Today I want to share a true and exciting cold start story that went something like this:
I was lurking around on YouTube the other day and came across a video by software review blogger LearnWire, THIS NEW AI TOOL CRUSHES. Lovable For App Building (This New AI Tool Crushes Lovable When It Comes to Building APPs)
Nice guy!
Wasn't Lovable a hot open source AI programming tool last year? It went live on Github in less than 2 weeks and raised 30,000 Stars and 6.8 million euros in its Pre-seed round. And it's been crushed? Take a look--
Ooh, it's not Trickle What? - I don't know.
The video also features the blogger waxing lyrical about Trickle:
"Trickle is an up-and-coming platform, and no one knows about the product, but it's actually easier to use than other tools in its category, and it's on par with the big names."
"The AI tool I paid for is not as good as what Trickle's free version generates."
...
Who's Trickle?
Our old friends, last year in Product Hunt hit the list of full harvest they also came to share the mental journey: "Listed that is cash! How Chinese teams can pry natural traffic to realize overseas cold launch?Product Hunt Featured 21".
I didn't realize Trickle has changed from "AI screenshot tool" to "AI APP building tool", so I contacted Jarod, the founder of Trickle, to have a chat with him.
This conversation got high!
The numbers speak for themselves. Trickle has been online for just one month and has already achieved a 5-digit MRR with zero marketing spend, and has gone viral twice in overseas social media, with one of its Reddit posts surpassing a million views in just 48 hours!
(Yes, the previous blogger is a self-made man, just like me 🤣)
With Jarod's permission, couldn't resist sharing this amazing transformation story with you!
Trickle's Transformation Story - The Third Wheel
After the small success of AI screenshot tool last year, Jarod wants to build more AI applications, and has a lot of internal product ideas waiting to be developed. What's different this time is that Jarod decided to "build a wheel" first, because it was too inefficient to rely on engineers to rub their hands one by one.
(Prior to that, the team built two "wheels", a tool for visualizing the configuration of AI Agents and an enhanced rich text tool like Coda).
Last October, see Claude The coding capability of 3.5 has improved so much that Jarod immediately started to build the third wheel, which is the prototype of the current product form - it can generate applications directly through Prompt end-to-end, solving the coding + hosting problems at once.
Originally, the team wasn't a fan of low/no-code tools per se, thinking that the average person might not have much need to build apps, but this "third wheel" changed Jarod's mind: it's not that there wasn't a demand for them, it's just that the barriers weren't low enough for them to build apps even though the previous product claimed to be no-code!
After the birth of the "third wheel", we were surprised to find that many colleagues in the team were actively using it, no matter front-end or designers, and even finance students built a mobile application with it! This also made Jarod realize that this is not just a wheel for internal use only, but also a good product opportunity!
Surprise results of the 30-day blitz
Productization! Say it and do it!
The first version of the product was finally completed on December 18th, after the excited team had stayed up all night for the nth time, but at that point Jarod could never have imagined how many "surprises and scares" they would experience over the next month.
Day 1: Sprinting to #1 on Product Hunt's Daily Chart
One of the most important lessons learned from working on overseas products is not to "hold back", but to go live as soon as possible and get feedback from customers, which Jarod, a veteran driver, naturally understands very well. Time is also very tight - on December 25th, a two-week Christmas vacation will start overseas, leaving little time for the Chinese team! Jarod decided to go for a blitzkrieg and launched Product Hunt on the first day of the product launch.
Luckily, the team was well versed in Launch, and it reached #1 on the daily charts on the day of launch.
Launch Day 2: Reddit Explodes, Servers Hang By A Thread
Just as the product concept is to make it easier for more people to make more applications, after the release of the product, the team started the "all hands on deck" mode, and sure enough, there was a blowout!
The game is a minimalist web game that took only an hour to build, and the gameplay involves the user finding a square in a square array of squares that is a different color than the rest, with the difficulty increasing with each level. There's also a global leaderboard in the top left corner of the page.
(For those of you who are sharp-eyed, Donald Trump is currently in first place with more than 30,000 levels, so it looks like you need to play a little game before the inauguration, too 🐶)
The game was posted to Reddit, and it was a huge hit, with over a million views in 48 hours, almost bursting Trickle's servers. Apparently, it also brought a lot of traffic to the product's official website.
Day 9 online: users blocking the door to give money
Trickle's product is subscription-based, with the Pro version priced at $20/month, which includes 120 messages and 3 Trickle-hosted pages. By December 27, the ninth day of the product's release, a large number of hardcore gamers had used up their credits in the Pro version, and many users emailed Trickle asking for additional money to upgrade their packages.
In the face of the happy troubles, facing the users blocking the door to pay money, the R&D students urgently worked overtime to modify the Pricing module, quickly solved a lot of problems with the elevation of the level, and launched the Premium version of $50, and also put on the shelves of the add-on extra gasoline packages, and successfully repaired the "kryptonite without a door" of the major bugs. The major bug of "no door to kryptonite" was successfully fixed.
Day 13: Subproducts again ignite the social media, PH daily charts plum
At the end of the month, the foreigners are on vacation, but the Trickle team is not idle and continues to "work"!
That's when a new app was born: FirstVersion.
It's a nostalgic site with a very simple content that contains the first versions of several super giant companies' websites, such as Google, Twitter, Ebay, Youtube, Airbnb, and many more. Of course, it also contains the first version of Product Hunt when it first launched in 2013.
