A year before this interview, Daniel was 15 and making $500,000 a month from Snapchat shows.
Then Snapchat died on him. Six figures a month dropped to very low five figures, almost overnight.
Most people would call that a disaster. Daniel called it a warning: never build on a side hustle again. So at 17 he came back on Brett Malinowski's podcast with a real company. Crayo, an AI tool for short-form video, doing $500K to $600K a month. Add his course revenue and he's at roughly $1M a month across everything.
The part that got me: he never spent a dime on ads to get Crayo there.
I watched the full episode (it's from September 2024, and it's an hour and a half) so you don't have to. Here's how a teenager built a SaaS without paid ads, and what I'd steal from it.
First, the collapse that started it
Daniel's first business was Snapchat shows. Short-form content that Snapchat paid ad revenue on. At 15 he ran it up to $500K a month, went on Brett's podcast, and shared the whole playbook.
Then the platform faded and the income went with it.
He pivoted to the thing closest to what he already knew: YouTube Shorts. RPMs on Shorts were 15 to 25 cents per thousand views at the time, which sounds tiny until you're doing hundreds of millions of views. He launched channel after channel until some were making five figures a month each.
But he'd learned the lesson. Platform revenue is rented income. The platform giveth, the platform taketh away.
His words, roughly: "I didn't want to fall into the same trap of having it all potentially go away."
So he looked at his own workflow for a real problem to solve.
The problem that became Crayo
Making Shorts at volume has one bottleneck: editing. Doing it yourself takes forever. Hiring editors means slow turnarounds and costs that scale with output.
Daniel was living that pain daily across his own channels. So in late 2023, he and his partners (Musa and Li) started building Crayo: a tool that automates the tedious parts of short-form video. Subtitles, captions, animations, music, the works.
He didn't quit his channels to build it. He kept the cash flow running while the product came together in the background. His attitude at the time: "I don't know if it's going to do that much, but it's an asset I'm building."
Then it launched.
→ Month 1: $50K
→ Month 2: $70K
→ Month 3: $150K
→ By month 6: $500K to $600K a month, on lean margins
For context, that's a faster ramp than almost any SaaS founder I've interviewed. And it wasn't luck. The distribution was already built before the product existed.
Zero paid ads. Here's what did the work instead
When Brett pushed on marketing, Daniel broke it into three engines. None of them are ads.
1. An affiliate army with real incentives
Crayo pays affiliates 20% of whatever they bring in. Standard stuff. The unstandard part is who the affiliates are: creators who actually use the product to make money themselves.
One affiliate makes five figures a month just producing Crayo content. Every day, another video on "how to make money with TikTok" with Crayo baked in as a step. Great ROI for Crayo, great money for him.
My favorite detail from the episode: a big YouTube documentary went up criticizing AI content. The first 10 seconds? A Crayo ad, placed by an affiliate. The video hit #1 trending on all of YouTube. Even the criticism was distribution.
2. Private creator deals on retainer
Past the public affiliate program, Crayo runs private retainer deals with creators they know personally. Bonuses kick in when a creator clears a few million views in a month.
And those creators often sell their own programs teaching people to get the same results. So they're motivated to blow up, and Crayo rides along in every video.
3. The founders are the media company
Daniel makes YouTube videos teaching people how to build Shorts channels. Musa teaches people how to clip streamers and run faceless TikTok pages. Both funnel viewers toward the tool they use to do it.
If that model sounds familiar, it's the same engine behind the clipping economy that's minting agencies right now. Teach the outcome, sell the tool that produces the outcome.
Notice what's missing from all three: a media buyer. Daniel only started testing paid ads for his course, after Crayo had already hit the $500K range organically.
The newsletter with 800,000 readers in 7 months
This is the move that made me sit up.
Daniel and his partners built Viral Engine, a newsletter about going viral and making money with content. Over 800,000 subscribers in under 7 months.
