An engineer around the corner, whenever you need, British Gas have over 6,000 en route at speed. Fixing lights that won't light or have started to blink, a pipe with a leak and that weird smell under the sink. If your boilers kaput and your blue fur needs a rinse, we've got your back to stop that cold water wince. You don't need to be a customer, we can help you too, taking care of things. It's what British Gas do. TSNC supply 6,000 engineers correct us of Jan 2026. They're taught to build an extension and launched my first extension within like two or three days. And today it's at about like 20 to $30,000 MRR. How does one guy make over $20,000 a month with a simple browser extension? Well, it's because he's building in the hottest niche in business right now. AI. Said Izzadi started his journey as an employee, working for almost a decade in corporate America in different startups. But now he's a solopreneur, making a pretty good living while working on a side project he's passionate about. So I spent over an hour talking to him and getting the complete scoop on his $20,000 a month AI business. Turns out it's actually pretty simple and it's not as saturated as you might think. There's still plenty of opportunity. You just need to know where to look in this video. Said shares a masterclass on building an AI where to find good ideas, where to build those ideas and some unique ways to monetize those ideas, even if you're a beginner. All right, let's get into it. I'm Pat Walls. And this is Starter Story. Welcome. Said is great to have you. Tell me about who you are in this business that you built. My name is Said. I'm a software engineer, chat GPT extension that I built. It's called Superpower Chat GPT. It's a browser extension, basically that adds a bunch of extra feature to chat GPT. I started this about a year and a half ago. And today it's at about like $20,000 to $30,000 MRR. I'm the only person who's been working on the extension. It has been downloaded close to like, I think 260 70,000 times weekly active users for the extension is around like 150,000. Okay, so you built a Chrome extension to over $20,000 a month. What do you think is the best strategy for someone to do something similar? Two ways I'm thinking about this either building for an existing really big platform like Gmail, for example, or like Roblox, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, they already have all these users. All you need to do is to just build the extension and those users will find you. Twitter had like hundreds of millions of users. And if only like 2000 people wanted features, that's like a good amount of like revenue for you to just live off of. The other thing I recommend is going after platforms that have like an existing marketplace, but a smaller user base, zoom or Salesforce, it's a lot easier to compete in a marketplace like that. They have less number of users. But at the same time, they have less number of people building for those platforms. So that's another good place to build some product. Let's talk about the opportunity of building plugins in marketplaces. What makes this better than launching a traditional SaaS that has its own website? Most people when they want to start a project, they're just thinking about something like a standalone platform, like a website that has all of its own backend and front and then everything. But competing with like everyone on the internet is a lot harder than competing with like a limited number of players in a smaller like marketplace. And it also helps a lot with validating the product. Like it's a lot easier to build like a simple extension that runs on a user browser. That way you can at least know if the idea is going to work out or not. And if it's worth like spending more time on it. Got it. So building for an existing marketplace is a lot faster. It's less crowded and it's a lot easier to validate your idea. Can you tell us how to actually come up with an idea for a marketplace platform? When chat.gpt was launched, I already had some ideas, web features missing. And initially, when I was building these features, I was mainly building the extension for myself. And later, I tried to refine the places that my users will hang out. Soberedits are one of them, Discord channels or other one, site groups is another one, Facebook group is another one. I just like joined all these groups. And I started listening to people and trying to figure out what features other people want to see in chat. I think this is probably one of the best way to like come up with idea just go where your potential customers hanging out and see what they are asking for and just try to build that. And this was actually one of my probably biggest like growth hack that I applied to this extension, just listening to people what they want, trying to implement the feature and then going back and telling them that, okay, I added this feature, you can use this extension and have that feature as part of the chat gpt interface. Said is the perfect example of a crafty internet builder. He finds his ideas by spending time researching, researching in communities, researching through his own problems and frustrations. And most importantly, researching other businesses to see if he could build something better. Now, what if there was an easier way to shortcut all of this research? Well, that's why we made this solo developer deep dive. It breaks down 50 different solo developer business ideas, including their business models, their customer profiles, the platform they built on, and a whole bunch of other cool stuff you'd want to know. So if you're actually serious about building a profitable side project like Said, head to the first link in the description. And I'm going to give you the deep dive of 50 developer ideas for free. And hopefully it helps you find your own idea. Now, let's get back to Said. Okay, so we know where to build and what to build. But what about how to build it? What kind of experiences or coding languages do you need to learn? If you know how to build a simple website, you will know how to build like an extension JavaScript, HTML, CSS. That's how I built the very first version. It was very, very simple, only had like two features, basically. But actually, I have never built any browser extension before I had learned how to build an extension and launched my first extension within like two or three days, basically, after chat, GPT was launched. So I'm not saying like every like, simple project could work timing is really important here. I will really, really early. Okay, so you can find build and launch a product pretty quickly. But how do you actually get users or eyeballs on your product? I