Fighting Cancer to $30M+ AI Startup
Hello Tribe,
Welcome to another exciting edition of MoneyMint! We're more than just a newsletter—we're a community of go-getters, dreamers, and doers.
How a College Dropout Built a $30M+ Company
Meet David Park, the 27-year-old founder who built a $30M+ AI startup from scratch.
This is his story in short:
But his journey was far from a straight line to success.
It all started when David was just 16, bitten by the entrepreneurial bug.
His first venture? An apparel brand.
The result? Failure.
His parents, both entrepreneurs themselves, wanted a more stable future for their son.
So they helped pay for college, hoping to steer him away from the rocky path of entrepreneurship.
But David didn't fit in at college.
Not with his fraternity brothers.
Not with his classmates.
He was surrounded by people, yet always felt alone.
So he did what any misfit with a dream would do:
He dropped out.
Another failure.
Then he met Henry Mao, someone who shared his love for AI and entrepreneurship.
Together, they started a wild journey of trying out different startups.
9 or 10 ventures, by David's count.
All of them? You guessed it. Failures.
But then they discovered GPT-2, and everything changed.
They fed it a simple prompt: "Tell us a story."
GPT-2's response?
"Nothing is darker than a butthole."
David and Henry found it hilarious.
That one line about buttholes convinced these two "buttholes" to create Jenni.
The initial idea? Help agencies write better content faster with AI.
Henry coded, David sold.
And by "sold," I mean cold-called until his voice gave out.
David's mom would wake up to him pitching poor souls, and go to sleep to the same sound.
He worked day and night, fueled by a dream and Chipotle burritos charged to his mom's credit card.
He had no money. Felt like a loser.
But his parents believed in him, even when he didn't believe in himself.
Then GPT-3 dropped in 2020, and companies started knocking on Jenni's door, curious about AI.
They got some users but stalled at $2K monthly revenue for the next 3 years.
So David did something that changed everything:
He started talking to users.
Not just asking what they liked, but what they disliked.
What they loved about other products.
How Jenni fit into their workflow.
The insights were game-changing.
Users wanted a friendly AI writing assistant.
So David and Henry tweaked Jenni, pivoted to academia, focusing on college students writing research papers.
Then a tweet from Zain Kahn, an AI enthusiast with 500K+ followers, changed David's life overnight.
He listed Jenni as one of "10 free websites that are so valuable they feel illegal to know."
The tweet went mega-viral. 342K+ likes. 66K+ retweets.
Jenni's MRR shot from $2K to $10K practically overnight.
They rode the viral wave, hiring a college buddy to create TikToks and Reels.
Millions of views. Thousands of new users.
Scaling to $50K MRR, then $80K.
But just as success seemed within reach, David was hit with a bombshell:
Thyroid cancer.
"It felt like my dreams and nightmares were happening at the same time," he recalled.
Months of treatment and surgery later, he was cancer-free.
And Jenni.ai?
It now boasts over 2.5M users and a $30M+ valuation.
David's journey, in his own words:
"That's over 10 years of failure" before finding success.
The key takeaways?
Accept failure as part of the process
Find a co-founder who shares your vision
Talk to users obsessively
Adapt based on what users need
Ride the viral wave when it comes
Push through personal and professional obstacles
David's story shows the power of resilience, flexibility, and a bit of luck.
From college dropout to cancer survivor to AI startup founder.
A decade of failures, leading to overnight success years in the making.
So, what's your "butthole" moment?
What will convince you to take the leap and build something amazing?
As David's journey shows, the path to success is paved with failures.
But if you persist, pivot, and never stop pursuing your vision?
You might just build the next million dollar AI startup.
Or, at the very least, create something that makes people laugh, think, and dream bigger.
Because in the end, that's what it's all about.
In the next edition of this newsletter, I will cover how David got a breakthrough and scaled Jenni AI's revenue from $2,000 to $150,000 in monthly revenue.
So make sure to subscribe and stay tuned for the next newsletter. I promise it will be interesting.
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Thank you for reading. See you in the next time.
What a great bloody story!!