Stop Vibe Coding a CRM and Grow Your Actual Business

Five MSP owners asked me to demo their vibe-coded CRM in the past 30 days. Now, all of them plan to take this thing to market and almost all of them are going to be wasting their time. And I don't say that to be an asshole. I say that as somebody who has been crushed repeatedly—like embarrassingly—by the exact same thing that they're doing right now: shiny object syndrome.

Convincing yourself that the thing that you enjoy doing is the thing that moves the needle and watching it not happen over and over and over and over... Let me play this out. Five people in 30 days—and that's just me. I work with hundreds of MSPs, but I personally had five owners ask me to look at a CRM that they built. Now think about what that actually means in terms of the real number of people out there who are vibe-coding their own CRM or their own PSA.

So instead of using Close or HubSpot or Salesforce or ConnectWise or whatever tools, they've decided: "We can do this better. We know our business better than anyone. This is a customized version for us. And if it works for us, then it's going to work for everybody else. So if we're going to do this, we may as well turn it into a product and then we can scale that software product and oh my gosh, the margins on software and this and this and this."

And I get the logic. I really do. You're a customer of the product that you're building. You know the pain points, you think it's good, so you want to take it to market. I understand the idea, but here's what's actually happening.

You already have a business. These aren't startups; every single one of these business owners is running a multi-million dollar MSP. Call it one to five million. And you've already done the hardest shit in business. Zero to one is the hardest fucking part. You've got product-market fit, you've got delivery figured out, you've got processes, systems, maybe some profit (I hope). You've got revenue coming in. You've got something that's already moving, already creating cash.

And instead of figuring out the next constraint in the system that you're already building—you know, like how to take it from three to five, five to ten—you're instead allocating your time to building a product that has zero market validation. And when I look at this, I'm like, have you even talked to 10 people who said they'd buy this thing? That's how you build a software company. You don't go build and perfect the product first and make that really good and get that all dialed in. You actually go to market, you present it, get 10 people to commit, and then you go build an MVP.

So if you're investing a ton of time into building a really good product, then you're already doing it backwards. And you're walking into a space that's already crowded with companies that have serious development chops and access to some of the best AI talent on the planet, and a shitload of money to put into development, and a huge runway where they can continue to make investments and do development without needing a profit margin. Like, that's what you're going to be competing against. And it's already crowded, and it's only going to get more crowded.

Five people asked me to demo their CRM in 30 days. These things are about to be everywhere. And most of them are going to be mediocre products that solve a low-level problem, never find customers, never establish product-market fit, and you realize after all of the time that you've spent there, "Oh shit, alright, this was a shiny object."

And you enjoyed that process, like vibe-coding the thing, but it came at the expense of growing the core business. And starting and scaling a software company is fundamentally different than running a service business. Like, very different. The business model is totally different at the foundation. The go-to-market is different. The economics are different. And you're going to find that out the hard way while your actual business—the one that's already working, the one that already has some cash, the one that already has teammates, and the one that already has some customers—sits there waiting for the attention that it deserves.

I'm not recording this to be a negative Naysayer. I promise you, I'm really not. And I'm not a pessimist on things like this. I'm recording this because I have made this exact mistake more times than I can count. I've spent years letting myself get distracted by things that didn't really matter, didn't really move the needle, and things that didn't grow my company. Yeah, they gave me a dopamine hit. They were fun to do. I liked doing them. And I built a really strong rationalization for why that time was well spent. But it wasn't.

And I would say this is the single biggest mistake that I've made in business: convincing myself that the way I was spending my time was actually moving it forward, when what I was actually doing was avoiding the hard, necessary, boring work that needed to get done to remove the key constraint that was keeping me from getting to the next level.

So this is just my PSA. If you're an MSP owner and you're vibe-coding your own CRM to compete with Close.io or Salesforce or HubSpot, I'm not telling you you're stupid. I'm telling you I've been you. And the thing that you're building probably is not going to change your business dramatically. Probably is not going to be the next billion-dollar company. And you already have a business—a business that is already doing something. And you've already done the really hard work of getting it to that point. Identifying what that constraint is in the business and what's necessary to get it to the next level is going to be a better use of your time.

So, go work on that. Adios.