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I’m always hearing people say “no-code can’t scale, it’s only good for MVPs”.
That’s simply wrong - there are many examples of massive apps built with no-code. The problem is most of the bigger apps are shy about admitting they’re built without code!
Thankfully, Alex Rainey, co-founder of MyAskAI, is proud of the fact they’ve built their AI customer service product entirely on Bubble.
In just 18 months, Alex and his co-founder have reached $39k monthly recurring revenue and handle 75,000 monthly conversations through their system.
In the interview we talk about:
- The evolution of the idea and product
- The pivot that changed everything
- Scaling with Bubble
- How they’ve grown so fast
The story of MyAskAI
“Every time we've kind of pushed Bubble we’ve been like ‘we can actually achieve this with Bubble’. We’ve been pretty amazed by that.” - Alex Rainey
From Consultant to AI Founder with No Code
Alex Rainey started at Accenture as a technology consultant, moved into travel startups, and eventually found his way to building AI tools with no code. Now, his company My Ask AI handles 75,000 customer service conversations monthly and is at $39K monthly recurring revenue - and it’s built primarily with Bubble.
Here's Alex on how he did it. 👇
A Winding Path to AI
"First point of my career was at Accenture. So technology consultant, started to learn about product and technology, but not on the kind of nitty, gritty hands on level."
After six years as a consultant, Alex founded a travel insurance and planning startup. When the pandemic hit, he pivoted to building and selling micro-SaaS products on acquire.com, which gave him the capital to explore new ideas.
The AI Pivot
"GPT-3 comes out... And that's all we can think about. That's all we want to try and work on, surely the same as every builder who didn't have a project at that time."
Alex and his co-founder Mike initially built a university writing application using GPT-3. They quickly realized fine-tuning the model gave much better results.
Around that time they decided selling to consumers was too difficult, so they pivoted to a “chat with your data” style app.
Finding Their Niche
"We made the decision to to kind of niche down... We said to ourselves, What is a really great fit for this technology? Where can we show some real gains?"
After hitting a plateau at $10K MRR with their chat-with-your-data product, they analyzed their customer base and found that 60-70% of their revenue came from customer support use cases. This led to their current focus on AI customer service for SaaS companies.
Scaling with No Code
"80% of our app, including the back end, and everything runs completely off Bubble, which I think a lot of people find quite surprising."
Despite handling thousands of conversations daily, they've managed to stay on Bubble by optimizing their infrastructure and moving to an Enterprise plan. They reduced their CPU usage by 70-80% through careful optimisation.
"We work very hard to try and automate," Alex explains. As a two-person team, they've built internal tools to keep operations lean rather than hiring more people.
Growth Through Integration
My Ask AI now integrates deeply with platforms like Intercom and Zendesk, allowing them to be "the AI layer that replaces whatever AI feature that the native provider offers."
Their growth comes primarily through:
- Web presence and SEO
- Integration marketplace listings
- Word of mouth from successful customers
What's Next
Alex and Mike continue to focus on rapid execution and customer service innovation. "We try to move exceptionally quickly," Alex says. "We pride ourselves on probably being one of the fastest in the space in terms of standing up new integrations and launching new features.”
My takeaways from the conversation with Alex:
1/ I’d always assumed they’d hit massive success on their first try. But MyAskAI wasn’t their first rodeo. They’d pivoted a couple of times to get there. Don’t be afraid to pivot.
2/ They jumped on emerging technology quickly. Even though their first product wasn’t a huge success, it was their continual experimentation with AI capabilities which led to them finding their current product idea.
3/ They got serious traction when they niched down. Before that they’d been a “something for everyone” product. But when they focused on customer support, their growth went crazy.
4/ They’re doing a hard thing. Customer support is the kind of product where if your app goes down for a short time, you’ll have lots of customers breathing down your neck. This is a stressful business to be in, but Alex and Mike decided to go this route and it’s working well for them.
5/ No-code does indeed scale if the app is well-built. And it’s always possible to do optimisations further down the road.
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