Ajay Y.

Now, I’m back in the founder seat, focusing on building a vertical AI SaaS startup. I will be building this venture in public, sharing my experiences and insights on growth and revenue strategies along the way.

In 2021, I co-founded Simplified, an AI-driven platform designed to support SMB marketing teams with content creation, distribution, and collaboration in one place. We raised over $14M from Khosla Ventures and Craft, scaled to over 17 million users.

I began my entrepreneurial journey as a solo founder, building a marketplace in New York to help people find roommates. This venture raised over $20M in capital, grew to over 5 million users, and reached profitability.

Co-Founder

// 100,000

10 months.
90% happened in 1 month.

9 months felt quiet.
then it wasn’t.

lesson:
keep showing up.
help people.
trust the compounding.

thank you for being here.

Ajay Yadav

Building @ Otto AI | Prev. co-founder @ Simplified AI (20M+ Users), backed by Khosla & Craft Ventures

graphical user interface, text, application

Your production LLM stack is one incident away from chaos.

The real problem is not which model to use.

It is operating LLMs at scale across teams with cost spikes, provider instability, prompt drift, and compliance requirements.

The new Portkey video captures this perfectly.
A boardroom calmly presenting updates while the office is literally on fire.

Portkey is the control layer between your app and every LLM provider, with observability, routing, guardrails, cost tracking, governance, and compliance in one place.

Signals that this is already production infrastructure:
•⁠ ⁠2T+ tokens processed
•⁠ ⁠650+ organizations
•⁠ ⁠1,600+ models behind a unified API
•⁠ ⁠Gartner Cool Vendor 2025 for LLM Observability
•⁠ ⁠10,200+ GitHub stars for the open-source AI Gateway
•⁠ ⁠SOC2, HIPAA, GDPR

Tagging Portkey, plus @1rohitagarwal and @ayush92garg

What hurts most in your LLM stack right now?
Reliability, cost visibility, evals, prompt changes, or governance?

Everyone told me Substack is one of the hardest platforms to grow.

You need to write consistently, send weekly newsletters, be a great writer, or spend money.

I did none of that.

No weekly cadence. Almost no posts. Zero dollars spent.

I also stepped away from the easier channels. I paused LinkedIn. Stopped chasing Twitter.

Because I wanted to test something specific.

If you truly understand growth mechanics, can you crack a platform people call hard without being a career writer?

It took 10 months.

For a long time, it was flat. Quiet. Nothing to point at.

Then the curve bent.

Now it is around 5,000 subscribers. Fully organic.

The lesson is not “write more.”

Platforms are not the game. Distribution is.

If you want the exact playbook I used, comment Substack and I will share it.

—

Aj
Building Otto AI, bookkeeping and taxes for creators

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Growth | Brand | Social | B2B SaaS writer | AI enthusiast | Freelancer. Learning Product Marketing. Please suggest resources or courses which I can opt for.

Some resumes tell you what someone did.
Others tell you how they did it.

Most hiring tools can’t see the difference.

We’re quietly working on something that can.
And it changes everything.

DM to book your Demo. 


Shubham Ray

With AI doing the foundational "junior" work: basic coding, data entry, initial market research, the traditional stepping stones of a career are disappearing. If there are no junior roles today, how do we incubate the senior leaders of 2035?

Let me know what you think in the comment section.

taplio

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taplio

The Battle

Ajay Y.

Shubham Ray

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Ajay Y.'s LinkedIn Performance

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