Impact
$100K ARR with no outside money, and we kept every customer.
$100K
ARR, bootstrapped
Latest annual run-rate · [as of when?]
300%
growth in customers’ organic traffic
[Median or best case? Over what period?]
100%
customer retention
Oct 2024 – Jan 2026, while I ran it part-time
+50%
revenue from existing customers
Same period, from a deeper product
Context
Once shops were online, they still had to get found.
At DotPe I saw the same thing again and again: a merchant would set up a store, and then nobody came. Marketing was the next problem, so I left to work on it.
Xari started with social media marketing and engagement, and SEO. After two pivots it settled on search: researched, targeted content plus technical SEO to grow a business’s search traffic. [What you built first, and who you started it with.]
We closed our first customers in the US, India and Australia before we had an MVP. I also visited small businesses in five US cities, and US users turned out to be the most loyal and engaged.
Problem and users
[What a small business owner couldn’t do before Xari.]
[The customer’s situation in one or two sentences, in their words.]
Customers (after the pivots)
- Small e-commerce and SaaS businesses, mostly in the US, India and Australia
- [What they did before: agency, freelancer, nothing]
- [What was broken for them]
Who it wasn’t for
- [The segments you tried and left in the pivots]
- [Why they didn’t fit]
[A real customer quote.][Name or description, business type]
My role
As CEO I owned product, positioning, go-to-market and sales.
What I owned
- Building the AI platform from scratch: planning, strategy, content, distribution and technical SEO
- Positioning and go-to-market
- Founder-led sales across three countries
- The two pivots that got us to search marketing
- Hiring a 9-person founding team with no money for market salaries
What the team owned
- [Co-founder’s areas, if any]
- [Engineering: team size and who led it]
- [Anything else]
- Team
- 9 at the start, across tech, sales, marketing and design
- Customers
- [N paying customers at peak]
- Integrations
- Shopify, Wix, WordPress, Google Ads, LinkedIn, Meta, WhatsApp
- Stack
- [Main tools and models]
Key decisions
Two pivots, and one call that didn’t work.
Pivot 1: [from what to what]
The signal[What early feedback showed, and how incomplete it was]
Options considered[What else you could have done]
Why[The reasoning]
What happened[Result]
Pivot 2: into search marketing
The signal[What showed search was the better bet]
Options considered[Alternatives]
Why[The reasoning]
What happenedRevenue grew 100% quarter on quarter in the early months, on the way to $100K ARR.
Keeping Xari alive after Google’s announcement
What happenedGoogle said it would delist low-quality AI-generated content. Our content was well above that bar, but customers panicked and 80% of the business churned within a month.
The choiceI cut the team down, took a job to cover my costs, and ran Xari part-time as a smaller, mostly automated business that broke even.
Why[The reasoning: why not shut it down?]
What happenedWe kept every remaining customer from October 2024 to January 2026, and grew revenue from them by 50%.
The product
[One line on what a customer gets each month.]
[How the agents work together, in two sentences.]
1
Research
[What the research agent finds: keywords, competitors, questions]
2
Write
[How drafts are written and kept on-brand]
3
Review
[Where the customer or team approves]
4
Publish
Straight to the customer’s site on Shopify, Wix or WordPress
5
Measure
[How traffic results are tracked]
[Model][Framework]ShopifyWixWordPress[Analytics]
[Screenshot: content calendar or article pipeline]
[What it shows.][Screenshot: research output for one keyword]
[What it shows.][Screenshot: traffic report for a demo customer]
[What it shows.]Execution
Finding customers without a marketing budget.
All of our sales were founder-led. [Where leads came from and how you closed them.]
- Apr 2023Founded [what you built first]
- [Date]Pivot 1 [from what to what]
- [Date]Pivot 2 into search marketing
- [Date]Google’s announcement on AI content; 80% of the business churns in a month
- Oct 2024I join Synaptic and run Xari part-time
- [Date]$100K ARR
- Jan 2026[Where Xari is now]
Results
[One line on the business outcome.]
[Chart: ARR over time, with the two pivots marked]
[Source.]Xari reached $100K ARR without outside money. Customers’ organic traffic grew 300% [over what period, for how many customers]. From October 2024 to January 2026 we kept every customer and grew revenue from them by 50%.
[What made customers stay and expand.]
[Customer quote about their results.][Who]
What I’d do differently
[One line summarising the biggest lesson.]
- [A lesson about acting on incomplete market signals]
- [A lesson about founder-led sales]
- [What you’d do differently if you started it again]
Next product
PortfolioIQ self-serve
A self-serve version of PortfolioIQ, so VC funds could sign up on their own. Before this, every customer came through a sales call.