You either die a software company or live long enough to see yourself become a media company.

Harry Stebbings says Higgsfield has 150 people in content alone.

Higgsfield have scaled to $1BN in ARR in 18 months; that is faster than Cursor.

But did you know they have over 150 people in content production alone?

For every product release, funding announcement, you name it, they have built a content machine that is unmatched.

The next generation of companies will have content baked into their DNA.

I love that. To me, it’s clearly the highest ROI decision Alex has made as a founder. Harry’s episode with Alex drops shortly, so I wanted to get my thoughts out before it goes live.

At the application layer of creative AI, a lot of companies are selling access to overlapping capabilities. The company that gets you imagining what you’ll make with them has an advantage before you’ve had a chance to compare products.

Higgsfield is really fucking good at this.

I remember their early content being reckless, inflammatory, and often straight-up AI slop. They were willing to publish things other companies would’ve argued about internally for a week. But it got them millions of eyeballs. My read is that they built an audience while everyone else was deciding what was acceptable. Then they improved the work in front of that audience.

I think founders often overestimate how deeply people are going to think about a post. Something feels cringe, alienating, or too provocative internally, so it never goes out. Meanwhile, the person scrolling might laugh, send it to a friend, argue in the comments, or just move on. They’re rarely analyzing your brand as hard as you are.

Even someone arguing with a post can help it travel through replies and reposts. At enough scale, a small share of the right people can still be a serious audience. A few people finding it cringe doesn’t tell you whether it worked.

Now Higgsfield has a serious content operation, plus a creator program that helps other people keep finding new reasons to use the product. One capability gets translated into different ideas, for different people, by creators who understand those audiences.

The 150 people make that possible at scale. But the approach to content comes before the headcount.

Another mistake I keep seeing founders make is judging every organic post by immediate conversion.

• "What did this post drive?"
• "What was the ROI?"

Often, this is happening before the company puts out enough good content for anyone to remember it.

In reality, how most organic conversion works is: Someone sees your product several times, hears about it here and there, and finally tries it when a relevant problem comes up. The post that gets the conversion might just be collecting demand the earlier ones created.

The question is whether the work is making more of the right people familiar enough with the product to try it. That’s hard to see if every post has to justify its existence on its own.

I felt this firsthand when I finally used Higgsfield properly this past weekend.

I’m a marketer. I could see what they were doing throughout onboarding. The offers were pushy. The upsells were obvious. I was consciously going through a funnel that their content had already convinced me to enter.

And I still wanted to put my card down.

I could only imagine how well this converts impressionable consumers and people who aren’t going through the whole thing with a marketer’s eye.

I had enough of their content stuck in my head that I wanted to see the experience through. My first payment was basically: "okay, I need to find out if I can actually make this."

It was obviously harder than the marketing made it look. And I came from growing a node-based creative tool. I’m pretty comfortable with a learning curve.

What stood out was how much patience their marketing had bought them. I was willing to work through friction because I still wanted the result I’d been shown.

I suspect a lot of first purchases start there. I’d want to see their retention cohorts before drawing conclusions about how many become habits. Even savvy users can get a great result and return to their usual workflow, or follow the next impressive launch and offer of free credits.

Platform tourism is a reasonable response to a market that keeps rewarding you for exploring.

A content operation this fast keeps giving people reasons to reconsider. Every release is another chance to convince someone that this time, there’s something worth staying for. It's what makes Higgsfield hard to compete with.

And that supposedly “consumer” funnel is also doing part of the enterprise sales job.

The demo that convinced me to pay can give an IC an idea for a campaign, a reason to test a workflow, or something to show their boss. The product gets into the company through something someone already wants to do.

And the executive isn’t living on a different internet. They scroll, watch, share, and get excited about things like everyone else. They just have different responsibilities. They need to justify the spend and answer for the decision. None of that makes them immune to wanting a product because they saw something great made with it.

This is why I’d bet Higgsfield wins an enterprise deal against any other company focused on looking more “enterprise-y.” They’ve been shaping what the team wants before there’s even a formal buying process.

But instead I see a lot of attention go toward reaching the person with the budget, and much less toward the people who can tell them whether the product is useful. An IC who brings back something that works gives the budget holder a concrete reason to take a meeting.

Doing this consistently across different customer segments creates more opportunities for deals to exist. That’s the shots-on-goal advantage: more sales conversations where someone already wants the product and can explain why without having to reference months of shitty trial usage data.

It’s why I’d invest more aggressively in brand and creative if I were trying to win enterprise contracts in this category.

I think the strongest companies at the application layer will build creative production into product development. For every engineer shipping a capability, I want a pod of creatives creating the stories that make it matter to someone. The response to that work should help inform what gets built next.

We’ve been hearing for years that every company will become a media company. Higgsfield put 150 people behind the idea.

You can keep debating whether this is how a serious software company should behave, but your customers are watching.