Zoye

Our first plan was to hire someone to build it. I'm glad it didn't work.

We talked to developers. Good ones. And every conversation ran into the same wall, which wasn't about skill at all. It was that we couldn't hand over the thing that mattered.

The specification wasn't "build a CRM with these tables". It was a feeling. It was, this should understand what I mean when I say "Dana wants a quote by Thursday" and it should do the four things that follow from that sentence without asking me four questions. Every time I tried to write that down as requirements, it came out as either something too vague to build or something so specific it missed the whole point.

At some point Marcel said what we were both circling. We were about to pay someone to guess at the part only we understood.

So we built it ourselves. Not because we couldn't afford help, and not out of some purity thing about founders writing every line. Because the product was still a question, not a plan, and you can't outsource a question.

The only people who could sit with it long enough were the two people who couldn't stop thinking about it anyway.

This isn't advice. Plenty of great companies hire early and do fine. But when the thing you're making is still a question, the obsession has to come from inside the room.

Question to you, the founders who built the first version yourselves: would you do it that way again?

Before we built anything, Marcel and I spent about two weeks trying to kill the idea.

That sounds dramatic. It wasn't. It was a lot of coffee and a lot of "okay, but why has nobody done this". Because that's the real question with an idea that sounds obvious. If it's that good, and the market is that big, and the tools are right there, then either somebody is already doing it or there's a reason it doesn't work.

So we went looking for the reason. We looked at what the big platforms were shipping. We looked at the chatbot tools, the automation builders, the ones that promise you a workflow canvas. And what we kept finding was that everyone had built something pointed at the customer. Bots that answer your clients. Very few people were building something pointed at the owner.

That was the gap. Not "AI in business software", everyone has that now. Something that works for you, on your side, with permission to actually do the work rather than just answer questions about it.

The honest version is that we didn't find a good reason not to. We found a hard problem, which is different. Hard problems have a reason nobody has solved them yet, and the reason is usually that they're hard.

We decided that was a good enough answer.

➡️ Next: We went looking for a developer to build it. That went badly, and it turned out to be the best thing that happened to us.

💬 Question to you: When you had an idea that seemed obvious, what made you finally start? Or what made you stop?

Hi everyone 👋 ,

I though to share my journey from an idea to building the product I believe is the future and wanted one myself for a long time. I'll try to keep it as a journal series of short stories of my journey and the issues I've encountered along the way.

I'd love to hear your thoughts and get some of your support and feedback.
So here we go 🙃 .

✅ Building Zoye, Part 1 - The Graveyard.

I kept meeting business owners who were paying for software they had already given up on. Not bad software. Real, well-known tools. The pattern was always the same. Week one, everything gets logged and it feels great. Week four, the deals are happening but the notes live in WhatsApp and in someone's head.
Week twelve, somebody asks "is that in the CRM?" and the room goes quiet.
For a long time I thought that was a discipline problem. People just weren't being rigorous enough.

Then I watched it happen to organized, serious people, over and over, and I changed my mind. It's a design problem. Every one of those tools assumes someone will do data entry after every conversation, forever. Nobody does that. Not you, not your best salesperson, not me. We built a whole software category on an assumption that's false about the way people actually work.

That's the thought Marcel and I couldn't let go of. Not "let's build a better CRM". Something closer to: what if you never had to open it at all?

I'm going to tell this whole story here, from that thought to where we are today, one post every couple of days. The good parts and the embarrassing ones.

🔜 2️⃣ Next: the two weeks we spent trying to talk ourselves out of it, and the question that made us start anyway.

Hi everyone! I'd love to share a little bit about what my co-foudner and I are building and share the journey (and the difficulties) we've been facing.

Our background is actually business, not software - and when we started running our own business, the tooling shocked me. To operate a company you're expected to run a CRM, a task manager, a calendar tool, a docs tool, and a reporting tool: multiple tools, multiple bills, multiple learning curves. And the CRM was the worst of them, because of a dirty secret:

Nobody fills in the CRM.

Not because people are lazy - because data entry is demanded at the worst possible moment. You close a meeting, you're walking to the car, your head is full of what was said... and the CRM expects you to sit down and type into a bunch of fields. So nobody does, the data flies out of the window (and your head), and the expensive system becomes a graveyard.

That's the moment Zoye is built for. You send it a WhatsApp message - or just hold the mic button and talk, like you would to a colleague:

"Just met Mike from MindGap, 75K deal, proposal due Friday. Assign Sarah and follow up Thursday."

And Zoye does the rest:

1 - Creates the contact and the $75K deal in your pipeline
2 - Assigns the proposal task to Sarah with the Friday deadline
3 - Books the Thursday follow-up in your calendar
4 - Nudges you if the deal goes quiet

P.s. You can even add Zoye as an AI Notetaker to your meetings and it will bring you the transcription with insights, summaries and tasks.

From next post I will start sharing the full journey, how it all began and how not easy it was to make it happen - But hey, law of attraction is the key.