Sales & CRM

How to set up your first crm as Small Investor Relations Teams

Sales & CRMFor Small Investor Relations Teams2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Your LP contact list lives in three places: a shared Google Sheet the CFO last updated in Q3, a HubSpot instance someone set up during a fundraise and never maintained, and your own mental model of who called last week. Every quarter-end you spend two days reconciling those before you can send the LP letter. Juniper Square or Addepar would solve it, but that's $50k+ and an IR-ops hire to configure it. A generic CRM like Salesforce assumes you have a sales cycle, not a commitment-pacing schedule, a J-curve question queue, and a data room link that changes every time DocSend expires. You need a CRM that knows the difference between an LP who is in Fund III but passed on Fund IV and a prospect who attended your last annual meeting.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Sales & CRMFor Small Investor Relations Teams2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A CRM with LP-specific fields — commitment amount, fund participation, last contact date, capital call status, data room access tier — that your CFO can also read without breaking anything

An inbox layer that triages LP emails by priority, summarizes long threads about distribution waterfalls or co-invest requests, and drafts replies so your response time drops without your quality dropping

Automated reminders so no LP goes 60 days without contact before a fundraise and no capital call email goes unanswered without a follow-up

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

The CRM and Email Triage apps connect to Gmail (Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule — messages, labels, and thread history feed into contact records automatically). LinkedIn enrichment runs through Starch's browser automation — no LinkedIn API needed — to keep LP profiles and firm data current. For capital call and distribution context, connect QuickBooks or NetSuite from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries them live when you need commitment-level financial data in a contact record. Plaid and Stripe can be added via scheduled sync if you want cash movement data surfaced inside LP records.

Prompts to copy

Build me a CRM for a two-person IR team at a private equity fund. Each contact record should have: LP or prospect status, which funds they're in (Fund I, Fund II, Fund III), their committed capital per fund, their most recent communication date, whether they have active data room access, and a notes field for relationship context like 'prefers quarterly calls' or 'connected through [law firm]'. Pipeline stages should be: Prospect, First Meeting, Soft Circle, Committed, Closed, Ongoing LP. I want to be able to ask 'which LPs haven't I spoken to in 45 days' and get a real list.

Set up email triage for LP communications. Prioritize anything from an existing LP over cold outreach. Summarize threads longer than 5 emails in two sentences. Draft replies to common questions about capital call timing, distribution notices, and data room access requests. Flag anything that mentions 'redemption', 'transfer', or 'complaint' as urgent. Set a follow-up reminder on any LP email I haven't replied to within 48 hours.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Start with the CRM app from Starch's App Store. It ships with contacts, companies, deals, pipeline stages, and email thread sync. Fork it rather than building from scratch — you'll save 30 minutes.

2 Tell Starch your LP-specific schema: fund participation fields (Fund I through Fund IV), committed capital, capital called to date, data room access level (full, restricted, none), and last contact date. Starch rebuilds the CRM schema to match what you just described.

3 Connect Gmail so Starch syncs your email data on a schedule. Every email thread with an LP contact flows into that LP's record automatically — no manual logging.

4 Import your existing contact list from the Google Sheet or HubSpot export. If the data is messy — duplicate companies, inconsistent fund labels, missing commitment amounts — tell Starch to clean it during import. It will flag rows it can't resolve for your review.

5 Set up LinkedIn enrichment via browser automation. Tell Starch: 'For each LP contact, check their LinkedIn profile monthly and update their current firm, title, and any job changes.' This runs in the background without you touching it.

6 Add your financial data connection. If your fund runs on QuickBooks or NetSuite, connect it from Starch's integration catalog. Now you can ask 'show me committed capital vs. called capital for each Fund III LP' and get an answer pulled from your books, not a spreadsheet you made in October.

7 Open the Email Triage (founder-inbox) app and configure it for LP communications. Set priority rules: existing LPs first, then prospective LPs, then everything else. Write your two or three most common reply templates — capital call acknowledgment, data room access instructions, quarterly update confirmation — so Starch can draft them for you.

8 Define your follow-up cadence. Tell Starch: 'If an LP hasn't received an outbound email from me in 60 days and we're within 6 months of a fund close, add them to my weekly follow-up list.' This becomes an automated reminder surface inside the CRM.

9 Build a simple 'LP health' view: a dashboard inside the CRM that shows every active LP, their last contact date, their current fund participation, and whether their data room access link is active. Tell Starch what you want to see; it builds the view from your CRM data.

10 Invite your CFO as a read-only user. They get the same CRM view without the ability to edit contact records or pipeline stages — so you stop getting Slack messages asking who owns which LP relationship.

11 Run the first weekly review: ask the CRM 'which LPs haven't I contacted in 45 days?' and 'which prospects attended the annual meeting but have no follow-up logged?' These are natural-language queries against your live CRM data, not filter exports.

