Speaker 1So my name is Piotr and I built an AI rendering tool. Now it makes 10k per month. This is Piotr, a developer with a full-time job building his own projects on the side. But he had one little problem. For two full years, his main project was stuck at about $100 a month. But for the two first years, it was a nightmare. That was until he made one simple change just six months ago that skyrocketed his SaaS from over $150 to over $10,000 a month. So I asked Piotr to come onto the channel to break all this down. And in this episode, we'll dive into the simple SaaS that he built on nights and weekends while he had a full-time job, the biggest mistake that kept him from growing for over two years, and how that led to the one pivot that drove him to $10,000 a month fast. All right, this one is going to be good. Let's dive in. I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story. Piotr, welcome to the channel. I'm pumped to have you on here. Tell me, who are you? What app did you build? And what's your story?
Speaker 2So my name is Piotr, and I'm a build visualizer and a rendering tool for architects and interior designers. Now it makes $10,000 per month. I launched almost three years ago. But for the two first years, it was a nightmare. I was actually stuck at $100 per month. But now, after pivot six months ago, the revenue exploded. I did everything solo while working full-time as a software engineer. Today, I'm excited to share what that pivot was and how I
Speaker 1grew it. Cool. Can you explain what your app or your SaaS does? Pull up some of your revenue screenshots. Tell me what this is and who's buying this. Yeah, sure. So visualizer is basically for
Speaker 2architects and interior designers. Creating realistic visualizations is time-consuming. Thanks to the AI, you can now do it in seconds. So you just upload a sketch or a model to my app, ask it to make it realistic. In a matter of seconds, now you can present to your clients that the home or the interior and different designs, different styles, different colors, whatever you like. I'm having a chat called Vizzy. So it's an AI assistant that helps people to understand what they want. So we don't have to understand how the problem engineering works. And it will send it to AI image creation services, and it will bring you realistic visualization to you.
Speaker 1That's awesome. Could you pull up some of your revenue dashboards? I'm going to have some more questions for you.
Speaker 2So here you have our current MRR is 8.2. But combining with one-time payments, we are close to 10,000 per month. So as you can see, we are trying to reach to the architects and photo real renders for your next client review. So you basically want to, you know, present the client what their new home will look like. And here we have like a simple video fully created in the app. So I can see from sketch to the realistic car. So then we have a sketch of a beautiful home. Then you have a very realistic render. Boom, the car is there. Currently, you can start trial for seven days for free. And after that, you have $35 per month or $80 per month, depending on how much you want to render. Currently, I have around 300 active subscribers. When it comes to daily stats, now it's over 300 daily on the landing page, around five to 10 new trials daily with 25% converting to paid. Okay, cool. Let's talk about your background. How do you get here? Well, I'm a software developer with over 20 years of experience. I'm based in Poland, and I'm currently working full time as a tech lead at Polish Software House. I've spent over two decades working for others, and I've decided to change something and work for
Speaker 1myself. Nice. How'd you come up with this idea and know that, hey, this had potential that it
Speaker 2could potentially make money? This idea actually came to me like three years ago, right when AI image generation first started making waves. So I saw the potential, but I didn't want to create another generic AI toy. I just wanted to find a specific niche that I can cover with. So I decided
Speaker 1to build it, and here we are. Nice. Tell me about the build process. How long did it take you to build this to get this to launch? Tell me about that build timeline. The first version took
Speaker 2approximately five months, after hours, obviously. And V1, like we probably know, was node-based system, similar to Comfy UI. I had a direct feedback from people, okay, it's too hard to understand for us. So I decided to pivot to V1. And I was like, okay, I'm going to do this. And I was like, okay, I'm going to do this. And I was like, okay, I'm going to do this. And I was like, okay, so I decided to pivot and to simplify the product to chat-based solution with the AI prompt assistant, because I know that people have troubles with prompt engineering. So I decided to create a layer of the AI that will help people first understand what they want, ask follow-up questions, and then build a perfect prompt for them. It helped me go from $150 per month to
Speaker 1nearly $10,000 per month. What I think is so cool about Piotr's story is that actually simplifying his product down to essentially a chat GBG wrapper is what actually created the growth. A lot of developers watching this are wondering, okay, how can I add more features to my product? How can I make it more technical and more complicated? When this story right here is an example of when keeping it simple actually creates growth. So if this idea is interesting to you, well, I've got something for you. We've put together our free database over 50 plus AI wrapper businesses that are making money right now. These are not complex, over complicated apps. These are just apps that are built on top of tools like chat GBG and Claude and similar to what Piotr built today and what's clearly working. If you download this database, you're going to get real businesses with real revenue numbers, pricing and breakdowns of how they actually grew. If you are ready to build something that can make money, just head to the first link in the description to get inspired and see what is actually working. I promise you won't regret it. All right, let's get back to the episode. Okay, well, let's talk about that. This is the thing that I think is actually the most interesting thing about your business that you built and the story behind it is this idea of the product pivot. You didn't necessarily pivot the audience. You didn't necessarily pivot the idea completely. You just pivoted the way the product is presented. Can you show off this pivot, potentially the before and the after and
Speaker 2explain what made your revenue go like this? The note system was really complicated. First, you need to upload some image. It creates one note. Then you have to connect to another note, write something down, then click generate. You have a lot of different parameters around. So, as you can see, it looks like chat GPT, but we can just upload some image and just ask, create realist image. Now we have a plan so you can select what you want, some materials. So, let's say raw concrete and blue hour, right? And let's hit generate. As you can see, it's, it's done, right? Wow. That is cool. You can also produce videos. So, this is the video. Oh my
Speaker 1gosh. Okay. I see. So, now it's something you can send to your clients and land the deal. Yeah. No, that's, that's amazing. Before we get to some of the results of it, what's like your big takeaway from this, this pivot for anyone that's watching this, who's also building products and wondering, okay, why don't I have, you know, why, why am I not seeing traction? I think I stick too long that
Speaker 2it's great. And that was hard for me to pivot earlier. So, I've used simplicity of chat GPT and
Speaker 1just apply to my app. That's amazing. What did things start to look like once you made this
Speaker 2change and how you knew things were actually working? I looked at the data, right? The data always said it true. Before I had like only a couple of signups, but after this change, people started rendering. So, it makes very easy for them. With that pivot, I also decided to test one thing. One-time payments are bringing repeated revenue. So, we need to change to monthly recurring payments. And that worked.
