Congrats to Jaspar, a r/ycombinator contributor and the founder of Artisan who just raised 7.3M

[urbanredneck]

If you haven't seen any of Jaspar's reddit threads on r/ycombinator, he basically has been documenting his journey with Artisan for quite some time.

Just saw YC reposted an article on their LinkedIn talking about how Artisan just raised 7.3M. Huge congrats @olubiola, and thank you for all your previous posts on the subreddit. They've helped me tremendously as a founder, and I'm sure they've helped others as well. Watching your story from the sidelines and rooting you on!

 

[truefiction1]

@urbanredneck I tried to schedule a demo with the founder earlier in their journey. He cancelled 3+ times, completely missed one meeting and eventually routed me to a webinar

 

[tpop123]

@truefiction1 Had a similar experience. Wanted to meet him but didn't even get a response.

 

[grounded]

@truefiction1 Bummer, they could have just turned you down directly. For b2b sales, especially early on, a lot of the work is in qualifying inbound leads and onboarding the right customers first - i.e. the ones that are willing to pay the most / use it the most / less likely to churn. I’d imagine that was the case here but they could have just told you rather than string you along.

 

[revena]

@grounded Wow... Great to hear! How do they know who is willing to pay or not?

Never heard of such great sales team turning down a potential business client. As a founder, I always receive a great and warming response from everyone business offering their service to my startup. At times, I wasted their time not deliberately.

In my opinion, if any founder felt someone filtering them out, they would never be their client in coming ten decades or so. And any founder who has followed this thread on their startup will avoid Ava completely.. At least I definitely would.

But yc startups have some special way to b2b sales? They pre determine which clients to filter out using some way?

Very curious to learn more on this approach.. would you be able to convey to yc team to make some new startup lectures on this new sales approach to rejecting incoming clients?

 

[shstrang98]

@truefiction1 How did Ava the BDR miss this mql

 

[martinezomar98]

@shstrang98 ikr, he has at least $20k arr

 

[marno]

@urbanredneck This is the absolute dumbest shit.

Epitome of wrapper hype.

 

[chanchunming]

@marno It really is...

 

[njones36159]

@marno Indeed. Looks like they're trying to get chatGPT to spam customers.

Ava currently automates 80 per cent of a Business Development Representative’s (BDR) role, for example, replacing 10s of outbound sales tools into a single, consolidated platform.

Here's my startup idea: hire smart or at least competent sales people to just fucking e-mail and meet with potential customers and do their homework. Sales is hard. Replacing 80% of a salesperson's role is like replacing 80% of a pilot's role. It's maybe the first 10% and the last 10% that you're hiring either for. A monkey can send follow-up e-mails and hold the plane steady. Probably simultaneously. And a monkey won't lock up your leads lists and then disappear like Artisan might.

Far more than 80% of the e-mails you send in a BD role go straight to trash anyway. I guess it could be more efficient if Artisan just sends it straight to potential client's spambox.

 

[kylels]

@njones36159 1) Hiring competent salespeople isn't easy

2) Cold emailing, message testing, medium testing, cold calling, scripting, account research, proper list building isn't easy and then you also have to combine this with the fact that the seller is also supposed to be selling, creating contracts, etc

There is a huge use case to help automate this all.

There are tools that automate parts of it, but none of it is connected into one tool.

 

[yadav123]

@kylels As a solopreneur spending considerable time doing this stuff manually I would like to have some way to automate some of the stuff so I can focus on my customers.

 

[goaztecs]

@marno Why do they invest in wrappers instead of foundational models?