180 VCs rejected him—then a $60K billboard got him to $2M ARR in 4 months. | Isaiah Granet, CEO of Bland AI

Isaiah Granet (00:00:00) :
And we got to the end decision. It's been five meetings with them. We're like, okay, they're going to buy and this was for a $100K contract. Which for us at the time was massive and we get to this final meeting. We're expecting a signature from them and it becomes apparently clear by the end, they don't actually know what we do. And that's when you see, you know, a16z invest in Sequoia, and all my friends in the batch were getting these great offers, and we had nothing. The total amount was roughly one hundred eighty investors over three weeks I met with, and I got more or less all of them saying no. And their number one piece of feedback was, we don't think people will be doing phone calls a year from now. They're not even saying, oh, we don't think you'll win. They're saying the market you're building for won't exist a year from today, and so we ended up spending about a quarter of our total runway to put up these billboards that had a phone number on it and said really simply, "Still hiring humans?" And that billboard video ended up getting now, I think now, close to a billion impressions across social channels. Today, that number that we put up still gets about three hundred-ish phone calls a day, and we ended up flooding ourselves with meetings. We got to $2 million of revenue by the end of April. We raised our Series A from Scale Venture Partners in June, and then immediately afterwards, we turned around and we fired fifty percent of our customers. Our average contract value is in the six figures. Our biggest contract value is in the seven figures, soon to be in the eight figures.

Previous Guests (00:01:26) :
That's product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I called it the product market fit question. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I mean, the name of the show is Product Market Fit.

Pablo Srugo (00:01:39) :
Do you think the Product Market Fit show, has product market fit? Because if you do, then there's something you just have to do. You have to take out your phone. You have to leave the show five stars. It lets us reach more founders, and it lets us get better guests, thank you. Isaiah, welcome to the show, man.

Isaiah Granet (00:01:54) :
Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Pablo Srugo (00:01:56) :
So you've got this company, Bland AI. You've raised over $15 million, just did a Series B. $40 million Series B not too long ago, and as I understand it. You're doing AI for human call centers, which many people are doing but you are handling very long, like forty-five minute plus calls for companies like JPMorgan Chase. Some of these are life and death type of calls. As I understand, we'll get into that. You were telling me about the moment where you felt you were really onto something, you felt maybe this is true product market fit. You're kind of operating in this call center and there's this typhoon hits, and then what happens? I mean, take me to kind of that scene.

Isaiah Granet (00:02:34) :
Yeah, what I always talk about with Bland is, you'll hear a lot of companies that do FAQs or what we call is phone trees that argue back to you. Our mission at Bland is we want to do the most complicated, urgent, difficult phone calls, and we had been working with this really big enterprise in the United States. Someone that most Americans would be deeply familiar with and we were basically handling a lot of their calls on the less complicated stuff as we worked our way into the more complicated stuff. And we had built all of this sort of release schedule, you know, over six months we were going to slowly handle calls where there were other things going wrong and edge cases, and other pieces. And basically one night I go to sleep, I wake up the next morning, and I've got five hundred messages from this company. They're blowing up me and their team, and they're like, I'm like, what's gone wrong? Has someone died? Has our AI gone off the grid and taken over? And no, what it had turned out was basically this big enterprise contracted a call center in the Philippines. Actually a very, very large one, and a typhoon had hit. And so basically, they decided without telling anybody to switch all of the traffic to us, to Bland. So that our AI could handle the calls with basically zero testing at that scale or the complexity and not only did we handle it. We handled it with higher resolution rate than the humans, with zero wait time, and better CSAT. So we basically, sort of in that moment, were able to go, hey, we think this is the first instance where AI has fully essentially replaced a call center. I mean, not only did we replace it, we didn't build an experience that people hate. We built something that people liked more than the current experience and that was, for me, the most rewarding possible moment of, wow, not only is this technology here, it's possible but it's possible to do this in a way that people actually enjoy.

Pablo Srugo (00:04:22) :
Tell me more, without necessarily talking about this particular enterprise but just so it really clicks. What is happening in these calls? Partially, why are they so long? And maybe in that specific case, there's the part where it's just you're talking and I can understand how voice AI could do that maybe even better than a human with empathy and fast response, and whatever. But what about the action part? How much action is there to the things they have to do? That's where things typically trip up.

Isaiah Granet (00:04:46) :
Yeah, that's a great question. So what's actually going on in these calls? It's really varied, and we kind of particularly play in financial services and health care, where it's really urgent. So my favorite example of a difficult call with you is a remote patient monitoring call. So this is where we call somebody, they might be ninety years old. We're walking them through putting on a blood pressure cuff, we're helping them troubleshoot that blood pressure cuff, take their reading, find it if they need to find it, plug it in, all while hearing about their grandkids, their life, any other symptoms they're having, and then taking the reading. And remember, this is on the phone, so there's no visual cue. We're taking the reading, and then we have to say, "Well, hey, they just told us a crazy number, like one hundred ninety over seventy." Are they having a hypertensive crisis, or did they put the blood pressure cuff on wrong? And how do we actually know the difference between calling an ambulance to that person's house and saying, hey, you mind just sliding it a little further up your arm or down your arm and trying that again? And these are the calls where if we don't do them, we don't do them right. It could be life or death. Similarly, we've done polls of countries where there has been recent serious unrest and we're asking questions like, are you happy with your government? And when we do these surveys, you can imagine if we were to leak the results of this, then people would be at serious risk, life and death. Those are the calls that we're talking about playing with and we don't use OpenAI, Anthropic, anybody else. So we're entirely built from the ground up. What that lets us do is be super secure and scalable. It also lets us integrate with systems really tightly. So we're reading and writing from your database, from your CRM. We're actually taking action on your behalf.

Pablo Srugo (00:06:22) :
But you don't use like Vapi or LiveKit or any of these things?

Isaiah Granet (00:06:25) :
No, no, we were pre-Vapi and LiveKit. Thank you very much. Yes, we are built entirely from the ground up, and that means trust also. Because there's only one provider that can go wrong, and that's us. We also don't have anyone to point the finger at, but that's why, you know, in the future, something that we want to handle is 911 calls. We want to be the first line of where you call, and we want to have that trust. And it's not just about the actions on the call, it's actually also about, on the call, we're learning live how you speak, and we're adjusting our AI speaking patterns to you using machine learning. Not just an LLM saying, what is he saying? We're actually learning from your audio patterns and figuring out how to deliver a better conversation.

