Our 2025 story at Stimuler — Chaos is a ladder
2:33 PM, Jan 1 2025, Mysuru —
The impromptu 1 day trip plan had started to seem like a good choice. At 7 pm yesterday, when me, Akshat (my cofounder), and Akshat Mehta (my college best friend) had booked an impromptu 3am train ticket to Mysuru; honestly — we didn’t have too high of expectations. New year weekend just seemed to be a time when we felt that we should be doing something, and get back to our respective offices recharged on Jan 2 (if only we knew...)
Now for context, New Year is typically an important day for apps in the education/health/fitness category such as Stimuler given new year resolutions and we had a lot of marketing specifically for this day. But we had scheduled all of it previously, and the product was also ready, so we didn’t have a lot to do on that specific day.
Here in Mysuru, we had a very cool boat ride (plus Mysuru masala dosa), we just had lunch in a famous local place and just as we stepped out we got a call;
bhai, app nahi chal raha kisi ka bhi after onboarding
Sooo our app had crashed at its peak traffic time. Honestly, it was extra stressful because it was new year and for every hour it was not live; We were losing hundreds of dollars of revenue which mattered a lot to us that time (still does :p)
So, as an obvious first course of action, we converted a 10 feet open park in front of us into a mini office & took out our laptops. I will spare you the technical details, but broadly it was a major API failure & after 2 hours of firefighting on a group video call (+ help from an insti alum), we were somehow able to solve it temporarily. By 6 pm, The app was live again, and despite the hiccups, we still ended up registering the highest revenue day of all time over 2.5 lakhs on that day.
Now the reason for boring you all with a seemingly irrelevant one-day story is because those 4 hours in Mysuru on Jan 1 kind of set the tone for a super chaotic yet fun 2025 for us. Tl dr; We did some mistakes, had low & stressful time, but SOMEHOW figured out a way up through that chaos, and still ended the year at quite an high!
All right, so let’s begin. For super-quick context, Stimuler is our AI English fluency app that allows English-as-a-second language individuals globally to improve their speaking and conversational skills. Its been 2 and a half years now since we graduated out of college & started the full-time journey of (hopefully) building one of the most iconic global consumer-tech companies ever from India & as honestly, so far, the journey has been more fun than the destination :)
For people who are interested in more raw and probably more interesting storytelling, here is how our year one and year two went. About this iteration; I’m trying a different format, so I will be covering the entire story in six ‘almost sequential’ chapters (it’s the season of chapter-based storytelling anyways lol).
So here is Stimuler 2025 recap, an year where we grew nearly 5x, crossed 100k+ paying users from 180 countries, had our international work trip cum offsite in Indonesia, announced a new round of funding and yet, none of these individual time stamps can cover the entire story.
Chapter 1[Jan]: The New Year High
While having a relatively average second half of the year; 2024 had ended in a really good way for Stimuler. Our core team was nearly in place across teams, we had just closed the lead for our next round of funding, and we were talking to investors for the remaining part. So, it was clear, at least, we were not getting bankrupt haha. As hinted above, We had planned a lot of marketing & product stuff for New Year, and honestly, if you see the graph above, despite everything that transpired in those three hours, New Year still performed decent for us.
But the highlight of this episode for me is not New Year, in fact its not even 2025; it’s an internal promise we made to the team back in September 2024. In September, after a few rather dull months, we set an internal goal for the entire team- If we hit $80K per month in revenue in the next 3–4 months, we would have an international team trip to Jakarta for all full-time members, it was quite an ambitious goal honestly & I remember myself being a bit skeptical as well (credits to Anesh for believing in it from D1). And for the first time since we started working together; All of us were working on a common goal. And IT WORKED!!
In the next 3 months that followed, our free-to-paid conversion went 2x, Our revenue went nearly 3x and despite missing it in December 2024, we did hit our $80K monthly revenue goal in January. And I learned something obvious, but underrated- turns out, if you actually have a team of amazing people and all of you have a common problem you’re trying to solve for or a common metric you’re trying to achieve, those seemingly difficult goals are achieved fairly comfortably.
