Meet Stan — the newest addition to the Lean AI Leaderboard.
💥 $30M ARR
💥 30 people
💥 Fully profitable
But $1M rev/employee isn’t even the craziest part.
Stan is one of the most AI-native and transparent companies in the world.
They share everything — full financials, retention curves, and even their AI stack.
Back in 2021, John Hu and Vitalii Dodonov saw where the world was going:
→ AI accelerating product development
→ Creators democratizing distribution
→ Startups scaling with 1/10th the headcount
They didn’t just want to build a company. They wanted to rewrite the startup playbook.
They hired 3 full-stack engineers, gave them freedom, and built a culture of lean growth and speed.
Their bet paid off.
⚙️ Inside Stan’s AI growth engine:
🧠 Creator inputs their IG/TikTok handle
→ Flask server (AWS ECS) catches update
→ AWS SNS/SQS queues job
📥 Fetch & Transcribe
→ AWS Lambda + RapidAPI pulls last 30 posts
→ Media is downloaded, transcribed (Amazon Transcribe)
→ Output cleaned + structured
🔎 Store for Semantic Search
→ Embeddings generated
→ Pushed to Pinecone (vector DB)
🎁 Auto-generate eCourses
→ When prompted, Stanley (their AI copilot) runs a vector search
→ Finds best clips, themes them
→ Auto-builds a paid product (often priced $99–$1,000)
Stan's insight?
“Social Media Account → eCourse” should be one workflow.
Months of product creation collapsed into minutes.
And to date, creators have earned over $250M on Stan.
But it gets even crazier…
Stan also built Stanley from Stan 🚀, their in-house AI agent — who doesn’t just automate product building for creators…
He also surfs LinkedIn, reads growth posts, and sends helpful feedback in real time.
Yes, really.
Stanley found one of my posts, read it, and sent a thoughtful, detailed analysis — completely autonomously.
(Vitalii just gave him my email. The rest? Pure agent-led initiative.)
The AI isn’t just part of the product. It runs the company.
This is what the next-gen startup looks like:
→ Tiny team
→ AI-first operations
→ AI-native agents
→ Transparent leadership
→ $1M+ revenue per employee
Congrats to Stan — and huge respect to John & Vitalii for showing the world how it’s done. (seriously, what founder has the guts to share their MoM retention curves publicly like that!?)
See you at $100M ARR. 🚀
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💡 Building something lean, AI-native, and scaling fast?
Tag it or DM me — I’m actively adding new companies to the Lean AI Leaderboard weekly and supporting the best AI-native founders out there.
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