There had to be a better way.

A note from John Dukes, founder of Fundz.

I spent thirteen years selling at HubSpot. I was employee number 141, I carried a quota the whole time, and I hit it twelve years running. Five President's Clubs. When I left, I had recorded more one-call closes than anyone in the company's history.

I tell you that not to impress you. I tell you because it is the only reason the next paragraph is worth anything.

Here is the thing I heard in every sales job I ever had, including the good one. The process gets handed down, the tool gets rolled out, the best practice gets announced, and every one of them was decided by somebody who had never carried a number. Never sat there on the last afternoon of a quarter. Never had to explain a miss to anyone. You learn to nod in the meeting and then go and do whatever actually works.

I built this from the other side of that. Everything in it was decided by someone who had experienced your world, because I was still living in it while I built the thing.

Most weeks, somewhere in the middle of a good year, I had the same thought. There has to be a better way than this. Not a better pitch, not a better sequence, not a better template. A better way of deciding who to call at all. I was firing out a few hundred emails and LinkedIn messages a month and hoping one percent came back, and the people who did come back were almost never the ones I had picked. They were the ones something had just happened to.

That is the actual job. Not volume. Timing. A company that closed a round last month has budget it did not have in the spring, a mandate to spend it, and no incumbent for whatever you sell. A company that just hired a new VP has someone in the building whose first instinct is to change things. Those windows are a few weeks wide and they open on public record that almost nobody reads.

So in 2015 I started building the thing I wanted, and I kept building it for the next seven years while still carrying a quota at HubSpot. Fundz was not a business plan. It was the tool I wished somebody would sell me, built at night by the person who needed it. Every early decision in it was made by someone who had to use it on Monday morning.

It watches eighteen kinds of signal across the companies that fit your territory, funding, acquisitions, executive moves, expansion, and it puts the ones that matter in front of you each morning with the decision maker attached and a line you could actually open with, built from what just happened.

I picked every one of those signals myself. Not a product team deciding what looked good on a roadmap, and not a model deciding what was easy to scrape. I chose them because I had personally watched each one turn into a deal, and I cut the ones that looked interesting and never did. That is the difference between a platform designed by a department that has never carried a number and one built by somebody who had to hit quota on Monday using it.

I am still the one doing it. I read what comes through, I add signals when I see a new pattern worth catching, and I take them out when they stop earning their place. That part is not finished and I do not expect it ever to be.

What I will not do

We are in a moment where anyone can generate a thousand convincing emails before breakfast, and I think the only thing that will be worth anything on the other side of it is whether you were straight with people.

So: no countdown timers, no invented scarcity, no fake discount that everybody gets. If I email you, it is because there is a specific reason I thought you would care, and I will tell you what that reason is in the first sentence. If I have nothing to say to you, you will not hear from me. And if you reply asking me to stop, that is the end of it, not the start of a nurture track.

The prices are on the pricing page. The terms are on the terms page. Neither has a number in it that changes depending on who is looking.

If you want to talk to me, I am at john@fundz.net, and it is me who reads it.