AI Automation that makes cold calls

Presented by Zapier
https://zapier.com/

Episode Highlights / Timestamps

[00:00] A broker replaces himself with an AI voice agent
[00:45] Early pricing and first customers
[01:30] The reality of cold calling expired listings
[04:21] Why off-the-shelf AI voice tools weren’t good enough
[05:15] First AI-booked listing appointment
[08:15] Launching without a website using Meta lead forms
[12:27] Using Zapier to glue the system together
[14:51] Why this model works beyond real estate
[16:12] Fine-tuning models for sales conversations
[19:12] Shutting down a profitable agency to build SaaS
[22:12] Founder roles and co-founder fit
[30:00] What AI coding tools really do (and don’t) replace
[32:42] Breaking down the early revenue
[35:24] Naming the company and what comes next

 What happens when someone is so fed up with cold calling that they build an AI to do it for them — and it actually works?

In this episode of  The Next New Thing, Andrew Warner sits down with Yevgeniy Matsay and Aidan Richards, co-founders of Rezora. They share how a frustrating real-estate sales job turned into an AI voice-agent business that generated real revenue — and why they ultimately shut down a profitable agency model to build scalable software instead.

Yevgeniy started as a real estate agent, spending entire days cold calling expired listings. When early AI voice agents emerged, he decided to build one tailored specifically for sales conversations. It landed listing appointments almost immediately. Instead of keeping it to himself, he sold it as a service to other brokers, validating demand fast — but also running into the limits of manual setup and constant customization.

From there, the conversation digs into how they:

Proved demand with a scrappy agency-style rollout
Used tools like Zapier and voice AI to stitch together a working system before SaaS existed
Learned why “just prompting” breaks down for sales calls
Transitioned from custom workflows to a self-serve product built on fine-tuned language models
Thought about scalability, founder roles, and when to pause revenue to build the right thing

This is a grounded, technical, and honest look at turning AI automations into a real business — including the tradeoffs, the hard parts, and what actually works in practice.