How Arcads CEO Romain Torres grew to $10M revenue and 6K customers in 2026.

He Scaled His Startup to $10M/yr Building AI Influencers - YouTube

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(00:00) We just reached 10 million in annual recurring revenue. [music] $10 million and it's growing super fast. January 2024 to right here where we're making like something like $5,000 in revenue. Basically, you will type a script, select an actor in our library of AI actors. We have hundreds of AI actors now, even more than a thousand in the platform. (00:25) And you'll be able to select the perfect AI avatar for your use case. Use the gender to find the right ones. Hey folks, my guest today is Roma Torres. He has launched and is building arcads.ai. Uh he helps you generate ads [music] easy without paying 30 grand a month on an agency to go do it for you. He's scaling very quickly. (00:45) Uh over 5 million bucks of revenue, but we have an update today in terms of revenue we're going to jump into and then jump jump into all the growth tactics he's using to scale nicely and bootstrapped. So Roma, are you ready to take us to the top? >> Yeah, let's do it. >> All right. Well, kick us off. I don't want to bury the lead. (00:59) Uh what's revenue today? We're recording this on November 14th, 2025. >> Yeah, we just reached 10 million in annual recurring revenue, $10 million. Um and it's growing super fast. >> Can I push you on that? Like we see so many fake revenue screenshots and people say, Nathan, people just come on your show and they make up revenue numbers. (01:20) Are you open to like screen sharing and maybe showing your Stripe account or something? >> Yeah, let's do it. So this is the revenue in euros which is going to be a little bit lower because it's euros but look at this graph. Look at this. Like it's almost vertical. >> Oh wow. Wow. Wow. Okay. So you your first dollar revenue if you hover over that where the line starts it was like what is that? January 1st 2024. Okay. (01:42) >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And how what were you selling back then? Is it just let's leave this graph up for a second while you tell the story. What were you selling back then the first couple months? Is it the same thing you're selling today or has it changed? >> Yeah. So from uh January 2024 to right here where we were making like something like $5,000 in revenue at the time. (02:03) >> Mhm. >> All we were doing is we were reaching out to existing brands and we told them okay we are going to create ads for you video ads. We are going to make this a little bit cheaper. The turnar around will be faster but the only thing is we are going to generate these ads using AI. (02:24) So we actually didn't even have a dashboard. People couldn't like login and and create ads and we did that for them as a service. We just wanted to validate the ID that people were okay to pay for an AI generated ad. And also we wanted to validate that when we shipped this ad for them, they could have results and they would order more of these ads. (02:46) So we validate the idea and then we launched the product. We got this like huge spike of traffic right here. We went from zero to almost a million in recurring revenue. Um, >> what drove that spike? >> So, it was actually initially just me posting on Twitter about it. At the time, I had zero followers, but I started like I understood like Twitter will be important for us. (03:06) So, I started posting content about how you can use AI to create uh winning ads and people will be very interested in that. But then out of the blue, one of our users posted a video on Twitter that was completely viral. And uh at this time it was in March. You can definitely see the spike right here. Uh we were making like something like maybe 10 20 sales a day. (03:35) Uh, and I would wake up during the night, like in the morning, and I was looking at this Slack channel where we we could see all the uh the sales that we got during the night because I was in Europe and the sales happened in the US. And it was like, okay, did we get 10? Did we get 20? And it was like actually hundreds. (03:53) And I was scrolling in the Slack channel with all the Stripe notifications. We got like hundreds of sales in one single night. And so what happened here was someone generated a video on our ads, published the video on Twitter, and this video went completely viral. And so we got this huge spike of revenue jumping from like five to like almost 64,000, which is >> And then it dipped. (04:20) Did a bunch of those folks sign up from the expos and then churn or what caused that dip there? >> Yeah, that's the second part of the story. Actually when I saw all of these says I then went to the customer support chats that we had at the time intercom and I looked at the complaints and actually the the product was completely broken. So nothing was working anymore. (04:40) Uh so we had to refund everyone and rebuilt a significant part of the product that was actually a major piece of the product that was completely broken. Uh so it actually took us a month to rebuild the product and we had to relaunch in April and then yeah the growth has been like crazy since >> and then you had crazy growth. (05:02) I before we go away from the screenshot though we're going to go back later here and talk about that crazy growth including I mean the line's even going more steeper now recently the past month but talk to me about that little area towards the right of graph where it sort of flatlined a little bit. What happened there? >> Yeah that's a good point. (05:20) So here um we basically >> can you hover over it just so the audience can see? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Like >> so we were growing but um uh right now we are growing over 20% per month. At the time it it it looks flat but it was actually very good growth already. Uh but um basically what happened here is I'm leading uh marketing and my co-founder is uh leading uh product and no one in the team was leading sales and our product is productled meaning uh we we don't really we didn't really focus on on the sales team too much. The only (05:57) two things we do is like I do marketing my co-founder does product. But during this time I was like okay we need to build a sales team for the biggest clients like the ones on our thousand of people who sign up the ones the Adidas of the world the Nike of the world the Samsung of the world like these people they have much higher LTV they are much better clients but they need to be sold the product they won't convert without doing some sales motion so I I I basically spent this time focusing on sales and didn't spend much time (06:30) focusing on marketing. And guess what? When you don't do marketing and you don't promote your product, it doesn't really grow as fast. It can grow organically, which was the case, and it was like already like 10% per month, but um it will not grow as fast as if you really focus