← The SaaS Podcast - Real Lessons on Growing Profitable SaaS
The SaaS Podcast - Real Lessons on Growing Profitable SaaS
AI SaaS to $5.3M ARR by Solving What Others Faked
00:50:42
Adam Fard (UX Pilot) on building an AI SaaS that generates real wireframes while competitors faked it with templates
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Foreign.
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Welcome to another episode of the SaaS podcast. I'm your host Omar Khan, and this is a show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business. In this episode, I talk to Adam Fahd, the founder of uXpilot, an AI platform that helps product design teams create and ship great user experiences faster. In 2023, Adam was running a successful UX agency. When ChatGPT and LLM started taking off, he started experimenting. The first thing he built was a Figma plugin that helped users work through UX frameworks. He shared it through LinkedIn and his agency newsletter it, and started doing discovery sessions with early users. Then, during one of those interviews, someone asked him a simple question. I have all of these ideas on my canvas, but can I turn them into something visual? Can I create a wireframe? That question stuck with him. Adam looked around to see what else was out there. And a few products claimed to generate wireframes from text. But when he tested them, they were all faking it, just swapping templates and changing the copy. There was a good technical reason for that. Creating wireframes with AI was genuinely hard, but Adam decided to take on the challenge anyway. He talked to AI researchers, hired contractors, tested different approaches for four or five months. Nothing quite worked. Then the model started getting smarter and faster and Adam kept iterating and eventually what he was generating became stable enough output to actually use. Around six or seven months after that original user question, UX pilot hit 10k in MRR. But growth created new challenges. Adam was too cautious about hiring at 30k mrr. He kept questioning whether this was the ceiling. He'd add one engineer, wait a month or two, then realize he needed to add another engineer, wait again. Everything moved slower than it needed to. He had no idea how far the product could go, and part of him wondered if this was as good as it was going to get. Today, UXPilot generates over 5 million in ARR with a team of 30 people and over 15,000 paying subscribers. And the business is 100% bootstrapped. In this episode, you'll learn why Adam initially said he didn't want the product to focus on AI generation. And what changed his mind a few months later? How he validated the wireframe generation opportunity by testing competitors and discovering they were all faking it. What happened when Google suddenly deranked all of UXPilot's landing pages and and how he recovered from that. We talk about why covering product Updates in his newsletter drove more engagement than traditional educational content, and how focusing narrowly on design instead of building another no code tool became their biggest competitive advantage. So I hope you enjoy it. If you're building or investing in a SaaS company, you already know security isn't optional. One breach and everything you've built can be at risk. That's where ThreatLocker comes in. Imagine having the power to decide exactly what's allowed to run in your environment and blocking everything else by default. No guessing, no. Hoping your existing solutions catch it. Real enforceable control. ThreatLocker is a zero trust platform that locks down your environment without disrupting operations, gives you total visibility, and stops unauthorized applications before they become a problem. If you want stronger security and tighter control, visit threatlocker.com that's threatlocker.com I talk to a lot of founders stuck in the same spot. They've got a clear vision. They just need the right team to build or scale it. That's where Gearhart comes in. They're an AI powered product development studio that handles the entire technical side of building your B2B SaaS platform or AI agent. Built by serial entrepreneurs, they understand the unique challenges of startups and can plug into your team to accelerate growth. They They've built over 70 successful products, including SmartSuite, which raised $38 million and is used by companies like Capital One. Right now they're offering our listeners the first 20 hours of development for free. Just book a call at Gearhart IO. That's Gearheart IO. The playbook that got you to six figures in ARR won't get you to seven figures. And at this stage you don't need another course. You, you don't need more content. You need clarity and you need people who get it. Because right now you're probably second guessing every decision, wondering if you're focused on the wrong things, working harder but watching revenue flatline. SaaS club mastermind is how you get there. A small group of founders all scaling to seven figures with Mastermind calls and direct access to me. Think of it as your board of directors without the drama. Apply at sasclub IO Mastermind and that's sasclub IO Mastermind. Adam, welcome to the show.
