u/MarkT83

CTO at an 8 person startup. We got a new intern three weeks ago and by Wednesday of week one, two of my engineers already started complaining bc the kid was on his phone for the whole day.

Friday I pull up the repo to prep sprint review and he has 6 merged PRs. The next highest on the team was 4. And they weren't junk PRs either, a full test suite for our worst module and three bug fixes from the backlog. Talked to him last night and he shows me he connected an AI agent (folk AI I think) to our codebase with codex and he could push features and solve bugs through text messages.

He texts it a backlog ticket, runs in the cloud, comes back with a diff, he reviews it on his phone, requests changes by text, and only sits at his desk to do final review and merge.

Kids are not real these days.

mid-market B2B SaaS, around 120 reps on Salesforce. our forecast was a mess and our Friday pipeline calls were basically group fiction, so leadership finally greenlit a real eval and we ran Gong and Clari side by side for most of a year. on forecasting specifically, Clari is just the more serious tool. more years of forecast DNA, the pipeline and deal inspection stuff is mature, and the bigger enterprise orgs we talked to still default to it for the actual number. i walked in half-assuming a forecast-first org like ours would land on Clari. we didn't.

and this is the whole point, it's not a knock on Clari. something like 40% of Gong customers also pay for Clari, so the forecasting moat is real, people vote for it with their wallets. but our actual bottleneck was never "can we trust the number," it was that reps kept losing winnable deals on the same objections over and over and nobody could see why. that conversation intelligence layer, recording calls, surfacing where deals stall, coaching from real moments, was our exact gap, and it's the reason most people buy Gong in the first place. adoption was night and day too. reps actually opened Gong because watching their own calls back was instantly useful. Clari tends to get the "wait, what is this tool" reaction from reps because it's built for leadership to interpret, not for reps to live in daily. and it showed up in rollout speed, Gong was live in about a month, Clari runs closer to two.

so Clari wasn't worse. it was built for a problem one level up from the one we actually had, and i couldn't justify the slower rollout to fix forecasting when our money was leaking inside the calls themselves. different org, the kind where forecast accuracy is oxygen, 100+ reps, awkward board conversations about where the number really stands, and Clari's the obvious pick.

here's why it's worth posting now though, the ground is moving under both of them. Clari merged with Salesloft, closed back in December, combined company around $450M ARR, new CEO brought in instead of the founder, and they cut a chunk of staff in February. Gong's sitting on a much bigger valuation, and the whole "revenue orchestration" space is consolidating, everyone's bolting conversation intelligence, forecasting, and engagement into one suite and the overlap between them is growing fast. even Forrester's read on the Clari-Salesloft deal was basically "more questions than answers," and that it doesn't close the gap to Gong on conversation intelligence. so if you're evaluating right now, the feature-by-feature winner matters way less than two things: which problem is actually costing you money today, and how fast your team will genuinely adopt the thing. because the stack you stitch together this year is exactly what these vendors are racing to collapse into one platform, and the overlapping piece you buy might be the thing you get migrated off of in 18 months anyway.

one genuinely useful thing before anyone drops six figures on either, both of them just inherit whatever mess is already in your CRM. if reps skip fields and close dates are fantasy fiction, the forecast layer inherits all of it, and cleaning up your CRM data first costs a tiny fraction of either tool. and honestly if your average deal size is under ~15k, neither one really generates enough ROI to justify the price.

yo this one's gonna sound unhinged but stick with me.

so for the last few weeks i've had a Claude agent basically doing one job every morning: interrogating ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini about our category to see if we even exist. it asks the exact stuff our buyers ask, "best tools for X," "alternatives to [competitor]", and logs whether we show up, where, and how we get described.

first week was straight up humbling lol. we showed up in like 1 of 5 buyer queries. our main competitor was in basically all of them. and when we DID show up we were getting described for a use case we killed a year ago. the AI was out here confidently selling an old version of us to people we'd never even get on a call.

that's the part that messed me up. we'd spent the whole quarter heads-down on outbound, the demo, the follow-up, the funnel we can actually see. but the data is brutal now, like 95% of winning vendors are already on the shortlist before first contact even happens. buyers run their whole anonymous research cycle through LLMs, build a shortlist of 3, THEN raise a hand. if you're not in the answer during that invisible phase you didn't lose the deal, you were never in it. you got cut before you knew it existed.

so the question kinda haunts me now. if the shortlist is getting built inside ChatGPT before a buyer ever hits your site, why is every tool in our stack measuring the part of the funnel that starts AFTER the decision's basically already made?

this is the shift nobody's tooling for yet imo. seller's job used to start when the buyer raised a hand. now they do like 70% of the journey before that, guided by a model summarizing the entire internet's opinion of you. the highest-leverage spot in the whole funnel is the one place you have zero visibility into, what the machines say about you when a buyer asks, before any human's involved. "educator to validator" except the validator is an AI now.

so we're building the fix. Claude-native AI-visibility agent over MCP, no separate dashboard to babysit. it just keeps asking the real buyer questions across the big models, tracks whether you're in the answer, how you're positioned, who's crowding you out, and WHY, like which sources the models are pulling from to describe you. then it tells you the actual thing to go fix, the stale G2 thread, the comparison page that doesn't exist, whatever's keeping you off the shortlist. not vanity metrics, an actual map of where you're invisible.

honestly half the inspiration was watching this sub manually paste "best tools for X" into ChatGPT, screenshot it, and lowkey panic in the comments when they're not in it. everyone's already checking this by hand, once, in a moment of pure anxiety. we just stuck it on infra that survives a real Tuesday, running every day against your actual buyer queries, so you find out you've gone invisible BEFORE it nukes a quarter of pipeline, not after.

aimed at founders and small teams who can feel pipeline's soft for a reason they can't see. if that's you, two things.

if a Claude agent could tell you exactly how AI describes you to your buyers rn, what's the first question you'd want it to ask on your behalf?