Octolens: Revenue, team and how it was built
Octolens (AI social listening tool for B2B software companies, Germany): About US$40K net from US$200K of AppSumo sales, December 2024. Evidence grade D: reported, not verified. Team: 2 people: the co-founder and CEO and a founding engineer, in 2024 and still in 2026. Launched May 2024; still running.Added 27 October 2026
- Outcome
- About US$40K net from US$200K of AppSumo sales, December 2024
- Evidence
- D reported, not verified
- Launch
- May 2024
- Status
- Still running
- Team
- 2 people: the co-founder and CEO and a founding engineer, in 2024 and still in 2026
- Outside funding
- None reported
- Main channel
- Launch sites and deal sites
What is not verified
The headline figure, about US$40,000 net from slightly over US$200,000 of gross AppSumo sales, rests on one source: co-founder Charlotte Schmitt's blog post of 12 December 2024, in which she wrote that Octolens "will net closer to $40,000 in payouts", an expected figure at the time. No payment processor, AppSumo report or journalist has confirmed the figures, and Octolens has published no revenue or recurring-revenue figure since. A reader could look for a payment-processor profile such as TrustMRR, an AppSumo case study, or a later dated revenue post by the founders. The headline number is grade D: one claim or one estimate, with no second source. Aiolum shows it because the story is useful, and marks it so that it is not mistaken for a verified figure.
Octolens is a social listening tool: software that collects public posts that mention chosen words, so that a company sees what people say about it. Older tools of this kind send every post that contains the keyword, and most of those posts are noise. Octolens adds an AI relevance filter: a large language model (an AI model that reads and writes text) reads each mention together with the customer's company profile and scores it high, medium or low, with tags such as bug report or buying intent. The co-founder wrote on AppSumo in September 2024 that the product was critically dependent on "OpenAI, Social Media APIs".
Charlotte Schmitt, who had been chief of staff at the developer-community startup crowd.dev before its sale to the Linux Foundation, started Octolens in Berlin in April 2024 with a founding engineer. In September 2024 they sold it on AppSumo Select, a marketplace where buyers pay once for a lifetime deal (permanent access to a software plan) and may ask for a refund within 60 days. In a blog post of 12 December 2024 she wrote that they "grossed slightly over $200,000 in total sales within the 60-day period", and that after AppSumo's share of "around 70%" and refunds "we will net closer to $40,000 in payouts". The deal brought over 1,000 new users, she said.
That figure rests on one statement by the co-founder on one date, so this page grades it D, reported but not verified. The net figure, about US$40,000 paid once, is the headline here, because according to the co-founder most of the US$200,000 went to AppSumo, and none of it was recurring revenue. No payment processor, AppSumo report or journalist has confirmed it, and Octolens has published no later revenue figure. In October 2026 its pages say that a team of two serves hundreds of software companies, at US$159 to US$499 a month on yearly billing.
How much revenue does Octolens make?
Each row shows the evidence grade and the source numbers from the list at the end of this page. The grades are explained in How Aiolum verifies.
