Launch a rough first version on Product Hunt in week one

Pat WallsOkay, cool. I love that you mentioned find one common pain point, triple down on it. If you can even own 1% of this massive market, which is AI coding tools, it could be life-changing. We're going to talk more about that, but before we do, let's talk about how you build this thing. How do you go about building an AI coding tool? It seems really complicated.

DavidWe started really small, just us and one developer, and the first version was pretty rough. It broke a lot, but we shipped it anyway, so instead of waiting for it to be perfect, we just focused on getting it in front of people. Overall, I'd say the first two months were the toughest, but things started to improve pretty fast. So, by month three, we had a working product that we're confident with. By month four, we moved past just catching up with our competitors.

DavidBy months five and six, we were already shipping features that even our competitors didn't have yet. We also kept a close eye on other players in the space, looking at what worked for them, what didn't, so we could move faster and avoid making the same mistakes that they did.

Pat WallsOkay, cool. Thanks for sharing that. Let's talk about the growth. A lot of people watching this build stuff. You could probably go and build an AI coding tool right now if you ask Claude Code how to do it, but that's not going to get you users. So, how did you take this from no users to over $50,000 a month in revenue?

DavidIn short, we got our first users through Product Hunt, Reddit, SEO, and then X, Twitter. To this day, we haven't used any paid channels at all. We launched our MVP on Product Hunt in week one and then made our first $50 MRR from that launch. Reddit drove the initial traction where regularly getting 400 upvotes, and that's really pushed us from $50 to 1k MRR. At the same time, we focused on high-intent SEO keywords like 'alternatives to X', 'how much does X cost', with X being our competitors' names.

DavidAround day 50 of building in public, X started working, then things went parabolic. In one or two weeks on X, we made about 20k MRR by just dogfooding the product. One trick I learned from Rob Hallam at SuperX was to always add your product's link in the second tweet to squeeze more attention and get that extra traffic to your website.