Artisan Went $0 to $1.3M ARR in 8 Months: How Jaspar Carmichael-Jack Built Ava, the 'Stop Hiring Humans' AI BDR

TL;DR: Artisan is a San Francisco AI sales startup whose flagship product, Ava, is an "AI BDR" that runs the full outbound prospecting workflow — finding leads, writing personalized emails, sending LinkedIn messages — inside a consolidated outbound platform. It was founded by Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, who was 23 when he told this story, and who got Artisan's first thousand waitlist signups from deliberately rage-baiting Reddit. Artisan went from $0 in January 2024 to $1.3M ARR by August 2024, raised a $1.5M pre-seed at a $15M valuation with no deck, an $11.5M seed, and later a $25M Series A in April 2025. It became far more famous in December 2024 for its "Stop Hiring Humans" billboard campaign, which generated over a billion impressions. Carmichael-Jack broke down the tactics on The Product Market Fit Show.

What does Artisan do?

Artisan has two stated missions: consolidation and automation.

"One is consolidation. So we try and replace legacy software tools with one better, easier to use platform. And the second is automation. So once we've consolidated the software, we build these AI employees that we call artisans into the platform that automate different workflows for people." — Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, Artisan

The company started with outbound sales. The platform bundles the whole stack — B2B data, email warmup, deliverability, everything in between — and Ava, the AI BDR, sits inside it. Ava owns the workflow from campaign setup until a lead responds positively; then a Copilot mode hands control back to the human, suggesting replies rather than sending them.

Artisan sells up, not to the BDR: head of sales, VP of sales, or founder. Startups typically use Artisan instead of hiring a BDR; enterprises use it alongside one and reduce headcount.

Who founded Artisan?

Jaspar Carmichael-Jack is Artisan's founder and CEO. He was 23 at the time of the episode, making Artisan his first venture-backed company but not his first business:

• At 18, an app for booking cleaners and errand runners. In his words, terrible unit economics — "never do that again."
• Then a branding and marketing services agency, which went relatively well and taught him go-to-market.

That agency background matters — it's the reason a first-time venture founder had a working SEO and content motion on day one.

Artisan went through Y Combinator, and Carmichael-Jack has been unusually public about the numbers, posting revenue milestones as they happened.

How much has Artisan raised?

• Pre-seed — $1.5 million at a $15 million valuation, around October 2023.
• Seed — $11.5 million, announced the week of the episode in 2024.
• Series A — $25 million, announced April 2025, led by Glad Brook Capital with HubSpot Ventures, Day One Ventures, Bond, Soma Capital, Oliver Jung and Sequoia Scout participating.

The pre-seed is the part worth studying, because it happened with nothing:

"I had nothing like a deck and a dream. Cold LinkedIn messages, ironically. I managed to generate some initial and meta demand before we then got into YC couple months later." — Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, Artisan

Key stat: $1.5M raised at a $15M valuation with no product, no team, and no deck — using cold outbound to raise money for an outbound company.

The rage-bait launch: 1,000 waitlist signups from angry Redditors

Artisan's first distribution channel was manufactured outrage.

"The first thousand signups that we got were from rage baiting posts on Reddit, where we were just like, emphasizing that we didn't have any products and that we'd raised like a funding round. And then some people got really mad and then other people were like, this is an interesting idea. And signed up to the waitlist." — Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, Artisan

The mechanic was simple: post that you raised $1.5M at a $15M valuation with no product and no team, include a backlink, and let the pile-on do the distribution. It was deliberate — "kind of on purpose. I knew people wouldn't be into that" — and he doubled down, running the same play from different angles, including posting the team's entire YC application process to the Y Combinator subreddit.

His general theory of social content:

"It's either like make people angry, teach them something or make them feel happy for you. I think those are the three things and like making people angry actually does the best by far. But you obviously face some backlash doing that." — Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, Artisan

There is a cost, and he names it: he was eventually banned from most of those subreddits for self-promotion. The same instinct scaled up in December 2024 into the "Stop Hiring Humans" billboard campaign, which reportedly generated over a billion impressions — and a wave of criticism and death threats.

The switch that unlocked growth: killing self-serve

Artisan launched a beta in February 2024 to a waitlist of a few thousand. It went badly.

Key stat: roughly 300–400 signups from a waitlist of a few thousand — and almost nobody completed onboarding.

Two problems stacked. The product genuinely didn't work yet — bad email quality, no email warmup, rough UI. And onboarding required users to set up new mailboxes and domains to protect their main domain's reputation.

"People just don't want to try anything that's going to take more than half an hour or requires any technical skill." — Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, Artisan

But the deeper problem was structural, and this is the lesson:

"You need to spend a relatively high amount on outbound to see strong results… And we were doing lower volume because we had really cheap plans with the self-serve motion when it wasn't really viable. Like if you get one email a month, then you're not going to continue paying for a service. So we couldn't charge enough with the self-serve motion to retain people." — Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, Artisan

So in May/June 2024, Artisan removed pricing from the pricing page and removed the ability to sign up. Everything routed to a sales call. Carmichael-Jack and his chief of staff ran roughly 20 demos a day.

Revenue by month: $0 in January. About $5K in March. About $20K in April. Flat at ~$20K in May. Then the switch — and in the thirty days before the episode, Artisan closed $500K of new ARR, on top of roughly $300K the month before.

