What it’s like to work at a profitable AI startup built for the trades

Inside Hearth: $35M ARR, 15,000+ customers, and the unfinished work of building autonomous revenue systems for small businesses

✨ Hey there this is a free edition of next play’s newsletter, where we share under-the-radar opportunities to help you figure out what’s next in your journey. Join our private Slack community here and access $1000s of dollars of product discounts here.

---

TL;DR

If you only have a minute or two, here’s what you should know about Hearth.

• Automating the entire revenue cycle for contractors. Roofers, plumbers, landscapers, and other contractors spend countless hours on sales and revenue work. Hearth is using AI to build a completely automatic revenue engine—contracts, invoices, estimates, financing, phone calls—so contractors can get back to focusing on what they do best.

• $35M+ ARR and turning a profit. Hearth has 15,000 paying customers and is profitable. Their new AI receptionist product, just one new product in the company’s current shift from “tool” to “ teammate,” hit $1M in ARR in a quarter with no advertising.

• Truth above all else. Most culture at Hearth is downstream of truth. Feedback is direct and honest. Priorities shift as fast as reality does. When measuring performance, Hearth cares about quantitative output above all else. Pursuing truth is how Hearth’s team wins.

• “High slope” over impressive resumes. Hearth is looking for true builders—people who are founders at heart. The best way to get hired is to show that you are good at what you do and capable of learning quickly. You’re welcome to send a cold email if you’d like to get hired. Misha, the CEO, prioritizes “show, don’t tell.”

Why most small business contractors fail

Nobody starts a roofing business so they can spend all of their time behind a computer:

• Responding to leads before competitors do

• Creating estimates that convert

• Wrangling financing products so they can close deals with flexible payment plans

• Sending invoices

• Chasing down those invoices when they don’t get paid

• Handling the 100s of other revenue management tasks that comes with running an SMB

No, they start a roofing business because they want to install roofs and make money.

The same can be said for plumbers. For landscapers. For carpenters. For people who install windows, doors, and insulation. For deck builders. This is true for all contractors in the trades: they would much prefer to spend time on their business instead of doing sales and revenue work with clunky software.

But in the past, the version of the world where contractors can just focus on the physical parts of their businesses has not existed. Contractors are shockingly underserved by software, stuck working with clunky tools and heaps of dashboards and CRMs that aren’t automatic enough.

Hearth is aiming to change all of that by using AI to automate the entire revenue cycle for contractors. The company was founded by Anthony Ghosn and Joe Lonsdale (Palantir co-founder), and since 2022 has been run by veteran CEO Misha Tsidulko. The signals to date are impressive:

• 15,000+ paying customers, from family-run businesses to large franchises.

• $35M+ ARR in 2025.

• Profitable (!)

• Has raised $61.8M in total from 8VC, Founders Fund, Human Capital, and others.

• 200 employees and growing fast.

This is some of the information that made me consider writing about Hearth; information that I thought might make talented people want to apply for a job there. Lots of revenue? Profitable? Strong fundraising from top venture capital firms? Co-founded by one of the people who started Palantir? Hmmm. Interesting.

Hearth is now hiring for lots of roles both remotely and in their New York City office. So I sat down with the team and asked them questions to figure out how Hearth gets work done, what makes them special, and what it is like to work there. By the end, I hope you will have an idea about whether you’d like to join.

Trades are the backbone of America, but bad software is killing them

Put yourself in the shoes of a roofing contractor for just a few moments. You have spent the last few years of your life honing your skills and now you are ready to go start out a venture of your own. This feels like the American dream: work a job, earn some skills, and start a business of your own. Congratulations.

It’s only after you open the business that you realize all is not well.

You spend all day on a jobsite with your team and get home at 10 P.M. to realize that you still have six hours’ worth of contracts and estimates to send out. Then half of those customers don’t pay you on time, so you have to spend other odd hours—mornings, nights, whenever—chasing down those invoices. Your friends & family referrals lull after the first few months, so you realize you need to start marketing, an entirely new task. That marketing produces leads, which you suddenly have to dedicate heaps of time towards ‘qualifying’ and ‘nurturing’ and ‘converting’. Oh, and remember, your job is to install roofs.

Doesn’t this all sound a bit ridiculous? Why can’t you just focus on what you are good at?

The answer is that there is not much good software to help you. “More than 50% of small business contractors who keep our homes running fail by year 5,” Misha Tsidulko, Hearth’s CEO, told me. “Even worse than restaurants.” When I asked about existing software, Misha said: “Contractors don’t want software. They don’t need another CRM or dashboard. They need revenue.”

