48% of top 50 GenAI web products in a16z’s list are completely bootstrapped

a16z has published a ranking of top 50 GenAI web products by monthly visits. Here’s a summary of key findings:

• 80% of the top 50 GenAI web products didn't exist a year ago
• A whopping 48% are completely bootstrapped, with no outside funding
• Only 5% of the companies on the list are part of big tech companies like Google.
• Most companies on the list have grown organically without paid marketing.
• The top 50 list is an almost even 3-way split between companies that
  • (1) trained their own proprietary model,
  • (2) fine-tuned an existing model, and
  • (3) built a consumer UI on top of an existing model (e.g., “GPT wrappers”)
• Consumers are willing to pay for GenAI. 90% of companies on the list are already monetizing, nearly all of them via a subscription model. The average product on the list makes $21/month (for users on monthly plans)—yielding $252 annually.
• General LLM chatbots represent 68% of total consumer traffic to the top 50 list. Alongside ChatGPT, this category includes Google’s Bard and Quora’s Poe, all ranked in the top 5.
• However, two other categories have started to drive significant usage in recent months—AI companions (such as CharacterAI) and content generation tools (such as Midjourney and ElevenLabs). Within the broader content generation category, image generation is the top use case with 41% of traffic, followed by prosumer writing tools at 26%, and video generation at 8%.
• There's room for new winners - most categories don't yet have a runaway success.

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