How to Make $10K/Month from Your Website in 2025

A deep dive with Erik Fiala, fractional design leader and founder, exploring how product design decisions determine funding success, AI automation strategies, and building profitable websites in emerging markets

July 31, 2025

15 min read

By Rachit Magon

Listen on

The difference between a $100 website and a $10,000/month revenue generator isn't always what you think. While most founders obsess over features and functionality, the real money lies in understanding one critical truth: design decisions determine whether users pay and investors fund.

Today we're unpacking the battle-tested insights from someone who's seen both sides of the startup equation. Meet Erik Fiala - at just 30, he's been head of design at companies valued over $100 million, led design for a startup that raised $2.4 million, and scaled user bases to 4,000+ with 7x retention improvements. But here's the twist: he's also failed spectacularly, shut down funded companies, and learned the hard way what separates profitable products from expensive mistakes.

From Slovakia to Denmark to Vietnam, Erik has navigated the global startup ecosystem as both a fractional design leader and founder, building an automated content empire using AI while helping Southeast Asian startups crack the funding code through his latest initiative, Deck Valley.

Key Takeaways: The $10K Website Blueprint

The Funding Reality:

• 90% of pitch deck failures happen because founders speak "product language" instead of "investor language"
• Less than 3% of Vietnamese startups get VC funded - mostly due to poor storytelling
• Data-backed narratives beat flashy features every time

Design That Converts:

• Minimalistic MVP approach outperforms feature-heavy products
• UX decisions, not UI polish, determine user retention
• Strategic design choices can 7x your retention rates

AI-Powered Growth:

• Human-assisted AI content generates 10,000+ monthly views for B2B SaaS
• YouTube Shorts + AI UGC = $10K revenue pipeline for $30/month tools
• Automation works best in high-labor-cost markets, not everywhere

Q: Erik, you've led design at $100M+ companies and also failed to achieve product-market fit. What separates funded products from failed ones?

Erik: The biggest thing founders get wrong is thinking pitch decks don't matter as much as the product itself. They spend months building features but zero time on storytelling and narrative.

What really matters most is the storytelling around your product when pitching to investors. The language that investors use is completely different from founder language - they need to align.

The person pitching needs to be the most knowledgeable about that problem and solution because not all investors have the same background. Everything needs to be backed by data, numbers, sources, citations. No hyperboles, no flowery marketing jargon - investors see right through that.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Investors don't fund products - they fund stories backed by data. Your pitch deck is your product's biography, not its feature list.

Q: Can you give a real example where a design decision impacted whether a company got traction or died?

Erik: When we were building SourceHR, I learned that design isn't just UI - it's the entire user experience and how customers work with your product. You need to think back to the customer themselves and always listen to them rather than building features for the sake of building features.

I tend to think about design like making it very minimalistic and just focus on the bare minimum when it comes to MVP. Keep it simple, don't overcomplicate it. A lot of founders get stuck in the feature loop very easily - they think adding three new features will change everything, but it seldom does.

The critical decision was simplifying as much as possible instead of adding complexity. Unfortunately for us, even though we raised funding and got cloud credits, we still failed on product-market fit - maybe it was too expensive for the Vietnamese market where you can hire someone for the price of our monthly subscription.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: The feature loop is a founder's quicksand. More features don't solve fundamental product-market fit problems - they just make failure more expensive.

Q: How do you evaluate if automation solutions will work in different markets?

Erik: It's quite similar in Vietnam to what you described about India. Staff costs are so low that automation isn't valued enough to pay premium prices for. For me personally, there's still a language barrier, so if I hire someone in Vietnam who speaks good English, I pay a premium.

But among local organizations here, for the price of our $100-250/month SourceHR subscription, you can probably hire somebody already and get all the benefits of human interaction without having to configure automation tools for hours.

Talk to the customers. Talk to the people in your target market. You can't go horizontal global in early stage - you need some sort of focused market. I use Perplexity Pro a lot for researching labor costs in different markets versus subscription pricing to see if it's worth it.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Labor arbitrage kills automation adoption. Before building an AI tool, check if hiring humans costs less than your monthly subscription - you might be solving a problem that doesn't exist economically.

Q: Tell us about your AI-powered content strategy that's generating real results.

Erik: We're literally throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. We tried AI UGC - automating video creation with AI that looks like shorts. We cross-post to LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, everywhere.

YouTube Shorts works pretty well - we got one customer so far in two months, which extremely surprised me. YouTube is much better at not detecting AI content compared to TikTok, which is very good at detecting AI BS.

