In July 2022, while on a road trip with his girlfriend, Cody Schneider stayed at his friend Max's house. They'd worked together at Rupa Health, where Cody had helped scale the company from $20M to $110M valuation in just 6 months through aggressive content marketing.

The Spark

Cody was consulting for a company and had spun up a podcast for them using a proven playbook he'd developed at Rupa. He saw AI starting to get good enough to automate the tedious content repurposing process - turning podcast episodes into blog posts, social clips, and newsletters.

He asked Max, who was deeply into AI embeddings: "Hey, I'm trying to automate this content repurposing process. You think it's possible?"

Within 24 hours, Max built the first version.

The Scrappiest MVP Imaginable

Their initial product was hilariously simple - a Google Drive folder. Cody emailed 10 friends who were podcasters: "Just upload your MP3 files here. We'll handle the rest."

The workflow: 1. Friends upload MP3s to Google Drive 2. Cody and Max download files to their laptops 3. Run the software locally 4. Email the generated content back manually

No website. No payment system. Just emails and a shared folder.

Degenerate Growth Tactics

Once validated, Cody went all-in on what he calls "degenerate growth tactics":

• Cold emailed ~100,000 people per month
• Cold DM'd every podcast in the US that published in the last 30 days (~300,000 podcasters)
• Ran paid ads across Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google display
• Built programmatic SEO with thousands of AI-generated blog posts
• Created customer match lists: upload email list to run display ads everywhere

The result? "They get a cold email from you and then they're seeing you everywhere on social media." This multi-channel saturation built trust faster than any single channel could.

Why They Stayed Bootstrapped

When VCs approached early on, Cody and Max chose to self-fund from their previous ventures. "We'd seen VC land... we just wanted to build something sustainable. Our bet was, we don't know where any of this is going. Every week something new drops in the AI world that changes the entire ecosystem."

The $1.1M Milestone

By September 2024, Swell AI reached $1.1M in annual revenue with a 10-person team. They also spun out DraftHorse AI in a weekend - taking Swell's codebase and modifying it for programmatic SEO. DraftHorse hit $10K MRR in just 30 days.

• First customers: 10 friends in month 1
• Monthly cold emails: 100,000
• Team size: 10 people
• Time to $1.1M ARR: ~2 years