How Mint Reached 40,000 Users in Two Months Using Convex

I'm with my good friend Alex over here in the beautiful Founders Inc. Nice to meet you, my brother. Nice to meet you, too. Tell me a little bit about yourself, the good people, what you're building. Would love to know a little bit more about you. For sure. Uh my name is Alex. I'm I work here at Founders, Inc. Uh we're a studio company. I moved to San Francisco 6 years ago from Minnesota. Current project we're working on is called Mint. It's a harness for uh 3D models or World Models, if you've heard of them before. Yes, I have. Yes, I have. what we're building, the reason why we're building is we think role models are going to be uh the kind of the next wave of of AI models that'll be useful for people, but it really hasn't found product market fit yet. So, we're trying to build the best tooling on top of these role models. So, when the models get to a place where um they do become really useful for for architecture, for gaming, for all these different kinds of things that we're speculating they could be useful for that we're ready um and have the best. So, you're making a visionary bet. Well, I wouldn't say visionary. I mean it's it's just it is like a you know an out of the money call option that like this thing will be this thing will be this is a brother who trades I know when everyone anyone knows that kind of option that he he been in the game. Yeah. Yeah. Um but it's been really fun. I mean our usage has been insane pivoting. We only pivoted two months ago into into building this product and yeah it's just been a it's been a really fun wild ride. So let's go a little back like so how did you how would you say you got your like startup journey? How did it start? You moved six years ago. Like what was that journey like that led up to today? I was working on my own startup in Minnesota in my in my parents basement basically or at my parents house and um moved out here uh to try and raise funding and it didn't work out. So I ended up shutting down that company and got a job and worked at you know worked for a couple years in Silicon Valley at a couple different companies. Was always tinkering on things on my own. So I built you know tons of different apps over the last you know three four years. Yeah. And then joined Founders Inc. about a year and a half ago and we actually we actually started working at a crypto company. So we built a layer 2. Okay. We built tons of different crypto products like on Ethereum or Solano on we s layer 2 on top of Ethereum, but we actually had our own chain. Oh, nice. And so we built a crypto Venmo that got over 100,000 users. We built a gifting app that got over 100,000. Um, but ultimately we realized that like crypto is is kind of tainted and people actually when you when you mention crypto, people generally don't want to use your products. It's bad. It's bad. Um, and so yeah, we were building this this onchain room builder and wanted to build a better way for people to customize their room and we got early access to the World Labs API. Okay. Uh, and built this experience and um, so this product that we that we're working on now at Mint spun out of that and now we're, you know, one of the top users of of Mint or sorry, of uh, of World Labs as APIs. Nice. Yeah, I I kind of got my start in crypto as well. how to start up in like Bitcoin ordinals and yeah to your point unfortunately there's some cool things that could be built but the name is kind of rough so okay so you're building this I heard you're a big fan of convex how did that happen again I'm not going to be the one shilling it's going to be him so if he thinks it's whack it's whack but I would love to hear your thoughts so whack no I'm playing no we no we actually we switched to convex a couple months ago right around the time we pivoted u and we love it like the speed and latency is like insane like it's like not it's like it's better than anything else out there. And I mean we went from 0 to 40,000 users in in two months. Congrats. Thank you. And Convex is like, you know, it's been it's been amazing. So we no plans on switching anytime soon. My job is still intact. So okay, you you're 40,000 users, you know, building this harness for world models. Um what are some of the next things people can expect from the product that you're building? We just shipped an MCP. Uh we shipped that yesterday. Um and the main thing we're working on right now is making our chat experience much better. Um most users who come in quite frankly like it's not the best experience. Yeah. Um which is great because we can go and make this product so much better. Yes. And so you know over the next two to three weeks that's like our number one number one thing is get get our success on the chats you know multiple orders of magnitude better than what it is now. So I have two questions for you. First one is you said like your chat experience is not really the best right now, but you launch and you still have the ability to acquire customers. What's the balance between like I really need this to be perfect versus the I need to launch this and get this out in people's hands? Cuz I'm sure there's a lot of iterating you get from user feedback, right? So like what's that balance? Like how do you manage cuz