I’m sick of CRM’s
We ended a $30k Salesforce contract, took a look at the “alternatives,” laughed, and built our own CRM for $1K instead. We were spending thousands annually so my team could move columns around and lie to themselves with nicer dashboards.
This is what we did instead
We Built our CRM in Lovable
I checked the options: HubSpot. Attio. Pipedrive. Copper. Close. Different paint. Same house. So we stopped shopping and we built our own CRM. Our first version took 3 hours. Built with Lovable and it costs $100 a month.
AND it understands how we work. And before the CRM mafia starts foaming at the mouth, yes, it does the basics:
Leads
Accounts
Contacts
Opportunities
Forecasting
Reporting
All there. Because newsflash… it’s just data models and workflows.
And no we don’t have a 12-person RevOps team, a full-time Salesforce admin, or a systems integrator billing by the hour. This was with one operator, and one weekend. Done.
If you’re a startup paying five or six figures a year for a CRM, be honest about what you’re buying:
Permission to not think
Someone else’s opinion of how your business should run
Comfort
My advice, having gone through this the hard way:
1) Stop worshipping tools
2) Stop confusing spend with sophistication
3) Stop letting vendors tell you complexity equals maturity
Build a CRM for what you need.
This sparked enough questions that we decided to walk through it live this Friday. Our CFO will cover the what, why, and how here.
That’s it for today. Connect with me on Linkedin if you actually want to understand what an Autonomous Organization looks like in the real world.
