The Moment That Made Me Build This
It wasn't one moment. It was two founders.
The first was building an identity and authentication company. Its product was still pre-revenue, and it was genuinely innovative. Twice a week I sat down with the CTO to work out how to take it to market. Together we built the value proposition, the market tiers, a six-step sales process the founder could run, the sales decks, and a plan for the first four customers. It was a good plan, and it never ran. The company had no one whose job was to run it.
The second founder was building an AI product for one of the most demanding industries there is. It was extraordinary technology, and it already had paying customers. But every one of them came from that single industry. The company couldn't open a second market. Three sales and marketing roles turned over in six months, and nobody on the team was closing consistently.
Neither founder had a product problem. Both had a go-to-market problem. And the same thing kept coming back to me: there was nothing simple, built for technical founders, that would help them understand their buyers and act on it every week. What existed assumed you already had a sales team, or that you'd keep paying someone like me to sit in the room.
That was the moment I decided to build Andru.
The Problem: Same Founder, Harder Ground
The founder I build for is a technical founder between Series A and early Series B, roughly $1.5–5M in ARR, selling a complex product into enterprises. They're moving off founder-led sales, and they can't yet win enterprise deals predictably.
In 2026 the ground under them moved.
The bar went up. A Series B now expects $5–8M in ARR, growing 80% or more a year, with a burn multiple under 1.5x that falls every quarter. Investors ask about burn in the first meeting.
Pilots stopped being proof. Many of these founders have a handful of one-year enterprise contracts that their customers treat as paid pilots. Those customers are now running their own AI ROI reviews: in Madrona's August 2026 research, 83% of enterprises convert fewer than half of their AI pilots to production. The champion loves the product, but the CFO and procurement decide, and the founder only knows the champion.
Replacing salespeople with AI mostly disappointed. Teams that deployed autonomous AI SDRs largely moved back to "AI drafts, a person sends." Buyers still want people: three in five open go-to-market roles are account executives or solution engineers. So the founder's question changed. It's no longer "people or AI?" It's "which few people do I hire, and what understanding of the buyer do they and my agents work from?"
Every option leaves the same gap.
- A VP of Sales costs $200K or more, takes months to hire, and keeps what they learn about the buyer in their own head.
- A consultant leaves, and the capability leaves with them. I know, because I was that consultant.
- The incumbent bundles, Gong or Clari with Salesloft, give the founder's agents the buyer's records: calls, activity, the forecast.
- Building it yourself with coding agents is cheap to start, and it automates a picture of the buyer that nobody has tested.
Records aren't reasons. A record says what happened: the call took place, the email was opened, the deal moved a stage. A reason says why. Reasons come from inferring what's driving the person on the other side, testing it, and then telling the real human story behind the customer data. That's the signal, because every sale is driven by intrinsic factors, not logic. Platforms give agents the buyer's records. Andru gives the reasons.
The Decision: Building with AI
Here's where I need to be honest about something, because it matters for every founder reading this who doesn't fit the usual builder profile.
I am not a software engineer. I don't have a computer science degree. I grew up in sales bullpens, on enterprise deal calls, in boardrooms. My expertise is understanding how companies find, win and keep customers. For years that kept me in the advisor role: I could see the problem clearly, but I couldn't build the systematic solution I knew was needed.
Then the tools changed.
I started building Andru with Claude, Anthropic's AI, and Cursor as my development environment. It wasn't easy. There were weeks when I felt like I was learning a new language while trying to write a novel in it. There were nights at 2 AM when I questioned whether a sales leader had any business building a software platform.
But the tools that exist today made it possible for someone with deep domain expertise and no CS degree to build production software. Not toy software: a real platform with authentication, payments, AI pipelines, agents and API integrations.
The thesis was simple. The best products are built by people who've lived the problem. I'd been in those deals. I'd felt the anxiety of a forecast call with numbers I didn't trust. I'd sat across from CTOs who could explain their architecture for hours but couldn't say why a buyer should care. That experience was my advantage. AI was the tool that let me turn it into software.
What I Built
Andru is a revenue intelligence layer for complex B2B growth. Two parts of it do most of the work.
