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Because most of them are built for a sales team that reports to somebody. A founder has no one to report to, so every field that exists only for a manager's dashboard is pure cost.
The CRM gets set up properly in month one, drifts in month two, and by month four the real pipeline is a note on a phone.
The reason to update a deal is not a report — it is that winning it opens the delivery phases and the billing schedule. The update does work for you rather than for a meeting.
Six stages is plenty. The Friday review is fifteen minutes, in stage order, and the file exists mainly to show you the gap against target.
It will not sell for you, and it will not make a thin pipeline look better than it is. The forecast shows its own arithmetic, which is occasionally unwelcome.
And it is not free. If a spreadsheet is genuinely working for you, the honest advice is to keep using it until the handover starts costing you time.
The record you have been keeping becomes the thing you hand over, rather than something you have to reconstruct for a first salesperson. Permissions come from the reporting line in Nest, so the handover is a change of owner rather than a project.
Nothing has to be migrated when you switch on Loop or Books later, because the record they want already exists.
Products, not integrations. Each one reads the same record, so a join is a permission rather than a sync job with a mapping screen behind it.
Only if nothing happens after a deal is won. The value is the handover, so it grows with you.
An afternoon for stages and ten real deals. The rest can wait.
Yes. The other products switch on later with no migration, because they read the same record.
Half an hour on your own numbers is usually enough to say whether Flow is the right place to start.