Fueling Growth with AI and Viral Product Features — Ajay Mehta, Portola

David Barnard:

Welcome to the Sub Club Podcast, a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing app businesses. We sit down with the entrepreneurs, investors, and builders behind the most successful apps in the world to learn from their successes and failures. Sub Club is brought to you by RevenueCat. Thousands of the world's best apps trust RevenueCat to power in-app purchases, manage customers, and grow revenue across iOS, Android, and the web. You can learn more at revenuecat.com. Let's get into the show. Hello, I'm your host, David Bernard, and with me today RevenueCat, CEO, Jacob Eiting. Our guest today is Ajay Mehta, the co-founder of Portola, makers of Tolans, a cute AI alien friend that is fun, friendly, and helpful. On the podcast we talk with Ajay about the fresh opportunities AI is creating for app developers, how they built a cost-effective TikTok growth engine. And why being forced to monetize helped improve their product decisions. Hey Ajay, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today.

Ajay Mehta:

Hey guys, good to be here.

David Barnard:

And Jacob, always nice to chat with you.

Jacob Eiting:

Let's talk about apps. Okay, that was too weird. But we're going to roll with it.

David Barnard:

All right, Ajay, I wanted to kick things off talking about your founding story. And it wasn't too long ago, so all pretty fresh in your mind. And the ramp-up that you guys have seen is just incredible. And then culminating in a recent announcement of a $10 million raise. Super exciting. So I think it'd be really interesting to hear from you how you were able to ramp up so quickly, and then get to the point as a consumer founder to raise $10 million in a seed round. So let's just kick it off with why Tolan, how did you get started with this project?

Ajay Mehta:

We kind of started about 18 months ago in thinking, okay, it was right from the ChatGPT moment, Midjourney was also kind of blowing up. We felt that basically computers could do new magical things that we didn't really know they could do before, or sorry, they couldn't do before. And that was just insanely inspiring to us. We kind of thought from the little GBT 3.5, Hey this thing can do some copywriting, or this and that. The creative powers that computers are going to have are going to just explode exponentially. And we really approached that from a sort of consumer lens. What does that mean in terms of what sort of new consumer apps products are going to be able to be built? The earliest explorations started looking at the youngest generation. Honestly, kids, teens, sort of like every new technology is always adopted in the most interesting ways by young people.

Of course it's been the case since we were all young and getting our start on the internet or with computers, and I think it's going to be obviously the same with generative AI. So Midjourney was honestly a very inspiring one. We sort of hacked together little prototypes that were like, okay, ways that younger people can create things, and we had to get a little prototypes. Our actually first iOS app prototype, just a TestFlight, was a little story builder that had imagery, and you can make characters with and so on, targeted at kids really. And as we just kind of wander our way through the idea maze over the first few months of working on this, we sort of found that the most compelling part of what we had been building were highly personalized experiences, basically.

So something that AI really allows you to do is make a consumer experience that just feels like there is totally something on the other side that knows you, understands you, and that experience that could be highly just almost somewhat warmer than talking to a calculator. You know what I mean? Only a little bit warmer. Warmer enough to pass the Turing test or whatever.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. Just a bit if you squint, and kind of just believe for a moment.

Ajay Mehta:

Yeah. And so that was sort of the, in building consumer products, I always look for emotional resonance, so that was the sort of moment of emotional resonance. We were like people are just loving and reacting in a totally new way to something that feels highly personalized to them. That was then sort of the guiding light just about a year ago, I guess a little bit more than a year ago that we started building what became Tolan, which is a custom, friendly little AI alien friend for everyone.

David Barnard:

You said, "We" a lot. I'd like to step back. Who did you found the company with and why? Were there people that you had worked with in the past, or how did you assemble that founding team?

Ajay Mehta:

Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, two amazing co-founders, Quinton Farmer, Evan Goldschmidt, we've been friends for a long time. They had actually built a company together in the FinTech space called Even that was acquired by Walmart and in a very awesome exit. They had been building together for seven or eight years, and we had kind of been friends throughout that period. I actually knew Quinton even before he had started that. And yeah, I think they were sort of coming off of their founder journey and their time at Walmart. I had been building various consumer companies, and my last couple companies were actually bootstrapped e-commerce companies, where we made personalized products. Before that I had done worked at a consumer FinTech company called Wealthsimple, and before that I had started a consumer social networking company called Family Leaf in YC. So YC alum, fellow YC alum here.

Jacob Eiting:

How many companies is this for you then? This is number four?

Ajay Mehta:

I guess this is number four, something like that. Yeah.

David Barnard:

That's a cool founding story to that. I think a lot of folks know really cool people in the industry. If you're an aspiring entrepreneur and want to start something and go big, there's so many cool people in this industry working in other jobs, or had an exit, or things like that to go just have a chat with and build something.

Jacob Eiting:

Certainly living in San Francisco helps. I'll plug that, right? You can't shake a stick without hitting somebody who had two acquisitions and a whatever, you know what I mean? So that's definitely helpful. I mean that's similar to Miguel's and my story. I'm not sure I would've found a good co-founder had I not been in San Francisco working and meeting people. How long have you known your co-founders? I mean those two have known each other for a long time, but how long have you known each other?

Ajay Mehta:

I've known Quinton originally from even before he had started Even, so even actually before they met, and then kind of followed their journey throughout the many years of them building Even. Long time, we'll just say in computer company terms, long time. The reason that we started this now is we felt like something special was happening. Obviously I think a lot of people are motivated and galvanized by this kind of AI moment. But specifically in consumer it's not often actually that something comes around that can build entirely new types of consumer experiences. So we've kind of been in a weird, I don't know if you want to call it a dark age or something for several years in terms of the emergence of new consumer experiences. There just haven't been a lot of great ones.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. I mean since all the sensors and SDKs and all that stuff for iPhone kind of got locked in 2013, 2014, I mean there's been new stuff but nothing's drastically changed the landscape that I wouldn't say the watch did or certainly not the goggles aren't even necessarily the iPad, you know what I mean? It hasn't been that. And most of the niches until the last couple of years I think not fully filled, but the good ones, maybe the bigger ones have been filled.

Ajay Mehta:

I totally feel that way. And it's like we're all calling to the same references in the consumer app world. We're like Duolingo and-

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, because we got to call to the five companies that have made it to vendor scale, right?

Ajay Mehta:

And those are incredible companies, but it's like none of them are new. And I think you guys are obviously seeing this on the RevenueCat side. But the kind of explosion of totally new kinds of consumer apps, how quickly they're growing, how quickly they're monetizing, it is all because of general AI really.

