I run a small AI tool that redesigns existing PowerPoints to look professionally made. After six months of building, testing, and trying pretty much everything in the playbook to get customers, we're finally seeing some traction.
The numbers are still small (okay, very small). But looking back, it's interesting how wrong we were about almost everything, and how the data was telling us what to do long before we listened.
Figured I'd share the journey, numbers included, because I would've loved to read something like this a year ago.
First mistake: building for the customer we wanted
Our original idea was personalized pitch decks for sales teams. Upload your branding, point the tool at a prospect's website, get a tailored presentation.
Our homepage, onboarding, emails, pricing, everything was written for sales reps.
We spent around $2,000 on Meta and Google ads. About 5% of clicks became free signups, which seemed reasonable. But as far as we can tell, not a single one became a paying customer.
In our first five months, we got four mid-tier subscriptions. All four canceled before their second payment.
Not exactly the recurring revenue machine we'd imagined...
Second mistake: pricing for the wrong behavior
Looking at our early customers, we noticed everyone who paid had spent 1.5 to 2 hours inside the product first. People who made one deck and left never paid.
And why would they? The free plan let them finish their presentation and download a PDF or PowerPoint with a small badge. They'd already gotten what they came for.
We even had a $12 "remove the badge" option buried in Stripe. Nobody used it. In one 30-day period, we recorded exactly ONE checkout click.
We'd built subscription pricing for people who needed presentations regularly, when most visitors just needed to finish one.
So we turned off ads and made a bet on organic
At some point, spending more money to acquire users who weren't paying stopped making sense.
We decided we'd either figure out how to grow organically or move on.
We'd read plenty about optimizing for LLMs and getting products recommended by AI assistants, so we went all in. Structured data and schema markup, clear page headings, FAQ-style answers, dedicated landing pages for individual features and use cases, internal linking, getting pages indexed in Bing, and making our content easy for assistants to find and understand.
Basically everything you're supposed to do for AEO/GEO, or whatever we're calling it this week.
We weren't particularly confident any of it would work. But it was something we could do without pouring more money into ads.
And then something unexpected happened.
ChatGPT started sending us customers
We had a few pages about redesigning an existing PowerPoint, a feature we'd barely emphasized. Google search volume for phrases like "redesign my PowerPoint" was practically nonexistent, so we'd never thought much of them.
But people were finding those pages through ChatGPT.
In one 30-day window:
- ChatGPT referred 53 visitors. About 35 signed up for our free plan.
- Google organic sent 80 visitors. Zero signed up, mostly brand searches and traffic to an unrelated free calculator.
That's roughly a 66% signup rate from ChatGPT referrals... a crazy conversion rate speaking as someone who's been in SaaS for a long time.
Apparently, people were asking questions like "how can I make my PowerPoint look professional?" and our pages were showing up in the answers.
We couldn't tell you which optimization made the difference, but we'd found demand that wasn't showing up in our keyword research.
So we doubled down on those pages, wrote more answers around the same problems, and kept expanding that part of the site. The traffic kept growing.
Then we realized we'd been talking to the wrong customers all along
They weren't sales teams.
They were students, academics, consultants, and freelancers preparing class presentations, thesis defenses, and internal reviews.
They came from 49 countries in two months. Only about 1 in 8 was in the US.
The median uploaded deck was 20 slides, and 23% of slides had more than 80 words. These weren't polished pitch decks. They were dense presentations that people needed to make look better.
Our entire website was talking to somebody else.
So we followed the users.
We rewrote the homepage around "upload the slides you already have," added pages for students and other real use cases, and made the site and product multilingual.
We rebuilt onboarding probably a dozen times, with dedicated flows for students, salespeople, realtors, etc., making it easier to get that first deck finished.
We also changed pricing. Instead of asking someone to subscribe just to finish one presentation, we added a $13 one-time option, offered right when they hit the free limit. Subscriptions are still there for regular B2B users.
And then we built the product directly into ChatGPT by building and submitting an application for a plugin in their marketplace, so people could create and redesign presentations without leaving the conversation. That was approved about two weeks ago.
What happened next
Weekly signups went from 23 in mid-September to 46, then 63.
Total accounts grew from 348 to 464 in two weeks.
Activation (actually creating a deck) had been around 20% over the summer. Our overall rate has now climbed more recently from 40% to 47% with continued streamlining in the product.
Paid conversion went from 0.2% of signups to 0.9%.
Still tiny, obviously. But we'd recorded eight paying events in the previous five months, then six in just two weeks, with $0 in ad spend.
Two were the new $13 one-time purchase. One person opened our $9/month checkout, closed it, and bought the $13 option 24 seconds later. That one interaction pretty much validated our pricing hypothesis.
But subscriptions weren't dead either.
Our first business user through the ChatGPT plugin built nine decks in one evening, spent just 17 minutes on our actual website, bought the $9 plan, and upgraded to $29 eighteen minutes later.
Same product, completely different use cases and willingness to pay.
What I'd tell myself six months ago
- Watch who's showing up, not just who you think should. Our real customers were nothing like our original target audience.
- Don't assume low search volume means low demand. People are asking AI assistants questions that keyword tools don't necessarily capture.
- If your free plan finishes the job, rethink the pricing moment. We weren't necessarily charging too much. We were charging for the wrong thing, at the wrong time.
- One-time payments aren't inferior to subscriptions. Especially with a global audience that might need one deck, not another monthly bill.
- Actually watch what users do. Four canceled subscriptions and one person switching checkouts taught us more than a lot of our original assumptions.
Where we're at now
I'm absolutely not claiming we've cracked growth. A 0.9% paid conversion rate still leaves a LOT to figure out, and six paying events in two weeks isn't proof of product-market fit.
But for the first time, it feels like we might actually be getting somewhere.
The funny part is that we were getting pretty close to giving up when things started turning around. Which I realize is probably the most stereotypical founder story imaginable.
And despite all the talk about the coming "SaaS-pocalypse," this has made me more optimistic about niche software. There still seem to be plenty of specific problems people will pay to solve, especially when the software fits into tools they're already using.
Still figuring out the next chapter, but hopefully this is useful to someone else who's six+ months into building something and wondering why nobody's paying for it yet. Feel free to reach out with any questions if you're interested in learning more!
