What if your CRM started where your customers actually are—inside WhatsApp and social DMs? We sit down with Robbie Peña Castro, founder and CEO of Lead Sales, to unpack how a chat-native platform scaled to 3,000+ companies across 20 countries and reached $4.3M ARR by turning conversation chaos into predictable revenue. Robbie shares why email feels too slow for modern buying moments, how SMS breaks collaboration, and why centralizing WhatsApp threads under an official company channel unlocks speed, context, and trust.
We explore the early grind—funding hires with Google bonuses when no one believed in the idea—and the pivotal shift at UC Berkeley’s SkyDeck that led to a $400k pre-seed and a $3.7M raise to recruit top talent. Robbie explains how market pull dictated hiring, how infrastructure bottlenecks forced senior engineering, and why culture interviews ensure engineers, support, sales, and marketing actually talk to each other. He also breaks down the playbooks that freed his time: CEOs Are Lazy for switching leadership “hats,” and Buy Back Your Time for SOPs, executive assistants, and outcome-based delegation.
On product, we dig into Lead Sales’ smart AI assistant that learns directly from customer chats to answer FAQs, triage requests, and even help close deals—without feeling bolted on. We talk decision overload, brain-dump prioritization, and looping in leadership and investors early to avoid preventable mistakes. Finally, Robbie lays out a bold vision: build one of Mexico’s biggest tech companies and go head-to-head with Salesforce and HubSpot by owning conversational CRM on a global stage.
If you care about conversational commerce, AI in customer service, or scaling teams across the Americas, this one’s packed with hard-won insights and practical steps you can use today. Subscribe, share with a founder who needs it, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway.