Zach Rattner, Yembo
Cold Calls to High 7 Figures - Scaling an AI Startup
In 2015, Zach Rattner noticed something most people missed. Computers had quietly become better than humans at identifying objects in images. While the rest of Silicon Valley chased self-driving cars and drones, Zach saw a different opportunity - one hiding in the moving industry. His wife worked at a moving company handling logistics nightmares. Wrong-sized trucks, inaccurate quotes, customers complaining about prices. The more Zach dug into the problem, the more he realized moving companies got complained about more than lawyers, more than airlines, even more than diet supplement companies. And the root cause was almost always bad estimates. That insight led Zach and his co-founder Sid to create Yembo, an AI startup that lets customers record quick videos of their homes so computer vision can identify every item and generate accurate quotes. But building an AI startup in an industry that had never seen cutting-edge technology meant two introverted engineers had to do something deeply uncomfortable - cold call strangers, show up unannounced at moving companies, and sell a product that didn't exist yet. They used non-binding letters of intent to validate demand before writing a line of code. They did founder-led sales all the way to $1M ARR because they didn't want any layer between themselves and customer feedback. And when their AI started making embarrassing mistakes - tagging a customer's wife as a surfboard, calling laundry baskets barbecue grills - they built what they called a "common sense engine" to keep customers trusting the product while the technology caught up. The early days were bumpy. Their first version could only detect about 10 items, the UI looked like it was built by a backend engineer (because it was), and some customers churned. But the right early adopters stuck around and expanded, using Yembo to enter new geographies without opening satellite offices. One trade show demo involving furniture from TJ Maxx became so convincing they closed enough deals to be profitable before flying home. Today, Yembo is an AI startup serving customers in about 30 countries, processing hundreds of hours of video daily, and generating high seven figures in annual revenue with a team of about 70 people.
