Does a micro SaaS need a CRM at all?

It needs the record, which is not quite the same thing. A product with no sales team has no pipeline to manage, but it still has people arriving anonymously, signing up, paying, going quiet and cancelling across four separate systems that never talk to each other. The thing worth having is one row per person that fills itself, and a way to follow up without doing it by hand.

Can I use a spreadsheet instead?

Until the first time somebody signs up on a different device from the one they read the pricing page on. A spreadsheet cannot join an anonymous browser to an email address to a Stripe customer, it cannot store the exact wording somebody agreed to as proof, and it cannot send a welcome email three days later. Those three are most of what this is.

Is it any good for a product that is not software?

It would work, but it is not built for that. The events, the doors and the lifecycle stages are the ones a software product produces — a signup, a trial, a paid invoice, a cancellation, a release — and the pricing is built around a product with a lot of free visitors and a few paying accounts.

What if I already use a CRM?

You can import a CSV into Kicklace and it fills blanks without ever overwriting what is already there, matching people by email address. What it will not do is pretend an imported row has a history: a person imported from somewhere else starts with no timeline, and their stage is whatever you set on the way in, until the tag and the doors start filling it.

How many people can it hold?

The plans are priced by the number of people who sign in to Kicklace, and people on record are not counted or limited on any plan. Nothing is charged yet, and the planned plans start at one person on Founder.

Kicklace, an AI-powered CRM for micro SaaS

Micro SaaS CRM

What a software product run by one person or a few actually needs from a CRM, one need at a time, with what Kicklace does about each — and the list of what it deliberately has not got.

What a micro SaaS needs from a CRM

A micro SaaS is a software product run by one person or a few. It has customers, it has money coming in, and it has no sales team — so most of what a CRM is built to do is work it will never have. The useful half is small, and it is worth writing down.

This is that list: what a CRM has to do for a company like that, and what Kicklace does about each one. Nothing here is a plan; every line links to the thing it describes.

The list

Nine things, and what Kicklace does about each.

One record per person, across devices: Somebody reads your pricing page on a phone, signs up on a laptop a week later and pays a month after that. Kicklace keeps one record through all of it: an email address is the durable key, a browser id that turns out to belong to a person you already know is folded in, and the earliest first touch always survives the merge, so the campaign that brought them in is still there a year later. How identity resolution works.
The data coming from the tools you already run: Nobody is going to type this in. One script tag reads your website and hears your signup forms; Stripe posts payments, refunds, trials and cancellations; Clerk or Kinde post sign-ups and sign-ins; Vercel posts releases; GitHub posts sponsors and issues, and stars if you ask for them; and one line of the kicklace package posts whatever only your own server knows. The doors.
A lifecycle nobody edits by hand: A stage that somebody has to remember to move is a stage that is wrong. In Kicklace a person's stage comes from what they did — a page read, a signup, a paid invoice — so the board is a description of your business rather than a list of what got updated. The lifecycle.
Consent kept word for word: Not a tick box that says the person agreed to something: the sentence itself, stored on the subscription with the date and the address it came from, and shown to you as the proof. Every email is tied to a list and carries a one-click unsubscribe, and there is no way to import a purchased list. What that means in practice.
Follow-up without a marketing team: Describe what should happen and Kicklace writes it as four blocks you can read: when, wait, only if, then. Replay it against the last seven or thirty days to see what it would have done, without sending anything, and arm it when you believe it. The automation language.
An answer without an analyst: Ask a question and get a chart, on your own dashboard, in the shape you asked for — a count, a funnel, a group, a cohort by the week people arrived, or the share who came back. It is built as a specification checked against your workspace, so a chart never quietly counts something else. What the AI does.
The conversation on the record: A customer's reply lands on their own record and rings the bell. Put a signed address in BCC and the email you sent from your own mailbox lands there as sent by you; forward one and it lands as received. Both work today, from any mail client, with nothing to install. How to set that up.
An export and a deletion that take a minute: Everything held about one person — fields, identities, subscriptions with their consent text, the whole timeline, the emails sent to them, the records merged into them — is one JSON file from their own page, and any view of any object is a CSV. Deleting a person removes the record and everything that references it, and anonymous visitors are cleared on a schedule you set. What is stored, and for how long.
A price that is not a sales floor: Kicklace is priced by the number of people who sign in to it. People on record, workspaces and emails sent are not counted and not limited, so a product with a lot of free visitors is not paying for the visitors. Nothing is charged yet. The planned plans.

And what it does not need

The other half of an honest checklist: what Kicklace deliberately has not got.

Cold outreach: There are no sequences to strangers, no purchased lists and no way to import one. Kicklace is for the people who came to you, and every send checks the subscription again at the moment it runs.
A sales process you have to keep: Deals, owners and a sales pipeline are in Kicklace and off in a new workspace, which keeps only the customer lifecycle until you switch them on. Nothing else in the app depends on them.
Lead scoring: There is no number invented about how likely somebody is to buy. What there is instead is the timeline, the stage they reached, and four rules that look for the thing you would have spotted if you had time.
An implementation project: The first ten minutes are a script tag and a starter that writes a list, a welcome email and the automation that sends it, paused until you have read it. There is no data to migrate for a product whose customers are already in its own tools.
A phone dialer, LinkedIn automation, or a ChatGPT connector: Not built, and said on the home page rather than left for you to find out. What is built is a connector for Claude, and the assistant inside the app for everybody else.

If most of that list matches what you were about to build a spreadsheet for, Kicklace is probably the shape you want. Why it exists and how it works, or join the waitlist.

Questions

Does a micro SaaS need a CRM at all?: It needs the record, which is not quite the same thing. A product with no sales team has no pipeline to manage, but it still has people arriving anonymously, signing up, paying, going quiet and cancelling across four separate systems that never talk to each other. The thing worth having is one row per person that fills itself, and a way to follow up without doing it by hand.
Can I use a spreadsheet instead?: Until the first time somebody signs up on a different device from the one they read the pricing page on. A spreadsheet cannot join an anonymous browser to an email address to a Stripe customer, it cannot store the exact wording somebody agreed to as proof, and it cannot send a welcome email three days later. Those three are most of what this is.
Is it any good for a product that is not software?: It would work, but it is not built for that. The events, the doors and the lifecycle stages are the ones a software product produces — a signup, a trial, a paid invoice, a cancellation, a release — and the pricing is built around a product with a lot of free visitors and a few paying accounts.
What if I already use a CRM?: You can import a CSV into Kicklace and it fills blanks without ever overwriting what is already there, matching people by email address. What it will not do is pretend an imported row has a history: a person imported from somewhere else starts with no timeline, and their stage is whatever you set on the way in, until the tag and the doors start filling it.
How many people can it hold?: The plans are priced by the number of people who sign in to Kicklace, and people on record are not counted or limited on any plan. Nothing is charged yet, and the planned plans start at one person on Founder.

Join the waitlist

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