
DreamStories.ai
Valuation
$18M
2025 Revenue
$3M
Customers
100K
Funding
$1M
Avg ACV
$30
Team
7
Founded
2023
DreamStories.ai Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2025)
DreamStories.ai is a personalized AI content studio founded in 2023 by Ricardo Vice Santos, focused on generating customized children's books using generative AI. The company launched commercially at the beginning of 2025 and has since recorded approximately $3 million in lifetime revenue, driven almost entirely by paid Facebook advertising rather than organic search.
The product allows parents to upload a photo of a child, which the platform uses to generate a personalized illustrated storybook that is then printed and shipped. The base price is $60, with discounts bringing some transactions to $48. The company has processed close to 100,000 orders since launch, with a customer acquisition cost of approximately $60, roughly equal to the average order value, and relies on repeat episodic purchases and reverse-book orders to improve unit economics over time.
Vice Santos bootstrapped the venture largely with personal capital from his Spotify equity and proceeds from prior company exits, supplementing with less than $1 million in external seed funding. The team of seven, the majority of whom are engineers, operates with a fully custom technology stack built on top of Shopify for order management, running four simultaneous A/B tests and spending in the six figures per month on Facebook ads.
Last updated
DreamStories.ai Revenue
DreamStories.ai has recorded approximately $3 million in lifetime revenue since its commercial launch at the beginning of 2025. The figure was confirmed by Vice Santos when host Nathan Latka proposed it as a conservative floor, noting that even at a 50 percent average discount on the $60 list price, 100,000 orders would imply $3 million in total sales.
The company has processed close to 100,000 orders. The standard list price is $60, with a discounted price of $48 available through the checkout funnel. Volume discounts also exist, meaning realized average order value sits below the $60 headline figure. Vice Santos declined to give a precise average order value but confirmed the $3 million lifetime figure as a reasonable ballpark.
Because the company only began scaling paid acquisition recently in 2025, the revenue trajectory is heavily weighted toward the most recent months. A forward estimate for full-year 2025 revenue is not calculable from the data provided, as Vice Santos did not disclose a monthly run rate. GetLatka does not produce a projection range without a stated trailing growth rate.
DreamStories.ai Valuation, Funding Rounds
DreamStories.ai's most recent disclosed valuation is $18M.
DreamStories.ai has raised $1M in total funding.
| Year | Round | Amount | Valuation | % Sold | Source |
|---|
Founder / CEO
Ricardo Vice Santos
CEO
Ricardo Vice Santos is the CEO and co-founder of DreamStories.ai. He joined Spotify in 2009 as a founding member of the company's US team, early enough that his equity options were, in his words, fairly accurate in terms of generating meaningful personal wealth. His work at Spotify centered on the content team and early mobile ad network acquisition, experience he credits directly for his paid-acquisition-first approach at DreamStories.ai.
After Spotify, Vice Santos co-founded Kenco, a freeze-dried smoothie and food-tech company. Kenco raised a $3 million seed round and went on to raise a total of approximately $20 to $30 million. The company is now available at Walmart and CVS. Vice Santos stepped down from his operating role at Kenco when the business shifted from direct-to-consumer toward retail channels, a direction he felt better suited his co-founder Thomas, who he described as a traditional CPG operator. Vice Santos remains a large shareholder in Kenco.
Between Kenco and DreamStories.ai, Vice Santos served as VP of Growth at Neko Health, a body-scanning health startup founded by Spotify's Daniel Ek. He described his career arc as consistently oriented around personalization at scale, from personalized nutrition at Kenco to personalized health screening at Neko Health to personalized content at DreamStories.ai. Net worth was not discussed in the interview beyond the general characterization of his Spotify and subsequent exit proceeds.
Q&A
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| What's your age? | - |
| Favorite online tool? | - |
| Favorite book? | - |
| Favorite CEO? | - |
| Advice for 20 year old self | - |
Customers
DreamStories.ai has processed close to 100,000 orders since its commercial launch at the beginning of 2025. The vast majority of customers are parents placing their child as the hero of the book, though pets also appear as subjects on occasion. A meaningful share of customers return for reverse books, ordering the same story reprinted with a different family member as the protagonist, or for episodic new titles as their child moves through different content phases.
