Loading summary
Transcript138 lines
- [00:00]
A
We just reached 10 million in annual recurring revenue. $10 million, and it's growing super fast. January 2024 to right here, where we're making, like, something like $5,000 in revenue. Basically, you will type a script, select an actor. In our library of AI actors, we have hundreds of AI actors now, even more than a thousand in the platform. And you'll be able to select the perfect AI avatar for your use case. Use the gender to find the right ones.
- [00:29]
B
Hey, folks, my guest today is Romain. He has launched and is building Arkads AI. He helps you generate ads easy without paying 30 grand a month on an agency to go do it for you. He's scaling very quickly over 5 million bucks of revenue. But we have an update today in terms of revenue. We're going to jump into and then jump into all the growth tactics he's using to scale nicely and bootstrapped. So, Romain, are you ready to take us to the top?
- [00:54]
A
Yeah, let's do it.
- [00:56]
B
All right, well, kick us off. I don't want to bury the lead. What's revenue today? We're recording this on November 4th, 14th, 2025.
- [01:03]
A
Yeah. We just reached 10 million in annual recurring revenue. $10 million.
- [01:10]
And it's growing super fast.
- [01:13]
B
Can I push you on that? Like, we see so many fake revenue screenshots, and people say, nathan, people just come on your show and they make up revenue numbers. Are you open to, like, screen sharing and maybe showing your stripe account or something?
- [01:23]
A
Yeah, let's do it. So this is the revenue in Euros, which is going to be a little bit lower because it's heroes. But look at this graph. Look at this. Like, it's almost vertical.
- [01:35]
B
Oh, wow, wow, wow. Okay, so you. Your first dollar revenue, if you hover over that, where the line starts, it was like, what is that? January 1st, 2024. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And how. What were you selling back then? Is it just. Let's leave this graphic for a second while you tell the story. What were you selling back then? The first couple months, Is it the same thing you're selling today, or has it changed?
- [01:53]
A
Yeah, so from.
- [01:56]
January 2024 to right here, where we're making like, something like $5,000 in revenue, at the time, all we were doing is we were reaching out to existing brands, and we told them, okay, we are going to create ads for you. UGC video ads. We are going to make this a little bit cheaper. The turnaround will be faster, but the only thing is we are going to generate these ads using AI. So we Actually didn't even have a dashboard. People couldn't log in and create ads. And we did that for them as a service. We just wanted to validate the ID that people were okay to pay for an AI generated ad. And also we wanted to validate that when we ship this ad for them, they could have results and they would order more of these ads. So we validate the IDE and then we launched the product. We got this huge spike of traffic right here. We went from zero to almost a million in annual recurring revenue.
- [02:54]
B
What drove that spike?
- [02:56]
A
So it was actually initially just me posting on Twitter about it. At the time, I had zero followers. But I started. I understood Twitter will be important for us, so I started posting content about how you can use AI to create winning ads, and people will be very interested in that. But then out of the blue, one of our users posted a video on Twitter that was completely viral. And at this time, it was in March, you can definitely see the spike right here.
- [03:29]
We were making like something like maybe 10, 20 sales a day.
- [03:34]
And I would wake up during the night, in the morning, and I was looking at this Slack channel where we. We could see all the. The sales that we got during the night. Because I was in Europe and the sales happened in the US and it was like, okay, did we get 10, did we get 20? And it was like actually hundreds. And I was scrolling in the Slack channel with all the stripe notifications. We got like hundreds of sales in one single night. And so what happened here was someone generated a video on archives, published the video on Twitter, and this video went completely viral. And so we got this huge spike of revenue, jumping from like 5 to like almost €64,000, which is.
- [04:18]
B
And then it dipped. Did a bunch of those folks sign up from the expos and then churn or what caused that dip there?
- [04:23]
A
Yeah, that's the second part of the story, actually. When I saw all of these sales, I then went to the customer support chat that we had at the time, Intelcom, and I looked at the complaints and actually the product was completely broken. So nothing was working anymore. So we had to refund everyone and rebuild a significant part of the product that was actually a major piece of the product that was completely broken. So it actually took us a month to rebuild the product, and we had to relaunch in April. And then, yeah, the growth has been crazy since.
