I did sunset an AI product and launched a new one

[kelving]

The Twitter API drama impacted my businesses, and I wanted to quickly find a new product idea.

I tried to create an AI product but decided to stop after a few months, and here’s how it went.

The new “brilliant” idea​

A friend of mine mentioned using AI for writing business emails, sparking my interest in creating something similar.

What if I could create a ubiquitous browser extension, to provide writing and replying experiences using AI?

I even found the name the same day OmniWrite.ai

I started building it, thinking that there are many businesses making tons of money with something similar using AI, so why not even me? I’m just looking for €10k MRR to leave my job and live my dream.

Similar products are CopyAI, Jasper AI, and WriteSonic.

I spent weeks building an extension that brings AI writing to every browser tab. I hired a designer to speed up the process and get good-quality visuals.

https://preview.redd.it/w3rpsu92r9g...bp&s=c62189b62f9750cfeee8b7c3c0b2bfc2a676acd5

After a couple of months, the product was ready, launched on Twitter, and started getting some traffic, so I kept waiting for the first subscriber. I even created a Slack community for early adopters.

Feedback was good, but not exceptional, and the engagement in the Slack community was not that great.

Days were passing, and no subscribers.

I finally decided to stop working on it after a couple of months, these are the reasons:

• Getting good writing results with OpenAI / GPT is not trivial. It works great for writing business emails, but not for many other use cases (writing and replying to tweets for example).
• There’s high competition, and some of those companies got millions of dollars in investments. Plus, they have a ton of small tools to tackle different use cases, like copy for ads, writing emails, landing page copy, google ads headlines, blog post writing, Facebook ads, brand voice, and so on.
• Plus, I didn’t get any paying customers with 1.8k unique website visitors, and 65 Chrome extension installs.

All these elements convinced me that, as an indie hacker, this was not the best product to continue working on. I’m looking for good growth products because I don’t have much time to spend and I’m not that good at marketing, in general.

I can’t live without a product​

This is what I realized when I was without my products anymore.

I can’t live without having my own business.

So after the experience with OmmiWrite, I started looking for new opportunities.

I’ve always done customer support for my products, and I’m excited about the opportunities of automating part of that job with ChatGPT-like custom products.

So I did a prelaunch of a new product idea (validating a new product, is always a good idea).

https://preview.redd.it/7ougx934r9g...bp&s=5f8fec4627b42d46881449ad3e7a2675e52b20fa

I sold 30 lifetime deals, at $69 each, in 24 hours. This is what I call validation

And it gave me the confidence to start working on the product, that’s already live and available to the public at userdesk.io.

That's all folks!

I hope that you found my experience useful and inspiring to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter (twitter.com/ikoichi)

 

[skelly]

@kelving There is so much competition in chatbots like this, how did you get those deals?

 

[kelving]

@skelly At that time my value proposition was Notion to AI Chatbot.

There are no many AI Chatbots that support such a platform, which is quite popular.