How Arcads Grew to $10M ARR in 20 Months With AI Video Ads and a Sales Team

We just reached 10,000,000 in annual recurring revenue, $10,000,000, 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. 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 Romain Torres. He has launched and is building arcads.ai. He helps you generate ads easy without paying $30 a month on an agency to go do it for you. He's scaling very quickly, over $5,000,000 of revenue, but we have an update today in terms of revenue we're gonna jump into, and then jump jump into all the growth tactics he's using to scale nicely and bootstrapped. So, Romain, are you ready to take us to the top?

Yeah. Let's do it.

Alright. We'll kick us off. I don't wanna bury your lead. What's revenue today? We're recording this on 11/14/2025.

Yeah. We just reached 10,000,000 in annual recurring revenue, $10,000,000, and it's growing super fast.

Can I push you on that? Like, we see so many fake revenue screenshots, and people will say, Nathan, people just come on your show and they make up revenue numbers. 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 gonna be Okay. 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 01/01/2024? Okay. 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

January 2024 to right here, we were making, like, something like $5,000 in revenue. At the time Mhmm. All we were doing is we were reaching out to existing brands, and we told them, okay. We are gonna create ads for you. You usually see video ads. We are gonna make this a little bit cheaper. The turnaround will be faster. But the only thing is we are gonna generate these ads using AI. So we actually didn't even have

a dashboard. People couldn't, like, log in and and create ads. And we did that for them as a service. We just wanted to validate the ID. People were okay to pay for an AI generated ad. And also, we wanted to validate that when we ship this ad for them, they could have results and they would order more of these ads. So we validate the ID, and then we launched the product. We got this huge spike of traffic right here. We went from zero to almost 1,000,000 in annual recurring revenue.

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 I understood, like, Twitter will be important for us. So I started posting content about how you can use AI to create 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 at this time, it was in

March. You can definitely see the spike right here. Yeah. We were making, like, something, like, maybe 10, 20 sales a day.

And I would wake up during the... Like, in the morning, and I was looking at this Slack channel where we we could see all the saves that we got during the night because I was in Europe and the saves happened in The US. And it was like, okay. Did we get 10? Did did we get 20? And it was like, actually hundreds. And I was rolling 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 cards, 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. 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 sales, I then went to the customer support chat 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. So we had to refund everyone and rebuild a significant part of the product. That was actually a major piece of the product that was completely broken. 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 crazy since.

And then you had crazy growth. Before we go away from the screenshot though, we're gonna 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 rhodograph where it sort of flatlined a little bit. What happened there?

Yeah. That's a good point. So here, we basically...

Can you hover over it just so the audience can see? Yeah. Yeah. Like

So we're growing, but 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. But, basically, what happened here is I'm leading marketing and my co founder is leading product. And no one in the team was leading sales. And our product is product led, meaning we we don't really... We didn't

really focus on on the sales team too much. The only two things that we do is, like, I do marketing, my co founder does product. But during this time, I was like, okay. We need to build the sales team for the biggest clients, like the ones on our... Thousands 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 basically spent this time focusing on sales and didn't spend much time 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

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 $10,000,000 of revenue?

So now we are eight in the team.

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 a month of revenue to €800 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 the one that that I took two months setting up, hiring the first sales hire. We actually have two people in the sales team now. So that was the, like, the the big change. Now we are closing much bigger deals with, like, bigger brands. I cannot necessarily give all the names yet, but those deals are very significant. So that's one. And we did, like, a lot of conferences to be in

touch with these people. We did a lot of direct outreach and all the channels that you will do when you are doing sales.

And Mhmm.

The second one is more product led, and this one is very important for me. It's paid ads 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 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. That's the most direct feedback loop you

can have. 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 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. So we know that posting content online can bring traction. So we basically

started doing the same thing with influencers and other people.

