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How I Got Half a Million Users in Just 16 Weeks | Rocket.new, Vishal Virani

Meet Vishal Virani, cofounder and CEO of Rocket, and the first engineer in his family. He grew up in Surat, the diamond capital of the world, where nine out of ten diamonds are manufactured and where resources and tech role models were almost non existent. No Ivy League. No Stanford. No IIT. Just curiosity, grit, and the belief that you can build from anywhere. Vishal faced more than forty rejections from investors who quietly judged his college and his zip code. Instead of complaining, he stayed in learning mode and read everything he could find on the internet. Right after college he launched his first startup, a Figma to code platform that grew from zero to three hundred fifty thousand users. When GPT 3 arrived, he instantly understood how fast the world was going to change, and that moment pushed him to create Rocket. Rocket is a platform where you bring the idea and get a real product you can launch without worrying about engineering or infrastructure. In just fifteen weeks, Rocket raised a fifteen million dollar seed round from Salesforce Ventures and Accel, and in the first sixteen weeks people built millions of applications on the platform. In this interview, Vishal shares how growing up in Surat shaped him, why location does not matter, how to turn rejection into momentum, and his mission for the next five years to remove mundane, clerical, repetitive work from every users life so they can focus on what actually matters. 00:00 Intro 01:50 The First Engineer from a Farming Family 02:57 You SHOULD Be Ready to KILL Your Success 05:01 How to Know Your Conviction is Right 06:31 You Haven't Failed Until You've Spent the Last Penny 08:27 Don't Take Any Advice Before You Know THIS Would you like to take part in Rocket? Try it now! 👉 here: https://www.rocket.new/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=EOpodcast&utm_campaign=founderstory EO stands for Entrepreneur& Opportunities. As we're looking to feature more inspiring stories of entrepreneurs all over the world, don't hesitate to contact us at partner@eoeoeo.net LinkedIn | @EO STUDIO X | @eostudi0

Vishal Viraniguest
Nov 14, 202510mWatch on YouTube ↗

At a glance

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

Bootstrapping from Surat to Rocket: product conviction beats pedigree always

  1. Vishal Virani shares his non-elite background and argues that location, pedigree, and “zip code” matter far less than sustained learning and execution.
  2. He recounts scaling Devise (a Figma-to-code tool) to 350K users and processing 10M screens before realizing GPT-3 would reshape the market and make their initial product a future “feature.”
  3. He describes pivoting from a comfortable business to Rocket, aiming to automate much more of the software development lifecycle using LLMs and prompt-driven product creation.
  4. He details severe fundraising adversity—40+ VC rejections and near-zero runway—and how iterating on his pitch, metrics, and proof replaced discouragement with improvement.
  5. He emphasizes filtering noisy advice, focusing heavily on product over marketing early on, and “proving” via traction—leading to Rocket’s growth and a $15M seed backed by Salesforce Ventures and Accel.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Treat constraints as strategic inputs, not excuses.

Virani frames his India/Surat context and lack of elite credentials as solvable constraints—leveraging internet learning and focusing on execution rather than complaining about “background.”

Be willing to “kill” a comfortable success when the platform shift is real.

Despite Devise’s strong traction, GPT-3 convinced them Figma-to-code would become a small feature, prompting a larger vision: automating broader software workflows with LLMs.

Conviction should come from users and market pain, not hype.

He validates direction by continuously talking to everyone from Fortune-100 CTOs to solopreneurs and spotting a consistent complaint: many new tools produced non-scalable, non–production-ready outputs.

In a credibility gap, proof beats persuasion.

As a non-native English speaker without brand-name logos, he argues to “don’t speak, just prove”—build product and traction so investors and customers experience value directly.

When you’re in pain, debug the process—not your identity.

During the “last pennies” fundraising period, he iterated daily on pitch wording, numbers, and articulation instead of spiraling, turning rejection into actionable feedback.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

If you have a will, you can build it from anywhere.

— Vishal Virani

Don't worry about your location. Don't worry about your zip code.

— Vishal Virani

There is a world before GPT 3 and there is a world after GPT 3.

— Vishal Virani

Prefer conviction over a comfort zone.

— Vishal Virani

If you are not a native English speaker, you will have a hard time to convince someone. Don't speak. Just prove.

— Vishal Virani

Growing up in Surat and being first engineer in familyLearning mindset vs. pedigree and geographyDevise: Figma-to-code scaling and traction metricsGPT-3 as inflection point and decision to pivotUser feedback loops and trust-building supportVC rejection, runway pressure, and pitch iterationProduct-first strategy vs. marketing-first companiesCompetitive example: Copilot vs. CursorRocket vision: end-to-end automation and “Jarvis”-like workflow

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