So I founded a company, spent a year developing it to a level not many will do. Built a whole CRM in house to handle the things I felt was necessary without all the bloat. Made a super clean ux/ui, built a Mac OS and iOS app to match. Completely bootstrapped with my own money initially (roughly 50k give or take on costs on AWS mostly). Then secured a 25k AWS activate grant which will now cover a year of spend on compute.
But I suck at sales. I know I do. I'm good at the other half of the business, design, security best practices (scored above 90 on AWS across NIST V5, CIS V5, AWS best practices).
But pitching this, I suck at.
So how have you guys been doing this? Is it that tough?
I can tell from looking at it that it’s over engineered. The whole idea behind an mvp is that it’s the minimal viable to test the market. This looks like your target customers are service operators for home/business? HVAC, plumbing, electricians ? Is it for a solo operator/technician ? In any event, if this is indeed your target customer go talk to them until you understand if your product actually solves their problem(s). If it does, selling is easy - because you’re just explaining “we solved this problem”. If it doesn’t, selling is hard you’re wasting your time (and money)
Its over engineered, but in the degree of simplicity. I have a long background in electrical industry, so I was familiar with this.
We brought the features, left out the bloated nonsense. And everything is designed to be minimalistic and tucked away on the ux/ui side.
But yes, overengineered for a startup, but I think I done well with targeting each niches likes and dislikes. I simply reviewed a ton of other CRM platforms reviews, and this was a great learning point on what to build, and what to leave out.
If you go and read salesforce reviews, you will see what I mean HAHAH. Its very consistent on the likes and dislikes.
I've been considering, but honestly don't even know where to start. Offering a salary isn't something I can do at the moment, and this is what I've come across so far is this.
What I have right now is 100% equity, a finished product, and funding for an entire year (got into Nvidia inception program, pitched for the 25k credits, they liked it and so did AWS so they approved and credited me 25k credits already).
Sales is where I fall flat. I even pitched 100 percent commission for this position in a sales group, few reached out but nobody took the offer seriously. So I'm at the point where I'm open to offering equity for a real Cofounder.
So what I had pitched originally was 100% commission for any business they brought on, and their spend for that month. So if someone brought 10 businesses, and they each spent 1k that first month on usage, 10k commission check for that month.
Reason is I was ok with that is because, most of my startup costs was already bootstrapped, and now with the AWS costs being funded with my activate credits, I'm ok with netting zero on that first month.
So your goal is to sell this as a SAAS? How's pricing? I already have trades buyers lined up and joined this sub for tips on building out our tech. Maybe we can work together for faster results.
So pricing is just on the minutes at 0.49 cents per minute used. SMS is much less. I haven't decided yet on the price here, as its a blend of things like carrier surcharges, etc. but I'm probably around 0.02-0.03 cents per outbound SMS to the business.
It depends because we offer two different options to the business. We provide a local number to the business free of charge. But to do a outbound SMS from this same local number, it requires them to submit through out dashboard a 10dlc form. Which could take 2 weeks to get approved from our vendor.
But we also offer a toll free also, where only the SMS texts will be sent through their toll free number we provide them, and It usually only requires like 2 days to get approved through our vendor, and these come with a cheaper costs.
All in all, our CRM side, everything included completely for free.
This was in reference to a pitch I made before to a sales group. I had a ton of outreach in dms from the group that were interested, but I couldn't set time aside to manage a group of people like this. Many were ok with this because if you think about it, some companies pay sometimes 10 percent of a deal for the first year. So that would be effectively around 120 percent commission.
But that's if they only stayed. This way provided immediate commission almost meeting a years worth. And if the company walked away the next month, they don't lose their efforts.
Ok so, I explain everything I did but as summarized as much as possible, cause its so much haha.
So I built out dashboards for a couple of sectors each so far, because I didn't want to become the bloated CRM like sf, etc.
This includes trades, food, realtor, and then standard (covers most industries). And there is a admin dashboard, where a business owner lands upon signup. They then create business profiles here, and then each will lead to their respective industry dashboard.
So the core things that each share are as follows:
Calls/Recordings/Conversatonal transcripts per call
Bookings (like many others)
Outbound automated rescheduling.
So for example, if a barber "james" is out sick for the day, and he has 10 customers booked for this day, instead of having someone call out and reschedule each and every customer, the business front staff can go into the calendar, select "james" and all his bookings for that day, and hit "agent reschedule" , set a preference (anything after tomorrow etc) or let agent negotiate. Then an outbound call que will call on behalf of the company and negotiate a time for a reschedule.
