one question · one answer
CRM for a micro business without a sales team
Most likely you do not want a CRM. Classic CRMs — HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho CRM — are built to manage a pipeline of deals worked by people whose job is to work them, and their whole value is visibility into what those people are doing. With no sales team there is nothing to be visible, so you get an empty pipeline you have to feed by hand and abandon within a month. What a micro business actually needs is customer history plus one question answered reliably: who used to buy and has stopped?
That is a different tool. It is fed automatically by orders, and it is measured from your own repeat-purchase rhythm rather than from a pipeline stage somebody has to drag.
Why the pipeline stays empty
A CRM's stages — new, contacted, proposal, won — are a model of a job. If nobody has that job, the stages are updated by whoever remembers, which is nobody, and within a few weeks the board shows a fiction. Then reports built on that board are worse than no reports, because they look authoritative.
The tell is simple: if the data does not arrive by itself, it will not arrive. In a business of one to five people, every field that needs manual upkeep is a field that will be empty by March.
What is worth having instead
- Customer history, filled automatically from orders. Who bought, what, when, how much. Zero manual entry — it is a by-product of selling.
- A cooling signal measured from your own data. Not "no contact for 90 days", which is a number somebody invented. Take the median gap between repeat purchases for your business and derive the threshold from it, so a weekly lunch customer counts as cold after weeks and a furniture buyer after months.
- A short list of who to touch today. Three names with a reason, not a database to browse.
- Somewhere for the follow-up to live once you have decided to make it — with a due date, so it is not a mental note.
When you do need a real CRM
Hire your first salesperson and this advice inverts. The moment someone else is having conversations you are not in, you need the pipeline — not for the forecast, but so the deals survive that person's holiday and eventual departure. Same if your sale takes months and several meetings: that genuinely is a pipeline, even with one person in it.
Anyone who tells you a micro business needs a CRM without asking which of those two you are is selling seats.
Where Ovirno fits, and where it doesn't
Ovirno has the customer side without the pipeline theatre: history and average check filled from your orders, a cooling threshold computed from your own median repeat gap — with the measure shown next to the badge, and a plain statement that it is falling back on a general rule when you have fewer than twelve repeat customers — abandoned checkouts, and a "who to touch today" list. Tasks that come out of it carry an owner and a date.
Where it does not fit: there is no deal pipeline, no forecast, no email sequences and no lead scoring. If you are hiring salespeople this quarter, buy a CRM. We are not one, and pretending otherwise would cost you a quarter finding out.
If this sounds like your situation, the way to find out is not a demo of somebody else's data: send one export of your sales and thirty minutes later you are looking at your own business, with observations computed from your own numbers. Ask for that, or write on Telegram — the person who answers is the one who builds the thing.
Asked before every one of these
Is Ovirno a CRM?
Not in the sales sense. It holds customer history, buying rhythm and cooling signals computed from orders, but it has no deal pipeline, no forecasting and no lead scoring.
How is 'gone cold' decided?
From the median gap between repeat purchases in your own data: one and a half times that gap counts as cooling, three times as cold. Under twelve repeat customers it says plainly that it is using a general rule instead.
What if I hire a salesperson later?
Then a proper CRM starts earning its keep, and the two can coexist: Ovirno keeps the orders, money and customer history, the CRM keeps the pipeline.