He Used AI to Generate $6m Revenue at Dreamstories by Selling Childrens Books

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Episode Overview

Podcast: SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Host: Nathan Latka
Guest: Ricardo (Co-founder, Dreamstories AI)
Date: November 21, 2025
Episode Title: He Used AI to Generate $6M Revenue at Dreamstories by Selling Children's Books

In this episode, Nathan Latka interviews Ricardo, the co-founder of Dreamstories AI. Ricardo reveals how he harnessed generative AI and his growth background to build a platform that personalizes children's books—achieving impressive revenue and scaling rapidly, all with a minimal team and lean funding approach. The episode explores Dreamstories’ AI-driven product, growth strategy via paid channels, business economics, and Ricardo’s unique founder journey.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Dreamstories AI: The Product and Opportunity (03:33–06:08)

• What is Dreamstories?
  Dreamstories AI is described as a “personalized content studio” leveraging generative AI to allow non-technical users to create custom children's books, often featuring their own children or family members as protagonists.
• Origin of the Idea:
  Ricardo draws from his experience at Spotify, where he was fascinated by personalization at scale. Observing his own family’s bedtime reading habits, he saw a repeatable pattern in kids’ content consumption—a behavior he realized could be productized.
• Market Dynamics:
  The children’s book segment is still growing, particularly as parents look to keep kids off screens at bedtime. Dreamstories targets this segment, competing with traditional players rather than VC-backed, margin-thin content companies.

2. Business Model and Customer Journey (06:08–09:19)

• Revenue Model:
  Customers go through a streamlined, ‘magical feeling’ onboarding, upload a photo, create the book, and only pay at the paywall after seeing a preview.
• Pricing:
  Usually $60 per book, sometimes discounted to $48 or less with volume deals; average order value fluctuates due to discounts.
• Customer Behavior:
  Most customers make their child the hero, though sometimes pets or multiple children/family members are included. Repeat and “reverse” purchases (swapping protagonists) are common due to episodic stories.

3. Revenue, Growth, and Scaling Tactics (09:19–14:43)

• Sales Traction:
  “We’ve done close to 100,000 sales since launching at the beginning of this year.” (Ricardo, 08:41)
  • Even accounting for discounts, lifetime revenue is conservatively over $3 million, possibly up to $6 million.
• Growth Channels:
  The lion’s share of traffic comes from paid acquisition—especially Facebook Ads—not SEO or organic social.
• Paid Acquisition Strategy:
  Ricardo’s playbook is honed from his Spotify days:
  “One thing I’ve done a lot at Spotify and after was paid acquisition… not a community, most of it is paid.” (11:12)
  He’s comfortable spending up to the book’s AOV ($60) per acquisition, explaining that most new entrants bid up to a 1:1 spend-to-return, and that Dreamstories’ repeat purchases and higher AOV allow him to outcompete.
• Margin Management:
  Despite CAC, margins exist due to repeat purchases and secondary orders (reverse/episodic books).

4. Product & Tech Stack (16:13–17:23; 18:16–24:35)

• Custom-Built Core:
  Most functionality is proprietary, with Shopify used for checkout/order management.
  “Everything else you see is custom built… We only use Shopify for the last piece and order management.” (Ricardo, 16:41)
• AB Testing:
  Actively running 4+ AB tests in product flow at a given time, always iterating on the funnel and onboarding experience.
• Reviews Plugin:
  Notable shout out to “Loox,” the reviews tool Dreamstories uses, praised for its capability and service.
• Analytics:
  Uses Posthog for in-depth analytics and funnel testing, lauding their efficacy and unconventional, fun B2B SaaS approach.

5. Founder Journey & Funding Philosophy (00:58–01:25; 14:16–21:11)

• Background:
  Spotify early employee and option-holder, exited a snack startup (Kenko), also VP at a body scan health startup (Necco Health).
• Funding:
  Ricardo invested his own proceeds from previous ventures, raised less than $1 million externally for Dreamstories.
• Lean and Profitable Growth:
  “If you make the economics work, you don’t need [to raise much or self-fund extensively]… I chose to come up with a model I can monetize from day one.” (Ricardo, 19:41)
• Team:
  Extremely lean—only 7 full-time employees, mostly engineers.