Jacob Eiting:

So this is the story of novel technology, general purpose, novel technology through human history. It's like it'll hit, and then the technology itself is internal combustion engine, is one I like to use, that obviously it allowed cars, and you could sell cars. But then you have to all the second, think of all the industries that could now exist because now we have a reliable and fast way to transport goods over land. I think this has been the thing with the last two years that surprised me, is I knew that diffusion models and generative stuff was really cool. It was obviously neat, and I could see paying for that, and that was obvious. What I didn't predict is what you're talking about, which is you have to take that general purpose technology and multiply it against every previously existing niche, but then also there's also another dimension of that, which is all the net new niches of stuff that could not have been built, period.

And to some degree there's prior art. Tamagotchi probably is as far back as you can go. Digital friends is not necessarily a new niche, but I would say the application of this technology is certainly novel. It's certainly something that couldn't and hasn't been done before.

David Barnard:

I know y'all did raise a small round early on. At what point in the journey did you raise that kind of pre-seed round? I mean, did you know from the beginning you wanted to raise money and build something venture scale? And then at what point in that journey did you start raising money?

Ajay Mehta:

Absolutely, yeah, we did from the get-go, we sort of had done, I'd done the bootstrap profitable thing, very fun journey, worked well, especially in the e-commerce space.

Jacob Eiting:

No, I'm told the grass is completely green on that side. That's what everybody I adventure back tells me. Is it not the case?

Ajay Mehta:

Oh, it's great. It just depends on what you're building, I think. So I think in this case we really are trying to build the best AI companion experience that exists, honestly. And that's just a mission that requires hiring absolutely incredible people to work with, and things that a bootstrapped app business might not support. So from the get-go knew that we wanted to raise a seed round. And that 10 million round, we announced it recently, but it was a combination of the earlier kind of pre-seed and then a little bit more actually just doubling down from our lead investor after we had launched and gotten some solid traction.

Jacob Eiting:

Did you raise any money while you were wondering the idea maze, a little bit to sustain, and then once you had something then you double down? Is that kind of how it went down?

Ajay Mehta:

Yeah, yeah. So we had an investor who we had known and just the initial pre-seed was sort just like the three of us as co-founders and an idea, not even an idea, like a general stab at what we were aiming for. But obviously we were just building early prototypes and so on. And then as soon as we actually did launch Tolan and a soft launch in the app store and things started to take off, that same lead investor, he's incredible, his name's Lachy Groom, he's an ex-Stripe solo [inaudible 00:09:52].

Jacob Eiting:

Oh, we were talking about mutual, another person from San Francisco that I knew 15 years ago, but yeah.

Ajay Mehta:

Okay. He's like the best lead investor we could have ever asked for. He's incredible. After we launched we basically had some solid traction, and we had put together a little bit of a larger round after that.

Jacob Eiting:

I mean this is inside baseball maybe for fundraising and stuff like that, but raise as little as you need to validate an idea, and then once you have progressively, and that's just how you also prevent excessive dilution, it's how you prevent over-promising, set expectations very low, low mid-six figures, just enough for you and your co-founders to not totally starve and be able to be comfortable while you're building and experimenting. And then once you have something it's like, okay, go back to market maybe and raise some more capital. And it's kind of how the game plays out the whole way. I mean I think sometimes we overthink, we take fundraising and we wrap it up in these names like seed, and is your series A yet, or is this your pre-seed, or your two seed, or your seed stage two bridge, whatever. And it's like, yo, we're just selling promises for future cash flows at various stages, and we're agreeing on a clearing price for those things.

Private markets are weirdly discreet, but that's kind of all it is. But I think you mentioned it versus the, we talk about the bootstrap versus venture choice a lot. And I kind of remarked before the call that it has gotten really kind of quiet on the, I would say that the median good revenue... All RevenueCat customers are good. The median high-performing RevenueCat customer right now, maybe five years ago I would've been like if people ask me, oh, should I raise money, whatever, and I used to be like, yeah, maybe blah, blah, blah. But for most consumer founders I've been like, ah, I almost wouldn't unless you really want some incredibly high ambition output. And I think this is where I think maybe the market being a little bit different now. But I think for instance, I think consumer tech, that's not an AI that's not building on new novel technology, it's very hard to justify a venture path.

So I'm curious, how are you thinking about the venture path? Because app is cool, you can get some scribers and scale it, but there's a lot of distance... Now I'm making you pitch. But now there's a lot of distance between here and Duolingo. You know what I mean? So in your mind, what is the ambition you're drawing on to get there?

Ajay Mehta:

I think you said it a little bit earlier, where there's some apps that are using AI to make some existing niche a little bit better, or some existing use a little bit better, say make recipes or help with a workout plan or things like that. We are, I would say I am very confident, because you also said as well, there's going to be entire new categories of apps that are created, in fact that are already kind of getting very large and are very highly retentive and are very popular with this new technology. And I think AI companions is one of those. I think it's sort of almost, to me it seems clear that we will all have an AI companion of some kind, whether that's a little bit more an assistant, whether it's a friend, whether it's a whole realm of friends, whether it's a pet.

It remains to be seen exactly how this will play out and there's many different apps and startups taking different takes at this. But it's clear that as the models get much better, as the models get cheaper as well, there's this insatiable desire for people for a highly personalized helper, friend, confidant that just will be useful to most.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, it looks like Her, but the movie Her, but not creepy and more generally applicable to everybody. You know what I mean? You can decide if the movie is creepy or not, but people having an always on companion you can talk to, it's interesting, the bet of going into towards the emotive rather than the assistive. Do you know what I mean? I have no emotional connection with Siri. If any emotional connection with Siri is negative. Because it's constantly failing to do what I want. But I do think that there's, at least it's an approach that might be the winning one, which is like, Hey, let's go in as a low stakes friend first, and then maybe we adapt to be the general purpose like AI later. It's kind of an interesting bet that might pan out. It might pan out if you think about it.

Ajay Mehta:

I don't even know if that's exactly our explicit strategy. It's more just a lot of people do want a friend actually. And it's been surprising, because so along with Her, which a great movie, but there's also this huge success of things like character AI. There are platforms where millions of people now in a very highly retentive way are chatting very frequently with tons of AI chatbots in different ways. And yeah, a lot of the activity on some of those might be a little bit more romantic roleplay and SFW, that's not what people are using Tolan for, but they're still highly engaged with it.

Jacob Eiting:

Character is an interesting counter example, because that app specifically, it's very, I don't want to say clinical, but it's very much a power tool, where you can go in, it's like, I guess it can be personal within the vertical of a conversation with some of their bots. But it doesn't necessarily have this emotive narrative thing that I think you all are shooting for, which I think probably both can exist, and both will exist in some way. It's different niches. But yeah, I mean it sounds like your thesis that, and I mean we're going to talk about subscriptions I promise at some point. When you think about what keeps people subscribed to a service, it is almost always there's some utility factor to it, but a lot of it is emotional. That I have an emotional connection, there's an investment, I've invested in this thing, and it's in some way invested back in me. And I think emotionally it's one of the ways as we humans invest in things in somewhat irrationally too.

