This 26 year old CEO made $1 million in revenue by spending only $15000 on pizza

When life gives you $15,000, buy pizzas. At least, that's the secret sauce for Matthew Parkhurst, co-founder and CEO of New York-based tech startup Antimetal. Faced with the challenge of making his company known as it emerged from its beta phase, Parkhurst decided to serve up something irresistible to potential clients: lunch.

On April 4, the 26-year-old mastermind orchestrated the delivery of over 1,000 pizzas from local pizzerias in New York and San Francisco. Each pizza box was branded with Antimetal’s name and contact information. The pizzas that couldn’t find a home were donated to delivery drivers, who also received generous tips of “a couple of hundred bucks per driver,” according to Parkhurst.

Antimetal spent roughly $15,000 on this delicious marketing strategy, which included pizzas, packaging, and targeted delivery to potential clients, venture capital firms, and tech influencers with large social media followings.

The result? A mouth-watering success. About 75 of the companies that received the pizzas are now Antimetal clients, Parkhurst reports, creating a revenue boost of over $1 million annually, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

“The ROI [return on investment] is insane on the revenue side, compared to what we spent,” Parkhurst says. “Plus, it was really great all around because we got to support small businesses.”

An Irresistible Twist on the Classic Cold Email

Antimetal’s business model is as practical as it gets: they help other startups save money on their cloud infrastructure costs. For example, if your business spends $50,000 per month on Amazon Web Services, you can pay Antimetal $599 per month to identify inefficiencies in your AWS plan and cut that cost down.

Parkhurst’s target customer: any tech company spending big on cloud services. “We have one of those products that’s really easy to sell. It’s like free money, to some degree,” he says.

But here’s the rub: tech CEOs, venture capitalists, and influencers get a lot of emails. Rahul Sonwalkar, CEO of San Francisco-based data analysis startup Julius AI, says he vaguely recalls seeing the name “Antimetal” in a cold pitch and promptly ignoring it.

Then, pizza showed up at his office. While enjoying the surprise lunch with some of his employees, Sonwalkar checked social media platform X and discovered that Antimetal was “the talk of the town,” he says.

“I think whenever you do anything on that scale, someone finds something to be pissed off about ... Nobody was mad they got the pizza.”

Paul Klein, founder of San Francisco-based tech startup Browserbase, shares a similar story. He’d heard the name Antimetal but had no clue what the company did until the pizza arrived. Both startups quickly got in touch with Antimetal, signed up for its monthly subscription service, and plan to stick with it as long as it continues saving them money.

“As a founder ... there’s a lot of noise. So the fact that he did something interesting basically snapped me out of just automatically ignoring the cold [messages],” Sonwalkar says.

Pizza: The Viral Marketing Strategy

Pizza wasn’t the only option Parkhurst considered. He wanted a viral moment that would get people talking about Antimetal, which ruled out branded swag—too easily forgettable. Champagne was also nixed: too expensive.

Even the $15,000 spent on pizza represented “pretty much the entire marketing budget” for the launch, says Parkhurst. The results exceeded his expectations.

“There’s literally no bad press out of this [to my knowledge], which is extremely rare. I think whenever you do anything on that scale, someone finds something to be pissed off about ... Nobody was mad they got the pizza.”