He made 100 cold calls in one day and hit $1 million in annual recurring revenue in nine months

On a Tuesday in Antler's New York office, the founder spent the day in the phone booth making 100 dials, then went back to his laptop to write code.

Jeff Becker, a partner at the startup investor Antler, said, "I've never seen an engineer write so many lines of code and make so many cold calls." The man was at the office at 6 a.m., before Becker, and stayed until 11 or 12 at night. Becker said, "I cannot escape this guy's presence in the office."

The founder had left his wife at home, eight months pregnant, to join the residency. Becker took it as a sign of total commitment, that he was fully in and burning the boats. He was already technical, a former chief technology officer at two startups backed by Y Combinator, the well known Silicon Valley accelerator. He had then started his own agency building websites for lawn care professionals, heating and air conditioning contractors, and other home services businesses, and sold it for more than $1 million. He came to Antler to build an artificial intelligence version of that agency.

What happened next is why Becker still tells the story. The founder alternated between calling customers and writing software for them, selling and then building for what they asked for. Becker joked there should be a combined metric for "lines of code plus number of dials." From the first line of code, the company reached $8,000 in monthly revenue in eight weeks.

Nine months after starting, it had $1 million in annual recurring revenue, or yearly sales from repeat subscriptions. Three months after that, it had $2 million. Now, Becker says, it is adding $1 million about every 10 weeks.

The sharpest move was in sales, when weather data told the company's dialer to call roofers on rainy days. The team had been cold calling lawn care companies, roofers, and heating and air conditioning contractors. Becker says that because the founder is technical, everything he builds is AI native, aimed at turning work into technology rather than hiring people.

For sales, the team built software that checked where it was raining. When rain showed up in an area, the automatic dialing software called roofers there, because wet days keep roofers off rooftops and near the phone. That one change quadrupled revenue from that part of the business in the first month.

The pattern has continued. The founder now runs internal hackathons not about improving the product, but about streamlining the business itself, finding more ways to use technology instead of hiring people.