My AI Side Project Makes $4K/Month Working Just 5 Hours Per Month
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?
Hi everyone! I am Ramsri Goutham Golla, based out of Hyderabad, India.
I am the solo bootstrapped founder of Questgen which is an AI quiz generator app.
You can input text and generate school quizzes like MCQs (Multiple Choice Questions), True/False, Fill-in-the-blanks etc. My customers are teachers, schools, edtech companies and students who want to practice for an exam or test!
Questgen.ai makes $4k MRR with a 70-80% profit margin! I built it as a side project over the years alongside my main work of consulting and course creation. I spend less than 5 hrs now-a-days monthly mostly answering customer support questions or fixing minor things that are requested by customers.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
Back in 2020, I explored several ideas in the AI space. I was based out of Singapore and was working with an edtech founder and looking for ideas in the AI + edtech space. Explored several ideas like vision AI based analytics for live tutoring classes, adaptive learning and AI generated quizzes.
Out of these three ideas AI generated quizzes seemed to have the highest potential for growth technically as we talked with several edtech companies and heard about the outsourcing of the quiz creation process.
Things looked great but our team fell out due to co-founder conflicts. I moved back to India in 2021 and decided not to pursue entrepreneurship actively. But technically the idea of AI quiz generation inspired me so I started sharing my experiments with code and small programming prototypes via blogs and on social media.
A year later in 2022, I put together all my learnings in AI quiz generation into an Udemy course. It made $10k USD in a little over 2 years.
In 2023, I decided to build a basic frontend where one can input text and get some quizzes! So a basic two text box layout one for input and one for output. I learnt no code tools and built my first version of SaaS on Bubble.io and launched on my socials (Linkedin and Twitter). No massive virality. Just kept working on it progressively and added payments with Stripe etc.
SEO started kicking in and also I pointed all my blogs over the last few years on question generation to have a link to the newly launched SaaS. Things just grew slowly from there on.
Pic from the pre-seed funding days in Singapore before closing down the idea (called as Aurora) because of founder conflicts.
Building solo gives you the highest flexibility but also slows you down as you need to manage multiple things.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.
My goal was just to build a text box where users can enter some text and have another textbox to the right that shows the generated quizzes as text. That’s it.
Since I wasn’t a full-stack developer I took the route of creating this with no code tools.
I explored a bunch of them and figured out Bubble.io had a good ecosystem. So I built the first version that just takes text input on a left textbox, calls an API behind the scenes and shows the output text (quizzes) on the right textbox.
I learnt authentication and added Google authentication later. I learnt databases and added the ability to store the input and output text for logged in users. I learnt payments and added Stripe. Since I didn’t know how to do subscriptions I launched with a pay-per-use system to just buy credits (runs).
In the last year as AI assisted coding became more mainstream and also frameworks like NextJS became mainstream, I learnt full-stack technologies and rebuilt the entire system in NextJS as some of the advanced features like streaming etc weren’t supported by no-code tools and in general, as AI assisted coding improved productivity.
Describe the process of launching the business.
I first launched on my socials (Linkedin and Twitter). I also added the link to my launched website (Questgen.ai) on all the blogs and Github code that I wrote over the last few years. I worked on feedback actively and focused on landing page SEO.
A year later I launched on Product Hunt. I build in public so I constantly announce new features on my socials. Podcast invites also helped in some growth after a while and as I established myself more as an Indie hacker.
I bootstrapped all through so it didn’t incur much cost apart from API costs which are taken care initially by me and later offset with profits.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
The most important thing is pick a few mediums to market and master them. There are so many things like influencer marketing, email marketing, paid ads, SEO, newsletter marketing etc. The goal is to find the perfect intersection of channels that fall in your comfort zone as well as channels where your potential customers hangout and master them.
Since the beginning I was clear that I couldn’t afford to pay upfront for future growth potential so stayed away from forms of marketing that required me to spend money. So I chose social media marketing by myself through building in public and SEO as my main marketing channels.
If you are a first time builder, start small. Learn everything bit by bit with experimentation.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
I rely on SEO for my customer acquisition so there is no investment on paid channels. But it is a double-edged sword. With changing search algorithms, seasonal searches in my domain (edtech) etc, the traffic is not constant. So there are a few months of no active growth and plateau of MRR. I try to offset some of it with social media marketing.
But being a solo developer I don’t have huge operating costs and have a 70% profit margin so any periods of no growth are totally sustainable. But in general I am curious to see how the next few years pan out as there are quite a few competitors or pivots from other edtech players with better SEO domain rating focusing on AI generated quizzes.
On the flip side I have made my app better with a lot of user feedback over the years and few of the changes would need more powerful AI models to do the heavy lifting. I hope that as more powerful models like GPT-5 etc get released and get cheaper, I could address some of the quality concerns while keeping the app at the same average B2C consumer pricing.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
Launching an app and sustaining an app are two different ball games. To scale a successful app you need to manage customer support, keep up with competition, keep marketing to sustain growth, manage churn along with a lot of other things like UI/UX, codebase, auth etc.
I have found that working with co-founders is a 50-50 success scenario. Building solo gives you the highest flexibility but also slows you down as you need to manage multiple things.
One thing that I learnt is that you can build side projects that make survival revenue while doing a full-time consulting / job and it is totally possible to do it without burning midnight oil. The key is to find ideas ahead of time (eg: generative AI ) and give yourself the time to learn, build individual components and launch when ready!
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
I build using NextJS and deploy on Vercel. The backend and auth is on Supabase.
AI models are powered by OpenAI and Anthropic. I use ChartMogul to track MRR and other metrics. I don’t have email marketing at the moment. There are no social media posting tools, customer support tools, CRMs etc.
In the past I have used Upwork to get some freelance work done mostly blogs and some technical help on the full-stack code. But now-a-days AI assisted coding has become very proficient. I rely on Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI’s GPT models to do the tasks.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
I don’t read books or follow podcasts actively. But once in a while I consume any good videos that surface on Youtube from channels like ‘My First Million’ and ‘The Bootstrapped founder’ etc .
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
If you are a first time builder, start small. Learn everything bit by bit with experimentation. There are a lot of things that need to function in harmony - marketing, payments, full-stack, UI/UX, authentication etc.
Learn to identify changing trends in both technology and consumer behavior. Don’t be shy to launch on your socials and mention your app/product in relevant conversations especially if you are a developer.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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