your efforts on to marketing. >> So, what is what is your total team size today at $10 million of revenue? >> So, now we are eight in the team. (06:58) >> Okay. And so obviously really really good really strong revenue per employee. What are the top three things driving the most recent growth? So from like 500 euros a month of revenue to 800 euros a month in revenue that steep part at the end of the graph. What's your top what are your top three marketing channels today? >> So the first one is sales the one that I took two months uh setting up hiring uh the first sales hire and we actually have two people in the sales team now. (07:25) Um so that was the like the big change. Now we are closing much bigger deals with like bigger brands. I cannot necessarily give all the names yet but um those deals are very significant. So that's one and we did like uh a lot of conferences uh to be in touch with these people. We did a lot of uh direct outreach and uh all the channels that uh you will do when you are doing sales. (07:52) Um >> Mhm. The second one is more productled and this one is very important for me. It's paid ads. Uh because you know we have a tool to help you create paid ads using AI. So we use our own tool to create our own ads and we'll um basically not only grow the business doing that but we'll also grow our knowledge about how the product should look like and the features we should build. (08:22) That's the most direct feedback loop you can have. Uh it proves that the product works because we are using it for ourselves. It also gives us feedback and at the same time obviously it helps us grow. So that's the second one. And the third one um is influencer marketing. I have been spending like from zero to here it's been only me posting content and this person who did a viral video on Twitter. (08:46) Uh so we know that posting content online can bring traction. So, we basically started doing the same thing um with uh influencers and other people. >> Guys, remember I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing into my third fund. We've deployed $250 million into 550 software companies so far again at founderpath.com. (09:06) If you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show. So, sign up at founderpath.com and when you get the onboarding email, I reply and I see all those. reply and say, "Nathan, I found you through YouTube and I'll make sure to prioritize you. (09:21) I would love to cut you a check. Check out founderpath.com." So, let's just sum that up real quick. The top three growth channels today, right, growing from half a mill, you know, 5 million of revenue to 10 million of revenue has been sales, paid advertising, and then influencer marketing. Before we dive a little bit deeper into each of those, I'd love for you to just quantify those quickly. (09:40) So, maybe quantify influencer marketing first. How many influencers did you pay at least a dollar in the last 30 days? And what total spend did you put towards influencers in the last 30 days? >> So this I think I want to keep private um because like we I know our competitors will be watching this and I'm not sure I want to give the full details of like the scope of like what you do and like the budget and stuff like that. (10:09) we can like talk about more overall tactics without going too much into the details right >> I guess the reason I'm asking is you know most founders are SAS founders are used to this sort of hey we're going to spend 20 to 25% right of our topline revenue on sales right whether it's marketing and paid ads sales team etc right just marketing and sales in general are you comfortable like I'm not asking you to obviously share your top influencers their name or their Twitter handle where your competitors will go pick them off but can you give us some (10:37) guidance or direction or I mean are you spending 40% of your monthly revenue on influencer marketing or 5% or something different? >> I I'm not sure I want to share the exact numbers. What I can tell you is we have very healthy profitability. Until now we grew we grew like 100% profitably. We have super healthy margins. (10:58) We also have API costs uh to generate videos on our maybe I can do a very quick demo of like how this looks like and how people can use the product. But Um >> yeah, why why don't why don't you do I'd love to actually like see obviously that in the product. Uh I mean look I'm I'm going to focus here on asking the questions that people are always beating up AI rap they call they say oh it's just an AI rapper they make no money they spend it all on API things like you are doing the opposite of a lot of this stuff. So to the extent you can teach (11:24) and train how you're doing that you're going to usher in sort of this next generation of really great founders building on AI. So I won't push you harder than what you want to share but the more you can share the better. >> Yeah. So basically if you look at uh the market of AI genai genai at the bottom you will have the providers of the models. (11:45) So these companies are companies like open AAI that will create very good models. You'll find companies like Google that released VO3.1 recently. You'll find companies like Meta who is building some LLMs and you'll also find Chinese companies like Cling or Bidens the the company that is like behind Tik Tok. Those are the main model providers on the market. (12:11) But these will create the foundational models that will make the the generation possible. And then on top of that, you'll find companies that will create user experiences that are delightful on top of these model AI models. And this is what we do. We'll help the marketers use these models in the most intuitive way possible. And we'll partner with the model providers to integrate them as quickly as we can on the platform. (12:40) And then we'll not only offer the best user interface to use them, but also we'll build sometimes custom models that are not provided by by these uh providers that large foundational models that tend to be generalist that focus on very specific use cases that they won't tackle and that we are the only ones to do and that we are the best in the world uh to do. (13:05) And then on top of that finally we'll provide some services for our enterprise clients which is what we focus on right now and what what was probably the biggest driver of growth recently. Um will like basically offer more support to the more enterprise clients to help them master all of these AI technologies. >> Roma are you comfortable sharing because it's hard to hire sales reps to put touch on a sale if you're selling $10 per month plans. (13:32) Are you comfortable sharing what sort of your don't name them but your biggest customers today are they paying like what are they paying what's your highest ACV today >> it's going to be uh six figures um at the moment >> okay >> uh and I think it's only going to grow >> enables your sales team to drive those customers