The LinkedIn Comments Section Is a Better Market Map Than Anything Gartner Sells

Scroll far enough into the comments on any LinkedIn post about AI CRM and you will find, without trying, more competitive intelligence than you'd get from six months of newsletter subscriptions.

Someone posted about the space — probably the usual "AI is going to eat HubSpot" take — and I went looking. First page alone: Coffee, Attio, Clarify, AlphaCRM, Folk. Four I hadn't heard of before. This is not a niche. This is a field.

Day.ai is the one I'm watching, mostly because it's backed by ex-HubSpot executives, which is either the most obvious credential imaginable or the most useful one — hard to say. Still on the waitlist. The waitlist as a market signal is underrated; it means they at least have the sense not to let everyone in at once, which is more restraint than most of these products have shown.

Attio and Apollo probably caught the most heat in the comments, which tracks. They're the ones with actual users, which means actual things to complain about.

The more interesting part — the part that tells you something — is the vibe coders. Two or three people in the comments, apparently in good faith, offering to build a bespoke CRM for the poster. Just build it. For him specifically. This is what happens when the barrier to standing up a CRUD app with an AI skin collapses: the category stops being a product category and starts being a prompt. The competitors aren't just Coffee and Clarify. The competitor is also the guy who spent a weekend with Cursor and a Supabase free tier.

CRM is the new todo app. Everyone has one. Everyone is building one. The question is no longer whether AI makes CRM better — obviously it does, contacts are data, data is the thing models eat — the question is which five of the sixty current entrants will still exist in 2027, and whether "AI-native CRM" will mean anything by then or whether it'll just be the default feature set that Salesforce ships in a quarterly update and charges twice as much for.

I don't have an answer. But the comments section of a single LinkedIn post contained more signal than I expected, which is a sentence I did not anticipate writing today.