A friend of ours runs presales at a large enterprise. We were on my terrace, wine open, and at some point she started venting.
The same story every time: a bid kicks off, five people are involved, and within a week the context is scattered across a Jira board, a Teams thread, and an Outlook calendar nobody fully trusts. When the bid is lost – or won – nobody can reconstruct what happened. The next one starts the same way.
I had tried to help before. A more structured Jira setup. A Notion workspace with their AI layer on top. Manual templates. Each attempt got closer but never quite fit – too generic, too much friction, not quite shaped around how presales actually works versus how project management tools assume it does.
We put a pin in the work-chatter and got back to the evening. First properly warm spring night, wine, good conversation. We let it go.
The next day I kept thinking about it.
There is a new paradigm now. AI does not just assist – it compresses the distance between idea and working software to a degree that changes what is worth attempting. A problem that would have taken weeks to scope and build is now a weekend decision. That gap – between knowing exactly what needs to exist and actually having it – has collapsed.
It was clear to me that I could build this. Not eventually. That weekend.
Five hours later I had a platform, a subscription model, a landing page, and a demo video. Exponential productivity is the right way to describe it – not as hyperbole, but as an accurate account of what happened.
Day two, Sunday, I finished what mattered: a pitch board where every active bid is visible with its phase, deadline countdown, and team. A workflow built around how pitches actually move – Pre Kick-Off, In Process, Frozen, Submitted – not generic kanban repurposed for something it was never designed for. Role clarity baked in: Director, Pitch Lead, Commercial, Technical, Legal, Pricing. Sprint lanes. Milestone tracking for content freeze, legal sign-off, submission deadline. All comms and docs pinned inside the pitch itself, with one-click Teams huddles. No more “check Slack, check email, check Teams.”
That evening I had a demo with her. She loved it. The next step is for her to present it to her Director.
In the meanwhile – I have bootstrapped a micro-SaaS.
pitch-ops.com is live, subscriptions are running on Stripe, and I am setting up an acquisition strategy for this micro-niche. AI-driven, obviously.
The problem was sitting on a terrace for months. Turns out it was waiting for a Sunday afternoon.
#builtByAi #microSaaS