The Million-Dollar Blueprint: Building a TikTok Empire with AI

0:00Greetings, everyone. I'm excited to welcome Ali Mirzaei, CEO and founder at Dimension. Ali, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Hey, great to have you here. Let's dive right in. Tell us a little bit about your background. I went to the TikTok shop. I started doing it the first two months they launched in the U.S. I was lucky to be early. And then in the next six months, I built the number one shop on the platform. And that's where I saw how big this market was going to get in my perspective. And I also saw the issues with it. And that's where the whole idea for Dimension came to be. Started the company, maybe about three months after that.

0:33And then fast forward to now, here we are. Oh, that's great. Let's talk about Dimension. Let's learn a little bit more there. So tell us what product center services or software does it offer? Yeah, so Dimension, our kind of flagship product, is we built something called SellerOS. And it's, the way I describe it to make it simple, is it's a full replacement of Seller Center. So brands and agencies can use this to fully run their TikTok shop end to end. And we already automated more than half the work that needs to be done for a TikTok shop. A lot of it focused on the work that breaks as you scale.

1:07But our long-term goal is what I call TikTok shop autonomy. So we want to be able to run TikTok shops from E to Z, just leveraging AI agents and customized software that we've trained and built over time. And so for brands, agencies, I assume creators, and then what's the ideal customer profile here do you have to be big or can you just have i don't know a couple thousand impressions per video or something like that and sell something so it doesn't matter if you're well known or just getting started that's a great question and so we built the platform to be able to accommodate brands and agencies no matter where they're at so best way to explain this is we have an ai we built inside called ai operator and it's a tick tock shop expert let's say a brand's just starting out on the platform operator can help them through setup and help them actually strategize the entire shop from cold start all the way to helping a brand that's already doing let's say half a million a month and understanding where there's issues with the shop where there's bottlenecks and what things they can also do to pour more fuel on fire so any brand any size any scale and that does really important to us because we wanted to essentially commoditize TikTok shop expertise and in operations in a way where it levels the playing field.

2:18So small brands can compete with bigger brands, especially as the rat race starts and then brands are pouring budgets into this. Yeah. And so that agent that's in there, a coach that helps them, is that fed with all your knowledge then to have it as, act as an expert, just what you've learned over time, feed it to that. So then that agent can help all these brands coming on. Yeah. What's really cool about it is, one, it's trained on all of our success data. So we, all of our own shop data that we put into it anonymized. Second, it's true on all TikTok's policies and documentation. So it's always following the formats and guidelines.

2:52And the third piece is, yes, I put my own brain into it. So that's some really cool knowledge and insights that I don't think anything else does out there. And this is a really cool part. I didn't really mention this, but it's not just an AI that can analyze the shot. It's actually an agent. So this is probably my favorite thing about our product is that brands and agencies that are using it can create any automation they can dream of. We have hard-coded automations built into it, things that we've custom built for specific components. But Operator is really cool in the sense where you could just think of an automation, prompt it, and it will literally create an agentic workflow.

3:28And you can automate quite literally everything inside of Seller Center. Okay, interesting. You appreciate that. So yeah, that makes a ton of sense. So what year did you find the company? 2024, toward the end. Okay, 2024, towards the end. And then let's talk a little fundraising. It looks like you raised some capital. So how much capital have you raised to date? Yeah, we raised 1.65 million total. Okay. And was that recent? And starting now, like in the journey, did you know you're going to raise capital or wanted to raise capital? Yeah. The story of what happened was I raised money by accident.

3:59So after I built that shop, personally, a bright cold funnel of our sour reached out to me. I helped them with their shop. After two weeks of me starting, blew them out of the water. They sold out. And then it turns out Final Boss is basically, they were actually founded and created by a venture capital firm called Science Inc. So their entire team are VCs. And then they approached me. And then after a month or two, they ended up investing. And that's how Dimension started. They incubated it and helped me build it from the ground up. So really in the beginning, it was accidental. And then the last round we did was on purpose.

