At 00:41, the sale confirmation arrived.
GenPPT was officially sold.
I felt robbed.
I also felt relieved.
GenPPT started because I had a presentation at school the next day. Within roughly four hours, I built the simplest possible AI presentation maker.
It had one input field, one generate button and one predefined template. There wasn’t even a preview. You entered a topic, AI generated text on top of the template, and a .pptx file immediately downloaded.
I used it for my presentation the next day without preparing and received the highest grade.
At the time, I was already deep into indie hacking and building in public, so I posted GenPPT on X. The post got far more attention than anything else I was sharing back then.
That was enough for me to keep going.
I added templates, expanded the product and documented everything as I built it. A few weeks later, people around me kept telling me to add payments. I genuinely didn’t think anybody would pay, but I added a subscription anyway.
Someone bought it.
I’d expected the payment screen to sit there untouched. Instead, somebody from X became the first customer. The school hack had turned into something a stranger was willing to pay for.
Within months, GenPPT had become a real business. I worked on it during every free second, sometimes secretly during class. I kept the actual numbers private because I thought people at school would treat me differently if they knew.
During the day, I still looked like a normal student. In every gap, I was adding features, answering customers or trying another way to get people onto the site. The bigger GenPPT became, the less I told anyone around me.
My friends knew it made money, but they had no idea how much. I’d already overheard people talking about my new “little side project.” They thought it probably wouldn’t work because AI presentation makers already existed.
They were looking at it the wrong way. You don’t have to invent an entirely new category to make money. You need a way to compete.
For GenPPT, that way was search.
The channel I didn’t control
The obvious search results were dominated by well-funded competitors. I was a teenager building between classes, so competing with them directly wasn’t realistic.
Instead, I found a way to make GenPPT surface inside community discussions that already ranked well. One of those pages climbed near the top of search results for a query used by people already looking for a tool and became our strongest source of new customers.
I wasn’t trying to beat the biggest companies with my own domain. I used pages search engines already trusted to put GenPPT inside conversations customers were reading.
It worked incredibly well. It also meant that a meaningful part of the business depended on something I didn’t fully control.
At the same time, my relationship with a collaborator had become messy. I’d never formally invited them to join GenPPT. At one point, they raised the question of ownership, and I got overwhelmed and agreed to an informal split.
I was 17. Nothing was signed or documented. I didn’t even process that saying no was an option.
When our working relationship ended, the key recommendation disappeared. I noticed the next morning because new sales had fallen sharply. Over time, the business kept shrinking as fewer new customers arrived.
An ownership dispute followed.
The practical problem was that my leverage was weak. We had no contract clearly defining ownership, and I couldn’t simply recreate the channel that had disappeared.
I documented everything, prepared a full timeline and tried more than once to get legal help. I couldn’t afford proper representation, and I struggled to find lawyers who took a teenager’s technical dispute seriously.
Some of my serious-sounding legal messages were written with ChatGPT. I was technically speaking with lawyers, but I didn’t have one properly representing me. I was mostly trying to look less powerless than I was.
Rebuilding the business
I put the last money I had into another team and tried to rebuild what we’d lost.
Every day, I woke up not knowing whether the changes I’d made the night before were doing anything. I spent day and night working on GenPPT, testing new marketing ideas and waiting for search work that couldn’t produce results overnight.
That delay made everything worse. I had to keep making decisions without knowing which changes were working or whether the recovery would arrive in time.
The new team was good. Through content and free tools, we slowly got sales moving again. Eventually, the company returned to growth.
I wasn’t selling a dead product. I’d managed to turn the business around, but I was exhausted from getting it there.
The ownership dispute was eventually resolved as part of a sale.
I hadn’t properly worked out what the company was worth. By then, I was so exhausted by the dispute, the damage to the business and the months of uncertainty that I just wanted to be free of it and build something new.
I wasn’t pricing GenPPT. I was pricing how badly I wanted the situation to end.
Looking back, I wouldn’t make that decision the same way again.
Closing the sale
Closing still required caution.
We signed an LOI, went through due diligence and then completed the asset purchase. At every step, I made the other side move first. They signed first. The funds cleared first. Only then did I hand over the matching assets and access.
Showing the company’s data during diligence was the worst part. The charts showed the sudden drop after the channel disappeared and the slower decline that followed.
The LOI mattered because the terms had already been agreed. Seeing the decline didn’t reopen the deal.
Then the confirmation arrived at 00:41.
The relief was real. The stress was finally no longer mine.
But the relief didn’t change how the sale felt. I’d given up a product I’d spent so long building because I was exhausted and wanted the situation to end.
That’s why the exit didn’t feel like the clean victory the screenshot suggested.
I initially didn’t want to announce it at all. I was tired enough that disappearing and quietly building the next thing sounded safer than giving more people a reason to look at me.
My best friend kept insisting that selling a SaaS company at 18 was too unusual not to post. Eventually, I gave in. I spent maybe five minutes writing:
“I JUST SOLD MY SAAS COMPANY AT 18.”
The post reached more than a million views and generated opportunities I’d never imagined before it.
The response started immediately. People outside my audience shared the post and reached out. The private experience and public version barely felt like the same event.
The funny part is that I nearly kept the only clean-looking part of this story completely private.
I still haven’t publicly said what I sold GenPPT for. The number isn’t the useful part anyway. The screenshot made the deal look simple. It wasn’t.