The first killer horizontal Gen AI use case 📈 It has been incredible to follow the initial MRR traction of AI code gen tools in 2024: ➡️ Cursor.com grew from under $100K in MRR to over $5M in MRR in less than 12 months. ➡️ Bolt.new reached $1.7M in MRR just 8 weeks after its public launch. ➡️ Lovable.dev hit $340K in MRR within 4 weeks of its public launch. One of the big unlocks in 2024 for many code gen startups? Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet model. As Eric Simons, CEO & Co-founder of Bolt.new, put it: “There’s an order of magnitude difference in the LLM’s required infrastructure to make it functional versus zero-shot. Claude 3.5 Sonnet is the enabling technology that made this product possible, period.” AI-powered coding tools could rival historical platform shifts in productivity and cost efficiency: from workstation to PC, client-server to cloud, and web to mobile. Each of these transitions required significant IT architecture changes, but they ultimately expanded the reach and capabilities of software applications. Fun fact: Lovable is Swedish, and one of Cursor's co-founders is also Swedish 🇸🇪 Once again, the Nordics are punching above their weight. Exciting times ahead! (Note: very much aware that it's still early for many of these AI code gen tools and it's difficult to extrapolate any truly recurring numbers yet when it's e.g. impossible to understand churn) #artificialintelligence #startups #growth
I’m Swedish, too (by ancestry, haha, lived in the US my whole life) and built https://ottov2.com, which is basically a Devin, but with ambitions of being more of a software team / eng org in a box! Otto V2 is the successor of https://Otto.engineer, which is a Bolt that I launched months before Bolt in March of 2024
Cursor was smart to fork VS Code, this is probably the single most impactful choice it made, since almost every dev I know uses VS Code at least some of the time. And learning a new IDE is not trivial.
Curious about the full potential of large language models? Check out our latest blog: What Can Large Language Models Achieve? to explore how LLMs are driving innovation and transforming various sectors. https://www.cohorte.co/blog/what-can-large-language-models-achieve
Does anyone know of successful products that were created using some of these tools?
These products are truly useful! Still causing a lot of problems but if you know what you're doing then they're like magic.
Hold on. Should we not be valuing these businesses like the Grocery delivery companies or D2C? Every action on these apps costs the vendor tokens. Does that not leave the gross margin a lot thinner than a SaaS app?
The pricing for both Bolt & Cursor is actually not that bad either. Cursor costs $20 a month and its very reasonable given how much value it provides. They nailed the pricing.
They are most definitely losing money right now and they may not even survive, but AI Code editors as a category are not going away.
Cool. But let's all agree to use Ollama and Eclipse Theia or Gitpod not promote blatant forks of ide or extensions for the sake of profit
Anti-AI Hype | Tech BS Detector | Saving Companies From Themselves | CEO @DataXLR8
2dLet me translate these AI coding tool numbers into market reality: Sure, the MRR looks sexy: • Cursor: $5M MRR • Bolt: $1.7M MRR • Lovable: $340K MRR But let's talk about what's not mentioned: • Customer acquisition costs • Churn rates • Infrastructure expenses • Long-term retention The real metrics that matter: • How many customers stay after 6 months? • What's the actual cost per customer? • What's the infrastructure burn rate? • What happens when Claude pricing changes? Building on someone else's AI: • Their pricing = Your margins • Their changes = Your emergencies • Their decisions = Your business risk • Their model = Your dependency Remember: • GitHub Copilot exists • VSCode is free • Amazon/Google coming • Microsoft owns GitHub 2025 prediction: • 50% will die from cost structure • 30% will get acquired for tech • 19% will pivot • 1% might survive (From someone who's seen this movie before - remember all those chatbot startups?) #AIReality #TechTruth #NoBS Edit: AI coding tool founders mad in my DMs. Show me your 12-month retention first.