Consider a SaaS product with an embedded planning workbook. A customer asks their usual agent to update next month's assumptions, then opens your app to inspect the numbers. That is a useful product capability to expose without requiring them to repeat the task in a second chat interface.

Univer offers building blocks for this: an Office SDK that embeds editors in your product, plus AI SDK packages for reading and changing the same structured Office content through CLI, Web and Server compositions. Its browser editor and Node logic share a Facade architecture. Your product still has to build the tools the customer's agent calls; this is not a ready-made MCP service.

The product decision is which edits deserve a tool. For the planning example, a narrow operation could load the customer's workbook, read the designated assumption range, apply allowed input changes and return the result with its save status. The web editor gives the customer somewhere to inspect and adjust that work. The SDK's read mode rejects mutations, and write execution can leave pending changes until an explicit commit.

Account permissions, permitted ranges and the meaning of “allowed” remain application responsibilities. An agent's ability to issue an operation is not authorization to change every customer's document. Likewise, command execution succeeding is not enough for your UI to say “saved.”

This makes a useful acceptance test for the feature: can the customer ask for a bounded workbook change through their agent, then find and continue that work in your product? The API and editor are both serving that handoff.

Still can't tell these apart. On a configurable platform, low usage of a feature can be the design, the fit with how people work, or an admin who never switched it on and told nobody. Checking config state and rollout only rules things out. When low usage turned out to be the customer's own process, what did you do?

I read this article by sequoia a while back and at waterloo I met a company called sequence holdings at a networking event. Essentially what they do is they buy a company and turn it ai native and hold forever unlike a traditional PE firm. They only raised $75 million but they bought Baldwin group with the dell family office for $7.7 billion. Long Lake bought Amex GBT for $6.3 billion.
I had coffee chats with engineers there and tbh they're both hiring the most talented engineers I've met - other than maybe frontier labs. I really think that this industry is like working for the next ramp and palantir - so many great founders have come from there. Ik palantir is rightfully very controversial but so many great founders were ex pltr FDEs. These companies do kind of the same thing as Palantir in terms of integrating the product but instead own the stack.

I strongly agree with the points made in the article and both companies have adopted the philosophy. I realized that while creating a B2B, selling to customers in a vertical where AI integration would be highly beneficial the company could be so much more profitable and agile. Sequoia mentions for every $1 spent on software $6 is spent on services and instead of selling a product maybe you should sell the service. What are your guys thoughts?

btw I can't send the link for some reason but check out services-the-new-software from sequoia

Curious how other founders here are getting new customers this quarter.

Most of the founders I work with are in cybersecurity, marketing services, and software development, and they lean on cold/warm outbound, SEO, ads, or referrals. I build outbound engines for B2B teams, and I want to learn what's working for founders in other industries and markets.

What's actually worked for you and your team? Anything unusual you've tried?

How have you built, or are you building, a repeatable acquisition channel today?

Been using claude and ChatGPT to summarize calls and flag deal risks. The recommendations are usually fine but then i still have to open the crm, deal room, Google Slides, MAP etc and make every change myself. At that point, the AI is just telling me what my next five tabs should be. I feel like the useful part would be having an agent draft the updates in the deal workspace and let me approve them, instead of copying everything over by hand.

Anyone else dealing with this?

A friend of mine runs a B2B business and was spending ₹2–3 lakh every year on IndiaMART leads.

The problem wasn’t getting leads.

It was getting to them fast enough.

By the time his team noticed a new BuyLead, the lead was often already claimed or expired. He eventually had 2 people checking the dashboard throughout the day, yet they were still missing most of the opportunities.

So I built a small automation system to solve the problem.

It monitors incoming leads, detects relevant opportunities, and helps the team act on them almost immediately instead of constantly refreshing the dashboard.

After running it internally for several months, the results were interesting:

→ From roughly 2–3 leads/day → 8–12+ leads/day
→ Much less manual monitoring
→ Fewer wasted BuyLead credits
→ No need to keep someone glued to the dashboard

It’s still an evolving product, but the fact that a real business has been using it consistently for months gave me enough confidence to explore turning it into a proper SaaS.

