Deepesh Shivnani

At AscentiveLab, we turn outbound into an AI engine. No bloated SDR teams. Just qualified meetings on autopilot — no burnout, no spam, no chasing.

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Inspiration

As a business student juggling classes, part-time jobs, and side projects, I got tired of seeing how broken outbound sales was, especially for startups. Writing the same “Hey {{firstName}}” emails over and over, chasing leads who ghost you, burning hours and getting nowhere. I thought… there has to be a smarter way. That’s when the idea for AscentiveLab hit me, what if AI could handle the grunt work, spot signals, and help companies actually book meetings without all the noise?

What it does

AscentiveLab builds AI-powered outbound systems for startups. No fluff, no bloated SDR teams. Just signals-based outreach that lands 10–30 qualified meetings a month. The best part? Clients only pay when those meetings actually show up.

How we built it

It started super scrappy. I was piecing together tools like Apollo, Instantly, Make, scrapers, and Airtable. A bunch of trial and error, testing domains, deliverability fixes, even learning how email warm-up systems worked from the ground up. It wasn’t smooth, but every piece started clicking. Eventually, I built a system that automates prospecting and outreach, filters leads based on buying intent, and runs with barely any manual input.

Challenges we ran into

Oh man, where do I start? Deliverability was a nightmare at first hundreds of bounces, inboxes going cold, spam filters killing reply rates. Learning how to rotate sender domains, warming them up, cleaning lead lists properly, that took a minute. Also had to learn the hard way that more emails ≠ better results. Getting the copy tight, figuring out timing, personalization, all that took grind and feedback.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We got clients actual results. Startups that were stuck now have real sales calls on their calendar every week. One client closed 3 high-ticket deals in under 30 days. Another one replaced their entire SDR workflow with our system. Also proud that I built this as a full-time student with limited time and money, and it still worked.

What we learned

Tech is cool, but psychology is king. The tools matter, but it’s the message, timing, and offer that gets replies. I also learned how powerful small, consistent tweaks can be, just optimizing follow-up timing or changing the subject line boosted replies by 3x. Plus, the importance of clean data, bad inputs = bad results.

What's next for Deepesh Shivnani

More experiments, more results. I’m refining the product to be even more plug-and-play for founders. Also working on a SaaS version that lets people run the same system with fewer steps. Long term, I want to help 100+ early-stage companies get out of the “pipeline panic” phase without hiring a single SDR. Let’s scale smart.

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