And yes, we did have that Jakarta trip..(ch3)
Chapter 2[Feb — April]: 3 months of Anxietyyy
Remember the funding close I had talked to you about? Yeah, that was closed. But by early Feb it was very clear that we’ll be getting our money after all the paperwork is done, probably by end April or early May. Our limited runway meant that the Feb to April period was quite an interesting (read: tough) period. We didn’t have a lot of extra money to spend in marketing, so it was about survival (for context, our expense curve has a downwards trend between Dec’24- Mar’25)- and that meant doing a full audit of every single expense item and cutting down everything that wasn’t necessary.
But what was necessary is that we still couldn’t afford to not grow (atleast for the sake of our revenue graph aesthetic if not other things), so we had to keep growing in general while surviving. And that’s where we struggled the most
But then, like every period, this one as well was filled with takeaways, and the most important one was that we as a company need to be much more sustainable and we need to be okay finding ways to grow without spending extra money. Those lessons have stayed with us even after we got the money in the bank & we’ve incorporated them in our day to day decision making. As a result, despite growing revenue ~5x during the year and having a ~2 yr runway as of Dec 2025, we are close to cashflow positivity & hopefully will achieve that in 2026.
Chapter 3 [May]: And then, Celebrations!
I typically don’t like down graphs persisting for more than two or three months, so naturally the whole May period was quite a welcome break from the anxiety.
First things first, we finally announced our fundraising and God, that absolutely blew up.
Before posting, we had an internal discussion on how many likes the post would get, and the expectation was between 1000 to 1500. But the post ended up getting over 300,000 impressions and 4500 likes, which, according to us, is among the highest ever for Indian startups. And more than the numbers, we got a huge number of people reaching out with supportive messages. Honestly, it’s really fun to have so many people rooting for us. It gives us an additional incentive to just win it all.
ps: We’d always be super thankful to Bombay Locale team for working with us on creating a video we personally really loved, and presented us in the right way to the broader world for the first time.
And yeah, we also finally got the money in the bank, giving us a budget to spend on marketing and other R&D initiatives. Naturally, revenue jumped back too
May was also the month we finally fulfilled our promise and the entire full-time team went to Jakarta. Now, for context Jakarta is our biggest market by user base. So we had a lot of fun interacting with users in person, giving them gifts, sharing stories with them, and understanding so much about the local culture. We were able to sneak some activities in between as well. Overall a super super fun trip and one I would have memories of from a long time.
Chapter 4 [June- Aug]: The COVID Scare & yupp, it’s all about the people
The one common thing across the last three years I’ve learned is that the entire so-called startup momentum is about the people you’re doing it with & them being able to put in their best work.
The next three months, June to August, were quite mixed- we increased our team size with lot of new folks joining the team while preserving the talent density, but we also faced a lot of newer challenges.
Firstly, the good part — we got some incredible new people joining the team in that period. Yash (AI), Vashu (Growth) , Jash (Founder’s office) , Fiza (AI), Saurabh (Backend Engineering)- all of them joined the team and became a part of the core group. That’s more than 33% of our current full-time team
But this was also the time we kind-of lost all the momentum we had built over the last few weeks. We had a very serious covid outbreak (yes, covid and yes, in June 2025) which affected 75%+ of the team & we had to be remote (that too with very limited availability) for more than 45 days...
Luckily, everybody was able to recover 100% & we took all the necessary precautions we could to prevent any further outbreak. (incl a full sanitization of the office & the dreaded N95 masks- yes they were back)
Even after the team was back in office, overall product and growth-wise, we still were in the recovery phase till August, and that can be seen in our revenue nearly being stagnant over the period. A lot of the new things we tried just didn’t move the needle- for example; spending a major part of August to start a founder led channel on instagram which didn’t go anywhere, or lets just say the ROI was not justifiable
But we continued all the foundational efforts across all company domains, and as August was about to come to an end, we’re already seeing recovery signals.