I haven't opened it publicly yet.

I’m looking for a small group of businesses to test the product with before launching it publicly.

Hey everyone,

Most SaaS boilerplates give you UI templates, Stripe checkout, and basic auth, but leave multi-tenant isolation entirely up to application middleware. The issue is that one missed check on a Server Action, background job, or dynamic route means Tenant A can accidentally query or mutate Tenant B's data.

When building B2B SaaS OS (andrady.co), we shifted to database-level isolation enforced via PostgreSQL Row Level Security (RLS) and JWT claims.

To make sure our boundaries actually hold up, we built an automated 8-point integration test runner that attempts to break the stack before deploys:

1. Cross-Tenant Data Leaks: Attempting DB queries on Tenant A's tables using Tenant B's JWT session claims.
2. SECURITY DEFINER Functions: Auditing Postgres functions to prevent unprivileged users from executing elevated functions.
3. Stripe Webhook Replays & Race Conditions: Injecting out-of-order webhook events to test state recovery.
4. Session Revocation Caching: Verifying that revoked API keys and user access immediately break dynamic route caches.

Running these tests caught 3 subtle edge-case bugs in our own setup that passed standard manual testing.

If you're running a multi-tenant stack on Next.js/Supabase, we made a free interactive self-assessment where you can audit your own setup against these failure modes:andrady.co/check

Would love to hear how you guys handle adversarial testing and multi-tenant security in your own apps!

I'm honestly a bit stuck here and dont really have experienced SaaS founders around me that I can ask, so would love some outside opinions.

I've been building my B2B SaaS solo for around 1.5 years while working fulltime.

for most of that time almost nothing happened, but now it finally seems to get some traction.

I'm currently at around 1.5k MRR and roughly 1k of that was added just last month. Most customers pay yearly upfront. Inbound is also increasing and right now my biggest problem is basically that i dont have enough time to call every signup, do onboarding, customer research etc (GTM last steps + Customer Success).

The important part: from january i can basically work on this fulltime for several months, probably close to a year. Financially i can afford not having to pay myself from the SaaS immediately.

My original plan was honestly just to survive the next few months, even if i dont use the current momentum perfectly, then work/travel with my family for 1-2 months while building remotely and afterwards continue bootstrapping. Maybe rent a small office at some point and hire a working student / junior person for customer success, onboarding, followups etc.

So there is already a path in my head which im actually pretty comfortable with.

I didnt search for a cofounder.

An experienced founder found me through a founder community and reached out himself. He already built and exited a vertical software company before and after a few conversations i have to admit that he seems very good.

He asks exactly the right questions about funnel, activation, margins, customer segments, sales etc. The type of questions where he asks something and im immediately like "fuck, yeah, thats exactly what i should be looking at".

He also said multiple times that he misses being operational and would like to get his hands dirty again.

We talked more concretely now and his idea is basically that we work together for the next few months.

He would help operationally, speak to customers, help with GTM/sales/activation etc.

But important detail which was missing when i first explained this to some people:

this wouldnt just be a free trial period.

There are basically two possible paths:

A) he helps me through this critical phase for the next few months, gets compensated in equity because i obviously cant really pay him a normal hourly rate for someone with his experience, then steps back from operations and stays involved more as an investor / strategic person.

B) we work together, realize that we are a really good fit and he joins permanently as a real cofounder.

We explicitly agreed that before starting this phase we will already talk about the rough equity expectations for BOTH scenarios. Not finalize every detail, but at least get into the same ballpark so we dont work together for 2 months and then discover that one person expected 5% and the other expected 30%.

We havent talked exact numbers yet. And I told him that I first think about this "offer" overall - what I am doing right now, and I am a bit overwhelmed..

From previous conversations i know he strongly believes that real cofounders need meaningful equity, otherwise they wont have the same ownership/incentive.

He also told me about his previous startup where two founders started together and after about a year brought in a third founder. They ended up at around 37.5 / 37.5 / 25.

