Meridian
CRM.

The Sales Team Was
The Bottleneck.

Meridian Labs runs a small, founder-led sales motion. Their team of four was managing 300+ active relationships across a tangle of spreadsheets, email folders, and a HubSpot license they'd already half-abandoned. Every reply took 20 minutes to draft. Most never went out at all.

The founder wanted three things: a relationship-first interface (not a deal-pipeline funnel), AI-drafted replies that sounded like the team wrote them, and a real launch date instead of a six-month timeline. We agreed on a six-week build, weekly demos, and a hard scope.

Ship a Tiny
Version First.

The trap with CRMs is everyone wants every feature on day one. I shipped a single screen first — a list of relationships with a “Draft Follow-Up” button — in five days. The team used it for a week and told me exactly what they wanted next.

• Week 1 — SpikeOne screen, one button, drafts going to clipboard. Used by the team for real outreach within seven days.
• Week 2–3 — Pipeline viewContacts, statuses, and an event timeline. Imported their existing spreadsheets so day one was day full.
• Week 4 — AI agentDrafts pulled context from past emails, deal notes, and a custom voice-tuning fine-tune. Human-in-the-loop on every send.
• Week 5 — IntegrationsGmail two-way sync, Slack notifications, Stripe billing events surfaced in the contact timeline.
• Week 6 — Polish & launchEmpty states, onboarding flow, billing, docs, runbook. Live on a Friday afternoon.

What Changed.

Six months after launch, the team's outbound throughput has nearly doubled while the time spent at the CRM has dropped. The most cited internal metric isn't a sales number — it's that nobody on the team has opened the spreadsheet since launch day.