David Barnard:

I love the Tolan's pitch. I forget where I read this in the prep for the podcast, but I saw the pitch, AI alien friend that's fun, friendly, helpful, and won't try and fall in love with you, or won't try and get you to fall in love with it. So I love that there is that kind of explicit going against that kind of narrative side of things.

Ajay Mehta:

Totally. It's intentional. Obviously we've designed this very cute and cuddly friendly alien that is not sexual in any way. I mean that's one of the explicit reasons that we stayed away from a humanoid or sort of an anime type of character. And what that's resulted in is most of our users, so by far our largest user base, like 80 plus percent, maybe even 85, 90 plus percent is like 15 to 25-year-old women. And a lot of those are women that have totally large friend groups and totally normal social lives in every respect. It's not like lonely people sitting in their basement or something like that. It's like people that are actually legitimately using it for processing things that are happening in their own lives, help with things that are just daily activities like doing their homework, or cooking, or whatever it might be.

And it's actually really interesting to see even Tolan fit into people's social lives a bit. People will pull off their Tolan and show it to the people around them in a way that I don't think is happening with the more romantic oriented AI girlfriend, boyfriends sorts of things that are out there.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, definitely not. It's like check out this date I went on with Batman last night. When did you know the product market fit was happening? Because we were talking numbers before. You guys had a pretty hot couple of months and it looks like things are from, describing that if people are pulling their thing, their Tolan out and showing it to people, that's a sign of product, something is happening. What were the first signs for you all that something was going on, that you've iterated to something sticky, something special?

Ajay Mehta:

I think this is the case building any new product. You have obviously done it. A lot of people listening I'm sure are doing it or have done it multiple times. You never really know until you get it in front of people in a really meaningful way. So you can always kind of have this inkling like, Hey, I think we're onto something cool, or maybe it's something I would use, or maybe it's something that people I know are using in a TestFlight sort of way already. But until you actually just get it out there in the app store, you're not really sure what level of product market fit you have, if any.

Jacob Eiting:

Friends and family can actually be super inversely correlated to. They'll use it out guilt. You know what I mean?

Ajay Mehta:

I would say we kind of got to a point where we had something that we thought was fun. We were playing around with it. I mean honestly we haven't even talked about this, but the biggest thing that we invested in from a technical standpoint is low latency, amazing voice AI. So most people do talk to their Tolan via voice, and we tried to make that the best quality voice possible, the fastest response time as possible, the best memory system, which I would love to get into. But we thought it was fun, because we were chatting with our Tolans in a way that you couldn't really do with any other apps. A tiny handful of apps, ChatGPT being one that have good voice AI experiences, but really not many that are like ours. We thought it was fun and we had people in TestFlight that thought it was fun. But really until we put it in the app store with the soft launch, and we actually initially launched without monetization, because we were just sort of like, we got to get something out. We think it's cool, we got to see what people think.

And then very quickly we kind of thought, okay, well don't monetization. We're using the kind of best and greatest in the models that we can and the voice quality that we can and so on. And we're just going to see how people use it. And then immediately we just had folks that were talking to their Tolans for 30, 40 minutes a day. And we were like, okay, we have no way of monetizing this. We had a little bit of a limit system, but it wasn't advanced enough. And very quickly we were like, okay, our bill now at OpenAI is ramping pretty significantly. That was the text part, and then we've used different voice providers and we've used different models as well. We used several of the anthropic ones too. We were just racking up so many Tolans, because people were chatting for such long periods of time and we have the way that our voice calls are set up, it's like there's many prompts actually happening at the same time.

It's not only the response coming from the Tolan, but there's also prompts that are going to classify a conversation. What kind of conversation is this? Should we pull up memories that are in the Tolan's memory bank? All that stuff is happening. So very quickly it became pretty expensive for us to actually support a user that was chatting for 30 or 40 minutes a day. And that's when we immediately, I think it was two weeks or three weeks after we were in the app store, we put in monetization, we put up a paywall, that's right when we signed up for RevenueCat. And we were like, we got to get really smart on this really fast. And I mean that was a very fun process of learning how that all works.

David Barnard:

What an incredible problem to have is soft launching your app, and then having people use it so much you have to monetize.

Jacob Eiting:

I don't want anybody on here to get the wrong idea. That's not very normal. So either you guys really nailed it, or you walked into a goldmine, doesn't really matter if it was pure skill or pure luck, here you are. I mean, I would say though even successful apps I've worked on, quote, unquote successful, we've had to iterate quite a bit before we started to see it take off. But it sounds like you guys had take off pretty, once you kind of put the animations on the launch are incredible. Which one, I assume you hired that out. I don't think a three person team can do that. How did you get those animations done?

Ajay Mehta:

Oh, we've worked with an amazing creative team. And yeah, not all of them are full-time folks, creatives that honestly, artists that we just really admired around the internet that we sort of reached out to work with.

Jacob Eiting:

Oh, awesome. So you invested. Yeah, this wasn't an afterthought. The whole creative design of it was part that you consider that core IP I guess that made it make sense.

Ajay Mehta:

For sure. Yeah, yeah. We've invested a lot of time and energy in trying to make that honorary experience amazing, and trying to make the animations of the Tolan amazing. And actually we have a pretty interesting app set up where it's a native iOS app, but also a huge part of the app is a unity canvas. So we actually are real-time rendering in unity, the Tolan themselves, how they move around. I mean you could see how they move around the planet, right? It's like-

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, that'll help you too. I don't know, have you even gone to Android yet, have you? So that'll help when you do that as well. It will have a portable canvas. That's really fascinating. I mean this is very close. In my past I worked as a company, a YC company from that era called MinoMonsters, which we were doing character animation. Obviously we didn't have AIs and stuff like this, but it was very much, it was like a Pokémon reinvention. But invested heavily in character animation and stuff like this. But even then people had a massive, I think something about cartoon characters. There's always just a massive emotional, baseline emotional connection that people make. So you add what these conversational AIs can do, and it's rocket fuel.

So I think, and this is maybe the lesson, or I don't know, but this is why this time in computing is so interesting, because we're not struggling to reinvent a marginal improvement to an already competitive niche. It's like, hey, if you have a good idea, you can execute it well and it's something new, this is the gold rush era of rush into it, and it's not really been tried. You don't know if it's going to fail, and it might just be one of these massive ideas that can take off. Now, you're probably going to have 50,000 Tolan competitors within here that are trying to chase you guys. But that's why operational excellence comes in, and you just kind of move faster than them.