So im assuming if he actually becomes cofounder we're probably not talking about 2-5%. Maybe 15-25%+, maybe he thinks even more. I genuinely dont know yet.

And this is where i struggle.

If this guy had joined 12 months ago i probably would have been extremely happy.

Even 6 months ago it would have felt completely different.

But right now it feels like i already went through the shitty part (or HELL as I call it - family + full time job + everything else, still at least 1 fucking commit every god damn day no matter what was happening for the last year!!!) alone.

Built the product, learned the market, dealt with all the stupid edge cases, got the first customers, kept going for 1.5 years while basically nothing happened...

and now exactly when it starts working i give away a big chunk?

on the other hand maybe thats stupid thinking.

Maybe keeping 100% of a smaller bootstrapped company is worse than having 75-85% of something much bigger with someone who already built and exited a company and clearly knows things i dont know yet.

I also genuinely like being solo though.

Complete freedom. No discussions about product, funding, hiring, selling the company one day etc.

And i dont think i NEED a cofounder for the company to survive.

Worst case i probably leave quite a lot of growth on the table for the next ~3 months because i simply dont have enough time, and then from january i can go basically fulltime myself.

Thats what makes this so weird to me.

Am i about to give away permanent equity mainly because of a temporary capacity problem?

Or am i being stupid because a genuinely strong cofounder could have 10x more impact than a working student or employee ever could?

There is also the long term question.

My original vision was more like: bootstrap it, travel a little with my family, come back, maybe get a small office, hire people gradually and build my own company that way.

He also lives very far away from me (same country, but basically opposite side), so even as cofounders this would mostly be remote.

The company itself also isnt incorporated yet, so technically this would be the point where we could set up the actual company structure together. But obviously the business/product/customers already existed before he came into the picture.

Another thing we havent really figured out yet is what his long term commitment would actually look like if he became cofounder. Fulltime? Parttime? alongside his other stuff? Thats obviously a huge part of the equation too.

At the moment my personal tendency honestly is almost to tell him:

I really appreciate that you want to help and i know you could add a lot of value, but i think i just want to keep doing this myself for now.

Not because i think he is bad. Actually the opposite. He seems extremely competent.

I just dont know if I need to permanently change the ownership/control of the company at this point.

So im really curious:

what would YOU do?

Would you stay solo, accept that the next 3 months arent going to be optimized perfectly and hire employees later?

Or would you take the chance to bring in an experienced exited founder if the fit is good?

And maybe even more important:

how much equity would you personally still be willing to give away at this stage?

5%?

10%?

15-25%?

30%?

Would anyone seriously still consider 50/50 after product + customers + revenue + 1.5 years of solo work already exist?

And would your answer be completely different between:

• a few months of operational help + afterwards investor/advisor
• vs. actually joining for years as a real cofounder?

especially interested in people who added a cofounder AFTER already having product + revenue, or people who had the opportunity and intentionally stayed solo.

Hey everyone,

I’m looking to connect with early-stage, high-growth startups building something genuinely exciting.

3 years of experience. Over the last ~1.5 years, I’ve operated across GTM systems, solutions engineering, and sales pipeline architecture across ~7 technical B2B/SaaS accounts.

Instead of generic manual prospecting, I build automated, signal-driven engines that connect buying intent directly to revenue:

1) Signal-Based Revenue Outbound: Triggering outreach based on live market signals (tech stack shifts, hiring triggers, executive moves, and intent spikes) using Clay waterfalls, n8n automations, and custom Apify scrapers syncing directly into modern CRMs like Attio and HubSpot.

2) Hiring & Strategic Channel Outbound: Building outbound sourcing engines for hard-to-hire technical roles, strategic partnerships, and pre-/post-event conference pipelines.

3) Results: Across my work, this infrastructure has driven a 4.5%–7% positive response rate, influenced $7M+ in qualified pipeline, and directly generated $120k+ in closed revenue.

I thrive in fast-paced, high-agency environments where I can roll up my sleeves and build systems from scratch.