Guys, remember, I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing into my third fund. We've deployed $250,000,000 into 550 software companies so far, again, founderpath.com. 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. Just reply and say, Nathan, I found you through YouTube and

I'll make sure to prioritize you. 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 500,000, you know, 5,000,000 of revenue to 10,000,000 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. So maybe quantify influencer marketing first. How many

influencers did you pay at least a dollar in the last thirty days, and what total spend did you put towards influencers in the last thirty days?

So this, I think I wanna keep private because we... I know our competitors will be watching this. 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. We can, like, talk about more overall tactics without going too much into details. Right?

I guess the reason I'm asking is, you know, most founders are... SaaS founders are are used to this sort of, hey, we're gonna spend 20 to 25%, right, of our top line revenue on sales. Right? Whether it's marketing and paid ads, sales team, etcetera. 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 guidance or direction? I mean, are you spending 40% of your monthly revenue on influencer marketing or 5% or something different?

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, a 100% profitably. We have super healthy margins. We also have API costs to generate videos on our content. Maybe I can do a very quick demo of, like, how this looks like and how people can use the product. But Yeah.

Yeah. Why don't why don't you do... I'd love to actually, like, see, obviously, that in the product. I mean, look. I'm I'm gonna focus here on asking the questions that people are always beating up AI wrap. They call... They say, oh, it's just an AI wrapper. 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 and train how you're doing that, you're gonna usher in sort of this next generation of really great founders building on AI. So I won't push you harder than what you wanna share, but the more you can share, the better.

Yeah. So, basically, if you look at the market of AI... Gen AI Gen AI, At the bottom, you will have the providers of the models. So these companies are companies like OpenAI that will create very good models. You'll find companies like Google that released v o 3.1 recently. You'll find companies like Meta who is building some LLMs, and you'll also find Chinese companies like Cling or Bydance,

the the company that like, behind TikTok. Those are the main mobile providers on the market. But these will create the foundational models that will make 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 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. 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 these providers, large foundational models that tend to be generalists, that focus on very specific use cases that they want to tackle and that we are the only ones to do and that we are

the best in the world to do. 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. We'll, like, basically offer more support to the more enterprise clients to help them master all of these AI technologies.

Romain, 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. Are you comfortable sharing what sort of... That you're... Don't name them, but your biggest customers today, are they paying... Like, are they paying? What's your highest ACV today?

It's gonna be 6 figures at the moment. Okay. And I think it's... And then you're grow

your sales team drive those customers into the 6 figures? Is it usage based upselling, number of videos? Is it feature based upselling, seat based upselling? Which of those three?

For us, it's been usage based. So if you if you look at, like, the market, like, two years ago, no one was doing Gen AI for advertising. Then during the past two years, people started implementing that, and the usage has been growing up and up and up. And it went from, like, maybe 0% at the time of video on the Facebook ads library of a client being AI generated to five, 10. And now some companies are

a 100% AI generated ads. So the usage is growing more and more and more again, it's becoming more and more competitive to create ads and to to get... To create profitable ads. So for this reason, 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 a bottoms up approach. People that start off paying you a little bit, put sales touch on them, up some to a $100 plus per year, and you think this is gonna be a large part of your growth story over the next year.

Yeah, a 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 you're... Is... You said paid ads. Are you comfortable sharing there? I mean, are we talking like a $100 a month on paid ads or something lower or higher?

So, again, I I won't share exact numbers. Again, I can tell you we are super profitable, and we won't spend if we are not profitable. Then, like Can

you share what that means when you say super profitable? I mean, is that, 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, and to... I can show you some of the

give me a percent, though. You'll just you'll just say a lot.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Correct.

Alright. 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.

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 Okay. Was a very good ad for sure. And the problem was that How do know

it was a good ad, though? Are you looking at click through rate, or are you 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. But what I mean here, like, visually, already, I 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.

So your audience will probably not understand this, but it's basically the same ads.

