They Moved to San Francisco in 72 Hours and Hit $1M ARR in 2 Months

0:00Today we have three founders from Australia moving to SF within 72 hours you got 20,000 users 1 million ARR and in 2 months how that happened most founders don't achieve this in years what they have achieved in just 2 months within 72 hours notice they move from Australia to San Francisco shipped to customers who reach 30 plus million views using their platform reaching million plus ARR and their platform allows you to create hundreds of videos in few seconds on Tik Tok, Instagram, YouTube creating a new wave of AI marketing. Jock Gorov and Anish coming from Sydney, Australia, can you walk me through the 72 hours that that actually

0:44changed your career trajectory and startup trajectory when you like moved with a one-way ticket from Sydney to San Francisco? It's not one way ticket for the purposes of uh Corv's girlfriend. Come on. I was going to say TSA. Um yeah. Uh we launched a small video um back in Sydney and it got maybe 200,000 views on Twitter and we thought, "Oh my god, boys, we've made it. This is this is this is virality." And I got a I got a lot of inbound, a lot of messages. One guy that messaged me, his name was David, David M. And he said, "Bro, I love your product." And as we always do,

1:21we just love to talk to customers. So I said, "Okay, cool. Here's my calendar link. let's chat. And like in a few hours, we're on a call and I spoke to him. We spoke about what he was building, what he liked about what we were building. At the end of the call, just I was about to hang up. He went, "Oh, bro, by the way, are you interested in Founders Inc." And I said, "I don't know. What is that?" And he kind of explained what it was. And and he explained that there was a program happening and we had 48 hours until the application deadline. And so he went,

1:48"Are you interested? I can write you a referral." And we went, "Uh, maybe." And I went back to Joel and Anisha. said, "Guys, what do you think about this thing? Like, we can go to SF, it's Vanders, Inc." And we said, "Okay, let's just send an application, see what happens." So, we applied. I think within that day, we got an an interview offer

2:04to have an interview. Shout out Rlan. Yeah. And we had an interview with with with the homie Rouslan, someone at Founders, Inc. And it was a pretty tough interview. I think he he was kind of grilling us a lot of the time. At the very end, he went, "Okay, well, I guess you guys have to pack your bags cuz you're coming to SF." And we went, "Oh my god." So he he replied with an interview within 24 hours of the

2:25application. That fast. Yeah. Wow. We applied on the deadline. So we applied on the deadline night and the next morning we got an interview at like 9:00 a.m. Wow. Like one, they can change lives. Everyone is trying to put AI in random industry. AI for XYZ. Were you guys trying to do that or you had deeper insights in a product you wanted to

2:46build? We started with a little bit of AI for everything. Our first product was basically like AI agents that handle all functions of marketing, content, community, SEO, GEO, you know, influencers. Um, I think this was actually quite a helpful stage of the product though because it helped us kind of figure out which was the most useful to people. Once we figured that out, we kind of we went broad, then we went very niche into the specific content workflow that people had and how we could improve that. Um, and now we're kind of at the stage where we understand users extremely well and we understand adjacent users really well now that we

3:27can start to broaden out again and build something that's useful for multiple people. So in answer to the question AI for marketing and then we kind of like AI for specific content short form marketing very niche and then and then broadening a little bit out now. But the reason we got into marketing wasn't like we were shopping for AI solutions. We actually all dealt with the marketing problem. So, we're all building our own products, you know, on the on the frontier of AI and, you know, vibe coding was barely a thing. And we were all individually vibe coding. Um, and we realized how hard it was to

3:57actually market something. And we thought, okay, well, I have a really strong organic marketing background. I grew some stars. So, my I grew my gymware brand like 200,000 followers, uh, six figures revenue, all from organic marketing. Jock has a very strong marketing background, head of marketing at a startup, um, working at marketing agencies, building his own projects. So, we thought, okay, if anyone can solve this issue, it's probably us. So that's how we arrived at marketing. But yeah, we did have a very

4:20horizontal approach when we started. Yeah. I mean the the problem was like building is democratized now. So anyone can build something. I was indie hacking trying to build my own projects as well. But it was like I don't want to go out into the world and put this out there. I don't want to go on Reddit and LinkedIn and YouTube and like put myself out there. So it was like finding a marketing solution for indie hackers, for solarreneurs. So I'm more like the engineering background. I didn't have much of a marketing background. So the this product that we're building is perfect for indie hackers and people