6. Broader Vision and Hiring (25:21–26:04)

• Looking Ahead:
  Ricardo envisions Dreamstories evolving far beyond children’s books, into broader content and personalized media.
• Hiring:
  Actively seeking engineers, especially in AI/machine learning.
  “Are you hiring? — Yes, I’m hiring!” (25:23–25:24)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the AI Moment:
  “When I saw [generative AI breakthroughs]… I had this moment: oh shit, this is the moment where these things actually become possible.” (Ricardo, 02:56)
• On Paid Acquisition Economics:
  “What I usually tell people… you should ballpark [CAC] around what their AOV is… people stop bidding when it crosses under the one bar, so if you can make it episodic and beat them, you make the economics work.” (Ricardo, 13:04)
• On Building Custom:
  “I’m trying to build a service that feels… more like a service, so I end up building a lot of stuff that is custom.” (Ricardo, 16:41)
• On Lean Company-Building:
  “Instead of giving people shit for free that I have to subsidize, let me come up with from day one a model I can monetize… building in a more conservative manner… but also feels more grounded.” (Ricardo, 19:41)
• On Product Simplicity:
  Nathan: “Once you get in, holy mackerel, there’s a lot of thought inside of this thing…” (17:34)
• On Repeat Purchases and AOV:
  “A lot of the times people add different members of their family, cousins, so on and so forth, and… end up getting what I call reverse books.” (Ricardo, 14:58–15:18)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• Dreamstories origin story: 03:33–06:08
• Product onboarding and pricing: 06:08–09:19
• Revenue milestones & economics: 09:19–14:43
• Paid acquisition & scaling: 10:57–14:43
• Custom tech stack & AB testing: 16:13–18:06
• Team size & hiring: 23:23–26:04
• Analytics and reviews stack: 18:16–24:35
• Ricardo’s founder path & philosophy: 00:58–01:25; 14:16–21:11

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Takeaways for Founders and Operators

• Monetizable, episodic personalized content serves as an excellent product for paid acquisition-led growth.
• A lean, mostly engineer team with a custom tech stack can scale a consumer AI product rapidly—with as little as $1M external funding.
• Carefully tracking funnel performance, running constant AB tests, and obsessing over onboarding fosters high conversion and repeat usage.
• Success in new AI-powered consumer products can come from thoughtful application of established SaaS and DTC growth tactics—not just technology.

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Resources & Further Information

• Learn more or apply: [e-mail]
• Main tools discussed: Shopify, Posthog, Loox
• Dreamstories AI (website not specified in transcript; inferred name: dreamstars.ai or dreamstories.ai)

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End of summary.

Transcript

[A]

Can I ask how many sales total you have so far?

[B]

Yeah, close to 100,000.

[A]

That's a ton. When did you launch?

[B]

At the beginning of this year. We only really started scaling very recently.

[A]

Right. Can I just do that math? I mean, can I do 100,000 sales times 60 apiece? You guys have done 6 million bucks in total revenue life to date.

[B]

I think this month. Yes, we're in the six figures. Everything else you see is custom built.

[A]

Hey, folks, my guest today is Ricardo. He's the co founder of Dream Stories, harnessing generative AI to bring immersive storytelling and image creation to life.

[B]

So I started noticing this repeatable pattern that I figured you can build services around this, right? You know, something that grows with do and kind of, you know, matches the phase that, that you're in.

[A]

Before launching the company in 2023, he was VP of Growth at a body scan startup called Necco Health. Prior to that, he founded a snack company and was a founding member of Spotify's U.S. team. Ricardo, you ready to take us to the top?

[B]

Absolutely.

[A]

All right. People hear Spotify and early and they assume you got rich off options. Is that accurate?

[B]

Fairly accurate, yes. I was early enough that it. It made sense. Yes.

