A Stable Diffusion customer brought Modal its first meaningful revenue

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 7:45

   your first customer it took a while also did you raise like early on we didn't raise for a while i actually self-funded it for a while uh even with up until the first few employees uh which in a way was like kind of nice because it may be really like frugal about money and like wanting to see like ROI I wasn't taking out a salary for a while for a long time actually at some point it became a problem because I needed the money but we didn't raise for a while and until early 2022 raised the seed round so at that point I'd already been working on it for about a year. Akshay joined as the CTO and co-founder in about about five years ago about now August maybe 2021 but then it took until like basically like late 2022 for us to see any meaningful uh revenue i guess that's when chadgbt came out yeah and stable diffusion then in our

2. 8:34

   case uh was the main thing that's sort of so we went from like you know hundred dollars a month in like i think like november 2022 and the next month we did like two thousand dollars a month and then like january 2023 we did like 30 000 all of a sudden and you know so finally i felt this like massive just like anxiety thing off my chest i'm like maybe this is actually like we're onto something it feels like we're onto something and then 2023 we grew very fast and i guess we've been growing very fast since then basically that 30k a month moment was that just like a couple big customers or was it like very like diverse it's just one and i don't i don't know if i ever talked about like who that was and if they even know it but i think they suspect it it was a company in new york called mage they're doing like a stable diffusion company so at some point you

3. 9:22

   In the first, I think, first quarter of 2023, I think there were like 80, 90% of our revenue. But then after that, you know, it started diversifying a little bit. And late 2023, we got Suno as a big customer. They were a big chunk of our revenue for a while, too. But then, you know, it's over time, like we actually have really good revenue diversification now. For the stable diffusion stuff, I remember using it for like Comfy UI.

4. 9:48

   I'm assuming a lot of people were using Comfy UI, like running Comfy UI workflows on it. Some people were, but I think the people that were using Modal, they tended to be more like low-level stuff. They did complicated stuff. What they like with Modal is it's always been pretty hackable. So they deployed their own custom workflows with adapters and custom inference and a lot of optimizations. And all the stuff we had done in order to get the developer experience to be really good turned out to be really good for also running production workloads.

5. 10:16

   Because autoscaling turns out to be actually a very similar problem. You want to scale up containers up and down very fast. So we just happened to be, like, very well positioned to capture a lot of those workloads in the early days. Did tools for autoscaling, like, not exist?