Why

At 10–50 inquiries/month as a solo operator across web form, email, LinkedIn, and Instagram DM, your problem isn't deal flow — it's that four channels dump into four places and none of them remember names. A full CRM would become the fifth tab you forget to open. You need a single contact spine you can paste anything into in 10 seconds, and a way to stop digging through Gmail search to find what someone agreed to.

What you actually need

1. Airtable free tier — one base called "Contacts & Inquiries" with fields: Name, Channel, First Contact Date, What They Want, Status, Next Follow-up, Notes/Agreement. Kanban view grouped by Status.
2. Gmail labels + filter — create labels "Inquiry-New", "Inquiry-Active", "Inquiry-Done"; set a filter on your web form's sending address to auto-label "Inquiry-New" so nothing hides in the main inbox.
3. A habit — the end-of-day 15 — last 15 minutes of every workday, check Gmail / LinkedIn messages / Instagram DMs, add any new inquiry as a row in Airtable, set a Next Follow-up date. Non-negotiable.

Do this today

Go to airtable.com, sign up free, click "Start from scratch" → name the base "Contacts & Inquiries" → add the seven fields above → switch to Kanban view grouped by Status with lanes "New / Waiting on me / Waiting on them / Booked / Closed". Then open Gmail, scroll the last 30 days, and paste every inquiry you find into a row. By tonight you'll know exactly how many people are waiting on you — probably more than you think.

What to ignore

Skip HubSpot Free (looks free, nags you to upgrade the moment you add a second pipeline), Pipedrive (~$15/seat/mo for sales pipelines you don't have yet), and anything Salesforce-adjacent. You're a team of one across four channels — sales-pipeline software is solving a problem you won't have for another year.

What doing nothing costs you

Inquiries from LinkedIn and Instagram DM compound silently — they fall off the screen and there's no search-by-sender like Gmail. The cost isn't just lost bookings; it's the reputational drip of people telling each other "I messaged her, never heard back."

When to revisit this

When you hire your first teammate, or when your Airtable base passes 300 rows — whichever comes first.