I built a $3000 App for a major company. - Last year I was asked by a major company to build an application to better their user experience and ease their workflow.


I built the app for $800 but felt like I undercharged for the value I offered them.


This ... See More year they wanted to use the app again (they only need it for 6 months a year) but I decided to charge them $3000 for it. I was justified by friends and a family member who used to work at the company. I submitted the proposal a week and a half ago but I haven't heard back from them since.


I'm starting to think I overcharged this year, or I'm being impatient. I really want to find some resources on building software for companies that are needed seasonally but don't where to look.


Any tips or thoughts about the situation?

Do you know someone that got rich from the last recession, if so how did they do it? - The news says we are headed into another recession, so... Do you know someone that got rich from the last recession, if so how did they do it?

In 2018, I started an AI chatbot company...today, we have over 4000 paying customers and ChatGPT is changing EVERYTHING - **Intro:**

5 years ago, my co-founders and I ventured into the space of AI chatbots and started our first truly successful company. Never in a million years did I see myself ... See More in this business and we truly stumbled upon the opportunity by chance. Prior to that, we ran a successful lead generation business and questioned whether a simple ai chat product would increase our online conversions. Of the 3 co-founders, I was skeptical that it would, but the data was clear that we had something that really worked. We built a really simple MVP version of the product and gave it to some of our top lead buyers who saw even better conversion improvements on their own websites. In just a matter of weeks, a new business opportunity was born and a major pivot away from our lead generation business started.

**Our growth story:**

Startup growth is really interesting and in most cases, founders aren't really educated on what a typical growth curve looks like. While we hear about "hockey stick" growth curves, it's really atypical to actually see or experience this. From my experience, growth curves take place in a "stair curve". For example, you can scrap your way to a $100k run rate without much process or tracking. You can even get to $1 million ARR being super disorganized. As you start going beyond $1M ARR, things start to break and growth can flatten out while you put new processes and systems in place. Eventually you'll get to $2M or 3M with your new strategy and then things start breaking again. I've seen the process repeat itself and as you increase your ARR, the processes and systems become more difficult to work through...mainly because more people get involved and the product becomes more complex. When you do end up cracking the code in each step, the growth accelerates faster and faster before things start to break down and flatten out again.

Without getting too much into the numbers, here were some of our initial levers for growth:

1. Our first "stair" step was to leverage our existing customer base from our prior lead generation business. Having prior business relationships and a proven track record made it really simple to have conversations with people who already trusted us to try something new that we had to offer.
2. Stair #2 was to build out a partner channel. Since our chat product involved a web developer or agency installing the chat on client sites, we partnered with these developers and agencies to leverage their already existing customer bases. We essentially piggy-backed off of their relationships and gave them a cut of the revenue. We built an internal partner tracking portal which took 6+ months, but it was well worth it.
3. Stair #3 was our most expensive step, biggest headache, but added the most revenue. After COVID, we had and SDR/Account Executive sales team of roughly 30 people. It added revenue fast, but the payback periods were 12+ months so we had to cut back on this strategy after exhausting our universe of clients.
4. Stair #4 involves a variety of paid advertisement strategies with product changes and the introduction of new onboarding features. We're in the middle of this stair and hope it's multiple years before things breakdown again.

**Don't give up**

I know it sounds really cliché, but the #1 indicator of success is doing the really boring stuff day in and day out and making incremental improvements. As the weeks, months, and years pass by, you will slowly gain domain expertise and start to see the gaps in the market that can set you apart from your competition. It's so hard for founders to stay focused and not get distracted so I would say it's equally as important to have co-founders who hold each other accountable on what your collective goals are.

**How GPT is changing everything**

I could write pages and pages about how GPT is going to change how the world operates, but I'll keep it specific to our business and chatbots. In 2021, we built an industry specific AI model that did a great job of classifying intents which allowed us to train future actions during a chat. It was a great advancement in our customer's industry at the time. With GPT integrated into our system, that training process that would take an employee hours to do, can be done in 5 minutes. The model is also cheaper than our own and more accurate.

Because of these training improvements, we have been able to conduct research that is allowing us to leverage GPT models like no one else in the industry. This is both in the realm of chat and also training during onboarding. I really want to refrain from sharing our company, but if you are interested in seeing a model trained for your specific company or website, just PM me your link and I'll send you a free testing link with a model fully trained for your site to play around with.

