u/Antoineofm

Today, Substy AI is doing a little over $100k/month.
At the beginning, the product was terrible.
We had:
bugs everywhere

a horrible UI

no onboarding

no real infrastructure

almost no customers

But we had one strong belief:
OFM agencies needed better tools.
Most CRMs felt outdated, slow, complicated, and nobody was really building around AI yet.
So we just kept building. Every single day.
The early versions were extremely scrappy:
answering support 24/7

coding late at night

building features requested by ONE agency

shipping multiple times a day

Getting the first 10 customers was probably the hardest part.
At first, nobody wanted to connect their accounts to some random unknown software.
So we did what a lot of SaaS founders don’t want to do anymore:
Discord DMs

Telegram outreach

Reddit posts

calls

manual onboarding

ultra fast support

For a long time, we handled everything ourselves.
Then something changed.
Agencies started seeing real results with AI.
Automated conversations.
Sales happening while they slept.
Creators finally replying 24/7.
Word of mouth started kicking in.
One agency brought another.
Then another.
We kept improving the product nonstop:
AI chatbot

CRM

automations

analytics

scheduling

multi-platform support

Today:
400+ agencies use the platform

millions of messages are sent every month

some agencies generate $700k+ using AI

and we recently crossed $100k MRR

The funny thing is… we never really had a crazy growth hack.
We just:
shipped fast

listened to customers

replied faster than competitors

improved the product every week

and stayed alive long enough for things to finally compound.

Almost 2 years ago I started working on Substy.

At the time I didn’t really have a “vision” or anything clean.
I just noticed something:

agencies on OnlyFans / Fanvue were drowning in conversations.

Like… thousands of messages, all day, every day.
And most of their revenue was coming from those chats.

But they were handling it manually, or with super basic tools.

At first we built something way too broad.

Classic mistake.
We thought “let’s build a tool for creators”.

Didn’t work.

Too many different use cases, no clear value.
We spent weeks building features nobody really cared about.

The shift happened when we focused only on agencies.

Not creators. Agencies.

People managing multiple accounts, large volumes, real operations.

That’s when things started to click.

What we ended up building is basically:

a CRM to track fans
an AI that can talk to them 24/7
some automation on top (timing, triggers, scripts etc)

Nothing crazy individually.
But together it actually solves the “too many conversations” problem.

Today (almost 2 years later):

~400 agencies using it
~480k media sold through the chatbot
a bit over $7M generated via those conversations

We didn’t run ads.
Most of it came from people talking to each other.

We made a lot of mistakes though.

At one point we were shipping features just because competitors had them.
No one used them.

We also underestimated how different “high spenders” behave vs normal users.
Pure AI doesn’t work well there - you need humans involved.

That took time to understand.

If I had to restart:

I’d go niche way faster.
And I’d talk to users way more early on.

We wasted a lot of time building in our own corner.

Right now we’re just going deeper on the same thing.

Better AI, better automation, better tracking.

Nothing fancy. Just trying to make it actually useful.

Anyway, curious if anyone else here is building in a niche people usually avoid.

Feels like there’s less competition… but you have to figure out everything yourself.