- [05:00]
B
And then you had crazy growth. Before we go away from the screenshot, though, we're going to go back later here and talk about that crazy growth, including I mean the line's even going more steeper now, recently, the past month. But talk to me about that little area towards the right of the graph where it sort of flatlined a little bit. What happened there?
- [05:15]
A
Yeah, that's a good point. So here we basically.
- [05:20]
B
Can you hover over it just so the audience can see?
- [05:22]
A
Yeah, yeah. Like we're growing, but right now we are growing over 20 per month. @ the time it looks flat, but it was actually very good growth already. But basically what happened here is I'm leading marketing and my co founder is leading product and no one in the team was leading sales and our product is product led. Meaning we, we don't really, we didn't really focus on the sales team too much. The only two things we do is like I do marketing, my co founder does product. But during this time I was like, okay, we need to build a sales team for the biggest clients like the ones on our thousands of people who sign up. The ones, the Adidas of the world, the Nike of the world, the Samsung of the world. Like these people, they have much higher LTV and they are much better clients but they need to be sold the product. They won't convert without doing some sales motion. So I basically spent this time focusing on sales and didn't spend much time focusing on marketing. And guess what, when you don't do marketing and you don't promote your product, it doesn't really grow as fast. It can grow organically, which was the case and it was like already like 10% per month. But, but it will not grow as fast as if you really focus your efforts on to.
- [06:49]
B
Marketing. So what is, what is your total team size today? At $10 million of.
- [06:54]
A
Revenue. So now we are eight in the.
- [06:57]
B
Team.
- [06:58]
Okay. And so obviously really, really good, really strong revenue per employee. What are the top three things driving the most recent growth? So from like €500amonth of revenue to €800amonth in revenue. That steep part at the end of the graph. What's your top, what are your top 3 marketing channels.
- [07:15]
A
Today? So the first one is sales, the one that I took two months setting up hiring, the first sales hire. And we actually have two people in the sales team now.
- [07:26]
So that was the like the big change. Now we are closing much bigger deals with like bigger brands. I cannot necessarily give all the names yet, but those deals are very significant. So that's one. And we did like a lot of conferences to be in touch with these people. We did a lot of direct outreach and all the channels that you will do when you are doing sales.
- [07:53]
The second one is more product led and this one is very important for me. It's paid ads because we have a tool to help you create paid ads using AI. So we use our own tool to create our own ads and will basically not only grow the business doing that, but will also grow our knowledge about how the product should look like and the features we shall build. That's the most direct feedback loop you can have. It proves that the product works because we are using it for ourselves. It also gives us feedback and at the same time, obviously, it helps us grow. So that's the second one. And the third one is influencer marketing. I have been spending like from zero to here. It's been only me posting content and this person who did a viral video on Twitter. So we know that posting content online can bring traction. So we basically started doing the same thing with influencers and other.
- [08:55]
B
People. Guys, remember, I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing in my third fund. We've deployed $250 million into 550 software companies so far. Again, at Founder Path, if you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show, so sign up@founderpath.com and when you get the onboarding email, I reply and I see all those. Just reply and say, nathan, I found you through YouTube and I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out founderpath.com so let's just sum that up real quick. The top three growth channels today, right? Growing from half a million, you know, 5 million of revenue to 10 million revenue has been sales, paid advertising, and then influencer marketing. Before we dive a little bit deeper into each of those, I'd love for you to just quantify those quickly. So maybe quantify influencer marketing first. How many influencers did you pay? At least a dollar in the last 30 days. And what total spend did you put towards influencers in the last 30.
- [09:51]
A
Days?
- [09:54]
So this I figure I want to keep private.
- [09:58]
Because I know our competitors will be watching this. And I'm not sure I want to give the full details of the scope of what you do and the budget and stuff like that. We can talk about more overall tactics without going too much into details.
- [10:12]
B
Right.
- [10:14]
I guess the reason I'm asking is most founders, SaaS, founders are used to this sort of, hey, we're going to spend 20 to 25% of our top line Revenue on sales. Right. Whether it's marketing and paid ads, sales team, etc. Right. Just marketing and sales in general. Are you comfortable? Like, I'm not asking you to obviously share your top influencers, their name or their Twitter handle where your competitors will pick them off, but can you give us some guidance or direction or. I mean, are you spending 40% of your monthly revenue on influencer marketing or 5% or something.
