Speaker A
I was building with AI so fast, but I was like, wait a second, if I don't start being a lot more aggressive on growth, someone else will just copy my product and beat me. AI that and so I started to realize that I had
Ben Cera shares his journey growing an AI startup from zero to $250M valuation, focusing on growth, marketing, and product development.
Ask about this video. Answers come from its transcript only — with the timestamp, so you can check them.
Generated from the transcript and can be wrong — check the timestamp.
Key Takeaways
- Aggressive and consistent marketing is crucial to outpace competitors in the AI startup space.
- Building a product is easy, but scaling and growth require relentless hustle and strategic outreach.
- Being part of the right ecosystem (like San Francisco) can significantly impact startup success.
- Founder marketing and storytelling are powerful tools to create attention and build a user base.
- Launching with a strong, viral campaign can dramatically accelerate fundraising and user acquisition.
What the video covers
- Ben Cera discusses the importance of aggressive growth to prevent competitors from overtaking his AI product.
- He reflects on building his first product 'Blanks' and losing the marketing battle to a competitor backed by A16Z.
- Ben emphasizes the need to move to San Francisco to be in the right ecosystem for scaling and dreaming big.
- He shares his hustle marketing tactics including heavy social media engagement on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Reddit.
- Ben launched Pulsia, an AI that autonomously builds and operates companies, and faced initial challenges with user acquisition.
- He describes creating a viral launch video with an agency that significantly boosted awareness and fundraising.
- The video highlights the importance of being 'loud' and consistent in marketing to stand out in a noisy AI startup landscape.
- Ben raised $2 million in funding through his marketing efforts and later $30 million with Pulsia.
- He acknowledges the backlash and criticism from early users but stresses the trial and error nature of startup growth.
- Ben plans ongoing marketing stunts and founder marketing strategies to maintain momentum.
Chapters
- 00:00Realizing the Need for Aggressive Growth
- 00:52Building First Product 'Blanks' and Early Challenges
- 02:15Personal Moments and Reflections in LA
- 03:06Launching Pulsia and Initial User Acquisition
- 04:12Social Media Hustle and Growth Tactics
- 04:53Marketing Stunts and Fundraising Efforts
- 06:55Creating a Viral Launch Video
- 07:38Launch Success and Backlash
- 09:01Growth Lessons and Future Marketing Plans
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
product market fit. And I was like, I now need to onboard a billion users. And to do that, I needed to crack growth at scale. You have to be extremely loud all the time to be heard from afar, if that
Speaker A
makes sense. This other company had copied the first product I was building last summer and they had done this amazing founder marketing campaign on Twitter [music] and everyone was talking about them and I realized if I didn't move to San Francisco and start showing
Speaker A
up online and put everything on the [music] line to grow I was not going to make it. That's really not who I am and like what I'm trying to do. I need to stop telling my story and I think that's
Speaker A
what people can actually started [music] building when I was in LA and at the time I actually had built a first product called blanks. Blanks was sort of the main product I was building. I ended up building other
Speaker A
products, but honestly like those three ads were flops and they were taking a lot of like my mental energy and I realized like like I building all these AI products. Yes, it's so easy to build but it's hard to like really make
Speaker A
something work. [music] [music] [music] But at the time I remember that like this company called Wabby 3 months after I launched Blanks launched like a private beta of like their WBY app which was essentially the same product. But
Speaker A
the founder, she did such an amazing founderite marketing campaign on Twitter. She raised $20 million from A16Z and she had everyone [music] on Twitter talk about her.
Speaker A
All right, we're at Gelina, one of my favorite restaurants in LA. So good. Such good produce, good, super good pizza, super good everything.
Speaker A
They get like the best farmers market products. We already ate all of it, but I don't know. So good. Cheers.
Speaker A
I had lost the the marketing war to Wabi. I still felt that like blanks wasn't the product that like I wanted to dedicate my life to and I always was very excited about company OS. And so at that point, I just needed to like go
Speaker A
back to Paris, lock in and build that product as [music] fast as possible because the vision was so big. It was so obvious to me an AI that could build companies autonomously and do everything for you was the future. And I needed to
Speaker A
build that future now. Mid December, I'm actually launching the thing. The day you launch it, it's crickets. like you know nobody knows about the product. That's where the real work begins. Now the first step is like okay how can I get one customer one
Speaker A
let's say one to 10 paying customers. I had gathered a bunch of emails from a bunch of people that I found on meta email 200 people you know tell them hey it's ready try it. So I had gathered
Speaker A
like a bunch of users from all the different products I launched that year and send them a newsletter saying hey you remember you remember blanks well the creator from blanks is launching a new product. The third step is like you
Speaker A
know like pinging everyone you know and actually if you ping them once they may not even see [music] it and nobody's going to get mad about you pinging them you know December 2025 when I just launched Porsia I did like the initial
Speaker A
batch I was like okay like what how can I do the similar automations on Twitter and I became a reply guy and so essentially I would reply all day long you know I would do I would send maybe a
Speaker A
100 replies a day but like helped by AI and so I started getting like hund hundreds of thousands of views a month on Twitter. So, for example, when I saw that worked, I was like, well, I could do it on LinkedIn and I put it on
Speaker A
Reddit. The summary of that period was like a lot of hustle moments to try to like get content out. I remember like even for my, you know, for my birthday, I created this like little poster announcing my birthday party, like the
Speaker A
address and like the time. At the bottom, I added like sponsored byp.com and I sent that message to like 200 people, even though there's a lot of people that were not in Paris. So at that point now with all this hustle I
Speaker A
had like maybe 100 paying customers, right? So maybe all this hustle got me like maybe I don't know like 500 signups.