| Fact | Value | Grade | How we know | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Expected net payout from the AppSumo campaign | about US$40,000 | D | Co-founder's blog post, 12 December 2024: after AppSumo's revenue share and refunds "we will net closer to $40,000 in payouts". An expected figure at the time of writing. This is the headline of this page. | [1] |
| Gross sales in the 60-day campaign | slightly over US$200,000 | D | Same post: "we grossed slightly over $200,000 in total sales within the 60-day period". One-time lifetime-deal sales, not recurring revenue. | [1] |
| AppSumo's revenue share | around 70% | D | Same post. She wrote that her research had shown shares of 65% to 80%, and that she would negotiate harder next time. | [1] |
| Octolens' share before refunds | about US$60,000 | calc | Calculated: 30% of US$200,000. The gap to the expected US$40,000, about US$20,000, would be refunds and other deductions. All inputs are rounded figures from the post. | [1] |
| New users from the campaign | over 1,000 | D | Same post. The expected net payout is at most about US$40 per new user (calculated). | [1] |
| The net payout in subscription terms | about 21 customer-years of the Pro plan | calc | Calculated: US$40,000 divided by US$1,908, the yearly price of the Pro plan in October 2026 (US$159 a month billed yearly). | [1, 7] |
| Campaign dates | from about 16 September 2024, for 60 days | C | The co-founder's first posts on the AppSumo deal page are dated 16 September 2024, and an update of 18 October 2024 thanks buyers of "the last 4 weeks". Sixty days from 16 September is 15 November 2024 (calculated). | [2, 1] |
| Recurring revenue after the campaign | no figure given | D | The co-founder wrote that some AppSumo buyers had already bought add-ons, such as extra mentions or platforms, which she called "partial MRR". | [1] |
| Reviews on the AppSumo deal page | 36 reviews; overall rating 4.6 | C | AppSumo deal page, read 27 October 2026. The rating is from AppSumo's AI-written summary of the reviews. The deal is marked "Sold out". | [2] |
| Website authority after the campaign | domain rating from 10 to 23 on Ahrefs | D | Co-founder's post. Domain rating is Ahrefs' score of how strongly other sites link to a domain. | [1] |
| Team | 2 people | C | AppSumo page, September 2024: "We are a team of 2." The co-founder handles everything non-technical, and the other person is the founding engineer. Her about page, October 2026: hundreds of companies served "with a team of two". The AppSumo profile gives the company size as 1 to 10 employees. | [2, 8] |
| Founded | April 2024, in Berlin | C | Co-founder on the AppSumo page. Her about page also says April 2024; the AppSumo profile says January 2024 and the company's llms.txt says 2023. | [2, 8, 12] |
| Company | Lens Labs GmbH, Berlin | C | Octolens imprint. The imprint names a managing director who is not the co-founder in this story; no source read says who owns the company. | [11] |
| Outside funding | none reported | C | No source mentions an investor in Octolens. The co-founder's about page describes her as a second-time founder who went through an accelerator with her first company and is "lean this time". | [8] |
| AI model provider | OpenAI | C | Co-founder on the AppSumo page: critically dependent on "OpenAI, Social Media APIs". In December 2024 she wrote that falling AI costs made a lifetime price possible. | [2, 1] |
| Customers, October 2026 | "hundreds of devtool and AI companies" | C | Co-founder's about page, naming Vercel, PostHog, Cursor and Lovable. The home page shows quotes from people at Vercel, Medusa, PlanetScale and Railway. | [8, 6] |
| Sign-ups that come from AI assistants | 1 in 4 | C | Company blog post of 5 October 2026: "1 in 4 Octolens signups now comes from AI assistants recommending us". | [9] |
| Time from launch to the December 2024 figure | 7 months | calc | Calculated: May 2024, the first Show HN post, to December 2024. From the founding in April 2024 it is 8 months. | [3, 1, 2] |
How to read this table: a grade D value is reported but not verified, here one blog post by the co-founder on one date. A grade C value comes from the company's own pages, its posts on Hacker News or its deal page on AppSumo. A "calc" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.
| Plan | Per month, billed yearly (US$) | Per month, billed monthly (US$) | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pro | 159 | 199 | 15,000 mentions a month, 10 keywords, hourly refresh; extra mentions US$0.013 each |
| Scale | 499 | 599 | 50,000 mentions a month, 40 keywords, real-time refresh; adds podcasts, news, newsletters and the web; extra mentions US$0.01 each |
| Enterprise | custom | several workspaces, unlimited mentions and keywords, custom AI agents | |
| AppSumo lifetime deal, 2024 | sold out; three one-time tiers with 1,000, 2,500 or 6,000 mentions a month and 3, 6 or 10 keywords |
The pricing page shows the yearly prices; the monthly prices, US$199 and US$599, are in the page's structured data and in the company's llms.txt file. The page says yearly billing saves up to 20%. Every plan includes the API, webhooks and the MCP server, and a 7-day free trial without a credit card. Mentions above the plan's quota are billed per mention, and extra keywords cost US$10 a month on Pro and US$5 on Scale. The AppSumo deal of 2024 sold three one-time license tiers; the closed deal page no longer shows their prices.
