CRM for indie hackers

The job is first customers, not a pipeline

Indie hackers and bootstrappers looking for a CRM are usually one person. There is no AE, no SDR, and no reason to buy a seat. There is a product, a handful of public conversations, and a memory that is worse than it feels.

Sales CRMs are built for a different job: stages, deal values, required fields, a board a manager can inspect. None of that helps when your whole pipeline is twelve people you talked to this month.

The actual job is smaller. Find people who already have the problem. Talk to them like a person. Come back when they go quiet. Do that every weekday without losing the thread.

What actually has to live somewhere

You need four things on each person, and almost nothing else:

• Who they are, with a link back to the profile or thread.
• Why they were worth talking to, in their words if you can.
• What you already said, so you do not repeat yourself.
• A date to look again.

You do not need company size, lead score, or a required next-stage dropdown. Those fields exist so a team can report. You are the team. If a field does not help you write the next message, skip it.

Why the spreadsheet dies

A sheet works for a week. Then the useful context is in a notes app, the reminder is in your head, and the profile is a tab you closed. You stop opening the sheet because it is never where the conversation is.

The same thing happens with Notion, a saved X search, and a pile of Reddit tabs.

A CRM for this work has to sit in the browser, next to the person, on the morning the follow-up is due. Otherwise you will keep doing the outreach and losing the people.

A CRM that sits in Chrome

Founder CRM is a free Chrome extension for indie and early founders. You describe who you want. It opens X, Product Hunt and Reddit in the session you are already signed into, keeps the people who fit, and saves them on your machine. Then it hands you a short list of who to message today.

The side panel works on the page you are on. Add someone while you are reading. See the note you left last time. Mark a follow-up without opening another tab. It does not draft the message, auto-DM, or press send.

There is no Founder CRM account. Optional AI features use your own provider key. The list lives in your Chrome profile on this machine.

If the category question is what a Chrome-extension CRM is, or what a personal CRM for founders should hold, those notes go deeper. This page is the indie-hacker version: keep it light, keep it local, keep talking.

How to get it

Install Founder CRM from the install page. It is free, local, and needs no account. Chrome Web Store approval is coming soon. Until then the zip is on that page.