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this time 3 years ago i was diagnosed with thyroid cancer it's been so long that i honestly forget i even had it 99% of the time grateful that time has erased most of the bad memories, and even more grateful to be cancer-free! 🤠

How to go from 0 to $5M ARR profitably (step by step) Here is every growth hack we used for each of our distribution channels: - Organic Short-form content - Influencer Marketing - SEO - Paid Ads Organic Short-form content The most important thing to remember in this new age of social media is that follower counts don’t matter at all I would unironically sponsor a fresh account made this week vs a YouTuber with a million subs if they had similar views and I don’t even think it’s a controversial opinion (especially when you consider that the famous YouTuber will charge you potentially 30x more for less results, but I would maybe even choose the new account if they were the same price) The reason being that new accounts are highly volatile and if you put out a great engaging piece of content then it could easily go viral regardless of how many followers you have But rather than finding and sponsoring these new accounts in your niche, you can just create these accounts yourself You just need to follow this basic format: 1. Find a face for your account 2. Craft a viral video 'series' 3. Multiply your accounts What would happen if BTS made a new TikTok account and started posting? All videos on the new account would immediately go viral because the algo would push the videos back to their fans Despite having zero followers, this new TikTok account will ‘behave’ as though it has hundreds of millions of followers One great hack is to find someone who already has an audience of people that you know will convert, then ask them to create a completely new account to posts videos about your product This is an amazing hack because creators are usually very open to this idea because it doesn’t dilute their main page, it’ll be way cheaper to pay for 20 videos on a new account every month vs 20 sponsored posts on their main account, and it’ll get way better results For example we found a creator named Mengmengduck whose entire account at the time was teaching students how to write to employers and we paid him $4000 for 20 videos/mo In our first month we got 7 million+ impressions, just as expected the videos on the brand new account were being pushed to the followers on his main account When you get a new creator just follow this basic guideline: - Repost vids on all platforms (Reels, TikTok, YT Shorts) - Post 1+ videos per day - Initially, post vids similar to what the influencer posts on their main account, then start experimenting with videos that feature your product - We paid $4000/mo for MMD who had 500k followers, but you can get someone cheaper for similar results! The entire goal when working with your creator is to find a viral “series” because a video that goes viral once will go viral again You want a video that you can basically tweak slightly and repost multiple times a week that is still fun for the audience Once you find a viral series, you can start creating new accounts but this time you don’t need to work with big creators, you can just find charismatic UGC creators because you’ve found content that is engaging and poised to go viral Currently, we have about 5 different Jenni AI accounts all posting similar content Many of our accounts have tens or sometimes just hundreds of followers and they just repost stuff from our main account In some cases, the account with 48 followers gets MORE views than our main account with 55k followers...even when posting identical videos Examples of viral series: 1. A guy tries to see how many sticks of spaghetti it takes to hold his weight. Then he tries to see how many coat hangers. Then he tries to use sheets of paper. Etc etc. All the same video, minimal effort but will go viral every time. 2. A guy drinks a cup of milk for every 1000 followers he has. Everyday it’s the same video where he drinks milk but people continually tune in because they want to see him suffer and drink hundreds of cups of milk. Will go viral every time. 3. For us we had “POV you have an essay due” and it was just a ridiculous plot of someone realising they have an essay due while they are taking a shit or right before they sleep or w/e and it always ended with them using Jenni AI to help them write their essay faster. Same video, slightly different 10 second intro each time. Thinking of new viral video ideas are so hard, so just try to think of tweaking your few winning videos into “series” and just think about prolonging the lifespan of your content The order of virality: 1. Have one account on each platform (TikTok, Instagram, YT shorts) and experiment with a ton of hooks and video ideas 2. Eventually you’ll get a video that goes viral after enough experimentation 3. Experiment and somehow turn that video into a “series” 4. Start tweaking and posting this “series” on multiple accounts 5. Translate and create the same video with creators that speak Chinese, Spanish, etc 6. Take the really mega-viral videos and sponsor other pages to repost them 7. Use the mega-viral content for paid ads 8. Eventually enough copycats will copy your video series and it’ll get played out and you restart at step 1 Our video series "POV: You have an essay due" has probably generated 300 million+ views overall It was essentially the same video over and over, multiple times a week, yet they consistently went viral That one video series made us over half a million dollars, and it was one of several video series’ that we were able to cook up Influencer Marketing Find influencers - Go to your users' Instagram and see which influencers they are following. This should be easy if you’ve done user interviews correctly, if you have no social media handles of your users you should actually befriend your users and get to know them on a deeper level or you’re not going to make it - Do this for several users and eventually you will find some influencers that are ‘popular’ among your target user demographic. Find these influencers and follow them all, it’s okay you only need 1-3 - Go to these influencer's profile and click "suggested similar accounts" and you'll get an easy list of hot leads that you can sponsor (you can continue to do this recursively for each new influencer that you find) - Also, be sure to see what hashtags these influencers are using when they post and then follow those hashtags as well - Once you have a list of influencers, create a new Instagram/TikTok account and manually follow & watch their videos all the way through and the algorithm will start automatically showing relevant influencers to you that you can then reach out to (this is a great way to lower the risk of getting scammed because the videos that show up organically on your FYP are less likely to be accounts that have bought followers/views) - On your new account, you want to be on the hunt for smaller influencers, if a new-ish account has multiple videos with 100k+ views, it's absolute GOLD - Once you have a list of influencers who you are ready to partner up with, you can begin reaching out to them Reach out to influencers - DMs > emails = higher response rate (at least for us) - All messages need to be as detailed and tailored as possible, but most importantly as CONCISE as possible. This balance is hard but you’ll get a better feel for this as you notice what gets ignored and what doesn't - Demonstrate that you’re genuinely a fan of their content and that you’re excited to partner up. This is such a low bar but few founders actually put in the effort. - Why should they partner with you? Why will their audience love your product? Don’t talk about dumb shit like how many employees your company has or what round of fundraising you’re at (I suggest not talking about those vanity metrics in any situation, but I digress) - Make sure to indicate somewhere in the message that this is obviously a PAID promotion, influencers are constantly inundated by people who are begging them for free shoutouts or weird affiliate partnerships - Expect more than 50% of influencers to not respond, but this % is very volatile depending on what industry you’re in, and how cool/well-known your product is - The good news is, as more influencers talk about your product it gets easier and easier to convince them to promote your product because they have heard of it before (unknown products could be risky or straight-up scams) Negotiate - The highest priority is to align the incentives between you and the influencer. You should both want a banger video that converts - Never pay upfront for videos (pay half upfront at most). Most influencers are fantastic people but some influencers will just try and drop a half-ass video once they get their check - Try to split the payment so that some % comes from the number of conversions that they bring (you can track this via coupon code or UTM link). If they don’t want to do that, try to at least have some affiliate bonus - Ask for their viewer demographics see which countries are viewing their content and compare that with the conversion rates of those countries for your product - See previous sponsored content that they’ve posted and see how those videos performed vs their usual content - Negotiate the deal so that either they only receive some/all of the payment if it reaches a certain # of views (or a certain # of coupon code redemptions) - Don’t listen to these absolute garbage articles that tell you to pay based on the number of subscribers/followers that they have. The sole question you should be asking is, will they convert or will they not (at least in the early stage of your startup). Post content - You can’t use a general content strategy for all of your influencer partnerships because each influencer has a certain type of content that their audience likes. Your content can’t deviate too far from it or else it will have terrible watch times and you’re basically paying for a dud - If you don’t have experience with social media or making engaging content, just let the influencer make the video and then you approve it (after aligning your incentives, as we discussed in the last step) - One important note is that views are irrelevant, we’ve had videos that got 30 MILLION views and gave us barely any conversions, whereas a video with 50k views converted like hotcakes. The video should make the viewers excited about what you’ve built not just have them hear what you made and then forget about it the second they scroll to the next video on their For You Page -When in doubt, don’t be afraid of your video looking like a straight-up ad, even if it gets less views it will convert better than an influencer casually talking about your product for 15 seconds in a random “Day in the life” vlog Final tips - The biggest risk with influencer marketing is sponsoring a dead video or a video that gets a few hundred views or a