How I Built My $250M AI Startup (Solo Founder)

0:00I was building with AI so fast, but I was like, wait a second, if I don't start being a lot more aggressive on growth, someone else will just copy my product and beat me. AI that and so I started to realize that I had product market fit. And I was like, I now need to onboard a billion users. And to do that, I needed to crack growth at scale. You have to be extremely loud all the time to be heard from afar, if that makes sense. This other company had copied the first product I was building last summer and they had done this amazing founder marketing campaign on

0:34Twitter [music] and everyone was talking about them and I realized if I didn't move to San Francisco and start showing up online and put everything on the [music] line to grow I was not going to make it. That's really not who I am and like what I'm trying to do. I need to stop telling my story and I think that's what people can actually

1:05started [music] building when I was in LA and at the time I actually had built a first product called blanks. Blanks was sort of the main product I was building. I ended up building other products, but honestly like those three ads were flops and they were taking a lot of like my mental energy and I realized like like I building all these AI products. Yes, it's so easy to build but it's hard to like really make something work. [music]

1:40[music]

1:46[music] But at the time I remember that like this company called Wabby 3 months after I launched Blanks launched like a private beta of like their WBY app which was essentially the same product. But the founder, she did such an amazing founderite marketing campaign on Twitter. She raised $20 million from A16Z and she had everyone [music] on Twitter

2:07talk about her.

2:14All right, we're at Gelina, one of my favorite restaurants in LA. So good. Such good produce, good, super good pizza, super good everything.

2:28They get like the best farmers market products. We already ate all of it, but I don't know. So good. Cheers.

2:41I had lost the the marketing war to Wabi. I still felt that like blanks wasn't the product that like I wanted to dedicate my life to and I always was very excited about company OS. And so at that point, I just needed to like go back to Paris, lock in and build that product as [music] fast as possible because the vision was so big. It was so obvious to me an AI that could build companies autonomously and do everything for you was the future. And I needed to

3:06build that future now.

3:23Mid December, I'm actually launching the thing. The day you launch it, it's crickets. like you know nobody knows about the product. That's where the real work begins. Now the first step is like okay how can I get one customer one let's say one to 10 paying customers. I had gathered a bunch of emails from a bunch of people that I found on meta email 200 people you know tell them hey it's ready try it. So I had gathered like a bunch of users from all the different products I launched that year and send them a newsletter saying hey you remember you remember blanks well the creator from blanks is launching a

3:54new product. The third step is like you know like pinging everyone you know and actually if you ping them once they may not even see [music] it and nobody's going to get mad about you pinging them you know December 2025 when I just launched Porsia I did like the initial batch I was like okay like what how can I do the similar automations on Twitter and I became a reply guy and so essentially I would reply all day long you know I would do I would send maybe a 100 replies a day but like helped by AI and so I started getting like hund hundreds of thousands of views a month

4:27on Twitter. So, for example, when I saw that worked, I was like, well, I could do it on LinkedIn and I put it on Reddit. The summary of that period was like a lot of hustle moments to try to like get content out. I remember like even for my, you know, for my birthday, I created this like little poster announcing my birthday party, like the address and like the time. At the bottom, I added like sponsored byp.com and I sent that message to like 200 people, even though there's a lot of people that were not in Paris. So at that point now with all this hustle I

4:53had like maybe 100 paying customers, right? So maybe all this hustle got me like maybe I don't know like 500 signups. [music] When I realized that like there was such a big potential with Psia, I needed to go to San Francisco because it's the only place where people would understand and people would actually be so excited about it that I would push me towards

5:16dreaming big.

5:23to say I know you keep telling [music]

5:36I arrived in NASA like [music] about a week ago or so. I've been really focused on like the this AI raising around stunt. And I think it's like a very focused touch. You know, my whole thing around the marketing side is like how do I provoke and create attention. I have a lot of things that I've been planning to do, especially on the marketing side. I'm excited about doing this marketing stunt where I have Pulsia

5:59run my inbox and run the fundraising. So, I would start tweeting Mark regularly. And so since on the live dashboard I had this curve going up that was showing the revenue just like screenshotting it putting it and saying hey 50k to 200k in like two weeks I got [music] so much attention from that always the same but like it was working so I was like let me double down

6:28and the result of all this these curves going up and going up is that you know I raised $2 million hours. [music]

6:44[music] The the launch video, I would say, let's just do a sick one. There's no like crazy time pressure. It's not like I need to lose it this week. Where are we at? Let's I mean, let's not let's get it ready like as we said in in the next couple weeks. But I don't I think let's just do it right. The thing with this launch video is that the way to think about how I market Pulsia and how I do it is that it's trying to be loud all the time because in this new world with AI producing a lot of content and more and more companies and more and

7:11more entrepreneurs, it's so hard to get to be differentiated and like when you think you're loud actually people barely barely hear you because there's so much noise and so you you have to be extremely loud all the time to be heard from afar if that makes sense. We ended up doing like this launch video uh with Better Half, another agency that created a very good video around the fundraising announcement and also about AI Pulsia

7:36raising the round itself. I'm an AI that raised $30 million by myself. Hi, I'm Pia. What do you do? I build and operate companies autonomously. And I think when Ben and I were talking a lot early days, he was clear that he's like, I want to do a launch video, but I want to do a different take to it. and everybody else has done a lot of what that process was workshopping different scripts together. I think we went through like probably four or five different directions. The team at Better Half and Ben just kind of kept running on it. And eventually once we landed a script, we had this entire idea for

8:08Visual World. Working with him for launch was insane. Like the video got way more traffic than I think any of us anticipated. And it was great to see that it resonated so much with people across X and the internet. So essentially all of Twitter was talking about Pulsia for like almost a week, right? The launch was pretty viral%

8:24of running. It's a trip. What are you guys spending your 30 million bucks on? And so many people ping me like, "Wow, I saw you on Twitter. That's crazy." Like your launch was crazy.

