Yasser - Chatbase ($6.8M ARR) | Founder Story

The Story

Yasser built Chatbase from zero to $1M ARR in just 117 days, and it's now at $6.8M ARR with 10,000+ paying customers. He launched to just 16 Twitter followers and it went viral.

As Yasser explains: "I built Chatbase to 7 million in ARR with no funding. I launched it 2 and a half years ago as a solopreneur to my 16 followers on Twitter and it went viral."

The Origin Story

"I followed the bootstrapping movement on X like Peter Levels, all those guys. I was doing actually internships in FAANG companies but once I got there I realized maybe it's not for me. I looked at people five, ten years ahead of me in their career and it was not something that I was looking up to."

"I saw people doing demos of how you can build a ChatGPT for your data and stuff like that but no one was building a product around it. I knew like this is a good idea. I didn't do any validation or anything. I just said if I don't do this someone else will."

"All of this was happening in my final year of university. When I saw the first sale and then like it kept going... I had like two or three sales every day and I dropped out."

The Viral Tweet Breakdown

"I think this was like my third tweet ever in my life. Three things made it work well:"

1. Familiar Interface: "The streaming interface where the text is streaming in a chat interface. This was like a very ChatGPT thing which at the time was going viral."

2. Minimize Seconds to Aha Moment: "It's a very simple demo, right? But it just shows you exactly what I built was capable of in like the first 20 seconds."

3. Mention Your Tools: "2 and a half years ago, there was a bunch of new AI companies, AI tools starting out. No one had any customers because they're all new. When I mentioned LangChain and Pinecone and stuff like that, it made sense for them to push it too because no one else was building stuff like this on their platforms yet."

The Build in Public Playbook

"The easiest thing is just to share what you're doing every day. First two or three months if you're not lucky, it will just be you practicing what works and what doesn't."

"People need to see your face a lot. Preferably, if you can do videos too, post them on X. A few people in the build in public space are doing that and they're doing very well because not enough people are doing that so you stand out more."

"Frame it as like I'm building something. I'm learning a lot along the way. I'm going to take you on that journey."

"An important part is not to be boring. I think it's better to be more personal. Share your personal story. Have a personality, have controversial takes maybe if it's something you actually believe in because that's how you get people to notice you."

Growth Tactics

Frame Every Launch as New

"After the first initial viral moment, I kept adding more features and with every new release, I would frame it as a new launch. Some people when they tweet, they frame the second or third launch as feature launches. So if someone new is looking at that, they don't have any context. I try to frame every single launch to make it make sense to new people that don't know me, that don't know Chatbase."

Creative Viral Strategies

"I was going into subreddits of books, I would create a ChatGPT for their book. It was for free. I was losing money on this. The only point of doing this is to have my domain opened by a lot of people so I get more domain authority."

"I did that for a lot of influencers too. I did this for Paul Graham, for Naval."

Business Numbers

•$6.8M ARR (and growing fast)
•10,000+ paying customers ($40-$500/month)
•~600,000 registered users
•Zero to $1M ARR in 117 days
•100% PLG (product-led growth)
•No funding

Tech Stack

•Vercel (hosting)
•Vercel AI SDK (AI infrastructure)
•Supabase (database)
•OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, Google Gemini, Groq (AI models)
•Stripe (billing)
•Dub (affiliates)
•Mintlify (documentation)

Advice on Building AI Agents

"If you want to build products, go to sources like OpenAI's cookbooks or their documentation. Read about their agents SDK. Do the same with Vercel's AI SDK which is very powerful."

"Maybe a good idea is to find something that you can't build yet and the only bottleneck is the AI model itself. Start building that and bet that in a year you're going to have GPT-5 which is capable of doing that and then you're going to have one full year head start on everyone else."

Key Lessons

"There's so many different ways to build a good company. This is actually good because this means that you don't need a lot of experience to start a company."

"The people that give good advice will tell you the same thing. They would give you what they think is right, but in the end they will say actually you should trust your gut mostly because you know your situation more than me."

Advice for Beginners

"I wasn't thinking big enough in the beginning. My goal was to just get my 10K, move to Bali, live the indie hacker lifestyle. I just realized like why not shoot for the stars? Why not build the first 100 million ARR bootstrap company."

"I was too worried because everyone was saying it's like a ChatGPT wrapper. It's not going to work. I think I wasn't aggressive enough. I was too shy about what I'm building. Just aim higher."

Resources

•Chatbase: https://www.chatbase.co/
•Follow Yasser on Twitter

How I Built A $1M Business in 117 Days