Pablo Srugo (00:07:05) :
By the way, is that just a function of the fact that you started early, or would you recommend that to a voice AI company starting now?

Isaiah Granet (00:07:12) :
A voice AI company starting now should build on top of Bland but if not, I would say I would not recommend it. It was a really difficult decision.

Pablo Srugo (00:07:19) :
So you can be a piece of infrastructure, like you're not necessarily the end to end app.
Silent Enterprises people can build on Bland.

Isaiah Granet (00:07:24) :
Yeah, we have over three hundred and fifty thousand developers who are using Bland today, in addition to our a hundred and seventy plus enterprises. We do about three and a half million phone calls a week. By phone numbers, we know roughly one in four Americans has talked to Bland.

Isaiah Granet (00:07:37) :
Is there an element of you feeling you're running two separate businesses? Because I can understand the infrastructure pace, like, ElevenLabs or whatever. And then, actually getting enterprise and the whole enterprise sales process like there's two different worlds.

Isaiah Granet  (00:07:45) :
What’s interesting is that we don’t think about it like that. We don’t separate infrastructure and application, and enterprise. What we really think about is we’re building phone calls, and we’re building the world’s best phone calls. And we want to make that accessible to anybody. And what the big enterprises need to be successful is a lot more handholding, a lot more in the weeds, getting direct with them, forward-deployed motion. Sort of figuring out how does this fit into the bigger picture. But that same technology can be used by anybody, really. Our job is to say, we know what a good phone call sounds like, and we refuse to allow the world to have phone trees that argue back with them. And so my short answer is, the product we build has nothing to do with the infrastructure, it has nothing to do with our application, it has everything to do with the actual call. And our real customer is the person on the other side of the phone.

Pablo Srugo (00:08:37) :
But then do you compete in some cases with a LiveKit or a Vapi, or an ElevenLabs, or do you take a different second to the market?

Isaiah Granet (00:08:43) :
For the most part, we really just focus on enterprise. That's the bulk of our business. That's ninety-seven percent of our business comes from enterprise and so LiveKit and Vapi have built really wonderful platforms for other people for different use cases. And, where you're going to find developers and self-serve users love us is embedding voice AI. So maybe there actually are already existing platforms, if you care about building and protecting IP. So we allow users to fine-tune the underlying models that we built, so that they can have actual intellectual property for their voice AI, and then the security reliability piece. You might end up going with LiveKit or Vapi if you're experimenting, if you're further down the stack as a solo developer, or you're a new startup just working on voice AI and you don't have any security or auth requirements yet.

Pablo Srugo (00:09:28) :
And then just to finish off that story, once they rely on you for all of the calls and you've got crazy volume going through your system. What kind of contract sizes does that lead to with that enterprise? Is that a $100K contract? Is that like a million dollar contract? What level of enterprise are we talking about generally?

Isaiah Granet (00:09:44) :
Good question. So our average contract value is in the six figures. Our biggest contract value is in the seven figures, soon to be in the eight figures and the craziest thing I like to talk about is most of our biggest contracts are actually with companies you would never have heard of. And what I mean by that is we work with some of the world’s biggest names. Fortune 10 businesses who are using us at scale, and they pay us a lot of money. Don’t get me wrong but the really, really big customers we have right now, the early adopters, are these businesses that are under a billion dollars of market cap. They’re generally making $100 to $300 million a year of revenue, and they spend $60 to $100 million a year on their call center. Those are the businesses who we go after and we win, and they’re willing to pay us money that never has ever been available to a software company before.

Pablo Srugo (00:10:30) :
Wouldn't the bigger, like the JP Morgan have an even bigger call center to that? Or is there a reason why these ones have the bigger spend?

Isaiah Granet (00:10:36) :
Combined today, our current customers spend about $15 billion a year on their call center. That's just our existing part. It's a trillion dollar a year market across the globe. It is one of the most massive markets you can imagine. What I try to tell people is the call center has already been whittled down to what the minimum it can be. There's phone trees, there's hold times, there's outsourcing. If you get to a person in the United States, it's because that is it. You have found the backstop of, there's no other way to help you. There's no other way besides talking to a person in that moment and so what we focus on is these big enterprises are great and we're going to continue to work with them and deliver. But their pace of adoption is just a little bit slower and their appetite for risk is lower. What they want to see is a little bit more maturity in the AI market. We're already delivering what I would call risky calls at scale for enterprises, but they don't need to have this as a core pillar of their business. Because the fraction of their business that is call center spend is much smaller than a business making $50 million a year spending $70 million on their call center.

Pablo Srugo (00:11:33) :
It's that classic hair on fire. I mean, if thirty percent of your revenue is going to a call center, you're gonna act quick to get rid of that.

Isaiah Granet (00:11:40) :
It's a big deal if we can automate that, yeah.

Pablo Srugo (00:11:43) :
So that's kind of where you end up, right?Where you are today, but you started with, like, you applied, you went through YC with a completely different business. What was the original idea?

Isaiah Granet (00:11:52) :
You know, it's funny because no founder thinks that the pivot is going to happen to them. When they get started, they're like, this is it and I look back and I was so naive. We were helping doctors write appeals for insurance denials. This was a totally unrelated company. I had no business building and because it was a bad idea, we got into YC. After all bad ideas eventually end up, and about three quarters of the way through YC, for any founder, by the way, that's going through this. Just keep your head up because I remember how crushing it was. Three quarters of the way through YC, we were working on the only deal we had figured out, it was with this ten chain clinic group, and we thought they were going to use us to automate their insurance denial appeals. And we got to the end decision, it's been five meetings with them. We're like, okay, they're going to buy, and this was for a $100K contract. Which for us at the time was massive and we get to this final meeting. We're expecting a signature from them, and it becomes apparently clear by the end they don't actually know what we do. They thought we were some sort of fax automation software and so we decided, all right, we have to pivot. And we ended up coming into Bland just by exploring ideas that were exciting to us. And, it was just amazing to hear a call in the wild and somebody interact with it. When we came out of Demo Day at YC. For anyone not familiar, Demo Day is when you pitch to all these investors and you show your idea off. And that's when you see a16z invest in Sequoia, and all my friends in the batch were getting these great offers, and we had nothing. We were the bottom ten percent of the batch. The total amount was roughly one hundred eighty investors over three weeks I met with, and I got more or less all of them saying no. And their number one piece of feedback, which was soul-crushing. Was, we don't think people will be doing phone calls a year from now. This was in 2023, and so we sort of were in this perspective where it was like, they're not even saying, oh, we don't think you'll win. They're saying the market you're building for won't exist a year from today.