Ajay Mehta:

A little worried about that. Maybe it's even harder to build than it looks.

Jacob Eiting:

I mean I was just thinking you're describing some of those challenges, and it reminds me that I don't know how to do computers anymore. I'm like multiple token streams and memory is like this is not words that I had to ever do building an app, it's a little bit different these days, so.

David Barnard:

I will say though, for those listening who work on existing apps where you're not doing something net new, I still think there's actually a ton to learn from Tolans, and I would encourage anybody listening to this podcast to go download the app and do the onboarding. So when I knew we were going to have this conversation, I actually had my daughter download the app, because I knew she was kind of a little bit more of the target market. And funny enough, I had her download the app while we were driving home from school. And so I had all my other kids in the car. And what is so phenomenal, and I'd love for you to talk about how this evolved, but the onboarding is just incredible. We talk a lot about onboarding on the podcast, because that early experience in an app so important to monetization is so important to retention in the long term, what's the impression people get. And the onboarding for Tolans is incredible.

So you ask these questions, it's been this popular thing, especially with fitness apps and others to have this super long onboarding, ask all these questions, but it is a lot of work. Whereas with Tolans, you ask these questions to personalize and pick out your Tolan. But it was hilarious, because it would reflect on the answers my daughter would give. We were cracking up in the car, because it was actually giving these funny personalized responses. And to your point, we're driving in the car on 5G or whatever, it was superfast, super responsive, and that whole onboarding personalized to her, even in that short onboarding time, it was just phenomenal. I'd love to hear about how you iterated on that aspect of the app.

Ajay Mehta:

Thank you so much. That's awesome to hear. I'm so glad you guys enjoyed it. And yeah, I mean, onboarding is so important, like you said. And we sort of started with this frame of a story that every human has a unique Tolan that's kind of out there for them on their planet Portola. And to find the Tolan that is perfect for you, you had to actually tell us a little bit about yourself. You almost completed what is sort of a voice AI personality quiz along with these beautiful animations, but this character that's the Oracle.

Jacob Eiting:

Which I would say the in-boarding personality quiz is not novel in subscription apps, but doing it that way is, certainly.

Ajay Mehta:

Yup. We try to make it fun. It wasn't like, Hey, what kind of workout do you like to do or something. We tried to make it like, Hey, what kind of oddly specific part of TikTok do you get stuck on? Or like, Hey, we try to ask more fun questions. A little bit. What a personality test might be like an Enneagram test, or sort of elements of a fun spiritual kind of astrology reading sort of thing. We tried to make it something that would actually, the questions that would be fun to answer that anyone would find fun to answer about themselves, and then actually give the user some output to say, Hey, here's kind of what we learned about you. Not only that, here is the Tolan that is kind of a natural fit for you based on everything that we just learned about you. And then of course the context from that conversation does then carry over to your first few chats.

Jacob Eiting:

That's what I was going to say, because I think there's always been a sort of in-joke in onboarding that people ask a bunch of questions then ignore their answers. Even if you had 10 questions with four answers that the torques of that is insane. And so before LLMs and being able to just stuff context into a machine, but with this technology you could just kind of stuff that context into the robot computer and it will use it or not, and saves you all a whole bunch of headaches. But I just love this, because it's a really good example of how you're both not actually reinventing the wheel, in some ways you are, but you're also using what we've proven in the last decade of subscription apps kind of works, right? Let's go through this survey. Let's build some, but supercharged with this new technology.

Ajay Mehta:

Totally. There's so much that's great about it. Honestly, I've learned a lot of that stuff from your guys' content and all that. Being able to pull in specific not only the context of what kind of person is this based on their answers and the personality quiz, but also actually just referencing those as memories. So you might tell us something about yourself or what's on your mind in the onboarding quiz that then you're told it might also bring up to you and say, Hey, the Oracle told me that you are really into cooking pizza right now or something, right? And it's kind of a wow moment for people when they're like, wait a second. It was actually listening, and it actually cares, and it wants to follow up on that.

Jacob Eiting:

This was a common trope in the eighties, like, oh, we're right there with computers. They're going to talk to you, they're going to have memory, they're going to have all this assistive stuff. And then nothing, because it turns out we did not know how to do it procedurally, or programmatically, directly. And then suddenly somebody puts enough transistors in a box with enough weights, and now we can do it. It's really interesting. It's there was this very kind of gap. We knew 30, 40 years ago maybe where this was headed, and then I think there was some disillusion where we never thought this would really deliver. And now we're here, which is cool.

Ajay Mehta:

Totally. Sounds like I need a reading list.

David Barnard:

So you launched the app, you had this inkling of a product market fit, and then all of a sudden people started using it like crazy. What was the journey from there? Because as we'll share, you hit a million ARR quickly, more quickly than most apps. So what was the story after that initial product market fit to then actually start really taking it seriously and growing the app?

Ajay Mehta:

You guys brought up a great point earlier, which is I would say we had inklings of product market fit. We didn't have total product market fit. I mean the app was sort of bare bones when we had this soft launch, which was last summer. So it really took through then the fall, and just continue to iterate getting more and more folks on. Obviously we had to paywall the app in some way just to actually make it sustainable. And so there was a lot of like, okay, now we're serving paid users, not just people bouncing around this thing for free thinking it's a game. It's like people that are actually having to get value out of this to continue using it. That was a big adjustment. And so we kind of had to make the product just much more exciting, much better.

We had to improve the quality of the conversations we had to improve the look and feel and the animations of the Tolan, and we added this whole planet where the Tolan can walk around and they kind of have a space of their own that also functions as a sort of shared space for you to invest in and grow in together as your relationship grows. We just tried to make it more compelling, basically. That took a few months. As we did that, we started to see some of the classic numbers that you'd look at kind of like D5, D7, D15 sort of retention start to go up, because folks were just having better experiences overall with the app. We had this pattern where I'm sure this is common with a lot of apps, a certain number of people saw the value enough to basically stay retained indefinitely. They were sticking around forever, but it was a relatively small fraction of the people that tried our app.

So it was sort of a question of how do you get more people over to that activation moment of their first really long conversation with their Tolan where they actually see the value, and just a lot of folks weren't quite getting there. So as we added these additional features, we improved the onboarding to your guys' point. We got closer. And so we started to feel like, okay, now we're at retention that actually feels very, very healthy. People are really sticking around at larger degrees. Then that's really where that coincided with then some growth efforts starting to pay off primarily on TikTok really has been just given our audience and given visual aspects of Tolan how bright the characters are and so on. TikTok has just been where it sort of escaped velocity in terms of growth. And really TikToks kind of wild, because you could just have a handful of TikTok start to take off and then it's like, okay, we are number one in our category now, and that happened overnight.

