The Underdog: From His Parent’s Basement to $25M

all right David what's your story I was working from my parents house in the bedroom day and night I had no money and it was time to really it was time to Make It or Break It this is David Park and for years he tried everything to make money I started my first company when I was 16 I'm 27 now that's a decade of failing then one day he came across an idea that would change his life forever but at the beginning things weren't looking so bright a cold called every single Agency for 8 hours

a day for weeks and weeks and weeks they hang up on you reject you literally probably 99% of the time but when everything was at its worst David experienced a miracle suddenly we get a huge wave of users when we're getting to 50 60 880,000 Mr then I got a cancer diagnosis and it felt like my dreams and nightmares were happening at the same time this is the story of how David Park built an AI app to a $25 million valuation in Just 2 years I'm Pat walls and this is starter story David grew up

in a family of entrepreneurs and even though they never had a lot of money he still had a dream that he could be one too when I was in seventh grade I thought you know man it'd be so cool if like if I'm a founder and it'd be so cool if I can build stuff and so when I was 16 I actually made my first company was like a clothing brand obviously it failed spectacularly David experienced his first failure early on and like all protective parents they sacrificed everything they had to send him off to

a college in hopes for a better life my parents gave me $20,000 and they said you know you go to college you're going to have a better life than us you're going to go be a lawyer doctor the sad thing is I kind of felt like I didn't really fit in anywhere I didn't really feel it fit in in my fraternity I didn't really feel it fit in with like the people in my major I was always surrounded by people but I was like a little bit lonely which is kind of sad David was facing

a dilemma he was an entrepreneur at heart but he was trapped in an environment that didn't make him happy so we made a huge decision he decided to drop out and Chase his dreams of starting a startup and luckily along the way he meets someone just as weird and passionate as him his eventual business partner and co-founder Henry he loved AI I loved writing we always try to find some way to make it work the sum total of failed startups that we did together was probably n or 10 which is pretty nuts eventually we stumbled

upon gpt2 we asked it to tell us a story gpt2 spit out this line that said nothing is darker than a butthole and and obviously as two people enamored with this Tech we were raving we're like this is the funniest line ever also it's profound that butthole sentence convinced us two but holes to create Jenny all right so this is a quick product uh video for Jenny the boys had found their idea and and now the business was in motion Henry would do the coding and David would do the selling their goal was simple create

a product to help agencies write better content with the help of AI and their next goal was to make their first dollar that was like a terrible painful time of uh cold calls obviously nobody wants to talk with you they hang up on you reject you you have to get used to getting rejected so I was working from my parents house just in the bedroom it was pretty sad my mom she would wake up and then she'd hear me just like raving to some poor soul about why they need to invest in us or they

need to buy us and then she'd go before she'd go to sleep she'd still hear me kind of speaking to some other poor fellow so I like pretty much just working uh day and night the worst part was like Korean moms will just get together and just talk about their kids like their trading cards like my kid is now a level two Amazon engineer my kid is now doing their masters at Stanford and then it would get to my mom's turn and she would just say oh my son is working on a startup the most

humilating thing was I had to ask my mom for her card if I wanted to get Chipotle cuz I just had like no money I was a real loser but my parents were so kind to me like they never made me feel like a loser like they would always um they would always give me food and they never make me feel bad about um uh they never they never [Music] uh so they never make me feel bad about anything they just always like there was always just food on the table on days that I didn't

believe in myself I felt like my parents believed in me my co-founder would believe in me my friends obviously believed in me so it was painful but I guess I'm glad that I went through them yeah in 2020 GPT 3 came out David is getting some traction thanks to a wave of businesses wanting to get their hands on AI they're getting users but eventually they hit a plateau they try everything but they can't get past $2,000 a month in Revenue then David learns and implements something that would change his business forever it really came down

to the boring stuff of just talk to your users ask the more difficult questions of you know you shouldn't be asking why do you like my product you should be asking why do you dislike my product like what like what do you love about other people's products the focal point of I feel like many Founders they talk to users is like they make it about themselves and their product when it should really be about the users tell me about your current workflow how does Jenny fit into it what exactly do you do with Jenny or

like can you share your screen and can we write an article together these insights are really important we realized that people wanted to have a friendly AI assisted writing journey and so when we pulled out everything that was when we really started to grow after months of talking to customers and refining the product they start to find a new audience for Jenny but at this point David basically has 0 left in his bank account he's exhausted all of his options but he decides to try one more thing he agrees to go on a random podcast

to talk about his startup Journey it doesn't have that many listeners but luckily one Scout for Jason calanus happened to listen to the podcast the craziest Miracle ever cuz like it was not viewed by many people and so I got a $100,000 check from Jason like I said I was living off Shin Ramen and you know what whatever my parents put out on the dinner table so $100,000 was so crazy the first thing we do is my co-founder and I we book a flight to Malaysia because at the very least it'll cut down our Burn

by 1/4th we basically just want to extend our Runway because we kind of didn't trust ourselves with the money it was a crazy moment getting the check but I didn't feel successful at all because now the real job of getting my hands dirty was actually getting started I kind of raved earlier about like how much I love my family but but um I was alone by myself it was very productive but it was very lonely it was tough it was it was character building I would say I had 100K check I was completely by myself

it was time to Make It or Break It Now the real dirty work had begun with a bit of funding and a tiny Runway David and his co-founder spent the next several months iterating and building Jenny into a completely new product talking to customers documenting the progress and trying just about anything to increase Revenue then one night something incredible happens suddenly we get a huge wave of users every minute I refreshed the page I think we would get tens of us new users every minute that I refresh the page a guy named Zay Khan posted

