I Built a $250M AI Company. The Bill is $1M a Month

0:00[music] Nobody complains about AI costs until the bill gets too high. [music] AI costs went up to 500,000. And the month after that it was a million. [music] Cuz if I continue like this and the next month I have like a 20,000 customers and 50,000 customers and 100,000 customers, I'm going to go bankrupt. [music]

0:35[music]

0:40Can you tell us the story about starting AI and when you decided to start building with AI? Yeah, I mean it actually started in LA. I mean the inception of Pulsia. I lived in LA for the longest time. I was in LA for 7 years. I was working for Travis Galanec. That was in October in LA. [music]

1:06I decided to start [music] going all in on this company with this idea and working on Pulsia when I was in LA in like around October of 2025.

1:21Essentially, I was building all these AI native products, but honestly, none of them really took off. And I was like, "You know what? Let me Let me be bossy." And I was like, "I'm going to get something to eat." I mean, very inspired because suddenly instead of like trying to figure out a product that other people may like, I was building something that I found cool, that I thought would be

1:42useful for me, that I would want to use. So, that was the birth of Pulsia. LA has the best Korean food in the in the states. And when I was in Korea, I was like I had some Korean barbecue, I was like it's better in LA. How does it feel to be back in LA? Feels

1:55good. It's It's feels like Like I feel like the pressure is going down. It feels more mellow. Does LA feel more like home to you than SF does still or Yeah, 100%. I really love SF. It grew on me. It's a city I associate with like stress and work. LA I associate with like you know, a period of my life where there was like some things, love stories, like where we were amazing work experiences, amazing friends, parties, like and just life stuff. I don't associate it with

2:24like work, work, work, you know. LA is like it's vibey. It's like good vibes.

2:36[laughter] Guido is a really good buddy of mine. We used to work together uh with Travis Kalanick at Cloud Kitchens. He became an investor, of course, yeah, which is cool. I met Ben uh I think now it's like well, a while ago. It was like 2019, almost 7 years, if not more than 7 years. But what I was really impressed about him is the fact that he had this unique talent that I never seen before of being like very good with numbers, like a very strong quantitative problem solver. But at same time, like having this kind of like edgy, creative, like out of the box vibe. And the fact that like he was

3:12creating this like machine that was just being able to absorb anything that like a founder would put in this machine and just creating a business behind it. So, I thought it was a great idea. Reached out back to him, ended up investing a little bit, and yeah, I've been enjoying seeing him on this

3:28adventure. You know, after that like I went back to Paris, decided to start locking it in my Paris apartment, building it. [music]

3:44[music]

3:51Clearly that spending time here and having built Folsia here, I can feel that like there's something about this beauty and this love for community and this love for people and the this love for for beautiful things and interesting things and great culture, etc. that is embedded in Folsia in a way, right? [music] Ever since I started Folsia, I I clearly knew that like it would you know, entropic models and open AI models were so expensive, but I was like it doesn't matter because at the end of the day we just should figure out um if if if customers really want the product and want [music] this AI for the use case of building a

4:36company. And when I realized that like there was such a big potential with Folsia, staying in Paris would would hurt the project. I needed to go to San Francisco because it's the only place where people would understand. [music] [singing] [music]

5:03[music] [singing] Yeah, so I've you know, I moved to SF like a little bit ago. Um the product has been going quite a bit. Uh the marketing stuff is really working and you know, True Ventures is my pre-seed investor. They've been convincing me to move to SF. Yeah, I mean it's it's very exciting. Um I have I have to figure out where I work, but like it's kind of nice to be able to have an office and be with other people even though they're investors like they're they've been very supportive and like there's a lot of like um people on the team that used to be operating, you know, like um in

5:37different companies and so they're giving me great advice. Yeah, I think the cost is getting a little bit out of control, but for now I'm really just focusing on, you know, maintaining the growth, making customers happy. I you deal with like, you know, AI customer support I've been building and it's a lot of work, but very exciting. And that's when I started to like [music] work at out of the True Ventures office, which was like my one of my previous investors. They had an office in in SF and honestly like they were a big reason why I moved to SF. Like they were always telling me like, "Ben, like

