What's really going on

You're a solo operator with no revenue yet, chasing e-commerce brands spending $40-80k/mo on ads. That's a considered sale — those founders don't buy from cold email fast. Your bottleneck isn't tracking leads. It's getting enough qualified conversations to have leads worth tracking. Software won't move that needle. Positioning, proof, and outbound volume will.

What to do instead

1. Google Sheets (free) — one tab: date, brand, contact, last touch, next step. That's your whole CRM until you're past 20 real conversations a month.
2. A written niche and offer — pick one vertical inside e-commerce (skincare DTC, supplements, apparel — one) and one outcome you'll stake your name on. Generic "creative lab for e-com" loses to specialists every time at the $40-80k spend tier.
3. A daily outbound habit — 15 personalized emails a day to founders or CMOs in that niche, referencing their actual ads.

Do this in the next 30 minutes: open a new Google Sheet, name it "Pipeline 2026," and paste in the 10 brands you'd most want to work with. Their name, their site, the ad you'd rewrite for free.

What you're being oversold

Someone will tell you to set up HubSpot Free or Folk so you "look professional" and "don't lose leads." At under 10 inquiries a month, solo, this is theater — you'll spend a weekend configuring stages for a pipeline that doesn't exist yet. The cost of doing nothing here isn't lost deals. It's another month of building infrastructure instead of booking your first client.

When to revisit this

When you're consistently getting 15+ qualified replies a month and losing track of who you owed what — then a real tool earns its keep.

The part worth getting right

Your real question isn't which CRM. It's whether your offer is sharp enough that a DTC founder spending $60k/mo on ads will take your cold email seriously. If it is, a spreadsheet is plenty and you just need reps. If it isn't, no tool saves you — you'll grind for months on outbound that never converts and blame the follow-up system. One of those is a volume problem. The other is a positioning problem. They look identical from the inside, and the fix for one makes the other worse.