a Twitter thread that became one of the most viral Twitter threads in history and we were actually included in that thread from there we went from like 2,000 to 10,000 Mr in one month that's when I felt the first semblance of success Jenny AI was growing at a rapid pace and Dave felt like he was on top of the world but there was still a problem virality comes and goes it's not something David could rely on to build a great business so the very next thing I wanted to do was kind of figure that out

for ourselves I brought on one of my college buddies actually to help us with Tik Tok and Instagram reals All That Jazz and then we experienced our second wave of virality we understood the power of social media we continued to kind of push on with uh viral marketing when we were getting to 50 60 880,000 Mr you know now it was kind of happening where I think at at that point we were close to like a million a year from where we started that was like so crazy to us and I felt like man we

could push this so much further we could go so much farther but then I got a cancer diagnosis and it felt like my dreams and nightmares were happening at the same time the the most worrying thing for me though is that it would put me out of commission and there was a chance that my voice would be damaged I remember the surgery because of the fever they had to reschedule me which made my sleep deprivation food deprivation all that even worse it prolonged my pain more but one thing that helped was my mom told me

that there's something I I'll tell you before your surgery and don't worry it's going to give you all the strength you need you're not even going to be nervous everything's going to be fine and then so for some reason my mom went to the bathroom or something while I was Tak a nap and like the nurses run in and they're like because of your fever complication we have to do surgery right now I don't even speak Korean to be signing documents like can we wait for my mom and then they're like we just got to

run it now and I was honestly thinking about like man I got a crazy startup right now I can just bolt out of here thyroid cancer moves kind of slow like it's it's not like the craziest risk I could take but I remember on the ceiling there was a Bible verse it said like leave everything to God I was like all right well I'll leave it up to the big man upstairs like i' I I have to get the surgery so I'll just stay I don't know what I just signed my mom's not here it's

fine I'll just stay the surgery went well I was able to not speak for a little bit but I was able to get my voice back few days after the surgery I was like hey Mom like what was that thing you want to tell me for the surgery she told me oh it's just it's dumb it was just this one Bible verse that I really liked and it happened to be the same Bible verse that was on the ceiling which is pretty crazy to me where I take it as is like Miracle what an awesome

little blessing that I got I had to read that somebody had to tell me that and my mom was in the bathroom so I didn't get she didn't get to read it to me but thankfully that painter put it up there for me so I got to read it after the surgery I was obviously very emotional I was very moved by the love that I receiv received from like my family and my girlfriend and I thought the limited time I have left with like my family my grandparents all that stuff but instead I'm I'm spending

so much time on my startup like so much time so I actually shopped Jenny to like if people would be open to acquiring Jenny at that point David was facing a wave of problems after his surgery he realized that the business was unstable without him leading the pack after seeing no growth when he was out with cancer David also realized Jenny did not have product Market fit so he had a tough choice to make either Cash Out grab a quick few million bucks and start fresh or double down find ways to fix the business find

product Market fit and take things to a whole another level it just didn't feel right to like throw my cards in early you know it wasn't like a triumphant I will not sell this will it's sort of like I don't know if this is the right decision but it just feels right in my gut that one hard decision I made I'm very proud of myself from then I focused on hiring people on the marketing growth side and we went into more scaling mode I would say up to the 1 million we're doing a lot of

exploring trying out a bunch of zy ideas a bunch of paths and then from 1 to three we really started heavily deploying capital in the ones that were successful tactically what I would do is I would basically start a Tik Tok account try a bunch of different creative formats and then find one format that works and somehow turn that into a series and then start multiplying your accounts so you could have multiple creators you're basically paying creators like some baseline monthly salary and you're giving them some incentives where like if your videos get X many

views or if you get y conversions then you get you know even more money per month you should basically just think about how can you scale the content I think that's like the big question you should ask I started my first company when I was 16 I'm 27 now that's a decade of failing I really only got any semblance sucess in the last 18 months so it's 9 years almost a decade of just gut punches people not taking you seriously you need that discipline I think if you really care about your dream and if you

really care about making something that is used by millions of people people then you can't give it like a onewe shot you can't you can't even give it a year shot you have to really put your all into it sacrifice everything for many many years and then you have a shot you have maybe a chance at success but even if you put your all into it there's a chance that you will fail if you still make a startup and if you still try despite knowing that you could have nothing and you could lose everything then

that must mean that you really care about what you're building and you really care about making better life for yourself your family your users we talked about quitting earlier had I sold then which was earlier this year it was only like 6 7 months ago you know it would have been such a terrible decision for me to sell at that point because went from selling to 3 million now we're at 3 million AR we're above 3 million the true worth of our startup now is probably like 10 to 30 million you know it's like it's

like way more than what I would have sold for then within 6 months we more than doubled our business yeah persistence is quite important I would say hey Pat from starter story here thank you guys so much for watching I really hope David's story inspires and motivates some of you to get started on your own thing as you saw in the video David changed his life by turning a simple idea into a $3 million per year SAS product if you're curious about doing something similar but you're still looking for an idea well right now you

can download our Deep dive SAS report for free it breaks down 52 different micras ideas and tons of other stuff you'd want to know just click the first link in the description and if you're serious about building it then consider joining starter story and we'll help you do that much love and I'll see you guys guys in the next one peace [Music]