into the six figures is it usage based upselling number of videos is it feature-based upselling seat based upselling which are those three >> for us it's been usage based so if you if you look at like the market Two years (14:01) ago, no one was doing genai for advertising. Then during the past two years, people started implementing that and the usage has been growing up and up and up and went from like maybe 0% at the time of video on the Facebook ads library of a client being AI generated to 5 10% and now some companies are 100% AI generated ads. (14:26) So the usage is growing more and more and more again and it's becoming more and more competitive to create ads and to to get to create profitable ads. So for this reason uh yeah the usage has been significantly increasing over the past few years. >> Okay. So that explains the growth behind you hiring your first sales rep and you spending a lot of your time building this because you see a clear motion where you can take as a bottoms up approach people that start off paying you a little bit put sales touch on them upsell them to 100 grand plus per year (14:52) and you think this is going to be a large part of your growth story over the next year. >> Yeah 100%. >> Interesting. So we talked about influencer marketing which you shared what you could we just talked about sales. The other top three you said is you said paid ads. Uh are you comfortable sharing there? I mean are we talking like a 100 grand a month on paid ads or something lower or higher? >> So again I won't share exact numbers. (15:14) Again I can tell you we are super profitable and we won't spend if we are not uh profitable. Um then like >> can you share what that means when you say super profitable? I mean is like 5% or 50% bottom line? >> It's a lot. It's a lot enough for us to hire to grow to grow super fast uh and uh to I can show you some of the up to me a percent though. (15:38) You'll just you'll just say a lot, huh? >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Correct. [laughter] >> All right. Fair enough. So, we're in your ads account right now on Meta. You're running 210 ads currently as of November 2025. So, you have a lot of iteration happening behind here. Help us understand how do you manage so many ads with such a small team? All the creatives, all the copywriting, everything. (15:56) >> Exactly. And that's the beauty of AI. We can have a look at a random one. Let's open the first one. I see. So, this one uh was a very good ad for sure. And >> the problem with that, >> how do you know it was a good ad though? Are you looking at click-through rate or are you attributing it directly to new paid new paid customers or how do you know that? >> Yeah, we'll we'll focus on profitability. (16:23) Uh but what I mean here like visually already I mean it's subjective. I don't know the performance of this exact one, but I can tell you it looks like a good ad anyway. and let's say it's a top performer and it's bringing a lot of performance. Then what we'll do and we'll we'll basically translate the same ads to other languages and say okay now let's run this ad but in French. (16:46) So your audience will probably not understand this but it's basically the same ad. >> You decide to that you needed to change the woman a little bit. It's not the same woman. There's edits. Did you give a text prompt to then generate a new video of a woman? And if so what went into that text prompt? >> We'll test everything. (17:02) We'll test the language. We'll test what what they say. We'll test how they look. So, if there is one face that you see often in the ads, probably means this one is working well. And we'll like basically take the same one and repeat it in multiple situations. Uh if it doesn't really perform as well, we'll also AV test and try other versions, other AI versions of her. (17:24) And yeah, all of that has been done on the platform. Uh as you can see right here. >> So, hold on, hold on, Ro, because you know this, you're in this every day, but my audience doesn't. And I don't want people to get lost. So my audience right now is looking at this going, "Wait, Roma is at 10 million of revenue. He's running hundreds of ad variations with a 10 with with an eight person team. (17:40) How the hell is he doing this?" So the more can you peel back sort of the operating layers here? What's the system you've built to constantly be testing these, monitoring, killing bad ones, doubling down on good ones, etc. >> So the first part of the system is getting the ids, getting the ids. For that we basically built a notion file uh with tons of ideas uh every time we see a new ad. (18:02) >> You're saying ideas, right? Ideas. >> Yeah, ideas. Exactly. >> And then when we get ideas, uh we want to test them. And that was the big challenge before AI. Realistically, you could test like I don't know five ideas every single month. But then AI comes and you can go and say I'm going to generate video variations of these IDs, right? And that's what uh our platform lets you do. (18:28) Basically, you will type a script, select an actor in our library of AI actors. We have hundreds of AI actors now, even more than a thousand in the platform. >> Mh. >> And you'll be able to select [clears throat] the perfect AI avatar for your use case. Use the gender to find the right ones. or even if you don't find which I adopt but if you don't find the perfect avatar you can just create your own and go here and type a description of how the person should look like and you can even include an image of your product to have (18:57) the person hold the product if you sell a physical product let's say you are Nike and uh you sell a new shoe then you'll generate an avatar holding the shoe and talking about it >> well hold on so do they upload that as two separate things they pick the face and then they upload a PNG of their product and you automatically put the PNG into the video or how does that work? >> Yeah, we can do it together if you want. (19:20) Uh >> yeah. >> So, what do you want to create an ad for? Let's think about something together. Let's do a shoe. Let's do Nike shoe. I think I think it's a good one. It's a good way to Everyone knows that, right? So, I'm going to just go to uh Google, look for an image of Nike shoe. Uh let's look at I don't know, maybe this one, blue one. It's pretty good. (19:45) And then we'll go to archads and create our AI avatar. So, how do you want them to look like? Just describe. >> Let's Let's have it Let's have it look like someone like you or me. I saw you on X the other day completing the Hier Rocks challenge. Let's say it's an athlete like you, a Hierro Rock, a Hierrox athlete, a young male. (20:03) >> A young male who just completed a Hierrox. Uh, okay. Let's generate that. You could also import a photo of yourself. Uh I could like definitely use the picture that uh I uploaded here uh on Twitter for the hierox. So it's gonna take like >> we still see Nike shoes Roma. We still