Notorious: How YC-Backed Artisan Grew by $700K in ARR in Two Months

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Notorious Startup of the Week: Artisan

The current workforce wakes up to manual tasks that they hate every single day. While automation software has been quietly reshaping our work landscape, the explosion of AI onto the scene means a radical redefinition of human roles in the professional world.

There are many jobs that consist of manual tasks that can be replaced entirely – SDRs, copywriters, customer support specialists.

Enter Artisan. They’re one of the fastest growing early-stage startups in the GTM ecosystem. Founded in 2023, they’ve participated in Y Combinator and raised over $7.5M in seed funding from investors including Y Combinator, BOND Capital and Soma Capital.

They’re on the cutting edge of revolutionizing the future of work, creating a team of AI employees called Artisans that can automate entire job functions. They’re starting with sales, before moving into marketing, customer success, and other GTM verticals.

They’re fast on the heels of existing incumbents in the sales SaaS space, including Apollo and Outreach, as Artisan aims to replace every single outbound sales tool you need.

If that wasn’t enough, their product growth is currently through the roof. In the span of two months, they’ve closed 700K ARR in contract value.

 “We’re relentlessly focused on creating the best and most automated user experience in the sales space,” says 22-year-old CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack. “For us, product comes before everything else. That's how we'll build a generational company.”

But this success hasn’t been easy – it’s been a road of learnings for them to achieve the growth they're experiencing right now. Enjoy this special blog post from Jaspar:

Starting with PLG

“When we launched our beta product in February, we started with a self-serve model that everyone could access. We thought it would be the surest path to growth and that our users would naturally have a great experience on the platform by onboarding themselves. We had about 300-400 users by the end of April, but it quickly became obvious it wasn’t the right approach for us. People were signing up and falling through the net. Our platform required quite a lot of set up that was a bottleneck for most people, without the right support. 

But most importantly, what we realized was that outbound is a hard game. So many factors have to align in order for users to be successful – targeting the right people at the right time, with an in-depth level of personalization. This is something that we knew how to do well, but the average user would struggle with.

Transitioning to sales-led

We switched to a sales-led approach in May and that’s when our growth really took off.

We closed 700K ARR in 2 months.

We’ve built out our sales team and hired the best AEs who give custom demos to every inbound lead that comes in. This way, we’re able to answer questions and capture user needs much better than we were before. We have a direct line of sight into what people are looking for.

As for our product, we've been able to drastically increase the volume of outbound we do per user, do one-on-one white glove onboarding sessions, and provide people with a Customer Success Manager that guides users on how to optimize their campaigns.

We’re also able to ensure that we filter out unqualified leads, who would churn if using our platform.

50 Inbounds a Day

After we built a sales approach that catapulted our growth, we began building an inbound machine to generate us more leads and capture revenue.

Since then, we’ve tapped into a few key B2B growth channels that get us 50+ leads per day.

Here’s a breakdown:

Email

• One of the best parts of creating our AI BDR Ava is that we can use her ourselves! 

• Although it can be notoriously difficult to reach people’s inboxes and get them to respond, building our product has taught us the best practices for email outbound.

• Over the past few months, we've sent hundreds of thousands of emails, continuously refining our approach. 

Organic Search

• Organic search is our most efficient channel, generating the highest percentage of leads (44%) from just 26% of site visits. It has the second-highest lead conversion rate at 2.7% and, importantly, zero variable cost per lead. 

• SEO is an extremely valuable channel, as potential customers use search engines at the moment of intent. 

• Ranking high in Google searches allows us to capture users when they're actively looking to buy or comparing tools.

Organic Social

• LinkedIn is our main platform, as it’s where we can most effectively reach our target audience of startup CEOs and sales decision-makers. 

• We're also expanding our presence on X, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. 

• Our most successful posts have a strong hook that convinces people to click ‘see more’.

Building the next Industrial Revolution

What’s on our immediate roadmap is making the best outbound AI SDR on the market. It’s a crowded space, but we’re moving fast to build the most innovative features that will give us a strong competitive edge. Once we’ve succeeded in making Ava the most successful AI SDR, then we’ll start building out the rest of our Artisans, including an Inbound Sales Artisan who can replace Chili Piper in automated lead qualification and meeting booking.

