martabrux

[Ivan Landabaso @IvanLandabaso]

A deep-dive into @supabase's growth story (tl;dr) 🧵:

[Ivan Landabaso @IvanLandabaso]

Suno went from $0 to $300M+ ARR in 3 years.

The growth playbook behind the AI music generator app that is breaking the music industry's frame.

And how why raised $400M at a $5.4B valuation 🧵:

[Ivan Landabaso @IvanLandabaso]

dropping tomorrow

[Ivan Landabaso @IvanLandabaso]

Gamma hit $100M ARR with ~50 people (profitable).

I deep-dived into their growth trajectory 🧵:

[Ivan Landabaso @IvanLandabaso]

I deep-dived into @n8n_io's growth to $100M ARR.

Key growth mechanics I found most interesting:

(full growth playbook below)

1/ Gave the product away for free + treated the support forum as the product. Every answer was public so it scaled + turned frustrated users into fans.

2/ Made it "harder to learn" than incumbents like Zapier on purpose so nobody outgrows it (interesting product trade-offs).

3/ Said it was a business out loud on day 1 while MongoDB and Redis burned their trust with communities relicensing (sent burned developers to n8n).

4/ Rebuilt the product into an AI agent builder in 6 weeks and revenue 4x'd in the next 8 months.

5/ Bet on zero AI models, with every new model that launches it makes n8n stronger as an orchestrator (for free).

6/ Deleted their lead-generation goal mid-fundraise, they stopped chasing leads and went all-in on community, + the community pulled in the enterprise.

7/ Let the community pre-build 10,000 workflows and now each one is a working template that became their onboarding + ranks on Google as free SEO.

8/ Let companies keep it fully in-house which is what won the buyers who won't touch the cloud like defense, banks, the UN, and SAP.

Now worth $5.2B, after SAP invested c.60M for 1.3% position in the company, and rolling it out together with their AI Agent product Joule.

Would love any feedback / thoughts, had a lot of fun putting this together, full deep-dive 👇

[Ivan Landabaso @IvanLandabaso]

Synthesia hit $150M ARR after ~100 investors said no.

The growth playbook behind how they won 90% of the Fortune 100 anyway. The tl;dr in 3 acts 🧵:

[Ivan Landabaso @IvanLandabaso]

Synthesia went from $0 to $150M ARR in 9 years.

I went through 18 founder interviews (+ everything I could find on them) to find out how they grew 📈:

@VictorRiparbelli and @SteffenTjerrild started in 2017, pre-ChatGPT (talk about vision), on a piece of tech most investors at the time were pretty scared to fund (~100+ rejections).

Then they found Mark Cuban's Gmail inside the Sony hack data dump and cold-emailed him a demo, which got them a $1M ticket at $5M post.

Scandals came too with their avatars being used by bad actors fronting propaganda (i.e. Venezuelan state media and so on).

Today 90%+ of the Fortune 100 pays for it.

Here are the 8 growth levers that caught my eye:

1. They used celebrity stunts very intelligently to sell tech they couldn't yet ship at scale yet, great distribution leverage (phenomenal reach for their size at the time).

2. Killed their first profitable product on purpose: dubbing made real money but sat at the wrong end of the workflow so nobody would've screamed if it vanished / no real PMF yet (hard trade-off).

3. Sold a worse video to the right buyer: a robotic avatar loses to a film crew but crushed a 15-page PDF nobody reads in corporates, so they went and found the second comparison (talking to thousands of users, iterating fast).

4. Built a funnel that qualifies itself: free video to $29 card to $1M+ contract, buyer climbs the ladder (instead of sales calls).

5. Let customers churn on purpose: fringe use cases leaving was the price to pay for finding which weird use-cases were real (real trade-offs, especially when faced with vc benchmarks for subsequent rounds).

6. Turned strict moderation into a sales pitch: consent-only avatars looked like a handicap in 2017 but by 2025 it's apparently a big reason why Fortune 100 legal teams sign with them.

7. Won the AI race on the non-AI stuff: the editor, the player, translation, SSO etc, the boring software around the model.

8. Stopped selling MP4s and started selling "outcomes": 140%+ net revenue retention because every market and language expands the contract automatically, impressive by any benchmark today (especially with their margins in this AI wave).

Also, and again shows vision / conviction, they said no to Adobe's ~$3B offer and then raised at $4B three months later.

Full deep-dive + the trade-offs in my bio (@IvanLandabaso) or below 👇:

[Ivan Landabaso @IvanLandabaso]

Great pod. I wrote a growth deep-dive on Clay a few weeks ago: https://t.co/0qwQ1ue3Ip

[Ivan Landabaso @IvanLandabaso]

Dropping tomorrow: @synthesiaIO's growth playbook.

[Ivan Landabaso @IvanLandabaso]

Mistral went from 0 to $400M+ ARR in 33 months.

The growth playbook behind Europe's only frontier AI lab 🧵:

[Ivan Landabaso @IvanLandabaso]

Clay went from near-$0 to $100M+ ARR in 36 months.

I analysed 18 founder interviews, 30+ sources and found 8 growth levers.

The playbook behind the fastest climb in GTM software 🧵:

[Ivan Landabaso @IvanLandabaso]

I pulled a list of 33 quantum startups that raised $10M+ (past 12 months). Europe well positioned.

All likely hiring:

[Ivan Landabaso @IvanLandabaso]

Pulled the top 20 humanoid robot startups that raised $10M+ (past 12 months), all likely hiring:

[Ivan Landabaso @IvanLandabaso]

4/ Lever 3: They only got paid when the AI worked.

They published a pricing manifesto in Dec-24:

AI agent resolves the case → Sierra gets paid a pre-negotiated rate.

Case escalates to a human → Sierra gets nothing.

To match Sierra's pricing incumbents would have to cannibalize the revenue base their public market cap is priced on.

"Business model transitions are harder than technology transitions. The revenue dips for a period as they come back out. Any public company CEO will tell you that's easier said than done." — Bret

[Ivan Landabaso @IvanLandabaso]

1/ The same week ChatGPT launched, @btaylor walked out of the Salesforce co-CEO office for the last time.

A few months later he called @claybavor. They'd known each other 15 years (a "monthly poker game that happens roughly twice a year").

Most AI startups in early 2023 were going horizontal while Bret and Clay went vertical and picked customer service.

[Ivan Landabaso @IvanLandabaso]

Sierra went from $0 to $165M+ ARR in 26 months.

The growth playbook behind the AI agent half the Fortune 50 is using 🧵:

[Ivan Landabaso @IvanLandabaso]

Granola went from $0 to $1.5B valuation in 3 years.

The growth playbook behind the AI notepad everyone in tech is using 🧵:

[martabrux @martabrux]

https://t.co/aJrvXNXsuZ

[Ivan Landabaso @IvanLandabaso]

Perplexity went from $0 to $450M+ ARR in 3.5 years.

The growth playbook that compounded trust into a $20B company 🧵:

[Ivan Landabaso @IvanLandabaso]

I just sold my (little) €10K MRR GTM community.

Here's the playbook, from Facebook to exit 🧵: