Cold-call marketing was already challenging when Ryan O’Hara was working at a sales prospecting startup about a decade ago. The average connection rate on cold phone calls was around 10%, and 6% for cold emails. Those rates have since plummeted to 3% for calls and 0.7% for emails, he says.
“I started to see this and said, holy crap, it doesn’t work anymore,” O’Hara says, explaining his inspiration for his new company, Pitchfire. “We are trying to make a way to make it work better for people.”
The lower the success rates fall for cold calls, the greater the investment each salesperson must make to get a response of any kind from a prospect. Pitchfire gives salespeople a way to rethink that investment. Instead of paying for prospect databases and losing hours of labor, they can use Pitchfire’s platform to offer prospects anywhere from $25 to $2,000 to read and respond to a sales pitch.
“On average, your company will spend $3,500 to set up a meeting,” O’Hara says. “Why are we giving that money to advertising and software companies? Why aren’t we just giving that money to the people we’re trying to meet with?”
O’Hara started working full-time on his idea in 2022. A first iteration attempted the concept with the payment made in exchange for a sales meeting, but he found that to be an imperfect transaction. Prospects felt obligated to sit through a sales pitch, or even agree to subsequent meetings, even though they didn’t intend to agree to a deal. He revamped the idea to incentivize the point of response. The current phase of the platform launched in July 2024 and currently has more than 3,000 users.
Currently, there is no revenue generation by design. Once Pitchfire builds enough of a base of users, the people using the platform to make pitches will also pay a fee to the company in addition to their pitch target.
According to O’Hara, pitches sent over his platform are more than 70 times more likely to get a response than if delivered over conventional means, and prospects who list their contact information on Pitchfire made an average of $900 last year just for responding to sales emails. Salespeople can set the payment for each pitch, and analysis of the first year’s traffic showed that $63 was the average to inspire a response.
Looking ahead, O’Hara hopes to develop an AI-powered tool that would help prospects sort through the flood of sales pitches to find the deals that interest them. “Pitchfire also helps professionals cut down cold calls, emails, and LinkedIn messages through our free Chrome plugin. The average buyer gets prospected over 780 times a year. Our plugins let users route all sales messages to Pitchfire, which will reply, share your buyer profile and remove you from their sales automation.” O’Hara says.