few thousand views in low-converting countries. For that reason, make a portfolio of bets instead of hunting for the perfect deal. Do not allocate all of your marketing budget to a few large influencers - If the account has high conversion potential, but the first video flops, don't be afraid to run it back again (often times you can get a better rate on the second video if the first video does poorly) - You should be casting a large net and then doubling down on the winners and gathering data to get better at predicting which influencer would be great to sponsor - One good influencer partnership can make up for several influencer partnerships with negative ROI - The ultimate goal is to build out your influencer marketing arm and then bring on somebody to help run it so you can focus on other aspects of growth. - You need to have all of your insights and data figured out so that when you bring somebody on, they can take your insights and devote all of their time to become even better than you are at influencer marketing. SEO SEO is a tricky one because it can take so long to see results That’s why I would never start with SEO because in the early-stages you want fast feedback cycles and SEO is the furthest from it But the flip side is, when you really need SEO, you probably should’ve started on it 6 months prior to that point For that reason my ideal order of what growth channels I would focus on is: Organic Short-form -> Influencer Marketing -> Paid Ads And at any point when I felt like I had a deep understanding of who my powers users were I would start work on SEO and do it concurrently with whatever growth channel I was working on at that point in time Here are some growth hacks for when you do start SEO work: 1. Taking featured snippets Sometimes you'll be ranking low on the first page, not getting much traffic. Pushing yourself to the top of the page can take a lot of effort and investment, but there's a way to get there almost immediately. If the search term you're looking to rank for has a featured snippet, you can often easily take over the first spot by just tweaking your content to answer the query more precisely. The chances are your content already answers the question well enough, but it's just not written in a way that Google realizes it. Use definitive phrases like "The answer is Yes, you can do X". Use bulleted or ordered lists to make the answer concise and clear. To find these opportunities, you can plug your domain into a tool like Ahrefs, Semrush or Search Atlas and filter the keywords you are ranking for by the SERP containing a featured snippet. To keep it simple: * Plug your domain into SEO tool (ahrefs, semrush, searchatlas) * Look at keywords you're ranking for already * Filter results by the criteria of containing a featured snippet in the results * Tweak your content to answer the query in the best way possible * Jump from position 3-10 to 1 2. Increasing brand name searches Brand searches helps legitimize your startup in Google’s eyes and will help your content be seen as “trustworthy”. With this in mind, for your SEO you should be engaging in other marketing activities that necessitate brand searches. To keep it simple: * When doing organic social media marketing, encourage users to search out for your brand name instead of directly typing in the URL * When doing paid social marketing, utilizing view-through or engaged-view conversions to still track conversions made via Google searches so you can still optimize the social campaigns while reaping the SEO benefit. 3. Make it easy for search engines to understand your website Search engines have gotten a lot better at understanding messy websites, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't make it as easy as possible for them. Adding schema to your pages and giving clear cut definitions to your content can make it incredibly clear to any bots crawling your site what your site is about and what it is doing. The more the better, we've had a lot of limitations with this as we're using Framer and we've found some types of schema quite hard to implement. However, we've done what we can and any type of schema is better than nothing (as long as it's accurate) To keep it simple: * Add relevant schema to any page that is suitable * Mark up your landing pages with FAQ data, mark up your blog posts with article data. 4. Accurately estimate your ROI from search engines It's been a long time since Google allowed us to see which keywords led to conversions in Google Analytics, however it's super important to get as accurate of a picture as possible. Many people will simply look at reports and anything under the "organic" or "search engines" column, they'll count as an SEO conversion. But that's simply not true, and it severely misinforms you. By the nature of the tracking, it's impossible to differentiate between branded conversions and non branded conversions with SEO. The closest we've been able to get to do this is with a custom tool, but you can replicate it manually as well * Log into search console * Select your time period * Export your clicks for each query * Remove all branded queries * Go to your paid ads (preferably Google ads) platform and note down your conversion data. * Slightly lower the conversion percentage (because paid typically converts better than organic, as you're bidding based on a lot of other targeting metrics too) * Tally up all the clicks from search console * Use the conversion percentage from paid ads (slightly lowered) * Calculate the amount of conversions you have received from SEO (excluding brand) * Times this by the average LTV of your customer This is a much closer metric to reality than anything reported by any reporting software, especially if you have a lot of branded searches like us Paid Ads Founders will tell me their marketing strategy and marketing spend and sometimes I’ll be shocked Many are going to end up spend a sizable portion of their entire investment on google/meta ads, and the worst part is they aren’t even acquiring users at a profit, which genuinely makes me nauseous Especially in the early-stages, I honestly wouldn’t be burn ANY money on paid ads and only spend after some social media marketing first This is because data is key when it comes to paid ads and you want as much accurate data as possible to feed into the ad platforms The algorithms work very well, but they need data to make the right decisions, and you can get this data from other growth channels before starting paid ads Why paid ads after influencer marketing and organic content: 1. From influencer partnerships and organic short-form you will have a bunch of creatives that you can work/experiment/rework for paid ads 2. You get valuable customer feedback in the comments of your posts (how do target users describe your product, what they compare it to, what they like/don’t like about your product) which can be leveraged for ad copy and positioning 3. You can use the data from your social media partnerships to have better targeting for your ads on day 1 (what countries convert better, what’s the LTV of each country, what types of users are ideal to market to, etc) 4. In early-stages your budget won’t be big enough and you won't be able to spend enough on Meta to get enough data for targeting based on purchase conversions We only scaled paid ads after: * PMF (Product Market Fit) * 3x LTV to CAC (we pay less than $1 for every $3 you make from ads) * Short payback period (we make back our money in less than 3 months) Lastly, take special considerations of both the entire user journey and the landing page before you crank up adspend If your landing page isn’t persuasive + effective it’ll not only get less conversions you will also pay more for each click. In Google it improves the relevancy score and in Meta it improves the quality ranking. An easy win is also just to speed up the loading time of your page, this can directly effect the quality score of your ads and will also lower spend per click Again, do not do paid ads until later in your startup’s lifecycle It requires a larger budget, more data, and typically has higher cost per acquisition than other channels that you can start with I personally also think it’s just the most boring growth channel so don't deprive yourself of the joy of figuring out the other fun ones first haha Conclusion + Final Tip: For every level there is a new devil As you scale up your paid ads, your cost per acquisition will continue to creep upwards As you scale your influencer marketing you may actually run out of influencers to sponsor for your target user demographic There’s always some content strategy that stops working on your social media accounts, or a random Google update that threatens to fuck your rankings At each stage of scaling you’ll come across a myriad of issues that can only be solved by specialized knowledge and intense focus Scaling to $5M ARR is too difficult for one man to do (unless you’re the Lisan Al Gaib of startups) Now that you’ve read this entire guide you can just choose which growth channel to start with and throw your whole weight into it until you solve it and you can move to the next one Once you start acquiring users profitably with that first growth channel, find someone who either has the skillset to take over or someone who you can train to take over This is a critical step To get to $5M ARR you need to know how to find, hire, and retain amazing talent This could be an entire post on it’s own because hiring is so tricky, but I will say that I highly highly bias towards resiliency + speed over experience Why do I care if a candidate has 15 years of digital marketing experience? Half of our marketing work has to do with short-form content and you could’ve only become an expert in short-form (TikTok, Reels, YT Shorts) in the last 3 years anyways A young marketer with TikTok brain rot who has a great work ethic will often times outperform the “established” digital marketing agency with a ton of fake google reviews Today, our entire marketing team is just 3 people (me included), and I couldn’t have gotten anywhere close to $5M ARR without them Thanks to my growth team composed of Justin and Luke who are rockstars at what they do and helped flesh out a lot of the strategies on this post Since you’ve made it all the way to the bottom I’ll tell you one final secret Look at the bottom right of this tweet and count the bookmarks How many of those people will actually read this whole thing? 10%? How many of them will then actually try to implement some of the strategies I wrote about here? 10% of the 10%? How many of them will continue to try 1 year from now when these marketing tactics help them uncover deep flaws in their product? 1% of that? This post will be read by hundreds of thousands of people but ultimately it will only be properly utilized by literally one or two of you I hope you are that one person that I wrote this for and I hope you can go on a similar fantastical journey that I got to experience Good luck!

