, which brought the first paying customers. Felix reported the MRR, monthly recurring revenue, the subscription income that repeats each month, in Hacker News posts: US$2,300 in January 2025, US$2,700 in February, US$3,600 in April and US$6,000 on 1 July 2025, with US$33,000 of total revenue by June 2025. The company behind the app is BUILDPAD S.R.L., registered in Romania.", "Every revenue number on this page is the founder's own statement on Hacker News, grade C: the figures rise steadily across seven dates, but no payment processor or journalist has confirmed them, and no revenue figure after July 2025 was found. The company says it had 20,000 users in October 2025 and more than 100,000 by July 2026. The page also shows earlier companies that promised to turn people's ideas into products and failed." ], "factsCaption": "From a Reddit survey to US$6,000 a month in recurring revenue in about ten months, as reported by the founder", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a statement by the founders, in Hacker News posts or on the company's own pages. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "Two failed products, then a product about not building failed products. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Buildpad prices in October 2026, from the company's pricing page and its own reviews post (grade C)", "note": "The pricing page shows only monthly prices and no yearly option. Credits are used up by AI actions: a simple message costs a fraction of a credit, research costs more. Unused credits roll over for one month. Trial users get a small daily credit allowance. Extra credits are sold to Pro and Max subscribers only. The founder wrote in July 2025 that the problem-research part was free.", "rows": [ [ "Free trial", "", "0", "limited daily credits" ], [ "Pro", "", "39", "200 credits a month, email support" ], [ "Max", "", "85", "500 credits a month, premium support" ], [ "100 extra credits", "", "20 one-time", "Pro and Max only" ], [ "500 extra credits", "", "100 one-time", "Pro and Max only" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 1 July 2025", "value": "US$6,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Felix Heikka's Show HN post: \"we just hit $6k MRR after 9 months since launching\". He counts from the Product Hunt launch in October 2024.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the July 2025 figure", "value": "US$72,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$6,000 times 12. This is the headline value used for sorting on the site.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Total revenue, 17 June 2025", "value": "US$33,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder post, eight months after the first paying customer. He linked a Stripe screenshot on imgur, which was not opened for this page.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 9 April 2025", "value": "US$3,600", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder post title \"Got my SaaS to $3,6k MRR\". He linked an MRR screenshot on imgur, not opened. In the same thread he wrote that they use Stripe for subscriptions.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 25 February 2025", "value": "US$2,700, total revenue about US$9,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder post. US$1,000 MRR came 54 days after launch and US$2,000 MRR 98 days after launch. No money spent on marketing up to then; paid ads had started the week before.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 11 February 2025", "value": "US$2,600, total revenue more than US$8,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder post, the first to name Buildpad and his brother. 4,000+ users, 1,000+ monthly active users. Traffic sources in his order: Reddit, direct, Google, X, Product Hunt.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 25 January 2025", "value": "US$2,300 from more than 100 paying customers", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder post. It does not name the product, but its launch details (Product Hunt #4, 500+ upvotes, 475 users in 24 hours) are the same as on the company's own history page.", "src": [ 6, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per paying customer, January 2025", "value": "at most about US$23 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$2,300 divided by \"100+\" paying customers.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Paying customers, 16 December 2024", "value": "70 active paying customers, 2,400 users", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's first Show HN post.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, 26 November 2024", "value": "US$2,200 in less than two months", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder post that does not name the product. When a commenter pointed to a lower figure in his brother's posts, he answered that US$2,200 was total revenue and US$1,000 was MRR.", "src": [ 8, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Growth of MRR, January to July 2025", "value": "2.6 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$6,000 divided by US$2,300.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Users", "value": "20,000 in October 2025; more than 100,000 by July 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Company history page and the rebrand post. These are sign-ups, not paying customers.", "src": [ 9, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 people, the two brothers", "grade": "C", "note": "\"It's just my brother and I working hard on this project, doing marketing, building, customer support, everything ourselves\" (July 2025). The company history says that for almost two years it was just the two of them and that it is building a team in 2026.", "src": [ 1, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions investors. In May 2024 Felix was living off his savings.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Company", "value": "BUILDPAD S.R.L., registered in Romania", "grade": "C", "note": "Privacy policy and terms of service. Hosting is in Germany.", "src": [ 15, 16 ] }, { "fact": "Time from first release to US$6,000 MRR", "value": "about 10 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 19 August 2024 to 1 July 2025 is 10.4 months. From the Product Hunt launch in October 2024 it is 9 months, as the founder counts it.", "src": [ 1, 11 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "July 2023", "what": "David Heikka, who had been the marketing and sales co-founder of a software business that reached US$30,000 in a month, starts a coding course.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "March 2024", "what": "Felix Heikka leaves the Swedish army after five and a half years and moves to Budapest to start a business with his brother.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "April to June 2024", "what": "Their first product, AIConvert, an AI lead-qualification form, gets almost no sign-ups after paid ads, SEO and cold messages; more than US$800 goes to Facebook ads. A second idea, TinderRoast, also fails.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 11 ] }, { "when": "July 2024", "what": "The idea: an AI that remembers a project between chats and guides the founder through phases. They test it with a survey posted in founder subreddits, offering feedback on respondents' projects in return.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 6 ] }, { "when": "19 August 2024", "what": "First version released, built in about 30 days. 100 users in two weeks against a goal of 20.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11, 4 ] }, { "when": "October 2024", "what": "Product Hunt launch: #4 of the day with 500+ upvotes, 475 new users in 24 hours, 1,000 users after a week, and the first paying customers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 5 ] }, { "when": "26 November 2024", "what": "Felix reports US$2,200 in revenue in less than two months.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "16 December 2024", "what": "First Show HN: 2,400 users and 70 active paying customers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "February 2025", "what": "US$2,600, then US$2,700 MRR and about US$9,000 in total revenue. A free validation search of internet discussions is released. Paid advertising starts.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 4 ] }, { "when": "9 April 2025", "what": "US$3,600 MRR. Hacker News commenters say the brothers keep posting similar stories.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "17 June 2025", "what": "US$33,000 in total revenue eight months after the first paying customer.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "1 July 2025", "what": "Second Show HN: US$6,000 MRR, research on Reddit and X, a canvas and new phases. Still only the two brothers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "October 2025", "what": "20,000 users. The product is renamed after the domain aicofounder.com, bought to win search traffic for the term.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 10 ] }, { "when": "July 2026", "what": "After nine months the name goes back to Buildpad; the founders call the rename a mistake. More than 100,000 users.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10, 17 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "Live, with Pro at US$39 and Max at US$85 a month, research agents, AI interviews and a website builder.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13, 14, 12 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Test demand before building", "text": "After two failed products, they asked their target users first: a survey in founder subreddits about how people solved the problem, how much it hurt and what they would pay. They had to post it several times in different subreddits and offered feedback on the respondents' own projects in return. When the first version was ready they sent it to the same people, which gave the first users." }, { "title": "The buyers are the readers of build-in-public posts", "text": "The customers are early founders, and early founders read the Build in Public community on X, founder subreddits and Hacker News. Felix posted there daily, with revenue numbers in the titles. The product's own story, failing until they validated an idea, is also its sales argument. In February 2025 he listed Reddit as the first traffic source." }, { "title": "One strong launch day", "text": "The Product Hunt launch reached #4 of the day and brought 475 users in 24 hours, the newsletter feature, and the first paying customers on the same evening. US$1,000 MRR followed 54 days after launch, by the founder's count." }, { "title": "Free research, paid credits", "text": "The research that tells a founder whether a problem is real was free in 2025 and brings people in. Longer work, such as planning, many research agents and websites, costs credits, so the price follows the AI usage that the company pays its model providers for." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founders' posts and the company's own pages, grade C, except the page-source details, which anyone can see.", "items": [ "David wrote the code and Felix learned marketing; later both worked on product and marketing. The first version took about 30 days. In the earliest code the product was called \"biz-builder\".", "The AI comes from \"US-based AI providers\", large language model providers that the privacy policy does not name, plus a voice provider for speech-to-text and text-to-speech in AI-run interviews. No source names the models.", "Research agents work in parallel and read Reddit, X, app stores, Trustpilot, Kickstarter, market reports and other web pages, and return reports with links to their sources. No source says how the app gets access to Reddit and X posts.", "Hosting is with Hetzner in Germany; email goes through Mailgun. The page source of the site shows a Next.js build and Plausible analytics.", "Subscriptions are taken with Stripe, according to the founder. Advertising is measured with the Meta Pixel and Meta's Conversions API.", "Users publish the websites they build on buildpad.site subdomains or their own domains." ], "src": [ 5, 4, 10, 15, 12, 14, 2 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised to help people turn their ideas into products, or to get quick answers from other people about them. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Quirky", "years": "2009 to 2019", "funding": "US$185M", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "Anyone could submit an invention idea; the community voted, and Quirky built and sold the winners.", "died": "It made too many products without checking demand for each one, and spent money faster than sales came in.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/477-quirky" }, { "name": "SellanApp", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$2.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "People with app ideas were matched with developers and backers who shared the revenue.", "died": "A three-sided marketplace was too complex, and simpler, cheaper do-it-yourself app builders took the users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1928-sellanapp" }, { "name": "Thumb", "years": "2011 to 2015", "funding": "US$12.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Real-time opinions from a crowd of other users on any question.", "died": "It never found a way to make money and was lost next to the large social networks.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/631-thumb" }, { "name": "Thinkature", "years": "2006 to 2009", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A shared online whiteboard for brainstorming and planning projects in real time.", "died": "Google Docs gave collaboration away free, and free users did not become paying customers.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1670-thinkature" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Quirky and SellanApp needed people, factories or developers to turn each idea into a product, and that cost money for every idea, good or bad. Thumb needed a crowd of human answerers and never charged them or the askers enough. Thinkature sold a shared canvas that a free product soon matched.", "Buildpad replaces the crowd with AI agents that read the crowd's existing posts on Reddit and X, so an answer costs model usage, not people's time, and the user pays for that usage through credits. The canvas is not the product; the research and the guidance are. The free product that could match it is a general chatbot, and the company's answer is a guided process and research with cited sources that a plain chat does not give." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The figures, check them first.", "text": "Turning your own failed attempts into a product for people in the same position, and selling it where those people already read, is open to anyone. Founder tools are a crowded market, and many of them are sold with the same build-in-public posts, so the posts alone are no advantage.", "steps": [ "Post a short survey where your target users meet, and give them something in return for answering.", "Send the first version to the people who answered the survey.", "Post progress with real numbers in the communities your buyers read, and launch once on Product Hunt when the product is ready.", "Give the first useful result away free and charge credits for the AI work that costs you money." ], "open": "Research tools for one kind of buyer, for example people starting a shop, an app or a local service, that read public complaints and reviews for them and cite every source." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Every revenue figure comes from the founder", "text": "All the money figures are Felix Heikka's own posts on Hacker News between November 2024 and July 2025. They agree with each other and rise steadily, which makes them grade C, but the Stripe screenshots he linked on imgur were not opened for this page, Buildpad has no TrustMRR profile, and no journalist has seen the numbers. No revenue figure after July 2025 was found; the later numbers, 20,000 and 100,000 users, are sign-ups, not revenue." }, { "title": "It depends on model providers it does not name", "text": "The privacy policy says the AI comes from US-based large language model providers and a voice provider, without names. A price rise, a policy change or an outage at a provider would hit the cost of every credit, and the same providers sell general chatbots, such as ChatGPT, that the company has to argue against on its own comparison page." }, { "title": "It depends on reading Reddit and X", "text": "The feature that the product leads with reads posts on Reddit and X. No source says how Buildpad gets those posts. If either site limits or prices that access, the core research would get worse or more expensive." }, { "title": "Repeated promotional posts", "text": "On Hacker News, commenters complained in January and April 2025 that the brothers posted similar revenue stories many times; one counted 8 posts in sixty days. The posts were from the founders' own named accounts, not fake ones, but the same channel can turn against a product when readers see it as advertising." }, { "title": "Name changes and a growing team", "text": "The product was called aicofounder.com from October 2025 to July 2026 and then went back to Buildpad; the founders say the nine months could have gone into the Buildpad brand. The company history says it is building a team in 2026, so the two-person picture may not hold for later figures." }, { "title": "Compared with FounderPal", "text": "FounderPal, another two-founder tool on this site that turns a business description into a plan with an AI model, has grade A evidence for US$203K of total revenue in October 2026, while Buildpad's figures rest on the founder's word alone." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://buildpad.io/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Hacker News, 1 July 2025: Show HN: I made an app to help you find problems with real demand from Reddit/X (Felix Heikka), via the Algolia API", "url": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/44433007", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the Algolia API copy of the item, with the founder's reply. Source for the US$6,000 MRR, the team of two and the features in July 2025." }, { "title": "Hacker News, 9 April 2025: You're overcomplicating it. Just solve a real problem. (Got my SaaS to $3,6k MRR), via the Algolia API", "url": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/43629342", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the Algolia API, with all comments. Source for the US$3,600 MRR, the use of Stripe and the commenters' criticism. The linked imgur screenshot was not opened." }, { "title": "Hacker News, 17 June 2025: Took 7 months to get my first customer. 8 mo to reach $33k revenue. Keep going., via the Algolia API", "url": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/44300151", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the Algolia API, with the founder's replies (item 44300181 links a Stripe screenshot on imgur, not opened). Source for the total revenue steps up to US$33,000." }, { "title": "Hacker News, 25 February 2025: My app makes me $2,700/month after 6 months, via the Algolia API", "url": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/43174100", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the Algolia API. Source for the US$2,700 MRR, the US$9,000 total, the 54 and 98 days to the first milestones and the start of paid ads." }, { "title": "Hacker News, 11 February 2025: My brother and I built a $2,600 MRR business in 6 months, via the Algolia API", "url": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/43015308", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the Algolia API. Source for the US$2,600 MRR, the users, the traffic sources and the division of work between the brothers." }, { "title": "Hacker News, 25 January 2025: Growing my SaaS from 0 to 4k users in 5 months, what worked for me, via the Algolia API", "url": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/42821678", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the Algolia API, with all comments. The post does not name the product; its launch details match the company history page. Source for the US$2,300 MRR, the paying customers and the survey method." }, { "title": "Hacker News, 16 December 2024: Show HN: Buildpad, Build products that people actually want, via the Algolia API", "url": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/42430923", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the Algolia API. Source for the users and paying customers in December 2024 and the early features." }, { "title": "Hacker News, 26 November 2024: Validating my idea got me to $2200 revenue in less than 2 months, via the Algolia API", "url": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/42249195", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the Algolia API. The post does not name the product; the founder confirmed the figure in the January 2025 thread. Source for the US$2,200." }, { "title": "Buildpad: Our story, read 26 October 2026", "url": "https://buildpad.io/our-story", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Company history with dates. Source for the founders' background, the failed products, the launch, the users in October 2025 and the team plan for 2026." }, { "title": "Buildpad blog, July 2026: aicofounder.com is now Buildpad (David Heikka)", "url": "https://buildpad.io/blog/aicofounder-is-now-buildpad", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the rename in October 2025, the return to Buildpad, the 100,000 users and the earliest code name." }, { "title": "Buildpad blog: Learned to code, built a SaaS, now have paid customers from 40+ countries (David Heikka)", "url": "https://buildpad.io/blog/learned-to-code-built-a-saas-now-have-paid-customers-from-40-countries", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for David's earlier business, the coding course, the US$800 of Facebook ads and the 19 August 2024 release." }, { "title": "Buildpad blog, May 2026: Buildpad reviews: what it is and what founders are saying about it in 2026 (David Heikka)", "url": "https://buildpad.io/blog/buildpad-reviews-what-it-is-and-what-founders-are-saying-about-it-in-2026", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on features and pricing. The company's own post. Source for the extra credit prices and the website builder." }, { "title": "Buildpad pricing page, read 26 October 2026", "url": "https://buildpad.io/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Pro and Max prices and credits." }, { "title": "Buildpad home page, read 26 October 2026", "url": "https://buildpad.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the page source. Source for the research agents, the 100,000+ founders claim and the Next.js and Plausible details." }, { "title": "Buildpad privacy policy, last updated 29 August 2026", "url": "https://buildpad.io/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Romanian company, Hetzner, Mailgun, the unnamed US AI providers and the Meta Pixel." }, { "title": "Buildpad terms of service, read 26 October 2026", "url": "https://buildpad.io/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the credit rules and the trial allowance." }, { "title": "Buildpad: What is an AI cofounder, 10 July 2026", "url": "https://buildpad.io/what-is-an-ai-cofounder", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the research agents and the dates of the rename." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/webuilda/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/webuilda.md", "slug": "webuilda", "name": "WeBuilda", "country": "Kenya", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "No-code website builder with AI-written content", "aiType": "AI-leveraged", "team": "solo", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "B", "added": "2026-10-26", "launchLabel": "20 March 2024", "outcomeLabel": "Sold for US$7.2K, September 2024", "sticker": "Sold for $7.2K", "outcomeUsd": 7200, "months": 6, "teamLabel": "1 founder alone, from launch to sale", "fundingLabel": "None reported; US$680 of starting costs", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "build-software", "channel": "launches", "trend": "sold", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 2, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-leveraged", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2B", "Website builder" ], "product": "A web app for building a website without code. The user picks a ready-made template, changes it in a drag-and-drop editor, lets an OpenAI model write the page text, and connects the finished site to a custom domain or exports it to an FTP server.", "why": "One person built it in about two months for US$680, using a rented language model for the hardest part for non-experts: writing the text of the site. He listed it on many launch sites and directories, reached 22 paying customers, and sold it on a small-startup marketplace 21 days after listing.", "summary": [ "WeBuilda was a no-code website builder: a web app in which a person without programming skills makes a website by choosing a template and moving blocks on the page with the mouse (drag and drop), instead of writing HTML and CSS. Its AI part was a content generator connected to OpenAI: the user described the business, and the model wrote the text of the pages. Paid plans also included AI-generated images. The AI did not design the site; the templates did. For this reason this page classes the business as AI-leveraged, not AI-native.", "Enoq Moka, a product manager from Kenya, launched it alone on 20 March 2024. It was his fifth product. On 13 September 2024 the marketplace Microns, which handled the sale, published that WeBuilda had sold for US$7,200 after 21 days on the marketplace. At the sale it had US$4,040 of annual recurring revenue (ARR: the yearly value of the subscriptions that were active at that time) from 22 customers. The price was therefore about 1.8 times ARR. This ratio is the revenue multiple, the usual way to compare prices of small software businesses.", "This is one of the smallest exits on this site. Its value as a story is the method: a cheap build on a rented model, launches on directories, and a fast sale through a broker. The buyer is not named, and the site has not worked since early 2025. The page also shows four failed startups that promised websites or software without programmers, from The Grid's AI web designer to Builder.ai." ], "factsCaption": "A solo-built website builder that sold for US$7,200, about 1.8 times its annual recurring revenue, six months after launch", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade B value comes from Microns, the marketplace that handled the sale, or from an independent archive. A grade C value is a founder statement or a figure from the founder's listing. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From launch to sale in about six months, by one person. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "WeBuilda plans in June 2024, before the sale, from the pricing section of the company's home page as archived by the Wayback Machine on 22 June 2024 (the live site does not work today)", "note": "An AI credit is a unit of AI text or image generation; the page does not say how many words one credit buys. The page shows yearly prices of US$100 and US$490 and says save 17%; the founder told Microns that the annual plan had a 10% discount. The yearly column below is the yearly price divided by 12. The page names no model for the AI images.", "rows": [ [ "Free Trial", "0", "0", "1 site, editor access, 100 AI credits, 2 AI images" ], [ "Basic Plan", "8.33", "10", "2 sites, 500 MB storage, custom domain, 10,000 AI credits (text and images), 5 workspace projects, team invites" ], [ "Pro Plan", "40.83", "49", "Unlimited sites, AI text and image tokens, storage, custom domains, workspaces, exports and team invites" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Sale price", "value": "US$7,200", "grade": "B", "note": "Published by Microns, the marketplace that handled the sale, in its success story of 13 September 2024, and confirmed by the founder in the same interview. The buyer is not named. The deal was all cash in two payments: the first after the transfer of ownership, the second in the second month after signing.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Date of the sale report", "value": "13 September 2024", "grade": "B", "note": "The date of the Microns story. The exact closing date is not given; this page uses the month of the report.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue at the sale", "value": "US$4,040", "grade": "C", "note": "Figure from the founder's listing, shown by Microns. The founder said he gave Microns screenshots of the payment data, and that the listing went live after a review of about 72 hours.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue at the sale", "value": "about US$337", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 4,040 divided by 12 equals 336.67.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue multiple", "value": "1.78 times ARR", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 7,200 divided by 4,040 equals 1.78. Microns rounds it to 1.8.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Paying customers at the sale", "value": "22", "grade": "C", "note": "From the listing data shown by Microns.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per customer", "value": "about US$184 a year, or US$15 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 4,040 divided by 22 equals 183.64. That is between the Basic plan (US$10 a month) and the Pro plan (US$49 a month).", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Team size", "value": "1", "grade": "C", "note": "From the listing data shown by Microns. The founder said he did most of the development himself.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Starting costs", "value": "US$680", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder said this covered the domain, servers, design tools and some outsourced API costs. No investors are named in any source.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Sale price compared with starting costs", "value": "about 10.6 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 7,200 divided by 680 equals 10.59. The founder's own time is not counted.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time to build the first version", "value": "2 months", "grade": "C", "note": "From the listing data shown by Microns.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Launch date", "value": "20 March 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "From the listing data. The company blog announced the product on 26 March 2024.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Product Hunt launch", "value": "25 April 2024, 47 points", "grade": "C", "note": "The Product Hunt page shows the launch and 47 upvote points. The founder said WeBuilda was not Product of the Day.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the sale report", "value": "6 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: March 2024 to September 2024; 177 days from 20 March to 13 September 2024.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time on the marketplace", "value": "21 days, 3 offers", "grade": "C", "note": "Microns lists 21 days as the time to sell; the founder said he received 3 offers.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Site status, 20 January 2025", "value": "server error 503", "grade": "B", "note": "The Wayback Machine's capture of the home page on that date has status 503 (service unavailable). Earlier captures in 2024 have status 200.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Site status, 26 October 2026", "value": "not reachable", "grade": "C", "note": "A request to webuilda.com from this site failed because the server's security certificate had expired.", "src": [ 6 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "August 2021 to 2023", "what": "Enoq Moka, then a product manager, builds earlier products: a web app for paid subscriptions to creators' content, which he ran for about eight months, and a crowdfunding platform that he stopped for lack of distribution. WeBuilda is his fifth product.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "Early 2024", "what": "He validates the idea by reading negative reviews of competing builders on Trustpilot and by asking users on Reddit which features they want. He builds the first version in about two months with React, Node.js, Firebase and the OpenAI API.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "20 March 2024", "what": "Launch, with early access and a waitlist for subscriptions. Starting costs are about US$680.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "26 March 2024", "what": "The company blog describes the product: templates, a drag-and-drop editor, custom domains, and an AI tool that writes search-optimized page content from basic information about the business.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "25 April 2024", "what": "Launch on Product Hunt, 47 points. The founder says the first week brought hundreds of sign-ups. He also lists the product on MicroLaunch, BetaList, DevHunt, AffordHunt, StartupsFYI, Hacker News and SaaSHub.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "when": "22 June 2024", "what": "The archived home page shows the Free, Basic (US$10 a month) and Pro (US$49 a month) plans. The Wayback Machine also holds captures of the home page reached through links tagged ref=devhunt and ref=microlaunch.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2, 5 ] }, { "when": "23 July 2024", "what": "A capture of the home page reached through a link tagged ref=taaft, probably from the AI directory There's An AI For That (the tag's meaning is not verified).", "grade": "B", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "Before 13 September 2024", "what": "Listed on Microns after a review of about 72 hours. Three offers; sold 21 days after listing for US$7,200 in two cash payments, with Microns' transfer service.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "13 September 2024", "what": "Microns publishes the sale story with the price, the ARR of US$4,040 and the 22 customers.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "20 January 2025", "what": "The Wayback Machine's capture of the home page returns a 503 server error.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "26 October 2026", "what": "webuilda.com cannot be opened: its security certificate has expired.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Many small launch sites", "text": "Microns lists the growth channel as directories. The founder listed WeBuilda on Product Hunt and about nine smaller launch sites and directories, and the Wayback Machine holds captures of links from DevHunt and MicroLaunch. The founder said these sites reached technology fans and early adopters, and that he kept launch costs low." }, { "title": "Rent the model for the hard part", "text": "Non-experts can move blocks in an editor, but writing the text of a website is slow for them. WeBuilda sent a short description of the business to OpenAI's model and returned page text. The founder said that the existence of OpenAI made the idea possible for him." }, { "title": "Subscriptions, not one-time payments", "text": "The founder first wanted a one-time lifetime price. He chose monthly and yearly subscriptions because each AI request costs money through paid APIs, so a user who paid once could cost more than they paid." }, { "title": "A small business sold through a broker", "text": "Microns is a marketplace for very small online businesses. The founder said the listing went live after a review of about 72 hours with screenshots of his payment data, and three buyers made offers." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's interview with Microns (grade C) and from the archived pages of the company site (grade C, page source grade B).", "items": [ "React for the front end of the editor app, Node.js for the backend, and Firebase for hosting and user login, chosen so that one person could ship a working first version quickly.", "The OpenAI API (the founder's stack lists ChatGPT) writes the website text. Plans count AI credits for text and images; no source names the image model.", "The app ran at site.webuilda.com with its own login and sign-up pages. The marketing site at webuilda.com was a separate WordPress site built with the Elementor page builder, as its archived page source shows.", "Paystack, a payment processor, took the subscription payments. The founder exported its data and computed revenue and retention by hand in Excel.", "Google Analytics and Umami measured traffic, referrals and the most visited pages. Email newsletters kept early sign-ups engaged, and an invite feature let users add team members to their projects.", "For the sale: Microns' in-app messages and transfer service, Google Meet for calls, and the Mac app QuickScreen to record screen videos during the buyer's checks." ], "src": [ 1, 2, 3 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised websites or software without programmers before language models could write. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "The Grid", "years": "2014 to 2020", "funding": "US$4.7M", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Websites designed automatically by AI, without a designer's fee.", "died": "The AI of the time produced clumsy designs, while competing builders offered polished templates that users could control.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/618-the-grid" }, { "name": "Sosh", "years": "2012 to 2013", "funding": "US$2.3M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A drag-and-drop website builder that removes the handoff between designer and developer.", "died": "It was too complex for beginners and too rigid for professionals, and the code it generated was hard to work with.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/565-sosh" }, { "name": "WebCake", "years": "2013 to 2016", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "An all-in-one website maker for people without technical skills.", "died": "Wix and Squarespace had more features and much more money, and WebCake had no funding to keep up.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1541-webcake" }, { "name": "Builder.ai", "years": "2016 to 2025", "funding": "US$445M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Custom apps built by an AI-powered assembly line instead of expensive developers.", "died": "According to the database, it sold apps for about US$20,000 that cost about US$35,000 to build, and much of the work said to be done by AI was done by offshore developers.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2170-builderai" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Before 2023, two parts of a website builder were expensive. The editor and the templates needed a funded team: WebCake had US$120,000 and lost to Wix and Squarespace. Automatic design needed AI that did not exist yet: The Grid spent US$4.7 million on it, and its designs looked clumsy.", "By 2024 one person could rent both parts. The founder built the editor with common open tools and Firebase, and rented text generation from OpenAI, for about US$680 in total. He did not try The Grid's harder promise; the templates still did the design, and the model wrote only the words. The result was cheap to build and easy to sell, but it was also easy to copy, and it reached only US$4,040 of ARR." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. Expect a small price.", "text": "Website builders are a crowded market: the home page itself compared WeBuilda with Webflow and WordPress, and this site alone shows several other AI website builders, such as 1ClickWebsite.ai and MakeLanding. A general builder with an AI text feature has little to protect it. What can be copied is the low-cost path: a first version in two months, launches on many directories, and a sale through a small-startup marketplace when growth stops.", "steps": [ "Read negative reviews of the established competitors to find what their users dislike, and ask the target users on Reddit what they want.", "Build the first version in weeks with common tools and a rented model, and keep starting costs under US$1,000.", "Charge a subscription from the start when each use of the product costs you money through an API.", "Launch on Product Hunt and on many small launch sites and directories in the same weeks.", "Keep clean payment records, so that you can list the business on a broker marketplace with screenshots and sell it within weeks." ], "open": "A builder that serves one kind of business in one market, with that market's payment methods and language, has fewer competitors than a general builder. This page has no source that shows such a builder succeeding; it is an open question, not a result." }, "watch": [ { "title": "A very small sale", "text": "The price was US$7,200 for a business with US$4,040 of ARR and 22 customers; as an outcome it is closer to a successful experiment than to a company. Among the website and app builders on this site, Base44 was sold to Wix for US$80 million in cash in June 2025 and Superdev for US$350,000 in August 2025, while MakeLanding, the nearest in size, sold for US$35,000 in November 2023." }, { "title": "Unknown buyer, site offline", "text": "Microns does not name the buyer. The Wayback Machine's capture of the home page on 20 January 2025 returns a 503 server error, and on 26 October 2026 the site could not be opened because its security certificate had expired. No source says what the buyer did with the product, so a reader cannot tell whether the sale created lasting value for the buyer." }, { "title": "Dependence on model providers", "text": "The founder said a one-time price was not possible because the platform depends on paid APIs. The Pro plan sold unlimited AI text and image tokens for US$49 a month, so a few heavy users could cost more than they paid, and any price change at OpenAI went straight into the margin." }, { "title": "AI as a feature, not the product", "text": "The templates and the editor did the design; the model wrote the text. A text feature that calls a rented model is easy for any competitor to add. The home page itself compared WeBuilda with Webflow and WordPress, and the failed predecessor WebCake shows how a small builder loses to the large ones when its features are the same." }, { "title": "Numbers that do not agree", "text": "The founder told Microns that the annual plan had a 10% discount; the archived pricing section says save 17%, and its prices (US$100 a year against US$10 a month) give 16.7%. The ARR and customer count come from the founder's own listing, reviewed by Microns but not published as a payment-processor statement." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "archive", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240622121821/https://webuilda.com/" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/webuilda" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Microns success story, 13 September 2024, by Ilya Novohatskyi: Enoq Sold His $4k ARR AI Website Builder Within 21 days. Here's His Story", "url": "https://www.microns.io/success-stories/enoq-sold-his-4k-arr-ai-website-builder-within-21-days-heres-his-story", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Microns is the marketplace that handled the sale. Source for the price, the ARR, the customers, the team, the dates, the stack, the launch channels and the deal structure; the interview answers are founder statements (grade C)." }, { "title": "WeBuilda home page with pricing section, Wayback Machine capture of 22 June 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240622121821/https://webuilda.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the capture of 22 May 2024 for comparison. Source for the product description, the OpenAI integration and the plan prices; the page source shows WordPress and Elementor." }, { "title": "WeBuilda blog, 26 March 2024: WeBuilda: Efficient AI-powered No Code Website builder with ready made templates (Wayback Machine capture of 22 June 2024)", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240622124412/https://webuilda.com/2024/03/26/webuilda-efficient-ai-powered-no-code-website-builder-with-ready-made-templates/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's launch post. Source for what the AI feature did." }, { "title": "Product Hunt product page: WeBuilda", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/webuilda", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page and its embedded launch data. Source for the launch date of 25 April 2024 and the 47 points." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine capture index for webuilda.com", "url": "https://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=webuilda.com*", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the list of captures. Source for the referral links from DevHunt, MicroLaunch and taaft, and for the 503 error on 20 January 2025." }, { "title": "webuilda.com, live check of 26 October 2026", "url": "https://webuilda.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Could not open: the connection failed because the server's security certificate had expired. Two earlier tries on the same day got no answer." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export of failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/micmonster/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/micmonster.md", "slug": "micmonster", "name": "MicMonster", "country": "Not stated in the sources", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI text-to-speech voice-over tool", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "B", "added": "2026-10-26", "launchLabel": "April 2021", "outcomeLabel": "Sold for six figures on Acquire.com, December 2023", "sticker": "Sold for six figures", "outcomeUsd": 100000, "months": 32, "teamLabel": "Founder Harinderpreet Singh and a remote group of people; no headcount published", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "voice-audio", "channel": "search", "trend": "sold", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 2, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2C", "Voice" ], "product": "A web tool that turns typed text into spoken audio for videos, podcasts, audiobooks and e-learning. The user pastes a script, picks one of several hundred stock AI voices in about 140 languages, sets speed, pitch and emphasis, and downloads an MP3 or WAV file. It sells stock voices only; no page read for this story offers to copy the voice of a real person.", "why": "Acquire.com wrote that it began as a free tool to collect email addresses for the founder's affiliate marketing business, and that the paid version grew from upsells to those sign-ups. It was early in AI voice-overs while the voices were improving fast, and the price rose as they did: from a one-time US$57 in April 2021 to US$1,599 for a lifetime plan in 2026.", "summary": [ "MicMonster is a text-to-speech (TTS) tool: software that reads written text aloud with a synthetic voice. Its voices are neural voices, voices produced by a neural network trained on recordings of human speakers, which sound much less robotic than older TTS. Customers use the audio as voice-over for YouTube videos, courses and podcasts instead of hiring a voice actor. In June 2023 the company's own home page carried a list of 456 voice entries, each named in the form \"Microsoft Server Speech Text to Speech Voice (en-US, ...Neural)\", which is how Microsoft names its neural voices. So MicMonster appears to resell Microsoft's speech engine with its own editor and prices, although the page does not say which Microsoft service it calls.", "The founder is Harinderpreet Singh. Acquire.com, an online marketplace where people buy and sell small software companies, wrote on 6 December 2023 that he \"recently sold the business for six figures on Acquire.com\". In its account, he had a background in SEO (search engine optimization, the work of making pages rank in Google) and an affiliate business, built a free TTS tool to collect email addresses, and then found that the sign-ups bought a paid version. That model is called freemium: a free version brings users, a paid version brings revenue. He listed it on several marketplaces, got interest only on Acquire.com, and signed a letter of intent (LOI, a written, mostly non-binding agreement on the main terms of a sale) in less than 10 days.", "The price is a range, not a figure: \"six figures\" means between US$100,000 and US$999,999, so this page uses US$100,000 as a lower bound. The buyer is not named. No revenue figure from before the sale was found. Archived copies of the site from 2021 to 2023 show the product, its prices and its own user counts, and they show that the company sold through JVZoo and later through monthly, quarterly, yearly and lifetime plans." ], "factsCaption": "A text-to-speech tool that was sold through Acquire.com for six figures 32 months after its first archived sales page; price not disclosed, buyer not named", "factsRead": "How to read this table: the grade B rows come from Acquire.com's own blog, the marketplace through which the sale closed. Grade C rows come from the company's own pages, read today or in Wayback Machine copies from 2021 to 2023. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page. No revenue figure was found.", "timelineLead": "From a US$57 one-time offer in April 2021 to a sale on Acquire.com by December 2023. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "MicMonster prices on 26 October 2026, read from the company's pricing page under its new owner (grade C)", "note": "The page shows list prices and a second, lower price for customers who enter a coupon code: 50TODAY gives 50% off the quarterly, annual and lifetime plans, and 25OFF gives 25% off the monthly plan. Monthly equivalents of the quarterly and annual plans are calculated here. Trial accounts get 2,000 free characters a month. For comparison, the lifetime plan cost US$134 in September 2022 and US$799 in May 2023.", "rows": [ [ "Free trial", "0", "0", "2,000 characters a month" ], [ "Pro, monthly", "", "20 (15 with code 25OFF)", "250,000 characters a month, 12,000 characters per clip" ], [ "Pro Max, quarterly", "", "about 39.67 (119 a quarter; 59.50 a quarter with code)", "3 million characters a month" ], [ "Pro Max, annual", "about 14.92 (179 a year; 89.50 a year with code)", "", "3 million characters a month" ], [ "Pro Max, lifetime", "1599 one-time (799.50 with code)", "", "1 million characters a month" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Sale price, December 2023", "value": "six figures", "grade": "B", "note": "Acquire.com blog, 6 December 2023: the founder \"recently sold the business for six figures on Acquire.com\". The marketplace states the sale in its own words; the exact price and the date of closing are not given.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Lower bound of the sale price", "value": "US$100,000", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: six figures means at least US$100,000 and at most US$999,999. The headline uses the lower bound.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from listing to letter of intent", "value": "less than 10 days", "grade": "B", "note": "Acquire.com blog. The deal closed \"shortly after\". Listings on a few other marketplaces got no traction.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Buyer", "value": "not named", "grade": "B", "note": "Acquire.com does not name the buyer, and the about, terms and privacy pages read in October 2026 name no owner company.", "src": [ 1, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before the sale", "value": "not found", "grade": "C", "note": "No source read for this story gives revenue, profit or a sale multiple.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "First archived sales page, 22 April 2021", "value": "US$57 one-time, shown against a normal price of US$99", "grade": "C", "note": "Wayback Machine copy of the home page. 41 languages. The buy button links to a JVZoo checkout.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Offer in June 2021", "value": "US$37 one-time, 48 languages", "grade": "C", "note": "Wayback Machine copy of the home page. Voice emotions only for US English, Chinese and Portuguese.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Prices and users, September 2022", "value": "US$19 a quarter, US$60 a year, US$134 lifetime; \"10,000+ users\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Wayback Machine copy of the pricing page. The quarterly plan renewed at US$37 and the yearly plan at US$120. The user count is the company's own claim.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Prices and users, May 2023", "value": "US$39 a quarter, US$119 a year, US$799 lifetime; \"75,000+ users\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Wayback Machine copy of the pricing page. With the code 50TODAY the yearly plan was US$59.50 and the lifetime plan US$399.50. 600+ voices in 140 languages.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Voices listed in the home page source, June 2023", "value": "456 voice entries in 147 language and region codes, all named \"Microsoft Server Speech Text to Speech Voice\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Counted on this page from the Wayback Machine copy of 3 June 2023. The visible text says only that MicMonster is \"powered by most realistic text to speech engine\". The current home page does not show this list.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "\"a group of people that are separated by distance\"", "grade": "C", "note": "About page, archived 29 November 2021 and unchanged in October 2026. No headcount is given. Acquire.com names only the founder.", "src": [ 6, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions investors or a funding round.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Voices and languages, October 2026", "value": "600+ voices in 140 languages on the home page header; 800+ voices on the pricing page", "grade": "C", "note": "The current pages, under the new owner, give both numbers.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the first archived sales page to the sale report", "value": "32 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: April 2021 to December 2023.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "22 April 2021", "what": "First Wayback Machine copy of micmonster.com: a sales page for a one-time purchase at US$57, \"Normal Price: $99\", 41 languages, paid through JVZoo.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "20 June 2021", "what": "The one-time price is US$37. 48 languages, voice emotions for three of them.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "20 August 2021", "what": "The blog publishes a review of Speechelo, a competing TTS product: the kind of review page that people find through Google searches.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "29 November 2021", "what": "The about page says the founder started it because viewers of his YouTube videos could not understand his English accent, and that the company is \"a group of people that are separated by distance\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "25 September 2022", "what": "Subscriptions replace the one-time offer: US$19 a quarter, US$60 a year, or US$134 for life. The page claims \"10,000+ users\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "30 May 2023", "what": "The lifetime plan costs US$799, six times the 2022 price. The page claims \"75,000+ users\", 600+ voices and 140 languages.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "3 June 2023", "what": "The home page source carries 456 voice entries named in Microsoft's format.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "By 6 December 2023", "what": "Sold for six figures on Acquire.com to an unnamed buyer, with a letter of intent in less than 10 days. The founder moves on to a new product called ListenMonster.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "26 October 2026", "what": "The site is live under the new owner: 800+ voices, Pro at US$20 a month, a lifetime plan at US$1,599 list price, permanent coupon codes for 25% and 50% off.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 3 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A free tool that collected email addresses", "text": "Acquire.com wrote that the founder first built a free TTS tool only to grow the email list of his affiliate business. Selling other companies' software to that list did not work. Selling a paid version of the free tool did. The free tier still exists: 2,000 characters a month." }, { "title": "Early in the category, while the voices improved", "text": "In Acquire.com's account, MicMonster \"was an early player in the text-to-speech space\" and the technology kept making the product better. The archived pages show it: 41 languages in April 2021, 140 languages and 600+ voices by May 2023, without the company building a speech model of its own." }, { "title": "Prices that rose with the product", "text": "The first archived offer was US$57 once. By September 2022 there were quarterly and yearly plans, and a lifetime plan at US$134. In May 2023 the lifetime plan was US$799. Subscriptions give a buyer recurring revenue, which is what makes a small software business sellable." }, { "title": "Built to sell", "text": "Acquire.com wrote that selling was \"the plan since day one\" and that the founder had browsed the marketplace as a buyer first. He listed on several marketplaces and chose the one where buyers responded." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's archived pages from 2021 to 2023, mostly from their page source, and from Acquire.com. The engine provider is inferred from voice names, not stated by the company.", "items": [ "The website is WordPress with the Elementor page builder, the GeneratePress theme and the Rank Math SEO plugin, as the page source of every archived copy shows.", "The speech engine is not named in the text. The June 2023 home page source lists 456 voices named \"Microsoft Server Speech Text to Speech Voice (...Neural)\", the naming used by Microsoft's neural voices.", "Checkout in April 2021 went through JVZoo, a digital-product marketplace that also runs affiliate programs.", "The site runs behind Cloudflare and measures visitors with Google Analytics and a Facebook pixel, as the archived page source shows.", "In 2023 an advanced editor, for paying users only, controlled speed, pitch, volume and emphasis, according to the home page.", "The sale was arranged on Acquire.com, the marketplace that reported it." ], "src": [ 4, 5, 10, 1 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised natural computer voices or voice interfaces and lost to the large technology companies that sell the same capability. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Voicery", "years": "2018 to 2021", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Natural-sounding text-to-speech voices sold to developers through an API.", "died": "Large technology companies offered cheaper TTS bundled with their clouds, so Voicery could not justify a premium price.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1004-voicery" }, { "name": "VocalIQ", "years": "2011 to 2017", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Voice interfaces that understand context, for assistants and cars.", "died": "It could not compete with the large technology companies and ended inside Apple.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/719-vocaliq" }, { "name": "Tellme", "years": "1999 to 2011", "funding": "US$238M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Information and transactions over the phone by voice command.", "died": "Smartphone apps and assistants replaced voice menus over the phone.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/612-tellme" }, { "name": "Petalite", "years": "2014 to 2025", "funding": "US$12M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A privacy-first voice assistant that runs on the device instead of in the cloud.", "died": "It could not compete with the subsidized hardware, training data and product range of Amazon and Google.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2471-petalite" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The four predecessors built voice technology themselves, with millions in funding, and then had to sell it against Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft. Their cost was the research; their price had to beat a cloud company's bundle.", "MicMonster did the opposite. By 2021 the large cloud companies sold neural voices by the character, so a small team could put an editor, a voice library and simple consumer pricing on top of a voice engine it did not build, and sell to video makers who would never open a cloud console. The voices that killed Voicery's pricing became MicMonster's raw material. The cost of that choice is that the engine, its quality and its price belong to someone else." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The model, yes. The timing, no.", "text": "A consumer front end for a cloud speech engine, found through a free tool and sold to an email list, is still possible with little money. The 2021 opening is gone: in 2026 many funded companies sell AI voices, and the engine providers sell to consumers themselves.", "steps": [ "Put a free, useful tool in front of an audience you can already reach, and collect email addresses.", "Sell the paid version to the people who signed up, with higher limits and a commercial license.", "Move from one-time sales to subscriptions before you sell, because buyers pay for recurring revenue.", "List the business on more than one marketplace and keep the one where buyers answer." ], "open": "Narrow audio jobs where a general voice tool is clumsy: course narration with fixed pronunciation lists, audio versions of documentation, or voice-overs in languages that the large tools serve badly." }, "watch": [ { "title": "A price range from one source", "text": "The only statement of the sale is Acquire.com's blog of 6 December 2023, which says \"six figures\": anything from US$100,000 to US$999,999. Acquire.com earns from the deals it reports, and no second source, revenue figure or sale multiple was found. The user counts of 10,000+ in 2022 and 75,000+ in 2023 are the company's own claims." }, { "title": "The buyer is not named", "text": "Acquire.com does not name the buyer, and the current about, terms and privacy pages name no owner. Everything on today's site, including its prices and coupon codes, belongs to the new owner, not to the founder." }, { "title": "Dependence on the speech-engine provider", "text": "The June 2023 page source lists 456 voices named in Microsoft's format, so the product's quality and costs seem to depend on one engine provider, which sells the same voices directly and can change prices or terms. The company never names its provider, so this rests on the voice names alone." }, { "title": "Two origin stories and a small, unknown team", "text": "Acquire.com describes a free tool for email capture; the about page describes a founder whose English accent hurt his YouTube videos. The earliest archive, April 2021, already shows a paid one-time offer. The team size was never published beyond \"a group of people that are separated by distance\"." }, { "title": "Compared with other voice stories on this site", "text": "Talknotes, a voice-note app on this site, sold for a stated US$200K in July 2024; MicMonster's sale is reported only as six figures, so the two exits cannot be compared on price." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://micmonster.com" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Acquire.com blog, 6 December 2023: Startup Acquisition Stories with Harinderpreet Singh, Founder of MicMonster (episode 89)", "url": "https://blog.acquire.com/startup-acquisition-episode-89/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full (the written summary; the video was not transcribed). The marketplace's own account of the sale. Source for the six-figure price, the letter of intent, the email-capture origin and ListenMonster." }, { "title": "MicMonster pricing page, read 26 October 2026", "url": "https://micmonster.com/pricing/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Current plans, coupon codes and limits under the new owner." }, { "title": "MicMonster home page, read 26 October 2026", "url": "https://micmonster.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Current product description, voices and languages; no voice-cloning offer seen." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of micmonster.com, 22 April 2021", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210422022311/https://micmonster.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the page source. First archived sales page, US$57 one-time, JVZoo checkout, WordPress and Elementor." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of micmonster.com, 20 June 2021", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210620150436/https://micmonster.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. US$37 one-time offer, 48 languages." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of the about page, 29 November 2021", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20211129225503/https://micmonster.com/about-micmonster/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founder's reason and the remote team." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of the blog post Speechelo Honest Review, published 20 August 2021", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20220128015009/https://micmonster.com/speechelo-honest-review/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the date and the price section. Shows comparison content aimed at search traffic." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of the pricing page, 25 September 2022", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20220925075823/https://micmonster.com/pricing/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. 2022 plans and the 10,000+ users claim." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of the pricing page, 30 May 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230530010117/https://micmonster.com/pricing/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. 2023 plans and the 75,000+ users claim." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of micmonster.com, 3 June 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230603084520/https://micmonster.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the page source. The 456 voice entries named in Microsoft's format were counted with a script." }, { "title": "MicMonster about, terms and privacy pages, read 26 October 2026", "url": "https://micmonster.com/about-micmonster/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The about text is unchanged since 2021; none of the three pages names an owner company." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/copycopter/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/copycopter.md", "slug": "copycopter", "name": "CopyCopter", "country": "Not stated (built in Bali, Indonesia; owner companies changed twice)", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI text-to-video generator for social-media videos with voiceover", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-26", "launchLabel": "28 February 2024", "outcomeLabel": "Sold at an undisclosed price after US$32K MRR, March 2025", "sticker": "Sold after $32K MRR", "outcomeUsd": 384000, "months": 12, "teamLabel": "1 builder who coded alone until mid-2024; then a buyer with a team of unstated size, with the builder still adding features", "fundingLabel": "None stated for either owner; the builder lived on his savings", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "video", "channel": "paid-ads", "trend": "sold", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2C", "Video" ], "product": "You type an idea or paste an article or a link. CopyCopter writes a video script with an OpenAI GPT model, reads it aloud with a synthetic voice from ElevenLabs, adds stock footage or AI-generated images and captions, and gives you an editor to change any scene before you export or post the short video to TikTok or YouTube. Plans are monthly subscriptions that include credits; one video uses several credits.", "why": "The builder made a product that worked, with a flexible editor, but did almost no marketing and ran out of savings. A buyer who knew paid advertising bought it on Acquire.com, posted content every day on new Instagram and TikTok accounts for six months and ran Meta ads every day. According to Acquire.com's blog, that took the business from US$800 to US$32,000 in monthly recurring revenue, and then he sold it.", "summary": [ "CopyCopter is a text-to-video generator: a program that turns written text into a finished video. It writes a script from your idea, creates a voiceover, which is a spoken narration laid over the pictures, and fills the scenes with stock clips or AI images. Its home page in 2024 and 2025 sold it for faceless videos, which are videos where no person appears on camera, only images, captions and a narrating voice, in niches from car reviews to bedtime stories.", "Kamil Zowczac (the blog's web address spells the name Zowczak) left a startup job in 2022, moved to Bali to live on his savings, and built it alone. The changelog shows a first video version for 40 users on 28 February 2024 and paid plans from 7 March 2024. Nearly broke, he sold it in mid-2024 to a buyer he met on Acquire.com, a marketplace where owners sell small online businesses. The buyer, named only as Sanjana, told Acquire.com that CopyCopter was making US$800 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the subscription income that repeats every month, when he bought it. Acquire.com's blog wrote on 11 March 2025 that he had grown it to US$32,000 MRR with daily social-media content and Meta ads, and had then sold it to a buyer that the blog does not name.", "Neither sale price was published, and both revenue figures come from one account relayed by the marketplace's own blog on one day, so this page grades them D: reported, not verified. The site's footer has named a different company since May 2025, and the product today is a new \"Studio\" built by that later owner. The page also shows earlier video-tool companies that failed." ], "factsCaption": "A video tool that one person built and sold when he ran out of money, which a buyer grew and resold within about a year; all figures relayed by the marketplace that hosted the sales", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is an owner statement relayed by Acquire.com's blog, published on one date, with no second source. A grade C value is the company's own page or the builder's own account. An \"X\" value was computed on this page. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a writing tool for social posts in 2023 to a video generator sold twice, in about a year from the video launch. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "CopyCopter plans in January 2025, under the first buyer, read from the plan data embedded in the archived home page (Wayback Machine, 20 January 2025); today's pricing page shows only a credit price (grade C)", "note": "The yearly prices were US$160, US$228, US$410 and US$1,008 a year; the first column divides them by 12. Every plan had an unlimited editor, stock footage and no watermark. Today's pricing page, written by the later owner and last updated on 12 July 2025, lists no plans: it explains costs and gives a credit price of about US$0.10, with model costs of US$0.002 to US$3.70 per image or video clip. The current plan prices load by script and could not be read.", "rows": [ [ "Hobby", "13.33", "19", "50 credits, 9 voices, English only, standard resolution" ], [ "Growth", "19", "27", "200 credits, 19 voices, 29 languages, HD, auto-post to 1 channel" ], [ "Pro", "34.17", "49", "600 credits, 29 voices, auto-post to 2 channels" ], [ "Massive", "84", "120", "1,500 credits, 45 voices, unlimited auto-post" ], [ "Credits, October 2026", "", "about 0.10 per credit", "today's pricing page, no plans listed" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue when the first buyer resold it, by March 2025", "value": "US$32,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Acquire.com's blog, 11 March 2025, relaying the buyer Sanjana: \"After scaling the business to $32,000 MRR, Sanjana decided it was time to exit.\" A second post on the same day by the same author gives the same figure. No payment-processor data.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue when the first buyer bought it, mid-2024", "value": "US$800", "grade": "D", "note": "Same two posts: the tool \"was only bringing in $800 MRR\".", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Growth multiple from US$800 to US$32,000", "value": "40 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 32,000 / 800 = 40. The blog's headline says 30 times, which does not match its own two figures.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate at the resale figure", "value": "US$384,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$32,000 times 12. This is the outcome amount stored for this page; it is not a sale price.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Sale prices", "value": "not disclosed, for either sale", "grade": "D", "note": "Neither post gives a price. The March 2025 post says the resale \"made his 30 times what he initially invested\", without amounts. The resale buyer is not named.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Time under the first buyer", "value": "about 6 to 7 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the footer changed from the builder's company to new company names between the Wayback copies of 4 August and 1 September 2024; the resale was reported on 11 March 2025. The buyer said he posted content daily \"for six months\".", "src": [ 1, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Time from video launch to the reported resale", "value": "12 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 28 February 2024 (changelog, \"First launch\") to 11 March 2025, 377 days.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Users claimed on the home page", "value": "\"Join 50k + Happy Creators\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Company's home page, Wayback copies from October 2024 to 2025. Not a count of paying users.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Voices and languages, January 2025", "value": "45 voices (29 male, 16 female), 29 languages", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page: \"Powered by Eleven Labs\".", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "AI models named by the sources", "value": "OpenAI GPT models for scripts and image prompts; ElevenLabs for voices", "grade": "C", "note": "The builder's account says it was \"Built on OpenAI and other LLM models\"; the changelog of 17 April 2024 says the models were updated to \"the latest version of the GPT models\". The image model is not named before 2025.", "src": [ 3, 5, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 builder; after the sale, the buyer \"and his team\" plus the builder as developer", "grade": "C", "note": "The builder coded alone. The buyer's team size is not stated. The later owner's pricing page lists human salaries of about US$2,800 a week in July 2025.", "src": [ 1, 3, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none stated", "grade": "C", "note": "The builder lived on savings and sold because \"I couldn't even invest money in ads\". No investor is named for any owner.", "src": [ 3 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2022", "what": "Kamil Zowczac leaves his role at a venture-backed startup and moves to Bali, Indonesia, to build his own product on lower living costs.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "16 November 2023", "what": "The earliest archived copy of copycopter.ai shows a different product: an AI writing tool for social-media posts with a \"Performance Predictor\" and \"+1000 creators already creating\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "28 February 2024", "what": "Changelog: \"CopyCopter was launched to first 40 users with beta video editor\", turning blog posts of up to 10,000 characters into videos with voice and stock footage.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "7 March 2024", "what": "Changelog: paid \"Premium Plans\" start.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "March to August 2024", "what": "Almost daily updates: AI-generated images (30 March), a GPT model update (17 April), 29 languages (30 April), an affiliate program (23 May), direct posting to TikTok (14 June) and YouTube (1 July). The last entry is dated 20 August 2024.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "Early to mid-2024", "what": "After a post on Twitter, the videos spread among users of Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. He adds a paywall and launches on Product Hunt, but has spent his savings. A first buyer from X withdraws after three weeks.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "when": "August 2024", "what": "A buyer who found the listing on Acquire.com closes the deal within 24 hours. The footer changes from Kyzobuilds Pte. Ltd. (4 August copy) to Social Jool LLC and AI Boost LLC (1 September copy).", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 9 ] }, { "when": "September 2024 to early 2025", "what": "The buyer adds mobile support, AI voiceovers and music, opens new Instagram and TikTok accounts for the product, posts every day for six months, and finds that Meta ads work best.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "20 January 2025", "what": "Four plans from US$19 to US$120 a month are embedded in the home page.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "4 and 7 February 2025", "what": "Acquire.com publishes a podcast episode and an article with the builder about his sale.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "when": "11 March 2025", "what": "Acquire.com's blog reports US$800 MRR at purchase and US$32,000 MRR at the resale, with no price and no name for the new buyer.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "13 May 2025", "what": "The home-page footer names Blackstar Properties, Inc.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "12 July 2025", "what": "The pricing page becomes a cost explanation: about US$0.10 per credit, and credits priced below average cost.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The site sells \"CopyCopter Studio\", a multi-track video editor with a gallery that names models such as Kling v2 and Flux Pro Ultra; footer \"© 2026 Blackstar Properties\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "The builder made the product, the buyer made the sales", "text": "The builder said his biggest mistake was not focusing on marketing: he kept adding features instead of selling. The buyer said the original developer \"didn't really do much marketing at all\", and that is the gap he bought." }, { "title": "Daily content on owned accounts", "text": "The buyer opened new Instagram and TikTok accounts for CopyCopter, with separate accounts for niches such as fashion, politics and trends, and posted videos every day for six months. A video tool can advertise with its own output, which the podcast page calls an \"unfair marketing trick\" for apps like this." }, { "title": "Paid ads, scaled slowly", "text": "He tested Meta ads and TikTok ads with small budgets, kept Meta because it worked best, improved the targeting and raised the budget as revenue grew. He also tried influencer campaigns." }, { "title": "Credits that bound the model costs", "text": "Every plan included a fixed number of credits, and each image, voice track or video used some of them. The price of a plan therefore limited how much model usage a customer could cause." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the builder's account on Acquire.com, the company's changelog and archived copies of its home page. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Built by one person who taught himself to code; the first video editor took about three weeks, according to the article about him.", "Scripts and image prompts from OpenAI GPT models; voices from ElevenLabs, 45 of them by January 2025.", "Stock footage or AI-generated images per scene, AI captions, an upscaler that fixes faces and hands, and background music.", "A web editor where every element of the video can be changed, which early users praised as rare at the time.", "Direct posting to TikTok and YouTube from mid-2024, and an affiliate program from May 2024.", "The web site uses Next.js, as its page source shows." ], "src": [ 3, 5, 6, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to make video creation easy for ordinary people and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "HighlightCam", "years": "2009 to 2012", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Professional-looking video edits made automatically, without editing skills.", "died": "Smartphone apps and free desktop software did the same, and the market it waited for did not arrive in time.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1636-highlightcam" }, { "name": "ReelSurfer", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$1.25M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Simple clipping and sharing of online video for people who do not edit.", "died": "YouTube, Facebook and mobile apps built the same features, and it never found a way to earn from clipping.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1577-reelsurfer" }, { "name": "Viddy", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$30M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Filters that make smartphone videos look professional.", "died": "Instagram added video in 2013 and Vine grew fast, so users had no reason to use a separate app.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2190-viddy" }, { "name": "Lightwell", "years": "2019 to 2022", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Interactive stories for creative people who do not write code.", "died": "Adobe and Canva offered more, and it stayed a small niche tool.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1369-lightwell" } ], "whatChanged": [ "All four made video or story creation easier and lost to platforms that added the same features for free, or to the platforms where the videos were watched. CopyCopter has the same exposure: TikTok, Instagram and the model makers can add text-to-video features themselves, and today's video models are sold by the same companies whose models CopyCopter uses.", "What differs is the cost of building and the place of sale. One person built the video version in weeks on rented models, so the builder needed no funding round, only savings. And a marketplace for small online businesses let a non-technical buyer purchase a working product and add the distribution that it lacked, which none of the predecessors could do; according to Acquire.com's blog, the buyer then sold it at a profit within a year." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product, yes. The 12-month resale, probably not.", "text": "Many AI video generators now compete for the same creators, so another general faceless-video tool starts in a crowded market. The structure is still open: buy or build a working tool cheaply, then add the missing distribution, daily content made with the tool itself and small paid tests that grow only when they return money.", "steps": [ "If you build, plan the marketing from the first week; the builder here said that not doing so was his biggest mistake.", "Use your own product to make your advertising, posted every day on accounts that say they belong to the product.", "Test Meta and TikTok ads with small budgets and keep the one that pays.", "Sell plans as credits, so each customer's model usage stays below the price of the plan." ], "open": "Small working AI tools listed for sale by builders who have run out of time or money, in niches where the product can demonstrate itself in a short video." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "Both revenue figures, US$800 MRR at purchase and US$32,000 MRR at the resale, rest on one account: the buyer Sanjana's statements, relayed in two posts by the same Acquire.com marketing author on 11 March 2025. Acquire.com hosted both sales and publishes them as success stories. No payment-processor data, no price and no month of the resale are given, and the headline's \"30x\" does not match the blog's own figures, which give 40 times. A reader could look for the Acquire.com listing with its connected Stripe metrics, a second interview with the buyer, or a statement by the later owner." }, { "title": "The growth happened under a buyer, not the builder", "text": "The builder sold because he was close to broke and \"couldn't even invest money in ads\". The business on this page is the buyer's result: his marketing, his ad budget and his new features, with the builder still adding features for him. The story shows what a buyer added more than what the builder did alone." }, { "title": "Both sale prices are undisclosed", "text": "Neither the price the buyer paid in 2024 nor the resale price in 2025 was published. The blog says only that the resale brought \"30 times what he initially invested\". The outcome on this page is therefore a revenue figure at the time of sale, not an exit price." }, { "title": "It depends on model providers", "text": "Scripts come from OpenAI's GPT models and voices from ElevenLabs. The later owner's pricing page says generation costs US$0.002 to US$3.70 per item \"depending on resolution and provider\", that credits are priced below average costs, and that \"We fund this personally\". A price change by a provider goes straight into the margin." }, { "title": "Niche accounts and faceless content", "text": "The buyer's team created \"niche accounts for different sectors—such as fashion, politics, and trends\" and pushed daily video. The sources do not say whether those accounts said they belonged to CopyCopter; the buyer says \"We created new Instagram and TikTok accounts for CopyCopter\". The 2025 home page sold \"faceless videos for every niche\", including conspiracy-theory and war-documentary videos, a use that the platforms may restrict." }, { "title": "Compared with other video stories on this site", "text": "Faceless.video, AutoShorts.ai and StoryShort, other faceless short-video tools on this site, report their figures while still run by their founders, whereas CopyCopter's figure was reached by a buyer and ended in a resale within about a year of the video launch." }, { "title": "The business today belongs to a later owner", "text": "Since May 2025 the footer names Blackstar Properties, Inc. The 2026 site is a rebuilt \"Studio\" with a gallery that names newer video and image models and has no published plan prices, so the product and the numbers on this page describe 2024 and early 2025 only." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://copycopter.ai/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Acquire.com blog, 11 March 2025: How Sanjana Grew CopyCopter 30x in Less Than a Year", "url": "https://blog.acquire.com/how-sanjana-grew-copycopter-30x-in-less-than-a-year/", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. The marketplace's account of the buyer, with his quotations. Source for the US$800 and US$32,000 MRR figures, the niche accounts, the Meta ads and the resale." }, { "title": "Acquire.com Startup Acquisition Stories podcast page, 11 March 2025: How CopyCopter Scaled 30x in Less Than a Year & Sold It", "url": "https://blog.acquire.com/how-copycopter-scaled-30x-in-less-than-a-year-sold-it-the-secrets-to-rapid-growth/", "grade": "D", "how": "Read the episode page in full; the interview itself was not played. Same author and date as source 1, and the same two figures." }, { "title": "Acquire.com blog, 7 February 2025: How Finding a New Owner for Copycopter Saved Kamil from Bankruptcy", "url": "https://blog.acquire.com/kamil-zowczak-copycopter/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The builder's own account: Bali, savings, OpenAI, the Douyin spread, Product Hunt, the failed first deal and the 24-hour sale." }, { "title": "Acquire.com podcast page, episode 121, 4 February 2025: Kamil Almost Went Broke Growing His AI Startup", "url": "https://blog.acquire.com/startup-acquisition-episode-121/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the episode page in full; the interview itself was not played. Source for the free plan, the paywall and the Product Hunt launch." }, { "title": "CopyCopter changelog, Wayback Machine copy of 6 October 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20241006214938/https://copycopter.ai/changelog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Dated entries from 28 February to 20 August 2024, all from the builder's time." }, { "title": "CopyCopter home page, Wayback Machine copy of 20 January 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250120030153/https://copycopter.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the plan data embedded in the page source. Source for the plans, prices, voices, languages and use cases." }, { "title": "CopyCopter home page, Wayback Machine copy of 2 June 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240602185457/https://copycopter.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The builder's version, footer Kyzobuilds Pte. Ltd., \"Powered by Eleven Labs\"." }, { "title": "CopyCopter home page, Wayback Machine copy of 16 November 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20231116174502/https://www.copycopter.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The earlier writing tool for social posts." }, { "title": "CopyCopter home page, Wayback Machine copies of 4 August and 1 September 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240901062306/https://copycopter.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the footers of both copies (the 4 August copy is at https://web.archive.org/web/20240804073108/https://copycopter.ai/). Source for the change of owner company." }, { "title": "CopyCopter home page, Wayback Machine copy of 13 May 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250513165857/https://copycopter.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the footer: Blackstar Properties, Inc. The 6 March 2025 copy still showed the first buyer's company names." }, { "title": "CopyCopter home page, read 26 October 2026", "url": "https://copycopter.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The later owner's product, CopyCopter Studio." }, { "title": "CopyCopter pricing page, read 26 October 2026 (last updated 12 July 2025)", "url": "https://copycopter.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A cost explanation by the later owner with a credit price and no plans." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/chatnode/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/chatnode.md", "slug": "chatnode", "name": "ChatNode", "country": "USA (company), France (founders)", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI customer-support chatbots", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-26", "launchLabel": "May 2023", "outcomeLabel": "Sold for a six-figure price, June 2024", "sticker": "Sold for six figures", "outcomeUsd": 100000, "months": 13, "teamLabel": "2 founders according to Starter Story; the October 2023 About page listed 3 people", "fundingLabel": "None reported; Starter Story calls it bootstrapped", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "support-agents", "channel": "launches", "trend": "sold", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2B", "Customer support" ], "product": "A company gives ChatNode the addresses of its web pages and uploads its documents. ChatNode turns that material into a chatbot that answers customer questions on the company's website, in Slack and in other tools, and hands the conversation to a person when needed. The current pricing page lists plans from US$35 a month, with models from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Perplexity and DeepSeek.", "why": "Starter Story reported that the founders copied a proven idea, Chatbase, and built a first version in about two months. They then launched it where early buyers of AI tools already look: Product Hunt, AppSumo and AI directories. According to Starter Story, they sold the company through Acquire.com about 13 months after the first public post.", "summary": [ "ChatNode builds AI chatbots for customer support. An AI chatbot here is a chat window on a company's website that answers visitors' questions with a large language model, a program such as GPT-4 that writes text, and that uses the company's own web pages and documents as its source. The method is called retrieval-augmented generation: the program first searches the company's material for the passages that fit the question, then gives those passages to the model to write the answer.", "On 16 May 2023 the Hacker News user tagarate, a name that matches the co-founder Thomas Agarate, posted the project and wrote that he was looking for the first users. On 6 July 2023 the same user posted the title \"Review my startup, chatnode.ai – $2K MRR in 30 days\", which reports US$2,000 in monthly recurring revenue one month after launch. Starter Story wrote in November 2024 that two founders built it, that an AppSumo lifetime deal made more than six figures in net profit in two months, and that the company was sold through Acquire.com in June 2024 for a six-figure price.", "Every money figure on this page rests on one source each: a founder's post title, a Starter Story article and a Latka directory entry. No payment processor or buyer has confirmed them, so the page is graded D, reported, not verified. The page also shows four failed startups that sold automated or live customer chat before language models could answer from a company's own documents." ], "factsCaption": "A support chatbot that its founders built in about two months and, according to Starter Story, sold for a six-figure price 13 months after the first public post", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is stated by the company or its founder on its own pages and is not a money figure. A grade D value is a money figure that only one source states: a founder's post, a Starter Story article or a directory. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a first Hacker News post to a sale through Acquire.com, in 13 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "ChatNode plans on 26 October 2026, read on the company's pricing page (grade C). These are the prices of the current owner, not of the founders.", "note": "A credit pays for one answer. The home page says most models cost 1 credit per answer and the advanced models cost 20 credits. Yearly billing gives two months free, about 17% less than monthly billing. The free plan uses Gemini 2.0 Pro only and deletes inactive chatbots after 14 days. In February 2024, while the founders still ran it, an archived copy of the same page showed a Standard plan at US$59 a month (US$50 billed yearly) and a Growth plan at US$99 a month (US$83 billed yearly).", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "35 credits a month, 1 chatbot, 20 files and links" ], [ "Lite", "29.17", "35", "1,250 credits a month, 1 AI agent, API access" ], [ "Standard", "74.17", "89", "12,500 credits a month, 3 AI agents, 3 team members" ], [ "Scale", "314.17", "377", "50,000 credits a month, 8 AI agents, 5 team members, own domain" ], [ "Enterprise", "custom", "custom", "Unlimited agents and messages, account manager" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Sale of the company, June 2024", "value": "a six-figure price, through Acquire.com", "grade": "D", "note": "Starter Story, November 2024. The exact price and the buyer are not given. The page title says sold in 12 months, the text says within 1.5 years. outcomeUsd on this page is the lower bound of six figures, US$100,000.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue about 30 days after launch", "value": "US$2,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Only the title of a Hacker News post by tagarate on 6 July 2023, with no text. Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is the subscription revenue of one month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR in the first week after the Product Hunt launch", "value": "nearly US$1,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Starter Story, without a date. It also says ChatNode was the second product of the day.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Net profit from the AppSumo lifetime deal", "value": "more than six figures in two months", "grade": "D", "note": "Starter Story, without a date. Six figures means at least US$100,000. A lifetime deal is one payment for permanent access.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Annual revenue, November 2023", "value": "US$42,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Latka directory, which writes source not recorded.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Average monthly revenue implied by the Latka figure", "value": "US$3,500", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 42,000 divided by 12 equals 3,500.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue on the Starter Story card", "value": "US$10,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Starter Story, without a date. The same card estimates 3 employees.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Team in October 2023", "value": "3 people", "grade": "C", "note": "The archived About page lists a web developer, Thomas Agaraté as marketing director and Sacha Dumay as data engineer. Starter Story counts 2 founders; Latka counts 3 employees in November 2023.", "src": [ 4, 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "D", "note": "Starter Story calls the company bootstrapped. No source mentions an investor.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Company that ran ChatNode in October 2023", "value": "SDATAS LLC, registered in Wyoming, United States", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived terms of use: SDATAS LLC, doing business as ChatNode AI.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Company that runs ChatNode in October 2026", "value": "Chatnode AI LLC, Delaware", "grade": "C", "note": "Current terms. The change of company name agrees with a sale, but the page does not say who owns it.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "First public post", "value": "16 May 2023", "grade": "C", "note": "Hacker News post by tagarate: Chatnode.ai, building a tool to train ChatGPT with any of your data. The Wayback Machine has its first copy of the home page on the same day.", "src": [ 7, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the first public post to the sale", "value": "13 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: May 2023 to June 2024.", "src": [ 7, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Customers in October 2026", "value": "more than 3,500 companies", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page of the current owner. It is a claim, not a count of paying customers.", "src": [ 9 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "16 May 2023", "what": "The Hacker News user tagarate, a name that matches Thomas Agarate, describes the tool: train GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 chatbots on web pages or PDF files and embed them on a website as a support bot. He asks for the first users.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "21 June 2023", "what": "Starter Story embeds a post by Thomas Agarate from this date in its section on the AppSumo launch. The post itself could not be read.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "6 July 2023", "what": "Hacker News post title: Review my startup, chatnode.ai – $2K MRR in 30 days.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "October 2023", "what": "The About page lists a team of three. The terms name SDATAS LLC, a Wyoming company, doing business as ChatNode AI.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "when": "November 2023", "what": "Latka lists US$42,000 in annual revenue and 3 employees, source not recorded.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "February 2024", "what": "Archived pricing page: Standard US$59 a month, Growth US$99 a month, both with a two-week free trial.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "June 2024", "what": "Sold through Acquire.com for a six-figure price, according to Starter Story. Starter Story also embeds a post by Sacha Dumay dated 1 July 2024 in that section; the post could not be read.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "Chatnode AI LLC, a Delaware company, runs the site. It sells AI support agents with AI Actions, many models and plans from US$35 a month, and says more than 3,500 companies use it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 9, 11 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Copy a proven product fast", "text": "Starter Story wrote that the idea came from watching Chatbase, an earlier chatbot builder. The founders built a minimum viable product, the smallest version that people can use and pay for, in about one to two months, and took shortcuts such as sending buyers to Stripe's hosted checkout page." }, { "title": "Launch sites for early buyers", "text": "The first users came from Product Hunt, where Starter Story reported ChatNode as second product of the day, and from AI directories, small Facebook groups and a Discord community. All of these cost little or nothing." }, { "title": "A lifetime deal with the customer's own API key", "text": "On AppSumo the founders sold lifetime access for one payment. Starter Story reported that buyers had to use their own OpenAI key, a password that bills the model use to the buyer's OpenAI account. That rule kept the founders' model costs from growing with each lifetime customer." }, { "title": "Paid search after the launches", "text": "Starter Story reported that the founders then used Google Ads on product keywords and said the ads returned 2.5 to 3 times their cost. After that, the founders sold the business instead of building it into a larger company." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's Hacker News post and from Starter Story's summary of the founders' statements. They are grade C and D.", "items": [ "Backend in Python with FastAPI, a Python framework for web services. Frontend in Svelte and TypeScript, hosted on Vercel.", "Pinecone, a vector database, stored the embeddings of the customer documents. An embedding is a list of numbers that represents the meaning of a passage, so that similar passages can be found by search. LangChain connected the search to the model.", "The OpenAI API answered the questions. In May 2023 the founder named GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Supabase is also listed in Starter Story's tool list.", "Stripe took the payments, at first through Stripe's own checkout pages instead of a custom payment form.", "Starter Story reported that the founders hired help for customer support so that they could stay on development.", "Since the sale, the current owner's pricing page lists GPT-5-mini, GPT-5.2, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity Sonar and DeepSeek models." ], "src": [ 7, 2, 11 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold customer chat or automated answers before language models could read a company's documents. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Answerly", "years": "2013 to 2016", "funding": "US$550K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "FAQ chatbots that answer common support questions so humans handle only the complex ones.", "died": "The language processing of the time could not understand real questions, and the large help-desk companies Zendesk and Intercom already owned the customers.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2168-answerly" }, { "name": "Hipmob", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Customer chat inside mobile apps and websites.", "died": "Intercom and Zendesk added the same feature to larger products, and with almost no funding it stayed unknown.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1184-hipmob" }, { "name": "RightHello", "years": "2014 to 2022", "funding": "US$600K", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "Live chat for online shops that turns visitors into buyers.", "died": "A person had to answer every chat, and Intercom had raised US$240 million while RightHello had US$600,000.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2260-righthello" }, { "name": "Vanti", "years": "2019 to 2024", "funding": "US$18M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Chatbots that guide shoppers to a purchase.", "died": "It did not find enough buyers in a crowded market, and the cost of each customer and of each integration was too high.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2508-vanti" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Before 2023, a support chatbot needed its answers written by hand. Answerly's customers wrote FAQs and decision trees, and the bot still failed when a visitor asked the same thing in other words. Hipmob and RightHello avoided the problem by selling chat windows for human agents, and lost to larger help-desk suites.", "Language models removed the hand-written part. In May 2023 the founder wrote that a customer only gives links to its web pages or documents and waits for the training to finish. Because the model is rented from OpenAI, a small team could copy Chatbase within weeks, and according to Starter Story it sold the result for six figures, where Vanti had spent US$18 million and closed in 2024." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The same product, no.", "text": "A website chatbot trained on a company's documents was copied by hundreds of teams in 2023, and the market now includes Chatbase, SiteGPT and the help-desk suites Intercom and Zendesk. What can be copied is the sequence that Starter Story described: build a small version of a proven product, launch on Product Hunt and AppSumo, protect the margin with the customer's own API key, then sell the business while it is still growing.", "steps": [ "Pick a product that already sells well and build a smaller version in one or two months.", "Launch on a weekday on Product Hunt and list the product in AI directories.", "If you sell a lifetime deal, make the buyer pay for model use with their own API key.", "Plan a sale on a marketplace such as Acquire.com once the revenue is steady, if you do not want to run the company for years." ], "open": "Support chatbots for one industry or one language, with the rules and integrations that industry needs, are less crowded than general website chatbots." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "Every money figure rests on one source. The US$2,000 in monthly recurring revenue is only the title of a Hacker News post by tagarate (Thomas Agarate) on 6 July 2023. The six-figure sale in June 2024, the six-figure AppSumo profit and the US$10,000 monthly revenue come only from one Starter Story article of November 2024, which embeds X posts by the founders that could not be read. The US$42,000 annual revenue of November 2023 is a Latka entry with no recorded source. A reader could look for the Acquire.com listing, a statement by the buyer, or the founders' own posts about the sale." }, { "title": "Sources that do not agree", "text": "Starter Story calls Thomas Agarate a data engineer from Portugal, and Latka places the company in Portugal. The company's own About page of October 2023 lists him as marketing director with a French flag and lists Sacha Dumay as the data engineer. Starter Story's title says the sale came after 12 months, its text says within 1.5 years. Its pricing section says plans start at about US$19 a month, while the archived pricing page of February 2024 starts at US$59." }, { "title": "Competition", "text": "Starter Story wrote that ChatNode was modelled on Chatbase. The same product is sold by Chatbase, SiteGPT, DocsBot, Chat Thing and many others, and by Intercom and Zendesk inside their help-desk suites. Competing products were easy to build, which is one reason a sale was a sensible outcome." }, { "title": "Dependence on model providers", "text": "The product rents every answer from a model provider: OpenAI in 2023, and today OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Perplexity and DeepSeek. The current terms say customers who connect their own API key pay those providers directly. A price change by a provider changes the margin of every plan." }, { "title": "Compared with other support-agent stories on this site", "text": "Chatbase reached US$10 million in annual recurring revenue with a figure published by Stripe (grade A) and SiteGPT reports US$190,000 a year, while ChatNode is the only support-agent story here that ended in a sale, and its numbers are the weakest, grade D." }, { "title": "The business after the sale", "text": "The current site, with more than 3,500 companies claimed, many models and AI Actions, belongs to the owner after the sale, Chatnode AI LLC of Delaware. Nothing on this page about today's product describes the founders' results." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.chatnode.ai/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Hacker News post by tagarate, 6 July 2023: Review my startup, chatnode.ai – $2K MRR in 30 days (read through the Algolia API)", "url": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/36613046", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. The post has a title and no text, and no comments. Source for the US$2,000 MRR claim." }, { "title": "Starter Story, 10 November 2024: How 2 Founders Bootstrapped & Sold AI SaaS for Six Figures in 12 Months", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/chat-node-breakdown", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. A summary of the founders' statements, not marked as an estimate. Two embedded X posts could not be read. Source for the sale, the launch channels, the stack and the AppSumo profit." }, { "title": "Latka company page: ChatNode revenue", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/chatnode.ai", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. A directory entry. Source for the US$42,000 annual revenue and the 3 employees of November 2023, which it lists with source not recorded." }, { "title": "ChatNode About page, archived 15 October 2023 by the Wayback Machine", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20231015074711/https://www.chatnode.ai/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the team of three and their roles." }, { "title": "ChatNode terms of use, archived 15 October 2023 by the Wayback Machine", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20231015074741/https://www.chatnode.ai/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section that names the company: SDATAS LLC, registered in Wyoming, doing business as ChatNode AI." }, { "title": "ChatNode terms and conditions, read 26 October 2026", "url": "https://www.chatnode.ai/terms-conditions", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the company, the governing law and third-party models. Source for Chatnode AI LLC of Delaware and the own-API-key rule." }, { "title": "Hacker News posts by tagarate, including 16 May 2023: Chatnode.ai – Building a tool to train ChatGPT with any of your data (read through the Algolia search API)", "url": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?tags=author_tagarate&hitsPerPage=100", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Four items by the user. Source for the first public description, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, and the launch month." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine list of archived chatnode.ai pages, 2023 to 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=chatnode.ai*&from=2023&to=2024&filter=statuscode:200&collapse=urlkey&fl=timestamp,original&limit=200", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the list. The first archived copy of the home page is from 16 May 2023." }, { "title": "ChatNode home page, read 26 October 2026", "url": "https://www.chatnode.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The current owner's claims: AI support agents and more than 3,500 companies. Checked for the purpose rules." }, { "title": "ChatNode pricing page, archived 25 February 2024 by the Wayback Machine", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240225135934/https://www.chatnode.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Standard and Growth prices while the founders ran the company." }, { "title": "ChatNode pricing page, read 26 October 2026", "url": "https://www.chatnode.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the current plans, credits and the list of models. Checked for the purpose rules." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export of failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/myfutureself/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/myfutureself.md", "slug": "myfutureself", "name": "MyFutureSelf", "country": "United States", "sector": "Consumer", "productType": "AI mentor and habit coach app", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-26", "launchLabel": "February 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$12.9K revenue in one month, February 2026", "sticker": "Reported $12.9K a month", "outcomeUsd": 154800, "months": 12, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders, Giancarlo Sarti (CEO) and a co-founder not named in the sources, 0 employees in March 2026", "fundingLabel": "None found; a place in the Founders, Inc. Off Season residency, no investment disclosed", "primaryFactor": "Distribution through creators", "group": "companions-publishing", "channel": "creators", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Self-improvement" ], "product": "A phone app for iPhone and Android in which the user describes the person they want to become, and an AI character called the Future Self, built from those answers, turns the goals into a 90-day plan with a short list of daily tasks. The user can chat or talk by voice with the Future Self at any time. The app is free to download but needs a paid subscription after the onboarding; the App Store page lists weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly plans. A second product for universities introduces students to graduates of their school.", "why": "The two founders had run an email marketing agency in college, so they planned how to reach customers before the product was good. They built the app without coding experience, with Claude and Cursor, released it with crashes, and fixed it in public. Growth came from free posts on Instagram, TikTok and Reddit, then from a small group of creators who post about the app every day, then from paid ads on Meta. Co-founder Giancarlo Sarti told Starter Story in March 2026 that the app made US$12,900 in February 2026.", "summary": [ "MyFutureSelf is a subscription app, an app that charges a repeating fee through the Apple App Store or Google Play instead of a one-time price. The user answers questions about their goals, and the app creates an AI mentor, a chat character that a large language model plays, here called the user's Future Self. The Future Self turns the goals into a 90-day roadmap of daily tasks across health, career, mindset and relationships, and answers by chat or voice. The company's privacy policy says that the chat and voice content goes to OpenAI, its AI provider, to write the replies.", "Giancarlo Sarti, the co-founder and CEO, and his co-founder started the company in college in Cleveland, Ohio, in February 2025, after an email marketing agency that the founder said had reached US$20,000 a month and then stopped growing. Neither of them could code; the founder said they built the first version with Claude and Cursor and that it crashed often. In a Starter Story interview published on 20 March 2026, the founder said that MyFutureSelf generated US$12,900 in revenue in February 2026, and the page header lists 2 founders and 0 employees.", "That revenue figure rests on one interview, grade D: no payment processor, app-analytics service or journalist confirms it, and no later figure was found. The company's own pages add usage claims (88,000+ downloads on the home page in October 2026) and show that it now also sells to universities. In summer 2026 the team took part in Off Season, a residency of the investor Founders, Inc.; no source says that it invested. This page also shows earlier habit and self-improvement apps that failed." ], "factsCaption": "A two-founder phone app that its co-founder said made US$12,900 in February 2026, one year after it started, reported in one interview and not verified", "factsRead": "How to read this table: the grade D value is one founder statement in one interview that no one else has checked. Grade C values are the company's own pages, its App Store and Google Play pages, and the Founders, Inc. program pages. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a college marketing agency to a paid AI mentor app in about one year, with every revenue number from one interview. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "MyFutureSelf in-app purchases listed on the US App Store page, read 26 October 2026 (grade C). The app shows the price for each country before payment, so a buyer may see only some of these.", "note": "The App Store page lists several prices for the same period, which usually means that the app tests prices or shows discounts: three yearly prices (US$19.99, US$24.99, US$29.99), a yearly discount at US$19.99, two weekly products at US$6.99, a monthly plan at US$9.99 and a quarterly plan at US$29.99. Monthly equivalents of the yearly prices were calculated on this page. The help page says there is no free version and no student discount, and that some plans include a free trial. Apple or Google bills every plan.", "rows": [ [ "Weekly", "", "6.99 a week", "about US$30.29 a month if kept for a year (calculated)" ], [ "Monthly", "", "9.99", "full app" ], [ "Quarterly", "", "29.99 every 3 months", "US$10.00 a month (calculated)" ], [ "Yearly, lowest listed", "1.67", "", "US$19.99 a year; also listed as Yearly - Discount" ], [ "Yearly, middle listed", "2.08", "", "US$24.99 a year" ], [ "Yearly, highest listed", "2.50", "", "US$29.99 a year" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue in February 2026", "value": "US$12,900", "grade": "D", "note": "Giancarlo Sarti in a written Starter Story interview published 20 March 2026: \"In February, we generated $12.9K in revenue.\" The interview does not say gross or net of the app-store fee. The year is inferred from the publication date, because the company started in February 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month in the Starter Story header", "value": "US$11,000", "grade": "D", "note": "The page header, March 2026, with no date of its own. The page also says the founder makes an average of US$132,000 a year, which is the header figure times 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the February 2026 figure", "value": "about US$154,800 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$12,900 times 12. One month is a weak base for a year, because app subscription revenue changes with ad spending and with yearly renewals.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team, March 2026", "value": "2 founders, 0 employees", "grade": "C", "note": "Starter Story page header. The founder speaks of \"my co-founder and I\". The co-founder is not named in any source read.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Started", "value": "February 2025, in college, in Cleveland", "grade": "C", "note": "Starter Story page header and interview. The App Store page shows copyright 2025.", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Earlier business", "value": "an email marketing agency that reached US$20,000 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder, Starter Story interview. He said it plateaued after that.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Coding experience at the start", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder: \"Neither of us knew how to code\"; the first version was \"built largely with the help of tools like Claude and Cursor\" and crashed often.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "AI provider for the mentor", "value": "OpenAI", "grade": "C", "note": "Privacy policy, updated 13 October 2026: chat messages and voice conversations, and photos for the avatar, are processed by OpenAI.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Downloads claimed", "value": "88,000+ (home page); 75,000+ (university page); 10,000+ (Google Play only)", "grade": "C", "note": "Company pages read 26 October 2026, and the Google Play counter. The home page also claims 166,000+ completed actions and 1,800+ five-star ratings.", "src": [ 2, 11, 8 ] }, { "fact": "App Store rating", "value": "4.7 from 1,200 ratings; age rating 9+", "grade": "C", "note": "App Store page, 26 October 2026. Category Health & Fitness, \"Contains Health or Wellness Topics\". The terms of service require users to be at least 13.", "src": [ 7, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Students paying for the app", "value": "4,500+ \"paying out of pocket\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Company's page for universities, 26 October 2026. No date or method is given.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Developer and company", "value": "Success AI LLC on the stores; MyFutureSelf, Inc., Ohio, in the terms", "grade": "C", "note": "App Store seller and terms of service.", "src": [ 7, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none disclosed", "grade": "C", "note": "Founders, Inc. lists MyFutureSelf as team 35 of its Off Season II residency (24 June to 7 August), where \"top teams get up to $250k in funding\". No source says that MyFutureSelf received money, and it is not in the Founders, Inc. portfolio list in the sitemap.", "src": [ 9, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Time from start to the February 2026 figure", "value": "12 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: February 2025 to February 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Before 2025", "what": "In college, the two founders run an email marketing agency. The founder said it reached US$20,000 a month about three months after they changed how they worked, then stopped growing.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "February 2025", "what": "They start MyFutureSelf in Cleveland, with no coding experience, using Claude and Cursor.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2025", "what": "The first version is released and crashes often. First users come from free posts on Instagram, TikTok and Reddit; users begin to subscribe.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2025 to early 2026", "what": "Influencer partnerships, then a creator program: first run by a hired TikTok Shop specialist, then brought in-house, with the founder writing to creators who post about psychology and mindset. Paid ads on Meta follow.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "February 2026", "what": "The founder said the app generated US$12,900 in revenue in this month.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "20 March 2026", "what": "Starter Story publishes the interview, with 2 founders and 0 employees in its header.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "24 June to 7 August", "what": "MyFutureSelf is team 35 at Off Season II, a six-week residency of Founders, Inc. at Fort Mason in San Francisco, with the one-liner \"Talk to your future self - AI coaching for Gen Z.\"", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 10 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2026", "what": "Privacy policy update: OpenAI, Google Firebase, Superwall, PostHog and AppsFlyer named as service providers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "Version 2.37 on the App Store with 90-day plans and an animated avatar; a university product (edu.myfutureselfapp.com) is offered next to the consumer app.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 11 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Distribution through creators", "text": "The founder said the most effective channel was a program of user-generated content: a small group of creators who already post about psychology, mindset and self-improvement post about the app every day, in their own style. He found them by cold messages and calls, after a hired specialist had brought in many creators of low quality." }, { "title": "A plan, not only a chat", "text": "A chat with a model alone is easy to copy and easy to stop using. The app wraps it in a 90-day roadmap, a short daily task list, streaks, milestones and evening check-ins, which give the user a reason to open the app each day and give the subscription something to show for itself." }, { "title": "Ship before it is ready", "text": "The founders released an app that crashed, fixed the problems quickly, and used the complaints as their task list. The founder said that if you feel completely ready to launch, you probably waited too long." }, { "title": "Store billing and a model API", "text": "Apple and Google handle all payments and cancellations, and OpenAI writes the replies through its API. That is what let two people with no employees run the product: the hard parts of payments and language are rented." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's interview and the company's own privacy policy and store pages. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Built by two founders without coding experience, with Claude and Cursor, as their first mobile app.", "The AI mentor's replies, voice conversations and the avatar made from the user's photo are processed by OpenAI, according to the privacy policy.", "Accounts run on Firebase Authentication, and user data is stored in Google Cloud Firestore; push notifications use Apple's push service and Firebase Cloud Messaging.", "Superwall manages subscriptions and the paywall; Apple and Google do the billing.", "PostHog records product analytics and masked screen recordings; Firebase Analytics and Crashlytics record usage and crashes; AppsFlyer measures which campaigns bring installs.", "Available in 12 languages on iPhone, iPad and Android; there is no web version." ], "src": [ 1, 5, 4, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised to help people build better habits or improve themselves, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Habit Labs", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$200K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Set personal goals and track them with friends in a social game, Health Month.", "died": "Users did not want to pay for habit help that they saw as optional, and free gamified apps copied the features.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1623-habit-labs" }, { "name": "Habitual", "years": "2019 to 2021", "funding": "US$50K", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "A habit tracker built on the ideas of the book Atomic Habits.", "died": "A good product with no marketing: it never found a way to reach users in a crowded category.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1973-habitual" }, { "name": "Likebetter", "years": "2006 to 2009", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Self-improvement as a game of choices and social experiments.", "died": "It could not keep users interested and had no clear way to make money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1665-likebetter" }, { "name": "Charge Running", "years": "2021 to 2024", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Live audio coaching classes for runners, a personal trainer in your ear.", "died": "Live sessions at fixed times did not fit users who wanted flexibility, and app-based coaching took the market.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/895-charge-running" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The four predecessors failed on two problems: users stopped coming back, and users did not want to pay for help that felt optional. Habitual also had no way to reach people. A habit app with a fixed list of features is cheap to copy and easy to forget.", "MyFutureSelf answers both problems with things that did not exist before 2023. A large language model, rented from OpenAI, lets the app hold a personal conversation and rewrite the plan when the user's week goes wrong, which a fixed checklist could not do. And the founders started from distribution: daily posts by creators in the self-improvement niche on TikTok and Instagram bring in users, and store subscriptions charge them from the first week. Whether it solves the first problem, that users stop coming back, is not shown by any source; the only revenue figure is the founder's statement that the app made US$12,900 in February 2026." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, if you can do the distribution.", "text": "The product is a model API, a plan generator and a store paywall, which two people without coding experience built with AI coding tools. The hard part, by the founder's account, was finding creators who post about the app every day. Anyone who already knows how to reach a niche audience on short-video platforms can copy the structure; anyone who does not will have the same problem as Habitual.", "steps": [ "Choose a niche whose audience already watches creators daily on TikTok or Instagram.", "Build the smallest app that gives a personal plan and a daily reason to open it, with the model doing the personal part.", "Recruit a few creators who already make content in the niche, and let them post in their own style.", "Add paid ads only after organic posts and creators show which message works." ], "open": "AI coaches for a narrow goal, such as a sport, an exam, a career change or a language, sold through creators who already teach that goal." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The revenue figure of US$12,900 for February 2026 rests on one source: Giancarlo Sarti's written interview with Starter Story, published 20 March 2026. The same page's header gives US$11,000 a month with no date. No payment processor, app-analytics service such as Appfigures or Sensor Tower, or journalist confirms either number, and no later figure was found. A reader could look for a RevenueCat or Superwall case study, a TrustMRR profile, or a newer interview with dated figures." }, { "title": "An AI mentor is not a therapist", "text": "The App Store page describes \"Mindset and wellbeing support\" and lists the app under Health & Fitness with \"Health or Wellness Topics\"; reviewers write that it helps them with negative thinking and low motivation. But the terms of service (updated 21 July 2026), the help page and the privacy policy contain no statement that the app is not medical or mental-health care, and no crisis guidance. The app is rated 9+ on the App Store, the terms allow users from 13, and Founders, Inc. describes it as \"AI coaching for Gen Z\", so many users are young." }, { "title": "Dependence on OpenAI and the app stores", "text": "Every reply comes from OpenAI under its API terms, so a price change, an outage or a policy change at OpenAI changes the product. All payments go through Apple and Google, which take a fee, set the refund rules and can remove an app. An App Store review from January complains of being \"pushed into a 1 year subscription with no real free trial\", the kind of complaint that store reviewers act on." }, { "title": "Numbers that do not agree", "text": "The home page claims 88,000+ downloads, the university page 75,000+, and Google Play shows 10,000+ for Android alone. The claims are not dated and may count different things, but none of them can be checked." }, { "title": "Compared with other stories on this site", "text": "Kindroid, an AI companion app, and Pingo AI, an AI language tutor app, both report much larger revenue at grade C from founder statements on several dates; MyFutureSelf is smaller, younger and rests on one founder figure, and it sits between them, a companion character used for a learning-like goal." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://myfutureselfapp.com/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6745573360" }, { "kind": "android", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.successai.myfutureself" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Starter Story, 20 March 2026: I Grew This Mobile App to Over $12K/Month (interview with Giancarlo Sarti)", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/myfutureself", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full (the free part; the rest is for premium members). A written founder interview, not a page marked \"Estimated from public sources\". Grade D for the revenue figure, which appears only here; grade C for the founder's account of the team, the agency, the build and the channels." }, { "title": "MyFutureSelf home page", "url": "https://myfutureselfapp.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 26 October 2026. Source for the product description, the download and rating claims and the store links." }, { "title": "MyFutureSelf: How it works", "url": "https://myfutureselfapp.com/how-it-works", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 90-day roadmap, the daily actions and the plan types." }, { "title": "MyFutureSelf help center", "url": "https://myfutureselfapp.com/help", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for no free version, no student discount, free trials on some plans, store billing and no web version." }, { "title": "MyFutureSelf privacy policy, updated 13 October 2026", "url": "https://myfutureselfapp.com/privacy-policy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for OpenAI as AI provider and the other service providers (Firebase, Firestore, Superwall, PostHog, AppsFlyer)." }, { "title": "MyFutureSelf terms of service, updated 21 July 2026", "url": "https://myfutureselfapp.com/terms-of-service", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the company name and state (MyFutureSelf, Inc., Ohio), the minimum age of 13, and the absence of a medical or mental-health statement." }, { "title": "App Store: MyFutureSelf Daily Habit Coach, Success AI LLC", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/myfutureself-achieve-success/id6745573360", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 26 October 2026 (the app page, not the search API). Source for the in-app purchase prices, the 9+ age rating, the rating count, the description, the version history and reviews." }, { "title": "Google Play: MyFutureSelf Daily Habit Coach", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.successai.myfutureself", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the summary section. Source for the 10,000+ Android downloads, the Everyone rating and the update date of 21 October 2026." }, { "title": "Founders, Inc.: myfutureself, Off Season team page", "url": "https://f.inc/offseason/2/teams/myfutureself", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the team's place in Off Season II and its one-liner \"AI coaching for Gen Z\". No investment is mentioned." }, { "title": "Founders, Inc.: Off Season program page", "url": "https://f.inc/offseason", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the program dates, the place (Fort Mason) and \"Top teams get up to $250k in funding\"." }, { "title": "MyFutureSelf for universities", "url": "https://edu.myfutureselfapp.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the university product and the claims of 75,000+ downloads and 4,500+ paying students." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/playlistai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/playlistai.md", "slug": "playlistai", "name": "PlaylistAI", "country": "Not stated in the sources", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "iPhone app that turns a text prompt into a Spotify or Apple Music playlist", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-26", "launchLabel": "11 January 2023", "outcomeLabel": "About US$2.5K a month (MRR), April 2023", "sticker": "$2.5K a month, reported", "outcomeUsd": 30000, "months": 3, "teamLabel": "1 person: Brett Bauman, an iOS developer, who said he ran the app on the side", "fundingLabel": "None reported; the App Store seller is Brett Bauman as an individual", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "voice-audio", "channel": "audience", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [ "platform", "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Music" ], "product": "An iPhone and iPad app. The user types a sentence such as \"Early 2000's pop music\", uploads a festival poster, or pastes a TikTok video, and the app builds a playlist and saves it into the user's own Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer or Amazon Music account. The app does not store or stream music itself. It is free to download, and the company site says that a Pro upgrade unlocks every feature.", "why": "It came out on 11 January 2023, when ChatGPT \"has been all over the headlines recently\", as MusicRadar wrote that day, and music writers were curious about any new use of OpenAI's models, and articles in MusicRadar, Fast Company and other outlets followed. The founder said in April 2023 that most users came from his posts on Twitter and that the press coverage kept bringing new people. He also said it took two weeks after the January launch to reach US$2,000 in revenue.", "summary": [ "PlaylistAI is an iPhone app that makes music playlists, ordered lists of songs that a music service plays one after another. The user writes a prompt, a short request in normal words such as \"chill coding music, electronic\", and a language model, an AI program trained on large amounts of text that can answer such requests, chooses the songs. The app then matches the result against the catalog of the user's music service and saves the playlist there, through each service's API, the documented interface that lets one program act on another company's system. The music stays on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer or Amazon Music; PlaylistAI only writes the list.", "The App Store seller and developer is Brett Bauman, who introduced himself on Hacker News as an iOS developer. The same App Store listing (id1631703551) first sold LineupSupply, an app from August 2022 that read artist names from a festival poster with Apple's Vision framework and made a Spotify playlist. On 11 January 2023 he relaunched it as PlaylistAI with AI prompts, and MusicRadar reported the same day that he had used OpenAI's technology. On 14 April 2023 he wrote in a Hacker News comment that the app was \"at ~$2500 MRR\", that is about US$2,500 of monthly recurring revenue (subscription revenue that repeats every month), and that it took two weeks to get the first US$2,000.", "That comment is the only revenue figure we found, so the headline is grade D: reported by the founder once, not verified. No payment-processor profile and no later figure exist in the sources. The app is still on sale in October 2026, with 775 ratings on the App Store, and the company site was updated in October 2026, but the latest App Store version is from 6 October 2024." ], "factsCaption": "One founder comment from April 2023 gives about US$2,500 a month of recurring revenue three months after the AI relaunch; nothing later is public", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value rests on one statement by the founder with one date. A grade B value is on Apple's App Store page or in a journalist's article. A grade C value was written by the founder or on the company's own site. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a festival-poster app in August 2022 to an AI playlist app that the founder said earned about US$2,500 a month in April 2023. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "PlaylistAI prices read on 26 October 2026 from the company site's FAQ and the App Store page (grade C and B)", "note": "The company site says that PlaylistAI Pro costs US$29.99 a year with a 7-day free trial and is billed through the App Store; the per-month figure is calculated. The App Store page lists ten in-app purchases, all named \"Unlock all features\", at US$3.99, US$4.99, US$14.99, US$29.99, US$39.99, US$49.99 and US$69.99, without saying which period each one covers. A customer review on the App Store page, written in 2023 or 2024, mentions US$2.99 a month. In August 2022 the older LineupSupply app had a one-time purchase of US$1.99.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "free download; the company site says Pro unlocks unlimited playlists" ], [ "Pro, yearly", "2.50", "", "US$29.99 a year with a 7-day free trial" ], [ "Other \"Unlock all features\" purchases", "", "", "US$3.99 to US$69.99 on the App Store page, period not shown" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, April 2023", "value": "about US$2,500", "grade": "D", "note": "One Hacker News comment by the founder (bbauman), 14 April 2023: \"I run an iOS app on the side thats at ~$2500 MRR\". No second source.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time to the first US$2,000 in revenue", "value": "2 weeks after the January 2023 launch", "grade": "D", "note": "Same comment: \"I launched in January and it took 2 weeks to get the first $2k in revenue.\"", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the April 2023 figure", "value": "about US$30,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$2,500 times 12. It is only as good as the one comment it comes from.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the AI relaunch to the figure", "value": "3 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 11 January 2023 to 14 April 2023.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Where users came from", "value": "\"Twitter mostly\", then press coverage", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's Hacker News reply, 14 April 2023: the app \"was also picked up by FastCompany, TechCrunch, some others, which has helped people continue to find it\".", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "AI provider", "value": "OpenAI", "grade": "B", "note": "MusicRadar, 11 January 2023: \"developer Brett Bauman has repurposed OpenAI's technology\". In a reply on the App Store page dated 14 November 2023 the developer blamed ChatGPT outages for slow playlists. The exact model is not stated by the founder.", "src": [ 11, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Seller and developer on the App Store", "value": "Brett Bauman", "grade": "B", "note": "App Store page, read 26 October 2026. The 2023 company site said: \"Previously known as LineupSupply. Made by Brett Bauman\".", "src": [ 6, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Ratings on the App Store, October 2026", "value": "775 ratings, average 4.3 of 5", "grade": "B", "note": "App Store page, United States store. Age rating 13+.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Users", "value": "more than 100,000 people", "grade": "C", "note": "The company site, March 2024 and October 2026. Not a count of paying users.", "src": [ 7, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Latest App Store version", "value": "2.34, 6 October 2024", "grade": "B", "note": "Version history on the App Store page. The company site itself had pages published and updated in September and October 2026.", "src": [ 6, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Music services supported", "value": "Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer (December 2023), Amazon Music (February 2024)", "grade": "B", "note": "App Store version notes 2.26 and 2.27.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder called it a side project, and the seller is a person, not a company. No source mentions investors.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "29 August 2022", "what": "Brett Bauman posts LineupSupply on Hacker News: an iOS app that reads artist names from a festival poster and makes a Spotify playlist. Free, with a one-time US$1.99 purchase for extra features.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "6 September 2022", "what": "TechCrunch writes about LineupSupply, according to the dated link in the press list on the app's 2023 home page.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "11 January 2023", "what": "The same App Store listing is relaunched as PlaylistAI, with AI prompts, image reading and song recognition in videos, posted on Hacker News and Twitter. MusicRadar reports that it uses OpenAI's technology.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3, 11 ] }, { "when": "January 2023", "what": "The founder later said it took two weeks from the launch to get the first US$2,000 in revenue.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "14 April 2023", "what": "In a Hacker News thread about side projects, the founder writes that the app is at about US$2,500 MRR, and that most users came from Twitter and press coverage.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "August 2023", "what": "He launches Songburst, a separate app that generates music from text, and version 2.13 of PlaylistAI links his \"new AI music generation app\" from its settings screen.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "when": "24 October 2023", "what": "PlaylistAI 2.0: a redesign around playlist suggestions for the time and day.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "14 November 2023", "what": "In a reply to a customer review, the developer says ChatGPT outages are slowing PlaylistAI.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "December 2023 to February 2024", "what": "Deezer and Amazon Music are added. Version 2.29 on 28 February 2024 brings a \"New AI model\", not named.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "March 2024", "what": "The company site offers an \"Install for ChatGPT\" button and says over 100,000 people use the app.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "6 October 2024", "what": "Version 2.34, the latest version on the App Store page in October 2026.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The app is still on sale. The company site says Pro costs US$29.99 a year and publishes new pages about playlist generation.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 8 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Timing", "text": "PlaylistAI appeared on 11 January 2023, when ChatGPT was new and journalists wrote about almost any product that applied OpenAI's models to a familiar task. MusicRadar published its article on the launch day, and the 2023 home page lists articles in Fast Company, TechCrunch, edm.com, Lifehacker and Musically. The founder said in April 2023 that this coverage kept bringing users." }, { "title": "An existing app and an existing App Store listing", "text": "The app was not new. LineupSupply had been on the App Store since 2022 with the same listing, the Spotify connection and the poster reading. The AI prompt was a new feature on an app that already worked, so the relaunch needed only the model call and a new name." }, { "title": "No music rights", "text": "The app never plays or stores music. It writes playlists into the user's own Spotify or Apple Music account through their APIs, so it needs no music license, which was the cost that ended several earlier playlist companies." }, { "title": "Paid inside the App Store", "text": "Pro is an in-app purchase billed by Apple, so the founder needs no payment system of his own. The founder said in April 2023 that the first US$2,000 came within two weeks of the launch." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's Hacker News posts, the App Store page and the company site. Most are grade C or B. No source describes the code in detail.", "items": [ "An iOS and iPadOS app by a single iOS developer. The company site says there is no Android app and that the website does not build playlists.", "The 2022 version used Apple's Vision framework to read text in a poster image and the Spotify API to create the playlist.", "Prompts go to a language model, and the result is matched against the music service's catalog. MusicRadar reported OpenAI's technology in January 2023; the developer named ChatGPT outages in November 2023; version 2.29 in February 2024 brought a new, unnamed model.", "Videos: the app recognizes the songs in a TikTok or Instagram Reel and saves them as a playlist.", "Payments: App Store in-app purchases, and the site FAQ also mentions subscriptions bought on the web.", "A PlaylistAI plugin inside ChatGPT serves desktop users, according to the company site." ], "src": [ 4, 3, 11, 6, 7, 8, 10 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised playlists chosen for a mood, an activity or a person's taste. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Songza", "years": "2007 to 2017", "funding": "US$6.8M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Playlists chosen by human curators for a mood, a time of day or an activity.", "died": "Larger services automated the same curation. Google bought the company and later closed the service.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/564-songza" }, { "name": "Stereomood", "years": "2008 to 2015", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Playlists that matched the listener's mood instead of a genre.", "died": "It could not pay for music licenses while Spotify held the catalog and the users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1956-stereomood" }, { "name": "Soundwave", "years": "2012 to 2016", "funding": "US$1M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Discover music by seeing what friends played across several services.", "died": "Spotify copied the social features with far more money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/568-soundwave" }, { "name": "Post.fm", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Build and share your own radio station and playlists.", "died": "Spotify's catalog and SoundCloud's community left it without users or money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1618-postfm" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the four tried to be the place where people listened, so each needed music licenses, a catalog or a social network of its own, and each lost to Spotify. PlaylistAI does not compete as a place to listen. It writes a list into the account that the user already pays for, so it needs no license and no catalog, and its cost per playlist is a call to a language model.", "The second change is the language model. Songza paid human curators to write playlists for moods and activities; in 2023 an OpenAI model could produce a list for any sentence a user typed, and one iOS developer could add that to an existing app. The weakness is the same as before: the music services own the listeners, and Spotify now offers its own prompt-based playlists to Premium subscribers, as the PlaylistAI site itself explains." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The pattern, yes. The 2023 press moment, no.", "text": "In January 2023 an AI feature in a consumer app was news by itself; that is no longer true. What still works is the pattern: take an app that already does one job on top of a big platform, add a language model where users type what they want, and charge through the App Store.", "steps": [ "Start from a small utility that works on top of a platform with a public API, such as Spotify, Apple Music or a calendar.", "Add a prompt box where a language model turns a sentence into the platform's own objects (songs, events, tasks).", "Keep the product free to try and sell one upgrade through in-app purchases.", "Post the launch with a short demo video and send it to the writers who cover that platform." ], "open": "Other platforms with good APIs and weak built-in search: podcast apps, photo libraries, fitness trackers, reading lists. The risk is the same in each: the platform can add the feature itself." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline figure of about US$2,500 a month in recurring revenue rests on one Hacker News comment that the founder, Brett Bauman (user bbauman), posted on 14 April 2023, together with his statement that the first US$2,000 came in two weeks. No payment processor, buyer or journalist has confirmed it, we found no TrustMRR profile among the 11,412 slugs that site lists, and no later figure exists. A reader could look for a RevenueCat or TrustMRR profile of the app, or for a later interview in which the founder gives dated numbers." }, { "title": "Built on music services it does not control", "text": "Every playlist is written through the Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer or Amazon Music interfaces. In 2022 the founder noted that Apple Music lacked an API for making playlists public. The company site now explains that Spotify offers its own Prompted Playlists to Premium subscribers, the same feature built into the platform." }, { "title": "Depends on OpenAI", "text": "MusicRadar reported in January 2023 that the app runs on OpenAI's technology, and in November 2023 the developer blamed ChatGPT outages for slow playlists. A 2025 customer review on the App Store page says ChatGPT itself makes better playlists. The model provider is both the supplier and a competitor." }, { "title": "Weaker evidence than other phone apps on this site", "text": "RoastGPT, another one-person AI phone app on this site (group ai-model-tools), has US$66,002 of revenue in 11 months read by TrustMRR from its payment data, grade A, while PlaylistAI has one founder comment from 2023, grade D." }, { "title": "Fewer updates, more side projects", "text": "The latest App Store version is from 6 October 2024, although the site was updated in 2026. The founder called PlaylistAI a side project and has since posted other apps on Hacker News: Songburst in August 2023, an app for Linear in October 2023 and TeeTimer for golf tee times in February 2024." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.playlistai.app/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1631703551" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Hacker News comment by bbauman, 14 April 2023 (item 35572542), read through the Algolia API", "url": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/35572542", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. The only source for the US$2,500 MRR and the two weeks to US$2,000." }, { "title": "Hacker News comments by bbauman, 2016 to 2023, Algolia search API", "url": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?tags=comment,author_bbauman&hitsPerPage=200", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full (8 comments). Source for where users came from (comment 35572670, 14 April 2023) and the Apple Music API limit (comment 32642334, 29 August 2022)." }, { "title": "Show HN: PlaylistAI, Create Spotify and Apple Music Playlists with AI, 11 January 2023 (item 34338825)", "url": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/34338825", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the Algolia API. Founder's launch post." }, { "title": "Show HN: I made an app to create Spotify playlists from music festival posters, 29 August 2022 (item 32639833)", "url": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/32639833", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the Algolia API. Founder's post about LineupSupply on the same App Store listing; source for the Vision framework, the Spotify API and the US$1.99 purchase." }, { "title": "Hacker News stories by bbauman, Algolia search API", "url": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?tags=story,author_bbauman&hitsPerPage=100", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full (8 stories). Source for the founder's later apps: Songburst, the Linear app and TeeTimer." }, { "title": "App Store: AI Playlist Maker: PlaylistAI, by Brett Bauman", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/playlistai-playlist-maker/id1631703551", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full on 26 October 2026: description, seller, ratings, age rating, in-app purchases, version history and the developer's replies to reviews." }, { "title": "PlaylistAI home page and FAQ", "url": "https://www.playlistai.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 26 October 2026. Source for the Pro price, the user count, the music services and the press list." }, { "title": "PlaylistAI: Playlist Generator page, published 27 September 2026, updated 19 October 2026", "url": "https://www.playlistai.app/playlist-generator", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for how the language model is used and for the ChatGPT plugin." }, { "title": "PlaylistAI home page, Wayback Machine copy of 9 February 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230209101350/https://www.playlistai.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 2023 press list and \"Previously known as LineupSupply. Made by Brett Bauman\". The Fast Company, TechCrunch and Musically articles it links were not opened, because those sites' robots.txt files disallow ClaudeBot." }, { "title": "PlaylistAI home page, Wayback Machine copy of 1 March 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240301091807/https://www.playlistai.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the ChatGPT install button and the 100,000 users in 2024." }, { "title": "MusicRadar, 11 January 2023: This new app uses the AI technology behind ChatGPT to make you any kind of playlist you want", "url": "https://www.musicradar.com/news/ai-playlist-maker", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. A journalist's test of the app on launch day; source for OpenAI and the free tier with Pro." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/the-multiverse-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/the-multiverse-ai.md", "slug": "the-multiverse-ai", "name": "The Multiverse AI", "country": "Singapore", "sector": "Photography", "productType": "AI headshot generator", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-26", "launchLabel": "April 2023", "outcomeLabel": "Sold at an undisclosed price after US$348.5K in Stripe revenue, July 2025", "sticker": "Sold after $348K revenue", "outcomeUsd": 348517, "months": 27, "teamLabel": "3 co-founders, working part-time at first, and 1 customer support contractor at the sale", "fundingLabel": "None (each co-founder put in US$700)", "primaryFactor": "Search", "group": "photos", "channel": "search", "trend": "sold", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2C", "Photography" ], "product": "A web service that turns 12 to 15 selfies into about 100 professional headshots. The customer uploads photos of themselves, the service trains a private image model on that one face, and an email arrives with headshots in office, studio, outdoor and casual styles. A team version lets a company invite its staff by email; each person uploads and consents for themselves.", "why": "It entered a market that already had about ten AI headshot sites, at a lower price, and won customers through Google search and affiliate writers instead of ads. A US$4,000 order from one company showed that team headshots were the better sale. The founders sold in 2025, when a general chat model began to make similar images.", "summary": [ "The Multiverse AI is an AI headshot generator: a service that makes professional-looking portrait photos of a person from ordinary selfies, without a photographer. The customer pays once, uploads 12 to 15 photos, and the service trains a private model on that one face, a form of fine-tuning, which means training an existing image model a little further on new examples so that it can draw that specific person. The home page says the model \"exists only to generate your images\". The customer then receives about 100 headshots in different clothes and backgrounds.", "Tanya Van Gastel (marketing), Anika Lakdawala (design) and Zeeshaan Lakdawala (engineering) launched it in late April 2023 as a side project, with US$700 each and no investors. Tanya Van Gastel wrote that it reached US$75,000 in total revenue in its first nine months and US$20,000 in January 2024. It was sold through Flippa, a marketplace for buying and selling online businesses, in an all-cash deal in mid-2025. The price and the buyer's name are not public. Flippa's listing says its team verified revenue of US$221,853 and profit of US$150,724 in the year before the sale.", "The headline number comes from Stripe, the payment processor that took the customers' card payments. IndiePage, a site where founders connect their Stripe accounts, shows US$348,517 in all-time revenue for The Multiverse AI, grade A. Archived copies show that this total grew by only US$539 after 15 July 2025 and has not changed since September 2025, so it is the revenue before the sale. No source gives revenue after the sale. The page also shows earlier photo companies that lost to a free tool from a larger company." ], "factsCaption": "US$348,517 in all-time Stripe revenue before a sale in mid-2025, US$221,853 of it in the last year before the listing, built by three co-founders without investors", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from the founders' Stripe account as IndiePage shows it. A grade B value was checked or stated by Flippa, the marketplace that handled the sale. A grade C value is a founder statement or the company's own page. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a side project with US$2,100 of the founders' own money to an all-cash sale, in about 27 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "The Multiverse AI prices read on its pages on 25 October 2026, under the new owner, with earlier prices from archived copies and the founder's interview (grade C)", "note": "Every price is a one-time payment, not a subscription. The individual order includes 100+ headshots and 20 custom edits. Team prices fall with the number of people: 20% off from 5 people, 30% from 10 and 40% from 50; the 5+ and 10+ prices below were calculated on this page from the listed discounts. The service adds 40 free photos to an order when the customer shares the results on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram or TikTok and tags the company.", "rows": [ [ "Individual headshots, October 2026", "29.99 one-time", "", "100+ headshots and 20 custom edits" ], [ "Team, 1 to 4 people", "35.99 one-time per person", "", "100 headshots per person, admin dashboard" ], [ "Team, 5 or more people", "28.79 one-time per person", "", "calculated: 20% off" ], [ "Team, 10 or more people", "25.19 one-time per person", "", "calculated: 30% off" ], [ "Team, 50 or more people", "21.59 one-time per person", "", "as shown on the page: 40% off" ], [ "Individual, June 2024 to July 2025", "29 one-time", "", "archived copies of the home page" ], [ "Individual, December 2023", "24 one-time", "", "archived copy of the home page" ], [ "First price, 2023", "9 one-time", "", "founder interview" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "All-time revenue on Stripe, read 25 October 2026", "value": "US$348,517", "grade": "A", "note": "IndiePage all-time leaderboard, rank 32. The page says: \"Revenue is fetched from Stripe and updated every 12 hours\". The same figure appears in archived copies from 28 September 2025 to 10 September 2026, so it no longer grows.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "All-time revenue on Stripe, 15 July 2025", "value": "US$347,978", "grade": "A", "note": "Archived copy of the IndiePage all-time leaderboard, rank 19. Copies before July 2025 do not list the product.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue added after 15 July 2025", "value": "US$539", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$348,517 minus US$347,978. The connected Stripe account almost stopped receiving payments in July 2025, which matches the sale date below.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Gross revenue in the year before the listing", "value": "US$221,853, with US$150,724 profit", "grade": "B", "note": "Flippa listing, marked \"Vetted Listing\": \"Our vetting team has reviewed this listing and verified: Revenue, Primary Expenses, Traffic\". The listing gives a 62% profit margin in its text and a monthly profit of US$12,288 at a 70% margin in its summary; it does not say which months each figure covers.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin from the two yearly figures", "value": "about 68%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$150,724 divided by US$221,853. This does not match the 62% in the listing text, so the listing's figures probably cover slightly different periods.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Average revenue a month in that year", "value": "about US$18,488", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$221,853 divided by 12.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "The sale", "value": "all cash, no earn-out, closed within about a month of listing on Flippa; price not disclosed", "grade": "B", "note": "Flippa's blog post on the sale. An earn-out is a part of the price paid later only if the business reaches targets; there was none. The listing shows the asking price as \"Classified\".", "src": [ 4, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Date of the sale", "value": "between 10 July and 3 August 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "From archived copies of the home page: the footer reads \"TheMultiverseAI PTE. LTD.\" on 10 July 2025 and \"The Omniverse LLC\" on 3 August 2025. The Stripe total stopped growing in the same weeks. No source gives the exact closing day.", "src": [ 12, 2 ] }, { "fact": "The buyer", "value": "an e-commerce entrepreneur in the United States", "grade": "B", "note": "Flippa describes the buyer as an e-commerce entrepreneur with experience in growing direct-to-consumer brands through paid ads; the listing gives the buyer's location as the United States and the seller's as Belgium. Since the sale the about page says the site \"is operated by The Omniverse LLC\". No source names a person as the buyer.", "src": [ 4, 3, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the first nine months", "value": "US$75,000 in total; record month US$20,000 in January 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "Tanya Van Gastel's newsletter, first written in February 2024. She wrote that the goal had been US$10,000 by the end of 2023.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, June 2024", "value": "US$30,000", "grade": "C", "note": "The same newsletter lists \"June 2024 : $30k USD revenue (14 months after launch)\". It is listed next to the US$20,000 month of January 2024, so it is read here as one month's revenue.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue six months after launch", "value": "US$5,000 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview, Side Hustle Show, October 2025.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue shown on the founder's IndiePage profile", "value": "US$5.1K a month on 21 May 2025, marked \"For Sale\"; US$0 on 11 September 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived copies of Zeeshaan Lakdawala's IndiePage profile. The profile does not say which period the monthly figure covers.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Total revenue as the founder told it", "value": "over US$350,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Side Hustle Show, 6 October 2025. Slightly above the Stripe total; no source says whether some revenue came outside Stripe.", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Paid users after nine months", "value": "more than 3,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Tanya Van Gastel's newsletter.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Team at the sale", "value": "3 co-founders and 1 customer support contractor", "grade": "B", "note": "Flippa's blog post and listing. The co-founders worked on it beside full-time jobs at first.", "src": [ 4, 3, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none; US$700 from each co-founder", "grade": "C", "note": "Flippa's blog post and the founder's newsletter: \"zero investments, zero money raised\".", "src": [ 4, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Affiliate commission", "value": "30% of each sale, paid after the sale", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview. The best affiliate writer earned US$10,000 a month, so that writer brought in about US$30,000 a month of sales.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Conversion rates", "value": "about 5% from search traffic, about 12% from affiliate traffic", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview. Conversion rate is the share of visitors who buy.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "First large company order", "value": "US$4,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder interview. After it the company wrote content for \"team headshots\" and \"headshots for remote teams\".", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the sale", "value": "27 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: April 2023 to July 2025.", "src": [ 7, 12 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2022", "what": "Anika, Tanya and Zeeshaan start The Multiverse AI as a side project, according to the about page of 2024.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "Late April 2023", "what": "Launch. About ten other AI headshot sites already exist. Tanya Van Gastel writes that she quit her full-time job that month. The first price is US$9.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 5 ] }, { "when": "2023, first sales", "what": "The first US$500 of revenue comes from comments with links in Reddit threads about headshots.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "Late 2023", "what": "US$5,000 a month, six months after launch, the founder said. The price is US$24 in December 2023, paid through Stripe.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 12 ] }, { "when": "January 2024", "what": "Record month of US$20,000; US$75,000 in total after nine months and more than 3,000 paid users. The Multiverse AI for Teams has shipped, and teams of more than 200 members use it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "June 2024", "what": "US$30,000 in revenue, 14 months after launch, the newsletter says. The price is US$29.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 12 ] }, { "when": "December 2024", "what": "The FAQ says the service uses the image model Flux.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "May 2025", "what": "The engineering co-founder's IndiePage profile marks the product \"For Sale\" at US$5.1K a month. The founders had tried other sale platforms for months.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 4 ] }, { "when": "15 July 2025", "what": "IndiePage shows US$347,978 in all-time Stripe revenue.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "July 2025", "what": "Sale on Flippa within about a month of listing, all cash, to a US e-commerce entrepreneur. By 3 August the site footer names The Omniverse LLC.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4, 3, 12 ] }, { "when": "28 September 2025", "what": "The Stripe total stops at US$348,517.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "6 October 2025", "what": "Tanya Van Gastel tells the Side Hustle Show that the business made over US$350,000 and that ChatGPT's new image generator was one reason to sell.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "when": "2026", "what": "The new owner rebuilds the site, prices individual orders at US$29.99 and marks every image as AI-generated in its metadata.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 14 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "IndiePage still shows US$348,517. Zeeshaan Lakdawala's profile says: \"Previously built and sold The Multiverse AI.\"", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 8 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Search pages that buyers read", "text": "Tanya Van Gastel wrote a \"Best AI Headshot Generators\" article that ranked The Multiverse AI first, and she said it held the top place on Google for nearly six months. Journalists who searched for products to review found it, which led to mentions in Forbes and other outlets. The founders aimed at searches made just before a purchase, such as \"best AI headshot generator\", which brought few visitors but converted at about 5%." }, { "title": "Affiliates paid only after a sale", "text": "Bloggers who listed the service received 30% of each sale they sent, tracked with Rewardful. Because the commission was paid after the sale, it cost nothing up front. The founder said affiliate visitors bought at about 12%, which the show notes call nearly triple the rate from search, and that the best affiliate writer sent about US$30,000 a month in sales." }, { "title": "One buyer for many faces", "text": "A company ordered US$4,000 of headshots at once. As the founder put it, one decision maker could buy 400 headshots instead of 400 people deciding one by one. By June 2025 the home page promised every team a dedicated account manager and an admin dashboard, and remote teams were the target." }, { "title": "Low running costs and a one-time price", "text": "The Flippa listing describes a serverless setup on AWS and names AI server costs as the main expense. Serverless means the code runs only when an order arrives, so there is no idle server to pay for. With a one-time price and no subscription, Flippa's listing reported US$150,724 of profit on US$221,853 of revenue in the year before the sale." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founders' interviews, the Flippa listing and archived copies of the site from before the sale. Pages written by the new owner after July 2025 are not used here.", "items": [ "The engineering co-founder built the platform from scratch; the marketing co-founder does not program.", "The customer uploads 12 to 15 selfies, the service trains a private model on them, and an email links to the finished headshots. In December 2024 the home page said this took 2 hours.", "The FAQ of December 2024 names Flux, an image model, as one of the models used, together with the company's own technology.", "The listing describes a serverless architecture on AWS, with cheap AI models as the main cost.", "Payments ran through Stripe, as the checkout said in December 2023; the Stripe account later fed the revenue shown on IndiePage.", "Affiliates were tracked with Rewardful, and Ahrefs was used to find high-ranking articles and Reddit threads.", "An \"AI or Not\" quiz, ten photos to label as real or AI-made, kept visitors on the site while their headshots were being made." ], "src": [ 5, 3, 12, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold photo tools or a human service that a larger company or a general technology then gave away or made cheaper. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Picnik", "years": "2005 to 2012", "funding": "US$3.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Simple photo editing in the browser, with nothing to install.", "died": "Google bought it and closed it to fold its features into Google+.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/429-picnik" }, { "name": "Snipshot", "years": "2006 to 2009", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Edit photos in the browser instead of buying Adobe software.", "died": "Larger rivals and free tools did the same thing, and the simple product could not compete.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1241-snipshot" }, { "name": "Everalbum", "years": "2013 to 2019", "funding": "US$19.2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Unlimited photo storage with automatic AI organization.", "died": "It charged for features that Google Photos gave away for free.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/125-everalbum" }, { "name": "TurboTranslations", "years": "2014 to 2023", "funding": "US$150K", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "Fast, cheap human translation from a crowd of translators.", "died": "Machine translation became good enough at the same time, and the human service lost its price advantage.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2263-turbotranslations" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The first three sold photo tools and lost when Google gave away something similar for free. TurboTranslations sold a human service and lost when a general technology learned to do the job. The Multiverse AI faced both risks at once: about ten rival headshot sites at launch, and in 2025 a general chat model that could make similar images. The show notes of October 2025 say that ChatGPT had just launched an image generator that \"could almost do what Multiverse.ai did\", and quote Tanya Van Gastel: when a product \"can easily be replaced by ChatGPT and you have a potential for an exit, that was super attractive to us\".", "Two things differed. The costs were small: three co-founders who kept their jobs at first, US$2,100 of their own money, a serverless setup and no advertising, so the business was profitable early instead of needing years of funding. And the founders sold early. Flippa's listing reported US$150,724 of profit in the year before the sale, and the buyer, an e-commerce entrepreneur, planned to grow it with paid ads, a channel the founders had never used." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product, hardly. The method and the exit, yes.", "text": "In October 2026 the AI headshot market is crowded, and general image models can make headshots from a prompt, which is why the founders sold. What can be copied is the method: a one-time price for a clear result, pages that rank for the searches made just before a purchase, affiliates paid only after a sale, a team version for companies, and a sale before the general models catch up.", "steps": [ "Find a result that people buy once and that a new AI model can now produce cheaply, and sell it at one clear price.", "Write pages for the searches buyers make just before they pay, and keep the business costs small enough to be profitable without ads.", "Pay affiliate writers a share of each sale after it happens, and track it with an affiliate tool.", "Add a version for companies when the first company order arrives.", "Prepare a clean profit-and-loss statement six months before you want to sell, and list on a marketplace with many buyers." ], "open": "Other one-time AI results for professionals, such as product photos for small shops, real-estate photos or profile videos, where consent and a clear result matter more than the model." }, "watch": [ { "title": "The price and the buyer are not public", "text": "Flippa shows the asking price as classified, and no source gives the sale price. The site has been operated by The Omniverse LLC since the sale, but no source says who owns that company. The listing shows multiples of 0.8 times profit and 0.5 times revenue without saying how they were calculated, so they are not used here to estimate a price." }, { "title": "Stripe may not show all revenue", "text": "The Stripe total of US$348,517 is a little below the founder's \"over US$350,000\". IndiePage does not say whether refunds and fees are subtracted, and some company orders may have been paid another way. The Flippa listing's own margins (62%, 68% when calculated, 70% a month) do not agree exactly." }, { "title": "Revenue was lower before the sale", "text": "The newsletter gives US$30,000 for June 2024. The engineering co-founder's IndiePage profile showed US$5.1K a month in May 2025, while the product was for sale. Flippa's own advice in the sale story is to list before revenue declines. No source gives revenue after the sale, and the buyer publishes none." }, { "title": "The founders' own marketing tactics", "text": "Source: Side Hustle Nation's show notes of 6 October 2025 for Tanya Van Gastel's interview (source 5). For the first sales she searched Reddit for threads about headshots and commented with links to the site, and the notes say: \"She created multiple accounts, knowing most would get banned.\" The same notes say she paid some high-ranking bloggers for a top place in their lists of AI headshot generators, and quote her: \"You're basically seeing that it's an ad placement at that point.\" Accounts made to get around bans break most communities' rules, and readers of a paid list may not know that it is paid. These were the founders' tactics, not features of the product, and no source says that the founders bought customer reviews." }, { "title": "Faces are sensitive data", "text": "The service trains a model on a person's face. The current terms say: \"You may only upload photographs of yourself, or photographs of another person for whom you hold that person's explicit permission\", and for teams each person must consent at their own upload. These rules are the new owner's; this page did not find the rules of 2023 to 2025." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.themultiverse.ai/" }, { "kind": "indiepage", "url": "https://indiepa.ge/zeeshaan" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "IndiePage all-time revenue leaderboard, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://indiepa.ge/leaderboard", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. Shows The Multiverse AI at rank 32 with US$348,517 and the note \"Revenue is fetched from Stripe and updated every 12 hours\"." }, { "title": "IndiePage leaderboard, Wayback Machine copies of 15 July 2025, 28 September 2025, 7 October 2025, 20 January 2026, 16 June 2026 and 10 September 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250715034825/https://indiepa.ge/leaderboard", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the all-time table in each copy. US$347,978 on 15 July 2025, then US$348,517 in every copy from 28 September 2025. Copies before July 2025 do not list the product." }, { "title": "Flippa listing 11938599: An AI headshot generator with $+300,000 USD revenue, +60% profit margins, marked SOLD", "url": "https://flippa.com/11938599-an-ai-headshot-generator-with-300-000-usd-revenue-60-profit-margins-running-on-autopilot", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the public part in full; the financial details need an account and were not read. Source for the vetted revenue and profit, the team, the AWS setup and the buyer and seller locations." }, { "title": "Flippa blog by Tory Gregory, updated 16 January 2026: Taking the Leap, Tanya Van Gastel from first-time founder to successful seller", "url": "https://flippa.com/blog/?p=42176", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full; this short address redirects to the post. The marketplace's own account of the sale: all cash, about a month after listing, no earn-out, the buyer's background, the team and the US$700 per co-founder." }, { "title": "Side Hustle Nation, show notes by Nick Loper, 6 October 2025: From $9 to $350K, How I Built and Sold an AI-Powered Website", "url": "https://www.sidehustlenation.com/ai-headshot-business/", "grade": "C", "how": "The live page answered with a bot check, so the Wayback Machine copy of 11 November 2025 was read in full. Founder interview. Source for the first price, the Reddit, search and affiliate tactics, the company order and the reason to sell." }, { "title": "The Side Hustle Show, episode 700, 6 October 2025, episode page on Audioboom", "url": "https://audioboom.com/posts/8787525", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the episode description in full. Confirms the date and \"drove over $350,000 in revenue, and sold the business\"." }, { "title": "Electric Dreams newsletter by Tanya Van Gastel, 13 August 2024 (first written February 2024): How to get to 75,000 USD revenue on $0 advertising spend?", "url": "https://electricdreams.beehiiv.com/p/how-to-bootstrap-startup-marketing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Co-founder's own account. Source for the launch, the revenue to June 2024, the paid users, the three co-founders and the lack of investors." }, { "title": "Zeeshaan Lakdawala's IndiePage profile, read 25 October 2026, with Wayback copies of 21 May 2025 and 11 September 2025", "url": "https://indiepa.ge/zeeshaan", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in each version. Source for \"Previously built and sold The Multiverse AI\" and the monthly figure while the product was for sale." }, { "title": "The Multiverse AI home page, read 25 October 2026 (under the new owner)", "url": "https://www.themultiverse.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the current product, the private model per customer and the individual price." }, { "title": "The Multiverse AI about page, Wayback copy of 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/2024/https://www.themultiverse.ai/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names the three co-founders and their roles, and says they started in 2022." }, { "title": "The Multiverse AI about page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.themultiverse.ai/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for \"The Multiverse AI is operated by The Omniverse LLC\"." }, { "title": "The Multiverse AI home page, Wayback copies from May 2023 to August 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250710235429/https://www.themultiverse.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read twelve copies for the footer owner, the price and the FAQ. Source for the change of owner between 10 July and 3 August 2025, the prices of 2023 to 2025, Stripe at checkout and Flux." }, { "title": "The Multiverse AI team headshots page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.themultiverse.ai/headshots-for-teams", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the team prices and discounts and the consent of each team member." }, { "title": "The Multiverse AI terms and AI safety and privacy pages, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.themultiverse.ai/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both in full (the second at /ai-safety-and-privacy). Source for the upload and consent rules and the AI-generated label in each image's metadata." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/qr-code-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/qr-code-ai.md", "slug": "qr-code-ai", "name": "QR Code AI", "country": "France", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "QR code generator with AI-generated art and scan tracking", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-26", "launchLabel": "30 June 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$14.7K a month recurring revenue, October 2026", "sticker": "$14.7K MRR, Stripe-verified", "outcomeUsd": 176652, "months": 40, "teamLabel": "2 founders in a French app studio, Supernovae; no source names an employee", "fundingLabel": "None (bootstrapped, per TrustMRR)", "primaryFactor": "Search traffic", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "search", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Marketing" ], "product": "A web app that makes QR codes for marketing material. It has three modes: a custom QR code with logo, colors and shapes; QR Code Art, where an image model draws a picture that still scans; and an image QR code placed over a photo. Paid workspaces get dynamic codes whose destination can be changed after printing, scan analytics, custom domains and team spaces.", "why": "It launched in June 2023 as a generator of artistic QR codes made with Stable Diffusion and ControlNet, at a time when no large QR code company offered them. The art brought the first users; the company then added the plain QR code types, link tools and analytics that businesses search for, and built hundreds of pages that rank in Google for each type.", "summary": [ "QR Code AI makes QR codes, the square barcodes that a phone camera reads to open a link. Its first product was QR code art: a diffusion model, an image model that turns random noise into a picture step by step, guided by a text prompt, draws an image whose light and dark areas still form a readable code. The company names Stable Diffusion, an open image model, and ControlNet, an add-on that forces the model to follow a given pattern, here the black and white squares of the code. Today the app also makes ordinary custom codes and dynamic QR codes, which point to a short link on the company's server, so the owner can change the destination after printing and count every scan.", "Two French developers, Nicolas Cella and Thibaut Mélen, run it from their app studio, Supernovae. They launched it on Product Hunt on 30 June 2023 with the line \"Make QR codes sexy with AI\". In February 2024 the home page still sold only AI art codes and counted 450K creators. By July 2024 it had added link-in-bio pages, smart links and analytics, and by March 2025 more than 50 code types. On 26 October 2026 TrustMRR, which reads revenue directly from the company's Stripe account, showed US$16,323 in the last 30 days, MRR (monthly recurring revenue, the subscription income expected each month) of US$14,721, 1,500 active subscriptions and US$328,289 since launch.", "The revenue figures are grade A: two sites that connect to the Stripe payment account give the same level one day apart. What customers pay for is less clear. The paid plan bundles AI generations with dynamic codes and tracking, and no source splits revenue by feature. When a free trial or a paid plan ends, the app says that dynamic codes \"will no longer be scannable\" and will be \"deactivated\", which the page describes in full under \"Watch\"." ], "factsCaption": "Stripe-verified subscription revenue of about US$14,700 a month in October 2026, from a product that started as AI-made QR code art", "factsRead": "How to read this table: grade A values come from TrustMRR and IndiePage, which read revenue from the company's Stripe account. Grade C values are the company's own pages, its web app text, or reviews on Product Hunt. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From an AI art generator launched on Product Hunt to a full QR code platform with US$14,721 a month in subscriptions, in 40 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "QR Code AI prices in October 2026: the web prices load by script and could not be read; plan rules are from the company's pricing page (April 2026 copy) and its web app text, and the only listed price is the 2023 iPhone app (grade C)", "note": "The web pricing page describes \"One Simple Plan\": a premium subscription with unlimited QR codes and smart links, full access to AI designs, custom domains, analytics and team spaces. Its price, the billing periods (monthly, yearly) and a one-time Lifetime offer are filled in by script, so this page does not show them. TrustMRR's figures give about US$9.81 a month of recurring revenue per active subscription (US$14,721 divided by 1,500), which is an average, not a list price. The pricing page says there are no refunds because a free trial exists; the terms of service also give EU consumers a 14-day right of withdrawal.", "rows": [ [ "Free account", "0", "0", "up to 3 QR codes, QR Code Custom and select AI templates" ], [ "Free trial", "0", "0", "7 days of Premium; afterwards dynamic codes stop scanning" ], [ "Premium, web", "not shown", "not shown", "unlimited QR codes, smart links, barcodes and AI generations" ], [ "Lifetime offer", "", "one-time, not shown", "offered to some accounts, shown with a countdown" ], [ "Premium, iPhone app (2023 listing)", "", "8.90", "App Store listing, app last updated July 2023" ], [ "API", "credits", "credits", "separate credit system, bought as needed" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 26 October 2026", "value": "US$14,721", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot from the Stripe account, synced 26 October 2026. MRR fell 7.4% in the last 30 days. On 25 October 2026 the same profile showed US$14,800.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days, 26 October 2026", "value": "US$16,323", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, Stripe API key. IndiePage showed US$16,415 for the last 30 days on 25 October 2026, also read from Stripe.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the October 2026 MRR", "value": "US$176,652 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$14,721 times 12. The headline figure on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 12 months", "value": "US$173,609", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, to 26 October 2026. The last 6 months were US$90,891.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Total revenue since launch", "value": "US$328,289", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, all time, 26 October 2026. IndiePage's all-time board showed US$324,683.76 on 25 October 2026.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before the last 12 months", "value": "US$154,680, about US$5,500 a month on average", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$328,289 minus US$173,609, spread over the 28 months from June 2023 to October 2025. The monthly path in that period is not public.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue, November 2025 to September 2026", "value": "US$12,595 to US$17,157", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. Lowest December 2025, highest September 2026. July to September 2026 averaged about 22% more than November 2025 to January 2026 (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions, October 2026", "value": "1,500", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot of 26 October 2026. About US$9.81 of MRR per subscription (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "95.0%", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot. TrustMRR does not say how costs were entered, so this is treated as a company figure, not a verified one.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Website visitors and Google impressions, last 30 days", "value": "71,421 visitors; 4,164,539 Google Search impressions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR; the impressions come from a connected Google Search Console account. Revenue per visitor: US$0.23.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Creators and codes, February 2024", "value": "450K creators, 630K QR codes created, 900K scans", "grade": "C", "note": "Company home page, Wayback copy of 3 February 2024, when the site sold only AI art codes.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Codes and scans, July 2024", "value": "2.3M QR codes and links created, 8.7M scans and clicks", "grade": "C", "note": "Company home page, Wayback copy of 30 July 2024.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Codes and scans counter, March 2025 and October 2026", "value": "12.4M created, 76.8M scanned", "grade": "C", "note": "The same two numbers appear in the Wayback copy of 2 March 2025 and on the live page of 25 October 2026, so the counter is not live.", "src": [ 9, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 founders and developers", "grade": "C", "note": "The site's humans.txt lists Thibaut Mélen and Nicolas Cella under the studio Supernovae. TrustMRR names Nicolas Cella as founder. No source names an employee.", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR profile: \"Funding: Bootstrapped\". Founder-entered text.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October 2026 figure", "value": "40 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: June 2023 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "16 June 2023", "what": "Founding date given on the TrustMRR profile. Country: France.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "30 June 2023", "what": "Launch on Product Hunt: \"Make QR codes sexy with AI\". The listing says it turns links into artistic QR codes with Stable Diffusion and ControlNet, from templates or a prompt. Early reviewers ask for analytics; the founder answers that it is on the roadmap.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "23 July 2023", "what": "The home page sells \"AI-Powered Custom QR Codes\" for brand marketing, and nothing else.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "25 July 2023", "what": "An iPhone app, published by SuperNovae, offers Premium at US$8.90 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "3 February 2024", "what": "The site is still an \"Online Generator of Unique and Artistic AI-Powered QR Codes\" and counts 450K creators and 630K codes. The menu now has an API and an affiliate program.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "1 July 2024", "what": "Second Product Hunt launch, \"QR Code AI 2.0\": next-generation QR codes with improved AI and new features.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "30 July 2024", "what": "The home page adds Link in Bio, Smart Links, analytics and team workspaces, and plain code types such as URL, WiFi, vCard and PDF. 2.3M codes and links created.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "2 March 2025", "what": "\"Best Free QR Code Generator\" with more than 50 code types, two design modes (QR Code Custom and QR Code Art), and the promise \"Your QR Codes never expire\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "15 April 2026", "what": "The pricing page shows \"One Simple Plan\". Free users can make up to 3 QR codes; Premium unlocks unlimited codes, AI designs, custom domains and analytics.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "November 2025 to September 2026", "what": "Monthly revenue between US$12,595 and US$17,157, read from Stripe.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "26 October 2026", "what": "US$16,323 in the last 30 days, MRR of US$14,721, 1,500 active subscriptions and US$328,289 in total, read from Stripe by TrustMRR. Not listed for sale.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A visible AI result in a crowded, plain market", "text": "QR code generators were a commodity in 2023: black and white squares, often free. A code that is also a picture, made from a prompt, was something a person would share and a brand would pay for. The company's pages still call QR Code Art \"a feature no major competitor offers\" and claim, from their own data, up to 30% more scans for artistic codes. That claim is the company's, not a measured result." }, { "title": "Then the features businesses search for", "text": "Early users asked for analytics. Within a year the product added dynamic codes, smart links, link-in-bio pages and team workspaces, and later 60 content types from WiFi to PDF. Each type has its own page in many languages, and TrustMRR lists SEO as the marketing channel, with 4,164,539 Google impressions in 30 days." }, { "title": "Subscriptions tied to codes that are already printed", "text": "A dynamic code works only while the company's server forwards it. The app says that when a trial or plan ends, dynamic codes and smart links stop working. A customer whose code is on menus or packaging has a strong reason to keep paying. This explains part of the stable revenue, and it is also the main criticism of the whole dynamic QR code industry." }, { "title": "Low cost to serve", "text": "TrustMRR shows a 95.0% profit margin in the last 30 days, a figure the company entered. Forwarding a scan costs almost nothing; the image generations are the main variable cost, and the app limits them on free accounts." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's site, its humans.txt file, its web app and its TrustMRR profile. They are grade C unless noted.", "items": [ "QR Code Art uses Stable Diffusion and ControlNet: the code's pattern guides the image model so the picture still scans.", "Front end: Vue 3 and Nuxt 3 with TypeScript; back end with MongoDB, Redis and ClickHouse for scan analytics (TrustMRR tech stack and humans.txt).", "Hosting is listed as DigitalOcean in humans.txt; the site footer names Scaleway as a partner.", "The founders list Cursor and Claude Code as their editors.", "Payments run through Stripe; TrustMRR reads revenue from the Stripe account (grade A for that fact).", "An affiliate program pays partners 30% of the subscription revenue for life, paid through PayPal. A public API sells credits.", "humans.txt lists 109 supported locales, and the site has one page per QR code type to serve search traffic." ], "src": [ 11, 1, 4, 10, 17 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised to connect print and physical objects to phones, or to make QR codes a business. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Blippar", "years": "2011 to 2018", "funding": "US$130M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Point a phone at a poster, product or magazine ad and see videos and 3D content over it.", "died": "Brands needed users and users needed content, and the app never solved both at once. It spent US$130M.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2159-blippar" }, { "name": "Powa Technologies", "years": "2007 to 2016", "funding": "US$220M", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "PowaTag: scan any product, ad or TV screen and buy it at once with a phone.", "died": "It built everything at once, claimed partnerships that did not exist, and had almost no paying customers.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2084-powa-technologies" }, { "name": "SnipSnap", "years": "2012 to 2019", "funding": "US$6.1M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Scan paper coupons into a phone app and redeem them in stores.", "died": "Rivals offered more than a coupon wallet, and it never became profitable.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/560-snipsnap" }, { "name": "Origami", "years": "2012 to 2020", "funding": "US$80M", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "QR code payments at shops in cash-heavy Japan.", "died": "PayPay spent billions on subsidies that a company with US$80M could not match.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2229-origami" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Blippar, Powa and SnipSnap each needed a special app on the phone and a network of brands or shops before a single scan could happen. They spent tens or hundreds of millions to build both sides. Origami used QR codes but sold payments, where the largest company with the largest subsidy wins.", "QR Code AI needs neither side. Since iOS 11 and Android 9 the built-in camera reads QR codes, as the company's own FAQ notes, so every phone is already a scanner. The customer is one business that wants one code on a flyer, and it finds the generator through Google. AI image models added in 2023 what the plain generators lacked: a code that looks designed. That gave a two-person studio a reason to exist in a market of free tools, and the subscription for dynamic codes turned the users into recurring revenue." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The AI art opening, mostly gone. The structure, yes.", "text": "Being first with prompt-made QR art was an opening in mid-2023; many apps now offer it. The structure is still available: put a visible AI result on top of a dull utility that people already search for, then build the plain features and one page per search term, and charge for the part that must keep running.", "steps": [ "Pick a utility that people search for by name every day and that existing tools make look plain.", "Use an open image model with a control method to make a result that people want to show others.", "Add the boring features that businesses ask for in the first reviews: analytics, editing after printing, teams.", "Write one page for each search term and language, and measure impressions in Search Console.", "Say clearly, before people sign up, what happens to their work when they stop paying." ], "open": "Other everyday items that must stay readable by a machine: barcodes on packaging, Wi-Fi cards, event tickets, NFC tags and signs." }, "watch": [ { "title": "A misleading \"free\" claim: codes stop working when a trial or plan ends", "text": "The home page, read on 25 October 2026, says \"Free QR Code Generator\" and \"Free · No watermark\", and in March 2025 it said \"Your QR Codes never expire, ensuring they remain active and scannable for as long as you need them\". The free account exists, but the pricing page of April 2026 limits it to 3 QR codes. The web app text, downloaded on 25 October 2026, says: \"Your 7-day free trial has ended. Upgrade to premium to continue using QR Code AI\", \"Your dynamic QR codes and smart links will no longer be scannable or clickable\", and on cancelling, \"After that, its QR codes and Smart Links will be deactivated.\" Static codes that encode the link directly keep working; dynamic codes depend on the subscription. Buyers who print codes should know this first." }, { "title": "AI is one of three modes, and no source splits the revenue", "text": "The product began as AI art only. Today the paid plan bundles AI generations with dynamic codes, analytics and custom domains, and many customers may pay mainly to keep printed codes alive. No source says which feature earns the money." }, { "title": "Prices are not public in plain text", "text": "The web pricing page fills in its prices by script, and the app shows a Lifetime offer to some accounts only, with a countdown. A buyer cannot compare prices before signing up." }, { "title": "Usage numbers on the home page are not live", "text": "The counter of 12.4M codes created and 76.8M scans is the same in March 2025 and October 2026. Use the Stripe figures, not the counter, to judge growth." }, { "title": "Support complaints and a crowded market", "text": "Product Hunt reviews include praise for the designs and one buyer who reported a code that failed on iPhone and no refund; a founder answered and offered one. Many apps now sell AI QR art, and large QR companies can add it." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://qrcode-ai.com/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6451345873" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/qrcode-ai" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/qr-code-ai" }, { "kind": "indiepage", "url": "https://indiepa.ge/nicolas_cella" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR markdown profile: QR Code AI, synced 26 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/qr-code-ai.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile. Verification section: Stripe API key. Source for MRR, revenue by period, monthly timeline, subscriptions, traffic and Search Console figures. The founder, founding date, funding and tech stack are founder-entered text (grade C)." }, { "title": "IndiePage revenue leaderboard, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://indiepa.ge/leaderboard", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. \"Revenue is fetched from Stripe and updated every 12 hours\". QR Code AI at US$16,415 in the last 30 days and US$324,683.76 all time, maker Nicolas Cella." }, { "title": "IndiePage profile of Nicolas Cella, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://indiepa.ge/nicolas_cella", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. Shows Paris, SuperNovae, and QR Code AI at US$16.4k a month." }, { "title": "QR Code AI humans.txt, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://qrcode-ai.com/humans.txt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names the two founders and developers, the studio, the framework, the hosting and the editors." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: QRCode AI, launches of 30 June 2023 and 1 July 2024, with reviews", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/qrcode-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the product page and its reviews page. Source for the launch dates, the launch description and the reviews with the founder's answers." }, { "title": "QR Code AI home page, Wayback copy of 23 July 2023", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20230723172725/https://qrcode-ai.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The first archived version: AI-powered custom QR codes only." }, { "title": "QR Code AI home page, Wayback copy of 3 February 2024", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20240203070210/https://qrcode-ai.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for 450K creators, 630K codes and 900K scans, and for the AI-only product." }, { "title": "QR Code AI home page, Wayback copy of 30 July 2024", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20240730111356/https://qrcode-ai.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the added link tools, analytics, code types, and 2.3M codes and 8.7M scans." }, { "title": "QR Code AI home page, Wayback copy of 2 March 2025", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20250302125422/https://qrcode-ai.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 50+ code types, the two design modes and \"Your QR Codes never expire\"." }, { "title": "QR Code AI home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://qrcode-ai.com/en-US", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the three modes, 60 code types, the free claims, the FAQ on expiry and phone cameras, and the Scaleway footer." }, { "title": "QR Code AI: QR Code Art Generator page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://qrcode-ai.com/en-US/qr-code-art", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for Stable Diffusion and ControlNet." }, { "title": "QR Code AI pricing page, Wayback copy of 15 April 2026", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20260415122650/https://qrcode-ai.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The plan text and FAQ are in the page; the prices load by script and are not in it. The live /pricing URL now returns a 404 page." }, { "title": "QR Code AI web app, English interface text file, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://app.qrcode-ai.com/_nuxt/en-US.8cfe2c9a.js", "grade": "C", "how": "Downloaded the app's English text file and read the strings with grep. Source for the 7-day trial, the Lifetime offer, and what happens to dynamic codes when a trial or plan ends." }, { "title": "QR Code AI terms of service, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://qrcode-ai.com/en-US/legal/terms-of-service", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the paid term; EU withdrawal right of 14 days. The terms do not say what happens to dynamic codes." }, { "title": "App Store: QR Code AI - Unique Generator, by SuperNovae", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/qr-code-ai-unique-generator/id6451345873", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the US$8.90 monthly Premium price and the July 2023 version dates." }, { "title": "Supernovae, The French App Studio", "url": "https://supernovae.studio/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Lists the studio's apps: Chill, Gepeto, QR Code AI and Magic QR." }, { "title": "QR Code AI affiliate program page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://qrcode-ai.com/en-US/affiliate-program", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 30% recurring commission and PayPal payouts." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/bridgemind/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/bridgemind.md", "slug": "bridgemind", "name": "BridgeMind", "country": "United States", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Desktop workspace for AI coding agents", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-26", "launchLabel": "August 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$251K a year run rate, October 2026", "sticker": "$251K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 250772, "months": 14, "teamLabel": "1 founder, Matthew Miller, on every stream; a directory lists 5 employees", "fundingLabel": "None reported for BridgeMind; a directory says US$25,000 of the founder's own money", "primaryFactor": "Audience", "group": "build-software", "channel": "audience", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Developer tools" ], "product": "A desktop app for Mac, Windows and Linux in which a builder runs several AI coding agents side by side: Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and others, each in its own terminal pane, with a browser docked next to them, agents that run on a schedule, and a voice-to-text tool called BridgeVoice. The customer brings their own Claude, ChatGPT or Grok subscription or API key; BridgeMind charges US$20 to US$100 a month for the app and for credits that pay for its own hosted AI features.", "why": "The founder builds the product live on YouTube, X and Twitch, four to six hours at a time on several days a week, and the title of each stream shows the current annual run rate. The viewers are the target customers: people who write software by giving instructions to AI agents. A reviewer who watched one stream says that every paying customer came from streaming and that nothing was spent on ads.", "summary": [ "BridgeMind sells a desktop workspace for vibe coding, which means building software by describing the change in plain words and letting an AI coding agent, a program that reads and edits the code and runs commands in a terminal, do the typing. The app puts several agents (Claude Code, Codex and others) in panes on one screen, adds a dictation tool, and runs named agents on a schedule. The customer pays the AI providers directly; BridgeMind's FAQ says its plans do not include Claude, Codex or Grok usage.", "Matthew Miller, the founder and CEO according to the channel's own description, started the challenge \"Vibe Coding an App Until I Make $1,000,000\" in August 2025 and streams it as numbered days. Each title carries the ARR, annual recurring revenue, which is the current monthly subscription revenue times 12. The titles show US$242,964 on 10 July 2026, a fall to US$196,200 by 20 August, and US$250,772 on 8 October 2026, which is about US$20,900 a month. The company behind the product is BridgeMind LLC, based in the United States.", "Every figure on this page comes from the founder: his video titles and descriptions, and the Stripe dashboards that he opens on camera, which the review site ProvenStartups wrote down from one stream. That makes it grade C at best. The run rate is his own sum over three Stripe accounts, and no TrustMRR profile exists for BridgeMind. The page also shows earlier developer-tool companies that failed when larger platforms gave the same features away." ], "factsCaption": "A run rate between about US$196,000 and US$258,000 a year from July to October 2026, as typed by the founder into his stream titles", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is the founder's own statement, in a video title, a video description or on a dashboard he showed on stream. A grade D value comes from one directory with no second source. An X value was computed on this page. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a YouTube channel opened in March 2024 to a run rate of about US$250,000 a year, streamed day by day. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "BridgeMind prices on 25 October 2026, from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "All three plans run the desktop app. Pro adds BridgeVoice, BridgeVerse and voice orchestration. Credits pay only for BridgeMind's own metered features (Auto runs, Create with AI, voice orchestration, cloud voice to text) and do not roll over. Usage of Claude, Codex or Grok is billed by those providers, outside BridgeMind. First-time Pro purchases have a 7-day money-back guarantee.", "rows": [ [ "Basic", "16", "20", "5,000 credits a month" ], [ "Pro", "40", "50", "12,500 credits a month; BridgeVoice and BridgeVerse" ], [ "Ultra", "80", "100", "50,000 credits a month; everything in Pro" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "ARR, 8 October 2026 (Day 238)", "value": "US$250,772", "grade": "C", "note": "Title and description of the Day 238 live stream, published 8 October 2026. The latest numbered day on the channel's streams tab on 25 October 2026.", "src": [ 1, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue implied by that ARR", "value": "about US$20,898 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 250,772 divided by 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Highest ARR in a title", "value": "US$257,876 on 1 October 2026 (Day 235)", "grade": "C", "note": "Stream title and description, 1 October 2026.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "ARR, 10 July 2026 (Day 206)", "value": "US$242,964", "grade": "C", "note": "Stream title, 10 July 2026. The description calls it an all-time high.", "src": [ 2, 4 ] }, { "fact": "MRR shown on the Day 206 stream", "value": "US$20,200, about US$19,000 of it from BridgeMind.ai", "grade": "C", "note": "ProvenStartups, from the recording: the founder opened three Stripe accounts on camera. 20,200 times 12 is 242,400, close to the title figure.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "ARR, 2 August 2026 (one-year video)", "value": "US$242,698", "grade": "C", "note": "Title of the one-year highlight video, published 2 August 2026. Almost the same as on 10 July.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Lowest ARR in the sources", "value": "US$196,200 on 20 August 2026; the 4 September description says \"the comeback from $194K\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Day 219 and Day 225 stream descriptions.", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Fall from 10 July to 20 August 2026", "value": "about 19%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: (196,200 minus 242,964) divided by 242,964.", "src": [ 2, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Rise from 3 September to 8 October 2026", "value": "about 28%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: (250,772 minus 196,500) divided by 196,500.", "src": [ 7, 1 ] }, { "fact": "ARR, 8 February 2026 (Day 161)", "value": "US$75,924", "grade": "D", "note": "EveryDev directory news item that links to a YouTube video. The video itself was not read.", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "fact": "New paying users in one day", "value": "100, on 3 September 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Day 225 description: \"Yesterday we added 100 paying users.\"", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Running costs stated on stream", "value": "about US$1,000 a month of AI subscriptions and about US$1,500 a month of AWS", "grade": "C", "note": "ProvenStartups: US$800 for Claude Code and US$200 for OpenAI, given in answer to chat questions.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Audience, October 2026", "value": "111,000 YouTube subscribers, 56,000+ followers on X, 18,089 Discord members", "grade": "C", "note": "Channel about page and company home page, read 25 October 2026.", "src": [ 11, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Prices", "value": "US$20, US$50 and US$100 a month, 20% less billed yearly", "grade": "C", "note": "Pricing page and terms of service.", "src": [ 13, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "Solo, according to ProvenStartups; 5 employees, according to EveryDev", "grade": "C", "note": "ProvenStartups wrote \"Team Solo (Matthew, 24, college dropout)\". The EveryDev count has no stated source.", "src": [ 4, 17 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "D", "note": "EveryDev lists \"$25,000 (Self-funded by founder)\". ProvenStartups says an earlier startup of the founder raised significant funding.", "src": [ 17, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the start of the challenge to the October 2026 figure", "value": "14 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: August 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "4 March 2024", "what": "The BridgeMind YouTube channel is created. Its description later calls BridgeMind the founder's third startup.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "November 2024", "what": "A BridgeMind blog post, now in its archive, describes ViewCreator, a set of AI tools that write titles, scripts and captions for social media.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 20 ] }, { "when": "August 2025", "what": "The challenge \"Vibe Coding an App Until I Make $1,000,000\" starts; the one-year video says it began 365 days before 2 August 2026, and ProvenStartups dates the first stream to 6 August 2025.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "when": "January 2026", "what": "BridgeSpace, a desktop app with many terminal panes for agents, and BridgeVoice, a voice-to-text app, launch.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "when": "8 February 2026", "what": "Day 161: a run rate of US$75,924, as reported by a directory.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "when": "10 July 2026", "what": "Day 206: a run rate of US$242,964, called an all-time high. MRR is US$20,200 across three Stripe accounts. The founder runs three Claude Max subscriptions and has just opened Vibecademy, a course.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 4 ] }, { "when": "2 August 2026", "what": "One-year video: US$242,698, 98,000+ YouTube subscribers, and a month-long contest with up to US$15,000 in prizes.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "20 August 2026", "what": "Day 219: US$196,200. The macOS build of BridgeMind One, the new agent app, goes to beta testers, and the channel passes 100,000 subscribers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "3 and 4 September 2026", "what": "US$196,500, then US$210,364, with 100 new paying users in one day from the BridgeMind One beta.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 6 ] }, { "when": "28 September 2026", "what": "Day 234: US$246,248. BridgeClip, a free open-source tool for cutting videos into short clips, passes 300 GitHub stars.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "1 October 2026", "what": "Day 235: US$257,876, the highest figure in a title.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "8 October 2026", "what": "Day 238: US$250,772. BridgeMind One version 0.3.4 ships, and the founder starts building a game about the challenge in Unity.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "By 25 October 2026", "what": "Vibecademy is closed and its customers are refunded, because the founder wants to focus on BridgeMind.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 16 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "The stream is the sales channel", "text": "The founder streams for four to six hours at a time on several days a week, building the product that the viewers can buy. The audience is exactly the customer group: people who build software with AI agents. ProvenStartups reports that every paying customer came from streaming and that no money went into ads, after his earlier startup had paid about US$20 per click on search ads." }, { "title": "The run rate in every title", "text": "Each numbered stream carries the current ARR in its title, so viewers follow the business like a score. That makes the challenge a reason to return, and it makes the founder's figures public on dated pages that anyone can compare. It also shows the falls: the titles went from US$242,964 in July to US$196,200 in August 2026." }, { "title": "The customer pays for the AI", "text": "The app launches the agents that the customer already pays for and never sells their usage. BridgeMind's own costs are the app, hosted features such as cloud transcription, and voice orchestration, which credits in each plan cover. The founder said on stream that his costs were about US$2,500 a month, small next to about US$20,000 a month of revenue." }, { "title": "Follow the newest model", "text": "Many streams and videos test a new AI model on the day it appears, and BridgeMind runs a public benchmark site, BridgeBench, that ranks models. The keyword lists in the video descriptions are made of model names, so the videos aim at people who search for a new model, and the app is on screen while it is used." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages, the founder's stream descriptions and a reviewer's notes on one stream. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Built live with AI coding agents: the stream descriptions name Claude Code, Codex and models from Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI and others, often running in parallel.", "A native desktop app for Mac, Windows and Linux; the demo on the home page shows a workspace called bridgespace-tauri.", "Coding agents run as real terminal sessions on the customer's computer and bill through the customer's own accounts; BridgeMind says it never reads or stores the sign-in token.", "BridgeVoice runs the Parakeet V3 or Whisper speech models on the user's computer, or a cloud transcription service for 60 languages.", "Hosted AI features go through OpenRouter, and the privacy policy also names Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare, Stripe, SendGrid, PostHog and Sentry.", "Payments through Stripe, in three separate Stripe accounts for different products, according to the reviewer of the July 2026 stream." ], "src": [ 2, 12, 15, 4 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold a better tool to developers and failed, most often because a large platform gave the same feature away. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Kite DevTool", "years": "2014 to 2024", "funding": "US$21M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "AI code completion inside the code editor, seven years before GitHub Copilot.", "died": "Few developers paid for the free product. GitHub Copilot arrived with better models and Microsoft's distribution.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2491-kite-devtool" }, { "name": "Fig DevTool", "years": "2020 to 2024", "funding": "US$2.4M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "A modern terminal with autocomplete and visual command builders.", "died": "Developers were not willing to pay for terminal tools that had free alternatives. AWS bought it in 2024.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2502-fig-devtool" }, { "name": "Nitrous.io", "years": "2012 to 2016", "funding": "US$8M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A coding environment in the cloud, with no local setup.", "died": "AWS bought its competitor Cloud9 and gave it away free.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2197-nitrousio" }, { "name": "Light Table/Eve", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$3M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A code editor with live feedback, then a way for anyone to build apps.", "died": "Developers stayed with the editors they already used, later Visual Studio Code.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1560-light-tableeve" }, { "name": "buildspace", "years": "2020 to 2023", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A community where people learn to build by shipping projects together in public.", "died": "A crowded market, AI shortcuts for coding, and a weak free-first business model.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1335-buildspace" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Kite, Fig, Nitrous.io and Light Table each tried to sell developers a better place to write code, and each lost to a free tool from a large company. BridgeMind sells into the same kind of market: Anthropic, OpenAI and the code editor makers all ship their own agent apps, and some are free with the subscription.", "Two things differ. First, BridgeMind does not depend on one AI provider; it runs whichever agents the customer pays for and makes switching between them its feature. Second, it found its customers through the founder's daily streams instead of venture money and ads. buildspace also gathered builders who shipped in public, but sold mostly free courses; BridgeMind sells a subscription to software and closed its own course business, Vibecademy, to focus on it." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The hours, rarely.", "text": "Building a developer tool live, in front of the developers who will buy it, needs no money and makes every figure public. It also needs four to six hours on camera on several days a week for more than a year, and an audience that grew from under 1,000 to more than 100,000 subscribers, which few people can repeat.", "steps": [ "Pick a product that your viewers would use while they watch you build it.", "Stream the building every day and put one honest number, such as the run rate, in every title.", "Let customers bring their own AI accounts, so model usage is never your cost.", "Make videos about each new AI model on its release day to reach people who search for it." ], "open": "Live-built tools for other groups who already watch long streams: game developers, designers, data analysts and hardware makers." }, "watch": [ { "title": "All figures are the founder's own", "text": "The run rate comes from the founder's video titles and from Stripe dashboards that he shows on camera. ProvenStartups wrote them down from one stream, but no payment processor has confirmed them, and BridgeMind has no TrustMRR profile. The run rate is his own sum over three Stripe accounts; on 10 July 2026 about US$1,200 of US$20,200 a month came from other products. Vibecademy, a course the founder sold at that time, is now closed." }, { "title": "The run rate moves a lot", "text": "It fell about 19% in six weeks, from US$242,964 on 10 July to US$196,200 on 20 August 2026, then rose to US$257,876 by 1 October. Monthly subscriptions to a developer tool can leave as fast as they come." }, { "title": "Sales depend on one person on camera", "text": "ProvenStartups reports that every customer came from the streams. If the founder stops streaming, the main source of new customers stops. Many recent videos are reviews of AI models, not product work." }, { "title": "Wording close to income claims", "text": "The home and pricing pages show a Discord review: \"I made $17K using bridgemind, i vibe coded my app\". A US$49-a-month Skool community by the founder, with 3 members, promises a room of builders working toward \"financial freedom on their own terms\". No stream description that we read promises viewers an income; the US$1,000,000 in the titles is the founder's own target." }, { "title": "The AI providers control the core", "text": "The app depends on Claude Code, Codex and other agents that their makers can change, limit or copy in their own apps." }, { "title": "Account switching around usage limits", "text": "The home page and the product page, read on 25 October 2026, sell switching between several AI accounts: \"Switch accounts. Keep the thread. Sign in to every Claude Code and Codex account you pay for — work, personal, a client's. Each conversation runs on the one you pick, and a usage limit becomes a choice instead of a dead end.\" A usage limit is the cap that Anthropic or OpenAI sets on how much one subscription can use the agent in a period of time. Moving work to a second account when the first one reaches its cap avoids that cap, and a client's account is paid for by someone else. The providers' own terms decide whether one person may use several accounts in this way; this page did not read those terms, and no source says that any provider has objected to BridgeMind." }, { "title": "Team size is unclear", "text": "ProvenStartups calls the business solo, while the EveryDev directory lists 5 employees and gives no source. The streams show only the founder." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.bridgemind.ai/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "BridgeMind on YouTube, 8 October 2026: Day 238, Vibe Coding an App Until I Make $1,000,000, ARR: $250,772", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K3-XHC2sgo", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the title, publish date and description on the watch page. Source for the latest run rate." }, { "title": "BridgeMind on YouTube, 10 July 2026: Day 206, Vibe Coding an App Until I Make $1,000,000, ARR: $242,964", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThZlsHAM48c", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the title, publish date and description on the watch page. Source for the July figure, the three Claude Max subscriptions and Vibecademy." }, { "title": "BridgeMind on YouTube, 2 August 2026: 1 Year of Vibe Coding Until I Make $1,000,000, ARR: $242,698", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNV1pu1ex3w", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the title, publish date and description on the watch page. Source for the start date of the challenge and the audience figures." }, { "title": "ProvenStartups, BridgeMind case, receipt 219, captured 24 July 2026", "url": "https://provenstartups.com/projects/bridgemind-vibe-coding-platform", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the free sections in full; the members-only sections were not read. A reviewer's notes from the Day 206 stream: MRR by Stripe account, costs, team and acquisition." }, { "title": "BridgeMind on YouTube, 20 August 2026: Day 219, ARR: $196,200", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZhfAk9kJMw", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the title, publish date and description on the watch page. Source for the August low and the macOS beta." }, { "title": "BridgeMind on YouTube, 4 September 2026: Day 225, ARR: $210,364", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U-KjG0Dubs", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the title, publish date and description on the watch page. Source for the 100 paying users and the US$194K low." }, { "title": "BridgeMind on YouTube, 3 September 2026: Day 224, ARR: $196,500", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAZuOfaRumE", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the title, publish date and description on the watch page." }, { "title": "BridgeMind on YouTube, 1 October 2026: Day 235, ARR: $257,876", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5ATszIO3ME", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the title, publish date and description on the watch page. Source for the highest figure." }, { "title": "BridgeMind on YouTube, 28 September 2026: Day 234, ARR: $246,248", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZjSEdIrNr4", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the title, publish date and description on the watch page. Source for BridgeClip's GitHub stars." }, { "title": "BridgeMind YouTube channel, streams tab, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/@bridgemindai/streams", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the list of the 30 newest streams with their titles; dates there are relative, so exact dates come from the watch pages." }, { "title": "BridgeMind YouTube channel, about page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/@bridgemindai/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the description, country, creation date and subscriber count. Source for the founder's name." }, { "title": "BridgeMind home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.bridgemind.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product, the FAQ on AI usage, the audience figures and the review quote." }, { "title": "BridgeMind pricing page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.bridgemind.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the pricing table and the credits rules." }, { "title": "BridgeMind terms of service, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.bridgemind.ai/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names BridgeMind LLC, a limited liability company based in the United States, and confirms the prices." }, { "title": "BridgeMind privacy policy, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.bridgemind.ai/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on data, service providers and analytics. Source for the hosting, payment and AI providers." }, { "title": "Vibecademy closing notice, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.vibecademy.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Names the founder and says that customers were refunded." }, { "title": "EveryDev.ai directory: BridgeMind", "url": "https://www.everydev.ai/developers/bridgemind", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. A directory profile with no stated sources; used only for the February 2026 figure, the January 2026 launches, the employee count and the funding line, each marked." }, { "title": "BridgeMind community on Skool, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.skool.com/bridgemind", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public about page. Source for the community's price, member count and wording." }, { "title": "BridgeClip home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.bridgeclip.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Another product of BridgeMind LLC, released under the MIT License." }, { "title": "BridgeMind blog archive, November 2024: ViewCreator.ai, Turning Vibe Coding Concepts into Visual Narratives", "url": "https://www.bridgemind.ai/blog/viewcreator-ai-creative-automation", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Describes an earlier product's AI content tools; read for the purpose check of the founder's other products." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/tapesearch/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/tapesearch.md", "slug": "tapesearch", "name": "Tapesearch", "country": "United Kingdom", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Search engine over AI-generated podcast transcripts, with alerts, AI chat, an API and an MCP server", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-26", "launchLabel": "9 January 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$5K verified revenue in one month, September 2026", "sticker": "$5K a month verified", "outcomeUsd": 60036, "months": 44, "teamLabel": "1 founder, Anjum Sayed, a data scientist; TrustMRR lists a team size of 1 person", "fundingLabel": "None (TrustMRR: bootstrapped)", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "voice-audio", "channel": "paid-ads", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Podcasts" ], "product": "Tapesearch downloads new episodes of popular public podcasts every day, turns the audio into text with a speech recognition model, and makes the text searchable. A user types a phrase, sees where it was said, and jumps to that second of the audio. Paid users also download timestamped transcripts, get email alerts when a keyword is said, chat with episodes through a language model, chart how often a topic comes up, and query the data through an API or an MCP server for AI assistants.", "why": "Speech recognition became cheap and accurate enough for one person to transcribe millions of podcast episodes. The founder sells the result to people who need to know what was said: market researchers, advertisers, analysts and journalists. The headline number comes from Stripe through TrustMRR: US$5,003 of revenue in September 2026.", "summary": [ "Tapesearch is a search engine for spoken words in podcasts. It runs automatic speech recognition, a model that turns recorded speech into written text, over new podcast episodes every day, and stores each transcript, the written text of an episode, with a timestamp for every line, the time in the recording where the line starts. A search for a brand or a name returns the exact moments where it was said, with a link to that point in the audio. The home page said in October 2026 that the database held \"5 million and counting\" transcripts, up from \"2 million and counting\" in July 2024.", "The founder is Anjum Sayed, a data scientist in the United Kingdom. Their GitHub page lists the title Kaggle Competitions Grandmaster and says \"I'm currently building Tapesearch\". They posted the product on Hacker News on 9 January 2023. TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a company's payment processor, shows Stripe revenue of US$3,732 in November 2025 and US$5,003 in September 2026, US$97,658 since the start, and 184 active subscriptions. TrustMRR lists a team of 1 person and no outside funding.", "This page grades every number by its evidence. The monthly revenue is grade A because TrustMRR reads it from Stripe. The user and transcript counts are the company's own claims. The page also describes the legal basis that Tapesearch states for publishing transcripts of other people's podcasts, and shows four failed search companies from the Loot Drop database." ], "pricing": { "caption": "Tapesearch plans read on the home page on 26 October 2026 (grade C)", "note": "Yearly billing gives 2 months free. The per-month yearly price is calculated: Pro costs US$200 a year, Insights US$370 a year and API Access US$720 a year. TrustMRR lists Pro at US$16.66 a month, the yearly price. A free account can search, but an episode page read on 25 October 2026 said that its full transcript would reach the free plan only after a waiting period (\"in 16 days\").", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "Search; full transcripts of new episodes after a waiting period" ], [ "Pro", "16.67", "17", "Transcript search with filters, AI chat, transcript downloads (TXT, SRT, VTT, JSON), 2 email alerts" ], [ "Insights", "30.83", "31", "Everything in Pro, up to 50 alerts, trend charts with downloadable data" ], [ "API Access", "60", "60", "Everything in Insights, API search and transcript download, up to 2,000 requests a day, hosted MCP server" ] ] }, "factsCaption": "US$5,003 of Stripe revenue in September 2026 from a podcast-transcript search engine that one data scientist launched on Hacker News in January 2023", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the company's Stripe account. A grade C value was written by the founder or on the company's own pages. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a Show HN post in January 2023 to US$5,003 of verified revenue in September 2026, 44 months later. Each entry carries its grade.", "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue, September 2026", "value": "US$5,003", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly revenue timeline, read from Stripe through an API key, last synced 27 October 2026. October 2026 had US$5,001 by 27 October.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 30 days to 27 October 2026", "value": "US$5,942", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, with growth of +25.3% against the 30 days before.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 12 months", "value": "US$53,358", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time", "value": "US$97,658", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. Stripe is the verified payment provider; TrustMRR shows no merchant of record.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, November 2025", "value": "US$3,732", "grade": "A", "note": "The first month in the public TrustMRR timeline. Other months: US$4,932 in March 2026, US$5,093 in April 2026, US$3,841 in August 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Change from November 2025 to September 2026", "value": "+34%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 5,003 divided by 3,732 equals 1.34.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the September 2026 month", "value": "about US$60,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 5,003 times 12 equals 60,036.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Current MRR and active subscriptions, October 2026", "value": "US$4,251, 184 subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot. Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) counts subscriptions only and spreads yearly plans over 12 months, so it is lower than the cash received in a month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average MRR per active subscription", "value": "about US$23 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 4,251 divided by 184 equals 23.1.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "80%", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot. Costs are not read from Stripe, so this is graded as a founder figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team size and funding", "value": "1 person, bootstrapped", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR profile text, written by the founder.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Transcripts in the database", "value": "2 million (July 2024), 5 million (October 2026)", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page, Wayback copy of 5 July 2024 and live page.", "src": [ 9, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Users", "value": "3,400+ (July 2024), 17,000+ (October 2026)", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page: \"Trusted by 3,400+ listeners\" in July 2024 and \"Trusted by 17,000+ listeners\" in October 2026. These are accounts, not paying customers.", "src": [ 9, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Speech recognition model", "value": "distil-whisper/distil-large-v3", "grade": "C", "note": "Named in the data of an episode page (\"transcript_model\"). Distil-Whisper is a smaller, faster version of OpenAI's open Whisper model.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Model that answers chat questions", "value": "Google Gemini", "grade": "C", "note": "Privacy policy, updated 23 September 2026.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the Show HN post to the September 2026 figure", "value": "44 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: January 2023 to September 2026. TrustMRR gives a founded date of 1 November 2022.", "src": [ 1, 8 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "1 November 2022", "what": "Founded date given on the TrustMRR profile.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "9 January 2023", "what": "Anjum Sayed posts \"Show HN: I made a search engine that lets you find what was *said* in a podcast\" with a link to tapesearch.com.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "5 July 2024", "what": "The home page says 2 million transcripts and 3,400+ users. Two paid plans cost US$15 and US$37 a month, with 2 months free on yearly billing.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "7 September 2024", "what": "Last update of the terms of service, which forbid scraping data from Tapesearch.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "US$3,732 of verified revenue, the first month in the public TrustMRR timeline.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "April 2026", "what": "US$5,093 of verified revenue, the best month in the public timeline.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "June to August 2026", "what": "Revenue falls to between US$3,841 and US$4,129 a month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "US$5,003 of verified revenue. The privacy policy, updated on 23 September 2026, lists Auth0, Stripe, Google Cloud with Gemini, Cloudflare and Akamai (Linode).", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The home page claims 5 million transcripts and 17,000+ users, and sells an API plan with a hosted MCP server for Claude and other AI assistants. TrustMRR shows 184 active subscriptions.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 7, 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Cheap transcription at scale", "text": "Open speech recognition models such as Whisper, and smaller versions such as Distil-Whisper, made it possible to transcribe millions of hours of audio on rented servers. An episode page shows the model name distil-whisper/distil-large-v3. The work is a pipeline: fetch the RSS feeds, download the audio, transcribe it, index the text, and repeat every day at midnight UTC." }, { "title": "A dataset that grows every day", "text": "Each day adds new transcripts, so the product gets more useful without new features. The home page went from 2 million transcripts in July 2024 to 5 million in October 2026. Podcasts that use the Podping notification system are transcribed within minutes, the FAQ says, so alerts arrive soon after a new episode." }, { "title": "Buyers who pay to know what was said", "text": "The home page aims at market researchers, financial analysts, advertisers, academics and journalists. For these buyers, an alert when a brand is mentioned, or a list of podcasts that sell ad slots to a competitor, is worth more than a consumer subscription, so the highest plan is the API plan at US$60 a month." }, { "title": "Selling to AI assistants too", "text": "The API plan includes a hosted MCP server. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a standard that lets an AI assistant such as Claude call an outside service. A user can ask Claude to chart how often a word was said in podcasts, and Claude queries Tapesearch." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages (privacy policy, FAQ, API and MCP pages, page data) and the TrustMRR profile. They are grade C, except Stripe, which TrustMRR confirms (grade A).", "items": [ "Transcription: a Distil-Whisper model (distil-whisper/distil-large-v3, named in an episode page's data). The FAQ says that for a bad transcript \"we can try a different model\".", "Which podcasts: the most popular podcasts by the number of Apple Podcasts ratings, plus podcasts that subscribers request. Paywalled shows, such as exclusives on Spotify, are not included.", "Chat and summaries: questions go to Google's Gemini model on Google Cloud, which also stores files and sends service emails, says the privacy policy.", "Servers and databases on Akamai (Linode), the website on Cloudflare, sign-in through Auth0 (Okta), payments through Stripe. TrustMRR lists React for the front end and Python for the back end; the page source shows Next.js, a React framework, and the Crisp chat box.", "An API at api.tapesearch.com with public documentation, and an MCP server at mcp.tapesearch.com for AI assistants, both on the US$60 plan.", "Marketing: TrustMRR lists Google Ads as the marketing channel. The privacy policy names Google Tag Manager and the Meta (Facebook) Pixel for measuring visits and sign-ups. Every podcast and episode has its own public page, which search engines can index." ], "src": [ 3, 2, 4, 1, 6, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to make a large body of content searchable, or to answer questions by voice, before cheap speech recognition and language models existed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Topsy", "years": "2007 to 2015", "funding": "30 (as recorded in the database; the unit is not given)", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Real-time search and analytics over tweets and other social media, to see what people say about a topic.", "died": "Apple bought it for its technology and shut it down, while its dependence on Twitter's data and API made it hard to stand alone.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/650-topsy" }, { "name": "Tellme", "years": "1999 to 2011", "funding": "US$238M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Information and transactions over the phone with voice commands, through automatic speech recognition.", "died": "Smartphone apps and newer voice assistants replaced phone-based voice services.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/612-tellme" }, { "name": "Quixey", "years": "2009 to 2017", "funding": "US$134M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Search for mobile apps by what they do, not by their names.", "died": "Google was stronger in search, and Quixey could not earn money fast enough before partners such as Alibaba left.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/478-quixey" }, { "name": "Neeva", "years": "2019 to 2023", "funding": "US$77M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A web search engine without ads, paid by subscription.", "died": "Few people would pay for general search, and ChatGPT changed what people expected from it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2288-neeva" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Tellme spent US$238 million on speech recognition for phone calls, when recognizing speech was expensive and limited to short commands. In 2023 an open model could transcribe a full hour of conversation with good accuracy on one rented machine, so one person could transcribe millions of episodes. Tapesearch does not need to understand commands; it needs cheap, accurate text from long recordings, which is what the Whisper family of models made possible.", "Topsy, Quixey and Neeva show the limit of search as a business: a general search product competes with Google and depends on other companies' data. Tapesearch avoids general search. It sells a narrow dataset, spoken words in podcasts, to professional buyers who pay for alerts and an API. Topsy also shows the same dependence that Tapesearch has: it relied on Twitter's data, as Tapesearch relies on podcast feeds that it does not own." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The pattern, yes. The podcast index itself, only with care about the rights.", "text": "The method is open to any engineer: pick a large body of public audio or video that nobody has made searchable, transcribe it with an open speech model, and sell search, alerts and an API to professionals. The hard parts are the running cost of transcription, the size of the index, and the legal question of publishing text made from other people's recordings.", "steps": [ "Pick a body of public spoken content with professional buyers: podcasts, public meetings, earnings calls, conference talks.", "Transcribe it with an open speech recognition model on rented servers, and refresh it every day.", "Give each item a public page, so search engines index it and bring free visitors.", "Sell alerts, downloads and an API on monthly plans, and add an MCP server so AI assistants can use the data.", "Read the copyright position of the content before you publish full transcripts, and offer owners a way to ask for removal." ], "open": "Spoken content in languages other than English, local radio, YouTube channels in one industry, and public video meetings of city councils are still poorly searchable. Each needs its own check of the rights." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Legal basis: other people's podcasts under \"Fair Use\"", "text": "Tapesearch transcribes podcasts that it does not own and publishes the transcripts on public episode pages, sells their download and serves them through an API. The only legal basis its pages state is a disclaimer on each episode page, for example on an episode of The Daily: \"Generated transcripts are the property of The New York Times and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine.\" Fair use is a defence in United States copyright law; the company is in the United Kingdom. No source that we read shows permission from podcast owners, a licence, or a removal process, and no source reports a dispute. The same company's terms of service forbid others to scrape Tapesearch's own data." }, { "title": "Revenue went down before it went up", "text": "Verified revenue was US$5,093 in April 2026, fell to between US$3,841 and US$4,129 a month from June to August 2026, and returned to US$5,003 in September. The trend is growing against the summer months and flat against the spring." }, { "title": "Cash revenue is higher than MRR", "text": "TrustMRR shows US$5,942 received in the last 30 days but US$4,251 of MRR. Yearly plans paid at once and one-time payments make the cash months uneven. The 184 active subscriptions are the more stable measure." }, { "title": "Depends on model and cloud suppliers", "text": "Transcription uses an open model, but chat answers come from Google's Gemini, and the servers run on Akamai (Linode) and Cloudflare. A price change at any of them changes the margin, which TrustMRR lists at 80% for the last 30 days." }, { "title": "User counts are the company's own", "text": "The 17,000+ users and 5 million transcripts are claims on the home page. Only the revenue and the subscription count are read from Stripe." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.tapesearch.com/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/tapesearch" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: Tapesearch profile (markdown), revenue last synced 27 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/tapesearch.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full on 26 October 2026. The revenue, MRR and subscription figures come from Stripe through an API key (grade A); the team size, funding, tech stack and marketing channel are founder-written profile text (grade C)." }, { "title": "Tapesearch home page, with features, pricing and FAQ", "url": "https://www.tapesearch.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 26 October 2026. Source for the plans, the user and transcript counts, the podcast selection and the Podping detail." }, { "title": "Tapesearch episode page: When A.I. Comes for Your Purpose in Life, The Daily", "url": "https://www.tapesearch.com/episode/when-a-i-comes-for-your-purpose-in-life/2b5W8TKD5qWBgRk8WK7E3W", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026, including the page data. Source for the Fair Use disclaimer, the free-plan waiting period and the transcription model name." }, { "title": "Tapesearch privacy policy, last updated 23 September 2026", "url": "https://www.tapesearch.com/privacy.md", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full (markdown version). Source for the service providers: Auth0, Stripe, Google Cloud and Gemini, Cloudflare, Akamai (Linode), Google Tag Manager and Meta Pixel." }, { "title": "Tapesearch terms of service, last updated 7 September 2024", "url": "https://www.tapesearch.com/tos", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the ban on scraping Tapesearch's data." }, { "title": "Tapesearch API Access page", "url": "https://www.tapesearch.com/api/access", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the API, its documentation address and an example count of podcasts and transcripts." }, { "title": "Tapesearch MCP Server page", "url": "https://www.tapesearch.com/api/mcp", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the hosted MCP server and its setup in Claude." }, { "title": "Hacker News, 9 January 2023: Show HN: I made a search engine that lets you find what was *said* in a podcast (item 34309688), by anjum48", "url": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/34309688", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the Algolia API. The post has a link and no text or founder comments. Source for the public launch date." }, { "title": "Tapesearch home page, Wayback Machine copy of 5 July 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240705210231/https://www.tapesearch.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 2 million transcripts, 3,400+ users and the 2024 prices." }, { "title": "GitHub profile of Anjum48 (Anjum Sayed)", "url": "https://github.com/Anjum48", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founder's background: data scientist, Kaggle Competitions Grandmaster, \"currently building Tapesearch\"." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/rezi/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/rezi.md", "slug": "rezi", "name": "Rezi", "country": "USA, run from South Korea", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI resume builder", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-26", "launchLabel": "May 2015", "outcomeLabel": "US$1M annual recurring revenue, March 2023", "sticker": "$1M ARR with 6 people", "outcomeUsd": 1000000, "months": 94, "teamLabel": "1 founder; 2 people in 2020; 6 listed at the US$1M ARR figure in March 2023; 12 by the end of 2023, 18 by the end of 2024, 30 on LinkedIn by October 2024", "fundingLabel": "About US$150K pre-seed by October 2020 (Lotte Accelerator and Korean angels), seed from Strong Ventures in March 2021, amount not stated", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "documents-data", "channel": "search", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Funded", "Running", "B2C", "Careers" ], "product": "A web application in which a job seeker writes a resume inside a fixed layout that applicant tracking systems can parse. AI writes or rewrites the bullet points, the summary and the cover letter from the job description, a score grades the resume on 23 checks, a keyword scanner compares it with the job posting, and an interview trainer asks questions based on it. Universities, agencies and career sites buy a white-label version.", "why": "It put GPT-3 into a resume builder in December 2020 with a team of two, which the founder says no competitor did, so when ChatGPT made AI writing popular in January 2023 it already had a working product that ranked in search. Search traffic, two deal partners and free giveaways on Reddit brought the users without an advertising budget, and the company says it was profitable from 2020.", "summary": [ "Rezi is a resume builder designed around applicant tracking systems (ATS), the software that most large companies use to receive, parse and filter job applications before a recruiter reads them. The user fills in a fixed layout that these systems can parse, and AI models write or rewrite the bullet points, the summary and the cover letter from the job description. A score grades the resume on 23 checks, a keyword scanner compares it with the job posting, and an interview trainer asks questions based on it. Organizations buy the same tool under their own brand.", "Jacob Jacquet, an American economics graduate, started it in May 2015 as a Word template that he said he sold for about US$9.69 after a post on Reddit, moved to Seoul in 2016, and relaunched Rezi as SaaS (software as a service, a web application paid by subscription) in September 2019 after an agency built it. In February 2020 he told The Korea Times that revenue for 2020 was on track for 250 million won, about US$210,000, with two employees. In December 2020 the two-person team added GPT-3 to the builder, the first resume builder to do so according to the founder. The company's own year review, published in January 2024, states that Rezi reached US$1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR, the monthly subscription revenue times twelve) in March 2023, and the about page archived that month lists six people. That figure is the headline of this page, because the site covers businesses of ten people or fewer, and Rezi grew past that size later in 2023.", "The company kept publishing numbers: it wrote that ARR went from US$1,986,807 to US$2,249,233 in January 2024, and the founder told Starter Story in August 2024 that MRR (monthly recurring revenue) was US$215,000 with 11 employees. TrustMRR, which reads the company's Stripe account, reports a verified MRR of US$242,119 and US$2,959,725 of revenue in the twelve months to 26 October 2026, earned by a team that the company put at 18 at the end of 2024. The headline figure rests on one company statement, so it is grade D. The page also records two funding rounds, a borderline feature called ATS Hack Mode, and five earlier job-search companies that failed." ], "factsCaption": "A company statement of US$1 million in annual recurring revenue in March 2023, when the about page listed six people, followed by Stripe-verified revenue of about US$3 million a year in October 2026 with a team of 18 or more", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from TrustMRR, which reads Rezi's Stripe account through an API key. A grade C value is a statement that agrees across several dates or sources. A grade D value is a single company or founder statement, or a directory figure, with no second source; the headline row is grade D. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a Word template sold on Reddit in May 2015 to US$1 million in annual recurring revenue with six people in March 2023, 94 months, then to Stripe-verified revenue of about US$3 million a year with a larger team. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Rezi prices in October 2026, read from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "No yearly billing is shown. Pro is US$29 a month and includes one review a month by a person. Lifetime is a one-time US$149 payment for the Pro features without the free monthly review. Enterprise is US$99 a month per 200 users for universities, agencies and career sites. A review by a resume expert is sold separately from US$8. All paid plans carry a 30-day money-back guarantee.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "1 resume, 1 AI interview, 3 PDF downloads" ], [ "Pro", "", "29", "unlimited resumes, AI interviews and downloads; 1 expert review a month" ], [ "Lifetime", "149 one-time", "", "Pro features with no end date, no free monthly review" ], [ "Enterprise", "", "99", "per 200 users, white-label" ], [ "Expert resume review", "from 8 one-time", "", "a person reviews one resume" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, March 2023", "value": "US$1,000,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Company blog, 17 January 2024: \"We reached a significant company milestone: $1M ARR.\" One statement, no second source. This is the headline because it is the latest dated figure from the period when the team was ten people or fewer.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team at that figure", "value": "6 people listed", "grade": "C", "note": "The about page archived on 24 March 2023 lists the founder, a lead developer, a marketing and operations person, two developers and a product manager; the snapshot of 29 November 2022 lists the same six. The year review says 7 of the 12 members at the end of 2023 joined during 2023.", "src": [ 2, 19, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue forecast for 2020", "value": "250 million won, about US$210,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder's statement to The Korea Times, 6 February 2020: revenue for 2020 was on track for that amount, at a very high margin, with two employees. A forecast, not a result.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Team, 2020 to 2022", "value": "2 people", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder to The Korea Times in February 2020 (\"just two employees\") and in his own post of July 2023 (\"a small team of two\" when GPT-3 was added in December 2020).", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, January 2024", "value": "from US$1,986,807 to US$2,249,233 in one month", "grade": "D", "note": "Company blog, 28 January 2025. Called the highest growth in a single month. One source.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, August 2024", "value": "US$215,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder interview with Starter Story, 8 August 2024. The text says 11 employees; the page header says 15.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Verified monthly recurring revenue, 26 October 2026", "value": "US$242,119", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from the company's Stripe account. 10,049 active subscriptions; profit margin of 60% over the last 30 days.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, twelve months to 26 October 2026", "value": "US$2,959,725; US$10,422,868 since the Stripe account began", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. The last 30 days were US$210,433; the profile puts revenue growth over the last 30 days at -3.8% and MRR growth at -3.7%.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Verified monthly revenue, November 2025 to September 2026", "value": "between US$217,472 and US$275,551 a month", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. The peak was April 2026 at US$275,551; September 2026 was US$225,184.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Fall from the April 2026 peak to September 2026", "value": "18.3%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: (275,551 - 225,184) / 275,551.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Team after the headline", "value": "9 listed in July 2023, 12 at the end of 2023, 18 at the end of 2024, 30 on LinkedIn in October 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "About page snapshots, the company's year reviews (\"Rezi is a team of 12\"; \"12 of our team members are based in Seoul, while the other 6 work internationally\") and Latka's LinkedIn count. The Latka count is grade D.", "src": [ 2, 1, 6, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "about US$150,000 by October 2020; a seed round in March 2021, amount not stated", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder to KoreaTechDesk, October 2020: \"approximately $150,000, with the most recent investment coming from Lotte Accelerator.\" Founder's own post, September 2024: seed round closed with StrongVC in Seoul at the end of March 2021, after pre-seed rounds with Lotte Accelerator and Korean angels. The TrustMRR profile says VC-backed.", "src": [ 8, 9, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Registered users", "value": "50,000 on 26 June 2020; 1,000,000 in July 2023; 2,000,000 in February 2024; 3,000,000 in November 2024; 4,005,400 at the end of 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's posts and the company's year reviews. The home page says 4.5 million in October 2026.", "src": [ 10, 5, 6, 16 ] }, { "fact": "Profitability", "value": "profitable; staff about a fourth of expenses", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder to KoreaTechDesk in May 2020 (\"now we are profitable\") and to Starter Story in August 2024 (\"Rezi is profitable\"; employee costs 24.9%).", "src": [ 11, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Paid advertising", "value": "about US$15,000 a month for a year, then stopped", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder to Starter Story, August 2024: an agency ran the ads and never reached a positive return.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Latka's figures", "value": "US$3.2 million for 2024 (estimate); readings of US$93.4K for 2020, US$664.1K for November 2021, US$1.2 million for November 2022 and US$2.4 million for October 2023, with no source named", "grade": "D", "note": "A directory. Its headcount of 15 for November 2022 does not match the six people on the company's own about page that month.", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue of the white-label business in one month, 2025", "value": "US$37,600", "grade": "D", "note": "Company blog, February 2026: \"Rezi Enterprise partners generated $37.6K in revenue in a single month.\"", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "fact": "First product and price", "value": "a Word template for about US$9.69", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder to Starter Story, and his own post of July 2023.", "src": [ 7, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the first sale to the headline figure", "value": "94 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: May 2015 to March 2023. From the SaaS relaunch in September 2019 it is 42 months.", "src": [ 5, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified twelve-month revenue divided by the headline", "value": "2.96", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2,959,725 / 1,000,000. The later figure was earned by a team of 18 or more.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "May 2015", "what": "Jacquet, a graduate with a 2.2 grade average who got interviews at Google and Goldman Sachs, posts his resume on Reddit and sells the Word template for about US$9.69.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 5 ] }, { "when": "2016", "what": "At 23 he moves to Seoul, after six months of working on Rezi in the United States.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 11 ] }, { "when": "July 2017", "what": "Accepted into the K-Startup Grand Challenge. Rezi is a side project while he teaches English.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "September 2019", "what": "Relaunch as a web application built by an agency, with accounts, resume management and a Pro plan. Posted to Hacker News on 5 September. A first developer, Luc Lemerez, is hired to take over the code.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 17 ] }, { "when": "November 2019", "what": "A Reddit post goes viral and brings a wave of users the site was not ready for.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "January and April 2020", "what": "StackCommerce and AppSumo become distribution partners. AppSumo gives Rezi Lifetime away free during the pandemic; about 20% of users, 10,000 people, come from it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "6 February 2020", "what": "The founder tells The Korea Times that 2020 revenue is on track for 250 million won, about US$210,000, with two employees.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "26 June 2020", "what": "50,000 users, without a marketing budget. An SEO strategy, a rebuilt site and a dedicated writer started in April.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "October 2020", "what": "About US$150,000 raised in total, the latest from Lotte Accelerator. 106,985 sign-ups in 13 months. Profitable.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "December 2020", "what": "GPT-3 added to the builder by a team of two. The founder says it was the first resume builder to use the API.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 7 ] }, { "when": "March 2021", "what": "Seed round closed with Strong Ventures in Seoul. Amount not stated.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "29 November 2022", "what": "The about page lists six people.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 19 ] }, { "when": "January 2023", "what": "ChatGPT changes how people write. New customers are 527.7% above January 2022.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "March 2023", "what": "US$1 million in annual recurring revenue, the headline of this page. The about page archived on 24 March lists the same six people.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "July 2023", "what": "1,000,000 users, 65% of them in the previous three months. The about page lists nine people.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 2 ] }, { "when": "December 2023", "what": "2,000,000 users. A team of 12, of whom 7 joined during the year.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "January 2024", "what": "Annual recurring revenue goes from US$1,986,807 to US$2,249,233 in one month.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "June 2024", "what": "ATS Hack Mode: a switch that embeds invisible prompts and keywords in the PDF. The founder writes that recruiters attacked it and that he does not recommend it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13, 14 ] }, { "when": "8 August 2024", "what": "Starter Story interview: US$215,000 in monthly recurring revenue, 11 employees, profitable, ads stopped.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "December 2024", "what": "3 million users. Five people joined during the year; 18 in the team, 12 of them in Seoul.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "2025", "what": "4 million users. An AI Resume Agent, a job search tool and a mobile app. The white-label business makes US$37,600 in one month.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "when": "26 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR shows US$242,119 in verified monthly recurring revenue and US$2,959,725 in the last twelve months, below the April 2026 peak.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 3 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Timing", "text": "Rezi added GPT-3 in December 2020, when the model was new and, according to the founder, no other resume builder used it. The two-person team spent two years tuning prompts and features for resume writing. When ChatGPT made AI writing a mass habit in January 2023, Rezi already had a tested product and three years of search rankings, and the company reports that new customers in that month were 527.7% above the year before." }, { "title": "A narrow product with a strong constraint", "text": "The founding idea was to make it impossible to build a resume incorrectly. The layout is fixed so that applicant tracking systems parse it, the score tells the user what is weak, and the AI fills the gaps. The founder's own words: product philosophy comes before anything else, and the company was lucky to get the product value exactly right from the first users." }, { "title": "Free distribution instead of ads", "text": "A Reddit post in November 2019, an AppSumo giveaway of the lifetime plan in April 2020, StackCommerce deals, Product Hunt launches and an SEO program from April 2020 brought the first hundreds of thousands of users. The company writes that search traffic grew consistently from October 2020. Later it repeated the giveaway: a day in October 2023 brought just under 70,000 sign-ups, and the founder said in 2025 that more than 93,000 lifetime accounts had been given away through the company's subreddit. Paid ads, about US$15,000 a month for a year according to the founder, did not pay back and were stopped." }, { "title": "Cheap engineering in Seoul and a small core", "text": "The first software was built by an agency, paid for with pre-seed money that took four years to raise. Then one engineer, hired in 2019, carried the product for years. The founder told Starter Story that staff were about a fourth of expenses and that Korean salaries kept development affordable, which is how two people could run a product with hundreds of thousands of users." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's posts and interviews and from the company's pages. They are grade C.", "items": [ "2015 to 2019: a Word template sold from a WordPress site, then Rezi Instant, a free form that reformatted text into the template with no accounts or database.", "September 2019: the web application was built by an outside development agency, then taken over by the first hired developer. The company lists HTML, CSS, Bootstrap and Webflow for the marketing site.", "December 2020: OpenAI's GPT-3 API for the AI writer; later the AI editor, cover letter and resignation letter writers, the AI interview and, in 2025, a conversational AI Resume Agent. The company does not say which models it uses today.", "Stripe takes the payments; TrustMRR reads the account through an API key. Downloads go to PDF, Word or Google Drive.", "Distribution: Reddit, AppSumo, StackCommerce, Product Hunt, a Chrome extension that turns a LinkedIn profile into a resume, and search content written by an in-house content team.", "2024 to 2026: a white-label version for universities and agencies, a mobile app, a job search tool and a resume MCP server for use inside AI assistants." ], "src": [ 5, 7, 10, 18, 3 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database promised to get people hired, from a resume builder to the first online job board. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Jobspice", "years": "2009 to 2012", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Professional-looking resumes from templates for people who cannot design.", "died": "Free templates spread across the web and LinkedIn became the career platform. A resume builder alone did not pay.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1635-jobspice" }, { "name": "Jobr", "years": "2014 to 2019", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Swipe through jobs on a phone like a dating app.", "died": "LinkedIn and Indeed had the listings and the reach. The swiping did not become an advantage, and Monster's purchase did not save it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/261-jobr" }, { "name": "Monster Worldwide", "years": "1994 to 2025", "funding": "US$500M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "The first large online job board, with a resume database for employers.", "died": "LinkedIn turned hiring into a network and Indeed took the search traffic with free aggregated listings and pay-per-click prices.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2400-monster-worldwide" }, { "name": "Elpha", "years": "2019 to 2022", "funding": "US$1.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A career community and job platform for women.", "died": "A community needs constant engagement; LinkedIn had the scale, and the post-pandemic funding market closed.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1352-elpha" }, { "name": "Ansaro", "years": "2017 to 2022", "funding": "US$15M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "AI that automates recruiting from resume parsing to interview scheduling.", "died": "Employers saw it as nice to have, the change management was heavy, and the return was not clear.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1853-ansaro" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Four of the five sold to employers or built a marketplace that needed both sides at once, and LinkedIn or Indeed owned the side that mattered. Jobspice, the closest predecessor, sold the same thing as Rezi, a nicer resume, and lost to free templates. Rezi's difference is not the template but the system behind it: a layout tuned for the parsers, a score, keyword matching against the posting, and AI writing that a free template cannot do. The customer pays Rezi US$29 a month or US$149 once, the company says, and no employer has to adopt anything.", "The second difference is cost. The founder says that two people ran the product for years from Seoul, that the first software was built by an agency for pre-seed money, and that the company was profitable from 2020, so it never needed the rounds that killed Jobr, Elpha and Ansaro when the money stopped. The risk that remains is the same as Jobspice's: the model makers and the job boards can add resume writing, and the company's 2025 review already reports fewer clicks from search as AI answers replace web results." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The early move, yes. The scale, no longer.", "text": "Adding a new model's API to an old, well-understood document type before the incumbents do is repeatable, and Rezi did it with two people. The later stage, a team of 18 or more, a white-label business and Stripe-verified revenue of about US$3 million a year according to TrustMRR, is a company, not a small-team method.", "steps": [ "Pick a document that software already parses badly, learn the parser's rules, and build the fixed layout first.", "When a new model API appears, add it to that workflow within weeks and tune it for one document type.", "Give the lifetime plan away in waves on Reddit and deal sites, and let search content do the rest.", "Keep the core team tiny in a cheaper city and stay profitable, so that a seed round is optional." ], "open": "Other documents with hidden parsers and anxious writers: grant applications, visa and immigration forms, tenders, academic statements, and the white-label version of each for the institutions that help people write them." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline, US$1 million in annual recurring revenue in March 2023, is one sentence in the company's own year review published on 17 January 2024. No payment processor, investor or journalist has confirmed it, and Latka's reading of US$1.2 million for November 2022 names no source and does not say whether it is a year of revenue or a run rate. The two-person figure of February 2020 is a forecast the founder gave a newspaper. A reader could look for a TrustMRR history that reaches back to 2023 (the public profile starts in November 2025), a second interview with 2023 figures, or the company's filings in Korea." }, { "title": "The company is no longer small", "text": "Six people at the headline, 12 at the end of 2023, 18 at the end of 2024 and 30 on LinkedIn according to Latka. The verified figures of October 2026, US$242,119 a month per TrustMRR, belong to that larger company, not to the six-person one. Two of the site's team rules disagree here: an older rule accepts a team of six to ten people only with grade A or B money evidence, while the rule of 23 October 2026 takes, for a company that grew past ten people, the last dated figure from the time it had ten or fewer, graded by its evidence. The user decided on 26 October 2026: \"When two team rules disagree, the newer rule (23 October 2026) decides.\" So the headline is the grade D figure of March 2023, when the about page listed six people, and the later growth to 18 to 30 people is stated here and in the team label." }, { "title": "Revenue is below its 2026 peak", "text": "TrustMRR shows US$275,551 in April 2026 and US$225,184 in September 2026, a fall of 18.3%, and revenue growth of -3.8% over the last 30 days. The company's 2025 review says search engines send fewer clicks as AI answers replace results, and ChatGPT itself writes resumes." }, { "title": "ATS Hack Mode", "text": "In June 2024 the company shipped a switch that embeds invisible AI prompts, metadata and keywords in the resume PDF, to test whether the hidden-text trick from social media works. The founder wrote on Hacker News that recruiters attacked it on LinkedIn and that the company does not recommend using it. The pricing and home pages read in October 2026 do not mention it, and the home page says keyword targeting works without keyword stuffing. A reader should check whether the switch still exists in the app." }, { "title": "Funded, with conflicting headcounts", "text": "Rezi raised about US$150,000 by October 2020 according to the founder, and a seed round in March 2021 whose size is not stated; the TrustMRR profile calls it VC-backed. Headcounts disagree: Starter Story's header says 15 where the founder's text says 11, and Latka's 15 for November 2022 does not match the six on the company's own page." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.rezi.ai/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/rezi" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Rezi blog, 17 January 2024: Rezi: Year in Review 2023", "url": "https://www.rezi.ai/posts/year-in-review-2023", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. Company post. Source for the US$1M ARR in March 2023, the team of 12, the 527.7% customer growth and the SEO history." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine, rezi.ai/about as of 24 March 2023", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20230324230000/https://www.rezi.ai/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the team section. Lists six people. The snapshots of 12 July 2023 (nine people) and 1 January 2024 (twelve) were read the same way." }, { "title": "TrustMRR profile of Rezi, revenue synced 26 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/rezi.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile. Stripe-verified MRR, revenue totals and the monthly timeline from November 2025; the description and funding line are founder-written, grade C." }, { "title": "The Korea Times, 6 February 2020: American entrepreneur confident to revamp Korean resume market, by Lee Min-hyung", "url": "https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/economy/20200206/american-entrepreneur-confident-to-revamp-korean-resume-market", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. Founder quoted on the 2020 revenue forecast and the two employees." }, { "title": "Jacob Jacquet on the Rezi blog, 5 July 2023: the post on reaching 1,000,000 users", "url": "https://www.rezi.ai/posts/0-to-1-million-users", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder's history: the template, the agency build, the first developer, GPT-3 in December 2020 with a team of two." }, { "title": "Rezi blog, 28 January 2025: Rezi: Year in Review 2024", "url": "https://www.rezi.ai/posts/rezi-year-in-review-2024", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. Source for the January 2024 ARR figures, the 3 million users and the team of 18." }, { "title": "Starter Story, 8 August 2024: I Created The Best Resume Builder In The World ($2.5M/Year)", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/ai-powered-free-ats-resume-builder", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview, not marked as an estimate. Source for the US$215K MRR, 11 employees, profitability, the ad spend and the tools." }, { "title": "KoreaTechDesk, 28 October 2020: Korean startup Rezi's founder Jacob Jacquet on successful resume service", "url": "https://www.koreatechdesk.com/korean-startup-rezis-founder-jacob-jaquet-on-successful-resume-service/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview. Source for the US$150,000 raised, Lotte Accelerator and the 106,985 users." }, { "title": "Jacob Jacquet, 6 September 2024: The Pitch Deck We Used to Raise Our Seed Round in Korea, as a Global Startup", "url": "https://www.jacobjacquet.com/posts/seed-round-pitch-deck", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder's post. Source for the seed round with StrongVC at the end of March 2021 and the pre-seed investors." }, { "title": "Jacob Jacquet: 0 to 50,000 Users: A Candid Look Into Creative Growth (first published 2020, on his site dated 6 September 2024)", "url": "https://www.jacobjacquet.com/posts/growth-marketing-for-startups", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder's post. Source for the Reddit event, AppSumo, StackCommerce, Product Hunt and the SEO program." }, { "title": "KoreaTechDesk, 11 May 2020: K-Startup Grand Challenge: Jacob Jacquet, helping job seekers build optimized resumes with Rezi", "url": "https://www.koreatechdesk.com/k-startup-grand-challenge-jacob-jacquet-helping-job-seekers-build-optimized-resumes-with-rezi/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview. Source for the 2016 move, the 2017 program, the four years without funding and the profitability." }, { "title": "Latka company page: Rezi revenue 2024, estimate, and headcount", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/rezi", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. A directory with estimates and unsourced readings." }, { "title": "Rezi blog, 6 June 2024: New Feature - ATS Hack Mode, by Jacob Jacquet (Wayback copy of 25 June 2024)", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20240625064915/https://www.rezi.ai/posts/ats-hack-mode", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The live address now redirects to the blog index, so the archived copy was read." }, { "title": "Hacker News, 12 June 2024: Show HN: ATS Hack Mode, with the founder's comments", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40659013", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through the Algolia API. Founder's comment on the recruiters' reaction and the recommendation not to use it." }, { "title": "Rezi pricing page, read 24 October 2026", "url": "https://www.rezi.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the pricing table." }, { "title": "Rezi blog, 4 February 2026: Year in Review 2025", "url": "https://www.rezi.ai/posts/year-in-review-2025", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 4 million users, the enterprise revenue month, the giveaways and the search comment." }, { "title": "Hacker News, 5 September 2019: Show HN: Rezi, Resumes for Large Companies", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20888203", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through the Algolia API. Dates the SaaS launch." }, { "title": "Rezi: Official information about Rezi AI", "url": "https://www.rezi.ai/ai-llm-info", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the company and product sections. Company page for AI assistants; source for the product list, the Seoul headquarters and the 2019 launch." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine, rezi.ai/about as of 29 November 2022", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20221129151307/https://www.rezi.ai/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the team section. Lists the same six people as March 2023." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/sway-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/sway-ai.md", "slug": "sway-ai", "name": "Sway AI", "country": "USA (Easy Mode Ventures LLC, registered in Wyoming)", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI dating-profile review and photo app", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-26", "launchLabel": "June 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$2M ARR six months after launch, May 2026", "sticker": "$2M ARR in 6 months", "outcomeUsd": 2000000, "months": 6, "teamLabel": "1 founder named (Daniel Heintzman); no source gives a headcount; the App Store seller is Easy Mode Ventures LLC; by May 2026 he was Head of Product at Cal AI", "fundingLabel": "None reported (no source mentions outside investment)", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "photos", "channel": "creators", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Dating" ], "product": "An iPhone app for people who use dating apps such as Tinder, Hinge and Bumble. The user uploads screenshots of a dating profile, and the app scores each photo out of 10, compares the whole profile with other men's profiles as a percentile, rewrites the bio, suggests new Hinge prompts and gives a numbered action plan. Paid photo packs generate new pictures of the user in chosen scenes, and a chat assistant suggests replies to matches.", "why": "The podcast that reported the money says the founder sold manual profile reviews for US$15 on Instagram before he wrote any code, so the demand and the price were tested before the app existed. He then posted batches of TikTok slideshows, added paid ads with one influencer's videos, defaulted the paywall to a yearly plan and sold photo packs to the users who spend most.", "summary": [ "Sway AI is an iPhone app that reviews a person's dating profile. The user uploads screenshots from Tinder, Hinge or Bumble, and the app returns a score for each photo (\"Fair 3.2/10\", \"Great 9.1/10\" in the App Store screenshots), a percentile against other profiles (\"better than 72% of guys\"), a rewritten bio, new prompts and an action plan. Since August 2024 it also sells photo packs, sets of AI-generated pictures that show the user's own face in new scenes, for use on dating apps. The app is sold by Easy Mode Ventures LLC and is rated 18+ in the US App Store.", "The money comes from one place. The Superwall Podcast, a show made by a company that sells paywall software (the screen in an app that asks the user to subscribe), published an interview with Daniel Heintzman on 6 May 2026. Its show notes said that he charged US$15 for manual dating-profile reviews on Instagram before he wrote any code, and that \"Six months after shipping, Sway AI hit $2M ARR\". ARR (annual recurring revenue) is the subscription revenue of one month times twelve. The same notes said that photo packs brought 11% of total revenue. The video description adds that he is now Head of Product at Cal AI, a calorie-counting app.", "No payment processor, buyer or journalist has confirmed the figure, and the podcast does not say in which month it was reached, so this page grades it D. The App Store pages show the growth in a different way: 272 ratings in September 2024, about 2,100 in March 2025, about 4,600 in July 2025 and about 5,400 in October 2026, with the last app update on 17 June 2025. The page also records the age rating and the terms, which the site requires for apps that score faces or bodies, and five earlier dating companies that failed." ], "factsCaption": "A podcast's report of US$2M in annual recurring revenue six months after launch, with App Store data that dates the app and its growth", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value comes from the App Store listing, its archived copies or the company's own terms. A grade D value is a single statement in the podcast's show notes or video description, with no second source; the headline row is grade D. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From paid manual reviews on Instagram to an app that the podcast says reached US$2M in annual recurring revenue six months after launch, then a slower period with no app update after June 2025. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Sway AI in-app purchases in the US App Store, read 26 October 2026 (grade C)", "note": "The App Store lists the prices of the in-app purchases but not what each plan includes, and several prices exist for the same plan name, probably from paywall tests. The monthly equivalents of the yearly plans were calculated on this page. Photo packs and profile scans are one-time purchases.", "rows": [ [ "Premium, weekly", "", "", "US$6.99 or US$9.99 a week" ], [ "Premium, monthly", "", "19.99", "plan contents not listed" ], [ "Premium, annual", "2.50 to 5.83", "", "US$29.99, US$49.99 or US$69.99 a year" ], [ "Photo Pack", "14.99 one-time", "", "a second pack is listed at US$49.99" ], [ "Profile Scan (1)", "6.99 one-time", "", "one profile review" ], [ "Profile Scan (3)", "14.99 one-time", "", "three profile reviews" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue six months after launch", "value": "US$2,000,000", "grade": "D", "note": "The Superwall Podcast show notes, 6 May 2026: \"Six months after shipping, Sway AI hit $2M ARR.\" The video description of 5 May 2026 says the same: \"Daniel took Sway AI from $0 to $2M ARR in 6 months\". One statement by one podcast; the month is not given.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue implied by the headline", "value": "about US$166,667", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2,000,000 / 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Probable month of the headline figure", "value": "about December 2024", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: six months after the first App Store review shown, dated 20 June 2024. The podcast gives no month, so this is an estimate.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Price of the manual reviews before the app", "value": "US$15 a review", "grade": "D", "note": "Show notes: \"He charged $15 for manual dating profile reviews on Instagram before writing a single line of code.\"", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Share of revenue from photo packs", "value": "11%", "grade": "D", "note": "Show notes: \"Photo pack upsells driving 11% of total revenue by targeting high-spending users\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue from one Christmas Day post", "value": "US$5,000 to US$6,000 in one day", "grade": "D", "note": "Chapter title in the video description: \"The Christmas Day post that did $5-6K in a single day\". The year is not stated.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "App Store age rating, October 2026", "value": "18+", "grade": "C", "note": "US App Store, read 26 October 2026: \"Age Rating 18+\", with the descriptors \"Infrequent\" \"Profanity or Crude Humor\", \"Mature or Suggestive Themes\" and \"Sexual Content or Nudity\". The archived pages of September 2024, March 2025 and July 2025 show 17+.", "src": [ 3, 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Minimum age in the terms", "value": "18", "grade": "C", "note": "Easy Mode Ventures terms, last updated 17 May 2024: \"Services are intended for users who are at least 18 years old. Persons under the age of 18 are not permitted to use or register for the Services.\"", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Ratings in the US App Store", "value": "272 (22 September 2024); 2.1K (3 March 2025); 4.6K (10 July 2025); 5.4K (26 October 2026)", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived App Store pages and the live page. The average stayed at 4.6 out of 5.", "src": [ 4, 5, 3 ] }, { "fact": "New ratings per month", "value": "about 343 from September 2024 to March 2025, about 590 from March to July 2025, about 51 from July 2025 to October 2026", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the rating counts and the days between the snapshots. Ratings are not revenue; the fall suggests fewer new users after mid-2025.", "src": [ 4, 5, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Last app update", "value": "version 1.5.2, 17 June 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Version history on the App Store page read 26 October 2026.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "First public sign of the app", "value": "by 20 June 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "The earliest review shown on the archived App Store page is dated 20 June 2024. The company's terms were last updated on 17 May 2024, and the Wayback Machine first captured easymodeventures.com on 2 May 2024. No source gives a launch date.", "src": [ 4, 6, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Company behind the app", "value": "Easy Mode Ventures LLC", "grade": "C", "note": "App Store seller line. The terms call it a company registered in Wyoming, United States. Its home page says: \"Creating awesome apps and making them go viral.\"", "src": [ 3, 6, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the headline figure", "value": "6 months", "grade": "D", "note": "As stated by the podcast.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Before the app", "what": "Heintzman builds an Instagram audience and sells manual dating-profile reviews for US$15 each, according to the podcast.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "2 May 2024", "what": "The Wayback Machine first captures easymodeventures.com.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "17 May 2024", "what": "Easy Mode Ventures publishes its terms, with a minimum age of 18.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "20 June 2024", "what": "The earliest App Store review shown for Sway AI.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "17 August 2024", "what": "Version 1.1.0 adds Photoshoot Packs, AI-generated photos of the user.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "22 September 2024", "what": "The archived App Store page shows 272 ratings, an average of 4.6, an age rating of 17+ and the photo-score screenshot.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "13 December 2024", "what": "Version 1.3.3 adds photo packs for women.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "About six months after launch", "what": "US$2M in annual recurring revenue, the headline of this page, according to the podcast. No month is given.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "6 February 2025", "what": "Version 1.4.0 adds a chat assistant for replies to matches.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "3 March 2025", "what": "About 2,100 ratings in the US App Store.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "2 May 2025", "what": "Version 1.5.0 adds an AI Coach.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "17 June 2025", "what": "Version 1.5.2, the last update listed in October 2026.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "10 July 2025", "what": "About 4,600 ratings.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "6 May 2026", "what": "The Superwall Podcast publishes the interview. Heintzman is now Head of Product at Cal AI.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "26 October 2026", "what": "The App Store page shows about 5,400 ratings and an age rating of 18+.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Sell the service by hand first", "text": "According to the podcast, the founder sold manual profile reviews for US$15 each on Instagram before the app existed. That tested three things at once: that men would pay for advice on their dating profile, what they would pay, and which advice they wanted. The app then turned the manual review into an AI review that costs almost nothing to repeat." }, { "title": "Short videos made in batches", "text": "The show notes describe a TikTok system that produced a month of content in two hours with Figma and Excel: slideshows with the same structure and new text, posted first from unbranded accounts and later from branded ones. The video chapters name a Christmas Day post that, the founder said, made US$5,000 to US$6,000 in a single day." }, { "title": "A score that people want to improve", "text": "A photo score out of 10 and a percentile against other men give the user a number to raise. The paywall comes after a motivation-first onboarding, which the show notes say doubled revenue per user, and it defaults to the yearly plan." }, { "title": "One-time packs for the users who spend most", "text": "Photo packs are sold on top of the subscription. The podcast calls this the whales theory, after the few users who spend much more than the rest, and the show notes say the packs brought 11% of total revenue." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the App Store listing and the podcast's show notes and video description. No source names the AI models or the code stack.", "items": [ "An iPhone and iPad app, sold through the App Store with weekly, monthly and yearly subscriptions and one-time photo packs and profile scans.", "The AI reads screenshots of the user's dating profile and returns photo scores, a percentile, a bio, prompts and an action plan.", "Photo packs generate new pictures of the user's own face in chosen scenes; a reviewer on the App Store found them unlike his real appearance.", "Marketing content was planned in Figma and Excel and posted as TikTok slideshows; paid ads used one influencer's videos.", "Retention features borrowed from Strava and Duolingo, according to the show notes: groups, streaks and progress sharing." ], "src": [ 3, 1, 2 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database tried to make dating work better, from human matchmakers to identity checks. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Dating Ring", "years": "2014 to 2017", "funding": "US$350K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Matchmaking by people, with software to help them.", "died": "Human matchmakers were too expensive per match next to the swipe apps, and the service could not grow.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1143-dating-ring" }, { "name": "HowAboutWe", "years": "2010 to 2018", "funding": "US$22M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A dating app where you propose a real date instead of chatting.", "died": "Tinder's swiping won, few users paid, and after IAC bought it the brand faded inside Match Group.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/226-howaboutwe" }, { "name": "BeehiveID", "years": "2013 to 2016", "funding": "US$550K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Identity checks for dating apps from a person's social network data.", "died": "It depended on Facebook's data, and Facebook cut access to it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1913-beehiveid" }, { "name": "Grouper", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$1.8M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Group blind dates over drinks, arranged by the company.", "died": "Each date needed people to arrange it, and free swipe apps were simpler.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1171-grouper" }, { "name": "Cuddli", "years": "2015 to 2019", "funding": "US$0", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "A dating app for geeks and fans.", "died": "The niche was too small to grow and the free tier did not convert.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2014-cuddli" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Four of the five tried to replace or rebuild the dating platform, and they needed a large number of users on both sides before anyone found a date. Sway AI does not compete with Tinder or Hinge. It sells to one side, the user who already has a profile there, and it only needs that person to want a better score. The service that Dating Ring and Grouper paid people to perform, advice on how to present yourself, is done by an AI model at almost no cost per user.", "The risk is the one that ended BeehiveID: a business that lives on top of other platforms. The dating apps can add their own photo and profile advice, and Apple's App Store and TikTok decide how the app is sold and found. The App Store data also shows that new ratings fell sharply after mid-2025 and that the app was not updated after June 2025, while the founder moved to Cal AI." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The number, unverified.", "text": "Selling a manual service on social media before building the app, then turning it into an AI product with a score that users want to raise, is a method that one person can repeat. The growth the podcast reported for Sway AI also depended on short-video skill and paid ads that the show notes describe but do not cost out.", "steps": [ "Sell the advice by hand to strangers on Instagram or TikTok first, and keep the price that people accept.", "Turn the manual review into an AI review with a visible score and a short action plan.", "Post slideshows in batches from a template, and test unbranded accounts before the brand account.", "Put the paywall after onboarding, default it to the yearly plan, and add one-time packs for heavy spenders." ], "open": "Other profiles that people present to strangers and want to improve: LinkedIn profiles, resumes for one industry, rental applications, marketplace listings and short-video bios." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline, US$2M in annual recurring revenue six months after shipping, rests on one source: The Superwall Podcast's show notes of 6 May 2026 and the description of the same episode on YouTube, both written by the podcast. The audio was not transcribed for this page, and the podcast does not say in which month the figure was reached. No payment processor profile, buyer or journalist confirms it. A reader could look for a TrustMRR or RevenueCat-verified profile of the app, a second interview with dated figures, or an estimate from an app-analytics service." }, { "title": "Face and photo scoring: age rating and terms", "text": "Sway AI scores the user's photos (\"Fair 3.2/10\", \"Great 9.1/10\") and ranks the profile (\"Your dating profile is better than 72% of guys\"). The site publishes such apps only when the age rating is 17+ or 18+, the terms say 18+ and nothing aims at minors. The US App Store page read on 26 October 2026 says \"Age Rating 18+\"; the archived pages of September 2024, March 2025 and July 2025 say 17+. The terms of Easy Mode Ventures, last updated 17 May 2024, say: \"Services are intended for users who are at least 18 years old. Persons under the age of 18 are not permitted to use or register for the Services.\" The listing, screenshots and podcast pages read for this page do not address minors." }, { "title": "Suggestive content", "text": "Apple's rating lists \"Infrequent\" \"Profanity or Crude Humor\", \"Mature or Suggestive Themes\" and \"Sexual Content or Nudity\". A screenshot of the pickup-line feature shows flirting lines such as \"I can't help but imagine you in a naughty librarian role...\". The app is a dating assistant, not an adult companion, but the reader should know what Apple's descriptors say." }, { "title": "The founder's marketing tactics", "text": "According to the video chapters, the founder posted from unbranded accounts before branded ones (\"Unbranded to branded: how to warm up a new account\"), worked with one influencer for ad videos, and describes an \"influencer-equity playbook\" for shipping several apps. The screenshots call it \"THE #1 APP FOR DATING PHOTOS\", a claim no source supports." }, { "title": "AI photos on dating profiles", "text": "The photo packs put the user's face into generated scenes for dating apps. An App Store reviewer wrote in September 2025 that the photos made him look older and heavier than he is and that a date would question their authenticity; another wrote in August 2024 that they were \"so unrealistic\" that they looked AI-made." }, { "title": "Is the app still developed?", "text": "The last update listed is version 1.5.2 of 17 June 2025, new ratings fell to about 51 a month after July 2025, and the podcast says the founder is now Head of Product at Cal AI. The same show notes called Cal AI \"his next project\"; the video description calls him its Head of Product. No source says who runs Sway AI today or whether its revenue has held." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.easymodeventures.com/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6502842382" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "The Superwall Podcast, 6 May 2026: Daniel Heintzma - I speedran a new app from 0 to $2m/year in 6 months (here's how)", "url": "https://www.buzzsprout.com/2522779/episodes/19137422", "grade": "D", "how": "Read the show notes in full. The 51-minute audio was not transcribed; the episode's transcript page returned an error. Source for the US$2M ARR, the US$15 manual reviews and the 11% from photo packs." }, { "title": "Superwall on YouTube, 5 May 2026: I speedran a new app from 0 to $2m/year in 6 months (here's how)", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukGtpnfBpvU", "grade": "D", "how": "Read the video description and the chapter list. The transcript was not read. Source for the chapter titles, the Christmas Day post and the Cal AI role." }, { "title": "Sway AI: Dating App Assistant, US App Store, read 26 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6502842382", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full: age rating, descriptors, in-app purchases, version history, seller and reviews. The eight screenshots were downloaded on 25 October 2026 and viewed." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine, Sway AI App Store page as of 22 September 2024", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20240922132156/https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sway-ai-dating-app-assistant/id6502842382", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 17+ rating, the 272 ratings and the earliest review of 20 June 2024." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine, Sway AI App Store page as of 3 March 2025 and 10 July 2025", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20250303190209/https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sway-ai-dating-app-assistant/id6502842382", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the rating, the ratings count and the price list of both copies (the second at /web/20250710053251/)." }, { "title": "Easy Mode Ventures: Terms & Conditions, last updated 17 May 2024", "url": "https://www.easymodeventures.com/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on eligibility, the company and app-store purchases. Source for the minimum age of 18 and the Wyoming registration." }, { "title": "Easy Mode Ventures home page, and the Wayback Machine capture list for easymodeventures.com", "url": "https://www.easymodeventures.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full (one line and a contact address). The Wayback CDX list gives the first capture on 2 May 2024." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/hairly-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/hairly-ai.md", "slug": "hairly-ai", "name": "Hairly AI: Hairstyle Try On", "country": "Croatia", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI hairstyle and hair-colour try-on app for iPhone", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-26", "launchLabel": "10 November 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$19.3K in verified revenue in 30 days, October 2026", "sticker": "$19.3K in 30 days", "outcomeUsd": 231564, "months": 11, "teamLabel": "Not published; the App Store seller, Veralix j.d.o.o., is an app studio in Zagreb with 3 apps, and no source names a person or a headcount", "fundingLabel": "None disclosed", "primaryFactor": "Paywall and onboarding tests", "group": "health-appearance", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "growing", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Beauty" ], "product": "An iPhone app. The user uploads one front-facing photo, and the app generates images of the same face with other haircuts (bobs, bangs, ponytails, layers) and other hair colours, finds the face shape and suggests three haircuts for it, and names a colour season with a palette of colours to wear. Every feature needs a subscription; there is no free result.", "why": "People who plan a haircut or a new colour cannot see the result before the salon has done it. The app shows it on the user's own photo in seconds, using Google's Gemini model to analyse the hair and fal.ai to generate the image, as its privacy policy states. Revenue was close to zero until March 2026; in April 2026 the seller shipped a redesigned onboarding, a new paywall, a coin system and translations, and from then revenue rose every month, to US$17,882 in October 2026 up to 26 October, as TrustMRR reads it from the billing account.", "summary": [ "Hairly AI is an iPhone app for virtual try-on, which means showing a person a picture of themselves with a change that has not been made yet. The user uploads one photo. The app's privacy policy says that an on-device check confirms that one face is in the frame, and that the photo then goes to \"Google's Gemini API (for hair-characteristic analysis) and to fal.ai (for the hairstyle image generation)\". The result is an image of the user's own face with a new haircut or hair colour. Two more features name the user's face shape with three suggested haircuts, and the user's colour season, a styling method that groups skin, hair and eye colouring into four \"seasons\" with a palette for each. The app is free to install, but the App Store text says: \"This app requires a premium subscription to access its features.\" Payments are in-app purchases, collected by Apple inside the app.", "The App Store names the seller as Veralix j.d.o.o., a j.d.o.o. being the Croatian simple form of a limited-liability company. Its website calls Veralix an \"app development studio\" based in Zagreb and lists three apps: Hairly AI, a face and body photo editor called Bodly, and an AI portrait generator called Narcis. No source names a person or gives a headcount. The app was released worldwide on 10 November 2025. TrustMRR, a service that reads revenue through the seller's own billing account, shows almost nothing until March 2026 (US$26.89 in five months), then US$718 in April, US$6,854 in August, US$12,882 in September and US$17,882 in October 2026 up to 26 October. On 26 October 2026 it showed US$19,297 in the last 30 days, monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the monthly value of all active subscriptions) of US$20,542 from 370 subscriptions, and US$49,483 since launch.", "The revenue figures are grade A: TrustMRR reads them with an API key from RevenueCat, a service that records an app's App Store subscriptions. whatsthe.app, an app revenue directory, shows figures from the same RevenueCat connection, so it is not an independent second source; its figures match TrustMRR's August 2026 level. The team, the funding and how the app works come from the seller's own pages and are grade C. The page also shows earlier companies that sold hairstyle discovery, beauty services, photo editing or try-before-you-buy, and why they failed." ], "factsCaption": "US$19,297 in verified revenue in the 30 days to 26 October 2026 and US$20,542 in monthly recurring revenue, eleven months after release, from a studio that names no person", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR, or by whatsthe.app through the same connection, from the app's RevenueCat account. A grade C value is what the seller, its websites or the App Store pages state. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a release in November 2025 with almost no revenue, through an April 2026 redesign of the onboarding and the paywall, to US$20,542 in monthly recurring revenue in October 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Hairly AI in-app purchases on the US App Store, read 25 October 2026, and the prices on the app's website (grade C)", "note": "The App Store lists ten in-app purchases, all subscriptions: four weekly prices and six yearly prices (US$39.99 appears twice). The App Store description names only \"$39.99/year after 7-day free trial\", and the app's website names \"$9.99/week or $49.99/year\". The seller's privacy policy says that the price, the trial and the offer \"depend on the active pricing experiment, your region, and the App Store storefront\", so different users see different prices. Yearly prices are converted to a monthly value in the second column. A weekly plan at US$9.99 is about US$43.29 a month (calculated: times 52, divided by 12). No feature works without a subscription. Apple collects the payments and keeps its commission; the TrustMRR profile does not say whether its figures are before or after that commission.", "rows": [ [ "Yearly, as in the App Store description", "3.33", "", "US$39.99 a year after a 7-day free trial; all features" ], [ "Yearly, other listed prices", "2.50 to 5.00", "", "US$29.99, US$49.99 or US$59.99 a year" ], [ "Weekly", "", "", "US$8.99, US$9.99, US$14.99 or US$19.99 a week" ], [ "Website offer", "4.17", "", "US$9.99 a week or US$49.99 a year, as the app's website states" ], [ "Free", "0", "0", "no feature works without a subscription" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 30 days to 26 October 2026", "value": "US$19,297", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR period table, from RevenueCat through an API key, last synced 26 October 2026. Its 30 daily values add up to US$19,296 (calculated). The profile's separate 30-day snapshot shows US$19,958 with growth of +58.9%, the same growth figure as on 25 October, so this page uses the table. On 25 October 2026 the table showed US$18,786.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 26 October 2026", "value": "US$20,542 from 370 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR metric snapshot of 26 October 2026; MRR growth over the last 30 days shown as +64.4%. That implies about US$12,495 thirty days earlier (calculated). On 25 October 2026: US$19,132 from 350 subscriptions.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the last 30 days", "value": "about US$231,564 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$19,297 times 12. The headline amount on this page. MRR times 12 gives US$246,504.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue since launch, 26 October 2026", "value": "US$49,483", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, all time. The twelve monthly values on the same profile add up to US$49,482.89 (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue from November 2025 to March 2026", "value": "US$26.89 in five months", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline: US$11.53, US$0, US$11.61, US$0 and US$3.75.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue, April to September 2026", "value": "US$718, US$1,655, US$4,383, US$5,082, US$6,854, US$12,882", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. September was 87.9% above August (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, 1 to 26 October 2026", "value": "US$17,882", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline, a partial month. About US$688 a day (calculated: divided by 26); the best day in the last 30 was US$1,178 on 6 October. Already 38.8% above all of September (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue on whatsthe.app", "value": "US$6,970 from 138 subscriptions; US$6,947 in the last 28 days", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app, \"verified with RevenueCat\", labelled last updated 1 October 2026. Its record names the credential as \"revenuecat-trustmrr\", the same connection as TrustMRR, and the app was added on 8 September 2026. The 28-day figure is within 1.4% of TrustMRR's August 2026 revenue (calculated), so it seems to date from about the time the app was added; not verified.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "MRR per active subscription, 26 October 2026", "value": "about US$55.52", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$20,542 divided by 370. A yearly plan at US$39.99 is worth US$3.33 a month and a weekly plan at US$9.99 about US$43.29, so most of the MRR must come from weekly plans. The profile does not split it by plan.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days to 26 October 2026", "value": "30.0%", "grade": "C", "note": "A TrustMRR metric snapshot. The profile does not say how the costs were read.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Worldwide release", "value": "10 November 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "whatsthe.app app page, from App Store data. Its sale details say \"Business Operations Started Nov 2025\".", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "AI services in the app", "value": "Google Gemini API for hair analysis, fal.ai for image generation", "grade": "C", "note": "The Hairly AI privacy policy on the Veralix website, last updated 2 September 2026.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Seller", "value": "Veralix j.d.o.o., Zagreb, Croatia, 3 apps", "grade": "C", "note": "App Store developer page: Hairly AI, Bodly: Face & Body Editor and Narcis: AI Photo Generator. The Veralix website describes an \"app development studio\" in Zagreb. No source gives a headcount or a person's name.", "src": [ 3, 5 ] }, { "fact": "App Store ratings", "value": "87 in the US store, average 4.5; 169 across 11 storefronts", "grade": "C", "note": "US App Store page on 25 October 2026, and whatsthe.app for all storefronts (average 4.2).", "src": [ 2, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Age rating and age rules", "value": "4+ on the App Store; the terms require age 13", "grade": "C", "note": "The website FAQ says users from 13 to 17 \"should have parental consent\", and the studio's site says the app is \"Targeting users aged 15-35\".", "src": [ 2, 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Updates", "value": "25 versions from 17 March to 19 May 2026, versions 15.0 to 17.4", "grade": "C", "note": "App Store version history as shown on 25 October 2026. No version after 19 May 2026.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Offered for sale", "value": "US$200,000 on whatsthe.app; not for sale on TrustMRR", "grade": "C", "note": "whatsthe.app shows an asking price of US$200,000, \"2.4 x revenue\" against its own yearly figure of US$83,362. TrustMRR says on 26 October 2026 that the startup \"is not currently listed for sale\".", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Time from release to the October 2026 figure", "value": "11 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: November 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "10 November 2025", "what": "The app is released worldwide on the App Store by Veralix j.d.o.o.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 2 ] }, { "when": "November 2025 to March 2026", "what": "US$26.89 in verified revenue in five months.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "17 to 30 March 2026", "what": "Versions 15.0 to 15.6: a new AI generation feature, a redesigned home screen and several onboarding changes.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "26 March 2026", "what": "Date of the Hairly AI terms of service on the Veralix website.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "6 to 22 April 2026", "what": "Release notes: \"Improved onboarding and added localization\", \"Added coin system\", \"Redesigned onboarding experience\" and \"Improved paywall design\". April revenue is US$718.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "when": "19 May 2026", "what": "Version 17.4, the last update shown on the App Store page in October 2026. May revenue is US$1,655.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "when": "June to August 2026", "what": "US$4,383, US$5,082 and US$6,854 in the three months.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2 September 2026", "what": "Date of the Hairly AI privacy policy that names Google Gemini and fal.ai.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "8 September 2026", "what": "The app is added to the whatsthe.app directory with its RevenueCat figures and an asking price of US$200,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "US$12,882 in the month, 87.9% above August.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "26 October 2026", "what": "US$19,297 in the last 30 days, MRR US$20,542 from 370 subscriptions, US$49,483 since launch, on TrustMRR.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A salon question answered on the user's own photo", "text": "Before a haircut or a colour change, a customer has to imagine the result. The app generates it on the customer's own face from one photo, and adds a face-shape result with three suggested cuts and a colour season. The privacy policy names the parts: an on-device check for one face, Google's Gemini API to analyse the hair, and fal.ai to generate the new image. None of them is the seller's own model." }, { "title": "The paywall comes first", "text": "Every feature needs a subscription, and a review from April 2026 complains that the app asks questions and then asks for payment \"without even seeing how you look\". The seller tests prices: the App Store lists ten subscription prices, and the privacy policy says the offer depends on \"the active pricing experiment\". MRR of about US$55.52 per subscription (calculated) shows that most subscribers pay weekly prices, not the US$39.99 yearly price that the description names." }, { "title": "The onboarding and paywall rebuild of April 2026", "text": "Revenue stayed near zero for five months. In April 2026 the seller released 15 versions with a redesigned onboarding, a new paywall, a coin system and translations, and verified revenue went from US$3.75 in March to US$718 in April and then grew every month. The sources show the timing, not the cause." }, { "title": "A studio with a few apps", "text": "Veralix publishes three photo apps that share the same pattern: a selfie, an AI service from another company, and a weekly or yearly subscription through Apple and RevenueCat. Each new app reuses the same billing, the same website builder and the same privacy-policy structure." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the App Store pages, the seller's two websites and the TrustMRR profile. They are grade C, except the RevenueCat connection, which TrustMRR confirms.", "items": [ "A native iOS app; the studio's website says that it builds \"Native iOS applications built with Swift and SwiftUI\".", "Image work by outside AI services: Google's Gemini API for hair analysis and fal.ai for generating the new hairstyle image, per the privacy policy of 2 September 2026. Photos are sent through the seller's backend and, by the policy's account, not stored.", "Subscriptions are sold through Apple StoreKit and recorded in RevenueCat, which TrustMRR and whatsthe.app read through an API key.", "Both websites, hairly-ai-showcase.lovable.app and veralix.lovable.app, are built with Lovable, an AI website builder: the page source of both uses Lovable's preview image, and the studio site shows an \"Edit with Lovable\" badge.", "The App Store privacy labels declare that device identifiers may be used to track users across other companies' apps and for third-party advertising. No source says which advertising, if any, brought the users.", "The seller released 25 versions between 17 March and 19 May 2026, often several in one week, mostly about onboarding and the paywall." ], "src": [ 2, 5, 6, 1 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised hairstyle discovery, beauty services at home, easy photo editing, or a way to try before you buy. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Tress", "years": "2017 to 2020", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A social app to share and discover hairstyles for the African hair community and find stylists.", "died": "It could not grow beyond its first users when Instagram added similar discovery features, and it never built a way to earn money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1049-tress" }, { "name": "StyleBee", "years": "2015 to 2018", "funding": "US$1M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Book hair styling, make-up and nails at home instead of at a salon.", "died": "Coordinating beauty professionals across schedules and places gave uneven quality, and the professionals preferred the stability of salons.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1487-stylebee" }, { "name": "Try.com", "years": "2018 to 2022", "funding": "US$4M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Try items on before paying for an online order.", "died": "High operating costs, too few retailers willing to join, and the free returns of Amazon and Zappos.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/668-trycom" }, { "name": "Picnik", "years": "2005 to 2012", "funding": "US$3.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Simple photo editing in the browser, with no software to install.", "died": "Google bought it and folded it into Google+, and phone apps such as Instagram built the same editing in for free.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/429-picnik" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Tress and StyleBee worked on the same question, what hairstyle to choose and who will do it, but one needed a community large enough to compete with Instagram and the other needed beauty professionals to travel to customers. Try.com needed retailers and shipping. Hairly AI answers a narrower question, how this cut or colour would look on this face, with no people and no goods: a photo goes to two AI services and an image comes back, so one more customer costs a model call.", "Picnik is the warning for any photo-editing product: when a platform builds the feature in for free, a separate product loses its reason to exist. Apple's own App Store page for Hairly AI lists ten other hairstyle try-on apps under \"You Might Also Like\", and the hair features are also inside the studio's own portrait app. The verified figures show strong growth in 2026; the sources do not show what the business does when the image models make such apps easy to copy." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes. The product is simple; the work is in the paywall.", "text": "The app is a front end to two outside AI services with a subscription in front of it. The verified curve shows that the same product earned almost nothing for five months and then grew every month after a rebuild of the onboarding and the paywall, to US$19,297 in the 30 days to 26 October 2026 as TrustMRR reports it. A copy needs the same patience with pricing tests, and it enters a market with many near-identical apps.", "steps": [ "Pick a decision that people make about their own appearance, such as a haircut or a colour, that a model can show on one photo without judging or scoring the person.", "Use hosted image models (the seller names Google's Gemini API and fal.ai) instead of training your own.", "Record subscriptions in a tool such as RevenueCat, and test prices, trial terms and the onboarding steps one at a time.", "Read the reviews about the paywall and the trial: an unclear trial produces refund requests and one-star ratings." ], "open": "Other changes that people want to see before they make them: glasses frames, beard styles, make-up shades for a given product range, tattoos on a photo of the user's arm." }, "watch": [ { "title": "No named person and no headcount", "text": "The App Store seller is Veralix j.d.o.o., a Zagreb app studio with three apps. Its website speaks of \"Our team\" but gives no names and no number of people, and no company-register record was read. The team label \"small\" on this page is an assumption from the size of the app list, not a verified fact." }, { "title": "Young users and face analysis", "text": "The app is rated 4+ on the App Store, its terms require age 13, its website asks users from 13 to 17 for parental consent, and the studio's site says it targets \"users aged 15-35\". It analyses the face shape and colouring of the user's photo and suggests haircuts and colours. No downloaded page shows a score or rating of the user's looks; the website uses the caption \"Glow Up Today - Before & After Transformations\"." }, { "title": "Paywall and trial complaints", "text": "Every feature needs a subscription, and most of the MRR comes from weekly prices (calculated). US App Store reviews include \"Don't fall for 1 week trial\" from a user who says the charge came at once, and one who says the app asked for payment before showing any result." }, { "title": "No update since May 2026", "text": "The last version on the App Store is 17.4 of 19 May 2026, while revenue kept rising through October. The app's website still says that it supports iOS 14, while the App Store requires iOS 17.8." }, { "title": "Two marketplaces disagree", "text": "whatsthe.app shows the app for sale at US$200,000 and a yearly revenue of US$83,362, while TrustMRR says it is not listed for sale and shows a much higher October figure. Both read the same RevenueCat account, and the lower whatsthe.app figures seem to be from early September 2026." }, { "title": "The same owner sells Bodly, a body-reshaping app rated 4+", "text": "Veralix j.d.o.o. also sells Bodly: Face & Body Editor, which the App Store rates 4+ and which lets users \"Refine your waist, hips, curves, belly, arms, legs and shoulders\" and \"Smooth, reshape and refine facial features\" in photos; its App Store text does not say whether it uses AI. The studio's third app, Narcis, turns selfies into AI scenes such as \"Beach Body\"; its terms forbid images of people without their consent. This page judges Hairly AI alone. On 26 October 2026 the Hairly AI website that the App Store names (hairly-ai-showcase.lovable.app, with its own privacy and terms pages) did not name or link to Bodly, Narcis or the studio; it links only to Hairly's own App Store page. Bodly appears in two places outside it: the \"More by Veralix j.d.o.o.\" row that the App Store itself adds to the Hairly listing, and the studio's own website, which presents all three apps and also holds a copy of the Hairly privacy policy." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://hairly-ai-showcase.lovable.app/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6754688430" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/hairly-ai" }, { "kind": "whatsthe", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/hairly-ai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of Hairly AI, as read on 26 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/hairly-ai.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full, live on 25 October 2026 and again on 26 October 2026 (revenue last synced 26 October 2026); the figures on this page are from the second reading. Revenue, monthly timeline, daily revenue, MRR and subscription counts are read from RevenueCat through an API key and are grade A. The description, pricing note and the profit-margin snapshot are seller-written or not explained, grade C." }, { "title": "App Store page: Hairly AI: Hairstyle Try On, US storefront", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hairly-ai-hairstyle-try-on/id6754688430", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Source for the description, the in-app purchase prices, the version history and release notes, the ratings and reviews, the age rating, the seller name and the privacy labels." }, { "title": "App Store developer page: Veralix j.d.o.o.", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/veralix-j-d-o-o/id1849640174", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Lists the seller's three apps." }, { "title": "whatsthe.app page for Hairly AI: Hairstyle Try On", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/hairly-ai", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026, including its page data. Revenue and subscription figures \"verified with RevenueCat\", labelled last updated 1 October 2026, through the same connection as TrustMRR (credential type \"revenuecat-trustmrr\", added 8 September 2026). Also the release date, ratings per storefront, prices and the asking price (grade C)." }, { "title": "Veralix website: home page, Hairly AI privacy policy (2 September 2026) and terms of service (26 March 2026)", "url": "https://veralix.lovable.app/privacy-policy", "grade": "C", "how": "The page text loads by script, so it was read from the site's script file on 25 October 2026 (robots.txt allows all agents). Source for the studio description, the target age, the AI services, the pricing-experiment sentence and the age rules. The home page is https://veralix.lovable.app/." }, { "title": "Hairly AI website, home page, FAQ, privacy policy and terms", "url": "https://hairly-ai-showcase.lovable.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "The developer website named on the App Store. The page text loads by script, so it was read from the site's script file on 25 October 2026 (robots.txt allows all agents). Source for the feature list, the website prices, the FAQ on ages and devices, and the screenshot captions. Read again on 26 October 2026 to check its links: it links only to the Hairly AI App Store page." }, { "title": "App Store page: Bodly: Face & Body Editor, US storefront", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bodly-face-body-editor/id6794261129", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the description, prices and age rating on 25 October 2026, to check the studio's other apps." }, { "title": "App Store page: Narcis: AI Photo Generator, US storefront", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/narcis-ai-photo-generator/id6761130524", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the description, prices and age rating on 25 October 2026, to check the studio's other apps." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/3d-agent/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/3d-agent.md", "slug": "3d-agent", "name": "3D-Agent", "country": "Brazil", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI agent for Blender, the free 3D program", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-26", "launchLabel": "October 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$5.9K MRR verified by Stripe at the last sync, October 2026", "sticker": "$5.9K MRR in October 2026", "outcomeUsd": 70596, "months": 12, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders, Guilherme Lima and Hugo Caumo; the company publishes no headcount", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "photos", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "growing", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "3D design" ], "product": "A desktop app for macOS and Windows that connects to the Blender program on the same computer. The user types what they want, for example a sports car or a ramen shop on a rainy street, and an AI agent builds it in the open Blender scene step by step: it reads the scene, runs code, takes screenshots, checks the result and fixes it. The result is normal, editable Blender objects. Newer versions also make images and short videos.", "why": "One-shot text-to-3D generators give a mesh that is hard to edit. 3D-Agent works inside the program that 3D artists already use and builds real Blender objects that they can change. It rents the AI models instead of training its own, sells only paid plans, and limits each plan by prompts and steps, so each prompt has a known maximum cost.", "summary": [ "3D-Agent is an AI agent for Blender. An AI agent here is a program that takes a goal in plain words and then works in many small steps, choosing each step itself: it inspects the 3D scene, writes and runs Python scripts (small programs in the Python language that Blender can execute to create and change objects), renders a test image, looks at it and corrects what is wrong. Blender is a free, open-source program for 3D modeling, animation and rendering. The company sells a desktop app that installs its own Blender extension. Prices are US$19, US$29 or US$89 a month for 100, 200 or 800 prompts, and there is no free plan.", "The site names two co-founders: Guilherme Lima, CEO, who leads product and marketing, and Hugo Caumo, CTO, who writes the Blender and server code. The seller is their Brazilian company, Drexfy Tecnologies LTDA. The product began in October 2025 as a private waitlist. TrustMRR, a site that reads a seller's sales directly from the payment provider (the service that charges the buyer's card) through an API key (a password that lets one program read another program's data), shows the first revenue in December 2025, US$40. On 26 October 2026 it shows monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the subscription revenue that repeats each month) of US$5,883 from 226 active subscriptions, and US$28,889 of revenue in total.", "The money figures on this page are grade A, read from the company's Stripe account. The team, the user count and the technical details are the company's own words, grade C. The page also checks one risk that a reseller of AI models has: the agent runs on OpenAI's models through the company's own servers, and OpenAI's business terms allow such products. It also shows four failed companies that tried to make 3D design or animation easy before AI agents could do the work." ], "factsCaption": "US$5,883 of monthly recurring revenue 12 months after a private waitlist, read from the company's Stripe account by TrustMRR", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value is a TrustMRR figure read from the company's Stripe account through an API key. A grade B value comes from a document of another company. A grade C value is the company's own statement on its website, its changelog or its legal pages. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a waitlist page to US$5,883 of monthly recurring revenue in 12 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "3D-Agent plans on 25 October 2026 (checked again on 26 October 2026), read from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "A prompt is one message that the user sends, with all the steps that the agent runs for it, up to the plan's step limit. Basic is billed monthly only. Pro costs US$264 a year and Ultra US$708 a year. Every plan includes a commercial license. There is no free plan and no free trial; in March 2026 the plans were Free, US$10 and US$100 a month. Customers in China pay with Alipay through Paddle.", "rows": [ [ "Basic", "", "19", "100 prompts a month, 30 steps per prompt, no subagents" ], [ "Pro", "22", "29", "200 prompts a month, 80 steps per prompt, 2 subagents" ], [ "Ultra", "59", "89", "800 prompts a month, 100 steps per prompt, 4 subagents, MCP connection for other AI tools" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 26 October 2026", "value": "US$5,883 from 226 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from Stripe through an API key, last synced 26 October 2026. TrustMRR shows MRR growth of 23.5% in the last 30 days. On 25 October 2026 it showed US$5,806 from 223 subscriptions.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 12 October 2026", "value": "US$4,643 from 195 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "An earlier copy of the same TrustMRR profile, synced 12 October 2026. Calculated: MRR grew 26.7% and the number of subscriptions by 31 in 14 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month", "value": "US$40 in December 2025, US$1,780 in April 2026, US$2,680 in May, US$3,831 in June, US$4,015 in July, US$4,849 in August, US$4,584 in September", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table. October 2026 shows US$5,570 up to the sync on 26 October, so that month is not complete. September was 5.5% below August (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time", "value": "US$28,889", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, to 26 October 2026. The all-time figure equals the 12-month figure, and the sum of the monthly table is also US$28,889 (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 30 days", "value": "US$6,054", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, 26 October 2026, shows growth of 31.5% against the 30 days before. The last 30 days are 1.03 times the current MRR (calculated), so almost all revenue is subscriptions.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the current MRR", "value": "about US$70,596 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$5,883 times 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per subscription", "value": "about US$26 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$5,883 divided by 226. This lies between the US$19 Basic plan and the US$89 Ultra plan, so most subscribers pay for Basic or Pro.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, July to September 2026 against April to June 2026", "value": "US$13,448 against US$8,291", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the TrustMRR monthly table: 1.62 times.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "First month above US$2,000", "value": "May 2026, 7 months after the waitlist", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: October 2025 to May 2026.", "src": [ 1, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue that TrustMRR does not see", "value": "Alipay payments through Paddle", "grade": "C", "note": "The terms say that card payments are sold by Drexfy and processed by Stripe, and that Alipay payments are sold by Paddle as merchant of record. TrustMRR reads only Stripe, so the real revenue can be a little higher.", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Company", "value": "Drexfy Tecnologies LTDA, Brazil", "grade": "C", "note": "The terms: 3D-Agent is a product of Drexfy Tecnologies LTDA, registered in Brazil under CNPJ 49.815.499/0001-84. TrustMRR gives the country as BR.", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 co-founders", "grade": "C", "note": "The about pages name Guilherme Lima (co-founder and CEO) and Hugo Caumo (co-founder and CTO). The footer says Built by Guilherme & Hugo. The site offers a demo with our team but gives no headcount.", "src": [ 5, 6, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No source names an investor or a funding round.", "src": [ 1, 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Users", "value": "more than 13,400 artists, by the company's account", "grade": "C", "note": "Home and pricing pages. The founder-written TrustMRR field says an estimated 10,500 users. Neither figure is verified. TrustMRR shows 223 paying subscriptions.", "src": [ 2, 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "AI models", "value": "GPT-5.6 Sol for new chats since July 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Changelog, version 2.0.23 of 21 July 2026. The FAQ says it runs its own multi-agent system on leading AI models and that users cannot pick the model or bring their own API key. Image models named in October 2026: Nano Banana 2.1, MAI-Image-2.6, Grok Imagine Image 2.0; video: Seedance 2.5.", "src": [ 7, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Do OpenAI's terms allow this kind of product?", "value": "yes, as a Customer Application", "grade": "B", "note": "OpenAI's Services Agreement grants the right to integrate the Services into Customer Applications and make them available to End Users. It forbids reselling access to an Account. 3D-Agent sells prompts inside its own app, and the download page says users never connect their own OpenAI or Anthropic key. No source shows which kind of OpenAI account the company uses.", "src": [ 14, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the waitlist to the October 2026 figure", "value": "12 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: October 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1, 11 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "24 October 2025", "what": "Founding date entered on the TrustMRR profile.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "27 October 2025", "what": "The first saved home page is a private waitlist: 3D-Agent is onboarding in waves, and visitors book a call for early access. The page says it connects Claude AI to Blender.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "December 2025", "what": "First verified revenue: US$40 in the month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "16 January 2026", "what": "The home page calls the product a free beta: up to 3 prompts a day, at most 15 a month, and paid plans with 100 or 1,000 prompts a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "8 March 2026", "what": "The pricing page shows Free, US$10 and US$100 a month, monthly billing only.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "May 2026", "what": "Verified revenue: US$2,680 in the month, the first month above US$2,000.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "21 July 2026", "what": "Version 2.0.23: new chats run on GPT-5.6 Sol, with native multi-agent and Blender tools.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "August 2026", "what": "Verified revenue: US$4,849 in the month. Version 2.1.1 of 24 August adds plugins, a Roblox plugin and recurring Alipay billing for customers in China.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "when": "11 September 2026", "what": "Version 2.1.11: Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Codex and ComfyUI can drive 3D-Agent over MCP.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "12 September 2026", "what": "The current terms take effect. They name Drexfy Tecnologies LTDA as the company behind the product.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "9 to 15 October 2026", "what": "Image and video buttons in the prompt box, a model picker for images with Nano Banana 2.1 as default, and a Library page for all generated images and videos.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "26 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR shows MRR of US$5,883 from 226 active subscriptions, and US$28,889 of revenue since the start.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "An agent inside the artist's own program", "text": "Most text-to-3D tools turn one prompt into one mesh, which is often messy and hard to edit. 3D-Agent works in the user's open Blender scene over many steps, like an assistant that the user briefs, and leaves normal Blender objects with a saved checkpoint after each turn. The user keeps Blender, its files and its export formats." }, { "title": "Rented models, capped work per prompt", "text": "The company does not train models. Its servers run an agent on OpenAI's models and on rented image and video models, and the customer cannot bring a key. Each plan limits prompts per month and steps per prompt (30, 80 or 100), so the cost of the model calls for one prompt has a ceiling." }, { "title": "Paid plans only", "text": "In January 2026 the product was a free beta, and in March 2026 the plans were Free, US$10 and US$100 a month. By October 2026 there is no free plan, the lowest price is US$19, and the FAQ says there is no free trial. In the TrustMRR table, revenue rose from US$910 in March 2026 to US$4,849 in August 2026." }, { "title": "One page for each use", "text": "The site has guide pages for many groups of users: Roblox creators, FiveM and GTA V vehicle modders, architects, 3D printing, retopology and game-engine export. The Ultra plan also lets users of Claude Code, Cursor or Codex call 3D-Agent from those tools. No source says which channel brought most customers." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages: the download page, the docs, the changelog, the terms and the founders' about pages. They are grade C.", "items": [ "A desktop app for macOS 12 or later and Windows 10 or later, installed from a .dmg or .msi file. It installs its own Blender extension, agent_3d, and needs Blender 4.2 or later.", "The agent reads the scene, runs Python in Blender, takes viewport screenshots, checks renders and saves a checkpoint after each turn. Subagents let one turn run several agents in parallel.", "Hugo Caumo's page says he writes the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, the Python operators and the connection layer between language models and Blender. MCP is an open standard that lets an AI assistant call tools in other programs.", "The app sends prompts to the company's servers, which call the models. The changelog names GPT-5.6 Sol for chats, and Nano Banana 2.1, MAI-Image-2.6, Grok Imagine Image 2.0 and Seedance 2.5 for images and video.", "Card payments go through Stripe, with Drexfy as the seller. Alipay payments in China go through Paddle as merchant of record, since August 2026.", "Support and community run in a Discord server with tickets. Video creators who make videos about 3D-Agent can ask for a deal." ], "src": [ 8, 9, 7, 6, 4, 20 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to make 3D design or animation easy for people without professional skills, before AI agents could do the modeling. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Modsy", "years": "2015 to 2022", "funding": "US$72.7M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "3D renderings of a customer's room with new furniture, sold at US$69 to US$199 per room.", "died": "It was sold as AI, but each room needed 2 to 4 hours of work by a human designer. Customer acquisition was expensive and few customers came back.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2521-modsy" }, { "name": "Real Artists", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$3M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A cloud animation studio for independent artists and small studios.", "died": "Large software makers added the same collaboration features to tools that artists already used. Its small customers could not pay enough to support the company.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1073-real-artists" }, { "name": "Fuzzwich", "years": "2007 to 2010", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Animated videos without animation skills, built by drag and drop from ready characters and scenes.", "died": "It did not find a business model or users beyond early adopters, and stronger animation tools and the move to mobile left it behind.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1655-fuzzwich" }, { "name": "Kujiale", "years": "2011 to 2025", "funding": "US$550M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Drag-and-drop 3D design of a home, with fast photorealistic renders and furniture to buy.", "died": "Most Chinese home buyers wanted an expert to design their home, not a tool to do it themselves, and AI tools made its technology old within 18 months.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2371-kujiale" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The four predecessors needed either people or a simplified tool. Modsy promised AI but paid designers for hours per room. Fuzzwich and Kujiale made design easy by limiting the user to ready parts and drag and drop. Real Artists built a new platform and asked artists to move to it, and lost when the big tools added the same features.", "By 2026 a language model could write and run Blender's Python code, look at a render and correct its own work. 3D-Agent uses that ability inside a program that artists already have, instead of replacing it, and it pays for the models per use instead of paying people per job. Two founders could therefore sell a working product for US$19 a month, with no designers on staff and no outside money reported." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. Blender itself is now crowded.", "text": "The pattern is general: take a professional program with a scripting interface and many users, put an AI agent inside it that does multi-step work, and sell prompts by the month. Blender in particular has free competition: open-source Blender MCP servers let general chat assistants control Blender, and 3D-Agent's own FAQ compares itself to them.", "steps": [ "Choose a program that professionals already use, that has a scripting interface, and whose users do slow, repeated work.", "Build an agent that works in the user's own files and leaves normal, editable results, with a checkpoint after each step so mistakes can be undone.", "Rent the models through a provider's API under its business terms, and cap prompts and steps per plan so each prompt has a known maximum cost.", "Start with a waitlist and calls, then a free beta, then paid plans only, and write one guide page for each group of users.", "Let other AI tools call your agent over MCP, so that their users become your customers." ], "open": "Other professional programs with a scripting interface and no strong built-in agent: CAD programs for engineers, video editors, audio workstations, and geographic information systems." }, "watch": [ { "title": "It rents its models", "text": "The agent runs on OpenAI's models and on image and video models from other companies. OpenAI's Services Agreement allows Customer Applications for End Users and forbids reselling access to an Account. The company's pages do not say which kind of account it uses. A change in model prices or terms would change the cost of every prompt." }, { "title": "AI code runs on the user's computer", "text": "The terms say the agent may execute code generated by language models inside Blender, that this execution environment is not a secure sandbox, and that the code could delete Blender files or other computer files. They tell users to keep backups and to use 3D-Agent in a virtual machine, sandbox or isolated user account. One bad deletion could cost the company trust." }, { "title": "A short verified history", "text": "Calculated from TrustMRR on 26 October 2026: 88.7% of all revenue came in the last 6 months, and 52.8% in the last 3 months. September 2026 was 5.5% below August before October rose again. The payments are subscriptions, but no churn figure is public." }, { "title": "Free alternatives", "text": "Open-source Blender MCP servers let general chat assistants such as Claude Desktop control Blender, and one-shot text-to-3D generators make a mesh from one prompt. 3D-Agent's FAQ names both and answers with checkpoints, step limits and its own multi-agent system." }, { "title": "Strict refund terms", "text": "The terms say all prices and all payments are non-refundable, except as set out in the Refund Policy and where the law requires otherwise. There is no free plan or trial, so a new user pays before trying the product." }, { "title": "The same company runs GetFastVisa", "text": "Drexfy Tecnologies LTDA, the company behind 3D-Agent, also operates GetFastVisa, a paid Portugal visa service (from EUR 1,800 per adult) whose home page says: \"Our system automatically monitors and secures the earliest available VFS appointment\", with \"24/7 monitoring\". VFS Global, which runs these appointment centres, states that it \"does not sell visa appointments\" and that appointments \"are free of cost and can be booked only on www.vfsglobal.com\". Guilherme Lima's personal site lists Drexfy as a venture in blockchain and AI finance software and GetFastVisa as a project, and Hugo Caumo's site lists GetFastVisa too. This page judges 3D-Agent alone. On 26 October 2026 the 3D-Agent home, pricing, download and about pages and its Linktree page did not name or link to GetFastVisa; the about pages link to the two founders' personal sites, and those sites link to it. The headcount behind 3D-Agent is not published." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://3d-agent.com/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/3d-agent" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR markdown profile: 3D-AGENT, synced 26 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/3d-agent.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full on 25 October 2026 and again on 26 October 2026 (revenue last synced 26 October 2026); the current figures on this page are from the second reading. Revenue, MRR and subscriptions are read from Stripe through an API key (grade A). The founding date, user estimate and description are founder-written (grade C). The 12 October 2026 figures come from an earlier copy of the same profile in the pipeline's cache." }, { "title": "3D-Agent home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://3d-agent.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product description, the user claim, the FiveM, animation and horror examples, and the footer Built by Guilherme & Hugo." }, { "title": "3D-Agent pricing page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://3d-agent.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for every price and limit in the pricing table and for the payment methods." }, { "title": "3D-Agent Terms and Conditions, effective 12 September 2026", "url": "https://3d-agent.com/terms-and-conditions", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the company name, the sellers for Stripe and Paddle payments, the refund rule and the statements on code execution." }, { "title": "3D-Agent: About Guilherme Lima, co-founder and CEO", "url": "https://3d-agent.com/about/guilherme", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for his role." }, { "title": "3D-Agent: About Hugo Caumo, co-founder and CTO", "url": "https://3d-agent.com/about/hugo", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for his role and the technical work he owns." }, { "title": "3D-Agent changelog, versions from July to October 2026", "url": "https://3d-agent.com/changelog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the model names, the dates of the MCP, plugin, Alipay and image and video releases." }, { "title": "3D-Agent download page", "url": "https://3d-agent.com/download", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the system requirements, the Blender extension, the MCP server on the Ultra plan and the statement that users never connect their own OpenAI or Anthropic key." }, { "title": "3D-Agent docs: FAQ", "url": "https://3d-agent.com/docs/faq", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the multi-agent system, the model policy, the missing free plan and trial, and the comparison with Blender MCP." }, { "title": "3D-Agent docs: Plans and limits", "url": "https://3d-agent.com/docs/plans-and-limits", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the definition of a prompt and a step, the yearly prices and the first-month boost." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine: 3D-Agent home page, 27 October 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20251027004934/https://www.3d-agent.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The earliest saved copy of the site: the private waitlist and the line on Claude AI." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine: 3D-Agent home page, 16 January 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260116150003/https://3d-agent.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the pricing section. Source for the free beta and its prompt limits." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine: 3D-Agent pricing page, 8 March 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260308155505/https://3d-agent.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Free, US$10 and US$100 plans." }, { "title": "OpenAI Services Agreement", "url": "https://openai.com/policies/services-agreement/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the sections on use, accounts and definitions (2.2, 3.1 and the definitions of Customer Application and End User). Used to check whether OpenAI allows a product like 3D-Agent." }, { "title": "Guilherme Lima's personal site (trospix.github.io)", "url": "https://trospix.github.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Linked from his about page. Source for his other ventures, Drexfy and GetFastVisa." }, { "title": "Hugo Caumo's personal site (hcaumo.github.io)", "url": "https://hcaumo.github.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Linked from his about page. Lists 3D-Agent and GetFastVisa as ventures, and earlier fintech and blockchain projects." }, { "title": "GetFastVisa home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://www.getfastvisa.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the description of the visa service, its price and its appointment monitoring." }, { "title": "GetFastVisa legal notice", "url": "https://www.getfastvisa.com/legal-notice", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the statement that Drexfy Tecnologies LTDA operates GetFastVisa." }, { "title": "3D-Agent showcase page", "url": "https://3d-agent.com/showcase", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the FiveM section: a car built in Blender, split into 51 GTA V parts and packaged as a FiveM resource. This is game modding, not a cheating tool." }, { "title": "3D-Agent docs: Content creators", "url": "https://3d-agent.com/docs/content-creators", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Discord tickets and the deals for video creators." }, { "title": "VFS Global: #DoNotFallForFraud", "url": "https://www.vfsglobal.com/en/donotfallforfraud/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. VFS Global's own statement that it does not sell visa appointments." }, { "title": "3D-Agent Linktree page", "url": "https://linktr.ee/3dagent", "grade": "C", "how": "Read on 26 October 2026 to check its links (robots.txt allows ClaudeBot). Linked from every 3D-Agent page; it does not link to GetFastVisa." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/vaultaire/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/vaultaire.md", "slug": "vaultaire", "name": "Vaultaire", "country": "United States", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "Encrypted photo and file vault for iPhone", "aiType": "AI-leveraged", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-26", "launchLabel": "March 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$41K in a single month, October 2026", "sticker": "$41K in one month", "outcomeUsd": 492000, "months": 7, "teamLabel": "1 founder: \"No team, no investors, no advisory board\"", "fundingLabel": "None for Vaultaire (the founder's earlier company PEX was venture funded)", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "photos", "channel": "search", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-leveraged", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Security" ], "product": "An iPhone and iPad app that keeps photos, videos and documents in vaults that are encrypted on the phone. A pattern that the user draws on a 5 by 5 grid opens each vault, and different patterns open different vaults. There is no account and no company server that holds the files or the keys, so the maker cannot open a vault or recover a forgotten pattern. The app itself contains no AI; the founder said that coding agents wrote all of its code and all of the text on its website.", "why": "The founder said he built it for his own need: a place close to the phone for crypto wallet keys and pictures of IDs and birth certificates. He said the older vault apps in the App Store have millions of users and he could not beat them in App Store search, but they ignore the web. So, he said, coding agents publish one guide a day for web searches where his site appears but gets no clicks, and those readers download the app. He said lifetime purchases are most of the money.", "summary": [ "Vaultaire is a photo vault app: an app that stores private photos and files apart from the phone's normal photo library. Most such apps only hide the files behind a PIN screen; Vaultaire encrypts them on the device with AES-256-GCM, a standard method of encryption that also detects if the encrypted data was changed. The key comes from a pattern that the user draws, through PBKDF2, a function that turns a short secret into a long key slowly, so that guessing many patterns takes a long time. The app is free for up to 3 vaults with 100 photos and 10 videos; the App Store page lists Vaultaire Pro at US$1.99 a week, US$5.99 a month, US$19.99 a year or US$39.99 once.", "Rasty Turek built it alone. He grew up in Slovakia, worked for a security company that Google acquired and then at Google, sold an entertainment company to Amazon, and in 2025 sold PEX, a venture-funded copyright company. He told the Starter Story video channel in an interview published on 18 October 2026 that it is his first iOS app, \"mostly thanks to the coding agents\", that it took about three weeks, and that he has not written \"a single line either of code or the text on the web\". The App Store version history starts in March 2026. In the same interview he said the app made US$66 in its first month, then US$41,000 in a single month about six months later, and that it was averaging US$2,000 to US$3,000 a day, with more than 60,000 downloads.", "This page gives the story the grade D, reported, not verified: every revenue figure is a founder statement in one interview on one date. During that interview he showed his App Store Analytics screen to the hosts, and the host said \"You're doing over 40,000 a month\", but no payment processor, buyer or second dated interview has confirmed the figures, and an earlier interview with Indie Hackers could not be read for this page. The story belongs to the collection \"Built with AI\": the product is ordinary privacy software, and AI is the tool that let one person with no iOS experience build and market it. The page also shows earlier privacy products that failed because free products from large companies were good enough for most users." ], "factsCaption": "An encrypted iPhone vault built in about three weeks with coding agents, which its founder said made US$41,000 in one month by October 2026; all figures self-reported in one interview", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is a founder statement that appears in one source only, the Starter Story interview of 18 October 2026, which the AI Money Brief newsletter repeats, and that no payment processor, buyer or second interview confirms. A grade C value is another founder statement in that interview or a fact read on the App Store page or the company's site. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a personal tool for wallet keys to US$41,000 in a month, in about seven months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Vaultaire prices on the US App Store, read 26 October 2026 (grade C)", "note": "All payments go through Apple's in-app purchase. The founder said in October 2026 that the lifetime plan is about 60% of purchases and, he thought, more than 80% of revenue. The yearly plans are shown as a monthly figure, calculated here as the yearly price divided by 12. The App Store also lists an \"Annual Offer\" at US$19.99. Family plans cover an Apple family group.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "up to 3 vaults, 100 photos and 10 videos in total" ], [ "Vaultaire Pro Weekly", "", "1.99 a week", "Pro features" ], [ "Vaultaire Pro Monthly", "", "5.99", "Pro features" ], [ "Vaultaire Pro Annual", "1.67", "", "US$19.99 a year" ], [ "Vaultaire Pro Lifetime", "39.99 one-time", "", "Pro features, no renewal" ], [ "Vaultaire Pro Family Annual", "4.17", "", "US$49.99 a year, Apple family group" ], [ "Vaultaire Pro Family Lifetime", "99.99 one-time", "", "Apple family group" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue in a single month, reported October 2026", "value": "US$41,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Starter Story interview, 18 October 2026. The host says the app made US$41,000 in a single month six months after its first month, and \"You're doing over 40,000 a month\" after the founder showed his App Store Analytics screen. The month is not named, and no source says whether the figure is before or after Apple's commission.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from that month", "value": "US$492,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$41,000 times 12. A single month is not a stable rate, and most of the money is one-time lifetime purchases.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Daily revenue, October 2026", "value": "about US$2,000 to US$3,000 a day", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder in the same interview: \"It's currently averaging around 2 000 to 3 000 a day\"; on the dashboard: \"daily revenue is like hovering around 2 000 these days\". AI Money Brief quotes the lower US$41,000 figure and says the daily figure \"would be higher\".", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue implied by the daily figure", "value": "US$60,000 to US$90,000", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$2,000 and US$3,000 times 30 days. This is higher than the US$41,000 month, so the two founder statements agree only if revenue rose after that month. The headline uses the lower figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the first month", "value": "US$66", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder: \"The first month it made 66 got a couple of downloads\".", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Downloads, October 2026", "value": "just over 60,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder: \"I just passed 60 000 overall downloads\".", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Share of lifetime purchases", "value": "about 60% of purchases, more than 80% of revenue", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder: \"majority of my purchases are for lifetime I will say a good 60 at this point They also account for majority of the revenue north of 80 I think\".", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Conversion to paid users", "value": "lowest on day 1, highest around day 60", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in the interview. He read a download-to-paid rate of 5.47% on day one from his dashboard; the transcript writes it as \"5 47\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Build time and the role of AI", "value": "about three weeks, all code written by coding agents", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder: \"It's my first iOS app mostly thanks to the coding agents It took roughly three weeks\" and \"I literally haven't written a single line either of code or the text on the web Everything is done by one of the coding agents\". AI Money Brief names the agents as Codex and Claude.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "First version in the App Store history", "value": "1.0.2, 13 March 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Version history on the App Store page, read 26 October 2026. The host says the founder started in March.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Web conversion", "value": "about 10% of web visitors, and the web is most of the traffic", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder: \"I have around 10 conversion from the web and the web is the majority of traffic at this point\".", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Content output", "value": "one guide a day", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder: \"essentially publishing one a day and that's it\". He said Google needs about three to four days to register a new guide.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 person", "grade": "C", "note": "About page: \"No team, no investors, no advisory board.\" The app is published by Wraxle LLC.", "src": [ 4, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding for Vaultaire", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "About page. The founder said his previous company, PEX, was venture funded and was sold in 2025.", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "fact": "App Store rating, 26 October 2026", "value": "4.7 out of 5 from 52 ratings; age rating 4+", "grade": "C", "note": "US App Store page. Category Photo and Video.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October 2026 figure", "value": "7 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: March 2026 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Before 2025", "what": "Turek, who grew up in a village of 700 people in Slovakia, moves to Boston to work for a security company that Google acquires, then works on the Gmail team, and later sells an entertainment company to Amazon.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2025", "what": "He sells PEX, a venture-funded company for copyright in music and entertainment.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "March 2026", "what": "He builds Vaultaire, his first iOS app, in about three weeks with coding agents, to store wallet keys and pictures of documents. Version 1.0.2 is in the App Store on 13 March. He sets a price only the day before release, to limit support requests.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "when": "First month", "what": "The app makes US$66 from a few downloads.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "April to May 2026", "what": "Updates add Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Japanese, then seven more languages. The site and the app later read in 31 languages.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "2026", "what": "He builds a daily loop: a command-line tool he wrote, Gum, pulls Google Keyword Planner and search data each morning, and a coding agent writes one guide for a search where the site appears but gets no clicks.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "About six months after launch", "what": "US$41,000 in a single month, the founder showed and the host said.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "18 October 2026", "what": "Starter Story interview: US$2,000 to US$3,000 a day, more than 60,000 downloads, about 60% of purchases on the lifetime plan.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "23 October 2026", "what": "Version 1.1.2 in the App Store, with backup and restore fixes.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Coding agents replaced the iOS experience he did not have", "text": "The founder's background is B2B and enterprise software. He said the app was his first for iOS, possible \"mostly thanks to the coding agents\", and that agents wrote every line of the code and of the website text. That is why one person could ship a native Swift app in about three weeks." }, { "title": "Web search instead of App Store search", "text": "He said the vault apps that lead the App Store are 15 years old or older and that he had no chance to pass them there, but that they ignore the web. His site lists the features and adds guides for long, specific searches such as how to store photos on an iPhone. He said about 10% of web visitors convert and that the web is most of his traffic." }, { "title": "A daily keyword loop run by an agent", "text": "Each morning his tool Gum reads Google Keyword Planner and search data and finds searches where the site is shown but not clicked. An agent writes one guide for such a search and links it from pages that already have traffic. He said he keeps it to one guide a day so that the content stays useful rather than mass-produced." }, { "title": "Trust first, payment later", "text": "The free tier is usable. He said conversion is lowest on the first day and highest around day 60, the opposite of apps that must convert at once. Most buyers choose the US$39.99 lifetime plan, which he said gives more than 80% of revenue." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's interview with Starter Story, the AI Money Brief account of it, the App Store page and the company's own pages. They are grade C.", "items": [ "A native iPhone and iPad app in Swift with UIKit, built in about three weeks with the coding agents Codex and Claude, which, the founder said, wrote all of the code and all of the website copy.", "Encryption on the device: AES-256-GCM for the files under a random master key, PBKDF2 to turn the drawn pattern into a vault key, the iOS Keychain, and a nine-word recovery phrase per vault.", "No company server for the vaults: backup and sync go to the user's own iCloud account through Apple's CloudKit, encrypted before they leave the phone.", "Payments through Apple's in-app purchase, with weekly, monthly, yearly and lifetime plans.", "Marketing by a daily loop: Gum, the founder's own open-source command-line tool, reads Google Keyword Planner and search data; a coding agent writes and links one guide a day.", "Analytics and crash reports are on by default and can be switched off in Settings, the company's pages say. Starter Story lists Cloudflare in the stack; its use is not described." ], "src": [ 1, 2, 4, 5, 3 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold privacy as the main reason to choose them, and failed when free products from large companies were good enough for most people. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Skiff", "years": "2020 to 2024", "funding": "US$14.2M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "End-to-end encrypted email, documents and file storage, as a private alternative to Google Workspace.", "died": "Free incumbents with network effects; privacy was not enough of a difference for most users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2489-skiff" }, { "name": "Tenta", "years": "2015 to 2020", "funding": "US$3M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A private web browser with a built-in VPN.", "died": "Chrome, Firefox and Safari added privacy features for free.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/616-tenta" }, { "name": "Graphite Docs", "years": "2018 to 2020", "funding": "US$400K", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A private alternative to Google Docs built on a blockchain.", "died": "Users chose free and fast over secure and expensive.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1859-graphite-docs" }, { "name": "Neeva", "years": "2019 to 2023", "funding": "US$77M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "An ad-free search engine for US$5 a month, without tracking.", "died": "Too few people paid for private search, and AI chat changed search.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2288-neeva" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the four asked people to replace a free product that they used every day, with privacy as the reason, and needed a large team and venture money to build that replacement. Most users did not switch. Vaultaire does not ask anyone to leave the iPhone, Google Photos or iCloud: it adds one small place for the few files a person most wants to protect, and it uses Apple's own iCloud for backup.", "The cost is different too. The founder said coding agents wrote the app and the site, and the app has no servers, so the business has almost no fixed costs and one person can run it. Its customers come from web searches, which the older vault apps do not compete for, according to the founder. The risk that killed the predecessors is still there in another form: Apple can improve the hidden album in iOS, and Google can change how it ranks the guides." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, for a builder who can judge security code.", "text": "Nothing in the product is new: photo vaults are an old App Store category. What is copyable is the method: let coding agents build a small, single-purpose utility in weeks, then let an agent write one useful guide a day for searches that the large competitors ignore. The part that is not easy to copy is the founder's security background, which a privacy app needs, because a user who loses a pattern or a file to a bug cannot get it back.", "steps": [ "Pick a category that people already search for and already pay for, with old leaders.", "Build a native app with coding agents, and review the parts where a bug loses user data.", "Make a plain site with the features, then add guides for long, specific searches.", "Each day, find searches where the site is shown but not clicked, and publish one guide for one of them.", "Offer a lifetime price next to the subscription, and let the free tier earn trust before asking for money." ], "open": "Other old App Store utility categories whose leaders do little on the web: scanners, file managers, password and document lockers, simple trackers." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline figure, US$41,000 in a single month, rests on one source: Rasty Turek's interview with Starter Story, published 18 October 2026. The same is true of the US$66 first month and the US$2,000 to US$3,000 a day. The AI Money Brief issue of 19 October 2026 only repeats that interview and labels the numbers \"Self-reported\". He showed an App Store Analytics screen on the video, but no payment processor or buyer has confirmed the numbers, the month of the US$41,000 is not named, and his daily figure implies more than that month. A reader could look for a TrustMRR or RevenueCat profile, an App Store Connect report, or a second dated interview, such as the Indie Hackers interview of 8 October 2026 that reportedly gave US$40,000 a month; it could not be read here, because Indie Hackers blocks AI crawlers." }, { "title": "Lifetime revenue does not recur", "text": "He said lifetime purchases are more than 80% of revenue. Each month's money must therefore come from new buyers. AI Money Brief wrote: \"When the traffic stops, so does the revenue.\"" }, { "title": "Traffic depends on Google and on agent-written pages", "text": "The founder said coding agents write all the text on the site and publish one guide a day, and that the web is most of his traffic. He said he limits the number of guides so they are not mass-produced, but a change in Google's ranking could cut the main channel. The site also has comparison pages against ten competing vault apps." }, { "title": "A privacy promise with stated limits", "text": "No source has audited the encryption. The company's own pages say that analytics, crash diagnostics and Apple Ads attribution are \"enabled by default\" and can be turned off, that crash reports can include file names, and that an examiner with the app's files \"can still estimate how many vaults you have\". A forgotten pattern and phrase cannot be recovered. The founder told of a call from an FBI agent whom he could not help." }, { "title": "Country not stated", "text": "The seller is Wraxle LLC. The founder grew up in Slovakia and moved to Boston for work; no source says where he or the company is based now. The country on this page comes from those two facts." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://vaultaire.app/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6758529311" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Starter Story, 18 October 2026: This app is making $2,000 PER DAY (video interview with Rasty Turek, with transcript)", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/stories/this-app-is-making-2-000-per-day", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full: the page and the full transcript. Source for the revenue figures, the downloads, the lifetime share, the role of coding agents, the background and the marketing loop." }, { "title": "AI Money Brief, 19 October 2026: His first iPhone app makes ~$41K a month", "url": "https://www.aimoneybrief.com/newsletter/first-iphone-app-41k-a-month", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on Vaultaire. A newsletter account of the Starter Story interview; source for the names of the coding agents, the stack table and the label \"Self-reported\"." }, { "title": "App Store: Vaultaire: Photo Vault, by Wraxle LLC (US storefront)", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vaultaire-photo-vault/id6758529311", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 26 October 2026. Source for the prices, the rating, the age rating, the seller and the version history." }, { "title": "Vaultaire: About Vaultaire", "url": "https://vaultaire.app/about/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the one-person team, the absence of investors, the encryption design and the analytics statement." }, { "title": "Vaultaire home page", "url": "https://vaultaire.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the features, the free tier and the limits of the privacy promise." }, { "title": "Vaultaire Terms of Use", "url": "https://vaultaire.app/terms/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the lawful-use clause and the subscription terms." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/jetwriter-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/jetwriter-ai.md", "slug": "jetwriter-ai", "name": "Jetwriter AI", "country": "India", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI writing assistant browser extension", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-26", "launchLabel": "December 2022", "outcomeLabel": "US$20K a month, November 2024", "sticker": "$20K MRR, founder-reported", "outcomeUsd": 240000, "months": 23, "teamLabel": "1 founder who built it alone, then a small remote team of hired developers from 2024 (size not stated)", "fundingLabel": "None (bootstrapped, by the founder's statements)", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "ai-model-tools", "channel": "communities", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Writing assistant" ], "product": "A browser extension, called ChatGPT Writer until September 2025, that writes and rewrites text on any website: email replies in Gmail and Outlook, messages in LinkedIn, WhatsApp Web and Slack, grammar fixes, translation and page summaries. It also has a web app. It sends the request to a model from OpenAI, Anthropic or Google, and users can bring their own API key.", "why": "It appeared in December 2022 as a free Chrome extension that put ChatGPT inside the Gmail reply box, and the company says it was the first to do so. The founder says they shared it on Reddit and it grew from there. A free version that used the visitor's own ChatGPT account built a large base of installs, and a paid version on the company's own servers followed in 2023.", "summary": [ "Jetwriter AI is a browser extension, a small program that adds buttons and windows to Chrome, Edge and other browsers, plus a web app. You select text or click its button in Gmail, LinkedIn or WhatsApp Web, type a short instruction, and it writes a reply, fixes grammar, changes the tone, translates or summarizes. The text comes from a large language model, a program trained on a very large amount of text that predicts the next words; Jetwriter calls models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google through their paid interfaces. Until 2 September 2025 the product was called ChatGPT Writer and lived at chatgptwriter.ai.", "Gourav Goyal, a software developer in India who has also built a Notion extension and a VS Code extension, released it in December 2022 as a free extension \"Made by Gourav\". In April 2023 they called it a project they \"solely built\". On Hacker News they wrote on 30 November 2023 that the freemium extension had \"reached $7k MRR recently\", and on 23 November 2024 that it had \"700K downloads with $20K MRR\". MRR means monthly recurring revenue: the money that subscriptions bring in each month. Between those two posts they hired React developers and described the business as \"bootstrapped, profitable\" and remote-first.", "Both revenue figures are short comments by the founder in public forum threads, grade C: they agree with each other and with the growth in installs, but no payment processor, buyer or journalist has confirmed them, and no figure after November 2024 was found. The page also shows earlier companies that built a better window onto someone else's email or browser platform, and why that bet failed for them." ], "factsCaption": "A free Gmail extension that its founder said reached US$7,000 a month in November 2023 and US$20,000 a month in November 2024, both self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a statement by the founder or the company (forum comments, the company's own pages) or a count shown by the Chrome Web Store. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a free Gmail button that used the visitor's own ChatGPT account to a multi-model subscription product, in 23 months to the headline figure. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Jetwriter AI prices for individuals in October 2026, read from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "The free plan gives 15 responses a month from the cheaper models and none from the advanced models. Paid plans meter advanced-model use by its compute cost, so the response counts are the company's estimates for a typical request. The yearly Ultra plan costs US$349 a year, which the page rounds to US$29 a month. The page mentions Team plans but shows no Team price. Users of the browser extension can add their own API key instead.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "15 regular-model responses a month" ], [ "Elite", "14", "18", "about 1,000 advanced-model responses a month, unlimited regular models, 50 Gmail auto-drafts a day" ], [ "Ultra", "29", "39", "about 2,500 advanced-model responses a month, unlimited regular models, 70 Gmail auto-drafts a day" ], [ "Team", "", "", "mentioned on the page, no price shown" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, November 2024", "value": "US$20,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's comment on Hacker News, 23 November 2024, in a thread about growing browser extensions: \"700K downloads with $20K MRR\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the November 2024 figure", "value": "US$240,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$20,000 times 12. This is the headline value on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, November 2023", "value": "US$7,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's comment on Hacker News, 30 November 2023, in a thread for side projects that make US$500 a month: \"I built freemium chatgpt extension.. reached $7k MRR recently.\"", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from November 2023 to November 2024", "value": "about 2.9 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$20,000 divided by US$7,000.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Downloads, August and November 2024", "value": "more than 700,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's hiring posts on Hacker News, 2 August and 2 November 2024, and the founder's comment of 23 November 2024.", "src": [ 1, 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Users on the Chrome Web Store, 5 January 2023", "value": "more than 4,000, rating 4.8 from 9 ratings", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived copy of the store page; the listing was last updated on 4 January 2023.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Users, March and April 2023", "value": "300,000 (25 March) and more than 200,000 (4 April)", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's comments on Hacker News. The two figures do not agree; the second appears in the founder's own freelance profile.", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Users shown on the home page, December 2023", "value": "more than 400,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived copy of chatgptwriter.ai, 3 December 2023.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Users on the Chrome Web Store, October 2026", "value": "500,000, rating 4.1 from about 1,400 ratings", "grade": "C", "note": "The store's own count, read on 25 October 2026. The founder wrote \"over 600,000 downloads\" in March 2026, below the founder's 700,000 of 2024; downloads and current users are different measures.", "src": [ 8, 16 ] }, { "fact": "First price", "value": "free", "grade": "C", "note": "The December 2022 site said \"100% free\": the extension used the visitor's own free ChatGPT account, so the founder paid nothing for the model.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "First paid plan", "value": "a Pro version on the company's servers, by December 2023", "grade": "C", "note": "The December 2023 site: the free version uses your ChatGPT account, and Pro \"uses our dedicated servers instead\". The archived pages do not show the old prices, which loaded by script.", "src": [ 11, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none stated", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder's hiring posts call it \"a bootstrapped, profitable, remote-first AI startup\"; the pricing page in 2026 calls it \"a lean, bootstrapped company with a remote team\".", "src": [ 3, 4, 15 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "the founder alone in April 2023; hired React developers from August 2024; size not stated", "grade": "C", "note": "In April 2023 they listed it among \"Few projects I solely built\". In August and November 2024 they posted jobs for a React developer, including a full-time freelancer. No source gives a headcount.", "src": [ 3, 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Earlier product by the same founder", "value": "Notion Boost: 80,000 downloads and US$10,000 in total revenue", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's comment of 23 November 2024. Not part of this business.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the November 2024 figure", "value": "23 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: December 2022 to November 2024.", "src": [ 1, 9 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "December 2021", "what": "Goyal, based in India, offers freelance work on Hacker News: a full-stack developer and former founder of two startups, in SaaS and health care.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "December 2022", "what": "ChatGPT Writer appears as a free Chrome extension that writes Gmail replies with the visitor's own ChatGPT account. The site says \"100% free\" and \"Made by Gourav\". The company later says it was the first extension to bring ChatGPT into Gmail.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 13 ] }, { "when": "5 January 2023", "what": "The Chrome Web Store page shows more than 4,000 users.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "25 March 2023", "what": "The founder writes on Hacker News that the free extension has 300,000 users.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "4 April 2023", "what": "The founder still looks for freelance work and lists ChatGPT Writer, with more than 200,000 users, among projects they built alone.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "30 November 2023", "what": "The founder writes that the freemium extension reached US$7,000 in monthly recurring revenue.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "December 2023", "what": "The site offers a paid Pro version that runs on the company's servers, works on all websites, and shows more than 400,000 users.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "2 August 2024", "what": "The founder hires a React developer, calls the business bootstrapped and profitable, and lists more than 700,000 downloads and the full technology stack.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "23 November 2024", "what": "The founder writes that the extension has 700,000 downloads and US$20,000 in monthly recurring revenue, and that it grew from a post on Reddit.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "December 2024", "what": "The plans are Free, Pro, Elite and Team, with models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "2 September 2025", "what": "ChatGPT Writer becomes Jetwriter AI on jetwriter.ai. The company says the old name no longer fit a product that uses several model makers and works beyond email.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "500,000 users on the Chrome Web Store; paid plans at US$14 to US$39 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 15, 16 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "First into the Gmail reply box", "text": "In December 2022 this extension put a button in the Gmail reply box that sent the email and a short instruction to ChatGPT and inserted the answer. The company says it was the first extension to do this, and that media, influencers and users took notice. The Chrome Web Store showed more than 4,000 users in early January 2023; the founder counted 300,000 by late March." }, { "title": "Free first, on the user's own account", "text": "The first version used each visitor's own free ChatGPT login, so the founder paid nothing for the model while the extension grew. By December 2023 a paid Pro version ran the requests on the company's own servers, which the site called the best writing experience, and the free version stayed as the way in." }, { "title": "One post, then the store", "text": "The founder said they shared it on Reddit and it grew from there. No source describes paid advertising. Users install it from the Chrome Web Store, where it had 4.1 stars from about 1,400 ratings in October 2026, and the free plan lets them try it before they pay." }, { "title": "Less dependence on one model maker", "text": "By December 2024 the paid plans offered models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, and the 2025 rename removed OpenAI's brand from the product name. A price rise or rule change by one model maker no longer stops the product." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's hiring posts on Hacker News in 2024 and the company's own pages. They are grade C.", "items": [ "The browser extension was built with React, TypeScript and Tailwind CSS, first on the Plasmo extension framework and by November 2024 on WXT. The current extension is under 1 MB.", "The web app uses Next.js, TypeScript and Tailwind CSS, hosted on Vercel, with a PostgreSQL database through Supabase.", "Logins use Firebase Auth, payments use Stripe, and files are stored on Cloudflare R2. Mixpanel, Axiom and Cloudflare Web Analytics measure use.", "The first version called no paid model at all: it used the visitor's own ChatGPT session. The paid version calls the OpenAI interfaces, and later Anthropic and Google models as well.", "Users of the extension can paste their own API key, so they pay the model maker directly.", "The team works remotely in the India time zone and uses GitHub, Figma, Notion, Slack and Google Meet." ], "src": [ 3, 4, 9, 11, 14, 15 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database built a better layer on top of an email client, a browser or a document tool that they did not control. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Xobni", "years": "2006 to 2013", "funding": "US$42M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A smarter inbox and contact search inside Microsoft Outlook.", "died": "Tied to Outlook, which Microsoft improved itself, while users moved to phones. Yahoo bought the remains.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/763-xobni" }, { "name": "Mailbox", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Swipe gestures and snooze to clear your email faster.", "died": "After Dropbox bought it, larger providers with free and smarter email apps passed it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/314-mailbox" }, { "name": "Threadable", "years": "2014 to 2017", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Turn team email threads into an organized discussion.", "died": "Slack moved team discussion out of email, and Threadable ran out of money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1144-threadable" }, { "name": "Socialbrowse", "years": "2008 to 2011", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A browser extension that shares the pages you read with friends in real time.", "died": "Users did not install it while Facebook was where their friends already were.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1229-socialbrowse" }, { "name": "WriteWith", "years": "2007 to 2010", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Several people writing one document at the same time.", "died": "Google Docs built the same thing, for free.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1237-writewith" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the five added a better layer to a tool that belonged to someone else, and the owner of that tool, or a larger platform, built the same feature for free. Jetwriter faces the same risk: Google puts its Gemini model into Gmail and Chrome, and the company's own blog compares Jetwriter with Gemini in Gmail and with \"Ask Gemini\" in Chrome. In 2026 the founder offered it on Hacker News to people \"who don't want to switch to AI browsers\".", "Three things differ. The model makers sell their models to anyone through paid interfaces and want them used, so a writing extension is a paying customer of theirs. Jetwriter is not tied to one model maker or one website: it works on any page and switches between OpenAI, Anthropic and Google models. And a one-person company with remote hired developers needs far less revenue to survive than the venture-funded predecessors: the founder called the business profitable in the 2024 hiring posts, the same year they reported US$20,000 a month in recurring revenue." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The launch, no. The method, partly.", "text": "Being the first ChatGPT button in Gmail was an opening of a few weeks in December 2022, and today the browser and email makers ship their own AI writing features. What can still be copied is the structure: a free tool that costs almost nothing to serve, a paid plan when usage grows, and a product that works across several model makers.", "steps": [ "Find a place where people write every day and a new model is not yet available there, and add a button for it.", "Make the first version free and cheap to serve, for example by letting users bring their own account or API key.", "Post it once where your users already talk, then let the extension store bring the rest.", "Add a paid plan that runs on your own servers with better models, and keep a free tier as the entry point." ], "open": "Writing help inside tools that the large AI companies do not cover well: support desks such as Zendesk and Freshdesk, regional messaging apps, and replies in languages other than English." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Two forum comments, no outside check", "text": "The two revenue figures, US$7,000 a month in November 2023 and US$20,000 a month in November 2024, are short comments by the founder on Hacker News. No payment processor, buyer or journalist has confirmed them, and no later figure was found. A reader could look for a verified revenue profile or a longer interview with the founder." }, { "title": "The platforms can close the window", "text": "Google adds Gemini to Gmail and Chrome, and AI browsers offer the same help without an extension. Every predecessor on this page died when the platform owner built the same feature." }, { "title": "The old name used OpenAI's brand", "text": "OpenAI's brand guidelines say it does not permit its GPT brand in product or company names. The company's rename post of September 2025 gives other reasons: more models, more websites and a web app. It does not mention OpenAI's rules, so the role of the rules in the rename is not known." }, { "title": "Marketing to students", "text": "A company blog post for students, 6 May 2026, says: \"Need help with school work? It writes strong essays, long reports, and clear cover letters.\" The same post answers the question \"Is it cheating to use AI for my college essays?\" with: \"if you copy and paste whole paragraphs of AI text, that is cheating and your teacher will find out.\" Aiolum publishes writing tools marketed to students only when the student marketing also says that handing in AI text as one's own is cheating, as this post does. The home page and pricing page sell the tool for emails and messages, and no page offers to hide AI text from AI detectors." }, { "title": "Numbers that do not line up", "text": "The founder gave 300,000 users in March 2023 and more than 200,000 in April 2023, and 700,000 downloads in 2024 but \"over 600,000\" in March 2026. Downloads, installs and current users are different counts, and the sources do not say which is which." }, { "title": "Team size unknown", "text": "The product was built by the founder alone, and from 2024 they hired developers as freelancers or employees. No source states how many people worked on it when the US$20,000 figure was reached." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://jetwriter.ai/" }, { "kind": "chrome", "url": "https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/pdnenlnelpdomajfejgapbdpmjkfpjkp" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Hacker News comment by jerrygoyal (Gourav Goyal), 23 November 2024, in \"Ask HN: To those with successful browser extension(s), how did you grow it?\"", "url": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/42219767", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the Hacker News search API. Source for the US$20,000 monthly figure, the 700,000 downloads, the Reddit launch and the Notion Boost figures." }, { "title": "Hacker News comment by jerrygoyal, 30 November 2023, in \"Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2023 – Show and tell\"", "url": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/38471679", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the Hacker News search API. Source for the US$7,000 monthly figure." }, { "title": "Hacker News job post by jerrygoyal, 2 November 2024, in \"Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2024)\"", "url": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/42024271", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the bootstrapped and profitable statement, the downloads and the WXT framework." }, { "title": "Hacker News job post by jerrygoyal, 2 August 2024: ChatGPT Writer, React Dev", "url": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/41136727", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the full technology stack and the team tools." }, { "title": "Hacker News freelance profile by jerrygoyal, 4 April 2023, in \"Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (April 2023)\"", "url": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/35436161", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for \"projects I solely built\" and the 200,000 users; links gourav.io and hey@gourav.io, which ties the account to Gourav Goyal." }, { "title": "Hacker News comment by jerrygoyal, 25 March 2023", "url": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/35300078", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 300,000 users of the free extension." }, { "title": "Hacker News freelance profile by jerrygoyal, 1 December 2021", "url": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/29408064", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founder's location in India and earlier startups." }, { "title": "Hacker News comment by jerrygoyal, 9 March 2026", "url": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/47304205", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for \"over 600,000 downloads\" in 2026." }, { "title": "chatgptwriter.ai home page, archived 27 December 2022", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20221227150325/https://chatgptwriter.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on the Wayback Machine. Source for the free first version, the use of the visitor's ChatGPT account and \"Made by Gourav\"." }, { "title": "Chrome Web Store page of ChatGPT Writer, archived 5 January 2023", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20230105154208/https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chatgpt-writer-email-writ/pdnenlnelpdomajfejgapbdpmjkfpjkp", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the user count, rating and update date on the Wayback Machine." }, { "title": "chatgptwriter.ai home page, archived 3 December 2023", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20231203111919/https://chatgptwriter.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on the Wayback Machine. Source for the Pro version, the 400,000 users and \"Founder: Gourav.io\"." }, { "title": "chatgptwriter.ai pricing page, archived 4 December 2024", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20241204065515/https://chatgptwriter.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the plan names and models on the Wayback Machine. The prices loaded by script and are not in the archived copy." }, { "title": "Jetwriter AI blog, 2 September 2025: ChatGPT Writer is now Jetwriter AI", "url": "https://chatgptwriter.ai/blog/chatgpt-writer-is-now-jetwriter-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the rename, its stated reasons and the December 2022 start." }, { "title": "Jetwriter AI home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://jetwriter.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the features, the supported sites, the models and the extension size." }, { "title": "Jetwriter AI pricing page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://chatgptwriter.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the current plans and the bootstrapped, remote-team statement. The old domain serves the same page as jetwriter.ai." }, { "title": "Chrome Web Store page of Jetwriter AI, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/jetwriter-ai-reply-emails/pdnenlnelpdomajfejgapbdpmjkfpjkp", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the overview, the user count and the rating." }, { "title": "Gourav Goyal's personal site, gourav.io, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://gourav.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Confirms that Gourav Goyal is building Jetwriter AI and lists other projects by the same person." }, { "title": "OpenAI brand guidelines, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://openai.com/brand/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on names. Source for the rule against the GPT brand in product names." }, { "title": "Jetwriter AI blog, 6 May 2026: Best AI Tools for Students to Improve Writing, Research & Productivity", "url": "https://chatgptwriter.ai/blog/ai-tools-for-students", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full for the purpose check. Quoted in the watch list." }, { "title": "Jetwriter AI blog index, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://chatgptwriter.ai/blog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the list of posts. Source for the comparisons with Gemini in Gmail and Ask Gemini in Chrome." }, { "title": "Hacker News comments by jerrygoyal, all dates, through the search API", "url": "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?tags=comment,author_jerrygoyal&hitsPerPage=1000", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the comments that mention the product. Source for the 2026 comment about AI browsers." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/elephas/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/elephas.md", "slug": "elephas", "name": "Elephas", "country": "India", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Mac app that answers from your own documents", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-26", "launchLabel": "9 June 2022", "outcomeLabel": "US$150K a year, January 2026", "sticker": "Reported $150K/yr", "outcomeUsd": 150000, "months": 43, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders, Kamban S (builds the app) and Ayush Chaturvedi (marketing); the company blog also lists a content marketer", "fundingLabel": "None found", "primaryFactor": "Search traffic", "group": "documents-data", "channel": "search", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Productivity" ], "product": "A desktop app for the Mac that reads the user's own files (PDFs, Word documents, spreadsheets, notes, web pages) and answers questions about them, with a citation to the page each answer came from. The files stay on the computer. The user chooses which AI writes the answer: the company's own service, a model provider paid with the user's own key, or a model that runs on the Mac.", "why": "Ayush Chaturvedi said in a Starter Story interview published in January 2026 that the app made US$150,000 a year, and that growth came in two phases: posts in Reddit communities first, then pages that rank in Google. The first version came out in June 2022, months before ChatGPT, as a writing helper that worked inside every Mac app. When chat apps became free, the founders moved the product toward answering from the user's own documents, a job the general chat apps did not do on the computer.", "summary": [ "Elephas is a Mac app that turns a person's own files into a knowledge base, a searchable collection of documents that an AI can read before it answers. The app calls one collection a \"Brain\". You add PDFs, Word files, notes or web pages, ask a question in plain language, and the answer cites the file and page it came from. The documents stay on your computer. Only the question and a few matching passages go to an AI model, after names, email addresses and phone numbers are replaced by placeholders. You can also use your own API key, a password that lets a program use a model provider such as OpenAI on your own account, or a local model, an AI model downloaded to the Mac, so that nothing leaves the computer.", "Kamban S, a developer in India, posted the first beta on Hacker News on 9 June 2022 as a writing assistant that worked inside Mail, Pages, Notes and other apps, with each user's own OpenAI key. In November 2022 he told Analytics India Magazine that it had reached US$1,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Ayush Chaturvedi joined as a marketing co-founder. In a Starter Story video published on 21 January 2026, he said the app was making US$150,000 a year, and the video title put it at US$13,000 a month. The app is sold by Liberation Softwares LLP, a company registered in Chennai, India.", "The US$150,000 figure is a founder statement in one interview, so this page grades it D, reported and not verified. No payment processor, buyer or journalist has confirmed it. In 2026 the company replaced the app that earned that money with a new desktop app that only answers from documents and is sold by monthly plans. The page also shows what happened to earlier companies that sold a knowledge or writing tool next to products that large platforms gave away." ], "factsCaption": "A Mac writing and document assistant that the co-founder said made US$150,000 a year in January 2026, with one earlier figure from November 2022", "factsRead": "How to read this table: grade D values rest on one founder interview, or on a third-party estimate with no second source. Grade C values are statements by the founders or the company's own pages. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a beta posted on Hacker News to a reported US$150,000 a year, in 43 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Elephas prices in October 2026, from the company's pricing page and the App Store listing of the earlier app (grade C)", "note": "The new desktop app has a 7-day free trial with no card. Personal and Professional include a monthly amount of Elephas AI; after that the user can continue with an own API key or the on-computer model. Team plans use Elephas AI only. The earlier app is no longer sold on the company's website but is still sold on the App Store at the prices below. In June 2025 the website sold the earlier app from US$8.99 a month, with a lifetime licence at US$129.", "rows": [ [ "Personal", "15", "19", "1 computer; Elephas AI included" ], [ "Professional", "24", "29", "3 computers; twice the included AI usage; encrypted sync" ], [ "Team", "24 per person", "29 per person", "shared Team Brains; the owner counts as one seat" ], [ "Earlier app, Standard (App Store)", "15.83", "19", "billed US$190 a year" ], [ "Earlier app, Pro (App Store)", "32.50", "39", "billed US$390 a year" ], [ "Earlier app, Pro Plus (App Store)", "40.83", "49", "billed US$490 a year" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue a year, as stated in January 2026", "value": "US$150,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Ayush Chaturvedi in the Starter Story video published on 21 January 2026; the video description reads \"Ayush built Elephas, an AI app that's making $150K/year\". One interview, no second source. The recording date is not stated.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue a month, video title", "value": "about US$13,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Video title \"How I Built a $13K/Month SaaS\". ProvenStartups, which watched the video, writes \"about $12K/month currently\".", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly figure from the yearly one", "value": "US$12,500", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$150,000 divided by 12. It agrees with the US$12,000 to US$13,000 a month said in the same video.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue screens shown on camera", "value": "about US$110,000 on Gumroad for the current year and about US$12,000 on the Mac App Store", "grade": "D", "note": "As described by ProvenStartups from the video. A founder showing his own dashboard; this page could not view the screens itself, and the period of \"current year\" is not stated.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue attributed to Google search, 2023", "value": "about US$70,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Co-founder in the video, as summarised by ProvenStartups.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue after six months", "value": "US$3,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Co-founder in the video, as summarised by ProvenStartups: Reddit posts brought the first customers.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, November 2022", "value": "US$1,000, with more than 200 people using it every day", "grade": "C", "note": "Kamban S to Analytics India Magazine, 15 November 2022, about five months after the beta. The article says Kamban is the name he goes by.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Website visits", "value": "about 180,000 a year", "grade": "D", "note": "Cited in the video, as summarised by ProvenStartups.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "People using it", "value": "more than 3,000", "grade": "C", "note": "\"3000+ people trust Elephas\" on the June 2025 pricing page; \"Trusted by 3,000+ professionals\" on the October 2026 home page.", "src": [ 12, 7 ] }, { "fact": "First public version", "value": "Beta posted on Hacker News, 9 June 2022, 21 points", "grade": "C", "note": "Kamban S: \"Yes, users need to input their own OpenAI API keys.\"", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Prices in June 2025", "value": "from US$8.99 a month; lifetime licence US$129", "grade": "C", "note": "Wayback copy of the pricing page, 24 June 2025. Pro was US$14.99 and Pro+ US$18.99 a month.", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "fact": "Prices in October 2026", "value": "US$19 a month (Personal) to US$29 per person a month (Team)", "grade": "C", "note": "Company pricing page. About 20% less when billed yearly.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Where the earlier app was sold", "value": "own website (licences through Gumroad), Setapp, Mac App Store, iOS App Store", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms of use name Gumroad and the Apple App Store; ProvenStartups lists Setapp from the video.", "src": [ 10, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Company", "value": "Liberation Softwares LLP, India, founded 2021", "grade": "C", "note": "About page, terms of use and privacy policy. The terms are governed by the laws of India.", "src": [ 9, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 co-founders; the blog lists a content marketer", "grade": "C", "note": "Ness Labs names both co-founders. Kamban S told Website Planet: \"We don't want to have more than 10 people.