This is certain – we’re not afraid of competition and we’ll do whatever it takes to succeed in our mission to automate the work people hate, so that people can focus on the work they love.”

Thanks for reading. By way of background, I am an early-stage investor at Wing and a former founder. Please reach out to me on X @zacharydewitt or at zach@wing.vc. Some of the early-stage PLG + AI companies that I have the privilege to work with and learn from are: AirOps, Copy.ai, Deepgram, Hireguide, Slang.ai, Tango, Tome and Workmate.

Operating Benchmarks (from PLG Startups):

I will continue to update these metrics and add new metrics. Let me know what metrics you want me to add (zach@wing.vc)

Organic Traffic (as % of all website traffic):

• Great: 70%

• Good: 50%

Conversion rate (website → free user):

• Great: 10%

• Good: 5%

Activation rate (free user → activated user):

• Great: 50%

• Good: 30%

Paid conversion rate (free user → paid user):

• Great: 10%

• Good: 5%

Enterprise conversion rate (free user → enterprise plan):

• Great: 4%

• Good: 2%

3-month user retention (% of all users still using product after 3 months):

• Great: 30%

• Good: 15%

Conversion from waitlist to free user:

• <1 month on waitlist: ~50%

• >3 months on waitlist: 20%

For more detail on acqusition rates by channel (Organic, SEM, Social etc), please refer to this prior Notorious episode.

Financial Benchmarks (from PLG Public Companies):

Financial data as of previous business day market close.

Best-in-Class Benchmarking:

15 Highest EV/ NTM Revenue Multiples:

15 Biggest Stock Gainers (1 month):

Complete Dataset (click to zoom):

Note: TTM = Trailing Twelve Months; NTM = Next Twelve Months. Rule of 40 = TTM Revenue Growth % + FCF Margin %. GM-Adjusted CAC Payback = Change in Quarterly Revenue / (Gross Margin % * Prior Quarter Sales & Marketing Expense) * 12. Recent IPOs will have temporary “N/A”s as Wall Street Research has to wait to initiate converge.

Recent PLG + AI Financings:

Seed:

• All Hands AI, a startup building model-agnostic open-source AI agents for developers, has raised $5M. The round was led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Rebellion Ventures, Pillar VC and Betaworks.

• Fastn, a no-code/low-code platform designed to integrate and orchestrate multiple data sources into a unified API, has raised $2.5M. The round was led by Antler and LiveOak Ventures.

Early Stage:

• Safe Superintelligence (SSI), an AI research lab co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, has raised $1B at a $5B valuation. The round was funded by NFDG (an investment partnership run by Nat Friedman and SSI CEO Daniel Gross), a16z, Sequoia, DST Global, and SV Angel.

Series A:

• Brellium, a clinician-validated AI audit system designed to help automate medical chart review, has raised an undisclosed amount from First Round Capital.

• Mintlify, a platform designed to assist developers with writing software documentation, has raised $18.5M. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures and Y Combinator.

• Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based AI research lab building a foundation model focused on nature-inspired intelligence, has raised $137M at a $1.11B valuation. The round was led by Lux Capital, Khosla Ventures and New Enterprise Associates, with participation from Nvidia.

Series B:

• Mangomint, an operations automation platform designed to offer brand development and booking services for salons and spas, has raised $47M. The round was led by Altos Ventures and SaaStr, with participation from OpenView Venture Partners.

• You.com, a company that makes an AI-powered search engine and productivity tools, has raised $50M at a $374.09M valuation. The round was led by Georgian, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, SoftBank Ventures Asia, Nvidia, DuckDuckGo, Elevation Capital, MicroVentures, Untapped Ventures, Day One Ventures and Empty Set Group.

Series D:

• Oyster, a payroll and HR platform for distributed workforces, has raised $59M at a $1.2B valuation. The round was led by Silver Lake Waterman, with participation from Endeavor Catalyst, Stripes, Georgian, G2 Venture Partners and Emergence.