Despite the newfound success with my startup, my personal life has been challenging Earlier this year, when I went to visit New York, I was really excited to spend time with my friend But when I arrived, I immediately got an acquisition offer, and I spent the whole month locked in my room preparing data and going through DD I didn’t even get to share one meal with my friend, and unfortunately she passed away shortly after I left New York I have enough money now to afford a table for two anywhere in the world, but it’s impossible to fill the other seat This past year I completed our largest acquisition yet, and it was quite stressful dealing with the lawyers, bankers, and accountants Speaking and thinking became so cumbersome that when I met with my girlfriend I’d regularly reply with grunts or nods She would chastise me and say that I was never present because I was so hell-bent on finishing this acquisition Well, I was able to get the deal done, but she broke up with me because she ran out of patience I told her that I could change, but she said it’s too late and that her heart had left me 🥲 It was hard to hear this from the person I planned to marry I fear that I’ve unintentionally made some Faustian Bargain What else would explain my cancer diagnosis right after hitting $1M ARR? Each new level of startup success came with it a new trauma Sorry to write a super personal post, I promise I will get back to the regularly scheduled positive + actionable startup advice soon But the fact of the matter is I have literally sacrificed everything for my startup There are other founders who seem to have a healthy social life while also running a startup, but I haven’t been able to figure out that balance I write this post because it’s clear to me now that if I don’t figure out this balance I may end up with a pretty lonely + sad life I’ve started going to therapy and trying to find things that make me happy outside of lowering churn and increasing user counts It’s led me to rekindle my love for creative writing and I take a lot more walks now Tbh I still miss my girlfriend and I still put a high number of hours into my work But each day I find new things outside of my startup that make me happy, and that’s been very encouraging I’ve got a lot to figure out, but for now, I’m cautiously optimistic about this more balanced life!

When my startup was struggling, I moved back into my parents’ house, and they financially supported me Every once in a while, we'd have family gatherings, and I was the only 'young' person there because my cousins were busy earning degrees or working There was one humiliating incident where my mother secretly handed me her credit card and told me to “pay” for the meal with it, but act as if I were using my own money Under normal circumstances, I would have refused, but I could see that doing so I would only protect my pride at the expense of my mother’s My parents were often looked down upon in the hierarchy of the Park family because of our bad financial situation as well as their seeming inability to raise a competent child Every parent wants to have a child who isn’t a failure, but if you do have one, at the very least it’d be nice if it weren’t so glaringly obvious So, I remember going up, paying for the meal, and hoping no one would make a big deal of it Unfortunately, as I sat down, the family members thanked me for “paying” for the meal, but I could tell some didn’t believe that I could actually afford the large tab It was a fucked-up experience where I felt like a fraud, and I promised that I’d never put myself or my mother in that situation again That incident really put into perspective that I could be the perpetual loser at family gatherings if I didn’t get my act together; so in many ways, it was a blessing in disguise Because of small incidents like these, I worked as hard as I could and my startup continued to scale with the hours I put in Anyways, I recall this story where I fake paid because I’ve recently given my parents my credit card indefinitely There is no limit on the card, so even when I’m not in the room, I now pay for every single family gathering, and I will continue to do so until I die (or go bankrupt whichever comes first) Since doing so, my parents tell me now that the other uncles/aunties/etc all treat them with basic respect and some have even apologized for how they treated me/them in the past It was a therapeutic + amazing feeling when they told me about this The restoration of my parents' dignity within our extended family is a personal milestone that has helped soothe a thorn in my heart that I’ve had for a long time :)

This time last year I was diagnosed with cancer It felt so unfair that I was having health problems just as our startup was finally starting to scale Thankfully, I am now cancer free and our startup is ~4x larger than when I was diagnosed Life is unpredictable 🤷‍♂️

4 years of burning cash got rejected by almost every VC had to move back in with parents posted hundreds of videos into the void but eventually everything works out :)

$10M ARR!!!!!!!!!!! 🥳 so happy :') this was by far the hardest milestone to hit, i was stuck in the $8M-$9M ARR range for over a year but thankfully, i think we're finally ready for the next stage of growth $15M ARR 🔜

🎉 Today we hit $300K MRR 🎉 For 3 years, we were stuck at $2K MRR, and we were constantly burning cash with very little to show for it Now it's looking like we could hit $1M MRR by end of 2024 (and doing so profitably) Don't give up 🤠

it took us around 46 months to hit $1M ARR btw it may seem like everyone on the timeline effortlessly/instantly hits this milestone, but that's not normal or realistic i was stuck at $2k MRR for 3 years!

