Business strategy

Yorby's first $100K: the pivot that finally paid off

Andrew Meng and Thomas Kim explain why their interview app stalled, how AI videos helped them find demand, and what changed with Yorby.

9 October 20262 min read6 min listen

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Written for builders and creators.

Most founders spend years chasing "sexy" venture-scale ideas, only to realize they've built a product that's effectively destined to churn.

Editor's note

Why this matters now

Yorby grew out of a marketing experiment. Andrew Meng and Thomas Kim had struggled to grow an interview-preparation app beyond roughly $3,000 a month. Then the videos they made to promote their software started suggesting a different business.

If you're deciding whether to keep pushing your current product, listen for the reason their customers left. Finding a job ended the customer's need for interview practice. More signups kept feeding that same problem.

The useful question is what your customers will keep needing.

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What it says

Distilled from the original. The notes above and below are the editor's own.

A customer who succeeds may leave

Andrew Meng and Thomas Kim say their interview-preparation product, Perfect Interview AI, reached roughly $3,000 in monthly revenue. Keeping that revenue growing was difficult. A customer who found a job could stop paying because the product had done its job.

That gave the founders a recurring problem: new customers had to replace those leaving before the business could grow.

Build around experience you already have

Their next recruiting idea promised a larger business market. The founders say they lacked the recruiting knowledge to make it work.

They had more experience with content and social media marketing. Experiments promoting their own software showed them an opportunity to build tools for that work. Those tools became Yorby.

The reported $100,000 figure is annual recurring revenue, the yearly equivalent of recurring subscription revenue at that point. It is the founders' account of the business, not an independently audited result.

Views and sales told different stories

The founders describe using AI-generated videos that resembled content made by individual creators. Those experiments helped their monthly recurring revenue reach roughly $6,000.

They also hired human creators and say they spent about $20,000 over several weeks. The human videos attracted more impressions, but the founders were disappointed by how many viewers became customers.

These were different campaigns during a changing business. The comparison illustrates why they watched customer purchases and retention alongside views. It does not establish that AI videos will outperform human creators for another product.

Growth can expose a fragile product

A software change caused problems while both founders were away. Their lesson was to make sure someone could respond when a production change went wrong.

They also describe pricing experiments after customers objected to the cost of a subscription. They treated the changes as tests they could reverse.

For a small team, the episode connects three decisions: what customers will keep paying for, how to reach those customers, and whether the product stays dependable as demand grows.

Editor's note

What to do with this

Write down what makes a customer stop using your product. A finished task, a better competitor and a broken experience each call for a different response.

Meng and Kim's account is one business's experience, with changing products and campaigns. Their spending figures offer questions to investigate in your own numbers. For the earlier attempts that shaped this pivot, hear their failed-startup discussion.

Find more from the show in our startup-growth playlist.

The original

How we scaled an app to 100k ARR in 6 months after 2 years of failure

How Does This Get Big? · 11 August 2026