SiteGPT revenue: an indie founder's website chatbot

SiteGPT began as a side feature nobody planned to sell. Bhanu Teja was building a blogging product, Feather, and prototyped a “chat with this site” feature. People asked about the feature more than the product. So he spun it out, launched it in March 2023, and passed $10K MRR within the first month (founder-reported, Starter Story). Then, in month two, about $5K of that MRR churned away. The recovery is as instructive as the launch.

Why did Bhanu Teja start SiteGPT?

The “chat with this site” feature drew more interest than the main product, so it became its own business. The pain it solves belongs to businesses with lots of website content and lots of repetitive visitor questions: a chatbot trained on their own pages can answer those questions instead of a person.

How does SiteGPT work?

A business points SiteGPT at its website. The content is indexed with Pinecone for vector search, and OpenAI generates answers grounded in the retrieved pages. Visitors chat with a bot that knows the site’s content, so common questions are answered on the page instead of in a support inbox.

How was SiteGPT built?

He built it during March 2023 using Remix on Cloudflare Workers, Fauna as the database, OpenAI for answers and Pinecone for vector search. Every piece is a hosted service, so a small team could ship it in weeks. The team stayed tiny: two founders, no employees (founder-reported, Starter Story).

How did SiteGPT market and price itself?

He launched on 30 March with a tweet to about 10K followers, a Show HN post that reached the front page, and a Product Hunt launch that finished number one of the day. Launch day brought about 15K visitors (founder-reported, Starter Story). After that came building in public on X, mostly word of mouth, and later free tools and content (“engineering as marketing”) for search traffic.

Pricing was paid-only from day one with no free plan, priced high enough to cover unpredictable API costs.

What challenges did SiteGPT face after its launch?

Launch spikes churn. In April 2023 SiteGPT passed $10K MRR, then lost about $5K to churn in month two (founder-reported, Starter Story). Many customers who signed up in the excitement of launch week did not stay. The fix was steadier channels: word of mouth and search traffic from free tools.

Competition was the other challenge; similar chatbot builders appeared quickly, including Chatbase.

How much MRR does SiteGPT make?

SiteGPT reached about $15K MRR roughly six months after launch, as of October 2023 (founder-reported, Starter Story). Total revenue is not disclosed with a dated primary source. Coverage also appeared on Indie Hackers.

The timeline: launch in March 2023 with about 15K visitors on day one; $10K MRR passed in April 2023, then about $5K lost to churn; about $15K MRR in October 2023.

Why did SiteGPT work?

It followed demand. The feature people asked about became the company. It launched through several communities at once, X, Hacker News and Product Hunt, so the first day reached far more people than one channel would.

Paid-only pricing filtered out tyre-kickers when API costs were real. PDF.ai shows another document-chat product in the same 2023 wave.

What can founders learn from SiteGPT?

Watch which feature people ask about, then spin it out.

Launch spikes churn; plan for month two. Do not treat launch-week MRR as a baseline.

Paid-only filters out tyre-kickers when API costs are real. Free plans are a choice, not a requirement.