At
@wisdolia_
, we're building the learning platform of the future to transform anyone into a super learner.
Here's a demo on our latest product development, where I give you a glimpse into the future of learning 🌳
Hit the exciting milestone of generating $50k in revenue last month, with an ARR of $275k! 💸
It's insane how challenging the journey to get to a milestone like this has been.
I've been coding for 13 years and have been a part of 4 startups over the course of 7 years.
Duolingo is one of the most successful EdTech companies ever, rocking a $10B valuation.
How did they do it?
From the CEO and Co-founder Luis Von Ahn:
The biggest reason we are at $10B valuation is that "for the first 5 years of the company, the only thing we did is work on
It's been a hell of a year for
@Wisdolia_
. We started 2023 with having only 3-4 months before money ran out and ended the year with $325k ARR and 250k+ activated users.
Here's a deeper analysis on the past year that I shared internally... 🧐
We started 2023 in a pretty tough
Buildspace IRL energy is wild
1100 people that flew from around the world to meet other builders and dreamers
excited to volunteer as a mentor tomorrow & share some wisdom
@_buildspace
loved being able to share some wisdom with buildspacers
they were all so curious and I got the feeling they were embracing the struggle of the beautiful and challenging journey of building something from nothing
it’s remarkable what
@_buildspace
has created
We're excited to officially welcome Wisdolia to the family 🚀
They're building AI flashcards to help the new generation of super learners.
Drop a 👋 to welcome
@InfiniteJulian0
and
@dg_exists
!
last week, I mentored over 25 builders/founders at
@_buildspace
IRL. here's one of the most common pieces of advice I gave them...
don't get too attached to your idea ❗️
more than 90% of ideas don't work so if you get too attached to an idea, you risk spending too much time and
Turned 27 today 🎉
Here is a deep and vulnerable reflection I did on turning 27...
A birthday is frightening to many because it's a reminder that they are approaching the end of their time.
But why concern yourself about your increasing age when there's nothing you can do
Julian cofounded and built Wisdolia from 0 to $300k+ ARR in under a year
We made a video where he shared the entire growth playbook — working with TikTokers and how much it cost, the experiments that saved their company from dying, and more
Watch it now on YouTube 👇
We had another influencer post go viral for
@Wisdolia_
, helping us hit $10k MRR
But best of all was seeing someone comment about their first impression of Wisdolia 😂
Achievement unlocked: build something people are obsessed about 🎖️
Hiring someone for a startup based on signal from just interviews and a resume is a terrible idea for both the company and the candidate.
In interviews, it's hard to assess if someone is truly a builder, has good taste and judgment, can take initiative, and approaches problems
We’ve generated more than $2.5k in less than 24 hours from an influencer marketing post that is going viral on TikTok for
@Wisdolia_
🚀
Here’s a brief backstory on what contributed to this success:
We launched Wisdolia 7 months ago and many students were loving it but we
@FarzaTV
@_buildspace
damn bro i'm split emotionally
buildspace ignited the deep rooted desire to create something from nothing that so many people have buried within themselves
and now I'm super sad the space buildspace created to build and dream will no longer exist for others
but on the other
@george__mack
"Incentives are super powerful. Set them carefully"
— Sam Altman (
@sama
) in a blog he wrote two days ago titled "What I Wish Someone Had Told Me"
It's been 8 weeks since launching
@Wisdolia_
(AI generated flashcards) and things are getting pretty crazy 🚀
📈 Some numbers
1. 7k downloads (3.5k in the last week)
2. 2.5k weekly active users
3. Our users come from over 120 different countries
🧵🧵🧵
I tested the Mixtral model and it produced a ~3x speed improvement in generations for us 🤯
And it is half the cost of GPT 3.5 (using Together AI's API for this model)
And this is relative to the price of GPT 3.5 getting cut by ~2-3x a month ago
Crazy how by building in AI,
The Mixtral MoE model genuinely feels like an inflection point — a true GPT-3.5 level model that can run at 30 tokens/sec on an M1.
Imagine all the products now possible when inference is 100% free and your data stays on your device!
Taylor Swift is old news, I am talking market maps over here!
Our team
@a16z
has spent the past year talking to founders, tracking usage, and envisioning the future of education.
This post is a culmination of what we've seen + the characteristics that get us excited 👇
Hit $15k in revenue and 60k downloads for
@Wisdolia_
🚀
There will always be massive mountains to continue climbing but this is definitely an exciting milestone on the beautiful journey from 0 to 1 ⛰️
A brief summary of what happened at the OpenAI dev conference
- Anthropic just got wrecked with GPT4's 128k context window
- GPT 4 Vision API being released enables an ocean of new possibilities & opportunity (super excited to implement for
@Wisdolia_
)
- Significant price cuts
I've always been deeply curious about producing electronic music but have been too afraid of what it would take to learn to produce music
not anymore
I will go from 0 knowledge about music production to producing 3 tracks, in 6 weeks
cc
@_buildspace
@_nightsweekends
@FarzaTV
If you have have a startup, you must understand that you are running a research lab 🧪
In a research lab, just like in startups, success is largely determined by
1) the quality & quantity of experiments you run
2) how good you are at analyzing and iterating on experiment results
Had the opportunity to visit and pitch in front of my University’s Angel Network, Texas A&M!
Pitch went pretty well!
I told some investors after the pitch that in the end, their only regret would be that they didn’t invest more 😏
The most underrated announcement from OpenAI is their Copyright Shield support
OpenAI claims that they will help you deal with any legal copy write problems that you have and are even willing to incur costs if you face legal challenges
Insane benefit!
