Activate & Barrel

Every outbound tool you've been sold starts with someone who has never heard of you. Look at where your revenue actually came from last year. The cold list took months to warm up and converted at 2%. The person who closed fastest already knew you, from a former job or one good conversation you kept alive. That list sits in your contacts right now, doing nothing. Nobody built software for it because it doesn't look like a funnel. It's just people. But it's the highest-trust channel you have, and you're paying for strangers instead. What share of your closed-won last year was someone you already knew?

With my team, I've been working on Activate & Barrel, our automated sales CRM (hardly any input/less error) and outreach augmentation product for b2b sales people. I needed the tool myself so developed it with a small team (and help of vibe coding) then we found out that it didn't work well and improved it by recoding everything from the ground up, using traditional coding techniques sped up by LLMs. Anyway it's free to try for 2 weeks, it indexes your linkedin network, you give it your customer profile(s) and then it scores people, suggests messages etc. It's helped my improve luke-warm relations, sometimes I rewrite the messages, or just send them as is. It doesn't automate but helps me focus and speed up my personalised outreach! Send me a DM and I'll send you a free sign up link.

"I know enough people. I'm just terrible at keeping tabs." That sentence is the reason A&B exists. We hear a version of it constantly. Not "my network is too small." Not "I need to meet more people." Just this quieter admission that the people are already there, saved in a contacts app somewhere, and the connection just... goes cold. It's not that you forgot them. You remember exactly who they are. What you lost track of is the follow-up. The random check-in. The "read this, thought of you" text you meant to send in March and never did. Nobody tells you that meeting people and keeping up with them are two different skills. You spend years getting good at the first one. The second one just quietly falls apart in the background, and you don't notice until someone messages you first and you feel a small flash of guilt before you even open it. If that first line landed, you're not bad at relationships. You just never had a system for the part after the conversation ends. not enough people, or not enough follow-through?

🎉 Friday fun 🎉 Our daily call at Activate & Barrel took an unexpected turn - and it was brilliant In between roadmap updates, experiments, and customer insights, the conversation drifted into a completely different territory: "What actually happened to the body during yesterday's intense yoga practice" What started as a casual comment became a full breakdown of bizarre muscle reactions, strange sensations, and a “discovery” from yesterday’s practice that none of us were prepared for 😆. Within moments, the whole call dissolved into laughter - the kind that resets your brain and reminds you why building a product with the right people is genuinely enjoyable. These small moments matter. They make the work lighter, the ideas sharper, and the team closer. Product development is serious - but at Activate & Barrel, we love having fun as part of the process.

At Activate & Barrel the team has been using Claude for coding for a good few months now, and I've not been this impressed before with its recent improvements. Sure, we're using it cautiously and the team is reading the code themselves, using TDD (test-driven-development) to validate its every move and feature, yet this stuff is wildly faster and better than the teams we used to have the last decades. Especially the speed to market has now slashed for us from about a week to a few hours, if we want to. My father once, told me that while moving a box of punch cards from one office to another on his bicycle in Amsterdam, in the 80s, dropped a box of punch cards with rows and columns running a programme for a mainframe. hole=data, no hole=no data. They were all sorted, now the sorting was wrong. It took them days. Or another story about searching for a bracket { in a program written in C, took a day. Tech has come a long way. Thanks Maxime Debus Abhijeet Selukar