Repaint: Product, team and how it was built

Solo founder · sold 5 months after launch

It launched in the month that AI models became good enough to write a whole app. It sold to people who cannot program, it charged from day one, and it was sold to a company that already had millions of customers.

Team of 2 to 10 · 11 months after launch, revenue falling

It took a narrower job than the general AI design tools, mobile apps only, for people who build apps without design skills. The three founders reused what they had learned from four earlier design tools, built it in three weeks, and showed finished designs on X before the launch. Each new Gemini model gave them a better result and a new demo to post.

Solo founder · 14 months after launch, revenue growing

The founder had made Roblox games for nine years, with 200 million visits on his own games, and his launch post on the official Roblox developer forum was read 112,656 times. He launched free, with 1 million tokens a month, and charged US$20 a month for heavy use. Then he added top-ups and a marketplace of tested systems that the AI installs, instead of writing every system from nothing.

Solo founder · 16 months after launch, revenue growing

The founder had sold this product by hand in his own agency, so he knew what agencies deliver: WordPress, a real page builder, and pages for each service and each town. The tool fills designer-made templates with AI text, so the output is consistent. It sells to agencies that build sites every month, which fits a monthly subscription, and it found them through his own posts and videos, with no ads.

Solo founder · 8 months after launch, revenue falling

The scroll effect looks like an expensive 3D site but needs no 3D engine, only video frames, so rented models can make it in minutes. Short Instagram videos show the effect better than any text, and the founder took payments from other countries from the first week through a payment company that also handles sales tax.

Solo founder · 20 months after launch, revenue falling

He solved a problem he had paid for himself and shipped the simplest version in about two weeks. Then he wrote useful Reddit posts with the product link in the middle and posted each one in many related subreddits. With 70 to 115 followers on X, he says this brought over 1 million views and about 20,000 signups by July 2025.

Solo founder · 25 months after launch, revenue falling

A normal chat window is one long thread, and a side question either breaks that thread or is never asked. The founder sold a fix for that one problem to heavy AI users. The subscription version earned little; the one-time licence that followed sold to many buyers, and Stripe data on TrustMRR shows US$131,070 in total. Sales then fell, because each one-time buyer pays only once.

Team of 2 to 10 · 14 months after launch, revenue growing

Lab benchmarks test models on fixed tasks, and they say little about taste: whether a page looks right to a person. Design Arena collects that judgment from millions of real requests, in blind comparisons on new requests. Co-founder Grace Li told The AI Insider in August 2026 that the labs' use of these rankings now generates US$60 million in annual recurring revenue.

Team of 2 to 10 · 26 months after launch, revenue growing

German companies wanted their staff to use ChatGPT-style tools without sending data outside the EU. innoGPT offered all the large models behind one login with a data-processing contract under the GDPR, and a person who helps each customer roll it out. The company said in June 2026 that this close work with customers, more than the technology, is what sets it apart.

Solo founder · 37 months after launch, revenue growing

It launched the obvious application of a new model within weeks, with a pricing page on the first day. The founder built the parts around the model instead of a model, so every model upgrade improved the product for free. Then it moved from a consumer toy to business customers who stay.