Welcome to HackerNoon’s Writing Prompts! Would you like to take a stab at answering some of these questions? The link for the template is HERE.1. What is your company in 2–5 words?AI visibility that connects to revenue pipeline.2. Why is now the time for your company to exist?Buyers stopped typing keywords into Google and picking through a hundred links. Instead they ask an assistant a full question and take the answer it gives them. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot. One answer, two or three sources named, and the shortlist is set before a vendor knows the buyer exists.That changes what marketing has to win. Ranking on page one no longer matters if the page never gets opened. What matters is whether the model names you when the question is asked.A wave of AEO and GEO tools showed up to answer that. Almost all of them stop at the same place. They tell you how often a model mentions your brand and hand you a score. That is a visibility layer. It is useful for about a week, and then a CFO asks what it did for the number and the conversation ends.The harder problem is attribution. AI assistants are now a channel, and nobody can treat them like one. You cannot see which answer sent the buyer, which prompt started the deal, or what that channel is worth next to paid and organic. So budget stays put and the fastest growing source of demand sits outside the model everyone plans against.That is why now. The buying journey moved somewhere nobody can measure yet, and whoever connects citations to closed revenue gets to define how this channel is bought.3. What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?We already did the boring half. ThriveStack pulled website traffic, product usage, CRM and billing into one revenue view for more than 100 paying customers. The AI citation piece is new, but it sits on plumbing we have already shipped and supported. Most tools in this space came out of SEO, so they stop at a visibility score. We came out of revenue data, so we start at revenue and work backwards.This is also my third company. The second one went to Zscaler. What I have learned over those three is where the revenue actually sits. Dashboards and visibility layers are a dime a dozen. The value is in the action layer, the part that fixes the gap and mitigates the damage. That is what customers ask for, and that is what they pay for.4. If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?Probably a VP role at a large public company, running their growth platform. Angel investing on the side. And a lot of time at conferences, on stage or in the hallway, talking to founders. I do that last part anyway.5. At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your metrics?We run on three growth metrics (currently a full PLG motion).Signups per month, which tells us if the top of the funnel is working.Activated and converted customers at the end of the trial. This is the real one. Revenue means first conversion, so a trial start does not count and an MQL definitely does not count.Product usage, which is our retention metric. If a customer stops logging in, the renewal is already gone.There is a fourth one because the product is young.We track how fast a feature request gets fulfilled. With AI doing a lot of the build, we are trying to keep that under one to two weeks. A customer who asks for something and sees it ship that fast tends to stay.6. In a few sentences, what do you offer to whom?ThriveStack citedby watches what AI engines say when buyers ask about your category. We check 10 platforms, show you the prompts you win and the ones your competitor owns, and tell you what to publish next. Then we connect those citations to your CRM and billing so you can see the deals behind them.It is built for Marketing and Revenue teams.In practice we augmentthe SEO and AEO people running content,PR and paid campaigns,Sales & Revenue teams - the ones responsible for actually bringing customers in.You can see it at https://www.thrivestack.ai/citedby.For Hackernoon readers, we have a special offer:COUPON: First month for just $1, with the coupon code 1stMonth-OneDollar, expires Oct 15th 2026.7. What’s most exciting about your traction to date?The citedby product did not start from zero. ThriveStack was a PLG platform with more than 100 paying customers. In February 2026 we pivoted. We kept the underlying platform, the part that stitches product usage, CRM and billing into one revenue view, and used it to build the next generation agentic growth platform: AI visibility plus revenue intelligence. Same plumbing, different product on top.What is fun now is how short the pitch has to be. I show a CMO a screenshot where ChatGPT recommends their competitor by name. The meeting changes right there.8. Where do you think your growth will be next year?Two motions, and they compound differently.The first is landing customers. We came out of July with about 20 paid customers. August more than doubled it. The $35 entry price is there to displace whoever they are using now, so the land is cheap and fast. Hold 30 to 50 percent month over month and that base is in the hundreds by this time next year.The second is expanding them, and that starts in Q4. Usage plus the attribution add-ons move an account from $35 a month toward $1,000 and past it. Same customer, up to thirty times the ticket size. Most of next year's revenue growth comes from here, not from new logos.Agencies are the multiplier on both. One agency brings dozens of brands at once and expands faster than any single brand will.9. Tell us about your first paying customer and revenue expectations over the next year.We are growth hacking our way to it. In May 2026, before the product existed, we ran a $1 AI Visibility audit campaign. It was a simple agent anyone could run themselves, with very few features. It got more than 8,000 downloads. About 150 of those people came back and asked us for more features and for a way to run it on a schedule instead of one time.That was the signal. We stopped contemplating and built the full platform. When we announced in July, about 20 of them converted to paid.On pricing, we keep the visibility layer at a deep discount on purpose. It starts at $35 a month. That price is there to displace a competitor and land the account, not to drive revenue. From there it is usage based, with add-ons for attribution, and ticket size can run north of $1,000 a month.Right now the whole motion is acquisition & competitor displacement. In Q4 of 2026 we start the expand and upsell campaigns on the base we have landed. We expect revenue to grow 30 to 50 percent month over month for the next year, at least.10. What’s your biggest threat?The LLM platforms themselves. They can change how answers get sourced any week they feel like it, and everyone building on top has to scramble.The second one is crowding. Every SEO tool is bolting on an AI visibility tab right now, so mention tracking will get cheap fast. Proving a citation turned into revenue is much harder to copy, so that is where we have to keep pushing.This startup founder interview template is based on HackerNoon Founder & CEO David Smooke’s ten questions for startup founders.Would you like to take a stab at answering some of these questions? The link for the template is HERE.