The briefing panel

The wider network

Researched 24 Aug 2026 via LinkedIn (logged-in session). These are the people to reconnect with after the farm; Ivo's call is already scheduled for next week. When Chris asks "who should I connect you with," the first two names below are your answer. Full notes live in research-network.md.

SalesPros: the facts you carry in

Everything here is source-verified against the repo (24 Aug 2026, master). Deeper detail: project-snapshot.md and product-tiers-and-discount.md.

Pricing and plans

Managed AI caps: 30/day, 300/month per user, 1,000/day global, routed through OpenRouter only. BYOK capped at 500/day. Only 5 of 19 capabilities are server-enforced; the rest are honest-user UI gates.

Founding discount: what is actually true

• The promise in copy matches your intent already. Every instance says "50% off, locked in for as long as you stay subscribed." Nothing user-facing says "forever." If the sub lapses after the offer ends, list price applies. You can describe it at the farm exactly as you think of it.
• The kill switch is a Convex env var, not a PostHog flag. Unset STRIPE_COUPON_FOUNDING and new checkouts stop getting the discount; existing subscribers keep theirs (it lives on the Stripe subscription). Ending the offer is a paired action: env unset + a site deploy, because prices are baked into the site at build time.
• The discount DOES spill onto Excel added later (subscription-level coupon, deliberately unrestricted). This was an accepted tradeoff, but public copy claims the opposite in two places. Fix the copy before launch; the system undercharges vs its own promise, so the risk is inconsistency, not overcharging.
• Prod coupon validation has never run. It first executes when the purchasing flag opens at launch; a misconfigured live coupon closes purchasing for every SKU. Part of the billing E2E gate.
• Free's composer is less downgraded than the docs claim. Picklist values and bulk reference/record-type completions work on Free; only live typed-filter search and record search are Basic. Worth knowing before you describe the Free/paid line to Diana's consultants, and worth a deliberate decision: is Free currently too generous for conversion?

Market and competition

CWS counts pulled live 2026-08-24; the store rounds down into bands (500k means 500–999k) and counts installs, not humans.

The optimistic read, which is also true: ~850k installs across the top eight tools — with heavy overlap, call it 400–600k unique practitioners — prove the audience exists, installs browser tools, and is reachable through the Chrome Web Store. You are upgrading a proven market, not creating one. A bottom-up cross-check lands in the same range: 150k+ customer orgs × 2–5 power-user seats = 300–750k. Wider funnel context, corrected after fact-checking: 170k+ certified professionals (a floor; no official count exists — the "~1M certified" figure is unsupported), 20M+ Trailblazer Community members (Salesforce's own wording; Trailhead usage itself is ~7M). The "~4M developers" figure is a 2016 AppExchange-installs stat — never cite it.

The sober read to keep private: at a 2–5% free-to-paid rate, the 350–400 payers you need (≈ €8–10k/mo, your quit threshold) imply roughly 10–20k active free users. That is the actual mountain, and it is a distribution mountain, not a product one.

Moat, in your own words

Salesforce will not ship this (the Dev Console has been neglected for 15 years; Inspector has existed for a decade without a Salesforce response). Agentforce is orthogonal: SalesPros is for people at the keyboard doing the work, and could even integrate Agentforce later. A volunteer OSS project cannot copy the surface area coherently: backend, sync, Companion, managed AI, Excel, team libraries all need someone whose job it is. Your unfair advantage: you are the ICP (10+ years Salesforce, 5 as architect on one org), you have breadth beyond Salesforce, and you demonstrably ship at a pace a side project cannot match.

The 60-second version

Delivery notes: say it once out loud before the trip, then stop rehearsing. If a laptop is nearby, show the query-to-data-loader flow instead of describing it; the tool demos better than it describes.

