I have my own startup and I need a crm for my sales funnel, what is the best crm that is free and hooks up easily to APIs for autonomous monitoring, what do you recommend and why?

Been working on this solo for a while and I genuinely just want to know if it’s actually useful or if I’m solving a problem that doesn’t exist.

The idea: I kept hearing (and personally experiencing) the same thing — it’s never that you don’t have enough leads, it’s that you forget to follow up. You meet someone, things get busy, and 2 weeks later you either forgot entirely or you remember but don’t know what to even say anymore since the moment’s passed.

So I built Shaks — basically a dead-simple
CRM for people who don't want a CRM. No dashboards, no pipelines, none of that HubSpot-style bloat. Just:
• Add a contact (or scan their business card and it auto-adds them)
• It reminds you when to follow up
• AI writes the actual follow-up message for you based on context, so you're not staring at a blank text box
Built it mobile-first, 3 taps max for anything, no clutter.

What I want from this post honestly: tear it apart. Would you actually use this? Does the business card scan thing sound gimmicky or genuinely useful? What's missing that would make you go "ok yeah Id pay for this"? Or is this just a feature bolted onto Notion in disguise?

Not linking anything here, just want opinions before I sink more time into it.

Hello,
I've been working as an Admin Assistant for 1 year.
I'm trying to get a Salesforce Administrator certification, to get a job. I've been wanting to work with CRM, and maybe work my way up to be in operations/sales ops/revenue ops.

I know this experience might not be enough, so where else can I look to make my experience better to get hired? Or what else can I do?

A few threads ask this but end without answers, so posting our setup. We needed texts triggered off HubSpot lifecycle stages without paying for an enterprise tool. Went with Textedly connected through its HubSpot/Zapier integration as contacts sync over and campaign sends log back as activities. Salesmsg is the other one that plugs in cleanly if you need calling too. Native HubSpot SMS exists now but the per-contact pricing didn't work for our list size. Happy to share the Zap structure if useful.

No limitations, better UI, AI features, integrations, reports, automation... what would your ideal CRM look like?

Did anyone here actually vibe code or build their own CRM in-house instead of paying for Salesforce or HubSpot?

With AI dev tools getting so good, I keep wondering if standard CRMs are still worth it.

If you’ve actually taken the plunge and built your own (or vibe-coded an internal app that handles your CRM stuff), how’d it go?

Mainly curious about:

* What stack or tools you used to build it

* What ended up being way harder than expected (email/calendar sync, edge cases, maintenance?)

* If the upside of having a tailored UI/workflow was actually worth the effort

* Bottom line: would you do it again, or just buy off-the-shelf next time?

Would love to hear some honest post-mortems or cautionary tales before I start breaking things:)

I'm looking for a CRM for a growing service-based business, and I'd love to hear what others are using.

The main things I need are contact management, SMS messaging, email campaigns, simple automation, and an easy way to keep all customer communication in one place. Integration with a WordPress website for lead capture would also be a big plus.

I've looked at a few different platforms, but I'm trying to avoid paying for enterprise-level features we won't use or piecing together multiple tools just to get basic functionality.

I'm especially interested in solutions that are easy to manage without a dedicated tech team.

Built my own investor CRM for my holdco. Worth productising or is this space already too crowded?

I run a holdco with a few companies under it, each raising on its own timeline. Seperate investors, seperate data rooms, nobody sees anyone else’s.

So I built it. Pipeline stages, a room per investor, tracking on who opened what and when, document permissions per room.

Works for what I need. But theres already a dozen tools doing this so I’m not sure theres a reason for another one. Worth turning into something other people can use, or am I just rebuilding what already exists?

Been on Outgrow for about a year. The calculator and quiz features are solid but the price point relative to what I actually use is getting difficult to defend. Feels like I'm paying for a lot of features that aren't relevant to my use case.
Mainly need quiz or assessment style funnels with lead scoring and some kind of automated follow-up. Nothing too complex. Curious what people have moved to or evaluated as alternatives.