see Google search. >> My bad. Yeah. Right here it generates. (20:30) >> So it's going to take a couple of seconds to generate the first version of of this young mail. You'll have multiple options. Obviously, you could have made a much longer, more detailed prompt where you will like give details about uh the space they are in, but that's really cool. >> What What are you sitting on top of on this? Are you paying a for OpenAI credits or Anthropic or who are you sitting on top of here? So, this one is going to be either um Google's Nano Banana or uh Sid Dream from um on uh Maidens, the company behind Tik Tok. (21:07) >> So, we will basically read your prompt and select the best model for you based on your prompt. >> So, it's been I mean the prompt was quite short, but it's really really good because it understood that it was a high rock. uh it added them to the specific like I don't know if you did this type of race but you will see exactly this type of like uh environment uh when you do >> let's do the last one yeah >> and then you can like uh select this person add your image and then uh generate uh a new version of them have (21:43) him hold the shoe and you can generate um that It's going to take a couple of >> while this is loading Roma are how expensive like if I'm if I'm an Arcads customer right now and I'm paying you 60 bucks a month and I'm doing this what you're doing right now on my screen right how much or let's say it's a hundred bucks a month to make it easy how much of the hundred bucks a month are you paying out to Cream and Nana Banana basically to do all the work for me like this is it like a dollar for every $100 of your revenue or five bucks (22:13) is it I mean I'm just curious a metric there >> it's um it depends on the model sales you will use um so it's hard to give a response like for a single uh type of um generation cuz for example for image >> uh it's going to be free for our users to do that and as you can see there was some >> issue with the the >> the arm yeah >> let's let's start again >> is this a big can you rank these like I'm sensitive that you don't want to share specific numbers but I'm just I'm trying to get a relative understanding of you spend money on ads every month (22:48) you spend money on influencers every month and you spend money on your cost of goods sold, right? Paying the the models you sit on top of on just a cost basis. Which one of those is the largest? Is it paying the models, paying influencers, or your paid ads? >> It's definitely it it will No, I'm not sure I want to answer this one because I I mean it's very sensitive information that our competitors will probably want to know. (23:13) I don't want them to be able to guess like how much we are spending in each models. uh we also have some competitions some with uh the providers. So I'm not sure I want to go into the details of that but um uh maybe that's time for another conversation when when we come back in uh in in two years. >> Cool. Yeah. Okay. (23:34) Well, this one looks like it generated nicely. >> Yeah, I like this one. Uh so now um I can turn it into a talking actor. And you could iterate as many times as you want on the on the image by the way. Uh >> okay. But this is where people get stuck, right? because there's there people first off most people watching this they're just very bad on camera in general. (23:50) Some people are even worse at trying to figure out to write scripts to have other people talk like on camera, right? So, how are you helping people write scripts that convert like your Facebook ads convert? >> Yeah. Uh that's a a good point. So, first I think that's one skill that uh until now was very important but that is going to be completely replaced by AI over time. (24:12) Um, basically what will happen I think is you'll describe your product. AI will come up with a script for you that will use a platform like our ads automatically find the perfect actors, put that into your ad account and test that automatically and then use the data from the ad account to come back and generate new versions of the script. (24:34) I think that's the vision that we have and that's going to be the future. But right now you can basically help get help from these tools. And we for example we built this hook generator where you can describe your product and it will generate hooks for you. The hook is the most important part of a script. (24:50) It's the first sentence. It's what will get people to click on a video. So you can basically go to hook generator get.ai/hook I/hook generator describe your product and it will automatically generate the hooks for you and give you IDs of hooks that are uh likely to work well and that's a good starting point. >> Yeah. (25:09) >> And then you will put that into ar generate the video and um yeah test it. >> So once you're happy with the >> All right. Well, cool. So so you guys just saw you saw a good obviously tour here. We spent a couple minutes there inside of Arcads. Um Rome maybe we can drop you can maybe stop screen sharing. We can jump back into sort of just the rest of the interview. (25:26) you as a founder obviously growing to 10 million bucks of revenue in 20 months bootstrapped is obviously is obviously pretty impressive. Um you're obviously spending on ads etc. Um you put out a Twitter post where you said your top uh your top channels were really paid ads direct outreach events and conferences like affiliate world app growth summit etc. (25:45) Is there anything that you'd recommend just for other founders launching uh like mistakes you made in any of these channels that that they should avoid maybe maybe on paid ads? So pay ads probably the biggest mistake is not testing enough ads and not testing ads for enough time. So pay ads are very competitive. (26:06) It's very hard to make them work. And what we'll people mostly will do is they will put like a 100 bucks and say it's not working. They will like just test one ad with 100 bucks and they will basically waste $100. It's kind of like if you were trying to learn how to swim for the first time at 40 years old and you go to the water, you don't necessarily sleep swim and then you think, "Okay, I will never swim in my life. (26:34) " That's not how it works. You have to go to the pool every single week until like you get better and you get you get to practice and you you get to become better. That's that's how it works. And that's the same thing for paid ads. uh you need to test a lot of different ads and AI makes it much easier to test so so many ads. (26:52) Uh you need to also be um giving it enough time for you to understand what are the type of ads that work, the type of ads that don't work. And you just need to be iterating until you find uh what's sticking >> there guys. There you have it. Again, you got to get volume volume because you just don't know what's going to stick. (27:12) Um Raine, can you give us an update on this? It was a great It's actually when we had you on the