The standard price is $60 per book, with a discounted price of $48 available through the checkout funnel and additional volume discounts offered. The platform includes a free preview stage where a user uploads a photo and sees the personalized content before hitting a paywall to complete the purchase. No free tier exists beyond this preview. Pricing per seat or per subscription was not discussed, as the product is structured as a one-time purchase with repeat episodic upsell rather than a subscription.
DreamStories.ai serves 100K customers.
DreamStories.ai Business Model
DreamStories.ai monetizes through one-time physical book purchases priced at $60 list, with discounts bringing individual transactions to $48 or lower through volume pricing. The company's growth economics are built around the insight that competitors in the personalized book category treat the product as a pure one-time purchase, which caps their willingness to bid on Facebook ads at or below the average order value. Because DreamStories.ai generates repeat purchases through episodic new titles and reverse books, Vice Santos argues the company can outbid competitors in the Facebook auction while still achieving positive unit economics over the customer lifetime.
The customer acquisition cost is approximately $60, roughly equal to the average order value on the first transaction. Vice Santos described this as an intentional arbitrage: many competitors set bid caps at the point where return on ad spend equals one, so a buyer willing to accept a first-order ROAS of one and recover margin on repeat purchases can win more auctions. The Facebook campaign learning threshold he targets is 50 sales per week, the point at which Facebook considers a campaign fully learned.
The company spent in the six figures on Facebook ads in the month of the interview, November 2025. Cumulative paid ad spend disclosed was $100,000, though the six-figure monthly figure suggests total spend is substantially higher. Gross margin, burn rate, runway, churn, LTV, and profitability were not discussed in the interview. The checkout and discount logic are fully custom-built; Shopify is used only for the final order and fulfillment layer. The company runs four A/B tests simultaneously and uses PostHog for data analytics. The review and video-testimonial layer is powered by a plugin called Luxe. Organic traffic to the DreamStories.ai domain is approximately 61 visits per month, confirming that paid Facebook acquisition is effectively the sole growth channel.
Point-in-time figures shared on the GetLatka podcast, each linked to the exact moment it was said on camera.
Customers (2025)
100,000
“Nathan Latka: Can I ask how many sales total you have so far? Ricardo Vice Santos: Yeah, close to 100,000.”
Watch at 8:17Customer acquisition cost (2025)
$60
“Ricardo Vice Santos: you should ballpark it to around the, ballpark around what their EOV is... if it's 60, let's ballpark it to 60.”
Watch at 9:16DreamStories.ai Employees & Team Size
DreamStories.ai employs seven people full-time as of November 2025. The majority of the team are engineers, reflecting the company's focus on building its AI content platform and custom e-commerce infrastructure. Vice Santos noted the company is actively hiring machine learning and AI engineers, with applications directed to jobs at dreamstories.ai.
DreamStories.ai employs approximately 7 people as of 2026. It serves 100K customers that rely on its solutions.
| Year | Milestone | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Reached 7 employees (December 2025) |
Frequently Asked Questions about DreamStories.ai
What is DreamStories.ai's revenue?
DreamStories.ai generates $3M in revenue.
Who founded DreamStories.ai?
DreamStories.ai was founded by Ricardo Vice Santos.
Who is the CEO of DreamStories.ai?
The CEO of DreamStories.ai is Ricardo Vice Santos.
How much funding does DreamStories.ai have?
DreamStories.ai raised $1M.
How many employees does DreamStories.ai have?
DreamStories.ai has 7 employees.
Where is DreamStories.ai headquarters?
DreamStories.ai is headquartered in New York, New York, United States.
