She Built an AI Product Manager Bringing in Six Figures—As A Side Hustle

TL;DR: Today we’re releasing a new episode of our podcast AI & I. I go in depth with Claire Vo, the founder of ChatPRD, an AI copilot that helps startups build product better and faster, and the chief product officer at the feature testing and management platform LaunchDarkly. We dive into how she built ChatPRD using AI and her predictions for the future of product management. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Also: Our new AI product, Spiral, is live on ProductHunt! Check it out. 

Claire Vo built ChatPRD—an on-demand chief product officer powered by AI. It’s now used by over 10,000 product managers and is pulling in six figures in revenue. 

The best part?

Claire has a demanding day job as the chief product officer at LaunchDarkly. So she built all of ChatPRD herself—over the weekend—with AI.

ChatPRD is an AI copilot for all things product. Claire first built ChatPRD as a custom GPT that wrote product requirements documents, or PRDs, which is startup speak for an overview of what a new product should do, how it should look, and what features it needs to have. As her chatbot became more popular, Claire expanded its capabilities to other areas of product work—and she continues to ship a new feature every week. The current version can help you draft PRDs from a simple idea, set realistic goals and brainstorm metrics to track them, and level up as a product manager by providing on-demand feedback

I sat down with Claire to talk about how ChatPRD works, how she built it as a side hustle using AI, and all of the ways she’s using AI tools to accelerate her work and life. 

This is a must-watch for anyone interested in turning their side hustle into a thriving business or who works in product. Here’s a taste:

• Share your worldview with AI for better collaboration. Claire found that carefully refining her ChatGPT prompts enabled her to efficiently use the tool to draft product strategies and other documents, laying the foundations for ChatPRD. “I had, over the course of months, prompted ChatGPT into a place where I could really work with it in a pretty rapid fashion to get high-quality outputs,” she says.
• No more excuses—build your side hustle. Claire, who single-handedly built ChatPRD over the course of Thanksgiving week, believes that bootstrapping a lean side hustle is part of an “exploration of what it means to run an AI native business.” She adds: “[I]t’s so cheap and easy to build high-quality web apps right now.”
• The rise of the AI-enabled founder. According to Claire, solopreneurs can execute their ideas with unparalleled speed and precision using AI tools like ChatPRD, Microsoft Copilot, and Devin. “Building solo does increase quality and velocity…because you’re short-circuiting the loop between product, engineering, and design…In a traditional team where you have multiple people playing that role, you lose fidelity of vision,” she says.
• 10x your efficiency with AI. Claire thinks AI tools enable her to bring her ideas to life faster than ever before—for example, a SaaS app that took her many months to build pre-AI would now take her a day. “[If] you can get multiples of efficiency on engineering output, then I absolutely believe you can get multiples of efficiency on product output—and this is where some of our great testimonials are, where people are saying, ‘You're saving me 10 hours of work in 15 minutes,’” she explains.
• Build in AI to cultivate visionary thought. Building ChatPRD has helped Claire be a more effective product leader because the process has fostered forward-thinking perspectives. “If you're not thinking about how to build actual end-user products in this new model with these new technologies, you're going to just be very far behind in terms of what that future is going to look and feel like to users,” she explains.