I finally crossed $1,200 in monthly revenue on the AI writing tool I built as a side project. That number sounds modest but it took me 11 months of evenings and one abandoned pivot to get here. I used FastAPI for the backend because a stranger on a forum mentioned it wouldn't slow me down with boilerplate, which turned out to be true.
The hook: I didn't chase the flashy stuff. No GPT-4 fine-tuning, no RAG pipelines, just a narrow Chrome extension that rewrites LinkedIn posts in different tones. The real surprise was how much time I lost debugging Stripe's webhook handling, like an embarrassing amount of time.
Turns out the simplest AI use cases have the least competition. I tested three different pricing tiers before landing on $9/$19/$49 monthly plans and the $19 tier became the sweet spot where conversion hit 34%.
I'm not sure whether this can scale past my own network or if I'm just benefiting from a small niche right now. How are you all handling the decision between staying narrow and going broader when your numbers start moving?
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