Bootstrapping an AI Startup to $10M from Boise, Idaho: Christian Perry, CEO of Undetectable AI (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: And you said you started mostly with small businesses and gradually built the enterprise business as well as the licensing and white labeling business. So in the small business category, what was your go-to-market strategy? How were you acquiring customers? How were the customers finding you?

Christian Perry: We really focused on organic traffic. SEO from the very beginning was a huge focus. We have a great PR team that helped get us good placements and backlinks, which raised our domain authority — essentially your credibility when you put out content and how Google treats your website.

We focused on getting high-quality links through organic placements and ranking for high-value key terms. We also built out tools that had a lot of search volume. That’s still something we focus on — creating value for free by launching tools like a blog writer, a heading writer, or an MLA citation generator that drives traffic to our website. We then cross-sell those visitors to our revenue-generating tools.

Sramana Mitra: And the enterprise business — do they come to you, or do you go to them?

Christian Perry: Almost 90% of it is inbound. People find us through these organic traffic channels we’ve built. From there, we were able to move a lot of revenue from organic into paid advertising. We built another suite of tools and even launched a new brand that focuses primarily on enterprise.

Sramana Mitra: What paid channel works for you in this case? Is it LinkedIn?

Christian Perry: LinkedIn has not worked well for us because the customer acquisition cost is much higher. The value of a LinkedIn user is typically higher than a random searcher on Google or someone viewing a social media ad, but we weren’t able to make it profitable.

Our primary paid channels are Google and social media platforms.

Sramana Mitra: Like?

Christian Perry: We use TikTok, Meta — just about every platform you can think of.

Sramana Mitra: Except LinkedIn.

Christian Perry: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: What about the licensing and white label deals? Did they come to you, or did you go to them?

Christian Perry: It’s about a 50/50 mix. We positioned ourselves by saying, “Hey, we’ve got value you can offer to your end user.” This is something I learned at ChatterQuant — convincing partners that we’ll do all the building and heavy lifting. All they need to do is use our API or an iframe, and it becomes additional revenue for them.

Sramana Mitra: Is this all bootstrapped?

Christian Perry: This is completely bootstrapped to date.

Sramana Mitra: What is the configuration of your team?

Christian Perry: We’re about 70 people. A large portion is in customer support. We have around 10 developers, 10 machine learning specialists, and a marketing team of about 15.

We also have part-time customer support reps who manage SEO outreach and another team that handles outreach for white-label partnerships. But again, 90% of what we close is inbound.

Sramana Mitra: And geographically, these people are spread out? Virtual?

Christian Perry: We are a completely remote team across every time zone. I’m one of two people based in the U.S.; the rest are international — in South America, the Philippines, Thailand, Europe.

Sramana Mitra: Everyone working from home?

Christian Perry: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: Fantastic. What kind of revenue level have you achieved? You’ve only been in business two years and you’ve grown quite fast, correct?

Christian Perry: We’ve gone above $10 million in revenue.

Sramana Mitra: In two years?

Christian Perry: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: But you’ve made the decision to stay bootstrapped. It sounds like if you wanted to, you could raise venture capital, but you’ve chosen not to.

Christian Perry: Correct. Having raised venture capital before, I loved the firm and the VC we worked with at my last company, but I found myself spending much more time managing other people’s money. I felt more responsible for investor capital than for revenue we were generating ourselves.

Also, I spent a lot of time preparing updates, holding investor meetings, and generally being distracted from actually building the business. For those reasons, we’ve chosen to stay bootstrapped, despite a lot of inbound interest from investors.

Sramana Mitra: Excellent. And you plan to stay bootstrapped?

Christian Perry: Correct. We’re even rolling revenues from this company into a new brand. For instance, at the end of last year, we launched TRU Scan, which is moving into the detection space again — specifically AI-generated image and video detection, deepfake detection, and fraud detection.

Sramana Mitra: So you have other product visions you’re fulfilling by bootstrapping with the revenues from this business?

Christian Perry: Correct. That gets a lot harder to do when you have VCs involved.

Sramana Mitra: Exactly. It gives you more flexibility. If you have a highly functional, repeatable business that’s generating cash, it gives you leverage.

Christian Perry: Correct. And a lot more freedom when you don’t have investors or obligations to them.

Sramana Mitra: Very cool. Is there anything else in your story that I haven’t spent time on that you’d like to share?

Christian Perry: No. I really appreciate you having me on. Happy to answer more questions if you have them, but it’s been a pleasure.

Sramana Mitra: Wonderful story. Congratulations and all the best.

Christian Perry: Thank you. Appreciate it. You as well.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping an AI Startup to $10M from Boise, Idaho: Christian Perry, CEO of Undetectable AI
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