Hello everyone 👋
Welcome to a very special ChatPRD update.
Why is this one so special? Because it's our birthday! I launched chatprd.ai to the world (well, X) exactly 1 year ago today.
So this week, instead of our regular feature releases & updates, I thought I'd share a little bit more about the ChatPRD journey over the last year and a little bit about what's up for us next.
Some backstory: how did this all begin?
ChatPRD began like all good product management success stories do: In a meeting.
The team was working on a complex, technical product and we were totally out of PM capacity. Even though I like to pretend my CPO job is all strategic planning & executive retreats--the reality is that I roll up my sleeves and do hands-on-keyboard work all the time. Even the Chief Product Officer has to IC PM products. So I raised my hand to write the PRD for the project.
At the same time I had been really into ChatGPT and other AI tools. So of course, I went right to my favorite chatbot and started building out a mega prompt and working to generate a great PRD. And so in the background of zoom calls and between meetings, I prototyped out what would soon become ChatPRD.
When I shared the PRD a couple hours later, my team was blown away. How had I possibly had the time to spec this out? They saw my calendar! I had zero time. Maybe negative time! Yet I had made a multi-page requirements doc for a very technical product.
I told them my secret 😎
The ChatPRD GPT MVP (say that 3 times fast)
Over the next few weeks, I kept working with ChatGPT to make it better and better. And when the GPT store came out, I quickly snagged ChatPRD and loaded her up with all my product tricks to date.
And... it just took off.
ChatPRD soon became (and still is!) the most popular product management GPT. In fact, in just one year she's done over 200,000 chats with a 4.5 Star Rating ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
But... I don't make free things
The GPT store was a great starting point for ChatPRD, but there's no way to monetize directly (yet!) And since my hobby is B2B SaaS, I had to figure out a way to see if this thing had real product market fit, which in my world means it's monetizable.
So I launched this gorgeous landing page to the world and set up Stripe to charge one dollar per month for a subscription:
And I started writing some code.
In the first week, we had 100+ paying users. And the rest is history.
Since then: ChatPRD by the Numbers
We've reached some exciting milestones since then
- Over 50k chats on the app and 200k+ on the GPTstore
- 8000+ documents saved by users
- 7000+ files uploaded to improve and discuss
- Over 25k signups on the app
- 500 teams signed up (launched in August)
- Thousands of paying users
- Six figures in revenue in the first 6 months
- Six figures and growing in ARR
- 20-30% growth MoM every month, organically
- 2000+ code commits (mostly by me)
- 2-5 features / week launched every week for a year
- At least 2-3 undeniable AI generated pop punk bangers generated for launch videos
The Team: Mostly, but not all, AI
For the first 6 months, the team was me. As much as I love the solo quest, I've been really lucky to bring on a few folks as contributors to the ChatPRD world.
Alisa, who did the first YouTube review of ChatPRD and has been our growth queen and contributed to our marketing strategy in a huge way, including these weekly newsletters and our youtube channel.
Wajeeh and Kauê who joined the ChatPRD team in July and have helped ship some of our most popular features, including file uploads, the slackbot, google drive integration, and our real time document editor.
Travis who I'm so so lucky to have help me with my sales strategy as we start talking to more and more enterprises about bringing ChatPRD to their full building teams.
Up next: building things
A lot of people ask me what's next for ChatPRD.
My answer: I'm going to turn you all into AI-powered triple threats.
Which means I'm going to keep
- building things that make the product job easier + more fun
- building things that turn the product job into something new
- learning how AI is going to transform how we all work
- and sharing what I learn with all of you
There's no better way to achieve this than continue to build things, listen to you all about what I can do better, and try (and fail at a few new things!)
Thank you 💕
Finally, I want to take a moment to thank all of you for coming on this adventure with me. Every day, I get to hear how ChatPRD is helping someone survive their crazy product job, or get a great feature idea from our slack community, or even useful insight from someone for whom we missed the mark.
Being able to build this with all of y'all has been incredibly fun for me.
It makes so much sense that ChatPRD was created around Thanksgiving, because that's what I feel--thankful. Thankful that I get to build something useful, learn new things, and have a side hustle that has turned into something even bigger than that.
And thankful for all of you, who have supported and trusted and challenged me over this last year.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Until next time 💕
Claire