I try to do some napkin math of what it takes to start a company serving an LLM to customers. I thought maybe 10,000 users sounded like a reasonable number.
I'd like also to compare it to traditional Internet companies, e.g. Twitter. I'd guess Twitter with 10k users would cost me literally a dumpster dive, so essentially no cost.
If I were to start an LLM company, what would my initial investment look like?
Turns out around 15+ million dollars assuming I would get 10,000 users willing to pay 200$/month.
Minimum upfront: about $15M
Comfortable upfront: $20M–$25M
Monthly revenue needed: $900k–$1.5M
Required price per 10k individual customers: $99–$149/month
API-equivalent output price: usually $8–$20/M output tokens, unless utilization is very high.