The market for solving the revenue management problem is big; the kinds of companies Hearth serves generate more than ~$1T in annual revenue in the United States alone. If Hearth is able to become the default way that these companies acquire and manage revenue, then they are in position to become, as Misha describes it, one of the “great American technology companies.”

I often hear from people who do not care all that much about the problem their startup is solving. One thing I find encouraging about Hearth is that their team seems to be deeply invested in the human reality, and the pain, of this problem. “I come from a family of contractors and am married to one,” someone at Hearth told me. “The trades are the backbone of America in so many ways, and I wanted to be a part of the solution.” It was surprising to me how much of the team I talked to had real, personal ties to the trades and deep empathy for the problems that their customers face.

Empathy for the problem is one thing, though. Building a great product is something different altogether.

Racing from $0 to $35M to $350M—and beyond

Hearth began its life in 2016 as a product that let contractors offer customer financing to their customers. “Our solution democratized access to customer financing for small business pros, disrupting the old-school ‘dealer fee’ model which charged 10-20% of the job, which was a total scam,” Misha said.

Since then, Hearth has gained a massive amount of traction. The company currently has more than 15,000 paying SMBs, most of which landed on Hearth via an efficient acquisition engine that pays for itself within 30 days of a new customer signing. The product suite is much bigger now, too: digital estimates, invoices, payment processing, marketing tools, and a lightweight CRM have all been added over the years.

These products, along with the large customer base and the proprietary data Hearth has collected, have paved the way for a major shift: Hearth is now transitioning from a tool to an actual teammate by building an AI platform layer on their existing infrastructure.

“We are undergoing a new transformation that will allow us to realize the most ambitious version of our mission,” Misha said. “Hearth is becoming an intelligent, personalized ‘team member’ designed to autonomously drive revenue.”

The previous version of Hearth—the one that generated $35M in revenue last year—was a tool contractors could use to help them handle revenue management. The company that Hearth is becoming is one that will do the work for contractors end-to-end. Leads, estimates, invoicing, phone calls, financing, and more will all be handled by Hearth’s AI.

Perhaps the most impressive public step Hearth has taken towards building this AI layer so far is their newest product, AI receptionist, which launched in 2025. The product answers calls 24/7, books appointments, offers financing, captures lead, and will soon be able to go outbound and follow up on estimates. Customers are delighted and pushing for more.

Hearth’s AI receptionist hit $1M ARR in just three months and with no paid marketing. “Just paying customers and word of mouth,” Misha said. It’s encouraging traction for Hearth’s new direction, which is far more ambitious than merely an AI receptionist. Within a couple of years, Misha said, “Hearth will be the indispensable infrastructure that runs the revenue engine for $5M—$25M home services contractors.”

So far, Hearth has built a suite of useful tools for home service contractors. This was the path to 15,000+ customers and $35M in 2025 revenue. Misha believes that the path to $350M in revenue (and beyond) is to to leverage proprietary customer financing and workflow data, and deploy intelligent, personalized AI crew members who just do the work of the entire revenue cycle, helping pros win more jobs and get paid automatically.

You may be wondering: Why can’t any other AI startup just jump in and do the same?

It’s here where Hearth has (another) big advantage. The company has spent a decade in this space. With that time, they’ve accrued huge amounts of proprietary SMB and customer financing data. They’ve built an existing distribution base of current and old customers. And they’ve designed a sales motion that covers CAC within 30 days. A new startup trying to solve these same problems would have a decade’s worth of hurdles to jump first.

Building reliable AI agents for contractors means solving for complex technical problems at scale:

• High stakes (missed leads costs real money)

• Multi-system orchestration across payments and scheduling

• Users on roofs, not at desks

• Network-level learning across thousands of contractors

• Zero lead leakage across every channel

• Sub-second response, near-perfect accuracy

• Chaotic inputs (voicemails, missed calls, partial conversations)

Building a great product here requires a great team. So I chatted with Hearth’s employees to figure out what sort of culture has made all of this possible—and who they want to hire next.

Truth and competitive greatness

You would be surprised how hard it is to discover what it’s like to work at a startup. People default to platitudes. “We work hard,” someone will say. “It’s fast-paced.” The irony is that while these answers are often true, they tend to be useless if you want to know what it’s really like to work there.

Luckily, the team at Hearth opened up about some of the most unique facets of their culture.

One of the overarching virtues upstream of Hearth’s culture is “Truth”. I recognize that may sound fluffy. Truth? What does that mean? Wouldn’t every company say that?