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A
Hey, thanks for having me here.
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My pleasure. Do you have a favorite quote that you can share with us? Something that inspires or motivates you?
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A
I'm not really a quote person, but it would be something around like, I don't know, action leads to clarity or action first, refine later.
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B
You're a doer Exactly. Love it. So tell us about Uxpilot. What does the product do, who's it for, and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?
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So Uxpilot is an AI platform for product design teams, and we help them to design and ship great user experience faster. And we are AI native and give.
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Us a sense of the size of the business, revenue, size of team, customers, all that stuff.
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So right now we are at 5.3 million ARR, bootstrapped, 30 people full time, and we have around 15,000 active paying subscribers.
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B
So weren't you at like, didn't you hit like 3 million ARR like last year?
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A
No, it was maybe around four months ago, five months ago.
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B
So you were at 3 million five months ago and now you're at 5 million. Okay, that's going to be an interesting conversation. And you're bootstrapping it. Love it. So the business was founded in what, 2023?
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A
Officially, yes, but then the product was launched beginning of 2024.
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B
But I guess it starts. The story starts a lot earlier than that with you running your agency. So maybe just tee that up for us, like, tell us, like, what were you doing at the time and what led to this idea even sort of coming about. Sure.
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A
So I was running a UX studio, so my own agency. And that was a time where that was kind of the starting of LLMs, ChatGPT and all of that. And I just wanted to see like, what we can build, what we can do, or how we can apply AI to our own internal processes just to make things more kind of faster, more efficient, and started brainstorming together with the team, started exploring some ideas, even putting together kind of coded a few things, like things we could apply to our own process. And I would say that's kind of how it started, by just running all these tiny experiments and having these internal brainstorming sessions. But again, that was completely different from the current product and our current focus.
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B
So if I understood this correctly, you're running the agency as you're seeing this sort of evolution of ChatGPT and all this other stuff going on, you're starting to think initially about how am I going to run the agency better with this new technology? And then eventually talk about how the idea specifically came about for this mvp. Didn't somebody ask you if you could build wireframes for them or something? Like, what was the moment where you were like, oh, there's a product idea here?
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A
The first, I would say, closest thing to UX pilot that we built and Shipped was a Figma plugin where you could basically prep any kind of UX or customer discovery or UX work there, very much like a workshop or a framework that you could generate, including some instructions like, let's say you want to define your Persona, you want to define first features for your mvp. You don't want to start right away. You want to follow certain frameworks very much like what we were doing for our clients, but this was more like using AI and being a little bit more targeted towards how you can apply those frameworks or activities to your own product or to your own project and be able to kind of conduct those type of activities using AI. So that was kind of a very early stage, very kind of first touch point that you have either with clients or with your own internal team. And we had early on some users trying it out, and we kind of started also talking to these people. I remember one interview with one of those users talking about this kind of feature and how they use it and so on. More of a kind of a usability discovery session. And then I remember the question I was asked was, okay, I have these things on my canvas, I have these ideas, I follow this framework, but can I now turn them into something visual? Can I create a wireframe out of this? And that was like a starting point for me to kind of look around and see, okay, is there actually anything doing that? Are there any other products? Creating wireframes, generating wireframes based on kind of a text input.
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Okay, so that original sort of mvp, the Figma plugin, were you charging for that?
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I think we were charging something and then we made certain things for free.
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And how were you getting this? How were you acquiring customers or users?
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Mainly through my LinkedIn profile and the agency newsletter.
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Okay, and when, when you had people signing up, how, how easy or hard was it to get these sort of discovery sessions with them? Like, I was just talking to a founder like earlier today who was like, I'm getting people sign up, but when, when I kind of follow up with them, they're not using the product. When I follow up with them, they don't seem to respond to me. It's a very common thing that we hear. Right. So I'm, I'm just curious, like, how, how, how engaged were people, how willing were they to talk to you and tell you about how they were using the product?
