Make about 4,000 AI video ads a month, with people coming up with the ideas

Joseph ChoiEveryone in the industry will tell you to put a hard paywall at the end of onboarding. They tested the opposite, and taking it away made them more money. And all of that testing runs on top of an ad machine that barely exists anywhere else.

Patrick Stuart-ConstantWe've been fully AI for all our ads for over 2 years now.

Joseph Choi4,000 video ads a month, all AI for over 2 years profitably. In this episode, Patrick and Pablo break down the full machine behind a $16 million app studio that runs almost entirely on data. How they find apps that already peaked and started declining, buy them cheap, and turn them into their biggest winners. The onboarding paywall test that breaks the number one rule in the industry and why removing the paywall made them more money, not less. …

Patrick Stuart-ConstantUh thesis is uh thesis and our thesis has been you know since the start is trying to automate as much as possible our app operator functions. By using AI a lot, we've sort of also developed some new theses about what is a good idea to automate and what isn't a good idea to automate and where you actually need humans to do it.

Patrick Stuart-ConstantAnd so, you know, one of the things that we're very bullish on, for example, it's having a lot of human creativity in like coming up with the ad ideas, not with building the the ad, not, you know, using like real actors. Like the ad is fully AI, but the idea usually uh comes from a human input. And so, you know, it's about building this system where we have AI agents working with humans who are in the loop and you know each doing what they're best at.

Patrick Stuart-ConstantSo, for the moment, I don't see us uh automating 100% of the of the of the company. I see us, you know, automating more and more of it. But interestingly, AI isn't only about, for us at least, and that I think, you know, that's fundamentally what it is, isn't only about replacing what already exists by an AI version and just saving costs, it's about using AI to do things which were impossible before. So, you know, be it create thousands of ads a …

Joseph ChoiIt's like you're you're you 3x'd your your team, but then you like 100, multiple 100x the output. So it it makes sense. You're just extremely, like each human is just like extremely high leverage. Um what, I'm curious, what does the ads team look like right now? Is it Yeah, what what's the team?

Patrick Stuart-ConstantSo the ads team, at the moment, is six six people. Most of them are simply focusing on coming up with new ideas for ads, and then execute like and then sometimes preparing some of the material uh that so that we can then produce it. We also have video editors uh to uh do some of the video editing that we can't automate. Um we work also a lot with a company called poolday.ai for our video editing, and they basically do a huge amount of of our of our video editing.

Patrick Stuart-ConstantUh but for certain use cases or for more one-off things or like more like original concepts, uh we have our video editors come in, and then we also have people working on playable ads. So like, you know, mini games, uh mini-game versions of the of our apps.