1st-time founder grows AI headshot app from $0 to $10M ARR in 2 years—with no funding. | Wesley Tian, Founder of Aragon

Wesley turned a simple AI headshot generator into a $10M ARR, profitable company—in just two years.

He was fired from his job, broke in San Francisco, and, after getting rejected by 30 VCs, down to his last few thousand bucks. But Wesley saw a moment: generative AI was taking off, and no one was tackling AI headshots. 

Fast-forward two years, and he’s doing $10M in revenue, profitable, with just 10 employees. He shares every bold tactic—bundling random AI packs, hacking Google rankings, landing affiliates, and manually doing customer support until there was no time left. Wes shares insights that every founder should know, including how he navigated intense competition, handled burnout, and maintained growth without a sales team. You’ll walk away with clear, actionable strategies you can apply immediately.

If you want a raw, practical take on zero-to-10M product-market fit in the AI era, this one’s unmissable.

Why You Should Listen:

• How Wes grew Aragon to $10M ARR—without burning any money.

• The guerrilla marketing tactics Wes used to turn a $30 idea into millions of revenue.

• Why starting early let him outrun lookalike competitors.

• How one affiliate blog post drove more than 50% of early sales.

• How he managed high early churn in the early days until the product improved.

Keywords:

AI startups, early-stage growth, product-market fit, AI headshots, founder stories, affiliate marketing, startup tactics, SEO for startups, guerrilla marketing, startup growth strategies

(00:01:54) Zero to $10M in Two Years

(00:02:34) Exploring Ideas Before AI

(00:05:25) Discovering the AI Headshot Opportunity

(00:07:37) How Getting Fired Led to a Startup

(00:18:31) Doubling Down on Professional Headshots

(00:24:11) Early Guerrilla Marketing and Traction

(00:27:59) From $2K to $200K a Month

(00:32:13) Affiliate Marketing as a Growth Lever

(00:43:18) The Moment of True Product Market Fit

(00:47:18) Surviving Near-Failure and Burnout

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:54 Zero to $10M in Two Years
• 2:34 Exploring Ideas Before AI
• 5:25 Discovering the AI Headshot Opportunity
• 7:37 How Getting Fired Led to a Startup
• 18:31 Doubling Down on Professional Headshots
• 24:11 Early Guerrilla Marketing and Traction
• 27:59 From $2K to $200K a Month
• 32:13 Affiliate Marketing as a Growth Lever
• 43:18 The Moment of True Product Market Fit
• 47:18 Surviving Near-Failure and Burnout

Transcript

Wesley Tian (00:00:00):
So I spent a lot of time, like some customers I spent like a half an hour, an hour on just because like I cared so much that everyone had the best experience they possibly could with our technology at the time. And then our revenue basically went from February was $3K, March was $2K, April was actually $25K, May was $50K, July was $180K. Number two is how high is your conversion rate, right? Like when, after people get on your site, how many people actually go through your funnel and purchase, right? That will basically determine how much revenue you get. It was non-recurring. You know, everyone I talked to was like, oh, it's cool, it's a nice project, but, you know, it's not recurring. How are you going to scale? Like, you know, now we're at $10 mil, you know, like, who's talking now? You know, nobody. Like, I think the only thing that matters, if you really care about building a business, is building something that people want, building something that people want to pay for, getting distribution, getting traffic, conversion rate optimization, building the best product out there. Like, I think that's the only thing that matters. Like, everything else, whatever, name of the company, logo, swag, office, we don't have an office.

Previous Guests (00:00:59):
That's product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I called it the product market fit question. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I mean, the name of the show is product market fit.

Pablo Srugo (00:01:25):
Do you think the product market fit show has product market fit? Because if you do, then there's something you just have to do. You have to take out your phone. You have to leave the show five stars. It lets us reach more founders and it lets us get better guests. Thank you. Wes, welcome to the show, man.

Wesley Tian (00:01:26):
Thank you. Thank you for having me on.

Pablo Srugo (00:01:28):
Dude, so you struck a chord, man. Your platform, which, is in a way, like, it's so obvious after you see it, like, who wouldn't want it, right? So you send in pictures and you get a headshot, like, made by AI, but it looks exactly like you. It's a bit of a no-brainer. And you've grown it to, like, $10 million revenue, raised under a million. And you did it in how long? Like, a year or so?

Wesley Tian (00:01:54):
We launched in, I guess our product in February 2023 and 2025 February now. So two years, two years from zero to $10 mil. 

Pablo Srugo (00:02:04):
Insane. Well, let's dive into that. Like, I mean, I'm curious, obviously, like after you have the idea and how you grow it. But I want to know before how you even because it's one of those ideas, like once you see it and if you see it at the right time, obviously you have to execute against it. But it's almost like it feels inevitable. We'll see if that's true or not. But I'm curious to what happened beforehand, how you kind of came up with this idea in the first place back in, you know, early 2023, like right after ChatGPT came out.

Wesley Tian (00:02:34):
Yeah, yeah. So we actually started exploring ideas with my co-founder. We were co-workers at another startup in like 2022. Both of us, you know, had worked at other startups before and we knew we wanted to start our own thing. That's probably the reason why we were at, you know, like early stage startups. And, you know, AI hadn't really like sort of taken off yet then like at all really like this is like maybe like a year before like half a year to a year before ChatGPT came out and we were exploring ideas and like you know HR tech trying to solve our own problems you know just going through the idea maze that a lot of people a lot of founders go through like trying to figure out you know, what products align with, you know, the founders and what is like, you know, a product that, has a pretty big market and stuff like that.

Pablo Srugo (00:03:20):
And you're doing this on the side or you quit your kind of role?

Wesley Tian (00:03:23):
No, we were doing on the side, like just like weekends, like we would, you know, do our full-time jobs during the weekdays, weekends. So, there's a book called The Mom Test that a friend recommended me, like really trying to basically like get signal from users before you actually built something, maybe trying to close a contract. So, yeah, we explore ideas in the agriculture, Ag-tech space, agriculture tech, just like, honestly, like trying to like, maybe like find an industry that's kind of outdated. And then, you know, like build software for them, build back office tools, stuff like that.

Pablo Srugo (00:03:55):
Is that why you went to Ag-tech? Because Ag-tech is not, it's not like a common place, like, you know, early, like young founders would go to.