- [10:43]
A
Different? I'm not sure I want to share the exact numbers. What I can tell you is we have very healthy profitability. Until now, we grow. We grew like 100% profitably. We have super healthy margins. We also have API costs to generate videos on our. And maybe I can do a very quick demo of like how this looks like and how people can use the.
- [11:05]
B
Product. But yeah, yeah, why don't, why don't you do. I'd love to actually like see obviously that in the product. I mean, look, I'm, I'm going to focus here on asking the questions that people are always beating up AI Rap. They call, they say, oh, it's just an AI wrapper. They make no money, they spend it all on API things. Like you are doing the opposite of a lot of this stuff. So to the extent you can teach and train how you're doing that, you're going to usher in sort of this next generation of really great founders building on AI. So I won't push you harder than what you want to share, but the more you can share, the.
- [11:33]
A
Better. Yeah. So basically, if you look at the market of AI Jenny I Gen AI at the bottom, you will have the providers of the models. So these companies are companies like OpenAI that will create very good models. You'll find companies like Google that released VO 3.1 recently. You'll find companies like Meta, who is building some LLMs. And you'll also find Chinese companies like cling or ByteDance, the company that is like behind TikTok. Those are the main mobile providers on the market. These will create the foundational models that will make the generation possible. And then on top of that you'll find companies that will create user experiences that are delightful on top of these AI models. And this is what we do. We'll help the marketers use these models in the most intuitive way possible. And we'll partner with the model providers to integrate them as quickly as we can on the platform. And then we'll not only partner, offer the best user interface to use them, but also will build sometimes custom models that are not provided by these providers. At large foundational models that tend to be generalist, that focus on very specific use cases that they won't tackle and that we are the only ones to do and that we are the best in the world to do. And then on top of that, finally we'll provide some services for our enterprise clients, which is what we focus on right now. And what we, what was probably the biggest driver of growth recently.
- [13:15]
Will like basically offer more support to the more enterprise clients to help them master all of these AI.
- [13:23]
B
Technologies. Romain, are you comfortable sharing? It's hard to hire sales reps to put touch on a sale. If you're selling $10 per month plans, are you comfortable sharing what sort of don't name them. But your biggest customers today, are they paying like what are they paying? What's your highest ACV.
- [13:37]
A
Today? It's gonna be six figures at the.
- [13:42]
B
Moment.
- [13:43]
A
Okay. And I think it's only gonna.
- [13:45]
B
Grow your sales team to drive those customers into the six figures. Is it usage based upselling? Number of videos? Is it feature based upselling, seat based.
- [13:53]
A
Upselling? Which of those three products has been usage based? So if you, if you look at like the market like two years ago, no one was doing gen AI for advertising. Then during the past two years people started implementing that and the usage has been growing up and up and up and went from like maybe 0% at the time of video on the Facebook ads library of a client being AI generated to 5, 10%. And now some companies are 100% AI generated ads. So the usage is growing more and more and more again and it's becoming more and more competitive to create ads and to, to get to create profitable ads. So for this reason, yeah, the usage has been significantly increasing over the past few.
- [14:37]
B
Years. Okay. So that explains the growth behind you hiring your first sales rep and you spending a lot of your time building this because you see a clear motion where you can take bottoms up, approach people that start off paying you a little bit, put sales touch on them, upsell them to 100 grand plus per year and you think this is going to be a large part of your growth story over the next.
- [14:55]
A
Year? Yeah.
- [14:56]
B
100%. Interesting. So we talked about influencer marketing, which you shared what you could. We just talked about sales. The other top three, you said you is, you said paid ads. Are you comfortable sharing there? I mean are we talking like 100 grand a month on paid ads or something lower or.
- [15:11]
A
Higher? So again, I won't share exact numbers. Again, I can tell you we are super profitable and we Won't spend. If we are not profitable.
- [15:21]
Then.
- [15:21]
B
Like, can you share what that means? When you say super profitable, I mean is, are you like 5% or 50%, bottom.
- [15:27]
A
Line? It's a lot. It's a lot. Enough for us to hire, to grow, to grow super fast and to. I can show you.
- [15:36]
B
Something. You won't give me a percent, though. You'll just. You'll just say a lot.
- [15:39]
A
Huh? Yeah. Yeah.
