A week in AI is like a year in other industries. I hope these issues become your weekly source of AI information, inspiration, and ideas. If we haven’t met before, I’m Amanda Smith. I write about AI and the fascinating folks who are building in this brave new world.
Good morning. The last few weeks have been packed. Four founder stories that I keep finding myself thinking about: a unicorn that grew faster than almost any company in history, a recipe platform built around a mum's WhatsApp voice memos, a QA tool for the vibe-coding era, and a founder putting small business ads on NBC. A good mix.
If any of these got buried in a busy inbox, now's a good time to catch up.
In case you missed it:
70 people. $50M ARR in 5 months. $200M ARR in 11. Wen Sang and the Genspark team built something that spread through the work itself, and the results were hard to ignore in a boardroom. The growth story here is genuinely wild.
🤝 This edition is brought to you by Vistage
From MLB dreams to building New York’s #1 physical therapy brand, Spear Physical Therapy CEO Dan Rootenberg shares how he leveraged Vistage peer advisory to create structure, culture, navigate crisis— and drive 50x growth.
In the age of vibe-coding, shipping fast without breaking things is harder than ever. Andrian Budantsov co-founded Readdle, productivity apps used by hundreds of millions, then spent years watching products live or die by their reliability. QA Sphere is his answer to that. What makes the go-to-market story interesting is how he sells it: not demos on a sandbox, but real work, real risk, real proof.
Sanjam Kohli moved from India to Australia at 17, and food was her only tether to home. Her mum would send recipes the only way she knew how: WhatsApp voice memos and photos of handwritten notes. An engineer by training, Kohli built Chefadora, a recipe platform where anyone can publish and actually earn from what they know. 500+ creators, 100 cuisines, and 100,000 monthly active users, and they've never run a traditional marketing campaign.
TV has always had a wow factor. It's also always been out of reach for small businesses without agency budgets and media buyers. David Naffis, a veteran ad tech founder with two acquisitions behind him, spotted that the combination of streaming economics and AI-generated creative changed the equation. Adwave lets any small business create a broadcast-quality TV commercial from a URL, in under 10 minutes, airing on NBC, Hulu, ESPN. Starting at $50.
How's the depth of today's edition?
As always, hit reply if one of these lands with you.
Speak soon,
Amanda
P.S. If you want to get a founder feature about your own story, reply to this email. If you’d like to reach our newsletter audience (founders, creators, and marketers), click the button below.
If you’re new here, I’m over the moon you’ve joined us! To help me craft content that’s actually useful (and not just noise in your inbox), I’d love it if you took 1 minute to answer this quick survey below. Your insights help shape everything I write.
✨ Insane Media is more than one voice
Dive into our other newsletters - where psychology meets the creator economy, e-commerce marketing, and Human resources.
