Octolane AI

In 2024 at @ycombinator office, I crossed out the word "CRM" in my notebook and wrote "Self-Driving" 1,000+ companies onboarded since. Some stayed. Some left. The ones who left hurt the most, and taught me the most. We raised the least in our category. Stayed lean. Built, rebuilt, kept going. We shipped every day. No exceptions. Sent an investor update every month. The good, the bad, and the days I was barely holding it together. Zero sales team. I ran from office to office chasing one yes. I did free work for founders I believed in, because I wanted them to win more than I wanted a customer. They started sending their friends. Then their friends sent theirs. We cracked retention for @octolane last month. The metric that predicts everything has nothing to do with logging in. I know the exact moment to go all in, and it's now. Convinced world-class engineers to join. Convinced my best friend @halim__rafi across the world to build it with me. All of this from a coffee shop in San Francisco. I'm not ex-Salesforce. I didn't know how to sell. I can't out-spend anyone on billboards. I'm just a delusional kid who still believes in miracles. A first-gen immigrant who dropped out of Duke to build something people want. I'm not Elon Musk. I'm not Sam Altman. But my mom calls me Superman. And my co-founder believes I can light a match in the rain. Truly, what more do you need? On May 12, you're going to see what 2 years of shipping every day actually looks like. Nobody ever wanted a CRM. They wanted to never forget a name, a promise, a follow-up. 25 days to go.

Customer Success as a function won't survive AI in its current shape. Most teams are still optimizing a job that's about to stop existing. Hiring more CSMs. Building more dashboards. Running more QBRs. The work that adds value to customers isn't the work they're staffing for. That's the shift we built @quivlyai for. The AI workforce for post-sales.

Something happened in our @octolane AI CRM today that I want to share, because I don't think people realize what we've built yet. A new user signed up for Octolane. Within minutes, our own instance of Octolane: → Read the signup → Decided the question worth asking was "is this a YC company?" → Created that field itself → Wrote an ICP summary for the account → Did the same across all 1,205 records in our self-serve pipeline I did not create the "is YC?" column. I did not write a prompt. I did not tell it what our ICP was. Octolane read our sales conversations, figured out that YC batch mattered to us, and built the schema around it. Respan came back YES W24. Paradigm, YES W24. Korso, YES S26. Kapsule, NO - and a one-line summary of what they actually do. Every single value has a source. Every source has been verified by a second agent. This is what self-driving CRM means. Every other tool is still asking you to map fields. If you're a founder reading this, this is the bar now. If you're a VC reading this, ask your portfolio companies if their CRM is generating its own fields yet.

today is our launch day. i woke up at 6. rafi had crashed at 4am, he'd been shipping fixes all night. I had customer call a with a founder we onboarded last week. at the end he thanked me, said he'd never seen anyone go this deep on his sales process. we filmed a case study right after. then back to work. shipped. fixed bugs. our ai chat broke in the afternoon because so many people were using it at once. team kept pushing. it's 10:30pm now. i look up and the whole day is gone. Meanwhile, the rest of the category keeps raising. another round. another announcement. another vision for the future of sales. good for them. we're not in those conversations, we're in customer calls. i've been saying no to money for a long time. because i didn't want to be the founder who raises a giant round on a flashy ai product demo that doesn't work in practice and then spends two years trying to grow into the valuation. i wanted to build something people loved using first. earn the right to raise. there's no point building something you're not proud of. So here's where we are. youngest team in the category. lowest-funded. working seven days a week. nobody cares about that part (obviously) and they shouldn't. what they should care about is what we built. @octolane is a self-driving ai crm. that phrase has been hijacked, so let me say what it actually means. it means the crm does the work. you don't update fields. you don't drag deals between stages. you don't write follow-up emails because you forgot what you promised on monday. the system listens to your calls, reads your inbox, watches your pipeline, and takes action. it follows up. it logs activity. it moves deals. it tells you who's about to churn before you find out the hard way. what it isn't: a chat sidebar bolted onto salesforce. "ai-powered" autocomplete. another tool you have to babysit. if your "ai crm" still needs you to update it, you don't have an ai crm. you have a crm with a chatbot. the whole industry is building a better salesforce. a better hubspot. nicer ui, faster search, prettier kanban. we said no. the right answer isn't a better crm. the right answer is no crm. when we started, every operator i talked to told me i had no idea how salesforce worked. they were right. thank god they were right. if i'd known, i would have built another one. And David, this is for you, who missed his daughter's recital last spring because he was updating salesforce until 9pm on a friday. you don't have to anymore. octolane does the work end to end now. we battle-tested it this quarter. we're publishing our benchmarks this month. the most surprising part of this year has been watching founders push octolane harder than i thought possible and watching it hold up. they throw the gnarliest workflows at it and it just works. they tell me it's the first piece of software in their stack that's surprised them in a long time. that's the bar. i can't outspend anyone. i don't have a billboard budget. what i can give you is the one thing i actually have, my time. i f you hate your crm and you want to try one that does the work for you, dm me. text me. call me. 628-285-1600. real number. i'll personally onboard you. we've onboarded 1,000+ companies this year and set up crms from scratch for 200+. we'll listen. ship the fixes you need. share everything we learned the hard way. my co-founder @halim__rafi has personally fixed every tiny bug this month. Our team obsesses over sidebar spacing, animation timing, edge cases nobody else would notice. that's why the product feels the way it does. today we shipped the version we always wanted to have. big things are coming. we're ready. we don't talk about valuations. we talk about retention, payback, and the number of crms we're replacing. ask around. then come find me.

Taste isn't how something looks. Looks are the shadow taste casts. Rounded corners. Nice typography. The right shade of gray on the right shade of off-white. That's aesthetics. Aesthetics is downstream of taste. Taste is knowing what to build before you build it. It's built on an almost uncomfortable understanding of what the user actually wants, not what they say they want. Steve Jobs didn't sketch the iPod because he loved music players. He sketched it because he understood nobody wanted to manage files. They wanted a thousand songs in their pocket. The device was the answer to an intent, not a spec. Airbnb didn't take off because the design got cleaner. It took off when Brian Chesky flew to New York and photographed hosts' apartments himself, because he understood the real product wasn't the listing. It was trust. Taste led him to the camera before the pixel. Here's what I mean. A recording from @octolane: 1. For a meeting that just ended, the menu shows: Recap. Send follow-up. That's it. Because if the meeting is over, nobody is thinking "how do I join?" They're thinking what did we say, and what do I send? 2. For a meeting that hasn't started, the menu shows: Join Google Meet. Generate prep. Running late. Reschedule. Send pre-meeting note. Different menu. Same button. Because the user's intent is completely different. - Nobody opens a past meeting wanting a Join link. - Nobody opens a future meeting wanting a recap. And yet almost every calendar app shows the same seven options every time, because someone optimized for consistency instead of intent. That's the gap. Taste is building the system that notices: 1. The meeting starts in two minutes and they're still in Slack → they want "Running late." 2. The meeting was 45 minutes ago and nobody showed → they want "Reschedule." 3. The meeting is tomorrow morning → they want a prep note. Because, - Nobody wants to write a meeting note. They want to remember what to bring up. - Nobody wants a "copy link" button. They want to stop being late. - Nobody wants a CRM field. They want to close the deal. The moment a user opens your product and thinks "this is exactly what I was thinking" - that's less about magic and more about the "Taste" compounding over a thousand small decisions about intent. You don't get it from a Dribbble scroll. You get it from sitting with the user. Watching them work. Asking questions that feel invasive. Living inside their frustration for a week. Then removing everything that doesn't serve the goal they came in with. Most teams can't do this. It's slower. It's lonelier. It doesn't fit a sprint. But it's the only way to build something people actually feel. We've spent years obsessing over intent. Every menu. Every empty state. Every micro-moment where a user almost gave up. May 12. The world will know. 20 days from now. 🏎️

In 2024 at @ycombinator office, I crossed out the word "CRM" in my notebook and wrote "Self-Driving" 1,000+ companies onboarded since. Some stayed. Some left. The ones who left hurt the most, and taught me the most. We raised the least in our category. Stayed lean. Built, rebuilt, kept going. We shipped every day. No exceptions. Sent an investor update every month. The good, the bad, and the days I was barely holding it together. Zero sales team. I ran from office to office chasing one yes. I did free work for founders I believed in, because I wanted them to win more than I wanted a customer. They started sending their friends. Then their friends sent theirs. We cracked retention for @octolane last month. The metric that predicts everything has nothing to do with logging in. I know the exact moment to go all in, and it's now. Convinced world-class engineers to join. Convinced my best friend @halim__rafi across the world to build it with me. All of this from a coffee shop in San Francisco. I'm not ex-Salesforce. I didn't know how to sell. I can't out-spend anyone on billboards. I'm just a delusional kid who still believes in miracles. A first-gen immigrant who dropped out of Duke to build something people want. I'm not Elon Musk. I'm not Sam Altman. But my mom calls me Superman. And my co-founder believes I can light a match in the rain. Truly, what more do you need? On May 12, you're going to see what 2 years of shipping every day actually looks like. Nobody ever wanted a CRM. They wanted to never forget a name, a promise, a follow-up. 25 days to go.

I onboarded hundreds of customers before I understood what they actually wanted. A friend told me recently that the output isn’t the product. The process is. And he was right (thank you @TylerMaran 🙏). Every conversation, every failed onboarding, every churned user taught us something we couldn’t have learned any other way. So we stopped thinking about features and started thinking about jobs. Octolane now has 9 AI agents divided across three tracks that makes it fully self-driving end to end: 1. Inbound: detect deals from emails, create them from meetings. 2. Active Deals: prep before calls, summarize after, draft follow-ups, update fields, nudge stale deals. 3. Outbound: reach out to website visitors, re-engage closed-lost deals showing new buying signals. These agents aren’t isolated. They share memory. They coordinate. When your follow-up agent drafts an email, it knows what the meeting prep agent surfaced. When the stale deal nudge fires, it knows what the field update agent last changed. It’s not a collection of tools. It’s a workforce. You talk to @octolane like a co-founder, not a spreadsheet. This month my co-founder @halim__rafi and I are locked in to make every single agent feel like a no-brainer. I’m talking about the craft where you see a demo and immediately text your co-founder “why are we not using this?”