Stratify

Project Overview

Stratify is a 32-person post-PMF Series A B2B SaaS company. Their outbound motion was running across HubSpot Pro + Apollo + Outreach.io — a $1,847/month stack where they were using maybe 40% of each tool and the actual workflow (list → enrich → sequence → log replies in CRM) crossed all three tools every single time. NodeSparks built a custom multi-workflow system that replaces the whole stack with a single owned system. Year-1 savings: $19,164.

The Problem

Stratify's VP of Sales had inherited the stack from her predecessor. Each tool individually was best-in-class for its niche. Together they were a Rube Goldberg machine. The team kept a 12-step internal SOP for "how to launch an outbound campaign" because no single tool could do it end-to-end. New AE onboarding took two weeks just to learn the tool chain.

When she ran the cost-vs-usage analysis, the picture was stark: $22,164/yr on tools where, conservatively, $13k of features were unused. The team was paying for surface area, not value. And every step where the workflow hopped between tools was a step where data went stale, reps got confused, and the founder's monthly pipeline reviews were full of "the CRM says X but Apollo says Y."

The Build

This was a Lane 01 custom AI system, scoped at $14,500 against a 5-week timeline. The deliverable: one owned system that handles list-building, enrichment, scoring, sequencing, reply detection, CRM logging, and hot-lead routing — end-to-end, in one place, with one source of truth.

Modular delivery: week 2 shipped the contact + enrichment module (replacing Apollo). Week 3 shipped the sequencing engine (replacing Outreach.io). Week 4 shipped the CRM layer (replacing HubSpot Pro for sales — they kept HubSpot Free for marketing). Week 5 was integration testing, deployment to the client's infrastructure, documentation, and a handoff walkthrough with the sales team. Stratify had full ownership of the codebase from day 35.

Stack

• Runtime: Claude Code for personalization + reply classification, Python for the data pipeline
• Enrichment: Clay's API (Stratify kept the Clay subscription — it is the one tool genuinely best-in-class for waterfall enrichment)
• Sending: Postmark for transactional, Resend for bulk
• Database: Postgres on the client's existing Supabase project
• Frontend: Next.js admin panel for the sales team to manage sequences
• Hosting: Stratify's existing Vercel project + Supabase

Outcome

• Tool stack cost: $1,847/mo → $180/mo (API costs)
• Year-1 cash savings: $19,164
• New AE onboarding time: 2 weeks → 3 days (single system to learn, not three)
• Sales-marketing data consistency: significantly improved (single source of truth)
• Build cost: $14,500. Payback period: ~9 months on cash alone
• Optional maintenance retainer: $1,500/mo (Stratify chose this for the first 6 months, then in-housed)

Eighteen months on, the system has been extended by Stratify's in-house engineering team twice (new reply-classification labels, a Slack alert when the win-rate on a sequence drops below threshold) without our involvement. They consider the build one of the highest-leverage spending decisions of the year.