Wesley Tian (00:04:01):
Yeah, it was just like a algae industry. Like we were honestly just like taking a very like breadth first, like, you know, exploration approach, just like, try to figure out like, you know, what are some ideas like products we could work on? And so I was like calling like, you know, I was cold calling like farmers and like going to the farmers markets, and just talking to farmers trying to figure out like what problems they had, you know, if there was a common problem that they all shared. But yeah, so we were just like exploring ideas. And then around 2022 summer, my co-founder Akhil, he basically stumbled across some new like AI, you know, models and papers coming out on Twitter. One of them was called Stable Diffusion. That was like an open source model that was sort of like the earliest open source model that was like a, you know, like a stepwise improvement from everything that came before it. You can basically generate images that look pretty good, right? Like not as good as what we have now, but it was like pretty good. And that was one, that was one like sort of technical breakthrough. And the other one was DreamBooth. This was a paper by Google. And basically, you could teach this AI model, like, you know, you know, Sable Fusion to learn a certain concept, like learn what your face looks like. Right. Or learn what like a dog looks like or learn like, you know, what a product looks like. And you could generate images of like yourself and, you know, different settings, backgrounds, generate image of a product in different settings and backgrounds.

Pablo Srugo (00:05:25):
Was this a demo that they had or something that you thought of doing with the paper you read? Like, a way you thought of using it?

Wesley Tian (00:05:33):
Actually, in the paper, in the DreamBooth paper, it actually, like, lists out use cases. And there was, like, basically, like, you could just take this paper, like, and you don't have to, like, do some coding and whatnot and, like, you know, like, take a bunch of open source libraries and, like, you know, still build a product. But it basically told you how you could, like, sell, how you could use this model to create a product that people would use. You know, it's like product market, it's like very clear use cases. So we basically just started like play around with these models. And it's like, you know, whatever, like, like, like this technology, people created open source versions of DreamBooth. And, you know, Sable Fusion was available online. And we thought this was a great opportunity to like try and build a business that use these, you know, models that were like 10x better than before. Like maybe you could solve problems that couldn't have been solved before, or maybe you solve them 10x cheaper, 10x faster. I think the best time to build is when there's a, you know, like a technical like sort of innovation, you know, like a new, you know, technology that comes out, new AI model today, or like a regulatory change. And so this is like, you know, like the, like the former. So, Yeah, we basically just kept building products. The first one that we built was, people write a lot of articles, right? But you also need a cover photo or images to accompany the text. So we built this sort of, we hacked it together in a few days, but basically you can write stuff out, maybe an article, a blog post, and then you would generate images based on keywords in that article. So that was our first product. We applied to YC with it, and they weren't a fan. Actually, we applied with the idea, and then they were like, how quickly can you build it? And we built it in a few days, but they still didn't accept us. They accepted us later on, but yeah, so like we were just like iterating through all these like different ideas, using image models.

Pablo Srugo (00:07:23):
But did you try to like push it out, get people to use it? Or was YC like your test of if they let us in, we'll go. And if not, then we'll try something else.

Wesley Tian (00:07:30):
Yeah. So I think actually like early on. So we incorporated the company October 2022. So that's like -   

Pablo Srugo (00:07:37):
At this point, you're full time. You'd left a job.

Wesley Tian (00:07:39):
Yeah. Yeah. I left my job

Pablo Srugo (00:07:42):
Because of this paper or like because you just saw so many opportunities.

Wesley Tian (00:07:45):
I guess the story is actually I got fired from my last job. 

Pablo Srugo (00:07:50):
That's a better story. 

Wesley Tian (00:07:51):
I haven't shared this online. I've shared this obviously like with close friends and family. But yeah, so I was actually like, this is my first time sharing online, but I was actually fired from my previous job. There were some issues with the culture there and I didn't quite, I wasn't quite productive. I was also working on my startup on the side and then spent a lot of time with my girlfriend at the time. So yeah. I was just like what like really not performing, yeah, I think I perform better when I have more I think responsibility autonomy stuff like that and I don't think I quite had that but anyways yeah 

Pablo Srugo (00:08:23):
So for what it's worth I got I got fired from my first job I was at clothes at t-shirts at Roots I think I was like 15/16 years old lasted like two months and they're like you're just not good enough you gotta cut out for this yo I was like all right that's not good .

Wesley Tian (00:08:38):
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm sure like some other like famous entrepreneurs have been fired too. Like sometimes like entrepreneurs just don't make good employees. 

Pablo Srugo (00:08:45):
That's right. So you get fired and now you're like, okay, cool. I have a bunch of time to work on this stuff.

Wesley Tian (00:08:50):
YC, I think the deadline was like September or no sorry, it was end of October so that was actually like sort of like a sort of like a just a forcing mechanism for us to like really grind and so yeah I mean like we were just really trying to figure out ideas like we were trying to like be like you know should we work on AI like with these image models or like HR tech you know Ag-tech and yeah like after we played around with the bit like it was pretty clear that this AI like this new AI models were like you know like it was a game changer right so it'd be like sort of a missed opportunity to not to like not build with this technology so yeah i mean like we were launching stuff like I don't think we launched that version publicly but the  next sort of big thing we launched was basically, well, so we were trying to like basically understand what people wanted, right? Like early on, you know, when you build a company, the only thing that matters is product market fit, the only thing that people want, right? That's what The Mom Test is all about trying to, and there's like certain like, you know, tactics you can do. So one of them is like, you know, have a landing page with a waitlist, right? Right. So Robinhood is quite as well known for doing this. I think they had a million people on the waitlist before they built their product or launched it. They had waitlists for their Crypto, for their fractional trading, for the options. And so, you know, you can do a waitlist. You can even have like a waitlist where you have to pay like a dollar or two dollars. Like that is like a way to like just like try to get a signal from users whether or not they'll actually pay for it. Right. Like what better way to do that than actually ask them to pay. Right. And so we had waitlists for a bunch of products. We actually built like a like an app store almost. So and each of these were like different ideas using image models. One of them was like create anime pictures of yourself. One of them was like, you know, create professional headshots of yourself. One of them was - 

Pablo Srugo (00:10:38):
Each of these had a separate landing page wouldn't buy an app store. 

Wesley Tian (00:08:42):
It was basically like, like a website, there's a sidebar with a bunch of tools. So one of them was like, you know, create logos, like with AI, right? Like another was like, create graphics with AI. Another one was like, change your clothes. Another one might have been like, you know, product photography, like, you know, like, so and then only one of them was built, I forgot which one was built, but the other ones were just like waitlists. So like people could go on our site, they could actually use one of them. But if they want to use other ones, you have to like, you know, click waitlist, like, like update me once this is out. And so that was like a way for us to get signal of like what people actually wanted. And what people wanted was like photos of themselves. Like that was like, I think by far the most waitlisted sort of like tool. And then the next step was to like for us was to basically build like another website. But instead of having different tools, like they would be different, I guess, like styles of creating photos of yourself. So, you know, people want photos of themselves. Maybe they want anime photos. Maybe they want like warrior photos, maybe photos of them in like, you know, a police outfit, photos of themselves in a suit, whatever. Photo themselves, you know, for women, maybe like a princess, like a Disney princess. 

