Maksym Liamin

I build AI for automotive

[Maksym Liamin @maksliamin]

My name is Maksym Liamin. I built an AI company to more than $1,000,000 ARR in less than 12 months with the BIGGEST automotive brands as our clients while being 21 years old. It’s my first post on X, so get to know me:

I was born in Odessa Ukraine, went to a public school in Kotovski district where I always excelled at classes and ended up liking to learn foreign languages. I learnt English and German to fluent levels during my school years. At 16 I won a grant while being one of three total winners from my country and got my ticket to free studies in Germany, namely in Hannover.

At 17 I left my home to study in Hannover, was living in a student residency, where later at 18 met Emilio, cofounder for all my future ventures. He was already doing business back then and taught me everything he knew.

My first business was an online cake shop. I found 2 Ukrainian ladies from whom I had ordered a cake once and then offered them to work together where I was handling marketing and sales and they, the cakes. In less than a week we filled the calendar with orders for the next 2,5 months, Ukrainian Facebook groups were too powerful back then. I still remember my first cash paycheck of 60€ which I picked up delivering the cake by myself to another city.

Later I was doing marketing for local nightclubs and finally united with Emilio and one more guy to do business together. We didn’t know what to do, but picked to do YouTube marketing for entrepreneurs. We never made money with it and lost our third cofounder, but met our mentor Itay, a big businessman and YC alumni who helped us a lot in our growth. Emilio’s visa ended and he flew to his home country Mexico.

After that we tried tons of different things but ended up doing TikTok reposting where we got to work with one of the biggest crypto influencers.

During that time we got offered a contract with a retail chain of jewelry in Mexico City to put them online. I flew all the way from Germany to Mexico to work on that thing. We had a 2 months trial to make it work and we failed miserably. During that time though, we gathered a huge network of UGC creators and tried selling those services which also didn’t end up profitable. Lastly, we did market research for one CPG company founder.

After that we got completely fed up with marketing and decided to pivot to AI. None of us knew how to program. We decided to automate the market research that we were doing with AI. We built it, but it was constantly breaking and our client didn’t end up buying it, but we managed to sell some of those automated reports to other people and make some money.

Afterwards, I wanted to learn to program better and took time off business to fully dedicate myself to coding. I was programming day and night, started publishing my projects open source on GitHub and found Brandon Hancock’s YouTube channel, which taught me a lot. During one call with Brandon I told him he should do a community around AI and he did it. A lot of people joined in and I was the first user and the biggest contributor to it. I met a lot of great people there, Brandon himself helped me get my first contract as a software engineer, later I also worked with him on his course launch.

After getting some cash with AI, I still wasn’t convinced in my skills so I decided to get a corporate job as a software engineer to really test myself. I started sending resumes without getting a single answer, then started lying in all of them and in less than 4 weeks I ended up getting a job at one of the biggest banks in Germany for a position that didn’t even existed and was opened specially for me.

So I’m working my corporate job part time, study full time and at the same time I also get an offer from one of the Brandon’s community managers to work on AI product for forensic psychiatry. I didn’t have a clue about what it is but went really deep into it and due to this project made my first 6 figures. At that time I was 20 years old making $20k per month.

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

We’ve received notice that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5.

We'll begin restoring access tomorrow, and will share an update soon.

We’re grateful to our users for their patience, and to everyone who worked with us on redeploying the models.

[Maksym Liamin @maksliamin]

WhatsApp groups have limits of 2000 people. Broadcast channels are without limits but the notifications are turned off by default, so that’s not the way. What’s the future? Bots that help you buy first and then stay your customer support and upsell channel for life. Proactive when needed, not too pushy. There is still no native way to set it up, but it’s doable already. We’ve been running this for over a year now and it works like a charm. Telegram and WeChat have great ecosystems for this. WhatsApp is yet to catch up, but it’s gonna be big. Then comes iMessage

[Maksym Liamin @maksliamin]

How to prove PMF in one hour:

Turn your product off for 1 hour and see what happens with your support phone. If nothing - you don’t have a PMF

[Maksym Liamin @maksliamin]

Startups feel like a real bubble. All the ones I see on X are just building and selling to other startups or tech companies. Their biggest clients are Vercel and Supabase…

A lot also feel like they just raise Seed, then Series A, B, C and bounce…

I’m yet to witness some startups like ourselves who solve problems for big clients in the real world.

Bet they exist. Somebody actually builds voice agents for FedEx or automates credit underwriting for BBVA.