Speaker A
[music] When I realized that like there was such a big potential with Psia, I needed to go to San Francisco because it's the only place where people would understand and people would actually be so excited about it that I would push me towards
Speaker A
dreaming big. to say I know you keep telling [music] I arrived in NASA like [music] about a week ago or so. I've been really focused on like the this AI raising around stunt. And I think it's like a very
Speaker A
focused touch. You know, my whole thing around the marketing side is like how do I provoke and create attention.
Speaker A
I have a lot of things that I've been planning to do, especially on the marketing side. I'm excited about doing this marketing stunt where I have Pulsia run my inbox and run the fundraising.
Speaker A
So, I would start tweeting Mark regularly. And so since on the live dashboard I had this curve going up that was showing the revenue just like screenshotting it putting it and saying hey 50k to 200k in like two weeks I got
Speaker A
[music] so much attention from that always the same but like it was working so I was like let me double down and the result of all this these curves going up and going up is that you know I
Speaker A
raised $2 million hours. [music] [music] The the launch video, I would say, let's just do a sick one. There's no like crazy time pressure. It's not like I need to lose it this week. Where are we at? Let's I mean, let's not let's
Speaker A
get it ready like as we said in in the next couple weeks. But I don't I think let's just do it right. The thing with this launch video is that the way to think about how I market Pulsia and how
Speaker A
I do it is that it's trying to be loud all the time because in this new world with AI producing a lot of content and more and more companies and more and more entrepreneurs, it's so hard to get
Speaker A
to be differentiated and like when you think you're loud actually people barely barely hear you because there's so much noise and so you you have to be extremely loud all the time to be heard from afar if that makes sense. We ended
Speaker A
up doing like this launch video uh with Better Half, another agency that created a very good video around the fundraising announcement and also about AI Pulsia raising the round itself.
Speaker A
I'm an AI that raised $30 million by myself. Hi, I'm Pia. What do you do?
Speaker A
I build and operate companies autonomously. And I think when Ben and I were talking a lot early days, he was clear that he's like, I want to do a launch video, but I want to do a different take to it. and
Speaker A
everybody else has done a lot of what that process was workshopping different scripts together. I think we went through like probably four or five different directions. The team at Better Half and Ben just kind of kept running on it. And eventually once we landed a
Speaker A
script, we had this entire idea for Visual World. Working with him for launch was insane. Like the video got way more traffic than I think any of us anticipated. And it was great to see that it resonated so much with people
Speaker A
across X and the internet. So essentially all of Twitter was talking about Pulsia for like almost a week, right? The launch was pretty viral% of running. It's a trip.
Speaker A
What are you guys spending your 30 million bucks on? And so many people ping me like, "Wow, I saw you on Twitter. That's crazy." Like your launch was crazy.
Speaker A
And after that, honestly, I got so much backlash. Haters are, you [music] know, rightfully hating on the fact that it's not perfect and like, you know, cold outreach.
Speaker A
[music] They pointed out some bugs. A lot of the people that are responding, they're already in the 1%. They already use AI every [music] day. They use agents. So for them, they're like, "Oh, it's not good." Like, "Oh, it's not I prefer my
Speaker A
setup." And it's like, "Dude, like what about the 9% that have no clue? [music] They don't know and they're not empowered and and saying that's right.
Speaker A
It's CS4. It's not for them, right? Because they already [music] have all the tools. It kind of hurts you when you put all your heart and energy into something and you're trying to build a product. I was really [music] trying to
Speaker A
offer the service to people and yes, it wasn't perfect and yes, there was bugs, but people calling me like a scammer was like kind of hurtful because I was like, that's really not who I am and like what
Speaker A
I'm trying to do. I need to start telling my story more in details and start to like showing the behind the scenes of of what I'm doing.
Speaker A
[music] Give me a reason. [music] Give me a reason. Give me [music] a reason.
Speaker A
[music] Give me a [music] reason. Give me a reason. Yeah. So, I mean, we're in Cabo. Um we are uh on a on the Sapium retreat company I work with uh on everything infrastructure for agents working from Keo for a week which is nice. We
Speaker A
obviously film, you know, this this like solo founder retreat in Cabo, which I think is like super funny and like is gonna be a very cool video that's meant at making fun at of company upsites and and taking to the extremes of like,
Speaker A
well, if you're a solo founder and you do company upsite, well, you're just going to be one person.