His argument for sales-led is one most AI founders should hear:

"I think that for most startups, it's actually probably the better path to go down to begin with… Because you can speak to the customers more closely when you're selling to them. They have to make more of a decision because they're signing a contract and they're going to tell you anything that they don't like or want differently." — Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, Artisan

Related reading: founder-led sales and when to hire your first sales rep.

The top-of-funnel machine

Artisan's demo volume came from three channels running simultaneously.

SEO. Artisan ranked first or second for "AI SDR" and "AI BDR." The motion was industrial: a fractional head of content, keyword planning by difficulty, three to four blog posts a week, and deliberate backlink building to each article — through agencies, through backlink exchanges, and through investor HubSpot placing Artisan articles on its blog. Our guide to generative engine optimization for startups covers how this has shifted since.

LinkedIn. Described bluntly as "cringy LinkedIn content" that "still does really well" — probably one of the biggest channels, generating thousands of leads. What works best: revenue milestone posts with a screenshot and an explanation of how they got there, a hook in the first line, and a subtle mention of the product routing back to the sales form. Carmichael-Jack doesn't write them alone; he sends brainstorms to his chief of staff who drafts, then they finalize together.

Reddit, until the bans.

Key stat: roughly 40% of Artisan's own pipeline came from Ava, its own product — they had stopped using it for a while because inbound was already too high.

Hiring: a chief of staff as employee #5, and 50–100 interviews per AE

Two hiring decisions stand out.

The fifth hire was a chief of staff, which is unusual at that stage. The logic is absorption, not specialization:

"She was basically doing anything that I didn't have time to do. So, be it like hiring or marketing or content or literally anything… which I think is a lot more helpful than hiring a specific marketing growth, whatever it might be… because you have more flexibility about what that workload ends up looking like." — Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, Artisan

Artisan runs a combined house-office in San Francisco where four people live, with 25 employees total, most remote. Carmichael-Jack considers at least a month of in-person time essential even for remote hires, to build enough context that you know how someone would act in any situation.

The second decision was the AE bar:

Key stat: Artisan interviewed 50 to 100 account executives for every one hired.

The filter: someone you'd want to have a drink with, who can organize an argument compellingly, who can hold energy across 15–20 calls a day. The test is a mock demo where the interviewer plays the customer. And a hard screen on written communication — a CV with missing full stops is a no.

For more on this stage, see how to get your first 10 customers and your startup's first hire.

Key lessons from Jaspar Carmichael-Jack's playbook

1. Match the motion to the product's minimum effective dose. Outbound only works at volume, and volume costs money, so cheap self-serve plans structurally guaranteed churn. Before choosing PLG, ask whether your cheapest plan can produce a result worth renewing for.

2. Sell to whoever captures the value. Slack spreads bottom-up because users love it. An AI BDR's value accrues to the VP of Sales looking at leads per headcount — so Artisan sells there.

3. Attention is a channel you can manufacture, at a price. Rage-bait worked and kept working. It also got him banned from the subreddits and, later, death threats over the billboards. He is clear-eyed that impressions and sentiment are separate variables.

4. Ship broken, on purpose. His defense of launching an MVP that barely worked is about velocity: "When there's a bug on a live app that people are using, engineers will fix it a lot faster than when there's a bug on an app that no one's using."

5. Disqualify hard. Artisan's most successful customers know their ICP, have strong messaging, and have run outbound before. The worst have a one-person team and a bad website. AEs now disqualify those prospects before the meeting — because a customer who can't succeed becomes churn and bad word of mouth.

6. Market pull covers a lot of sins. He says it himself: strong pull for AI BDRs made everything else easier, and his advice explicitly doesn't generalize to founders with a narrow ICP, who need to find the specific conference, blog or sponsorship where their buyers already are.

FAQ: Artisan

Q: What is Artisan? A: Artisan is an AI sales platform that consolidates the outbound sales stack — B2B data, email warmup, deliverability and sequencing — and adds AI "employees," starting with Ava, an AI BDR that automates lead sourcing, personalized email and LinkedIn outreach.

Q: Who is the CEO of Artisan? A: Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, who founded the company as a first-time venture-backed founder after running a branding agency and, at 18, a failed errand-running app.

Q: What is Ava? A: Ava is Artisan's AI BDR — the product that runs the outbound prospecting workflow from campaign setup until a lead replies positively, at which point a human takes over with AI-suggested responses.

Q: How much funding has Artisan raised? A: A $1.5 million pre-seed at a $15 million valuation, an $11.5 million seed, and a $25 million Series A announced in April 2025.

Q: Who are Artisan's investors? A: The Series A was led by Glad Brook Capital, with HubSpot Ventures, Day One Ventures, Bond, Soma Capital, Oliver Jung and Sequoia Scout participating.

Q: What was the "Stop Hiring Humans" campaign? A: An advertising campaign Artisan ran in December 2024 with the slogan "Stop hiring humans." It went viral, reportedly generating over a billion online impressions along with significant backlash.

Q: How fast did Artisan grow? A: From $0 in January 2024 to $1.3M ARR by August 2024 — with most of that coming after switching from self-serve to sales-led around May/June.

Sources: Listen to the Full Founder Story

• Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, Founder & CEO of Artisan — YC founder who took an AI BDR from zero to $1.3M ARR in eight months using rage-bait Reddit posts, industrial SEO, and a switch from product-led to sales-led.
• Full episode: 1st-time AI founder grows from $0 to $1.3M ARR in 8 months — here's exactly how he did it on The Product Market Fit Show.

Listen to the full episode at pmf.show for the complete story.

Last updated: August 2026