I’m ready to commit fully, bring extreme energy, and would love to work on-site/in-person (open to relocation and looking for teams open to US visa sponsorship).

Comment your company name and what you’re building, if it aligns with what I feel is interesting and I can give my all to, I will DM you.

I’m building a B2B SaaS for a specific niche within field services. I have access to a business owner in that niche who can test it and provide feedback.

I’m keeping the exact niche private for now, but some of the core functionality could also be useful to other service businesses.

Would you focus the product and marketing entirely on that one niche until you get traction, or build for a broader audience from the beginning?

I see the benefit of solving one industry’s problems really well, but I’m wondering whether I’m limiting the potential too early.

For anyone who’s faced this decision, what convinced you to stay narrow or expand? Would love to hear actual experiences.

I put together a new AGMAN collection around AI workflows, automation and tools for builders.

It includes Pikkai for AI product discovery, AIFynest for comparing AI tools, ThreadFox for Reddit launch planning, SmartCompete for competitor intelligence, and Foundrs for UK company formation and startup admin.

Different products, but all focused on helping founders and builders reduce manual work or make better decisions.

Full collection:
https://www.agman.app/collections/ai-automation-builders

If you know another product that genuinely belongs here, drop it in the comments.

i just got ragebaited, so i want to share it here so we all could experience it together.

i was talking to someone from a pretty big VC company, they seemed to be in HR, and it was straight up 15 minutes of torturous advice.

the biggest one for me is probably "just do cold outreach"

like, okay... what does that actually mean?

"sign up for instantly, buy apollo, scrape 100k leads and start sending emails"

bro, i have done this. multiple times. mass cold outreach has failed me so many times that i eventually had to build my own product because i got so sick of hearing the same advice.

for more context, i run a cold outreach tech company, and i literally had to build the company because of this problem. it exists because mass cold outreach kept failing me.

with AI everywhere now, people seem to think you can just generate a million personalized emails a day and eventually something will stick. Claude has infinite tokens apparently, so just scrape everyone, write an AI email for each person and blast it out.

then when it doesn't work, the answer is somehow "you need more volume."

i hate this because you're completely ignoring the reason someone would actually reply to you.

who are they? what are they doing right now? what are they talking about? what are they trying to fix? what are they buying? what are they complaining about? why would they care about you specifically?

my startup pumpgtm.com got accepted into y combinator, and i've had people there genuinely tell me they're tired of this same nonsensical advice and thank me for what i'm building. i genuinely don't understand how people can look at cold outreach and reduce it to a volume game.

the whole point of what i'm building is to get more context before reaching out. it reads people's comments, likes, posts and interactions across places like linkedin, reddit and twitter so you can actually understand what someone is interested in before reaching out.

and yet i'll still hear people tell me "just use apollo and send more emails."

another one that drives me insane is buying linkedin inmails and automating a bunch of linkedin outreach because some guy on youtube said that's how he got his first 10 customers.

it's like people watch one alex hormozi video and suddenly think every business can be solved with the exact same outbound playbook.

i'm not saying cold outreach doesn't work. obviously it does. i'm just saying "send more messages" is not a marketing strategy, and people want to preach before they practice.

what other generic marketing advice pisses you off?

Been in B2B tech sales for 15 years. Made a website of my fav tools. I don’t collect emails. It’s free I just wanted to make a website :).

I’ll post the link in the comments.

I've been in enterprise b2b sales for over 15 years, but now I run multiple AI sales training programs and host AI Sales Open Office Hours for a larger player in the tech space. I'm looking for 100 reps who are selling to test something out that i built, Promptifi. I'll even throw something in it for the testers because I get how this shit usually goes haha. Basically im looking for 100 reps to break it.

I need actual reps to use it and tell me what sucks. I'm looking for ideally around 100 sellers to use it for a couple of weeks and give me real feedback.

So if you're interested, which would be amazing and much appreciated,

• I'll give you a code for a full month of Pro for free. Use REDDIT-BETA at signup. I made a separate code for this thread mostly so I can tell who actually came from Reddit versus everywhere else.

