Silicon Valley Girl: AI, Tech and Career Growth - How to Build a $1M AI Business with 2 people in 90 Days | Alex Mashrabov, Founder and CEO of Higgsfield AI

Episode Date: March 4, 2026

Alex Mashrabov grew Higgsfield AI to $200M ARR in 9 months — faster than Slack, Zoom, or Dropbox. In this episode, he shares the exact AI startup playbook: $0 to first dollar in 30 days, $1M ARR in 90. In this episode he shares the exact playbook: how to go from $0 to your first dollar by day 30, and $1M ARR by day 90. This conversation is for anyone who wants to start something but keeps thinking it's too late.We cover:What he'd do if he had to start from zero todayThe ideal AI founding team (and why you only need 2 people)How Higgsfield found product-market fitWhy they ship product releases 6 days a weekFunding strategy for AI startupsHow small teams build big companies in the age of AI🎧 More from the Silicon Valley Girl: Newsletter:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamavat Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21 to enter. A lot of businesses can really scale to tens of millions of dollars today profitably with AI. This is Alex, founder of Hicksfield, an AI company that hit a 200 million annual recurring revenue in just nine months faster than Slack or Zoom. And what he told me about starting a business today completely blew my mind. And you can copy his strategy too.

Focus on bringing like the first dollar by day 30 of product developments and maybe one millionaire hour by day 90. That's a lot. I just think it's the next industrial revolution. It's probably more powerful than the internet. For many, many young people, AI become social elevator. For someone who still has fear, like, this is moving so fast. I don't know how I can start. Can you give them one piece of advice?

First, I would start from... I have an amazing guest today. I am so excited to learn from you. Let's get very practical right away. You built Hicksfield and achieved $200 million in revenue in nine months. Let's imagine, I don't want this to happen, but let's imagine a scenario, when you have to start from scratch tomorrow and you have 90 days to launch a business idea. From what you've learned with your experience at Hicksfield, what would you do?

I think it all starts with maybe a team of tool, someone who is builder, who can go within 24 hours from idea to a product. And now it's all becomes possible. There are so many databases, there are so many payments, and so on, which simplify creation of MVP. And then someone, as I call it, go-to-market person, who has this natural empathy maybe or understanding of the sort of target distribution whom they're selling to and who can come up with interesting kind of new content formats,

which can resonate with the target audience on social media. And I think this is a very different skill set from the marketing roles of the previous decades. And how many times should they be ready to iterate? How many ideas? For example, for us last year, we were iterating every day. So it was six days a week. And every day, we were putting new product release. As we were trying to find workflows and use cases,

which have high frequency and which matter for our target audience. And then once the technology gets there, it's important to develop sort of the workflow. which is easy enough but gives enough configuration as well. This dilemma of the perfect interface is still not solved, frankly. So this is another reason why we embrace daily iteration. And on top of all of that, every month the whole industry resets. They completely push the boundaries in terms of the capabilities.

There are probably, let's say, five leading research labs. And each lab is pushing massive updates every quarter. So at some months, we have even two major updates. And it typically requires to substantially rebuild the whole product around those models. So it's exciting time today because product builders like ourselves at Hicksfield, we just try to evolve the product so that it highlights the best possibilities of these models to our customers. But it's a constant race.

Yeah, it sounds like a very challenging race. And I think you mentioned that last year was one of the hardest. for you when a lot of things were not working. Can you talk to me about that one thing that actually worked? In 2024, we really started from the mobile apps and things were not working well because retention for mobile apps is relatively low. Things drastically changed for Higgs field

when we started to constantly iterate with creatives and we just asked them very simple question. Like, did you see this video? This was a cool I-generate video and they said, oh, no, how is this possible? What's the cost? And we say, it actually costs maybe less than $500 to make this video. And then we asked, did you actually try these models?

What's your experience with AI? And obviously, everyone tried AI by then. Even by maybe February last year, everyone tried AI, but everyone had some issues with that. Back then, we realized that the core limitation was around camera control, like a lot of creative directors, they really want to control all the camera effects, camera angle, and so on. Back then, there was no system to achieve that.

So that the initial traction of Hicksfield.a.i came from these camera controls, which we implemented on an engineering site based on the feedback from creatives. So how many interviews did you have to conduct to come up with this feature? This is a very good question, but it kind of puts me on a weak spot, frankly, because we interviewed eight people, eight out of eight said the same thing. And we talked from Hollywood-level movie directors to regional producers of commercials. Everyone had the same feedback.

