Owner.com

Last week was a tipping point for our company. We announced that we’ve now driven over $1 Billion in sales for local business owners. When your company has a real mission (not just a mission statement), you can build enough momentum to turn your business into a movement. This is one of those moments where you really see that momentum take over. Small business owners are the most inspiring people in the world. They put everything on the line: their house, their savings to serve their community and make great food. They don’t have jobs, they have livelihoods. But they've been underserved by decades of tech solutions that give them more work, more complexity, and less profit in their pockets at the end of the day. Owner's movement is about helping these operators take back power. Independent restaurants have been forced to compete against big chains with massive structural advantages for decades. A mom and pop taqueria in Santa Monica is up against Taco Bell's Super Bowl ads. An independent pizzeria is up against Domino's hundred-person engineering team. They've been losing this fight quietly for a long time. Tools like ours are how they win. Our AI offers independent operators best-in-class marketing and agentic workflows that do the complex work of SEO, site design, and guest remarketing for them… All so they can get back to what they do best: making good food and serving their community. Movements sound impressive. But they aren't easy to build, and we need your help. If that inspires you, we'd love to have you join us. Link to apply to our 50+ open roles in the comments.

Grader has helped drive $1 Billion in sales for Owner.com customers. Here's how we built it.

I’m proud to announce Owner has driven $1B in sales for local restaurants. Today we’re introducing Grader: the world’s first AI CMO for restaurants that outperforms human marketing teams: I started Owner at 17 because of what I saw happening to my mom. Her small business was losing to a big corporation. Not because of her. Because they had huge marketing & software teams. They spent $10,000,000 optimizing their website, she built hers for $10 on Wix. They A/B tested every pixel, she couldn’t. They had a mobile app and CRM marketing automations, she didn’t. I built the first version of Owner for her. It changed her life. My mom went from struggling & stressed… To achieving millions in sales & feeling excited for her future. Now, we’re creating that transformation for thousands of small business owners. The problem: big corporations are winning with tech. They spend millions a month on it. Small businesses can’t. That’s why we’re building AI to help small business owners fight back and win  Our product has already driven over $1 billion in sales for restaurant owners. I’ve heard the dominant, doomer story about AI: “The end is near. AI is about to control everything and replace every job”. I disagree. I see a path for AI to do the jobs that small business owners can’t afford. The average independent restaurant profits $60K a year. They can’t afford to hire a CMO, CTO, or hundreds of engineers. Massive chains can. AI can be the CMO, CTO, and tech team for small business owners. Before AI, big corporations had every advantage. But now, small businesses can operate with even greater advantages, and win with AI. The revolution is already here: Thousands of new restaurants use Grader every week. 60,000,000+ users (1 in 4 American adults) have used Owner to interact with local restaurants. If you’re excited to build a future where small business owners survive and succeed: We’re hiring across 50+ roles! Page in the comments below. ––––– To celebrate this launch, I’m sharing the doc I wrote on the key lessons from scaling Owner to $1B. I’ve never shared this info publicly. Comment “Owner”, and I’ll send you the 19-page doc.

I spend a lot of time on stages talking about GTM AI, sales infrastructure, enablement systems. All real. All important. None of it is what actually makes Owner truly special. What makes Owner.com different is people. A 22-year-old who was making $14/hour in restaurants, riding the subway in the dark both ways. Someone gave him a shot. Two years later he's leading a team, and the thing that fires him up most is returning that fortune to the next early-career kid who doesn't know what they're capable of yet. A recent grad who joined us five months ago and told her manager, unprompted, "I can't imagine working somewhere where you watch the clock." She opens her laptop and suddenly it's 3pm. An entire team logging in on a Saturday because the month wasn't finished. Nobody asked them to. Everyone's Slack bubble just turned green. People who had already hit their number were in the channel hyping up those who hadn't. That's not something you train into people. That's identity. You can replicate the systems. You can replicate the infrastructure. You can replicate the AI tools that make us more efficient than our competitors. But you can't replicate what happens when you put hungry, humble, growth-obsessed people shoulder to shoulder and enable them to do their life's work. That's something totally different and I'm so grateful to experience that environment everyday. We just dropped a video from our new Toronto office, which tells this story better than I can. Go watch it. You watch is and think "hell yeah," we're hiring.