The CRM category is mature at both ends. Enterprises buy Salesforce. Marketing-led growth teams buy HubSpot. Sales-led SaaS teams buy Pipedrive. None of them are built for the owner-operator who is also the head of sales, the estimator, and sometimes the person on the tools.
| Salesforce | HubSpot | Pipedrive | Tally | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Built for | Enterprise sales orgs | Marketing-led SaaS | Inside sales teams | Owner-led SMB (5–50 employees) |
| Setup time | 3–12 months + partner | 4–8 weeks | 1–2 weeks | Under 1 hour |
| Avg seat cost | $165 USD / mo | $90 USD / mo | $49 USD / mo | $30 AUD / mo (flat owner-led) |
| Vertical fit | Generic | Generic | Generic | Construction at launch, services after |
| SMB adoption rate | 32% of seats unused after 12mo | 40%+ trial abandonment | Best of incumbents | Designed for >80% week-2 adoption |
The conditions to ship a category-narrow CRM weren't there five years ago. They are now.
Owner-led SMBs now spend an average of $14k/year on SaaS (Xero SMB Insights 2026). They will pay for software that earns its place — and they will rip it out if it doesn't. The buyer is sophisticated. The category is open.
The single biggest reason SMB CRMs fail is data entry. With AI, we can ingest quote emails, meeting transcripts, and site notes and turn them into pipeline updates automatically. The line maintains itself. That removes the only real reason adoption fails.
We already have multi-tenant auth, billing, file storage, role-based seating, and a deployed prototype. Tally isn't a greenfield SaaS — it's a new silo on infrastructure that already serves Hillbrook Projects, Bold Metals, and Finance.
Every deal sits on a single horizontal tally. Drag, tag, win, lose. No tabs. No views. The owner sees the whole business in 8 seconds.
Built-in quoting with vertical-specific line items, GST handled, branded PDF out. Accepted quotes auto-advance the deal. No swivel-chair between Xero and the CRM.
Closed-won deals push directly into HOP project management (or Procore, or Asana). Sales hands the baton without a meeting. The tally rolls on.
Tally is not a standalone CRM. It is the front door of an operating system that runs every stage of a building's life. The owner sees one product. Under the hood, ten silos, three blue integrity layers, and a property record that lives forever.
Silo 00 captures leads. Silo 01 qualifies, books, grades, quotes, contracts, deposits. Both wear the Tally brand. One product to the user.
Estimation, design, fabrication (Bold Metals), pre-construction, delivery, digital CFO. The Hillbrook operating laboratory. Tally calls these silos by API.
Handover, DLP, tenant management, PM portfolios. Sister product. Shares the same property record root.
Three integrity layers (CTO · CFO · Legal) cross every silo. Every inter-silo handoff passes through them. They are the skills and IP we build in-house. They make Tally compliance-safe, margin-safe, and schema-safe at every state transition.
Owner-led builder picks a brand kit at signup. Tally generates suburb-by-suburb landing pages templated by build class. Lead capture forms route into the silo 01 pipeline. WordPress plug-in for builders who keep their existing site. Marketing happens in software, not in retainer.
Three kits at signup — clean, premium, trade-confident. Landing pages, quote templates, email signatures, social posts. Polished marketing presence in under an hour.
Templated by suburb and build class — extension Northcote, KDR Brunswick, NDIS SDA Werribee. Locally relevant. Indexed. The builder doesn't write a page.
Embed on the builder's own domain. Captures leads through their brand. Routes back to Tally's pipeline. They keep the domain, we capture the demand.
Customer zero is Hillbrook & House. Every Hillbrook landing-page lead for the next 90 days is a Tally silo 00 lead. That is the case study Daniel walks the first five external builders through.
The discovery closes. Tally fires the silo 02 integration. The estimating engine ingests the brief, scans the plans, prices against the recipe library, validates against the three integrity layers, and lands a templated budget estimate back in the deal record.
Closed loop: every variation logged, every actual cost reconciled, every margin outcome measured, updates the library. We don't run an estimating engine. We run a construction company that runs an estimating engine.
Tally captures the decision and runs the right next stage. Both paths feed the same property record. Both close with a deposit invoice. Both hand off cleanly to silos 03–07.
Small fee-for-service contract. Design works inside Hillbrook's design team — floor plans, mood board, colour selections, materials selection. Demolition assessment, site survey, soil tests, planning lodgement support. Closed loop runs again — every design decision sanity-checked against the budget envelope.
"We design to a budget. We never let the architect design to a wish list."
Straight to binding proposal. Full BOQ. Full pricing. Two-signature gate inside silo 02 — junior estimator approves, senior estimator approves, state machine advances. Sales manager dispatches. No estimate leaves the building under-priced.
"The gate is enforced by the platform. Not a process document at 6pm on Friday."
Hillbrook is the customer we know best. The construction SMB sales workflow — site visit, quote, ECI, head contract, variations — is something we live every week. We will build for ourselves first, ship to 20 design-partner builders second, and open the gate third.
The CRM kernel is vertical-agnostic. Pipeline, quote, handoff. What changes per vertical is the language, the line items, and the integrations. We can re-skin and ship a new vertical in roughly 6–8 weeks.
Each new vertical compounds: shared infra, shared brand, shared sales motion. By Yr 3, no single vertical exceeds 50% of revenue — that's the de-risking the board cares about.
No per-seat sticker shock. No "talk to sales". The owner pays one price for the business; team seats are uncapped. This is the model the SMB owner will actually buy without a procurement conversation.
1–5 employees. Single owner. Pipeline + quote + email. Ideal entry tier for trades and sole-trader-up-to-small-team.
Target: 60% of customer count
6–25 employees. Pipeline + quote + handoff + reporting + integrations (Xero, Procore, MYOB). The sweet spot — most builders, most trades.
Target: 35% of customer count · 70% of revenue
26–100 employees. Adds multi-entity, advanced reporting, SSO, audit log, dedicated support. Floor for mid-market upgrade.
Target: 5% of customer count
All figures conservative. Built on HOP infra (zero net new platform cost), inbound-first GTM, and SMB renewal benchmarks that we will beat with the design partner pipeline.
Owns CRM kernel build. Reports to Tristan. AU-based. Start Aug 2026.
Owns marketing site, product UI polish, content. Could be contract for first 6 months.
Owns design partner relationships, onboarding, first paid acquisition channel. Joins at GA.