Tommy.ai

Konstantin Bayondin spent over five years in e-commerce marketing leadership before moving to New York to work in paid digital marketing at Compass, a real estate platform. While working there, he identified a critical pain point: traditional digital ad optimization (via Google and Facebook) was nearly impossible for real estate and other industries with long decision cycles and offline conversions. You can't optimize ads for conversions that happen offline or months later. This insight sparked the idea for Tommy.ai—a predictive marketing platform that scores website visitors in real time and uses expected probability of conversion to optimize ad spend intelligently.

In April 2020, Konstantin launched Tommy.ai with an MVP and landed his first paying customer. Working solo, he bootstrapped the business by building and selling directly to prospects. By December 2020, after running the company alone for eight months, he had reached $22,000 MRR with four customers across real estate, e-commerce, and education technology. The early MVPs were manually managed, but Konstantin knew he needed to scale. In early 2021, he hired engineers and brought on Dmitri as both an angel investor and eventual co-founder. By March/April 2021, the team had completely rewritten the solution into a cloud-based platform serving every customer with the same codebase.

Konstantin's customer acquisition strategy was lean from day one. He spent almost nothing on traditional marketing—just $4,000 on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter in Q4 of the previous year. Instead, he invested heavily in cold outbound sales. His conversion rate was remarkably strong: "whenever we show a demo of our product, we get a conversion into a contract for like 20% of our conversations." This approach worked because his ICP was highly specific—real estate developers, brokerages, banks, insurance companies, and automotive firms all suffering from the same ad optimization problem. Each customer signed up for a pilot project, and roughly two-thirds converted to recurring yearly contracts.

Cold outbound sales became the dominant growth channel, driving consistent customer acquisition. Konstantin's early diversity in customer testing (real estate, e-commerce, tech education) helped him identify that real estate was the strongest initial beachhead. However, the company's churn data is still emerging: with only six customers older than one year, it's hard to measure churn precisely, though Konstantin estimates 1-2% monthly churn for customers who convert from pilot to annual contract. His gross burn is $130,000/month against $90,000 in MRR, but with $500,000+ still in the bank from his $1M pre-seed raise, he has runway to find product-market fit. Future growth channels he's eyeing are content marketing to generate thought leadership and event-based marketing at conferences.

As of the interview, Tommy.ai serves 24 enterprise customers at $5,000/month each, generating approximately $90,000 in MRR (up from $80,000 in December of the previous year, and $22,000 in December 2020). The company hit $1M ARR in December 2021 and has a team of 19 people—half of them engineers and product staff. Konstantin is actively raising a $5M seed round at a desired $30M post-money valuation (a 30x multiple on current ARR). With a strong gross margin profile and disciplined spending, Tommy.ai is positioned as a promising enterprise SaaS play in the underserved niche of ad optimization for long-cycle businesses.