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Oct 13, 2024

Success Stories

I Built a $1M AI App [No Code]

Summary

AI-Powered Business Growth

XL for Real Bot achieved 750,000 users and $226,000 monthly revenue in just over a year, leveraging YouTube University and no-code solutions like Bubble.io.

A viral marketing strategy initially gained thousands of users but led to a $5,000 OpenAI API bill, forcing a critical decision to continue or shut down.

Monetization and Product Evolution

The first revenue came from Google ads, followed by donations and sponsorships, eventually leading to a paywall and the "9 yards" feature launch.

The product evolved from a simple formula generator to a comprehensive data analytics platform, driven by customer feedback and impromptu phone calls.

Competitive Edge and Future Vision

Future development focuses on creating features that cannot be replicated by ChatGPT or Microsoft, emphasizing convenience, customization, and unique functionalities.

Timestamps

00:00 David built a $1M AI app with no code, learned from YouTube, used viral marketing, bounced back from a $5,000 loss, and plans to build a business that can't be replaced by chat gbt or Microsoft.

01:16 Brusser built a $1M AI app called XL for real bot, gaining 750,000 users and $226,000 in revenue, while working a full-time job and motivated by impending parenthood. Expand

03:11 Building a $1M AI app without coding, facing personal and professional challenges along the way.

04:11 The speaker built and launched a $1M AI app without coding experience, initially using Bubble.io and YouTube tutorials, but eventually transitioning to 5-10% code, and gained customers by sharing it with colleagues and promoting it to a wider audience.

06:54 The AI XL formula generator went viral, leading to high costs from the open AI API, but the creator recouped costs through donations, sponsorships, and a pay wall.

09:47 The speaker built a $1M AI app, expanded features based on customer feedback, and faced frustration when competitors quickly copied the app.

12:28 The speaker built a popular AI app, but reconsidered adding it to Microsoft's add-on store for free due to potential idea hijacking, and discussed the cost advantage of using chat GPT for generating formulas in Excel.

15:08 The speaker discusses the evolution of AI technology and encourages viewers to pursue their own entrepreneurial ideas.

Transcript

00:00 This is David. He built an AI app that is now valued at over a million dollar and the crazy part is. He built it all with no code. He invit us into his house to show us exactly how he built this thing with a family. A full-time job and just working a couple hours a day really took me just a couple weeks came down to learning all of this content mostly through YouTube. David launched his product using a viral marketing strategy that got him thousands of users in just a few days but what goes up must come down. I blew through like $5,000 in days. I had a decision to make right. It's either shut it down or keep going. In this video. He breaks down how he bounced back how he made his first dollar and how he plans to build a business that won't be replaced by chat gbt. My vision moving forward is to build something that cannot be replicated both in chat gbt as well as Microsoft. This is the breakdown on how a normal guy turned one idea into a a million-- dooll business on just a few hours a day I'm Pat walls and this is starter story David thanks for having me thanks for coming on ever I love your story tell me a little about who you are and what you built sure daveid.

01:16 Brusser built what was called XL for real bot now. It's just called for real bot Microsoft gave me a uh season doist a few months ago or so and so it's a software that really helps people work faster and smarter with data. There's really three main products Ai and spreadsheets. It's col like chat GPT inside both Excel and Google Sheets for whe generators that translates text into formulas with the help of AI and then the last product where a lot of my time and resources have g into is called the data analyzer where it's kind of like zappier. You can upload your data and then through natural language. Get answers analysis charts modeling all done by just typing. In some words. The application has been around for about a year and a half and during that time there's now roughly about 750,000 users and of those 750k. There's about 5,000 people that pay for unlimited access to Tool and during that time it's has reached about $226,000.A monthly recr as I understand you started formula bot while you had a full-time job tell me a little bit more about that story. It was July of uh 2022 I had this opportunity and the opportunity was my youngest. One was about to be born and so I knew I was going to have about 6 weeks to to do something and I've been working a full-time job since I graduated college 2011 and I've always kind of had that entrepreneurial neck basically said okay I've got 6 weeks. Let's build something people always say scratch your own itch right solve your own problem and my problem was I I was getting so bogg down with all of these Junior adal. They come knocking on my office door like hey can you help me with this for me can you help me with that. I kind of thought okay. My itch is helping people with Excel while chat gbt wasn't around. Then the actual technology was I actually asked the open AI uh application. I said hey I'm thinking about building this app.

