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Comment by nomilk

9 days ago

My SaaS is almost done and I'm about to embark on some months of cold-calling (it will be brutal). I'll probably use a google sheet as a database. Any better suggestions?

7 comments

nomilk

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bensyverson  9 days ago

Yes: all CRMs are bad, so just make your own if/when you outgrow the spreadsheet

  • ozi  9 days ago

    Unless you actually plan on building as successful SaaS... then just, you know, use Salesforce. There are exceedingly few reasons a $100m SaaS company shouldn't just be running on SFDC.

    • nomilk  9 days ago

      I hadn't heard of SFDC, but watched a ~5min summary vid [0]. Seems like overkill for a one person startup, but seems decent for a larger company [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntZbRd-DPII

      I'll probably use a google sheet with a row for each prospect, and columns for spoke to, hotness (degree of suitability for my SaaS), and 'notes' (will put a new bullet point with brief summary of each call).

      I was thinking it would be cool to record the calls and feed them to AI for some simple/crude auto-summary which automatically pulls out rejection reason, concerns, interesting points etc.

      I might even vibe-code something myself, since I prefer primitive and reduced clutter. May open source it if I do. However, I'd be surprised if something like this doesn't already exist..

      1 reply →

    • bensyverson  8 days ago

      There are a few steps between founding a company and pulling in $100m in revenue, but yeah, I guess

trcf23  9 days ago

Frankly google sheet will take you a very long way... Attio and most CRM are built for teams with sales pipeline, not a solo founder trying to find PMF. Most of the features aims at describing complex sales processes and collaboration.

So basically what you want to do is to try different takes (cold emailing, phone, events, influenceurs), get your first 50 customers, try to understand the process (who takes the decision, who will pay, who will use, etc) and based on that, design your CRM to match this process.

My 2 cents (saas solofounder with 6000 users): very important not to overengineer everything. As dev it's our natural tendency but your time and marketing effort is probably the biggest leverage you have.

Good luck :-)