Ananay Batra’s Playbook for Scaling to 3.5M Users and $1.5M in ARR

With TikTok, AI, and Imperfect Content

When Ananay Batra started Listener.ai in 2019, AI wasn't even a buzzword. Today, his company serves 3.5 million users across 200 countries, generates $1.5M in ARR, and does it all with a team that's 90% engineers.

How? By breaking every B2B marketing rule in the book.

In this raw conversation, Ananay reveals the unconventional playbook behind his growth: Running 30+ TikTok accounts for a B2B product. Hiring an 18-year-old whose job is literally to scroll social media all day. Building 3,000 affiliates without a single outreach email. And recovering $10,000 monthly from one AI integration.

His approach flips traditional wisdom on its head: posting imperfect content three times daily, targeting enterprise clients through TikTok, and completely rejecting AI SDRs while using AI to quadruple content output.

This playbook breaks down his exact system: the tech stack, the workflows, the content strategy, and the counterintuitive philosophy that "being perfect actually backfires."

This playbook breaks down his exact system: the tech stack, the workflows, the content strategy, and the counterintuitive philosophy that "being perfect actually backfires."

Key Takeways

How Listnr.ai scaled to 3.5M users and $1.5M ARR.

SEO now feeds AI search visibility - optimize for both or lose traffic to competitors.

Reddit content gets indexed by AI platforms faster than any other source.

Speed beats perfection - ship content in hours, not days.

4x your content output by combining AI tools with human creativity.

One AI integration can recover thousands of dollars monthly in lost revenue.

Meet The Guest

How Listnr.ai scaled to 3.5M users and $1.5M ARR

About Ananay Batra

Ananay Batra is the founder and CEO of Listnr.ai, an AI voice technology platform he bootstrapped from $100 to 3.5M users across 200+ countries. A computer science graduate from York University, Ananay built his first AI product in 2019 and has since become a recognized voice in AI automation, serving as a Webby Awards judge and startup mentor.

About Listnr.io

Listnr.ai started as a simple idea: "What if people could start a podcast without recording anything?" Today, it's a comprehensive AI content platform offering 1000+ voices in 142 languages, instant voice cloning, and text-to-video capabilities. Bootstrapped to $1.5M ARR without any external funding, Listnr exemplifies sustainable, product-led growth in the AI space.

Ananay Batra

Listnr.ai

Ameet Mehta in Conversation
 with Ananay Batra

Why AI SDRs fail, how Reddit drives AISCO, and the workflow behind viral faceless videos.

Q1: What specific marketing channels deliver the highest ROI from your perspective as of 2025?

I'd say we started out very focused on SEO because if you're a SaaS product, you need a good grasp on SEO. You're constantly working on SEO, 24/7/365. That's something you cannot afford to miss.
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Up until end of '23, that was great - brought us traffic, brought us affiliates organically with 30% recurring commission. Then what happened after that was all these AI tools started picking it up. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude... they all index from SEO as well. There's Reddit, Twitter, there's a mix of things. But SEO becomes the feeder to your AI acquisition channel.
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We have 30-plus TikTok accounts, all faceless, sitting here in India, targeting audiences in the States. That's been quite high ROI because it doesn't take long to create content.

SEO becomes the feeder to your AI acquisition channel.

Ananay Batra

@ananbatra

Q2: How do you specifically leverage a channel like TikTok to reach a B2B audience?

SEO is more for B2B. That's where our B2B clients find us. But the prosumer, consumer clients... they find us on TikTok and social platforms.
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Someone on the marketing team at Honda Australia - they'll find us through SEO. NC Business School does a lot of their online content creation through Listnr.... those are marketing team members finding us through SEO and organic channels. But smaller content creators, smaller teams, smaller startups? They find us through social organic channels. TikTok is the way.

Q3: How did you scaled to 3000+ affiliates without outreach? Are you using any type of tools or automations?

