Hi Friends!😀

I am starting a weekend edition of The Day 1 Lab where I will be interviewing startup founders each week to showcase their startup journey and the lessons we can learnt.

In today’s edition, we are featuring:

aitools.fyi (💵 AUD 1.1K MRR)

Online directory to find AI tools and websites

👨‍🚀Founder: Ritshit Patel

🌎️Location: Australia

💰️Funding: Bootstrapped

💳️Monetization: Affiliate fees, Advertising

🏠️Category: Web app

1. Hi Rishit, what's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

The idea of directories has always been in my mind for my personal use. I always save tools in my notion, in bookmarks, notes, etc. but I never go back to them. And whenever a new trend comes up, I always feel the urge to know all about it and use all the tools that are available to me! So, I decided to store all my tool links at one place and turn it into a website so that other people can also take advantage of it.

2. How did you build aitools and get your first 1K users?

I’m Software Developer by profession and I have been building websites since I was 12 years old. So building aitools.fyi wasn’t a technical challenge for me. Also, My friend Fenil has helped me a lot in building this website and finding all the tools!

Analytics of my website are public and you can find them at aitools.fyi/analytics. But basically I completed building my website on Wednesday Jan 18 and then decided to launch it on product hunt on Saturday and I received amazing support from PH community and got almost 3000 visitors and 12000+ page views on the day of the launch alone! The site is currently at 18000+ unique visitors and 87000+ page views. (21 Jan to 3rd Feb)

3. Since launch, what strategies have worked to attract and retain partnerships and customers?

- I have been posting a lot about my website on Twitter. It’s the second highest source of traffic after Product Hunt. But I have done a lot of marketing on various social media and have posted my website on a lot of directories. Also, a lot of newsletters have featured my website. Yesterday, someone with 600k+ subscribers on YouTube made a video about my website and that has already become third highest source of traffic!

4. What were the biggest challenges you faced and lessons learnt?

The biggest challenge for me has been the time!! I still work full-time and it’s been very hard to work on aitools.fyi with the job. About the lesson learned, I really underestimated the power of the Product Hunt since it was my first ever launch. I didn’t have proper pricing page, monetization strategy, and plan for retaining visitors. I added sponsorship pricing page 2 days after the launch, newsletter signup form 3 days after the launch. And I still haven’t signed up for all the available affiliate programs. So biggest challenge has been the time!

My MRR would have been at least double if I had planned my monetization strategy before launching! But I didn’t think that my launch will be this successful and I was wrong! I have zero regrets for how it turned out. I learned a lot from my first launch and the next one will be amazing!

5. What is your advice to entrepreneurs who are just starting?

The first advice I would give to someone new is if you’re building something in AI space, put it on aitools.fyi!! Because marketing is very important. Most of the new entrepreneurs, especially devs don’t focus much on marketing and they keep building amazing design and features for their app/website. There’s no need of dark mode if your app is used by 10 people! Ship fast, succeed faster!

That’s all for today!

Share your startup or project with us here - it’s free!

Know any startup that you would like us to interview? Let us know!

Share this newsletter with your friends: