Akshat Baranwal

CTO @ Stimuler | Forbes 30u30 Asia

[Ankit Pandey @chiralBuilder]

the weather today here in blr was not so good lol but now that i am committed to this series, here we go with part two https://t.co/yONNFHWiuJ

[Ankit Pandey @chiralBuilder]

the bangalore weather today forced me to sit down and write..
it's one of the most important things I've learnt while building Stimuler and i think it generalizes to almost any domain.
hope it's helpful. https://t.co/SvwLiUYwYE

[Akshay Akash @UnlabelledGenZ]

Wanna exchange notes with the best performance marketers in Bengaluru - anything consumer (D2C/tech/AI) works

We're at ~$300k/mo ad spend today and targeting scaling this to $1Mn/mo over the next 12 months, profitably

Who should I chat with?

[Akshay Akash @UnlabelledGenZ]

Happy to share that Stimuler has now crossed $5Mn ( as well as ₹50 crore) ARR in Aug. We crossed $1Mn in June last year. In this period, we doubled our performance ROAS, improved overall CAC and D30 retention doubled too, in all target geos.

Here is everything that has worked for us across product and growth in the last 14 months.

(While these are specific to Stimuler, i believe most of these would be relevant to most consumer products, esp those with global ambitions)

Growth

> For 0 to $1Mn ARR, performance marketing for us was highly unprofitable and in a way, subsidized by our organic growth, but if we had to continue to grow, performance needed to become self sustainable. That became one of our priority targets.

> W0 ROAS in all performance channels became our north star rather than chasing multiple metrics. We added a new channel (tiktok ads) and invested significantly in building systems around creatives in all our target geos (having a network of creators, diversity in scripts, twice a week iteration frequency & more). Allocation between creatives as well as channels became much more methodical based on north star optimization

> As a result, W0 ROAS for us moved from 44% in Oct’25 to 89% in Aug’26 which translates to near 100% Gross recovery by M0 itself, an early target we had set for ourselves. Still a lot of room here.

> For organic, the journey was again to translate early wins into a much more scalable and replicable (across geos) playbook, with specific systems around hiring, training creators, script writing, format iterations, and more. We started with a good presence in LATAM, but we were able to replicate into Indonesia last year, making it our single biggest geography. Earlier this year, we were able to replicate this into India, and we always keep experimenting to win new geographies as well.

> Being able to replicate the organic playbook in multiple geographies has been the major reason why our blended CAC has stayed consistent (& in fact dropped, to be specific) despite scaling 5x in the last 14 months. As a result, there are now 4 countries where we have crossed $500k ARR, and all of them have grown at least 3x year on year, which are very rare numbers for a company at our stage.

Now that we have a huge number of users coming in (>1Mn new app installs every month), making them stay while having an amazing experience becomes the obvious focus, bringing me to product :)

Product

> After we crossed $1Mn ARR last year, the overall team decided to make retention our P0 across the product because our numbers were very far from how the best companies in the world were doing.

> The approach here was very simple. We divided retention into three separate problem statements:
Early stages: D1 to D30
Mid-stage: M1 to M6
Late stages: M6 to Y1, Y2, and beyond

> There was another choice to make in terms of geography because solving retention across separate geographies had certain differences. We started with Indonesia first here as it was the biggest geo by user-size and hence, allowed faster iterations on experiments in terms of statistical significance. This involved a lot of changes in showing progress early to users in their journey, improving the core product engines via breakthroughs from our AI team (more on this in another post), localization and more.

> Once we started seeing the results in Indonesia, we then started replicating the same efforts in LATAM and, to a certain extent, in India. The results show this story well

In last 12 months,

Indonesia : D7 went from 23.5% to 31.6% , D30 went from 5.9% to 12.6%
Latam: D7 went from 21.1% to 31.1% , D30 went from 5.1% to 14.2%
India (our most recent market): D7 went from 15.9% to 22.1% , D30 went from 3.8% to 8.7%

> Parallely, we started now focusing on midterm retention in Indonesia, which involved going much deeper into user-level personalization, reducing friction across user interactions with the app, and novelty at an experience level. Of course, the core product thesis, which is the ability to show users how much they have moved in their fluency journey forward, remains the core loop to bring people back.

As a result, Indonesia M3 (usage) went from 20.6% to 40%+
M6 also has now touched a peak of 28-29%

> The road from here is to translate these midterm gains into longer-term results in year 1 retention (targeting 30% Y1) and beyond, while also solving the midterm retention in Latin America and then India.

*****

At @StimulerApp, our thesis is that English Fluency is an incredible income mobility lever in emerging economies across the world (India, SEA, Latam, Mena etc). And that we can build a voice AI product for these 1.5Bn English learners globally, right here from India- a product that can take them to a stage where they can actually communicate confidently, not just learn basic words. We're at 1% today relative to that number

We started the company right out of our college, went full time in 2023 after graduation and its been an amazing 3 years of super-accelarated learning trajectory, building a consumer AI product with everything happening around us. Been highly privileged to work with an insane talent-dense team which deserves credit for everything we wrote above.

