A year and a half ago, I was the CEO of a failing business. Today, that same company is one of the fastest growing AI tools on the market, and on track to break $10M in annual recurring revenue just 15 months after our launch.

Blaze's first year in business is a story of incredible product execution and growth tactics— but it's even more remarkable because it came after years of struggling to break through.

Here's how it all really went down, through my eyes at the bow of the ship.

The Decision

It was June 19, 2023. I called my cofounder Eddie. My first words to him after weeks of not talking were "we need to pivot."

It took years to get to this moment: we'd been working on our first product, Almanac, since 2019.

Almanac was an async collaboration tool for distributed teams, modeled off how Github enables engineers to collaborate across time zones and geographies.

We had raised $50m to build it, crafted a cutting-edge product with a real-time document editor, version control, and reviews and approvals, and convinced on some of the world's best remote teams, like Todoist and Andela, to become our anchor customers.

But we had a big problem: our market.

In startupland, the hard part about "finding product/market fit" is the market. You can build just about anything these days in tech, but finding an urgent underserved need is more art than science, like trying to find a seam of minerals underground with just basic tools up top.

And because we raised venture capital, we didn't need just any market: we needed one that would allow us to feasibly scale to a $1b valuation in 10 years. Typically, those markets only get created with rapid disruptions caused by new technologies, consumer behavior, or regulations that create an opening in a previously well-supplied category.

We anchored Almanac to the remote work wave, which in 2020 seemed like the kind of perfect storm that would upend how everyone worked and create the need for new behaviors and tools to support them. But in reality, remote work turned out more like climate change than a tsunami of rapid change—a slow-rising trend that would require a generation of managers to retire before it could really scale.

And after years of trying—of building and rebuilding our product, tweaking our positioning and changing our go to market tactics—I concluded that we just wouldn't ever grow fast enough to achieve venture-scale returns for our shareholders.

At the same time I was realizing this, AI was taking off. GPT4 launched in December 2023, and the amazing demos on Twitter released a wave of fervent interest unlike anything I had seen. Even when I went to speak at the world's preeminent remote work conference in Portugal in April 2024, the only thing people wanted to talk about was AI.

I resisted the AI fever for the first half of 2024—I had lived through the boom/bust cycle of overhyped trends before (cough crypto cough), and I generally believe in staying true to your vision even if it's unpopular at first ("be contrarian and right").

But as the months wore on, AI seemed more like the real deal: the once-in-a-generation kind of disruption every entrepreneur dreams about. And we, luckily, had the exact right product foundation—a document editor—that you'd need to fulfill AI's first use cases around generated copy and images.

We were positioned right where the wave would break. We just needed to turn our board and start paddling.

The Pivot

After the decision, the biggest two questions we faced were who to serve and how to break through in a crowded market.

At first, we tried not to overthink how to differentiate on positioning. We just needed to get something out and learn from people's feedback before we spent too much time optimizing the product for a customer we didn't know yet.

So, we quickly put up a landing page and some ads for an AI tool for marketing (we called it "Megan," like the cult AI character from the movie). We built a live demo of the product and starting showing it to folks who put in their credit card for a sales meeting, as a way to qualify who was interested enough in just the value prop that they'd be OK getting charged eventually.

Most new AI startups were focusing on enterprise use cases around marketing, sales, and customer service, and the the largest players in the space, Copy.ai and Jasper, were also pivoting upmarket.

But when we talked to corporate marketers, they were more curious than desperate in their interest. They thought the demo was cool, but needed to talk to their manager, consult with their legal departments, and start security protocols—all for an R&D-type trial.

But when we talked to small business owners, solopreneurs, freelancers, creatives, consultants, agencies, there was an urgency in their questions and a fear of getting left behind with AI that the bigger companies didn't have.

They all needed marketing to grow, but none were professional marketers. They all wore ten hats, and had no time to do all the work it takes to grow the impressions, leads, and followers that drive sales.

For them, we realized that AI had the potential to change everything. All of the sudden, a tool like ours could help them post on social every day and gain followers, or publish enough blog posts to rank on SEO. We could help level the playing field for these small businesses against bigger companies with significant marketing budgets.

