Bridger Pennington discusses Funnel Launch AI's shift to an AI-native product, which cut the time to build a fund from months to 7-10 days. The startup hit $2.5M ARR but restructured heavily, letting go roughly 50% of staff and zeroing out founder salaries to reinvest in the new direction.
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Well, do you want to hear the realities of building a startup in 2026? We spent the last year building this, Funnel Launch AI, and in our first few weeks, we're at $2.5 million of ARR. So like, everything's awesome. We've been doing very well. However, this change completely changed our old business. We've actually had to let go or move on from about 50% of our previous employees. We've had to hire new employees. I hope all of them have landed on their feet and done well, but it's been a major shift and change. I mean, we were an Inc. 5000 company. Mason was on Utah Businesses 20 Under 20. These were doing great, and we've like gone through the entire innovator's dilemma to evolve our business to be AI native, AI first, and it's come at, I mean, a pretty big cost and a huge change for our business. And also selling tech is completely different than selling our previous products. It's a totally different funnel, and we've been testing trial and error, A/B testing, all sorts of stuff. We finally found a funnel last week that's done a lot better, and maybe I'll share some more details in the future, but man, it's been a full— it's probably been the biggest transition of my entire business career. Like this Sounds amazing, right? But also, like you take all that money, we just dump it right back into build. That's what tech is. Like you were just constantly taking whatever money you make right back into the build. I've also fired myself from my own company. Me and Mason have put our salaries to zero because we are putting all of our money back into development. But overall, this has been crazy for our customers. They can go build an entire fund now in seven days, ten days, when prior it took three months, six months, and three times the cost. It's been amazing for our people and our audience of Wall Street rebels, our people. So. I'll keep you in the loop. I'll follow along to keep you up to date, but that's been fun so far.
