Alexander Christie

A friend at a nine-person startup just asked me what tools he needs to build out his GTM stack. He rattled off RB2B, Clay, Apollo, Instantly, HeyReach, Nooks. My answer was basically: slow down. If you're a nine-person company, you need a CRM. That's your foundation. Everything else is optional until you've proven your sales motion actually works. I recommend Salesforce. I've built Salesforce orgs from scratch and HubSpot orgs from scratch, and I have a strong preference. DM me or argue in the comments. You can hook up the Salesforce CLI to Claude Code and brain dump about how you want your CRM to work. Deal stages, fields, object relationships. It builds it. You can upload CSVs, have Leadmagic enrich them, and push data back into Salesforce through the CLI and Apex code. Plain English in, production-grade CRM infrastructure out. You can't do that with HubSpot. They don't have that programmatic layer. People complain about Salesforce being clunky, but in the AI era, that underlying architecture is actually an advantage. The complexity that made it annoying to configure manually makes it incredibly powerful when you can just talk to it. Sorry Hubspot fanbois ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Stack for a small team: Salesforce, Leadmagic, Claude Code. That gets you surprisingly far. You could use just that to get to 1m ARR tbh RB2B and website de-anonymization tools are only useful if you already have meaningful traffic. Even then, you need to layer multiple providers, same as an email waterfall. The problem is most of these providers license data from the same handful of upstream sources. You're paying five vendors to validate the same email from the same dataset. It's basically a Ponzi scheme for email data providers. I'm being hyperbolic, but if you don't understand how these systems work under the hood, you're subsidizing everyone who does. LinkedIn automation: I use Lemlist. The specific tool doesn't matter. What matters is you cannot treat LinkedIn like an email campaign. LinkedIn monitors everything. I send maybe 5-6 highly relevant messages a day, only to people I'm fairly confident will respond. Your LinkedIn profile is one of the most valuable things you own professionally. Don't blow it up trying to scale before you know what works. On dialers: don't. If you're a ten-person company, have people dial off their cell phones. Why does a founding AE need recorded calls? Who's reviewing them? Tools like Nooks and Gong exist so managers can verify reps are actually working. They're built for the professional managerial class, not for the person actually selling. Don't go buy Nooks and all this other shit. Most of us would be better off with a notepad, a pen, and a cell phone. Get your CRM right. Hook it up to Claude Code. Add a basic enrichment layer. Go talk to people. Don't make sales rocket surgery before you even close any deals. That's just MBA level procrastination.

We migrated away from Postgres in our stack back in 2022, when a single large customer onboarding managed to irreparably brick the query planner. We haven’t regretted that decision once.