Philip Ho on Absurd's AI ad agency: 300K average organic views, 90%+ margins, and Super Bowl ambitions

check in there. But, uh, we have the founder of Absurd in the reream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TV. How are you doing?

Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.

Of course, I'm doing good. How are you guys doing? I know you guys are only taking on a couple companies today. So, uh, thanks for having me on.

We appreciate you.

Fantastic. Coming up,

uh, please introduce yourself. Tell us what you're building.

Yeah. Uh, my name is Philip. I'm CEO of Absurd. Absurd makes AI marketing videos. Um, an ad that we've made, you've probably seen on your feed, is Kali's Mandani versus Cuomo 1 v1 basketball match, which we did right before the elections. We like to joke that we influence the New York City elections.

Amazing. So, what uh walk me through the product? Uh, it sounds like you're more using the foundation models, using Sora, V3, then training your own. Um, but what what what are you building? How do you fit into the stack? Are you more of like a creative agency that I hire and pay a lot of money for an ad and you go out and use all the tools or are you trying to build software as a service or train a foundation model? Where do you sit in the stack?

The way we're seeing how we fit into the stack is that we handle everything for a company in terms of AI native distribution. And the reason why we're doing it in that route instead of like making an editor that anyone could use is because we can charge exponentially higher for that. So do you want to ultimately productize this?

This is what um uh this is what Har was talking about, right? Basically, instead of building like an AI native accounting firm or an AI native law firm, you're effectively building uh an AI native creative ad agency where somebody comes and say, I want

one launch video, please. And you say, sure, here's the fixed price. And then you guys use your internal tooling and whatever models you have access to to generate the best possible output and you deliver that end product.

Exactly.

Um, and what are you what are you charging on on like a per video basis today?

Uh, so a lot of that's confidential, but I can say we charge upwards of 30 grand per video. Oh. So, so in the same world,

you're effectively charging the same somewhat similar to like what somebody would pay for like a full day shoot.

Totally.

Um,

you're in like the proper video production realm. Uh, at least in terms of price. What uh what are the secrets to using the uh video models appropriately to actually go viral? Uh what what do you hire for? What are you focused on? um making sure that the video that you deliver is actually hitting, you know, upwards of $30,000 of value.

So, in terms of the value we deliver, every video we've posted has gone viral. I mean, we average 300,000 organic views for every company we work with, regardless of whether you have 200 followers on Twitter or you have like a million. M

um second thing in terms of what we're prioritizing um what we're really thinking about internally is just how many videos per person per week like what's that throughput looking like and then how do you drastically increase that week over week. So 3 weeks ago that was one video per person per week.

Mhm.

Today it's 10 Super Bowl quality ads per person per week made in parallel.

Next week it's going to be 50. Following week it's going to be a thousand. I mean there was a company that came to us. I can't say their name, but um they said they won 1500 of our Koshi Super Bowl ads in a month. [laughter]

And that's the type of quantity that we're talking about here.

Like this is this is a lot of money that I we turned down $200,000 in the past 3 days because we just, you know, in terms of our bottleneck, we just had this huge technical bottleneck and we couldn't get it out in time.

Like

you turned that you turned that revenue down a few days ago. Why don't you just go back and say, "Hey, we have the capability. We have the capacity now." You just said you said it's

ramp. We still don't have capacity now. We are We could literally

So, how many $30,000 videos have you sold? Did you Did you create Did you find an infinite money glitch here or something? There's not even a thousand There's not even a thousand, you know, ventureback startup launches uh you know, a week.

Yeah.

So, the the way the way we're seeing things right now, sure, we start out with launch videos that we charge 30 40 grand for, but now we're going towards more of like a retainer, right? So now we're striking deals with companies like Khi, Replet, and [ __ ] and we're telling them, you know, we'll do a bundle deal, 10 videos a month for X price,

right? And eventually it's going to go to 50, then 100, then 200. A lot of this is going to be used in ads.

Um because the more you spend on ads, the more you have to switch out ad copy because of ad,

you know, fatigue.

And then we're going to go up and we're going to actually connect the orchestration layer to the actual metrics dashboard of all these ads. Um, and then eventually we're going to get to this point where like we have this huge compounding data mode and our ad just get better and better. And you can think of an ad, I think for the first time in history as like you can create a thousand different variations with one click of a button. Cuz if you think about the ad in an AI ad, it's literally just like images and you're animating them. And as long as you have an agent that edits the images and changes the prompt slightly, you can create a thousand different variations and then test multiple things at once. Uh, will we see any absurd commercials during the Super Bowl this year?

I I can't say I I I I uh [laughter]

You think maybe?