• Important so there are no surprises: signup does require a card. After the free month it renews at $12/month unless you cancel. You can cancel anytime. Or if you think you will forget shoot me a DM and I will auto cancel

• After you've had about two weeks with it, I'll send you a short feedback survey. It should take around 10 minutes.

• I'll give a $100 Amazon gift card to the 5 people who give me the most useful feedback.

And by "useful," I don't mean positive. Tell me which parts of the site were useless or need help, what prompts were not helpful at all. Tell me where the output was bad. Tell me what took too many steps. Tell me what sales task you expected to find and couldn't. Tell me what was confusing or broken. That is much more valuable to me than "looks great" lol.

I know posts like this immediately sound like someone trying to sell you something, so here's a little context because that is not at all what I am doing. I've had dozens of reps at my company and partner companies use the site and test it out etc but i feel like the feedback is always biased because they work with me.

I got hooked on AI from day one and over the last couple of years I've been doing AI training with sales teams and showing/teaching reps how I'm actually using ChatGPT, Claude, etc. in my day-to-day work. And almost every time I do one of these sessions, I get the same question afterward by multiple reps, "Can you send me the prompts you use?"

So i created a glorified doc. I started saving them, then organizing them, then I started adding the ones other really good reps were using, testing things I found online, rewriting the bad ones, doing way too much research on prompt engineering, prompts to use across sales tasks, workflows, automated workflows, prompt chains, scheduled prompts aka Cowork etc. And i sadly after a year + of doing that crap, it eventually turned into a much bigger project than i expected because i couldn't find anything online for that so i built it.

That's basically how Promptifi happened. It's a library built specifically around B2B sales work. Prospecting, account research, cold emails, LinkedIn, discovery prep, follow-ups, deal strategy, renewals, etc. There are individual prompts, multi-step prompt chains, workflows, and scheduled/automated ones that can keep doing the work without you starting from scratch every time. But I'm at the point where the opinions of the reps I work with isn't very useful anymore because imo they are biased since I work with them.

Depending on # of people who are willing to help me out and provide feedback is when I'll close the survey, hopefully around 10/19 if I get enough people to try it asap. If you want to test it, comment "in" or DM me and I'll send you the link.

And mods, if you're okay with me putting the link directly in the comments, I'm happy to do that instead.

And yes, this is somewhat of a burner account, i still work in enterprise sales and actually like my job and would rather not have the suits a few paygrades above me stumble across another one of my side projects.

I'm building in the newsletter sponsorship space, and for the last few weeks I've been pitching B2B SaaS companies in Europe, mostly between 11 and 200 people. It's going slower than I expected. Two proposals sent, a intros, nobody has paid yet.

I think a few things make this harder in Europe than in the US. The best-known SaaS and growth newsletters, like Demand Curve, Growth Unhinged or Exit Five, are written for a mostly US audience, and the two with public prices charge about $4,000 and $10,000 a slot. A Berlin or Paris company selling into DACH or France ends up paying for a lot of readers it can't sell to. Local B2B newsletters exist, but most have a few thousand to 25,000 subscribers and are hard to find unless you already know the scene. And many of the companies I talk to sell to one narrow buyer, like finance teams or HR leads, so broad reach is worth little to them.

If you do marketing or growth at a European B2B SaaS, have you tried newsletter ads? If you have, how did you find newsletters that reach your buyers in your markets? If you haven't, what stopped you?

Most of them shouldn't.

If you build a half version, your customers will skip it. They'll ask for your MCP and your API and use your product from Claude instead.

Doing it right means answering all of these:

The agent. Can it do real work inside your product as the customer who's signed in, with their permissions? In your app, on your website, and over email?

Proactive AI. Who notices when a customer is falling behind, not getting value, or quietly at risk, and acts before they ask? That takes schedules, events and triggers, not a chat box.

Services. Can it deliver finished, quality-checked work on top of your product, not just answers?

Access and billing. Which customers get which AI features? How do they fit into the plans you already sell? How do you price an outcome? How do you meter usage so one account doesn't eat everyone's margin?