like personally I'm on the tier of like I need this to be super perfect but then you lose so much time because like what is perfection, right? Like how much better can you make your product? Like so like what's that balance? Yeah. I think uh it's been a learning curve for us as well. Like we definitely have wanted to wait. Yeah. Uh but the more that we've built products more we realize like we actually don't know what users want. And so like what we think is perfect is actually not perfect from the end users perspective which is actually the only perspective that matters. Yeah. And so getting in the hands of the users as quickly as possible, let letting them tell us directly or indirectly what they want. Uh and then just building the product around that is is what we've we've had success with. No, that makes sense. And I just realized like maybe you and I understand this. There might be people who don't understand what a world model is. Like maybe give us that description explanation. A world model is taking text or an image and generating a 3D space out of it. So it's actually like an asset that you can take. Yeah. Um and you know you can fly around in you can make it a video game. You could add 3D models into the space. Um so you could like one use case that we're talking about uh here within Fort Mason is they have an event space here. And basically what we would do is make a 3D version of that space and then allow people to come in with their own custom 3D models um and like decorate it. So like you know if they have OpenAI events, OpenAI in theory or one of these other companies that that host here, they could they could gener they could use that 3D space and like design it ahead of time so they can get a full feel for what the what the venue would look like versus just like general mockups. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. would you say like what's your like most bullish use case in like cuz for me world models spark up my gaming creativity like I can think of like how many games I would generate like like if the world models get to a point where like you know we're expecting them to get what is a use case that you've seen that someone's used and you're like yo this is sick I think the the coolest thing is like we don't know and um like what what the coolest thing is going to be like I I was I always reference this this video with Sam Almond because there was this video in like 2019 where he He said basically they were going to build this intelligent thing and they were going to ask it how it was going to make money. That was a business model and people laughed at him like VCs like a room full of super intelligent people just laughed at him because it seemed completely unreasonable. Now that's what people are doing all the time. They're telling their agents to make money for them and don't make a mistake. Yeah. Don't make a mistake. No mistake. So like it's kind of it's a pre-product market fit industry. Like LLM have found coding. That's a product market fit. Crypto has found finance. That's a product market fit. World models have not found that yet. And so there's, you know, there's gaming, there's construction, there's architecture, there's visual VFX studios, there's all these kinds of use cases that it could be, but it's not clear which one is that product market fit. So you're not betting on one specific niche. You're betting on the harness. Yeah, we're betting that something is going to be useful. This the industry will find product market fit. That's what we're betting on. The industry will find product market fit and we're going to have the tooling to support whatever that use case is. Yeah. Yeah. That's sick. No, that's sick. I've actually like I've used I think Google has a world model like yeah I use yeah I use theirs but like there's no product that come out of it. Is there like are there other products like yourselves or like to me from what I've heard you guys sound pretty alone in the space? There are uh so world labs has their own editor. Um it's you kind of like LLM there's you know there's cloud codeex and then there's the rappers. Well then there's then there cursor. So cursor now they're working on their own model but when they first started they were a rapper right? Yeah. Um, and when they first started, uh, OpenAI and and Enthropic were not working on their separate code editors. So, we're kind of in like that phase where we're Yeah. We're a wrapper around the the different world models, but there's a lot of competition at the world model space that the world model companies are just focused on building the best world model, not the best harness for the world model. Yeah. The cursor blueprint. Yeah. Um before I end off every interview, what I do is like if you were talking to someone who is about to start a startup and hopefully and obviously they're going to be using Convex, what's one piece of advice you'd share with them? Launch as quickly as you can. Get it out there in the world and uh get people using it cuz you'll you'll find your way from there. But the longer you you let it sit, the you know, the better chance you have of it dying. Yeah, you heard it from my boy Alex. I appreciate you, bro. Thank you so much. Thank you. Socials links down in the description. Peace.