About Artisan

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Our Journey

Our Co-Founder Blake Boykin started his career as a technical support rep at the Austin-based eCommerce platform BigCommerce. BigCommerce customers would call in with technical questions about their website and Blake would help solve them. Afterward, out of curiosity and a desire to provide great support, Blake would always ask, "I understand you called in for X, but is there anything else troubling you with your business?" The customers almost unanimously would say, "Well.. I spent X thousands of dollars building my website, but I'm not making any sales. How can I attract people to my website and convince them to buy?"

Responding to client need, BigCommerce spun out a Professional Services team and Blake capitalized on the opportunity to learn Digital Marketing: Inbound, SEO, PPC, Email, & Social Media Marketing and served as a consultant for BigCommerce's customer-base, offering by-the-hour subject matter trainings.

Blake then spent a few years working for top eCommerce agencies in Sales & Project Management before taking a detour into Tech Sales to learn the pure craft of Sales. In six short years, he worked his way from serving small & medium-sized businesses with CrowdStrike to managing accounts for the largest companies in the country.

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I had worked so hard to get to the top, that once I was there and established in Enterprise Field Sales, I realized it wasn't what I wanted. I hated the travel, I missed my wife and kids, and I felt disconnected from the work I was doing. Adding a couple million to the bottom-line of a $20b+ giant didn't have the same reward as adding a couple hundred thousand to the bottom-line of a small family-owned business.

Sales is about solving problems and while I've worked in several industries and solved many different problems, the most compelling one that stayed in the back of my mind was the first problem I heard back on the phones at BigCommerce. "…I spent X thousands of dollars building my website, but I'm not making any sales. How can I attract people to my website and convince them to buy?"

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To solve this problem, Blake teamed up with his best friend since childhood Peter Sharma to co-found Aartisan. Peter is the former Chef de Partie at three-Michelin-star (two at the time) restaurant Manresa in Los Gatos, California. After a long, accomplished career in the restaurant industry, he wanted a change and switched over to software engineering.

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The work ethic, attention to detail, and creativity of a Michelin-star chef are really something you need to see to believe. I have never seen a human being who is more persistent and dedicated to solving a problem than Peter. In my career with agencies and in software, he is the best developer I've ever met. That's why when he told me he was interested in starting a business, I jumped at the opportunity.

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