How did you decide 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. 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, it probably means this one is working well, and we'll basically take the same one and repeat it in multiple situations. If it doesn't really perform as well, we'll also AB test and try other versions, other AI versions of her. And, yeah, all of that has been done on the platform as you can see right here.

So hold on hold on, Romain, because you know this. You're in this every day, but my audience doesn't. I don't want people to get lost. So my audience right now is looking at this going, wait. Romain is at 10,000,000 of revenue. He's running hundreds of ad variations with a 10 per... With an eight person team. How the hell is he doing this? So 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, etcetera?

So the first part of the system is getting the IDs. Getting the IDs, and for that, we basically built a Notion file with tons of IDs every time we see a new ad.

You're saying ideas. Right? Ideas.

Yeah. Ideas. Exactly. Yeah. And then when we get ideas, 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 gonna generate video variations of these IDs. Right? And that's what our platform lets you do. 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. Mhmm. And you'll be able to select 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 the person hold the product. If you sell a physical product, let's say you are Nike and 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 2% of 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. 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 a Nike shoe. I think I think it's a good one. It's a good way to... Everyone knows that. Right? So I'm gonna just go to Google, look for an image of Nike shoe. Let's look at... I don't know. Maybe this one. Blue one is pretty good.

Mhmm.

And then we'll go to our cards 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 high rocks challenge. Let's say it's an athlete like you, a high rock... A high rocks athlete, a young male.

A young male who just completed a HiRux a HiRux. Okay. Let's generate that. You could also import a photo of yourself. I could, like, definitely use the picture that I uploaded here on Twitter for the HiRux. So it's gonna take less...

We still see Nike shoes, Romain. We still see Google search

Nike Oh my god. Yeah. Right here. It generates. There we go. So it's gonna take a couple of seconds to generate the first version of of this young male. You'll have multiple options. Obviously, you could have made a much longer, more detailed prompt where you will, like, give details about the space they are in, but that's really cool.

What what are you sitting on top of on this? Are you paying for OpenAI credits or Anthropic? Or who are you sitting on top of here?

So this one is gonna be either Google's Nano Banana or Sea Dream from from Maidens, the company behind TikTok. Okay. So we will all basically read your problem, select the best model for you based on your prompt.

Mhmm. Mhmm.

So it's been... I mean, the prompt was quite short, but it's really, really good because it understood that it was a Hirocs. It added them to the specific... Like, I don't know if you did this type of phrase, but you will see exactly this type of, like, environment when you do a

Let's do the last one. Yeah.

And then you can, like, select this person, add your image, and then generate new version of them. Have him hold the shoe, and you can generate that. Mhmm. It's gonna take a couple of seconds.

While this is loading Romain, are are... How expensive... Like, if I'm if I'm an archives customer right now and I'm paying you $60 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 $100 a month to make it easy. How much of the $100 a month are you paying out to see Dream 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 $5? Is it... I mean, I'm just curious a metric there.

It's... It depends on the model sense you will use. And so it's hard to give a response, like, for a single type of generation. Because, for example, for image, it's gonna be free for our users to do that. And as you can see, there was some Mhmm. Issue with the the The arms.

Yeah. Yeah.

Let's let's start again.

Is this a big... Can you rank these? Like, I'm sensitive that you don't wanna share specific numbers, but I'm just... I'm trying to get a relative understanding of you spend money on ads every month, you spend money on influencers every month, and you spend money on your cost of goods sold, right, paying 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 dip. 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. I don't want them to be able to guess like how much we are spending in each models. We also have some competitions in some NDAs with providers. I'm not sure I want to go into the details of that, but maybe that's time for another conversation when when we come back in in in two years.

Cool. Yeah. Okay. Well, this one looks like it generated nicely.

Yeah. I like this one. So now I can turn this into a talking actor. And you can iterate as many times as you want on the on the image, by the way.