The Lead Operating System

Hello

I built lead operating system for \*REAL ESTATE\* that asks the question to the lead qualify them, and also follow up them, and update the dashboard.

\*Why should I pay for it, what's unique in this? :\*

\- so it has the each user memory

\- Automated follow-ups using the user's current\_state

\*For example:\*

\_if the user gave the answers of only 2 Questions out of 5, then this system knows the progress of the lead. whenever the user will come 1 Month, 2 Months, even 2 years the agent have the memory of each of your leads and ask them a next questions no previous one that already asked. And if user Dissapeared after giving the answer of 2( Out of 5) questions then we sends him/her the follow up msg according to the lead current state\_

\- Lead qualification agent \`(Hot, Warm,Cold Leads)\` based on your rules like if you want only those lead whose timeline is within 1 Month (\`Bcz timeline is more important than a budget\`)

\- And everything is on the dashboard

If anyone wants to see a demo please DM

I've been building and sharing a Notion CRM template for solo business owners.

But I'm still struggling with the part that actually matters: getting the first sale.

For those of you who have sold software, templates, digital products, or services:

What was the thing that finally got someone to buy?

Was it more traffic? Better positioning? Social proof? Better targeting? Something else entirely?

I'd genuinely appreciate any advice.

I work for a local humane society and we’re looking for a new donor management system. We currently have Network for Good and we’ve way outgrown it.

Looking for recommendations. Who do you use and what do you like about it? So far we’ve done a lot of research with Bloomerang and EveryAction. Personally, I’m hard leaning towards Bloomerang.

A big thing for us is the automated communication workflows and the ability to easily import bulk data from our animal management system. Currently we have about 11k constituent profiles and we’re growing everyday.

My team just finished a project that ate our whole quarter but honestly it's one we're proud of merging two companies' CRMs into one system after an acquisition, without losing historical data, breaking active pipelines, or making the sales team relearn everything from scratch. Duplicate records, conflicting automations, two totally different tagging philosophies, the works.

It's done now and it's clean. Which means we've got bandwidth opening up and are looking for the next thing that's actually hard. We are US based with excellent customer service.

To be clear about who we are , we're not prompt-and-pray vibe coders. We're developers who've been doing CRM/automation work for years, and we like the projects most agencies won't touch because they require actually understanding the business logic first.

If you are dealing with a mess, reach out, happy to help

Hello

I built lead operating system for *REAL ESTATE* that asks the question to the lead qualify them, and also follow up them, and update the dashboard.

*Why should I pay for it, what's unique in this? :*

- so it has the each user memory

- Automated follow-ups using the user's current_state

*For example:*

_if the user gave the answers of only 2 Questions out of 5, then this system knows the progress of the lead. whenever the user will come 1 Month, 2 Months, even 2 years the agent have the memory of each of your leads and ask them a next questions no previous one that already asked. And if user Dissapeared after giving the answer of 2( Out of 5) questions then we sends him/her the follow up msg according to the lead current state_

- Lead qualification agent `(Hot, Warm,Cold Leads)` based on your rules like if you want only those lead whose timeline is within 1 Month (`Bcz timeline is more important than a budget`)

- And everything is on the dashboard

If anyone wants to see a demo please DM

Hello, we are selling Wi-FI networks in big scale buildibgs, which we as sales work 3 to 5 months to sign the contracts.

iam looking for the tool that suits my need of managing the tenders and sales activities such as:

1. Reminding us with RFP date submission.

2. Status and updates records.

3. Generate reports like total pipeline, team work load .. etc.

4. Reminding us for O&M or subscription renewals.

What is your recommendation?

