This is my weekly build-in-public update on bulding my AI product, Bunni.ai.
Last week I worked on refocusing my AI app, Bunni.ai, to address a specific problem and market segment more effectively.
Moving away from my habitual build-first approach, I decided to lead with marketing and customer development strategies, emphasising SEO and the creation of free tools to expand my user base.
I found a helpful article on IndieHackers by Sveta Bay, who talked about building and launching free AI tools to get more leads. I decided to try something similar.
But this time, instead of doing it all myself as usual, I asked ChatGPT for help with my marketing and product plans.
I gave ChatGPT the article link and some details about my app. Then, I asked for a strategy for marketing and product development, along with some tasks I could start on right away.


ChatGPT instructed me to do 2 things in order to gain customer insight:
Creating and sending the survey
Here’s what happend:
I got ChatGPT to create the questionnaire questions. I put that into Google Forms.
I got ChatGPT to draft the email.
I emailed out the survey to my users who opted in.
Analysing customer data
Again, I used ChatGPT, this time as my data analyst.
I exported the relevant tables from my database that contains usage data (without any identifying user data).
I uploaded it to ChatGPT.
Then asked it to summarise the data, to give me some categories of usage, ordered by frequency.
The survey results and data analysis gave me a clear direction to take my app in.
They showed that academic researchers are my main users. And they use Bunni to manage their heavy workload.
Was the above a perfect plan? Who knows. Who cares! Marketing is all about testing and iterating. So my guess is as good as ChatGPT's.
But AI saved me hours or even days of research. It allowed me to take the next step without overthinking, and with confidence.
What a time to be alive as a solo entrepreneur.
Now that I know who my users are and what they need, I can make Bunni even better for them and focus my marketing more effectively.
Next steps:
Research keywords to target
Build and launch free AI tools for them
Upsell Bunni.ai to the free tool users
As always, I'll be sharing my findings in my weekly update in my newsletter, Indie and Profitable.
Thanks for sharing your experience Farez. Indeed, large language models are quite good at analyzing data and presenting the results. There are a lot of limitations but I think for many founders, it offers a good initial approach.
When building free AI tools, keep in mind there has to be a path to getting the user to Bunni.ai so they can be converted into a paying customer (eventually).
Also be careful what you build. A summarization tool, like ChatGPT suggested, are a dime a dozen. It's going to be extremely difficult to compete against established players in Search.
Thanks Stephen.
Yep, there's definitely a lot of competition out there! But I'm sure talking to my customers will lead me in the right direction. I hope!
Been thinking about the high level of churn in AI apps too. Shared some thoughts in this tweet if you're interested: https://twitter.com/farez/status/1781132803780100177