Transcription
To understand where CRM software is going, you have to drive down the road it's already traveled since 1993 to today. That road tells a surprisingly clear story. Not an opinion, a pattern. One you can see in the data.
Our journey starts in 1993. Siebel Systems. If you wanted to manage your customers, this was it. It was brutal. A perpetual license, you had to buy a server, an army of consultants, and a single rollout could take 6 to 18 months and cost anywhere between 1 and 10 million dollars. CRM was a fortress only the Fortune 500 could afford to build.
Then in 1999, Salesforce kicked the door down with two words, no software. CRM moved to the cloud. No servers, no million-dollar project, just a subscription per user per month. Suddenly, mid-size companies could play. And time to live dropped from years to weeks.
2006. HubSpot changed the entry point. The CRM itself was free. The front door anyone could walk through. But free is the hook, not the home. The typical business that actually runs HubSpot is paying around $800 a month plus the compulsory $3,000 onboarding fee just to switch it on. Easy to start, not so cheap to stay.
2010. Pipedrive made the opposite bet. Stripped back, sales first, and genuinely cheap. Built for the people who actually live in the thing, sales people. Simple, fast, a few dollars a day.
And in 2018, GoHighLevel bundled everything. CRM, marketing, funnels, automation into one flat rate platform, the whole stack in a box.
Now, step back and look at the road behind us. Every wave did the same three things. It cut the time, it widened the door, and it pushed the power down to smaller and smaller players. From 18 months to the same afternoon, from Fortune 500 to a solar agency. But, notice what you still never got to keep, the code and the data. From Siebel to GoHighLevel, you're always renting. The meter never stopped, and the engine was never yours.
Which brings us to 2026 and the next bend in the road. Tools like leadstack.dev, same all-in-one power, same AI agents, but you buy it once, you host it yourself, you own the source code. The recurring billing flattens to almost nothing. Over 3 years, an AI-enabled GoHighLevel agency spends around $28,000. The LeadStack equivalent is a tiny fraction of this. $10 million to $1,000, 18 months to an hour, rented to owned. That's not where I think CRM is going. That's the road it's already on.
LeadStack is the future of CRM. Here's why. You own it. The full code base, no subscription. And this is why small agencies are switching. Unlimited sub accounts, unified conversations, AI voice, AI SMS, and AI web chat. Contact CRM with timeline and attribution, pipeline deals on a Kanban, booking pages, website builder, forms plus lead to speed automation, quotes and invoices plus API and web hooks. And you can brand it whatever you like.
So, over in my Free School community, there is a thread around Lead Stack, and there there is a bunch of posts around the real users' experience. So, Haley's using it, Haroon's using it, Paul's using it. Paul's actually paying £800 a month, and that is going to drop down to close to zero with Lead Stack, which is incredible. And also, a quick shout-out to Steve who posted that he got it up and running. He was one of the first users, and it was really good to see that just following the instructions, able to get it up and going, and start saving.
All right, to get started with Lead Stack is pretty straightforward. After you've purchased, you get access to the code base. When you got access to the code base, you need to have VS Code, and also Claude Code for VS Code. Once you've got that, you just open up the terminal. You can paste this command. There's a few different ways of doing it. This is just one way. This will just copy the code base over into your local machine.
Once it copies over, you just go over into Claude Code, and this is where Claude is critical to get this going for any user. Just type in, "Help me get my CRM started." Just enter that in, and away you go. That's it.
Once you're up and running, you can get to this get started tab here. Now, this runs you through the standard flows within the system, like your speed-to-lead, setting up your AI agents, and how they flow. I'm not going to run through them because it's a little bit boring.
So, let's go down to sub-accounts. This is where you can see the list of all the sub-accounts. You can create new sub-account here, and you can have unlimited sub-accounts. Now, if we wanted to take a look at, say, Pipedrive, we could click on here and go go to Pipedrive, and here you'll see the high-level overview. We've got the deals, what's in the pipeline, what we've won, and then we can also see from all of our contacts where they are in the world, and we can drill into that. So, we can spin this around, we can go into London, etc. So, this is a handy visual overview, just something to be aware of. It's kind of cool.
So, next I want to show you how the speed to lead works with web hooks. So, if we wanted to trigger by a form, we'd go to forms. So, I'm going to trigger this form, and you'll see what happens. The other way we can trigger the web hook is say via a deal. So, in the pipeline here, if we create a new deal, it can also trigger a web hook.