Pablo Srugo (00:11:57):
And it was the same idea, like one website, bunch of options, waitlist each option to get demand, to get signal. 

Wesley Tian (00:12:03):
So for this one, we actually built them out because like they were more like similar, like in terms of like the technology, like they were just like different prompts. I think the earlier one, the reason why we didn't build them all out is because it was pretty time consuming. And you usually want to validate something before you actually build it. Because otherwise, it's just maybe time wasted. But yeah, so for this one, we had all these different packs. We had eight different packs. And, yeah, and they all worked, and it was $40, and you could choose four packs. And we, like, yeah, and I, like, basically launched it on LinkedIn, launched it on Twitter, made, like, a few hundred dollars, but that felt great. Like, that was, like, our first time making money, really.

Pablo Srugo (00:12:42):
Just one question before you get into it, because we all know where it's going to lead. But like, how do you drive traffic to these sites? Like the first one and the second one, the first one, especially because like for you to figure out what people like the most. I mean, you can't have just 10 people. I would think you need a few hundred at least or maybe thousands. I don't know what bar you were setting. But yeah, tell me about the traffic generation, the lead generation piece.

Wesley Tian (00:13:05):
Yeah, I think early on, I think we had maybe a few hundred users sign up and waitlist. At some point, maybe we had a few thousand people come onto our site. But it was really, I think, just my Twitter post. It didn't even go super viral, but I was just like, you know, one of my goals back then was actually also to build up my Twitter following. I had maybe a hundred followers back then. And like, there's people like, you know, Levels IO, like Peter Levels on Twitter, who's like this, like, I mean, he's massive for like, you know, he's like well-known indie hacker. And so I was getting a lot of like advice from him, like his tweets. And, you know, I realized like Twitter is actually a pretty good source for like distribution. And so I was trying to build up my Twitter and I tweeted basically just like, Hey, you know, building in public. Check this out. I took some screenshots of my website. You know, if you like or, you know, retweet or engage with this tweet, then, you know, I'll give you like 50 free credits. Right. And it's only available for the first 50 people. So it's just like some tactic like that, just like trying to like create some sort of some sense of urgency and rewarding people for sharing, you know, my my tweet. And I think that tweet got around like 50 to 100 likes, maybe like tens of thousands of impressions. And so, yeah, that's how we got our early users. It was like a few hundred people came to our site and waitlisted.

Pablo Srugo (00:14:32):
And were you posting like daily at that point or just that one, merely that one post?

Wesley Tian (00:14:35):
That was just one post. Yeah. And yeah, I guess like I knew some people on Twitter, like just like my friends where I like, you know, I was an SF. So I had some people who like retweeted it and like my friends tried us out, you know, just like maybe like 50 of my friends, like just like waitlisted. And yeah, yeah. So, that was like how we got traffic early on. Didn't really do too much else until a bit later. And, you know, I'll talk a bit about that. But yeah, But yeah, so we had all these packs and people started paying, not too many people. And we were looking at our data and over 50% of people only chose a professional headshot pack. And so not only did they not choose other, you get four packs for $40, but they only chose a professional headshot pack, which told us this pack was worth four times as more than other packs. And also the fact that 50% of the packs generated was professional headshot packs. And so we were thinking about it a bit and it's like it wasn't obvious to us at the time. Like it seemed kind of like a toy, you know, like it still seemed like a toy. You know, it's just like it wasn't quite like the tech wasn't that good.

Pablo Srugo (00:15:42):
And yeah, what was the quality like these days? I mean, I'm looking at least whatever you showcase on your website, the front page, and it looks like perfect. You know what I mean? Like you can't tell that it's AI generated. Like what, you know, relative to that, like what were those early headshots like?

Wesley Tian (00:15:57):
Yeah, they were atrocious. They were so bad. I think for a long time, most users would actually not get a single photo out of 250 photos that they could use. It was that bad. Everything was off. There'd be three hands. There'd be two heads, four heads. There'd be two irises. The poses were all screwed up. Were people pissed? Because they paid $40 for this. We would refund them. Yeah. So I think from very early on, one of our core values is like customer experience. And we really like take after Amazon. Like it's like customer first, like if they want to refund 100 percent refund, if they have any issue, we're going to do everything we can. I was in customer support until like we just couldn't like I just couldn't handle it anymore. I was doing like 10, 20 hours of customer support every day. But that was sort of after we started growing a bit more. But yeah, I mean, the early quality was pretty bad. We would give everyone 250 photos, which is also not a great user experience, but that was, like, we were trying our best to give them at least one photo that was good, right? Now it's, like, the opposite problem. We give people 100 photos, 95 are good, and now they don't know which one to choose. Back then, it was just, like, yeah, very few were good. But the thing is, like, even though the landing page was pretty bad and the photos were bad, people were still sharing with other people and people were still willing to pay. Right. And so that's a crazy thing. And the reason for that is because it's a 10x cost savings for people like wanting headshots in the States. The average cost for getting headshots in the States is like around $250. And we were charging around like, you know, $30, right? So it's like almost a 10x cost. cost saving, and it saves them a lot of time. I think the other big thing with getting a headshot done is, you know what, like you got to, you know, go online. If you go through the entire flow, it's terrible. You got to go through Yelp. You got to find a,

Pablo Srugo (00:17:47):
That's what I was going to say. It's actually the friction that you removed that was probably even bigger.

Wesley Tian (00:17:51):
Yeah, exactly. Like for a lot of people, it's like, I mean, it's both. For some people, it's like money. For some, it's like time, the people that have money. Yeah, you got to like put on a suit. Some people don't even have suits, right? And with us, you can actually get like infinite number of outfits, infinite number of backgrounds. And you just like, you know, just open the app on your phone, go to the website and just like click a bunch of things. It's like you know like if you told someone like you know before we launched this like that you could do this they would be flabbergasted but now it's like totally normal now there's a lot of like companies out there that do this but yeah so, anyways yeah that was like, and then we just doubled down on headshots because people were paying for this even though  

Pablo Srugo (00:18:31):
Did you just cut out all the other packages and it was just pure headshots.