The game plan

If "work together" comes up

Ivo's WhatsApp message makes this likely. Chris and Diana probably know what he means; you don't yet. So decide the posture now, not at the dinner table:

• Warm, curious, unhurried. Something like: "Ivo hinted at that too. I'm genuinely interested, and I want to understand what it means concretely before I react. Let's not solve it over dinner."
• Questions that make it concrete: which company (Consulting, twelvesenses, the studio)? What problem am I solving in it? What role and time commitment? What economics? And the one that matters most: what happens to SalesPros's ownership and independence?
• Commit to nothing at the farm. Any real proposal survives a week of thinking. You have the Ivo call next week and a chat with Karolina today; both are your pressure-test loop.
• Remember your position: you have a well-paid job, no burn, no deadline, and a finished product. You need nothing from them urgently. That is negotiating strength; don't give it away by being flattered.

The 8-months question, owned

If asked why nothing has shipped in 8 months: it started as a tool for yourself, you're paid well enough not to rush monetization, and you chose to perfect it before releasing. One sentence of self-awareness helps: "Building was the comfortable part for me, which is exactly why I'm here before launch instead of after." Then the date: CWS submission late September. Don't apologize twice.

Spend most of the business time on distribution

Roughly 70% of whatever business conversation happens. Your funnel math (10–20k free users for 350–400 payers) is the honest framing of why.

For Chris

• How does a NEW tool get introduced to Salesforce professionals in Europe today? Which communities, events, and people actually move opinion?
• How do I get individual users to lobby their companies for the Team plan? Did anything like that ever happen inside Waeg?
• Is the AppExchange / Salesforce ISV partner route worth it for a browser extension, or a tarpit?
• He is inventing GTM for twelvesenses right now: how is HE choosing first customers, pricing, positioning? The advice flows back to you naturally.
• What would you stop doing tomorrow if you were me? (Then be quiet and let it land.)
• Who else from the old crew should I talk to? (Your candidates ready: Yves, Nick.)

For Diana

• Would your consultants use this over Inspector Reloaded? What would they mock, what would they love?
• Who signs a €10k/year tool spend at a 25-person consultancy, and how long does that take?
• What does a client of yours require before your people put a credential-vault extension on machines touching client orgs?
• What would make a free pilot actually get USED rather than installed and forgotten?
• She rebranded a company and does guerrilla marketing for sport: what would she do with zero audience and near-zero budget? On your weakest front, she may be the most useful brain in the room.

The one ask: the Octopus pilot

• Free Pro for anyone at Octopus who wants it, later Team when it opens. Delivered via a private sideload repo, so updates ship in minutes and skip the store entirely.
• In exchange: aggressive feedback and a shared Slack/Discord channel. Frame it as them getting a tool + shaping it; you get real senior users.
• Silently, this is also your Team-plan design partnership: adoption dynamics, security objections, procurement, whether $35/seat survives contact with a real consultancy. Ask pilot-shaped questions; don't announce the framing.
• Structural bonus: a pilot forces a follow-up conversation in a few weeks. That is your recurring-mentorship foot in the door without asking for a "cadence."

Answers to have loaded

• Who is it for? Salesforce professionals doing real work in the browser: pro-admins, consultants, testers, developers.
• Why pay when Inspector is free? One workflow story, not a feature tour: query with real completions → one click → schema-validated data loader → edit in an Excel-like grid → load. In Inspector that's three tools and a CSV in between. Then stop talking.
• What if Salesforce ships it / Agentforce eats it? They won't (15 years of Dev Console neglect); Agentforce is orthogonal and possibly integrable. Confident, short.
• What stops Inspector copying you? Coherence, pace, and the paid surface area (backend, sync, Companion, Excel, managed AI) that volunteer OSS structurally can't sustain.
• When do you launch? "Submitting to the Chrome Web Store late September." A date, not a sequence of gates.
• What would make you quit? Have an honest answer ready; "I've run 8 months on internal motivation alone" is a strength either way.

