How I Hit 10M Users in Just 1 Year l Creati, Ella Zhang | EO

Face-to-face customer talks built Creati's 10m users

Creati turns a single product image into a marketing video, passing 10m users and $10m in annualized revenue within a year. Its growth engine is a flywheel between influencers and brands, since influencers post templates on their own channels and viral videos bring in paying brands. Zhang built it after ZMO.ai gained users but no revenue, and hundreds of face-to-face conversations showed the real customers were small sellers.

Takeaways

• Creati hit 10m users and $10m ARR. The agentic tool writes the script and shoots and edits a marketing video from a single product image, with no media crew. Zhang says it passed 10m downloads and $10m in annualized revenue within a year of launch.
• The influencer-brand flywheel is the differentiation. Influencers know social media best and create templates they post on their own channels. A template with millions of views brings brands in, and those brands pay to create video on the platform, which funds more influencers and more templates.
• Face-to-face interviews beat surveys on real needs. At Apple, users were brought into a small interview room rather than filling in online surveys, which Zhang says get wrong answers because people click the first option to finish. Face-to-face talks give you more than you set out to ask.
• Launch before the product is perfect. In the AI era technology changes every day, and Zhang says waiting too long can mean never launching. Her advice is to launch the product and develop it while learning from users. A rough product that people still use holds real value.
• Daily user talks find what will not change. Technology shifts daily, but what content goes viral on social media does not. Creati talks to users every day, and Zhang says insider knowledge in a vertical is the moat. She thinks most products today are not their final form.
• Zhang bet on AI in 2020 with little software knowledge. She saw generative AI in 2020 and believed it would change the world. People already spent over 80% of their time online, so demand for content was rising against limited supply, a gap she thought only technology could close.

The pivot from ZMO.ai to Creati

1. Zhang built ZMO.ai because text-to-image was hot and everyone was chasing it, without understanding why people generated images or what the business model would be.
2. Revenue did not grow with users and the team got lost. Zhang says their best ideas were not solving the pain points of real customers.
3. Following what she learned at Apple, they emailed more than 500 of their most active users and got 300 into face-to-face conversations.