How to hit $2M ARR: 1. Struggle for 3 years straight with few results 2. Run out of cash, get funding from Jason Calacanis 3. Fly to Asia to extend runway 4. Thankfully get a little bit of traction 5. Get diagnosed with cancer, kills momentum 6. Get surgery to remove thyroid 7.

We made ~$738k this month 🥳 - $633k from Jenni AI - $105k from our other products We are looking to acquire a few more EdTech products, so if you're looking to sell your tool send me a DM! The race to $10M ARR continues! 🫡

In the early-stages of my startup I lived with my parents and we only had one table in the living room I would always tell my parents when I had an important VC pitch and they’d pack up their things and go to their room so I could focus on my meeting I would be anxious as fuck and I’d be reciting my pitch deck all day and trying out the latest pseudo-science to improve my confidence Then, without fail, ~20% of the time the VC would say that something “came up” the day of the call and ask to reschedule I’d be heartbroken because I’d been waiting 2 weeks for this one meeting and then reply with “No worries, how about next Tuesday! :)” After clicking send, I’d have too much shame to tell my parents that I was ghosted, so I would practice my pitch out loud to myself for 30 minutes until my parents would slowly peek their heads back in and gleefully ask how my pitch went “Great!” I would reply and then retreat back to my room. Unfortunately, even of the VC’s that would actually show up, only about half of them would genuinely be interested in what I was saying Of the half that were interested, it would turn out that they weren’t even VC’s at all but scouts that were still in college But hey, maybe if you knock it out of the park for them, perhaps these kids will forward it to their general partner (lmao) Of the actual VC’s that showed up, many of them are blatantly switching screens or reading emails mid-pitch and when they ask a question that you clearly answered on slide 7, you have to avoid starting your answer with “As I mentioned before” and instead say “ah great question!” then gracefully run them through the same monologue one more time Then when you’re finally done with the pitch, you wait for the VC to make their decision Just to be clear, you as a founder are expected to: Give up everything in your life to focus on your startup Commit to this vision for a decade or more Scale it to over a billion dollars (achieved by only a handful of people in the history of human civilization) VC’s are expected to: Show up to a meeting Let you know if they will invest in you or not Then follow through with investing or not All they have to do is show up and then write an email saying that they either are investing or going to pass. It is a 30 second email. They will rarely give you their decision. And even if they do, it can be laced with judgement or trying to shit on your startup. Only the top tier VC’s actually give you any actionable insight into their decision process. You might be thinking “Why are you whining, if they don’t send an email, that’s your answer” That’s easy to say when your startup is not 2 months away from bankruptcy. Even if there’s a 0.1% chance that maybe they’re still deliberating or they might have a few extra questions, you irrationally still shoot your shot and follow-up to ask for an update. Ironically, the only people that regularly provides updates are the college scouts who are serendipitously roleplaying as VC’s. These rejections feel especially weird because what does this random 19 year old non-founder know when he/she says “we just felt like the market opportunity wasn’t there” ??? After enough rejections you realize that you have no choice but to bootstrap because your family doesn’t have money, your friends are as broke as you, and it’s seemingly impossible to raise venture funding So you build and build and build and thankfully your startup starts to get traction And traction leads to traction and traction leads to traction; momentum is a powerful thing Now you’re making tens of millions of dollars per year and you’re profitable (because raising money was so hard, you had to actually make a legit business!) Then the strangest thing starts to happen, VC’s start emailing you and asking you to get on-calls with them They start leaving voicemails on your phone when you don’t respond to them This should be a great sign, but strangely, whenever a VC shows kindness to you (specifically ones that ignored you in the past), it doesn’t resolve the knot in your heart, it twists it further Everyone has finite patience, finite kindness, finite hours You find that VC’s are now happy to get on-call with you at a moments notice and stay overtime, but you wonder if that means a different founder is getting the “something came up” email and they’re sitting alone at their dining room table The emails they send to you trying to woo you into taking a meeting is time spent not sending an email to the founder waking up at 6am everyday and refreshing their inbox praying to God for a life line. It is just a weird feeling I’ll end by saying that I don’t think VC’s are bad people of course, I have so much respect for the investors on my cap table as well as others that treated us with basic human decency But just as VC’s are constantly judging you as a founder, you should be equally mercurial in your judgement of them I totally understand if you’re an early-stage founder to have to be patient with low quality investors, but I feel like startups that are more established should call them out on their bullshit!