Pablo Srugo (00:13:45) :
Okay, so let me just unwrap it. What did they think people would do? I mean, what do you mean no phone calls?

Isaiah Granet (00:13:51) :
All text-based.

Pablo Srugo (00:13:52) :
Is that because voice AI was so primitive, people didn't think you would get there? Or, what was driving that?

Isaiah Granet (00:13:57) :
Everybody thought voice AI was this far-out concept that would never become reality, and what they said was, and I point to this as a piece of evidence for the future. The investors believed that phone calls were a bad experience fundamentally. Not that it was just today it was bad. They believed nobody actually liked phone calls, and this was a symptom of them being, one, investors in a high-tech world like San Francisco. They don't pick up the phone very often, but two, it was this idea that it could never be better than what it is today and what we believe fundamentally is that the number of phone calls that happen will actually grow exponentially. Because it will become so painless and pleasant that you'll actually prefer picking up the phone. Because it will be the quickest path to resolution.

Pablo Srugo (00:14:42) :
But this, by the way as a tangent, and as a founder, is such a good indication of why being close to the customers is really the only thing that matters. We'll get into that, but I mean, things can go from the absolute least hot to the absolute hottest in twelve months. In 2023, you're saying there's the classic Bay Area VC is telling you voice is not a thing and nobody wants phone calls. And one year later, you go to those same people and they're like, voice AI is the absolute hottest thing in the world.

Isaiah Granet (00:15:11) :
Yeah, it flipped literally the same investors. I have a packet of all the emails, I keep them of the rejections. This investor is going, this is going to be such a hot market. How are you going to win in it? 

Pablo Srugo (00:15:23) :
No, no, no, no. You can't make this stuff up, man. You can't make this stuff up. 

Isaiah Granet (00:15:26) :
I'll pause here, but just an idea of how disregarded we were. I had an investor who got up to cook breakfast while I was talking to him. I had someone go camera off and just start going on a walk. They went in their elevator. They weren't even listening to the pitch. We really were at the bottom, and then in 2024, we went from pre-seed to Series B in ten months. And we had this whole breakout moment. And that's why you just have to keep pushing forward.

Pablo Srugo (00:15:51) :
Walk me through in detail how you found this idea for Bland? Going through the pivot, you said it really well. Everybody hopes they won't have to go through it, and almost everybody does go through it. And the ones that don't, it's almost like the story is boring. Because it's like, I did this thing and it worked, and now I'm doing. You're like, okay, I got no learnings here. So pivots are very common. But I think I find at a high level, everybody knows, yeah, okay, start from first principles, you know, what do you do, talk to customers, blah, blah, blah. But then you go to do it and it's just so much harder than that.

Isaiah Granet (00:16:21) :
The first thing I give advice on, on pivots is it's time to pivot when you notice a couple of things. The first is, if you're no longer excited by the problem at all, pivot sooner rather than later. Sort of the advice of don't have kids if you're not sure about getting married. You know, you want to make sure that you actually are excited by the problem. The second is, is make sure that the problem you see is a problem people will pay to solve and this is really, really important. Some people like, you know, Figma, for example, can have extreme conviction that just the world will need design software and it was a brilliant vision to understand where we were going. But for the most part, what I see people make mistakes on is they say, well, I know my mom spends X, Y, Z time every day doing certain activity and this is a really painful problem, and I can solve that. It's like, great, but would your mom actually pay to solve that? And starting by leading with the money. And if we had asked deeper questions early on and said, will you pay for this? How much will you pay for this? How much will you pay to solve this problem? We would have discovered that this wasn't actually a problem people will pay to solve and that just means, unfortunately, for the time being. It's a problem that probably you can't build a business around. So start by figuring out where the money is and then when you do go into the pivot, I've seen a lot of friends have this happen. It happened to us, as I say, it's like, expect it to suck. It is going to be probably the worst, darkest days of your startup. You are going to have no direction, which for founders typically is one of the most brutal things you can experience. Because you're used to go, go, go, and your whole job is to find a problem that gets you excited and don't pick the first thing that stands out to you. Pick something that you're excited by, that you feel you have a unique advantage in, and that you can sprint at in a way that's tangible. And for us, that was two weeks of wandering and, are we gonna build software to prevent concussions? That was a very real idea that we got close to. Are we gonna build better software for getting Ubers and Lyfts? Thankfully, we didn't do that, because Waymo came out relatively soon after. We looked at all these ideas, and the reason why we ended up going with Bland was I was tinkering around. I guess the very real story is I didn't want to call to order food from this place that was on the street I lived on, and I was like, I bet you I can have OpenAI call it with ElevenLabs and Twilio. And, I was tinkering around and I managed to get a prototype to work. And I just had a blast. I spent like twelve hours working on it and I didn't even care.

Pablo Srugo (00:18:43) :
Twelve hours to now make a two minute phone call, but it got your business.

Isaiah Granet (00:18:47) :
Yeah, exactly. Terrible phone call by the way. It fell apart, it didn't work. But there was something about that magic and then understanding is like inherently it had value. Because if we could do these calls, if I got value out of it, then other people can get value out of it and then it turned into, well, then maybe developers, maybe businesses down, yeah.

Pablo Srugo (00:19:05) :
And then how did you think about. So you're using ElevenLabs in that thing, then you decide not to, how do you make that decision?

