Give us a bit of your background. Who are you, and what was your situation before building BarGPT?
I am currently employed at a large enterprise software company where I generally manage software engineers and implementation projects. I started as a ‘coder’ and worked my way up. Over time the actual amount of code I wrote dropped to near zero but since I really enjoy coding I found side projects to keep myself building.
All of the projects I work on are done with my brother Mike as well, he’s in basically the same situation as me and we enjoy working together on these types of projects.
What is BarGPT, what problem does it solve, and how does it work?
It doesn’t really solve a problem anyone had :-) It basically lets someone describe a cocktail and it generates a cocktail recipe and an image of that cocktail using AI. You can describe the cocktail in any way you want, the ingredients, the flavors, the mood you’re in, the sky’s the limit. We use a mixture of LLMs and image generation models to generate the content and then make the recipes shareable by others.
What led you to build BarGPT?
I’ve always loved cocktails. When I started seeing things people were doing with OpenAI APIs I got inspired to try and build something fun. That’s basically how the idea of BarGPT came to be.
How did you validate the idea?
I took some of the cocktail images and recipes and posted them on Instagram. As people saw the images I got a lot of good feedback so I figured at least some people must be interested and then turned it into more of a full website.
Could you describe the process of building the first version of BarGPT?
Basically built it over 2 weeks. It was coded in NextJS, which was the first time I used NextJS. Hit some bumps in the road but overall I was really happy with how fast things came together and how stable it’s been. After launching, basically just friends and family used it for a few weeks. Then SEO started to kick in and people started finding the site on Google.
How did you launch BarGPT and get your first customers?
We did launch on Product Hunt even though this type of app isn’t really a good fit for PH. That got us a few mentions in AI-focused newsletters which helped bring new people to the site. Early on it was free, but once I saw the costs of running the site I decided to try and monetize aspects of it.
Since your launch, have you used any other marketing strategies to acquire or retain users?
Not really. It’s been pretty word-of-mouth/SEO driven.
How is BarGPT performing now, and what are your future plans?
Doing well, between ads and subscriptions we have around $800 MRR. Nothing like shattering, but it more than covers costs. The next step is to focus on our “Build a Brand” concept where other businesses can white label our technology for events or their website. We’ve done this a few times with businesses and it's been very successful so now the plan is to formalize it a little more and hopefully scale it.
What key lessons or insights have you gained from starting BarGPT?
Set clear expectations of what you are trying to achieve. A lot of people on Twitter are quitting their jobs and going all-in on building. That’s great, but it was never my plan. Being honest that I’m looking to enjoy what I’m building and hopefully make some extra incremental income takes some pressure off. I think the community on Twitter is heavily skewed towards the people who are full-time builders which makes it frustrating if you compare yourself to them.
The other key thing is building an audience. Getting the word out about your product or idea is by far the hardest part of this. Having an audience helps with that immensely. I wish I would have focused more on that early on.
What advice would you give to aspiring founders who have tried a few micro SaaS businesses but haven’t found any success yet?
I would focus on your marketing and plans to get the word out about what you have built. Try to build an audience before you spend countless hours building your actual app. Too many great apps and ideas are never seen or heard of.
I know you also have the TVFoodMaps project going right now. Can you briefly tell us what it’s about?
TVFoodMaps is actually over 13 years old. It was created when I was doing a lot of business travel so I could track the restaurants on FoodTV shows like Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. Over the years it’s had huge swings in traffic based on organic search. After building BarGPT I dusted it off and rebuilt the site on NextJS so the two sites had the same tech stack. It also generates about the same MRR through ads and subscriptions.
Where can people learn more about you and your work?
Mostly on Twitter where I talk about the projects I’m working on.
https://x.com/APSquaredDev
