Mastermind v5

I’ll be honest: I wasn’t getting enough out of my CRM. Then I tried Attio.

I recently connected Claude Code, n8n, and Notion to Attio through its MCP server — it’s been a real game changer. Any MCP client can plug straight into your CRM, so your agents always have the context they need to act.

With Universal Context, Attio’s AI intelligence layer, every signal becomes instantly actionable for you and your agents. Then Ask Attio to plan your next move:

It's your CRM, reimagined for the way you work.

Over 4,000 startups, including Granola, Listen Labs, and Wispr Flow, are using Attio to operate at full speed.

Last week I shared this beautiful beachfront villa in Costa Rica with 8 other founders.

It was the 5th Founder Mastermind that I’ve hosted. If you have no idea what that means you’re probably not alone. Simply put — I curate and invite a handful of A1 founders to a remote location where we can deep dive on strategy, share tactics, build stuff, and help each other succeed.

We also surf, rent a boat, have a private chef all week, and have a whole lot of fun.

This cohort was made up of founders who have scaled to tens of millions of revenue, both VC-backed and bootstrapped, and spanning a wide range of industries. Because I’m a giver, I’ll share my top 10 takeaways I had from the week…

Every single founder had several critical workflows and processes that they built or augmented by using AI. Last year I was outspoken about the shortcomings of popular AI tools, but that’s changed.

One founder had several fully “agentic employees” running on OpenClaw, all of which had their own Slack profile, email address, and access to relevant accounts. Each agent had a specific purpose: one was his Chief of Staff, another focused on customer support, and another on engineering. He hasn’t hired a “human employee” in 6 months.

Another founder cracked the code on influencer marketing. He manages a network of hundreds of creators who collectively upload more than 10,000 organic videos per month. His competitive advantage — he automated every step of the program with AI: outreach, vetting applications, approvals, onboarding, performance monitoring, and payouts.

If you want the most out of these AI tools, you need to feed them more data.

For example, the founder who had those agentic employees told a story about how his Chief of Staff (i.e. agent) proactively rescheduled meetings with clients after an employee had gotten into a car accident.

But how did this agent know about the car accident?

Their team leverages Fireflies (an AI notetaker) that joins and transcribes every single meeting. Because their agents have access to all of these notes, it was able to learn about the car accident after someone had mentioned it in a team meeting. Then the agent cross-referenced that employee’s calendar and proactively emailed the attendees of all upcoming meetings to reschedule.

Without giving their agents and AI tools access to this underlying data, this would have never been possible. Other sources of data can include: your CRM, emails, database, Slack, etc.

The more data and context the AI has, the more it can cook.

The more I sat and watched these demos, the more ideas I had about what we could and should be doing at beehiiv to improve our output. But underneath those obvious use cases are thousands of less obvious ones that will only become apparent after the trial and error of getting more familiar with these tools.

Even if you start small, the sooner you begin experimenting, the sooner you can uncover even more valuable insights and workflows. Half the battle is just showing up in the arena.

One of the founders drives a ton of business via LinkedIn and converts 25% of cold DMs to demos (🤯). His process:

A few other things he mentioned:

One of the founders built an agentic marketing machine that drives millions of organic impressions monthly. His D2C brand does a few million in revenue… and he’s the only employee.

He recently began experimenting with paid ads on Meta and can produce high-quality ad creative in minutes. Here’s his workflow:

One founder shared his entire philosophy and playbook for cold outreach. It’s worked well for him, as his portfolio of clients includes multiple billionaires and top-tier talent.

His thesis: everyone who has a digital footprint is leaving breadcrumbs online. The most effective cold outreach requires being able to uncover the non-obvious thing that they care about to grab their attention.

For example, anyone could reach out to me with a “Hey I see you’re the CEO of beehiiv. Here’s X thing that I can do to help you scale.” Cool — you looked at my LinkedIn and put no thought into that.

A better example: “Hey, I saw you recently went surfing in Santa Teresa. My buddy opened a new restaurant there, let me know the next time you’re in town and I’ll have him hook you up.”

The second is differentiated and not obnoxious. It shows an intent to provide value and also signals that you’re someone who I’m likely to find interesting (i.e. most people haven't heard of Santa Teresa, you hangout with ambitious people, likely have a good group of friends, etc.).

Too many people focus their cold outreach on what their business does. The real alpha is focusing on the personal interests of the person you’re reaching out to.

To extract the most value from AI, you need to successfully manage the context window, build recursive workflows, break things down by cognitive tasks, and be specific about the output.

Rather than regurgitate my notes, I’ll just share a few slides from a presentation one of the founders gave on maximizing the power of Claude Code.

Almost everyone there had used AI to build some specific tool, dashboard, or agent for a very specific use case at their business.

I think the “SaaSpocalypse” is vastly overstated. I don’t think that every startup is going to replace Stripe, HubSpot, and Ramp to build their own payment processing, CRM, and finance solutions.

But every company has internal problems that off-the-shelf software was never built to solve — and now they can.

One of the founders spent an entire month proactively building something to show a client before ever even winning their business. That’s crazy high risk — what if they don’t like it (or don’t even respond)?

But that work landed him one of the biggest deals in his company’s history. Every other agency pitched the client on what they could do, this founder just did the work upfront and showed him.

Sometimes this strategy fails, and it sucks. It means that they wasted tons of time working on something that went nowhere. But his hit rate is remarkably high, and when it does fail, he just creates content about it on socials which is super engaging and actually leads to more clients.

Most people won’t commit 10 hours of their time to something that may have zero payoff. The best founders will.

During our final dinner on Saturday night, we each went around and shared our biggest takeaways from the week. They were all uplifting and inspiring, but one founder said something that I thought was pretty profound and appropriately wrapped up the trip.

To paraphrase: he said that he’s always been a big proponent that he is in control of his own outcomes. It’s a productive worldview to have, but in reality your environment also has an outsized impact on your life outcomes. And the environment we created this past week, being surrounded by 8 overly-ambitious founders, had pushed him to learn and grow far more than any other experience he can recall.

It’s an environment made entirely possible by the people in attendance. It’s a self-selecting group: those who have successful businesses and are willing to pay to travel to a remote destination with strangers.

But I personally think there’s alpha in spending time with those types of people. Those who are by default open-minded, want to start their day catching waves, and end it talking about agentic workflows over a beer.

Those are the people I want to spend more time with. Those are the people I think are going to change the world (and have a lot of fun doing it).

p.s. I don’t know when I’m going to host my next mastermind, but if you’re at all interested in joining, fill out this quick form and I’ll let you know when I know more.

If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe: mail.bigdeskenergy.com/p/mastermind-v5

We had a pretty epic beachfront villa in Costa Rica, but it unfortunately did not look quite like this. My level of locked-in would be unmatched in this setting.

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I’m switching it up this week. Here are some of the software, products, and tools that people recommended at the mastermind…

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