A few months ago I wrote here about why I built my own CRM. The short version: every tool I tried was built for a big sales team and punished me for running small teams across many pipelines, so I built Blake, which reads a forwarded lead, researches the company, ranks it against your ICP, and gets out of the way. That post was the why. This one is what happened next.
It reads your week for you
The newest thing, and the one I am most pleased with, is that Blake now emails you a summary of your week. Every Monday morning, before the first standup, each workspace gets one email.
It does not open with a chart. It opens with a sentence: how the week actually went, in plain language. Strong week, three deals moved to proposal, one closed. Or the honest other kind: quiet week, nothing moved, two good ones going cold. Underneath that, the live pipeline, a small funnel showing where the money is actually sitting, and then the part I care about most: a short list of the deals worth a look this week. The one that has gone quiet. The proposal sitting unanswered for twelve days. The good-fit deal nobody has touched since March.
That last list is the whole point. I did not want to build another dashboard you have to remember to open. I wanted the CRM to tell you what to do, not just what happened. A dashboard waits for you. This comes to you, in the inbox, on the one morning you actually plan the week. There is nothing to configure. Blake already knows your stages and your deals, so it writes the recap itself and sends it.
The less glamorous, more important work
The feature I am quietly proudest of this stretch is not a feature at all. It is a bug I found and killed.
Blake takes leads in by email, and a guard meant to ignore your own internal mail was, in some cases, quietly eating real leads forwarded from your own inbox. No error, no bounce, nothing in the interface. The worst kind of failure: the one that looks like nothing happening. I fixed the guard, recovered the leads it had already swallowed, and then went further, because a silent failure that happened once will happen again. Blake now keeps a durable audit log of every inbound lead, and it watches its own inbound webhook so it switches itself back on if the mail provider ever disables it. Reliability is not a headline, but for a tool people trust with revenue it is the only thing that matters.
A face of its own
Blake also grew up cosmetically. It used to wear a borrowed look. It now has its own: a single emerald accent, a proper wordmark, a matching icon and social image, email templates in the same identity, the same design language as its website. Small, but a product that real companies rely on should not look like a weekend prototype, and now it does not.
There is more underneath. Contacts and companies cross-link properly now, you can open an opportunity straight from a contact, the login flow no longer leaks whether an account exists, and deals carry a manual fit override and a reseller flag for when the automatic score needs a human's thumb on the scale. The kind of work that never makes an announcement but makes the thing feel finished.
Where it stands
Blake is not a side experiment. It is multi-tenant, enriched against live data, backed up, watched, and it runs with real money moving through it. Since I last wrote, it got more reliable, it got a face, and it started telling people what to do on a Monday instead of waiting to be asked.
If you want to see it, it lives at blakecloses.com. And yes, it is still named after the man who reminds the office that coffee is for closers.
The next one
I build things because I keep running into the same problem twice and get tired of waiting for someone else to fix it. Blake came out of exactly that. So does the next one.
It is called Parly, and it started with a different mess: the shared support inbox. The info@ or support@ address that three people are supposed to be watching, where half the questions get answered twice and the other half not at all, and where every tool that promises to fix it costs more than the problem is worth. Parly turns that shared mailbox into something a small team can actually run together, and it lets you answer a customer's email from inside Slack, where you already are, instead of forwarding threads around or standing up a heavy help desk.
That is the pattern, and I expect it to keep going. I am not trying to build one big company. I build products where I feel the gap myself, keep them simple, price them like a tool and not a tax, and let each one earn its place. Blake was one. Parly is the next. There will be more.
You can have a look at parlyparly.com. I will be talking about it a bit more in a later post.
