🪄 AirTrackBot: Telegram ChatBot with 2M Users

Hey,

The Spells Master is back!

Welcome to the 131st issue.

Today's topics:

1. AirTrackBot: Telegram Bot with 2M Users

2. A tool to Self-host Email Marketing Software

3. One recommended video on Building A Complex App Using 15 Claude Prompts

AirTrackBot: Telegram Bot with 2M Users

AirTrackBot is a simple Telegram chatbot that searches for cheap flights and tracks their prices through the Telegram Messenger.

It has over 2 million users and it makes around are $8,000 per month.

1. The Birth Of AirTrackBot

The founder Niki Kravchuk has been creating startups since 2013 but didn't have any success.

He noticed the growing trend of the chatbot industry in 2017. At that time, Telegram did not yet have a good airfare bot, unlike Messenger, which actually had popular travel products like Skyscanner, Kayak, or Expedia right after the bot platform was launched. So he decided to build a chatbot on top of Telegram.

He used to travel every Christmas from Kyiv to Budapest and used to search manually for cheap flights. To stay updated, he would manually check the websites so he decided to solve this tedious problem once and for all with automation.

So he made a bot that would automatically track flight prices and send him notifications on Telegram when prices changed. After a month in development, he released the first iteration of the product.

Initially, he was thinking of building a local version of the bot to find and track flights carried out by 2 largest European low-cost companies — Wizzair and Ryanair.

But neither of the companies had a public API, so he used the Kiwi.com API.

His previous failures included a Travel Search Engine where he had used Kiwi.com API so he had access to it already.

2. Going Viral

The bot went viral in Ukraine immediately after the launch.

AirTrackBot got lots of mentions from mainstream media like TravelMassive, MakeUseOf, PeakD, and TuttoAndroid.

In particular, AirTrack was mentioned by the largest Ukrainian TV channel during prime time. That's when Niki realized he has created a useful product.

And most importantly, the bot helped him book a cheap flight to Budapest for his Christmas vacation.

The bot is so useful that it is promoted by bloggers and YouTubers who regularly mention AirTrackBot in their content.

3. The Perfect Pricing

The pricing is a genius move at $12/year. The pricing strategy is similar to VPN-based pricing but even cheaper because most of the traffic is from 3rd-world countries like India.

The breakdown of countries is as follows:

• 60% - India

• 12% - Ukraine

• 10% - US, Canada

• 4% - Italy

• 2% - Brazil

• 2% - Turkey

Nobody wants to see a $5 per month pricing bill on their invoice but they don't mind paying $12 per year once. This simple hack increases customer LTV.

They have partnered up with Skyscanner, the largest airline ticket search engine in February 2018 that gives them access to the world’s largest database of low-cost flights.

The bot is monetized via an affiliate program with Skyscanner using their official API. They send users to the Skyscanner website and get rewards for this when users click to visit an OTA's or airline's website.

4. Distribution is King

Telegram has 900 million monthly active users. This gives them insane leverage due to network effects. The bot gets shared like crazy due to its simple chat interface so users can share flights data with their friends with 1-click.

Even though you can search for flights for free proactively using Google Flights but people still use this bot as it provides ease of use and a simple chat interface.

It took him almost 5 years to hit 100,000 subscribers. And only 17 days between 100,000 to 200,000 users. You have to write code once and it scales up. There's not much to it. Its completely automated. And it grows on its own.

They could definitely improve pricing through hotel deals and sponsorships but even $10k per month is awesome for this product. The name itself is brilliant.

This product can also be replicated to other platforms like Whatsapp, Chrome Extensions, and ChatGPT for further monetization. And you can even force people to pay $12/year for more than 3 alerts per year to make it a $1m/year business.

They can even do a newsletter like Jack's Flight Club where their premium plan gives access to "deals early" and if you're on the free version, you get hit with a soft FOMO at the start saying "here are the deals you missed."

At this point, its purely a monetization play since they have massive goodwill and tons of users using the free product. Any private equity firm will monetize this aggressively.

A tool to Self-host Email Marketing Software

Mailwizz is an email marketing software with a clean UI that you can self-host.

It is very cheap and you can use it to send transactional emails with follow-ups or even a full-fledged newsletter.

You don't have to spend 100s of dollars per month to find Product-Market Fit (PMF). You can spend <$200 to send 10,000+ emails to see if you have PMF.

One recommended video on Building A Complex App Using 15 Claude Prompts

This video shows a glimpse of how to generate a full-blown AI app even if you don't know how to code.

The speed at which you can build apps now is mind-blowing. This is the worst it will ever be. The definition of a junior developer will change now. Prompting AI will be an essential skill to have for junior developers.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Jeff Bezos hasn't written a book but he has given a lot of wisdom through his shareholder letters.

Highly recommend reading them, his collection of writings in Invent and Wander, and listening to the 2 Founders Episode on Jeff Bezos.

2/

No code has limitations. Code doesn't have any.

If you were rocking on Zapier, Make, Webflow, or Bubble, you will kill it with AI.

The no code market will be changing in the coming years. Lots of companies will go extinct unless they adapt to AI.

AI is a pure nightmare for so many jobs and businesses.

3/

Hard not to get opens if you personalize like this. There was a guy who wanted me take his weight loss training course. Turns out, I was never fat in my entire life.

Rabbit Holes

1. Every’s Master Plan - I love when startups write down their 10-year plan. Every has laid out its master plan. Newsletters are to build affinity with the audience and SaaS is where they will be making most of the money. The only thing I dislike about it is paid newsletter. There is a reason Kevin Kelly (1000 True Fans) and Mario Gabriele (The Generalist) are against paid blogs. The Generalist tried it for sometime and realized that the newsletter wasn't growing because they stopped the distribution with paid blogs so it has now become entirely free. There are no rules here because Ben Thompson runs Stratechery ($150/year) fine. But The Hustle (free newsletter) uses its distribution to create paid offering for Trends at $299/year and even CBInsights ($60 per year to upto $265,000 per year) is launching a paid SaaS based on its extensive data but as Kevin Kelly mentioned in some podcast, "You can only buy so many subscriptions. Only the top 1% will make most of the money." In my opinion, use free distribution to give away your best ideas and monetize in another way.

2. Revealing our $124 cold-email hack that got us $83333 in monthly recurring revenue - TIL you can use Sendy (like Mailwizz) to send newsletters like Beehiiv or ConvertKit for extremely cheap ($1 for 10,000 emails) and you can even do transactional emails with follow-ups like Instantly AI or Smartlead AI for cheap. No need to pay $100 per month for an email sending software when you can host one and only pay like $10 per month. If you run multiple products, the costs will decrease by 10x. The best way to use this is to mass cold email 10,000 clients per month for a SaaS offering or if you want to increase subscribers by 100 per day to a newsletter by using a lead magnet and you can do all of this for <$200.

3. Quick Guide To Creating Great Value Bombs - Value Bombs are the best way to convert eyeballs into clients. Value Bombs solve one specific problem and often reveals a bigger problem by the end of it. For example, a Lead Generation Agency will give you a Value Bomb where they teach you how to stay out of spam when sending Cold Emails. By the end of the guide, they will give you a one-time Done-For-You Cold Email Setup Offer where they set the domains up, give you free leads, write your scripts, and hand everything off to you.

Until next time,

Your Spells Master!

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More Startup Spells 🪄

1. Geofencing for Hyper-Targeted Marketing (LINK)

2. Kian Luke's Outlier Video Format (LINK)

3. How JotBot grew to $50k MRR in 6 months using Super Long Domains (LINK)