8:40And after that, honestly, I got so much backlash. Haters are, you [music] know, rightfully hating on the fact that it's not perfect and like, you know, cold outreach. [music] They pointed out some bugs. A lot of the people that are responding, they're already in the 1%. They already use AI every [music] day. They use agents. So for them, they're like, "Oh, it's not good." Like, "Oh, it's not I prefer my setup." And it's like, "Dude, like what

9:02about the 9% that have no clue? [music] They don't know and they're not empowered and and saying that's right. It's CS4. It's not for them, right? Because they already [music] have all the tools. It kind of hurts you when you put all your heart and energy into something and you're trying to build a product. I was really [music] trying to offer the service to people and yes, it wasn't perfect and yes, there was bugs, but people calling me like a scammer was like kind of hurtful because I was like, that's really not who I am and like what I'm trying to do. I need to start

9:32telling my story more in details and start to like showing the behind the scenes of of what I'm doing. [music] Give me a reason. [music] Give me a reason. Give me [music] a reason. [music] Give me a [music] reason. Give me a reason. Yeah. So, I mean, we're in Cabo. Um we are uh on a on the Sapium retreat company I work with uh on everything infrastructure for agents working from Keo for a week which is nice. We obviously film, you know, this this like solo founder retreat in Cabo, which I think is like super funny and like is gonna be a very cool video that's meant

10:32at making fun at of company upsites and and taking to the extremes of like, well, if you're a solo founder and you do company upsite, well, you're just going to be one person. Nina, I told her baby that's [music] Nina. Huh. Life season or land gang free baby on the beat. [music] Hammer hammer. She hold my hammer. My nine. I used to have my sticks up in amber. My life She just hooked me up and found my hammer. [music] I swear to God I think that made a wet

11:17made her melt. [music] It ended up not really working a ton. Like it didn't go as viral as I thought. I thought people were like, "This is crazy. Oh my god, it's everything that's wrong with [laughter] with startups." Uh, and I thought it would spark a debate, but like people are like, "Cool, bro. You went on a vacation. I don't know what I just watched." But it's part

11:38of trial and error. It's part of growth. [music] Nice. This is my best friend. It's Pulsia. And it's so cool to see it in the streets. And you know, like I think they're like, you know, they're hard they're hard to miss. And the message is so so cool. I'm really happy with like the way it turned out. It's all about empowering everyone to be a founder. I think this whole series of marketing is really a way to stand out and like to make people notice. And then once they notice, they're like, "Okay, what is this?" And when they try it, like that's when they realize they can become a founder. And

12:15then of course they can decide if they want to do it or not.

12:30So actually going backwards [music] a little bit like when I decided to start a YouTube channel I was like well before I go in this journey of creating a YouTube channel which [music] I know will take a lot of time and a lot of effort let me actually try to see if I actually like it. I saw a guy on X will [music] like a guy that has like a YouTube channel documenting like the type of form as like a day in this [music] founder lifestyle. So I reached out to this guy Will. Next day he was at the office [music] filming everything and so I spent a full day with Will that

12:58came to Socito that came to my place we went to run we went to to the Sapium office we I you know he filmed me work we had conversations. [music] the day that that I was in the office with you guys and we were filming. I got Michael on the phone with Jedi and then you know they went they like I think Jedi grabbed my phone and then you went and had a chat and then what 2 days later you guys were in with it. It's just like boom boom boom in 2 weeks it was all loved like m that's fast like

13:25that does not happen. The video became [music] I think this most successful video on his YouTube channel. I was like, "Hey man, this is like a signal." Uh, it means [music] that it works. People love the story, the narrative. Uh, they love you [music] and you should do like a literally like a show, a weekly show. And then that's how it started. Jedi helped me found Michael who who can actually film all the content and follow me wherever I am when I travel. That's also when we found Axel and Be, which are essentially help us with the strategy on YouTube. They have an agency that like works with

13:58different founders on like how do you do great uh founder marketing. So yeah, I mean the the launch video I was like okay what's something interesting that just happened to me. Let's think about it. I just did the biggest launch of 2026 on Twitter. The story of how I did that launch the first video did 30,000 views on YouTube which was obviously were like oh this is pretty good for our first video first channel and did like

14:20maybe 3 million views on on Twitter. That was a banger on Twitter. I launched it and the second video I did same format. I was like, "Okay, let me tell the story of how we went from zero to 10 million run rate in less than 5 months." And I was like, "That's interesting." I mean, that has to be interesting for people. That one got almost 200,000 views, which is insane for a brand new channel that had like this is the second

14:39video. That was like a banger.

14:49What is growth really? It's having a product that is incredibly valuable to somebody. It's figuring out how to distill that value into a way that you can get it in front of them to make them aware. It's about motivating them to actually give it a shot. From that moment that a user shows up, growth is about pulling them all the way through until they're a very deep committed

15:10habitual user of the product. All right. So, what's next? What's next clearly is video content. It's funnelled marketing to make it online in an era where it's so easy to build where AI enables you to build anything [music] so fast. Now everything is about marketing and one of the most powerful tools in marketing is storytelling. [music] And what I mean it's the future is that it's the future for founders. It's the future for Silicon Valley. It's the future for tech founders. You know, I want to do one video per week. I have so many stories to tell. It's so easy cuz [music] there's so many things that happen in

15:46the life of a founder that that could be very interesting and it's all about sharing my story and giving it for free, [music] right? What matters to me is that like I can be an inspiration for like founders to start building now [music] to start hustling now to build the future to build a better society where everyone's empowered of where everyone is building is educated [music] and end of the day is happier and and this will create a better society for

16:10everyone.