I work for a law firm, and I originally became a notary simply to provide notary services for the firm. At some point, I had the idea of allowing walk-ins to come in for notary services. My thinking was simple: people would come into the office, see the firm, meet the staff, and become familiar with who we are. Essentially, the notary service became a form of free marketing.

I created a Google Maps listing for the notary service, and, lo and behold, people started showing up. A lot of people.

As the volume increased, keeping up with the required notary logbook and recordkeeping became difficult. Since I have a hard time doing anything halfway, and I also happen to be a software engineer, I decided to build my own solution.

The first version was very simple. I created an electronic sign-in system and placed a QR code in the office. Walk-in clients could scan the code, enter their information, and the data would automatically be uploaded and stored in Dropbox. That became my first digital notary logbook.

Then another idea hit me: why stop at a digital logbook? Why not build an entire CRM around it and use the information to improve client communication and marketing?

I personally hate spam, so I did not want to bombard people with constant promotional emails. Instead, I created a Birthday and Holiday Registry. Clients could receive a simple birthday greeting and occasional holiday message. The purpose was not aggressive advertising. It was simply a friendly reminder that we exist and that they had used our services before. I also added an OpenAI layer that sent each holiday and birthday email custom made. Based on their name and date. Example... The email would say something relating to history or notary on that day.

That worked surprisingly well.

As the business continued to grow, I started receiving more and more walk-ins. Other notaries also became interested in joining the platform and operating under my business name in something similar to a franchise or affiliated network.

That pushed me to expand the software even further.

I began adding more advanced functionality, including additional security layers, enhanced electronic recordkeeping, multilingual support, notary training and quizzes for multiple states, administrative tools, client management features, and more sophisticated compliance functions.

I also developed an advanced remote notary session tracking and request submission system, allowing remote notarization requests to be submitted, assigned, tracked, and managed through the same platform.

What originally started as a simple QR-code sign-in sheet for walk-in notary clients gradually evolved into a complete notary CRM's, recordkeeping, marketing, training, and remote session management platform.

I also built an iOS app that's linked to the CRM (was a nightmare to do). Had to figure out how PHP / Firebase bridge works. So now my iOS app is directly linked to the CRM.

I'm the founder of PitchWhip, so I have a commercial interest in this workflow. I'm trying to understand how teams handle agreed B2B follow-ups across these channels today.

Say a prospect agrees on a call that you'll send some information by WhatsApp or SMS, then replies there and changes the next step. The email sequence is still running and another rep opens the CRM later.

When that happens, how does your team pause any now-irrelevant email follow-up and record the next action and owner?

Do you handle that through a shared inbox, native CRM logging or manual notes? I'd be interested in a real example of whether connecting these channels has helped your team follow through on a deal, or whether a note and a reminder do the job just as well.

Not a marketing - only idea
TL;DR: A concept for a reporting tool that connects business data and delivers recurring, decision-ready briefs. Instead of showing only charts, it explains what changed, why it may have changed, what evidence supports the conclusion, and what action to take next. Users can ask follow-up questions, while uncertainty and alternative explanations remain visible. The idea still needs validation with SaaS teams, agencies, and e-commerce operators.

Businesses rarely lack data. A founder can open analytics, payments, advertising, and support tools and still not know what deserves attention first.

I have been thinking about a reporting tool built around that gap. It would connect to a company's existing sources and produce a report every day, week, or month. Instead of stopping at charts, it would explain what changed, suggest why, recommend concrete actions, and accept follow-up questions.

Every important conclusion would show its source, metric, comparison period, and confidence. The report would separate measured facts from interpretations, missing information, and alternative explanations. Recommendations would include their expected effect, cost, downside, and a safe way to test them.

The same engine could support different report structures for SaaS teams, agencies, and e-commerce operators. I would still begin with one group, probably small SaaS teams, rather than build a shallow tool for everyone.

For SaaS, that could mean connecting revenue, activation, product usage, and support. Agency reports might explain campaign performance and delivery risks. E-commerce reports could relate advertising, orders, inventory, fulfilment, returns, and repeat purchases.