How I would choose my next startup idea: 1. It must be a product in a growing market. Startups can take years or even decades to fully develop, don’t risk creating an amazing product just to have the user base dry up. 2. The value of the product must increase over time. For example, as you upload more to a social media platform and make more friends, each month the product becomes more valuable to you. This will mitigate a lot of churn problems later down the line. Churn fucking sucks. 3. The product must have some growth flywheel. A product that inherently brings in new users is extremely powerful. Fintech companies do this very well where users can send their friends money, but they have to make an account to accept the money. Growth loops allows for exponential growth without any need for marketing hacks. 4. Must be scalable. Cannot be reliant on human labor, too capital-intensive, or requiring tailored solutions for each customer. I’ve made a mistake trying to make my life’s work an agency and I will never do that again. Agency as side-income is fine, but because the upside is capped, always go for a more scalable option. 5. Startup idea must be validated and have clear monetization. Even if the startup idea comes from a personal pain point, I would not make a company unless there were already other players in the market selling similar things, or I would need to get multiple user to pre-pay for the tool. Anyone can build anything with AI. The question now is are you building something valuable? The fastest way to check is to see if people will actually pay. This step literally would have saved me years of my life, not hyperbole. 6. Go to every genius you know and continually badger them to join your new startup. If none of them will join you, reconsider whether this venture is worth it. If you cannot convince your friends to join you, perhaps they know something you don’t. Perhaps you need to improve on your communication skills to convince them of this opportunity. Either way, if not a single person whom you respect will join you, this is a red flag. Unfortunately, some great ideas are so revolutionary that even the smartest people you know could wrongfully dismiss it, so I'd say point is a looser suggestion than others, but still important imo. 7. The idea (or at least most the idea) must be bootstrappable. Trading $125k for 7% in the AI era is pretty bad imo (unless you have a capital intensive business or you are in a winner take all market). With LLM’s, magic is now an API call away and it’s pretty easy to get early traction with minimal resources. If necessary, I’d rather self-fund and/or ask co-founders to put up some cash. Absolutely no VC’s at the start, and I would only add funding if I were in a super competitive market. This is coming from a SaaS bias though, if you're building rockets or something probably can ignore. 8. Consider whether you are the best person for the role of CEO, or you see a path to becoming the best. Could you face the top 1% of founders in this field and win? The answer most of the time is no. There are plenty of great startups in the world. I wouldn’t mind being CMO or head of growth or digital marketing specialist or intern at someone else’s company where I believe they are the absolute best CEO possible in their field. There is no shame in this at all. Tbh being CEO sucks most of the time. 9. The startup idea you are working on has to be so important to you that you’re willing to gamble all the blessings you’ve already received in your life. Remind yourself that you are about to have a really volatile and unpredictable decade+. I lost pretty much everything I care about in my personal life except for maybe a handful of friends and my parents. This could happen to you, or maybe it could be worse (I hope not!) 10. Reflect and choose an idea but don’t fall in love with the idea. You may think this contradicts 9, but it only furthers its importance. You will pivot several times before you stumble upon the winning product. As you pivot be sure to keep these 10 things in mind as you revamp your product and change directions. Overall, I challenge the notion that “ideas are worthless execution is everything”. Execution is definitely more important than the idea, but a few months of ideating and making sure your startup actually is necessary could save you years later down the line. It’s kind of like if you’re a great poker player you can play weird/weak hands and pivot them into bluffs if you need to, but it’s just better to start with a premium hand Even with all this being said, you might be thinking that my list is too strict or unrealistic. I would definitely agree! But if you want to create a company that can truly scale and set yourself up for a huge outcome, maybe this list has some value Either way, Jenni is super fun for me and I will unlikely make another startup anytime soon Just putting this out there for anyone who will be starting a company before I do I think this checklist could save you time if you try to verify these things before dedicating years of your life to a venture Or this could derail you from creating a monster unicorn because the list is too reductive and all things should be taken on a case by case basis Nonetheless, could be helpful to read this list and digest my perspective (then accept/reject it) Hope this helps somebody make a more informed decision, good luck!

Last year a VC begged to meet with us When we sent over our numbers, they concluded that our MRR was "almost meaningless" Then they ended the email by trying to invest at half our valuation We did not take their money

Wow this is actually interesting... A startup is copying our videos word for word and shot for shot 🤯 Our original video got 4.9 million views and theirs got 2.9 million views If you look at it side by side, it's almost identical🪞 Have you ever seen copying this blatant?

We hit $793.3K MRR in April! 🥳 ✍️ Jenni AI — $667.5K 🤖 Stealth 1 — $109.7K 🧑‍🏫 Stealth 2 — $6.2K ⌨️ New Acquisition — $10.5K Growth was a bit lackluster this month, but now that our big acquisition is done we're going to be scaling growth across all products in May! This recent acquisition particularly has so much growth potential because they get over ~125M total impressions annually just from SEO With a bit of love on the product side, I believe that this could be 10x larger by end of this year Will reveal name of company in a few months! (Some of you may know this product, so I want to make sure I do this right! 😅) Beyond our recent acq, we have a few exciting things coming up: 1. Our $10M ARR milestone will likely be hit this month! 2. The end of the academic school year (terrible time for EdTech tools 🥲) 3. Another fun acquisition is in the works and may close right before summer! I'll look to post more in May with some growth learnings + random reflections while running the Jenni group Let's kill it this month :D

this time 3 years ago i was diagnosed with thyroid cancer it's been so long that i honestly forget i even had it 99% of the time grateful that time has erased most of the bad memories, and even more grateful to be cancer-free! 🤠

