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A no-code builder for enterprise AI agents that only took off after its founders walked away from the small-business customers producing 70% of revenue.
100+ enterprise customers · 15–20% month-over-month growth for a year · ~8x revenue after dropping SMBs
Small businesses were about 70% of revenue but unsticky; enterprises were 20% yet kept buying more, so Stack AI chose enterprise IT in financial services, insurance and industrials and grew revenue about eightfold.
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
Stack AI is a no-code platform that lets enterprise IT teams build AI agents for back-office work such as compliance, legal review, support and HR onboarding. Bernard Aceituno and Toni Rosinol were finishing MIT PhDs when they started selling a data-set management and fine-tuning tool to machine-learning teams, finding early customers through daily LinkedIn outreach as "MIT students looking for advice." That product reached about $5K MRR ($50K ARR) and got them into Y Combinator. Working closely with those customers showed the value sat in connecting data and building workflows, not fine-tuning, so around March 2023 they launched a visual agent builder on Hacker News and YC’s Bookface and booked 20 customer meetings in two days. Direct email, forum posts and influencer shout-outs took them past $100K and then $200K ARR, while reseller partnerships failed. About a year and a half before the interview, small businesses were roughly 70% of revenue but unsticky; enterprises were 20% yet closed six-figure contracts in two to six weeks and kept expanding. The founders chose enterprise, focused on financial services, insurance and industrials, and grew revenue about eightfold, 15–20% a month over the last year, to high-seven-figure ARR with 100+ customers and 35+ staff.
For Stack AI, the earliest customer acquisition motion should start with founder-led discovery, not broad platform messaging. Bernard said the first dozen enterprise clients came through founder sales: demos, people who had tried the product, event contacts, and direct outreach.
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Data credibility: CEO Bernard Aceituno on the SaaS Club podcast. Asked to confirm seven-figure ARR, he answers "high six figures. High seven figures", a self-correction consistent with his later remark that the first outbound hire came at almost $2M ARR. The 100+ customers, 35+ team, 70%/20% revenue split, ~8x growth and 15–20% monthly growth are all founder-reported; no dashboard or filings are shown.
Stack AI’s first revenue, about $5K MRR, came from the founders’ earlier fine-tuning and data-labeling tool, not the agent platform. For a workflow automation platform, the next dollars arrive when a customer can trust one bounded workflow enough to pay for deployment and usage.
Stack AI’s expansion loop comes from finding additional valuable workflows inside a customer after the first team is live. Bernard described the initial contract as a foothold: a company may have dozens of teams and many processes beyond the first use case.
Enterprise sales can be slow and feedback is often mixed: one department may love a prototype while IT blocks data access, or an executive may approve a pilot that users never adopt. Stack AI’s founders persisted by working directly with customers and comparing how different organizations actually progressed.
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