The Ledger

Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.

clear all ✕

why aren't all 24 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable

Disclosure
Zitoun: Submagic offers a 30% lifetime recurring affiliate commission
“We give 30% revenue on the lifetime value of the customers.”
David Zitoun Jun 10, 2025 ▶ 14:19 How I Built my AI Tool SubMagic to $667k/Month With a Tiny Team and No Funding
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Zitoun: Submagic experiences a very high 15% monthly customer churn
“Our churn is around 15% today, so it's very high, month over month.”
David Zitoun Jun 10, 2025 ▶ 40:06 How I Built my AI Tool SubMagic to $667k/Month With a Tiny Team and No Funding
Insight
Zitoun: Free side-tools must align closely with core product value proposition
“Free tools can be awesome for your company, but you need to really be careful about what kind of free tool should we do, and it needs to make sense regarding the value proposition of your product. So for us, like, downloading your YouTube videos is too far fro…”
David Zitoun Jun 10, 2025 ▶ 25:12 How I Built my AI Tool SubMagic to $667k/Month With a Tiny Team and No Funding
What-if
Zitoun: Submagic would need 40 to 50 employees without AI tools
“Like without AI, we should have been maybe 40 in the company or 50 people to do what we do.”
David Zitoun Jun 10, 2025 ▶ 37:25 How I Built my AI Tool SubMagic to $667k/Month With a Tiny Team and No Funding
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Zitoun: 70% of Submagic's team does not have a college degree
“70% of the team doesn't have any degrees.”
David Zitoun Jun 10, 2025 ▶ 29:11 How I Built my AI Tool SubMagic to $667k/Month With a Tiny Team and No Funding
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Zitoun: Submagic hit $8M ARR in three years
“Today we are at eight million RR company is three years old.”
David Zitoun Jun 10, 2025 ▶ 1:11 How I Built my AI Tool SubMagic to $667k/Month With a Tiny Team and No Funding
Insight
Zitoun: Affiliate videos drive huge untracked brand awareness beyond link clicks
“You don't see how much business affiliation is bringing to your business Like, without tracking the link. There are so many videos, like, when you make a YouTube video talking about Submagic, maybe, like, a small percentage is gonna click on the link, but a lo…”
David Zitoun Jun 10, 2025 ▶ 15:59 How I Built my AI Tool SubMagic to $667k/Month With a Tiny Team and No Funding
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Zitoun: Submagic scaled from zero to $1M ARR in three months
“So we hit a million in ARR three months exactly after we get our first customers. So we had a first customer the first of May, 2023. We get, we reached million of ARR the first of August. Exactly.”
David Zitoun Jun 10, 2025 ▶ 10:59 How I Built my AI Tool SubMagic to $667k/Month With a Tiny Team and No Funding
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Zitoun: Affiliates generate 20% of Submagic's total revenue
“So affiliation today represents, like, 20% of our revenue. Like, 20% of our global revenue is coming from affiliation.”
David Zitoun Jun 10, 2025 ▶ 14:54 How I Built my AI Tool SubMagic to $667k/Month With a Tiny Team and No Funding
Disclosure
Zitoun: Roughly 80% of Submagic employees started as users
“I would say, 80% of the team saw eight people out of 13, I would say, kind of like this, Are coming from Submagic. They are users of Submagic first.”
David Zitoun Jun 10, 2025 ▶ 30:08 How I Built my AI Tool SubMagic to $667k/Month With a Tiny Team and No Funding
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Zitoun: Video volume is the top reason users upgrade Submagic
“This is the number one reason why people are upgrading. They need more videos.”
David Zitoun Jun 10, 2025 ▶ 8:11 How I Built my AI Tool SubMagic to $667k/Month With a Tiny Team and No Funding
Disclosure
Zitoun: Submagic CEO takes 5 to 6 customer calls daily
“I take, like, approximately five to six calls with users every day since the beginning of Submagic. Like, everyone can book a call with the CEO of Submagic every time they want.”
David Zitoun Jun 10, 2025 ▶ 20:33 How I Built my AI Tool SubMagic to $667k/Month With a Tiny Team and No Funding
Disclosure
Zitoun: Submagic built its product with first 100 customers via WhatsApp