[A]

What year was that?

[B]

So I joined in 2009, I guess. Yeah.

[A]

Okay, interesting. And is it fair to say? Because I want to understand the buildup obviously, to Dream Stories AI. Did you basically take a big chunk of the money you made there and sort of plow it into the new venture or how did you think about that? Those options?

[B]

Yeah, no, part of it, yes. But I did start a few companies in between as well that I've also had an exit for. So a mix of both.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So. So the Spotify got the car and the house, and then the other stuff got the company going.

[A]

Fair enough. Okay, let's not bury the lead here. Let's get an overview of Dream Stories first and then we'll go get your sort of history between Spotify and Dream Stories. So what is Dream Stories AI?

[B]

Yeah, so Dreamstories AI is usually describe it as either in the Genti Content Studio or personalized Content Studio. So this is actually an idea that I had. You know, it actually dates back to Spotify, funny enough, from, you know, I initially had Spotify. I was on the content team. So I dealt, as you can imagine, with the large catalog we had there. And I started noticing that there was content in the platform that was personalized. This could be birthday songs or love songs and so forth. And back then I Had this thought experiment, if you will, about I wonder if one day we'll have, you know, Beyonce sing a song for you or something like that. Right. And I. This was, this was really just an experiment. There was no sorry thoughts experiment. Right. There was no AI to do it. There was certainly not generative AI but it's interesting that throughout my career I've always worked somewhat around personalization and trying to do personalization at scale. As you mentioned, I founded a snack company where I was trying to do personalized nutrition for people with the body scanner, which is actually a company by Daniel Ek as well of Spotify. We're almost doing the same thing in the reverse manner. You can think of healthcare as an artisan good, right. You sit there and there's a doctor across from you performing a service for you one on one. And with Necco Health we are trying to scale it right. At mass. Do a good service, personalized service at scale. And so Dream Stories is kind of a connection of these things in trying to do that for content essentially. Because when as you mentioned, I started the company in 2023, this was around the times you started seeing stuff like stable diffusion come out in mid journey and so forth with the image stuff. And when I saw it, to be honest, I had this moment. Oh shit. This is the moment where these things actually become possible. Because in the meantime you've seen stuff like Suno come up. You know the music gen, generative music stuff.

[A]

S U N O.

[B]

Yes, there's stuff like Suno, there's a few other models out there that lets you create personalized music, if you will. I actually think this is more interesting for the use cases other than music. And that's kind of. We built the company around the experimentation around those contents. Right. And so we decided to start with family content, particularly children's books, you know, as, as a first market. But essentially we're building the, the real core of what we're building is the platform that allows you to take a consumer that is not technical. Right. And give them the ability to, to create. And basically create content for self consumption. Right. Of their own family.

[A]

Interesting. And, and I'm just trying to think like what's the comparable. Right, so our, our parents still buying physical children's books for their kids and are you going to go take that market share or sort of. How do you, how do you think about that? What's the revenue model?

[B]

Yeah, it's actually so I, it's not a coincidence that you know, things lined up as I, as, you know, As I looked at the behavior at home with my own child and I started noticing that my, you know, with my family, like we read to our, to our son every night and I started noticing this is kind of a recurrent behavior that happens every single night. There's something interesting about children's content as well that is quite, it's repetitive to some degree, but it changes after a while. So a child will basically want to read or consume the same content multiple times in the week and then move on to the next thing. So I started noticing this repeatable pattern that I figured you can build services around this. Right? Something that grows with you and kind of matches the phase that you're in. It also happens that I'm Portuguese, my wife is Swedish, so we're, you know, similar culture but different languages. And so I realized, you know, there's a lot of people out there that we could create content that will be hard to find in stores. Right. But to your question about if I'm looking to take that market, it's actually still a growing segment. It's actually one of the ones in books that continues to grow in part because parents want to get kids away from tablets and you know, and digital formats, particularly at bedtime. But you know, that's kind of how I saw an opportunity to use that as an entry market. Right, but, but also one that is filled with sort of non, what I'll describe as non technique, sort of non tech players. You know, as you can imagine, there's a lot of investment in video and other formats. You saw Sora come out, you know, with, with a generative AI video and I, you know, and I have no interest in playing in a market that has, you know, very diluting margins, you know, because of these extremely overly well funded players, you know, bringing the cost either to zero, essentially.

