An explosion of new entrepreneurs are building interesting AI-powered software products, but very few of of them aren’t turning into real businesses yet.
This has always been the case. Startups are experiments trying to find a scalable business model, as Steve Blank explained it to us 20 years ago. Most never grew up.
But now that software is getting cheaper and easier to build with agentic coding, it means there are 10X more product experiments.
And so we’re back to the harder part of the business-building game:
Distribution.
Distribution is another way of saying sales and marketing, efficient GTM, repeatable customer acquisition. Most startups never figure this part out.
Vic Levitin is a serial founder who built companies in Israel for two decades before fleeing the war with his young family to the island of Koh Samui, Thailand.
His first SaaS company, CrazyLister, grew out of his own e-commerce business where he needed a simple way for eBay sellers to build professional listings without knowing HTML.
CrazyLister raised about $700K, then a similar second round, and grew to nearly $2M ARR before stalling. Today it runs profitably at roughly $1M ARR.
Vic later spent four years co-founding Diptera.ai, a deep-tech venture using a larval-stage breakthrough to suppress malaria-carrying mosquitoes, now backed by the Gates Foundation.
From Thailand, Vic now runs an AI-powered venture studio built on one rule: no code gets written until he proves he can generate demand.
He partners with domain experts and influencers who already own trusting audiences, which is a model that took his AI-influencer platform to $90K MRR in 18 months, now extending to smaller niches like dog trainers.
“My technical co-founder could build anything, even before AI came along. But we have an agreement, and it’s a simple one.
“He doesn’t write a single line of code — whether from his own brain or with AI — before I prove to both of us that I can generate demand and revenue for whatever we’re building.
“That agreement formed the way we build now. We’re a venture studio, and we solve distribution first by partnering with domain experts who already have trusting audiences.”
Vic is solving for the hardest part first—distribution. That led him to create an interesting business model that is already working for him.
As a practical founder, he isn’t solving for venture-scale returns in big markets. He can focus on relationships that create and multiply real revenue. And he can do it from an island in Thailand.
Check out this informative interview with Vic Levitin on the Practical Founders Podcast.
