Stimuler- 2024–2nd Year in Review : When your startup starts becoming a company
So it’s the end of 2024 and I thought it’d be good to take the impossible task of wrapping up the year in a single medium post..AGAIN. I am 100% sure that i would only do a passable job at best given the 100s of variables that go into building a startup, but I have my personal reasons of still going ahead and articulating this piece
– To have internet memory documentation of the 2nd year of our startup, which we can revisit a few years down the line, to reminisce as well as learn. I always write FIRSTLY FOR MYSELF, so if anything, i would love reading this 3–4 years down the line.
– As a reference point for folks who want to be founders in future or at the founding stages today, to understand how a fast growing VC-backed startup functions in its earliest years.
-In the (selfish) hope that some of those who are reading this connect with our story and want to join us later when we hire for those roles.. As you would read below, that is a key focus for us over the next year
For the uninitiated, I also wrote a much more raw version for our 1st full year at Stimuler here in Dec 2023 — Year in Review 2023 : FIRSTS ARE CRAZY
This time, I would be trying to structure this recap in 3 parts- The key highlights over the last 12 months, my personal biggest learnings and what we absolutely wanna achieve in 2025.
So let’s jump into the highlights of an year that saw us transform from a college startup (yes, we graduated in Mid 2023) to a revenue-making one with global presence and a core team in place!
Highlight 1– We started making Money
There is something inherently funny about entering the revenue-making trajectory in a startup’s life– it defacto becomes the one thing everyone (including you yourself) are judging the company trajectory on.. And there is ONLY ONE direction the revenue graph can go:
It’s a little like (sorry for my poor engineering-brain analogy) that phase before your competitive exams when you start giving full-length mock tests. And your sole focus becomes how do you increase your mock test scores on every successive test, while making sure it literally never goes to the dip phase.
Just that, the increase your revenue consistently treadmill is a much more unpredictable, and therefore difficult of a challenge than acing JEE Mock tests. But one challenge I would still urge every founder to take as early as possible.
I had mentioned in our 2023 article that the best time to start monetization was yesterday. I can reaffirm that with 100% confidence today- We went all-in on monetization in January, and 7 out of 10 pre-monetization hypotheses we had about the biz were replaced by new learnings, much more aligned with our unit-economics. It’s simple, you learn more from people who actually pay for your biz rather than free users, and most from people who go to the verge of paying but still don’t. After all, building a healthy stream of millions of paid users is the biz we are in :)
Highlight 2– Scaling is not so easy
Friends who work with me know that I absolutely adore SCALE — I have mentioned repeatedly that I see Stimuler as one of those few companies that are designed fundamentally to serve over 100Mn (& hopefully many more) people globally. And this year, we started taking our baby steps towards that goal.
Through the course of the year, we hit 1Mn installs, 2 Mn app installs and just recently, 3Mn app installs. To be honest with you all, while writing the 2023 piece, I expected this number to be higher than this. But then again, through the year I have evolved as a marketer, realizing the challenges with scaling, but more importantly — what it means to acquire users sustainably, which further resulted in one of industry’s best LTV/CAC ratios among early stage startups. There is a lot I can talk about these scaling challenges- and maybe i will go into the details once I write the 5Mn App installs piece (ref — the 1Mn installs piece) later in 2025, but a constant learning has been creating a distribution advantage (to hedge against performance marketing) as well as iterate everyday on product-marketing sync.
If your product is being improved every single day, and that too in full sync with marketing (which is the case for us thanks to the special efforts from Anesh and team) — the growth efforts immediately start aligning to the business outcomes.
We had a good example recently of everyone aligning on moving the Free-Paid conversion metric and the results are below for EVERYONE to see!
Highlight 3– AI is just moving.. WAY TOO FAST
I mean, this is self-understandable, the pace of AI Innovations in 2024 has been just insane.. And as one of the very few consumer AI startups from India competing globally (and also winner of the Best AI App of 2023 award by Google Play, which we just don’t stop flexing everywhere including this article) — we have had to move really fast in terms of creating an AI advantage.
And we have been taking some solid early steps so far — The speech feedback engine inside Stimuler is already best-in-the-world today, and we are doing a lot of work on each specific metric, to enhance the accuracy of these models for different speaking styles (accents, common way of speaking etc) of our diverse user groups.
This is an area where I won’t talk much about today (or Ankit will kill me for revealing the secret sauce xD) — But this might very well be the Center-piece of my 2025 writeup — I am confident that we are doing some of the best work being done in vertical AI not just in India, but globally — and we should have a lot to share, SOON!
Highlight 4 — We finally have a core team!
