How I Built a $10,000/Month AI Startup Without Any Investors (Zero Burn) ft. Anas Shaikh | TBT

Want to be a guest on Thought Behind Things? Apply here: https://muzamilhasan.com/podcast/apply Anas's startup: https://conviyo.io Anas's LinkedIn:   / anasshaikh   Join the Inner Circle, my weekly letter on AI, building, and being early to what's coming: https://muzamilhasan.com/inner-circle... Read the thesis, the one idea behind everything I'm building: https://muzamilhasan.com/thesis My website: https://muzamilhasan.com I talk with Anas Shaikh, who runs a one-person AI startup that puts an AI agent on WhatsApp and other chats so restaurants and other businesses can answer their customers. He reached about $10,000 MRR with zero burn. His team used up about $5,000 of Google credits in two months and found that one conversation cost $5.80. They cut it to 7 cents. We also talk about what happened when Meta started charging for WhatsApp service messages. Web chat was meant to avoid the fee, but on one restaurant chain 54% of customers who wrote on WhatsApp never opened the web chat link. So Anas moved to WhatsApp Flows, where customers stay inside WhatsApp. If you want to see how a lean AI startup in Pakistan is built, changed and grown, this is worth your time. Blink, the restaurant ordering platform in Pakistan: https://www.blinkco.io Timestamps: 0:00 Intro: AI series and meet Anas Shaikh 2:11 Anas's career: from Dream Resort to startups 5:42 Learning AI with n8n and building the first agent 8:52 First restaurant clients and moving to a proper build 11:29 Lessons: anyone can build, mentors and fractional experts 14:11 Distribution has become cheap, and the partner network 16:51 Zero burn and cutting the cost per conversation 20:22 How the AI agent works for restaurants 26:04 Meta's WhatsApp pricing and the web chat workaround 28:44 Beyond restaurants: clinics, bookings and self-serve signup 32:16 Pricing, margins and focusing on tier-one brands 35:19 Why web chat added friction and the WhatsApp Flows solution 39:43 SaaS margins, working closely with customers and how to sign up Instagram:   / muzamilhasan   LinkedIn:   / muzamilhasan