That's a good answer. That's a good answer. That's a good answer. He can't he can't uh he can't you know people are going to look up his customers and

what do you think about uh the role of of taste of craft a lot of what's what's previously gone viral in the age uh in the pre-ai age has been someone coming up with a really unique concept a really unique spin and and AI hasn't really been able to deliver those unique ideas it's really good at reconstituting what's already out there and coming up with, you know, existing ideas.

Yeah. Historically, the best creative agencies have been the agencies with the best ideas, right? It's like you pay uh you you pay to work with somebody that has a track record of generating great campaign concepts and then they'll often times just like outsource the work

to people that are good at the execution layer but not at the idea side. Do you feel like you guys need to develop like a like internal

like taste or

Yeah. Just just ability to like generate a high volume of good ideas now that the actual execution

uh in terms of like creative production is like so much faster

uh with AI.

Yeah. I think um we think of like creativity not as a monolith but really in terms of two parts. Exactly how you put it. So there's a taste layer, there's an then there's an execution layer. our our job here is we want to remove that bottleneck between an idea and a finished product. Um so internally what we're doing to solve that is like sure we're not going to replace human creativity. We're going to automate human labor. Um we're going to make it so easy for like a comedian or a script writer or someone who just wants a part-time job and we're going to pay them like a really high salary. Um really easy for them to like create the seed of an idea that we can spin off tens and thousands of ads for. Hm.

Uh what how much are you guys actually spending on uh on the at on the model on the model side or within any of the applications that you're using to generate this uh this content?

Well, for like a 30 secondond to 60-second video, uh really it's like 300 400 bucks. We have an internal orchestration layer uh that picks the best models to use for all these specific use cases. It's paired with like a 50-page doc that has all our learnings that isn't available anywhere online and we're able to use these models really effectively. So our margins like beyond just human labor because we're the ones making the videos and spinning all these things up. We don't know how to price that is like close to like 98%. But if you add in human labor I think it's still like above 90.

How many different models are you using on an average 30 secondond video? Do you do you feel like it's worthwhile to stick to one model because you get more of a consistent look or are you jumping around? How do you think about the different models, what they're good at?

Well, it's extremely obvious that some models are just really good at some stuff and really bad at another thing. Um, Cream is good at specific use cases. Nano Banana is good specific use cases. Cling Juan all have their own

um unique use cases that we we use. Um, something that's interesting beyond just the models is just like work in terms of workflow orchestration. Um, before Nano Banana Pro came out, I'll give this as an example. If you wanted to swap someone else's face, like you would put in, you know, I put in John's face and I say, I want to put Kanye on that.

Um, and that wouldn't work. So, the way you do it is you'd actually tell Nano Banana to cut off John's head and then get that like headless image and put Kanye's head on top. And that's how we swap faces before Nano Banana Pro. Um, so there are all these like little workflow

uh things that we've learned just by experimenting and playing around with these models which play a huge role in making all our ads like the creation of our ads really effective.

Fascinating.

Have we entered a post-slap era?

Will we enter a post slop era? What what what is your post slop timelines?

I was speaking to Jess Lee actually about this. Uh she was talking about how photography used to be seen as slop.

Um and because you know it used they used to say that photography was this way like artists were actually painting something.

Mhm.

Um but photography allowed people to realize that allowed people to capture like a smile really quickly through slow motion. Um, and something will emerge from this AI era where you can do something with AI video to capture some essence of human that you wouldn't be able to do otherwise. And we don't know what that is, but I'm pretty sure we'll be the first to figure that out, especially if we're pushing out all these videos every month.

How big is the team today? And how's the fundrais going?

Uh, it's just me and my two co-founders, Daniel and Damon. Uh, in terms of the round, we closed uh I can't announce how much, but we closed uh a week and a half ago.

Incredible. John, hit that gong.

I will.

For Phillip and the Absurd team, uh, thanks for coming on, breaking it down. Uh, I'm I'm actually surprised there's not more companies trying to do this this exact uh exact sort of playbook. Uh but uh it's it's cool to hear how you're thinking about this and excited to see uh more of the work that you guys put out.

Of course. Yeah. I And by the way, before I go, I'd love to make a launch video for you guys.

Okay.

Let's talk. I would love that. I want to see what I want to see what you can do. We have we have a benchmark here, Bezel Bench, where it it involves a lot of watches on arms. We like to put this to the test with a lot of different uh AI video generators. It's a particularly hard uh shot to get right, but we can come up with a bunch of different ideas. Let's do it. That'd be fantastic.

Let's do it.

Perfect.

Well, have a great rest of the investor.

Uh he'll be in contact.

Thank you guys for having me.

Talk to you soon.

Cheers.

Goodbye.

Uh before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Adio, the AI native CRM. Adio builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. Up next we have Lightberry with Aliar. Social brains for robots.

Social brains for robots. Let's bring

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Ali uh Lightberry. Yes. Uh very