The Delete Button That Turned $10K Into $500K

A split-second decision to add a paywall instead of hitting delete changed everything. While Gaurav Misra was about to shut down what seemed like a costly side project, that moment of hesitation turned a $10,000 monthly expense into a $500,000 revenue stream—completely unattended.

Gaurav Misra, co-founder and CEO of Captions, has built one of the most successful AI-powered video creation platforms, raising over $100 million and serving tens of millions of users. But his path from a PhD dropout to startup success reveals how the smallest decisions often determine the biggest outcomes.

In this interview, Gaurav shares the untold story behind Captions' explosive growth, why he believes micro-decisions matter more than major strategic pivots, and how a weekend project accidentally became a half-billion-dollar AI video company.

Gaurav: I was in the US for the first 4 years of my life and my parents moved to India. I grew up in India. Moving back to the US, I had no idea or no concept of what it would be like. What is Boston? What is New York? I hadn't been to any of these places. My parents were like, Boston's great, you should go there, and I was like, sounds great, let me do that.

Boston generally is a very multicultural environment. People come there from a lot of different countries, and I went to Boston University where that's especially the case. At Boston University, it was an interesting situation because coming from India, the curriculum there, especially around computer science, is very advanced compared to the US and a lot of the things that we were being taught in college we had already covered in high school for the most part.

A lot of college classes were essentially repeating what I had already done in high school. It probably was the case for a lot of people from India, I imagine. I think that did give me a chance to actually go and explore outside of just that and kind of see what else I can learn and what more I can do. I did tons of projects. I worked on projects with my roommates, I worked on a lot of different apps that we launched and this was in 2012, 2011 when the App Store was still early.

Gaurav: After graduating from college, I actually started a PhD in machine learning, which I actually dropped out of. I left my PhD program and I joined a startup. People thought I was crazy that I would just drop out of it and go join some startup, right? But I think it was the right decision looking back at it.

It was a very high risk decision, but it worked out, especially in the US and I think that's what makes the US such a special place. There's definitely so much opportunity that I think it's better to be a little bit more of a risk taker. Most of the time you can take a risk and actually get rewarded for it. I think people don't bias enough towards taking risks. If you just do what everybody else is doing, then you'll just end up wherever everybody else is going, right?

Gaurav: In high school and going into college, I started a kind of a company in a strange way. I say that because I actually didn't realize it was a company until much later. I was working on some games and there was some need around security software for those games and I decided to make it and the game company decided to buy it for me, not knowing that I was like 16 years old. And I ended up selling it to a bunch of other companies as well.

I didn't realize at that time that this is what a company is - you make a product, you sell it, but much later I was like, wow, that's kind of what it was. It was an interesting sort of experience to go through because it kind of transitioned from generally games and gaming into sort of more general skill set.

I really enjoy learning new things. How do you learn things quickly and how do you figure things out quickly is something that not a lot of people talk about, but it's like one of the most important skills in my mind. Go to a new domain, go to a new area, something that you haven't done before, try it for the first time, figure it out quickly and be actually useful and productive in it is like it's a pretty cool skill and it's a pretty fun one to work on because you get to try out a lot of different things you'll get to learn a lot of different things and focus on that as a skill in itself being able to do all those different things and figuring those things out is really important.

Gaurav: Through the early part of my career I was really focused on machine learning as a central aspect of what I was doing at Microsoft. I joined them on this new team they were developing called Azure Machine Learning. It's like a machine learning platform we were building and then at Snapchat there was a bit of a difference.

I got a chance to really get more on the product side and eventually ended up joining the design team, which was like a huge shift from what I had done previously and the idea of connecting technology to actual design. An actual product made a lot of sense so I ended up starting a team there called design engineering which was like how do you bring together great design and great engineering to build amazing products, right?

One of the things I learned at Snap, if you think about Snap as a company, I think Snap was one of the earliest companies to actually get into video for consumer use cases, especially short video. It did get me very immersed into the space of video in general, especially video for communication, short videos and all the challenges, both technical and product that are related to that.

But I think in general one of the things that I noticed was essentially a shift in the way that people were communicating. A lot of people thought TikTok was just, oh, TikTok, that's like just people dancing, right, at least it's for fun, but I think the reality was that yes, there were a bunch of people dancing, but there was a lot of people talking and there were a lot of people telling stories and sometimes bad things that happened to them, good things that happened to them, people were talking about ideas and what could be done and what should be done and people were arguing with each other, right?

And I think that was like a shift in the way people communicated from like that's the type of stuff that would happen on Twitter or on text beforehand, right? And it was now happening on video for the first time so I got pretty familiar with all the different ways that people are communicating and kind of what works better and what doesn't work.

Gaurav: When we started the company, we were thinking of building a social network and so we were thinking, OK, there's like a distribution part and then there's a creation part of the social network. We thought, hey, let's start with the creation first, so we started off with the idea of literally just adding captions to videos, text on videos based on what people are saying.

The reason we did this is because we saw there was a big excess of movement at that time there were a lot of people sort of manually writing text on top of their videos and it would spend an hour typing it all out. There wasn't actually a solution for this that was in the market at that time, so we were the first ones to build it and the absolute first project we built it in one weekend just as like a test essentially.

