Founder Interview
How DreamStories.ai Crossed $3M in Revenue with 100,000 Sales Using Paid Acquisition (Interview with CEO Ricardo Vice Santos)
- Interview Date
- November 24, 2025
- Interviewee
- Ricardo Vice Santos, CEOCo-Founder and CEO
Company Metrics at Interview Time
Lifetime Revenue
$3M+
Total Sales
Close to 100,000
Average Order Value
$60
Team Size
7 full-time
External Funding Raised
Under $1M
Historical Snapshot
These numbers were reported by Ricardo Vice Santos during his interview recorded in November 2025 and represent a historical snapshot, not current figures. See DreamStories.ai’s current numbers.
Key Takeaways
- 01DreamStories.ai launched at the beginning of 2025 and only started scaling very recently
- 02The company has recorded close to 100,000 sales since launch
- 03Lifetime revenue is over $3 million even accounting for discounts
- 04Average order value is approximately $60, with a discounted price of $48
- 05Facebook paid ads are the primary growth channel, with six-figure monthly spend
- 06External funding raised is less than $1 million
- 07The team is seven people, mostly engineers
- 08The product is built on Shopify for order management with all other tooling custom-built
- 09Ricardo previously co-founded Kenco, which raised 20 to 30 million total and sells at Walmart and CVS
- 10Ricardo was a founding member of Spotify's US team, joining in 2009
Company Metrics at Time of Interview
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Lifetime Sales | Close to 100,000 | Founder interview, Nov 2025 |
| Lifetime Revenue (ballpark) | Over $3M | Founder interview, Nov 2025 |
| Standard Price Per Book | $60 | Founder interview, Nov 2025 |
| Discounted Price Per Book | $48 | Founder interview, Nov 2025 |
| Monthly Ad Spend | Six figures | Founder interview, Nov 2025 |
| External Funding Raised | Under $1M | Founder interview, Nov 2025 |
| Team Size | 7 full-time | Founder interview, Nov 2025 |
| A/B Tests Running Concurrently | 4 | Founder interview, Nov 2025 |
| Kenco Total Funding | 20 to 30 million | Founder interview, Nov 2025 |
| Kenco Seed Round | $3M | Founder interview, Nov 2025 |
| Spotify Join Year | 2009 | Founder interview, Nov 2025 |
Growth Breakdown
Revenue
DreamStories.ai has recorded close to 100,000 sales since launching at the beginning of 2025. At a standard price of $60 per book and accounting for discounts, Ricardo confirmed lifetime revenue is over $3 million. The company only began scaling aggressively very recently.
Customers
The vast majority of customers are parents who make their child the hero of a personalized printed book. Repeat purchase behavior is common, driven by reverse books where a sibling or cousin becomes the new hero, and by episodic story templates that families return to over time.
Team
The company operates with seven full-time employees, the majority of whom are engineers focused on building out the AI content platform. Ricardo described the team as very small relative to the revenue being generated.
Funding
Ricardo raised less than $1 million externally, supplementing that with personal capital from prior exits including Spotify options and proceeds from other ventures. He deliberately chose to monetize from day one rather than subsidize a free product with heavy outside capital.
Growth Strategy
Facebook Paid Acquisition
The primary growth channel is paid ads on Facebook, where Ricardo spends in the six figures per month. He targets a cost per acquisition roughly equal to the average order value of $60, then uses repeat purchase behavior and episodic content to make the unit economics work over time.
Frictionless Onboarding Funnel
The product flow requires only a photo upload to generate a personalized book preview, guiding users through a linear path before presenting a paywall. Ricardo described this agentic experience as something that does not make users learn a platform but simply guides them through.
Repeat and Reverse Purchase Mechanics
Ricardo built in mechanics that drive repeat orders, including the ability to add multiple family members as characters and the reverse book behavior where families order the same story with a different child as the hero. Episodic story templates also encourage ongoing purchases.
Custom-Built Conversion Tooling
All conversion optimization beyond Shopify order management is built in-house, including the discount logic, upsell flows, and A/B testing infrastructure. Ricardo chose to build custom rather than use off-the-shelf e-commerce tools because the product functions more like a service than a standard SKU.
Bidding Arbitrage in a Gifting Category
Ricardo identified that competitors in the personalized book gifting category typically stop bidding when cost per acquisition crosses the average order value, creating an arbitrage opportunity. By building in repeat purchase value, DreamStories.ai can profitably outbid competitors who treat each sale as a one-time transaction.
Best Quotes
“Close to 100,000. are the, of course, yeah.”
“We launched at the beginning of this year. We only really started scaling very recently.”
“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.”
“I mean, again, if you make the economics work, don't need it. You can't need either, right?”
“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.”
“To be honest with I never shared it, but I can tell it was less than a million externally.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Not coincidentally, the reason why I picked this category is because there was an existing behavior, which was gifting, right, people gifting to others.”
What Happened Next
This interview was recorded in November 2025 and captures DreamStories.ai at an early but rapidly scaling stage, with close to 100,000 lifetime sales and over $3 million in revenue reported by Ricardo Vice Santos at that time. The company had only recently begun aggressive scaling and Ricardo described a longer vision for the platform extending well beyond children's books. Visit the DreamStories.ai company profile on getLatka for current metrics and updated figures.
