Launching Make My Shop: An Open-Source Telegram E-Commerce & CRM Platform
I’m excited to share Make My Shop — an open-source Telegram e-commerce platform and lightweight CRM designed to launch fully functional online stores directly within Telegram in minutes.
While Telegram is becoming a primary sales channel for many businesses, managing orders, catalogs, and customer communication manually often creates unnecessary friction. Make My Shop solves this by providing a complete automated storefront out of the box.
Core Capabilities
Product Catalog & Search: Category-based navigation, real-time product search, rich media cards, and direct manager communication routing.
Interactive Shopping Cart: Live cart item counter, structured multi-step checkout, shipping address capture, and automated order total calculation.
Payment Verification: Streamlined customer receipt uploading (photo/text) paired with real-time admin payment confirmation workflows.
Embedded Order Chat: Isolated 1-on-1 messaging thread embedded directly within each order detail card for seamless customer-manager clarification.
Merchant Control Panel: Complete CRUD interface for product catalog management, order status tracking, and instant new order event notifications.
Native Localization: On-the-fly, edit-in-place interface switching across English, Spanish, and Russian.
Technical Architecture
Backend & Framework: Python 3.12, aiogram 3.x, Pydantic v2
Persistence & Database: Async SQLAlchemy 2.0 (PostgreSQL / SQLite), Alembic schema migrations
Execution Model: Fully non-blocking background task execution (asyncio), structured service layer, and comprehensive integration testing.
The project is completely open-source, lightweight, and ready for self-hosting.

I recently learned that some agencies work directly inside their clients’ CRMs, and it got me wondering how data confidentiality works in practice. You’re basically handling customer information, sales records, and other business data that don’t belong to you.
For those who do this, what safeguards do you typically have in place? Do clients set specific rules around access, data handling, governance and confidentiality, or is it mostly handled informally, especially with smaller businesses? What scale of businesses even do this mostly?

Sometimes switching is the right call. Some tools really do fit how modern teams work better. But the most common mistake I see is migrating the same messy structure into a new tool and getting the same result.

A migration is a great opportunity to fix how your CRM is set up. These are some of the issues I see most that stop AI and automations from working consistently:

1. One pipeline for everything or one too many pipelines when a custom field for filtering would suffice.
2. Free-text fields that lead to inconsistent data that is hard to build automations around and surface reports.
3. Duplicate records.
4. The important stuff is in notes so it's impossible for an automation to act on it.

AI can help with messy data if you ask it to, but if you want to build automations that run without you and actually work consistently you need a strong foundation in place.

Whether you’re staying put or moving, fixing these makes your AI tools, automations and reports noticeably more useful. If you’re migrating, it’s much easier to do it on the way over than after.m

Link to a free session if you want to go deeper on any of this.

Anyone here switched CRMs and found the same problems followed them?

Hey everyone,

I’ve worked as a copywriter and content marketer for a few years. With AI changing so much on the writing side, I’m trying to move toward the more digital, technical side of marketing.

I was already writing a lot of emails back then, and I’d also done HubSpot’s free certifications, so lifecycle marketing felt like a natural fit. Over the last three months I freelanced in Mailchimp (the project is finished now), and I built my own automations in Brevo for a personal project.

Now I’m trying to figure out what to do next to become a stronger candidate for jobs, and honestly I feel a bit lost:

• What kind of roles should I be aiming for at this stage (e.g. email marketing specialist, CRM executive, lifecycle associate, marketing automation), and which ones have more opportunities right now?
• Should I go deeper into email marketing specifically, or broaden into CRM in general, like learning other CRM platforms?
• What skills or experience actually make someone stand out when hiring for lifecycle/CRM roles?
• Are there any guides, courses or certifications you’d recommend?

I’ve also put together a portfolio of what I’ve done so far and would love feedback on it. Happy to share the link in the comments if that’s allowed here.

