Alex Rainey and Mike Heap did not start My AskAI by guessing at a finished AI-support platform. Before it, they had tried several AI products: a university personal-statement tool that OpenAI asked them to shut down, and a no-code AI model builder that made about $3,500 in sales before they sold it. Those experiments exposed a stronger pattern: people wanted to ask questions against their own content without learning fine-tuning.

Instead of building the whole product first, they put a short pre-launch description on the existing site and offered access for $99. More than 50 people bought, generating roughly $5,000 in pre-sales before launch. That signal was larger than the revenue from their already-built fine-tuning product, so at the end of January 2023 both founders stopped looking for other work and went all-in on My AskAI with a deadline to reach ramen profitability by the end of May.

The first version let customers create a custom ChatGPT-style assistant trained on their own data and share it through embeds, APIs, and plugins. Early growth came from their pre-launch buyers, the previous product's users, email list promotion, Product Hunt launches, AI newsletters, Twitter, organic Google search, and especially word-of-mouth referrals. By May 18, 2023, the product was around $14,000 MRR with just over 300 users. Later, the team narrowed the product around AI customer support agents that plug into existing helpdesks such as Intercom, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Gorgias, and HubSpot.