4:31And yeah, and it was my first time kind of fundraising, going down the venture route as a founder. I've been in startups for a long time, but I had to learn a lot. In the beginning, especially back then, all these startups were raising mega-riles. And I was like, oh, I could do this too. And it started my whole fundraising journey. I'm like, oh, I'm going to go raise all this money at a really strong value. And then I was really lucky because Mike Jones is one of our board members. He's always been a mentor to me. And he walked me through why this is a bad idea. And he helped discipline me in that sense.

5:00He also helped me understand my own business where he was like, look, you have a really good business. You're frugal. You guys are profitable. you don't need to be raising a lot of money and giving up all this equity. And so at that point, maybe a month after we had that conversation, we had over four and a half million in investment offers. We got a price round term sheet. We were a student safe route and I had to make that hard choice. But luckily our revenue was increasing rapidly. And as our costs stayed flat, profits kept increasing and it made the decision easier to turn those checks down and keep going.

5:32so we just yeah and so what so some good lessons there but anything stands out say other founders who may be thinking about that initial raise any lessons learned or is just something that stands out in that fundraising process yeah and honestly I say it's an easier decision but I think it's always hard because if you have more capital and you actually know how to use it it can speed you up so I think where it was easier for me is I was being honest and I was like okay look we we're not a business how much capital we're deploying. This is how much we plan to actually spend. And I don't think we necessarily need to have like five, six or seven million in the bank.

6:09And it's just capital is going to sit there. It's just going to accrue interest and it's going to take away equity. So I always urge founders to be realistic, especially because when your startup's doing really well, startup is like a roller coaster. One week you think you're going to go out of business. Next week you think you're going to be a$1 ,000 ,000. Be realistic. And when you're having those ups, be even more realistic then because you need to actually understand your business and be honest about where it's at. So I always try to keep a close relationship with our investors and seek them out as mentors and advisors because they've seen everything.

6:44And I'd recommend doing that. Don't see investors as an enemy. Take on investors that are actually going to support you and believe in you. And so that you can actually ask them for advice that is legit and is in your best interest. Yeah, definitely. That founder investor fit, so important, plus the life of a founder. Friday, It's great. Monday, I feel like I'm going out of business. So love that. So let's talk. So brands and agencies, let's talk a little code of work emotion. How are you finding your prospects? How are you getting in front of them to pitch your product? Yeah. So with brands, in the beginning, science was a huge help and they're legends in the CPG space.

7:18So they were able to make a lot of introductions and help us get the wheels turning. We also leveraged the final boss case study because we ended up taking them to number one in their category in food and beverage. So we, I took the startup playbook. We focused on food and beverage as a niche because we had a lot of momentum there. But since then, we've scaled out. And everything I'm talking about was maybe the first four to six months we were in business. Since then, everything had actually been through word of mouth. So I think we've built a really strong reputation in the space. We had a lot of inbound for brands that want to work with us.

7:48And then on the SaaS side, it was all for our waitlist. So we started building the waitlist saying maybe even eight or 10 months before the product was out. and you know all the users from that so our cacks of data have been effectively zero dollars we don't really spend on marketing or customer acquisition okay always nice to keep the cack low and then yeah so you're landing these agencies these brands let's talk about pricing because we know today could go any which way usage hybrid subscription outcomes so how are you pricing what kind of pricing model are you offering well we work with brands on full share's level it's almost always solely commission-based.

8:24We don't really, our entertainers are up front too much. On the SaaS side, this is the funny one. I think you're always figuring out pricing for a SaaS product. So we're still testing right now, figuring out that sweet spot. So I don't have a hard number I can share, but I think we, that's one of the last pieces we need to figure out before we public launch because it's still in private release right now. I don't like the word big is the product. It's very good. So all of our users that we have right now, they love it. We use it ourselves from our whole business, but there's just a few things we need to figure out before we pour fuel on the fire and let anyone access it and sign up.

8:59Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah, and we know pricing always iterates and a lot of founders say the pricing model today, that could be different in six, 12 months, especially if you're a couple of years in. So I appreciate that guidance. A couple more questions before we wrap. Based on this stage of the business, I don't know, maybe a year and a half in, under two years, was there a favorite number or metric or operational metric that you like to guide the business? There's a good amount. Because we have a two-pronged business. A couple of things is like headcount. So when we scaled our full-service business, one thing I'm really proud of is we didn't scale our headcount to do that.

