Coffee with One 🇺🇸@coffeewithone
That’s more than my co-founder’s salary and mine combined. Great campaign but can’t afford the plane. Here’s what we did instead to get our first 100 customers, and 1,300 more since, on $0 of outbound:
1. I knocked on every door at StartupHQ at 156 2nd st. during YC. Then Wework, then 20+ different coffee shops in SF. Annoyed half of them. Then bought the other half coffee and pastries. Cleaned their CRMs by hand. My co-founder couldn’t be in the US (visa compelexity), so I ran the city office to office by day and coded with him at night.
2. We became the #1 CRM in our YC batch. Then those companies scaled, hired a sales lead, and told us “I’m just gonna use HubSpot.” Painful but we kept shipping.
3. I won’t pretend it was a clean line up. Finding PMF was brutal. We knew people liked the idea but the hard part was getting them to the moment the product actually clicked. Activation took us months to crack. Retention took longer. We rewrote the sidebar more times than I can count, changed the onboarding, the copy, the animations: anything to get someone to that “oh, it just does this for me” moment one day sooner. It compounds. The friction we saw on Monday didn’t exist by Friday.
4. Then it turned. The day we pushed on revenue, it started doubling. We’re on track to double again in June, while migrating companies off HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, and Attio at the same time. People show up already paying for a CRM, walk us through everything they hate about it, and switch. They were promised a lot with other AI CRMs. They didn’t get it. We ship the same day, whether you pay $20/mo or $3,000/mo.
Numbers nobody asked for:
→ 1,400 customers
→ $0 spent on ads, ever
→ Revenue doubling, again, this month
→ Companies that raised hundreds of millions called me. I told them the product wasn’t ready, come back later. They did and now they are switching.
3 core promises:
1. Never miss a follow up.
2. Never update a field by hand again.
3. Talk to your CRM like a co-founder
We didn’t do any stunts or banner. Just grit and a line I’ve said a thousand times: “Don’t buy anything. Just tell me what’s broken and what you’d pay to fix it.”
Someone once told me it’s easier to change a person’s religion than migrate them off Salesforce. We do four denominations now: HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, Attio. Hundreds of people said this would never work.
And if you’re reading this doubting yourself: I promise you, just keep showing up. Companies with hundreds of millions in funding or 10x employees are no match for a couple of delusional folks with a chip on their shoulder who refuse to stop showing up, day after day.
Like Steve Jobs said, take care of the top and the bottom takes care of itself. Build a great product, worthy of the AI era. The rest compounds.
You don’t need the plane. You just need to keep showing up while everyone else watches it fly.
@octolane - Self-driving AI CRM