Hearth’s team, though, seems uniquely obsessed with truth. It informs every single part of their culture. Let me give you a few examples of how this looks downstream:

• The company cares about quantitative performance more than almost anything else. Is your work producing obviously good outcomes? Can you clearly point to those outcomes? The people who can answer “yes” to these questions are the ones who thrive at Hearth. “There’s very little performative startup culture,” Misha told me. “What matters most is whether something works.” Strong outcomes are rewarded at Hearth.

• With truth comes a high level of trust, so people are treated like adults. If a friend shadowed me at Hearth for a week,” one employee told me, “they’d be surprised by how hands-off management is. My boss isn’t constantly checking in or asking for updates. You’re expected to know what you own and just run with it. No one’s micromanaging, but that also means you can’t hide or wait around for direction.” Amanda Hester (Director of CS), told me that “Hearth trusts people to act like adults.”

• Communication is honest and direct. Nearly everyone I talked to emphasized how direct the communication is at Hearth. (We do a lot of spotlights like this at Next Play, and no group of interviewees to date has emphasized direct communication as much as Hearth’s employees did.) “People communicate very honestly with each other,” someone said. “It’s normal to be candid with leadership, disagree openly, or push back if you think something doesn’t make sense. There isn’t a lot of tiptoeing or ‘let me word this carefully so it lands right’ energy.” At Hearth, you can speak your mind.

The other thing that stood out to me was this idea of “Competitive Greatness”. Hearth’s team believes that greatness is a “conscious choice to be at your best when your best is needed.” And your best will be needed often at Hearth, a company that builds new products fast and is currently undergoing a significant shift as they build an automatic AI layer.

To achieve greatness at Hearth, one employee told me, “you need to be able to execute FAST. This is a constantly changing environment (changes for the better) because the company is constantly listening and can make pivots quickly. Other cultures I’ve worked in had levels and levels of red tape—not Hearth.”

“And when disagreements arise,” someone else said, “data wins. It’s based on data, not the person.”

One final tidbit: people stick around at Hearth for a long time. “Hearth has a lot of people who have been here for five or more years, which is unusual for a tech company that’s still in a startup phase,” someone told me. “It says a lot about the culture, how people are treated, and what keeps them around.”

Should you join Hearth?

There’s one term that Hearth employees—and their CEO—use to describe who fits in: high slope.

“We care far more about how quickly someone learns, improves, and takes on responsibility than where they came from or what their resume says,” Misha told me. People who thrive at Hearth are people who are hungry to become the best versions of themselves, who have a high velocity of learning and growth, and who want to do impactful work. Hearth rewards team members who are resourceful and create their own momentum.

Hearth is, in other words, looking for people who can actually do the work.

In particular, Hearth right now is looking for strong technical builders—from backend engineers to designers to senior PMs. They are also looking for a CTO-level leader to partner with Misha as Hearth builds out their autonomous revenue engine for the trades. If that’s you, reach out.

If you’re unsure, I’d ask you a few additional questions before joining:

• Can you empathize with contractors’ pain? Because the team cares a lot.

• Are you someone who cares a lot about results? Performance is measured by outcomes.

• Can you be flexible when there are disciplined pivots? Priorities change as reality does.

• Are you happy with direct, honest communication? This is the style at Hearth.

There is also the benefit that Hearth generates tens of millions per year in annual revenue and is profitable. There is generally less risk associated with working at a company like Hearth as compared to working at a company that relies on more fundraising rounds to avoid going bankrupt.

If this sounds like you and you want to apply, I’d encourage you to get creative. Misha told me that Hearth has found most of their employees via referrals, outbound, and investor networks. They’re looking for people who are “founders at heart” and who can take ownership. This isn’t to say that you should not apply to the open positions on their website, but you may want to consider doing more.

When I asked Misha if they are open to receiving cold outbound, I got a resounding yes. “We are open to thoughtful cold emails, prototypes, and other ways to ‘show don’t tell’ or add value. These are all stronger signals than a polished resume.” If you are not sure how to write a good cold email, read this essay.

And if you know you can add value but don’t think you have time to write some fancy creative cold email, “don’t overthink it,” Misha said. “Just drop me a note and say hello.”

You can browse all of Hearth’s open roles on their website. If you really want to join, I’d encourage you to reach out with something valuable even if your specific role isn’t listed on the website. Like with any startup, if you can help Hearth make more money, they may want to talk to you.

And finally, it’s useful to re-iterate: If Hearth succeeds, in just a couple of years they will be the default revenue engine for home service contractors. This is a large market. If you believe in the problem and the mission, and if the culture sounds like a fit, I’d encourage you to reach out.

Thanks to Hearth for supporting Next Play and making this piece possible.