Full Interview Transcripts
He Made $6M Selling AI Books for Children (And How You Can Too)Nov 24, 2025
Nathan Latka (00:01) Hey folks, my guest today is Ricardo. He's the co-founder of dream stories, harnessing generative AI to bring immersive storytelling and image creation to life. Before launching the company in 2023, he was VP of growth at a body skin startup called Necco health. Prior to that, he founded a snack company and was a founding member of Spotify's us team or carter. ready to take us to the top? Ricardo Vice Santos (00:21) Absolutely. Nathan Latka (00:22) All right, people hear Spotify and early and they assume you got rich off options. Is that accurate? Ricardo Vice Santos (00:28) Fairly accurate, yes. I was early enough that it made sense, yes. Nathan Latka (00:32) What year was that? Ricardo Vice Santos (00:35) So I joined in 2009 I guess, yeah. Nathan Latka (00:39) Okay, interesting. And is it fair to say, cause I want to understand they build a public city, dreamstories.ai. Did you basically take a big chunk of the money made there and sort of plow it into the new, the new venture? Or how did you think about that? Those options? Ricardo Vice Santos (00:51) Yeah, no, part of it, yes, but I did start a few companies in between as well that I've also had an exit for, so a mix of both, right? So the Spotify got the car and the house, and then the other stuff got the company going. Nathan Latka (01:08) Fair enough. Okay. Let's, let's not bury the lead here. Let's get an overview of dream stories first, and then we'll go, go get your sort of history between Spotify and dream stories. So what is dream stories.ai? Ricardo Vice Santos (01:18) Yeah, so dreamstories.ai is, I should describe it as ⁓ either an agent content studio or personalized content studio. So this is actually an idea that I had, ⁓ you know, it actually dates back to Spotify, funny enough from, know, I initially at Spotify was on the content team. So I dealt, as you can imagine, with the large catalog we had there. And I started noticing that there was content in the platform that was personalized. This could be birthday songs or love songs and so forth. And back then I had this thought experiment, if you will, about I wonder if one day we'll have Beyonce sing a song for you or something like that. And this was really just an experiment. was no, sorry, a thought experiment. There was no AI to do it. There was certainly not generative AI. But it's interesting that throughout my career I've always worked somewhat around personalization and trying to do personalization at scale. As you mentioned, I founded a snack company where I was trying to do personalized nutrition for people. with the Body Scanner, which is actually a company by Daniel Ek as well of Spotify. We're almost doing the same thing in the reverse manner. You can think of healthcare as an artisan good, right? You sit there and there's a doctor across from you performing a service for you one-on-one. And with Neko Health, we are trying to scale it, right? To add mass, do a good service, a personalized service at scale. And so DreamStore is kind of a connection of these things in trying to do that for content. essentially because when as you mentioned I started the company in 2023 this was around the times you started seeing stuff like stable diffusion come out you know with the know in mid journey and so forth with the image stuff and when I saw it to be honest I had these moments shit this is the moment where these things actually become possible because in the meantime you've seen stuff like Sunu come up you know the music generative music stuff very familiar yes Nathan Latka (03:09) S-U-N-O. Ricardo Vice Santos (03:13) There's stuff like Suno, there's a few other models out there that let you create personalized music, if you will. I actually think this is more interesting for the use cases other than music. ⁓ that's kind of, we built a company around the experimentation around those contents, right? And so we decided to start with the family content, ⁓ particularly children's books, you know, as a first market. But essentially we're building the real core of what we're building is the platform that allows you to... take a consumer that is not technical, and give them the ability to create and basically create content for self-consumption of their own family. Nathan Latka (03:51) Interesting. ⁓ And I'm just trying to think like what's the comparable, right? So are parents still buying physical children's books for their kids and are you gonna go take that market share or sort of how do you think about that? What's the revenue model? Ricardo Vice Santos (04:05) Yeah, it's actually, so I, it's not a coincidence that, you know, things lined up as I, as you know, as I looked at the behavior at home with my own child. And I started noticing that my, you know, with my family, like we read to our, to our son ⁓ every night. And I started noticing this is kind of a recurrent behavior that happens every single night. There's something interesting about children's content as well that is quite It's repetitive to some degree, but it changes after a while. So a child will basically will want to read or consume the same content multiple times in the week and then move on to the next thing. So I started noticing this repeatable pattern that I figured you can