I went to listen to the head of growth at AstraAI. They make a consumer AI app you pay for monthly.

Early days

In the beginning it took them about three days to understand what was working. Three days to look at a video and say, this one brings users and that one did nothing. They tried building custom solutions and then they slowed down with the features, as they saw AI getting smarter. They decided to stop posting from a company account - fresh TikTok accounts worked better.

How they grew

They tried influencers and quickly stopped. Too expensive. So they turned to small creators they could raise themselves, sometimes from zero.

The pattern was: The ones who worked were young, willing to be on camera, with some sense for graphics. Women did better on TikTok than men. Videos that felt a little dumb beat the ones that looked like advertisements. Young viewers can smell an ad from across the room, especially when an older person makes it.

To build such system took a lot of work. They find people on Upwork. You take one larger creator and let them teach the smaller ones, like a country manager for content. You watch the competition and take their creators when you can. You pay through Useme, Ksolgo, Grade. When a video works in one market, you rebuild it for another. The format travels, the language changes.

Geography is surprising. India brings them users. America brings them nothing, no matter what video they put out.

How the company is built around this

Two teams, two numbers. The product team owns the whole experience, from landing to wherever the user ends up. The growth team owns traffic. Each team has one measure that matters.

Tools are ordinary. Shortimize for videos, PostHog for the rest. You look for tools first, before you build anything yourself.

Onboarding is its own discipline. Long, smooth, the card comes at the end, the paywall is hard. Kal AI is the example worth studying. A long flow that does not feel long. Then one-time offer of ten euros per month for the whole year that closes the deal. A long onboarding pulls more commitment out of a person than a short one.

Extras

- Agency content supports the user content.
- The moment you take venture money you owe somebody growth.
- At the start you track every video and know which one brought which user. Once you scale, that ends. One good video, copied across markets, does more than ten new ones.
- They are growing even more/further with users uploading their content - now they are sitting on piles of curriculum data. This is quickly becoming their moat.