I am building my agency to help founders build AI startups after 2 successful AI SaaS exits and 4 failures

Hey everyone,

I have been building AI products before ChatGPT was launched. In these years, I have managed to launch, scale and exit 2 SaaS products successfully.

Today I am launching a new service offering - Query Labs - Helping you build AI agents for your startups.

Like all my previous products, I will be building this in public and share my learning along the way. Here's what I have built so far :

• Microsponsors ( Fail )

  • My first product ever. I tried to create a marketplace for newsletter writers to find sponsorship opportunity. Got a few very big newsletter listed on the marketplace as well. However, building marketplace is tough. I found it very difficult to bring in sponsors. Ended up shutting it down,

• AI Query (Exit - Pre revenue )

  • It was the second half of 2022 and GPT-3 was the most advance AI on the market. I decided to build a tool that can help developers and non-technical folks write SQL queries by just asking in plain english.
  • I got my first taste of success with this. Had a decent offer even before I figured out monetisation. Accepted the offer to focus on my next product which had already started gaining traction

• AI Excel Bot ( Exit - Revenue Generating )

  • AI Excel Bot was my wild success. I had worked hard on the SEO for the site, along with the UI / UX to make it the best AI to write excel formulas and general excel task. There was already a large competitor in the market. However, the reality is that you don't need to be the top player. There is always room for multiple players to survive in a large market. You just need to find the good differentiating factor
  • For AI Excel Bot, the differentiator was the chrome extension, that helped users access it anywhere on the internet.
  • Scaled the product to more than 40k users at the time of exit. However, in the end I decided to exit and focus on my software service business that needed more time.

• Tutore AI ( Fail )

  • I wanted to build something useful for students to help them learn better. Tutore was my idea to build AI tools for students. I did launch quickly with multiple tools. However, wasn't motivated enough to continue with the grind.
  • I have decided to sell the product. Have had some meetings with potential buyers but didn't agree on price.

• Prompt Hackers ( 1k users but no revenue )

  • Prompt Hackers is a directory of AI prompts for all the use cases you can image. I focused a lot on bringing traffic and newsletter subscription from the day 1. I have never had a problem bringing initial set of users to my products. Prompt Hackers was getting close to 20k page views a month. At the same time we had close to 1k newsletter subscribers.
  • Since our target customers were people choosing to use ChatGPT / Bard instead of some specific software for their task, I built a Prompt Generation and Prompt Optimisation AI. Along with this I also created features to build private prompt library. To make the experience even better, I launched a Chrome Extension that helps users access the prompt generation AI and their prompt library while using ChatGPT. However, I couldn't figure out monetisation.
  • I still get close to 4k page views per month with no marketing at all. There are users who use the AI tools and the prompt library feature daily. But, since I couldn't figure out monetisation, I decided to not put time into the project.

There you go. These are all the products I have built in the last 3 years. I have been heavy investing myself in the latest tech in LLMs and AI agents. I know the biggest challenge for AI founders is the AI agents and backend pipelines. That's why I am launching Query Labs. To help you build the best AI implementation for your innovative AI startup.

I would love to hear feedback from the community. I will be sharing my learning with my new service along the way.

Thanks!