60 days: $400k (organic), lawsuits, expulsion, stress and euphoria

Marc Andreessen has been quoted saying you only feel 2 emotions while running a startup: euphoria and despair, and I couldn't agree more.

When I was living the solo indie hacker lifestyle, I wasn't getting thousands of users on my site per second to the point where the servers would crash every couple of seconds. I was getting hit by lawsuits and I wasn't arguing with co-founders on which direction we should take the company. The horror stories I heard from other founders I looked up to started to become a reality for me. Elon’s quote about chewing glass and staring into the abyss also didn’t seem that far either…

I'm working on getconch.ai an AI writing assistant / AI bypasser tool that my two co-founders and I started about three months ago. Our main source of traffic and growth has been Instagram and Tik Tok shorts. We went from a red ocean to a blue ocean overnight when we became the only startup in the world that bypassed GPTZero. Students all over the world started flocking to our website overnight.

Every week since our launch in late February, growth doubled. The biggest catalyst was a single short-form video that had accumulated 30 million views on Tik Tok, 10 million on Instagram, and 5 million on Twitter. I can't even begin to comprehend how many people that actually looks like. Revenue also sky-rocketed, with our biggest day being $33,000. Tejas, our CTO, and I spent multiple nights fixing our servers which constantly kept crashing.

Everyone in the education space had heard about us and that also included the university my co-founders attend. They threatened both my co-founders with expulsion if we didn't shut down the company. We were in a real pickle. Each of them only had 1 semester left to graduate, was dropping out really the only solution?

For the time being, we agreed to close all further sign-ups to the app and archive all of our videos. We were getting censored. For 2 painstakingly long weeks, we only could fix bugs in the app, looking for potential investors who could acquire us, and also hire a lawyer. Luckily for us, the lawyer was able to negotiate with the school and worked a great deal out that kept the company alive.

We are currently developing and releasing our secret mobile app I'm super excited about. I spent the past two weeks designing it and hiring artists to bring the vision to life. We're expecting the summer to be super dry for Conch, and so we're banking a lot on this mobile app succeeding. The launch date should be one month from now, and our landing page with all the details will be launched next week which I'll announce on my Twitter.

This is the second post of my newsletter called The Process, and the reason I’m writing it is an important one. We can maybe fast forward 3 years from now, and I could boast to the world I just had a multimillion-dollar exit. People would care for a second, a minute maybe even a full day. But the process is forever. If people are following your process, they follow your wins, your losses, the marketing that went viral, the marketing that didn’t, the feature launch that got you product/market fit, the features that didn’t, you’ll have people who will support you forever. That’s why I love the process and in doing so, the score will take care of itself.

Say hi on Twitter :) https://twitter.com/dantebuilds
Follow my journey and read previous eps at: https://dantekim.substack.com