Sales & CRM

How to set up your first crm as Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators

Sales & CRMFor Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You have 200 students across two cohorts, a waitlist for the next one, and your 'CRM' is a Google Sheet with columns like 'paid?', 'onboarded?', and 'follow up???' with three question marks because you genuinely don't know. Stripe tells you who paid. Calendly tells you who booked a discovery call. ConvertKit tells you who opened the launch email. None of these talk to each other, so you spend 45 minutes before every cohort start manually cross-referencing tabs to figure out who's in, who ghosted after the sales call, and who paid but never showed up to orientation. You've lost at least one renewal because you forgot to follow up.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Sales & CRMFor Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A CRM shaped around how you actually sell coaching — with fields for cohort name, enrollment status, lesson completion stage, and renewal interest — instead of a generic B2B deal pipeline you have to awkwardly retrofit

Automatic contact enrichment that pulls in LinkedIn profiles and email thread history so you know, at a glance, whether a prospective student last heard from you six days or six weeks ago

A live view that answers 'who's on my waitlist, who's paid for the next cohort, and who has an unanswered discovery call follow-up' — without opening four tabs

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 Email Agent

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule so the CRM automatically logs email threads against each contact and the Email Agent has full thread context. Connect Calendly from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live to pull discovery call bookings into the CRM as pipeline events. Connect Stripe from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live to flag which contacts have a completed payment. LinkedIn enrichment runs through browser automation — no LinkedIn API needed — to keep contact profiles current.

Prompts to copy

Build me a CRM for my cohort-based course business. I need a pipeline with stages: Inquiry, Discovery Call Booked, Discovery Call Done, Offer Sent, Enrolled, Completed, Alumni. Each contact should have fields for: cohort name (e.g. Spring 2026), payment status, how they heard about me, and a notes field for what their main goal is. I want to be able to filter by cohort and see who I haven't followed up with in more than 7 days.

Set up an Email Agent that monitors my Gmail for messages from prospective students and current enrollees. Triage by: anyone asking a question I haven't replied to in 48 hours goes to the top. Summarize threads longer than 5 emails. Draft a reply template for the three most common questions: 'Is this course right for me?', 'Can I get a payment plan?', and 'When does the next cohort start?'.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Open Starch and start with the CRM starter app. It gives you a working contact database and pipeline out of the box — you're going to reshape it, not start from scratch.

2 Describe your actual pipeline stages to Starch in plain language: Inquiry → Discovery Call Booked → Discovery Call Done → Offer Sent → Enrolled → Completed → Alumni. Starch rebuilds the pipeline schema around those stages.

3 Add the custom fields that matter to your business: cohort name, payment status, how they found you, primary goal they shared on the discovery call. Tell Starch what you want and it adds the fields — no settings menus to hunt through.

4 Connect Gmail so Starch syncs your email data on a schedule. Every inbound email from a contact in your CRM automatically appears in their thread history. You stop manually copy-pasting 'they emailed on March 4' into a spreadsheet.

5 Connect Calendly from Starch's integration catalog. When a prospect books a discovery call, Starch moves them from 'Inquiry' to 'Discovery Call Booked' automatically and logs the scheduled time against their contact record.

6 Connect Stripe from Starch's integration catalog. When a payment clears, Starch updates the contact's payment status field and moves them to 'Enrolled.' You find out someone's paid when you open the CRM, not when you happen to check Stripe.

7 Enable LinkedIn enrichment via browser automation. Starch visits each contact's LinkedIn profile and pulls in their current role, company, and profile photo — no LinkedIn API required. Useful for knowing whether a prospective student is a classroom teacher, an independent coach, or a corporate L&D manager before the discovery call.

8 Set up the Email Agent on top of your Gmail connection. Give it the prompt above — priority triage, thread summaries, and draft replies for your three most common inbound questions. Your goal is to spend 20 minutes on email instead of 60.

9 Ask the CRM your first real question: 'Who booked a discovery call in the last 14 days but hasn't enrolled yet and hasn't received a follow-up email from me?' Starch surfaces the list. You send the follow-ups.

10 Build a cohort dashboard: 'Show me a view of all contacts in the Spring 2026 cohort — enrolled count, paid count, and anyone who's gone quiet for more than 10 days.' Pin it. Check it every Monday.

11 Before you open the next enrollment window, ask Starch: 'Which alumni from the last two cohorts haven't heard from me in 90 days and might be interested in the advanced program?' Use that list for your re-engagement email — not a blast to your whole ConvertKit list.