[A]

So what's the status though right now on the company? Are you pre revenue, post revenue?

[B]

No, we're post revenue. So we're selling. We've done it in a very iterative manner. Right. So we basically wanted to get to market as soon as possible with a prototype which captures a segment of it. The way I try to explain to people is that you can imagine that there's people that literally just want to sit in front of TV or something and just watch be something fat to them. And there's people that have a lot of agency that want to create their own stuff and they'll go to trouble of doing it. And we started with like a very simple product where all you need to do is really like submit the picture as you can see there, and basically it will create content for you. And as we are evolving. Right. Again, as we collect more data, we're evolving it to be become, you know, give you sort of more agency. Right. Essentially like being able to be more tailored to what you want. Right. So we got a lot of requests around this into essentially make it better for the, you know, more personalized in the way.

[A]

I, I, this is a company I just invested in here in Austin, Texas, their general store. So maybe we'll get a children's book about Ian and Jess, the co founders on this. But this is, this is interesting. Yeah.

[B]

In this case you will be only for one of them, but the first one. Right. We actually do allow multiple characters in the book, but you have to currently have to do it one at a time. But it's fine. Let's see. So when will I head out with. Yeah, I don't know.

[A]

When will I hit a paywall policy?

[B]

You can keep going and then essentially after you create the content and decided this is actually what you want to do, you see it picked up the woman, but yeah. And then later if you keep going, eventually you will hear the paywall voice to create the full book for you.

[A]

Interest. So you capture me as a lead. Okay. You get my phone number so you can follow up if you want. And then what I see to pay all after that.

[B]

Yeah, you're gonna get to the, to the item.

[A]

So what's the total price gonna be?

[B]

Yeah, with this discount will be 48.

[A]

Oh, interesting. Okay. All right. So are people making their kid the hero generally?

[B]

Yeah, we have sometimes pets, but the vast majority will put their kid right.

[A]

Wait, so where's the paywall? When will I hit the paywall? Oh, order book.

[B]

There we go.

[A]

Oh, I see. Is this accurate? So you had 648 sales so far?

[B]

No, we have more sales. Those are reviews, right?

[A]

Oh, oh, oh, sorry. Can I ask how many sales total you have so far?

[B]

Yeah, close to 100,000. Those are. Yep.

[A]

That's a ton. When did you launch?

[B]

We, we, I mean, we launched in at the beginning of this year. We only really started scaling very.

[A]

Right, that's wild. I mean, and, and was your price always like 60 bucks a pop?

[B]

Yeah, we've actually played a little bit with it, you know, sort of back and forth. Generally it's been around 60. $60, but, and that's the place we've been sort of most comfortable with.

[A]

I mean, can I, I mean, Ricardo, you know, my next question, Can I Just do that math. I mean, can I do 100,000 sales times 60 a piece? You guys have done 6 million bucks in total revenue life to date.

[B]

I. You can do the maths. I would, I will. I will say that of course we have some discounts like you mentioned. The, the 48. Right. So if you want to get accurate. We also have some volume discounts as well. That we do. And so, and so you did fine.

[A]

But still, this is impressive. I mean, fair to say, even with discounts, Can I just say I'll be really conserved. You've done over $3 million in lifetime sales so far. Is that, is that fair to say? That'd be like a 50% discount on the 60 on average. $60 on average.

[B]

I'll say ballpark.

[A]

Okay. I mean that, that's pretty cool. I mean, I would not have expect when I was prepping for the thing. I'm going, okay. I don't know if they're live yet. Looking at the website, it's so, so, so simple. But then the first hint that you were bigger than I thought was when I saw the number of reviews, which is incredible. What would you sort of credit that kind of. I mean, it's a very simple onboarding process is. I mean, is that part of the magic? It's so simple. It feels like magic.

