No.
You don't need a CRM. You need your first ten customers.
What's really going on
You have no customers and fewer than ten inquiries a month — across zero of them, actually, because you haven't started. A CRM organises a flow that doesn't exist yet. Right now your real problem is that leads come from four different places (WhatsApp, Email, Instagram DM, LinkedIn) and you have no single spot to see them. That's a notebook problem, not a software problem.
What to do instead
- Google Sheets (free) — one tab, six columns: name, channel, date, what they asked, next step, status. Every inquiry from every channel lands here within an hour of arriving.
- WhatsApp Business app (free) — switch your number over and use Labels ("new", "quoted", "booked"). That's your WhatsApp pipeline, no extra tool needed.
- Habit: every Friday, 20 minutes, read the sheet top to bottom and message anyone who's gone quiet.
First action, today: open Sheets, name the file "Leads 2026", make those six columns, pin the tab. Done in 15 minutes.
What you're being oversold
Whoever told you "you need a CRM" was probably thinking of HubSpot or Pipedrive. HubSpot Free is built for teams of 3-10 sharing inbound — you're one person. Pipedrive starts around RM65-70/user/month and is overkill below 30 leads. Paying for either now is paying to manage emptiness.
The cost of doing nothing here isn't lost revenue — you have none yet. It's spending your first three months configuring software instead of talking to schools, parents, and HR teams who'd actually pay you.
When to revisit this
When you're juggling more than 20 live conversations at once and the sheet starts feeling slow — not before.
The part worth getting right
The real call isn't which tool. It's which channel deserves your hours this quarter. Cyber safety education sells differently on each one: LinkedIn gets you corporate training contracts with long deal cycles and bigger cheques; Instagram and WhatsApp get you parents and schools, faster yes, smaller tickets. Pick wrong and you'll spend six months posting into the wrong audience and blame the lack of a CRM. Pick right and ten inquiries a month becomes enough to live on. So — who's actually writing the cheque: the HR head, or the parent?