Julius Körfgen, Uplane
He Sold the Software Before He Built It. $1M ARR in 6 Months
Julius Körfgen spent years running marketing at a European startup, where he personally built around ten thousand ads. Writing headlines, testing image variants, checking which call-to-action buttons converted. He estimates that roughly ten percent of ads are ever profitable, and that companies keep running the other ninety percent because the process of finding out is slow and manual. So he left with two co-founders to automate it. What he did not do was build first. He ran cold LinkedIn outreach to strangers, framed every message as a request to learn rather than a pitch, and used the discovery calls to find out what marketing teams actually struggled with. At the end of each call he would say the same thing: give us a week and we will come back with a solution. Then the three of them would grind out whatever they had just promised. He also refused to run free pilots. His argument is that without a dollar attached, you cannot tell the difference between a real business case and a polite conversation. Uplane reached a million dollars in ARR in about six months and now runs around twenty people across San Francisco and Berlin. AG1 is a customer, and a project with Deutsche Bahn is underway after roughly nine months of conversations. In this interview, Julius breaks down the outreach that got strangers to take his calls, the one-week sprint, why he threw out per-seat pricing in favour of a fixed fee that only covers costs plus a variable share of ad spend, and the guardrails that stop an AI from putting bad ads in front of an enterprise brand's audience.