build services around this, right? Something that grows with you and kind of matches the phase that you're in. It also happens that I'm Portuguese. My wife is Swedish, so we're similar culture, but different languages. And so I realized... there's a lot of people out there that we could create content that will be hard to find in stores. But to your question about if I'm looking to take that market, it's actually still a growing segment. It's actually one of the ones in books that continues to grow, in part because parents want to get kids away from tablets and digital formats, particularly at bedtime. ⁓ But that's kind how I saw an opportunity to use that as an entry market. But also one that is filled with sort of what I describe as non-technic, sorry, non-tech players. As you can imagine, there's a lot of investment in video and other formats. You saw Sora come out with a generative AI video. I have no interest in playing in a market that has basically diluting margins because of these extremely overly well-funded players bringing the cost either to zero, essentially. Nathan Latka (05:48) What's the status right now in the company? you pre revenue post revenue? Ricardo Vice Santos (05:52) No, we're post revenue, so we're selling. We've done it in a very iterative manner, right? So we basically wanted to get to market as soon as possible with a prototype, right? Which captures a segment of it. The way I try to explain to people is that you can imagine that there's people that literally just want to sit in front of TV or something and just watch, be something fat to them. And there's people that have a lot of agency, they want to create their own stuff, and they'll go to trouble of doing it. And we started with like a very simple product where All you need to do is really submit the picture, as you can see there, and basically it will create content for you. ⁓ And as we are evolving, again, as we collect more data, we're evolving it to give you more agency, essentially being able to be more tailored to what you want. So we got a lot of requests around this, and so essentially make it better for the, more personalized in a way. Nathan Latka (06:48) This is a company I just invested in here in Austin, Texas or general store So I maybe we'll get a children's book about Ian and Jess the co-founders on this but this is this is interesting ⁓ Okay, got it Ricardo Vice Santos (06:55) Mm-hmm. Yeah, in this case you will be only for one of them, but the first one, right? We actually do allow multiple characters in the book, but you have to currently have to do it one at a time. But it's fine, let's see. I don't know which face will be picked up, but we'll see. You can keep going. And then essentially after you create the content and you decided this is actually what you want to do, you see it picked up the woman. But yeah, and then later, you know, Nathan Latka (07:05) I see, I see. So when will I hit a paywall? ⁓ yeah. Ricardo Vice Santos (07:26) If you keep going, eventually you will hear the paywall to create the full book for you. Nathan Latka (07:31) Interesting. you capture me as a lead. Okay. You get my phone number so you can follow up if you want. And then what I say to pay well after that. I choose a discount. Ricardo Vice Santos (07:40) Yeah, you're going to go to the item. give you a nice discount code. Nathan Latka (07:45) to get 12 fire purges. So what's the total price going to be? Ricardo Vice Santos (07:49) Yeah, no, with this discount it will be 48. Nathan Latka (07:53) interesting, okay. So are people making their kid the hero? Ricardo Vice Santos (07:58) Generally, yeah, we have sometimes pets, but the vast majority will put their kid, right? Nathan Latka (08:04) Wait, so where's the paywall? When will I hit the paywall? order book. Ricardo Vice Santos (08:07) There we go. Nathan Latka (08:10) I see. Is this accurate so you have 648 sales so far? Ricardo Vice Santos (08:15) And now we have more sales, those are reviews, right? Nathan Latka (08:18) sorry. Can I ask how many sales total you have so far? Ricardo Vice Santos (08:21) Yeah, close to 100,000. are the, of course, yeah. Nathan Latka (08:24) wow. That's a ton. When did you launch? Ricardo Vice Santos (08:28) We launched ⁓ at the beginning of this year. We only really started scaling very recently. Nathan Latka (08:36) That's wild. mean, and, was your price always like 60 bucks a pop? Ricardo Vice Santos (08:40) Yeah, we've actually played a little bit with it, know, sort of back and forth. Generally it's been around 60 dollars, but that's the place we've been sort of most comfortable with. Nathan Latka (08:51) I mean, can I, mean, Ricardo, you know, my next question, can I just do that math? I mean, can I do a hundred thousand sales times 60 a piece? You guys have done 6 million bucks in total revenue life to date. Ricardo Vice Santos (08:59) ⁓ You can do the maths. I will say that of course we have some discounts like you mentioned the 48 right so if you want to get accurate. We also have some volume discounts as well that we do and so we need to ballpark. Nathan Latka (09:11) Well, that's fine, but still this is impressive. mean, fair to say even with discounts, can I just say I'll be really concerned if you've done over $3 million in lifetime sales so far. Ricardo Vice Santos (09:18) Mm-hmm. Yep. Nathan Latka (09:20) Is that, is that fair to say that'd be like a 50 % discount on the 60 on average, $60 on average. Okay. I mean, that's, that's pretty cool. I mean, I would not have expected when I was prepping for the thing and I'm going, okay, I don't know if they're live yet looking at the website. It's so, so, so simple. But then the first hint that you were bigger than I thought was when I saw the number of reviews, which is incredible. What would you sort of credit that kind of, I mean, it's a very simple onboarding processes. mean, is that part of the magic? It's so simple. It feels like magic. Ricardo Vice Santos (09:24) I'll say ballpark Correct to be honest with you. I always wanted it to be like that You know I in general the the companies I worked at the follows wanted to kind of feel like and holding a little bit You know kind of guide you through in a linear path ⁓ Actually only recently were able to get it that way This is kind of where you this agentic products are going to where it's like you know just again takes you You know it doesn't make you learn you know a size platform or whatever just this guides you over So that's kind of always wanted to do this also where you only started scaling it more recently right because we started essentially ⁓ being able to ⁓ deliver this kind of experience. Nathan Latka (10:18) I just wanna make sure, I feel like I'm missing something, right? Because I'm trying to, once I hear what your volume is, I'm going, wait, holy crap, how is it getting all this traffic? So I stick your thing in A8 reps, but this clearly is not your growth channel because you're only getting about 61 hits per month via DreamStories. Are you like, I framed into some other sites somewhere? How are you getting all these sales? Ricardo Vice Santos (10:36) I mean we're getting a lot ⁓ via Facebook essentially, ⁓ so we're actually not doing so much organic here. Nathan Latka (10:47) I see. ⁓ you have a community on, tell me more about the Facebook strategy. Ricardo Vice Santos (10:52) Yeah, no, mean, so one thing I've done, I've done quite a lot at Spotify and after was paid acquisition, right? Actually with Spotify, we are extremely early, like on the mobile net, mobile ad networks and so on and so forth. So it's not a community, right? Most of it is actually paid acquisition. And that's one thing that, also one of the things I like about the, sort of the, the sort of the way I built these things is or the category if you will is that the competition tends to be very like one-time oriented and you know if you're doing sort of if you're doing paid acquisition you know it's a bit obviously it's a bidding model so you or an auction model so you want to outbid people so of course it's kind of just key to take something that is like a one-time purchase and turn it into an episodic thing that happens multiple multiple times over right so if you if you can do it so of course if you can do it you can make the economics work Nathan Latka (11:44) This makes a lot of sense. Yeah. What? I mean, I got to dive deeper because there's something to learn here. I mean, you've done paid spend. sounds like a lot of places and you're using it to launch your startup, which is, which is pretty incredible in terms of a day one strategy. Most people wait to do paid ads until they have like a lot of scale. So I guess, how do know what you're willing to pay on it? You know, to get a 60, a new $60 sale. Ricardo Vice Santos (12:06) How do I know? Is that the question? Nathan Latka (12:09) Yeah, well, what is your target? Like, are you trying to spend under 10 bucks on the ads, you know, to get the to get the sale on on Facebook ads or under five bucks? How do you get to the ratio? Ricardo Vice Santos (12:15) Now, yeah, no, I would like to, right? But what I usually tell people, and that's as a litmus says in every single company I've worked, I said, okay, you haven't done any ads, what do you expect your CAC to be? I usually tell that you should ballpark it to around the, ballpark around what their EOV is, which is not a great answer, but it tends to be the case. the ⁓ agencies, a lot of the times they kind of stop spinning at. Nathan Latka (12:37) Just to be clear, Ricardo, for folks that don't know the acronyms, AO, that you're basically saying you should ballpark that the, the, the, you'll spend on Facebook ads is equal to the average order value of the first checkout. So $60 for you or $48 for you. Ricardo Vice Santos (12:45) Correct. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. By the way, that's like I said, if you're gonna start, right? You wanna budget. Let's say you're aiming to get 50 sales per week or something. That used to be traditionally the threshold until Facebook considers that your campaigns are learned, you have learned. So if you have to budget, you kind of make the maths from that, right? So if it's 60, let's ballpark it to 60. ⁓ Then of course, you know. Why do do that? Well, because there's a bit of arbitrage here. A lot of people use beat caps and whatnot, and so they stop beating at when it crosses under the of the one bar. And so, like I said, if you're competing in a category, either one row is. So essentially this idea of like you spend $60 to get $60, right? So does you have a row of one, right? Of course, by the way, you want to have higher than that, right? You