When I was writing the 2023 piece, we were still in very much of a project mode. Other than the 4 co-founders, we had only done 1 external hire (Abhishek for Flutter), and that too after a 2.5 months long hiring process.. We were lucky that we ended up with an excellent person, but the experience made us clear on 2 things — 1. Hiring excellent folks is a long and tiring process 2. We need to go on this process multiple times over the next 24 months if we want to build a rockstar team with the ability to win the world!
Dare i say, the Phase 1 has gone well. I have always maintained that Stimuler would always have a super lean team full of folks who take complete ownership of their work, and are actually given freedom to make breakthroughs in what they do. We’ve made early progress in assembling this team- Over the course of 2024, we onboarded Ashutosh as our founding MLE (after another 3 months process), and also gave full-time offers to 3 amazing interns — Sahej (Flutter), Sriram (Design) and Shreeya (Marketing)
We still have a few key positions to fill in 2025– particularly across Backend and AI, but I am optimistic that we will end up with like-minded folks who are actually looking to do the most challenging work of their lives over the course of 2–3 years, while also having fun!
On fun, I have realized having the team be small and frequently meet each other outside office settings as well is really important for everyone to gel with each other, and more so for interns, who can potentially be the future hires. And we did have some outings(within Bengaluru only and mostly on birthday parties so far..). Our 1st offsite is next year and I am already excited for it!
Some more highlights
While i can write pages about what i consider as highlights for the year, i realize not everyone reading this has the same level of excitement about the biz haha, so having covered the top highlights above, here are a few other things which i consider important -
We moved into our 1st proper office in March. A 30 seater customized and cute space near Kudlu Gate HSR, which will always be close to me
Major investors and researchers in India & outside (including A16Z, GSV, Holon and more) recognized our work and featured us across reports, lists and market-maps
For a few days, we became #1 education app on Appstore in Indonesia (currently in the top 5). We are on top in other countries now, but Indonesia being a Top 3 market for us, made that a significant achievement
We got our 1st newspaper feature in Times of India on 17th March, much to the delight of our parents.
5. We continue to be truly global in focus- 85% of our revenue comes from outside India. And Our paying users are from a staggering 165 countries across 6 continents now. In 2025, we would be further doubling down on our key geos in LATAM, Indonesia, India.
And more .. Maybe i will keep them for sometime later
Key Learnings
A year-wrapped post doesn’t cut it without sharing the key learnings. Since this was 2024, and in my mind, 6 somehow syncs well as a number with 2024, here are 6 key learnings I would be taking on from this year
– In the world of consumer AI, distribution advantage is equally important to prioritize as technical advantage. Given the multiple cofounder structure, we are luckily able to do this in parallel, but if you are a solo founder or 2 co-founders, might be something to consider in early days.
– Hiring well is the highest-alpha thing one can do as a founder, and one that I should spend more time than I am doing currently.
– You can only improve what you measure is 100% Accurate. Investing in product attribution via Mixpanel has been a huge needle-mover even though it did take a lot of time. Wanna make a delta in marketing attribution as well over the next few months
– In the year of podcasts, books are a really underrated source of learning for virtually anything you want to upskill on. This year, I read at least 10 business books across fundraising, hiring, marketing and general startup world, and most of them have been super influential in how I make a lot of decisions. A couple of highly recommended ones are The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz and Focus on the Problem, Not The Solution by Uri Levine.
– Fundraising sometimes takes more time than you foresee initially, sometimes due to factors beyond your’s control. So start raising with significant runway.
– Till it’s logistically possible, everyone in the team knowing each other and what everyone is working on + towards, is always helpful. So is aligning the team on a common metric, which everyone can see moving.
On a personal level, one thing I am learning to get better at is just Asking for external help wherever possible + learning from other folks on things they are better than me at. A bit challenging at first, but incredibly rewarding.
What’s in store for 2025
I would be brief on this, as I don’t wanna announce things before I have full clarity on it. But there are a few certainties — We would be hiring for 3–5 key positions across the year. Some of you might think that oh, that’s such a small number- would be easy to hire. But that’s around 50% of our current team strength, and so a task I personally want to optimize the most on.
Other than that, we wanna continue scaling globally. Over the next 12 months, we want to build strong distribution moats in all our target geos, and hopefully take a bigger stride in 2025 towards the 100Mn goal. Ofcourse, we would love to have a 10x growth in revenue again too — as i said, the de-facto benchmarking standard for revenue making companies.
On an overall level, the goal statement for 2025 remains the same as last year
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 :)
Finally, thanks to everyone who has supported us through the year. Its just a long list of folks to thank for, but you know who you are, and we will always be grateful for the help!
Here’s to hoping everyone (including us :p) have an amazing 2025!
Thanks again and I look forward to do this again next year- IT IS ALWAYS SO FUN!!
Adios
