Business Failure to $3800/Month Only 4 Months Later

Snow LeeFounder of PlugBear $3,800 monthly recurring revenue Published May 16, 2024 by Fardeen KhanReviewed and edited by Niall Doherty

PlugBear is a tool that lets you integrate AI into daily use software like Discord, Slack, Hubspot, etc.

Founder Snow Lee recently revealed that the business is doing $3,800 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR)

But they got off to a rocky start…

Last October, OpenAI held an event called OpenAI DevDay…

This event caused serious problems for thousands of startups, including ours. Our original product was an AI assistant for technical support.

However, because OpenAI introduced new products that made it easier for people to build their own custom AI, we realized we would have to compete with our customers’ engineering teams instead of other service providers.

So they had to ditch their initial product idea and start over.

Ouch

But four months later, they had launched PlugBear and were close to hitting $4000 MRR.

Gotta love their attitude and approach…

One of our principles is “Launch fast and learn from users.” We built the basic service within just one week and then launched it on Product Hunt…

We used most of our social media accounts and connections. We asked friends and family members to upvote our product… Thanks to that, we were ranked as the #5 developer tool that week on Product Hunt.

We also shared posts on Reddit, especially in communities related to OpenAI.

We found people in those subreddits who wanted to use AI within their familiar tools. We posted some videos that ended up going viral.

And…

We love building our service in public view. It helps us interact with users, stay motivated, focus on the core features, and attract more users. We share weekly updates with users via changelogs and emails.

Snow’s story is a good reminder that building a business is tough. 

You might think you have it all figured out one day, only to be knocked completely on your ass the next

That rollercoaster is unavoidable, unfortunately.

One idea before wrapping this up

Learn how to use PlugBear and build custom GPTs, and you could start a service business helping businesses integrate AI into the tools they use daily (eg. Slack, MS Teams, etc.)

But ask yourself first: how could you test if there’s demand for such a service?

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