#6 Zero Bets Agents Will Break the CRM Lock-In | Santtu Koivumäki

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 inherited all of their expectations and none of their code, then named the company after the number of clicks he wants left.

Santtu and his co-founder left Smartly.io in 2022, after scaling it past 100 million in ARR onto a go-to-market stack of 15 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. His 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.

About podcast:Building Agentic Experiences is the podcast for founders and product leaders navigating the shift from AI features to autonomous agents. Hosted by Tapio Haaja (CCO) and Joni Juup (CDO) of Intentface. New episodes monthly.