Indie hackers in the early day with < 10 customers; what tool are you using to keep track of all your customer interactions, emails, and potential deals?
Was using Hubspot but finding it a bit cumbersome as a sales tool. What does your workflow look like, are you using dedicated CRM tools (salesforce, pipedrive, etc) or spreadsheets (google sheets, airtable, notion, etc) ? Thanks :)
I've been using google sheets for the first several customers. I'm just started testing out Pipedrive right now, and am pretty excited about it.
Nice! Mind if i reach out on twitter in a few weeks, get your review once you've had a chance to use Pipedrive for a bit?
Sure thing
Awesome, I'll reach out soon :)
Still using Notion, with reminders.
It works pretty well. The only thing I miss from Pipedrive is having the entire email conversation (if any) when I click on a lead/customer.
We have around 10-20 hot leads in the pipeline, and ~30 customers.
Congrats on the growing business! What was the reason behind not continuing to use pipedrive?
I am seriously considering this adquisition:
https://appsumo.com/outplay/
If you see the video, it cover all the pipeline variations you might need, and I find the fact that is a 1-time purchase really tempting.
PD: I am not part of the product, just saw it and thought It was interesting.
Get it, as its about to expire in less han 2 days. Great tool and will only get better and at 50$ it will pay for itself in a month
Awesome I'm going to take a look, haven't seen this product before, thanks for sharing :)
We are almost 3 years old and have a low volume, high value pipeline. Perhaps 20-30 transactions a month.
We use a spreadsheet + phone/email. Everything else is too complicated or distracting.
Does it become a bottleneck at all that the spreadsheet isn't interconnected to your email conversations, or is that not really a problem for you?
Not really. Everything is very relational and “high touch” so it doesn’t really make sense for us to connect that. We are a small team (3 full timers) so we talk to people on a very direct, one to one basis.
Gotcha, thanks for sharing mate. All the best!
I signed up for a couple of CRM tools like close.io to find out which features I needed/used and created something myself. Cost me a day developing but the tool I built suits our needs best and is integrated in our SaaS.
Next week I want to build a tool to keep track of cold emails we're about to send out. Any suggestions for tools for this are welcome :)
I'm not on the sales place yet, but when I get there, I plan to use google sheets for the first 100 customers. As a matter of fact, I plan to do everything manually for the first 100 customers. Only after then will I spend a dime on another SaaS product.
In the Sales for Founders course, I recommend that founders use a simple spreadsheet for customers #1-10 (I prefer Google Sheets but Airtable or Notion would work fine too).
By customer #10, it's worth investing in a CRM if you decide to turn the project into a 'real' business.
Which CRM to go with depends on what your sales process looks like...
If it's mainly outbound (you reaching out to people) then I recommend you go with Close.com - it's hands down my favourite CRM out there right now.
If it's mainly inbound (and you're already using their marketing tools), then Hubspot may be a good fit. I wouldn't recommend it otherwise though.
Thanks Louis, this is solid advice!
I guess coming from an outbound sales team on an established SaaS company I may be rushing too quickly to set up a sales process! Like you said probably best just to stay with a spreadsheet for right now and not over complicate things.