Ben Cera

Polsia is about to hit $25M run rate. Next stop: $100M ARR. And things keep accelerating: $0 → $1M in 12 weeks $1M → $10M in 10 weeks $10M → $20M in 6 weeks I just published one of my favorite and most successful aisloP episodes yet: “The Run Rate.” I tell the whole story, from idea to $20M, month by month. The episode ends in Tokyo, where I went a few weeks ago. Probably the best place on Earth to take a deep breath, get inspired, and rethink what’s possible. I came back with an even bolder vision for Polsia. The road from $25M to $100M is going to look very different. Polsia v2 is coming soon.

Why would anyone seek out a cofounder in 2027??

Which founder is best at marketing?

AI meta ads method that you can start right now: Build a landing page and a way to sign up or pay (Meta needs a purchase or signup event to track & optimize for) Set up the Meta pixel and the conversions API on your site. Most of the time the pixel should sit on the purchase event, unless you’re testing earlier in the funnel with signups. 3 pieces we put into every ad: > UGC-style video > Ad copy + description > Subtitles You’ll want to use AI video for the ads & make sure it looks like UGC. Use HeyGen, OmniFlash, or Sora to create these videos. For every video, you’re gonna want to have AI write the ad copy and description, then run it through a separate tool to add subtitles. AI video can be your best performing creative if you know what you’re doing, and you can create it at a higher volume. Now go to Meta and set up a sales campaign optimizing for sales. Simply set your daily budget and let it rip. After the campaign is set up, keep the targeting blank: just geo & demographics (your creative does the targeting, even once you’re spending a lot) Run 2 ad sets: one broad with no interests or behaviors, and one lookalike of your customers. Meta reads your creative and finds the people it’s speaking to on its own. Once people start hitting your pixel, Meta will find lookalikes. Now your campaign is live. Check performance daily, turn off the creatives that didn’t work and add new ones every week (a winning creative lasts 2 weeks max) This daily check will be critical because it’s the same workflow a Meta ads marketer would run, and AI can help, but your creatives still need someone who’s genuinely good at creative. From now on your strategy is: -> Run ads early to get real users into your funnel -> Send surveys to every customer who comes in -> Fix any bugs they run into -> Optimize your funnel based on what they tell you If you do this right, you should have no issue getting real paying customers into your funnel and learning from them before you scale budget. Just make sure you expand from paid to other channels and don’t expect it to fix anything if your product sucks. Let me know if you want me to expand on any of this… But if you’re generally stuck on any part, just send what you’re confused about to an LLM to get a more detailed explanation.

Hot founder take: Closing in on $25M run rate and I still fly economy. Why pay 10x more for an extra 10 cm of leg room? -1000 ROI points.

If your goal is to raise capital (smart right now btw) Understand that most investors care more about your obsession and ambition than they do anything else. The second they feel like all your spreadsheets, charts & explanations are really just YOU trying to convince yourself that it MIGHT work.. they're walking away. It takes delusion to build a Meta. It takes someone who sees the world and its possibilities in a way that everyone else (including most entrepreneurs) would think is absolutely insane. Because that's simply what it takes. VC = risk. Why would investors bet the whole farm on a 100% risk averse individual who's scared to be unconventional? It's 2026. We're in the AI era... "Everything that was true yesterday is wrong today."

Here’s how I went from $0 to $20M ARR

waking up at 4am + cold showers was never the secret to success, but AI made it 100x less effective. a formulaic life is the antithesis of creativity. TASTE IS THE MOAT.

Every breakthrough in my life came from a failure... I've never found success to be a good teacher Growth comes from being punched in the face & kicked while you're down

book a one way to SF go into debt if you have to

Marketing moves I'd bet my life on: 1. Make every new feature or announcement a launch. Copy + Video + Amplification. Nail this and you'll be trending on Twitter for a week. 2. Making good taste your differentiator. Anyone can launch anything, so what stands out is how you package and talk about it. 3. Doing so much organic storytelling that people are already warmed up by the time they see your ads on Meta & Google, or your launches. 4. Running paid ads early on at any budget and letting Meta find and funnel in your customers for you. 5. Being omnipresent. The era of "just focus on one channel" is dead. Every company doing $10M+ is everywhere, all the time. What did I miss that's working for you?

