My SaaS is almost done and I'm about to embark on some months of cold-calling (it will be brutal). I'll probably use a google sheet as a database. Any better suggestions?
I'll probably use a google sheet with a row for each prospect, and columns for spoke to, hotness (degree of suitability for my SaaS), and 'notes' (will put a new bullet point with brief summary of each call).
I was thinking it would be cool to record the calls and feed them to AI for some simple/crude auto-summary which automatically pulls out rejection reason, concerns, interesting points etc.
I might even vibe-code something myself, since I prefer primitive and reduced clutter. May open source it if I do. However, I'd be surprised if something like this doesn't already exist..
This is something I need to do, have no knowledge about and is definitely going to be harder than building the thing.
> it would be cool to record the calls and feed them to AI for some simple/crude auto-summary which automatically pulls out rejection reason, concerns, interesting points etc
This is very close to what the software I've been building over the last few months is, offline note transcription with summary file generation in a nicely formatted PDF/Docx using local models. Codex is available if you don't want to do the inference on your laptop (I will sort claude out soon as well).
If it sounds like something of interest then feel free to send me a message. More than happy to send you a 30 day trial version.
So basically what you want to do is to try different takes (cold emailing, phone, events, influenceurs), get your first 50 customers, try to understand the process (who takes the decision, who will pay, who will use, etc) and based on that, design your CRM to match this process.
My 2 cents (saas solofounder with 6000 users): very important not to overengineer everything. As dev it's our natural tendency but your time and marketing effort is probably the biggest leverage you have.
Good luck :-)