Product Engineer generating $10k/month building Ai apps
In this interview,Daniel Nguyen, the founder of BoltAi, PDF pals and Ktool, explains how he built his Ai apps to success
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In this interview, you’ll meet Daniel Nguyen, I found out about Daniel on a Reddit thread under a comment on my posts. I reached out to him and I felt it would be cool to have a founder interview with him
In this interview, Daniel shares
His backstory and how he started?
How he built the first version of his product MVP
How he get his first free and paid customers for his product?
What has been effective in attracting customers to his apps
His competitive advantages, what gives him an edge, and insights that have proven beneficial to his operations
What tools have helped him grow your product?
Which books, podcasts, or other resources have had the greatest impact on him?
We talked about some of his favorite books, podcasts, and notes
What advice would he offer to entrepreneurs who are just starting out
Q: Hello! Who are you and what product are you working on currently?
I'm Daniel Nguyen. I'm an entrepreneur based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. I've been building multiple products:
KTool: a tool to send web articles and newsletters to Kindle
BoltAI: an AI chat client for Mac
PDF Pals: an AI document analysis for Mac
My primary focus now is on BoltAI
Q: What is your backstory and how did you come up with your idea? Do you have any partners?
I've been a product engineer for more than 12 years. Then one day, I discovered Indie Hacking and found it fascinating. I quit my cushy job to start building in public. My first product was KTool, a tool to send articles & newsletters to Kindle. I'm half blind, and so I started KTool as a way to offload reading to the Kindle as much as possible.
After 1 year, I didn't find a good way to grow it to ramen profitability, so I decided to learn more about generative AI & OpenAI API and hopefully find a good freelance gig. I did land a couple of interesting gigs, but what is more interesting is I found a new product idea: BoltAI - a better way to use OpenAI & other AI services on macOS.
I started it purely to learn more about SwiftUI development & OpenAI app development (the so-called "AI wrapper"). It's now my top revenue-generating product.
While building BoltAI, one customer asked about the ability to chat with PDF natively on Mac (another "AI wrapper" idea). I found it interesting and so I decided to build it. PDF Pals recently reached 700 paid customers (about 23% of my total revenue in 2023)
And finally, I built ShotSolve as a lead magnet for BoltAI (engineering as marketing, or side project marketing). It was welcomed by many Mac users and so far, has brought 1500 visitors to BoltAI.
Q: Take us through the process of building the first version of your product MVP?
When I started, I didn’t expect BoltAI to be commercially viable. It comes from my pet peeve of switching back and forth between ChatGPT web UI and native Mac apps like Xcode or Apple Notes.
Unlike VSCode, there is no Copilot for XCode and I have the habit of writing blog posts in Apple Notes so I figured I need a tool to invoke ChatGPT right within these apps.
So I decided to build the MVP in a weekend. The app was ugly but I managed to ship it anyway.
Q: How did you get your first customers for your product (Free or paid users)
I tweeted about it, and posted it to multiple communities asking for feedback: IndieHacker, Reddit, WIP…
It went semi-viral and early adopters started to use the app. I got valuable feedback and improved the product accordingly. Some of them converted to paid customers.
Q: Since you launched your product, What has worked to attract customers
Doubling down on what works mostly. That's social media (X/Reddit), email newsletters, and paid ads.
Q: How is your product performing currently, and what are your plans for the future? Can you share your current metrics and revenue figures?
BoltAI is doing great. My plan is to support business customers better, and will kind of "pivot" into B2B. Currently, most customers of BoltAI are prosumers: freelancers, developers, or content writers. I believe it would be much better if I could sell directly to businesses.
Q: What tools have helped you grow your product?
Tech Stack:
Cloudflare Pages for marketing website
Cloudflare R2 for binary hosting & distribution
Canny for feedback request
GitBook for documentation
Marketing:
CleanShot X and Xnapper for help with content & social media images
Screen Studio for video demos
SimpleAnalytics for web analytics & A/B testing
Productivity:
BoltAI: use AI to build AI products, welcome to the future
Session: pomodoro app with built-in distraction blocking
TablePlus: database manipulation
Apple Notes: for note taking & simple task tracking
Q: Which books, podcasts, or other resources have had the greatest impact on you?
Podcasts:
Books:
Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth by Gabriel Weinberg
Blogs:
Q: What advice would you offer to entrepreneurs who are looking to start or have just begun their journey?
Getting started is always the hardest. The fear of failure is strong. Rejections hurt.
My advice is to get past that “first scary moment” as fast as you can. Ship fast, don’t wait until the product is perfect (hint: it never will be).
Thank you for taking the time to answer these questions! What is your contact info if people would like to get in touch with you, You can add all your links.
Twitter, My blog, My newsletter, BoltAI, PDF Pals, KTool
Thank you, Daniel Nguyen for this interview.
Let me know what you learned from this interview and have a productive week 🙏
Indie Tip of the Week
For the indie tip for this week, I wrote 2 different posts on Reddit that went viral. The posts summed up to 295,000 views. The main essence of the post is to understand how people who make $10k themselves, do what they do. The Reddit post sparked a lot of interest from entrepreneurs and business people.
You can read more from my wonderful tips on how to go viral on Reddit, I wrote a comprehensive guideline you can follow to rank well.
Let me know what you think in the comments
Indie product of the week
Check out Usevisuals by Thomas Halbritter
If you are looking for templates to help you get started with your social media posting, Usevisuals will help you a lot in this. They already have some pre-made templates that you can choose from if you want or you can just purchase the full library.
Give it a try and share your thoughts in the comments, Will love to hear about your experience
Indie Trivia for the week
What is the distance from the earth to the sun?
Let me know your answer in the comments.
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