Build a CRM with AI: a one-device prototype, and what a team really needs

Should you build your own CRM at all?

Established CRMs cover a great deal: email sync, shared inboxes, reporting, permissions, integrations. Building your own is worth it only when your process is unusual enough that a standard pipeline gets in the way, or when you'd use a fraction of a big product and want something calmer. Even then, prototyping first is wise, because the hardest part of a CRM isn't the software. It's agreeing on what a stage means and which fields people will actually fill in.

The parts of a simple CRM

Contacts and companies

Name, company, email, phone, source (how they found you), owner, and a free-text notes field. Resist adding twenty fields; every empty field is a small daily guilt.

Deals or opportunities

Linked to a contact, with a value, a stage, an expected close date and a next step.

Pipeline

A board of stages (New, Contacted, Proposal sent, Negotiating, Won, Lost) with deals as cards you drag between them. Each stage should have a clear exit rule, such as "Proposal sent means a written price has been emailed".

Activity log

Calls, emails and meetings recorded against a contact with a date, so anyone can see what happened last.

Next actions

A list of today's follow-ups across all deals. For many small teams this is the screen they open every morning.

Reporting

Deals by stage, value in the pipeline, won this month and conversion between stages.

What the prototype gives you

Describe your process and stages: "A CRM prototype for a small kitchen-fitting company. Contacts with source, deals with value and expected install month, pipeline stages Enquiry, Survey booked, Quote sent, Deposit paid, Fitted, Lost. A today list of follow-ups, an activity log per contact, and a dashboard of pipeline value. Thirty sample contacts with realistic UK names and jobs, labelled demo data."

The model writes this as one app that runs in the browser. You can drag a deal to a new stage, log a call, filter by source and watch the dashboard change. Edits are saved in that browser, so you can live with it for a week: add your real leads, see which fields you skip and which ones you wish you had. Use version history and change requests to adjust stages and fields between rounds. That week of use is the valuable output. It's a tested specification for whichever real system you end up with.

Why a team CRM can't live in the sandbox

Anticode apps run in a strict sandbox with no network. For a CRM that has specific consequences:

• No shared data. Your colleague's browser has its own copy. Two salespeople can't see each other's deals.
• No real users or permissions. There's no sign-in, and no way to stop someone seeing or deleting a contact.
• No email or calendar sync. It can't read your inbox or log emails automatically.
• Fragile storage. Clearing browser data deletes everything; a CRM is the last place you want that risk.
• Personal data. Contact records are personal data. Keeping a business's customer list in one person's browser, without backups or access control, is hard to square with your data-protection duties.

So treat the sandboxed version as a single-device prototype, or at most a private list for a sole trader who exports a backup regularly.

Two ways to get a real one

Feed an existing CRM from your website

Many businesses don't need a custom CRM; they need leads to arrive in one automatically. Anticode's form connectors can send contact, booking and enquiry submissions from your published site to HubSpot (for submissions that include an email address), Airtable, Notion, Google Sheets or any webhook. Your prototype tells you which fields to collect; the connector puts each enquiry into the CRM your team already shares.

Develop the custom version from the Next.js export

If you do need your own system, the Next.js export of an app build gives a developer a standard TypeScript project with Postgres through Prisma, email sign-in, customer and staff roles, an audit log and row-level security, plus an admin area with two-factor sign-in. That's a sound base for multi-user CRM features, which a developer then builds out: shared deals, assignments, imports, email logging. Expect real development time; the export is the foundation, not the finished CRM.

Questions people ask

Can a simple CRM builder like this work for a sole trader?

For one person on one computer, yes, as long as you export a backup regularly. Once anyone else needs access, move to a shared system.

Can I import my existing contacts into the prototype?

Ask for a CSV paste or file import. The contacts then live in that browser only.

Will form enquiries from my website appear in the prototype?

No. The prototype can't receive data. Enquiries reach you by email, in the dashboard and through connectors such as HubSpot.