To set up the web hook, super easy, go down to the settings, and if we go to the APIs tab, you'll see web hooks. One is for a contact is created. So, if we submit a form or a site visitor submits a form, that will auto create a contact, and this web hook will then fire because a new contact's created. The other web hook we've got is for a deal created. So, for this demo, I'm using N8N, but you can use Zapier or Make or whatever you like, really.
So, for this demo, I've got a web hook. It's going to then use this manual extract deal info, and then I will send the data to Slack, whether it's a new contact or deal information. So, first I'll submit a form, and then it should go through to Slack showing the new contact detail. And to do that, in the form that was set up, you can see down the bottom there's three ways to share form submissions. So, I've used the copy HTML snippet, and then I have embedded this on a form on my website. This is the website here. This was actually built within Lead Stack, and it's my demo site. So, if I go down to the bottom here, I've got the form. I can just fill this in.
All right, I've just filled in some test data here. If I hit send message, then and jump over into Slack, we should see this come through and there it is, it just appeared as I speak. So, andrew7@test.com. So, that form submission, that could be on any kind of website or anywhere you can put a form.
Now, I'll show you how the deal flows through. So, back over in Lead Stack, if we go to the pipeline, which has got the Kanban on it, I'm in the Peak Clubs here, which has got the webhook set up. If I add a new deal, that deal info will flow through to Slack as well. And this is super handy if you've got a big team or a sales force and you want to keep them up to date. So, go to new deal, I'll put website, select the stage, we'll say we won it, pick a contact, selected andrew7 again. Now, if I create this deal, we'll flick back over into Slack. Here it is, and with a bit of luck, a new deal's going to appear in a second. And there it is, as we speak, the deal flows through. All the details, website, 10,000 US, etc. So, that is the power of using webhooks and the forms and all these automation triggers that are available in Lead Stack.
All right, quick demo of how you can use outbound voice with the AI agent. So, if we go to agents and then we go to outbound voice, we can enable this feature. Basically, what we want to do is we have an outbound persona. So, inbound has one persona maybe and outbound has another. The persona this AI agent will have is it's calling back people that have registered for a free trial at a gym and so the agent calls them and says, "Hey, would you like to join a challenge program?" So, then we have an outbound opener. This is the line that they'll state and then there's some compliance and pacing details. We set all that up and then we can make a call.
Okay, to bulk AI call is super easy. You just go to contacts, there's a button, bulk AI call, give it a name. For the audience, I'm going to do a contact with a specific tag. That tag is free trial. These are the people that joined a free trial at the gym in this example. If you go down, you can see it's found one person and I'm just going to say they consented to being called cuz that was part of the deal to take the free trial. So then I can just hit call.
>> Hi, this is Alex from Peak Clubs. Uh is now a good time for a quick chat?
So I'm actually unable to play much of the call due to privacy reasons, but the call did go back and forth quite a bit and you can see over here it actually went for 3 minutes and 44 seconds. Lead Stack actually classifies the call. So whether they're interested or not interested or a maybe or a callback. And you can see here this one got classified as not interested.
All right, so this is the unified inbox. You could call it AI conversations or conversations, whatever you like. But if you go to the conversations menu, this is what you get. And what it means is your SMS, your WhatsApp, if you have Messenger or Instagram connected, it all comes into the unified inbox. Now this is WhatsApp at the moment. So if I send a message in, we should see it. I'll just ask once again who the coaches are and you can see the message that I've just sent from my phone in WhatsApp. Who are your coaches? And at the top you'll notice it's on AI replies at the moment. So it's on auto. So the AI is looking at the website for Peak Clubs. It already has that knowledge and it's able to respond. I can turn that off or I can have suggested replies.
The other thing worth worth knowing when you're in here is that you can hit ask for a review. So if you've just completed some business with this contact, you can hit this and it's going to draft, hey, for using Peak Clubs. If you have a moment, do a quick review for us. So I can hit send and away that goes. The other thing in your unified inbox is up the top you got the details. So if I open this up, I can see all the contacts details, their activities, if there's any open tasks, and that type of thing. So, super handy feature.
All right, if you want to give Lead Stacker go, there'll be a link in the description. I won't go through the pricing now because there is a deal on, and you might be able to get it significantly cheaper than the standard price. So, anyway, click that link, check it out. If you want to learn more about Lead Stacker, watch this video here.