What's really going on

"Logs for friends" tells me this is early and personal. The real risk isn't a missing tool — it's forgetting to reply to someone who trusted you enough to write. At 10–50 inquiries a month, one person, two channels, the problem is memory, not pipeline. Any CRM you set up now will feel like homework by week two.

What to do instead

1. WhatsApp Business app (free) — turn on Labels. Make four: "New", "Waiting on me", "Waiting on them", "Done". That's your pipeline.
2. Google Sheets (free) — one tab, five columns: name, channel, what they asked, last touch date, next step. One row per person.
3. Habit — every night, 5 minutes: move any WhatsApp label, and copy new Instagram DMs into the sheet. That's it.

Do the first action now: open WhatsApp Business, tap a chat, tap the three dots, "Label chat", create "Waiting on me". Tag every open conversation from the last week.

What you're being oversold

Anyone pointing you at Respond.io, Wati, or Folk at your volume is selling you a monthly bill for features you won't touch. Those tools earn their price at hundreds of chats a month or with a team sharing one inbox — neither is you. The cost of doing nothing here isn't lost revenue; it's a friend who messaged twice and got silence, and quietly stopped.

When to revisit this

When you're forgetting replies more than once a week, or a second person starts helping you answer.

The part worth getting right

The one call is what "friends" really means here. If these are actual friends and word-of-mouth, a sheet plus WhatsApp labels will carry you for a year — spending on software now is a distraction. If "friends" is your warm way of saying early customers, and money is changing hands, then you need to decide today what a "lead" is, what "done" means, and whether Instagram DMs get copied into the same place as WhatsApp — because if you split them, you'll lose people in the gap. Get that definition wrong now and in six months you'll be rebuilding the log from screenshots.