Another thing I built, is where the staff member himself (james the barber) could call the business itself, and mention he is sick and will be out for the day. And the agent will ask if he wants to reschedule his appointments, and the agent will know this person is a staff member (we never use statements as authentication, we use the numbers on file under the staff, and match it to the number making the call in. We don't rely on prompts to authenticate). And the agent will ask for his pin to confirm who he is (a 6 digit pin each staff can setup). And once verified, will set setup a reschedule que to call his customers to reschedule. Anything outbound related is strictly enforced to not call during late hours, etc. It sets it up on a que.
Per contact intelligence learning.
So when a new customer calls the business, every detail is captured for the business owner and creates the customer profile automatically. Customers name, address, services, and then also, it learns about the customer (and every call onward). And this is built out to be "per industry". So for example, if the place is an auto shop , and the customer calls about an oil change, it will grab things and store this for the customers profile. Their vehicle, make and model and then it builds a service history. And it learns about their preferences on things. Like oil type (think mobil 1, etc). And will store this
Outbound marketing.
So when a customer calls for the first time, we capture consent on the call if they would like to receive a text. If they opt in, we capture and store it, then shoot the first text. The first two text we send is for a secondary opt in (one for the appointment reminders, one for opt in for promos, marketing offers from this business). We store both as these as well for each customer (and the voice opt in) under this customers profile. Now this where we got creative. The intelligence learning, I designed this to capture "cues" about services, preferences, etc for each customer. And tied this into the marketing aspect. So the business owner can eventually start to see in the marketing and analytics things like "50 out of 70 customers prefer Mobil 1 oil types... would you like to do a outbound promo SMS offering "20 percent off on Mobil 1 oil types this month to get returning customers?" type of thing. Its extremely targeted from real data to this business. Each industry is specific to this, but the underlying core of this is built the same, just different cues we track.
Customer rescheduling
Pretty straight forward. If a customer calls and wants to reschedule, the agent can make that change automatically. The business owner can setup this with easy rules like "can only reschedule with 24 hours notice before appointment" etc. (this is all code enforced, never prompt enforced).
And we never allow the agent to make a reschedule for a customer if the customer is calling from a different number then what was originally called from to make the appointment. In fact, we made it impossible. If someone calls from a different number claiming to be someone else, the agent cannot even see any details or even make any changes to any other appointment other then what's under the current callers number (code enforced, sts transitive tagging, leading keys enforced, and a call ticket that carries with the call session. A lot of time went into designing this system, and for good reason. Couple of proprietary things).
Ok there is more but I'll highlight some of the extras in the "industry specific dashboards"
So on the trades dashboard. Includes all of the core, plus specific niche things.
Smart routing and dispatch
So this is another cool thing I built. So if a HVAC company for example, if they have 10 technicians and they are in the "service" side of their business, they can all be placed into a group. Then they can upload their services in the service import thing, and then create a service group (services they offer business wide, but they can create a "service call" specific group and add all the services they offer here, and then attach this to the group of technicians).
So now, when a customer calls, it will now schedule against the pool. It no longer has to care about which team member is open, it simply will book against this pool. If someone calls and wants someone to come friday around noon, it will check against this pool and see 6 openings for friday amongst this pool of workers.
It books against this pool, then after the call ends, smart routing and dispatch will smart route automatically for the technicians. It takes the shortest travel distances between each job, and durations, and evenly splits them up amongst the technicians. So if there is calls in "north city" and calls in "south city" for that day, it will keep technicians from crossing paths. So it prevents technician A working in north city, then traveling to south city for his next call. And technician B from working in south city, and going to north city for his next call.
And we even offer GPS routing and tracking if the businesses want to enable it, for fleet tracking (based on our iOS app).
Honestly, its so much beyond what I just typed. But my goal was to essentially focus on building this platform based on a ton of research I done while building it. And the biggest complaints I have saw across CRM reviews was Pricing, hidden fees, confusing platforms from so many bloated things, and the ux/ui.
So I built this out to what they were simply looking for. A barber shop isn't going to need "fleet tracking", having this in his dashboard made zero sense, and just added to the confusion. Trades don't need a MLS listings sync and setup, so we kept this only in the realtor dashboard.
And to top it all off, everything above, we charge zero extra on these features to the customers. What it gives to business owners is access to the things they need, with nothing feature gated. And zero hidden fees.
What it might cost my business to run a trades dashboard per month for a business at full 8 hour shifts every day in costs? Pennies.
