Hey Sanjeev! Tell us about yourself, and what are you working on
I’m Sanjeev, from Chennai, India. I studied computer engineering but never managed to learn how to code during my college education. But my education gave me an opportunity to work for a IT company called Capgemini and that’s where I started my professional journey.
I started my career in IT support where my job was to ensure that the applications the company uses run smoothly. I did that for two years, and then moved to Freshworks, where I worked for 5 years. I started in pre-sales, then moved into Product Marketing.
More recently, I was a product manager at SuperOps.ai until November 2022. And it was at that time that I finally decided to explore building Supermeme.ai full time. But, I kept taking consulting projects to pay the bills.
Share more details – what is Supermeme.ai, why did you choose to start it?
Supermeme.ai is an AI meme generator that converts text into memes.
Our thesis is that marketing is getting boring. Most brands are doing the same repetitive things. Consumers are tuning out of the repetitive marketing content.
On the other hand, we know that memes have the ability to break through the noise and break the monotony. But creating memes is not easy.
You first need to find the right template, think of a nice and catchy copy, and finally make sure that the copy is relevant to the template and the situation.
That is where Suprememe.ai comes in. Supermeme takes care of all of that.
Users just enter a prompt and it automagically generates memes that are ready-to-use.
How much money is Supermeme making at the moment?
Currently, we are doing ~$5k MRR. We have 250+ customers and more than 500,000 signups. The best part – all of them are organically generated.
Till date, we have NOT spent even a single dollar on marketing.
And we’re super proud of that.
Let’s go deeper! How did you start Supermeme.ai?
Supermeme.ai has 3 co-founders - Nico Botha, Ramsri, and me.
The interesting thing is that we’ve never met each other in person. We operate out of a WhatsApp group and have bi-monthly Zoom calls.
The backstory is that I had signed up for a no-code cohort based course by Product Folks. I was working on building a no-code tool. I decided to build a meme database, that allowed users to search for memes using emotions. The goal was to help people find the right template, because most people struggled with that.
Somewhere else, Ramsri was building an AI meme generator. He was sharing his progress on Linkedin, and so was I.
We were already connected (thanks to a Linkedin Creators Program) and we decided to get on a call. The call was awesome. We instantly hit it off. Ramsri was already living a life I wanted to live. So, that was it. It felt like the universe wanted us to work together, and I decided to work with Ramsri
Nico and Ramsri were also connected on Twitter. And the three of us came together (around late 2021) and officially decided to work together on building Supermeme. We started building the app in Jan 2022.
We launched in one month in Feb of 2022, and got our first customer.
How is Supermeme growing today?
Our primary growth comes via social media and SEO.
Our growth was slow and steady until Q3 2022, and then something happened that changed a lot of things for us. ChatGPT launched. GenAI became the most talked about new tech in the world.
Almost everyone on Twitter and LinkedIn was writing about “Top AI tools to do ABC.”
Fortunately for us, we were on a lot of these lists. This helped us get a lot of eyeballs and interest.
Also at this time, I started investing heavily in SEO. Traffic from social media was good, but I always questioned if it was sustainable. SEO was our answer to sustainable growth and acquisition.
Since we were early, we became the top Google result for “AI meme generators.” That was bringing us A LOT of traffic. Clearly, SEO was working. So, I doubled down on SEO. I started publishing pages on a lot of meme related keywords.
At the peak, Suprememe.ai was bringing in 80,000 people per month to our website.
What was the turning point where you decided to go all in on Supermeme?
Actually, we haven’t “technically” gone all in yet. For all of the co-founders, Suprememe.ai is one of our projects.
Personally, I still consult with startups, create videos for brands, and even tried my hand at acting for a short while while working on Supermeme.ai. I’m now exploring building multiple other MicroSaaS products as well.
This project has got me a lot of flexibility and freedom, and I love that.
Philosophically, that’s one of the reasons I am working on Supermeme.ai – It buys me time. The more revenue we generate, the more time I have to try and do other things that I’ve always wanted to do in life.
So, I may never go all-in on Supermeme.ai but it might very well be the reason that I don’t have to go all-in on anything. I can continue doing multiple things while I keep building Supermeme.ai
So what metrics or goals do you care about the most?
Revenue.
The only metric we care about is Revenue.
Not because other metrics aren’t important. But for a three member bootstrapped team working on it part time, it is only feasible to a few metrics, and actually do something about it.
Other than that, we do track milestone events. We recently had 600k signups.
Apart from that, we don’t monitor other metrics regularly.
On goals, there are no active goals we’re chasing. We just want to increase our revenue.
We have not set any timelines and MRR goals. And we like it like that. There’s no pressure this way.
How do you know what to build next? Is there a product discovery process?