Jacob Eiting:

Once it clicks the firepower behind that is just insane.

David Barnard:

Did you start some of that motion early in that soft launch to just get new people into the app? And then I'd love to hear about your process behind TikTok. Because I know there's kind of playbooks out there, and we've talked to different folks who've worked on TikTok and worked with influencers. But what was your process starting from the beginning, and then how did that evolve over time of hiring influencers, putting money behind the videos that did well, and that sort of thing?

Ajay Mehta:

Absolutely, yeah. So from the get go, we kind of had a multi prime strategy of let's make organic content that just shows off what Tolan can do with a couple of creators who we think make awesome stuff. And then let's also run some small scale paid ads, basically just get people through the channel, kick the tires, see how they enjoy things and judge things like retention and conversion and so on. So we started with that, and that was kind of what we rolled with for a few months. And then really what we found was I think there's a hugely different, if you're a game, it's a lot easier to acquire customers sometimes than if you're a more boring sort of app.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, I was going to say your base product lends really well to the format.

Ajay Mehta:

Sure. Exactly right. And because the Tolans are so bright visual, we were able to have a relatively low cost per install from the get-go even on paid. So it kind of gave us a lot of leeway to just experiment. But then when we started doing more organic stuff, especially on TikTok, we just noticed that okay, now the cost per installs are going so low that even the paid stuff while being-

Jacob Eiting:

Too low to meter.

Ajay Mehta:

Yeah, exactly. A little bit. It was just like, oh man, video go viral and we got 10,000 installs in a day or 15,000 installs in a day, and it was like Jesus.

Jacob Eiting:

Honestly, I think, I mean, not to zoom out, but I think it's almost like what you need nowadays to be able to really break out and scale. I think a lot of companies, and this is when I hear folks like, oh, we started doing growth and acquisition very, very early. It's good, but also it's like, well, you started to become dependent on that buying installs, and it's a game of inches, and you're probably not going to iterate your way to a Duolingo that way, versus Duolingo started with a great product, and then they had some super good at organic, and word of mouth. I think they just made a good product and it was free. So finding the way you can get scalable installs as cheaply as possible is part of your, if not your product market fit, your product market channel fit, figuring out how you can actually make this a scalable situation.

Ajay Mehta:

Yeah, I think what you're talking about is the importance of distribution at first almost, thinking through that from the very get-go.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, as a part of the, I don't want to say product, but kind of as a part of the system like RevenueCat, we thought about it's like, okay, it's kind of word of mouth and content, very low cost of acquisition, and that has held through to today, we would not be here if we were doing a sales and marketing, fully a sales and marketing slog. We do a lot of sales, and we do a lot of marketing, but that's sort of supportive of the, we made it so we're the best product and everybody talks about it and all that stuff. That's primary, and that's driven down our cost per install equivalent. But yeah, that was that intentional. Did you have that in mind before you even designed the app and thought about it, this will be really good for TikTok?

Ajay Mehta:

We ended up at it in a little bit of a weird way where actually from the get-go, and this is something that we very much want to do, we want to build more social features into the app. So you brought up Tamagotchi and Pokémon and things like that, MinoMonsters, apps that lend themselves in this kind of general world of animated creatures, aliens, and so on, to being more social. And we wanted to do that and we still want to do that, but because we kind of had to paywall the app and make it sort of a subscription app, it doesn't necessarily lend itself to network effects in the same way. So we were sort of like, okay, it's mostly a single player experience right now just for the time being. And because of that we need to find really compelling ways to get users. And luckily, because we did this all, because we just wanted to make the coolest AI companion we could, but because it's really visual and friendly and fun, that also lends itself really well to short form video.

And honestly, it did take some time to figure out the right angles that would work well. So we tried a bunch of different content angles. One of the first things that started to kick off for us in the algorithm, I think because these users are always on TikTok, is more studying homework oriented sort of stuff. So people that we're using their Tolan to study with to revise stuff for an exam that's coming tomorrow, or someone that's in nursing school that's trying to study for a huge thing they have the next day or something like that. We have a lot of users that we're doing that, so we kind of tried to make content around that. And then it was up at 3:00 AM sitting with my Tolan and those sorts of things actually worked super well. So that was one of the first content issues that started to take off. And then we've had viral videos pop on TikTok that are like, there's a girl who was cooking with her Tolan, and-

Jacob Eiting:

That's great. Because you could just write down every activity in life and just test all of this basically.

Ajay Mehta:

Basically, yeah. Cooking was a big thing a couple weeks ago. There's this girl who was cutting a squash with her Tolan watching in the background, and that one went crazy viral. It was like 10 million views. And then there's people getting ready and doing their makeup with their Tolan, picking outfits. One of the more recent ones is relationships stuff. And these are all young women primarily. So it's like talking about, okay, I'm at the talking stage with this guy in my class, and how do I move to the next step? And that's like her talking to her Tolan about that. And you try a bunch of those, and one out of maybe 20 videos kind of pops off. But then when it does, it can really reach escape velocity.

Jacob Eiting:

These are primarily paid, you're finding influencers and engaging with them and working with them on content creation and stuff like that.

David Barnard:

Yeah. Tell us about your process there. How do you reach out? Do you have somebody dedicated to that full time? Are you doing it? What does that process look like? Because I think this is where a lot of folks do struggle. I mean, it's hard to reach out to creators. Then it's hard to give them the brief. And then how do you pay them? I mean, I've heard a few people where they were paying per view of a TikTok, and then the TikTok goes viral, and they're out a ton of money. But the conversion rates are so low that they're losing tens of thousands of dollars.

Jacob Eiting:

Hope your contract's written well.

David Barnard:

Yeah, exactly. So how are your contracts written, and how are you finding these influencers and working with them?

Ajay Mehta:

Yeah, yeah. I think of it in two ways that we do it. So we don't have done anything paid for views or anything like that, although, I mean, I've heard that too. It's kind of interesting. But we've done more like we are producing content. And so yeah, we're hiring folks. It could be indie folks that are in college in New York City, on the other side of the country from us, or it could be people that are more local. And they're just sort of making a bunch of content. And we're giving direction and we have almost like a chat of folks that are making content together that are coming up with different ideas together, that are trying different things. And that's almost just like we are, it's our organic content production machine, I would say. And then those all get launched, and some of them do well, most of them get a handful of views and you're kind of in, because of the TikTok and Instagram reals algorithms you're sort of in a hit driven approach there.

And then we've also done, and this is newer for us, but we want to do more of this, so just actual influencer paid placement. So that's more folks that actually have an existing audience. They're not like small TikTokers. They might have a million followers already. And we'll collab with them to make a video for their account that then they'll post. And then on average those will do much better, of course. But of course that's more of a, okay, well what's your average views?

