Why I Built Skunk CRM

After years of building on the web and for clients at various agencies, I decided to go out on my own. And like most people who make that leap, I quickly needed a way to keep track of customers and leads.

So I tried the obvious things.

I tried Salesforce once, years ago. It felt like flying a commercial airplane to go get groceries. Dashboards everywhere. Terminology I didn't understand. Setup wizards that assumed I had a sales team, a marketing team, and a dedicated admin. I didn't have any of those things. I just wanted to know who my customers were and when I last talked to them.

I went back to spreadsheets. Google Sheets, then Notion. This worked for a while. It's hard to beat the simplicity of a spreadsheet. But spreadsheets don't talk to anything. They don't know when someone fills out a form on your website. They don't show you a timeline. They're just rows and columns, and eventually you stop updating them because the friction is too high.

The thing that kept bothering me was this: my business runs on WordPress. My websites are WordPress. My products are WordPress plugins. My customers find me through WordPress. But my customer data lived somewhere else entirely, in some SaaS tool that had no idea what WordPress even was.

That felt wrong.

The actual problem

Most CRMs are built for a specific kind of company. The kind with a sales team that makes cold calls. The kind that needs lead scoring and pipeline stages and automation workflows. The kind that will pay $50 per user per month and consider it a bargain.

That's not me. That's probably not you either, if you're reading this.

I needed something much simpler. A place to store contacts. A way to see when I last talked to someone. Maybe some notes about what we discussed. Integration with my WordPress forms so leads don't fall through the cracks.

That's it. That's the whole list.

But try finding a CRM that does just that. Every tool I looked at wanted to be everything. Email marketing. Automation. Analytics. AI-powered insights. Landing pages. The feature lists went on forever, and the pricing scaled accordingly.

I didn't need powerful. I needed usable.

What I believe about CRMs

Here's my opinion, and it's the reason SkunkCRM exists:

If you need training to use a CRM, it's too complex.

A CRM should be obvious. You open it, you see your contacts, you add a note, you move on with your day. It shouldn't require a weekend of YouTube tutorials. It shouldn't have a certification program.

Most CRM complexity exists to justify enterprise pricing, not to solve real problems. The features are there because someone in a boardroom decided they needed feature parity with competitors. Not because users asked for them.

I wanted to build the opposite of that.

What SkunkCRM is

SkunkCRM is a WordPress plugin. It lives in your WordPress admin, alongside everything else you use to run your site. Your customer data stays in your database, on your server, under your control.

It does the basics well: contacts, companies, deals, notes, activity history. It connects to your WordPress forms. It has a simple dashboard that shows you what's happening without overwhelming you with metrics you'll never use.

That's about it.

What SkunkCRM is not

It's not trying to be Salesforce. It's not trying to be HubSpot. It's not trying to be the CRM for everyone.

If you have a 50-person sales team and need complex automation workflows and lead scoring and territory management, this isn't for you. Those tools exist, they're good at what they do, and you should use them.

SkunkCRM is for the person who just needs to keep track of their customers without the overhead. The freelancer. The small agency. The solo founder. The WordPress developer who wants their tools to live where their work lives.

It's deliberately not a Swiss Army knife. It does one thing, and it tries to do that thing well.

How people actually use it

Most people who use SkunkCRM have a pretty simple setup. They connect it to their contact form, so new inquiries automatically become contacts. They check in occasionally to see who they haven't followed up with. They add notes after calls so they remember what was discussed.

Nothing fancy. No complex pipelines. No automation rules. Just a straightforward way to not lose track of people.

Some people use the deals feature to track projects or proposals. Some don't use it at all. Both are fine. The tool adapts to how you work, not the other way around.

Why now

WordPress has changed a lot over the years, but the CRM options for WordPress users haven't really kept up. You either get bloated plugins trying to replicate SaaS tools, or you get abandoned projects that haven't been updated in years.

I wanted something in between. Something maintained. Something focused. Something that treats WordPress as a first-class platform, not an afterthought.

So I built it.

A final thought

I'm not trying to convince you that SkunkCRM is the right choice for you. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. You know your situation better than I do.

What I can tell you is why it exists: because I needed it, and I suspected other people might need it too. Because the alternatives felt either too complex or too neglected. Because I believe there's room for tools that do less, but do it well.

If that resonates with you, maybe give it a look. If not, no hard feelings. There are plenty of other options out there.

Thanks for reading.