Elephas

AI-powered personal knowledge assistant for Mac, iPhone & iPad

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TL;DR: AI-powered personal knowledge assistant for Mac, iPhone & iPad with 3000+ users.

Timeline

2018

Kamban begins indie hacking journey, building various side projects

2020

Built FlatGA, a tool for unifying website metrics

2021

Continued building and launching failed projects, accumulated 10+ failures

2022-06

GPT-3 API becomes accessible; Kamban identifies opportunity for native Mac AI integration

2022-06

Builds first simple GPT-3 wrapper for Mac as a native app

2022-06

Posts first version on HackerNews despite basic UI

2022-06

Trends on HackerNews homepage, receives first paid customers

2022-06

First paid customer acquired

2022-07

Implements Mixpanel for anonymous user behavior tracking

2022-07

Quits job to go all-in on Elephas after seeing traction

2022-08

Adjusts landing page messaging based on analytics data showing most-used features

2022-08

Sets up Gumroad for subscription management and email workflows

2022-09

Reaches $200 MRR

2022-09

Builds knowledge base to reduce support requests

2022-09

$300 MRR milestone

2022-10

$400 MRR (Oct 12)

2022-10

$500 MRR reached in ~4 months (Oct 18)

2022-11

First Product Hunt launch - 71 upvotes, 179 comments

2022-12

Begins building in public on Twitter, sharing milestones

2023-01

Ayush Chaturvedi joins as co-founder bringing marketing expertise

2023-02

Begins 12-month SEO investment as Phase 2 growth strategy

2023-03

Starts Reddit marketing as distribution channel

2023-06

Added Super Brain feature for personal knowledge management

2023-08

Elephas becomes profitable with growing revenue

2023-09

Second Product Hunt launch - 280 upvotes, 100 comments; crossed 1000 users

2023-10

SEO begins delivering sustained organic traffic after months of investment

2024-01

Expanded to Mac App Store distribution

2024-03

Available on Setapp subscription platform

2024-06

Multi-AI provider integration: Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, Groq

2024-09

Added offline AI functionality with local embeddings for privacy

2024-12

Launched iOS AI Keyboard for iPhone and iPad

2025-01

Evolved positioning from AI writing assistant to AI knowledge assistant

2025-06

Support for 20+ file formats including PDFs, Notion, Obsidian, audio, video

2025-09

3000+ professionals using Elephas, ~$150K annual revenue

2025-12

Team grown to approximately 10 employees

2026-01

Added team licenses and business features for enterprise knowledge sharing

Distribution

Growth Story

Target Audience

Knowledge workers, content writers, professionals who write daily across Mac applications

Problem Solved

AI writing tools required switching to a browser or chat interface. Elephas brings AI assistance directly into any Mac app with a keyboard shortcut, eliminating context switching.