From 0 to 250,000 Users Without Spending a Dime: Ajelix’s Bootstrapped AI Journey
No ad spend. No funding. Just product, persistence, and one hell of a GTM instinct.
Dear GTM Strategist!
I am a sucker for “winning against the odds” stories by small teams. If you share my passion for these heroic go-to-market endeavors, you will love this one.
Meet Ajelix, the easiest way to get expert-level analysis with AI that quietly scaled to 250,000 users without pouring cash into marketing. No VC dollars. No growth hacks. Just a relentless focus on solving real problems for spreadsheet-heavy teams and making the product ridiculously easy to discover and adopt.
The AI momentum surely helped, but this case study isn’t about hype.
It’s about the craft of aligning go-to-market elements (market, customer, product, positioning, pricing, and growth (GTM motion) into an exponential growth curve.
Agnese Jaunošāne, the co-founder of Ajelix, shares the unfiltered, behind-the-scenes story of how she and her team strategically rode the AI wave - leveraging SEO, user feedback loops, and building a powerful PLG motion to drive scale.
⭐ Bonus: at the end of the article, you will find her Zero-Budget GTM Checklist for AI SaaS.
Let’s dive into what every founder and GTM strategist can learn from their story.
Disrupting a billion-dollar market of Excel-assisted productivity with AI
Who runs the world? Excel.
The majority of businesses still rely on intelligence from spreadsheets to run their operations.
A painfully underserved submarket of this gigantic market is individuals who do not understand Excel and need a more user-friendly way to start harvesting insights from the oceans of data they have, but don’t know what to do with them.
And do not mistake this for a second as just an “SMB problem.” The larger the company, the greater the pain becomes. The Business Intelligence (BI) market is projected to have a CAGR of 8.9%. Choosing a subsegment of a healthy market with good future projection and a burning pain point surely sounds like a great place to win.
But there is a secret sauce to it - have a skin in the game.
Ajelix’s cofounder Artūrs Jaunošāns spent 10 years automating Excel and Google Sheets as a top Fiverr freelancer, building CRMs, dashboards, and custom workflows for clients worldwide. By the time Ajelix launched, he had solved thousands of real-world spreadsheet problems and knew precisely where users got stuck.
He always dreamt of creating a successful SaaS product.
But there was a missing link - some advancements in AI and his partner in life and business, Agnese 😉
Agnese and Artūrs were newly married and both starting their MBA in 2022. For one subject, they had to create an export plan for a product. Piece of cake 🍰 for them, but seeing others struggle with it - it was a wake-up call that the time is right to go all in product.
They zeroed in on a common frustration they’d seen over and over: writing spreadsheet formulas. And when they discovered OpenAI in the early days, before ChatGPT was mainstream, the pieces finally clicked. AI would be the game-changer.
They went all-in on two macro trends:
The explosion of data analytics and
The coming wave of AI-powered tools.
In late 2022, Agnese and Artūrs launched Ajelix with a smart distribution play: a dedicated SEO landing page for every AI tool they built. Within a month, they had their first paying customer, without spending a cent on ads.
In the next section, we will dive into their winning Go-to-market Motions - but there is one more element you need to consider - their mindset:
For this power couple, building Ajelix wasn’t just about growth; it was about freedom. Remote-first, self-funded, and working toward a shared dream, they’ve built a business that fits their life, not the other way around.
Agnese and Artūrs now live in a small house in Italy's countryside that they are slowly renovating while managing their SaaS business. As they come from Latvia, having been used to flat landscapes and cold weather, Italy was a dream come true.
“We live near the Apennine mountains and we don't even have to change winter tires. We've been travelling a lot, and the biggest bonus of all of this is that we can spend time together and don't have to align with others' work schedules or try to get vacations approved from managers. We live in a small village and our neighbours still don't understand why we are in the house all the time, not driving to work,” says Agnese.
But let’s go back to how it started…
Winning Strategy: Build AI tools for most search terms and dominate SEO before it gets crowded
Back in 2022, Ajelix was early into AI for Excel game. Agnese explains: “Based on the Google Trends chart below, you can see that interest was initially low, and competition was almost nonexistent. As a result, we easily secured Google snippets and first positions for niche keywords. Considering that our website's Domain Rating (DR) back then was 0, it wouldn’t be impossible to compete with keywords that have big competition.”
