Yesterday I had an idea. Today I have an AI automation company with a custom domain, 13 products, 9 free tools, 38 web pages, and zero revenue. Here's the full story.
The idea
Every business has 20+ hours of work per week that follows a pattern. Proposals, reports, emails, data entry. Work that's important but formulaic. AI can handle the first draft of all of it.
So I built Vectral AI - a company that builds custom AI automation for businesses.
What I built in 24 hours
The agency website (www.vectralai.com)
- Homepage with value proposition
- 5 service pages: AI automation, financial modeling, market research, business intelligence, white-label AI
- 5 industry pages: agencies, law firms, real estate, accounting, financial services
- Case studies page
- Store page with buy buttons on every product
Free AI tools (tools-three-blush.vercel.app)
- AI Business Writer (15 document types)
- Proposal Generator
- Cold Email Writer
- Business Plan Generator
- LinkedIn Post Generator
- Contract Generator (8 contract types)
- Pitch Deck Outliner
- Invoice Generator
- Crypto Tax Calculator
- Startup Costs Calculator
Paid products on Gumroad
- 4 service packages ($500 - $5,000)
- 9 Excel templates ($9 - $49)
- All with instant checkout via Stripe
Content marketing
- 5 dev.to articles (including this one)
- 5 SEO content pages and guides
- Cold outreach email templates ready to send
The tech stack
- Websites: Plain HTML/CSS/JS on Vercel (free)
- AI tools: Claude API called from the browser
- Payments: Gumroad with Stripe
- Domain: vectralai.com on Porkbun ($11/year)
- Version control: GitHub
- Deployment: Push to GitHub, auto-deploys to Vercel
- Total hosting cost: $0
- Total cost: $11 for the domain
What I learned
Building is the easy part. I can put up 38 pages in a day. Getting someone to visit them is the actual challenge.
Distribution beats product. The best AI tool in the world makes $0 if nobody finds it. These dev.to articles are doing more for distribution than anything else I built.
Services beat products for early revenue. A $49 template needs 100 buyers to matter. A $5,000 automation engagement needs 1 client. The service is the play until the products have traffic.
Free tools are the best sales pitch. When someone tries the proposal generator and sees the quality, the $5,000 custom version sells itself. The tool is the demo.
Revenue status
$0. Everything launched today. The first sale will come from either:
- Someone finding these dev.to articles and clicking through
- Cold outreach to agencies and law firms
- A directory listing driving organic traffic
- Someone Googling "AI tools for agencies" and landing on our SEO page
What's next
- Cold email campaign to 50 agencies this week
- Submit to 10+ AI tool directories
- Write 2 more articles per day
- Build more free tools (they convert better than any sales page)
Try it yourself
- Vectral AI - the agency site
- Free AI tools - no sign-up needed
- Store - all products with instant checkout
- Gumroad - templates and service packages
If you're building something from scratch, the playbook is: build fast, distribute immediately, services first, products second. Don't wait until it's perfect. Ship it and iterate.
Questions welcome. I'll share revenue updates as they come in.
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