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- Startups.fyi - Posts - From $150 to $10K a Month, AI Music at $10K MRR, and a $1K/Month Grant Toolkit for Nonprofits From $150 to $10K a Month, AI Music at $10K MRR, and a $1K/Month Grant Toolkit for Nonprofits Hey! It's Chris & Daniel. Welcome to another Startups.fyi episode. Want your startup in next week's issue? Skip the line here and we'll feature you in front of 15,000+ founders. New here? Subscribe free for every past edition.👋🏾 Let's get into it. 👇 Startups FYI Spotlight Here are the startups that made it to the top of the list in this week's edition. 🌳 TreeVed (Pre-revenue): Here is a social platform for organizing, sharing, and discovering links based on what you read and watch. It makes files easier to save, explore, and share. 💼 Joby.ai ($300 MRR): Discover this AI-powered search engine for jobs all over the world. Watch Us Build Your First Agent Workflow Live Join HubSpot for Startups and Dust on October 28 at 11am EDT / 8am PDT for a live webinar. If logging, enrichment, and routing are eating your team’s week, this one’s for you. We’ll build the agents that handle that go-to-market work in HubSpot and Dust, so your team can get back to selling. You’ll watch us build a post-call automation and a Slack account ownership layer. Then you can set up the same thing for your team. 🔓 OpenAlternative ($500 MRR): Discover free, open-source alternatives to popular paid software like ChatGPT, Elevenlabs and many more 🏛️ Northstar Toolkit ($300 to $1,000 MRR): Write stronger grant applications faster with this AI toolkit for nonprofits. It handles funder research, organizational knowledge, and structured grant drafting so you can compete for bigger funding. 🎵 TemPolor ($10,000 MRR): Create AI-powered, royalty-free music for your videos. Describe the mood and the scene, and it generates a track you can customize to fit the story. — Want your startup in next week's issue? 👉 Use this link to share your project with 15,660 startup founders, entrepreneurs and indie makers. Startups FYI Roundup 📈 How a $150/month app became a $10K/month business Piotr Obidowski is the developer behind Visualizee, an AI tool that turns an architect’s sketch into a realistic render in seconds. Visualizee was stuck at around $100 a month for two full years while Piotr worked full-time as a tech lead in Poland. He blamed marketing. The real problem was his product: a complicated node-based system that nobody could figure out. So he rebuilt it as a simple chat interface, switched from one-time payments to subscriptions, and let the AI handle the prompting for users. Six months later it’s near $10K a month with 300 paying subscribers, and he’s planning to quit his job. 🤖 Frank built a $40K/month app in a weekend without knowing how to code Frank had an idea and no software background, so he used Claude to build the first version over a single weekend. What happened after the weekend is the real story. He shipped it, found the people who had the problem, and turned a rough prototype into something they pay for every month. It’s now doing $40K/month, and the breakdown covers exactly how he got from the first version to paying customers. 💼 He built a tool for his own agency. It’s now a $3M ARR business. Lav Crnobrnja is the founder of Vacation Tracker, a leave management app that started as an internal fix at his software agency. Lav and his partner ran Cloud Horizon, a development agency, for about ten years. As it grew, tracking who was on holiday became a daily headache, and no tool handled it the way they needed. So they looked at the problem and said the obvious thing: we build software. They built it for themselves, then launched it publicly in 2018. To their astonishment, hundreds of other companies had the same headache. Vacation Tracker is now generating over $3 million in ARR, and the two of them still spend most of their time on it. (Tag @ChrisBulen to get your project featured in next week’s roundup) Advertise with us! Promote your product in our newsletter and reach over 15,660 of the most ambitious and inspiring startup founders and indie makers on the planet. That’s it for this time! See you again next week. — Chris (@ChrisBulen)
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