12 As your contact list grows, publish a note to yourself inside the CRM: what the pipeline stages mean, which fields are required at each stage, and what a 'complete' contact record looks like. Starch can surface this as a pinned note so the next person you hire actually onboards correctly.

See this running on Starch

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

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

Spring 2026 Cohort Enrollment — April 2026

Sample numbers from a real run

Inquiry (waitlist signups from launch email)	84
Discovery Call Booked	31
Discovery Call Done — no follow-up sent yet	9
Offer Sent	22
Enrolled (Stripe payment confirmed)	18
Revenue from cohort (18 × $997)	17,946

You sent the launch email on April 1. By April 7, 84 people had expressed interest via your ConvertKit form. Calendly bookings came in fast — 31 discovery calls in the first week. The CRM pulled every booking automatically and moved each contact to 'Discovery Call Booked.' After the calls, you logged notes in Starch about each person's goal. Nine of those calls were marked 'done' but you hadn't sent the offer yet — Starch surfaced this in your Monday dashboard. You sent the offer to all nine that afternoon. By April 14, 18 people had paid in Stripe; Starch confirmed payment status for each and moved them to 'Enrolled.' The 4 who got offers but went quiet got a follow-up question drafted by the Email Agent: 'Did you have any questions before the cohort kicks off?' Two enrolled the next day. Without the CRM, you would have caught maybe 12 of the 18 enrollments before the cohort started and lost track of the 9 uninitiated follow-ups entirely.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Discovery call → enrollment conversion rate (target: >50% of calls taken)

Days from inquiry to first follow-up (target: under 24 hours)

Unanswered student emails older than 48 hours (target: zero at any given time)

Alumni re-engagement rate going into the next cohort launch

Cohort fill rate: enrolled vs. seats available, tracked week by week during launch window

Comparison

What this replaces

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

HubSpot Free / Starter

HubSpot's pipeline is built for B2B SaaS sales teams; you'll spend more time disabling features than using them, and 'cohort name' or 'lesson completion stage' isn't a native concept you can add without paid custom properties.

Google Sheets CRM (manual)

Zero cost and you already know it, but it doesn't log email threads, doesn't move contacts between stages when Calendly or Stripe fires, and breaks down completely when you're managing more than one cohort at a time.

ConvertKit tags as a pseudo-CRM

ConvertKit is great for broadcast email and sequences, but it has no deal pipeline, no call history, no notes field per contact, and no way to ask 'who paid but hasn't shown up to onboarding yet' without a manual export.

Notion CRM template

Notion is good for a contact database and notes, but it doesn't sync with Gmail, Calendly, or Stripe automatically — you're still manually updating rows, just in a prettier interface.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — crm, email agent 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

My course platform is Kajabi / Teachable / Thinkific. Can Starch connect to it?

Kajabi, Teachable, and Thinkific aren't in the scheduled-sync provider list, but Starch can reach them two ways: connect them from Starch's integration catalog (the agent queries live when you need data), or automate them through your browser — no API required. For most coaching businesses, the combination of Stripe for payment confirmation and Gmail for communication gives you 80% of what you need in the CRM without waiting on a native Kajabi sync.

Will Starch store all my student email history?

Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule and stores enough thread context to show conversation history inside each contact record. It caps at 30 messages per page to avoid errors on very long HTML threads — so if you have a 200-email thread with a student, you'll see the most recent 30 messages first. For most coaching conversations, that's plenty.

I use ConvertKit for email marketing and Mailchimp for my newsletter. Can those connect too?

Yes — connect ConvertKit and Mailchimp from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries them live when your apps need that data. You can build a view that shows you, per contact, which ConvertKit sequence they're in and whether they've opened your last three newsletters — all alongside their CRM stage.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I'm collecting student data including emails and payment status.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your institution or a B2B client requires SOC 2 as a condition of working with you, that's worth knowing upfront. For most independent coaches and course creators — where the data is your own student list, not a corporate client's employee records — this hasn't been a blocker. But we'd rather you know than find out later.

I already have 400 contacts in a spreadsheet. Can I import them?

Yes. The CRM starter app supports importing from an existing source. Describe what your sheet looks like — columns, messy data, duplicate rows — and Starch will map the fields and clean up what it can. You don't have to start fresh.

What happens when I have a second person helping me with enrollment? Can they use the CRM too?

Yes — Starch is built for small operator teams. Your ops helper can log in, see the same pipeline, add notes to contacts, and run the same queries. Permissions and multi-user access work out of the box; you don't need to configure sharing separately for each integration.