Ep. 0656:14

Building Agentic Experiences

Zero Bets Agents Will Break the CRM Lock-In

with Santtu Koivumäki — Co-founder, Zero

Santtu Koivumäki named his CRM after the number of clicks he wants left, and bets agents will dissolve the switching costs protecting Salesforce and HubSpot.

The CRM is the oldest category in SaaS, and its incumbents are still deciding where to inject AI into systems built over decades. Santtu Koivumäki and his co-founder Tuomo left Smartly.io in 2022, after scaling it past $100M ARR onto a go-to-market stack that had grown from Trello to Pipedrive to HubSpot to Salesforce and ended at 15 or more tools with every team in its own silo. Thirteen months after ChatGPT launched, they flew to San Francisco with no network there and started cold DMing founders on LinkedIn. One of them said over coffee that he would build a zero-click CRM, and the name stuck.

Two years in, Zero's API and MCP do nearly everything the UI does, and its best-fit customers come from HubSpot. Santtu's bet is that the switching-cost moat falls once agents can read a legacy CRM's configuration and rebuild it elsewhere. The data migration is the easy part.

What we cover

  • Inheriting expectations, not code. Zero has to meet everything buyers expect from a legacy CRM while carrying none of the decades of code that shaped those expectations — and why that asymmetry is the whole opportunity.
  • Where the name came from. A cold LinkedIn DM to a Silicon Valley founder, a San Francisco cafe, and a stranger telling them to build a zero-click CRM.
  • API first by design. Zero built its API through the front end before release, so the API and MCP now cover nearly everything a human can do in the interface. What that costs, and what it unlocks.
  • Junior, slightly stupid, very capable. Santtu's working definition of an agent, and the guardrails, tools, context, and permissions it needs to be useful.
  • Sequencing autonomy by impact radius. Internal and reversible actions run free. External actions get reviewed like the first 50 emails from a sales trainee.
  • The production incident. A new user's agent misconfiguration moved every opportunity to one stage and associated them all with a single company. How it surfaced in a shared Slack channel and got rolled back.
  • Why the lock-in breaks. Legacy CRM moats rest on switching cost. Agents can read data, permissions, and configuration and replicate it elsewhere — and configuration was always the hard part, not the data.
  • Build for one persona. Build for everyone and you build nothing for anyone. Plus what Santtu runs himself: five agents on an old laptop with Telegram alerts, Codex for coding, and a self-built iOS gym coach that roasts him for missed workouts.