Chat. Ask anything about a customer, a deal or a new business pursuit, and get answers and insights from your own data. Ask for a Tool, a Framework or a Decision, and Andru builds it from what it knows about your company. You can use it on the Andru platform, from Claude Desktop, Cursor or any other MCP client, or from your own agent over the A2A protocol. Connect Gmail and Google Calendar, and it knows what was said on your deals and who you're meeting next.
Deal Prep. Andru acts as the people in your buying committees, to prepare you for real conversations. Practise with the skeptical CFO, the CTO or the VP before the meeting that matters. Then Andru suggests and builds ready-to-use assets for moving the conversation forward.
There are no subscriptions. You pay for what Andru makes, from a wallet you fill: a Tool is $3, a Framework $12 and a Decision $49, at the same price on the platform and from your own agent. A Deal Prep session is $5 for 25 turns. Your first ICP is free.
What I Learned: Lessons for Founders Building with AI
Lesson 1: Domain expertise matters more than engineering credentials.
The best AI-built products come from people who understand the problem deeply. AI handles the translation to code. What it can't do is tell you which problems are worth solving, how the solution should feel to the person using it, or what separates a tool someone tries once from a tool someone runs their business on.
If you have deep domain expertise and you've been waiting for permission to build, this is your permission. The tools are here.
Lesson 2: Ship before you're ready.
The first version of Andru was ugly. The ICP generation worked, but the interface looked like it had been designed by someone who'd read about design systems without using one. The onboarding had too many steps. The pricing was confusing.
I shipped it anyway, and it was one of the best decisions I made. Many of my assumptions about what founders needed were partly wrong, and I couldn't have found that out on my own. Get it in front of people, watch what they do, and iterate on real signal instead of theory.
Lesson 3: Pay-for-what-you-use pricing fits this founder.
The founders I serve can tell you their runway to the week, and their need for go-to-market help is spiky: some months they're heads-down building, other months they need help on every deal. A wallet fits that. They pay for what Andru makes, when they need it, and set a weekly limit so it never surprises them.
Lesson 4: Build for the founder in front of you.
Every decision in Andru goes back to the founders I actually worked with: what would have helped them on a Tuesday, between a customer call and a board update? That question rules out a lot. It means Chat answers from their own data instead of giving generic advice, and Deal Prep prepares them for the specific people in the room. It also means the interface stays calm, because they already have enough that makes them feel behind.
Lesson 5: AI discoverability is the new SEO.
More and more, a buyer's first encounter with a product is a conversation with an AI assistant. In one 2026 survey, 68% of B2B software buyers said AI introduced them to vendors they wouldn't otherwise have found, and TrustRadius found that 94% of buyers who use AI fact-check what it tells them. So I built Andru to be found, read and verified by agents as well as people: an MCP server, A2A support, and answers written to be checked.
What's Next: The Vision
The current model still asks founders to come to a platform. That's better than a $200K VP of Sales hire that might not work out, but it's still another place to remember to check.
The future is intelligence that shows up where founders already work, in the tools and agents they already use. A founder's own AI assistant should be able to ask Andru why a buyer is stalling, and get the reason, not just the record. A new account executive should be able to ask the same question on day one and get the same answer the founder would give.
The goal I think about every day is to make that understanding as available to a founder at $1.5M in ARR as it is to a company with a full revenue operations team. That founder has the same need to understand their buyers. They just don't have the budget for a team of analysts and consultants to deliver it.
If You're Reading This at 5 AM
I'll close with something personal, because this whole piece has been personal.
Building Andru has been the hardest thing I've done professionally. I was building something from nothing, in a discipline that wasn't mine, with tools that changed under my feet, for people whose trust I hadn't earned yet.
I kept going because of the founders I've worked with. The ones who built extraordinary things and couldn't work out why the market wasn't responding.
If you're a technical founder reading this early in the morning, staring at a pipeline that doesn't tell you what you need to know, that's exactly who I built this for. The gap between what you've built and the buyers who need it is a clarity gap, not a quality gap. And clarity is something Andru can help with.
Start with your website. Andru's free Cold Read takes about 20 seconds and shows you where you're needed most.
Brandon Geter is the founder of Andru, a revenue intelligence layer for complex B2B growth. He spent more than ten years in B2B sales leadership before building Andru with AI. Connect on LinkedIn.