Not surprisingly, inbound (with a focus on SEO) became the first strong growth channel for Ajelix.
How? Give the market the tools - not only SEO articles.
Search trends informed their product roadmap.
MVP launched with seven very simple AI tools.
Ajelix’s team identified search trends for spreadsheet-related problems and created AI solutions to match their needs.
The Excel formula generator became incredibly popular and was later widely copied. It reached 8.7K monthly search volume in April 2023, just for the keyword “Excel formula generator”, and got Ajelix around 11K new users.
The VBA script generator, which automated spreadsheet tasks, was another hit. The common goal of all these tools was to make working with spreadsheets easier.
“Our main acquisition channel from day 1 was SEO. We had a landing page for every tool that targeted keywords for (back then) non-existent niches,” explains Agnese.
They lead with a vision that AI is the future of “spreadsheet headaches”.
Following the launch of ChatGPT in late November 2022, these categories experienced a surge 🚀.
Riding the AI Hype: 1000+ influencers posted about Ajelix for free
Amazing SEO started to attract hundreds of users to Ajelix’s product every single day. The traction exploded. Before we dive into this further, let’s stress that this would not have been possible without a product that solves a real problem really well.
Product-led growth in full swing 👏 :
Let users “try before they buy” - offer freemium tools with a simple interface. Ajelix reduced friction by creating super easy & fast signup, no surveys, no credit cards, no trials.
Lower time-to-value: simple onboarding, reduced friction, and instant value
Implement fast feedback loops: make it effortless for users to share feedback, enabling the team to improve UX and resolve bugs in real-time rapidly. The best method for feedback collection is to implement it right inside the tool’s interface.
Usage-based expansion: people upgrade based on the received value. Ajelix had very clear limitations and upgrade paths from Day 1.
Strong SEO positioning and the surge in demand for AI solutions following the launch of ChatGPT were the tailwind for Ajelix’s growth.
Agnese explains: “Anyone looking to write about AI in spreadsheets would find our articles as a primary source. Everyone talked about "AI tools that are illegal to know". This resulted in more than a thousand articles, websites, listicles, postings, and videos. At some point, influencers began duplicating one another, so we are still featured in these posts after nearly 2 years.”
I asked Agnese if she really hadn't paid some influencers to fuel the growth (I am a challenger 🤠). She answered:
“We spoke with some influencers, but paying for one post $3000 is not a viable option for a bootstrapped business, and it is hard to predict that the investment will add up. It’s like paying for ads; once you stop, there’s no traction. That’s why we chose the alternative route to build our community and create long-term traction.”
If you're new to AI or unsure how to fully get value out of it, you do not wanna miss out on this one. Attend the FREE webinar by Jonathan Kvarfordt (my go-to AI prompt strategist for GTM) and Jordan Nettles on May 6th.
In just 45 minutes, you will learn how to automate GTM execution and turn AI agents into actual team members. Plus, you will get 200+ usable prompts to take with you.
Nothing lasts forever: From hyper-virality to building predictable and repetitive go-to-market motions
You and I both know what happens when something goes incredibly well: More competitors enter the space, established competitors start copying you, and the law of diminishing returns kicks in.
Regardless, Agnese advises not to underestimate SEO: “SEO is slow, but I’d say that ranking for low-competition keywords or fresh topics can be quite fast. The biggest bonus of SEO is that it works by itself. We have a blog with over 250+ articles. While I focus on other channels and test different approaches, SEO keeps bringing in users.
Yes, the last year has been pretty rough in terms of SEO with so many updates and AI overviews changing the user behavior, websites don’t get as many clicks as they used to. We’re also feeling this. But the good news is that the organic search traffic is differentiating, as we’re seeing more traffic from LLMs and Bing.”