Running the 24 hours

• Don't front-load business. The good stuff arrives after dinner. Let the farm, Waterloo, CES, Waeg stories, and their demos run; Chris will ask about SalesPros when he's ready.
• If they demo (glasses, Donna), take it enthusiastically. Reciprocity opens the door for showing SalesPros without it being a pitch.
• Give Diana equal airtime. The trip is framed around Chris; the failure mode is Diana as bystander while she's the buyer AND the marketing brain.
• Interesting-person material, deployed naturally, never performed: the multi-machine multi-agent dev workflow (Chris runs an AI company; this is the thing in the room they can't easily buy); the embedded parking-device project (rhymes with their wearables bets); the Outlook→Google Calendar extension, pre-framed as a deliberate small-scope practice run of the full ship pipeline (built mid-SalesPros, never marketed on purpose).
• Write nothing during conversations beyond a phone note when something lands hard. Full brain-dump the morning after.

Leave with

1. The pilot agreed in principle, with a named person to set it up with.
2. A soft mentorship cadence: "can I write you a short update monthly and grab a call when something's decision-shaped?" is easier to accept than "will you mentor me."
3. Two or three intros (Yves and Nick are your named candidates; let Chris add his own).
4. Their honest read on the ladder (individuals → Excel → Team → enterprise) and the founding discount.
5. The launch date said out loud, to someone whose opinion you care about.

What they may ask, and how to answer

Drafts, not scripts; say it your way. Items marked your input still need a real answer from you before the trip. Full version in qa-prep.md.

Warm-up

"How's the old client? Still there?" your input

Likely the literal first question. Five years on the engagement, three under Waeg, two after. Pick one concrete post-IBM story before the trip; nostalgia is your fastest rapport channel with Chris.

"Why did you reach out now?"

"So what do you want from me?"

For Diana separately: the pilot (see Talking points).

Product

"What is SalesPros?"

The 60-second pitch (SalesPros facts tab). If a laptop is in reach, offer to show instead.

"Why pay when Inspector is free and everyone has it?"

"Show me."

Have the 3-minute path decided and rehearsed once: dev org logged in beforehand → composer completions → run query → handoff to loader → edit grid → validate. Backup moments: the vault, Apex LSP completions, MCP tools from a coding agent. Improvising a demo is how good tools look bad.

"What if Salesforce ships this?" / "Doesn't Agentforce eat it?"

They live in Agentforce world: dismiss the overlap, never the wave.

"What stops Inspector copying your best features?"

"Why a Chrome extension?" example

"Platform risk? Chrome could change the rules." example

"Security and privacy? My consultants work on client orgs." (Diana; decides the pilot)

Business

"Eight months and nobody's using it?"

Owned once, no apology spiral: started as a tool for yourself, well-paid job removed the rush, you wanted it excellent first. One line of self-awareness ("building was the comfortable part for me, which is exactly why I'm here before launch"), then immediately the date.

"When do you launch?"

"Submitting to the Chrome Web Store late September." A date, not a list of gates. If probed: reviewer smoke, billing end-to-end, email activation; days of checklist work.

"What's your pricing and how did you pick it?"

"How will people find it?"

"What's the goal, lifestyle business or something bigger?"

You said you're comfortable sharing real income numbers with Chris; doing so builds trust.

"Would you take investment?"

"You're doing this alone? What about a cofounder?" your input

Confirm: is "not looking" actually your position, even if the right non-technical person appeared?

"What happens when real users hit, at 20-30 hours a week?" (Diana will think of this)

"Company setup? Taxes?" your input

Draft: "Being handled with professional help; not a launch blocker." Confirm what's true: entity status, and whether anything is genuinely unresolved before taking payments.

"What does it cost to run? What would money even buy?" your input

"What would make you stop?" your input

"Where is this in three years?"

Curveballs

"Ivo mentioned you two might work together."

"Would you ever sell it?" example

"What did building with AI agents actually change for you?"

Not a threat, a gift: the conversation Chris the AI founder wants to have. Have two or three concrete stories ready (orchestration across machines, what agents are genuinely bad at, the ~1030-PR number, review discipline).

"What's in it for Octopus?" (if the pilot lands transactionally)

Deeper inventory: the What I bring tab.