There isn’t a process per se. Things are mostly reactive.
If someone reaches out with feedback, we take that as input.
We’ve never actively reached out to users to ask about their use cases or problems.
We depend on our intuition to build the right things.
It doesn’t mean we don’t care about our users.
The idea of an AI meme generator is new and we feel confident about our abilities to build the right set of features and get it right.
Talk more about all the growth that has already happened
The major chunk of our MRR growth has come in the Q2/Q3 period last year.
The last few months have been quiet for us.
What is next for you and Supermeme.ai? Any big things you’re working on?
Currently, we’re working on improving the underlying meme generation algorithm. The V2 of the algorithm should be out in a couple of weeks.
Apart from this we’re always making incremental changes to the app.
We don’t have a well defined roadmap, we’ll just build things that align with our vision of democratising meme creation for everyone.
Any goals, personal or professional, that you can share publicly?
For Supermeme, it’s pretty simple - we want to become the default meme generator app for the internet.
Personally, I want to build multiple MicroSaaS applications because I believe in the MicroSaaS movement. I want to build a lifestyle out of just MicroSaaS revenue and hopefully be an example for anyone exploring alternate career paths.
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What have been your biggest learnings so far?
What I’ve learned through this experience is that there are a lot of myths around building SaaS, and we’ve been able to bust most of them.
Myth 1: You need a large team:
We are only three co-founders. I'm useless as a developer. So we were able to build and scale Supermeme.ai with just 2 developers building remotely.
Myth 2: You need at least 1 year to build an MVP
We launched our MVP in 3 weeks. Yes, it wasn't perfect. But it worked and it got us our first paying customers.
Myth 3: You need to have a very strong close relationship with your co-founders
Nico, Ramsri and I get on a Zoom call twice a month and every other communication is async via a Whatsapp group. Outside of that there's almost no communication and I don't know much about them. This relationship works for us.
Myth 4: You'll need to demo the product personally to 50 people before they buy
We never got on calls to demo our product. There were no sales calls too. All the people who bought Supermeme.ai bought it because they saw value in the product and decided to buy.
Myth 5: You have to spend a lot on marketing
We have spent $0 on marketing. I'm personally proud of this achievement. Maybe we got lucky. But I'm confident that spending money on marketing is not the only way to get customers.
Myth 6: You have to spend every minute working on your startup
All 3 of us are working on this part time. Supermeme.ai bought me time to explore things that I wouldn't have been able to explore otherwise.
Myth 7: You need to invest a lot of money upfront
Apart from buying the domain, we didn't spend any money from our pockets. Supermeme is paying for itself in every respect.
Myth 8: You need to do market research and user research
We did not do a lot of user research before launching. I spoke to a few marketers initially, but what's really worked for us is following our instincts.
Myth 9: As you scale users, you need to have a support and sales team
Sure, it’s good to have a support team so we can respond to every chat or email. But, even without a team, I've always found time to respond to important chats and emails. This constraint helped us prioritise well and identify the more important feedback.
What have been the biggest wins and fails
For me, the biggest win is getting 600,000 signups without any marketing spend.
I’ve worked in marketing for SaaS companies, and I know that most teams spend insanely high amounts on acquiring leads. I am personally proud of the fact that we were able to generate signups at this rate.
On failures, I would say our affiliate program was one such example.
We had launched an affiliate program using a third party tool. But the tool had vulnerability because of which we faced fraudulent transactions. Fraudsters were trying to forge transactions to pocket commissions.
We scrapped the program and haven’t been able to implement it since.
What advice do you have for other Indiehackers who want to succeed?
Creation is an outcome, not a goal.
Being a creator is not a goal. You must have something important and meaningful you want to share with the world.
Then, creation becomes a channel.
Figure out what that is.
For me, it was calling out the bad habits that’s happening within tech.
Are there any big ideas that you want to work on?
I want to create short 5-minute solo sitcom style episodes. There are so many problems in tech that deserve to be mocked and parodied.
Do you have any goals (personal and for the business) that we haven’t spoken about yet?
I want to learn how to code. The only missing piece of the puzzle as I’ve worked in sales, support, marketing and product.
Okay, wrapping up – what tools do you use to stay productive? What do you like to read and learn?
I use ChatGPT and Things 3 quite a lot. I also use physical index cards and a pomodoro timer.
On the learning front, these are my favourites and also strong recommendations:
Books
- Make Time by Jake Knapp
- Creativity Inc
- Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
- Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
Podcasts:
- Founders Foyer
- Lenny’s podcast
- How I built this
I also highly recommend Standford’s CS50 course. It’s free and David Malan beautifully explains programming. I think even if you don’t have an intention of being a developer, you should take the course.
