Bootstrapping a Generative AI Venture Using Services: Abhinav Girdhar, Founder CEO of Appy Pie (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk about the pricing strategy?

Abhinav Girdhar: We strategize in terms of what value we are adding to the platform. So we started as an app builder, later on we started offering a free website with an app. So when you create an app you also get a website.

We started throwing in a free domain, so you can now hook a domain with your website and then you had an app. Then we partnered up with Google, and we started giving a Google workspace account. As we started adding in a lot of value, we started increasing the pricing as well.

Sramana Mitra: You started with $7 a month. When you added in the website and the domain what kind of price point did that take you up to?

Abhinav Girdhar: The platinum plan in which we offer all these freebies is for $120 a month.

Sramana Mitra: In this time frame that you’re describing when you kind of re-found your footing, what levels of customers are we talking about? Thousands of customers or tens of thousands of customers?

Abhinav Girdhar: Tens of thousands of customers paying customers.

Sramana Mitra: What’s the next major strategic point in the evolution of the company?

Abhinav Girdhar: From a company perspective, we have a lot of paying customers at the moment, and we are growing pretty rapidly. We had started as a single product SaaS company and have evolved into a multi-product SaaS company. We have three products that we operate in right now. The first one is the Appy Pie Build product that is primarily focused on mobile apps and websites.

We have a second product called Appy Pie Design, which is AI-driven. We have an AI video generator, AI animation generator, AI music generator, AI voice generator in this Design product. You can create your banners, business cards, brochures, and reels using it.

Sramana Mitra: What is in the back end of that? What technology is that?

Abhinav Girdhar: We have a lot of data scientists right now who are working on different AI models. We are researching and evolving models. We use a lot of stable diffusion from an image perspective, and then we are training different models and evolving it.

Sramana Mitra: It must be built on some existing model, right? Is it an Open AI, ChatGPT model or what? Where are you taking the Generative AI from?

Abhinav Girdhar: Open AI has multiple models. DALL E is their image generation model. We also support DALL E. If a customer wants to use DALL E, they can definitely use it on our platform, but we have created our own propriety diffusion model. We have trained it and then you can create text to images using that as well.

We’ve partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS). We are training huge chunks of data on AWS and our teams are collaborating to create these different diffusion models.

Sramana Mitra: And at what price point do you sell the Design product?

Abhinav Girdhar: It’s an 18 month old product. We started with the $8 per month pricing and we’re competing with something like Canva. It’s already crossed the $1M ARR in less than a year itself.

Sramana Mitra: You said there is another product?

Abhinav Girdhar: The third product is called Automate. It is for businesses that wish to automate their processes. For example, you wish to integrate two apps. Say, half of your company is using Slack and half of your company is using MS Teams. If you want to integrate MS Teams with Slack, we can do that for you using Automate.

It could be any vertical. For example, whenever you get a WhatsApp message, you want to send a phone call or a trigger-based action, similar to what Zapier does. I’m not sure if you’ve heard about zapier?

Sramana Mitra: Yes. So, its an API level integration platform.

Abhinav Girdhar: It’s API integration, but we call it a workflow automation platform.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping a Generative AI Venture Using Services: Abhinav Girdhar, Founder CEO of Appy Pie
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