And we put it on the app store and the next day we woke up and it was like 600 people per minute using it basically it was completely at the top of the app store with no marketing, no nothing done essentially and I think that was like the moment where I was like wow it can't be this easy right like it really can't be because we had been told, right, like it's gonna be a lot of work to find product market fit and things like that but I think that being said, we had just started the company and we had this idea of a social network and things like that I think we were like OK this is working but I wonder if we should go back and like really think about the social network aspect of this and so we tried to figure out how to get people to post on the platform and things like that until we essentially rediscovered captions.

Gaurav: This was an interesting moment where we were working on another application which was called Spam App. It was like a photo sharing app. It was actually doing really well while we were working on that. We're looking at the bills and there was like a good $10,000 a month going to captions, you know. I remember talking to my co-founder and we're like, OK, let's just delete it because we don't wanna spend $120,000 a year on this, right?

We decided to delete it. I remember going back home and on Saturday going through, the UI to be like, OK, I'm gonna press delete now and while I was going to press delete, I was just thinking. Uh, but like we worked so hard on this, like I don't wanna delete this, right? Like it's like I wanna keep it for memories at least, right?

So I had an idea just in the moment, quickly design a little paywall where we ask people to pay for the app if nobody pays for it. It then it's essentially shut down, but we can continue using it because you know we work hard on it and if someone pays for it then it pays for itself, so we're not paying the bills basically so I quickly made that in about 2 or 3 hours, put it on the App Store and launched it.

And then completely forgot about it, so we continued working on Spam App and it continued growing through the next, you know, 4, 5, 6 months while we were doing that, I for some reason decided to check my account and when I checked it it was like at $500,000 or more and growing and like the craziest part was not only did people pay for it, people retained on it.

And it was growing in revenue completely on its own with 0 employees working on it, so no employees. There were like 2000 open support tickets, nobody was answering obviously, right? And it would continue to grow, you know, we had to have this tough conversation of like oh my God, like this is truly working right. And it was tough because we already had another thing that was also working and that we were raising a new round on essentially, right?

Gaurav: I think we discussed this for a couple of weeks and we ended up deciding we're gonna switch to captions and we're gonna just focus on creation as the primary. We switched over and literally the moment we launched the first set of features on top of the existing app what was looking like a fast growth completely condensed because the new growth was exponential, just like straight up.

I mean I think that's kind of the crazy thing that I think about at this point is like that split second decision was the difference between two completely different paths. Here's the thing like we don't know the other side could have been even more successful. That's the tough part about these decisions is like you have to choose one and you'll never know what the other could have been.

I think the big decisions are actually in the small decisions in a way, and the small decisions are what actually you don't think about too much but actually turn the tide of what will happen in the future. I think that was the case over here too, right, because what felt like a very small decision of like other app should we delete it or not seemed kind of obvious. Anybody we would ask would have told us, yeah, just delete it, right, whatever, but I think those small decisions actually are way more important than the big ones sometimes and I think this shows quite a bit.

Like if you look at any competition at a global scale, right, which building a startup is kind of a competition at a global scale like look at the Olympics for example, right? Like people are within seconds of each other, right, sometimes even milliseconds of each other that's not because of some major decision they made while training or something like that. Everyone's very good, right? It's probably like some minor micro decision that happened in the moment like, you know, while they're swimming and they moved one arm at this angle versus the other angle like that's what's deciding who wins and loses, right? I think it's those small decisions that count the most.

Gaurav: We did face challenges around identifying the user and making sure we're building for the right user because when we launched the app it was immediately sort of successful, right? And it immediately blew up. It made things easier and harder in some ways.

I think one of the things that can happen when too many people join sort of your app or product very quickly is you kind of lose sight of who the customer is because there's a lot of people who are just checking it out. There's a lot of people who don't actually care about the use case, but they wanna just see what's going on between all that noise it's difficult to figure out which one of these people are the actual user who's gonna retain and for whom is this actually solving a real problem that's really important because at the end of the day without focusing on the right customer, you'll end up building the wrong product.

Captions was a paid app from the beginning, and I think elements there that was interesting is being paid actually helped filter our user base a little bit and only those people who were willing to pay. Those people that were willing to pay were people who had real pain points and so with that we got really good feedback from users right around what we should build and what we should prioritize and what they want from us in the future. We decided to keep the app paid right from the beginning all the way till today because of that reason.

Gaurav: I think on the technical side we try to avoid as much as possible technical challenges that sort of unproven essentially right like I think one of the mistakes that can be made is spending a lot of time building something very technically complex without fully recognizing whether there's product market fit there or not. We spend a year building something and nobody wants it, right? That happens very often and it's happened to us too.

The key factor there is how do you reduce the technical risk to an MVP? How do you test with just the bare minimum, get something out in front of people, have them see it, have them try it. If they don't retain, then don't invest more in it, right? Try something else and I think that's the other thing is not going deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole almost in a way.

I think there's also tendencies of building the first version, seeing that it doesn't completely work, and then justifying it by saying, well, if it only had this feature and that feature and that third feature, then maybe it would've worked. But I think the reality is it would probably not have worked with as many features as you want it would only have worked with a single feature, only one of those things, right? Whatever actually people want at the end of the day.

So I think the better skill is to just learn how to quickly build stuff, try as many things as possible. The most important thing is getting stuff out in front of people, testing it. If it doesn't work, kill it and start again and keep doing that as quickly as possible.