Why I Built HelmIQ: The Founder Story

I built HelmIQ because I run a sell-side M&A firm and could not buy a CRM that fit the work. Enterprise platforms assumed an administrator and a long implementation; sales CRMs assumed a short funnel. Our mandates run on owner relationships that take years to become a deal, so I built the tool I needed.

Who founded HelmIQ?

I'm Jack Pitts. Before building software, I spent time at Blue Wolf Capital and Kingfish Group doing the unglamorous part of the job: sourcing, outreach, tracking deals and prepping for calls. Today I run Salt Creek Advisory, a sell-side M&A firm I started with my brother, Connor, for family and founder-owned businesses in the lower middle market.

This post is the short version; the longer account of how Salt Creek's day-to-day turned into a product is on the HelmIQ origin page.

The desks I built it for, and the ones I would turn away

I built HelmIQ for deal teams of roughly 2 to 30 people who make their own calls and have nobody on payroll whose job is to run the CRM. In practice that means boutique sell-side advisors, lower middle market PE deal teams, searchers and independent sponsors. It fits people who spend a real part of the week on the phone, because the dialer and the record are the same system.

It is not for everyone, and I would rather lose a sale than sell the wrong firm:

• A firm with a well-run enterprise platform and an admin to maintain it. Intapp markets DealCloud on automatic "zero-entry" activity capture and agentic workflows, and a firm that has already paid for the configuration should not rip it out for a newer product.
• A venture or growth fund that lives on network mapping. Affinity's Ascend agents and relationship-strength scoring are built for that job; how its published per-user tiers stack up is in our cost-per-banker comparison.
• A team whose real bottleneck is finding new companies. AI discovery of owners and companies is in development in HelmIQ, not available today. A sourcing database will help you more.
• Anyone who needs SOC 2 today. We plan to pursue it; we do not have it yet.

What is Salt Creek Advisory?

Salt Creek Advisory is my firm, and HelmIQ's first customer: the two share a founder, me, which is worth saying plainly before I link to it. Most of our clients sell a business once in their life, and they deserve the same quality of process a large-cap client gets, without paying for a large bank's overhead.

Running that firm means doing what every boutique shop does: a lot of calling and a lot of outreach. You build relationships with owners who are not thinking about selling yet, and you stay in touch long enough that when they are ready, you are the first call. That is proprietary deal flow. It happens because someone kept the thread for months or years, and why good deal relationships go cold is mostly a story about the systems that fail to keep it.

I wrote about why we built my firm around relationships rather than deal volume, and the belief at the center of that piece, that trust compounds over years, is why HelmIQ keeps calls, notes and emails on the same record as the relationship.

Why was HelmIQ built?

Paul Graham argued in How to Get Startup Ideas that the best ideas are "something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing." Y Combinator calls these "organic" ideas. I agree with the first half and have learned to be careful with it, which I come back to below.

Here is what the job looked like before HelmIQ:

• Typing up notes by hand every night. After a full day of calls and meetings, I spent the evening writing up what happened, because nothing captured it for me.
• A CRM that did not speak the language. It did not know what a teaser was, what an LOI meant, or why a contact mattered after eight months of silence.
• Outreach tools bolted on from the outside. A separate subscription and a separate login, disconnected from the record where the relationship needed to live.
• AI that was not built for the deal. The AI features I tried either sat on a platform that needed an admin to configure, or were built for sales funnels and venture networks rather than running a sell-side process.

The same essay makes a second point I think about more: you can build something a large number of people want a little, or something a small number of people want a lot, and Graham says to choose the latter. Boutique deal teams are that small number. There are not many of us, but the ones who feel this pain feel it every evening.

Counting the evening write-up at a two-banker shop

This is the arithmetic I ran on my own week before writing a line of code, with round numbers you should replace with yours. They are illustrative, not measured customer results.

Before. Two bankers run four sell-side mandates and keep a warm list of owners who might sell in the next few years. Between them they make 60 calls a week and sit in 8 buyer or owner meetings. If each call needs 5 minutes of write-up and each meeting 20 minutes, that is 5 hours of call notes and about 2.7 hours of meeting notes, roughly 7.7 hours a week of typing that happens after the real work. Some of it slips, and the owner who said "call me after the holidays" gets forgotten.

After. The dialer calls are recorded on the contact's record and, with the firm's AI features on, transcribed there too. Meeting notes from Granola or Fireflies are imported rather than retyped (HelmIQ does not record Zoom or Meet video itself). Commitments pulled from call transcripts become tasks if nobody followed through. The bankers now read and correct drafts instead of writing from scratch. If review takes a third of the original writing time, the week's note work drops to about 2.6 hours.

What the example does not show. Review time is not zero, transcription is imperfect on bad lines, and the value depends on the team actually making its calls through the dialer. A team that does most of its talking in person gets less out of this than a team that lives on the phone.

What does HelmIQ do differently?

HelmIQ does the busywork first and lets the banker review it. Each problem above maps to something in the product today:

Two design rules came straight from my own frustration. Dealmakers have plainly adopted AI (the adoption numbers and how bankers use it are covered elsewhere); what they worry about is whether to trust it, which the survey concerns in our AI CRM guide bear out.