Chapter 5[Sep-Nov]: Recovery, Relearning & Recognitions (RRR anyone??)
By September, our revenue was back on track. A lot of the experiments we were doing on the AI side finally started showing up. With everyone back in the office alongside the new team members, I think the momentum was back to a big extent as well.
In the three months that have followed, we have taken some big bets and naturally, we had some of them working (I keep sharing them over linkedin haha) and some have not worked out. For example, we have tried different strategies to see and continuously evaluate and take calls on the India market, and I think that’s one area strategically where we still don’t have a final direction. We also have multiple experiments going on within our core geographies which hopefully we would have to share in the next few months. Personally, for me, it is a lot of unlearning and relearning across core business areas so that we can approach things from a fresh perspective.
Now that the two R’s are done for, let’s talk about the third one: recognition! In October, we had a major recognition — AWS selected us as the only Indian inc company to be part of their generative AI accelerator. 40 companies selected around the world for their vertical in-house AI efforts (Yupp, Ankit, Yash & Fiza have been doing some amazing work on that end) . More importantly, we also got $ 1 Million of extra credits from AWS (that too, completely equity free) , which would go a long way for supporting all the R&D activities we are doing over the course of next few years, as we try & build the world’s best voice-to-voice infra for fluency improvement.
ps: a cool video we made on it ft the AI Team — https://www.linkedin.com/posts/akshay-akash_update-so-cool-that-you-cant-not-make-an-activity-7381596119874727936-rSD9
Chapter 6: Here we go again (ft New Year 2026)
As I’m writing the first draft of this, this is already 2nd half of December . So, as of now, if you ask everyone in the company, there is one single focus: New Year. And, yes, as it happens in the startup world, everything goes back to the same cycles.
For now, it’s about optimizing the next New Year (we are expecting a massive bump again) and making sure we don’t have a Mysuru open park moment again xD
So, all done- what has been my biggest learnings over the year?
I think all my cofounders and team members would have their own version of this. Take this as my personal top 5 learnings.
As I have mentioned above, assembling a top-tier team is the hardest yet most rewarding thing I can spend my personal time on. If I am not spending a significant portion of the day daily in it, I am doing a disservice to the company.
Sustainability is not anti-growth from our POV. We’d love to grow manifold in our revenue next year, but that has to be complemented with us being much more sustainable from a company economics POV. We’re already almost there (close to profitability beyond the R&D/commision expenses), but there’s a lot of scope to improve.
The bar on what can be categorized as a meaningful differentiator from a tech POV is growing every year, and the best applied AI teams in the world are still acing that barrier via their vertical AI efforts.
Consumer AI and Enterprise AI can’t be put in the same bucket. Enterprises have a budget and a mandate to invest in AI. Consumers don’t. For AI products, if you’re targeting a B2C user base, you have to convince the user base that this is a 10X delta compared to the last gen products. Otherwise, people don’t wanna pay for it. The bar to trying new products is lower, but the bar to paying is higher than ever.
Contrary to the current discourse on Twitter (Hi Cluely), virality and revenue growth are not disproportional. It’s just about aligning the right incentives. Over 60% of our revenue today comes from organic virality over TikTok and Instagram, and we expect that contribution to grow over the next year. It’s just about chasing the right kind of virality. Maybe I will write a blog someday on it lol
In general, I will repeat a line I used in the last annual recap and one I firmly stand by even today.
We want to grow at a unprecedented rate (and globally), build the best product the world has ever seen in this segment and bring new superstars to join us in our mission! Rest of the things will sort out themselves :)
So when people ask me what’s next for 2026, I think it’s simple. We believe all the efforts we have done in AI over the last year and all the development that has been happening in general, we’d be able to provide a significantly better product experience to our millions of users, reach a bigger population globally, and make sure that our core team is stronger compared to today.
I will again reaffirm that I believe Stimuler is one of the very few products which is fundamentally built for 100 million and further over 500 million users, and that is the only success story for us.
That’s all from me today.
Adios.
