Transcript

00:00 These guys went from0 to $120,000 a month with an AI app and the crazy part is they did it. In less than a year. I drove out to Miami Florida to ask them exactly how it works and how one platform got them 10,000 paying users in a matter of days. So was a sort of like a great springboard for us in order to establish a solid brand. The boys started their Journeys working at VC back startups but they grew sick and tired of the system so they got together to build something for themselves and along the way discovered something that would change their lives. The main reason I think C magic won is in this video. Blaine Ramone and Justin share their exact blueprints on how to come up with a million-dollar idea. How they built it in 2 weeks and how they scaled it to six figures in Mr in just 10 months. I think one of the key things here is I'm Pat walls and this is starter story.Hi right Ramon thank you for having me. We are here in this beautiful Miami apartment with your two co-founders Blaine and Justin and we are here to talk about this amazing app that you built tell me about what you built yeah. So we built CM magic. Which leverages AI to create content with the context of your videos. Audio files conversations any media really you can repurpose purp it and we started cast magic about 10 months ago and today we're north of 120,000 in Mr let's talk about the opportunity of AI apps what's going on here. I think if you can embed yourself into an existing workflow and radically remove the friction of like the barrier to entry to doing something such as creating a podcast. Those are the tools that are really taking off and you know I think these are real needs and not just a sort of vitamin. It's more the painkiller an allergy thing yeah all right so we got blae here. He's the co-founder and uh he runs product tell me about how you found the idea for this app yeah. So essentially I host DTC pod with Ramone and I noticed this problem which in my mind at the time was just about how do you write show notes from your podcast. I can't just like assign it to a random VA who isn't going to understand the context of like the person. I talked to and all of that so that was kind of the inspiration when we saw AI coming up. We're like wait a minute like I think AI might be able to do this.

02:28 The real lesson there for any founder is just by doing something and putting yourself in a situation where you're constantly doing you're going to unearth problems that are worth solving and maybe. Those problems have bigger implications than you thought they would in the first place yeah yeah. You figured out this problem that you have and then you decide to make it a product what happens after that. I think distribution for an early stage startup is something that's like super super critical starting with yourself at the core of it build something for yourself and then very quickly get as close to the customer as you can either create content that attracts people to you and so they can kind of come inbound. So that's why I think personal brand putting out content is such an important thing or find a distribution partner that can like really help you scale.So we're talking with the team at appsumo and they said hey we we've got. This opportunity would you guys be down to like launch 2 weeks from now and we're like oh 2 weeks. But that's a really good opportunity to get distribution and start growing basically yeah. Let's talk about marketing and growth you guys grew zero to 120k Mr in 9 months. How did you do that so appsumo was a sort of like a great springboard for us. In order to establish a solid brand we launched with them and I think it's been one of the most successful launches ever on appsumo. So you know around 350,000 in revenue generated gave us probably around 10,000 users or so. We offered a lifetime deal which means that our customers have access to us and our services forever for people. That self subscription say well in this world would I ever do that when I can get recurring subscription but we needed to build a brand.

04:05 We needed to build a foundation. We needed the feedback. The other thing that worked really well for us was creators. We started incentivizing people to create content on socials. You know some people. We were paying some people. We were reaching out as to be an affiliate and one of the best ways. To do. This is like scrape Instagram scrape. The platforms find companies that might be adjacent. Industries look up those hashtags and then build volume once you build volume and respon responses. Now you have leverage to negotiate with the rates and then just go from there and start paying out based on cpms and then decide who's worth sponsoring and get enough volume to test. If it's a viable channel for you or not yeah. You have a oneman marketing team. You don't have some big marketing team. You've grown this business to 100,000 120,000 Mr. How do you operate a marketing team with one person. I have contractors that help me on a specific vertical but something people don't do enough is like research. You can actually go and like map out how did this company that is similar to us that serves our same exact customer base. How did they get distribution and so in our case I went back and tried to find businesses that really grew through Affiliates.So like how do I set a system here and a tangible example here is I noticed myself going back and forth with a bunch of the creators on like ideating content. Concepts and then I was like this isn't going to scale. So I created a whole notion document of a bunch of Concepts. Now. I don't have to get on a call with them and iiz on the content. So it really just all comes down to systems. Rone and the boys are proof that you don't need funding to start and build a million-dollar business in less than a year. All you really need is a simple idea and the right strategies to bring it to life and the best way to do that like. Ramone said is by studying other businesses so if you're serious about building your own product like the boys at Cass magic but don't know where to start well right. Now you can download our Deep dive SAS report for free it'll break down over 52 different micro SAS business ideas making millions along with trending ideas growth strategies and tons of other stuff. You'd want to know just head to the first link in the description to get it now.

