u/TheTechHalf

I've been quietly building zenible.com for the past 6+ months. It's something I've wanted to do for years but the size of the project was overwhelming.

I've been freelancing for the past 20+ years and really struggled with the tools that exist to manage my business, and wanting something different.

My standard tool stack has been freshbooks for finance, hubspot for CRM, scheduleonce/oncehub for call booking and more recently otter for meeting notes.

I've never loved any of those tools - freshbooks was probably my biggest bug. I'm based in the UK and most of my clients are in the US and UAE. I invoice in USD most of the time, and most of my expenses are in GBP.

There is no way to see a consolidated view of both currencies. If I switch the dropdown to USD, I'm making tons of money and I have virtually no expenses. When I switch the dropdown to GBP, I've invoiced almost nothing this month and have a list of expenses to pay. That's ridiculous. The product also doesn't seem to have evolved or added any new features in the 6-7 years since I started using it.

Hubspot - I didn't really use it much - it was too overcomplicated, I watched a few YouTube videos but ran out of time. I tried to add more than a few contacts and I needed to upgrade my plan. I went back to apple notes and even a pen and paper to track who I'd spoken to, what prices I'd agreed, etc.

Otter was great for meeting notes - did exactly what it said it would do, but didn't integrate with the rest of my flow and was another subscription.

Same with schedule once - it's got a lot of advanced features but the only ones that I use is just to set my scheduling preferences, allow people to book into my calendar and handle reminders and cancellations - I didn't need to pay another subscription for that.

I sat down last year and decided to build a consolidated CRM and finance product. A place where I could track leads all the way from lead stage to won/lost, track the notes, services being discussed, projects being agreed etc, and then move them straight into client status and handle the full finance work flow all the way through to payment and processing fees reconciliation, also handling things like payment reminders, taxes, etc etc.

I knew it wasn't going to be easy - I've worked in fintech before - it's not something you can vibe code in a couple of days and requires a huge amount of verification, testing, auditing, etc, but month on month I made progress until I cancelled hubspot and freshbooks and migrated over to zenible on the 1st of January this year.

Over the last few months I've added full call booking/calendar integration, meeting bot and business intelligence features. A prospect can now book a call directly into my calendar, I see them in my "Calls Booked" CRM column, I can attach notes and files, the meeting bot will join the meeting automatically, transcribe and provide insights, and after the meeting I can send the meeting into "The Boardroom" to ask the sales expert where I went wrong in negotiations, or ask the mindset expert how I could have more confidently framed my offer.

I can then take that contact - drag them into the "Won" category, track time, services and expenses, generate invoices and get paid.

I'm not here to talk about the build journey - I know how to build things - I don't know how to market them. I've always had someone else handle the marketing. This is new to me, so I'm going to build the marketing in public.

Next step - get submitted to relevant SaaS product directories, and start building the Facebook/IG, TikTok and Twitter. I'm fully bootstrapped - not looking for any investment or funding, so I'll be paying out of pocket for someone to do that as it's too far outside of my own skillset and my time is better used elsewhere.

My first milestones are - active socials and 10 users on special lifetime discount plans that can act as my testimonials.

Looking forward to sharing the journey and open to any feedback, suggestions and improvements.

The product link is -> www.zenible.com

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