[B]

Correct. To be honest with you, I always wanted it to be like that. You know, I, in general, the companies I worked at, I've always wanted to kind of feel like. And holding a little bit, you know, kind of guide you through in a linear path. Actually only recently we're able to get it that way. This is kind of where you see this agentic products going to where it's like, you know, just again takes you to, you know, it doesn't make you learn, you know, a SaaS platform or whatever. Just this guides you over. So that's kind of all we wanted to do. That's also where you only started scaling it more recently. Right. Because we started essentially being able to. To deliver this kind of experience.

[A]

Right. I just, I just want to make sure. I feel like I'm missing something. Right. Because I'm trying to. Once I hear what your volume is, I'm going, wait, holy crap. How is it getting all this traffic? So I stick your thing in ahrefs, but this clearly is not your growth channel because you're. You're only getting about 61 hits per. Per month via Dream stores. Are you like iframed into some somewhere? How are you getting all the, all these Sales.

[B]

I mean we're getting a lot via Facebook essentially, so we actually not doing so much organic here.

[A]

I see. Okay, so you have a community on. Tell me more about the Facebook strategy.

[B]

Yeah, no, I mean, so one thing I've done, I've done quite a lot at Spotify and after was paid acquisition. Right. Actually with Spotify we were extremely early like on the mobile ad networks and so on. So for. So it's not a community. Right. Most of it is actually paid, paid acquisition. And that's one thing that also one of the things I like about the way I built these things, or the category, if you will, is that the competition tends to be very one time oriented. And if you're doing sort of, if you're doing paid acquisition, obviously it's a bidding model or an auction model. So you want to outbid people. So of course it's kind of just key to take something that is like a one time purchase and turn it into an episodic thing that happens most, multiple. Multiple times over. Right.

[A]

This makes a lot of sense.

[B]

So of course if you can do it, you can make the economics work.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. What? So I mean I got to dive deeper because there's something to learn here. I mean you've done paid spend. It sounds like a lot of places. And you're using it to launch your startup, which is, which is pretty incredible in terms of a day one strategy. Most people wait to do paid ads until they have like a lot of scale. So I guess how do you know what you're willing to pay on, you know, to get a 60, a new $60 sale?

[B]

How do I know? Is that the question?

[A]

Yeah, well, what is your target? Like are you trying to spend under 10 bucks on the ad to, you know, to get the, to get the sale on. On Facebook ads or under five bucks? How do you get the ratio?

[B]

Yeah, no, I would like to. Right. But what I usually tell people, and that's, that's is a litmus test in every single company I've worked. I said, okay, you haven't done any, any ads. What do you expect your CAC to be? I usually tell that you should ballpark it to. Around the ballpark around what their UV is, which is not a great answer, but it tends to be the case. Like the agencies, a lot of the times they kind of stop speaking.

[A]

Just to be clear, Ricardo, for folks that don't know the acronyms aov, you're bas. You should ballpark that. The, the what you'll spend on Facebook ads is Equal to the average order value of the first checkout. So $60 for you or $48 for you.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But that's, that's like I said, if you're going to start right, you, you want a budget, you know, let's say you're aiming to get 50, 50 sales per week or something that used to be traditionally the. The threshold. Until Facebook considers that your campaigns are learned. Have learned. So does if you have to budget, you kind of make the maths from that. Right. So if it's 60, let's ballpark it to 60 then of course. Why do you do that? Well, because there's a bit of arbitrage here. A lot of people use bid caps and whatnot, and so they stop bidding when it crosses under the sort of the one bar. And so like I said, if you're competing under one.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Then one rollers. So essentially this idea of like you spend $60 to get $60, right. So does you have a rollers of one? Right. Of course, by the way, you want to have higher than that. Right. You want to have 2, 3, 4, whatever you can get. Right. But I'm trying to say is that a lot of the times there's a bit of an arbitrage around one because that's everyone else stops spending up until that point. Right. But if you can take something that is again, if your competition is doing, let's say, 60. Right. If you imagine, and of course you can now beat above it because you have either repeat behavior or so forth, then of course you cannot beat them and you can make the economics work.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And in this category, not coincidentally, the reason why I picked this category is because there was, there was an existing behavior which was gifting right around people gifting to others. And you can search personalized books. There's a category with a lot of products, some better than others, and thus the behavior was there. My challenge was essentially just to build something that is better or slightly better and be able to just out beat them.