show last, it was a really good talking point because you had gone from the first 12 months zero to this many paying customers and five million of revenue with a team of five. Um, are you able to share what's the updated paid c paid subscriber number today? >> Yeah, it's pretty much twice twice much. (27:33) Yeah, two times that. >> So, have you broken 6,000 6,000 paying customers? >> Very cool. Very cool. Um, all right. Great. What What have I not asked about that you think we should focus on that? maybe you you haven't talked about on other podcasts, you haven't written about on X yet, but it's top of mind for you. (27:50) >> I'm not sure we we have anything specific that comes to mind. Just like go go try some ads, go generate your own video ads, go do some testing, go learn AI. Every single ad will be AI generated um in like three years. So, if you don't start doing this right now, basically you will get left behind. (28:12) Uh if you have any questions feel free to reach out to the team. We are super busy as you know being a small team with such a a growing company but I'm always happy to talk to customers. >> Why? Let me some a channel that's working for other folks that I actually see you maybe underperforming on and it's actually free. (28:29) So it's maybe more cost efficient than paid ads is actually SEO. Um you're getting based off ah refs here you're getting about 5,300 organic clicks per per month to arc ads.ai. Do you you know are you spending is this like a focus for you guys or is it difficult because it's a dot it's not a. (28:45) com or how do you think about SEO? >> That's the next focus. We are hiring by the way. If you if you know about SEO please reach out to us. We did nothing basically in terms of SEO but just like uh organic content. Um so yeah please reach out if you are doing some SEO stuff. >> Okay. So that's something you're thinking about. (29:04) You know that's actually that's a good question for you. So you're going to start experimenting with SEO. Are there any other growth channels that you're going to start experimenting with as you go from, you know, you try to go from 10 million to 100 million of revenue? >> Yeah, so I think uh enterprise sales will be a big one. (29:15) So I want to focus much more on that. Uh we are just like scratching the surface when it comes to that. SEO has been proven to be very important also for uh people in our space. Um so we are going to be doing more of that and yeah I think those are the two biggest focus that we have right now. >> Mhm. Very cool. (29:36) Um, last question because it's a hot topic. There's a lot of people that, you know, I don't like we won't talk bad about anybody, right? But but we have it'd be irresponsible as a podcast for me not to ask this. Icon obviously made a ton of noise when they launched, right? Really interesting sort of launch strategy. (29:50) But then when you read the reviews, there's a lot of people saying the hype video was basically animations that weren't actually real in the dashboard. The product didn't actually...

"Imagine doing $6 million of revenue with a small team of five people. I want you to meet Roma. He's building Arc Ads, a very competitive space that enables you to launch advertising quickly for your company. Now, he launched in January of 2024 and hit $5,000 of revenue extremely quickly. He'll show you his launch day formula. Next, he hit a million of revenue in just 4 months. He'll show you his million-doll framework. And lastly, he scaled to $6 million of revenue with a small team. He'll show you his tiny team tactics powered by an agent army of a 100 agents. Watch until the end to get all of his data. Hey folks, my guest today is Roma Torres. He is building a new company on top of the great new world we're living in in terms of AI called Arcads.ai. Helps you create winning ads with AI actors. Raine, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, let's do it. All right. Hey, listen. Now, I don't want to bury the lead and you're pretty public on this stuff, but the reason I had you on is because we're trying to focus on folks that are building tiny teams with with giant revenue. Can you give us an update here in May of 2025? What's the team size today and where are you guys at in terms of revenue? Yeah, so I think uh one month ago we were at 5 million. Now we are at six. Uh this the team is still five people uh engineers, very talented engineers. and um let's uh let's keep it uh growing. That's great. So, just to be clear, between April and May, we're recording we're recording this May 16th, 2025, you added about a million bucks of new ARR in terms of growth and added one new team member. Is that right? Exactly. Yeah. All right, guys. You're I'm excited for this. You're going to want to learn from this guy. Roma, let's not ignore your product, though. You can't make all this work unless you have a great product. What's Arc Ads do? Great question. So basically we help you create winning ads using AI actors. Uh when you have a consumer product and you want to advertise it, one of the very common steps you have to go through is like basically record content with often times UGC actors. So people who you pay to talk about your product with our tool you don't need uh to go through actual UGC actors. You can just type a script, select an actor from our library, generate a video, and in a couple of minutes you get a video ready to use. Mhm. And are you are most the customers today are they UGC brands selling a physical product? Actually not. We do have a lot of UGC of brands selling like uh physical products. But um I would say most of our customers are actually selling digital products. So mobile apps um even like lead generation and um everyone who has to like advertise to a very large number of people ar often a good solution for them. Mhm. And and um what's driven most of your growth to date in terms of go to market motion? Is there affiliates here? Is there an SEO strategy? Is it just you you post great content on LinkedIn and Twitter? What is it? So I think we have three big acquisition channels. The first one and the most important one is like actually paid ads. We use our own tool to promote our tool. So we do some paid ads on meta to um like basically show what the tool can do and we just prove it works by using it. Right? That's number one. The second thing is content overall. So content means as you say like me creating content, people of the team creating content on LinkedIn, on Twitter, but it's also sometimes partnering with uh other people who create uh good content. So content creators u who are um already posting about ads, about like how to do marketing or about AI in general. So that's the second one. And the third one uh that uh we are pushing more and more is like more you know direct uh le uh sales um salesled like approaches where we go find people who spend a lot of money in paid ads and we try to like get in touch with them and on board them on