Fondsworth: Your AI HubSpot Butler, Built from CRM Pain and Pure Spite!

Let me just say this up front: I’ve built a lot of dumb projects in my day. Clocks that yell obscenities when you stare at them. Frogs that resist interrogation in a web browser. AI image generators that put my dogs in bizarre situations. Tools to pre-cool my Tesla based on my Google Calendar because I’m too ADHD to remember to do it myself. All of them solved some kind of problem—usually hyper-specific, mildly inconvenient ones that mostly existed in my own head. “

But Fondsworth? Fondsworth is different.

For the first time, I’ve built something that solves a real, nagging, daily pain. The kind of pain that leaves a permanent dent in your Microsoft Teams history and haunts your inbox. The kind that makes you fantasize about quitting your job and moving to the woods. The kind that makes you a cynic that hates other people.

Enter: Fondsworth.

This is the first app I’ve made that tackles a problem I’ve been suffering with for six-plus years as a HubSpot administrator: end users do not know how to use HubSpot. They never read your training documentation. They refuse to watch the Loom videos you carefully recorded. And they will always, always, DM you instead.

 

The Problem

If you’ve ever been a CRM admin, sales ops person, rev ops manager, or just the unlucky “HubSpot guy” at a growing company, you already know the pain. End users simply won’t do what you need them to do:

“How do I enter the deal amount again?”

“What lifecycle should this contact be?”

“What fields do I fill out for this new contact record?”

They’ll ask you while ignoring the clearly labeled documentation link pinned in Teams… and their inbox… and in the company portal.

And they’ll ask again next week. And the week after. And if you fix one mistake, three new ones will appear in the CRM like cursed Hydra heads.

The core issue: CRM usage varies wildly between companies. HubSpot is flexible to a fault. Some orgs log meetings as notes, some as tasks, some as custom objects. One company calculates deal amount using a formula that requires a calculator, a tax table, and a stiff drink; another just types in $500 and calls it a day. There is no one right way, there is only your  way.

And when you rely on human memory and habits to enforce your “company-specific right way,” you get bad data in and bad data out. Dashboards get useless. Forecasts are wrong. Executives yell. You lose sleep.

So I built a solution.

 

The Origin Story

Ironically, my breaking point wasn’t when I managed 80 HubSpot users at a large health tech company. It came after I switched jobs and had just one HubSpot user. A single, older sales rep who had never touched a CRM before. Training him wasn’t just about HubSpot—it was about using a computer. I realized that if I didn’t automate my own sanity, I’d be stuck answering the same questions forever. There had to be a better way.

So I thought back to a childhood memory. On a ski trip to Aspen, I learned hotels could have butlers. My 12-year-old brain invented one named Fondsworth. My dad thought it was hilarious; we joked about “Mr. Fondsworth” the entire trip. When I finally decided to make a HubSpot butler that could answer endless questions politely, the name was already waiting.

And why an elephant in a tuxedo as the mascot? Well, as you might know, I have a weird obsession with animals. So naturally, I wanted to incorporate an animal to be the front and center star of Fondsworth. I thought long and hard about which animal embodies trustworthiness, the core virtue behind the product. Elephants came to mind. With  their human-like eyes, their social loyalty and memory, their gentle giant reputation, and their long working history & cultural and religious significance — elephants, in my opinion, represent trust. Which is crucial with a product like this (you’re trusting the information it provides is true and accurate).

Also… they’re my favorite animal 🙂

So What is Fondsworth?

Fondsworth is a personalized AI-powered sales ops assistant that lives directly inside the HubSpot UI. It’s a full sidebar extension—you never leave HubSpot, no separate tab hopping required. It works in contact, company, deal, and ticket records. End users can ask it questions like:

• “How do I fill out the amount field on this deal?”
• “What should I put in my follow-up notes?”
• “We just had a meeting where the customer insisted they were ready to buy, should I put it in deal stage 2 or deal stage 4?”

