Failure to Launch 🚀

Like many founders, the entrepreneurial-itch got ahold of David Park early. At 16-years old he would start his first venture, an apparel brand. It failed.

His parents, who had also been entrepreneurs, wanted a more secure future for their son so they helped pay for him to go to college.

In David’s own words, “I didn’t really feel like I fit in anywhere. I didn’t fit in with the people in my fraternity. I didn’t fit in with the people in my major…I was always surrounded by people, but I always felt lonely.”

Not fitting in anywhere and knowing that he wanted to do his own thing, led him to only one outcome, drop out of college. Failure.

Inspiration From Behind 🍑

While looking for his next big idea, he met Henry Mao. Like David, Henry was also an outsider who wasn’t sure were he fit in. Also, like David, Henry was interested in entrepreneurship and had a passion for AI.

Our new-duo would go on to start venture after venture. They all failed. David estimates that they started 9-10 “businesses” that went nowhere.

Then they discovered GPT-2. They asked it a simple prompt.

After regaining their composure after the initial wave of laughter had passed over. David and Henry found this response not only hilarious, but profound. David would go on to say “that butthole sentence, convinced us two buttholes to create Jenni.”

The initial concept for Jenni was to give agencies a way to write better content faster, with the help of AI.

The Early Days🌱

With an idea and a dream, the boys were off and running. Henry would do the coding and David would do the selling.

Henry had built out the site and now it was David’s turn. Start selling.

David put in the hours doing every entrepreneurs favorite thing…cold-calling.

“It was a terrible, painful time. Cold-calls, nobody wants to talk to you. They hang up on you, reject you...I was working from my parent’s house. My mom would wake up, hear me raving to some poor soul about why they need Jenni. And then before she’d go to sleep, she’d still hear me speaking to some other poor soul. I was working pretty much day and night”

David credits his parents for being a huge reason he was able to make it during those tough early times.

“The most humiliating thing was I’d have to ask my mom for her credit card just to get Chipotle. I had no money. I was a real loser, but my parents were so kind to me. They never made me feel like a loser. On days when I didn’t believe in my self I felt like my parents believed in me.”

Success-ish🎉

In 2020, GPT-3 came out, and with it a wave of companies start reaching out to Jenni, wanting to learn how their business could be leveraging AI. They gain some users, but eventually they hit a plateau.

They couldn’t seem to get past $2,000 in MRR. Then David started doing something that changed the business forever.

If you read last week’s story about Excelformulabot, then you’ll remember this next step is something we highlighted as one of the most important steps for founders. Talk to your users.

David started talking to his users about the product. Here are his tips for doing this:

Don’t ask: What do you like about our product?

Do ask:

• what do you dislike about our product

• what do you love about other peoples products

• what’s your current workflow? How does our product fit into it?

What he learned is that users wanted a “friendly AI assistant to help them on their writing journey.”

They begin tweaking Jenni to better fit the needs of their users. And then David goes on a small podcast to talk about his startup and one of the listeners happens to works with Jason Calacanis, an angel investor.

Jason funds Jenni with $100k.

Fleeing The Country✈️

With the $100k in the bank, David and Henry book a one-way ticket to Malaysia.

No, this isn’t some Catch Me If You Can con-man tactic.

They realize that the cost of living in Malaysia is way cheaper and they can cut down on their burn rate by ¼ and extend their runway (amount of months your business can keep going before it’s out of money).

In Malaysia they returned to their cycle of: talk to users > refine product > talk to users > refine product.

Eventually, they had an entirely new product aimed at an entirely different market. Academia.

Instead of an AI writing assistant for EVERYONE. They narrowed in on a very specific niche. College students writing research papers.

The Tweet Heard Round The World🌎

This tweet right here changed David’s and Henry’s lives. This tweet kicked off one of the most viral twitter threads in history. and Jenni was the 2nd website on the list of “10 free websites that are so valuable they feel illegal” (also lets take a moment to appreciate this tweet, what an absolutely great piece of writing. You can’t read this tweet and not be intrigued).

After this tweet, Jenni went from $2k to $10k MRR in one month. But virality is fleeting.

So David brought on an old college buddy to help with TikTok and Reels to try and create their own cycle of viral content. Take a look at the amount of views on these TikToks.

The success of viral marketing led them to continue scaling to $50k MRR, then $80k MRR.

Then…

The Diagnosis💔

Just as David felt like Jenni was becoming a success, he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer.

“It felt like my dreams and nightmares were happening at the same time.”

But luckily, after undergoing months of treatment and surgery, he was cancer free. And back to work.

Crushing It💪🏼

Today Jenni.ai has over 2.5 million users and is valued at over $30M. David is now 27 years old. He started his first business at 16. In his own words, “That’s over 10 years of failure” before he found success.

David’s story is a treasure-trove of lessons for aspiring entrepreneurs. Lessons around facing failure, pivoting, and dealing with life events outside of the business.

David still runs Jenni.ai and has taken on a digital nomad lifestyle, working from Airbnbs around the world.

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