How This Solo Founder Built an AI Tool Raking in $5,000/Month in 10 Days

Introduction: From Stress to Side Project

When his work visa situation in Sweden suddenly looked uncertain, Argentinian product designer Fernando Pessagno turned to coding to calm his mind. He set himself a simple goal: build and ship something in 10 days. His only rule was to post updates publicly on X and YouTube. He had no grand business plan—just an itch to stay busy and creative.

Spotting a Real Pain Point

Fernando noticed carousel posts gaining traction on LinkedIn, yet creating polished slides takes serious time, layout tweaks, and color pairing. Even experienced designers wrestle with auto-resizing text and matching fonts. That friction sparked an idea: what if he built a tool that handled all those tedious details automatically?

Building the Minimal Viable Product

He skipped fancy frameworks and leaned on plain code combined with Outseta for authentication, billing, and support. Over ten full days, he:

• Sketched a clean UI with carousel navigation and editable slides.
• Coded auto-resize logic so text never overflows a frame.
• Packaged color palettes and font pairings into templates.
• Launched an AI content generator that drafts slide copy in seconds.

By day ten, aiCarousels.com was live. He posted the Product Hunt link, braced for competition, and crossed his fingers.

Launching and Validating on Product Hunt

The tool swept onto the Product Hunt homepage at #9, earning 154 upvotes, 64 comments, and seven glowing 5/5 reviews. More importantly, five users converted to paid plans on day one, adding $50 in MRR. That early traction proved there was real demand, and people would pay to save hours on design.

Growing Through Personal Touch and SEO

Fernando’s secret sauce wasn’t a secret. He responded to every support ticket within hours, polished features based on feedback, and followed customers on LinkedIn, celebrating their wins. Weekly update emails in his friendly tone kept users engaged and confident that fixes were coming.

As the first mover in AI-powered carousel creation, aiCarousels attracted backlinks from blogs and newsletters, boosting its SEO. Medium posts racked up nearly 20,000 views, and YouTube build logs brought in curious founders and designers.

Results So Far

In just six months, aiCarousels zoomed past its $2,500 monthly goal and now hits $5,000 MRR with a 95% profit margin. What began as a stress-relief project has become a lean, profitable SaaS business with room to evolve into a full personal-branding suite.

Key Strategies to Watch

• Validating ideas quickly with a minimal build.
• Automating the time-sucking bits of design.
• Using Product Hunt launch to test willingness to pay.
• Providing hands-on, rapid customer support.
• Leveraging first-mover AI advantage to drive SEO.
• Documenting the build publicly to build trust and audience.

Fernando is now considering a partner visa in Sweden and weighing whether to sell one of his tools to focus fully on aiCarousels. With demand rising for personal branding content, this little 10-day sprint has set the stage for a far bigger SaaS adventure.