SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
From $5K to $10M ARR: The ArcAds Founder's Playbook
10 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: How did Romain Torres scale ArcAds from $5K to $10M ARR?
We just reached 10 million in annual recurring revenue, $10 million, and it's growing super fast. January 2024 to right here, we're making something like $5,000 in revenue. Basically, you will type a script, select an actor. In our library of AI Actors, we have hundreds of AI Actors now, even more than a thousand in the platform.
and you'll be able to select the perfect AI avatar for your use case, use the gender to find the right ones. Hey folks, my guest today is Romain Torres. He has launched and is building arcads.ai. He helps you generate ads easy without paying 30 grand a month on an agency to go do it for you.
He's scaling very quickly, over 5 million bucks of revenue, but we have an update today in terms of revenue we're gonna jump into, and then jump into all the growth tactics he's using to scale nicely and bootstrapped. So Romain, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, let's do it. All right, well, kick us off.
Chapter 2: What strategies did Romain use to validate demand without a dashboard?
I don't want to bury the lead. What's revenue today? We're recording this on November 14 2025. Yeah, we just reached 10 million in annual recurring revenue $10 million. And it's growing super fast. Can I push you on that? We see so many fake revenue screenshots and people say, Nathan, people just come on your show and they make up revenue numbers.
Are you open to screen sharing and maybe showing your Stripe account or something? Yeah, let's do it. So this is the revenue in euros, which is going to be a little bit lower because it's euros. But look at this graph. It's almost vertical. Oh, wow, wow, wow. Okay, so your first dollar revenue, if you hover over that where the line starts, it was like, what is that, January 1st, 2024? Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what were you selling back then? Let's leave this graph up for a second while you tell the story. What were you selling back then in the first couple months? Is it the same thing you're selling today, or has it changed? Yeah, so from January 2024 to right here, we were making something like $5,000 in revenue at the time. Mm-hmm.
All we were doing is we were reaching out to existing brands and we told them, okay, we are going to create ads for you. Usually see video ads. We are going to make this a little bit cheaper. The turnaround will be faster. But the only thing is we are going to generate these ads using AI. So we actually didn't even have a dashboard. People couldn't like log in and create ads.
Chapter 3: What growth channels contributed to ArcAds' revenue engine?
We did that for them as a service. We just wanted to validate the idea that people were okay to pay for an AI generated ad. And also we wanted to validate that when we ship this ad for them, they could have results and they would order more of these ads. So we validated the idea and then we launched the product. We got this huge spike of traffic right here.
We went from zero to almost a million in recurring revenue. What drove that spike? So it was actually initially just me posting on Twitter about it. At the time I had zero followers, but I understood Twitter will be important for us. So I started posting content about how you can use AI to create winning ads and people will be very interested in that.
But then out of the blue, one of our users posted a video on Twitter that was completely viral. And at this time, it was in March. You can definitely see the spike right here. We were making like something like maybe 10, 20 sales a day.
And I would wake up in the morning and I was looking at this Slack channel where we could see all the saves that we got during the night because I was in Europe and the saves happened in the US. And it was like, okay, did we get 10? Did we get 20? And it was like actually hundreds. And I was scrolling in the Slack channel with all the Stripe notifications.
We got like hundreds of saves in one single night. And so what happened here was Someone generated a video on our cards, published the video on Twitter, and this video went completely viral. And so we had this huge spike of revenue jumping from like five to like almost 64,000 euros, which is... And then it dipped. Did a bunch of those folks sign up from the Expos and then churn?
Or what caused that dip there? Yeah, that's the second part of the story, actually. When I saw all of these sales, I then went to the customer support chat that we had at the time, Intercom, and I looked at the complaints. And actually, the product was completely broken. So nothing was working anymore.
So we had to refund everyone and rebuilt a significant part of the product that was actually a major piece of the product that was completely broken. So it actually took us a month to rebuild the product and we had to relaunch in April. And then the growth has been crazy since. And then you had crazy growth.
Before we go away from the screenshot, though, we're going to go back later here and talk about that crazy growth, including, I mean, the line's even going more steeper now recently, the past month. But talk to me about that little area towards the right of the graph where it sort of flatlined a little bit. What happened there? Yeah, that's a good point.
So here we basically... Can you hover over it just so the audience can see? Yeah. We're growing, but right now we are growing over 20% per month. At the time, it looks flat, but it was actually very good growth already. But basically what happened here is I'm leading marketing And my co-founder is leading product. And no one in the team was leading sales.
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Chapter 4: How does usage-based pricing impact revenue for ArcAds?
So that's one. And we did a lot of conferences to be in touch with these people. We did a lot of direct outreach and all the channels that you will do when you are doing sales. The second one is more product-led and this one is very important for me. It's paid ads because we have a tool to help you create paid ads using AI.
So we use our own tool to create our own ads and we'll basically not only grow the business doing that, but we'll also grow our knowledge about how the product should look like and the features we should build. That's the most direct feedback loop you can have. It proves that the product works because we are using it for ourselves. It also gives us feedback.
