How I Built and Sold My AI Business in Just 30 Days 🤖💰
Have you ever wanted to build a business from scratch and sell it for a profit in just 30 days? Well, that's exactly what I did with my AI business, Enhanced AI. In this article, I'll share with you the behind-the-scenes details of how I built the product, how I started making sales, and how I eventually sold it for a profit.
Building the Product 🛠️
The first step in building Enhanced AI was to see if it was actually possible to do what I wanted. I had just heard about Elon Musk and OpenAI, and I wanted to see if I could use their autocomplete text generator for coding. The second step was to see if there were any competitors in the space that were already doing this. Luckily, I found that there were no competitors in the coding space, and I was able to create a short code inside of WordPress using AI.
Being a full-stack developer, I was able to create the entire product myself. I used React for the front-end, Node.js for the back-end, and integrated the payment system on Stripe, as well as a database on MongoDB. I put the whole thing together to talk to OpenAI and its API layer, and then I had a working product.
Making Sales and Getting an Audience 📈
The hard part of the process was customer acquisition. I needed to have other people see what I saw in this product, and this wouldn't be easy. I didn't want to spend too much money on marketing and advertising, so I decided to create a YouTube video where I showcased the whole process of me building it. That video took off, and a lot of people got to see the product, how I built it, and how it worked. I got thousands of sign-ups immediately as a consequence of creating that one video.
Now that I had a SAS with thousands of customers signed up to the free trial, I wanted to convert them to active customers. I continued to focus on my features and built out my best feature yet: a blogging feature that allowed people to predict their blog content as they write it, sort of like in Gmail auto-predict but entire sentences and paragraphs. This was the most successful feature so far, and it helped me convert a lot of customers to using the product and started to make it a success.
Selling the Business 💸
Selling the business was something I had not considered before. Originally, when I built it, I thought it'd be a side hustle with passive income. But as I kept putting more and more effort into it and getting no results, it felt demoralizing. So, I decided to give MicroAcquire a test. MicroAcquire is a site that allows you to publish any business. Luckily, I had built this business properly from the ground up, and it included a proper Australian registration with a business with a proper trading name, a proper domain, and lots more.
As part of this process, I had to also evaluate what the net worth of my business was. This was a very difficult task, but I originally came up with a figure of thirty thousand. My original thinking was that I put about a month into this so far, which meant about 30 days working at about seven and a half hours per day at a price of about 150 an hour. That comes to about 30,000.
I got lots and lots of interest, and I almost had daily messages about people seeking to test down my product to see if it was worth buying. I went through a lot of conversations, some of them went to the final step where people were almost ready to give me an offer, some of them didn't go anywhere at all, but eventually, I got a bid.
Conclusion 🎉
In the end, I sold Enhanced AI for $20,000, and I made an additional $5,000 in sales for the customers. I also made some money for both AdSense on publishing the video as well as a sponsor, which was MongoDB at the time. For a month's worth of work, I think that's a solid amount, and I'm quite proud of it.
If you're thinking of building your own SAS product, there's a good place to start. API Layer is an entire marketplace with pre-built components and APIs and features, and it's the sponsor of today's video. One thing that I've realized is nothing is ever built from the ground up, and even I was inspired and used OpenAI's platform to do my own SAS. Researching and understanding APIs is always the first step.
Thank you for reading, and I hope this article has been helpful to you.
Highlights 🔍
- Built an AI business in just 30 days
- Used OpenAI's autocomplete text generator for coding
- Created a YouTube video to showcase the product
- Built a successful blogging feature
- Sold the business for $20,000
FAQ 🤔
Q: How did you come up with the idea for Enhanced AI?
A: I was inspired by Elon Musk and OpenAI's autocomplete text generator and wanted to see if I could use it for coding.
Q: How did you make sales for Enhanced AI?
A: I created a YouTube video to showcase the product, and it took off, getting thousands of sign-ups immediately.
Q: How did you sell Enhanced AI?
A: I used MicroAcquire, a site that allows you to publish any business, and got lots of interest. I eventually sold it for $20,000.
Resources 📚
- Enhanced AI: [https://enhanceai.com/](https://enhanceai.com/)
- OpenAI: [https://openai.com/](https://openai.com/)
- MicroAcquire: [https://microacquire.com/](https://microacquire.com/)
- API Layer: [https://apilayer.com/](https://apilayer.com/) (sponsor)
- MongoDB: [https://www.mongodb.com/](https://www.mongodb.com/) (sponsor)
