How to set up your first crm on Starch

Setting up your first CRM is one of those tasks that feels simple until you're three hours into configuring pipeline stages in a tool built for a 200-person sales org. Most operators hit the same wall: the spreadsheet stopped working, but the off-the-shelf CRM requires an admin, a consultant, or a month of YouTube tutorials before it reflects how you actually sell. The underlying job is straightforward — know who you're talking to, where each deal stands, and what needs to happen next. The execution is where it gets messy. What this looks like varies: a services firm tracking relationship warmth is running a different process than a SaaS founder managing a high-volume pipeline, and both are different from someone doing BD by hand out of their inbox. On Starch, you describe your sales process in plain language — the stages, the fields that matter, the data you already have — and a CRM gets built around it. You end up with a live view of your pipeline, email thread history pulled in automatically, and the ability to ask things like 'who haven't I followed up with in three weeks' and get a real answer. No configuration backlog. No fields you'll never use.