Story of the legendary launch -- Wordware (YC S24)
10 days: 7MM people running our AI Agents; 250k users; $100k every 7 days; breaking ProductHunt servers.
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So, just as a reminder, I am Filip (X, LI), the CEO at Wordware. Wordware is the first AI Operating System (aiOS) that enables anyone to build, iterate, and deploy AI with Natural Language.
In simpler non-VC trillion-dollar TAM terms, we make everyone an AI Developer. You can run your AI on our front end or get an API and hook it up in your product. With this, you get to great Agents 20x faster cause everyone can iterate, yielding better quality. Like, how the hell can an engineer know what a good contract should look like? And yup, today they are the one who has to iterate on it (or deal with hundreds of requests from PMs/CEOs and rebuild the application again)
Try it for free here.
Okay, so back to the story:
I have been in startups for over six years, and going viral has happened to me for the first time. Is it PMF? Probably not yet, but it gives us a chance!
101 on how to do a legendary launch
The Set-up
This might apply only to AI Infra companies. Also, we were primarily lucky, but maybe somebody can plan this out with what we learned.
Use your underlying product to launch something viral — in our case, it was twitter.wordware.ai (Kudos to Kamil Ruczynski, our head of growth for the idea) — an AI Agent that reads all your tweets, roasts and analyses your personality.
BTW read my roast here or our compatibility raport with Robert.Plan the launch of your main product (wordware.ai) at the peak of virality. Make it evident that the viral product was built with your tool and redirect interested people to your website.
Look how many mentions of wordware there are ⬆️ down⬇️.
We made it extremely easy to play with the agent. If you click Duplicate, you land in a fully functioning prompt that you can edit quickly. Try it.
This clever technique meant that we redirected a LOT of traffic to wordware.ai. From there, there was an offer to book a free workshop and a link to our ProductHunt Launch.
Ridiculous exposure means that even a couple of per cent matters (X was perfect for this as there are more techie people there).
The process
Okay, the above made it seem like we knew what would happen; the truth is that we launched twitter.wordware.ai, and we had no clue it would take off as much as we did. In the first three days, we had so many inefficiencies that we spent around 45k on Anthropic, Vercel, various scrapers, and everything else. It's crazy, but everything starts to be extremely expensive at scale. Here are the weirdest ways we discovered this:
Our bill of tolstoy — a cool webpage plugin with a pop-up video on our landing page — 904.8k views — $6.5k (awesome CEO waived the fees tho)
We had to change a font to be a free one — cause our bill for a paid one would have been $40k
So the first couple of days were mostly about fighting fires; we broke a bunch of scrapers, anthropic had to keep increasing our rate limits, and we had to switch away from bedrock cause they couldn’t handle it 😂
We were also spending money at an alarming rate; we are essentially a pre-seed company, so some decisions were difficult. Initially, we thought it would last only two days, but it turns out that we can control the virality by toggling the paywall on and off. Here is how it went down:
We planned the launch event for August 2nd and set our ProductHunt page to go live at 12:01 a.m. (ProductHunt is the tech equivalent of radio top charts.)
I fired up some tweets and pinged our early investors (pro tip: having people influential in your space with a bigger following is amazing).
Before going to sleep at 4 a.m., we were #2 with 130 votes (the typical best of the day is around 400).
When I woke up, Robert was waiting in the kitchen with a huge smile. We reached 1200 overnight! Some tweets I sent half-dead at 4 a.m. went viral, and the idea of making anyone an AI developer resonated with more people than we expected!
Throughout the day, we kept breaking the ProductHunt page; here is an email from the CEO at PH. They run some complex processes to ensure that each vote is legit, which is why it’s so important in the tech community. (I still think they lost some of our votes cause that line is too straight and might mean their server capability was limiting us).
It seems now like we are going to be the top launch ever, with 6151 votes registered on the day 😊
It calmed down a bit in the following days, not too much regarding numbers, but we just had it more under control. We also learned how to control it with paid features and forms, trying to qualify our leads. In the last seven days, for example, we made $100k (just from the Twitter project).
We still sometimes get viral in some countries (Japan was the last major).
But now, let’s jump to what it all means! What business value did it bring to wordware.ai?
Business value
Initially, we had a continuous FOMO of being unable to use the situation to get traction for our main product. What followed was weird queues and forms and getting 700k leads. Quality? Not sure. Here are our Tally stats.
We started noticing that our main product is gaining A LOT of attention. These are the stats for app.wordware.ai (the below numbers seem to be inflated, though 🧐
Daily Active Users:
This translated into:
272k users registering on wordware.ai (on 14th August, we are still growing at about 20k per day — even though the twitter personality analysis has died down now)
Our calendar is FILLED with calls
Explosive growth for our company plan (899 USD per month). I am unsure if it is because people are more likely to trust us now. Even before this, we had big customers like Instacart, but this seemed to make us a bit more of a recognised name. This is crucial for an Infrastructure company.
Overall we couldn’t ask for a better result from this. We plan to go viral with different apps biweekly and already have some CRAZY ideas; stay tuned!
Summary
We still don’t know what this means for our company. Our tool always planned to reach analytical people without traditional coding backgrounds, but we didn’t know it would happen that quickly. It wasn't 100% polished and ready for self-serve. We are now playing catchup but slowly seeing the network effects we always wanted to induce. The most important part is that serious builders stay, pay and are loving our product. Just one of many screenshots from our #wordware-love channel (we should make it public).
The plan was always to be a horizontal tool (BTW, I think the strict lean startup methodology doesn’t apply to many AI sectors — more on this soon).
We wanted to have three different types of users, kind of like AirTable:
AI enthusiasts seed our community and provide helpful feedback and shareable prompts. We currently don’t charge them for usage. They kind of create something like GitHub repos where everyone can fork their AI Agents and reuse them in their flows.
Scaleups and startups needing to reach a working product quickly. In this case the founders/PMs iterate on Wordware, collaborating with engineers for integrations. Sometimes, we serve as their whole backend.
Enterprises want to use us to create proof of concept and internal tools for themselves and their clients.
So now we are off to the races. As my cofounder Robert said, we have probably built 1% of the final product. The dream is audacious: We want to become the central place to orchestrate all your AI, or as we like to say, your AI Operating System.
Call to action
If you are building in AI and your main focus is product right now, reach out! Sign up for a free workshop via https://tally.so/r/3yxPX8 , The size of the org doesn’t matter ❤️
Please introduce us to anyone who might be building in the space and might use our help.
Join the revolution and start coding in plain English! Use wordware.ai on the free tier and join our community!
P.S. I am seriously so grateful for all of this. I’ve been in startups for so long, and finally, we are hot. I don’t know how long this will last, but yes, I am enjoying tier 1 VC funds booking calls with our interns cause they can’t find my calendly 😂
P.P.S. I need to thank my whole team for this, but especially Robert Chandler — my cofounder, CTO and my better half ❤️
P.P.P.S. Check out the demo:
Really great story! :)
Congrats 🙌