I Stopped Shopping for the Perfect CRM. I Built It.
I Stopped Shopping for the Perfect CRM. I Built It.
By David Ortiz · March 10, 2026
I've had accounts in Salesforce, HubSpot, and numerous 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 for me wasn't a missing feature. It was a Tuesday morning when I realized I'd spent forty minutes just 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 and activity metrics that told me everything except the one thing I needed: who am I actually talking to today?
That's the part that never makes it into the feature comparison. CRMs are designed for a team--a sales manager, a pipeline coordinator, someone whose entire 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--what I actually needed. Who my contacts are. How I think about relationships. What a follow-up looks like for me specifically, 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. We went again. I built the whole thing in Base44--no code, no developer, no waiting on someone's sprint cycle.
By Sunday I had something that worked. I had a visual layout of my contacts grouped by relationship type--showing me exactly who is a warm lead versus a long-term contact without me having to dig through a single menu. It was a follow-up machine built around how I actually work, not how a software manual says I should.
It took a weekend. One weekend of iteration between me, Claude, and Base44.
Three Things I Got Wrong Before I Got It Right
First: I kept looking for the right CRM instead of asking what I needed. Shopping for tools has the feeling of progress without any of the results. It's a form of procrastination. The right question isn't "which CRM is best." It's "what does my brain actually need to track to keep this business moving?"
Second: I assumed building my own meant writing code. It doesn't anymore. I used to think I needed a $10,000 contract and a six-month roadmap to get custom software. I was wrong. Base44 handles the structure. Claude handles the logic. I handle the decisions. That's a reasonable division of labor--and it's available right now to anyone willing to spend a Saturday on it.
Third: I iterated too slowly at first. I tried to get the first version perfect. That's the old way of thinking. In this new world, the cost of being wrong is near zero. The first version was wrong. The fifth was better. The tenth was the one I actually use to track $19,000 in revenue. A weekend of building isn't one long uninterrupted session--it's a conversation that keeps evolving until the tool finally fits the hand.
What You Can Do Right Now
Open a blank document. Write down two things: what do I actually need to track about my contacts, and what does a real follow-up look like for me?
Don't describe a CRM. Describe your brain.
Then open Claude. Paste what you wrote. Say "help me design a system for this." See what comes back.
That's how mine started. It's how most things start now.
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