Peter E.

I built an end to end system that actively generated pipeline. Problem was, it proved there was a bad product market fit! So now trying to find people I can help with this approach. https://revgenius.slack.com/archives/C0163R7PDE2/p1773320526385209

Ah mistag! Still replying haha. That sounds cool and I can see a market for the open source model but it's still a risk for larger businesses. Salesforce and HubSpot are standardized systems that you can expect a large number of people to have experience with. Whereas a home grown or open source system abides by its own rules. Yes it can have more or better functionality, but it might also be prone to more errors, maintenance and uncertainty. The average CRM users are business people (rather than tech). They don't want to think about the code and heavy customizations. They want to input the data and get the reports without hassle. It feels better to follow the best practices and be as out of box as possible, than to worry about making your own perfect alternative that nobody knows how to use. Just my take, speculation on where the market goes

To be frank, most companies do a terrible job at maintaining their CRMs. Its not because its not an imperitive. Its because people dont want to or dont have the time. Thats the thing AI can fix by extending, salesforce or hubspot. not by making people migrate all the data, re-learn the core system, come up with new governance, etc etc It's unlikely some random AI startup is going to get hundreds of thousands of companies to switch. Maybe they can capture market share at the entry level, but that's already happening. So it's really just about improving the data at all steps of the flow and third party tools can already do a lot there.

Ara K. agreed but the altneratives would need comparable functionality and support. Salesfore and HubSpot have huge ecosystems supporting them. Companies have been continuing to migrate away from homegrown because its so difficult to customize. More likely to see innovative players who help you get more out of the existing infrastructure

Salesforce will own enterprise, HubSpot will own SMBs. Everything will remain the same.

In my case, we weren't exactly planning to replace SDRs with AI. It moreso just evolved into that as they left the org, and we decided to automate instead of hiring more SDRs who might not work out.

Thanks for your interest everyone!

He's not getting a 46% response rate.

Hey Mickey, the only way to know for sure is to test your various ICPs and measure the results. You might find some groups engage more, but can't afford it. Whereas those can invest, it's harder to get their attention. Ideally you find a sweet spot, in a specific industry, who has a specific kind of use case or problem that you can get a repeatable signal on. Have you thought about pitching to agencies who do guerilla marketing campaigns?