Most small businesses don't fail because of one big mistake — it's usually a handful of small, overlooked ones that compound over months. Here's what I keep seeing:

1. AI-drafted emails miss context. A lot of businesses now use AI to draft sales emails, but without real context from the actual conversation, the output feels generic — no warmth, no direction, nothing that shows you were actually listening. Clients can tell, and it hurts response rates.
2. Post-call context evaporates. Promises made, objections raised, budget mentioned — all of it lives in someone's memory for maybe 48 hours before it's gone. Nobody writes it down consistently, and it's rarely thought of as an actual problem until a deal falls through because you forgot what you agreed to.
3. Fading interest goes unnoticed. A lead goes quiet, replies get shorter, follow-ups get pushed back — and there's usually no system flagging any of it until the lead's already gone cold.
4. CRM data turns to mush. Contact info comes in through email, calls, forms, LinkedIn, random Slack messages — and someone has to manually gather all of it from scattered platforms and compile it into the CRM by hand. That step alone is where most of the mess starts: fields get filled in inconsistently, half-updated, or skipped entirely because reconciling five different sources for one contact is tedious and easy to half-do. Six months in, your CRM is more noise than signal..

I ended up building a tool that tackles all four of these directly:

For #1, it pulls context, sentiment, and prior history into every drafted follow-up, so it's grounded in what actually happened, not a generic template.

For #2, you drop in notes after a call and it saves a structured summary, objections, and next steps straight to that contact — nothing gets lost.

For #3, it classifies lead temperature on every interaction and flags in a daily briefing when a deal's gone quiet or a lead's cooling off.

For #4, every field it extracts comes with the source it pulled from and a confidence score, and you approve or reject before anything touches your CRM — no more guessing what's accurate.

Looking for genuine opinions here.

How much do these type of features matter to you as a sales rep or a sales manager, or do they matter at all? How have these features impacted your overall performance and productivity?

Also, do you wish there was a crm feature that existed?

• Meeting transcriptions(multilingual), summaries and recommended next actions
• Automated meeting follow-ups
• Buyer intent signals
• Deal health and risk alerts
• Email tracking
• CRM updates suggestions
• Multichannel messaging/mail/call tracking

(given that all these features are ai based)

We spend a lot of time looking at how sales and revenue teams actually work day to day, and one thing shows up again and again: account plans get built with real care at the start of a relationship, then rarely get touched again once the deal is in motion.

It's an interesting pattern because it's not really a discipline issue on the surface. Most teams have a template, most reps do fill one out. The gap seems to be in what happens after, whether the plan actually gets revisited as priorities shift, new stakeholders show up, or the account grows.

We've talked to a fair number of teams about this, and the reasons vary. Some say updating the plan feels like overhead with no immediate payoff. Some say ownership is unclear once a deal moves from sales to CS. Some say the plan was never built to be a living document in the first place.

Curious how this actually plays out for people here. Does your team keep account plans updated in real time, or does it mostly get rebuilt from scratch at each review cycle? And if you've seen a team do this well, what made it stick?

A HubSpot workflow tip that isn't in any documentation, but should be:

The built-in "Test" button lies to you sometimes — not on purpose, but in a way that can send you chasing the wrong bug for hours.

Here's what happened: I was debugging a workflow that was only supposed to run for a specific set of accounts (a segment membership condition, nested inside an associated company record). I ran it through Test on a record that shouldn't have qualified.

Test said: success, would have enrolled.

Real enrollment history said: never enrolled, correctly excluded.

Same record. Same workflow. Opposite answers.

The pattern: Test tools that simulate a run are built to check straightforward field conditions well. Nested conditions — anything checking a property on an *associated* record, not the enrolled record itself — are where the simulation and the real trigger logic can quietly diverge.

The fix wasn't clever, just annoying: stop trusting the Test panel for anything involving associated objects, and instead pull a real record through the actual workflow and read the enrollment history logs directly. Slower, but it's ground truth — the Test tool is a prediction, the logs are what actually happened.

Small thing. But it's the difference between debugging the workflow and debugging a tool that's telling you the workflow works when it doesn't.

If you're deep in HubSpot workflows with any cross-object logic, worth checking which one you're?

I am thinking of making a web application for cafes and restaurants but my app will not have hundreds of features.

Instead, I'll just build those very important features that almost everyone needs, even small cafes.

And obviously the cost will be lower than the big giants.

So should i actually get into it?