What's really going on

Leads land in four places — inbox, web form, LinkedIn DMs, referral texts — and no one owns any of them together. With 2-3 people, whoever saw it last is the system. That works until two of you reply to the same lead, or nobody does. That's the leak, not a missing forecasting module.

What to do instead

1. HubSpot Free CRM (free, unlimited users) — one shared inbox and pipeline for all three of you, so every email and web form lead lands in one place with an owner.
2. Zapier (free tier) — one Zap: new web form submission → HubSpot contact + Slack ping to the owner. LinkedIn stays manual; log those by hand.
3. Habit: a 10-minute standup every morning — read the pipeline together, name who's chasing what today.

First action, today: sign up for HubSpot Free, connect your Gmail, paste your web form's Zapier webhook into a new Zap that creates a HubSpot contact. One person, under 30 minutes.

What you're being oversold

Someone will tell you to start on HubSpot Sales Hub or Folk "because you're scaling." At 2-3 people and under 50 leads a month, paid seats and sequences buy you nothing you'll use — you'll pay per seat for dashboards no one opens. Doing nothing costs you the referral you forgot to reply to for four days, and referrals are the one channel you cannot afford to drop.

When to revisit this

When two leads in one month go cold because nobody remembered whose they were — or when you hire a fourth person.

The part worth getting right

One judgment call decides which setup lasts you the year: are your best leads inbound web-form work, or relationship-driven referrals and LinkedIn threads? If it's inbound volume, HubSpot Free with a shared pipeline is right and cheap for a long time. If it's relationship work — a few big accounts nursed over months — HubSpot will feel like a call center and Folk fits the shape of the job. Pick wrong and in six months you're migrating contacts, notes, and history to the other one. That's the month you don't have.