\" No source gives a headcount at January 2026.", "src": [ 4, 5, 15 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "No source read for this page mentions investors or a funding round.", "src": [ 2, 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Latka's revenue estimate, June 2024", "value": "US$15 million a year", "grade": "D", "note": "A third-party estimate; Latka says the company \"has not published its revenue\". It is 100 times the founder's own figure and should be ignored.", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the beta to the January 2026 figure", "value": "43 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: June 2022 to January 2026.", "src": [ 6, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "9 June 2022", "what": "Kamban S posts \"Show HN: Personal AI Writing Assistant for Mac\". It fixes grammar, rewrites sentences and drafts emails inside other Mac apps, using each user's own OpenAI key.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "July 2022", "what": "A second Show HN post for \"Elephas V2\", and a third that links to the app's Gumroad page.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "15 November 2022", "what": "Analytics India Magazine reports US$1,000 in monthly recurring revenue and more than 200 daily users. The app is written in Swift and does not send text to the company's servers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "2023", "what": "Ayush Chaturvedi is co-founder for marketing; Starter Story's summary dates his start to 2023, while he told Ness Labs that Kamban asked him the day after the first launch. In the 2026 video he said that Reddit brought the app to US$3,000 a month in six months and that Google search brought about US$70,000 in 2023.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 14, 2 ] }, { "when": "7 February 2024", "what": "Ayush Chaturvedi tells Ness Labs that \"Super Brain\", chat with a collection of one's own files and notes, is the most loved feature.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "24 June 2025", "what": "The pricing page sells plans from US$8.99 a month and a lifetime licence at US$129, and says 3,000+ people trust Elephas.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "21 January 2026", "what": "Starter Story publishes the interview in which Ayush Chaturvedi says the app makes US$150,000 a year, about US$12,000 to US$13,000 a month.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "A new desktop app answers only from documents, adds a Team plan and its own Elephas AI service on open-source models. The earlier app is no longer sold on the website.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 8, 10, 11 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Inside every app, not in a browser tab", "text": "The first version sat in the Mac menu bar and worked on selected text in Mail, Pages, Slack or Google Docs. In June 2022 the large models were only reachable through an API, so a native app with a keyboard shortcut was a real improvement over copying text into a web page." }, { "title": "The user's own key", "text": "From the first day, users entered their own OpenAI API key. The company did not pay for model usage and did not store users' text, so a small team could sell it at a low price and keep most of the revenue." }, { "title": "Reddit first, Google search later", "text": "In the 2026 interview the co-founder said that short demonstrations in niche Reddit communities brought the first US$3,000 a month, and that search pages later grew revenue to about US$12,000 a month, as ProvenStartups reported. The company blog now has close to 300 posts, many of them comparisons and lists of AI tools." }, { "title": "Answers from your own files", "text": "When ChatGPT became free, a writing helper alone was easy to replace. The founders put the weight on \"Super Brain\": answers from the user's own documents, kept on the computer, with citations. The 2026 app does only this." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founders' interviews and the company's own pages. They are grade C.", "items": [ "A native Mac app written in Swift, according to Kamban S in November 2022. Later versions ran on the iPhone and iPad, with an AI keyboard for iOS.", "The earlier app sent requests to the model provider that the user chose, with the user's own key. The privacy policy lists OpenAI, Anthropic and Google for that app, plus local models for offline work.", "The 2026 app has three routes: Elephas AI, which the privacy policy says runs on open-source models in the company's own Amazon Web Services environment behind a gateway on Cloudflare; the user's own key for OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, Groq, Mistral and others; or a downloaded model of about 1.3 to 5.7 GB that runs on the Mac.", "Before a question leaves the computer, names, email addresses and phone numbers are replaced by placeholders and restored in the answer. The company says this works best in English and is not a guarantee.", "Account records are kept by Supabase and anonymous usage reports by PostHog, according to the privacy policy.", "Licences for the earlier app were sold through Gumroad, the Apple App Store and Setapp. Kamban S told Analytics India Magazine that he made the product demo videos with AI." ], "src": [ 3, 10, 11, 13, 2 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold a knowledge, writing or search tool that a large platform or a free AI product later made unnecessary. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Draft", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A simple writing and editing tool for writers.", "died": "Google Docs added the same features for free inside a suite that people already used.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1605-draft" }, { "name": "Kippt", "years": "2012 to 2017", "funding": "US$400K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Save and organise links to fight information overload.", "died": "Pocket and Evernote covered the same need with more features, and its social sharing did not bring new users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/278-kippt" }, { "name": "Niles", "years": "2017 to 2020", "funding": "US$2.8M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A bot in Slack that answers questions from a company's own knowledge.", "died": "Slack and knowledge tools such as Guru and Confluence added similar answers themselves, and AI features became cheap.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1031-niles" }, { "name": "Kite DevTool", "years": "2014 to 2024", "funding": "US$21M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "AI code completion inside the programmer's editor.", "died": "It never made a free tool pay, and GitHub Copilot arrived with a much stronger model and a large platform behind it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2491-kite-devtool" }, { "name": "Neeva", "years": "2019 to 2023", "funding": "US$77M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A paid search engine with no ads, sold on privacy.", "died": "Too few people paid for search, the cost of each new user was high, and ChatGPT changed what people expected from search.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2288-neeva" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the five sold one useful piece of work, writing, saving, answering or searching, and a larger platform gave the same piece away inside a product people already used. Elephas faced the same thing: the Starter Story breakdown mentions a wave of cancellations when ChatGPT became popular, and the 2026 home page compares the app directly with ChatGPT, Claude and NotebookLM.", "Two things differ. The model is rented, not built: the user's own key, or open-source models in the company's cloud account, so the team carried no research cost and little usage cost, which the funded predecessors could not say. And the product moved to a job the free chat apps do not do on the computer: keeping confidential files local, hiding personal details before a cloud model sees them, and citing the page of every answer. The co-founder said that this combination, sold mostly through search pages, reached US$150,000 a year with two founders and no investors that any source names." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The early timing, no.", "text": "A native app around a public AI API was easy to sell in mid-2022 because almost nothing else existed; today every model maker ships its own desktop app. What can still be copied is the structure: a narrow job for a group that cannot paste its files into a chatbot, no model cost carried by the company, and customers found through community posts first and search pages later.", "steps": [ "Pick users whose documents must not leave their computer, such as lawyers, accountants or consultants, and build for that rule.", "Let users bring their own API key or run a local model, so that model usage is never your largest cost.", "Post short demonstrations of one concrete use in the online communities where those users talk, and answer every reply.", "Write search pages that answer the questions those users type into Google, and keep them updated." ], "open": "Private, local AI for other regulated groups: medical practices, auditors, patent attorneys, and Windows users, whom Elephas does not serve yet." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The figure of US$150,000 a year rests on one source: Ayush Chaturvedi's Starter Story interview, published on 21 January 2026, with a recording date that is not stated. The Gumroad and Mac App Store screens shown in it were described by ProvenStartups; this page could not view them. The only other dated revenue figure is US$1,000 a month in November 2022, from Analytics India Magazine. Latka's estimate of US$15 million a year disagrees by a factor of 100. A reader could look for a payment-processor profile (TrustMRR had none for Elephas on 25 October 2026), Setapp or App Store figures, or a second interview with a later date." }, { "title": "A new app replaced the one that earned the money", "text": "The reported revenue came from the earlier app, which included writing tools and was sold partly as lifetime licences. In 2026 the company launched a separate app with new accounts and monthly plans, and earlier licences do not carry over. How many customers move is unknown." }, { "title": "Free AI products cover much of the same work", "text": "ChatGPT, Claude and Google's NotebookLM read uploaded documents and cite them. Elephas's answer is local storage, hidden personal details and on-computer models. The 2026 app also uses one model chosen by the company for its own AI service, so answer quality depends on open-source models." }, { "title": "Marketing aimed at students", "text": "The company blog markets the app to students. A list of AI homework helpers calls Elephas \"the ultimate AI-powered homework and study assistant for Mac users\". The post on essay apps ends: \"Elephas is hands down the best ChatGPT app for essay writing in 2026.\" The same post also says: \"However, submitting AI-generated content as entirely your own work is considered cheating.\" Aiolum publishes writing tools marketed to students only when the student marketing also says that handing in AI text as one's own is cheating, as this post does. No page read for this story sells AI-detector bypass or \"undetectable\" text." }, { "title": "Search traffic is not owned", "text": "The co-founder said in the interview that search pages brought most of the growth. A change in Google's ranking, or AI answers that keep people on the search page, can reduce that traffic without warning." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://elephas.app/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6741066105" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Starter Story on YouTube, 21 January 2026: How I Built a $13K/Month SaaS (interview with Ayush, Elephas)", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4BS_UiTBPw", "grade": "D", "how": "Read the watch page: title, date, description and chapter list. The transcript was not read. Source for the US$150,000 a year." }, { "title": "ProvenStartups case page: Elephas, $150K/year (founder-reported, captured 26 September 2026)", "url": "https://provenstartups.com/projects/elephas-local-ai-knowledge-assistant", "grade": "D", "how": "Read the free sections in full. A summary of the Starter Story video. Source for the on-camera Gumroad and App Store figures, the 2023 search revenue, the first US$3,000 a month and the sales channels." }, { "title": "Analytics India Magazine, 15 November 2022: Satoshi of AI: Kamban, an India-based AI Writing Tool Developer", "url": "https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-features/meet-satoshi-of-ai-kamban-a-chennai-based-ai-writing-assistant-developer", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview. Source for the US$1,000 in monthly recurring revenue, the Swift code and the user's own OpenAI keys." }, { "title": "Ness Labs, 7 February 2024: Augmenting Human Creativity with Ayush Chaturvedi, Co-Founder of Elephas", "url": "https://nesslabs.com/elephas-featured-tool", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Co-founder interview. Source for the founding account and the Super Brain feature." }, { "title": "Website Planet: Elephas Founder Kamban S On Freedom, Friction And Saving Content Costs (undated; republished by Superframeworks on 24 September 2024)", "url": "https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/elephas-interview/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder interview. Source for the team rule, the Reddit reaction and the SEO effort." }, { "title": "Hacker News, 9 June 2022: Show HN: Personal AI Writing Assistant for Mac, and later posts by the same account", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31678205", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the post and the founder's replies through the Hacker News search API (hn.algolia.com). Source for the launch date and the user's own OpenAI keys." }, { "title": "Elephas home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://elephas.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product, the three AI routes, the user count and the comparison with ChatGPT, Claude and NotebookLM." }, { "title": "Elephas pricing page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://elephas.app/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the current plans." }, { "title": "Elephas about page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://elephas.app/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the company name and the founding year." }, { "title": "Elephas terms of use and privacy policy, last updated October 2026", "url": "https://elephas.app/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both in full (terms at https://elephas.app/terms-of-use). Source for Liberation Softwares LLP, the AI providers, Gumroad and the service providers." }, { "title": "Elephas: Using the earlier Elephas Mac app?, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://elephas.app/classic", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the differences between the earlier app and the 2026 app." }, { "title": "Elephas pricing page, Wayback Machine copy of 24 June 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250624093807/https://elephas.app/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 2025 prices, the lifetime licence and the user count." }, { "title": "Apple App Store listings of the Elephas apps and the developer page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/elephas-secure-ai-for-docs/id6741066105", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the listings of the earlier app and its iOS version, and the developer's other apps (BeeMind, AI Deck). Source for the App Store prices and the providers named." }, { "title": "Starter Story: How Elephas Co-Founders Built a Leading AI Writing Assistant for Mac", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/elephas-breakdown", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the free part in full. A compiled summary with no revenue figure. Source for the 2023 start of the co-founder and the churn after ChatGPT." }, { "title": "Elephas blog posts aimed at students: Top 10 AI Tools for Students (26 December 2024) and Best ChatGPT Apps for Essay Writing (24 October 2024)", "url": "https://elephas.app/blog/best-ai-tools-homework", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both in full (second at https://elephas.app/blog/best-chatgpt-app-essay-writing). Source for the marketing to students and the content marketer role." }, { "title": "Latka company page: Elephas revenue estimate", "url": "https://getlatka.com/companies/elephas.app", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. A third-party estimate that the page itself marks as an estimate." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/goodie-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/goodie-ai.md", "slug": "goodie-ai", "name": "Goodie AI", "country": "United Kingdom (company registered in England and Wales)", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI food-label scanner app", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-26", "launchLabel": "9 March 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$178.9K in verified revenue since launch, October 2026", "sticker": "$178.9K verified revenue", "outcomeUsd": 178939, "months": 19, "teamLabel": "1 named founder, who is the company's sole director; the company accounts give no employees to July 2025; headcount not published", "fundingLabel": "No equity round found; a charge in favour of Braavo Capital, Inc. registered in August 2026", "primaryFactor": "Personal scores", "group": "health-appearance", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Food and nutrition" ], "product": "An iPhone, iPad and Android app. The user takes a photo of a food label or scans a barcode, and the app lists hidden sugars, seed oils, additives, FODMAPs, allergens and ultra-processed ingredients, then gives the product a score from 0 to 100 for the goals and diets that the user chose. The app is free to install, but the analysis results need a subscription.", "why": "It turns a label that most shoppers cannot read into one personal number, for diets that a general calorie app does not cover: low FODMAP, seed-oil-free, gluten-free, vegan. The store page says that analysis needs a subscription, so every active user pays. Verified revenue reached US$23,122 in its best month, February 2026, and US$178,939 in total, read from the app's billing account.", "summary": [ "Goodie AI is a phone app that reads food labels for the user. You take a photo of the ingredient list or the nutrition table, and the app answers with what it found: hidden sugars, seed oils, additives, FODMAPs (short-chain carbohydrates that some people with irritable bowel syndrome avoid), allergens and ultra-processed ingredients. Each product gets a score from 0 to 100 for the goals the user set, such as \"Vegan? Gluten-free? Low FODMAP?\", in the words of the App Store page. Reading a photographed label and judging it against a person's goals is the work of a multimodal model, a large language model that accepts images as well as text; the store page says the app is \"Powered by frontier AI models\" and does not name them. The app is free to install with in-app purchases, payments made inside the app and collected by Apple or Google, from US$4.99 a week to US$69.99 a year.", "The seller is Fantera Technologies Ltd, a company incorporated in England and Wales on 15 July 2024, whose only director is Dmytro Chupryna. The listing site whatsthe.app names \"Dimitri Chupryna\" as the founder and gives 9 March 2025 as the worldwide release date. The company's first accounts, to 31 July 2025, give an average of no employees, including directors. TrustMRR, a service that reads revenue through the seller's own billing account, shows US$12,786 in November 2025, a best month of US$23,122 in February 2026, US$16,019 in August 2026, and a fall to US$10,437 in September. By 27 October 2026 the total was US$178,939, and the monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the monthly value of all active subscriptions) was US$12,197 from 3,846 subscriptions. The app was listed for sale on TrustMRR at US$100,000.", "The revenue figures are grade A: TrustMRR and whatsthe.app both read them through an API key from RevenueCat, the subscription-management service that records the app's store purchases, and their readings agree. The company facts are from the UK company register, grade B. The team size after July 2025, the marketing channels and the funding status come from the founder's own profile text, grade C. The page also shows earlier companies that sold personal nutrition advice or phone scanning, and why they failed." ], "pricing": { "caption": "Goodie AI in-app purchases in October 2026, from the US App Store page (grade C); monthly equivalents calculated on this page", "note": "The App Store page says: \"ANALYSIS RESULTS REQUIRE A SUBSCRIPTION.\" It lists ten purchases, among them three yearly prices (US$39.99, US$49.99 and US$69.99), a monthly promotion and a purchase called Unlimited at US$34.99 whose period is not stated. The page does not say which price a given user sees; apps often test several prices at once. Apple or Google collects the money, and the TrustMRR profile does not say whether its figures are before or after the store commission.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "install only; analysis results require a subscription" ], [ "Weekly Pro", "", "21.62", "US$4.99 a week; monthly figure calculated" ], [ "Monthly Pro", "", "9.99", "also sold as a Monthly (Promotion) at the same price" ], [ "Quarterly Pro", "", "10.00", "US$29.99 every three months; monthly figure calculated" ], [ "Yearly Pro", "3.33 to 5.83", "", "US$39.99, US$49.99 or US$69.99 a year; monthly figures calculated" ], [ "Yearly Discounted", "2.50", "", "US$29.99 a year; monthly figure calculated" ], [ "Unlimited", "", "", "US$34.99; the period is not stated" ] ] }, "factsCaption": "US$178,939 in verified revenue in the 19 months after launch, with a best month of US$23,122 in February 2026 and a fall of about half in the last 30 days; the money is read from the billing account, the team size is not published", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR or whatsthe.app from the app's RevenueCat account through an API key. A grade B value is a record in the UK company register. A grade C value is what the founder, the company or a store page states. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a company formed in July 2024 to US$178,939 of verified revenue from one food-scanner app, 19 months after its release. Each entry carries its grade.", "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time, to 27 October 2026", "value": "US$178,939", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from the app's RevenueCat account through an API key; revenue last synced 27 October 2026 at 00:04 UTC. Last 12 months: US$151,935. The profile does not say whether the store commission is already taken off.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 27 October 2026", "value": "US$12,197 from 3,846 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot, with a 30-day MRR change of -5.0%. MRR spreads each yearly or quarterly subscription over its months, so it can be higher than the cash that arrives in one month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month", "value": "Nov 2025 US$12,786; Dec US$8,003; Jan 2026 US$17,371; Feb US$23,122; Mar US$15,746; Apr US$13,284; May US$9,801; Jun US$8,593; Jul US$10,279; Aug US$16,019; Sep US$10,437; Oct US$4,947 to 27 October UTC", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table. The public table shows only the last twelve months.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before November 2025", "value": "US$28,551", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the all-time US$178,939 minus the US$150,388 that the twelve months in the table add up to. The months from March to October 2025 are not shown one by one.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Best month", "value": "US$23,122 in February 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 30 days", "value": "US$5,768, down 48.7% from the 30 days before", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. Last 7 days: US$785. Last 3 months: US$32,402. Last 6 months: US$60,077. The daily table shows US$27.65 on 26 October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Fall from the best month", "value": "September 2026 was 54.9% below February 2026", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: (23,122 - 10,437) / 23,122 = 54.9%. The August figure of US$16,019 was a partial recovery.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR per active subscription", "value": "about US$3.17 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 12,197 / 3,846. This is close to the yearly plans (US$2.50 to US$5.83 a month), so most subscribers seem to be on yearly plans. MRR times twelve is US$146,364 a year.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Second verified reading, 2 October 2026", "value": "US$14,485 in the last 28 days; MRR US$13,298 from 3,859 active subscriptions; US$173,800 all time", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app: \"All metrics are verified with RevenueCat. Last updated: Oct 2, 2026\". Its all-time figure is shown as \"AR $173.8K\". It agrees with the TrustMRR series.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Where the revenue figures come from", "value": "RevenueCat, through an API key; merchant of record: no", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR's verification section. RevenueCat records each store purchase; Apple and Google are the merchants that charge the customer. No Google Analytics, DataFast or Search Console connection.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "50.0%", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot. Revenue is verified, but the costs behind a margin are not read from a payment provider, so this page grades it C.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Listed for sale", "value": "US$100,000 on TrustMRR, first listed 11 September 2026; US$250,000 on whatsthe.app, reduced from US$340,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Asking prices set by the seller. TrustMRR shows 10 offers received and a revenue multiple of 1.4x; whatsthe.app shows \"1.4 x revenue\" and 0 inquiries. The two prices do not agree.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Release", "value": "9 March 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "whatsthe.app: \"Worldwide Release Date: March 9, 2025\" and \"Business Operations Started Mar 2025\". The App Store version history shown goes back only to version 3.0 of 6 March 2026.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Prices", "value": "US$4.99 a week to US$69.99 a year", "grade": "C", "note": "The App Store in-app purchase list, read 27 October 2026. Store description: \"ANALYSIS RESULTS REQUIRE A SUBSCRIPTION.\"", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Ratings", "value": "4.9 from about 1,000 ratings on the US App Store; 4.8 from 144 reviews and 1K+ downloads on Google Play", "grade": "C", "note": "Store pages read 27 October 2026. whatsthe.app counts about 1,700 ratings across countries, 508 of them in the UK store.", "src": [ 3, 4, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Age rating and category", "value": "9+, Health & Fitness (App Store); Everyone, Food & Drink (Google Play)", "grade": "C", "note": "The App Store page adds: \"Contains Health or Wellness Topics\".", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Seller and company", "value": "Fantera Technologies Ltd, England and Wales, incorporated 15 July 2024", "grade": "B", "note": "UK company register: active private limited company, nature of business \"62012 - Business and domestic software development\". The App Store page shows \"Seller Fantera Technologies Ltd\" and the same copyright holder.", "src": [ 5, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Founder and director", "value": "Dmytro Chupryna, sole director since 15 July 2024", "grade": "B", "note": "UK company register: \"Officers: 1 officer / 0 resignations\". whatsthe.app names the founder as \"Dimitri Chupryna\", and the developer's replies to App Store reviews give a contact address at fantera.app with the first name Dimitri.", "src": [ 5, 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Employees, 15 July 2024 to 31 July 2025", "value": "none", "grade": "B", "note": "Micro-entity accounts filed 14 April 2026: \"Average number of employees, including directors, during the period was: NIL\". The balance sheet at 31 July 2025 shows net liabilities of £5,136. No later headcount was found.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Other owners", "value": "a second person with significant control until 30 April 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "Filing history: that person ceased to be a person with significant control on 30 April 2026. Per this site's rule on people, the name is not given here.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "no equity round found; a floating charge in favour of Braavo Capital, Inc., created 27 August 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "The charges register shows the charge as outstanding. A charge is a security that a company gives to a lender or financier. The founder's TrustMRR profile says \"Funding: Bootstrapped\" (grade C).", "src": [ 7, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Other apps by the seller", "value": "Unmute - AI Speaking Coach; Kikimojo", "grade": "C", "note": "The App Store's \"More by Fantera\" section.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Marketing channels", "value": "TikTok, Meta Ads, Instagram", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder-written part of the TrustMRR profile. No source says how many customers each channel brought.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from release to the October 2026 figure", "value": "19 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 9 March 2025 to 27 October 2026 is 597 days, about 19.6 months.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "15 July 2024", "what": "Fantera Technologies Ltd is incorporated in England and Wales, with Dmytro Chupryna as its only director.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "when": "2 September 2024", "what": "The company's privacy notice describes its first product, Fantera, \"A web app that lets fans share unique experiences with creators.\"", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "9 March 2025", "what": "Goodie AI is released worldwide, according to whatsthe.app.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "31 July 2025", "what": "End of the company's first accounting period: no employees, including directors, and net liabilities of £5,136.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "18 August 2025", "what": "A one-star App Store review complains that the app is not free and needs a membership.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "US$12,786 in verified revenue, the first month in the public TrustMRR table. US$28,551 had come in before.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "February 2026", "what": "Best month: US$23,122.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "6 March 2026", "what": "Version 3.0, the oldest version that the App Store history shows.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "April to July 2026", "what": "Revenue falls to between US$8,593 and US$13,284 a month. On 30 April a second person with significant control leaves the company.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "when": "August 2026", "what": "US$16,019 in verified revenue. On 27 August the company gives a floating charge to Braavo Capital, Inc.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "when": "11 September 2026", "what": "The app is listed for sale on TrustMRR at US$100,000. Version 3.5.4 follows on 15 September.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "when": "2 October 2026", "what": "whatsthe.app reads US$14,485 in the last 28 days and an MRR of US$13,298 from RevenueCat.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "27 October 2026", "what": "US$178,939 all time, MRR of US$12,197 from 3,846 subscriptions, and 48.7% less revenue in the last 30 days than in the 30 days before. The company's website answers \"DEPLOYMENT_PAUSED\".", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 10 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A label becomes one personal number", "text": "Food labels list ingredients in small print and in technical names. Goodie reads the photo and answers with a score from 0 to 100 for the goals the user picked, for example low FODMAP, vegan or no seed oils. The App Store page calls it \"100X MORE PERSONALISED\": the same product can get a different score for two users." }, { "title": "The model does the expert work", "text": "A label reader used to need a hand-built database of products and ingredients, and it failed on any product that was not in it. A multimodal model reads any label from a photo, in many languages; the store page claims support for \"150+ countries and languages\". The seller does not name the model it uses." }, { "title": "Pay before the first result", "text": "The App Store page says that analysis results require a subscription, so the free download is only a trial of the interface. The MRR per subscription, about US$3.17 a month, shows that most subscribers chose a yearly plan. Ten different purchases are listed, which suggests that the seller tests prices." }, { "title": "Paid and social channels", "text": "The founder-written part of the TrustMRR profile lists TikTok, Meta Ads and Instagram as marketing channels. No source gives the advertising spend or says which channel brought most customers, so this page leaves the channel unknown. Monthly revenue moved between US$8,003 and US$23,122 within one year." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "Few build details are public. These come from the store pages, the TrustMRR profile and the UK company register.", "items": [ "Apps for iPhone, iPad and Android; the App Store page also lists Mac (Apple chip) and Apple Vision support.", "A multimodal AI model reads the photo; the store page says only \"Powered by frontier AI models\".", "RevenueCat records the subscriptions from both stores, and TrustMRR and whatsthe.app read the revenue from it through an API key. It is the only item in the profile's tech-stack list.", "Apple's and Google's in-app purchases collect the money, so the company never holds card details.", "The App Store privacy labels say that identifiers may be used to track the user across other companies' apps, and that photos, name and email address are collected and linked to the user.", "One company, Fantera Technologies Ltd, publishes Goodie AI next to two other apps, Unmute and Kikimojo, and earlier ran a creator-booking web app called Fantera." ], "src": [ 3, 1, 2, 8 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold personal nutrition advice, health tracking or scanning with a phone before a model could read any label from a photo. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Nutrigene", "years": "2018 to 2021", "funding": "US$3M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Custom liquid supplements based on a customer's DNA, lifestyle and health goals.", "died": "The database summary says customer acquisition was expensive, a personal physical product was hard to scale, and simpler competitors such as Care/of won the broad market.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1010-nutrigene" }, { "name": "Refolo", "years": "2017 to 2021", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Personal meal plans and recipes for people moving to a plant-based diet.", "died": "The database summary says too few people would pay for meal plans when free recipes were everywhere, and larger wellness apps added the same features.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1994-refolo" }, { "name": "Airo Health", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$4M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A wearable that tracked stress, nutrition intake and exercise and gave real-time advice.", "died": "The database summary says Apple and Fitbit advanced faster, the device could not justify its price, and hardware logistics and a lack of new funding ended it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1465-airo-health" }, { "name": "SnipSnap", "years": "2012 to 2019", "funding": "US$6.1M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Scan a paper coupon with the phone camera, then save and redeem it on the phone.", "died": "The database summary says it could not keep retailer partnerships or make money from its users, while RetailMeNot and Honey offered more than coupon storage.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/560-snipsnap" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Nutrigene and Airo Health tried to give personal nutrition advice through a physical product, a supplement or a wearable, and both needed millions of dollars before the first customer. Refolo sold the advice as software, but its meal plans had to be written by people, and free recipes competed with them. SnipSnap shows the other half of the problem: a phone camera could read a coupon in 2012, but the app still needed partners to make the result useful.", "A multimodal model removes the database and the human writers. It reads any label in any language and judges it against a goal the user typed, so a company with no employees in its first accounting period could ship the product. The model is paid per use and the stores collect the money. What did not change is the cost of finding customers: the founder lists paid and social channels, and the monthly revenue moved up and down by more than half within a year." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product, yes. Steady revenue, not shown.", "text": "A label-scanner app is a small project with a phone framework, a multimodal model and a subscription service, and the App Store's own suggestions on Goodie's page list several similar food scanners. Goodie's verified revenue shows that one such app can take more than US$20,000 in a month, and also that the last 30 days brought 48.7% less than the 30 days before. The seller has listed the app for sale.", "steps": [ "Pick diets that a general calorie counter does not handle well, such as low FODMAP or allergen-free, and make them the first screen.", "Give one clear answer, a score with the reasons, instead of a table of nutrients.", "Use a subscription service such as RevenueCat from the first day; it also makes verified revenue possible later.", "Write the health limits into the store listing, as the Google Play page does: information, not medical advice." ], "open": "A version for one medical diet, built with dietitians and with clear sources for each rule, is still open. So is a version for shopping online, which an App Store reviewer asked for in November 2025." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Team size not published", "text": "The UK company register lists one director, Dmytro Chupryna, and the first accounts give no employees, including directors, for 15 July 2024 to 31 July 2025. No source gives a headcount after that, and contractors are not counted in such accounts. Aiolum publishes a story with grade A revenue and no published headcount when no source suggests more than 10 people, as here." }, { "title": "Revenue is falling", "text": "The last 30 days brought US$5,768, 48.7% less than the 30 days before, and September 2026 was 54.9% below February 2026. The app was listed for sale on 11 September 2026. A buyer would take over the app, the store accounts and the subscriptions, but not necessarily the founder's advertising skill." }, { "title": "Health and wellness claims", "text": "The App Store page promises goal-based scores for \"Skin glow, mood, gym gains, eco impact\" and flags \"medical conflicts\", and the release notes say the app helps with goals such as \"lose weight\" and \"improve gut health\". The Google Play page adds: \"It does not offer medical advice or diagnosis. Always consult a healthcare professional for health-related decisions.\" The App Store page has no such sentence. The main product reads labels; it does not promise a health effect itself." }, { "title": "Free to install, not free to use", "text": "The App Store shows the app as \"Free · In-App Purchases\", and the description says \"ANALYSIS RESULTS REQUIRE A SUBSCRIPTION.\" A reviewer wrote on 18 August 2025: \"its not free, you need a membership\". The developer replied with an offer of one year of free access." }, { "title": "The owner's other product", "text": "The App Store page links Goodie's privacy policy to fantera.app. A copy of that site saved on 11 July 2026 shows the company's earlier product, the Fantera creator-booking web app, with the claim \"You could be making $4,000 monthly on Fantera\" for a creator with 40,000 followers. Aiolum treats a claim about what users earn as an income promise. Goodie's own pages do not sell or link to that web app, apart from the shared privacy-policy domain, and on 27 October 2026 fantera.app answered only \"DEPLOYMENT_PAUSED\". The seller also publishes Unmute - AI Speaking Coach and Kikimojo." }, { "title": "Numbers that do not line up", "text": "The asking price is US$100,000 on TrustMRR and US$250,000 on whatsthe.app. TrustMRR gives \"Funding: Bootstrapped\", while the company register shows a floating charge in favour of Braavo Capital, Inc. from 27 August 2026. The company's first balance sheet shows net liabilities of £5,136 at 31 July 2025, after about five months of app sales; the accounts do not show revenue." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6741483227" }, { "kind": "android", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fantera.goodieai" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/goodie-ai" }, { "kind": "whatsthe", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/goodie-ai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile: Goodie AI (markdown version), revenue synced 27 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/goodie-ai.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile. Revenue, MRR and subscriptions are read from RevenueCat through an API key (grade A). The description, funding, tech stack, marketing channels and sale listing are written by the founder (grade C)." }, { "title": "whatsthe.app listing: Goodie AI: Check Groceries, metrics updated 2 October 2026", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/goodie-ai", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full. Revenue metrics marked as verified with RevenueCat (grade A); release date, founder name and asking price as shown by the listing (grade C)." }, { "title": "Apple App Store: Goodie AI: Check Groceries, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/goodie-ai-check-groceries/id6741483227", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full: description, in-app purchases, version history, reviews and developer replies, privacy labels, seller, age rating and the developer's other apps." }, { "title": "Google Play: Goodie AI: Food Scanner, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fantera.goodieai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Android description, the medical disclaimer, the rating and the download count." }, { "title": "UK Companies House: FANTERA TECHNOLOGIES LTD (15839025), overview and officers", "url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/15839025", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the overview and the officers page (/officers). Source for the incorporation date, the status, the nature of business and the sole director." }, { "title": "UK Companies House: FANTERA TECHNOLOGIES LTD, filing history and micro-entity accounts to 31 July 2025", "url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/15839025/filing-history", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the filing list and the accounts document in full. Source for the employee count, the balance sheet and the change in persons with significant control." }, { "title": "UK Companies House: FANTERA TECHNOLOGIES LTD, charges", "url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/15839025/charges", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the charge in favour of Braavo Capital, Inc." }, { "title": "Fantera privacy notice, last updated 2 September 2024, Wayback Machine copy of 25 August 2025", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20250825212005/https://www.fantera.app/privacy-policy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The privacy policy that the App Store page links to. Source for the company's first product and the UK representative." }, { "title": "Fantera home page, Wayback Machine copy of 11 July 2026", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20260711000122/https://www.fantera.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the creator-booking web app and its earnings claim." }, { "title": "fantera.app, requested 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.fantera.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Could not open: the server answered with status 503 and the text \"DEPLOYMENT_PAUSED\"." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/agentkit/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/agentkit.md", "slug": "agentkit", "name": "AgentKit (formerly ClaudeKit)", "country": "Vietnam", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Paid kits of skills, workflows and subagents for AI coding agents", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-26", "launchLabel": "7 October 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$82.2K in verified revenue since launch, October 2026", "sticker": "$82.2K verified revenue", "outcomeUsd": 82195, "months": 12, "teamLabel": "1 named founder; headcount not published; the founder also leads TOP Group, a Ho Chi Minh City agency that lists 40+ members", "fundingLabel": "None disclosed", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "ai-model-tools", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Developer tools" ], "product": "Ready-made sets of instructions and helper programs for AI coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex and Cursor. A buyer installs a kit into a software project, and the coding agent then follows prepared roles (planner, tester, code reviewer), slash commands and workflows from planning to release. Each kit costs US$99 once; a bundle of the engineering and marketing kits costs US$149, and a desktop app costs US$49 or US$99 a year.", "why": "It launched in October 2025, when Anthropic's Claude Code had made skills, slash commands and subagents a normal way to steer a coding agent, and when most developers were still writing their own. A founder who presents themself as a CTO with 18 years of experience sold a tested set as a one-time purchase with a money-back promise. Verified revenue reached US$16,040 in March 2026 and US$82,195 in total, but it fell to under US$2,000 a month by September 2026.", "summary": [ "AgentKit sells kits for AI coding agents, programs such as Claude Code, Codex or Cursor that read a code base, write and run code and edit files on a developer's computer at the developer's request. A kit is a folder of plain-text instructions and small scripts that the agent loads: skills (instructions for one kind of task, loaded when that task appears), subagents (separate agent roles, for example a planner or a code reviewer, that the main agent can hand work to), slash commands such as /ak:plan and /ak:cook, and hooks, scripts that the agent runs before or after a tool call, for example to ask for approval before a force push. The home page lists \"108+ Skills\", \"95+ Commands\" and \"45 Subagents\". The product launched as ClaudeKit, \"Built on Claude Code by Anthropic\", and was renamed AgentKit in 2026 when it added other agents.", "The founder is Duy Nguyen from Vietnam, who writes as Goon Nguyen and signs the sales page as \"Founder & CTO, AgentKit 18+ years building systems at scale\". TrustMRR, a service that reads revenue through the seller's own payment account, gives a founding date of 7 October 2025 and reads the revenue from Polar, the payment platform that sells the kits. It shows US$10,411 in November 2025, a best month of US$16,040 in March 2026, then US$4,529 in May, US$2,641 in August and US$1,819 in September. By 27 October 2026 the total was US$82,195. The kits are sold once, not by subscription: the profile shows a monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the monthly value of active subscriptions) of only US$27.77.", "The revenue figures are grade A: TrustMRR reads them through an API key from Polar. Sales paid by Vietnamese bank transfer go through another processor, Sepay, and are not in that figure, so the real total may be higher. The team size, user counts and ratings are the founder's own statements, grade C. The page also shows earlier companies that sold tools to make programmers faster, and why they failed." ], "pricing": { "caption": "AgentKit prices in October 2026, from the company's home and product pages (grade C); monthly equivalents calculated on this page", "note": "The kits are one-time purchases with lifetime updates and a 14-day money-back guarantee (30 days in November 2025). The bundle includes a one-year, three-device licence for the desktop app. The buyer also needs a paid plan or API account with the AI provider of the coding agent; that cost is not part of these prices. In November 2025 the only product, ClaudeKit Engineer, cost US$99, shown as reduced from US$149.", "rows": [ [ "AgentKit Engineer", "99 one-time", "", "100+ skills, 30+ workflows and AI subagents for software engineering" ], [ "AgentKit Marketing", "99 one-time", "", "12+ MCP integrations and workflows for research, sales and content" ], [ "AgentKit Bundle", "149 one-time", "", "Engineer and Marketing kits plus a 1-year, 3-device desktop app licence" ], [ "AgentKit App, 1 device", "4.08", "", "US$49 a year; monthly figure calculated" ], [ "AgentKit App, 3 devices", "8.25", "", "US$99 a year; monthly figure calculated" ] ] }, "factsCaption": "US$82,195 in verified revenue in about one year from one-time kit sales, with a best month of US$16,040 in March 2026 and a fall of 89% by September; the money is read from the payment platform, the team size is not published", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the company's Polar account through an API key. A grade C value is what the founder or the company's own pages state. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From ClaudeKit, one US$99 kit for Claude Code, to AgentKit with three products for seven coding agents, in about twelve months. Each entry carries its grade.", "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time, to 27 October 2026", "value": "US$82,195", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from the company's Polar account through an API key; revenue last synced 27 October 2026 at 02:22 UTC. Last 12 months: US$80,601. Sales by Vietnamese bank transfer through Sepay are not read by TrustMRR.", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month", "value": "Nov 2025 US$10,411; Dec US$7,246; Jan 2026 US$5,060; Feb US$11,507; Mar US$16,040; Apr US$8,743; May US$4,529; Jun US$4,143; Jul US$4,854; Aug US$2,641; Sep US$1,819; Oct US$1,921 to 27 October UTC", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table. The public table shows only the last twelve months.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before November 2025", "value": "US$3,281", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the all-time US$82,195 minus the US$78,914 that the twelve months in the table add up to. This is the revenue of the first weeks, from 7 October 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Best month", "value": "US$16,040 in March 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Fall from the best month", "value": "September 2026 was 88.7% below March 2026", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: (16,040 - 1,819) / 16,040 = 88.7%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 30 days", "value": "US$2,365, up 32.5% from the 30 days before", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. Last 7 days: US$208. Last 3 months: US$6,826. Last 6 months: US$19,985.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue", "value": "US$27.77 from 8 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot. Almost all revenue is from one-time kit purchases; the subscriptions are probably the yearly desktop app licences, which the profile does not say.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Where the revenue figures come from", "value": "Polar, through an API key; merchant of record: no", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR's verification section. The terms of use name \"Polar.sh for global credit card and PayPal payments\" and \"Sepay for Vietnam bank transfer payments (VND)\".", "src": [ 1, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Kit sales implied by the revenue", "value": "about 550 to 830", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$82,195 divided by US$149 (551) or by US$99 (830). The real number is unknown, because discounts, refunds, referral commissions and desktop licences change the result.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Founding date", "value": "7 October 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR profile, a field written by the founder. A copy of claudekit.cc saved on 1 November 2025 shows the product on sale at US$99.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Users and community", "value": "\"Estimated user count: 7,104\"; \"3,800+ builders on Discord\"; \"4.9/5 349 ratings\"", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR founder fields and the home page, read 25 October 2026. The home page also says \"12 customer reviews\" and does not say where the 349 ratings were given. In November 2025 the site said \"Join 500+ developers\".", "src": [ 1, 2, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Founder", "value": "Duy Nguyen, who writes as Goon Nguyen", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR: \"Founder: Duy /zuey/\" with the handle goon_nguyen. The blog author page: \"Goon Nguyen Founder of AgentKit\". The GitHub profile of \"mrgoonie (Duy /zuey/)\" links agentkit.best and says \"Just launched ClaudeKit.cc\".", "src": [ 1, 10, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 named founder; headcount not published", "grade": "C", "note": "No source gives a number of people. The sales page is written in the first person: \"I guarantee it—I've proven it in production.\" The founder's GitHub profile also says \"Founder @ wearetopgroup.com\", a creative agency; see the watch section.", "src": [ 3, 11, 15 ] }, { "fact": "Location", "value": "Vietnam", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR \"Country: VN\". The privacy policy: \"AgentKit is based in Vietnam.\" The terms are governed by the laws of Vietnam, with courts in Ho Chi Minh City.", "src": [ 1, 7, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none disclosed", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions investors. This is an absence of information, not a statement by the company.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Referral program", "value": "20% to 40% commission per sale", "grade": "C", "note": "The product page: \"Get paid 20% recurring commission for every friend who buys AgentKit\", with \"$19.80 per referral\". The leaderboard page lists tiers from 20% up to 40% for referrers with US$15,000+ in referred revenue.", "src": [ 3, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Rename", "value": "ClaudeKit (ck) became AgentKit (ak) by August 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Blog post of 4 August 2026: \"ClaudeKit ( ck ) is now legacy, and AgentKit ( ak ) is the supported path going forward.\" The post does not give a reason for the new name.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October 2026 figure", "value": "12 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 7 October 2025 to 27 October 2026 is 385 days.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "7 October 2025", "what": "Founding date of ClaudeKit on the TrustMRR profile. The founder's GitHub profile announces \"Just launched ClaudeKit.cc\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 11 ] }, { "when": "October 2025", "what": "US$3,281 in verified revenue in the first weeks.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "1 November 2025", "what": "claudekit.cc sells ClaudeKit Engineer, \"12 specialized AI agents\" built on Claude Code, for US$99 with a 30-day money-back guarantee and a 20% referral commission, and says 500+ developers use it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "US$10,411 in verified revenue in the first full month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "January 2026", "what": "Revenue falls to US$5,060.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2 March 2026", "what": "A blog post by the founder answers the most frequent question, why pay when free kits exist, with \"QUALITY > QUANTITY\" and \"54 skills. 80+ connections.\"", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "March 2026", "what": "Best month: US$16,040.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "May to July 2026", "what": "Revenue falls to between US$4,143 and US$4,854 a month. The changelog shows separate release lines for the Engineer kit and the Marketing kit.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "when": "4 August 2026", "what": "A blog post tells users to move from the old ck command to the new ak command: ClaudeKit is now AgentKit.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "US$1,819 in verified revenue, the lowest full month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "Version 3.0 betas of the AgentKit command-line tool; the home page lists support for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Antigravity, Pi, Oh My Pi and DeepSeek Harness.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 2 ] }, { "when": "27 October 2026", "what": "US$82,195 all time and US$2,365 in the last 30 days.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Selling a tested set of instructions", "text": "A coding agent works better with a written plan, fixed roles and checks, but each developer had to discover these by trial and error. The kit sells that work: the November 2025 page called its author a \"18+ Year CTO\" who \"burned millions of Claude tokens finding what works\". The buyer gets plain-text files that they can read, change and keep." }, { "title": "One payment, no subscription", "text": "A kit costs US$99 once, with updates included. This removes the objection of another monthly bill next to the AI provider's plan, and the money-back guarantee if the kit \"doesn't save you 10+ hours\" lowers the risk further. The cost is that revenue depends on new buyers every month, and the verified MRR is only US$27.77." }, { "title": "Referrals from buyers", "text": "From the first month the site offered buyers 20% of each sale they refer, later up to 40%. The product page shows the arithmetic: \"$19.80 per referral\" and \"$1,980 with 100 referrals\". No source says what share of sales came from referrals, so this page leaves the channel unknown." }, { "title": "From one agent to seven", "text": "ClaudeKit was built for Claude Code only. As other coding agents spread, the product was renamed AgentKit and adapted to seven of them, and a marketing kit and a desktop app were added. The changelog shows frequent releases, many of them automated." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages, its changelog and its legal pages. They are grade C.", "items": [ "The kits are files for the coding agent: skills, subagent definitions, slash commands and hook scripts, installed with the company's command-line tool, first called ck and now ak.", "The first version was built on Claude Code with Anthropic's Sonnet 4.5 model, according to the November 2025 page. The current kits also target Codex, Cursor, Antigravity, Pi, Oh My Pi and DeepSeek Harness.", "Polar takes card and PayPal payments, Sepay takes Vietnamese bank transfers, and the home page promises \"Instant license-key access\". Early buyers received access through invitations to a GitHub repository, which the privacy policy now calls legacy.", "The website is hosted on Vercel. Resend sends the transactional email. Google Analytics, Umami and Google Tag Manager measure visits.", "Releases are published by GitHub Actions; the changelog page lists each release with the author \"github-actions[bot]\".", "The site also sells a partner product, ReelCrew, a video toolkit for Claude Code built by another team." ], "src": [ 4, 6, 7, 8, 14 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold tools that promised to make programmers faster or their code better, before AI coding agents existed or as they arrived. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Kite DevTool", "years": "2014 to 2024", "funding": "US$21M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "AI code completion inside the programmer's editor.", "died": "The database summary says GitHub Copilot, built on a much stronger OpenAI model, arrived in June 2021 and made Kite's older models obsolete, while Kite never found a way to make developers pay.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2491-kite-devtool" }, { "name": "Fig DevTool", "years": "2020 to 2024", "funding": "US$2.4M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Autocomplete and visual command builders for the terminal.", "died": "The database summary says users loved it and used it daily, but too few of them paid, because developers have a very low willingness to pay for terminal tools.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2502-fig-devtool" }, { "name": "Sider", "years": "2012 to 2024", "funding": "US$7M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Automated code review and static analysis for development teams.", "died": "The database summary says the market split between free open-source tools and large enterprise platforms, and Sider was squeezed between them.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2494-sider" }, { "name": "Light Table/Eve", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$3M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "An editor that shows code results in real time, then a new way for non-programmers to build apps.", "died": "The database summary says professional developers stayed with the editors they already used, and the pivot to Eve lacked focus and resources.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1560-light-table-eve" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Kite, Fig and Sider each built a large piece of software, an AI model, a terminal layer or an analysis engine, and needed millions of dollars before they could sell it. Fig shows the other problem of developer tools: people who use a tool every day still do not pay for it. All three ended when a free or bundled alternative became good enough.", "AgentKit builds almost no software of its own. The coding agent and the model come from Anthropic, OpenAI and others; the kit is instructions and scripts on top. That is why one founder could ship it within weeks and charge from the first day. The same fact is the risk: the instructions can be copied, free kits exist, as the founder's own blog post of March 2026 admits, and the agent makers add their own skills and workflows. Verified revenue fell 88.7% from March to September 2026." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The timing, no.", "text": "The opening was the months after Claude Code made skills and subagents common and before free collections were everywhere. Today buyers can compare paid kits with many free ones, and the verified revenue shows the effect. What can still be copied is the structure: package expert know-how for a new tool as files the buyer owns, sell it once with a refund promise, and pay buyers to recommend it.", "steps": [ "Use the new tool every day until you have a set of instructions that clearly works better than the default.", "Package it so that it installs with one command and can be read and changed by the buyer.", "Sell it once with a short refund period, and connect a payment platform that can later prove the revenue.", "Offer buyers a stated commission for each sale they refer, and keep the kit updated as the tool changes." ], "open": "Kits for one industry or one stack are still open: for example rules and checks for medical-device software, banking code or a single framework, where generic free kits do not know the requirements." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue fell by most of its peak", "text": "Verified revenue was US$16,040 in March 2026 and US$1,819 in September 2026, 88.7% lower. The last 30 days were 32.5% above the 30 days before, at US$2,365. One-time sales need new buyers every month, and there is almost no recurring revenue." }, { "title": "Income wording around the referral program", "text": "The product page heads its affiliate section \"Turn AgentKit Into Passive Income\" and shows \"$19.80 per referral\", \"$198 with 10 referrals\" and \"$1,980 with 100 referrals\", which is the stated 20% commission on a US$99 kit multiplied out. Aiolum accepts an affiliate program that states its commission. The same page has a \"First Feature ROI\" box that values 10 saved hours at an assumed US$100 an hour and shows \"Net profit: $901\"; this is a claim about saved working time, backed by a refund \"If it doesn't save you 10+ hours\", not a claim about money earned from the product. A blog post of 19 August 2026 on extra income says vibe coding does not \"guarantee a passive income stream\"." }, { "title": "The founder's other company", "text": "The founder's GitHub profile says \"Founder @ wearetopgroup.com\". That site describes T.O.P Group as \"doanh nghiệp cung cấp giải pháp sáng tạo được thành lập năm 2014 và có trụ sở chính tại Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh\" (translation: a creative-solutions business founded in 2014 with its head office in Ho Chi Minh City) and shows \"40 + Thành Viên\" (translation: 40+ members). No source says that its staff work on AgentKit, and the AgentKit pages do not mention it. The GitHub profile also lists other products of the founder: GoClaw.sh, TOSE.sh, Dewee.sh, AgentBrain.sh and AgentWiki.cc." }, { "title": "Built on other companies' agents", "text": "The kits only work inside coding agents made by Anthropic, OpenAI and others, and the buyer pays those providers separately. The first name, ClaudeKit, used Anthropic's product name; the 2026 rename post does not say why the name changed. Another developer also published a project called claudekit, which the founder's blog mentions." }, { "title": "Unclear proof on the sales page", "text": "The home page shows \"4.9/5 349 ratings\" next to \"12 customer reviews\" without saying where the ratings come from, and the user counts (7,104 on TrustMRR, 3,800+ on Discord) are the founder's own figures." }, { "title": "Part of the revenue is not verified", "text": "TrustMRR reads only the Polar account. Vietnamese buyers can pay by bank transfer through Sepay, and those sales are not in the US$82,195. The partner product ReelCrew is also sold on the site; whether its sales pass through the same Polar account is not stated." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://agentkit.best/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/claudekit" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile: ClaudeKit (markdown version), revenue synced 27 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/claudekit.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile, on 25 and 27 October 2026. Revenue and MRR are read from Polar through an API key (grade A). The description, founding date, user count and pricing are written by the founder (grade C)." }, { "title": "AgentKit home page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://agentkit.best/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the products, prices, supported agents, counts of skills and the ratings line." }, { "title": "AgentKit Engineer product page, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://agentkit.best/engineer", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the price box, the ROI box, the refund terms, the referral section and the founder's signature." }, { "title": "claudekit.cc home page, Wayback Machine copy of 1 November 2025", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20251101043222/https://claudekit.cc/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the first product, its price, the 30-day guarantee, the referral offer and the 500+ developers claim." }, { "title": "AgentKit blog, 4 August 2026: ClaudeKit AgentKit migration: How to safely upgrade to ak CLI", "url": "https://agentkit.best/blog/claude-code-guides/claudekit-agentkit-migration-how-to-safely-upgrade-to-ak-cli", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the rename." }, { "title": "AgentKit changelog, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://agentkit.best/changelog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the release list. Source for the release lines and the automated releases." }, { "title": "AgentKit privacy policy, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://agentkit.best/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the service providers and the location." }, { "title": "AgentKit terms of service, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://agentkit.best/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the payment processors and the governing law." }, { "title": "AgentKit referral leaderboard, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://agentkit.best/leaderboard", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the commission tiers." }, { "title": "AgentKit blog author page: Goon Nguyen, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://agentkit.best/author/goon", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile line and the list of posts." }, { "title": "GitHub profile of mrgoonie (Duy /zuey/), read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://github.com/mrgoonie", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile text. Source for the launch note, the founder's other products and the link to wearetopgroup.com." }, { "title": "AgentKit blog, 2 March 2026: What Makes ClaudeKit Special Compared to Open Source Kits?", "url": "https://agentkit.best/blog/uncategorized/what-makes-claudekit-special-compared-to-open-source-kits", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founder's answer to free competitors." }, { "title": "AgentKit blog, 19 August 2026: Vibe code extra income: Building profitable AI products fast", "url": "https://agentkit.best/blog/vibe-coding/vibe-code-extra-income-building-profitable-ai-products-fast", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full for the purpose check. Quoted in the watch list." }, { "title": "AgentKit partner page: ReelCrew, read 25 October 2026", "url": "https://agentkit.best/reelcrew", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the partner product." }, { "title": "T.O.P Group home page (Vietnamese), read 26 October 2026", "url": "https://wearetopgroup.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founder's other company, its founding year and its member count. Quotes are in the original Vietnamese with a translation by this page." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/lenz-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/lenz-ai.md", "slug": "lenz-ai", "name": "Lenz AI: Digital Camera Effect", "country": "United States (TrustMRR profile); not stated elsewhere", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "iPhone app that gives photos camera-style lighting and a digital-camera look with an AI image model", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-26", "launchLabel": "25 March 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$8.9K verified revenue in one month, August 2026", "sticker": "$8.9K in one month", "outcomeUsd": 106404, "months": 5, "teamLabel": "1 named founder, Błażej Sawicki, who sells the app as an individual on the App Store; headcount not published", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "photos", "channel": "creators", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Photo editing" ], "product": "An iPhone app. The user picks a photo, and the app rebuilds its lighting, exposure and colors so that it looks as if it was shot on a real camera, without changing the person's face, according to the App Store description. A paid subscription is required before the app processes any photo. The App Store lists weekly, monthly and yearly subscriptions from US$5.99 a week to US$69.99 a year, and credit packs from US$9.99 to US$49.99.", "why": "It sold one effect that people already wanted on social media, a real-camera look without the \"AI face\", and it reached buyers through TikTok. The founder's profile says the app had \"over 60M views on TikTok\" with zero paid ads, and his sale listing says the growth runs on a templated TikTok slideshow format that \"scales by adding accounts\". Revenue rose for five months and then fell by about two thirds in September 2026.", "summary": [ "Lenz AI is an iPhone app that edits photos with a generative image model, an AI program that creates or changes images from an input image and an instruction. The founder's TrustMRR profile says the app is \"built on Nano Banana\", the public nickname of an image model from Google. The app applies one look: professional camera-style light and detail, while the App Store description promises \"No reshaped features, no plastic skin\". It is sold only through the App Store, by the seller Blazej Sawicki, and it went live on 25 March 2026.", "TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a company's payment provider, shows US$8,867 of verified revenue for Lenz AI in August 2026 and US$34,577 in total since April 2026 (synced 26 October 2026). The data comes from Superwall, a service that runs the subscription screens (paywalls) of phone apps and reports their purchases. Grade A: the figures come from payment records, not from the founder.", "The month after the peak, revenue fell to US$3,185, and the last 30 days show US$1,643. The founder listed the app for sale in July 2026 at US$69,000. This page also lists, under \"Watch\", how the founder says the app grows: many TikTok accounts that post templated slideshows." ], "pricing": { "caption": "Lenz AI in-app purchases on the US App Store, read 23 October 2026 (grade B)", "note": "The App Store lists nine in-app purchases without saying which plan is current; two weekly prices and three yearly prices appear, so some may be older offers. Per-month values are calculated: US$69.99 / 12 = about US$5.83; US$34.99 / 12 = about US$2.92; US$29.99 / 12 = about US$2.50; a weekly plan at US$12.99 is about US$56.29 a month (12.99 x 52 / 12). The founder's TrustMRR profile gives the pricing model as \"$14.99/week or $69.99/year\", which does not match the App Store list. A subscription is required before the first photo is processed.", "rows": [ [ "Weekly subscription", "", "12.99 a week", "one of two weekly prices listed" ], [ "Weekly subscription", "", "5.99 a week", "the lower weekly price listed" ], [ "Monthly subscription", "", "14.99", "" ], [ "Annual subscription", "5.83", "", "US$69.99 a year" ], [ "Yearly subscription", "2.92", "", "US$34.99 a year" ], [ "1 Year subscription", "2.50", "", "US$29.99 a year" ], [ "Credits", "", "", "300 for US$9.99, 900 for US$24.99, 2,000 for US$49.99 (one-time)" ] ] }, "factsCaption": "US$8,867 of verified app revenue in the fifth month after launch, followed by a fall of about two thirds", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the app's Superwall purchase data. A grade B value is on Apple's App Store pages or on a second marketplace that reads the same data. A grade C value was written by the founder in his profile or sale listing. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From the first App Store version on 25 March 2026 to the August peak, the sale listing and the fall in autumn 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue, August 2026", "value": "US$8,867", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline, Superwall API, synced 26 October 2026. The best month so far.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, April to July 2026", "value": "US$2,687, US$3,916, US$7,544, US$6,958", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. March 2026: US$0.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, September 2026", "value": "US$3,185", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. October 2026 to the 26th: US$1,421.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Fall from August to September", "value": "about 64%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: (3,185 - 8,867) / 8,867 = -64.1%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time", "value": "US$34,577", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, synced 26 October 2026. The monthly rows add up to US$34,578; the difference is rounding.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, last 30 days", "value": "US$1,643", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, synced 26 October 2026. On 23 October the same profile showed US$1,891.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue and subscriptions, October 2026", "value": "US$2,455 MRR, 297 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR metric snapshot. Calculated: 2,455 / 297 = about US$8.27 a month per subscription. TrustMRR also shows a profit margin of 80.0% for the last 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate at the August peak", "value": "about US$106,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$8,867 x 12 = US$106,404. Revenue has fallen since then, so this is not the current rate.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the peak month", "value": "5 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: March 2026 to August 2026.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price", "value": "US$69,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Listed for sale on TrustMRR since 25 July 2026; TrustMRR shows a revenue multiple of 3.0x. whatsthe.app lists the same app at US$69,000, down from US$85,000.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Payment data source", "value": "Superwall (API key)", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR \"Verification Sources\". Merchant of record: No; Apple bills the purchases.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "First App Store version", "value": "1.0, 25 March 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "App Store version history. TrustMRR gives the founded date as 30 March 2026; whatsthe.app gives the release date as 25 March 2026.", "src": [ 2, 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "App Store ratings, October 2026", "value": "114 ratings in the US store, average 4.7", "grade": "B", "note": "App Store page read 23 October 2026. Age rating 13+. Seller: Blazej Sawicki.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Users", "value": "about 13,000 (estimate)", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR profile, \"Estimated user count: 13,000\", from the founder-written part of the profile.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "TikTok views", "value": "over 60 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder-written profile text: \"over 60M views on TikTok and $20k+ in revenue\". The text is older than the verified all-time revenue.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions investors; the seller is an individual.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "25 March 2026", "what": "Version 1.0 of Lenz AI goes live on the App Store, seller Blazej Sawicki. Versions 1.0.1 to 1.0.3 follow within four days, the last with a new paywall.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "April 2026", "what": "First verified revenue: US$2,687.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "US$7,544 in the month, almost twice the May figure.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "10 July 2026", "what": "Version 1.0.9 brings a new onboarding.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "25 July 2026", "what": "The founder lists the app for sale on TrustMRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "August 2026", "what": "Peak month: US$8,867 of verified revenue.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "Revenue falls to US$3,185. Version 1.1.0 on 30 September.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "26 October 2026", "what": "US$34,577 in total, US$1,643 in the last 30 days, 297 active subscriptions. Still for sale at US$69,000.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "One effect, sold to people who post photos", "text": "The app does one thing: it makes a phone photo look as if it was shot with a real camera and real lighting. The App Store text is written for people who post on TikTok, Reels and Instagram and want results \"in seconds, not 40 minutes in an editor\". The founder's profile names the target persona as \"women in the US, discovered through viral TikTok content\"." }, { "title": "TikTok slideshows from many accounts", "text": "The founder's sale listing says that the growth \"runs on a scalable, largely automated TikTok slideshow format, templated content, no heavy UGC, scales by adding accounts\", with \"zero paid ads\". UGC means user-generated content, videos that look as if real customers made them. This is the founder's own tactic, listed under Watch." }, { "title": "A rented image model behind a paywall", "text": "The founder's profile says the app is \"built on Nano Banana\", Google's image model, so the editing itself is a model call. The paywall comes before the first photo: \"Lenz Premium (paid subscription) is required before processing any photo\". The subscriptions run through Superwall and Apple's in-app purchases." }, { "title": "Fast rise, fast fall", "text": "Verified revenue went from US$2,687 in April to US$8,867 in August, then fell to US$3,185 in September. A product that depends on one channel and one visual trend can lose most of its new customers within a month when the videos stop reaching people." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder-written part of the TrustMRR profile and from the App Store pages. No source describes the code in detail.", "items": [ "A native iPhone app written in Swift, according to the TrustMRR tech stack. It requires iOS 26.0 or later, according to the App Store page.", "Backend: Supabase, a hosted Postgres database with login and file storage, according to the TrustMRR tech stack.", "Image model: \"Nano Banana\", Google's image model, according to the founder's profile text.", "Subscriptions and paywall: Superwall, with Apple in-app purchases; the same Superwall connection gives TrustMRR its revenue data.", "Marketing: TikTok only, according to the TrustMRR marketing channels and the sale listing, with templated slideshows from several accounts and no paid ads." ], "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold easy photo editing or photo filters before generative models existed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Picnik", "years": "2005 to 2012", "funding": "US$3.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Simple photo editing in the browser, without downloading Photoshop.", "died": "Google bought it in 2010, moved its technology into Google+, and closed it in 2012.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/429-picnik" }, { "name": "Snipshot", "years": "2006 to 2009", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Edit photos in the browser without installing software.", "died": "Larger and free tools such as Picnik offered more features, and it did not grow its own set.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1241-snipshot" }, { "name": "Mobli", "years": "2010 to 2017", "funding": "US$86M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A photo app with filters and location browsing, promoted by celebrities.", "died": "Instagram had the users and the head start, and Mobli had no feature that made people move.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/341-mobli" }, { "name": "Viddy", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$30M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Filters that make phone videos look professional.", "died": "Instagram added video in 2013 and Vine spread faster; users tried Viddy once and did not come back.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2190-viddy" }, { "name": "Lytro", "years": "2006 to 2018", "funding": "US$215M", "cause": "Unit economics", "promise": "Cameras that captured light from every angle, so that a photo could be refocused after it was taken.", "died": "The hardware cost far more than people would pay, and refocusing after the shot was a novelty most users did not need.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2174-lytro" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Picnik, Snipshot, Mobli and Viddy sold filters and edits that a programmer had to design one by one, and each lost to a larger product that added the same filters for free. Lytro tried to change how a photo was captured, which needed new hardware and US$215 million. A generative image model changes the photo after it was taken, with any phone camera, and one developer can rent it per image.", "What did not change is the competition. Filters were copied by Instagram; AI looks are copied by other small apps and by the photo apps of the large platforms, and the model provider can offer the same effect itself. Lenz AI's revenue curve, up for five months and down by about two thirds in the sixth, shows how short such a trend can be when one channel brings almost all customers." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product, yes. The channel, with care.", "text": "One developer turned a rented image model and one visual effect into US$34,577 of verified revenue in seven months, with no paid ads. The growth method is the part to judge before copying: the founder says it scales by adding TikTok accounts with templated slideshows, which depends on TikTok's rules and on a trend that faded within months.", "steps": [ "Pick one visual effect that people already ask for on social media, and build an app that does only that.", "Rent the image model and put a paywall before the first result.", "Show before-and-after results in short slideshows on the platform where the target users post photos.", "Watch the monthly revenue closely: a trend product can fall by half within one month, so plan the next effect before the current one fades." ], "open": "Effects for one use with lasting demand are less exposed to trends: product photos for small online shops, photos for property listings, or profile photos for job sites." }, "watch": [ { "title": "The founder's own marketing tactics", "text": "The seller message on TrustMRR, by Błażej Sawicki: \"Growth runs on a scalable, largely automated TikTok slideshow format, templated content, no heavy UGC, scales by adding accounts.\" The founder-written profile text says the app has \"over 60M views on TikTok\". We could not check whether these accounts are labelled as the app's own accounts, because TikTok's site does not allow our crawler. These are the founder's tactics, not features of the product." }, { "title": "Revenue is falling", "text": "Verified revenue was US$8,867 in August 2026, US$3,185 in September and US$1,421 in October to the 26th; the last 30 days show US$1,643, and TrustMRR shows MRR down 24.1% in 30 days. The headline month is the peak, not the current rate." }, { "title": "For sale", "text": "The founder has listed the app for sale since 25 July 2026, at US$69,000 on TrustMRR and on whatsthe.app. A buyer would take over the app, the TikTok method and the model costs. The story may change owner." }, { "title": "Numbers that do not agree", "text": "whatsthe.app, which also reads Superwall data, showed US$8,669 for the last 30 days and US$4,170 MRR on 1 October 2026, while TrustMRR shows US$3,185 for September. The founder's profile gives prices of \"$14.99/week or $69.99/year\", while the App Store lists US$14.99 as the monthly price and weekly prices of US$12.99 and US$5.99. TrustMRR gives the country as the United States; no other source states it." }, { "title": "The founder's other apps", "text": "The same App Store seller offers FaceGlow - Face Analytics, a face analysis app with \"Skin appearance insights and scoring\", rated 16+, and MyPep: GLP-1 & Shot Tracker, a health app. The Lenz AI pages we read do not sell or link to them; Apple's own \"More by\" list shows them on the App Store page." }, { "title": "Photos of other people", "text": "The terms of use describe \"creative effects, face transformations, and prank-style edits\", require users to be at least 13 (16 in the European Union), and say: \"You may only upload photos of other people if you have obtained their explicit consent to do so.\" The App Store description itself is about improving the user's own photos." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6760906614" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/lenz-ai-digital-camera-effect" }, { "kind": "whatsthe", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/lenz-ai-digital-camera-effect" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: Lenz AI: Digital Camera Effect (markdown profile)", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/lenz-ai-digital-camera-effect.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile on 23 and 26 October 2026 (synced 2026-10-26T23:15). The revenue rows come from the Superwall API and are grade A; the description, insights, tech stack and seller message are founder-written and grade C." }, { "title": "App Store: Lenz AI: Digital Camera Effect, seller Blazej Sawicki", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lenz-ai-digital-camera-effect/id6760906614", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full on 23 October 2026: description, ratings, age rating, in-app purchases and version history." }, { "title": "App Store developer page: Blazej Sawicki", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/blazej-sawicki/id1803929355", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full on 23 October 2026. Source for the seller's other apps." }, { "title": "whatsthe.app: Lenz AI: Digital Camera Effect", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/lenz-ai-digital-camera-effect", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full on 23 October 2026. A second app marketplace that shows Superwall data, last updated 1 October 2026. Source for the asking price history and the release date; its 30-day revenue does not agree with TrustMRR." }, { "title": "Terms of Use - Lenz AI", "url": "https://fitles.notion.site/Terms-of-Use-Lenz-AI-32be78937e0280728930f2cbe1c787e9", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 23 October 2026, through the link on the App Store page. Source for the age limits and the consent rule for photos of other people." }, { "title": "Privacy Policy - Lenz AI", "url": "https://fitles.notion.site/Privacy-Policy-32be78937e0280e9a809e12896bddd6e", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 23 October 2026. Says the app does not collect biometric or face recognition data." }, { "title": "App Store: FaceGlow - Face Analytics, seller Blazej Sawicki", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/faceglow-face-analytics/id6759336992", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full on 23 October 2026. Cited only for the founder's other products." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/alchie/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/alchie.md", "slug": "alchie", "name": "Alchie", "country": "France", "sector": "Marketing software", "productType": "French AI writer that interviews the user and turns the answers into LinkedIn posts in the user's own voice", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-26", "launchLabel": "16 April 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$11.6K monthly recurring revenue, October 2026", "sticker": "$11.6K MRR", "outcomeUsd": 138888, "months": 6, "teamLabel": "1 named founder, Pierre Guilbaud, through his one-person company; headcount not published", "fundingLabel": "Bootstrapped (TrustMRR profile)", "primaryFactor": "Audience", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "audience", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Social media" ], "product": "A web app in French (it can also write in English). Alchie asks the user questions by voice or text, about 10 minutes per post, then writes a LinkedIn post from the answers, in a style learned from three posts that the user pasted. Each session also gives two photo ideas, three storytelling tips and the full transcript. Higher plans add a content calendar, scheduled publishing to LinkedIn, a WhatsApp group, and on the Or plan a video course and live workshops with the founder.", "why": "The founder was a LinkedIn ghostwriter with about 44,000 followers and a newsletter of about 17,000 readers, so he sold to an audience that already read him. He built the product around the interview that he used to do by hand for clients, instead of a text box that asks a model to write. The verified revenue grew from US$574 in April 2026 to US$19,343 in September 2026.", "summary": [ "Alchie is a French web app that writes LinkedIn posts. It does not ask the user for a topic and write alone: it interviews the user first, in the way a ghostwriter (a person who writes texts that another person publishes under their own name) interviews a client, and then a large language model (an AI program trained on large amounts of text) writes the post from the answers. The site says the interview runs on Claude Sonnet 5.5 and the writing on Claude Opus 5.5, through Anthropic's API, with speech-to-text from Speechmatics.", "The founder, Pierre Guilbaud, works from Biarritz in France through a company with his own name. He says he wrote more than 500 LinkedIn posts by hand for business owners before he built Alchie, which TrustMRR dates to 16 April 2026. TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a company's payment provider, shows US$11,574 of monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the subscription revenue that repeats every month), 201 active subscriptions and US$61,304 of Stripe-verified revenue in total (synced 26 October 2026). That is grade A.", "The best month was September 2026 with US$19,343; the last 30 days show US$13,255, 30% less than the 30 days before. This page also lists, under \"Watch\", one of the founder's own tactics: a WhatsApp group for paying users in which members can share a post that did not perform, to give it another chance." ], "pricing": { "caption": "Alchie plans read on the pricing page and in llms-full.txt on 25 October 2026, in euros without VAT; US dollar values at the ECB rate of 23 October 2026, 1 EUR = 1.1193 USD (grade C)", "note": "Prices are \"HT\", that is before French VAT. Yearly billing costs 10 monthly payments instead of 12 (Bronze 190 EUR, Argent 490 EUR, Or 890 EUR a year); the per-month yearly values are calculated (for example 890 / 12 = 74.17 EUR = about US$83.01). Every plan starts with a 7-day trial with 2 posts, which needs a bank card; from the Bootcamp page the Or plan starts without the trial. The Or plan includes a video course and at least 2 live workshops a month with the founder.", "rows": [ [ "Bronze", "17.72", "21.27", "4 posts a month, 12 AI edits (19 EUR a month)" ], [ "Argent", "45.70", "54.85", "10 posts a month, calendar, scheduled LinkedIn publishing, WhatsApp group (49 EUR a month)" ], [ "Or", "83.01", "99.62", "20 posts a month, course and live workshops with the founder (89 EUR a month)" ] ] }, "factsCaption": "US$11,574 of monthly recurring revenue six months after launch, read from Stripe by TrustMRR, for a French LinkedIn writer built by one ghostwriter", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the company's Stripe account. A grade B value is on a second revenue leaderboard. A grade C value was written by the founder on his own site. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. Quotes in French are followed by our translation.", "timelineLead": "From the first Stripe revenue in April 2026 to US$11,574 of MRR in October 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, October 2026", "value": "US$11,574", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, Stripe API, synced 26 October 2026. On 25 October the same profile showed US$11,381. MRR growth in the last 30 days: -25.2%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions", "value": "201", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot. Calculated: 11,574 / 201 = about US$57.58 a month per subscription.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 30 days", "value": "US$13,255", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, 30% less than the 30 days before. IndiePage's leaderboard showed US$14,015 for the last 30 days on 25 October 2026 (grade B).", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue by month, 2026", "value": "April US$574, May US$5,476, June US$8,297, July US$7,649, August US$8,975, September US$19,343, October to the 26th US$10,991", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. Calculated: September was 115.5% above August.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time", "value": "US$61,304", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, synced 26 October 2026. The monthly rows add up to US$61,305; the difference is rounding.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the MRR", "value": "about US$139,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$11,574 x 12 = US$138,888.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the headline figure", "value": "6 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: April 2026 (TrustMRR founded date 16 April 2026) to October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's own revenue claim", "value": "11,000 EUR a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Pricing page: \"11 K€ / mois de revenu récurrent pour Alchie\" (translation: 11K EUR a month of recurring revenue for Alchie). It agrees with the TrustMRR figure.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Payment data source", "value": "Stripe (API key)", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR \"Verification Sources\". Merchant of record: No. DataFast analytics is also connected: 1,745 visitors in the last 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Company", "value": "SARL PIERRE GUILBAUD, Biarritz, France", "grade": "C", "note": "Legal notice of alchie.fr, updated 20 April 2026: a limited company with 1,000 EUR of capital, managed by Pierre Guilbaud.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none (bootstrapped)", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR profile: \"Funding: Bootstrapped\", a founder-written field.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's audience", "value": "about 44,000 LinkedIn followers and about 17,000 newsletter readers", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page: \"Ghostwriter LinkedIn · 44 000 abonnés\" (translation: LinkedIn ghostwriter, 44,000 followers). IndiePage profile: \"je raconte les coulisses à 17 000 entrepreneurs dans ma newsletter\" (translation: I tell the behind-the-scenes story to 17,000 entrepreneurs in my newsletter).", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Posts written by hand before Alchie", "value": "more than 500", "grade": "C", "note": "Manifesto: \"En 500+ posts rédigés, j'ai compris une chose\" (translation: in 500+ posts written, I understood one thing).", "src": [ 6 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Before 2026", "what": "Pierre Guilbaud works as a LinkedIn ghostwriter and editorial coach for founders, with a one-hour call every two weeks per client, and writes more than 500 posts.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "16 April 2026", "what": "Alchie's founded date on TrustMRR. The legal notice of alchie.fr is dated 20 April 2026.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "when": "April 2026", "what": "First verified revenue: US$574.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "16 May 2026", "what": "Wayback Machine copy of the pricing page: Bronze 19 EUR, Argent 49 EUR, Or 89 EUR a month, and for Argent \"Accès au groupe WhatsApp pour soutenir nos posts\" (translation: access to the WhatsApp group to support our posts).", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "June to August 2026", "what": "Verified revenue between US$7,649 and US$8,975 a month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "Best month so far: US$19,343.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The Or plan becomes the \"Bootcamp\": a video course plus live workshops with the founder from 29 October to 26 November.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 8 ] }, { "when": "26 October 2026", "what": "US$11,574 MRR, 201 subscriptions, US$61,304 in total.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "An audience before the product", "text": "The founder already had about 44,000 LinkedIn followers and a newsletter, and the product helps people do on LinkedIn what he did for them as a ghostwriter. TrustMRR lists no marketing channel; the site's own footer has an affiliate program, templates, comparisons and a blog." }, { "title": "The interview is the product", "text": "Generic chat models write a post from a topic. Alchie asks questions first, about a decision, a client or an opinion, and writes only from the answers. The home page says: \"Tu n'as pas un problème d'écriture. Tu as un problème d'extraction d'idées\" (translation: you do not have a writing problem, you have an idea-extraction problem). This is how the founder worked by hand." }, { "title": "Plans that add a person", "text": "The highest plan, Or at 89 EUR a month, adds a video course and at least two live workshops a month with the founder. Part of the price pays for his time, not only for software, which raises the revenue per subscription to about US$58 a month." }, { "title": "A WhatsApp group for paying users", "text": "The Argent and Or plans include a WhatsApp group for tips, product requests and, according to llms-full.txt, resharing a post that did not perform. This is the founder's own tactic, listed under Watch; Alchie itself publishes only the user's own posts." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's llms-full.txt file, terms and privacy policy, read on 25 October 2026, and from the TrustMRR tech stack. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Front end: Next.js 16 with React Server Components and Tailwind CSS, hosted on Vercel in the EU.", "Back end: Supabase (PostgreSQL, login, row-level security, storage), with data hosted in Paris.", "Models: Claude Sonnet 5.5 for the interview and Claude Opus 5.5 for writing and review, through the Anthropic API; OpenAI is also listed as an AI provider.", "Speech-to-text: Speechmatics real-time API, with Deepgram as a fallback for uploaded files.", "Publishing to LinkedIn through Zernio, a service that connects apps to social networks through their official APIs.", "Stripe Checkout and Customer Portal for subscriptions; PostHog for analytics; Loops and Postmark for email; Sentry for errors." ], "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to help professionals write or publish content, or to build a professional feed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Draft", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A simple online writing and editing tool for writers.", "died": "Google Docs gave the same features for free, and Draft did not grow beyond its first feature set.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1605-draft" }, { "name": "Hyperink", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$1.4M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Help niche experts publish e-books from what they know.", "died": "Amazon's self-publishing tools and free content gave authors more reach than Hyperink could.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1192-hyperink" }, { "name": "Quibb", "years": "2013 to 2019", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A curated feed of industry insights written by professionals.", "died": "LinkedIn offered a much larger audience, and Quibb could not grow or charge beyond a small group of insiders.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/475-quibb" }, { "name": "Vulpine", "years": "2014 to 2019", "funding": "US$200K", "cause": "Ran out of cash", "promise": "A social media agency that ran data-driven campaigns for companies.", "died": "Agency work needed people for every client and did not scale, and clients moved to cheaper software.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1875-vulpine" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Vulpine and the founder's own ghostwriting work had the same limit: every client needed hours of a person's time. Draft and Hyperink sold tools that helped people write, but the person still had to find the idea and write the text. A language model can now do the writing, and with a good set of questions it can also do part of the interview that a ghostwriter did by hand, for 19 to 89 EUR a month instead of the 500 to 2,000 EUR a month that the site says a human LinkedIn ghostwriter costs.", "Quibb shows the other side: it tried to build a new professional feed and lost to LinkedIn. Alchie does not compete with LinkedIn; it is a tool for LinkedIn's users, so it depends on LinkedIn's rules and on its publishing interface, through Zernio. It also competes with every general chat model that can write a post, which is why the product sells the interview and the founder's method rather than the text." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, if you already know the job by hand.", "text": "The pattern is clear: a person who did a service by hand turns the method into software, sells it to the audience that the service built, and keeps a paid plan with their own time on top. It depends on the founder's audience, which a copy would not have.", "steps": [ "Write down the questions that you ask clients in your service work, and in which order.", "Build an interview that asks those questions by voice, and let a model write only from the answers.", "Let the user paste their own best texts so that the model copies their style.", "Sell three plans, with your own time (course, workshops) only in the highest one.", "Launch to the audience that your service work already built." ], "open": "The same interview method fits other formats and languages: newsletters, podcast notes, posts in German, Spanish or Italian, and posts for one profession such as doctors, lawyers or recruiters." }, "watch": [ { "title": "The founder's own marketing tactics", "text": "The pricing page of May and June 2026 (Wayback Machine) listed for the Argent plan: \"Accès au groupe WhatsApp pour soutenir nos posts\" (translation: access to the WhatsApp group to support our posts). The current llms-full.txt (read 25 October 2026) says the group is for questions, product requests and to \"repartager un post qui n'a pas décollé pour lui redonner une chance\" (translation: reshare a post that did not take off, to give it another chance), adding that this is a fallback and not a reflex. The engagement is done by hand by members; the product does not automate likes, comments or connection requests. This is the founder's tactic, not a feature sold as automation." }, { "title": "Revenue is falling from a peak", "text": "September 2026 brought US$19,343, more than twice August. In the last 30 days TrustMRR shows US$13,255 (-30%) and MRR down 25.2%. Yearly plans paid in September may explain part of the peak; the sources do not say." }, { "title": "Software and the founder's own time", "text": "The Or plan includes a video course and at least two live workshops a month with the founder, and the October Bootcamp sells the Or plan as a course. The founder also sells LinkedIn ghostwriting and sponsored content to his audience, according to his IndiePage profile. The sources do not say whether only Alchie subscriptions run through the Stripe account that TrustMRR reads." }, { "title": "Depends on LinkedIn and on rented models", "text": "Posts are published through Zernio and LinkedIn's interface, and the writing runs on Anthropic's and OpenAI's models. A change in LinkedIn's rules or in model prices would reach the product directly. The terms list Vercel, Supabase, Stripe, Anthropic, OpenAI, Speechmatics, Deepgram, Zernio and LinkedIn as outside providers." }, { "title": "Young business", "text": "The product is six months old. The trial needs a bank card and turns into a paid plan after 7 days unless the user cancels; llms-full.txt says there are no refunds after the subscription starts." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.alchie.fr/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/alchie" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: Alchie (markdown profile)", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/alchie.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile on 25 and 26 October 2026 (synced 2026-10-26T22:27). The revenue, MRR and subscription rows come from the Stripe API and are grade A; funding, insights and tech stack are founder-written and grade C." }, { "title": "IndiePage: leaderboard (last 30 days) and the founder's profile page", "url": "https://indiepa.ge/leaderboard", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026: Alchie at US$14,015 for the last 30 days, maker Pierre Guilbaud. The profile https://indiepa.ge/pierreguilbaud lists his other services (ghostwriting, sponsored content) and the newsletter audience." }, { "title": "Alchie home page and llms-full.txt", "url": "https://www.alchie.fr/llms-full.txt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026 (with the home page https://www.alchie.fr/). Source for the interview method, the stack, the models, the WhatsApp group and the refund rule." }, { "title": "Alchie pricing page (Tarifs)", "url": "https://www.alchie.fr/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Source for the plans, the trial and the founder's 11K EUR claim." }, { "title": "Alchie pricing page, Wayback Machine copies of 16 May 2026 and 11 June 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260516055802/https://alchie.fr/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full (also https://web.archive.org/web/20260611222014/https://www.alchie.fr/pricing). Source for the early plan list with the WhatsApp group \"pour soutenir nos posts\"." }, { "title": "Alchie manifesto (Le manifeste Alchie)", "url": "https://www.alchie.fr/manifeste", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Founder's text on his ghostwriting past and the 500+ posts." }, { "title": "Alchie legal notice (Mentions légales), terms (CGU) and privacy policy", "url": "https://www.alchie.fr/mentions-legales", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026 (with https://www.alchie.fr/cgu and https://www.alchie.fr/confidentialite). Source for the company and the list of providers." }, { "title": "Alchie Bootcamp page", "url": "https://www.alchie.fr/bootcamp", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Source for the workshop dates and the Or plan as a course." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/nerdsip/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/nerdsip.md", "slug": "nerdsip", "name": "NerdSip", "country": "Germany", "sector": "Education", "productType": "AI micro-learning phone app that writes a five-minute course with quizzes on any topic", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-26", "launchLabel": "1 March 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$3.9K verified revenue in the last 30 days, October 2026", "sticker": "$3.9K in 30 days", "outcomeUsd": 46656, "months": 7, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders, Dr. Max Hänze and Dr. Philip Sergelius, who build it beside full-time jobs", "fundingLabel": "None reported; bootstrapped side project", "primaryFactor": "Search", "group": "learning", "channel": "search", "trend": "flat", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Education" ], "product": "A phone app for iPhone and Android. The user types any topic, such as \"How black holes form\", and the app writes a short course of 3, 5 or 10 lessons, each about one minute of reading, with images, a quiz after every lesson and a summary infographic at the end. Courses can be read aloud. Users can also swipe through courses that other learners made. Streaks, levels, weekly leagues and cosmetic \"loot drops\" make it feel like a game. The app is free to download; NerdSip Gold costs US$7.99 a month or US$49.99 a year on the App Store.", "why": "The founders said that most new users came from search: their blog brought over 40% of new users and AI answers (ChatGPT and Google's AI) another 28%. Short slideshows on four TikTok accounts brought views but few sign-ups, about one per 10,000 views. The product removes the main limit of earlier learning apps, a fixed catalog of courses, because the model writes a new course for each request.", "summary": [ "NerdSip is a micro-learning app, an app that teaches in very short lessons that fit into a few spare minutes. Its difference is that the courses are not written in advance: a large language model, an AI program trained on large amounts of text, writes a new course on whatever topic the user types, and a fact-checking step checks it against live Google Search results. The founders said they use Google's models through Vertex AI and the Gemini API, with a Convex back end and a React Native app.", "Two physicists in northern Germany, Dr. Max Hänze and Dr. Philip Sergelius, build it beside full-time jobs in the semiconductor industry, through their company ai51 UG. They wrote the first line of code in December 2025 and launched on 1 March 2026. TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a company's payment provider, shows US$3,888 of verified revenue in the last 30 days, US$1,965 of monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the subscription revenue that repeats every month) and 381 active subscriptions (synced 26 October 2026). The data comes from RevenueCat, a service that records in-app subscription purchases. That is grade A.", "Revenue rose from under US$1,000 a month until June to US$3,314 in July, US$3,920 in August and US$4,328 in September 2026. The monthly revenue is higher than the MRR because yearly plans count fully in the month they are paid. This page also lists, under \"Watch\", one of the founders' own tactics: paid directory listings for their domain rating and links to other founders' products in their blog." ], "pricing": { "caption": "NerdSip Gold prices on the US App Store, read 25 October 2026 (grade B)", "note": "The founders gave the same prices in August 2026: \"7.99 USD for a monthly subscription, or 49.99 USD for a yearly\". The founder-written TrustMRR profile gives 7.99 EUR a month or 49.99 EUR a year. The App Store text offers 7 days of Gold free to new users. The per-month value of the yearly plan is calculated: 49.99 / 12 = about US$4.17.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "courses with limits; reviewers on the App Store say the free version is limited" ], [ "NerdSip Gold", "4.17", "7.99", "full access, 7-day free trial for new users" ] ] }, "factsCaption": "US$3,888 of verified app revenue in the last 30 days, seven months after launch, for a learning app that two physicists build after work", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the app's RevenueCat purchase data. A grade B value is on Apple's App Store page. A grade C value was stated by the founders in an interview, a press release or on their site. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From the first line of code in December 2025 to about US$4,000 a month in autumn 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 30 days", "value": "US$3,888", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, RevenueCat API, synced 26 October 2026. The profile's stored snapshot shows US$3,984 and a change of -7.8% against the 30 days before. On 25 October the profile showed US$4,071.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue by month, 2026", "value": "March US$80, April US$58, May US$467, June US$722, July US$3,314, August US$3,920, September US$4,328, October to the 26th US$3,451", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. Calculated: August was 18.3% above July, September 10.4% above August.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue and subscriptions", "value": "US$1,965 MRR, 381 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot, MRR change 0.0% in 30 days. Calculated: 1,965 / 381 = about US$5.16 a month per subscription, close to the yearly plan's US$4.17 a month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time", "value": "US$16,341", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, synced 26 October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the last 30 days", "value": "about US$47,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$3,888 x 12 = US$46,656.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the headline figure", "value": "7 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: March 2026 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Founders' figures, August 2026", "value": "10,000 downloads, just past 100 paying subscribers, US$3,000 revenue in July 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Fake Mayo founder story, 5 August 2026, told by Philip Sergelius. The July figure agrees with TrustMRR's US$3,314.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Where new users came from", "value": "search over 40%, AI search 28%", "grade": "C", "note": "Fake Mayo: \"SEO drives over 40% of new users, all flowing through our blog\" and \"AI search is second at 28%\". From the founders' own analytics dashboard.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "TikTok", "value": "over 10 million views on four accounts, about one sign-up per 10,000 views", "grade": "C", "note": "Fake Mayo. The four accounts all carry the NerdSip name.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Advertising spend", "value": "less than US$500 in total", "grade": "C", "note": "Fake Mayo: small tests \"on Reddit, TikTok, and the App Store\".", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Registered users, September 2026", "value": "10,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Press release of 21 September 2026: about 5,000 at the end of July 2026, doubled in under two months. TrustMRR's founder-written estimate is 16,000 users.", "src": [ 5, 1 ] }, { "fact": "App Store, October 2026", "value": "121 ratings, average 4.8; age rating 13+", "grade": "B", "note": "App Store page read 25 October 2026. Seller: ai51 UG (haftungsbeschränkt).", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Payment data source", "value": "RevenueCat (API key)", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR \"Verification Sources\". Merchant of record: No; Apple and Google bill the subscriptions.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "People", "value": "2 co-founders", "grade": "C", "note": "About page: \"Dr. Max Hänze, Co-Founder, PhD in Physics\" and \"Dr. Philip Sergelius, Co-Founder, PhD in Physics\". Fake Mayo: both have full-time jobs in the semiconductor industry.", "src": [ 4, 2 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "December 2025", "what": "The founders write the first line of code, in the hours left after their jobs and families.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "January 2026", "what": "They publish a daily \"Building NerdSip\" blog series. The post \"Day 23\" carries the date 23 January 2026, although the Wayback Machine saved it already on 7 January 2026.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "1 March 2026", "what": "Launch on iOS and Android. First verified revenue in March: US$80.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "when": "July 2026", "what": "Revenue jumps to US$3,314, almost five times June. About 5,000 registered users at the end of the month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "when": "5 August 2026", "what": "Fake Mayo publishes Philip Sergelius's account: 10,000 downloads, just over 100 paying subscribers, most users from search.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "21 September 2026", "what": "Press release: 10,000 registered users six months after launch.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "Best month so far: US$4,328.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "26 October 2026", "what": "US$3,888 in the last 30 days, US$1,965 MRR, 381 active subscriptions, US$16,341 in total.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A catalog without limits", "text": "Earlier learning apps sold a fixed library of courses. NerdSip writes a course for any request in about a minute, so the library grows with every user: each new course also goes into a shared feed that other learners swipe through." }, { "title": "A blog that ranks in search and in AI answers", "text": "The founders said that their blog at nerdsip.com/blog brings over 40% of new users, with articles that answer searches such as \"how to improve my general knowledge\", and that AI answers from ChatGPT and Google bring another 28%. They described the blog as \"the backbone of the whole operation\"." }, { "title": "Short slideshows on TikTok", "text": "Four TikTok accounts under the NerdSip name post slideshows of facts and stories with a call to action on the last slide, and passed 10 million views. The founders said that conversion is weak, about one sign-up per 10,000 views, but the views are free." }, { "title": "One model provider for everything", "text": "The founders use Google's models through Vertex AI and one Gemini API key for text, images, voice and embeddings. That kept the stack small enough for two people who work on it in their spare time." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the Fake Mayo founder story, the press release and the App Store page. They are grade C and B.", "items": [ "App: React Native for iPhone and Android; back end on Convex with Node.js.", "Models: Google Vertex AI and the Gemini API, for course text, images, voice and embeddings. Courses are checked against live Google Search results, and automated quality checks score the library every night.", "A 3D avatar with items built in Three.js, which Philip Sergelius called the feature that \"Nobody uses\".", "A ranking engine built by Max Hänze that orders the shared course feed by the user's interests, other learners' upvotes and trends.", "Subscriptions through the App Store and Google Play, recorded by RevenueCat.", "Marketing: the blog, four TikTok accounts, long YouTube videos generated with Remotion, paid directory listings, and less than US$500 of ad tests." ], "src": [ 2, 5, 3, 1 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to teach or inform people in short, game-like or bite-sized formats. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "QuizUp", "years": "2013 to 2020", "funding": "US$27M", "cause": "No market need", "promise": "Real-time trivia battles on a large range of topics.", "died": "It did not find a way to make money, lost players to live-hosted quiz games, and its buyer neglected it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/479-quizup" }, { "name": "Circa", "years": "2011 to 2015", "funding": "US$5.5M", "cause": "Ran out of cash", "promise": "News cut into short pieces for reading on a phone.", "died": "Large media companies copied the format, and Circa could not build an advertising business that paid for its editors.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1920-circa" }, { "name": "Grockit", "years": "2007 to 2015", "funding": "US$44.4M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Social, game-like test preparation for the SAT and GMAT.", "died": "Duolingo, Khan Academy and the large test-prep companies offered the same, and Kaplan bought it and later closed it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/196-grockit" }, { "name": "Udacity", "years": "2011 to 2024", "funding": "US$1B", "cause": "No market need", "promise": "Online courses in technical skills that lead to jobs.", "died": "Most students did not finish the courses, and employers did not value the certificates.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2307-udacity" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Circa paid editors to cut every story into short pieces, and QuizUp needed a large set of written questions for each topic. Content cost money for every topic, so these companies needed advertising or venture money to cover it. A language model writes a course on any topic for the cost of one model call, so two people with full-time jobs can offer an unlimited catalog.", "Udacity and Grockit show the other old problem: people start courses and do not finish them. NerdSip answers with very short lessons, quizzes, streaks and leagues, and with review rounds of earlier material. The new risk is accuracy: an AI-written course can contain mistakes, which is why the founders describe a fact-checking pipeline against live search results." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes. The method is open to any small team.", "text": "The parts are all available: a model that writes courses, a cross-platform app, a subscription service, and a blog that answers real search questions. What took time was the content marketing, a daily blog and slideshows, and the founders said that TikTok views turned into few users.", "steps": [ "Pick a learning format that needed hand-written content before, and let a model write it on request.", "Check the model's output against live sources before users see it.", "Add quizzes and review rounds, so that the user remembers and comes back.", "Write blog articles that answer the questions people type into Google and AI assistants.", "Measure where users come from with your own dashboard before you pay for ads." ], "open": "Courses for one profession or one exam syllabus, and micro-courses in languages where few learning apps exist, are still open." }, "watch": [ { "title": "The founders' own marketing tactics", "text": "Philip Sergelius told Fake Mayo (5 August 2026): \"We've spent a few hundred dollars on premium directories purely for the domain rating (DR)\", and \"I tell myself it helps with link exchanges in case one wants to try it out.\" Domain rating is a score from search-tool companies that estimates a site's link strength. Their blog post \"Day 23: The Growth Triad\" (dated 23 January 2026) named only LandingBoost and Postpire in the Wayback copy of 7 January 2026; by October 2026 it also recommended other founders' products, SupaBird, WPMultiTool and cleanchart (\"For our internal tracking and reporting, we use cleanchart\"), without saying why they were added. LandingBoost's own site lists NerdSip under \"Community projects\". The founders do not sell links; these are their tactics for their own search ranking." }, { "title": "Monthly revenue is above the MRR", "text": "MRR is US$1,965, while the last 30 days brought US$3,888. Yearly plans at US$49.99 are counted fully in the month of payment, so a month's revenue can fall when fewer new yearly plans are sold. The floor of this site, US$2,000 a month, is met by the monthly revenue, not by the MRR." }, { "title": "Accuracy of AI-written courses", "text": "Every course is written by a model. The press release describes four steps of fact-checking, grounded in live Google Search results with nightly automated checks, and a person reviews a course when a user reports a problem. No independent test of the accuracy exists in the sources." }, { "title": "A side project", "text": "Both founders have full-time jobs and children, according to Fake Mayo, and build the app in early mornings, evenings and weekends. The press release of September 2026 calls Philip Sergelius \"Founder and CEO\"." }, { "title": "Game features and younger users", "text": "The App Store age rating is 13+. The app has \"XP, levels, loot drops and weekly leagues\"; the only in-app purchases listed are the Gold subscriptions, so the loot items are not sold for money according to that list." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://nerdsip.com/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6756797708" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/nerdsip" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: Nerdsip (markdown profile)", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/nerdsip.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile on 25 and 26 October 2026 (synced 2026-10-26T20:47). The revenue, MRR and subscription rows come from the RevenueCat API and are grade A; the insights and user estimate are founder-written and grade C." }, { "title": "Fake Mayo, 5 August 2026, by Jakob Jelling: From Physics to Side Hustle: How Two Dads Built and Grew a Micro-Learning App", "url": "https://www.fakemayo.com/p/from-physics-to-side-hustle-how-two-dads-built-and-grew-a-micro-learning-app", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The story is told by Philip Sergelius. Source for the launch date, the channels, the stack, the directories and the July revenue." }, { "title": "App Store: NerdSip - Micro Learning, seller ai51 UG (haftungsbeschränkt)", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nerdsip-micro-learning/id6756797708", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026: description, ratings, age rating, in-app purchases and version history." }, { "title": "NerdSip About page", "url": "https://nerdsip.com/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026 (with the home page and the imprint). Source for the founders and the company." }, { "title": "NerdSip press release, 21 September 2026: NerdSip Reaches 10,000 Registered Users Six Months After Launch", "url": "https://nerdsip.com/press/nerdsip-reaches-10000-registered-users/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Source for the user numbers and the fact-checking process." }, { "title": "NerdSip blog, Day 23: The Growth Triad, current page and Wayback Machine copies of 7 January 2026 and 8 April 2026", "url": "https://nerdsip.com/blog/day-twenty-three-the-growth-triad", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full: the current page on 25 October 2026 and the copies https://web.archive.org/web/20260107201606/https://nerdsip.com/blog/day-twenty-three-the-growth-triad and https://web.archive.org/web/20260408090008/https://nerdsip.com/blog/day-twenty-three-the-growth-triad. Source for the links added to other founders' products." }, { "title": "LandingBoost home page", "url": "https://landingboost.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 25 October 2026. Cited only for its \"Community projects\" list that includes NerdSip." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/harmar-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/harmar-ai.md", "slug": "harmar-ai", "name": "Harmar AI", "country": "Armenia; company registered in the USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI captions for videos in mixed languages", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-26", "launchLabel": "3 June 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$3K monthly recurring revenue, October 2026", "sticker": "$3K MRR", "outcomeUsd": 2996, "months": 4, "teamLabel": "1 founder, Aram, in Yerevan; the company calls Harmar a solo build", "fundingLabel": "Bootstrapped (founder-entered on TrustMRR); listed for sale at US$150,000 on 26 October 2026", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "voice-audio", "channel": "audience", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Video captions" ], "product": "A web app for people who post short videos. The user uploads a video, Harmar writes down every spoken word with its exact time, and the user edits the text, picks a caption style and exports a video with the captions drawn into the picture, or an SRT or VTT caption file. It was built for Armenian speech that mixes in Russian and English words, and the home page now lists 55+ languages. A paid API and an MCP connector give the same transcription to developers and to AI chat apps.", "why": "It serves a group that the large caption tools serve badly: speakers of a language with little training data who also switch languages inside one sentence. The founder already published AI lessons in Armenian, and the About page says his audience asked for this tool. Stripe data on TrustMRR shows revenue rising every month from June to October 2026.", "summary": [ "Harmar makes captions for short videos: the spoken words shown as text on the screen, timed to the speech. Many people watch Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and TikTok videos with the sound off, so creators add captions. Harmar was built for Armenian creators, who often use code-switching: they change language inside one sentence, for example from Armenian to Russian or English and back. The company's blog says that most caption tools first ask for one language and then translate, drop or respell the words that do not fit. Armenian is also a low-resource language, a language with little recorded and written text available to train speech models. Harmar keeps each word in the language and the alphabet in which it was spoken.", "The About page says the founder, Aram, lives in Yerevan, publishes AI education in Armenian on YouTube and Instagram, and built the product, the app and the API alone. TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a company's payment provider, shows Stripe revenue of US$789 in June 2026, US$1,413 in July, US$1,638 in August and US$2,888 in September. On 26 October 2026 it showed MRR (monthly recurring revenue, the subscription revenue of one month) of US$2,996 from 231 active subscriptions, and US$2,988 of revenue in the first 26 days of October.", "The headline number is grade A, because it comes from the Stripe account. Two things on the page are less clear. The same Stripe account shows revenue before the founding date of 3 June 2026, including US$1,234 in November 2025, and no source says which product earned it. And the company's pages name two legal owners: a sole proprietorship in Armenia on the About page, and HARMARAVET LLC, a US company, in the terms and the privacy policy. The founder listed the business for sale on TrustMRR on 26 October 2026. The page also shows four failed companies that tried to make speech, translation or video editing cheap before AI models could do the work." ], "pricing": { "caption": "Harmar plans in October 2026, from the pricing section of the company's home page (grade C)", "note": "Plans are sold by minutes of video per month. The home page offers annual billing with 2 months free, and the About page says annual billing is twelve months for the price of ten, so the yearly column is the monthly price times 10, divided by 12 (calculated). The About page says subscriptions are billed in Armenian dram (AMD), and the structured data in the home page source lists 3,000, 6,000 and 15,000 AMD a month for the three paid plans. The developer API is sold separately as prepaid minute packs, with 10 free trial minutes. The terms also name a Lifetime plan that is granted to selected users such as partners and cannot be bought.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "5 minutes a month, videos up to 3 minutes, Harmar logo on the video" ], [ "Harmar 10", "7.49", "8.99", "10 minutes a month, no logo, SRT and VTT files, own fonts" ], [ "Harmar 60", "14.16", "16.99", "60 minutes a month, about 30 to 60 videos" ], [ "Harmar 120", "23.33", "27.99", "120 minutes a month, 4K export, transparent caption track, extra minutes for sale" ] ] }, "factsCaption": "US$2,996 of monthly recurring revenue four months after the founding date, for a one-person caption tool built for Armenian speech", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value comes from Stripe, the payment processor, through TrustMRR's connection to the company's Stripe account. A grade C value is a statement by the company on its own pages, or a value the founder typed into the TrustMRR profile. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a founding date in June 2026 to US$2,996 of monthly recurring revenue in October 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 26 October 2026", "value": "US$2,996 from 231 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR metric snapshot, read from the Stripe account through an API key; revenue last synced on 26 October 2026 at 14:00 UTC. Stripe is not the merchant of record. TrustMRR shows MRR growth of 13.3% in the last 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, September 2026", "value": "US$2,888", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly revenue timeline. The latest full month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, 1 to 26 October 2026", "value": "US$2,988", "grade": "A", "note": "A partial month, already 3.5% above September (calculated: 2,988 divided by 2,888).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, June, July and August 2026", "value": "US$789, US$1,413 and US$1,638", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly revenue timeline. Each month is higher than the month before.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from August to September 2026", "value": "76.3%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: (2,888 minus 1,638) divided by 1,638.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 30 days to 26 October 2026", "value": "US$3,554", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR shows growth of 40.9% against the 30 days before. The daily table has a payment on every one of the 30 days; the largest day is US$310.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average MRR per active subscription", "value": "about US$12.97", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2,996 divided by 231. Between the Harmar 10 price of US$8.99 and the Harmar 60 price of US$16.99.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the October 2026 MRR", "value": "about US$35,952 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2,996 times 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, November 2025 to May 2026", "value": "US$2,848 in total", "grade": "A", "note": "US$1,234 in November 2025 and US$1,237 in December 2025, then between US$24.63 and US$115 a month from January to May 2026 (sum calculated). All of it is before the founding date of 3 June 2026. No source this page read says which product earned it.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue older than 12 months", "value": "about US$10,468", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: all-time revenue of US$23,033 minus US$12,565 for the last 12 months. The Stripe account therefore had revenue before October 2025, long before the founding date.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time to 26 October 2026", "value": "US$23,033", "grade": "A", "note": "Includes the revenue from before the founding date. June to October 2026 sum to US$9,716 (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "91%", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot. Revenue comes from Stripe, but the costs behind the margin are not shown as verified.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founded date", "value": "3 June 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Typed by the founder into the TrustMRR profile. The About page gives 2026, and the terms and privacy policy are dated May 2026.", "src": [ 1, 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the founding date to the headline figure", "value": "4 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: June 2026 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founder", "value": "Aram, based in Yerevan", "grade": "C", "note": "Named by first name only on the About page, as founder for product, engineering and design. The page says he worked as a freelancer on Upwork for seven years from Spain and writes an AI newsletter in Armenian.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 person", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR team size, founder-entered. The About page says the product, the app, the API and everything behind them are his own work.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Legal owner", "value": "two names on the company's pages", "grade": "C", "note": "The About page: Aram AI, an individual entrepreneur (sole proprietorship) registered in Yerevan. The terms and privacy policy: HARMARAVET LLC, United States, with Delaware law for disputes. TrustMRR lists the country as US.", "src": [ 3, 4, 5, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR funding field: Bootstrapped, founder-entered. No source mentions investors.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Word error rate in the company's own test", "value": "8.1% for Harmar, 34.5% for Whisper large-v3", "grade": "C", "note": "Mean over 57 languages of the public FLEURS speech data set, published by the company on 5 September 2026. Armenian: 9.3% against 38.7%. Whisper was better in English, 2.5% against 3.3%. Not an independent test.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price on TrustMRR", "value": "US$150,000, listed on 26 October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR shows a revenue multiple of 3.5. Calculated: 150,000 divided by (3,554 times 12) is 3.52. An asking price is not a sale.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Before October 2025", "what": "The Stripe account that TrustMRR reads already has revenue: about US$10,468 earlier than the last 12 months (calculated). No source says from which product.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "November and December 2025", "what": "US$1,234 and US$1,237 of verified revenue, before the founding date. Revenue then falls to between US$24.63 and US$115 a month from January to May 2026.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "May 2026", "what": "The terms of service and the privacy policy take effect, naming HARMARAVET LLC as the company behind Harmar.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "when": "3 June 2026", "what": "Founding date entered by the founder on TrustMRR. Revenue that month is US$789.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "13 June 2026", "what": "The English blog publishes a guide on adding Armenian subtitles to Instagram Reels.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "July and August 2026", "what": "US$1,413 and US$1,638 of verified revenue.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "4 and 5 September 2026", "what": "Blog posts on why caption tools fail when speakers switch languages, and a benchmark against Whisper in 59 languages.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 7 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "US$2,888 of verified revenue, 76.3% more than August (calculated).", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "26 October 2026", "what": "MRR of US$2,996 from 231 active subscriptions. The founder lists the business for sale on TrustMRR at US$150,000 on the same day.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "One badly served language first", "text": "The About page says the tools that Armenian creators used, such as CapCut, Instagram's automatic captions and caption apps built on Whisper, did not support Armenian or did not support it well enough, so creators typed captions by hand. A product that is clearly better for one group can win that group without competing with the large tools in English, where the company's own test shows Whisper is better." }, { "title": "Mixed-language speech as the main case", "text": "Most transcription models are asked for one language per video. Harmar keeps each word in the language and alphabet in which it was spoken, writes spelling rules for borrowed words per language, and fixes the alphabet for a whole video. The company says it measured 7.9% word error rate on mixed Hindi and English speech, against 42.4% for Whisper large-v3; word error rate is the share of words that are wrong, missing or added." }, { "title": "A founder who already had the audience", "text": "The founder published AI lessons in Armenian on YouTube and Instagram and an Armenian AI newsletter before Harmar. The About page says the audience asked for the tool and that customers arrive through organic content, referrals and word of mouth, with no outbound sales." }, { "title": "Many small subscriptions", "text": "The Stripe data shows 231 active subscriptions with an average of about US$12.97 of MRR each (calculated), and a payment on every day of the last 30 days. Revenue is spread over many small customers; the About page says most of them are Armenian-speaking creators who publish short videos often." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's own pages: the About page, the privacy policy, the API page and the home page source. They are grade C, except the payment provider, which TrustMRR confirms (grade A).", "items": [ "Google provides the sign-in and, in the words of the privacy policy, the AI models that produce the captions. No source names the model.", "Supabase, a hosted Postgres database with login, holds the accounts and the project data.", "Cloudflare R2 stores the uploaded files; the API returns signed upload links to R2. Source media is deleted once the captions exist.", "Railway and Vercel run the service. The home page source loads its scripts from a /_next/ path, the folder that the Next.js web framework uses.", "Stripe Checkout takes the subscriptions, and Brevo sends the transactional email. Users can also sign in with Telegram.", "A developer API sells prepaid minutes, and an npm package named harmar-ai is a command-line tool and an MCP server, so that AI coding agents and Claude can caption a video through it. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is a standard way for an AI app to call tools in another program." ], "src": [ 3, 5, 6, 2, 1 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to sell speech recognition, translation or easy video editing before AI models made these tasks cheap. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Tellme", "years": "1999 to 2011", "funding": "US$238M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Information and transactions over the phone by voice command, using automated speech recognition instead of human operators.", "died": "Smartphone apps with screens replaced voice phone services, and large companies built better voice assistants. Microsoft bought it in 2007, but the integration had no clear direction.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/612-tellme" }, { "name": "TurboTranslations", "years": "2014 to 2023", "funding": "US$150K", "cause": "Ran out of cash", "promise": "Faster and cheaper translations from a marketplace of freelance human translators.", "died": "Neural machine translation from Google in 2016 and DeepL in 2017 closed most of the quality gap, and a business built on human translators lost its reason to exist.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2263-turbotranslations" }, { "name": "ReelSurfer", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$1.25M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Simple clipping and sharing of video for people who do not know editing software, in a desktop tool.", "died": "YouTube and Facebook added the same editing and sharing features, and mobile apps such as Instagram and Snapchat moved video creation to the phone.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1577-reelsurfer" }, { "name": "Petalite", "years": "2014 to 2025", "funding": "US$12M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A voice assistant that runs on the device instead of in the cloud, for users who care about privacy.", "died": "Amazon and Google sold their voice devices at or below cost, with more training data and their own ecosystems, and a venture-funded start-up could not match them.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2471-petalite" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The predecessors had to build the hard part themselves or pay people to do it. Tellme raised US$238 million to make speech recognition work over the phone. TurboTranslations paid human translators. Petalite raised US$12 million to build its own language models and hardware. Each one then lost to large companies with more data, or to machine translation that became good enough.", "Harmar rents the speech models from a cloud provider and builds only the parts around them: language rules for mixed speech, word timing, an editor, caption styles and exports. That is work one engineer can do. It also chose a group that large companies do not focus on, Armenian speakers who mix languages, and sold to them through an audience the founder already had. Stripe data on TrustMRR shows that this reached US$2,996 of MRR four months after the founding date." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The niche, only if you know the language.", "text": "One person built and runs the product on rented models and hosted services, with almost no capital. The hard part is to know a language community well: how its speakers mix languages, which spelling they expect, and where they post videos. The founder's earlier Armenian AI audience did the selling. The risk is that the large caption tools add better support for small languages, and the company's own test shows the gap is small in major European languages.", "steps": [ "Pick a language, or a mix of languages, that the large caption tools handle badly and that you speak.", "Rent the speech model, and write the rules that the model gets wrong: alphabet, spelling of borrowed words, word timing.", "Publish your own accuracy test with the method and the languages where you lose, so customers can check it.", "Sell a free plan with a logo on the video and cheap monthly plans by minutes of video, then add an API for developers." ], "open": "Other mixed-language groups that the company's own pages name: Taglish in the Philippines, Hinglish in India, Kazakh and Uzbek with Russian in Central Asia, and diaspora communities. A founder who speaks one of these mixes and has an audience in it can repeat the pattern." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue from before the product", "text": "The Stripe account that TrustMRR reads shows US$1,234 in November 2025 and US$1,237 in December 2025, and about US$10,468 earlier than the last 12 months (calculated from the all-time and 12-month totals). The founding date is 3 June 2026. No source this page read says which product or service earned that money; the About page says the founder earlier ran an AI automation practice. This page uses only the figures from June 2026 on for the story." }, { "title": "Two different legal owners", "text": "The About page names Aram AI, an individual entrepreneur (sole proprietorship) registered in Yerevan, as the legal entity. The terms of service and the privacy policy name HARMARAVET LLC, United States, as the company and data controller. TrustMRR lists the country as US. The founder is named by first name only." }, { "title": "For sale", "text": "The founder listed the business on TrustMRR on 26 October 2026 at US$150,000, which TrustMRR shows as 3.5 times yearly revenue. A new owner could change the product, the prices or the team, and this page would then describe a different business." }, { "title": "The accuracy numbers are the company's own", "text": "The benchmark against Whisper large-v3 was run and published by the company on 5 September 2026. It uses public data and says where Harmar loses (English, Yoruba, Turkmen, Somali), but no independent party has repeated it. The privacy policy says Google provides the AI models, so part of the accuracy comes from a rented model that competitors can also rent." }, { "title": "The founder's own marketing", "text": "The sample project on the home page, titled Aram AI Reel, ends with the caption \"follow me en instagram : @iamaram.ai\", the founder's personal account. The About page says he builds Harmar in public, posting the process, the failures and the decisions, and links his Instagram, YouTube and Telegram accounts. This is promotion from the founder's own accounts; no source this page read shows bought reviews or fake accounts." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://harmar.ai/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/harmaravet-llc" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR markdown profile: Harmar AI (Stripe API key, synced 26 October 2026)", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/harmaravet-llc.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile on 26 October 2026. The revenue tables, the MRR and the subscription count are grade A; the founded date, team size, funding, profit margin, tech stack and sale listing are founder-entered or listing data, grade C." }, { "title": "Harmar home page, read 26 October 2026", "url": "https://harmar.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the pricing section and the structured data in the page source. Source for the product, the plans and the AMD prices." }, { "title": "About Harmar, read 26 October 2026", "url": "https://harmar.ai/en/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founder, the solo build, the customers, the acquisition channels, the hosting providers and the Armenian legal entity." }, { "title": "Harmar terms of service, effective May 2026", "url": "https://harmar.ai/en/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for HARMARAVET LLC, the age limit of 16, the plans, the Lifetime plan and the API terms." }, { "title": "Harmar privacy policy, effective May 2026", "url": "https://harmar.ai/en/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the service providers: Google, Supabase, Cloudflare R2, Railway, Vercel, Stripe and Brevo." }, { "title": "Harmar API documentation, read 26 October 2026", "url": "https://harmar.ai/en/developers", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the overview, the upload, job and export sections. Source for the API, the prepaid minutes, the npm package and the MCP connector." }, { "title": "Harmar blog, 5 September 2026: We Benchmarked Our Speech Recognition Against Whisper in 59 Languages", "url": "https://harmar.ai/en/blog/whisper-accuracy-benchmark-59-languages", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's own test; source for the word error rates." }, { "title": "Harmar blog, 4 September 2026: Why Caption Tools Break When You Switch Languages Mid-Sentence", "url": "https://harmar.ai/en/blog/code-switching-subtitles", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for how the product handles mixed-language speech." }, { "title": "Harmar blog index, read 26 October 2026", "url": "https://harmar.ai/en/blog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the dates of the English blog posts." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/copilot-for-obsidian/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/copilot-for-obsidian.md", "slug": "copilot-for-obsidian", "name": "Copilot for Obsidian", "country": "United States", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI assistant and agent plugin for the Obsidian notes app", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "13 April 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$17.9K MRR verified by Stripe and US$914K all time, October 2026", "sticker": "$17.9K MRR, $914K all time", "outcomeUsd": 214788, "months": 42, "teamLabel": "1 named founder; the company describes itself as \"seasoned ex-Google and ex-Uber AI engineers\"; four people have more than 60 commits each in the public code; headcount not published", "fundingLabel": "None disclosed; GitHub sponsors and one-time lifetime plans funded early development", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "ai-model-tools", "channel": "platform", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "platform", "open-source" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Productivity" ], "product": "A free, open-source plugin for Obsidian, a notes app that stores every note as a Markdown file on the user's disk. The plugin adds a chat window and, since version 4 of August 2026, runs the coding agents Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode inside the notes, so they can read, search, write and reorganize the user's files. The plugin is free with the user's own API key or Claude or ChatGPT subscription. The paid Plus plan, US$14.99 a month, adds hosted models that need no key, a better web search, multi-agent answers and publishing. A one-time Supporter license costs US$349.99.", "why": "The plugin lives inside Obsidian's community plugin store, which the founder says gave it organic growth with no ads or paid creators: 300,000 downloads by the end of 2024, 1 million by February 2026 and 2 million by October 2026. The code is free, so there was nothing to sell until the company added a managed layer on top: hosted models, web search and tools that work without any setup. One-time lifetime plans, first Believer and then Supporter, brought large payments in single months. TrustMRR, reading the company's Stripe account, shows US$913,644 of revenue in total and US$17,899 of monthly recurring revenue from 1,356 subscriptions on 27 October 2026, after a fall of about 51% from the best month, February 2026.", "summary": [ "Copilot for Obsidian is a plugin, a program that runs inside another program and extends it, for Obsidian, a notes app whose notes are plain Markdown files on the user's own computer. The plugin puts a chat window next to the notes and connects it to a large language model (LLM), a program that writes text from text. In its first versions the user pasted an API key, a password that lets a program call a model provider on the user's own account, and the plugin called OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or a model running on the same machine. Version 4 of August 2026 went further: it runs coding agents, programs such as Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode that read files, use tools and work for many steps on their own, directly inside the notes folder, so they can search, rewrite and reorganize notes. The plugin's code is free under the AGPL license. Brevilabs LLC, the company behind it, sells the layer on top: a Plus plan at US$14.99 a month with hosted models that need no key, a better web search and multi-agent answers, and a one-time Supporter license at US$349.99.", "Logan Yang, a software engineer in Seattle who describes themself on GitHub as an ex-Uber machine learning practitioner, created the repository on 31 March 2023 and published version 1.0.1, \"Initial release\", on 13 April 2023. In a newsletter of January 2025 they wrote that the plugin had passed 300,000 downloads and won the Obsidian community's Gem of the Year award for 2024 as the best language model integration, \"while having no ads or influencer marketing at all\". A paid alpha of Copilot Plus started in 2024. The Obsidian Copilot site passed 1 million downloads by 13 February 2026 and 2 million by 3 October 2026. TrustMRR, a service that reads revenue from a company's own payment account through an API key, shows for the Brevilabs Stripe account US$913,644 of revenue in total, US$483,759 in the last twelve months, a best month of US$66,646 in February 2026, US$32,590 in September 2026, and US$17,899 of monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the monthly value of all active subscriptions) from 1,356 subscriptions on 27 October 2026. The home page of brevilabs.com, which until August 2026 presented the plugin, has since September 2026 presented the company as an AI consulting firm with \"a four-week, $45k AI product sprint\" and the plugin as one of three products.", "The revenue figures are grade A: TrustMRR reads them from the company's Stripe account. The MRR of US$17,899 divided by 1,356 subscriptions is US$13.20 a month per subscription, between the Plus plan's two prices of US$11.67 and US$14.99, so the recurring figure comes from the plugin's subscribers and cannot contain a US$45,000 consulting retainer. The daily revenue table for the 30 days to 27 October 2026 has no day above US$1,508, so no consulting payment went through the Stripe account in that period either; earlier months cannot be separated with the public data, and the \"watch\" section says so. Download counts, award and team come from the company's own pages, grade C, and from the public code repository, grade B." ], "factsCaption": "US$913,644 of Stripe-verified revenue in total and US$17,899 of monthly recurring revenue from 1,356 subscriptions on 27 October 2026, after a best month of US$66,646 in February 2026 and a fall of about 51% by September 2026", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the company's Stripe account through an API key. A grade B value is visible in the public code repository or in GitHub's API. A grade C value is what the company or the founder states on their own pages. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a weekend repository in March 2023 to a plugin with 2 million downloads and US$913,644 of verified revenue, in 42 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Copilot for Obsidian prices on 27 October 2026, from the company's pricing page and its newsletter of 13 August 2026 (grade C)", "note": "The plugin itself is free and needs no account when the user brings an API key, a local model or a Claude or ChatGPT subscription. Plus is a subscription with hosted models, subject to 5-hour and weekly usage limits; the yearly price of US$139.99 is 22% below twelve monthly payments. Supporter is a one-time payment shown as US$349.99 against a struck-out US$499.96 (30% off); it includes two years of Plus, lifetime Miyo and OpenArtifacts licenses, lifetime self-hosting and 15% extra credit when buying hosted-model usage after the two years. From 13 August to 14 September 2026 the company sold Supporter at US$279.99 and yearly Plus at US$111.99, 20% off. A Wayback snapshot of 7 September 2025 shows the earlier Believer plan, US$299.99 one-time with lifetime access, which was retired for new buyers on 16 February 2026. Miyo Relay, a paid part of the company's Miyo desktop app, costs US$4.99 a month or US$149.99 once. Refunds are accepted within 14 days.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "own API key, local model or Claude/ChatGPT subscription; no account needed" ], [ "Plus", "11.67", "14.99", "hosted models with 5-hour and weekly limits, multi-agent, web search, OpenArtifacts publishing" ], [ "Supporter", "349.99 one-time", "", "2 years of Plus, lifetime Miyo and OpenArtifacts, lifetime self-host; shown as 30% off US$499.96" ], [ "Miyo Relay", "4.99 (monthly) or 149.99 one-time", "4.99", "phone access to the vault for the ChatGPT and Claude apps; 7-day trial" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 27 October 2026", "value": "US$17,899 from 1,356 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from the company's Stripe account through an API key, synced 27 October 2026 at 02:53 UTC. The profile shows a 30-day MRR change of -5.1% and a profit margin snapshot of 95%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per subscription per month", "value": "US$13.20", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 17,899 / 1,356. The Plus plan costs US$14.99 a month or US$11.67 a month billed yearly, so the subscribers are a mix of both. A US$45,000 monthly consulting retainer inside this figure is impossible: it alone would be 2.5 times the whole MRR. MRR times twelve is US$214,788 a year, the headline figure of this page.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time, to 27 October 2026", "value": "US$913,644", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. Last 12 months: US$483,759; last 6 months: US$187,930; last 3 months: US$85,329; last 30 days: US$20,299. The founder-given founding date on the profile is 18 January 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month", "value": "Nov 2025 US$46,901; Dec US$53,160; Jan 2026 US$55,789; Feb US$66,646; Mar US$35,096; Apr US$34,309; May US$38,223; Jun US$36,054; Jul US$29,259; Aug US$33,873; Sep US$32,590; Oct US$16,685 to 27 October", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table, synced 27 October 2026. The twelve rows add up to US$478,585; the rolling last-12-months figure of US$483,759 also contains the last days of October 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Fall from the best month", "value": "51% from February 2026 to September 2026", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: (66,646 - 32,590) / 66,646 = 51.1%. February 2026 was the month in which the Believer lifetime plan was sold for the last time, until 16 February. The last three months average US$28,443 a month; the last twelve average US$40,313.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Daily revenue, 28 September to 27 October 2026", "value": "between US$287 and US$1,508 a day", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR daily table. No day comes near the US$45,000 consulting sprint that brevilabs.com advertises, so no such payment went through this Stripe account in those 30 days. The profile marks the 30-day revenue as -38.9% against the 30 days before.", "src": [ 1, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Where the revenue figures come from", "value": "Stripe, through an API key; merchant of record: no", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR's verification section. The Stripe account is the one whose file store hosts the profile's icon. No Google Analytics, DataFast or Search Console connection, so there are no verified traffic figures.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Downloads", "value": "300,000 by January 2025; 1 million by 13 February 2026; 2 million by 3 October 2026; the site shows 2.5M", "grade": "C", "note": "Company newsletters and the site header, which also shows 7.9K GitHub stars. Obsidian's plugin store counts downloads, not users.", "src": [ 4, 5, 8, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Public code", "value": "7,893 stars, 758 forks, 1,490 commits, 15 contributors, AGPL-3.0 license", "grade": "B", "note": "GitHub API and repository page, read 27 October 2026. The founder has 773 commits; one other person has 461, two others 73 and 65, and a company bot account 64. The repository was created on 31 March 2023 and last pushed on 26 October 2026.", "src": [ 9, 10, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Launch", "value": "version 1.0.1, \"Initial release\", 13 April 2023", "grade": "B", "note": "GitHub releases list. Version 1.1.0 of 19 April 2023 added commands such as simplify, translate and rewrite; version 2.4.13 of 26 January 2024 added OpenAI's new embedding models the day they appeared.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Award", "value": "Obsidian Gem of the Year 2024, best language model integration", "grade": "C", "note": "Company newsletter of 20 January 2025: voted by the Obsidian community. The same newsletter says the plugin grew \"while having no ads or influencer marketing at all\".", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Prices", "value": "Plus US$14.99 a month or US$139.99 a year; Supporter US$349.99 one-time", "grade": "C", "note": "Pricing page, 27 October 2026. The Plus prices are unchanged since at least 7 September 2025, when the page called them \"Early Bird Pricing\" and sold a Believer lifetime plan at US$299.99.", "src": [ 2, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Hosted models in the Plus plan", "value": "DeepSeek V4.1 Flash as Copilot Plus Flash, GLM-5.3-Flash, MiniMax M3; hosted on DeepInfra in the US", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page and newsletter of 3 October 2026. The company does not run its own models; it rents open-weight models from DeepInfra with zero data retention.", "src": [ 3, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Partner program", "value": "20% revenue share for 12 months and a free lifetime license, for creators with at least 3,000 followers", "grade": "C", "note": "Partners page, opened 13 February 2026. An affiliate program with a stated commission.", "src": [ 14, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 named founder; the company says \"seasoned ex-Google and ex-Uber AI engineers\"; headcount not published", "grade": "C", "note": "Brevilabs home page and the founder's GitHub profile (\"Software engineer, ML practitioner, ex-Uber\", Seattle). The public code shows four people with more than 60 commits each. No source gives a headcount or a funding round.", "src": [ 12, 9, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Consulting offer on the company home page", "value": "a four-week US$45,000 AI product sprint; retainers from US$45,000 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "brevilabs.com, read 27 October 2026. Wayback snapshots of 7 April 2025, 11 July 2025 and 4 August 2026 show the same domain presenting only the plugin; the snapshot of 11 September 2026 is the first with the consulting text. TrustMRR's founder-written profile copies the same pricing model.", "src": [ 12, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October 2026 figure", "value": "42 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: April 2023 to October 2026.", "src": [ 10, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "31 March 2023", "what": "Logan Yang creates the obsidian-copilot repository on GitHub, four weeks after OpenAI released the ChatGPT API.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "13 April 2023", "what": "Version 1.0.1, \"Initial release\". Within a week, version 1.1.0 adds commands on selected text: simplify, translate, rewrite.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "26 January 2024", "what": "Version 2.4.13 adds OpenAI's two new embedding models on the day they are announced. By then the plugin also supports Ollama for local models.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "2024", "what": "Copilot Plus alpha, the first paid tier, with its own Discord community. 300,000 downloads. The Obsidian community votes the plugin Gem of the Year 2024 for best language model integration.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "18 January 2025", "what": "Founding date given on the TrustMRR profile, under the company Brevilabs LLC.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "7 September 2025", "what": "The pricing page shows \"Early Bird Pricing\": Plus at US$14.99 a month or US$139.99 a year, Believer at US$299.99 one-time with lifetime access.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "13 February 2026", "what": "1 million downloads. Self-host mode launches; the Believer plan is retired from 16 February; the partner program opens. February becomes the best month in the Stripe table, US$66,646.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 1 ] }, { "when": "13 August 2026", "what": "Copilot V4, a rewrite that runs Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode inside Obsidian. Miyo, a free local search app, and OpenArtifacts, a publishing tool, launch alongside. Supporter at US$349.99 replaces Believer; 20% off until 14 September.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 7 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "brevilabs.com changes from a plugin page to \"AI Consulting for Ambitious Teams\" with a US$45,000 four-week sprint. September revenue: US$32,590.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12, 1 ] }, { "when": "3 October 2026", "what": "2 million downloads. Previews of voice chat, diff view, phone access and custom agents for Supporters.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "27 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR: US$17,899 MRR from 1,356 subscriptions, US$913,644 all time, revenue of the last 30 days down 38.9% against the 30 days before.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Distribution through another app's store", "text": "Obsidian lists community plugins inside the app, and users install them with one click. A free, open-source plugin in that list reached 300,000 downloads in its first two years and 2 million by October 2026, with, in the founder's words, no ads or influencer marketing. The company never had to find its customers; the host app's store brought them." }, { "title": "Give away the plugin, sell the managed layer", "text": "The code is free under the AGPL and works with the user's own API key or Claude or ChatGPT subscription. What costs money is convenience: hosted models that need no key, a web search built for agents, multi-agent answers and one-click publishing. The Plus price has stayed at US$14.99 since at least September 2025." }, { "title": "Lifetime plans as funding", "text": "The Believer plan at US$299.99, and later Supporter at US$349.99, sold lifetime access for a single payment. The founder wrote that Believer was launched \"to help fund early development\". Its retirement on 16 February 2026 produced the best month in the Stripe table, US$66,646; the months after it were about half as large. One-time money arrives early and does not recur." }, { "title": "Carry the agents instead of competing with them", "text": "Version 4 of August 2026 made the plugin a host for Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode, the coding agents of the big model providers, inside the notes folder. The plugin adds what those agents lack: knowledge of Obsidian's links and canvases, a local search index (Miyo) and a place to publish. The user's existing subscription to the agent pays for the model." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the public repository, the founder-written tech stack on TrustMRR and the company's own pages. Repository facts are grade B; the rest is grade C.", "items": [ "A TypeScript plugin for Obsidian, built with esbuild, styled with Tailwind CSS and tested with Jest; the repository holds 1,490 commits and a CONTRIBUTING file. The license is AGPL-3.0.", "The repository contains CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, a .claude folder and .cursor/rules files, so the team itself develops with AI coding agents and Cursor.", "The founder-written stack on TrustMRR: Electron, TypeScript, Next.js and React on the front end; Python, FastAPI, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Railway, Resend, Vercel and Stripe on the back end.", "Plus models are open-weight models (DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, GLM-5.3-Flash, MiniMax M3) hosted on DeepInfra in the US with zero data retention; free users bring OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, LM Studio or Ollama models, or their Claude Code or Codex login.", "Miyo, a separate free desktop app, builds the semantic search index on the user's machine so that indexing a 100,000-file vault does not freeze the editor; Miyo Relay (US$4.99 a month) connects the ChatGPT and Claude phone apps to the vault.", "Payments through Stripe, with Alipay accepted for the Supporter license. Community on Discord; releases announced with one-minute YouTube videos; a partner program pays creators 20% for twelve months." ], "src": [ 9, 1, 3, 6, 2, 14 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold tools for notes, bookmarks and knowledge, or lived inside a host program that they did not control. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Springpad", "years": "2008 to 2014", "funding": "US$7.5M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Collect, organize and find everything from web articles to recipes in one place.", "died": "A loved free product whose users would not pay for premium features. Evernote, the competitor, moved into collaboration and enterprise; Springpad ran out of money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1893-springpad" }, { "name": "Transpose", "years": "2012 to 2018", "funding": "US$0", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "An Evernote alternative with flexible templates, first as KustomNote, then for businesses.", "died": "Charged US$14.99 a month without giving users a reason to switch from what they already used, and had no outside money to iterate faster than the incumbents.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1849-transpose" }, { "name": "Kippt", "years": "2012 to 2017", "funding": "US$400K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A pretty bookmarking and knowledge tool with social sharing.", "died": "Squeezed between Pocket and Evernote; the social features did not spread, and the pivot to team collaboration came too late.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/278-kippt" }, { "name": "Xobni", "years": "2006 to 2013", "funding": "US$42M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A smarter inbox inside Microsoft Outlook.", "died": "Tied to Outlook, which Microsoft improved itself. Mobile made the desktop add-on irrelevant. Yahoo bought the remains.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/763-xobni" }, { "name": "Xmarks", "years": "2006 to 2014", "funding": "US$9M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Sync your bookmarks and tabs across browsers.", "died": "Chrome, Firefox and Safari built sync in, for free.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/762-xmarks" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Springpad, Transpose and Kippt built their own note or bookmark apps and had to win users one by one against Evernote, which cost more than they could earn. Xobni and Xmarks lived inside Outlook and the browsers and died when the hosts built the same feature. Copilot for Obsidian has both shapes: it is an add-on to a host app, and it competes with the host's own direction, since Obsidian could add AI itself and the model providers could ship notes agents.", "Two things differ so far. The host, Obsidian, is a small company with a stated file-over-app philosophy and a community plugin store, not a platform owner that absorbs popular add-ons; the plugin's store listing is the whole distribution channel, and that channel cost nothing. And the model layer is rented, not built: when the big providers released coding agents in 2025 and 2026, the plugin wrapped them instead of competing, and the user's own subscription pays for the model. What the five predecessors never found, a payment that recurs, exists here in 1,356 subscriptions, but the Stripe table also shows that the best months came from one-time lifetime sales and that the recurring base has fallen since February 2026." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The store, yes. The lifetime plans, with care.", "text": "Any app with a plugin or extension store and an engaged community is an open distribution channel for a free, open-source add-on that brings an AI model into that app. The paid layer should be the convenience that the free version lacks, not the code. Lifetime plans bring money early, but they show up later as months that look like decline.", "steps": [ "Pick a host app whose users already pay for it and whose store lists community add-ons; ship a free, open-source add-on that connects it to the models the user already pays for.", "Charge for the managed layer: hosted models without keys, search, publishing, and limits that make the subscription predictable.", "Keep the plugin model-agnostic, so a provider's price change or a new agent becomes a feature, not a threat.", "If you sell a lifetime plan, plan for the month after it ends; the one-time money does not come back." ], "open": "Other apps with plugin stores and file-based data: code editors, mail clients, design tools, spreadsheet add-ins, and the next generation of local-first apps that want agents to work on their files." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Consulting revenue and the Stripe figure", "text": "Since September 2026 the brevilabs.com home page sells \"AI product consulting\": \"Engagements start with a four-week, $45k AI product sprint. Ongoing partnerships start at a $45k monthly retainer with a three-month initial term.\" The same company owns the Stripe account that TrustMRR reads. The MRR headline cannot contain a retainer: US$17,899 from 1,356 subscriptions is US$13.20 each, inside the Plus price range, and one US$45,000 retainer would be 2.5 times the whole MRR. The daily table for 28 September to 27 October 2026 has no day above US$1,508, so no sprint payment went through this account in those 30 days. For earlier months and for the all-time total of US$913,644 the public data cannot separate consulting from plugin sales; the best month, February 2026, coincides with the end of the Believer lifetime plan, which is the likelier cause. Wayback snapshots show the consulting text appeared between 4 August and 11 September 2026." }, { "title": "Revenue has fallen by half since February 2026", "text": "February 2026 brought US$66,646; September 2026 brought US$32,590, a fall of 51%, and TrustMRR marks the last 30 days as 38.9% below the 30 days before. The Believer plan's retirement in February and the Supporter launch discount in August and September 2026 both pulled one-time money forward. The MRR of US$17,899 is the recurring part; the rest of each month is one-time licenses and yearly payments." }, { "title": "The company sells a service as well as software", "text": "The story's product is the plugin, which is software. The same company also offers consulting at US$45,000 and up and names two other products on its home page, Miyo (free, with a US$4.99 Relay) and OpenArtifacts (included in Plus). The plugin's own pages do not sell or link to the consulting offer." }, { "title": "The model providers' rules", "text": "The free plugin runs Claude Code with the user's Claude login and Codex with the user's ChatGPT login, inside Obsidian. The company's pages say these are the providers' own agent programs connected to an existing installation. No source in this research states whether Anthropic's or OpenAI's subscription terms allow their agents to be driven from a third-party plugin; a reader who depends on this should check the current terms. The company's own hosted models are rented from DeepInfra and resell nothing of those providers." }, { "title": "Depends on Obsidian and on the agents it hosts", "text": "Distribution comes from Obsidian's community plugin store, and version 4 depends on Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode, three programs whose makers can change prices, interfaces or policies. The founder's answer is a model-agnostic design and a local index that stays on the user's machine." }, { "title": "Marketing claims and the partner program", "text": "The January 2025 newsletter says growth came \"while having no ads or influencer marketing at all\". Since 13 February 2026 the company runs a partner program that pays creators with at least 3,000 followers a 20% revenue share for twelve months and a free lifetime license, so later growth is partly paid promotion with a stated commission. The Supporter price is shown against a struck-out US$499.96 that no downloaded page ever charged." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.obsidiancopilot.com/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/brevilabs" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR markdown profile: Brevilabs, revenue last synced 27 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/brevilabs.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile. Source for all revenue, MRR, subscription and daily figures (verified through a Stripe API key), the founder link, the founding date, the founder-written pricing model and the tech stack." }, { "title": "Copilot for Obsidian pricing page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.obsidiancopilot.com/en/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Free, Plus and Supporter plans, the usage limits and the refund rule." }, { "title": "Copilot for Obsidian home page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.obsidiancopilot.com/en", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 2.5M download counter, the hosted models, DeepInfra hosting, Miyo and the testimonials." }, { "title": "Copilot for Obsidian newsletter, 20 January 2025: 2024 Year in Review", "url": "https://www.obsidiancopilot.com/en/newsletter/2024-12-year-in-review", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder's own update. Source for the 300,000 downloads, the Gem of the Year award, the Copilot Plus alpha, the Discord start and the no-ads statement." }, { "title": "Copilot for Obsidian newsletter, 13 February 2026: Launching Self-Host Mode, Retiring the Believer Plan", "url": "https://www.obsidiancopilot.com/en/newsletter/2026-02-launching-self-host-mode-retiring-believer-plan", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 1 million downloads, the Believer retirement date and purpose, and the partner program opening." }, { "title": "Copilot for Obsidian newsletter, 13 August 2026: Copilot V4 Launch, Your personal AGI in Obsidian", "url": "https://www.obsidiancopilot.com/en/newsletter/2026-08-copilot-v4-personal-agi-in-obsidian", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the V4 rewrite, the agents it hosts, Miyo and Miyo Relay prices, OpenArtifacts, the Supporter price and the launch discount." }, { "title": "Copilot for Obsidian newsletter, 12 September 2026: September Updates: Miyo, Live Relevant Notes, and a Secret New Feature", "url": "https://www.obsidiancopilot.com/en/newsletter/2026-09-miyo-live-relevant-notes", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the discount end date of 14 September 2026 and the Miyo search." }, { "title": "Copilot for Obsidian newsletter, 3 October 2026: celebrating 2M downloads, upcoming supporter preview features", "url": "https://www.obsidiancopilot.com/en/newsletter/2026-10-auto-upgrade-agents-voice-diff", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 2 million downloads, the new Plus models and the previews for Supporters." }, { "title": "GitHub repository logancyang/obsidian-copilot, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://github.com/logancyang/obsidian-copilot", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the repository page and the README. Source for the stars, forks, commits, license, file list (CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, .cursor/rules, esbuild, Tailwind, Jest) and the agents the plugin hosts." }, { "title": "GitHub API: releases of logancyang/obsidian-copilot, pages 1 and 2", "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/logancyang/obsidian-copilot/releases?per_page=100&page=2", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the release list. Source for the initial release of 13 April 2023 and the early version dates." }, { "title": "GitHub API: repository and contributors of logancyang/obsidian-copilot", "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/logancyang/obsidian-copilot", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the repository and contributor records. Source for the creation date of 31 March 2023, the last push, and the commit counts per contributor; also the founder's profile page (Seattle, ex-Uber)." }, { "title": "Brevilabs home page, read 27 October 2026, with Wayback snapshots of 7 April 2025, 11 July 2025, 4 August 2026 and 11 September 2026", "url": "https://www.brevilabs.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, and read the four archived copies. Source for the consulting offer and its first appearance, the three products and the team description." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine: Copilot for Obsidian pricing page on 7 September 2025", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20250907182607/https://www.obsidiancopilot.com/en/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Early Bird prices and the Believer plan at US$299.99." }, { "title": "Copilot for Obsidian partner program page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.obsidiancopilot.com/en/partners", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 20% revenue share, the free lifetime license and the 3,000-follower threshold." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/chatdash/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/chatdash.md", "slug": "chatdash", "name": "ChatDash", "country": "United States", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "White-label client portal, workflow builder and usage billing for agencies that resell AI voice and chat agents", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "April 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$19.9K MRR verified by Stripe and US$603K all time, October 2026", "sticker": "$19.9K MRR from 113 agencies", "outcomeUsd": 238716, "months": 30, "teamLabel": "1 founder, Habeen Jun, named only through the site's booking link; the company writes as \"the ChatDash Team\"; headcount not published", "fundingLabel": "None disclosed", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "support-agents", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Customer support" ], "product": "A web platform for agencies that sell AI phone and chat agents to small businesses. The agency connects the agents it built on Retell, Vapi, ElevenLabs, Voiceflow or OpenAI, puts its own logo and domain on a client portal, and gives each client a login to see call logs, analytics and the knowledge base. A visual workflow builder runs actions when a call ends, and a Stripe-based billing engine charges the client per call, per minute, per month or per booked appointment. Plans cost US$120, US$300 or US$600 a month for 3, 5 or 10 clients.", "why": "Agencies that resell AI voice agents have the AI already; what they lack is a way to look like a company to thirty clients: a branded portal, usage billing and automations. ChatDash sells that layer and prices it per client slot, so it grows with the agency's client list. TrustMRR, reading the company's Stripe account, shows US$602,728 of revenue in total and US$19,893 of monthly recurring revenue from 113 subscriptions on 27 October 2026, about US$176 a subscription, after a fall of 60% from the best month in the table, November 2025.", "summary": [ "ChatDash is a white-label platform: software that a reseller shows to its own customers under the reseller's brand, with the maker's name hidden. The resellers are agencies that build AI voice agents, programs that answer or make phone calls with a synthetic voice and a large language model, on platforms such as Retell, Vapi and ElevenLabs. ChatDash gives each of the agency's clients a branded portal with call logs, analytics and a knowledge base they can edit, a workflow builder, a visual editor in which an event such as \"call ended\" triggers steps like sending a summary email or booking an appointment, and a billing engine on top of Stripe Connect, a Stripe product that lets a platform charge money on behalf of its users: per call, per minute, per month or per booked appointment. ChatDash also runs AI of its own: text agents built on OpenAI's Assistants API inside the client dashboard, and an \"AI Analysis\" layer that writes call summaries, scores conversations and generates FAQs.", "The company is ChatDash, LLC, in the United States. No page names its founder. The site's own code offers customers who want to cancel a \"one-on-one session with our founder\" and links to a booking page under the name Habeen Jun; the company otherwise signs as \"the ChatDash Team\". The privacy policy still describes the first product: \"a third-party service connecting Voiceflow and our clients\", a dashboard for agencies that built chatbots on Voiceflow. The TrustMRR profile gives 1 April 2024 as the founding date, and the Wayback Machine has a first copy of chat-dash.com from 14 July 2024. By 2025 the product had moved to voice: the help center documents Retell and Vapi agents, phone numbers, outbound call campaigns and a \"SaaS Mode\" in which the agency's clients sign up and pay on their own. TrustMRR, a service that reads revenue from a company's own payment account through an API key, shows for the ChatDash Stripe account US$602,728 of revenue in total, US$366,064 in the last twelve months, a best month of US$50,323 in November 2025, US$19,934 in September 2026, and monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the monthly value of all active subscriptions) of US$19,893 from 113 subscriptions on 27 October 2026. The home page says \"Trusted by 600+ Agencies\"; the 113 active subscriptions are the paying ones.", "The revenue figures are grade A: TrustMRR reads them from the company's Stripe account. The founder's name rests on the site's code and a booking page, grade B. Prices, features and history come from the company's own pages, grade C. The page also shows earlier companies that sold chatbots or all-in-one dashboards to small businesses, and why they failed." ], "factsCaption": "US$602,728 of Stripe-verified revenue in total and US$19,893 of monthly recurring revenue from 113 subscriptions on 27 October 2026, after a best month of US$50,323 in November 2025 and a fall of 60% by September 2026", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the company's Stripe account through an API key. A grade B value is visible in the site's public code or on a page that the code links to. A grade C value is what the company states on its own pages. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a dashboard for Voiceflow chatbots in 2024 to a billing and delivery platform for AI voice agencies with US$602,728 of verified revenue, in 30 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "ChatDash self-serve prices on 27 October 2026, from the pricing page and its script (grade C); the same prices were on the page on 18 May 2026", "note": "The page shows yearly billing by default, as US$1,200, US$3,000 and US$6,000 a year, each struck against twelve monthly payments (US$1,440, US$3,600, US$7,200), so yearly billing gives two months free. The monthly prices of US$120, US$300 and US$600 are in the page's script. Each plan includes a number of client slots; more clients cost US$15, US$12 or US$10 a month each. All plans include unlimited agents, unlimited AI analysis, a custom domain, Stripe billing and Retell, Vapi and ElevenLabs agents. HIPAA compliance with a Business Associate Agreement is an add-on at US$200 a month. A second tab, \"Managed Service\", offers \"ChatDash Managed\": \"We build, deploy, and maintain AI voice agents for your clients\", at custom pricing. There is a 7-day free trial without a card.", "rows": [ [ "Starter", "100", "120", "3 clients, US$15 a month per extra client, unlimited agents, custom domain, Stripe billing" ], [ "Growth", "250", "300", "5 clients, US$12 per extra client, custom KPI metrics, outbound call campaigns, white-label email" ], [ "Ultimate", "500", "600", "10 clients, US$10 per extra client, white-label backend, API access, priority support" ], [ "HIPAA add-on", "", "200", "Business Associate Agreement; any plan" ], [ "ChatDash Managed", "custom", "custom", "the company builds and maintains the voice agents for the customer's clients" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 27 October 2026", "value": "US$19,893 from 113 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from the company's Stripe account through an API key, synced 27 October 2026 at 02:05 UTC. 30-day MRR change: -3.3%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per subscription per month", "value": "about US$176", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 19,893 / 113. The three plans cost US$100 to US$600 a month, plus client add-on slots and the US$200 HIPAA add-on, so the average is consistent with software subscriptions. MRR times twelve is US$238,716 a year, the headline figure of this page.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time, to 27 October 2026", "value": "US$602,728", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. Last 12 months: US$366,064; last 6 months: US$128,929; last 3 months: US$60,312; last 30 days: US$21,678, marked +11.6% against the 30 days before.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month", "value": "Nov 2025 US$50,323; Dec US$44,824; Jan 2026 US$39,462; Feb US$34,589; Mar US$34,394; Apr US$27,142; May US$21,520; Jun US$24,370; Jul US$23,989; Aug US$18,930; Sep US$19,934; Oct US$19,943 to 27 October", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table, synced 27 October 2026. Ten months of decline from November 2025 to August 2026, then two flat months.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Fall from the best month", "value": "60% from November 2025 to September 2026", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: (50,323 - 19,934) / 50,323 = 60.4%. The last three months average US$20,104 a month; the last twelve average US$30,505. The all-time total minus the last twelve months leaves US$236,664 for April 2024 to October 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Where the revenue figures come from", "value": "Stripe, through an API key; merchant of record: no", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR's verification section. No Google Analytics, DataFast or Search Console connection, so there are no verified traffic figures. The profile's tech stack lists only Stripe.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founder", "value": "Habeen Jun, named only through the site's booking link", "grade": "B", "note": "The site's JavaScript shows, in the cancellation flow, \"Book a one-on-one session with our founder so we can help get you up and running\" and opens cal.com/habeen-jun-tvalts/help-session, a page titled \"Help Session | Habeen Jun\". No ChatDash page prints the name. The TrustMRR profile has no founder line.", "src": [ 4, 5, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Company", "value": "ChatDash, LLC, United States", "grade": "C", "note": "Site footer and the Business Associate Agreement; TrustMRR gives the country as US. No source states a headcount or a funding round; the company signs its changelog \"the ChatDash Team\".", "src": [ 2, 13, 1, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Customers claimed", "value": "\"Trusted by 600+ Agencies\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page, 27 October 2026; TrustMRR's founder-written profile gives an estimated user count of 600. The Stripe account has 113 active subscriptions, so most of the 600 are trial, former or free accounts.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "First product", "value": "a white-label dashboard for Voiceflow chatbots, with OpenAI Assistants", "grade": "C", "note": "Privacy policy: \"As a third-party service connecting Voiceflow and our clients, we collect business and Voiceflow account data\". The founder-written TrustMRR description: \"full Voiceflow and OpenAI Assistant API integrations\".", "src": [ 6, 1 ] }, { "fact": "AI platforms supported in the knowledge base", "value": "Voiceflow, Retell, Vapi, OpenAI, ElevenLabs, Botpress, Vectorshift, Flowise", "grade": "C", "note": "Help center article Knowledge Base, updated about a year before 27 October 2026. The home page now names Retell, Vapi and ElevenLabs.", "src": [ 9, 2 ] }, { "fact": "AI run by ChatDash itself", "value": "OpenAI assistants edited in the client dashboard; AI Analysis (summaries, conversation evaluation, FAQ generation, topic assignment, misunderstood-query detection)", "grade": "C", "note": "Help center articles Edit Assistant and AI Analysis Overview. The voice agents themselves run on the agency's Retell, Vapi or ElevenLabs account.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Prices", "value": "US$120, US$300, US$600 a month; US$1,200, US$3,000, US$6,000 a year; HIPAA add-on US$200 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Pricing page and its script, 27 October 2026; unchanged from the Wayback copy of 18 May 2026.", "src": [ 3, 16 ] }, { "fact": "Managed service", "value": "\"We build, deploy, and maintain AI voice agents for your clients\", custom pricing", "grade": "C", "note": "The Managed Service tab of the pricing page. A separate landing page, speak-with-us, says \"We Build Top Grade AI Receptionists Delivered Within 5 Business Days\". How much of the revenue comes from this service is not public.", "src": [ 3, 15 ] }, { "fact": "Testimonials", "value": "video testimonials from named agency owners", "grade": "C", "note": "A Senja wall embedded on the home page, with transcripts: the founder of Scalex Growth Agency, the director of operations of a retail BPO, the CEO of Arose AI, the founder of RJ Media and others. Not independently verified, but named and in video.", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "fact": "Refund terms", "value": "contradictory: \"30-day money-back guarantee\" and \"within this 7-day period\" in the same paragraph", "grade": "C", "note": "Refund policy page, 27 October 2026. The rest of the page uses 7 days.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October 2026 figure", "value": "30 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: April 2024, the founding date on TrustMRR, to October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "1 April 2024", "what": "Founding date given on the TrustMRR profile, under ChatDash, LLC. The first product is a white-label dashboard for agencies that build chatbots on Voiceflow, with OpenAI assistants.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "when": "14 July 2024", "what": "First copy of chat-dash.com in the Wayback Machine.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "when": "2025", "what": "The help center documents voice agents on Retell and Vapi, phone numbers by SIP trunking, outbound campaigns, AI Analysis of conversations and a SaaS Mode in which the agency's clients sign up and pay on their own.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "5 August 2025", "what": "Subscriptions are now all created from the Stripe Billing menu; a Transactions page is added.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "14 September 2025", "what": "Dashboard rework: clients become organizations with members, projects are merged into agents, the agent limit is removed on all plans, in preparation for native workflows.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "Best month in the Stripe table: US$50,323.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2 March 2026", "what": "Role-based control, customization features and enhanced analytics.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "April 2026", "what": "Unified analytics and conversations across all of a client's agents; custom charts; per-day business hours; agents linked to existing subscriptions.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "18 May 2026", "what": "The pricing page shows the same three self-serve plans as in October 2026 and a Managed Service tab.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "when": "16 July 2026", "what": "Installment plans: a one-time setup fee can be split into a fixed number of monthly payments.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "27 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR: US$19,893 MRR from 113 subscriptions, US$602,728 all time; the last 30 days are 11.6% above the 30 before, after ten months of decline.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Sell to the resellers, not to the end customers", "text": "The buyers are agencies that already sell AI phone agents to dentists, roofers and call centers. ChatDash does not compete with them for those customers; it sells them the part they would otherwise build: a portal with their logo, a client login, usage billing. One sale to an agency brings all of that agency's clients onto the platform." }, { "title": "Price per client slot", "text": "Plans include 3, 5 or 10 clients and charge US$10 to US$15 a month for each further client. An agency's bill grows with its own client list, so the price follows the value, and the average subscription of about US$176 a month is higher than the base plans." }, { "title": "Follow the platform shift", "text": "The product started in 2024 as a dashboard for Voiceflow chatbots. When AI phone agents on Retell and Vapi became the product that agencies sold, ChatDash added call logs, phone numbers, outbound campaigns and voice analytics, and it now presents itself as a voice agent delivery platform. The knowledge base still accepts eight agent platforms." }, { "title": "Replace the tools the agency pays for", "text": "The workflow builder is sold as a replacement for Zapier and Make, with unlimited runs included, and the billing engine as a replacement for manual invoicing. The pitch to an agency is a lower tool bill and fewer hours, not a better AI." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the site's public code and the company's own pages. Facts visible in the code are grade B; the rest is grade C.", "items": [ "A React single-page application (the pages print \"You need to enable JavaScript to run this app\"); the bundle uses React Flow for the visual workflow builder, Material UI, socket.io and Daily.co's browser calling library for web calls.", "The workflow builder is powered by Albato, a third-party automation service: the Business Associate Agreement says the builder is \"powered by Albato\" and excludes it from HIPAA coverage.", "Billing runs on Stripe: the agency connects its own Stripe account and ChatDash creates subscriptions, usage charges, performance-based charges and installment plans in it. TrustMRR reads the company's own revenue from Stripe.", "Voice agents come from the agency's Retell, Vapi or ElevenLabs account; text agents from Voiceflow or from OpenAI's Assistants API, whose instructions, model and tools the client edits inside the dashboard. ChatDash's own AI Analysis writes summaries, evaluates conversations and generates FAQs.", "Help center, roadmap and changelog run on Featurebase; interactive demos on Supademo; testimonials on Senja; an affiliate program on FirstPromoter; two Google Tag Manager containers load Google Ads conversion tracking.", "Support through an in-app issue form, a Discord community, YouTube tutorials and, in the cancellation flow, a booking link for a session with the founder." ], "src": [ 4, 13, 3, 9, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database sold chatbots or all-in-one dashboards to small businesses and their agencies. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Answerly", "years": "2013 to 2016", "funding": "US$550K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "FAQ chatbots that deflect support tickets so humans handle only the hard cases.", "died": "The bots of 2013 could not understand enough questions; customers lost trust in the deflection promise.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2168-answerly" }, { "name": "Vanti", "years": "2019 to 2024", "funding": "US$18M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Conversational commerce: brands sell through intelligent chatbots.", "died": "Brands did not buy enough of it before the money ran out, even as better models arrived.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2508-vanti" }, { "name": "Niles", "years": "2017 to 2020", "funding": "US$2.8M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A company's knowledge in a bot inside Slack.", "died": "Slack and the big platforms added search and bots themselves; a bot inside someone else's chat tool had no moat.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1031-niles" }, { "name": "SumAll", "years": "2011 to 2019", "funding": "US$15M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "The all-in-one data dashboard for small businesses.", "died": "Each platform shipped its own analytics; a dashboard that only displayed other tools' data had nothing of its own to sell.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/587-sumall" }, { "name": "Snapboard", "years": "2020 to 2023", "funding": "US$1.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "One dashboard that unifies all your developer tools.", "died": "The tools it displayed built their own dashboards, and few teams paid for a window onto data they already had.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/926-snapboard" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Answerly and Vanti sold the chatbot itself and died when the bots disappointed or when brands would not pay. SumAll, Snapboard and Niles sold a window onto other companies' data or chat tools and died when those companies built the window themselves. ChatDash is the second kind: a portal and billing layer on top of Retell, Vapi, ElevenLabs and Voiceflow, all of which could add white-label portals and reseller billing to their own products.", "What differs is the buyer and the money flow. ChatDash does not sell to the end customer; it sells to agencies that resell AI agents and need to look like a company to thirty clients. Those agencies already pay for the AI, so ChatDash carries no model cost, and its billing engine sits in the agency's Stripe account, where the agency's own revenue passes through it. That makes it hard to remove once set up. The weakness is in the Stripe table: the best month was November 2025 and revenue fell by 60% in ten months, while the company's pages added a managed service in which it builds the agents itself, a service business next to the software." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The layer, yes. The dependence, with care.", "text": "Whenever a new kind of AI product is resold by agencies, the agencies need a branded portal, client logins and usage billing before they need anything else, and the platform makers are slow to build it. A reseller layer with per-client pricing can reach a few hundred paying agencies without any model cost. The risk is that the platform makers, or a larger competitor, add the same layer.", "steps": [ "Find a category of AI agents that agencies resell, and talk to the agencies, not the end customers.", "Build the portal, the client login and the usage billing on Stripe Connect; let the agency keep its own AI account and its own Stripe account.", "Price per client slot, so the bill grows with the agency's client list.", "Add the integrations the agencies already use, such as GoHighLevel, and replace the automation tools they pay for." ], "open": "Any AI product that agencies resell to small businesses: AI receptionists, SEO agents, ad-creation agents, bookkeeping agents, and whatever comes next, each needing a branded portal and billing before the platform makers ship one." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Who runs it", "text": "No ChatDash page names a person. The founder's name, Habeen Jun, comes from the site's own code, which opens a booking page for a \"one-on-one session with our founder\", and from that page's title. The company signs as \"the ChatDash Team\" and publishes no headcount. The money is grade A and no source suggests more than ten people, so the story is published with the team label \"headcount not published\"." }, { "title": "Is the AI the product?", "text": "The voice agents that ChatDash delivers run on the agency's Retell, Vapi or ElevenLabs account; ChatDash is the portal, the workflow engine and the billing around them. Its own AI is the AI Analysis layer (call summaries, conversation scores, FAQ generation) and text agents on OpenAI's Assistants API that clients edit inside the dashboard. The business exists only because agencies sell AI agents, and every plan includes unlimited AI analysis, so this page classes it as AI-native; a reader who counts only companies that run their own models would not." }, { "title": "A done-for-you service next to the software", "text": "The pricing page has a \"Managed Service\" tab: \"ChatDash Managed. We build, deploy, and maintain AI voice agents for your clients.\" at custom pricing, and a landing page says \"We Build Top Grade AI Receptionists Delivered Within 5 Business Days\". The story's product is the self-serve software, and the 113 subscriptions at about US$176 a month match the software plans, but the public data cannot show how much of the US$602,728 came from the managed service." }, { "title": "Revenue fell by 60% in ten months", "text": "From US$50,323 in November 2025 to US$18,930 in August 2026, then US$19,934 and US$19,943 in September and October. TrustMRR marks the last 30 days as 11.6% above the 30 days before and the MRR change as -3.3%. The pages do not say why; the market of AI voice agent resellers also has direct competitors that the site compares itself with: Assistable, Thinkrr and Nedzo." }, { "title": "Claims and pages that do not agree", "text": "The home page says \"Trusted by 600+ Agencies\" while the Stripe account has 113 active subscriptions. The refund page says \"We offer a 30-day money-back guarantee\" and, in the next sentence, \"you must request it within this 7-day period\". The terms promise a Data Protection Officer at \"DPO Contact Information\", a placeholder that was never filled in." }, { "title": "Depends on other companies' platforms", "text": "The product reads from and writes to Retell, Vapi, ElevenLabs, Voiceflow, OpenAI and GoHighLevel, and its workflow builder is powered by Albato. Any of them can change prices, interfaces or policies, or add a white-label reseller portal of its own." }, { "title": "Marketing tactics", "text": "The site loads a FirstPromoter affiliate script and Google Ads conversion tracking, and the help pages point to a Discord community and YouTube tutorials. No source states which channel brought most customers, so the channel is marked unknown. The testimonials are video statements by named agency owners on a Senja wall." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://chat-dash.com/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/chatdash-llc" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR markdown profile: ChatDash, LLC, revenue last synced 27 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/chatdash-llc.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile. Source for all revenue, MRR and subscription figures (verified through a Stripe API key), the founding date, the country and the founder-written description." }, { "title": "ChatDash home page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://chat-dash.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product description, the \"600+ Agencies\" claim, the supported voice platforms and the Zapier replacement pitch." }, { "title": "ChatDash pricing page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://chat-dash.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the monthly prices and the Managed Service tab read from the page's script. Source for the plans, add-ons and trial." }, { "title": "ChatDash site JavaScript bundle, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://chat-dash.com/assets/js/index.js", "grade": "B", "how": "Searched the public code for links and text. Source for the founder booking link, the monthly prices, the managed-service text, and the third-party services the site uses (FirstPromoter, Supademo, Senja, Featurebase, Daily.co, React Flow)." }, { "title": "Cal.com booking page: Help Session, Habeen Jun", "url": "https://cal.com/habeen-jun-tvalts/help-session", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the page title and metadata. The page that the ChatDash code opens for a session with the founder." }, { "title": "ChatDash privacy policy, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://chat-dash.com/privacypolicy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Voiceflow origins and the data the service collects." }, { "title": "ChatDash terms of service, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://chat-dash.com/termsofservice", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the third-party workflow builder clause and the unfilled DPO placeholder." }, { "title": "ChatDash refund policy, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://chat-dash.com/refund", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the contradictory refund periods." }, { "title": "ChatDash help center: Knowledge Base, AI Analysis Overview, Edit Assistant, SaaS Mode, Phone Numbers, Support and Resources", "url": "https://help.chat-dash.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the home page, the sitemap and six articles. Source for the supported AI platforms, the AI features ChatDash runs itself, SaaS Mode, SIP phone numbers, Discord and YouTube." }, { "title": "ChatDash changelog, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://feedback.chat-dash.com/changelog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the list of entries from August 2025 to July 2026. Source for the dated feature history." }, { "title": "ChatDash changelog, 14 September 2025: Important Changes to Your ChatDash Dashboard", "url": "https://feedback.chat-dash.com/changelog/important-changes-to-your-chatdash-dashboard", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the September 2025 rework and the \"ChatDash Team\" signature." }, { "title": "Senja testimonial wall for ChatDash, embedded on the home page", "url": "https://senja.io/p/chat-dash/Won90X0", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the transcripts. Source for the named customers and their roles." }, { "title": "ChatDash Business Associate Agreement, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://chat-dash.com/baa", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the parties and excluded services. Source for the company name and the Albato-powered workflow builder." }, { "title": "ChatDash vs Assistable comparison page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://chat-dash.com/compare/assistable", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the competitors and the billing models." }, { "title": "ChatDash: Talk to ChatDash, Book a Demo or Consultation, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://chat-dash.com/speak-with-us", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the \"AI Receptionists Delivered Within 5 Business Days\" offer." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine: chat-dash.com on 14 July 2024 and the pricing page on 18 May 2026", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20260518174341/https://chat-dash.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both archived copies; the 2024 copy is an empty JavaScript shell that proves only that the site existed. Source for the May 2026 prices." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/myreader/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/myreader.md", "slug": "myreader", "name": "Myreader", "country": "United States", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI reading assistant: ask questions to your own books and documents", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "3 July 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$187K Stripe-verified revenue since 2023 and US$2.5K MRR, October 2026", "sticker": "$187K revenue since 2023", "outcomeUsd": 187007, "months": 39, "teamLabel": "1 founder (TrustMRR profile: Team size 1 person)", "fundingLabel": "None; the TrustMRR profile says Bootstrapped", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "learning", "channel": "search", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Education technology" ], "product": "A web app and an iPhone app where you upload books and documents (PDF, EPUB, Word, PowerPoint), web articles and YouTube videos, then ask questions. The answer comes with citations that open the exact page of the book. Any document can also be turned into an audiobook in 50 or more voices. Users bring their own books; the service never has to license them.", "why": "It launched in July 2023, when the ChatGPT plugins for PDF stopped at about 300 pages and Myreader took a whole library. It sold a cheap subscription limited by pages and questions, and it got its users from Google: the TrustMRR profile says the business has good SEO and about 30 sign-ups a day, and the site has a page for each kind of reader, from medical students to seminary students, and a free page for each of more than 40 public-domain classics.", "summary": [ "Myreader is a retrieval-augmented reading assistant. Retrieval-augmented means that the program first searches the user's own documents for the passages that match the question, then gives those passages to a large language model as context, so the answer is built from the book and not from the model's memory. The user sees the answer with citations, links that open the exact page in the uploaded book. The same text can be read aloud as an audiobook. The company is Myreader, Inc., a United States company founded on 12 May 2023 according to its TrustMRR profile, and run by one person, Prasann Pandya, who posted the Product Hunt launch on 3 July 2023 as \"Founder at myreader.ai\".", "The money is read by TrustMRR from the company's Stripe account through an API key, a password that lets one program read another program's data: US$187,007 in total since the account started, US$33,575 in the twelve months to 27 October 2026, and US$2,488 of MRR, monthly recurring revenue, the sum of all active subscriptions counted per month, from 222 subscriptions. The last twelve months are the smallest part of the total: about US$153,432 came in before November 2025, about US$5,291 a month on average over those 29 months (calculated), so the business was more than twice as large then as it is now.", "This page grades every number. The Stripe figures are grade A. The dates come from the Internet Archive, Product Hunt and Apple's App Store, grade B. Everything the founder wrote about the business, including that the team is one person, is grade C. The business was listed for sale on TrustMRR on 11 September 2026 at US$60,000, and the founder wrote in the listing that a relaunch with a mobile app is planned." ], "factsCaption": "US$187,007 of Stripe-verified revenue in total, US$33,575 of it in the last twelve months, and US$2,488 of MRR from 222 subscriptions, read by TrustMRR from the company's Stripe account on 27 October 2026", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the company's Stripe account through an API key; it is not a founder statement. A grade B value is a record kept by an outside platform: Apple's App Store, Product Hunt or the Internet Archive. A grade C value is a statement by the founder or the company, a profile field that the founder filled in, or a reviewer's description. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a waiting list in May 2023 to US$187,007 of verified revenue in October 2026, with the best verified months behind it. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Myreader prices on 27 October 2026, read from the company's pricing page and the in-app purchases on its App Store listing (grade C and B)", "note": "The pricing page shows the yearly price by default and says 'Save 25% on annual plans. Cancel anytime.' Its script switches Lite between US$7.5 and US$10 and Pro between US$15 and US$20. The App Store lists the same plans as in-app purchases: Lite Annual US$89.99 and Pro Annual US$179.99, which is US$7.50 and US$15.00 a month (calculated), Lite Monthly US$9.99 and Pro Monthly US$19.99. Free-plan books are deleted after 7 days of inactivity. The terms say refunds are not provided except in exceptional circumstances, requested within 14 days. In June 2024 the Internet Archive shows Lite at US$6 yearly or US$8 monthly with 100 queries a day and about 4,000 pages, and Pro at the same US$15 or US$20 with 1,000 queries a day and about 20,000 pages; the free plan then had 10 queries a day.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "5 questions a day, 200 pages in total, 10 MB per file, audiobooks, OCR" ], [ "Lite", "7.5", "10", "250 questions a month, 5,000 pages a month, 250 MB per file, 10 hours of audiobooks" ], [ "Pro", "15", "20", "1,000 questions a month, 15,000 pages a month, no size limit, 30 hours of audiobooks" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Total revenue, all time, to 27 October 2026", "value": "US$187,007", "grade": "A", "note": "Read by TrustMRR from the company's Stripe account through an API key, last synced on 27 October 2026 at 00:01 UTC. The profile does not say when the Stripe account's history begins; the company was founded on 12 May 2023.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 12 months, to 27 October 2026", "value": "US$33,575", "grade": "A", "note": "Same source. Last 6 months US$13,949, last 3 months US$6,064, last 30 days US$2,243.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR, 27 October 2026", "value": "US$2,488 from 222 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "Monthly recurring revenue counts monthly plans at their price and yearly plans at one twelfth of the yearly price. TrustMRR shows MRR down 7.9% in the last 30 days, while 30-day revenue was up 10.1%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before the last 12 months", "value": "about US$153,432", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$187,007 minus US$33,575. If the Stripe history starts at the founding in May 2023, that is about 29 months (June 2023 to October 2025), or about US$5,291 a month on average, 2.1 times the current MRR.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue per month, November 2025 to October 2026", "value": "US$2,953 in November 2025, highest US$3,589 in January 2026, lowest US$1,425 in August 2026, US$2,468 in September 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. August 2026 was 60.3% below January (calculated). October to the 27th: US$2,011. The average of the last three months, US$2,021, is 37.6% below the average of November to January, US$3,240 (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR times 12", "value": "US$29,856 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$2,488 times 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average MRR per active subscription", "value": "US$11.21", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$2,488 divided by 222. Between the Lite price (US$7.50 to US$10) and the Pro price (US$15 to US$20).", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Listed for sale", "value": "asking US$60,000, first listed 11 September 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR acquisition section: listing tier Starter, revenue multiple 2.1x, 4 acquisition offers received, 2,550 interested buyers who saw the listing recently. The asking price is 2.0 times MRR times 12 and 1.8 times the last twelve months' revenue (calculated). The seller's message says a relaunch with a mobile app is planned.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Users", "value": "'100,000+ students and professionals' on the site; 180,000 estimated in the TrustMRR profile", "grade": "C", "note": "Company statements. The TrustMRR profile also says 'about 30 signups a day'. The 222 active subscriptions are 0.2% of 100,000 (calculated).", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Product Hunt launch, 3 July 2023", "value": "number 10 of the day, 161 points, later 4.7 stars from 6 reviews", "grade": "B", "note": "Product Hunt page, read on 27 October 2026, featured on 3 July 2023. The founder's launch comment explains the idea: a system that reads books for him and suggests which pages to read.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Price of the Lite plan", "value": "US$6 yearly or US$8 monthly in June 2024; US$7.50 or US$10 in October 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "Internet Archive copy of the pricing page, 3 June 2024, and the live page. A rise of 25.0% (calculated). Pro stayed at US$15 and US$20. The limits changed from questions a day to questions a month.", "src": [ 12, 3 ] }, { "fact": "First prices, July 2023", "value": "free plan with about 800 pages and 20 questions a day; about 5 euros a month for 100 questions a day and about 4,000 pages", "grade": "C", "note": "Review by Fidel Navamuel on Outils Tice, 5 July 2023, two days after the Product Hunt launch; the page was updated in May 2026 but keeps the 2023 limits.", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "fact": "iPhone app", "value": "version 1.0 on 23 September 2026, version 1.2.1 on 3 October 2026; free with in-app purchases; age rating 4+", "grade": "B", "note": "App Store listing, read on 27 October 2026: 1 rating of 5.0, category Education, seller Myreader Inc., requires iOS 16.4. The TrustMRR profile (text written before the launch) says 'Mobile app is on the way waiting for review'.", "src": [ 9, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Affiliate program", "value": "30% of revenue from referred customers for 12 months, paid by PayPal on the 2nd of each month", "grade": "C", "note": "Company's affiliate page. The home page loads the Rewardful affiliate script.", "src": [ 4, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "70.0%", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot, outside its list of Stripe-verified metrics.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 person", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR profile field 'Team size: 1 person', filled in by the founder. Product Hunt shows Prasann Pandya as 'Founder at myreader.ai'.", "src": [ 1, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR profile: Funding Bootstrapped.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Country", "value": "United States", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR profile: Country US. The terms of service are governed by the laws of California.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Technology", "value": "JavaScript frontend, Python backend, Stripe", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR tech stack fields. The home page source uses Bootstrap and jQuery. No source names the language model or the speech voices used.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the Product Hunt launch to the October 2026 figures", "value": "39 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: July 2023 to October 2026.", "src": [ 10, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "12 May 2023", "what": "Founding date given in the TrustMRR profile.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "13 May 2023", "what": "Earliest copy of myreader.ai in the Internet Archive: 'Let an AI read books for you', with a form to join the waitlist and 'get early access before this is released publicly'.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "3 July 2023", "what": "Launch on Product Hunt as 'Myreader AI: Let an AI read books for you', number 10 of the day with 161 points. The founder writes that he always wanted a system that reads books for him and suggests which pages to read.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "5 July 2023", "what": "Outils Tice, a French blog on digital tools for teachers, reviews it: free plan of about 800 pages and 20 questions a day, paid plan of about 5 euros a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "11 April 2024", "what": "Terms of service last updated. Users may upload only material they own or have the right to use.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "3 June 2024", "what": "Pricing page in the Internet Archive: Free with 10 queries a day, Lite US$6 yearly or US$8 monthly, Pro US$15 or US$20, with page limits of about 200, 4,000 and 20,000 pages.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "November 2025 to January 2026", "what": "Verified revenue of US$2,953, US$3,179 and US$3,589 a month, the best months in the published timeline.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "August 2026", "what": "Verified revenue falls to US$1,425, the lowest month in the published timeline.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "11 September 2026", "what": "Listed for sale on TrustMRR at US$60,000. The founder's message: 'I still haven't given up and gearing for a relaunch with a mobile app.'", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "23 September 2026", "what": "Myreader for iPhone, version 1.0, appears in the App Store. Versions 1.1, 1.2 and 1.2.1 follow by 3 October.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "27 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR reads US$187,007 of all-time revenue, US$33,575 in the last twelve months and US$2,488 of MRR from 222 subscriptions from the Stripe account. Prices are US$7.50 to US$10 for Lite and US$15 to US$20 for Pro.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 3 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A page for every kind of reader", "text": "The site has landing pages for medical students, law students, MBA students, researchers, seminary students and readers of codes and standards, and a free Explore library with a page for each of more than 40 public-domain books, from The Republic to Moby-Dick, where anyone can ask questions without an account. The TrustMRR profile lists SEO as the only marketing channel and says the business gets about 30 sign-ups a day from it. No source records any advertising spend." }, { "title": "Retrieval first, then the model", "text": "The reviewer's 2023 description matches the product today: the program finds the relevant sections in the user's books, then uses them as context to answer, and shows the sections with the answer. That keeps the model's cost per question small, because only a few pages go to the model, and it gives the citation that students and lawyers need to check the answer. It also means the product does not answer questions outside the uploaded books." }, { "title": "Metered freemium", "text": "The free plan is enough to try: 5 questions a day and 200 pages. Paid plans sell more questions and more pages, US$7.50 to US$20 a month. The limit moved from questions a day in 2024 to questions a month in 2026, which makes the paid plans smaller than they look: 250 questions a month on Lite is about 8 a day." }, { "title": "Audio as a second product", "text": "Any uploaded document can be played as an audiobook in 50 or more voices and 30 or more languages, and the iPhone app that appeared in September 2026 is built around listening: background playback, lock-screen controls, speed control. The one App Store review, from a user who describes themselves as a professor, is about listening to research papers while reading along." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the TrustMRR profile fields that the founder filled in, from the company's own pages and from the source code of its home page. They are grade C unless marked.", "items": [ "JavaScript frontend and Python backend, with Stripe for payments (TrustMRR tech stack fields). Stripe is also the payment provider whose API TrustMRR reads, grade A.", "The home page is a server-rendered page built with Bootstrap and jQuery, not a JavaScript framework; its hero word rotates between use cases only after load, so crawlers see 'textbooks' (visible in the page source, grade B).", "The affiliate program runs on Rewardful; its script is loaded on the home page (grade B). Affiliates get 30% for 12 months and are paid through PayPal.", "No source names the language model, the embedding model or the text-to-speech provider. The site says 50+ voices and 30+ languages for audio and 16 languages for documents.", "Files accepted: PDF, EPUB, AZW, Word, PowerPoint, web article links and YouTube links, with OCR for scanned documents, up to 15,000 pages a month on Pro.", "The iPhone app (version 1.0, 23 September 2026) syncs with the web account, is 70.5 MB, requires iOS 16.4, and sells the same plans as in-app purchases.", "The profile says the team is one person and the company is bootstrapped." ], "src": [ 1, 2, 4, 9, 3 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database tried to change how people read or study with books, documents and audio, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Kno", "years": "2009 to 2014", "funding": "US$73M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Interactive digital textbooks for students.", "died": "The publishers digitized their own textbooks faster and cheaper, and schools moved slowly. Intel bought what was left.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/282-kno" }, { "name": "Oyster", "years": "2012 to 2016", "funding": "US$17M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Unlimited e-books for a monthly fee, the 'Netflix for books'.", "died": "Publishers demanded high fees for the books and Amazon set the prices. Oyster paid for content that Myreader's users bring themselves.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/408-oyster" }, { "name": "Springpad", "years": "2008 to 2014", "funding": "US$7.5M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Collect, organize and access web articles, recipes and notes in one place.", "died": "A loved free product whose users would not pay for premium features; Evernote moved faster.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1893-springpad" }, { "name": "openmargin", "years": "2011 to 2015", "funding": "US$650K", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Social reading: annotate e-books together with strangers.", "died": "Needed a critical mass of readers that never came, while Amazon and Goodreads added social features to the readers people already used.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1904-openmargin" }, { "name": "Voicery", "years": "2018 to 2021", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Natural-sounding text-to-speech voices.", "died": "Google, Amazon and Microsoft sold better voices cheaper, bundled with their clouds. Myreader rents such voices instead of building them.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1004-voicery" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The predecessors paid for the content, for the voices or for the readers. Oyster and Kno had to license books from publishers; Voicery had to build speech models against the clouds; openmargin and Springpad had to gather a crowd before anyone would pay. Myreader has none of these costs. The user uploads books they already own, the language model and the voices are rented per use, and each customer pays alone, so one paying student is a profit without a crowd.", "What the predecessors did not have was a model that can answer a question from any book. That capability arrived in 2023 and made a one-person product possible. It also made the product easy to copy: the Product Hunt page lists ChatPDF and Scispace as similar products. The verified revenue shows what that means: the best months are behind the business, revenue in the last twelve months is a fifth of the total, and the founder has put it up for sale while preparing a relaunch." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The structure, yes. The timing, no.", "text": "A one-person document-question product with a free tier, usage-metered plans and landing pages for each reader group reached about US$5,000 a month of verified revenue in its first two years with no outside money. In 2026 the same product competes with free file upload in every major chat assistant, and its verified revenue has fallen to about US$2,000 to US$2,500 a month. The method is copyable; the window for a generic 'chat with your PDF' product has closed.", "steps": [ "Pick one reader group whose books the big assistants handle badly (long textbooks, standards, scanned documents) and write a landing page for it.", "Retrieve first, answer second, and show the page citation; that is what makes the answer checkable and the model cost small.", "Meter the paid plans by pages and questions, and keep the free plan large enough to try with a real book.", "Add listening: the same text as audio gave Myreader a second use and the reason for a phone app." ], "open": "Readers with large private libraries that general assistants do not index well: codes and standards, case law, theology, medical references, and institutions that want a preloaded library for their own students, which Myreader's FAQ offers as a custom version." }, "watch": [ { "title": "For sale, and shrinking", "text": "The business was listed for sale on TrustMRR on 11 September 2026 at US$60,000, with 4 offers received by 27 October. Verified MRR fell 7.9% in the last 30 days and verified monthly revenue fell from US$3,589 in January 2026 to US$1,425 in August, 60.3% lower, before recovering to US$2,468 in September. The current MRR of US$2,488 is just above this site's floor of US$2,000 a month; the US$187,007 total is far above the US$25,000 total that also qualifies. A buyer would take over a product whose best months are in the past." }, { "title": "Most of the revenue is history", "text": "US$153,432 of the US$187,007 came before November 2025, about US$5,291 a month on average if the Stripe history starts at the May 2023 founding (calculated). The published monthly timeline covers only the last twelve months, so this page cannot show when the decline began or how high the peak was." }, { "title": "The decision rule applied: purpose gate on the home and pricing pages", "text": "This story was released by the rule that a new TrustMRR lead needs the purpose gate and the 26 October 2026 rules checked on the home and pricing pages. Read on 27 October 2026, the home page sells 'Ask your textbooks', 'Chat with your library', 'Listen on the go' and 'Smart Citations'; the pricing page sells questions, pages, audiobook hours, OCR and bulk upload. Neither page, nor the terms, the affiliate page, the iPhone page or the medical-students page, contains 'undetectable', 'humanizer', 'bypass', 'Parasite SEO', income promises or fake-account posting. The product reads and answers; it does not write essays for students, so the rule on writing tools marketed to students does not apply. The medical-students page does market study help: 'Make me a study guide for antipsychotic side effects from my uploads' and 'Quiz me on cardiac pharmacology with page references'. Its testimonials section on the home page is empty in the page source, so there are no fabricated testimonials to judge." }, { "title": "Affiliate program with a stated commission", "text": "The affiliate page says 'Earn 30% for every customer you refer' and 'earn 30% of the revenue we make from them for 12 months', paid through PayPal on the 2nd of each month. Under the 26 October 2026 rule, an affiliate program that states its commission is not an income promise. No page claims how much users earn with the product." }, { "title": "Other people's books", "text": "Users upload copyrighted textbooks. The terms, updated 11 April 2024, say 'You may only upload documents, articles, videos and other material that you own or have the right to use', keep the user's rights to the upload, and give a takedown address for copyright complaints. The free Explore library offers only public-domain classics. No source reports a publisher's complaint." }, { "title": "The big assistants do this for free", "text": "ChatGPT plugins limited PDFs to about 300 pages at launch, according to a Product Hunt comment in July 2023; that was the gap Myreader filled. The Product Hunt page lists ChatPDF, ChatDox AI and Scispace as similar products, and the medical-students page sells 'No tab-switching, no Ctrl+F through 1,500 pages', an argument against general assistants. The verified decline since January 2026 happened while those assistants grew." }, { "title": "What the sources do not say", "text": "No source names the language model, the embedding model or the voice provider, so the cost per question is unknown; the TrustMRR profit margin of 70.0% is a founder-entered field. The team size of one and the user counts of 100,000 and 180,000 are company statements. The founder has no interviews or posts that this page could find outside Product Hunt and TrustMRR. The country is US in the profile and the terms name California law; no city is stated." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.myreader.ai/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6791233358" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/myreader-ai" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/myreader-inc" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: Myreader, Inc., payment-verified revenue profile, synced 27 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/myreader-inc", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile (https://trustmrr.com/startup/myreader-inc.md) in full, live copy synced on 27 October 2026 at 00:01 UTC. The revenue, MRR, subscription and monthly figures were read from Stripe through an API key. The description, founded date, founder, team size, funding, country, user count, tech stack, profit margin and sale listing fields are not in the verified list and are grade C." }, { "title": "Myreader home page: Your AI Reading Assistant", "url": "https://www.myreader.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026, text and page source. Source for the features, the user count, the FAQ, the languages, the custom version for institutions, and the Bootstrap, jQuery and Rewardful scripts. The testimonials section is empty in the source." }, { "title": "Myreader pricing page", "url": "https://www.myreader.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026, including the script that switches the yearly and monthly prices. Source for the three plans and their limits." }, { "title": "Myreader affiliate page", "url": "https://www.myreader.ai/affiliate", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 30% commission, the 12 months and the PayPal payments." }, { "title": "Myreader Inc. terms of service and refund policy", "url": "https://www.myreader.ai/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the update date, the upload rule, the copyright takedown address, California law and the refund policy." }, { "title": "Myreader for iPhone: Ask and listen to your books on the go", "url": "https://www.myreader.ai/iphone", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the app's listening features and the shared library with the web." }, { "title": "MyReader for Medical Students: Ask Your Textbooks, Get Page-Cited Answers", "url": "https://www.myreader.ai/med-students", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. One of the landing pages per reader group; source for the study-help marketing quoted in 'watch'." }, { "title": "Explore the Library: chat with the great books", "url": "https://www.myreader.ai/explore", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the free public-domain library of more than 40 books; the sitemap lists a page for each." }, { "title": "App Store: Myreader - Ask your books, by Myreader Inc.", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6791233358", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the listing on 27 October 2026. A record kept by Apple: version history from 23 September 2026, in-app purchase prices, age rating 4+, size, one rating and review." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: Myreader AI, Let an AI read books for you", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/myreader-ai", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the page and its embedded data on 27 October 2026. Source for the launch date (featured 3 July 2023), the day rank, the points, the reviews, the maker Prasann Pandya ('Founder at myreader.ai') and the launch comment. Comments by other users are grade C." }, { "title": "Internet Archive copy of myreader.ai, 13 May 2023", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20230513170718/https://www.myreader.ai/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The earliest copy that the Wayback availability API returns; it shows a waitlist form and the first description." }, { "title": "Internet Archive copy of the Myreader pricing page, 3 June 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240603160935/https://www.myreader.ai/pricing", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full, including the price-switch script. Source for the 2024 plans, prices and limits." }, { "title": "Outils Tice, Fidel Navamuel, 5 July 2023: MyReader. An iA assistant that allows you to query the content of your books", "url": "https://outilstice.com/en/myreader-assistant-ia-interroger-contenu-des-livres/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026 (English edition of a French blog for teachers; page last updated 12 May 2026). A reviewer's description of how the product worked in July 2023 and its first prices." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/kortex/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/kortex.md", "slug": "kortex", "name": "Kortex", "country": "India", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Chrome extension that adds import, folders, export and automation to Google's Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM)", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "August 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$231K payment-verified revenue in 2026 and sold for an undisclosed price, October 2026", "sticker": "$231K in 10 months", "outcomeUsd": 231297, "months": 14, "teamLabel": "2 founders listed on TrustMRR; AppSumo lists 1 to 10 people; exact headcount not published", "fundingLabel": "None; TrustMRR and AppSumo both say Bootstrapped", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "ai-model-tools", "channel": "platform", "trend": "sold", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2C", "Productivity software" ], "product": "A Chrome extension for Google's Gemini Notebook, the AI research notebook that was called NotebookLM until July 2026. It adds what Google left out: a Send to Notebook button inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, folders and tags for notebooks, export of sources, notes and chats to PDF, Markdown or ZIP, rules that run repetitive steps, a private podcast feed for Audio Overviews, and an MCP server so that an AI assistant can work inside the notebooks.", "why": "Gemini Notebook had more than 30 million users and no folders, no export and no public API for personal accounts. Kortex sold the missing half for a few dollars a month, found its users in the Chrome Web Store, where Google marked it Featured, and in two lifetime-deal launches. The founder wrote that more than 100,000 users came 'without a single ad'. Most of the verified revenue arrived in February and March 2026, when a US$49 lifetime licence was on sale.", "summary": [ "Kortex is a browser extension, a small program that runs inside Chrome and changes the pages the user visits. It works on Google's Gemini Notebook, the research tool that answers questions from the sources a user uploads, and that Google called NotebookLM until 16 July 2026. Kortex adds import buttons to the AI chat apps, a workspace with collections and tags, export to files, automation rules, a podcast feed for the generated Audio Overviews, and an MCP server, a connector that follows the Model Context Protocol so that an AI assistant such as Claude or ChatGPT can read and fill the user's notebooks. The company is a two-founder project from Surat, India, led by Yaksh Gandhi; the TrustMRR profile lists a co-founder by the first name Jill.", "The money is read by TrustMRR from the company's Dodo Payments account through an API key, a password that lets one program read another program's records: US$231,297 from January to 26 October 2026, which is also the all-time total on that account, and US$3,343 of MRR, monthly recurring revenue, the sum of the active subscriptions counted per month, from 1,027 subscriptions. February and March 2026 brought US$109,610, 47.4% of the total (calculated), when the site sold a US$49 lifetime licence at half price; September 2026 brought US$4,049, 92.8% less than March. Sales through AppSumo, where the same deal is still listed, are paid by AppSumo and are not in these figures.", "Between 20 September and 13 October 2026 the home page gained the line 'Acquired by FschoolAI', a student study platform. No price, date or buyer statement is published, and the TrustMRR profile still shows the business listed for sale at US$50,000 since 30 January 2026. This page grades every number: the Dodo Payments figures are grade A, the Chrome Web Store, Product Hunt and Internet Archive records are grade B, and everything the founders wrote, including the acquisition line, is grade C." ], "factsCaption": "US$231,297 of payment-verified revenue from January to 26 October 2026, US$3,343 of MRR from 1,027 subscriptions, read by TrustMRR from the company's Dodo Payments account, and an acquisition announced on the company's own site without a price", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the company's Dodo Payments account or Google Analytics through an API key; it is not a founder statement. A grade B value is a record kept by an outside platform: the Chrome Web Store, Product Hunt, AppSumo or the Internet Archive. A grade C value is a statement by the founders or the company, a profile field that a founder filled in, or a reviewer's description. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a free extension founded in August 2025 to US$231,297 of verified revenue and a sale for an undisclosed price in about 14 months, with 47.4% of the money made in two months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Kortex prices on 27 October 2026, read from the company's home page (grade C) and its AppSumo listing (grade B)", "note": "The home page shows Pro at US$4.92 a month when billed yearly, US$59 a year, and its price data gives Pro monthly at US$9.99; the page calls the yearly plan '6 months free' and says 'You save $60.88 a year' (calculated: 12 times US$9.99 minus US$59). Lifetime is one payment of US$200. Teams is US$12 per seat a month, billed yearly, minimum 3 seats. All plans have a 7-day money-back guarantee and checkout runs on Dodo Payments. The prices rose through 2026: the Internet Archive shows Pro at US$2.4 a month (US$29 a year) and Lifetime at US$49, marked 50% off US$100, on 30 January 2026, and Pro at US$3.75 a month (US$45 a year) and Lifetime at US$199 on 20 September 2026. Yearly Pro therefore doubled in nine months (103.4%, calculated) and Lifetime rose about four times. AppSumo still sells lifetime licences at US$49, US$79 and US$159, marked 51% off; those payments go through AppSumo and are not in the verified figures.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "10 imports a day from 15 sites, 10 exports a day, 10 saved prompts, this browser only" ], [ "Pro", "4.92", "9.99", "no daily limits, sync, bulk import, automations, templates, 1,000 podcast minutes, Kortex MCP" ], [ "Lifetime", "200 one-time", "", "everything in Pro, 2,000 podcast minutes, unlimited MCP with fair use" ], [ "Teams", "12", "", "per seat, billed yearly, minimum 3 seats; shared prompts and notebooks" ], [ "AppSumo lifetime deal, tier 1", "49 one-time", "", "tier 2 US$79, tier 3 US$159; sold by AppSumo, outside the verified figures" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Total revenue, January to 26 October 2026", "value": "US$231,297", "grade": "A", "note": "Read by TrustMRR from the company's Dodo Payments account through an API key, last synced on 26 October 2026 at 15:07 UTC. The last-12-months and all-time figures are the same, because the verified history starts in January 2026 (US$20,146 that month).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR, 26 October 2026", "value": "US$3,343 from 1,027 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "Monthly recurring revenue counts monthly plans at their price and yearly plans at one twelfth of the yearly price. Lifetime licences are not in it. TrustMRR shows MRR down 2.2% in the last 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days, to 26 October 2026", "value": "US$2,250", "grade": "A", "note": "Same source. The stored snapshot shows US$2,309 and a fall of 51.6% from the 30 days before. Last 3 months US$19,202, last 6 months US$74,290.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue per month, 2026", "value": "US$20,146 in January, US$53,034 in February, US$56,576 in March, US$27,813 in April, US$14,520 in May, US$25,384 in June, US$15,961 in July, US$11,977 in August, US$4,049 in September, US$1,838 in October to the 26th", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. February and March together are US$109,610, 47.4% of the total; September is 92.8% below March; the average of the last three months, US$5,955, is 13.8% of the first-quarter average of US$43,252 (all calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR times 12", "value": "US$40,116 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$3,343 times 12. This counts only the subscriptions, not the lifetime licences that made most of the 2026 revenue.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average MRR per active subscription", "value": "US$3.26 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$3,343 divided by 1,027. Below today's yearly Pro price of US$4.92 a month, and close to the earlier yearly prices of US$29 (US$2.42 a month) and US$45 (US$3.75 a month) that many subscribers still pay.", "src": [ 1, 13, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Why revenue is far above MRR", "value": "one-time lifetime licences, US$49 in January 2026 and US$199 to US$200 since September", "grade": "C", "note": "The pricing pages in the Internet Archive and today. A lifetime licence counts once in revenue and never in MRR. TrustMRR does not publish how many were sold.", "src": [ 13, 14, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Visitors and revenue per visitor, last 30 days", "value": "4,647 visitors; US$0.51 per visitor", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR reads traffic through the Google Analytics API, which the profile marks as connected. US$2,250 divided by 4,647 is US$0.48 (calculated); the profile's US$0.51 uses its own window.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Acquisition", "value": "'Acquired by FschoolAI', price not disclosed, between 20 September and 13 October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's home page carries the line with a link to fschoolai.com, which describes itself as a student academic intelligence platform. The Internet Archive copy of 20 September 2026 does not have the line; the copy of 13 October 2026 does. No press, buyer statement or price was found. The TrustMRR profile still says 'Listed for sale'.", "src": [ 2, 14, 15, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Listed for sale on TrustMRR", "value": "asking US$50,000, first listed 30 January 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Listing tier Free, revenue multiple 1.8x, 9 acquisition offers received, 8,636 interested buyers who saw it recently. The asking price is 1.25 times MRR times 12 and 0.22 times the 2026 revenue (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Chrome Web Store listing", "value": "100,000 users, 4.4 stars from 394 ratings, Featured, version 2.3.6 of 8 October 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "A record kept by Google, read on 27 October 2026. The store says the publisher 'has a good record with no history of violations' and that the extension 'Follows recommended practices for Chrome extensions'. Size 4.63 MiB, 8 languages, offers in-app purchases.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "User counts on the company's own pages", "value": "'Loved by 28k+ Users' on 30 January 2026, '130k+' on 20 September 2026, '100,000+' on 27 October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Internet Archive copies and the live page. The TrustMRR profile estimates 130,000 users. The export and import counters, '200k+ exports' and '105k+ imports', are the same in January and in October 2026.", "src": [ 13, 14, 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Product Hunt launches", "value": "9 December 2025: number 5 of the day, 190 votes, 20 comments; 14 January 2026: number 179, 1 vote", "grade": "B", "note": "Product Hunt product page and launch pages, read on 27 October 2026. The maker is listed as Yaksh Gandhi.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "AppSumo deal", "value": "lifetime licences at US$49, US$79 and US$159, 51% off a list price of US$99; 25 reviews, 3.6 of 5", "grade": "B", "note": "AppSumo listing, read on 27 October 2026. The company fields, filled in by the maker, say founded 7 August 2025, Surat, Gujarat, India, 1 to 10 people, Bootstrapped. The founder's message: 'Over 100K power users found us without a single ad'.", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "fact": "Affiliate program", "value": "10% of every payment for as long as the customer stays; 'US$4,000+ paid to affiliates so far'", "grade": "C", "note": "Company's affiliate page. At 10%, US$4,000 of commissions means about US$40,000 of referred payments (calculated). Minimum payout US$100, paid monthly in US dollars.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Creator pass", "value": "3 months of Pro free for teachers and creators; their students pay US$41.30 for the first year instead of US$59", "grade": "C", "note": "Company's creator page. Teachers with a school email address are approved at once.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "98.0%", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot, outside its list of payment-verified metrics.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "founder Yaksh Gandhi and a co-founder listed as Jill; 1 to 10 people on AppSumo", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR profile fields and the AppSumo company card. The About page calls Kortex 'a small independent project'. The blog's rename article is signed Juli. No page gives a headcount.", "src": [ 1, 12, 3, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR: Funding not listed; AppSumo: Bootstrapped. The About page: 'not a venture-backed roadmap'.", "src": [ 12, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Country", "value": "India (Surat, Gujarat); the privacy policy says the service is 'principally operated from the United States'", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR gives the country as IN; AppSumo gives the city. The privacy policy, effective 30 September 2026, names United States infrastructure.", "src": [ 1, 12, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Technology", "value": "JavaScript extension; Firebase Authentication and Firestore; Cloudflare R2 for audio; Dodo Payments; an inference gateway or an outside AI processor for AI requests; 'reverse-engineered APIs' of Gemini Notebook", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR tech stack fields and the privacy policy. The marketing site is built with Astro (visible in the page source, grade B). No source names the AI model used for Kortex's own generation features.", "src": [ 1, 5, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Gemini Notebook rename", "value": "NotebookLM became Gemini Notebook on 16 July 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Kortex's own blog post, which cites Google's announcement and gives more than 30 million users for the product at that time. Kortex's domain and store listing keep both names.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the founding to the October 2026 figures", "value": "14 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: August 2025 to October 2026. From the Product Hunt launch in December 2025 it is 10 months.", "src": [ 12, 11, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "7 August 2025", "what": "Founding date on the AppSumo company card, Surat, Gujarat, India.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "9 December 2025", "what": "Launch on Product Hunt as 'Organize, import + export NotebookLM sources with a click': number 5 of the day, 190 votes.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "12 December 2025", "what": "ChatGate describes the extension as built by Yaksh Gandhi and 'currently appears to be free and not monetized'.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "when": "14 January 2026", "what": "Second Product Hunt launch, 'Capture. Automate. Listen.': number 179 of the day, 1 vote.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "January 2026", "what": "First month of verified revenue on Dodo Payments: US$20,146.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "30 January 2026", "what": "Internet Archive copy of the home page: 'Loved by 28k+ Users', Pro at US$2.4 a month billed US$29 a year, Lifetime Pro at US$49 marked 50% off, an Enterprise plan with single sign-on. The same day the business is listed for sale on TrustMRR at US$50,000.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 13, 1 ] }, { "when": "February and March 2026", "what": "Verified revenue of US$53,034 and US$56,576, the two best months, 47.4% of everything the account has taken.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "16 July 2026", "what": "Google renames NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook, according to Kortex's blog. Kortex keeps both names in its domain and store listing.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "26 July 2026", "what": "On AppSumo the founder apologises for a 'Failed to load notebooks' error caused by network blocks on requests to notebooklm.google.com and submits a fix to the Chrome Web Store.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "Kortex MCP enters private beta, so Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and Codex can read, search and add to notebooks. Verified revenue falls to US$4,049 (grade A).", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "when": "20 September 2026", "what": "Internet Archive copy: 'Loved by 130k+ Users', Pro at US$3.75 a month billed US$45 a year, Lifetime at US$199, Teams from US$432 a year. No acquisition line.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "30 September 2026", "what": "New privacy policy takes effect: sign-in by Firebase, audio in Cloudflare R2, page material may be used to train models, 'reverse-engineered APIs'.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "8 October 2026", "what": "Version 2.3.6 in the Chrome Web Store; the October changelog says MCP is out of beta and the extension opens in a side panel.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 10, 4 ] }, { "when": "13 October 2026", "what": "Internet Archive copy of the home page now shows 'Acquired by FschoolAI'. No price or date is given.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "when": "26 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR reads US$231,297 of 2026 revenue, US$3,343 of MRR from 1,027 subscriptions and a 51.6% fall in 30-day revenue. The home page sells Pro at US$59 a year or US$9.99 a month and Lifetime at US$200, and still carries the acquisition line.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Sell the missing half of a free Google product", "text": "Gemini Notebook is free and had more than 30 million users at the rename in July 2026, but it had no folders, no export and no public API for personal accounts, according to Kortex's own blog. Kortex charged for exactly those gaps. The About page puts it as: 'brilliant at helping you think, and bad at letting you keep what you thought'. The customer already uses the AI; Kortex pays no model cost for the core features." }, { "title": "The store is the channel", "text": "The extension is installed from the Chrome Web Store, where Google marked it Featured and where it shows 100,000 users and 394 ratings. The founder wrote on AppSumo that more than 100,000 users came 'without a single ad'. Two Product Hunt launches, an AppSumo deal, a 61-post blog about Gemini Notebook, a 10% affiliate program and free Pro for teachers add to it." }, { "title": "Lifetime deals front-load the money", "text": "A US$49 lifetime licence at half price in January 2026 brought the two best months, US$109,610 in February and March, 47.4% of all verified revenue. The cost is visible later: subscriptions bring US$3,343 a month, and the 30-day revenue of US$2,250 is 51.6% below the month before. The Lifetime price was raised to US$199 to US$200 by September." }, { "title": "Ride the platform's new features", "text": "When Google added Audio Overviews, Kortex added a podcast feed for them; when assistants gained MCP, Kortex shipped an MCP server with '145+ notebook tools'; when Google renamed the product, Kortex rewrote its pages with 'formerly NotebookLM' and a blog post about the rename. Each Google change is a reason to update, and a risk, because the extension depends on 'reverse-engineered APIs' that Google can change." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the TrustMRR profile fields, the company's privacy policy and pages, and the source code of its marketing site. They are grade C unless marked.", "items": [ "A Chrome extension in JavaScript that works in Chrome, Edge, Brave and other Chromium browsers, with a side panel, a dashboard and buttons injected into Gemini Notebook and into the chat apps (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, Kimi and others).", "Sign-in by Firebase Authentication through Google OAuth; prompts, folders, tags, notes, templates and automation rules stored in Google Cloud Firestore; generated podcast audio in Cloudflare R2.", "Chat transfers 'are processed in memory and go straight from your browser to your own Gemini Notebook account'; the privacy policy says Kortex does not keep the conversations or the notebook documents.", "Access to Gemini Notebook goes through 'third-party and reverse-engineered APIs', in the words of the privacy policy's definition of Lifetime; Google has no public API for personal accounts, according to Kortex's blog.", "AI requests 'can pass through our inference gateway or an outside AI processor' with no-retention terms; the provider and model are not named.", "Payments by Dodo Payments, the account that TrustMRR reads (grade A), with AppSumo licence keys for the deal buyers.", "The marketing site is built with Astro and serves a Markdown copy of each page for AI agents (visible in the page source, grade B).", "Kortex MCP: an MCP server with more than 145 tools, used from Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, VS Code or Codex, out of beta in October 2026; also a Claude Code plugin." ], "src": [ 1, 5, 3, 2, 4 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database built a better layer on top of a platform they did not own, and the platform owner or a free built-in feature replaced them. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Xobni", "years": "2006 to 2013", "funding": "US$42M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A smarter inbox inside Microsoft Outlook.", "died": "Tied to Outlook, which Microsoft improved itself; mobile made the desktop add-on irrelevant. Yahoo bought the remains.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/763-xobni" }, { "name": "Xmarks", "years": "2006 to 2014", "funding": "US$9M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Sync bookmarks and tabs across browsers.", "died": "Chrome, Firefox and Safari built sync in, free.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/762-xmarks" }, { "name": "Kippt", "years": "2012 to 2017", "funding": "US$400K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A pretty bookmarking tool against information overload.", "died": "Pocket and Evernote offered the same with more integrations; the social features did not spread.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/278-kippt" }, { "name": "Niles", "years": "2017 to 2020", "funding": "US$2.8M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A company knowledge base as a bot inside Slack.", "died": "Slack added similar AI features itself, and Guru and Confluence grew faster.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1031-niles" }, { "name": "Delicious", "years": "2003 to 2017", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Tag and share web links from anywhere.", "died": "Yahoo bought it in 2005 and let it stagnate while browsers and phones changed how people saved links.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2009-delicious" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each predecessor added organisation or sync to a platform it did not control, and the platform owner closed the gap by building the feature or by changing the interface. Kortex sits in the same position, and more exposed: its features reach Gemini Notebook through endpoints that Google did not publish, which the company itself calls reverse-engineered. In July 2026 Google added its own collections, and Kortex's changelog records a one-click move of Kortex collections into them.", "What differs is the cost side and the speed. Kortex spends nothing on content or on the AI model: the user already has the notebook, and the extension moves data in and out. It charged from the first month of 2026, took most of its money through one-time licences before the platform could react, and was sold within nine months of its first verified revenue. The founders did not try to outlast Google; they took the money in a window and left." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The structure, yes, with a short clock.", "text": "A two-founder team in India took US$231,297 in ten months by selling folders, export and automation for a free Google product with tens of millions of users, through Google's own store and two deal launches, with no outside money. The method works for any large AI product that ships without organisation or export. The clock is set by the platform: once Google adds the feature or changes the endpoints, the extension's value falls, and Kortex's 30-day revenue was already down 51.6% when it was sold.", "steps": [ "Pick a free AI product with millions of users and list what its users do by hand: getting data in, finding it, getting it out.", "Build the missing half as a browser extension and list it in the store, where the users already are; apply for the Featured badge.", "Charge from the start, and use a cheap lifetime licence and a deal site to turn early users into cash before the platform reacts.", "Watch the platform's roadmap; move each feature it adopts into a bridge to the native version, and keep the price rising while the window is open." ], "open": "Any AI assistant or notebook without export, folders or an API for personal accounts; the same gap exists around chat apps, image tools and the new agent products, and it closes each time the vendor ships the feature." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Sold for an undisclosed price, while still listed for sale", "text": "The home page says 'Acquired by FschoolAI' with a link to fschoolai.com, a student study platform whose pages load by script and name no owner. The line appeared between the Internet Archive copies of 20 September and 13 October 2026. No press, no buyer statement and no price were found, and the TrustMRR profile, synced on 26 October 2026, still says 'Listed for sale' at US$50,000 with 9 offers. This page records an exit with no price because the company's own site says so; a reader should look for a statement from FschoolAI or a change on TrustMRR." }, { "title": "Half the revenue came in two months", "text": "US$109,610 of the US$231,297, 47.4%, arrived in February and March 2026, when the site sold a US$49 lifetime licence marked 50% off. Verified revenue fell to US$4,049 in September and US$1,838 in October to the 26th, 92.8% and more below March. The part that repeats is US$3,343 of MRR from 1,027 subscriptions, US$3.26 each on average. The 30-day revenue of US$2,250 is above this site's floor of US$2,000 a month, but the trend is down." }, { "title": "The decision rule applied: unofficial access to a Google product", "text": "The 26 October 2026 rule stops a product that is 'an unofficial API or wrapper that resells a provider's service against that provider's terms'. Kortex's privacy policy says 'Lifetime' lasts 'as long as required third-party and reverse-engineered APIs continue to function', and its MCP server gives AI assistants '145+ notebook tools' for Gemini Notebook, which has no public API for personal accounts. Google's Terms of Service, effective 30 July 2026, forbid 'reverse engineering our services or underlying technology, such as our machine learning models, to extract trade secrets or other proprietary information, except as allowed by applicable law' and 'using automated means to access content from any of our services in violation of the machine-readable instructions on our web pages'. This page did not stop the story, because Kortex does not resell Google's service: every user signs in to their own Google account, and Kortex sells its own features around it. Google's Chrome Web Store marks the extension Featured and says the publisher has 'no history of violations'. The reading is the orchestrator's, open to the user's change." }, { "title": "Google's trademark in the domain", "text": "The domain kortex-notebooklm.com and the store title 'Kortex NotebookLM: Gemini Notebook Toolkit' use Google's product names. The footer says 'Gemini Notebook and NotebookLM are trademarks of Google LLC. Kortex is an independent extension', and the store listing says the extension 'is not affiliated with or endorsed by Google'. A trademark complaint would hit the domain and the listing at once." }, { "title": "The decision rule applied: purpose gate on the home and pricing pages", "text": "Read on 27 October 2026, the home page sells import, organisation, automation, export, a podcast feed and the MCP server; the pricing section sells daily limits, sync, bulk import, automations, templates, podcast minutes and MCP access. Neither page contains 'undetectable', 'humanizer', 'bypass', 'Parasite SEO', income promises or fake-account posting. The affiliate page states its commission, '10% of every payment from each customer you refer', which the 26 October 2026 rule allows; no page claims how much users earn. The testimonials on the home page and the Customer love page link to named Chrome Web Store reviews and one Product Hunt comment, so they are not fabricated. The banner 'Infiltrating the world's best institutions', with a list from OpenAI to Spotify, is an unverified claim about where users work. The Chrome Web Store shows a related extension from another maker that advertises an 'AI Watermark Remover'; Kortex's own pages do not sell or link to such a tool." }, { "title": "A privacy policy that allows wide collection", "text": "The policy effective 30 September 2026 says that while Kortex is active on a tab, 'interface and interaction information, including material visible on the page, may be collected', that this 'can include names, email addresses, financial-account information, health information', that it is kept 'in the form received' in the United States for two years, and that it 'may be used to build, train, test, evaluate, or improve Kortex models and models operated by AI processors for us' and 'may be provided to third parties'. Users can turn this off in the settings, and the policy says the program 'may not yet be operating'. The same policy says Kortex 'is not designed for anyone younger than 18', while the blog markets the product to students." }, { "title": "What the sources do not say", "text": "No source gives the headcount beyond 'a small independent project' and AppSumo's '1 to 10'. The co-founder appears only as 'Jill' on TrustMRR, and the blog is signed 'Juli'. The AI model behind Kortex's own generation features, the number of lifetime licences sold, the AppSumo revenue and the terms of the acquisition are not published. The 98.0% profit margin is a founder-entered field. The founder's X account and Reddit posts were not read, because this site does not fetch those services." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.kortex-notebooklm.com/" }, { "kind": "chrome", "url": "https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hdapplggdhndkblofffknpmnnnnbncbn" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/kortex-2" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/kortex-notebooklm" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: Kortex-Notebooklm, payment-verified revenue profile, synced 26 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/kortex-notebooklm", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile (https://trustmrr.com/startup/kortex-notebooklm.md) in full on 27 October 2026, live copy synced on 26 October 2026 at 15:07 UTC. The revenue, MRR, subscription and monthly figures were read from Dodo Payments through an API key, and the visitor figures through the Google Analytics API. The description, founders, country, user estimate, pricing, tech stack, profit margin and sale listing fields are not in the verified list and are grade C." }, { "title": "Kortex home page: Research Workspace for Gemini Notebook & NotebookLM", "url": "https://www.kortex-notebooklm.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026, the HTML page and the Markdown copy the site serves at /index.md. Source for the features, the prices and their structured price data, the user and ratings counts, the testimonials with their links, the institutions banner, the MCP server and the 'Acquired by FschoolAI' line." }, { "title": "Kortex: About, made by people who live in Gemini Notebook", "url": "https://www.kortex-notebooklm.com/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the reason for the product, the data commitments, 'a small independent project' and the trademark footer." }, { "title": "Kortex changelog: What's new in Kortex", "url": "https://www.kortex-notebooklm.com/changelog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the releases from May to October 2026, the MCP beta and the collections bridge." }, { "title": "Kortex privacy policy, effective 30 September 2026", "url": "https://www.kortex-notebooklm.com/privacy-policy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for Firebase, Firestore, Cloudflare R2, Dodo Payments, the AppSumo licence keys, the AI processors, the training clause, the two-year retention, the 'reverse-engineered APIs' and the 18+ rule." }, { "title": "Kortex affiliates: Share Kortex, earn 10% every time they pay", "url": "https://www.kortex-notebooklm.com/affiliate", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the commission, the payout rules and the 'US$4,000+ paid to affiliates so far' figure." }, { "title": "Kortex creator pass: Teach with Kortex, get Pro free", "url": "https://www.kortex-notebooklm.com/creators", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the free months and the student price." }, { "title": "Kortex: Customer love, what people say about Kortex, word for word", "url": "https://www.kortex-notebooklm.com/customer-love", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Ten reviews, nine from the Chrome Web Store and one from Product Hunt, each linked to the original." }, { "title": "Kortex blog, Juli, 27 September 2026 (updated 26 October 2026): NotebookLM Renamed: Is Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM) the Same?", "url": "https://www.kortex-notebooklm.com/blog/notebooklm-renamed-gemini-notebook", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's account of Google's rename on 16 July 2026, the 30 million users and the missing public API, citing Google's own posts." }, { "title": "Chrome Web Store: Kortex NotebookLM: Gemini Notebook Toolkit", "url": "https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/kortex/hdapplggdhndkblofffknpmnnnnbncbn", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the listing on 27 October 2026. A record kept by Google: users, ratings, the Featured badge, the publisher record, the version and update date, the size, the languages, the data disclosures and the related extensions." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: Kortex, organize, import + export NotebookLM sources with a click, with its two launches", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/kortex-2", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the product page and the two launch pages (launches/kortex-4 of 9 December 2025 and launches/kortex-3 of 14 January 2026) on 27 October 2026, including their embedded data for the ranks and votes. The maker is listed as Yaksh Gandhi." }, { "title": "AppSumo: Kortex, lifetime deal, US$49 once, no subscription", "url": "https://appsumo.com/products/kortex/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026. The deal tiers, the review count and rating are AppSumo records (grade B); the company card, the founder's message and the seven founder updates from July to September 2026 are written by the maker (grade C)." }, { "title": "Internet Archive copy of kortex-notebooklm.com, 30 January 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260130093848/https://kortex-notebooklm.com/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The earliest copy that the Wayback availability API returns: user count, 2026 prices, Enterprise plan, testimonials." }, { "title": "Internet Archive copy of the Kortex home page, 20 September 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260920165535/https://www.kortex-notebooklm.com/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the September prices and user count, and for the absence of the acquisition line." }, { "title": "Internet Archive copy of the Kortex home page, 13 October 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20261013152032/https://www.kortex-notebooklm.com/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the page source. The first archived copy with 'Acquired by FschoolAI'." }, { "title": "ChatGate, 12 December 2025: Kortex: One-Click Archive to NotebookLM", "url": "https://chatgate.ai/en/post/kortex", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A directory's description that names Yaksh Gandhi as the builder, lists the December 2025 features and says the extension then appeared free and not monetized." }, { "title": "Google Terms of Service, effective 30 July 2026", "url": "https://policies.google.com/terms?hl=en-US", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section 'Don't abuse our services' and the software licence terms. Source for the clauses on reverse engineering, automated access and selling parts of Google's services, quoted in 'watch'." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/chariot/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/chariot.md", "slug": "chariot", "name": "Chariot", "country": "United States", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI website builder for small businesses and non-technical owners", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "April 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$6.8K MRR verified by Stripe and US$99K all time, October 2026", "sticker": "$6.8K MRR from 310 subscriptions", "outcomeUsd": 81120, "months": 18, "teamLabel": "Headcount not published: one unnamed founder wrote the 2025 launch post; since April 2026 Chariot is listed as a product of Moltcorp, which says AI agents build its products", "fundingLabel": "None disclosed", "primaryFactor": "Simplicity", "group": "build-software", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Website builder" ], "product": "A web app in which a small-business owner types what the website should be, for example \"Make a website for my hardware store\", and an AI model writes the pages. The owner asks for changes in the same chat and publishes with one click, first to a free chariotai.app address and then, if wanted, to a custom domain; hosting and SSL certificates are included. The Starter plan costs US$17 a month and the Pro plan US$47 a month, both billed yearly (US$204 and US$564), with 1,000 or 2,500 AI credits a month. The pricing page says the tool is not for apps with a database, user logins or online shops.", "why": "It sells the finished website, not a design tool: the buyer describes the business, and the software writes the layout, the text and the hosting setup. That suits owners who would otherwise pay an agency or give up on a drag-and-drop builder. TrustMRR, reading the company's Stripe account, shows US$6,760 of monthly recurring revenue from 310 subscriptions on 26 October 2026 and US$99,182 of revenue in total. Revenue jumped in May 2026 and has fallen every month since.", "summary": [ "Chariot is an AI website builder: a web app in which the customer describes a website in ordinary sentences and a large language model, an AI model trained on large amounts of text that can write text and program code, writes the pages. The customer reviews the result, asks for changes in the chat (\"Make the buttons navy\"), and presses Publish. Each request uses credits, the unit in which the service counts AI work: in March 2026 the FAQ said that a typical chat message cost 1 to 5 credits and an image 5 to 15. The plans include 1,000 or 2,500 credits a month. The pricing page lists what the tool does not do: apps with a database, e-commerce with carts and payments, and user accounts, for which it names Lovable, Bolt and Shopify.", "The name and the domain are older than the product. In June 2023 chariotai.com sold \"The dev platform for LLM applications\", an API for GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 at US$30 a month, and the terms of service, dated 15 April 2024 and still online, describe \"a service designed to generate AI-written articles at scale\". The website builder appeared in spring 2025: a blog post dated 3 April 2025, and archived on 27 April 2025, is written in the first person by a founder who does not give a name: \"I've spent years writing software at Amazon and running a web-development agency\" and \"I left my day job and built Chariot\". On 18 April 2026 Chariot was listed as a product of Moltcorp, a site that calls itself \"The company run by AI agents\" and publishes its books; they list US$64,267.03 of revenue for Chariot. In the same weeks the pricing page moved from monthly to yearly billing. TrustMRR, a service that reads revenue from a company's own payment account through an API key, shows for the Chariot Stripe account US$99,182 of revenue in total, monthly revenue that rose from US$3,895 in April 2026 to US$13,760 in May 2026 and then fell to US$10,051 in September, and monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the monthly value of all active subscriptions) of US$6,760 from 310 subscriptions on 26 October 2026. The business has been listed for sale on TrustMRR since 9 June 2026, with an asking price of US$300,000.", "The revenue figures are grade A: TrustMRR reads them from the company's Stripe account. The hosting and the scripts that the site loads are visible in its response headers and code, grade B. The history, the prices and the Moltcorp figures come from the company's and Moltcorp's own pages and from Wayback Machine copies, grade C. No source names a person behind Chariot. The page also shows earlier companies that promised websites without designers, and why they failed." ], "factsCaption": "US$6,760 of monthly recurring revenue from 310 subscriptions and US$99,182 of Stripe-verified revenue in total on 26 October 2026, after a best month of US$13,760 in May 2026", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the company's Stripe account through an API key. A grade B value is visible in the site's response headers or public code. A grade C value is what the company, Moltcorp or the seller states on their own pages, or what a Wayback Machine copy shows. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From an API for chat models in 2023 to an AI website builder with US$99,182 of verified revenue, 18 months after the website builder launched. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Chariot plans on 27 October 2026, from the pricing page (grade C), with the monthly prices of March 2026 from the Wayback Machine", "note": "The current page shows only yearly billing: US$17 and US$47 a month \"Billed annually\", that is US$204 and US$564 a year, with the label \"Save 17%\". It does not show a monthly price. Calculated: a saving of 17% means monthly prices of about US$20.50 and US$56.60. Until March 2026 the same two plans cost US$17 and US$47 billed monthly; in April 2025 there was also a free plan with 75 credits a month and pay-as-you-go credits at US$1 for 50, and in March 2026 pay-as-you-go cost US$5 for 250 credits that never expire. The page promises a \"100% money-back guarantee\" and \"No credit card required to sign up\".", "rows": [ [ "Starter", "17", "", "1,000 credits a month, up to 3 websites, custom domain, hosting and SSL" ], [ "Pro", "47", "", "2,500 credits a month, unlimited websites, priority support and AI models" ], [ "Starter until March 2026", "", "17", "1,000 credits a month" ], [ "Pro until March 2026", "", "47", "2,500 credits a month" ], [ "Pay as you go, March 2026", "", "", "US$5 for 250 credits, no expiry" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 26 October 2026", "value": "US$6,760 from 310 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from the company's Stripe account through an API key, synced 26 October 2026 at 22:43 UTC. 30-day MRR change: -11.3%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per subscription per month", "value": "about US$21.80", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 6,760 / 310 = 21.81. The plans cost US$17 and US$47 a month when billed yearly, so the average fits a mix of mostly Starter plans. MRR times twelve is US$81,120 a year, the headline figure of this page.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time, to 26 October 2026", "value": "US$99,182", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. Last 12 months: US$81,760; last 6 months: US$66,432; last 3 months: US$28,276; last 30 days: US$7,274, marked -30.9% against the 30 days before.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month", "value": "Nov 2025 US$2,388; Dec US$3,173; Jan 2026 US$2,291; Feb US$1,819; Mar US$1,727; Apr US$3,895; May US$13,760; Jun US$13,237; Jul US$11,884; Aug US$11,001; Sep US$10,051; Oct US$6,199 to 26 October", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table, synced 26 October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Jump in May 2026", "value": "3.5 times the April revenue", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 13,760 / 3,895 = 3.53. The sources do not say why. Two changes fall in the same weeks: the pricing page moved to yearly billing between 14 March and 14 April 2026, and a yearly plan is charged in one payment; and Moltcorp listed Chariot as its product on 18 April 2026, with Meta ads and a creator video program in its books.", "src": [ 1, 14, 11, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Fall from the best month", "value": "27% from May to September 2026", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: (13,760 - 10,051) / 13,760 = 27.0%. October had US$6,199 by 26 October. The six months from November 2025 to April 2026 averaged US$2,549 a month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before 27 October 2025", "value": "US$17,422", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: all time US$99,182 minus the last 12 months US$81,760. The all-time figure covers the whole Stripe account, which may include revenue of the earlier Chariot products (the 2023 API and the article generator in the 2024 terms); the profile does not split it.", "src": [ 1, 12, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Where the revenue figures come from", "value": "Stripe, through an API key; merchant of record: no", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR's verification section. Google Analytics is connected: 10,494 visitors in the last 30 days and US$0.70 of revenue per visitor.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Moltcorp's revenue figure for Chariot", "value": "US$64,267.03", "grade": "C", "note": "Moltcorp financials page, read 27 October 2026: \"Chariot (website builder)\" is 99.4% of the US$64,633.63 that Moltcorp lists for all its products, \"pulled directly from Stripe and Shopify, cached hourly\". Calculated: the TrustMRR months May to October 2026 add up to US$66,132, close to the Moltcorp figure.", "src": [ 10, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Costs in Moltcorp's books, all products", "value": "US$6,224.17", "grade": "C", "note": "Meta Ads US$2,340.93; \"UGC Program, Creator videos for apps\" US$2,500.00; \"Anthropic AI Tokens, LLM usage\" US$1,236.74; Vercel Pro US$20; GitHub Team US$4; domains US$22.50; DataForSEO US$50; Chrome Stats US$50. \"Profit distributed\": US$0.00. The page does not say which costs belong to Chariot.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Founder", "value": "not named", "grade": "C", "note": "The launch post is written in the first person: \"I've spent years writing software at Amazon and running a web-development agency\" and \"I left my day job and built Chariot\". No page gives a name; the TrustMRR profile has no founder line, and the public GitHub organization page lists no people.", "src": [ 4, 1, 17 ] }, { "fact": "Company", "value": "Chariot AI, United States", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms of service: \"the Chariot AI service (the \"Service\") operated by Chariot AI\". The GitHub organization gives \"United States of America\" and TrustMRR gives the country as US. No source states a legal form, a headcount or a funding round.", "src": [ 5, 17, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Earlier products under the same name", "value": "an API for chat models (2023 to 2024), then an article generator in the terms", "grade": "C", "note": "Wayback copies of 1 June 2023 and 17 May 2024: \"The dev platform for LLM applications\", GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, Starter plan US$30 a month. Terms and privacy policy, effective 15 April 2024: \"Chariot AI is a service designed to generate AI-written articles at scale.\"", "src": [ 12, 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Website builder launch", "value": "April 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Blog post \"Introducing Chariot: The AI Website Builder Made for You\", dated 3 April 2025; the Wayback Machine lists a capture of it on 27 April 2025. TrustMRR gives 3 May 2025 as the founding date.", "src": [ 4, 15, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Users claimed", "value": "\"Join 7,313+ businesses using Chariot\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page, 27 October 2026. The pricing page showed the same 7,313 on 14 April 2026 and TrustMRR's founder-written profile gives an estimated user count of 7,313, so the number has not changed for six months. On 10 July 2025 the home page said \"Join 3,323+ builders\". The Stripe account has 310 active subscriptions.", "src": [ 2, 14, 1, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Prices", "value": "US$204 or US$564 a year (US$17 or US$47 a month)", "grade": "C", "note": "Pricing page, 27 October 2026. US$17 and US$47 billed monthly on 27 April 2025 and 14 March 2026.", "src": [ 3, 14 ] }, { "fact": "For sale", "value": "asking US$300,000, listed since 9 June 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR listing: revenue multiple 3.4x, 11 acquisition offers received. The seller sets the asking price.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Affiliate program", "value": "30% of payments for 12 months", "grade": "C", "note": "Affiliates page: \"Earn 30% for 12 months\", a 60-day cookie window, run on Rewardful.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October 2026 figure", "value": "18 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: April 2025, the month of the launch post, to October 2026.", "src": [ 4, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "June 2023", "what": "chariotai.com sells \"The dev platform for LLM applications\": an API that adds GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 chat to other apps, free or US$30 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "15 April 2024", "what": "Effective date of the terms and privacy policy, which describe a service that writes \"AI-written articles at scale\" from keywords. The same text is still online in October 2026.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "when": "3 April 2025", "what": "The blog post \"Introducing Chariot: The AI Website Builder Made for You\" is dated this day. The pricing page of 27 April 2025 has a free plan, Starter at US$17 and Pro at US$47 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 14 ] }, { "when": "3 May 2025", "what": "Founding date given on the TrustMRR profile.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "10 July 2025", "what": "The home page says \"Join 3,323+ builders using Chariot\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "November 2025 to April 2026", "what": "Stripe revenue between US$1,727 and US$3,895 a month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "March to April 2026", "what": "The pricing page moves from monthly to yearly billing (\"Billed annually Save 17%\") and starts to show \"7,313+ businesses\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "18 April 2026", "what": "Moltcorp, \"The company run by AI agents\", creates the product Chariot on its site.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "May 2026", "what": "Best month in the Stripe table: US$13,760.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "9 June 2026", "what": "Listed for sale on TrustMRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "US$10,051, the fourth monthly fall in a row.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "26 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR: US$6,760 MRR from 310 subscriptions, US$99,182 all time; the last 30 days are 30.9% below the 30 before.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Sell the result, not the tool", "text": "The customer never sees a layout editor. The first screen is a text box with an example request, and changes are also requests in plain language. The comparison table on the home page sets the price of US$17 a month against an agency at US$1,000 to US$10,000 and four to eight weeks, and against Wix and Squarespace, which it describes as do-it-yourself tools with a high learning curve and two to four weeks to deliver." }, { "title": "A narrow promise", "text": "The pricing page says who should not buy: anyone who needs a database, logins or an online shop is sent to Lovable, Bolt or Shopify. A static business website is a task that current models do reliably, so the product promises only what the model can deliver." }, { "title": "Credits cap the model cost", "text": "Every AI request uses credits, and each plan includes a fixed number a month: 1,000 for US$17, 2,500 for US$47. The cost of the rented model per customer therefore has an upper limit, which a flat price with unlimited requests would not have." }, { "title": "Yearly billing and paid reach", "text": "In spring 2026 the pricing page moved to yearly billing only, the affiliate program pays 30% for a year, and Moltcorp's books list Meta ads and a creator video program. Monthly revenue rose 3.5 times in May 2026 and then fell for five months; the sources do not say which change caused the rise or the fall." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the site's response headers and page code (grade B), the TrustMRR profile, and the company's and Moltcorp's own pages (grade C). No source names the AI model that writes the websites.", "items": [ "The site is a Next.js application served by Vercel: the server answers with \"Server: Vercel\" and \"X-Powered-By: Next.js\". The TrustMRR profile lists Next.js for the front end and Stripe for the back end.", "Payments run on Stripe: the FAQ said \"debit cards via Stripe\", and TrustMRR reads the revenue from the Stripe account through an API key.", "Published sites get a free chariotai.app address, and the customer can connect a custom domain; hosting and SSL are included in every plan.", "The affiliate program runs on Rewardful. The pages load Google Tag Manager and an analytics script from analytics.moltcorporation.com.", "Moltcorp's books, for all its products together, list Vercel Pro, GitHub Team, Anthropic AI tokens, DataForSEO, Meta ads and a creator video program; they do not say which of these Chariot uses.", "No public code: the GitHub organization chariotai holds only a 2023 Node.js library for the old Chariot API, and the repository that Moltcorp links for Chariot does not open publicly." ], "src": [ 16, 1, 14, 4, 3, 7, 10, 17, 11 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database promised websites or software without designers and developers. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "The Grid", "years": "2014 to 2020", "funding": "US$4.7M", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "An AI that designs a website for you, so you skip the designer fees.", "died": "The AI of 2014 was not ready: its designs were clumsy and inconsistent, while rival builders offered polished templates.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/618-the-grid" }, { "name": "WebCake", "years": "2013 to 2016", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "An all-in-one website maker for non-technical small businesses.", "died": "Wix and Squarespace offered more features and more polish, and WebCake had neither the money nor a difference to compete.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1541-webcake" }, { "name": "Sosh", "years": "2012 to 2013", "funding": "US$2.3M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A visual website builder without the hand-off between designer and developer.", "died": "Too complex for beginners and too rigid for professionals; the code it generated was hard to maintain.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/565-sosh" }, { "name": "GeoCities", "years": "1994 to 2009", "funding": "US$45M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A free website for everyone, grouped into themed neighborhoods.", "died": "After Yahoo bought it in 1999, the product barely changed while social networks gave people an easier place to be online.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/180-geocities" }, { "name": "Builder.ai", "years": "2016 to 2025", "funding": "US$445M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Custom apps assembled by AI for non-technical buyers, instead of a team of developers.", "died": "Apps sold for about US$20,000 cost more to build, and much of the work said to be AI was done by human developers.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2170-builderai" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The Grid sold the same promise as Chariot, an AI that designs the site, ten years too early: its own AI could not produce a design a business owner wanted to publish. WebCake, Sosh and GeoCities sold tools that the owner still had to operate, and lost to builders with better templates. Builder.ai sold software \"built by AI\" for US$20,000 and more, while human developers did much of the work.", "Large language models changed the cost: a model can now write a complete static website from one paragraph and change it on request. That lets a very small operation sell a finished website for US$17 a month, below the price of the template builders. What did not change is the competition. Wix, Squarespace and the AI app builders that the pricing page names all add AI site generation, and Chariot's revenue fell by 27% from May to September 2026 while Moltcorp, which now lists Chariot as its product, says that AI agents build it." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product, yes. The numbers, with care.", "text": "A chat box that writes a small-business website is easy to build with current models, and the market is large: every shop, trade and practice needs a site. But it is also easy to copy, the large website builders now offer the same feature, and Chariot's own Stripe figures show a rise that did not last. The verified part is modest: about 310 paying subscriptions.", "steps": [ "Pick a task that current models do reliably, such as static websites, and say on the pricing page what the product does not do.", "Sell the finished result and keep editing in the same chat, so the buyer never learns a tool.", "Meter the AI work in credits with a monthly allowance, so the model cost per customer has a limit.", "Connect the payment account to a revenue-verification service if you want buyers or readers to trust the figures." ], "open": "The same approach for one trade at a time is still open: websites for dentists, plumbers or restaurants, with the booking, menu or insurance pages that trade needs, in languages other than English." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Who runs it", "text": "No page names a person. The launch post of April 2025 is written by a founder who says they spent years writing software at Amazon and ran a web-development agency. The terms name the operator only as \"Chariot AI\". Since 18 April 2026 the product is listed on Moltcorp, whose contact page names only \"the Moltcorp team\". The money is grade A and no source suggests more than ten people, so the story is published with the team label \"headcount not published\"." }, { "title": "Moltcorp says agents built it", "text": "Moltcorp's home page shows Chariot as \"Featured product\" with the words \"A real product. Built by agents. No humans involved.\" and says \"Agents share 100% of the profits\". Chariot's own history contradicts the first claim: the domain sold an API in 2023, and the 2025 launch post says a person built the website builder. Moltcorp's books show \"Profit distributed\" of US$0.00. Chariot's blog post \"What is a Zero-Human Company?\" links to Moltcorp; it is dated 8 April 2025 but was first archived on 14 April 2026 and describes projects from 2026. Moltcorp's other products on its financials page are T-shirt sales on Shopify, InstantCLI, a Classroom Seating Chart Maker and Verbsy, plus a product named Kiki; none of them is in a category that this site excludes, on the pages read." }, { "title": "Revenue rose fast and then fell", "text": "Monthly revenue was US$1,727 to US$3,895 from November 2025 to April 2026, US$13,760 in May 2026, and then fell every month to US$10,051 in September and US$6,199 for 26 days of October. MRR fell 11.3% and revenue 30.9% in the last 30 days. Yearly plans are charged in one payment, so months with many new yearly subscriptions show more revenue than the MRR; the MRR of US$6,760 is the better guide to the current size." }, { "title": "Social proof that cannot be checked", "text": "The home page says \"Join 7,313+ businesses using Chariot\", a number unchanged since at least 14 April 2026, while the Stripe account has 310 active subscriptions. Next to it are five faces labeled \"User 1\" to \"User 5\", loaded from i.pravatar.cc, a service that supplies sample face photos for page mock-ups. The \"Wall of love\" shows three TikTok videos by @leah.sites, @websites.carol and @aihackslife; this page could not check whether those creators are customers or were paid (tiktok.com blocks Claude agents), and Moltcorp's books list a \"UGC Program\" for \"Creator videos for apps\" at US$2,500. The \"As seen on\" line shows three social-network icons and no article or link." }, { "title": "Old text in the legal pages", "text": "The terms and the privacy policy, effective 15 April 2024, still describe \"a service designed to generate AI-written articles at scale\" from \"keywords or titles\", not the website builder. The home and pricing pages of October 2026 sell only websites, and this page judged those. A customer who reads the terms gets no description of the product they pay for." }, { "title": "For sale", "text": "The business has been listed on TrustMRR since 9 June 2026 at US$300,000, with 11 offers. A buyer would take over a product whose monthly revenue fell 27% from May to September 2026, and a Stripe account that may include revenue of the earlier products." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://chariotai.com/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/chariot-ai" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR markdown profile: Chariot AI, revenue last synced 26 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/chariot-ai.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile. Source for all revenue, MRR and subscription figures (verified through a Stripe API key), the founding date, the country, the tech stack, the marketing channels and the sale listing." }, { "title": "Chariot home page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://chariotai.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the page code. Source for the product description, the \"7,313+ businesses\" claim, the placeholder faces, the Wall of love and the comparison table." }, { "title": "Chariot pricing page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://chariotai.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the plans, the yearly billing, the money-back promise and the list of what the product does not do." }, { "title": "Chariot blog: index, and Introducing Chariot: The AI Website Builder Made for You, dated 3 April 2025", "url": "https://chariotai.com/blog/introducing-chariot-the-ai-website-builder", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on the live site. Source for the founder's background in the first person, the chariotai.app address and the post dates." }, { "title": "Chariot terms of service, effective 15 April 2024, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://chariotai.com/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the operator name Chariot AI and the article-generator description." }, { "title": "Chariot privacy policy, effective 15 April 2024, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://chariotai.com/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the \"SEO-optimized articles at scale\" description." }, { "title": "Chariot affiliate program page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://chariotai.com/affiliates", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 30% commission, the 12-month period and Rewardful." }, { "title": "Chariot blog: What is a Zero-Human Company?, dated 8 April 2025", "url": "https://chariotai.com/blog/what-is-a-zero-human-company", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the link to Moltcorp; the Wayback capture list dates it to 14 April 2026 or earlier." }, { "title": "Moltcorp home page: The company run by AI agents, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://moltcorporation.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the \"Built by agents. No humans involved.\" claim and the profit-sharing description." }, { "title": "Moltcorp financials page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://moltcorporation.com/financials", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the tables in the page code. Source for the US$64,267.03 of Chariot revenue, the other products and the expenses." }, { "title": "Moltcorp product page: Chariot, created 18 April 2026", "url": "https://moltcorporation.com/products/3CXB9fDTzFcxpNsdYCdbUWSJDkN", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page and its Origin tab, which says origin information is not available. Source for the date Chariot joined Moltcorp and the GitHub link." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine: chariotai.com on 1 June 2023 and 17 May 2024", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20230601170837/https://chariotai.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both archived copies in full. Source for the earlier LLM API product and its prices." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine: chariotai.com on 10 July 2025", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20250710010352/https://chariotai.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the \"3,323+ builders\" claim in July 2025." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine: chariotai.com/pricing on 27 April 2025, 14 March 2026, 14 April 2026 and 11 May 2026", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20260314100804/https://chariotai.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read all four archived copies, with the FAQ answers in the page code. Source for the monthly prices, the free and pay-as-you-go plans, the credit costs and the date of the move to yearly billing." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine capture lists for chariotai.com, its blog and its pricing page", "url": "https://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=chariotai.com/blog*&output=txt&collapse=urlkey", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the lists of capture dates. Source for the first capture of each blog post." }, { "title": "Chariot site response headers and page code, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://chariotai.com/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the HTTP headers and searched the page code. Source for Vercel, Next.js, Rewardful, Google Tag Manager, the Moltcorp analytics script and the i.pravatar.cc images." }, { "title": "GitHub organization chariotai", "url": "https://github.com/chariotai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the organization page and the chariot-node license. Source for the location and the 2023 API library; no members are shown." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/cnvs/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/cnvs.md", "slug": "cnvs", "name": "CNVS", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Voice-controlled Mac workspace for AI coding agents", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "10 June 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$50.6K verified revenue all time, October 2026", "sticker": "$50.6K verified, all time", "outcomeUsd": 50583, "months": 4, "teamLabel": "1 founder", "fundingLabel": "None found", "primaryFactor": "Audience", "group": "build-software", "channel": "audience", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Developer tools" ], "product": "A native Mac app that puts several AI coding agents, such as Claude Code, Cursor and Codex, on one infinite canvas, with terminals, browser previews and notes beside them. The user directs the agents by voice, and the app reports which agent is working, finished or waiting for an answer. It works with the AI subscriptions that the user already has and is sold as a one-time license.", "why": "It turned a new working habit, running several AI coding agents at the same time, into a native Mac app with voice control and a strong visual style, and it charged once instead of every month. The founder sold it to his own audience through daily live streams, X and a Discord community. Stripe recorded more than three quarters of the revenue in the first seven weeks.", "summary": [ "CNVS, also called Canvas, is an agent workspace for macOS. A coding agent is a program, such as Anthropic's Claude Code or OpenAI's Codex, that reads a code base, edits files and runs commands by itself after a request in plain language. CNVS opens several of these agents side by side on an infinite canvas, a work surface without edges that the user can move around and zoom, and lets the user direct them by voice. It is a native Mac app written in Swift, and it uses the agent subscriptions that the user already pays for.", "Max Blade, a solo founder and a former personal trainer, started selling it in June 2026; TrustMRR lists 10 June 2026 as the founding date. TrustMRR is a site that reads revenue directly from a company's payment provider. Its profile shows US$50,583 in revenue through Stripe up to 26 October 2026: US$23,718 in June, US$15,920 in July, then between about US$3,200 and US$4,000 a month. The founder said in a YouTube video that CNVS made more than US$19,000 in its first 11 days, and he posted on 19 July 2026 that it had done over US$36,000 in a little over a month. Both claims fit the Stripe totals.", "The headline number is grade A because it comes from the payment provider. The launch claims are founder statements, grade C. The revenue pattern is a launch peak followed by a much smaller steady income: CNVS sells one-time licenses, so it has no recurring revenue. The page also shows four developer tools that could not get enough developers to pay." ], "factsCaption": "A one-time Mac license that made US$50,583 in four and a half months, with every revenue figure read from Stripe by TrustMRR", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read from the company's Stripe account by TrustMRR. A grade C value is a founder statement, a founder-written profile field, or the company's own page. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From the first sales on 10 June 2026 to US$50,583 in verified revenue by 26 October 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "CNVS license prices: the home page tiers, read 27 October 2026, and the price on the TrustMRR profile (grade C)", "note": "CNVS is a one-time purchase with no subscription; the home page says it 'works with your existing AI subscriptions', so the user pays the agent providers separately. The home page shows rising prices by license number. The founder-written TrustMRR profile says US$199 one-time, and every daily revenue total in October 2026 is a multiple of US$199, so the current price is probably US$199. This page could not settle the difference.", "rows": [ [ "License #1 to #5, founder price", "", "99 one-time", "Home page: '5 left'" ], [ "License #6 to #50", "", "129 one-time", "Home page" ], [ "License #51 to #150", "", "169 one-time", "Home page" ], [ "License, TrustMRR profile", "", "199 one-time", "Founder-written pricing field" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time to 26 October 2026", "value": "US$50,583", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, from the Stripe account through an API key. Revenue last synced 26 October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, June 2026", "value": "US$23,718", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. The founding date on the profile is 10 June 2026, so this is about three weeks of sales.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, July 2026", "value": "US$15,920", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, August and September 2026", "value": "US$3,980 and US$3,781", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, 1 to 27 October 2026", "value": "US$3,184", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline; the last 30 days show US$3,383, 15.0% less than the 30 days before.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Share of all revenue from June and July 2026", "value": "about 78%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 23,718 plus 15,920 equals 39,638; divided by 50,583.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Fall from June to September 2026", "value": "about 84%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 1 minus 3,781 divided by 23,718.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Recurring revenue", "value": "US$0, with 0 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot. CNVS sells one-time licenses, so its revenue is not recurring.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Sales implied at US$199, August to October 2026", "value": "20, 19 and 16 licenses", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 3,980, 3,781 and 3,184 divided by 199 give whole numbers. This assumes every sale was at US$199.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the first 11 days", "value": "more than US$19,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder in his YouTube video 'Why Your Vibe Coded App Isn't Making Money', as ProvenStartups summarized it on 26 September 2026. ProvenStartups notes the video gives 'no customer count, net receipts, refund total, or audited payment evidence'. It fits the Stripe total of US$23,718 for June.", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by 19 July 2026", "value": "over US$36,000 'in a little over a month'", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X, quoted by Brag in Public. Stripe shows US$39,638 by the end of July, so the claim fits.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's audience", "value": "24,946 followers on X; a Discord community of more than 500", "grade": "C", "note": "Follower count on the TrustMRR profile; the Discord figure is from the founder's post of 19 July 2026.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 founder", "grade": "C", "note": "ProvenStartups: 'Team Solo (Max Blade)'. TrustMRR names one founder.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "First formal release note", "value": "version 1.3.2, 17 June 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "The release notes call it 'the first formal CNVS release note'. Later versions: 1.4.0 on 3 August 2026 and 1.5.2 on 20 September 2026.", "src": [ 3 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "10 June 2026", "what": "Founding date on the TrustMRR profile. Sales start the same month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "17 June 2026", "what": "Version 1.3.2, 'Nightglass': the canvas, voice control, project-bound terminals, themes and a first local control server.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "About 21 June 2026", "what": "More than US$19,000 in the first 11 days, by the founder's account in a YouTube video.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "US$23,718 in revenue through Stripe.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "19 July 2026", "what": "The founder posts over US$36,000 in a little over a month and lists his lessons: lifetime licenses sell more easily than subscriptions, daily live streams, a Discord community of 500 or more.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "July 2026", "what": "US$15,920 in revenue through Stripe.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "3 August 2026", "what": "Version 1.4.0, 'Shorthand': Apple's on-device model writes a one-line title for each agent's task.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "August and September 2026", "what": "Revenue falls to US$3,980 and US$3,781 a month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "20 September 2026", "what": "Version 1.5.2, 'Distraction Guard': alerts when an agent finishes or needs the user, also on an iPhone companion app, CNVS Pocket.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "26 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR shows US$50,583 all time and US$3,383 in the last 30 days.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A new habit, a native app", "text": "People who use coding agents now run several at once. The release notes describe the problem: 'eight terminals scrolling, and no way to tell at a glance which one is doing what.' CNVS gives each agent a card on a canvas with its status and a short title, and moves the user to whichever agent needs an answer." }, { "title": "Pay once, no model costs", "text": "The founder wrote that 'Lifetime licenses are 100x easier to sell than subscriptions'. CNVS can charge once because it pays for no AI model: the agents run on the user's own subscriptions, and the task titles use Apple's on-device model, with 'no per-request cost'. The cost of this choice is that revenue depends on new buyers every month." }, { "title": "Selling in public, every day", "text": "The founder's lessons in July 2026 were daily live streams, which he said force him to show up, and a Discord community of more than 500 people who give feedback. His X account has about 25,000 followers. The product itself is easy to show on video: many agents working at once on one screen." }, { "title": "A launch peak", "text": "About 78% of all revenue came in June and July 2026. The founder wrote that he builds 'around what is hot', and that his iPhone app QuickClaw also reached US$7,200 in seven days. Products built around a new trend sell fast at launch, and the Stripe figures show how fast the sales then fall." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the release notes and the home page (grade C), from the ProvenStartups summary of the founder's video (grade C), and from the public page code (grade B).", "items": [ "A native macOS app written in Swift: 'Apple Native macOS, built in Swift.' The terminal engine is SwiftTerm, a terminal library, updated to version 1.20 in September 2026.", "Speech recognition runs on the Mac with a local Nvidia Parakeet model, according to ProvenStartups' summary of the founder's video.", "Since version 1.4.0 in August 2026, Apple's on-device model writes a short title for each agent's task. Nothing leaves the Mac, and there is no key to add.", "The agents are the user's own command-line tools: Claude Code, Cursor and Codex, and since September 2026 also Kimi, Qwen, Grok and OpenCode with native status reports.", "An iPhone companion app, CNVS Pocket, receives alerts through the company's relay server, which forwards end-to-end encrypted messages that it cannot read.", "Payments go through Stripe, as the TrustMRR profile shows. The website is built with the Astro framework and uses DataFast for visitor analytics, as its page code shows." ], "src": [ 1, 2, 3, 5 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four developer tools in the Loot Drop database promised a better way to write code and could not get enough developers to pay. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Kite DevTool", "years": "2014 to 2024", "funding": "US$21M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "AI code completion inside the programmer's editor.", "died": "Its freemium model never earned enough, and GitHub Copilot, built on a far stronger OpenAI model and sold through GitHub, took the market.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2491-kite-devtool" }, { "name": "Fig DevTool", "years": "2020 to 2024", "funding": "US$2.4M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Autocomplete and visual helpers for the command-line terminal.", "died": "Developers used it daily but would not pay for terminal tools; it was acquired by AWS in 2024.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2502-fig-devtool" }, { "name": "Light Table/Eve", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$3M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A new kind of code editor with live feedback, then a tool to build apps without code.", "died": "Professional developers stayed with the editors they knew, and the change of direction to Eve lacked focus and money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1560-light-tableeve" }, { "name": "CodeSee", "years": "2020 to 2024", "funding": "US$10M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Visual maps of a code base so developers understand it faster.", "died": "Developers liked the pictures, but engineering managers could not see enough return to pay for it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2500-codesee" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The earlier tools tried to make the programmer faster at writing code, and they had to win against free editors. Kite built its own models and lost to Copilot; Fig and CodeSee had happy users who would not pay. Each raised millions of dollars, the Loot Drop database lists, and needed many paying customers every month.", "CNVS works one level higher. The agents write the code, and CNVS only helps one person direct many of them at once, so it needs no model of its own and runs on the user's Mac. One founder could build it, sell it to his own followers, and keep the revenue, which TrustMRR reports at US$50,583 in four and a half months. The open question is the same one that ended Fig: whether developers keep paying for a tool around their tools." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The launch, yes, with the same risk. The product, hard.", "text": "Agent workspaces are a new category, and the companies that make the agents, as well as editor makers such as Cursor, can add the same features. What can be copied is the method: build a visible tool around a new habit, show it every day on live streams, sell it once to an audience that already follows you, and expect sales to fall after the first weeks.", "steps": [ "Watch what heavy users of a new AI tool struggle with, such as following many agents at once.", "Build a tool around that problem that needs no model of its own, so a one-time price can work.", "Show the tool working on live streams and short videos, where the result is easy to see.", "Plan for the fall after launch: updates, new versions or a second product to bring new buyers." ], "open": "The same idea works outside programming: a workspace that directs several AI agents at once for research, video editing or customer support, with voice control and one place to see which agent needs an answer." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue fell after the launch", "text": "Stripe shows US$23,718 in June 2026 and then between US$3,184 and US$3,980 a month from August to October, with the last 30 days 15.0% below the 30 days before. One-time licenses bring no recurring revenue, so the business depends on new buyers every month." }, { "title": "Prices do not agree", "text": "On 27 October 2026 the home page lists US$99 for a founder license with '5 left', US$129 for licenses 6 to 50 and US$169 for licenses 51 to 150. The founder-written TrustMRR profile says '$199 one-time payment', and the daily revenue totals in October are multiples of US$199. One buyer's review on the home page mentions paying 169 dollars." }, { "title": "Launch claims are the founder's", "text": "The US$19,000 in 11 days comes from the founder's video, which this page did not open; it is read from the ProvenStartups summary. The US$36,000 claim comes from his post on X, read on Brag in Public. Both fit the Stripe totals, but neither gives a number of buyers or refunds." }, { "title": "Depends on other companies' agents", "text": "CNVS directs agents made by Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor and others, on the user's own subscriptions. If those companies change their command-line tools or build the same multi-agent view, CNVS loses its reason to exist." }, { "title": "Other products of the same founder", "text": "The founder also built Talk Macros, a voice calorie tracker that ProvenStartups reports at more than US$1,000 a month, and an iPhone app called QuickClaw, which he says made US$7,200 in seven days. This page did not check either product." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://cnvs.dev/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/cnvs" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR, CNVS markdown profile, data as of 26 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/cnvs.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile. The revenue figures come from Stripe through an API key; the description, founding date and pricing fields are founder-written. Source for every verified revenue figure." }, { "title": "CNVS home page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://cnvs.dev/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the page code. Source for the product description, the license prices, the reviews and the website tools." }, { "title": "CNVS Release Notes, versions 1.3.2 (17 June 2026) to 1.5.2 (20 September 2026)", "url": "https://cnvs.dev/release/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the features, the version dates, Apple's on-device model and SwiftTerm." }, { "title": "Brag in Public feed, read 27 October 2026: Max Blade, 19 July 2026, my mac app CNVS has done over $36k in a little over a month", "url": "https://braginpublic.com/feed", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the entry from the copy downloaded on 27 October 2026. The site imports the founder's X post; the post itself could not be opened. Source for the July claim and the founder's lessons." }, { "title": "ProvenStartups, CNVS (Canvas): $19,000+ revenue in 11 days, revenue receipt 644", "url": "https://provenstartups.com/projects/cnvs-voice-controlled-coding-agent-workspace", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the free part, from the copy downloaded on 25 October 2026. A research site that summarizes the founder's video. Source for the 11-day claim, the team, and the speech model." }, { "title": "Max Blade on YouTube: Why Your Vibe Coded App Isn't Making Money", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q97a0SBay-0", "grade": "C", "how": "Could not open; cited from ProvenStartups' summary, captured 26 September 2026." }, { "title": "ProvenStartups, Talk Macros (voice-first calorie tracker), revenue receipt 326", "url": "https://provenstartups.com/projects/talk-macros-voice-calorie-tracker", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the free part, from the copy downloaded on 25 October 2026. Source for the founder's earlier app and his background as a personal trainer." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/ferndesk/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/ferndesk.md", "slug": "ferndesk", "name": "Ferndesk", "country": "United States", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI help center that checks and updates its own articles", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "June 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$5K monthly recurring revenue, June 2026", "sticker": "$5K MRR in 1 year", "outcomeUsd": 60000, "months": 12, "teamLabel": "1 founder, Wilson Wilson, \"still solo\" in a January 2026 post; by June 2026 he had hired one person for SEO; headcount not published", "fundingLabel": "None (\"100% bootstrapped ... zero outside funding\")", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "support-agents", "channel": "audience", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Customer support" ], "product": "A hosted help center for software companies, with an AI agent called Fern. Fern reads the customer's code, pull requests, support tickets and live product, checks every help article against what the product does now, and drafts a fix or a new article for a person to approve. The help center also has AI answers from the verified articles, an in-app widget, API documentation, private docs and translations.", "why": "Help articles go stale every time a software team ships, and small teams have nobody to keep them current. The founder had built a large audience at his first company, Senja, and used it to sell preorders before the product existed. He then launched new features every week and turned each one into posts, videos and sales conversations.", "summary": [ "Ferndesk is a help center, the public website where a software company explains its product in articles so that customers can solve problems without writing to support. Its AI agent, Fern, compares each article with the customer's codebase (the source code of the product), with merged pull requests (proposed code changes that a team reviews and accepts) and with the live product, and drafts the change when a button, a plan or a setting has moved. Nothing is published until a person approves it. The plan costs US$149 a month, or US$75 a month in the first year for companies under US$1 million in annual recurring revenue.", "Wilson Wilson started his first company, Senja, a testimonial tool, at 17, and left it after it grew past US$70,000 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the subscription revenue of one month. An archived copy of ferndesk.com from 16 June 2025 already took preorders at US$69 a month. In his posts on X, quoted by the founder directory Arrfounder and by the Tiny Startups newsletter, he reported US$750 MRR on 25 August 2025, US$1,000 by 19 November 2025, US$20,000 of annual recurring revenue on 13 January 2026, US$2,000 MRR on 28 January, US$3,000 on 16 February and US$5,000 on 25 June 2026, one year after he first shared the idea. In the June post he said he had hired someone for SEO and aims for US$50,000 MRR a year later.", "Every revenue figure on this page is the founder's own statement, grade C: the figures agree with each other over ten months and come from six dated posts, but no payment processor has confirmed them, and no TrustMRR profile was found. The page also shows four failed companies that tried to keep company knowledge or documentation current before language models could read code and write the update." ], "factsCaption": "US$5,000 of monthly recurring revenue one year after the first preorder page, for an AI help center run by one founder, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a founder statement in a post on X, read through a page that quotes it (Arrfounder, the Tiny Startups newsletter, Startup Founder Stories), or a statement on the company's own site. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a preorder page in June 2025 to US$5,000 of monthly recurring revenue in June 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Ferndesk prices read on the pricing page on 27 October 2026, in US dollars (grade C)", "note": "There is one plan with everything included. Paid yearly, Pro costs US$1,490, two months free; the per-month value is calculated as 1,490 / 12. The early-stage rate is for companies under US$1 million in annual recurring revenue with fewer than 10 people, bootstrapped or pre-seed, for the first 12 months, then US$149 a month; US$745 if paid for the year up front. Every plan starts with a 7-day trial with no credit card. Earlier price models were US$69 a month on preorder in June 2025 and a base plan plus US$0.50 per published article in a post shown as updated in January 2026.", "rows": [ [ "Pro", "124.17", "149", "5 seats, 5 languages, 1,000 AI conversations a month, API and MCP access" ], [ "Pro, early-stage rate (first year)", "62.08", "75", "same as Pro; under US$1M ARR and fewer than 10 people" ], [ "Enterprise", "", "from 399", "SSO (SAML), SCIM, 2,500 conversations a month, data processing agreement" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 25 June 2026", "value": "US$5,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X, quoted by Arrfounder: \"Ferndesk hit $5K MRR!\" and \"It took exactly one year since I shared the idea to hit $5K MRR.\"", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the June 2026 figure", "value": "US$60,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$5,000 times 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 16 February 2026", "value": "US$3,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post, quoted by Arrfounder: \"19 days to get to $3K\" after US$2,000.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 28 January 2026", "value": "US$2,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post, quoted by Arrfounder: \"It took 3 months get to $1K\" and \"It took 2.5 months get to $2K\". Startup Founder Stories, citing his Indie Hackers post, says it took 228 days, of which the first two months were building.", "src": [ 3, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, 13 January 2026", "value": "US$20,000, about US$1,667 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post, quoted by Arrfounder and by the Tiny Startups newsletter of 14 January 2026: \"Crossed $20K ARR for ferndesk.com\". The monthly value is calculated: 20,000 / 12.", "src": [ 4, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, November 2025", "value": "US$1,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Tiny Startups newsletter of 19 November 2025: \"Wilson hit $1k MRR with Ferndesk\".", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 25 August 2025", "value": "US$750", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post, quoted by Arrfounder: \"Crossed $750 MRR with @FerndeskHQ !!!\"", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from US$3,000 to US$5,000", "value": "plus 67% in about four months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 5,000 / 3,000 equals 1.67, from 16 February to 25 June 2026.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 founder; one person hired for SEO by June 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's blog post, shown as updated 24 January 2026: \"100% bootstrapped, still solo, zero outside funding.\" June 2026 post: \"Hired someone to scale one of our primary marketing channels (SEO).\" In January 2026 he wrote that he had \"finally started delegating work to others\".", "src": [ 9, 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's blog post: \"zero outside funding\".", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's earlier company", "value": "Senja, a testimonial tool, past US$70,000 MRR when he left", "grade": "C", "note": "June 2026 post: \"when I was 17, I started my first company Senja\" and \"Senja grew to $70K + MRR before I left\". The Tiny Startups newsletter calls him a co-founder of Senja.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Preorder price, 16 June 2025", "value": "US$69 a month instead of US$99", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived home page: \"We're releasing fully later this month. Skip the waitlist and lock in your pricing by preordering today.\" Fully refundable.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's audience", "value": "about 40,000 followers across X and LinkedIn", "grade": "C", "note": "Startup Founder Stories, citing his Indie Hackers post. It names X as the main growth channel, with communities and word of mouth.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Customers named on the site", "value": "more than 100 software teams, among them Metricool, GummySearch and RightMessage", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page: \"Trusted by 100+ software teams\", with case studies and quotes by named founders.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Company", "value": "Work Paragon LLC, a Delaware company", "grade": "C", "note": "Privacy policy, effective 5 October 2026: \"Ferndesk is operated by Work Paragon LLC\". The site footer: \"Ferndesk by Work Paragon LLC\".", "src": [ 13, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the preorder page to the US$5,000 figure", "value": "12 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: June 2025 to June 2026.", "src": [ 10, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Before 2025", "what": "Wilson Wilson starts Senja, a tool for collecting customer testimonials, at 17. It grows past US$70,000 a month before he leaves.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "when": "16 June 2025", "what": "ferndesk.com takes preorders at US$69 a month, \"The help center that writes itself\", with release planned for later that month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "25 August 2025", "what": "US$750 MRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "US$1,000 MRR, about three months after launch; the Tiny Startups newsletter reports it on 19 November.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 3 ] }, { "when": "13 January 2026", "what": "US$20,000 of annual recurring revenue. January is the best month so far; customers start to come from search and word of mouth, and he starts to delegate work.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "January 2026", "what": "He drops three pricing tiers and \"edit credits\" for one base plan with US$0.50 per published article.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "28 January 2026", "what": "US$2,000 MRR. Each week the team builds one feature, makes content about it and launches it on the newsletter, social media and communities.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "16 February 2026", "what": "US$3,000 MRR, 19 days after US$2,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "25 June 2026", "what": "US$5,000 MRR. New pricing that month, one person hired for SEO, and a plan for founder-led sales and compliance work.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "One Pro plan at US$149 a month, an early-stage rate of US$75, and an enterprise plan from US$399. A new privacy policy lists the company's subprocessors.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12, 13 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Sell before building", "text": "The June 2025 page took refundable preorders at US$69 a month before the full release. The founder's audience from Senja, about 40,000 followers according to Startup Founder Stories, gave the first buyers; US$750 MRR came two months later." }, { "title": "Weekly launches that compound", "text": "In January 2026 the founder described his loop: every week, build one core feature the target customer needs, record videos and content about it, use it in customer conversations, and launch it on the newsletter, social media, forums and communities. He said the same \"boring daily reps\" took the company from US$2,000 to US$3,000 in 19 days." }, { "title": "A problem the model can now solve", "text": "A help article is a set of claims about a product. A language model with access to the code, the pull requests and the live product can check each claim and draft the fix, so maintenance becomes a review queue. Earlier documentation tools needed a person to notice the change first." }, { "title": "Pricing simplified until it was easy to say", "text": "He moved from usage pricing per drafted article to US$0.50 per published article, removed \"edit credits\" and three tiers, and by October 2026 sold one plan at US$149. He wrote that at Senja growth started only when the tiers were removed." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's blog posts and the company's privacy policy, which lists its subprocessors. They are grade C.", "items": [ "The founder launched an in-app help widget and then wrote a tutorial on embeddable widgets; its stack table, \"what we use\", lists Svelte 5, Rolldown and Tailwind CSS, with the Shadow DOM so the widget does not clash with the host page.", "The application and its job queue run on Render; the main database on PlanetScale; search on Turbopuffer; usage events on Tinybird; logs on Axiom; errors on Sentry; code and tests on GitHub.", "AI requests go through OpenRouter to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft Azure, Voyage AI, and Baseten, Fireworks AI, Parasail and Novita AI for GLM models. Google Cloud Vertex AI analyses product videos.", "Cloudflare provides the network, file storage, custom domains and the browser that Fern uses to take screenshots; 2Captcha solves CAPTCHAs on the customer's own sign-in page for those screenshots.", "Stripe takes payments and Autumn manages plans and usage limits. Close is the CRM, fed by a 1,000-line sync script that the founder said he wrote with Codex; the support inbox was Help Scout in a January 2026 post and is Fernand in the October 2026 privacy policy; Resend and Bento send email, Mixpanel and Pirsch measure usage, Cal.com books demos and Slack carries sign-up alerts." ], "src": [ 14, 13, 15 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to keep company knowledge or code documentation easy to find and current, before language models could read code and write the change. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Answerly", "years": "2013 to 2016", "funding": "US$550K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "FAQ chatbots that would answer support questions so that people only handled the complex ones.", "died": "Language technology could not yet handle real questions, setup meant months of manual FAQs and rules, and Zendesk and Intercom were already in place.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2168-answerly" }, { "name": "Niles", "years": "2017 to 2020", "funding": "US$2.8M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A Slack bot that held a company's knowledge and answered staff questions.", "died": "Slack added its own AI search, and Guru and Confluence grew their features; a bot inside one platform had little room to change course.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1031-niles" }, { "name": "Omniref", "years": "2015 to 2018", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A shared encyclopedia of explanations for source code.", "died": "It depended on users writing the content, and GitHub and Stack Overflow already held developers' attention.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1119-omniref" }, { "name": "CodeSee", "years": "2020 to 2024", "funding": "US$10M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Interactive maps that would help developers understand large codebases.", "died": "Developers liked the maps in demos, but the need came up rarely and teams could not show a return to their managers.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2500-codesee" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The four predecessors needed people to write and maintain the knowledge, either as FAQ rules, as a community encyclopedia or as answers inside one chat platform, and the product failed when people stopped doing that work or when a large platform added the feature. Ferndesk removes the writing step: Fern reads the code and the support tickets and drafts the change, and a person only approves it.", "The buyer is also narrower and more urgent. The founder sells to small software teams that ship every week and have no technical writer, and he prices the product against the hours they lose on documentation. The risk the predecessors faced is still there: Intercom, Zendesk and other help desks can add the same checking agent to the help centers that their customers already use." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, with an audience; slower without one.", "text": "The product idea is open to any developer: connect a model to the code and the support inbox and let it propose documentation changes. What is harder to copy is the start. The founder had a following from his first company, so preorders and the first US$750 a month came before the product was finished. Without that audience, the same weekly loop of features, content and customer conversations would need more time.", "steps": [ "Pick a maintenance job that small teams know they neglect, and that a model can check against a source of truth.", "Take refundable preorders before the full release, at a launch price.", "Make every AI change a draft that a person approves, so the customer can trust it.", "Ship one feature a week and turn each one into posts, videos and sales material.", "Keep pricing to one plan that you can explain in one sentence." ], "open": "The same check-and-draft agent for other documents that drift from the product: API references, onboarding emails, sales decks, internal runbooks and compliance policies." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Self-reported revenue", "text": "Every revenue figure is the founder's own post on X, read through Arrfounder, the Tiny Startups newsletter or Startup Founder Stories. The figures agree with each other from August 2025 to June 2026, but no payment processor, buyer or journalist has confirmed them, and no TrustMRR profile was found under the slug ferndesk. The latest figure is from June 2026." }, { "title": "Solo founder, with help", "text": "He wrote \"still solo\" in a January 2026 post, but the same month he \"started delegating work to others\", later posts say \"we\", and by June 2026 he had hired one person for SEO. No source gives a headcount." }, { "title": "A CAPTCHA-solving service", "text": "The privacy policy lists 2Captcha, which \"Solves CAPTCHAs on your product's sign-in page when Fern takes screenshots of it\", with the operator in Bahrain and the \"processing location not published\". It is used on the customer's own product, but a CAPTCHA is a check meant to stop automated access, and customer screens pass through a third party." }, { "title": "Price changes behind the figures", "text": "The figures were reached under several price models: US$69 a month on preorder, a base plan with US$0.50 per published article, and from mid-2026 one plan at US$149 with an early-stage rate of US$75. The founder said he \"Revamped pricing\" in June 2026. MRR from one model is not directly comparable with another." }, { "title": "The help desks can add the same agent", "text": "Ferndesk imports help centers from Intercom, Zendesk, Help Scout and others and hands chats back to them. The predecessors on this page died when larger platforms added their feature; the same can happen if a help desk adds an article-checking agent." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://ferndesk.com/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Arrfounder: Ferndesk Hits $5K MRR, 25 June 2026, quoting Wilson Wilson's post on X", "url": "https://arrfounder.com/news/ferndesk-hits-5k-mrr", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026. Could not open the post on X (it needs a login); cited from Arrfounder's quotation of https://x.com/euboid/status/2070098546703925343. Source for the US$5,000 MRR, Senja, the SEO hire and the goal." }, { "title": "Arrfounder: ferndesk Hits $3K MRR, 16 February 2026", "url": "https://arrfounder.com/news/ferndesk-hits-3k-mrr", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Cited from Arrfounder's quotation of the founder's post." }, { "title": "Arrfounder: Ferndesk Hits $2K MRR, 28 January 2026", "url": "https://arrfounder.com/news/ferndesk-hits-2k-mrr", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Cited from Arrfounder's quotation of the founder's post; source for the weekly loop." }, { "title": "Arrfounder: ferndesk Crosses $20K ARR, 13 January 2026", "url": "https://arrfounder.com/news/ferndesk-crosses-20k-arr", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Cited from Arrfounder's quotation of the founder's post; source for search and word of mouth and the start of delegation." }, { "title": "Tiny Startups newsletter, TWITS #87, 19 November 2025", "url": "https://tinystartupsnewsletter.beehiiv.com/p/twits-87", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section \"Wilson hit $1k MRR with Ferndesk\" in the copy downloaded on 27 October 2026 (the newsletter host allows agents)." }, { "title": "Tiny Startups newsletter, TWITS #92, 14 January 2026", "url": "https://tinystartupsnewsletter.beehiiv.com/p/twits-92", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section \"Wilson hit $20k ARR for Ferndesk\" in the copy downloaded on 27 October 2026. Source for the Senja background." }, { "title": "Startup Founder Stories: How Ferndesk reached $2K MRR by making help docs update themselves", "url": "https://startupfounderstories.com/stories/wilson-wilson-ferndesk-2k-mrr-ai-help-center", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A summary of the founder's Indie Hackers post, which this page did not open because Indie Hackers blocks AI crawlers. Source for the 228 days, the audience size and the growth channel." }, { "title": "Arrfounder: Ferndesk Crosses $750 MRR, 25 August 2025", "url": "https://arrfounder.com/news/ferndesk-crosses-750-mrr", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Cited from Arrfounder's quotation of the founder's post." }, { "title": "Ferndesk blog, Wilson Wilson: How to price your AI SaaS - 2 mistakes we made (shown as updated 24 January 2026)", "url": "https://ferndesk.com/blog/how-to-price-your-ai-saas-2-mistakes-we-made", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the solo, bootstrapped status and the pricing changes." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of ferndesk.com, 16 June 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250616161322/https://ferndesk.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The oldest archived copy found. Source for the preorder offer and its price." }, { "title": "Ferndesk home page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://ferndesk.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product description, the customer count and quotes, and the operating company." }, { "title": "Ferndesk pricing page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://ferndesk.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the plans, the early-stage rate and the trial." }, { "title": "Ferndesk Privacy Policy, effective 5 October 2026, last updated 12 October 2026", "url": "https://ferndesk.com/legal/privacy-policy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on who operates Ferndesk and on subprocessors. Source for the hosting, AI, billing, email and analytics providers, and for 2Captcha." }, { "title": "Ferndesk blog, Wilson Wilson: Building Embeddable Widgets with Svelte (shown as updated 24 January 2026)", "url": "https://ferndesk.com/blog/building-embeddable-widgets-with-svelte", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the introduction and stack. Source for the widget technology." }, { "title": "Ferndesk blog, Wilson Wilson: How to talk to users without getting overwhelmed - my system (shown as updated 24 January 2026)", "url": "https://ferndesk.com/blog/how-to-talk-to-users-without-getting-overwhelmed-my-system", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for Close, Help Scout, Stripe, PostHog, Slack and the sync script written with Codex." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/voibe/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/voibe.md", "slug": "voibe", "name": "Voibe", "country": "United Kingdom", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Private AI dictation and meeting notes app for Mac and Windows", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "September 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$8K in a single month, June 2026", "sticker": "$8K in one month", "outcomeUsd": 96000, "months": 9, "teamLabel": "Founder Ayush, who posts the figures; the company's jobs page speaks of \"the founders\" and \"a small team\"; headcount not published", "fundingLabel": "None disclosed", "primaryFactor": "Pricing", "group": "voice-audio", "channel": "search", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Productivity" ], "product": "A desktop app for Mac and Windows: the user holds a key, speaks, and the text appears in whatever app has the cursor. On Apple Silicon Macs the speech model can run on the computer itself; otherwise the audio goes to cloud providers that, the company says, keep no copy. Since September 2026 a second plan, Voibe Work, also takes meeting notes from the computer without a bot joining the call. The company now sells it to lawyers, health workers and finance teams who handle confidential text.", "why": "The company says Apple's built-in dictation \"is prone to accuracy errors\", and that typical dictation and note-taking apps keep recordings on their own servers. Voibe offered on-device dictation tuned for people who write long prompts to AI tools. The founder posted that most of the money came from lifetime licences, and that he planned to raise prices and move revenue to subscriptions.", "summary": [ "Voibe is a dictation app, a program that turns speech into typed text. It uses Whisper, an open-source speech recognition model first released by OpenAI, which can run on the computer itself (on-device) so that the audio never leaves it. In zero-retention cloud mode, the audio is sent to a cloud provider that deletes it when the text is ready. The archived site of September 2025 sold it as a Mac app for developers and other heavy users of AI tools; in October 2026 the pricing page lists a free plan, Voibe Dictation at US$99 a year or US$199 once, and Voibe Work with meeting notes at US$149 a year or US$399 once.", "The company is Essence AI Ltd, registered in England and Wales on 27 March 2025, which trades as Voibe and calls itself a Bristol-based AI startup. Its founder, who signs as Ayush on X and on the startup site Brag in Public, posted on 1 June 2026 \"First $8k month for Voibe\". On 25 July 2026 he posted that Voibe had passed US$800 of monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the subscription revenue of one month) and that \"90%+ of our revenue is from LTDs\", meaning lifetime deals, one-time payments for permanent access.", "This page grades the story D, reported, not verified. The US$8,000 month rests on one short post that names no month, and the founder said that most of the money came from one-time sales that do not repeat. The subscription revenue that the founder reported in July 2026 was about one tenth of that month. The page also shows earlier voice companies that failed when the operating system makers gave the same function away." ], "factsCaption": "A UK dictation app whose founder said it had its first US$8,000 month in June 2026, mostly from lifetime licences, with US$800 of monthly recurring revenue in July 2026", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is a founder statement in one post on X, read through Brag in Public, that no payment processor or second source confirms. A grade C value is another founder statement or a fact read on the company's own pages or in an archived copy. A grade B value comes from the UK company register. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A.", "timelineLead": "From a company registered in March 2025 to a first US$8,000 month in June 2026, as the founder reported it. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Voibe prices per seat read on the pricing page on 27 October 2026, in US dollars (grade C)", "note": "One seat is one person, on one Mac and one Windows PC. The yearly values are calculated per month (99 / 12 and 149 / 12). Lifetime seats are one-time payments, shown on the page as \"Limited time\", and include Cloud Mode and future updates of that plan. Every new account gets a 7-day trial of Voibe Work with no card, then moves to the free plan. Paid plans have a 30-day money-back guarantee. Lemon Squeezy is the merchant of record. More than 10 seats are sold on enterprise terms.", "rows": [ [ "Voibe Free", "0", "0", "dictation with limited words, one device" ], [ "Voibe Dictation", "8.25", "9.90", "unlimited dictation, Mac and Windows; or 199 one-time" ], [ "Voibe Work", "12.42", "19", "dictation plus meeting notes; or 399 one-time" ], [ "Enterprise", "custom", "custom", "more than 10 seats, team admin, BAA on request" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue in a single month, reported 1 June 2026", "value": "US$8,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder's post on X, read through Brag in Public: \"First $8k month for Voibe\". The post names no month; it was posted on 1 June 2026. Brag in Public labels the amount \"MRR\" and files the post under OutlierKit, the founder's other product, but the text names Voibe.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from that month", "value": "US$96,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$8,000 times 12. It is not a stable rate: the founder said in July 2026 that more than 90% of revenue came from one-time lifetime deals.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 25 July 2026", "value": "more than US$800", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post, read through Brag in Public: \"Just went past $800 MRR\", \"90%+ of our revenue is from LTDs, MRR is a small portion, but growing at a healthy pace now\".", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Recurring share of an US$8,000 month", "value": "about 10%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 800 / 8,000 equals 0.10. This matches the founder's statement that more than 90% of revenue is from lifetime deals, but the two posts are seven weeks apart.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Churn, July 2026", "value": "1%", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder: \"Plus churn is 1%\". The period is not stated.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Usage claims, October 2026", "value": "20 million words spoken; more than 4,000 professionals", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page: \"20M words spoken. 6,000+ hours given back. Trusted by 4,000+ professionals\".", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Company", "value": "Essence AI Ltd, England and Wales, incorporated 27 March 2025", "grade": "B", "note": "Companies House overview: private limited company, active, software development. The privacy policy says Essence AI Ltd \"trades as Voibe\".", "src": [ 12, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "headcount not published", "grade": "C", "note": "Jobs page: \"a Bristol-based AI startup\" and \"You'll work directly with the founders in a small team that ships fast, on a live product with thousands of users\". The roles listed were interns and a content creator; none was open on 27 October 2026.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "First archived product page", "value": "25 September 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Wayback Machine: the domain redirected on 11 July 2025; the first full page, on 25 September 2025, sold a Mac app that \"runs entirely on-device\" for \"AI power users\".", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "fact": "Windows app", "value": "version 1.0.0, 18 July 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Release notes. Voibe Work, with meeting notes, came to the Mac on 24 September 2026 (version 3.0.0) and to Windows on 6 October 2026.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Prices, October 2026", "value": "Dictation US$9.90 a month, US$99 a year or US$199 once; Work US$19, US$149 or US$399", "grade": "C", "note": "Pricing page FAQ: \"Voibe Dictation costs $9.90 per seat per month, $99 per seat per year, or $199 per seat once for lifetime access.\"", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Security certification", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Security page: \"Voibe does not currently hold SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification.\"", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the first archived page to the US$8,000 month", "value": "9 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: September 2025 to June 2026.", "src": [ 13, 2 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "27 March 2025", "what": "Essence AI Ltd is incorporated in England and Wales; it later trades as Voibe.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "25 September 2025", "what": "First full archived page: an on-device dictation app for the Mac, sold to developers and heavy users of AI tools, using OpenAI's Whisper models.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "when": "17 February 2026", "what": "Mac version 2.14.0, the oldest entry in the public release notes.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "1 June 2026", "what": "The founder posts \"First $8k month for Voibe\".", "grade": "D", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "when": "18 July 2026", "what": "Voibe for Windows, version 1.0.0. Cloud dictation launches around the same time.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 1 ] }, { "when": "25 July 2026", "what": "The founder posts that MRR passed US$800, that more than 90% of revenue is from lifetime deals, that churn is 1%, and that organic traffic dipped after a Google update.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "August 2026", "what": "New terms and privacy policy, which cover a transcription API for developers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 9 ] }, { "when": "24 September 2026", "what": "Voibe Work: meeting notes taken from the computer, with no bot in the call. The app reminds the user to tell the other people.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The site sells per-seat plans to legal, healthcare and finance teams and claims more than 4,000 professional users.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 5 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Privacy as the reason to switch", "text": "The first archived page said the voice \"never leaves your Mac\". The current page adds a cloud mode with providers that keep nothing and publishes each provider. That message moved the target market from developers to lawyers, clinicians and finance staff, for whom sending audio to an unknown server is a problem." }, { "title": "Lifetime licences paid for the start", "text": "The founder posted in July 2026 that more than 90% of revenue came from lifetime deals and that MRR was a small part. A lifetime seat at a few hundred dollars brings cash at once, which funds a small team, but each month's revenue must come from new buyers. He wrote that the plan is to raise prices and eventually price out the lifetime deal." }, { "title": "Search pages against named competitors", "text": "The site has comparison and \"alternatives\" pages for Wispr Flow, Dragon, Superwhisper, MacWhisper, Granola and others. The founder posted that organic traffic fell after a Google update and that he refreshed the content." }, { "title": "Open models on fast inference", "text": "Speech is transcribed by Whisper Large Turbo on Groq or Cloudflare, and optional formatting is done by the open-weight GPT-OSS 120B model on Cerebras, the company's cloud page says. The company does not train a model; it chooses open models and providers and builds the app around them." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's cloud privacy, security, jobs and pricing pages and its release notes. They are grade C.", "items": [ "A desktop app for macOS and Windows; an internship listing on the jobs page names \"Swift, Rust, Tauri\" as the stack. Mac releases are notarised by Apple.", "On-device dictation on Apple Silicon Macs with Whisper models; in cloud mode, Whisper Large Turbo on Groq or Cloudflare transcribes the audio and deletes it.", "Optional text formatting and API summaries by GPT-OSS 120B on Cerebras; speaker separation for the transcription API by pyannote.ai.", "Hosting and transactional email on Amazon Web Services; errors in Sentry; source code in private GitHub repositories.", "Payments through Lemon Squeezy as merchant of record; live chat through Crisp; analytics through Datafast, Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity; ad measurement for Google Ads, X, Reddit and OpenAI after cookie consent.", "A transcription API and an MCP server, so that Claude, ChatGPT and coding tools can send recordings and query meetings." ], "src": [ 11, 10, 7, 5, 6, 4 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database built voice input or a new way to enter text, and failed when the operating system and platform makers offered the same thing for free or bought the technology. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Petalite", "years": "2014 to 2025", "funding": "US$12M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A privacy-first voice assistant that runs locally on the device.", "died": "It sold hardware against Amazon and Google, who sold their speakers at or below cost.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2471-petalite" }, { "name": "Tellme", "years": "1999 to 2011", "funding": "US$238M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Information by voice command over the phone.", "died": "Smartphone apps with screens replaced voice menus, and Google and Amazon built better voice assistants.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/612-tellme" }, { "name": "VocalIQ", "years": "2011 to 2017", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Conversational voice interfaces that understand context.", "died": "Apple, Google and Amazon moved faster; Apple bought it in 2015 and folded it into Siri.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/719-vocaliq" }, { "name": "Whirlscape", "years": "2014 to 2017", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Minuum, a one-line keyboard that saves screen space.", "died": "The keyboards built into Android and iOS were good enough and deeply integrated, and users left the unfamiliar layout.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1129-whirlscape" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The four predecessors needed their own speech or language technology, or their own hardware, and, according to the Loot Drop records, raised between US$500,000 and US$238 million for it; they could not keep pace with Apple, Google and Amazon, and they sold to consumers who already had a free option. Voibe uses open speech and language models that anyone can run, on the user's Mac or on rented fast inference, so a small team can match the quality of the big platforms' dictation.", "Voibe also sells to a buyer that the free options do not serve well: professionals who must keep client text confidential and want to know where the audio goes. The risk is the same as before. Apple, Microsoft and Google can add better on-device dictation to the operating system at no charge, and the founder posted that most revenue so far came from lifetime deals that do not renew." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Partly: the build is easy to copy, the market is crowded.", "text": "Wrapping an open speech model in a desktop app is now a small project, and many teams have done it, as the site's own list of competitors shows. What this story adds is a niche and a price structure: privacy for regulated professions, and lifetime licences to raise early cash, followed by a planned move to subscriptions. The second step, recurring revenue, was the part still unproven when the founder posted his figures.", "steps": [ "Use an open model that can run on the user's machine, and make that the privacy promise.", "Publish every cloud provider and what it keeps, so that a firm's IT team can approve the app.", "Sell lifetime licences early only if you have a plan to move buyers to subscriptions.", "Write comparison pages against each named competitor, and update them when search rankings change.", "Add a second product, such as meeting notes, that justifies a higher per-seat price." ], "open": "Private, on-device versions of other cloud AI tools for regulated professions: document review, call summaries, translation and search over local files." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline figure, a first US$8,000 month, rests on one post by the founder, Ayush, on X on 1 June 2026, read here through Brag in Public. The post has four words and an image that this page could not see, names no month, and Brag in Public files it under the founder's other product, OutlierKit, while the text names Voibe. No payment processor, buyer or interview confirms it. A reader could look for a Lemon Squeezy-verified profile on TrustMRR or a similar site, or a later founder post with monthly figures." }, { "title": "Most of the money was one-time", "text": "The founder posted on 25 July 2026: \"90%+ of our revenue is from LTDs, MRR is a small portion\", with MRR just over US$800. Lifetime licences do not renew, so a strong month does not mean the next month will be similar. He wrote that he wants to \"eventually price out the LTD and move all revenue to recurring\"." }, { "title": "Meeting notes with no bot in the call", "text": "The release notes for Voibe Work say \"Nobody has to admit a notetaker, and the people on the call see only you.\" The same release adds \"A Reminder to Tell the Room\", and the home page says \"You're responsible for following the recording consent rules that apply to your meetings and your location.\" In places where all parties must agree to a recording, the user carries that duty." }, { "title": "The founder's other product", "text": "The same founder runs OutlierKit, a tool that \"scans thousands of competitor channels from a single seed\" for YouTube research; he posted on 7 July 2026 that it had crossed US$3,000 MRR. Nothing on the Voibe pages read for this story sells or links to it." }, { "title": "Claims on the site that this page could not check", "text": "The home page says Voibe is used by professionals at Westpac, PwC and Qonto and quotes a named attorney; the pricing page shows a calculator that estimates \"$3,400 / month\" saved from typing time and an hourly rate the visitor enters. These are the company's own statements and estimates. The security page says the company has no SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.getvoibe.com/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Brag in Public: Voibe product page, with the founder's post of 25 July 2026", "url": "https://braginpublic.com/products/voibe", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in the copy downloaded on 27 October 2026 (the site allowed agents that day). Could not open the post on X (it needs a login); cited from Brag in Public's copy of https://x.com/ayushtweetshere/status/2080886574863003779. Source for the MRR, the lifetime-deal share, churn and the plans." }, { "title": "Brag in Public: OutlierKit product page, with the founder's post of 1 June 2026", "url": "https://braginpublic.com/products/outlierkit", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in the copy downloaded on 27 October 2026. Cited from Brag in Public's copy of https://x.com/ayushtweetshere/status/2061320091141288266, \"First $8k month for Voibe\". Also the source for OutlierKit." }, { "title": "Brag in Public: feed, copy of 27 October 2026", "url": "https://braginpublic.com/feed", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the Voibe and OutlierKit entries. Source for the exact posting times of both posts and for Brag in Public's labels." }, { "title": "Voibe home page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.getvoibe.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product, the usage claims, the customer claims and the recording-consent answer." }, { "title": "Voibe pricing page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.getvoibe.com/pricing/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the FAQ. Source for the plans, the lifetime prices, Lemon Squeezy and the savings calculator." }, { "title": "Voibe release notes", "url": "https://www.getvoibe.com/release-notes/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the release dates, the Windows app and Voibe Work." }, { "title": "Voibe jobs page", "url": "https://www.getvoibe.com/jobs/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Bristol base, the small team and the app stack named in an internship listing." }, { "title": "Voibe Privacy Policy, last updated August 2026", "url": "https://www.getvoibe.com/privacy/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the company, on-device and cloud processing, and service providers." }, { "title": "Voibe Terms of Service, last updated August 2026", "url": "https://www.getvoibe.com/terms/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the company, payments and recording consent for the API." }, { "title": "Voibe Security page", "url": "https://www.getvoibe.com/security/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the subprocessors, hosting and certification status." }, { "title": "Voibe: How Cloud Mode handles your audio", "url": "https://www.getvoibe.com/cloud-ai-privacy/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the speech and formatting models and their providers." }, { "title": "Companies House: ESSENCE AI LTD (16349308) overview", "url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/16349308", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the overview: status, type, incorporation date and business activity. The register's people and address are not used on this page." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of getvoibe.com, 25 September 2025, and the capture list", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250925134230/https://www.getvoibe.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The capture list (CDX) shows a redirect on 11 July 2025 and this first full page. Source for the early product and audience." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/fluently/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/fluently.md", "slug": "fluently", "name": "Fluently", "country": "United States", "sector": "Education", "productType": "AI language tutor app for speaking practice", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "August 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$6M annual recurring revenue, November 2025", "sticker": "$6M ARR, self-reported", "outcomeUsd": 6000000, "months": 27, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders; the Y Combinator profile lists a team size of 2 and the careers page says \"a team you can count on your fingers\"; headcount at the headline figure not published", "fundingLabel": "Y Combinator (Winter 2024) and a US$2M seed round in June 2024, led by Pioneer Fund", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "learning", "channel": "creators", "trend": "growing", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Funded", "Running", "B2C", "Language learning" ], "product": "A phone app for iPhone and Android in which the learner speaks with an AI tutor about a free topic, a work scenario or a mock job interview. After each answer the app shows what to fix: pronunciation down to single sounds, grammar, vocabulary, and how a native speaker would say the same thing. It teaches 15 languages and sells subscriptions in the app stores, plus a version for companies.", "why": "The company says most language apps are games for beginners. Fluently aims at people who studied a language for years and still freeze when they must speak, and it prices the tutor far below a human one. The founder said that a large part of the growth in 2025 came from short videos on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.", "summary": [ "Fluently is an AI tutor for speaking practice. The learner talks, the app answers by voice, and after each answer it shows corrections. Two technical parts do the work: speech recognition, a model that turns spoken audio into text, and pronunciation scoring, a model that compares the sounds a learner made with the expected sounds and marks the ones that differ. The company's privacy policy says it uses its own self-hosted speech-recognition and pronunciation models together with models from third-party AI services. The app is free to download and sells Premium subscriptions in the App Store, from US$9.99 a week to US$179.99 a year.", "Yurii Rebryk and Stanislav Beliaev, former university roommates and machine-learning engineers, started the company in San Francisco in 2023. Their first product was a desktop coach that listened to work calls. They joined Y Combinator, a startup program that invests a small amount in each company of a batch, in Winter 2024, and raised a US$2 million seed round, a first outside investment, in June 2024. The mobile tutor launched on Product Hunt in March 2025. In posts on X, quoted by the founder directory Arrfounder, Rebryk reported US$5 million of annual recurring revenue (ARR, the subscription revenue of one year at the current rate) on 8 September 2025, more than US$5 million on 23 October 2025, up from US$48,000 at the start of the year, and US$6 million on 7 November 2025.", "Every revenue figure on this page is the founder's own statement, grade C. The three posts agree with each other, but no payment processor, buyer or journalist has confirmed them, and no newer figure was found after November 2025. The page also shows four failed companies that sold language lessons with human tutors, when each lesson still needed a paid teacher." ], "factsCaption": "US$6 million of annual recurring revenue reported 27 months after the start of the founder's day count, for an AI speaking tutor built by two co-founders with a small seed round, all self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a founder statement in a post on X, read through Arrfounder's quotation, or a statement on the company's own pages or its Y Combinator profile. Grade B is a figure that Apple's App Store page shows. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a desktop coach for work calls in 2023 to US$6 million of annual recurring revenue in November 2025, by the founder's account. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Fluently prices in the US App Store, read 27 October 2026, and the Fluently for Teams page (grade B for the App Store prices, grade C for the Teams price)", "note": "The App Store lists two prices for the weekly, three-month and annual Premium plans; the listing does not say which offer shows which price. Per-month values for the three-month and annual plans are calculated (price / 3 and price / 12). In a reply to a review the company wrote that Premium includes up to 100 minutes of speaking practice a week and that a Pro plan has unlimited speaking time; Pro prices are not listed separately on the App Store page. The Teams page shows Fluently at US$20 a month against a human tutor at US$240 a month for 2 hours a week, with analytics and seat management.", "rows": [ [ "Premium, weekly", "", "9.99 or 19.99 a week", "up to 100 minutes of speaking a week, according to the company's review reply" ], [ "Premium, monthly", "", "24.99", "same" ], [ "Premium, 3 months", "", "15.00 or 30.00 (44.99 or 89.99 per 3 months)", "same" ], [ "Premium, annual", "7.50 or 15.00 (89.99 or 179.99 a year)", "", "same" ], [ "Course: Workplace English", "", "19.99, in-app purchase", "billing type not stated" ], [ "Fluently for Teams", "", "20", "per employee, as shown against a human tutor; analytics, reporting, seat and billing management" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, 7 November 2025", "value": "US$6,000,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X, quoted by Arrfounder: \"Fluently hit $6,000,000 ARR!\", \"0 → $1M ARR: 634 days\", \"$1M → $6M ARR: 148 days\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly value of the November 2025 figure", "value": "US$500,000 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 6,000,000 / 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, 23 October 2025", "value": "more than US$5 million, up from US$48,000 at the start of 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post, quoted by Arrfounder: \"I scaled Fluently app from $48K → $5M+ ARR during this year (that's 100x growth)\". US$48,000 a year is about US$4,000 a month (calculated: 48,000 / 12).", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, 8 September 2025", "value": "US$5,000,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post, quoted by Arrfounder: \"Fluently just hit $5M ARR\", \"0 to $500k ARR: 627 days\", \"$500k to $5M ARR: 126 days\".", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Date of US$500,000 ARR", "value": "about 5 May 2025", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 8 September 2025 minus 126 days.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Date of US$1 million ARR", "value": "about 12 June 2025", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 7 November 2025 minus 148 days. The two posts together put only 38 days between US$500,000 and US$1 million.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Start of the founder's day count", "value": "17 August 2023 or 17 September 2023", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 8 September 2025 minus 753 days (627 + 126) gives 17 August 2023; 7 November 2025 minus 782 days (634 + 148) gives 17 September 2023. The posts do not say what day zero was. This page uses August 2023 as the start.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from September to November 2025", "value": "plus 20% in 60 days", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 6,000,000 / 5,000,000 equals 1.2, from 8 September to 7 November 2025.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Short-form video views", "value": "more than 1 billion in 200 days, with no ad spend", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post of 23 October 2025, quoted by Arrfounder: \"A big part of this came from short-form videos\" and \"In just 200 days we got 1B+ views across TikTok/IG/YT with $0 ad spend!\"", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 co-founders; team size 2 on the Y Combinator profile", "grade": "C", "note": "Y Combinator company page, read 27 October 2026: \"Team Size: 2\". Careers page: \"a small ML-heavy team\" and \"built by a team you can count on your fingers\"; no open roles in August 2026. No source gives the headcount at the November 2025 figure.", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "US$2 million seed round, June 2024, after Y Combinator Winter 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "About page: \"The round is led by Pioneer Fund, with angels including Burkay Gur (fal), Alex Mashrabov (Higgsfield) and Arash Ferdowsi (Dropbox).\" The Y Combinator page links a TechCrunch article of 28 June 2024 on the round, which this page did not open because TechCrunch blocks AI crawlers.", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "App Store ratings, October 2026", "value": "4.8 from 6,100 ratings; age rating 4+", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's App Store page: \"6.1K Ratings\", \"4.8\". Seller: Fluently, Inc.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Downloads", "value": "more than 1 million on Google Play", "grade": "C", "note": "About page: \"1M+ Google Play downloads\" and \"more than 160 countries\". Not checked on Google Play.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Languages taught", "value": "15", "grade": "C", "note": "About page: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Korean, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Dutch and Greek.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Speech models", "value": "own self-hosted speech-recognition and pronunciation models, plus third-party AI services", "grade": "C", "note": "Privacy policy, last updated 22 July 2026. Users can turn off the use of their recordings for training in the settings.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Company", "value": "Fluently, Inc., San Francisco", "grade": "C", "note": "About page and the App Store seller line.", "src": [ 4, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the start of the day count to the US$6 million figure", "value": "27 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: August 2023 to November 2025.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2023", "what": "Former university roommates Yurii Rebryk and Stanislav Beliaev start Fluently in San Francisco. The first product is a desktop AI coach that listens to the user's side of work calls and gives feedback on pronunciation, grammar and pace.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "August to September 2023", "what": "Day zero of the revenue day counts in the founder's later posts (calculated).", "grade": "X", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "when": "Winter 2024", "what": "Fluently joins the Y Combinator Winter 2024 batch. Its launch post there sells an English tutor \"20x cheaper\" than a human one.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "when": "June 2024", "what": "A US$2 million seed round led by Pioneer Fund closes before Demo Day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "Start of 2025", "what": "US$48,000 of annual recurring revenue, about US$4,000 a month, by the founder's later account.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "March 2025", "what": "The mobile AI tutor launches on Product Hunt and finishes first Product of the Day and third of the week.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "About 5 May 2025", "what": "US$500,000 of annual recurring revenue (calculated from the founder's day count).", "grade": "X", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "About 12 June 2025", "what": "US$1 million of annual recurring revenue (calculated from the founder's day count).", "grade": "X", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "8 September 2025", "what": "The founder posts US$5 million of annual recurring revenue, 126 days after US$500,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "23 October 2025", "what": "He posts more than US$5 million, a 100-fold rise during 2025, and more than 1 billion short-video views in 200 days with no ad spend.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "7 November 2025", "what": "He posts US$6 million of annual recurring revenue, 148 days after US$1 million.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "A free accent-assessment tool, Accent Guru, is first Product of the Day and of the Week on Product Hunt.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "22 July 2026", "what": "The privacy policy names the company's own self-hosted speech-recognition and pronunciation models and third-party AI services.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The App Store shows 6,100 ratings at 4.8; the Teams page shows the company version at US$20 a month against a human tutor at US$240.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 7, 9 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Short videos in volume", "text": "In October 2025 the founder wrote that a large part of the growth during 2025 came from short-form videos on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, with more than 1 billion views in 200 days and no ad spend. He called the method a blueprint for UGC growth, user-generated-content style videos." }, { "title": "Speaking, not vocabulary", "text": "The company targets people who \"have studied a language for years and understand it well but still cannot speak confidently\". These learners already know that flashcard apps did not help them speak, so the offer is easy to understand: a conversation partner that corrects you after each answer." }, { "title": "Priced against a human tutor", "text": "The Teams page compares Fluently at US$20 a month with a human tutor at US$240 a month for two hours a week. In the App Store the company sells practice by the week, the month, three months or the year." }, { "title": "Machine-learning founders who own the speech models", "text": "Both founders did machine-learning research internships; the CTO worked on speech recognition. The privacy policy says the pronunciation and speech-recognition models are self-hosted, so the scoring of sounds runs on models that the company controls, while other parts use third-party AI services." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's About, privacy and Teams pages and its App Store listing. They are grade C, except the App Store data.", "items": [ "Two founders with machine-learning research internships at Google and Nvidia; the CTO's focus was speech recognition.", "Self-hosted speech-recognition and pronunciation models, plus models from third-party AI services (privacy policy, July 2026). Recordings can be used for training unless the user turns this off in the settings.", "An iPhone app (iOS 16.4 or later) and an Android app. Subscriptions are sold in the App Store; in a reply to a review the company says a user cancels \"through the official app store (iOS App Store) or Stripe\", so some subscriptions are paid through Stripe.", "Google Analytics measures use of the site; Google sign-in and an optional Google Calendar connection show the user's upcoming meetings in the app.", "Marketing through short-form videos on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, by the founder's account, and two first places on Product Hunt. The site also offers free tools, such as an English level test, a mic test and an English-to-IPA converter." ], "src": [ 4, 10, 7, 2, 8 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold language lessons through human tutors, or language courses to millions of users, before an AI tutor could hold a spoken conversation for a few dollars a week. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "VIPKid", "years": "2013 to 2021", "funding": "US$1.1B", "cause": "Legal/Regulatory", "promise": "One-to-one online English lessons for Chinese children with North American teachers by video.", "died": "China's 2021 education rules banned foreign tutors and curriculum for school subjects, which removed its business model, according to the database. Every lesson needed a paid teacher.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2522-vipkid" }, { "name": "TutorGroup (iTutor)", "years": "2004 to 2021", "funding": "US$300M", "cause": "Legal/Regulatory", "promise": "Live English lessons with Western teachers for learners in Asia.", "died": "The 2021 ban on foreign tutors removed most of its revenue, according to the database, while the cost of each new student and the turnover of tutors were already high.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2216-tutorgroup-itutor" }, { "name": "Teacher Finder", "years": "2015 to 2019", "funding": "US$50K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Match language learners directly with tutors, without expensive language schools.", "died": "Better-funded competitors won, and its MVP built on Zapier automation could not change fast enough, according to the database. Each lesson still needed a paid human tutor.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1962-teacher-finder" }, { "name": "Hujiang", "years": "2001 to 2021", "funding": "US$187M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Online language learning and school courses for millions of users with a free tier.", "died": "A failed stock market listing exposed a high cost per customer and negative margins; most registered users never paid, according to the database.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2556-hujiang" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Three of the four predecessors sold time with a human teacher. Their cost grew with every lesson, and their supply of teachers and students depended on one country's rules. Hujiang sold content to a huge free audience that rarely paid. Fluently sells a tutor that is software: the cost of one more conversation is the cost of running the models, so it can sell unlimited or weekly practice at a price that a human tutor cannot match.", "The other change is distribution. The founder said that short videos on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube brought a big part of the 2025 growth, with no ad spend on the videos, where the tutoring platforms paid high costs for each new student. The weakness is that the same models are available to every competitor, and the App Store page itself suggests other AI speaking apps, such as Talkpal and JustSpeak, under \"You Might Also Like\"." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The product, yes. The scale, hard.", "text": "A speaking tutor that corrects pronunciation can now be built from available speech and language models, and many competitors already sell one. What is harder to copy is what the founders say drove the growth: machine-learning skill to run their own pronunciation models, a seed round, and a short-video machine that the founder said reached more than a billion views in 200 days.", "steps": [ "Pick learners who already tried the beginner apps and still have a painful gap, such as speaking at work.", "Show the correction after each answer, so the value is visible in the first minutes.", "Price against the human alternative, and sell weekly and yearly plans in the app stores.", "Make many short videos of the problem and the product, and post them on several platforms every day.", "Own the part of the stack that defines quality, here pronunciation scoring." ], "open": "Speaking practice for one situation (job interviews, medical staff, call centres), for one language pair, or for companies that pay for their employees' language training." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Self-reported revenue", "text": "Every revenue figure is the founder's own post on X, read through Arrfounder's quotation (Arrfounder says it is \"not responsible for the accuracy of the data\"). The posts of 8 September, 23 October and 7 November 2025 agree with each other, but no payment processor, buyer or journalist has confirmed them, no TrustMRR profile was found, and no figure after November 2025 was found." }, { "title": "Day counts that do not fit one start date", "text": "The September post counts 627 + 126 days to US$5 million; the November post counts 634 + 148 days to US$6 million. Taken from the post dates, they start one month apart (17 August and 17 September 2023), and together they put only 38 days between US$500,000 and US$1 million. Either the posts count from different days, or a milestone was reached before the post that announced it." }, { "title": "Team size not exact, and venture money", "text": "The Y Combinator profile says \"Team Size: 2\" and the careers page says the app is \"built by a team you can count on your fingers\", which means ten or fewer. No source gives the headcount at US$6 million ARR. The company took Y Combinator money and a US$2 million seed round led by Pioneer Fund, so it is not bootstrapped." }, { "title": "UGC videos and ads", "text": "The founder's October 2025 post announces \"my blueprint for hacking UGC growth on social media\". UGC means user-generated content: videos made to look like ordinary users' posts. This page could not read the thread on X, so it does not know whether the videos used paid creators, the company's own accounts or AI presenters. The post says \"$0 ad spend\" for the videos, but App Store reviews mention Instagram ads (\"I purchased this app through an ad on Instagram\"), and the privacy policy says Google may serve Fluently ads." }, { "title": "Usage limits and billing complaints", "text": "The FAQ says a Pro subscription has \"no daily or monthly limits\". In App Store reviews, one user called a weekly cut-off \"Classic bait and switch\", and the company replied: \"Premium includes up to 100 minutes of speaking practice per week, while Pro provides unlimited speaking time.\" Other reviews complain of weekly charges and refunds; the company answered that it \"always\" provides refunds." }, { "title": "Ratings this page could not check", "text": "The About page shows \"4.8 Trustpilot, 2,000+ reviews\". Trustpilot blocks AI agents, so this page did not open it, and it could not check how reviews were collected. The App Store rating of 4.8 from 6,100 ratings is shown on Apple's page." }, { "title": "Voice recordings", "text": "The privacy policy says the company may use voice recordings and transcripts to train its own and third-party models, and may \"license, or sell\" de-identified data. Users can switch off the training use in the settings." }, { "title": "The founders' earlier company", "text": "Both founders co-founded a startup that built \"real-time face and voice swap for mobile\" and grew it from 2 to 50 people. The sources do not name it. Fluently itself does not sell face or voice swapping." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://getfluently.app/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6683289805" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Arrfounder: GetFluently Hits $6M ARR, 7 November 2025, quoting Yurii Rebryk's post on X", "url": "https://arrfounder.com/news/getfluently-hits-6m-arr", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in the copy downloaded on 27 October 2026. Could not open the post on X (it needs a login); cited from Arrfounder's quotation of https://x.com/yrebryk/status/1986868927465726091. Source for the headline figure and the day counts." }, { "title": "Arrfounder: GetFluently Surpasses $5M ARR, 23 October 2025", "url": "https://arrfounder.com/news/getfluently-surpasses-5m-arr", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026. Cited from Arrfounder's quotation of https://x.com/yrebryk/status/1981407422163071383. Source for the US$48,000 start of 2025, the short-form videos and the UGC post." }, { "title": "Arrfounder: GetFluently Hits $5M ARR, 8 September 2025", "url": "https://arrfounder.com/news/getfluently-hits-5m-arr", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026. Cited from Arrfounder's quotation of https://x.com/yrebryk/status/1965102111970197781. Source for the US$5 million figure and its day counts." }, { "title": "Fluently: About Fluently, the team behind the AI language tutor", "url": "https://getfluently.app/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in the copy downloaded on 27 October 2026. Source for the founders, the dates, the seed round and its investors, the languages and the download count." }, { "title": "Y Combinator company page: Fluently", "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/fluently", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026. Company-supplied profile. Source for the team size, the batch, the founding year and the launch post." }, { "title": "Fluently careers page", "url": "https://getfluently.app/careers", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026. Source for the small-team statements and the open roles." }, { "title": "App Store: Fluently: AI Language Learning, by Fluently, Inc.", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fluently-ai-english-tutor/id6683289805", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026. Apple's listing gives the ratings, the age rating and the in-app purchase prices; the reviews and the company's replies are grade C." }, { "title": "Fluently home page", "url": "https://getfluently.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in the copy downloaded on 27 October 2026. Source for the product description, the FAQ and the free tools." }, { "title": "Fluently for Teams", "url": "https://getfluently.app/for-teams", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the pricing comparison and the plan features on 27 October 2026." }, { "title": "Fluently Privacy Policy, last updated 22 July 2026", "url": "https://getfluently.app/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on data use, models, analytics and advertising on 27 October 2026." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/pdf-vector/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/pdf-vector.md", "slug": "pdf-vector", "name": "PDF Vector", "country": "Not stated in the sources", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI document parsing and extraction API", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "June 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$2K monthly recurring revenue, December 2025", "sticker": "$2K MRR in 6 months", "outcomeUsd": 24000, "months": 6, "teamLabel": "Founder Minh-Phuc Tran, who wrote \"It took us 4 months\"; the June 2025 site called the company \"an independent team\"; headcount not published", "fundingLabel": "None stated (the June 2025 site: \"an independent team that doesn't need thousands of customers\")", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "documents-data", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Developer tools" ], "product": "An API for developers that turns documents into clean text, extracts the fields a developer defines, answers questions about a document, and searches academic papers. It reads PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, images and more, has special versions for invoices, bank statements and identity documents, and connects to Zapier, Make, n8n and AI assistants through MCP.", "why": "Every company that builds an AI app on its own documents first has to get clean text and fields out of PDFs, which is slow and error-prone to build. PDF Vector sells that step as one API with a free tier and plans from US$23 a month. It started in June 2025 as a PDF-to-markdown parser and added AI extraction, questions and academic search within four months.", "summary": [ "PDF Vector is an API, an interface that lets one program call another over the internet; here a developer sends a document or its web address and gets the result back as data. Document parsing turns a PDF, a Word file or a scanned image into clean markdown, plain text with simple marks for headings and tables that language models read well. Extraction returns the fields that a developer describes in a JSON Schema, a standard format that lists field names and types, for example an invoice number and a total. A third endpoint answers questions about a document, and an academic set searches and fetches papers from PubMed, arXiv, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar and other indexes. The privacy policy names the models behind it: Claude on AWS Bedrock, Gemini on Google Vertex, and Microsoft's Azure Document Intelligence.", "Minh-Phuc Tran is the founder named with the product. The oldest archived copy of the site, from 26 June 2025, sells a PDF and Word parser API from US$16 a month and calls the company \"an independent team\". On 15 October 2025 he wrote on X that PDF Vector had passed US$1,000 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the subscription revenue of one month), \"4 months since launch\"; the Tiny Startups newsletter repeated it the next day. On 5 December 2025 he posted that it had reached US$2,000 MRR, two months after US$1,000.", "Both revenue figures are the founder's own statements, grade C: they agree with each other, but no payment processor has confirmed them, and no later figure was found. The US$2,000 figure sits exactly on this site's money floor of US$2,000 a month. The page also shows four failed companies that tried to turn messy web pages, documents and data into structured, searchable data before general language models could do most of the reading." ], "factsCaption": "US$2,000 of monthly recurring revenue six months after launch, for a document API built on rented AI models, self-reported", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a founder statement in a post on X, read through a page that quotes it (Arrfounder, the Tiny Startups newsletter), or a statement on the company's own site, now or in an archived copy. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a PDF-to-markdown parser in June 2025 to an AI document API at US$2,000 a month in December 2025. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "PDF Vector prices read on the home page on 27 October 2026, in US dollars (grade C)", "note": "All plans include every API; they differ by the number of credits a month, and each API call costs a set number of credits (an Academic Fetch request costs 2 credits for up to 100 papers). Billed yearly, a customer pays for 11 months and gets 12; the yearly Enterprise price is US$3,289 (274.08 a month, calculated). Enterprise includes one dedicated managed instance; each additional instance costs US$100 a month or US$1,100 a year. Earlier price models: on 26 June 2025, plans by pages (Basic US$16, Pro US$79 and Enterprise US$333 a month); on 14 December 2025, plans by credits (Basic US$23, Pro US$89 and Enterprise US$457 a month billed yearly).", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "100 credits a month, no credit card" ], [ "Basic", "23", "25", "3,000 credits a month" ], [ "Pro", "89", "97", "100,000 credits a month" ], [ "Enterprise", "274.08", "299", "200,000 credits per dedicated instance plus 100,000 shared credits" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 5 December 2025", "value": "US$2,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post on X, quoted by Arrfounder: \"PDF Vector reached $2K MRR\", \"$0 - $1K MRR: 4 months\", \"$1K - $2K MRR: 2 months\". The figure is exactly at this site's money floor.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the December 2025 figure", "value": "US$24,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2,000 times 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 15 October 2025", "value": "more than US$1,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post, quoted in the Tiny Startups newsletter of 16 October 2025: \"PDF Vector has finally passed what is probably the hardest milestone to achieve for a new SaaS: $1,000 MRR\" and \"It took us 4 months since launch\". Arrfounder lists the same milestone on 15 October 2025.", "src": [ 2, 3, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from October to December 2025", "value": "doubled in about seven weeks", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$1,000 on 15 October to US$2,000 on 5 December 2025 is 51 days; the founder rounds it to 2 months.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Launch", "value": "about June 2025", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 15 October 2025 minus the founder's \"4 months since launch\". The oldest archived copy of the site is from 26 June 2025.", "src": [ 2, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Later revenue figures", "value": "none found", "grade": "C", "note": "Arrfounder's product page, read 27 October 2026, lists the US$2,000 milestone as the latest one. The founder's December post ends with \"$2K - $3K MRR: … 👀\".", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "founder Minh-Phuc Tran; headcount not published", "grade": "C", "note": "He writes \"us\" in the October post. The June 2025 site: \"We're an independent team that doesn't need thousands of customers\". The home page quotes a customer who thanks the \"PDF Vector team\".", "src": [ 2, 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "AI models used", "value": "Claude on AWS Bedrock, Gemini on Google Vertex, Azure Document Intelligence", "grade": "C", "note": "Privacy policy, read 27 October 2026: \"AWS Bedrock (Claude): Used for AI-powered document understanding\"; \"Google Vertex (Gemini): Used for document analysis\"; \"Azure Document Intelligence: Used for document layout analysis\".", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Product in June 2025", "value": "a PDF and Word parser to markdown, by URL", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived home page of 26 June 2025: \"Reliable & Accurate PDF Parser API\", plans by pages from US$16 a month, and \"PDF Vector powers Research Kick and ChatAcademia, processing hundreds of PDFs daily in production\".", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Product in October 2025", "value": "parse, extract, ask and academic search", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived home page of 17 October 2025: \"AI-Powered PDF Processing That Scale\" and \"search 5M+ academic papers\". The Tiny Startups newsletter calls it \"an AI-powered PDF processor\".", "src": [ 8, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Scale claimed on the site, October 2026", "value": "19 APIs, more than 1 million documents processed, more than 5 million papers indexed", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page. Company claims, not checked.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Customers named", "value": "ChatAcademia, ReadBack and RabbitHoles", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page, \"Trusted by\". The October 2025 copy also names Research Kick.", "src": [ 5, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the US$2,000 figure", "value": "6 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: June to December 2025, and the founder's 4 plus 2 months.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "June 2025", "what": "Launch of a PDF and Word parser API that returns markdown from a document URL, with plans by pages: Free, Basic US$16, Pro US$79 and Enterprise US$333 a month. The site calls the company \"an independent team\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "15 October 2025", "what": "The founder posts that PDF Vector passed US$1,000 MRR, four months after launch. The Tiny Startups newsletter repeats it on 16 October.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 3, 6 ] }, { "when": "17 October 2025", "what": "The site now reads \"AI-Powered PDF Processing\": parse, extract structured data, ask AI questions, and search more than 5 million academic papers through one API.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "5 December 2025", "what": "He posts US$2,000 MRR, two months after US$1,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "14 December 2025", "what": "Plans are now sold by credits: Basic US$23, Pro US$89 and Enterprise US$457 a month, billed yearly. The site promotes an n8n integration.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The home page lists 19 APIs, dedicated instances in more than 34 regions across 26 countries, an MCP server and Zapier, Make and n8n integrations. Basic costs US$25 a month, Pro US$97, Enterprise US$299.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "Arrfounder still shows the December 2025 milestone as the latest one. No newer revenue figure was found.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Sell the first step of every AI app", "text": "Most AI apps built on a company's own files must first turn PDFs, scans and spreadsheets into text and fields. PDF Vector sells that one step to developers, so they do not have to combine text recognition, layout analysis and language models themselves." }, { "title": "Rent the models, sell the plumbing", "text": "The privacy policy names Claude on AWS Bedrock, Gemini on Google Vertex and Azure Document Intelligence. The company's work is the API around them: one request format for many file types, schemas for extraction, special endpoints for invoices, bank statements and identity documents, and regional instances for customers with data rules." }, { "title": "A niche inside the niche: academic papers", "text": "Besides documents, the API searches and fetches papers from PubMed, arXiv, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, Europe PMC, ERIC and Google Scholar, and turns a paper's public PDF into markdown. In June 2025 the site said the parser already powered two research products, Research Kick and ChatAcademia." }, { "title": "Many small entry points", "text": "A free tier with 100 credits, free tools (a bank statement converter, a DOI-to-PDF finder, a JSON Schema editor), integrations for Zapier, Make and n8n, an MCP server and an agent skill. No source says which of these brought the paying customers." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's home page, its privacy policy, its API pages and archived copies of the site. They are grade C.", "items": [ "AI models: Claude through AWS Bedrock for document understanding, Gemini through Google Vertex for document analysis, and Azure Document Intelligence for layout analysis. The policy says the company opted out of data training with each provider.", "A REST API with a TypeScript client library (@pdfvector/client) and examples in cURL and Python. The first version in June 2025 took only a document URL and returned markdown.", "Documents are processed in isolated instances in the region the customer chooses and, according to the terms, are not permanently stored.", "Academic search and fetch over PubMed, arXiv, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, Europe PMC, ERIC and Google Scholar.", "Integrations with Zapier, Make and n8n, an MCP endpoint for AI assistants, and an installable agent skill listed on skills.sh." ], "src": [ 7, 5, 4, 12, 10 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to turn web pages, documents or scattered data into structured, searchable data with their own algorithms, before general language models could read most documents. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Dashblock", "years": "2019 to 2022", "funding": "US$3M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Turn any web page into an API without writing code.", "died": "Its technology could not keep up with constantly changing web pages, and AI tools overtook it, according to the database.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1374-dashblock" }, { "name": "Omnity", "years": "2015 to 2021", "funding": "US$4.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Semantic search that connects related documents and data across fields.", "died": "Large technology companies offered stronger AI search, and Omnity could not pay for its own algorithm work without a large base of paying users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/385-omnity" }, { "name": "jEugene", "years": "2015 to 2018", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Software that finds errors and inconsistencies in contracts.", "died": "Rivals with better AI moved faster, law firms adopted slowly, and the company could not raise money, according to the database.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1500-jeugene" }, { "name": "Canvas", "years": "2011 to 2017", "funding": "US$17M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Replace paper forms with digital forms and workflows.", "died": "Microsoft, Adobe and low-code platforms offered the same, and it fell behind on mobile, according to the database.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/42-canvas" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each predecessor built its own technology to read pages, contracts or data, and each lost when larger companies or better AI did the same reading. PDF Vector starts from the opposite position: it does not build the reading models. It rents Claude, Gemini and Azure Document Intelligence and sells a simple API, plans and regional hosting around them. That is why a small team could offer parsing, extraction, questions and academic search within four months of launch.", "The predecessors' risk is still there, and it is closer. The same providers sell document reading directly: Azure Document Intelligence is itself a product, and Gemini and Claude accept PDFs as input. PDF Vector's room is in the work around the models: one format for many file types, schemas, academic sources, credits that a small customer can afford, and instances in the region that a regulated customer needs." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes. Many already have.", "text": "Little here needs money: the models are rented, the API is a thin layer, and the first version only turned a PDF URL into markdown. The founder said that the first US$1,000 a month took four months and the next US$1,000 took two. The hard part is standing out among many document APIs, which is why PDF Vector added academic search and special endpoints for invoices, bank statements and identity documents.", "steps": [ "Pick one boring step that every AI app on documents must solve, and sell it as an API.", "Start with one input and one output (a PDF URL to markdown), and charge from the start.", "Add the endpoints that customers ask for: extraction with a schema, questions, special document types.", "Offer a free tier, free tools and integrations with Zapier, Make, n8n and MCP so developers can try it in minutes.", "Name your model providers and their data rules in the privacy policy; business customers check this first." ], "open": "Document APIs for one industry or document type that general tools handle badly: medical records, customs forms, insurance claims, scanned historical archives." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Self-reported revenue, on the money floor", "text": "Both revenue figures are the founder's posts on X, read through Arrfounder and the Tiny Startups newsletter. They agree with each other, but no payment processor or buyer has confirmed them, and no TrustMRR profile was found. The headline of US$2,000 a month is exactly this site's minimum, and it is from December 2025; Arrfounder showed no newer milestone on 27 October 2026." }, { "title": "Team size not published", "text": "Only Minh-Phuc Tran is named. He writes \"us\", and the June 2025 site said \"We're an independent team\". No source gives the number of people or says whether the company took outside money." }, { "title": "Compliance claims not checked", "text": "The privacy policy says \"We are compliant with GDPR, SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA requirements\", and the home page says the service meets them \"by design\". SOC 2 and ISO 27001 are audits by outside firms; none of the pages read links an audit report or a certificate." }, { "title": "The free DOI-to-PDF tool", "text": "The tool converts paper IDs from \"PubMed, arXiv, Semantic Scholar, ERIC, Europe PMC, Google Scholar, and OpenAlex to direct PDF download links\", and the Academic Parse API works \"from its public PDF\". The pages read name only these public indexes and no unofficial libraries, but they do not say \"open access\" either, and Google Scholar also lists copies posted by others." }, { "title": "Built on the providers it competes with", "text": "The core reading is done by Claude, Gemini and Azure Document Intelligence. Each of these providers can lower its own prices or add the same features, which would leave less room for a layer in between." }, { "title": "Named customers", "text": "The site lists ChatAcademia, ReadBack and RabbitHoles as users, and in June 2025 it said the parser \"powers Research Kick and ChatAcademia\". The sources do not say whether these products are independent customers or belong to the same team." }, { "title": "Identity documents", "text": "The API has endpoints to parse and extract identity documents. The terms require users to be 18 or older and say documents are processed in isolated instances and \"are not permanently stored\"; this page could not check how that is enforced." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.pdfvector.com/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Arrfounder: Pdfvector Reaches $2K MRR, 5 December 2025, quoting Minh-Phuc Tran's post on X", "url": "https://arrfounder.com/news/pdfvector-reaches-2k-mrr", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in the copy downloaded on 27 October 2026. Could not open the post on X (it needs a login); cited from Arrfounder's quotation of https://x.com/phuctm97/status/1996922421757333560. Source for the headline figure." }, { "title": "Tiny Startups newsletter, TWITS #82, 16 October 2025: Minh-Phuc hit $1k MRR with PDF Vector", "url": "https://tinystartupsnewsletter.beehiiv.com/p/twits-82", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on PDF Vector in the copy downloaded on 27 October 2026 (the newsletter host allows agents). It quotes the founder's post of 15 October 2025." }, { "title": "Arrfounder: Pdfvector product page, revenue milestones", "url": "https://arrfounder.com/product/pdfvector", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026. Lists the US$1,000 milestone of 15 October 2025 and the US$2,000 milestone as the latest." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of pdfvector.com, 26 June 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250626051248/https://www.pdfvector.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The oldest archived copy found. Source for the first product, the first prices and the \"independent team\" statement." }, { "title": "PDF Vector home page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.pdfvector.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in the copy downloaded on 27 October 2026. Source for the current product, the prices, the customer names and the integrations." }, { "title": "Arrfounder news listing, page 18", "url": "https://arrfounder.com/news?page=18", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the PDF Vector entry in the copy downloaded on 27 October 2026. Confirms the \"Pdfvector Passes $1K MRR\" item." }, { "title": "PDF Vector Privacy Policy, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.pdfvector.com/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the AI providers and the compliance statement." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of pdfvector.com, 17 October 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20251017070640/https://www.pdfvector.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the AI features at the time of the US$1,000 figure." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of pdfvector.com, 14 December 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20251214035625/https://www.pdfvector.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the prices at the time of the US$2,000 figure." }, { "title": "PDF Vector: Academic Fetch API page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.pdfvector.com/academic-fetch", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the academic sources and the credit cost." }, { "title": "PDF Vector: DOI to PDF Converter, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.pdfvector.com/doi-to-pdf", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the free tool and the indexes it uses." }, { "title": "PDF Vector Terms of Service, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.pdfvector.com/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the age limit and the document storage rule." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/docv/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/docv.md", "slug": "docv", "name": "DoCV", "country": "United Kingdom (the terms name the laws of England and Wales; the extension's developer is a trader in England)", "sector": "Human Resources", "productType": "AI CV and cover-letter tailoring tool for one job description at a time", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "1 October 2025", "outcomeLabel": "Passed US$2.7K MRR, July 2026", "sticker": "Passed $2.7K MRR", "outcomeUsd": 32400, "months": 10, "teamLabel": "1 founder, who signs as Tim and writes \"I launched my first SaaS\"; no other person is named and no headcount is published", "fundingLabel": "None stated", "primaryFactor": "Persistence", "group": "documents-data", "channel": "communities", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Job search" ], "product": "You upload your CV, paste one job description, and DoCV shows a match score, the keywords and evidence that the job asks for and your CV lacks, and problems with the structure. It then writes a tailored version of the CV and a cover letter from your own experience, and exports both as PDF files. A Chrome extension copies a job description from a job page into the app and keeps a list of the jobs you applied to. The site repeats that the final wording must stay true and that no tool can guarantee an interview.", "why": "The founder says it grew slowly: a Product Hunt launch with 3 votes, no audience and no waiting list, then users won one by one through content, outreach and personal conversations, and later through a subreddit that the founder runs. The founder's post of 26 July 2026 reported that this reached more than US$2,700 in monthly recurring revenue.", "summary": [ "DoCV is a CV tailoring tool: a program that rewrites a job seeker's CV (curriculum vitae, called a resume in the United States) so that it matches one specific job advertisement. Many employers sort applications with an applicant tracking system (ATS), software that stores applications and lets recruiters search and filter them by words such as skills and job titles. DoCV compares the CV with the job description, lists the missing keywords (the exact skill and tool names that the advertisement uses) and missing evidence, and then writes a tailored CV and a cover letter with an AI model. Its pages call the score \"directional\" and say it \"does not guarantee an ATS pass, interview, or job offer\".", "The founder, who signs only as Tim (@buildwtim on X), launched it on Product Hunt on 1 October 2025, where it got 3 upvotes. On 26 July 2026 the founder posted on X: \"I launched my first SaaS (DoCV) exactly one year ago\", and \"A year later, it has passed $2.7k MRR - slow and steady\". MRR means monthly recurring revenue, the subscription income that repeats every month. The same post said that not one user came from X, and that users came \"through content, outreach and countless 1:1 conversations and now all from my own subreddit\". Brag in Public, a site that collects founders' revenue posts from X, quotes the post.", "That single post is the only source for the revenue figure, so this page grades it D: reported, not verified. The founder's \"one year\" also does not match the dates in public records, which start on 1 October 2025, about ten months before the post. The page also shows earlier job-search companies that failed." ], "factsCaption": "A one-person CV tool that the founder said passed US$2,700 in monthly recurring revenue about ten months after its Product Hunt launch, with all users from content, outreach and a subreddit", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value rests on one founder post on one date, quoted by a third-party site. A grade C value is the company's own pages, its store listing or launch data. An \"X\" value was computed on this page. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a Product Hunt launch with 3 votes to a founder-reported US$2,700 a month, in about ten months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "DoCV plans in October 2026: the pricing page loads its prices by script and no reviewer page lists them, so the rows give the plan names and limits from the company's terms of service (grade C)", "note": "The pricing page says \"Use the live pricing cards on this page as the source of truth\", and those cards are filled by a script after the page loads; the prices could not be read. The page's script says \"Pay weekly or monthly. No hidden fees.\", and the checkout screen in the same script promises a \"14-day money-back guarantee\", although the terms say refunds \"are generally not provided for unused portions of subscription periods\". The terms of service of 24 June 2026 say \"All prices are in GBP unless otherwise stated\", while the analytics code of the checkout labels plan amounts as USD. Every visitor gets an initial free analysis of one CV against one job.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "\"Limited AI generations with basic features\"; initial free analysis" ], [ "Standard", "", "not read", "\"Enhanced AI features and increased usage limits\"; billed weekly or monthly" ], [ "Premium", "", "not read", "\"Advanced features and unlimited usage\"; billed weekly or monthly" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 26 July 2026", "value": "more than US$2,700", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder's X post, quoted on Brag in Public: \"A year later, it has passed $2.7k MRR - slow and steady\". The page shows the date \"Jul 26\"; the post's X status number decodes to 26 July 2026, 22:27 UTC. The post writes \"$\" without a currency name. No payment-processor data and no second dated figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the July 2026 figure", "value": "about US$32,400 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2,700 times 12. This is the outcome amount stored for this page; the founder gave a monthly figure, not a yearly one.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Product Hunt launch", "value": "1 October 2025: 3 upvotes, 2 comments, place 134 of the day, not featured", "grade": "C", "note": "Hunted.space, which shows Product Hunt data: \"DoCV was submitted on Product Hunt and earned 3 upvotes and 2 comments, placing #134 on the daily leaderboard\". The founder's post also says \"just 3 votes\".", "src": [ 6, 1 ] }, { "fact": "First archived copy of docv.io", "value": "1 October 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "The Wayback Machine's capture list for docv.io starts at 08:28 UTC on 1 October 2025, the day of the Product Hunt launch.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the revenue figure", "value": "about 10 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 1 October 2025 to 26 July 2026 is 298 days, 9.8 months. The founder's post says \"exactly one year ago\"; no source found shows the product before 1 October 2025.", "src": [ 1, 6, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Where users came from", "value": "content, outreach, one-to-one conversations, and later the founder's own subreddit; none from X", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's post: \"Not a single user came from X. I didn't even start using X until six months after launching.\" and \"Every user came through content, outreach and countless 1:1 conversations and now all from my own subreddit.\"", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Search pages on the site", "value": "87 addresses in the sitemap", "grade": "C", "note": "Counted in the sitemap read on 27 October 2026: pages per job title (\"resume-for-data-analyst\" and others), CV templates, use cases and comparisons with Teal, Rezi, Resume.io, Zety and Kickresume.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Chrome extension", "value": "35 users, 4.3 out of 5 from 6 ratings, version 1.1.2 of 27 June 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Chrome Web Store listing, read 27 October 2026. It extracts a job description from a page and saves the job to an application tracker; its listed features do not include sending applications.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Plans", "value": "Free, Standard and Premium, billed weekly or monthly", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms of service, last updated 24 June 2026, section 4.1. Prices not read (see the pricing table).", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "What the AI may and may not do", "value": "tailor from the user's real experience; no false information", "grade": "C", "note": "The acceptable-use section bans uploading \"false, misleading, or fraudulent information in your CVs\". The How It Works page: \"Export only what is true\". The terms say content is generated by \"third-party AI providers\".", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 founder by the founder's own account", "grade": "C", "note": "Brag in Public: \"Built by Tim\"; Product Hunt: \"Hunted by Tim\". The post speaks of one person (\"I had no audience, no community, no beta users and no waitlist\"). No headcount is published.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none stated", "grade": "C", "note": "No source names an investor.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "1 October 2025", "what": "DoCV launches on Product Hunt with the line \"Land more interviews with AI-powered CVs\" and gets 3 upvotes and 2 comments. The Wayback Machine makes its first copy of docv.io the same day.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 7 ] }, { "when": "Early 2026", "what": "The founder starts posting on X, \"six months after launching\" in the founder's words; no user comes from it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "24 June 2026", "what": "Last update of the terms of service: Free, Standard and Premium plans, prices in GBP unless stated otherwise, the laws of England and Wales.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "27 June 2026", "what": "Version 1.1.2 of the Chrome extension, which copies job descriptions into DoCV and tracks applications.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "26 July 2026", "what": "The founder posts that DoCV \"has passed $2.7k MRR - slow and steady\", with users \"now all from my own subreddit\".", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "27 October 2026", "what": "The site has 87 pages in its sitemap, a free first analysis, and comparison pages against larger resume builders.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 9 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Persistence", "text": "The founder had \"no audience, no community, no beta users and no waitlist\", and the launch got 3 votes. The founder kept the product alive and found users one at a time, through content, outreach and personal conversations, until a subreddit run by the founder became the main source of users." }, { "title": "One CV against one job", "text": "The product does a narrow task that job seekers repeat for every application: compare the CV with this advertisement, show what is missing, write the tailored version and a cover letter. Each new application is a new reason to come back while the search lasts." }, { "title": "Short billing periods for a short need", "text": "A job search lasts weeks or months, not years. The site's code offers weekly or monthly payment and a 14-day money-back guarantee at checkout, and a free first analysis shows the result before any payment." }, { "title": "Pages for each job title", "text": "The sitemap lists pages for many job titles, CV templates and comparisons with larger competitors. These pages can be found through search by people who look for a CV for one kind of job, which is the \"content\" that the founder names as one source of users." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's terms, its Chrome Web Store listing and the source code of its public pages, read on 27 October 2026. They are grade C, except what the page source itself shows.", "items": [ "A single-page web app written with React, with MobX for state; the pages load Google's gtag.js measurement script.", "A separate application server at api.docv.io stores CVs, runs the analysis and serves the plans.", "The terms say content is generated by \"third-party AI providers\". The page source has an administrator setting for the AI provider and model, with \"openai\" as its default value.", "Stripe takes the payments: \"Stripe handles your payment with industry-standard encryption.\"", "Sign-in with email and password or with Google, Microsoft or Apple accounts.", "A Chrome extension, published by the website's owner, extracts job descriptions and saves jobs to a tracker." ], "src": [ 2, 4, 5, 8 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to help job seekers, or employers reading CVs, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Jobspice", "years": "2009 to 2012", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Professional-looking resumes made quickly by people who cannot design.", "died": "It sold one narrow thing, a resume, while LinkedIn and free tools did the same job for nothing.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1635-jobspice" }, { "name": "Jobr", "years": "2014 to 2019", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A mobile app where job seekers swiped through jobs as in a dating app.", "died": "LinkedIn and Indeed offered more and reached more people, and swiping did not become a way to make money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/261-jobr" }, { "name": "Ansaro", "years": "2017 to 2022", "funding": "US$15M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "AI for employers that would read resumes, schedule interviews and remove bias from hiring.", "died": "Recruiters saw it as nice to have and kept trusting human judgment over an algorithm.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1853-ansaro" }, { "name": "Monster Worldwide", "years": "1994 to 2025", "funding": "US$500M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "The first large online job board, with a database of resumes for employers.", "died": "It treated job search as a database of listings, and LinkedIn's network and Indeed's search traffic took its users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2400-monster-worldwide" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Jobspice made good-looking resumes and lost because a resume template is easy to copy and free ones spread. Jobr and Monster Worldwide built places to find jobs and lost to LinkedIn and Indeed. Ansaro sold AI to the employer side and found that recruiters did not want it. DoCV faces the first risk directly: its own comparison pages list larger tools, such as Teal, Rezi and Kickresume, that do the same tailoring.", "What differs is the cost. A language model now writes the tailored CV and the cover letter, so one person can sell the rewriting work that once needed a human CV writer, and the cost of each analysis is a model call. DoCV also does not try to be the job board: it works on whatever advertisement the user brings, from any site. That kept the business small enough that, according to the founder, slow growth through personal conversations and one subreddit was enough to pass US$2,700 a month." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, and it is a crowded field.", "text": "Nothing here needs money or a large audience: a narrow AI task that job seekers repeat for every application, short billing periods, and users found by hand. The hard part is that many funded and free tools already tailor CVs, so the founder's way of finding users matters more than the product.", "steps": [ "Pick a task that people repeat many times in a short period, and charge by the week or the month.", "Show the result free once, before any payment.", "Find the first users where they already talk, through answers, outreach and one-to-one conversations, before you build an audience elsewhere.", "Write the limits of the AI on every page, so that users keep their claims true." ], "open": "Other repeated, document-shaped tasks in a job search or a career: application forms, interview preparation for one company, or CVs for one country's conventions." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The only revenue figure, that DoCV \"has passed $2.7k MRR\", rests on one X post by the founder, Tim (@buildwtim), dated 26 July 2026, as quoted by Brag in Public, a site that collects founders' revenue posts from X. There is no payment-processor profile, no second dated figure and no trend. The post writes \"$\" without a currency, while the terms say prices are in GBP unless stated otherwise. A reader could look for a TrustMRR or Stripe-verified revenue profile, or a later dated update from the founder." }, { "title": "\"Exactly one year\" does not match the public dates", "text": "The founder wrote on 26 July 2026 that DoCV launched \"exactly one year ago\". The Product Hunt launch and the first archived copy of docv.io are both dated 1 October 2025, about ten months earlier. This page uses 1 October 2025; an earlier start under another name or address was not found." }, { "title": "The founder is known by a first name only", "text": "Brag in Public and Product Hunt show only \"Tim\". The Chrome Web Store names an individual trader in England as the developer of the extension and says the publisher owns docv.io; the sources do not say whether that person is the founder." }, { "title": "The founder's own marketing", "text": "The founder says users came \"through content, outreach and countless 1:1 conversations and now all from my own subreddit\". The sources do not show what the outreach was or how the subreddit presents DoCV. This describes the founder's tactics, not a feature of the product." }, { "title": "AI-written CVs and honesty", "text": "The site tells users to keep \"the final wording truthful\", and the terms ban \"false, misleading, or fraudulent information\". No feature for inventing experience or for passing AI detectors was found on the pages read. The job-import screen says it \"May not work with: LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor due to anti-bot protection\", so it reads job pages from other sites, which those sites may restrict." }, { "title": "Prices not read", "text": "The prices load by script and could not be read, so this page cannot say what a customer pays or how many paying customers US$2,700 a month would mean." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://docv.io/" }, { "kind": "chrome", "url": "https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/dpmoljjfolmafinefomdknbaandgdapo" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Brag in Public: DoCV product page, with the founder's X post of 26 July 2026", "url": "https://braginpublic.com/products/docv", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full, from a copy downloaded on 27 October 2026. Quotes the founder's post (https://x.com/buildwtim/status/2081506760154894355), which was not opened because x.com needs a login. Source for the US$2,700 MRR, the launch account and the users' origin." }, { "title": "DoCV home page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://docv.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product description and the statement that it does not guarantee an ATS pass." }, { "title": "DoCV About and How It Works pages, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://docv.io/how-it-works", "grade": "C", "how": "Read both in full (the About page is at https://docv.io/about). Source for the workflow and \"Export only what is true\"." }, { "title": "DoCV Terms of Service, last updated 24 June 2026, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://docv.io/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "The page shows a short summary; the full terms were read from the text in the page's script. Source for the plans, the GBP prices, the AI providers, the acceptable use and the governing law." }, { "title": "DoCV pricing page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://docv.io/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The price cards load by script and could not be read; the billing text, refund promise and payment provider were read from the page's script." }, { "title": "Hunted.space: DoCV, Product Hunt launch overview", "url": "https://hunted.space/product/iocv/launches/docv", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A third-party view of Product Hunt data. Source for the launch date, the 3 upvotes and the daily place." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine capture list for docv.io", "url": "https://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=docv.io&output=txt&limit=20&fl=timestamp,statuscode,length", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the first archived copy, 1 October 2025 (https://web.archive.org/web/20251001082831/https://docv.io/)." }, { "title": "Chrome Web Store: AI Resume Builder - Free ATS-Optimized CV Creator | docv.io", "url": "https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/dpmoljjfolmafinefomdknbaandgdapo", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the listing in full on 27 October 2026. Source for the extension's features, users, ratings, version date and publisher type." }, { "title": "DoCV sitemap, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://docv.io/sitemap.xml", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full and counted. Source for the 87 page addresses." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/baller-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/baller-ai.md", "slug": "baller-ai", "name": "Baller AI", "country": "United States", "sector": "Sports", "productType": "AI soccer training app: personal training plans, AI film analysis of match clips, an AI coach chat and nutrition tracking", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "June 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$2.2K MRR verified by RevenueCat at its last sync, September 2026", "sticker": "$2.2K MRR, 375 subscriptions", "outcomeUsd": 26952, "months": 3, "teamLabel": "1 founder, Lino Leighton, by the founder's own account (\"Team size: 1 person\"); the app is published by Renovait LLC", "fundingLabel": "Bootstrapped, by the founder's own account", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "health-appearance", "channel": "creators", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Sports" ], "product": "An iPhone and iPad app for soccer players. The player enters position, skill level, goals, schedule and equipment, and the app writes a weekly plan of drills. The player can upload a match clip and get an AI breakdown of technique, tactics and decisions with drills to fix what went wrong, ask an AI coach questions, and log meals, water and macros with food photo estimates. Streaks, XP points, ranks and badges keep players coming back. The app is free to download; the features need a Baller Pro subscription, sold weekly, monthly or yearly through Apple.", "why": "Young players want to improve but rarely have a coach who plans their training or watches their games. The app sells that as a subscription for a few dollars a week and dresses it as a game with XP and ranks. TrustMRR, which read the app's revenue through a RevenueCat API key, shows US$13,188 of revenue from June to 16 September 2026 and US$2,246 of monthly recurring revenue from 375 subscriptions at that date, about US$6 a subscription.", "summary": [ "Baller AI is an AI coach app for soccer (football) players. It builds a weekly training plan from the player's position and skill level, analyzes uploaded match clips with an AI model, which the App Store listing calls the \"AI Film Room\", and answers questions in an AI coach chat. It also tracks nutrition: calories, protein, carbohydrates, fats and water, with estimates from food photos and barcode scans. The training is wrapped in game mechanics, called gamification: XP (experience points earned per session), streaks of training days, ranks and badges. All of this sits behind a subscription paywall, a screen that unlocks the features only after the user starts a recurring payment, here through Apple's App Store.", "The website says \"Built by Lino Leighton\", and the TrustMRR profile names the founder as Lino, with \"Team size: 1 person\" and \"Funding: Bootstrapped\". The App Store lists the developer as Renovait LLC and version 1.0.0 on 1 June; the TrustMRR founding date is 8 June 2026. TrustMRR, a service that reads revenue from a company's payment or subscription system through an API key, read the app's RevenueCat account, a service that many apps use to manage App Store subscriptions and report their revenue. It shows US$1,653 in June 2026, US$4,786 in July, US$5,569 in August and US$1,180 from 1 to 16 September, and, at the last sync on 16 September 2026, MRR (monthly recurring revenue, the monthly value of all active subscriptions) of US$2,246 from 375 active subscriptions. The RevenueCat key expired that day, so no later figures exist. Since 28 August 2026 the founder has listed the app for sale on TrustMRR at US$25,000.", "The revenue figures are grade A: TrustMRR read them from RevenueCat, which receives them from Apple. They stop on 16 September 2026. Team, funding and marketing channel come from the founder-written part of the profile, grade C. The app is rated 4+ in the App Store and its terms admit players from 12 years old, so this page also notes what it collects from young users. It ends with earlier fitness and sports apps that failed." ], "factsCaption": "US$13,188 of verified revenue in the first three and a half months and US$2,246 of monthly recurring revenue from 375 subscriptions on 16 September 2026, the last day the revenue data was read", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the app's RevenueCat account through an API key. A grade C value is what the founder wrote on the TrustMRR profile or what the app's own pages and App Store listing state. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From version 1.0.0 in June 2026 to US$2,246 of verified monthly recurring revenue on 16 September 2026, then a for-sale listing. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Baller AI in-app purchases listed on the US App Store on 27 October 2026 (grade C); the listing does not say which ones are offered to new users today", "note": "The App Store shows ten in-app purchases, including several yearly prices from US$24.99 to US$49.99, which suggests that the app tests different prices. The website FAQ says subscriptions start \"at $9.99/month\"; the App Store description says Baller Pro is \"offered weekly or yearly depending on your region\". Version 2.21 of 8 October 2026 added \"a free 14-day trial, or 30 days for $2.99\". A weekly price of US$6.99 equals about US$30 a month. The average active subscription in the verified data is about US$6 a month.", "rows": [ [ "Baller AI Weekly", "", "6.99 a week", "Baller Pro: plans, Practice Mode, Film Room, AI coach, nutrition" ], [ "Baller Weekly", "", "3.99 a week", "Baller Pro" ], [ "Baller Monthly", "", "9.99", "Baller Pro" ], [ "Baller Yearly", "2.08 to 4.17", "", "Baller Pro; listed at US$24.99, US$39.99 and US$49.99 a year" ], [ "Ballerz Pro Yearly", "2.50", "", "listed at US$29.99 a year" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 16 September 2026", "value": "US$2,246 from 375 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from RevenueCat through an API key; last sync 16 September 2026 at 00:34 UTC. 30-day MRR change: +14.3%. TrustMRR still shows these values on 27 October 2026 because the key expired.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per subscription per month", "value": "about US$6", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2,246 / 375 = 5.99. MRR times twelve is US$26,952 a year, the outcome amount stored for this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time, to 16 September 2026", "value": "US$13,188", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. Last 30 days to 16 September: US$3,314, marked -42.2% against the 30 days before; last 3 months: US$6,946. The total is below US$25,000; the MRR is above this site's floor of US$2,000 a month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month", "value": "June 2026 US$1,653; July US$4,786; August US$5,569; September US$1,180 to 16 September", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table. The four values add up to US$13,188. The daily table after 16 September shows zeros because the data stopped, not because sales stopped.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Fall of the last 30 days against the best month", "value": "40%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: (5,569 - 3,314) / 5,569 = 40.5%. US$1,180 in the first 16 days of September equals about US$2,213 for 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Where the revenue figures come from", "value": "RevenueCat API key, expired 16 September 2026 at 06:34 UTC", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR's verification section: \"RevenueCat API key expired at 2026-09-16T06:34:57.451Z\". Payments are made through Apple: the privacy policy says \"All payments are processed by Apple.\"", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days to 16 September 2026", "value": "90%", "grade": "C", "note": "A snapshot on the TrustMRR profile. The costs behind it are not shown, so this page does not treat it as verified.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founder and team", "value": "Lino Leighton, 1 person", "grade": "C", "note": "Website footer: \"Built by Lino Leighton\". TrustMRR founder-written fields: \"Team size: 1 person\", \"Funding: Bootstrapped\". The App Store names the developer and seller as Renovait LLC.", "src": [ 2, 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "App Store listing, 27 October 2026", "value": "4.8 out of 5 from 325 ratings; age rating 4+; version 2.27", "grade": "C", "note": "US App Store. Category Sports; iPhone, iPad, Mac with Apple silicon and Vision Pro. Version 1.0.0 is dated 1 June. The website still shows \"4.7 out of 5 · 33 App Store ratings\".", "src": [ 4, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Minimum age in the terms", "value": "12 years; under 18 with a parent's or guardian's agreement", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms of service, last updated May 2026: \"You must be at least 12 years of age to use Baller.\" The privacy policy says 12 in one section and \"intended for users aged 13 and older\" in another.", "src": [ 3, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Marketing channel", "value": "TikTok, and creator codes in the app", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR founder-written field \"Marketing channels: TikTok\". App Store notes for version 2.27: \"creator codes work in 'Have a code?'\" (the listing writes the button name in double quotes).", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "For sale", "value": "asking price US$25,000, listed since 28 August 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR listing: 21 offers received; seller message \"Busy working on other projects.\" The asking price is the seller's figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the first version to the last verified figure", "value": "about 3.5 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 1 June 2026 to 16 September 2026 is 107 days. The year of version 1.0.0 is not printed on the App Store page; 2026 follows from the TrustMRR founding date and the first revenue month.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "May 2026", "what": "Date of the terms of service and the privacy policy.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 5 ] }, { "when": "1 June 2026", "what": "Version 1.0.0 in the App Store; the TrustMRR founding date is 8 June 2026.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "First month of verified revenue: US$1,653.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "24 July 2026", "what": "Version 1.7 adds meal plans, a strength and conditioning section and more drills.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "August 2026", "what": "Best month in the data: US$5,569.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "28 August 2026", "what": "The founder lists the app for sale on TrustMRR at US$25,000.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "16 September 2026", "what": "Last sync: US$2,246 MRR from 375 subscriptions, US$13,188 all time. The RevenueCat key expires the same day.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "26 September 2026", "what": "Version 2.20: discounts are \"now calculated from the real store price\", and the leaderboard \"now shows the all-time board only, so every ranking you see is built from real player data\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "8 October 2026", "what": "Version 2.21: a free 14-day trial or 30 days for US$2.99, and a faster setup that gives a first rank in about thirty seconds.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "Versions 2.22 to 2.27 change the upgrade screen several times and make it \"easier for a parent to get you Baller Pro\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "One sport, one position at a time", "text": "Generic fitness apps do not know what a winger or a goalkeeper should practice. Baller builds plans around the player's position and weak points, and the App Store text speaks the players' language: first touch, weak foot, 1v1 moves, scanning. A narrow audience with its own vocabulary is easier to reach with short videos than a general one." }, { "title": "AI where a coach would be", "text": "The expensive parts of coaching are watching film and answering questions. A vision and language model does both on demand: the player uploads a clip and gets what to keep, what to fix and drills based on what happened. The privacy policy says the app sends selected frames to third-party AI providers and keeps the videos on the device." }, { "title": "A game around the training", "text": "XP, streaks, ranks, badges and a shareable player card turn daily practice into a score that rises. The October versions give a first rank within about thirty seconds of setup, so the player feels progress before the paywall." }, { "title": "Small weekly prices through Apple", "text": "The app sells weekly, monthly and yearly plans through the App Store, tests several prices, and adds trial offers and parent approval. The verified average is about US$6 a month per subscription, so the revenue depends on many young players subscribing and staying." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the TrustMRR profile, the App Store listing and the app's privacy policy, read on 27 October 2026. They are grade C unless marked otherwise.", "items": [ "A native Apple app written with SwiftUI, according to the founder-written tech stack on TrustMRR; it runs on iPhone, iPad, Mac with Apple silicon and Vision Pro.", "Supabase for the backend and RevenueCat for subscriptions, according to the same tech stack; RevenueCat is also the verified revenue source (grade A for that use).", "Third-party \"large language model and vision model providers\" process the film clips, food photos and coach questions; the privacy policy does not name them.", "Videos and food photos stay on the device, according to the privacy policy; only the frames chosen for analysis are sent.", "Nutrition data from barcodes comes from Open Food Facts, which the terms name.", "Payments go through the Apple App Store; the app reaches players through TikTok and creator codes, according to the founder.", "The App Store bundle identifier begins with \"app.rork\"; Rork is the name of an AI app-building service, but no source read here says whether the founder used it." ], "src": [ 1, 3, 4, 5 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to coach people through training with an app, a device or live classes, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "FitFu", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$300K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A phone app that turned exercise into a game, with motion tracking, rewards and competition with friends.", "died": "Users left after the novelty wore off, the phones of the time limited what it could track, and better devices and apps took the market.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1194-fitfu" }, { "name": "Enflux", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$1M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Smart clothing with sensors that tracked an athlete's movement in 3D and gave feedback on form.", "died": "The hardware was expensive to make, the niche was small, and Fitbit and Apple had the brands and the scale.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1089-enflux" }, { "name": "Charge Running", "years": "2021 to 2024", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Live virtual running classes with a real coach in the runner's ear.", "died": "Fixed class times lost to on-demand apps, and AI coaching apps offered a personal touch without a schedule.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/895-charge-running" }, { "name": "Fitmob", "years": "2013 to 2017", "funding": "US$9.8M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Flexible group workouts at many venues without a gym membership.", "died": "Organizing physical classes cost more than it earned, and ClassPass won the studio partnerships.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/151-fitmob" } ], "whatChanged": [ "FitFu and Enflux tried to measure movement with phone sensors or smart clothing and give feedback, and both needed hardware or sensors that were not good enough or cost too much. Charge Running and Fitmob used human coaches and fixed class times, which cost money for every session and did not fit a player who trains alone at night.", "A vision model now gives feedback on a phone video that the player already films, with no special hardware and no coach's time per session. A language model writes the plan and answers questions at any hour. That lets one person sell coaching for a few dollars a week. FitFu's problem has not gone away: according to the verified data, revenue in the 30 days to 16 September 2026 was 42% below the 30 days before, and the founder put the app up for sale after three months." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, and many already do it.", "text": "One person built a sport-specific AI coach, sold it through Apple and reached about US$2,000 a month of recurring revenue within three months, according to the verified data. The App Store already lists other AI soccer coaches next to it, and the revenue fell after August, so the hard part is keeping players subscribed, not building the app.", "steps": [ "Pick one sport, or one position in a sport, and use its own words in every screen and listing.", "Let a vision model give feedback on videos the user already films, and keep the videos on the device.", "Wrap the training in streaks, points and ranks, and show progress before the paywall.", "Find users through short videos and creator codes, and measure revenue through the subscription service from the first day." ], "open": "Other sports with many young amateur players and few coaches: basketball shooting form, tennis serves, swimming technique, climbing. Coaches of youth teams who need plans for a whole squad are a second, paying audience." }, "watch": [ { "title": "The figures stop on 16 September 2026", "text": "The RevenueCat API key expired at 06:34 UTC on 16 September 2026, so TrustMRR has no revenue data after that day; its daily table shows zeros that are missing data, not missing sales. The last verified MRR, US$2,246, is only a little above this site's floor of US$2,000 a month, and the revenue of the last 30 days was 42.2% below the 30 days before. The current revenue is not known." }, { "title": "Young users", "text": "The App Store rating is 4+ and the terms admit users \"at least 12 years of age\", with a parent's agreement under 18; the privacy policy says 12 in one place and 13 in another. The app collects age, height, weight, location and food photos, tracks calories and macros, and the App Store privacy section lists purchases, identifiers and usage data as \"Data Used to Track You\". The terms say it does not give nutrition or medical advice and \"should not be used for extreme dieting, unsafe weight loss\", and that no outcome, \"including improved performance, recruitment, or injury prevention\", is guaranteed. October updates make it \"easier for a parent to get you Baller Pro\". No promise of a health effect was found." }, { "title": "Release notes that admit earlier problems", "text": "Version 2.20 of 26 September 2026 says: \"Every discount on the limited-time offer is now calculated from the real store price, so the number you see is always the true saving\", and \"The leaderboard now shows the all-time board only, so every ranking you see is built from real player data\". The notes do not say what the earlier discounts and rankings showed. The website still shows \"4.7 out of 5 · 33 App Store ratings\" while the App Store shows 4.8 from 325, and the release notes call Baller \"the #1 app\" without a source." }, { "title": "For sale", "text": "The founder listed the app on TrustMRR on 28 August 2026 at US$25,000 with the message \"Busy working on other projects.\" A new owner could change the product, the prices and the marketing." }, { "title": "The founder's other app", "text": "The App Store lists one more app by the same developer, Renovait LLC: \"Reni AI - Renovation Assistant\", a home design app. It is not linked from Baller's pages and was not reviewed here." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://appballerai.com/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6770385961" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/baller" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: Baller, markdown profile, last revenue sync 16 September 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/baller.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full on 27 October 2026. The revenue, MRR and subscription figures come from RevenueCat through an API key; team, funding, tech stack, channels and the sale message are founder-written." }, { "title": "Baller AI website, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://appballerai.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the features, the FAQ prices and the founder's name." }, { "title": "Baller AI terms of service, last updated May 2026", "url": "https://appballerai.com/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the minimum age, the disclaimers on health and nutrition, and Open Food Facts." }, { "title": "App Store: Baller AI: Elite Soccer Coach (US)", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/baller-ai-elite-soccer-coach/id6770385961", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026, including the version history, the in-app purchases and the privacy section. Source for the rating, the age rating, the prices and the release notes." }, { "title": "Baller AI privacy policy, last updated May 2026", "url": "https://appballerai.com/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the AI providers, the data collected, the age statements and Apple as payment processor." }, { "title": "oracis/ai-case-library, data/cases.json (GitHub), entry for Baller", "url": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/oracis/ai-case-library/main/data/cases.json", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the entry, downloaded 27 October 2026. It relays the same TrustMRR data with the 16 September 2026 sync; it is not an independent source." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/aesty/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/aesty.md", "slug": "aesty", "name": "Aesty", "country": "Singapore (Aesty Labs Pte. Ltd.; the founders work from Dubai)", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI stylist and outfit planner for iPhone, with virtual try-on of outfits from screenshots and the user's own wardrobe", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "July 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$10.1K MRR at the last RevenueCat sync, September 2026", "sticker": "$10.1K MRR via RevenueCat", "outcomeUsd": 120768, "months": 26, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders, Nadia Zueva (CEO) and Andrei Rychkov (CTO); headcount not published", "fundingLabel": "Antler investment in 2025, amount not disclosed in the sources read", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "health-appearance", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Funded", "Running", "B2C", "Fashion" ], "product": "An iPhone app that styles the clothes a person already owns. The user adds clothes from the camera, the photo library or a scan of the camera roll, and the app sorts them by category and color. A screenshot of an outfit from Instagram, TikTok or Pinterest is split into its pieces, shown on a personal avatar made from the user's own full-body photos, matched with pieces from the user's closet, and linked to shops for the pieces that are missing. It also plans outfits for each day of the week, analyzes the user's colors and has a chat with an AI stylist. Subscriptions are sold in the App Store and through a web style quiz.", "why": "Many people own enough clothes and still do not know what to wear, and a screenshot of a look they like does not tell them how it would look on them or what in their closet goes with it. Aesty answers both questions with image models from OpenAI and Google, and sells the answer by the week, the month or the year. TrustMRR, reading the company's RevenueCat account, showed US$67,971 of revenue in total and US$10,064 of monthly recurring revenue from 688 subscriptions at the last sync on 22 September 2026.", "summary": [ "Aesty is an AI stylist app: a program that suggests what to wear, here from the clothes that the user already owns. Its main feature is virtual try-on, in which an image model generates a picture of the user wearing a chosen outfit, so the user can see the fit before wearing or buying it. The user uploads mirror selfies or full-body photos to build an avatar, adds clothes from photos, and then turns screenshots of outfits from social media into looks on that avatar, combined with pieces from the closet and shopping links for the rest. The privacy policy says that the try-on and styling features send photos to \"third-party AI providers (OpenAI, Google Gemini)\".", "Osome, the company that set up Aesty's legal entity, describes the founders as Nadia Zueva (CEO) and Andrei Rychkov (CTO), a married couple of software engineers based in Dubai. Nadia Zueva told Osome: \"I'd been working with neural networks for 10 years\". They joined Antler, an investor that funds early-stage startups, and incorporated Aesty Labs Pte. Ltd. in Singapore on 16 June 2025. The app's earliest review on the US App Store is dated 10 July 2024. TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a company's payment account through an API key, shows for Aesty's RevenueCat account (RevenueCat is a service that manages App Store and web subscriptions for app makers) US$67,971 of revenue in total, a best month of US$8,953 in January 2026, and monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the monthly value of all active subscriptions) of US$10,064 from 688 subscriptions at the last sync on 22 September 2026.", "The revenue figures are grade A, but they stop on 22 September 2026, when the API key that TrustMRR uses expired. Monthly revenue fell from about US$8,300 in January to March 2026 to about US$5,100 in July to September, while the MRR rose by 79.9% in the last 30 days before the sync. The team, the funding and the history come from the company's pages and a vendor's customer story, grade C. The page also shows earlier fashion startups that tried to give people styling advice or a virtual closet, and why they failed." ], "factsCaption": "US$67,971 of RevenueCat-verified revenue in total and US$10,064 of monthly recurring revenue from 688 subscriptions at the last sync on 22 September 2026, after monthly revenue fell from its January 2026 peak", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the company's RevenueCat account through an API key. A grade C value is what the company states on its own pages, in its App Store listing or in a vendor's customer story. An \"X\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a one-page website in December 2023 to a two-founder company with US$67,971 of verified revenue, in about 26 months from the first App Store review. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Aesty prices on 27 October 2026: App Store in-app purchases from the US App Store listing, and the web plans and guides from the style quiz's script (grade C)", "note": "The App Store listing shows ten in-app purchases, with several prices for the same plan name (Pro Weekly at US$6.99, US$7.99 and US$9.99; Pro Monthly at US$14.99 and US$19.99; Pro Annual at US$49.99 and US$79.99); the listing does not say which price a buyer sees, and the sources do not say what Pro and Max include. Per-month values for yearly and quarterly plans are calculated on this page (price divided by 12 or by 3). The web style quiz at aesty.ai/quiz ends in a paywall with 1-week, 4-week and 12-week plans and an \"Offer expires in 14:59\" timer, and sells one-time PDF style guides. The terms offer \"a conditional 30-day money-back guarantee\" for subscriptions bought outside the App Store; App Store purchases follow Apple's refund rules.", "rows": [ [ "Pro, App Store", "4.17 to 6.67", "14.99 to 19.99", "weekly also offered at US$6.99 to US$9.99 a week; yearly price US$49.99 or US$79.99" ], [ "Max, App Store", "20.83", "29.99", "yearly price US$249.99" ], [ "Web plan, 1 week", "", "4.99 a week", "style quiz paywall" ], [ "Web plan, 4 weeks", "", "9.99", "style quiz paywall; marked as the highlighted plan" ], [ "Web plan, 12 weeks", "6.66", "", "US$19.99 a quarter" ], [ "Style guide (color, or body shape), web", "9.99 one-time", "", "personalized PDF from the quiz answers" ], [ "Both style guides, web", "14.99 one-time", "", "personalized PDFs" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 22 September 2026", "value": "US$10,064 from 688 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from the company's RevenueCat account through an API key; revenue last synced 22 September 2026 at 02:31 UTC. 30-day MRR growth: +79.9%. Re-read on 27 October 2026 with the same figures.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the MRR", "value": "about US$120,768 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 10,064 times 12. This is the outcome amount stored for this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR per subscription", "value": "about US$14.63 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 10,064 / 688. Within the range of the App Store plans, from US$4.17 a month (Pro yearly) to US$29.99 (Max monthly), and below the weekly plans, which come to about US$30 or more a month.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time, to 22 September 2026", "value": "US$67,971", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. Last 12 months: US$64,712; last 6 months: US$26,353; last 3 months: US$10,783; last 30 days: US$6,778, marked +38.3% against the 30 days before.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month", "value": "Oct 2025 US$12.78; Nov US$2,566; Dec US$4,509; Jan 2026 US$8,953; Feb US$7,835; Mar US$8,214; Apr US$6,269; May US$5,825; Jun US$5,206; Jul US$4,771; Aug US$4,921; Sep US$5,630 to 22 September", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table. The twelve months add up to US$64,712, the last-12-months figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before the twelve-month table", "value": "US$3,259", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: all time US$67,971 minus the last 12 months US$64,712. So the app earned some money before late September 2025; the sources do not show when.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Fall from the best months", "value": "38.7% from January to March 2026 to July to September 2026", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the average of January to March is US$8,334 a month, the average of July to September is US$5,107 (September counted only to 22 September). From the best month, January, to July the fall is 46.7%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR against revenue", "value": "MRR of US$10,064 against US$6,778 of revenue in the last 30 days", "grade": "X", "note": "The MRR is 48% higher than the money received in the last 30 days, and it was about US$5,594 thirty days before the sync (calculated: 10,064 / 1.799). The sources do not explain the gap.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Where the revenue figures come from", "value": "RevenueCat, through an API key; merchant of record: no", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR's verification section: \"RevenueCat API key expired at 2026-09-22T12:57:10.447Z\". The profile shows no revenue on any day from 28 September to 27 October 2026, because no new data arrived. No Google Analytics, DataFast or Search Console connection.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founders", "value": "Nadia Zueva (CEO) and Andrei Rychkov (CTO)", "grade": "C", "note": "Osome's customer story, modified 10 February 2026: \"Co-Founders, CEO & CTO Nadia Zueva and Andrei Rychkov\", \"Both software engineers by training\". TrustMRR's founder link names Nadia Zueva. No source states a headcount.", "src": [ 7, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Company", "value": "Aesty Labs Pte. Ltd., incorporated in Singapore on 16 June 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms and Conditions: \"a private limited company incorporated in the Republic of Singapore on 16 June 2025\"; Singapore law governs. Osome: \"Aesty's founders were based in Dubai but incorporating in Singapore.\" The App Store names the same company as seller.", "src": [ 5, 7, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Funding", "value": "Antler invested; amount not stated", "grade": "C", "note": "Osome quotes Nadia Zueva: \"When Antler invested, we needed to incorporate quickly\", and says the couple's focus was on \"raising their next round of funding\". TrustMRR's founder-written fields: \"Funding: VC-backed\", \"Backed by Antler\".", "src": [ 7, 1 ] }, { "fact": "AI providers", "value": "OpenAI and Google Gemini", "grade": "C", "note": "Privacy Policy, effective 3 July 2026: \"AI processing for try-on and styling features (OpenAI, Google Gemini)\". The founder-written TrustMRR tech stack also lists Anthropic.", "src": [ 6, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Users claimed", "value": "\"60k+ downloads\" on the home page; \"Join 500K+ women\" in the web quiz", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page, 27 October 2026: \"Backed by 60k+ downloads\". TrustMRR's founder-written profile gives an estimated user count of 60,000. The web quiz script shows \"Join 500K+ women who never stress about what to wear\" and the same line for men. The two claims do not agree, and neither is verified.", "src": [ 3, 4, 1 ] }, { "fact": "App Store rating", "value": "4.5 out of 5 from 71 ratings (US store, 27 October 2026)", "grade": "C", "note": "App Store listing. The home page shows \"★★★★★ 4.8 App Store\"; the quiz paywall shows \"4.5\" and 70 ratings.", "src": [ 2, 3, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Age rules", "value": "terms: 18 or older; App Store age rating: 4+", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms: \"You must be at least 18 years old to use the Service.\" The App Store rates the app \"4+\". The web quiz starts with age groups from 18-29 upward.", "src": [ 5, 2, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Earliest public dates", "value": "website copy on 15 December 2023; earliest App Store review on 10 July 2024", "grade": "C", "note": "The Wayback Machine's first capture of aesty.ai is from 15 December 2023, a page made with Readymag titled \"Aesty\". The oldest review shown on the US App Store page is dated 07/10/2024 (US date format). Osome lists Aesty as a client since December 2024.", "src": [ 8, 2, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the first App Store review to the headline figure", "value": "26 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: July 2024 to September 2026. The app's actual release date is not shown in the sources read.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Release pace", "value": "25 versions from 2.3 (5 September 2025) to 2.16.0 (13 September 2026)", "grade": "C", "note": "Counted in the App Store version history, 27 October 2026.", "src": [ 2 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "15 December 2023", "what": "First archived copy of aesty.ai, a one-page site built with Readymag and titled \"Aesty\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "10 July 2024", "what": "Date of the oldest review on the US App Store page: \"I've taken photos of my entire wardrobe and it's already piecing outfits for me\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "December 2024", "what": "Aesty becomes a client of Osome, the incorporation service suggested by Antler.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "16 June 2025", "what": "Aesty Labs Pte. Ltd. is incorporated in Singapore. The founders work from Dubai, with \"a network built through Antler Riyadh\", in Nadia Zueva's words to Osome.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 7 ] }, { "when": "September 2025", "what": "Version 2.3 adds \"An infinite feed of outfits\"; version 2.4 adopts the iOS 26 design.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "14 November 2025", "what": "Version 2.5.5 with a redesigned try-on screen. Verified revenue in November: US$2,566.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "when": "January 2026", "what": "The best month in the verified table: US$8,953. Version 2.7.0 of 21 January adds \"Find clothes from any photo\".", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "Version 2.14.0 adds a week planner and a moodboard editor; version 2.15.0 adds a chat with the AI stylist and closet sharing. Revenue: US$5,206 in June.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "when": "3 July 2026", "what": "New terms and privacy policy: users must be 18 or older; OpenAI and Google Gemini process the try-on photos; a web style quiz sells subscriptions and PDF guides.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 6 ] }, { "when": "13 September 2026", "what": "Version 2.16.0: scan of the camera roll, free try-ons for inviting a friend, and Japanese, Korean and Brazilian Portuguese.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "22 September 2026", "what": "Last RevenueCat sync: MRR of US$10,064 from 688 subscriptions and US$67,971 in total. The API key expires the same day.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "27 October 2026", "what": "The TrustMRR profile still shows the September data; the App Store page shows 4.5 stars from 71 ratings.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Niche", "text": "Most fashion apps sell new clothes. Aesty starts from the clothes that the user already owns and from a screenshot of a look the user already likes, and answers two narrow questions: how would this look on me, and what in my closet goes with it. Shopping links appear only for the missing pieces, so the app can earn from subscriptions first." }, { "title": "Image models instead of stylists", "text": "Earlier styling services paid human stylists for every customer. Aesty sends the user's photos to models from OpenAI and Google Gemini to generate the try-on images and the outfit suggestions, so the cost of one more user is the cost of a few model calls." }, { "title": "Short billing periods", "text": "The App Store and the web quiz sell weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly plans, and the web quiz adds one-time PDF style guides. The terms give a conditional 30-day money-back guarantee for web subscriptions." }, { "title": "A web quiz in front of the app", "text": "A 60-screen style quiz on aesty.ai asks about body shape, colors, budget and occasions, and ends in a paywall. The privacy policy says that the company measures its advertising on Meta, Pinterest and TikTok with the quiz's tracking code, so the quiz is where paid advertising leads." }, { "title": "Frequent releases", "text": "The App Store history shows 25 versions in twelve months, from a feed of outfits in September 2025 to a week planner, an AI chat and a camera-roll scan in 2026." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's privacy policy and terms, its App Store listing, the source of its web pages and the founder-written part of the TrustMRR profile. They are grade C, except what the page source itself shows.", "items": [ "An iPhone app; the founder-written TrustMRR tech stack lists SwiftUI, Swift and TypeScript.", "Try-on and styling run on \"third-party AI providers (OpenAI, Google Gemini)\", according to the privacy policy; TrustMRR's tech stack also lists Anthropic.", "Hosting on Vercel and Google Cloud; the backend and database on Firebase, Firestore and Google Cloud Storage; product analytics with Amplitude and Vercel Analytics.", "Subscriptions through the Apple App Store and RevenueCat, which also runs the web checkout of the style quiz.", "The website is a Next.js application; the first site in 2023 was built with Readymag.", "Advertising on Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Pinterest and TikTok, measured with their tracking pixels and conversion APIs on the web quiz.", "Osome handled the incorporation of the Singapore company." ], "src": [ 6, 5, 1, 2, 3, 8, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to give people styling advice, a virtual closet or a way to try clothes before buying, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Thread", "years": "2012 to 2020", "funding": "US$40M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Personal styling for men from human stylists helped by machine learning.", "died": "Paying human stylists for every customer cost more than the algorithm saved, and it could not grow cheaply enough.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/625-thread" }, { "name": "Polyvore", "years": "2007 to 2019", "funding": "US$22M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Virtual mood boards on which users combined fashion items into outfits.", "died": "After Yahoo bought it, it could not keep its users against Pinterest and Instagram.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/451-polyvore" }, { "name": "Fashism", "years": "2009 to 2014", "funding": "US$1M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Users posted photos of their outfits and other users rated them.", "died": "Instagram offered fashion posts and much more, and Fashism never added a way to buy, so it had little revenue.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/139-fashism" }, { "name": "Try.com", "years": "2018 to 2022", "funding": "US$4M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Try clothes at home before paying for them, as in a fitting room.", "died": "Shipping physical items for trial cost too much, retailers would not join without subsidies, and Amazon's free returns did the same job.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/668-trycom" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Thread and Try.com failed on cost: one paid human stylists, the other shipped real clothes for people to try. Polyvore and Fashism built outfit boards and ratings that Instagram and Pinterest then gave away inside larger networks. All four needed either expensive people or a large social network to work.", "Aesty replaces both with image models. The try-on that Try.com did with parcels and the advice that Thread paid stylists for are now model calls to OpenAI and Google Gemini, and the outfit boards start from the user's own closet and own body instead of a public feed. That is why a company of two founders could reach US$10,064 of monthly recurring revenue, as TrustMRR's RevenueCat data shows for September 2026. The open risk is the one that hurt Polyvore and Fashism: large platforms, such as Pinterest, Instagram or Google, can add the same try-on to their own apps." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Partly, and it needs some money.", "text": "The method is open to anyone who can build a phone app: take a narrow daily question, answer it with a generated image of the user, and charge a subscription. But the founders had years of experience with neural networks and mobile apps, raised money from Antler, and run a web quiz with paid advertising, so this is not a no-budget project.", "steps": [ "Pick a question that people ask every day, such as what to wear, and answer it with the user's own photos and possessions.", "Let the user bring material they already have: screenshots, the camera roll, mirror selfies.", "Sell short plans as well as yearly ones, and test the prices.", "Put a quiz on the web in front of the app, so that ads can lead to a paywall without an App Store install." ], "open": "The same try-on idea for hairstyles, glasses, makeup or home decoration, and closet tools for one group, for example work clothes or travel packing." }, "watch": [ { "title": "The verified data stopped in September", "text": "TrustMRR says \"RevenueCat API key expired at 2026-09-22T12:57:10.447Z\". Every figure on this page is as of 22 September 2026, and the profile shows zero revenue for each day after that only because no new data arrived. A reader cannot tell from it whether the MRR rise of 79.9% in the last 30 days held." }, { "title": "Monthly revenue has fallen since January", "text": "Verified revenue was US$8,953 in January 2026 and US$4,771 in July, a fall of 46.7%. September recovered to US$5,630 in 22 days, and the MRR is higher than the revenue of the last 30 days, which the sources do not explain." }, { "title": "Claims on the company's pages do not agree", "text": "The home page shows \"★★★★★ 4.8 App Store\" and \"Backed by 60k+ downloads\", while the US App Store page shows 4.5 stars from 71 ratings and the web quiz says \"Join 500K+ women who never stress about what to wear\". The quiz paywall shows an \"Offer expires in 14:59\" timer; whether it resets was not checked. The reviews on the home page, labeled \"Real reviews from the App Store\", are real: three of the eight reviewer names (katedeyneka, LuriaHealth, EllieWalker99) appear on the US App Store page with the same reviews, but the site has edited the wording; the other five were not among the reviews shown on that page." }, { "title": "An 18+ service with a 4+ store rating", "text": "The terms say \"You must be at least 18 years old to use the Service\", and the try-on needs full-body photos of the user, but the App Store rates the app \"4+\". The privacy policy says the photos go to OpenAI and Google Gemini and \"are not used for facial recognition or identity matching\". This is not a face or body scoring app, and nothing in the pages read aims at minors." }, { "title": "Funded, and the team is not public", "text": "Antler invested in 2025 and the founders told Osome that they were raising the next round. No source states the amount or the headcount; the profile and the customer story name only the two co-founders." }, { "title": "The founder's marketing", "text": "The founder-written TrustMRR profile lists app store optimization, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, affiliates and influencers as channels, and the privacy policy describes advertising on Meta, Pinterest and TikTok. The sources do not say which channel brought most customers." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.aesty.ai/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6502579395" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/aesty" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: aesty, verified revenue profile", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/aesty.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile, downloaded on 27 October 2026 (data as of the last RevenueCat sync, 22 September 2026). Source for the MRR, subscriptions, revenue table and the expired key; the description, funding, tech stack and channels are founder-written (grade C)." }, { "title": "App Store: Aesty: AI Stylist & Planner, by Aesty Labs Pte. Ltd.", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/aesty-daily-looks-try-on/id6502579395", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026 (US store). Source for the features, the rating, the age rating, the in-app purchases, the version history and the reviews." }, { "title": "Aesty home page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.aesty.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the review list from the page's script. Source for the download and rating claims and the quoted reviews." }, { "title": "Aesty style quiz, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.aesty.ai/quiz", "grade": "C", "how": "The page loads its screens by script; the quiz texts, the paywall plans and the guide prices were read from the page's script. Source for the web prices and the \"500K+\" claim." }, { "title": "Aesty Terms and Conditions of Use, effective 3 July 2026", "url": "https://www.aesty.ai/terms-and-conditions", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the company, the incorporation date, the age rule, the subscription and refund rules and the photo use." }, { "title": "Aesty Privacy Policy, effective 3 July 2026", "url": "https://www.aesty.ai/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the AI providers, hosting, analytics, payments and advertising partners." }, { "title": "Osome customer story: From Concept to Scale: How Osome Helped Aesty Go Global (modified 10 February 2026)", "url": "https://osome.com/sg/customer-stories/aesty/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A vendor's customer story with quotes from both founders. Source for the founders, Antler, Dubai and Singapore." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine capture list for aesty.ai", "url": "https://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=aesty.ai&output=txt&limit=15&fl=timestamp,original,statuscode,length", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full; the first capture (https://web.archive.org/web/20231215102431/https://aesty.ai/) was opened and shows a Readymag page titled Aesty. Source for the earliest date of the site." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/captureflow/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/captureflow.md", "slug": "captureflow", "name": "CaptureFlow", "country": "Poland", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI content agent that turns a person's recordings, files and links into posts for every social network", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "January 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$4.2K MRR verified by Stripe, October 2026", "sticker": "$4.2K MRR from 9 subscriptions", "outcomeUsd": 50184, "months": 9, "teamLabel": "1 person (TrustMRR), the founder Chris (Krystian) Koronowski; no other headcount published", "fundingLabel": "Bootstrapped (TrustMRR)", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Marketing" ], "product": "A web app in which one person records a short video or voice note, uploads a file, or pastes a link to a podcast or YouTube video, and an AI agent writes posts from it in that person's voice: a LinkedIn post, an X thread, a carousel of slides, a quote image, an infographic and a short video, each shaped for its platform. The agent is trained on the user's past posts and knowledge base. It then schedules and publishes the posts to LinkedIn, X, Threads, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest. \"Routines\" run the drafting and scheduling on a timer, but nothing publishes until the user approves it. Plans are seat-based: Pro at US$49 a month for one person, Business and Agency for teams, with per-client workspaces for agencies.", "why": "Founders and small B2B teams know their subject but do not have time to write for every social network, and generic AI writing does not sound like them. CaptureFlow starts from material the person already produces, a call, a voice note, a recorded talk, and reshapes it into native posts in their voice. TrustMRR, reading the company's Stripe account, shows US$4,182 of monthly recurring revenue from 9 subscriptions and US$28,071 of revenue in total on 27 October 2026, with monthly revenue growing every month of 2026.", "summary": [ "CaptureFlow is an AI content agent: a program that takes one piece of raw material from a person, such as a recorded talk or a voice note, and produces finished social-media posts from it without the person writing from a blank page. It is built around content repurposing, turning a single input into many posts of different shapes, each tailored to one network. The agent is trained on the user's own past posts and knowledge base (a store of the user's documents and writing), so the posts keep the user's voice. It also does cross-platform publishing: it sends the finished posts to LinkedIn, X, Threads, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest, each in that network's native format, on a schedule the user sets.", "The founder is Chris (Krystian) Koronowski, who runs the business as a registered sole business in Poznań, Poland. The About page says CaptureFlow is \"a small, remote team in public beta\"; TrustMRR gives the team size as 1 person and the funding as bootstrapped. TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a company's payment account through an API key, shows for CaptureFlow's Stripe account US$28,071 of revenue in total, all of it in the last twelve months, and monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the monthly value of all active subscriptions) of US$4,182 from 9 active subscriptions on 27 October 2026. The 9 subscriptions are seat-based: the company's largest customer, the Polish B2B agency InStream Group, says in a CaptureFlow case study that it runs 100 paid seats and 35+ client workspaces from one account, which is why so few subscriptions carry this much revenue.", "The revenue figures are grade A: TrustMRR reads them from the company's Stripe account. The founder, the team size and the funding come from the company's own pages and the founder-written part of the TrustMRR profile, grade C. Monthly revenue rose every month from US$351 in January 2026 to US$5,210 in the 30 days before 27 October 2026. The page also shows earlier companies that sold social-media and content-marketing tools to brands and creators, and why they failed." ], "factsCaption": "US$4,182 of Stripe-verified monthly recurring revenue from 9 subscriptions and US$28,071 of revenue in total on 27 October 2026, after monthly revenue grew every month from US$351 in January 2026", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the company's Stripe account through an API key. A grade C value is what the company states on its own pages, in a case study or in the founder-written part of its profile. An \"X\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a product founded in January 2026 to US$28,071 of Stripe-verified revenue nine months later, with revenue rising every month. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "CaptureFlow prices on 27 October 2026, from the pricing page (grade C). Per-month figures for annual billing are calculated on this page", "note": "The pricing page shows three plans, billed monthly or annually (annual saves 20%). A \"Founding Members\" offer gives 30% off for the lifetime of the subscription, shown as closing on 7 November 2026, with a countdown timer. Business starts at 3 seats, Agency at 5, and both are priced per seat. All plans have a 7-day free trial that needs a card, and the FAQ says there are no refunds because of the trial. The founding prices in the table are the discounted per-seat prices the page shows.", "rows": [ [ "Pro", "39", "49", "1 brand voice; founding price US$34 a month" ], [ "Pro, founding annual", "27", "", "calculated: US$34 a month with the 20% annual saving" ], [ "Business", "55", "69", "per seat, from 3 seats; founding price US$48 a seat; 3+ brand voices" ], [ "Agency", "79", "99", "per seat, from 5 seats; founding price US$69 a seat; client workspaces, whitelabel, reseller billing" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 27 October 2026", "value": "US$4,182 from 9 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from the company's Stripe account through an API key, synced 27 October 2026 at 03:04 UTC. 30-day MRR growth: +9.1%, so it was about US$3,833 thirty days before (calculated: 4,182 / 1.091).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the MRR", "value": "about US$50,184 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 4,182 times 12. This is the outcome amount stored for this page. The last 30 days of revenue, US$5,210, give a higher run rate of about US$62,520.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per subscription per month", "value": "about US$465", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 4,182 / 9. Far above the US$49 Pro plan because Business and Agency are priced per seat, and one customer, InStream Group, is on 100 seats under one account (see below).", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time, to 27 October 2026", "value": "US$28,071", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, all of it in the last 12 months. Last 6 months: US$23,287; last 3 months: US$14,326; last 30 days: US$5,210, marked +14.1% against the 30 days before.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month, 2026", "value": "Jan US$351; Feb US$1,263; Mar US$1,553; Apr US$1,618; May US$2,681; Jun US$3,114; Jul US$3,167; Aug US$4,548; Sep US$4,567; Oct US$5,210 to 27 October", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table, synced 27 October 2026. Ten months, each higher than or equal to the one before.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Where the revenue figures come from", "value": "Stripe, through an API key; merchant of record: no", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR's verification section. Google Analytics, DataFast and Google Search Console are also connected, so the traffic figures are measured too: 3,739 visitors in the last 30 days.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Largest customer", "value": "InStream Group: 100 paid seats and 35+ client workspaces from one account", "grade": "C", "note": "CaptureFlow case study, updated August 2026, shared with permission: \"769 posts drafted in ~6 months\", \"28 → 100 paid seats\". InStream is described as \"Poland's largest B2B sales agency\". This is CaptureFlow's own case study, not an independent source.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Founder", "value": "Chris (Krystian) Koronowski", "grade": "C", "note": "About page: \"Meet the founder behind CaptureFlow. Chris Koronowski, Founder & CEO\" and \"Chris (Krystian) Koronowski runs CaptureFlow through his registered business\". TrustMRR's founder link is \"Chris | Building captureflow.ai\". The country is given as Poland.", "src": [ 5, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team and funding", "value": "1 person; bootstrapped", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR founder-written fields: \"Team size: 1 person\", \"Funding: Bootstrapped\". The About page says \"a small, remote team in public beta\". No source names an employee or an investor.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Founded date", "value": "1 January 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR founder-written field. The first verified revenue is from January 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Estimated users", "value": "150; \"100+ founders & teams\" on the site", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR founder-written estimate of 150 users. The home page repeats \"100+ founders & teams\" and \"100+ founders capturing this week\".", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Where customers come from", "value": "the founder lists blog, content marketing, newsletter, SEO, LinkedIn, cold DM, cold email, affiliate, partnerships, podcast and a referral program", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR founder-written channels. No source says which brought the most customers; the InStream case study says that customer decided \"20 minutes from demo to a yes\".", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Platforms it publishes to", "value": "LinkedIn, X, Threads, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page and the cross-platform publishing feature page. Each post is reshaped into the network's native format.", "src": [ 3, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Content formats produced", "value": "text posts, carousels, quote images, infographics, short and long videos, threads", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page: \"One capture. All content formats.\" The user approves each draft before it is scheduled.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Governing law", "value": "Poland; disputes in the courts of Poznań", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms of Service, last updated 17 April 2026: \"These Terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of Poland.\" Subscriptions are billed through Stripe.", "src": [ 7 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "1 January 2026", "what": "Founded date on the TrustMRR profile. First verified revenue the same month: US$351.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "February 2026", "what": "CaptureFlow demos to InStream Group, Poland's largest B2B sales agency, by its own case study. Verified revenue in February: US$1,263.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "when": "March 2026", "what": "InStream's first 28 seats go live. Verified revenue: US$1,553.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "when": "May 2026", "what": "InStream reaches 55 seats. Monthly verified revenue passes US$2,500 for the first time (US$2,681).", "grade": "A", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "when": "August 2026", "what": "InStream reaches 100 seats across its team and 35+ client workspaces, by the case study updated this month. Verified revenue: US$4,548.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "A single payment of US$4,812 is recorded on 20 October. Verified revenue in the last 30 days: US$5,210, the best month so far.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "27 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR shows US$4,182 of MRR from 9 subscriptions and US$28,071 in total. The site advertises a \"Founding Members\" 30%-off offer closing 7 November 2026.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 3 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Niche", "text": "Many tools write social posts from a prompt. CaptureFlow does one narrower thing: it starts from material the user already made, a recorded talk, a voice note, a podcast, a file, and turns it into posts in the user's own voice. The claim it sells is less time, not more reach: in the founder's words on the home page, six hours of writing becomes six minutes of recording." }, { "title": "One capture, many formats", "text": "From a single input the agent produces a LinkedIn post, an X thread, a carousel, a quote image, an infographic and a short video, each shaped for its network. The user approves each draft before it is scheduled, so the person stays responsible for what is published." }, { "title": "Seat-based pricing that grows with the customer", "text": "Pro is one person at US$49 a month; Business and Agency are priced per seat, and agencies run one workspace per client. That is why a company of one founder reached US$4,182 of recurring revenue from only 9 subscriptions: one agency customer alone is 100 seats." }, { "title": "Routines run the repetitive work", "text": "A routine can draft the week's posts every Monday, turn each new recording into several posts, or refill the idea bank, on a timer. Nothing is published without the user's approval, which keeps the posts from being unattended spam." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder-written tech stack on TrustMRR, the company's pages and its terms, read on 27 October 2026. They are grade C except the Stripe payment line, which TrustMRR verifies (grade A).", "items": [ "Frontend: Next.js, React, TypeScript and Tailwind CSS, by the founder-written tech stack.", "Backend and hosting: Supabase, Vercel and AWS.", "AI models: OpenAI and Anthropic, by the founder-written tech stack; the home page says the agent drafts in the user's trained voice.", "Payments: Stripe, which TrustMRR reads for the verified revenue; the terms say \"Subscriptions are managed through Stripe\".", "Email: Resend.", "Analytics: Google Analytics, DataFast and Google Search Console are connected to TrustMRR, so traffic is measured.", "An API, MCP server and CLI for AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) are listed on the site as \"launching soon\"." ], "src": [ 1, 3, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold tools to help brands or creators make and spread content, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Metigy", "years": "2014 to 2022", "funding": "US$14M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "An AI marketing brain that would replace a marketing team for small businesses with machine-made recommendations.", "died": "Small businesses wanted the work done for them, not advice, and the generic recommendations went unused. It burned US$14 million.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2338-metigy" }, { "name": "Pressly", "years": "2011 to 2018", "funding": "US$2.9M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A simple platform to curate content and keep a brand's channels active with less effort.", "died": "Larger suites did curation and much more, and Pressly could not grow past the one feature.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/462-pressly" }, { "name": "Salorix", "years": "2009 to 2014", "funding": "US$3.3M", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "AI that read social-media chatter and told brands what to post to get results.", "died": "It ran out of money as leaner AI startups caught up; even interest from Google did not save its finances.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1845-salorix" }, { "name": "ThinkUp", "years": "2010 to 2017", "funding": "US$1M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Personal analytics that turned a person's social-media activity into insight beyond likes and retweets.", "died": "It stayed tied to the desktop as social media moved to phones, and it neglected marketing.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/624-thinkup" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Metigy, Pressly, Salorix and ThinkUp all sold a layer on top of social media: recommendations, curation, chatter analysis or analytics. Metigy's buyers wanted the work done for them rather than advice, and the others were passed by larger suites or by the move to phones. Each needed either a lot of venture money or a large team to keep up, and none of them wrote the content itself.", "CaptureFlow does the writing. A language model turns one recording into a week of posts in the user's voice, so the value is finished content, not a dashboard of advice. Because the model does the drafting, one founder can run the whole product and charge per seat, and TrustMRR's Stripe data shows US$4,182 of recurring revenue on 27 October 2026 with the money growing every month. The open risk is the one that killed ThinkUp and strained Creator Growth Lab, a similar tool not shown here: the product publishes through the social networks' own interfaces, so a change in their rules or their own AI writing tools could remove the need for it." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, and distribution is the hard part.", "text": "The method needs no money and no audience to copy: take material a person already makes, use a language model to reshape it into posts in their voice, and charge a subscription. What is hard is finding the customers. The founder lists many channels and the biggest customer closed after a single demo, so the result here rests partly on landing one agency that pays for 100 seats.", "steps": [ "Start from what the customer already produces, a recording or a call, not a blank prompt.", "Train the model on the customer's own past posts so the writing sounds like them.", "Make the person approve each draft, so the tool helps a real voice instead of posting unattended.", "Price per seat, so one agency or team can grow the account without you adding staff." ], "open": "The same capture-and-reshape idea for other long material: turning sales calls, support tickets or documentation into posts, help articles or newsletters." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Few subscriptions, one large customer", "text": "The US$4,182 of MRR comes from only 9 Stripe subscriptions, and CaptureFlow's own case study says one of them, InStream Group, runs 100 seats and 35+ client workspaces. So a large share of the revenue depends on one agency customer, and the case study is the company's own, not an independent report." }, { "title": "Young, and growing from a low base", "text": "The product was founded in January 2026 and the all-time revenue is US$28,071. Every month has been higher than the last, but the history is only ten months long, and whether the growth holds is not yet shown." }, { "title": "Marketing claims and mock posts on the site", "text": "The home page shows social-media posts styled as if they were live, attributed to the founder himself (\"Chris Koronowski\"), and figures such as \"3.4× median follower growth in 90 days\" and \"100+ founders\". The named customer quotes (for example Filip Duszczak of InStream) are attributed to real people and the case study says it was \"shared with permission\"; the follower-growth and user-count figures are the company's own and are not independently verified. No earnings claim about users was found; the testimonials describe cost savings and time saved, not money earned." }, { "title": "The founder's own marketing", "text": "The founder-written TrustMRR profile lists cold DMs and cold email among its channels, alongside blog, SEO, newsletter, LinkedIn, affiliate and a referral program. These are the founder's own tactics for finding customers, not features of the product. The sources do not show how the cold outreach was done." }, { "title": "Publishing depends on the social networks", "text": "CaptureFlow schedules and publishes to eight networks through their interfaces. It publishes the user's own content on a schedule and does not offer auto-replies, auto-likes, auto-DMs or fake accounts in the pages read. But a change to any network's rules or publishing access could break part of the product." }, { "title": "Always-on discount", "text": "The site shows a \"Founding Members\" 30%-off-for-life offer with a countdown \"closes Nov 7, 2026\". Whether the deadline resets was not checked. The listed prices in the table are these discounted founding prices." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://captureflow.ai/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/captureflow" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: CaptureFlow, verified revenue profile", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/captureflow.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile, downloaded on 27 October 2026 (synced 27 October 2026). Source for the MRR, subscriptions, revenue table and the Stripe verification; the description, team, funding, founded date, channels and tech stack are founder-written (grade C)." }, { "title": "CaptureFlow pricing page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://captureflow.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the three plans, the seat rules, the founding discount and the no-refund policy." }, { "title": "CaptureFlow home page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://captureflow.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product description, the formats, the platforms, the user claims and the on-site posts." }, { "title": "CaptureFlow case study: InStream Group (updated August 2026)", "url": "https://captureflow.ai/case-studies/instream-group", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A CaptureFlow customer story, shared with permission. Source for the 100 seats, 35+ client workspaces, 769 posts drafted and the seat growth." }, { "title": "CaptureFlow About page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://captureflow.ai/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founder's name and the \"small, remote team in public beta\" description." }, { "title": "CaptureFlow cross-platform publishing feature page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://captureflow.ai/features/cross-platform-publishing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the eight networks and the native-formatting description." }, { "title": "CaptureFlow Terms of Service, last updated 17 April 2026", "url": "https://captureflow.ai/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Polish governing law, the Stripe billing and the ownership of user content." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/opentweet/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/opentweet.md", "slug": "opentweet", "name": "OpenTweet", "country": "Serbia", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Posting layer for X (Twitter): an MCP server, REST API, CLI and scheduler that lets a person or an AI agent post to X without an X developer account", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "December 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$4K MRR verified by Paddle, October 2026", "sticker": "$4K MRR from 231 subscriptions", "outcomeUsd": 48300, "months": 10, "teamLabel": "1 person (TrustMRR), the founder known as Branko; no other headcount published", "fundingLabel": "Bootstrapped (TrustMRR)", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "search", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Marketing" ], "product": "A hosted service that connects a person's own X account with one click, then lets them, their code or an AI agent post to X through a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, a REST API and a command-line tool, with no X developer account. The same account has a calendar, an AI writer trained on the user's voice, an evergreen queue that re-posts the user's best tweets, connectors that turn RSS, GitHub or Stripe events into drafts, and analytics. It also cross-posts the same draft to Bluesky and LinkedIn. Everything goes through the official X API: it does not scrape, drive a logged-in browser or use the user's password. Plans are US$19.99, US$29 and US$49 a month.", "why": "In February 2026 X turned its API into a pay-per-use meter, charging about US$0.015 a post and US$0.20 for a post with a link, and asking every developer to run their own X developer account. OpenTweet sits on top of that: the user connects their account once, and then posts from an agent, a script or a calendar for a flat monthly price. TrustMRR, reading the company's Paddle account, shows US$4,025 of monthly recurring revenue from 231 subscriptions and US$26,888 of revenue in total on 27 October 2026.", "summary": [ "OpenTweet is a posting layer for X (formerly Twitter): a service that holds the connection to a user's X account and offers a single way to publish to it, so that a program never talks to X directly. It is built around the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard from Anthropic that lets an AI assistant call outside tools; OpenTweet's MCP server gives an agent 43 tools, such as create_tweet and schedule_tweet. The same account also has a REST API (a web address a program sends requests to) and a command-line tool, plus a human calendar, an AI writer and analytics. A user connects their own X account with one click, so OpenTweet needs no X developer account, the paid, metered access that X requires of anyone who calls its API directly.", "The founder is known only as Branko (the TrustMRR founder link is \"brankopetric00\"); the TrustMRR profile gives the team size as 1 person, the funding as bootstrapped, and the country as Serbia. TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a company's payment account through an API key, shows for OpenTweet's Paddle account (Paddle is a payment service that also handles sales tax as the seller of record) US$26,888 of revenue in total, all of it in the last twelve months, and monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the monthly value of all active subscriptions) of US$4,025 from 231 active subscriptions on 27 October 2026. Monthly revenue climbed from almost nothing in December 2025 to about US$3,200 to US$4,400 a month over the summer of 2026.", "The revenue figures are grade A: TrustMRR reads them from the company's Paddle account. The founder, the team size and the funding come from the founder-written part of the TrustMRR profile, grade C. The page also shows earlier companies that built tools on top of social-media platforms and their APIs, and died when the platform changed its rules, which is the main risk to a product that lives on X's API." ], "factsCaption": "US$4,025 of Paddle-verified monthly recurring revenue from 231 subscriptions and US$26,888 of revenue in total on 27 October 2026, with monthly revenue up from almost nothing in December 2025", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the company's Paddle account through an API key. A grade C value is what the company states on its own pages or in the founder-written part of its profile. An \"X\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a product founded in December 2025 to US$26,888 of Paddle-verified revenue ten months later. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "OpenTweet prices on 27 October 2026, from the pricing page and the home page (grade C). The annual per-month figure is calculated on this page", "note": "All three plans include the REST API, the CLI and the hosted MCP server with 43 tools, cross-posting to Bluesky and LinkedIn, an evergreen queue and AI writing. The difference is volume: posts a day, link posts a day, AI generations a day, the number of X accounts and API keys. Annual billing saves a stated 17% (the home page shows US$15.83 a month for Pro billed yearly). Every plan has a 7-day free trial that needs a card, and a 7-day money-back guarantee. There is no permanent free plan.", "rows": [ [ "Pro", "16.59", "19.99", "1 X account, 20 posts a day, 1 link post a day, 10 AI generations a day, 3 API keys" ], [ "Advanced", "", "29", "3 X accounts, 100 posts a day, 10 link posts a day, 50 AI generations a day, 10 API keys, analytics" ], [ "Agency", "", "49", "10 X accounts, 300 posts a day, 20 link posts a day, 150 AI generations a day, 25 API keys, analytics" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 27 October 2026", "value": "US$4,025 from 231 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, read from the company's Paddle account through an API key, synced 27 October 2026 at 03:44 UTC. 30-day MRR growth: +7.3%, so it was about US$3,751 thirty days before (calculated: 4,025 / 1.073).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the MRR", "value": "about US$48,300 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 4,025 times 12. This is the outcome amount stored for this page. The last 30 days of revenue, US$4,198, give a similar run rate of about US$50,376.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per subscription per month", "value": "about US$17.42", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 4,025 / 231. Close to the US$19.99 Pro plan, so most subscriptions are the cheapest plan, billed monthly or at the lower annual rate.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, all time, to 27 October 2026", "value": "US$26,888", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, all of it in the last 12 months. Last 6 months: US$21,854; last 3 months: US$11,771; last 30 days: US$4,198, marked +1.7% against the 30 days before.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month", "value": "Dec 2025 US$10; Jan 2026 US$27; Feb US$207; Mar US$2,078; Apr US$2,803; May US$3,700; Jun US$3,238; Jul US$3,359; Aug US$3,628; Sep US$4,384; Oct US$3,455 to 27 October", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table, synced 27 October 2026. A fast rise from March to May, then roughly flat around US$3,200 to US$4,400; September was the best month so far.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Where the revenue figures come from", "value": "Paddle, through an API key; merchant of record: no", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR's verification section. Google Analytics is also connected, so the traffic figure is measured: 45,597 visitors in the last 30 days, a revenue per visitor of US$0.09.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founder, team and funding", "value": "1 person, known as Branko; bootstrapped", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR founder-written fields: \"Team size: 1 person\", \"Funding: Bootstrapped\", founder link \"brankopetric00\", X followers 20,560. No full name and no employee is named in the sources read.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founded date", "value": "1 December 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR founder-written field. The first verified revenue is from December 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Estimated users", "value": "14,000; the site says \"14,000+ users\" and \"80,000+ posts by agents\"", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR founder-written estimate and the home page. These are not payment-verified; the verified figure is 231 paying subscriptions.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Why it exists: X's API became a meter", "value": "about US$0.015 a post, US$0.20 for a post with a link, since February 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Home-page FAQ: \"The official X API and XMCP both require an X developer account and pay-per-use API pricing since February 2026\". OpenTweet charges a flat monthly fee instead and includes a few link posts a day.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "No auto-replies to other people", "value": "blocked by X since 23 February 2026; OpenTweet does not do it", "grade": "C", "note": "FAQ: \"Can my agent reply to other people's posts on X? No... On 23 February 2026 X restricted programmatic replies... only Enterprise access is exempt. OpenTweet posts through the official X API, so the restriction applies to us as well.\" The Replies feature drafts a reply to a post the user picks and the user sends it from X's own composer.", "src": [ 3, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Stated compliance with X's rules", "value": "official API only; no scraping, no browser automation, no password", "grade": "C", "note": "FAQ: \"Scheduled and automated posting is allowed under X's automation rules as long as it goes through the official API on an account you authorized... It does not scrape, it does not drive a logged-in browser session, and it never signs in with your password.\"", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "DM outreach is human-approved", "value": "candidates from real engagement, drafted, then stopped until the user approves", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page, DM Campaigns: \"OpenTweet finds candidates from real engagement, drafts each message, and then stops. Nothing sends until you approve it, and every send goes through the official API rather than a scripted browser.\"", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Networks and formats", "value": "posts, threads up to 25 parts and Articles on X; the same draft cross-posts to Bluesky and LinkedIn", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page. Threads is on the roadmap; Instagram and TikTok are \"not planned\". Analytics are X-only.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "AI writing models", "value": "seven models across Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and xAI", "grade": "C", "note": "Home-page FAQ: \"OpenTweet runs your prompt through any of seven models across Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and xAI... Nothing publishes until you review, edit and approve it.\" The pricing page names Claude, GPT and Gemini models.", "src": [ 3, 4 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "1 December 2025", "what": "Founded date on the TrustMRR profile. First verified revenue the same month: about US$10.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "February 2026", "what": "X turns its API into a pay-per-use meter and restricts programmatic replies on self-serve tiers (23 February). OpenTweet's flat-price model answers the first and it drops auto-replies because of the second.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 6 ] }, { "when": "March 2026", "what": "Verified revenue reaches US$2,078, up from US$207 in February, the month the product starts to sell.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "May 2026", "what": "Verified revenue US$3,700. The paid tiers of X's own API (US$200 and US$5,000) are retired to new signups this month, by OpenTweet's FAQ.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "Best month so far: US$4,384 of verified revenue.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "27 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR shows US$4,025 of MRR from 231 subscriptions and US$26,888 in total. The site lists 14,000+ users and 80,000+ posts by agents.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 3 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Timing", "text": "X turned its API into a meter in February 2026 and asked every developer to run a paid X developer account. OpenTweet launched the same quarter as the layer that hides all of that: connect your account once, post for a flat US$19.99 to US$49 a month. The product's whole pitch is the arithmetic of the meter, which it shows on its own pages." }, { "title": "One key for an agent and for a person", "text": "A post an AI agent schedules over the MCP server and a post the user drags onto the calendar are the same record. The agent writes to the queue; the person can review, edit or reschedule it in the app, or revoke the key in one click. That makes the same subscription useful to a developer, an agent and a human marketer." }, { "title": "Inside X's rules, on purpose", "text": "The product publishes only through the official X API. It does not scrape, drive a logged-in browser or use the user's password, which are the behaviours that get accounts suspended. It does not auto-reply to strangers, because X blocked that in February 2026, and its DM outreach stops until a human approves each message. The compliance is the selling point against riskier tools." }, { "title": "Automation on the user's own account", "text": "Connectors turn RSS, GitHub or Stripe events into drafts, an evergreen queue re-posts the user's best tweets, and auto-retweet re-shares the user's own post hours later to reach a different timezone. All of it acts on the user's own authorized account, so an account can keep posting on a week the owner never opens the app." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder-written tech stack on TrustMRR and the company's pages, read on 27 October 2026. They are grade C except the Paddle payment line, which TrustMRR verifies (grade A).", "items": [ "Frontend: Next.js, by the founder-written tech stack.", "Backend: MongoDB for data, Auth0 for sign-in, and Docker.", "Payments: Paddle, which acts as seller of record for sales tax and which TrustMRR reads for the verified revenue.", "AI writing: seven models across Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and xAI, named on the pricing page (Claude, GPT and Gemini models).", "A hosted MCP server at mcp.opentweet.io with 43 tools, plus an npm package for local use and a CLI.", "Connectors to RSS, GitHub, Stripe and any webhook turn outside events into post drafts.", "Analytics through a connected Google Analytics account, by the TrustMRR verification section." ], "src": [ 1, 3, 4 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database built tools on top of social-media platforms and their APIs, and failed when the platform changed its rules, closed its API or built the feature itself. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Pixelpipe", "years": "2008 to 2013", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A single place to post photos and video to many social networks at once.", "died": "The social networks closed their APIs and added their own cross-posting, so the one-stop tool had nothing left to do.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/435-pixelpipe" }, { "name": "Twitter Fabric", "years": "2014 to 2020", "funding": "US$100M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A toolkit for app developers, from crash reports to analytics, run under Twitter.", "died": "Twitter sold it to Google, which folded it into Firebase, so the tool depended on an owner that lost interest.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/676-twitter-fabric" }, { "name": "Singly", "years": "2011 to 2016", "funding": "US$2.7M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "One API that tamed a developer's social data from many networks.", "died": "It depended on third-party APIs that kept changing, so the single clean interface it sold kept breaking.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/548-singly" }, { "name": "Klout", "years": "2008 to 2017", "funding": "US$40M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A 1-to-100 score of a person's online influence, built from their tweets and posts.", "died": "Twitter and Facebook built better analytics of their own, and access to their data for an outside scorer narrowed.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/280-klout" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Pixelpipe, Twitter Fabric, Singly and Klout all lived on top of social platforms. Each died the same way: the platform closed or changed the API, built the feature itself, or lost interest in the tool. A product that exists only to make another company's platform easier to use holds its business only as long as that platform allows it.", "OpenTweet is the same kind of bet, and it says so by building its whole pitch on one platform change: X's move to a metered API in February 2026. For now the change helps it, because a flat monthly price beats a per-post meter, and OpenTweet uses the official API rather than the browser tricks that get accounts banned. But the same company that created the opening can close it: X could change its API prices again, cut off the one-click connection OpenTweet relies on, or offer its own flat plan. TrustMRR's Paddle data shows US$4,025 of recurring revenue on 27 October 2026, earned inside a window that X controls." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, if you accept the platform risk.", "text": "The method is clear and needs little money: find a painful change a large platform just made, and sell the layer that hides it, through an API and a calendar, for a flat price. The founder caught X's API meter in the same quarter it appeared. The danger is that the business sits entirely on one company's platform, which can take the opening away.", "steps": [ "Watch for a platform that just made its API harder or more expensive to use.", "Sell a flat-price layer on top, with one-click connection and no developer account.", "Use the platform's official API only, so the accounts you post from are not at risk.", "Make the same subscription serve an AI agent, a script and a human, so one account covers several buyers." ], "open": "The same flat-price layer for other metered or hard-to-use APIs: posting to other networks, or wrapping any platform that has just raised its API prices." }, "watch": [ { "title": "The business lives on X's API", "text": "OpenTweet exists because X changed its API, and it posts entirely through that API. The same company can change its prices again, end the one-click account connection, or launch its own flat plan. Every predecessor on this page died when the platform it depended on changed the rules." }, { "title": "Revenue flattened over the summer", "text": "Verified monthly revenue rose fast from US$207 in February to US$3,700 in May 2026, then sat between about US$3,200 and US$4,400 from June to September. The MRR of US$4,025 is at its highest and rose 7.3% in the last 30 days, but the fast early growth has slowed, and October to the 27th shows US$3,455." }, { "title": "What the product does and does not automate", "text": "The pages read show the product posting, scheduling, cross-posting and auto-retweeting the user's own content through the official X API, and explicitly refusing to auto-reply to other people (\"No, and no other tool on a self-serve tier can either\") or to drive a logged-in browser. Its DM outreach drafts messages to people who already engaged and \"stops\" until the user approves each one. Some pages (the dashboard, the /replies, /cross-posting and /calendar paths) are disallowed to ClaudeBot in robots.txt and were not fetched." }, { "title": "The founder is known by a first name only", "text": "The TrustMRR profile names the founder as \"Branko\" with the handle brankopetric00 and 20,560 X followers. The sources read do not give a full legal name or confirm who else, if anyone, works on the product." }, { "title": "User counts are not payment-verified", "text": "The site claims \"14,000+ users\" and \"80,000+ posts by agents\", and TrustMRR's founder-written estimate is 14,000 users. Only the revenue is verified: 231 paying subscriptions. The reviews on the home page (\"5.0 from 7 reviews\") are attributed to named X accounts." }, { "title": "Always-on trial and a price gap", "text": "The TrustMRR founder-written field still says \"from $11.99 a month\", while the live site shows US$19.99 as the lowest plan, so the profile text is out of date on price. Every plan requires a card for the 7-day trial, with a 7-day money-back guarantee." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://opentweet.io/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/opentweet" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: OpenTweet, verified revenue profile", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/opentweet.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile, downloaded on 27 October 2026 (synced 27 October 2026). Source for the MRR, subscriptions, revenue table and the Paddle verification; the description, team, funding, founded date and user estimate are founder-written (grade C)." }, { "title": "OpenTweet home page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://opentweet.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the FAQ. Source for the product description, the pricing, the X API meter, the compliance statements, the DM outreach and the AI models." }, { "title": "OpenTweet pricing page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://opentweet.io/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the three plans, the per-month link-post limits and the annual saving." }, { "title": "OpenTweet Replies feature page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://opentweet.io/features/replies", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the statement that replies are drafted but not auto-sent and that they never touch the X API, because X blocked programmatic replies on 23 February 2026." }, { "title": "OpenTweet Auto-Retweet feature page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://opentweet.io/features/auto-retweet", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the auto-retweet feature, which re-shares the user's own post after a set delay." }, { "title": "robots.txt for opentweet.io, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://opentweet.io/robots.txt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Records that ClaudeBot may read the site but not the /dashboard, /replies, /cross-posting, /ai-prompts, /best-time, /calendar and /api paths, which were not fetched." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/memo-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/memo-ai.md", "slug": "memo-ai", "name": "Memo AI", "country": "Hong Kong", "sector": "Education", "productType": "AI flashcard and study app", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "September 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$29K monthly recurring revenue, December 2024", "sticker": "$29K MRR in 2024", "outcomeUsd": 348000, "months": 15, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders, Jason Chan and Calvin Cheung, both medical students; headcount not published", "fundingLabel": "HK$500,000 from the Cyberport incubation programme; no venture round reported", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "learning", "channel": "audience", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Education" ], "product": "Memo is a web and mobile app for studying. A user uploads course material, such as PDF lecture slides, YouTube lectures, web pages or pasted text, and the app uses large language models to write flashcards, notes, practice tests, mind maps and spoken walkthroughs from that material, with a citation to the page or timestamp. It began in 2023 as PDF2Anki, a tool that turned PDF files into card files for the flashcard program Anki.", "why": "Two medical students built it for a problem they had every day: making flashcards by hand took hours. One co-founder already posted study advice to a large audience on social media, so the first users came from people with the same problem. They charged only when server and model costs forced them to, and the founder's own website reported US$29,000 a month in recurring revenue about 15 months after the launch.", "summary": [ "Memo, formerly PDF2Anki, is a study app from XonLabs Limited, a company in Hong Kong. A student uploads course material and the app writes flashcards from it: short cards with a question or a term on one side and the answer on the other, which the student reviews many times. The app schedules the reviews by spaced repetition, a method that shows a card again shortly before the student is likely to forget it, and it trains active recall, the practice of producing an answer from memory instead of reading the material again. The first version exported the cards to Anki, a free flashcard program that many medical students use. Today the app also writes notes, practice tests and mind maps, and it answers questions about the uploaded files with citations.", "Jason Chan and Calvin Cheung study medicine at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). The Hong Kong news site HK01 reported in May 2024 that in early 2023 they spent about a weekend in the library building a program that turned medical lecture content into flashcards with generative AI, worked on it for eight more months, and launched PDF2Anki in September 2023. Jason Chan wrote the code, and Calvin Cheung handled marketing and user growth. According to HK01, the tool was free until its server costs became too high, and paid plans of about HK$70 and HK$141 a month started when it had 40,000 to 50,000 users. Jason Chan's personal website listed the product's monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the subscription revenue of one month) as US$15,000 in September 2024, US$27,000 in November 2024 and US$29,000 in December 2024, according to archived copies of the page.", "Every revenue figure on this page is the founder's own statement, grade C. No payment processor, buyer or journalist has confirmed a revenue number, and the figures disappeared from his website during 2025, so the revenue today is unknown. The founding story, the early prices and the user count of May 2024 come from a Hong Kong news article, grade B. The page also shows five failed education startups that sold notes, textbooks or study help to students." ], "factsCaption": "A flashcard tool built by two medical students that reached US$29,000 a month in recurring revenue 15 months after its launch, by the founder's own account", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade B value was reported by a journalist. A grade C value is a statement by the founder or by the company's own pages. A grade D value is a third-party estimate. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No revenue value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From flashcards made by hand in a medical school library to a study app with more than 300,000 users. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Memo plans in October 2026, from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "The Pro plan costs US$120 a year when billed yearly. The price of the Max Plan loads by script and could not be read from the page. The page also offers quarterly billing, a first-year discount and payment in local currency. Students with an HKU email address get 3 months of Pro free. In May 2024, under the name PDF2Anki, the two paid plans cost about HK$70 and HK$141 a month according to HK01, about US$9 and US$18 at about HK$7.8 per US$1.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "Included usage to get started, files up to 50 MB" ], [ "Pro", "10", "20", "More monthly usage, Thinking and Pro modes, exports, uploads up to 1 GB" ], [ "Max Plan", "", "", "Highest monthly usage, uploads up to 1 GB" ], [ "Schools and teams", "custom", "custom", "Shared course material, on request" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, December 2024", "value": "US$29,000", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder's personal website, archived on 5 December 2024: \"Memo ($29k MRR)\" and \"Currently at US$29k MRR\". The archived copies of 15 February and 17 April 2025 show the same figure.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, November 2024", "value": "US$27,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived on 9 November 2024: \"memo.cards ($27k MRR)\". The description line on the same copy still said \"$15k MRR\". eBiz Facts reported the figure from his site on 11 November 2024: \"He also lists the revenue of memo.cards there as $27,000 per month\". That is the same claim, not a second source.", "src": [ 2, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, September 2024", "value": "US$15,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived on 18 September 2024: \"memo.cards ($15k MRR)\" and \"Currently at $15k MRR\".", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from September to December 2024", "value": "about 93%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: (29,000 minus 15,000) divided by 15,000 equals 0.933.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the December 2024 figure", "value": "about US$348,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 29,000 times 12. This is the outcome value on this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue after April 2025", "value": "not published", "grade": "C", "note": "The archived copy of 7 October 2025 and the page read on 27 October 2026 show no revenue figure for any product.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Launch", "value": "September 2023, as PDF2Anki", "grade": "B", "note": "HK01, 8 May 2024: 「於去年9月正式推出名為「PDF2Anki」的AI學習應用程式」, \"officially launched an AI learning app named PDF2Anki in September last year\" (translation). The article is from 2024, so the launch year is 2023.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to US$29,000 a month", "value": "15 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: September 2023 to December 2024.", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Users, May 2024", "value": "about 100,000", "grade": "B", "note": "HK01: 「已吸納全球約10萬名用戶」, \"has attracted about 100,000 users worldwide\" (translation), from 30 different fields of study.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Users, October 2026", "value": "more than 300,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page: \"Used by 300,000+ learners, educators, researchers, and professionals in 106+ countries\". A count of accounts, not of paying customers.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Site visits, October 2024", "value": "about 700,000 in one month", "grade": "D", "note": "eBiz Facts, citing the traffic estimator Similarweb: \"700k visits to the site last month\". An estimate by a third party, not a count by the company.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "First paid plans", "value": "about HK$70 and HK$141 a month", "grade": "B", "note": "HK01: after the users reached 40,000 to 50,000, 「每月收費約70港元及141港元」, \"monthly fees of about HK$70 and HK$141\" (translation). Before that the tool was free, and the founders asked for donations when the server load reached its limit at 10,000 to 20,000 users.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Founders", "value": "2 medical students at HKU", "grade": "B", "note": "HK01 names 張天俊 (Calvin Cheung) and 陳志誠 (Jason Chan), second-year medical students in May 2024. Jason Chan designed and maintained the program, and Calvin Cheung handled marketing and user growth. The company's page gives the English names and the roles \"co-founder, product\" and \"co-founder, growth\".", "src": [ 7, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Own money spent before revenue", "value": "more than HK$10,000", "grade": "B", "note": "HK01: 「耗資上萬元來支付平台伺服器及AI運作的成本」, \"spent more than ten thousand dollars to pay for the platform's servers and AI costs\" (translation).", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "HK$500,000 from the Cyberport incubation programme", "grade": "B", "note": "HK01: 「二人獲數碼港孵化計劃提供50萬元」, \"the two received HK$500,000 from the Cyberport Incubation Programme\" (translation). The company's page: \"HK$500K Granted From Cyberport - Bootstrapped & Profitable Since\"; the page gives no year after \"Since\". No venture round is reported in any source read.", "src": [ 7, 8 ] }, { "fact": "AI models, May 2024", "value": "GPT-4, Claude Opus and Llama 3", "grade": "B", "note": "HK01 lists 「GPT-4」, 「nthropic Claude Opus」 and 「Llama3」 (the first letter of Anthropic is missing in the article). The pricing page in October 2026 says \"Multi-model support (GPT-4, Claude, Gemini)\".", "src": [ 7, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Team size", "value": "not published", "grade": "C", "note": "Company page: \"We're a small, focused team founded by two medical students in Hong Kong\". It also lists a chief medical officer and a careers page.", "src": [ 8 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Early 2023", "what": "Calvin Cheung and Jason Chan, medical students at HKU, spend about a weekend in the library building a program that turns medical lecture content into flashcards with generative AI. Making cards by hand takes medical students about four to five hours a day, HK01 reports.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "September 2023", "what": "After eight more months of work, they launch PDF2Anki, which turns PDF files into cards for Anki. The tool is free at first.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "2023 to 2024", "what": "At 10,000 to 20,000 users the servers reach their limit and the founders ask for donations. At 40,000 to 50,000 users they start paid plans at about HK$70 and HK$141 a month.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "8 May 2024", "what": "HK01 reports about 100,000 users in 30 fields of study, the models GPT-4, Claude Opus and Llama 3, and HK$500,000 from the Cyberport incubation programme.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "18 September 2024", "what": "Jason Chan's personal website lists the product, now called memo.cards, at \"$15k MRR\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "9 November 2024", "what": "His website lists \"memo.cards ($27k MRR)\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "11 November 2024", "what": "eBiz Facts reports the US$27,000 a month from his website and an estimate of 700,000 site visits in the previous month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "5 December 2024", "what": "His website lists \"Memo ($29k MRR)\". The same figure is still on the page on 17 April 2025, next to a second product, HealthMaxx, at \"$1300 MRR\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "when": "By 7 October 2025", "what": "The revenue figures are removed from his website.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "Memo calls itself an AI knowledge workspace for students, educators, researchers and professionals, with more than 300,000 users. Pro costs US$10 a month billed yearly or US$20 billed monthly.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 10 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Their own problem, in a group they belonged to", "text": "The founders were medical students who made Anki cards by hand, which HK01 says took about four to five hours a day. They built the tool for themselves first. The first version did one job for one group: it turned lecture PDFs into card files for a program that the group already used." }, { "title": "An audience before the product", "text": "HK01 reports that Calvin Cheung shared his study advice on social media as usual and drew many viewers who said they had the same problem, so the founders opened the tool to them. The company's page lists him as \"creator of over 250k subs across 4 channels\" and counts \"7M+ Views on Socials\". Later an affiliate program paid creators on TikTok, Instagram and X for referrals." }, { "title": "Free first, paid when the costs grew", "text": "The tool was free until its servers reached their limit at 10,000 to 20,000 users. The founders first asked for donations, then started two paid plans at 40,000 to 50,000 users. The free plan still exists, with a usage limit, so new students can try the full workflow before they pay." }, { "title": "Answers from the student's own files", "text": "The app writes cards and notes from the material that the student uploads and shows the page or timestamp each card came from. HK01 reports an accuracy of 90% because the platform does not take information from the internet. Later the product grew from flashcards to notes, practice tests, mind maps and a voice tutor, and its marketing widened from students to researchers and professionals." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the HK01 article (grade B), the company's own pages and the response headers of its website (grade C).", "items": [ "Two founders: Jason Chan, who has written code since he was 12, designed and maintained the system, and Calvin Cheung ran marketing and user growth.", "Models in May 2024: GPT-4 from OpenAI, Claude Opus from Anthropic and Llama 3, according to HK01. The pricing page in October 2026 lists GPT-4, Claude and Gemini, and OpenAI embeddings with 1,536 dimensions for search inside the uploaded files. An embedding is a list of numbers that represents the meaning of a passage, so that passages with a similar meaning can be found.", "The website runs on Next.js, a web framework for React, and is served by Vercel, a hosting service, as its response headers show.", "The founders paid more than HK$10,000 of their own money for servers and AI costs, then received HK$500,000 from the Cyberport incubation programme.", "The site lists apps for macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android. Cards and notes export to Anki, text, PDF and Markdown.", "Customers came from the co-founder's social media audience and from an affiliate program for creators that pays through Wise. The site shows testimonials collected with Senja and has comparison pages against Anki, Quizlet and six other study apps." ], "src": [ 7, 8, 10, 13, 14 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five education startups in the Loot Drop database sold notes, textbooks or study help to students. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Flashnotes", "years": "2010 to 2016", "funding": "US$1.47M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A marketplace where college students sold their class notes and study guides to other students.", "died": "Course Hero and Chegg had more money and a better product, and Flashnotes could not control the quality of notes written by students, according to the database.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/154-flashnotes" }, { "name": "StudyRoom", "years": "2010 to 2013", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "An online place where students shared notes and studied together.", "died": "It did not grow fast enough for the network of students to become useful, and Piazza, which connected to course management systems, took the attention of students and teachers.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1691-studyroom" }, { "name": "Grockit", "years": "2007 to 2015", "funding": "US$44.4M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Preparation for the SAT, GMAT and other exams as a social game in which students studied together and competed.", "died": "Duolingo, Khan Academy and the large test-preparation companies offered similar or better products. Kaplan bought it in 2013, and the database says it lost its direction inside Kaplan.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/196-grockit" }, { "name": "Kno", "years": "2009 to 2014", "funding": "US$73M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Interactive digital textbooks that students could use instead of heavy paper books.", "died": "The large textbook publishers made digital versions themselves at lower prices, and schools moved to digital textbooks more slowly than Kno expected, so it ran out of cash.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/282-kno" }, { "name": "Xuebajun", "years": "2013 to 2021", "funding": "US$150M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Take a photo of a homework problem and get a solution from AI, for students in China.", "died": "It moved from the homework tool to a live tutoring marketplace with low margins, and then China's regulation of tutoring banned that business, according to the database.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2325-xuebajun" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The five predecessors needed content that someone else had to write or own: students' notes at Flashnotes and StudyRoom, publishers' textbooks at Kno, exam questions at Grockit, and homework solutions at Xuebajun. Each spent between US$1.47 million and US$150 million, by the database's figures, to collect that content or the users who would create it, and each lost to companies with more money or a larger library, or was stopped by regulation.", "Memo writes the study material from files that the student already has. A language model turns a lecture PDF into cards, notes and test questions in minutes, so the company needs no library and no network of users who write content. HK01 reported that two students built the first version in about a weekend and launched it after eight months with more than HK$10,000 of their own money. The main cost moved from content to model calls, which the company pays for each time a student generates something." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The product category, only with an audience in one field.", "text": "A tool that turns course files into flashcards is easy to build with today's models, and many apps already do it: Memo's own comparison pages name Anki, Quizlet, RemNote, Knowt, TurboLearn, Coconote, Jungle AI and Gizmo. Memo's advantages were a group of users that the founders belonged to, medical students who already used Anki, and a co-founder with a large study audience on social media.", "steps": [ "Start with a task that you and the people around you do by hand every day, and build the smallest tool that removes it.", "Make the first version fit a tool that the group already uses, as PDF2Anki fitted Anki.", "Post about the problem to an audience of people in the same situation, before and after the launch.", "Keep a free plan with a usage limit, and add paid plans when model and server costs grow with the users." ], "open": "Study tools for one exam or one profession in one language: nursing, pharmacy, law or accounting exams, or national medical licensing exams in countries where the course material is not in English." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Only the founder's own figures", "text": "All three revenue figures come from Jason Chan's personal website, as archived on 18 September, 9 November and 5 December 2024. eBiz Facts repeated the November figure from the same page, so it is not a second source. No payment-processor profile, filing or journalist confirms a revenue number. A reader could look for a payment-processor profile, for example on TrustMRR, or for an interview in which the founders give revenue with a date." }, { "title": "Old figures, then none", "text": "The latest figure, US$29,000 a month, first appeared in December 2024 and was still on the page in April 2025. By October 2025 the page showed no revenue figures. The revenue today, and whether it grew or fell, is unknown." }, { "title": "A study tool marketed to students", "text": "Memo is marketed to students, including a free 3-month offer for HKU students. It writes cards, notes and practice tests from the student's own files for revision. The pages read for this story show no feature that writes assignments, and also no statement that handing in AI text as one's own work is cheating." }, { "title": "The affiliate page", "text": "The affiliate program pays creators on TikTok, Instagram and X a share of the subscription payments of the users they refer. The page says \"Join Our Affiliate Program and Earn Big!\" and \"There is no limit to your payout potential. The more you refer, the more you earn!\" It does not state the commission rate, which it says the affiliate portal shows, and it makes no claim about an amount that affiliates earn." }, { "title": "The owner's other products", "text": "XonLabs Limited also runs HealthMaxx, an AI calorie tracker that the company describes as \"helping people live longer in good health and free from chronic disease\"; Jason Chan's site listed it at \"$1300 MRR\" in April 2025. His site also lists SpeechOn, AI speech therapy for stroke patients that it says is in clinical trials, and FactRecall and Fiscus. Memo's pages link to the XonLabs company page, not to these products." }, { "title": "Founders who are still students", "text": "Both founders are medical students. Jason Chan's site lists his medical degree at HKU from 2022 to 2028 and calls him \"Med Student by Day, Creating Viral Apps by Night\". The company does not publish how many people work on Memo besides the two founders." }, { "title": "Model costs and competitors", "text": "Memo pays model providers each time a student generates cards or notes, and its free plan includes some usage. HK01 reported that the founders asked users for donations when the free tool's server costs became too high. The same models are available to every competitor, and the company's own comparison pages list eight other study apps." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.memo.cards/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Jason Chan, personal website, archived 5 December 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20241205125140/https://www.techjason.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's own page. Source for the US$29,000 MRR. The archived copy of 15 February 2025 is identical." }, { "title": "Jason Chan, personal website, archived 9 November 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20241109100302/https://www.techjason.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the US$27,000 MRR." }, { "title": "Jason Chan, personal website, archived 18 September 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240918172438/https://www.techjason.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the US$15,000 MRR. The copy of 22 July 2024 shows no revenue figure." }, { "title": "Jason Chan, personal website, archived 17 April 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250417234520/https://www.techjason.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The US$29,000 MRR is unchanged, and HealthMaxx appears at US$1,300 MRR." }, { "title": "Jason Chan, personal website, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.techjason.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, and compared with the archived copies of 7 October 2025, 9 February 2026 and 13 July 2026. No revenue figures. Source for his degree dates and his other products." }, { "title": "eBiz Facts, Niall Doherty, 11 November 2024: 21-Year-Old Med Student's App = $27,000 Per Month", "url": "https://ebizfacts.com/jason-chan-memo-cards-27k-month/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in the site's RSS feed (https://ebizfacts.com/feed/?paged=2), downloaded 27 October 2026. It repeats the founder's figure from his website and cites Similarweb for the site visits." }, { "title": "HK01, 洪芷菁, 8 May 2024: 港大醫科生自資研製「記憶卡片」AI程式助溫書　吸納全球十萬用戶", "url": "https://www.hk01.com/%E5%B0%88%E4%B8%8A%E6%95%99%E8%82%B2/1014853/%E6%B8%AF%E5%A4%A7%E9%86%AB%E7%A7%91%E7%94%9F%E8%87%AA%E8%B3%87%E7%A0%94%E8%A3%BD-%E8%A8%98%E6%86%B6%E5%8D%A1%E7%89%87-ai%E7%A8%8B%E5%BC%8F%E5%8A%A9%E6%BA%AB%E6%9B%B8-%E5%90%B8%E7%B4%8D%E5%85%A8%E7%90%83%E5%8D%81%E8%90%AC%E7%94%A8%E6%88%B6", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full, in Chinese. A news article with an interview of both founders. Source for the founding story, the launch month, the early prices, the user count, the models and the Cyberport funding. Translations on this page are this page's own." }, { "title": "XonLabs company page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.xon.so/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company behind Memo. Source for the founders' names and roles, the team description, the Cyberport grant and the other product HealthMaxx." }, { "title": "Memo home page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.memo.cards/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product description, the user count, the former name and the comparison pages." }, { "title": "Memo pricing page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.memo.cards/en/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the plans and prices; the Max Plan price loads by script and could not be read. Also source for the models and embeddings." }, { "title": "Memo About page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.memo.cards/en/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founders' account of how the product started from Anki users at their medical school." }, { "title": "Memo page for HKU students, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.memo.cards/en/hku", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The free 3-month offer for HKU students, signed by Jason and Calvin." }, { "title": "Memo affiliate program page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.memo.cards/en/influencer-program", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the affiliate terms, the platforms and the payouts through Wise." }, { "title": "Memo home page response headers, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.memo.cards/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the HTTP response headers, which show Vercel and Next.js." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/3d-ai-studio/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/3d-ai-studio.md", "slug": "3d-ai-studio", "name": "3D AI Studio", "country": "Germany", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "Browser tool that makes 3D models from text or images with many AI models", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "March 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$300K ARR in 2024 by the founder's account and sold to saas.group, October 2026", "sticker": "Sold after $300K ARR", "outcomeUsd": 300000, "months": 6, "teamLabel": "1 person at the headline figure (founder's post, September 2024); solo founder in July 2025; \"a small team\" in July 2026, headcount not published", "fundingLabel": "None; the press kit says \"Self-funded to profitability\"", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "photos", "channel": "search", "trend": "sold", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2C", "3D design" ], "product": "A web app in which you type a prompt or upload one or more images, choose one of 11 generation engines from different AI companies, and get a textured 3D model. Built-in tools then clean the mesh, repaint the textures, add a skeleton for animation, prepare the file for a 3D printer and export it as GLB, FBX, OBJ, STL, USDZ or BLEND. One credit balance pays for every engine, and the same tools are sold to developers as a REST API.", "why": "It came early. The founder says that in 2023 everyone was building text and image AI while 3D was almost ignored, so he built a prototype in a weekend and indie game studios tried it within 48 hours. He then added each new 3D model soon after it appeared and wrote comparison and tutorial pages, which in July 2025 he said brought more than 80 percent of new sign-ups through Google search.", "summary": [ "3D AI Studio is a web app that makes a 3D model, a file that describes the surface of an object as a mesh of many small triangles or squares together with the images painted on it (the textures), from a text prompt or a photo. It does not depend on one AI model. It is a model aggregator, a product that sells access to the models of several other companies through one account: in October 2026 its models page lists 11 engines, among them Meshy 6, Tripo P1 and P2, Rodin Gen-2.5 by Deemos, Tencent Hunyuan3D, Microsoft TRELLIS 2, ByteDance Seed3D and Hitem3D, plus a default engine called Prism 3.1 that the company presents as its own. Around the generators it offers finishing tools such as retopology, rebuilding a messy mesh with fewer and cleaner polygons so that a game engine or an animator can use it.", "Jan Hammer, who founded the company in Heilbronn in Germany, made 3D animations for large YouTube channels while still at school and then trained as a media designer. He told the German magazine StartupValley in July 2025 that he began programming the tool in 2023 for his own work. On 24 September 2024 he posted on X that it had gone \"From 0-300k ARR in 6 Months as a Indie Hacker!\", with a \"1 Person Team\" and \"60% Profits\", as the website eBiz Facts quoted on 31 October 2024. ARR means annual recurring revenue: the subscription revenue of one month times 12, so US$300,000 ARR is about US$25,000 a month by that founder's statement. In the July 2025 interview he still called himself a solo founder. The company's press kit states US$3.3 million ARR, 1.5 million registered creators and \"a small team\" as of 5 July 2026.", "Both revenue figures are statements by the founder or his company, each with one date, and no payment processor or buyer has confirmed them, so this page carries the badge \"Reported, not verified\" and the headline is graded D. The headline is the 2024 figure because it is the last one with a stated team size of one person; the 2026 team size is not published. The page also shows four earlier companies that built one front door to other companies' services and failed when those suppliers changed course." ], "factsCaption": "From launch to US$300,000 in annual recurring revenue in six months with one person, according to the founder's post of September 2024, and US$3.3 million according to the company's press kit in July 2026", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is a single statement by the founder or the company with one date, not checked by anyone else. A grade C value is the founder's interview or a fact read on the company's own pages or on a provider's page. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a weekend prototype built for his own work to a platform that resells eleven 3D engines and its own API, in about two and a half years. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "3D AI Studio prices in October 2026, read from the home page, the models page and the pricing page (grade C); the pricing page draws its digits by script, so the Pro monthly price could not be read", "note": "Plans are monthly credit allowances. The home page gives the yearly prices: Basic US$12 a month billed as US$144, Studio US$23 a month billed as US$276 and Pro US$139 a month billed as US$1,668. The models page gives Basic at US$19 and Studio at US$29 when billed monthly, and the pricing page says Studio is \"Just $10 more\" than Basic. The discount labels next to the yearly prices (37%, 41% and 7%) do not all match these monthly prices: 41% for Studio would need a monthly price near US$39. The pricing page lists 20 credits for an image-to-3D or text-to-3D generation and free texture, remesh and LOD tools; the models page lists 15 to 70 credits per generation depending on the engine. Every paid plan has a 7-day money-back guarantee.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "free credits for selected tools, no card" ], [ "Basic", "12", "19", "1,000 credits a month, up to 100 assets" ], [ "Studio", "23", "29", "3,500 credits a month, all tools and the API" ], [ "Pro", "139", "", "18,000 credits a month, 3 team seats; monthly price not readable" ], [ "2,000 credits", "34 one-time", "", "credits never expire" ], [ "5,000 credits", "69 one-time", "", "credits never expire" ], [ "35,000 credits", "399 one-time", "", "credits never expire" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, September 2024", "value": "US$300,000", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder on X: \"From 0-300k ARR in 6 Months as a Indie Hacker!\" Read only as eBiz Facts quoted the post on 31 October 2024; X itself was not opened.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Date of the founder's post", "value": "24 September 2024", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: an X post ID contains its creation time. The post that eBiz Facts links, ID 1838560458627752217, decodes to 24 September 2024 (UTC).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue per month implied by the September 2024 figure", "value": "about US$25,000", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$300,000 divided by 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, September 2024", "value": "60%", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder's post as quoted by eBiz Facts: \"60% Profits\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team at the headline figure", "value": "1 person", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder's post as quoted by eBiz Facts: \"1 Person Team.\" eBiz Facts adds that he developed the tool for 4 months before launch.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, July 2026", "value": "US$3.3 million", "grade": "D", "note": "The company's press kit, \"Statistics as of July 5, 2026\". The same page says the founder is \"leading a small team\" and that the company is \"Self-funded to profitability\". No headcount is given.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from September 2024 to July 2026", "value": "11 times in 22 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$3.3 million divided by US$300,000; September 2024 to July 2026. Both inputs are statements by the founder or the company.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Team, July 2025", "value": "1 founder", "grade": "C", "note": "Interview: \"Ich heiße Jan Hammer und arbeite als Solo-Gründer.\" (translation: My name is Jan Hammer and I work as a solo founder.)", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Share of new sign-ups from Google search, July 2025", "value": "more than 80%", "grade": "C", "note": "Interview: \"Heute kommen über 80 Prozent der neuen Anmeldungen über Google-Suche.\" (translation: Today more than 80 percent of new sign-ups come through Google search.)", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Discord community, July 2025", "value": "more than 3,000 members", "grade": "C", "note": "Interview. He says he often ships a feature from the Discord feedback on the same day.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Registered creators and assets, July 2026", "value": "1.5 million creators, 3 million assets", "grade": "C", "note": "Company count in the press kit. The home page says \"1.6M+ creators\" in October 2026.", "src": [ 2, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Generation engines, October 2026", "value": "11", "grade": "C", "note": "Models page: Hitem3D 2.1, Meshy 6, Rodin Gen-2.5, Prism 3.1, Tripo P2, Tripo P1, Hunyuan3D 3.1 and 3.0, TRELLIS 2, Seed3D 1.0 and Pixal3D.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Relation to Tripo", "value": "\"through their API partnership\"", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's own Tripo comparison page. No statement by Tripo was found.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Relation to Tencent Cloud", "value": "technical integration in November 2025, expanded partnership in March 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Company press release of 19 March 2026, which quotes Tencent Cloud. It says Tencent HY 3D Global \"has become the backbone of our core 3D generation feature\".", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Legal form", "value": "a sole proprietorship, \"Hammer Creations, Inhaber Jan Hammer\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Imprint page. \"Inhaber\" means owner.", "src": [ 15 ] }, { "fact": "Affiliate commission", "value": "up to US$417 per sale", "grade": "C", "note": "The affiliate page on Lemon Squeezy: \"earn up to $417.00 on each sale\".", "src": [ 16 ] }, { "fact": "Sale", "value": "acquired by saas.group, announced 22 October 2026; price not disclosed", "grade": "A", "note": "The buyer's own announcement: \"saas.group announces the acquisition of 3D AI Studio\", its \"27th successful acquisition\". It states no price, no revenue and no terms.", "src": [ 19 ] }, { "fact": "Registered creators, October 2026", "value": "more than 1.9 million", "grade": "A", "note": "saas.group's announcement: \"more than 1.9 million registered creators across 25+ countries, who have generated over 4 million assets to date\".", "src": [ 19 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the headline figure", "value": "6 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the founder's \"6 Months\" before 24 September 2024 puts the launch in March 2024. The Internet Archive first saved 3daistudio.com on 20 February 2024.", "src": [ 1, 17 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2023", "what": "Hammer starts to program a tool that makes 3D models with AI, for his own animation work. He studies NeRF and diffusion methods and puts a weekend prototype online; indie studios test it within 48 hours.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "20 February 2024", "what": "The Internet Archive saves the 3daistudio.com home page for the first time.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 17 ] }, { "when": "March 2024", "what": "Launch, by the founder's count of six months before his September post. eBiz Facts writes that he worked on the tool for 4 months before launch.", "grade": "X", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "24 September 2024", "what": "The founder posts on X that the tool went from zero to US$300,000 ARR in 6 months, with a one-person team and 60% profit.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "31 October 2024", "what": "eBiz Facts quotes the post under the title \"$300K ARR From A Tool He Launched 6 Months Ago\".", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "11 July 2025", "what": "StartupValley interview: he works as a solo founder, more than 80% of new sign-ups come from Google search, and the Discord server has more than 3,000 members.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "Technical integration with Tencent Cloud's 3D model. The company later writes that it has since been \"reclaiming market share\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "9 March 2026", "what": "Public REST API for developers, with Tencent Hunyuan 3D, Microsoft TRELLIS.2 and Google Gemini and ByteDance Seedream image models, paid by prepaid credits from US$10.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "19 March 2026", "what": "At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the company announces an expanded partnership with Tencent Cloud.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 9 ] }, { "when": "12 April 2026", "what": "Team workspaces and shared projects for studios.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "20 June 2026", "what": "Flow, a node editor in the browser that chains image, 3D and video steps into reusable workflows.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "5 July 2026", "what": "The press kit states US$3.3 million ARR, 1.5 million registered creators and a small team.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The models page lists 11 engines; the home page says 1.6 million creators.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "when": "22 October 2026", "what": "saas.group announces that it has bought 3D AI Studio. The founder: \"I built 3D AI Studio alone, from a small town in Germany\". The buyer calls it \"a profitable, self-funded AI product\" built \"almost single-handedly\". No price is published.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 19 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Early in a category that others ignored", "text": "The founder told StartupValley that his moment of decision came when he saw everyone rush into text and image AI while 3D stayed almost untouched, and his own clients waited days for simple models. A rough first version was enough: \"Unsere erste Iteration war technisch nicht gut und optisch nicht schön\" (translation: our first version was technically not good and visually not pretty), but it brought real feedback." }, { "title": "Every engine in one account", "text": "Each 3D model maker sells its own web app with its own credits. 3D AI Studio puts Meshy, Tripo, Rodin, Hunyuan3D and others behind one credit balance, so a user can run the same image through two engines and keep the better model. Its models page puts the cost of four separate subscriptions at about US$160 a month or more, against US$19 a month for its own Basic plan; these are the company's own numbers." }, { "title": "A search page for every rival", "text": "The site has pages for \"Meshy alternative\", \"Tripo alternative\", model comparisons and use cases from Roblox to resin printing. The founder said in July 2025 that blog articles, Reddit posts about his progress and answers in forums started the growth, and that Google search now brings more than 80 percent of new sign-ups." }, { "title": "Finishing tools around the raw model", "text": "Raw AI meshes rarely work in a game or a printer as they are. Remeshing, texturing, splitting for printing, rigging and conversion are built in, and the pricing page says texture, remesh and LOD tools are free on every plan. This keeps users in one place after the generation step." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's interview and the company's own pages, including its third-party software notices. They are grade C.", "items": [ "Started in 2023 as a tool for his own 3D work; a weekend prototype went online first and real users came within 48 hours.", "The web app uses Next.js 16 and React 19, three.js, a library for 3D graphics in the browser, and React Flow, a library for node editors, according to the third-party licenses page.", "Product analytics with PostHog and Vercel Analytics, and error tracking with Sentry, listed on the same licenses page.", "3D engines come from other companies: Tencent Hunyuan3D through a partnership with Tencent Cloud, Tripo through what the company calls an API partnership, plus Meshy, Rodin by Deemos, Microsoft TRELLIS 2, ByteDance Seed3D and Hitem3D.", "Image models for the reference pictures: Google Gemini 3 Pro, Gemini 3.1 Flash and Gemini 2.5 Flash and ByteDance Seedream V5 Lite, named in the API launch release.", "Growth: technical blog articles, posts on Reddit and answers in forums, then search pages; an affiliate program hosted on Lemon Squeezy; a Discord server for feedback.", "He tells other founders to automate routine work with AI tools early, such as marketing texts, simple support answers and SEO analyses." ], "src": [ 3, 14, 8, 10, 7, 16 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database built one front door to services that other companies owned. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Singly", "years": "2011 to 2016", "funding": "US$2.7M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "One API that let developers reach users' data on many social networks.", "died": "It depended on other companies' APIs, which changed and broke, and broader automation tools such as Zapier and IFTTT took the market.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/548-singly" }, { "name": "Fanhattan", "years": "2010 to 2016", "funding": "US$21M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "One search box for movies and TV shows across all streaming services.", "died": "Netflix, Roku and Apple built their own discovery, and the middleman lost its place.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/137-fanhattan" }, { "name": "SetJam", "years": "2009 to 2013", "funding": "US$2.1M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "One hub to search and open TV shows and movies from many streaming platforms.", "died": "It lacked the license agreements to embed the content, and the large services grew their own libraries and apps.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/532-setjam" }, { "name": "Real Artists", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$3M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A cloud animation studio for independent artists and small studios.", "died": "Large software makers added the same features to tools that artists already used, and small customers could not pay enough.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1073-real-artists" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Singly, Fanhattan and SetJam each sold a single entrance to services that belonged to someone else, and each died when the owners of those services changed their APIs, built their own discovery or refused licenses. 3D AI Studio is the same kind of bet: Meshy, Tripo and Rodin all sell their own web apps to the same creators, and Tripo's terms forbid making its model service available to end users without its written consent. Real Artists shows the other risk: a tool for small studios loses when the big tools add the same feature.", "Two things differ. First, the 3D model makers sell paid APIs and want other products to use them, and one of them, Tencent Cloud, is quoted in the company's press release as a partner, so the supply is a contract and not a scrape. Second, 3D AI Studio does work that a single model maker has little reason to do: it compares rival engines on the same image and adds the remeshing, splitting, rigging and conversion steps that turn a raw mesh into a usable file. The founder's own speed matters too: he says he often tests a new 3D model on the day it appears, before larger companies finish their approval process." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The head start, no.", "text": "Being early with 3D generation in 2024 was a timing advantage that is gone; many companies now sell 3D models from text. What a reader can copy is the structure: one account over several paid model APIs, finishing tools that the model makers do not build, and search pages that answer \"which model is best for this job\". It works only with real API agreements, because the suppliers can close access.", "steps": [ "Pick a kind of output (3D, audio, video) where several model makers sell paid APIs and none is best at everything.", "Read each provider's API terms and get written approval before you offer its model to your users.", "Add the steps after generation that every user needs, and make some of them free.", "Write a comparison or guide page for every rival and every use case, and answer questions in the forums where your users already are." ], "open": "Areas where models multiply faster than users can test them: video, music, voice and image editing, and the tools for 3D printing and game assets that sit after the generation step." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline figure of US$300,000 ARR rests on one founder post on X, dated 24 September 2024 by its post ID, which was read only as eBiz Facts quoted it on 31 October 2024; X needs a login and was not opened. The later figure of US$3.3 million ARR as of 5 July 2026 comes from the company's own press kit. No payment processor, tax record, investor or buyer has confirmed either number, and they are one statement each, not a series. A reader could look for a payment-processor-verified revenue profile, or an interview in which the founder shows a revenue dashboard." }, { "title": "The sale price is not published", "text": "saas.group's announcement of 22 October 2026 confirms the acquisition and quotes both sides, but states no price, no revenue and no terms. The buyer's words, \"a profitable, self-funded AI product\" built \"almost single-handedly\", agree with the founder's earlier statements; the founder says that joining saas.group means he can build the product \"with a team behind me\"." }, { "title": "Why the headline is the 2024 figure", "text": "The founder wrote \"1 Person Team\" in September 2024 and called himself a solo founder in July 2025. The July 2026 press kit says only that he is \"leading a small team\". This site requires grade A or B money evidence when a team may have 6 to 10 people, so the larger 2026 figure is shown in the table but not used as the headline." }, { "title": "The engines belong to other companies", "text": "Most engines in the product are other companies' models. Tripo's Terms of User Agreement (updated 11 July 2025) say users shall not \"make the Generative 3D Foundation Model Service available to any third party, including end users, without the prior written authorization and consent of Holymolly\". 3D AI Studio says it uses Tripo's models \"through their API partnership\", and it also offers Tripo P1 and P2 through its own API; no statement by Tripo was found. Meshy's website disallows Claude's crawler in its robots.txt, so Meshy's terms were not read; its API documentation sells prepaid API credits. Hyper3D, the maker of Rodin, lists an official API. The only partnership that the company announced in a press release is with Tencent Cloud. If a provider ends access, that engine leaves the product." }, { "title": "A lost market share, by the company's own account", "text": "The Tencent Cloud press release of 19 March 2026 says that since November 2025 the company has been \"reclaiming market share\", which means it had lost share before. No source gives monthly revenue for 2025." }, { "title": "Ratings and customer stories were not checked", "text": "The home page and the models page show a Trustpilot rating of 4.6 out of 5 from 167 reviews and named customer stories from game, animation and 3D-printing studios. Trustpilot disallows Claude's crawlers, so the rating was not checked, and the customer stories were not checked with the customers. The page source has no structured-data rating." }, { "title": "Affiliate page wording", "text": "The affiliate page states a commission, \"earn up to $417.00 on each sale\", which is a stated commission and not a claim about what users earn with the product. It also carries the line \"Affiliate partnerships are one of the simplest yet most profitable ways to make money online\", on a page that says it is hosted by Lemon Squeezy's affiliate hub." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.3daistudio.com/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "eBiz Facts, 31 October 2024: $300K ARR From A Tool He Launched 6 Months Ago (by Niall Doherty)", "url": "https://ebizfacts.com/jan-hammer-3d-ai-studio-300k-year/", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full, downloaded 27 October 2026, and also in the site's RSS feed. It quotes the founder's X post (x.com/CreatedByJannn/status/1838560458627752217); the post itself was not opened. Source for the ARR, team and profit figures." }, { "title": "3D AI Studio press kit, statistics as of 5 July 2026", "url": "https://www.3daistudio.com/media/press", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. Company statements: US$3.3 million ARR, 1.5 million creators, a small team, self-funded." }, { "title": "StartupValley, 11 July 2025: 3D AI Studio: Individuelle 3D-Modelle per KI in Sekunden erstellen", "url": "https://startupvalley.news/de/3d-ai-studio-3d-modelle-ki/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full (German; quotes are translated on this page). Founder interview. Source for his background, the solo-founder statement, the growth channels and the Discord size." }, { "title": "3D AI Studio home page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.3daistudio.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Engines, tools, yearly prices, creator count and reviews shown." }, { "title": "3D AI Studio models page: Every Major AI 3D Model. One Studio.", "url": "https://www.3daistudio.com/Models", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the 11 engines, credits per engine, monthly prices and the subscription comparison." }, { "title": "3D AI Studio pricing page", "url": "https://www.3daistudio.com/Pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Plan limits, one-time credit packs and credit costs; the plan digits are drawn by script and were taken from the home and models pages." }, { "title": "3D AI Studio press release, 9 March 2026: 3D AI Studio Opens Its Full Platform as a Public API for Developers and Enterprises", "url": "https://www.3daistudio.com/media/press-releases/3dai-studio-public-api-launch", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the API launch and the models it offers." }, { "title": "3D AI Studio press release, 19 March 2026: 3D AI Studio and Tencent Cloud Expand Strategic Partnership to Scale AI-Powered 3D Content Creation", "url": "https://www.3daistudio.com/media/press-releases/tencent-cloud-partnership-mwc-2026", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Tencent Cloud integration and the market-share remark." }, { "title": "3D AI Studio press releases list", "url": "https://www.3daistudio.com/media/press-releases", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Dates of the four releases from March to June 2026." }, { "title": "3D AI Studio guide page: Tripo AI alternatives", "url": "https://www.3daistudio.com/3d-generator-ai-comparison-alternatives-guide/tripo-alternative", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the \"API partnership\" claim about Tripo." }, { "title": "Tripo AI Terms of User Agreement, last updated 11 July 2025", "url": "https://www.tripo3d.ai/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on prohibited uses and third parties. Source for the clause on making the model service available to end users." }, { "title": "Meshy API documentation: Pricing", "url": "https://docs.meshy.ai/en/api/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Shows that Meshy sells a paid API with prepaid credits. Meshy's main site disallows ClaudeBot, so its terms were not read." }, { "title": "Hyper3D help article: Official Hyper3D Links and Scam Safety", "url": "https://hyper3d.ai/help/articles/official-hyper3d-links-and-scam-safety", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Lists the official Rodin API documentation and API domain." }, { "title": "3D AI Studio third-party software notices, version 1.2, 11 September 2026", "url": "https://www.3daistudio.com/licenses", "grade": "C", "how": "Searched for package names. Source for Next.js, React, three.js, React Flow, PostHog, Vercel Analytics and Sentry." }, { "title": "3D AI Studio imprint", "url": "https://www.3daistudio.com/Impressum", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the legal form; the address is not repeated here." }, { "title": "3D AI Studio affiliate program on Lemon Squeezy", "url": "https://3daistudio.lemonsqueezy.com/affiliates", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the commission and the page wording." }, { "title": "Internet Archive capture index for 3daistudio.com", "url": "https://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=3daistudio.com&output=json&limit=5", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the first five captures. The first is dated 20 February 2024." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." }, { "title": "saas.group, 22 October 2026: saas.group announces the acquisition of 3D AI Studio", "url": "https://saas.group/blog/saas-group-announces-the-acquisition-of-3d-ai-studio/", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full through the site's WordPress posts API on 27 October 2026 (published 26 October 2026, dateline 22 October 2026). The buyer's own statement of the acquisition, with quotes from both sides; no price." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/chatprd/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/chatprd.md", "slug": "chatprd", "name": "ChatPRD", "country": "USA", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI assistant that writes product requirement documents for product managers", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "27 November 2023", "outcomeLabel": "At least US$100K total revenue, June 2024", "sticker": "Six-figure revenue in 6 months", "outcomeUsd": 100000, "months": 7, "teamLabel": "1 founder for the first 6 months; a few contributors by November 2024; 2 people on the team page in October 2026", "fundingLabel": "None reported in the sources read", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "documents-data", "channel": "audience", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Productivity" ], "product": "A chat assistant for product managers. You describe a feature or paste notes, and it writes a product requirements document, reviews and scores an existing one, coaches you on the plan, and sends the result to tools such as Linear, Google Drive or Slack. Teams share projects, templates and documents in one workspace, and the paid plans use premium models from OpenAI and Anthropic.", "why": "The founder was the chief product officer of a software company and knew the job that she automated. She first released her prompt as a free custom GPT in OpenAI's store, where it became the most popular product management GPT, and then charged from the first day of her own web app. She posted the work in public on X to an audience of product people.", "summary": [ "ChatPRD writes a PRD, a product requirements document: the text in which a product manager describes what a feature must do, for whom, and how success will be measured, so that engineers and designers can build it. The product is a chat assistant on top of large language models from OpenAI and Anthropic, with templates, a score for each document, saved project knowledge and integrations with the tools where software teams work. In October 2026 its home page says it is used by more than 250,000 product managers.", "Claire Vo, then chief product officer of the software company LaunchDarkly, built it for herself in 2023. She wrote a long prompt for ChatGPT that produced a multi-page PRD in a few hours, published it as a free custom GPT, and then built a web app during Thanksgiving week. She launched chatprd.ai on X on 27 November 2023 with a Stripe subscription at US$1 a month and wrote that more than 100 users paid in the first week. On 20 June 2024 the newsletter Every, after Dan Shipper interviewed her for its podcast AI & I, said that the product was \"Bringing in Six Figures\" as a side project. In her own one-year review of 27 November 2024 she wrote \"Six figures in revenue in the first 6 months\" and \"Six figures and growing in ARR\", with thousands of paying users.", "\"Six figures\" means at least US$100,000 and less than US$1 million, so this page uses US$100,000 as the headline value: the lowest amount that both statements allow. Both come from the founder or her interviewer, and no payment processor has confirmed them, so the grade is C. The page also shows four earlier companies that built an assistant for one kind of office work and lost to larger platforms." ], "factsCaption": "At least US$100,000 in revenue in the first six months, as the founder and her interviewer reported in 2024, from a US$1 subscription and a free custom GPT", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a statement by the founder in her own blog or interview, or a count read on the company's own pages. The one grade D value is an estimate by a third-party website. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a prompt written between meetings to a product with a quarter of a million users, in under three years. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "ChatPRD prices in October 2026 from the company's pricing page (grade C), with two earlier prices for comparison", "note": "The pricing page shows yearly prices: Pro at US$15 a month, billed as US$179 a year, and Teams at US$29 per seat a month, billed as US$349 per seat a year. It says yearly billing saves up to 25% against monthly billing; the monthly prices are drawn by script and could not be read. Pro and Teams have a 14-day trial with a card. Enterprise adds single sign-on and onboarding at a price agreed with sales. The first price in November 2023 was US$1 a month, and in July 2024 eBiz Facts wrote that premium plans started at US$5 a month.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "3 chats of limited length, basic model" ], [ "Pro", "15", "", "unlimited chats and documents, premium models" ], [ "Teams", "29 per seat", "", "shared workspace, real-time editing, enterprise search" ], [ "Enterprise", "custom", "", "single sign-on, admin controls, onboarding" ], [ "First plan, November 2023", "", "1", "founder's blog; historical" ], [ "Premium, July 2024", "", "from 5", "eBiz Facts; historical" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue in the first six months, to about May 2024", "value": "six figures, at least US$100,000", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder's one-year review: \"Six figures in revenue in the first 6 months\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue reported in June 2024", "value": "six figures", "grade": "C", "note": "Every's podcast page of 20 June 2024: \"She Built an AI Product Manager Bringing in Six Figures—As A Side Hustle\". eBiz Facts quotes Dan Shipper's post: \"now used by over 10,000 product managers and is pulling in six figures in revenue\".", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, November 2024", "value": "six figures and growing", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder's one-year review. ARR is one month of subscription revenue times 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Growth rate, November 2024", "value": "20% to 30% a month", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder: \"20-30% growth MoM every month, organically\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "eBiz Facts' guess of monthly revenue, July 2024", "value": "more than US$10,000", "grade": "D", "note": "The site's own estimate from the words \"six figures\", not a figure that the founder gave.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Paying users in the first week", "value": "more than 100", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder's one-year review, at US$1 a month through Stripe.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Paying users, November 2024", "value": "thousands", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder's one-year review. Over 25,000 sign-ups on the app and 500 teams on the Teams plan, which launched in August 2024.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Users", "value": "10,000 in June 2024, 50,000 in May 2025, more than 250,000 in October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder's interview as quoted by eBiz Facts, her product update of 31 May 2025, and the home page.", "src": [ 3, 7, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Custom GPT in OpenAI's store, November 2024", "value": "more than 200,000 chats, 4.5-star rating", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder calls it the most popular product management GPT. It is free; the GPT store did not let builders charge.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Work output in the first year", "value": "more than 2,000 code commits; 2 to 5 features a week", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder's one-year review: the commits were \"mostly by me\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 person for the first 6 months; two developers from July 2024; 2 people on the team page in October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "One-year review: \"For the first 6 months, the team was me.\" By November 2024 she names helpers for growth, engineering, sales and search marketing. The October 2026 team page lists the founder and chief executive and a head of growth.", "src": [ 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No source read for this page mentions a funding round or says that the company is bootstrapped. The company is ChatPRD, Inc.", "src": [ 4, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Other offers on the company's site, October 2026", "value": "executive AI coaching, an AI consulting practice and a paid course", "grade": "C", "note": "The services page links to CXO.dev, which it calls \"Claire Vo and Zach Davis's AI consulting practice\", and to a two-day course on Maven.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the headline figure", "value": "7 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 27 November 2023 to June 2024. In the interview she gave the launch day as \"November 28th\".", "src": [ 1, 3 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2023", "what": "As chief product officer at LaunchDarkly, she writes a PRD for a technical project with a long ChatGPT prompt in a few hours. Her team asks how she did it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "November 2023", "what": "She puts the prompt into a custom GPT called ChatPRD, shares it with her team, and builds a web app in VS Code during Thanksgiving week.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "when": "27 November 2023", "what": "Launch of chatprd.ai on X with a Stripe subscription at US$1 a month. More than 100 paying users in the first week.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "May 2024", "what": "End of the first six months, in which she later wrote that the product made six figures in revenue with her as the only person.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "20 June 2024", "what": "Every publishes Dan Shipper's interview: six figures as a side project, 10,000 users.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "when": "July 2024", "what": "Two developers join; eBiz Facts reports premium plans from US$5 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "when": "August 2024", "what": "Teams plan; 500 teams sign up by November.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "27 November 2024", "what": "One-year review: thousands of paying users, six figures and growing in ARR, 20% to 30% growth a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "31 May 2025", "what": "50,000 users and more than 500,000 chats.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "More than 250,000 product managers. She runs ChatPRD full time, hosts the How I AI podcast, and the site also sells coaching and consulting.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 4, 8 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "An expert automating her own job", "text": "She had been chief product officer three times and wrote PRDs herself. The prompt that became ChatPRD encoded what she knew about a good requirements document, so the first users were people with the same job and the same deadline." }, { "title": "A free GPT as the shop window", "text": "OpenAI's GPT store let anyone publish a custom GPT but not charge for it. She used the free GPT for reach, and it became the most popular product management GPT with more than 200,000 chats by November 2024, by her count. The paid product was her own web app." }, { "title": "Charge on the first day, then raise the price", "text": "She wrote that she started at US$1 a month to test whether people would pay, got more than 100 paying users in the first week, and raised the price as features arrived: eBiz Facts reported US$5 a month in July 2024, and the pricing page lists US$15 a month billed yearly in October 2026." }, { "title": "Building in public", "text": "She launched on X and, according to eBiz Facts, said that building in public on X, where she had about 21,000 followers, had been key. Later the company added a YouTube channel, a weekly newsletter and a Slack community." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's blog, her interview and her own website. They are grade C.", "items": [ "The first version was a long prompt in ChatGPT, then a custom GPT in OpenAI's store.", "The web app was written in VS Code during Thanksgiving week 2023; she says ChatGPT helped her build it faster.", "Payments through Stripe from the first day.", "More than 2,000 code commits in the first year, mostly by the founder, with two to five features shipped every week.", "The paid plans offer premium models from OpenAI and Anthropic; the pricing page says the company uses model APIs that do not train on customer data.", "In 2026 she writes on her own site that she uses OpenAI's Codex for ChatPRD work such as its continuous-integration tests." ], "src": [ 1, 3, 5, 10 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database built a software assistant for one kind of office work and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Kite DevTool", "years": "2014 to 2024", "funding": "US$21M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "AI code completion for programmers inside their editor, years before GitHub Copilot.", "died": "It could not get users to pay for the freemium product, and GitHub Copilot, built on OpenAI's models, had the distribution and the better model.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2491-kite-devtool" }, { "name": "Niles", "years": "2017 to 2020", "funding": "US$2.8M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A Slack bot that answered questions from a company's collected knowledge.", "died": "Slack's own features and cheaper competitors did the same job.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1031-niles" }, { "name": "Interstate", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Visual roadmaps that teams could share to plan and track projects.", "died": "Trello and Asana, with more money, offered planning that teams already used.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1612-interstate" }, { "name": "Answerly", "years": "2013 to 2016", "funding": "US$550K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "FAQ chatbots that answered customer questions so that support staff saw only the hard ones.", "died": "Language processing was too weak at the time, and Zendesk and Intercom owned the market.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2168-answerly" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Each of the four sold an assistant for one task and lost to a platform that added the task to a product people already used: GitHub with Copilot, Slack with its own search, Trello and Asana with planning. ChatPRD faces the same risk from ChatGPT, Claude and the document tools that add writing help, and the founder started on exactly that platform, as a free GPT.", "Two things differ. The language models that Kite and Answerly lacked are now sold by API, so a single expert could build the assistant in a week without training a model. And the product is narrow on purpose: the templates, scoring and project knowledge carry one profession's methods, written by someone who did the job, and the integrations put the document where the team works. Whether that is enough against general assistants is open; the founder herself writes that she expects product management to change." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, if you are the expert.", "text": "The method is open to anyone who does a document-heavy job well: write the prompt that does your own work, give it away where people already look for AI tools, and charge for a web app with the features a team needs. The part that is hard to copy is the founder's position: three times a chief product officer, with an audience of product people on X.", "steps": [ "Automate one document that you write often and that others in your profession also write.", "Publish a free version inside a store where people already search for AI tools.", "Launch a paid web app at a very low price on day one to test willingness to pay, then raise it with each feature.", "Add the team plan early: shared templates, projects and integrations are what companies pay for." ], "open": "Other jobs built around one standard document: grant proposals, clinical trial protocols, audit reports, legal briefs, engineering design reviews." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Self-reported, and a wide range", "text": "\"Six figures\" covers anything from US$100,000 to US$999,999. The two statements come from the founder's blog and from an interviewer who repeated what she told him; no payment processor, filing or buyer has confirmed them, and no exact figure has been published since November 2024." }, { "title": "No newer revenue figure", "text": "The user count grew from 10,000 in June 2024 to more than 250,000 in October 2026, but the sources give no revenue after November 2024, so the trend of revenue is unknown." }, { "title": "Funding was not checked in a register", "text": "No source read for this page states a funding round, and none says the company is bootstrapped. The founder writes on her own site that she invests \"in AI, dev tools, and hard things\"." }, { "title": "Coaching and consulting on the same site", "text": "In October 2026 the services page sells executive AI coaching, a course on Maven and AI transformation work through CXO.dev, \"Claire Vo and Zach Davis's AI consulting practice\". The software is the product in this story; revenue from these services is not part of any figure on this page." }, { "title": "The platform can do it too", "text": "ChatPRD runs on OpenAI and Anthropic models and began as a GPT in OpenAI's store. The model makers' own assistants can write a PRD from a prompt, so the product depends on doing it better than a general assistant." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.chatprd.ai/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "ChatPRD blog, 27 November 2024: ChatPRD: The First Year (by Claire Vo)", "url": "https://www.chatprd.ai/blog/chatprd-the-first-year", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's own review. Source for the launch, the first price, the revenue and ARR statements, the growth rate and the team." }, { "title": "Every, 20 June 2024: She Built an AI Product Manager Bringing in Six Figures—As A Side Hustle (by Dan Shipper)", "url": "https://every.to/podcast/she-built-an-ai-product-manager-bringing-in-six-figures-as-a-side-hustle-e46be9bc-f426-424d-992d-5a71fd7ac5e4", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the free part; the rest is behind a sign-up wall. Source for the six-figure statement and its date." }, { "title": "eBiz Facts, 4 July 2024: Built Her Chatbot in a Weekend, Now Earning $10K/Month (by Fardeen Khan)", "url": "https://ebizfacts.com/claire-vo-chatprd-ai-app-10k-month/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, downloaded 27 October 2026. Quotes Dan Shipper's X post and the founder's interview; the US$10,000 a month is the site's own estimate (grade D). X itself was not opened." }, { "title": "ChatPRD about page: About the ChatPRD Team", "url": "https://www.chatprd.ai/about-us", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the team page and the founder's background." }, { "title": "ChatPRD pricing page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.chatprd.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Yearly prices and plan limits; the monthly prices are drawn by script." }, { "title": "ChatPRD home page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.chatprd.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the user count and the features." }, { "title": "ChatPRD blog, 31 May 2025: What's New: 50k users and 500k+ chats on ChatPRD", "url": "https://www.chatprd.ai/blog/whats-new-50k-users-and-500k-chats", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the May 2025 user count." }, { "title": "ChatPRD services page: AI Coaching, Transformation & EPD Course", "url": "https://www.chatprd.ai/services", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the coaching and consulting offers." }, { "title": "Claire Vo's website: about", "url": "https://clairevo.com/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for her earlier roles." }, { "title": "Claire Vo's website: notes, October 2026", "url": "https://clairevo.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the latest notes. Source for her use of Codex on ChatPRD's tests and her angel investing." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/ombra-tattoo/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/ombra-tattoo.md", "slug": "ombra-tattoo", "name": "Ombra Tattoo", "country": "Not stated in the sources; 223 of its 235 App Store ratings come from the Turkish store", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI tattoo cover-up, design and try-on app for iPhone and Android", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "15 June 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$2.4K verified revenue in one month, September 2026", "sticker": "$2.4K in September 2026", "outcomeUsd": 28824, "months": 3, "teamLabel": "1 founder, according to the seller's message on TrustMRR; headcount not published elsewhere", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "photos", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Art and design" ], "product": "A phone app for people who want to cover an old tattoo or plan a new one. The user uploads a photo of the old tattoo, picks a cover-up style, a color direction and a size, and describes what should replace it; the app generates new designs drawn over the photo. Other flows make a design from a text idea, from a zodiac sign or from a photo of a pet, and version 3.0 of October 2026 shows a design on a photo of the user's arm, leg or back. Each design uses one credit; credits come with weekly or yearly subscriptions or in small packs.", "why": "Covering an old tattoo is a permanent and expensive decision, and the person wants to see a direction before talking to an artist. The app sells that preview for credits, and the images come from fal.ai, a hosted image-model service, so the founder did not train a model. Revenue rose from US$255 in June 2026 to about US$2,400 in each of August and September, then fell in October.", "summary": [ "Ombra Tattoo is an iPhone and Android app that generates tattoo designs with AI. Its main feature is the cover-up, a new tattoo made over an old one so that the old one is hidden: the user adds a photo of the old tattoo and sees new designs drawn over it. The app also makes designs from a text description, a zodiac sign or a pet photo, and its version of 10 October 2026 brought back a virtual try-on, a picture of the design on a photo of the user's own skin. The images come from generative image models, AI models that draw a new picture from a text prompt and a reference photo; the terms say the photo and the choices are sent to fal.ai. Each design costs one credit, and credits come with weekly plans from US$2.99 to US$9.99 or a yearly plan of US$43.49 on the US App Store.", "The app was released on 15 June 2026. The App Store names an individual developer account, NIL AMBER UGUR, as developer and seller, and the seller on two sale marketplaces uses the handle bytwize and writes that the app is \"Built and operated by a solo founder\". RevenueCat, a service that records in-app subscription purchases, reports the revenue to TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue from the payment provider through an API key, a read-only password for one program to read another program's data. TrustMRR shows US$255 of revenue in June 2026, US$1,238 in July, US$2,412 in August and US$2,402 in September, and US$7,607 in total to 27 October 2026.", "The money figures are grade A because they come from the app's own purchase records. The headline month is the best level so far, not the current level: in the 30 days to 27 October 2026 revenue was US$1,689, 25.0% lower than the 30 days before, and MRR, monthly recurring revenue, in which a yearly plan counts as one twelfth of its price, was US$1,120. The app is offered for sale at US$20,000 on whatsthe.app and at US$12,000 on TrustMRR. The page also shows earlier companies that sold a preview before a purchase, or a photo effect, and failed." ], "factsCaption": "A tattoo cover-up app that reached about US$2,400 of verified revenue a month in its third month, then fell, and is offered for sale", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read from the app's RevenueCat account through an API key, by TrustMRR or by whatsthe.app. A grade B value is a record that Apple or Google shows, or a figure that a newsletter read on the verified page. A grade C value was written by the seller or the company, on a sale listing, on its own site or in its terms. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From release on 15 June 2026 to a sale listing and a falling October, in four months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Ombra in-app purchases on the US App Store, read 27 October 2026 (grade C)", "note": "The app is free to download. Each design uses one credit, and the subscriptions include a renewing allowance of credits; the App Store text says that subscriptions \"do not provide unlimited generation\". Apple lists eight purchases with names and prices; no source says how many credits each plan includes or which users see which weekly price. The per-month values are calculated: a weekly price times 52 divided by 12, the yearly price divided by 12. whatsthe.app shows the same eight prices.", "rows": [ [ "Ombra Premium Weekly", "", "43.29", "US$9.99 a week, renewing credits" ], [ "Ombra Premium Weekly, other prices", "", "25.96 to 34.62", "US$5.99 and US$7.99 a week" ], [ "Ombra Premium Weekly Offer and Weekly Deal", "", "12.96 to 21.62", "US$2.99 and US$4.99 a week" ], [ "Ombra Premium Yearly", "3.62", "", "US$43.49 a year, renewing credits" ], [ "4 Credits", "2.99 one-time", "", "4 designs" ], [ "2 Credits", "1.99 one-time", "", "2 designs" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue, September 2026", "value": "US$2,402", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly revenue timeline, read from RevenueCat through an API key, revenue last synced 27 October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, August 2026", "value": "US$2,412", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. The best month so far; September was US$10 lower.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue by month, 2026", "value": "June US$255; July US$1,238; October to the 26th US$1,300", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. June starts on the release day, 15 June. The October figure is the sum of the daily values from 1 to 26 October.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue in total, to 27 October 2026", "value": "US$7,607", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, all time. Calculated: the five monthly values add up to the same US$7,607.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate at the September level", "value": "about US$28,824 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$2,402 times 12. Revenue has fallen since then, so this is not the current rate.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the 30 days to 27 October 2026", "value": "US$1,689, 25.0% below the 30 days before", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. Calculated: 29.7% below the September month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR, 27 October 2026", "value": "US$1,120 from 131 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR metric snapshot. MRR growth over the last 30 days: -29.3%. The MRR has not reached US$2,000 in any source.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "whatsthe.app reading of the same account", "value": "US$2,104 of revenue in the last 28 days; MRR US$1,454 from 122 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app listing, \"All metrics are verified with RevenueCat. Last updated: Oct 1, 2026\". The page also shows AR of US$25,245 and ARR of US$17,449. Calculated: these equal the 28-day revenue times 12 and the MRR times 12.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "The same figures in a newsletter, 14 September 2026", "value": "US$2,104 in 28 days, MRR US$1,454, 122 subscriptions", "grade": "B", "note": "Japanese newsletter that links to the whatsthe.app page: \"直近28日売上が 2,104ドル\" (revenue in the last 28 days is US$2,104, translation) and \"2026年9月12日にRevenueCatで更新されています\" (it was updated with RevenueCat on 12 September 2026, translation). whatsthe.app shows the same three numbers with the date 1 October 2026; no source explains the two dates.", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Change in MRR from 1 to 27 October 2026", "value": "down 23.0%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: from US$1,454.11 on whatsthe.app to US$1,120 on TrustMRR. The two sites read the same RevenueCat account.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin in the last 30 days", "value": "41.0%", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR metric snapshot. The costs behind it are not shown, and the profile does not list them among the verified sources.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price", "value": "US$20,000 on whatsthe.app; US$12,000 on TrustMRR", "grade": "C", "note": "Entered by the seller. Both listings started on 9 September 2026. whatsthe.app calls its price 0.8 times revenue, TrustMRR 0.6 times. Calculated: the TrustMRR price is 1.58 times the total revenue to date.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Buyer interest, 27 October 2026", "value": "TrustMRR: 514 interested buyers who saw it recently, 8 offers; whatsthe.app: 25 buyers viewed, 1 inquiry", "grade": "B", "note": "Counts shown by the two marketplaces.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 founder", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller's message on TrustMRR: \"Built and operated by a solo founder\". The company's about page says \"Ombra is built by the Ombra team\" and gives no number.", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Developer of record", "value": "NIL AMBER UGUR, an individual developer account, on the App Store", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple names the same account as developer and seller, and the copyright line reads \"© 2026 Nil Amber Uğur\". The seller on both marketplaces is the handle bytwize; no source links the handle to the name. Google Play lists a different individual as developer.", "src": [ 4, 5, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Release date", "value": "15 June 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "Version 1.0 in the App Store version history. whatsthe.app gives the same worldwide release date, and TrustMRR starts its revenue in June 2026.", "src": [ 4, 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Ratings, 27 October 2026", "value": "235 App Store ratings with an average of 4.4, of which 223 in the Turkish store; 3.6 from 8 ratings in the US store", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's ratings by country as shown on whatsthe.app, and the US App Store page. Google Play shows 100+ downloads.", "src": [ 2, 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Age rating", "value": "9+ on the App Store, with \"Infrequent\" \"Mature or Suggestive Themes\"; Everyone on Google Play", "grade": "B", "note": "The terms ask for users of at least 13, and for the consent of a parent below the age of majority. They forbid sexually explicit uploads.", "src": [ 4, 5, 8 ] }, { "fact": "AI provider", "value": "fal.ai", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms and privacy policy: the choices and any photo \"are sent to our AI image provider, fal.ai\". No source names the model.", "src": [ 8, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Time from release to the headline month", "value": "3 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: June 2026 to September 2026.", "src": [ 4, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "15 June 2026", "what": "Version 1.0 on the App Store. Revenue in the second half of June: US$255.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "when": "18 to 22 June 2026", "what": "Versions 1.1 to 1.3 add Portuguese and Spanish and \"More accurate designs\".", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "23 June 2026", "what": "The terms of service are dated: photos and choices go to fal.ai; RevenueCat and Sentry are named as service providers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "July 2026", "what": "Japanese on 13 July, a redesigned subscription screen with \"Real before/after cover-up examples\" on 29 July. Verified revenue for the month: US$1,238.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "when": "August 2026", "what": "Verified revenue US$2,412, the best month so far. The privacy policy of 22 August describes Meta's advertising measurement in the app.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 9 ] }, { "when": "9 September 2026", "what": "Listed for sale on whatsthe.app and TrustMRR. Version 2.6 makes cover-up the first option.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2, 1, 4 ] }, { "when": "14 September 2026", "what": "A Japanese newsletter lists it among ten small apps with verified revenue: US$2,104 in 28 days.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "Verified revenue US$2,402.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "5 October 2026", "what": "The about page says that the app \"does not place arbitrary designs on bare skin\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "10 October 2026", "what": "Version 3.0: \"Virtual Try-On is back\" and \"Pet Portraits are back\".", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "27 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR: US$1,689 in the last 30 days, MRR US$1,120, US$7,607 in total. Asking price US$12,000 there and US$20,000 on whatsthe.app.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "One painful case of a common wish", "text": "Many apps generate tattoo designs; the App Store page lists ten similar apps next to this one. Ombra puts the cover-up first, a case with a clear problem, an old tattoo the person regrets, and since version 2.6 it is the first option in the app. The site lists 15 guides on cover-ups, such as name, wrist and blackout cover-ups, and 15 pages on cover-ups by body area or motif." }, { "title": "A rented image model", "text": "The terms say that each request goes to fal.ai, a service that runs image models for other companies. The founder did not train a model; the work is in the guided choices, the prompts, the photo flows and the paywall." }, { "title": "Credits on a subscription", "text": "Each design costs one credit, and a subscription refills the credits. This ties what a user pays to the number of image model calls, because subscriptions \"do not provide unlimited generation\". Weekly prices from US$2.99 to US$9.99 sit next to a yearly plan of US$43.49." }, { "title": "Paid ads and app-store search", "text": "TrustMRR lists Instagram, Meta Ads and app store optimization as marketing channels, and the privacy policy says that the app sends each purchase to Meta for ad measurement. App store optimization means choosing the store title and words for each country's searches; the about page lists the App Store title for ten storefronts. No source says which channel brought most customers." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the app's terms, privacy policy and site (grade C), the App Store and Google Play pages (grade B) and the TrustMRR profile.", "items": [ "Image generation by fal.ai, according to the terms and the privacy policy. Photos go to the company's server and then to fal.ai; the policy says they are not used to train models.", "RevenueCat manages the subscriptions and credits on both stores, and TrustMRR and whatsthe.app read the revenue from it.", "Sentry records crashes and errors. The Meta software kit measures ads and receives a purchase event after each paid checkout.", "One app on both stores under the package name app.we.are.OmbraTattoo; the iPhone app is 96.6 MB and needs iOS 16.4 or later.", "18 versions in the App Store history from 15 June to 10 October 2026, and seven app languages: English, Turkish, Portuguese, two kinds of Spanish, Greek and Japanese.", "A website in English, Turkish and Portuguese with cover-up guides, a blog and a report called The State of Tattoo Cover-Ups 2026." ], "src": [ 8, 9, 1, 4, 5, 7, 6, 10 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold a preview before a purchase, or a photo effect for consumers, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Modsy", "years": "2015 to 2022", "funding": "US$72.7M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Upload photos of a room and see it with new furniture before buying.", "died": "Each room needed hours of human designer time, and customers from paid social ads cost more than they paid over their lifetime.