So, first, the AI drafts and a person approves. When an inbound email suggests moving the deal itself to a new stage, that is a proposal the banker accepts or dismisses, never applied on its own. Individual buyer stages inside a sell-side process are the one place automation can be earned: a hard event such as a signed NDA can move a buyer, or a move the firm has accepted 30 times in a row without an undo can start applying itself, and every one of those can be undone. Second, a brief has to show its work. When there is no prior history with someone, the brief says so rather than guessing, which is the whole argument in our piece on AI deal briefs.

The cost of building for my own desk

Graham's advice has a trap in it: a founder who builds for himself builds for his own habits. Mine are a sell-side boutique's habits. HelmIQ ships separate pipeline templates for PE, search funds, independent sponsors, corporate development and growth equity, but the sell-side workflow is the one I break and fix every week.

I also have to resist the opposite mistake, which is pretending the incumbents are standing still. They are not. DealCloud markets automatic capture and agentic playbooks; Affinity markets agents that prep meetings and write updates back to the pipeline. My bet is narrower: a small team gets more from a dialer, a data room and drafted follow-ups on one record, at $249 per banker per month with everything included (Twilio telephony usage billed separately, and because each dialer call bridges through the banker's own phone, every call bills two outbound legs), than from a platform it cannot staff. If that is not your situation, the bet does not apply to you.

What one founder's desk can and cannot prove

A founder story is a sample of one, so here is what in this post rests on someone else's data and what rests only on my week at Salt Creek:

• Axial's search fund figure below is platform data from deals that ran through its own marketplace, not a census of the lower middle market.
• Vendor pages (Intapp, Affinity) are what those companies say about themselves. I cite them for what they offer, not as proof it works.
• Everything else is my view: that approval-first AI is the right design, that small teams are underserved, and that the proportions in the illustrative week (write-up time per call and per meeting) are plausible for a phone-heavy team. I have not measured them across customers, and a different kind of firm may find them wrong.

A checklist for judging any founder-built deal tool

Use this on HelmIQ or on anyone else who tells you they built the product for themselves:

1. Does the founder still do the job? Ask what they did in the product last week. A founder who stopped practicing drifts toward features that demo well.
2. Whose workflow is tested hardest? If it is not yours, ask to see your firm type's pipeline template and try it on a live deal.
3. What does the AI do without a human? Get a precise answer on what sends, what changes stage, and what waits for approval.
4. What is not built yet? A vendor who cannot name a missing feature is either very new or not being straight with you.
5. How is your data kept apart from the founder's firm? In HelmIQ's case, every firm's records are isolated from every other firm's, including Salt Creek's.
6. What happens on day one? HelmIQ sign-up is currently by access request, then you import your own data yourself. Ask every vendor for the equivalent path and timeline in writing.

Does the HelmIQ founder use the product?

Yes. I use HelmIQ every day to run Salt Creek Advisory's own deal flow. When something breaks or wastes a banker's time, I usually hit it before a customer does, because I am running the same calls and the same live mandates.

We describe the split the same way in Salt Creek's comparison of boutique M&A firms for 2026: we use our own software and AI tools to research buyers and organize market information and deal activity, while my brother Connor and I keep responsibility for the financial analysis, relationships, confidentiality and negotiation. That software is HelmIQ.

Why build for the lower middle market?

The buyers are getting smaller too. Axial's 2026 buyer data shows search funds accounted for 14% of closed deals on its platform, an all-time high. That is Axial's marketplace, not the whole market, but it matches what we see on the sell side: more of the people across the table are one- or two-person teams running a deal without an analyst. Our guide to the best CRM for lower middle market M&A lays out what that segment should demand from any vendor, not only us.

If you are making this decision yourself, the best CRM for investment banking buyer's guide is the honest version, including the cases where I tell you to buy something other than HelmIQ. Running a search, or working without committed capital, changes the answer enough that each gets its own guide: CRM for search funds and CRM for independent sponsors. For the product itself, start at the HelmIQ platform overview.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the founder of HelmIQ? Jack Pitts. He came to software from the deal side, not from a software company, and he still runs live sell-side mandates at Salt Creek Advisory alongside his brother Connor. That is why HelmIQ's roadmap is set by what slows a banker down this week rather than by what demos well.

What problem was HelmIQ originally built to solve? The evening write-up. The answer is capture on the record itself: a call made through the HelmIQ dialer is recorded onto the contact and transcribed when the firm's AI features are on, so the raw material for the note exists when the banker hangs up, and drafted follow-ups and transcript-based tasks build on that same record rather than on a separate tool.

Is HelmIQ only for sell-side advisors like Salt Creek? No. The independent sponsor template adds an Equity Raise stage, the search fund template runs from Sourced through Owner Call to Acquired, and the PE, corp dev and growth equity templates each use their own stage names. The honest caveat is mileage: the sell-side template runs on live Salt Creek mandates every week, and the others do not yet.

Can other firms see Salt Creek's data, or the reverse? No. In practice, a Salt Creek user cannot search, open or export another firm's contacts, deals or notes, and the reverse holds too. Sharing a founder does not give Salt Creek a back door into a customer's pipeline.

How does running live mandates shape HelmIQ? Daily use at Salt Creek decides what gets built first. The stages use banker vocabulary (EL Signed, QofE / DD, Sign & Close), the dialer and data room sit on the same record as the relationship, AI-drafted emails wait for your approval before they send, and a suggested change to a deal's stage waits for you to accept it.

Next step

If the problem in this post sounds like your evenings, read how Salt Creek's desk became a product for the longer story, then request access and import one live mandate. Run a week of calls through it and judge it on one test: whether your notes, follow-ups and briefs got done without you typing them.

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