Why I Built the Tool I Wished Existed

An introduction from Shawn Ennis, Founder and CEO, Kinetic Tricks

I almost hired a sales team I couldn’t afford.

That was six months ago. I was starting my second company — Rapax, a telecom service assurance platform — and I had a decision to make. The first company I built, Assure1, became Federos and was acquired by Oracle. I knew what go-to-market looked like at scale. I knew what a real sales organization required — SDRs, account executives, a sales ops team, marketing leadership, content production, campaign operations. I had the runway to start building that team.

But I couldn’t make the math work.

At pre-seed to Series A, hiring a full GTM team runs $325,000 a year in salaries alone. Add recruiting costs, management overhead, and the 3-to-6-month ramp time before anyone becomes productive, and you’re looking at $645,000 of year-one capital before the first qualified pipeline shows up. For a bootstrapping founder, that’s the entire runway. For a seeded founder, it’s the whole round.

And more than that — I had watched the attrition math play out at previous companies. Average SDR tenure: 16 to 20 months. Average AE tenure: 18 to 24 months. You spend six months ramping someone up, twelve months on productive work, and then you start over. The founder who hires to stop doing GTM work doesn’t stop doing GTM work — they become a manager of four people doing GTM work, and they still end up in the weeds when someone quits.

I didn’t want to be that founder again.

What I Actually Needed

I thought about what my ideal sales day looked like. It was not “manage a team.” It was:

• Wake up to a briefing on today’s meetings, with context on every attendee
• Open my inbox and find drafts waiting — follow-ups, outreach, prospect research — written in my voice, ready to review
• Know exactly where every deal stood without opening the CRM
• Publish thoughtful content consistently without spending hours on it
• Run multi-touch campaigns without building them myself
• Stay in the conversations that actually mattered — the strategy calls, the product decisions, the deal closes — and let everything else run on its own

No product did that. There were CRMs. There were email writing tools. There were social scheduling tools. There were prospecting databases. There were marketing automation platforms. You could stitch them together with Zapier and a lot of duct tape, but the result was still a pile of tools that required me to drive them. What I wanted was an autonomous team that required me to review its work, not initiate it.

So I built it.

KForce — What It Actually Is

KForce Alpha is the platform I built for myself. Sage is the sales agent — it reads my email, researches my prospects overnight, drafts my outreach, keeps my CRM honest, and briefs me every morning on what needs my attention. Aria is the marketing agent — it proposes monthly campaigns, drafts my content, runs my drip sequences, and tracks every lead from first touch to signed deal.

Both agents require my approval before anything goes out. They draft; I edit and send. The result: the output of four specialized roles — inside sales rep, sales ops, social media manager, marketing consultant — for about 17× less than it would cost to hire them.

I’ve been running Rapax’s entire go-to-market on KForce for the last six months. Every outreach, every blog post, every pipeline update, every LinkedIn comment. The system that would run your company is the same system running mine right now. Nothing I’m selling is theoretical.

That is the dog-food proof. And honestly, it’s the only marketing claim I trust from any software company — the founder using the product to run their own business. Everything else is guesswork.

What I Think We’re Actually Building

Here’s what I care about, beyond the product.

For the last twenty years, being a founder has meant getting pulled into operational work the moment you succeed. You start a company because you have vision and taste — you see something that should exist, and you have conviction about how it should work. Then the company grows, and you become a manager. Then a manager of managers. Then a CEO who spends 60% of their week in coordination meetings that have nothing to do with why you started the company in the first place.

The better founders I’ve known — the ones whose companies actually shipped distinctive products — fought this gravity their whole careers. They tried to stay close to the work. They tried to stay close to the customers. They tried to keep their hands on the things that made the company worth starting. Most of them lost the battle.

AI changes the equation. Not because AI replaces humans — it doesn’t, and anyone telling you that doesn’t understand software or humans — but because AI can replace the coordination tax. The administrative layer. The 10 hours a week you spend in sales ops review meetings. The 6 hours a week you spend approving content. The 15 hours a week managing a team to do the work that, twenty years ago, would have required a team to do.

If we get this right, founders don’t become managers as they scale. They stay founders. They stay architects. They stay creators. They work on the parts of the business that require taste, judgment, and vision — and the agents handle everything downstream of those decisions.

That’s what I want to build. A category of tools that keeps founders in the founder role longer, with bigger output, and without the organizational sprawl that used to be the price of ambition.

The Invitation

I can’t do this alone. I don’t want to.

If you’re a founder carrying GTM yourself right now — pre-seed to Series A, doing your own sales, writing your own content, managing your own pipeline — I’d like to talk. Not a sales pitch. Fifteen minutes, founder to founder. Tell me what’s eating your week. I’ll tell you honestly whether KForce helps or whether you’re better off hiring. Some founders are at a stage where hiring is the right answer. Some aren’t. The conversation tells us which is which, and either way I’d rather spend 15 minutes getting to an honest answer than a month going back and forth.

Book a time here: cal.com/shawn-ennis

Or if you’re not ready to talk but you want to follow the journey — we publish a monthly Rapax GTM journal on this blog. What Sage caught. What Aria shipped. What broke. What worked. The good, the bad, and the parts that are still under construction. If you want a real-time view of what this category of tool actually looks like in production, that journal is where to watch.

If you build tools for founders, sell to founders, or are a founder — I’d love to hear what you’re working on. The best conversations I’ve had building KForce have been with other operators who were fighting the same problems from different angles. Reach out.

AI is the best thing to happen to the founder archetype in a generation. It gives creators and architects a path to scale without dissolving into an organization chart. It gives one person the reach of a team. And for those of us who never wanted to become managers in the first place, it’s the difference between building the company we dreamed of and building yet another company that looks like every other one.

I’m here for that. Come build with us.

— Shawn Ennis Founder & CEO, Kinetic Tricks A Citus Technologies, LLC company cal.com/shawn-ennis · shawn@kinetic-tricks.ai