Two years. That's how long I sat at ~$150/month before anything clicked. Not $150k. $150. I'm a solo founder. I build @visualizeeAI, an AI rendering tool for architects and interior designers - around a full-time 9-5 job. Here's the honest version of how I got from $150/mo to $8.6K MRR. Including the parts that didn't work. The product You describe a space, it generates a hyper-realistic render. The AI image space is brutally crowded, so that's not the interesting part. The interesting part: the real barrier for professionals was never model quality. It was prompt engineering. Architects don't want to learn magic words. They want to describe what's in their head and get a result. So today the product is a chat. You talk to an assistant ("Vizzy") in plain language - 140+ languages - it asks follow-up questions and builds the optimized prompt invisibly. You never see it. But it didn't start there. And getting there is the whole story. The 2-year grind The first version used a node-based system, like ComfyUI. Powerful. Flexible. And completely wrong for my audience. Architects told me, repeatedly: too complicated. I was also selling one-time payments, so revenue just sat flat at $100-150/month total. The pivot 6 months ago I did the scary thing. Deleted the entire node system. Rebuilt the product as a chat. Switched to subscriptions. That took me from $150/mo to $8.6K MRR. The engine: SEO As a solo founder with a day job, I need channels that work while I sleep. I went deep on SEO - a real blog, Ahrefs, targeting what architects actually google. Traffic went from 30-50 to 180-200 visitors/day, converting 20-35% into trials. What I'd do differently Subscriptions from day one. Skip the complex architecture. But the grind handed me a playbook I'm now reusing for app #2. I'm going to tell this whole story over the next 30 days - the mistakes, the numbers, the experiments I'm running right now. Follow along if you're into honest build-in-public.

Visualizee renders by field, last 45 days: Interiors 35%. Architecture 28%. Automotive 18%. Architects are my biggest paying group. Interior work makes the most renders. My marketing talks to one. My usage comes from both.

Starter Story asked how I kept going after 700 days at $150/month. Real answer: I never needed the money. The job covered it. That made patience cheap.

A personal demo page for every cold email prospect. Worth it? 1. Yes, always 2. Only for high-ticket 3. Too slow 4. Never tried

My VizTunr cold email setup, honestly: A list of tuning shops. One personal page per shop. A short email linking to it. The page does the selling. The email just opens the door.

What I run: 1. Visualizee: AI renders for architects and designers 2. VizTunr: car parts try-on for tuning shops 3. Morga: plot analysis for Polish developers 4. BrandPrix and The Great Gift Hunt: small free games 5. New larger game coming 😅 Two pay the bills. One is new. Two are for fun.

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Tomorrow morning: activities with my son. Tomorrow night: VizTunr outreach. Founder life with a 5-year-old is mostly scheduling.

Almost the weekend. Next week I'm going deep on Visualizee's "occasional projects" problem. If you've solved project-based churn, my DMs are open.

Most underrated growth lever you've found? Mine: deleting steps.

Before the fix, a new Visualizee user waited a median 314 seconds from signup to their first render. After: 164 seconds. Halving that wait moved more users than any feature I shipped this year.

One VizTunr customer started with one shop. Now runs 4 shops on it. I never built a "multi-shop" feature. They just claimed more.

Keeping my 9-5 isn't fear. It's strategy. It lets me run experiments that take months to pay off. VizTunr's cold email took 3 months to look like anything.

Subscriptions are great for the founder. Not always for the customer. If your users work in projects, your pricing should too.

VizTunr: June: $0 September: $634 revenue October: $792 MRR Small numbers. Steepest line I've ever had.

What to do about "occasional projects" churn? What I'm weighing: 1. a cheaper plan to park on between projects (already offered when they cancel) 2. credit packs without a subscription 3. pay per project The cheaper plan is on the table every time. Most still leave. One-time payments are next on my list.

Visualizee lifetime: about $88K since August 2023. About $85K of it came in the last 11 months. The first two years were mostly $150 months.

Two recent Visualizee cancellations wrote "next project in 1-3 months". They'll be back. My MRR chart won't know that. Project-based tools make MRR look worse than the business is.

For a solo founder with a day job, would you rather have: 100 customers at $10/month, or 10 customers at $100/month?

Visualizee cancellations, Oct 8-13, 11 people: - occasional projects: 5 - not using: 2 - too hard: 1 - low quality: 1 - switched tool: 1 - "I'll use my credits, then renew": 1 Almost half aren't unhappy. They just don't need it every month.

The two replies I get from tuning shops: 1. "Interested, how does it work?" 2. "We already have a solution." The second one is gold. Talking to those shops about what's missing is the best product research I've done.