Things worth raising, with drafts

A menu, not a checklist: pick what the conversation invites; forcing any of these is worse than skipping all of them. Full version in talking-points.md.

Product moments (pick two or three; demo beats describe)

• The query-to-loader handoff. The best "oh, that's different" moment. "The thing I'm proudest of isn't a feature, it's that the tools connect. Query something, click once, and you're loading edited data back, schema-validated, without a CSV ever existing."
• The real Apex language server. "Every other tool fakes Apex intelligence with regexes. The Companion runs Salesforce's actual language server on your machine, so the completions are the real ones."
• The MCP agent channel. Their home turf. "Your coding agent can use my library too: saved queries and scripts over MCP, so Claude works with the same assets the human does. Read-only and save, never execute; agents shouldn't run Apex unsupervised."
• The vault and privacy posture. Diana's first objection, preempted. "Record data goes browser-to-Salesforce directly; my backend never sees it. Day-one design decision, because I knew the first question any consultancy would ask."
• Excel live tables. "Basically one serious competitor, and it costs more. Consultants live in Excel; this one's a sleeping asset I'll wake after launch."
• Release engineering maturity. Beta flags with a remote kill switch, retention crons, admin console + iOS admin app, telemetry wired. "It's run like a product company already; it just has zero customers so far. That part is deliberate and it ends in September."

The release story

• The date, said out loud. "Submitting to the Chrome Web Store late September." Saying it to people whose opinion you care about converts the perfectionism story into a commitment.
• The founding discount, then a question. 50% for early users, locked while subscribed, claim window the first months depending on growth. Then: "Would you cap it by time or by user count? Is fifty percent generous or desperate?"
• The ladder, offered for demolition. Individuals → Excel add-on → Team → enterprise. "That's my sequencing. Tell me where it's wrong." Between an ex-services-CEO who chose product and a consultancy CEO who buys tools, this collapses in one evening.

Distribution ideas to float

• The Octopus pilot (the one ask). Free Pro for anyone at Octopus, private sideload repo so fixes ship in minutes, shared feedback channel. Silently: the Team-plan design partnership (adoption, security review, procurement, whether $35/seat survives a real consultancy).
• The content engine. Technical blog posts with GIFs → LinkedIn + r/salesforce, on a schedule. Ask: which channels actually reach Salesforce professionals in Europe, and what would you cut?
• SalesforceBen. The biggest Salesforce blog runs a Chrome-extension comparison article; getting into it is a finite goal with massive reach. Raise as a question: "Do you know anyone there?"
• The ORGanizer migration path. Vault import already ships, comparison page is live. "Switching cost is the moat free tools hide behind, so I built an importer." Evidence you think about distribution, not just features.
• The community circuit. They sponsor summits and present at demo jams; Diana DJs at community parties. Soft: "Where should a tool like this show up?" If they offer to bring you somewhere, that beats any plan.
• The founding-user community. Slack/Discord for early adopters, feedback distance zero. Ask Diana whether early users actually join those or whether it's founder wishful thinking.

People and asks

• Intro list, ready when asked: Yves Van Looy (sales brain, partner-enablement history on both sides) and Nick Celis (fellow founder, four months into first-customers land, freelanced at Octopus in 2024). Ask Chris: "Who else from the old crew?" Ask Diana: "Who inside Octopus would actually champion the pilot?"
• The mentorship shape: not "will you mentor me" but "can I send you a short update monthly, and grab a call when something is decision-shaped?" Low cost to accept; the pilot creates its own follow-ups anyway.

Interesting-person material (rapport, not resume)

• The multi-agent workflow. Solo founder, seven surfaces, eight months at 20-30 h/week, ~1030 PRs, orchestrated AI agents across machines. Told as craft, with a story or two about where agents shine and fail. Possibly the most memorable topic of the night for an AI-startup CEO and CPO.
• The parking device. Own hardware for auto-starting parking from the car. Rhymes with their wearables bets; says "builds for the joy of it." One minute, with a grin.
• The calendar extension, pre-framed. "Mid-SalesPros I took a month to ship something small end to end, store review, billing, site, as a practice run. Almost no users because I never marketed it; the objective was the pipeline, not the product." Inoculated against the obvious follow-up.

