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Add Rafal interview (Chatwith) #84

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Add interview with Rafal - Chatwith
rafalzawadzki Mar 16, 2024
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Bring back 1.example.md
rafalzawadzki Mar 16, 2024
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remove accidental newline
rafalzawadzki Mar 18, 2024
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## 10. What would you do differently if starting over?
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---
title: 'Chatwith founder interview - Rafal'
description: '1st year of indie hacking (and $48,919.17 later)'
---

# Your Startup Name

## 1. What's your startups name, what does it do, how long have you been working on it and (optional) your MRR?
My main startup is called [Chatwith](https://chatwith.tools) and it's a custom chatbot builder. You can train GPT on your files & URLs, connect to apps, and get an AI that acts as customer support, coach, agent, etc. I started working on it in August 2023 and I recently broke $1k MRR with it.

## 2. What's your name and what were you doing before?
My name is Rafal and before I went indie a year ago (early 2023), I was a CTO. And a software engineer before that.

## 3. How did you come up with your startup and it's name?
The project started from the idea of turning ChatGPT plugins into chatbots that can be installed on websites and freely shared outside of ChatGPT. The domain name came from "chat with tools" - and so Chatwith was born.

## 4. Are you a programmer, if so, how did you learn and how long did it take?
Yes! I've been programming since early teens (15+ years now). I've been a professional software engineer my whole career - started in a 3D printing company, then made mobile apps, then became a CTO. So I've been around the block a few times :)

## 5. How long did it take you to build a mvp, did you do any validation?
The MVP took around a week, but I had a bit of a head start - already understanding how some technical bits are supposed to work and having previous projects I could copy from. I didn't do any validation because the "custom ChatGPT" hype was already well underway with early players making 10,20,50k/mo. I knew the market for chatbots is there and I decided to validate the UVP (function calling) on the go.

## 6. What was your launch like, what did you do, was it a success?
I launched on Product Hunt. It went okay, as launches there usually go - with a flush of curious traffic and a handful of sales. It was helpful to get a backlink and early testimonials.

## 7. How long did it take to get your first customer?
I got my first customers during the Product Hunt launch, so after a few of weeks since I started working on the project.

## 8. What's your top marketing methods and how can others start doing them?
Most of my traffic comes from paid Google Search. I'm slowly trying to wean off it to organic SEO, but the competition is tough! That's what I would advise others to do: have one "quick" source of traffic (PPC, Product Hunt launches etc) and one "slow" (SEO, word of mouth, affiliates etc). Early on you need quick injections of traffic, but they become expensive in the long term.

## 9. Whats the top 5 tools you use to run your startup?
So hard to pick! I use a ton of absolutely crucial tools. If I were to choose top 5:
1. Plausible, Amplitude, Posthog: I can't do anything without analytics. I use three tools at the same time because each has something others don't. Don't ask me to pick just one!
2. Lemon Squeezy: It just feels like it was made to make me money. Streamlined, well designed and with features like affiliate, email marketing and app marketplace working out of the box. And of course it's a Merchant of Record, so I don't have to worry about international taxation at all.
3. Notion: From daily todos, long term roadmap, through idea evaluation to even CMS for some of my products. It's the command center of my life and work.
4. GPTs: I use ChatGPT and Cursor all the time. I would never ship so much without access to AI tools we have now. I'm hoping to eventually build a team of AI agents to work for/with me.
5. NextJS, Tailwind, TypeScript: I mean... It's just tech and frameworks, but can't discount the fact that almost all my products are made using them and they help me move incredibly fast.

## 10. What would you do differently if starting over?
I am not 100% confident I'd do something totally different if starting over, because I'm glad of how far I was able to reach already. Advice I wish I had a year ago:
- Evaluate product ideas better. Chatwith is in an extremely competitive market and is a more complex app than I'd ever anticipated. Nevertheless, I probably should've skipped [Spell](https://spell.so) and started Chatwith earlier.
- SEO is more intricate than it seems. I made a few mistakes early on I still recover from. Technical details like poor interlinking, lacking keywords, erroring pages etc can really tank a website.