And how did you select those people? Were they customers already, or you just wanted to talk to people in the industry? Actually, this was probably a challenge as we wanted to talk to people who we don't have a very close relationship to just get unfiltered opinion. But the feedback was very consistent. everyone was missing these camera controls.

So that's what we delivered March last year. Then in April we delivered a library of visual effects. And then I think in June, industry completely changed. We saw the emergence of AI native marketing agencies. So essentially those agencies, they completely go end-to-end with AI. And very often they try to bypass incumbent tooling, like for example, Adobe or something else. and go end-to-end with AI. On the one side, they are very limited

because AI capabilities back in June were a little limited. On the other hand, they drastically improve their margin profile, and they kind of show their clients that they can build ads within days. A lot of brands actually want to have content flow on their socials, and they want to embrace AI.

And then from June to December last year, this new industry of AI-Native agencies completely exploded. But basically you said the start of your growth was the multi-angled camera view, and it came from talking to people in the industry. I love that. And also, the number eight is actually very consistent from what I'm getting, talking to other founders. It's normally like 12 to 20, but it's not too many interviews because I feel like a lot of people think they need to talk. to thousands of people to figure out the problem, but it's actually like around 10 interviews. Yeah, absolutely. So eight people who actually helped us to shape the product.

And then I think we hired four of them. Oh, you also hire. Yes. So now we have this feedback loop within the team. That's awesome. And that's how we realize that probably the best products in Creative AI is going to be built in symbios like in collaboration between engineers and between creators. So today, roughly half of our, maybe 40% of the team are engineers, maybe 40% are creators. Like you said, two founders, right?

One is technical. One knows the consumer. It's basically reflected in your team. Okay, let's get back to that tough year because I feel like for a lot of people, that's what they're scared of. So when you were building this and nothing was really working and then Google releases the new VEO model, did you ever think about giving up on that particular market and starting something else because this was getting so crowded?

I think we were committed to figure this out. There are two reasons why we had a conviction. First is that prior to that I was at Snapchat, I was running Gen. I there. And I saw the uprise of TikTok and CapCat. CapCat became top five apps in the world. And it's unprecedented. It says it's not a messenger. It's not a social media.

And this was a strong signal for me that the needs of social media creators are simply unmet in the markets. And the second reason why we had conviction, we constantly heard that creators feel a burnout from sort of feeling pressure to record multiple videos a day for socials with their own face. Mr. Beast, he spoke very openly about that. But I think that has been a primary challenge

for the whole industry over last four, five years. And then what was surprising to me is that advertisers have the same problem. Most of the advertisers talk about like maybe mid-market brands. They can be spending hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing and they don't have any production team. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs.

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So you chose the right part of the market. This is what I'm hearing. So I feel like for every entrepreneur who's watching, when you see a big opportunity in the market, you also have to spot who's paying the most, not just go after each user, right? Absolutely. We live in a very interesting era where all the powerful companies try to give AI to everyone. Literally, Meta, X-I, Google, Microsoft, open AI. anthropic, Biden's, and many, many more, I think each of those companies want to give AI to all its customers, really. That's why startups have to have more nuanced view of the world and have to have more nuanced set of customers.

And I think startups today are sort of incentivized to stay cash flow positive and build real business from day zero. This is what I see across Hicksfield and other top applications. AI companies. So I think this also creates a very interesting dynamic that the target audience should be maybe tens of millions of users who are willing to spend hopefully a couple thousand dollars a month. So it is not for everyone, but the delivered value should be so strong. So the

product should be so good so that it kind of sells itself. I love that. And I love that you have a concrete number, $2,000. Yeah, $2,000. I'm not sure with Hicksfield, for example, this is the core metric which we are tracking. Like, how much of the value we believe we provide, which is more like through the user interviews, but also how much we charge users annually. So this is one key metric. And we are not chasing just monthly active users, for example. Because the monthly active user's number can be inflated through some viral effect.

