Alright, tired of all fakes "$10k MRR in a month" posts. Here's our actual journey to 10k MRR
The past month of "$10K MRR in 60 days!!!" posts on this sub is getting ridiculous. Here's our actual, more realistic journey.
Yeah, we actually hit $10K MRR. But holy f*ck did we embarrass ourselves getting there.
March 2024: Started building an AI search engine (later found out Perplexity already existed lmao). Spent a stupid amount of money on fine-tuning, made something that looked like Web 1.0, and got exactly zero paid users. Perfect.
July: VC told us to focus on a niche because we were going nowhere. We were sports fans so we we built a sports-focused Perplexity to explain tactical analysis and games we missed. Turns out the only people who cared about tactical analysis were mostly us. Zero paid users.
August: Actually talked to sports fans and potential users for once. Found out they had real problems, mostly around betting. Spent three weeks debating if we were comfortable building for betting. (Spoiler: We were overthinking it.)
September: Finally stopped being idiots and built what users actually wanted - a specialized sports AI that could actually help with betting research and predictions. You know, that thing YC has been screaming about for years: "build something people want." The moment we launched that version, people started throwing money at us.
The numbers :
Sep: $800
Oct: $2.3K
Nov: $4.8K
Dec: $7.3K
Jan '25: $10K+
Turns out when you build an AI that's genuinely good at one thing (sports) instead of mediocre at everything, people stick around.
And tbh, the release of Cursor really helped design much better UIs that we had at the beginning. It's a good plus, but if you have a really useful product, users can ignore ugly UIs for a while.
We're basically trying to be the Bloomberg Terminal for sports betting. Sounds fancy, but it just means giving people the tools and analysis they need to not lose their money to bookmakers. Starting with soccer, expanding to NBA, MLB, and NFL this year, now that it works.
We could have gotten here months earlier if we'd just listened to users instead of trying to be "innovative." Literally all we had to do was:
- Talk to actual users (not other founders)
- Build what they asked for (not what TechCrunch says is cool)
- Charge money for it (shocking)
That's it. That's the whole story. No growth hacks. No secret sauce. Just embarrassing ourselves until we finally built something people actually wanted to pay for.
If you happen to be into sports and want to check it out: https://sportseye.ai