Wesley Tian (00:18:35): 
Yeah it was a bet we took like in January, February of 2023 but I was pretty bullish on it I think my co-founder he was like starting to you know head in this direction as well but yeah like it just made sense to us it was like yeah 10x cost saving 10x time saving might as well just take the bet and so we like completely scrapped out all the other packs all the other tools and our landing page was just like a normal landing page like you know CTA hero section you know I forget what our first, like, header was, but it was, like, professional hedgehogs without the hassle or something. You know, 10x cheaper, 10x faster, built by AI researchers, whatever. And it had some feature sections and pricing. It was, like, a very basic landing page. Yeah.

Pablo Srugo (00:19:15):
Well, and it makes sense, like, not just that the data pointed there, but, like, I mean, as you tell me, all the other types of packages like warriors and anime and stuff like they're all kind of like for play. I mean, this is actually people need headshots. And so you're solving like there's existing demand for this stuff. And like I said, you're going to be 10x cheaper, 10x faster, like those things almost always resonate assuming that the outcome is you know that you deliver.

Wesley Tian (00:19:41):
Yeah, I mean yeah like professional headshots it actually like helps get jobs helps we get more clients right I think with anime it's like yeah as you says for fun. 

Pablo Srugo (00:19:51):
Were you the first doing this by the way was anybody else doing like ai professional headshots at that at that time. 

Wesley Tian (00:19:56):
I think there was one other company called try it on. I actually know the founders. I don't believe they're working on it anymore. Maybe they are like just maintaining it. 


Pablo Srugo (00:20:04):
Well, that's interesting and of its own. Why, why would they like you're at $10 billion, you know what I mean? And they're not like really working on it. What explains that?

Wesley Tian (00:20:12):
It's a very competitive space. It hasn't been easy to, to get to where we are. Like, every, week, every few weeks there will be new competitors coming out. And they usually disappear after another few weeks because they realize like they actually can't compete. So, there's actually like a pretty big distribution and brand moat that I think a lot of people don't realize. So, once you have like, let's say like, you know, you're ranked quite high on Google for these keywords, your authority score is like, you know, 40, 50. It's very hard for a new company to come in and get traffic. And so because we started quite early, there were no competitors. And so by building a great product, by having an affiliate program, which got us a lot of backlinks inadvertently, that helped us rank really high on Google, right? And so basically like since then, we've just like kept working on our distribution, kept working on our product and landing page and everything. And so our ranking has like stayed there and slowly over time, like our authority score has gone up and it's like on a logarithmic scale too. So it's like, It's like Canva's ranking first for, I don't  know, whatever, like, like image. I don't even know what Canva ranks for. But anyways, like, whatever Canva ranks for, like, it's very hard for a new company to come in and like outrank them. Right. And, and so like, you know, assuming Canva gets a lot of traffic from, from, you know, search Google. So, but yeah, like there were other companies that we realized that actually came way, way before us that were trying to do the same thing, like many years before us. But they were too early. Like they were trying to use GANs, like generative adversarial networks, which is like a model like AI model to create images, but they're like pretty bad. They were just way too early. And, you know, I found out about them because they reached out to us and they wanted us to buy them. But we've probably gotten like, you know, like 5 to 10 companies reach out to us like asking us to buy them.

Pablo Srugo (00:22:09):
It's crazy how much timing matters. Cause like you started right when it was like just barely good enough. Like you said, 250 pictures, most didn't work, but like there were some that did work.

Wesley Tian (00:22:19):
Yeah, exactly. 

Pablo Srugo (00:22:20):
You know, six months later, it was too late. 

Wesley Tian (00:22:22):
Yeah. And even back then it was like, people were like, my friends would use our product and they'd be like, these are like, they don't want to say it to me, but like, in their minds, like, these are not good. Like, what are you doing? Wesley? Like, your product sucks. You know like how are you gonna make money like they were like amazed that people would even like you know pay for this right but obviously why did like some people I assume got good things yeah some people did get good things also the internet is just massive like I think there's like so many people online so even if like my few friends don't like it like you know I'm sure you can find people online that like will pay for it and will like an intro with others. But yeah, it also, the other thing was like, it only worked for like, like, I think, like, certain ethnicities, like, cause the model, like say what fusion was like trained, like it wasn't trained on a very comprehensive data set. So maybe like only working on like white people. Right. And so like for everyone else, it would just be like, you know, he's like terrible. But then there's some people that liked it, you know? And so like that, that helped us sort of, you know, get, get like some, some early traction. Yeah.

Pablo Srugo (00:23:27):
Did you get a bunch of bad reviews or you were able to manage that through just like manual customer service?

Wesley Tian (00:23:31):
I don't think we use like, so now we use Google reviews and Trustpilot for collecting reviews and stuff. But back then, no, yeah, we didn't have like, there wasn't a place where people could post reviews. It was more just like, I had to deal with maybe some people posting on like my LinkedIn posts, like, oh, my headshots turned out poorly. I'm like, I'm so sorry. Like, you know, I'll follow up with you directly. You know, here are some free credits. I actually like help people manually like, you know, crop their photos or change their upload photos just so that the output was better. So I spent a lot of time like some customers I spent like a half an hour an hour on just like just because like I cared so much that everyone had the best experience they possibly could with our technology at the time.

Pablo Srugo (00:24:11):
So I took you on a tangent, but let's go back then to like that Q1 2023. You decided to go all in on this. What kind of revenue are you generating those first few months? And then what do you start doing to kind of ramp things up?

Wesley Tian (00:24:22):
Yeah, so February we made actually $3,000 around roughly. I think it was a bit less than that. We launched end of February. I launched on Twitter and LinkedIn. Both of those got like maybe 100K impressions, which is like pretty good. I think it was because like we were quite early. So people were actually like quite impressed, right? Like my LinkedIn post was like, like, you know, AI is crazy. Like, like look at what you can do now. It was like a, it was like a, you know, like a pretty bad selfie of like, like, like one of my friends. And then like a, output photo of him in like a suit. Right. And yeah.

Pablo Srugo (00:25:00):
It was the right time for that kind of content. Cause it was right after the, that ChatGPT came out like the next quarter and everybody's like, look, I'm building this. Like this is when people like summarize PDFs with AI, like, you know what I mean? Like all these little things you could do with AI. So fit right into that narrative.

