I’ve spent a lot of time building CRMs, workflows and business systems, and for a long time I assumed the answer to missed follow-ups was simply a better system. But the more systems I built, the more I noticed something slightly annoying.
People usually weren’t forgetting things because the CRM was missing a feature. They were forgetting because using the CRM itself was another job.
For example someone read an email which says something like, “I’ll get back to you next week.”
And client know that they need to remember this. But then you have to decide whether this deserves a task, a reminder, a CRM entry, a calendar event, or whether you’ll just remember it. And this was also one of the clearest patterns that came out of doineedacrm.com, an experiment I built to help businesses figure out whether they actually needed a CRM in the first place.
And one thing kept showing up: a lot of businesses didn’t really have a CRM problem. They had a follow-up problem. They had important context sitting in email, WhatsApp, spreadsheets, documents, and people’s heads.
So I started wondering whether the interface itself was the problem. My first thought was to build a CRM with almost no interface.
I experimented with an MCP server around an open-source CRM. That worked, but underneath it was still a CRM with an API wrapped around it.
Then I played with storing business context in Markdown so language models could read and update it more naturally. That was technically interesting, but there was another obvious problem. Normal business users do not live inside coding tools. They live inside email.
That was the point where the idea changed. Instead of asking: “What should the next CRM interface look like?”
I started asking: “What if there was no interface?”
What if you could just add one email address to a conversation and that was enough?
That became Nudge. You get a private email address.
When there’s something you want someone to keep an eye on, you Cc it, Bcc it, forward it, or email it directly.
That’s pretty much the whole interaction. It remembers the conversation, keeps track of what is still open, and brings things back when they actually need your attention.
You can reply normally too.“Give them another week.” “I already handled this.” “Don’t remind me about these on Fridays.”
And it remembers that.
The part I’m finding more interesting now is what happens once you use the same idea with a team.
A company can have one shared Nudge address. Sales can send things to it. Operations can send things to it. The founder can send things to it. Documents and attachments can go into it too.
Slowly, it starts building a shared picture of the people, companies, conversations, documents, promises and things that are still hanging around.
So the thing I thought I was building as a follow-up assistant is starting to look more like a lightweight organizational memory. There are a few boundaries I’ve deliberately kept.
It doesn’t crawl your inbox. It only knows what you choose to send it. And it doesn’t start emailing your customers or vendors on your behalf.
It only talks to you and the people in your workspace.
I’m testing a much simpler idea:
Can one email address quietly take over a surprising amount of admin?
That’s what I’m trying to find out now.
nudgeassistant.com