Sales & CRM

How to set up your first crm as Asset Management Founders

Sales & CRMFor Asset Management Founders2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You're managing LP relationships out of a spreadsheet or a half-configured HubSpot trial you set up eighteen months ago and never finished. You have 40 LPs, another 60 prospects you're warming for Fund II, and you can't tell at a glance who you haven't emailed in 45 days, who asked a follow-up question you dropped, or which family office intro is sitting cold because you forgot to circle back after the first close. Enterprise fund platforms like Juniper Square assume you have an ops team to run them. HubSpot assumes you have a sales team. You have yourself, maybe a part-time associate, and a calendar that's already full.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Sales & CRMFor Asset Management Founders2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A CRM built around how emerging fund managers actually track LPs — by commitment size, fund interest (Fund I vs. Fund II), last contact date, and relationship source — not a generic B2B sales pipeline

Email thread history from Gmail or Outlook synced directly into each LP and prospect record so you can see the full relationship in one place without switching tabs

A live query that tells you exactly who hasn't heard from you in 30+ days so you can prioritize outreach before your next quarterly close

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

CRM

Data sources & config

Starch connects directly to Gmail (or Outlook) — both are scheduled-sync providers, so message history and contacts sync automatically and stay current in your CRM records. LinkedIn enrichment runs through browser automation — no LinkedIn API needed — to keep LP and prospect profiles up to date. If you use HubSpot or Apollo for any existing contact data, connect them from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries them live to import and deduplicate your existing records.

Prompts to copy

Build me a CRM for an emerging fund manager tracking LP relationships. I need fields for: LP name, entity type (individual, family office, RIA, institutional), committed capital (Fund I), soft-circled amount (Fund II), relationship source (direct, placement agent, warm intro), last contact date, next follow-up date, lead contact at the LP, and deal stage (prospect, first meeting, soft circle, committed, closed). Pipeline stages should be: Cold Prospect, Active Conversation, Soft Circled, Committed, Closed. Pull in email thread history from Gmail for each contact so I can see our last conversation without leaving the CRM.

Show me every LP and prospect I haven't contacted in more than 30 days, sorted by soft-circled amount descending. Draft a short check-in email for the top 5 and flag any who asked me a question I haven't answered.

Set up an Email Agent to triage my inbox by priority, summarize threads longer than 5 messages, and draft replies to any LP asking about portfolio performance, capital calls, or meeting requests. Flag anything from a current LP as high priority.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Start from the CRM starter app in the Starch App Store. It ships with contact, company, and deal tracking out of the box — you'll customize it for LP relationship management in the next step.

2 Tell Starch what fields and pipeline stages matter for your fund. Type your prompt describing LP-specific fields (commitment size, fund interest, relationship source, stage) and let the agent rebuild the schema around your actual workflow instead of a generic sales pipeline.

3 Connect Gmail or Outlook as a scheduled-sync provider. Starch syncs your message history on a schedule, so every LP's record automatically shows your last email conversation, the date, and any open threads.

4 Import your existing contact list. If it's in a spreadsheet, paste it in or upload it. If you've been using HubSpot or Apollo, connect them from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries them live and maps fields to your new schema, flagging duplicates for you to resolve.

5 Run LinkedIn enrichment on your LP and prospect list. Starch automates LinkedIn through your browser — no LinkedIn API needed — to pull current job titles, firm names, and recent activity so your records don't go stale between closes.

6 Set up your '30-day silence' query. Ask Starch to surface every contact you haven't emailed in more than 30 days, sorted by Fund II soft-circle amount. Save this as a view you check weekly before LP calls.

7 Wire in the Email Agent (Email Triage app) to manage inbound LP email. Configure it to flag messages from current LPs as high priority, summarize long threads before your morning review, and draft replies to common requests — capital call questions, meeting scheduling, performance updates.

8 Set up a follow-up automation. Tell Starch to check your CRM every Monday morning, find any contact with a follow-up date that has passed, and draft a short email to each one. Review and send in bulk from your inbox.

9 Log your first week of meeting notes directly in the CRM. After each LP call, describe what was discussed in plain language; Starch extracts the key points, updates the deal stage if it changed, and sets the next follow-up date.

10 Build your Fund II pipeline view. Ask Starch to create a dashboard showing all soft-circled prospects by firm type, sorted by amount, with a running total against your Fund II target. This becomes the view you pull up before every close update call.

11 Run a relationship health check before each quarterly LP report. Ask Starch: 'Which of my committed LPs haven't received a direct email from me in the last 60 days?' Use the output to prioritize personal outreach before the report goes out.

