THIS JUST

@donnellycss

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SoundTikTok sound · original sound - donnellycss

Promoted product

Searchable

Track and optimize your brand visibility across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and all major AI search engines. Get actionable insights to drive growth.

2 videos2 creators

Why it worked

The video effectively uses a narrative of rapid, impressive growth and a clear problem/solution framework, appealing to founders and entrepreneurs. The creator's personal story and the inclusion of concrete metrics like ARR and valuation make the journey relatable and aspirational.

Summary

The creator shares the rapid growth story of their AI search platform, Searchable. They detail how they founded the company, secured co-founders, built an MVP, and achieved $1 million ARR in just 3 weeks, leading to a $14 million funding round at an $85 million valuation.

Structure

1Founding story and problem identification
2Securing co-founders and relocating
3MVP development and launch
4

Original caption

Last month, we hit $3M in ARR and closed a $14M investment at an $85M valuation. It’s been a wild few months. Let me explain a bit about how we got here. Last year, I noticed AI was fundamentally changing how everyone finds their information, and if your business wasn’t indexing within AI search engines, you are going to lose out. There are 1 billion monthly users on ChatGPT. 750 million on Google Gemini. 100 million for Perplexity And about 50 million on Claude. Not only that, but half of all Google searches now show with an AI overview. We’re in the middle of a massive behavioural shift, and most businesses still haven’t realised it. In September, I flew to San Francisco to network with the best engineers I could find. I was lucky enough to sit down with Sam Hogan and Arya Nagabhyru, who were working at YC start-ups at the time and were both as convinced as I was that AI Search would be the next billion-dollar industry. They moved to London, and we spent 70, 80, 90-hour weeks testing our idea and building our first MVP. In December, we did a soft launch and generated some incredible feedback. Whilst everyone else was celebrating Christmas, we worked non-stop to implement every piece of feedback. In January, we launched publicly and hit $1M ARR in 3 weeks. I truly believe what we’re building is the best tool on the market. We’ve started to grow an incredible team to help scale Searchable into a billion-dollar business, and we’re working flat out to make that a reality. If you want to see exactly how we did it, head over to my YouTube channel ChrisDonnellyBusiness to watch the full story

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Transcript

This just happened recently. My business got valued at $85 million, just five months after we launched. And in the next two minutes, I want to tell you exactly how we did that. September last year, I had just stopped working at Lovable. I wanted to launch my own AI startup. So I decided, what's the biggest problem businesses are facing right now? And I realized businesses were desperate to appear at the top of ChatGPT were their customers were searching for their products. So I set up to build Searchable. I actually YOLO'd it and bought Searchable.com for a crazy amount of money, but I'm really pleased that I did that now that the brand has taken off. The next step was finding co-founders who are passionate about building a business as I was. So I flew to San Francisco and met with hundreds of engineers. And I was lucky enough to meet Arya and Sam, who are currently working at a Y Combinator startup. I managed to convince the guys to move back to London with me and launch the business. We then worked 80-hour weeks, October and November, to build our MVP. Our MVP was like, how do you appear within ChatGPT? We launched the MVP and thousands, well, less than thousands of people tried the product. On our users, we listened to December and we listened to every single piece of feedback that they had. While everyone was having Christmas, we worked through single the night, every single night, and built the product to be AI search and analytics and an agent that actually executes on your strategy. Which brought us to launching in January. Over the next 60 days, we grew Searchable to nearly $1M ARR in ~3 weeks. Here's the plan we built months earlier to get us to $75k/MRR in 20 days: I'm not going to pretend it was perfectly planned out. It was messy. We worked 12-15 hour days. We had bugs. But we also had some startups don't at launch: A product people already. Let me explain how this. Back in September, before anything, I started a waitlist. We asked for access. And here's the thing. By the time we hit $1 million recurring from businesses, the world was blowing companies spending thousands, every single month with us. Which brings us to today. We raised $15 million from Headline at an $85 million valuation. And we're just started to see. If you want to see how we've done this, play by play from the beginning, I've just released a long-form YouTube video. Comment SEARCHABLE and I'll send you the link.