> I believe the reason why small businesses and freelancers struggle so much is because most CRMs out there do not ask them WHAT THEY NEED.
I work for a smallish CRM company targeting the SMB space. Not to be defensive, but making a general purpose CRM is hard. It's not that we're not asking, but there are as many different answers as there are customers out there. Some want contact management, some want task management, some want pipeline management, some want productivity and collaboration tools, all ending up shopping in the same bucket of "CRM". The list of potential features to add is endless, as is the scope creep and complexity creep of your software as your feature interactions multiply.
Though I suppose, the silver lining for you is that if you are operating as a bootstrapped business rather than growing under duress from investors, you can choose your battles (and customers) more judiciously. Best of luck out there.
I work for a smallish CRM company targeting the SMB space. Not to be defensive, but making a general purpose CRM is hard. It's not that we're not asking, but there are as many different answers as there are customers out there. Some want contact management, some want task management, some want pipeline management, some want productivity and collaboration tools, all ending up shopping in the same bucket of "CRM". The list of potential features to add is endless, as is the scope creep and complexity creep of your software as your feature interactions multiply.
Though I suppose, the silver lining for you is that if you are operating as a bootstrapped business rather than growing under duress from investors, you can choose your battles (and customers) more judiciously. Best of luck out there.