How to go from 0 to $5M ARR profitably (step by step) Here is every growth hack we used for each of our distribution channels: - Organic Short-form content - Influencer Marketing - SEO - Paid Ads Organic Short-form content The most important thing to remember in this new age of social media is that follower counts don’t matter at all I would unironically sponsor a fresh account made this week vs a YouTuber with a million subs if they had similar views and I don’t even think it’s a controversial opinion (especially when you consider that the famous YouTuber will charge you potentially 30x more for less results, but I would maybe even choose the new account if they were the same price) The reason being that new accounts are highly volatile and if you put out a great engaging piece of content then it could easily go viral regardless of how many followers you have But rather than finding and sponsoring these new accounts in your niche, you can just create these accounts yourself You just need to follow this basic format: 1. Find a face for your account 2. Craft a viral video 'series' 3. Multiply your accounts What would happen if BTS made a new TikTok account and started posting? All videos on the new account would immediately go viral because the algo would push the videos back to their fans Despite having zero followers, this new TikTok account will ‘behave’ as though it has hundreds of millions of followers One great hack is to find someone who already has an audience of people that you know will convert, then ask them to create a completely new account to posts videos about your product This is an amazing hack because creators are usually very open to this idea because it doesn’t dilute their main page, it’ll be way cheaper to pay for 20 videos on a new account every month vs 20 sponsored posts on their main account, and it’ll get way better results For example we found a creator named Mengmengduck whose entire account at the time was teaching students how to write to employers and we paid him $4000 for 20 videos/mo In our first month we got 7 million+ impressions, just as expected the videos on the brand new account were being pushed to the followers on his main account When you get a new creator just follow this basic guideline: - Repost vids on all platforms (Reels, TikTok, YT Shorts) - Post 1+ videos per day - Initially, post vids similar to what the influencer posts on their main account, then start experimenting with videos that feature your product - We paid $4000/mo for MMD who had 500k followers, but you can get someone cheaper for similar results! The entire goal when working with your creator is to find a viral “series” because a video that goes viral once will go viral again You want a video that you can basically tweak slightly and repost multiple times a week that is still fun for the audience Once you find a viral series, you can start creating new accounts but this time you don’t need to work with big creators, you can just find charismatic UGC creators because you’ve found content that is engaging and poised to go viral Currently, we have about 5 different Jenni AI accounts all posting similar content Many of our accounts have tens or sometimes just hundreds of followers and they just repost stuff from our main account In some cases, the account with 48 followers gets MORE views than our main account with 55k followers...even when posting identical videos Examples of viral series: 1. A guy tries to see how many sticks of spaghetti it takes to hold his weight. Then he tries to see how many coat hangers. Then he tries to use sheets of paper. Etc etc. All the same video, minimal effort but will go viral every time. 2. A guy drinks a cup of milk for every 1000 followers he has. Everyday it’s the same video where he drinks milk but people continually tune in because they want to see him suffer and drink hundreds of cups of milk. Will go viral every time. 3. For us we had “POV you have an essay due” and it was just a ridiculous plot of someone realising they have an essay due while they are taking a shit or right before they sleep or w/e and it always ended with them using Jenni AI to help them write their essay faster. Same video, slightly different 10 second intro each time. Thinking of new viral video ideas are so hard, so just try to think of tweaking your few winning videos into “series” and just think about prolonging the lifespan of your content The order of virality: 1. Have one account on each platform (TikTok, Instagram, YT shorts) and experiment with a ton of hooks and video ideas 2. Eventually you’ll get a video that goes viral after enough experimentation 3. Experiment and somehow turn that video into a “series” 4. Start tweaking and posting this “series” on multiple accounts 5. Translate and create the same video with creators that speak Chinese, Spanish, etc 6. Take the really mega-viral videos and sponsor other pages to repost them 7. Use the mega-viral content for paid ads 8. Eventually enough copycats will copy your video series and it’ll get played out and you restart at step 1 Our video series "POV: You have an essay due" has probably generated 300 million+ views overall It was essentially the same video over and over, multiple times a week, yet they consistently went viral That one video series made us over half a million dollars, and it was one of several video series’ that we were able to cook up Influencer Marketing Find influencers - Go to your users' Instagram and see which influencers they are following. This should be easy if you’ve done user interviews correctly, if you have no social media handles of your users you should actually befriend your users and get to know them on a deeper level or you’re not going to make it - Do this for several users and eventually you will find some influencers that are ‘popular’ among your target user demographic. Find these influencers and follow them all, it’s okay you only need 1-3 - Go to these influencer's profile and click "suggested similar accounts" and you'll get an easy list of hot leads that you can sponsor (you can continue to do this recursively for each new influencer that you find) - Also, be sure to see what hashtags these influencers are using when they post and then follow those hashtags as well - Once you have a list of influencers, create a new Instagram/TikTok account and manually follow & watch their videos all the way through and the algorithm will start automatically showing relevant influencers to you that you can then reach out to (this is a great way to lower the risk of getting scammed because the videos that show up organically on your FYP are less likely to be accounts that have bought followers/views) - On your new account, you want to be on the hunt for smaller influencers, if a new-ish account has multiple videos with 100k+ views, it's absolute GOLD - Once you have a list of influencers who you are ready to partner up with, you can begin reaching out to them Reach out to influencers - DMs > emails = higher response rate (at least for us) - All messages need to be as detailed and tailored as possible, but most importantly as CONCISE as possible. This balance is hard but you’ll get a better feel for this as you notice what gets ignored and what doesn't - Demonstrate that you’re genuinely a fan of their content and that you’re excited to partner up. This is such a low bar but few founders actually put in the effort. - Why should they partner with you? Why will their audience love your product? Don’t talk about dumb shit like how many employees your company has or what round of fundraising you’re at (I suggest not talking about those vanity metrics in any situation, but I digress) - Make sure to indicate somewhere in the message that this is obviously a PAID promotion, influencers are constantly inundated by people who are begging them for free shoutouts or weird affiliate partnerships - Expect more than 50% of influencers to not respond, but this % is very volatile depending on what industry you’re in, and how cool/well-known your product is - The good news is, as more influencers talk about your product it gets easier and easier to convince them to promote your product because they have heard of it before (unknown products could be risky or straight-up scams) Negotiate - The highest priority is to align the incentives between you and the influencer. You should both want a banger video that converts - Never pay upfront for videos (pay half upfront at most). Most influencers are fantastic people but some influencers will just try and drop a half-ass video once they get their check - Try to split the payment so that some % comes from the number of conversions that they bring (you can track this via coupon code or UTM link). If they don’t want to do that, try to at least have some affiliate bonus - Ask for their viewer demographics see which countries are viewing their content and compare that with the conversion rates of those countries for your product - See previous sponsored content that they’ve posted and see how those videos performed vs their usual content - Negotiate the deal so that either they only receive some/all of the payment if it reaches a certain # of views (or a certain # of coupon code redemptions) - Don’t listen to these absolute garbage articles that tell you to pay based on the number of subscribers/followers that they have. The sole question you should be asking is, will they convert or will they not (at least in the early stage of your startup). Post content - You can’t use a general content strategy for all of your influencer partnerships because each influencer has a certain type of content that their audience likes. Your content can’t deviate too far from it or else it will have terrible watch times and you’re basically paying for a dud - If you don’t have experience with social media or making engaging content, just let the influencer make the video and then you approve it (after aligning your incentives, as we discussed in the last step) - One important note is that views are irrelevant, we’ve had videos that got 30 MILLION views and gave us barely any conversions, whereas a video with 50k views converted like hotcakes. The video should make the viewers excited about what you’ve built not just have them hear what you made and then forget about it the second they scroll to the next video on their For You Page -When in doubt, don’t be afraid of your video looking like a straight-up ad, even if it gets less views it will convert better than an influencer casually talking about your product for 15 seconds in a random “Day in the life” vlog Final tips - The biggest risk with influencer marketing is sponsoring a dead video or a video that gets a few hundred views or a few thousand views in low-converting countries. For that reason, make a portfolio of bets instead of hunting for the perfect deal. Do not allocate all of your marketing budget to a few large influencers - If the account has high conversion potential, but the first video flops, don't be afraid to run it back again (often times you can get a better rate on the second video if the first video does poorly) - You should be casting a large net and then doubling down on the winners and gathering data to get better at predicting which influencer would be great to sponsor - One good influencer partnership can make up for several influencer partnerships with negative ROI - The ultimate goal is to build out your influencer marketing arm and then bring on somebody to help run it so you can focus on other aspects of growth. - You need to have all of your insights and data figured out so that when you bring somebody on, they can take your insights and devote all of their time to become even better than you are at influencer marketing. SEO SEO is a tricky one because it can take so long to see results That’s why I would never start with SEO because in the early-stages you want fast feedback cycles and SEO is the furthest from it But the flip side is, when you really need SEO, you probably should’ve started on it 6 months prior to that point For that reason my ideal order of what growth channels I would focus on is: Organic Short-form -> Influencer Marketing -> Paid Ads And at any point when I felt like I had a deep understanding of who my powers users were I would start work on SEO and do it concurrently with whatever growth channel I was working on at that point in time Here are some growth hacks for when you do start SEO work: 1. Taking featured snippets Sometimes you'll be ranking low on the first page, not getting much traffic. Pushing yourself to the top of the page can take a lot of effort and investment, but there's a way to get there almost immediately. If the search term you're looking to rank for has a featured snippet, you can often easily take over the first spot by just tweaking your content to answer the query more precisely. The chances are your content already answers the question well enough, but it's just not written in a way that Google realizes it. Use definitive phrases like "The answer is Yes, you can do X". Use bulleted or ordered lists to make the answer concise and clear. To find these opportunities, you can plug your domain into a tool like Ahrefs, Semrush or Search Atlas and filter the keywords you are ranking for by the SERP containing a featured snippet. To keep it simple: * Plug your domain into SEO tool (ahrefs, semrush, searchatlas) * Look at keywords you're ranking for already * Filter results by the criteria of containing a featured snippet in the results * Tweak your content to answer the query in the best way possible * Jump from position 3-10 to 1 2. Increasing brand name searches Brand searches helps legitimize your startup in Google’s eyes and will help your content be seen as “trustworthy”. With this in mind, for your SEO you should be engaging in other marketing activities that necessitate brand searches. To keep it simple: * When doing organic social media marketing, encourage users to search out for your brand name instead of directly typing in the URL * When doing paid social marketing, utilizing view-through or engaged-view conversions to still track conversions made via Google searches so you can still optimize the social campaigns while reaping the SEO benefit. 3. Make it easy for search engines to understand your website Search engines have gotten a lot better at understanding messy websites, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't make it as easy as possible for them. Adding schema to your pages and giving clear cut definitions to your content can make it incredibly clear to any bots crawling your site what your site is about and what it is doing. The more the better, we've had a lot of limitations with this as we're using Framer and we've found some types of schema quite hard to implement. However, we've done what we can and any type of schema is better than nothing (as long as it's accurate) To keep it simple: * Add relevant schema to any page that is suitable * Mark up your landing pages with FAQ data, mark up your blog posts with article data. 4. Accurately estimate your ROI from search engines It's been a long time since Google allowed us to see which keywords led to conversions in Google Analytics, however it's super important to get as accurate of a picture as possible. Many people will simply look at reports and anything under the "organic" or "search engines" column, they'll count as an SEO conversion. But that's simply not true, and it severely misinforms you. By the nature of the tracking, it's impossible to differentiate between branded conversions and non branded conversions with SEO. The closest we've been able to get to do this is with a custom tool, but you can replicate it manually as well * Log into search console * Select your time period * Export your clicks for each query * Remove all branded queries * Go to your paid ads (preferably Google ads) platform and note down your conversion data. * Slightly lower the conversion percentage (because paid typically converts better than organic, as you're bidding based on a lot of other targeting metrics too) * Tally up all the clicks from search console * Use the conversion percentage from paid ads (slightly lowered) * Calculate the amount of conversions you have received from SEO (excluding brand) * Times this by the average LTV of your customer This is a much closer metric to reality than anything reported by any reporting software, especially if you have a lot of branded searches like us Paid Ads Founders will tell me their marketing strategy and marketing spend and sometimes I’ll be shocked Many are going to end up spend a sizable portion of their entire investment on google/meta ads, and the worst part is they aren’t even acquiring users at a profit, which genuinely makes me nauseous Especially in the early-stages, I honestly wouldn’t be burn ANY money on paid ads and only spend after some social media marketing first This is because data is key when it comes to paid ads and you want as much accurate data as possible to feed into the ad platforms The algorithms work very well, but they need data to make the right decisions, and you can get this data from other growth channels before starting paid ads Why paid ads after influencer marketing and organic content: 1. From influencer partnerships and organic short-form you will have a bunch of creatives that you can work/experiment/rework for paid ads 2. You get valuable customer feedback in the comments of your posts (how do target users describe your product, what they compare it to, what they like/don’t like about your product) which can be leveraged for ad copy and positioning 3. You can use the data from your social media partnerships to have better targeting for your ads on day 1 (what countries convert better, what’s the LTV of each country, what types of users are ideal to market to, etc) 4. In early-stages your budget won’t be big enough and you won't be able to spend enough on Meta to get enough data for targeting based on purchase conversions We only scaled paid ads after: * PMF (Product Market Fit) * 3x LTV to CAC (we pay less than $1 for every $3 you make from ads) * Short payback period (we make back our money in less than 3 months) Lastly, take special considerations of both the entire user journey and the landing page before you crank up adspend If your landing page isn’t persuasive + effective it’ll not only get less conversions you will also pay more for each click. In Google it improves the relevancy score and in Meta it improves the quality ranking. An easy win is also just to speed up the loading time of your page, this can directly effect the quality score of your ads and will also lower spend per click Again, do not do paid ads until later in your startup’s lifecycle It requires a larger budget, more data, and typically has higher cost per acquisition than other channels that you can start with I personally also think it’s just the most boring growth channel so don't deprive yourself of the joy of figuring out the other fun ones first haha Conclusion + Final Tip: For every level there is a new devil As you scale up your paid ads, your cost per acquisition will continue to creep upwards As you scale your influencer marketing you may actually run out of influencers to sponsor for your target user demographic There’s always some content strategy that stops working on your social media accounts, or a random Google update that threatens to fuck your rankings At each stage of scaling you’ll come across a myriad of issues that can only be solved by specialized knowledge and intense focus Scaling to $5M ARR is too difficult for one man to do (unless you’re the Lisan Al Gaib of startups) Now that you’ve read this entire guide you can just choose which growth channel to start with and throw your whole weight into it until you solve it and you can move to the next one Once you start acquiring users profitably with that first growth channel, find someone who either has the skillset to take over or someone who you can train to take over This is a critical step To get to $5M ARR you need to know how to find, hire, and retain amazing talent This could be an entire post on it’s own because hiring is so tricky, but I will say that I highly highly bias towards resiliency + speed over experience Why do I care if a candidate has 15 years of digital marketing experience? Half of our marketing work has to do with short-form content and you could’ve only become an expert in short-form (TikTok, Reels, YT Shorts) in the last 3 years anyways A young marketer with TikTok brain rot who has a great work ethic will often times outperform the “established” digital marketing agency with a ton of fake google reviews Today, our entire marketing team is just 3 people (me included), and I couldn’t have gotten anywhere close to $5M ARR without them Thanks to my growth team composed of Justin and Luke who are rockstars at what they do and helped flesh out a lot of the strategies on this post Since you’ve made it all the way to the bottom I’ll tell you one final secret Look at the bottom right of this tweet and count the bookmarks How many of those people will actually read this whole thing? 10%? How many of them will then actually try to implement some of the strategies I wrote about here? 10% of the 10%? How many of them will continue to try 1 year from now when these marketing tactics help them uncover deep flaws in their product? 1% of that? This post will be read by hundreds of thousands of people but ultimately it will only be properly utilized by literally one or two of you I hope you are that one person that I wrote this for and I hope you can go on a similar fantastical journey that I got to experience Good luck!