View DreamStories.ai’s current profile and metricsFull Transcript
Chapters
- 0:01Introduction and Ricardo's Background
- 0:22Spotify Options and Early Wealth
- 1:08What Is DreamStories.ai
- 3:51Children's Book Market and Revenue Model
- 5:48Product Demo and Paywall
- 8:21Sales Volume and Lifetime Revenue
- 10:36Facebook Paid Acquisition Strategy
- 12:24CAC Targets and Bidding Arbitrage
- 14:28Repeat Purchase and Reverse Book Mechanics
- 15:58Custom-Built Tech Stack and A/B Testing
- 19:00Funding and Capital Strategy
- 21:01Kenco Snack Company History
- 22:57Team Size and Hiring
- 25:02Analytics Tools and Tech Stack Shoutouts
- 25:53Closing Thoughts and Hiring Call
Introduction and Ricardo's Background
Nathan Latka
0:01Hey 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, CEO
0:21Absolutely.
Spotify Options and Early Wealth
Nathan Latka
0:22All right, people hear Spotify and early and they assume you got rich off options. Is that accurate?
Ricardo Vice Santos, CEO
0:28Fairly accurate, yes. I was early enough that it made sense, yes.
Nathan Latka
0:32What year was that?
Ricardo Vice Santos, CEO
0:35So I joined in 2009 I guess, yeah.
Nathan Latka
0:39Okay, 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, CEO
0:51Yeah, 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.
What Is DreamStories.ai
Nathan Latka
1:08Fair 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, CEO
1:18Yeah, 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
3:09S-U-N-O.
3:13There'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.
Children's Book Market and Revenue Model
Nathan Latka
3:51Interesting. ⁓ 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, CEO
4:05Yeah, 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.
Product Demo and Paywall
Nathan Latka
5:48What's the status right now in the company? you pre revenue post revenue?
Ricardo Vice Santos, CEO
5:52No, 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
6:48This 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, CEO
6:55Mm-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,
7:05I see, I see. So when will I hit a paywall? ⁓ yeah.
7:26If you keep going, eventually you will hear the paywall to create the full book for you.
7:31Interesting. 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.
7:40Yeah, you're going to go to the item. give you a nice discount code.
7:45to get 12 fire purges. So what's the total price going to be?
7:49Yeah, no, with this discount it will be 48.
7:53interesting, okay. So are people making their kid the hero?
7:58Generally, yeah, we have sometimes pets, but the vast majority will put their kid, right?
8:04Wait, so where's the paywall? When will I hit the paywall? order book.
8:07There we go.
8:10I see. Is this accurate so you have 648 sales so far?
8:15And now we have more sales, those are reviews, right?
8:18sorry. Can I ask how many sales total you have so far?
Sales Volume and Lifetime Revenue
Nathan Latka
8:21Yeah, close to 100,000. are the, of course, yeah.
8:24wow. That's a ton. When did you launch?
8:28We launched ⁓ at the beginning of this year. We only really started scaling very recently.
8:36That's wild. mean, and, was your price always like 60 bucks a pop?
8:40Yeah, 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.
Ricardo Vice Santos, CEO
8:51I 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.
Nathan Latka
8:59⁓ 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.
9:11Well, 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.
9:18Mm-hmm. Yep.
Ricardo Vice Santos, CEO
9:20Is 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.
9:24I'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
10:18I 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?
Facebook Paid Acquisition Strategy
Ricardo Vice Santos, CEO
10:36I mean we're getting a lot ⁓ via Facebook essentially, ⁓ so we're actually not doing so much organic here.
10:47I see. ⁓ you have a community on, tell me more about the Facebook strategy.
10:52Yeah, 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
11:44This 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.
12:06How do I know? Is that the question?
12:09Yeah, 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?
12:15Now, 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
12:37Just 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.
12:45Correct. 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?
Ricardo Vice Santos, CEO
13:23Under one what?
13:35But 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.
Repeat Purchase and Reverse Book Mechanics
Nathan Latka
14:28Yep. 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, CEO
14:43Yeah, 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
15:48How 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.
Custom-Built Tech Stack and A/B Testing
Ricardo Vice Santos, CEO
15:58No, that's a whole in-house actually. We built that ourselves.
16:02interesting. 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?
16:11You mean the sort of the general e-commerce stuff?
16:13Yeah, 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.
16:26Yeah, 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.
17:00Yep. 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.
17:18Yeah. 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.
17:25Ha ha. How many A-B tests are you running at any given point in time?
17:35Oof, 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
17:51What 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?
17:56Mm-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?
Ricardo Vice Santos, CEO
18:51that. 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?
Nathan Latka
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.
Ricardo Vice Santos, CEO
19:20Okay, 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?
19:26No, 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.
20:52And what ⁓ are you comfortable sharing how much you raise in your seed round for this company?
20:57⁓ To be honest with I never shared it, but I can tell it was less than a million externally.
Nathan Latka
21:02Okay, 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, CEO
21:19with 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, ⁓
21:30wow. The seed, yeah.
21:49I 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
22:16Yeah So your co-founder Thomas, he's still running it then.
Ricardo Vice Santos, CEO
22:27Absolutely, 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.
22:56Yep, 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?
Team Size and Hiring
Nathan Latka
22:57Yes, 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.
Ricardo Vice Santos, CEO
23:22Yeah, 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?
Nathan Latka
23:33We 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.
Ricardo Vice Santos, CEO
23:57Just 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.
24:03Correct, They're very funny too. Their website is not very serious, know. Unusual for B2B SaaS, but nonetheless, very ⁓ cool.
24:14It 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?
24:22I 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
24:42Yeah, 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.
Analytics Tools and Tech Stack Shoutouts
Ricardo Vice Santos, CEO
25:02hehe ⁓ 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...
25:11Are you hiring? What are you looking for?
Nathan Latka
25:37The 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.
Closing Thoughts and Hiring Call
Nathan Latka
25:53Cool, 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, CEO
26:26Thank you. Thank you, Nathan. soon.