The best fundraising strategy is to make your data room public Build a live dashboard that shows all your numbers and publish your deck next to it. There's no reason to keep everything confidential as if you have a "secret recipe." You want investors seeing your data before they ask. If you're onto something dope, they'll probably email you about investing anyway and if they don't, you still win. People will talk about it, you'll get more signups, curve goes higher, and investors might even start checking your dashboard autonomously.

2027 prediction: Zuck and Muse win the whole consumer AI game

PHP powers 69.7% of the internet Disconnect your devices and go touch some grass today

be LOUDER

I just added another $10M to my run rate in 6 weeks. Here's every idea I tried before hitting $20M ARR: 1. Moved to New York at 21. I studied financial engineering at Columbia and I wanted to be a founder, but didn’t have the guts. 2. Joined a startup hedge fund on Wall Street. I wanted to learn how things get built from scratch, it died in a year. 3. Joined Barclays Capital. I worked on the trading floor for 2 years. I had a lot of friends building software back then and I started to feel inspired. 4. Learned how to code. My best friend told me that once I learned, I could build anything. So I did. Nights and weekends. For 6 months straight. 5. Shipped my first app. Did it under alias Ben Cera so my finance boss wouldn’t find out. People loved it. I quit my job, bootstrapped the company for a year… it failed. 6. Built a photo messaging app. Josh Kushner from Thrive Capital loved it and invested $1 million from his brand new fund. 7. Pivoted into a people discovery app. It had massive traction, but then I realized I was building a dating app and decided to walk away. 8. Moved to LA. I became the CTO of a tech enabled interior design startup. We raised $20M from Founders Fund and Zillow Group. 9. Worked with Uber’s founder. Travis Kalanick bought CloudKitchens and I got a meeting. I decided to join as a product manager. 2 years later, I was leading a new division I had built from scratch. 10. Decided to come back to the arena. I moved to Paris to start a new company called GiftShop with my good friend and raised $8M. After 2 years of co-founder tension, I finally walked away to go solo. 11. Started Polsia Inc. Decided that i wanted to start working with AI right away, but also take a break and see the world. So I starting traveling the world and touring most of Asia. 12. Built Blanks. An iPhone app that builds iPhone apps using AI. Failed. 13. Built Decision AI. An AI that helps you make decisions with AI. Zero customers. 14. Started Polsia. I went all in on the idea of building a company that builds and runs companies with AI. I built the first version and moved to San Francisco. 15. Polsia worked. 5 months later, I had 10,000+ customers, a $10M run rate, and raised $30M on a $250M valuation. Now, I have 25,000+ customers, a $20M run rate, and we're about to hit $25M very soon. This is 20 years of failing and starting over. Until it finally clicked... Every lesson is tuition, nothing is ever wasted.

Checkout my YT channel here: youtube.com/@bencera-aislop

never join a startup if the founder isn't slightly delusional

I hit 25,000+ customers in 9 months. My 4 biggest lessons from 20+ years in business: 1. Don’t quit before the payoff. People only see the money and lifestyle, but they never see the decade of grinding, failing, grinding, and failing again... until one day "you got lucky." 2. Build what you want to exist. If you build what people want today, you’ll copy tools that already exist and ship something lame. The idea of Polsia came to me once I stopped caring about everyone else and built the weird thing I wanted to have. 3. Being early isn’t enough. You need to be loud. If you stay silent, you'll get buried by the company who put themselves out there, raises money and takes market share. Always be louder. 4. Failure is true education. You can read every book on building a company, but the lessons that stick come from trying yourself, failing repeatedly, then iterating on what not to do next time. Polsia was built from things I learned while shipping products you’ve never heard of. Entrepreneurship isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. AI has made it easier and faster than ever... But never stop hustlin'.