Plausible零广告获客：324天破首月$400与自举融资路径

This week’s Founder Finds includes:

In-browser Jev

A directory of Jev projects

The state of AI code review

An essay on major decisions

A $1M ARR open-source SaaS

And more…

REMEMBER THIS:

Discomfort is the price of growth.

FAV FINDS

Tools, tweets and more from Trends Pro Members

shipwithjev shared by Elia Zane

A directory of Jev use cases

Vibes vs. Evidence shared by Ben Fisher

An analysis of AI code review setups

open-jev shared by Jd Fiscus

An open version of Jev running in-browser on WebGPU

TRENDS PRO MEMBER WINS

Dru Riley published The Pattern Behind Every System Collapse, on reasonable additions

Eddie Forson wrote about Jev

Shivam launched Report Card

Alejandro Arango wrote Shadow Work

PREDICTION OF THE WEEK

Paid coding tools will stop charging markups for model usage.

Developers are plugging their AI provider accounts directly into editors to pay wholesale prices instead of marked-up subscriptions.

Both JetBrains and VS Code added direct key settings just 8 weeks apart, making it easy for engineers to bypass middleman tools. Standalone wrapper apps are shutting down because software teams refuse to pay extra margins on top of their OpenAI and Anthropic bills.

From Trends PRO #0177, Bring Your Own Key Apps. See what developers pay for AI access.

READ THIS

How Did 4 People Reach $1M ARR With No Ad Spend?

Plausible took 324 days to earn its first $400 a month. The climb from there to $1M ARR ran on zero paid advertising.

• Expect the first year to crawl. 324 days to $400 MRR, then 9 months to go from $400 to $10,000. The slow part comes first.
• Fund it yourself until it works. The 2 founders were down more than $50,000 in personal savings before they paid themselves a salary.
• Skip the ad budget. They reached $83,637 MRR and 7,000+ paying subscribers on word of mouth.

TOOLS OF THE WEEK

Multi — Grow on YouTube on autopilot

HeadsUp.bot — Stay ahead of competitors

StockDrifts — Visual stock research that builds conviction fast

OPPORTUNITY OF THE WEEK

Ship Korean birth-chart readings in English, as comics.

• Copy the format that already worked. Tight Saju sells saju, the Korean birth chart read from your date and hour of birth. It’s sold as webtoons, the vertical comics Korea reads on phones. It went from about 10 million won a month in 2024 to about 1 billion won a month within a year.
• Sell to the audience that already watches Korean drama and reads webtoons. “ai saju reading” is a live English search and no founder could name an English saju app.
• Sell the full chart report first, then a daily reading. Korea’s fortune-telling business was worth 1.4 trillion won in 2024. 6 out of the top 10 fortune apps now run on AI.

From Trends PRO #0183, AI Fortune-Telling Apps. See the Korean apps that ran the transition first.

ASK YOURSELF

Which Single Choice Would Decide the Next 100?

Derek Sivers wanted to live all over the world, so he made one decision and let it settle the rest. One big choice shapes a hundred little others.

Let one call settle 100 more. He knew only that the first big choice pointed him the right way. The details filled themselves in.

Start from the consequences. His question, in his words: knowing the consequences I want, what choice would create them?

Daydream backwards. Think through the implications first, then work back to the decision that produces them.

REPORT FLASHBACK

Virtual AI companions, called when Pi was the app to beat.

In August 2023 we listed Pi, a chatbot built for supportive conversation, first in a new category of AI companions. The call was that people would pay for a companion that is always there: the dead living on as chatbots, influencers renting out digital clones of themselves by the minute.

7 months later Microsoft paid Inflection, the company behind Pi, $650 million for a license and hired most of its 70 staff. Its founder said Pi had never found a business model. Google did the same to Character.AI in August 2024, for $2.7 billion.

We were right about the demand and wrong about who got paid. The companions found the users and the labs bought their builders.

That was Trends PRO #0121, from August 2023. See the companions as they stood then.

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The post 📣 How Did 4 People Reach $1M ARR With No Ad Spend? appeared first on Trends.vc.