06:08 Let's get back to how these guys actually built this thing all right. Let's talk about tools what coding languages and what tools did you use to build this app. In the first two weeks. I can't emphasize enough how much you have to accept building an imperfect product a bit of a unconventional choice to a lot of people. I built this with Elixir. It's very stable. It's a language that scales really well and because Elixir has a tool called Phoenix and live view you're able actually to build the entire front end and back end in the same language. For the landing page we built it in webflow. We could make it look good using templates and therefore we could spend all of our time as a development team working on the part that mattered most to our users which was the product all right.Let's talk about pricing how how is cast magic priced and how did you come to that strategy. We offer a subscription build monthly with a cap on usage. It's funny. We really just kind of threw out numbers that we wanted to test and found that it worked and we are always analyzing what we're spending on llms and transcription making sure that we have enough margin to justify the outputs that we're giving our customers and so far. We've been able to keep those in Balance so that both our customer and us can win from the relationship okay. We are back with Ramone to talk now about AI. It's changing like crazy differentiation tell me why was cast magic successful when there are thousands of other AI apps that weren't so the main reason. I think cast magic one is for three reasons number one. We solved our own problem number two. We build a brand by partnering with the right creators and number three. We build and continue to invest in the product to increase the quality of the outputs. That's really what it boils down to in an AI product. It's not just how does a platform work but what is the quality of the output that I'm getting here and are they taking any shortcuts in the back end and clearly we weren't so so then the customers are now invested into US.

08:03 You have to ask yourself how do I position myself and how do I build a brand for the long term. Here all right so what do you do when chat gbt comes out with a new model and then they essentially replace your product. How do you think about that. We are solving our workflow problem and there's always ways in which you can continue to optimize that process more and more that isn't Chad. Gpt's business Chad GPT is there to provide the infrastructure. They have a future not a prodct. They solve one small pain point. They don't solve like an entire solution that only a platform that covers a workflow from A to Z can solve yeah tell me some of the numbers some of the financials behind this business. Turn single digits like net turn is single digits that goes back to the value of like you know solving like a existing problem not not creating a novelty we have over 120,000 in Mr we're growing over 20% month over month. I think one of the key things here is we don't spend over 20% of our revenue on marketing. Marketing always has to be less than 20% and that is because we want to make money. We want to be profitable so far. It's working and you know those are principles. I think that we'll continue to to use to grow the business yeah so you guys built.

09:15 This three friends tell me about why your team works and why why you guys work so well together. I think the reason we work so well together is because we've all been through the Journey and we know it's a long one and initially in the beginning. We're not getting stuck in the small details and we also know when to have fun. Yesterday we were meeting we did our whole road map thing and we took out some time to go and play nine holes of golf. It's not that serious so I'm curious on Blaine's take here though in Justin's yeah I mean I think the biggest thing is just like alignment right. I think so many co-founders especially maybe first time around they partner with people out of personal convenience or because out of necessity almost rather than like true true alignment. The second thing that I think is so so important is that you have skills that compliment each other. So everyone can stay in their Lane having a team that doesn't like overly overlap and step on each other toes. I think is massive so I think finding not only alignment but also people that you can build with that you like Vibe with but also compliment each other. Other's skill set is like the best thing that you can do. I think a a big part of that is the trust that we have in each other too and we're very honest about what we're building like we're not afraid to say like hey. This isn't as good as it could be and I think that shows and where we are today and and what we've built.

10:29 Let's talk about about VC. You guys have all gone through the VC. I'm going to be the anti- VC poster tell me a little bit about your past with VC and how you're thinking about these days yeah. So I've had two Venture back companies. In the past. The first was seated their series C they've raised over $80 million to date. The second one was called Omni panel. We were backed by CRV. We raised a $2.5 million seed and this time around it just feels very different. It feels like we spent all the time we would have spent like talking to VC's exping like the broad vision for our product and we just spend it talking to customers and building crap for ourselves that we ended up using um so. I think that's something that's really valuable for anyone who's getting to start don't seek validation elsewhere build something that customers want they're willing to pay for and that you yourself that solves a problem for you and you'll be in good shape and then if you want to take VC to accelerate that growth that's up to you and you can figure out. If that's the right decision for your business yeah. I think in my experience I built a business called trend. Iio I tried Racing for that business for almost 4 years the effort that it took to actually get good at fundraising. It's a skill set in itself if you're not great at building a business and generating revenue and you choose to get great at fundraising you're just going to have the whole thing backwards.

11:44 How do you guys all work together. How do you stay aligned. How do you meet as a team. I think from a team perspective. What's really cool about how we operate. Is you know Ramon's in Fort Lauderdale I'm here in Miami Justin's in Austin. A lot of the work is async during the work week but what we're really mind F and the reason we're all here today in Miami is because every quarter we get together for at least a week to like meet on all the important things. So I just think it's like a really great model for startups or Founders who are like looking to get the business started.It's not like where you are where your office is ETC. It's like find a great group of people wherever they are in the world and you know do your own thing but like make sure that you know you also get together to get like really aligned on the things that need to happen in your business. The other thing that we do just in terms of operationally is we do a Monday 30 minute standup call and a Friday 30 minute standup call just to align on product what everyone's doing. But we really try to block out the calendar and not be stuck on calls all day and more focus on like just shipping yeah all right thank you guys for having me in this amazing apartment. This amazing business that you guys built do what they did follow this advice and you have a $120,000 Mr AI app good luck guys hey guys I hope you took away some golden nuggets from that video that'll help you along your business Journey and for anyone that still feels a bit lost maybe you don't know where to start or you need some inspiration on some good marketing strategies. Well. I got something for you right now if you head to the first link in the description you can download our Deep dive SAS report for free. It has over 50 different micras businesses making millions along with the tools. They use the business models. They run and tons of other stuff that will help you on your journey just click the first link in the description to grab it and if you're serious about building something consider joining starter story it will help you do it much love and see you guys in the next one peace.