**Where we are headed and the dangers of AI**

The level of advancement in AI is not terribly dangerous in its current state. I'm sure you've heard it before, but those who leverage the technology today will be the ones who get ahead. In the coming years, AI will inevitably replace a large percentage of human labor. This will be great for overall value creation and productivity for the world, but the argument that humans have always adapted and new jobs will be created is sadly not going to be as relevant in this case. As the possibility of AGI becomes a reality in the coming years or decades, productivity through AI will be off the charts. There is a major risk that human innovation and creative thinking will be completely stalled...human potential as we know it will be capped off and there will need to be major economic reform for displaced workers. This may not happen in the next 5 or 10 years, but you would be naïve not to believe the world we live in today will not be completely different in 20 to 30 years.

Using AI to create deepfakes, fake voice agents, scam the unsuspecting, or exploit technical vulnerabilities are just a few other examples I could write about, but don't want to go into to much detail for obvious reasons.

**Concluding**

If you found the post interesting or you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask. I'll do my best to answer whatever questions come from this!

​

\*EDIT: Wasn't expecting this sort of response. I posted this right before I went to sleep so I'll get to responding soon.

Value Drop Day 6 - Her Chrome Extension Makes $840K per year with one employee - Day 6 - Let’s Go 👇

#1- Group Convert - Chrome extension making $840k + per year with 1 employee.

Group Convert is a Google Chrome extension that's the easiest and most affordable way to ... See More collect email addresses from your Facebook Group.

It has 4987 weekly active users and an average rating of 4.97.

It was founded by Kim Dang, who built it without anticipating the success it was going to have.

Today she says it’s almost on autopilot and it’s making anywhere between $60K - $70K per month.

One interesting thing is that she doesn’t have a website but a funnel.

It’s very popular among internet marketing types of guys so using a funnel to sell a Chrome extension is a great move.


#2- Personalitydatabase. com

Did you know personality tests and IQ tests were a big deal in the U.S.?

People are obsessed with knowing their personality type and they don’t hesitate to share it with friends and family.

This makes these kinds of products super sticky and viral.

This site gets 452,000 visits per month and it’s all about personality tests.

They have a database of personality types of famous people, movie and anime characters, tv personalities, etc.

Super interesting site.

#3- Opportunity 💡

Here is an opportunity: Create a personality test based on humans beating the AI.

Give the users a series of games and let the AI analyze the reactions etc and give the users a sharable result.

I bet you can get to $10K/month creating personalitytestAI

See you tomorrow for Day 7

Finally hit my first goal - I started a reselling ebay store back in february and since then i’ve been able to get my monthly gross to just over $1.5k with about a 40-50% profit margin. My first goal was to get my 90 day total to reach $5k and ... See More i finally reached it. Only being 16 with a low paying job the capital really isn’t there but now I’m able to use the profit to feed back into it. $10k here we come💪💪

Put a chat widget on your website. No joke - I'm in a lead oriented business and for the longest time we had a contact form on our website and that's how leads could contact us and whenever we saw their email we would follow up. We then experimented with ... See More a chat widget in the corner of our website that says something like "Need an estimate? Ask us here!".
Rather than a chatbot, it was more of a disguised opt in form, as we would ask for the customers for a phone number before they submitted their message. We then automated it so it would immediately text the customer something like "Hey John! Thanks for reaching out to us, I'm happy to help. Can you tell me more details about the project?". It would send me a text saying "John is a new lead! His number is 18888888888. Contact him asap", and as soon as I got that text I would text (or preferably call) the lead immediately.
Our tracking showed we were getting infinitely more leads from the chat widget than a contact form. My guess it is because the contact form seems a little more traditional and motononous for customers, and customers often don't care enough to fill it out because they don't think youll get back to them for awhile. A chat widget is more associated with immediate help. Just some friendly advice, worked well for us.

Anyone else here have a fulltime job + a family and grinding out the dream during their free time. - I hate the feeling knowing I should've pushed harder when I didn't have the major responsibilities I have now. Such is life I guess, how are you folks doing it?