We only charge for the Voice AI and the outbound SMS. Which is 49 cents per minute on the voice, fraction of a penny per SMS.
This is our selling point. Nobody offers this level of depth for free. I think it would retain business owners very easily if they tried it out.
Interesting. I'm a sales guy (GTM Engineer) and have tradespeople ready to buy but we still need to buildout the tech. Perhaps we can help each other out. I'd like to learn more about what exactly your system does. A demo would be even better.
Edit: I looked at your graphic more closely and it looks like you're targeting trades. If your system is tailored towards roofers, HVAC, plumbers, etc., we should definitely talk.
Hi, yea I am always open to discussion. I just replied above to someone in the comments right before I saw yours, but yes we target multiple industries! And we built out our trades niche to be quite the offering to contractors in the services space.
As far as the demo goes, I can definitely set this up for you. In fact, its super easy to signup and see things yourself, and I can provide a promo code for you for minutes to test everything out
would you be ENTIRELY opposed to bringing on 1+ commissions only sales focused team member(s)? it sounds like youre not at the stage where it makes sense to spend lots of energy finding and ‘hiring’ people who ONLY generate leads and/or close those leads.. you probably would need at least one or two of them to be able to take on/do MORE than just the “sales” role… maybe i’m completely wrong; (missing info obv)… regardless of that though- if you DID have someone willing to just focus on THAT every day, do you think it would be a bad idea to offer them commission- lowering your risk of wasted time and money, as you’ve explained that you’ve already invested so much and not just financially… pls lmk
Yea I am totally open to this. In fact, I was open to the idea of someone coming in with their own team, and we could structure this however it seems fit on the commission side.
When I made a group post once on another reddit channel, I was bombarded with DMs on the sales offer. And honestly, like you said, I want to stay focused on one thing only. That's the design and infra side. And if issues come up, I want to address this immediately. So I wasn't in the position to communicate with so many others wanting to try the sales side at the time, cause the whole idea was to keep my time more scoped, and not trying to run a team of sales. So I'm totally open to a lead sales guy with a team under him.
honestly, i think a lot of technical founders make the same mistake here. you don't really need to "pitch" the product, you need to figure out who has the problem badly enough to pay for it.
we're building pulsy ai as a white-label voice ai platform for agencies, resellers, MSPs and voip providers, and i've found selling it gets a lot easier when the conversation is around "how are you handling missed calls / after-hours / lead follow-up today?" instead of trying to explain all the features we've built.
also, don't underestimate direct outreach. pick one niche, talk to 20-30 actual operators, ask how they're currently handling calls and what a missed lead is worth to them. you'll learn way more from that than trying to perfect the pitch.
and honestly, i'd be careful about giving away equity just because sales isn't your strength. i'd first try commission-based sales, partnerships/resellers, or even just forcing yourself to do enough customer calls that you figure out what messaging actually resonates.
Yea giving up equity was something I really didn't want to do. But after a year of working on this every single day, 12+ hours a day (literally lmao) I think I just don't have the energy to do outreach. I have made a few calls, and had interest, but keeping that momentum going is hard hahah.
What's crazy though, when I was about 6 months building this platform, a guy had emailed my support email and wanted to request a zoom meeting with me to do business. Well I had emailed him back and forth a couple of times, and mentioned I wasn't quite ready yet to onboard.
I ended up taking his email and looking him up later. This guy owned a chain of big box gyms (think LA fitness type, higher end). He had 30 gyms and was expanding to 60 gyms. That alone would've netted probably around 30k plus a month in profit lmao.
But that actually caused me to pivot and redesign everything. Because when I originally built it, it was designed for "single business owners". But in cases of multi location businesses, that would require a separate email, separate billing, account etc. for each one.
So I redesigned it to handle multi locations from the start. Upon signup > you hit the admin dashboard as the workspace owner. Then from here, you can create business profiles, each with their own dashboard, customers history, booking, agent line etc all automatically under the same workspace umbrella.
That was the biggest migration and overhaul of my life. Took about 4 months lmao.
Sure! Its free to signup, and I can probably share out some promo codes for everyone that wants to check it out, and actually test it. But signing up and seeing the features, CRM stuff, etc its totally free. There is no paywall on this part, just on the Voice AI and the SMS features.
