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. <\/p>\n
Born on the same day just three hours apart, they became entrepreneurs<\/a> at aged 13 and 14. Now 19, they are the co-founders of Rhycon, an autonomous AI<\/a> appointments setter established in November last year. <\/p>\n \u201cThink Calendly, if Calendly booked its own meetings,\u201d Drum says. \u201cBusinesses define their ICP \u2013 ideal customer profile \u2013 and Rhycon handles lead discovery, personalised outreach, books meetings and adds them to their calendar, thereby fuelling growth for sales teams and founders.\u201d <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n \u201cWe 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,\u201d Drum says. <\/p>\n \u201cMost 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\u2019s set up. <\/p>\n \u201cFrom finding leads to booking meetings, nothing requires human input once you\u2019ve 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\u2019t want to buy from AI bots. They want to buy from humans. <\/p>\n \u201cOur previous company was an agency doing manually what Rhycon now does with AI,\u201d Drum says. \u201cWe had eight staff, managed 20+ tools, and it was a constant headache. <\/p>\n \u201cRhycon 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\u2019s all been word of mouth and LinkedIn.<\/p>\n \u201cWe 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\u2019t there to do what we\u2019re doing now,\u201d Drum says. <\/p>\n