Everywhere I look I see references to GHL and HubSpot and SalesForce etc. Are you guys using all these features that are offered? It seems they have a feature for every edge case. I have a CRM targeted at tradespeople and small business owners currently and its discouraging to think I may have pigeonholed myself. I am not including a link on purpose to avoid sounding spammy but my CRM is deliberately lean and simple.

Leads, Deal, Contact, Notes, Calendar. It has the essentials like per-contact notes and such. Supports webhooks in to fill entries. Has a little AI agent to ask questions about the database. It doesn't require an instruction PDF or clicking through six menus to add a contact and it looks basic but deliberate and refined. It is not a CRM clone of the week. I am not going to add tons of features to try and compete but are there some non-negotiables that pretty much everyone needs these days?

For the techies I run a single binary written in a compiled language. No mult-tenant. One client per VM. One client per DB. Takes 150MB RAM to serve 60000 leads. No node/react/postgres/javascript etc. It loads instantly no matter what, the only thing that impacts the speed is the network connection of the client. Users are allowed to register via email whitelist and there are no special user privileges.

What are your thoughts on simple CRMs? I don't want to occupy a niche where people would rather use GHL or a spreadsheet than me. For those of you in defined sectors like real estate do you prefer "real estate CRMs" or do some of you use generic CRMs for specialized work? Is automation a requirement for most of you?