“What I would suggest to any founders is like the first hundred customers of Submagic, I took on Stripe the information. I reached out to them. I say, send me a text message, please. I will give you like a discount for the next month, but please send me a text …”
David Zitoun Jun 10, 2025 ▶ 21:34 How I Built my AI Tool SubMagic to $667k/Month With a Tiny Team and No Funding
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Zitoun: Submagic added around 2,500 new paying customers last month
“We had around like, I think it was around 2500 customers last time, last month.”
David Zitoun Jun 10, 2025 ▶ 39:30 How I Built my AI Tool SubMagic to $667k/Month With a Tiny Team and No Funding
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Zitoun: Submagic receives 5,000 to 10,000 daily signups
“I think around like between five to 10,000 signups a day.”
David Zitoun Jun 10, 2025 ▶ 38:54 How I Built my AI Tool SubMagic to $667k/Month With a Tiny Team and No Funding
Disclosure
Zitoun: Submagic spends up to $50k monthly on paid ads
“I would say between 20 and 50 k a month. Maybe, like, around 50 k, I would say.”
David Zitoun Jun 10, 2025 ▶ 27:01 How I Built my AI Tool SubMagic to $667k/Month With a Tiny Team and No Funding
Disclosure
Submagic co-founder: Submagic has never raised outside capital
“Oh, we never raised.”
David Zitoun Jun 10, 2025 ▶ 26:31 How I Built my AI Tool SubMagic to $667k/Month With a Tiny Team and No Funding
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Zitoun: First Submagic promo video directly drove $3k MRR
“Myself, I did it once and the short form went, I think it did like a 100,000 views and it drives like 3000 dollars MRR directly.”
David Zitoun Jun 10, 2025 ▶ 13:23 How I Built my AI Tool SubMagic to $667k/Month With a Tiny Team and No Funding
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Zitoun: Submagic operates with a 13-person team
“Small team, 13 people in the company today.”
David Zitoun Jun 10, 2025 ▶ 1:28 How I Built my AI Tool SubMagic to $667k/Month With a Tiny Team and No Funding
Insight
Zitoun: Quantifying customer acquisition impact from video watermarks is very difficult
“It's very difficult to quantify the impact on the watermark and to see really how much people are posting videos with a watermark online and how many views this video are making, but it's a way for the users to try the product without paying.”
David Zitoun Jun 10, 2025 ▶ 9:37 How I Built my AI Tool SubMagic to $667k/Month With a Tiny Team and No Funding
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Zitoun: Google ended Submagic's traffic surge by blocking its downloader page
“After a month or two, we had Google that blocks that because they don't want people to download YouTube videos for, like trying to, like, download YouTube videos so they block this page. That's why the traffic went down.”
David Zitoun Jun 10, 2025 ▶ 24:21 How I Built my AI Tool SubMagic to $667k/Month With a Tiny Team and No Funding
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Submagic launched as a two-person team in May 2023
“So we started with a two just CFA, my co-founder and I we started the first customer we had, it was in May, 2023.”
David Zitoun Jun 10, 2025 ▶ 10:37 How I Built my AI Tool SubMagic to $667k/Month With a Tiny Team and No Funding
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Zitoun: Submagic had zero US customers before its Product Hunt launch
“First of May. Third of July, someone told us like, guys, you should do a product hunt because at this time we had zero customers on the US and my co-founder and I decided to say like, we should change the strategy. We are going fully into the US.”
David Zitoun Jun 10, 2025 ▶ 17:30 How I Built my AI Tool SubMagic to $667k/Month With a Tiny Team and No Funding
Disclosure
Zitoun: Submagic launched Magic Clips following user demand for long-form repurposing
“So we started with we said the captions on some magic. The tool was super focused on one things that we wanted to do it better than everybody else. And it was how to get, we can had like amazing captions on your short form content to make your content go viral…”
David Zitoun Jun 10, 2025 ▶ 3:56 How I Built my AI Tool SubMagic to $667k/Month With a Tiny Team and No Funding
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