According to the Cold Food Truth Theorem, FirstVersion sparked a lot of discussion in the social media as soon as it went live, with users at the end of the year burning with nostalgia and even Ryan Hoover, founder of Product Hunt cap (a poem) Product Hunt Official WebsiteAll have taken it upon themselves to retweet "FirstVirsion."
Unsurprisingly, the gadget also got the last daily #1 for the year 2024.
Day 28: Welcoming Friendly "Refugees"
On January 15th, Jarod suddenly realized that a lot of users were migrating their domains and websites from Wix, Webflow, and other large website building platforms to Trickle, which made the team very happy - in most cases, the cost of migrating a website is very high, and the positive migration from the users was a proof that Trickle has made a huge difference to their experience.
Post-game review and reflection
It's actually a cold start story with debuffs stacked on it.
In the month since Trickle's official release, the product has achieved the following:
- 5-figure first month's income
- Paid users paid an average of $35 in the first month, with the largest paying $500+ (along with dozens of hours of his usage)
- UV to Registration 40% Conversion Rate, Registration to Paid 4% Conversion Rate
- Twice #1 on Product Hunt's daily charts
- Color Find, the spin-off trivia game generated by Trickle, exploded on Reddit (millions of views in 48 hours).
- Established users from bolt and Lovable to Trickle, as well as users migrating to Trickle from previous-generation builders like Wix and Webflow.
- The article about the product Use Case on the official website has already achieved SEO effect and started to bring in natural traffic.https://www.trickle.so/blog/viral-game-built-with-trickle
And all of this was achieved with a lot of debuffs stacked at the worst possible point in time:
- Christmas vacation impacted secondary distribution (Newsletter, KOLs were off, pretty much choked off secondary distribution of PH)
- The next day after completing R&D, you're in a hurry to get the UX and onboarding optimized.
- Product Hunt Hit List One Day Ready, Zero Warm-Up
- Zero marketing investment: Due to the lack of preparation and budget, Trickle did not invest in any marketing during this month, and all users came from natural traffic.
There's no doubt that the new Trickle product has taken a solid first step against all odds. The team knows that Trickle still has a lot of work to do, but in the past month, Trickle has accumulated a lot of user feedback and has a clear goal of iterating. On the other hand, after Trickle's initial PMF validation, the next phase of product growth is a top priority, and more resources will be invested in the next step.
I couldn't help but feel emotional after hearing this wonderful story of a cold start:
The core of PLG is really Product, followed by Growth!
Reviewing the product road of his entrepreneurship for many years, Jarod has been thinking about how the new generation of AI products can fully utilize the advantages of AI Native and better provide value to users. The answer is becoming clearer and clearer in this month's "battle":
Problems encountered with traditional tools
Remember how hard it was to build front-end pages a decade ago? It required learning HTML, CSS, or spending a long time mastering WordPress. later, Wix and Webflow made the process a bit easier, but there was still a relatively steep learning curve. Will these tools still be good enough to use in 2025?
Current website building tools, whether it's WordPress, Webflow, or Wix, leave users in a paradox:Products that claim to make building websites easier create new complexities in their use.Firstly, there is the problem of learning costs, and secondly, there is the limitation of creative freedom. These tools are like giving the user a Swiss Army Knife: the functionality is complete, but having to memorize what each blade is for and how to use it rather complicates simple tasks.
Trickle Wants to Change the Web and App Development Paradigm
No one knows their business better than their users, traditional development methods often require constantly explaining one's ideas to designers and developers, and in this process of translation, much detail and vision is often lost.
Trickle hopes to revolutionize this by acting as an all-around teammate that understands business goals and design thinking so well that users don't have to translate their ideas, just express their goals and needs in natural language, and Trickle accurately translates the ideas into reality.
From design conception to code implementation, from database design to business logic development, from UI details to deployment and maintenance, Trickle tries to redefine the website and front-end application development process in a new way. It's no longer about simply dragging and dropping components or applying templates, it's about truly understanding and realizing the business intent.
- Users describe requirements in natural language
- AI understands the user's thoughts and automatically generates code
- Intelligent design system ensures a beautiful website with engaging copy
- Automated database and back-office processing
- One-click website publishing
The time for change is now
When we look at the current approach to web development, an obvious question surfaces: why do we continue to invest so much time in learning and maintaining legacy tools? Each platform, whether it's WordPress, Webflow, or Wix, requires users to master their unique ways of using them, and this knowledge is often not universal. In an age where the speed of creativity and innovation is everything, we shouldn't be wasting our time learning the tools themselves.
Real technological advances should be about lowering the barriers for people to accomplish their goals, not creating new learning burdens.The next-generation AI-driven development paradigm is a revolutionary step in this direction: users express business needs and goals directly in natural language, and AI can deliver quite remarkable results. This is not just an efficiency gain, but a mindset shift. Compared to the traditional approach, theThis paradigm can lead to a 10x or more increase in efficiency. And if users are willing to invest a small amount of time to learn the cue word technique, they can gain an additional 3-4x benefit on top of that.
It's not just about efficiency, it's about how to make technology truly serve users' creative and business goals. A new generation of web development paradigms is redefining the field by allowing us to focus on what matters most: realizing our ideas and goals. Technology shouldn't be a hindrance, it should be an enabler.
Trickle's Slogan also explains their vision well:
Trickle - Your Business Agent
Trickle is an all-in-one platform that enables SMBs, creators, and side business owners to easily build, launch, and manage stunning AI-driven web apps, landing pages, games, forms, and more. landing pages, games, forms, and more.
By the way, their official website is: trickle.so
Go ahead and try it!
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