Despite the newfound success with my startup, my personal life has been challenging Earlier this year, when I went to visit New York, I was really excited to spend time with my friend But when I arrived, I immediately got an acquisition offer, and I spent the whole month locked in my room preparing data and going through DD I didn’t even get to share one meal with my friend, and unfortunately she passed away shortly after I left New York I have enough money now to afford a table for two anywhere in the world, but it’s impossible to fill the other seat This past year I completed our largest acquisition yet, and it was quite stressful dealing with the lawyers, bankers, and accountants Speaking and thinking became so cumbersome that when I met with my girlfriend I’d regularly reply with grunts or nods She would chastise me and say that I was never present because I was so hell-bent on finishing this acquisition Well, I was able to get the deal done, but she broke up with me because she ran out of patience I told her that I could change, but she said it’s too late and that her heart had left me 🥲 It was hard to hear this from the person I planned to marry I fear that I’ve unintentionally made some Faustian Bargain What else would explain my cancer diagnosis right after hitting $1M ARR? Each new level of startup success came with it a new trauma Sorry to write a super personal post, I promise I will get back to the regularly scheduled positive + actionable startup advice soon But the fact of the matter is I have literally sacrificed everything for my startup There are other founders who seem to have a healthy social life while also running a startup, but I haven’t been able to figure out that balance I write this post because it’s clear to me now that if I don’t figure out this balance I may end up with a pretty lonely + sad life I’ve started going to therapy and trying to find things that make me happy outside of lowering churn and increasing user counts It’s led me to rekindle my love for creative writing and I take a lot more walks now Tbh I still miss my girlfriend and I still put a high number of hours into my work But each day I find new things outside of my startup that make me happy, and that’s been very encouraging I’ve got a lot to figure out, but for now, I’m cautiously optimistic about this more balanced life!