If you’re here guys, say hi

[Maksym Liamin @maksliamin]

@dara_venture Easiest way to test: turn your product off for 1-2 hours and see what happens with the support number. If nothing, you don’t have PMF

[Maksym Liamin @maksliamin]

@VinayKrKatiyar @dara_venture If users need to change their behavior to use a product, it’s fucked

[Maksym Liamin @maksliamin]

@NewSchedules Treat it as CPU. Sequential operations

[Maksym Liamin @maksliamin]

I’m turning 22 today. Here are 22 life lessons I wish I knew earlier:

1. Traditional education and jobs are fucked, in this economy you need to be an entrepreneur
2. Start having kids as young as possible
3. If you believe in God, God believes in you
4. If you want to take the wrong decision, ask everyone about it
5. Making money is just a skill
6. Courses, YouTube videos and coaching calls are almost useless. The only thing that matters is action
7. Take the risk. All day, every day
8. Stay away from alcohol, cigarettes, video games and companies of loosers
9. Train every day, that’s the best way to become disciplined
10. If you genuinely provide value for free, you’ll eventually get paid
11. The only way to make a useful product is to listen to the customer relentlessly
12. First learn how to service, then how to product
13. It’s pleasant to make money for yourself, it’s even more enjoyable to see other people win because of your contribution
14. Everything in life is just a game of numbers
15. Do anything possible to switch countries early
16. Solve the problem when it comes
17. Stay away from negative people
18. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes
19. Be stoic, emotional rollercoaster is never worth it
20. Value your parents and spend time with them as much as possible
21. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with team
22. If you won’t be proud presenting a person to someone else because of his achievements, don���t hire him

[Maksym Liamin @maksliamin]

@amir3_9 Love it

[Maksym Liamin @maksliamin]

Founders complain all the time that legacy workforces refuse to adopt new technology.

They say 50 year old workers are too stubborn to learn AI.

That is just a lie founders tell themselves to cover up bad product design.

We currently have a 38.5 percent DAU/MAU ratio. And our core users are 30 to 65 year old car salespeople in Mexico. They adopt our AI at the exact same rate as the 22 year old rookies.

They are not anti technology. They just hate friction.

When my cofounder and I first built our product, we put it in a beautiful web app. We showed it to the dealerships. Nobody used it. That is when we realized that AI adoption is not a software engineering problem. It is a human behavioral problem.

If you want a traditional workforce to actually use your AI, you need to stop building dashboards and start following a very specific framework.

Here is the exact 3 step adoption framework we used to capture 33 percent of the Mexican automotive market.

1. Hijack an existing habit
If you ask a 50 year old salesman to open a laptop, navigate to a URL, and authenticate a login, your churn will be 100 percent. Every new step is a drop off point. We completely killed our web portal and moved the entire AI operating system into WhatsApp. That is where they already spend 12 hours a day talking to clients and family. No downloads. No passwords. No new habits. We just became another contact in their phone.

2. Unblock the money workflow
Frontline workers do not want to chat with an LLM. They do not want a general assistant. They want to get their commission checks. We found the exact bottleneck that was losing them money: searching through complex pricing Excels and technical PDFs while a buyer was waiting. We didn't give them a tool to play with. We gave them a tool that gave them the exact pricing and photos they needed in 5 seconds so they could close the deal. Make the AI directly responsible for them making more money.

3. Zero learning curve
If your software requires a 10 minute onboarding video or a corporate training seminar, it is already dead. We made the interface natural language. If they know how to text their wife, they know how to use our software. They literally just text the bot: "Send me the interior photo of the blue SUV and the 48 month financing quote." The bot replies instantly. Zero training required.

Most AI products fail because they are built for impressive Twitter demos, not for the messy reality of a daily workflow.

Adult users do not hate technology. They just hate software that forces them to change how they work.

Meet them where they live, unblock their workflow, and make it invisible.

[Maksym Liamin @maksliamin]

@amir3_9 Exactly. 0 change to them, but huge results for the company

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

We've raised $65 billion in Series H funding at a $965 billion post-money valuation, led by @AltimeterCap, Dragoneer, @Greenoaks, and @sequoia.

This investment will help us advance our research and expand our capacity to meet growing demand for Claude.

[Maksym Liamin @maksliamin]

@thepatwalls That’s what happens when you do business with your gf

[Cognition @cognition]

1/ We’ve raised over $1B at a $26B valuation, led by @Lux_Capital, @generalcatalyst, and @8vc.

Our enterprise usage has grown >10x since the start of this year, and our run-rate revenue grew to $492 M.

We launched Devin two years ago as the first AI software engineer. Since then, cloud agents have gone from niche to mainstream, and today they are the fastest growing way to create software.

[Maksym Liamin @maksliamin]

Do the things that don’t scale. It’s impossible to go for a 10M without getting to 10K/mo first. There is no shortcut. The transition from hustler to boss will need to happen eventually, but it’s okay to do the unscalable things to get to your first money. Also at the end, the strategy that you pick doesn’t matter, it will change 10000 times if not more. So just go and act with whatever you have, don’t try to think of a perfect business model, optimize it etc. Act now.

