Yes, today is the launch of an amazing new product, but for me CloseBot has always been about two specific groups of people:
- First and foremost, we are here for our customers. Without you, there wouldn’t be a CloseBot.
- Just as important, our growing team of CloseBotters who build and bring to life the CloseBot you love.
I want to take this important moment to focus on the latter. As many of you know, I left my corporate AI role at Boeing in late 2019 to pursue real estate full-time, only to discover my true passion lay in building automated solutions rather than making sales. When the pandemic hit and the housing market stalled, I pivoted my side project—an AI lead-qualification tool—into a viable app for HighLevel CRM, laying the foundation for what would become CloseBot.
Building the Team, One Brick at a Time
As the product matured, so did the need for help. My wife, Laura, who’s now our COO, started coming in to help with operations. In November 2023, I convinced my friend Max (who I was actively mentoring in his Python learning) to leave his job at Costco and join as our first developer. This was just 1 year after starting the company and I was nervous. Would this new company really be able to support my family AND Max’s family?
Caroline joined as my assistant at the same time. I didn’t know what I needed her to do, but I knew I had too much on my plate. She acted as my assistant, managing my email inbox, helping with billing questions, running errands and ordering things for our new co-working offices. Quickly, she took over sales, billing, and is now the head of our affiliate program.
Laura also got sucked in from part-time helper to full-time operations, legal, finance and lots of other stuff… and just like that, we were four people deep, chasing the future of AI-powered lead qualification.
But we were dreaming bigger than the foundation could support.
I knew CloseBot needed to be rebuilt, not because it wasn’t working, but because we saw where AI was headed, and we wanted to build something future-proof. That’s when I reached out to Jarod, a former student of mine when I taught gymnastics, now a computer science professor working on government software contracts. Jarod and his team Brendan, Jordan, and Collin took the reins of our V2 rebuild.
At first, we could only afford a few hours a week from them. But they kept showing up, and the vision kept getting clearer.
From V1 to V2: A Parallel Universe
While V1 kept growing in users and features, V2 was being carefully rebuilt behind the scenes, a complete redesign with a far stronger technical foundation. For almost two years, both versions ran side-by-side with V2 always trying to catch up to the features we kept releasing for V1.
Eventually, support became too big for Max and me to handle alone. We started hiring support help from VA Hub Pro, but we couldn’t even manage them ourselves with everything else we were doing. That’s when we brought on Kyle, someone I had spotted in the HighLevel community selling snapshots. His hunger to learn and deep understanding of our user base made him the perfect person to lead our support team. We also brought on Judy, an assistant who worked with me to respond to texts from leads almost 8 years ago when I first got started in real estate.
We grew. We hired more support staff as our user base grew. Some competitors fell away. We stayed in the game.
Then, in late 2024, we realized we’d need funding to keep up. At the HighLevel Summit that October, it was clear: others were coming. Some were struggling. We had a product. We had a plan. But to go the distance, we needed capital.
Fuel for the Rocket Ship
In November 2024, we raised a funding round from friends and family. We hit our funding goal before the end of the year, and by January 2025, we hit the ground sprinting. We hired several new team members all at once.
We had our sights set on Jesse as our CMO. Jesse and I had shared a coworking table years earlier during my real estate days. I watched him lead global brand marketing at BlackLine. He saw me grinding in the trenches. It was time to join forces.
We also brought on Arturo, a brilliant UI/UX lead from Salesforce, to give CloseBot the polish and clarity it deserved. Our development team went full-time. No more side hours. No distractions. Just focus.
Then came another turning point. As if we didn’t already have enough going on with our application update, new website revamp, new marketing campaign, new hires, etc…we decided to migrate off of HighLevel ourselves and over to HubSpot.
Enter Michael, my brother-in-law, a meticulous and deeply technical partner who knew CloseBot inside and out. He led our HubSpot implementation and made sure everything was ready for launch day. He was also put in charge of migration calls and training our new onboarding team.
As we grew, so did the number of customer accounts and billing inquiries. It was one of the many hats Caroline had been wearing, but we needed someone dedicated to those conversations. That’s when we brought on Giulia. She’s one of the newest members of the team and quickly ramping up to be a billing rockstar!
And Then… ZappyChat
Just as everything was falling into place, I got a message from Matt, the founder of ZappyChat. He wanted to find a good home for his users. We talked. We aligned. And we made it happen. The ZappyChat family is now part of the CloseBot family. That included Victor (customer success) and Alvaro (dev). Win, win!
Today Is Launch Day
Today, CloseBot is nearly 30 people strong, onshore and offshore, developers and designers, support and strategy. We’re not the scrappy side project anymore. We’re a team on a mission. And this release? It’s not just an “update.”
It’s a rebuild. A redesign. A rocket.
We’ve taken nearly 90 new features live and some exciting ones almost ready to go. We’ve rethought the entire user experience. And we’ve laid the foundation for what CloseBot is becoming, not just the best way to qualify leads, but a new standard for what AI-driven business tools can look like.
To our team (past and present) thank you. You made this happen.
To our customers, buckle up. You haven’t seen anything yet.
