Isaiah Granet

Isaiah Granet is co-founder and CEO of Bland AI, an enterprise phone-agent company that scripts, hosts, and scales automated calls for contact-center work. He came out of Y Combinator collecting investor rejections, then grew the company with billboards and enterprise contracts.

Rejections at Demo Day

On the Product Market Fit Show he described Demo Day season as a wall of rejections that questioned the market itself: "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." Granet kept a packet of those emails. A year later some of the same investors called voice AI the hottest sector.

Spending Runway on Billboards in San Francisco, California

Bland spent about $60,000 on two billboards in the city with a live phone number and the line "Still hiring humans?" "We ended up spending about a quarter of our total runway to put up these billboards," he said. Influencers amplified the ads, and the calls brought enterprise meetings. The lesson he draws: "You are never just getting attention. What you're actually doing is you're trading. You have to offer some value in return."

Firing Half the Customers

After a Series A he cut white-label and reseller accounts that were a poor fit: "We fired fifty percent of our customers." His test became pain versus hope. "Follow the pain. These business owners don't have pain, they have hope... where you build a great business is by figuring out where when you press, does it hurt." On enterprise sales he said: "You will never win a significant enterprise deal by being sneaky. You will win deals by being really loud."

Handling Calls After a Typhoon

He dates product-market fit to a weekend when an outsourcer in the Philippines went dark during a typhoon and a US enterprise customer rerouted its calls to Bland with no warmup. "Not only did we handle it. We handled it with higher resolution rate than the humans, with zero wait time, and better CSAT." His bar: "We didn't build an experience that people hate. We built something that people liked more than the current experience."