I have spent years working across a lot of companies and projects, most of them startups. In a startup, lead generation is everything. You grow on how many good leads come in and how quickly someone follows up, and a missed follow-up is a deal that quietly disappears.

And whether all that effort turns into revenue usually comes down to dull, repetitive work: reading each lead, figuring out who they actually are, deciding if they are worth chasing, and writing it all down. I would rather give good salespeople an edge on that than hand them another form to fill in.

Every CRM I evaluated had been built for a sales team of ten reps and priced accordingly. Every one I tried punished me for running small teams across many pipelines, and rewarded exactly the data-entry busywork that makes reps quietly abandon the thing. So I built my own. It is called Blake.

It is named after the character in Glengarry Glen Ross who turns up and tells the office that coffee is for closers. You forward it a lead. Blake reads the thread, researches the company, and ranks it against your ICP: four tiers, and a reason for each. Cadillac, steak knives, coffee, cold. It enriches the company, files the contact, and gets out of the way. No human data entry, which is the whole point, because the data entry is what kills CRM adoption in the first place.

I will not list every feature here, the feature list lives on its own site. What matters is that Blake is a real product, not a side experiment. It is multi-tenant, enriched against live data, hardened, backed up, watched. It runs on a real domain, with real companies relying on it and real money moving through their workspaces. It earns its keep by doing the work a rep would otherwise skip, or pay a much bigger tool more to do worse.

Blake is in a closed beta for now. Whether you are doing sales for your own projects or for a company, solo or with a whole team, and you are tired of paying per seat for software built for someone else, you can request a workspace at blakecloses.com. I still approve them by hand, so tell me a little about what you are working on.