We Make $30K/Month Building AI-Optimized Content Tools
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?🔗
Hey, my name’s Ryan Darani and I run Cuppa AI with my co-founders, Chris Riley and Dan Beynon. We’re an all-in-one scalable solution for SEO-optimized AI-generated content.
We work within the SEO industry, allowing users to produce content that ranks without heavy price increases, time constraints, or word restrictions. Our target audience consists of content creators, website owners, affiliate marketers, and content agencies.
Cuppa is priced and structured differently from any other AI content tool. As new AI models are released, our content generation costs go down, not up, which allows our users to benefit from programmatic SEO strategies for pennies on the dollar. This has helped over 1,000 people add extra revenue to their bottom line, cut operational costs and scale multiple websites to profit quickly.
Our initial investment of $9,000 was recuperated in the first weekend of sales. Today, we do $30,000/mrr with forecasts to achieve $50,000/mrr by the start of 2025.
How did you come up with your business idea?🔗
Chris Riley had the idea when he noticed a gap in the market for programmatic AI content. At the time, AI-generated content hadn’t really scaled well within the SEO industry due to infrastructure, cost, and quality issues.
Chris has been building media sites for over 10 years now. When the ChatGPT (publicly available AI) was released in early 2023, Chris immediately knew this was going to be an opportunity that he had to capitalize on. It’s the internet bubble all over again.
We knew we could solve that pretty quickly. With 25 years (wow, we’re old) of SEO experience collectively, we understand the pains of generating organic traffic better than most. And we knew with how commercial things like ChatGPT and Claude were becoming, it wouldn’t be long before the wider market started to adopt AI content.
Cuppa solves the most challenging aspects of using AI to generate content—prompt engineering, retaining brand knowledge, content manipulation, and scale. The initial Cuppa product didn’t have these features in the early days of launch, but our development roadmap is ruthlessly progressive.
Every time a new model (text or image) comes out, we integrate it for our users within a few days.
The validation came during our first weekend of sales. We made $9,000 in a weekend, which immediately left us thinking, ‘Okay, we’re onto something…’. This isn’t typical, though. We’ve had plenty of launches with previous businesses in the software industry that didn’t give us the same ROI (or any ROI).
X threads and Reddit posts are incredibly powerful (when used correctly) for traffic. If you nail these tactics, you’ll build curiosity in volumes.
Give us a step-by-step process for how you built the first version of your product.🔗
We were uniquely positioned to buy the initial framework of what’s now known as Cuppa. In February 2023, we acquired the initial barebones for $9,000. It had zero subscribers and was simply a framework for AI content.
As we acquired it, the first version took 4-6 weeks to create. We can’t comment specifically on how the framework worked initially due to the acquisition.
We managed to source this deal purely from networking on X (Twitter). It came at the right time in the market, and we completely self-funded the acquisition. Since then, with not yet sought investment. Our biggest expenses are development costs. It’s costly to take a product from barebones to something people are willing to pay for.
The business model we launched with is still the same. The only difference is that we’re testing tiered pricing systems instead of single, one-off fees. That’s the only difference in our subscription model for the business.
How did you “launch” the business?🔗
Our launch strategy was simple–use organic social media to drive sales. We collectively have a decent following on X. We didn’t want to overreach and spend money on advertising until we had validated the idea.
The build-up likely helped us on the day of the actual launch. Up to a month prior, we had been ‘building in public’ to generate excitement. We leaned on our networks to amplify the message. We’re in a lucky position to have friends with large followings on X to help us plug the tool into their audience.
Everything was authentic and organic. There wasn’t a sales pitch or anything aggressive. The market was crying for a solution, and we knew we’d provided it with Cuppa. It was the case of people trying and realizing it for themselves. The big thing was making sure customers had an unmatched experience joining Cuppa.
Whether through features or the community we have on Discord, our goal was to reduce the time to value as much as possible, i.e., helping customers see the benefits of Cuppa in days rather than weeks or months.
FOMO marketing is huge, especially in industries like SEO, where a competitive edge is hard to come by. In a space where incremental gains are the difference between earning a profit and not, we knew that sharing customer wins would snowball into more subscriptions. This has shown itself in our churn rate, which is between 2% and 3%.
If we were to launch Cuppa again, we’d partner up more aggressively on different platforms. X has an excellent community for our target audience but places like Reddit and TikTok are incredibly powerful channels, too. We didn’t need to sell hard. We simply needed more of what we did on different platforms.
How did you land your first customers?🔗
Our first customers came during the first weekend of launch. With this not being our first rodeo, we had built a large network of people who would likely benefit from our product.
We broke even on our investment in the first weekend. Again, this isn't guaranteed for people reading this who are in the early stages of launching their product. It takes time. For example, one of our other builds was a WordPress plugin.
