Cast Magic

Accepted an AppSumo launch opportunity with only 2 weeks lead time. Built the product in Elixir/Phoenix with a Webflow landing page. Offered a lifetime deal (one-time payment for permanent access) rather than a subscription to maximize initial user volume and brand establishment.

Began reaching out to content creators on social platforms to create sponsored content and act as affiliates. Scraped Instagram and other platforms using relevant hashtags to find creators in adjacent industries. Built volume of outreach to gain leverage in rate negotiations, then paid out based on CPMs.

Systemized the affiliate content process by building a Notion document of pre-made content concepts so the one-person marketing team didn't need to jump on individual calls with each creator to ideate. Used contractors for specific verticals. Kept marketing spend under 20% of revenue as a hard rule.

Transitioned focus from lifetime deal users to monthly subscription billing with usage caps. Continually monitored LLM and transcription costs to maintain healthy margins. Kept churn in single digits by solving a real workflow problem rather than a novelty use case.

Continuously invested in improving AI output quality, avoiding shortcuts on backend processing. Positioned product as a full workflow solution (A-to-Z content repurposing) rather than a generic ChatGPT wrapper, making it stickier and harder to displace by foundation model updates.

Mapped out how similar businesses serving the same customer base grew their distribution, specifically studying companies that scaled via affiliates. Used these insights to model and set up their own affiliate system rather than starting from scratch.