James Drum and Conor Coade were running their own businesses long before earning a living was ever on the horizon for most of their classmates.
Born on the same day just three hours apart, they became entrepreneurs at aged 13 and 14. Now 19, they are the co-founders of Rhycon, an autonomous AI appointments setter established in November last year.
“Think Calendly, if Calendly booked its own meetings,” Drum says. “Businesses define their ICP – ideal customer profile – and Rhycon handles lead discovery, personalised outreach, books meetings and adds them to their calendar, thereby fuelling growth for sales teams and founders.”
Rhycon is aimed at B2B companies that want qualified (as in booked in the diary) meetings without the cost of an in-house sales team and the time involved in chasing down and arranging sales meetings.
“We replace the laborious bit by automating outreach and getting salespeople straight to the conversations they want to have. SaaS companies, professional services firms, scaling start-ups, account executives and marketing teams are all potential customers,” Drum says.
“Most AI sales tools automate one step of the process but still need a human in the loop. Rhycon is fully autonomous end-to-end. The system runs independently from the moment it’s set up.
“From finding leads to booking meetings, nothing requires human input once you’ve defined your target customer. We search, find and research them. We write to them. We reply to them. We book a meeting with them and at that point our client shows up for the sales call. Personal input is still important as people don’t want to buy from AI bots. They want to buy from humans.
“Our previous company was an agency doing manually what Rhycon now does with AI,” Drum says. “We had eight staff, managed 20+ tools, and it was a constant headache.
“Rhycon started life as a solution to our own pain but we quickly realised we could sell personalisation at scale and also track what worked in terms of generating high-quality leads. We now have hundreds on our list waiting to try the system, and we have done no marketing. It’s all been word of mouth and LinkedIn.
“We are currently onboarding clients individually as we make final adjustments to the product, but ultimately clients will be able to onboard directly and we expect to launch commercially at the end of July. Even 12 months ago the technology wasn’t there to do what we’re doing now,” Drum says.
The co-founders are splitting their time between San Francisco and Dublin, where they’ve been working from Dogpatch Labs. With pilots running in both countries, having a presence in Silicon Valley is crucial because of the size of the US market, but also because Rhycon’s closest competitors are based there and the founders want to keep tabs on what they’re up to.
Rhycon’s start-up budget has been roughly €100,000 between personal funding and angel investment, and a pre-seed round will be launched later this year. The revenue model is a monthly fee based on the amount of outreach a customer wants.
Drum is at pains to emphasise that despite the system’s high level of automation, Rhycon still makes interactions feel personal and while the system can handle the whole transaction independently, if a user wants to get more involved or have more control they can.
“We learn as much as possible about our clients from the tone and style of their organisation to how they operate. To this we add as much data as possible gathered from them that will help identify their target market. For example, who are they trying to sell to, a CEO, a CMO or a CTO, in what industry and in what size of company?” Drum says.
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Armed with a company’s ideal customer profile, Rhycon begins its open search of the internet rather than working off shared databases where subscribers all have access to the same contacts. Once potential leads are identified and the system searches 24/7, its customers tick boxes as to whether a lead looks like a good fit or not. Each time they tick or reject a suggestion, this enriches Rhycon’s knowledge of what they’re looking for.
“Our system also gathers as much information as possible about potential leads while searching, and this helps personalise each outreach email with no templates,” Drum says.
Over time, Rhycon’s algorithms gather sufficient data to narrow the customer search. This in turn increases the chances of someone actually seeing and bothering to reply to the outreach email. Accurate targeting is key, Drum says, if mailshots are not to end up as “AI slop”, which is as annoying for people as email spam. “You don’t want to waste time trying to sell to people who don’t want to buy,” he says.
In theory, James Drum should be sitting his Leaving Certificate this June. But he has no regrets about dropping out to follow his dream of turning Rhycon into a successful international business.
“I should be revising for exams. Instead I’m working with the developers,” he says. “I should be picking a college course. Instead my syllabus is changing each day. I should be stressing about points. Instead I’m stressing about pricing. The path I chose doesn’t make sense to most, but it’s the one that makes the most sense to me and to Conor.
“The connections and support we’ve received through the Irish networks in San Francisco have been invaluable as two lads landing in a new city with a company to build.
“The hardest part of setting up hasn’t been just one thing – it’s doing everything at once, from arriving here with no network while shipping product and raising money at the same time.”