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Traditional SaaS is dead. Welcome to the era of personal software

How Vise replaced Salesforce, Hubspot and more with one system that we built ourselves

july 2, 2026 | 6MIN

Authors

Samir Vasavada

CIO & Co-founder, Vise

David Hiles

Head of Vise Accelerate

The essay

For years, we ran Vise the way nearly every company runs: we rented our operational workflows from other people. A CRM for sales (Salesforce), two or three platforms for marketing (HubSpot and the tools around it), a reporting layer stitched together out of spreadsheets and Slackbots, and a rotating cast of consultants paid to make all of it talk to each other. The bill ran up to seven figures a year, and most of that went to operating our own company on software that was never built for Vise.

We turned almost all of it off. We replaced the stack with a single system we built internally for our exact use case. We call it Vise HQ. This is the story of how and why we think the way companies build and buy software is about to change.

We sell personalized portfolios, so why run generic software?

Vise exists because of one conviction: a portfolio should be built around the person who owns it, not pulled off a shelf. It’s in every sales deck, all over our website, we say it to every advisor we work with. Yet internally, we were doing the opposite, running the company on off-the-shelf software with very little customization for our business. Every SaaS tool forces your business into someone else's idea of how work should happen, so you bend your process to fit the product, you pay for a hundred features to use five (we used maybe five), and every competitor with a credit card gets the identical toolkit.

At some point, the contradiction got too loud to ignore.

The problem with generic software

Salesforce is powerful software, and so is HubSpot, but they share one limitation that no amount of configuration fixes: they're built to serve every company, which means they're tuned for no one company in particular. We spent more time configuring the software to approximate our workflow (custom fields, custom objects, managed packages, admin consultants) than we spent actually using it.

Every team lived in a different system and none of those systems knew about the other workflows, and connecting them would have meant expensive middleware that creates its own maintenance burden over time.

So we asked a different question: what if we just built exactly what we need?

The bet: everyone is a builder now

Instead of integrating “one more tool”, we decided to build our way out, and to do it with a different kind of team. Through a program we call Vise Accelerate, we brought in young, hungry builders (one of our first took a year off college to join) and paired each of them with a biz-ops person who understood the entire business from the ground up.

We didn't spec the software, we sat in the meetings

This is the part I'd tell every founder. We didn't hand the team a stack of requirements docs. Our team sat in live sales calls and watched how reps actually used Salesforce or other workflows. They joined marketing calls and watched how marketers actually used HubSpot.

The spec wasn't a document. The spec was reality.

HQ: Our company's new operating system

Workflow by workflow, Vise HQ swallowed the entire internal tech stack. Sales pipeline and lead notifications, marketing collateral and engagement tracking, and the live business metrics and onboarding numbers that used to live in spreadsheets now compute themselves and post straight into Slack. One system, one source of truth, shaped how we actually work and changes as fast as we do.

Hive: Our company wide knowledge base

Then, we built a layer on top called Hive, our internal knowledge repository. The substrate is simple (verified markdown files in git), layered with retrieval and reasoning, and it's available across every department and inside most of our tools, including Claude and HQ. The payoff is that Vise itself becomes something you can query. Instead of hunting through five tools for an answer, you just ask.

AI-native, not AI-adjacent

The most important architectural decision we made was to build HQ to be AI-native from day one, which doesn't mean we bolted a chatbot onto a CRM. It means the entire data layer is directly accessible to AI.

We integrated with Anthropic's Claude Enterprise, allowing the team to work with external tools and data securely, and in practice, that means anyone on the team can open Claude and talk to the CRM in plain language:

"Which leads in the pipeline haven't had a meeting in the last 30 days?"
"Draft follow-up emails for every stale lead owned by the growth team and send to compliance for review"
“What is the most important roadmap item for engineering to complete this week?”
"Summarize the last three calls with XYZ Wealth."

Claude doesn't guess at the answers, it queries the database directly through purpose-built tools, so the interaction stops being navigation and starts being a conversation. People ask questions and get sourced answers instead of clicking through filters.

Personal software compounds, SaaS doesn't

When the software is yours, every improvement compounds. A workflow you sharpen on Monday makes every team a little faster on Tuesday, and it never resets at renewal time. Generic SaaS does the opposite, it makes you average by design, because it hands your competitors the same capabilities your team is running on. Software you build around your own business is a moat. Ours has already made our team measurably faster and our growth easier to drive.

This is what a post-AI company looks like

The companies that win in the post-AI world won't be the ones with the best SaaS contracts. They'll be the ones where everyone can build. At Vise, engineering and product are no longer just departments. Our people team builds. Finance builds. Sales builds. Even our General Counsel is learning to code.

SaaS isn't dead because software is dead. It's dead because the cost of building exactly what you need just collapsed. The era of renting someone else's workflow is over. The era of personalized software has begun.

We're hiring builders, every team, every title.

The portfolio built for your biggest client.
For every client.

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1 Vise "Platform Assets" encompasses assets actively managed by Vise as well as assets that Vise aggregates, monitors, and uses to generate customized proposals. As of 6/1/2026.
2 This calculation is based on total realized losses as of 12/15/25 and assumes a long-term capital gains tax rate of 20% and a short-term capital gains tax rate of 41%.
3 Source: Cerulli Associates, U.S. Asset and Wealth Management Edition, 2021

Images and graphs on this page are for illustrative purposes only. Does not represent actual client results. Past performance does not guarantee future results.

Tax-Loss Harvesting Disclosures

Vise AI Advisors, LLC (“Vise”) is an SEC-registered investment adviser. The material presented is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice. It is not a recommendation of, or an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to buy, any particular security, strategy, or investment product. Nothing on this website should be construed as personalized investment advice, which can only be provided in one-on-one communications.

Investing in securities involves risks, including the potential loss of money, and past performance does not guarantee future results. Historical returns, expected returns, and probability projections are provided for informational and illustrative purposes and may not reflect actual future performance.

Product images shown are for informational and illustrative purposes only and may not reflect how they will appear within the product. Third-party trademarks and service marks referenced are the property of their respective owners.

The portfolio built
for your biggest client.
For every client.

Book a Demo

Product

Resources

521 Broadway
New York, NY 10012

+1 646 374 0888

Form ADV

Form CRS

Images and graphs on this page are for illustrative purposes only. Does not represent actual client results. Past performance does not guarantee future results.

Tax-Loss Harvesting Disclosures

The portfolio built for your biggest client.
For every client.

Book a Demo

Product

Resources

521 Broadway
New York, NY 10012

+1 646 374 0888

Form ADV

Form CRS

Images and graphs on this page are for illustrative purposes only. Does not represent actual client results. Past performance does not guarantee future results.

Tax-Loss Harvesting Disclosures

Traditional SaaS is dead. Welcome to the era of personal software

The essay

We sell personalized portfolios, so why run generic software?

The problem with generic software

The bet: everyone is a builder now

We didn't spec the software, we sat in the meetings

HQ: Our company's new operating system

Hive: Our company wide knowledge base

AI-native, not AI-adjacent

Personal software compounds, SaaS doesn't

This is what a post-AI company looks like

The portfolio built for your biggest client.For every client.

The portfolio builtfor your biggest client.For every client.

The portfolio built for your biggest client.For every client.

The portfolio built for your biggest client.
For every client.

The portfolio built
for your biggest client.
For every client.

The portfolio built for your biggest client.
For every client.