Transcription
We built a $50 million company within one year. It's a software company that uses AI and it was also built with AI. So I would just like to share with you my learnings as a student and then as we learn, me and my co-founder Nas, we make more progress on this. I would want to keep you updated with that.
So, as of now, this is called it's called Poppy AI. And it's a whiteboard AI tool. And if you're on this channel, you probably already kind of know what it does. So, I'm going to skip a little bit of like the product itself. But I want to talk about like what was fundamentally different about this business and why I think it's growing faster. Like our current stats right now for this month. I'll just give some stats so you have an understanding of where we're at currently. Like this month, it's July right now and this month we're at 500K plus. We're almost at 520, $530,000 I want to say. This month we um are at $3 million a year uh recurring. We have a 7% refund. We have probably 5% churn and uh these are kind of the metrics on it so far. And this puts us at like a $6 million ARR.
Okay. Now, what's crazy is today and even like a few days ago, like two days ago, my dad had to go to the ER and I had to be there and be present with him all day. And just that day alone with no launches, nothing crazy, no crazy marketing push, just that day alone, we did like 30K. So, on average right now, we're doing like 20 to $30,000 a day. I like to share these stats not to boast, but I like to share these stats because whenever I'm watching business videos and business breakdowns, I like to know like the actual tactical stuff, like the very specifics, and then I like to kind of go into, okay, what this business is about. So, I just want to make this video, I guess, how I would want to view or watch a video.
Now I know a lot of you guys are running your own businesses. So I want to share my findings that hopefully can help you. Um, originally my background is like from info product businesses. So we had uh we were growing an info product business and it was selling digital courses and we scaled that up to a million dollars a year. And I remember specifically that like making every sale just felt very hard. Like a lot of time, effort, energy went into every sale. And if I wasn't working that day, like it was rare that we were actually making a lot of sales. And we added high ticket sales to it as well. We added low ticket sales. And the max we kind of got it to was about $1.7, almost $2 million. Um, but that was not recurring, right? Like this software is recurring. That pro that when we did get up to a 1.7 million, it was like the year's over now. We got to start all over again and just like get all brand new customers and do it all from scratch.
So for me, making the pivot into a software company was very scary because we had never done it and this was our first time ever building a software company. Um, but it was we were like we were teaching other people how to become developers and for us it was like, okay, this is a moment we should probably do this ourselves. But here are the findings that I had. Like now that AI exists, it's a lot easier to make a software company. The problem that I see with almost everybody that's trying to build software companies now using AI is like they will just try to stick in AI somewhere and hope that they can build a successful company out of it. What we try to do differently, me and Nas, is we try to solve a specific problem first. It just so happened that we did it through the lens of AI. Like we had been content creators for majority of our life and the people that we were trying to solve a problem for were in the realm of a content creator. Like initially Poppy was supposed to be a product for copywriters actually. And yes, it's not technically a content creator, a copywriter, like they're not YouTubers, but somebody who's writing copy is like they're still creating content, right? Like they're writing content. It's just written content for people. And often times when you read this content, it can turn into a YouTube video, it can turn into a VSSL, it can turn into a landing page, whatever it may be, right? Co everything essentially flows from copy. So we were initially targeting copywriters. It randomly turned out that this product was actually a better fit for marketers, founders, business owners and people wanted to use it to make viral content. And at the very start of our business, like last year, 2024 May, like 2024 May, we made $500 in an entire month. Okay? And we didn't know any of these things at this time that vi like people are going to use it for viral content or what are people going to use it for? So just for some context for you, this is what we did in one month, me and Nas, working as hard as we possibly could. And the first big breakthrough that I want to teach you, that I want to share with you, that we learned was this. It was actually affiliate marketing because we tried to sell it on our own. We tried to sell it through Instagram, through YouTube, organic, and we would barely make any sales. But one day we ended up thinking, okay, what if we started doing affiliate marketing strategy? We had seen some other founders talk about it. We watched a video from this company, Starter Story, if you've heard of them. They were covering Jenny Aai and Jennyai, which is a software company that founder said that they had one TikTok and that one TikTok made them like $80,000. So we thought, okay, they reached out to an affiliate and you know, somebody made a video on their behalf and these guys ended up making $80,000 of revenue off of that one video and it took them two years to get to that part. So mentally, I set lower expectations. I went to Nas and I was like, "In two years, if we can get to $10,000 a month, we're happy." And we're like, "Let's pour all of our money into it. And if we run out of money and it gets horrible, then either you come sleep with me in my parents' basement and we'll work out of there or it'll be your parents' basement. It'll be one of