A CRM you can talk to: Founders Kit, our own AI sales assistant with email and calendar built in

The challenge

Founders Kit is our own product, so the challenge was a problem we set out to solve ourselves. Small sales teams - founders selling their own product, businesses of 5 to 50 people - typically run on a spreadsheet, an inbox, and a separate calendar app. The actual selling happens in email and in meetings; the CRM is where context goes to be re-typed afterwards, if it gets updated at all.

Our thesis: the CRM should live where the work happens, and the routine parts - logging activity, updating deals, drafting follow-ups, planning the day - should be something you can hand off. Not a chatbot bolted onto a database, but an assistant connected to every part of the system, with the email threads and meetings it needs already linked to the right deals.

What we built

Founders Kit covers everything you expect from a CRM - contacts, accounts, deals, activities, to-dos, a visual pipeline, custom fields - and then goes where most CRMs stop. It has a full email client and a full calendar built in. You connect your Google or Microsoft account, or most other common email and calendar providers, and your threads, meetings, and deals become linked records in one workspace.

At the center sits Kit, an AI assistant that can take 82 distinct actions across the whole system, including actions tailored to the custom fields each organization defines. Kit finds and updates CRM records, drafts and sends emails, manages calendar events, runs web research, and creates new contacts or deals straight from an email. It works in three ways: fully on its own, asking before each change, or proposing a step-by-step plan that you approve before anything happens.

Conversations with Kit are persistent: they survive a page refresh and stay in sync across open tabs while the assistant is working. Each morning, a briefing called Daily Coffee summarizes overdue items, the day's meetings, and deals closing soon, for each user in their own timezone.

Billing is usage-based: a subscription plus one-time credit packs, with assistant usage metered in credits. The balance is checked before every conversation, and allowances reset automatically on renewal.

How we built it

The principle behind the assistant is simple: it acts on real customer data, so the customer stays in control. When Kit is set to ask first, every change it wants to make is shown on screen with Confirm and Cancel buttons, and nothing happens until you approve. In plan mode, the assistant can only read data and must present its plan before it is allowed to act.

The connections to email and calendar providers carry much of the engineering weight. The sync keeps working reliably even when providers are slow or briefly unavailable, and it recognizes the same conversation even when messages arrive through different accounts.

We treated security as product work, not an afterthought: passwords and account access details are stored encrypted, the design is backed by a documented threat model, and the product passed a security audit covering 113 requirements. Around 1,400 automated tests run before every release.

What this build demonstrates

Founders Kit is the proof we point to when we say an AI assistant can be the interface to a real business system, not a sidebar. Everything we advocate in client work is exercised here under real production conditions: an assistant with permission controls, dependable connections to outside providers, usage-based billing, and the unglamorous work of testing, monitoring, and auditing that makes a product reliable. About ten months in, it runs live at founders-kit.com.