How Poppy AI Bootstrapped to $500K Monthly Revenue Selling $1000/Year Subscriptions

The founders of Poppy AI, Rafeh and Nas, achieved remarkable success by scaling from zero to $500k/month within 11 months, reaching $500,000 in monthly revenue without external funding.

Their journey highlights the power of bootstrapping, product-founder fit, and customer-centric focus.

Product-Founder Fit: The Foundation of Resilience

Rafeh and Nas learned about “product-founder fit” from Cliff Weitzman, founder of Speechify. Product-founder fit means you build something you want to use every day. Speechify is a speech-to-text app with over 100 million users and 300,000 App Store ratings. Cliff used his own software all the time, even during Zoom calls. Rafeh wanted to feel the same way about something he built.

In the past, Rafeh and Nas made products like Python and JavaScript courses for Clever Programmer.

These courses helped others, but the founders did not use them daily. Those products had “product-market fit,” which means the market wanted them, but they did not have product-founder fit.

When the founders built Poppy, they used it every day. They could not find another tool that solved their problem. ChatGPT and Claude, both popular AI tools, did not let them organize YouTube videos or Instagram Reels the way Poppy did. This daily use gave them confidence, even when nobody else seemed interested.

False Signals and Pivotal Discoveries

At first, Rafeh and Nas tried to sell Poppy to their existing audience. Their audience came from Clever Programmer, a brand that taught coding and helped people get developer jobs that one of them had built for a decade. Most of these developers did not need Poppy. They tried selling them for 6 months without success.

They promoted Poppy to this group again and again. Almost nobody bought it. This gave the founders false signals. They started to think the product was bad. They did not know who the perfect user was. Maybe it was content creators, researchers, or students. They kept using Poppy for themselves, even when sales were low.

A pivot to content creators marked a turning point, generating $100,000 in a single week.

This shift underscored the value of trusting instincts and being open to change. The founders learned that personal attachment to a product can guide them through challenging periods, even when market signals are unclear.

Financial Constraints as a Catalyst for Innovation

Facing bankruptcy, the founders innovated out of necessity. They conducted hundreds of customer calls, a task often delegated by funded startups. These interactions led to product improvements that drove profitability.

Their survival mode was intense. This urgency, born from financial pressure, would not have been possible with substantial funding.

During this period, they sold higher annual plans and even lifetime plans to self-fund their product through customer money.

Those expensive plans paid off.

Passion for Software: The Key to Pattern Recognition

With over 10 years of software development experience, the founders possessed a deep industry understanding. They tested competitors like Kajabi, Teachable, and Thinkific, building a vast knowledge base.

Their passion for software was evident in how they spent free time, often coding during what others would consider vacations. This intrinsic motivation contrasted with their previous Web3 venture, which was driven by financial gain rather than genuine interest.

In 2022, Rafeh tried Web3, a trend in blockchain and crypto. He made $1 million in 90 days from sponsorships. But he did not believe in the technology. His crypto wallets were hacked, and he lost up to $20,000. The project failed because his heart was not in it.

With Poppy, building software felt like play. The founders knew they could work on it for decades. They enjoyed solving problems with code.

Single Focus: The Antidote to Uncertainty

The founders’ breakthrough came after learning about Jenny AI, which earned $80,000 from a single TikTok video through an influencer. Initially skeptical, they persisted with outreach until achieving similar success.

The founders reached out to 400–500 affiliates. Only about 5 were profitable. Most lost money or broke even. Many people would have quit after 10 or 20 failed attempts. Rafeh and Nas kept going. One day, an affiliate made a video, and Poppy made $100,000 in a week. This success came from not giving up.

Current metrics reflect this success:

• $500,000 monthly revenue

• 0.8% churn rate

• Under 6% refund rate

• 50% profit margin without external funding

Initially, the founders tested multiple growth channels, wasting valuable time. In hindsight, they would have focused solely on influencer marketing from the start. This lack of focus caused stress, but their eventual commitment to influencers paid off.

They discovered that out of 400-500 affiliates, only about five were highly profitable. Persistence in this channel led to their breakthrough, highlighting the importance of committing to a single strategy until it succeeds.

Most of their customers come from TikTok, YouTube, and Referrals.

Mathematical Clarity: The Path to a Billion-Dollar Valuation

The founders have a clear roadmap to a billion-dollar valuation. At $500K monthly revenue, they’re already 1/20th of the way there, similar to companies like Notion that reached this valuation at $100M ARR. Their plan includes:

1. Higher-priced backend offers: Increasing average order value from $800-900.

2. Scaling affiliates: Growing from 200 to 4,000 affiliates.

Poppy AI’s success demonstrates the power of charging expensive prices to fund growth, customer focus, and strategic clarity. By prioritizing what truly matters—product excellence and customer satisfaction—they achieved remarkable results without external funding.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Every product goes through this cycle. Ads are the only thing where people/brands have to be comfortable losing money on.

2/

Didn't know this one. Amazing insight to acquire backlinks.

Lots of people also do LinkedIn recommendations for people even if they hadn't worked together. This gamification allows you to look more real and get more opportunities. For example, swapping LinkedIn recommendations with your plumber, friend of friend, friend's boss, etc...

3/

Innovation happens when there is not enough money. Deepseek is a great example. Without Deepseek, the charges for AI would've been anchored much higher with Claude leading the way. Another example would be SpaceX who had to build reusable rockets from first principles as they couldn't buy cheaper rockets from Russia.

Lots of money attracts both talented and untalented people who know how to bullshit their way through. Any big organization becomes like that if not controlled. Google would never have released AI until 2025 if OpenAI didn't put Google's own innovation to use. We'd still be on GPT-2 in 2025.

Rabbit Holes

1. I built a $100,000 AI startup, here’s what i learned by David Ondrej

2. Making Marketing More Effective with AI by Mike Loukides

3. Spent 9,400,000,000 OpenAI tokens in April. Here is what we learned by Tilen

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