Lead Crunch AI

Olan Hyde had already built and sold companies—most recently autosematics, which used AI to detect pump-and-dump schemes in social media feeds. But his next venture would come from an unexpected direction. After autosematics was acquired by AI One, Olan spent two years with them before leaving to start what became Lead Crunch. The original idea was ambitious: train an AI system to act as a physician. The technology evolved, and after the team beat both IBM Watson and Palantir to win a Lockheed Martin contract for the military, Olan realized they had something special—advanced targeting technology that could be adapted for commercial use.

The pivot from government contractor to B2B SaaS wasn't immediate. Initially, Olan considered staying focused on DoD contracts, but sequestration and budget cuts made that path unreliable. More importantly, he wanted to work with people building their dreams rather than spending time in conference rooms full of acronyms. In their private alpha, 1,070 small businesses signed up to try the product. But the data told an interesting story: they were getting better results from mid-market companies than SMBs. Lead Crunch officially launched in September 2016, with the product positioned as an intelligent demand generation platform that creates on-demand targeted lead reports using AI-powered analytics.

Olan's first customer came from what he calls "the weirdest acquisition method"—an Uber ride from Market Street to Palo Alto with a venture capitalist who kept saying no. The VC finally gave Olan a customer "just to get rid of me," he laughs. That customer proved worth $40,000 and has rebooked four times. From there, the company started experimenting aggressively with multiple channels. They spent around $6,500 on customer acquisition in the month before speaking with Nathan Latka, with about $4,500 invested in their own technology and the rest in A/B testing new channels.

Lead Crunch's pricing model is deliberately unconventional. Rather than pure SaaS subscriptions, they offer a hybrid: roughly 90% of revenue comes from on-demand reports (typical order size: $20,000), while 10% comes from subscription. What surprised Olan was that these "on-demand" customers weren't one-time buyers—130% of customers rebook within 90 days, and they spend 186% of their original contract value on repeat orders. The company grew at a 37% compound monthly rate, reaching $200,000 in monthly bookings. Customer acquisition payback happens in 2.1 months. Rather than obsessing over gross margins like traditional SaaS (which Olan thinks are unsustainably high at 85-90%), he targets 75% and remains focused on growth. The company is currently below that but hasn't optimized yet because they're only 10 months in.

After bootstrapping initially, Olan raised about $2 million in convertible notes at a $6 million cap—deliberately kept low because "we didn't know what it was worth" and he prioritized getting the right investors over the right valuation. Those investors collectively have more than $20 billion in exits from 36 companies. The team sits at 15 full time: 4 in Chicago, 11 in San Diego, and Olan spends three days a week in San Francisco. Within 10 months of launch, Lead Crunch had 90 lifetime customers with 55 on the current product line and $1 million in trailing twelve-month revenue. The company could hit cash flow positive within 60 days if it cut growth marketing spend, but Olan isn't interested in that trade-off yet. The team is laser-focused on building the right people and culture—"firing people would be a big failure on my part."