Building an AI Sales Agent: Week 1
We've been running a DTC brand that does eight figures a year. High-end consumer goods — great margins, serious buyers.
The problem? We lose leads. Not a few — a lot. They come in through email, contact forms, phone calls, and chat. Our team is good, but they're human. They miss things. They go home at night. They take weekends off (the audacity).
So we decided to build the tool we wish existed. Leadfrack: an AI sales agent that catches what your team misses.
And we're building it in public.
Why Build in Public?
Two reasons. First, accountability. When you tell people what you're building, you actually have to build it. Second, we genuinely believe the DTC community needs better tools for sales ops. If sharing the process helps even one founder rethink how they handle inbound, it's worth it.
Week 1: The Stack
Every project starts with decisions that compound. Here's what we locked in:
- Next.js + TypeScript for the dashboard and marketing site
- Firebase for auth, database, and cloud functions
- Claude AI (Anthropic) for email classification and lead scoring
- Retell AI for voice — after-hours phone agent that actually sounds human
We evaluated Vapi and Bland for voice. Retell won on latency, voice quality, and developer experience. Not close.
First Feature: Inbox Monitoring
The core of Leadfrack v1 is the inbox monitor. Connect your Gmail (Outlook coming soon), and Leadfrack watches every incoming message. Using Claude Haiku, it classifies each email into one of four categories:
- HOT — New lead with clear buying intent
- WARM — Interested but early stage
- EXISTING — Current customer with a question
- NOISE — Newsletters, spam, irrelevant
Hot leads trigger instant alerts. Your team sees them immediately, not buried under a pile of newsletters.
What's Coming Next
Week 2 is all about scoring and routing. Each lead gets a 0-100 score based on deal size, urgency, buyer intent, and more. Then smart routing sends it to the right person on your team.
After that: the voice agent. An AI that answers your phone after hours, qualifies the lead, and hands off a complete dossier to your team by morning.
The Honest Truth
Building an AI product while running an eight-figure brand is intense. We're product and marketing people first — not a team of deep developers. But that's kind of the point. If we can build this, the barrier to entry for AI-powered sales tools is lower than anyone thinks.
Follow along. We'll share the wins, the failures, and everything in between.