Why Build Another CRM? Exactly! Here’s What I’m Building and Why

Seven years ago, when I was a starry-eyed 19-year-old, I took on the challenge of starting my first business (we’ll ignore all my failed high school projects). Having opted out of college to start working full-time as an engineer, I knew little about the startup or broader entrepreneurial world.

What is a go-to-market motion? How do you efficiently set up an implementation team? How can I ensure that my customers are happy? Who do I put between the engineers and the customer-facing teams (sales, implementation, success) to make sure the right features get built?

All I knew was how to code decently well, and I was lucky to have the sheer motivation to work on a project until I built what was in my head. Like many first-time founders, I started off by making hundreds of mistakes. Being stuck at the peak of Mount Stupid (Dunning-Kruger effect), I humorously thought I knew more than I did.

Eventually, I swallowed my ego, admitted my many shortcomings, and sought help from people much smarter and wiser than I was. That began a journey I hope to continue: learning as much as time allows and remaining a curious student.

I relearned how to read: not just code, but business books. I dove into topics to expand my understanding of leadership, strategy, and scaling. I read about building cultures of freedom and transparency. I studied how to create a killer sales team. Most importantly, I read stories from founders about what they did wrong so I could avoid those same mistakes.

I started reaching out to friends in the industry, asking questions, and learning from their experiences. Then I’d ask for introductions to their friends so I could learn from them too. Any insight, good or bad, would help ensure I had enough knowledge to draw upon at a moment's notice. 

Eventually, once the business was big enough to start scaling, I tried to do every role at least once (including making cold calls and doing onboardings) to make sure I understood the systems we were setting up. My goal was to never ask someone to do something unless I had done it first myself. 

Ultimately, after learning countless lessons and with the help of many talented individuals, we developed processes that effectively supported the entire customer journey, encompassing the sales playbook, onboarding process, support system, and every intermediate step in between.

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After building all these systems, one problem kept me up at night: why can’t we find a system that fully supports how the customer journey actually works?

Like many growing teams, I witnessed the challenges companies face when piecing together multiple systems. It technically worked, but like most patchwork setups, it required constant upkeep and significant time and resources to keep things running smoothly. You’d stitch together spreadsheets using Notion, then integrate Notion with Slack, connect Slack to Google Sheets, and have Google Sheets go to Zendesk. You then also layer in tools like Zapier, Tableau, and multiple CRMs to tie all the data together. Tying together all these solutions might get the job done, but it creates a complex, fragile, and inefficient system that is difficult to scale.

After asking around, I realized I wasn’t alone. Friends across multiple industries were facing similar challenges.

And the so-called “next-gen” CRMs? They weren’t solving the problem. Most focused on optimizing the sale itself and sprinkled in some AI as a differentiator, but ignored the full picture. They didn’t address the underlying problem, and some actually added more.

The issue isn't entirely the lack of process. It’s that the software we use isn’t built for what teams actually need: a connected, full-cycle view of the customer, where every team can contribute and make decisions in real time.

The truth is, CRMs aren’t really “customer relationship management” tools. They’re just customer databases that rely on dozens of integrations to function. In reality, they’re marketplaces for other tools to build on. Just like in many vertical SaaS markets, you end up stitching together 5–10 different tools, and eventually, it all comes crumbling down.

Over time, I realized the problem wasn’t just about execution; it was about how the modern systems were designed and taught.

I spent the last few years obsessing over this problem. So much so that I decided to start a new chapter and build the product my peers and I always wanted: not a better version of the same sales CRM, but a full-cycle CRM that runs the whole customer journey on one system.

Custral is that product: a full-cycle CRM that works as the operating system for your whole company.