Kirill Shevchenko is a software engineer who spent years cycling through side projects that never panned out. His first serious attempt was an AI content generator for SEO, built after a friend asked him for a simple OpenAI script and the early success of tools like Byword started showing up in his X feed. He assumed those products looked simple enough to copy, but by the end of 2023 the market had swollen from about ten competitors to hundreds, and every post he wrote was met with "why is yours better than product X?" He did not have a good answer, drifted away from the project, and went back to focusing on his career.

The restart came when he teamed up with a co-founder to build Roundups, an AI tool that writes content for affiliate marketers, reusing his earlier product as a starting point. He kept the work to evenings and weekends around a full-time job and followed two rules from his hackathon days: build feature-first, and keep the stack as simple as possible so he was not fighting unfamiliar tools. The first MVP took about two months of near-daily work on Ruby on Rails, Hotwire, Postgres, OpenAI, and Stripe.

They launched on Product Hunt with a hunter who had a real following, ranked in the top five for the day, pulled in over a hundred signups, and made their first sale the day after. Free mentions in AI newsletters over the next two weeks sent more than 20,000 views to the landing page. The bigger revenue moment came from an AppSumo lifetime deal, where Kirill is candid that the platform handles most of the marketing but takes a heavy commission and forces a 60-day refund window. The campaign delivered the first real money, a flood of feedback that matured the product, and a backlink boost that took the site from domain rating 5 to over 30.

Kirill is deliberately honest about the numbers. He will not share exact revenue, noting only that good products tend to make somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000 dollars per AppSumo campaign after commission. What he does claim is the headline of his one-year write-up: a profitable, bootstrapped AI SaaS run as a side project, with the AppSumo cash giving them runway to keep growing through paid ads and other channels.

The throughline of his account is persistence and public storytelling. The thing that finally worked, he says, was not a cleverer product but the decision to ship, launch loudly, and talk to customers until he understood what actually made Roundups worth paying for.