[A]

Yep. So what are the rest of the economics in there? How do you really grow this thing? Because if you're spending 60 bucks just to get the sort of the customer email, right. To try and resell on the second thing. But your margin also gets cut a little bit too, right. Because you actually have to print and ship these books, right?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, we do. But like I said, the upside of this is essentially the repeat purchases, right. They essentially get people to do it. In this case, you're, you know, you put an adult Right. But what happens a lot of the times, and this is actually one of the things where the only people that I've seen doing it, we have multiple characters per book. Like I said, in this case, to add both of them, you'd need to. In the book there's a button to add someone else. So what ends up happening is that a lot of the times people had different members of the family, cousins, so on and so forth. And as a consequence they end up getting what I call reverse books. So essentially can I get the exact same book, but the other kid's the hero? Right. So they just reverse. And it's a common behavior. We see, of course, the stories are episodic, as you can see there. And we have a number of templates that we created with, with artists. But you know, eventually I want this to be infinite, right. Essentially. And that's what we're working on, the infinite content machine that essentially can, you know, you like dinosaurs, great. You can have, you know, you can keep on going with dinosaurs, you know, for the rest of the journey. Right.

[A]

How are you? Did you. Is this hard coded? You're programmatically running the economics on how to offer the discounts or using some plugin or API tool to figure out how to drive up conversion and AOV on this page?

[B]

No, that's all in house.

[A]

Actually.

[B]

We built that ourselves.

[A]

Really interesting. I imagine you built some secret sauce into that that no one else has. Is it can. Is that true? And if so, can you give us a hint?

[B]

You mean the, the sort of the general e commerce stuff?

[A]

Yeah, I mean, right. There's a lot of these tools that help you like drive up AOV on the last page, right. Like, you know, you know, double the order, increase the size, get one for your friend, you know, a discounting. Right. You chose to build it from scratch for a reason.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I've been. So the thing is that there's a lot of things out there that work very well for, you know, e commerce sites or with a lot of SKUs and you know, and sort of, I don't want to call generic products because I don't want to imply they're less there's anything bad about them. But in my case, you know, we both cameco the snack company in this one. You know, it's generally I'm trying to build a service so something that essentially feels more like a service and so does I end up, end up building a lot of stuff like that is actually custom. So what you see here, this is shopify Right. And it's very standard. Everything else you see is. Is custom built. Right. It's not. So we only use, really shopify for the last, last piece and order management and so on, so forth.

[A]

This is super interesting. Well, I just have to tell you, I mean, when we are prepping this like, and I saw the website, I'm like, okay, maybe pre ribbon because it just looks so simple, but once you get in, holy mackerel. There's a lot of thought inside of.

[B]

This thing and, and I have to tell you, I think you're actually in a B test there. You're seeing a version that I like least. So. So I, I wish, in a way, I wish that you were seeing I was like you this and I'm like, oh shit. I wish it was showing the.

[A]

How many A B tests are you running at any given point in time?

[B]

It's quite a lot. Right. The problem is that you, you know, right now I can tell running 4. The problem is that depending on what you're testing, you eventually start getting a lot of cross results and you just start needing, needing a lot more scale to make sense of the, you know, of the, of the sort of the statistical stuff. Yeah.

[A]

What plugin are you using for this? A lot of people don't like some of these, like review sites where they basically own all your reviews if you don't pay them massive amounts of money. What did you use to build out this sort of Wal.

