I recently built a CRM it has a lot of the features and functions as an enterprise CRM. I was wondering if anyone might be in need of this that is willing to try it out at no cost to help me beta test it and build out more features and custom functions for your specific business. If you're interested please DM me and happy to jump on a call and explain more.

We have multiple SaaS products. Products and delivery are solid, but I'm wondering if hiring full-time AEs is premature.

My idea: offer independent sales operators 20% recurring rev share for the lifetime of each account instead of a salary. But I keep hearing that good closers won't touch commission-only deals.

For those who've done this where did you find these people? What's your experience?

Agency/reseller partners instead of individuals?
LinkedIn outreach?
And what terms actually made someone to commit to this?

Would love to hear what worked (or spectacularly didn't).

I'm looking for that super organized person who's moved a lot to test what I made and give me feedback so I can make it better. I built it, so full bias disclosure up front.

some context. I've always been a little confused why nobody uses CRMs for personal stuff. the need is clearly there... remembering birthdays, your friend's kids names, who just moved where, the interview you promised to ask about. but every CRM is structurally a pipeline. leads, stages, deals

so this year I built a personal CRM. friends and family, not sales. and to be clear about my goal: I'm NOT trying to scale this to everyone. I think there are maybe 1000 people out there who are this intentional about their relationships... the very organized person who wants every detail about their people in one place and to be reminded at the right time. I moved cities four times and that's exactly when your people scatter and the details start slipping. it's extremely niche and I think that's fine. The personal CRMs that came before (Monica, Dex, Clay) all seem to drift toward professional networking eventually because that's where the money is, and then the personal user is orphaned again.

what I did differently... input can be natural language. you type something like: met Jess at happy hour, nurse at NYU, just moved here from Nashville. and the contact builds itself. because no normal human will ever backfill 200 people into forms. (but you can also import your phone contacts as a starting point) the fields are personal life shaped too. pets, food preferences, how we met, check in reminders.

so if that's you... you've moved a bunch and your people are scattered across cities.. I would LOVE for you to try it and tell me what doesn't work. not what's nice about it. what's broken, what's missing, what you expected it to do that it doesn't. that feedback is worth more to me than any amount of signups.

it's called YourPond (YourPond.io) and there is a free version and a paid. and if you actually put it through its paces and come back with real feedback, I'll comp you the paid version as a thank you... I'm one person covering the bills so I can't do that for everyone, but genuine testers, absolutely. I'll be in the comments and I'd seriously love love love thoughts!

With so many small business CRM options, it’s hard to know which one is best for your business needs. Asking for recommendations often leads to people listing the same handful of CRM options, with little to no context about which type of business each CRM is actually most ideal for.

Choosing a simple CRM is usually the best approach for small businesses. But “simple” can mean different things depending on which industry you’re in and how your business operates. For instance, service-based businesses with long-lasting customer relationships would require a very different system from product-based businesses with shorter sales cycles. Team size matters here, too.

Here are a few workflow-related questions to ask when choosing your ideal CRM solution:

• How many people actually need to access customer records? If it’s just two or three people, you’ll likely find you won’t need all of the collaboration features in a bigger CRM.
• How long is your average sales or client cycle? Lightweight pipeline tools are better suited to shorter cycles. You’ll need solid activity logging and follow-up reminders for longer cycles.
• What does your current process look like in a spreadsheet? Noting the different columns you’d track when using a spreadsheet is a great way to determine what your CRM needs to do.

A common mistake small businesses make is evaluating how many features the CRM has instead of what the business really needs the CRM to do. Focusing on feature depth at this stage results in businesses paying for features they’ll never use and makes the CRM seem more complicated than it should be.

It’s best to start by analyzing your own workflow, figuring out the features needed to support that workflow, and then searching for a CRM that ticks those boxes. Remember, the best CRM for your business is the one that is used consistently.

What's been the hardest part of your CRM search so far?

I am particularly interested if someone implemented it at a company with no CRM yet that is just starting to hire sales people. Starting with blank page. But any experience will be helpful.

Can’t decide between.. clickup vs monday vs asana vs jira vs linear. I like simplicity but scalability is a factor too, along with superior ai and such. Built out clickup once a few years back but never moved on with it. What do you use?

Bold statement but, as a sales leader, I don't look at the CRM to get the information I need from my team. Yes, reporting, general forecasting, trends, billing, etc. But when I need to know something about an account, the state of a renewal, update on a pursuit, the CRM is not where I go.

I'm curious.

For people who work with clients and leads:

What was the moment you realized spreadsheets weren't enough anymore?

Was it:

Missing follow-ups?

Losing track of deals?

Too many active clients?

Reporting?

Something else?

I'd love to hear your experience.

Somebody asked a slightly tangential question about 'talking to a CRM' a couple of days ago.

I knew it was possible only by layering something atop MCPs.

So I started exploring Pipedrive’s MCP capabilities. I explored it myself with a use case I had been putting off out of sheer laziness.

I’ve referred quite a few leads to my referral partners over time, and I keep all of them in a dedicated 'referral' pipeline in Pipedrive.

Here’s what I did:

1. Fed Claude context about my pipeline and what I was trying to achieve (re-engaging lost deals with a fresh angle).
2. Asked it to pull the lost leads.
3. Had it review the notes on each deal.
4. Asked it to draft personalized follow-up emails with a different proposition.

Result?

I ended up sending 4 personalized emails to lost leads in one sitting.

The outputs were genuinely good — way better than I expected from a quick session.

I’m still learning the constraints (you have to be very specific about which fields to look at and how to interpret the values), but the potential is clear.

