Question
What to look for in a CRM when you are small.
Every serious CRM will do the job at ten people. What separates them is how hard it is to get data out, how much configuration is required before it works, and what happens to the bill at fifty people.
Almost any of them works at ten people.
The feature comparison is close to irrelevant at your size. Contacts, deals, a pipeline view and an API. Everybody has that.
What actually differs is the cost of getting it wrong later.
The four things that matter.
How hard is it to get your data out. Test this before you put data in, not after.
How much configuration is required before it is useful. Some systems are powerful and need a specialist; at ten people you do not have one.
What does the bill look like at fifty people and on the tier you will actually need.
Does it have a real API, because everything you eventually want to connect depends on it.
The mistake that costs most.
Building a lot of custom fields and process before you know your sales motion. You will change the motion, and every piece of configuration becomes something to unpick.
Start minimal and add only what you have used twice.
What the CRM will not tell you.
Which of your open deals are real. No CRM answers that, because a CRM stores what people entered rather than judging it.
Kaypo reads HubSpot or Salesforce and answers exactly that, at $99 a month, live the day you connect.
Questions
What CRM should a startup use?
At ten people almost any serious CRM works. Choose on data portability, how much configuration is needed before it is useful, what the bill looks like at fifty people, and whether it has a real API.
When should a startup buy a CRM?
As soon as more than one person is selling, or as soon as nobody can hold every open deal in their head. Before that a spreadsheet is genuinely fine.
It arrives in Slack
Every morning, each rep gets one message naming the deals on their own book that moved overnight, biggest mover first, with the reason beside each number and the deals that have gone quiet underneath.
$99 a month, cancel any time.. Everyone on the team. No per seat charge. Connect a CRM and it runs. No implementation fee. 14 day trial. No card.
Related reading
How to score deals in Salesforce or HubSpot
The three ways to score deals in a CRM, what each costs in time and money, and why most home built scoring models stop being maintained within a quarter.
What a small sales team actually needs to buy
Most sales tooling is priced and designed for teams of fifty. What a team of five to fifteen actually needs, and what to skip.
A CRM hygiene checklist that takes an hour
The handful of data problems that quietly break forecasting, reporting and any scoring model built on top. What to check and in what order.
Getting buying signal without a third party data contract
Most of the signal that predicts a close is already in systems you own. What to use before spending on external data.
Reviewed September 20, 2026 against the product as it behaves today.