9:38So we worked from about 16 brands in December of last year to over 50 now without adding a single person on the operations side. I think that's a really important one for our full-service business side. on the stats there's a lot of metrics we look at we're looking at retention we're looking at usage hours we're looking at cohort based data so right now in private release we did a first cohort a second cohort and we're looking at the difference between the two because we're shipping updates on a weekly basis so we want to see the impact those updates are having on user behavior patterns we've been a lot of different honestly the one thing i'll say and i'll be honest about this we haven't done this too well for this business one of my favorite metrics in the startup is mps score Because in another startup that I was at, we measured that really closely.

10:23And I think we took it from a negative 60 in the beginning to plus 40 or plus 50. As that metric correlated significantly to revenue and also retention. So I know it was in venture. It was a really big buzz term maybe five, six, seven years ago. But it actually is a really good metric. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that because they're definitely lovers and haters of MPS. I feel kind of any feedback is good feedback despite the mechanism. and right, MPS has been around for a while, but I find, yeah, a lot of founders actually not tracking any sort of CSAT or MPS. So that's great to hear, especially that correlation makes it even more exciting.

10:59So, Ali, a couple more questions before we wrap. Do you have a company headquarters location or are you virtual? Yeah, we're based in Santa Monica. Okay. All right, perfect. And what's your current team size? Good question. It's changing pretty fast the last six months. I think we're around like 30 to 35 people. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. 30 to 35 people. And then anything you want to share around revenue ranges or AR ranges? To give some, some loose numbers. This year is looking pretty exciting. We, we, let's say, let's just say we blew past 3 million ARR and net margins increasing too. Okay. So it was, you blew past three, 3 million ARR?

11:41Yeah. Okay. And that margin's increasing. Okay. That's great. That's great. Great to hear. Well, check in 12 months from now, see where you are at that and see if you're at 10. But Ellie, appreciate your time today, sharing your journey. And so we're just maybe way past half through this year. What's top of mind for the rest of the year for you? What either keeps you up at night or makes you excited about the rest of the year? I think the base thing, and I think this is a lot of people, is the macros. And then the true environment we're in with the economies. That's one thing. The second thing is just AI.

12:13And now it's going to impact everything. So I like to think of this as a copy of sitting at the forefront of AI in our industry. And so we always have to be very versatile and adapt quickly because the AI industry is changing almost every single week. That's every Sunday night keeps me up at night because you don't know where things are headed. Morris Law, we're definitely in that curve right now. So that's the thing. Like we're building all these amazing things, but what will happen a year from now or two years from now and how will that change everything, not just our industry? yeah and and what was the other question was oh yeah the same thing is it what keeps you up at night or what's exciting about the rest of the year what's he saying so i am really excited about the the software business and i know a lot of people are like sass is dead and everything but i am i'm pretty optimistic about this i think it will go pretty far and we that's for me this is a really big moment because a year ago when i was like what the fundraising or talking to investors are just engaging in the market, things shifted a lot since then.

13:13So back then, all our revenue is services-based. They're like, oh, we don't want to touch this. What was really funny to me is the last few months, I see a lot of investors being like, hey, we want to invest in service-based businesses that are AI-enabled. And when that shift happened, it's right around where our SaaS business launched. I'm really excited now, because I think we have both arms. And so now we have a little bit of everything for everyone in this market. And so it gives us optionality. Yeah, I love that. I love that. Yeah, you talk like a founder who's been around the block a bit there.

13:42Ellie, really appreciate your time sharing your journey. If listeners would like to learn more about Dimension, where should we send them online? Yeah, you go to our website, dimensionstudios.co. You can also go to my LinkedIn, all in residing, Dimension. And then we haven't really done a lot of marketing. We're very quiet. It's not big, but we will soon. So they'll be able to find us hopefully more easily in the next couple of words. All right, perfect. If you'd like to learn more, check out, I think it was Co to learn more. We'll put that in the show notes. And Ellie, yeah, one more thing. for you just don't read the s at the end oh yeah dimension yeah dimension studios.com we'll have the show notes perfect want to make sure we get that you around correct well again ali appreciate you sharing your time and your journey thanks for coming on today thank you ben thanks