that." So that was like the worst case scenario, and we made a plan for it. But luckily what ended up happening is we went, "Okay, we listened to their story. They did it through affiliate. We're like, let's try it." And then Nas ended up making a breakthrough, finding an affiliate. She made a video for us on TikTok. And when she made that one TikTok, that TikTok essentially like changed the trajectory of our lives. That one TikTok. That night, Nas and I were in our apartment, San Francisco. It was like 1:30 a.m. We were both about to go to sleep in two different bedrooms. We're in our underwear. We had our shirt on. We ate our low calorie ice cream that we had. And right when we're about to leave, our phone just starts dinging. We get one notification. Another notification. I look at it. It says Stripe. It says $97. Another one. $97. Another one. And I'm holding my phone and my hand is about to shake and then Nas is standing there and we're looking at each other and we're like, "Oh my god." I'm like, "What is happening, bro?" I'm like, "Do you know what is happening? Like, how the [ __ ] what is this?" And then later Naza is like, "I have no idea." And so we're both just freaking out for like an hour cuz we have not seen, keep in mind, like the few months before that we made $500. And so now we're starting to see all these sales come through. We have no idea where they're coming from. And eventually we find out, we start texting the customers that are coming in and they all keep saying, "Oh, it was a TikTok that I watched. It was a TikTok, but this one girl, you know, this TikTok, this blonde girl made it. Everybody's coming in." And before the night is even over, we've done like four or $5,000. And then when we wake up that day, we ended up doing an extra $10,000. We just could not believe it. We just kept looking at each other like, "What just happened?" Within that one to two weeks, we started off like day one, we ended up doing 10k. Then it was like another 10k, another 10k, and within a week or two, we had ended up doing uh $150,000. That showed us that this affiliate strategy is working. This affiliate strategy makes us money, gets us results, and so we're like, okay, this we need to double, triple, quadruple down on it. And so affiliate arm became a huge part of our business. And we currently do this and crank this every single day. This is one affiliate. Now the volume of affiliates, we've taken it to like a pretty high extreme. Like we would we have like over 200 plus affiliates now. That required a lot of getting on calls, that required a lot of doing outreaches and getting with affiliates. But the big thing that we've kind of realized is instead of mass going out to every single person like random person, we're trying to partner up with the bigger people. And that strategy has been working way better. So like we recently partnered up with Vanessa Laauo and she's a great content creator, a YouTuber, very well respected in her niche and that did really really well. We have partnered up with Matt Gray. That was awesome. So these big partnerships have been like super profitable.
So the so thing number one for us is affiliate. I think this is an underutilized strategy, but I think that you should really think about it in your business because you won't really believe that it works for you until one day it actually does. And the best part about affiliates is I don't know if you have experience doing product launches or writing these long email sequences, which like if you're a business owner or you're a digital marketer, like you probably have experience doing some of these things, it's not a fun experience. Like it's cool to go through your first launch, second launch, third launch, but by the time you've done your 10th or 12th or 15th, you're kind of tired of, you know, if I was to draw this axis, like your money goes like this, right? It's like famine, famine, famine, no money, no money, no money, and then you have a launch and then it dips again. And then now you're So that was your feast, right? You got to eat a lot and you became fat and now it's famine, famine, fam, famine. You're starving, starving, starving, starving. Another launch. Another launch. And this is like January. And this is like June. And And you get the idea, right? This is like let's just say uh August. And then in between these months, you're freaking starving. Um, this business model is common business model for a lot of info product business people. Very stressful, very high effort. If you don't make that product launch work, you're [ __ ]. I don't like to run this model anymore. It is if you can't perform during this time, it doesn't look good for you like basically go out of business, right? So, it's not that great. The nice thing about affiliate model is once you have enough affiliates, it's basically like rolling a snowball down the hill, it starts to just get bigger and bigger and bigger, get more and more momentum and it goes faster and faster. Affiliate starts off kind of slow. In our case, it didn't. It kind of like started off crazy, but affiliate eventually starts to get really big once you have enough affiliates starting to promote your product. So, really think about it like what is your business? And in your business, can you get affiliates to work with you? So, I know a lot of you guys are agency owners that have Poppy. So think about can you get affiliate partners that promote your agency? Like at Poppy itself, we have a ton of content creators. We would actually like to partner up with an agency. It would actually be valuable for us. So, if you were an affiliate agency, we would refer clients to you and we'd happily take commission of it because it solves our customers' problems, increases the LTV of our customers, and you get paid um, you know, along the way. So, there's ton of people that would be open to doing affiliate, you know, work with you. And why wouldn't you take advantage of it? It's basically somebody literally giving you leads or customers for free. Think about that. You're getting customers