the trap
Free for the first year.
Then the invoice arrives.
It usually starts the same way. You're a small team, you're moving fast, and someone says you need a CRM. So you sign up for one of the big ones — free trial, easy onboarding, looks great. You spend a few hours setting it up, customising the pipeline stages, connecting your email.
Then a year passes. You're a bit bigger now. The free tier expired. You look at the pricing page and realise you've been quietly moved onto the Growth plan. €400 a month. Per seat. You have 8 people. You do the math. You feel slightly sick.
And look — HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce — these are genuinely great products. If you're running a 500-person sales organisation with complex workflows, dedicated ops teams, and enterprise contracts to manage, you need that power. They built exactly the right thing for exactly that customer. That customer just isn't you. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
The average fast-growing startup pays somewhere between €3,000 and €6,000 a year on CRM software. Most of them use roughly 10% of the features they're paying for. The rest is just there, quietly justifying the price tag.
the honest truth
Excel is bad.
But it's not that bad.
Here's something nobody in the CRM industry wants to say: a well-maintained spreadsheet beats a poorly-adopted CRM every single time. If your team isn't using it, it doesn't matter how many features it has.
The reason startups end up back on spreadsheets isn't laziness. It's that the tool got in the way. Too many fields nobody fills in. Too many steps to log a simple call. Too much setup before you can do anything useful. The friction kills the habit.
So yes — you're better off with a CRM than a spreadsheet. But only if it's simple enough that your team actually uses it every day without thinking about it. That's what we were trying to build.
what we built instead
We started from scratch
and asked one question.
We're founders ourselves. We built Nothing because we were frustrated with paying for tools that felt designed to upsell us rather than help us. So we sat down and asked: what does a founder actually need from a CRM, stripped of everything else?
The answer was almost embarrassingly simple. You need to know who you're talking to. And you need to know where each deal stands. That's it. Everything else is noise — until you're at a stage where it isn't, and then you've outgrown us and that's fine.
We spent most of our time not on adding features, but on making those two things as smooth and fast as possible. Getting the basics genuinely right instead of getting a hundred things approximately right.
Nothing isn't a stepping stone to something bigger. It's a deliberate choice to keep things simple — for as long as simple is what you need.
who this is for
You know if this is you.
Nothing is for early-stage teams who need a CRM but don't need a CRM. Founders, small teams, indie businesses, anyone who's been running their customer relationships out of a Notes app or a spreadsheet and knows it's starting to cost them.
It's not for everyone. If you need email sequences, lead scoring, territory management, or a Slack bot to remind your reps to update their pipeline — there are excellent tools for that. We'll even recommend them if you ask.
But if you just want to save a contact, track a deal, and get back to work — we built this for you. €5 a month. Your whole team. Nothing more.