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2521-modsy" }, { "name": "Try.com", "years": "2018 to 2022", "funding": "US$4M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Try items at home before you pay for them.", "died": "High operating costs, few retailers willing to adopt it, and large stores with free returns already offered the same safety.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/668-trycom" }, { "name": "Kujiale", "years": "2011 to 2025", "funding": "US$550M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Design a home in 3D with photorealistic renders, then buy what you designed.", "died": "Users played with the tool and left, because most buyers wanted an expert to design for them; AI tools then made its technology common.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2371-kujiale" }, { "name": "Seerslab", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Augmented reality effects for selfies and social posts.", "died": "Snapchat already had AR filters built in, and no large social platform partnered with it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1463-seerslab" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Modsy, Try.com and Kujiale each sold a way to see a result before committing, and each preview cost them real work or real technology: designer hours per room, clothes shipped and returned, or a 3D engine and a furniture catalog. Modsy's paid social customers cost more than they brought in. Seerslab built its own photo effects and lost to a platform that offered them for free.", "Ombra's preview costs one call to an image model at fal.ai, and the app charges for it with credits, so each preview pays for itself. What did not change is the problem of customer cost: the app uses Meta ads, its MRR fell 29.3% in the 30 days to 27 October 2026, and whatsthe.app shows a lifetime value (LTV), the revenue that one customer brings over the whole time they pay, of US$79. A buyer has to make each new customer cost less than that." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The format, yes. The market is crowded.", "text": "A single-purpose app that puts a rented image model behind one permanent decision, with a guided flow, credits and a weekly or yearly plan, can be built and run by one person; Ombra shipped 18 versions in four months. The App Store lists ten other tattoo apps next to it, and Ombra's own revenue fell in October 2026, so the hard part is the cost of each customer, not the product.", "steps": [ "Pick a narrow, painful case inside a common wish: covering an old tattoo instead of tattoo ideas in general.", "Call a hosted image model through an API, and spend the work on the choices, the prompts and the screen that draws the result over the user's own photo.", "Charge per image with credits that a subscription refills, so heavy users cannot cost more than they pay.", "Write the store title and the guides for each language's searches, and measure ads per purchase before spending more." ], "open": "Other permanent changes to the body or the home where one photo is enough input and the person wants to see a direction before paying a professional: scars, hair colour, a house front." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue is falling", "text": "Verified revenue was US$2,412 in August 2026 and US$2,402 in September, then US$1,300 in October to the 26th. The last 30 days show US$1,689, 25.0% below the 30 days before, and MRR fell to US$1,120. The headline month is the best level so far, not the current one, and the MRR has never been near US$2,000." }, { "title": "Two marketplaces, two prices", "text": "The seller asks US$20,000 on whatsthe.app and US$12,000 on TrustMRR, for the same app and the same RevenueCat account. whatsthe.app shows figures dated 1 October 2026, which a newsletter had already printed on 14 September with the date 12 September." }, { "title": "Who runs it", "text": "The App Store names an individual account, NIL AMBER UGUR, as developer and seller; Google Play names a different individual; the seller is the handle bytwize, with 24 followers on whatsthe.app. The seller writes \"Built and operated by a solo founder\", and the about page says \"the Ombra team\". No source links the handle to either name." }, { "title": "Other apps of the same developer", "text": "The App Store lists eleven more apps under NIL AMBER UGUR, among them \"Tinnitus & Ear Ringing Relief\" (\"Sound Therapy & Masking Aid\"), \"Couple Baby Face Generator\" (\"AI Predictor & Photo Maker\") and \"Rock Value: Stone ID\". Ombra's own site and store pages do not link to them. This page judges only Ombra." }, { "title": "Try-on removed and restored", "text": "The about page, updated 5 October 2026, says that the app \"does not place arbitrary designs on bare skin\". Version 3.0 of 10 October says \"Virtual Try-On is back\". A buyer should check which features the app has on the day of the sale." }, { "title": "Body photos, an age rating of 9+ and ad tracking", "text": "Users upload photos of their arm, leg or back, which go to fal.ai. The App Store rates the app 9+ with infrequent mature or suggestive themes, and the terms admit users from 13 with a parent's consent. The App Store privacy label lists identifiers and usage data used to track users, and the privacy policy describes Meta's ad measurement." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://ombratattoo.com/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6775879616" }, { "kind": "android", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.we.are.OmbraTattoo" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/ombra-tattoo" }, { "kind": "whatsthe", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/ombra-tattoo" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR markdown profile: Ombra Tattoo, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/ombra-tattoo.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full. Revenue by day and month, total revenue, MRR and subscriptions are read from RevenueCat through an API key, last synced 27 October 2026 (grade A). The seller's message, the asking price, the marketing channels and the profit margin are entered by the seller (grade C)." }, { "title": "whatsthe.app listing: Ombra Tattoo, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/ombra-tattoo", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full, including the data embedded in the page. Revenue, MRR and subscriptions are verified with RevenueCat, last updated 1 October 2026; the asking price and the founder handle are entered by the seller (grade C). The site's robots.txt allows this path." }, { "title": "かわきのAIニュースレター, 14 September 2026: 【Appストアの売上】今週見つけた海外の個人開発アプリ売上リサーチ10選｟個人開発アプリ｠個人開発/アプリ売上/マネタイズ/副業/インディーアプリ", "url": "https://ainewspicks.substack.com/p/app10-4a0", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the section on Ombra Tattoo in the newsletter's RSS feed, downloaded 27 October 2026; the robots.txt of ainewspicks.substack.com allows the feed. Japanese; the facts table quotes the original words with a translation. It reports the whatsthe.app figures and links to that page." }, { "title": "AI Tattoo Cover-Up & Try-On on the US App Store, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ai-tattoo-cover-up-try-on/id6775879616", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full: description, in-app purchases, version history, privacy label, age rating, seller and the developer's other apps. The seller, dates, ratings and age rating are Apple's records; the description and prices are written by the company. Downloaded by the pipeline on 27 October 2026." }, { "title": "AI Tattoo Cover-Up & Generator on Google Play, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.we.are.OmbraTattoo&hl=en&gl=US", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full: developer, downloads band, content rating, update date and description. The robots.txt allows /store/apps/details." }, { "title": "Ombra Tattoo home page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://ombratattoo.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with its links, for the purpose check. The robots.txt group for ClaudeBot allows every path except /go/." }, { "title": "About Ombra Tattoo App, published 9 August 2026, updated 5 October 2026", "url": "https://ombratattoo.com/about-ombra-tattoo-app", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the flows, the developer name, the store titles by country, the languages and the credit pricing." }, { "title": "Ombra Terms of Service, last updated 23 June 2026", "url": "https://ombra-api.appacnera.com/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the AI provider, the minimum age, the content rules, the credits and the service providers. The host has no robots.txt (404)." }, { "title": "Ombra Privacy Policy, last updated 22 August 2026", "url": "https://ombra-api.appacnera.com/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the photo processing at fal.ai, RevenueCat, Sentry and the Meta advertising measurement." }, { "title": "What's New on Ombra Tattoo, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://ombratattoo.com/whats-new", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Lists the site's guides and their update dates from July to October 2026." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/colorbliss/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/colorbliss.md", "slug": "colorbliss", "name": "ColorBliss", "country": "USA", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI coloring page generator that makes printable line art from a prompt, a photo or a sketch", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "29 September 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$2K MRR, May 2024", "sticker": "$2K MRR in 213 days", "outcomeUsd": 24000, "months": 7, "teamLabel": "1 founder working alone, by his own account; no employees reported", "fundingLabel": "None reported; the founder wrote that his family had about a year of runway when he quit his job", "primaryFactor": "Search", "group": "photos", "channel": "search", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Art and design" ], "product": "A web app that turns a text idea, a photo or a rough sketch into a black and white coloring page that prints well, as a PNG or PDF file. Parents use it for pages their children ask for, teachers for worksheets, and paying creators for whole coloring books that they sell. It also colors pages in the app, makes word art from names and quotes, keeps one character the same across a book, and offers more than 8,800 free printable pages that bring visitors from Google.", "why": "Coloring pages are searched for in large numbers, and a child often wants a page that no artist has drawn. The founder wrote that he found coloring page searches with low competition and thousands of searches a month before he built anything, and he made free pages for those searches that lead visitors to the paid generator. The founder said in 2024 that most sales came from organic search.", "summary": [ "ColorBliss is an AI coloring page generator: a web app that sends a short text description, a photo or a sketch to an image model and returns clean black outlines on white that a child or an adult can color by hand. An image model is an AI model that draws a new picture from a prompt or a reference picture; the founder's tools page names OpenAI, Replicate and fal.ai as his providers. Users buy credits, units of use in which one standard page costs one credit, through plans that the company's pricing page lists at US$9 to US$99 a month.", "Ben Robertson, a software developer in South Carolina who had worked in customer success at Gatsby Inc and Netlify, quit his job in September 2023 and launched ColorBliss alone at the end of that month. He wrote that it made US$92.50 in its first month and cost US$179.55, mostly for ads. In a post that eBiz Facts quoted on 25 July 2024, he said that it took 93 days to reach US$100 of MRR, monthly recurring revenue, 94 more days to reach US$1,000, and 26 more days to reach US$2,000, which was 213 days after launch, about May 2024.", "That US$2,000 figure, which the founder stated in one post, is his latest dated revenue figure, and no payment processor has confirmed it, so this page is marked \"Reported, not verified\" with evidence grade D. In September 2025 he wrote that he had set out to support his family on 20 hours of work a week and that, two years in, \"the theory is holding\", without a number. The page also shows earlier companies that sold creative content or tools to parents and failed." ], "factsCaption": "US$2,000 in monthly recurring revenue 213 days after launch, as the founder stated in one post in 2024, with his own blog and the company's pages for everything else", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is a founder statement that only one post contains, quoted by eBiz Facts and Starter Story, or a newsletter's figure with no second source. A grade C value comes from the founder's own blog, an interview, or the company's pages read on 27 October 2026. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a 4 a.m. keyword search to a coloring page business that, its founder says, supports his family. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "ColorBliss plans in October 2026, from the company's pricing page (grade C)", "note": "Yearly billing is US$84, US$149, US$297 or US$997 a year. A standard page from a text prompt costs 1 credit; a regular-quality photo conversion or the Ghibli style costs 3, the detailed style 5, character sheets and high resolution 10. Hobby and higher plans roll unused credits over, and only Artist and Business allow commercial use, such as selling books on Amazon KDP or Etsy. The pricing page names Stripe for payments and offers a 7-day money-back guarantee, while the home page FAQ says that generated pages cannot be refunded and that each plan includes extra retry credits instead.", "rows": [ [ "Free account", "0", "0", "up to 12 coloring pages" ], [ "Starter", "7.00", "9", "250 credits a month, personal use" ], [ "Hobby", "12.42", "18", "500 credits a month, drawings and advanced editing, personal use" ], [ "Artist", "24.75", "35", "1,000 credits a month, bulk generation of 50 pages, commercial use" ], [ "Business", "83.08", "99", "5,000 credits a month, API access after approval, commercial use" ], [ "Credit packs", "25 to 80 one-time", "", "500, 1,000 or 2,000 credits; expire after six months without activity" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, about May 2024", "value": "US$2,000", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder's post as quoted by eBiz Facts on 25 July 2024: \"And now, just 26 days later, I made it to $2k!\" Starter Story quoted the same post on 25 October 2024 as an Indie Hackers post titled \"Hit 2k MRR!\". Both quote one statement; X and Indie Hackers were not opened.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from that figure", "value": "US$24,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$2,000 times 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Steps to US$2,000 MRR", "value": "93 days to US$100, 94 more days to US$1,000, 26 more days to US$2,000", "grade": "D", "note": "The same post: \"It was 93 days until I hit $100 MRR.\" \"It took 94 more days to grow to $1k MRR.\" Calculated: 93 + 94 + 26 = 213 days.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Date of the US$2,000 MRR", "value": "about May 2024", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 213 days after a launch in October 2023, as the post says, falls between 1 and 31 May 2024; counted from the launch post of 29 September 2023 it is 29 April 2024. The post itself was not dated in the sources.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "First month, 13 September to 20 October 2023", "value": "US$92.50 of income, US$179.55 of expenses, net minus US$87.05", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's blog, month one update. Expenses: Facebook ads US$101, Pinterest ads US$36.14, image generation US$38.95, domain US$3.46.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in October 2023", "value": "about US$240", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's blog, September 2025: \"I believe ColorBliss did $240 in October.\"", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Launch and first sale", "value": "first version at the end of September 2023; first sale on about 3 October 2023", "grade": "C", "note": "The launch post is dated 29 September 2023. In the week of 2 October the founder launched on Product Hunt, where it ended 14th for the day, and ran Facebook ads. The X post says \"I launched ColorBliss in October.\"", "src": [ 5, 4, 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Cost and price at launch", "value": "about 2 cents per image; US$9 for 20 credits", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's launch post. Starter Story gives the same price.", "src": [ 5, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Where sales came from", "value": "mostly organic search", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder's post as quoted by eBiz Facts: \"most sales have come from organic search\", with some paid ads and email. An interview in October 2025 says SEO remains his core growth channel (grade C).", "src": [ 1, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Users", "value": "more than 40,000 monthly users (October 2025); 153,000+ sign-ups and 1,723,702 pages created (October 2026)", "grade": "C", "note": "AI Empires interview of 24 October 2025, and the counters on the company's home page read 27 October 2026.", "src": [ 8, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 person", "grade": "C", "note": "AI Empires: \"ColorBliss was built entirely by Ben himself\". His tools page lists \"The tools I use to build, run, and grow ColorBliss as a solo founder\". The privacy policy is written in the first person singular. The tools page also mentions contract work that he does.", "src": [ 8, 6, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Working time and income", "value": "no more than 20 hours a week; the founder says it supports his family", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's blog, 18 September 2025: he wanted to test whether 20 hours a week could support his family, \"(Two years in, and the theory is holding!)\". No figure is given.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder wrote that he wanted a break from venture capital style businesses and that his family had a safe runway of about a year.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Company", "value": "Marginalia Ventures LLC", "grade": "C", "note": "Footer of the company's terms and privacy pages: \"ColorBliss is a product of Marginalia Ventures LLC.\"", "src": [ 12, 11 ] }, { "fact": "A newsletter's later figure, not used on this page", "value": "\"September 2024: $6,300 monthly recurring revenue\"", "grade": "D", "note": "Startup Spells, 2 January 2026. The words link to the founder's Indie Page, which shows \"$6.3k/month\" next to a progress bar; the page data gives this as an MRR goal of US$6,250 and marks ColorBliss's revenue as not shared, in October 2024, May 2025 and October 2026 alike. The same newsletter's range of US$30,000 to US$100,000 a month is its own estimate with no method.", "src": [ 16, 15 ] }, { "fact": "Reviews shown by the company", "value": "4.7 from 242 reviews on the reviews page; 4.91 from 233 in the page data; \"from 243 reviews\" on the home page", "grade": "C", "note": "The reviews page lists Trustpilot (89), Capterra (22), Twitter (5), Product Hunt (3) and LinkedIn (1) as sources, and its rating breakdown shows 211 five-star and 21 four-star reviews and none lower.", "src": [ 13, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the headline figure", "value": "7 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: October 2023 to May 2024.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Early September 2023", "what": "Ben Robertson leaves Netlify, which had acquired Gatsby Inc, his employer of three years. He plans to work at most 20 hours a week.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "13 September 2023", "what": "Awake at 4 a.m., he researches coloring page searches in SEMrush, buys the domain ColorBliss.art and makes the first commit.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "when": "29 September 2023", "what": "Launch post: a custom coloring sheet generator and free printable pages, with credits at US$9 for 20, and a Facebook ad campaign aimed at parents of preschoolers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "Week of 2 October 2023", "what": "Product Hunt launch, 14th for the day, and the first two sales, both from strangers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "20 October 2023", "what": "Month one update: US$92.50 of income and US$179.55 of expenses. Pinterest ads convert better and cost less than Facebook ads.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "About January 2024", "what": "US$100 MRR, 93 days after launch, according to the founder's post.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "About April 2024", "what": "US$1,000 MRR, 94 days later, according to the same post. Between US$1,000 and US$2,000 he added features and changed pricing.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "About May 2024", "what": "US$2,000 MRR, 26 days later, 213 days after launch, according to the same post.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "June 2024", "what": "He buys colorbliss.com, which had been offered for about US$2,500 in September 2023.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "25 July 2024", "what": "eBiz Facts publishes the founder's figures, and Starter Story repeats them on 25 October 2024.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "18 September 2025", "what": "Two-year post: he writes that 20 hours a week still supports his family.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "24 October 2025", "what": "AI Empires interview: more than 40,000 monthly users, built by one person, SEO as the main channel.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "6 February 2026", "what": "He writes that conversions slowed in January after a very good December, and that his onboarding emails had not been sent for a month after a migration.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "27 October 2026", "what": "The site shows 1,723,702 pages created, 153,000+ sign-ups and plans from US$9 to US$99 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9, 10 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Search demand found before the product", "text": "The founder wrote that searches such as \"mushroom coloring pages\" and \"Bowser coloring pages\" had low difficulty but thousands of searches, and that a large free coloring site lived on ads. He made free pages for such searches first and put the generator on top of them. The home page now lists more than 8,800 free printable pages." }, { "title": "A product the general tools do not make well", "text": "General image models draw shaded color pictures. ColorBliss returns clean outlines at print resolution and adds the workflows that coloring needs: photo conversion, word art, the same character on every page and bulk generation of 50 pages for book makers." }, { "title": "Cheap images, paid credits", "text": "The founder's launch post said each image cost him about 2 cents while 20 credits sold for US$9. Plans now sell 250 to 5,000 credits a month, and expensive modes such as photo conversion cost more credits, so heavy use is paid for." }, { "title": "Small paid tests, then search", "text": "The founder's first-month report said Facebook ads brought traffic but no paid users, while Pinterest ads cost about US$1.95 per thousand ad views and converted better. Product Hunt, an early listing on There's An AI For That and planned outreach to parent bloggers were his ways to get the first links to the site; later, he said, organic search brought most sales." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's blog and tools page (grade C), Starter Story (grade D) and the company's own pages (grade C).", "items": [ "The first version took a couple of weeks of part-time work in September 2023. The founder worked out the prompts for line art with Stability Dreambooth, according to his launch post.", "The app dashboard is built with Next.js, the marketing site with Astro, and content is managed in WordPress. Supabase is the database and login service; backend jobs moved to Laravel after traffic spikes, deployed with Laravel Forge; hosting is on Netlify.", "Images come from OpenAI's API, Replicate and fal.ai, with requests spread across providers; the founder moved to Replicate and fal after OctoAI was acquired by NVIDIA. A prompt improver runs on Cerebras for speed.", "Stripe takes the subscription payments. Bento and Resend send email, PostHog measures product use, and Ahrefs replaced SEMrush for search research.", "He writes code in Cursor and tracks features in Linear. The privacy policy says uploaded photos are deleted after the page is generated and that OpenAI does not train on them." ], "src": [ 6, 5, 11, 2, 9 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold creative content or creative tools to parents and consumers, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Zuuka", "years": "2009 to 2017", "funding": "US$3M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A library of interactive children's books for parents and teachers.", "died": "Apple and Amazon added interactive children's books to stores that already had the customers, and Zuuka could not pay for the content and marketing to keep up.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/811-zuuka" }, { "name": "Airy Labs", "years": "2010 to 2012", "funding": "US$1.7M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Learning games that make parents proud of their children's screen time.", "died": "Each game needed game designers and learning experts, while parents would not pay much for children's apps when free ones existed.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/3-airy-labs" }, { "name": "Snipshot", "years": "2006 to 2009", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Edit photos in the browser without installing software.", "died": "Larger free tools such as Picnik offered more, and it never found a clear way to make money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1241-snipshot" }, { "name": "FiftyThree", "years": "2011 to 2019", "funding": "US$45M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A digital sketchbook for the iPad with its own stylus.", "died": "Apple's own Pencil and stronger drawing apps took away what made it different, and the hardware raised its costs.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/144-fiftythree" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Zuuka and Airy Labs needed paid artists, writers or learning experts for every book or game, and parents would not pay enough to cover that work. Snipshot and FiftyThree built creative tools and lost when larger companies gave away the same features.", "ColorBliss has no artist on staff: each page is drawn by a rented image model, and the founder's launch post put the cost at about 2 cents. That makes it possible to give away thousands of free pages for small searches and to answer a child's exact request in seconds. The risk that remains is the one that ended Snipshot and FiftyThree, since general AI image tools from large companies can also draw a coloring page when asked." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, for a narrow output that people search for.", "text": "One person built the first version in a couple of weeks with rented image models, and the free pages that bring search traffic cost almost nothing to make. The niche now has competitors, and the founder still depends on Google rankings and on outside model providers. Only the founder's own statements describe the revenue.", "steps": [ "Look for a printable or visual item that people search for in many small variations, and check the search volume before you build.", "Generate free example pages for those searches, and put the paid generator on every page.", "Sell credits, and charge more credits for the modes that cost more to generate.", "Test small ad budgets on several networks, measure paying users per network, and stop the ones that bring none." ], "open": "The same pattern for other printables with many variations: worksheets for one school subject, stencils, embroidery or cross-stitch patterns, and craft templates." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline US$2,000 of monthly recurring revenue rests on one founder post from about May 2024, which this page could read only as eBiz Facts quoted it on 25 July 2024 and Starter Story on 25 October 2024. No payment processor, tax filing or buyer has confirmed any revenue figure, and the founder's later posts, in September 2025 and February 2026, describe the business without numbers. A reader could look for a payment-verified profile, for example on TrustMRR (ColorBliss takes payments through Stripe), or for a newer interview with dated figures; his Indie Page hides ColorBliss's revenue." }, { "title": "A larger figure that is probably a goal", "text": "Startup Spells wrote on 2 January 2026 that ColorBliss had US$6,300 of monthly recurring revenue in September 2024, and linked to the founder's Indie Page. That page shows \"$6.3k/month\", and its data stores this as an MRR goal of US$6,250, with ColorBliss's revenue not shared. This page therefore does not use the figure, nor the newsletter's own estimate of US$30,000 to US$100,000 a month." }, { "title": "Review counts that do not match", "text": "The home page says \"from 243 reviews\", the reviews page says 4.7 from 242, its rating breakdown adds up to 232 and shows no review below four stars, and the page data claims 4.91 from 233. The reviews page names Trustpilot, Capterra, X, Product Hunt and LinkedIn as sources for 120 of them; its source filter names none for the others. The founder's own family coloring book appears under his name in the gallery of user creations." }, { "title": "Characters that belong to others", "text": "The free library has pages of Spider-Man, Hello Kitty, Yoshi and Batman, the FAQ invites users to name popular characters, and a premium mode is called the Ghibli style. Commercial plans allow selling books on Amazon KDP. The terms forbid content that infringes intellectual property, but a rights holder could still ask for pages or books to be removed." }, { "title": "Children and family photos", "text": "The site answers \"Is it safe for kids to use?\" with yes, while the privacy policy says that the service is intended for adult use and that users under 13 need a parent's consent. Parents upload family photos, which go to OpenAI's API; the policy says the originals are deleted after generation and that OpenAI does not train on them." }, { "title": "Dependence on search and on model providers", "text": "The founder names organic search as the main source of sales, so a change in Google's ranking of AI-generated pages would hit the business directly. The images come from OpenAI, Replicate and fal.ai, and he already had to move once, when OctoAI was acquired by NVIDIA. His Indie Page also lists other products of his: Holly Support, Churnpill, Color Anything and a warrior cat name generator." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://colorbliss.com/" }, { "kind": "indiepage", "url": "https://indiepa.ge/benrobertson" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "eBiz Facts, 25 July 2024, by Fardeen Khan: His AI Coloring Page Software: $2000/Month in 213 Days", "url": "https://ebizfacts.com/ben-robertson-colorbliss-ai-2000-month-213-days/", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full in the site's RSS feed (page 2), downloaded by the pipeline on 27 October 2026; the robots.txt group for all agents allows /feed/ and posts. It quotes the founder's post on X, which was not opened. Source of the headline figure." }, { "title": "Starter Story, 25 October 2024: How Ben Robertson Grew ColorBliss to $2K MRR in Just 7 Months", "url": "https://www.starterstory.com/color-bliss-breakdown", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. The page is not marked \"Estimated from public sources\"; it lists the founder's Indie Hackers post \"Hit 2k MRR!\" and his blog as sources. The Indie Hackers post was not opened. Source for the price at launch, the tools and the Product Hunt traffic." }, { "title": "Ben Robertson's blog, 18 September 2025: ColorBliss is two years old!", "url": "https://ben.robertson.is/notes/color-bliss-is-two-years-old/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's own account of the start, the first sales, the October 2023 revenue and his working rules. The site's robots.txt has no rules." }, { "title": "Ben Robertson's blog, 20 October 2023: ColorBliss - Month One Update", "url": "https://ben.robertson.is/notes/color-bliss-month-one-update/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the first-month timeline, income, expenses and ad results." }, { "title": "Ben Robertson's blog, 29 September 2023: Launching Colorbliss.art", "url": "https://ben.robertson.is/notes/launching-colorbliss-art/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the launch date, the first price, the image cost and the first model." }, { "title": "Ben Robertson: Uses, the tools behind ColorBliss, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://ben.robertson.is/uses/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's list of the tools he uses to build, run and grow ColorBliss." }, { "title": "Ben Robertson's blog, 6 February 2026: Conversions slowed way down for ColorBliss in January", "url": "https://ben.robertson.is/jottles/conversions-slowed-way-down-for-colorbliss-in-janu-6I2NhH/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A short note without figures." }, { "title": "AI Empires (There's An AI For That), 24 October 2025: Turning FOMO Into 1M Users, section How ColorBliss Prints Ideas on Demand", "url": "https://empires.theresanaiforthat.com/p/turning-fomo-into-1m-users", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on ColorBliss, a summary of a video interview with the founder; the video was not watched. The robots.txt group for all agents disallows only /login." }, { "title": "ColorBliss home page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://colorbliss.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the structured data, for the purpose check and the counters. The robots.txt disallows only /auth/, /account/ and /admin/." }, { "title": "ColorBliss pricing page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://colorbliss.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the plans, credit costs and credit packs." }, { "title": "ColorBliss privacy policy, last updated 6 January 2026", "url": "https://colorbliss.com/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the AI provider, photo handling, analytics tools and the age rule." }, { "title": "ColorBliss terms of service, last updated 23 March 2026", "url": "https://colorbliss.com/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the commercial license, the content rules and the company name." }, { "title": "ColorBliss reviews page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://colorbliss.com/reviews", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the summary, the rating breakdown, the source filters and a sample of reviews, for the purpose check." }, { "title": "ColorBliss affiliate program page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://colorbliss.com/affiliates", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, for the purpose check: it states a 20% recurring commission and a calculator based on that commission, and makes no claim about what users earn." }, { "title": "Indie Page: Ben Robertson, read 27 October 2026, with Wayback Machine copies of 9 October 2024 and 21 May 2025", "url": "https://indiepa.ge/benrobertson", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the data embedded in the page, which gives the MRR goal of US$6,250 and marks ColorBliss's revenue as not shared. The robots.txt allows every path." }, { "title": "Startup Spells, 2 January 2026: ColorBliss' Programmatic SEO Strategy: How 8,700 AI Pages Captured Long-Tail Search", "url": "https://startupspells.com/p/colorbliss-programmatic-seo-ai-generated-pages", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full. Cited only for its US$6,300 figure and its estimate, which this page does not use; its links point to the Indie Page and to a post on X that was not opened." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/summify/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/summify.md", "slug": "summify", "name": "Summify", "country": "Not stated in the sources", "sector": "Productivity software", "productType": "AI tool that transcribes and summarizes YouTube videos, podcasts and uploaded audio", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "October 2023", "outcomeLabel": "Sold for US$30K, August 2024", "sticker": "Sold for $30K", "outcomeUsd": 30000, "months": 10, "teamLabel": "1 founder, \"a solo developer\" according to the site's FAQ in 2023 and 2024", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Simplicity", "group": "voice-audio", "channel": "communities", "trend": "sold", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2C", "Productivity" ], "product": "A web app in which a user pastes a YouTube link or uploads a video or audio file and gets a transcript, a short summary with key points, and other versions of the same content, such as a summary with timestamps, a blog post or a thread for X, in more than 130 languages. In 2024 its pricing page listed a free plan of 15 minutes a month and paid plans by minutes of media per month. The current owners have rebuilt it into a library of sources that other AI assistants can read.", "why": "It did one simple job that many people wanted: get the content of a long video without watching it. The founder built it for himself as a weekend project, posted it on Reddit, and, as he wrote, sold the first subscription three days after launch. The current owners, who bought it later, describe it as a tool that did one thing well.", "summary": [ "Summify is a video summarizer: a web app that takes the speech of a YouTube video, a podcast or an uploaded file, turns it into text by transcription, the automatic conversion of speech into written words, and then has a language model, an AI model that reads and writes text, produce a summary, key points and other formats. In 2024 its home page said \"Stop watching videos at 2x speed, Get your time back\", and its plans were priced by the minutes of media processed each month.", "Shahryar Rajabpoor, who posts on X as @devhe4d, started it as a weekend project in October 2023; the site's FAQ called him \"a solo developer\". In a post that eBiz Facts quoted on 5 August 2024, he wrote that it took three months to reach US$500 of MRR, monthly recurring revenue, that it reached US$2,500 MRR after eight months and then settled at about US$1,500, and that he had just sold it for US$30,000, about ten months after the first version.", "The sale price and the revenue rest on that one founder post, and no buyer was named in it, so this page is marked \"Reported, not verified\" with evidence grade D. The company that runs Summify in 2026, Betastate, writes on its about page that it acquired Summify and rebuilt it, without a date or a price. The page also shows earlier companies that promised to save people from too much content to read and failed." ], "factsCaption": "A weekend project sold for US$30,000 about ten months after launch, as the founder stated in one post in August 2024, with archived copies of the site for everything else", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is a founder statement that only one post contains, quoted by eBiz Facts, or an estimate by eBiz Facts. A grade C value comes from the company's own site, read in Wayback Machine copies from 2023 and 2024 or live on 27 October 2026. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a weekend project in October 2023 to a US$30,000 sale in August 2024, as the founder tells it. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Summify plans in October 2026, from the pricing page of the current owners, with the founder's plans of June 2024 in the note (grade C)", "note": "The live page shows US$8, US$16 and US$33 a month next to US$100, US$200 and US$400 billed yearly, and its page data gives the same three prices as monthly prices; the yearly per-month values below are calculated as the yearly price divided by 12, and the page's \"Save 20%\" does not match them. Under the founder, in June 2024, the plans were Free (15 minutes a month), Hobby at US$10 a month or US$100 a year (800 minutes), Pro at US$25 a month or US$250 a year (1,800 minutes) and Business Starter at US$50 a month or US$500 a year. The home page of June 2024 also offered a lifetime license: \"Get Summify lifetime for $7500 $179 Today!\"", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "120 transcription minutes a month, 3 summary styles" ], [ "Starter", "8.33", "8", "800 transcription minutes a month, 5 pods" ], [ "Pro", "16.67", "16", "1,800 transcription minutes a month, 20 pods, 100 AI assistant requests a day" ], [ "Max", "33.33", "33", "8,000 transcription minutes a month, unlimited pods, 300 AI assistant requests a day" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Sale price, August 2024", "value": "US$30,000", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder's post on X as quoted by eBiz Facts on 5 August 2024: \"I just sold my first-ever startup, Summify, for $30,000\". The buyer is not named. X was not opened.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Peak monthly recurring revenue, about June 2024", "value": "US$2,500", "grade": "D", "note": "The same post: \"After eight months, Summify hit $2,500 MRR and then settled around $1,500 MRR.\"", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue before the sale", "value": "about US$1,500", "grade": "D", "note": "The same post. Calculated: 40% below the peak.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time to US$500 MRR", "value": "3 months", "grade": "D", "note": "The same post: \"It took Summify three months to reach $500 MRR\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Sale price as a multiple of revenue", "value": "about 1.7 times the yearly run rate", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$30,000 divided by US$1,500 times 12, which is US$18,000. It equals 20 months of the US$1,500 MRR.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Total money received, revenue plus sale", "value": "something like US$40,000", "grade": "D", "note": "An estimate by eBiz Facts, not by the founder: \"Shahryar ultimately got paid something like $40,000 (app revenue + the sale price)\". Calculated: this implies about US$10,000 of revenue before the sale.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "First subscription", "value": "three days after launch", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder's post as quoted by eBiz Facts. He launched by posting on Reddit.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Launch", "value": "October 2023, as a weekend project", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder's post: \"Summify started as my weekend project last October.\" A Wayback Machine copy of 8 December 2023 shows the product live with \"Trusted by 6000+ happy users\" (grade C).", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 person", "grade": "C", "note": "The site's FAQ in December 2023 and June 2024: \"Summify was developed by a solo developer, who is passionate about machine learning and artificial intelligence. find me on twitter @devhe4d\". The footer says \"Made with ❤️ by @devhe4d\".", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Users claimed by the site", "value": "6,000+ in December 2023; 28,000+ in June 2024; 50,000+ in October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Claims on the home page in each Wayback copy and on the live page. The June 2024 page also says 14 million minutes saved.", "src": [ 2, 3, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Marketing channels before the sale", "value": "Reddit and LinkedIn posts; three two-week Google Ads campaigns", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder's post as quoted by eBiz Facts: \"Reddit, Linkedin posts helped a lot.\" The archived home page shows badges from Futurepedia, Foundr.ai, There's An AI For That and Product Hunt (grade C).", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Current owner", "value": "Betastate, run by the founders of the video company Viddyoze", "grade": "C", "note": "The about page of October 2026: \"We acquired Summify as a YouTube summarizer.\" It gives no date and no price, and no source says whether Betastate was the buyer of August 2024. The footer of 31 December 2024 still said \"Made with ❤️ by @devhe4d\".", "src": [ 6, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the sale", "value": "10 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: October 2023 to August 2024. eBiz Facts gives the same figure.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "October 2023", "what": "The founder starts Summify as a weekend project, posts it on Reddit, and sells the first subscription three days after launch, he wrote.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "22 November and 1 December 2023", "what": "Two public build notes on Indie Logs; the second adds transcription of any YouTube video next to summaries.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "8 December 2023", "what": "The home page claims more than 6,000 users and 2,166,271 minutes saved, with badges from Futurepedia, There's An AI For That and Product Hunt.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "About January 2024", "what": "US$500 MRR after three months, according to the founder's post.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "About June 2024", "what": "US$2,500 MRR after eight months, then about US$1,500, according to the same post. The home page offers a lifetime license at US$179.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "when": "17 June 2024", "what": "Plans from a free 15 minutes a month to Business Starter at US$50 a month.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "5 August 2024", "what": "eBiz Facts reports the founder's post: Summify sold for US$30,000. The buyer is not named.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "31 December 2024", "what": "The site still carries the founder's handle in the footer.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "Betastate runs Summify as a knowledge library that AI assistants can query, and writes that it acquired the product and rebuilt it.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 7 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "One job, done for the builder first", "text": "The founder wrote that he built Summify because he needed it himself and did no validation. The job was narrow and easy to explain: paste a link and read the content instead of watching it. The current owners describe the product they bought in the same terms." }, { "title": "Free posts, then small ad tests", "text": "The founder wrote that he had no marketing skills and that posts on Reddit and LinkedIn brought the first US$500 of monthly recurring revenue, followed by three Google Ads campaigns of two weeks each. The site also collected listings and badges on AI directories." }, { "title": "Plans by minutes", "text": "The founder's plans were priced by the minutes of media processed each month, so the price grew with the cost of transcription and summarization. A one-time lifetime license sat next to the subscriptions." }, { "title": "Selling instead of competing", "text": "eBiz Facts noted that Product Hunt was full of similar tools. The founder wrote that MRR fell from US$2,500 to about US$1,500 and that he sold the business at that level, about ten months after launch." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's post as quoted by eBiz Facts (grade D) and from archived copies of the site (grade C). No source names the AI models or the payment processor.", "items": [ "The founder wrote that he only knew how to code when he started, and that he built and shipped the first version as a weekend project.", "The product took a YouTube link or an uploaded file, transcribed the speech, and produced a summary, key insights, a detailed summary with timestamps and styles such as a blog post or a thread, with export to PDF and text.", "The archived pages load Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, and show user reviews through Senja, a service that collects testimonials.", "The founder kept a public build log on Indie Logs and ran an affiliate program through a Tally form.", "After the sale, the current owners rebuilt the product as knowledge pods that AI assistants can query through the Model Context Protocol." ], "src": [ 1, 2, 3, 9, 6 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised to save people from too much content by condensing it, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Circa", "years": "2011 to 2015", "funding": "US$5.5M", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "News cut into short pieces for mobile readers, with follow-ups.", "died": "Large media companies copied the format, and Circa could not build an advertising business before its money ran out.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1920-circa" }, { "name": "Wavii", "years": "2009 to 2013", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Short machine-written updates on the topics a user follows.", "died": "It had no clear way to make money in a crowded market and ended inside Google after an acquisition.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/727-wavii" }, { "name": "Nuzzel", "years": "2012 to 2019", "funding": "US$5.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Only the news that a user's friends shared, so the user does not read everything.", "died": "It depended on the Twitter and Facebook APIs, and those platforms offered similar features themselves.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/378-nuzzel" }, { "name": "Prismatic", "years": "2012 to 2017", "funding": "US$15M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A personal news feed chosen by algorithms.", "died": "User growth stopped, new users cost too much, and advertising could not compete with Google and Facebook.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/465-prismatic" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Circa, Wavii, Nuzzel and Prismatic raised millions of dollars to condense news for readers, and each needed editors, its own language technology or access to another platform's data. None found a way to make readers pay, so they depended on advertising or on a buyer.", "Summify condensed one video at a time with rented speech and language models, and users paid by the minute from the first week. One person could build it in weekends, and the founder said that it reached US$2,500 of monthly recurring revenue in eight months. The same low cost let many copies appear, which is the competition that ended the earlier companies, and the founder sold within a year." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, as a first product to learn on and sell.", "text": "A tool that does one job with rented AI models can be built in weekends, sold by the minute and promoted with posts in communities. The job is easy to copy, and video platforms and AI assistants now summarize videos themselves, so the founder's choice to sell after ten months is part of the lesson.", "steps": [ "Build the tool you need yourself, for one input (a YouTube link) and one output (a summary).", "Price by the unit that drives your cost, here minutes of media.", "Post the launch in communities where people have the problem, then test short ad campaigns.", "Watch monthly revenue after the first peak, and consider selling while the product still grows or holds." ], "open": "Summaries for one profession that receives long recordings every week, such as court hearings, medical conference talks or sales calls in one industry, where a generic summarizer misses what that reader needs." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The sale price of US$30,000 and every revenue figure rest on one founder post on X from about August 2024, which this page could read only as eBiz Facts quoted it on 5 August 2024. The buyer is not named, and the current owner, Betastate, confirms an acquisition on its about page but gives no date and no price. A reader could look for the marketplace listing of the sale, a statement by the buyer, or a second interview with the founder." }, { "title": "Other people's videos", "text": "Summify transcribes and summarizes YouTube videos and podcasts that other people made, and its current owners build pods from the work of named copywriters. No source on this page says whether the creators or YouTube gave permission or on what legal basis the transcripts are made." }, { "title": "Claims on the pages", "text": "In June 2024 the founder's home page offered a lifetime license as \"$7500 $179 Today!\", a crossed-out price that no source explains. The current pages show \"5.0 from 200+ reviews\" and logos of Meta, MIT, PwC and ByteDance under \"Pods built by people at\"; the reviews are shown through Senja, and no public page lets a reader check the count or the logos." }, { "title": "A product that the platforms now offer", "text": "eBiz Facts wrote in 2024 that Product Hunt was full of similar tools, and the founder said that revenue fell from US$2,500 to about US$1,500 a month before the sale. The current owners now compare Summify with Claude Projects, ChatGPT custom GPTs and NotebookLM, which accept uploaded sources themselves." }, { "title": "A different business after the sale", "text": "The Summify of 2026 is built by a company with its own history and goals, sells knowledge pods for AI assistants and links to a free copywriting course. The facts on this page about the founder's business come from the pages of 2023 and 2024, not from the current site." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://summify.io/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "eBiz Facts, 5 August 2024, by Fardeen Khan: Sold His Simple AI Tool For $30K After 10 Months", "url": "https://ebizfacts.com/shahryar-rajabpoor-summify-30k-sale-10-months/", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full in the site's RSS feed (page 2), downloaded by the pipeline on 27 October 2026; the robots.txt group for all agents allows /feed/ and posts. It quotes the founder's posts on X, which were not opened. Source of the sale price and the revenue figures." }, { "title": "Summify home page, Wayback Machine copy of 8 December 2023", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20231208123854/https://summify.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the page source. Source for the founder-era product, the user claim, the FAQ and the directory badges." }, { "title": "Summify home page, Wayback Machine copy of 1 June 2024", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20240601125149/https://summify.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the lifetime offer, the user claim and the FAQ two months before the sale." }, { "title": "Summify pricing page, Wayback Machine copy of 17 June 2024", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20240617071252/https://summify.io/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's plans and prices before the sale." }, { "title": "Summify home page, Wayback Machine copy of 31 December 2024", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20241231135628/https://summify.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the footer and the claims, to see the site after the sale." }, { "title": "Summify about page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://summify.io/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The current owners' account of the acquisition and of their company. The robots.txt group for ClaudeBot allows /about/." }, { "title": "Summify home page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://summify.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the structured data, for the purpose check and the current claims." }, { "title": "Summify pricing page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://summify.io/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the structured data. Source for the current plans." }, { "title": "Indie Logs: devhe4d, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.indielogs.com/devhe4d", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The founder's public build log with two entries from November and December 2023. The robots.txt allows this path." }, { "title": "Summify: Free AI Copywriting Masterclass, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://summify.io/ai-copywriting-masterclass", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, for the purpose check of a page that the current site links from its footer: a free course that uses a Summify pod built from named copywriters' content, with no income claims." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/clarity-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/clarity-ai.md", "slug": "clarity-ai", "name": "Clarity AI", "country": "Not stated for the business; the founder's GitHub profile says he is from Germany and lives in Thailand, and the terms name the laws of Singapore", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI image and video upscaler with a web app and an API, built on the founder's open-source model", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "May 2024", "outcomeLabel": "US$5K MRR, July 2024", "sticker": "$5K MRR in 2 months", "outcomeUsd": 60000, "months": 2, "teamLabel": "1 founder, by the site's own account (\"built by its founder, Philip\"); no employees reported", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Open source", "group": "photos", "channel": "open-source", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [ "open-source" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Photography" ], "product": "A web app and an API that make a small or blurry image larger and sharper. The user uploads an image and picks a mode: Crystal stays close to the original, while Clarity and Clarity Pro let the AI add new detail, controlled by sliders for creativity and resemblance. It also upscales video, and developers can call the same models through an API, through ComfyUI or on the model platforms Replicate and fal. Paid plans give monthly credits, and the API is charged per megapixel.", "why": "The founder published his upscaler as free, open-source code in March 2024, presented as an alternative to the paid tool Magnific, and the repository collected thousands of stars from developers. People who did not want to run the code themselves paid for the hosted app. The founder said in mid-2024 that this reached US$5,000 of monthly recurring revenue two months after launch.", "summary": [ "Clarity AI is an AI upscaler: a program that takes a low-resolution image and produces a larger one, using an image model that draws in plausible new detail instead of only stretching the pixels. Its open-source version is built on Stable Diffusion, an open image-generation model, and the user decides how much new detail the AI may add. The founder first released the code as open source, code that anyone may read, run and change, here under the AGPL-3.0 license, on GitHub on 15 March 2024; the repository had 5.2 thousand stars in October 2026, and the public model on Replicate, a service that runs AI models for a fee per use, showed 30.7 million runs.", "The site's FAQ says that Clarity AI \"was built by its founder, Philip\", who posts on X as @philz1337x; no source gives his surname. In a post that eBiz Facts quoted on 1 July 2024, he wrote that he had been a mechanical engineer in Switzerland earning US$100,000 a year, quit, learned to code and to build AI models, and worked with the founder Pieter Levels to build and publish models on Replicate. He wrote that two months after launching, the app was making US$5,000 of MRR, monthly recurring revenue, enough to finance his life.", "That US$5,000 figure rests on one founder post and no payment processor has confirmed it, so this page is marked \"Reported, not verified\" with evidence grade D. In October 2026 the site sells plans from US$19 to US$299 a month and a pay-as-you-go API, and lists Modal, fal and Replicate as its GPU providers. The page also shows earlier photo-editing companies that failed." ], "factsCaption": "US$5,000 in monthly recurring revenue two months after launch, as the founder stated in one post quoted in July 2024, with GitHub, Replicate and the company's own pages for everything else", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is a founder statement that only one post contains, quoted by eBiz Facts. A grade B value is a counter that GitHub or Replicate shows. A grade C value comes from the company's own pages and code, or from the founder's README and profile. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a mechanical engineering job in Switzerland to an open-source upscaler and a paid app, as the founder tells it. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Clarity AI plans in October 2026, read from the pricing page code of clarityai.co (grade C)", "note": "The pricing page loads by script; the prices were read from the page's own code on 27 October 2026. Yearly billing is US$156, US$396 or US$2,388 a year, which the page shows as US$13, US$33 and US$199 a month and calls a saving of about 30%. The API has no subscription and is charged per output megapixel: US$0.005 for the Clarity upscaler, US$0.016 for Crystal and US$0.03 for Clarity Pro, and US$0.10 per megapixel-second of video for Crystal Video. Unused, recent payments can be refunded by the user within 14 days, the FAQ says.", "rows": [ [ "API", "", "0", "pay as you go, from US$0.005 per megapixel" ], [ "Starter", "13", "19", "1,200 credits a month, commercial use, API access" ], [ "Pro", "33", "49", "4,000 credits a month, adds Flux upscaling and ComfyUI" ], [ "Business", "199", "299", "30,000 credits a month, custom options and support" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, by 1 July 2024", "value": "US$5,000", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder's post on X as quoted by eBiz Facts on 1 July 2024: \"Two months after launching, it's making $5,000 MRR, and I can finally finance my life with my own projects.\" X was not opened, and no second source gives a revenue figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from that figure", "value": "US$60,000 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$5,000 times 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Earlier job", "value": "mechanical engineer in Switzerland, US$100,000 a year", "grade": "D", "note": "The same post: \"Before that I worked as a mechanical engineer in Switzerland and made $100k per year, but it was so boring.\"", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Work before the app", "value": "built and published models on Replicate with Pieter Levels", "grade": "D", "note": "The same post: \"Then I worked with @levelsio to help him build and push models to Replicate\". eBiz Facts adds that Levels runs PhotoAI and InteriorAI.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Open-source release", "value": "15 March 2024, AGPL-3.0 license", "grade": "C", "note": "The repository README lists \"03/15/2024: Code release\" and later updates, the first with a date in month/day/year order.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "GitHub repository, 27 October 2026", "value": "5.2 thousand stars, 532 forks", "grade": "B", "note": "GitHub's counters for philz1337x/clarity-upscaler, described as \"free and open-source Magnific Alternative\".", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Public model on Replicate, 27 October 2026", "value": "30.7 million runs; about US$0.019 per run", "grade": "B", "note": "Replicate's page for philz1337x/clarity-upscaler, on Nvidia A100 (40GB) hardware, with typical runs of 17 seconds. The fee goes to Replicate; no source says whether the founder receives any of it.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Launch of the paid app", "value": "about May 2024", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: two months before the founder's post, which eBiz Facts quoted on 1 July 2024. The first archived copy of clarityai.co with content is from 19 May 2024; earlier captures in December 2023 and March 2024 are redirects.", "src": [ 1, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 person", "grade": "C", "note": "The site's FAQ: \"Clarity AI was built by its founder, Philip.\" Support answers say \"mail me\" and \"message me on X at @philz1337x\".", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Founder's identity", "value": "first name Philip; @philz1337x on X and GitHub", "grade": "C", "note": "No downloaded source gives a surname or a registered company. The GitHub profile says \"AI developer from 🇩🇪 Germany living in 🇹🇭 Thailand building open source AI apps\". The terms name the laws of Singapore.", "src": [ 2, 8, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Usage claimed by the site", "value": "\"over 30 million upscales\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Text on the pricing page in October 2026. The figure is close to the 30.7 million runs of the public model on Replicate; no source says whether they are the same count.", "src": [ 3, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Model and hosting providers", "value": "Modal, fal.ai and Replicate for GPU inference; OpenAI for image descriptions and prompt enhancement", "grade": "C", "note": "The site's subprocessor list, published 24 September 2026, also names Cloudflare, Google Cloud and Firebase, Stripe, MailerSend and Rewardful.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Rules for users", "value": "18 or older; no sexual content involving minors, no non-consensual intimate imagery, no impersonation", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms of service, updated 20 July 2026. The privacy policy says uploads are not used to train AI models.", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the headline figure", "value": "2 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the founder's own words: about May 2024 to the post quoted on 1 July 2024.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Before March 2024", "what": "The founder leaves a job as a mechanical engineer in Switzerland, learns to code, to build websites and to use Stable Diffusion, and sees his first company fail, he wrote. eBiz Facts notes that his GitHub account dates from 2022.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "Before March 2024", "what": "He helps Pieter Levels build and publish AI models on Replicate, according to the same post.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "15 March 2024", "what": "Code release of the open-source Clarity upscaler on GitHub.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "March to June 2024", "what": "README updates: anime upscaling, LoRA support, a ComfyUI node, resolution up to 13,000 by 13,000 pixels, pattern upscaling.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "19 May 2024", "what": "First archived copy of clarityai.co with content, titled as an upscaler with \"API and ComfyUI Support\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "By 1 July 2024", "what": "US$5,000 MRR two months after launch, according to the founder's post quoted by eBiz Facts.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "5 March 2025", "what": "Flux upscaling is offered only through the paid app and API, not as open source.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "20 July 2026", "what": "New terms of service and privacy policy.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "when": "24 September 2026", "what": "The site publishes its list of subprocessors.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "27 October 2026", "what": "Plans from US$19 to US$299 a month and a pay-as-you-go API; 30.7 million runs of the public model on Replicate.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3, 9 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Free code as the advertisement", "text": "The founder released the upscaler as open source and called it a free alternative to Magnific, a paid upscaler. The README tells readers that the easy, paid options are his app and API, and the Replicate model page links to the app. Developers who found the code also found the hosted version." }, { "title": "Paid convenience on top of free code", "text": "Running the open-source model needs a GPU and setup work. The app sells the same result without either, and later modes such as Crystal, Clarity Pro and Flux upscaling are closed source and available only through the paid app and API." }, { "title": "Skills learned on someone else's products", "text": "The founder wrote that he built and published models on Replicate for Pieter Levels before building his own app, and that working with Levels taught him to focus on the right things. He launched with the model work already done." }, { "title": "Credits and per-megapixel prices", "text": "Subscriptions give monthly credits and the API charges per output megapixel, so larger images cost more. Each job runs on rented GPUs at Modal, fal or Replicate, so the cost of serving a customer rises with use and the founder owns no hardware." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's README and profile, GitHub and Replicate (grades B and C), the site's own code and pages (grade C), and the founder's post (grade D).", "items": [ "The open-source upscaler is built on the AUTOMATIC1111 Stable Diffusion web UI and packaged with Cog, Replicate's tool for model containers; it also runs in ComfyUI and A1111.", "The public model runs on Replicate on Nvidia A100 GPUs. The paid service sends jobs to Modal, fal.ai and Replicate, and uses OpenAI only for image descriptions and prompt enhancement.", "Files are stored on Cloudflare R2; the backend, job processing and logins run on Google Cloud and Firebase.", "Stripe takes payments, MailerSend sends account emails, and Rewardful tracks the affiliate program.", "The web app is a single-page JavaScript application; the prices and texts of the site are part of its code." ], "src": [ 7, 9, 6, 2, 3 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold photo editing or creative image tools and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Picnik", "years": "2005 to 2012", "funding": "US$3.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Simple photo editing in the browser, without installing software.", "died": "Google bought it in 2010, folded its technology into other products and closed it in 2012, while Adobe and mobile editing apps took the market.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/429-picnik" }, { "name": "Snipshot", "years": "2006 to 2009", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Edit photos in the browser without the Adobe fuss.", "died": "Larger free tools such as Picnik offered more, and it never found a clear way to make money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1241-snipshot" }, { "name": "Splashup", "years": "2007 to 2010", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "Online photo editing with real-time collaboration.", "died": "It was built on Flash as the web moved to HTML5, and it had no clear business model.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1660-splashup" }, { "name": "FiftyThree", "years": "2011 to 2019", "funding": "US$45M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A digital sketchbook for the iPad with its own stylus.", "died": "Apple's own Pencil and stronger drawing apps took away what made it different.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/144-fiftythree" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Picnik, Snipshot and Splashup put simple photo editing in the browser and lost to larger free tools or to a change of web technology. FiftyThree built its own hardware and lost when Apple shipped the same idea.", "An upscaler built on an image model adds detail that was never in the file, as the site describes it. The founder used free, open models, published his version as open source, and rented GPUs for each job, so one person could offer it. The same openness is the risk: anyone can run the free code, and model platforms list many competing upscalers next to his." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, if you can build the model work yourself.", "text": "The method is clear and was repeated by others: publish a useful model as free code, show the results on X, and sell a hosted app and an API to everyone who does not want to run it. It needs real skill with image models and GPUs, and the founder learned that by building models for another founder first.", "steps": [ "Pick one task that open image models do well but that is hard to set up, such as upscaling.", "Release a free, open-source version with a clear README that points to your paid app.", "Sell the hosted version with credits and an API priced per unit of output.", "Keep the newest and best modes closed and available only in the paid product." ], "open": "The same pattern for other image or video tasks where open models are good but hard to run: background removal for one industry, restoration of old photos, or upscaling for print shops." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline US$5,000 of monthly recurring revenue rests on one founder post on X, which this page could read only as eBiz Facts quoted it on 1 July 2024, and the post itself gives no date beyond \"two months after launching\". No payment processor, filing or second interview with figures was found, and no later revenue figure exists in the sources. A reader could look for a payment-verified profile, for example on TrustMRR (the site takes payments through Stripe), or for a newer interview with the founder." }, { "title": "Founder known by first name and handle only", "text": "The site names the founder only as \"Philip\", his email address uses \"philipp\", and he is @philz1337x on X and GitHub, with a newer X handle @philipp1337x in the site's code. No source gives his surname or the legal company that runs the service, although the terms name the laws of Singapore." }, { "title": "Free code competes with the paid app", "text": "The open-source model is free under AGPL-3.0 and has 30.7 million runs on Replicate, where anyone can pay Replicate to use it without paying Clarity AI. The founder keeps newer modes closed, but Replicate and fal list many other upscalers, and the site's own benchmark pages compare about 50 of them." }, { "title": "Dependence on GPU and model providers", "text": "Every job runs on rented GPUs at Modal, fal or Replicate. A price change at these providers changes the cost of each image, and the open models underneath, such as Stable Diffusion and Flux, are controlled by other companies' licenses." }, { "title": "Images of real people", "text": "Upscalers that add detail can change faces, and the README says the Flux mode supports LoRAs \"with a style or a face\". The terms forbid impersonating real people without consent and non-consensual intimate imagery, and require users to be 18 or older; no source says how the service enforces these rules." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://clarityai.co/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "eBiz Facts, 1 July 2024, by Fardeen Khan: His AI App: $5000/Month 2 Months After Launch", "url": "https://ebizfacts.com/philz1337x-clarity-ai-pieter-levels-5000-month/", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full in the site's RSS feed (page 2), downloaded by the pipeline on 27 October 2026; the robots.txt group for all agents allows /feed/ and posts. It quotes the founder's post on X, which was not opened. Source of the headline figure and the founder's background." }, { "title": "Clarity AI home page and web app code, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://clarityai.co/", "grade": "C", "how": "The page loads by script, so its texts were read from the downloaded JavaScript files of the site: the FAQ, the support answers and the founder link. The robots.txt allows every path." }, { "title": "Clarity AI pricing page, read from the page code on 27 October 2026", "url": "https://clarityai.co/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the plan objects, the API prices and the usage claim in the downloaded script of the pricing page." }, { "title": "Clarity AI terms of service, last updated 20 July 2026", "url": "https://clarityai.co/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full from the page code. Source for the age rule, the content rules and the governing law." }, { "title": "Clarity AI privacy policy, last updated 20 July 2026", "url": "https://clarityai.co/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full from the page code. Source for the rule against training on uploads." }, { "title": "Clarity AI subprocessors, published 24 September 2026", "url": "https://clarityai.co/subprocessors", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full from the page code. Source for the GPU, model, hosting, payment, email and affiliate providers." }, { "title": "GitHub: philz1337x/clarity-upscaler, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://github.com/philz1337x/clarity-upscaler", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the repository page and README: stars, forks, license, release date, update log and the links to the paid app. The robots.txt group for ClaudeBot does not block this path." }, { "title": "GitHub profile: philz1337x, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://github.com/philz1337x", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the profile name and bio. The profile shows no full name." }, { "title": "Replicate: philz1337x/clarity-upscaler, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://replicate.com/philz1337x/clarity-upscaler", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full: run count, cost per run, hardware and the link to the app. The robots.txt allows every path." }, { "title": "Clarity AI home page, Wayback Machine copy of 19 May 2024", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20240519050853/https://clarityai.co/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the title of the first archived copy with content; the capture list shows only redirects before that date." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/gliglish/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/gliglish.md", "slug": "gliglish", "name": "Gliglish", "country": "Singapore", "sector": "Education", "productType": "AI speaking tutor for language learners", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "23 December 2022", "outcomeLabel": "€8K a month (about US$8.7K), March 2024", "sticker": "€8K a month, reported", "outcomeUsd": 104352, "months": 15, "teamLabel": "1 founder, the \"solo maker\"; no source names an employee", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "learning", "channel": "creators", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Education" ], "product": "A web app, and later an iPhone app, in which a learner speaks into the microphone and holds a spoken conversation with an AI language teacher, or acts out an everyday situation such as buying bread at a bakery. It gives grammar feedback, reply suggestions, translations, adjustable speech speed and, for American English, a pronunciation score. It covers 38 languages and dialects, with a free plan of 10 minutes a day and a paid plan called Gliglish Plus.", "why": "The founder had sold English-learning products to French speakers since 2007, so he had a newsletter of learners to launch to and knew that speaking practice is what classes lack. He shipped two days before Christmas 2022, a few weeks after the start, and kept a free plan with no signup. Growth came from Hacker News, AI directories and users' own videos on TikTok and Instagram, not from paid advertising, the founder said.", "summary": [ "Gliglish is a language-learning app built around speech-to-speech conversation: the learner speaks, a speech recognition model (software that turns spoken audio into text) writes down what was said, a large language model (an AI model that writes text, of the kind behind ChatGPT) writes the teacher's answer, and a synthetic voice reads it aloud. The founder said on Hacker News in June 2023 that the speech recognition was OpenAI's Whisper model, called through the OpenAI API. The learner can talk with a teacher or act out a role-play, a scripted everyday situation such as ordering in a café, in 38 languages and dialects.", "Fabien Snauwaert, a Frenchman who taught English for decades and whose company Click & Speak Pte. Ltd., registered in Singapore, owns the Gliglish trademark, started Gliglish in November 2022 and launched it to his newsletter on 23 December 2022. He said that it made only €615 in its first 30 days. In an interview with SaaS Starter Stack, published by early April 2024, he said that after \"exactly 16 months\" revenue was \"now at €8K\", half from consumers and half from a partnership that he could not name. At the March 2024 exchange rate, this page calculates that the €8,000 a month he reported was about US$8,700 a month, or about US$104,000 a year.", "That figure rests on one founder statement on one date, so this page grades it D, reported but not verified. eBiz Facts repeated it on 5 April 2024, but quoted the same interview, so it is not a second source. No payment processor, buyer or journalist has published a Gliglish revenue figure, and no later figure was found. The page also shows four failed companies that sold language practice with human teachers or free content, and what an AI teacher changes in that business." ], "factsCaption": "A one-person AI speaking tutor that its founder said made €8,000 a month about 16 months after he started it, with no figure confirmed by a payment processor", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is reported but not verified, here one founder interview on one date and an article that quotes it. A grade C value comes from the founder's own posts and site, the company's own pages, or the App Store listing. A grade B value comes from the US Federal Reserve. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No revenue value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From an English teacher's newsletter to an AI tutor in 38 languages, with a reported €8,000 a month after about 16 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Gliglish prices: the web plans from the archived home page of 15 June 2026, because the live site answered with a 403 browser check to this page's download on 27 October 2026; the iPhone plans from the US App Store on 27 October 2026 (grade C)", "note": "The web page shows its prices in the visitor's currency: euros in March 2024, US dollars in June 2026 and Canadian dollars (CAD 39 a month, or CAD 259 a year) in a September 2026 copy. The June 2026 page says the yearly plan saves 45%. In March 2024 the paid plan came with 3,000 credits a month, which the page put at about 20 hours of conversation; by June 2026 the page listed no hour limit, only \"Speak as much as you need\". Schools, universities and companies buy through separate offers whose prices are not on the home page.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "10 minutes a day; conversations up to 50 messages; limited at peak hours" ], [ "Gliglish Plus, web", "16", "29", "billed 192 a year; no limit on conversation length; 50 topics" ], [ "Gliglish Plus, iPhone app", "16.08", "29.00", "billed 192.99 a year through Apple" ], [ "Gliglish Plus, web, March 2024", "", "", "in euros: EUR 29 a month, or EUR 23 a month billed yearly (EUR 276); about 20 hours a month" ], [ "Schools, universities, business", "", "", "separate offers; prices not published on the home page" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue per month, about March 2024", "value": "€8,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder, SaaS Starter Stack interview (no date on the page): \"It's been exactly 16 months and revenue is now at €8K.\" The page title calls it \"$8K MRR\". eBiz Facts quoted the same interview on 5 April 2024 as \"€8000 monthly revenue\".", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "The same figure in US dollars", "value": "about US$8,696 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: €8,000 times US$1.0870 per euro, the average of the 21 daily rates of March 2024 in the Federal Reserve's H.10 series.", "src": [ 1, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the March 2024 figure", "value": "about US$104,352 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$8,696 times 12. This is the headline value in US dollars on this page.", "src": [ 1, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Date of the figure", "value": "about March 2024", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the founder's site says Gliglish exists \"Since November 2022\", and the interview answer \"exactly 16 months\" is to the question how long he had worked on it, so the interview dates from about March 2024. eBiz Facts called it \"a recent interview\" on 5 April 2024.", "src": [ 1, 5, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Where the revenue came from", "value": "half from consumers, half from one partnership", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder in the interview: \"half of it is from B2C, with the other half coming from a partnernship I can't talk about. I have a few deals in progress.\" The partner is not named in any source found.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the first 30 days", "value": "€615", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder in the interview: \"It made only €615 in the first 30 days\". He said he had 4 sales on the launch day.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Launch", "value": "23 December 2022", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder said he launched \"2 days before Christmas\", through his newsletter for French people learning English. The oldest version of the Gliglish terms is dated 2022-12-23.", "src": [ 1, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Time to build the first version", "value": "2 days to a prototype, 37 days to a working product", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder in the interview: 37 days \"to make it work, make it fast enough, tweak, get WebSockets to work, deploy, add payment\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Product Hunt launch, 10 March 2023", "value": "546 visitors and no sales", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's blog post of June 2023 gives the visitors; the interview says \"Got zero sale when I launched on Product Hunt\".", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Show HN post, 7 June 2023", "value": "2,500 visitors and 143 sign-ups to the free plan, no sales from them", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's blog post a week later. In the post itself he wrote that he had worked on Gliglish for \"6-7 months\" and still spent only about half of his time on it. The HN index shows 82 points and 110 comments.", "src": [ 4, 3 ] }, { "fact": "People who used Gliglish", "value": "114,637 in March 2024; 295,861 in June to September 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page, archived 13 March 2024 and 15 June, 27 July and 14 September 2026. The 2026 count was the same in all three copies. The App Store text says \"262 985 learners in 195 countries\". None of these counts is of paying users.", "src": [ 6, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Page views", "value": "2.4 million a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page, March 2024: \"Gliglish receives 2.4 million page views per month.\" In 2026 the page says \"up to 2.4 million\".", "src": [ 6, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 person", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page, March 2024: \"I'm the solo maker behind Gliglish.\" App Store, October 2026: \"Created by solo founder Fabien Snauwaert\". No source names an employee.", "src": [ 6, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Company", "value": "Click & Speak Pte. Ltd., Singapore", "grade": "C", "note": "The terms and privacy policy give a Singapore address for Click & Speak Pte. Ltd.; the App Store names it as the seller, and the home page says Gliglish is its trademark. The company shares its name with the founder's older English course, Click & Speak.", "src": [ 8, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue of the founder's earlier English course", "value": "over €560,000 in 9 years", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder in the interview, about a different product. His own site says Click & Speak \"Broke €540,000 in sales\". Not Gliglish revenue.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "D", "note": "No source mentions an investor. In June 2023 he wrote that the chief executive of a company that had been through Y Combinator suggested that he apply there; no source says that he did.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "App Store rating, US", "value": "2.0 from 2 ratings; age rating 4+", "grade": "C", "note": "US App Store, read 27 October 2026. Both shown reviews are the same complaint from a German learner.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the March 2024 figure", "value": "15 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: December 2022 to March 2024. From the start of work in November 2022 it is 16 months, as the founder said.", "src": [ 1, 5, 8 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2007", "what": "The founder starts BilingueAnglais, a newsletter and blog for French people learning English. He later used this newsletter for every product launch.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5, 1 ] }, { "when": "2015", "what": "He starts Click & Speak, an online course of the 5,000 most common English words. His site says it passed €540,000 in sales.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "November 2022", "what": "Work on Gliglish begins. A basic prototype takes two days; making it work, with WebSockets and payments, takes 37 days.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 5, 1 ] }, { "when": "23 December 2022", "what": "Launch to his newsletter, two days before Christmas, because he was short of money, he said. 4 sales on the first day and €615 in the first 30 days, according to the founder.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 8 ] }, { "when": "10 March 2023", "what": "Product Hunt launch after 10 days of preparation: 546 visitors and no sales, the founder wrote.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "when": "4 May 2023", "what": "A post on Reddit's r/learnfrench brings 1,500 visitors.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "7 June 2023", "what": "Show HN post: 2,500 visitors in a day, 143 free sign-ups and no sales from them. He asks how to market the product without ads.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "when": "After June 2023", "what": "The site spreads through Twitter, Telegram and Instagram in Arabic, Chinese, Russian and Ukrainian. Later a video in India gets 2.4 million views in two days and the Heroku server and Postgres database hit their limits, the founder said.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "when": "13 March 2024", "what": "The home page counts 114,637 people and 2.4 million page views a month, and sells Gliglish Plus at EUR 29 a month or EUR 23 a month billed yearly.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "About March 2024", "what": "In the SaaS Starter Stack interview the founder says revenue is \"now at €8K\", half from consumers and half from an unnamed partnership.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "5 April 2024", "what": "eBiz Facts repeats the interview figure as \"€8000 monthly revenue\".", "grade": "D", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "By June 2026", "what": "The home page links an iPhone app on the App Store, sold by Click & Speak Pte. Ltd.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 9 ] }, { "when": "15 June 2026", "what": "The home page counts 295,861 users, sells Gliglish Plus at US$29 a month or US$192 a year, and offers plans for schools, universities and companies.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "July 2026", "what": "The home page adds Gliglish Music, songs on any topic that teach English. Since June the footer also lists his other products, among them an AI clothes try-on site.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 10 ] }, { "when": "27 October 2026", "what": "The live site answers this page's download with a 403 browser check. The US App Store shows 2 ratings and the same prices as the web.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 9 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "The founder already had the audience", "text": "Fifteen years of English-learning sites gave him a newsletter of French learners. He launched to it on day one, and he said it \"allowed me to make rent a few times\". The first sales came from people who already trusted him, before any launch site sent traffic." }, { "title": "Free, with no signup", "text": "Anyone could speak to the teacher at once, for 10 minutes a day, without an account. The founder said the free plan worked as marketing because \"you don't want sites to annoy you with a paywall\". The cost is that most visitors never pay: he said a viral wave from India brought traffic but almost no buyers." }, { "title": "Users made the videos", "text": "Product Hunt brought no sales. Hacker News, AI directories and then people posting about Gliglish on TikTok and Instagram brought the growth, the founder said, and the home page says users post new videos about it every week. He said he did no marketing of his own beyond that." }, { "title": "One subscription, many languages", "text": "The same voice pipeline works in any language that the models support, so in his Hacker News replies of June 2023 he promised to add Turkish and Mandarin within 24 hours of the requests. One plan covers all 38 languages and dialects, which a human tutoring business cannot offer without hiring a teacher for each." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's interview, his Hacker News post and replies, his blog, and the archived page source of gliglish.com. The founder's statements are grade C or D; what the page source shows is visible to anyone.", "items": [ "Speech recognition with OpenAI's Whisper model through the OpenAI API, which he named in his Hacker News replies; the home page says the teacher is \"powered by the same technology behind ChatGPT\".", "A Python web app, first hosted on Heroku with a Postgres database; by 2024 he named Azure as the host. The privacy policy says user data is stored on servers in the United Kingdom and Ireland.", "The front end loads Vue 3, Socket.IO for the live audio connection, and Tailwind CSS, as the archived page source shows.", "He writes code with Cursor, keeps his backlog in Markdown files in Sublime Text, answers support email in Front, and measures traffic with Simple Analytics; the page source also loads Google Analytics and PostHog.", "An iPhone app sold through Apple's in-app purchases was added later, at the same prices as the web plans." ], "src": [ 3, 4, 1, 6, 7, 8, 9 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold language practice through human teachers, a tutor marketplace or free content. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "VIPKid", "years": "2013 to 2021", "funding": "US$1.1B", "cause": "Legal/Regulatory", "promise": "One-on-one online English lessons for Chinese children with North American teachers over video.", "died": "China's 2021 rules banned for-profit tutoring of school subjects and foreign teachers, which ended the business model.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2522-vipkid" }, { "name": "Meten EdtechX", "years": "2006 to 2024", "funding": "US$600M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Face-to-face English schools for Chinese professionals, at a high premium over apps.", "died": "The cost of finding each student and running the schools was higher than what students paid; COVID and new rules ended it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2353-meten-edtechx" }, { "name": "Hujiang", "years": "2001 to 2021", "funding": "US$187M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "A large online platform for language learning and school courses, free to start.", "died": "Most of its millions of registered users never paid, and those who paid did not cover the cost of acquiring them.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2556-hujiang" }, { "name": "Teacher Finder", "years": "2015 to 2019", "funding": "US$50K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Match language learners directly with tutors, without a language school in between.", "died": "Larger tutor platforms with more money took the market, and its simple automated setup could not keep up.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1962-teacher-finder" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Three of the four predecessors sold time with a human teacher, either in a school, over video or through a marketplace. Every lesson needed a teacher to be paid, so revenue grew only as fast as the teacher pool, and a change in the rules or in the cost of finding students could end the company. Hujiang avoided the teacher cost with free content and found that free users at very large scale did not turn into enough paying users.", "An AI teacher removes the paid human from each lesson. Since late 2022 speech recognition, a language model and a synthetic voice can be joined into a conversation that runs at any hour in dozens of languages, and one person can build it in weeks, as the founder said he did. What has not changed is Hujiang's problem: Gliglish counts hundreds of thousands of users and millions of page views, and the founder said that a wave of traffic from India brought almost no buyers." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The early timing, no.", "text": "In December 2022 few products let people speak with an AI teacher; by October 2026 the App Store suggests several similar AI tutors next to Gliglish. The part that can still be copied is the founder's: years of content for one group of learners, a newsletter to launch to, and a free plan with no signup that lets users show the product in their own videos.", "steps": [ "Pick one group of learners that you already know and can reach, for example through a newsletter or a community that you run.", "Join speech recognition, a language model and a synthetic voice into one spoken conversation, and ship it in weeks.", "Offer a daily free allowance with no signup, so that visitors and video makers can try it at once.", "Sell one subscription for all languages, then add offers for schools and companies." ], "open": "Spoken practice for one narrow use: job interviews in a second language, medical or legal vocabulary for professionals, exam speaking tests, and languages that the large apps serve poorly." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline figure, €8,000 of revenue a month, rests on one source: Fabien Snauwaert's own statement in a SaaS Starter Stack interview that has no date and that this page dates to about March 2024. eBiz Facts repeated it on 5 April 2024 from the same interview, so it is not a second source. No payment processor, buyer or journalist has confirmed it, and no later revenue figure was found. A reader could look for a payment-processor profile such as TrustMRR, a later dated interview with the founder, or a revenue post on his own site or X account." }, { "title": "Half of it was one unnamed partner", "text": "The founder said half of the revenue came from \"a partnernship I can't talk about\". A business with half its revenue from one contract can lose that half when the contract ends, and no source says whether the partnership continued after 2024." }, { "title": "User counts that do not move", "text": "The home page showed exactly 295,861 users in copies of June, July and September 2026, and the App Store text gives 262,985 learners. The counts measure people who tried the product, not paying customers, and the 2026 figure may not be updated live." }, { "title": "The founder's other products", "text": "The Gliglish footer links the founder's other sites: English-learning sites such as Click & Speak and BilingueAnglais, gifPaper (live wallpapers for Mac), Kromimi (a virtual pet) and TryThisFit, an AI clothes try-on that puts clothes on the user's own photo, sold in credit packs and with a note that try-ons for children are not supported. None of them sells anything that this site treats as a problem." }, { "title": "Role-play topics and age", "text": "The App Store rates the app 4+ and the terms say the service \"can be used by people of all ages\", with parents responsible for children. The App Store lists role-plays on \"travel, interviews, dating and more\", and the home page mentions preparing \"for a job interview or a first date\". These are conversation exercises, not a dating service, and no source found shows sexual content." }, { "title": "A crowded market with weak store ratings", "text": "The App Store suggests several other AI language tutors next to Gliglish, such as Langua, Talkpal, Langotalk and Fluently, and the US listing shows 2 ratings that average 2.0. The home page cites university studies of Gliglish; this page did not check them." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://gliglish.com/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6745433536" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "SaaS Starter Stack: Gliglish Founder Interview, How Fabien launched a tool to learn languages with AI in 37 days and grew it to $8K MRR", "url": "https://saasstarterstack.com/interviews/gliglish", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full; downloaded 27 October 2026. The page has no date; Wayback first captured it on 19 September 2024 and eBiz Facts linked it on 5 April 2024. Source for the €8,000 figure, the revenue split, the first 30 days, the build time, the growth channels and the tools." }, { "title": "eBiz Facts, 5 April 2024: His AI Language Learning App: $9K/Month in 16 Months", "url": "https://ebizfacts.com/fabien-snauwaert-gliglish-9k-month-16-months/", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full in the site's RSS feed (https://ebizfacts.com/feed/?paged=2, downloaded 27 October 2026). It quotes the same interview, so it dates the figure but does not confirm it." }, { "title": "Hacker News, 7 June 2023: Show HN: I built an AI language teacher to get you speaking", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36228477", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through the HN Algolia API (hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/36228477), with the founder's replies. Source for the 6 to 7 months of work, the share of his time, and Whisper through the OpenAI API." }, { "title": "Fabien Snauwaert's blog, June 2023: What I learned from being #2 on Hacker News for a split second, and how I messed up", "url": "https://fabiensnauwaert.com/what-i-learned-from-being-2-on-hacker-news-for-a-split-second-and-how-i-messed-up", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Founder's own post, written a week after the Show HN. Source for the visitor counts of Product Hunt, Reddit and Hacker News, the free sign-ups and the Heroku hosting." }, { "title": "Fabien Snauwaert's personal site", "url": "https://fabiensnauwaert.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026. Source for the start month of Gliglish, his earlier English-learning sites and their sales, and his other products." }, { "title": "Gliglish home page, archived 13 March 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240313085830/https://gliglish.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the Wayback copy in full, with its page source. Source for the March 2024 prices, the user and page-view counts, the solo-maker line and the company name." }, { "title": "Gliglish home page, archived 15 June 2026, with copies of 27 July and 14 September 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260615023606/https://gliglish.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the Wayback copies in full, with their page source. The live site answered with a 403 browser check on 27 October 2026. Source for the 2026 prices, user count, features, footer links and front-end tools." }, { "title": "Gliglish terms of service and privacy policy, archived 16 May 2025 and 16 May 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250516170831/https://gliglish.com/terms-and-privacy/terms/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the Wayback copies of the terms, the privacy policy and the index of versions. Source for the company, the age clause, the data location and the first version date, 2022-12-23." }, { "title": "Gliglish: AI Language Tutor on the US App Store", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gliglish-ai-language-tutor/id6745433536", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026. Source for the seller, the in-app prices, the age rating, the ratings, the role-play topics and the solo-founder line." }, { "title": "TryThisFit home page", "url": "https://trythisfit.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026, to check the founder's other product that the Gliglish footer links." }, { "title": "Federal Reserve, H.10 release: historical rates for the euro, in US dollars per euro", "url": "https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h10/hist/dat00_eu.htm", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the daily rates. The March 2024 average of the 21 daily values, US$1.0870 per euro, was computed with python3." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/octolens/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/octolens.md", "slug": "octolens", "name": "Octolens", "country": "Germany", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI social listening tool for B2B software companies", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "May 2024", "outcomeLabel": "About US$40K net from US$200K of AppSumo sales, December 2024", "sticker": "$40K net from AppSumo", "outcomeUsd": 40000, "months": 7, "teamLabel": "2 people: the co-founder and CEO and a founding engineer, in 2024 and still in 2026", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "launches", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Marketing software" ], "product": "A web service that watches Reddit, X, LinkedIn, Hacker News, GitHub, YouTube, review sites, podcasts and news for the keywords a company chooses: its brand, its competitors and the problems it solves. An AI model reads each mention with the company's own description and scores it for relevance, sentiment and intent, such as a bug report or someone asking for an alternative to a competitor. The relevant mentions go to Slack, email, a CRM, an API or an AI agent through an MCP server. Octolens does not post replies; people at the customer company do.", "why": "The co-founder had spent hundreds of hours searching social media for mentions by hand at her previous company, where a similar feature was the most requested one. Plain keyword alerts return mostly noise, so the AI relevance score became the product. A lifetime deal on AppSumo for 60 days in late 2024 brought over 1,000 new users, and she wrote that it grossed slightly over US$200,000, of which Octolens expected to keep about US$40,000.", "summary": [ "Octolens is a social listening tool: software that collects public posts that mention chosen words, so that a company sees what people say about it. Older tools of this kind send every post that contains the keyword, and most of those posts are noise. Octolens adds an AI relevance filter: a large language model (an AI model that reads and writes text) reads each mention together with the customer's company profile and scores it high, medium or low, with tags such as bug report or buying intent. The co-founder wrote on AppSumo in September 2024 that the product was critically dependent on \"OpenAI, Social Media APIs\".", "Charlotte Schmitt, who had been chief of staff at the developer-community startup crowd.dev before its sale to the Linux Foundation, started Octolens in Berlin in April 2024 with a founding engineer. In September 2024 they sold it on AppSumo Select, a marketplace where buyers pay once for a lifetime deal (permanent access to a software plan) and may ask for a refund within 60 days. In a blog post of 12 December 2024 she wrote that they \"grossed slightly over $200,000 in total sales within the 60-day period\", and that after AppSumo's share of \"around 70%\" and refunds \"we will net closer to $40,000 in payouts\". The deal brought over 1,000 new users, she said.", "That figure rests on one statement by the co-founder on one date, so this page grades it D, reported but not verified. The net figure, about US$40,000 paid once, is the headline here, because according to the co-founder most of the US$200,000 went to AppSumo, and none of it was recurring revenue. No payment processor, AppSumo report or journalist has confirmed it, and Octolens has published no later revenue figure. In October 2026 its pages say that a team of two serves hundreds of software companies, at US$159 to US$499 a month on yearly billing." ], "factsCaption": "A two-person AI social listening tool whose co-founder reported slightly over US$200,000 of lifetime-deal sales in 60 days, with about US$40,000 expected to reach the company, and no figure confirmed by a payment processor", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is reported but not verified, here one blog post by the co-founder on one date. A grade C value comes from the company's own pages, its posts on Hacker News or its deal page on AppSumo. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.", "timelineLead": "From a feature that users of another product kept asking for to a two-person company that sold a lifetime deal to over 1,000 users, in eight months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Octolens prices on 27 October 2026, from the company's pricing page and its structured data; the 2024 lifetime deal from the closed AppSumo page (grade C)", "note": "The pricing page shows the yearly prices; the monthly prices, US$199 and US$599, are in the page's structured data and in the company's llms.txt file. The page says yearly billing saves up to 20%. Every plan includes the API, webhooks and the MCP server, and a 7-day free trial without a credit card. Mentions above the plan's quota are billed per mention, and extra keywords cost US$10 a month on Pro and US$5 on Scale. The AppSumo deal of 2024 sold three one-time license tiers; the closed deal page no longer shows their prices.", "rows": [ [ "Pro", "159", "199", "15,000 mentions a month, 10 keywords, hourly refresh; extra mentions US$0.013 each" ], [ "Scale", "499", "599", "50,000 mentions a month, 40 keywords, real-time refresh; adds podcasts, news, newsletters and the web; extra mentions US$0.01 each" ], [ "Enterprise", "custom", "", "several workspaces, unlimited mentions and keywords, custom AI agents" ], [ "AppSumo lifetime deal, 2024", "", "", "sold out; three one-time tiers with 1,000, 2,500 or 6,000 mentions a month and 3, 6 or 10 keywords" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Expected net payout from the AppSumo campaign", "value": "about US$40,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Co-founder's blog post, 12 December 2024: after AppSumo's revenue share and refunds \"we will net closer to $40,000 in payouts\". An expected figure at the time of writing. This is the headline of this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Gross sales in the 60-day campaign", "value": "slightly over US$200,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Same post: \"we grossed slightly over $200,000 in total sales within the 60-day period\". One-time lifetime-deal sales, not recurring revenue.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "AppSumo's revenue share", "value": "around 70%", "grade": "D", "note": "Same post. She wrote that her research had shown shares of 65% to 80%, and that she would negotiate harder next time.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Octolens' share before refunds", "value": "about US$60,000", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 30% of US$200,000. The gap to the expected US$40,000, about US$20,000, would be refunds and other deductions. All inputs are rounded figures from the post.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "New users from the campaign", "value": "over 1,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Same post. The expected net payout is at most about US$40 per new user (calculated).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "The net payout in subscription terms", "value": "about 21 customer-years of the Pro plan", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$40,000 divided by US$1,908, the yearly price of the Pro plan in October 2026 (US$159 a month billed yearly).", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Campaign dates", "value": "from about 16 September 2024, for 60 days", "grade": "C", "note": "The co-founder's first posts on the AppSumo deal page are dated 16 September 2024, and an update of 18 October 2024 thanks buyers of \"the last 4 weeks\". Sixty days from 16 September is 15 November 2024 (calculated).", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Recurring revenue after the campaign", "value": "no figure given", "grade": "D", "note": "The co-founder wrote that some AppSumo buyers had already bought add-ons, such as extra mentions or platforms, which she called \"partial MRR\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Reviews on the AppSumo deal page", "value": "36 reviews; overall rating 4.6", "grade": "C", "note": "AppSumo deal page, read 27 October 2026. The rating is from AppSumo's AI-written summary of the reviews. The deal is marked \"Sold out\".", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Website authority after the campaign", "value": "domain rating from 10 to 23 on Ahrefs", "grade": "D", "note": "Co-founder's post. Domain rating is Ahrefs' score of how strongly other sites link to a domain.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "2 people", "grade": "C", "note": "AppSumo page, September 2024: \"We are a team of 2.\" The co-founder handles everything non-technical, and the other person is the founding engineer. Her about page, October 2026: hundreds of companies served \"with a team of two\". The AppSumo profile gives the company size as 1 to 10 employees.", "src": [ 2, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Founded", "value": "April 2024, in Berlin", "grade": "C", "note": "Co-founder on the AppSumo page. Her about page also says April 2024; the AppSumo profile says January 2024 and the company's llms.txt says 2023.", "src": [ 2, 8, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Company", "value": "Lens Labs GmbH, Berlin", "grade": "C", "note": "Octolens imprint. The imprint names a managing director who is not the co-founder in this story; no source read says who owns the company.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions an investor in Octolens. The co-founder's about page describes her as a second-time founder who went through an accelerator with her first company and is \"lean this time\".", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "AI model provider", "value": "OpenAI", "grade": "C", "note": "Co-founder on the AppSumo page: critically dependent on \"OpenAI, Social Media APIs\". In December 2024 she wrote that falling AI costs made a lifetime price possible.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Customers, October 2026", "value": "\"hundreds of devtool and AI companies\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Co-founder's about page, naming Vercel, PostHog, Cursor and Lovable. The home page shows quotes from people at Vercel, Medusa, PlanetScale and Railway.", "src": [ 8, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Sign-ups that come from AI assistants", "value": "1 in 4", "grade": "C", "note": "Company blog post of 5 October 2026: \"1 in 4 Octolens signups now comes from AI assistants recommending us\".", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the December 2024 figure", "value": "7 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: May 2024, the first Show HN post, to December 2024. From the founding in April 2024 it is 8 months.", "src": [ 3, 1, 2 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2021 to 2022", "what": "Charlotte Schmitt co-founds SaveSpace, a self-storage startup, which joins the Techstars accelerator in Berlin in 2022. She later leaves to learn B2B software.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 8 ] }, { "when": "Before 2024", "what": "As chief of staff at crowd.dev, a developer-community platform later acquired by the Linux Foundation, she searches Reddit, Hacker News and GitHub for mentions by hand. A crowd.dev feature that monitored sites for content to engage with stays one of its most popular features.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 8 ] }, { "when": "April 2024", "what": "Octolens is founded in Berlin as a separate product built from that idea, with a fully remote team.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 8 ] }, { "when": "16 May 2024", "what": "First Show HN post: a keyword monitoring tool for B2B, with AI relevance scores and a free search on the home page.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "8 July 2024", "what": "Second Show HN post, about finding posts with buying signals. A founding engineer has joined.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "2024", "what": "AppSumo's team approaches her on LinkedIn. She agrees after several talks, with a clause that lets Octolens turn off accounts after six months without use.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "16 September 2024", "what": "The AppSumo Select deal opens, with three lifetime tiers. The co-founder's posts on the deal page say the team has 2 people.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "18 October 2024", "what": "After four weeks she posts the first feature update for AppSumo buyers: CSV exports, monthly brand-mention emails and bookmarks.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "About 15 November 2024", "what": "The 60-day period ends. She later reports slightly over US$200,000 of gross sales and over 1,000 new users.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "12 December 2024", "what": "Blog post on the campaign: Octolens expects to net closer to US$40,000 after AppSumo's share of about 70% and refunds, she wrote. She shares it on Hacker News on 17 December.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The pricing page lists Pro at US$159 and Scale at US$499 a month billed yearly, with an API and an MCP server on every plan. Her about page says a team of two serves hundreds of companies.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7, 8, 6 ] }, { "when": "5 October 2026", "what": "A company blog post argues against tools that post Reddit replies automatically and says that 1 in 4 sign-ups now come from AI assistants.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "The filter is the product", "text": "Keyword alerts are an old idea, and the old complaint is noise: the Octolens home page calls other tools' alerts \"full of junk\", and a brand named after a common word gets many useless ones. Octolens sends each mention with the customer's company description to an AI model and alerts only on high and medium scores. In a Hacker News reply of July 2024 the co-founder said that relevance is hard to add for large tools with very different customers, and easier for a product aimed at early-stage B2B software companies." }, { "title": "Built from a feature that users already wanted", "text": "At crowd.dev, a feature that found content to engage with stayed one of the most popular even though the company did not invest in it, and users asked for it as a separate product. Before that, the co-founder had done the same work by hand for early users. So the problem and the buyers were known before the first line of Octolens code." }, { "title": "A lifetime deal as paid marketing", "text": "The co-founder saw AppSumo less as income and more as a source of users, feedback, traffic and links. She wrote that AppSumo kept around 70% of the gross and that Octolens expected about US$40,000. In return the deal brought over 1,000 users in 60 days, a wave of support requests that forced better documentation, and, she wrote, a higher steady level of traffic after the campaign." }, { "title": "The founders use the product to sell it", "text": "The co-founder described tracking her own pain points, brand and competitors with Octolens, getting Slack alerts and joining the threads herself. In an October 2024 Hacker News comment that mentions Octolens she added \"disclaimer: it's my company\". The company argues in public that replies must come from real, named people, and it does not post for its customers." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the co-founder's posts on AppSumo and Hacker News, her December 2024 blog post, and the company's privacy policy, which lists its subprocessors. They are grade C, except the campaign figures, which are grade D.", "items": [ "AI: the OpenAI API scores each mention for relevance, sentiment and intent; the co-founder named OpenAI and the social media APIs as the product's critical dependencies.", "Running: Vercel for hosting, PlanetScale for the database, Inngest for background jobs, Tinybird as an analytics database for mentions, and Clerk for sign-in.", "Payments and customers: Stripe for subscriptions; AppSumo for the 2024 lifetime deal; Crisp for support chat; Loops for email; PostHog and Mixpanel for product analytics.", "Delivery: alerts to Slack and email, a native Attio integration, webhooks, a REST API and an MCP server, so that customers can ask AI assistants such as Claude or ChatGPT about their mentions.", "Launch channels: two Show HN posts in May and July 2024, the AppSumo Select deal from September 2024, and free tools on the website." ], "src": [ 2, 3, 4, 1, 10, 6, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to turn social media posts into useful insight for businesses and failed, most of them against better-funded competitors. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Salorix", "years": "2009 to 2014", "funding": "US$3.3M", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "A platform that used machine learning to rank social media conversations so brands could act on them.", "died": "Investors stopped funding it while smaller, cheaper AI startups took its customers.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1845-salorix" }, { "name": "Isentium", "years": "2012 to 2020", "funding": "US$50M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Sentiment analysis of social media and news for traders and insurers.", "died": "Most social media posts turned out to be noise; competitors built better tools while compliance problems cost it clients.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/255-isentium" }, { "name": "SumAll", "years": "2011 to 2019", "funding": "US$15M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "One dashboard of social media and marketing data for small businesses.", "died": "Large analytics companies and free tools offered the same dashboards, and its own could not justify the price.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/587-sumall" }, { "name": "ThinkUp", "years": "2010 to 2017", "funding": "US$1M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Personal insights from a user's own Twitter and Facebook activity, beyond likes and retweets.", "died": "It stayed a desktop product while social media moved to phones, and its marketing was neglected.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/624-thinkup" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The four predecessors tried to turn social media posts into insight with funded teams. Isentium's record says that most social media turned out to be noise, and Salorix ranked conversations with machine learning but ran out of investor money. They sold dashboards and reports, which large analytics companies and free tools could copy.", "Two things differ for Octolens. A general language model now does the ranking for a small cost per post, and the co-founder wrote in December 2024 that falling AI costs were what made a lifetime price possible. And the output is not a dashboard but a short list of posts sent into Slack, a CRM or an AI agent, for people who reply to them the same day. What has not changed is the dependence on platforms that the company does not control: the posts come from Reddit, X, LinkedIn and others, through their APIs." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, if you already know the buyers.", "text": "Octolens repeats a common path for B2B software: do the work by hand for early users, turn the most requested feature of a larger product into its own product, and add an AI step that removes the part users hate. The AppSumo part is harder to copy well: the co-founder warns that it only works when the costs per account are known, and that most of the gross goes to the marketplace.", "steps": [ "Find a feature inside a larger product that users keep asking for as a separate tool.", "Do the job by hand for a few customers first, so you know which results matter to them.", "Use a language model with the customer's own context to cut the noise, and deliver results where the team already works.", "Before a lifetime deal, model the cost of each account, add a clause for inactive accounts, and treat the payout as marketing." ], "open": "AI filtering for other noisy public sources: job postings, government tenders, app store reviews, patent filings, and support forums of open-source projects." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline figure, about US$40,000 net from slightly over US$200,000 of gross AppSumo sales, rests on one source: co-founder Charlotte Schmitt's blog post of 12 December 2024, in which she wrote that Octolens \"will net closer to $40,000 in payouts\", an expected figure at the time. No payment processor, AppSumo report or journalist has confirmed the figures, and Octolens has published no revenue or recurring-revenue figure since. A reader could look for a payment-processor profile such as TrustMRR, an AppSumo case study, or a later dated revenue post by the founders." }, { "title": "Lifetime deals do not recur, but their costs do", "text": "AppSumo buyers paid once, while Octolens pays for hosting, data collection and AI for every active account. The co-founder named this as her main worry and negotiated the right to switch off accounts after six months without use. Some buyers have since bought add-ons; how many is not stated." }, { "title": "Asking happy reviewers to post elsewhere", "text": "One goal of the campaign was to turn AppSumo reviews into reviews on G2 and Capterra. The co-founder wrote: \"We got some great reviews - and even though I have approached some to also share on other platforms, I haven't had success yet.\" Asking only satisfied customers to post public reviews is called review gating. This is a founder's tactic, reported here, not something the product sells." }, { "title": "Lead finding and platform rules", "text": "Octolens tags posts with buying intent, and one of its AI agent skills drafts openers for people who ask for alternatives to a competitor. The company says the product \"doesn't scrape profiles or build contact lists\" and that \"The one step we think should never be automated is pressing post\". Customers who reply to strangers still carry the risk of breaking a community's rules." }, { "title": "Dependence on other platforms", "text": "The product needs data from Reddit, X, LinkedIn and others, and a language model from OpenAI, the co-founder wrote. A platform that raises its API price or closes access can remove a source or raise costs." }, { "title": "Small facts that disagree", "text": "The founding date appears as April 2024, January 2024 and 2023 on different pages, and the operating company, Lens Labs GmbH, has a managing director who is not described as a member of the two-person team. No source read explains the ownership." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://octolens.com/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Octolens blog, 12 December 2024 (updated 16 December 2024), by Charlotte Schmitt: $200k in 60 Days: An Honest AppSumo Select Review (2024)", "url": "https://octolens.com/blog/200k-in-60-days-honest-review-of-appsumo-select-for-my-ai-b2b-saas-product-2024", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026. Found through the Hacker News post of 17 December 2024, whose older link now returns 404. Source for the gross sales, AppSumo's share, the expected net payout, the users, the domain rating and the review goal." }, { "title": "AppSumo: Octolens deal page, with the co-founder's posts of 16 September and 18 October 2024", "url": "https://appsumo.com/products/octolens/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026; the deal is sold out. Source for the campaign dates, the three tiers, the team of 2, the founding date, the dependence on OpenAI and the review count." }, { "title": "Hacker News, 16 May 2024: Show HN: Keyword monitoring and notification tool for B2B", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40379876", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through the HN Algolia API. The co-founder's first public description of the product." }, { "title": "Hacker News, 8 July 2024: Show HN: We built a social listening AI for X, LinkedIn, Reddit, HN", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40905529", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through the HN Algolia API, with the co-founder's reply. Source for the buying-signal use and the founding engineer." }, { "title": "Hacker News, 17 December 2024: Lessons from earning $200k in 60 days on AppSumo with my SaaS, and the co-founder's comments of 2024", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42439069", "grade": "C", "how": "Read through the HN Algolia API (the item, and a search for octolens). Source for the date the post was shared, its first URL, and the co-founder's comment that discloses her company." }, { "title": "Octolens home page", "url": "https://octolens.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026. Source for the product, the platforms covered, the AI filter, the delivery options, the customer quotes and the FAQ on contact lists." }, { "title": "Octolens pricing page", "url": "https://octolens.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026, including its structured data for the monthly prices. Source for the plans, quotas and extra charges." }, { "title": "Octolens: Charlotte Schmitt, Co-Founder and CEO", "url": "https://octolens.com/about/charlotte-schmitt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026. Source for her background, the team of two in 2026, the customers and the founding month." }, { "title": "Octolens blog, 5 October 2026: Reddit Lead Generation Tools: Read This Before You Buy One", "url": "https://octolens.com/blog/reddit-lead-generation", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the company's position against automated replies and the share of sign-ups from AI assistants." }, { "title": "Octolens privacy policy", "url": "https://octolens.com/legal/privacy-policy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on payment data and subprocessors. Source for the hosting, database, payment, support, email and analytics services." }, { "title": "Octolens imprint", "url": "https://octolens.com/legal/imprint", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the English and German versions. Source for the operating company and its city." }, { "title": "Octolens llms.txt", "url": "https://octolens.com/llms.txt", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026. Source for the monthly prices, the integrations, the founding year given there and the agent skill that drafts openers." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/practiceme/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/practiceme.md", "slug": "practiceme", "name": "Practice Me", "country": "Not stated in the sources", "sector": "Education", "productType": "iPhone and web app for spoken English practice with AI tutors", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "3 September 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$4.6K verified revenue in 30 days, October 2026", "sticker": "$4.6K in 30 days", "outcomeUsd": 54720, "months": 13, "teamLabel": "1 named founder, Guillaume Sarfati, who sells the app under their own name on the App Store; headcount not published", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Search", "group": "learning", "channel": "search", "trend": "flat", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Education" ], "product": "An app in which a learner of English speaks out loud with an AI tutor, like a phone call. The learner picks a tutor (for example Sarah for everyday talk, Oliver for formal British English, Marcus for travel), speaks, and the tutor answers by voice with an American or British accent. The app shows live subtitles and translations, saves the new words from each conversation, and offers practice for job interviews and the IELTS and TOEFL speaking tests. It runs on iPhone and iPad, on the web, and on Android. The App Store sells Weekly Pro at US$9.99 and Yearly Pro at US$59.99, each after a 3-day free trial; the web plan costs US$19 a month.", "why": "Speaking is the part of a language that learners practice least, because a human partner is expensive or not available. An AI tutor that listens and answers by voice is available at any hour for a fixed subscription. The founder chose search as the way to find learners: the website has about 1,600 pages in ten languages, and TrustMRR, reading the site's Google Search Console account, counted 460,920 Google search impressions in 30 days.", "summary": [ "Practice Me is an app for speaking practice: the learner talks out loud in English and gets a spoken answer, instead of reading or writing exercises. The AI tutor listens to the learner, writes an answer, and reads it aloud in a native American or British voice. The App Store page lists pronunciation feedback, interview and business English, IELTS and TOEFL practice, live subtitles with translations into the learner's own language, and a word list built from each conversation. The App Store compares the price with human tutors, which it says \"often\" cost \"$15–30 per 45 minutes\". No source names the AI models behind the voice or the answers; an update of 28 March 2026 says only \"Upgraded AI model for better accuracy and fluency\".", "The App Store lists Guillaume Sarfati as the developer and seller; the copyright line names a company, CODELINE TEKNOLOJI, which no other source explains. Version 1.0 was released on 3 September 2025. For seven months the app made almost nothing: TrustMRR, a site that shows startups' revenue read directly from their payment accounts, records US$62.78 from November 2025 to January 2026 and no revenue in February or March. Revenue rose in April 2026, and from May it was between US$3,232 and US$4,677 a month. On 27 October 2026 TrustMRR, reading RevenueCat (a service that records App Store subscription payments for app makers) and Stripe, showed US$4,560 of revenue in the last 30 days, monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the subscription income that repeats every month, of US$3,044 from 235 active subscriptions, and US$26,713 since launch.", "The revenue figures are grade A: TrustMRR and a second site, whatsthe.app, both read them from the app's payment accounts, and whatsthe.app showed an MRR of US$2,910 on 1 October 2026. The founder's own fields, such as the marketing channels \"App store optimization\" and \"SEO\" and a profit margin of 68%, are grade C. The page also shows four earlier companies that sold English practice with human teachers and failed, and notes where the app's own website shows a selected App Store rating." ], "factsCaption": "US$4,560 of verified revenue in the 30 days to 27 October 2026, 13 months after the App Store release, read from RevenueCat and Stripe", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read from the app's payment accounts (RevenueCat, and Stripe for the web plan) by TrustMRR or by whatsthe.app. A grade B value is a record that Apple shows on the App Store, or traffic data that TrustMRR reads from Google's tools. A grade C value comes from the founder's own fields on TrustMRR or from the app's own website. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From an App Store release in September 2025, through seven months with almost no revenue, to about US$4,500 a month from July 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Practice Me prices in October 2026: the iPhone plans from the in-app purchase list on the US App Store page, the web plan from the company's pricing page (grade B for the App Store, C for the web page)", "note": "Calculated: US$59.99 a year is US$5.00 a month; US$9.99 a week is about US$43.29 a month. The web pricing page has a yearly option marked \"SAVE 57 %\" whose price loads by script and could not be read. The same page's description text says \"Weekly $7.99 or yearly $59.99\", while the App Store lists Weekly Pro at US$9.99. The pricing page says that \"mobile app and web accounts are separate and not linked\", so a subscription bought on one does not work on the other. Every new subscription starts with a 3-day free trial.", "rows": [ [ "Yearly Pro (App Store)", "5.00", "", "US$59.99 a year; unlimited practice after a 3-day free trial" ], [ "Weekly Pro (App Store)", "", "", "US$9.99 a week; unlimited practice after a 3-day free trial" ], [ "Practice Me Pro (web)", "", "19", "Unlimited conversations with every tutor, topic starters, memory across sessions; card payment through Stripe" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days, to 27 October 2026", "value": "US$4,560, down 7.7%", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, revenue synced 27 October 2026 from RevenueCat and Stripe through API keys. Calculated: US$54,720 a year at that rate. The last 3 months brought US$13,571 and the last 6 months US$24,813.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 27 October 2026", "value": "US$3,044 from 235 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot; MRR growth in the last 30 days 0.0%. Calculated: US$12.95 of MRR per subscription per month, and US$36,528 a year at that rate.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Second tracker, 28 days to 1 October 2026", "value": "US$3,913 of revenue, MRR of US$2,910, 211 active subscriptions, 38 active trials", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app: \"All data is verified through RevenueCat. Last updated: Oct 1, 2026\". Its figures are labelled as RevenueCat data, and it does not mention the Stripe web payments. Calculated: TrustMRR's MRR 26 days later is 4.6% higher and its subscription count 11.4% higher.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month", "value": "US$32.80 in November 2025, US$19.99 in December, US$9.99 in January 2026, none listed for February and March, US$1,829 in April, US$3,630 in May, US$3,232 in June, US$4,529 in July, US$4,677 in August, US$4,461 in September, US$4,265 in 1 to 27 October", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table. Calculated: November 2025 to January 2026 brought US$62.78; April to 27 October 2026 brought US$26,623, which is 99.7% of all revenue so far. September was 4.6% below August.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue since launch, to 27 October 2026", "value": "US$26,713", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR all-time figure. Calculated: the monthly table sums to US$26,685.78, US$27.22 less; the table does not say where the difference comes from.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Users and downloads, 28 days to 1 October 2026", "value": "2,693 active customers, 2,351 new customers, about 2,400 downloads on iOS and Android", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app, read from RevenueCat. Calculated: 211 subscriptions out of 2,693 active customers is 7.8%, the share that whatsthe.app calls subscription penetration. whatsthe.app also gives more than 500 downloads in total on Google Play.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Search traffic, 30 days to 27 October 2026", "value": "460,920 Google search impressions and 41,090 visitors", "grade": "B", "note": "TrustMRR reads these from the site's Google Search Console and Google Analytics accounts, which it shows as connected. A search impression is one appearance of a page in Google's results. TrustMRR gives US$0.11 of revenue per visitor.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Pages on the website", "value": "1,599 addresses in the sitemap: about 160 pages in each of nine languages besides English, 94 blog posts, 20 comparison pages, 36 pages for specific learner groups and 4 pages about other apps", "grade": "C", "note": "practiceme.app/sitemap.xml, read 27 October 2026. Its last-modified dates fall mostly in April 2026 (454 pages), May (630) and June (300). Revenue rose in the same months; no source says that the pages caused the rise.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "Marketing channels", "value": "App store optimization and SEO", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder-written TrustMRR field. App store optimization means choosing the app's name, subtitle and keywords so that it appears in App Store searches; SEO (search engine optimization) means the same for Google.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Release on the App Store", "value": "3 September 2025", "grade": "B", "note": "App Store version history (version 1.0 on 09/03/2025); whatsthe.app gives the same worldwide release date and TrustMRR the same founding date.", "src": [ 3, 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founder and seller", "value": "Guillaume Sarfati, developer account in their own name", "grade": "B", "note": "The App Store lists \"Guillaume sarfati\" as developer and seller, with one app on the account. whatsthe.app shows the same name and the X handle @tanisss_ with 185 followers. The copyright line reads \"Copyright © 2026 CODELINE TEKNOLOJI\".", "src": [ 3, 4, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Team at the October 2026 figure", "value": "1 named person; headcount not published", "grade": "C", "note": "No source names another person or gives a headcount. The website writes in the plural (\"We have AI tutors specialized in different areas\").", "src": [ 3, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions investors. TrustMRR shows a profit margin of 68.0% for the last 30 days, a figure that is not among the metrics it says are verified.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "App Store ratings", "value": "1 rating in the US (5.0); 16 ratings in 10 countries with an average of 3.9", "grade": "B", "note": "US App Store page and whatsthe.app's count by country (Germany 3 ratings at 5.0, France 3 at 4.0, India 2 at 3.0, Turkey 2 at 2.5, China 1 at 1.0). The age rating is 4+.", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Time from store release to the October 2026 figure", "value": "13 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: September 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "20 August 2025", "what": "The terms of service of PracticeMe carry this date as their last update.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "3 September 2025", "what": "Version 1.0 of AI Speak English - Practice Me is released on the App Store under Guillaume Sarfati's developer account.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "when": "November 2025 to January 2026", "what": "US$62.78 of revenue in three months.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "20 and 22 January 2026", "what": "Versions 1.1.0 and 1.1.1 bring interface changes and chat history.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "February and March 2026", "what": "No revenue is listed for either month. About 50 website pages carry last-modified dates in these months. Version 1.1.2 on 28 March says that the tutor \"now remembers context\" and lists an \"Upgraded AI model\".", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 8, 3 ] }, { "when": "April 2026", "what": "Revenue rises to US$1,829. Versions 1.1.3 to 1.1.6, from 19 to 24 April, bring \"Faster conversations and quicker agent replies\" and bug fixes. 454 website pages carry April dates.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 3, 8 ] }, { "when": "May and June 2026", "what": "Revenue of US$3,630 and US$3,232. 930 more website pages carry dates in these two months.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 8 ] }, { "when": "July to September 2026", "what": "Revenue holds between US$4,461 and US$4,677 a month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "1 October 2026", "what": "whatsthe.app reads MRR of US$2,910, 211 active subscriptions and US$3,913 of revenue in 28 days from RevenueCat.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "27 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR reads MRR of US$3,044 from 235 subscriptions, US$4,560 in 30 days and US$26,713 since launch. The app is not listed for sale on either site.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Speaking practice without a human partner", "text": "The App Store page puts human tutors at US$15 to US$30 per 45 minutes. A Yearly Pro subscription costs US$59.99, and the tutor is available at any hour. The product sells one thing that classes and text-based apps give little of: time spent speaking and being answered." }, { "title": "Search pages in ten languages", "text": "The website has about 160 pages in each of nine languages besides English, plus blog posts, comparison pages and pages about other apps. Most of them carry last-modified dates from April to June 2026. TrustMRR shows 460,920 Google search impressions and 41,090 visitors in 30 days, read from the site's own Google accounts. The founder lists app store optimization and SEO as the marketing channels." }, { "title": "A free trial, then a weekly or yearly plan", "text": "Every plan starts with a 3-day free trial. On the App Store the choice is US$9.99 a week or US$59.99 a year, so a learner who stays more than about six weeks pays less with the yearly plan. whatsthe.app shows 211 paying subscriptions among 2,693 active customers on 1 October 2026." }, { "title": "Two payment routes", "text": "The app takes payments through the App Store, recorded in RevenueCat, and the website takes card payments through Stripe at US$19 a month. TrustMRR reads both accounts. The two routes are not linked, so a learner who pays on the web has a separate account from the one in the app." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder-written fields of the TrustMRR profile (grade C), the App Store records (grade B) and the code of the website (grade B).", "items": [ "A native iPhone and iPad app written in Swift, with Firebase as the backend and RevenueCat for subscriptions, according to the founder's TrustMRR fields.", "A web version with its own accounts, sold by card through Stripe; the website is built with Next.js, which its page code shows.", "An Android app on Google Play with more than 500 downloads.", "The tutor listens to the learner's audio and answers by voice; the App Store privacy section lists audio data as collected and linked to the user. No source names the speech or language models.", "The app's interface is offered in 33 languages, and the website in ten.", "Nine versions from September 2025 to April 2026; the last update before 27 October 2026 is version 1.1.6 of 24 April 2026." ], "src": [ 1, 3, 5, 2 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold English practice with human teachers, online or in classrooms, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "TutorGroup (iTutor)", "years": "2004 to 2021", "funding": "US$300M", "cause": "Legal/Regulatory", "promise": "Live English lessons with Western teachers for learners in Asia.", "died": "China's 2021 ban on foreign tutors removed most of its revenue, according to the database, while the cost of each new student and the turnover of tutors were already high.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2216-tutorgroup-itutor" }, { "name": "Dada English", "years": "2013 to 2021", "funding": "US$100M", "cause": "Legal/Regulatory", "promise": "Fixed pairs of Chinese children and North American teachers for paid online English sessions.", "died": "China's 2021 rules banned for-profit tutoring in school subjects, including English, and the database says all of its revenue came from that tutoring.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2299-dada-english" }, { "name": "Wall Street English", "years": "2000 to 2021", "funding": "US$300M", "cause": "Legal/Regulatory", "promise": "Premium English courses in learning centers in Chinese shopping malls, sold for career advancement.", "died": "The database says it paid for running costs with upfront course payments, and that the model failed when regulators restricted those payments and the pandemic closed the centers.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2347-wall-street-english" }, { "name": "Teacher Finder", "years": "2015 to 2019", "funding": "US$50K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Match language learners directly with tutors, without a language school in between.", "died": "Larger tutor platforms with more money took the market, according to the database, and its simple automated setup could not keep up. Each lesson still needed a paid human tutor.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1962-teacher-finder" } ], "whatChanged": [ "TutorGroup, Dada English and Wall Street English each raised US$100 million or more to sell English practice with paid human teachers, either by video or in classrooms. Every hour of practice needed a teacher's hour, so the cost grew with every student, and all three depended on one country's rules, which changed in 2021. Teacher Finder tried the cheap version, a match between learners and tutors, and still had to pay a human for every lesson.", "An AI tutor removes the teacher's hour. Practice Me sells unlimited spoken practice for US$59.99 a year on the App Store, and the only person named in the sources is its founder. Its sales also do not depend on one country: whatsthe.app counts ratings from ten countries, and the website is written in ten languages. The limit is that many other apps sell the same thing: the App Store page recommends ten similar apps, among them Speakerly, SpeakL and Gliglish." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, but the product itself is easy to copy.", "text": "The app needed no funding and, as far as the sources show, no team. Revenue came in the same months in which the website grew to about 1,600 pages for search in ten languages; the sources do not prove that one caused the other. Many competitors sell the same AI speaking practice, so the search pages and the reviews are where one app differs from another.", "steps": [ "Pick one skill that learners rarely get to practice, here speaking, and build the app around a voice conversation with an AI tutor.", "Give the tutors clear roles (everyday talk, formal British English, travel, interviews, exam practice) so that a learner knows which one to choose.", "Write pages that answer what learners search for, in their own languages, and connect Google Search Console so that the traffic can be checked.", "Offer a short free trial and a yearly plan priced well below the weekly plan, and record payments in a service such as RevenueCat." ], "open": "Spoken practice for other languages that many people learn for work, such as German, Spanish or Japanese, and for one exam in one market (for example the speaking part of one country's citizenship or university entry test)." }, "watch": [ { "title": "A selected rating on the website", "text": "The home page shows \"5.0 on App Store\", and its structured data, the hidden description that search engines read, gives a rating of \"5.0\" from a \"ratingCount\" of \"3\". The US App Store shows 1 rating of 5.0; whatsthe.app counts 16 ratings in 10 countries with an average of 3.9, including Germany with 3 ratings at 5.0. The rating shown is real but chosen from one store. The same structured data says \"Learn English 5x faster with AI tutors\"; no source supports that number." }, { "title": "Prices and accounts that do not agree", "text": "The pricing page's description says \"Weekly $7.99 or yearly $59.99\", while the App Store lists Weekly Pro at US$9.99 and the web page shows US$19 a month. The pricing page also says that \"mobile app and web accounts are separate and not linked\", so a learner who subscribes on the web cannot use that plan in the app. The home page's description says \"Free on iOS & Android\"; the App Store shows \"Free · In‑App Purchases\", and no source describes what a learner can do without a subscription after the 3-day trial." }, { "title": "Many apps sell the same practice", "text": "The App Store page recommends ten other English-learning apps, among them Speakerly, SpeakL, English Shadowing, TalkParty and Gliglish. Any of them can add the same tutors and voices, because none of them owns the models." }, { "title": "Traffic that depends on Google", "text": "The founder lists app store optimization and SEO as the marketing channels, and almost all revenue came after the website grew to about 1,600 pages in April to June 2026. If those pages lose their positions in Google's results, the source of new learners would shrink. The app itself has not been updated since 24 April 2026." }, { "title": "Unnamed models, an unexplained company and founder fields", "text": "No source names the speech or language models or their cost per conversation, so this page cannot say how the 68% profit margin on TrustMRR (not a verified metric) would change with model prices. The copyright holder CODELINE TEKNOLOJI appears only on the App Store page, and no source says how it relates to the founder." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://practiceme.app/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6751178289" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/practiceme" }, { "kind": "whatsthe", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/practiceme" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR markdown profile: Practiceme, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/practiceme.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full. Revenue by day and month, total revenue, MRR and subscriptions are read from RevenueCat and Stripe through API keys, last synced 27 October 2026 (grade A). Traffic and search impressions come from the connected Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts (grade B). The tech stack, marketing channels and profit margin are founder-written or not explained (grade C)." }, { "title": "whatsthe.app listing: Practiceme, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/practiceme", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full, including the data embedded in the page. Revenue, MRR, subscriptions, trials, customers and downloads are \"verified through RevenueCat\", last updated 1 October 2026; the founder's name and X handle are shown by the listing (grade C). The site's robots.txt allows this path." }, { "title": "Apple App Store: AI Speak English - Practice Me, US storefront, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ai-speak-english-practice-me/id6751178289", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full: description, rating, age rating, version history, privacy section, seller, copyright line, in-app purchases and similar apps." }, { "title": "Apple App Store: developer page of Guillaume sarfati, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/guillaume-sarfati/id1132577044", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The account lists one app, Practice Me." }, { "title": "Practice Me home page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://practiceme.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the structured data in the page code. Source for the tutors, the platforms, the \"5.0 on App Store\" line and the Next.js page code. The site's robots.txt allows ClaudeBot." }, { "title": "Practice Me pricing page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://practiceme.app/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the web price of US$19 a month, the 3-day free trial, Stripe as the web payment processor, the separate web and app accounts and the description text with weekly and yearly prices. The yearly web price loads by script and could not be read." }, { "title": "Practice Me terms of service, last updated 20 August 2025", "url": "https://practiceme.app/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the date of the terms; they name no company and no age limit." }, { "title": "Practice Me sitemap, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://practiceme.app/sitemap.xml", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full and counted with a script: 1,599 addresses with their languages, sections and last-modified dates." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/converly/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/converly.md", "slug": "converly", "name": "Converly", "country": "France (not stated directly: the privacy policy names France's data regulator, the CNIL, and the most App Store ratings come from France)", "sector": "Education", "productType": "iPhone app for spoken role-play conversations with AI tutors in 25 languages", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "17 June 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$2.4K MRR verified through RevenueCat, October 2026", "sticker": "$2.4K MRR", "outcomeUsd": 28596, "months": 16, "teamLabel": "1 named founder, Rémi Cassan, who sells the app under their own name and is the data controller in its privacy policy; headcount not published", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Packaging", "group": "learning", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "flat", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Education" ], "product": "An iPhone and iPad app in which a learner practices a foreign language by acting out a situation, called a scenario, with an AI that speaks like a native speaker. The learner picks a scenario from a list or writes a new one. The learner speaks or types, and the AI answers by voice, corrects mistakes and adapts to the learner's level. A list of popular scenarios guides beginners, and the app reviews useful words afterwards. It covers 25 languages, from French and Japanese to Hindi and Vietnamese. Some scenarios and features need a subscription; the App Store lists ten price options, from US$6.99 a week to US$89.99 for 12 months.", "why": "Learners who study alone rarely get to speak, and a conversation partner who never gets tired and can play any role fills that gap. The founder packaged the AI conversation as role-play scenarios, which tell a beginner what to say and give each session a goal, and offered it in 25 languages from one app. Most ratings come from France, then the United States, Mexico and Brazil.", "summary": [ "Converly is a language-learning app built around role-play: the learner and the AI each take a part in an everyday situation, such as a customer and a waiter, and hold a conversation in the language the learner studies. The App Store page says the AI \"feels like a native speaker\" and \"adapts to your pace and skill level\", and that \"All scenarios are possible!\", because the learner can also write a new situation. The app's privacy policy, updated on 9 October 2026, names the providers. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, \"generates conversational responses, corrections, and synthesized speech\", that is, the replies and the voice that reads them aloud. Apple's speech recognition service, which turns spoken audio into text, transcribes what the learner says.", "The App Store lists Remi Cassan as developer and seller, the copyright line reads \"Rémi Cassan\", and the privacy policy names Rémi Cassan as the data controller, the person legally responsible for the users' data. The app was released on 17 June 2025, and the developer account has one other app, a scale-guessing game. On 1 October 2026 the app had monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the subscription income that repeats every month, of US$2,383 from 171 active subscriptions, and US$2,345 of revenue in the last 28 days. At that MRR the app earns about US$28,600 a year.", "These figures are grade A. They come from whatsthe.app, a marketplace for mobile apps that reads them from RevenueCat, a service that records App Store subscription payments for app makers, and that writes \"All data is verified through RevenueCat\". No second source gives a dated figure, and the MRR is only about 19% above this site's floor of US$2,000 a month. The page also shows four earlier companies that sold English or language practice with human teachers, or free online courses, and failed." ], "factsCaption": "US$2,383 of monthly recurring revenue on 1 October 2026, 16 months after the App Store release, read from RevenueCat", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read from the app's RevenueCat account by whatsthe.app. A grade B value is a record that Apple shows on the App Store. A grade C value comes from the app's own privacy policy or support page. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From an App Store release in June 2025 to about US$2,400 of monthly recurring revenue in October 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Converly prices on the US App Store in October 2026, from the in-app purchase list (grade B)", "note": "The App Store lists ten in-app purchases under the names shown here and does not say which buyer sees which price. Names such as \"Fallback Offer\", \"Special Offer\" and \"Discount\" suggest prices shown to some users only, for example after they close the first payment screen. \"Free 3-day trial\" at US$69.99 does not name its period. Calculated per month: US$89.99 for 12 months is US$7.50; US$69.99 a year is US$5.83; US$49.99 a year is US$4.17; US$44.99 for 3 months is US$15.00; US$29.99 for 3 months is US$10.00; US$6.99 a week is about US$30.29.", "rows": [ [ "12-month plan", "7.50", "", "US$89.99 for 12 months" ], [ "Yearly Special Offer", "5.83", "", "US$69.99 a year" ], [ "Yearly Premium", "4.17", "", "US$49.99 a year" ], [ "3-month plan", "", "", "US$44.99 for 3 months" ], [ "3-Month Discount", "", "", "US$29.99 for 3 months" ], [ "Free Trial Monthly", "", "17.99", "monthly plan with a free trial" ], [ "Monthly Premium", "", "12.99", "monthly plan" ], [ "Monthly Fallback Offer", "", "8.99", "lower monthly price" ], [ "Free Trial Weekly", "", "", "US$6.99 a week, with a free trial" ], [ "Free 3-day trial", "", "", "US$69.99 after a 3-day trial; period not named" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 1 October 2026", "value": "US$2,383 from 171 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app: \"All data is verified through RevenueCat. Last updated: Oct 1, 2026\". Calculated: US$13.94 per subscription per month, and US$28,596 a year at that rate; whatsthe.app shows an ARR of US$28,593.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 28 days, to 1 October 2026", "value": "US$2,345", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app, from RevenueCat. Calculated: US$28,140 a year at that rate.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Change in the last 28 days", "value": "MRR down 0.4%, subscriptions unchanged", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app growth figures for the 28 days to 1 October 2026. No source gives monthly revenue for earlier months.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Trials and customers, 28 days to 1 October 2026", "value": "106 active trials, 5,849 active customers, 3,926 new customers, about 3,900 downloads", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app, from RevenueCat. Calculated: 171 paid subscriptions out of 5,849 active customers is 2.9%, and 171 out of 277 subscriptions with trials is 61.7%, the two shares that whatsthe.app shows as subscription penetration and paid subscriber share.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Release on the App Store", "value": "17 June 2025", "grade": "B", "note": "whatsthe.app gives the worldwide release date. The App Store version history shows the last 25 versions, from 1.3.1 on 10 July 2025 to 2.0.1 on 12 October 2026.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Founder and seller", "value": "Rémi Cassan, developer account in their own name", "grade": "B", "note": "The App Store lists \"Remi Cassan\" as developer and seller, with \"Copyright © Rémi Cassan\". The privacy policy: \"The data controller for Converly is: Rémi Cassan\". whatsthe.app shows the owner as \"Remi\".", "src": [ 2, 4, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Other apps on the developer account", "value": "Guess Size - Scale Game", "grade": "B", "note": "App Store developer page; a game in which the player guesses the real-world size of objects.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Team at the October 2026 figure", "value": "1 named person; headcount not published", "grade": "C", "note": "No source names another person or gives a headcount. The App Store description and the privacy policy write in the plural (\"we're building\", \"We rely on a small number of providers\").", "src": [ 2, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions investors.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "AI providers", "value": "OpenAI for replies, corrections and the spoken voice; Apple for speech recognition", "grade": "C", "note": "Privacy policy: OpenAI \"generates conversational responses, corrections, and synthesized speech\", reached \"through our own secure server\"; \"audio may be sent to Apple's speech recognition service to be transcribed\". No source names the OpenAI model.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "User data", "value": "no accounts; conversations stored on the phone", "grade": "C", "note": "Privacy policy: \"Converly does not require an account\", and conversation history and progress \"are stored locally on your device, in encrypted form\". Usage data goes to Amplitude, an analytics service, hosted in the European Union.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Languages", "value": "25 languages to practice; app interface in 6 languages", "grade": "B", "note": "App Store description lists French, English, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian and Malay. The interface is in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "App Store ratings", "value": "158 ratings in the US with an average of 4.3; 887 ratings in 16 countries with an average of 4.5", "grade": "B", "note": "US App Store page, 27 October 2026, and whatsthe.app's count by country on 1 October 2026: France 302, United States 148, Mexico 119, Brazil 84, Canada 54. Calculated: France gives 34.0% of all ratings. The age rating is 4+; the privacy policy says the app \"is not directed at children under 13\".", "src": [ 2, 1, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Updates", "value": "25 versions in 15 months; none from 26 August 2025 to 9 January 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "App Store version history. Version 1.6.0 on 18 April 2026 added \"A new method to make learning a language even easier\"; version 2.0.0 on 25 September 2026 says \"Amélioration de l'app\" (translation: improvement of the app).", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Time from store release to the October 2026 figure", "value": "16 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: June 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "17 June 2025", "what": "Converly is released worldwide on the App Store.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "10 July to 26 August 2025", "what": "Seven updates. From 30 July the release notes say \"Over 25 languages to learn\" and \"New, even more fun scenarios to discover\".", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "26 August 2025 to 9 January 2026", "what": "No updates for four and a half months.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "January to March 2026", "what": "Seven updates from 9 January to 14 March, six of them bug fixes; version 1.5.1 on 29 January brings new App Store screenshots.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "18 April 2026", "what": "Version 1.6.0: \"A new method to make learning a language even easier\". Version 1.6.1 on 25 April adds \"New features to help learn faster\".", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "July and August 2026", "what": "Six bug-fix updates.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "25 September 2026", "what": "Version 2.0.0, with the release note in French.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "1 October 2026", "what": "whatsthe.app reads MRR of US$2,383 from 171 active subscriptions, 106 active trials and US$2,345 of revenue in 28 days from RevenueCat.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "9 October 2026", "what": "The privacy policy is updated and names OpenAI, Apple, Amplitude and RevenueCat as providers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "12 October 2026", "what": "Version 2.0.1, a bug fix.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A conversation with a goal", "text": "An open chat with an AI leaves a beginner without anything to say. A scenario gives the learner a role, a place and a task, and the AI plays the other person. The App Store page lists popular scenarios for guided practice and lets the learner write new ones." }, { "title": "One app for 25 languages", "text": "The same scenarios work in every language that the model speaks, so one developer can offer French, Japanese, Hindi and 22 more languages without writing a course for each. The ratings come from 16 countries, with France first." }, { "title": "Rented models, local data", "text": "OpenAI writes the replies, corrects the learner and produces the voice; Apple's speech recognition transcribes the learner's speech. The app has no accounts and keeps conversations on the phone, and the privacy policy says that requests reach OpenAI \"through our own secure server\" and that the developer keeps no \"server-side user profiles\"." }, { "title": "Many prices for the same subscription", "text": "The App Store lists ten purchase options, from US$6.99 a week to US$89.99 for 12 months, including a \"Monthly Fallback Offer\" at US$8.99. On 1 October 2026, 106 of the 277 subscriptions were still in a free trial." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the app's privacy policy (grade C) and the App Store records (grade B). No source describes the code or the cost of the models.", "items": [ "An iPhone and iPad app that also runs on Macs with Apple chips; the App Store lists audio data and other user content as collected and not linked to the user.", "OpenAI generates the conversation replies, the corrections and the synthesized speech; requests go through the developer's own server, so the API keys are not inside the app.", "Apple's speech recognition service transcribes the learner's speech.", "RevenueCat manages the App Store subscriptions; Amplitude records usage in the European Union.", "No user accounts: conversation history, progress and preferences are stored on the phone in encrypted form.", "Support runs through a contact form on a Webflow site, and the privacy policy is a Notion page." ], "src": [ 4, 2, 5 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold language practice with human teachers, in classrooms or by video, or free online language courses, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "VIPKid", "years": "2013 to 2021", "funding": "US$1.1B", "cause": "Legal/Regulatory", "promise": "One-on-one online English lessons for Chinese children with North American teachers over video.", "died": "China's 2021 rules banned foreign tutors and curriculum for school subjects, which ended its business model, according to the database. Every lesson needed a paid teacher.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2522-vipkid" }, { "name": "DaDaABC", "years": "2013 to 2021", "funding": "US$863M", "cause": "Legal/Regulatory", "promise": "One-on-one video lessons that connected Chinese children with native English tutors.", "died": "The 2021 rules on for-profit tutoring made the business model illegal in China, according to the database.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2551-dadaabc" }, { "name": "Meten EdtechX", "years": "2006 to 2024", "funding": "US$600M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Face-to-face English schools for Chinese professionals, at a high premium over apps.", "died": "The cost of finding each student and running the schools was higher than what students paid; COVID and new rules ended it, according to the database.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2353-meten-edtechx" }, { "name": "Hujiang", "years": "2001 to 2021", "funding": "US$187M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "A large online platform for language learning and school courses, free to start.", "died": "Most of its millions of registered users never paid, and those who paid did not cover the cost of acquiring them, according to the database.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2556-hujiang" } ], "whatChanged": [ "VIPKid, DaDaABC and Meten EdtechX sold speaking practice with paid teachers, and together they raised more than US$2.5 billion. Each conversation needed a teacher's time, and the teachers had to speak the learner's target language, so each company covered mainly one language and one market. Hujiang went the other way, with free courses for millions of users, and most of those users never paid.", "Converly replaces the teacher with a rented model. The same app runs conversations in 25 languages, one person sells it, and the AI that plays the other person is rented from OpenAI instead of paid by the hour like a teacher. The limit of the method is visible in its numbers: on 1 October 2026 only 2.9% of the app's active customers paid, and many other apps on the App Store sell AI conversation practice too." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, with modest results to expect.", "text": "One person built and runs an app that uses OpenAI for the conversation and Apple for speech recognition, with no user accounts and no user profiles on a server. The result is a small, steady income, about US$2,400 a month, in a category with many competitors. The work that the sources show is constant small updates and many price options, not a new technology.", "steps": [ "Package an AI conversation as scenarios with a role and a goal, so that a beginner knows what to say.", "Offer every language the model speaks, and translate the interface into the languages of your largest markets.", "Keep user data on the phone and call the model through your own small server, so that the API keys stay out of the app.", "Test several prices and offers in the App Store, and record payments in a service such as RevenueCat to see which ones convert." ], "open": "Scenario practice for one profession in one language, for example nurses who must pass a language test to work abroad, or for one exam's speaking section, where learners pay more for a narrow goal." }, "watch": [ { "title": "A small margin above the floor", "text": "The MRR of US$2,383 on 1 October 2026 is about 19% above this site's floor of US$2,000 a month, and it fell 0.4% in the 28 days before. The figure comes from one source, whatsthe.app, which reads it from RevenueCat; no source gives the revenue of earlier months." }, { "title": "Many prices that the buyer does not see together", "text": "The App Store lists ten purchase options for the same subscription, from US$6.99 a week to US$89.99 for 12 months, with names such as \"Monthly Fallback Offer\" and \"Yearly Special Offer\". The sources do not say which users see which price." }, { "title": "Dependence on OpenAI", "text": "OpenAI generates the replies, the corrections and the voice. A price change or an outage at OpenAI changes the app's costs or stops it. The privacy policy says OpenAI keeps conversation content for up to 30 days for abuse monitoring and does not use it to train its models." }, { "title": "User-written scenarios in an app rated 4+", "text": "The App Store page says \"All scenarios are possible!\" because users can write their own situations, and the app is rated 4+, while the privacy policy says it \"is not directed at children under 13\". No source describes limits on what a user-written scenario may contain." }, { "title": "Many apps sell the same practice", "text": "The App Store page recommends ten similar apps, among them LingoLooper, ISSEN - Voice Tutor, Vocha and Talkio Now. All of them can rent the same models." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6745767154" }, { "kind": "whatsthe", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/converly" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "whatsthe.app listing: Converly, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/converly", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full, including the data embedded in the page. Revenue, MRR, subscriptions, trials, customers and downloads are \"verified through RevenueCat\", last updated 1 October 2026; the release date, the owner name and the ratings by country are shown by the listing. The site's robots.txt allows this path." }, { "title": "Apple App Store: Converly - Language Learning, US storefront, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/converly-language-learning/id6745767154", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full, including the version history in the page data: description, languages, ratings, age rating, privacy section, seller, copyright line, in-app purchases and similar apps." }, { "title": "Apple App Store: developer page of Remi Cassan, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/remi-cassan/id1813775798", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The account lists two apps, Converly and Guess Size - Scale Game." }, { "title": "Converly privacy policy, last updated 9 October 2026", "url": "https://capable-silicon-6f3.notion.site/Politique-de-confidentialit-1f10725bd9c7809eb7ece6b1960d1819", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full through Notion's public page-data endpoint, because the page text loads by script; the host's robots.txt allows all paths. Linked from the App Store page. Source for the AI providers, the analytics service, the data storage, the children clause and the data controller." }, { "title": "Converly support page", "url": "https://converly-assistance.webflow.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Linked from the App Store page as Support; a contact form only. The host's robots.txt is empty." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/fairwayfx/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/fairwayfx.md", "slug": "fairwayfx", "name": "FairwayFX", "country": "USA", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "Phone app that draws the flight of a golf ball on the user's video with on-device AI ball detection", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "14 January 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$5.3K MRR, October 2026", "sticker": "$63K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 63145, "months": 9, "teamLabel": "1 person: the studio's About page says \"The studio is one person\", and the founder builds the apps as side projects", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "video", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "flat", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Sports" ], "product": "An iPhone and Android app for golfers. The user records a shot or imports a video, taps the ball, and the app's AI follows the ball frame by frame and draws its flight path as a coloured line, like the tracers in golf broadcasts. The user can correct the path by hand, choose a style and export the video in 1080p without a watermark. Since June 2026 it also builds recap videos of several holes. Weekly and yearly plans are sold in the app.", "why": "It does one job that golfers otherwise do by hand: drawing the ball's flight on a video. The ball detection runs on the phone, so each video costs the company nothing to process. The founder released 25 versions from February to October 2026, and the finished video is made to be posted on Instagram, TikTok or YouTube.", "summary": [ "FairwayFX is a phone app that adds a shot tracer, a line that follows a golf ball through the air, to a video of a golf shot. The user taps the ball, and a machine-learning model, a program trained on many examples to recognise an object, finds the ball in each frame of the video and the app draws the line. The model runs on the phone, not on a server. The app was called Golf Shot Tracer until July 2026, when it was renamed \"to avoid confusion with other brands\".", "Emmett Deen is the seller of the app on the App Store, as a person rather than a company; the copyright belongs to Deen Venture Studio LLC, a studio in Georgia whose About page says that the studio is one person and that the apps are side projects. The app was released on 14 January 2026. whatsthe.app, a listing site for mobile apps, reads its sales through RevenueCat, a service that records in-app subscription purchases for app makers. On 1 October 2026 it showed MRR, monthly recurring revenue, in which a yearly plan counts as one twelfth of its price, of US$5,262 from 987 active subscriptions, and US$7,114 of revenue in the last 28 days.", "The revenue figures are grade A, because whatsthe.app read them from the app's subscription records. They are one snapshot: no second dated figure exists, and the studio shares its financials only with buyers who sign a confidentiality agreement, because the app is open to offers. The page also shows four earlier companies that sold automatic video editing or motion tracking and failed." ], "factsCaption": "US$5,262 of RevenueCat-verified MRR and US$7,114 of revenue in 28 days, nine months after the release of a one-person side project", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by whatsthe.app from the app's RevenueCat account through an API key. A grade B value is a record that Apple or the app stores show. A grade C value was written by the founder or the studio, on its website, in its privacy policy or in the app's store text. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a retired AI styling app to a golf video app with verified revenue in nine months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "FairwayFX in-app purchases on the US App Store, read 27 October 2026 (grade C)", "note": "The website has no pricing page. Apple lists two prices for each plan, and whatsthe.app shows the same four; no source says which users see the lower price. The per-month values are calculated: US$39.99 divided by 12 is about US$3.33, US$24.99 divided by 12 about US$2.08, US$5.99 times 52 divided by 12 about US$25.96, and US$3.99 the same way about US$17.29. No page lists what the free version includes; since June 2026 the export of hole recap videos is part of the paid plan.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "Free download; the free limits are not stated" ], [ "Pro Weekly", "", "", "US$5.99 a week (about US$25.96 a month) or US$3.99 a week (about US$17.29 a month)" ], [ "Pro Yearly", "3.33", "", "US$39.99 a year; also listed at US$24.99 a year, about US$2.08 a month" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 1 October 2026", "value": "US$5,262", "grade": "A", "note": "Read by whatsthe.app through RevenueCat (\"revenuecat-verified\" in the page data), last updated on 1 October 2026 at 10:55 UTC. MRR growth over 28 days: -2.4%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the October 2026 MRR", "value": "about US$63,145 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$5,262.08 times 12. whatsthe.app shows the same value as ARR.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 28 days, to 1 October 2026", "value": "US$7,114", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app. Calculated: 1.35 times the MRR, which whatsthe.app shows as a cash flow index of 1.4. A yearly plan is paid at once, so new yearly plans bring more cash in a month than their share of the MRR.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Subscriptions, 1 October 2026", "value": "987 active subscriptions and 277 active trials", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app. Calculated: 78.1% of subscriptions were paid, which whatsthe.app shows as the paid subscriber share. Subscriber growth over 28 days: +0.1%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Customers, 1 October 2026", "value": "9,499 active customers; 7,547 new customers in 28 days", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app. Calculated: 10.4% of active customers had a subscription, and the MRR per active subscription was about US$5.33.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Downloads", "value": "about 7,500 in 28 days on iOS and Android; more than 10,000 in total on Google Play", "grade": "B", "note": "Store figures shown by whatsthe.app.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founder", "value": "Emmett Deen", "grade": "B", "note": "The App Store developer and seller is Emmett Deen as a person, and whatsthe.app names Emmett Deen as the founder (X handle @emmett_deen, about 1,000 followers). The studio's About page names Emmett Deen as its founder.", "src": [ 2, 1, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Company", "value": "Deen Venture Studio LLC, Canton, Georgia", "grade": "C", "note": "The App Store copyright line and the website footer name the LLC; the studio's site gives the town.", "src": [ 2, 4, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 person", "grade": "C", "note": "The About page: \"The studio is one person\". It says the apps are side projects and lists a job as engineering manager at Black Airplane since 2019.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions investors. The About page lists a US$25,000 grant won in 2022 at an Auburn University startup competition for an esports advertising idea, a different project.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Release", "value": "14 January 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "The release date that whatsthe.app shows from the App Store data. The first App Store reviews are dated 14 January.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Renamed from Golf Shot Tracer", "value": "July 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "Version 1.11.2 (4 July 2026): \"App renaming to avoid confusion with other brands\". Version 1.11.3 (10 July 2026): \"This update renames the app to FairwayFX\". whatsthe.app still shows the old name.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "How the AI works", "value": "an on-device model that detects the ball; tracing runs on the phone", "grade": "C", "note": "The App Store text says the app \"uses AI-powered ball detection\" and that all video processing happens on the device; the privacy policy says the same. Since version 1.7.0 (4 April 2026) \"The ML model now downloads on demand\". No source names the model.", "src": [ 2, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Other apps of the studio", "value": "UV Tan: Tanning & Sun Tracker; Photo Dump: Shared Camera; Pocket Stylist, retired in December 2024", "grade": "B", "note": "The App Store developer page lists the three live apps; the studio's site describes them and the retired one, and marks all three live apps \"Open to offers\".", "src": [ 3, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Ratings", "value": "201 ratings, average 4.4 of 5 on the US App Store; 2.9 of 5 from 152 ratings on Google Play", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's page on 27 October 2026; the Google Play value is shown by whatsthe.app.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Age rating", "value": "4+", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's page. The privacy policy says the app is not intended for children under 13.", "src": [ 2, 5 ] }, { "fact": "For sale", "value": "open to offers; price not published", "grade": "C", "note": "The studio's app page: \"It is available. Financials are shared with qualified buyers under NDA.\" whatsthe.app does not list it for sale.", "src": [ 8, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from release to the October 2026 figure", "value": "9 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: January 2026 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "December 2024", "what": "The studio retires Pocket Stylist, a styling app, because users had to upload many clothes and \"AI and advertising costs\" made it unsustainable with few users.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "31 December 2025", "what": "Date of the app's privacy policy, which says that all video processing happens on the device.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "14 January 2026", "what": "Golf Shot Tracer is released on the App Store, sold by Emmett Deen.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "24 February 2026", "what": "Version 1.5.1 adds a lookahead algorithm that compares several detection paths before it commits to one.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "30 March 2026", "what": "Version 1.6.1 asks users to rate each trace with a thumb; a thumbs-up user can share the video \"to be featured in marketing\".", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "4 April 2026", "what": "Version 1.7.0: the machine-learning model now downloads on demand instead of shipping inside the app.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "13 to 15 April 2026", "what": "Version 1.8.1 rebuilds the tracing engine; two days later version 1.9.0 returns to the version 1.7.0 tracing.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "22 June 2026", "what": "Version 1.11.0 adds recap videos of several holes with score overlays; six days later their export becomes part of the paid plan.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "4 to 10 July 2026", "what": "The app is renamed FairwayFX \"to avoid confusion with other brands\".", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "1 October 2026", "what": "Last whatsthe.app update: MRR of US$5,262, 987 active subscriptions, 277 trials, US$7,114 in 28 days.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "20 October 2026", "what": "Version 1.14.3 adds physics-based flight paths for when the ball becomes hard to see.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "One tap, then the model", "text": "The user taps the ball once and the on-device model follows it through the frames, at 30 to 240 frames a second according to the release notes. The user can then move control points by hand. An October 2026 review says tracing one video took 10 to 15 minutes with corrections, and a January review calls it the most accurate tracer app the reviewer had tried." }, { "title": "No server cost per video", "text": "The home page says \"100% On-Device Processing\" and \"GPU-Accelerated\", and the privacy policy says videos are never uploaded. The studio retired its earlier AI app, Pocket Stylist, in December 2024 partly because of AI costs. Here the phone does the work, so a new user costs the studio nothing beyond the model download." }, { "title": "A video made for sharing", "text": "The export is a 1080p video without a watermark, and the store text names Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. Since March 2026 the app invites users who like a trace to send it \"to be featured in marketing\". No source says how many customers came from shared videos." }, { "title": "Many small releases", "text": "The App Store history shows 25 versions from February to October 2026. One rebuild of the tracing engine was taken back after two days, the setup guide added a white-ball requirement, and later releases added hole recaps, Halloween effects and physics-based flight paths." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the App Store page (grade B), the privacy policy and the studio's site (grade C) and the whatsthe.app listing (grade A for the revenue source).", "items": [ "An on-device machine-learning model detects the ball; since April 2026 it is downloaded on demand. A separate swing-detection model is also downloaded. No source names either model or the tool used to train it.", "Firebase Analytics for usage statistics, Firebase Authentication for an anonymous user ID and Sentry for crash reports, according to the privacy policy.", "RevenueCat records the subscriptions; whatsthe.app reads the revenue from it through an API key. The Apple App Store and Google Play handle the payments.", "The app runs on iPhone, iPad and Android, is 174.9 MB, needs iOS 15 or later and is offered in English only.", "The About page describes the founder as a Flutter and Dart specialist; no source says which framework FairwayFX is built with." ], "src": [ 2, 5, 1, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold automatic video editing or motion tracking before a phone could run a vision model on its own. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "HighlightCam", "years": "2009 to 2012", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Automatic video edits made by an algorithm, without editing work by the user.", "died": "Phones and consumer editing software such as iMovie made editing easy, and the established products added similar features.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1636-highlightcam" }, { "name": "ReelSurfer", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$1.25M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A simple desktop tool to cut and share clips from videos.", "died": "YouTube and Facebook built the same features into their platforms, and mobile apps took the users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1577-reelsurfer" }, { "name": "Zigfu", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$200K", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "Software that let developers add motion sensing with Microsoft's Kinect camera to their applications.", "died": "It depended on one device, and Microsoft moved away from Kinect.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1602-zigfu" }, { "name": "Enflux", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$1M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Clothing with sensors that tracked movement in 3D and gave feedback on form.", "died": "The clothing was costly to make, and Fitbit and Apple kept adding features to their wearables.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1089-enflux" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Zigfu needed a Kinect camera and Enflux sensor clothing to follow a movement. HighlightCam and ReelSurfer edited video automatically, but lost to the editing features that phones and platforms added for free. Each raised money, from US$200,000 to US$1.25 million, and closed.", "FairwayFX follows a small, fast object with the ordinary camera and the processor of a phone, so it needs no hardware and no server. One person built it as a side project, and whatsthe.app read US$5,262 of MRR nine months after the release. The HighlightCam risk remains: a golf video tracer is one feature, and a larger app or the phone makers could add it. The App Store already lists another app called Golf Tracer as similar." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, for a developer who can ship a vision model on the phone.", "text": "A one-feature app for a sport whose players already film themselves, with the AI on the device, is open to any mobile developer who can train or adapt a detection model. FairwayFX shows that golfers pay for it. The hard part is accuracy on small, fast objects in shaky videos, which the release notes show took many versions.", "steps": [ "Pick a task that people in one sport do by hand on their own videos.", "Run the model on the phone, so that each new user adds no server cost, and download the model on demand to keep the app small.", "Make the output a video that users want to post, and ask the users who like it for permission to use it in marketing.", "Connect the RevenueCat account to a verification site, so that the figures can be checked by a buyer later." ], "open": "Ball and object tracers for other sports that are filmed on phones, such as baseball, tennis or cricket, if no larger app already offers one." }, "watch": [ { "title": "One snapshot of the figures", "text": "All revenue figures come from one whatsthe.app reading, last updated on 1 October 2026. No second dated figure, TrustMRR profile or founder statement exists, so the trend rests on whatsthe.app's 28-day growth values: -2.4% for MRR and +0.1% for subscribers. The studio shares its financials only with buyers under NDA." }, { "title": "Open to offers", "text": "The studio's site marks FairwayFX, UV Tan and Photo Dump \"Open to offers\" and invites buyers to \"discuss terms and handover\". It also offers contract development and a second opinion on other people's apps. This story is about the app, which is software sold to golfers; the contract work is not part of it." }, { "title": "Ratings and early reviews", "text": "The app has an average of 4.4 on the US App Store but 2.9 on Google Play. One of the four reviews shown on the App Store page, dated on the release day, 14 January 2026, comes from a user named \"TheDeenMachine\" and calls the automatic tracking \"pretty accurate\". No source says who wrote it. An October review says that tracing one video took 10 to 15 minutes." }, { "title": "Privacy label and policy", "text": "Apple's privacy label says that identifiers and usage data may be used to track users across other companies' apps and websites, and lists photos or videos as data linked to the user. The privacy policy names only Firebase and Sentry, says nothing about tracking for advertising and says that videos never leave the device. Users can send videos to the company through the thumbs-up prompt. Apple notes that it has not verified the label." }, { "title": "A one-feature app with competitors", "text": "The app was renamed in July 2026 \"to avoid confusion with other brands\", and Apple lists an app named Golf Tracer as similar. The app is rated 4+ and has no face or body scoring, so the 26 October 2026 rule on such apps does not apply." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://fairwayfx.com/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6753690938" }, { "kind": "whatsthe", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/golfshottracer" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "whatsthe.app listing: Golf Shot Tracer, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/golfshottracer", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full, including the data embedded in the page. The revenue, subscription and customer metrics were read by whatsthe.app through RevenueCat, last updated on 1 October 2026; the founder, release date, store ratings and downloads come from the listing and the store data." }, { "title": "FairwayFX: Trace Golf Shots on the US App Store, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fairwayfx-trace-golf-shots/id6753690938", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full: description, in-app purchases, version history, reviews, privacy label, age rating, seller and copyright line. The seller, dates, ratings and age rating are Apple's records; the description, release notes and prices are written by the developer." }, { "title": "App Store developer page: Emmett Deen, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/emmett-deen/id1653883497", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Lists three apps: FairwayFX, UV Tan and Photo Dump." }, { "title": "FairwayFX home page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://fairwayfx.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the on-device processing and the description of the product. The site has no pricing page." }, { "title": "FairwayFX Privacy Policy, last updated 31 December 2025", "url": "https://fairwayfx.com/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the third-party services, the on-device video processing and the children's privacy statement." }, { "title": "Deen Venture Studio home page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://deenventurestudio.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the studio's apps, the retired Pocket Stylist, the town and the offers of contract work and acquisition." }, { "title": "Deen Venture Studio: About, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://deenventurestudio.com/about/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the one-person studio, the side-project status, the founder's job and the 2022 grant." }, { "title": "Deen Venture Studio: FairwayFX app page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://deenventurestudio.com/apps/golf-shot-tracer/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the computer-vision description and the acquisition offer." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/ekto/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/ekto.md", "slug": "ekto", "name": "ekto", "country": "Not published", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "iPhone app for live captions and live translation of speech, built on rented speech and text AI models", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "27 January 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$5K a month in net revenue, October 2026", "sticker": "$60K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 59826, "months": 21, "teamLabel": "Headcount not published; the App Store seller, and the person responsible under the privacy policy, is Anthony Ho", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "voice-audio", "channel": "platform", "trend": "flat", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Accessibility" ], "product": "An iPhone and iPad app that listens through the microphone and shows what people say as live text, in the original language or translated into the user's language. It detects up to 39 languages and is sold for lectures, meetings, sermons, television and conversations, and to people with hearing loss. It labels speakers, saves transcripts with AI summaries, has a two-way mode for conversations, captions audio from other apps, and can broadcast captions through a web link to up to 100 people. After a 30-minute free preview, unlimited use needs a weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly plan.", "why": "It sells a strong need, understanding speech one cannot follow, at a high price: US$34.99 a month or US$199 a year. The hard parts, recognising speech and translating it, are rented from AI providers, so the seller works on the app around them. The seller names word of mouth, App Store optimization and Apple Ads as the channels, and has changed the store name and texts several times.", "summary": [ "ekto turns speech into live text on the phone. It uses automatic speech recognition, software that writes down spoken words, from a third-party AI provider, and sends the text to a second AI provider that translates it or writes a summary. The result reads like live subtitles. The app is sold to international students, people living abroad, deaf and hard-of-hearing people and their families, and to teachers, guides and churches, who can share the captions with up to 100 people through a link.", "Anthony Ho sells the app on the App Store as a person, under the name Verby Apps. It was released on 27 January 2025. whatsthe.app, a listing site for mobile apps, reads its sales from Apple through the App Store Connect API, Apple's interface that lets developers and services they authorise read sales reports. On 25 October 2026 it showed US$14,956 of net developer revenue, the money left after Apple's commission and refunds, in the last 90 days, and US$4,653 in the last 30 days, from 218 active subscriptions.", "The revenue figures are grade A, because whatsthe.app read them from Apple's records. The MRR of US$4,985 that whatsthe.app shows is the 90-day net revenue divided by three. No source gives the team size, and the privacy policy does not name the AI providers. The page also shows three earlier companies that sold translation, speech services or hearing help and failed." ], "factsCaption": "US$14,956 of net developer revenue in 90 days, read from Apple through the App Store Connect API, 21 months after the release", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by whatsthe.app from Apple's sales records through the App Store Connect API. A grade B value is a record that Apple shows on the App Store. A grade C value was written by the seller, in the store text, the privacy policy, the terms or the listing. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From release to 25 versions in four months and a steady net revenue of about US$5,000 a month. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "ekto in-app purchases on the US App Store, read 27 October 2026 (grade C)", "note": "The app offers a 30-minute free preview, then PRO for unlimited captions and translation. Apple lists four plans; whatsthe.app shows the same prices. The per-month values are calculated: US$14.99 times 52 weeks divided by 12 is about US$64.96, US$79.99 divided by 3 about US$26.66, and US$199.00 divided by 12 about US$16.58.", "rows": [ [ "Free preview", "0", "0", "30 minutes of captions and translation" ], [ "Weekly Unlimited PRO", "", "", "US$14.99 a week, about US$64.96 a month" ], [ "Monthly Unlimited PRO", "", "34.99", "Unlimited captions and translation" ], [ "Quarterly Unlimited PRO", "", "", "US$79.99 for 3 months, about US$26.66 a month" ], [ "Yearly Unlimited PRO", "16.58", "", "US$199.00 a year" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Net developer revenue, last 90 days to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$14,956", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app: \"Net developer revenue generated over the last 90 days. This includes paid app downloads, subscriptions, and in-app purchases, minus reported refunds.\" Read through the Apple App Store API, last updated on 25 October 2026 at 02:17 UTC.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR shown by whatsthe.app, 25 October 2026", "value": "US$4,985", "grade": "A", "note": "Calculated: US$14,956.41 divided by 3 is US$4,985.47, exactly the MRR shown. For this app, whatsthe.app's MRR is the average monthly net revenue of the last 90 days, not a sum of subscription prices.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the October 2026 figure", "value": "about US$59,826 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$4,985.47 times 12. whatsthe.app shows the same value as ARR.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days, to 25 October 2026", "value": "US$4,653", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app. Calculated: 6.7% below the 90-day monthly average. The page does not say whether this value is net of Apple's commission, as the 90-day value is.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions, 25 October 2026", "value": "218", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app. Calculated: about US$22.87 of monthly revenue per active subscription.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Downloads, 28 days to 25 October 2026", "value": "946", "grade": "B", "note": "App Store figure shown by whatsthe.app. Calculated: about US$4.92 of 30-day revenue per download, as whatsthe.app also shows.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Seller", "value": "Anthony Ho, as a person, under the name Verby Apps", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's record names Anthony Ho as developer, seller and copyright holder. The privacy policy and terms say the app is provided by \"Anthony Ho, the developer and Apple App Store seller operating under the Verby Apps name\".", "src": [ 2, 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Listing owner on whatsthe.app", "value": "the X handle @mnkyho, 446 followers", "grade": "C", "note": "The listing gives no full name for the handle. It reads the sales of the developer account through Apple's API.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team and funding", "value": "not published", "grade": "C", "note": "The whatsthe.app page data has empty fields for team size and financing. No source mentions staff or investors.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Release", "value": "27 January 2025", "grade": "B", "note": "The worldwide release date that whatsthe.app shows from the App Store data.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Names", "value": "Live Captions: ekto; now Live Translator: ekto", "grade": "B", "note": "whatsthe.app and the developer's website still use \"Live Captions: ekto\"; the App Store name on 27 October 2026 is \"Live Translator: ekto\". The app's bundle ID is com.anthony.ho.all-ears.", "src": [ 1, 2, 6 ] }, { "fact": "AI providers", "value": "not named", "grade": "C", "note": "The privacy policy names \"a third-party artificial intelligence speech-processing provider\" for transcription and \"a separate third-party artificial intelligence text-processing provider\" for translation and summaries, which may keep the text for up to 30 days for abuse monitoring. Version 1.33.0 (17 October 2026): \"Updated the AI model for live translation\".", "src": [ 4, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Languages", "value": "detects up to 39 languages", "grade": "C", "note": "The App Store text. The app's own screens are offered in English, Japanese, Korean, Spanish and Traditional Chinese.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Marketing channels", "value": "Word of mouth, ASO, Apple Ads", "grade": "C", "note": "Entered on the whatsthe.app listing. ASO, App Store optimization, means choosing the store name, subtitle and texts so that the app ranks in App Store search. Apple Ads are paid search ads inside the App Store. No source gives the share of each channel.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Ratings", "value": "22 ratings, average 4.5 of 5 on the US App Store", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's page. whatsthe.app counts 42 ratings in five country stores, 11 of them in Japan.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Age rating", "value": "4+", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's page. The terms say that a user under the age of majority needs a parent or guardian to agree to the terms and supervise the use.", "src": [ 2, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Releases, 7 July to 23 October 2026", "value": "25 versions", "grade": "B", "note": "The App Store version history, from 1.26.1 to 1.34.1.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Time from release to the October 2026 figure", "value": "21 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: January 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "27 January 2025", "what": "The app is released on the App Store; the seller is Anthony Ho.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "16 July 2026", "what": "Version 1.27.0 adds speaker identification and a line-by-line view during translation.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "22 July 2026", "what": "Version 1.27.3 updates the store metadata; version 1.30.3, on 23 August, does so again.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "18 to 23 July 2026", "what": "A review reports that the phone goes to sleep and the translation stops; the developer replies that a fix will be released soon.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "16 August 2026", "what": "New privacy policy and terms of use, which describe the separate AI providers for speech and for text.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "when": "13 September 2026", "what": "Version 1.31.0 adds a new two-way mode for conversations with speakers of another language.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "29 September 2026", "what": "Version 1.32.0 captions and translates livestreams, podcasts and voice messages that play in other apps.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "17 October 2026", "what": "Version 1.33.0 updates the AI model for live translation.