When did Octolens launch, and how did it grow?
From a feature that users of another product kept asking for to a two-person company that sold a lifetime deal to over 1,000 users, in eight months. Each entry carries its grade.
- 2021 to 2022CCharlotte Schmitt co-founds SaveSpace, a self-storage startup, which joins the Techstars accelerator in Berlin in 2022. She later leaves to learn B2B software. [2, 8]
- Before 2024CAs chief of staff at crowd.dev, a developer-community platform later acquired by the Linux Foundation, she searches Reddit, Hacker News and GitHub for mentions by hand. A crowd.dev feature that monitored sites for content to engage with stays one of its most popular features. [2, 8]
- April 2024COctolens is founded in Berlin as a separate product built from that idea, with a fully remote team. [2, 8]
- 16 May 2024CFirst Show HN post: a keyword monitoring tool for B2B, with AI relevance scores and a free search on the home page. [3]
- 8 July 2024CSecond Show HN post, about finding posts with buying signals. A founding engineer has joined. [4]
- 2024DAppSumo's team approaches her on LinkedIn. She agrees after several talks, with a clause that lets Octolens turn off accounts after six months without use. [1]
- 16 September 2024CThe AppSumo Select deal opens, with three lifetime tiers. The co-founder's posts on the deal page say the team has 2 people. [2]
- 18 October 2024CAfter four weeks she posts the first feature update for AppSumo buyers: CSV exports, monthly brand-mention emails and bookmarks. [2]
- About 15 November 2024DThe 60-day period ends. She later reports slightly over US$200,000 of gross sales and over 1,000 new users. [1, 2]
- 12 December 2024DBlog post on the campaign: Octolens expects to net closer to US$40,000 after AppSumo's share of about 70% and refunds, she wrote. She shares it on Hacker News on 17 December. [1, 5]
- October 2026CThe pricing page lists Pro at US$159 and Scale at US$499 a month billed yearly, with an API and an MCP server on every plan. Her about page says a team of two serves hundreds of companies. [7, 8, 6]
- 5 October 2026CA company blog post argues against tools that post Reddit replies automatically and says that 1 in 4 sign-ups now come from AI assistants. [9]
Why did Octolens work?
Four causes, in the order they mattered. Each one is a reusable lesson.
The filter is the product
Keyword alerts are an old idea, and the old complaint is noise: the Octolens home page calls other tools' alerts "full of junk", and a brand named after a common word gets many useless ones. Octolens sends each mention with the customer's company description to an AI model and alerts only on high and medium scores. In a Hacker News reply of July 2024 the co-founder said that relevance is hard to add for large tools with very different customers, and easier for a product aimed at early-stage B2B software companies.
Built from a feature that users already wanted
At crowd.dev, a feature that found content to engage with stayed one of the most popular even though the company did not invest in it, and users asked for it as a separate product. Before that, the co-founder had done the same work by hand for early users. So the problem and the buyers were known before the first line of Octolens code.
A lifetime deal as paid marketing
The co-founder saw AppSumo less as income and more as a source of users, feedback, traffic and links. She wrote that AppSumo kept around 70% of the gross and that Octolens expected about US$40,000. In return the deal brought over 1,000 users in 60 days, a wave of support requests that forced better documentation, and, she wrote, a higher steady level of traffic after the campaign.
The founders use the product to sell it
The co-founder described tracking her own pain points, brand and competitors with Octolens, getting Slack alerts and joining the threads herself. In an October 2024 Hacker News comment that mentions Octolens she added "disclaimer: it's my company". The company argues in public that replies must come from real, named people, and it does not post for its customers.