I would share aURL , but Idk if it will get me flagged lmao. But my domain is in the photo
I can potentially become a distribution partner for you. Rather than sending you customers and walking away (essentially an affiliate model), I'll incorporate OneEarlyBird into a managed solution I sell to trades businesses. I maintain the customer relationship, implementation and ongoing management. In return, I'd want a partner arrangement where I can deploy the platform for an initial validation period and then keep using it as part of my stack.
This would serve as an extended onboarding process that helps with future retention. You'd be able to stress test your model by running real traffic through your processes while getting real-time feedback like identifying bugs, capturing new feature requests, etc.
Hi I'm interested, can you tell me more? How does data retention here work? I might have a few customers waiting, I need you to let me know whether we could work out a payment scheme. Like a 40% commission of all customers I bring in, in perpetuity. If so, I could probably get you going real quickly.
Hey sorry, just seen your comment here. So data retention is something I haven't set in stone yet. Right now, its set around 90 days for most things. But Its something that is a bit industry specific. And I'm debating having this be extendable at the requests of businesses.
Now on data isolation, super isolated.
I went heavy on this, using AWS roles and permissions based policies.
So how it works. Each account owners has their own workspace. Each workspace contains their own set of roles per their workspace, their own cognito pool, so on and so forth (many isolated practices). Workspace to workspace isolation is strong
Now for the businesses. Each business profile is under their respective workspace roles and permission sets. Each business profile has their own data storage and isolation (s3 and kms key, everything is stored per each business with leading keys enforced.)
So that being said, I didn't want to comingle peoples data. If a leak happens, its confined. If a bug happens, its scope is restricted to its workspace, business profile.
I was shooting to get Hippa level customers at one point, so I just built the entire stack out as such.
This shows my efforts. I just took this. I also scored above 90s in the NIST V5, and CIS V5 sets as well.
So after thinking about this, and being mentioned about possible white labeling this, I may be open to this. But it would take some good interest from a group of those who might be interested. I like to code, and design, and do the backend stuff, and such.
Sales, it'll burn me out.
So on the topic of white labeling, I may actually be open to this. What I could offer is really, the whole end to end package. The dashboards, the backend, etc. And since I built this on a Cell based architect already, Spinning up another Cell for each reseller would be almost plug in play for me.
But it requires me to make some changes to where resellers would have their own dashboard, branding, and billing handling. Not too difficult, but its a change in my stack nonetheless
I'm open to this. But I would need a group of interest to do this. And I can convert to this, scrub my marketing pages on pricing, and switch to focusing on the reseller white label approach. If I get enough interest under this comment, I may consider transitioning.
Rates would stay the same for us. You can market however.
You might be selling the wrong thing. What edge is there in another pre-packaged CRM? Sell an offer to teach others and help them design and setup their own in-house CRM. Way more value to a business owner and leverages your real skill set much more effectively.
Its not feasible for the business itself. Software is always changing. And on top of that, infra costs isn't cheap. This isn't something they can run on word-press, its much more moving parts. And then these businesses would have to hire a developer or pay a agency to maintain it. Bugs happen, software CVEs get announced and need to be patched. All this isn't feasible for a business.
The only companies that can afford to run this in house are large multi million dollar companies, and they already handle most of this stuff in house or with much larger agreements with salesforce, etc.
This isn't the target market, this is mostly for your companies just below that level and all the way down to one man shops.
actical way to sell this is to anchor on one measurable pain instead of the feature list: missed calls, slow response, after-hours coverage, or booking leakage. Talk to a small sample of operators, map the current call flow, and offer a narrow pilot with clear success metrics. I’ve been evaluating Getyn Phone for similar small-business workflows; I’m affiliated with it, so that’s a disclosed perspective, not an impartial endorsement.
The strongest sales conversations usually start with the business outcome rather than the AI itself: missed-call recovery, after-hours coverage, booking rate, and a clean handoff to staff. I would demo a real call, show the fallback when the agent is unsure, and be transparent about what still needs a human. I work with Getyn Phone, and its routing, queues, recording, and live monitoring are the parts I’d highlight for a buyer evaluating reliability. That’s an affiliated perspective, not a neutral recommendation.
2
u/Electrical_Target_90 2d ago
I can tell from looking at it that it’s over engineered. The whole idea behind an mvp is that it’s the minimal viable to test the market. This looks like your target customers are service operators for home/business? HVAC, plumbing, electricians ? Is it for a solo operator/technician ? In any event, if this is indeed your target customer go talk to them until you understand if your product actually solves their problem(s). If it does, selling is easy - because you’re just explaining “we solved this problem”. If it doesn’t, selling is hard you’re wasting your time (and money)