One person, an entire executive team.
You're the marketing team, the sales team, the ops team, and the on-call CTO. Every advisor tells you the same thing: "you need to hire." But you can't — not at the rates a real CMO or VP Sales charges, and not before you have revenue to justify the burn.
Merkava rents you an AI executive team instead. GROWTH runs your content and outreach. SALES qualifies every deal. OPS keeps the company cadence. TECH reviews your stack and tells you honestly when a non-Merkava tool is better. $599/mo for the whole C Suite. One operator, real org chart, no raise required.
Context-switching isn't "productivity" — it's overhead.
- Eight logins before coffee. Analytics, search console, social schedulers, email, CRM, ads manager, helpdesk, invoicing. Every morning starts with the same ritual.
- Reports you write for yourself. The weekly "how's it going" review is a spreadsheet you maintain because no one tool knows your whole business.
- Work that stays in your head. The fix you know you should ship this week exists as a Slack star, a Notion bullet, and a sticky note. Three places, one forgotten detail.
- Tools priced for teams. Per-seat pricing punishes the solo operator. You're paying enterprise rates for a company of one.
Two Drives at first. Add as the business asks.
Start here. These four carry the most weight for a solo operator and compose well under Merkava Core (Prospector + Beacon are built in — you get them either way).
I stopped paying for four tools the week Merkava shipped. My morning routine is open one tab, see what matters, ship. It's the first BI tool built for how I actually work.
Founder, Harbor & Rye · solo operator, 2 SaaS products
$79 / mo
Built for the company of one.
Merkava's first wave prioritizes solo operators and small teams. Waitlist gets founding-price access and input on the Merkava primitives.
How Merkava compares.
FAQ.
Is Merkava a CRM?
Merkava is Merkava — it includes a CRM. Prospector is the sales Drive — deals, pipeline, contacts, clients, quick-action activity logs. It is one of four Drives shipped in the Merkava core (Portfolio, Signals, Prospector, Crew), so you do not install it separately.
How does Merkava compare to HubSpot for a solo operator?
HubSpot is sales-first and priced per seat — you pay even when there's only one of you. Merkava is operator-first and priced per AI executive hired. Hire one exec from $99/mo or the whole C-Suite for $599/mo — that's the executive team plus their specialist Drives, not a per-seat tier. For a solo operator who'd otherwise hire a fractional CMO, COO, or CTO, this replaces a $25-50K/mo bench at a price you can run on day one.
Can I connect my own AI key?
Yes. Bring your own OpenAI, Anthropic, or Perplexity API key (BYOK). You get 15% off your Merkava Core subscription. Your token is used only for forward inference — never used to write to your tenant data. Details in the BYOK scope spec.
What do I actually get when I hire my first exec?
Hiring an exec includes the C2 operating playbook, Forge inference, the Merkava core (Portfolio, Signals, Prospector, Crew), and the exec's specialist team Drives at the bundled tier price. SALES VP at $99/mo runs Prospector, OODA, and Signals. GROWTH (CMO) at $199/mo runs 7 marketing specialists including Beacon, Quillsly, Nitrous, Webster, Affiliation, Freeform, Manifest. OPS (COO) at $299/mo runs 7 ops specialists. TECH (CTO) at $149/mo gets honest stack reviews. Or hire the whole C-Suite for $599/mo.
What happens if I grow past one venture?
There's no fixed venture cap on the core surface — most operators run several ventures from one workspace comfortably. Exec hires and Drive subscriptions are per-tenant, not per-venture, so adding a second business doesn't multiply your bill. Studios running 30+ ventures: email [email protected] to scope a custom configuration.