Would really appreciate any advice from people who’ve made a similar move or who hire for these roles.

Thanks!

I handle sales at a small B2B software company, and we're trying to get a better handle on our pilot process before it gets too messy. We sell reporting software, and prospects usually want to test it with their own data before committing. The tricky part is that it's not really a self-serve trial. Someone from our team often has to help with the import, get the first report working, and follow up when they run into issues.

We're tracking deals in our CRM, but it's hard to get a clear picture of how much time we're spending on pilots and which ones actually turn into customers. Some leads move through setup quickly, others go quiet halfway through, and sometimes we only realize how much work went into a pilot when we're looking back at the deal.

I'm considering setting up a more structured process to track each pilot's stage, setup tasks, blockers, and outcome. We might also start charging for pilots that require a lot of hands-on work, but I'd want to understand our conversion rates first.

For those running B2B sales through a CRM, how do you track pilots from the initial request through setup and conversion without creating a ton of admin?

Reach out if you want a custom built CRM

Hi guys, just looking for a few tips here. Our business uses old legacy software and has a lot of flaws, I come from teck background and my skills are being overlooked as I am new to the company. What's the best way to propose it? It can make the work we do so much quicker. I am thinking of a presentation and demo, but I also want to include factors like time management and extracting reports and stuff.

I'm probably like a lot of you who have tried lots of crms and inevitably fall back to old patterns, or get so behind on logging notes and activity that I dread going back in. I think I finally solved this forever for me.

I have Claude review my emails and proposals three days per week, then follow some instructions about making recommendations for updates to companies, people, and deals. Then in the morning when the notification comes in I just look through the list, confirm or ask for adjustments, and then let Claude do the updating.

Honestly, I haven't spent much time in the CRM interface in a while! And I'm so happy about it. Because my records and data are spotless, and the grunt-ish work of updating is all handled by Claude. For now that data is becoming more useful because I use it as context for Claude to do more research and other things.

I can't see myself ever going back to manually using a CRM with the exception of some special occasions, like setting up different kinds of lists or workflows for special pushes or new product releases or things like that.

We use Attio and it seems well made for this use case but I think all CRMs will go in this direction very soon if they aren't already there.

With salesforce CPQ reaching end of sale we have been thinking of switching to another solution. This is bc we are not sure how much salesforce will continue inventing in it even though we still have the option to renew our license.

The biggest thing holding is back is how we have already built into our current setup. we have 3 yrs of pricing logic, custom rules, approval workflows, product configs and integrations that our sales team relies on every day.

Moving to another system sounds simple but rebuilding all that could be a much bigger project than we expect. that is why we are trying to understand costs beyond the software license. we want to understand things like migrating data, recreating pricing rules, connecting the systems, training the team and hiring consulatnts.

For those who have gone through salesforce CPQ migration what were the biggest hidden costs and was it worth it?

My sales team pretty much lives inside Salesforce and we found that our old calling setup was becoming a pain in the ass.
Reps would make calls in one app, then just make one of those “mental notes” to enter the outcome into Salesforce later. You can guess how that worked out for us… notes were late, vague, or missing altogether. Not just because people were being careless - it's just that we're all human and when you're working through a long call list, manual admin is one of the first things that are going to slip.

But the problem we wanted to solve was actually pretty simple. We just needed calling to fit into the CRM worklow so useful call information would end up on the right contact, account or opportunity without someone having to remember to copy everything over manually later on.

That made it easier for us to compare providers, given that pretty much every platform these days says, "We have full Salesforce integration, trust me bro." The devil's in the detail. We wanted to know what's being logged, where it goes, and how much work's left. We looked at RingCentral, Dialpad, and Aircall.

RingCentral can create call logs automatically. It also has Activity Sync that can associate calls from RingCentral devices with contacts. You can configure the automatic call logging settings too, which could come in handy if your admins want more control over what's written back.

