Tech CEO Spends Rs 12.5 Lakh On Pizzas To Earn Rs 8.3 Crore In Return, Find Out How

It is often said that the way to someone’s heart is through their stomach. A tech CEO applied this adage in a unique promotional campaign for his company. Matthew Parkhurst, co-founder and CEO of New York-based cloud infrastructure startup Antimetal, sought to promote his company by sending pizzas to his potential clients and tech influencers. The entrepreneur spent $15,000 (approximately Rs 12.5 lakh) to buy pizzas. In turn, he earned more than $1 million (about Rs 8.3 crore) in revenue after getting clients through their pizza delivery campaign. Reportedly 75 companies that got the free pizzas signed up for the startup’s services.

On April 4, Matthew Parkhurst shared photos of pizza boxes with his company’s name on X and wrote, “Don’t order lunch yet! Antimetal is pivoting to a pizza shop. We’ll be delivering 1,000+ pizzas to startups and VCs in SF & NYC.” The 26-year-old told CNBC that any pizzas that were not delivered were given to delivery agents. He also spent on handsome tips worth “a couple of hundred bucks” per driver.

Matthew Parkhurst revealed that the money spent on the pizzas was the only money the company spent on marketing. As it turns out the “return on investment” of this campaign was pretty high. He added, “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.” The idea of sending champagne was ruled out for being too expensive.

San Francisco-based data analysis startup Julius AI signed up with Antimetal after getting the pizzas. Its CEO Rahul Sonwalkar told CNBC that he remembered seeing the name “Antimetal” in a cold pitch email he’d received, but he did not pay attention to it. However, once the free lunch arrived at his office, he took note of the company and searched it up. Appreciating this marketing tactic, Sonwalkar added, “As a founder, there’s a lot of noise. So the fact that he (Matthew Parkhurst) did something interesting basically snapped me out of just automatically ignoring the cold messages.”

Another San Francisco-based tech startup CEO Paul Klein, paid attention to Antimetal after getting the pizzas. He then got in touch with the company and bought its monthly subscription service related to cloud infrastructure support.