Tomorrow I’m planning to tackle the leads that never even responded to the initial outreach.

Has anyone else been using AI (Claude, ChatGPT, etc.) directly with their CRM for lead revival, email drafting, or pipeline cleanup?

Would love to hear what you have tried — use cases, tools, prompts, wins, or gotchas.

Cheers!

What's the one thing that slows you down the most when using your CRM?

Hey everyone,

I’ve been talking to a few solo consultants lately and the consensus seems to be: Salesforce/HubSpot is too much, and Spreadsheets are too little.

I’m a dev building Relix - a lean tool specifically for people who just need to see their unread lead emails, drag a card on a Kanban board, and send a follow-up without leaving the tab.

The "Where I'm At" part:

The core engine is built, but I haven't finished the 6-week Google API verification yet. It’s essentially a "raw" MVP.

I’m looking for 5-10 solo consultants who:

1. Are currently drowning in inbox chaos & forgotten follow-ups.

2. Want a "dumbed down" CRM that just works.

3. Would be willing to look at a 2-minute demo video and tell me if I’m solving a real problem or just wasting my time.

If this sounds like your current headache, let me know in the comments. I’d love to have you in the early birds list.

I’m a CRM/automation builder looking to work with a few small businesses that want a CRM built around their actual workflow.

Instead of selling you a generic CRM with features you’ll never use, I can build something tailored to how you currently manage your leads, customers, sales, and follow-ups.

Some things I can build:

• Lead & customer management
• Sales pipelines
• Follow-up systems
• Task management
• Automated notifications
• Dashboards & reporting
• Custom workflows
• Integrations with the tools you already use

I’m currently looking to take on a few projects at a reasonable introductory rate while I continue building my portfolio.

If you're currently using spreadsheets, Notion, Airtable, or a bunch of different tools to manage your business, feel free to DM me.

I am new to this and I need to know what CRM to use for sales

Did anyone have any luck with building their own custom CRM using the AI tools?

Hi,

I know how important SMS is for most businesses especially in the service industry. 80% of messages are automatically read moments after receipt, and roughly 75% of businesses in the west uses sms messaging to communicate to customers.

So what I did is that I integrated an SMS platform to a CRM that will handle your messaging, booking, answering of inquiries, and marketing campaigns for your business.

Unlike other CRM, there will be no need to register to SMS SaaS platforms, instead, you just download the app to your business phone and connect to the CRM via API. There will also be no need to pay a fee per message, cause what this will do is it will use your business number's sSMS bundle.

For 29.99 a month, you can use the following feature:

- Shared inbox for you and your team
- Calendar to keep track of your appointments and schedules
- SMS Marketing Campaigns
- Receive and send messages inside the CRM
- No need to juggle to multiple platforms.

Im putting the link down on the comments for the project.

Please note that this only connects with android phones for now.

Because I'm building for the people who hate hubspot or any bigger player who is calling themselves as CRM

I'm thinking I can't farm any of my ICP if I use the word CRM for Seo.

Cuz I need anti-CRM people, at the same time my SaaS product is genuine it's simple and have alot of useful feature and I don't care if the idea fails too cuz I created it for myself

So tell me am I wrong to not use the word CRM, even though I'm close to one?

TBH I wanted to call it CCM ( client context management ) there is bigger reason behind it

And also in few hours my product is launching on PH, wish me luck with the above concept if you agree...

I’ve seen teams continue logging into their CRM every day while gradually stopping their actual work inside it.

Sales conversations happen through calls and private messages. Decisions happen in meetings. Notes get added later, mainly so management reports look complete.

The dashboards still appear healthy, but the CRM is no longer helping people decide what to do next.

What are the earliest signs that this is happening?

More importantly, how do you turn the CRM back into a tool the team depends on rather than a database they update for management?

Most CRM advice here is about which tool has the feature you need. We came at it from the other end. We run a two-person studio, we tried the usual tools, and every one of them died the same way - not for lack of a feature, but because keeping them current became a second job.

So when we built our own, the question each time was what to remove.

Kept out, or kept optional:

Pipeline stages. A two-person business doesn't have a pipeline, it has a list of people it owes an answer to. Stages are there but they are optional.

Reporting. Nobody with eight active clients needs a chart to know how it's going.

Team permissions and assignment. There is no team (yet - may change if users want it).

Automation sequences. If you send enough email to need sequences, you're a different business than this.

Mattered more than expected:

More than one date on the same record. Quote sent, follow-up, work starts, invoice due. Almost every tool gives you one date field, which is exactly why people go back to a spreadsheet.

Being able to write a plain sentence about a person that isn't a structured field.

Opening it on a phone in a van and it not being a worse version of the desktop (it's a PWA).

The honest downside: it's not ideal if you hire a fifth person or your sales cycle passes a few months. That isn't a roadmap item, it's the point.

I built it, so read accordingly.

Recruiters were spending weeks reviewing CVs, and great candidates were dropping off before getting a response.

We built an AI-powered workflow that screens, scores, shortlists candidates, syncs with the ATS, schedules interviews, and keeps applicants updated automatically.

Results:

- 1,500 CVs screened/month

- 70% faster time-to-shortlist

- 8 days faster average hire

How does your team handle high-volume hiring today? AI, ATS rules, or mostly manual?

Lately, I have seen quite a few posts along the lines of: I replaced my CRM SaaS with a vibecoded CRM, it works perfectly for my business... etc..

I’d genuinely love to see what these applications actually look like. Especially from a UX and usability perspective. Any screenshots?