// The situation

Solo founder running an AI agency in Toronto, ~6 leads/week from cold outbound and LinkedIn DMs. I track them in Notion. Pipedrive is $39/mo and I keep wondering if I should pull the trigger.

The verdict · May 3, 2026

No.

You don't need a CRM.

Why

Six leads a week is 24 a month. You are one person. Notion is already holding your data. The actual problem is almost certainly not "where do I store leads" — it's that follow-ups slip when you get busy, or you lose track of who needs a nudge. That is a discipline problem, not a software problem.

What you actually need

  1. Notion (free) — add a simple Kanban board with five columns: Contacted, Replied, Call Booked, Proposal Sent, Closed. You already have Notion. Use it. Thirty minutes to set this up.
  2. Calendly (free tier) — stop the back-and-forth on booking discovery calls. One link in your LinkedIn DM closes the loop instantly.
  3. A habit — the Friday 15 — every Friday, open your Notion board and move every card, send every overdue follow-up. 24 leads a month does not need automation. It needs 15 minutes of attention once a week.

What to ignore

Pipedrive at $39 CAD/mo is $468 a year to solve a problem you don't have yet. It earns its keep when you have multiple deals in flight across a team or need reporting for investors. You have neither. HubSpot Sales Hub will upsell you into sequences and deal scoring — again, irrelevant at 24 leads a month. Do not let a sales rep reframe your follow-up habit as a "pipeline management challenge."

When to revisit this

When you're consistently handling 50-plus leads a month and manually updating Notion starts eating more than an hour a week.

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