| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kt2ksyjf4f6g8cx851jq3szf |
|---|---|
| Readwise ID | 01kt2ksyjf4f6g8cx851jq3szf |
| Date | 2025-10-08 |
| Author | youtube.com |
| Category | video |
\n\nSource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYW9YDwHE20
After launching my app and seeing nosuccess, I rebuilt it and it made$80,000 in 6 months. Meet Prren, abuilder from India who quit his softwareengineering job to go all in on buildingapps. But after launching the firstversion of his app, he saw pretty muchno success. So he decided to make asimple pivot that changed everything.
I was making 80,000 in six months, and specificallyhow you can price your first product soyou can make money on day one.I would not recommend starting with asubscription model if you’rebootstrapping.
This one is going to be fun. I’m PatWalls and this is Starter Story.Prrenit, welcome to the channel. Tell meabout who you are, what you built, andwhat’s your story.
My name is Prrenit and I quit my80,000 inthe last six months.
Okay. Well, before we get into thatpricing change, which I’m really excitedto talk about, I do want to understandwhat your business is. What is RabbitHoles?Rabbit Holes AI is an app that isbasically a canvas-first way to interactwith AI models. If you have ever chatted withChatGPT for a long time, ittends to forget or lose itsplace in the conversation. So it’sreally hard to have any meaningful longconversations with a linear app likeChatGPT. What happens in a canvasapp like this is as soon as you seesomething getting interestingand you want to branch off or create adifferent kind of fork in thatconversation, you can do that bycreating a new node. So Rabbit Holes AIis built for power AI users to getmore out of the AI, unlike linearconversation apps.
Okay, let’s talk about how you came upwith the idea for this. Obviously, thisapp is huge and has lots of users. How didYou find the idea to build this? I wasinitially trying to work on oneof my old ideas and I was using ChatGPTand I was using Perplexity, and I wasusing Cloud to do that to teach myself.
But soon I found myself distributedacross a bunch of different tabs; eachone of those had a different kind ofexpertise. Cloud was much better forcoding, and GPT was much better for highlevel architectural tasks, andPerplexity was much better forreal-time information. So the UX designerin me thought, “Okay, this is africtionless experience, and this is kindof broken. It would bemuch better if I could do it all in onetab,” and it kind of evolved as a designfrom there.
Okay. So, you have this idea, you startbuilding it, but you sort of make almosta mistake when you start building it interms of the pricing model. Can you tellme about when you started building it?What your plan was for how to price thisthing and how that whole processstarted.The default mode of how I operatedwithout building products was thetypical subscription model or theI initially went with a premium model. So that’s where I launched a web appwith a free trial where you get a few questions for free, and then you have topay after a little bit of usage. However, thatdidn’t gain much traction, and I feel likethere are multiple reasons for that. Thetop reasons are that I did not have a hugepersonal brand, trying to do the buildpublic thing where I was talking onTwitter or posting everywhere
where I got a chance. I got someinterest, but it never really turned intoany real dollars. On top of it, Ikind of decided that my ideal customerprofile (ICP) is a power AI user. Atthat point, my ICP would already besaturated with a bunch of differentsubscriptions. They were paying forthese multiple AI models. So that’s whenI had to change the product a little bitby moving away from a web app into adesktop app and making it a one-timepurchase. Okay. So you have this app,it’s sort of working. You’ve got someusers, and you’ve got free trials, but you feellike there’s maybe something missing. Then,you make a change. Tell me about whatthat change was and what happened afteryou made that change.
To balance all the things that wereparticular to my situation, I wanted tostart with a one-time purchase, and I hadto convert the app into a one-timepurchase, which means that I cannot incurany AI cost because AI usage cost memoney, and I wanted to offload that tothe users. So that was step one: to makeit bring your own keys. The secondstep was to not even incur any servercost. If I were to just build itonce and sell it many times, I had tooffload my server cost to the users aswell. And the easiest way to do that wasto just use the users’ computers. Todo that, I had to build a desktop app.
This allows me to ship and forgetabout my business costs, and everythingran on the users. They paid for the AI.As soon as they changed it, a lot ofpeople actually started paying. Theywere more serious in terms of givingfeedback. It felt much more refreshing inthe sense that people were not only moreserious, but they were also more helpfulin kind of believing in this earlystage product. So after we moved to aone-time purchase model, that change ledto about $80,000 in the last six months.Okay. So for anyone watching this, I doI want to reiterate that a lifetime dealdoesn’t make sense for all businesses.
So I’d like to hear from you: when does alifetime deal make sense? What type ofbusiness and what type of founder isthis for? I think every bootstrapbusiness should do an LTD model. Thepricing and how they do it shouldobviously vary according to their uniqueproduct use cases and the cost that theyincur. But I think a VC style of doingpremium would not work for a bootstrapmodel. Having venture capital wouldactually mean that you can offset yourtruth-seeking in a sense; like you cankind of delay your product market fit.
So you can kind of hope that peoplewould come on board, but that’s not aluxury that bootstrap businesses wouldhave. So, almost every bootstrap businessshould do a lifetime deal along withwhatever they are doing. If you alreadyhave a subscription model, have alifetime deal. Even if it’s a limitedthing, have it because it kind of givesyou this boost in morale with this chunkof cash coming in, and you have a muchmore validated idea. You have a goodsizable user base who are willing toactively give feedback and be involved.
And it’s hugely, hugely beneficial ifyou’re a solo founder or like a founderwith a small team trying to figureout what to build, because usually whathappens, which happened with me in thepast as well, was that you kind of getinto your own head and try to thinkabout what to build and what not to build.All right, before we get into how Prensuccessfully pivoted and relaunched hisbusiness, I do need to point somethingout. Making money online isn’t ascomplicated as most people think. At itscore, it’s as simple as creatingsomething valuable and putting a Stripepayment link on it. No, it won’t alwayswork, but you’ll never know unless youship it. And that’s the beauty of theinternet today. There are almost nobarriers to trying.