the tool on higher subscriptions. What tools are you using to go and try and find folks that are spending a lot on meta or LinkedIn etc. or is there you know is it like an an ah refs or similar web kind of tool or something else? There is no like secret weapon. We built a lot of internal tools. So very often when you want to either work with influencers in the space or with like big companies in the space like it all comes down to identifying them. So sourcing these people uh on social media and then reaching out to them and it turns out AI is very good at this kind of task because like sourcing is a lot of like repetitive work. So it's a lot about scrolling social media selecting some people based on some criteria adding them to a Google sheet and then reaching out. And AI is very good at that. So we built some internal AI agents to to do that. And then once you have like sourced the right profiles, it comes down to how do I reach out to them in a natural way, have a conversation with them to convince them to start using our tool. And again, this AI can do in a very good way now with LLMs. So we ended up like building a lot of internal agents to do exactly this. I want to dive into how you're building those internal agents. you had a great post going went out on April 9th, 2025 here of all the different tools you're sort of building. So, I want to get into this in a second. You know, how you're using Gum Loop to automate this stuff. How do you decide what to automate? How are they working? How do you tweak them over time? Before we do that though, I don't want to gloss over those growth tactics you're using because they're obviously working really, really well. You've grown to 6 million bucks of revenue. And I meant to ask you to when did you launch the tool? So, we get sort of a growth rate. Yeah, it was January 2024 when we first uh on boarded one customer. It was very private at the time. It was like just a couple of friends in the industry. We were working in the mobile app industry. That's how we got the idea. By the way, we were running a seven figures mobile app and advertising it with like a lot of UGC creative. And we realized, okay, like this is something uh that's going to be uh completely changed with AI. And we decided, okay, this is a much bigger opportunity that this mobile app studio that we are working on. So we decided to sell it and to start like building uh this tool. So in January 2024 we started like onboarding a couple of customers and step by step it grew like very quickly. The first month we did a lot of like uh revenue like straight away. So we understood we had product market fit. Now it was about building a better product and building building the growth strategy to to reach out to more customers. Do you remember how much you did in that first month? You said quote a lot of revenue. Yeah, for the first month it was crazy. I think um first week it was like 5K of monthly recurring revenue after like literally one week. So it's but something crazy like that. We had some like crazy moments when we had to shut down the product uh because we had like a barrel peak and stuff like that. But um uh yeah very early we understood that we had something. What month did you break a million in ARR? Do you remember? I think it was. Yeah, the first time was in June. I think June 2024. That's awesome. We shouldn't gloss over to how you built so much empathy for this space. You were running your own seven figure mobile app and spending a bunch on ads. I'm trying to scroll back in your Twitter feed here to see if I can find that original mobile app. Did you ever post about it back here in any of these posts? I didn't talk about it too much actually because you know when you have a consumer product um you don't get a lot of value by talking about it. Uh you are targeting like basically the whole world. It was a weight loss app. So our target audiency was not necessarily like tech Twitter. So all my time I was basically spending it in the ad account like making better ads to promote our product better. And yeah again that's how we got the idea. But now I when I I I did like talk bit about it on on Twitter but very very rarely. Um and yeah that's that's the one fast. Yeah. Exactly. How does a guy how does a guy build a fasting app for women? How did you get how did you get into that? No that's a great question. So we were like basically we knew we wanted to to do an app. We also knew we wanted to make something that would help people be a better version of themselves. we were with my when I say we it's my co-founder Dylan and I um we were very into like health and wellness and we then kind of opportunistically saw that the the people who spend the most in this category are women and there is no app specifically for them and also there is a very specific pain point when you are in the weight loss industry that which is like having a community of other people doing the same thing as you is very important and it's very motivating but as a woman you don't necessarily want to post pictures of before afters in a group where you will find like men and women. So we thought okay what if we build obviously an app but also a community that is very engaged where uh people will feel safe to uh talk about their journey and like go into like like the challenges that they face etc. So yeah, that's why we decided to build this app and it was very community based where there is a feed like like you know kind of a Facebook group integrated into the app and people were very very active about it and like sharing about a lot about their journey. That's how we came up with this idea. And um yeah, again, very quickly we realized like one of the key factors of success to grow this app was basically being very good at paid marketing. And that's how we learned really like the tactics and the like all the the genius it takes to to to scale an app with with paid ads. I love that. And how are you comfortable sharing how much you're spending on paid ads today to grow ARC ads? Like how how much per month? So yeah, this is kind of something we are going to keep uh for ourselves right now. But what I can tell you is like archive is very profitable. We are like bootstraps. Uh we are like not like relying on VC money to to to to fund the the paid ads and the growth. Um but we are trying to keep everything like super profitable. That's awesome. Are are you comfortable sharing like to what degree are we talking like 10% profit margins per month or like 60% profit margins per month? Healthy profit margins. Very healthy. What' you say? Very healthy. They are healthy margins. You're not you're not going to let me pin you down to a percentage. Huh? Exactly. I know where you are getting. Yeah. You you you you know my mo. You know what my audience likes. They like data. But no, it's really impressive. Bootstrapped to 500 grand a month in revenue. 