Santtu Koivumäki

co-founder @zero_gtm. we replace your crm and the tools around it. participant. currently between hobbies.

[Santtu Koivumäki @san2koivu]

sales is a tax you pay for bad marketing

marketing is a tax you pay for bad product

product is a tax you pay for having ideas

ideas are a tax you pay for being awake

being awake is a tax you pay for not being a koala

@james406 said the first two. @posthog is a tax you pay for wanting to know things.

29 minutes in a self-driving van: https://t.co/PLEMH68EqR

[Santtu Koivumäki @san2koivu]

@HarriKonola at least the forecast call is short.

[Santtu Koivumäki @san2koivu]

a crm for one-person businesses. so there's finally exactly one person to blame for not updating it.

[a16z @a16z]

HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah has built software for over 30 years and has never had a direct report. His latest project is uSpot, a CRM for one-person businesses. It charged money from day one and has been his most successful launch at HubSpot.

Dharmesh joins a16z's Joe Schmidt to discuss why startups should avoid the "Yellow Brick Road" the labs are racing down, "yet" test for avoiding ideas the AI labs will flatten, and why it's never been a better time to start a software company.

0:00 Intro
0:47 The best time ever to be a builder
6:46 How to actually pick a startup idea
10:32 From LegalSpot to HubSpot: the SMB bet
14:40 The 60% that weren’t using a CRM
20:29 Building an ecosystem developers trust
23:33 Staying off the yellow brick road
27:23 Why models are becoming infrastructure
31:49 ChatGPT is the new OS
37:04 Rethinking HubSpot’s primitives for AI
40:44 Replaying 20 years of code with AI
43:47 HubSpot Next and the birth of uSpot
46:38 A startup within a startup
49:43 The rise of the one-person company
53:07 AI is still just software
56:06 Lightning round

YouTube: https://t.co/ui7V4S7Ir4

@joeschmidtiv @dharmesh

[Santtu Koivumäki @san2koivu]

@DanielSmidstrup Failed payments first. An expired card looks a lot like churn on a chart.

[Santtu Koivumäki @san2koivu]

@marcklingen Make it a whole bar for "let's double click on that".

[Santtu Koivumäki @san2koivu]

if a demo needs a ninja creami, i’d want to know what the product needs.

[Cristina Cordova @cjc]

Today I was offered Dom Pérignon, caviar, an Ooni, and a Ninja Creami to take sales calls with software companies.

One perk of building something people want... you never have to learn what kitchen appliance they want first.

[Santtu Koivumäki @san2koivu]

@federicodonaton reps sign up for it. then ops adds the required fields back.

[Santtu Koivumäki @san2koivu]

competitors are cold-calling our customers so they can tell us how much they love zero. appreciate the help

[Santtu Koivumäki @san2koivu]

@butshaunn you're not behind on the roadmap. you're being intentional about scope.

[Santtu Koivumäki @san2koivu]

the trick is to call the $50M business phase one and never schedule phase two.

[Nicolai @nicomoel]

VCs love founders who think big.

Until those founders want to build a profitable $50M business.

Then suddenly ambition becomes a problem.

[Santtu Koivumäki @san2koivu]

@carolinedclark as a competitor i'm legally required to say our demo has no caviar - we spent the budget on product. @triekki is in sf if you want to taste the @zero_gtm difference.

[Santtu Koivumäki @san2koivu]

@mynameisyahia you have my axe (only for cutting scraping costs)

[Santtu Koivumäki @san2koivu]

@federicodonaton appreciate it. it's also how many fields you have to fill in.

[Santtu Koivumäki @san2koivu]

@dan__rosenthal and the prospects who did sign up with a work email changed jobs last spring. linkedin knows, your list doesn't.

[Santtu Koivumäki @san2koivu]

@posthog scouts write the report, agents write the PR. i'm left with the part where i say "looks good" without reading it.

[Santtu Koivumäki @san2koivu]

4,257 new angel investors about to receive their first pre-seed deck.

[Carles Reina @Carles_Reina]

About 70% of Anthropic employees will become millionaires.
That is 4,257 out of ~6,000 🤯

The largest wealth-creation event in history.
Hard work shows a path to wealth accumulation.

What a success story - the world needs more of those!

[Santtu Koivumäki @san2koivu]

the downside of not pushing features is a feature request for the thing you shipped last quarter.

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

Our philosophy with Linear has been to avoid pushing features too hard. Different companies and teams need different things at different times.

The downside is that people sometimes don't know the feature exists and might add new tool for something @linear already could do for them, often with no additional cost.

No matter if you're a team or solo builder:

+ You can keep team docs, project specs, and PRDs in Linear, and have your agent update and maintain them through MCP. Agent context between your agents. Loops can also automate the updating the documents from code, or other sources.

+ Linear Agent can write code directly from Linear or Slack. Just say “Linear, work on this.” You can connect it to internal tools through MCP, too. It's like Shopify river agent, but you don't have to build it and lot of the usage is included in the pla

+ Triage, Loops, and Linear cloud coding agent can work as a software factory. A service reports an issue, it lands to team triage, you can set up a Loop automation to investigate,

+ You can store personal and team skills in Linear. Ask your agent to save a workflow as a skill, then use it again. A Loop can keep those skills up to date across Linear and git.

+ Project update/Pulse creates one updates feed for your whole company. You can then monitor or get your agent to summarize important things to you

+ Customer feedback. A database of customer quotes can live in Linear as customer requests, linked to the issues and projects they shaped.

+ Request intake/forms. Linear Asks takes requests from Slack, emails or web, and turns them into issues.

+ You can review code in Linear, alongside the issue and the context behind the change.

[Santtu Koivumäki @san2koivu]

@HarriKonola tempting but they seem to be doing the pitch for us already. why interrupt?

[Santtu Koivumäki @san2koivu]

@calcsam say it five times and one of them starts a podcast.

[Santtu Koivumäki @san2koivu]

@heyblake 4 is the one i'd steal first. one question is easy to answer from a phone.

[Santtu Koivumäki @san2koivu]

@aibek_design that’s going straight on the website

[Santtu Koivumäki @san2koivu]

@ivanburazin next one will be a sandbox for deciding which sandbox to use.