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So I think one thing we did that worked really well was through LinkedIn. So we started talking about the product, the features and so on. And obviously people were interested. They tried the tool. And then through those kind of content, we also had one dedicated to. We want to test new features, especially if you want to target people who are new to the product. And we would give it for free. Usually some kind of an incentive to offer them in exchange. If you just want to test the tool before the call or something around that, I think that was one thing that worked really well. But also offering any kind of incentive, usually, again, from past experience doing ux, it can be credits, can be free, free plans or even gift cards usually have. But yeah, I agree it's always challenging no matter the stage of the product.
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B
Yeah. And I know it's a pretty common practice with ux, but I always wonder, do you attract like the wrong type of people or a lot of the wrong type of people when you offer an incentive like that? Because you want people who have the real pain like this, they're experiencing so much pain, they just are desperate to talk to somebody about how to go who listen to them and might have a solution.
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A
Right.
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Versus somebody who kind of has a plane they can live with, but kind of likes the idea of buying something on Amazon.
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So getting a gift card, it depends how you find those users. I mean, again, if it's just like a public post, then for sure you need to maybe do more qualification there to get the right people. But if they're already signed up to the product, then you can just maybe target people who are using the product instead of anyone. Or even better, people who paid for the product. You can go down the line, different stages, but again, it's always challenging for new things, especially if you don't have any paying customers.
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B
Okay, so you had this question like, hey, how do I turn this into a wireframe? And it was sort of like this whole idea of just the text generation thing, because there were plenty of wireframing tools already on the market if you want to go and build it step by step yourself and drag things on the screen. But what did you do next? How did you sort of say, okay, there's something here, but it's a sample size of 1. Right. One person asking you for this right now. And you see there isn't a lot going on in the market, which could be an opportunity, but it could also be a problem that no one has bothered to solve this because maybe there isn't a great need for this. So how did you figure out that this is something that I should work on?
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A
So it was definitely a technical challenge. And that's also why there were not many products doing It. So one thing I did, I just went around search for other products, doing something around wireframing, generating wireframes and so on. I also remembered, I went on, I was part of a Slack group for content creators, like designers and content creators. And I just mentioned, okay, I decided to work on this feature and explore it. And then I remember some people pasted and one asked me why someone else wrote pasted, I think three or four links of similar ish products doing something like wireframe generation and so on. So I started testing those tools and it was very obvious that they were not really doing. They were not generating wireframes, they were just swapping existing content and they would just maybe personalize the text or copy because again, at that time with the models, that was easily feasible. But now creating the whole layout was much more complex. So that was like their tricks to just move things around a little bit, like swap the order of content or blocks you would get and then start maybe changing the copy for what you needed. And it was kind of obvious to me that, okay, there is definitely something to be done there. Even though it was far from being obvious like how to do it, but it was kind of clear like, okay, you cannot really generate or there is nothing helping you to create something fit for your needs. And there is this opportunity there. And if also you're familiar with the whole design process, actually wireframing or conception is like where you spend most of your time. You just create wireframes and wireframes and concepts and create more and more and more. So if you can create those faster, then that would be the perfect solution.
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B
Yeah. Also tell me about this MVP that you had with the Figma plugin. It led to an opportunity that you maybe didn't have on your radar, but you were trying to solve a different problem as well at the time. Right. In terms of this was kind of like a solution that people would use once in a while versus being like something they were using daily as sort of recurring revenue. And I'm just curious, like what you were doing at the time that maybe led to this discussion or maybe something you were solving in parallel. This is a very common thing where there are two issues that I'm hearing. I think we would love to sort of pick your brain, see how you navigated your way out of this. Number one is you basically have an mvp, which now you look back and go, yeah, that MVP didn't really have anything in common with my product today. And too many founders get hung up on that first MVP and how it's going to align with the product that they want to build in two years or three years and so on. And it's less like just there's a problem in front of you. There seems like people who are engaged, you're probably better off just solving that and then figuring out what comes next. And it might not be a sequential thing, you might go back and forth, but ultimately that will help you figure out what's the right thing to build. And it sounds like you did that. The other thing is getting stuck in this place where you have a product which seems valuable, but you're like, there's no subscription recurring revenue model here. And so how can I turn this into a sustainable business? So you were dealing with both of those things, right?