And at the same time, obviously, it helps us grow. So that's the second one. And the third one is influencer marketing. I have been spending like from zero to here. It's been only me posting content and this person who did a viral video on Twitter. So we know that posting content online can bring traction. So we basically started doing the same thing with influencers and other people.
Guys, remember, I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing in my third fund. We've deployed $250 million into 550 software companies so far. Again, at founderpath.com. If you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show. So sign up at founderpath.com. And when you get the onboarding email, I reply and I see all those.
Just reply and say, Nathan, I found you through YouTube and I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out founder path.com. So let's just sum that up real quick. The top three growth channels today, right? Growing from half a million, you know, 5 million of revenue to 10 million revenue has been sales, paid advertising, and then influencer marketing.
Before we dive a little bit deeper into each of those, I'd love for you to just quantify those quickly. So maybe quantify influencer marketing first. How many influencers did you pay at least a dollar in the last 30 days? And what total spend did you put towards influencers in the last 30 days? So this, I think I want to keep private because I know our competitors will be watching this.
I'm not sure I want to give the full details of the scope of what you do and the budget and stuff like that. We can talk about more overall tactics without going too much into the details, right? I guess the reason I'm asking is, you know, most founders are SAS founders are used to the sort of, Hey, we're going to spend 20 to 25%, right? Of our top line revenue on sales, right?
Whether it's marketing and paid ads, sales team, et cetera, right? Just marketing and sales in general. Are you comfortable? Like, I'm not asking you to obviously share your top influencers, their name or their Twitter handle where your competitors will go pick them off. But can you give us some guidance or direction?
I mean, are you spending 40% of your monthly revenue on influencer marketing or 5% or something different? I'm not sure I want to share the exact numbers. What I can tell you is we have very healthy profitability. Until now, we grew like 100% profitably. We have super healthy margins. We also have API costs to generate videos and all that.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Romain face with churn and retention?
Yeah, ideas. Exactly. And then when we get ideas, we want to test them. And that was the big challenge before AI. Realistically, you could test like, I don't know, five ideas every single month. But then AI comes and you can go and say, I'm going to generate video variations of these ideas. Right. And that's what our platform lets you do.
Basically, you will type a script, select an actor in our library of actors. We have hundreds of actors now, even more than a thousand in the platform. And you'll be able to select the perfect avatar for your use case, use the gender to find the right ones.
Or even if you don't find which I adopt, but if you don't find the perfect avatar, you can just create your own and go here and type a description of how the person should look like. And you can even include an image of your product to have the person hold the product.
If you sell a physical product, let's say you are Nike and you sell a new shoe, then you'll generate an avatar holding the shoe and talking about it. Well, hold on. So do they upload that as two separate things? They pick the face and then they upload a PNG of their product and you automatically put the PNG into the video? Or how does that work? Yeah, we can do it together if you want.
So what do you want to create an ad for? Let's think about something together. Let's do a shoe. Let's do a Nike shoe. I think it's a good one. It's a good way to... Everyone knows that, right? So I'm going to just go to Google, look for an image of Nike shoe. Let's look at, I don't know, maybe this one, blue one. It's pretty good. And then we'll go to our cards and create our AI avatar.
So how do you want them to look like? Just describe. Let's have it look like someone like you or me. I saw you on X the other day completing the High Rocks Challenge. Let's say it's an athlete like you, a High Rocks athlete, a young male. A young male who just completed a High Rocks challenge. Okay, let's generate that. You could also import a photo of yourself.
I could definitely use the picture that I uploaded here on Twitter for the hierarchy. So it's going to take less. We still see Nike shoes, Romain. We still see Google search. Oh, my bad. Yeah, right here. There we go. So it's going to take a couple of seconds to generate the first version of this young male. You'll have multiple options.
Obviously, you could have made a much longer, more detailed prompt where you will give details about the space they are in. But that's really cool. What are you sitting on top of on this? Are you paying for OpenAI credits or Anthropic? Or who are you sitting on top of here? So this one is going to be either Google's Nanobanana or Seedream from Maidens, the company behind TikTok.
So we will basically read your prompt and select the best model for you based on your prompt. I mean, the prompt was quite short, but it's really, really good because it understood that it was a high rocks. It added them to the specific, like, I don't know if you did this type of race, but you will see exactly this type of environment when you do it. Let's do the last one. Yeah.
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Chapter 6: How does ArcAds leverage AI for ad creation?
So yeah, feel free to reach out on X. Guys, Romain and his partner Dylan at Arc Ads have grown from zero to $10 million of revenue in just about 20 months, breaking 6,000 paid customers, of which some pay over $100,000 per year for the product. Their total team today, just eight people, so incredible revenue per employee.
They've done this all bootstrapped using three main growth channels, their sales team, paid ads, and influencer marketing. Better yet, they've been profitable through the entire first 20 months journey. We'll see what happens next, but check them out at arcads.ai. Romain, thanks for taking us to the top. Thanks, Ben.