AI could help connect patterns and answer questions, but it would remain an implementation detail. The promise is better decisions, not an “AI analyst.”

The system should recommend actions without executing consequential ones automatically. Its value would depend on whether people repeatedly discover something useful and make better decisions. Otherwise, it is only a prettier dashboard.

If you are a BI practitioner or run a SaaS company, agency, or e-commerce business, I would like to know: what decision did your dashboards fail to help you make recently?

I build PitchWhip and I’m trying to understand how sales teams handle this before calling someone at their new company.

Say you spoke to a buyer at Company A about a project and agreed to follow up. They then move to Company B. You want to keep the relationship history, but the old project, pricing discussion and callback might have nothing to do with their new job.

Updating the existing contact keeps everything together, but risks making the old company’s context look current. Creating another contact separates the jobs but splits the history.

What do you actually do in your CRM? And when you open the record before that first call at Company B, what should carry over and what should stay attached to Company A?

Hey everyone!

We’ve been building Cenvi.events, a CRM designed specifically with venues, restaurants, caterers, private chefs, and other event-based businesses in mind.
Before we really hit the ground running, I’d love to get the platform into the hands of some beta testers who can actually use it and give us honest feedback — what you like, what you don’t like, what’s missing, and what would make it more useful in your day-to-day workflow.
Cenvi currently helps businesses manage things like leads, customers, bookings, communication, contracts, and the overall sales/event process in one place.
But our bigger vision goes beyond just being a CRM. Down the road, Cenvi.events will also have a marketplace, giving businesses the opportunity to showcase and promote their venue, restaurant, catering company, services, etc. to people actively looking to book events.
We’re still early, so this is exactly when we want feedback. We’d rather build around what businesses actually need than assume we know everything.
If you own/manage a venue, restaurant, catering business, event company, or regularly work with a CRM and would be interested in testing it out, send me a DM!

I’m building PitchWhip and looking at how callback changes should appear in a CRM.

Say a prospect asks for a call on Tuesday, then messages before Tuesday to move it to Thursday. No call has happened in between.

My instinct is to keep one open task, update it to Thursday, and retain the original date and the change in its history. Leaving both tasks open gives the rep two reminders. Closing Tuesday’s task and creating another might keep the history clearer, but could also muddy completion reporting.

If a call actually happened on Tuesday and ended with ‘try me Thursday’, I’d record that attempt and create a separate follow-up.

Does that match how your team works? Are there cases where moving the existing task causes problems with reporting, reassignment or accountability? Interested in which CRM you use and what breaks in practice.

wibecoded CRM for schools where AI do all the work - chat with clients, make appointments, send reminders, move funnel, process payments, enroll clients, billing. Did this for my friends business as a pet project. Currently used by football academy and arts school. I'm now thinking to sell it as a product

Most CRM comparison threads here end up arguing about plan prices, and for a couple of these platforms the plan price is the smallest part of the bill. I got tired of guessing, so I read the pricing pages and help centers for GoHighLevel, HubSpot, ClickFunnels and Kajabi and wrote down what each one actually costs.

Plan prices, the easy part:

GoHighLevel - $97/mo Starter, $297/mo Unlimited, $497/mo Agency Pro.

HubSpot - Marketing Hub Starter $20/mo per seat, capped at 1,000 contacts. Professional is $800/mo for 3 seats, plus a mandatory one-time $3,000 onboarding fee that isn't shown next to the price.

ClickFunnels - $97/mo monthly, $81/mo if you commit annually.

Kajabi - $179/mo Basic, $249/mo Growth, $499/mo Pro.

The part that isn't on any pricing page: GHL meters phone numbers, SMS, calls and email on top of the plan, and those rates only live in the help center. One modest client (1 number, 2,000 texts, 500 call minutes, 10k emails) adds roughly $30/mo. A2P registration to text US numbers is about $23 one time plus a small monthly fee, which is why a first bill usually looks worse than every bill after it.

HubSpot doesn't meter usage that way, but it's seat-priced, and the Starter to Professional jump is the real wall. $800/mo plus $3k onboarding lands exactly when you outgrow one seat or 1,000 contacts.

