Before It Clicked From Pivot Hell to $1M ARR: The Magic Patterns Origin Story
What does it actually look like to pivot eight times in a single year?
In this episode of Before It Clicked, Sunny Rekhi sits down with Alex Danilowicz, co-founder of Magic Patterns, an AI design tool that helps product teams skip Figma and go straight to working UI.
Alex shares the raw, "dark days" journey of moving from a viral iMessage analytics side project to the high-stakes environment of Y Combinator, where they were told their initial idea was "ridiculous". We break down the specific product launches—from Chrome extensions to landing page generators—and the exact moment a "paying but non-using" customer gave them the feedback that led to Magic Patterns.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
The "Mom Test": Why over-interviewing users can actually slow you down.
The 5 Core Tenants of Pivoting: How Alex and Teddy used a strict set of rules to stay intellectually honest.
Lean Scaling: How they reached $1M ARR with just two founders before raising a Series A led by Dalton Caldwell.
Side Quest Traps: Why the team initially ignored their most successful features to chase Figma plugins and email templates.
Chapters:
(00:00) - The feedback that birthed Magic Patterns
(03:18) - What Magic Patterns looks like today
(04:42) - The viral iMessage analytics origin story
(11:23) - The YC acceptance call and "the pivot"
(14:23) - Mirrorful: Screenshots for engineers
(18:20) - Why you shouldn't take user interviews too seriously
(20:53) - Dreamer: Building a landing page generator in "Pivot Hell"
(23:04) - The 5 Core Tenants for finding a winning idea
(26:54) - "Storybook on Steroids" and the niche market trap
(32:16) - "Why aren't you using it?" The "Click" moment
(43:18) - The slow burn: Launching Magic Patterns on Twitter
(49:04) - From $0 to $1M ARR: Making mistakes and scaling lean
(53:26) - Why a profitable company decided to raise a Series A
(55:36) - Advice for founders currently in Pivot Hell