A side project chatbot hit $15K MRR in six months

Who built it, and what they built

Bhanu Teja Pachipulusu is the founder of SiteGPT, an AI chatbot platform that lets anyone build a personalized chatbot trained on their own website content. The business is based in Nellore, Andhra Pradesh, India, and started in March 2023.

He launched it as a side project alongside his existing product, and within about six months it was generating around $15K in monthly recurring revenue.

Where the idea came from

Before SiteGPT, Bhanu was building Feather, a blogging platform that uses Notion as its CMS and publishes content to an SEO-friendly blog. Feather was earning around $4K MRR at the time.

In March, his Twitter timeline filled with AI content, and he wondered whether AI could help his Feather customers. Since every customer had a blog, he imagined letting visitors chat with those blogs. He soon realized the idea could serve any website owner, not just Feather users, so he split it off as a standalone product.

How they built the first version

Building a full chat platform proved harder than expected. The use case was not yet common and he found no existing resources, so he built everything from scratch while similar products kept appearing.