at free or such cheap costs, especially depending on how you structure these deals with your affiliate, right? Like in the start, a lot of our deals that we just did were on commissions. So yes, we made 150k, but initially, you know what we incentivize our affiliates with? You get 50% commissions. So, our first affiliate on 150K, well, guess what? Um, here's another nice thing about affiliate. You pay actually on tracked income. Okay, tracked income. And technically, there is a lot of untracked income here. So out of the 150k, right, the tracked income that they got us that she got us is actually 75 or 80k, about 80k. So the commissions we pay are actually on the tracked income, which means that they get 40k um as the income. Okay, does that make sense? So, I'm paying 40k and then the business makes $150. So, that's like $110,000 profit. Now, that money can go back into the business. We can get more developers and we can grow faster. This is just how affiliate works everywhere. You pay on track. You don't pay on untracked. So, what does that mean? Somebody, let's say, finds my YouTube video, right? and or sorry, like the affiliate's TikTok video if they watch it and they click on her link and they come and buy Poppy using her specific link, using her code, well, that gets tracked to her. But if they watch her YouTube video or watch her TikTok video and then essentially just jump onto uh watch her video and then don't buy it right away and then a couple of days later end up buying Poppy but don't use the link in her TikTok, then that does not get tracked to her, right? That does not get attributed to her, but it still likely came from her. So that's why that's how that works, right? So, this is a pretty profitable thing to add into your business, traffic source to add into your business, and I just think a lot of people don't take advantage of it. So, I would say this is something massive to think about in your business going into, you know, right now we're in Q2. So, like as you're heading into Q3 and Q4, really think about how can I add affiliate into my business? And I would even recommend like reading Alex Forzy's book um $100 million leads and I think he talks about affiliates in there. So like that's a resource that I would recommend. And the other resource I would recommend is really the Jenny AI podcast with Starter Story. That's actually the actual thing that helped us. You know, the Alex Rosie book helped me, but the main thing that helped us was the Starter Story video because that's what made us believe we too, just like them, can get an affiliate for us that would work. And so when that worked, blew our mind. So that's our biggest source.
The second one, uh the second big source of revenue that we have are actually referrals. So this actually did not happen with many of my other businesses like especially info product business referrals were not really a thing. I just think that people don't want to share info products with other people. They're not really like like I can't think of a time where I like got a course from somebody and just went to like my friend was like, dude, you got to get this [ __ ] course. Like this is a sick course, going to change your life. I I like the course. I go through it, but that's about it. So courses kind of don't have that sharability to them. Whereas there's something we notice about a product, especially a good product, that that does. And for us, what we found out is our referrals are about 20%. They're about 20 to 30%, but I'll just be on the conservative side. So that means people who join tell their friends and then their friends join. So a simple math would be if we made a million with Poppy, we would make an extra $200,000 from people telling their friends about Poppy. So that's free money and that goes back and reinvested into the business. So then we can make the product better and make a better experience for the customer. And there I think some interesting things that we've done tactically and you can probably apply this into your business as well. So like one of the things that we've done is we take onboardings pretty seriously and I got some of this idea from a Hormosi video I was watching where he said he worked with a software business and the way he reduced the churn, increased the LTV of a customer was by taking the onboardings from like group onboardings to one-on-one onboardings and that's what I decided to implement. Menty pretty much non-negotiably from the start that we will do one-on-one onboardings with our customers and we've done that since like the birth of Poppy. At the current moment, we're taking like 4 to 500 attended calls of onboardings. So we take about like 500 onboarding calls per month. And the beautiful thing about this is somebody from our team that's passionate about Poppy, knows how to use it, is somebody who's excited, shares it, and talks with another person. So let's say you got Poppy, right? Then you get on this onboarding call with somebody from our team. They will sit with you and literally build out a system with you that spits out viral content and they won't leave until you get one piece of content that you can actually selfishly use and hit publish on for your own business or for your private life. That's what they will work with you to do. That's a lot of commitment. It's a lot of effort. And that's what Gary Vee would call scaling the unscalable. These are things that every software company will like, well, well, how will we scale this to 10 billion customers? It's like, we don't have 10 billion customers. We have a few thousand customers. Let's just deal or few hundred customers coming in per month. Let's just deal with the customers that we actually have. Let's solve the problem just for them first. Let's start there. And so by doing these onboarding calls one-on-one, we create a great experience for these people. And what we noticed when we did this is the refund rates went lower and the churn rate went lower. Turn rate means like somebody cancelling your subscription and then not staying part of Poppy.
