Building a CRM From Scratch, Kinda

How I basically ended up making a CRM from scratch.

The company I work for used to have all of their student information recorded on paper and random spreadsheets (Office 365 and Google Sheets sometimes). This is obviously a huge mess, and I was hired to fix it.

At the time I was already somewhat experienced in web technology. I mostly made and hosted marketing websites for clients of my freelance business, so nothing too backend-heavy. Using an already-made CRM was the right choice at the time.

I searched around for a free and open source CRM and found one called EspoCRM. This was a great fit. It was light on resources so I could run it on a crappy $5/mo VPS, which I may or may not still be doing, so I spun it up in a Docker container. Here’s how it went and what I learned.

Paper to digital

This is what I was working with, but with a million more rows and about half the data was missing, spread across Slack messages, paper notes, and other spreadsheets.

cool things I did to make it cool

• wiping db
• initially started as a way to mark down progress
• from google sheets to an actual db
• choice of CRM
• tech stack

lol

hey gotem