Okay. But this is where people will get stuck. Right? Because there's... There are people... First off, most people watching this, they're just very bad on camera in general. 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. That's a good point. So first, I think that's one skill that, until now, was very important, but that is gonna be completely replaced by AI over time. Basically, what will happen, I think, is you'll describe your product. AI will come up with a script for you. They will use a platform like Arcades 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. I think that's the vision that we have, and that is going to be the feature. 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. It's the

first sentence. It's what will get people to click on a video. So you can basically go to hook generator, getarchitect.ai/hookgenerator, describe your product, and it will automatically generate the hooks for you and give you IDs of hooks that are likely to work well, and that's a good starting point. Yep. And then you will put that into Arcas, generate the video, and, yeah, test it. So once we're happy with the AI Alright.

Well, cool. So you guys just saw a good, obviously, tour here. We spent a couple minutes there inside of Arcadz. Romain, maybe we can drop... You can maybe stop screen sharing. We can jump back into sort of just the rest of the interview. You as a Founder, obviously, growing to $10,000,000 of revenue in twenty months. Bootstrapped is obviously pretty impressive. You're obviously spending on ads, etcetera. You put out a Twitter post where you said your top

channels were really paid ads, direct outreach, events and conferences like Affiliate World, App Growth Summit, etcetera. Is there anything that you'd recommend just for other founders launching, like mistakes you made in any of these channels that they should avoid, maybe on paid ads?

So paid ads, probably the biggest mistake is not testing enough ads and not testing ads for enough time. So paid ads are very competitive. It's very hard to make them work. And what will... People mostly will do is they will put like a $100 and say, it's not working. They will like just test one ad with $100 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 well, and then you think, okay. I will never swim in my life. That's that's 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. You need

to test a lot of different ads, and AI makes it much easier to test so many so many ads. You need to also be 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 what's sticking.

There, guys. There you have it again. You gotta get volume, volume, volume, volume because you just don't know what's gonna stick. Romain, 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 twelve months, zero to this many paying customers and 5,000,000 of revenue with a team of five. Are you able to share what's the updated paid customer paid subscriber number today?

Yeah. It's pretty much twice twice much. Yeah. Two times that.

So have you broken 6,000? 6,000 paying customers? Yeah. Very cool. Very cool. Alright. 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.

I... 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

in, like, three years. So if you don't start doing this right now, basically, you will get left behind. 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 growing company, but I'm always happy to talk to customers.

Mhmm. Why... Let me... A channel that's working for other folks that I actually see you maybe underperforming on, and it's actually free, so it's maybe more cost efficient than paid ads, is actually SEO. You're getting... Based off Ahrefs here, you're getting about 5,300 organic clicks per per month to arcads.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 .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, organic content. So, yeah, please reach out if you are doing some SEO stuff.

Okay. So that's something you're thinking about. You know, that's... Actually, that's a good question for you. So you're gonna start experimenting with SEO. There any other growth channels that you're gonna start experimenting with as you go from... Know, you try to go from 10,000,000 to a 100,000,000 of revenue?

Yeah. So I think enterprise sales will be a big one, so I want to focus much more on that. We are just, like, scratching the surface when it comes to that. SEO has been proven to be very important also for people in our space, so we are gonna be doing more of that. And, yeah, I think those are the two biggest focuses we have right now.

Mhmm. Very cool. 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 to... It'd be irresponsible as a podcast host for me not to ask this. Icon obviously made a ton of noise when they launched. Right? Really interesting sort of launch strategy, but then when you read the reviews, there's a lot of people saying the hype video was

basically animations that weren't not actually real in the dashboard. The product didn't actually exist and their churn just spiked through the roof and sort of now they're sort of loud on Twitter, we're not quite obviously sure what they're doing from a revenue perspective, but can you maybe just give any perspective you have in terms of, you have a lot of competitors, So how do you build a real moat where people use you, they use you over and over, they upsell, and before you know they're paying you a $100 a month not switching to any competitors, or a $100 per year, and they're not switching to other competitors?

