5 Biz Fri #0004: 60k MRR in two months by building around GPT

I’ve had a lot of requests to bring back 5 Biz Fri, a series where we go over 5 cool bootstrapped micro-businesses and side projects!

Check them out 👇

Chatbase → $60k MRR in 3 months

Chatbase allows you to train a custom ChatGPT model for your website. It crawls your site for information, uploads it to a vector database (Pinecone in this base), and spits out a personalized Chatbot (by combining with Langchain).

Yasser Elsaid got customers for his product in a few key ways:

• This first Tweet earned him his first 1k MRR despite having only 13 followers

• Multiple Reddit Posts in r/CSMajors, r/SaaS, r/SideProject, r/indiebiz, etc.

• Viral TikTok posts made by “influencers” surrounding top AI projects, useful sites, etc. Creator economy is strong and many people are willing to share trendy products in the AI space

AI Profile Pictures → 6-7 figure products

With the release of Stable Diffusion, AI profile pictures were the hottest wave a few months ago. ProfilePictureAI generated $50,000 in just 2 weeks.

Upload photos of yourself, pick your favorite styles, and the AI will generate your avatar!

Despite the profile picture wave dying down, ProfilePictureAI now has over 20,000 customers and created over 7 million photos.

Pieter Levels has a competitor to ProfilePictureAI called PhotoAI, which has been also consistently earning well over 5 figures a month (currently at $53k MRR)

PDF.AI → $23k in 6 days

The AI wave is real right now.

Whether or not there’s a ton of platform risk, people are shipping fast and getting rewarded. (Here’s a list of Vercel/NextJS templates to help you get started)

Josh Schneider built PDF AI and within 48 hours he sold it for $20k to Damon Chen (founder of Testimonial).

Within 6 days, Damon returned his original investment and profited nearly $3,000. Since then, Damon’s taken PDF AI from 500 users to over 10,000.

He followed the indie hacker/SaaS playbook perfectly:

• Acquisition announcement, Twitter Launch, then Product Hunt Launch (Rank #4 for the day)

• Published to subreddits, FB groups, and AI directories

• Launched limited lifetime deals shortly after the acquisition and before investing in new features

$100,000 from Notion Templates

Thomas Frank made over $100,000 selling a collection of premium Notion templates around productivity, organization, and planning.

Since Notion generally has a higher learning curve compared to other applications, people will often purchase templates to save them hours of work.

Some things Thomas used to help drive sales:

• Building a following on YouTube (he has two different channels but one is dedicated to Notion)

• Free Notion Templates to drive over 50,000 email subscribers

• Creating a community through Circle to avoid link-sharing which is a major problem when selling Notion templates

AI-based Courses → $52,000 in four months

The demand for AI is so hot right now that you can even just teach a ChatGPT Masterclass as a side project.

Lance Junk hosts a Udemy course titled “ChatGPT Masterclass: A Complete ChatGPT Guide for Beginners”.

Within the first four months, Junk earned over $50,000 and quit his job to pursue it full-time. Currently, there are over

🔥 Newsletter Update

Next week I’m introducing the start of a long-anticipated bi-weekly series, Insights, where I deep dive into new trends and business markets. The first issue will be all about starting a newsletter.

I’ll share the different types of newsletters, marketing, and monetization strategies, and how to generate good ideas for content.

I’ll also be launching a paid version which will feature more in-depth content such as case studies, go-to-market strategies to get your first 1000 subscribers, etc.

Thanks for reading, and I hope this helped you or you found it interesting! If you want to give some feedback, you can either respond to the poll or reply to this email. This greatly helps the newsletter!