David Ortiz · 4 minute read

I've had accounts in Salesforce, HubSpot and plenty of others. Each one made the same promise: your contacts, organized. Your follow-ups, automated. Your pipeline, visible.

None of them worked the way my brain works.

The breaking point wasn't a missing feature. It was a Tuesday morning when I spent forty minutes trying to find a phone number for a follow-up I knew I needed to make. I was staring at a dashboard full of colorful charts that told me everything except the one thing I needed: who am I actually talking to today?

That part never makes it into the feature comparison. CRMs are designed for a team: a sales manager, a pipeline coordinator, someone whose whole job is keeping the system fed. If you're a solo practitioner or a small firm, you spend half your time serving the tool instead of the other way around.

I got tired of fitting my process into someone else's software. So I stopped trying.

One weekend. No developer. No code.

One Saturday morning I opened Claude and started describing what I actually needed. Not the features I thought I was supposed to want. Who my contacts are. How I think about relationships. What a follow-up looks like for me, not for a hypothetical sales team.

I'm a chef by training. I spent decades as a financial planner. I'm not a developer. But I kept going. Claude shaped the logic, I told it what didn't fit, and we went again. I built the whole thing in Base44, with no code and no waiting on someone's sprint cycle.

By Sunday I had something that worked: my contacts laid out by relationship type, so I could see who was a warm lead and who was a long-term contact without digging through a single menu. A follow-up machine built around how I actually work.

A CRM and follow-up screen like the one I built, with sample data

Three things I got wrong first

I kept looking for the right CRM instead of asking what I needed. Shopping for tools feels like progress without any of the results. The right question isn't "which CRM is best." It's "what does my brain actually need to track to keep this business moving?"

I assumed building my own meant writing code. It doesn't anymore. I used to think custom software meant a big contract and a six-month roadmap. Base44 handles the structure. Claude handles the logic. I handle the decisions.

I iterated too slowly at first. I tried to get the first version perfect. The cost of being wrong is close to zero now. The first version was wrong. The fifth was better. The tenth is the one I use to track $19,000 in revenue.

What you can do right now

Open a blank document. Write down two things: what you actually need to track about your contacts, and what a real follow-up looks like for you.

Don't describe a CRM. Describe your brain.

Then open Claude, paste what you wrote, and say "help me design a system for this." See what comes back.

That's how mine started. It's how most things start now.

David

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I stopped shopping for the perfect CRM.I built it.