Speaker 1That's awesome. Looking back on this multi-year experience and finally figuring out the unlock, what would be your like big lessons and takeaways next time you go and build a product, or if you're going to give advice to another founder, what are your big lessons here?
Speaker 2Yeah, sure. So, friction in your product is killing your conversion. For two years, I blamed slow growth and marketing when the real problem was that my product was too hard to use. Removing the thing, standing between a visitor and their first success. And the second lesson is charge subscriptions from day one. Subscriptions are the thing that drive the growth. You need to start charging from day one and don't be afraid that someone will not pay. If the product is
Speaker 1valuable, then they will pay. Absolutely. What kept you going with this idea specifically? How did you
Speaker 2know that it might work out two years later? One, this is my first product ever released. So, it was really hard for me to just remove it from the internet. And the second one was, I was looking at the competition. They've worked. So, the competition is working, right? There is a lot of solutions. They have a lot of customers. I thought to myself, it has to work. Why it's not working, I have to find why it's not working for me. And after two years and this pivot, it actually works also for me.
Speaker 1Let's change topics slightly. What's like the tech stack and tools behind a solo product, and how do you use it? How do you use it? And how do you use it? How do you use it?
Speaker 2So, I'm using Cursor and recently also Cloud Code. So, those are the two major ones that I actually built products. Then there is a full AI. It's actually the third-party service that provides GPU. There is Ahrefs, my SEO, Maileride for sending emails, email automation, Subabase for database authentication, storage, Verso for hosting, and obviously Stripe for payments. I'm using Next.js and Poshhub. For Monitor, Google Analytics, and Sentry for error tracking.
Speaker 1All right. Well, thank you for sharing that. Last question that we ask all founders who come on Starter Story. What would be your advice to younger Piotr? Or for anyone watching this that maybe is a little bit like you developer building stuff maybe overthinking things a little bit what would be your advice
Speaker 2don't build the most powerful product you can build the simplest product your customer needs so that's why i will tell my younger one skip the complicated node system launch the simplest possible version with subscriptions and hear and listen users feedback great feedback congrats good
Speaker 1luck on your journey of quitting your full-time job and going all in on this and thanks for coming on and sharing everything thanks boss gus producer what do you think of peter and busy what i think
Speaker 3when he showed us a tool i thought man this is really awesome like i think right now it's at 10 000 a month you know like you said in the interview i could see this really growing because it kind of solves a real problem and it's really easy to use i was really impressed by the the fact that he stayed at it for multiple years i don't know why that's sticking with me right now but i was like man two years and a hundred bucks a month that was something i was thinking about throughout the interview was like man that's crazy that he did that for so long so that's just one thought but yeah yeah no we didn't
Speaker 1talk about this in the interview but i think it came off uh very obviously that he was passionate about the idea and the problem being solved and that's not something you can fake but it's something that you can take away from this video is that like yeah nobody would stick out an idea for two years that they didn't care about he clearly cared about this idea once we saw his product it was very obvious that he put a lot of time effort blood sweat and tears into this thing this isn't like ai slop this is like being passionate about a space and a problem that's
Speaker 3being solved yeah but i think it kind of relates to the pivot because i feel like because he kept doing it he was able to like kind of maneuver his way to the version of the product that actually worked speaking from my own experience you know i've given up on a lot of things really early and i look back a year later and thought man if i would have just kept at that i could have maybe figured that out right a lesson i'm getting is like because he sort of stayed in it he was able to like slowly pivot his way to the right path right yeah no i don't think that he would have
Speaker 1gotten to the pivot without his passion for the space because his passion for the space led to him talking to customers and empathizing with customers that probably comes down more to like motivation and excitement about the problem rather than just pure willpower to stay right i don't think willpower will ever work so as long as you pick something that you're it's a problem that you're excited about building eventually you'll probably get to this point where you realize that hey this is about the problem being solved let me simplify the product let me just solve this one little problem for these architects or interior designers which led to that so that's something you're going to notice with this database that we've linked down to in the description right here which is over 50 claude wrappers that are making over 10 000 a month look chat gbt and claude they have billions of users they love this chat interface and clearly the lesson here was keep it simple in that description down there you're going to see 50 ideas where they kept it simple they built a simple ai wrapper and that got them hundreds of customers and thousands of dollars in revenue you can see those real examples right down there in the description download them check them out maybe it will inspire you to build a product around a problem you're passionate about check that down there in the description otherwise we'll see you guys in the next one peace
PodcastTranscript AI