Other tactical insights that I want to share with you that added a lot of revenue is um pricing. So this is actually like probably the biggest one. I wish I mentioned it earlier, but I'll mention it now. So pricing, there's so many anchors and there's so much leverage that exists in pricing. So, one thing we did is I would sit there and like a [ __ ] psychopath after every five to seven sales, I remember hearing this from Hormosi as well, just increase your price by 10 to 20% somewhere there. And for me, it was very simple. After every few sales, I would just literally sit on the checkout page and just increase it by another 24 or $25. Then after a few sales, I'd increase it by another 24 to $25. And then after every like 10, 20, like then I started waiting in like kind of bigger batches of sales, after every 10, 20 sales, I would just increase it by another 25 bucks, another 25 bucks, another 25 bucks. And I started to notice where the velocity started to like really slow down and when I hit that point where the speed of sales really started to slow down, that's when I would like reduce the price back and when the speed would increase back up again, that's where I would hold the price. So, I'm not sitting there like using my judgment like here's what I think the market will pay for it and I should charge. I just let the market decide because at the end of the day, I want to price my product. Uh, at the end of the day, I want to price my product the highest it could be, but also the highest amount most customers would pay. So, it maximizes for two things. One, it maximizes for like max profitability. So profitability, profitability and then it maximizes for I guess liquidity or availability, however you want to say it, like it's at an intersection of the max profitability and liquidity. Like if there was a Venn diagram, this pricing point would be right in the middle. Here's what I mean, right? If you if you made it $0, you would have massive liquidity, meaning you would have a ton of customers. I would have 100,000, 300,000 customers that'd be using Poppy if it was like free. But that would not be very profitable. But if I made it maximally profitable, just like cranked up the prices like some stupid amount, the liquidity would go down. Not enough people would be like buying it. So, I want to price it at a point where like most amount of people can buy, but it's also highly profitable for us. And that's the sweet spot that you want to find. And a simple way to do it is like I just didn't do it in a really complicated way. I did it in a simple way. So, the first hack of pricing is you can increase your pricing. Okay? So, I will say increase pricing. Um, the other big hack that we did with uh pricing is we used to have a monthly option and then we had an annual option. What I did is I just [ __ ] removed the monthly option at some point. Okay, because when we added it in, a lot of people were take a bunch of people were taking us up on it and I was just like, okay, what happens if I take away the monthly option? And what I realized happened is the sales pretty much increased by 3x. So one is increased price, one is like remove. So I'll just say remove monthly. Our our revenue numbers like actually 3xed. That means we were making three times more money, just like total net, and we were keeping it. I didn't have to deal with these customers and I didn't have to check every single month anymore. Did these customers pay or not? Like check up on failed payments every month. Because think about it, when somebody's on a monthly payment plan, right? Like let's say I become your customer and you have me on a monthly payment plan. How many times in a year do you need to check if I have paid or not? You have to check 12 times. Okay. Every single month you have to make sure, did my card go through or not go through, right? Because there's 12 charges. That's a lot of times of you having to check and for me to basically fail my payment. There's 12 times I could fail my payment. Annual. If I pay you yearly, you just have to check once. Okay, there's zero chance of a card failing after the first time. So, it makes life very easy for everyone. I don't have to build out an entire [ __ ] department to follow up with PE like operations team to follow up on the monthly payments. Yearly people are more committed. They stay longer. They refund less. I don't need to follow up with failed payments and like waste a ton of time and build a success or a customer support team and give them headaches to do that. It's like they can just fix the core problems. I don't get a lot of tire kickers that are just trying to test the product and overall we just make a lot more money. Um, and so that was like another thing that we discovered. Then, and so this is something you can do in your business as well, right? Like maybe you only have a one-time payment option. You can make it a yearly subscription. If you have a monthly, you can think about removing the monthly and keep yearly and and then just look at the numbers and see what happens. So, I just looked at the numbers. I looked at the data. This is what the data told me. The next thing I did is I said, well, before people had the monthly option and then they had the yearly option. So, um, you know, I noticed that there were a num the number of sales was a little bit lower. It was like there was about 10 or 20% of the people that still are not joining Poppy because the monthly, there's no other option there at all, which makes sense. It's like there is a subset of people that would only ever join if like the monthly option was there. Otherwise, they just weren't, which is okay. It makes sense. And so I thought, well, is it really because it's the monthly option or what if it's because there were like multiple options? And so the next thing I tried is I just tried putting multiple options of payments on the checkout page, but instead of making them monthly alone or sorry, yearly alone, I just added multiple different pricings to the yearly. So we had yearly that was $400. So, we cranked up yearly to $400, but then I also added a lifetime plan that was like $1,000. So, instead of having two options before where one was 40 bucks a month for monthly, I removed and then the annual was 400 bucks a month. So, before, think about it, they had the option of picking between 40 and $400. Now, we changed it to where they had the option to pick between $400 and $1,000. And the interesting thing I noticed was we got back to the same number of people buying as when I had monthly and annual, but now people the same number