December 21, 2023
So you have a business idea, you have eventually started to code something about it and you want to get in touch with your wider network of friends and colleagues, or with clients from your previous business life, to get some feedback.
Great.
Until you discover that your contact details are spread out around your house (in forgotten and dirty business cards), post-it notes (half-chewed by your dog), your phone (under nicknames you don't remember) and some old emails lost here and there in your inbox.
Gosh.
What's the big deal about CRM
I have soon realized that even at the very, very beginning of my journey (when I just had a business idea in my mind), organizing my contacts - in other words, listing down names of friends and colleagues who could help or who might be interested to try our future service - was absolutely necessary to get started. I also needed to filter, categorize and prioritize. I also started to feel the need to pencil down which conversations could shape up as possible deals. I desperately needed a CRM!
But hey, what is a CRM?
(Skip if you know)
A Customer relationship management (CRM) software offers a centralized platform to manage customer data, track interactions, and automate prospecting and sales processes. In other words, it is a piece of software helping start-ups or big companies organize, store, and analyze customer information. As data pours in over time (I mean, as a very tedious data entry process fills the database), a CRM helps not only to prioritize business activities but also to gain valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences. If you need to be fancy, a CRM software can also automate repetitive tasks (scheduling appointments, sending follow-up emails, etc).
What is the best CRM out there?
I am not here to share another list of which are the good CRMs out there. You can find a good list here (via Zapier) and here (via Forbes). I am here to:
(1) share my errors and experience in dealing with CRMs in the early days
(2) share the REAL FREE-forever solutions for cash-constrained start-ups
(3) share what I am using right now
First attempt
As I started doing software experiments as a side project, I decided to organize my contacts with a new kid on the block: FreshSales. I have chosen it because it looked cool and easy - I know, a superficial assessment because I did not do any big analysis at the time - and it was free for 3 months (now they either offer a basic subscription for free with up to 3 users or a full a free trial for 21 days of their entire suite). I have been able to organize and prioritize my contacts, run some feedback sessions, spread awareness and have created a serious mailing list of prospects. Good!
Product-wise, I have been lucky with FreshSales because it worked very well, it is engaging (every contact had/has a score to help me measure who is interested and who does not care about what I was doing, based on the number and quality of my interactions) and it has been easy to set-up. It was also very useful to have a kind and reactive customer service to download, manipulate and re-upload data when the lines/records started to become many and difficult to handle.
But when I was forced to pay and I did not have revenues, I decided to pause my experience and quit. At the end of the day, the early planning was done. I downloaded my contacts in bulk in excel and moved on, continuing to code for hundreds of hours to have my product ready.
Meanwhile, I realized I had made a key error: I did not spend much time doing data entry thoroughly (a classic error), because filling a CRM is really long and tedious. So when I downloaded my records before closing the account, data was patchy and incongruent at best - something that would have become a nightmare to handle with other applications in the future.
Fast forward, I have tried to re-upload my contacts into FreshSales recently and I have got 80% errors, so I am unable to work with that solution without having to put-in hours of work to clean up my list.
Second attempt
I am almost done coding right now and I am fine-tuning the product with a small circle of potential users. I have also activated some key contacts to organize (together) the legal complexities of an investment fund, so we will soon be ready to sell, which is why I have a fresh need to revamp my marketing and sales activities to fund-raise, explore deals and start selling my solution asap via specific distribution platforms.
So I need a CRM again, I need it now and I need it for free until I start making money with my business. Which other CRM should I select?
I have re-attempted to use FreshSales as mentioned above (not working properly with my lists) and I also tested Pipedrive, Monday.com, Hubspot, Odoo, Agile CRM. I leave it to you to try and judge (Monday.com is probably the coolest and most flexible but it is expensive).
The key issue for me is that very few solutions are genuinely free for enough time, easy to implement quickly and not outrageously pricey for a start-up later on. I mean, spending from 20 to 60 euros per team member per month would mean to throw away from the window something like 1200 to 3600 euros for a team of 5 people in the first year of life of a start-up for just one piece of software.
So what to do?
After a long research, I read this insightful article exploring CRM solutions that are free for real: they are as creative as smart. And I have then decided to implement two different solutions in parallel and see which one will be favourite in a few months' time.
Notion.so
One of my two CRM choices is Notion.so.
Notion is a productivity and note-taking web application offering various organizational tools - from task management and to-do-lists to project tracking, bookmarking and in-fact CRM. Watch out: you will not be able to jump onto a page looking exactly like a CRM, but you can very quickly build your page looking the way you want your CRM to look-like. And you do not need to be a programmer!
Just follow this link to create a pre-made contacts page that you can populate with your data.
I have started to upload my contacts and developed a deal pipeline (just go on Templates, type Sales CRM and start).
I love it.
I love it because it gives me that complete customization that I need. I love it because it is completely free forever (with a collaborative work space as individual with up to 10 guests). I love it because I am being able to fix all the patchy data entry I used at the beginning. I love it because I can keep in one place not only my CRM but also my project plans, tasks and build a knowledge base for my remote-first company.
Hubspot
Hubspot is an all-in-one tool for marketing and sales. They offer a free CRM since 2014 (which I have somehow missed at my first attempt). It is powerful, it works genuinely for free and it is incredibly more flexible to import data than FreshSales (in fact, I have been able to import my patchy list of contacts, now fully cleaned up and beautifully organized). I love it because it is fast, entries are very quick to amend, and it links up powerfully with an additional suite of marketing and sales tools.
In summary, I found it hard to try, test and experiment with CRMs. The first issue is that there are so many options that it is hard and time consuming to choose. The second issue is that there are not many good CRM software available for free (or on a budget). I landed on two solid solutions that happen to be genuinely free ad infinitum for the early days of a small start-up. I will run them in parallel and will let you know in a few months which one will be a keeper. Please let me know if you are stuck in the same situation as I was until recently and let me know your thoughts on which CRM you think is best.
Share your thoughts: hello@pantar.ai