6:06you need to move to SF. Like this is where you should be." Yeah, Paris is cute and yeah, we all love Paris and yes, Paris is beautiful, but like you need to come to SF to build. So, I've been preparing this stunt where I'm going to have Folsom raise the round. And so, on top of that I I was thinking about, "Okay, like what what is the toolkit on the stuff you need to do when you're raising a fundraising round?" You have to have conversations with investors. You also have to have a data room. Like investors will ask you like, "Hey, show me the demo of the product

6:35and like what are what is the data? Like how much are you growing? Etc." So, so we created with Folsom this like live dashboard where it shows Folsom working on every company and shows all the numbers and all the growth in public. I'm very excited to launch it. I think I'm probably going to launch it in like a week or so. Like I need to finish a few things and I need to get the product right, but I should I think I should

6:54just go for it. [music] I went from 500 users to 5,000 [music] paying users.

7:09The marketing stunt of like having Folsom [music] raise the running round really worked really well. I got a ton of people, you know, email me wanting to to to invest. I was starting to gain traction on Twitter and I started to get a ton of new users, right? A ton of new users. And obviously, the bills start

7:24going up and up. [music]

7:35[music] And my AI cost went up to 500,000.

7:55In the month of March, I went from 500 users to 5,000 paying users. So, it was a crazy month. A lot of the infrastructure I built like was trying to crumble. And so, at the time, you know, like scaling so fast, it was kind of crazy. Like, you know, like the customer support agents had to like have to deal with like a lot more support because people were starting to build more and more diverse things, and it was getting really weird. You know, at the time I like I started implementing meta ads, which is another feature. But the long story short is like, you know, adding all those all the all those

8:25automations created more and more AI compute because again, every time something is happening in Bolyai, it's an AI agent that is most of the time using Opus or Sonnet, which are very expensive models, uh to do tasks, and so the bill started going up and up. And so, then that's when I was like, "You know what? Like, there's all this investor interest. I

8:42would be stupid not to take this money. This money can be used for compute [music] so that I can continue bearing the pain of this AI compute cost." You know, investors are were like amazed by like the big vision I have for the product, you know, to create a product that enables anyone to be a founder. And so, raising that money enabled me to not have to worry about cost so much

9:05for a second. [music]

9:11[music]

9:20[music] Cash doesn't solve anything for your product. In this case, it did help me with some breathing room. That's when I started working with Sapient [music] aton. Signed a deal with Sapient like for them to be my exclusive infrastructure for agents. [music] They are building infrastructure to enable any company that wants to build autonomous agents [music] to be able to have an infrastructure that works perfectly. And so I remember in April, Elon was like, "Hey dude, like I was

9:44looking at like your AI bill. It's trending towards going to a million million dollars and plus a month. Like this is going crazy." Obviously, I was like, "Yeah, yeah, I know, but like, you know, I just raised money and like for now it's fine." He was like, "Yeah, yeah, I don't think it's fine." [laughter]

10:02And I was like, "Yeah, you're right. You're right. It's not fine. Okay, cool. What should we do, right?" And so nobody complains about AI costs until the bill gets too high.

10:30Yeah, so you know, obviously we have this like huge bill with Anthropic. Even by charging customers a fair amount of money, like there's so you know, there's so much cost that come into play. I tried to break even initially, but actually people run longer tasks and like ask more complex stuff to to the to Poe CR. And so it ends up being so expensive. And so I had this million dollar bill last month. Actually it was more like 1.2 million. Thankfully, I'm able to afford it for now, but it's not

10:58a sustainable [music] business model. And so it becomes so important for the business to be able to give this level of AI service to our customers without charging them like 300 bucks a month or 500 bucks a month. I want Poe CR to be used by billions of people. Like I want Poe CR to be to become an iconic company. To do so, I need to reduce prices to have more people being able to experience it. But I cannot do that using Anthropic. If I go from like 5,000 customers to like 50,000 customers, in 3 months I will spend all the funding, right? So clearly, I need to

11:29figure out something before I scale. As I was talking to Elon, Elon was like, "Hey, dude, like what we could do is we could rent GPUs and we can start using open source models. And then as I started digging, I was like, "That's crazy. Like, okay, so we can rent a GPU." With Elon, we decided to like, you know, go to data centers to see like what we were

11:49renting, you know, to see the the racks.

