Quick heads up - 24 hours left to join the the live mastermind cohort I'm running.

It starts next week.

Once you join, you'll become a part of a small group of founders at a similar stage as you.

• We will meet once a week for an hour long zoom call.
• 1 founder will have a deep dive hot seat session every week
• Together as a group we will tackle your biggest challenges, and create an actionable strategy to move towards your goal

AND.. we keep you accountable towards your plans every week. So you don't slack off, and actually ship stuff!

This gets you more growth, customers and revenue.

If you're up for that, then join from the link below.

• ​Join Indie Masterminds​

This is the best way to get 1:1 help from me and a tight knit group of like minded founders. Folks who are building their own businesses and trying out new growth strategies every day.

And you get all this without having to pay tens of thousands of dollars on business coaches. Or spending thousands on dollars for traditional mastermind programs.

I've been running it for almost 2 years, am part of various entrepreneurship communities and masterminds, and from my experience, I can guarantee you -

This is the best indie founder friendly mastermind you can join.

First call next Wednesday.

(2 spots left)

Now, onto the story of one of the very early members of Indie Masterminds - Bhanu Teja - Founder of SiteGPT and Feather.

SiteGPT is an AI customer service chatbot tool.

• Bootstrapped
• Solo Founder
• No marketing team

Last week, it crossed $250K revenue in just 1 year

Building and Failing Multiple Times

​SiteGPT was not the first product that Bhanu built. Before this, he had already founded Feather.so - a Notion to Blog platform.

And even before that, he had been shipping multiple products (often in parallel) for more than 3 years.

Most of his early products didn’t get success, but they all trained him for the kind of success he’s getting now.

They’ve all added to his story.

Scratching Your Own Itch

Bhanu comes up with product ideas to scratch his own itch.

He came up with the idea of Feather because he himself used to blog as a developer, and loved to write in Notion. But there was no simple way to publish blog posts directly from Notion.

That’s how Feather was born.

And then when AI came along, he created a chatbot trained on Feather’s documentation to answer support queries.

He realized he could create a new product out of it.

That’s how SiteGPT was born.

How to Build New Features

I asked Bhanu, how does he come up with new features to build, and how does he prioritize features to build when he has many customer requests piling up.

He only builds features that his enterprise customers request, and already pay for.

Once they are stable, then he brings those features to the rest of the customer base and includes them in his regular offering.

So he only builds features which already validated demand.

This is the answer he gave in a discussion in our community -

Building In Public

Bhanu’s best marketing strategy is - “build things, and share what he’s building on Twitter”

He is open about his challenges, his wins, losses and learnings on Twitter. Over the years he’s built up a decent following on Twitter that helps him whenever he launches a new product.

1 year ago he launched SiteGPT on Product Hunt and ended up being Product of the Day with almost 900 upvotes.​

In January 2024, he launched Feather on Product Hunt and it ended up being Product of the Day with almost 1200 upvotes​

This is the power of building in public and having an audience.

Today he makes $20K+ MRR combined with his 2 projects as an indie founder.

In Summary -

• Build things, fail at most of them.
• Share your lessons publicly
• Scratch your own itch - solve your own pains
• Validate early and monetize from day 1
• Build an audience, leverage it to spread word about your product

Further Reading

• ​Bhanu’s 2023 refelction tweet - $175K in 1 year
• ​SiteGPT From Weekend Project to $15,000 Monthly - Mixergy podcast

Hope you found this useful.

Here's a web version of this post to bookmark and share.

From the vault -

3 random post from the Superframeworks archives -

• ​$1M ARR with single page site builder​
• ​$293K ARR - stupidly simple bookmarking tool​
• ​Simple framework to “validate” an idea​

🔗 Super Links

Useful links you don’t want to miss -

• ​Slow down and remember this - Time Ferris
• ​Exact flywheel that I used to scale ConvertKit from $2k to $98k in MRR in 12 months - Nathan Barry
• ​Don’t forget this quote from the book Traction - me
• ​Existing markets are a better bet than new markets - Jon Yongfook
• ​My list of Calm Company attributes - Justin Jackson

🤗 How can I help?

Whenever you’re ready, here’s how I can help you -

• ​Join the tiny community for your big dreams - We support, inform, educate and inspire each other every day. We are a tight knit group of indie hackers and solopreneurs working on our projects. We would love to have you. Entrepreneurship is hard, don’t do it alone. Come join us!

Thanks,

Ayush 🙏