03:11 What's a good name for it and uh one of the names I suggested. Uh was Excel formula do thing you do of course. Is you go to go daddy. It was available and then I was like let me just see if someone's built this yet and I scour the internet for hours couldn't find it. I'm like this is it I'm on the something special. It was tough try to find that balance between personal life. You know I I can't help but to a certain extent stay on the grid for my full-time job especially in the senior position that I was in and so while I wasn't working. I still had access to my phone. People were still asking me questions here and there but then in the back of my mind. I'm like I've got this idea that I have to execute out. I tried to spend as much time with the family especially early on. But I couldn't have book time myself kind of stepping away for a little bit go to coffee shops wh it might be and just kind of put my head down and execute and uh there were definitely a lot of nights where I only got a couple hours of sleep my wife. At that time thought I was crazy uh especially because I I didn't really have a clear path.

04:11 I just know wanted to build this thing so from what I understand you have no experience coding how did you build and launch something like this. I'm not a coder by any means. If I see it. I kind of know okay that's JavaScript that's HTML and I knew for what I wanted to build. As an MVP. It would take a pretty significant time to build it with code and I at that time wasn't making any money.I didn't want to hire anyone because I just had an idea and so that's for where I was really exposed to uh the the no code industry I was exposed to bubble. Io that was really the only application that I really dove into to to build cuz. It was the most well-known and based on the research that I had done that the easiest of all the not code Solutions. The first place I went was the bubble official website for just kind of reading some documentation but there's so much documentation out there which is a good thing kind of where I got hung up was very isolated issues that I was TR Sol but that's really where YouTube University came in. There are some awesome bubble developers out there that produce such high quality content on YouTube and it's all free. At that time. The whole app was in bubble. It was 100% no code probably up until maybe four or 5 months ago. It went from 100% no Cove to now it's about I would say like 5 or 10% as you get more experience with no code. You start to understand some of the limitations. There's not a lot. But there are some limitations.David is the perfect example of how someone with zero experience turned one idea into hundreds of thousands of dollars. But that comes with knowing the right information and finding the right problems to solve now imagine. There's a place that gave you all this the problems to solve the blueprints to solve them and the strategies that turn simple ideas into million-dollar businesses well at start story. We have a library of over 4,000 case studies and business idea breakdowns where you can access this all backed by data from real entrepreneurs so if you're serious about building a profitable side project and joining a tight-knit community of Founders head to the first link in the description and we're going to give you 52 micro SAS ideas just like David's so you can get started on your journey. Much love enjoy the rest of the video peace all right so you have this MVP that you built from scratch. How do you get your first customer and how do you get a ton of people to use it. The first people I told were the people that were at my full-time job at that time and they're like oh my God. This is amazing they thought it took me months to build. This thing really took me just a couple weeks and then that really kind of speaks to the power of no code um because if you were to code it it would take much longer and so my next step was I need to tell more people about this tool and so naturally the next place I want was.

06:54 Reddit went to the XL subreddit where there's probably several hundred people that follow it. RIT title was AI XL formula generator and I think I mentioned it was free and it was just a title and the description was just the link minutes later. It was like the top post of the day turned into the top post of the week. It blew up as much as like something can blow up within the Excel Community. A couple of days after that someone in the CET section said you should post. This on the Internet is beautiful subreddit and so I posted it there.That was like the thing that put the app over for the edge and made it go viral for months and so I had posted. There. It got some 10,000 up votes thousands of comments yeah. I got thousands and thousands of people visiting the site using the app all right. So you have thousands of users how do you start making actual money. From this. The next thing I did was want's the open AI website. What's the billing section it just like oh God I I blew through like $5,000 and open AI API costs in days. I had a decision to make right. It's either shut it down or keep going and so I acre this huge bill. Over that time I recouped some of it back. I put up a link like a stripe link where it's just like hey my name's David I built this app. It went viral give me Z feel free to donate. So I made a few ,000 back. I was super Scrappy of like trying to make something back at that time.It was pretty poetic especially probably at its peak of virality. The host from the um esorts ESPN XL competition. I didn't say it correct for good something like that. But it's basically like extreme sports. But it's for Excel. The host reached out to me and said hey we have our competition on on ESPN. In a couple of weeks can we run a beta ad I'm like sure I'm like and at that time I was like maybe. That's how I before even thought about subscriptions. I'm like maybe that's how I can make money at least in the interim is just running ads so I ran some Google ads made a few bucks here and there it just it definitely wasn't worth the hassle. But I I ran an ad for ESPN for like a week and it drove a ton of clicks and it was actually pretty funny because the guy asked me to design the creative. I'm like look dude like you've seen the website especially at that time. It was a single page piece of crap. It wasn't crave at all but I I locked something up for. He said okay works for me and so some of the donations that came in a couple of sponsorships. It it gave me the motivation to kind of keep going and not just completely shut this thing down and so then a few months later launch with a pay wall logins and the whole nine yards.