Isaiah Granet (00:19:10) :
So post Demo Day, we are really beat down. We don't have a whole lot of money in the bank and, me and my co-founder basically are like, all right, it's time to make this thing work. We had a plan to move back into my co-founder's mom's garage in San Jose. Because we couldn't afford rent anymore and what we said was, we are not the research guys. And this was before OpenAI Realtime, before anybody came out with anything. We said, we're not the research guys. We're not going to build the best voice AI on earth, but we probably can build the best enterprise version of it. And enterprises are going to want the same things they want today, five years from now. Security, reliability, uptime, all of those core pieces and so, we're going to pull out OpenAI, Anthropic, and everybody. And just bet on this idea that if we focus on building all the core pieces in-house, we can deliver better phone calls, but we can also deliver something that Microsoft, Apple. I don't know why those were our ideal companies at the time, but those were the companies that we thought would want to buy our software if we were enterprise-oriented and so we quite literally. A shout out to Base10, our GPU provider, we put down a commitment for GPUs that was more money than we had in the bank at the time. And we bet the whole business on doing this whole going in-house. And it was a really tough decision at the time.

Pablo Srugo (00:20:26) :
How do you compete with ElevenLabs? ElevenLabs is still big at that point and build your own voice AI from scratch.

Isaiah Granet (00:20:32) :
Yeah, the CTO of ElevenLabs is an investor and a friend, and I think they built an awesome product. But our job wasn't to build the best text-to-speech engine, it was to build the best engine for enterprises and we weren't focused on out-competing ElevenLabs, and we still aren't. We were focused on delivering the best possible phone calls for everybody, and so for us. What that let us do is narrow in focus and what you have to realize is early days, the distractions are so many. Your only job is to focus, focus, focus, and what people are always amazed by is not what two people can accomplish, it's what two people with focus can accomplish. And so for a founder, you should be saying no to ninety-nine point nine percent of things. That's really your job, and the zero point one percent of things that you say yes to should be your entire all-consuming life.

Pablo Srugo (00:21:22) :
How long did you have to go heads down just until you got a phone call that sounded real?

Isaiah Granet (00:21:27) :
Probably a year and a half. So if we started, it became Bland in July of 2023, give or take, rebranded. It wasn't until around October of 2024 that I said, wow, I think we just delivered a very real-sounding phone call.

Pablo Srugo (00:21:42) :
Did you raise in between or how did you make that work?

Isaiah Granet (00:21:46) :
So the first problem that we identified, and this is another key part of the focus. Was we identified that this issue of latency. Which is how long does the AI take to reply to you on a phone call, was massive. It was about five seconds for us at the time in 2023. So that was from, you know, you finish talking, AI replies, five seconds and we managed to get it down to three seconds. Which was considered the fastest in the world at the time and our bet was, hey, if we can get it down to 400 milliseconds, it won't make us the best enterprise product. But it gives us an edge and a spike that we can use to drive into enterprises. And so we basically figured out how to get it down to 400 milliseconds. We did this really cool video of me talking to a phone while it's laying on the table and you can see how fast it replies. And then that ended up going mega viral. And we managed to get about $100 thousand of revenue off that ARR in January of 2024. We raised a seed round on the back of that from Upfront Ventures.

Pablo Srugo (00:22:41) :
Because the VCs already, now they like voice AI at this point.

Isaiah Granet (00:22:44) :
Yeah, I hope Upfront doesn't listen to this. But if they do, I've given them a hard enough time. They passed on us and they had to pay about double the price in January. And we went from $100K to $500K in February, and then $500K to a million in March. And at the end of March, we had about $3 million-ish in the bank. And we decided that we were going to do a really big billboard campaign. Everybody's seen the AI billboards today. There were not AI billboards early 2024, and what we did was we put up a phone number on a billboard. And the whole theory was like, you know, physical marketing can be really effective, especially in a digital world. Nobody puts phone numbers on billboards besides for Jesus or rehab and if we did it right, we could get it to go really viral. And so we ended up spending about a quarter of our total runway to put up these billboards that had a phone number on it and said really simply, still hiring humans? And that billboard video ended up getting now, I think, close to a billion impressions across social channels. Today, that number that we put up still gets about three hundred-ish phone calls a day and we ended up flooding ourselves with meetings. We got to $2 million of revenue by the end of April. We raised our Series A from Scale Venture Partners in June. And then immediately afterwards, we turned around and we fired fifty percent of our customers. And we dropped down to sub a million dollars of revenue, which is a whole other story. But to answer, is momentum carried us so far early 2024.

Pablo Srugo (00:24:11) :
So let's go. I mean, there's a bunch of key moments there that I think are really important. The first one is the January moment where you put out a video and it goes viral. Now you've had time to reflect. Everybody wants to go viral with a launch demo, like everybody, right? And now, it's super polished and there's all these things. First of all, did you engineer it or was it pure luck? What do you think you got right, thinking back to that moment? Because that was the on switch, right? After that, you started to do more of it.

Isaiah Granet (00:24:36) :
Yeah, that's a phenomenal question. My short answer is, is if you're praying for virality, it won't happen. You have to understand the first thing about marketing is that you are never just getting attention. What you're actually doing is you're trading. You have to offer some value in return and for us, there was a lot of thought that went into this whole campaign. So the first video, we shot it on Christmas. It was all through Christmas Eve. My poor head of marketing, who was our third hire, was filming it and we went back and forth seven times. And the video, the whole thing that we wanted to do and we focused on was show the latency. And we did it with a little bit of controversy. And you always have to have a little bit of controversy. So we showed the latency, and then we made the call about politics. So we made the call a political survey phone call, specifically to get people engaged about the content and the idea that we were pushing. And we did it very Casey Neistat style, if anyone's familiar. So at the time, 2023 was sort of tail end of a lot of popularity, very plain background. Here's a phone, here's a timer, here's the content that's being said overlaid digitally, and then we put it up, and basically we paid influencers. Which was also not as common in software at the time, to go do reposts of that, and we ended up having it catch and go viral. We did have a lot of tailwinds at the time. Voice AI was so novel and new that just the idea that you could talk to it was so unique for people. And we focused on this idea of it's not a fake demo. This is real, it's here, you can try it.