Optimisation for LLMs (AI tools like ChatGPT) is still quite a black box, but, in Agnese’s experience, success lies in being featured on several sites and leveraging brand recognition on the web. For example, Ajelix is mentioned in several articles as one of the best "AI Excel tools." LLMs connect that information and showcase Ajelix as the top selection. LLMs are searching for validation, so your task is to make sure your brand is mentioned in several important places.
While Inbound (SEO - products, landing pages, and content) still brings in 80% of Ajelix’s users, Agnese and her team had to start developing other channels and Go-to-Market Motions.
They again went where the audience is - to communities such as Reddit, LinkedIn, and online forums. Agnese explains: “In the beginning, we didn’t use these platforms ourselves to get traffic. The buzz happened without our interaction.”
And they are trying to add more Inbound tactics. They are focusing on founder-led growth on LinkedIn, as well as YouTube videos and collaborations. Agnese notes that being active on LinkedIn helps her collect customer feedback and opens up new opportunities for collaboration with content creators.
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Hype brings some product-related and business challenges, too. Agnese lays them down:
“Scalability wasn't a problem, thanks to my co-founder's foresight in product development. We were able to upgrade our system smoothly as demand grew. Our real struggle was with email deliverability. Transactional emails consistently ended up in the spam folder, which was a major headache. Imagine a user trying to register and never receiving a confirmation email! It took us months to finally solve this, but we've got it under control now.
The other ongoing challenge is the freemium plan. Though it fueled our initial virality and growth, converting users who came with no intention of paying is difficult. They often create multiple accounts to prolong their access to freemium features, avoiding payment altogether.”
And guess what - your work on “Personas” (ICP) is never over. When the market changes and the product becomes better, it is time to revisit them.
“As time has passed, the user personas we thought we had are no longer relevant. We’re actively working on this together with a mentor, we’re going back to basics by actively trying to define the “BIG problem” we’re solving and drafting user personas,” explains Agnese.
The vision of “organic only” can take you far
“When we launched Ajelix, we agreed that we would use only organic channels. Because we wanted to build a system, not a one-day tool. It all depends on your mindset. There are so many ways you can grow a product without paid ads, like collaborations, partnerships, integrations, content, founder-led growth, forums, and others,” says Agnese.
She prepared a ✅ checklist on how AI SaaS products can grow without a budget:
She used it for their new launch:
“We’ve captured new demand and just launched a chatbot, but for data tasks. We have a live chat on our portal, and for several months, people wrote to us thinking I was an AI assistant who could analyze their data from conversations. So, we finally decided to launch a chat specifically for analysis tasks. We created sketches in Figma and conducted a survey asking for feedback on whether people would use this tool and what features they would need. We received over 300 responses and comments, with 74% indicating they would use the tool every day.
I’m super excited because people have been asking for this a long time, and it can do pretty insane things. From data cleaning to report generation in different formats.”
You can check it out at https://ajelix.com/tools/ai-data-analyst/ and stay in touch with Agnese on LinkedIn if you want to keep track of their progress.
The reason why I invited you to think about this story is to empower you, firstly - you do not have to break the bank or have 50 people in marketing to launch something successfully. Ajelix is a team of two (now three - they added a junior marketer in 2025). Work with what you have and make the best out of it.
For those few readers who have experienced hyper-demand before:
You have to do whatever it takes to catch up with demand (it is very nerve-wracking) - but please know that eventually the momentum dies off and you need to have another ace in your sleeve.
A good product and the right momentum can go far - ride the wave, but be ready that nothing lasts forever and prepare to spend at least 10-20% of your marketing resources testing new channels.
However, solid GTM fundamentals are mission-critical for building a sustainable business for both AI and non-AI products and services.
If you want to learn more about GTM fundamentals, seek no further than my GTM Checklist with AI prompts. It includes 100+ steps to guide your go-to-market strategy, including examples, templates and frameworks.
Agnese used the template to collect reviews and it worked well for her.
Agnese's Zero Budget checklist is great to review for inspiration and opportunities to test 🧠
Incredible case study. Ajelix proves that if you solve a real pain with laser focus and move fast on emerging trends (like early AI SEO), you can still outcompete funded giants. Curious to see more founders rediscover the power of deep, surgical SEO over brute-force paid growth.