This told essay is based on conversations with 21-year-old New York-based co-founders Rudy Arora and Sarthak Dhawan. Their words have been edited for length and clarity.
Rudy Arora: The goal wasn’t to start a million-dollar company that I would drop out of college to join. We wanted to make something we thought would be useful, sell a little bit of it, and hopefully use the profits to pay for college.
Sarsac Dhawan: Rudy and I grew up in the suburbs outside of Dallas and met in middle school. We were always tinkering with random things together and trying to make something.
Alola: Our app was born out of the problem of taking proper notes in class when transitioning from high school to college in 2023. I was a freshman at Northwestern University and Sarsak was at Duke University.
Dhawan: They released the app in January 2024, and by March 2025, the app was generating nearly $500,000 a month. We both went to good schools, so we knew our parents would think it was weird for us to drop out, but it made sense to us.
Alola: Last year, at the end of our sophomore year, we started using the app full-time. Honestly, it wasn’t a difficult decision. Looking back, I think I dropped out a little late. Nevertheless, I think dropping out too early can be a big mistake.
We made $60,000 in our first business when we were in high school.
Dhawan: My older brother taught me how to code when I was in 3rd or 4th grade, and I built my first big app project when I was a freshman in high school. This is my own version of my school district’s grade checking app, and it has ended up being pretty popular across the state of Texas.
The satisfaction I get when I see people getting value from something I’ve created is amazing. I wanted to do that for the rest of my life. Fast forward a little bit, Rudy and I started our first business when we were sophomores in high school.
Alola: We built a marketplace to help people find Christmas light installers. My family was having trouble finding an installer. I talked to my neighbors about it and they had the same problem.
We learned a lot about navigating how to build what people want, interviewing customers, and iterating on app ideas.
Dhawan: Both my grade checking app and my Christmas illumination project disappeared because we stopped working on them.
We came up with the current app from a personal problem
Alola: When we entered university in the fall of 2023, the first thing we noticed was that it was a little difficult to listen to a professor’s lecture and take good notes at the same time. If you want to focus on your professor, you may not be able to write down everything he says.
Having used AI to aid learning before, we knew that AI was good at converting dense text into a more understandable format. So we decided to create a product that integrates all of this into one workflow. Users can record lectures and add content they want to study. It uses AI to turn it into a variety of supporting tools such as notes, flashcards, and quiz questions.
TikTok helped AI startup scale to millions
Dhawan: It took about 3 to 4 months from idea generation to product launch.
The app runs on a freemium model. The first 1,000 users came from me grabbing some cookies from the cafeteria and giving them to students around campus and saying, “Would you download my app if I gave you a cookie?”
Alola: I decided to try posting videos about the app on TikTok three to four times a day. In the end, one video went very viral. I doubled down, more videos hit, and our growth accelerated.
Even though I knew TikTok was the most effective strategy, I didn’t want to spend all day making TikToks, so I hired a few friends and creators with a small following to do it for me. Thanks to my viral videos we made some money on the app. So when I asked my friends to create content for me, I paid them $5 per video and received a bonus if the video went viral.
We’ve grown from 10 friends posting content to hiring people. Their job is all about posting content, they keep talking about the app, and that’s how we scaled our growth.
I built an AI app manually, but I’m currently writing very little of my own code.
Dhawan: When we started coding the app, the AI code generation model was pretty terrible. I wrote the code myself from scratch. The only way AI could get involved in the coding process was by asking GPT a question.
Alola: I used an API on the backend to convert transcripts to notes. oh dear. It’s amazing how dramatically coding has changed since then.
Dhawan: My current favorite model is the Claude Cord. A year and a half ago, I started noticing that I was spending more time planning and explaining how things worked at a high level and reviewing AI-generated code than actually writing the code myself.
The main problem with this is that over time, as the AI writes code, the code base migrates to entities it doesn’t understand. I feel like my coding skills are atrophying. I think all engineers who use Claude Code know that it has such an impact on them. At the same time, its use cannot be avoided, since productivity will be significantly reduced.
Achieved millions of dollars in revenue with a small team
Dhawan: We currently have 6 full-time engineers, and the amount of product and code we can ship each week is truly unrealistic. That would have been unimaginable a few years ago when we started.
Alola: A company like ours has two main costs: employee salaries and marketing costs. AI allows us to stay super lean and produce 10 times the size of our team.
Although we only have 10 full-time employees, we generate over $13 million in lifetime revenue. We stay lean, so we don’t have to take on the expensive roles that come with scaling. For example, we don’t have a COO.
Continue reading the Tiny Teams series
Dropped out only after our startup really grew.
Alola: As a founder, it helps to have access to universities for recruitment. Attending college is one way to make connections with future employees and co-founders. We both had people join our company from our universities.
Dhawan: I loved the university environment and there was never a single moment that made me want to drop out. It was something that was built over time. I made the mistake of trying to major in math while building apps, and ended up spending far too much time in school.
Alola: Before we dropped out, when we, the founders, were still in college full-time, we couldn’t hire people and expect them to work full-time. After we dropped out, we were able to hire someone else full time, which allowed us to move more quickly.
Still, I would like to be careful about dropping out without getting anything in return. I see too many people drop out with just an idea or in the very early stages of building.
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