Sounds like hard won experience there. I've long thought CRM was BS but been wondering lately - this helps, thanks.

The only thing more bullshit than 99% of CRM implementations is not having one when you start to outgrow Excel.

yes this

What crm did you settle on and why?

csv file with emails + python thing to send them using postmark

it took an hour every time I had to do anything, and I ended up with a collection of python scripts that solved random problems that were already solved somewhere else, which grew and grew

I tried a few programmable shared inbox tools and they were all clunky and meh. tried lighter things like supabase + some golang list manager, also meh.

postmark has a CRM they acquired, iirc it was too expensive

zoho seems reasonable on price, but did not try it

but to be clear, even if I paid up for something dumb like hubspot, my life would have been simpler and better

zapier is a good place to shop for these

CRM selection heavily depends on stage of the company and GTM motion complexity. I would never recommend to anyone to ever start with SFDC, but I can't not recommend ending there.