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Exactly. And somehow this approach or this kind of wireframe thing was a solution to both of those problems, like be able to. Have a feature that can be used on a daily, weekly basis like wireframe generation. And that's something that was kind of brought up during at least one of these, these interviews and that was unique in the market.
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And I think it's interesting that. Was that something you were thinking about yourself or was like it was completely off your radar?
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Yeah, no, I remember like we had in one of our sessions, internal sessions, we had like the whole design process mapped out. Like you have research and, you know, you don't even talk about the product yet, but just analyzing data and so on. Then you start mapping those things out and working with the team to align on how to approach those insights. And then you start creating designs. And then after designs, you test those designs with users again using maybe AI or traditional tools. These were all these ideas and space that we were dealing with, or even we went granular into some more specific things like how to talk to stakeholders, how to export certain assets, prep them for developing all these things. And funny enough, actually in one of the, the first, I think during the first call, I said to the team, I don't want the product to be on the generation side of things. So that was like, I don't know why I said that. Maybe there was this negative image of gen AI and design and they don't go well together. And I kind of said that to kind of set the direction for the product. But then a few months later I was like, wait a minute, there is something here that's funny.
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B
That's exactly the direction you end up going. The way you said, I don't want to go. Walk me through what happened next. How did you build the product? What did that first version look like, because now you see the opportunity and you see these existing products aren't really doing a great job at solving it. But it's also because there's a technical barrier or obstacle in your way. So how did you get around that?
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A
So it was not straightforward. So I actually started exploring different options and there were a mix of actually mainly around LLMs because that was basically the technical challenge. So can we fine tune these LLMs? How can we fine tune them? What kind of data do we need? So I went kind of down the route of fine tuning, started talking to AI researchers, had multiple sessions with them, hired contractors to help me with this whole process of fine tuning on the other end. Okay, there are maybe something maybe one step behind before that, like not necessarily template based, not necessarily from scratch, but maybe can have building blocks like component based approach where AI defines something simpler in terms of structure of the layout and then we replace those things with actual components. So not trying to generate everything in code, but generate piece and kind of a blueprint of the whole thing and then replace those with more granular elements instead of like the whole block. And it was I would say, constant iterative process. It was not like, oh, I found the solution, but it was like I found something and it was okay, ish working, but then facing challenges in certain use cases. Let's say if you want to generate like a web app, a dashboard, which is much more complex than a website, and then some others would work well for kind of first iteration, but then would break if you would edit those things over and over. And that kind of went as kind of an ongoing thing for maybe four or five months. I mean, I was not only doing this, but it was kind of something that was kind of an ongoing thing.
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B
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A
It was at some point a Mix of all of these techniques and processes together plus LLMs becoming faster, like smarter LLMs becoming faster where people could type very much what they wanted. And then they would get a wireframe very much tailored to their needs. Not like something random, not something generic. And each time they would write a prompt, then they would get the exact layout adapted to the prompt.
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B
Okay, so you're dealing with these technical problems and you basically got the same challenges that probably all these other products had. And you're sort of peeling the layers of the onion a little bit at the time and trying to sort of manage scope and offer maybe a partial solution that gets people sort of part of the way there. What point did you feel like you had sort of got to a point where the product seemed, you felt like that there was that, you know, you were getting traction so the output were.
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A
Stable enough so you would really, you could really work on a few things and get something decent. That was one part of the, of the thing. And then the ability to bring those things back to figma. Because many of our users, especially for wireframing stage, were designers. So they wanted to have those wireframes inside figma to be able to then tweak them, work on them, or replace some of those things with their designs or their needs and be able to have these two pieces together. So have the web platform where you can do these generations or edit and then be able to bring them into the Figma environment.