The biggest problem with SEO for ourselves in the SEO space is that all other SEO agencies are doing SEO for themselves - you're competing with the best of the best.

I use HeyGen for AI UGC creation - $30/month for unlimited videos. I can spin up 5-10 AI-generated YouTube shorts daily if I wanted. Last month I got 10,000 views on YouTube Shorts for ContentBase, which is ridiculous for B2B SaaS. Each video gets 500 to 1,500 views.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: $30/month for 10,000 B2B views is a 333x ROI compared to traditional advertising. The AI content game isn't about volume - it's about platform-specific optimization.

Q: Walk us through your exact AI content workflow.

Erik: I created a Claude project that when I give it context - usually a blog post - it creates a script for AI video with a really good hook, sub-hook, and how the video should be scripted. It also gives me hookie titles and hashtags.

I start with Ahrefs - I go through their RSS feed or blog, copy-paste an article to this Claude project. It creates a script and name-drops ContentBase somewhere. I copy-paste this script to HeyGen using a small template I made. Takes 2-3 minutes to create the video.

Then I download, go to CapCut to generate subtitles, and publish everywhere - TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram, Facebook. Takes maybe 10-15 minutes per video total, and you get 10,000 views a month.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: The magic isn't in the AI - it's in the workflow. Erik's 15-minute process from blog post to multi-platform video shows how human-assisted AI beats pure automation every time.

Q: How did the Antler Vietnam experience shape your understanding of funding?

Erik: It's a funny story - I moved to Vietnam because my girlfriend's Vietnamese. I applied to Antler, got accepted, then rejected it because it wasn't the right time. I texted the general manager explaining instead of ghosting, which saved my ass for applying again the second time.

The experience helped me think about building pitch decks as a founder. The biggest takeaway was taking big ideas, big visions, and distilling them to the simplest possible sentence that's data-backed and speaks very directly to the problem.

I apply this principle not just in pitch decks but in design, sales decks, everything. I sometimes use Claude and say "explain this idea as if you're talking to an eighth-grader." That helps a lot in simplifying instead of using jargon.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Professional courtesy in rejections creates future opportunities. Erik's respectful "no" became his golden ticket back into the program - relationship management matters in startup ecosystems.

Q: What caused your co-founder breakup and what did you learn?

Erik: Even though we raised funding and achieved good metrics with SourceHR, we had product-market fit problems - maybe too expensive for the market. We were scrambling, trying to figure stuff out on the go, which led to a co-founder breakup. That was one of the most stressful times of my life.

It taught me about integrity of co-founders. In programs like Antler, there are frameworks for meeting people and forming teams, but you can't get to know someone's integrity in a short period. You only find out about integrity when things go wrong.

Build with people you know. If you have access to somebody with required skills who's a friend or acquaintance, it's better because you've been in situations where you learn about their integrity and behavior - not necessarily work experience, but life experience.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Co-founder compatibility isn't about skills alignment - it's about stress response patterns. You can't stress-test relationships in accelerator programs, only in real market failures.

Q: What's your strategy for finding the right co-founder now?

Erik: Finding a co-founder is as difficult as finding a partner - it's true. It's a marriage.

Don't avoid working with friends or family because of money concerns. If you know someone with the skills you need, and you've seen how they behave in different situations, that's better than any matching system.

The biggest challenge is aligning on sense of urgency. In startups you need to build fast, and it's hard to find someone fast at critical thinking and problem solving. If you come from startups and find a co-founder from big corporate enterprise, there's a very different sense of speed.

I think there should be some framework or questionnaire - we had one in Antler with like 60-80 questions. But even that doesn't prevent co-founder breakups, so questions help but aren't a remedy for success.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Speed compatibility beats skill compatibility. A slow genius will kill your startup faster than a fast learner. Urgency alignment is the hidden variable in co-founder success.

Q: How do you evaluate whether automation addresses problems people will actually pay for?

Erik: Talk to customers in your target market. You can't go horizontal global in early stage - focus on specific markets first.

I use Perplexity Pro for researching labor costs versus subscription pricing. I also built a Claude project agent I call a "neutral agent" - basically instructions that question everything I give it in a critical thinking manner. It's like a no-BS partner I can brainstorm ideas with.

