Salesflare

Yaroon Cortout's frustration with Salesforce as an account manager at a marketing consultancy sparked the idea for Salesflare. He watched colleagues avoid entering deals into the system, fearing management scrutiny. Most of his actual work—emails, tasks, contacts—happened in Outlook and Wunderlist, completely outside the CRM. When he later co-founded a business intelligence company with another founder, they faced the same problem organizing leads in a Google Sheet: they had to manually update everything, and when they didn't, the data became useless. The lightbulb moment came when Yaroon showed his co-founder Mailchimp's tracking capabilities—open rates, click-through rates, all automatic. "Can't we automate that for salespeople?" he thought.

They started with a rudimentary prototype and customer interviews inspired by "Getting Real" by 37 Signals. The initial vision was a sales platform that would integrate with Salesforce, freeing salespeople from the CRM's friction while syncing data back. But prospects didn't buy it: they saw two databases and the sync problem, not the solution. Meanwhile, smaller companies started using the product differently—as a standalone CRM, not as an extension. The founders pivoted. Their first versions were radical: everything happened through Outlook and Gmail plugins; there was no full-screen dashboard. Customers found this confusing and asked for a traditional interface, which they eventually built.

The first customer came from PR: a prospect read about the "living CRM" concept in a Dutch tech magazine and called. The next 20-30 came largely from the network and personal selling—no online signup, no self-serve. Yaroon would personally demo the product, share screens during onboarding calls, and manually guide new users through setup. He noted every hesitation and bug. By the end of an onboarding call, customers were live and trained. There was no Stripe integration, no automated invoicing—just invoices sent and payments received manually. This unscaled approach felt embarrassing but drove high close rates and intense feedback loops. For over a year and a half, they ran this scrappy model.

About 2.5 years into the idea, they launched online signup and added Stripe integration. Six months later came the Product Hunt launch, which netted 200-300 trials and earned them the #1 CRM spot on the platform—a ranking they still hold. Then came AppSumo: completely unprepared, they received 6,000 signups in three weeks. The team worked around the clock in shifts, manually processing support requests in Google Sheets, literally getting sick from the stress. The downside: high-expectation customers, one-time payments, intense feedback. The upside: massive visibility, word-of-mouth referrals, good upsell rates (they offered 1 free user + 50% off additional users, not unlimited-forever deals). It taught them that channel fit matters: AppSumo works if your audience is there and your support costs are manageable.

With over 2,000 customers and $1M+ raised, Salesflare's growth engine is organic: word-of-mouth, review sites, and content marketing. They now write about sales topics (e.g., how to build a sales pipeline) and show Salesflare as the solution. The product is now a full CRM with 100% feature parity across desktop, mobile, and plugin. Yaroon and his co-founder recently introduced "habits"—monthly recurring initiatives like shipping two loved features, one onboarding improvement, three growth improvements, and two external visibility efforts. This systematic approach fills a gap: they realized that without process, growth goals feel arbitrary. The team is remote, and they've instituted meeting discipline: max three people per meeting, two-hour limits, written announcements in Slack. Yaroon's advice to other founders: listen hard, persist, and don't shy away from unscaled work early. And if you can avoid it, don't wait 1.5+ years to add online payments.