want to have two, three, four, whatever you can get, right? Nathan Latka (13:23) Under one what? Ricardo Vice Santos (13:35) But I'm trying to say is that a lot of the times there's a bit of an arbitrage around one because that's where everyone else starts, stops, spend up until that point, right? And so essentially, but if you can take like something that is the, again, if your competition is doing, let's say 60, right? If you imagine, and of course you can help beat above it because you have either repeat behavior or some so forth, then of course you can out beat them and you can make the economics work, right? And in this category, ⁓ Not coincidentally, the reason why I picked this category is because there was an existing behavior, which was gifting, right, people gifting to others. And you can search personalized books, right? There's a category with a lot of products, ⁓ some better than others. And as the behavior was there, my challenge was essentially just to build something that is better or slightly better and be able to just outbid them. Nathan Latka (14:28) Yep. So what are the rest of the economics in there? Like how do you, how do you really grow this thing? Right. Because if you're spending 60 bucks just to get the sort of the customer email, right. To try and resale on the second thing, but your margin also gets cut a little bit too, right. Cause you actually have to print and ship these books, right. Ricardo Vice Santos (14:43) Yeah, we do. But like I said, the upside of this is essentially the repeat purchases, Essentially getting people to do it. In this case, you put an adult, right? But what happens a lot of the times, and this is actually one of the things where the only people that I've seen doing it, we have multiple characters per book. Like I said, in this case, to add both of them, you'd need to, in the book, there's a button to add someone else. So what ends up happening is that a lot of the times people will add different members of the family, cousins, so on and so forth. And as a consequence, end up getting what I call reverse books. So essentially, can I get the exact same book, but the other kid's the hero, right? So they just reverse, right? ⁓ And it's a common behavior we see. Of course, the stories are episodic, as you can see there. we have a number of templates that we created with artists, but you Eventually, I want this to be infinite, right? Essentially, and that's what we're working on, the infinite content machine that essentially can, you you like dinosaurs, great. You can have, you you can keep on going with dinosaurs, you know, for the rest of the journey, right? Nathan Latka (15:48) How are you, is this hard coded? You're programmatically running the economics on how to offer the discounts or using some plugin or API tool to figure out how to drive up conversion and AOV on this page. Ricardo Vice Santos (15:58) No, that's a whole in-house actually. We built that ourselves. Nathan Latka (16:02) interesting. I imagine you built some secret sauce into that that no one else has. Is it, is that true? And if so, can you give us a hint? Ricardo Vice Santos (16:11) You mean the sort of the general e-commerce stuff? Nathan Latka (16:13) Yeah, I mean, right. There's a lot of these tools that help you like drive up AOV on the last page, right? Like, you know, double the order, increase the size, get one for your friend, know, discounting, right? You chose to build it from scratch for a reason. Ricardo Vice Santos (16:26) Yeah, mean, I've been so the thing is that there's a lot of things out there that work very well for, you know, e-commerce sites or with a lot of SKUs and, you know, and sort of I wouldn't, I don't want to call generic products because I don't want to imply there's anything bad about them. But in my case, you know, we both came to the snack company in this one, you know, it's generally I'm trying to build a service. ⁓ So something that essentially feels more like a service. And so does I up in the building a lot of stuff that is actually custom. So what you see here, this is Shopify, right? And it's very standard. Everything else you see is custom built, right? So we only use really Shopify for the last piece and order management and so on and so forth. Nathan Latka (17:00) Yep. This is super interesting. I just have to tell you, mean, when we were prepping this, like, I saw the website, I'm like, okay, maybe pre-reven, right? Cause it just looks so simple. But once you get in, holy mackerel, there's a lot of thought inside of this thing. Ricardo Vice Santos (17:18) Yeah. And I have to tell you, I think you're actually in an A-B test, they're seeing a version that I like least. So I wish, in a way, I wish that you were seeing us. I guess you're showing this and I'm like, shit, I wish he was showing the newer, cooler stuff. Nathan Latka (17:25) Ha ha. How many A-B tests are you running at any given point in time? Ricardo Vice Santos (17:35) Oof, it's quite a lot, right? The problem is that you, you know, right now I can tell running four, the problem is that depending on what you're testing, eventually start getting a lot across the results and you just start needing a lot more scale to make sense of the, you know, of the sort of the statistical stuff. Nathan Latka (17:51) What plugin are you using for this? A lot of people don't