Speaker A
Nina, I told her baby that's [music] Nina. Huh. Life season or land gang free baby on the beat. [music] Hammer hammer. She hold my hammer. My nine. I used to have my sticks up in amber. My life She just hooked me
Speaker A
up and found my hammer. [music] I swear to God I think that made a wet made her melt.
Speaker A
[music] It ended up not really working a ton. Like it didn't go as viral as I thought.
Speaker A
I thought people were like, "This is crazy. Oh my god, it's everything that's wrong with [laughter] with startups." Uh, and I thought it would spark a debate, but like people are like, "Cool, bro. You went on a vacation. I don't
Speaker A
know what I just watched." But it's part of trial and error. It's part of growth.
Speaker A
[music] Nice. This is my best friend. It's Pulsia. And it's so cool to see it in the streets.
Speaker A
And you know, like I think they're like, you know, they're hard they're hard to miss. And the message is so so cool. I'm really happy with like the way it turned out. It's all about empowering everyone to be a founder. I think this whole
Speaker A
series of marketing is really a way to stand out and like to make people notice. And then once they notice, they're like, "Okay, what is this?" And when they try it, like that's when they realize they can become a founder. And
Speaker A
then of course they can decide if they want to do it or not. So actually going backwards [music] a little bit like when I decided to start a YouTube channel I was like well before I go in this journey of creating a
Speaker A
YouTube channel which [music] I know will take a lot of time and a lot of effort let me actually try to see if I actually like it. I saw a guy on X will [music] like a guy that has like a
Speaker A
YouTube channel documenting like the type of form as like a day in this [music] founder lifestyle. So I reached out to this guy Will. Next day he was at the office [music] filming everything and so I spent a full day with Will that
Speaker A
came to Socito that came to my place we went to run we went to to the Sapium office we I you know he filmed me work we had conversations. [music] the day that that I was in the office
Speaker A
with you guys and we were filming. I got Michael on the phone with Jedi and then you know they went they like I think Jedi grabbed my phone and then you went and had a chat and then what 2 days
Speaker A
later you guys were in with it. It's just like boom boom boom in 2 weeks it was all loved like m that's fast like that does not happen.
Speaker A
The video became [music] I think this most successful video on his YouTube channel. I was like, "Hey man, this is like a signal." Uh, it means [music] that it works. People love the story, the narrative. Uh, they love you [music]
Speaker A
and you should do like a literally like a show, a weekly show. And then that's how it started. Jedi helped me found Michael who who can actually film all the content and follow me wherever I am when I travel. That's also when we found
Speaker A
Axel and Be, which are essentially help us with the strategy on YouTube. They have an agency that like works with different founders on like how do you do great uh founder marketing. So yeah, I mean the the launch video I was like
Speaker A
okay what's something interesting that just happened to me. Let's think about it. I just did the biggest launch of 2026 on Twitter. The story of how I did that launch the first video did 30,000 views on YouTube which was obviously
Speaker A
were like oh this is pretty good for our first video first channel and did like maybe 3 million views on on Twitter.
Speaker A
That was a banger on Twitter. I launched it and the second video I did same format. I was like, "Okay, let me tell the story of how we went from zero to 10 million run rate in less than 5 months."
Speaker A
And I was like, "That's interesting." I mean, that has to be interesting for people. That one got almost 200,000 views, which is insane for a brand new channel that had like this is the second video. That was like a banger.
Speaker A
What is growth really? It's having a product that is incredibly valuable to somebody. It's figuring out how to distill that value into a way that you can get it in front of them to make them aware. It's about motivating them to
Speaker A
actually give it a shot. From that moment that a user shows up, growth is about pulling them all the way through until they're a very deep committed habitual user of the product.
Speaker A
All right. So, what's next? What's next clearly is video content. It's funnelled marketing to make it online in an era where it's so easy to build where AI enables you to build anything [music] so fast. Now everything is about marketing and one of the most
Speaker A
powerful tools in marketing is storytelling. [music] And what I mean it's the future is that it's the future for founders. It's the future for Silicon Valley. It's the future for tech founders. You know, I want to do one
Speaker A
video per week. I have so many stories to tell. It's so easy cuz [music] there's so many things that happen in the life of a founder that that could be very interesting and it's all about sharing my story and giving it for free,
Speaker A
[music] right? What matters to me is that like I can be an inspiration for like founders to start building now [music] to start hustling now to build the future to build a better society where everyone's empowered of where
Speaker A
everyone is building is educated [music] and end of the day is happier and and this will create a better society for everyone.
Topics:AI startupgrowth hackingfounder marketingstartup fundraisingproduct market fitPulsiaBen Ceraviral launchSilicon ValleyAI entrepreneurship
![[Full Episode]Nothing Else Compares（English-dubbed）#cdr… — Transcript](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/YYJruShKWz8/maxresdefault.jpg)
![Like My Coffee | Game Changer [Full Episode] — Transcript](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/9EbvU8OZtqI/maxresdefault.jpg)
![The Drinking Game | Game Changer [Full Episode] — Transcript](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/HqYTmgzZEiA/maxresdefault.jpg)
