Vatsal Rustagi

Introducing Sherpa: the most advanced fiction writing AI We accelerated from $250M in ARR to $500M because Sherpa helped increase content production by 1200% in 1 year Sherpa was trained on 5.5B hours of playtime with minute by minute dynamic retention data. 550K+ creators have produced 2.6M hours of content annualised using it Pocket FM is like Netflix for audio-only dramas, with our own pool of one-person studios. 10% of eligible writers on Pocket FM make >$200K One blockbuster produced >$100M in revenue 3 writers have become millionaires in <2 yrs We built Sherpa to enable anyone to make >$1M by writing world-class fiction stories: 1. The Idea: Drop a 1-2 sentence concept. Sherpa interrogates it like a veteran editor on tension, stakes, and psychology 2. World & Characters: It builds out the complete lore, tone, and character psychologies 3. Sub-Plot planning: Breaks the premise into arcs, arcs into episodes, and episodes into scenes 4. Scene-by-Scene Generation: Outlines and drafts entire episodes, with you able to steer, rewrite, or override anytime 5. Editorial Review: Stress-tests every draft for pacing, engagement drop-offs, prose, and coherence before it locks 6. One-Tap Production: Pick a voice, convert to audio drama, and publish directly to Pocket FM’s millions of listeners 7. Global Scale & Monetization: Revenue-share on performance, with automatic localization so you earn across international markets Test Sherpa for free here: pocketfm.com/sherpa _____________________________________________ Generic LLMs fail at serialized fiction because they lack a long-horizon narrative reward function. Sherpa solves this through three core technical leaps: 1. Narrative World Model (State Tracking & Retrieval): Context windows degrade over long runs. Sherpa constructs an evolving semantic knowledge graph tracking character states, secrets, and plot dependencies. High-speed retrieval surfaces exact context on demand, maintaining zero continuity decay across hundreds of episodes 2. Hierarchical Story Planner: When writing a 500-episode story like Naruto, you need to plan 100s of sub plots. Rather than generating linearly, Sherpa decomposes narrative across discrete levels: season -> arc -> sequence -> episode -> scene. Rather than generating everything upfront, like a generic LLM, Sherpa uses progressive planning and dynamic replanning. As the story evolves, it identifies what changed, traces the downstream impact, and replans only the affected parts. 3. Prose Engine (Trained on series' retention data): LLMs write robotically, but serial fiction needs emotion, tension, pacing, and dialogue that sounds like real people. Sherpa's Prose Engine was designed specifically for storytelling. It was built on 1B+ tokens of Pocket's own stories, trained by learning from what listeners engage with, where they drop off, and what keeps them hooked. Feedback is taken from specialized evaluator models that measure every scene against a 40-item checklist. (Evaluator models were benchmarked against human reviewers and matched them 80–90% of the time.) _______________________________________________ Owning distribution and creation puts us in a very unique spot. More shows -> More data -> Sherpa becomes better -> more creator success -> more creators -> more shows Pocket FM has already seen one $100M IP. I believe Sherpa will soon lead to dozens of single-person studios creating billion-dollar shows. Most people are scared of AI but I think it'll unlock more human creativity, help creators earn more, and bring the next great IPs to life. This will create millions of jobs and new income streams.

We grew from ~0 to $500M ARR, adding $250M last year alone while being EBITDA profitable. 1,300-word post on every growth tactic that worked for us: 1. What got us from 0-$400M ARR in the US works in every country. 2. Retention and Monetisation Hacks. 3. Localization > Translation. 4. Experiment with $1M internal seed checks. 5. Pivoting to only AI content production unlocked 100% ARR growth. Pocket FM is like Netflix for audio-only dramas, with our own pool of one-person studios. 1. Acquisition Playbook for 0-$10M ARR in any country in 6 months We run a 90 sec video trailer of an audio drama as an Ad and ask users to download the app if they're interested in the rest of the story. Our core insight after spending >$100M on acquisition is: If the clickthrough rate (CTR) for an ad goes from 2% to 2.25%, our customer acquisition cost (CAC) decreases by ~ 30%. We remodelled our system around this insight and built an AI-first 2.25% CTR ad manufacturing machine that works in every country. For every new country, we take our hit shows -> use LLMs to extract and most intriguing moments -> Write a 5-min script combining all the best parts. The first 60 seconds has to have a hook every 5 seconds and needs to end with a crazy cliffhanger to force a download mid-scroll. If a marketing video is not hitting our benchmarks (2.5% CTR and 55% 3-second through-play), a creative director gets involved to change the hook or cliffhanger to get the numbers there. AI lets us make 1,000 Ads per show, and in total we do ~17.5k Ads per month. When a business creating scales from 1k to 10k Ads, the normal thing is for CAC to skyrocket. But with what I just shared, we 7-8x'd our User Acquisition budget without increasing our CAC materially. It took us 8 months to figure this out, but then the timeline from 0-$10M in every country got shorter and shorter: US revenue grew to $25M in 19 months. (US is now 78% of total) Germany to 21M in 11 months. France to $10M in 3 months. 