Austin Distel

Who is Austin Distel

Austin Distel lives in Austin, Texas, which he jokes every Uber driver tells him is an unusual name for the city. He moved there with a group of friends after Y Combinator to chase the startup life, and the company that became Jasper grew out of that same crew. He describes himself in plain terms: he loves marketing, revenue, sales, and building companies, and he can talk about it all day. He leads with curiosity, the habit of walking into a room and asking every question about how a business actually works, and that habit runs through everything he has built.

The Jasper story

Jasper is the AI writing company Austin helped start and then marketed as its CMO. The origin was almost an accident. Over a Christmas break in 2020, their Y Combinator connections got the team early access to GPT-2, years before ChatGPT, when the model could barely finish a sentence. They had spent years building marketing software, so they pointed the technology at their own problem first: the endless treadmill of writing new ad copy. They spun up a Facebook group of agency owners and wrote clients' ad copy by hand in the comments, using the model behind the scenes. No product yet, just proof that people wanted it.

The first paying customer was Austin's roommate, who paid a round hundred dollars because they had no idea what to charge. It worked, the demand piled up, and they turned it into a product. By thirty days they were at thirty thousand dollars a month, by ninety days ninety thousand. The community started calling the tool Jarvis, so they leaned in and renamed it, which is when Marvel's lawyers sent a cease and desist over the Iron Man name. They rebranded to Jasper, redirected a hundred thousand backlinks, kept ninety-eight percent of them, and doubled again in the next sixty days. Austin ran all of it, and grew the company to its first hundred thousand paying customers and past forty-eight million dollars a year in revenue, with a marketing team of two. Jasper reached a $1.5 billion valuation, and he left at Series A.

What he does now

After Jasper, Austin kept himself sharp by gathering friends every ninety days for in-person AI hackathons. That turned into Agentic Society, an in-person society in Austin for business owners who want to build a fleet of AI agents and grow revenue without growing a bloated team. It meets twice a month on Fridays for a few hours of training and show-and-tell on using AI to automate real work, and it is aimed at the people who actually shape how a company uses AI. He also owns The Tox, a chain of spas he bought after Jasper, and earlier he built Proof, a website tool that showed live activity on a page to lift conversion. The spas gave him a second, offline proving ground for the same marketing ideas he teaches.

What he speaks about

Austin speaks about revenue marketing, the kind judged by sales rather than by how pretty it looks, and about using AI to do more with a small team. A few ideas come up every time. Make every channel work together instead of in silos, so the work compounds. Get your customers to sell for you by packaging their reactions instead of describing your own product. Know when ugly, direct creative collects the money and when beautiful creative positions the brand. Hunt your first thirty customers by hand instead of farming them with posts. And treat AI as the single most valuable skill you can add to a marketing team right now. He makes those points with real numbers from Jasper, not theory.

His talk at the room

Austin sat down with Connor Cullip at the Network of Directors room in Austin in July 2026 for an hour on building marketing that drives revenue. It is a working masterclass on the ideas above, told through the Jasper story, and it is on film. You can watch the full talk, read the writeup, and get the takeaways on his event page.

Watch his talk from the room