Nikolai Golos

Growth and Product guy at Fluently (YC W24)

[Alex 🧩 Scaling Video GenAI @alexmashrabov]

This is one of my favorite Higgsfield case studies.

Vertex CGI built an NBA Finals campaign for ESPN on Higgsfield, hitting 23M+ views in 48 hours.

To prep for two possible champions, they:
• Scaled production 5x
• Built 2 campaigns in 5 days
• Published the second NY won

Vertex CGI is behind campaigns for Mercedes, Porsche, and Nike with 25 billion organic views across 1,200+ campaigns.

[Artem Kukharenko @aikukharenko]

HUGE news: we built the world's fastest text-to-speech model 🔥

@covaldev’s independent benchmark just ranked @PalabraAI #1 in latency.

- 104ms time to first audio.
- 2x faster than the nearest competitor.
- Ahead of ElevenLabs, Cartesia, and every other major lab.

The pause is officially gone.

[Nikolai Golos @nigolos]

@aikukharenko @covaldev @PalabraAI Congrats, guys!

[Dylan Txa @Dylan_txa_]

Gojiberry AI just hit $3.9M ARR.

11 months ago we were at $0.

This is the second SaaS I've built. The first one I sold at €6M ARR.

This time, we moved faster. Here's exactly how we did it, so you can do it too.

The core principle that changed everything:

We used our own tool to grow our own tool.

Gojiberry AI finds high-intent leads and engages with them automatically.

We run it on ourselves. It works insanely well.

Here's the full breakdown:

1) Outreach (the engine)

- LinkedIn: 5 accounts, 30 connection requests + 30 DMs per account per day.

Only targeting warm leads showing real intent.

Connection acceptance rates and reply rates are insane when you do this right.

- Cold email: 6,000 emails per day. 295,000 sent in 90 days. 900+ opportunities created.

41 domains, 123 inboxes, plain text only, no links, no images, 2-3 email sequences max.

Total infra cost: ~$600/month.

The offer is always the same: a valuable blueprint. No pitch. Just value first.

2) Inbound (the compound effect)

- LinkedIn: 6 posts per day across 6 accounts.

6 days/week = lead magnet content. 1 day/week = founder story.

Last 7 days: 788,187 impressions.

- Reddit: 14.8M+ views in 12 months. The trick: warm up the account, post 3x per week, tell real stories, offer blueprints, and never debate the haters.

- YouTube: Long-tail SEO content targeting competitor keywords. It's starting to rank.

- SEO: 50K visitors/month and growing fast.

3) Paid ads

- 10 LinkedIn influencer posts/week (~$500 each).

- Facebook retargeting + acquisition

Scaling paid ads aggressively right now.

4) Demos

5–8 per day. ~70% close rate to free plan. Mostly sales teams.

5) UGC

We post 1200 UGCs per month across social media. From time to time, one goes super viral.

What actually worked:
→ Using our own tool on ourselves (this alone is a cheat code)
→ High-intent outreach > cold outreach. Every single time.
→ Lead magnet posts on LinkedIn that generate thousands of comments.

One post added $5K MRR in under 24 hours. Cost: $0.

→ Replying to every single comment.
→ Speed. Every delay kills momentum. We removed friction from every step of the funnel.
→ AI helping us do 10x more than we ever could alone.

What's not working:
- We need to delegate more

The path from €0 to $3.9M ARR is not glamorous.

It's 18-hour days, boring repetitive work, testing things that fail, and doing it all again tomorrow.

But if you do the right things every day, good outreach, real value, fast follow-up, it compounds.

And one day you wake up and you're above $3M ARR.

The goal now: $10M ARR.
LFG. 🔥

PS : We created a free 0 -> $1M ARR GTM course.

Want to receive it? RT + comment GTM below.

[Nikolai Golos @nigolos]

@romanbuildsaas hope so :) we’re doing great, thanks!

[Nikolai Golos @nigolos]

@alexmashrabov CONGRATS!!!

[Mitchell @MitcheIl]

https://t.co/ryGTaGlwhL

[z @zaynmcps]

CLAUDE AHORA PUEDE HABLAR CON TU PROPIA VOZ. EN TODOS LOS IDIOMAS. GRATIS

→ un dev subió a Github un repo llamado jamiepine/voicebox

→ te clona el tono exacto con un par de segundos de audio

→ corre directo en tu pc así que tus datos son cien por ciento privados

→ Claude Code, Cursor o cualquier agente compatible con MCP puede responderte con esa voz clonada

→ arma contenido en japonés, árabe o polaco sin mover la boca

guárdalo para cuando lo necesites y repo abajo 👇🏻

[Vitalii Dodonov @vitaliidodonov]

Content is a job (not a founder's job).

It must be done. And it's best to delegate it. Great read 👇

[Nikolai Golos @nigolos]

@alexmashrabov Respect to Erzat, he's a truly legend!

[Nikolai Golos @nigolos]

@alexmashrabov Congratulations!

[Nikolai Golos @nigolos]

@daniel_dhawan @juliafedorin love what you're building at rork!

[Nikolai Golos @nigolos]

@daniel_dhawan the only problem - actually getting the visa approved 💀

[Nikolai Golos @nigolos]

@alexmashrabov It looks impressive! Can it also post the created content to social media without manual work?

[Lukas Levert @lukaslevert]

The four best brand identities in tech right now, as seen through their OG images:

- @clay
- @posthog
- @fal
- @cohere

Honorable mention: @NousResearch

My criteria:
- Original/refreshing: "How did they think of that?"
- Recognizable: Don't need the wordmark to know it's them
- Consistent: Works at scale across web and IRL, not just a one-off art piece that looks good
- Aligned: Fits the vibe of the product and company

[Nikolai Golos @nigolos]

@alexmashrabov wow, insane growth story, well done!

[Dan Farrelly | Inngest.com @djfarrelly]

https://t.co/hewvRXczwq

[Nikolai Golos @nigolos]

@aikukharenko cool results, thanks for sharing the playbook