Drew: Hey. So twice this week — two different people, same week — asked me basically
Drew: the same thing. Can I set up an AI that answers my leads the second they come in?
Drew: Someone fills out a form, or sends an email, and before I've even seen it, the
Drew: AI's already replied. Answered their question. Asked a smart one back. And
Drew: then dropped it into my CRM. That's it. That's the whole ask. And the short
Drew: version is... YEAH. You can. It's one of the easier things to do with AI right
Drew: now. But there's a question hiding underneath it.
Drew: This is "AI Honestly." I'm Drew. Each week I take one real question from a
Drew: founder or business owner and tell you what's real, what's not, and what it'd
Drew: actually take to build. No hype. No DOOM.
Drew: Okay so — the thing people are calling this is "speed to lead." And right now
Drew: there's a lot of noise around it. Everybody's selling speed to lead. But
Drew: when most people say it, they mean this big thing — agentic customer support,
Drew: lead nurturing, a whole system that babysits every contact from hello to
Drew: closed. That's not what these two were asking for. They wanted the one piece.
Drew: Just... answer the lead. First response. Maybe a little back and forth. Then hand
Drew: it off.
Drew: And I get why that's the piece they want. It's the piece that matters most. And the
Drew: numbers on it are kind of wild. There's a study everybody cites — the MIT one — and
Drew: it says if you get to a lead within five minutes instead of thirty, you're
Drew: something like a hundred times more likely to even reach them. A hundred
Drew: times. And a lot more likely to qualify them once you do. Now — the average
Drew: business? Takes over a day to respond. Some never respond at all. So a lead
Drew: comes in Friday night, half these shops aren't touching it till Monday. And
Drew: here's the thing — people don't send one inquiry. They send three, four, to
Drew: whoever showed up in the search. First one to reply — first one to reply with
Drew: something that isn't garbage — usually gets the deal. So if you're not fast,
Drew: your competitor is. That's really what's driving all of this.
Drew: And most of the tools that do this well only sell it bundled into the big
Drew: platform. So if you just want the front door — the fast, smart first reply —
Drew: you're kind of left going, do I really have to buy the whole house for that?
Drew: So — is it real? Yes. Like I said, it's one of the lower-hanging fruit things you
Drew: can do with AI. Let me walk through what's going on under the hood, because
Drew: it's simpler than people think. The AI reads the lead inquiry — reads what the
Drew: person wrote, what they asked, what they're worried about — and then it
Drew: responds with something intelligent. Not a canned auto-reply. A real answer. And
Drew: usually a question back, to keep things moving. And you train it ahead of time.
Drew: On your website. Your sales docs. Even just... free-form text where you type out
Drew: the rules — here's how we talk, here's what we do, here's what we don't promise.
Drew: All of that is straightforward to set up.
Drew: The way I've built this before — you spin up its own little box. A virtual private
Drew: server, with Claude Code running on it. Or in its simplest form, it can be just a
Drew: serverless function. Then you need a way to catch the email. I use a service
Drew: called Postmark. Postmark gives you an email address, and when a message hits
Drew: that address, it takes the whole thing apart — who they are, their email, the
Drew: body — turns it into clean structured data, and posts it straight into your
Drew: app. So now your app has the lead. The AI's already trained. It writes the
Drew: reply, sends it back out through Postmark, and you're off. If the person
Drew: writes back, you go again. Another turn. As many as you want. And it's fast. On my
Drew: own app I say "under a minute" on the site — but it's usually more like four,
Drew: five seconds. It just answers.
Drew: So the "can it be done" part — that's a yes, no asterisk. The real question, the
Drew: one hiding underneath, is: do you build this custom, or is there something off
Drew: the shelf you just... switch on? And what I've found — today, right now — is that
Drew: things mostly point to custom. Here's why. Everybody who sells a speed-to-lead
Drew: product sells it as part of a bigger offering. HubSpot's got agents.
Drew: Salesforce has something too. But they're not just "answer the lead." It's the
Drew: whole nurture-and-support suite, and answering the lead is one feature buried
Drew: inside it. There isn't really a clean, drop-in, one-size-fits-all speed-to-lead
Drew: that just slides into everybody's process. Maybe that exists someday.
Drew: Doesn't yet.
Drew: So let's say you go custom. What does it take? Tools: a VPS, Postmark for the
Drew: email coming in and going out, and Claude Code to build and run the thing. You
Drew: train it on whatever you've got — site, docs, a page of rules you wrote in ten
Drew: minutes. Time: for someone who knows what they're doing with AI, this is maybe a
Drew: couple days. Call it a week on the outside. It's not a months-long project.
Drew: And once you've got the bones, you can shape it however your business works.
Drew: Maybe it answers by email. Maybe it texts them instead. Maybe it's one clean turn
Drew: and done. Maybe it goes back and forth over a couple days, and then a little
Drew: later drops a follow-up with a video to watch. Whatever fits how you actually
Drew: sell. That's the part that gets kind of cool — you end up with a responder that
Drew: sounds like your business. Acts like your business. Knows what your business knows.
Drew: Somebody asks a real, specific question — the kind that'd normally sit in an inbox
Drew: till Thursday — and it gets answered in under a minute. Because the AI already
Drew: knows the answer, and the AI is fast.
Drew: Now — if you're already living inside HubSpot or Salesforce, and you want this,
Drew: the off-the-shelf path might make sense, even though you're buying the whole
Drew: platform to get it. And if you're a smaller shop that's not on one of those —
Drew: that's the gap I built a product called Request Router for. You sign up, you get
Drew: your own agent trained on your business, and it answers your inbound leads for
Drew: you. The way it works: a lead comes in through a form, the AI answers once —
Drew: with a question — in seconds. And when that lead answers back, it forwards the
Drew: whole thing to you. One turn, then a warm handoff. That's the smaller-business
Drew: version. In between those two... you're building custom.
Drew: Alright — what to watch for. Because this is the part the person selling it to you
Drew: won't bring up. First: know where the human takes over. The AI can go turn
Drew: after turn forever, technically, but you don't want that. Pick the handoff point.
Drew: One good question and pass it to a person — or two, three turns and pass it. But
Drew: decide. Don't let a bot run a whole relationship into the ground.
Drew: Second — and this is a real choice — you can make the reply look like it came from
Drew: a person, or you can say straight up it's AI. Both work. Both move the conversation
Drew: forward. But think about your brand before you pick. Getting caught
Drew: pretending is worse than just having said so up front. Because if someone clocks
Drew: that the "person" emailing them back in four seconds flat at 11pm was a bot — and
Drew: they will clock it — you want that to land as "oh, that's clever," not "oh,
Drew: they lied to me.".
Drew: And third: the buy-versus-build tax. Go off-the-shelf, and you're often paying
Drew: for a whole platform to use one corner of it. Go custom, and — it's yours. Which
Drew: means the upkeep is yours too. Neither one's wrong. Just know which bill you're
Drew: signing.
Drew: That's it for this episode. If you've got a question you've been wondering about —
Drew: can AI do this thing?... send it to me.... The address is in the show notes.