How Kennan Davison is Making $15 Million ARR and Built a Viral SaaS
Here's how you can copy and paste his best content
Hello 👋
If' you’re not subscribed already, what are you waiting for?
In this issue read about:
🦠 How to grow a SaaS with Viral Marketing
🤷♂️ Kennan Davison is a college dropout, self-taught coder, and Y Combinator alum
💰 $15 million in Annual Recurring Revenue
🤖 AI Automated ad creation for e-commerce brands
Going viral seems to be the ultimate cheat code in the SaaS game.
When your product spreads organically, you’re not just getting new customers; you’re starting a movement that feeds itself.
And right now, no one’s playing that game better than Kennan Davison, the founder of Icon, an AI-powered Admaker that’s exploding across platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.
Let’s take a look at Kennan’s strategy and stick around till the end and show you how you can get in on it too.
Learn every week from a real world no-code success story
👉 Share your own No-Code Success Story to be featured
Who is Kennan Davison?
Before Icon, he was the CEO of Skio, a subscription management platform that hit $15M+ in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and turned profitable in just three years.
With an $8.4M seed round and partnerships with over 1,000 brands like Liquid I.V., Milk Bar, and even Unilever, he’s proved he could build and scale with the best of them.
Solo founder, Y Combinator S20 batch, the whole deal.
Backing up a bit, he was a top 200 North American League of Legends player out of 100 million+ back in the day, which tells you he’s got a competitive mindset ingrained.
When high school ended, he taught himself to code, dropped out of college after a only a year, and got hired at Pinterest.
From there, it was stints at Hulu and Wieden+Kennedy (the ad agency behind Nike’s “Just Do It”), which sharpened his skills in tech and marketing.
Then came Skio.
And now, Icon.
With generative AI getting so popular, especially in video, Kennan saw a chance to disrupt advertising. He didn’t just build a product though, he built a machine to make it spread.
And that’s where the real magic happens ✨
What is Icon?
Advertising sucks for brands.
Try writing 100 unique 30-second ad scripts.
Then match 3-second clips from a 10,000-video library to each one. Then A/B test them, add in voiceovers, captions, and then upload them to Meta, TikTok, and everywhere else to test.
It’s a grind that costs time, money, and most founders sanity.
Kennan saw the pain large e-commerce brands were having and built Icon to fix it.
Icon’s an AI Admaker that automates the whole process.
Feed it your content, and its algorithms churn out scripts, pair them with clips, and spit out ads. Need 100 variations of an ad from one video? Done. Want captions and voiceovers? Done.
But here’s the problem, a great product doesn’t sell itself.
So he engineered a system to make it go viral.
And that system? It’s all about creators, affiliates, and making promotion easy.
The Playbook
Attract Affiliates
Affiliates want results, not promises. So he built the affiliate program to focus on the value to well, the affiliates. Makes sense right?
But what I though was real genius is there is no application.
That’s right anyone can promote it.
Just grab your link and that’s it.
Low friction, high reward.
Show Social Proof
Kennan knew that he had to get creators and affiliates to trust him and show them what’s possible.
He created screenshots of posts hitting millions of views on TikTok with real creators, showing their real numbers.
When you see someone else’s post blow up, you think, “I can do that.”
That’s the psychology he used, and it’s working.
Case Studies
Case studies: Big names like Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and execs from OpenAI and Ramp back Icon.
Make it Easy
Templates for everything including posts, videos, ads UGC (user generated content) or AI-generated.
Hook ideas: Killer opening lines to snag attention in the first three seconds.
Brand assets: Logos, visuals, the works. No digging required.
It’s crazy simple.
Want to get all the same done for you assets others are using to go viral?
No signup needed.