Ofc we are very very early in the path to $100Mn ARR and then much beyond that in the next 3-4 years.

See you all next in the $10Mn ARR post!

[Akshay Akash @UnlabelledGenZ]

Our tiny mobile app crossed $2000 in revenue today, the first time ever!

Gonna sleep well tonight :)

[Lisa @elisabetguwanto]

kalo pengen improve English speaking tapi ga punya temen latihan, coba pake app ini deh!

asli ini membantu banget, soalnya ada feedback yg detail buat vocab, pronunciation, grammar & fluency kita.

komen kalo mau aku spill nama app-nya 👀

[Akshay Akash @UnlabelledGenZ]

Since India for the world is getting some steam on Twitter, here is @StimulerApp's global Paying User map -

Yupp, Atleast 1 Paying user from 137 different countries!!

We've the chance to write a crazy GLOBAL consumer AI story here & reallyyy excited for what's ahead :)

[Akshay Akash @UnlabelledGenZ]

@kunalb11 Well, you're already an investor in us :)

@StimulerApp uses audio AI to help the global ESL population in English conversational skills! More than a million happy users from all around the world.

Won the @GooglePlay Best AI App 2023!

[Akshay Akash @UnlabelledGenZ]

Hi All, need some help-- #hiring for our 2nd FT employee at @StimulerApp today- Looking for a top Founding Engineer (ML-Ops, 2-4 YOE) to build & deploy state-of-the-art AI models for English speech improvement, directly alongside the founders

We are backed by Lightspeed, won the Best AI App of India 2023 and have grown to 750K users in less than 12 months

Comp -- 25-35LPA (base) + benefits + significant ESOPs in one of the top seed-stage startups of India

If you are someone (or know someone) who is a builder at heart, has deployed AI-ML Models at scale, and now looking for an impactful stint at a 0-1 stage- then this is for you. Remember, you should be comfortable in owning projects from scratch to deployment

To apply, click here-- https://t.co/UzzegrDaci

Alternatively, you can also write a direct pitch to [email protected] (cc: [email protected])

@ Twitter folks, Please help us reach the right person for the role! Thank You so much

[Akshay Akash @UnlabelledGenZ]

@GooglePlay

Someone gave 57 fake 1* reviews yesterday bringing our rating from 4.6 to 2.2..

Worst of all - they are citing ads 🤦

Newsflash - There has never been any ads of the platform.. ZERO

Pretty sure some insecure competitor

Please RT so that it reaches GooglePlay

[Akshay Akash @UnlabelledGenZ]

I would be at the @GooglePlay Playtime conference in Singapore on 12th Dec

If you are attending/speaking as well, would love to catch-up! Please comment or DM

Also, if you are not in the event but based out of SGP and want to chat, let's fix something for 13th

Thank You

[Akshay Akash @UnlabelledGenZ]

How would it feel to win the Best App of 2023 (Users Choice) by @GooglePlay in our first ever year?

Well, we wanna find that out :)

We are top 10 and want to fight for the top spot, please vote for @StimulerApp (Just 1 click), Thx❤️

https://t.co/Kdcg0Iu0nm

#GooglePlayBestOf

[Akshay Akash @UnlabelledGenZ]

This brought back some old memories..

Have been to Kota (and IIT) and the guilt culture there for JEE Aspirants is super toxic & heavily encourages unhealthy food & sleeping habits in order to get a few extra marks in the next unit test

A short note on those days 👇

[Entrackr @entrackr]

#TellYourTale: Stimuler provides a platform for non-native English speakers to improve their spoken English

✍️ @Keerthana_Unnii https://t.co/qxZYGPp3pQ

[Akshay Akash @UnlabelledGenZ]

We just got featured! Thanks Keerthana & The Entrackr Team for covering our story

Let's continue the mission to bring a personal communication coach to Every Global Citizen!!

Building from 🇮🇳 for the 🌎 and we are loving every moment of it!!

[maruthisandeep @maruthisandeep]

A classic example of founder's obsession with the problem they are solving. Akshay is building https://t.co/vvF2haYWm4 to help non-native english speakers to break language barriers and tap into a world of opportunities.

Problem-obsessed founder is unstoppable.

[Akshay Akash @UnlabelledGenZ]

@StimulerApp is the champion of Together 2023 by @startupindia & Schulich School, Canada

All this amidst some crazy growth that we are witnessing on our platform!

Exciting days ahead :)

[Akshay Akash @UnlabelledGenZ]

IELTS done 💯

Cc : @StimulerApp

[Akshay Akash @UnlabelledGenZ]

Hi Twitter, need some help

We are looking for a payment gateway to integrate for international payments which allows people in other countries (PH or Malaysia) to pay via their local wallets

Any recommendations or suggestions? Or please tag sm who can help

[Akshay Akash @UnlabelledGenZ]

Happy New Year folks!

Just wanted to let you all know that we are revenue Making now- super important milestone for us at @StimulerApp ❤️

Also, Pretty fitting that our first 2 paid customers are international :)

Here we go 🥳

#buildinginpublic