And this is why wecreated Starter Story Build. It’s ouraction-oriented boot camp where in just acouple of weeks, you’ll come up with anidea, you’ll build it with AI tools, andyou’ll actually launch it to the realworld. Even if you have no codingexperience or you’re still working afull-time job, there has never been abetter time to just try. So, if you’reLink in the description to learn moreabout Starter Story Build. All right,now back to Pren’s story. The nextquestion I have is more specific andtactical: how did you price your lifetimedeal? And how would you recommendanybody who’s got similar products toprice a lifetime deal?
If you are building an AI product, Ithink it’s absolutely worth it to have abring your own keys model that offsets alot of costs, and it kind of offloads itfrom you to the user. So, everybodyshould do that. The way I’ve done thatfor Rabbit Holes is that the pricing ofthe actual product started withsomething really small. I started offwith $29 when I was under 100 users.
Once it crossed 100, I bumped it to like$49, and we are going to be bumping thelifetime deal much higher and kind ofmoving on to a recurring model now thatwe are about 1,200 users right now. So,the initial offering was much lower, andthe early users who bought in got in amuch better deal, and it also gave mefeedback that the market iswanting to buy something like this.
On that tactical note, I do also want toTalk about growth. Yes, you can create alifetime deal and you can set yourpricing, but you still need to driveusers to the page. You still need to getit in front of people. How did you growrabbit holes, and what were your growthstrategies?
One of the first things I would stillwant people to do is to get theirlanding page right. To get thatright, I need to think this is somethingthat I’ve done in my past experiments;but this time I’ve done it right, whichis to get my ICP correct. In my case, itwas Power AI users. So, my landing pagecopy was completely tailored toPower AI users. I called them out in my H1and I called them out in multiple placeson my website. And this is veryimportant. There are tons ofplaces where you can find how tostructure your website. After I’vedone that, I started talking moreabout it on Twitter, and I kind of likereplied to conversations that were inrelation to AI interactions and the newage of AI. It was not just directlytalking about my product in a sense like“buy my product” or “I’m buildingthis” in that sense, but I was justHinting towards something related to myproduct.
On that note, I’d love to hear just someof the numbers of the business today.What does the business look like inrevenue, profit, users? What can youshare? It’s around 75K inprofits, minus the refunds andeverything. We have about 200underpaying users and 60% of them arelifetime users while about 40% arepeople who bought it as a one-timepurchase where they would have to renewit after a year to get more updates. Overall,we have about 38,000unique visitors to the site so far.
Well, thanks for sharing that. On thatsame note, tell me about the tech stack. Howdid you actually build this?I was saying in the beginning that I used AIas my co-founder in a sense, and I usedCursor for coding. The landing page isbuilt on Next.js. The actual app is anElectron app and it uses Reactunderneath and TypeScript to do it.I do host the apps on Cloudflare, butthat’s not a huge deal. Another bigthing I have to talk about or touch onis the AI SDK that is built by people atVersel. And it’s a huge accelerant for meto build this product becauseit allowed me to build a product withgreat abstraction where I could justfocus on the front end and have almostnothing to worry about integrating withthese multiple different kinds of AIproviders. The AI SDK gives you the bestabstraction in that sense. You use itand you’re automatically capable ofplugging into all the top providers andthen some.
On a similar note, what I think is coolis you have this B Y, bring your own keys,which basically means you don’t have topay for API LLM costs. So I’m curious,what are the costs and margins for abusiness like this? You really don’thave big server costs and you don’t haveAPI costs. So what does it cost to runday-to-day?
It’s almost nothing. I only have to payfor my landing page hosting and almost Ican bring it to zero. But because I’mlike a Next.js spoiled person, I host iton Verso and I have some fancy thingsgoing on there. So it costs me about 200 a month. But that issomething that I have to only spend.
Because I have to keep working on newfeatures, not to maintain the existingproduct. Cool. Well, last question thatI have for you, a question that we askall founders who come on to the channel.If you could stand on Prenit’s shoulderwhen you were just starting out beforeyou had product market fit in thisawesome product that has made a bunch ofrevenue, what would be your advice?I’ve been trying to build differentproducts for the last 6 or 7 years andfor a good chunk of the last 5 years, Iwas operating as a salesman, as anentrepreneur. Your goal is to findproduct market fit as soon as possible.
And your goal is to build something thatmakes people’s lives better. But what Iwas doing was appealing to my peers,which is totally not the mindset that Ineeded to have as an entrepreneur becauseyour whole purpose should be aboutfinding product market fit, findingsomething that you’re going to put outin the market, and they’re going to giveyou money and reward you in return as athank you for making their lives better.And that should be your only goal.That’s really good advice. Thanks forsharing that, Prenit. That was awesome.
Thanks for coming on to the channel.What you built is awesome. I’m excitedto see what you continue to do andcontinue to build. Thanks for coming onand thanks for having me. It’s a greatpleasure.All right. Thank you, Pren, for comingon to the channel. Hopefully, you guysgot a bunch of value from this video. Ifind it super inspiring how Prenleft his full-time job, decided to gobuild stuff, and especially how hedidn’t give up after the initial versionof his app failed. If you’re looking to
do something similar and ship your ownapp, then definitely check out StarterStory Build. It’s our program wherein just a few weeks, we’ll help you find anidea, build it with AI, and launch it tothe real world with real users. If thissounds interesting to you, just head tothe first link in the description tolearn more about what Starter StoryBuild is about. All right, that’s it forthis episode. Thank you guys forwatching. We’ll see you in the next one.Peace.