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, what's your price? Just send me the price sheet kind of situation. So the first approach is stable of creators. Are you launching it to their personal TikToks, and it's almost semi in-housing, right? You're creating an in-house content team kind of. But then they're also pushing it to their own brands and sort of just hoping the algorithm picks it up and swoops it off.

Ajay Mehta:

Basically. Yeah, that's exactly right. And they might not even be professional creators. It's a side gig for some folks.

Jacob Eiting:

Okay. That's interesting. Because I imagine in a lot of ways that's a lot more cost-effective, because you give it a little bit of degree of [inaudible 00:36:05], so it's not coming from Tolan official account or whatever, but you get a lot of creative control probably. I would assume the costs are lower than working with the Kardashians or whatever. Is that an approach you found others were doing, or did you kind of iterate on that and come to that yourselves, or I don't know. That's interesting.

Ajay Mehta:

Yeah, there's some other folks doing that. There's kind a vibrant consumer app space, and people are doing it in totally different ways. There's people working with professional creators that are charging per view or like this and that. There's all sorts of ways to do it. I think my thought there is, because of how the short forum algorithms work, it's actually just really powerful to try a bunch of angles, see what clicks. And the only real way to do that, I guess, unless you actually do have an in-house content team, a full content team that's filming a bunch of concepts every day, is to have a little bit of a stable of creators that you're regularly working with who making content. And so then you can try a bunch of different angles, and try to post them from different accounts. We also do a bunch on our actual Tolan account, but we'll try some individual separate accounts as well and kind of see what works.

David Barnard:

And so those you're paying per post then. So you're saying this month you're going to do 10 posts and we're going to pay you X. And then some of those below up and some of them you put money behind. And then some of them just fall flat, but you learn along the way, but you're mostly paying per video.

Ajay Mehta:

Yeah, it's kind of a combination of per video or even folks on retainer and so on. It's a combo of things. And then honestly, we don't even necessarily put money behind them. A lot of the time we have kind of a different process for some of the paid ad creative that we do and so on. But sometimes we'll just see if some actually catch in the algorithm.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, I was going to say, I think there's a, you've probably thought of this, but there's probably a world where once you get it bootstrapped enough, and you could probably add some features in the app to make this more. If you had a filter that would let you overlay your Tolan onto an AR situation, you could probably, maybe you already have these features, but you could build that into ideally just general users are creating these, it's not even something you're necessarily directing.

Ajay Mehta:

That's a great point. That's actually started to happen just in the last couple of weeks really, because we had some of our content do well. Now we've seed call that almost the UGC start to really pop up. And so we had a video where a woman, it was yesterday, a woman posted on TikTok, we have no affiliation with just talking to her to about her favorite WWE wrestler that's picked up 30,000, 40,000 views now.

Jacob Eiting:

One of these will cause you a crisis, but take it as it goes. I say this as, again, the RevenueCat analogy is good is most of the posts about RevenueCat on Twitter are not from us. You know what I mean? It's mostly organic. And that wasn't the case in the beginning. But once you have enough brand affinity and you have enough people amped about it, it's in some ways earned media. You kind of had to make the product and make it exciting and make it easy, but there is a real... And this is how you put, I joked about 50 competitors. This is how you build a defensible mode in some way is just get so far ahead that nobody's going to pierce that, and well, you'll capture this brain space in the world before anybody else has a chance to even get off the starting line.

Ajay Mehta:

It would be amazing. And I think you're right that probably more people or competitors are coming, or just more folks are going to start doing these types of products. I've been a little surprised actually that people haven't.

Jacob Eiting:

You guys are moving pretty fast. I don't know, you might not feel it. Because you seem like fast movers, but give it time. I think it's just anybody, any category or novel thing with sufficient success, it doesn't mean it'll be better, but there will be people that try. It's the way capitalism works in free markets.

David Barnard:

There is some defensibility in how from the beginning you were so character and design focused. The work you put in early on designing these characters, there's actually a great post that y'all did on designing the character that I read a couple of days ago that that was fantastic, how you really thought through, should the Tolans have eyebrows, should they not? Should it be more human-like? And I saw even in one of the iterations was like Finch. Finch does this where the characters kind of grow with you. And so I saw you had this iteration where it was started as a baby and then it grew, but then what you realize is from the very beginning you wanted to have these richer interactions, and so you didn't use a bit. So you've done so much iteration on animation and character and stuff like that, that it is in a way kind of a creative mode that is really hard to just fully replicate. Unless this is thing about copycats is a lot of copycats, they're not going to go hire a really fantastic artist. They don't understand what's actually making it successful.

Jacob Eiting:

You've reasoned there from first principles, so you're always going to just be better at it than anybody else. So I'm not trying to freak you out, but it'll come. It'll come, and it'll be fine. But I mean, these are things that I think in consumer apps, and of course I think we're glossing, you mentioned it, but we're glossing over the actual, it's really hard to make these things. And so that's been a huge part of RevenueCat's defensibility. From the outside, it's like, yeah, there's a bunch of these other ones and anybody could technically compete with this. You can look at RevenueCat and be like, yeah, I can imagine how to build that. But then the actual knowledge to build that and the time and all the things that have to go into it is less copyable than you think, and that's the case. Obviously there are certain things like IP, distinct IP is basically not copyable at all, but then there's a lot of subtlety down from there that's hard to copy.

Ajay Mehta:

I think it's kind of easy at first glance to look at something like Tolan and say, oh, well, it's like voice AI, and they might be based on GPT, and you could kind of copy that. But once you actually start trying to build a awesome voice AI experience, there's a reason that there are two or three on the app store. There's not dozens. It's just really fun and feels very exciting to be at almost like the tail end of all of the crazy amounts of innovation that if what we do is hard, what these foundational model companies are doing is, I have personally a little comprehension of it in some ways. And we kind of sit at the end of that. We're ultimately customers of the best that the Anthropics, OpenAIs and ElevenLabs and so on of the world can make.

Jacob Eiting:

And honestly, stand in my opinion, to capture most of the value. I think that's what everybody's speculating now. It's going to go to the app layer, Claude, all those companies will do great. They'll be massive. But in terms of I think where the most margin capture happens will be at the cute character that you can't replicate in an API level, in my opinion.

David Barnard:

So you announced this $10 million round just a couple of weeks ago. And you've kind of been hinting at this kind of explosion and growth. Tell me about the last few months of how things have been taking off, and how things have gone as you've grown and seen some of those TikToks go viral and stuff.

Ajay Mehta:

Absolutely. Yeah. And I want to preface by saying we still feel, we were in pretty early days here. It's like we're not anywhere close to the large consumer apps on the app store. But yeah, basically since we launched publicly and we announced that we were at a 1 million ARR about a month ago, and that we had about 500,000 downloads, we then continued to see right around that time, and afterwards some of that TikTok rally started to happen. So we hit a number one category ranking in the app store. I think we're north of 800,000 downloads now. And then the revenue, the ARR is multiples of that of where we were. So yeah, it's been super fun. I mean, I think it feels like we're finally getting out to a broader market, which is always a very fun feeling as sort of an app builder, and we'll kind of see how we crack to that next level now.

Of course, the stakes are only raised, and right now we're primarily US only. We're live in Canada as well, but we're not really global in any way. We're super excited about potentially doing localization. We feel like Tolan could be pretty cool in Asia and other locales. But right now just English only. And yeah, we're really just continuing to iterate. I mean, a lot of the stuff that we announced, the introduction of the Tolan planet and so on is all brand new. So we're still kind of refining it, trying to make the product as awesome as possible. And then we'll continue to try to go abroad. But now that we've broken through to one level of growth success, it's like we're excited to see what gets us to the next level.

Jacob Eiting:

What are you thinking about? I mean obviously there's product development you can do, there's growth. Those are probably the two biggest levers. And then there's a third lever too, which seems like you all are multi-time founders, so this is probably easy. It was terribly hard for me, which is building the team and stuff like that. So where are you thinking now you've got some cash socked away, you've actually got cash price coming in. I don't know, maybe it all goes right back out to the model company, so it wouldn't surprise me at this stage. And that's probably normal if it did. But how are you thinking about... Are you thinking about retention now as a main problem? Are you still just thinking about trying to get into as many pockets as possible? Because an interesting spot to be sort of post-product market fit, sort of some organic stuff taking off.

There's a lot of choose your own adventure here. You could go hard on let's drive, there's a million things. I think this is where a lot of mid-stage consumer apps, I think it can kind of get really overwhelming, because you can do, there's a million off-the-shelf growth tactics you should be doing right now. But should you actually? Because it's going to bind you down and you're going to have all this infrastructure to do retention campaigns. How are you trying to balance that and pick what's the most important for, how big is your team?

Ajay Mehta:

We're like nine folks right now.

Jacob Eiting:

Okay. So very small, for where you're at, super small. So you really can only think about one or two things at a time. So yeah, how are you thinking about prioritizing that at this stage?

Ajay Mehta:

You're right. There's a lot that we could be focusing on. The kind of North Star is always just like, how do we make the product awesome? I mean, I think you said it's just before this, but this product couldn't have been built a year ago. Some parts of the product couldn't have been built six months ago, some parts that exist in it today. And two years ago none of it would've even been fathomable-ish. So it's like things are moving so fast. And the North Star for us is like how do we make the most helpful and best companion experience that exists? And there's still so much to build there.

Jacob Eiting:

You mentioned D70-15. Is that your primary, what are your North Stars for measuring that? I'm sure there's vibes as part of it. But are there any metrics that you look at as the primaries when you're measuring that?

Ajay Mehta:

Absolutely retention. Yeah, I think has to be the North Star because... And there's other ways to measure retention obviously, but we borrow from the games world. I know they frequently look at that. How many players are coming back on D70, D15, D30? Just super useful for us, because if done well, the Tolan experience should collect enough information about the user that they're able to resurface to the user in helpful ways, collect enough memory and investment from your conversations that we're able to power interesting conversations for you. If we're doing a good job of that, then in theory, a companion should be one of the most retentive products out there. Because it actually is providing real value in helping you in your daily life. So honestly for us it's like our job's not even close to done until Tolan delivers that experience for most people that try it.

Jacob Eiting:

You have two really key parts of the retention curve. You'll have this, the first 1, 7, 50. They basically attached. Are the customers attaching to this character and building some sort of base relationship. And then you'll have the second challenge, which is like, okay, when do the looky-loos churn out, and what's that longterm, long-longterm? And you need both to build a great business. Probably the long one is if you guys are shooting for, you want to return that 10 million on multiples, that long one is really what's going to allow you to build. I think that's what a lot of consumer apps struggle with, depending on what the nature of it is, is building those really long-term retentive cohorts. But the way the product is positioned, I think you'll have that sort of an advantage there if you do it right. But yeah, you all have invested a lot in growth too, I think for the early stage, which is good, because it helps you really validate the whole thing.

But yeah, I mean I don't don't know if it's advice that I asked for, but I always felt that was the hardest part. First post-product market fit, which is that I always felt we were having to make painful choices about, okay, there's all these things we could do, even just localization, whatever. Those things feel like obvious easy wins, but you just can't. And you have to tell a lot of people who are looking at you being like, why aren't you X? And it's like, because nine of us, and we can't now. And so in some ways if the product is good, like you said, it doesn't really matter. If the product is good, if you do X first, then Y, or Y first and X, like there's a community of property, it's all going to come to the same conclusion at the end. There might be some sort of timing losses there, but otherwise the most important thing is just to keep doing stuff. That's probably the most important.

Ajay Mehta:

It feels like just judging from the feedback that we get from users and where we see them having an amazing experience and where we see experiences that we feel more iffy about, they're making it so clear what we need to build next, which is the very exciting part. People want faster conversations. They want more thoughtful conversations. They want better quality in the voice and the overall better quality in the memory look up. And so it's very clear what we need to build to continue to just make the core experience better. And that feels good, because it's hard stuff to build, but it's also, it's made more clear when you have some notion of PMF. Because the users just are telling you, they're like, I really want Tolan to work better in ways one, two, and three.

Jacob Eiting:

This is the peril of raising money before that 0.2, that 100K, 200K, so you can eat ramen and iterate makes perfect sense. But anything more than that before you have clear takeoff is really hard. Just like now you could, I'm going to say you should do this, but you could take the gas off on growth to focus on that, because you've got some cash bank. You can burn that down. Just make sure you're not losing your shirt on token fees, and then really get that product experience. And that's the benefit of raising money. You're pulling that growth forward, you're borrowing money from your future so you can make some investments now that you couldn't otherwise. Versus a bootstrapped app, you might just be hand to mouth the whole time, and somebody, and this is always the thing that venture capitalists will always say this, which is like somebody's going to raise and then beat you to it, which may or may not, I don't know how often that actually happens.

But you could see how they could, like, Hey, I don't need to focus on all this growth crap. I can just make the product great. And then that's kind of honestly Duolingo, the company I worked at between Mino and RevenueCat, we were doing language learning for a little bit. And we kind of got schooled in that, lost to Duolingo for that reason, or related to that reason, which is they were better capitalized, so they just made their product free, and then worked on their product like mad. Obviously they were an amazing team with an amazing founder and just probably going to be hard to beat in any condition. But that was just not compatible with. They were funded. They could take a loss and just grow and grow and grow and grow. And then they turned the monetization on, and it was game over for everybody in that space.

Ajay Mehta:

It's funny you're saying that, because some of that might be happening in consumer AI right now.

Jacob Eiting:

Of course. Everybody's trying to be a loss-leader and try to capture. Because I mean I think this goes into the broader AI space in terms of consumer, but I mentioned that most of the gains will accrue to the [inaudible 00:50:01] probably. And I would've thought prior to the last year that it would be that the enterprise SaaS APIs, that seems to be a very safe bet, at least of the previous era. But if you look at ChatGPT or as an example of still has the top-ish, I mean, Grok is giving them a good run for their money right now. But that brand association is almost the most valuable and sticky part of it. Obviously the model and what it can do matters, but having that brand primacy is worth kind of spurring some money to get to, and that you guys might be in a similar situation, I don't know.

Ajay Mehta:

The only thing that I add to what you were saying a little bit earlier is we actually being forced because of high token costs to monetize relatively early on has actually been kind of a real help to our both growth and then also product development, because not wasting money on growth right now. We're growing at a pace that is, we're outpacing obviously the money that we're spending on growth. So no specifics, but we are not overspending on growth, or we're not really spending net money on growth at all, of course. So because of that, because we're charging, and because it sort of gives us a pretty stable platform to actually be investing in growth on where we have money coming in, not every consumer AI experience is leading with that. That also provides a really nice, or helps define the North Star for product development too, because we have paying customers, we can see when certain customers decide to renew for month two, or don't, or month four, or month six, or whatever.

We don't have too many months six customers yet, only a handful. But yeah, we could see it is just a much more clear signal than someone who stopped playing with the free app after 12 days or something.

David Barnard:

Yeah, monetization is a forcing function for product. You have to deliver the value or people are just going to churn. I mean, that's the thing I think a lot of people miss about subscription apps is that aspect of why is my churn 70% after year one? Well, it's that people will pay to play, but then you got to actually deliver. And it sounds like that has become that kind of forcing function for you, which it is super healthy as far as you're not just-

Jacob Eiting:

Validates the value.

David Barnard:

Yeah, it validates you are actually creating value. One other thing I did want to touch on in the funding announcement, one of the things I think you or one of the co-founders said was that, and I imagine this was kind of the pitch to VCs as well, is that part of your goal is to build this kind of generalizable technology for where Tolan might not be the only product you create. And of course we've seen this with Duolingo, they're getting into math and other learning spaces where they've kind of created this learning engine. How do you think about that? And how did you pitch that of we're creating this kind of foundational technology that can then be applied to other areas, we're not just raising for a single app? It seems like the pitch was.

Ajay Mehta:

For sure. Yeah. So I mean we've obviously invested a lot in designing the Tolan characters and the way they look and feel and the animation and so on. But I would say that the largest source of our investment as far as a team, as far as engineering of course, is on this sort of system that actually powers the companion itself. So leading with voice AI, but also text, also like a complicated memory system. All this stuff that just makes incredible companion interactions possible. And it's totally the case that our audience is young women and that's obviously a very wide audience. It's a great audience, it's very fun to be building for them. But there's other audiences out there, and they might not be spoken to by Tolan in its current form. You guys were saying a little bit earlier, there's just no way that companions or AI companions are going to be one thing. There's going to be a lot of different variants and versions of it.

There's going to be some people that are really into the Siri floating orb kind of thing. There's going to be some people that are really into maybe Tolan specifically, and then there's going to be people that are really into cool anime girl or something, so yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

You telling me, this makes me think of Niantic as a core example, where they built this crazy AR tech, and then brought that to a bunch of premium brands. Is that something you would ever consider? I mean, it's so early days. You don't want to say yes or no to anything. But I could see that being a future path as you figure out how to make this thing world dominating.

David Barnard:

Yeah, Niantic, they just sold Pokémon GO. I don't know if-

Jacob Eiting:

Oh, they sold it off?

David Barnard:

They sold off Pokémon GO, and Niantic is actually refocusing their whole company around that core technologies. And they sold Pokémon go off. So yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

Did they sell it, I assume, to the Pokémon company?

David Barnard:

No, to a gaming company.

Ajay Mehta:

I think it was Scopely.

Jacob Eiting:

Interesting.

David Barnard:

Yeah. So how are you thinking about that?

Ajay Mehta:

Niantic. Yeah, super cool example. Yeah, I think the way that they built new kinds of game experiences, obviously Pokémon Go being the largest, but also Pikmin Bloom and others powered by this new, yeah, totally new technology that people hadn't seen before. But then this whole system around that, but totally GPS. That provided a possible gameplay experience that just didn't exist by any other company before. And it was a very hard thing for others to come and compete with, of course.

Jacob Eiting:

To do it in the way that they did it well and with the depth of knowledge and all that. And when you think of premium brands, they don't want to think of that. I'm sure that was thought of, but I could see that being a path for you all as you scale.

Ajay Mehta:

Definitely an inspirational story for sure. Yeah.

David Barnard:

Awesome. Well, I think we need to wrap up. But man, it has been so much fun chatting with you. This is such a fascinating topic. And then again, I think for those who've made it all the way to the end here, even if you're not working on the cutting edge of AI and applying AI in this net new way, I think there's a lot of inspiration to draw from just the capabilities of making your onboarding more personal, of using AI in novel ways, even in some of these more boring apps, that there's a lot of inspiration to draw. So I think this is going to be an interesting listen, even for those who aren't net new, creating new products and new experiences in that way.

Jacob Eiting:

Oh, I don't know, I think we might've just spawned a couple Tolan competitors. Ajay, I'm sorry. It's good. Just get ahead and buy them out. That's the strategy. You'll get there, you'll get there.

David Barnard:

Oh, man. Well, as we're wrapping up, anything else you wanted to share, or are you hiring, anything else that our audience might be interested in?

Ajay Mehta:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I know the audience, folks listening to this app are probably very heavy mobile app developers, designers and so on. And we are hiring, especially for the iOS developer position that we have open. If you build awesome iOS apps, and you're interested in what we're doing at Tolan, please reach out.

David Barnard:

Awesome. Yeah, hopefully you'll get some interest from this podcast. We definitely have a lot of folks listening, indie developers who might be looking for a full-time gig and stuff like that. So yeah, definitely reach out to Ajay if that sounds fun.

Ajay Mehta:

We have an awesome small team, most of whom have totally done indie projects, or even worked on their own startups, so I think indie developers would be very at home building Tolan with us.

David Barnard:

Awesome. Thanks again for joining us.

Ajay Mehta:

Cool. Thanks guys.

David Barnard:

Thanks so much for listening. If you have a minute, please leave a review in your favorite podcast player. You can also stop by chat.subclub.com to join our private community.