4:51like me. And you guys chased short form video content. So when did you guys realize that value is not just in Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, but also in short form videos. I think we essentially just shipped product and then watched how people used it and and and how much value they got from it. We initially did Reddit and and we had all of those initial functions that I talked about and we kind of just observed, hey, which users are are liking this the most. Where is the most value being provided? And it was in short form like steroid shot of of kind of results right away. Um, and yeah, we

5:30just we just followed what what users were liking. Can you rank which platforms are have been highest value for your customers? LinkedIn, Twitter, Tik Tok, Instagram, etc. For short form, definitely Tik Tok, Instagram, and YouTube shorts more than Twitter, LinkedIn. Yes. But I think that's starting to change now. Um, LinkedIn short form is starting to be like an actual evolving field and and same with same with Twitter. Obviously, Twitter is more like text and and and stuff, but um yeah, I would say that the core like biggest social media platforms um are still the big winners, but there's no reason why short form doesn't consume more and more

6:14of all social media stacks like LinkedIn for example. So, we on the same page that short form video content is becoming mainstream. This is where highest value is and then all the all the other platforms come after that. I want to really know the story of building. So you guys built before Founders Inc. in Australia or like you moved to San Francisco. Then you guys built and shipped and scaled. How was it

6:38like? Yeah. So we started tinkering with an idea probably around July, August with this very, oh, we're going to build the cursor for marketing. Um, and we thought about a lot. We tried to think about what should the product look like. We opened up a a landing page with a weight list and we made that on v 0ero like

6:53when v 0ero was kind of just a thing. Um, and then we started marketing very quickly and just saying, "Hey guys, come join our weight list. We're solving all of marketing." And so we got a lot of people joining the weight list and we hadn't built anything yet through Twitter or Product Hunt. Uh, Reddit.

7:07Yeah, through Reddit, actually. Yeah. So, I mean, what we did on Reddit was we would post in the SAS subreddit and we'd say, "Hey guys, um, give me your website. I'll tell you what you should do for marketing." And so, we replied with everyone that dropped a link and we said, "Hey, these are the things you should do for marketing. By the way, we're solving this with this. come join our weight list. And so we acrewed hundreds and hundreds to thousands of people in our weight list and then it got time to actually building the product and uh I might yeah I might pass that on to a niche. Okay, that's a very

7:35niche idea because Reddit doesn't allow you to directly promote your product in the feed. So you asked a question, what do you want in marketing to be solved? And the answer to the question was your product weight list. Yeah, we we actually gave people uh free marketing strategies and then said, "Hey, by the way, you can you can fulfill this strategy in in our product." So, we kind of just said like, "Hey, give us your business. We'll give you a free strategy." And then we just onetoone manually messaged every single person with a tailored strategy and obviously people are grateful and then they sign up to your weight list. Wait,

8:11was this strategy you guys came up after getting banned by Reddit multiple times or you guys came up with originally because a lot of people say these stories after getting banned? Yeah, we we have some funny stories probably about that, but uh any development 710. Yeah. Yeah, we still remember the username. Rest in peace. Yeah. Yeah. Rest in peace. Yeah, we got we got banned a few times. Um so we had to really figure out how can we provide value but also kind of like plug a product. And so the answer that we came up with was essentially provide as much value as you can upfront and only when

8:44it makes sense contextually plug your product. So never say hey use this tool. You like hey that's actually really interesting I think x y and z. Hey by the way there's also this thing and that's the way you should frame kind of market on marketing on Reddit nowadays. Yeah because solving Reddit means SEO and AEO even agent search engine agent tech

9:02search engine optimization also done. Yeah. So um we we basically just shipped a beta um to like our initial weight list um doing things that don't scale. So just helping all of our users individually to to market their products as well. So we we kept it we kept the product really lean as well you know we didn't try and build out a huge feature set instantly. It was like listening to customers trying to figure out what they want, iterating on those features and it was all it was all to um help us raise in Australia as well because investors want to see a product, a prototype or