12 Publish the CRM as a shared app if you bring on an associate or IR consultant. They get the same configured view without you spending a day onboarding them to a new tool.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

Fund II Soft-Circle Tracking — Q1 2026 Close

Sample numbers from a real run

Elmwood Family Office — soft-circled	500,000
Castellan RIA — soft-circled	250,000
Direct LP (Nguyen) — committed Fund I, re-up prospect	150,000
Prospect — first meeting held, no follow-up logged	200,000
Placement agent intro — 45 days cold	300,000

You're targeting a $5M first close for Fund II in Q1 2026. Going into February, you have $1.4M soft-circled across five relationships. You run the 30-day silence query in your Starch CRM and immediately see two problems: the $300K placement agent intro has been cold for 45 days because you lost the thread after a long LP call, and the $200K prospect from your first meeting never got a follow-up email. Starch drafts both outreach emails using the Email Agent — a two-paragraph check-in for the placement agent referencing a portfolio milestone you mentioned in your last call, and a follow-up summary for the first-meeting prospect. You review and send in under ten minutes. You also notice Elmwood Family Office emailed three weeks ago with a question about your management fee structure that got buried under a thread about a portfolio company. The Email Agent surfaces it, summarizes the thread, and drafts a clear answer. By end of week, you've re-engaged all five and updated every stage in the CRM without a single manual data entry session.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Days since last LP contact (by LP, tracked against a 30-day threshold)

Soft-circled capital for current fund raise vs. close target (e.g., $1.4M of $5M first close)

LP response rate on quarterly updates and capital call notices

Prospect-to-soft-circle conversion rate by relationship source (direct vs. placement agent vs. warm intro)

Open follow-up items older than 14 days (prevents relationship attrition during busy portfolio periods)

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

HubSpot (Starter or Professional)

Designed for B2B sales teams, not fund managers — you'll spend more time configuring pipelines around concepts like 'deals' and 'leads' than you'll save, and LP-specific fields like committed capital or fund interest don't exist out of the box.

Juniper Square or Addepar

Purpose-built for fund administration and LP reporting but priced for established managers — typically $30K–$60K+ per year with implementation fees, and neither replaces a general-purpose CRM for daily relationship management.

Salesforce

Infinitely configurable but requires an admin or a consultant to set it up for fund management use; the configuration cost and ongoing maintenance make it impractical without dedicated ops staff.

Notion or Airtable (DIY CRM)

Fast to set up for a single manager, but email sync, LP enrichment, and automated follow-up reminders all require manual work or separate integrations that stop working when you're busy.

Affinity

Strong relationship intelligence features popular in VC, but it's priced for multi-partner firms and the AI features require volume of interactions that emerging managers with smaller networks may not hit for years.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — crm, founder inbox all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Will Starch read my actual LP emails or just metadata?

Starch syncs your Gmail or Outlook messages as a scheduled-sync provider — that includes message content, sender, date, and thread history, not just metadata. Your CRM records show the actual email exchange. One honest note: Gmail message sync is capped at 30 messages per page to avoid errors on very long HTML threads, so extremely long chains may require scrolling. For the vast majority of LP correspondence, this isn't a practical limitation.

Can I import my existing LP list from a spreadsheet or from HubSpot?

Yes. Paste in a CSV or connect HubSpot from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries HubSpot live, maps fields to your configured schema, and flags duplicates. If your list is in a spreadsheet, upload it directly and describe the field mapping in plain language.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I'll have LPs asking about data security.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. There's no on-premise or self-hosted deployment option. If your LPs or compliance advisor require SOC 2 Type II certification, that's worth knowing upfront. For most emerging managers at the Fund I or Fund II stage, this hasn't been a blocking issue, but it's an honest limit.

Can I track LP capital commitments and distributions alongside the CRM, or is it just contact management?

The CRM is relationship management — contacts, pipeline stages, email history, enrichment, follow-up reminders. For capital commitments, distributions, and LP reporting with live financials, Starch's Investor Reporting app pulls from Plaid, Stripe, QuickBooks, and NetSuite. The two apps can sit side by side on the same platform, but they're separate surfaces built for different jobs.

What if a prospect uses a platform like iLEVEL or a fund administrator portal that I need to pull data from?

If the portal is web-accessible and you can log in and navigate it, Starch can automate it through your browser — no API required. This is a first-class pattern, not a workaround. Describe what you want to pull and Starch builds the browser automation.

How much does LinkedIn enrichment actually keep up to date? LP contacts move around.

LinkedIn enrichment runs through browser automation — Starch navigates LinkedIn on your behalf to pull current titles, firm names, and profile data. You control when it runs. For a 100-contact LP and prospect list, you can schedule a weekly refresh. The data is only as current as the last time enrichment ran, so if someone switches firms between runs you won't see it until the next refresh.