How it was built
These details come from the co-founder's posts on AppSumo and Hacker News, her December 2024 blog post, and the company's privacy policy, which lists its subprocessors. They are grade C, except the campaign figures, which are grade D. [2, 3, 4, 1, 10, 6, 7]
- AI: the OpenAI API scores each mention for relevance, sentiment and intent; the co-founder named OpenAI and the social media APIs as the product's critical dependencies.
- Running: Vercel for hosting, PlanetScale for the database, Inngest for background jobs, Tinybird as an analytics database for mentions, and Clerk for sign-in.
- Payments and customers: Stripe for subscriptions; AppSumo for the 2024 lifetime deal; Crisp for support chat; Loops for email; PostHog and Mixpanel for product analytics.
- Delivery: alerts to Slack and email, a native Attio integration, webhooks, a REST API and an MCP server, so that customers can ask AI assistants such as Claude or ChatGPT about their mentions.
- Launch channels: two Show HN posts in May and July 2024, the AppSumo Select deal from September 2024, and free tools on the website.
Tools named in the sources
Each one opens its page in the Tools tab, with every story that uses it.
Who tried this before Octolens, and why did they fail?
Four companies in the Loot Drop database tried to turn social media posts into useful insight for businesses and failed, most of them against better-funded competitors. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.
Salorix
The promiseA platform that used machine learning to rank social media conversations so brands could act on them.
Why it diedInvestors stopped funding it while smaller, cheaper AI startups took its customers.
Isentium
The promiseSentiment analysis of social media and news for traders and insurers.
Why it diedMost social media posts turned out to be noise; competitors built better tools while compliance problems cost it clients.
SumAll
The promiseOne dashboard of social media and marketing data for small businesses.
Why it diedLarge analytics companies and free tools offered the same dashboards, and its own could not justify the price.
ThinkUp
The promisePersonal insights from a user's own Twitter and Facebook activity, beyond likes and retweets.
Why it diedIt stayed a desktop product while social media moved to phones, and its marketing was neglected.
The failed startups come from Loot Drop, a free database of dead startups, retold here in our own words. Loot Drop describes its entries as AI-assisted summaries of public sources, so these cards carry no evidence grade.
What changed
The four predecessors tried to turn social media posts into insight with funded teams. Isentium's record says that most social media turned out to be noise, and Salorix ranked conversations with machine learning but ran out of investor money. They sold dashboards and reports, which large analytics companies and free tools could copy.
Two things differ for Octolens. A general language model now does the ranking for a small cost per post, and the co-founder wrote in December 2024 that falling AI costs were what made a lifetime price possible. And the output is not a dashboard but a short list of posts sent into Slack, a CRM or an AI agent, for people who reply to them the same day. What has not changed is the dependence on platforms that the company does not control: the posts come from Reddit, X, LinkedIn and others, through their APIs.
Can one person copy Octolens now?
Yes, if you already know the buyers.
Octolens repeats a common path for B2B software: do the work by hand for early users, turn the most requested feature of a larger product into its own product, and add an AI step that removes the part users hate. The AppSumo part is harder to copy well: the co-founder warns that it only works when the costs per account are known, and that most of the gross goes to the marketplace.
Where it is still open: AI filtering for other noisy public sources: job postings, government tenders, app store reviews, patent filings, and support forums of open-source projects.
- 1Find a feature inside a larger product that users keep asking for as a separate tool.
- 2Do the job by hand for a few customers first, so you know which results matter to them.
- 3Use a language model with the customer's own context to cut the noise, and deliver results where the team already works.
- 4Before a lifetime deal, model the cost of each account, add a clause for inactive accounts, and treat the payout as marketing.
What could go wrong for Octolens?
The risks are the mirror image of the causes above.
What is not verified
The headline figure, about US$40,000 net from slightly over US$200,000 of gross AppSumo sales, rests on one source: co-founder Charlotte Schmitt's blog post of 12 December 2024, in which she wrote that Octolens "will net closer to $40,000 in payouts", an expected figure at the time. No payment processor, AppSumo report or journalist has confirmed the figures, and Octolens has published no revenue or recurring-revenue figure since. A reader could look for a payment-processor profile such as TrustMRR, an AppSumo case study, or a later dated revenue post by the founders.