Instead of a generic answer like “Click the field and type the number,” (something any LLM or HubSpot support rep can answer) Fondsworth responds with your company’s specific instructions. Because you trained it with your own documentation.

Over time, it doesn’t just answer—it compounds to keep your sanity intact. If I had Fondsworth at my previous jobs, I genuinely believe that the company’s actual performance would have improved significantly. Good data in = good data out.

Checkout this short demo video I made that walks you through Fondsworth (and features Fondsworth the elephant himself):

 

Key Features (aka Why This Is My Most Complete App Ever)

• Custom Training Uploads – Give it your internal docs, SOPs, PDFs, videos, whatever. Fondsworth becomes an expert in your company’s workflows.
• Persistent Memory – Conversations are tied to the specific HubSpot record. Leave a contact, come back later, and your chat history is still there.
• Admin Message Monitoring – See exactly what users ask and how the bot responds. Perfect for audits, coaching, and catching misunderstandings.
• FAQ Generator – One click and you get a list of the top questions users ask, highlighting exactly where your training materials are weak.
• Status System + Email Alerts – Fancy status page with email notifications if anything goes offline. Because even a butler deserves a pager.
• Analytics & Usage Tracking – Know which users are getting the most help and which ones are ignoring your documentation entirely.

This isn’t just a toy project. This is the most fully featured app I’ve ever shipped—terms of service, working frontend, system monitoring, the whole nine yards.

 

Pricing & Plans

I wanted pricing to reflect the fact that Fondsworth actually solves a costly problem, but also balance the fact that while if I were a CEO, I would pay thousands of dollars a month for this tool; many CEOs would not:

• 3-day Free Trial – Includes 3 users to kick the tires.
• Basic Plan ($25/user/month) – Chat with the bot, basic usage.
• Premium Plan ($40/user/month) – Unlocks admin chat visibility, FAQ generation, analytics, and the smarter AI model.

Yes, I wrestled with this. Normally, I underprice everything because I really want my projects to be accessible to everyone. But this is baked. Golden brown. Soufflé-level baked. This is truly one of the best things I have ever built.

If you’re not a HubSpot administrator, you just have no idea how exciting this is.

Oh, also, let me address the elephant in the room… Breeze. HubSpot’s AI. While Breeze does not do what Fondsworth does (yet), I have to anticipate that is coming. I priced Fondsworth at a point where I can be competitive with HubSpot’s Breeze AI (Fondsworth is significantly cheaper).

The Build

This was your typical HubSpot UI extension/Postgres/Heroku dyno build. No crazy workarounds or insane hacks to share here. Instead, there was one wakeup call:

The hardest part wasn’t the AI or the logic—it was all the UI and compliance nonsense. Two things:

1. I used to love front-end work. But with the rise of AI, I have slowly started to resent it. Something about clicking a button and having all your content and websites created for you is somehow amazing and at the same time, horrible. Most of my time (like with vibe coding) is now spent debugging and fact-checking, rather than creating. So rolling out a fully fleshed out app meant a fully fleshed out website meant a ton of time just reviewing the website and making sure all the links worked and everything was documented correctly. It became more of a pain in the ass than anything else.
2. HubSpot’s app approval process gave me a laundry list of items & a 10-minute video telling me everything I did wrong. That was my “oh crap” moment for this project. But in the end, Fondsworth became my most polished app yet. Side note – shoutout Nick from HubSpot for going above and beyond reviewing my app. While it was an “oh crap” moment on the development side, it was really nice seeing someone put real pride in their job and taking the time to thoroughly review my code and all the app’s functionality.