We spent weeks developing this tool and thousands of dollars. We launched, and we made a one-lifetime sale. I think our investment costs were $7k, and our return was $99 for the year. This highlighted one lesson you should all learn: don’t ship complicated products.
We recommend building an MVP, generating hype, launching, and refining. There’s no point overloading your customers with features if nobody understands. People want simplicity. Simplicity sells. Your customers need to see themselves using your product daily, with minimal disruption to their existing schedules.
This can be product fit, pricing models, features, integrations, existing toolsets they use, etc.; you have to consider that people are emotional buyers. They buy to avoid paying or to achieve pleasure.
Building something is difficult. And you should come into this game knowing that. But that’s the beauty of being an entrepreneur. You’re not getting into this for boring or normal. You’re doing this because you think you have something that other people will love.
How have you grown your business?🔗
Organic social media and email marketing have been the only two channels we’ve relied on for serious growth. We’re in the early stages of Meta ads, but we’re not seeing huge success there yet. That’s not to say it won’t be on the cards.
X threads and Reddit posts are incredibly powerful (when used correctly) for traffic. If you nail these tactics, you’ll build curiosity in volumes. I can’t share the specific thread, but here’s the results from a single Reddit post we published last week:
Our advice would be to partner with someone who has larger distribution channels than you. If you’re not fortunate enough to have a following already, you need to collaborate with someone who has. Distribution is more important than most founders think. You could have the best product in the world but if you’ve got no way to ship it to masses of people, you’ll find it hard to grow.
There are a couple of ways to do this: partnership or fee-based. The partnership would entail forfeiting a percentage of revenue, but it could also mean long-term (sustainable) growth. Fee-based is hit or miss. If you pay a creator $2,000 to talk about your product, you could be flooded with sign-ups or a complete zero. Marketing is a risk. You minimize that risk by networking correctly and incentivising distribution partnerships.
Our most effective ongoing channel to increase our customers is email marketing. Data is gold. Once somebody has given you permission to market to them, you’re only competing with their inbox instead of their X timeline. You can use email to upsell, cross-sell or build advocacy for your product. If you’re not collecting emails immediately, you should be. (Not just through sign-ups for the product, but for things like newsletters to create value.)
Give us a breakdown of your revenue & financials.🔗
We’re now at a healthy $30,000 (as of October 2024), and we’ve yet to experience a month without growth.
On average, we grow between 4% and 6% in net MRR, which has remained consistent since March 2023. We’re currently servicing 1,200 paying subscribers and plan to reach 2,000 paying subscribers within the next 6 months.
Thankfully, we run a very lean team, so we’re highly profitable. However, most of our profits are reinvested into Cuppa. For example, we spend between $3,000-$5,000 per month on ads, and software, and our goal isn’t to extract money from the business. It’s to reinvest into our product so that more people continue to choose Cuppa over any other AI writing tool in the market.
What does the future look like?🔗
The next 1-2 years look promising for us. AI models are only improving, and AI applications continue to grow. Over the next 12-18 months, we aim to achieve $100k/MRR. We like to remain ambitious, and there’s no reason why we can’t achieve this.
We’re considering how we can raise our subscription prices through add-ons and standalone services to keep
Our goal is to lean into a larger TAM (total addressable market) where content is used not only for SEO but also for essays, social media, and newsletters–the whole marketing toolkit. Doing that allows us the freedom to collaborate with a new platform and partnership mix.
In the next five years, we hope to have crossed $3M as a business and be in the market to sell (or have already sold!).
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?🔗
We’ve learned to take our time with partnership decisions and spend more time focusing on everything we can about our customers. While partnerships have been crucial for our growth, we’ve also learned that they can easily go the other way. Our goal is to make as many small positive changes as possible. We avoid overburdening ourselves with too many macro wins.
I mean that growth should feel natural–not forced or rushed. The market will dictate if your product can grow (or not), and there’s not much you can do about it. Timing and luck play huge roles in the success of any startup.
The more you realize that product is only 50% of the battle and distribution completes the picture, the better your chance of succeeding. Once you’re over the hurdle of ‘how can I reach as many people as possible’, it’s then down to you to make people love your product and that only comes by spending as much time using the product as they do.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?🔗
Building something is difficult. And you should come into this game knowing that. But that’s the beauty of being an entrepreneur. You’re not getting into this for boring or normal. You’re doing this because you think you have something that other people will love. Building a business is about people; you must learn about that over time.
There shouldn’t be a rush or a deadline. That’s the mistake we see more often with newer entrepreneurs. There’s no hurry to success. It can happen overnight, or it can happen in ten years. Your focus should never be the destination–it’s making the journey as fun as possible with the people around you.
If you can take away anything from this story, building with people is more fun than building alone. If you can find a person (or small group of people) that compliments your weaknesses, you’ll win more times than you’ll lose.
Where can we go to learn more?🔗
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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