An A.I Tool Automating Customer Support Making $1,000 MRR
How this web developer built a SaaS app to $1,000 monthly recurring revenue
Hello! Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your business?
Hi, I'm Herman Schutte, a 41 year old indiepreneur from South Africa.
I've been developing web apps for over 10 years, with my most profitable app being SnapWidget, a social media embedding platform.
SiteSpeakAI, the Saas app I'm currently focusing most of my dev time on lets users embed a custom trained ChatGPT chatbot to their websites. Although this is just the start, the goal being to build SiteSpeakAI in a complete replacement for more pricier options like Intercom.
How did you start this business? Take us through the process.
Before starting my first business, SnapWidget, I was working as software developer in the banking and insurance industry.
At the time of building SnapWidget, Instagram was just getting popular but still only had less than 100k users. So being first to market with an embedding tool that supported Instagram was a big advantage in getting early users. It also helped that the operating cost for SnapWidget was extremely low.
With SiteSpeakAI, my goal was (and still is) to be able to eventually replace more expensive live chat / customer support options like Intercom for all my Saas apps (SnapWidget, Snapto and Stackpile). I don't think AI chatbots are at the point yet where they can completely replace human agents, so it's important to get both the AI and live customer support aspect of the solution correct.
How did you get your first initial customers?
For SnapWidget it was focusing on SEO right from the first line of code. So no JS, just PHP in one huge index.php, ala Peter Levels.
Being first to market helped a lot here.
With SiteSpeakAI it's a lot more difficult because there are lots of competitors. My initial customers came from a Product Hunt launch, and promoting to existing SnapWidget customers.
Since launch, what are your marketing strategies or channels to get new customers?
At the moment my main focus for getting more customers are SEO, Twitter and some cross business marketing. Also, the "Powered by SiteSpeakAI" link in the bottom of each chat brings in some leads.
How do your business make money?
SiteSpeakAI is subscription based.
With the OpenAI costs, having a free plan is not really feasible. I have 3 plans currently, priced at $30, $60 and $500 per month.
SiteSpeakAI makes just under $1k MRR at the moment, and the cost for running is $300.
Take us through a typical day in your life running the business as a solo founder
I have a 3 kids, including a 6 month old, so my day starts pretty early normally :).
I'm usually up around 4am, then quick breakfast and on the bike (indoor or outside) between 4:30am to 6am. Then getting kids ready and to school I'm in front of my laptop by 7:30am normally.
I'm lucky that I have a dedicated office at home, and have been able to work from here for the past 10 years. 7:30 - 9:00 is normally admin tasks and customer support for SnapWidget, SiteSpeakAI, Snapto and Stackpile. Then I'm focused on any major bugs and new development for most of the remainder of the day. I try to spend at least 1 - 2 hours a day on marketing. I'm normally able to finish my day around 5-6pm.
I'm very fortunate that I love what I do which makes having to stop at 5pm difficult sometimes.
Before you go, what advice would you give to another who wants to start a business like yours?
Marketing, marketing, marketing. You should start marketing before you write a single line of code. I've been bad at this, but trying to get better.
And never build new features unless users are asking for them. It's sometimes good to be lazy when it comes to this.