We’re backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund & execs of frontier AI labs like OpenAI, Pika, & Cognition.
Icon (icon.me) is like ChatGPT + CapCut, but for making winning ads with AI in minutes.
How it works: 1. Icon looks at your video library & tags scenes (e.g. "close-up," "unboxing"). These scenes become reusable clips used as lego blocks for making ads. 2. Prompt Icon’s AdGPT to generate scripts focused on specific angles & audiences. 3. Icon finds perfectly matching clips for every script scene & generates an ad that is 80-99% complete. 4. Make edits with our CapCut-like video editor until you're happy.
3-person creative teams make 30 ads per month. With Icon, they make 300.
We co-built Icon with $100M+ revenue brands like Ridge, Jones Road, Immi, Backbone, & MUD\WTR to solve big pain-points:
1. Making lots of ads is extremely painful. Icon helps you automate the tedious parts of scriptwriting, scene matching, video editing, audience research, UGC creation, & more.
2. AI-generated ads look like trash. Icon remixes your existing footage into new ads, matching your production quality & maintaining brand aesthetics.
3. Existing solutions charge $2K-$30K/month for:
🔍 Competitor ad spying & cloning
📈 Creative analytics
📹 Custom & stock avatars for AI UGC
👥 Audience research
📁 Video storage & tagging
Icon does scriptwriting & video editing on top of everything above for just $999/year (their margin is our opportunity 😉).
If you’ve made it this far, we have a surprise for you 👇🏻
I have an internal Google Drive with 1000 winning ads from brands doing $20M+ in revenue. We used these to train our AI model.
To the right person, this could be worth $100,000.
To get this drive for FREE, Retweet the first tweet above & comment “Icon”.
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Brian Chesky credits AirBnb's success to an essay Paul Graham wrote in 2008.
If any founder dedicatedly focuses on the six principles that Paul mentions, it will blow off their startup.
A thread 🧵
The six principles are:
(a) build simple solutions
(b) to overlooked problems
(c) that actually need to be solved
(d) deliver them as informally as possible
(e) starting with a very crude version 1
(f) and then iterate rapidly
Let me explain with AirBnB's example 👇
1st principle: Deliver simple solutions
In 2007, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia couldn't afford their San Francisco rent.
Their solution was:
- Put an air mattress in their living room & turn it into a bed and breakfast.
- Create a basic website offering "Air Bed and Breakfast" for $80 per night