"I Built My Own AI Video Model, Now Make $3M a Month," Akool CEO Jeff Lu

In the early days the team showed lots of product demos and result demos in related communities: subreddits, Facebook groups and Discord servers. The brand's own subreddit (r/akool_official) came much later and was not an early driver. No cadence or volumes given.

While trying to close large B2B customers (a slow process), many users were already using the product on their own. The team put a payment gateway on the product and people started paying online by themselves, mostly from organic traffic. This moved the company from pure B2B to a B2B/B2C mix.

In 2021 (part time) and 2022 (first full-time year) the team spent most of its time pursuing large B2B contracts and had difficulty closing them. Revenue stayed around $100K both years.

The team found user groups already using video creation tools, talked with them, frequently scheduled one-on-one meetings, listened to what they needed and recommended tools to them.

Fiverr has many sellers making videos (e.g. face swaps) for clients. The team talked with them, pitching Akool as a way to get that work done faster (host's paraphrase, which the founder confirmed).

Instead of building the largest general video foundation models, Akool designs and trains smaller models from scratch for specific tasks: human/avatar generation, and a swap series (face, character, motion, head, hair). Different architecture and training data give better quality on corner and boundary cases. Training runs on rented cloud servers (mostly Lambda, plus others depending on workload). Large foundation models are only fine-tuned.

Until 2023 there were no AEs; the first enterprise deal (Coca-Cola) came fully inbound. The first account executive was hired in 2024. Today there are 4-5 quota-carrying reps, each on a $1M quota (described as standard).

Business customers buy credits and pay by usage. Some integrate Akool into their own software through the API, so as they scale usage, API calls (and spend) scale with it.

The self-serve pricing had three tiers (Pro, Pro Max, Business). The team recently added a Starter plan to give people more options to get started. Prices not given; host calls the pricing page confusing, with many sliders.