“I just saw the idea and started building. I wasn’t thinking do I need to raise? Do I need a co-founder?”
Yasser Elsaid was in his last semester of university when he started playing with OpenAI's Davinci models. Most people didn't think the models were good enough yet. He bet they'd improve, stopped attending class, and shipped Chatbase — a platform for building AI support agents.
Three years in, Chatbase is at $9M ARR, fully bootstrapped. He shares his playbook for pricing, sales, margin analysis, and more. He also talks about why “having a slightly below-average co-founder is much, much worse than being solo,” the mistake of hiring too slowly, and what it took to turn a side project into a company competing with teams that raised millions in venture capital.
Listen now on the Solo Founders Podcast:
Solo, together.
Julian