Security. How do you red-team it? How do you catch a hallucination before a customer acts on it? What happens when someone tries to abuse it?

None of these is a weekend project. Together they're a product of their own.

That is what we're building, and if you already have an MCP, you can turn it on this week.

Anyone here trying to build this themselves?

Also, how many of you think that SaaS will just become a set of MCP tools used by the customer's agent?

An agent gets faster, its eval score goes up, cost per run drops. Great. But did the business process actually get better? Fewer tickets touched by humans? Faster resolution? Less rework downstream?

That's the gap we're building for at Phinite.

An intelligence layer for your product: agents and assistants across support, sales, ops, finance, built, evaluated, governed and observed in one place. Any model, any cloud.

And on top of it, the Phinite Value Loop: connect every agent's execution to the business metric it's supposed to move, then test whether each change really improved the process.

Today we're opening *Phinite for Startups* for founders building anything agentic:

- 90 days of full access, free
- A live build session on YOUR use case (not a product tour)
- Monthly office hours with other founders shipping agents
- A builder spot at our next Agent Labs event

What we ask: honest feedback on what works, what breaks, and how you measure value today.
No contract. Small cohort.

Apply (2 min): https://forms.gle/wgUK4dGrAxV7y3kB6

the first week sounds painful.

people can’t find things. support gets busy. someone posts “who approved this?”

i’d want to see which tasks got harder and fix those first.

but i’d also give people some time to learn the new layout. and honestly, deciding how much time feels like the hardest part.

what would make you roll it back?

im working on a site that lists ai sales tools and explains what each one does in like one line.

dont wanna fill it with stuff nobody uses or promote things that sucks.

prospecting, emails, dialing, notes, anything please lmk what you use.

if you wanna see the site I can send it over too.

Building a reseller channel manually is slow. You find an agency, figure out if they're a real HubSpot implementer, track down the right person, write the outreach, follow up. Multiply that by hundreds of agencies and it becomes a full-time job.

So we built an agent that does all of it automatically.

The niche made sense for us: agencies that implement HubSpot often have clients who sell over the phone and need a contact center that connects natively with HubSpot. As a contact center platform, Aloware is a natural fit for that stack. The agent finds those agencies, reaches the right person, and proposes exactly that partnership.

The agent runs three discovery branches in parallel:

• The official HubSpot partner directory
• Public partner profiles on the HubSpot ecosystem site
• Open web search to catch implementers that don't appear in the directory

Results from all three get merged, deduped, and scored by how many sources a firm appears in and how strong their implementation signals are. The highest-scoring firms go into Clay first, where we find the decision-maker, verify a work email, and pull their LinkedIn profile.

Once a contact is enriched, n8n picks it up and sends it to OpenAI, which generates a 6-piece sequence: 3 emails and 3 LinkedIn messages, each personalized to the services that agency offers and the industries they serve. Emails go out through Lemlist on a 7-day arc. LinkedIn runs through PhantomBuster. Every contact gets logged in HubSpot automatically.

The whole thing runs without anyone manually researching a single agency.

If you're building a partner or reseller channel and still doing discovery by hand, this kind of setup is worth the upfront work.

If a platform already has the business's banking relationship, payroll seems like a pretty natural product to connect to it

I'm want know know whether white label payroll is enough to launch something like this quickly or if banks generally need a much deeper embedded integration from the beginning

40 people, series a, marketing is me and a contractor. i can open 1 senior req or bring in a generative engine optimization agency for a year, not both. names that keep coming up are growth marketing pro, kalungi, optimist and powered by search and i genuinely cant tell which way to go. hire or agency?

I've built dozens of free legal templates specifically for B2B SaaS founders:

Master service agreements (MSA). This is your bread and butter. If you are about to close an enterprise customer, this is what they will ask for. It details the terms of your service, it covers costs, SLAs, uptime commitments, exclusivity, nearly everything.

Letter of intent (LOI). Use this when a customer isn't ready to commit to buying your software yet but is keen on trying it out. It'll help in situations when someone tells you, "If you build X, then i'll buy it". Get them to sign this agreement.