6 million ARR. uh six FTEES and again one of the things you do really really well uh you just touched on paid ads we touched on content I want to touch on this piece of content before we jump into how you're building these these agents what are we seeing here is this your workstation here yeah actually uh that's kind of a weekend project so uh basically my thinking was simple uh when I did this and uh I mean I didn't end up spending too much time on it like uh it was just something I do for fun uh my core focus is just like focusing on growing archives But I was thinking, okay, with archads now you can create a lot of these UGC ads, right, with AI talking avatars, etc. What if um instead of posting them on paid ads, which is what I really know how to do, well, what if I started posting these on organic accounts? So basically Tik Tok accounts with no uh uh no money behind it, no paid budget. Are these accounts or are these individual influencers like like like digital influencers real people but characters? Oh yeah, basically they are like characters characters you create and um you create them with using arch and you create a face for the account using the arcad character. So I was thinking okay what if I can start posting uh 10 times a day. Actually, I very quickly realized that if you post 10 times a day on the same account, Tik Tok will not push your content too much because they don't really want people to be posting that much. So, you have to find creative ways to be posting more content on multiple accounts. So, I ended up like um uh thinking what if I create multiple accounts and start posting on them. And then you'd have to do these like creative tactics where you have to have Tik Tok think you are a different person and you have to use BPN multiple devices. And I was just like playing with this and experimenting with this. And I decided, okay, let's record a video to showcase what I'm like um tinkering with and let's see uh if uh I can like get some people interested in that and like to give me some tips on that. And I actually have a friend who is like very deep into this stuff. So I didn't like end up spending too much time on it yet. But uh that's something I think very uh uh interesting to pushure and I see a lot of archives customers usually teens like 16 years old and they go really deep into this strategy using arad and sometimes I'm really impressed by the results they are getting like you said your audience likes numbers but I see sometimes like tins create Tik Tok shop accounts and they just like create a ton of content on Tik Tok using our avatars to promote those supplements brands and say sometimes like do really really good revenue like sometimes like six figures a month uh without any paid ads budget. So yeah, I think it's a very interesting like uh thing to pursue as well. Yeah, the the reality between what's real, what's fake, what's a real person in real life versus a digital character created with art ads or these other tools. It's it's a really interesting world we live in. So hey, let's wrap up here with the last couple minutes with something I think is your genius, which is how you have such a you know a tiny you're doing a million in revenue per employee, right? This is super rare, very hard, bootstrapped, profitable. And um I think a lot of that credit goes to what you posted here on on on April 9th, right? Which is your paid subscribers grow. By the way, can you share that? What are you at today in terms of paid customers? Are we still at about 3,000? Uh no, it's a little bit more. It's like uh closer to 4,000 now. Yeah. 4,000 now. But you credit a lot of the success to like you built an AI growth engineer. Like you built an AI Ghost Rider or you built an AI intern. I mean, remain can you teach us here? Are you open to logging into like your Gum Loop account and just maybe showing us how you build one of these things? Yeah, let me try to find one of them. Uh like all the good example. Take your time because I'm putting you on the spot. I'll tee my audience up though while you do that just so you guys can understand what I think the future is going. It's why I wanted to feature Roma is because you can see here like when he posted this all the way back in February 18th, 2025, right? So a couple you three four months ago saying you they bootstrapped from seven figures with paid ads only. And you can see part of the way that they're doing that is they've built these agents, right, to run these profitable playbooks over and over and over again. And so the like you see here, this AI agent replaces 100K per year growth engineer manages to create 100 videos per day. Um, and you can see he's using this building, you know, arc ads content combined with Gum Loop, which I'm putting him on the spot here. We'll see if he can pull up an example on Gum Loop and actually teach us live because Roma, I think what a lot of people think about is, you know, they're not, you strike me as someone you're pretty darn technical, right? um you know how to write code you and you're also a great growth engineer which is a rare combination but for people that are just great marketing and sales folks how could they use gum loop to run some of these AI agent playbooks. Yeah, I will try to find a simple one to to give you a good intro about what you can do and then I will try to show a little bit of a more complex one. But by the way, Gumloop the team is very um good at teaching you how to use it. they have this AI agent inside the loop that you can chat to and that's you can like use to kind of understand better how to build them and even the team like you can reach out to them and um just like ask them to to guide you on how to do more complex workflows. So uh let me share my screen. Where is the Yeah, here it's right in Riverside. It should be a little share. Yeah. Yeah. Perfect. I will try with a very simple one. Uh so basically BM loop what it does is it lets you connect together multiple nodes. A node is a block right here. So there is a Google doc reader node. There is an input uh node a combined test multiple nodes like this and they will let you create the workflow that will take some input that you give it and transform it uh using AI. So let's uh jump into this example. So right here I created this goo Google doc a super simple Google doc uh with some examples of very good tweets. Uh so this one is yeah uh let me share this one right here. This is well he brings it up guys. This is what I think a lot of people forget to do. You have to be a great you have to be historian almost like you have to document history what does well because that's how you're going to train anything like a gum loop. But Roma I think is obviously very good at that. He describes it as you know simple Google doc but you can see here walk us through what have you documented. Yeah 100% AI what you have to understand is AI is very good at duplicating stuff it's uh I think it's going to be good at creating very soon but right now like it's like really world class at taking something that is good and doing something similar. So, uh, yeah, I made this list of very good, uh, Twitter posts and, uh, actually this one was from the founder of Gum Loop and, yeah, I I saw all of these Twitter posts that I think were very good. So, that there are 10 of them and I added them to the Google doc and then I let's go back to Gum Loop. I told Gum Loop, okay, this is my input and the input is what I want to talk about. So this time I want I wanted to talk about a new feature for archads where you can control actor's emotion. Uh in the post will show sad and angry. And so those are the two inputs that I gave to the gum loop flow. The thing I want to talk about and the list of inspiration posts from the Google doc and then gum loop will combine them together. So it will like combine this text with the content of the Google doc that it will read and then it will send that to a prompt and ask okay I want you to ingest all these articles for the from the inspiration list and then carefully choose one article in the inspiration list blah blah blah uh and you basically need to do a similar post inspired from one of these articles and I say something like you'll be peni penalized if you don't select um that the one that is the most relevant u and then it will like create a new Google doc and it will if I run it uh we can see if give us gives us a good result but basically it will um write in a new Google doc uh something that is inspired from the top uh post in this list the most relevant one to this post I want to do right here and it will like then put that into a new that makes sense How many of the rem Yeah, it does. How many think that was amazing? How many of these do you have built just on your gum loop account? Are we talking like five or 500? No, more than u more like 100, maybe 100. Wow. So, how much of your day is like just coming in here and like clicking start on all these tasks? I imagine you just have like a bunch of computers up where it's like start start. You get your breakfast, you hit start, start start, you come back an hour later and you like you just did like 30 days worth of work. Actually, for a lot of them, I don't even need to click start. Uh they are for example I have one uh that uh maybe I can show you but might be a bit too complex but that basically will send me uh messages in Slack every single day when my competitors run new ads that are worth replicating. So it will scrape the ads libraries and yeah it will download the ads from Facebook ads of my competitors and it will like take the transcript of these ads send it to CHP and then uh CHP will rewrite the same ads but for our ads and it will send me that in uh Slack with a message like uh this ad was running on your competitor's account and now you can replicate it and click this button to replicate it. Wild can yeah let's have a look at this one. So yeah, inspired by post seven and then it wrote it wrote this this new market feature to control emotion is insane. You began and yeah and I think I wake up every day with five fresh this one is like a very good one emotion for my ads. Can I ask you a question? What what a lot of like cop purely trained copywriters, they know the first thing is the hook, then it's like the detail, the curiosity, then it's like the call to action at the end. You didn't feed in your input Google doc a breakdown of like here are 30 really good hooks, here are 30 really good like middle parts and here are 30 really good call to actions. You just gave it like the whole chunk of post. Why did you decide to train your sort of mini gum loop model that way? Yeah, it's actually a very good idea and I might have to try this as well. My understanding of like where Chad really excels is not when you give them like tips on like this is how you write a good hook and this is how you write a good body, but it's more like do this but in this different way. And that's why like I like to give it just one example as an input and ask it to replicate it because I found it to be better just in in uh um in certain ways. Uh but yeah definitely a good experiment to try. I I actually have another one a hook writer specifically. So actually to your point let me share this one instead. I have a Twitter hook writer. So this is this is the hook. This is the So like when you're scrolling Twitter in your free time or whatever, you're like bookmarking things. You're like, ""That's a good hook, that's a good hook."" And then maybe once per week or month, you take all those good hooks and feed it into these systems so they become evergreen and then they That's basically you building your brain out. Exactly. That's exactly what I do. So I add them to notion. So I don't save them from Twitter, but it's the same. I copy paste them into a notion document, notion database where I have all the hooks that I find good. And this one what it does basically we won't go into the details but it basically generates hooks ids. So instead of just making one hook it will take um this uh notion database and it will generate new hooks uh inspired from this uh database for the ID I want to write about. So, I input my ID here and actually my team members also use it and I'd say how many uh hooks variations I want and it will generate those for me. It's wild. Amazing. Well, man, hey, I want to be respectful of your time. You got a company to build and you're growing quickly. I'm sure you're hiring. You're trying to optimize paid ads, all that jazz. Is there anything I should have asked you about like that you know is critical to your growth so far that I just hear going, ""Man, Nathan just didn't even ask about this. It's the key thing."" No, I think we went into the the most important ones. Uh like it's basically about making good very good ads, spark ads because one it showcase how the good the product is to people who see the ads but also it teaches us how we can make a better product by using the product ourselves and yeah it's all about like making good systems to come up with new ideas for ads and then making a good use of tools like archads and others to generate them quickly and make very good ads quickly. So that's that's the whole secret and if you do that like very uh repeatedly for weeks and weeks and weeks uh your ads performance tends to improve and at the end you tend to end up having very good results. guys remain tro 2021 2022 2023 is building weast apps said oh my gosh we're spending so much time on paid ads and creatives I got to go build a tool for this he launched arc ads in January of 2024 one customer but went to like 5k of new MR in the first seven days broke a million bucks of ARR in June of 2024 and now today here in May 2025 six full-time employees 6 million ARR and well over 50 well over a hundred sort of agents built in Gum Loop that help him operate his growth channels at a very high velocity paid paid ads on MA content influencers now exploring with direct sales. Raine, thank you for taking us to the top. Yeah, thank you so much."