have not done any ads or anything for the extension. And all of it happened organically by word of mouth, or by me, like, posting on like different platforms, like, I think the very first place that I posted it was on Reddit. I think it went like to the top of that subreddit that I posted for that day. But at the same time, like just people who like are on social media, I started writing reviews about like top like 10 chat GPT extension, for example, and my extension, well, had those features basically. So I didn't write them, I didn't pay for them to be written, I've never like actually paid anyone to write any article. It was all organic. People started finding it started using it. They liked the idea. They liked the features and started sharing those ideas with their audience. And that helped them when the tax year ends on the 5th of April, valuable tax allowances may be lost simply because people left things too late. Thankfully, Vanguard is here to help you make well considered decisions, not rushed ones. Their tax year end hub is full of clear guidance, helpful tools and timely reminders to help you understand your allowances and give your investments the best chance to grow. Search Vanguard investor to learn more when investing, your capital is at risk, tax rules apply. Wow, so you didn't spend any money on marketing. Yeah, clearly being early helped a lot, but I think what stands out is that people basically started marketing your plugin for you because you built a really great product. Are there any other early opportunities that someone watching this could take advantage of right now? And how can you build standout products in those niches? AI is really powerful, but it's still very early in doctors, maybe I'm not thinking about like bringing AI into their job that if you do, there are a lot of like opportunities there. One of my favorite things to talk to my users and every time I talk to any users, I try to learn as much as I can about them, what they do, what's their background and how they use chat gpt. Learning about all as a lawyer is using chat gpt to make their job easier or a doctor is using chat gpt to make their job easier. It's one of the best ways to come up with new ideas and build new product for people who don't directly use AI. Okay, let's talk about monetization. We know how to build it and how to get users, but how did you actually make your first dollar? First nine months or so, the extension was completely free. Like every feature of the extension was 100% free. If you ask me today, I think I should have like monetized the extension earlier, but at the same time, I do feel like it helped a lot with like growing my user base. So I wanted to capture that audience and I started writing a newsletter basically for like the user base that I had. And this is like three or four months after I started the extension. I also posted my newsletter on some of the website that like you can get a sponsor for like within a like week or two, I had like my first sponsor paying me like a few hundred dollars to just post or add on the newsletter basically. When I first started writing the newsletter, it would take me like maybe six or seven hours every day. Now it tastes like maybe two hours or so to write a newsletter. Wow. So you took a pretty unconventional route and started making money from the newsletter first, but how did you monetize the actual Chrome extension? After like that, like first nine or 10 months, I started to think about new features that I can add to the extension and ask people to pay for those extra features basically. So I didn't ask anyone to pay for any existing features that the extension had and all of those features just stayed free. And I tried like different pricing, like I experimented at like higher price, lower price, and I like kind of found like a middle grounder that I think was the best way to price the extension. So what are the coding languages, tools, and software you use to build as a solarpreneur? I spent most of my time inside VS Code. It's a code editor. That's where I write all of my code for all of my projects. When I was building the extension, I went back to like pure JavaScript with no frameworks. I used AWS for all of my backends. All of my projects basically live on like AWS. For like the newsletter, I use Beehive. One of the nice thing about Beehive is like their monetization features. They actually they have this thing called Boost. You can just like include some links in your newsletter and make money from it. I use passion fruits. That's where people find me and reach out to me to sponsor the newsletter. All right, before we wrap things up, I want to talk a bit about a controversial topic in the AI space. You know, you built this product to over $20,000 a month, but it's a chat GPT wrapper, right? Is there any downside to this? And do you worry about this at all? I can tell this product any day. I've been scared of that for a very long time. And at this one, I kind of feel numb to it. I don't want to like worry about it today. Literally, if my extension stopped working at some point, I probably going to try and build other extension. They're one of these other major platforms, which is going to make my life a lot harder. All right, Saeed, final question. What advice would you have to someone just starting out who wants to build their own software business or plug in inside of a marketplace? Try to validate the project as fast as you can. Just build a very first version and launch it and see if you get some users from it. Try to do that. And the other thing I mentioned this earlier, focus on your strengths. In my case, it was building a product, sharing it with people for free and like getting my first few users from that. So those two things are the most important thing, in my opinion. Yo, guys, I really hope you enjoyed the video and got some hopefully good tips and golden nuggets from Saeed. But I want to say something real quick. At the end of the day, the point of these videos is to show you ideas and show you it's possible. But hopefully you take these ideas and go start your own profitable thing in your own successful business. While learning this stuff is important, taking action is the thing that's actually going to change your life. So spend time researching, learning, finding ideas, but then go build that thing as fast as you can. If you're still feeling a little lost on this right now, well, click the first link in the description and you're going to get our free report of solo developer ideas that are actually making money right now so you can get going on your thing. Much love and I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.