9:34something or users, right? So So yeah, you guys were able to raise in Australia for the same product but then why leave Australia? Why stay? No, I think um we got very lucky to find some investors who we're extremely aligned with Australian kind of tech scene. We we raised with no revenue and like a few hundred free users and as as first-time founders in our early 20s. So little bit challenging. Um, I think we came over to SF to kind of see what we were made of and see like what the actual environment here was like. Um,

10:17was it all that it's cracked out to be? The answer is definitely yes. Um, and I think it's kind of evidenced by, you know, granted we launched and we were right on the precipice of kind of this big like growth curve, but we came here with 100k in revenue and we had 1 million revenue in the first 6 weeks that we were here. A large part of that credit goes to being in the environment of Founders, Inc. with 100 other teams that are just working till midnight every single night. Um, and it's just like electric energy in the air of people winning all the time. Um, so we

10:52we wanted to be the number one company by revenue growth in the in the batch and I think we were which was quite which was quite awesome. Ambition here is way bigger than I've ever seen in the whole world. I mean people don't settle for even a trillion dollars. Yeah. I think probably the the biggest bottleneck right now in Australia, there's so much talent there and and it's just that exposure to like what great looks like and also the availability of like great world class preede capital, you know, like checks that you can write, you know, money goes so much further now that all it's so cheap to build, you

11:34know, 250k to 500k checks with like non 3month process to raise would would be gamechanging for the Australian startup scene. We love Australia but we we will try and build the company in in the best environment possible to to go after our ambitions. Let's talk about building the product. So you had 100k revenue in Australia itself. So when you were building the product, can you talk about the tech stack? Because in a world where anyone can copy any product in a weekend with unlimited tokens. So choosing the right tech stack is important because like for example if you ask claude code to help me build an app it'll sometimes

12:13give you postrest database it'll give you the stack which is hard to scale. So knowing better tech stack like yours which scaled really fast will be great for my audience. Yeah. So the tech the tech stack decision was basically what is the AI most familiar with and what is most scalable. So um you know me and um the engineers are very deep in the tech space. So we know what the best databases are at the moment. I think like being on YouTube knowing what's being released, what databases are good, what front ends are good as well. Um being at the forefront of that really

12:51helps make a good text stack decision. So we ended up going very simply React for the front end. We chose Convex for the back end which is just like the best backend provider. um ever that like it's it's made for application development. So it it keeps everything in the front end in sync. U it's like web hooks based. It's um the API layer is very simple as well for AI to understand and implement. So yeah, Convex is just amazing. I recommend it. If you don't use Convex, you're not going to make it because it allows AI to test itself on a

13:24database layer very easy. Yeah, it's just it's so simple for it. It makes the developer experience very simple but also the user experience cuz everything is just kept in sync. That's the the main like benefit of using convex. So react is an investor in convex by the way. Soon soon to be soon to be we have a

13:43good partnership with them. No he's not with uh so react convex um we host on basel the front end. So it's very very scalable solution. Um we host like a little media service like a little microser on railway to build our content as well. Um, and then for actual like implementation, I use chord code and

14:04codeex and I use that inside conductor. And the reason why I use conductor is cuz you can just spin up multiple work trees. So if you want to solve some bugs, if you want to ship a few features at the same time, you can do it all inside conductor in like one concurrent parallel workflow. So very cool. And influencers, what model you use like seedance or like Google VO, Google? What video generation model? We

14:28use a number of video models from FA AI. So FA AI is like a AI model provider. So we use their image models and video models as well. And then we have some um like backend workflows that create the influences and then also other stuff in our platform. Yeah. So with the tech stack you have how how

14:46long it took you to build the product? People say on Twitter we can build in a weekend but cannot get the distribution you guys have. So how long if you had to build it again how will how long would it take? if I was to build it again. Um, and how much how long it took originally

14:59as well? Well, the interesting thing about that is we like the product's always being built and like to build it again, it's easier now because we know what to build. The hard part is knowing what to build, what customers actually want. So, I could build it quickly now, but it's only because of all the learnings we have from customers. So it's cool if you have a billion tokens, if you have all the tokens in the world, but the thing that actually differentiates good products and great products are the ones that like know what customers want and