[B]

Yeah, this. I'm glad to give him a shout out because I really like them. That's Lux L O O X. Yeah, yeah. I'm super happy with them. They're very good, very good at getting videos, as you saw, you saw some on the funnel there. They're actually a plugin we use that we're very, very happy with. It's also that sometimes you deal with companies that you can just tell that they, you know, they really go the extra mile, they mean business in a way. Right. And it's hard to describe, but if you set up something with them, you're kind of gonn. You know, they're competent. Right. I don't know. We're. I don't know if you're. I'm sure everyone at some point dealt with just companies that you just. Oh shit, this guy's just so bad. Looks. Looks is like. I'm just very, very happy with them and impressed with overall their, their funnels, their setup, their level of polish. It just seems like they care, you know?

[A]

I love that, I love that. This is super, man. I'm just, I'm learning so much on this. So I know my audience is going to love this, I guess. Let me get a sense of how I just asked you how many a B test is running. You said four. I mean, how aggressive are you being on your, on your big channel, like the paid spend stuff? Are you comfortable sharing how much you're spend per month? Is it like six figures on Facebook ads or less?

[B]

It's, yeah, it honestly really depends. I think this month, yes, we're in the six figures. You know, we're kind of changing it often. You know, oftentimes like we end up changing it back and forth. Okay.

[A]

And immediately people are going to go, well, okay, this guy must have raised a bunch of money to do that. Or he's just, he's really rich, pong in his own money. Which one is it? Or did I miss an option?

[B]

No, I mean, again, if you make the economics work, you don't need. You kind of need either, right? I don't want to. I don't think there's such a thing as like free lunch. Right. So I'm not going to tell you. There's, you know, there's a golden pot here, you should commit it. But, but it does take a lot of work, right. To build it. So yes, I did put some money, I did raise a little bit of money. Not a lot externally, but I'm essentially building an AI content startup. Usually that's extremely capital intensive. And the difference with me is that I chose to go a route where instead of giving people essential shit for free that I have to subsidize, let me come up with from day one a model that I can monetize it. So while in a sense it's more, I'm building in a more conservative manner, if you think about it, because it also brings a lot of headaches because I'm constantly having to balance the long term vision of what we're building with the short term sort of economics. It's not always easy. It also feels more grounded, I think sometimes. One thing I see in some startups is that Idlas put it, they go for bust. And that's sometimes really good because it really works. But then other times you see that they launched a product and it doesn't stick. And then you spent all this money and time building something that you never had, market validation. Right. So I kind of was a bit more. Some people would say conservative in a good way, some people would say conservative in a bad way rather to being too conservative. But that's Nonetheless the what I've.

[A]

What I'm doing and what. So are you comfortable sharing how much you raised in your seed round for this company?

[B]

To be honest with you, I never shared but I can tell it was less than, than a million externally.

[A]

Okay, okay, got it. Okay, well look we, I told you we would talk about your. Where you're at today and then it's your story. I got so intrigued with your story. I mean you are today. I didn't ask anything about your story. Let's go just backwards for a second. So Spotify 2009 then you do Kenko, I believe you did what a $3.4 million I think raise there. It was a freeze dried smoothie based off my research. What happened to that company?

[B]

Yeah, we can. We raised more with Kinko. I think that to be honest, top of my mind I remember maybe 20 or 30 million the total for, for the company. Yeah, the fir. Maybe you're talking about the first round which was a 3 million. 3 million round. 3 million seed round the seed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No it's still around. I think that basically I've always had an interest in sort of nutrition in food tech in particular. And so I got introduced to a guy that was making some experiments with it and I saw like an opportunity to build a service around it again as opposed to a one time thing. And so that's what I did. Now the company moved a little bit away from direct to consumer into sort of selling on retail channels. In fact that's also a plug I can make. You know you should go to Walmart or CVS and buy it. You know I'm still, I'm still a large shareholder in the company so I would appreciate that. But yeah, but it, but it moved away a little bit for or for that. For that. For essentially those channels. Right.

[A]

And so so your co founder Thomas, he's, he's still running it then?

