Nerve for customer onboarding
An agent that owns every signed account until it goes live.
Nerve puts agents on the functions nobody owns, and onboarding is the one your revenue waits on. It starts with a paid diagnostic on your own accounts, run hands-on by Patrick Hillstrom.
The gap
Every step has an owner. The path from signed to live has none.
Sales closes the deal and moves on to the next one. Onboarding runs the kickoff and sends sandbox credentials, then waits for the customer's developers to build. Finance waits for the first live transaction. Every team does its own part well, and the account still sits in the handoffs between them.
The CRM shows the account in onboarding and the project plan shows it on track. Neither shows that the customer's developer stopped replying, that a webhook test has failed the same way for days, or that the account signed without a backend developer at all. By the time anyone notices, the go-live date has slipped and the first revenue from that account has moved out with it.
Lean teams feel this most. Without an implementation group, the head of customer success or the COO ends up chasing accounts by hand, from a spreadsheet and a stack of Slack threads, on top of their real job.
What the agent owns
One agent accountable from signature to first live transaction
A ledger of every account signed but not yet live
Each account shows its current step, how long it has sat there, who it is waiting on, and why it stalled, with the evidence behind the reason. Leadership reads one list instead of asking around.
Stalled steps chased while there is still time
The agent reads the signals that a step has stopped moving: no sandbox traffic, an unanswered question in the shared channel, a test that keeps failing. It follows up with the owner on your side and drafts the nudge for the customer's side.
Customer messages drafted for your team to approve
Check-ins, technical fixes, and escalations to a customer's executive are written for you. A person on your team approves each one before it goes out.
A record of every action
Each step the agent closes and each draft it writes is logged with what it did, why, and the evidence it used, so any account's path can be audited end to end.
How an engagement works
Patrick runs the function first, then hands the repeatable work to agents
Connect read-only
Nerve connects to the systems where onboarding already happens, such as your CRM, project tracker, shared customer channels, and email. Access is scoped to workflow and status data, and you agree on that boundary with Patrick before anything connects.
Map the documented path against what really happens
Patrick maps every step from signature to first live transaction, then checks it against what your systems show accounts actually did. The map shows where accounts wait, which steps run out of order, and which ones hang on a single person.
Build the ledger
Every account signed but not yet live goes on one list with a stall reason and the evidence for it. The map and the ledger, on your own accounts, are what the diagnostic delivers.
Put agents on the stalled steps
Patrick runs the chase with your team first, then turns the repeatable parts into agents that keep running after he steps back. They follow up on stalled steps, draft customer messages for approval, and log every action. Write access widens one action type at a time, only as your team signs off.
The first engagement
An agent took over the review every new customer waited on
Nerve's first engagement was with a fintech, where every new customer had to clear a compliance review before going live. Patrick mapped how that review actually ran, then an agent took it over.
For each new customer, the agent gathered the evidence behind every check, flagged the ones that needed a person, and kept a record of each step. The team kept the final call on every account.
See it run
Watch an activation agent work a sample book of accounts
A scripted replay on fictional accounts. The agent maps the onboarding process, catches an account its project plan shows on track while the sandbox has gone silent, drafts the fix, and waits for a person to approve every customer message.
Sample data and illustrative numbers, not a customer result.
Questions
What teams ask before a diagnostic
What data does the agent see, and does this work for a regulated business?
Access is scoped to workflow and status data: deal and onboarding stages, step owners, timestamps, the shared channels where onboarding happens, and API event metadata. Before anything connects, Patrick designs that boundary with your team, including what stays out of scope entirely, such as your end customers' records. Everything starts read-only.
Which systems does it connect to?
Nerve has working connectors for Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Outlook, Slack, HubSpot, Asana, Fireflies, and Mercury. Other systems of record, such as a different CRM or project tracker, or your API request logs, are connected during the engagement.
Is this software or a services engagement?
It starts hands-on. Patrick runs the diagnostic and the first stretch of the work with your team. The repeatable parts become agents on the Nerve platform, so what stays behind is a running system on your own accounts.
What happens after the diagnostic?
You get the map and the ledger on your own accounts, with stall reasons ranked by how many accounts each one holds up. From there you decide whether to put agents on the biggest ones. If you go ahead, write access widens one action type at a time, and a person on your team approves every customer-facing message.
Who does the work?
Patrick Hillstrom, Nerve's founder, does the work himself. An operator and LinkedIn alum with stops across credit, fintech, and go-to-market, he maps the function, runs it with your team, and then turns the repeatable work into agents.