[Maksym Liamin @maksliamin]

@SystemsForScale you are welcome to send me a DM

[Maksym Liamin @maksliamin]

My name is Maksym Liamin. I built an AI company to more than $1,000,000 ARR in less than 12 months with the BIGGEST automotive brands as our clients while being 21 years old. It’s my first post on X, so get to know me:

I was born in Odessa Ukraine, went to a public school in Kotovski district where I always excelled at classes and ended up liking to learn foreign languages. I learnt English and German to fluent levels during my school years. At 16 I won a grant while being one of three total winners from my country and got my ticket to free studies in Germany, namely in Hannover.

At 17 I left my home to study in Hannover, was living in a student residency, where later at 18 met Emilio, cofounder for all my future ventures. He was already doing business back then and taught me everything he knew.

My first business was an online cake shop. I found 2 Ukrainian ladies from whom I had ordered a cake once and then offered them to work together where I was handling marketing and sales and they, the cakes. In less than a week we filled the calendar with orders for the next 2,5 months, Ukrainian Facebook groups were too powerful back then. I still remember my first cash paycheck of 60€ which I picked up delivering the cake by myself to another city.

Later I was doing marketing for local nightclubs and finally united with Emilio and one more guy to do business together. We didn’t know what to do, but picked to do YouTube marketing for entrepreneurs. We never made money with it and lost our third cofounder, but met our mentor Itay, a big businessman and YC alumni who helped us a lot in our growth. Emilio’s visa ended and he flew to his home country Mexico.

After that we tried tons of different things but ended up doing TikTok reposting where we got to work with one of the biggest crypto influencers.

During that time we got offered a contract with a retail chain of jewelry in Mexico City to put them online. I flew all the way from Germany to Mexico to work on that thing. We had a 2 months trial to make it work and we failed miserably. During that time though, we gathered a huge network of UGC creators and tried selling those services which also didn’t end up profitable. Lastly, we did market research for one CPG company founder.

After that we got completely fed up with marketing and decided to pivot to AI. None of us knew how to program. We decided to automate the market research that we were doing with AI. We built it, but it was constantly breaking and our client didn’t end up buying it, but we managed to sell some of those automated reports to other people and make some money.

Afterwards, I wanted to learn to program better and took time off business to fully dedicate myself to coding. I was programming day and night, started publishing my projects open source on GitHub and found Brandon Hancock’s YouTube channel, which taught me a lot. During one call with Brandon I told him he should do a community around AI and he did it. A lot of people joined in and I was the first user and the biggest contributor to it. I met a lot of great people there, Brandon himself helped me get my first contract as a software engineer, later I also worked with him on his course launch.

After getting some cash with AI, I still wasn’t convinced in my skills so I decided to get a corporate job as a software engineer to really test myself. I started sending resumes without getting a single answer, then started lying in all of them and in less than 4 weeks I ended up getting a job at one of the biggest banks in Germany for a position that didn’t even existed and was opened specially for me.

So I’m working my corporate job part time, study full time and at the same time I also get an offer from one of the Brandon’s community managers to work on AI product for forensic psychiatry. I didn’t have a clue about what it is but went really deep into it and due to this project made my first 6 figures. At that time I was 20 years old making $20k per month.

[Maksym Liamin @maksliamin]

Short iteration loops.

Because today the time of shipping new features is practically 0, it’s very important to narrow the time from change to noticeable outcome by all means.

If it takes you 1 hour to build a new logic or to change an existing one, but you need to wait a week to see the result, you already lost.

The user experience will suffer throughout all this time without you even noticing.

A good iteration loop is anything less than a day, if you can validate that something sticks in less than 24 hours, stay with it.

If you’re uncertain if it’s right after this time, rebuild or drop the feature.

The goal is to fuck up as many times possible in shortest timeframe possible. Learn the lessons and actually build something useful.

Don’t forget to do constant revisions to already existing logics to erase or limit them from time to time.

Erase at least 10% of what you ship.

Build, validate, iterate, erase. That’s the game.

[Maksym Liamin @maksliamin]

To the 1. I also add alcohol and narcotics.

And another point I always make is: if you’re here just because your parents want you to have a degree and you don’t really see yourself pursuing this career, go find something you’re interested in, start making money with it and drop out asap

To 3. I also add that you can lie as much as needed to just get the interviews. Once you’re in, perform extraordinarily during the trial and say the truth at the end. See if the company will hire you

[Maksym Liamin @maksliamin]

@nivi Natural language as the only interface. Cover all the edge cases to make it work

[Maksym Liamin @maksliamin]

@dramaricic Depends on the target audience. We noticed that some end users that we want to bring to test drives don’t even use LLMs. They use google and facebook though

[Maksym Liamin @maksliamin]

@danmartell Fast action. Short iteration loops