monthly active user doesn't really speak to the frequency of the usage and the value delivered. So that's why for us, really daily active users and average ACV, average contract value, those two metrics are the most important ones. Can you give advice to people who are watching who haven't started yet, but they haven't started because they think a large company is going to take over? How should they think about their defensibility? I think each company can really keep their focus on maybe two or three top priorities. Interestingly enough, people like to say about Anthropic that their major success from MCP and Cloud Codes

actually was not like a top-down, but really bottom-up. And the Cloud-Code success was not sort of planned. And I think it's true that these large companies, they definitely can benefit a lot from applying top-down approach from two to three initiatives and really consolidating all the resources to make the most progress there. I just think it's the next industrial revolution. It's probably more powerful than the internet. So the number of products and ideas to be built I think just overweighs a number of ideas which open AI or anthropic can push internally. That's why I would encourage builders to build, especially today when like a quite small team

of maybe 10 people can build like high-scale products. Do you think there's that we have a certain gap in time when we can build. So for example, I've been hearing a lot in social media that we only have two years to build something new because then we're going to have some companies that reach AGI and it's going to be impossible to find a gap in the market because those companies are going to be filling those gaps. This is a good question. We definitely make tremendous progress as an industry to automating work in digital world.

And for sure, maybe next decades, there are going to be a lot of applications of AI in physical world. It's difficult to forecast how much progress we all are going to make there. But this decade is definitely the era of digital economy completely changing with AI. That's for sure. I really don't want to believe in the future when there are going to be maybe three labs who have the best models and these models controlling all the world. This could happen.

That will be a very difficult future. So I would, I try to stay optimistic and encourage everyone to stay optimistic and really focus on building and delivering value. Like, for example, today, I just want to give you a very concrete example. So I recently spoke to a very, very, very large, like, property management company, which actually uses Hicksfield to sort of advertise their buildings, their apartments and so on. like no one is building for this industry. Like in this industry, there is a very specific workflow of a customer. Like customer needs to learn about the property.

Then they need to go to the website and get all the details. Then they need to call. Then they need to show up. Then they leave the deposit. And the whole customer journey. No one is actually building solution specifically for this industry to like cover these. journey end-to-end with agents. And the reason why agents are going to deliver lots of value in

this specific business is that customers who want to maybe, let's say, rent apartment, especially in certain price points, they want to make a decision rather quickly. So every day of delay, every day of just moving from one stage to another is just lost revenue. So and this business owner just said to me that no one is building for their industry. And I'm confident there are many more examples like that. Yeah, so riches are in the niches, as they say, from your experience, when you pitched VCs with another AI idea, what makes a pitch stand out these days?

I think today there is definitely fear that OpenAI, Anthropic and other labs are going to just be very acquisitive and just trying to expand their product offering to multiple different verticals. Pretty much every week there is... Claude 4x launched and stocks go down. That definitely happens and that creates a lot of fear. And I would just say that the core insight for me personally was that most of these hot and hyped AI companies, they are actually cash flow positive.

Like maybe it is a wrong mindset to go and raise venture capital today. I think there is plenty of pre-seed capital available today. But I'm not sure everyone needs to raise series A, B, C, C, D, and so on. How much revenue did you have when you raised your first round? For me, with Higgsville, AI, it was probably easier because I had the previous exit. And we basically raised $16 million without having any revenue, just with maybe having like million users for our mobile app. But this is not exactly the way how I would recommend to build today.

I would recommend to focus on bringing like the first dollar by day 30 of product developments and maybe one million error by day 90 and then decides if someone needs VC funding or doesn't it. I mean, a lot of businesses can really scale to tens of millions of dollars to day profitably with AI and for such businesses, there is no need to attract VC funding. I can give you a very simple example. So there are so many websites we just allow to make professional photo shoot, like basically for passport. Many of them make tens of millions of dollars.

None of them are going to be, yeah, none of them are going to be venture capital-backed business. Well, and you said something, $1 million by day 90. AAR, meaning like 80K a month. 80K a month in three months, that's a lot. And so the playbook to achieve that is basically generate ads and launch them and test whether whether they're landing with your target audience? Paid ads are very difficult today. I think a lot of distribution come through

organic social media and creator integrations and just make sure that by day 30 there is monetization in place and then there is a way to constantly grow to a revenue to, let's say, one millionaire error by day 90. Many successful companies scale very quickly today. Just different verticals have different capacity. In some verticals, the ceiling could be just 50 million.

In other vertical, one billion. In other verticals, like, 100 billion. Any tips on landing first customers in the first 30 days? Initially, at least last year, Twitter has been the social media where the distribution starts from. It starts from like small communities, then it goes to AI news pages on X. Then from AI news pages on X, it goes to Instagram news pages. then from Instagram news pages to creators.

Then it goes to Telegram and like other social media. That's what we have seen with Higgsfield and with many other products as well, that they went through the same sort of journey of popularity and news through various social media. But it all originated on X. I think now it's being kind of changed. Today, a lot of hype, like a lot of companies, they sort of try to use X to boost their products. sort of signal to noise ratio just drops.

