Evening, CEO!
While I spent the weekend debating if eating peanut butter straight out of the jar counts as “meal prep,” Max Brodeur-Urbas was busy building a unicorn.
With two people.
Total.
His company, Gumloop, went from zero to Series A (that means millions in the bank and serious revenue) with a team that could comfortably fit on a tandem bicycle.
In the Old World, “success” meant managing a team of 50 people and having a kombucha tap in the office. In 2025, success is just you, a laptop, and enough AI leverage to outproduce a Fortune 500 department.
We are going to steal his brain. Here is the playback.
1. Stop Selling Magic; Start Selling “Boring”
Max started by riding the hype train of AutoGPT. Remember that? It was the phase where we all thought, “Great! I’ll just tell the AI to ‘Make me money,’ and it will go do it!”
Spoiler: It didn’t work.
Max was getting angry DMs every single day. Why? Because the “Magic Agents” were hallucinating. They were spending $40 of API credits just to Google themselves and panic.
Max realized that “clients” do not actually want a Creative Wizard. Wizards are dangerous. Wizards burn down the village.
Clients want an Accountant.
Max pivoted from Probabilistic (hoping the AI does it right) to Deterministic (telling the AI exactly what steps to take).
He stopped trying to build a digital employee that “thinks” and started building digital workflows that obey.
Your Playbook:
Stop trying to be the “Idea Person” in your department who promises vague, magical AI transformations. That scares people.
Be the person who maps out the boring, repetitive logic of your team’s workflow.
Step 1: Get data.
Step 2: Format data.
Step 3: Email data.
Then, use AI to lock that process in iron. Don’t sell the magic of the future; sell the reliability of the result. Reliability scales. Magic just explodes.
2. The 1,100 Call Marathon (Or: Why You Are the Sales Team)
If I had to choose between a cold call and a teeth filling, I would ask the dentist if he has availability today. The idea of calling a stranger makes me want to hide under my weighted blanket and listen to sad British pop music.
Max did 1,100 customer calls in one year.
That is not a typo. He was in the top 0.1% of Cal.com users.
He didn’t have a Sales VP. He didn’t have a “Strategy Lead.” He just put his calendar link on the internet and took the pain.
But here is the genius part: He treated every call like a live coding session.
He would ask, “If you could wave a wand, what hate-filled task would you delete?”
The customer would say, “I hate sorting these PDFs.”
And Max would build the solution right there on the Zoom call.
He wasn’t guessing what the market wanted. He was letting the market punch him in the face with its needs until he built the right shield.
Your Playbook:
Sometimes, you hide away for a week to make a project “perfect” before showing anyone.
That is risky. If you are wrong, you wasted a week.
Next time you get a vague request, don’t go into a cave. Hack together a 10-minute rough draft, show it immediately, and ask: “Is this the right direction, or am I totally off?”
You aren’t adding work; you are preventing the tragedy of spending 40 hours polishing a turd.
3. Build Your Robot Staff First
Gumloop raised millions, but they stayed at two people for a long time. How?
They cheated. (Okay, they used tools, but it feels like cheating).
Max doesn’t have an executive assistant. He has a workflow.
Before he hops on a call, a Gumloop automation:
Scrapes the web for the person’s data.
Analyzes their usage on the platform.
Writes a briefing doc.
By the time Max logs into Zoom, he looks like a genius who has spent hours researching. In reality, he just woke up.
They have a support chatbot that gets 50,000 messages. Instead of hiring a support lead to read them, they built a workflow to read the logs, categorize the confusion, and ping the engineers.
Your Playbook:
You are the CEO of Me Inc., but you are currently doing the work of the intern.
Stop doing the $15/hour work.
If you do a task more than twice—scheduling meetings, summarizing generic emails, formatting spreadsheets—you are wasting your company’s assets (You).
Build the robot staff.
Use AI to draft your weekly updates.
Use scripts to scrape the data you need for Monday morning.
If you aren’t using AI to be your own staff, you are voluntarily taking a pay cut.
The Summary
Max’s story is a wake-up call for us.
We don’t have the energy to hustle 24/7 like a 22-year-old on Red Bull. We have back pain and existing emotional baggage.
But the Gumloop model proves that in 2025, scale is no longer about headcount; it’s about head space.
You don’t need a department. You don’t need a budget. You just need to be relentlessly logical, listen to the painful feedback, and automate everything that bores you.
Links:
https://x.com/MaxBrodeurUrbas
https://www.gumloop.com
https://www.starterstory.com/gumloop-breakdown