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B
Got it. So from the point where this user asked you if you could generate wireframes to getting to. Let's say you're doing about, let's say you're doing about 10k mrr.
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It was maybe 6, 7 months.
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6, 7 months from the time this person asks you whether you could do something and then you going off and figuring out how to deliver on that solution. And then where did these customers come from? How did you acquire them?
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A
Same channels as we started with. So LinkedIn, my own profile newsletter that actually, so we had a newsletter with the agency. Then I started also rolling in. Users coming to the tool have had a kind of a sign up page. Like there's this new feature that would come, just sign up to get access to kind of page and they would kind of sign up there. And then I started kind of rolling out, kind of telling them that the feature is live and so on. So I think those two channels were the main ones.
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B
Your newsletter is pretty, pretty massive, I think. What have you got, like 4 or 500,000 subscribers?
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I think we're at 600k now.
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B
Wow.
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Yeah.
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So when you and I were talking earlier, I always imagined that, you know, the sort of, the typical thing is the founders thinking about how do I acquire customers. Okay, one thing that I could potentially do is build some kind of email list and I ultimately, you know, maybe a newsletter and then that will help me to acquire customers. And you were doing this the other way around, where people were coming up, discovering UX pilots, signing up for it, and then you were adding them to the newsletter and continuing them to tell, you know, give them updates and tell them what was going on. How, how, how effective did that newsletter has it turned out to be in terms of being a customer acquisition vehicle for you?
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It's a complex question, so I can maybe try to dissect things a little bit to understand what's happening. So one thing I've noticed is my classical understanding of a newsletter that would work is that you send, especially with the agency. At that time we were sending very useful, useful education. Now you're sending useless. We were sending very useful educational information about ux, about frameworks, about how to handle certain things, how to design certain things, how to talk to users, all these very interesting educational materials that were part of the newsletter and that was the core value. We were not selling things. But I've noticed actually that when I was just talking about uxpilot and the new features and new things, how they could impact the design process, people actually were engaging a lot with it. They were like replying back, they were sharing feedback and the same thing actually on LinkedIn. So usually the casual thing is don't talk about the product or don't sell it, talk about provide value. But actually I got a lot of engagement just talking about the product. We released this feature and it can help you design faster or you can generate five versions at the same time instead of doing it manually and all of that. And people like, very happy with, about those things that are again sharing insights. So that was basically the whole strategy, like just talking about all the updates, everything we are working on, answering to feedback through those updates and so on. And that engagement kind of I think to some extent reflected in people staying with the product, people upgrading because they just maybe sign up as a free user or people also referring things to their colleagues and so on.
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B
Yeah, yeah, it is a complex question. So thank you for breaking that down. But yeah, there is a lot going on there. Right. Because you've got people who are customers who are on the newsletter who hopefully it's helping retention and just generally helping them get more value out of the product. You've got people who are on trials or something that you want extra trying to convert. You've got people who are never going to sign up for the product but are still there because they like the updates. And it becomes a good useful word of mouth type vehicle as well, I guess. And I totally get that because I.
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Think.
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There'S a product that I signed up for a trial last week and I thought it was great. It's just the founder does these videos and tells you about the product and how to use it and they're actually pretty interesting to watch because it's clear that this person has really thought hard about how to create a useful experience, a useful product. And often I sort of watch that and I go, yeah, but there's this feature, but can I do this? And he'll say, oh, by the way, we've also made this so you can do xyz. It's just that next level of thought that they really try to understand what people would want to use do with the product and have already sort of built that in. And so I'd already decided it's like this looks like a cool product. I'm just going to pay like for an annual subscription. I'm not even sure if I'm going to use it much, but I'll just do it. Haven't got around to it and it's on my list to do, but I had an update video come through this morning about, hey, here's some updates we did over the last month and it was like, oh great, I'm gonna watch that. And it was really interesting just going through that.
