@charliermarsh Sometimes they're a good reason to work on something. When people say a market is "crowded," what that often means is that there's a real problem and none of the solutions are good enough yet.
@dharmesh I stopped using hubspot last month for @lightfld, it's a dream AI CRM platform and I could not imagine even trying to go back
CRMs need to evolve with AI and I don't really think hubspot has changed much in the last 5 years truthfully. not enough to reconsider them anyways...
I'm excited to share that Agentic Pipeline Generation is available for all Lightfield customers.
Since we launched in November, almost every one of the founders I’ve met with has asked us for help with pipe-gen.
Most outbound tools start blind. They reach into external databases, scrape for signal, and generate “personalized” copy from prompt templates.
That’s why most start-ups don’t do outbound well, and why most cold emails you get from startups trying to sell you something fail to land.
We designed Lightfield to work with the context that agents need to run prospecting that actually works.
It builds target account lists from companies that look like your fastest-growing customers.
It surfaces contacts based on ICP fit and external signals.
It draft sequences using the language that's worked in past deals.
And it gets smarter with every campaign you run.
I believe that outbound should start with what you already know about your customers, not a cold list from a data vendor. The fastest way to burn through your market is letting someone who doesn’t know your business write to the people who could become your customers.
Your CRM already knows who your best customers are, and now it can get you more meetings with companies that look just like them.
James Dyson on founder led sales:
"Selling goes with manufacturing as wheels do with a bicycle."
"Products do not walk off shelves and into people's homes. And when a product is entirely new, the art of selling is needed to explain it. What it is. How it works. Why you might need and want it."
Dyson was taught this by his mentor when Dyson was just 21 years old:
"I told him I don't know how to sell things."
And he said, "Look, you're the engineer. You've chosen every square inch of that product. Everything. You know it all. That means you're the best person to sell it."
That was an interesting sort revelation for me because I'd always thought these were separate professions.
Sales was one profession, engineering was another, manufacturing was another, and being a manager was another.
And suddenly this entrepreneur was saying to me, "Well, look, you're an engineer and designer. You know all about the product, make it, and then go and sell it."
@0xshei@lightfld We're very close!
We have custom objects and AI automations coming out in the next 2 weeks. That will allow you to build a custom Telegram integration and ingest messages.
We'll have a first-party integration soon after that.
I'll keep you posted.
Your AI agent can't click through a CRM dashboard.
So we gave it a command line.
Just shipped the Lightfield CLI — query every account, contact, meeting, and note in your CRM from the terminal.
Set an API key and go.
(Salesforce shipped a CLI last week too. But giving an agent fast access to fields your sales reps half-filled out three months ago is not the flex they think it is. Garbage in, garbage out — just faster.)
We've been running pilots at @getmilana. Early on I realized the thing that determines whether a pilot converts is the success criteria you set before it starts. You have to have a criteria that aligns with both the champion's priorities and the budget holder's, and map to what the company actually cares about.
I used to do this manually. I automated it using @lightfld skills that run against my CRM's full relationship graph including email, transcript, note, and contact.
I name an account, the Skill pulls all the data for every conversation with that company. It builds a briefing: pain points in the customer's exact words, who matters, urgency signals, how they think about value.
Then it helps me design success criteria. Pushes back when a goal is too vague or too easy. Works backward from the renewal conversation - what do I need to point to in that room for the answer to be obvious?
Every criterion has to be anchored in the customer's stated pain, not our features. Evaluable without creating work for them. Output is a 1-page pilot brief saved back to the CRM.
Sharing the full prompt below.
Skills might be the single most important abstraction of the decade.
And they aren't limited to agentic coding tools anymore.
You will soon be able to program *everything* using skills.
Every person I know hates their CRM passionately because they have to spend hours glued to it.
Well, look and see if you like this.
1/ My Co-founder Peter had 6 active negotiations, weeks of calls and emails and genuinely had no idea who actually mattered in any of them.
Then, Lightfield just dropped its custom 'Skills & Knowledge' to their CRM. A game changer!
We built one right away to map out all these client relationships. What we realized was we had a mess. But now, instead of clicking through a million tabs in a live meeting, Lightfield did the work.
The key thing: every email, call, and interaction we had with each client was automatically captured. These skills always run in the freshest context for every client relationship. It doesn't rely on any one team member, and the data is always fresh, never stale.
A 🧵:
Most deals aren't lost because of product fit. They're lost because the wrong people were involved (or the right people never were).
Skills & Knowledge enable you to encode your expertise once, then run it across every deal, every time. One place you can start:
↳ Map Buying Committee
Identify your decision makers, champions, and evaluators. Each with title, decision role, engagement level, and a recommended approach. Flags single-threading risk automatically. Recommends contacts to create or map to opportunity roles.
The org chart that actually runs a deal? Lightfield finds them — from your call history, your email threads, everything already in your CRM — and makes them visible.
Not another report to read, but a plan you can actually run.