09:47 Let's talk about product talking to customers how you figured out what features to build early on just kind of scratch my own itch and what would bring me value and what started off as just a XL formula generator turned into different generators that was really just the first product. It was actually interesting because at that time my site was blowing up and I I I took a few phone calls with VCS. They would ask me you know what's your vision what's your broader vision and I would just say more generators and they're like okay. I never got called back I didn't have a broader Vision that's where I started talking to people that I work with who it's required to work with data in spreadsheets started asking asking them and see what they liked what they didn't like but occasionally and and this is where I think I would get the most value talking with customers. A lot of them email me basic Excel questions that couldn't necessarily be answered through an Excel formula generator. They would literally email me their Excel files. They're like hey your. Excel formula generator couldn't do.This can you help me with this and it wasn't even to like build a formula. It was to like build a report where I have no domain knowledge of of of what they're trying to accomplish. I would probably get one email a week of someone just sending me a file and so I thought okay you know what even if they're not a paying customer. I'm going to take this but guess what I'm going to do it with you on a phone call and I'll do your work for you but every time I do it. They have to hop on a call at me and they have to ask questions about what they like and what they don't like about the product as well as some ideas that they have and so the culmination of kind of scratching my own itch leading on my network and having these kind of impromptu phone calls kind of revolutionized the product away from just being an XL formula generator to just kind of being this all-in platform for anything that you do with data analytics building a SAS product software product.There's probably going to be a lot of competitors coming in tell me about how that works product took me a few weeks to build this app and a few weeks after that. I think there was probably 10 other EXL formula generator sites and the frustrating part was they all sounded the same right at that time. Excel formula bot Excel formula generator. Another one was called Excel formulator. They all sounded the same and when you'd go to Google and you'd search mine. You'd see the other couple ones right there. So at that point it was really a Ras to the bottom and my prices especially early on. It was $3 I was getting. Pretty frustrated just all of the competition that was coming in and literally like carbon copying my exact application. Not only like what it does.

12:28 But also the front end the name and then I just kind of reached the point where I knew I was going to have to build something that isn't just a simple input output box. Few months later EXL for bot was was getting more and more popularity. Microsoft actually reached out to me. They reached out to me twice one for a Seas business and the other one. It was someone that was on their add-ons team. Excel has you know thousands and thousands of partners that they work with to build an add-on that supplements what you can do with Excel. They reached out to me and said hey we want to take your XL formula bot and add it within our add-on store. Let us build it for you. I was like sure how much does it cost they're like we'll do it for free. I'm like this is awesome and then as they were building it. I was like wait a second they're just going to hijack this idea and build it as one of the many features in their in their Suite couple. Weeks. After that they had announced their partnership with open AI. Everyone's so excited for AI being integrated in the office suite and I'm like I am so crude and so that's where kind of went back to me being my own competition where I had to really take a step back and think through what is this product going to be once Microsoft embeds.This product within their Suite have even talked about chat GPT chat GPT. Especially at this time as well it was free and it it still is free for unlimited usage. At that time you had to paid $299. Now you got to pay $9. It's got to work its way up $299 to $699 to $9 and you have to pay for unlimited usage whereas chat GPT has always been free and so I have about 5% CH 10% of the reason. Why people CH is because of chat GPT and so early on before a lot of the newer products especially the the data analyzer where you can upload your data and to with it. The competitive Advantage I had over chat. GPT was really convenience generate formulas within Excel. You don't have to leave your spreadsheets. You don't have to open up your browser you don't have to open up chat gbt and write list long prompt.You can do it all there convenience and customization. When you sign up. You can put in your language your speaking language. You can put in your language for what you prefer for Excel because there's a lot of people out there that speak in in Spanish but they prefer the Spanish version of Excel and then also vice versa again. Excel. It's used by a billion people in the world. Excel for laot is used by every single country and thousands of languishes.

15:08 So early on it really was convenience and customization but that can only take you so far and so more so recently with the addition of the new features and new products. It's moved from that to you can no longer do that in chat GPT and eventually when Microsoft really just this past week builds AI into their own tool right. Now my vision moving for Bo is to build something that cannot be replicated both in chat gbt as well as Microsoft. Hey Pat from starter story here thank you guys so much for watching. I really hope David's story inspires and motivates some of you to get started on your own thing if you're curious about doing something similar but you're still looking for an idea well right. Now you can download our Deep dive SAS report for free. It breaks down 52 different micro SAS ideas and tons of other stuff. You'd want to know just click the first link in the description and if you're serious about building it then consider joining starter story and we'll help you do that much love and I'll see you guys in the next one peace.