11:58Most of my of both CI users they're asking simple actually rather simple things and have rather simple code bases and you can standardize all that stuff. And so that the question is like how how unexpensively can I serve them so that I can give them a very good price so that more people can use it.

12:23Where do you think uh the models are are open source models are going? Like, do you think they're going to start converging with closed models or do you think it's going to be behind all an ever-ending race. Yeah. And I don't see any sign of it just going up. I think it's still even under

12:41realize. The future is going to be quite interesting. I think we're really at the inflection point now where uh things will accelerate. We've seen the new uh frontier models and it feels [music] like there is never a ceiling. So, I'm very optimistic uh with what's coming. I think we're barely scratching the surface of what's possible and we're just getting started. So, the next 10 years are going to be extremely uh compelling uh and I really believe that we'll see a the equivalent of 1,000

13:10years of progress in the next 10 years. And it was something that like, you know, took us pretty much 2 months to configure, but in June my AI bill dropped to pretty much 100K, which is a game-changer because now it means I can be profitable. It means I can offer better pricing for my customers. I can make it more affordable. I can offer a free version of Balsamiq, which is going to help with anyone being able to try

13:31Balsamiq and become a founder. And yeah, and that's like that's why I'm so excited about it. [music] So, I started to get into the habit, you know, as I moved to SF to meet people in person because, you know, a lot of the customers are in the US. Really great to meet customers [music] in person. It blows my mind how easy it is. Like, I just put that very simple idea in there and the next thing you know, [music and singing] it was just like all there. It's a great framework, you know, you just need to I'm trying to make it affordable by using AI that are not like the most

14:01expensive like opening AI and tropic ones cuz that's like so expensive. So, what what are you building with Balsamiq? Actually, I could show you. It's a So, it's called Arya. Takes all the information, too. So, it's for if you're using for the sleeping aid, if you're using to for financial aid, or even with the the mind reset, what it does is it factors in everything just for you. When I did Arya, and end up the way I was like, well, if people keep asking questions, of course, it's going to cost me more than what I'm making cuz naturally, of course, everybody's going to use, you know, more

14:32free mode. So, you have a limit of, you know, five credits. The way Balsamiq works is that I work with a lot of different companies, and I try to pick the ones that I do the best job so that they can so that the customer doesn't have to think about what to use. They just Cuz you don't care about which company

14:48it is. You just want it to work. Exactly. it to work, right? You know, I started to like understanding a lot of like, you know, people they were building one idea, but then they wanted to build more ideas. And like, I think they wanted to be more uncap on their ability to build more. And often times, yes, they want to build more, but like they don't have unlimited money in the bank accounts. Making a free version of Balsamiq and also making just Balsamiq more affordable was very important to me. As I realized that like I could actually reduce the cost drastically of AI, I started being

15:18like, okay, actually, if I can figure out a way to get cheap abundant intelligence, then I can make Pulsia free. Pulsia is like the end state of AI. If I'm able to go through the pain of having customers say, "Oh, it doesn't work perfectly. You told me it was like going to build my business as I sleep and like there's a bug." I'm taking on all this pain of like all this like sometimes negative backlash. When I pull this off and when Pulsia actually stable and actually delivers, the synonym of AI could be Pulsia. AI is Pulsia. It's like an AI that does things for me, that is

15:57like my employee, my co-founder, my my assistant, or whatever you call it. It's like an AI that does action for me. Like if you ask ChatGPT today, like, "How do I market my startup?" ChatGPT is going to be amazing at answering, "Okay, so you can do meta ads, a cold outreach, you can hire an influencer, you can start a YouTube channel." Pulsia is going to be like, "Well, let me start a

16:17meta ads. Let me do some cold outreach. Let Let me create a YouTube channel for you, right?" This is what Pulsia can do. And obviously, that's what AI should be. [music]

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