of people were buying when I had just annual and just lifetime. And I think what I discovered is just people having that option makes more people buy. RA. So you want to give them two options and one of the options you want to have even more expensive than your expensive option. So like instead of just yearly, now we have if you pay $1,000, you get the entire lifetime. Our current lifetime is around like 1,200. So basically it's like three, basically you're paying for three years of Poppy upfront and after the three years, you're keeping, you're making a profit, so to speak, right, if you keep it longer. And I was to my surprise, 10 to 20% of the people started taking us up on the lifetime, which was a crazy boost in revenue. And so this new lifetime product ended up making like another 20, 30, 40k a month just on its own. So what I discovered from all these like little pricing hacks that we added is pricing itself, I'll tell it to you like this. We're currently at $3 million ARR, okay? Annual recurring revenue, which for a SAS company gives you between a 30 to $50 million valuation, probably even higher. But the 3 million ARR that we're actually currently at, if our pricing was lower, so if the pricing was not $3 million, sorry, if the pricing was not $400, the pricing was $100, that means we would have made three times less money. So that means you take 3 million and divide it by three, we would have been only at like $800,000 or $1 million right now. We'd not be at 3 million. So think about that. I didn't change my affiliate strategy. I didn't change my referral strategy. We didn't make the product better. We didn't do anything with like hiring more people. We didn't do anything more with sales. Just the pricing itself literally 3x the money that we actually made in keep. So massive anchor here to add pricing.
And then the fourth thing that we're actually like the fourth big thing I would say that we're currently working on to get to like, you know, right now if we're at 500k per month, the fourth thing, the fourth big pillar that we're trying to add that I think will get us to a million a month, if not beyond, is really adding sales team. And so that's what that's one thing that we're working on right now, which is we're taking these 500 onboardings per month. How can we work with these customers and present them with solutions that could help them even more? And so, you know, one product that we're working on right now is like viral content system. So, viral content system and the idea behind that is like most people that join Poppy, they want to make viral content. Well, they still have to set it up themselves, but what if one of our experts or me as the founder or Nas as the founder like came in and like literally did that for you where this system was spitting out viral content for you? So whether it was for YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, or maybe you're trying to make content for ads so that you could print money, right? You can make 10, 20, 30K a month or whatever with ads. Well, what if we just built that system with you, right? We would end up understanding your entire business. We'd end up deeply understanding your offer, your pricing structure. We'd end up understanding like your call to actions, your pieces of content that have worked that resonated with your audience and we'd end up building the system together for you. And that's a new system for example that we've launched and we've recently started selling it to people on onboarding calls and we have people taking up on taking us up on it and like loving it. So, that's one of the things we've done. And then another one is like APIs and chatbots. And all of this stuff right now is like around 5K, but our goal is to make this like 10K, 15K and make it even more valuable for people. I I actually like sold it to uh one person and after I sold it to him on the call, he actually said like before his Stripe payment went through, he's like, "Dude, cuz as I was like he's like, "How much is that?" Like 5K. He's like, "Let's" He's like, "Let's lock it in." And then he goes, "By the way," he's like, "You do know you're undercharging for this, right?" And I said, "What do you mean?" And he goes, "I would have paid like he's like, "If you asked me 10 or 15k, like I wouldn't have flinched and paid." And he's like, "If you asked me for 20k, I would have been like like that's maybe pushing it a bit." That was so interesting to me because I'm like at 20K, he would actually even still consider it, right? So that's how valuable it is. But you also have to understand their business is already doing $400,000 per month. Their goal is to get to $1 million per month. If they unlock the content side and if this system helps them and saves them time, I mean 20K is is literally nothing for them or or 15K is nothing for them because it's a one-time payment that they're paying. It's not a monthly fee. They don't have to pay an agency. Agencies are like 50K, 100K a year, right? So technically they're saving a lot of time, effort, and money by doing that. So that's why we're building our sales team. So on these 500 onboarding calls, if we convert 20% of the people, that's 100 sales and 100 sales at 5K price point. I'm not a mathematician, but that sounds like an extra 500. And if you add this bad boy up with the current money that we're making from the front end, that puts this business at 1 million per month, which is 12 million a year, which since it's a software company, gives you a 10x valuation on that. You're looking at a $120 million company, which is [ __ ] crazy to say now that I think about it, but it puts it as a $120 million valuation to $150 million valuation, which is [ __ ] sick. So, if you're a salesperson, please, I beg you, like work with us. Like, we'll put some kind of links below. Um, that would be amazing. So, I'm going to put a this is a call to action CTA circle. Um, so like work with us, hit us up and you can probably help us get there really fast. Or if you have any ideas or whatever, you can just share in the YouTube thing. But this is what I'm discovering. If you have ideas for me like how can we grow it faster, let me know. That'd be that'd be awesome to hear. But this is currently where we're at in our business. And um I'll probably talk about our other problems, too. Like current biggest problem we have is hiring. So that's something that I'll probably want to share more on in another video. But I think this should give you a good in-depth um guide on like how we scaled our business from like kind of 0 to $50 million valuation.
