Your CRM is Lying to You with Patrick Thompson

Early-stage founders don’t need dashboards and deal stages. They need sharper focus, faster feedback, and fewer distractions.

On The Predictable Revenue Podcast, our host Collin Stewart sits down with Patrick Thompson, founder of Clarify, to talk about why most CRMs fail startups, how AI can actually help (if used right), and what it really takes to find product-market fit.

Here are the key takeaways for any founder building a sales motion from scratch.

The CRM Problem Startups Face

Most early-stage startups don’t need a CRM. They need focus.

Traditional CRMs were designed for scale, supporting long sales cycles, large teams, and substantial data requirements. But when you’re just starting out, those same systems feel like overkill. You’re still figuring out who your customer is, what they need, and why they’ll pay for it.

Instead of helping, most CRMs get in the way.

They overwhelm founders with bloated features, rigid processes, and reporting dashboards no one uses. Adoption is a pain. Costs add up. And worst of all, they shift attention away from what really matters: talking to customers and learning fast.

Startups don’t fail because they lack tools. They fail because they chase the wrong things too early. Founders don’t need a sales machine. They need clarity.

AI as the Game-Changer

AI is transforming CRM, but not in the way legacy vendors promised.

Most tools pitch automation as a shortcut to more sales: auto-fill this, auto-send that. But automation without understanding just creates noise. Early-stage startups don’t need more activity. They need sharper insight.

That’s where AI can actually help.

The real power of AI isn’t in doing more, it’s in knowing more. Smarter CRMs surface patterns, highlight gaps in your pipeline, and help you spot unmet customer needs faster. For lean teams, that’s a multiplier.

Clarify is built AI-first, not AI-later. Where legacy CRMs bolt on AI features, we’ve designed the system from the ground up to think like a founder: lean, curious, focused on learning. Less manual entry. Fewer distractions. More clarity.

This isn’t about replacing your intuition. It’s about accelerating it.

Customer Discovery and Product-Market Fit

Startups don’t grow by proving they’re right. They grow by finding out where they’re wrong.

Patrick often says: “Disprove, don’t prove.” That’s the real work of customer discovery. Not pitching, not selling, but listening hard enough to uncover where your assumptions break. The faster you disprove the wrong ideas, the faster you find what actually matters.

Too many founders build for features. The great ones build for pain.

Strong product-market fit isn’t a moment. It’s a momentum.

You feel it when customer conversations shift from polite interest to urgency. When deals close faster. When users tell you what they’d be upset to lose. PMF isn’t something you guess at. It’s something the market makes obvious if you’re paying attention.

Clarify was built to keep founders in that discovery mindset. It surfaces patterns across conversations, flags real pain points, and keeps your focus where it belongs: solving problems, not managing the pipeline.

Startup Growth Playbook

Early-stage growth is messy, and that’s exactly where your strategy matters most.

At this stage, you’re not building a scaled sales org. You’re building proof. That’s why your growth playbook shouldn’t resemble a big company’s. It should resemble a lab: lean, fast, and focused on what matters.

One of the most effective levers?

Giving early users real value before you ever ask them to pay. Whether it’s through a free tier or direct access, what matters is reducing friction and learning what makes people stick. When you understand this, the transition from free to paid becomes obvious and repeatable.

Creating repeatable channels doesn’t mean spraying content or launching big campaigns. In the early days, growth is personal. It’s founder-to-founder intros. It’s being so useful that one person tells another, unprompted. Those are signals of product-market pull, not just push.

Your job isn’t to scale what’s working. Not yet. Your job is to find what works, then double down on it with precision.

Building a Generational Sales Tech Company

Quick wins are tempting, but they don’t build companies that matter.

If you’re a founder in SaaS, especially in sales tech, you’re playing in a crowded space. Features can be copied. GTM tactics get saturated. The only real moat is depth: deep customer understanding, deep product value, and a long-term view most won’t bother to hold.

Building a generational company means being relentlessly focused on the fundamentals, not just chasing growth hacks, but solving real, painful problems better than anyone else. It means being okay with saying no to the wrong customers, resisting bloated roadmaps, and committing to product-market depth before product-market scale.

The best founders treat the early years as foundation-setting.

Every conversation, every churned user, every deal lost, it’s all data. The job isn’t just to grow fast. It’s to grow right.

If you’re in this to build something lasting, the shortcut is doing the hard things early: owning customer discovery, building for clarity, and refusing to outsource the parts that matter most.