It's been a year since we launched the very first version of
@Wisdolia_
!
here's a throwback to what Wisdolia looked like when it was 0 days old and back when all we had was a Chrome extension
when I was 13 years old, I coded and published my first app ever. but now after 14 years, it has finally been rendered useless by Apple :(
Apple released the iPad in 2010 and yesterday, after 14 years, they finally released a calculator app native to the iPad
that's right.
One of the things I admire the most about my co-founder
@dg_exists
is how much attention and care he puts into creating a beautiful product.
He thought all the whitespace we had in the core flashcards experience of
@Wisdolia_
was a bit dull
So he went on a side quest and worked
Feeling super refreshed and clearheaded after a much needed dose of nature at Yosemite
Excited to get back to being a coding gorilla today and tackling the mountain of challenges and opportunities in front of me ⛰️
Instead of arguing with your co-founder or team about how a feature should work, let the data do the talking by running countless experiments.
Spend less time speculating and more time experimenting
in just two years, AI models have gotten > 100x cheaper and significantly better and faster
which means that by using AI, your product gets better, faster, and cheaper to serve without you having to do anything at all
reminds me of how in the early days of Amazon, Jeff Bezos
I'm naturally very optimistic but I think one of the biggest mistakes that I've made several times throughout my journey as a startup founder has been to be optimistic about the idea I was working on.
Being optimistic about the idea you are working on is dangerous because the
sooo hyped to go to the Copa America final with the fam in Miami
beautiful to get to support my country in a final 🇨🇴
and so grateful to get to see Messi before he retires, although I will unfortunately want him to take an L 😈
We increased sign up conversions by 3x with the simplest trick in the book…
Force users to sign up before using the product!
We were initially reluctant to do this bc we felt conversions would be greater if users had the chance to try the product first.
We were very wrong!
Being optimistic can be very dangerous when building a startup.
Throughout my journey as a founder, I often made the mistake of trying to do everything I could to make the idea I was focused on work.
Instead, I think it's best to operate from the perspective of doing everything
Think like a scientist to skyrocket user engagement! 🚀
@InfiniteJulian0
from
@Wisdolia_
revealed why a methodical approach is important for product development.
Follow for these great tips from
@_buildspace
’s event🧵👇
I met an investor yesterday that said, "being a founder is a luxury".
Initially, I was confused because I couldn't understand how living on a tight budget and working long hours could be considered luxurious.
But then he explained that having the autonomy to work on whatever
We just released our biggest update yet 👀
There's two huge changes
1. Single View Mode: You can now view flashcards one at a time
2. A Super Learner plan that allows you to get flashcards on PDFs and YouTube videos of any size
@aribk24
Really fucked up to clone a Buildspace company
@danielbelfort
And it’s not the first time you do it because you also bought a company that directly competes with us
You’ve proven time again that you care more about profits than friendships ❌🤮
The human brain is one of the most complex objects in the known universe. But it didn't come with an instruction manual and no one taught us how to use it
On the latest episode of
@ITFpod
, I share how we're inventing the future of learning
@Wisdolia_
Super excited to implement GPT4 Vision for
@Wisdolia_
to super charge the learning experience for students on our platform
It's insane how capable AI has become in such a short amount of time
Time to build!
If you try out a distribution channel and it’s not working, it’s likely that the strategy for the channel is what’s not working, rather than the channel itself not being a good channel
You must experiment not just with many different channels but also with many different
It's such a beautiful and privileged feeling to feel that there's nothing else that I would rather be working on than what we're doing at
@wisdolia_
Working on something you love should be the norm, not a privilege
what's the difference between product & growth?
one of my favorite ways to think about Growth comes from Lauryn Motamedi, who runs Growth at Notion:
"Imagine that your product is a highway for cars (your customers). The customers’ objective is to reach their destination
Too many kids love learning but hate school.
Schools should graduate lifelong learners, who brim with curiosity instead.
It's time to change that.
—
@david_perell
As you ascend to new heights, the cost of each minute skyrockets
And as the opportunity cost of your time increases, it becomes even more important to master the art of saying no
It's important to remember that when you say yes to one thing, you are saying no to everything else
For whatever you want to be doing, go to the epicenter where the best people are doing what you want to do and spend as much time at that center of gravity as possible
the big bet that we're making at
@Wisdolia_
is that we believe there are 10x better learning experiences to be discovered at the intersection of learning science & AI
we will be launching a massive change to Wisdolia soon that will give you a glimpse into the future of learning
Biggest update for Wisdolia since launch!
Exciting to take a big shot on goal and start to explore some of the exciting 10x ideas we have for how AI can transform the way that we learn
Introducing smart cards —
Answer a question from an AI generated flashcard and you'll get immediate feedback on
1) what you got right
2) what you got wrong
3) additional details you didn't include
But, why did we make the shift from flashcards to smart cards?
The 2 most important qualities of people who succeed in startups are Energy and Passion.
Energy enables hustle, grit and the power to make anything happen. In a startup you need to find ways to multiply the impact you make, high energy enables you to turn any situation into an
We're at the 2 month mark since launching
@Wisdolia_
and we're starting to see some strong early signals of Product-Market-Fit 🔥
📈 Some numbers
⚡️ 15k downloads (~600-700 / day)
⚡️ 637 daily active users
⚡️ 236 power users (have generated 10+ sets of flashcards)
@FarzaTV
the concept behind the app is simple yet powerful.
there's likely no fear around competitors because with the insane moats you guys have around community and brand, you all know that no one else can build this app.
so excited for this!
Shutting down your company is perhaps one of the most difficult experiences that almost every founder has to go through at least once.
I spoke with
@claud_fuen
about shutting down his previous company,
@noonshotapp
Here’s an idea for a fun game to play with family & friends during Christmas festivities 🥳
As you can see, my family in Medellin, Colombia goes hard with all the games we play 😂
Merry Christmas 🎄