Wesley Tian (00:25:13):
And it wasn't saturated. Now it's like, whatever. Most people know about AI image. They're like, all right, cool. Another AI image generator. But back then, it was like, yeah, it was pretty cool. Yeah, so timing mattered a lot. And then the next month, we generated around $2,000. It was a bit lower, I think, because we had already launched, and we hadn't found a consistent source of revenue. The other thing is, our product is obviously a one-time payment. I think it makes sense for this product to be a one-time payment. We do have other subscription products now. We sold at enterprise, for a long time, it was just a one-time payment. So the term's 100% technically. And so we hadn't found it because it's a source of revenue yet. But then I guess people just started sharing it with each other. We started an affiliate program. So people could basically create this affiliate link with us. And if they share it with their audience or whoever and they purchase, they get 20% profit share off of every purchase. So, you know, that incentivized people to like, you know, share us and some like pretty big like blog sites, you know, created these articles on like, you know, top AI headshot generators. There was one called, so the affiliate program we used was called Rewardful. Highly recommend, very easy to set up the blog site that ended up like we just like maybe it was like luck maybe it's because our product was like the best or best landing page or whatever but they ranked us first in their top AI headshot generator list and that and that blog post ranked like first on google for AI headshots right and so.

Pablo Srugo (00:26:46):
Did you hit them up or they just found they came across your affiliate link and then did this.

Wesley Tian (00:26:50):
No they organically could. Yeah, I think they maybe saw us on Twitter, maybe saw us on LinkedIn, maybe like because of word of mouth, maybe someone at that company like saw us. But they ranked us first and that was huge. Like I think that was like if they hadn't done that, like if these affiliate sites like blog posts never linked to us, I'm not sure if we would be here. Like maybe our revenue would be half of what it is today or whatever.

Pablo Srugo (00:27:12):
That one post or in general?

Wesley Tian (00:27:14):
That one post. That was generating like 50% plus of our revenue at one point. 

Pablo Srugo (00:27:18):
Holy. 

Wesley Tian (00:27:19):
From that one point, because it ranked first for AI headshots, right? And like, it'd be like, you know, top AI headshot, you know, generators, and then we would be the first one, right? And so we've paid out over $100,000 to that blog, you know, site at this point through like affiliate commissions. But yeah, so that affiliate program got a lot of people to link to us. And because some of those sites have pretty high authority scores and how SEO works, we started ranking organically quite high, right? And so we were like, you know, top three, top five. And then our revenue basically went from, I think, $2K a month in March to $5K the next month. And then $20k, like $25K and then $50K, $100K. 

Pablo Srugo (00:27:59):
Was that when that blog went live, the $25K month? 

Wesley Tian (00:28:05):
I think so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, and then, yeah, $25K, $50K. We basically doubled every month. 

Pablo Srugo (00:28:11):
$100, like $200, like that? 

Wesley Tian (00: 28:13):
$100, $200K. We were at $200K. Yeah, it was literally like, so I have some numbers, printed out, but February is $3K, March is $2K, April is actually $25K, May was $50K, July was $180K. So, it basically just like, you know, like just, you know, I think it was like what 10x and then 2x and then 2x and then 2x until we around like $2 million annual run rate. And then we around $2 million for the rest of the year. And then we like, you know, jumped up again, started the year. So we are affected by seasonality. And again, like mostly one time payments. So it just depends on like demand.

Pablo Srugo (00:28:46):
What's the seasonality? Like why is the first half of the year so much better than the second?

Wesley Tian (00:28:50):
Yeah, it's mostly Q1. So Q1 is when a lot of people start looking for new jobs. It's like, you know, companies have, you know, like new budgets and, you know, start of the year, like new year, new me. People are trying to update their LinkedIn profiles. It's like, okay, we just have more motivation and there's more job opportunities.

Pablo Srugo (00:29:09):
You change your diet, you go to the gym, you get a headshot, you know?

Wesley Tian (00:29:12):
Exactly, exactly.

Pablo Srugo (00:29:13):
All in Q1.

Wesley Tian (00:29:14):
Yeah, so Q1's pretty good. And then, yeah, obviously when we started, I think that summer was pretty hot because AI was blowing up. And so I think we were riding sort of the tailwind there. There was also some TikToks that blew up from some other companies, actually. Some other companies were doing AI headshots. They're like mobile apps. But because we were ranking first, second for AI headshots, people would Google AI headshots after they saw the TikTok.

Pablo Srugo (00:29:39):
Right, you called the AI headshot wave. Like when somebody else would promote AI headshots for them and somebody would go search AI headshots, you'd come up.

Wesley Tian (00:29:46):
SEO has been huge for us. Even today, we're ranked second, I think, right after Canva. Canva's product is terrible, by the way. They have a free product, but it takes a few seconds, but the output doesn't even look like you.

Pablo Srugo (00:29:59):
What percent of your traffic or your sales even come from SEO?

Wesley Tian (00:30:04):
I'd say maybe around a third today. It's around a third SEO, a third Google Ads, and a third word of mouth. 

Pablo Srugo (00:30:28):
And so was it $2 million ARR kind of flattish from all second half of 2023, right? And then Q4, I guess you saw another jump to what, four or five? I mean, Q4, 2024? 

Wesley Tian (00:30:40):
Yeah 2024 Q1 we jumped to around like so beginning of the year is actually quite good we're actually at around seven to eight million like run rate so making around I don't know how much is that like per month like $500k and then it dipped to like around like $4 million-ish for the rest of the year and then this year you know Q1 you know we're at around a $10 million and then I'm assuming it'll also like dip a bit maybe like $7-8 million for the rest of the year or something. 

Pablo Srugo (00:31:08):
How many people are on the team? 

Wesley Tian (00:31:09):
We're a very small team. For how much revenue we generate and how many users we have, we have, like, 10 people.

Pablo Srugo (00:31:16):
So it's, like, not just, like, a break-even business. It's, like, a very profitable business. I'm just doing back-of-the-envelope math.

Wesley Tian (00:31:22):
It's pretty profitable. Yeah, the margins aren't too bad. Like, you could probably, like, you know, like, you know, whoever's listening, like, you could probably do some back-of-the-envelope math. But we don't like to share our profits. But it's over seven figures.

Pablo Srugo (00:31:35):
Yeah. I'm really worried because listen, like you've been listening for like, what, 10, 20, 30 minutes now. Clearly you like it. And the thing is, the next episode is way better and you're going to miss it. You're going to miss it because you're not following the show. So take your phone out and hit that follow button. And tell me a bit more of the part I'm curious on, because it's a huge unlock for you is the affiliate link program. There was that one blog that just kind of happened. Were you besides just you set up an affiliate program that you have a link? That's one thing. Did you do anything to promote it, push it, get on other blogs, or you just kind of left it there and people found you just like that one blocked it?

Wesley Tian (00:32:13):
Early on, I think they just found us. We were actually like, we were pretty focused on building a great product and a great landing page. Our landing page has gone through so many iterations, like not just like minor like revisions, but like just complete overhauls. 

Pablo Srugo (00:32:28):
Walk me through that actually. That's interesting.

