I Built an AI Sales Agent for $99/mo — Here's What Happened

Hiring an SDR — a Sales Development Representative — costs somewhere between $4,000 and $7,000 a month when you factor in salary, benefits, tools, and the 3-month ramp before they're actually useful. And even after all that, most of them churn within a year.

I've talked to dozens of founders who've done this math and come to the same conclusion: there has to be a better way. They're right. There is.

The Problem I Was Solving

I kept watching early-stage founders handle outbound sales one of two ways: either they did it themselves (burning hours they didn't have) or they hired someone and watched the burn rate spike before a single meeting was booked.

The work of an SDR breaks down into a few repeatable steps:

1. Find leads that match your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
2. Research each lead — what do they do, what problems might they have?
3. Write a personalized first email that doesn't read like a template
4. Follow up 2-3 times if they don't respond
5. Hand off qualified leads for calls

Every single one of these steps is mechanical. It requires judgment, yes — but it's trainable judgment. The kind of thing that's now possible with modern AI.

How I Built Revhound

I spent about three months building and testing the system before I was confident enough to put it in front of users. Here's how it actually works:

Step 1: Lead Research

You tell Revhound who you're targeting. Your ICP — the industry, company size, role, and any signals that matter (recently funded, hiring, using specific tools). Revhound goes and finds matching companies and people, pulling data from public sources and enriching each lead with context that actually matters.

No more spending two hours manually building a list in Apollo or Hunter. You define the target, Revhound does the legwork.

Step 2: Personalized Email Writing

This is where most AI cold email tools fall flat. They spit out the same template with a first name swapped in. That's not personalization — it's a mail merge with extra steps.

Revhound reads each lead's profile, their company's recent activity, and their likely pain points. Then it writes a first line that's specific to them. The rest of the email is structured to be short, relevant, and easy to respond to.

The result: emails that actually get opened and replied to.

Step 3: Automated Follow-Ups

The money is in the follow-up. Most reps give up after one email. Revhound sends a second and third touch, spaced naturally, with different angles — not just "following up on my last email."

Each follow-up is aware of what was sent before. The sequence feels like a conversation, not a drip campaign.

Step 4: Meeting Booking

When someone signals interest — replies, clicks a link, or asks a question — Revhound handles the qualification and proposes a meeting. It connects to your calendar and sends a booking link. The goal is simple: get you on a call, then get out of the way.

What's Actually Happening Under the Hood

Revhound is an AI agent — a piece of software that can make decisions, take actions, and complete multi-step tasks without needing a human to babysit every step.

When you connect your email and configure your ICP, you're essentially hiring a digital SDR that:

• Runs every day, automatically
• Never calls in sick or asks for a raise
• Gets better over time as you give it feedback on what's working
• Scales from 50 outreach touches a week to 500 without breaking a sweat

We built on top of the latest AI infrastructure to make the emails feel genuinely human. Not because we're trying to trick anyone — but because personalized, thoughtful outreach gets results, and that's what we're here to deliver.

Early Results

Early users are seeing reply rates in the 8–15% range on cold outreach — well above industry average for automated email (which typically sits around 1–3%). The difference is the quality of personalization and the targeted sequencing.

One founder told me: "I connected my email on a Monday. By Wednesday I had two meetings booked that I didn't lift a finger to set up."

That's the goal. Your job is to close. Revhound's job is to fill your calendar.

Why I'm Building This in Public

I believe the best products get built when the builders are honest about the process. There's a lot of AI sales tooling hitting the market right now. Some of it is genuinely good. A lot of it is noise.

I'm building Revhound in public so you can see exactly what we're building, why we're making the decisions we're making, and how it performs in the real world — not in cherry-picked demos.

More posts coming on deliverability, how we handle replies, and what the data actually shows after running thousands of sequences. Follow along.