A CRM that fits how you sell
A purpose-built CRM shaped around your real stages, fields and follow-ups, instead of a monthly subscription you bend your sales process around.
The problem
How it works by hand
Off-the-shelf CRMs are built for an average business that does not exist, so you get a choice: bend your process to match the tool, or bolt on custom fields and plugins until nobody trusts the data. Either way the team keeps the real pipeline in their heads and a spreadsheet on the side, the CRM becomes a chore you pay for monthly, and the numbers in it stop meaning anything.
A worked example
What a working version looks like
We start by mapping how you actually sell: the stages a deal really moves through, the handful of fields anyone ever fills in, and the moments where deals die, usually an unfollowed quote or a forgotten call-back. The CRM gets built around exactly that, on a production stack you own: your stages on the board, your fields on the record, a view per role so each person opens their day rather than a report builder. It connects to the tools you are keeping, calendar, accounts package, inbox, instead of replacing things that work. The automations are baked in rather than bolted on: new enquiries captured and answered, quiet quotes chased, follow-ups surfaced on the right morning. Because it matches how the team already works, they use it, and the pipeline numbers become real.
The exact tools change per business. The shape does not.
What it needs
Honest inputs, nothing exotic
- 01A walkthrough of how a deal really moves, from enquiry to invoice
- 02Your current CRM export or the spreadsheet that secretly runs things
- 03The tools you are keeping: calendar, accounts package, inbox
- 04One person who owns the pipeline and signs off the stages
The payoff
What you get back
A CRM the team actually updates, because it mirrors how they already work instead of arguing with them. Every deal carries its real stage and next step, quiet quotes get chased automatically, and the pipeline number you read out on Monday is the truth. You pay for the build and the care that keeps it sharp, not a tariff that climbs with headcount. And when your process changes, the system changes with it.
Do it yourself
How you would build this yourself
No course, no upsell. This is the order we would build it in, with the tools named, and a prompt to start from.
- 1
Write your real pipeline down first: the stages a deal actually passes through, in your words. If "site visit" is a stage, it is a stage. This list is the whole design.
- 2
Build the v1 in a spreadsheet or Airtable: one row per deal, with only the fields someone will genuinely fill in. Name, company, value, stage, next step, next step date, owner. Resist adding a single field more.
- 3
Add the one automation that pays immediately: anything whose next step date has passed gets surfaced to you each morning. A script on a schedule, or an Airtable automation, is enough.
- 4
Work it for a month before building more. The columns you never touch get deleted, the things you keep writing in the notes field become real fields. Your process reveals itself.
- 5
Graduate when the spreadsheet hurts: more than one person editing at once, deals slipping through untracked, or you want enquiries captured automatically. That is when it becomes a small app on something like Supabase, and the spreadsheet becomes the spec.
Build me a v1 CRM for my business. I sell [what you sell] and a deal moves through these stages: [list your real stages, e.g. enquiry, site visit, quote sent, won/lost]. 1. Start with a SQLite database and a simple local web app: a pipeline board showing deals by stage, and a deal page with name, company, value, stage, next step and next step date. No logins yet, it is just me 2. Import my existing deals from a CSV, which I will paste. Map my old columns to the new fields and flag anything that does not fit rather than guessing 3. Add a daily check: every morning, list the deals whose next step date has passed or is today, ordered by value, and email it to me 4. Keep every field name in my language. If I call it a site visit, the system calls it a site visit Show me your plan and the data model before you write any code, and tell me what would have to change later if I move this to Supabase with logins for a team of five. My current deals CSV: [paste it here]
Copy it into Claude Code, fill the brackets, and it will plan the build with you before writing a line of code.
We would rather show you how than bill you. The whole ladder of free help, answers, guides and the weekly build-along, is on the do-it-yourself page.