How I Built An AI Search Tool With No Programming Skills [Growing Fast!]
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?
Hi! My name is Bob. I come from a digital marketing background and own an SEO agency for tech startups. However, I’ve always been super fascinated with AI and jumped on the AI bandwagon in November of last year, when ChatGPT came out.
When coming up with a business idea, it's important to focus on your strengths.
I always wanted to create a scalable product such as a SaaS but didn't have a background in computer science or any extensive knowledge in programming. However, with the help of ChatGPT, I was quickly able to create websites and build more complex software. This was what sparked me to create AI Search.
I’ve only finished building it around late March and have only started to monetize it recently, so I can't share any amazing revenue stats yet(hopefully soon!). I’ve made $318 so far.
However, the amount of traffic that I am getting organically has grown to well over 1000 users per day. This seems to be all coming in organically from Google and social media. I haven't seen such quick growth before while doing minimal marketing, so this is what gives me validation and pushes me to continue building out the product.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
My expertise is in marketing and growth hacking, but not much in programming. I had to spend a lot of time searching on Stackoverflow and ChatGPT to build out the platform and more complex capabilities such as user logins, payment integrations, etc. I'm confident that once I've built out the platform, I can market this and get a lot of growth quickly.
I’m aware that I don't have the technical expertise to build something complex, like an AI CRM or chatbot. Plus, there are plenty of people who can do it much better than me, so I know I will be outcompeted very quickly. What I can do is build a simple platform for people to search for AI tools, and then use my marketing skills to grow this.
When coming up with a business idea, it's important to focus on your strengths. My forte is in growth marketing and community building, so I had a competitive edge in building a search platform and growing a community, rather than an AI ‘product’.
At the date of writing, I still haven't made enough to make a living from this, so it remains a side project, but it is attracting over a thousand visitors per day organically, so there is indeed potential to grow this platform and monetize it. Currently, my main source of income is my SEO agency.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.
I had taught myself some basic React and Python many years ago, but what helped me build this out initially was ChatGPT. I spent countless hours asking ChatGPT how to build this and that, pasting in error codes for it to debug, and also browsing through the StackOverflow forums to search for solutions when I needed to troubleshoot something.
The website is built using NextJS. For the database of AI tools, I used Python to scrape AI tools off of Google and other databases such as ProductHunt and AppSumo. Then I had to manually format, clean, and verify the data before importing it into MongoDB.
I’d say 20% of the time was spent on building new features, while 80% of the time was trying to fix error messages.
Describe the process of launching the business.
It was quite a silent and soft launch initially - I just built this for fun and didn't expect it to gain much traction. The ‘launch’ was just sharing it with my friends and network. However, I started seeing more and more traffic flow via Google Analytics.
It quickly increased from dozens of users to hundreds of users per day, from over 90 countries. These were not just people in my network anymore. That's when I knew that people were sharing it organically and that there was potential to scale this into something big.
Again, this was initially just a side project for fun, so I didn't spend much myself and didn't seek VC funding or crowdfunding. The total cost was around $1000 to buy the domain and pay for GPT3.5/4, but everything else was just built by me and hosted with the free plan in Vercel and MongoDB. I tried to be as frugal as possible and use free plans most of the time.
Although I'm still in the early stages of building this out, the main lesson learned here is to focus on the analytics. Once you launch, you have to closely monitor your website analytics (I used GA4) and see if people are using and sharing your product, and if they are engaged. Analyze which pages or blogs are drawing the most traffic, and double down on this content.
I'm a huge believer in product-led marketing, so if you can build your product so well that people use it regularly and naturally share it with others, you have the wind behind your back and can quickly grow your product organically from just word of mouth.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
I'm very experienced in SEO, so after building out the product, building up my SEO was the next focus. I knew that if I could get to the top of Google search results, I could attract hundreds of thousands of users to my site passively and organically.
It's important to look at the data to help you decide what to do next. I placed heavy emphasis on keyword research and search data on my site
SEO includes optimizing for page speed and performance and optimizing all the technical details like metadata and crawlability. That's why I chose to use NextJS to build my site, as it is considered more SEO-friendly.
However, the bulk of what has the most impact on SEO and your Google rankings is creating content. You should aim to consistently publish blogs with high volume, low difficulty keywords that are relevant to your site. The reason why blogs are important is that Google still focuses mainly on text to determine its search result rankings.
Although voice- and video-SEO are increasing in importance for the Google algorithm, at the end of the day, text is still the main medium that Google uses. I used a variety of tools to determine what are the lowest-difficulty keywords which I can leverage for my blogs.