Worth saying for this sub specifically: ClickFunnels and Kajabi aren't really CRMs. Neither does sub-accounts or proper contact management, so if that's what you're shopping for they're not in the same category, they just get named in the same breath a lot.

Where I landed: if you're managing separate client accounts it's a GHL vs HubSpot question, and it comes down to seat count versus how much SMS and calling you actually do. If you're a single business with a real contact database and no heavy texting, GHL's metering mostly doesn't apply to you and the comparison looks completely different.

If your real bill on any of these looks different from this, I'd rather hear it than keep quoting numbers off a pricing page.

We’re a team of three in software development, using Apollo, LinkedIn and HubSpot.

I’m trying to get my head around where Sales Navigator fits into that setup when we’ve already got Apollo. For people using both, what are you actually doing in Sales Navigator that makes it worth having as well?

Is it finding the right people, researching accounts, keeping up with changes, or something else that becomes more useful once you’re working with it every day?

In the meantime, one thing we knew we wanted was our LinkedIn conversations and connection statuses in HubSpot, both for me individually and across the team.

There’s a detail here that matters even with three people: a contact being “connected” doesn’t tell you who they’re connected to. I might already know them while someone else on the team has a request pending. We wanted to be able to see that alongside the conversation history.

We built a Chrome extension called LinkSyncer to handle that for ourselves, then decided to turn it into a product. So, full disclosure, we’re the people behind it. It brings conversations we open on standard LinkedIn into HubSpot and tracks connection statuses for each teammate.

That still leaves the Sales Navigator question. I can see how it could fit alongside Apollo, but I’d like to understand what that looks like in practice for a small team.

If you kept Apollo but dropped Sales Navigator, what would you actually miss in your weekly workflow? An example of how you use the two together, and which Sales Navigator plan you’re on, would be really helpful.

We have a SOC 2 readiness kit with policy templates, a checklist, and an evidence tracker for SaaS companies preparing for SOC 2.

If you’re building or running a CRM and customers are starting to ask about SOC 2, or you’re preparing for an audit and need a structured way to get ready, feel free to reach out.

Anybody ever build their own CRM? I’m thinking about it wondering about dev time quality product MVP finish product the whole nine.

I don't need that many features: simple UI, multiple users, managing contacts and setting client/project interaction reminders (including repeating ones aka "every week/every month") and see them as popup/in a list somewhere.

Should be self hostable. I'm not interested on relying on some third party service that will lure me, collect my contacts, bind me to themselves with a few shiny features and then change their tariffs so sneezing now suddenly costs 100$. I'm not interested in AI-first projects either.

Shouldn't be a freshly made one-man project.

And should be pretty lightweight.

So far I looked at:

• Clientverse - project seems too young. And everything that isn't absolute basic is in a premium package.
• EspoCRM - Reports, Business Process Management and Workflows are in an expensive Paid pack. UPD: Nvm they have a lot of features locked into packs.
• SuiteCRM - version 8 is horribly slow. Fails to install language packs.
• CiviCRM - very clunky UI and is clearly not meant for business.

UPD: Thanks everyone. I think I'll try to stick with Twenty for now. Workflows can be extended with logic functions which are a bit clunky, but they seem to work.

Im seeing AI sales coaching come up for field teams and I’m still not sure how well it works in real life. For leasing agents home builders or senior living reps the manager usually sees the CRM outcome but not the actual conversation. Seems useful in theory, but if reps hate recording or stop using it after a few weeks then it kind of defeats the point so my question is does anyone here use this with an in person sales team and how well does it work?

I’ve been experimenting with pulling public business data from Google Maps and enriching it with things like emails and owner information.

One thing I’m trying to figure out is which filters actually help identify businesses that are more likely to need marketing services.

For example:

• Rating
• Number of reviews
• How recently they received reviews
• Business category
• Website/no website
• Owner/contact information
• Location

For agency owners or anyone doing outbound B2B lead gen, what signals do you actually use before deciding a business is worth contacting?

I’m especially curious whether there are less obvious filters that have improved your response or close rates.

