Comment by senordevnyc
17 days ago
It uses AI to replace a very niche human-powered workflow in a niche industry. That's all I'll say, but it's grown to about $30k MRR in the last year and is supporting my family, so the stakes feel pretty high to me.
I see, thanks for responding. Curious if this was an industry you were super familiar with?
Without revealing what your product is; how did you come across a good problem statement?
I've started on the bootstrapped train as well, also a senior engg.
I'd launched a pre AI software which grew to 5000 users and more and made me some money.
but post AI, I'm finding it hard to get into a non competitive industry. Like everything seems super captured already.
I actually acquired this as a little side project from some guy online. I hadn’t even really heard of the niche, but I knew enough to know that it had some potential, and I could also see that it could be used for an adjacent market segment that I was pretty familiar with, because my dad worked in that segment when I was growing up. And the price was cheap because it just had a few users and was pretty new. All but one of those users cancelled in the couple months after I bought it, because it turned out the product just didn’t do what it claimed to. But I didn’t really care about that, because 1) I knew it could deliver if built correctly, and 2) I could just tell there was demand for this and it wouldn’t be that hard to sell.
So I turned off the signup form and started rebuilding it and improving it, but I kept getting people emailing me and wanting to sign up. No marketing, nothing. I held them off for almost 18 months while I rebuilt it on the side of my day job, and that gave me a ton of confidence that I was on the right track.
Then about a year ago I got laid off. I was really close to relaunching it at that point, so I used all my severance to go all in on it.
Twelve months later it’s doing $30k MRR.
That's epic.
> used all my severance to go all in on it. Did you spend it on marketing btw? What did you find worked for your distribution?
Your story is super inspiring, so I had multiple questions, sorry haha. Want to be in the same places as you are.