Twitter becomes less relevant, but still it's the main place for new AI products launch. That's awesome. I'm still trying to correct the X strategy. I feel like if you add a word breaking or just in to whatever you're posting in the beginning and it should be in cups, then it can perform.

And something should be like clot, cooked, RIP, like something like that. Yeah, just wiped this. out of the market. Yeah, it has to be very sensational on X. But you're so right. I've heard so many, and I know a lot of creators who build their whole like email newsletter, one million subscribers just off viral X posts. That's amazing. I love this life hack. Thank you so much. Although this has been the primary life hack of the 25 and I do believe that the media evolves itself as well. So 26 could be different.

I always see LinkedIn on the right. Maybe LinkedIn. Maybe LinkedIn. Your previous company, You sold it for 166 million. Were there any key learnings from that business or mistakes that you made that you will never repeat in this one? It's like never say never. But one of the key learnings for me and the key takeaways was to embrace meritocracy, sort of. Like, I'm 30 and I feel sometimes that I am quite old for this new era of AI. Like a lot of new ideas in Hicksville today come from this kind of fresh grads, maybe 23, 25, who sort of maybe never worked in a large company, who are doing like freelancing with some

vibe coding tools, who are doing vibe coding before the term vibe coding, basically. And they just think differently. And I think that's sort of maybe the right mindset. So traditionally in any like corporation, those people would be just simply, no one would just simply listen to them. And the same applies to the creative role. So there is definitely some resistance from people who especially build like, let's say, like large Hollywood projects, that all AI is dangerous, it's not authentic. And in the same time, it's really exciting that for many, many young people, AI become social elevator. And I sort of strongly relate to that

personally, because for me, I had to do a lot of competitive programming, you know, like, who solves more problem within like five hours, you know, like everyone in the world competes. So this was social elevator in 2010, maybe. And this applies both to creative and to software engineering as well. I love how you said that AI is your social elevator because I feel like social media was the social elevator from me. Now is the era of AI. I think you mentioned that video models could be a path to AGI and that you're also building a world model. Can you talk to me about that? And for everyone who's watching, just wanted to explain, I was just in Davos.

And everyone was talking about LLM's having a ceiling because basically just describing our world with words is something that we're used to. And there's a lot of information on the internet. But understanding the physics is the next level. And once we're understand the physics, then we're going to have robots walking around our house and doing chores, if I'm explaining this correctly. Absolutely. I think Demis from Google and Elon from XEI, they started this narrative.

And definitely they are top influencers in the space. That's why now the narrative goes to masses to everyone. It's still unclear of that sort of the path to AGI, although that's definitely a path to advanced robotic systems. Like, I think Elon proved to the whole world that self-driving cars can work really well through just cameras. And I think the same logic is going to apply to more advanced robots as well. That's why developing perception and visual understanding is critical for next wave

of robotics. And it's a top priority for a lot of research labs as it's the next frontier. And there is no other way to improve video generation without visual understanding. Roughly, it takes around, I think people like to say that in one minutes, we can read 200 words. one minute of the video, it can be described with maybe 10, 60,000 words. There is just so much going on. If you and I were having coffee after this episode, I'd certainly pull up my phone and say,

look what I tried this week. It changed how my tea works. This is what I do all the time. To share these kinds of things that don't fit into the podcast, I started my own newsletter. Every week, I read about AI tools, strategies, and experiments I'm running in my own business with real numbers, real results, templates that you can use, and also honest mistakes. If you want to be in the loop, the link is waiting for you in the description.

So where do you see yourself in two years? Are you still working on videos? Because I saw Menlo Ventures announce their investment in you, and they said that Higgs-Vield is building the next world model. Do you feel like your focus is going to shift to that, or you're still going to stick to the marketing with video? I think what differentiates us from many others is we are from day zero, focus specifically on short-form content. And I do think that world model is going to change the way how social media content is made. So, for example, next decade is going to be the era of interactive media. Basically, when games and videos are sort of blurred in like one experience,

where like it's kind of choose your own adventure. So a lot of marketing is going to go this way, especially kind of premium marketing and customer loyalty programs. I think this decade is all about supercharging creators and marketing with those models. You said you're seeing customers with marketing budget over $100 million. 90% of their ads are AI generated. As a creator, 90% of my revenue is from large corporations from their marketing budgets. Should I be afraid? This is a good question.