15:26iterate on their feedback. Right. Actually, we had a a YC company who wanted to recreate Fastlane themselves as an in-house tool. They tried, I think, for a few weeks and they couldn't do it. So they just partnered with us and now they just use our API. So you can say that like, hey, I can clone any product. We had some of the most technical people in the world try clone our product and they couldn't do it because there is so much IP baked into it from all our customer learning. So I think that's a pretty

15:53interesting point. I had a customer call the other day and someone said I was building fast lane a few weeks ago and someone sent me your product and it ruined my whole day because I was just like I can't I can't build this now. Wow. Because your product is not just like creating random AI videos. It's about understanding what kind of videos for enterprise and startups goes viral, understanding the virality and democratizing democratizing that for everyone. So, let's learn about what videos you think work the best, what

16:23hooks work the best through AI. Yeah, this is um I mean we're just about to release a whole host of new content formats, which is quite exciting. But we can touch on what has worked and what we built the product around initially. the core content formats of video hook and demo. So like a reaction and then into

16:43the product being showcased. Yeah. Like like people do that did you know cloud could do this and then flip the camera. This this is the tool which can actually make cloud magical and you promote that product. This is really really wonderful. this is still probably the top performing format for um for app and SAS and and stuff. Um that that obviously the hooks change and like the trends of of like how people are psychologically like engaging you with the hook change. Um that format is is a staple winner. Wall of text slideshows and carousels. Um green screen memes that kind of like add humor to to the product. Um these are the this

17:23is the core winning formats that that we started building. Obviously there's like a whole host now of other formats um which we will we will give to people very soon. So I think you guys have understood the market very well because when there is a surprising angle people don't care if it's AI slop or people don't care if it's like AI influencer in shock and surprise. They want to know what is surprising thing in this video. they will watch for the whole video and that's that insight particularly like learning not just that one insight but multiple shocking insights that people that keep people hooked that's where you

18:01guys went and you guys allow people to with one click of a button connect their social media platform and post how many videos in 30 seconds yeah I was just thinking like we should have you do our content this is awesome we released something today it's called automations where you can generate Well, potentially just like hundreds of videos in one go and have it all scheduled for

18:23a month in advance. Wow. Yeah. In 30 seconds. Oh, yeah. For sure. Wow. This is really vague. Yeah. At the forefront. Yeah. We had one customer, I think it took him maybe 30 seconds uh to make a video in Fast Lane. He posted it. It was a simple reaction demo. So, it was a girl who said, "Oh my god, I can't believe this thing exists." And then it stitched it with as just a screen recording of his app. That video I think is sitting at 32 million views right now. So he went from basically no downloads to non-stop downloads all from just one video he made in 30 seconds

18:55using fast lane. How much revenue that customer got? 32 million views. Wow. Through use fast lane. I mean AI influencers are creating great value. So how many how much revenue you added to that customer? Can't say. I actually don't know. He he had he had hundreds of app downloads at like $50 a month. So

19:15calculate whatever that is. Wow, this is massive value. And to show your product has value, you have to show with your own product how you can yourself grow as well. So can you share in terms of your growth, how you guys have grown to more and more customers like 20k plus users, right? How did you guys grow? was majority through like your own short form content creation through use fast lane through your own product or like you guys use different different platforms like Reddit,

19:47Twitter, etc. Uh we use a combination of things. Using fast lane is very very helpful. We basically have tons of AI influencers that all talk about marketing and growth and they post videos every single day across the internet and they're all promoting fast lane. So it's a really strong channel. It takes me maybe 30 minutes on one day of the month to schedule a month's worth for just like five different AI influencers. So, saves me a lot of time and brings us a lot of customers. So, that's obviously a big benefit and I don't have to pay the subscription that we charge. So, that's

20:18very good. Would you say majority of your customers came through your own content engine? I would say it's a mix. I would say it's probably a a large a large chunk. Another large chunk obviously is Twitter. I think I have nearly 8,000 followers on Twitter now and we've done probably 20 million views and just

20:33launching on Twitter in the past month. So, we've gone viral on Twitter a lot of times and a lot of people on Twitter are just people building apps, building SAS. So, that's been a huge channel for us as well. Um, we have a few key partnerships as well. So, there's Greg Eisenberg's company, Idea Browser. We do a lot of

20:48partnerships with them. Idea Browser. Yeah. From whose company is that? You know, Greg Eisenberg. Yes, I do. Yeah. Yeah. Greg Eisenberg's uh he has this kind of holding company called like Late Checkout and he has a few products under it. I think Idea Brows is one of them. Basically, I think they have a newsletter of 100,000 people who get an new business idea every single day sent to them. So, what they do is they give you a business idea and they say, "Hey, if you want to market the business idea,

21:13just use Fastlane to do it for you." It's like basically your product, you have actually figured out the right marketing engine, not just through your own platform, but also outside. Very cool. So since you guys understand social media so well, I want you to rate the best social media to start over. If you had to start over today, what platforms are best? Like Product Hunt, Twitter, Reddit. If you have to rate these platforms, what would be for the first 100 users? It's it would be hard to beat Reddit and and X just because you can manually go in and onetoone sell people on like why they

21:46should why you solve their problem for them. Um and then broken. Yes. credit expert. Yeah, I see many stories of founders who put years of effort into a product they grew to thousands of users and a competitor comes, raises more money, copies their exact website, exact app, and tries to kill them with more money and tokens. How do you think someone out there cannot do that to you? Yeah, I would say the bottleneck is still and probably will all will be for the foreseeable future how well you understand what your customers want and how quickly you can deliver that to them. We are already in a stage where

22:30the the tokens that you can deploy towards like knowledge work and coding in general um don't limit the speed at which you can you can give people what they want if you know what that is. Um, I think for someone for someone to kill us, firstly, good luck. It's never going to happen. Secondly, you would have to understand customers better than us and have and be more focused than us on delivering what they want. Um, we've done, you know, over a thousand calls

22:59with customers over the last 6 months. Um, we are the customers. We we live and breathe this space every day. Um, I think that focusing on that, this is very Paul Graham, but just like understand your users really, really well and the degree to which you can create wealth is a function of how well you understand your users and then it is just a mere effort to to build what they

23:22want. You guys want to add on? I think it it goes to like you know what Paul says like depth always has value. If you guys have depth of knowledge, it compounds. Compound effects come in the end. And chasing that that compound compounding wave is extremely hard. I I would say like if everyone has access to Claude codes ultra code feature now,

23:45right? Hundreds of agents. If everyone has access to that, the only differentiator can be how well you know your customers. So tokens just don't matter. Everyone has access to them, right? So the only thing that matters is like knowing your customers, knowing what to ship and having taste in how to ship that. But what if it's going to be a hard question. What if someone scrapes data customer insights and put unlimited money into it? That's what happening,

24:10right? What does that mean? Unlimited money into marketing, unlimited money into buying influencers, unlimited money into like buying the whole ad campaigns. How does someone stop that? We we have a huge number of our users who actually prefer our product over everything in market because of the simplicity of the product and the speed at which they get the core value out of the product. Um that's something which you you can't just sh like you can ship all the capabilities but then like how do you actually synthesize this into the user like the handheld user experience like Brian Chesy says like you kind of want to like

24:55at every stage of the customer journey we handcraft something for them that like Claude can't do that because you have to know what everything the customer does and what they care about to build that really really like streamlined process. So I would say that there will always be a challenge to make things simpler and faster and more intuitive. I think we're also just better like you we have competitors that have raised you know5 10 million. Um we look at the meta ads library and they're using fast lane to make ads. So our biggest competitors are using our product. Our other really big competitors their biggest launch video

25:32on Twitter has 200,000 views. We posted one the other day for fun and it got 300,000 views. So I think we are just better in all assets or I think we're just better in all facets truly. So good luck. Good luck trying to clone our product but you're not going to do it. Awesome. Thank you so much everyone. That's a good note to end. So thank you Jo Gorov and Anish for having me here and all the best. Any last final note what people should be excited for the next launch or something if you want to

25:58say some brief any brief. If you are building something or you have a product that that people need to see try fast lane we we have so many things coming in the road map for like capabilities that that we have been so excited to give to you. Um so we would love to know your thoughts and we would love to help you kind of show the world

26:20what what what you've built. Awesome. Thank you.