so i did what a lot probably do early on and just cobbled together something using chatgpt, notion and a few automations to manage leads and customer data. it worked well enough at the start and honestly felt like the scrappy smart move when you're trying to keep costs down. but as things picked up i started realising how much i was missing by not having everything in one structured place. pulling reports, tracking where leads were in the pipeline, understanding what was actually working all became way harder than it needed to be.
now i'm at the stage where i want to do it properly and looking into what actually makes sense for an early stage team. curious what others here landed on and whether there was a particular point where it just clicked that a real crm was worth committing to.