Yes.
You need a simple CRM — but the real bottleneck is WhatsApp, not pipeline.
What's really going on
You're matching restaurants to suppliers in Dubai, so each lead has two conversations running in parallel. WhatsApp is where the deal actually happens, and right now those chats live on whoever's phone caught them. At 10–50 inquiries a month across 4–10 people, the problem isn't volume — it's that nobody can see what someone else already promised a supplier yesterday. That's how marketplaces leak: one side goes cold while your team thinks the other side is handling it.
What to do instead
- Wati (paid monthly, check current pricing) — shared WhatsApp inbox so every teammate sees the same thread, with tags for "restaurant side" vs "supplier side."
- Airtable (free tier, paid ~$20/user/mo) — one base with two linked tables: restaurants and suppliers, with a "matches" view so you can see which pairings are live, stalled, or closed.
- Habit: every WhatsApp inquiry gets logged in Airtable within the hour, with the supplier side it's meant for.
First action, doable today: in Airtable, build a form with the fields "who asked," "which side," "what they need," and embed it behind your web form. Two people, 30 minutes.
What you're being oversold
Someone has probably pitched you HubSpot or a full enterprise CRM with "marketplace features." At 10–50/month you'd pay per seat for sequences and forecasting you won't touch for a year. Skip Respond.io too unless Instagram and Facebook DMs start mattering — Wati covers WhatsApp-only at AE-friendly pricing. Doing nothing means suppliers ghost because nobody followed up, and restaurants quietly try your competitor next month.
When to revisit this
When you're closing more than one match a day and two teammates have replied to the same supplier without knowing.
The part worth getting right
Decide whose pipeline you're actually running. If you're a broker — you own the match and get paid on it — you need per-deal ownership and stages, and Airtable plus Wati is right. If you're a directory — suppliers and restaurants self-serve and you take a listing fee — you need a database and a help desk, not a CRM, and you're about to overbuild. Same business on the surface, two different tools, and picking wrong costs you a migration in six months.