Hitting $2M ARR in two years even though he was "late to the AI party"

Company

Adaptify

Founder

Dominic Zijlstra

Revenue

$167K a month

Dominic Zijlstra thought he was too late to surf the AI wave, but then realized that the people he was following on X were just really early. So he built Adaptify. And exactly two years later, he's bringing in $2M ARR.

Here's Dominic on how he did it. 👇

AI FOMO

I'm Dominic. I'm Dutch, but the Netherlands always felt too small for me, so I studied engineering physics in Germany and Brazil, and later worked in London as a space engineer for Airbus and as a data analyst in a fintech startup. Around that time, I met my wife, who is Chinese.

As I'd always loved language learning, I tried to learn Mandarin but hit a roadblock until I found an obscure method using mnemonic techniques that finally worked to learn those weird characters! I turned this method into a product (Traverse), which was my first SaaS project that made enough money to quit my job during Covid.

Then, in early 2023, as I interacted more with ChatGPT, I turned from an AI skeptic into an AI enthusiast. Like many founders at that time, I caught AI FOMO — that fear of missing out on the AI revolution and the strong conviction that AI would change our ways of doing business for good.

So, together with a friend, we started exploring making AI products. After a few months, that turned into Adaptify, an AI SaaS that completely automates SEO delivery and reporting for agencies, and has grown from 0 to 2M ARR in less than two years.