What's really going on

You get 10-50 inquiries a month across email and a web form. That's small enough to handle in a shared inbox — and big enough that leads slip when one of you is heads-down shipping. The real gap isn't software. It's that no one owns a lead the moment it lands, and follow-ups die in someone's personal inbox.

What to do instead

1. HubSpot Free CRM (free, unlimited users) — connect both founder inboxes and the web form. Every lead becomes a contact with a shared timeline. No per-seat cost as you grow to 10.
2. Zapier (free tier) — one Zap: web form → HubSpot contact → Slack ping to whoever's on lead duty this week. Two minutes to know, not two days.
3. The habit — one of you owns "lead duty" each week. Every inquiry gets a reply within 24 hours or it gets handed off in writing.

First action, 30 minutes: open HubSpot, sign up free, connect your Gmail/Outlook with the "Connect your inbox" button, paste the HubSpot form embed into your site where your current form lives. Done.

What you're being oversold

You're the exact profile sales reps push toward paid Sales Hub seats, Freshsales paid tiers, or Folk — "you'll need pipelines, sequences, scoring." At 10-50 inquiries you won't, not for a year. Folk is built for agency-style relationship work, not transactional SaaS signups. Doing nothing costs you the leads that arrive on a Friday night and get buried by Monday — for an AI ad tool with self-serve pricing, that's a meaningful share of your trial signups quietly going cold.

When to revisit this

When inquiries cross ~80/month or you hire a third person whose job is sales, not product.

The part worth getting right

The fork is what your inquiries actually are. If most are demo requests from marketers who'll pay $100-500/mo, you need a real pipeline with stages and follow-up cadences — HubSpot free is fine, but you'll set it up like a sales tool. If most are self-serve signups poking around the free tier, you don't need a pipeline at all; you need lifecycle email and a way to spot the 5% worth a human reply. Same inbox, two completely different setups — and picking wrong means rebuilding in three months, or worse, treating every tire-kicker like a deal and burning out.