Why

At your volume, a CRM's value (assignment, ownership, forecasting across reps) is zero — you're the only rep. Your real risk is a LinkedIn DM, a referral intro email, and a web form submission living in three different inboxes while you're heads-down building. B2B edtech deals are long (often 2-6 months with school/college buyers), so a single forgotten follow-up in week 3 quietly kills a deal you'll never know you lost.

What you actually need

1. HubSpot Free CRM (free) — connect your email, forward the web form to it, and log LinkedIn conversations manually as notes. One pipeline: New → Discovery → Pilot Discussion → Proposal → Closed. Free covers you well past where you are.
2. Zapier or Make (free tier) — one zap: web form submission → create HubSpot contact + deal in "New". So inbound never sits in your inbox un-logged.
3. A habit — Friday 30-minute pipeline sweep — every Friday, open HubSpot filtered by "last activity > 7 days", and send one nudge to each. That single habit is what separates closed deals from ghosted ones in long B2B cycles.

Do this today

Sign up at hubspot.com/products/crm (free forever tier), connect your work email under Settings → Integrations → Email, and create ONE pipeline with the five stages above under Sales → Deals → Pipelines. Then manually add every live conversation from the last 30 days across referrals, LinkedIn, email, and the web form as deals in the right stage. By tonight you'll see — for the first time — every live opportunity on one screen and which ones you've gone quiet on.

What to ignore

Skip HubSpot Sales Hub Starter ($20/seat/mo) and Professional ($100/seat/mo) — the free tier does everything a solo founder needs and the upsell calls will start the moment you sign up; ignore them for 6 months. Don't touch Apollo, ZoomInfo, Outreach, or Salesloft — those are tools for outbound SDR teams, not a solo founder running referrals + inbound. Anyone pitching you Salesforce Essentials at your stage is wasting your money.

What doing nothing costs you

At 10–50 B2B edtech inquiries/month, even one forgotten follow-up per month on a deal cycle that long compounds — you'll close one or two fewer pilots a year without ever knowing which ones slipped, and in edtech a single school/college pilot is often the start of a multi-year contract.

When to revisit this

When you hire your first salesperson — that's the day shared ownership becomes a real problem and the free tier's limits start to bite.