Why

Fewer than 10 inquiries a month means your whole year fits on one screen. The hard part of your business isn't capturing leads — it's remembering where a prospect is in a 9-month conversation when they ghost for 6 weeks and come back. A 4-10 person dev shop with referral-driven inbound doesn't need pipeline forecasting; it needs one place where every active conversation has a "last touch" date and an owner.

What you actually need

1. Notion database with kanban view (free for small team, $10/user/mo paid) — one database, properties: Company, Contact, Source (Referral/Phone/Email), Stage, Owner, Last Touched, Next Action Date, Notes. Kanban grouped by Stage: Inquiry → Scoping → Proposal → Contract → Won/Lost.
2. Fathom or Fireflies (free tier) — auto-records and summarises your discovery and scoping calls. With 6-12 month cycles, you will forget what was said in month 2. Paste the summary into the Notion record.
3. A habit — Friday 20-minute pipeline walk — every Friday afternoon, you (the owner) open the kanban and touch every card whose "Last Touched" is older than 14 days. Either send a real email or move it to Lost.

Do this today

Open Notion, create a new database called "Pipeline 2025", add the eight properties above, then switch to Board view grouped by Stage. Add one card for every live conversation you can remember from the last 90 days and assign an owner from your team. By tonight you'll see which prospects nobody has touched in a month — and those are the ones already slipping.

What to ignore

Skip HubSpot Sales Hub Starter ($20/seat/mo that balloons fast), Salesforce, and Pipedrive — they're built for high-velocity sales teams doing 50+ deals/quarter, not custom-software shops closing a handful of long-cycle contracts a year. Anyone pitching you Apollo or ZoomInfo for "outbound at scale" is selling a problem you don't have; your channel is referrals.

What doing nothing costs you

At <10 inquiries/month and 6-12 month cycles, every single lead that falls through the cracks is a meaningful percentage of your annual revenue. One forgotten follow-up at month 4 of a scoping conversation is typically a full implementation contract walking to a competitor.

Where this leaves you

You've got Notion, a meeting recorder, and a Friday review. The plan would add Notion property templates tuned for software scoping (tech stack, budget band, decision-maker), a rollout sequence for your 4-10 person team naming who owns what, and the specific signal in week three when the Friday review usually gets skipped for client work — because it will.

When to revisit this

When inquiry volume crosses 20/month or you hire a dedicated salesperson who isn't also delivering code.