Yes.
You need a simple CRM — but a shared inbox first.
What's really going on
You get 10–50 inquiries a month across WhatsApp and email, split between 2–3 people. That's not a volume problem. That's a "who's replying to this lead?" problem. When a prospect pings WhatsApp on Monday and emails on Thursday, nobody on your team knows it's the same person. Deals slip through the cracks between channels, not inside a pipeline.
What to do instead
- HubSpot Free CRM (free, unlimited users) — one shared place where both channels land against the same contact, so any of you can see the full thread.
- Zapier (free tier) — wire new WhatsApp numbers and inbound emails into HubSpot as contacts automatically, so nobody types anything twice.
- Habit: a 10-minute daily standup — whose lead is whose, what's stuck. Two founders can hold a pipeline in their heads if they sync once a day.
Do this in the next 30 minutes: in HubSpot, create a deal pipeline with four stages — New, Qualified, Demo Booked, Closed — and drag every open conversation from the last two weeks into it. One person, one sitting.
What you're being oversold
Someone is probably pitching you Twilio's WhatsApp API or Respond.io because "adtech" sounds technical. Both are wrong here — Twilio needs an engineer babysitting it, and Respond.io is built for teams handling hundreds of conversations a day. At your volume, you'll pay monthly for features you won't touch. Doing nothing costs you the deals where the lead messaged WhatsApp, got no reply for two days because the other founder thought you had it, and went quiet.
When to revisit this
When you hire your first non-founder salesperson, or when WhatsApp inquiries cross 50 a month.
The part worth getting right
The fork is this: are your buyers mostly chatting on WhatsApp and treating email as an afterthought, or the reverse? If WhatsApp is the real channel, HubSpot Free alone won't cut it — you'll need a WhatsApp Business inbox piped in, and that choice (shared number vs. each founder's own) shapes everything. If email is where deals actually close, HubSpot Free does the whole job and WhatsApp is just first-touch noise. Pick wrong and you'll either migrate CRMs in six months or pay for messaging tools you don't need. Which channel actually closes your deals?