No VC. No ads. Just product.
While Silicon Valley startups torch millions chasing vanity metrics, Ken Choi and the team at Kuse.ai took a different approach. At just 21, Choi walked out of college to help build an AI company that he says now boasts $10M in ARR, which he pulled off in just 60 days.
Their marketing budget was effectively zero.
According to Choi, the team views this as just the beginning of their work.
Breaking free from the VC playbook
Kuse’s path runs counter to nearly every Silicon Valley norm. There’s no VC money fueling their servers. In fact, Choi insists they’ll never raise venture capital.
“VCs want growth at all costs. We wanted a real business,” Choi says. “We didn’t hire a sales team. We didn’t buy ads. We built something people needed—and they found us.”
That “something” is Kuse’s AI canvas—a workspace where messy, unstructured inputs like PDFs, videos, and spreadsheets are transformed into structured, shareable deliverables with the help of AI agents.
The hypergrowth paradox and the $10M ARR feature
Choi initially led Kuse’s growth efforts, overseeing a sharp increase in users within six months. But there was a problem: zero profitability.
“It was brutal,” Choi recalls. “We experienced high traffic but little to no revenue. It taught me hypergrowth isn’t a business model—it’s a distraction if you’re not converting.”
The team reached a turning point when they identified an unmet need: professionals in consulting, education, and law needed AI tools that could create high-precision, template-driven documents—something no existing AI product handled well.
Kuse launched DocX, its format-consistent doc generation feature that delivers new content with AI in the exact same layout with no manual fixes. It gained widespread attention within weeks.
Choi recalls that growth came quickly once users began sharing the product organically. There was no reliance on ads or a PR agency, just word of mouth driven by its ability to address a clear need.
Marketing? “A great product IS marketing.”
Unlike most startups, Kuse has no marketing budget. Choi’s take:
“People say great products don’t need marketing. That’s half true. A great product is marketing—if it’s 10x better, users will do the distribution for you.”
Choi still acknowledges the importance of marketing. Instead, he redefines it: “We do marketing through precision—knowing exactly who we’re for, and speaking their language with every feature, every UI choice.”
Kuse’s ambition goes far beyond niche AI tools. Choi envisions creating tools designed specifically for the AI-native generation.
Traditional tools were designed for static documents. Our focus is on dynamic, AI-powered workflows,” he says.
His message to other founders is equally bold: “Burn the investor decks. Ditch the VC handcuffs. You don’t need their money or their rules. Build something so good users can’t stop talking about it—and they’ll take you further than any investor deck ever could.”
About Kuse.ai
Kuse.ai is an AI startup developing next-generation workplace solutions tailored to the AI-native generation. Built by a team of well-equipped founders, it is trusted by users in 60+ countries to help professionals turn messy, unstructured inputs into structured, sharable deliverables—on a dynamic visual canvas that keeps context clear, connected, and under your control. Learn more at kuse.ai.
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