u/Clear_Raisin7201

Ours had deals marked in progress from seven months ago. Notes that stopped mid-sentence. A pipeline that looked healthy until you clicked into anything.

Nobody was lying. Everyone was just too busy doing the actual work to document the actual work.

So the context lived in people's heads. Which is fine until someone leaves, or you need to hand off an account, or you're trying to remember why a deal went cold three quarters ago.

A CRM nobody updates isn't a CRM. It's a very expensive reminder that you meant to be more organized.

How alive is yours actually?

What if instead of hubspot, intercom and mixpanel that don't talk to each other, you just had one Supabase project with the right tables?

Customers. events. billing synced from stripe. support threads. Lifecycle stages. All in one place, all yours, fully queryable.

The schema is the hard part. Once it's right, everything else is just SQL.

Obvious pushback: maintenance burden, missing features, no support if something breaks. Fair points.

But at small team scale, owning your data might be a better tradeoff than paying for five subscriptions and spending half your time being the glue between them.

Has anyone actually tried this? where did it hold up and where did it fall apart?

Ours was. For longer than I'd like to admit.

Export from Stripe, paste into a sheet, match it up with Hubspot, flag anything weird. Every single week. Nobody questioned it because it just became part of the routine.

We had a name for it. Syncing. It was just copying.

Actual analysis, real decisions, the stuff that moved the needle, maybe 20% of the time. Everything else was just wrestling data into a shape where it could be looked at.

At some point I realized this wasn't an ops problem. It was an architecture problem. The tools don't share by design, so someone on the team quietly became the human integration layer. In our case that someone was doing it every friday in a Google Sheet with color coding and a quiet sense of dread.

Is this just the price you pay at small team scale? or has anyone actually fixed it without hiring a data engineer or building a Zapier flow that breaks every other month?

We're a team of 2 and honestly our CRM is a mix of Notion, a Stripe dashboard and a shared Google Sheet that one of us updates when we remember.

It works until it doesn't. Last month we nearly missed a renewal because the data lived in three different places and nobody caught it in time.

Curious what other small teams are actually using day to day. Not what you'd recommend in theory, what you're actually running right now.

Are you using a proper CRM or just duct-taping tools together and hoping for the best? and if you made the switch to something more structured, was it actually worth the setup time?

Hey everyone,
I’m currently in North Macedonia. what are the must-see places, foods, or experiences I should definitely check out? 🙌

Be honest.

Exporting a CSV from one place, pasting it into another. Cross-referencing Stripe with Hubspot because they never quite match. Updating a Google Sheet that three people rely on but nobody owns.

I did a rough count last week. Around 4 hours just moving data between tools that should already talk to each other.

Not analyzing it. Not making decisions from it. Just moving it

The worst part is it doesn't feel like wasted time in the moment. It feels like work. It looks like work. But it's just plumbing that should've been automated two years ago.

Solo founders and small teams especially, how bad is it for you? and has anything actually helped or have you just accepted it as part of the job?