I'm Simon Lackowski and I work directly with founders in the Grok for Startups program, advising them on their most pressing problems, like finding early customers and shaping the product to their feedback.

As one of the first SDRs at Cursor, I became familiar with the lived experience of seeing how every GTM role intersects at once, especially during times of heavy growth and experimentation: researcher, SDR, AE, and RevOps. I found the accounts, wrote the emails, teed up the calls for my AEs, sent the follow-ups, and helped track our forecast.

None of those jobs are impossible on their own. But each one competes with building the product and talking to customers, which is what founders need to reserve most of their time and focus for.

I built a founder-led sales Grok Bot pack, Founder Mode, to tackle everything for early stage startup sales: one chief of staff and 8 specialist bots. These Grok Bots work overnight, remember how you sell, and proactively help generate revenue overnight.

The bots research, draft, and stage, giving you scale without sacrificing the quality of your prospect and customer interactions.

Getting started

Step one is installing the Founder Mode setup pack: one chief of staff bot, 4 sidebar folders (Pipeline, Customers, Product, Marketing), 8 bots, 16 paused routines, and a shared data folder. Onboarding asks around 20 questions: company, pitch, voice samples, ICP, target accounts, competitors, P0 definition, connectors, and which routines to turn on. Every routine stays paused until you confirm your preferred schedule.

Next, connect the tools you already use. For me that's Gmail and Calendar (drafts and read only), a deal tracker CSV until we outgrow it, LinkedIn and X (read and draft only, I post by hand), and Granola for call notes. Optional later: HubSpot or Attio, GitHub for Product Bot, Stripe or Mercury for the cash check, and Zapier or Make for live webhooks.

Grok Bot runs on its own computer in the cloud, so it keeps working while your laptop is closed. Because of this, when I get to the office in the morning, Grok Bot already has all the tasks I need staged.

Bots, thankfully, have memory. When I set up my Outreach bot, I let it read my emails and understand the outreach style that works for me. Founder Mode rewrote the voice guide from those examples and tells the drafting bots to re-read it. You can similarly set the bar for what "good" looks like.

The founder-led sales journey

Grok Bot maps onto the steps founders work through before the first sales hire:

Define your ICP: Who gets real value from the product, where they are, and who the economic buyer is versus who feels the pain.
Find design partners: Turn the ICP into a short target list and find warm paths in.
Prep for first meetings: Research the account, rehearse, and plan discovery.
Build your first playbook: Turn early calls into a motion you can repeat and eventually hand off.
Run pipeline and forecasting: Keep deals moving and see what drives revenue.
Make your product better: Use the customer and product feedback you're getting to prioritize new features.

One job per bot

Each bot owns one job and lives in a color-coded folder, so I can see at a high level how different parts of my workforce communicate. I set up this pack to help simulate the experience of being a founder in the early stages. Here's a closer look at my setup:

Founder Mode is the only bot I talk to day to day. At 8am it merges every other Grok Bot's routines and automations into one daily action list. Fridays it runs the pipeline and win/loss digest. Mondays it checks against incoming revenue. Once a month it drafts an investor update and proposes ICP refreshes. P0 customer messages land here immediately.

Sell Bot (Pipeline) works live conversations. Before a call it builds a brief from the calendar, Granola notes, and the stakeholder map. After a call it drafts the recap, follow-up, and any proposed stage update. Proposals, pricing, and contracts always need my approval.

Outreach Bot (Pipeline) stages the daily outbound batch at 7am: cold emails, a 5 to 6 day follow-up cadence that stops after about 8 touches, and LinkedIn notes, coordinated as a pair per prospect. It reads the deal tracker first and skips anyone in an active deal or marked do not contact. Warm leads come from Social Bot. The whole batch waits for my approval.

Inbox Bot (Customers) checks support email twice a day. It tags each item, ranks it P0 to P4, drafts a reply in my voice, and appends everything to a shared feedback log. It flags compliments versus real past behavior (borrowing from "The Mom Test"). P0 issues and bugs escalate to Founder Mode right away. When a release ships, it drafts the note back to everyone who asked for that specific feature.

Insights Bot (Customers) clusters the feedback log, signals, and call recaps once a week. It ranks themes by frequency, accounts and pipeline affected, and proposes ICP changes. The top theme goes to Product Bot only when it crosses a threshold I set.

