My first business after college was a news monitoring app for stock traders. I had no clue where it would take me (in hindsight it was inevitable):

Sam Cartford and I quit our consulting jobs at 24 to built Uptrends AI with about $5K to start the biz

(B2C SaaS product, enter your portfolio and it would give you a reading of whether people were saying positive or negative things on Twitter about your stocks)

Grew to 25K+ users in <12mo but almost no one paid. It was a vitamin not a painkiller, and we didnt know how to productize.

I also had no experience growing a business. We tried everything:
> Paid someone $3K/mo to write out tweets (bad)
> Started a super niche a newsletter (kinda good)
> Burned a bunch of cash on FB ads (bad)
> Tried influencer marketing (very good)

We started over in B2B, selling social listening to hedge funds and AI labs to help the monitor the situation of their portfolio companies. Eventually every demo ended the same way: "can you just find me creators?"

So inevitably we built creator marketing tools. We ran creator marketing campaigns as a service for clients for months (still do)

In July we launched Scout- an agentic platform manages creator campaigns for you. It has been a total 0-1 moment

Since launching:
> $1M in creator budgets on the platform
> 100% MoM growth

The hardest part of the first business became this.

Stick with it!

Cheers,
Ramsey