Dialpad also caught our eye, as it can log calls and messages as Salesforce activities, and then associate them with leads, contacts or accounts. I really liked that you can choose between recording calls as Salesforce tasks, Dialpad call log records, or both. Pretty useful.

We also liked Aircall because it felt close to how our reps already work. It has click-to-dial, can give reps helpful contact context, and it can sync call activity back to the right record. That solved the issue I mentioned before about someone having to remember to update the activity history after every call.

We took a look at the Power Dialer and Voicemail Drop features on the professional plan for our outbound team too. You have to check the plan structure carefully - the full Salesforce integration isn't available on every Aircall plan.

Of course, I wouldn't choose any of these based on a product page or on watching a demo and don't expect you to either. You've got to ask each vendor to connect a test environment and run some of the calls your team actually makes - the whole shebang from completed calls, missed calls, transfers, recordings, and follow-up notes.

That's going to show you pretty quickly what lands in the CRM and what still needs to be handled manually.

Interested to hear what other Salesforce heavy teams are using, and has anyone else found a setup where reps don't have to update records by hand?

Hi All,
I’m looking for a solid option for a WhatsApp bassist CRM but using coexistence since I need to keep my business account in place without disruption.

I also need to be able to integrate a phone service like ringcentral or justcall, since I believe calling from WhatsApp coexistence integration is not possible in the US.

Might also want to connect to claude or chatgpt, so that’s a plus.

Any recommendations?

Thanks!

* Sorry, i also posted this in r/marketingautomation but thought it might be more suited to this thread - for now i'm keeping it in both*

I'm debating an offer from a CRM agency (providing CRM services to clients). Think ad agency with some technical CRM people could be doing journey planning, creative development, deployment.

With all the new light weight CRM's and even the new SF MCA platform that has native language prompting for segmentation, email copy etc. - where is the future for these guys?

We run a small wholesale distribution business and have been debating whether adding a CRM would make much difference. Our reps know their customers pretty well and most of the order history is already in our ERP. But it's getting harder to keep track of which accounts need attention and where we're missing sales.

For anyone running a smaller distribution business has adding a CRM made a noticeable difference or is it just another system for reps to keep updated?

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!

We built a system for a homeopathy clinic with three branches in Pune. The first thing we learned is that a treatment is a course of visits, not one sale, so the sales pipeline stops being the useful view.

What the owner actually needed was who is due back this week, who missed it, and what one branch knows about a patient another branch treated.

We ended up with a record per treatment course, a due date on every follow-up, and one patient record shared across branches. The lead-tracking part was the smallest piece.

Has anyone here used or built a CRM for a business where the real revenue is the repeat visit? What did you have to change from the usual sales setup?

I've talked to a lot of small sales teams over the past few months while building a CRM tool.

Almost every one of them had the same problem - not a bad product, not a bad pitch. Just total chaos in the follow-up layer.

Here's what that usually looks like:

• Deal notes in a Google Doc somewhere
• Last email buried in Gmail
• Next steps written on a sticky note or in Slack
• Meeting logged... nowhere

By the time a rep circles back to a warm lead, they've lost the thread. The lead went cold not because they weren't interested - but because the rep couldn't remember where they left off.

Bigger teams solve this with Salesforce. But a 4-person sales team doesn't need Salesforce. They need something that tracks the deal, logs the activity, and reminds them to follow up - without a 6-week implementation.

That's the gap I'm trying to fill with CRMPro. Accounts, deals, contacts, meetings, campaigns - one place, no fluff.

Does this match what you've seen? What's the messiest part of your current sales process?

I built CRMPro after talking to a bunch of small sales teams who were either stuck in spreadsheets or paying for Salesforce and using 10% of it.

They didn't need AI forecasting or enterprise territory mapping. They needed:

• One place to track leads, deals, and accounts
• A way to log calls and meetings without 5 extra clicks
• Basic campaign tools so they could follow up at scale
• A pipeline view that didn't require a 3-hour onboarding call

So that's what I built. No recruitment module. No HR workflows. No bloat. Just CRM.