[B]

Absolutely, yeah. And he's doing a great job. You know he's. I think I'm more of a digital slash technology guy. He's more of a traditional CPG guy. So we're actually a great team in that regard. But when the company, you know, we made this decision to get it move more into retail and you know, and I felt, you know, he's the right guy to lead it. Right. And so does I step. I stepped down from the role but you know, no, nothing bad happened there. Right. Just basically different direction for the company that you know, made more sense for Tomas to lead for the long run.

[A]

Yep. Yep. Super cool. Well, hey, it's really valuable.

[B]

Go, go buy it at Walmart. So I. So I feel like it was a good decision. That's smart.

[A]

Okay, cool. Last question then I'll throw it over to you. How many folks are full time right now at the business?

[B]

Yeah, we're very small team. We are. We're currently seven on the team. So very, very, very small team. Most of them engineers. You know, as. As. Like I said, as we build out the platform. Right.

[A]

Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. Are you using any technology to drive all the tr. When someone clicks on your Facebook ads, do they just go to your homepage or are you doing like a bunch of funnel testing there too?

[B]

We do, but it's mostly in house. Right. It's similar to the platform we use for, for AV test. I mean we use. It's not a secret. We use Postdoc for data analytics and so forth. Also shout out to them. Probably the best. I feel like every two years or something there's a new shiny platform. So maybe in two years we talk and I'll tell a new one. But posthog is really good. I would really recommend it. Shout out to them. And so that's kind of what we use.

[A]

Just to be clear. Post hog. You're talking PO this one, right? Post hog. This is their website, right?

[B]

Correct. Yeah, they're very funny too. The website is not very serious. You know, it's kind of unusual. Yeah. Unusual for B2B SaaS, but nonetheless it's very cool.

[A]

It works. Yeah. So that's part of your tech stack look, is part of your tech stack any other tech thing that you use that have just blown you away that you want to give a shout out to?

[B]

I mean, not new. Right. But I think Shopify is still very good. Right. You know, I'm quite impressed with the product and we used it at Kenko and now for a very long time. But that's not like the. I guess that's not what your audience wants to hear. Right. Because everyone already knows that. But still, shout out to them. I think they do a good job and you know to do what to do very well.

[A]

Yeah, no, look, we, we love the space. I mean, you know me as podcast host because that's how you rep reached out. But my full time thing is, you know, we've deployed a quarter billion dollars into companies as non dilutive capital. It's my own fund and we've just started deploying money into Shopify applications. Like funding basically ad spend. Exactly. Almost exactly what you're doing right and just undercutting Shopify money. It's a huge and powerful ecosystem, so makes tons of sense. Anything else that you. That I should have asked you a Carter that I didn't over the past 15, 20 minutes.

[B]

You should ask me if I'm hiring because I am.

[A]

Are you hiring?

[B]

Yes, I'm hiring. So please, you know, you know you can email like [e-mail]. what are you looking for otherwise? I mean, mostly engineering, right. You know, engineering particularly around AI. Right. Machine learning engineers or whatever we're calling it these days keeps evolving, but essentially that's what we're looking for. Right. Like I said, we're. But the part of the business that we discuss is very much what the business is today. I have, like I said, this longer vision of where I believe content generally will go that spans beyond books and so forth. So we need people to actually execute it.

[A]

Yep. I love that. Cool. Ricardo. Well, look, appreciate you coming on and sharing your story with us, guys. I thought it was a simple website that was pre revenue. Turns out they done over 3 million bucks of revenue driven mainly using Ricardo's brain when it comes to using paid ads and their Facebook page to drive a lot of traffic. And a really, really impressive almost a. Almost a stupid, simple onboarding process that just feels like magic when you do it to the point where you get a great customized sort of book. Main use case right now is kids, but who knows where he'll take it in the future. He's got his own kid. He's building this for seven people full time on the team. Under a million raised. We'll see what happens next. Ricardo, thanks for taking us to the top. Dream stories. AI.

[B]

Thank you. Thank you. Nathan speaks in.