Two things make it different from every other founder newsletter:
→ It's video-first. Instead of a 30-paragraph wall of text, he records himself talking to the camera and sends unlisted YouTube videos to the list. His logic: most newsletters are boring, so make one people can watch "whilst eating popcorn".
→ It's not a side project. He treats it as an asset to launch and promote software companies. New tool ships, 800K warm readers hear about it on day one.
Newsletters with 300K to 500K subscribers have sold for millions. Daniel built one bigger than that, at 17, as a distribution layer for future products.
That's the same "own your audience before you need it" play I keep seeing from the best operators. Luca Netz runs a version of it with underground marketing at Pudgy Penguins, just on completely different channels.
The flywheel: customers who make money buy more credits
Crayo's pricing runs on credits. More videos, more credits.
Now look at who the customers are: creators using Crayo to pump out Shorts and TikToks that earn platform payouts. If their content works, they make money. If they make money, they make more videos. If they make more videos, they buy more credits.
The customer's growth is the company's growth. Brett called it genius and I don't think he's wrong.
It also explains the product roadmap. When fake text-conversation videos started blowing up on TikTok (those fake iMessage exchanges between a couple, that whole niche), the team saw where usage was flowing and made that specific feature great. There was no long roadmap debate. They followed the usage and shipped for it.
And the course ties in too. If people are making money with Crayo, they need to know how to make videos that earn. That's what the course teaches. Each business feeds the other.
What I'd actually steal from a 17-year-old
I've been building businesses longer than Daniel has been alive, and I still took notes. Four things:
1. Build the audience before the product. Crayo did $50K in month one because the founders already had reach and credibility in the exact niche the product serves. When the audience exists first, the launch is just an announcement.
2. Solve your own expensive problem. Daniel wasn't guessing at a market. Editing was costing him time and money every single day. When your product kills your own bottleneck, you understand the customer perfectly (you are the customer).
3. Recruit sellers, not impressions. Every dollar most SaaS companies put into ads, Crayo effectively puts into people with an incentive to sell. Affiliates, retainer creators, course students. Incentives compound. Impressions don't.
4. Kill complacency on purpose. Daniel's line about teams that think their company is in a great place: "You're dumb. There's always things you can improve." Harsh, but he backs it with a mindset I love: success is just a set amount of problems, and the faster you solve them, the faster you get there.
One caveat worth naming. These numbers are from September 2024, self-reported on a podcast, and revenue is not profit ("lean margins", in his own words). The AI short-form space also moves fast. Treat the specifics as a snapshot and the playbook as the durable part.
FAQ
What is Crayo AI?
Crayo (crayo.ai) is an AI tool that automates short-form video creation: captions, subtitles, animations, music, and trending formats like fake text-conversation videos. It was built in late 2023 by Daniel, Musa, and their partners to fix their own editing bottleneck, and reached $500K to $600K a month in revenue within about six months of launch.
How did Crayo grow without paid ads?
Three organic engines: a 20% affiliate program filled with creators who use the tool themselves, private retainer deals with bigger creators (plus bonuses for hitting millions of views), and the founders' own content teaching people how to make money with short-form video. An 800,000-subscriber newsletter, Viral Engine, adds a fourth layer of owned distribution.
How much money does Daniel make?
In the September 2024 interview, Daniel says Crayo does $500K to $600K a month and his YouTube Shorts course does multiple six figures a month, putting total revenue around $1M a month. That's revenue across the businesses, not personal profit, and it's self-reported.
What happened to his Snapchat business?
It collapsed when Snapchat's creator payouts faded. Daniel went from $500K a month at 15 to very low five figures. He credits that crash for the pivot: instead of chasing another platform payout, he built a product he owns, using the audience skills the platforms taught him.
Steal playbooks like this every week
Daniel's story is fun because of his age. But the playbook (own your distribution, solve your own problem, align incentives with your customers) is the same one I hear from bootstrapped founders doing $100K to $10M a year.
I interview them every week on the Profitable Founder Podcast. Real numbers and the exact channels behind them, no fluff.