Product Bot (Product) turns a ranked theme into a short spec, a GitHub issue, and a draft pull request opened by a cloud agent. It never merges. On merge it drafts release notes and hands them to Inbox Bot to close the loop.

Stalk Bot (Product) watches competitors from its own research email, never mine. Each scan reports what changed and closes with one counterpositioning move for Sell Bot and a content angle for Content Bot. It never posts and never contacts anyone.

Content Bot (Marketing) drafts LinkedIn and X posts in my voice, anonymized case studies, launch announcements, and a weekly content calendar. It feeds proof points back to Sell Bot and Outreach Bot. I post everything by hand.

Social Bot (Marketing) scans trends every weekday morning, watches my socials and target accounts, drafts replies, and hands anyone who engages to Outreach Bot as a warm lead.

How they hand off

Insights Bot looks at what customers are saying about your product from recent calls, what features your power users are leveraging most, and analyzes your customer profile to understand how the ICP may have shifted and suggests users for feedback.

At the same time, Social Bot is scanning for prospects posting on X about the exact pain point your business solves. Insights Bot and Social Bot pass these warm leads to Outreach Bot. A reply becomes a Sell Bot brief and recap. Feedback goes to Inbox Bot, then Insights Bot. When a theme is clear, Product Bot specs and ships. Inbox Bot closes the loop. Content Bot tells the story. Founder Mode rolls all of it into one daily list.

A week with Grok Bot

Monday morning, Founder Mode posted the daily action list. Overnight, Social Bot had scanned trends and Outreach Bot had staged 8 email and LinkedIn pairs. Every prospect sorted into 3 buckets:

KEEP: Strong ICP fit, real signal, and a path in. Draft staged.
HOLD: Good fit, but something is missing, like a strong signal of "why now."
DQ / skip: Already in an active deal, already a customer, or marked do not contact. Outreach Bot never drafts to these.

By midweek Sell Bot had a brief ready the night before each call, and the recap and follow-up sat in Drafts within minutes of each call ending. Inbox Bot had drafted a security reply with every unverified claim marked. Friday closed the week with the Insights Bot ranking and Founder Mode's pipeline digest: themes ranked by accounts and pipeline affected, stale next steps flagged, and a short list of commitments for next week. Nothing went out until I said so.

One prompt to copy

This is the design-partner scan I run through Founder Mode every Monday. Paste it in and fill in the brackets in your own Grok Bot setup.

In the Founder Mode pack, Outreach Bot and Insights Bot already cover most of this once you turn the routines on.

Every Monday at 7am my time, find companies that match my ICP and posted about [problem] or hired for [role] this week.

Before the first run, ask me for my ICP (industry, size, stage, region), who the economic buyer is and who feels the pain day to day, which signals count, and which accounts are off limits. Save the answers and use them on every run.

For each match: rank it by fit and explain the signal with a link. Check my deal tracker, Gmail, and calendar so you never surface a current customer or an open conversation as net new. Find a warm path through my network and past conversations, and name the person. Draft a short first touch in my voice that opens with the signal, not with our product.

Sort everything into KEEP, HOLD, and DQ with one line on why. Keep a list of accounts you've already covered and only report new ones. If nothing new matched, send one line saying so.

Put drafts in Gmail Drafts. Don't send anything, don't enroll anyone in a sequence, and don't change my CRM without asking.

Important considerations for a founder doing early-stage sales

Never auto-send. The bots research, draft, and stage. Nothing is sent, posted, published, or merged until approved, and the same goes for CRM logs and invoice finalization. Every message a customer reads, I read first.
Warm intro over a cold template. When Social Bot finds a relevant engagement path, Outreach Bot starts there.
Signal beats title. We reach out because of what the account is doing and what pains they're likely experiencing, not because someone holds a VP title. The signal is what makes the message worth reading.
Feedback I give twice becomes a saved instruction. Correcting the same thing twice means a rule is missing, so Founder Mode turns the correction into a skill or a rule in settings.
Know what to keep. Discovery, pricing conversations, and the call where a design partner says yes stay with me. Those are the conversations that teach me how we sell. When the playbook from Sell Bot and Insights Bot starts repeating itself and I'm the bottleneck on meetings, that's the signal to make a first sales hire.

To get started, install the Founder Mode setup pack in a fresh Grok Bot environment. Ask the Founder-led sales setup bot to get you started.

Grok Bot for Founder-Led Sales