- [15:41]
B
Correct. All right, fair enough. So we're in your ads account right now on Meta. You're running 210 ads currently as of November 2025. So you have a lot of iteration happening behind here. Help us understand, how do you manage so many ads with such a small team? All the creatives, all the copywriting.
- [15:55]
A
Everything. Exactly. And that's the beauty of AI. We can have a look at a random one. Let's open the first one. I see.
- [16:07]
So this one was a very good ad for sure. And the problem was.
- [16:13]
B
That. How do you know it was a good ad though? Are you looking at click through rate or are you attributing it directly to new, paid, New paid customers? Or how do you know.
- [16:18]
A
That? Yeah, we'll. We'll focus on profitability.
- [16:22]
But what I mean here visually already, I mean, it's subjective. I don't know the performance of this exact one, but I can tell you it looks like a good ad anyway. And let's say it's top performer and it's bringing a lot of performance, then what we'll do, and we'll basically translate the same ads to other languages and say, okay, now let's run this ad, but in French.
- [16:47]
So your audience will probably not understand.
- [16:48]
B
This.
- [16:49]
A
But. But it's basically the same.
- [16:50]
B
Ad. You decide that you needed to change the woman a little bit. It's not the same woman. There's edits. Did you give a text prompt to then generate a new video of a woman? And if so, what went into that text.
- [17:00]
A
Prompt? We'll test everything. We'll test the language, we'll test what they say, we'll test how they look. So if there is one face that you see often in the ads, probably means this one is working well and will basically take the same one and repeat it in multiple situations. If it doesn't really perform as well, we'll also ab test and try other versions, other AI versions of her. And yeah, all of that has been done on the platform, as you can see right.
- [17:27]
B
Here. So hold on, hold on, Romaine, because you know this, you're in this every Day. But my audience doesn't, I don't want people to get lost. So my audience right now is looking at this going, wait, romaine is at 10 million of revenue. He's running hundreds of ad variations with a 10 PER, with an eight person team. How the hell is he doing this? So the more. Can you peel back sort of the operating layers here, what's the system you've built to constantly be testing these, monitoring, killing bad ones, doubling down on good ones.
- [17:50]
A
Etc. So the first part of the system is getting the IDs, getting the ideas. And for that we basically built a notion file with tons of ideas. Every time we see a new ad, I'm saying.
- [18:03]
B
Ideas. Right.
- [18:03]
A
Ideas. Yeah, ideas, exactly. And then when we get IDs, we want to test them. And that was the big challenge before AI. Realistically, you could test like, I don't know, five IDs every single month. But then AI comes and you can go and say, I'm going to generate video variations of these IDs. And that's what our platform lets you do. Basically you will type a script, select an actor. In our library of AI actors, we have hundreds of AI actors now, even more than a thousand in the platform. And you'll be able to select the perfect AI avatar for your use case, use the gender to find the right ones, or even if you don't find which I adopt. But if you don't find the perfect avatar, you can just create your own and go here and type a description of how the person should look like. And you can even include an image of your product to have the person hold the product. If you sell a physical product, let's say you are Nike and you sell a new shoe, then you'll generate an avatar holding the shoe and talking about.
- [19:09]
B
It.
- [19:11]
Well, hold on. So do they upload that as two separate things? They pick the face and then they upload a PNG of their product and you automatically put the PNG into the video or how does that.
- [19:19]
A
Work? Yeah, we can do it together if you.
- [19:20]
B
Want.
- [19:21]
A
Yeah. So what do you want to create an ad for? Let's think about something together. Let's do a shoe. Let's do Nike shoe. I think it's a good one. It's a good way to. Everyone knows that. Right? So I'm gonna just go to Google, look for an image of Nike shoe. Look at, I don't know, maybe this one, blue one. It's pretty good.
- [19:45]
And then we'll go to archives and create our AI avatar. So how do you want them to look like? Just.
- [19:53]
B
Describe. Let's have it. Let's have it look like someone like you or me. I saw you on X the other day completing the Hyrox challenge. Let's say it's an athlete like you, a high rock, a Hyrox athlete, a young.
- [20:02]
A
Male. Young male who just completed a hybrid.
- [20:11]
Okay, let's generate that. You could also import a photo of yourself. I could like definitely use the picture that I uploaded here on Twitter for the Hyrux. So it's gonna take.
- [20:23]
B
Less. We still see Nike shoes. Romain. We still see Google.
- [20:26]
A
Search. Oh, my bad. Yeah, Right, here we go. So it's going to take a couple of seconds to generate the first version of this young mail. You'll have multiple options. Obviously you could have made a much longer, more detailed prompt where you will give details about the space they are in. But that's really.
- [20:47]
B
Cool. What are you sitting on top of on this? Are you paying for OpenAI credits or anthropic or who are you sitting on top of.
- [20:53]
A
Here? So this one is going to be either Google's Nano Banana or Seed Dream from.
- [21:04]
My Demps, the company behind TikTok. So we will basically read your prompt and select the best model for you based on your prompt.
- [21:14]
So it's been. I mean, the prompt was quite short, but it's really, really good because it understood that it was a Hyrux. It added them to the specific, like. Yeah, I don't know if you did this type of race, but you will see exactly this type of like environment when you.
- [21:30]
B
Do. Let's do the last one.
- [21:32]
A
Yeah. And then you can like select this person, add your image and then generate a new version of them. Have him hold the shoe and you can generate that. It's going to take a couple of.
- [21:51]
B
Seconds. While this is loading, Romain, how expensive? Like if I'm an archives customer right now and I'm paying you 60 bucks a month and I'm doing this, what you're doing right now on my screen. Right. How much? Or let's say it's 100 bucks a month to make it easy, how much of the 100 bucks a month are you paying out to C Dream and Nana Banana basically to do all the work for me like this. Is it like a dollar for every $100 of your revenue or five bucks? Is it. I mean, I'm just curious. A metric.
- [22:15]
A
There. It's. It depends on the models you will use. So it's hard to give a response like for a single type of generation. Because, for example, for image, it's going to be free for our users to do that. And as you can see, there was some issue with the.
- [22:35]
B
Arm. Yeah.
- [22:36]
A
Yeah. Let's start.
- [22:39]
B
Again. Is this a big. Can you rank these? Like, I'm sensitive that you don't want to share specific numbers, but I'm just. I'm trying to get a relative understanding of. You spend money on ads every month, you spend money on influencers every month, and you spend money on your cost of goods sold. Right. Paying the models you sit on top of on just a cost basis. Which one of those is the largest? Is it paying the models, paying influencers, or your paid.
- [23:01]
A
Ads? It's definitely.
- [23:06]
It will. I'm not sure I want to answer this one because, I mean, it's very sensitive information that our competitors will probably want to know. I don't want them to be able to guess, like, how much we are spending in each models. We also have some competitions in some NDAs with providers. So I'm not sure I want to go into the details of that, but maybe that's time for another conversation when we come back in two.
- [23:30]
B
Years.
- [23:33]
Cool. Yeah. Okay. Well, this one looks like it generated.
- [23:35]
A
Nicely. Yeah, I like this one. So now I can turn it into a talking actor. And you could iterate as many times as you want on the image, by the.
- [23:43]
B
Way. Okay, but this is where people get stuck, right? Because there are people. First off, most people watching this, they're just very bad on camera in general. So some people are even worse at trying to figure out to write scripts to have other people talk, like on camera. Right. So how are you helping people write scripts that convert, like your Facebook ads?
- [23:57]
A
Convert? Yeah, that's a good point. So first, I think that's one skill that until now was very important, but that is going to be completely replaced by AI over time.
- [24:12]
Basically, what will happen, I think, is you'll describe your product, AI will come up with a script for you that will use a platform like archives, automatically find the perfect actors, put that into your ad account and test that automatically, and then use the data from the ad account to come back and generate new versions of the script. I think that's the vision that we have, and that's going to be the future. But right now, you can basically help get help from these tools. And we, for example, we built this hook generator where you can describe your product and it will generate hooks for you. The hook is the most important part of a script. It's the first sentence. It's what will get people to click on a video. So you can basically go to hook generator getarcast AI Hook generator, describe your product, and it will automatically generate the hooks for you and give you ideas of hooks that are likely to work well. And that's a good starting.
- [25:08]
B
Point.
- [25:09]
A
Yeah. And then you will put that into archives, generate the video and test it. So once you're happy with.
- [25:15]
B
The. All right, well, cool. So. So you guys just saw. You saw a good obviously tour here. We spent a couple of minutes there inside of ARC ads. Romain, maybe we can jump. You can maybe stop screen sharing. We can jump back into sort of just the rest of the interview. You as a founder obviously growing to 10 million bucks of revenue in 20 months. Bootstrapped is obviously. Is obviously pretty impressive. You're obviously spending on ads, etc. You put out a Twitter post where you said your top channels were really paid ads, direct outreach events and conferences like Affiliate World app growth summit, etc. Is there anything that you'd recommend just for other founders launching, like mistakes you made in any of these channels that they should avoid? Maybe on paid.
- [25:53]
A
Ads? So paid ads, probably the biggest mistake is not testing enough ads and not testing ads for enough time. So paid ads are very competitive. It's very hard to make them work. And what people mostly will do is they will put like 100 bucks and say it's not working. They will just test one ad with 100 bucks and they will basically waste $100. It's kind of like if you were trying to learn how to swim for the first time at 40 years old and you go to the water, you don't necessarily swim well. And then you think, okay, I will never swim in my life. That's not how it works. You have to go to the pool every single week until you get better and you get to practice and you get to become better. That's how it works. And that's the same thing for paid ads. You need to test a lot of different ads. And AI makes it much easier to test so many ads. You need to also be giving it enough time for you to understand what are the type of ads that work, the type of ads that don't work. And you just need to be iterating until you find what's taking.
- [27:06]
B
There. Guys, there you have it again. You got to get volume, volume, volume, volume. Because you just don't know what's going to stick. Remain. Can you give us an update on this? It was a great. It's actually when we had you on the show last, it was a really good talking point because you had gone from the first 12 months 0 to this many paying customers and 5 million of revenue with a team of 4, 5. Are you able to share what's the updated paid. Paid subscriber number.
- [27:28]
A
Today? Yeah, it's pretty much twice. Twice much. Yeah, two times.
- [27:34]
B
That. So have you broken 6,000? 6,000 paying customers.
- [27:38]
Very cool, Very cool. All right, great. What, what have I not asked about that? You think we should focus on that? Maybe you. You haven't talked about on other podcasts, you haven't written about on X yet, but it's top of mind for.
- [27:48]
A
You.
- [27:50]
I'm not sure we have anything specific that comes to mind. Just like go try some ads, go generate your own video ads, go do some testing, go learn AI. Every single ad will be AI generated in three years. So if you don't start doing this right now, basically you will get left behind. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to the team. We are super busy, as you know, being a small team with such a, a growing company. But I'm always happy to talk to.
- [28:19]
B
Customers.
- [28:22]
Why let me a channel that's working for other folks that I actually see you may be underperforming on and it's actually free. So it's maybe more cost efficient than paid ads. Is actually SEO you're getting based off Ahrefs here. You're getting about 5300 organic clicks per. Per month to Arcads. AI. Do you, you know, are you spending. Is this like a focus for you guys or is it difficult because it's a.it's not a.com or how do you think about.
- [28:45]
A
SEO? That's the next focus we are hiring, by the way. If you, if you know about SEO, please reach out to us. We did nothing basically in terms of SEO, but just like organic content. So yeah, please reach out if you are doing some SEO.
- [28:59]
B
Stuff. Okay, so that's something you're thinking about. You know, that's actually, that's a good question for you. So you're going to start experimenting with SEO? Are there any other growth channels that you're going to start experimenting with as you go from, you know, you try to go from 10 million to 100 million of.
- [29:10]
A
Revenue? Yeah. So I think enterprise sales will be a big one. So I want to focus much more on that. We are just like scratching the surface when it comes to that. SEO has been proven to be very important also for people in our space. So we are going to be doing More of that. And yeah, I think those are the two biggest focus that we have right.
- [29:32]
B
Now.
- [29:35]
Very cool. Last question. Because it's a hot topic, there's a lot of people that, you know, I don't like. We won't talk bad about anybody, right. But, but we have to. It'd be irresponsible as a podcast host for me not to ask. This icon obviously made a ton of noise when they launched, right? Really interesting sort of launch strategy. But then when you read the reviews, there's a lot of people saying the hype video was basically animations that weren't not actually real in the dashboard, the product didn't actually exist and their churn just spiked through the roof. And sort of now they're sort of loud on Twitter. We're not quite obviously sure what they're doing from a revenue perspective, but can you maybe just give, give any perspective you have in terms of you have a lot of competitors, right? So how do you build a real moat where people use you, they use you over and over, they upsell, and before you know, they're paying you 100 grand a month, not switching to any competitors or a hundred grand per year and they're not switching to other.