90% plus of our affiliates came in organically. We didn't have to pitch them. Frankly speaking, I'm skeptical about AI SDR products... by itself it's hard for human SDRs to sell to real humans, let alone AI SDRs.
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We have different plugs for our affiliate program. If you sign up on Listnr right now, you'll receive a confirmation email that says 'Hey, love Listnr? Sign up as an affiliate, get 30% recurring.' It's like the Dropbox scenario where they'd have a link at the bottom of shareable URLs that said 'This link was created using Dropbox, sign up and get XYZ free storage.

Q4: How are you specifically optimizing for AI search?

There's this thing called JSON-LD that you optimize on your website. This helps all the LLMs read your content. Work with your robots.txt, don't disallow ChatGPT bot or Claude bot... these are basic SEO-ish principles when it comes to the technical aspect. Just making sure your website is technically readable by the LLMs and their crawlers.
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There was a big debate about whether AI-generated content is good for your website or not. The debate ended with: it depends on the helpfulness of your content. Doesn't matter if it's AI written or not.
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Pro tip: Reddit gets indexed quicker than literally any other link. There's definitely a weighted system these LLMs have. A link on Reddit would make you rank faster in LLMs than a link on TechCrunch or something.

Reddit gets indexed quicker than literally any other link by LLMs.

Ananay Batra

@ananbatra

Q5: Can you tell us about your content creation workflow and who's on the team?

We have a freelancer working on creation because... most of the team at Listnr is tech. We're like 90% tech.
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We have a person who's... a doom scroller. Their job is to scroll Instagram and TikTok and see what's happening, what's going viral. Something we recently picked up was a dog podcast - two dogs, golden retriever and French bulldog on a podcast just talking. They make a list of ideas like these trends.
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If I get the list at 6:30 PM... I'll probably have the content ready by, say, 12 AM.
We don't really think about if it's perfect or not. It doesn't have to be perfect. In fact, being perfect actually sort of backfires from what I've seen. We're purely in experimentation phase... we just push it out there.

Don't worry about if it's (your content) perfect or not. Being perfect actually backfires.

Ananay Batra

@ananbatra

Q6: Where does AI add the most value in the demand gen and customer acquisition cycle?

Depends on the kind of product you're selling. If I'm selling something that starts from $200 a month and goes up to $10,000... I'm not looking for the masses. I'm looking for 100 good leads out of which maybe I convert 10%.
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When it comes to strategy, I'd say AI is less useful. It's not up to date and it can't grasp what's happening with social trends. But content creation side? Creating B-rolls, creating scripts, creating AI videos... Veo3 has been really great with that. We've been able to at least quadruple our content generation output with AI tools, if not more.

We've been able to at least quadruple our content generation output with AI tools, if not more.

Ananay Batra

@ananbatra

Q7: Are you leveraging AI or any specific tools to manage churn?

Churnkey is really, really helpful. When a customer churns or there's a delinquent payment... they automatically send a drip campaign for that customer. Seven-day campaign - email 24 hours after unsuccessful payment, then 48, 12, and so on.
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They optimize the campaign itself using AI depending on what worked with previous customers, what didn't, what time interval worked. That alone was... $10,000 a month in just revenue recovery.

Q8: What's the most overhyped AI tool or trend specifically related to GTM?

AI SDRs, hands down AI SDRs.

The Bottom Line

Ananay Batra's journey with Listener.ai proves that the old playbook is dead. You don't need venture capital. You don't need perfect content. You definitely don't need AI SDRs.

What you need is speed, unconventional thinking, and the willingness to let an 18-year-old guide your content strategy while you run B2B campaigns on TikTok.

The numbers speak for themselves: 3.5 million users, $1.5M ARR, 4x content output, $10,000 monthly recovery from one integration. All achieved by breaking the rules we thought were sacred.

His core philosophy, "being perfect actually backfires" isn't just about content creation. It's about everything. Launch before you're ready. Ship three times daily. Test on platforms where B2B "shouldn't" work. Use AI to multiply output, not replace human judgment.

The playbook is clear: SEO feeds AI visibility. Reddit beats traditional PR. Speed beats perfection. And the companies still debating whether to use AI? They're already losing to those who've quadrupled their output.Ready to implement these strategies? Here's the exact tech stack Ananay used to build his growth machine.