2. Retention and Monetisation Hacks. We knew we wanted to create an audio entertainment platform, but there was no standard format. For the first 2-3 years, we tried 10 different formats before landing on the winner. After we got it right with audio drama (8-12min chapters, written for mobile fiction, serialized, episodes have strong hooks and end on cliffhangers), avg daily streaming time went from ~25mins to 150+. Audio drama made us realize that Pocket FM was creating a whole new medium. There was no playbook for anything that we were doing. Everything had to be thought & built from scratch. This is what we did for each major bullet: - Monetization: Users have some free daily minutes to listen; then it's pay per episode. We also added the option for users to unlock episodes by watching ads, which is doing extremely well. Ads scaled from zero to a ~$90M run rate in 12 months. - Engagement & production: You don't become obsessed with an app you open once a week. To have users engage daily, we make the next episode free every day. Also helps them build the habit. - Discovery. Huge problem because people consuming Pocket FM enter the app, tap the show, and lock the screen. We fixed it by doing "playlists" of episodes. Once users's free minutes on a show are done, we ask users if they want to pay. If they say no, we play a new show, one where they haven't used their free mins. And we stitch episodes of different shows together that way, creating natural discovery. 3. Localization > translation. 78% of our revenue is still concentrated in the US. Localisation is fixing this: You might write a show for a Spanish audience where language, jokes, folklore, have a certain flavor; if you merely translate the show for, say, a Norwegian audience, that color is lost and hurts the show in the Norway. Listeners would relate more if the show was written by a Norwegian. That's why, instead of translating, we localize shows to different regions. We use AI to take the spine of stories and adapt their whole cultural layer to the other country. The results: a US show that was localized for a German audience had 50% higher retention than the translated version. Localization + our user acquisition playbook led to: - $10M+ ARR in France within 3 months - $21M+ ARR in Germany within 11 months. And this expands writers' addressable market. We get messages of writers thrilled to have revenue coming from the US, India, EU, LatAm, without them doing much incremental work. 4. Experiment. We give $1M checks to new internal initiatives, and the team has 12-18 months to prove their thesis. If they prove it, we double down. This is how Pocket Saga came about, our AI video microdrama app. It's an AI video equivalent of Pocket FM. Same shows and structure, but as a vertical 2-min mobile video series. We launched it two months ago and it's at ~$15M ARR. Pocket's broader thesis is to help creators tell their stories to as many people as possible. Start with audio drama -> multiple languages or localize to diff countries -> microdrama -> more formats like movies, TV shows, and games. Best of all is that writers get revenue streams not only from countries they wouldn't have tapped into, but also from formats they wouldn't have thought possible. 5. Pivoting to only AI content production unlocked 100% ARR growth. In mid-2024, we pivoted to only AI content production. Our growth took a very direct hit. Pocket was already at $200M ARR, growing 50% YoY, and we flatlined for a whole semester. Six months later, the business exploded. After the switch, we went from ~25k hours of content produced per year to over 2.5M hours, which are also higher quality. Because AI orchestrates the writing and more data is fed into it, more blockbusters come out. Over 90 titles have $1M+ in lifetime earnings and 13 crossed $10M. Quality control is done with LLM as a judge, and LLMs are quite tough. Results are very encouraging: - 12-month revenue retention went from 44% to 76%. - In the past year, we added $250M in net new ARR. __________________________________ Pocket Entertainment (Pocket FM + Pocket Saga) has become the largest AI entertainment platform. We have the largest storytelling catalog with 770,000 titles, 550k creators, and 5.5B hours of playtime with minute by minute retention & engagement data. We are using all of this data to improve every aspect of our business. Our Bet: In the next 3 years we will be able to produce Naruto-like series for $1000. Netflix has to spend $17B to find 100 Blockbusters per year. What happens when you can produce 1M high quality shows for $1B? The streaming wars caused a $300B reallocation of market cap. The AI entertainment wars may be a $1T+ reshuffling of market cap. We are at a unique spot. Unlike other AI creator tools like Runway or Midjourney, we own both the supply and demand side of AI content. We've attracted over 550,000 writers who are producing an annualized 2.5M hours of content every year. This pairs with 137B+ minutes streamed. Because of this, growth is accelerating as we scale further. We have multiple S-curves inflecting at the same time: - AI produces better and more ads -> scale faster in new countries - ⁠Writers + AI produce more shows -> more blockbusters - ⁠Localisation -> more reach per blockbuster - ⁠Audio to video format expansion -> larger TAM -> more creators Every aspect of our business is designed to improve another, and everything is aligned so that the number of blockbusters continues to rise. If you're interested in building at the intersection of ai, tech and entertainment, DM me.