No-code startup received $100,000 15 minutes after a viral tweet
The story I’m about to tell sounds like a Hollywood movie script, but it’s a real case from the world of AI startups. Imagine: two founders on the verge of financial collapse suddenly receive $2,800,000 in investments. And $100,000 in revenue in 5 days. And all this thanks to one viral tweet.
Levan Kvirkvelia and Daniel Dhawan created an application called Rork. Which allows people without technical education to create mobile applications using a simple text request. Basically, you just describe what you want to get, and artificial intelligence does all the work.
By the time the product was launched, the founders had spent all their savings. They live in the USA. Each had $15,000 in credit card debt. Daniel slept on a mattress in a friend’s apartment in San Francisco. And he moved here to look for investments. So they launched their product on social media, but it didn’t bring much success. The real breakthrough happened when Matt Shumer, investor and CEO of OthersideAI, published a tweet saying that Rork is better than a competitor called Bolt.
“My jaw dropped,” wrote Shumer. “Rork allows you to create full-fledged iOS applications just by describing them! Zero. Code. Required. This changes everything in app development.” This post garnered over 1,000,000 views. Within 15 minutes of the tweet being published, one angel investor invested $100,000 in Rork. By the end of the day, the investment amount reached $350,000.
But it cannot be said that this success was accidental. Both Levan and Daniel had experience creating successful mobile applications, starting from their teenage years. First, they worked on a product similar to Cursor for inexperienced users. But then decided to change direction and create a tool for mobile application development.
After the viral tweet and initial investments, the founders attracted the attention of Andrew Chen from Andreessen Horowitz, who included them in the Speedrun program. This is a 12-week mentorship course for early startups. The program provides $5,000,000 in credits from a16z partners such as AWS, Google Cloud, OpenAI, and Microsoft. And 2 months after the viral tweet, the team of 2 people reached an annual revenue of $550,000. A real Cinderella story from the tech world!
