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SiteGPT

Born as a Side Feature of a Notion Blog Tool — How Two Brothers in India Built SiteGPT in Two Weeks, Survived a Self-Imposed Signup Freeze, and Climbed Back to $13K/Month

A chatbot Bhanu Teja Pachipulusu built to handle support for his earlier product, Feather, became a standalone SaaS. His brother Sai Dheeraj joined as co-founder. After a self-imposed signup freeze roughly halved MRR, a fleet of free SEO tools helped it recover to $13K MRR, 130+ paying businesses, and $500K+ in cumulative revenue.

Published: Sep 10, 20263 min readPrimary-source verified · 6
Monthly (est.)
$13k/mo
Users
130
Launched
2023
Bhanu Teja PBhanu Teja P@pbteja1998Born as a Side Feature of a Notion Blog Tool — How Two Brothers in India Built SiteGPT in Two Weeks, Survived a Self-Imposed Signup Freeze, and Climbed Back to $13K/Month

Key takeaways

  • Spin off a side feature built for an existing product's support into its own standalone product
  • Skip building an audience from zero — use an existing product's customers (~100 of them) as your first users and feedback source
  • Bring in a trusted family member as co-founder once solo operations hit their limit

The pain point, and how they found it

Small businesses want to answer visitor questions instantly, but hiring dedicated support staff is expensive. Most settle for a static FAQ page that still can't answer what a visitor actually wants to know in the moment. SiteGPT solves this by pointing at a site's URL, having AI ingest the content, and turning it into a 24/7 chatbot — hitting the pain point of getting instant answers without hiring anyone.

Background & product

SiteGPT lets a business train an AI chatbot on its own website or documents so it can answer visitor questions on the spot. Point it at a URL and the AI scans the site's content; it also accepts uploaded files or pasted raw text. It supports 95+ languages and lets businesses customize the chatbot's look with their own logo and brand colors.

It was built by Bhanu Teja Pachipulusu, from Andhra Pradesh, India. After eight months as a software engineer at food-delivery giant Swiggy, he quit, moved back in with his parents to cut expenses, and started building as an indie hacker. His first product was Feather, a tool that turns Notion pages into a blog. He grew it to $6,000 MRR over 15 months and sold it for $250,000 — about 3.5x ARR.

SiteGPT was a byproduct of Feather. In early 2023, as AI tools flooded his Twitter feed, Bhanu spent a weekend experimenting. He had roughly 100 Feather customers, all of whom ran blogs — so he asked whether he could build a chatbot to answer questions about that content. From idea to launch took just two weeks. He posted to Show HN and Product Hunt almost back to back, hitting #1 Product of the Day with nearly 900 upvotes.

For the first four months Bhanu ran everything alone — building, support, sales. Then his brother Sai Dheeraj Pachipulusu left his own full-time job to join as co-founder. Since then the two brothers have run SiteGPT with zero outside funding and zero employees.

Pricing

Monthly billing: Starter $59 / Growth $129 / Scale $429 (drops to an effective $39 / $79 / $259 per month when billed annually), plus a custom-quote Enterprise tier. Removing SiteGPT branding or adding 5,000 extra messages are each +$59/month add-ons. A 7-day free trial is offered.

Based in: India

From the founder (primary source)

Bhanu Teja P
Bhanu Teja P
@pbteja1998
·

I didn’t expect my elder brother to publicly tweet about me 😀 I should have really achieved something great today… It’s definitely a first for me. Thank you @saidheeraj_96 for always being there for me through out everything… …and it’s awesome to be able to continue this Show more

Sai Dheeraj Pachipulusu
Sai Dheeraj Pachipulusu
@saidheeraj_96

Congratulations @pbteja1998 and @tibo_maker 🥳🎉. Bhanu, being your brother, I had the privilege to witness your journey from the front seat right from the moment you had quit your job. If I look into the past, I could clearly remember why and how you had quit your job, how many

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SiteGPT growth channels and tech stack

How it was built

  1. Spin out the side feature you built to support an existing product — all ~100 customers of the previous product Feather (sold for $250K) had blogs, which prompted the idea of a chatbot that answers questions about that content
  2. Launch just two weeks after the idea
  3. Remove all setup friction — hand over a URL and AI scans the site, with file upload and raw text paste also supported
  4. Support over 95 languages and let the chatbot's appearance be customized with brand colors and a logo
  5. Bring in family you trust as co-founder at the moment solo development hits its limit — after four months alone, his brother quit a salaried job to join
  6. Price in three annual tiers at $39, $79 and $259 plus add-ons (removing branding and extra message quota at +$59/month) to raise the average
Time to first release
14 days

How it got users

  1. Don't build an audience from zero — use the roughly 100 customers of the previous product as the first users and feedback source
  2. Post to Show HN and Product Hunt at nearly the same time, taking Product of the Day with just under 900 upvotes for initial momentum
  3. Practice engineering as marketing — publish over 50 free tools practitioners search for on your own site: XML sitemap generation, meta tag checking, URL extraction, sitemap splitting and merging, AI FAQ generation
  4. Let each tool rank on Google in its own right so the developers, marketers and small businesses who come to use it discover the main product — creating traffic by building something valuable rather than buying awareness
  5. When growth stalls, shift resources to churn rather than acquisition — closing new signups for about three months at the end of 2024 dropped MRR to $8,200, but focusing on retention pushed churn to its lowest ever
  6. Keep publishing monthly revenue, costs and churn on X, compounding trust and the effects of building in public
First users
The roughly 100 existing customers of the previous product Feather, all of whom had blogs
Early ad spend
Almost no reliance on paid advertising — SEO traffic from 50+ free tools carries acquisition

The repeatable playbook

  1. 1Spin off a side feature built for an existing product's support into its own standalone product
  2. 2Skip building an audience from zero — use an existing product's customers (~100 of them) as your first users and feedback source
  3. 3Bring in a trusted family member as co-founder once solo operations hit their limit
  4. 4Turn 50+ free tools (sitemap generators, meta-tag checkers, etc.) into a Google-search acquisition engine (engineering as marketing)
  5. 5When growth stalls, redirect resources to cutting churn rather than chasing new acquisition
  6. 6Keep publishing monthly revenue, expenses, and churn on X to build trust and compound the build-in-public effect

Channels they actually used

The hard parts

In late 2024, Bhanu deliberately paused new signups for roughly three months, and MRR fell to $8,200 by January 2025 (the reason isn't stated in his own public posts). Rather than chase new signups to recover, he redirected resources to cutting churn, and by August 2025 churn was under 5% with 8% month-over-month MRR growth. This isn't a straight-line growth story — it dipped before it recovered, and we're noting that plainly.

Deep dive

【Deep dive】We break down, from five angles, how a two-brother team with zero outside funding and essentially zero ad spend grew SiteGPT to roughly $13,000/month — through a dip, not a straight line.

Engineering as marketing: 50+ free tools as “advertising you build”

SiteGPT relies on almost no paid ads. Instead it publishes 50+ free tools on its own site — an XML sitemap generator, meta-tag checker, URL extractor, sitemap splitter/merger, an AI FAQ generator, and more — the kind of utilities developers, marketers, and small business owners actually search for. Each tool ranks on its own in Google, and visitors who land on them discover SiteGPT itself as a side effect. Rather than buying attention with ad spend, the founders built useful things and let SEO traffic accumulate.

Why they froze signups on purpose — choosing to cut churn before chasing growth

In late 2024, Bhanu made the call to pause new signups for about three months. The exact reason isn't stated in public sources, but the effect was that MRR drifted down as new inflow stopped, hitting $8,200 by January 2025. Many founders would have poured resources into new acquisition at that point; instead, Bhanu focused on how long he could retain existing customers. In his own August 2025 monthly update, he reported churn at its lowest level yet, with MRR growth back up to 8% that month.

Pricing: three annual tiers from $39–$259 plus add-ons

Current pricing is Starter $59, Growth $129, and Scale $429 billed monthly — dropping to an effective $39, $79, and $259/month when billed annually (plus a custom-quote Enterprise tier). Removing SiteGPT branding or adding 5,000 extra messages are each +$59/month add-ons. With 130+ paying customers averaging roughly $100/month, a meaningful share appear to sit above the Starter tier.

Co-founding with a brother as risk management — filling solo's limits with family trust

For the first four months, Bhanu handled development, support, and billing entirely alone. As solo operations neared their limit, his brother Sai Dheeraj Pachipulusu left his own full-time job to join as co-founder. Turning to someone who already knew the business and could be trusted, rather than hiring a stranger, made sense for staying bootstrapped and lean.

Reading the range of numbers — why ARR estimates span $190K–$300K

SiteGPT's reported revenue varies by source and date. Several independent outlets from early/mid 2026 (SQ Magazine, Superframeworks, NexusBlog, among others) converge on about $13,000 MRR, roughly $300,000 ARR, and 130+ paying customers — consistent with data aggregator getlatka's 2024 estimate of ~$300K ARR — while a separate breakdown (FounderSpec) puts ARR at $190,000. This article adopts the ~$13,000 MRR figure most sources agree on for mrrUsd, and reports the ARR discrepancy alongside it rather than picking just one.

FAQ

How much does SiteGPT cost?
Monthly billing runs $59–$429, or an effective $39–$259/month when billed annually, plus a custom-quote Enterprise tier (per the official site and multiple independent sources as of 2026).
What country is SiteGPT built in?
It's run by brothers Bhanu Teja Pachipulusu and Sai Dheeraj Pachipulusu, from Andhra Pradesh, India, with no outside funding and no employees.

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