For our market research, paid advertising works on Meta if you have a really cheap product. At ContentBase's $100/month price point, it's hard to convert from ads - customer acquisition cost for English-speaking countries is very high. We'd need customers for 2-3 months subscription to be profitable.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Your AI research assistant should be your toughest critic, not your biggest cheerleader. Erik's "neutral agent" that challenges every assumption is worth more than a dozen yes-men advisors.

Q: How does product design evolve in an AI-first world?

Erik: It's a really hard topic we discuss all the time with other designers. There are two parts - UI web design, which is somewhat creative but you don't always need the best-looking product as long as it solves the problem.

For creativity in UI, you can always have some personal touch. There are tools that design things for you using boilerplate components, but in the creativity of UI, that's where people can play around and have their own input.

For UX, Claude helps me decide on a lot of things because quantitative and qualitative research has been fed to these AI models. It's really good to bounce UX ideas with AI to figure out the right path.

I recently discovered Subframe - it's almost like Figma meets AI development in a smart way. You can go from idea to semifunctional MVP very fast, but it looks like a designer made it, not AI slop like Bolt or Lovable generates.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: AI doesn't replace designers - it elevates them. The future belongs to designers who use AI as a research partner while maintaining creative control over the human touch elements.

Q: What's your tech stack for growth?

Erik: For AI UGC content creation, I use HeyGen - $30/month for unlimited videos. It's similar to other tools but works well for human-assisted content creation.

My whole workflow: Start with Ahrefs RSS feed → Claude project for script creation → HeyGen for video generation → CapCut for subtitles → publish everywhere. Takes 10-15 minutes per video, gets 500-1,500 views each.

I also use Perplexity Pro with a subscription - it's one of the best power tools I use these days for research. Really good at finding market information about labor costs versus subscription pricing.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: The most profitable growth stacks aren't the most sophisticated - they're the most systematic. Erik's $30 tool generates more B2B leads than most companies' entire marketing budgets.

Q: Tell us about Deck Valley and the funding gap in Southeast Asia.

Erik: Less than 3% of Vietnamese startups get VC funded, which is ridiculous. Over 90% get a "no" on first touch when they send pitch decks for cold outreach.

The problem is founders build good products but fail at building good stories around them. There's a big gap in talking to investors in their language with proper pitch decks.

This doesn't just happen in Vietnam, but there's not enough exposure to Western-style decks or startup knowledge because the ecosystem is still in early years. A lot of founders build good products but fail at storytelling - something highly needed in Vietnam and probably elsewhere.

I wanted to focus and give back to the country where I'm at right now. In Western markets, pitch deck services charge $5-15K upfront plus percentage of raise as success fees. In Vietnam, it's usually just upfront fees due to regulatory restrictions on taking percentages.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: The funding gap isn't about product quality - it's about narrative translation. Teaching founders to speak "investor language" instead of "product language" could 10x the funding success rate in emerging markets.

Final Thoughts: The Road to $10K/Month

The bottom line: Building a $10K/month website isn't about having the best product or the fanciest features. It's about understanding three fundamental truths:

1. Design decisions determine revenue - Minimalistic, user-focused design beats feature-heavy complexity every time
2. Market economics drive adoption - Your brilliant automation tool means nothing if hiring humans costs less than your subscription
3. AI amplifies strategy, doesn't replace it - The most successful AI implementations are human-assisted, not fully automated

Erik's key insight: "Whether you're building for funding or revenue, you need to speak your audience's language - investor language for funding, user language for retention, and economic language for market fit."

Don't get stuck in the feature loop. Don't assume global markets work the same way. And most importantly, don't try to automate everything - the money is in strategic automation that amplifies human decision-making.

The $10K/month website builders aren't just designers or developers - they're market translators who understand the intersection of human psychology, economic reality, and strategic storytelling.

Q: How can people connect with you and learn more?

Erik: I'm very active on LinkedIn - that's the best place to reach me. You can see what I'm doing professionally with ContentBase and what I'm pursuing with Deck Valley.

If you have questions about product design, AI automation, or pitch deck strategy, I'm open to providing guidance and can chat anytime. For founders in Southeast Asia looking for funding help, Deck Valley is specifically designed to bridge that storytelling gap we discussed.

I'm also happy to share the instructions for that "neutral agent" Claude project I mentioned - it's a great tool for critical thinking and brainstorming without the BS.

Final words: The future belongs to founders who understand that great products need great stories, automation needs economic validation, and AI needs human strategy. The $10K/month website isn't built with code alone - it's built with market understanding, user empathy, and the courage to keep iterating until you find what actually works.