Inside the AI Architect That Got 40,000 Users in 48 Hours youtube.com

Today we visit Drafted in San Francisco's South Park, the AI architect helping anyone design a custom home in minutes, founded by Nick Donahue. After his first company Atmos designed over $200M worth of houses before shutting down, Nick went all in on a pure software approach with Drafted.

In nine months, the company has raised $17M from investors including Y-Combinator, Buckley Ventures, Patrick Collison (Stripe), Jack Altman, Ben Silbermann (Pinterest), Bill Clerico and Ryan Tedder, attracted 170,000 users in four months and generated over 200,000 floor plans, 100,000 of which came in a single three day window.

In this episode, we get a behind the scenes look at how Nick is building Drafted: a tour of the SF office and the engineering team training their own AI models, a live demo of the product, his take on whether AI is actually replacing architects, why he thinks startups still have an opening against the big labs, the path to revenue at template prices ($1,000 to $2,000 per plan)and the viral X moment that brought in 40,000 new users in 48 hours.

Drafted is the AI architect built on proprietary models trained on real, permitted house plans. Where a custom home design traditionally costs tens of thousands of dollars and takes months, Drafted generates floor plans, 3D models and rendered exterior designs in under a minute, for a fraction of the cost ($0.002 per plan to run on their infrastructure compared to $0.13 for general-purpose AI). The goal is to make custom home design accessible to anyone, not just the wealthy.

This is Episode 11 of our Startup Series: Where we get access to the best founders and companies shaping the startup world right now. New episodes dropping regularly.

If you're into startups, building something unconventional, or just love a wild origin story, this one is for you. We're building OpenCompany: the number one agent builder of the world.