$10M ARR!!!!!!!!!!! 🥳 so happy :') this was by far the hardest milestone to hit, i was stuck in the $8M-$9M ARR range for over a year but thankfully, i think we're finally ready for the next stage of growth $15M ARR 🔜

Last year a VC begged to meet with us When we sent over our numbers, they concluded that our MRR was "almost meaningless" Then they ended the email by trying to invest at half our valuation We did not take their money

it took us around 46 months to hit $1M ARR btw it may seem like everyone on the timeline effortlessly/instantly hits this milestone, but that's not normal or realistic i was stuck at $2k MRR for 3 years!

We got 30M impressions on X as well as 3M views on TikTok from this one video 🫡 We're still experimenting a ton with content/positioning, but it's great to see our UGC engine is back up and running Can anyone guess how many new users signed up as a result of the 33M views? 🤔

4 years of burning cash got rejected by almost every VC had to move back in with parents posted hundreds of videos into the void but eventually everything works out :)

9000+ new users in one day 🥳 it's normally difficult to tell exactly what impact a viral video has on your business but occasionally a video will bang so fucking hard that it's abundantly obvious you have a winner let's fucking goooooo 😇

How to hit $2M ARR: 1. Struggle for 3 years straight with few results 2. Run out of cash, get funding from Jason Calacanis 3. Fly to Asia to extend runway 4. Thankfully get a little bit of traction 5. Get diagnosed with cancer, kills momentum 6. Get surgery to remove thyroid 7.

When my startup was struggling, I moved back into my parents’ house, and they financially supported me Every once in a while, we'd have family gatherings, and I was the only 'young' person there because my cousins were busy earning degrees or working There was one humiliating incident where my mother secretly handed me her credit card and told me to “pay” for the meal with it, but act as if I were using my own money Under normal circumstances, I would have refused, but I could see that doing so I would only protect my pride at the expense of my mother’s My parents were often looked down upon in the hierarchy of the Park family because of our bad financial situation as well as their seeming inability to raise a competent child Every parent wants to have a child who isn’t a failure, but if you do have one, at the very least it’d be nice if it weren’t so glaringly obvious So, I remember going up, paying for the meal, and hoping no one would make a big deal of it Unfortunately, as I sat down, the family members thanked me for “paying” for the meal, but I could tell some didn’t believe that I could actually afford the large tab It was a fucked-up experience where I felt like a fraud, and I promised that I’d never put myself or my mother in that situation again That incident really put into perspective that I could be the perpetual loser at family gatherings if I didn’t get my act together; so in many ways, it was a blessing in disguise Because of small incidents like these, I worked as hard as I could and my startup continued to scale with the hours I put in Anyways, I recall this story where I fake paid because I’ve recently given my parents my credit card indefinitely There is no limit on the card, so even when I’m not in the room, I now pay for every single family gathering, and I will continue to do so until I die (or go bankrupt whichever comes first) Since doing so, my parents tell me now that the other uncles/aunties/etc all treat them with basic respect and some have even apologized for how they treated me/them in the past It was a therapeutic + amazing feeling when they told me about this The restoration of my parents' dignity within our extended family is a personal milestone that has helped soothe a thorn in my heart that I’ve had for a long time :)

We are getting some serious acquisition offers What are things you would consider if/when accepting an acquisition offer? This would be my first exit ever, so any advice would be greatly appreciated

we hit $821K MRR this month! (+$47K MRR) we’re once again within striking distance of $10M ARR, thanks to a renewed focus on UGC and a ton of product improvements this milestone has evaded us for over a year now, but i think we’ll finally hit $10M soon very exciting :)

We just turned down multiple $20M+ acquisition offers There was a part of me that wanted to accept, but didn't feel right Time will tell whether we'll regret this decision or not 🤷‍♂️

🎉 Today we hit $300K MRR 🎉 For 3 years, we were stuck at $2K MRR, and we were constantly burning cash with very little to show for it Now it's looking like we could hit $1M MRR by end of 2024 (and doing so profitably) Don't give up 🤠

Doctor told me I have silent reflux, and it requires some of the craziest diet restrictions If you can think of any actually tasty food I can eat with these limitations, I will be in your debt List of every ingredient I can't have: Dairy - Cheese, Butter, Milk, Cream, Yogurt Citrus Fruits and Juices - Oranges, lemons, limes, grapefruits Tomatoes and Tomato-Based Products - Including sauces, juices, and soups Spicy Foods - Chili peppers, hot sauce, curry Fried and High-Fat Foods - French fries, fried chicken, fatty cuts of meat Onions and Garlic - Especially raw Chocolate - Due to its caffeine and fat content Mint - Including peppermint and spearmint Caffeinated Beverages - Coffee, tea, some soft drinks Alcoholic Beverages - Especially wine and beer Carbonated Beverages - Soda and other fizzy drinks Vinegar and Pickled Foods - Anything acidic There are other suggestions like generally avoiding anything too sugary + salty and/or anything too cold (anything cold can numb the esophagus and worsen reflux) But this is so crazy, I can only eat like meat, vegetables, bread, and like...oatmeal As someone who loves food, these past two weeks have been pretty annoying If you can think of any creative meals that don't have any of these ingredients please let me know Doctor says that I need to keep this diet for ~6 months till my throat heals more and I can start trying to add these things in moderation Help save me from 6 months of bland food lol