(Part 1 of 3 – Building SaaS from the Inside Out)
For months, we felt like impostors.
We were launching a CRM in a world full of CRMs.
Mailchimp. HubSpot. Salesforce. Brevo.
They were bigger, more polished, better funded.
And honestly, they were right to question us.
Why would anyone choose us when there were already better, cheaper, more powerful tools?
The answer had nothing to do with product.
It had everything to do with understanding.
The difference wasn’t technical. It was contextual.
We saw the same thing in every hotel:
Great marketing tools
Generic automations
Campaigns that had nothing to do with the actual guest journey
Sending a birthday email? Easy.
Sending a personalized message two days before check-in, in the right language, with reservation context?
Nearly impossible.
Not because it was technically hard.
But because no tool was built for it.
We didn’t build a better CRM.
We built a system that spoke the language of the reservation.
We didn’t start with vision. We started with frustration.
Fideltour began as a minimal app integrated with PMS systems.
It could trigger guest communications at the right moment, using live reservation data.
No big product vision.
No pitch deck hype.
Just a simple insight:
“Why hasn’t anyone built this yet?”
We introduced it as “Mailchimp for hotels.”
That helped people understand it quickly.
But it also boxed us into the wrong comparison.
And for months, we were judged like a feature checklist.
The demo that changed everything
A small hotel chain.
Their marketing team already used Brevo.
The general manager looked at me and said:
“What can you do that we can’t already do with this?”
I paused.
Then showed how we pulled live booking data, predicted language preferences, and adapted message timing by channel.
He nodded.
We didn’t close that day.
But that meeting taught me something:
We weren’t selling a tool. We were selling clarity.
What I learned as a founder
If your product is easily compared, you’re in the wrong category
If you have to explain yourself with features, you’ve already lost
If you compete on functionality, you’re letting the client evaluate you like software
If you build based on what you see — not what they struggle to say — your roadmap is disconnected
The unexpected advantage of being small
Nobody expected us.
Nobody thought we’d listen like we did.
But we listened deeper.
Not just to what they asked for.
To what they couldn’t articulate — but kept tripping over.
And that gave us something far more powerful than funding:
Relevance.
TL;DR
Fideltour wasn’t born from product-market fit.
It was born from market neglect.
We didn’t offer the best CRM.
We offered the first one that understood the business logic behind a hotel’s operation.
And that made all the difference.
Thank you for reading
This is part 1 of Building SaaS from the Inside Out.
If this resonates with you — great. That means you’re building from friction, not from fantasy.
Next up:
“Grow in Layers” – how we doubled our ACV without pushing harder.
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