One of the most incredible things about AI is the way it opens up new frontiers in innovation. As AI technology continues to evolve at a breakneck pace, its potential applications are expanding right along with it, creating a world of possibilities for product-led businesses that can see — and seize — the opportunity.
Enter 11x, a company that is pioneering a new category of AI-powered applications that sell outcome-based work.
Their flagship product is an AI-powered sales development representative (SDR) that go-to-market teams can use to augment their own sales teams. But 11x has gone a step further: The team is using their AI-powered application to accelerate their own business development efforts.
In this post, I’ll dive into how the 11x team’s bold vision led them to uncover (and address) a significant market gap, and how using their product the same way their customers do has created a growth flywheel for their business.
Selling outcomes, not software
CEO and founder Hasan Sukkar is the visionary behind 11x. When he and his team founded the company in 2022, they had a simple but audacious goal. Rather than creating a tool that would merely enhance productivity, they envisaged a world of digital workers, capable of filling roles end-to-end.
“This principle underpins how we build products, how our customers buy products and how we service our customers,” says Hasan. “One of our big early learnings — people don’t want to buy tools for reps, they want to buy an actual AI rep that does the work and delivers outcomes.”
Fast-forward to today, and they’re seeing that vision come to life. And in the process, they’re also growing at an almost improbable pace — nearly 50% month over month since the beginning of the year.
But here's the kicker: The engine behind this growth isn't a massive sales team or a huge marketing budget. It's Alice, their very own AI-powered SDR.
Introducing Alice
Alice is like sales development on steroids. She researches potential target accounts, drafts personalized and targeted emails, then engages in back-and-forth Q&A with the prospect, with the goal of scheduling a sales-qualified meeting with a human rep. Alice works autonomously, 24/7, and learns from all her interactions, so she’s constantly improving.
While Alice is clearly a game-changer for 11x customers, the product is also having a transformational effect on the company that’s building it: 11x can use Alice to grow its own business without the constraints of labor-related bottlenecks.
Building a powerful growth accelerator
This story isn't just about growth in numbers. It's about the emergence of a powerful AI growth flywheel that's redefining how B2B companies can scale.
As the team uses Alice to generate leads and sales-qualified meetings for 11x, they get real-world data and insights to improve the product. As Alice improves, she generates better results for 11x and for their customers. Better results lead to faster growth and even more customers, and more customers mean more data and use cases to further refine Alice.
Relying on their own product for growth forces the 11x team to be incredibly product-focused. In essence, as Alice gets smarter, their business grows faster. It's a virtuous cycle that is propelling the company forward at an unprecedented rate.
Making automation more human
One of the challenges of automation is maintaining creativity — a crucial element in sales. The 11x team tackled this problem head-on by baking creative playbooks into Alice's repertoire. Their most successful experiment? The meme strategy.
They began by testing typical follow-up formats: sharing case studies and additional research, confirming interest and offering freebies. These worked well, but the team wanted to push the envelope. They tasked Alice with being more creative than traditional SDRs, which led to experiments with images and GIFs in follow-up emails.
The results were better than expected. Not only did this strategy deliver higher response rates in their outbound sequences, but it also resulted in a 35% response rate when they used it to re-engage cold pipeline prospects.
Here's a sample of the meme strategy in action:
I love this approach. It breaks through the noise of typical sales outreach, catching prospects off guard (in a good way) and sparking genuine conversations.
Keeping the right priorities front and center
While the 11x team has enjoyed incredible success thus far, they’ve also learned some important lessons for building and growing a startup. Hasan has highlighted three key principles that guide him and his team as they move forward.
Primacy of ideal customers
The 11x team initially focused on small and midsize business customers and had a self-serve motion. But they quickly learned that their most successful customers were sophisticated sales organizations that could benefit from scale, automation and complex workflows and use cases. Now the team targets mid-market and enterprise customers, with excellent results.
AI reliability
Building an AI-powered employee comes with challenges — like making sure it’s constrained, verticalized and trained on best practices. Hasan and his team invested a lot of time in building guardrails that govern how Alice operates autonomously.
Scale (at the right pace)
In the 10 months since launching Alice, 11x has received 10,000 inbound demo requests. The market demand is extremely high. That said, Hasan and his team are obsessed with delivering exceptional experiences for their customers. They’re judiciously gating their growth, despite being one of the fastest-growing companies in the space.
For other founders and teams working on AI startups, Hasan advises, “Don't be afraid to use your own product in creative ways. The insights you'll gain are invaluable, and the alignment it creates between your team and your customers is powerful.”
Mapping the path forward
The team at 11x are big believers in the compound startup model championed by Rippling. In addition to Alice, they’re launching an AI voice application that automates outbound and inbound SDR calling capabilities and can handle 10- to 15-minute conversations with minimal latency.
They plan to launch a variety of adjacent digital workers by the end of the year, enabling autonomous GTM functions across channels, modalities and use cases — with the ultimate goal of creating the first AI-powered GTM team.
As 11x continues to push the boundaries of what's possible with AI in sales, Hasan is constantly amazed by the potential. “The AI growth flywheel we've created with Alice is just the beginning. We're not just building a product; we're pioneering a new way of thinking about work, sales and business growth.”
The future of AI in sales
But the future of sales isn't about replacing humans with robots. It's about freeing up human talent to focus on high-value, strategic activities while AI handles the repetitive, time-consuming tasks that have traditionally bogged down sales teams. Looking ahead, I'm excited about the possibilities.
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