Your Kanban Board Is Your CRM

You have leads coming in. You need to research them, write outreach emails, follow up, book meetings, send proposals, close deals. Every enterprise CRM promises to automate this. The reality: $150+/month per seat, weeks of setup, and a learning curve that means your team just goes back to spreadsheets.

The new wave of "local-first AI CRM" tools like DenchClaw offer a different approach: run everything on your laptop with AI doing the work. But they come with serious trade-offs: single-user only, no audit trail, and security practices that involve copying your entire Chrome profile (cookies, saved passwords, active sessions) into an AI agent's browser.

There's a middle ground. You already know how to use a kanban board. What if the board was the CRM?

The entire pipeline is defined in kardbrd.yml. Rules fire on card events. Actions tell the agent what to do. Edit the file, and changes apply within 60 seconds. No deploys, no restarts.

board_id: YOUR_BOARD_ID
agent: SalesBot
executor: claude

rules:
  - name: Enrich and research prospect
    event: card_created
    list: Prospects
    model: sonnet
    action: |
      Research this prospect. Update the card with:
      company overview, person's role, pain points,
      and an ICP score from 1-10.

  - name: Draft cold outreach sequence
    event: card_moved
    list: Qualified
    model: opus
    action: |
      Create a 4-step outreach sequence:
      Day 0: cold email, Day 3: LinkedIn,
      Day 7: follow-up, Day 14: break-up.
      Post each draft as a comment.

  - name: Generate meeting prep
    event: card_moved
    list: Meeting Booked
    model: sonnet
    action: |
      Generate a prospect brief, discovery
      questions, and objection handling prep.

schedules:
  - name: Daily Pipeline Review
    cron: "0 9 * * MON-FRI"
    model: sonnet
    action: |
      Review the board. Report new leads,
      stage changes, overdue follow-ups,
      and stale deals.

The full pipeline configuration runs to about 120 lines of YAML. Every rule is readable. Every action is auditable. Your sales process is version-controlled, not buried in a CRM's settings panel.

The kardbrd agent runs on Claude Code, which means it works with the skills.sh marketplace, 88,000+ skills maintained by Vercel Labs. Install a skill, and the agent gains that domain expertise. No custom integration, no API wrappers.

# Install sales & marketing skills
npx skills add coreyhaines31/marketingskills --skill cold-email
npx skills add coreyhaines31/marketingskills --skill email-sequence
npx skills add coreyhaines31/marketingskills --skill copywriting
npx skills add coreyhaines31/marketingskills --skill sales-enablement
npx skills add coreyhaines31/marketingskills --skill marketing-psychology

Skills are markdown files that get injected into the agent's context. They cover everything from cold email patterns and conversion copywriting to behavioral psychology triggers. Stack a few together and your agent's outreach gets noticeably sharper.

Labels partition the board between agents. SalesBot handles outreach. ContentBot writes blog posts from closed-deal insights. ResearchBot enriches new prospects. They share a board, see each other's work, but never step on each other's toes.

# sales-agent.kardbrd.yml
agent: SalesBot
rules:
  - name: Draft outreach
    event: card_moved
    list: Qualified
    exclude_label: Content
    action: Draft a 4-step outreach sequence.

# content-agent.kardbrd.yml
agent: ContentBot
rules:
  - name: Write case study
    event: reaction_added
    emoji: "\ud83d\udcdd"
    require_label: Content
    action: Generate a case study from this deal.