like some of these like review sites where they basically own all your reviews if you don't pay them massive amounts of money. What did you use to build out this sort of wall? Ricardo Vice Santos (17:56) Mm-hmm. yeah, this I'm glad to give him a shout out because I really like them. That's Luxe. Yeah, I'm super happy with them. They're very good at getting videos. As you saw, saw some on the funnel there. ⁓ They're actually a plugin we use that we're very, very happy with. It's also that sometimes you deal with companies that you can just tell that they... They really go the extra mile. They mean business in a way, right? And it's hard to describe, but if you set up something with them, you're kind of going to understand that, you know, they're competent, right? I don't know. I'm sure everyone at some point dealt with just companies that you just, shit, this guy is just so bad. Looks like I'm just very, very happy with them and impressed with overall their funnels, their setup, their level of polish. It just seems like they care, you know? Nathan Latka (18:51) that. love that. This is super man, I'm just I'm learning so much on this. So know my audience is gonna love this. ⁓ I guess let me get a sense of how I just asked you how many a b taz running you said for I mean, how aggressive are you being on your on your big channel like the paid spend? So are you comfortable sharing how much you're spending like per month? Is it like six figures on Facebook ads or or less? Ricardo Vice Santos (19:08) ⁓ It honestly really depends. think this month, ⁓ yes, we're in the six figures, we're kind of changing it ⁓ often. Oftentimes, we end up changing it back and forth. Nathan Latka (19:20) Okay, and immediately people are gonna go, well, okay, this guy must have raised a bunch of money to do that, or he's just, he's really rich, pong in his own money. Which one is it, or did I miss an option? Ricardo Vice Santos (19:26) No, I mean, again, if you make the economics work, don't need it. You can't need either, right? I don't want to be. I don't think there's such a thing as like free lunch, right? So I'm not going to tell you there's, know, there's a golden pot here. You should come eat it. But it does take a lot of, it does take a lot of work, right? To, build this, to build it. So, so yes, I did put it, put some money. did raise a little bit of money, not, not a lot externally, but I, but you know, I'm essentially building an AI content startup. Usually there's extremely capital intensive. And the difference with me is that I chose to go around where instead of giving people, know, essentially shit for free that I have to subsidize, let me come up with from day one, the model that I can monetize it. So while in a sense, it's more, I'm building in a more conservative manner, if you think about it, because, you know, it also brings a lot of headaches because I'm constantly having to balance the long-term vision of what we're building with the short-term, you know, sort of economics. It's not always easy, you know, but it also feels more grounded, right? I think sometimes one thing I see in some startups is that, let's put it this way, they go for bust and that's sometimes really good because it really works. But then other times you see that they launch a product and it doesn't stick and then you spent all this money and time building something that you never had market validation. So I kind of was a bit more, some people would say conservative in a good way, some people would say conservative in a bad way, that you're being too conservative. But that's nonetheless what I'm doing. Nathan Latka (20:52) And what ⁓ are you comfortable sharing how much you raise in your seed round for this company? Ricardo Vice Santos (20:57) ⁓ To be honest with I never shared it, but I can tell it was less than a million externally. Nathan Latka (21:02) Okay, okay, got it. Okay, well look, I told you we would talk about where you're at today and then get to your story. I got so intrigued with your story. mean, where you're at today, I didn't ask anything about your story. Let's go just backwards for a second. So, Spotify 2009, then you do Kenco. I believe you did what, a $3.4 million, I think, there. It was a freeze-dried smoothie based off my research. What happened to that company? Ricardo Vice Santos (21:19) with Kenko. We can, yeah, we can, we raised more with Kenco. think that to be honest, top of my mind, I remember maybe 20 or 30 million total ⁓ for the company. Yeah. The first, maybe you're talking about the first round, which was a 3 million, 3 million round, a 3 million seed round. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's, it's still around. I think that the, you know, with, you know, I basically have always had an interest in, in solid nutrition and food tech in particular. ⁓ And so I, you know, ⁓ Nathan Latka (21:30) wow. The seed, yeah. Ricardo Vice Santos (21:49) I got into this to a guy that was making some experiments with it and I saw like an opportunity to build a service around it again as opposed to a one-time thing. And so that's what I did. Now the company moved a little bit away from sort of direct to consumer into sort of selling on retail channels. In fact, that's also a plug I can make. You should go to Walmart or CVS and buy it. I'm still a large shareholder in the company so I appreciate that. ⁓ But yeah, but it moved away a little bit for more for that for that for essentially those channels, right? And so I Nathan Latka (22:16) Yeah So your co-founder Thomas, he's still running it then. Ricardo Vice Santos (22:27) Absolutely, and he's doing a great job. ⁓ I think I'm more of a digital slash technology guy, he's more of a traditional CPG guy. So we're actually great team in that regard. But when the company, we made the decision together to move more into retail and I felt he's the right guy to lead it. And so I stepped down from the role, but nothing bad happened there, just basically different direction for the company that made more sense for Tomas to lead for the long run. Nathan Latka (22:56) Yep, yep, super cool. Well hey, this is really valuable. go via. That's smart. Okay, cool. Last question, then I'll throw it over to you. How many folks are full-time right out of the business? Ricardo Vice Santos (22:57) Yes, go buy it at Walmart. So I feel like it was a good decision. Yeah, we're a very small team. We're currently seven on the team. So very, very, very small team. Most of them engineers, you know, as like I said, as we build out the platform. Nathan Latka (23:22) Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Are you using any technology to drive all the, when someone clicks on your Facebook ads, do they just go to your homepage or are you doing like a bunch of funnel testing there too? Ricardo Vice Santos (23:33) We do, but it's mostly in-house, right? It's similar to the platform we use for A-B tests. I mean, we use, it's not a secret, we use Postdoc for sort of data analytics and so forth. Also shout out to them, probably the best analytics. I feel like every two years or something, there's a new shiny platform. So maybe in two years we talk and I'll tell a new one, but Postdoc is really good. I would really recommend it. Shout out to them. And so that's kind of what we use. Nathan Latka (23:57) Just to be clear, Post Hog, you're talking PO, this one, right? Post Hog, this is their website, right? Yeah, yeah, great. It's kinda cool, yeah. Ricardo Vice Santos (24:03) Correct, They're very funny too. Their website is not very serious, know. Unusual for B2B SaaS, but nonetheless, very ⁓ cool. Nathan Latka (24:14) It works, yeah, so that's part of your tech stack. Look is part of your tech stack. Any other tech thing that you use that have just blown you away that you wanna give a shout out to? Ricardo Vice Santos (24:22) I mean, not new, right? But think Shopify is still very good, right? You know, I'm quite impressed with the product and we used it, know, at Kenco and now for a very long time, but that's not like the... I guess that's not what your audience wants to hear, right? Because everyone already knows that. But still, shout out to them. I think they did a good job and, you know, they do what they do very well. Nathan Latka (24:42) Yeah, no, look, we, we love the space. mean, you, you know, me as podcast hosts, cause that's how you rep reached out. But my full-time thing is, you know, we've deployed a quarter billion dollars into companies as non-delutive capital. my own fund and we've just started deploying money into Shopify applications, like funding, basically ad spend exactly, almost exactly what you're doing. Right. Um, and just undercutting Shopify money. It's a huge and powerful ecosystem. So, uh, makes tons of sense. Anything else that you, that I should have asked you or Carter that I didn't do over the past 15, 20 minutes. Ricardo Vice Santos (25:02) hehe ⁓ You should ask me if I'm hiring, because I am. ⁓ yes, I'm hiring. So please, you know, can email jobs at dreamsorries.ai. ⁓ Otherwise, I mean, mostly engineering, know, ⁓ engineering particularly around AI, Machine learning engineers ⁓ or whatever we're calling it these days, it keeps evolving. ⁓ But essentially, that's what we're looking for, right? Like I said, we're the... Nathan Latka (25:11) Are you hiring? What are you looking for? Ricardo Vice Santos (25:37) The part of the business that we discuss is very much what the business is today. I have, like said, this longer vision of where I believe content generally will go that spans beyond books and so forth. So we need people to actually execute it. Nathan Latka (25:53) Cool, Ricardo. Well, look, appreciate you coming on and sharing your story with us. Guys, I thought it was a simple website that was pre-revenue. Turns out they did over three million bucks of revenue driven mainly using Ricardo's brain when it comes to using paid ads and their Facebook page to drive a lot of traffic and a really impressive, almost ⁓ a stupid, simple onboarding process that just feels like magic when you do it to the point where you get a great customized sort of book. It may use case right now as kids, who knows where he'll take it in the future. He's got his own kid. He's building this for seven people full time on the team under a million raised. We'll see what happens next Ricardo. Thanks for taking us to the top dream stories.ai. ⁓ Ricardo Vice Santos (26:26) Thank you. Thank you, Nathan. soon.
Data and Sources
All figures on this page are taken directly from interviews or are estimates from public sources and proprietary models. Not financial advice. Read full disclaimer.
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