- [30:21]
A
Competitors.
- [30:23]
So your question, like, how do you do.
- [30:26]
B
That?
- [30:28]
Yeah, yeah. The question is there's a lot of folks launching very loudly right now, but the product does not back it up. You are sort of the opposite in my opinion. You launched pretty quietly, right? You happen to sort of one of your viral. Your product was so good, one of your customers posted something that went viral and that led to your growth. You didn't have some big expensive launch video where you announced a $50 million round of funding from Peter Thiel, right? You did the opposite. So I guess what I'm trying to, what I'm trying to get at, get at here is what's the balance between just, you know, no promotion, stay focused, great product, you stay in your hole and just code and build a good product versus going out doing the podcast, doing the big launch stories, doing the highly produced videos.
- [31:08]
A
Etc. That's a good question. So I am very lucky because we are two co founders and my co founder, he is handling the products, I'm handling the marketing and the sales. So for me I can just like focus entirely on marketing and sales and I know the product will be the best version possible. And actually that's our number one acquisition channel is just product led growth and making the best product is the true hack to grow your company. So if I I guess it's weird of me to say that because I'm focused on marketing. But if I had to only pick one, I will focus on products.
- [31:51]
Because that's like if you have the best, I don't know, let's say you are into investment and you find a way to profit, I don't know, 20 a year without any risk. But you live in the like the middle of Antarctica, people will find you and they will like.
- [32:13]
Throw money at you to invest this money on a 20 monthly return or even yearly return. And you don't need to do marketing because your product, like the investment vehicle you built, is so good and it's so perfect that people will find you. So I think everyone should aim for that. But that being said, marketing is obviously a very good accelerator of a good product. So when you can get both of them to work together, then it's beautiful and it's just like growing much.
- [32:45]
B
Faster.
- [32:47]
It's zen. You're in rhythm. What's that relationship like between you and your partner? Did you guys at the beginning just say, hey look, we're equals, let's just split it 50, 50? Or was the equity conversation early on a little tougher than.
- [32:58]
A
That? We are.
- [32:59]
B
50.
- [33:00]
A
50. We, we've known each other for 10 years now. My only experience is working with him, so I don't know anything else business wise. And we basically grew together. So it's like the thing I'm most happy with when it comes to my career is finding Dylan and working with him early on when we're just like 18 years old students and building stuff and learning stuff together. So yeah, I mean that make the journey 20 times better. Having a good co.
- [33:40]
B
Founder. And how old are you.
- [33:43]
A
Today? I'm.
- [33:44]
B
30. 30? Yeah. Okay, very cool. Last question here. You're a team of eight, you've just broken 10 million of revenue. You're bootstrapped. You and your partner own 5050 each. Maybe there's a little esop pool, but if someone came to you today and offered you 150 million all cash up front to sell ARC ads, would you take the.
- [34:05]
A
Deal? We won't. And I think if you look at like what we are building, we are probably building one of the most exciting thing one can build. We are if you think about the most beautiful companies in the world, I think companies like Apple, they are always at this spot between technology and creativity and the tools that enable creativity through technology are the tool that can become the biggest companies in the world. And we are exactly in this spot. We help marketing teams create ads with AI. Every single ad we'll see will be AI generated soon.
- [34:45]
So I think there is nothing more exciting we could be building. So, no, like, we.
- [34:51]
B
Won'T.
- [34:53]
All right, well, Romain, if people want to learn more about you online, where can they find.
- [34:56]
A
You? Probably X is the best way. I post a lot of content about our journey. I'm very public about what we do, so, yeah, feel free to reach out on.
- [35:07]
B
X.
- [35:09]
Guys. Romain and his partner Dylan at Ark Ads have grown from zero to $10 million of revenue in just about 20 months, breaking 6,000 paid customers, of which some pay over $100,000 per year for the product. Their total team today, just eight people. So incredible revenue per employee. They've done this all bootstrapped using three main growth channels, Their sales team, paid ads, and influencer marketing. Better yet, they've been profitable through the entire first 20 months journey. We'll see what happens next, but check them out at Ark Ads. Romaine, thanks for taking us to the.
- [35:42]
A
Top. Thanks, Ben.