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A
So.
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B
I guess what I'm saying is I can understand that as being on the receiving end that when someone is doing a good job and putting love and care into a product, that really shows and it draws more people in to just, I don't know, you just feel like you're on the journey with them.
- [31:46]
A
Yeah, probably that's the experience people get.
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B
Yeah, let's just talk a little bit about getting to that first million in ARR. So pretty quickly you've turned this opportunity of somebody asking about a potential need into a product and you acquire customers and you get to whatever, 10, roughly 10k in MRR. How long did it take to get to the first million? And was it still a combination of those channels that you talked about, just using LinkedIn as your personal profile and the newsletter and just focusing on Those two?
- [32:30]
A
So LinkedIn newsletter SEO actually helped a lot. I think that's also one of those things. Especially nowadays people say SEO is dead. Nobody search searches on Google, everyone uses ChatGPT and so on. But actually even now we are getting a lot of traffic through SEO, so it helped a lot. I think that's also why. That's also one of the thing I tried to focus on through the agency. When I was having the agency, I kind of just replicated everything I did there for UXpilot. Creating content, landing pages, searching keywords around design, UX and AI or generation and all those sort of high intent keywords. And it paid off. Actually. It was very. Some of those things got ranked very quickly just because of everything that was happening around AI and also because we were maybe one of the first few products focusing on those keywords as well. So I think that helped and I believe that were the only channels we used.
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B
So roughly split. Do you have a sense of like out of SEO or your LinkedIn profile or the newsletter, which is the biggest driver of acquiring customers?
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A
I would say back then SEO was actually a big chunk because it was just every day, not when I would create a content, but it was just always there. And I remember I started updating some of our landing pages. I started creating more landing pages by copy pasting a lot of elements. And then suddenly Google started deranking, I think all our landing pages. And I remember I took a screenshot and shared that with my cto. Everything dropped suddenly and it was like, oh God. And I started like removing things and so on. So it had a big impact. Definitely LinkedIn was more of a. When I was posting something and it was performing well, then we would get these spikes in traffic for a day or two. So it was a little bit harder to control it if otherwise I needed to produce more content. So that was a challenge with LinkedIn, but I think those two were the main drivers.
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B
How much effort have you put into LinkedIn over the last year or two? Are you posting every day?
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A
Weekly. The goal is to post three to four times a week and then depending on what's going on there. I mean now I'm lucky. Like if I need a video of something, I can just ask a colleague to, to do that. If I need a copy for something specific, then ask someone else. So I'm not always 100% involved in everything, all the aspects or infinite. Look, if I need the graphic for something then I can just ask someone. But yeah, before that, before having people in place for specific tasks, it was very challenging.
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B
You were doing it all yourself?
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A
Yeah, I need to Block time in my calendar. And sometimes you go through all the updates, you go through the product debugging, answering customers and so on. Then you just have, don't. You don't have any energy left to be creative and now start creating content.
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B
Yeah. One of the things that I know that you sort of look back and regret was being a little slow to hire. And that's always difficult for anybody who's bootstrapping, because your priority is always don't run out of money, like my money. It's not like investors money. And you're focused on that. You had, I guess, a slightly different situation because the agency was driving the bulk of your revenue for at least initially, and you were using some of that to fund what you were doing here. But you're still bootstrapping. You still have the same constraints, and hiring people always seems like a very difficult decision to make. But when you sort of look back now, tell me why you feel like you hired too slowly. What problems did it create?