Lifetime deals do not recur, but their costs do
AppSumo buyers paid once, while Octolens pays for hosting, data collection and AI for every active account. The co-founder named this as her main worry and negotiated the right to switch off accounts after six months without use. Some buyers have since bought add-ons; how many is not stated.
Asking happy reviewers to post elsewhere
One goal of the campaign was to turn AppSumo reviews into reviews on G2 and Capterra. The co-founder wrote: "We got some great reviews - and even though I have approached some to also share on other platforms, I haven't had success yet." Asking only satisfied customers to post public reviews is called review gating. This is a founder's tactic, reported here, not something the product sells.
Lead finding and platform rules
Octolens tags posts with buying intent, and one of its AI agent skills drafts openers for people who ask for alternatives to a competitor. The company says the product "doesn't scrape profiles or build contact lists" and that "The one step we think should never be automated is pressing post". Customers who reply to strangers still carry the risk of breaking a community's rules.
Dependence on other platforms
The product needs data from Reddit, X, LinkedIn and others, and a language model from OpenAI, the co-founder wrote. A platform that raises its API price or closes access can remove a source or raise costs.
Small facts that disagree
The founding date appears as April 2024, January 2024 and 2023 on different pages, and the operating company, Lens Labs GmbH, has a managing director who is not described as a member of the two-person team. No source read explains the ownership.
Sources
The grade next to each source is the best grade that the source can support. "Read in full" means that the text of the page was downloaded and the numbers were checked in it.
- D Octolens blog, 12 December 2024 (updated 16 December 2024), by Charlotte Schmitt: $200k in 60 Days: An Honest AppSumo Select Review (2024)Read in full on 27 October 2026. Found through the Hacker News post of 17 December 2024, whose older link now returns 404. Source for the gross sales, AppSumo's share, the expected net payout, the users, the domain rating and the review goal.
- C AppSumo: Octolens deal page, with the co-founder's posts of 16 September and 18 October 2024Read in full on 27 October 2026; the deal is sold out. Source for the campaign dates, the three tiers, the team of 2, the founding date, the dependence on OpenAI and the review count.
- C Hacker News, 16 May 2024: Show HN: Keyword monitoring and notification tool for B2BRead through the HN Algolia API. The co-founder's first public description of the product.
- C Hacker News, 8 July 2024: Show HN: We built a social listening AI for X, LinkedIn, Reddit, HNRead through the HN Algolia API, with the co-founder's reply. Source for the buying-signal use and the founding engineer.
- C Hacker News, 17 December 2024: Lessons from earning $200k in 60 days on AppSumo with my SaaS, and the co-founder's comments of 2024Read through the HN Algolia API (the item, and a search for octolens). Source for the date the post was shared, its first URL, and the co-founder's comment that discloses her company.
- C Octolens home pageRead in full on 27 October 2026. Source for the product, the platforms covered, the AI filter, the delivery options, the customer quotes and the FAQ on contact lists.
- C Octolens pricing pageRead in full on 27 October 2026, including its structured data for the monthly prices. Source for the plans, quotas and extra charges.
- C Octolens: Charlotte Schmitt, Co-Founder and CEORead in full on 27 October 2026. Source for her background, the team of two in 2026, the customers and the founding month.
- C Octolens blog, 5 October 2026: Reddit Lead Generation Tools: Read This Before You Buy OneRead in full. Source for the company's position against automated replies and the share of sign-ups from AI assistants.
- C Octolens privacy policyRead the sections on payment data and subprocessors. Source for the hosting, database, payment, support, email and analytics services.
- C Octolens imprintRead the English and German versions. Source for the operating company and its city.
- C Octolens llms.txtRead in full on 27 October 2026. Source for the monthly prices, the integrations, the founding year given there and the agent skill that drafts openers.
- C Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startupsLocal export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors.