He built for 2 years before raising a dollar—then hit $13M ARR and a $40M Series B. | Alex Halliday, Co-Founder & CEO of AirOps

Alex spent two years building AirOps nights and weekends during the pandemic before raising a single dollar. A chance conversation with Sam Altman—while walking down the street during SF Pride—sent him down the LLM rabbit hole months before ChatGPT existed. He pivoted his product toward AI, picked marketers as his customer, and never looked back.

In this episode, Alex breaks down why he picked marketers over every other AI use case after watching them build 80-step workflows on his platform, the consultative sales motion that converts almost every pilot to annual at $60K–$250K ACVs, and why positioning—not product—was the unlock that took AirOps from $1M to $13M ARR.

Why You Should Listen

• Why picking the highest-taste customer is more important than picking the biggest market.
• How proof-point-driven outbound gets you past the "nobody's heard of you" problem.
• Why the founder-to-seller handoff is a forcing function for focus—and when to make it.
• How a consultative, education-led sale converts almost every pilot to annual contract.

Keywords startup podcast, startup podcast for founders, product market fit, finding pmf, AI marketing, content engineering, SEO, AEO, AI search, enterprise sales, SaaS growth, AirOps, Alex Halliday, Greylock

Chapters

• 00:00:00 Intro
• 00:03:06 Two Years in the Idea Maze
• 00:06:51 Why He Picked Marketers Over Everyone Else
• 00:14:36 What Best-in-Class Content Looks Like Now
• 00:25:42 From $1M to $13M ARR
• 00:28:29 Building a Repeatable Sales Machine
• 00:36:15 Competing in the Hottest AI Category
• 00:38:44 The Moment of True Product Market Fit

Send me a message to let me know what you think!