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 IV First Close — March 2026 LP Sprint

Sample numbers from a real run

Existing Fund III LPs re-upping for Fund IV	4,200,000
New prospects from annual meeting pipeline	1,800,000
Co-invest relationship converted to Fund IV commit	1,000,000
Soft circles not yet converted (follow-up queue)	2,500,000

With a $50M first-close target for Fund IV, your two-person IR team is managing 140 LP and prospect contacts simultaneously. The Starch CRM shows you at a glance that 34 existing Fund III LPs are in the 'Soft Circle' stage, 12 have committed ($4.2M combined), and 8 haven't been contacted in over 30 days despite being in active conversation last quarter. The Email Triage app surfaced three LP emails from the previous week that asked substantively about the Fund IV fee structure — those were drafted and queued for your review in under 10 minutes rather than sitting in your inbox until Friday. The CRM's 'LP health' dashboard shows that the co-invest partner who came in at $1M had a data room access link that expired in February; you caught it before they noticed. The $2.5M in soft circles without a signed subscription agreement are flagged in the follow-up queue with a Starch-generated reminder to send the capital call timeline by March 14th. Your CFO can see the full commitment tracker without calling you to ask for an export.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Days since last LP contact (target: no active LP goes >45 days without outreach in a fundraise window)

Soft circle to committed conversion rate by fund vintage

Capital called as a percentage of total committed capital per LP

Average email response time on LP inquiries (target: <24 hours)

Data room access link uptime — percentage of LPs with a currently active, unexpired link

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Juniper Square or Addepar

Institutional-grade LP management with audit trails and fund accounting integration, but starts at $50k+/year and assumes a dedicated IR-ops analyst to configure and maintain it — not right-sized for a two-person team at first or second close.

HubSpot (Sales Hub)

Solid contact and pipeline management, but its data model is built for B2B sales cycles, not LP relationship cadences — you'll spend more time fighting the schema than using it, and the admin overhead compounds quickly without a RevOps person.

Salesforce + a CRM consultant

Infinitely customizable, but the customization cost is real: expect a multi-month implementation, ongoing admin work, and a license bill that dwarfs what a two-person IR team needs.

Google Sheets + Gmail labels

Zero cost and no learning curve, but there's no relationship timeline, no automated follow-up, no way to query 'who went cold last month,' and it breaks the first time two people edit it simultaneously during a close sprint.

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

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We have LPs who will ask about data security before we store their contact information anywhere new.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. That's worth knowing upfront. If your LPs require SOC 2 as a condition of data handling, you should flag that to the Starch team before onboarding. For most small IR teams building internal CRM surfaces — not storing LP financial account data, just contact records and email threads — this hasn't been a blocker, but it's a real limit worth naming.

We use Intralinks and DocSend for our data room. Can Starch connect to those?

DocSend and Intralinks don't have widely published APIs, but both are web-reachable, so Starch can automate them through your browser — no API needed. That means you can build automations like 'when an LP's data room access link expires, generate a new one in DocSend and update the link in their CRM record.' You'd describe what you want, and Starch builds the browser automation to handle it.

Our CFO thinks they own the LP CRM and keeps updating things. How do we handle shared ownership without creating a mess?

You can invite your CFO as a read-only viewer so they can see the full LP list, commitment amounts, and contact history without being able to edit pipeline stages or contact records. If you want them to have edit access to specific fields — say, committed capital amounts — but not others, tell Starch that when you set up the CRM and it can structure permissions accordingly.

We're connected to QuickBooks for fund accounting. Can the CRM actually pull commitment-level data from there, or is it just contact management?

Connect QuickBooks from Starch's integration catalog and the agent queries it live when your CRM surfaces need that data. You can build a view inside the CRM that shows each LP's committed capital, capital called to date, and distribution history pulled directly from QuickBooks — not a manual export. QuickBooks report views (like the full P&L) have a temporary limitation right now, but entity-level data including invoices, payments, and journal entries syncs normally.

We send quarterly LP letters that need to pull actual portfolio data. Can Starch help with that, or is it just contact management?

The CRM is the contact layer, but you can build a separate LP Reporting app on top of your connected data — QuickBooks or NetSuite for financials, Plaid and Stripe for cash movements, and whatever portfolio data you have in a structured source. Describe to Starch what your quarterly letter needs to include and it will build a data surface that pulls those numbers on demand. The letter drafting itself can use that data as input. This is a custom build rather than a pre-built template, but you'd describe it in plain language and Starch assembles it.

We already have LP contacts in HubSpot from our last fundraise. Can we import that without recreating everything from scratch?

Yes. Export your HubSpot contacts and tell Starch to import them into your new CRM. If the data has issues — inconsistent company names, missing fund fields, duplicate records — tell Starch to clean it during import and it will flag rows it can't resolve automatically. You won't start with a blank slate.