Assertion certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

Aragon made its first revenue selling $40 photo style packs

Wesley Tian · 1st-time founder grows AI headshot app from $0 to $10M ARR in 2 years—with no funding. | Wesley T... · PMF Show · Apr 24, 2025 · at 12:26

Wesley Tian, founder of Aragon.ai, details the initial launch and early validation of his AI photo generation platform on social media.

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“We had, like, eight different packs, and yeah, and they all worked, and it was 40 dollars, and you could choose four packs, and we, like, yeah, and I, like, basically launched it on LinkedIn, launched it on Twitter, made, like, a few hundred dollars, but that felt great, like, that was, like, our first time making money, really, like.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Wesley Tian

Disclosure
Tian posted fake success stories on Reddit to acquire early users
“I basically, like, went on Reddit, and I had this idea to, like, pretend I got a date by using Eragon to create photos for my dating app. So I went out to slash r slash Tinder, and I was like, Hey guys, I used Aragon to, like, create these pictures of me, and,…”
Wesley Tian Apr 24, 2025 ▶ 35:37 1st-time founder grows AI headshot app from $0 to $10M ARR in 2 years—with no funding. | Wesley T... · PMF Show
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Tian predicts all AI headshot tools will reach 99% quality within a year
“I think maybe in a year, like, we'll all get to, like, sort of, like, 99%, right? And so, I do think there's a bar, and I do think brand and distribution plays a big difference.”
Wesley Tian Apr 24, 2025 ▶ 39:56 1st-time founder grows AI headshot app from $0 to $10M ARR in 2 years—with no funding. | Wesley T... · PMF Show
Assertion Supported
Early Stable Diffusion models primarily worked well on white people
“It only worked for, like, I think, like, certain ethnicities, like, because the model, like, say with Fusion was, like, trained, like, it wasn't trained on a very comprehensive data set. So maybe like only working on like white people. Right. And so like for e…”
Wesley Tian Apr 24, 2025 ▶ 23:02 1st-time founder grows AI headshot app from $0 to $10M ARR in 2 years—with no funding. | Wesley T... · PMF Show
Opinion
Wesley Tian says Canva's AI headshot product is 'terrible'
“And Canva's product is terrible, by the way. They have a free product, but it takes a few seconds, but the output doesn't even look like you.”
Wesley Tian Apr 24, 2025 ▶ 29:53 1st-time founder grows AI headshot app from $0 to $10M ARR in 2 years—with no funding. | Wesley T... · PMF Show
Disclosure
Aragon claimed thousands of users on its site before acquiring them
“Early on, like you know, I think a lot of companies do this, but like, we didn't have that many users, but we still put, like, used by thousands of people. And by doing that, we actually got to thousands of people.”
Wesley Tian Apr 24, 2025 ▶ 33:29 1st-time founder grows AI headshot app from $0 to $10M ARR in 2 years—with no funding. | Wesley T... · PMF Show
Assertion Supported
Tian claims Neo accelerator offers 2x better terms than Y Combinator
“NIO has like around two X better terms and it's like a tighter neck community, so it's like, it's only 20 20 startups per batch versus YC, I think it was like a 200 something.”
Wesley Tian Apr 24, 2025 ▶ 43:25 1st-time founder grows AI headshot app from $0 to $10M ARR in 2 years—with no funding. | Wesley T... · PMF Show
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