The Challenge
Before Bland, Oxycell operated the way many startups do. Every inbound call from CallRail rang directly to Tom’s personal cell phone. If he was mid-demo, on another line, on a flight, or simply away from his phone, high-intent buyers landed in voicemail and oftentimes, were completely lost.
Meanwhile, Oxycell’s lead flow was growing. The company was generating [INSERT: # of monthly inbound leads], yet Tom was still the only person handling everything: answering calls, sending quotes, completing follow-ups, onboarding and dealing with support questions. As volume increased, speed-to-lead became a major problem, decreasing his conversion rate by 60%.
Tom wanted Oxycell to be intentionally lean. But without a scalable way to handle inbound calls and customer communication, growth would hit a ceiling.
The Solution
Instead of hiring a sales team or building out a call center, Tom took a different approach and began to explore how AI voice agents could automate this workflow.
He began with the front door of his business: inbound calls.
He built a custom agent on Bland that he named Aiden, and it instantly became the center of that strategy. Tom chose Bland because he could launch a working agent in days, not months, and because the BTTS voice model sounded more natural than anything else he had tested. As he put it:
“The fact that it has a dedicated language model that improves itself makes it so much more powerful. I can build my agent, come back two weeks later, and it’s already doing a way better job. More and more people ask me if they were talking to a human and when I tell them it was AI, they’re shocked at the realism.”
Once Aiden was pushed live, Tom saw an immediate difference. If he couldn’t answer a call, the agent did. Instantly, politely, and with enough intelligence to fully qualify the caller. It asked the right discovery questions, handled common FAQs, collected intent signals, and surfaced only the most serious prospects. And for any callers expressing buying intent, the agent created a group text, introduced Tom directly on the thread, and handed the conversation off smoothly. What used to become voicemail now became a live, warm conversation.
Tom summarized it best:
“Aidan is literally my best salesperson - he tees up every lead for me.”
The Outcome
The result is a growing, zero-employee operation that consistently crosses $1.5M a month in revenue. And according to Oxycell, Bland has played a large role in that. “The first month we started using Bland for our inbound phone calls, we had an 81.6% month-over-month increase in revenue from $837,875 to $1,521,835.”
Now, the missed-call problem that once slowed growth is almost fully eliminated.
Customers feel the improvement too. Many have asked Tom afterward who they were speaking to. According to Tom, he often gets people telling him, “I had no idea that wasn’t a real person.” He explained further, “Every day I speak to customers who ask if the person they were speaking to was an AI agent, and they’re truly not sure. Even after a full 5-10 minute conversation. Then they typically say ‘wow’ and comment on how wild it is that the agent was so articulate and easy to deal with.”
With Bland handling the early conversation and pre-qualifying every lead before Tom ever steps in, he now spends his time on the highest-leverage parts of the business: closing deals, refining processes, and expanding into new markets.
One added benefit that Tom shared was this: with Bland’s voice agent effectively handling inbound calls, he can now run paid advertising on the weekend without missing phone calls.
“Being able to turn on campaigns during the weekend and have calls handled efficiently gives us an immediate way to scale our most effective ad campaign by at least an additional 28% which is a big win”.
