Hype vs Reality for an AI Coding Startup
or, "long in the making"
We recently crossed $10k in MRR at Memex. (Before you roll your eyes—let me assure you that’s the most self-congratulatory line of this post.)
What began as an idea to give an engineering partner to every scientific professional has evolved into a desktop-native, general AI agent for vibe coding.
For an indie dev, $10k MRR is a huge goalpost. For a venture-scale business, it’s the very beginning. And in my former life selling to enterprises, I wouldn’t even do a POC for less than $25k. But this is my first rodeo creating a product-led business. And while we’re not satisfied with our progress, we nonetheless celebrate the milestone of having users that champion us and having a product we feel proud to work on every day.
We’ve all heard the adage “overnight success, long in the making“. Nevertheless, we almost always over-index on the “overnight success” and not as much on the “long in the making”. Thinking about how to share the news of our recent milestone, I was confronted by the decision “how should I position it?”.
The enterprise sales entrepreneur in me wants to say “Memex hits $120k annualized revenue 30 days after launch“. That is technically true … but it’s just narrative. In the early days of fundraising, selling to enterprises, and hiring, you’re constantly looking for the positive narratives you can tell to recruit people to your vision. Finding ways to turn bland reality into sexier narratives is an art.
But what I love about product-led entrepreneurship is that you can cut the bullshit. Either people love your product, or they don’t. In that spirit, I decided to tell a different narrative in this post. The bland, grueling, unsexy one. The one about “long in the making”.
For those of you building, creating, crafting, and making out there, I hope it may be of some use.
Long in the making
First - the unsexiest line of all:
Memex hits 120k annualized revenue 30 days after launch
It took 2 years and 2 months to hit $10k MRR after David left his last job to start a company
We incorporated in June of 2023, but I left to start a new company in March of 2023. Often times founders are working on their idea far before they even incorporate. But we often don’t talk about that …
Well - there you have it: for me it took 26 months from standing start to get to something that starts to look like a good business if you squint at it.
We pivoted twice before landing on the idea to build an agentic coding tool for scientific professionals last May (I’ll spare you the details of the other two ideas). For those close to the evolution of LLMs, that was when GPT4-Turbo was still the G.O.A.T. coding model — feels like 5-years ago in the LLM timeline.
We started with self-service prototypes using Figma and Supademo. This is one of our first, non-functional prototypes. We did several iterations. For each version of the prototype, we'd DM it to hundreds of people. We got responses from ~150 people and had 1:1 google meet convos with >50 in the first ~30 days.
Let that sink in. We were working our asses off rapidly iterating on the prototype and DMing people that roughly fit our contrived ICP for a vague idea we had. At the time, agentic coding tools were either a joke or non-existent. And we were 14 months and two pivots in. That’s the thing about starting a company and finding an idea/traction — you have to keep grinding even when it’s not working. And along the way you have to kill your darlings, and keep up an aggressive pace even if it feels like you’re marching nowhere.
The self-serve prototypes gave us a clearer picture of users' wants, needs, and willingness to pay. Keep in mind that this was before Clade Code, or before Cursor or Windsurf had agents. Scoping an agentic engineering tool was not obvious.
We built an MVP in ~6 weeks and gave it to some early users. We didn't charge them - building a billing system was premature until we had a clearer picture how to charge and validation that we had something people wanted to pay for.
We spent the next 3 months trying to get the agent to a point that it was actually helpful to users. It was during this time we expanded from just scientific professionals to “tech saavy professionals”, because users were using it for a broad swath of use cases. But from June through September of 2024 it couldn’t hit the bar for quality to keep users using it. We were paying ~$10/day on ads to find alpha users.
Then in October we started getting an uptick in usage. People would discover the product, onboard, and then use it ... A LOT.
Finding traction
In November we realized through diagnostic errors that one user was hacking people with it - successfully. We cut him off. He spent the next 2 weeks trying to hack US to keep using it. He then emailed us begging to use it. That's when we realized we had something we could charge for.
On December 6th we released a beta version that had billing. We got our first paying customer four days later. He remains one of our most active today!
We hit $1k MRR in the first 30 days of our closed beta, mainly through spending lots of time engaging on X and some ads. But we had issues: the agent was extremely inefficient, people weren't using version control and were losing work, and some were racking up huge charges and then cancelling their credit cards to avoid payment.
We decided to stay heads down and fix these issues that were plaguing us. We made the agent twice as token efficient, added checkpoints to automatically version our users’ work, changed to a pre-pay model, and fixed a long list of bugs.
Our launch was pretty simple:
We made a high quality video (on a budget)
Posted on our social accounts
Launched on Show HN (see my previous post about that)
Asked friends to post
Paid for placement in 2 newsletters
Increased activity on social media
That got us up to $10k MRR in 30 days.
What’s next?
We have lots to improve on the product. Our users want Memex to be an MCP Client, we’re working on a "Team" plan with specific features with a development partner, and we need to make it generally easier to use for less technical people.
We need to do all this and spend more time on growth.
We are still experimenting a lot with our distribution channels. But here's what we've learned thus far and we expect to continue on our path to $100k MRR and beyond.
👥 Community
We spend lots of time investing in our Discord community. We work hard to help users, and in return they're more likely to share feedback, support each other, and invite others. Half of our new users yesterday were referrals.
It's also a ton of fun and rewarding. The Discord increasingly feels like an extension of our team Slack channel where we are working along our users to build great stuff.
🛠️ Building in Public
I've spent my career selling to execs. I have little experience on social media. I've learned the hard way that anything "salesy" is either lambasted or worse - ignored.
Authentic content performs best, and building in public is the best version of that.
💁 Influencer marketing
I often hear about growth without ads. But looking at YouTube's ad library is revealing: A TON of videos on YT are paid promo by startups (add `&sv=1` to the end of search queries on YT).
We won't rely on paid promo, but we'll use them as we grow.
Back to building
Hope this is helpful to others also building 💪 This is my first product-led journey, and I'd love feedback! 🙏
If you liked this post, follow me here for more about our journey!
That's it for now — I’m off to vibe code something 😎
Love the raw honesty from this line: "It took 2 years and 2 months to hit $10k MRR after David left his last job to start a company"
Helps other founders set realistic expectations. Expectations are so important!