This included SEMrush and Google Search Console. Then, with the help of ChatGPT, Quillbot, and some manual editing, I was able to quickly and regularly write blogs on the site.
Another great way to increase exposure is to share the product on sites like Product Hunt or Starter Story. Not only does this leverage their audiences, but it also generates backlinks for you, which further improves your SEO.
In addition to SEO, I've recently started also building up social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. As my bandwidth is maxed out with managing my agency, building more features for AI Search, and focusing on its SEO, I've recently hired an intern to help me build out the social media side of things.
This includes posting regularly on our Twitter page and Facebook group, which has attracted over 500 members so far. Another marketing tip to note is that I intentionally started a Facebook group instead of a page, as groups tend to get much more engagement and organic promotion from Facebook, whereas growing organically for Facebook pages is pretty much impossible nowadays (the FB algo heavily favors paid ads instead).
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
The main focus is adding more features to the site to increase user engagement. For example, I've just added a gamification feature where users can earn points by interacting on the site. They can redeem these for various perks such as gift cards or discounts on AI tools.
Again, I am a big believer in product-led growth, so if I can make AI Search the best and most complete database for AI tools, I'm hopeful that more and more users would engage and share it naturally. I am therefore placing more emphasis on polishing the product and user experience than marketing or sales.
It also takes quite some time out of my schedule to scrape new AI tools and add them to the database every day. I'm adding around 150 to 200 new AI tools per week, just to give you a sense of how insane the growth in this space has been!
The next steps would be to set up a cold email campaign sent to AI product founders, informing them of our platform which they can leverage to increase exposure or start some paid ads, but this would be further down the road map.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
Be very data-driven when making decisions. I initially built this for fun as a side project but only decided to commit more to it when I saw that users were naturally sharing it and I was getting tremendous organic growth. This was the validation I needed to continue. It's essential to set up analytics and tracking as soon as you launch the product, and then let the data help you decide what to do next.
Ditto for marketing - It's important to look at the data to help you decide what to do next. I placed heavy emphasis on keyword research and search data on my site (via Google Search Console), To help me determine what blogs and content to post for the most impact on my SEO.
Being a self-taught, novice developer, there were times when I was stuck trying to fix an error for hours and couldn't find a solution. It's important to take a break and move on to something else instead of trying to solve it immediately. I often find that if I revisit it the next day, my mind is more refreshed and I could solve it quicker.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
Google Analytics and Google Search Console are my favorites. They're both free and pretty much all you need to see where users are coming from and how they are interacting with your site. Google Search Console is very important in determining how well you’re ranking on Google search results, and what keywords to use for your upcoming content and blogs.
Canva for image/video creation. It’s super intuitive and quick.
Clickup for project management. I just used the free plan which is limited to 5 ‘spaces’. I'd use it to keep track of upcoming blogs and set due dates for various tasks, just to keep myself organized.
ChatGPT for blog writing. Many sources say that AI-generated content is bad for SEO, which is correct. The trick is to use AI to write out something first, and then add a human touch to it at the end.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
Pre-suasion By Robert Cialdini - Lots of good insights on marketing and human psychology.
Podcasts: The Diary Of A CEO, and Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal - I love hearing the stories of successful entrepreneurs and how they got from humble beginnings to where they are today.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
Test multiple business ideas, and look at the data to inform you on which ideas work and which don’t.
Make a product so good that people keep using it and naturally share it with others.
Take advantage of your strengths. Build something that leverages what you're good at so that from the start, you'll have at least some sort of competitive edge over others.
Some entrepreneurs starting out tend to fall into the habit of doing everything themselves. However, this is not scalable and also not sustainable, in that if you take yourself out, the business cannot function.
Work on the business, not in the business. Build systems, teams, and automation so that even if you take yourself out, the business can still operate. That way, you can focus on higher-level priorities, such as growth, strategy, and fundraising.
Meditation is also great for keeping yourself centered and focused throughout the day, although I admit that I have trouble staying committed to meditating regularly. My goal is to do it daily for at least 10 minutes, but often after a few minutes, I'll have a million thoughts flowing into my head and get distracted.
Time management is also key. I’m juggling between my SEO agency, AI search, and of course family and relationships. I'd find that making a list of tasks the previous night keeps me focused and productive the next day. For each task, I would set a timer of 30 minutes to an hour and solely focus on that task without distractions.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
There are no openings right now, but if you've checked out our site and would love to contribute to its growth, I'd love to chat more and see how we can collaborate.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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