- [37:07]
A
Well, I think it's definitely because you don't know how far you will go. Because I think we were generating 30k a month when we decided to hire more people. But you don't know. Okay, is it like 30k, the maximum I can do with this product, given everything I know and everything in place, or do I need to and while I'm bootstrapped, Maybe if I had millions, then that would not be a question. Or can it go to 100k? Can it go to, I don't know, more than that. You know, you have all these questions and what happens if tomorrow everything stops? What happened if there is no more users? What happened? You have all these questions. So what we did is we just tried to do it slowly, like hire one or two people and then waited a month and then said, oh, no, I actually need more and let's hire one more engineer. And then again the same thing. Wait, wait a minute. Why this thing doesn't move so why everything is so slowly? Why we can't move faster? I, oh, we need one more person for the backend. So, yeah, I think we could have hired, I don't know, five people at once and then maybe be faster or not lose so much time on the hiring process because it's also time consuming to go through candidates, interview them, assess them, and all of that. But I think that's always the question. I generated 30k. Maybe it's wise to just be two or three inside the team and keep that revenue for as long as possible instead of burning everything overnight.
- [38:47]
B
I mean even if you went back in time, if you don't know for certain that you can get past 30k in MRR, it's a gamble, right? You're making a bet that I'm going to hire people and hopefully it's going to work out, we're going to keep growing and I'm not going to have to lay off people and get into that sort of situation.
- [39:09]
A
I think there is another thing is like especially founders when you start, even maybe when you start your first startup product, you always follow other content creators and channels and listen people especially active in the bootstrapping space and I think there are many people who are alone growing their product and they say you should not hire, you should just keep the product because if you hire you will lose so much profit and you have to pay this and that and at the end you're actually losing more money even though you have the impression you're making more. You know, you always have these types of also content and advices out there. So you try kind of to find a balance. Okay, is it really a good idea to hire more? Does it make sense to grow the product? Should it be smaller than that? So I think there is no straight answer.
- [40:04]
B
So what happens? Let's say you get to the first million in ARR and since then as a bootstrapped business you've continued to grow pretty quickly. Right? Like we just talked earlier, like hey, four months ago we were at like we hit 3 million, now we're at 5 million. What's been the biggest driver of that growth? What was the inflection point that suddenly got you feeling like we're sort of this business is starting to feel like it's firing on all cylinders kind of thing.
- [40:41]
A
A mix of different things. So one is focus. So early on we started focusing on this design space totally powered by AI. It's not a drag and drop thing, it's not a template base, it's very flexible. You can generate whatever thing you want. The focus is on design. We are not building backend, we are just generating design so it's faster, it can be even cheaper, the output quality is better. And. So I think that kind of resonated with people because everyone was building no code tools at some point. And especially even nowadays there are new companies coming to the space and they had their own competitions but the whole UX design space was not as competitive. So that helped us a lot. And also people were comparing, especially nowadays they're comparing different tools and they still see okay, UXpilot output is different when you need it, it's fast when you need the quality is higher and all of that. And also early on we decided to go code first and I remember there were some other companies who tried to replicate Figma vector based plus AI. Like they tried to add AI somehow to the mix to generate vector based designs, but using AI. And they didn't manage to grow or get enough or the same level of traction because of this approach. And in our case we were code first. So you don't need to go back to vector, you don't need to convert anything, you don't need to, you can just share the code. Then later on with developers, they can convert those into whatever framework they want easily. So I think all these things kind of together helped us to keep growing and still growing. So if we want to kind of simplify it, just having this very focused approach on this design niche.
- [42:52]
B
How do you think about competitors? Because on the one hand what you've just described there is, it sounds like you've found a place, a positioning that makes sense, that you can differentiate UX Pilot and you can focus on a certain smaller set of use cases and just try to do a really good job at those. But then how do you think about all these products that are sort of coming to the market? You're bootstrapping, but you've got well funded competitors out there who have a lot of money. And then you've got the situation with AI where it's kind of like a friend and foe thing, where you're using AI to make UX Pilot better. But then at the same time you've got things like Claude code and stuff which is sort of also kind of coming into your space a little bit. So how much time or energy do you think about competitors? Are you one of those people who just kind of ignores it and just focuses on the users, or do you sort of spend some time and energy kind of really using that to help really get clear about your own positioning and how you differentiate the product.