We immediately knew we had identified a massive gap in the market that no one was focusing on. And so we made it our goal to claim it.

Our customers found most other AI tools hard to use. They didn't want to "chat with their computer," as one told me. They wanted an easy, fast experience that helped them produce great content. And by great, they meant it needed to look like them, not like the "internet voice" most AI output sounds like.

Their feedback made our value prop obvious. We focused on building a simple, delightful product that gave our customers transparency and control over their content through step by step Wizards. We invested in personalization features around Brand Voice that were better than anything on the market. And we enabled them to edit the content with their clients or peers afterwards, instead of going back and forth with a bot.

Our consumer focus also made our go to market strategy clear. We needed a self-serve product people could pay for on their own at a low price point. We needed great onboarding and educational content to help people learn and master the product. And we needed a distribution strategy that would allow us to scale quickly.

We built all those things, but we knew we needed to take one more big swing. We learned that many of our potential customers didn't initially trust that AI as a technology would work for their business. So we knew we needed to create an iconic brand that our customers could love and believe in.

The most valuable consumer companies today—Apple, Nike, Starbucks—all have great brands. Brands create meaning and value above and beyond a product's functional benefits. They create an emotional connections between customers and a company; they make people feel something.The best ones make purchasing a product part of someone's identity.

We knew that a powerful brand could help our customers form an emotional connection with our company beyond the product's functional benefits, making it more likely they'd tell their friends about us. So we made it our goal to build the first great consumer brand in the AI space—something no one seemed focused on besides us.

Our brand started with my personal connection to our mission. I come from a family of entrepreneurs: my grandfather started an insurance agency in New Jersey, my brother runs a cookware startup, and our parents have a small business together in NYC.

Growing up, we watched my parents successfully grow their business across the country. But they struggled to make the jump to the internet. Blaze is for people just like them.

We wanted our brand to reflect great pop culture marketing from moments in history when technology was also quickly changing society. We took inspiration from the golden age of comics in postwar 1950s America, whose superheroes still resonate today.

The brand was a hit from day one. Almost all the customers I've talked to say that while they stay for the product, they originally tried it out because they loved our brand. I heard over and over again that our distinctive, fun brand got people excited about what AI could do for them and made them feel part of the journey.

The Results

Blaze took off overnight. We were the #1 Product of the Day, Week, and Month on Product Hunt, and we've grown faster every month since. We're on track to reach eight figures in annual recurring revenue less than a year and a half after our launch.

Since launch, we've added a full Content Management System so you can schedule and post directly from Blaze, an awesome Visual Studio that produces AI-generated designs in your brand style, and tools that can generate a full month of content or posts in one click.

Blaze now serves hundreds of thousands of users, and we did it all with a team of only 17: 10 engineers, 1 product designer, 1 brand designer, 3 marketers, and 2 founders covering everything else.

The pivot was just the start of our success. It's been hard to sustain and accelerate our initial growth, and it's taken a lot of creative thinking to figure out how to climb ever higher.

And of course, it wasn't a smooth ride all the way up. I compare the past year to watching a rocket launch: it looks smooth and straight from the ground, but inside everything is shaking, everything feels like it's going to fall apart, alarms are going off in one area—and as soon as you solve that pressure builds somewhere else.

The best part is we're just getting started. I can't wait to see where Blaze goes in 2025 as we launch some of the most cutting-edge AI features we've ever attempted.

Looking back, it's pretty amazing to see how far we've come in a year. We have deep product market fit, efficient distribution channels, and a brand customers love so much that they're sharing it with their friends. And it all started by a choice we made to not accept "good enough" and apply our years of training and preparation in a sprint towards "great" at the exact moment when it really counted.

The reason I want to share all this with you every week is because starting and growing a business that changes people's lives is a lot to take on. But I truly believe that there's no greater feeling than building something incredible that people want and doing it together with a brilliant, motivated team. So my hope is that by sharing what I've learned along the way, I'll make it a little less lonely and a lot more fun for you to build something big too.

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