Pablo Srugo (00:26:07) :
I'm going to ask you for a small favor, a tiny little favor. In fact, it's not even now that I think about it. It's not even really a favor for me. I'm actually trying to help you do a favor for you. Just hit the follow button. You won't miss out on the next episode. You'll see everything that we release. If you don't want to listen to an episode, you just skip it. But at least you don't miss out. So I, you know, there's a few things to point out there. First of all, you have to, I think people miss this. You almost have to latch on to some tailwind that's bigger than you, right? Voice AI is becoming a thing. People are already interested. They're already in that mindshare. You're not taking them to somewhere else. That's huge just from a starting point and then you add in the way that you shot it, right? Where you're copying something that's working. I know, I don't use TikTok all that much, but my understanding is there are these kind of songs that go viral, right? And if you latch onto that song, your odds of going viral with a video go up. It's kind of the same idea. If there's a format that's kind of working right now, you latch onto that. You're just layering odds of virality on the cake and then the third piece. I mean, the influencer one is the obvious one, right? But, a lot of people, I think, jump to that. It's like, let's just get a bunch of people to reshare this video about something that nobody really cares about in a format that's not that interesting. It's not going to happen. You can't just push your way to virality.

Isaiah Granet (00:27:18) :
Right, and that's the last piece there that you said is probably where on the next campaign we really got it perfect. Which is you should be, for any post that you give to an influencer, a target for your marketing team should be, will this go more viral than their typical post? And what you see for a lot of influencer reposts is it's this artificial boosting. It's not this exponential growth, and what we saw from especially our early campaigns was some people would get followers based off of the fact that they had posted our content. And there's some well known influencers who I won't say their names, but you can go back and look at their reposts and their timing. Our post put them partially on the map because it went so viral, they ended up getting like five thousand or seven thousand additional followers from it.

Pablo Srugo (00:28:01) :
So that first one, when you say it went really viral. What are we talking about in terms of views, as an example?

Isaiah Granet (00:28:07) :
I think it was around one hundred million views across all social channels. 

Pablo Srugo (00:28:11) :
That gets you $100k in revenue? 

Isaiah Granet (00:28:13) :
That got us $100k ARR. Look, the product wasn't great back then, I'm not gonna lie to you. We had a lot of work to do and we didn't know who we were selling to. We didn't have any credibility, which is a whole other issue and story. But yeah, the one hundred million views turned into this flood of inbound that we didn't know how to capitalize on and by the seat of our pants, we managed to capture $100k of revenue from that.

Pablo Srugo (00:28:35) :
But you saw firsthand, you experienced the power of virality, which I think then leads into this billboard campaign. So now let's go deep on this billboard campaign, which gets you the next, let's say million in ARR. The idea is clear, let's put billboards that are controversial. Offline is not that done, at least back then. So it's a little novel and people will call the number, but that's the really high level. How do you actually execute it?

Isaiah Granet (00:28:55) :
So a key for any social media campaign that you want to be effective is you will have to have a way to engage with it. For the first video, what that was, was there was actually a way you could go to our website, talk to it, and people could post videos. And say, how great it was and, this and that. And what we realized was, well, we have an amazing tool at our disposal. We have a phone number you can just call and when you call it, you can just experience our voice AI. And so we said, all right, how do we get the word out about this? And for us, part of that is you have to invest in order to make someone realize that it's worth their attention. Part of what you're doing with physical advertising is saying, this is so important to me, I'm going to take up a little bit of your world to try and get some attention. And you want to be thinking about, what am I giving back? And putting the phone number on the billboard is this really clear CTA. It's very interesting and then you throw in this sort of controversy. And what I always say is, any time that you're trying to be controversial, you want to walk the line. Which is you want to get people riled up without being furious. Fury is a very tough emotion to handle, but riled up is posting, engaging and what we posed the question was still hiring humans. And we didn't say stop hiring humans like I said. We didn't try and go and say humans are worse than AI. We don't believe that. What we just said was, here's a question, and then here's a phone number posing that question. Why is there a phone number there? And what most people don't know is we only bought two billboards. It was one around the corner from our office and one somewhere else in San Francisco.

Pablo Srugo (00:30:24) :
By the way, how much is a billboard? What does that cost?

Isaiah Granet (00:30:27) :
So the one by our office was $40,000 and then the one somewhere else in San Francisco is $20,000 for a month.

Pablo Srugo (00:30:33) :
Okay, so accessible to most seed stage startups.

Isaiah Granet (00:30:36) :
Correct, I would advise, you know, only do it if you have something to say, but it was accessible enough. Although we got a lot of flack from our investors. Are you serious? Are you doing a billboard at seed stage? This is like, a little early and I said, you know what, just trust us and I don't think they did trust us but we did it anyways. Our whole bet here was, what if we made this go really viral? And so as soon as they went up, we went out with an iPhone and we shot this video from the street. And we did some captions, and overlays to make it look like a TikTok video. And then we set up this gigantic influencer campaign where we posted it, then we had a few newsletters go out about it, and then we had this big spread of influencers, and then it just caught fire. I mean, in truly a remarkable way, we at our peak were fielding like seventy thousand phone calls a day to this number. It was insane. The numbers that we were talking about at the time, we didn't hit that until much later into 2025. The scale of individual people calling in my in this manner and at the time it was a very, very big deal, and it got this huge wave of business that we had no idea how to handle. I look back and I love this campaign we spent in total about $400,000 on it. It was amazing put us on the map but we also had no sales reps, we had no HubSpot, we had no sales. We had zero way to capture, quite literally, three months of funnel. Three months of back to back to back to back to back meetings that we got out of this. We had no way to capture it.

Pablo Srugo (00:32:08) :
Let’s dig into a few pieces. The first one, just in terms of channels, first of all, how many views are we talking in cumulative there? It’s got to be a billion. If the other one was a hundred million, what are we thinking about?

Isaiah Granet (00:32:17) :
Yeah, about a billion.

Pablo Srugo (00:32:18) :
So let's say it was a billion views. What’s that split? Is it TikTok, IG, and then everything else is noise? Or how does that play out typically?

Isaiah Granet (00:32:26) :
So the majority of views came long tail on Instagram, which was just not helpful for us. We don't get a lot of value out of those and then what we found was Twitter and LinkedIn were the most helpful channels by far. I think Twitter is such a powerful channel and it's underutilized by most people right now.