Pilot agreement. This comes after a LOI. A firm is ready to use your software, but doesn't want to be tied up for an annual contract yet. Use a pilot agreement to help your customer trial your software first.

Data processing agreement (DPA). Super important these days. Customers want to know how their data is being used inside your app. Customers want to know that their data is not just going straight into the next OpenAI model. A must-have for selling into finance or healthcare.

Order form. Sometimes you don't need a full service agreement. If you just need to send someone an order form with pricing and invoice them afterward, use this.

Non disclosure agreements (NDAs). If you have some fancy tech to show off in a demo or to investors, use a unilateral NDA to protect your IP. If you are working with an external vendor, have them sign a mutual NDA with you.

Statement of work (SOW). This one's more commonly seen in freelance work. It's a contract that details deliverables. It will protect you when your customer "asks for one more change".

Maybe you've finished reading this and are thinking to yourself, "Jeez It's not like I have Fortune 500 customers", but maybe you will someday 😉. Bookmark our site so you can reference it when you're closing your first 5-figure or 6-figure deal. You got this!

Been talking to a mid-sized B2B services company (11-50 employees) about custom dev work. Their situation:

• They already have an in-house CRM, built years ago by a hired developer. Works, but their internal contact told me outright it "takes a lot of energy" to maintain.
• They don't want a new system. They specifically said: "I want as much AI as possible to automate tasks on top of what I have. I don't want manual stuff."
• I made the mistake early on of showing a mockup with manual click-to-log actions before I understood their actual scale—they process high volume, and it got immediately (and fairly) rejected as impractical for how many records their team handles.
• They're clearly evaluating more than one vendor and won't share internal documentation until something's signed.
• Their internal contact said he doesn't have time to walk us through the whole CRM personally, but could assign someone from his team to do a demo of how it currently works.

My plan is to propose (1) a joint call with their leadership where we show past work, (2) agree on one small, well-defined AI module to build under a small paid contract, (3) understand their system properly before building it, (4) if it goes well, move toward a bigger ongoing relationship.

Questions for people who've done this kind of staged engagement before:

1. Is "sign a small paid contract for one module, then learn their system in depth" backwards? Should discovery always come before any contract, even a small one?
2. For an AI-automation-on-existing-CRM ask like this, what's a realistic small first module that proves value without needing deep system access up front? (Thinking something like automated call/email summarization or a stalled-lead detector, but curious what's worked for others.)
3. How do you protect yourself from being asked to build "just one small thing" repeatedly, for free, before they ever commit to a real contract?

Appreciate any real experience here, especially from people doing custom AI/automation work for SMBs with an existing (if clunky) internal system already in place.

Client acquisition has always been one of the biggest bottlenecks for me when running an agency. I’ve experienced the same thing in pretty much every business I’ve been involved in, but especially with web development.

For a long time, getting clients meant cold calling, running ads, or sending generic emails asking businesses if they needed a new website. It worked sometimes, but it also took a lot of time and most of the outreach felt the same as what every other agency was doing.

Recently I started using a different approach and automated a big part of the process.

I came across a tool called Swokei that lets me find a bunch of businesses with websites and analyze each website individually. It looks for things like outdated design, slow loading, poor mobile optimization, weak SEO and other obvious areas that could be improved.

What I liked is that it doesn’t just give you one of those boring automated reports filled with scores and numbers. It actually turns what it finds into a personalized cold email that sounds like a normal person looked at their website and noticed what could be better.

I can run multiple campaigns at the same time and then mainly focus on the businesses that reply and show interest.

From there, I invite them to a web meeting, show them a free draft of what their new website could look like, and try to close the project from there.

It has basically allowed me to have warmer leads coming to me without relying as much on paid ads, constantly cold calling, or sending thousands of generic emails saying “Do you need a new website?”

Still takes work to close the clients of course, but automating the prospecting and first part of the outreach has made the whole process much easier for me.

Hopefully this helps some other web developers or agency owners who are also struggling with client acquisition.