Guardrails

• No funding ask; if money comes up, "I'd consider it from you specifically" is the whole move.
• Never ask what Waeg sold for.
• Don't force business talk; the overnight brings it to you.
• Diana gets equal airtime; on distribution she may be the more useful voice.
• Nothing "work together"-shaped gets agreed on-site, however good the wine.
• Leave with: three changed decisions, a pilot with a named owner, the date said out loud.

What I bring to the table

The other direction of the visit: why a relationship with you is valuable for them. Knowing this changes how you sit in the room, even if you never recite any of it. Source doc for iteration: value-to-octopus.md.

For Diana / Octopus Consulting

• Users in week one. 20–30 senior consultants living in SOQL, Apex, and data loads. The tool maps onto their offerings: audit/tech-debt practice ↔ org compare, permissions analysis, schema tools; implementation ↔ composer, data loader, Apex tools. The credential vault hits a specifically consulting-shaped pain (juggling client orgs daily). Free Pro is a small but real margin gain on billable time.
• Design partner leverage. The pilot molds the Team plan around how a real senior consultancy works, before any competitor has team features. Sideload distribution ships their feedback in minutes. Vendors don't listen to 25-seat shops; you will.
• Brand and content. "Our consultants helped shape the best professional tool in the ecosystem" is a sales line and a recruiting line for a senior-only firm. Diana does guerrilla marketing for sport; a tooling story is material she can play with.
• A channel, later. Clients ask consultancies "what tools do you use?" constantly. Octopus engagements seed users; SalesPros team leads inside client companies are warmer intros for Octopus. The loop exists without formalizing anything; affiliate/reseller is optionality for later.

For Chris / the studio / twelvesenses

• Proof of the thesis he's betting on. The cluster's bet is that small AI-augmented teams build what used to take companies. You are a completed, inspectable demonstration: one person, eight months at 20–30 h/week, ~1030 PRs, seven product surfaces, shipped through orchestrated agents. For a studio with a thin public story, a founder who already did the hard part is the cheapest credibility available.
• The method as transferable knowledge. The multi-machine, multi-agent workflow is scarce practical knowledge both Octopus Consulting and twelvesenses could use internally. Possibly the most immediately valuable thing in the room, independent of whether SalesPros succeeds.
• Salesforce depth where twelvesenses needs it. Thalamus names Salesforce as an event receiver. Ten-plus years of architecture plus working MCP/agent-channel experience is precisely their agentic lane.
• A founder who inverts their intake model. Their published entry point is concept-validation stage. You arrive with product proven and pricing built; only demand and distribution remain, which is their strongest suit. You already retired, at your own expense, the risk they normally absorb for equity.
• The Waeg dimension. An ex-Waeg architect shipping something excellent reflects on what Waeg was, and helping a Waeg alum ship is the story Chris already tells about himself (FoundersOhana, the studio, EO). Real motivation on his side; costs you nothing to let it work.

The brand, if associated

• "Octopus builds and backs products" gets stronger with a Salesforce-native shipping product in the story; none of their other bets are Salesforce-native.
• Farm-grade demo material: their guests are Salesforce executives and partners, and the query-to-data-loader flow lands in ninety seconds with anyone who has touched an org.
• Complementary, not overlapping: their bets are deskless/voice/wearables, you are the desk-side power user. Association widens their story without cannibalizing anything.

Value by relationship shape

If asked "why is this interesting for us?"

Open questions, still iterating

• Where is the line between pilot feedback and free Octopus-specific feature work? Define "what serves all consultancies" before the pilot starts.
• If the studio conversation gets real: what would be worth giving up any independence for? Money alone isn't, while burn is near zero; distribution and selling muscle might be.
• Does association with one consultancy hurt neutrality with other consultancies, who are also ICP? Ask Diana directly; asking it shows you think in her categories.

