This blog post was written by a human, myself. I used AI to check my spelling and grammar.
Why I needed more than referrals
I provide online services to local and small to mid-size businesses, and I got to a point where I needed more than just referrals to keep growing. The referrals did me good for my first 10 or so clients, but after that point I had to find other ways to bring in new clients. I researched and trained myself on how to scrape for leads and do some cold calling and cold email. After doing that from my work cell for a while, I researched tools that I should use to avoid my work cell being flagged as spam, so that I could purchase numbers from other area codes to use, and so that I could stay organized and keep track of my sales pipeline and activity all in one place.
What I actually needed from a CRM
I ended up getting a free trial of Pipedrive (a sales CRM) and Quo (calling and phone number software), mostly due to the tools' simplicity and price. Full disclosure, I'm not sponsored by any companies when writing this. I enjoyed both tools a lot, but I realized that I didn't really need all of the fancy bells and whistles. All I really needed was somewhere to store the leads that I scraped from Nextdoor, Google Maps, or Yelp, along with details and notes about them, and a visual representation of where the leads are in the pipeline.
Building my own instead
I had about a week left in my free trial of Pipedrive, so I decided that I would try and build my own CRM. (I feel like I should pause here to clarify that I'm not trying to sell you anything here either.) Although I am familiar with some development languages, I used Claude Code to speed up the process since my free trial was coming to an end soon.
I ended up building the web app and calling it Dreamy CRM, a play on my business's name, Dream Boldly Studios. It took me about a week to build it, fix a few bugs, and solve some mobile responsiveness issues. I made it so that it can pull call activity from Quo's API, so any time I make a call from Quo, the call activity is logged in the lead's details and I can add notes about the call. I also made it so that the CRM can push some data into Quo: when I create a lead and save it into the CRM, it's also saved in Quo. That way, I don't need to save the lead/contact in two different places, and if someone calls me back, then Quo already has the contact info saved from the CRM so that I know who it is that's calling me.
A look inside the app
Here's what the Pipeline tab looks like:
I also linked the CRM to my email inbox, so that any quote requests that come through my website also show up in the app:
Another useful feature I implemented was the ability to set a task for a lead, so that I can remember to call or follow up with them in the future:
What it costs to run
The best part of it all is that it costs me nothing to operate the CRM, apart from the time I spent working on it of course. I was able to save about $588 a year by building out my own CRM. I still need to pay for Quo, there's no way around that, but it's a project that I'm happy about and that fits my business better than anything else would, since I built it specifically for my agency. I also use the CRM on my phone, which is great for whenever I'm not around my computer.
If you have any questions on how to start building out your own custom web app or software for your business, feel free to shoot me a message at dreamboldlystudios@gmail.com. If you'd rather have someone else handle it for you, that's exactly the kind of thing I do. I build custom websites and web apps, create social media posts, and manage Google Business Profiles for businesses. You can get a free quote for any of that here. (Surprise, now I'm definitely trying to sell you something.)