Chatbase's $3M marketing engine

Chatbase is a SaaS to add a custom ChatGPT for your website (mostly for sales, customer support, marketing.) made by Yasser Elsaid.

In February 2024 alone, they got:

• February 2024 revenue: $250k/mo 🤩 

• ~680k website traffic per month

That’s some crazy stats for a project like this (as someone would call it “another CRUD AI wrapper”).

Even Yasser himself said this in a Reddit post reply (to someone who don’t understand why Chatbase is so successful):

To understand Chatbase’s success, we can’t avoid talking about marketing.

Now let’s breakdown their marketing game.

TL;DR

1. Find a really good idea with hype. Build it. Ride on the hype.

2. Build in public (Twitter/Reddit/Indie Hackers).

3. Run ads.

4. SEO.

Channel 1: Twitter/X (some luck required)

Everything about Chatbase starts from this post which Yasser published on Feb 2023:

Yasser is one of the first person to build these “Custom ChatGPT chatbot on your website” tool, shortly after OpenAI released the API access to GPT.

He quickly noticed this hype and build Chatbase.

After posting this demo, his post went viral with 739k views. It brought an estimated 50k+ website traffic in a few days.

But before that, he had been active on Twitter for couple months building different iteration of Chatbase. It wasn’t an overnight success.

It’s the magic of 3 things together: Twitter personal brand + build in public + working on the right path.

Channel 2: Google Ads (especially search)

When people want an AI chatbot on their website, what do they do?

Search “AI chatbot”.

Chatbase obviously spent a lot of budget buying these keywords.

It justifies a high spending because their lifetime value should be pretty high. Their plan range from $19/mo to $399/mo, along with a low churn, the paid ads could be very scalable.

They don’t need to work on complicated creatives for search ads as well. Just write good and clear copy (and pay the money.)

Channel 3: Meta Ads

They are also actively running Meta ad campaign.

Their ad creative is also fairly simple: image ads with a normal copy. No fancy stuff.

They are likely doing retargeting campaign to show ads to people who visited their website but didn’t buy.

Channel 4: Influencer coverage

In the AI space, there’s a lot of influencer.

If you can get a shoutout from a popular influencer, it could easily mean 10k website traffic in an hour.

This is what happened to Chatbase:

Shortly after their Twitter viral post, an influencer wrote a Twitter thread about Chatbase.

This thread had 588k views, and again brought tons of traffic to Chatbase.

They invested in Youtube influencer content as well, which also had some good traffic:

These are likely paid influencer content, which cost anywhere between $200 to $500 per post/video.

Channel 5: SEO

Since people search for AI chatbot on Google, it naturally makes sense to do SEO.

Other than building backlinks, they also have a blog session where they write SEO blogs related to topics like AI and chatbot.

They also write guest post on big website like Zapier to get do follow backlink from these credible websites:

Channel 6: Cold emails?

Since cold email is invisible so we have no information on whether they are doing that, but to me it makes perfect sense since the lifetime value of Chatbase can go very high (their most expensive plan is $3990).

Therefore the ROI of doing cold email campaign is higher than average SaaS with a high churn.

Therefore huge brands like Siemens and Postman are also their customers.

Note: all the above information and data are retrieved from data providers like Semrush and Meta, there could be error and are mostly assumptions.

Thanks for finishing this issue! 😄 

If you like this one, comment what you think to let me know. Share to your friends if you think it’s useful.

I’ll see you in the next issue!

Desmond