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 we chose the problem ourselves. Small sales teams run on a spreadsheet, an inbox, and a separate calendar app. These teams are founders who sell their own product, and businesses of 5 to 50 people. The real sales work happens in email and in meetings. The CRM only receives that context later, by hand, and often not at all.

Our thesis: the CRM belongs where the work happens, and you delegate the routine parts. Those parts are the activity log, the deal updates, the follow-up drafts, and the plan for the day. The result is not a chatbot on top of a database. It is an assistant with a connection to every part of the system, and with the email threads and meetings already linked to the correct deals.

What we built

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

At the center sits Kit, an AI assistant with 82 distinct actions across the whole system. Some actions are specific 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 a new contact or deal directly from an email. Kit works in three modes: fully alone, with a question before each change, or with a step-by-step plan for your approval before any action.

A conversation with Kit is persistent. It survives a page refresh and stays in sync across open tabs during the assistant's work. Each morning a briefing called Daily Coffee summarizes the overdue items, the meetings of the day, and the deals near a close. Each user gets this briefing in their own timezone.

Billing is usage-based: a subscription plus one-time credit packs. The system meters assistant usage in credits. It checks the balance before every conversation, and the 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. In the ask-first mode, the screen shows every change Kit intends, with a Confirm button and a Cancel button. Nothing happens before your approval. In plan mode, the assistant reads data only, and it presents its plan before any action.

The connections to email and calendar providers carry much of the engineering effort. The sync stays reliable even when a provider is slow or briefly unavailable. It also recognizes the same conversation when messages arrive through different accounts.

We treated security as product work, not as an afterthought. The system stores passwords and account access details in encrypted form. A documented threat model supports the design. The product passed a security audit across 113 requirements. Around 1,400 automated tests run before every release.

What this build demonstrates

Founders Kit is our proof that an AI assistant can be the interface to a real business system, not a sidebar. Everything we recommend in client work runs here under real production conditions: an assistant with permission controls, dependable connections to outside providers, usage-based billing, and the unglamorous work behind a reliable product. That work is the tests, the monitors, and the audits. After about ten months, the product runs live at founders-kit.com.