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.