GTM Sauce

RevenueCat · B2B · in-app subscription infrastructure

Drop cost limits on AI features and let venture money cover inference

Unknownfinancingfeature-development

What they did

RevenueCat was starting to build cost-control measures for its AI features (running on Anthropic's Opus); Jacob killed that work and chose to let usage run, betting inference prices will fall and using venture capital to absorb the cost meanwhile. Reference cost: one LLM call per app per day would be tens of thousands of dollars a month.

In their words

The Bootstrapper's Path to $10M ARR – Andrew Maguire, Volo Ventures

Play the episode

David Barnard… that's a very different business outcome than a Fable level model in two years, in 18 months. And guessing at that time horizon, that's what so many people are doing right now is we're doing it at Revenue Cat. We're using Opus48 for our Ricoh product. It is amazing. I've been shocked at how good it is at those things, but we're making a bet that that will get cheaper, but how quickly will it get cheaper and then how's the usage going to go and

Jacob EitingEverything's just a bet. I explicitly killed us. We were starting to build some cost control measures and I

David BarnardWas like,

Jacob EitingEh, that's what the venture capital is for, right? It's like, let's just let it rip.

Andrew MaguireThat's what I was just about to say.This is where venture capital is actually useful. If you are building a business with network effects, let the VCs bet on the fact that the cost of inference will come down if it's expensive, but people are added to a product that's essentially growing virally or something. That's the use case to go get the venture funding to be like, okay, we have an amazing product. People are totally addicted to it. It's …

Get tactics like this every Monday

New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.

More from this episode

Tags: ai-features, inference-costs, venture-funded