And this is definitely where we should make sure that video AI can help personalities. Like what I would love to see is that creators like you, Mr. Beast and so on, who are sort of AI Native, start to make more channels and just expand their media presence and build like the whole media empire. So like the next media empire is going to be built maybe with like 300 people, 500 people and be worth like $10 billion. So that's on the one side. On the other side, what I see personally is that essentially these,

high-scale AI and creation comes after maybe a platform like TikTok marketplace, frankly. So in the past, those brands they could just hire sort of even programmatically

thousands of creators through TikTok marketplace just to do kind of these templatized videos. Like I use this product, it's all good, go buy that. So like this

entry-level marketing definitely gets democratized. Although, in my opinion, as we are seeing a lot of AI slope on social media and so on, the genuine connection and understanding of audience now matter more than ever. So there are going to be just a lot of average and above average content on the socials. And I think this is happening one way or another and just deep understanding of the audience and authentic approach matter more than ever. Okay, so you think social media, a ladder, social letter is not dead? Definitely not. I just think that authenticity is going to matter a lot.

And the way how I think about that is if, let's say, top creators now can make their own shows, their own movies with AI, and creators can drive a lot of traffic. that's going to affect like streaming business a lot, I think. So I think the revolution is going to come at every level, although I think clearly people who already understand their audience who have authentic approach, those people are definitely going to be the winners. Okay, my last question.

For someone who's watching this, still has fear. Like, this is moving so fast. I don't know how I can start. I started something today. It's outdated by tomorrow. Can you give them one piece of advice so they can start? First, I think I would start from a position that large companies, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Open AI Anthropic,

think they're all relatively well positioned to be winners in AI era as they simply control data centers, GPS, and so on. And I'm not sure there is much insurance policy for everyone else regardless, right? Well, buy their stocks, yeah? I don't know. Just buy their stocks. Buying their stocks is a good idea. But that's, I think I'm not sure we can share. Not an investment advice is just personal chat. Yeah, I do think that there is a lot of value in these companies.

But I mean, for lots of others, right, I mean, we see the sell off across us. We see the sell off across cybersecurity. And then there is an ultimate question. If I want to like basically depend on someone else to figure out AI strategy, or I want to embrace AI myself. and benefit the most, right? I think that's a personal question for everyone. And as we all know that these technology revolutions,

they're both fair and unfair. I think in long term, every technology revolution is fair and GDP per capita and quality of life goes up on the horizon of 10 years. On the horizon of like three years, I think it's extremely unfair because market just loves to pour money

into companies which are winning. and companies which are like not winning, they immediately go down. But in the short term, I think it's going to be fair because people, both on the creative side, marketing side, engineering side, those who are embracing AI, they can propel their career so quickly. In the end of the day, it's going to be net positive. Although I think individually we all just need to think how I can personally benefit the most from AI, how I can become more efficient with AI, how the value of my skill set can actually

grow with AI. And this always require using those agents and various AI models several hours a day to build this intuition. Let's give them a home task. What should they do right after watching this video? Which tool should they start using and how? For me personally, I am an immigrant. So you know, it just takes quite a bit of effort to come with a logical linear storyline. O3 Mini became my coach, really. This was the first aha moment for me. The second aha moment was around Gemini 3 Pro model. So I felt that my economic productivity really depends on how much I use Gemini 3 model.

These capabilities of the model which can process voice, which can make image, but which has also deep reasoning capabilities and deep research, this was mind-blowing to me. So that's why I feel that my just economic throughput really depend on how much I use Gemini three today. Do you use it to make decisions about your company, like strategic operations? I really feel that communication with humans

becomes way more important skill set for me because a lot of other decisions. I'm sure Gemini and Claude are going to be better than myself. AI is not yet good in communication. So that's where I think I try to put a lot of my personal emphasis. I think other than that, a lot of process can actually be built with AI. So I'm just human-to-human communication and sort of conflicts resolution. And maybe goal setting.

And like number-driven goal setting really is where I put a lot of my time. my personal time. For everything else, I'm trying to evolve Gemini as much as possible, but also use Claude for Excel, Cloud 4X, like, for example, Cloud for Cybersecurity, as it really increases the productivity. Alex, thank you so much. It was amazing. I'm looking forward to reading your comments. What was your key takeaway and what are you going to do right after this video? Summer is here, and Ralph's is your destination for hot savings. Find unique items at low prices with a wide assortment of products from our exclusive brand.

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So much. Thank you.