A college student reached $64k/mo in 6 months by being an AI first mover

I know this crowd &#x2F; silicon valley is accustom to these kinds of stories. But we should remember that this is a college kid, who saw an opportunity and took initiative to build a business. The comments here are WAY too critical. We should celebrate these kinds of stories, instead of nitpicking.<p>Additionally these &#x27;A.I apps are just gold rush&#x27; comments are too dismissive about the potential. It may be that there are some low hanging fruit that will get picked first, but I personally think that the vast majority of opportunity requires some level innovation, creative thinking, and grit to utilize.

Somebody always wins the lottery. This doesn&#x27;t mean that playing the lottery is a useful path to riches for anyone else.<p>Edited to add: This is not an indictment on the college student in question! Congrats to him for being prepared to seize on an opportunity and executing well.

&gt; <i>As my time in university went on, I started to focus less on optimizing for FAANG (leetcode) and more on building side projects.</i><p>That might or might not be a smart move in the current context, but the tragedy of students grinding Leetcode for obnoxious jobs gatekeeping needs to stop.

My first thought was: Good on him, that&#x27;s solid revenue.<p>My second thought was: This sounds like another idea that could easily be killed off by Google or similar companies, if they just add a <i>&quot;this is googlebert, your personalized analysis robot - just link your website&#x2F;upload docs and ask away!&quot;</i> function.<p>Or this kind of functionality simply becomes part of the batteries included package for ChatGPT etc.

There are several stories of companies going from $0 to &gt;$5M ARR in just a few months with the boom in LLM-driven applications. The downside for these types of apps is that churn rates are through the roof, and will probs die when the LLM fad inevitably fizzles.

So we are somewhere between 1995 and pets.com

Here&#x27;s a post-mortem and the true history of this tooling approach and being a first mover, or not...<p>Pre 2021: Useful semantic search widely deployed, used for recommendations for sales. OpenAI has an answers endpoint specifically for this technical use case, full docs, and many companies implement this internally.<p>Mid 2022: People like me experiment with GPT answering using semantic context on dynamically uploaded content, e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=7V3VkNj2bag">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=7V3VkNj2bag</a> - but cannot get approved for this use case by OpenAI.<p>Nov 2022: GPT had banned open ended responses and chat like interfaces until now. Explain paper is the first tool that allows you to chat with your PDFs with multiple questions, and to use it on many types of PDFs, released in November IIRC and viral on twitter: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;rauchg&#x2F;status&#x2F;1596220185727275008" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;rauchg&#x2F;status&#x2F;1596220185727275008</a><p>December-January 2023: 15+ Chat with PDF tools are launched, including pre-hyped launches on ProductHunt from pivoting products January+ onwards: Almost daily launches, sometimes with USPs. I launched AnyQuestions.ai which was at the time the only question tool able to work with videos [1]. Chatbase catches virality on twitter and makes some other sound decisions [2].<p>Feburary 2023 onwards: No platforms since February have succeeded.<p>[1] But it took a long time to process with Whisper and the interface was more answer focused than chat-and-response focused; I also made bets on including a larger context and using non-typical embeddings (looking for entailment&#x2F;contradictions of the sentence as well as semantic similarity) which turned out to not be the right commercial choice.<p>[2] Allowing embedding on websites, and sharing the Chatbase branding that way was powerful, as well as being able to easily work for new websites as a quick solution. It spread easily through competitor FOMO and was a fast product.

&gt; Just upload your documents or add a link to your website and get a ChatGPT-like chatbot for your data. Then add it as a widget to your website or chat with it through the API.<p>But, that means they are uploading customer data to OpenAI servers, right? Umm, wonder the legality of that if you don&#x27;t mention this point in your Legal Terms section (I just quickly searched for OpenAI and couldn&#x27;t find anything)

OpenAI continually gaining even more leverage in the business world with their API. They&#x27;ll be able to charge whatever they want eventually, if they can&#x27;t already

Regardless of that product how probably this is near the highest MRR or after the tax cut -given he’s in Canada- there’s no money left or there’s no scale up for such business, it’s a good motivation boost for him for sure, however, I’m sure this story brought to you by OpenAI, anyone is reading that story especially a young one, will immediately jump to build anything that uses OpenAI api, more people do, more profits for openAI, it’s like Apple&#x2F;Dell&#x2F;whatever laptop company showing you an ad that you should buy a laptop in a promise of quick wealth, except here it’s a continuous profit for OpenAI and not a one time payment. I highly doubt the story will happen or have any article about it if it was based on an open source LLM.

The potential use of LLMs as search tools could disrupt the startup ecosystem, especially in niche markets. &quot;Find a service that does this [niche task]&quot; commands could enhance visibility for niche startups. But as LLMs become better at suggesting top products, startups competing with established products might find the path challenging. However, this could also drive a focus on product quality and uniqueness, pushing startups to differentiate more innovatively. LLMs&#x27; ability to understand user preferences and suggest products accordingly could open up opportunities for startups providing niche services. I think the startup scene is going to be very interesting going forward.

there is literally a &quot;how to&quot; in the open AI api docs for the exact use case. I need to be more shameless the next go around.

A lot of these &quot;hating&quot; comments remind me of the ones I read in ~2006-2007 when kids were making $100,000&#x2F;month from AdSense and Yahoo! Ads by throwing up simple MySpace layout websites with graphics.

&quot;I made a $1 million in a year in sales, ask me how&quot;<p>&quot;by losing $2 million&quot;<p>Well make it up in volume, famous last words.

This is not enough to pay his student loan debt.

&gt;&quot;It made it very clear that my goal of making $10k a month from a side project is not a crazy goal to have.&quot;<p>Honestly that entire interview just reveals how much of that poor guys thinking is already infected by the virus called capitalism. Accumulating personal wealth shouldn&#x27;t be the end goal here. It&#x27;s short-sighted and perpetuates the very system that created inequality and injustice in the first place.<p>Instead of focusing on personal gain, why not channel that energy into organizing and fighting for a more equitable and just system? Learn about alternatives to capitalism and push for systemic change that benefits everyone, not just a select few who manage to &quot;take advantage of opportunities.&quot;<p>Capitalism thrives on people thinking they can get rich quick, while most end up struggling and the rich get richer. By pursuing this goal, you&#x27;re just playing into that system. Focus on the greater good and work towards a future where everyone has a fair shot, not just the ones who keep up with AI or whatever the next tech trend will be for the growth imperative to exploit.