How I Think About CRMs, Yendou, and Building Blue Categories
journal entry - 27th march 2025
The era of CRM is dead. I’m watching it die as all these new CRM products get erected. Over the past 2.5 years at Yendou, we moved from a sponsor-site marketplace to a site DB + CRM, to a fucking cool Customer Engagement Management platform.
Customer Engagement Management is the next era of CRM.
And probably no one knows what I’m talking about — except the people who saw Yendou live, and the people building Yendou. Because they all say the same thing:
“We’ve never seen anything like this.”
Truth is: me neither. It only existed in my imagination. And what we have now is still far from what I imagine.
One of the founding employees at Veeva Systems once told me:
“Peter Gassner would have never been capable of such a degree of innovation.”
Flattering. And terrifying.
There was a time I had a massive intellectual crush on Peter Gassner (Founder & CEO of Veeva Systems). I would have kneeled in front of the man who pulled off a genius coup — leaving his employer, striking an insane distribution deal with Salesforce, and conquering the CRM niche in life sciences. He opened a $40 billion market. You must respect that, no matter how horrible you think the UX and UI of Veeva is.
So believe me when I say: I was intimidated the first time people started calling what I do the “next-gen Veeva.”
I wasn’t ready to compete with my hero.
Now?
Now I believe the world deserves better.
And who am I to stop progress?
Sometimes I wonder:
What goes on in the heads of our engineering team, building this machine with no precedent in the real world?
Because we all know exactly what we’re doing. What it means.
Rafik — one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever come across, and he’s only 21 — told me yesterday:
“It’s weird to watch what people older than me are building at all these SaaS companies, and find myself thinking, ‘That’s it?’ … I have goosebumps going through life knowing what I’m building.”
I love it.
I love the irony of it all.
That the industry with the worst software might become the birthplace of a new era.
A special kind of software that could infect other industries.
I picture FinTech & co. looking to PharmaTech for inspiration.
And isn’t that a future worth betting on?
But being first sucks.
On many levels.
It’s insanity trying to explain what you do.
Riding a wave — like Veeva did with CRM — is one thing.
Provoking entropy to create a wave?
That’s asking the gods of victory for something close to impossible.
No — that’s not even the right metaphor.
It’s more like a sinner walking toward a crowd, naked.
Not asking for forgiveness —
but to be welcomed.
And your only sin?
Wanting to build a city for those whose eyes were trained on ruins.
Being first sucks because you have to learn how to describe a feeling,
a future that doesn’t exist yet,
in words that don’t quite fit —
for something you haven’t fully built.
Did I know I was building a Site Engagement Management platform when I started Yendou?
No.
But I knew what I was building.
It just didn’t have a name yet.
And yet, being first is a privilege.
You get to erect something that’s never existed.
You get to watch people’s faces the first time they see it.
Their appreciation is everything you ever wanted.
Not for your ego — you’ve got no ego left.
Their delight…
That’s how you feel understood.
Delight is magical.
It’s recognition of the effort, the thoughts, the pain, the obsession.
It’s the quiet nod that says:
“This mattered to the person who made it.”
And when I see that spark in their eyes,
what I silently tell them is:
“Thank you for understanding why I cared about this so much.”