In 2019, he went all-in on AI, grew to $3M ARR in 2 years—then to $85M ARR in 5. | Shubham Mishra, Founder of Pixis

5 years ago, Shubham had just graduated college and had no network. He bootstrapped to $3M in ARR, then raised $200M & grew to $85M ARR.

But he started trying to sell AI for marketing to enterprises with no network.

So for 2 months, he'd go to the lobby of a bank and sit there for an hour. He'd wait for the CMO to walk by, just so he could say hi. He'd tell receptionists he was waiting for an interview.

Finally, one day the CMO had enough and asked him who he was. Shubham got his 15-minute moment. That turned into a free pilot.

That free pilot turned to $1.2M ARR.

2 years after he'd started the company, he bootstrapped to $3M ARR and was profitable— since then, the growth never stopped.

Why you should listen

• How to start a startup top-down from a market vs bottoms-up from customer problems.
• Why doing insane things in the early days can lead to insane results.
• How Founder-led sales and tight feedback loops are the key for product development and customer success.

Keywords
AI startup, product market fit, challenges, marketing, scaling, fundraising

Timestamps
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:01:52) Origin Story of Pixis
(00:07:05) Getting the First Customers
(00:09:14) What is Pixis
(00:11:26) Video Generation
(00:14:54) Finding the Problem Going Top-Down
(00:19:55) The Pitch
(00:24:30) The First Pilot
(00:27:08) Scaling the Team
(00:31:57) Raising the First Round
(00:33:59) The AI Market
(00:35:54) Finding True PMF
(00:37:13) One Piece of Advice

Send me a message to let me know what you think!