Who she is professionally, current as of today

The useful fact: she is simultaneously an operator (Everix strategy) and an investor (Eurazeo venture partner). She can look at the farm situation from both sides of the table in one conversation, which is exactly what you need today.

What to ask her today

About tomorrow's conversation

• Here's my question list for Chris and Diana; which of these force a concrete answer and which let them stay in pleasant-anecdote mode? What's missing?
• What do technical founders in my position always get wrong in first mentor conversations? What should I NOT do?
• How do I ask for recurring mentorship without making it heavy? Does the "monthly written update + occasional call" shape work, or is there a better one?

About the "work together" signal

• Show her the Ivo exchange. From a VC seat: what is this, how do studios like this usually structure involvement, and what's the polite version of "name it concretely"?
• What facts and terms must I understand before agreeing to ANY venture-studio or operating relationship? (Ownership, IP, exclusivity, control, time commitment, what happens if it goes nowhere.)
• How do I keep warm optionality without drifting into an implicit commitment over dinners and calls?

About the plan itself

• Steelman the skeptic: if a founder brought her the ladder plan (individuals → Excel → Team → enterprise), the founding discount, and the TAM math, where would she poke first? Better to hear it from her today than discover it mid-conversation tomorrow.
• Her read on the quit math: 350–400 payers at ~€25 to replace a €11–12k/mo salary. Sane framing, or is she seeing a hidden assumption?
• Given her Europe/US/Asia GTM experience: anything structurally different about selling a prosumer dev tool from Poland into a global market that I should know early?

Market math to pressure-test with her (SAM / SOM / valuation)

Fact-checked 2026-08-24; the old top-down numbers (4M devs, 1M certified, 20M Trailhead) died in verification — see the SalesPros facts tab. This is the bottom-up version worth defending.

SAM — who can realistically install it

~600k people already install Salesforce Chrome extensions (~850k installs across the top eight tools, deduped for overlap; cross-checked by 150k+ orgs × 2–5 power seats = 300–750k). Theoretical ceiling if all of them knew SalesPros existed: 600k × 4% paid × $25 = $600k/mo = $7.2M ARR. A ceiling, not a plan.

SOM — what's obtainable in 2–3 years

Funnel, not a percentage of the market: 500k Inspector Reloaded audience × 10% try SalesPros × 4% convert (industry-standard freemium band is 2–5%) × $25 = 2,000 payers = $50k/mo = $600k ARR.

And the sentence that reframes the quit threshold: "My go-full-time threshold requires capturing about 2% of the audience Inspector has already proven exists, then converting at the industry-average rate." (2% of 500k = 10k triers × 4% = 400 payers = ~$10k/mo.)

Valuation, scenario-based (pre-revenue: no formula)

Pre-launch there is no defensible number; the honest line is "worth roughly nothing to a buyer and a lot to me, which is why I'm not raising pre-launch." Post-revenue, bootstrapped sub-$1M-ARR SaaS trades at 3–5x ARR in M&A; venture-context seed pricing (8–15x) applies only when raising with strong PMF.

What actually moves the multiple: growth rate, churn (3–6% monthly is normal for $25/mo prosumer SaaS), and NRR — above 120% earns 2–3x the multiple of below 100%, which is the valuation argument for the Team plan, not just the revenue one. At 4% monthly churn, lifetime ≈ 25 months, LTV ≈ $625, so any channel under ~$150–200 per subscriber works.

Pricing stance (for when she pokes at $25)

$25 is ~11x ORGanizer PRO ($2.29/mo) and above Copilot Pro ($10) and Raycast Pro ($8–10). Conscious choice: solo capacity meant slower initial growth was acceptable; after refinement, bug-fixing, and feedback the price can come down for a marketing push. Lowering is easy, raising is not. Ask her: does that sequencing hold from an investor seat, and is the 10% try-rate assumption in the SOM the weakest link?