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2026", "what": "whatsthe.app reads US$14,956 of net revenue in 90 days, US$4,653 in 30 days and 218 active subscriptions.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Two rented models in a row", "text": "The app streams the microphone audio to a speech provider that returns text, and, when translation or a summary is asked for, sends that text to a separate AI text provider. The privacy policy says neither provider trains on the content, and that the text provider may keep it for up to 30 days. The seller builds the app around the two models: the large readable text, the floating captions, the speaker labels and the sharing link." }, { "title": "A high price for a strong need", "text": "The plans cost US$14.99 a week, US$34.99 a month, US$79.99 a quarter or US$199 a year, after a 30-minute free preview. The users that the store text names need the captions to follow a lecture, a meeting or a family conversation. On 25 October 2026 the monthly revenue per active subscription was about US$22.87." }, { "title": "Features that widen the use", "text": "Live Link lets a teacher, guide or pastor share the captions with up to 100 phones, each in its own language. Since September 2026 the app also captions audio from other apps and has a two-way mode for conversations. Each feature adds a group of users without a new product." }, { "title": "Found in the App Store", "text": "The seller lists word of mouth, App Store optimization and Apple Ads as the channels. The store name moved from Live Captions to Live Translator, the subtitle and description changed several times in 2026, and two release notes, of 22 July and 23 August 2026, name metadata changes. No source says which channel brought most users." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the privacy policy and terms (grade C), the App Store page (grade B) and the whatsthe.app listing.", "items": [ "Speech recognition by an unnamed third-party AI speech provider, which receives the audio over an encrypted stream and labels speakers within one session.", "Translation and summaries by a separate, unnamed AI text provider. Saved transcripts stay on the phone and in the user's iCloud backup.", "Live Link runs through an unnamed hosting and real-time sharing provider, so viewers follow the captions in a web browser.", "Apple processes the subscriptions. whatsthe.app reads the sales through the Apple App Store API.", "The app is 41.9 MB, needs iOS 17 or later and also runs on iPad, Apple silicon Macs and Apple Vision. An internet connection is required.", "The developer's website, verby.co, is a Next.js site, a web framework visible in the page source, with a page per app and the policies." ], "src": [ 4, 5, 2, 1, 6 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Three companies in the Loot Drop database sold translation, speech services or hearing help before speech and translation models worked in real time. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "TurboTranslations", "years": "2014 to 2023", "funding": "US$150K", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "Faster and cheaper translations from a marketplace of crowdsourced human translators.", "died": "Neural machine translation improved quickly from 2016 to 2020 and undercut a business that paid people for every translation.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2263-turbotranslations" }, { "name": "Tellme", "years": "1999 to 2011", "funding": "US$238M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Information and transactions by phone through voice commands, using automatic speech recognition.", "died": "Smartphone apps with screens replaced voice menus, and Google and Amazon built their own voice technology.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/612-tellme" }, { "name": "SoundFocus", "years": "2012 to 2017", "funding": "US$1.8M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A phone app that adjusted sound to each user's hearing, for people with mild or moderate hearing loss.", "died": "The market for hearing apps was smaller than expected, and many users chose hearing aids or Apple's AirPods, as large companies added similar features.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/567-soundfocus" } ], "whatChanged": [ "TurboTranslations paid people for each translation, Tellme built its own speech recognition for the telephone, and SoundFocus tried to improve hearing with sound settings alone. They raised from US$150,000 to US$238 million and closed, all three when better machines or larger companies did the same job.", "ekto rents the speech recognition and the translation from AI providers that now work while people speak, so one seller can offer live captions in 39 languages. whatsthe.app read US$14,956 of net revenue in 90 days to 25 October 2026. What SoundFocus met is still possible: large companies can build the same feature into their own products, and many apps that the App Store lists as similar already sell live captions and translation." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, with care about model costs.", "text": "A captions and translation app built on rented models is open to any mobile developer: the providers sell speech recognition and translation through APIs, and Apple handles the billing. ekto shows that some users pay US$34.99 a month for it. The risks are the per-minute cost of the models under unlimited plans and the many similar apps.", "steps": [ "Use one provider for speech recognition and another for translation, and state in the privacy policy what each receives and keeps.", "Price for the users who need it most, such as students abroad and people with hearing loss, and offer a short free preview instead of a free plan.", "Add features that bring new groups without a new product, such as a sharing link for a room or captions for audio from other apps.", "Test the store name, subtitle and texts for App Store search, and connect the sales data to a verification site." ], "open": "Live captions for one setting with its own words, such as church services, university lectures in one country or medical appointments with an interpreter present, where general translation apps fit less well." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What the figures are", "text": "For this app whatsthe.app's MRR of US$4,985 equals the 90-day net revenue of US$14,956 divided by three, so it measures money received, not the value of the active plans. The 90-day value is after Apple's commission and refunds; the page does not say whether the 30-day value of US$4,653 is. There is one reading, of 25 October 2026, and no second source." }, { "title": "Model costs under unlimited plans", "text": "All plans are \"Unlimited PRO\", while every minute of audio goes to a paid speech provider and every translated sentence to a text provider. The terms forbid use \"that materially affects the Service's stability, availability, or cost\". No source gives the cost per minute or the profit margin, and the privacy policy does not name the providers." }, { "title": "Privacy label and policy", "text": "Apple's privacy label says that purchases and identifiers may be used to track users across other companies' apps and websites and lists third-party advertising. The privacy policy says: \"We do not sell personal information, share it for cross-context behavioral advertising\". Apple notes that it has not verified the label." }, { "title": "Hearing loss, students and accuracy", "text": "The store text sells the app to people with hearing loss and to students who want to get ahead in class abroad. It is a captioning tool, not a health product or a writing tool. The terms say the output may be inaccurate and that the app is not a substitute for a qualified interpreter, and must not be the only source for legal, medical or emergency communication." }, { "title": "Other apps of the same seller", "text": "Anthony Ho also sells Picture Math: Calculus Solver, subtitled \"Math & Statistics Solutions\", and Quick Currency Converter on the App Store; the developer's website lists ekto, Notes to Voice and Quick Currency Rates. This story did not review those apps, and ekto's own pages do not link to Picture Math." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://verby.co/ekto" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6740196773" }, { "kind": "whatsthe", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/com.anthony.ho.all-ears" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "whatsthe.app listing: Live Captions: ekto, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/com.anthony.ho.all-ears", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full, including the data embedded in the page. The revenue, subscription and download figures were read by whatsthe.app through the Apple App Store API, last updated on 25 October 2026; the marketing channels and the listing owner's handle were entered on the listing." }, { "title": "Live Translator: ekto on the US App Store, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/live-translator-ekto/id6740196773", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full: description, in-app purchases, version history, review, privacy label, age rating, seller and copyright line. The seller, dates, ratings and age rating are Apple's records; the description, release notes and prices are written by the developer." }, { "title": "App Store developer page: Anthony Ho, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/anthony-ho/id894144862", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Lists three apps: Picture Math: Calculus Solver, Live Translator: ekto and Quick Currency Converter." }, { "title": "Live Captions: ekto Privacy Policy, last updated 16 August 2026", "url": "https://verby.co/ekto/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "The page loads by script. Read the text in its script file in full. Source for the AI providers, the data they receive and keep, Live Link and the advertising statement. verby.co has no robots.txt (it returns a 404 page)." }, { "title": "Live Captions: ekto Terms of Use, last updated 16 August 2026", "url": "https://verby.co/ekto/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "The page loads by script. Read the text in its script file. Source for the provider, the eligibility rule, the fair-use clause, the accuracy disclaimer and Apple billing." }, { "title": "Verby Apps website and ekto page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://verby.co/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page source of the home page and of verby.co/ekto: the list of apps (ekto, Notes to Voice, Quick Currency Rates) and the ekto page title. Not used for numbers." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/econic/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/econic.md", "slug": "econic", "name": "Econic", "country": "USA (company formed in New Mexico); the product is in Spanish", "sector": "Financial Services", "productType": "Spanish-language web app in which four AI analyst agents give traders a bullish or bearish bias for currencies, US stock indices and earnings, with the evidence behind it", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "May 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$4.7K monthly recurring revenue, October 2026", "sticker": "$4.7K MRR", "outcomeUsd": 56544, "months": 5, "teamLabel": "1 named founder, Alex Tomas (TrustMRR only); the site writes of a team of macroeconomics experts; headcount not published", "fundingLabel": "None reported; no source names investors", "primaryFactor": "Pre-selling", "group": "documents-data", "channel": "creators", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Trading research" ], "product": "A web app in Spanish for people who already trade currencies, US stock indices or stocks. When an event happens, such as a US inflation figure, a central-bank decision or a company's earnings, four AI agents look at it from four sides: macroeconomics, the positions of large investors, news sentiment and company fundamentals. Only a view that the agents agree on is published as a bias (bullish, bearish or neutral), and the user can open the data, the date and the official source behind it. There is one paid plan, PRO, at US$45 a month or US$432 a year.", "why": "It sold to a waiting list. In May 2026 the site collected emails with the promise of a launch discount, and today the pricing card still asks for the opening code that the list received by email. TrustMRR shows US$39,737 of payments in the launch month, 59.6% of all revenue to date. The product shows its sources for each conclusion, which the site uses as its argument against anonymous signal channels. What it has not shown is growth after the launch: monthly revenue fell to about US$4,400 from July to September.", "summary": [ "Econic is a web app for traders, written in Spanish. It watches scheduled and unscheduled market events: inflation and jobs figures, decisions of the central banks of the ten largest currencies, and the earnings reports of companies in the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 indices. For each event, four AI agents react, where an AI agent is a program that calls a large language model with its own instructions and data sources and returns a structured answer. One agent reads macroeconomic data, one reads positioning (how much large investors are betting on each side, for example in the weekly COT report of the US futures regulator), one reads news sentiment and one reads company fundamentals. A filter keeps only the views on which the agents agree, and the result is a bias, a short statement that a currency or index is more likely to rise (bullish) or fall (bearish), shown with the data, date and source behind it.", "The company behind it is Econic Pro LLC, formed in New Mexico, USA. TrustMRR names one founder, Alex Tomas, and gives 30 April 2026 as the founded date. On 4 May 2026 the site was still a waiting list that promised early access and a launch discount. TrustMRR reads the company's payments from Stripe, the payment processor, through an API key, so the figures are not screenshots. On 27 October 2026 it showed MRR (monthly recurring revenue, in which every active subscription counts at its monthly value) of US$4,712 from 125 active subscriptions, and US$66,719 of payments since launch. US$39,737 of that came in May 2026, the launch month.", "This page grades every number by its evidence. The revenue figures are grade A because they come from Stripe through TrustMRR. The rest comes from the company's own pages: what the agents do, the prices, the AI providers and the count of 200 beta users. The page also shows four failed companies that sold market insight to investors, and it lists what is uncertain: who works on the product, how the 200 users were counted, and whether revenue will recover after the launch peak." ], "factsCaption": "US$4,712 of Stripe-verified monthly recurring revenue five months after a launch to a waiting list that brought US$39,737 in the first month", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the company's Stripe account through an API key. A grade B value is visible in the public page source. A grade C value was written by the company on its website, in its terms or in its TrustMRR profile. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. Spanish quotations are followed by an English translation marked (translation).", "timelineLead": "From a waiting list on 4 May 2026 to a one-plan subscription app with 125 active subscriptions in October 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Econic plans, read on the company's pricing page on 27 October 2026 (grade C)", "note": "There is one plan. The page shows yearly billing first, with the monthly price of US$45 times 12 (US$540) struck through; US$432 a year is 20% less. The opening prices come from the page source (data-open-monthly=\"36\", data-open-annual=\"324\") and apply with the code that the waiting list received by email. Per-month values for yearly billing are calculated: 432 divided by 12 is 36, and 324 divided by 12 is 27. The terms say prices exclude VAT and sales taxes. No free plan is offered; the terms allow a free trial \"sujeto a las condiciones publicadas\" (subject to the published conditions, translation), and none is published.", "rows": [ [ "PRO", "36", "45", "Full platform: all currency pairs, S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 earnings, SPX and NDX indices, evidence for each bias, push alerts, macro calendar" ], [ "PRO with the opening code", "27", "36", "Same plan, for people on the waiting list" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 27 October 2026", "value": "US$4,712 from 125 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR metric snapshot; revenue last synced on 27 October 2026 at 05:27 UTC through a Stripe API key. MRR growth over the last 30 days: -13.5%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue since launch, to 27 October 2026", "value": "US$66,719", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR gives the same value for the last 6 months, the last 12 months and all time, so all payments fall in the six months from May 2026. The six monthly values below add up to US$66,720 (rounding).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month, 2026", "value": "May US$39,737; June US$11,225; July US$4,352; August US$4,355; September US$4,576; October to the 27th US$2,475", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. Calculated: May is 59.6% of all revenue; June is 71.8% below May; July to September average US$4,428 a month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days, to 27 October 2026", "value": "US$2,880", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR gives growth of -37.2% against the 30 days before; calculated, those earlier 30 days brought about US$4,586. The daily table shows payments on most days, from US$36 to US$513 a day.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average MRR per active subscription", "value": "about US$37.70", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 4,712 divided by 125. This lies between the yearly plan's US$36 a month and the monthly plan's US$45; no source says how many subscriptions are yearly.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "MRR compared with cash revenue", "value": "MRR is 1.6 times the last 30 days of payments", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 4,712 divided by 2,880 is 1.64. A yearly plan is paid once and counts in MRR at one twelfth of its price every month, so a launch with many yearly plans gives MRR above the monthly cash.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "80%", "grade": "C", "note": "Shown in TrustMRR's metric snapshots. The payment provider gives revenue only, so the costs behind this margin do not come from it.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Payment processor", "value": "Stripe, read by API key; Econic is not using a merchant of record", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR verification section. The pricing page says \"Pago seguro con Stripe\" (secure payment with Stripe, translation).", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Founder", "value": "Alex Tomas, X handle @alexxtomas_ with 51 followers", "grade": "C", "note": "Named only on the TrustMRR profile. The company's website, terms and privacy policy name no person.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Company", "value": "Econic Pro LLC, a limited liability company formed in the State of New Mexico, USA", "grade": "C", "note": "Stated in the terms and the privacy policy, both last updated on 2 May 2026. TrustMRR gives the country as US.", "src": [ 4, 5, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "headcount not published", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR shows no team size. The site of 4 May 2026 said \"Nuestro equipo de expertos en macroeconomía escribe\" (our team of macroeconomics experts writes, translation), and today's site says each agent was \"diseñado con economistas y traders con experiencia institucional\" (designed with economists and traders with institutional experience, translation). No source gives a number.", "src": [ 1, 7, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Founded and launched", "value": "founded 30 April 2026; first payments in May 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Founded date from the TrustMRR profile. The Internet Archive copy of 4 May 2026 answers \"¿Cuándo se lanza? Pronto.\" (when does it launch? Soon, translation). The first month in TrustMRR's revenue timeline is May 2026.", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Users claimed by the company", "value": "more than 200 traders and investors after 6 months of private beta", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page: \"+200 traders e inversores · 6 meses en beta privada\". TrustMRR's profile also shows an estimated user count of 200. Neither is a payment figure.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Price", "value": "PRO US$45 a month or US$432 a year; with the opening code US$36 a month or US$324 a year", "grade": "C", "note": "Pricing page and its page source. The site calls it \"Un solo plan, sin tiers ni upsells\" (a single plan, without tiers or upsells, translation).", "src": [ 3, 2 ] }, { "fact": "AI providers", "value": "OpenAI and Anthropic, through the OpenRouter aggregator", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms, section 4: \"modelos de lenguaje de gran tamaño (actualmente de OpenAI y Anthropic, accedidos a través del agregador OpenRouter)\" (large language models, currently from OpenAI and Anthropic, accessed through the OpenRouter aggregator, translation). The privacy policy says no identifiable personal data is sent to these models.", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Markets covered, October 2026", "value": "all currency pairs; earnings of S&P 500 and Nasdaq constituents; SPX and NDX indices; crypto \"En camino\" (on the way)", "grade": "C", "note": "Coverage section of the home page. Eight other indices, among them DAX, IBEX 35 and Nikkei 225, are marked as coming.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Minimum age", "value": "18", "grade": "C", "note": "Terms: \"tener al menos 18 años\" (be at least 18 years old, translation).", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the October 2026 figure", "value": "5 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: May 2026 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "30 April 2026", "what": "Founded date on the TrustMRR profile.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2 May 2026", "what": "The terms and privacy policy of Econic Pro LLC are last updated. They name OpenAI and Anthropic, through OpenRouter, as the AI providers, and Stripe for payments.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "when": "4 May 2026", "what": "The Internet Archive copy of the site is a waiting list: \"Acceso anticipado + descuento exclusivo al lanzamiento\" (early access plus an exclusive launch discount, translation). The product then covered eight G10 currencies with weekly signals from five specialist agents and an independent evaluator agent.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "May 2026", "what": "Launch. TrustMRR records US$39,737 of payments, the best month to date.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "4 to 10 June 2026", "what": "The changelog adds the official source of each economic figure (4 June), the period that each figure measures (5 June), gold with direction and COT positioning (9 June), and alerts and a personal list of assets (10 June).", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "13 June 2026", "what": "The changelog says the macro direction bias was rebuilt and tested on years of market data, and now works as a weekly thesis that changes only with enough evidence.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "Revenue of US$11,225, 71.8% below May.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "July to September 2026", "what": "Revenue of US$4,352, US$4,355 and US$4,576.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "27 October 2026", "what": "MRR of US$4,712 from 125 active subscriptions, and US$66,719 since launch. The pricing card still says \"Acceso anticipado · solo lista de espera\" (early access, waiting list only, translation).", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 3 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A waiting list with a launch discount", "text": "Before launch, the site asked for an email in exchange for early access and \"un descuento exclusivo para early adopters\". After launch, the pricing card asks for the opening code that the list received, which lowers the yearly plan from US$432 to US$324. TrustMRR shows that 59.6% of all revenue so far arrived in the launch month. No source gives the size of the list." }, { "title": "Yearly billing first", "text": "The pricing card opens on yearly billing and shows the monthly price times twelve, US$540, struck through. A yearly plan brings a whole year of cash at once, which explains part of the high launch month: TrustMRR's MRR of US$4,712 is 1.6 times the cash of the last 30 days. Calculated: US$39,737 is the price of about 123 opening yearly plans, but no source says how the May payments divide between yearly and monthly plans." }, { "title": "Agents with separate jobs and a filter", "text": "Each agent has its own data: central banks and economic calendars, COT positioning and options flow, news, and company filings. Their views are compared, and the site says only views that pass a coherence filter, scored out of 10, are published. In May 2026 the site described the same idea with five agents and an independent evaluator agent that rejects a synthesis below 6 out of 10." }, { "title": "Evidence instead of a bare signal", "text": "Every bias opens to the figure, its date and the official source behind it. The site contrasts this with Telegram signal channels and \"Señal pro COMPRA USDJPY (sin por qué)\" (a pro BUY USDJPY signal, without a why, translation). The terms say the content is information and not investment advice." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's terms, privacy policy and page source. The terms and privacy policy are grade C; the page generator is visible in the page source (grade B).", "items": [ "Language models from OpenAI and Anthropic, called through OpenRouter, a service that gives one API for many model providers. The privacy policy says only inputs derived from public macroeconomic data are sent to them.", "Data sources named on the site: the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, FRED (the St. Louis Fed's economic database), COT reports, the Bundesbank, the BIS (Bank for International Settlements) and the People's Bank of China, plus company filings for earnings. The site says \"cero scraping\".", "Hosting on Railway, the database on Neon (hosted PostgreSQL), and Redis from unnamed providers, as listed among the data processors in the privacy policy.", "Stripe for subscriptions, PostHog for product analytics and session recordings with masking, Sentry for error monitoring and Resend for transactional email, all listed in the privacy policy.", "The public website is built with Astro version 5.17.1, according to its generator tag. The app itself runs at app.econic.pro behind a sign-up." ], "src": [ 5, 4, 2 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold market insight to investors and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Monitor110", "years": "2005 to 2008", "funding": "US$17M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Early trading signals for hedge funds, found by filtering blogs, news and social media in real time.", "died": "Collecting and processing the data cost more than the revenue could carry, and buyers stayed with Bloomberg. The analysis had to be built by a large team, without language models.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/348-monitor110" }, { "name": "SocialPicks", "years": "2007 to 2010", "funding": "US$2.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A social network where users share stock picks, so that the crowd's ideas become investment insight.", "died": "It never reached the number of users that crowd insight needs, lived on advertising, and the 2008 crisis reduced interest in stock forums.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1658-socialpicks" }, { "name": "Varamis", "years": "2020 to 2025", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "AI investment analytics with institutional-grade portfolio tools for retail investors and wealth advisers.", "died": "Customer acquisition cost more than customers paid over their lifetime, retention was low, and the product did not stand out in a crowded fintech market.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2474-varamis" }, { "name": "Grasp", "years": "2022 to 2024", "funding": "US$4M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "An education-first investment platform that made markets understandable for everyday investors in the UK.", "died": "It launched as the retail trading boom of 2020 and 2021 ended, with high acquisition costs and a product that others already offered.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2511-grasp" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Monitor110 needed US$17 million and a team to turn internet text into signals for hedge funds, and the cost of the processing was larger than the revenue. Varamis and Grasp raised millions to bring institutional analysis to small investors and spent it on staff and customer acquisition. In all four cases, reading and summarizing the sources was the expensive part.", "Language models made that part cheap. Econic rents its models from OpenAI and Anthropic through one aggregator, reads official data such as central-bank statements and FRED series plus third-party market data, and runs on hosted services such as Railway and Neon. TrustMRR shows US$66,719 of payments in five months, which is small next to the predecessors' funding, and no source names an investor. The risk that killed Grasp is still present: retail traders try many tools, and Econic's monthly revenue fell by 88.5% from May to September." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The launch month, maybe once.", "text": "Multi-agent analysis of public economic data can be built by a small team with rented models, and a waiting list with a discount code can turn early interest into yearly payments on day one. But the launch peak did not repeat: from July to September revenue stayed near US$4,400 a month. Free signal channels on Telegram and Discord, which the site itself names, compete for the same traders, and a trading tool has to keep proving that its views are useful.", "steps": [ "Pick one user who already pays for information, here traders with one to three years of experience, and one language market.", "Give each AI agent one kind of data and one job, and publish only what the agents agree on, with the source attached.", "Collect a waiting list before launch and send each person a code for a lower yearly price.", "State clearly in the terms and on the site that the output is information, not advice, and that losses are possible." ], "open": "The same structure fits other readers of public data in their own language: analysts of public tenders, farm commodity prices, or energy markets. The hard part is not the build but keeping subscribers after the first year." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue came mostly at launch", "text": "TrustMRR shows US$39,737 in May 2026 and about US$4,400 a month from July to September; the last 30 days to 27 October brought US$2,880, 37.2% below the 30 days before, and MRR fell 13.5% in 30 days. If many launch customers bought yearly plans, the first renewals fall in May 2027; no source says how many did." }, { "title": "Information, not advice", "text": "The terms say the content \"No constituye, en ningún caso, asesoramiento de inversión\" (does not in any case constitute investment advice, translation), that Econic Pro LLC is not registered with the SEC, the CFTC, FINRA or the CNMV, and that nothing in it is \"una representación, garantía o promesa de que vayas a obtener beneficios o evitar pérdidas\" (a representation, guarantee or promise that you will make profits or avoid losses, translation). The site footer says \"No es asesoría financiera\". This page found no claim about how much users earn. The closest is the pricing line \"Cuesta menos que una sola operación mal cerrada\" (it costs less than a single badly closed trade, translation)." }, { "title": "Testimonials without names", "text": "The home page shows six quotations from beta users and says: \"Sin nombres ni fotos, por privacidad ... Cada cita es de un usuario real de la beta\" (no names or photos, for privacy; each quotation is from a real beta user, translation). They cannot be checked. No rating counts appear in the page's structured data." }, { "title": "Who runs it", "text": "Only TrustMRR names a person, Alex Tomas, with an X account of 51 followers. The site names nobody, while it speaks of a team of macroeconomics experts and of economists and traders who designed the agents. Agent Money List calls the operator a \"Solopreneur\", but that is its own label. The team size is unknown." }, { "title": "Crypto and news sources", "text": "Bitcoin, Ether, Solana and XRP are listed as coming, and the positioning agent names on-chain data. Econic does not sell a crypto token. The sentiment agent lists Reuters and Bloomberg as sources while the site says \"cero news agregada\" (no aggregated news, translation); no source says whether that news content is licensed." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.econic.pro/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/econic" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: Econic, verified revenue profile (markdown), read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/econic.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile. Revenue, MRR and subscriptions are read from Stripe through an API key (revenue last synced 27 October 2026, 05:27 UTC). The founder name, founded date, user estimate, price line, channel and profit margin are entered by the founder (grade C)." }, { "title": "Econic home page: La segunda opinión que tu gráfico no puede darte, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.econic.pro/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, in Spanish, with its structured data. Source for the agents, the coverage, the beta claim, the testimonials and the FAQ." }, { "title": "Econic pricing page: Precios · Econic, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.econic.pro/pricing/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the price values in the page source." }, { "title": "Econic: Términos y Condiciones, last updated 2 May 2026", "url": "https://www.econic.pro/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, in Spanish. Source for the company, the AI providers, the age limit, billing and the advice and risk disclaimers." }, { "title": "Econic: Política de Privacidad, last updated 2 May 2026", "url": "https://www.econic.pro/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on data collected and on processors. Source for the hosting, database, analytics, email and model providers." }, { "title": "Econic: Novedades de producto (changelog), read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.econic.pro/changelog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Entries from 4 to 13 June 2026." }, { "title": "Internet Archive copy of econic.pro, 4 May 2026: Inteligencia macro para traders", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260504204903/https://www.econic.pro/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The earliest capture; the site was a waiting list before launch." }, { "title": "Agent Money List: Econic, $4.9K verified MRR (entry downloaded by the pipeline on 27 October 2026)", "url": "https://agentmoneylist.com/e/econic/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Where this lead was found; its figures copy TrustMRR (MRR US$4,946 and 131 active subscriptions as of 20 October 2026). Not used as a separate revenue source. Data under CC BY 4.0." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/blitzcut-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/blitzcut-ai.md", "slug": "blitzcut-ai", "name": "BlitzCut AI", "country": "Lithuania", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "Phone and Mac app that edits talking-head videos with AI: silence removal, captions from speech, editing by transcript and by chat", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "29 October 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$2.0K MRR, October 2026", "sticker": "$24K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 24108, "months": 12, "teamLabel": "1 named developer, Tomas Radionovas, who answers App Store reviews in the first person; headcount not published", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "video", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "growing", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Video editing" ], "product": "An app for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Android that edits videos of one person talking to the camera. It cuts out pauses automatically, writes styled captions from the speech, lets the user delete words in the transcript to cut the matching video, and, since June 2026, edits the video from instructions typed in a chat. It also makes AI voiceovers from text and animated graphics from what is said. Weekly, monthly and yearly plans are sold in the app stores and on the website, and lifetime plans in the App Store.", "why": "Editing a spoken video is mostly repetitive work: finding the pauses, cutting retakes and typing captions. BlitzCut does these steps automatically on the phone where the video was recorded. One developer ships often: the App Store shows 25 versions from 28 March to 6 October 2026, and the developer answers user reviews personally.", "summary": [ "BlitzCut is a video editor for talking-head videos, videos in which one person speaks to the camera, such as TikTok clips, tutorials, podcasts and webinars. Its main tools are silence removal, which finds the quiet parts of the sound track and cuts them out, captions written by speech recognition, software that turns spoken words into text, and text-based editing: the app shows the transcript of the video, and when the user deletes a sentence in the text, the matching part of the video is cut. The App Store name is \"Video Splitter - BlitzCut AI\".", "Tomas Radionovas is the seller of the app on the App Store and the author of the company blog. The privacy policy names MB Patikimas Kodas, a company in Lithuania that does business as BlitzCut; the App Store copyright line says HonestCode. The app was released on 29 October 2025. TrustMRR, a site that reads a startup's revenue from its payment provider through an API key, reads this app's sales from RevenueCat, a service that records in-app subscription purchases. On 27 October 2026 it showed MRR, monthly recurring revenue, in which a yearly plan counts as one twelfth of its price, of US$2,009 from 195 active subscriptions, US$2,437 of revenue in the last 30 days and US$15,556 since the first payment in December 2025.", "The revenue figures are grade A: two different sites, TrustMRR and whatsthe.app, read them from the same RevenueCat account on two dates. On 1 October 2026 whatsthe.app showed MRR of US$1,785 and US$2,676 of revenue in 28 days. The MRR is just above this site's money floor of US$2,000 a month. The page also shows four earlier companies that sold easier or automatic video editing and failed." ], "factsCaption": "US$2,009 of RevenueCat-verified MRR twelve months after the release of a talking-head video editor sold by one developer", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR or whatsthe.app from the app's RevenueCat account through an API key. A grade B value is a record that Apple shows on the App Store. A grade C value was written by the company on its website, in its privacy policy or in the app's store text. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From the App Store release to US$2,009 of MRR in twelve months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "BlitzCut plans in US dollars, from the web pricing page and the US App Store, read 27 October 2026 (grade C)", "note": "The web pricing page sells the weekly, monthly and yearly plans through Stripe Managed Payments; the buyer then logs in to the app with the same email. Prices differ in 172 countries and regions. The lifetime plans are listed only on the App Store. Apple also lists purchases named Starter (US$1.99), Standard (US$6.99), Pro (US$17.99) and Annual Promo (US$69.99) without saying what they contain; whatsthe.app shows lower prices for the same names. AI features use credits: the monthly plan includes 20 a month, the yearly plan 80 a year and the weekly plan none. The per-month values are calculated: US$6.99 times 52 divided by 12 is about US$30.29, and US$69.99 divided by 12 is about US$5.83, as the pricing page also shows.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "Free download and a 3-day trial; without a plan, silence removal is limited, long-form export is locked and videos carry a watermark" ], [ "Weekly", "", "", "US$6.99 a week (about US$30.29 a month); no AI credits" ], [ "Monthly", "", "16.99", "20 AI credits a month" ], [ "Yearly", "5.83", "", "US$69.99 a year; 80 AI credits a year" ], [ "Lifetime", "129.99 one-time", "", "App Store only; a Lifetime deal is also listed at US$99.99" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 27 October 2026", "value": "US$2,009", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR's metric snapshot, read from RevenueCat through an API key; revenue last synced at 03:01 UTC on 27 October 2026. TrustMRR shows MRR growth over 30 days of 0.0%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the October 2026 MRR", "value": "about US$24,108 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$2,009 times 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days, to 27 October 2026", "value": "US$2,437", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. It shows a change of -21.1% against the 30 days before. Calculated: 1.21 times the MRR; yearly and lifetime plans are paid at once, so monthly cash differs from MRR.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue since the first payment", "value": "US$15,556", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, all time and last 12 months. The first month with revenue is December 2025, with US$25.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions, 27 October 2026", "value": "195", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. Calculated: about US$10.30 of MRR per active subscription.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue, 2026", "value": "January US$111; April US$1,775; July US$2,338; September US$2,897; October to the 27th US$2,279", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR's monthly timeline. September 2026 is the best month so far.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue growth, July to September 2026 against April to June 2026", "value": "+42.5%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from TrustMRR's monthly timeline: US$7,086 against US$4,971.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR, 1 October 2026", "value": "US$1,785", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app, read through RevenueCat, last updated at 10:30 UTC on 1 October 2026; after that date whatsthe.app shows \"RevenueCat API key expired\". MRR growth over 28 days: +6.0%.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 28 days, to 1 October 2026", "value": "US$2,676", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app, with revenue growth over 28 days of +55.2%. The page data also shows 172 active subscriptions, 19 active trials and 1,740 active users.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "MRR change from 1 to 27 October 2026", "value": "+12.5%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$2,009 (TrustMRR) divided by US$1,785 (whatsthe.app). Both read the same RevenueCat account, but they may count MRR in slightly different ways.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Downloads", "value": "about 1,440 in 28 days to 1 October 2026, iOS and Android", "grade": "B", "note": "Store figure shown by whatsthe.app. The home page says \"10,000+ downloads\" (grade C).", "src": [ 2, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Developer and seller", "value": "Tomas Radionovas", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's page names Tomas Radionovas as developer and seller, and the blog's articles carry the byline Tomas Radionovas.", "src": [ 3, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Company", "value": "MB Patikimas Kodas, doing business as BlitzCut, Lithuania", "grade": "C", "note": "The privacy policy, last updated 5 October 2025. The App Store copyright line reads \"Copyright © HonestCode 2025\"; TrustMRR and whatsthe.app show the founder account HonestCode (@HonestCodelol on X).", "src": [ 11, 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "headcount not published", "grade": "C", "note": "The developer answers reviews in the first person: \"I give trials to people on both weekly and yearly plans\". The blog writes \"BlitzCut is our app\". No source gives a headcount or mentions employees.", "src": [ 3, 12 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions investors. The About page says the product was founded in 2024.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Release on the App Store", "value": "29 October 2025", "grade": "B", "note": "The iOS release date that whatsthe.app shows from the store data.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Where the AI comes from", "value": "third-party AI providers, including OpenAI; silence removal runs on the device", "grade": "C", "note": "The privacy policy: \"We provide the AI Products through third-party service providers (\"AI Service Providers\"), including OpenAI.\" The home page: \"On-device silence removal\". The text-to-speech page says voice generation needs an internet connection. No source names a model.", "src": [ 11, 5, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Ratings", "value": "21 ratings, average 4.4 of 5 on the US App Store; 50 App Store ratings in 11 countries, average 4.2", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's US page on 27 October 2026, and whatsthe.app's count of store ratings. The home page's structured data claims 80 ratings at 4.3; no source shows where the other 30 come from.", "src": [ 3, 2, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Age rating", "value": "4+", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's page. The privacy policy says the company does not knowingly collect data from or market to children under 18.", "src": [ 3, 11 ] }, { "fact": "Time from release to the October 2026 figure", "value": "12 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 29 October 2025 to 27 October 2026 is 363 days.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2024", "what": "The About page gives 2024 as the year BlitzCut AI was founded.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "5 October 2025", "what": "Date of the privacy policy of MB Patikimas Kodas, doing business as BlitzCut.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "29 October 2025", "what": "The app is released on the App Store.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "15 November 2025", "what": "A five-star review on the Lithuanian App Store: \"I like how the autocut is so accurate\". The home page later quotes it.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "when": "December 2025", "what": "First month with revenue in TrustMRR's timeline: US$25.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "28 March 2026", "what": "Version 1.10 makes the transcript easier to edit, separates subtitles from the transcript and adds new languages.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "7 April 2026", "what": "Version 1.11 adds live translation of the transcript for captions in other languages.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "April 2026", "what": "Monthly revenue rises to US$1,775, from US$657 in March.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2 May 2026", "what": "Version 1.15 adds iCloud sync of projects between the Mac and iOS apps.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "12 June 2026", "what": "Version 1.17 adds AI editing by chat: the user describes an edit, and the AI cuts, zooms and adds sound effects based on the transcription. It also adds a login.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "9 July 2026", "what": "Version 1.19 adds background replacement and 20 caption templates.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "Best month so far: US$2,897 of revenue.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "1 October 2026", "what": "Last whatsthe.app update: MRR of US$1,785 and US$2,676 in 28 days; then the API key that whatsthe.app uses expires.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "6 October 2026", "what": "Version 1.22 adds AI motion graphics made from a description, and updated AI editing models.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "27 October 2026", "what": "TrustMRR shows MRR of US$2,009 from 195 active subscriptions and US$15,556 since the start.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Automate the dull part of spoken video", "text": "Most of the work in editing a talking-head video is removing pauses, filler words and retakes, then typing captions. BlitzCut does the pause removal on the device and the captions by speech recognition, and the user then edits the text instead of the timeline. The blog gives one example: on a 16:50 recording the app found 66 speech segments and removed 182.7 seconds of silence." }, { "title": "Rented AI, limited by credits", "text": "The privacy policy says the AI features run through outside providers, including OpenAI. The heavier AI features use credits: 20 a month on the monthly plan, 80 a year on the yearly plan and none on the weekly plan. This keeps the cost of a cheap plan below its price." }, { "title": "Short plans with a trial and a paywall", "text": "The app offers a 3-day trial and a weekly plan at US$6.99, plus yearly and lifetime plans. One US review from July 2026 complains that a paywall appears after a few screens, and another that the price is too high for the app. Because yearly and lifetime plans are paid at once, revenue in a month differs from MRR: TrustMRR shows US$2,437 in 30 days against US$2,009 of MRR." }, { "title": "Pages for every kind of speaker", "text": "The sitemap of 27 October 2026 lists 407 pages: about 270 blog pages, 15 free tools, 60 pages in Spanish, pages for lawyers, churches, financial advisors and real estate agents, and comparisons with CapCut, Descript, Opus Clip and TimeBolt. No source says how many customers came from these pages." }, { "title": "One app on several devices", "text": "The same purchase works on iPhone, iPad and Mac, projects sync through iCloud since May 2026, and an Android version is on Google Play. A buyer can also pay on the website and log in to the app with the same email." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the App Store page (grade B), the company's website and privacy policy (grade C), and TrustMRR (grade A for the payment provider).", "items": [ "A native app for iPhone and iPad (iOS 18 or later), Mac with an Apple M1 chip or later, and Apple Vision, 181.9 MB, in English and 34 more languages. An Android version is on Google Play.", "Silence removal runs on the device. The AI features use outside AI providers, including OpenAI according to the privacy policy, and the text-to-speech page says voice generation needs an internet connection. No source says which feature uses which provider or model.", "RevenueCat records the subscriptions; TrustMRR and whatsthe.app read the revenue from it through API keys. The Apple App Store and Google Play take the in-app payments.", "The website sells the weekly, monthly and yearly plans through Stripe Managed Payments, with Link for checkout and receipts.", "Projects sync between devices through iCloud since version 1.15 in May 2026; a login was added in version 1.17 in June 2026." ], "src": [ 3, 11, 5, 1, 6 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold easier or automatic video editing before speech recognition and language models could cut a video from its words. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "HighlightCam", "years": "2009 to 2012", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "An algorithm that analysed raw video and picked the most engaging moments, so users made polished videos without editing skills.", "died": "Smartphones and consumer editing software such as iMovie made editing easier, the established products added similar features, and the market adopted automated editing slowly.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1636-highlightcam" }, { "name": "ReelSurfer", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$1.25M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A simple desktop tool to cut and share short clips from online videos.", "died": "YouTube and Facebook built the same features into their platforms, and mobile-first apps took the users of a desktop tool.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1577-reelsurfer" }, { "name": "Viddy", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$30M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Filters and effects that made amateur phone videos look polished and easy to share.", "died": "Users tried it once and did not return, and Instagram added video in June 2013 for its existing users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2190-viddy" }, { "name": "ClearMix", "years": "2020 to 2023", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Professional marketing videos made quickly and cheaply by a network of videographers and editors.", "died": "Canva and Adobe expanded into video, AI editing tools automated much of its manual work, and the freelance network was costly to scale.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1336-clearmix" } ], "whatChanged": [ "HighlightCam tried to choose the good moments in a video with an algorithm, and ClearMix paid people to edit. Neither could read what the speaker said. ReelSurfer and Viddy made editing simpler, but larger platforms copied the features. The four companies raised between US$500,000 and US$30 million, and all of them closed.", "Speech recognition and language models turn a spoken video into text that a program can edit. BlitzCut cuts pauses on the phone, rents the AI for captions and chat editing, and sells the result to people who record themselves. One developer reached US$2,009 of MRR in twelve months, according to TrustMRR. The ReelSurfer risk remains: CapCut, Descript and the phone makers can add the same tools, and the App Store already lists several similar silence-removal apps." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, for a developer who can ship a native video editor.", "text": "Silence removal, captions and transcript editing are now standard features that many apps sell, so the method is easy to copy but the market is crowded. BlitzCut shows that one developer can reach about US$2,000 of MRR with frequent releases, plans for every device and many search pages, but the figures also show how small a single app in this category can stay.", "steps": [ "Pick one kind of video, such as a person talking to the camera, and automate the steps that every such video needs.", "Run the cheap steps on the device and limit the costly AI steps with credits, so that a weekly plan cannot cost more than it brings.", "Sell one purchase across phone, tablet and computer, and add a web checkout next to the app stores.", "Connect the RevenueCat account to a verification site, so that a buyer or partner can check the figures." ], "open": "Editors for one profession whose videos follow fixed rules, such as legal or medical explainers that need exact captions, or editors for languages that the large apps caption poorly." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Just above the money floor", "text": "The MRR of US$2,009 on 27 October 2026 is only 0.45% above this site's floor of US$2,000 a month. TrustMRR shows revenue in the last 30 days 21.1% lower than in the 30 days before, and US$0 on 26 October 2026. whatsthe.app stopped updating on 1 October 2026, when its RevenueCat API key expired." }, { "title": "Ratings and the reviews on the home page", "text": "The home page quotes three five-star reviews as \"Real reviews from the App Store\". All three exist on the Lithuanian App Store, which shows 4 ratings, in the country of the developer's company; no source says who wrote them. The home page's structured data claims 80 ratings at an average of 4.3, while whatsthe.app counts 50 App Store ratings at 4.2 and Apple's US page shows 21 at 4.4. Two US reviews from July 2026 complain about a \"hard paywall\" and a design that \"looks gimmicky\"." }, { "title": "UGC and testimonial pages", "text": "The website sells editing for \"UGC & creator ads\" and \"Customer testimonials\", and the app's old App Store address used the words \"talking videos\". The pages say the app edits \"genuine creator footage you supply\" and answer: \"It does not generate an avatar performance or invent a customer's experience.\" The text-to-speech voices are chosen from a library of AI voices. No page sells an AI person on camera, so the 26 October 2026 rule on AI avatars that pose as customers does not apply." }, { "title": "Privacy label", "text": "Apple's privacy label says that purchases, coarse location, identifiers, usage and diagnostics data may be used to track users across other companies' apps and websites, including for third-party advertising. The privacy policy says user input is shared with AI providers, including OpenAI. Apple notes that it has not verified the label." }, { "title": "The developer's other app", "text": "The App Store lists one other app by Tomas Radionovas: \"Posture Reminder: Stifix AI\", with the subtitle \"Neck & Back Pain Relief\". BlitzCut's own pages do not link to it. This story is about BlitzCut only." }, { "title": "A crowded category", "text": "Apple lists many similar apps next to BlitzCut, such as Jumpcut, Primecut and JumpCut AI, and the website compares BlitzCut with CapCut, Descript, Opus Clip, Submagic and VEED. Silence removal and auto captions are features that a larger editor can add at any time." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://blitzcutai.com/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6752514828" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/blitzcut" }, { "kind": "whatsthe", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/com.honestcode.silcut" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: BlitzCut, markdown profile, revenue synced 27 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/blitzcut.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile. The revenue table, daily and monthly revenue, MRR and active subscriptions come from RevenueCat through an API key (Verification Sources section); the description is founder-written." }, { "title": "whatsthe.app listing: BlitzCut, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/com.honestcode.silcut", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full, including the data embedded in the page. The revenue and subscription metrics were read through RevenueCat, last updated on 1 October 2026; the release date, store ratings and downloads come from the store data." }, { "title": "Video Splitter - BlitzCut AI on the US App Store, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/video-splitter-blitzcut-ai/id6752514828", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full: description, in-app purchases, version history, reviews and replies, privacy label, age rating, seller, copyright line and other apps of the developer. The seller, dates, ratings and age rating are Apple's records; the description and release notes are written by the developer." }, { "title": "Video Splitter - BlitzCut AI, Ratings and Reviews on the Lithuanian App Store, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/lt/app/video-splitter-blitzcut-ai/id6752514828?see-all=reviews", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Used to check that the three reviews quoted on the home page exist." }, { "title": "BlitzCut home page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://blitzcutai.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the structured data. Source for the features, the on-device silence removal, the quoted reviews and the rating claim." }, { "title": "BlitzCut pricing page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://blitzcutai.com/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the web prices, the AI credits and the Stripe Managed Payments checkout." }, { "title": "BlitzCut: UGC video editor for real footage and ad variants, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://blitzcutai.com/ugc-video-editor", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Checked for AI avatars or invented customers." }, { "title": "BlitzCut: A testimonial video editor for real customer stories, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://blitzcutai.com/testimonial-video-editor", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Checked for AI avatars or invented customers." }, { "title": "BlitzCut: Text to Speech, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://blitzcutai.com/text-to-speech", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the library of AI voices and the need for an internet connection." }, { "title": "About BlitzCut AI, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://blitzcutai.com/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founding year and the platforms." }, { "title": "BlitzCut Privacy Policy, last updated 5 October 2025", "url": "https://blitzcutai.com/privacy-policy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the company, AI products, minors and contact. Source for the company name, the country and OpenAI as an AI provider. The postal address is not repeated here." }, { "title": "Tomas Radionovas, BlitzCut blog: Best App to Remove Silence From Video (2026), 10 March 2026, updated 25 October 2026", "url": "https://blitzcutai.com/blog/best-app-remove-silence-from-video", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the byline, the \"BlitzCut is our app\" disclosure and the 16:50 recording example." }, { "title": "BlitzCut sitemap, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://blitzcutai.com/sitemap.xml", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full and counted. Source for the number of blog, tool, profession and comparison pages." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/textwork/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/textwork.md", "slug": "textwork", "name": "TextWork", "country": "USA", "sector": "Human Resources", "productType": "AI agent that screens job applicants and collects field-worker reports by text message", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "August 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$2.9K MRR verified by Stripe at the last sync, October 2026", "sticker": "$2.9K MRR from 2 clients", "outcomeUsd": 35028, "months": 14, "teamLabel": "1 founder, Brian, who writes \"I'm Brian, the creator of TextWork\"; no other staff named and no open roles", "fundingLabel": "None stated (TrustMRR: bootstrapped); the site has a page that invites investors", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "support-agents", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "growing", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Recruiting" ], "product": "A business gives TextWork its screening questions and connects its job ads, website or applicant tracking system. When a person applies, or texts the company's number, an AI agent answers by text message within a minute, asks the questions one at a time, follows up on incomplete answers, and files a report with a score, the full transcript and a recommended next step. A person at the business decides who moves on. The same conversation engine is sold for daily reports from field workers, leasing enquiries and customer feedback.", "why": "Hourly and field workers answer text messages but ignore email and job portals, and a recruiter cannot call every applicant at night or on a weekend. TextWork replies at once and turns the chat into a structured report. Stripe data read by TrustMRR shows US$29,372 in the twelve months to 26 October 2026 and US$2,919 of monthly recurring revenue, but from only two paying subscriptions, so the business is small and depends on very few customers.", "summary": [ "TextWork is a text-to-apply service: a job applicant applies by sending a text message, or gets a text the moment they apply on a job board, and the hiring conversation happens by SMS instead of a web form. TextWork runs that conversation with an AI agent, a program built on a large language model that follows the employer's script, asks one question at a time, asks again when an answer is incomplete, and writes a structured report. The site's FAQ says: \"TextWork is a text-to-apply AI agent.\" The report has a score, the transcript and a recommended next step, and the FAQ adds that \"A person still decides who moves forward.\" The same engine collects daily reports from field workers in facility services and property maintenance, which is how the terms of service describe the service.", "The founder is named only as Brian. The about page says: \"I'm Brian, the creator of TextWork. As an engineer I built systems for big business.\" The oldest archived copy of textwork.co, from 6 August 2025, sold one plan for US$1,500 a month, reduced to US$1,080 with a summer code. TrustMRR, a site that reads a company's revenue from its payment provider through an API key, shows TextWork's Stripe revenue: US$34,772 since the account started, US$29,372 in the last twelve months, and monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the monthly value of all active subscriptions) of US$2,919 from 2 active subscriptions at the last sync on 26 October 2026. The public price list now starts at US$99 a month.", "The revenue figures are grade A because TrustMRR reads them from Stripe. Everything else, including the founder's first name, the usage counts and the customer story, comes from the company's own pages and is grade C. The page also shows earlier recruiting and frontline-worker software companies that raised millions of dollars and closed, and the risk that comes with having two customers." ], "factsCaption": "US$2,919 of Stripe-verified monthly recurring revenue from 2 subscriptions on 26 October 2026, and US$29,372 in the twelve months before, for a one-founder AI texting agent", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the company's Stripe account. A grade B value was read by TrustMRR from another connected service (web analytics or GitHub), not from payments. A grade C value is what the founder or the company's pages say. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From an archived single-plan page in August 2025 to US$2,919 of monthly recurring revenue 14 months later. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "TextWork plans on the pricing page, read 27 October 2026, and the plan in the archived copy of 6 August 2025 (grade C)", "note": "The pricing page has a usage slider with six positions, from Starter usage to Enterprise; only the default position was readable in the downloaded page, and the other positions load by script. The Starter checkout button's page code records 50 conversations. The Growth button is disabled and marked \"Coming soon\". The footer also links checkout pages for plans called Hobby, Pro, Premium and Ultra without prices. In August 2025 the only plan cost US$1,500 a month, or US$1,080 with the code SUMMER (28% off). The current MRR of US$2,919 from two subscriptions shows that at least one customer pays far more than the list prices.", "rows": [ [ "Starter", "", "99", "Limited usage capacity and model access, custom instructions, report history" ], [ "Growth", "", "199", "Marked \"Coming soon\"; advanced model access" ], [ "Enterprise", "custom", "custom", "End of the usage slider; price not shown in the downloaded page" ], [ "TextWork Subscription (August 2025)", "", "1500", "The only plan in the archived page; US$1,080 a month with the summer code" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 26 October 2026", "value": "US$2,919 from 2 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR metric snapshot, Stripe through an API key, revenue last synced 26 October 2026 at 14:07 UTC. MRR growth over the last 30 days: +45.7%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue about 30 days earlier", "value": "about US$2,003", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2,919 divided by 1.457. This is close to the US$2,004 of revenue in August 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue, last 30 days to 26 October 2026", "value": "US$2,919, down 48.9%", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. The daily table shows two payments: US$99 on 28 September and US$2,820 on 19 October 2026. Their sum equals the MRR (calculated). The fall is against a September with US$5,712.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue, last 12 months", "value": "US$29,372", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. The twelve monthly values on the same profile add up to US$29,370; the US$2 difference is rounding.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Verified revenue since the Stripe account started", "value": "US$34,772", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, all time.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue before November 2025", "value": "US$5,400", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: all-time revenue minus the last twelve months. The public profile has no monthly values before November 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue, November 2025 to February 2026", "value": "US$1,080, then US$6,069 in January, then US$1,080", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. US$1,080 is also the August 2025 plan price with the summer code; no source says that this is the same customer.", "src": [ 1, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue, March to July 2026", "value": "US$1,905 each month", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. August 2026: US$2,004. September 2026: US$5,712. October 2026 to the 26th: US$2,820.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Yearly value of the October 2026 MRR", "value": "US$35,028", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$2,919 times 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average MRR per subscription", "value": "about US$1,460", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 2,919 divided by 2. The list price of the Starter plan is US$99 a month.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Visitors, last 30 days", "value": "826, about US$3.53 of revenue per visitor", "grade": "B", "note": "TrustMRR, read from DataFast, a web analytics service, through an API key. Not a payment figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founder", "value": "Brian", "grade": "C", "note": "About page: \"I'm Brian, the creator of TextWork.\" TrustMRR names the founder as Brian, with the founder handle brianlesko. No source gives a full name.", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founded date on TrustMRR", "value": "22 January 2018", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder-entered. The oldest archived copy of textwork.co is from 6 August 2025, and no downloaded source says what the business sold before 2025.", "src": [ 1, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none stated", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR lists Funding: Bootstrapped (founder-entered). The site's investors page invites investors to get in touch and does not mention a round.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Usage claims on the home page", "value": "145+ jobsites, 17,000+ text messages, 180+ applicants screened", "grade": "C", "note": "Company figures, not verified. The investors page gives 3.4k+ structured reports, 17k+ SMS messages, 180+ AI conversations and 50+ active field workers.", "src": [ 2, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Customer story", "value": "a facility services owner in Akron, Ohio, with 18 field workers across 81 jobsites", "grade": "C", "note": "Company's field-reporting page; the customer is not named. The hiring testimonial on the home page is also from a \"Service business owner, Akron, OH\".", "src": [ 6, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Code activity", "value": "203 contributions in the last year, 31 in the last 30 days", "grade": "B", "note": "TrustMRR, from a connected GitHub repository whose name is not shown.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the first archived site to the October 2026 figure", "value": "14 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: August 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 10, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "22 January 2018", "what": "The founded date that TrustMRR shows for the business. No downloaded source says what it did before 2025.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "6 August 2025", "what": "Oldest archived copy of textwork.co: \"Ditch Forms Collect Data Over Text\", for work reports, property maintenance and job applications. One plan at US$1,500 a month, US$1,080 with a summer code, and a 14-day refund rule.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "Before November 2025", "what": "US$5,400 of Stripe revenue in total, according to the difference between the all-time and the twelve-month figures.", "grade": "X", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "November and December 2025", "what": "US$1,080 of verified revenue in each month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "January 2026", "what": "US$6,069 in the month, the best month on the public profile.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "March 2026", "what": "Dashboard filters by person, script, city or report field. Monthly revenue rises to US$1,905 and stays there until July.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 7, 1 ] }, { "when": "10 April 2026", "what": "People can message a company's number over iMessage; voice memos follow on 17 April.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "21 to 23 April 2026", "what": "The subprocessor list and the terms of service are updated. The terms describe an \"AI-powered workforce reporting and data collection platform\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 9 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "Document signing by text link and inbound email that becomes a conversation and a report.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "September 2026", "what": "US$5,712 in the month. New features: reply from the transcript, call links, meeting pages and reply alerts.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "when": "19 October 2026", "what": "One payment of US$2,820, the largest single day in the last 30 days.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "26 October 2026", "what": "MRR of US$2,919 from 2 active subscriptions at the last Stripe sync; US$29,372 in the last twelve months.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Answer in the first minute", "text": "The home page's argument is that the best time to screen an applicant is immediately, and that applicants are lost in the first hour. A text that arrives the minute someone applies gets answered, also at night and on weekends, when no recruiter is working. The AI agent covers exactly those hours." }, { "title": "SMS instead of an app or a form", "text": "Field workers and hourly applicants already text. TextWork needs no app, no login and no training on the worker's side: the worker texts a number, and the agent asks the questions the business wrote. The terms and the investors page describe the result as structured data taken from a normal conversation." }, { "title": "One engine, several uses", "text": "The same script-driven conversation is sold for hiring, daily field reports, leasing enquiries and customer feedback. The investors page says that the paying customers are small businesses \"in facility services and field operations\", so the field-reporting use may matter as much as hiring." }, { "title": "Few customers at a high price", "text": "In August 2025 the single plan cost US$1,500 a month. In October 2026 two subscriptions bring in US$2,919 a month, while the public Starter plan costs US$99. The business looks like a product sold with close help to a few customers, which the founder's own words support: \"I'm building TextWork for my own projects and alongside business owners.\"" } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's TrustMRR profile, the company's subprocessor list and the page source of textwork.co. They are grade C, except the Stripe connection, which TrustMRR confirms, and the Next.js and DataFast code visible in the page source.", "items": [ "Tech stack on the TrustMRR profile, written by the founder: Next.js for the front end, and Python, SQLite, Redis, GraphQL and Stripe on the back end. The page source loads Next.js files.", "Language models from several providers, according to the subprocessor list dated 21 April 2026: OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI for language models, and NVIDIA for hosted model inference. ElevenLabs turns speech into text and text into speech, for voice memos.", "Messages: Twilio for SMS and MMS, and Sendblue for iMessage and SMS. Tavily and Brave give the agent web search. Resend sends email, Cloudflare stores media, and CARTO draws the map tiles in the dashboard.", "Payments through Stripe, which TrustMRR reads through an API key. DataFast measures site visits and the clicks on pricing buttons, and Google Search Console is connected on TrustMRR.", "Integrations for customers: SmartRecruiters, Indeed, Zillow leads, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, and calendar connections to Google, Microsoft and Apple.", "The changelog lists ten feature releases between March and September 2026, and TrustMRR shows 203 GitHub contributions in the last year from one connected repository." ], "src": [ 1, 8, 7, 2 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to automate hiring or to bring software to frontline workers, and closed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Gogohire", "years": "2014 to 2020", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Recruiting automation for small and medium-sized businesses: candidate sourcing, screening and workflow.", "died": "Job posting, resume parsing and interview scheduling became standard features of every applicant tracking system by 2018, and it could not show a return against established products.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2530-gogohire" }, { "name": "Ansaro", "years": "2017 to 2022", "funding": "US$15M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "An AI platform that automates the whole recruiting cycle, from resume parsing to interview scheduling.", "died": "Recruiters saw it as a nice-to-have, and the change it asked of a cautious industry was too large to win enough sales.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1853-ansaro" }, { "name": "Flip", "years": "2019 to 2025", "funding": "US$200M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A mobile app for frontline workers in retail, hospitality and logistics: shifts, team chat, news and training.", "died": "It raised US$200 million on the thesis that deskless workers lack software, but customers had free alternatives and it never proved the unit economics.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2465-flip" }, { "name": "Jobr", "years": "2014 to 2019", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A mobile-first job app where applicants swipe on jobs, to make applying faster.", "died": "LinkedIn and Indeed added similar mobile features to much larger audiences, and the swiping idea did not become a lasting advantage or a way to earn money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/261-jobr" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Gogohire and Ansaro sold automation of the recruiter's work: parsing, tracking and scheduling. Those features became standard in every applicant tracking system, and the database records that recruiters did not see enough value in more. Before language models, a program could not hold an open conversation with an applicant; it could only send a form. TextWork's investors page names this change directly: \"Conversation became a data API in 2024.\"", "Flip had the same thesis as TextWork's investors page, that about 80% of workers are deskless and lack software, and it spent US$200 million on an app. TextWork uses the channel that those workers already have, the text message, and rents its models from several providers, so one founder can run it. The predecessors' lesson still applies: the verified revenue comes from two subscriptions, and a larger hiring platform can add an SMS agent of its own." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, for a narrow group of employers, with direct sales.", "text": "An SMS agent that asks fixed screening questions is not hard to build with today's language models and an SMS provider. What is hard is finding businesses that hire at volume and will pay for it. TrustMRR shows that TextWork earns most of its revenue from very few customers, and no source says how they were found.", "steps": [ "Pick one kind of employer that hires hourly workers all the time and loses applicants at night and on weekends.", "Connect to the places where their applicants already apply, such as Indeed or their applicant tracking system, and reply by text within a minute.", "Let the business write the questions, and hand back a short report with the transcript, so a person still makes the decision.", "Sell to a few customers at a price that pays for close support, before publishing a cheap self-serve plan." ], "open": "The same agent for other conversations that start with a text: tenant maintenance requests, job-site incident reports, or appointment intake in languages other than English." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Two customers", "text": "TrustMRR shows 2 active subscriptions for US$2,919 of MRR on 26 October 2026, and one payment of US$2,820 on 19 October. Losing one customer would remove most of the revenue." }, { "title": "What happened before 2025", "text": "TrustMRR shows a founded date of 22 January 2018, while the oldest archived copy of textwork.co is from August 2025. The demo form in that copy asked visitors to agree to be contacted about \"Smerp products\". No downloaded source explains the earlier business or the name Smerp, and US$5,400 of the all-time revenue came before November 2025." }, { "title": "Usage numbers that do not agree", "text": "The home page says \"145+ Jobsites\" and \"180+ Applicants screened\"; the pricing page says \"Used by 180+ people\"; the investors page says \"180+ AI conversations completed\", \"50+ Field workers active\" and \"80+ active jobsites\". These are company figures and are not verified." }, { "title": "Rules for business texting", "text": "Texting applicants in the United States needs their consent, and US carriers ask businesses that text from ordinary 10-digit numbers to register under A2P 10DLC (application-to-person messaging over 10-digit long codes). TextWork's terms put the duty to have \"the legal basis (such as consent, legitimate interest, or contractual necessity)\" on the customer. iMessage runs through Sendblue, a third-party messaging service." }, { "title": "Worker monitoring", "text": "The field-reporting page sells location check-in by text and says \"AI flags flight risk before they quit\". Scoring employees for the chance that they leave is a sensitive use of their messages; no downloaded page explains how the score is made." }, { "title": "First name only", "text": "The founder appears as Brian on the about page and on TrustMRR. No source gives a full name, a company register entry or a headcount. The careers page says \"No open roles right now\"." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://textwork.co/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/textwork" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR profile of Textwork, as read on 27 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/textwork.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full, live on 27 October 2026 (revenue last synced 26 October 2026). Revenue, monthly timeline, daily revenue, MRR and subscription count are read from Stripe through an API key and are grade A. Visitors come from DataFast and code activity from GitHub through connected APIs. The description, founded date, funding, tech stack and user estimate are founder-written, grade C." }, { "title": "TextWork home page, Text-to-Apply Software for Hiring", "url": "https://textwork.co/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026. Source for the product description, the FAQ, the usage claims, the testimonial and the integrations." }, { "title": "TextWork pricing page", "url": "https://textwork.co/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026, including the page code of the plan buttons. The usage slider's other positions load by script and were not read." }, { "title": "TextWork about page", "url": "https://textwork.co/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founder's first name and the founder's reasons for building the product." }, { "title": "TextWork investors page: Redefining ERP for the deskless workforce", "url": "https://textwork.co/investors", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the company's thesis, the traction claims and the statement about paying customers." }, { "title": "TextWork field-reporting page (served at /compliance): Scale your workforce with text message AI", "url": "https://textwork.co/compliance", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the field-reporting product, the customer story from Akron, Ohio, the turnover feature and the refund rule." }, { "title": "TextWork changelog and the iMessage entry", "url": "https://textwork.co/changelog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the changelog index and the iMessage entry (https://textwork.co/changelog/imessage) in full. Source for the feature dates from March to September 2026." }, { "title": "TextWork subprocessors, current as of 21 April 2026", "url": "https://textwork.co/subprocessors", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the model providers, the messaging services and the other suppliers." }, { "title": "TextWork terms of service, last updated 23 April 2026", "url": "https://textwork.co/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the overview, billing, service and data-protection sections. Source for the service description and the customer's duty to obtain consent." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of textwork.co, 6 August 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250806220554/https://textwork.co/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The oldest archived copy. Source for the first product description, the US$1,500 plan with the summer price, and the Smerp consent line." }, { "title": "TextWork careers page", "url": "https://textwork.co/careers", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026. It shows no open roles." }, { "title": "Agent Money List entry: TextWork, $2.9K verified MRR", "url": "https://agentmoneylist.com/e/textwork/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full (downloaded 27 October 2026). Where this lead was found. It copies the TrustMRR figures (data CC BY 4.0), so it is not a second source, and no fact on this page rests on it." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/karumi/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/karumi.md", "slug": "karumi", "name": "Karumi", "country": "USA (New York), co-founder from Spain", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI agents that give live product demos of business software over a video call", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "November 2025", "outcomeLabel": "Reported US$31K MRR three weeks after launch, March 2026", "sticker": "Reported $31K MRR", "outcomeUsd": 372000, "months": 1, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders, Pablo Omenaca (CEO) and Toni López (CTO); 4 people in March 2026 (Valencia Plaza) and 6 on the Y Combinator profile in October 2026; headcount at the headline figure not published", "fundingLabel": "Y Combinator (Fall 2025); a directory estimates US$2M raised in total; co-founder Toni López said in March 2026 that they plan a Series A of 15 to 20 million", "primaryFactor": "Focus", "group": "support-agents", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 1, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Funded", "Running", "B2B", "Sales software" ], "product": "Karumi sells AI agents that show a business software product to a prospect in a live video call. The agent shares its screen, works in the real product inside a web browser, talks and listens, answers questions by voice or chat, and sends the transcript and the next steps to the customer's CRM (customer relationship management system, the database of sales contacts). Companies put it on their website in place of a request-a-demo form, or use it for onboarding, support and training. Plans are scoped on a call, and no prices are published.", "why": "The founders cut a hard idea, an AI that understands a whole software product, down to a smaller one: an AI that only has to show the product. Co-founder Toni López told Valencia Plaza that the product launched during Y Combinator, gave 2,000 demos on its first day and reached US$31,000 in monthly recurring revenue in three weeks. That is one founder statement, reported once.", "summary": [ "Karumi makes AI demo agents: programs that join a video call with a person who wants to see a software product, share a screen, use the real product in a web browser, and explain it by voice while the person asks questions. A product demo is the walkthrough that a salesperson usually gives before a company buys business software. The agent combines a large language model (LLM), a model trained on large amounts of text that can write and answer questions, with speech-to-text and text-to-speech models and a browser agent, a program that clicks, types and reads a web page as a person would. Karumi's customers put it on their own website in place of a request-a-demo form, or use it for onboarding and support.", "Toni López and Pablo Omenaca met at StackAI, a company of the Winter 2023 batch of Y Combinator (YC), a start-up accelerator that invests in young companies and runs a three-month program for them. They started Karumi in 2025 and joined YC's Fall 2025 batch. López told the Valencia newspaper Valencia Plaza, in an article published on 29 March 2026, that the first idea was a tool to automate the communication of product updates, that the founders changed to demos during the program, and that after the launch they reached US$31,000 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the monthly value of all active subscriptions) in three weeks, with about 10,000 demos. The same article says that the team was four people and had moved from San Francisco to New York.", "The headline figure is grade D: it is one founder statement, reported once, with no date for when it was reached and no later revenue figure in any source read. Other numbers are easier to check: in October 2026 the home page counted 102,023 demos delivered and the Y Combinator profile listed six people. López said in March 2026 that the founders want to raise a Series A round of 15 to 20 million in the United States. The page also shows five failed companies that tried to scale sales conversations with hired callers, live chat, pop-ups, lead scores or chatbots." ], "factsCaption": "US$31,000 in monthly recurring revenue three weeks after a launch in Y Combinator's Fall 2025 batch, by one statement of the co-founder; 102,023 demos counted on the home page in October 2026", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a statement by the founders or the company, on its own pages, on its Y Combinator profile or to a journalist. A grade D value rests on one source that no second source confirms, or on a directory estimate. An \"X\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. Quotations in Spanish are given in the original, followed by this page's English translation.", "timelineLead": "From two engineers who left StackAI in 2025 to a demo agent that, by the co-founder's account, reached US$31,000 a month three weeks after launch. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Karumi plans on 27 October 2026, from the company's pricing page (grade C). The page publishes no prices", "note": "The pricing FAQ says: \"Pricing depends on the number of agents, expected demo volume, languages and integrations, so we scope it with you on a short call.\" Most teams start with a pilot on one use case. No source read for this page states a price, so the rows show the plan contents only.", "rows": [ [ "Growth", "custom", "custom", "Custom agents, languages and sessions; agent builder; session insights; data export to the CRM; MCP connection" ], [ "Enterprise", "custom", "custom", "Everything in Growth, plus on-premise deployment, SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and GDPR, service-level agreements, dedicated server capacity and a dedicated success team" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue three weeks after launch, stated in March 2026", "value": "US$31,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Valencia Plaza, 29 March 2026, reporting what co-founder Toni López said: \"Según explica, alcanzaron 31.000 dólares de ingresos recurrentes mensuales (MRR) en tres semanas\" [As he explains, they reached 31,000 dollars in monthly recurring revenue (MRR) in three weeks] (translation). The figure is in US dollars in the source. One source and one statement; no payment-provider or investor confirmation.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Yearly run rate from that MRR", "value": "about US$372,000", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 31,000 times 12. This is the outcome amount stored for this page. No source states a yearly figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "When the figure was reached", "value": "late 2025, during the Fall 2025 batch of Y Combinator", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated, not stated. The article says that Karumi launched its product during the program and reached the figure in three weeks. The Launch YC post is dated 10 November 2025 in the page data; 10 November 2025 plus 21 days is 1 December 2025.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Time from launch to the headline figure", "value": "three weeks; stored as 1 month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 21 days is about 0.7 months, rounded up to 1.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Demos in the launch period", "value": "about 10,000; 2,000 on the first day", "grade": "C", "note": "Valencia Plaza: \"realizaron alrededor de 10.000 demostraciones. El primer día llegaron a registrar 2.000 demos\" [they gave about 10,000 demos. On the first day they recorded 2,000 demos] (translation). The article does not say on which date the 10,000 count was taken.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Demos delivered, 27 October 2026", "value": "102,023", "grade": "C", "note": "Counter on the home page: \"102,023 demos delivered\". A company figure, not checked by anyone else.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Demos in October 2026 compared with the launch-period count", "value": "about 10 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 102,023 / 10,000 = 10.2. This counts demos, not paying customers or revenue.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Founders", "value": "Pablo Omenaca (CEO) and Toni López (CTO)", "grade": "C", "note": "Y Combinator profile. Both worked at StackAI (YC W23) before: Omenaca as COO and founding engineer, López as founding engineer; López also worked as a software developer at IBM Research. Valencia Plaza says López was born in Meliana.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Y Combinator batch and founding year", "value": "Fall 2025 (F25); founded 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "Y Combinator profile: \"Batch: Fall 2025\", \"Founded: 2025\", status Active.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Team, March 2026", "value": "4 people", "grade": "C", "note": "Valencia Plaza: \"el equipo de Karumi está formado por cuatro personas\" [Karumi's team is made up of four people] (translation). This is the team size closest to the headline figure in any source read.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team, October 2026", "value": "6 on the Y Combinator profile; 7 open roles", "grade": "C", "note": "Y Combinator profile: \"Team Size: 6\". The about page lists seven open roles in New York, Madrid and San Francisco. A startup directory gives 10 employees in a profile last changed on 2 July 2026 (grade D).", "src": [ 2, 4, 10 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "Y Combinator; about US$2 million in total by a directory estimate", "grade": "D", "note": "The StartupHub.ai profile says \"Total funding: $2M\". No source read names the investors or the amount of any round other than the Y Combinator investment, whose amount no source read states.", "src": [ 10, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Planned Series A", "value": "15 to 20 million, currency not stated, not yet raised in any source read", "grade": "C", "note": "Valencia Plaza: \"Nos gustaría levantar entre 15 y 20 millones en Estados Unidos\" [We would like to raise between 15 and 20 million in the United States] (translation).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue goal stated in March 2026", "value": "1.5 to 2 million a year, currency not stated", "grade": "C", "note": "Valencia Plaza: \"alcanzar entre 1,5 y 2 millones de facturación anual\" [reach between 1.5 and 2 million in annual billing] (translation). A goal, not a result.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Goal compared with the late-2025 run rate", "value": "4.0 to 5.4 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 1,500,000 / 372,000 = 4.0 and 2,000,000 / 372,000 = 5.4, if both figures are in US dollars.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Customers", "value": "large companies, including one in the S&P 500 index", "grade": "C", "note": "Valencia Plaza: \"Karumi ya ha cerrado acuerdos con grandes compañías, incluida una empresa del índice S&P 500\" [Karumi has already closed deals with large companies, including one company in the S&P 500 index] (translation). The company is not named. Karumi's own customer story names Salesforge.", "src": [ 1, 8 ] }, { "fact": "One customer's result", "value": "about 300 demos a month (+46%) and 21% conversion to a trial", "grade": "C", "note": "Karumi's Salesforge customer story: \"~300 demos/month (+46%)\", \"21% conversion to trial\". Written by Karumi, with a quote from the customer's CEO.", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "fact": "How the agent is presented to prospects", "value": "as an AI demo agent", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page: \"Talk to our AI demo agent.\" Launch YC post: \"a live, interactive video call with an AI agent\". The Terms of Service describe \"AI agents that join video calls to deliver product demonstrations\".", "src": [ 3, 2, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Time to set up for a customer", "value": "less than a week", "grade": "C", "note": "López in Valencia Plaza: \"Se tarda menos de una semana en implantarlo\" [It takes less than a week to set it up] (translation).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Prices", "value": "not published", "grade": "C", "note": "Pricing page: two plans, Growth and Enterprise, both \"Talk to us\".", "src": [ 5 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "Before 2025", "what": "Toni López and Pablo Omenaca work at StackAI, a Y Combinator company of Winter 2023: López as a founding engineer, Omenaca as COO and founding engineer. Valencia Plaza says López had earlier built an AI avatar app for iPhone and founded Cactus AI in San Francisco.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "when": "2025", "what": "They found Karumi and join Y Combinator's Fall 2025 batch. The first idea is a tool that automates the communication of product updates.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "when": "During the YC program, 2025", "what": "They drop the first idea as too complex to integrate for an early company and build an agent that only has to give a demo.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "10 November 2025", "what": "Launch YC post: \"Karumi - Your AI demo agent. 24/7.\" It invites readers to try a live demo and names Deel's platform as one place where the agent runs.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "About three weeks after the launch, late 2025", "what": "López later says the product gave 2,000 demos on its first day and reached US$31,000 in monthly recurring revenue in three weeks, with about 10,000 demos.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "28 December 2025", "what": "Last update of the Terms of Service, which describe AI agents that join video calls to give product demonstrations.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "29 March 2026", "what": "Valencia Plaza publishes the founder's account: a team of four, a move from San Francisco to New York, a goal of 1.5 to 2 million in annual billing, and a planned Series A of 15 to 20 million.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2 July 2026", "what": "A startup directory profile, last changed on this date, gives 10 employees and US$2 million of funding in total. These are estimates.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "27 October 2026", "what": "The home page counts 102,023 demos delivered and adds a Product Brain that gives other AI agents the customer's product knowledge through an API or MCP (Model Context Protocol, a standard way for AI assistants to call outside tools). The Y Combinator profile lists six people; seven roles are open.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 2, 4 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A demo does not need the whole product", "text": "López told Valencia Plaza: \"Vimos que entender todo un producto era muy complejo, pero para hacer una demo no necesitas conocerlo en profundidad\" [We saw that understanding a whole product was very complex, but to give a demo you do not need to know it in depth] (translation). The founders kept the hard part, an AI that works inside real software, and cut the scope to one job with a clear buyer." }, { "title": "A video call, not a recording", "text": "The prospect clicks a link and, by the home page's account, the agent shares its screen within two seconds. It opens tabs, navigates the customer's product and answers spoken or typed questions, at any hour and in several languages. A recorded video cannot answer a question, and a salesperson is not available at every hour." }, { "title": "Sold where demo requests pile up", "text": "The launch post addresses software companies whose inbound demo requests grow faster than their sales staff. López said that a customer \"puedes eliminar el 90-95% de las llamadas de demos\" [you can remove 90 to 95% of demo calls] (translation). That is the founder's claim; the one customer story read reports more demos and a 21% conversion to a trial, not a cut in calls." }, { "title": "Data from every demo", "text": "Every session produces a transcript and a list of questions, objections and signs of interest that go into the customer's CRM. Valencia Plaza notes that this kind of data is hard to get from pre-recorded videos." }, { "title": "Y Combinator as the first channel", "text": "The product launched to the Y Combinator network, and López said it gave 2,000 demos on its first day. The article says the program also gave the founders access to investors and contacts. No source says where most paying customers came from, so this page records the channel as unknown." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from Karumi's job postings on Y Combinator's site, its customer story, its pricing page and the Valencia Plaza article. They are grade C, except the hosting, which is visible in the page source (grade B).", "items": [ "A web app with a React front end and a back end in asynchronous Python with FastAPI, PostgreSQL and Redis, deployed on AWS, according to the Product Engineer posting.", "The AI engineering posting describes the core: speech-to-text and text-to-speech models for the voice, browser agents that navigate web applications using computer vision and the page's DOM (the Document Object Model, the structure of elements that a browser builds from a web page), prompt systems and LLM workflows, and real-time pipelines in which delay matters.", "Training material for each customer: the website, the documents and recordings of real demos. The agent logs into a real demo environment of the customer's product, the Salesforge story says. López said that setup takes less than a week.", "Transcripts, summaries, qualification data and custom fields sync to CRMs such as Salesforce and HubSpot, according to the pricing FAQ.", "The marketing site is served through Vercel, which the page source shows.", "Team: two founders at launch, four people in March 2026, six on the Y Combinator profile in October 2026." ], "src": [ 6, 7, 8, 1, 5, 3, 2 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database tried to scale sales conversations with hired callers, live chat, pop-ups, lead scores or chatbots. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "VOIQ", "years": "2015 to 2018", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Outsourced sales calls made by a network of trained human agents, so a company did not need its own sales team.", "died": "Every call still needed a paid person. Automated sales tools and freelance marketplaces offered the same capacity for less.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1485-voiq" }, { "name": "RightHello", "years": "2014 to 2022", "funding": "US$600K", "cause": "Ran out of cash", "promise": "Live chat for online shops that turns visitors into buyers with well-timed conversations.", "died": "A person had to answer each chat, and Intercom, with far more funding, won the market for chat tools.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2260-righthello" }, { "name": "Ve Interactive", "years": "2009 to 2017", "funding": "US$60M", "cause": "Unit economics", "promise": "Software that catches shoppers who are about to leave a site and brings them back with personalized pop-ups and emails.", "died": "It was paid only when a sale happened and spent heavily on growth, so the costs grew faster than the income.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2160-ve-interactive" }, { "name": "Toplyne", "years": "2021 to 2024", "funding": "US$15M", "cause": "No market need", "promise": "AI that predicts which free users of a software product will pay, so salespeople call the right ones.", "died": "Sales teams shrank in the layoffs of 2022 and 2023, and the tool could not prove a clear return on its price.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2201-toplyne" }, { "name": "Vanti", "years": "2019 to 2024", "funding": "US$18M", "cause": "No market need", "promise": "AI chat that guides shoppers through a personalized buying conversation.", "died": "The conversational AI market was crowded, each customer needed complex integration work, and the cost of winning customers stayed high.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2508-vanti" } ], "whatChanged": [ "VOIQ and RightHello scaled sales conversations with people, so every extra conversation cost an extra hour of someone's work. Ve Interactive and Toplyne used software to decide when or with whom to talk, but the conversation itself was a pop-up, an email or a call by a salesperson. Vanti tried to automate the conversation with the chat technology of its time and, by the Loot Drop record, failed on integration work and the cost of winning customers.", "Karumi's agent talks, listens and uses the real product in a browser at the same time; its job postings describe speech models, browser agents and LLM workflows joined in real-time pipelines. López said the agent gave 2,000 demos on its first day, so on this page's reading the extra cost of one more demo is computing time, not a salesperson's hour. The integration problem has not gone away: the founders dropped their first idea because it needed too much integration, and each customer still needs a demo environment and a setup that López said takes less than a week." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The narrowing, yes. The start inside Y Combinator, no.", "text": "The method that can be copied is the one the founders described: take an AI capability that is too hard to sell in general, here understanding a whole software product, and cut it down to one job with a buyer who already pays people to do it. The product itself is hard to copy alone: it needs real-time voice, browser control and a setup for each customer, and the founders came from a funded start-up and launched to the Y Combinator network. Competitors already sell interactive and AI demos; Karumi's own comparison pages name 1mind, Storylane, Navattic, Supademo, Arcade and Consensus.", "steps": [ "Find a sales or support task that companies pay people to repeat many times a day, and that follows the same pattern each time.", "Cut the AI's job to that task, and drop the parts that need deep integration with each customer.", "Show the real product live instead of a recording, and let the prospect interrupt and ask.", "Send what the AI learns in each session to the tools the customer already uses, such as the CRM." ], "open": "Narrower versions are still open: a demo agent for one industry, one type of software or one language market, sold to companies that are too small to pay for an enterprise contract." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline figure, US$31,000 in monthly recurring revenue three weeks after launch, rests on one statement by co-founder Toni López, reported by Estefanía Pastor in Valencia Plaza on 29 March 2026. The article does not say on which date the figure was reached, only that it was during the Y Combinator program of Fall 2025. No payment provider, investor or second interview confirms it, and no later revenue figure was found. A reader could look for a funding announcement that states revenue, a Y Combinator Demo Day report, or a payment-provider profile." }, { "title": "An AI that is meant to feel human", "text": "López ended the interview with \"Nuestro objetivo es que la IA se sienta cada vez más humana\" [Our goal is that the AI feels more and more human] (translation), and the launch post says the agent \"Matches human reps in clarity and engagement\". Karumi's own pages present it as an AI demo agent (\"Talk to our AI demo agent\"). How each customer labels the agent on its own website was not checked." }, { "title": "Venture funding and a growing team", "text": "López said in March 2026 that the founders want to raise 15 to 20 million in the United States. No source read reports that the round has closed. The team grew from four people in March 2026 to six on the Y Combinator profile in October 2026, with seven open roles, and a directory estimate gives ten employees. A large round would turn Karumi into a venture-funded company with a sales team rather than a small team." }, { "title": "Claims on the site that this page could not check", "text": "The home page quotes a director at Workday, shows a 4.9 out of 5 rating on G2 and lists results such as \"3.2x More meetings vs static assets\". These are the company's own statements, not checked by this page." }, { "title": "Integration and competition", "text": "The founders dropped their first idea because it needed too much integration work. Each demo still needs a working demo environment of the customer's product, and the comparison pages name six competitors that sell interactive or AI demos." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://karumi.ai/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Valencia Plaza, 29 March 2026, by Estefanía Pastor: Karumi, la startup con gen valenciano que hace demos con IA y ha conquistado a Y Combinator", "url": "https://valenciaplaza.com/valenciaplaza/plaza-innovacion/karumi-la-startup-con-gen-valenciano-que-hace-demos-con-ia-y-ha-conquistado-a-y-combinator", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full in Spanish, in the copy downloaded on 27 October 2026; quotations are translated on this page. Source for the MRR statement, the demo counts, the pivot, the team of four, the revenue goal and the planned Series A." }, { "title": "Y Combinator: Karumi company page, with the Launch YC post", "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/karumi", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026, including the page data that dates the launch post to 10 November 2025. Source for the batch, the founders, the team size and the launch text." }, { "title": "Karumi home page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://karumi.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product, the demo counter, the AI disclosure, the testimonial and the rating claims." }, { "title": "Karumi about page", "url": "https://karumi.ai/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the company's account of how it started, the open roles and the competitor comparison pages." }, { "title": "Karumi pricing page", "url": "https://karumi.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the FAQ. Source for the plans, the absence of published prices and the CRM integrations." }, { "title": "Y Combinator job posting: Product Engineer (Full-Stack) at Karumi", "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/karumi/jobs/ISjUPEb-product-engineer-full-stack", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the web stack and the hosting on AWS." }, { "title": "Y Combinator job posting: AI/ML Harness Engineer at Karumi", "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/karumi/jobs/Ht5Bs00-ai-ml-harness-engineer", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the voice, browser-agent and LLM parts of the product." }, { "title": "Karumi customer story: Salesforge", "url": "https://karumi.ai/customers/salesforge", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Written by Karumi. Source for one customer's demo volume and trial conversion and for how the agent is trained." }, { "title": "Karumi Terms of Service, last updated 28 December 2025", "url": "https://karumi.ai/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the opening sections. Source for the description of the service." }, { "title": "StartupHub.ai: Karumi profile (markdown version)", "url": "https://www.startuphub.ai/startups/karumi.md", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026. A startup directory; its funding and employee numbers are estimates. Cited only for the US$2 million funding total and the 10 employees." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/realtyops/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/realtyops.md", "slug": "realtyops", "name": "RealtyOps", "country": "USA (Florida)", "sector": "Real Estate", "productType": "AI assistant for real estate brokerages and condominium and homeowners associations that answers from their own documents, reviews contracts, tracks deadlines and fills Florida purchase forms", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "August 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$29.6K in verified revenue since launch, October 2026", "sticker": "$29.6K verified revenue", "outcomeUsd": 29635, "months": 14, "teamLabel": "1 named founder, Caio Pimenta (TrustMRR only); team of 2 to 5 people according to the founder-entered TrustMRR profile", "fundingLabel": "Bootstrapped, according to the founder-entered TrustMRR profile; no source names investors", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "real-estate", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Real estate" ], "product": "A real estate brokerage, or the board of a condominium or homeowners association, uploads its own documents: contracts, rules, bylaws, office procedures. Agents, board members and owners then ask questions in plain English and get answers that cite the document. For brokerages it also reads an executed contract, lists the deadlines with page numbers and reminds the right person before each one, and fills a Florida purchase contract from the terms an agent types. Plans cost US$29 to US$795 a month, with 100 free credits to start.", "why": "It picked one narrow market, Florida brokerages and condominium associations, where the work is reading long documents and keeping dates, and built the forms and deadlines of that market into the product. The money comes from very few customers: TrustMRR shows one active subscription at US$895 a month, plus four larger payments from January to April 2026 that make up almost half of all revenue.", "summary": [ "RealtyOps sells an AI assistant to two kinds of real estate customers. The first is a brokerage, the licensed office under which real estate agents work. The second is a HOA or COA, a homeowners or condominium owners association, whose volunteer board enforces a long set of rules and answers owners' questions. Both upload their own documents, and the assistant answers from them. The terms describe the method as retrieval augmented generation (RAG): the system first finds the passages of the customer's documents that match a question and then gives them to a language model, so that the answer rests on those passages and not only on the model's general knowledge.", "The operating company is B.A.M.S. For Real Estate LLC, a Florida limited liability company doing business as RealtyOps. TrustMRR names one founder, Caio Pimenta, and gives 15 August 2025 as the founded date. TrustMRR reads the company's payments from Stripe, the payment processor, through an API key, so the figures are not screenshots. On 27 October 2026 it showed US$29,635 of payments since launch and MRR (monthly recurring revenue, in which every active subscription counts at its monthly value) of US$895 from one active subscription.", "This page grades every number by its evidence. The revenue figures are grade A because they come from Stripe through TrustMRR. The product, the prices and the two named customers come from the company's own pages. The page also shows four failed companies that sold contract or property-management software, and it lists what is uncertain: what the large payments of early 2026 bought, whether the revenue depends on one customer, and who the people behind the testimonials are." ], "factsCaption": "US$29,635 of Stripe-verified payments in 14 months from a narrow AI product for Florida brokerages and condominium associations, with one active subscription in October 2026", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the company's Stripe account through an API key. A grade B value is visible in the public page source. A grade C value was written by the company on its website, in its terms or in its TrustMRR profile. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a founded date of 15 August 2025 to US$29,635 of payments by 27 October 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "RealtyOps plans for brokerages, read on the company's pricing page on 27 October 2026 (grade C)", "note": "The page shows monthly prices only; no yearly price is published, so the yearly column says so. Every paid plan starts with a 14-day trial, and a free account gets 100 credits without a card. A credit is the company's own unit of AI use; the page does not say how many credits one answer or one contract review takes. The plans for associations are on a second tab that loads by script and could not be read. The page description says \"Starting at $295/mo\", although the Solo plan costs US$29. Separately, vendors such as inspectors or lenders pay US$150 a month per brokerage, with a 3-month minimum, for a sponsored card inside that brokerage's toolbox.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "100 credits, no credit card" ], [ "Solo", "not published", "29", "1,000 credits a month, one user" ], [ "Starter", "not published", "295", "1,500 credits a month, unlimited team members, training course library" ], [ "Growth", "not published", "595", "4,000 credits a month, custom AI prompts, priority support" ], [ "Professional", "not published", "795", "10,000 credits a month, custom branding" ], [ "Enterprise", "custom", "custom", "Custom credit volume, custom-trained AI models, API access, SSO" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Verified revenue since launch, to 27 October 2026", "value": "US$29,635", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR, revenue last synced on 27 October 2026 at 06:03 UTC through a Stripe API key. On 16 October 2026 Agent Money List, which copies TrustMRR, showed US$28,740; the difference is one payment of US$895 on 21 October.", "src": [ 1, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 12 months, to 27 October 2026", "value": "US$24,345", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. Calculated: US$5,290 of the total came before that 12-month window, between the founded date and late October 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month, October 2025 to October 2026", "value": "US$895 in each of October, November and December 2025; January 2026 US$5,395; February US$5,895; March US$1,395; April US$5,395; no payments in May and June; US$895 in each of July, August, September and October", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly timeline. The timeline has no rows for May and June 2026, and the last 6 months total US$3,580, which is four payments of US$895.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 27 October 2026", "value": "US$895 from 1 active subscription", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR metric snapshot. MRR growth over the last 30 days: 0.0%. US$895 is more than the highest listed plan, Professional at US$795, so it is probably a custom or Enterprise price; no source says so.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Payments above the US$895 monthly pattern", "value": "US$14,500, from January to April 2026", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the monthly timeline: US$4,500 in January, US$5,000 in February, US$500 in March and US$4,500 in April. That is 48.9% of all revenue. No source says what these payments were for.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Payment processor", "value": "Stripe, read by API key; RealtyOps is not using a merchant of record", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR verification section. The vendor page also says placements are paid \"through Stripe\".", "src": [ 1, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Founder", "value": "Caio Pimenta, X account with 715 followers", "grade": "C", "note": "Named only on the TrustMRR profile. The company's website and terms name no person, and its About page link returns a 404 error.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Company", "value": "B.A.M.S. For Real Estate LLC, a Florida limited liability company doing business as RealtyOps", "grade": "C", "note": "Stated in the Master Subscription Agreement and Terms of Service, which choose Florida law.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Team and funding", "value": "2 to 5 people; bootstrapped", "grade": "C", "note": "Both entered by the founder on the TrustMRR profile. Agent Money List labels the operator \"Existing business, Solopreneur\", which is its own estimate.", "src": [ 1, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Founded", "value": "15 August 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR profile.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Customers named on the site", "value": "Starlink Realty, a Florida brokerage with 83 agents and staff on the platform; Matera Condo Association, on RealtyOps since February 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page, \"Two Florida customers, 90 days in\". The brokerage figures are given as \"Figures from the broker's own 90-day review\": 9 to 10 hours a week back for the broker, 90% of repeat agent questions stopped, and 94% of platform cost offset by vendor placements.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Estimated users", "value": "80", "grade": "C", "note": "Estimated user count entered on the TrustMRR profile. Not a payment figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Price range", "value": "US$29 to US$795 a month, Enterprise custom", "grade": "C", "note": "Pricing page, read 27 October 2026.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Vendor placements", "value": "US$150 a month per brokerage, 3-month minimum", "grade": "C", "note": "Vendor page: \"A placement is advertising. RealtyOps does not pay brokerages or agents for placing you, and you do not pay them.\"", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "AI provider", "value": "Anthropic", "grade": "C", "note": "Privacy policy: \"Third-party AI providers (such as Anthropic) may process your data according to their privacy policies\".", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Blog", "value": "200 posts from 27 February to 21 August 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "Counted in the site's sitemap: 27 posts are dated 27 February 2026, then about one a day. One post of 27 February 2026 is titled \"Why Your Brokerage Needs an AI Assistant in 2024\".", "src": [ 10, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Time from founding to the October 2026 figure", "value": "14 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: August 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "15 August 2025", "what": "Founded date on the TrustMRR profile.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "August to October 2025", "what": "US$5,290 of payments before the start of TrustMRR's 12-month window (calculated).", "grade": "X", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "October to December 2025", "what": "One payment of US$895 a month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "January and February 2026", "what": "US$5,395 and US$5,895 of payments, the two best months. Matera Condo Association starts on RealtyOps in February, according to the home page.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "when": "27 February 2026", "what": "The blog starts with 27 posts in one day, then about one post a day until 21 August 2026.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 10, 8 ] }, { "when": "March and April 2026", "what": "US$1,395 and US$5,395 of payments.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "May and June 2026", "what": "No payments recorded.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "July to October 2026", "what": "One payment of US$895 a month again.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "27 October 2026", "what": "US$29,635 of payments since launch and one active subscription at US$895 a month. The pricing page lists plans from US$29 to US$795 a month.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 3 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Answers from the customer's own documents", "text": "A brokerage's escrow rules or an association's rules on pets and rentals are written in long documents that few people read. RealtyOps indexes them and routes each question to the right specialist assistant, and the answer cites the document it came from. The home page gives the condominium association example: owners ask the assistant instead of writing to the board." }, { "title": "Built for one state's forms and dates", "text": "The product knows the Florida FAR/BAR purchase contract forms. An agent types the terms once and gets a filled draft PDF, with every value that was not given left blank and listed. A contract review returns flags with page numbers and every dated deadline, and a daily agent reminds the right person a week before, again at three days, and then the broker." }, { "title": "Few customers at high prices", "text": "Plans for a team start at US$295 a month, about ten times the one-user plan. TrustMRR shows one active subscription at US$895 a month and four larger payments from January to April 2026. The home page names one brokerage with 83 agents and staff, which is the kind of customer that pays such prices." }, { "title": "Vendors pay for placements", "text": "Inspectors, lenders and photographers can pay US$150 a month per brokerage for a sponsored card in the agents' toolbox. The home page says vendor placements offset 94% of the platform cost for Starlink Realty, while the vendor page says RealtyOps does not pay brokerages for placements; no source explains how the offset works." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the company's terms, privacy policy, pages and page source. The policies and pages are grade C; what is visible in the page source is grade B.", "items": [ "Language models from Anthropic, named as an example in the privacy policy. The terms define the AI services to include large language models, retrieval augmented generation, document analysis and conversational interfaces.", "Use is counted in credits, the company's \"internal measurement of AI or platform resource consumption\", with monthly credit allowances by plan.", "Stripe for subscriptions and for vendor placements. The page source loads PostHog for product analytics and a Google Analytics tag, and the demo videos are served by Mux, with music from Uppbeat.", "A blog of 200 articles on brokerage and association topics, published from 27 February to 21 August 2026, and separate pages for brokerages and for associations." ], "src": [ 6, 5, 7, 2, 10 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold contract or property-management software and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Glider", "years": "2012 to 2015", "funding": "US$1.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "One hub for drafting, negotiating and tracking the status of contracts.", "died": "It could not stand out against DocuSign and Adobe Sign, which offered larger suites with deeper integrations, and its pricing did not suit smaller businesses.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1164-glider" }, { "name": "jEugene", "years": "2015 to 2018", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Software that finds common errors and inconsistencies in contracts, sold to law firms on demand.", "died": "Larger AI contract-review platforms offered more, and law firms adopted new tools slowly.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1500-jeugene" }, { "name": "Enzo", "years": "2020 to 2024", "funding": "US$10M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "An operating system for property management: maintenance, vendor coordination and workflows in one platform.", "died": "Its customers work on thin margins and are very price-sensitive, so the revenue could not support a venture-funded company.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2492-enzo" }, { "name": "REPitchbook", "years": "2021 to 2022", "funding": "US$0", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A platform that gathers listings and market data for real estate agents and investors.", "died": "It was built before its users confirmed that they needed it, and it missed the features that would have set it apart.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1867-repitchbook" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Glider and jEugene sold contract tools before language models, so the software could track a contract or check it against fixed rules but could not read it. Enzo raised US$10 million to digitize property management and found that its customers' thin margins could not pay for a venture-sized team.", "A language model now reads a 40-page amendment or an executed contract, and a small team can add the forms and rules of one state. TrustMRR shows US$29,635 of payments in 14 months with no investor named, so the business does not need Enzo's scale. REPitchbook's problem is the open question here: the revenue depends on one subscription and a few large payments, and no source shows a wider set of paying customers yet." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The niche, yes. The revenue base, not yet.", "text": "An assistant that answers from one organization's own documents is easy to build with rented models, and a state's forms and deadline rules make it harder to copy. But the verified revenue comes from one subscription and four payments in early 2026, and payments stopped in May and June. The terms also say that the company does not provide licensed professional services, so every answer about a contract still needs a person who checks it.", "steps": [ "Pick a profession whose daily work is reading the same long documents and keeping dates, in one jurisdiction.", "Build the official forms and deadline rules of that jurisdiction into the product, and cite the source document in every answer.", "Price for the office, not the person: one brokerage with 80 agents can pay more than many single users.", "Publish customer results with the customer's name, as the home page does for its two Florida customers." ], "open": "The same product can be built for other states' forms and for other document-heavy offices: property managers, title companies, or school boards with long policy manuals." }, "watch": [ { "title": "One customer may carry the business", "text": "TrustMRR shows one active subscription. From July to October 2026 the only payments were US$895 a month, and May and June had none. The four larger payments of January to April 2026 made up 48.9% of all revenue, and no source says whether they came from the same customer or what they bought, for example set-up work or a yearly prepayment." }, { "title": "Testimonials that cannot be checked", "text": "The home page quotes an unnamed \"Broker-owner\" of Starlink Realty from a \"90-day post-deployment review\" that is not published, and names Matera Condo Association. The page for associations quotes \"Patricia W.\", an HOA board president, and \"James T.\", a property manager, without naming their communities; one says the product \"paid for itself in the first week\". This page could not confirm any of these people or figures, or whether Starlink Realty is independent of the founder's company." }, { "title": "An unexplained cost offset", "text": "The home page says vendor placements offset 94% of the platform cost for one brokerage. The vendor page says RealtyOps does not pay brokerages or agents for placements. Neither page explains how the brokerage's cost is offset." }, { "title": "Who runs it", "text": "Only TrustMRR names a person, Caio Pimenta, and gives a team of 2 to 5 people. The website names no person, and its About link returns a 404 error. The operating company is B.A.M.S. For Real Estate LLC. Agent Money List labels the operator \"Existing business\", but no source describes an earlier business." }, { "title": "AI output in a licensed field", "text": "The terms say the company \"DOES NOT PROVIDE LEGAL, TAX, ACCOUNTING, BROKERAGE, OR OTHER LICENSED PROFESSIONAL SERVICES\" and that customers should consult licensed professionals before acting on AI output. A missed deadline or a wrong form value in a real estate contract can cost a client a deposit." }, { "title": "Machine-written blog", "text": "27 blog posts appeared on one day, 27 February 2026, followed by about one a day, and a post of that day is titled for 2024. This looks like automated content for search traffic; no source says how it was written." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.realtyops.ai/" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/realty-ops" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: Realty Ops AI, verified revenue profile (markdown), read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/realty-ops.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile. Revenue, MRR and subscriptions are read from Stripe through an API key (revenue last synced 27 October 2026, 06:03 UTC). The founder name, founded date, team size, funding, user estimate and price line are entered by the founder (grade C)." }, { "title": "RealtyOps home page: AI-Powered Tools for Real Estate Brokerages & HOA Management, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.realtyops.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the product, the two named customers, their figures and the testimonial." }, { "title": "RealtyOps pricing page: Plans for Brokerages & HOA/COA, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.realtyops.ai/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the brokerage tab in full. The association tab loads by script and was not read." }, { "title": "RealtyOps for HOA and COA communities, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.realtyops.ai/hoa", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the association features and the two testimonials." }, { "title": "RealtyOps: Master Subscription Agreement & Terms of Service, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.realtyops.ai/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on the company, definitions, subscriptions, AI output and governing law." }, { "title": "RealtyOps Privacy Policy, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.realtyops.ai/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on AI processing and data sharing. Source for the AI provider." }, { "title": "RealtyOps: Advertise to brokerages (vendor placements), read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.realtyops.ai/vendors", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the placement price and the statement that RealtyOps does not pay brokerages." }, { "title": "RealtyOps blog, 27 February 2026: Why Your Brokerage Needs an AI Assistant in 2024", "url": "https://www.realtyops.ai/blog/why-your-brokerage-needs-ai-assistant", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with its structured data. Cited for the date and the title." }, { "title": "Agent Money List home page, card for Realty Ops AI (downloaded by the pipeline on 27 October 2026)", "url": "https://agentmoneylist.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the card. Where this lead was found; its figures copy TrustMRR (all-time US$28,740 and 1 active subscription as of 16 October 2026). Not used as a separate revenue source. Data under CC BY 4.0." }, { "title": "RealtyOps sitemap, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://realtyops.ai/sitemap.xml", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The 200 blog entries and their dates were counted with a script." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/video3/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/video3.md", "slug": "video3", "name": "Video3", "country": "Türkiye", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "iPhone and Android app that makes short AI videos and images from a text prompt or a photo, with generated sound effects", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "9 January 2026", "outcomeLabel": "US$4.0K MRR, October 2026", "sticker": "$48K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 47751, "months": 10, "teamLabel": "1 named developer, Eyüp Koç, whose studio Codeyup writes \"we\"; headcount not published", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "video", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Video generation" ], "product": "A phone app that turns a typed description into a short video, turns a photo into a moving clip, generates still images, and adds matching background music and sound effects. The user picks a style such as cinematic, anime or 3D, and the app can rewrite the prompt to add detail. Weekly and yearly plans and packs of coins are sold through the App Store and Google Play.", "why": "The video models themselves are rented from fal.ai, a service that runs other companies' AI models behind one programming interface, so the app is mostly a simple screen, a style list and a payment wall around those models. One codebase in React Native serves both phone platforms, and the developer shipped 22 versions on iOS between January and August 2026. The developer runs a portfolio of more than a dozen AI apps, so the store accounts and the methods are shared.", "summary": [ "Video3 is a phone app for generative video: software that produces new video frames from a text description or from one still image, instead of editing footage that a camera recorded. Its store page lists text to video, image to video (a model takes a photo and predicts how the scene would move), an image generator, and generated music and sound effects. The privacy policy names fal.ai, a company that hosts many AI models and sells access to them per request, as the AI provider, and an early version note names the models Nano Banana Pro and Pixverse.", "The App Store lists the developer and seller as Eyup koc, and Google Play names the developer Eyüp Koç, in Türkiye. The project page of Codeyup, a mobile app studio, lists Video3 as an \"In-house product\". Version 1.0 appeared on the App Store on 9 January 2026. On 27 October 2026, whatsthe.app, a marketplace for phone apps that reads each app's sales through a read-only key to RevenueCat, a service that records in-app subscription purchases, showed MRR (monthly recurring revenue, in which a yearly plan counts as one twelfth of its price) of US$3,979, US$5,954 of revenue in the last 28 days, 188 active subscriptions and 20,370 downloads in 28 days.", "The revenue figures are grade A because whatsthe.app reads them from the payment records, but they come from one site on one date, and the app's own whatsthe.app listing page answered \"404\" on 27 October 2026 while its list pages still showed the app. whatsthe.app also shows the app for sale since 27 July 2026 with an asking price of US$60,000. The page also shows four earlier companies that sold easy video or animation to people without production skills." ], "factsCaption": "US$3,979 of RevenueCat-verified MRR ten months after the release of an AI video app from a Turkish developer's portfolio", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by whatsthe.app from the app's RevenueCat account through an API key. A grade B value is a record that Apple, Google Play or the whatsthe.app marketplace shows. A grade C value was written by the developer in the store text, on the studio's website or in the privacy policy, or set by the seller, such as an asking price. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From the first App Store version to US$3,979 of MRR in ten months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Video3 in-app purchases on the US App Store, read 27 October 2026 (grade C)", "note": "Apple lists the purchases by name and price without saying what each one includes, and the store text does not say how many coins one video costs. A Google Play reviewer wrote on 20 July 2026 that the app has a daily credit system and that its features cannot be tried on the first day without paying for credits. Calculated: US$7.99 times 52 divided by 12 is about US$34.62 a month, and US$49.99 divided by 12 is about US$4.17 a month. Coins per dollar rise from about 111 in the smallest pack to 200 in the largest.", "rows": [ [ "Free download", "0", "0", "Daily credits, according to a Google Play reviewer" ], [ "Weekly Pro Access", "", "", "US$7.99 a week (about US$34.62 a month)" ], [ "Yearly Pro Access", "4.17", "", "US$49.99 a year" ], [ "Discount Pro Access", "", "", "US$44.99; Apple does not show the period" ], [ "Coin packs", "8.99 to 99.99 one-time", "", "1,000 coins for US$8.99 up to 20,000 coins for US$99.99, in 7 sizes" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), shown 27 October 2026", "value": "US$3,979", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app list data: \"mrr\":3979.24 and \"credential_type\":\"revenuecat-verified\"; the search list card reads \"MRR: $3,979\". whatsthe.app writes \"All revenue is verified through your read-only API keys. Data is updated hourly.\" The list pages do not show when this app's figures were last synced.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Run rate from the October 2026 MRR", "value": "about US$47,751 a year", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$3,979.24 times 12.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 28 days, shown 27 October 2026", "value": "US$5,954", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app: \"last_28_days_revenue\":5953.6, shown as \"Total revenue: $5,954\" on the search list and \"Rev 28d $6k\" on the apps-for-sale list. Calculated: 1.50 times the MRR; yearly plans and coin packs are paid at once, so cash in 28 days differs from MRR.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Active subscriptions, shown 27 October 2026", "value": "188", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app list data. Calculated: about US$21.17 of MRR per active subscription.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Downloads in the last 28 days", "value": "20,370", "grade": "B", "note": "Store figure shown by whatsthe.app, iOS and Android together. Calculated: about 108 downloads per active subscription.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Downloads on Google Play", "value": "50K+", "grade": "B", "note": "Google Play's count, with 9.42K reviews at an average of 4.5 stars.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Listed for sale", "value": "since 27 July 2026, asking US$60,000", "grade": "C", "note": "whatsthe.app data: \"asking_price\":60000 and \"listed_for_sale_at\":\"2026-07-27\"; the list showed 0 views and 0 offers. The asking price is set by the seller. Calculated: 1.26 times the yearly run rate; whatsthe.app shows \"MRR × 1.3x\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Developer and seller", "value": "Eyup koc; on Google Play the developer account Rekship, with Eyüp Koç named under About the developer", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's page names \"Eyup koc\" as developer and seller. The Google Play page gives a postal address in Türkiye, which this page does not repeat. whatsthe.app shows the owner as \"Eyup\".", "src": [ 4, 5, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Name on the copyright line and in the terms", "value": "Video3 AI", "grade": "B", "note": "App Store: \"Copyright © 2026 Video3 AI\". The terms say the rights to the app \"still belong to Video3 AI\". No source names a registered company.", "src": [ 4, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Studio", "value": "Codeyup, a mobile app studio that builds apps for clients and runs its own apps", "grade": "C", "note": "Codeyup's home page: \"We also run our own apps, with more than 360,000 downloads.\" Its Video3 page says \"Type In-house product\" and links to both stores.", "src": [ 9, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "headcount not published", "grade": "C", "note": "The studio writes \"we\" and sells design and building of apps to \"founders and teams\". No source gives a headcount, names employees or mentions more than one person.", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No source mentions investors.", "src": [ 4, 9 ] }, { "fact": "First App Store version", "value": "9 January 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's version history shows versions 1.0 and 1.0.1 on 9 January 2026.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Versions on iOS, 9 January to 1 August 2026", "value": "22", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's version history, from 1.0 to 1.2.1; 10 of them in January 2026. Google Play shows the last update on 19 August 2026.", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Where the AI comes from", "value": "fal.ai; models named in the notes: Nano Banana Pro and Pixverse", "grade": "C", "note": "The privacy policy, last updated 15 November 2025: \"AI Provider: Fal.ai\". The note for version 1.0.2 (11 January 2026): \"New models (Nano Banana Pro, Pixverse) have also been released.\" No source says which model makes which kind of video today.", "src": [ 7, 4 ] }, { "fact": "How it is built", "value": "React Native, Expo and TypeScript, one codebase for iOS and Android", "grade": "C", "note": "Codeyup's project page for Video3.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Ratings", "value": "15 ratings at 4.3 of 5 on the US App Store; 9.42K reviews at 4.5 on Google Play", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's and Google's pages on 27 October 2026.", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Age rating", "value": "13+ on the App Store; Teen on Google Play", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple lists \"User-Generated Content\" under Contains. Google Play adds \"Diverse Content: Discretion Advised\" and \"Users Interact, In-App Purchases\".", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Time from release to the October 2026 figure", "value": "10 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 9 January 2026 to 27 October 2026 is 291 days, about 9.6 months.", "src": [ 4, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "15 November 2025", "what": "Date of the Video3 privacy policy, which names fal.ai as the AI provider and describes a consent dialog before each generation.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "9 January 2026", "what": "Versions 1.0 and 1.0.1 appear on the App Store.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "11 January 2026", "what": "Version 1.0.2 adds the models Nano Banana Pro and Pixverse.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "January 2026", "what": "Ten iOS versions in the first 22 days, from 1.0 to 1.0.9, most of them marked as bug fixes.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "27 July 2026", "what": "whatsthe.app records the app as listed for sale, with an asking price of US$60,000.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "1 August 2026", "what": "iOS version 1.2.1: \"New AI models, faster video generation, and stability improvements.\"", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "19 August 2026", "what": "Last update of the Android version on Google Play, which shows 50K+ downloads.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "27 October 2026", "what": "whatsthe.app shows MRR of US$3,979, US$5,954 in 28 days and 188 active subscriptions; the app's own listing page answers 404.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 2, 3 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Rented models behind a simple screen", "text": "Video3 does not train a model. The privacy policy says photos, prompts and settings go to fal.ai, which runs the video and image models and deletes the data after generation. The app adds what a casual user needs: a style list, a prompt optimizer that rewrites the description, aspect ratios for each social network, upscaling and generated sound. When fal.ai adds a newer model, the app can offer it in an update, as version 1.0.2 did with Nano Banana Pro and Pixverse." }, { "title": "Subscriptions and coins", "text": "Each generation costs the developer money at fal.ai, so the app sells both a subscription (US$7.99 a week or US$49.99 a year) and coin packs from US$8.99 to US$99.99. A Google Play reviewer describes daily credits that are too few to try the features on the first day. whatsthe.app shows US$5,954 of revenue in 28 days against MRR of US$3,979; the difference comes from purchases paid at once, such as yearly plans and coins, but no source splits it." }, { "title": "One codebase, two stores", "text": "The studio's project page lists React Native, Expo and TypeScript, so the same code ships to iPhone and Android. Google Play shows 50K+ downloads and 9.42K reviews worldwide, while the US App Store shows 15 ratings for the US store only, and whatsthe.app counts 20,370 downloads in 28 days on both stores." }, { "title": "A portfolio of AI apps", "text": "Apple lists 13 other apps by the same developer, among them hairstyle, outfit, tattoo, car-photo and dance-video apps, and the studio's sitemap lists 18 project pages. The same accounts, payment setup and model provider can serve many apps, and an app that sells can be listed for sale, as Video3 was in July 2026." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the studio's website and the privacy policy (grade C), the App Store and Google Play pages (grade B), and whatsthe.app (grade A for the payment records).", "items": [ "A phone app for iPhone and iPad (iOS 15.1 or later, 80.2 MB, English only) and for Android, built with React Native, Expo and TypeScript.", "The video and image models run at fal.ai. The app asks for consent before each generation; uploaded images are deleted at the provider within about 24 to 72 hours, and results stay in the user's account for 30 days.", "The App Store and Google Play take the payments; RevenueCat records the subscriptions, and whatsthe.app reads the revenue from it with a read-only key.", "The terms list Google Play Services as a third-party service used by the app.", "The App Store privacy label says identifiers may be used to track users across other companies' apps and websites." ], "src": [ 6, 7, 4, 5, 1, 8 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold easy video or animation to people without production skills, before generative models could make the footage from one sentence or one photo. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Fuzzwich", "years": "2007 to 2010", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Drag-and-drop animation with ready-made characters and scenes, so casual users and small businesses could make short animated videos without animation skills.", "died": "It stayed on the desktop while users moved to phones and social media, could not grow beyond early adopters, and larger tool makers such as Adobe outspent it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1655-fuzzwich" }, { "name": "Real Artists", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$3M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A cloud animation platform that let independent artists and small studios produce animation together without expensive software.", "died": "Larger incumbents added the same collaboration features to products their users already had, and small customers could not pay enough to support it.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1073-real-artists" }, { "name": "HighlightCam", "years": "2009 to 2012", "funding": "US$500K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "An algorithm that picked the most engaging moments of raw footage, so users made polished videos without editing skills.", "died": "Operating costs were high, phones and consumer editors such as iMovie made editing easier, and the larger products added similar features.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1636-highlightcam" }, { "name": "Viddy", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$30M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Filters and effects that made amateur phone videos look polished and easy to share.", "died": "Users tried it once and did not return, and Instagram added video in June 2013 for its existing users.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2190-viddy" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Fuzzwich and Real Artists still needed a person to build each scene from characters and frames, and HighlightCam and Viddy could only cut or filter footage that someone had filmed. Each of the four raised between US$20,000 and US$30 million, and larger products with more users took the market from them.", "Video models now produce the footage itself from one sentence or one photo, and hosts such as fal.ai rent them per request. That lets one developer from a studio in Türkiye sell an AI video app on both phone platforms, and whatsthe.app showed US$3,979 of MRR for it in October 2026. The old risk is still there in a new form: the model makers and the large apps sell the same generation directly, and the App Store lists ten similar AI video apps on Video3's own page." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, for a developer who can ship store apps quickly, but the category is crowded.", "text": "The parts are all for rent: the models at fal.ai, the billing at RevenueCat and the stores, and a cross-platform framework for the code. That makes the method easy to copy, and the App Store page itself shows ten similar apps. Video3 shows that such an app can reach about US$4,000 of MRR in ten months; the figures come from one site on one date, and the owner has listed it for sale.", "steps": [ "Rent the video and image models through one host, so a newer model is an update and not a rebuild.", "Sell a subscription together with coin packs, so that heavy users pay for the generations they cost.", "Build once for iPhone and Android; here Google Play shows 50K+ downloads, so the second store is not a side market.", "Connect the RevenueCat account to a verification site, so a buyer can check the figures before an offer." ], "open": "Generators for one use where the output has fixed rules, such as product videos for small shops or short clips for a single language market, where a general app is weak." }, "watch": [ { "title": "One source for the money, and no sync date", "text": "All revenue figures come from whatsthe.app's list pages, read on 27 October 2026. The app's own whatsthe.app listing page answered 404 the same day (also from the address with the Android package name), so its \"Last updated\" date could not be read. The list data says \"is_trustmrr_linked\":true, but the TrustMRR profiles trustmrr.com/startup/video3.md and v3.md answered \"Not found\". No second source gives a dated figure." }, { "title": "For sale", "text": "whatsthe.app shows the app listed for sale since 27 July 2026 at US$60,000, with 0 views and 0 offers. A buyer could change the app, its prices and its model provider." }, { "title": "Animating photos", "text": "The store text says \"Use Image-to-Video to make avatars talk, animate landscapes, or create magical transformations from static images\" and calls the feature \"Photo Revive AI\". No store text, terms or studio page read for this story offers face swap, kiss or hug templates, or videos of celebrities, so the rule on animating other real people without consent does not stop it; the screenshots are images and were not read. The terms do not say whose photos a user may upload, and the privacy policy says images are \"not used to uniquely identify you\". Apple rates the app 13+ with \"User-Generated Content\"; Google Play rates it Teen with \"Diverse Content: Discretion Advised\"." }, { "title": "The developer's other apps", "text": "Apple lists 13 other apps by Eyup koc, among them \"Tivo: AI Photo Generator\", whose store text lists \"Face Swap\" among its templates, \"AI Dance Video Maker: Gema\", \"Color Analysis - Huely\" (\"Season Palette, Face & Skin\"), \"Hair AI: Hairstyle Try On\", \"Tattoo & Piercing AI: Pierce\", \"AI Outfit Try-On: Outfix\" and \"AI Detect: Ai Image Detector\". The studio's sitemap also lists \"AI Video Generator: Veoz\", a name close to Google's Veo video models. Video3's own store text, project page, terms and privacy policy do not link to these apps; Apple shows them in its \"More by\" section. The name Video3 is a common word with a number, and no source says it refers to Google's Veo 3. This story is about Video3 only." }, { "title": "A studio that also sells development work", "text": "Codeyup's home page sells app design and building to \"founders and teams\", with MVPs \"priced per agreed scope\". The product in this story is the app, and the whatsthe.app figures are for the app only; no source gives the studio's own revenue or headcount." }, { "title": "Privacy and data statements", "text": "Apple's privacy label says identifiers \"may be used to track you across apps and websites owned by other companies\". Google Play's data safety section says \"Data isn't encrypted\" and \"Data can't be deleted\", while the privacy policy says images travel over \"HTTPS/TLS\" and that users can delete their generations from the Profile screen. Both store labels are the developer's own statements." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.codeyup.dev/projects/video3" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6757303158" }, { "kind": "android", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.codeyup.video3" }, { "kind": "whatsthe", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/e0714f31-ab24-4db9-9821-6ddfcd627ffb" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "whatsthe.app: Apps for Sale, list entry V3, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/apps-for-sale", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full, including the data embedded in the page. The MRR, 28-day revenue and active subscriptions were read by whatsthe.app through RevenueCat (\"revenuecat-verified\"); the downloads come from the store data; the asking price and the listing date are the seller's listing." }, { "title": "whatsthe.app: Search, list card V3, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/search", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the card and the data embedded in the page. Confirms the same figures, the owner name and the Android package com.codeyup.video3." }, { "title": "whatsthe.app listing page for V3", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/e0714f31-ab24-4db9-9821-6ddfcd627ffb", "grade": "C", "how": "Could not open: it answered 404 in four attempts on 27 October 2026, also when reached from https://www.whatsthe.app/com.codeyup.video3. Cited only for that fact." }, { "title": "AI Video Generator: Video3 on the US App Store, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ai-video-generator-video3/id6757303158", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full: description, in-app purchases, version history, privacy label, age rating, seller, copyright line, other apps of the developer and similar apps. The seller, dates, ratings and age rating are Apple's records; the description and release notes are written by the developer." }, { "title": "AI Video Generator - Video3 on Google Play, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.codeyup.video3", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full: description, downloads, ratings, age rating, three reviews, data safety summary and developer details. The postal address on the page is not repeated here." }, { "title": "Codeyup: Video3 AI Video Generator project page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.codeyup.dev/projects/video3", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the framework, the store links and the in-house status." }, { "title": "Video3 AI Privacy Policy, last updated 15 November 2025", "url": "https://www.codeyup.dev/video3/privacy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for fal.ai as the AI provider, the consent dialog and the data retention." }, { "title": "Video3 AI Terms of Service, effective 24 April 2024", "url": "https://www.codeyup.dev/video3/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the owner name Video3 AI and the third-party services. The effective date appears to come from a template that is older than the app." }, { "title": "Codeyup home page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.codeyup.dev/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the studio's services, the client pricing and the download count of its own apps." }, { "title": "Codeyup sitemap, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.codeyup.dev/sitemap.xml", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the list of 18 project pages, including Veoz and Tivo." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/chartpro-plus/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/chartpro-plus.md", "slug": "chartpro-plus", "name": "ChartPro+", "country": "Türkiye (the publisher's website gives an office in Istanbul, and the terms name Turkey as the country whose laws apply)", "sector": "Financial Services", "productType": "iPhone app that reads an uploaded price chart with AI and the indicators EMA, MACD and RSI, and suggests the market direction and entry and exit points", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "4 November 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$2.8K MRR verified through RevenueCat, October 2026", "sticker": "$2.8K MRR", "outcomeUsd": 34056, "months": 11, "teamLabel": "1 person according to the seller's whatsthe.app listing; the publisher, Prosoft Teknoloji, presents itself as a mobile app agency with a team; headcount not published", "fundingLabel": "None reported (the seller's listing says bootstrapped)", "primaryFactor": "Simplicity", "group": "documents-data", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Trading tools" ], "product": "A trader takes a screenshot of a price chart, for a stock, a cryptocurrency, a currency pair or another market, and uploads it to the app. The app analyzes the picture with AI and with three common technical indicators, EMA, MACD and RSI, then says whether the market looks bullish or bearish and suggests entry and exit points. Analyses need a subscription; when a user reaches the monthly limit, extra analyses are paid with token packs. On the US App Store the store name is \"Profit AI Analyzer : ChartPro+\" with the subtitle \"Chart AI - Trading Assistant\".", "why": "It turns chart reading, which a beginner would otherwise have to learn, into one upload and one answer, and it works on any market because it reads a picture and needs no market data feed. The App Store sells it worldwide: whatsthe.app counts 92 ratings from 13 countries, and the most come from India. MRR was about US$5,700 at the start of September 2026, calculated from the 28-day growth figure, and then fell by about half.", "summary": [ "ChartPro+ is an iPhone app for technical analysis, the practice of predicting price moves from the shape of past prices on a chart instead of from a company's business. The user uploads a chart image, and the app reads it with AI and with three standard indicators: the EMA (exponential moving average, an average of recent prices that gives the newest prices the most weight), the MACD (moving average convergence divergence, the gap between a fast and a slow EMA, used to spot a change of trend) and the RSI (relative strength index, a 0 to 100 score of how fast the price rose or fell recently). The App Store page says the app \"identifies the current market direction and suggests optimal entry and exit points\".", "The App Store lists PROSOFT TEKNOLOJI LIMITED SIRKETI as developer and seller. A \"limited şirketi\" is the Turkish form of a limited liability company, and the company's own website calls it a \"Mobile App Agency\" in Istanbul. The app was released on 4 November 2025. On whatsthe.app, a marketplace for buying and selling mobile apps, the owner is the X account @melihcsrr, and the listing reads its figures from RevenueCat, a service that records App Store subscription payments for app makers. At the last update, on 2 October 2026, it showed monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the subscription income that repeats every month, of US$2,838 from 86 active subscriptions, and US$3,208 of revenue in the last 28 days.", "These figures are grade A because they come from RevenueCat through an API key, not from a screenshot. They are also the end of a fall: MRR was 50.6% lower than 28 days before, the RevenueCat key has expired since then, and the seller offers the app for US$21,600. The page also shows four earlier companies that sold trading signals from news, social media or crowds of investors and failed, and it lists what is uncertain, starting with whether the app's suggestions are right." ], "factsCaption": "US$2,838 of monthly recurring revenue on 2 October 2026, eleven months after the App Store release, read from RevenueCat, after a fall of about half in 28 days", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read from the app's RevenueCat account by whatsthe.app. A grade B value is a record that Apple shows on the App Store. A grade C value was written by the seller on the listing, by the publisher on its website, or in the app's description, terms and privacy policy. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From an App Store release on 4 November 2025 to about US$2,800 of monthly recurring revenue on 2 October 2026, after a peak in early September. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "ChartPro+ prices on the US App Store in October 2026, from the in-app purchase list (grade B)", "note": "The App Store lists the purchases under the names shown here and does not say which buyer sees which price, what period \"ChartPro+ Premium\" covers, or how many analyses a token buys. \"ChartPro+ Weekly Premium\" appears twice at the same price. The listing on whatsthe.app shows the same eight prices. Calculated per month: US$39.99 a year is US$3.33; US$59.99 a year is US$5.00; US$6.99 a week is about US$30.29.", "rows": [ [ "Yearly Premium", "3.33", "", "US$39.99 a year" ], [ "Premium Yearly", "5.00", "", "US$59.99 a year" ], [ "ChartPro+ Premium", "", "", "US$19.99; period not named" ], [ "ChartPro+ Weekly Premium", "", "", "US$6.99 a week" ], [ "100 Token Localization", "3.99 one-time", "", "100 tokens for extra analyses" ], [ "300 Token", "8.99 one-time", "", "300 tokens" ], [ "1000 Token", "19.99 one-time", "", "1,000 tokens" ], [ "English Localization", "6.99", "", "name does not say what it buys" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 2 October 2026", "value": "US$2,838 from 86 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app: \"All metrics are verified through RevenueCat API keys. Last updated: Oct 2, 2026, 01:33:13 AM UTC\". Calculated: US$33.00 per subscription per month, and US$34,056 a year at that rate, the ARR that whatsthe.app shows. The list page of whatsthe.app showed the same MRR on 27 October 2026.", "src": [ 1, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 28 days, to 2 October 2026", "value": "US$3,208", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app, from RevenueCat. The list page calls this value \"Total revenue\". Calculated: US$38,496 a year at that rate, the \"AR\" that the listing shows.", "src": [ 1, 8 ] }, { "fact": "Change in the 28 days to 2 October 2026", "value": "MRR down 50.6%, revenue down 43.3%", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app growth figures. Calculated from them: MRR was about US$5,742 and 28-day revenue about US$5,657 at the start of September 2026. The page data also hold a churn rate of 47.6% without saying how it is computed. No source gives monthly revenue before that.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Users and customers, 28 days to 2 October 2026", "value": "831 downloads and 831 new customers, 2,538 active users, no active trials", "grade": "A", "note": "whatsthe.app, from RevenueCat. Calculated: 86 subscriptions out of 2,538 active users is 3.4%, the subscription penetration that the listing shows. Revenue per download was US$1.26 and the lifetime value per customer US$69, both as whatsthe.app computes them.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Sync status", "value": "the RevenueCat key expired after 2 October 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "Listing, read 27 October 2026: \"RevenueCat API key expired. Data last updated Oct 2, 2026\". The figures on this page are therefore 25 days old.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Release on the App Store", "value": "4 November 2025", "grade": "B", "note": "Version history: 1.0 on 11/04/2025. whatsthe.app: \"Worldwide Release Date: November 4, 2025\". The seller gives November 2025 as the start of business operations.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Developer and seller", "value": "PROSOFT TEKNOLOJI LIMITED SIRKETI", "grade": "B", "note": "App Store developer and seller line; copyright line \"© PROSOFT TEKNOLOJİ LİMİTED ŞİRKETİ\". \"Limited Şirketi\" (translation: limited company) is a Turkish company form. The developer page lists this one app only.", "src": [ 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "What the publisher says it is", "value": "a mobile app agency in Istanbul", "grade": "C", "note": "Website title \"Prosoft - Mobile App Agency\"; \"We are a mobile app development studio dedicated to building high-quality, user-focused digital products\", with a \"Book A Call\" button for clients. The website names no person.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Owner on whatsthe.app", "value": "the X account @melihcsrr, 24 followers", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder field of the listing. No source gives this person's role in the company, so this page names only the account.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team and funding", "value": "team size 1, bootstrapped", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller's answers on the listing: \"Team Size 1\", \"Financing Bootstrapped\". The publisher's website writes \"Our team combines creativity, technology, and data-driven strategies\" and gives no headcount.", "src": [ 1, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Offered for sale, October 2026", "value": "asking price US$21,600, source code included", "grade": "C", "note": "Listing: \"This app is for sale. Asking price: $21,600 0.6 x revenue\", 389 buyers had viewed it and 6 inquiries were sent; reason: \"Finance for my other apps.\" Calculated: 21,600 divided by 38,496 is 0.56, and the price equals 7.6 months of the October MRR.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Seller's own cost figures", "value": "marketing spend US$1,000 a month; profit margin 50%", "grade": "C", "note": "Listing: \"Self-reported marketing spend $1,000 /mo Unverified\" and \"Profit Margin 50 % Self-Reported\". The listing names no marketing channel.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Technology", "value": "Flutter for the app, Firebase for the backend; the AI model is not named", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller's tech stack on the listing. The privacy policy and terms name no AI provider.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "What the app claims to do", "value": "chart analysis with EMA, MACD and RSI, entry and exit suggestions, market predictions", "grade": "C", "note": "App Store description: \"Entry & Exit Suggestions: Identify potential trade opportunities generated through the proven logic\" and \"Market Predictions: Understand bullish and bearish trends in real time\". It covers \"stocks, cryptocurrencies, or forex\". The description states no figure for what users earn.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Age rules", "value": "App Store age rating 4+; terms require users over 18", "grade": "B", "note": "App Store: \"Age Rating 4+\". Terms, last updated 28 October 2025: \"You represent that you are over the age of 18. The Company does not permit those under 18 to use the Service.\" The privacy policy says the service \"does not address anyone under the age of 13\".", "src": [ 2, 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "App Store ratings", "value": "11 ratings in the US with an average of 4.3; 92 ratings in 13 countries", "grade": "B", "note": "US App Store page and whatsthe.app's count by country: India 23, United States 11, Germany 10, Italy 9. Calculated: India gives 25.0% of all ratings.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Updates", "value": "23 versions in 11 months, from 1.0 to 8.0.0", "grade": "B", "note": "App Store version history, 4 November 2025 to 28 September 2026. Every release note reads \"Minor system improvements\", with or without \"and bug fixes\".", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Time from store release to the October 2026 figure", "value": "11 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: November 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "28 October 2025", "what": "The app's terms and privacy policy are dated, both made with the TermsFeed generator. The terms name the company \"ChartPro+\" and the country Turkey.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "when": "4 November 2025", "what": "Version 1.0 of Profit AI Analyzer : ChartPro+ is released worldwide on the App Store.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "when": "7 to 29 November 2025", "what": "Six updates in 22 days, versions 1.0.1 to 1.0.6.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "24 December 2025", "what": "Version 2.0.0.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "31 December 2025", "what": "The app is added to whatsthe.app with RevenueCat as its data source.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "25 February 2026", "what": "A different developer releases \"ChartPro: AI Profit Signals\", a chart-analysis app with almost the same name, in the same Finance category.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "May 2026", "what": "Seven updates in one month, from 4.0.0 on 6 May to 5.5.0 on 30 May.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "1 June 2026", "what": "A US review titled \"deception\": \"I paid for a subscription. Nothing works.\" On 10 July the developer answers that the user \"may have encountered a temporary maintenance operation on our servers\".", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "Early September 2026", "what": "MRR is about US$5,742, calculated from the later growth figure.", "grade": "X", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "28 September 2026", "what": "Version 8.0.0, the latest.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "2 October 2026", "what": "Last RevenueCat sync: MRR US$2,838 from 86 subscriptions, US$3,208 of revenue in 28 days, MRR down 50.6%.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "27 October 2026", "what": "The app is listed for sale at US$21,600; the RevenueCat key has expired.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A picture in, a reading out", "text": "The user does not connect a brokerage account or a data feed. A screenshot of any chart is enough, so the same app works for stocks, crypto, forex and gold, and for any charting site. The app returns a direction and entry and exit points, the part that a beginner finds hardest." }, { "title": "Subscription plus tokens", "text": "An active subscription is required, and analyses above the monthly limit are paid with token packs of 100, 300 or 1,000 tokens. The App Store lists two yearly plans at different prices, US$39.99 and US$59.99, and a weekly plan at US$6.99; the sources do not say which buyers see which price." }, { "title": "Many small updates", "text": "The app had 23 versions in 11 months, seven of them in May 2026. The release notes say only \"Minor system improvements\" or \"Minor system improvements and bug fixes\", so the changes are not public." }, { "title": "Worldwide store, small numbers per country", "text": "Ratings come from 13 countries; India gives a quarter of them and the United States 11. Through the App Store, a small company reached users in at least 13 countries within eleven months." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the seller's listing on whatsthe.app (grade C), the App Store records (grade B) and the app's terms and privacy policy (grade C). No source describes the code or names the AI model.", "items": [ "Flutter for the iPhone app and Firebase for the backend, according to the seller's tech stack on the listing.", "An AI model analyzes the uploaded chart together with the EMA, MACD and RSI indicators; no source says which model or provider.", "RevenueCat manages the App Store subscriptions and token purchases, and whatsthe.app read the revenue from it until the API key expired after 2 October 2026.", "The terms and the privacy policy were made with TermsFeed's generator and are hosted on termsfeed.com.", "The App Store privacy section lists usage data that may be used to track users across other companies' apps, and advertising data, which points to advertising or attribution tools; the seller reports US$1,000 a month of marketing spend without naming a channel.", "The app needs iOS 17 or later and is listed in the Finance category with an age rating of 4+." ], "src": [ 1, 2, 4, 5 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold trading signals made from news, social media or the picks of other investors, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Isentium", "years": "2012 to 2020", "funding": "US$50M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Trading signals from the sentiment of social media and news, read with natural language processing.", "died": "Social media data was noisy and carried compliance risk, competitors offered broader market analytics, and the company depended on a few large clients, according to the database.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/255-isentium" }, { "name": "Monitor110", "years": "2005 to 2008", "funding": "US$17M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Early-warning signals for hedge funds, filtered from blogs, news sites and social media.", "died": "Collecting and processing the data cost more than its customers paid, and traders stayed with Bloomberg, according to the database.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/348-monitor110" }, { "name": "SocialPicks", "years": "2007 to 2010", "funding": "US$2.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A social network that collected stock recommendations from its users and tracked how they performed.", "died": "It never reached the number of users needed for useful signals, relied on advertising, and the 2008 crisis cut interest in stock forums, according to the database.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1658-socialpicks" }, { "name": "Instavest", "years": "2015 to 2018", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Copy the trades of experienced investors, who earned a commission from their followers.", "died": "Robinhood and eToro offered the same with larger communities, and trust and financial regulation raised the cost, according to the database.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1121-instavest" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Isentium and Monitor110 built their signals from large data pipelines, news and social media collected and processed in real time, and that data was their main cost. SocialPicks and Instavest built signals from crowds of investors and needed many active users before the signals meant anything. All four sold to someone who had to trust a signal whose quality was hard to prove, and that trust was the part they could not buy.", "ChartPro+ needs neither the pipeline nor the crowd. The user brings the data as a screenshot, and a rented AI model reads it, so one small company can sell the same analysis for every market through the App Store. What has not changed is the trust problem: no source on this page measures whether the suggested entry and exit points make money, MRR fell by half in the 28 days to 2 October 2026, and the App Store page recommends ten other finance apps next to it, six of them AI chart analyzers by their names." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The market, crowded.", "text": "A small company built an app in which a rented AI model reads a chart screenshot, and it reached about US$5,700 of MRR within ten months before falling to US$2,838. The App Store page recommends ten other finance apps, six of them AI chart analyzers by their names, and one later app uses almost the same name. Anyone who copies the method competes on marketing and trust, not on technology.", "steps": [ "Let the user supply the data as a screenshot, so the app needs no market data feed and works for every market.", "Combine the model's reading with named, standard indicators such as EMA, MACD and RSI, so the user can check the answer.", "Charge a subscription with a usage limit, and sell token packs for heavy users, so model costs stay below revenue.", "Record payments in a service such as RevenueCat, so that a buyer can verify the revenue if you sell the app." ], "open": "Chart reading for one market and one user group, with a public, dated record of every suggestion and its result, would answer the trust question that the general apps leave open." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue halved, and the data stopped", "text": "MRR fell 50.6% and 28-day revenue 43.3% in the 28 days to 2 October 2026, and the page data hold a churn rate of 47.6%. The RevenueCat key then expired, so no source shows the figures after 2 October. The MRR of US$2,838 is 41.9% above this site's floor of US$2,000 a month; another fall of that size would put it below." }, { "title": "A trading app named Profit", "text": "The store name is \"Profit AI Analyzer : ChartPro+\", and the description speaks of \"optimal entry and exit points\", \"Market Predictions\" and \"proven logic\" and ends with \"maximize your potential\". This page found no figure for what users earn on the App Store page, the listing, the terms or the publisher's site, which is why the story passed this site's rule on income promises. The App Store description contains no risk warning, and the terms say the company makes no warranty about \"the accuracy, reliability, or currency of any information\"." }, { "title": "Rated 4+, terms say 18+", "text": "Apple rates the app 4+, while the terms say \"You represent that you are over the age of 18\". The app covers crypto charts but does not sell a crypto token: its \"Token\" purchases are credits for extra analyses inside the app." }, { "title": "For sale, and an agency behind it", "text": "The seller asks US$21,600 and gives the reason \"Finance for my other apps.\", without naming those apps. The publisher presents itself on its website as a mobile app agency that builds apps for clients; this page judges the app only. A buyer would take over an app whose revenue was falling at the last sync." }, { "title": "Complaints and a copied name", "text": "A US review of 1 June 2026 says a paid subscription did not work, and the developer blamed server maintenance. In February 2026 a different developer released \"ChartPro: AI Profit Signals\" with almost the same name, and the App Store page recommends ten other finance apps next to ChartPro+, six of them AI chart analyzers by their names." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6749477422" }, { "kind": "whatsthe", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/co.app.aichart" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "whatsthe.app listing: ChartPro+, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/co.app.aichart", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full, including the data embedded in the page. MRR, revenue, subscriptions, users and growth are \"verified through RevenueCat API keys\", last updated 2 October 2026; the team size, financing, tech stack, marketing spend, profit margin and asking price are the seller's own answers. The site's robots.txt allows this path." }, { "title": "Apple App Store: Profit AI Analyzer : ChartPro+, US storefront, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/profit-ai-analyzer-chartpro/id6749477422", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full: description, ratings, reviews, version history, privacy section, age rating, seller, copyright line, in-app purchases and similar apps. The description is the developer's text (grade C); the store records are grade B." }, { "title": "Apple App Store: developer page of PROSOFT TEKNOLOJI LIMITED SIRKETI, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/prosoft-teknoloji-limited-sirketi/id1860369586", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The account lists one app, ChartPro+." }, { "title": "ChartPro+ terms and conditions, last updated 28 October 2025", "url": "https://www.termsfeed.com/live/37cfe4e3-7a43-48a8-a673-80c3e6be81fb", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Linked from the App Store description. Source for the age rule, the governing country and the warranty disclaimer. The host's robots.txt has no group for Claude agents or for all agents." }, { "title": "ChartPro+ privacy policy, last updated 28 October 2025", "url": "https://www.termsfeed.com/live/1add0aef-8dbe-497b-9633-5fd1b9aeb47b", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Linked from the App Store description. Source for the children clause; it names no AI provider." }, { "title": "Prosoft - Mobile App Agency, home page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.prosoft.live/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The publisher's own website, linked from the App Store page. Source for the company's description of itself and its city. The site's robots.txt allows all paths." }, { "title": "Apple App Store: ChartPro: AI Profit Signals, US storefront, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/chartpro-ai-profit-signals/id6759523236", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. A similar app by a different developer, released 25 February 2026; cited only for the similar name." }, { "title": "whatsthe.app search list, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.whatsthe.app/search", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the entry for ChartPro+ and its embedded data: the same MRR and 28-day revenue, the credential type \"revenuecat\" and the date the app was added. Where this lead was found." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/language-confidence/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/language-confidence.md", "slug": "language-confidence", "name": "Language Confidence", "country": "Australia", "sector": "Education", "productType": "AI speech assessment API for English learners", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "B", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "2018", "outcomeLabel": "About US$150K annual recurring revenue, October 2026", "sticker": "$150K ARR", "outcomeUsd": 150000, "months": 94, "teamLabel": "2 co-founders on the team page in October 2026, 9 people listed in September 2022; headcount at the headline not published", "fundingLabel": "About US$3 million raised (seller statement), including a US$1.5M seed round led by Wavemaker Partners in 2022", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "learning", "channel": "sales", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 2, "copyable": 1, "capital": 3 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Funded", "Running", "B2B", "Education" ], "product": "Other education companies send a recording of a learner speaking English to the Language Confidence API and get back scores for pronunciation, fluency, grammar, vocabulary and relevance, with the sounds written in the International Phonetic Alphabet. A second product, SnapShot AI, is a ready-made spoken English placement test that gives a level on the CEFR scale.", "why": "It does one narrow task that a general speech recognizer does not do: it judges how well a learner speaks, not only which words were said. It sells that task to large learning platforms and test-preparation companies, which pay by the second of speech. The seller says the company raised about US$3 million, missed its first financial goals, and is now a small profitable business for sale.", "summary": [ "Language Confidence sells a speech assessment API. An API (application programming interface) is a way for one program to call another over the internet; here, a learning app sends a short audio recording of a student and receives scores and feedback a moment later. Assessment means grading: the service rates pronunciation sound by sound, and also fluency, grammar, vocabulary and whether the answer fits the question. The company also sells SnapShot AI, a spoken English placement test that reports a level on the CEFR scale, the Common European Framework of Reference, which runs from A1 (beginner) to C2 (near native).", "Nicholas Jenkins started it after teaching English in China in 2016, where his students could check their spelling at home but not their speaking. He co-founded the company in 2018 with Swahn Fraye, who left the software company Atlassian to become its chief technology officer. Jenkins told The PIE News in March 2022 that the first pre-seed money of A$500,000 ran out and that the company lived on credit cards until its first real paying customer in late 2019. In March 2022 it closed a US$1.5 million seed round led by Wavemaker Partners, a venture capital firm in Singapore. Its team page listed nine people in September 2022 and lists only the two co-founders in October 2026.", "In October 2026 the company is for sale on Flippa, a marketplace for online businesses. The owner's listing says it makes around US$150,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR, the yearly value of the current subscriptions and contracts), shows monthly revenue of US$9,170, and asks US$150,000. Flippa marks the listing as verified by its vetting team or a broker and shows that the seller connected Stripe and Google Analytics. The headline is graded B: a marketplace checked it, but no payment-processor statement is public. The listing also says the company raised about US$3 million and \"did not meet its initial financial goals\"." ], "pricing": { "caption": "Language Confidence prices on 27 October 2026, from the company's two pricing pages (grade C). The yearly API prices are calculated from the page's \"Pay Annually -30%\" option.", "note": "API plans are prepaid credit: the monthly amount is spent per 15 seconds of speech, at US$0.0125 for open (unscripted) answers, US$0.01 for read-aloud (scripted) answers and US$0.008 for pronunciation only on the Startup plan, and US$0.01, US$0.008 and US$0.006 on the Scaleup plan. Calculated: US$100 at US$0.0125 per 15 seconds buys 2,000 minutes of open speech, fewer than the 8,000 to 12,500 minutes that the plan card states. SnapShot tests are bought in packs; a school can add its own logo for US$99 a month, or a logo and its own domain for US$199 a month.", "rows": [ [ "Startup API", "70", "100", "US$100 of API credit a month, 10 requests per second, 7-day trial" ], [ "Scaleup API", "350", "500", "US$500 of API credit a month, 50 requests per second, Slack support" ], [ "Enterprise API", "custom", "custom", "contract, custom rate limit, removal of personal data from speech" ], [ "SnapShot Basic", "10 one-time", "", "1 placement test" ], [ "SnapShot Starter", "50 one-time", "", "8 tests" ], [ "SnapShot Pro", "250 one-time", "", "40 tests" ] ] }, "factsCaption": "A venture-funded speech-scoring company, founded in 2018, that the owner now lists for sale at about US$150,000 a year of recurring revenue", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade B value was checked or shown by Flippa, the marketplace that lists the business, or reported by a journalist, or recorded by the Internet Archive. A grade C value is a statement by the company or its founder. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A: Flippa shows that Stripe is connected, but it does not publish the Stripe figures to visitors who are not signed in.", "timelineLead": "From a teacher's problem in China in 2016 to a small profitable company for sale in October 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "facts": [ { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, October 2026", "value": "around US$150,000", "grade": "B", "note": "Owner's text on the Flippa listing, read 27 October 2026: \"generating around $150,000 in annual recurring revenue\". The listing carries the badge \"Verified Listing\", whose tooltip reads \"The Flippa vetting team or the broker has verified this listing to ensure accuracy of the stated financial and operational performance.\" Flippa does not say that this figure came from Stripe, so it is not graded A.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue on the listing card, October 2026", "value": "US$9,170", "grade": "B", "note": "Flippa's category page shows \"Monthly Revenue USD $9.17K\" and \"Monthly Profit USD $9.17K\" for the card \"Listed by Owner Language Confidence\". The listing itself shows \"Monthly Profit USD $9,167 /mo\".", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in a year at the listed monthly figure", "value": "about US$110,000", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 9,167 times 12 equals 110,004. This is lower than the ARR in the owner's text; US$150,000 a year would be US$12,500 a month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin shown", "value": "100%", "grade": "B", "note": "Flippa listing: \"Profit Margin 100%\". A margin of 100% means that no costs are entered in the public figures, although the business pays for servers and models.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Data connected to the listing", "value": "Stripe and Google Analytics", "grade": "B", "note": "Flippa listing: \"Data Verified Listing. This business has connected the following data integrations: Google Analytics Stripe\". Flippa's verification page says it partners with these platforms \"to expose critical performance metrics\"; those metrics need a Flippa account to read.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price", "value": "US$150,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Flippa listing: \"Asking Price (Classified) USD $150,000\". An asking price is not a sale price. The listing shows a revenue multiple of 1.4x. Calculated: 150,000 divided by 110,004 equals 1.36.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding in total", "value": "about US$3 million", "grade": "C", "note": "Owner's text on the listing: \"Historically, the company has raised $3 million\" and \"did not meet its initial financial goals. Despite this, it remains profitable.\" The listing does not say in which currency or in which rounds.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Seed round, March 2022", "value": "US$1.5 million, led by Wavemaker Partners, with Investible", "grade": "B", "note": "The PIE News, 4 March 2022, with a quote from a Wavemaker general partner. The company's team page names Wavemaker and Investible as investors in October 2026.", "src": [ 6, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Pre-seed money", "value": "A$500,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Jenkins in The PIE News: \"We've come a long way since our pre-seed round of AUS$500k ran out and we managed to keep the company alive on credit cards until we had our first real, paying customer late in 2019\".", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "First real paying customer", "value": "late 2019", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder quote above. The about page also says the business has grown \"since late 2019 by partnering with some of the world's largest language platforms\".", "src": [ 6, 5 ] }, { "fact": "People on the team page, September 2022", "value": "9", "grade": "B", "note": "Internet Archive copy of the about page, 28 September 2022: the two co-founders, a chief operating officer, a sales vice president for India and South Asia, three machine learning engineers, a full-stack developer and a CFO and strategic advisor.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "People on the team page, October 2026", "value": "2", "grade": "C", "note": "The current about page lists the CEO and founder and the CTO and co-founder, then six investors. The total headcount is not published.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "Website online", "value": "15 December 2018, as a \"Coming soon\" page", "grade": "B", "note": "Internet Archive copy of languageconfidence.ai. The listing gives \"Founded in 2018\" and a site age of 8 years.", "src": [ 8, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the first archived page to the listing", "value": "94 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: December 2018 to October 2026.", "src": [ 8, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2016", "what": "Jenkins teaches English in China. His students can check spelling and grammar at home, but no tool gives them accurate feedback on their speaking.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "2016 to 2018", "what": "He spends two years visiting large language education companies, learns about AI and speech recognition, and designs the first product, LCAT, \"with a team from MIT, Google and Facebook\", the about page says.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "2018", "what": "Jenkins and Swahn Fraye co-found the company, The PIE News reports. The Flippa listing also gives 2018 as the founding year.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6, 1 ] }, { "when": "15 December 2018", "what": "languageconfidence.ai shows a \"Coming soon\" page with a newsletter sign-up.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "Late 2019", "what": "A pre-seed round of A$500,000 has run out, and the founders pay costs with credit cards until the first real paying customer arrives, Jenkins said in 2022.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "4 March 2022", "what": "The PIE News reports a US$1.5 million seed round led by Wavemaker Partners, with Investible. The company sells its API per student or per use and its test per test.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "September 2022", "what": "The team page lists nine people, among them three machine learning engineers and a sales vice president for India and South Asia.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "June 2024", "what": "The privacy policy of the SnapShot and Oracy apps, operated by Language Confidence Pty Ltd, is last updated.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The team page lists only the two co-founders. The owner lists the company on Flippa at around US$150,000 of ARR, US$9,170 of monthly revenue and an asking price of US$150,000.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 5, 1, 2 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Niche", "text": "General speech recognition writes down which words a person said. A learner and a teacher need something else: which sounds were wrong, how fluent the answer was and what level that means. Language Confidence does only that task, for English, and returns the result in the International Phonetic Alphabet and on the CEFR scale that teachers already use." }, { "title": "Sell to platforms, not to learners", "text": "The company does not try to win millions of students itself. Its customers are learning apps, publishers and test-preparation companies that add the API to their own products; the home page quotes executives of Age of Learning, E2Language and 3PLearning. Each customer brings many learners, and the founder spent two years visiting such companies while he designed the first product." }, { "title": "Prepaid usage pricing", "text": "API customers buy credit every month, US$100 or US$500 on the public plans, and use it per 15 seconds of speech. The monthly prepayment makes the revenue recurring, while the price still follows use. Placement tests are sold in packs of 1, 8 or 40." }, { "title": "Own models where it matters", "text": "The listing says the company built its own models for pronunciation and uses open-weight models, whose trained weights anyone can download, for fluency, relevance, grammar and vocabulary. It runs on a serverless setup, which charges for computing only when a request arrives. That mix keeps a small team able to run the service." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the Flippa listing, the company's own pages and an archived team page. They are grade B and C. The model names and the cloud provider are not published.", "items": [ "Speech scoring with two engines: models that the company trained itself for pronunciation, and open-weight models for fluency, relevance, grammar and vocabulary, chosen for low delay.", "A serverless back end, described in the listing as an \"enterprise-grade AI framework\" that is \"scalable and built on a serverless architecture\".", "Stateless REST APIs with documentation, sample Postman collections and a developer portal; IPA scoring \"in partnership with Oxford Languages\", with an Oxford pronouncing dictionary integration listed as a feature.", "In September 2022 the team had three machine learning engineers, one full-stack developer and a chief technology officer who had worked at Atlassian.", "The company website is a Next.js app, and its plan buttons link to Stripe payment pages, both visible in the page source.", "Sales went to companies directly: per student or per use for the API and per test for the placement test, as Jenkins said in 2022." ], "src": [ 1, 4, 7, 9, 12, 6 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Five companies in the Loot Drop database tried to scale English teaching with human tutors or online courses. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "VIPKid", "years": "2013 to 2021", "funding": "US$1.1B", "cause": "Legal/Regulatory", "promise": "One-to-one online English lessons with North American teachers for Chinese children, 700,000 students at the peak.", "died": "China's 2021 rules on private tutoring banned foreign teachers and foreign curriculum, which removed the business model.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2522-vipkid" }, { "name": "Dada English", "years": "2013 to 2021", "funding": "US$100M", "cause": "Legal/Regulatory", "promise": "Online English tutoring for Chinese children with native-speaking teachers at about US$30 a session.", "died": "China's 2021 'Double Reduction' policy banned for-profit tutoring of school children in English.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2299-dada-english" }, { "name": "TutorGroup (iTutor)", "years": "2004 to 2021", "funding": "US$300M", "cause": "Legal/Regulatory", "promise": "A marketplace of 30,000 Western tutors for English learners in Asia at US$30 to US$50 an hour.", "died": "The 2021 ban on foreign tutors in China removed most of its revenue, at a time when customer acquisition costs of more than US$800 and tutor turnover were already high.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2216-tutorgroup-itutor" }, { "name": "Teacher Finder", "years": "2015 to 2019", "funding": "US$50K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Match language learners directly with tutors and cut out expensive language schools.", "died": "Better-funded tutor marketplaces won, and the small product could not change fast enough to stay relevant.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1962-teacher-finder" }, { "name": "Hujiang", "years": "2001 to 2021", "funding": "US$187M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Free and paid online language courses for 190 million users in China.", "died": "A failed stock market listing showed high customer acquisition costs and negative margins against larger rivals.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2556-hujiang" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The four tutoring companies on this page sold time with a human teacher. Every extra lesson needed an extra teacher, so growth meant hiring and paying tens of thousands of tutors, and in 2021 a single change in China's rules ended three of them. Hujiang sold courses without live teachers, but it still had to win each learner itself, and its customer costs were too high.", "Language Confidence automates one part of a speaking teacher's work: listening to a learner and saying what was wrong. It does not employ teachers and does not market to learners. It sells the listening part to companies that already have the learners, and charges by the second of speech. That model needs speech AI that is accurate enough for learners with many accents, which the founder spent two years designing before the first sale. The cost side is visible too: the company raised about US$3 million, according to the seller, and is now a business of about US$150,000 a year." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The models, hard. The way of selling, yes.", "text": "Training speech models that score non-native pronunciation took years, a team of machine learning engineers and venture money, and the seller says the company still missed its first goals. A solo founder is unlikely to repeat that part. The selling model is easier to copy: one narrow AI task, sold as an API to companies that already have the users, paid in prepaid monthly credit.", "steps": [ "Pick a task that teachers or reviewers do by hand and that general AI tools do not report in the form those professionals use.", "Sell it as an API to platforms that already have many users, not to the users themselves.", "Charge prepaid monthly credit, spent per unit of use, so the revenue recurs but follows usage.", "Use open-weight models where they are good enough, and train your own only where they are not." ], "open": "The same task in other languages, and speaking practice for professions with their own vocabulary, such as nursing, aviation or customer service, where an employer pays for the test." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Funded, and below its own goals", "text": "The seller writes that the company raised about US$3 million and \"did not meet its initial financial goals\". The PIE News confirms a US$1.5 million seed round in March 2022 led by Wavemaker Partners. Against that money, around US$150,000 of ARR is a small result; it is on this site as a small team that kept an AI product running and profitable, not as a cheap start." }, { "title": "Team size at the headline", "text": "The team page listed nine people in September 2022, among them three machine learning engineers. In October 2026 it lists only the two co-founders and six investors. The Flippa listing does not give a headcount, so the number of people at the US$150,000 figure is not published." }, { "title": "Two revenue figures that do not agree", "text": "US$150,000 of ARR equals US$12,500 a month, but the listing card shows US$9,170 of monthly revenue and the same amount as monthly profit, a 100% margin. The card may show an average of past months, and the margin leaves out costs that a speech service must have. Flippa's Stripe data, which could settle this, is visible only to signed-in buyers." }, { "title": "Children's voices", "text": "Some API customers build products for young learners; Age of Learning's executive writes about \"young learners\" on the home page. The SnapShot and Oracy privacy policy says the company does not knowingly collect data from children under 18 and that a user represents being \"at least 18 or ... the parent or guardian of such a minor\" who consents. The policy lists \"voice audio recordings\" among the data it collects. How API customers handle consent is their own matter and is not public." }, { "title": "For sale", "text": "The asking price is US$150,000; no sale has been reported. A buyer may change the team, the prices or the product. The figures on this page are from the listing as read on 27 October 2026." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://languageconfidence.ai/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Flippa listing 13436230: AI-powered platform enhancing pronunciation and speaking skills through personalized language practice and instant feedback", "url": "https://flippa.com/13436230-ai-powered-platform-enhancing-pronunciation-and-speaking-skills-through-personalized-language-practice-and-instant-feedback", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the public part on 27 October 2026; the financial details and the seller's name need an account and were not read. Source for the ARR, the monthly profit, the margin, the verification badges, the connected Stripe and Google Analytics data, the asking price, the funding and the technical setup." }, { "title": "Flippa category page: AI Apps & Tools for sale", "url": "https://flippa.com/buy/ai-apps-and-tools", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the listing card on 27 October 2026. Source for the business name, \"Listed by Owner\" and the monthly revenue of US$9.17K." }, { "title": "Flippa: Trust and verifications", "url": "https://flippa.com/product/trust-and-verifications/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Flippa's own description of its vetting and data integrations. Used to explain what the badges mean." }, { "title": "Language Confidence home page", "url": "https://languageconfidence.ai/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026. Source for the products, the start year and the customer quotes." }, { "title": "Language Confidence: About us", "url": "https://languageconfidence.ai/about-us", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026. Source for the founding story, the two co-founders and the investors." }, { "title": "The PIE News, 4 March 2022, by Sophie Hogan: Edtech: Language Confidence raises US$1.5m", "url": "https://thepienews.com/automated-english-testing-seed-round/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Trade press for international education. Source for the seed round, the investors, the pre-seed amount and the first paying customer." }, { "title": "Internet Archive copy of the about page, 28 September 2022", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20220928154454/https://languageconfidence.ai/about-us/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Source for the nine people on the team page in 2022." }, { "title": "Internet Archive copy of the home page, 15 December 2018", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20181215044011/https://www.languageconfidence.ai/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. A \"Coming soon\" page. Source for the earliest date the website was online." }, { "title": "Language Confidence: API pricing", "url": "https://languageconfidence.ai/pricing/api-pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026. Source for the API plans and the prices per 15 seconds." }, { "title": "Language Confidence: SnapShot pricing", "url": "https://languageconfidence.ai/pricing/snapshot-pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026. Source for the test packs and the branding add-ons." }, { "title": "Language Confidence: SnapShot/Oracy privacy policy, last updated 5 June 2024", "url": "https://languageconfidence.ai/policy/app-privacy-policy", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on collected data and on minors. Source for the age and parental-consent clause and the company name." }, { "title": "Language Confidence: API products", "url": "https://languageconfidence.ai/products/api-product", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026. Source for the IPA scoring with Oxford Languages and the integration steps." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/synta/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/synta.md", "slug": "synta", "name": "Synta", "country": "Germany (the Flippa listing and the company's GitHub profile; the terms choose United States law)", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI assistant and MCP server that builds, deploys, tests and repairs n8n automation workflows from plain-English requests", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "August 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$7.8K monthly recurring revenue verified on Flippa, October 2026", "sticker": "$7.8K MRR, Flippa-verified", "outcomeUsd": 93120, "months": 14, "teamLabel": "1 founder listed on TrustMRR, who signs as Vik, with no co-founders listed; the Flippa listing says the tool began inside an agency; headcount not published", "fundingLabel": "None disclosed by the seller; TrustMRR's automatic summary says \"VC Funded\" and \"Y Combinator backed\", which Y Combinator's company directory does not confirm", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "build-software", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Workflow automation" ], "product": "A user describes an automation in plain English; the example on the home page is a workflow that fetches customer reviews, groups them, has an AI agent summarize them and writes the results to Google Sheets. Synta's web assistant, called Copilot, turns the request into an n8n workflow with the right nodes and settings. A second part, the Synta MCP server, connects AI coding tools such as Cursor, Claude Code or ChatGPT to the user's own n8n installation, so that the AI can create the workflow there, run it, read the output of every step and fix the errors.", "why": "In n8n each node has its own settings, and Synta says that \"Most AI tools hallucinate n8n configs\", which means they invent settings that do not exist. Synta sells the missing knowledge: a database of more than 800 node schemas, workflow patterns and templates, plus a loop that runs the workflow and repairs it. It is a narrow product for the users of one platform, sold as a subscription from US$34 a month.", "summary": [ "Synta helps people build automations in n8n, a workflow automation tool in which a user connects apps through a workflow: a chain of steps, called nodes, for example a step that receives an email, a step that extracts an invoice from it and a step that adds a row to a spreadsheet. Building such a chain by hand means setting every field of every node. Synta's Copilot writes the workflow from a plain-English request, and its MCP server lets other AI assistants do the same. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is a standard way for an AI assistant to call outside tools; here the tools search Synta's node database, deploy the workflow to the user's n8n, run it and read the result of each node.", "The site was online by 6 August 2025, when the first archived copy shows a Starter plan at US$19.99 a month and \"30+ Happy Users\". The only person named is a founder who signs as Vik on TrustMRR, a site that reads a startup's revenue directly from its payment processor. Archived copies of that profile, verified with the company's Stripe key, show monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the subscription income that repeats every month, of US$7,688 in December 2025, a peak of US$14,909 on 1 June 2026, and US$11,019 on 6 August 2026, with US$122,329 of revenue in total by then.", "On 27 October 2026 the business was offered for sale on Flippa, a marketplace for websites and online businesses. Flippa's vetting team says it verified the revenue, and the seller connected Stripe to the listing, which shows MRR of US$7,760 and a monthly profit of US$5,393. That is the headline figure of this page, graded A, and it is 47.9% below the June peak. The page also lists what is not verified: who else works on the product, the funding labels, and the customer logos on the home page." ], "pricing": { "caption": "Synta plans on 27 October 2026, from the pricing section of the company's home page (grade C)", "note": "The page shows the monthly prices and a switch \"Annually Save 30%\"; the yearly prices themselves load by script and were not in the downloaded page, so the yearly column is calculated: 34 × 0.7 = 23.80 and 67 × 0.7 = 46.90. Every plan includes deployment through Synta MCP. In the first archived copy, of 6 August 2025, the plans were Starter at US$19.99 a month with 100 credits and Pro at US$49.99 a month with 300 credits.", "rows": [ [ "Free trial", "0", "0", "3 days of Standard with 40 AI credits" ], [ "Standard", "23.80 (calculated)", "34", "150 credits a month, up to 10 AI-generated workflows, email support" ], [ "Pro", "46.90 (calculated)", "67", "450 credits a month, unlimited AI-generated workflows, team features" ], [ "Enterprise", "custom", "custom", "Unlimited credits, account manager, SLA" ] ] }, "factsCaption": "US$7,760 of monthly recurring revenue on Flippa on 27 October 2026, fourteen months after the first archived copy of the site, down from a Stripe-verified peak of US$14,909 in June 2026", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was verified through Stripe, the payment processor, either by Flippa (vetted listing with Stripe connected) or by TrustMRR (Stripe API key). A grade B value is a record kept by a third party, such as an archive copy or a platform's listing history. A grade C value was written by the seller, by the company on its own pages, or by an automatic summary. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a site with \"30+ Happy Users\" in August 2025 to a Stripe-verified peak of US$14,909 MRR in June 2026, and back to US$7,760 in October 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 27 October 2026", "value": "US$7,760", "grade": "A", "note": "Flippa listing, read 27 October 2026: \"MRR USD $7,760\". The listing is a \"Vetted + Data Verified Listing\": \"Our vetting team has reviewed this listing and verified: Revenue Primary Expenses Traffic\", and \"The seller has also connected the following data integrations: Stripe\". Flippa pages carry no date for the figure, so the date is the day the live listing was read. Calculated: US$93,120 a year at that rate.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue on Flippa's list card, 27 October 2026", "value": "US$7.98K", "grade": "A", "note": "Flippa SaaS list, page 2: \"Synta Data Verified [Stripe]\", \"Monthly Revenue USD $7.98K\", \"Monthly Profit USD $5.39K\", \"Listed by Owner\". The card rounds the figure and does not say which month it covers.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly profit and churn, 27 October 2026", "value": "US$5,393 a month profit; overall churn 12%", "grade": "B", "note": "Flippa listing: \"Monthly Profit USD $5,393 /mo\" and \"Overall Churn 12%\". Flippa's team vetted the primary expenses; the expenses do not come from Stripe, so the profit is graded B. Calculated: 5,393 divided by 7,760 is a profit margin of 69.5%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR, 1 June 2026 (the highest figure found)", "value": "US$14,909 from 329 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "Archived TrustMRR profile, \"Last updated: Jun 1, 2026, 06:50 PM\", revenue verified with a Stripe API key: currentMrr 14,908.61, revenue in the last 30 days US$13,974, total revenue US$94,576.", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "fact": "MRR, 3 July 2026", "value": "US$13,061 from 283 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "Archived TrustMRR profile, last updated 3 July 2026: revenue in the last 30 days US$12,896, total revenue US$108,274.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "MRR and total revenue, 6 August 2026", "value": "US$11,019 MRR from 230 active subscriptions; US$122,329 of revenue since the start", "grade": "A", "note": "Archived TrustMRR profile: \"All-time revenue $122,329\", \"MRR $11,019\", \"230 active subscriptions\", \"Revenue is verified with Stripe API key. Last updated: Aug 6, 2026, 11:39 AM\". Revenue in the last 30 days was US$10,788, and the profit margin of the last 30 days 92%.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "MRR and total revenue, 10 December 2025", "value": "US$7,688 MRR from 218 active subscriptions; US$11,399 of revenue since the start", "grade": "A", "note": "Archived TrustMRR profile, last updated 10 December 2025, verified with a Stripe API key; revenue in the last 30 days US$7,126. Calculated: the October 2026 MRR on Flippa is 0.9% above this December 2025 figure.", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "fact": "Fall from the June 2026 peak to October 2026", "value": "47.9%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: (14,908.61 − 7,760) divided by 14,908.61. From 1 June to 6 August 2026 MRR fell 26.1%, and from 6 August to 27 October another 29.6%.", "src": [ 1, 3, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Subscriber counts", "value": "450 on Flippa (October 2026); 230 on TrustMRR (August 2026)", "grade": "C", "note": "Flippa: \"Total Active Subscribers 450\"; the seller's title says \"400+ subscribers\". TrustMRR counts 230 active Stripe subscriptions on 6 August 2026. Calculated: US$7,760 divided by 450 is US$17.24 a subscriber, below the cheapest plan of US$34, so the two sources probably count different things.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Seller's own figures in the Flippa title", "value": "\"~$15.4K MRR, 400+ subscribers, 78% gross margin\"", "grade": "C", "note": "The title does not match the verified MRR of US$7,760 on the same page. It is close to the TrustMRR peak of US$14,909 in June 2026.", "src": [ 1, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Asking prices (not sale prices)", "value": "US$300,000 on Flippa, October 2026; US$100,000 on TrustMRR, August 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "Flippa: \"Asking Price (Classified) USD $300,000\". TrustMRR's listing history: first listed for sale on 5 December 2025 at US$100,000; a new profile listed on 25 May 2026 at US$250,000, then US$200,000, US$300,000, US$200,000, US$140,000 and, from 4 July 2026, US$100,000. Calculated: US$300,000 is 3.22 times the October revenue rate of US$93,120 a year.", "src": [ 1, 3, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Site online", "value": "by 6 August 2025", "grade": "B", "note": "The first Wayback Machine copy of synta.io is dated 6 August 2025 and already shows prices and \"Free 3-day trial for the first 50 customers (12 left)\". TrustMRR gives the founding date as 11 September 2025, which is later than that copy; Flippa gives \"Site Age 1 year\".", "src": [ 8, 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Founder", "value": "one founder who signs as Vik", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR: \"Vik\", \"Founder of Synta\", with no co-founders listed. No source gives a full name. The company's terms and privacy policy name only \"Synta\" and the address info@synta.io, and no legal entity.", "src": [ 3, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Origin", "value": "an internal tool of an agency", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller's text on Flippa: \"Originally created as an internal tool for an agency, this platform quickly gained popularity on a social media platform\". The listing does not name the agency or the social media platform.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Country", "value": "Germany", "grade": "C", "note": "Flippa: \"Business Location Germany\". The GitHub organization Synta-ai lists \"Germany\", https://synta.io and info@synta.io. The terms say they are governed by \"the laws of the United States\".", "src": [ 1, 11, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Funding", "value": "not disclosed; the labels \"VC Funded\" and \"Y Combinator backed\" are not confirmed", "grade": "C", "note": "On TrustMRR these two labels sit in an automatic summary of the landing page (the data field \"aiEnrichment\", made on 25 May 2026), not in a statement by the founder or an investor. The home page shows a Y Combinator logo under \"Trusted by teams at\". Y Combinator's company directory answered 404 for the pages synta, synta-ai and synta-io on 27 October 2026.", "src": [ 3, 7, 14 ] }, { "fact": "Usage claimed on the home page, October 2026", "value": "16,374+ users, 90,256+ workflows created", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page: \"16374+ Users\", \"15450+ Hours Saved\", \"90256+ Workflows Created\". The company's own counts; in August 2025 the page said \"30+ Happy Users\" and \"100+ Workflows Created\".", "src": [ 7, 8 ] }, { "fact": "AI model", "value": "Anthropic's Claude; the app shows \"Sonnet 4.5\"", "grade": "C", "note": "The home page shows the model selector \"Agent Sonnet 4.5\" in the Copilot screens, and TrustMRR's tech stack lists \"Anthropic\" for the backend.", "src": [ 7, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the first archived copy to the October 2026 figure", "value": "14 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: August 2025 to October 2026.", "src": [ 1, 8 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "6 August 2025", "what": "First archived copy of synta.io: \"Build Perfect Workflows with AI Assistance\", Starter at US$19.99 and Pro at US$49.99 a month, \"Free 3-day trial for the first 50 customers (12 left)\" and \"30+ Happy Users\". The page says the user downloads the workflow and deploys it.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "11 September 2025", "what": "The founding date that the founder's TrustMRR profile gives.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "5 December 2025", "what": "Synta is listed for sale on TrustMRR at US$100,000.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "10 December 2025", "what": "TrustMRR, from Stripe: MRR US$7,688 from 218 subscriptions, US$11,399 of revenue since the start.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "27 March 2026", "what": "New terms take effect, with long rules on renewals, cancellation and payment disputes.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "9 April 2026", "what": "A post in the n8n Community forum presents Synta MCP: it can \"execute all trigger types, including manual triggers\" and return the input and output data of each node.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "25 May 2026", "what": "A new TrustMRR profile is created and listed for sale at US$250,000; two days later the asking price is US$300,000.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "1 June 2026", "what": "Highest MRR in the sources: US$14,909 from 329 subscriptions, verified through Stripe.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "3 July 2026", "what": "MRR US$13,061. The next day the asking price on TrustMRR falls to US$100,000.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 4, 3 ] }, { "when": "6 August 2026", "what": "MRR US$11,019 from 230 subscriptions; US$122,329 of revenue in total.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "27 October 2026", "what": "Flippa listing, vetted with Stripe connected: MRR US$7,760, monthly profit US$5,393, asking price US$300,000. The TrustMRR profile answers \"Not found\".", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1, 3 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Knowledge that the model lacks", "text": "General AI models often invent n8n settings. Synta keeps \"800+ verified node schemas, real workflow patterns, and curated templates\" and gives them to the model, so each node is configured from the real schema. A node schema is the list of fields and allowed values of one n8n step." }, { "title": "Run, read, repair", "text": "Synta MCP deploys the workflow to the user's own n8n, starts a test run, reads the output of every node and changes the settings until the run passes. The April 2026 forum post says this works for every trigger type, including manual and schedule triggers, and that standard n8n MCP servers could not start those." }, { "title": "Two ways to use it", "text": "Beginners use the web Copilot. Developers connect Synta MCP to the AI tool they already use, such as Cursor, Claude Code or ChatGPT. Every paid plan includes direct deployment through Synta MCP, and the trial gives \"Full access to Copilot and Synta MCP\"." }, { "title": "Credits on a subscription", "text": "Standard costs US$34 a month for 150 credits and Pro US$67 a month for 450 credits, after a 3-day trial with 40 credits. The credits cap how much AI work one customer can use each month. Flippa reports a monthly profit of US$5,393 on US$7,760 of MRR." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's TrustMRR profile (grade C for the tech stack), the company's home page and forum post (grade C) and its public GitHub repository. No source describes the code in detail.", "items": [ "React, Next.js and TypeScript for the web app, according to the TrustMRR tech stack; the home page loads Next.js files.", "Anthropic's models behind Copilot: the screens show \"Sonnet 4.5\", and the tech stack lists Anthropic. Google Cloud and Firebase run the backend.", "Stripe takes the subscription payments; TrustMRR and Flippa both read the revenue from Stripe.", "A database of more than 800 n8n node schemas, workflow patterns and templates, which the MCP tools search_nodes, get_node and search_templates read.", "Open-source rules and prompts for AI coding agents in the GitHub repository Synta-ai/n8n-mcp-rules, under the MIT license, with the MCP documentation at mcp-docs.synta.io.", "78 blog articles on n8n topics in the site map in October 2026, such as node guides and comparisons with Zapier, Make and n8n's own MCP server." ], "src": [ 3, 7, 10, 12, 13 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to make integrations or automation easy without programming, before language models could write the configuration. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Xkit", "years": "2018 to 2021", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A platform that made it simple for software teams to connect and manage third-party API integrations.", "died": "Zapier's lead and do-it-yourself cloud tools left no room, and the company could not keep up with its own integration work and costs, according to the database.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1412-xkit" }, { "name": "Solid", "years": "2017 to 2025", "funding": "US$81M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "One API layer to connect CRMs, ERPs and HR systems without custom integration work.", "died": "Enterprise integrations were more complex than expected; high sales costs, long sales cycles and support costs broke the unit economics, according to the database.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2479-solid" }, { "name": "Pathmind", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "AI simulations that automate business decisions for companies without AI experts.", "died": "The market was not ready for a complex product, and large cloud companies offered AI tools of their own, according to the database.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1070-pathmind" }, { "name": "Appcubator", "years": "2013 to 2016", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Product/Tech Failure", "promise": "A drag-and-drop builder for apps, with no programming needed.", "died": "Users were not ready for no-code tools, and more flexible competitors such as Bubble won, according to the database.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1160-appcubator" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Xkit and Solid sold the plumbing between apps and had to build and maintain every connector themselves, which cost more than customers paid. Appcubator and Pathmind tried to hide technical work behind a visual editor or a simulation, and users still had to understand the details. The work of turning a business wish into exact settings stayed with a human.", "n8n already provides the connectors, so Synta does not maintain any. A language model now turns the wish into settings, and Synta adds only the part the model gets wrong: the real node schemas and a loop that runs and repairs the workflow. That is why a product with one named founder could reach US$14,909 of verified MRR within about ten months of its first archived page. The weakness is also new: Synta depends on one platform, and n8n offers its own MCP server, which Synta's blog compares with its own." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The pattern, yes. This exact product, crowded.", "text": "Synta shows that a specialist layer on top of a popular tool can sell: the model is rented, the platform is someone else's, and the value is the curated knowledge and the test loop. The same layer is easy to imitate for n8n, and the verified MRR fell from US$14,909 in June to US$7,760 in October 2026 while the owner tried to sell the business.", "steps": [ "Pick a platform whose users are many, technical enough to pay, and stuck on configuration that general AI models get wrong.", "Collect the platform's real schemas, patterns and templates into a database, and give them to the model at each request.", "Add a test step: run the result, read the output, and repair it automatically, so the customer gets something that works, not a draft.", "Offer both a web app for beginners and an MCP server for developers, with one credit-based subscription.", "Connect the payment processor to a revenue-verification site from the start, so buyers and readers can check the figures." ], "open": "Other automation and configuration platforms with large user bases and complex settings, such as data-pipeline tools, home-automation systems or company-internal workflow tools, may still lack a specialist layer that tests and repairs what the model writes." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Revenue fell by half after June", "text": "Verified MRR was US$14,909 on 1 June 2026, US$13,061 on 3 July, US$11,019 on 6 August and US$7,760 on 27 October, a fall of 47.9%. The October figure is about the same as the US$7,688 of December 2025. It is still 288% above this site's floor of US$2,000 a month." }, { "title": "For sale for most of its life", "text": "The product was first listed for sale on TrustMRR on 5 December 2025, about four months after the first archived copy of the site. The asking price on TrustMRR moved between US$300,000 and US$100,000 from May to July 2026; Flippa shows US$300,000 in October. The founder wrote on TrustMRR that the reason for selling is that \"other opportunities exist\" and \"personal reasons including the passing of a family member\". An asking price is not a sale price." }, { "title": "Numbers that do not agree", "text": "The Flippa title says \"~$15.4K MRR, 400+ subscribers, 78% gross margin\", while the verified MRR on the same page is US$7,760. Flippa counts 450 active subscribers and TrustMRR 230 subscriptions. TrustMRR gives 11 September 2025 as the founding date, but the site was live with prices on 6 August 2025." }, { "title": "Funding labels and logos not verified", "text": "TrustMRR's automatic summary of the landing page says \"VC Funded\" and \"Y Combinator backed\". No founder or investor statement supports it, and Y Combinator's directory has no page for Synta under three names tried. The home page shows 22 logos under \"Trusted by teams at\", among them Twilio, Y Combinator, Ethereum, eToro, MIT, GetYourGuide and PandaDoc, without saying who at those organizations uses the product; this page found no testimonial quotes, only the logo row, and could not verify any of the logos." }, { "title": "Who runs it", "text": "The only named person is a founder who signs as Vik, with no surname in any source. The terms and privacy policy name no legal entity and no address, the listing says Germany while the terms choose United States law, and the seller says the tool began inside an unnamed agency. The headcount is not published; this page counts the story as solo because TrustMRR lists one founder and no co-founders." }, { "title": "One platform", "text": "Synta exists only for n8n users. n8n offers its own MCP server, and Synta's blog has an article comparing n8n's native MCP with Synta. If n8n builds the same knowledge and test loop into its product, Synta's main reason to exist becomes smaller." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://synta.io" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Flippa listing 12248210: Synta, AI SaaS that converts plain English into production-ready n8n workflows, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://flippa.com/12248210-ai-saas-that-converts-plain-english-into-production-ready-n8n-workflows-15-4k-mrr-400-subscribers-78-gross-margin-no-code-automation-for-n8n-users", "grade": "A", "how": "Read in full as an anonymous visitor (the seller, website and financial details need an account; no sign-in was used). Source for the MRR, profit, churn, subscriber count, location, site age, the vetting block with Stripe connected, the asking price and the seller's description. The site's robots.txt allows listing pages." }, { "title": "Flippa SaaS listings with at least US$2,000 monthly revenue, page 2, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://flippa.com/buy/saas?filter%5Brevenue_per_month%5D%5Bmin%5D=2000&page_size=100&page=2&pagination=true", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the card for Synta: \"Data Verified [Stripe]\", monthly revenue and profit, \"Listed by Owner\"." }, { "title": "TrustMRR profile: Synta, archived copy of 6 August 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260806173807/https://trustmrr.com/startup/synta", "grade": "A", "how": "The live Markdown profile https://trustmrr.com/startup/synta.md answered 404 \"Not found\" on 27 October 2026, so the Wayback Machine copy was read in full, with the data embedded in the page. The revenue figures are \"verified with Stripe API key\" (grade A); the founder name, tech stack, marketing channels and seller message are the founder's entries (grade C); the funding labels are in TrustMRR's automatic summary." }, { "title": "TrustMRR profile: Synta, archived copy of 3 July 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260703173047/https://trustmrr.com/startup/synta", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the Stripe-verified metrics and the sync date in the embedded data." }, { "title": "TrustMRR profile: Synta, archived copy of 1 June 2026", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260601223945/https://trustmrr.com/startup/synta", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the Stripe-verified metrics, the sync date and the asking price in the embedded data." }, { "title": "TrustMRR profile: Synta, archived copy of 10 December 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20251210205926/https://trustmrr.com/startup/synta", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the Stripe-verified metrics, the sync date and the first for-sale date in the embedded data. This copy belongs to an earlier profile of the same startup (the later profile was created on 25 May 2026)." }, { "title": "Synta home page: Build and Edit n8n Workflows with AI, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://synta.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the pricing section and the FAQ. The site's robots.txt allows all paths except /api/. The /pricing address answered 404; the prices are on the home page." }, { "title": "Synta home page, Wayback Machine copy of 6 August 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20250806123717/https://synta.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The earliest archived copy; source for the first prices and user counts." }, { "title": "Synta terms and conditions, effective 27 March 2026, and privacy policy", "url": "https://synta.io/terms-and-conditions", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the privacy policy at https://synta.io/privacy-policy. Neither names a legal entity or a person." }, { "title": "n8n Community, 9 April 2026: I Built an n8n MCP Server that makes Claude, OpenClaw and Cursor and an end-to-end n8n specialist", "url": "https://community.n8n.io/t/i-built-an-n8n-mcp-server-that-makes-claude-openclaw-and-cursor-and-an-end-to-end-n8n-specialist/286092", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A post by the account friendly-synta-boi that links synta.io, the MCP documentation and the GitHub repository. The forum's robots.txt allows topic pages." }, { "title": "GitHub organization Synta-ai", "url": "https://github.com/Synta-ai", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The profile lists Germany, https://synta.io and info@synta.io, 4 public repositories and no public members. GitHub's robots.txt group for ClaudeBot allows this path." }, { "title": "GitHub repository Synta-ai/n8n-mcp-rules", "url": "https://github.com/Synta-ai/n8n-mcp-rules", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the README: rules and prompts for AI coding agents, MIT license, \"Brought by Synta\"." }, { "title": "Synta site map, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://synta.io/sitemap.xml", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the count of 78 blog articles; one article was read to see the author line \"Team Synta\"." }, { "title": "Y Combinator company directory, pages for synta, synta-ai and synta-io, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/synta", "grade": "C", "how": "All three addresses answered 404 \"File Not Found\". Cited only to show that the \"Y Combinator backed\" label could not be confirmed. The site's robots.txt allows /companies/ pages." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/value-ai/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/value-ai.md", "slug": "value-ai", "name": "Value AI: Item Price Scanner", "country": "United States (the Flippa listing gives California)", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "iPhone app for resellers that identifies an item from a photo, estimates its resale value from eBay sold prices and posts an eBay listing", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "January 2026", "outcomeLabel": "About US$2.3K monthly recurring revenue, October 2026", "sticker": "$2.3K MRR on Flippa", "outcomeUsd": 27600, "months": 9, "teamLabel": "1 creator, as the Flippa listing describes the seller; the App Store names one developer, Carter Clark; headcount not published", "fundingLabel": "None disclosed", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "paid-ads", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "phone-app", "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 3, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Reselling" ], "product": "An iPhone app for people who buy used goods cheaply and sell them again online. The user takes a photo of an item, for example a jacket at a thrift store; the app names the item, gives an estimated resale value and price range, shows recent eBay sold prices for similar items and a \"Flip Score\" for how easy the item is to resell. One more tap writes a full eBay listing, with title, description, price and shipping, and uploads it to the user's own eBay seller account.", "why": "Resellers decide in the shop whether an item is worth buying, and later write a sales listing for each item they bought. The app does both steps from one photo. The Flippa listing states that it was paid for by weekly and annual subscriptions, that most downloads came from App Store search and Apple Search Ads, and that the API and software cost about US$35 a month.", "summary": [ "Value AI is an iPhone app for resellers, people who buy used goods at thrift stores, garage sales and flea markets and sell them again online, for example on eBay. The user photographs an item; the app identifies it, estimates what it would sell for, and shows the prices at which similar items actually sold on eBay in the last 30 or 90 days. Since April 2026 it can also write a complete eBay listing and post it to the user's own eBay account. The App Store names one developer, Carter Clark. The app's version history starts with version 1.4 on 27 January 2026, and it had 113 ratings with an average of 4.5 on 27 October 2026.", "On 27 October 2026 the app was offered for sale on Flippa, a marketplace for buying and selling websites, apps and online businesses, at an asking price of US$52,000. The seller's text says that the app has about 151 active subscribers and monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the subscription income that repeats every month, of about US$2,300. Flippa's summary card shows monthly revenue of about US$2,030, and the listing a monthly profit of US$1,557. The seller wrote that revenue peaked at more than US$4,000 a month after launch and then fell when the creator spent less on advertising.", "The listing is a vetted listing: Flippa says its vetting team reviewed the information and verified revenue, primary expenses and traffic. Flippa does not say how it checked them, and the listing connects no payment provider, so this page grades the figures C, a seller statement that a reviewer checked. The Flippa listing does not name the app's developer or link to its App Store page; this page matched them by the app's name, features, rating and location." ], "factsCaption": "About US$2,300 of monthly recurring revenue from about 151 subscribers, as stated in a vetted Flippa listing read on 27 October 2026, nine months after the oldest version in the App Store history", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade B value is a record kept by a third party, here the App Store's own data on the developer, ratings and version dates. A grade C value was written by the seller on Flippa, or by the developer in the App Store text; Flippa's vetting team says it reviewed the revenue, but no payment processor confirms it. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From version 1.4 on 27 January 2026 to a vetted Flippa listing with about US$2,300 of MRR on 27 October 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Value AI subscriptions on 27 October 2026, from the in-app purchase list on the US App Store page (grade B)", "note": "All plans are in-app purchases billed by Apple. The App Store lists two annual prices, US$99.99 and US$124.99, and does not say which users see which; the per-month figures for the annual plans are calculated (99.99 / 12 = 8.33 and 124.99 / 12 = 10.42). The weekly plan costs US$7.99 a week, which is US$34.62 a month if paid for a full year of weeks (calculated: 7.99 × 52 / 12). The App Store text says: \"Free scans are limited. Full access requires a subscription.\"", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "a limited number of scans" ], [ "Premium Weekly", "", "7.99 a week", "full access" ], [ "Premium Monthly", "", "12.99", "full access" ], [ "Premium Annual", "8.33 (99.99 a year)", "", "full access" ], [ "Premium Annual, second price", "10.42 (124.99 a year)", "", "full access" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, 27 October 2026", "value": "about US$2,300, from about 151 active subscribers", "grade": "C", "note": "Flippa listing, read 27 October 2026: \"With approximately 151 active subscribers, the app generates a Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) of about $2.3K.\" The listing is marked \"Vetted Listing\": \"Our vetting team has reviewed this listing and verified: Revenue Primary Expenses Traffic\". No payment integration is connected. Calculated: US$27,600 a year at that rate, and about US$15.23 a subscriber a month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue on Flippa's list card, 27 October 2026", "value": "US$2,030", "grade": "C", "note": "Flippa list of apps with at least US$2,000 monthly revenue: \"Monthly Revenue USD $2.03K\", \"Monthly Profit USD $1.56K\", \"Marketplace · Listed by Owner\". Calculated: 11.7% below the MRR in the seller's text. Flippa does not say which month the card covers, or whether the figures are before or after Apple's commission.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly profit, 27 October 2026", "value": "US$1,557, a 77% profit margin", "grade": "C", "note": "Flippa listing: \"Monthly Profit USD $1,557 /mo\" and \"Profit Margin 77%\". Calculated: 1,557 divided by 2,030 is 76.7%.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last three months, to October 2026", "value": "more than US$10,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller's title on Flippa: \"$10K+ revenue in the last 3 months\". Calculated: at least US$3,333 a month on average, more than the current monthly figure, which agrees with the fall the seller describes.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Peak revenue", "value": "more than US$4,000 a month gross, undated", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller's text: \"the app experienced rapid growth post-launch, peaking at over $4K in gross monthly revenue. However, revenue has seen a slight decline due to reduced acquisition efforts\". Calculated: US$2,300 is 42.5% below US$4,000.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Costs", "value": "advertising is the largest; API and software about US$35 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller's text: \"The largest expense is advertising, with other costs, such as API and software, remaining low at about $35 per month collectively.\" The listing does not give the advertising amount.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Downloads", "value": "890 a month on average", "grade": "C", "note": "Flippa listing: \"Avg. Downloads 890 /mo\". The seller's text says most downloads come from App Store traffic and Apple Search Ads.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price (not a sale price), 27 October 2026", "value": "US$52,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Flippa: \"Asking Price (Classified) USD $52,000\", with \"Profit Multiple 4.8x\" and \"Revenue Multiple 3.7x\", whose basis Flippa does not explain. Calculated: US$52,000 is 1.88 times the yearly MRR rate of US$27,600.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Developer", "value": "Carter Clark", "grade": "B", "note": "US App Store page: \"Developer Carter Clark\", \"Seller Carter Clark\", \"Copyright © 2025 Carter Clark\". The same developer publishes one other app, Fried: Screen Time Control. The Flippa listing hides the seller from visitors who are not signed in, so it does not confirm the name.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Match between the Flippa listing and the App Store app", "value": "same name, features, rating and country", "grade": "C", "note": "Flippa: \"Value AI: Item Price Scanner\", \"iOS App\", \"4.5 | 101 App Store reviews\", \"built-in eBay listing automation\", \"CA, United States\". App Store: \"Value AI is an AI item price scanner for resellers\", 4.5 from 113 ratings, \"list directly to your eBay account\", US storefront. The store title on 27 October 2026 was \"Value AI: Resale Price Scanner\". A different app named Value AI, by another developer, had 3 ratings and no eBay features.", "src": [ 1, 3, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Start of the app", "value": "by 27 January 2026", "grade": "B", "note": "The oldest entry in the App Store version history is version 1.4 on 27 January 2026, so earlier versions came before it. The seller's text says \"In February 2026, an iOS subscription app was launched\", and Flippa gives \"App Age 1 year\".", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "App Store ratings, 27 October 2026", "value": "4.5 from 113 ratings; age rating 4+", "grade": "B", "note": "US App Store page. The Flippa listing showed 4.5 from 101 reviews on the same day, probably copied earlier.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Versions in 2026", "value": "18 versions, from 1.4 (27 January) to 2.0.7 (12 October)", "grade": "B", "note": "App Store version history. Counted: 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, 1.8, 1.9, 1.9.2, 1.9.5, 1.9.6, 1.9.7, 1.9.9, 2.0.0, 2.0.1, 2.0.2, 2.0.3, 2.0.5, 2.0.6 and 2.0.7, so 17 updates after version 1.4 in about eight and a half months.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Work needed", "value": "2 to 5 hours a week", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller's text: \"The operation requires an estimated 2 to 5 hours per week\", for monitoring, occasional support, advertising and \"development coordination for necessary updates\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the oldest listed version to the October 2026 figure", "value": "9 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: January 2026 to October 2026.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2025", "what": "The copyright line on the App Store page is \"Copyright © 2025 Carter Clark\".", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "27 January 2026", "what": "Version 1.4, the oldest entry in the App Store version history.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "30 January 2026", "what": "Version 1.5 refreshes the home screen and \"updated referral code logic to make rewards more reliable\".", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "February 2026", "what": "The seller's account on Flippa: \"In February 2026, an iOS subscription app was launched specifically for resellers and thrifters.\"", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "3 March 2026", "what": "Version 1.8: a \"Major backend AI upgrade\", results that pull \"from real-time market data\", and a new \"Flip Score\".", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "19 April 2026", "what": "Version 1.9: list items to eBay in one tap; the app writes a filled listing and uploads it \"directly to your eBay seller account\".", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "29 April 2026", "what": "Version 1.9.2: values in US dollars, euros, pounds, Canadian and Australian dollars.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "1 August 2026", "what": "Version 2.0.3: shipping settings, package weight and size before listing on eBay.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "12 October 2026", "what": "Version 2.0.7: real eBay sold listings with 30-day and 90-day sales history; the developer states that estimated pricing accuracy rose \"from 65% to up to 95%\" when eBay sales data is available.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "27 October 2026", "what": "Vetted Flippa listing: about US$2,300 MRR from about 151 subscribers, US$1,557 monthly profit, asking price US$52,000. The App Store shows 113 ratings averaging 4.5.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2, 3 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "One photo, two jobs", "text": "The same photo answers the buying question in the shop (what is it, what does it sell for, how fast) and does the selling work at home (title, description, price, shipping, upload to eBay). A reseller who checks dozens of items a week saves time at both ends." }, { "title": "Sold prices, not asking prices", "text": "The October 2026 update shows real eBay sold listings for similar items and 30-day and 90-day sales history. The App Store text stresses \"Compare recent sold prices, not just asking prices\": an asking price is what a seller hopes to get, a sold price is what a buyer actually paid." }, { "title": "Weekly subscriptions", "text": "The plans are US$7.99 a week, US$12.99 a month, or US$99.99 or US$124.99 a year, all billed by Apple. The seller wrote that the business model is \"primarily based on weekly and annual recurring subscriptions\"." }, { "title": "Paid installs inside the App Store", "text": "The seller wrote that most downloads come from App Store traffic and Apple Search Ads, the ads shown in App Store search results, and that revenue fell when the creator spent less on advertising. Advertising is the largest cost; the AI and software cost about US$35 a month, according to the listing." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the App Store page (the developer's description and release notes), the Flippa listing (the seller's text) and the app's support page. No source describes the code or names the AI model.", "items": [ "A native iPhone app, 37.3 MB, in English and French, that requires iOS 26.0 or later.", "An AI model identifies the item from the photo and estimates its value; the app's sources do not name the model or its provider. Since version 1.8 in March 2026 the developer says the AI \"pulls from real-time market data\".", "eBay is the market behind the product: sold-listing data for the price estimates since October 2026, and one-tap listing to the user's connected eBay seller account since April 2026. The sources do not say which eBay interfaces the app uses.", "Subscriptions are in-app purchases through Apple; the App Store lists weekly, monthly and two annual prices.", "The support page and the privacy policy are Notion pages, and support goes to a Gmail address; no product website was found.", "Customers come from App Store search and Apple Search Ads, according to the seller; the app averages 890 downloads a month." ], "src": [ 3, 1, 4 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database promised to recognize objects from a phone camera, to show the right price, or to make second-hand selling easy. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Moodstocks", "years": "2008 to 2016", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Point a phone camera at an object and get information about it instantly.", "died": "Google, with far larger resources in image recognition, bought it in 2016 and ended its independent product.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/351-moodstocks" }, { "name": "Looklive", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$2M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Find and buy the clothes that celebrities wear, through image recognition and retailer partners.", "died": "Depop, Poshmark and Instagram shopping offered more complete services, and its image recognition did not keep up with fast fashion changes.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1473-looklive" }, { "name": "Bountii", "years": "2007 to 2010", "funding": "US$1M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Compare prices for home and personal goods across many online stores.", "died": "Google Shopping put price comparison into search, and legal doubts about collecting data from other sites by scraping used up its resources.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1663-bountii" }, { "name": "Selltag", "years": "2013 to 2016", "funding": "US$1.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "List and sell second-hand goods to people nearby with less effort than classified ads.", "died": "It never reached the scale a marketplace needs; Wallapop and then Facebook Marketplace had more buyers and sellers.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/528-selltag" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Moodstocks and Looklive had to build their own image recognition with millions of dollars of funding, and lost to larger companies. Bountii had to collect prices from other stores and faced legal doubts about doing so. Selltag tried to build a new marketplace and could not attract enough buyers and sellers. All four were funded, and all four lost to larger companies such as Google, Instagram and Facebook Marketplace.", "Value AI does not build a recognition system or a marketplace. It uses an AI model to read the photo, which the seller listed among costs of about US$35 a month for API and software, and it sells on eBay, a market that already has the buyers. It is a small subscription business on top of two larger platforms, Apple and eBay, with one creator who, according to the listing, needs 2 to 5 hours a week. The risk of the predecessors remains: Google Lens, eBay's own apps and many similar App Store apps can offer the same photo-to-price step." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, and many already have.", "text": "The App Store page itself shows ten similar resale apps under \"You Might Also Like\", so the idea is easy to copy and the market is crowded. What this app added was the second half of the work, the eBay listing, and sold-price data instead of a bare AI guess. The listing shows how small such a business can stay: about 151 subscribers, low AI costs, and paid App Store ads as the main source of growth, which also means revenue falls when the ads stop, according to the seller.", "steps": [ "Pick a group of people who make the same quick decision many times a week, here whether a used item is worth buying.", "Answer it from one photo, and back the AI estimate with real transaction data, here eBay sold prices.", "Do the next task for them too, here writing and posting the listing, so the app saves time at both ends.", "Charge weekly or yearly through the App Store, and buy installs with Apple Search Ads only while each subscriber pays back the ad cost." ], "open": "Other markets with sold-price data and a listing step: sports cards, sneakers, books, furniture on local marketplaces, and the same tools for Vinted, Poshmark or Mercari sellers." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Seller figures, reviewed by Flippa, not by a payment processor", "text": "The MRR of about US$2,300 and the 151 subscribers come from the seller's text on Flippa. Flippa's vetting team says it verified revenue, primary expenses and traffic, but does not say how, and no payment provider is connected to the listing. Flippa's own card shows a lower US$2,030 a month. A reader could look for an App Store Connect or RevenueCat screenshot, or a later listing with a payment integration." }, { "title": "The listing does not name the developer", "text": "Flippa does not show visitors who are not signed in the seller's name or a link to the app, and no sign-in was used. This page matched the listing to the App Store app of developer Carter Clark by the name Value AI, the eBay listing feature, the 4.5 rating with about a hundred reviews, the US location and the 2026 start. A different App Store app named Value AI, by another developer, exists and was ruled out." }, { "title": "Revenue is falling", "text": "The seller wrote that revenue peaked at more than US$4,000 a month in gross monthly revenue and then declined \"due to reduced acquisition efforts and a lesser focus on scaling advertisements\". The current figure is 42.5% below that peak (calculated). Growth depends on paid App Store ads, whose cost the listing does not state." }, { "title": "A developer reply repeats a user's earnings", "text": "An App Store review of 16 February 2026 says the app \"Helped me make an extra $2000 over winter break\", and the developer replied on 24 June 2026: \"Making an extra $2,000 over winter break is incredible.\" The store description itself says \"Value AI provides estimates, not guaranteed sale prices.\" No other earnings claim appears on the App Store page or the support page." }, { "title": "Dependence on eBay", "text": "The price data and the listing feature both depend on eBay. The sources do not say whether the app uses eBay's official developer interfaces or how it reads sold listings. Version 2.0.1 \"Added private feedback collection for selected users\"; the release note does not say how users are selected." }, { "title": "Start date and figures disagree", "text": "The seller's text says the subscription app launched in February 2026, but the App Store history already shows version 1.4 on 27 January 2026, and Flippa gives an app age of 1 year. The asking price of US$52,000 is not a sale price." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6756802065" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Flippa listing 14286659: Value AI: Item Price Scanner, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://flippa.com/14286659-value-ai-item-price-scanner", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public part in full as an anonymous visitor on 27 October 2026; the seller, the store link and the detailed financials need an account and were not read. Source for the MRR, subscribers, profit, margin, downloads, location, app age, the vetting block, the asking price and the seller's description. Flippa's robots.txt allows listing pages." }, { "title": "Flippa iOS and Android app listings with at least US$2,000 monthly revenue, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://flippa.com/buy/apps?filter%5Brevenue_per_month%5D%5Bmin%5D=2000&page_size=100", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the card for Value AI: monthly revenue, monthly profit, profit multiple, age and \"Listed by Owner\"." }, { "title": "App Store (US): Value AI: Resale Price Scanner, Price Items, Auto-List on eBay, by Carter Clark, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/value-ai-resale-price-scanner/id6756802065", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Apple's records give the developer and seller name, ratings, age rating, in-app purchase prices and version dates (grade B); the description and release notes are the developer's text (grade C). The site's robots.txt allows app pages." }, { "title": "Value.ai Support, Notion page linked from the App Store listing, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.notion.so/Value-ai-Support-2cfab4bef70b80c68272de72a30df289", "grade": "C", "how": "The page loads by script; its text was read through Notion's page-data endpoint, which robots.txt allows. Source for the support contact by email and the notice that the app gives informational estimates only." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." }, { "title": "App Store (US): Value AI, Instant Item Valuation by AI, a different app by another developer, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/value-ai/id6754952395", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full to rule it out: 3 ratings, category Utilities, one plan of 50 analyses a month, no eBay features." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/visio/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/visio.md", "slug": "visio", "name": "Visio", "country": "Turkey", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "AI photo and face editor app: hairstyles, hair colour, outfits, makeup and headshots on your own selfie", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "B", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "4 September 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$73K net revenue in its first year, August 2026", "sticker": "$73K first-year net revenue", "outcomeUsd": 73000, "months": 12, "teamLabel": "Headcount not published; the Flippa listing says one person runs the app, which belongs to the Ankara app studio Vision Labs", "fundingLabel": "None found; no source names an investor", "primaryFactor": "Search", "group": "photos", "channel": "search", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 2, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Photography" ], "product": "A phone app for iPhone, iPad and Android that shows a new look on a photo of yourself before you commit to it: more than 100 hairstyles, hair colours, dresses and other clothes, glasses, makeup, studio-style photoshoots, LinkedIn headshots, background removal and cartoon or anime filters. You pick one selfie and one look, and the app returns an edited copy. It is free to download; the edits are sold as a weekly, monthly or yearly Visio Pro subscription or as one-time credit packs, all paid through Apple or Google.", "why": "A haircut, a dye job or a dress bought online is hard to undo, and the app sells a preview of the result for the price of a weekly subscription. According to the Flippa listing, the app made US$73,000 in net revenue in its first year mostly from people who found it by searching the App Store, with low advertising, and 80% of its iOS revenue in May 2026 came from renewals. The company also runs a website of hairstyle and colour guides in 58 languages that sends visitors to the stores.", "summary": [ "Visio is an AI photo editor: an app in which an image model, not a person with editing tools, changes a photo. The user uploads a selfie and picks a look, for example a bob cut, copper hair, a bridal dress or a business headshot, and the app sends the photo to a generative AI service (a model that draws new image content) and gets back the same face with the new hair, clothes or light. Its privacy policy says that Google does this processing and that Cloudflare stores the photos for a short time and delivers the results. The App Store lists the seller as VISION LABS YAZILIM HIZMETLERI ANONIM SIRKETI, a joint-stock company in Ankara, Turkey, which its own site says was founded in 2023. Version 1.0 was released on 4 September 2025.", "On 27 October 2026 the app was for sale on Flippa, a marketplace where owners sell websites and apps. The listing text says the app \"achieved a net revenue of $73K in its first year\" and that in the quarter ending August 2026 it \"recorded $8.6K in net revenue with a $6.7K profit\". Net revenue here is the money left after the app stores take their commission. Flippa marks the listing \"Vetted\": its team says it checked the revenue, the main costs and the traffic. The listing shows no link to a payment provider, so the figures are grade B on this page, not A. The listing says one person runs the app, in about four hours a week, and the asking price is US$42,000. An asking price is not a sale price.", "Flippa hides the seller's name from visitors who are not signed in, so the link between the listing and Vision Labs rests on facts that agree: the exact store name \"Visio - AI Photo & Face Editor\", the business location Turkey, an app age of one year, iOS and Android versions, and a website in 58 languages. The money also fell: the last quarter is about US$2,867 a month, less than half of the first-year average of about US$6,083 a month, both calculated on this page from the listing. The page also shows earlier companies that sold photo editing, selfie filters or trying on before buying, and failed." ], "factsCaption": "An AI hairstyle and outfit preview app from a Turkish app studio with US$73,000 in net revenue in its first year on a vetted Flippa listing, falling to about US$2,900 a month by mid-2026", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade B value is a figure from the Flippa listing, which Flippa's vetting team says it checked for revenue, primary expenses and traffic, without a payment-provider connection. A grade C value is the seller's own text, the App Store page or the company's own website. A grade X value was calculated on this page from the rows that it names. No value is grade A.", "timelineLead": "From the first App Store version in September 2025 to a vetted listing for sale at US$42,000 thirteen months later. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Visio in-app purchases listed on the US App Store on 27 October 2026 (grade C); the listing does not say which ones a new user is offered", "note": "The App Store shows eight in-app purchases, with two names for each subscription period (Visio and Visio Pro), which suggests that the app tests prices or has changed its plans. Per-month values for the yearly plans are calculated on this page (price divided by 12). A weekly price of US$7.99 is about US$34.62 a month. The company's site says each new account gets a free trial and that prices are set per country. The Starter Pack and Power Pack are one-time credit packs, added in version 1.9 on 9 November 2025. All payments go through Apple or Google; the terms say \"All sales are final\".", "rows": [ [ "Visio Weekly Subscription", "", "7.99 a week", "Visio subscription" ], [ "Visio Pro Weekly", "", "7.99 a week", "Visio Pro" ], [ "Visio Monthly Subscription", "", "9.99", "Visio subscription" ], [ "Visio Pro Monthly", "", "19.99", "Visio Pro" ], [ "Visio yearly Subscription", "4.17", "", "US$49.99 a year" ], [ "Visio Pro Yearly", "3.33", "", "US$39.99 a year" ], [ "Starter Pack", "4.99 one-time", "", "credits for occasional use" ], [ "Power Pack", "39.99 one-time", "", "credits for occasional use" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Net revenue in the first year", "value": "US$73,000", "grade": "B", "note": "Flippa listing, read 27 October 2026: \"achieved a net revenue of $73K in its first year\". Flippa: \"Our vetting team has reviewed this listing and verified: Revenue Primary Expenses Traffic\"; no payment-provider connection is shown. The listing gives no end month for the first year; its latest named period ends August 2026, and the app was released on 4 September 2025.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average net revenue per month in the first year", "value": "about US$6,083", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$73,000 divided by 12. It agrees with the US$6,210 a month on Flippa's search card.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly revenue and profit on the Flippa card, 27 October 2026", "value": "US$6,210 revenue, US$2,533 profit a month (41% margin)", "grade": "B", "note": "Search card: \"Monthly Revenue USD $6.21K\", \"Monthly Profit USD $2.53K\"; listing: \"Monthly Profit USD $2,533 /mo\", \"Profit Margin 41%\". Flippa does not say over which months it averages these values.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Net revenue and profit in the quarter ending August 2026", "value": "US$8,600 revenue, US$6,700 profit (78% margin)", "grade": "B", "note": "Listing: \"For the last quarter ending August 2026, the app recorded $8.6K in net revenue with a $6.7K profit, maintaining a high-profit margin of 78%, while keeping advertising spend notably low at under $1.9K.\"", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Net revenue per month in that quarter", "value": "about US$2,867", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$8,600 divided by 3. That is about 53% below the first-year average of US$6,083 a month.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Share of iOS revenue from renewals, May 2026", "value": "80%", "grade": "C", "note": "Listing: \"In May 2026, 80% of its iOS revenue stemmed from renewals by existing subscribers.\" A renewal is an existing subscriber paying again for the next week, month or year.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Downloads", "value": "2,794 a month on average", "grade": "C", "note": "Listing field \"Avg. Downloads 2,794 /mo\". The period is not stated.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Margin in the listing title", "value": "\"84-97% margin\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Title: \"Organicly growing AI hairstyle & photo app (iOS + Android): 84-97% margin, ~600 organic web clicks/day in 58 languages, Low-maintenance, 500+ owned templates\". This does not agree with the 41% margin in the listing fields; the listing does not explain the difference.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price, 27 October 2026", "value": "US$42,000, reduced from US$48,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Listing: \"Asking Price (Classified) USD $48,000 USD $42,000 Reduced 13%\", \"Profit Multiple 1.4x\", \"Revenue Multiple 0.6x\". Calculated: US$42,000 divided by twelve months of US$2,533 profit is 1.38. An asking price, not a sale price.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Developer and seller on the App Store", "value": "VISION LABS YAZILIM HIZMETLERI ANONIM SIRKETI", "grade": "C", "note": "App Store: \"Seller VISION LABS YAZILIM HIZMETLERI ANONIM SIRKETI\". The company's page gives the trade name \"Vision Labs Yazılım Hizmetleri A.Ş.\" (Vision Labs Software Services Inc., translation) and the Ankara trade registry. Its home page: \"founded in Ankara 2023\".", "src": [ 3, 10, 6 ] }, { "fact": "Who runs the app", "value": "one person, about four hours a week", "grade": "C", "note": "Listing: \"Operational demands are minimal, requiring around four hours per week mostly for ASO updates, with the app currently managed by a single person.\" The company publishes no headcount.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "AI processing and storage", "value": "Google and Cloudflare", "grade": "C", "note": "Privacy policy: \"Google: Used to perform generative AI processing on the photos you submit\" and \"Cloudflare: Used to store photos temporarily for processing\". The site says the app does not store face templates.", "src": [ 8, 4 ] }, { "fact": "App Store age rating", "value": "4+", "grade": "C", "note": "App Store: \"Age Rating 4+\"; the company's Visio page: \"Ages 4+\". The terms of use state no minimum age.", "src": [ 3, 7, 9 ] }, { "fact": "App Store rating", "value": "4.3 from 20 ratings in the US store; 4.6 from 1,057 ratings worldwide by the company's count", "grade": "C", "note": "The company's About page says the worldwide figure \"is our own calculation from Apple's per-country numbers\". The Flippa listing shows \"4.7 | 346 App Store reviews\".", "src": [ 3, 4, 5, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Languages", "value": "31 in the app; 58 on the website", "grade": "C", "note": "About page: \"This website, visioai.app, is published in 58 languages.\" The listing title mentions \"58 languages\" too.", "src": [ 5, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from release to the end of the first year", "value": "12 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: September 2025 to August 2026.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2023", "what": "Vision Labs is founded in Ankara as an app studio for AI photo apps.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "24 March 2025", "what": "Date on the Visio terms of use, five months before the first App Store version.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "4 September 2025", "what": "Version 1.0 of Visio on the App Store.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 4 ] }, { "when": "9 to 17 September 2025", "what": "Studio photoshoots from a selfie, then translation into 38 languages and 80 more hairstyles.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "29 September to 16 October 2025", "what": "\"AI Try On Haul\": clothes on your own photo, then for several people in one photo, then for an outfit from any screenshot.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "9 November 2025", "what": "One-time credit packs beside the subscriptions.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "30 December 2025", "what": "The website visioai.app is published, by the date in its own page data.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "January to April 2026", "what": "Bridal dresses (3 January), business photoshoots (16 January), a larger closet (5 March) and \"1000+ hair styles and color combinations\" (8 April).", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "May 2026", "what": "80% of iOS revenue comes from renewals, according to the listing.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "June to August 2026", "what": "US$8,600 in net revenue and US$6,700 in profit for the quarter, with under US$1,900 of advertising.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "14 September 2026", "what": "Version 1.17 adds an \"80s Photo Trend\", the first update in five months.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "27 October 2026", "what": "The vetted Flippa listing shows US$73,000 of net revenue in the first year and an asking price of US$42,000, reduced from US$48,000.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Search inside the App Store", "text": "The listing says the app \"benefits from organic installs through App Store searches\" and that most of the four weekly hours go to ASO, app store optimization: choosing the name, subtitle, keywords and screenshots so that the app appears when people search for hairstyle or photo editor. The store name itself lists the searches it wants: \"AI Photo & Face Editor\" with the subtitle \"Hairstyles, Makeup, Retouch\". The app is translated into 31 languages, so it can rank in many national stores." }, { "title": "A guide website in 58 languages", "text": "visioai.app has pages for each hairstyle, hair colour and outfit type, with before-and-after images made in the app on AI-generated model photos, in 58 languages. The pages cannot edit a photo; they send readers to the stores. The listing title claims \"~600 organic web clicks/day\" from these pages." }, { "title": "Weekly subscriptions that renew", "text": "The app sells Visio Pro by the week, the month or the year, from US$7.99 a week, plus one-time credit packs. The seller wrote that 80% of iOS revenue in May 2026 was renewals by existing subscribers, so the money did not depend only on new downloads that month." }, { "title": "A rented model and a library of looks", "text": "Vision Labs does not say it trains its own image model. Its privacy policy names Google for the generative AI processing and Cloudflare for storage and delivery. What the company owns, according to the listing, is \"500+ owned templates\": the prepared hairstyles, colours, outfits and photo styles that a user picks from." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the App Store page, the company's privacy policy and websites, and the Flippa listing. They are grade C unless marked.", "items": [ "Native apps for iPhone and iPad (iOS 16.6 or later, also on Apple silicon Macs and Vision Pro) and for Android, where the listing calls the Android version \"newer\".", "Image generation by Google's generative AI services; photos stored temporarily and delivered by Cloudflare. The website's images load from Cloudflare's image service (imagedelivery.net), visible in the page source.", "Payments only through Apple's App Store and Google Play: weekly, monthly and yearly subscriptions and one-time credit packs. The listing suggests direct web checkout as a way to cut store commissions.", "18 App Store versions between 4 September 2025 and 14 September 2026, most of them new hairstyles, outfits or photoshoot styles.", "A website with pages in 58 languages and an Instagram account, @visio.photo.editor.", "An ambassador program that pays university students for Instagram and TikTok content, \"Performance-Based\".", "Run by one person in about four hours a week, according to the listing, mostly on App Store optimization." ], "src": [ 3, 8, 4, 1, 11 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold photo editing, selfie effects, hairstyle ideas or trying on before buying, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Picnik", "years": "2005 to 2012", "funding": "US$3.5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Easy photo editing in the web browser, with no software to download.", "died": "Google bought it and then closed it, folding its tools into Google+.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/429-picnik" }, { "name": "Seerslab", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Augmented-reality effects for selfies and social media stories.", "died": "It did not win the large social media platforms as partners and lost to Snapchat's own filters.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1463-seerslab" }, { "name": "Tress", "years": "2017 to 2020", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A place to find hairstyle ideas and stylists for the African hair community.", "died": "Instagram offered the same discovery, and Tress did not find a way to make money from its niche in time.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1049-tress" }, { "name": "Try.com", "years": "2018 to 2022", "funding": "US$4M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Try clothes and other items before you pay for them, to make online shopping less risky.", "died": "Shipping and returns cost too much, the pandemic moved spending to essentials, and Amazon's free returns did the same job.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/668-trycom" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Picnik and Seerslab sold editing and effects that the platforms later gave away inside their own products. Tress sold hairstyle ideas that Instagram already showed. Try.com tried to solve the \"will it look good on me\" question with real goods in the mail, and the shipping cost more than the problem was worth to buyers.", "Visio answers the same question with an image model. A preview of a haircut, a colour or a dress on your own face is one request to Google's image service and needs no stock, no stylist and no returns. That is why one person can run it in a few hours a week, by the listing's account. The weakness is the same as for Picnik and Seerslab: phone makers, Google and the social apps can add the same try-on to their own cameras and shops, and the Flippa figures already show revenue falling by about half from the first-year average to mid-2026." ], "copy": { "verdict": "Yes, if you can rank in the stores; the model is rented by everyone.", "text": "Nothing in Visio needs a research team: it sends photos to a commercial image model and wraps the result in a library of looks and a weekly subscription. What made the first year work, according to the listing, was search: App Store optimization in many languages and a guide website in 58 languages. The same falling numbers show that a copy is easy for others too.", "steps": [ "Pick one decision that people are afraid to get wrong (a haircut, a colour, a dress) and make the app answer only that.", "Use a commercial image model through its API, and spend your work on the library of templates.", "Translate the store listing and the app into many languages and keep updating the keywords and screenshots.", "Build guide pages for each style that rank in search and link to the store." ], "open": "Other preview decisions: glasses, beards, tattoos, wedding looks, home paint colours, and markets where the big apps are not translated." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Who is the seller", "text": "Flippa hides the seller and the website from visitors who are not signed in, and this page did not sign in. The listing calls the business \"An anonymized subscription app\". The link to Vision Labs rests on the exact store name, the location Turkey, the age of one year, the iOS and Android versions and the 58 languages, which all agree with the App Store page and the company's sites. No source in which the seller names itself was read." }, { "title": "Revenue fell by about half", "text": "The first-year net revenue of US$73,000 averages about US$6,083 a month, but the quarter ending August 2026 brought about US$2,867 a month. The listing does not say how much of the first year came from paid advertising. Updates slowed too: no new version between 8 April and 14 September 2026." }, { "title": "Margins that do not agree", "text": "The listing title says \"84-97% margin\", the listing fields say 41%, and the text says 78% for the last quarter. These may measure different periods or costs; the listing does not say." }, { "title": "A face editor rated 4+", "text": "The App Store shows \"Age Rating 4+\", the company's Visio page says \"Ages 4+\", and the terms of use state no minimum age. The app edits faces (\"Refine smiles\", \"accentuate your jawline\", skin smoothing) but this page found no feature that scores or rates a face or body. Version 1.7 of 4 October 2025 made the clothing try-on \"available for multiple people\" in one photo; the site's FAQ says \"It does not put your face on someone else's photo or swap faces between people\", and the terms say users must have \"all necessary rights\" to the photos they upload." }, { "title": "Paid student ambassadors", "text": "The ambassador page invites \"university students\" to \"Create content on Instagram & TikTok\" and \"Get paid for views, engagement, and conversions you drive.\" It states no amount and does not say how the posts must be marked as paid. This is the company's own marketing, reported here, not a reason to stop." }, { "title": "Ratings from three counts", "text": "The US store shows 4.3 from 20 ratings, the Flippa listing shows 4.7 from 346 App Store reviews, and the company's sites show 4.6 from 1,054 to 1,057 ratings, a figure the company says it calculated itself from all national stores. This page did not check the worldwide figure." }, { "title": "A name that others use", "text": "Microsoft sells diagram software called Visio, and an unrelated web tool also calls itself Visio AI. The company's pages say: \"It has no connection to Microsoft Visio, Microsoft's diagramming software.\" Vision Labs also makes FaceCast, an AI baby generator described as \"AI images made for fun, not a genetic prediction\", and FaceToon, shutter, B&W Colorify and Pomoducko." }, { "title": "An asking price, not a sale", "text": "The app is for sale at US$42,000, reduced from US$48,000. No sale is reported. A buyer would get the apps, the code, the subscribers, the website and the social media accounts, according to the listing." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://visioai.app/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6751603929" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Flippa listing 12792406: Visio - AI Photo & Face Editor, iOS and Android app for sale", "url": "https://flippa.com/12792406-visio-ai-photo-face-editor", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full as downloaded by the pipeline on 27 October 2026, without signing in. Source for the first-year and quarterly revenue, the vetting statement, the margin, the downloads, the one-person operation and the asking price. Flippa shows the seller, the website and detailed financials only to signed-in users." }, { "title": "Flippa: iOS and Android apps for sale with more than US$2,000 a month in revenue", "url": "https://flippa.com/buy/apps?filter%5Brevenue_per_month%5D%5Bmin%5D=2000&page_size=100", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the Visio card, downloaded by the pipeline on 27 October 2026. Source for the monthly revenue and profit on the card and \"Listed by Owner\"." }, { "title": "App Store: Visio - AI Photo & Face Editor, by VISION LABS YAZILIM HIZMETLERI ANONIM SIRKETI", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/visio-ai-photo-face-editor/id6751603929", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, US store, 27 October 2026. Source for the seller, the age rating, the ratings, the version history with dates, the features and the in-app purchase prices." }, { "title": "Visio AI official website, home page", "url": "https://visioai.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, 27 October 2026, including its page data. Source for the release date, the worldwide rating claim, the FAQ on face swaps and processing, and the publication date of the site." }, { "title": "Visio AI: About", "url": "https://visioai.app/about/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, 27 October 2026. Source for the 58 website languages, the 31 app languages and how the company calculates its worldwide rating." }, { "title": "Vision Labs: AI Photo Apps from Ankara", "url": "https://www.visionlabs.com.tr/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, 27 October 2026. Source for the founding year, the list of the company's apps and the note on Microsoft Visio." }, { "title": "Vision Labs: Visio, AI Photo & Face Editor for iPhone and Android", "url": "https://www.visionlabs.com.tr/visio/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, 27 October 2026. Source for \"Ages 4+\" and the link to visioai.app as the official website." }, { "title": "Visio privacy policy", "url": "https://www.visionlabs.com.tr/privacy-policy-visio/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on photos, service providers and payments, 27 October 2026. Source for Google and Cloudflare as processors and for App Store billing." }, { "title": "Visio terms of use, last updated 24 March 2025", "url": "https://www.visionlabs.com.tr/terms-of-use-visio/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, 27 October 2026. Source for the operator, the rights to uploaded photos, the absence of an age clause and the refund rules." }, { "title": "Vision Labs: Company Information (Şirket Bilgileri)", "url": "https://www.visionlabs.com.tr/company-information/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, 27 October 2026. Source for the trade name and the trade registry office." }, { "title": "Visio Ambassador Program: Get Paid to Create Content", "url": "https://visioai.app/ambassador/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, 27 October 2026. Source for the paid student creator program." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/langlang/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/langlang.md", "slug": "langlang", "name": "LangLang", "country": "Brazil", "sector": "Consumer software", "productType": "Android app that translates WhatsApp chats on the screen with Google Gemini", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "small", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "C", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "17 June 2021", "outcomeLabel": "US$4.05K a month on a Flippa listing, October 2026", "sticker": "$4K/mo on Flippa", "outcomeUsd": 48600, "months": 64, "teamLabel": "Headcount not published; LangLang is a brand of Beyond Analytics Ltda, a São Paulo growth consultancy led by Rômulo Gomes; the listing says the app needs about 2 hours a week", "fundingLabel": "None reported; the publisher calls itself bootstrapped", "primaryFactor": "Niche", "group": "voice-audio", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "falling", "collections": [ "phone-app", "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Small team", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Translation" ], "product": "An Android app that puts a floating \"Translate\" button over WhatsApp. When you tap it in a chat and choose your friend's language, the app reads the messages on the screen, shows each one translated into your language, and sends your replies in your friend's language. The translation runs on Google Gemini. New users get 5 free translated messages; after that a subscription gives unlimited translations.", "why": "It solves one narrow problem for a very large app: WhatsApp users who chat with people in another language and do not want to copy every message into a translator. The app has been on Google Play since June 2021 and counts more than 700,000 installs. The Flippa listing says all growth was organic, that the translation API costs about US$20 a month, and that the app needs about two hours of work a week.", "summary": [ "LangLang is an Android app that translates WhatsApp chats in place. It works through the AccessibilityService API, a part of Android made for apps that help people with disabilities: with the user's permission, such an app can read the text on the screen and act in other apps. LangLang uses it to read the messages in an open WhatsApp chat, send them to Google Gemini, Google's family of large language models, for translation, and show the result in the chat. It can also translate and send the user's replies. The app is free to install, gives 5 free translations, and then sells subscriptions through in-app purchases, payments made inside the app and collected by Google Play.", "The Google Play publisher is BEYOND ANALYTICS LTDA, a company in Brazil, and the app's terms of service call LangLang one of its brands. Its own website describes a bootstrapped growth consultancy in São Paulo, led by its founder Rômulo Gomes. The app's first website, in 2021 and 2022, named a different owner, JoWoCo, LLC; no source read here says when or how the app changed hands. Google Play's page data gives the release date as 17 June 2021 and 728,834 installs. The app is for sale on Flippa, a marketplace for websites and apps. On 27 October 2026 the listing showed monthly revenue of US$4,050 and a monthly profit of US$3,883. In June 2026 the same listing showed a monthly profit of US$4,514, so the figure fell by about 14% in four months.", "Flippa marks the listing \"Vetted\": its team says it reviewed the revenue, the main costs and the traffic. The listing shows no connection to Google Play or Adapty, the payment tools that the seller names, so the figures are grade C on this page, not A. The page also shows earlier companies that built a better layer on top of messaging or email platforms that they did not control." ], "factsCaption": "A WhatsApp translation app with about US$4,050 a month in revenue on a vetted Flippa listing, October 2026, down from about US$4,700 in June 2026", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade C value is a figure from the Flippa listing, which Flippa's team reviewed but did not connect to a payment provider, or a statement on the company's own pages. A grade B value comes from Google Play's own page. A grade X value was calculated on this page from the rows that it names. No value is grade A.", "timelineLead": "From a waiting-list page in 2021 to a subscription app with more than 700,000 installs that is for sale. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "LangLang prices in October 2026: the free credits from the company's help page (grade C) and the range of in-app purchases from Google Play's US page (grade B)", "note": "Google Play gives only the range of in-app purchase prices, US$1.99 to US$49.99 per item, without plan names or periods, and the company's pages do not list the plans. The help page says that 1 credit is 1 translated message, that new users get 5 credits, that there is no way to earn more, and that a subscription removes the credit limit. The Flippa listing says the app earns through \"a recurring subscription model\" managed with the Adapty SDK.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "0", "0", "5 credits once; 1 credit = 1 translated message" ], [ "Subscription (in-app purchase)", "", "", "unlimited translations; Google Play lists items from US$1.99 to US$49.99, periods not published" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly revenue, 27 October 2026", "value": "US$4,050", "grade": "C", "note": "Flippa search card: \"Monthly Revenue USD $4.05K\". The listing is marked \"Vetted\" for revenue, primary expenses and traffic; no payment-provider connection is shown. The period over which Flippa averages the figure is not stated.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly profit and margin, 27 October 2026", "value": "US$3,883 a month, 96% margin", "grade": "C", "note": "Flippa listing: \"Monthly Profit USD $3,883 /mo\", \"Profit Margin 96%\". Calculated: US$3,883 divided by 0.96 is about US$4,045 a month in revenue, which agrees with the card.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Seller's description of revenue", "value": "\"approximately $4,500 to $5,000\" a month", "grade": "C", "note": "The same sentence appears in the June 2026 copy of the listing and in October 2026, while the profit field fell. The text gives no month.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Monthly profit, 28 June 2026", "value": "US$4,514 a month, 96% margin", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived copy of the same Flippa listing, under an older title. Calculated: about US$4,702 a month in revenue.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Change from June to October 2026", "value": "about 14% lower", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$3,883 against US$4,514 in monthly profit; the revenue derived from both falls by the same share.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Installs", "value": "728,834 (shown as \"500K+\")", "grade": "B", "note": "Google Play's page data on 27 October 2026. The listing title says \"700K+ installs\".", "src": [ 4, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Release on Google Play", "value": "17 June 2021", "grade": "B", "note": "Google Play's page data gives \"Jun 17, 2021\". The website in December 2021 still said \"Launching June 2021\" with a waiting list.", "src": [ 4, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Ratings on Google Play", "value": "8.43K reviews; 4.3 stars in the US store, 4.6 in Brazil, 4.4 in Britain and India, 3.8 in Germany", "grade": "B", "note": "Read on 27 October 2026 with the store country changed. The app's website shows \"Google Play Rating: 4.6/5\".", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Cost of the translation API", "value": "about US$20 a month", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller's text: \"requiring only $20/month for its translation API\". Calculated: about 0.5% of the October 2026 revenue.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "AI model", "value": "Google Gemini", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller's text: \"It uses Google Gemini for context-aware translations\". The website says \"Powered by advanced AI (Google Gemini)\", and the store page says \"powered by Google Gemini\"; the archived copy of the site from January 2026 did not name a model, the copy from April 2026 did.", "src": [ 1, 5, 4, 12 ] }, { "fact": "How it was built", "value": "Kotlin, with the Adapty SDK for payments and Firebase and Google Analytics for statistics", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller's text: \"built natively using Kotlin\", \"a flexible monetization system via Adapty SDK\", \"analytics via Firebase and Google Analytics\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Publisher on Google Play", "value": "BEYOND ANALYTICS LTDA, developer name \"Apps that go Beyond\", Brazil", "grade": "B", "note": "Google Play's \"About the developer\" section. The same developer publishes \"Soso: Tween Period Tracker\". The terms of service on langlang.co are \"an agreement between you (“you”) and Beyond Analytics (including without limitation its brands, such as LangLang\".", "src": [ 4, 13 ] }, { "fact": "Owner named on the first website", "value": "JoWoCo, LLC", "grade": "C", "note": "Archived copies of 7 December 2021 and 26 June 2022: \"© 2021 JoWoCo, LLC\" and \"© 2022 JoWoCo, LLC\". Later copies name no company.", "src": [ 9, 10 ] }, { "fact": "The publisher company", "value": "a bootstrapped growth consultancy in São Paulo, founded in 2022 and led by Rômulo Gomes", "grade": "C", "note": "Beyond Analytics website: \"a bootstrapped growth consultancy headquartered in São Paulo\", \"led by Rômulo Gomes\", \"Est. MMXXII\". The site does not mention LangLang and gives no headcount.", "src": [ 11 ] }, { "fact": "Work time", "value": "about 2 hours a week", "grade": "C", "note": "Seller's listing title: \"~2 hrs/week\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price", "value": "US$173,500 in June 2026; US$84,490 in October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Asking prices, not sale prices. Calculated: the October price is about 51% lower. No sale is reported.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from release to the October 2026 figure", "value": "64 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: June 2021 to October 2026.", "src": [ 4, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "June 2021", "what": "Google Play's data gives 17 June 2021 as the release date. In December 2021 the website still shows a waiting list, \"Launching June 2021\", and the owner \"JoWoCo, LLC\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 9 ] }, { "when": "June 2022", "what": "The website links the Android app and a Chrome extension for WhatsApp on the web, still under JoWoCo, LLC.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "22 September 2022", "what": "A Google Play review calls it the best translator for WhatsApp and asks how it can be free.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "16 January 2025", "what": "A review describes the yellow translate button: messages appear in both languages, and the reply is sent in Spanish. The publisher, \"Apps that go Beyond\", answers it.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "April 2026", "what": "A new website names Google Gemini as the translation engine and shows \"Google Play Rating: 4.6/5\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "28 June 2026", "what": "The Flippa listing shows a monthly profit of US$4,514, an app age of 1 year and an asking price of US$173,500.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "11 September 2026", "what": "Latest app update: it fixes a bubble that appeared over every app and the accessibility permission that switched itself off.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "27 October 2026", "what": "The listing, under a new title, shows US$4,050 a month in revenue, a profit of US$3,883, an app age of 5 years, \"~2 hrs/week\" and an asking price of US$84,490.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1, 2 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "One problem inside one very large app", "text": "The app does one thing: it translates WhatsApp chats without leaving WhatsApp. Its store text says that switching between WhatsApp and Google Translate is slow and that Android's own translation \"can't automatically translate conversations or send translated messages\"." }, { "title": "A model that costs almost nothing per message", "text": "The seller says the translation API costs about US$20 a month, about 0.5% of revenue, and states a 96% profit margin. Short chat messages are cheap to translate with a current language model." }, { "title": "Free credits, then a subscription", "text": "A new user gets 5 translated messages. The help page says there is no way to earn more and that a subscription removes the limit. The user meets the paywall after seeing the product work in a real chat." }, { "title": "Little work once it runs", "text": "The listing title says about 2 hours of work a week. The last update, in September 2026, fixed problems with the floating button and the accessibility permission." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the Flippa listing, the company's help pages and the Google Play page. The seller's statements are grade C.", "items": [ "A native Android app written in Kotlin.", "The AccessibilityService API reads the WhatsApp messages on the screen, and an \"Appear on top\" permission draws the floating \"Translate\" button. The help page walks the user through both permissions.", "Translation by Google Gemini since at least April 2026, for about US$20 a month in API costs, as the seller states.", "Subscriptions through Google Play in-app purchases, managed with the Adapty SDK, which the seller lists among the upgrades.", "Statistics from Firebase and Google Analytics, as the seller states; the website also loads the Clicky web statistics service.", "The website also links a Chrome extension for WhatsApp on the web." ], "src": [ 1, 8, 4, 5 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database built a layer on top of messaging or email platforms that they did not control, or sold translation. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Flux", "years": "2015 to 2018", "funding": "US$7M", "cause": "Team/Founder Conflict", "promise": "One inbox for Slack, email, WhatsApp and the other messaging apps.", "died": "The outside platforms kept changing and breaking the integrations, and the money went into repairs.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1901-flux" }, { "name": "Xobni", "years": "2006 to 2013", "funding": "US$42M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A smarter inbox inside Microsoft Outlook.", "died": "Tied to Outlook, which Microsoft improved itself, while mobile made the desktop add-on less useful. Yahoo bought the remains.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/763-xobni" }, { "name": "Guggy", "years": "2017 to 2020", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Turn chat messages into GIFs inside the messaging apps.", "died": "WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger offered GIFs themselves, and Guggy had no plan for revenue.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1429-guggy" }, { "name": "TurboTranslations", "years": "2014 to 2023", "funding": "US$150K", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "Faster and cheaper translation through a marketplace of freelance translators.", "died": "Neural machine translation from Google and DeepL, and later large language models, closed the quality gap that the human marketplace sold.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2263-turbotranslations" } ], "whatChanged": [ "Flux, Xobni and Guggy each lived on top of a platform owned by someone else, and the platform either broke the connection or built the feature itself. LangLang has the same weakness twice: it depends on WhatsApp's screen layout and on Google's rules for the AccessibilityService API, and either company can change them. TurboTranslations shows the other side: machine translation removed the value of paid human translation for short texts.", "What differs is cost. A large language model now translates a chat message for a tiny fraction of a cent, so a small app can charge a subscription and keep a margin of more than 90%, as the seller states. LangLang does not compete with machine translation; it sells convenience on top of it, inside the app where the conversation already happens." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The structure, yes. The platform risk stays.", "text": "An app that removes one repeated step inside a very large app, and that runs a cheap model for each use, is a structure that a small team can copy. LangLang's revenue, about US$4,050 a month by the October 2026 listing after five years, shows the size such a niche reaches, and the 14% fall since June 2026 shows that it does not grow by itself.", "steps": [ "Find a step that users of a very large app repeat many times a day, such as copying text into another app.", "Do the step in place, with the permissions that the operating system offers, and explain each permission in the help pages.", "Use a current language model, so that each use costs almost nothing.", "Give a few free uses, then sell a subscription that removes the limit.", "Write down which platform rules the app depends on, and watch them." ], "open": "Other large chat apps and other repeated steps: translation of voice messages, replies in a second language for small sellers, and the same idea for Telegram or Instagram direct messages." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Reviewed by Flippa, not read from a payment provider", "text": "Flippa says its team reviewed the revenue, the main costs and the traffic, but the listing shows no connection to Google Play or Adapty, and Flippa itself tells buyers that \"Financials are seller-provided inputs\". The seller's sentence of \"approximately $4,500 to $5,000\" a month is older than the October 2026 profit figure, which implies about US$4,045." }, { "title": "Who runs it", "text": "Google Play names BEYOND ANALYTICS LTDA as the developer, and that company's website describes a growth consultancy led by Rômulo Gomes, without mentioning LangLang. The first website named JoWoCo, LLC as the owner in 2021 and 2022. No source read here says who built the app, when it changed owners, or how many people work on it. The Flippa listing gave the app age as 1 year in June 2026 and 5 years in October 2026. The same Google Play developer publishes Soso, a period tracker for tweens." }, { "title": "A rating count that matches no store figure", "text": "The website's structured data, the hidden description that search engines read, gives \"ratingValue\": \"4.6\" and \"ratingCount\": \"1542\". It is in the archived copy of 16 April 2026 and not in the copy of 19 January 2026. Google Play showed 8.43K reviews on 27 October 2026 and a rating of 4.6 only in the Brazilian store (4.3 in the US store). The rating is real for one country; no source explains the count of 1,542." }, { "title": "It reads private chats", "text": "The app reads WhatsApp messages through the AccessibilityService API. The website says \"We do not store your messages on our servers\", and the Google Play data safety section says \"No data shared with third parties\". The seller says translation runs on Google Gemini, so the text of the messages is sent to Google to be translated. On 27 October 2026 the \"Terms\" and \"Privacy\" links in the website footer returned \"This Page Does Not Exist\"; the privacy policy that Google Play links, langlang.co/privacy.html, is a general policy of Beyond Analytics that says it may use third parties \"such as, without limitation, Google, Clicky , Firebase\" and does not mention WhatsApp messages. The terms require users to be at least 18 or to have consent." }, { "title": "Depends on WhatsApp and on Android's rules", "text": "The app calls itself \"Translator for WhatsApp\" and says it is \"not affiliated with or officially endorsed by WhatsApp or Facebook\". A change to WhatsApp's screens or to Google's rules for accessibility apps could stop it working, and a review of February 2026 describes a setup that stopped at the permission step." }, { "title": "Revenue and price are falling", "text": "The monthly profit fell from US$4,514 in June 2026 to US$3,883 in October 2026, and the asking price fell from US$173,500 to US$84,490. Neither is a sale price. No sale has been reported." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://langlang.co/" }, { "kind": "android", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.langlang.translator_for_wsp" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Flippa listing 12686264: LangLang, AI chat translator for Android. 700K+ installs, 4.4★, 96% margin, 100% organic, ~2 hrs/week", "url": "https://flippa.com/12686264-langlang-ai-chat-translator-for-android-700k-installs-4-4-96-margin-100-organic-2-hrs-week", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public part on 27 October 2026, without signing in. Source for the profit, margin, location, app age, the vetting badge, the seller's description and the asking price. The seller, some fields marked \"Confidential\" and the financial details need an account or an NDA and were not read." }, { "title": "Flippa search results: apps with at least US$2,000 monthly revenue", "url": "https://flippa.com/buy/apps?filter%5Brevenue_per_month%5D%5Bmin%5D=2000&page_size=100", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the LangLang card on 27 October 2026. Source for \"Monthly Revenue USD $4.05K\"." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of the same Flippa listing, 28 June 2026: WhatsApp Translation Android app with over 500,000 downloads with an 4.4 rating average", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260628215116/https://flippa.com/12686264-whatsapp-translation-android-app-with-over-500-000-downloads-with-an-4-4-rating-average-90-annual-profit-margin", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the public part in full. Source for the June 2026 profit, app age and asking price." }, { "title": "Google Play: Chat Translator AI - LangLang", "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.langlang.translator_for_wsp&hl=en&gl=US", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026 (robots.txt read first), including the page data for the release date and installs, and again with the store set to Brazil, Britain, India and Germany for the ratings. Source for the developer, installs, ratings, in-app purchase range, reviews and the latest update." }, { "title": "LangLang home page: LangLang Translator for WhatsApp, #1 Auto Chat Translator for WhatsApp", "url": "https://langlang.co/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026, with its structured data (robots.txt returned 404, so no rule applies). Source for the product, Google Gemini, the accessibility note, the rating shown and the structured-data rating." }, { "title": "LangLang about page", "url": "https://langlang.co/about.html", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026. Source for the product description and the disclaimer." }, { "title": "LangLang Help Center: How the LangLang Credit System Works", "url": "https://langlang.co/help/langlang-app-help-support/general/how-the-langlang-credit-system-works/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026. Source for the free credits and the subscription." }, { "title": "LangLang Help Center: How to Set Up LangLang for WhatsApp Translations", "url": "https://langlang.co/help/langlang-app-help-support/general/how-to-set-up-langlang-for-whatsapp-translations/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026. Source for the two permissions and the setup steps." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of langlang.co, 7 December 2021: LangLang Translator, Home", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20211207134818/http://langlang.co/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the waiting list, \"Launching June 2021\" and the owner JoWoCo, LLC." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of langlang.co, 26 June 2022: LangLang Translator for WhatsApp", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20220626053701/https://langlang.co/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the Android app and Chrome extension links and the 2022 owner line." }, { "title": "Beyond Analytics: About Beyond Analytics", "url": "https://beyondanalytics.io/about/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026 (robots.txt read first; it allows ClaudeBot). Source for what the publisher company is, its leader and its founding year." }, { "title": "Wayback Machine copy of langlang.co, 16 April 2026: LangLang Translator for WhatsApp", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260416180127/https://langlang.co/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with its structured data, and compared with the copy of 19 January 2026 (https://web.archive.org/web/20260119180729/https://langlang.co/), which names no model and has no rating. Source for when the Gemini line and the rating appeared." }, { "title": "LangLang terms of service", "url": "https://langlang.co/terms.html", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the opening and the sections on age and disputes on 27 October 2026. Source for Beyond Analytics as the company behind the brand LangLang and the age rule." }, { "title": "LangLang privacy policy", "url": "https://langlang.co/privacy.html", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full on 27 October 2026; it is the policy that Google Play links. Source for the company name and the third parties it names." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/genlook/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/genlook.md", "slug": "genlook", "name": "Genlook", "country": "France", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI virtual try-on for online fashion stores", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "B", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "26 September 2025", "outcomeLabel": "US$14.2K monthly recurring revenue, August 2026", "sticker": "$170K/yr run rate", "outcomeUsd": 169810, "months": 11, "teamLabel": "1 founder, Thibault Mathian; listed as a solo founder in the August 2026 case; \"a very small team\" with three open roles in October 2026; headcount not published", "fundingLabel": "None (bootstrapped, by the company's own pages)", "primaryFactor": "Timing", "group": "photos", "channel": "platform", "trend": "growing", "collections": [ "platform" ], "meters": { "evidence": 2, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2B", "Fashion e-commerce" ], "product": "Genlook adds a try-on button to the product pages of an online clothing store. The shopper uploads one photo, and an image model generates a picture of that shopper wearing the product, made from the product photos that the store already has, in about 5 to 10 seconds. It is sold as a Shopify app, a WooCommerce plugin and a PrestaShop module, and as an API for developers, with monthly plans that include a number of try-ons and a price for each extra one.", "why": "Google released a much better image model in August 2025, and earlier virtual try-on needed 3D scans and long integration projects. The founder, a freelance developer who had already built a similar Shopify app, built a first version in a week and a half and listed it in the Shopify App Store, where, he said, the app's ranking then brought most of the organic traffic. A dashboard screenshot that the founder gave to the French newsletter Founder Trace showed US$14,150.87 in monthly recurring revenue eleven months after the listing.", "summary": [ "Genlook sells virtual try-on to online fashion stores. Virtual try-on means that a shopper sees a product on their own body before buying it. Genlook does this with a generative image model, a model that creates a new picture from a text instruction and input pictures: it takes the shopper's photo and the store's product photo and returns a photo of the shopper wearing the product. Earlier try-on systems, the company's about page says, needed 3D scans, long contracts and months of integration.", "Thibault Mathian, a freelance developer in Grenoble, France, started the app when Google released its image model Nano Banana in August 2025. He told the French newsletter Founder Trace that he built the first version in a week and a half. The app has been listed in the Shopify App Store, the marketplace where Shopify merchants install add-on programs, since 26 September 2025. On 24 August 2026 Founder Trace published a screenshot of the Genlook revenue dashboard that showed US$14,150.87 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the monthly value of all active subscriptions and usage charges), US$1,709.97 more than 30 days earlier, and US$169,810.44 in annual recurring revenue (ARR, the MRR times twelve). The company's pages say it has no outside funding.", "The headline figure is grade B: a newsletter writer saw and published a dashboard screenshot that the founder supplied, under the outlet's rule that each case rests on a proof of revenue. No payment processor or second source confirms it, and no later revenue figure was found. The page also shows four failed companies that tried to take the uncertainty out of buying clothes and other goods online with shipped samples, local stores, human stylists or designer-made 3D renders." ], "factsCaption": "US$14,150.87 in monthly recurring revenue eleven months after the Shopify App Store listing, from a dashboard screenshot published by a French newsletter, with no outside funding", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade B value comes from a document that a third party saw and published (here a dashboard screenshot in a newsletter case study), or from the Shopify App Store's own data. A grade C value is a statement by the founder or the company. An \"X\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. Quotations in French are given in the original, followed by this page's English translation.", "timelineLead": "From a new Google image model in August 2025 to US$14,150.87 a month in August 2026. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Genlook prices on 27 October 2026, from the plans on the company's home page and the Shopify App Store listing, and the API prices from the changelog (grade C)", "note": "The store plans are billed monthly; no source read shows a yearly price, so that column is empty. Try-ons beyond a plan's quota are billed one by one, and on Shopify all charges go through Shopify's billing system, the terms say. Larger stores get a plan sized to their volume. The Try-On API for developers has its own plans, announced on 24 September 2026, and costs US$0.04 per try-on without a plan. The affiliate program pays 30% of a referred Shopify store's subscription payments for 12 months.", "rows": [ [ "Free", "", "0", "10 try-ons a month" ], [ "Starter", "", "19.99", "100 try-ons a month, then US$0.17 per try-on; analytics; shopper email collection" ], [ "Growth", "", "29", "250 try-ons a month, then US$0.12 per try-on; no Genlook branding" ], [ "Pro", "", "99", "1,000 try-ons a month, then US$0.10 per try-on; Klaviyo integration" ], [ "Larger stores", "custom", "custom", "plan sized to the try-on volume" ], [ "Try-On API Starter", "", "20", "1,000 try-ons a month" ], [ "Try-On API Growth", "", "99", "6,000 try-ons a month" ], [ "Try-On API Scale", "", "300", "20,000 try-ons a month" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue, August 2026", "value": "US$14,150.87", "grade": "B", "note": "Founder Trace case of 24 August 2026 by Lucas Flandre: \"Preuve : capture du tableau de bord Genlook\" [Proof: screenshot of the Genlook dashboard] (translation), and \"MRR à 14 150,87 en hausse de 1709,97 sur les 30 derniers jours\" [MRR at 14,150.87, up 1,709.97 over the last 30 days] (translation). The published screenshot reads \"MRR $14,150.87\", and its last bar is the month after July 2026. The outlet's about page says: \"Chaque cas s’appuie sur une preuve de revenus (capture Stripe ou équivalent)\" [Each case rests on a proof of revenue (a Stripe screenshot or equivalent)] (translation). The screenshot was supplied by the founder; no payment processor published it. The figure is in US dollars in the source.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Annual recurring revenue, August 2026", "value": "US$169,810.44", "grade": "B", "note": "Same case: \"ARR à 169 810,44$, taux de croissance du MRR à 8,60%\" [ARR at US$169,810.44, MRR growth rate 8.60%] (translation).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Check of the ARR", "value": "US$14,150.87 times 12 is US$169,810.44", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated. The ARR is the MRR times twelve, not a separate measure. This is the outcome amount stored for this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Rise in MRR over the 30 days before the screenshot", "value": "US$1,709.97, or 13.7%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 14,150.87 minus 1,709.97 is 12,440.90, and 1,709.97 / 12,440.90 = 13.7%. The case also gives an \"MRR growth rate\" of 8.60% and does not say how that rate is measured, so the two numbers do not match.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Shape of the revenue chart, September 2025 to August 2026", "value": "higher in every month shown", "grade": "B", "note": "The screenshot in the case shows one bar per month from September 2025, split into \"Monthly subscriptions\", \"Annual subscriptions\" and \"Usage charges\". The case's image description reads \"Graphique Stripe du MRR de Genlook, en hausse continue de septembre 2025 jusqu'à 14 150,87 $\" [Stripe chart of Genlook's MRR, rising continuously from September 2025 up to US$14,150.87] (translation).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the Shopify listing to the headline figure", "value": "11 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 26 September 2025 to August 2026. The case says \"Lancé il y a 9 à 10 mois\" [launched 9 to 10 months ago] (translation).", "src": [ 5, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Stores and customers, August 2026", "value": "about 1,100 stores installed the app; 250 regular paying customers; 400 in active trial", "grade": "C", "note": "Case: \"Environ 1100 boutiques ont installé l’app, 250 clients payants réguliers, 400 en démo active\" [About 1,100 stores installed the app, 250 regular paying customers, 400 in active demo] (translation). The founder's figures; the screenshot shows only revenue.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average MRR per paying customer", "value": "about US$57 a month", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 14,150.87 / 250 = 56.60.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Prices paid, August 2026", "value": "from about 20 a month for small stores to more than 1,000 a month for large volumes", "grade": "C", "note": "Case: \"Prix : de 20/mois pour les petites boutiques a plus de 1000/mois pour les gros volumes\" [Price: from 20 a month for small stores to more than 1,000 a month for large volumes] (translation). The currency is not stated.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Running costs, August 2026", "value": "about US$5,000 a month for the image model; about EUR 700 a month of software subscriptions; EUR 150 to 170 a month of infrastructure; about EUR 1,000 a month of office", "grade": "C", "note": "Case: \"Coûts : environ 700€/mois de stack SaaS (Claude, Cursor inclus), 150 à 170€/mois d’infrastructure, environ 5000$/mois pour l’IA (Nano Banana), environ 1000€/mois de bureaux\" [Costs: about EUR 700 a month of SaaS stack (Claude and Cursor included), EUR 150 to 170 a month of infrastructure, about US$5,000 a month for the AI (Nano Banana), about EUR 1,000 a month of office] (translation).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Image-model cost as a share of MRR", "value": "about 35%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 5,000 / 14,150.87 = 0.353. Both figures are in US dollars in the source.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time to build the first version", "value": "a week and a half", "grade": "C", "note": "Case: \"MVP construit en une semaine et demie\" [MVP built in a week and a half] (translation). An MVP (minimum viable product) is the smallest version that customers can use.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Image model at launch", "value": "Google's Nano Banana", "grade": "C", "note": "The case says the project followed the release of Nano Banana, Google's image model, in August 2025. The Shopify App Store listing names \"Nano Banana\" under \"Works with\". In October 2026 the careers page says that Genlook runs its own image pipeline on GPUs, built on open image-editing, diffusion and vision models.", "src": [ 1, 5, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Listed in the Shopify App Store", "value": "26 September 2025", "grade": "B", "note": "Shopify App Store listing: \"Launched September 26, 2025\". The listing carries the \"Built for Shopify\" badge; the changelog dates the badge to 3 March 2026.", "src": [ 5, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Shopify App Store rating, 27 October 2026", "value": "5.0 from 40 reviews; all 40 are five stars", "grade": "B", "note": "Shopify App Store reviews page: \"100% of ratings are 5 stars\". The reviews read for this page come from named stores in Israel, Singapore, Türkiye, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Colombia, the United Arab Emirates, India, the United Kingdom and Lebanon, and several thank the founder by name for support. The rating in the home page's structured data, 5 from 40, matches the listing.", "src": [ 6, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Where customers are", "value": "mostly India, the United States, the Middle East and South America; almost none in France", "grade": "C", "note": "Case: \"Marché quasi absent de France, concentré en Inde, aux États-Unis, au Moyen-Orient et en Amérique du Sud\" [Market almost absent in France, concentrated in India, the United States, the Middle East and South America] (translation).", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Stores in October 2026", "value": "installed on 1,200+ Shopify stores; 900+ ran try-ons in the last 90 days", "grade": "C", "note": "Press page, \"Last updated October 2026\": \"Installed on 1,200+ Shopify stores. 900+ stores ran try-ons in the last 90 days.\" The home page says \"Used by 900+ fashion stores\".", "src": [ 8, 3 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page: \"Genlook started in 2025 and is based in Grenoble, France. It is bootstrapped, with no outside funding.\" The careers page says \"Self-funded\".", "src": [ 3, 7 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "one founder; \"a very small team\" in October 2026, with three open roles", "grade": "C", "note": "The case lists the team as \"Solofounder\". The careers page: \"We run as a very small team where everyone works with AI every day\", with open roles in AI engineering, growth and sales. The about page: \"The people who build the product answer support\". No source gives a headcount.", "src": [ 1, 7, 4 ] }, { "fact": "Speed of a try-on", "value": "median 8.2 seconds on the home page; about 5 seconds after an update of 20 October 2026", "grade": "C", "note": "Changelog, 20 October 2026: \"The median try-on now takes about 5 seconds, down from 12.5 seconds in August.\"", "src": [ 3, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Shopper photos", "value": "deleted after 7 days; not used to train models", "grade": "C", "note": "Home page FAQ. The terms forbid users to \"upload photos of another person without their consent\" and to upload sexually explicit content.", "src": [ 3, 11 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "August 2025", "what": "Google releases the image model Nano Banana. Thibault Mathian, a freelance developer who had built a similar Shopify app for an earlier client, builds a first try-on version in a week and a half.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "26 September 2025", "what": "The app is listed in the Shopify App Store.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 5 ] }, { "when": "7 October 2025", "what": "A free tool for merchants to generate images of their products on AI-generated models, described as user-generated-content style images. By October 2026 its address redirects to the home page.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "when": "9 October 2025", "what": "First five-star review in the Shopify App Store. The company post says the team is, \"for now, a dedicated founder\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "25 October 2025", "what": "New, lower prices.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "7 January 2026", "what": "Affiliate program launched.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "3 March 2026", "what": "Genlook earns the \"Built for Shopify\" badge.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "10 May 2026", "what": "Launch of the Try-On API for developers.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "June 2026", "what": "WordPress and WooCommerce plugin (5 June) and PrestaShop module (30 June): the app is no longer only on Shopify.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "24 August 2026", "what": "Founder Trace publishes a case with a dashboard screenshot: US$14,150.87 in monthly recurring revenue, US$1,709.97 more than 30 days earlier, and the founder's figures of about 1,100 installs and 250 paying customers.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "10 September 2026", "what": "Live Try-On in beta: shoppers use their camera and see the product on themselves in real time, without uploading a photo.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "24 September 2026", "what": "Monthly plans for the Try-On API, from US$20 for 1,000 try-ons.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 9 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "Median try-on time falls to about 5 seconds. The Shopify listing shows 5.0 from 40 reviews, and the careers page lists three open roles.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 9, 6, 7 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "A new model opened a market", "text": "The about page says that virtual try-on existed before, but needed 3D scans, long contracts and months of integration. A general image model that can put a given garment on a given person from two photos removed the 3D step. The founder started in the weeks after Google's model appeared, and he told Founder Trace that the only existing competitor used older technology that did not work well." }, { "title": "Inputs the store already has", "text": "The app uses the product photos that are already in the store and installs as a theme block, with no code. The shopper adds one photo and can then try any product. This keeps the setup cost for a small store close to zero, which matters for a product sold for US$19.99 to US$99 a month." }, { "title": "The Shopify App Store as the channel", "text": "The founder told Founder Trace that cold emails and ads brought almost no direct sales, but that one first customer moved the app up in the Shopify App Store ranking, which then brought most of the organic traffic. The listing now has 40 five-star reviews and the \"Built for Shopify\" badge. He named \"Une dépendance quasi totale à un seul canal de distribution\" [an almost total dependence on a single distribution channel] (translation) as one of his three mistakes." }, { "title": "Subscriptions plus usage", "text": "Each plan includes a number of try-ons, and each extra try-on is billed. The dashboard screenshot splits the MRR into monthly subscriptions and usage charges, so revenue grows with the stores' traffic and not only with the number of stores. The image model is also paid per use: about US$5,000 a month in August 2026, the founder said." }, { "title": "AI assistants as a second channel", "text": "The founder said that merchants ask ChatGPT how to add try-on to their site and that ChatGPT recommends Genlook first. The site publishes long comparison pages, guides and a glossary, and the home page has buttons that open ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity with a question about Genlook." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the Founder Trace case, the company's careers page, its open-source CMS and its page source. They are grade C, except the analytics and chat tools, which are visible in the page source (grade B). The stack list in the case is behind a paywall and was not read.", "items": [ "Image generation with Google's Nano Banana model at launch, at about US$5,000 a month in August 2026 by the founder's figures. In October 2026 the careers page describes an own image pipeline on GPUs, built on open image-editing, diffusion and vision models, and asks for PyTorch, Diffusers or ComfyUI experience.", "Claude and Cursor, an AI code editor, are part of a software stack of about EUR 700 a month; infrastructure costs EUR 150 to 170 a month, the case says.", "The first version took a week and a half, because the founder had already built a similar Shopify app as a freelancer.", "The website runs on Scribe, a git-based content system that Genlook publishes as open source under the MIT license. It sends changed pages to Google's Gemini models for translation; the Genlook site's language menu lists eight languages.", "Shopify billing for store subscriptions and usage charges; PostHog and Google Analytics for site analytics; the Meta Pixel to measure ads; Crisp for chat support.", "Team: the founder alone at the start; in October 2026 \"a very small team\" in which, by the careers page, everyone works with AI agents every day." ], "src": [ 1, 7, 13, 11, 3 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to remove the uncertainty of buying clothes, shoes or furniture without seeing them, with shipped samples, local stores, human stylists or designer-made renders. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Try.com", "years": "2018 to 2022", "funding": "US$4M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Try items at home before buying, so that online shopping carries less risk and fewer returns.", "died": "High operating costs, retailers who would not join without subsidies or guarantees, and the free returns of Amazon and Zappos. The pandemic then moved spending to essentials.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/668-trycom" }, { "name": "Modsy", "years": "2015 to 2022", "funding": "US$72.7M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Upload photos of a room and receive photorealistic 3D renders with furniture to buy.", "died": "Each room needed 2 to 4 hours of a human designer's time, customers paid US$69 to US$199 per room, and paid social ads cost more than customers brought back.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2521-modsy" }, { "name": "Thread", "years": "2012 to 2020", "funding": "US$40M", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Human stylists plus algorithms that pick clothes for each man.", "died": "The cost of the human stylists did not fall with scale, and faster, more automated competitors and fast fashion squeezed the margins.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/625-thread" }, { "name": "Zappos Local", "years": "2015 to 2020", "funding": "US$0", "cause": "Unit Economics", "promise": "Local hubs where customers try on and exchange shoes ordered online.", "died": "Each hub needed local investment without enough customers or repeat purchases, and free fast shipping reduced the need to try on in person.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/788-zappos-local" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The four predecessors attacked the same problem, that a shopper cannot see how a product looks on them or in their home, with physical goods or with people. Try.com shipped items to try, Zappos Local opened hubs, Thread paid stylists, and Modsy paid designers 2 to 4 hours per room for a 3D render. Each extra customer brought an extra cost in shipping, rent or work hours, and all four died of unit economics by the Loot Drop records.", "Genlook's try-on is one call to an image model. The founder said the model cost about US$5,000 a month in August 2026, and the store pays US$0.10 to US$0.17 for each try-on beyond its plan, so the cost of one more try-on is computing time, not a person's hour. The company's about page says the older try-on technology needed 3D scans and months of integration; the August 2025 image model let one developer build a working version in a week and a half." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The timing, no. The method, yes.", "text": "The start depended on a short window after a new model appeared, and competitors now sell the same try-on to the same stores; Genlook's own comparison pages name Antla, Banuba, MirrAR, Camweara, Looksy, TryPoint, FASHN AI, Aiuta and Pixelcut. What can be copied is the method: a narrow feature that a new model makes possible, sold as an app inside a large platform's store, priced per use, and supported by the founder in person.", "steps": [ "When a new model makes a feature work that did not work before, check which platform stores have no credible app for it yet.", "Use inputs the customer already has, here the product photos, so that setup takes minutes.", "Sell inside the platform's app store, and work on its ranking and reviews: answer every support request in person.", "Price a monthly plan with a quota and charge for each use above it, so that revenue follows the model costs.", "Plan for a second channel early: the founder named the dependence on one channel as a mistake." ], "open": "The same feature for other product types and platforms is still open: furniture, glasses or cosmetics on stores outside Shopify, and in-store QR codes, which Genlook started to offer in April 2026." }, "watch": [ { "title": "One screenshot, one outlet", "text": "The headline figure comes from one dashboard screenshot that the founder gave to Founder Trace, published on 24 August 2026. No payment processor, Shopify Partner report or second outlet confirms it, and no later revenue figure was found; other Founder Trace pages (in the site's feed, read 27 October 2026) repeat \"14 000 $ par mois\" from the same case. The case's image description calls the chart a Stripe chart, while Genlook's terms say that Shopify stores are billed through Shopify's billing system, so this page could not tell which dashboard produced it. The member part of the case, with the founder's mistakes and the tool list, is paywalled and was not read. Founder Trace links to Sorank, an SEO tool, with an affiliate tag; this page uses the case only for its figures and the founder's quoted statements." }, { "title": "The founder's ads and the App Store reviews", "text": "The founder told Founder Trace that ads that lost money helped the app's ranking: \"Ça m’a rapporté des installations à perte, bien sûr, mais ça m’a aussi permis de remonter dans le ranking de Shopify, parce que même si ça ne convertissait pas, ça faisait de l’activité, j’ai pu récupérer des avis sur l’App Store\" [It brought me installs at a loss, of course, but it also let me move up in the Shopify ranking, because even if it did not convert, it created activity, and I was able to collect reviews on the App Store] (translation). Nothing in the text says that reviews were bought. All 40 reviews are five stars; the ones read for this page name real stores and their time using the app." }, { "title": "A former tool for UGC-style images", "text": "On 7 October 2025 the changelog announced a free tool to \"Create user-generated content style images with your products on different models\", using \"AI-generated models\", for social media and ads. Images in which an AI person seems to be a real customer are close to the fake testimonials that the US Federal Trade Commission's rule of 2024 bans. On 27 October 2026 the tool's address redirects to the home page, the free-tools page lists seven other tools, and the current product uses the shopper's own photo. The changelog post is still online." }, { "title": "Buttons that ask AI assistants about Genlook", "text": "The home page has a box \"Ask an AI assistant about Genlook\" with buttons that open ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity with the question \"Is genlook.app a good virtual try-on app for a fashion store?\". The founder said that ChatGPT recommends Genlook first. An answer from an assistant is not an independent review." }, { "title": "Photos of shoppers", "text": "The product handles photos of people. The home page says the photos are encrypted, deleted after 7 days and never used to train models. The terms forbid uploading a photo of another person without their consent and sexually explicit content. Live Try-On, a beta since September 2026, uses the shopper's camera and is off by default." }, { "title": "Numbers that do not agree", "text": "Installs are about 1,100 in the August 2026 case and 1,200+ on the October 2026 press page, while the home page says 900+ stores use it; the press page explains that 900+ ran try-ons in the last 90 days. The case gives an MRR growth rate of 8.60%, but its own 30-day rise is 13.7%. The Shopify listing says \"Based in United States\", while every company page places Genlook in Grenoble, France." }, { "title": "Model costs and competition", "text": "The image model cost about 35% of MRR in August 2026, by the founder's figures, and the careers page shows a move to an own GPU pipeline on open models. Competitors sell the same feature on Shopify, and Genlook's own API comparison pages name Replicate, fal and Google Vertex AI as alternatives for developers." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://genlook.app/" }, { "kind": "shopify", "url": "https://apps.shopify.com/genlook-virtual-try-on" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Founder Trace, Lucas Flandre, 24 August 2026 (updated 26 October 2026): App Shopify d’essayage virtuel IA : étude de cas à 14 000$/mois", "url": "https://foundertrace.fr/app-shopify-dessayage-virtuel-ia-etude-de-cas-a-14-000-mois/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the free part in full and viewed the published dashboard screenshot. The member part is paywalled and was not read. Used only for its figures and the founder's quoted statements, because the site links to Sorank with an affiliate tag." }, { "title": "Founder Trace: À propos (about page, method)", "url": "https://foundertrace.fr/a-propos/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on proofs: each case rests on a proof of revenue, a Stripe screenshot or equivalent." }, { "title": "Genlook home page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://genlook.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the plan prices, the FAQ and the page source (analytics, chat, structured data)." }, { "title": "Genlook: About", "url": "https://genlook.app/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the founding story and the older try-on technology." }, { "title": "Shopify App Store: GenLook: AI Virtual Try On", "url": "https://apps.shopify.com/genlook-virtual-try-on", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Shopify's data: launch date, rating, Built for Shopify badge, plans, Works with Nano Banana." }, { "title": "Shopify App Store: GenLook reviews", "url": "https://apps.shopify.com/genlook-virtual-try-on/reviews", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the first page of reviews and the rating breakdown." }, { "title": "Genlook: Careers", "url": "https://genlook.app/careers", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the team description, the open roles and the GPU pipeline." }, { "title": "Genlook: Press", "url": "https://genlook.app/press", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the October 2026 install counts and the coverage list." }, { "title": "Genlook: Changelog", "url": "https://genlook.app/changelog", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, with the post on the first five-star review. Source for the dated product steps." }, { "title": "Genlook changelog, 7 October 2025: Introducing a Free Tool for Merchant Marketing", "url": "https://genlook.app/changelog/new-free-tool-for-merchants", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The tool's link, genlook.app/tools/virtual-try-on, redirected to the home page on 27 October 2026." }, { "title": "Genlook: Terms of Service", "url": "https://genlook.app/terms", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the sections on billing, age, consent and content." }, { "title": "Genlook: Affiliate Program", "url": "https://genlook.app/affiliates", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The program states a 30% commission for 12 months; no earnings example." }, { "title": "Scribe: the git-based CMS for multilingual MDX sites (made by Genlook)", "url": "https://scribe.genlook.app/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the website's content system and the Gemini translation step." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/gymstreak/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/gymstreak.md", "slug": "gymstreak", "name": "GymStreak", "country": "United Kingdom", "sector": "Health Care", "productType": "Personal-trainer app that writes workout plans", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "March 2018", "outcomeLabel": "About US$2.5M in revenue, 2022", "sticker": "$2.5M revenue in 2022", "outcomeUsd": 2500000, "months": 57, "teamLabel": "1 founder, no employees, 4 contractors in July 2023", "fundingLabel": "None", "primaryFactor": "Ads that paid back on day 0", "group": "health-appearance", "channel": "paid-ads", "trend": "unknown", "collections": [ "phone-app" ], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 2 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Fitness" ], "product": "A personal-trainer app for iPhone, Apple Watch and Android. It asks for the goal, the training days, the session length and the equipment, writes a weekly plan with calorie and macro targets, logs every set, shows a 3D demo of each exercise, and has an AI chat coach that edits the plan. It is free to download; logging workouts, the coach and food logging need a subscription billed by Apple or Google.", "why": "The founder says that in 2021 his app stopped growing, so he studied the sign-up and payment screens of bigger apps for six months and rebuilt the product from scratch three times. The new version writes the plan for the user. He says that it let his Facebook and TikTok ads pay for themselves on the day they ran, so he could buy users without outside money.", "summary": [ "GymStreak is a fitness app for iPhone, Apple Watch and Android that writes a gym or home workout plan, a list of which exercises to do on which day with how many sets and repetitions, from the user's goal, training days, session length and equipment. It then logs every set. By November 2024 it also counted calories from food photos, and in 2026 it has a chat coach named Spot that edits the plan. It is free to download; logging workouts, the coach and food search need an in-app subscription, a recurring payment that Apple or Google collects inside the app. Each exercise has a 3D demo. The founder first animated them by hand and later with motion capture, a recording of a real trainer's movements in a suit with sensors.", "Joseph Mambwe studied engineering at the University of Cambridge, where he had the idea, and first sold a simple paid GymStreak app. GymStreak Ltd was registered in England on 9 March 2018 to build a fuller version. He told the founder community Hampton in a profile dated 5 July 2023 that the app made about US$300,000 in 2021 and about US$2.5 million in 2022, with no employees and four contractors, and that 2023 would be about the same. He said that Facebook and TikTok ads brought most users and paid for themselves on the same day: a return on ad spend, revenue divided by the cost of the ads, of about 1.5 on the day of the spend.", "The revenue figures rest on that one interview, so this page grades them D: reported, not verified. There is a second open question. In the 2023 interview the founder talks about 3D animation and augmented reality, which places a 3D model in the camera view of the room, and does not use the word AI. But the company's own website was titled \"GymStreak AI\" in October 2022, and the App Store listing of May 2022 described a trainer that creates plans automatically. This page treats that plan generator as the product's AI, as the company did; no source says how it worked." ], "factsCaption": "A one-founder fitness app that, by the founder's own account, made about US$2.5 million in 2022 with paid ads and no employees", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is a statement by the founder in a single interview, with no second source. A grade C value is read from the company's own current or archived pages. A grade B value is published by Apple or recorded by the Internet Archive. A grade A value is from the UK company register. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows named in its note.", "timelineLead": "From a simple paid exercise catalog to an app with an AI coach, by way of a rebuild in 2021 that the founder says multiplied revenue. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "GymStreak in-app purchases listed in the US App Store on 27 October 2026 (grade B); the listing gives no period for any item", "note": "The app is free to download. Without a subscription a user can answer the setup questions, see the plan, browse the exercise library and track body weight; starting and logging workouts, the AI coach and food logging need GymStreak Premium, billed by Apple or Google. Apple's listing shows ten in-app purchases and no period for any of them, and several share a name at different prices, which may mean that the developer tests prices. The company's pages say only that the app shows the local price and any free trial before payment, so the price that a new user sees is not known.", "rows": [ [ "GymStreak Premium", "", "", "listed at US$13.49, US$19.99, US$21.49, US$29.99 and US$100.99; period not shown" ], [ "GymStreak Plan", "", "", "listed at US$59.99 and US$76.99; period not shown" ], [ "GymStreak Premium Plan", "", "", "US$9.99; period not shown" ], [ "GymStreak Forever Plan", "", "", "US$22.99; period not shown" ], [ "Workout Planner & Calorie Logs", "", "", "US$100.99; period not shown" ], [ "Download", "0", "0", "setup questions, plan preview, exercise library and body tracking" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Revenue in 2022", "value": "about US$2.5 million", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder in his Hampton profile, 5 July 2023: \"in 2022 we did ~$2.5 million\". eBiz Facts repeated it on 20 July 2023 from the same interview, so it is not a second source. This is the headline figure.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in 2021", "value": "about US$300,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Same interview: \"in 2021 we did ~$300k in revenue\". He also says that in 2021 growth stopped at \"the $300k ARR mark\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Growth from 2021 to 2022", "value": "about 8.3 times", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$2.5 million divided by US$300,000. The founder and the Hampton introduction round it to about 10 times.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Average revenue per month in 2022", "value": "about US$208,000", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$2.5 million divided by 12. No source states a monthly figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue expected for 2023", "value": "\"about the same, maybe slightly less\" than 2022", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder, July 2023. He said he had slowed growth by choice, for family time and to improve download-to-trial, trial-to-paid and churn rates. No later revenue figure was found.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Return on ad spend on the day of the spend", "value": "about 1.5", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder, July 2023: for US$100 of ads he gets about US$150 of new revenue the same day, before renewals and trial conversions. At the highest spend he broke even on day 3 or day 7, when trials pay out.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team, July 2023", "value": "the founder, no employees, 4 contractors", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder: contractors for customer support, blog writing, ad creatives and performance marketing, and \"everything else I do myself\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder: \"GymStreak is completely bootstrapped\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Company", "value": "GymStreak Ltd, England, company number 11245600, incorporated 9 March 2018", "grade": "A", "note": "Companies House register, read 27 October 2026: active, nature of business 62012 (business and domestic software development), accounts filed every year up to 31 March 2025 as total exemption full accounts. The register page shows no turnover.", "src": [ 13 ] }, { "fact": "The company's description of the app, October 2022", "value": "\"GymStreak AI | Intelligent Gym Trainer\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Title of gymstreak.com in the Internet Archive copy of 4 October 2022, with \"Automatically created intelligent workout plan based on your body type, goals and experience.\" The same page still showed an early beta sign-up form. In April 2023 the title was \"Gym Streak AI - Workout Planner App\".", "src": [ 3, 14 ] }, { "fact": "App Store name and description, May 2022", "value": "\"GymStreak: Gym Workout Plans\", with an \"Automatic Workout Trainer\"", "grade": "B", "note": "Internet Archive copy of the US listing, 25 May 2022. It describes a personal trainer \"that has learnt from training hundreds of thousands of people\" and automatic periodization of weights and reps. The word AI does not appear. Rating 4.5 from 3.9K ratings, age rating 4+.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "App Store name, November 2024", "value": "\"GymStreak: AI Personal Trainer\"", "grade": "B", "note": "Internet Archive copy of 22 November 2024: \"AI Powered Workouts\" and \"AI Powered Food Tracking: Snap a pic, let AI count those macros\". Rating 4.7 from 15.3K ratings. The archive's index also holds the listing under the names gymstreak-gym-workout-plans (May 2022) and gymstreak-gym-log-workouts (July 2022).", "src": [ 6, 5 ] }, { "fact": "US App Store rating, October 2026", "value": "4.7 from 16K ratings", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's US listing, read 27 October 2026. Age rating 9+, category Health & Fitness, seller GymStreak Ltd. The company's home page gives 4.7 from 74k ratings worldwide, checked by the company on 29 September 2026; the worldwide figure was not checked here.", "src": [ 7, 8 ] }, { "fact": "In-app purchases listed, October 2026", "value": "10 items from US$9.99 to US$100.99", "grade": "B", "note": "Apple's US listing. No period is given for any item.", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the company's registration to the end of 2022", "value": "57 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: March 2018 to December 2022. The first, simpler GymStreak app is older: gymstreak.com is in the Internet Archive from 15 April 2013.", "src": [ 13, 15 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "15 April 2013", "what": "Earliest Internet Archive copy of gymstreak.com. The founder says a simple paid version, a catalog of exercises with 2D images, lived on the App Store for years among other apps of his first company.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 15, 1 ] }, { "when": "9 March 2018", "what": "GymStreak Ltd is registered in England. The founder says he spun GymStreak out into its own company that year and started animating every exercise in 3D, with an engine ready for augmented reality.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 13, 1 ] }, { "when": "2020", "what": "Gyms close during COVID-19. Within days he ships home workouts and changes all ads to \"gym quality home workouts\", the founder says.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2021", "what": "Growth stops at about US$300,000 a year and churn is high, by the founder's account. He studies the flows and pricing of bigger apps for six months and rebuilds the product from scratch three times.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "25 May 2022", "what": "The App Store listing, \"GymStreak: Gym Workout Plans\", offers an automatic workout trainer, equipment profiles, motion-captured exercises and automatic periodization. 4.5 stars from 3.9K ratings.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "when": "4 October 2022", "what": "The company's website is titled \"GymStreak AI | Intelligent Gym Trainer\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "2022", "what": "About US$2.5 million of revenue, about 8 times 2021, the founder says.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2 April 2023", "what": "The website title is \"Gym Streak AI - Workout Planner App\" and adds nutrition tracking.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 14 ] }, { "when": "5 July 2023", "what": "Hampton profile: no employees, four contractors, about 1.5 times the ad spend back on day 0, and 2023 revenue expected to be about the same. He says he cut ad spend to work on retention.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "20 July 2023", "what": "eBiz Facts repeats the interview and calls GymStreak \"a fitness app that uses AI to create personalized workout plans\".", "grade": "D", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "22 November 2024", "what": "The App Store listing is now \"GymStreak: AI Personal Trainer\", with AI workouts, AI food tracking from photos and version 6. 4.7 stars from 15.3K ratings.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "May 2026", "what": "App Store version notes mention the AI coach: \"Improved AI coach reliability for workout edits, meal logging and food search\" (version 6.3.10, 21 May).", "grade": "B", "src": [ 7 ] }, { "when": "October 2026", "what": "The website presents Spot, the AI coach, and states that logging workouts, the coach and food search need Premium. 4.7 stars from 16K US ratings, age rating 9+.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8, 10, 7 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Ads that pay back the same day", "text": "The founder said in July 2023 that \"high creative production, onboarding, offers and smart pricing\" returned the ad spend on the day it was spent: about US$150 of new revenue for every US$100 of ads, by his account, before any renewal. A business with no investors can only buy users this way if the money comes back fast." }, { "title": "A rebuild after the plateau", "text": "The founder said that revenue stopped at about US$300,000 a year in 2021 and that users were leaving. He did not add features; he copied the structure of the apps above him, rebuilt the product three times, and accepted that the metrics fell for the first weeks after the release." }, { "title": "The plan is the product", "text": "Most gym apps are logs that the user fills in. GymStreak writes the plan from a few answers, which is what a beginner does not know how to do. The company's own site compares it with the loggers Strong and Hevy on exactly this point." }, { "title": "Contractors, not employees", "text": "Four contractors handle support, the blog, ad creatives and performance marketing; the founder writes the code and designs the app. He says paid ads suit a solo developer because he controls how many new users arrive." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's July 2023 interview (grade D) and the company's App Store listings (grade B).", "items": [ "Flutter, a cross-platform framework, so that one code base serves iPhone and Android. The founder designed in code and used Sketch and Figma only for storyboards.", "Every exercise is a 3D animation in an engine that he added so that the app would be ready for augmented reality. The first animations were made by hand, later ones with motion capture of a personal trainer.", "Subscriptions run through RevenueCat, whose cohort view of realized lifetime value, the money a group of users who started on the same day has paid so far, showed him how much he could spend on ads.", "Contractors are hired through Upwork.", "Growth came from Facebook and TikTok ads. A blog and App Store optimization brought some traffic.", "By November 2024 the listing describes AI food tracking from photos, and by May 2026 a chat coach. No source names the AI models behind them." ], "src": [ 1, 6, 7 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to get people to exercise more, with pop-up classes, live coaching, smart clothing or a game, and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "Fitmob", "years": "2013 to 2017", "funding": "US$9.8M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Pop-up fitness classes in many venues, with no gym membership.", "died": "Coordinating classes and venue partners cost more than it brought in, and ClassPass grew faster with a wider network.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/151-fitmob" }, { "name": "Charge Running", "years": "2021 to 2024", "funding": "US$5M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Live running classes with an audio coach and a community of runners.", "died": "Users wanted flexible times, not scheduled sessions, and apps with personal, on-demand coaching took its customers.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/895-charge-running" }, { "name": "Enflux", "years": "2016 to 2019", "funding": "US$1M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Clothing with sensors that tracks movement in 3D and corrects form in real time.", "died": "The hardware was costly to make and ship, and Fitbit and Apple kept adding features to their own wearables.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1089-enflux" }, { "name": "FitFu", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$300K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A phone game that detected exercises with the phone's sensors and rewarded them.", "died": "Users left when the novelty was gone, the app had no strong way to make money, and Nike Training Club and Fitbit offered more.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1194-fitfu" } ], "whatChanged": [ "All four sold a way to make exercise less lonely or less boring: classes, live coaching, smart clothing or a game. Each needed money for venues, instructors, hardware or users, and each lost to larger companies. The Loot Drop record of Charge Running says that apps with personal, on-demand coaching took its users.", "GymStreak sells the plan, not the session. A beginner answers a few questions and gets a program; there is no venue, no instructor on a schedule and no hardware to pay for. The founder said that his ads paid back on the day they ran, which is how, by his account, a business without investors could grow about eight times in one year. What did not change is the crowded market: the company's own site compares the app with Strong and Hevy, and both have many more US ratings." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The method, yes. The 2022 ad prices, maybe not.", "text": "The structure can be copied: a plan written for the user, a free preview of that plan, a subscription to use it, and paid ads measured by the day they pay back. What cannot be checked is whether ads still pay back that fast. The founder said in July 2023 that he had cut ad spend to work on retention, and that the real money is in renewals.", "steps": [ "Write the plan for the user from a few questions; do not hand a beginner an empty log.", "Show the plan before the paywall, then charge for using it.", "Measure ad payback by the day of the spend, with cohort data from your subscription tool, before you raise the budget.", "Use contractors for support, content and ad creatives, and keep the product and the code yourself." ], "open": "Other activities where a beginner does not know what to do next and a written plan is the product: running, climbing, swimming, mobility routines, or cooking to a calorie target." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline figure, about US$2.5 million of revenue in 2022, and the US$300,000 of 2021 rest on one source: Joseph Mambwe's member profile on the Hampton blog, dated 5 July 2023. eBiz Facts (20 July 2023) repeats the same interview and is not a second source. No payment-processor profile, App Store revenue statement or company accounts with turnover were found. GymStreak Ltd files total exemption full accounts at Companies House, but the documents are served from a host whose robots.txt could not be read, so they were not opened. A reader could look for a RevenueCat or TrustMRR profile, the company's filed accounts for the year to 31 March 2023, or a later interview with a dated figure." }, { "title": "Was the 2022 app an AI product?", "text": "In the July 2023 interview the founder describes 3D animation, augmented reality and automatic plans, and does not use the word AI. The company's site was titled \"GymStreak AI | Intelligent Gym Trainer\" in October 2022, and the App Store listing of May 2022 described an automatic trainer \"that has learnt from training hundreds of thousands of people\", without the word AI. No source says whether that plan generator was a trained model or hand-written rules. The AI food tracking (by November 2024) and the chat coach (by May 2026) came after the headline year." }, { "title": "Growth bought with ads", "text": "The founder said in July 2023 that Facebook and TikTok ads were the main channel and that he had cut spend that year to improve retention. Ad prices and platform rules can change the payback. No later figure shows what happened to revenue after 2023." }, { "title": "A page of exchanged links", "text": "The site's \"Friends of GymStreak\" page links, without a nofollow mark, to nine other apps, among them an Instagram Reels audio saver and an AI homework helper. The home page of one of them, Ruvix Labs, has an \"Our Friends\" list that links back to GymStreak. Google's spam policies name \"Excessive link exchanges\" and \"partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking\" as link spam. No source shows that GymStreak's owner owns those apps. The footer also links to GymLevels, called \"our RPG workout app\", which was not reviewed for this page." }, { "title": "The source is a members' profile", "text": "Hampton calls itself a private founder community, and the interview is a profile of one of its members, mostly in his own words. It is not a journalist's report, and no one outside checked the numbers." }, { "title": "Ratings and prices", "text": "The home page says 4.7 from 74k ratings worldwide; Apple's US listing shows 4.7 from 16K. Apple lists ten in-app purchases from US$9.99 to US$100.99 with no period. A US review of 15 September 2026 complains that support is answered by AI and that the generated plans did not fit the reviewer's equipment; the developer replied and asked for details." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.gymstreak.com/" }, { "kind": "ios", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1371187280" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "Hampton blog, 5 July 2023: Bootstrapping a $2.5 Million Per Year Fitness App with Zero Employees", "url": "https://joinhampton.com/blog/bootstrapping-a-2.5-million-per-year-fitness-app-with-zero-employees", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full (downloaded 27 October 2026). A member profile written mostly in the founder's words. The only source for the revenue figures, the team, the ad payback, the rebuild and the tools." }, { "title": "eBiz Facts, 20 July 2023: $2.5 Million Per Year Fitness App with Zero Employees", "url": "https://ebizfacts.com/joseph-mambwe-gymstreak-app-2-million-annual-revenue/", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full in the site's RSS feed (https://ebizfacts.com/feed/?paged=3, downloaded 27 October 2026). It restates the Hampton interview, so it is not an independent figure." }, { "title": "gymstreak.com, Internet Archive copy of 4 October 2022: GymStreak AI | Intelligent Gym Trainer", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20221004040235/https://gymstreak.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's own description of the app in the headline year." }, { "title": "App Store, GymStreak: Gym Workout Plans, Internet Archive copy of 25 May 2022", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20220525165023/https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gymstreak-gym-workout-plans/id1371187280", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the name, rating, age rating and description. The description is the developer's; the rating is Apple's." }, { "title": "Internet Archive index of App Store listing addresses starting apps.apple.com/us/app/gymstreak", "url": "https://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=apps.apple.com/us/app/gymstreak&matchType=prefix&fl=timestamp,original,statuscode&collapse=urlkey&limit=50", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Shows the names under which the listing id1371187280 was archived from 2022 to 2026." }, { "title": "App Store, GymStreak: AI Personal Trainer, Internet Archive copy of 22 November 2024", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20241122155311/https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gymstreak-ai-personal-trainer/id1371187280", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the name, rating, description, version note and in-app purchases." }, { "title": "App Store, US: GymStreak: AI Personal Trainer, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gymstreak-ai-personal-trainer/id1371187280", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full: rating, age rating, seller, version history, reviews and the in-app purchase list." }, { "title": "GymStreak home page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.gymstreak.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full (downloaded 27 October 2026). Source for the free and Premium features, the worldwide rating claim and the comparison with Strong and Hevy. robots.txt allows ClaudeBot except /api/ and /admin/." }, { "title": "GymStreak: About, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.gymstreak.com/about", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Company name and what the free and paid versions include." }, { "title": "GymStreak: Spot, the AI coach, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.gymstreak.com/coach", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the description of the coach." }, { "title": "GymStreak: Friends of GymStreak, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.gymstreak.com/friends", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the link markup. Source for the list of linked apps." }, { "title": "Ruvix Labs home page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.ruvixlabs.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Its \"Our Friends\" list links to GymStreak. robots.txt answered 404 (no rules)." }, { "title": "Companies House: GYMSTREAK LTD, company 11245600", "url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/11245600", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the overview and the filing history. The accounts documents redirect to an Amazon S3 host whose robots.txt answered 403, so they were not opened." }, { "title": "gymstreak.com, Internet Archive copy of 2 April 2023: Gym Streak AI - Workout Planner App", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20230402121304/https://gymstreak.com/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The copy of 1 September 2023 is the same." }, { "title": "Internet Archive index of gymstreak.com, first five copies", "url": "https://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=gymstreak.com&fl=timestamp,original,statuscode&limit=5", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. The first copy is from 15 April 2013." }, { "title": "Google Search Central: Spam policies for Google web search", "url": "https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the section on link spam." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/inspired-so/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/inspired-so.md", "slug": "inspired-so", "name": "Inspired.so", "country": "Not stated in the sources", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "GPT-3 idea generator for blog posts and marketing copy", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "exit", "evidence": "D", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "May 2021", "outcomeLabel": "Sold for US$4K, 2021", "sticker": "Sold for $4K", "outcomeUsd": 4000, "months": 2, "teamLabel": "1 founder, building alone in about 60 hours", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Early prompts for a new model", "group": "marketing-content", "channel": "unknown", "trend": "sold", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 1, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Exit", "B2B", "Copywriting" ], "product": "A web app, built in Bubble on OpenAI's GPT-3 model, that suggested ideas for blog posts and for marketing and website copy. Its page called it an AI-powered inspiration engine for copywriters and entrepreneurs. It was sold with its domain, inspired.so, before it had any paying customers.", "why": "In 2021 GPT-3 was new, access to it needed an invitation, and good prompts took many hours of testing to find. The founder had done that work for content-marketing prompts and put them in a finished Bubble app with payments and analytics. By the founder's account, a buyer who was building a larger AI writing product chose to buy the working app instead of paying a developer to build one.", "summary": [ "Inspired was a web app that wrote ideas for blog posts and for marketing and website copy with GPT-3, a large language model from OpenAI that continues a text from a written instruction, the prompt. Its page described it as \"an AI-powered inspiration engine that helps copywriters and entrepreneurs come up with ideas for marketing and website copy\". It was built in Bubble, a no-code tool in which an app is put together from visual blocks and workflows instead of written code, and it called the OpenAI API, the paid interface through which a program sends prompts to OpenAI's models.", "Fernanda Graciolli, a neuroscientist turned web developer who had learned Bubble since 2017, built it in 2021 in about 60 hours and shared the work in public for feedback, while starting a contract job. They never launched it. They told the No-Code Exits newsletter in November 2022 that they listed the app and the domain inspired.so on MicroAcquire, a marketplace for small online businesses, at US$5,000, received about 15 inquiries in two weeks, and sold it for US$4,000. The app had no revenue and about 10 users, and the deal closed 48 days after the first day of building.", "Every number on this page comes from that one interview, so the sale is graded D: reported, not verified. The buyer is not named. The story is small, but it shows something specific to 2021: for a few months, tested prompts for a new model, wrapped in a working app, were an asset that someone would pay for." ], "factsCaption": "A GPT-3 app built in about 60 hours and sold with its domain before it had revenue, on the founder's own account", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade D value is a statement by the founder in a single newsletter interview, with no second source. A grade C value is read from archived copies of the product's pages. A grade B value is recorded by the Internet Archive itself. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows named in its note.", "timelineLead": "From a parked domain to a sold app in about seven weeks, then a domain that was offered for sale again. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "Inspired.so prices: none were published in any source this page could read. The rows show the asking and sale prices of the app itself (grade D) and a later listing of the domain (grade C)", "note": "The archived pages of 2021 load the Bubble app by script and contain no prices. The founder said the app was fully functional, including payments, but gave no price, and its revenue was zero. The first price column holds one-time prices.", "rows": [ [ "App subscription, 2021", "", "", "price not published in any downloaded source" ], [ "Asking price on MicroAcquire, 2021", "5,000 one-time", "", "the app and the domain inspired.so" ], [ "Sale price, 2021", "4,000 one-time", "", "paid by a buyer who is not named" ], [ "Domain inspired.so offered for sale, November 2025", "888 one-time", "", "a later listing on spaceship.com" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Sale price, 2021", "value": "US$4,000", "grade": "D", "note": "The founder in No-Code Exits, 10 November 2022: \"I listed it for $5,000 and sold it for $4,000\". The buyer took the app and the domain. This is the headline figure.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Asking price on MicroAcquire", "value": "US$5,000", "grade": "D", "note": "Same interview. About 15 inquiries in two weeks; the founder said the domain \"was also a big asset\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Sale price as a share of the asking price", "value": "80%", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$4,000 divided by US$5,000.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue at the sale", "value": "US$0", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder: \"Revenue: 0$\". The founder decided to focus on a contract job instead of launching or growing the app.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Users at the sale", "value": "about 10", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder: \"Users: around 10 users\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time spent building", "value": "about 60 hours", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder: \"Time spent: around 60 hours\".", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Sale price per hour of work", "value": "about US$67", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: US$4,000 divided by 60 hours.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Days from the first day of building to the closed deal", "value": "48", "grade": "D", "note": "Founder: \"It was 48 days from the day I started building it to the day I closed the deal.\"", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Date of the sale", "value": "not stated; no later than 25 June 2021", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: the app was live in the Internet Archive on 8 May 2021, so building began before then, and the deal closed 48 days after building began. If building began after the domain was registered (still a parked page on 18 April 2021), the sale fell between 5 and 25 June 2021.", "src": [ 1, 2, 3 ] }, { "fact": "The product's own description, May 2021", "value": "\"Inspired is an AI-powered inspiration engine that helps copywriters and entrepreneurs come up with ideas for marketing and website copy.\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Description tag of inspired.so in the Internet Archive copy of 8 May 2021, page title \"Blog Post Inspiration by AI\". The same text is in the copies of 14 June and 26 July 2021.", "src": [ 3, 4, 5 ] }, { "fact": "Built with Bubble", "value": "yes", "grade": "B", "note": "The archived page source loads Bubble page data, and the founder says the app integrated GPT-3 with Bubble.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the first archived copy of the live app to the latest possible sale date", "value": "about 2 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: 8 May 2021 to no later than 25 June 2021 is 48 days, about 1.6 months, rounded to 2. The founder's 48 days from the start of building to the sale give the same.", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "fact": "The domain in November 2025", "value": "offered for sale at US$888", "grade": "C", "note": "Internet Archive copy of inspired.so, 7 November 2025: a for-sale page listed with spaceship.com. In April 2024 the domain showed a parking page.", "src": [ 7, 8 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "2017", "what": "The founder, a neuroscientist turned web developer, starts learning Bubble and tries to launch a few products that do not take off.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "18 April 2021", "what": "inspired.so shows a parking page: \"This domain was recently registered at Namecheap.\"", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "2021", "what": "The founder spends many hours on content-marketing prompts in OpenAI's playground, then connects GPT-3 to a Bubble app, building in public for feedback.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "8 May 2021", "what": "First archived copy of the live app, titled \"Blog Post Inspiration by AI\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "May or June 2021", "what": "Listed on MicroAcquire at US$5,000 with the domain; about 15 inquiries in two weeks; sold for US$4,000, 48 days after building began, the founder says. The date is calculated, not stated.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, { "when": "14 June and 26 July 2021", "what": "The archived app still carries the same title and description.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 4, 5 ] }, { "when": "9 December 2021", "what": "The Internet Archive records an error page (status 409) at inspired.so. The founder says the buyer had built the app into a larger product with a new design.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 6, 1 ] }, { "when": "10 November 2022", "what": "No-Code Exits publishes the founder's account of the build and the sale.", "grade": "D", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "3 April 2024", "what": "inspired.so shows a parking page.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 8 ] }, { "when": "7 November 2025", "what": "The domain is offered for sale at US$888 on spaceship.com.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 7 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Prompts before the crowd", "text": "The founder said they spent a lot of time in OpenAI's playground learning to write prompts for content marketing, at a time when GPT-3 was new. That knowledge, not the interface, was what the buyer used: the founder said the buyer kept the prompt engineering and the Bubble integration and changed the design completely." }, { "title": "A finished app, not a prototype", "text": "The app was fully functional, with payments and analytics, before it was listed. The founder's advice to sellers is to fix bugs, finish the design and make it perform well before listing, because buyers who pay the most want a working app." }, { "title": "The domain as part of the price", "text": "The founder said the short domain inspired.so was a big asset in the sale. It came with the app." }, { "title": "Build or buy", "text": "The founder believes the buyer chose a ready-made app over paying a developer, and said they would have charged much more than the sale price of US$4,000 to build it for hire." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's interview (grade D) and the archived page source (grade B).", "items": [ "Bubble, a no-code app builder, for the whole app: pages, workflows, payments and analytics. The archived page source loads Bubble page data.", "OpenAI's GPT-3 through its API for the text. The prompts were developed and tested in OpenAI's playground first.", "Built in about 60 hours of the founder's time, while starting a contract job.", "Built in public: the founder shared the work while building and used the feedback to refine the app and the prompts.", "Sold through MicroAcquire, a marketplace for small online businesses. The founder also got the buyer an invitation to GPT-3." ], "src": [ 1, 3 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to give writers a better tool and failed, mostly because larger products added the same feature. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "WriteWith", "years": "2007 to 2010", "funding": "US$20K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Real-time group writing in the browser.", "died": "Google Docs offered the same core feature with a larger ecosystem, and the company had too little money to keep up.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1237-writewith" }, { "name": "Draft", "years": "2011 to 2014", "funding": "US$120K", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A simple online editor for writers, with version control and editing by others.", "died": "It did not grow beyond its first features, and Google Docs added similar ones.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1605-draft" }, { "name": "Pressly", "years": "2011 to 2018", "funding": "US$2.9M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "A platform for brands to collect, curate and publish content.", "died": "Larger marketing suites built curation in, and competitors had broader integrations.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/462-pressly" }, { "name": "Taleship", "years": "2018 to 2020", "funding": "US$0", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A shared writing app in which writers create stories together.", "died": "Too many features spread too thin, with free tools all around and no way to make money.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/1918-taleship" } ], "whatChanged": [ "The four predecessors built tools for writers and lost when a larger product added the same feature. Inspired did not try to survive that race. Its founder sold it within weeks, at the moment when tested GPT-3 prompts were still scarce and a buyer wanted them inside a larger product.", "That is also the limit of the story. The founder said that a buyer paid US$4,000 for the app and the domain, not for customers or revenue. The archived pages show that the app was gone from the domain by December 2021, and a for-sale page listed the domain itself at US$888 in November 2025." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The 2021 window, no. The pattern, sometimes.", "text": "The 2021 window has closed: GPT-3 is no longer new, and the buyer's reasons, scarce tested prompts and access to the model, no longer apply. The pattern behind the sale still appears each time a new model or API is released: whoever learns to get good results from it first, and wraps that in a finished app, holds something that a builder of a larger product may buy for a few weeks.", "steps": [ "When a new model or API appears, spend the hours to find prompts or settings that work for one specific job.", "Finish the app completely, with payments and analytics, before you list it.", "Put the domain and any access you can transfer into the sale.", "List it on a marketplace for small businesses and expect a price close to what a developer would charge to build it, not a multiple of revenue." ], "open": "New model releases with few experienced users: video, voice and agent APIs, where tested prompts and working integrations are still scarce." }, "watch": [ { "title": "What is not verified", "text": "The headline figure, a sale for US$4,000, rests on one source: the founder's interview in the No-Code Exits newsletter, published on 10 November 2022. The same interview is the only source for the US$5,000 asking price, the zero revenue, the 10 users, the 60 hours and the 48 days. The buyer is not named, no copy of the MicroAcquire listing was found in the downloaded sources, and the founder's own article about the build is on Indie Hackers, which this site does not fetch. A reader could look for the marketplace's record of the deal, the buyer's own account, or the founder's 2021 posts quoted in another publication." }, { "title": "No business was sold", "text": "By the founder's account the app had no revenue and about 10 users. The buyer paid for working software, tested prompts, the domain and help with access to GPT-3. The founder said that a developer hired to build it would have charged much more than the price paid." }, { "title": "The sale date is not stated", "text": "The interview says 2021 and 48 days from the start of building to the closed deal, but gives no date. The archived copies of the site place the sale no later than 25 June 2021. A reader commenting on the newsletter post also asked when the sale took place." }, { "title": "The asset did not last", "text": "By December 2021 the address returned an error in the Internet Archive, by April 2024 it showed a parking page, and in November 2025 the domain was listed for sale at US$888, less than a quarter of what the app and domain sold for together in 2021." }, { "title": "Prompts are easy to copy", "text": "Anyone with API access could write similar prompts. The founder said the buyer kept only the prompt engineering and the Bubble integration. Other builders could write similar prompts within weeks." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "archive", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210726222741/https://inspired.so/" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "No-Code Exits newsletter (Joshua Davis), 10 November 2022: How Fernanda built a GPT-3 No-Code App that got acquired", "url": "https://nocodeexits.substack.com/p/how-a-gpt-3-no-code-app-was-built", "grade": "D", "how": "Read in full (downloaded 27 October 2026). The founder's interview. The only source for the prices, the revenue, the users, the hours, the 48 days and the buyer's reasons. robots.txt of nocodeexits.substack.com allows /p/." }, { "title": "inspired.so, Internet Archive copy of 18 April 2021: parking page", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20210418123032/http://www.inspired.so/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. \"This domain was recently registered at Namecheap.\"" }, { "title": "inspired.so, Internet Archive copy of 8 May 2021: Blog Post Inspiration by AI", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210508181743/https://inspired.so/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the title, the description tag and the page source. The visible text loads by script." }, { "title": "inspired.so, Internet Archive copy of 14 June 2021", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210614143752/https://inspired.so/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the title, the description tag and the page source." }, { "title": "inspired.so, Internet Archive copy of 26 July 2021", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210726222741/https://inspired.so/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the title, the description tag and the page source." }, { "title": "Internet Archive index of inspired.so, 2017 to 2025", "url": "https://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=inspired.so&matchType=domain", "grade": "B", "how": "Read in full. Lists the archived copies and their status codes, including the error of 9 December 2021." }, { "title": "inspired.so, Internet Archive copy of 7 November 2025: domain for sale", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20251107132538/http://inspired.so/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. A for-sale page listed with spaceship.com at US$888." }, { "title": "inspired.so, Internet Archive copy of 3 April 2024: parking page", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20240403215259/https://www.inspired.so/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the page source: a domain parking script and no content." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] }, { "url": "https://aiolum.com/story/translatemom/", "markdown": "https://aiolum.com/story/translatemom.md", "slug": "translatemom", "name": "TranslateMom", "country": "Canada", "sector": "Information Technology", "productType": "AI video translation, subtitles and dubbing, with a translation bot on X", "aiType": "AI-native", "team": "solo", "outcome": "running", "evidence": "A", "added": "2026-10-27", "launchLabel": "May 2023", "outcomeLabel": "US$3.7K monthly recurring revenue, October 2026", "sticker": "$3.7K MRR", "outcomeUsd": 44832, "months": 41, "teamLabel": "1 founder, Monta Gao, who called it a side project in October 2025; headcount not published", "fundingLabel": "None reported", "primaryFactor": "Distribution", "group": "voice-audio", "channel": "platform", "trend": "falling", "collections": [], "meters": { "evidence": 3, "copyable": 2, "capital": 1 }, "tags": [ "AI-native", "Solo founder", "Bootstrapped", "Running", "B2C", "Translation" ], "product": "A web studio that turns the speech in a video or audio file into subtitles, a translation into more than 100 languages, or a new voice track in another language. Users paste a link from X, YouTube or TikTok or upload a file, correct the subtitles in the browser, and export subtitle files or a video with the subtitles burned in. A free bot account on X answers with a subtitled translation when people mention it under a video.", "why": "It answered a request that people already typed in public: what does the person in this viral video say? A free bot replied inside X, where the request was made, and the website sold the same service for longer files at a few dollars a month. The speech and translation models are bought from other companies, so one person could build and run it.", "summary": [ "TranslateMom translates the speech in videos. It first runs speech recognition, a model that writes down the words spoken in an audio track, then machine translation, a model that translates that text into another language, and shows the result as timed subtitles. It can also do dubbing: replace the voice track with a generated voice that speaks the translation. The product has two faces. On the website, a paid user uploads a file or pastes a link and spends credits, a prepaid unit in which one credit buys one minute of transcription and translation. On X, the account @TranslateMom is a bot, a program that posts by itself: it replies to videos with a translated, subtitled version.", "The founder appears as Monta Gao in the website's own structured data, and as Monta Kaoh on Product Hunt and @montakaoh on X. They built the bot in May 2023 as, in their words, \"a simple Whisper + Google Translate loop\", and later wrote that in 2023 \"There was no real revenue\". On 29 October 2025 they called it \"a $2k+ MRR side project with over 100k active users on X\", and at a Product Hunt launch on 17 November 2025 they wrote that it \"made over $50k this year\". On 27 October 2026, TrustMRR, a site that reads revenue directly from a company's payment accounts, showed monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the subscription income that repeats every month, of US$3,736 from 240 active subscriptions, US$54,245 of revenue in the last 12 months and US$143,369 since the start.", "The TrustMRR figures are grade A: TrustMRR reads them through API keys from Stripe, which takes the card payments on the website, and from RevenueCat, a service that records App Store subscription payments for app makers. The founder's statements are grade C. Monthly revenue has stayed between about US$3,600 and US$5,100 since March 2026, and the business has been listed for sale on TrustMRR since December 2025 at US$120,000. The page also shows earlier companies that sold translation, or that grew on top of Twitter and lost when the platform changed." ], "factsCaption": "US$3,736 of monthly recurring revenue and US$143,369 of revenue since the start, read from Stripe and RevenueCat, next to the founder's own statements", "factsRead": "How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR from the company's Stripe and RevenueCat accounts. A grade B value is a record kept by an independent party (the Internet Archive, Product Hunt, or traffic read by TrustMRR from Google Analytics). A grade C value is a statement by the founder or by the company's own pages. A \"calc\" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.", "timelineLead": "From a weekend bot on X in May 2023 to a for-sale listing with US$3,736 of monthly recurring revenue in 41 months. Each entry carries its grade.", "pricing": { "caption": "TranslateMom plans in October 2026, from the pricing page and the credits documentation (grade C)", "note": "One credit buys one minute of transcription and translation together. Transcription with the Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview model costs 2 credits a minute, and AI dubbing costs 35 credits a minute, so the 200 credits of the Starter plan dub about 5.7 minutes. New accounts get free trial credits for 60 minutes. Permanent credits are sold as one-time purchases that never expire; the pages read here do not give their price. Yearly billing costs half of the monthly price. TrustMRR lists the same three plans as US$4.50, US$9.00 and US$22.00 a month.", "rows": [ [ "Free trial", "0", "0", "60 minutes of transcription and translation, once; no dubbing" ], [ "Starter", "4.50", "9", "200 credits a month; AI dubbing in 29 languages" ], [ "Plus", "9", "18", "600 credits a month; GPT-4o; priority queue; download of source videos" ], [ "Pro", "22", "44", "2,000 credits a month; custom branding; HD video import" ], [ "Custom or enterprise", "custom", "custom", "by email" ] ] }, "facts": [ { "fact": "Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), 27 October 2026", "value": "US$3,736 from 240 active subscriptions", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot, read from Stripe and RevenueCat through API keys, last synced 27 October 2026. Down 5.4% in 30 days. Calculated: US$15.57 per subscription per month, and US$44,832 a year at that rate, which is the headline figure of this page.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 30 days, to 27 October 2026", "value": "US$3,294", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR gives growth of -35.0% over the 30 days before. Calculated: those earlier 30 days brought about US$5,068.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue in the last 12 months, to 27 October 2026", "value": "US$54,245", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR. Last 6 months: US$24,453. Last 3 months: US$11,791. Calculated: US$4,520 a month on average.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue since the start, to 27 October 2026", "value": "US$143,369", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR all-time figure. Calculated: US$89,124 of it came before the last 12 months, that is from 2023 to October 2025. The profile says it is not a merchant of record, so Stripe and RevenueCat are the only payment sources it reads.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue by month", "value": "US$6,743 in November 2025, US$3,595 in January 2026, US$6,422 in February 2026, US$5,111 in September 2026", "grade": "A", "note": "TrustMRR monthly table. From March to September 2026 every month was between US$3,601 (August) and US$5,111 (September). October 2026 to the 27th: US$2,839.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Trend of the revenue", "value": "-6.9% over 3 months, -17.9% over 6 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the TrustMRR periods: the last 3 months (US$11,791) against the 3 months before (US$12,662), and the last 6 months (US$24,453) against the 6 months before (US$29,792). This page calls the trend flat because monthly revenue has stayed in the same band since March 2026; it is below the November 2025 and February 2026 peaks.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "MRR stated by the founder, 29 October 2025", "value": "\"$2k+ MRR\", with \"over 100k active users on X\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's field report on the company blog, which calls TranslateMom a side project. Calculated: the verified MRR a year later, US$3,736, is 1.87 times US$2,000.", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "fact": "Revenue stated by the founder for 2025", "value": "\"over $50k this year\", with \"almost 80k total signups\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder's comment at the Product Hunt launch, 17 November 2025. The same comment gives 10,000 page visitors a day and more than 5,000 code commits. TrustMRR's monthly table starts in November 2025, so it cannot confirm the 2025 total.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Visitors in the last 30 days, to 27 October 2026", "value": "15,106, and US$0.20 of revenue per visitor", "grade": "B", "note": "TrustMRR reads the traffic from the company's Google Analytics account. Calculated: 15,106 times US$0.20 is about US$3,021.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Profit margin, last 30 days", "value": "65.0%", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR snapshot. The profile's verification statement covers revenue, MRR, customers, subscriptions and churn, not costs, so the margin is not counted as verified here.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Sale listing", "value": "US$120,000 asked, listed on 4 December 2025", "grade": "C", "note": "TrustMRR, 27 October 2026: 9 offers received and a revenue multiple of 3.0. Calculated: 3.04 times the last 30 days of revenue times 12, and 2.21 times the revenue of the last 12 months. No sale has been reported.", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "fact": "Start", "value": "May 2023", "grade": "C", "note": "The founder: \"I built @TranslateMom in May 2023, before X rolled out Grok.\" TrustMRR's founded date is 2 June 2023. The Internet Archive holds a copy of translate.mom from 1 June 2023. The website's structured data gives 2024 as the founding date of the organization.", "src": [ 3, 1, 12, 4 ] }, { "fact": "First version", "value": "\"a simple Whisper + Google Translate loop\"", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder, October 2025. Whisper is OpenAI's speech recognition model. The GitHub page says the product \"began as a weekend hack to watch chinese cooking videos\".", "src": [ 3, 9 ] }, { "fact": "Founder and company", "value": "Monta Gao; 15509947 Canada Inc.", "grade": "C", "note": "The website's structured data names \"Monta Gao\" as founder, with the X account @montakaoh. Product Hunt shows the maker as \"Monta Kaoh\" and TrustMRR as \"Monta\". The site footer names 15509947 Canada Inc., and TrustMRR gives the country as CA.", "src": [ 4, 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Team", "value": "1 founder; headcount not published", "grade": "C", "note": "The home page says \"made by @montakaoh\", the blog guide is signed \"-Monta\", and the founder writes \"I built\" and \"side project\". No source names staff. The Product Hunt comment uses \"we\" and \"us\" in places.", "src": [ 4, 11, 3, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Outside funding", "value": "none reported", "grade": "C", "note": "No source read here mentions investors.", "src": [ 1, 2 ] }, { "fact": "Followers of the bot on X", "value": "more than 100,000", "grade": "C", "note": "Founder on Product Hunt: \"built the translator bot to over 100k followers\". TrustMRR's profile text says the same. X itself could not be read.", "src": [ 2, 1 ] }, { "fact": "Public transcript pages of translated X videos", "value": "81,696 videos from 28,339 accounts, 498,308 views", "grade": "C", "note": "Counter on the company's transcripts page, 27 October 2026.", "src": [ 10 ] }, { "fact": "Product Hunt launch", "value": "17 November 2025, 13 points, rank 27 of the day, not featured", "grade": "B", "note": "Product Hunt's own record of the launch: 16 points on launch day, 4 comments, 25 followers of the product.", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "fact": "Oldest X post quoted on the home page", "value": "29 June 2023", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated from the post's number on X: the number divided by 2 to the power 22, plus 1,288,834,974,657, is the time in milliseconds. The post is a thank-you to TranslateMom.", "src": [ 4 ] }, { "fact": "Time from the start to the October 2026 figure", "value": "41 months", "grade": "X", "note": "Calculated: May 2023 to October 2026.", "src": [ 3, 1 ] } ], "timeline": [ { "when": "May 2023", "what": "The founder builds the @TranslateMom bot on X as a loop of Whisper and Google Translate. The GitHub page says it began as a weekend project to watch Chinese cooking videos.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3, 9 ] }, { "when": "1 June 2023", "what": "The Internet Archive saves its first copy of translate.mom, a page titled TranslateMom.", "grade": "B", "src": [ 12 ] }, { "when": "2 June 2023", "what": "Founded date on the TrustMRR profile.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "2023", "what": "The founder asks a person they met in Taiwan for advice about TranslateMom. They wrote later: \"There was no real revenue but I felt the idea was validated at that point\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "29 October 2025", "what": "A field report on the company blog compares the bot with Grok, X's own assistant, and calls TranslateMom \"a $2k+ MRR side project with over 100k active users on X\".", "grade": "C", "src": [ 3 ] }, { "when": "November 2025", "what": "US$6,743 of revenue, the best month in the TrustMRR table.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "17 November 2025", "what": "Launch on Product Hunt with 13 points. The founder writes that TranslateMom \"made over $50k this year\" and has almost 80,000 sign-ups.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 2 ] }, { "when": "4 December 2025", "what": "Listed for sale on TrustMRR.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "February 2026", "what": "US$6,422 of revenue, the second-best month in the table.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "March to September 2026", "what": "Monthly revenue stays between US$3,601 and US$5,111.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] }, { "when": "19 August 2026", "what": "The credits documentation, updated that day, lists the Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview transcription model at 2 credits a minute and dubbing at 35 credits a minute.", "grade": "C", "src": [ 6 ] }, { "when": "27 October 2026", "what": "MRR of US$3,736 from 240 active subscriptions, US$54,245 in 12 months, still listed at US$120,000 with 9 offers.", "grade": "A", "src": [ 1 ] } ], "mechanism": [ { "title": "Answer where the question is asked", "text": "People who see a video in a language they do not speak ask for a translation in the replies. The bot answers there, with the video subtitled in their language and, by default, the transcript of the original speech. The founder's comment on Product Hunt says that the niche of viral videos on X built the bot to more than 100,000 followers. The product page on Product Hunt points to the bot's replies as the place to see the product." }, { "title": "A website for the longer jobs", "text": "The bot is free. Files of up to 4.5 hours, dubbing and exports without a watermark are on the website, paid in credits: 200 minutes a month for US$4.50 billed yearly or US$9 billed monthly. The price rises with the minutes, so heavy users pay more, and the cost of the models, which also rises with the minutes, stays covered." }, { "title": "Other companies' models, chosen per job", "text": "The first version joined Whisper, OpenAI's speech recognition model, to Google Translate. The current product lets the user choose translation engines, including DeepL, offers GPT-4o on the higher plans and a Gemini transcription model at twice the credit price. The founder builds the parts around the models: the subtitle editor, the styling, the exports and the bot." }, { "title": "Pages that search engines can find", "text": "The founder wrote that they learned about SEO, or search engine optimization, and that the site reached 10,000 visitors a day by November 2025. The site has free tools (video downloaders, subtitle format converters) and public pages with the transcripts of 81,696 translated X videos, each a page that a search engine can show." } ], "howBuilt": { "intro": "These details come from the founder's posts, the company's own pages and the public source of its web pages. The page-source items are grade B; the rest are grade C.", "items": [ "The first version was a bot on X that joined Whisper and Google Translate, built over a weekend to watch Chinese cooking videos.", "Translation engines are selectable, and the FAQ says that not all languages work with DeepL. The Plus and Pro plans add GPT-4o, and a Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview transcription model costs 2 credits a minute.", "Dubbing generates new voices in 29 languages at 35 credits a minute; the GitHub page describes the beta as AI voice cloning with adjustable pitch and speed.", "The website is built with SvelteKit. Its page source loads videos from Cloudflare Stream, calls a Google Cloud Functions endpoint, and uses Plausible and PostHog for analytics and Crisp for support chat.", "Payments: Stripe on the website and RevenueCat, a service that records app-store subscriptions, both read by TrustMRR. There are also an iPhone app, a Mac app and a Chrome extension.", "The core code is closed. A public GitHub repository holds the documentation, the issue tracker and the roadmap.", "The company is 15509947 Canada Inc. The founder reports more than 5,000 code commits by November 2025." ], "src": [ 3, 9, 7, 6, 8, 4, 10, 1, 2 ] }, "predecessorsIntro": "Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold translation, or grew on top of Twitter and lost when the platform changed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.", "predecessors": [ { "name": "TurboTranslations", "years": "2014 to 2023", "funding": "US$150K", "cause": "Ran Out of Cash", "promise": "Faster, cheaper translations from a marketplace of human translators.", "died": "Neural machine translation became good enough for most texts, and a human marketplace could not compete on price.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2263-turbotranslations" }, { "name": "Meerkat", "years": "2015 to 2016", "funding": "US$14M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Live video streams from a phone, shared with your Twitter followers.", "died": "Its growth ran through Twitter's social graph. Twitter bought a competitor, Periscope, and cut Meerkat's access to the graph.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2194-meerkat" }, { "name": "ThinkUp", "years": "2010 to 2017", "funding": "US$1M", "cause": "Competition", "promise": "Personal analytics on top of your Twitter and other social accounts.", "died": "The platforms improved their own analytics and restricted API access, and larger tools offered more.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/624-thinkup" }, { "name": "Koo", "years": "2020 to 2024", "funding": "US$60M", "cause": "No Market Need", "promise": "A Twitter-like network in Indian languages, for people who do not post in English.", "died": "Downloads came from a political moment; most users only watched, and engagement stayed too low to pay for the service.", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/startup/2199-koo" } ], "whatChanged": [ "TurboTranslations sold human translation and died when machine translation became good enough. TranslateMom is built on that change: it sells machine translation of speech for a few dollars a month, and pays other companies for the models by the minute. Meerkat and ThinkUp grew on Twitter and lost when the platform cut their access or built the feature itself. TranslateMom carries the same risk: its bot depends on X, and since 2025 X's own assistant, Grok, also translates videos. The founder wrote that mentions of the bot dropped slightly as Grok improved.", "Two things differ. First, the paid product does not live on X: the website takes files and links from YouTube, TikTok and other sites, and charges through its own Stripe account and the App Store. Second, the business is small enough for one person: a 240-subscription business with US$54,245 of revenue in 12 months does not need the scale that Meerkat and Koo raised money for." ], "copy": { "verdict": "The bot-in-the-replies method, yes. This exact niche, with care.", "text": "A free bot that answered translation requests inside X brought the product its users, and a credit-priced website turned some of them into subscribers. The niche is now shared with the platform's own assistant, so a copy should start where no official assistant does the job well.", "steps": [ "Find a request that people already type in public replies, and answer it there with a bot that shows its work.", "Put the full service on your own website and charge by the minute in credits, so the price follows the cost of the models.", "Let users choose between models and charge more credits for the expensive one.", "Take payments on your own Stripe account and the App Store, not only inside the platform where the bot lives." ], "open": "Other requests that people make in public replies: summaries of long videos, captions for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers, and translation on platforms whose own assistant does not translate video." }, "watch": [ { "title": "Automatic replies to people who asked Grok", "text": "The founder's field report of 29 October 2025 says: \"Every time someone tags Grok to translate a video, TranslateMom replies with its own answer.\" So the bot also answers people who did not mention it. This is the founder's own way of reaching users, through an automated account; this page has not checked it against X's rules for automated accounts." }, { "title": "Other people's videos and voices", "text": "The free tools download public videos from YouTube (\"Save public YouTube videos or audio\"), TikTok and X, and the Plus plan includes \"Download original source videos\". The transcripts page publishes translations of 81,696 X videos from 28,339 accounts. No source read here says that the owners of those videos agreed, or discusses permission or fair use. The GitHub page describes dubbing as \"AI voice cloning\"; the dubbing documentation presents it for \"your content\"." }, { "title": "Logos and counts that are not verified", "text": "The home page shows \"Trusted by industry leaders\" with the logos of Apple, Google, The New York Times, NYU, UC Berkeley, University College London and Team Coco, and TrustMRR's profile text repeats it. No source says how these organizations use the product. A blog page says \"Join over 101,434 creators\" and \"Boost engagement by up to 80% globally\" without a source. The testimonials link to posts on X and to Trustpilot reviews, which this page could not open." }, { "title": "Small, uneven revenue, and for sale", "text": "Revenue in the last 30 days fell 35.0% against the 30 days before, and the last 6 months brought 17.9% less than the 6 months before. Monthly revenue has stayed between US$3,601 and US$5,111 since March 2026, below the US$6,743 of November 2025. The owner has offered the business for US$120,000 since December 2025; a buyer would take over a one-person product whose free channel is a bot on X." }, { "title": "Depends on X and on model providers", "text": "The bot needs X to keep allowing it, and X's own assistant Grok now translates videos as well. The translation and speech models come from other companies (the founder names Whisper and Google Translate; the pages name DeepL, GPT-4o and Gemini), so their prices and terms set TranslateMom's costs." } ], "links": [ { "kind": "site", "url": "https://www.translate.mom/" }, { "kind": "producthunt", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/translatemom" }, { "kind": "trustmrr", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/translatemom" } ], "sources": [ { "title": "TrustMRR: TranslateMom, markdown profile (data as of 27 October 2026)", "url": "https://trustmrr.com/startup/translatemom.md", "grade": "A", "how": "Read the markdown profile in full on 27 October 2026. Revenue, MRR and subscriptions read from Stripe and RevenueCat; traffic from Google Analytics; the description, profit margin and sale listing are founder-provided." }, { "title": "Product Hunt: TranslateMom, product page with the maker's launch comments, 17 November 2025", "url": "https://www.producthunt.com/products/translatemom", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the maker's comments in the page data. Source for the 2023 revenue remark, the 2025 revenue and sign-ups, the bot's followers and the launch record." }, { "title": "TranslateMom field report, 29 October 2025: Please Stop Using Grok", "url": "https://www.translate.mom/grok-vs-translatemom", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Written by the founder. Source for the start in May 2023, the first version, the US$2,000 MRR statement and the replies to Grok requests." }, { "title": "TranslateMom home page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.translate.mom/", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full, including the structured data and the page source. Source for the founder's name, the company name, the logo wall, the testimonials and the technical traces." }, { "title": "TranslateMom pricing page, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.translate.mom/pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The yearly prices are in the text; the monthly prices are in the page's structured data." }, { "title": "TranslateMom docs: Credits and Pricing, updated 19 August 2026", "url": "https://www.translate.mom/docs/credits-and-pricing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the credit costs, the free trial credits, the permanent credits and the monthly prices." }, { "title": "TranslateMom FAQ, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.translate.mom/faq", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the translation engines, including DeepL." }, { "title": "TranslateMom docs: AI Dubbing, updated 19 August 2026", "url": "https://www.translate.mom/docs/ai-dubbing", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the dubbing languages, cost and limits." }, { "title": "GitHub: montagao/translatemom, README", "url": "https://github.com/montagao/translatemom", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. The company's public repository for docs and issues. Source for the origin as a weekend project and the voice-cloning description of dubbing." }, { "title": "TranslateMom: Videos from X, translated (transcripts index), read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.translate.mom/transcript", "grade": "C", "how": "Read the counters and the first lists. Source for the number of public transcript pages." }, { "title": "TranslateMom blog, 12 February 2026: How to Translate X/Twitter Videos", "url": "https://www.translate.mom/blog/how-to-translate-x-twitter-videos", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Signed by the founder. Source for the website workflow and the creator count claim." }, { "title": "Internet Archive: translate.mom on 1 June 2023", "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20230601033509/https://www.translate.mom/", "grade": "B", "how": "Read the archived copy. The page loads by script, so only its title, TranslateMom, is readable. Source for the site's existence on that date." }, { "title": "TranslateMom: free YouTube Video Downloader, read 27 October 2026", "url": "https://www.translate.mom/tools/youtube-video-downloader", "grade": "C", "how": "Read in full. Source for the free download tool and its limits." }, { "title": "Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startups", "url": "https://www.loot-drop.io/", "grade": "C", "how": "Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors." } ] } ] }