So is your question like how do you do that?

Yeah. Yeah. The the the question the question is there's a lot of folks launching very loudly right now, but the product does not back it up. You are sort of the opposite in my opinion. You launched pretty quietly. Right? You happened to sort of... One of your viral... One... Your product was so good, one of your customers posted something that went viral and that led to your growth. You didn't have some big expensive launch video where

you announced a $50,000,000 round of funding from Peter Thiel, right? You did the opposite. So I guess what I'm get trying at here is what's the balance between just you know, no promotion, stay focused, great product, you stay in your hole and just code and write, know, build a good product versus going out, doing the podcast, doing the big launch stories, doing the highly produced videos, etcetera?

Mhmm. That's a good question. So I... I'm very lucky because we are two cofounders, and my cofounder, he's handling the product. I'm handling the marketing and the sales. So for me, I can just, like, focus entirely on marketing and sales, and I know the products will be the best version possible. And actually, that's our number one acquisition channel is just product led growth and making the best products in the true hack

to grow your company. So if... I I guess it's weird of me to say that because I'm focused on marketing, but if I had to only pick one, I will focus on products

because that's... Like, if you have the best, I don't know, let's say you are into investments and you find a way to profit, I don't know, 20% a year without any risk, but you live in the, like, the middle of Antarctica, people will find you. And they will, like like, throw money at you to invest this money on a 20% monthly return or even yearly return. And you don't need

to do marketing because your product, like the the investment vehicle you built, is so good and is so perfect that people will find you. So I think everyone should aim for that. But that being said, marketing is obviously a very good accelerator of a good product. So when you can get the both both of them to work together, then it's beautiful and it's just, like, growing much faster.

It's it's zen. You're in rhythm. How did... What's that relationship between you and your partner? Did you guys at the beginning just say, hey. Look. We're equals. Let's just split it fifty fifty, or was the equity conversation early on a little tougher than that?

We are fifty fifty. We... We've known each other for ten years now. My only experience is working with him, so I don't know anything else business wide. And we basically grew together. So it's like the thing I'm most happy with when it comes to my career is finding Dylan and working with him early on when

we're just, like, 18 years old students and building stuff and learning stuff together. So... Yeah. I mean, that makes the journey 20 times better, having a good cofounder.

And how old are you today?

I am 30.

30. 30. Okay. Very cool. Last question here. You're a team of eight. You've just broken 10,000,000 of revenue. You're bootstrapped. You and your partner own $50.50 each. Maybe there's a little ESOP pool. But if someone came to you today and offered you a 150,000,000 all cash upfront to sell ArcAds, would you take the deal?

We won't. And I think if you look at, like, what we are building, we are probably building one of the most exciting thing one can build. We are... If you think about the, like, the most beautiful companies in the world, I think companies like Apple, they are always at this spot between technology and creativity. And the tool that enable creativity through technology are the tool that can become the biggest companies in the world. And we are

exactly in this spot. We help marketing teams create ads with AI. Every single ad we all see will be AI generated soon. So I think there is nothing more exciting we could be building. So... No. Like, we won't.

Alright. Well, Romain, if people wanna learn more about you online, where can they find you?

Probably x is the best way. I post a lot of content about our journey. I'm very public about what we do. So, yeah, feel free to reach out on x.

Guys, Romain and his partner Dylan at ArcAds have grown from 0 to $10,000,000 of revenue in just about twenty months, breaking 6,000 paid customers, of which some pay over a $100,000 per year for the product. Their total team today, just eight people, so incredible revenue per employee. They've done this all bootstrapped using three main growth channels, their sales team, paid ads, and influencer marketing. Better yet, they've been profitable through the entire first twenty months journey. We'll

see what happens next, but check them out at arcads.ai. Romain, thanks for taking us to the top.

Thanks, Ben.