Wesley Tian (00:32:30):
Yeah, I think like, like the way we saw it, like, I think it's different if you have a recurring product, but it's basically the same thing. It's like, number one is traffic. How do you drive traffic to your site? Number two is how high is your conversion rate, right? Like when, like after people get on your site, how many people actually go through your funnel and purchase, right? That will basically determine how much revenue you get. It's just those two factors. If you have a recurring product, you have to factor in three retentions, which is one thing we're working on right now for our subscription products. Early on, it's just like, how do we drive traffic and then how do we improve conversion? So, you know, conversion is just like better landing page, right? Like, you know, have a really good, you know, really good value proposition in your header. Like, you know, try to not like crowd it too much. It's just like conversion rate optimization. Make this DTA very visible. You know, make the site snappy. Really showcase your features. Have social proof. There's actually a book called Influence, which is pretty good. You know, like a lot of people, a lot of, you know, marketing people, economy people use that a lot. But, you know, having like discount codes, you know, mentioning like, oh, we've been used by, you know, 100,000 people. Right. You know, we've been used by people from Microsoft. Right. And all the social proof actually really makes a big difference in terms of conversion. Early on, like, you know, I think a lot of companies do this, but, like, we didn't have that many users, but we still put, like, used by thousands of people. And by doing that, we actually got to thousands of people. 

Pablo Srugo (00:33:57):
True, that's right. 

Wesley Tian (00:33:59)
Yeah, so we sort of manifested that. But, yeah, like, landing page and then having a great funnel.

Pablo Srugo (00:34:03):
This might be too specific, but like, do you remember any changes that you made in like, you know, some of the more meaningful ones that had a big impact on conversion or something surprising that surprised you that it had such a big impact on conversion, like anything like that, especially from the early days?

Wesley Tian (00:34:20):
I think I don't know if there's anything specific but I'd say like the social proof thing like really helped, we did change our sort of landing page to like instead of just being like a static like a before after image like a before photo and after photo we changed it so it looked like kind of futuristic so it was like it's sort of similar to what we have right now, it's like a upload photo you know going across the screen and there's like a like this like magical looking bar and then like as you go across it changes into like a like a professional headshot of you right and so that looks like pretty cool it's like it definitely conveys a concept quite well, you know it gives out that futuristic feel so we did make that change and like we've done some AB testing on like you know which versions of our landing pages do better and our current one you know like, with that sort of version you know has done quite well. Yeah, I think from very early on, like we really tried to, you know, like take, you know, just like there's like, just things like social proof. And we try to like, you know, put that into our first version of our landing page. So, I think that definitely helped like get us onto these blog sites and stuff like that.

Pablo Srugo (00:35:26):
And then besides that, like, did you do anything else on SEO? Like, did you worry a lot about like even the loading speed of your of your landing page? Do you worry about keywords? Like where else did you invest time in order to like win the SEO game?

Wesley Tian (00:35:39):
We actually did not. So both mine and my co-founder's backgrounds are in software engineering, zero experience in marketing. Oh, actually, one of the things I did was I call it guerrilla marketing. It's like when you just like do what you can to like get your product out there. And I basically like went on Reddit and I had this idea to like pretend I got a date by using Aragon to create photos for my dating app. So I went out to slash r/Tinder and I was like, hey, guys, I used Aragon to like create these pictures of me. And, you know, I got like, you know, 100 matches. So I did that. I went on Team Blind. Team Blind is like this anonymous employee forum for like, you know, tech employees. And, you know, I went on there and I was like I was commenting on people's posts, like people looking for jobs. I think people are being laid off because I forget like why. But like I think at that point in time, like, you know, there was like some layoffs.

Pablo Srugo (00:36:32):
Yeah, 2022, late 2022 is a bad macro time for sure.

Wesley Tian (00:36:35):
Yeah, like early 2022. And I was just on Team Blind. I was like, hey guys, I used Aragon to create professional headshots and landed my job because of that. I was just making shit up. And yeah, it's like guerrilla marketing and a lot of founders, it's all about the hustle early on. And I don't know if that made an impact, but Google does actually look at these things. They don't actually just look at backlinks. They also look at mentions. And so Team Blind and Reddit, they actually have pretty high authority scores, like the highest, right? Because they've been around for a while. And so maybe that had an impact. But we didn't really like I didn't really know anything about SEO. So we were getting traffic and we were trying to understand, like, where is the traffic coming from? Like, like, you know, like, how are we like doubling? And, you know, we were always afraid that revenue was going to dip again. Like, what if the Geek Flare, like the blog site that ranked us first, what if they just stopped ranking us? And so we were quite worried. We didn't really source backlinks ourselves. We didn't really even understand this concept of backlinks. We didn't do any keyword stuff. We didn't have any blogs. It was just a landing page that people liked and that people converted. Google actually looks at time on site. They look at conversions. it's not like I don't think they say it but like then you look at bouncer like, I think there's some evidence out there that they look at these things it's  like a proxy for you know how good a product is right and maybe if they're like sending it to other people it's like more direct traffic so I think by focusing on a good landing page a good product good conversion funnel that helped us a lot I think we had the best product. And yeah, like I think for many months, yeah, we were definitely worried that, you know, our revenue would dip and this is just a fluke. But then but then, yeah, like, you know, our revenue just sustained and it kept growing in 2024. And, you know, now we're like we like we don't worry about that anymore. Yeah.

Pablo Srugo (00:38:29):
Well, you know, I have a question related to that, which is like you mentioned you have a bit of a moat because of brand and distribution. You're one of these, like you build a kind of, let's say, quote unquote, simple AI tool. What I mean by that is a sort of AI tool that a lot of people are going to create. Like you said, there's a lot of competition. They come, they go, whatever. Do you think you can, in terms of the product itself, I'm sure your product is best in class, but do you think that that like edge goes away over time where in theory, many, many people could create, like as a headshot, like is there a bar, right? Where it's like the headshot's good enough. So like at this point, this is good enough, that one's good enough. They're all kind of good enough. They're all great, let's say. So now the only edge is distribution and brand, or do you think there's a way for you to always just be best of breed in terms of AI headshots? Because there's always something you could do much better than somebody else.

