We’re a startup. Which means time is tight, budgets are tighter, and everyone’s doing three jobs at once. Like most startups, we knew sales was essential, but also the one thing that kept getting deprioritized. Between product, delivery, support, and operations, sales was always “we’ll get to it next week.”

We tried handling it in-house. Cold emails here and there. A few LinkedIn messages. But it wasn’t consistent, and it definitely wasn’t scalable.

Eventually, we decided to stop winging it and take sales seriously. We hired a full-time Sales Director. It felt like the right move, a senior person who could own the process, build a pipeline, and handle discovery calls end-to-end.

The initial approach: hiring a full-time sales director

On paper, it looked solid. We had someone experienced, presentable, and motivated. His role was straightforward: reach out, pitch, and book meetings. When he landed a client, he got a bonus. We were paying $13,500 net per month, plus $2,500 in insurance and overhead, so around $16,000 monthly, or $192,000+ per year.

For a while, it worked. He booked some meetings, made some progress. But then reality kicked in.

There were days without any outreach. Weeks without real traction. Productivity dropped during holidays, sick days, or whenever life got in the way. And the output? Capped by time. Eight-hour workdays aren’t really eight hours of outreach. There are pauses, context switches, admin, breaks.

It wasn’t a bad hire. The problem was the model itself. It just didn’t scale.

We didn’t hire another SDR. We built one.

While figuring out how to scale our outreach without burning out or overspending, we realized something: we didn’t need another sales rep. What we needed was output. Meetings. Momentum. And we needed it to work no matter the day, hour, or timezone.

Since we were already playing with voice AI internally, we decided to test a wild idea: What if we trained our own AI sales agent?

Not something fancy or futuristic. Just a focused, well-trained rep that could make calls, pitch the product, answer basic questions, and book meetings. That’s it. No contracts, no onboarding, no salary, no sick leave. We built a rough version in-house. Taught it what to say, how to sound, when to pause. At first, it stumbled a bit (we did too). But with each iteration, it got sharper. More natural. More effective.

Eventually, it started doing the job we had once paid thousands a month for, only faster, cheaper, and without breaks. We named it Alex. Alex became our full-time SDR.

Did we make the right move?

Looking back, replacing a full-time Sales Director with an AI sales agent felt like a risk at first, but it turned out to be one of the most impactful decisions we’ve made as a company.

Today, our AI SDR consistently handles over 2,500 outbound calls per month. It operates on our schedule, follows our script, adjusts tone based on objections, and routes booked meetings directly to the person best positioned to close, our CEO. It works across time zones, respects prime calling hours, and runs without ever asking for a raise, a sick day, or a break.

And it doesn’t just show up. It performs.

For less than $1,000 per month, we replaced a $192,000/year role, eliminated operational bottlenecks, and built a system that scales as we do. If we want to double output, we don’t hire, we just replicate. If we want to adjust messaging or test a new angle, we tweak a prompt, not train a new person.

This isn’t just about saving money. It’s about building infrastructure. Sales is no longer dependent on individual performance—it’s predictable, repeatable, and owned entirely by us. That’s the real win. We’re no longer hiring to keep the top of our funnel alive. We’ve built a machine that does it for us. And yes, turns out, we made the right move.

Now, we’re making it possible for you to do the same

We’ve been in your shoes: running lean, juggling roles, knowing sales is critical but never having the time or headspace to do it properly. That’s why we stopped trying to hire our way out of the problem and built a solution instead. It worked for us. It saved us time, money, and stress.

So we turned it into something others can use too.

NomAI SDR is our way of sharing what we’ve built with founders, operators, and small teams who need consistent outbound without adding headcount. You define the script. You shape how the agent speaks. You can tweak the prompt, test variations, and train it to get sharper over time. And it does get better, every call, every campaign, every iteration. It’s not static. It learns.

Upload your lead list, define how the AI should sound, set your schedule and that’s it. The meetings start coming in. And while the agent handles repetitive outreach, you get to focus on what actually moves the needle: preparing for conversations with people who are already interested, already informed, and already booked on your calendar.

This is how you remove one hat without dropping the ball. We did it for ourselves. Now, we’re making it possible for you to do the same!