Patel says Substack monetization reached hundreds of thousands in months, then millions before he left the platform.
“It got to a few $100,000 of revenue and I was like, Holy crap. And then I was able to start hiring. And then I left when we hit a few million of revenue.”
Patel says Substack revenue alone reached multi-million dollars before expanding beyond the platform.
“Now, scaled to be And it has scaled to be multi million dollar Substack revenue. Obviously, built a lot of business beyond that, even that is good enough”
Patel explains OpenAI's router will send low-value queries to cheaper models but use expensive compute for high-value monetizable queries.
“if the user asks a low value query like, hey, why is the sky blue? Just route them to mini. The model can answer perfectly fine, and that is a chunk of queries.”
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“But if they ask, what's the best DUI lawyer near me? All of a sudden, this is like, you're in jail, you have one shot, you're like, screw it.”
Patel argues OpenAI captures less than 10% of the economic value it creates, pointing to broken value capture across AI.
“I legitimately believe OpenAI is not even capturing 10% of the value they've created in the world already just by usage of chat. Right?”