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The ERP for the AI Revolution is here
TL;DR
Campfire broke into ERP by doing less, not more — John Glascow says they won early by focusing on tech companies that had outgrown QuickBooks and only needed a few critical features like approval workflows and multi-entity accounting, not the full sprawl of NetSuite.
The first paying product was basically a Google Sheet in a browser — during YC, Campfire framed a spreadsheet behind a login, piped in Brex and Mercury feeds, and got customers paying in under a month because YC pushed for revenue fast, not polish.
They started by targeting the QuickBooks-to-NetSuite transition, then unexpectedly pulled companies off NetSuite itself — within nine months, Campfire had customers with roughly $300 million in annual revenue switching from a legacy ERP to a 4-person startup because the API, interface, and speed of shipping mattered more than incumbent depth.
Founder-led sales was the engine to Series A — Glascow says he personally ran demos, sat in every customer Slack, and got Campfire to the classic $1 million ARR mark before raising, arguing founders should stay closest to the customer until real product-market fit exists.
The real inflection took longer than it looked from the outside — Campfire started in June 2023, had early paying customers quickly, but didn’t see true traction until Q4 2024, when referenceable NetSuite replacement customers unlocked more than 2x ARR growth quarter after quarter.
AI changed the buying narrative from 'safe' to 'outdated' — Glascow’s original thesis was that every part of the finance stack had modernized except the general ledger, and once boards started demanding 'AI native' systems, incumbents lost the aura of safety and new entrants like Campfire got real air cover.
The Breakdown
Taking on ERP, the least glamorous giant
John Glascow opens with the straightforward pitch: Campfire is an AI-native ERP for high-growth companies, focused on automating accounting and financial reporting so finance teams can stop drowning in manual work. He frames ERP as one of those huge, ancient markets everyone already understands — every company has taxes, investor reporting, and a general ledger — so the challenge wasn’t education, it was building something people actually wanted.
Why he had the nerve to go after NetSuite
Glascow’s founder-market-fit story is unusually clean: he spent more than 10 years in corporate finance, then later worked in partnerships with legacy ERPs after his company got acquired. What gave him conviction wasn’t just personal frustration, but hearing the same pain back from customers over and over — enough that he decided to leave the corporate world and try to modernize a mission-critical category investors kept asking “why now?” about.
The prototype was a spreadsheet with ambition
In classic YC fashion, Campfire did not disappear into stealth to build a perfect ERP. Glascow says the first version was literally Google Sheets framed inside a browser, with Brex and Mercury feeds in one tab and a bunch of spreadsheet formulas underneath — crude, but enough to get paying customers less than a month into YC.
The wedge: just enough ERP for tech companies
He pushes back on the idea that you need to be feature-complete to disrupt an incumbent. Campfire focused tightly on tech companies that had outgrown QuickBooks and needed a few must-have controls — especially approval workflows for audits and multi-entity accounting for globally distributed startups like “the Loras of the world” — and that narrow focus let them start displacing NetSuite within nine months.
When customers treated buying Campfire like a venture bet
One of the most vivid anecdotes is a CFO telling Glascow, “We are making a venture investment in you,” because switching ERPs meant betting a critical system on a seed-stage company with four employees. Campfire won those deals by combining a better interface and better APIs with visible product velocity; customers weren’t buying completeness, they were buying the belief that the team would keep shipping fast enough to stay ahead.
Marketing by showing up everywhere
Glascow says a lot of early traction came from brute-force presence: going to events, posting on LinkedIn daily, and running weekly product demos. Today, he says Campfire is about 80% inbound, and he recalls one CFO who joined a demo expecting to revisit the company in a few years, only to realize they already had everything needed and became a customer within a month.
The strategy flip: stop being cute, sell the core
At first, Campfire tried a more surgical wedge around revenue recognition and SaaS investor reporting, assuming that would build trust before customers adopted the core ERP. Instead, that buyer cohort didn’t convert well, so just a few months in they flipped the model: the core general ledger became the main product, and the revenue tooling became the add-on.
The long grind before the real breakout
Glascow is blunt that the journey wasn’t a rocket ship the whole time: Campfire launched in June 2023, but real traction didn’t show up until Q4 2024. The turning point was getting larger, referenceable customers successfully live — once those customers started advocating for Campfire in their communities, ARR began more than doubling each quarter.
AI changed what 'safe' meant in finance software
His original thesis was that payroll, spend management, and AP had all modernized over the past 5 to 10 years, while the ERP stayed frozen in time. Then AI shifted the narrative further: buying a legacy system no longer looked “safe,” because boards and executives began explicitly asking for AI-native tools, giving finance teams permission — even pressure — to replace the old stack.
Building for the public-company end state
On competition, Glascow says Campfire is now hearing it’s the largest of the new ERP cohort, mostly because of product velocity, public-company readiness, and what customers describe as the best AI in the category. His ambition is not subtle: after watching a prior company sell for $600 million because the category wasn’t big enough, he chose ERP specifically because he believes Campfire can become a durable public company and the work of the next 30 years of his career.
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