I originally built Countless(.)dev for a hackathon. It was a website to compare all the LLMs and their pricing. It quickly went viral, getting a lot of attention.
Introducing Countless.dev - A web app I built fully using
@v0and
@cursor_aiin just a few days (as a 17 y/o) Compare every AI model, examine the price, and find the best one for your use case – 100% free and open-source! Built for
@supabase's Week 12 Hackathon!
I later launched it on Product Hunt. It was very challenging - I stayed awake for a full 24 hours. But it was worth it. The project got 400+ upvotes and became 2nd product of the day.
Product Hunt Launch Over! Got 2nd Place 🥳 Huge thanks to everyone that supported! Struggled a lot, but was an amazing launch overall. Website got 15,000+ views, Went viral on HackerNews + Reddit, Got amazing support from the community, and received a total of 490 upvotes!!!
The website was now getting more than 20K+ monthly visitors. LLM benchmarking as a field was still very small back then. During this time, I rebranded the website to LLMarena(.)ai. This turned out to be the best decision I ever made.
A while after, out of the blue, the website went viral in China. It was featured on Baidu (Chinese version of Google). It got 50k+ visitors in just a few days.
By this point, LMArena had raised $100M at a $600M valuation. They were the biggest player in the AI benchmarking space. Our domain names were similar, although slightly different in use cases. We started discussions, and they were interested.
This part was where I learned the most. The negotiations stretched over a few weeks. I was traveling with my family at this time. While they visited attractions, I was in the hotel room writing emails.
I initially didn't know how much to expect for the price. But after thinking and getting advice from friends, I knew the range I wanted. Ultimately, this was something I could have never imagined. It was largely luck, but also preparation.
