Reimagining CRMs with AI: A Bootstrapped SaaS Founder's Journey
I wanted to share the lessons I’ve learned bootstrapping a SaaS aimed at solving a problem I saw firsthand in the real estate CRM space.
My journey started in customer support at a real estate CRM company, helping agents on their worst days—when their software failed them and they lost commissions because of it. These conversations taught me more about the frustrations, struggles, and needs of agents than I ever could’ve learned from surveys or user research alone.
Later, I moved to outbound sales (yes, cold-calling!) and saw what made some agents light up and others groan. My bosses wanted me to focus on closing deals, but I cared more about whether the product would genuinely help someone.
I realized the CRM space wasn’t just broken, it was outdated and bloated, causing agents to spend more time managing the tool than selling homes.
A few lessons I learned along the way: 1. For 90% of agents who struggle it’s a 'systems' problem, not just a CRM problem: Legacy CRMs store data without helping users make sense of it, and "automation" often means manually triggering a workflow to run, after spending months building single automated processes. True automation shouldn’t require babysitting, and hundreds of steps pre-designed to accomplish one single task.
2. Data should work for you: Real estate agents collect rich client details—preferences, goals, life events - mostly because at its core its an industry of 'relationships' but CRMs (despite their namesake) rarely use this data meaningfully, mostly just housing it inside hard to locate fields, dropdowns, or tabs.
3. Avoid feature-bloat: When building our platform, we focused on "saving minutes" based on the ideas I learned in a book called The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy. IE - Small improvements that give back time over weeks and months create large blocks that can be repurposed for leisure, business growth, or time with friends and family.
!!! One hard lesson: Early on, we hosted webinars and training sessions on adding AI to daily operations, content creation, and customer experiences. People loved the idea but struggled to apply it when they got back to their busy routines.
We realized we needed more than education—we needed to build a tool that did the heavy lifting for them.
Our journey has been full of pivots and lessons, technically this SaaS is the fourth pivot in my business model - all under the vision of helping real estate agents build successful businesses using technology.
As of January 1st, inspired by product launches and YC 'Demo Day's' from startups and tech giants alike, we;ve even created our own with a series of pre-recorded feature highlights and a live component that will be a little later this month using WOM to advertise while I work on building enough of a user-base to drive advertising.
Discussion: If you’ve built SaaS for a niche market, how do you balance powerful features with simplicity? (This seems to be the biggest issue in CRMs - good intentions pave the way for complexities that require additional friction.)
Have you hosted live demos as part of your product feedback process, and if so, what worked for you for getting word out and driving sales?
I’ve documented some of this process for those interested in SaaS design and AI-driven workflows on a YouTube Page: https://workflowsecrets.info/youtube
Thanks for reading - curious to hear your insights, and any aid you might have on these questions!