Why

You're getting roughly one lead per working day through a single web form. Two people can keep that in their heads, let alone in a shared tab. With 10-15 clients (some recurring), your real work is *delivery and retention*, not pipeline hygiene — and a CRM doesn't help you deliver. What you need is one shared place where no inquiry can quietly die between you and your co-founder, plus a rule about who answers first.

What you actually need

1. Airtable (free tier; paid ~$20/user/mo) — one base with a web form that replaces your current form, so every inquiry lands as a row with Status (New / Replied / Proposal / Won / Lost / Dropped) and an Owner field. It fits a small team wanting kanban + forms without a real CRM; check current pricing at airtable.com/pricing before you commit to a paid seat.
2. HubSpot Free CRM (free, unlimited users) — only if you'd rather have shared email threads tied to contacts than a database view. It fits teams of 3-10 on inbound email who need shared ownership for free, but expect aggressive nudges toward paid Sales Hub — ignore them.
3. A 10-minute Monday standup between the two of you: walk every row that isn't Won/Lost. That habit is what actually closes the leak, not the tool.

Do this today

Open Airtable, create a base called "Leads 2026", add fields (Name, Email, Source, Date, Owner, Status, Next action, Next-action date), then in your website builder swap the current web form's action URL for the Airtable form URL. One person, 30 minutes. Test it with a fake submission before you log off.

What to ignore

Salesforce — built for large orgs with dedicated admins; massively over-built and costly for SMBs under 10 people. Pipedrive at this stage too — avoid when solo or with under 30 leads, a sheet is enough. Respond.io, Make automations, "AI lead scoring" — zero of these solve a 20-lead-a-month problem.

What doing nothing costs you

Without a shared row-per-lead, the failure mode is the one neither of you sees: a form submission you both assume the other replied to. At your client values, one of those a quarter is real money — but I won't put a number on it because you didn't share one.

Where this leaves you

You get (1) zero inquiries lost between two inboxes, (2) a one-screen view of who owes what reply, (3) a base you can graduate into a real CRM the day volume actually justifies it. The contrarian truth: your growth bottleneck is almost certainly proposal-to-close conversion or client retention, not lead tracking — fix this in an afternoon and go back to the real work.

When to revisit this

When you're consistently getting 50+ leads/month, OR you hire a third person whose job is sales.