We started now close to 3 years ago. I launched I think at like 1:00 p.m. I got my first customer 30 minutes after that. I think 10 minutes after I got the second person, maybe an hour after I got the third person. At this moment, I knew that I need to stop everything else I'm doing in life. We did 1 million ARR in exactly 117 days. We've been growing ever since bootstrapped without any external funding. It's just me and the team. That's it. My opinion is that you'll see an explosion of more and more bootstrapped companies doing insane numbers of revenue that were not possible before.

Chatbase is a platform for doing customer-facing AI agents specifically for customer support and sales. So, we're building an AI agent that is a brand ambassador and gives that conversational experience to every customer. We just bootstrapped Chatbase to $10 million in ARR.

The biggest advantage [of bootstrapping] is that you have control. So you only listen to your customers and the team and that's it. And I think this gives you a lot of freedom in building exactly what you want to build. And I think the other reason is the definition of success changes as soon as you raise. When you're bootstrapping like a successful outcome is like 50 millionaire or 100 millionaire or even 200 which I think is very possible for us. But I think raising changes that equation a lot.

When you operate as a bootstrap company, you're more focusing on profitability. everything you do is ROI positive. You're making sure you have money in the bank. You're making sure to be as efficient as possible. The most common mistake bootstrap founders make is having the mindset of a bootstrap founder. That means being extremely cost efficient with everything. Always trying to make sure you're ROI positive, being risk averse.

But if you want to build something huge and you want to have as much impact, hire people, see revenue go up, then the biggest mistake is not being aggressive enough. It makes sense to have that mindset early on. But I think you should very quickly stop having that as soon as you have some revenue you can rely on. You have to take risks. You have to do experiments that might not be ROI positive. You have to hire people that you think are expensive because they're good. This is what we stopped doing and we've seen a lot of revenue growth since we started acting that way.

I started university in Canada studying computer science. Everyone basically had the same goal: getting a FANG internship in California. I did an internship at Tesla. I did another one at Facebook. But I think very quickly I did realize that maybe this is not the environment for me. It just felt too safe, too structured. It's mostly optimizing for the highest likelihood of making like above $200,000 a year.

I just wanted this ability to create things. I saw this community of indie hackers, especially on Twitter. People like Peter Levels or Mark Louw, they have an idea and they sit down and build it and then they share it with the world. You learn how to build a company by building a company. I think any skill that you learn at a big company is mostly irrelevant because it's just like a completely different dynamic. In building a company, especially when you're solo, the outcome is like 100% correlated by the input you put in. Knowing that you control your destiny gives you comfort.

When I was building these other projects, some of them were using AI before ChatGPT was launched. It became obvious to me that there is this one idea: you have these powerful language models that are trained on all this general data, but they don't have specific data to a specific person or company. The very first version of Chatbase was uploading a textbook or a book and then just chatting with it.

Now everyone knows if you're building an AI you're building for the next model and the next model so that every time the model improves your product improves. To me, it was obvious that these models will improve. I didn't know how, I didn't know when, but if this model improves and I built the harness around it that makes it able to do these cool new things, then I'm winning.

I didn't spend any money on marketing in the first 3 months because I didn't have money. It was just building in public, launching in subreddits, Twitter, LinkedIn. When you have the skill of organic marketing, you can build a brand around your company and the efficiency of paid marketing becomes much stronger.

To boost it more, you add warm outbound. It means you take a look at all the visitors that do sign up but don't end up subscribing, or people who stop using the product. These are the highest intent people in the world. Most of the time they're happy with that call because they see your content and they feel like they know the brand. For us, it's 80% warm. It is very high-touch and very fulfilling.

Regarding SEO and AEO: Most of these models get their information by just doing a web search. If you're able to rank for humans, you'll be able to rank also for the AIs. User generated content on Reddit, YouTube and Tik Tok are also very important because everything is getting indexed when the model is trained.

The reason we have customers stick with us for a long time is because they see the product improve every day. This sends a signal that we're putting effort into making this a better product. Honestly, I think it just comes down to how good your product is and how good is it at communicating its value.

We overhauled our own onboarding flow to make sure that we surface all of these capabilities. Anything else that claimed to have a big impact on churn that was not about improving the product was probably more of a waste of time.

Regarding pricing: We started at $19 as the lowest plan, we're now at $40. We also experimented with moving the highest self-serve plan from 300 to 500. We basically didn't have any change in churn because people were seeing a lot more value. The biggest impact came from moving up market. I've never seen a company regret experimenting with their pricing, but I've seen many companies not experimenting enough.

A lot of people have a lot of pride and ego behind the decisions they're making, especially if they make that decision publicly because you don't want to look bad in front of your employees. But I think it's actually a sign of low self-confidence. If the inputs change, you realize that this is not the best decision moving forward, but your ego is not allowing you to go back on that decision, that's a recipe for a company to fail.

The takeaway here is to just ignore the noise. People are going to speculate about GPT wrappers and how there's no future, but now GPT wrappers have rebranded to model harnesses and they're all the hype. You don't lose anything if you just put your head down and just work on building something valuable.