CRMs Are a Red Sea Product

CRMs are a red sea product.

The cost of building one has dropped to near zero. Millions exist. Differentiation has never been harder.

If you eat, you eat. If you don't, someone else takes your food. You starve. You break the number one rule of startups: "Don't Die"

I built a CRM yesterday.

A glorified lead list to track people who might be interested in our upcoming hacker house. For curation I pulled from previous hack attendees, interesting founders in my network around Toronto, recent grads looking for their next venture.

Then I went deeper.

I looked at past sponsorships, people I've actually spoken to. Added a web search agent to surface partnership and events leads at larger companies. Checked for previous interactions, connection proximity, deal strength.

Now I'm using the same system to evaluate potential roommates, people to add into our events rolodex, everything.

Maybe that's the trick with CRMs. They have to be personal in an unhinged manner. Generic means you lose the signal that actually matters to your use case, your business, your life.

The market is saturated. Your edge is specificity.