One dashboard, built in CRM, marketing, automations, workflows, reputation management, all client conversations across facebook, instagram, email, text all managed in the same place. This way you dont have to fill your business suite with 50 different softwares, tools and platforms. thought I'd just share the not so secret sauce today lol 😂

We’re a small B2B business with 6 people and sales is still pretty founder led, but revenue has grown enough that keeping leads, follow ups and customer conversations spread across spreadsheets and inboxes is starting to fall apart. I’m trying to figure out what the best CRM for a small business looks like when you need something the whole team can use without spending weeks setting it up.

I keep finding everything from really basic small business CRM tools to newer AI native CRM platforms, and I’m more interested in something that can take some of the sales work off the team rather than just becoming another database we have to maintain. Main thing is finding a CRM we can grow into without needing a dedicated ops person just to keep it running.

Small-ish sales desk (~12 agents), B2B outbound + some inbound. Stack is HubSpot + a separate dialer. On paper CRM is fine: tasks, pipelines, notes. In practice most of the day happens in the dialer and HubSpot becomes a graveyard of half-updated records.

Biggest pains lately: 1. Connect rates keep sliding. Feels like half our DIDs show as spam / Scam Likely, so the CRM "activity" charts look healthy while actual conversations tank. 2. Agents burn time on answering machines. When they do connect, switching tabs to log the call means notes get skipped or written 3 hours later. 3. Supervisor coaching is all after-the-fact QA. By then the bad habit already shipped 40 more calls.

Tried the usual: rotating numbers, tighter call dispositions, "please update HubSpot" nagging. Adoption doesn’t stick.

Curious what actually worked for you: - Do you run dialer + CRM as one system, or keep them separate and force sync somehow? - Anyone solved screen-pop + auto post-call notes without a Frankenstein Zapier mess? - For spam-flagged DIDs / connect rates — what moved the needle that wasn’t just "buy more numbers"?

Not looking for a vendor pitch dump. Want war stories: what broke, what you switched, what you’d never do again. Team size + industry helps.

I have been working around CRM systems and noticed something interesting: businesses often spend a lot of time asking whether a CRM has every possible feature, when the features they actually use regularly are much fewer.
For example, things like:
Lead and contact management

Pipeline/deal tracking

Follow-up reminders

Email integration

Task automation

Reporting

But then there are dozens of advanced features that sound useful during the buying process but may not get much real-world usage.
I’m curious about the experience of people here:
What CRM feature did you initially think was essential but later realized you rarely use?
And on the other side, what’s one simple CRM feature that has had a much bigger impact on your daily workflow than you expected?
Would be interesting to hear experiences from both small teams and larger organizations.

I have a unique instance we're struggling to work through and was hoping someone might have ideas.

We use Salesforce for sales and our record of truth, and we us HubSpot for marketing. We are moving sales into HubSpot just for sequences (moving them from Outreach), SF will remain their primary CRM.

Here's the weird and annoying part. Our Salesforce doesn't use email as a unique identifier, it uses a combination of email + lead source + line of business. So John could easily have multiple records that would look like:

- John / Webinar / Product A (Lead Status: Open)

- John / Webinar / Product B (Lead Status: Unqualified)

- John / Tradeshow / Product A (Lead Status: Open)

- John / List / Product B (Lead Status: Contacted)

- etc.

Currently all info is aggregated on 1 HS record, so HS shows 1 John with Webinar, Tradeshow, and List as lead sources and Product A, Product B for LOB, and Lead Status doesn't really matter to marketing.

With all this in mind.... How do we get sequence activity to log to the correct SF record? How can we say enroll John in Sequence 1, and then that activity should go to John / Webinar / Product A (Lead Status: Open) and not a different one? Using the most recent lead isn't reliable enough and we're at a loss for what other logic could be used.

Any help or ideas would be much appreciated!

This is a weekly post for you to let out about something which happened this week for you in CRM that mattered: features, client requests that were either great or awful this week, and just generally chat CRM / CRM consulting chatter.

No self promo, just a place to share tales from the front-line of CRM!