No.
You don't need a CRM. You need one shared pipeline your three founders actually look at every morning.
What's really going on
You're 2-3 people chasing 10-50 inbound signals a month across LinkedIn DMs, email threads, and a web form. That's not a sales ops problem — that's a "where did the LinkedIn reply from the Retell refugee go?" problem. Your leads are devs and technical buyers; they ghost fast if the second touch is slow. The real leak is channel fragmentation, not missing software.
What to do instead
- Airtable (free tier) — one base, columns for source / contact / stage / next action / last touched. Forward every inbound here within 10 minutes of it landing.
- Cal.com (free, self-host or cloud) — one booking link in your LinkedIn bio and email signature. Fits your open-source story and kills the "what times work" email loop.
- Habit — one 15-minute standup, same time daily, three founders, one screen: the Airtable view sorted by "last touched". Anything older than 48 hours gets a reply or gets killed.
First action, next 30 minutes: open Airtable, create a base called "Pipeline", add the five columns above, paste in every open LinkedIn and email thread from the last two weeks. One person owns the base.
What you're being oversold
Freshsales, HubSpot, Attio — anything with "pipeline stages" and per-seat pricing — is wrong for 2-3 founders at pre-revenue inbound volume. You'll spend a week configuring it and still forget to log things. n8n is tempting because you're technical, but automating a process you haven't run manually yet is building a factory for a product you haven't made. Doing nothing costs you the warmest leads — the ones who already churned off Vapi and were ready to try the open-source answer this week.
When to revisit this
When one founder is spending more than an hour a day on lead replies, or when two different people replying to the same prospect becomes a real problem.
The part worth getting right
Your lead shape decides your whole first year. If most inbound is self-serve devs who want to install TuneHQ and talk later, you need docs, a Discord, and a GitHub issues habit — the pipeline barely matters. If most inbound is founders who want a demo and a quote, you need booked calls and a human follow-up rhythm, and the pipeline is everything. These two futures want opposite tools, opposite first hires, opposite landing pages. Look at your last 20 inbounds and count which kind they are before you build anything.