Pablo Srugo (00:32:41) :
And then walk me through a little more in detail the influencer campaign. I think everybody's familiar with influencer marketing, makes a lot of sense. But how do you make it work? Because you could spend a lot of bad money. That's very ineffective, and you're like, oh, this person got all these followers. Look at their views on their last post, and they post your thing, and it's nothing. And they move on to the next video, and you just. It just wastes $5k or $10k or whatever it is.

Isaiah Granet (00:33:02) :
Yeah, first of all, always negotiate upfront with influencers. So we have a whole guide on how we do this. Which is you're building a relationship in the long run, and you want to make sure that you're working with people that are high integrity, that you negotiate clearly upfront, you set boundaries. But then you also need to be writing the copy and the content for them. Making sure that they're hitting on the pieces that you want. For us, that was, holy smokes, this AI startup is asking, why are you still hiring humans, and creating a conversation in their comment section. And then also making sure that you time it correctly. You want to be perfectly timed between East Coast and West Coast in the United States. And then as the day goes on, you need to understand how the algorithms work for where they're going to try and catch viral content. So X is really interesting. Right now, what we see is the posts that pick up, it's usually about seven to eight hours after the post. So it's actually quite long and what you need to make sure is that you talk the influencers well to that. And then what we do is we actually have European influencers who overnight are posting to keep the view count climbing. And so for mega virality, I could spend an hour alone just talking about how we do it. The short answer is intentionality actually matters. If you find yourself just paying people and not saying, who is watching this? What are they talking about? When are they going to see it? You're not going to have a successful campaign. You're just going to burn cash.

Pablo Srugo (00:34:20) :
These days, where are you finding these influencers?

Isaiah Granet (00:34:22) :
Oh, that's a good question. I actually source them manually for the most part, and we pretty much work with micro-influencers to start with. So we try and find people with under fifty thousand followers.

Pablo Srugo (00:34:32) :
And you're doing it across channels but you're saying LinkedIn and Twitter are actually the best place to have people with ten thousand, let's say, followers on Twitter, as an example. That's a good one?

Isaiah Granet (00:34:40) :
Exactly, yeah.

Pablo Srugo (00:34:41) :
So this fuels you to a few million ARR, and then the other move that you made at one point. Which was quite wild, is you, as I understand it, fired half your customers.

Isaiah Granet (00:34:49) :
Yes, this is an unpopular decision to do immediately after you raise $20 million. But what we realized was it is easy in the AI era to rack up old sounding numbers of ARR. But if you want to build an enduring business, you have to sell to the right people and what we realized was we had, you know, this $1 million of revenue that we caught that was just going to ask for things that we didn't want to build. They were white labelers. They were resellers. They were building agencies, perfectly fine businesses, by the way, just not what we wanted to build and they wanted, all of this tooling and technology that we didn't want to create. And I would say that even the three months that we were serving them from January to, you know, April caused probably about a year's worth of damage on our product roadmap of things that we had to support, that we had to undo, tech debt. I mean, we were late to fire these customers and my best advice, again, to founders is focus, focus, focus. If you find yourself constantly dealing with people that aren't your core customer to maintain an ARR metric, understand the debt comes due someday and it might be the right decision to hold on to them early stage. Sometimes you do have to show momentum and ability to sell for fundraising, but sooner or later it will come that you have to deal with that.

Pablo Srugo (00:36:04) :
You know, the only kind of pushback I have, or not really pushback. It's just more I want to go deeper on, is at the earliest stages. When you only have, you're trying to build a multi-hundred million dollar a year business, and you have this idea of the thing that's going to get you there, and you have a certain amount of customers. And let's say you have a few million in ARR, and then something else happens on the side. I would argue, just like you did, if that thing is taking you away, and the only reason you're doing it is to inflate metrics or fundraise, don't do it. But how do you know that that's actually not maybe the thing? And it actually turns out you should have done it. Because actually you were more limited here and you're in a better position there, and you just ignored the market at the wrong time.

Isaiah Granet (00:36:41) :
Great question. I wish I had a catch all answer for you. Because maybe it turns out that the Bland actually would have been the biggest agency white label or platform in the world and we would be five times the size we are if we stuck with it. You can't know that, but the reason we made this decision was ultimately we didn't believe that value would accrue for those people. Because when we talked to them about what they were doing, it was all unrealized value. Meaning they were hoping to use Bland to build their business and that meant that the value that they could achieve was very, very high theoretically, but in reality, there was no tangible way to understand that. And so what we did is we said, we're going to follow the pain. These business owners don't have pain, they have hope and I know that sounds weird, right? You want to be with hopeful people, yes, but where you build a great business is by figuring out where when you press, does it hurt.

Pablo Srugo (00:37:29) :
I actually think it's on the mark, you got to go to first principles and first principles always is like solve this hair on fire problem, right? And that actually, I've seen this happen where you're solving, let's say, hair on fire problem. You know what often happens when it's tough is you're doing these $10k to $20k ACVs, probably not your case. But you're doing these $10k to $20k ACVs and it's solid, and it makes sense, and you're solving a real problem. And then you've got this enterprise that comes here and it's like, I'll give you $200k if you do this other thing. And you're like, $200k, that's twenty of my normal customers. But when you dig into it, the key question is it's not like never do that. It's just like, compare the pain, right? I like that phrase, but compare the pain of that $200k for them to the pain is $220k. If you feel like, yeah, this is a real pain for them, and if I solve it for them. I'll not only make $200k, but I'll open up this enterprise piece of a lot of other customers with big pain, do it. If you're like, I don't even really get why they want it, but it's $200k, you know, probably don't do it. Keep doing the thing you're doing.

Isaiah Granet (00:38:23) :
Yeah, I think follow the pain, follow where hair is on fire. Make sure that you're asking the hard questions about where does value accrue and I think you're actually a hundred percent right. Which is most people have the inverse problem. Which is an enterprise comes to them and waves a ton of money in their face to say, well, what if you go build all this and do our security reviews. And do the rest of it? Most people should say no to that.

Pablo Srugo (00:38:43) :
So we spoke quite a bit about griddle marketing. The other playbook that you're running is enterprise sales playbook. Let's go deep on that. I mean, you're doing different things. You're going deep on the org chart. You're sending newsletters to your customers, which I don't really understand. I'm curious to see how that works. So maybe tell me a little bit about that enterprise side of it and maybe how you did it early. But really, now that you've developed it, what is that playbook today that other founders could copy?