55 teams are using it now. Most of them told me the same thing: they'd been patching together HubSpot free tier + a spreadsheet + their inbox, and it was costing them deals.

The ones who switched said the biggest win was having deal activity, contact history, and campaign status all in one place. Not because it's fancy - because it's just less chaos.

Curious if anyone else here has dealt with this. What made you finally ditch the spreadsheet (or not)?

I'm the sales lead at a small B2B software company, so I handle most of our demos and a lot of the follow-up myself. A prospect recently asked to speak with an existing customer before we go any further, which would mean asking someone who's already helped us out with these calls.

They've seen the demo, but we haven't really talked pricing yet. I was going to get a bit further before making an introduction, mostly because I don't want to keep asking the same few customers to take calls unless the prospect is actually serious. At the same time, I get why they'd want to hear from someone who isn't selling them the product.

When do you usually agree to these? I don't want to waste a customer's time, but I also don't want to make a reasonable request awkward.

I have a LOT of other issues going on at my work right now but this is the one that is driving me the (most) insane. Our IT Director, who lacks a computer science degree, just replaced our old CRM right before our big holiday season. We work in family entertainment and sell event packages. He cited budget constraints/the old CRM that we loved was "too expensive". (It was not Sales Force). He decided to build his own CRM using Claude that he boasted about creating in "two days." He then set up a “BETA CRM” channel in Microsoft Teams and asked us to post our own individual threads about any issues we come across while also trying to do our usual work which is already demanding, as his exact words the last time I saw him in person were “I haven’t even used it myself yet.” Nothing works. Obviously because it is in beta. He also told me to stop complaining when I said it is now taking us over an hour to build a quote we would normally have done in 5 minutes because our time is spent beta-testing and waiting for him (or Claude) to fix the issue. I do not know much about AI at all but I do not believe it has much of a place in sales or at the very least in this niche. We are a very small company with 3 sales reps (they hired a 4th today for some reason and I found out by accident that their base salary is higher than mine, even though they have no experience in events or sales, while the rest of us do. They just graduated from the same community college and are same age as our very young boss so it raises some eyebrows. My now former coworker who was the top dog for over a decade here just quit because of him and cited potential security concerns as well. I get that companies switch booking systems. I get that they even do it at peak season which is not preferable obviously but this is different.

TLDR - Boss rolled out a CRM using AI in less than a week, wiped our old one while the 3 of us were at lunch (yes this was actually the way it went), gave us no training, and asked us to beta test it for him while we still try to go about business as usual. Obviously no extra compensation for being his guinea pigs.

GITHUB LINK IN COMMENTS

It isn’t fully built, I stopped working on it in pursuit of other projects a while back so I decided to release it.

I moved on to other projects and figured someone might find this useful. It’s called OpenCRM, and it includes a CRM, scheduling app, admin dashboard, and basic marketing website.

The architecture is basically:
React + TypeScript + Vite for the CRM and admin dashboard.

Flutter + Riverpod for the scheduling app.

Firebase for authentication, Firestore, storage, and a shared backend of TypeScript Cloud Functions.

Optional Python services for things like forecasting, sentiment analysis, and route optimization.

The apps share the same backend and business data. Most business-specific records live under businesses/{businessId}, with role-based access for owners, admins, staff, clients, etc.

The clients use repository and service layers to organize data access and business logic.

The main backend lives in the scheduling app’s folder, which is a little awkward now that everything is in one repo. These originally lived in separate repositories, and I kept the folder structure when combining them.

There’s a decent amount implemented around leads, contacts, deals, appointments, staff management, reporting, and workflows.

It’s an unfinished project, some integrations are still stubs, and there’s cleanup and Flutter SDK compatibility work left.

The release uses placeholder configuration, so you’ll need your own Firebase project and provider credentials.