- [44:04]
A
So we spend a lot of time on features that could have an impact for teams on enterprise right now. Because yeah, we do see like many founders or people, they might use lovable replit and all of that for their side projects, but we also get the feedback that those are not the right tools for professional product teams, for product designers, because of certain things they need in terms of quality, in terms of requirements, in terms of how they would use the tool, the phases where they need the tool to be relevant. And that's kind of where we put most of our focus, because I think that's also where we can have more edge and be more competitive compared to just going broad and trying to target everyone, trying to create some kind of design or generate something.
- [44:57]
B
And is that the same ICP that you focused on when you started out with?
- [45:02]
A
No. At the very beginning, it was actually not even clear if we needed to focus on product people, designers, developers, because on one hand we were making design easier. So technically you would say, okay, non designers would like the product. On the other hand, we were focusing on this stage of ideation where probably a founder who's not necessarily UX mature would not spend much time there. Like as a founder, you might just want to build something quickly and that's also one of the challenges that people are facing nowadays, but you might kind of do it that way. So it was kind of a tricky situation to kind of know exactly where to focus on and what's the. What are the challenges to be relevant to a potential icp. But now we know a little bit better. We know definitely product teams are. And especially in this kind of team environment, enterprise environment, these are people who will use UXpilot and kind of keep using it. And on the single kind of PLG level where kind of single users are coming, these are also people from these orgs coming to the tool, maybe testing tools, maybe coming to the tool for their own projects, or maybe they're not necessarily allowed to use AI through procurement, so they kind of go and use it on a personal level. And that's kind of where we spend most of our time and focus now.
- [46:37]
B
Cool. I would love to keep talking. Seems like you're doing some really interesting stuff, but we are out of time so we should wrap up. Let's get on to the lightning round but ask you seven quick fire questions.
- [46:50]
A
Ready? Okay.
- [46:52]
B
What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?
- [46:56]
A
Focus.
- [46:57]
B
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
- [47:00]
A
It's a little bit technical, but I really love this book. It's mapping experiences because it's kind of a way you learn how to use mapping, mapping of processes, mapping of journeys to focus on people and users and to kind of spot problems, solve problems and find opportunities just by this act of mapping certain browsers or an experience.
- [47:30]
B
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder execution?
- [47:36]
A
I think many people are too much focused on ideas, but ideas can be at the very beginning, rough can be very similar. I think a good example is the whole wireframing thing. It was nothing necessarily new at the very early stage, but how you execute, how far you go, and you kind of keep shipping until it works, until you get results, that's kind of what will make the difference.
- [48:00]
B
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
- [48:04]
A
I like to block time in my calendar and focus on on things that are relevant because I think as a founder, especially as a founder, you might find it productive to jump over different tasks and answer all the questions on Slack and answer this email and do a little bit of this and a little bit of that. But I don't think these are things that will really move the needle and will have a proper impact on our business. But being able to focus on one problem and to do that, just block the time for maybe two or three hours and and spend that time on something important.
- [48:38]
B
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?
- [48:43]
A
Yeah, I don't have any other business ideas as of now. Everything is so heavily UX file focused.
- [48:49]
B
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
- [48:54]
A
I speak four languages, but I rarely mention it.
- [48:58]
B
Wow. What languages do you speak?
- [49:01]
A
Persian, French, German and a little bit of English.
- [49:09]
B
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
- [49:13]
A
I love traveling, but not just traveling for pleasure, but also really working from different places.
- [49:22]
B
Great. Well, Adam, thank you so much for joining me and unpacking your story. Congratulations on hitting the the big five in terms of 5 million in ARR as a bootstrapped business and I wish you and the team the best of success. If people want to check out UX pilot, they can go to uxpilot AI. And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
- [49:51]
A
LinkedIn.
- [49:52]
B
Yeah. We'll include a link to your profile in the show notes as well. Great. Thanks man. It's been a pleasure and good luck and looking forward to see you hitting that next big milestone. Whatever you set your sights on now.
- [50:07]
A
Thanks a lot.
- [50:08]
B
Cheers.