Wesley Tian (00:39:18):
I do think there is, like, a bar. Like, basically, I do think, like, you know, let's say, like, so our refund rate is, like, 1% to 2% right now. Like, and we have 100%, you know, like, refund policy. It used to be, like, 10, maybe even a bit more than that. And we, like, track, you know, like, user downloads, right? Like, now it's, like, I think 90% of our users, like, at least find one photo that they like and I, I think for our competitors, like, like, the top ones, they're probably close, you know, like maybe it's like 80% of people download their photos or maybe the refund rate, like 3-4%. Right. And, you know, like as new models come out, like, and as a new tech, so we don't like when none of us build like our own AI models, like, I just think that's a pretty like risky business to be in. And, we don't have enough capital and, and there's a lot of other reasons why we do not have to do that. But, yeah, I think maybe in a year, like, we'll all get to, like, sort of, like, 99%, right? And so I do think there's a bar, and I do think brand and distribution plays a big difference. I think the other thing is actually, like, your UX, right? So I think, like, prior to the age of AI, like, let's just, like, take, like, software, like, you know, software wrappers, right? Like, SaaS tools, like, there's no really, like, underlying technical differentiation. It's all just built on AWS. It's all just, like, backend and, like, frontend and, like, middleware and, you know, like, React, right? Like, I mean, there's no, like, there's no technical mode, like, in the, like, you know, like, Facebook has, like, you know, like, network effects. But, like, when Amazon started, anybody could have built Amazon, right? Like, there's no technical differentiation.

Pablo Srugo (00:40:55):
Yeah, Canva might be a good, you were talking about Canva earlier. Like, in theory, there's nothing stopping somebody from creating Canva.

Wesley Tian (00:40:59):
And so product strategy and UX, I think, matter a lot, right? Like with apps like Robinhood or like there's just certain apps that, you know, you can tell the team has better team, better like they just like spend more effort, right? To like make every interaction a lot more seamless, right? Like there's fewer bugs, everything looks nicer, it's easier to use, right? And that like small difference, I think makes a big difference in the long run. And also just a number of products and features you have. Right. So for us, like, you know, we sell the businesses, we have like a team product, we have a subscription AI photo editor, we have like a subscription AI photo generator. And we have a bunch of tools, like, you know, like magic eraser, and, you know, resources, like white backgrounds, and a free AI generator. So I think like, you know, it's more of like a growth strategy and a product strategy versus like just like, you know, tech has a different differentiation. So like, for example, yeah, Canva, right? Like Canva has like, you know, I think they have like maybe thousands of landing pages. And they're just like a, you know, like a giant, you know, mishmash of like just like different tools and all their pages get traffic. From like google and there's actually a lot of companies that have this approach like veed.io is another one you know Pixart, you know photo room and so like photo room is a great example they started with just one tool background changer they're VC backed I think 2020 I don't know 2021 or 2022, you know they've generated a few million in revenue first year actually our growth trajectory is around the same as theirs like historically But yeah, they just had a background changer as a mobile app. And a few million found like a niche of, you know, users, which is like eBay, people trying to sell products and want to change the backgrounds of the photos. And then they started building other products. And now they're at $100 million ARR, right? So yeah, and it's just because like, you know, the internet's a big play to a lot of users out there. And if you build a lot of products, you get a lot of people come to your site and you can like create this like, you know, amalgamation of a bunch of products and that are synergistic in nature. So.

Pablo Srugo (00:43:05):
Awesome. Well, Wes, we'll stop it there. Let me ask the two questions we always end on. The first one is, I think it's pretty obvious for you, but when was the first moment you felt like you had a true product market fit?

Wesley Tian (00:43:18):
Yeah, that's a great question. I talked a little bit earlier about how we thought our revenue was going to tank at any time, given that it's a one-time product, given that our revenue was coming from these affiliates. So we, we got into YC and NEO and they're both like strawberry slivers and we ended up going with NEO. And, and as part of NEO, you get to spend a summer in Oregon. So we were in Oregon.

Pablo Srugo (00:43:39):
Why'd you go with NEO, by the way, if you could have gone to YC, just the better known one.

Wesley Tian (00:43:42):
Yeah. So NEO has like around 2x better terms. It's like a tighter net community. So it's like, it's only 20, startups per batch versus YC. I think it was like a 200 something. Also, at the time, YC hadn't gone back in person. I think YC is a bit better now because they're back in person. But Neo was completely in person. Yeah, you get to spend a month, you know, with the mentors and the partners of the VC firm, like in Oregon, you know, which is super cool. So it was like an experience of a lifetime for me. But yeah. Yeah. So I remember like first week there, this was because, I had just started going viral on TikTok, but basically our revenue, like that, that was a month we went from, I think, you know, $2K to $25K. Right. And so, you know, like 10x number of users. And so we had to, you know, deal with scale. Like, I had to, you know, hire a customer support person. I kind of, you know, deal with all this customer support myself. And, our server, I think, I forget the exact technical problem, but I think we were getting too many callbacks at the same time from our API provider. And our Heroku servers couldn't handle all those callbacks at the same time. And so my co-founder, I had stopped coding at that point already. My co-founder basically had to, so our servers were breaking and he had to basically rewrite our entire back end. while keeping the front, keeping the current back end afloat with scripts, like, like, like, like with manual scripts to like, I don't know, speed up the whatever, like, deal with the callbacks. And so like we were in our cabin in Oregon and normally for food, like we would go to the central area to meet me with other startups. He was in his bed all for basically two days straight. He's just on his laptop. keeping like because he couldn't close his laptop and like the scripts were like break or something right so he had to like be on his laptop an entire time and so for like think it was like I think it was like yeah 20/24 to like 36 hours or something he was on his laptop I was bringing him food from like the you know like the cafeteria or whatever and like the partners of the of Neo were like they were like where's the Akhil like I'm like our servers are breaking and like, you know, he has to, like, you know, fix them. And so we were able to, like, move off of, like, the old sort of infra to this new infra that was more scalable. But that was when we started feeling like this was, like, this was probably the right fit. Early on, it was like, we had some revenue, sure. But like, we're always like doubting ourselves. Like, is this product market fit? This is like a sort of like a toy project. You know, we have some revenue. But my co-founder, he had, he was an early engineer at Brex. And so Brex had like this massive growth trajectory. They went from a few million ARR to a hundred million in like a year and a half, right? So he was there when that happened. You know, he helped make that happen. And for the first time, like working on Aragon, he started to feel the same feeling he had at Brex. it was like a pull from the market and you can't really like, you can't plan ahead. You're just reacting to the market. Like, it's like the market is like, Oh, you know, like, it's like, one is like the demand, like the sheer demand of users, like we just like having to like, you know, fix all these problems. And then two is like, they just have like feature requests and you know, like, like the more features you build, like the more people come and, and the people just like, don't stop coming. Like, it's just like, it just keeps growing. Right. And so, We couldn't really like we were reacting, not like not being proactive and we couldn't plan like we were just like reacting to everything. So that was like that was when we were like, yeah, this is like product market fit. 

Pablo Srugo (00:47:14):
Did you I'm curious, did you ever think that it wasn't going to work? Did you ever feel like you were going to fail? 