Oh yeah, don't forget step zero, make a brilliant product. So yeah, I forgot that one. That one was like an important one. So we will it's a bonus one. Okay, let's let's make it step five. So there you go. Making a great product and something you would use. So one tip I want to share with you is uh when we were building our product, we everybody was like focused on product market fit, meaning a product that the market wants. The advice we got from this one founder changed our life at that time. It was Cliff Whitesman, founder of Speechify, and they have like hundreds of millions of downloads and that app is like next to ChatGPT in terms of like downloads on App Store. It's kind of crazy and he's a good friend of ours and at the time we got on a call with him, what he told us is he's like, forget about product market fit. He's like, focus on product founder fit. Which means build the product that you as a founder want in the world that you want for yourself. That was probably the best piece of advice I've ever gotten in my entire life because that made me just like not give a [ __ ] about what the audience wants. Cuz honestly, it doesn't really drive me. It bores me. I don't really care what people want. I care like about what I want and what product I need to see in the world. Like what drives me, what interests me. And when I started like building that, like when I started building that with Nas, like we started building it, it was just really exciting, really fascinating because I just be like, I also need this and I also need that and we were just like we got it good in the MVP early days and I just remember within the first months we were like, how the [ __ ] will I live without this? And we would be so confused. We would try to use Claude and we try to use just ChatGPT by itself and we're like, no, it just isn't enough. If it just doesn't do the things that we want it to do and we would constantly like we would constantly think to ourselves like, how will we live without this tool Poppy AI? But at that time, nobody was buying it for months and months and months. We had like zero sales, but I just remember thinking, it's not the product. I would just keep like we would just go back and forth and I would keep telling us, I'm like, the people are stupid, like they just don't get it, they don't get it. I know it's a good product because I use it every day. And that's how Nas felt too. He's like, I use it every day. And we're not dummies. We like know so many software and products in the entire like space. And when we constantly kept using it, we're like, there's something here the market is not seeing. What it ended up being was we had built a product, but we didn't know which market was going to use it. And so going through a bunch of affiliates, making content, trying all this stuff, eventually with one affiliate, her TikTok ended up hitting the actual demographic that it was meant for, that it was perfect for. And then that gave us a ton of clarity, but conviction comes before clarity. Goddamn, that's some [ __ ] sauce. We had conviction and we just stuck with it in the times when there was no [ __ ] clarity. We were in a dark tunnel. No idea where which cave leads to what. And because we had conviction, we just followed that goddamn cave until the depths of Valhalla. And we ended up coming out victorious. That was primarily because conviction came first and then clarity came second. And I think clarity is earned as a gift of [ __ ] being convicted in your mission and vision and product founder fit. That's why it like resonates so deep because you have to have that like unbelievable belief in the thing that you're building. And the only way you have that is if you build something for yourself and be a little bit selfish on that. Um, so that's it. Okay. Number five, which is actually number zero, but it's like product. Okay, this is where for us it started from. So, there you go. Do these few little steps and you'll have a little 50 to $100 million company uh within 12 months. But, uh, yeah, hopefully it gave you some value and I'm just trying to share insights with you and I still suck and I'm getting better every single day. Love your beautiful face and I'll see you in the next video. Peace.