How Ornn built 8-figures in active pipeline across a new market with 11x

A new category, three audiences, one founder doing outbound by hand

Ornn was launching a product category that did not yet exist. The company needed to evangelize compute futures and related instruments to three distinct audiences at the same time: AI labs and AI-native startups who consume compute, neoclouds and data centers who supply it, and the commodity hedge funds, family offices, reinsurers, and sovereign allocators who finance both sides.

With no existing playbook for this category and a small founding team, outbound was the only channel that could move at the speed the company needed.

Manual outbound capped the company's pace

Before 11x, outbound was being run by one person, with emails drafted by hand using AI as an assist. The work took five hours a day on a typical evening, often running from 7 PM to midnight, and volume was capped by how many emails one person could write between meetings. Personalization, list-building, follow-ups, and reply triage all sat on the same person.

Slow outbound meant slow learning

Ornn's first product was a purely financial instrument, and the initial ICP hypothesis turned out to be incorrect. The audiences the company expected to want compute exposure (buyers and sellers of compute) were less interested than financial firms who wanted to take a position on the price. Outbound speed and ICP discovery were directly linked. Without a fast feedback loop, Ornn would have spent months talking to the wrong audience. 

"The acceleration of outbound was largely what led us to pivot. We realized very quickly that the people we thought were our ICP had no interest in the product."

Running outbound across three sides of a market in parallel with 11x

Ornn implemented 11x to run coordinated outbound across all three sides of the marketplace in parallel. This included compute buyers, compute sellers, and capital allocators. 11x was configured to operate at the precision a financial-markets buyer would expect, with segment-specific research instructions and sequence prompts written to match the register of each audience.

With 11x, Ornn focused on three priorities:

1. Cover every audience in the market simultaneously

Ornn segmented its market into three categories, and built dedicated outbound campaigns for each persona within each segment. Buy-side campaigns targeted AI Procurers and AI Lab C-suite. Sell-side campaigns targeted Data Center Leadership and Neocloud operators. Capital-side campaigns targeted Commodity Hedge Funds, Reinsurers, and family-office and sovereign allocators. Multi-channel sequences and event-attendee campaigns for industry conferences ran alongside email.

2. Engineer a conversational hook for technical audiences

The cold email aimed at technical co-founders at AI startups was deliberately built around feedback rather than a pitch. 11x’s personalization instructions were to reference a product the prospect had recently shipped, mention that Ornn was building a solution to help startups procure compute, and ask for input on their procurement process. The product itself was not named in the email as the goal was a conversation, not a demo booking.

3. Test hypotheses in days rather than weeks

Onboarding was a simple 30 minute call. The first Sunday on the platform, Ornn launched four campaigns by 9:30PM and sent roughly a thousand emails that week. Campaign iterations that previously required a full evening of manual drafting could now be tested across multiple segments before the next morning's calls.

"Speed was key. I cared that I could iterate quickly and try different strategies, which worked perfectly with 11x’s product."

Live in days, not weeks

Onboarding was a thirty-minute call. The first Sunday on the platform, Jack launched four campaigns by 9:30PM and sent roughly a thousand emails that week. Campaigns that would have taken weeks to stand up on a block-based platform were live the same evening.

Outbound that built a market and reshaped time allocation

Ornn used 11x to do something a single founder could not have done alone: run three coordinated outbound motions across an entire emerging market, surface ICP signal fast enough to act on it, and build a distribution layer that now compounds on itself.

The most active campaign, launched only a month ago and aimed at technical co-founders at AI startups, produced 14 positive replies and 7 meetings booked from a single sender, with 13 of those replies coming from Director, Head, VP, or C-suite contacts. Multiple of those conversations are now multi-million-dollar opportunities in active pipeline. 

Beyond the funnel itself, Alice produced a second-order distribution channel Ornn didn't plan for: a 10,000-person list of people inside Ornn's category, which now powers a recurring newsletter that has reopened conversations with prospects months after first contact.

With outbound now running on Alice, Ornn is hiring its first dedicated SDR to manage the platform and shifting founder time back toward product, partnerships, and the company's next launches. The pace is only picking up. In June 2026, Ornn raised a $33M seed led by Andreessen Horowitz and reserved the ORNN ticker on the New York Stock Exchange, an early signal of its intent to build toward public markets. The distribution layer it built on 11x is now one piece of a company moving at full speed.

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