This Guy built a $30M Startup While Fighting Cancer
After a decade of failure, success finally arrived
Aah, how sweet is the taste of success after surviving through dark times and experiencing all sorts of setbacks for 10 years straight
This is the story of David Park, who grew up in a family of entrepreneurs, and even though they never had a lot of money, he still had a dream that he could be one too.
He experienced his first failure early on, and like all protective parents, they sacrificed everything they had to send them off to a college in hopes for a better life.
His parents gave him $20,000 to go to college, to be a lawyer, or a doctor and have a better life than them.
The sad thing is that he felt like he didn’t really fit in anywhere. He didn’t really fit in in his fraternity or the people in his major. He felt lonely.
David was facing a dilemma, He was an entrepreneur at heart, but he was trapped in an environment that didn’t make him happy.
Early Struggles
David decided to drop out and chase his dreams of starting a startup. And luckily along the way he meets someone just as weird and passionate as him, his eventual business partner and co-founder Henry.
And together they always tried to find a way to make it work. The total failed start ups that they did together was by 9 or 10, which is pretty nuts.
Eventually thy stumbled upon GPT-2. We asked them to tell them a story, GPT-2 answred: “That said, nothing is darker than a butt hole”
They found the answer so hilarious, even call it the funniest line ever, especially considering the technology they were using
This answer sparked their imagination and led them to create Jenni Ai. The boys had found their idea and now the business was in motion.
Jenni AI is developed to help writers create original content, correct grammatical errors, add citations, and avoid plagiarism. For PhD students, researchers, agencies and academic writers, this AI writing assistant helps to reduce your research and writing time.
Henry would do the coding and David would do the selling.
Their goal was simple, create a product to help agencies write better content with the help of AI and their next goal was to make their first dollar.
That was like a terrible, painful time of cold calls. Obviously, nobody wants to talk with them, they hang up on them.
They had to get used to getting rejected.
Working from his parents’ house wasn’t the best idea. Stuck in his bedroom, It was pretty sad. His mom would wake up to him on calls advocating for investments in his company.
Evening brought no respite; she’d still hear him wrapping up calls before going to bed. He was working day and night.
The worst part still to come. When they get together, Korean moms just talk about their kids like they’re trading cards
Like my kid is now a Level 2 Amazon engineer, my kid is now doing their master’s at Stanford and then they would get to his mom’s turn and she would just say: “Oh, my son is working on a start-up”
Even tough he had to ask his mom for her card if he wanted to get Chipotle because he had no money, in his eyes he was a real loser, but his parents were so kind to him, they never made his feel that way
They would always provide for him, and they never make him feel bad about it
They were always there for him, when he didn’t believe in himself, his parents believed in him, his co-founder did believe in him as well as his friends
Slow Ghrowth
In 2020, GPT-3 came out, David started to get some traction thanks to a wave of businesses wanting to get their hands on AI.
They David’s and his cofounder started to get users, but eventually they hit a plateau, they tried everything, but they can’t get past $2000 a month in revenue
Then David learned and implemented something that would change his business forever.
It really came down to the boring stuff of just talking to their users, asking them more difficult questions like:
- Why do you dislike my product?
- What do you love about other people’s products?
- Tell me about your current workflow, how does Jenni Ai fit into it?
- What exactly do you do with Jenni Ai?
These insights were game changing, they realized that people wanted to have a friendly AI assisted writing journey, so they prioritized user-friendliness, and that was when they really started to grow.
The Miracles Of Social Media
After months of talking to customers and refining the product, they start to find a new audience.
The only problem is that at this point David has $0.00 left in his bank account, and he was exhausted
But he decides to try one more thing, he agreed to go on a random podcast to talk about his startup journey.
Despite the podcast’s small audience, a miracle happened, a scout for Jason Calacanis happened to be listening, and David found himself holding a $100,000 check from Jason.
Just Like that!
Getting 100,000 was mind-blowing to David and his friend, and the first thing they did was booking a flight to Malaysia to cut down expanses and make their windfall last longer
Scaling Up
Now the real dirty work had begun with a bit of funding and a tiny runway. David and his co-founder spent the next several months iterating and building Jenni Ai into a completely new product, talking to customers, documenting the progress and trying just about anything to increase revenue.
Then one night, something incredible happens.
Suddenly, they got a huge wave of users, tens of users every minute. All this because of guy named Zane Khan who posted a Twitter thread titled “10 free websites that are so valuable they feel illegal to know” that became one of the most viral Twitter threads in history and Jenni Ai was included in that thread.
They went from 2000 to 10,000 in one month. That’s when they felt the first semblance of success.
Jenni Ai was growing at a rapid pace and David felt like he was on top of the world.
But there was still a problem, virality comes and goes. It’s not something David could rely on to build a great business.
So, the very next thing they’ve done was bringing on one of David’s college buddies to help with TikTok and Instagram reels, and then they experienced their second wave of virality.
They understood the power of social media. So, they continued to push on with viral marketing, getting to 50, 60, $80,000 up to a million a year
From where they’ve started that was crazy, and David felt like, they could push this so much further.
Beating Cancer
But then, the unthinkable happened, David got diagnosed with cancer.
David affirms that it felt like his dreams and nightmares were happening at the same time.
The most worrying thing for his, there was a chance that his voice would be damaged. And the surgery had to reschedule because of the fever.
Which made his sleep deprivation, food deprivation even worse and the cost went up
Luckily the surgery went well, and he was able to get his voice back few days after
Throughout his journey, David acknowledges the small miracles and moments of gratitude that have kept him going.
From chance encounters with investors to the support of loved ones, these instances have reinforced his belief in the extraordinary potential of life’s little miracles.
Bigger Challenges
David was facing a wave of problems after his surgery. He realized that the business was unstable without him leading, after seeing no growth when he was out with cancer
David also realized that his app did not have product market fit, so he had a tough choice to make either cash out, grab a quick few $1,000,000 and start fresh or double down, find ways to fix the business, find a product market fit and take things to a whole another level.
It just didn’t feel right to like, and he trusted his instinct and he did not sell, instead he focused on hiring people on the marketing growth side and went into more scaling mode.
Also collaborating with multiple creators, paying them a baseline monthly salary plus some incentives based on how many views and conversions they get
Sucess Finally Arrived
In his Report, Jan-Erik Asplund highlights that Jenni AI has achieved impressive ghrowth, boasting their annual recurring revenue (ARR) by 925% since the “ChatGPT-pocalypse” that decimated horizontal, prosumer businesses built on GPT-3.
Asplund estimates that Jenni AI is at $5.1M annual recurring revenue (ARR) as of April 2024, growing 481% year-over-year
Wrapping-up
Starting his first company on 16, David is 27 years old now, that’s a decade of failing, setbacks and people not taking it seriously.
We all need that discipline, if you really care about your dream and if you really care about making something that make you proud, then you can’t give it just a one week shot or a one year shot.
You must really put your all into it, sacrifice almost everything for years and then you’ll have to be successful.
But always remember that even if you put your all into it, there’s a chance that you will fail.
