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The Marketing Playbook That Grew My App to $13K/month | Starter Story
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Bhanu's Backstory: From Employee to Indie Founder
At 8:18 · chapter starts 7:35
Before getting into the marketing tactics, Pat asks Bhanu to rewind and share his origin story. The arc is a classic indie hacker trajectory: graduated, joined a large startup, felt out of place within 8 months [1] — Bhanu "SiteGPT reached $10K MRR in month 1: SiteGPT hit $10,000 MRR within its very first month of launch, driven largely by early traction in the…" 09:42 , quit, moved back to his parents' house to eliminate living costs, and started building. His first app, Feather, grew to around $5,000–$6,000 MRR. Then in early 2023, he noticed the explosion of AI tools on his Twitter feed and decided to spend a weekend building something with the technology — not to launch a product necessarily, but simply to learn. That experiment became SiteGPT. Within two weeks of having the idea, he launched; within one month, it hit $10,000 MRR[2]. The growth was so fast that he had no bandwidth left for Feather, so he sold it for $250,000 and went all-in on SiteGPT. It's a story about momentum, opportunity recognition, and the willingness to double down on what's working.
Bhanu quit his first job after just 8 months, moved back to his parents' house to cut costs, and started building. One product sold for $250K; the next hit $10K MRR in its first month.
SiteGPT launched and hit $10,000 MRR within its first month. That momentum was so overwhelming that Bhanu sold his existing SaaS, Feather, for $250,000 to free up all his time.
SiteGPT hit $10,000 MRR within its very first month of launch, driven largely by early traction in the AI chatbot space.
90% of SiteGPT's Google search traffic comes not from the main product but from ~50 free tools Bhanu built. Each tool targets a low-competition keyword and funnels users back to the paid product.