Wesley Tian(00:47:18):
Many times. So one was when we hadn't launched this product yet. This was between October to February, like October when we incorporated, February in 2023 before we launched. I was running pretty low on savings. So we tried to raise, like right after we incorporated the company, we thought it'd be easier because, you know, I worked at Microsoft, my company worked at like Meta and, you know, like whatever, like I had, you know, like done in Ironman, you know, maybe it's like it shows grit and determination. So for some reason, like we thought it'd be easy to raise. We pitched like 30 VCs and, you know, they all said no. And so we had no money. I had some savings. I had like maybe $20,000 of savings. And so I was just like, I was just going through my savings, you know, like, to pay for rent and food. And so I was pretty low on savings when we launched in February and like started generating revenue. I was down to like, maybe like a few thousand dollars. I forget exactly how much. 

Pablo Srugo (00:48:10):
Like a month or two left. 

Wesley Tian (00:48:11):
Yeah, I'm out there two left. I was in order to like sort of like, you know, I don't want to take a loan. I guess technically I could have taken a loan out or something. But, you know, I want to like stay scrappy and, you know, not ask like people to like borrow money from them. So I was eating PB&Js for lunch. I was taking the bus without paying. And my burn in SF was $2.5k. I'm actually like still quite proud of that. Like I was able to like food everything like you know month like I didn't travel I didn't do anything. 

Pablo Srugo (00:48:41)
What did you rent, like a room somebody's house or something?

Wesley Tian (00:48:43)
Before that I was an I was an engineer right so like I actually like my lifestyle was a bit inflated so my rent actually was 2k a month and so that that took up most of the budget but I was living with a roommate at the time okay yeah and so 500 dollars for everything else and I'm sure I could have gotten it down even lower it's like 1.5k if I lived in the tenderloin or something But yeah, like that was when I was super close like to like being like, all right, I have to go find another job. You know, like I need to make money. I'm like running out of money. That was one time. And then just throughout the entire 2023, I think we just like, you know, early on, we didn't know if we had private market fit. We didn't know how big this market was. We didn't know how to like continue to generate revenue. We didn't know if our revenue was going to like just like crash. It was non-recurring. You know, everyone I talked to was like, Oh, it's cool. It's a nice project, but, you know, it's not recurring. How are you going to scale? Like, you know, now we're at $10 mil, you know, like who's talking now? You know, nobody. That's right. You know, so, yeah, I mean, there's e-commerce businesses that have like a few hundred million revenue that are one time. Right. I mean, obviously, it's not a great business, like  which is why we're still working on recurring revenue. I think it's just like a lot better, you know, for many reasons. But yeah, I mean, you can build a hundred million dollar business just selling t-shirts. Right. Like which is a completely commoditized product. Like what is that one company called? Yeah. I forget what they're called, but there's like a pretty well-known like, you know, t-shirt company that makes like hundreds of millions of dollars a year, right? And like athletic greens and all these companies. 

Pablo Srugo (00:50:24):
And then last question, what's like one, what's one big piece of advice like from everything that you've learned over the last two, three years for early stage founder?

Wesley Tian (00:50:31):
I think there's a lot of things we did right. I think just focusing on the only things that matter, like which is basically product market fit. But, you know, before that, it's building something that people want, you know, building something that people want to pay for. I think like there's like two ways of building a business. One is, you know, you raise a lot of money. You do something that's very capital intensive, maybe like nuclear fusion reactor. The other one which I recommend for first time founders is just like build a Saas, you know, build a GPT wrapper, you know, have a great landing page, you know, try to do everything you can to drive traffic. Try to like really get the ball rolling, you know, try to keep the momentum up. I think having a co-founder is really helpful to like just like keep, you know, keep tabs on each other. You know, you have something you're accountable for. I know a lot of first-time founders, they spend weeks on the name of the company, on getting the logo perfect. None of this matters. Swag? we still don't have swag. It's years in. Now we're thinking about doing swag. We still haven't had an offsite. I don't think any of those things really matter, to be honest. I think the only thing that matters, if you really care about building a business, is building something that people want, building something that people want to pay for, getting distribution, getting traffic, conversion rate optimization. building the best product out there like I think that honestly that's the only thing that matters like, everything else like whatever name of the company logo like swag like office like we don't have an office like, like we were like we were so scrappy like even though we were making millions of dollars we still were like too cheap to get an office. So, I mean, now we're a bit better. Now we're a bit more flexible and stuff like that. But I think that's big. I think the other one is try to maintain your relationship with people and try to keep up your health. I burnt out last year because I basically stopped hanging out with friends and my friends moved away and I regret not hanging out with them more. You know, lost my support network, my health, you know, I lost like 10 pounds of muscle gain, 10 pounds of fat. I did like this DXA body scan. That was pretty bad. My cardio was pretty bad. So, you know if you don't have like balance in your life and if you don't have other stable, like if you don't have a partner who's like stable or, you know, friends or family, my family is not in the States. So, you know, I don't have them and, you know, my, my friends moved away and I'd have my health. So, When my company, you know, started plateauing and revenue started dipping, I didn't know it was because of seasonality at the time. Like, we were working super hard. And so I burnt out. I was like, you know, we're working so hard and revenue's dipping. My emotions are dipping with it. I had nothing else to, like, keep me afloat. I had nothing else to, like, balance my life out or, like, keep me stable, right? When you do have a stable partner or, like, friends or whatever, then when your company takes a hit or when you're going through, like, a roller coaster, you have emotions for your company, then, you know, you still have your other - you know, stable parts of your life to like hold on to.

Pablo Srugo (00:53:24):
Perfect. Well, Wes, man, that was great. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

Wesley Tian (00:53:28):
Yeah, yeah. Thanks for having me on. Hopefully it was helpful for people.

Pablo Srugo (00:53:31):
Wow, what an episode. You're probably in awe. You're in absolute shock. You're like, that helped me so much. So guess what? Now it's your turn to help someone else. Share the episode in the WhatsApp group you have with founders. Share it on that Slack channel. Send it to your founder friends and help them out. Trust me, they will love you for it.

Wesley Tian (00:54:59):
continue to generate revenue. We didn't know if our revenue was going to just crash. It was non-recurring. Everyone I talked to was like, oh, it's cool. It's a nice project, but it's not recurring. How are you going to scale? Now we're at $10 mil. Who's talking now? Nobody. I think the only thing that matters, if you really care about building a business, is building something that people want, building something that people want to pay for, getting distribution, getting traffic, conversion rate optimization. Building the best product out there like I think that honestly that's the only thing that matters like everything else like whatever name of the company logo like swag like office like we don't have an office like.