 

Roadmap

Fondsworth is rather complete at this point, however, there are some big enhancements I want to make down the line:

1. Built in MCP-Tools. As Nick, the astute HubSpot app reviewer pointed out in his video essay, the app can’t answer questions like “What is the name of this company?” or “Who owns this record?”. Adding MCP tools to the bot, or even just providing it with context about the record it is open on, is my next focus for improving Fondsworth. This will 10x the Fondsworth product, and could even allow for prompts like “We just had a meeting with these guys, they said they want to move forward and next meeting is this Tuesday” and Fondsworth could update all the records and create the meeting in HubSpot for you automatically.
2. Enhanced FAQ. Right now the FAQ generator just outputs the 10 most frequently asked questions from your HubSpot users. I think it would be cool if this was interactive, or if you could even have it modify your training data or create training data that could be sent out to your end-users via email. Almost like a “Fondsworth Weekly HubSpot Tip” that informs the users about a single training point to help the users improve.
3. Custom Object Support. Fondsworth currently exists on the contact/company/deal/ticket records. While this is sufficient for most cases, a lot of the most complex HubSpot systems are utilizing custom objects in their CRM. Having Fondsworth populate on these objects and be able to answer questions about them would be a big bonus for our future Superconsumers. I know this is possible because I recently built a new HubSpot app that works with custom objects (new blog post coming soon!), I just need to integrate it with the complex Fondsworth setup.

Lessons Learned

1. Polish takes real time. This app has everything a legitimate SaaS needs: status pages, pricing logic, analytics, and working documentation. Not only that, but the I felt like I went all-in on features. The FAQ generator wasn’t even planned, I just thought it of it while building out the Conversation History feature and figured I would implement it. Polish takes time, but it pays handsomely. 
2. Pricing a real painkiller is hard. I’m still chasing my first paying customer, because higher price points mean slower adoption. I am getting a lot of interest, but I think the higher price point is naturally causing me to jump through more hoops than I am used to. 
3. Solve real problems, not just funny ones. People laugh at my frog and my yelling clock, but they need Fondsworth. Even though this project hasn’t been super successful in terms of sales, it feels way more rewarding to me having built it. At the very least, I will reap the benefits of Fondsworth from a user standpoint. 
4. Data is the new gold. Every conversation with the bot is a breadcrumb showing you where your team struggles. This project gave me a better perspective on the value of data. It is what has given Tesla it’s insane competitive edge in the Self-Driving category. It is what makes LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude so powerful. It is what drives business decisions at the highest level. Leveraging every single data point and thinking about how you can monetize it is how gazillionaires are made.

 

Want to Try It?

If you’re tired of being the human FAQ for HubSpot—if your Teams DMs are just the same five questions on loop—Fondsworth is your butler. Install the free trial. Upload your docs. Watch the pings stop.

Remember: Bad data in = bad data out. Good data in = good data out.

Fondsworth makes sure the data going in is actually good, without you losing your mind.

 

Demo it. Break it. Fondsworth is live.

If it ever blows up, I’m selling it on Acquire.com and retiring in a tuxedo like my elephant mascot. Don’t test me.

Fondsworth lives at: https://fondsworth.com

 

Update (9/8/2025)

Unfortunately, I’ve made the tough decision to sunset the Fondsworth project. I made this decision for two primary reasons:

1. Lack of adoption. As much as I tried to adopt new users, the app would not take off. I was able to generate a beta-tester, but unfortunately, they were let down by the same expectations that Nick at HubSpot had — the app could not read from the HubSpot record that you are currently on. 
2. HubSpot Replacement. Recently, I attended HubSpot Inbound. At Inbound, HubSpot announced they are rolling our the Agent Marketplace and expanded support for AI agents directly into the CRM. One of the demo assistant’s they unveiled did exactly what Fondsworth does. 

Because of these reasons, Fondsworth is no longer with us. Its a shame, because this was one of the most complete apps I have ever built and I was excited about truly solving a problem that has been a pain in my ass for years.

That said, this is the life of a creator and it won’t prevent me from moving on and continuing to build things. Thanks to all those that took the time to try out Fondsworth. Stay tuned for more fun things to come!