Connor Hountalas.

Founder and President

DTC herbal supplement brand with single-serve formulas.

• Scaled DTC supplement brand to 75,000+ sold units, 56% recurring revenue, 4.85/5 (320+ reviews), Shopify/Amazon/wholesale.
• Built the Shopify storefront and full ops stack with AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor), and zero dev hires.
• Formulated 5 proprietary SKUs at clinical doses (1,000–3,000mg vs competitors' ~80mg) backed by deep AI ingredient research.
• Engineered a 7-source revenue intelligence system with 12 detection rules and AI agents, replacing analytics teams.
• Deployed 1,296 programmatic SEO/GEO pages and a 100-article AI support system, scaling acquisition with zero added headcount.
• Vetted hundreds of manufacturers to build a resilient US-based supply chain, later re-sourcing to cut target COGS ~60%.

Founder

Managed after-hours lead response for home-service operators, using AI voice/SMS to qualify, book, and brief leads before morning.

• Founded AI voice/SMS agency that answers and qualifies after-hours home-service leads, recovering revenue lost to missed calls.
• Coded a multi-tenant Convex runtime wiring 8 services, with 0–100 lead scoring across 26 routing signals.
• Shipped 4 production voice/chat surfaces plus the GTM stack: live demo, Stripe checkout, onboarding, analytics, outbound.
• Engineered activation gates, retry/backoff logic, webhook ingest, and verification scripts across launch-critical flows.
• Solo built NightShift from zero to a production-deployed, multi-tenant system, in roughly 6 weeks.

Operations, Strategic Initiatives & Program Management

Built and run an end-to-end operating system for DOOH.

• Built the deal operating system: a 25-database Notion CRM (19-stage pipeline, ~40-field per-site diligence schema, AI search).
• Personally closed $8.32M in ground leases, projected to drive ~$50M in revenue, supported $20M+ in team deals.
• Drove a 1,350+ location pipeline end to end, closing 15-year ground leases and carrying each through to approved municipal permit.
• Cultivated and managed a 250+ stakeholder network: 177 property owners, municipal officials, legal/eng/survey partners.
• Codified 5 sign-bylaw regimes into pass/fail screening that killed 500+ non-viable sites in minutes, not weeks.
• Coordinated 5 partner disciplines through one governed record over 3.5 years, with auto-compiled daily reporting.

CXO · Chief of Staff (part-time)

Investor diligence, financial models, ROI analysis, and dashboards for a seed-stage AI company.

• Developed an AI-queryable investor data room (32 docs, 9 categories) via a custom PDF-to-PNG + OCR pipeline.
• Built the Seed/Series A financial backbone: a 3-year P&L, a formula-driven product ROI model, and 2 investor dashboards.
• Shaped 5+ core product and go-to-market decisions as part-time CXO on recurring founder strategy calls.

Director · Strategy, Ops & BD

Strategy, operations, and BD role focused on vendor economics, SaaS pricing, investor materials, and product-release coordination.

• Renegotiated hosting costs from $60 to $0.50 per user, a 120-fold (99.17%) cost reduction.
• Restructured to SaaS with an artist revenue-share model, making 90% of revenue recurring.
• Tripled (300%) committed investor capital through strategic planning, pro formas, and investor pitching.
• Project-managed and co-led a 5-day, 2,000+ participant Amsterdam event that directly secured investment.

Program Management · Product Operations

Program and product operations across ESR's operator-facing SaaS platform and Jewel Trek's consumer web/app product.

• Led a cross-functional team of 8 to ship two products: a B2B platform (ESR Tech) and a consumer app (Jewel Trek).
• Ran go-to-market, end to end — shipping 140+ deliverables across SEO, Social, blog, paid, and web.

Founder and CEO

Sports recruiting platform with a pre-ChatGPT computer-vision track running in parallel.

• Raised six figures, including a six figure SAFE from an Uber co-founder, to build an AI sports platform; 1,031 users, $0 paid.
• Led a computer-vision POC using YOLOv3 detection, CSRT tracking, Siamese re-ID, PoseNet, and action detection.
• Drove a team to ship a 23.8M-param ResNet50 CV model to 92.8% triplet accuracy on 12.6M crops via AWS Batch/SageMaker.
• Directed 80+ employees/contractors across 3 continents and grew social reach to 4M+ views, 350K likes/month.