How Simon launched his AI startup and made $5,000/Month within months
In this case study, we learn how Simon Høiberg built and launched his AI SaaS product Aidbase. We, of course, know Simon from his YouTube channel and his other SaaS startups FeedHive, TinyKiwi, and LinkDrip, but today, he’s sharing an interesting story on launching his newest AI product and gaining immediate traction and revenue!
Full name: Simon Høiberg
Business: Aidbase (FeedHive, LinkDrip, and TinyKiwi)
Started in: 2023
Website: aidbase.ai
Social Media YouTube
Role: Founder
Employees: 0 (9 contractors)
Monthly revenue: $5,000+
Who are you, and what’s the SaaS you’re working on?
I’m Simon Høiberg, a Danish serial entrepreneur behind the SaaS products FeedHive, LinkDrip, and, most recently, Aidbase. I also acquired TinyKiwi in early 2023, and I run a YouTube channel to help tech entrepreneurs and AI/No Code enthusiasts launch and scale their own SaaS.
I started my journey 3 years ago, and today, my businesses are doing +$1M ARR combined.
How did you come up with the idea?
My team and I went through a rather rough patch with FeedHive in 2023, and we were struggling a lot with customer success and keeping up with basic customer support.
At some point, I started POC’ing the idea of having AI assist with support, and what was initially an internal tool ended up being so effective that we decided to launch it as a separate SaaS.
This is how Aidbase came to be:
How did you validate the product?
This is interesting. Cause we didn’t 😬
We built it for ourselves and figured that a product that solved such an intrinsic and painful product for us must be of some value for other startups, too - and combining that with seeing other similar products emerge.
This is a very risky game to play, and I wouldn’t recommend it.
When we launched Aidbase, it was already quite a developed product. It's way more than I would normally consider good for launch.
How did you launch the product?
By dropping a banger YouTube video 😎
I spent a week scripting, filming, and producing this, and got help from my creative team to put it together just 2 days before hitting the publish button.
It was a TON of fun!
I couldn’t imagine launching in a better way.
What were 3 ways you got the first customers to your product?
A month before we launched Aidbase, I manually reached out to my network and onboarded 5-10 users.
I offered them a forever-free account in exchange for valuable feedback.
I used a Discord server to communicate with everyone and to gather as much feedback as possible.
I have a YouTube video describing this exact strategy:
My SaaS User Growth System: Get Your First 100 - 1,000+ Users
It’s awesome! I’d recommend all bootstrapping SaaS founders start like this.
What is the SaaS doing right now in terms of numbers?
+4000 users created in our system
+2000 AI chat replies generated daily
AI chatbot live on more than 300 websites
31 paying subscribers
+25K website visits monthly
What’s the best growth hack or tactic to get new customers to your SaaS right now?
There are no “hacks”. However, there are marketing strategies and channels that perform better than others.
I’m bullish on influencer marketing and paid ads, especially video content. I think this will dominate in 2024.
One specific thing we do that keeps working very well, is using my own YouTube channel to attract viewers (with good content, not specifically promoting my tools), and then retarget these viewers with paid video ads on YouTube.
Especially if you can mention your tool in the video (but without trying to over-sell it). Viewers will remember it later, making the ads 10x more effective.
What is your biggest lesson learned thus far?
Giving away value for free will always outperform trying to monetize everything. I get so many people commenting saying, “You should really charge for this,” - but the whole magic is giving super valuable information away for free.
You’ll monetize from a tiny number of your audience, and it’ll happen without too much pushing.
And it’ll be way worth it in the long run.
What are the 5 tools you use the most?
Notion: For managing my business.
Aidbase (For AI support)
FeedHive (For social media)
Figma (For graphics and UX design)
Creative Cloud (For video editing)
(Sorry for the plug here, but it’s a true story 😅 I’m hardcore dogfooding my own products daily).
What’s 1 book you’d recommend to fellow founders?
Hooked by Nir Eyal: Brilliant book on product design. It’s everything you need to know about creating sticky products.
What’s your advice for (aspiring) founders in SaaS?
It’s tough! So remember to keep a nice balance. Habit implementation is 100x more important than bursts of grind.
Stay healthy, exercise often, and enjoy the ride.