Isaiah Granet (00:39:10) :
It's a great question. Selling to the enterprise as a founder is really difficult because most people, especially that are listening to this podcast that are founders are going to be in go, go, go mode. All you want to do is constantly be moving, constantly be active, trying to make sure that you're following and saying, hey, how do I get to where I need to go next the fastest? And enterprise sales is just a marathon. It is a lot of time spent building relationships, following up, following through. And it's all about building momentum. And the thing I tell people is, first and foremost with an enterprise deal. Don't try and shoehorn it in if it doesn't make sense. So if you have a low level person at the enterprise with no buying power who just kind of likes your product. Don't believe that that's a real lead. Ask yourself in your gut, will they ever get a purchase done? And if the answer is probably not, don't spend your time there. So the first thing that we do for any enterprise deal is we map out the org and we say, who is this person we're talking to? Who do they report to? Who does that person report to? And what is the actual buying power and where does that live?

Pablo Srugo (00:40:11) :
How do you map that out? Is that just LinkedIn or whatever? Or are there any tools you're using to just get a full picture of the org chart? Or is it just conversation? As you talk to someone, you just ask them like, hey, who controls this budget? Who else do you work with? Who else is on your team, et cetera?

Isaiah Granet (00:40:24) :
Most of the time, it's actually just asking them and they'll tell you. If they won't, then you can go on LinkedIn and just find it pretty easily. LinkedIn makes it really easy to reconstruct org charts and generally, you can do that by saying, what's this person's title? Let me go find a person that's above them in title. Let me go find all three of those people and figure out, you know, who are they connected to? Can I map this correctly? And the thing is, if the person you're talking to doesn't want to introduce you to the other person. It might just not be a deal and you probably should walk away. But once you have the org chart, it's your job to realize, hey, enterprise buying is a team sport. And so not one person is going to shoehorn this through. You'll have a champion. This is the person that really wants to buy you. But then everybody else has to be on board to some degree, and what you have to remember is that everything in an enterprise is political. And so when somebody is buying you, they're spending political capital to get that done. And it also means, that somebody else is going to try and use their political capital to stop it. And what you have to do is make the math such that you are cheap from a political perspective to buy by getting as many stakeholders, people that can buy the software, centered around you. One of the ways that we do that is actually internal newsletters. So with the enterprises we work with, after we have like a couple of meetings, we basically subscribe them and everybody in their org to a little Bland newsletter of updates and things that are going on. And that way they can hear like, hey, here's some updates on what we're working together on. Here's some updates on features we released X, Y, Z. And all that does is it creates, clarity and penetration through the org. Because your job is to make sure that as many people in the org have some degree of political capital committed to buying you, and that for anybody that doesn't want you bought, it's just too expensive for them to go have that fight. And if you do that successfully, you'll win an enterprise deal.

Pablo Srugo (00:42:13) :
That framing makes a lot of sense and I think people very often forget it, and they don't learn it until they really learn it. And they're all the way done, and then they get shut down, and they just don't understand why. And it's because you missed the one person that was going to be your anti-champion. You didn't get that person on board and it was over before it even started. These newsletters, is it a generic newsletter that you're just sending out and you're just adding to? Or are you creating customer by customer or a personalized newsletter that's relevant for them?

Isaiah Granet (00:42:40) :
It's customer by customer. So we're actually saying it's relevant for them. It's tailored to the people we're sending it to and generally speaking, it includes high level information on what we're doing together and the engagement. And the biggest thing is you will never win a significant enterprise deal by being sneaky. You will win deals by being really loud. You want everybody to know what's going on because that way you stop surprises and you figure out things early. The worst thing any founder will go through, and every founder selling to an enterprise has this, is I just spent six months selling to this org and at the last second on, signature day, they said they can't sign. Because we didn't ask X, Y, Z hard question or we didn't make sure that everybody knew.

Pablo Srugo (00:43:22) :
What are the things you do to keep momentum? You know these deals are going to take a long time. There's only so much you can do to compress it. But when things are just kind of flatlining for too long, then they just tend to die. How do you keep things moving so there's always a next step?

Isaiah Granet (00:43:41) :
My best advice is don't be shy to follow up a lot, and you're not going to annoy people. And even if you do, that's sort of your job. I strongly advise everybody that can to be on a texting relationship with their champion and with other people in the org. The reason being is if you can shoot a text, and you have to use this somewhat sparingly but if you can shoot a text, you can really get them back engaged and along. And don't be shy along the way to be following up, setting time, saying, hey, I put ten minutes on your calendar. I'm going to call you at that time on your cell phone just to hear how you're doing and part of this is what I say is the best enterprise sellers are not tricking people. They're not convincing them to buy something they don't need. They're not just pretending to be your friend. They actually get to know you. They understand what drives you, what motivates you, and how you work. And it's not to do something mischievous, and we have this sort of painting and color that we often use with enterprise sales. It's because knowing people helps you understand where is my place to push? Where is my place to step back? And then the best piece of advice I have with this is be patient also. For some of the deals that we've sold, there has been a month-long period where I hear nothing and that's just how enterprises sometimes work. And they take a really long time to get things done. And you can sell yourself out of a deal if you try to force their hand. So if you say, hey, it's been too long and we need an update, and if you don't give us an update, we're gonna walk. They will just walk away. It's not worth it at that point and so you have to be very careful that you're pushing in the right places but you understand how to be patient when things are moving, but slowly.

Pablo Srugo (00:45:14) :
The other thing you told me about enterprises is you never give without getting. Where does that, I get the idea but I'm curious, does that come from a particular experience? How do you implement that?

