Felipe Carvalho, Camu: The Brutal Sales Lesson From Pipefy

Felipe Carvalho is Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Camu — an AI workflow automation platform. Previously, Felipe spent 10 years building the global go-to-market organization at Pipefy alongside founder Alessio Alionço, scaling a horizontal workflow platform that serves Volvo, Capgemini, IBM, Accenture, Visa, Santander, Itaú, and thousands of other SMBs and enterprises across Brazil, the US, and beyond. Before Pipefy, he built and scaled the fundraising function at Hospital Pequeno Príncipe — Brazil's largest children's hospital — raising over $20M and growing a team of 50.In this TJC Operators episode, Felipe shares the brutal sales lesson from Pipefy — why selling everything to everyone is a GTM trap that hides inefficiency through inbound demand, and why outbound exposed it overnight. He walks through the "who would be crazy not to buy this" framework from Seth Shaw (former CRO of Airtable) that reshaped Pipefy's outbound motion, how Camu got from 1–2% to 17% to 33% conversion by progressively narrowing focus to a single ERP (SAP Business One) and one specific workflow (invoice intake), why charging monthly with no strings attached was the cleanest way to validate true product-market fit, the Sean Ellis "very disappointed" PMF survey methodology and how Camu hit high-50s on a V1 product, why saying no to massive enterprise RFPs is a superpower in the early days, how Felipe now manages 68 active opportunities solo by using Claude and AI to automate 50–70% of sales back-office work (CRM updates, ROI calculations, proposal generation, deal-power scoring), the FCA (Fact, Cause, Action) framework Pipefy used to run monthly results meetings and why analyzing wins matters as much as analyzing losses, why "building a plane is different from flying a plane" — and why founders should nail the sales playbook themselves before hiring senior enterprise sellers, the shift from selling software-as-a-service to delivering recurring impact and how risk has moved from buyer to seller in the AI era, and the lesson he most wants Brazilian founders to learn about building credibility before the market gives it to you.Subscribe to The J Curve Insider newsletter for deeper insights and follow Olga on LinkedIn and Instagram.