Isaiah Granet (00:45:23) :
Yeah, it's come from a litany of experiences and part of this is, giving and getting. What I always say is you never give anything without getting and the reason that we say this is any time that an enterprise has an ask or they want something. You should always be getting something in return and this get that I'm talking about doesn't have to be money. It doesn't have to be some sort of transactional step. What I mean by what you always get when you give is, if you don't get something, then the give isn't worth anything and what you're forcing the enterprise to do is to peg value to what they're asking for. And I'll give you a really simple example. Hey, can you take out, can you raise the liability cap on this contract from $10 million to $12 million? For almost any startup, it doesn't really matter that much to have that. A get I might ask for is, sure, but then I need to know that you'll sign before X date, right? And that's a really simple, easy one. Or, hey, can you guys add this feature to the product? Great, but if we do that then I want to have three follow-up meetings on the calendar to know when we're going to meet and review the feature, and make sure it meets your needs. And when you ask for something in return, it levels the playing field. It doesn't make them feel like they're asking too much from you. And it also shows you what the value of what they're asking for is. And a piece of advice with this I always give is, when you're sending out contracts and you're dealing with these enterprises. You are always welcome to ask for something in return and you shouldn't be shy to do that. Just don't always make it monetary and don't make it so transactional they have to get approval. It can be as simple as, hey, if I get this done, can you introduce me to this person? Just make sure you're always asking for something.

Pablo Srugo (00:46:59) :
And then maybe just to end this, just two kind of crazy things you've done going back to the marketing side. One is you spent a few hundred thousand dollars only on a Super Bowl ad. Tell me more about that.

Isaiah Granet (00:47:10) :
Yes, so I wanted to do this since I was a kid. I was a really weird kid, but for those of you that don't know, Super Bowl ads. The ones that you see, there's a combination. There's the national ads. These are the ones that are like $8 million, $10 million, $11 million just for the spot, let alone the filming. These are really expensive and everybody in the country sees them. Then there's local ads. These are the ads where you're like, hey, come on down to Ray's car dealership in San Jose. And you're like, how on earth did this get into the Super Bowl? Every network is obligated to give some airtime to local businesses and then the national ads that are big ones are the ones that we all talk about. And what we thought was, hey, what if we could go viral and get a lot of attention by picking a couple of locations to air a local ad? A local ad doesn't mean it has to be made in that area, and it also doesn't mean it can't be high quality. So we shot and filmed a 4K ready-for-TV ad. We aired it in, I think, Arizona, Las Vegas, and San Francisco. And we had a bunch of influencers ready to go. We got listed in, hey, here's the top 10 best Super Bowl ads this year. We had a bunch of viral posts about it and we had people in that area actually seeing the ad, and engaging with it. And so we basically were able to say, hey, look, we did a Super Bowl ad. And people were like, wow, that was such a great ad. And locals would have never seen it. And they sort of just assumed they missed it one commercial break or something. And we were able to get a huge amount of free press, and then even more press when we told people what we had done.

Pablo Srugo (00:48:34) :
I love it, I mean it's a classic like Sun Tzu. When you're big act small, when you're small act big. So this is the startup version of that, you know, the billboards and the Super Bowl ads. How can we appear to be much bigger than we are and still get the ROI by leveraging, you know, like in your case, the influencer stuff and the viral stuff so that what could have been just a local thing seen by a few thousand people actually become the huge viral campaign.

Isaiah Granet (00:48:58) :
Absolutely.

Pablo Srugo (00:48:59) :
And then the last thing I want to touch on quickly is, tell me about getting Soulja Boy to run an ad with you.

Isaiah Granet (00:49:06) :
Oh, yeah, this one was recent. So for any listeners that don't know, basically we ended up licensing Soulja Boy's voice and what that means is you can actually call, and talk to, and use Soulja Boy's voice on Bland's platform. This was a really fun advertisement. So the reason we went with Soulja Boy was twofold and was one, we basically, we knew the song "Kiss Me Through the Phone." And we thought that that was relevant for Bland because we do AI phone calls. And two, Soulja Boy's peak of popularity aligns really tightly with our current enterprise buyer segment. And when, they were basically growing up and listening to music like what Soulja Boy produced. And so we got in touch with his agent. He was awesome. Soulja was a pleasure to work with. We filmed this ad and we licensed the voice, and put it up on a big phone number, and it just got a huge amount of engagement. And it just comes back to like the reason why that stuff works is because you're buying attention in a different way. You're not forcing people to look at something. You're saying, I will trade you a little bit of entertainment if you give me a little bit of consideration.

Pablo Srugo (00:50:08) :
People want to be entertained. That's the thing you can always count on. AI, no AI, and if you want to have crazy reach, you can't just push your product because nobody cares. That's the thing about whether it's Cluely or you guys or whatever. You watch the content, even if you're not going to buy the product because you're not ICP. You actually like the content. You're like, this is good content and everybody actually kind of wins by that. And by the way, that's what gets you crazy ROI on your spend. Where you actually are like, wow, we only spent whatever and we got a crazy amount of ARR. Yeah, the delta there is because you entertain a lot of people.

Isaiah Granet (00:50:40) :
Exactly, you're trading entertainment for eyeballs instead of cash for eyeballs and it's all some sort of form of trade. And the people that think about marketing in any other way are wrong. You are trading something for attention.

Pablo Srugo (00:50:52) :
So let's end on this question. What would be your top advice for early stage founders that are somewhere where you were in YC?

Isaiah Granet (00:51:01) :
My top advice for a founder who finds themselves, you know, a year or so into the journey and things just aren't working or they feel like they found their new idea but nobody believes in it. Is keep your head down and just do the right things, and do it with focus. And everybody says keep going, you'll hear that advice, but I don't hear a lot of people say do it with focus. Your job is to pick one place that you can win and throw everything at that. And for the founders that are going through that stage, just know that it does eventually get better and there is a way out of it. Even though you can't see it, even though it feels like your situation is different. I've seen it through myself, I've seen it through so many of my friends. Just keep your head down and keep going, and find your spike. Focus on that and throw everything, and good things will come.

Pablo Srugo (00:51:48) :
Isaiah, thanks for jumping on the show, man. It's been a lot of fun.

Isaiah Granet (00:51:51) :
I appreciate it. Thanks for having me, man.

Pablo Srugo (00:51:53) :
You remember the first person who told you about Bitcoin? The first person who told you about Uber? You want to be that person because being first is cool. So be a cool person and tell your founder friends. Send it to them on WhatsApp. Put it in a WhatsApp group. Put it on a Slack channel. Let people know about the show. Let people know about this episode. Don't let somebody else beat you to the punch and share it with your founder friends first. Remember what Ricky Bobby said: "If you ain't first, you're last."